Major Republican Donor Seeks Ouster of Twitter's CEO (reuters.com) 164
Jack Dorsey co-founded Twitter in 2006, coding up the first prototype (with the help of a contractor) when he was still in his 20s. Dorsey's now it's CEO -- but "A major Republican donor has purchased a stake in Twitter and is reportedly seeking to oust him," reports the Guardian.
Bloomberg News first reported that Elliott Management has taken a "sizable stake" and "and plans to push for changes at the social media company, including replacing Dorsey". Paul Singer, the billionaire founder of Elliott Management, is a Republican mega-donor who opposed Donald Trump during the real-estate magnate's run for the presidential nomination but has since come onside...
Elliott Management is an activist investor, which means it regularly pushes for change in companies in which it buys shares.
Gizmodo referred to them as "hedge fund goons". But Reuters adds that Twitter "is one of the few U.S. technology companies headed, but not controlled, by one of its founders.
"It has given shareholders equal voting rights, making Dorsey, who owns only about 2% of the company, vulnerable to a challenge from an activist investor..."
Bloomberg News first reported that Elliott Management has taken a "sizable stake" and "and plans to push for changes at the social media company, including replacing Dorsey". Paul Singer, the billionaire founder of Elliott Management, is a Republican mega-donor who opposed Donald Trump during the real-estate magnate's run for the presidential nomination but has since come onside...
Elliott Management is an activist investor, which means it regularly pushes for change in companies in which it buys shares.
Gizmodo referred to them as "hedge fund goons". But Reuters adds that Twitter "is one of the few U.S. technology companies headed, but not controlled, by one of its founders.
"It has given shareholders equal voting rights, making Dorsey, who owns only about 2% of the company, vulnerable to a challenge from an activist investor..."
Would be interesting to see (Score:2, Insightful)
I've often wondered if the bias model is inherently more successful, so if this happens I hope the company moves more towards free expression ( ditching things like shadow bans and the like along the way ), if only as a contrast.
Re:Would be interesting to see (Score:4, Insightful)
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I wonder if it's an interia situation; are twitter/reddit/facebook/ect..so successful because they built their following in their respective formats first? Is that why challengers can't create the userbase necessary to become successful?
Or is it something inherent to the bias each platform displays? Or even more; is their bias a result of their success? Did they change to chase the dollar, and those cumulative changes perceived as bias?
Like I said; it'll be interesting to see what happens.
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Twitter paid millions and millions of dollars, month after month, for years, to be mentioned on television frequently. To be part of how the news is told, how entertainment is explained, etc.
Competitors with ideological bones to pick are not going to have or attract enough money to compete with actual business.
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Its because with freedom of speech comes trolling, and too much of that drives reasonable people away.
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With any luck they'll a appoint Boeing's ex-CEO and let him drive it into bankruptcy.
Re:Would be interesting to see (Score:4, Informative)
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It's not the conservatives that get platforms like Gab in trouble but the racists and nazis.
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That's a fair point. It's not the conservatives that give the Republican Party a bad name, either. It's the fundamentalists.
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There are now for the first time more registered Independents than Republicans. [thehill.com]
So this seems to be taking a toll on the GOP. I wouldn't be surprised to see a new conservative/libertarian movement outside of the GOP to develop in earnest.
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That article is somewhat deceiving, because only 31 states require party registration.
The actual identified party strength, as reported by Gallup polling, is 28% of Americans identified as Democrat, 28% identified as Republican, and 41% as Independent.
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Also it doesn't help that conservatives are told to build their own platform and are then sabotaged when they try to do it. Voat is DDOSed all the time and platforms like Gab and other sites have had their payment processors and means of funding targeted and are kicked off of App stores etc.
Look, I'm not conservative and certainly not a Conservative, but wow you clearly really hate conservatives. If you think Voat and Gab are representative of conservatives than frankly you have a lower opinion of them than
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Such as...? There sure are various alternative sites where alt-right (alternatives to the conservative right) tend to congregate. But I'm not sure we've seen conservative social media except for some directed specifically at specific religious/Christian denominations.
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Well, no. Actual conservative media (e.g. The Economist) uses mainstream social media without issue.
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The Economist thought Boris was too extreme. And he's not trying to dismantle the NHS or strengthen freedom of speech, to my knowledge.
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Well, yes. Almost all conservative economists thought Brexit was a terrible idea. They still do.
