Thanks. I’m happy with how it’s performing. I haven’t been paying much attention to it recently, but I do consider it ready for wider deployment at this point. It’s been running with minimal issues for quite a while in a busy community. It was harder than I expected to get it to work in a satisfactory way, not just making bad or random decisions or banning unpopular people, or otherwise acting like a lot of human Lemmy moderators.

I drink your tears and they are delicious. It’s the number 4 community on slrpnk without me needing to do anything at all to feed it. I’m happy with that. I might take a look at deploying it in some non-test-bed scenarios, since it seems like it’s proven itself for long enough that it’s no longer in a “test” phase in any meaningful sense.

The spam in the modlog is a real concern. I may take a look at how to try to minimize it without impacting any design goals.

I’m also enjoying some of the reasons you got attention from human moderators:

Being an condescending asshole

Misinformation

Being aggressive, ridiculous, and insulting. Any further moderation issues from this user will result in a permanent ban from this community.

Aggressive, hostile, and ridiculous.

Gee, I can’t imagine to myself why you might be mad about automated moderation tools. Surely you’re just suddenly concerned about their long-term impact on Lemmy, and want to offer your input, to do your part to make the environment a better place.

No idea. Maybe it’s region-specific, or maybe it allows a certain number free before it kicks in.

I don’t think this is true. What do you mean by “deeply involved”? Just that she didn’t endorse him, or something else?

They are not owed our votes - they must effectively campaign to win them. That’s politics.

You aren’t owed life, or shelter, food every day, or freedom from imprisonment from no reason. Or from torture. Nobody outside yourself has any obligation to create for you a system that you like.

We made all this up, all this justice, flawed or not. We create it every day. Except now it might be about to go away. We either get together and create and sustain it, or it can blow away like a fart in the wind.

That’s realpolitik. Welcome to it, and congratulations.

Good news! Trump is planning to point a huge amount of anger at the Democrats as soon as he gets into office. Jack Smith, Joe Biden, Laetitia James, and who knows who else will probably get federal charges which will probably succeed.

I’m glad to hear you are united with that anger. I’m sure it will help us maintain the two-party system. What’s your next step, once those obstacles to the two-party system are cleared out of the way?

We are protesting the end of American democracy.

The time for infighting is done. I don’t see what complaining about the DNC accomplishes at this stage.

I think you can apply the same thing to anyone from the DNC who wants to talk about Latino or Arab voters who didn’t vote for the Democrat. It’s all just irrelevant at this point. It’s solidarity and survival time. I don’t care whether you think it’s this person’s fault or this other person’s fault.

I added an entry to the FAQ, at the end, about why the bot doesn’t notify for bans. I think the key thing to understand is that these aren’t permanent bans, and they apply 99% to people who will never care about the moderated community. If you have thoughts about it, I’m happy to talk, up to a point. The explanation is up there.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

They were banned from [email protected] ages ago, and just now starting posting new stuff there under new accounts.

You could be charitable and say that they probably didn’t understand how Pleasant Politics works, and had no idea that they were banned.

Or, you could say that this user has such a clear pattern of badly-intended participation that this is clearly in the spirit of ban evasion regardless.

To me, it would be different if they were coming with a post apologizing about trying to antagonize the whole community, and promising to be less toxic in their future interactions, and asking for a second chance. They’re not doing that. The fact that they’re not even bothering, just saying that they plan to continue the same obnoxious conduct as before, trying to innocently claim that they didn’t mean anything by it, and avowing to skirt carefully within the letter of the law, would mean that common sense would motivate a ban regardless and they don’t deserve any extra leeway when rules are broken, even if it was honestly unintentional in this case.

It’s up to you. In my opinion no good can come of having this person involved for as long as they really want to defend their right to troll, but it’s up to you.

You’re welcome to your dickness. The name is terrible. It just means no trolls.

@[email protected] I don’t know where to put this for sh.itjust.works