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Twitter isn't flooded with garbage?
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Sturgeon's Revelation applies.
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Right, I mean it's not like they regularly get dehosted and have payments transfers banned or anything.
How about some context? (Score:2)
All alternative versions of the major social media platforms have failed since Twitter and Facebook came on the scene about 20 years ago. The closest that anyone has come was WhatsApp and Facebook paid billions of dollars to buy them and make sure it didn't disrupt their business model.
TikTok is the second closest and that has the direct backing of a $75 Billion dollar company with significant financial and resource backing by the Chinese government. I'm not really sure you can call either one of those soci
Re: Would be interesting to see (Score:1, Troll)
Re: Would be interesting to see (Score:2)
It's clear what is going to happen. (Score:1)
I myself have come to accept and recognize that this will all be solved through violence. It's coming soon. It will be bloody. It's inevitable.
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I love the propaganda language.
"I'm not going to defend that particular accident" is "two paragraphs defence focused on ad hominem attacks and slander."
"Telling communist terror groups that they will not be cowed" is "instigating a riot".
"Introducing yourself and seeing what the civil rights group focused on issues of freedom of expression is like" is "collaborating with fascists".
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The person to whom you replied didn't suggest Ngo is a conservative. Their point was that he was beaten up for not supporting Antifa.
There are plenty of people across the political spectrum that do not support Antifa, including but also not including conservatives.
I'd still argue with the suggestion that attacking him makes Antifa racist. They were attacking him for political reasons not racial ones, so it makes them fascist.
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Re:Would be interesting to see (Score:4, Interesting)
I think Steyer is out actually
Yes, Tom Steyer quit today. He went all-in on SC and came in a distant 3rd. He had no realistic path to the nomination.
Pete Buttigieg also quit today. He was 4th in SC. Unlike Steyer, he is young enough to have a bright future in politics.
The race is now down to Sanders, Biden, Bloomberg, and a rabble of no-hopers.
Super Tuesday is the day after tomorrow.
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The interesting thing about South Carolina, I would bet dimes to dollars, postal votes hugely, absolutely hugely favoured Biden, whilst in person voting favoured Sanders. How did not even know they were voting, oh yeah. Watch out for postal votes, the establishment will cheat.
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It's not "toxic", it's a hypothesis. There's nothing wrong with speculation, as long as folks remember that it IS speculation.
Too many people act terrified of ideas. Small minded folks who show more interest in following dogma than finding facts.
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Pete Buttigieg also quit today.
Some of these people who are fighting an uphill battle sometimes quit strategically - they can't win the nomination, so they quit ahead of Super Tuesday and hope to maneuver for the vice-presidential section.
With two rather old guys being the most likely candidates for the nomination, whomever is the VP choice might have a decent chance of making president (if they beat Trump). Heck, Pence might have that in the back of his mind as well, given that Trump is not exactly a spring chicken nor in particularly g
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Never stopped her before. Her sycophants tell her that she's incredibly popular and beloved by all.
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She spent a frelling BILLION DOLLARS and lost to a senile orangutan. How do you even do that?
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Twitter is not growing and needs some fresh vision to see if they can find how to expand and grow.
Why? Can't we just let it go the way of Myspace and Napster? It was cute and marginally innovative for a while, but really, it's not the place for any discussion more serious than the recipe for a sandwich.
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Re:Would be interesting to see (Score:4, Insightful)
Bias models are less successful (Score:2)
There is nothing to indicate that the 'bias model' is inherently more successful.
A bias model chases away some customers, who then participate in other systems. In effect, it's reducing your userbase.
A good example of this is CNN, which used to be a highly rated news source, but is now a distant *third* [thehill.com] behind Fox news (first) and MSNBC (second)(*).
So there's a rationale and a clear evidence-by-example of how a bias model is less successful than a fair model.
(*) From the linked article:
In prime time, Fox News finished first with an average of 2.4 million viewers. In April 2018, the network also averaged 2.4 million viewers, according to Nielsen.
MSNBC was second with an average of 1.66 million viewers, down from 1.93 million in April 2018.
CNN was third with 767,000 average primetime viewers, down from 1.04 million in April 2018.
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The advantage of Fox is that many of their shows are stated as Pro Republican so they are not trying to hide it, but rather that is their point of difference. The other advantage they have obviously is that they are the only cable channel that is pro Republican so they don't actually have any competition. In fact perhaps they need to be regulated as a Monopoly.
However to reply to your point if you looked at historic ratings of Fox
Of course the bias model is more successful (Score:2)
According to conservatives, the bias model is successful, It won the free market.
I suspect all you'll get out of this (Score:1)
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Free expression is overrated. Really anything with the label "free" never achieves what it's proponents believe it will. Those systems are usually pretty quickly overwhelmed by the loudest voices, the least scruples, the most money, etc. Human societal interactions require rules in order to stave off tyranny by the bullies of the world.
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True, but "free" in this case would mean giving the users control over content they're exposed to, and not the central company.
I would like to see what a 'light' touch from a company would do to an established company with a large user base.
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Reddit. The actual company doesn't moderate anyone. That's the sub moderators jobs. The only thing they actually do towards users is quarantining subs. But you can still go there without issue. But even reddit is falling prey to brigaders. The ability to keep generating accounts makes blocking trolls a moot point sometimes.
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They remove entire subs that aren't doing anything illegal. They may be distastful, but in many cases they no more break the community standards than hundreds or thousands of other subs.
Thats definitely moderating.
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What subs have they deletes?
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You pretty much have this, its called Facebook.
Dorsey the Square (Score:4, Insightful)
In addition to his paltry 2% stock shareholdings, his (at times) questionable leadership of Twitter has made him an easy target.
More interestingly, the rich and powerful who wish to control the narrative are better served buying up social media companies than traditional news outlets.
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That's partly because the traditional news reporting organisations now drive much of their content from social media.
The BBC in the UK for instance seem as incapable as the Labour Party of understanding that Twitter is not representative of the country as a whole. It reflects their own views back at them so they think these are normal and that anybody disagreeing is an ignorant outlier.
This has been shown repeatedly over the last 3-4 years, resulting in increasing mistrust in the BBC, as they demonstrably d
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No individual or company should be able to own more than a small section of the media or the social media. A platform as large as Twitter would need to be independent and really should have some legal requirement to be politically neutral.
You're not wrong, but the control of the news is still in the hands of relatively few billionaire news magnates. [investopedia.com] The greatest potential to influence public opinion is merely shifting to new outlets with the proliferation of social media and the number of people who get much of their news from it.
This is a pretty significant reveal actually (Score:1, Insightful)
Republicans have pretty much given up trying to win voters with their superior ideas, innovation, and leadership, and better government.
Now it is all about suppressing votes of people who don't like them, controlling information people see, appealing to white nationalist, lying their f***ing heads off about pretty much everything they are doing.
Case in point this article: They want to use their financial muscle tilt all social media they can in their favored direction. And this they aren't even tryin
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I've seen the tech world move from libertarians to leftists. Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit constantly shadow ban and censor conservative content.
Have you stopped for a moment and considered the business model of those companies that you mention?
It is based on having a product that the vast majority of people like using, preferably with other people. And they are international. So they really, really need to create an atmosphere that is welcoming, regardless of ethnicity, language, sexuality, gender and so on. Various forms of racism, misogyny, homophobia and other types of hate speech are quite simply a thread to their business model. Thus, they try
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I don't get why corporations aren't strongly in favor of universal healthcare. If that existed, they could stop paying for their employees' health care.
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Democrats have pretty much given up trying to win voters with their superior ideas, innovation, and leadership, and better government.
Now it is all about buying votes of people who don't like them, controlling information people see with biased media, appealing to racist socialists and progressives, lying their f***ing heads off about pretty much everything they are doing.
Case in point this article: They want to use their financial muscle in tech and Hollywood to tilt all social media they can in their favo
Re:This is a pretty significant reveal actually (Score:5, Insightful)
Now it is all about suppressing votes of people who don't like them, controlling information people see
Classic case of projection. You're accusing the right of doing what the left are already doing via Google, Twitter, Youtube etc. Now you're upset when somebody tries to use the same tools against you. Perhaps the left should have considered this possibility when you engaged mass suppression of right wing opinions, labelling every conservative viewpoint as "hate speech." Censorship is never a good idea because it invariably ends up being used against the censors. Welcome to the world you've created.
They want to use their financial muscle tilt all social media they can in their favored direction.
Oh look, more projection. Major technology companies, such as Google, have been using their financial muscle to push a left wing agenda. Major media companies, such as Disney, have effectively been commandeered by the left and are using their financial muscle to push a left wing agenda. In October 2017 George Soros transferred $18billion to his Open Society Foundations, using his financial muscle to push a left wing agenda. The left has been using it's financial muscle to push its agenda for decades. Now, when there's one case of the reverse possibly happening, you scream injustice. What a hypocrite.
The Republicans are in a good position to retake the house and retain the senate and the presidency. If that happens you can look forward to a much needed realignment. From the recent panels at CPAC, it looks like fixing the bias at the technology and social media companies will be a high priority. We might finally get to hear both sides of the argument, and you're clearly not happy about that.
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Classic case of projection
You can't win every argument by drooling "herp derp projection" when the actual facts are against you. Voter suppression, actually real voter suppression (not the "omg I got banned from twitter for facts about the (((illuminati)))") one but the ones where people are heavily penalised for trying to use the polls, prevented from using them and gerrymandering are by and large a Republican game.
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Oh, look, it's Rip Van Winkle. In the century that you were asleep, the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln that stomped heavily on states' rights (Civil War) and introduced the federal income tax switched places with the Democrats.
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The left happily get their news and opinions from The Young Turks, Colbert, Trevor Noah, etc,etc all of whom have very well funded YouTube presences.
Let's wait and see (Score:1, Flamebait)
Republicans have pretty much given up trying to win voters with their superior ideas, innovation, and leadership, and better government.
Let's wait for November and see how many voters have been won by the current administration, shall we?
I've never seen such complete derangement in people in my entire lifetime.
Our country is doing better than in 2016 by every measurable statistic, but to hear dems tell it we've done everything wrong in every possible way since the election.
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Every measurable statistic? So the fact that the federal debt has increased by $3 trillion is "doing better?"
Party of Business (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder why Republicans did not try it earlier.
The domination of left-wing new tech is annoying.
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I wonder why Republicans did not try it earlier.
The domination of left-wing new tech is annoying.
They have tried. Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace and immediately turned it into a steaming pile of shit. Now Facebook has struck an alliance with Trump to get him and his Republicans re-elected. It'll be fun to watch how that ends, specifically whether Facebook, having dethroned Fox News as the new hub of conservative propaganda, can turn into an even bigger and smellier shit pile that it already is. If Twitter gets bought out by a Republican donor and follows MySpace and Facebook down the toilet like all oth
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I wonder why Republicans did not try it earlier.
The domination of left-wing new tech is annoying.
They have tried. Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace and immediately turned it into a steaming pile of shit. Now Facebook has struck an alliance with Trump to get him and his Republicans re-elected. It'll be fun to watch how that ends, specifically whether Facebook, having dethroned Fox News as the new hub of conservative propaganda, can turn into an even bigger and smellier shit pile that it already is. If Twitter gets bought out by a Republican donor and follows MySpace and Facebook down the toilet like all other conservative attempts to dominate the tech sector I'll be throwing a party to celebrate.
Murdoch is an avid leftist Clinton supporter. Has been since the 90's. Just because he owns a controlling stake in Foxnews does not make him a right winger.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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At the very least don't give up controlling equity w/o going public....
A friend of ours sold 51% to VCs who could then basically steal the rest, since you can't live off 49% of something generating no income and can't sell it either.
Would be fun to see (Score:2, Interesting)
Would be fun to see liberals purged from the platform. They're currently in support of purging people they disagree with. Give them taste of their own medicine.
Singer was strongly anti-Trump (Score:2)
From Politico [politico.com]:
Um, yeah (Score:3, Interesting)
Gizmondo's opinion doesn't matter (Score:3)
Unserious people whining again. We know their position, and it's "you can't do that because we don't like it!"
Good (Score:2)
I hope current management gets pushed out. Twitter survives DESPITE it’s leadership, not because of it.
Republicans want to control Twitter? (Score:2)
Didn't that already happen? Who still reads twitter? Its just an open cesspit of racism, misogyny and outright stupidly.
I can't think of a better group to pilot the ship than the Trumpist Republican party.
Good luck with that.
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Re: Make Twitter MORE conservative? (Score:2)
Please also enumerate the principles of the Democrat party.
Pause
Ok, now I'll tell you what they are for ALL political parties EVERYWHERE:
To obtain and grow the power of the party at the expense of all other parties. Full stop.
Welcome to Grown Up World. A bit ugly, eh?
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I'll bite.
Whatever the Republican Party's principles once were, their principles are now "we do whatever the oligarch-religious-industrial-complex wants, and fuck everyone else". It is essentially the tool of a fundamentalist ideology.
The Democratic Party doesn't have principles in the sense that most people think of it, because it is a loose coalition of related but distinct social movements that disagree on a lot. This is why it can never get its act together.
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The democrats are a coalition and many people are members because they are not welcome anywhere else. For instance most black voters are at least slightly to moderately conservative. But black voters don't vote for republicans because of the long history of racism in the party that does not get purged. You see the same with jewish voters.
There are also economically conservative but socially liberal voters that also end up in the democrats. That is why the democrats end up so scatterbrained.
Without gerryman
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But black voters don't vote for republicans because of the long history of racism in the party that does not get purged.
I think it's because they are low information voters that they don't know that Democrats were the party of the South during slavery and Jim Crow. Democrats talk big about helping that demographic every 4 years then it all goes back to status quo for the following three years. There's a dependency there that is unhealthy. Want to see what Democrats really think of minorities? See if they think minorities can accomplish basic tasks like getting ID to vote. Republicans think that minorities are capable an
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Considering the low-information voters who don't understand the Southern Strategy and platform shift of the 1960s?
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The Republicans of the Abraham Lincoln era were against states' rights (hello Civil War) and were for big government and taxes- they introduced the federal income tax. It takes a special kind of idiot to fail to recognize that the two parties switched roles. And then there's the blatantly racist comment that black voters are "low information voters." And yet minorities don't need help in light of this nonstop racism?
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Perhaps you could point us to this "Democrat Party" and we could compare them.
The political parties in the US that generally appear on ballots, in rough order of size, are the
Democratic Party
Republican Party
Libertarian Party
Green Party
Communist Party of the USA
However I am unaware of any "Democrat Party". Please enlighten us.
Re: Make Twitter MORE conservative? (Score:2)
Re:Make Twitter MORE conservative? (Score:5, Insightful)
The republican party, just needs to end.
Parties don't end. They change.
They only change when enough of their voters abandon them.
Their voters only abandon them when they feel another party better represents their interests.
The Democratic Party is making zero effort to reach out to persuadable Republicans. You don't win people over by telling them they are deplorable and treating their culture with disdain.
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The Democratic Party is making zero effort to reach out to persuadable Republicans.
Well, sure. We're in the primaries. Most voters tune in at the last minute. There isn't much a purpose in trying to appeal to the other side in a primary vote which will (almost) entirely be decided by the diehards of the Democrat base.
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The Democratic Party is making zero effort to reach out to persuadable Republicans. You don't win people over by telling them they are deplorable and treating their culture with disdain.
It's tough to be more honest about their disdain when it's not even merely OK to be white. Democrats are true racists.
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Re:Make Twitter MORE conservative? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Make Twitter MORE conservative? (Score:5, Informative)
I did, and found no evidence Twitter was okay with it. The author deleted it and apologized.
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Sorry, my finger slipped. Posting to undo moderation.
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Meanwhile, I'm out here, a 2-time candidate for MPP in Ontario, who had been tweeting under my own legal name (@Owen_Ferguson) since 2006. Never got a blue check mark despite trying every thing I could to get one, and in 2019 I politely asked someone who was making a shitty analogy between fire drills and shooter drills to "please go die in a fire" and now I'm banned from life, with my entire post history gone like a citizen thrown out of a helicopter into the ocean.
Twitter can eat my balls. It's completely
Twitter is center-left (Score:5, Insightful)
The only thing right-wing about Twitter is that it's used much more heavily by people in the far right, than in the center-right. The opposite for the trend of those on the left.
Re: Make Twitter MORE conservative? (Score:3, Insightful)
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I remember when they called Reagan a dunce and an idiot and a cowboy every day for 8 years. Now, looking back, even the left wing media has put him on a high horse as a great president.
Not really. The left wing media doesn't think Reagan was a great POTUS, but it's just so rare to find an actual conservative in today's GOP that they pine for the olden days. Remember when you could actually have a debate on the merits of some topic? Yeah, it's been a while.
Since then no one looks at either Bush as great.
Neither Bush will be considered a great POTUS, but W has been rehabilitated as a good man who made serious mistakes.
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Reagan was a turd. From Iran/Contra to Star Wars to Trickle-down economics, he never met a bad idea he didn't like.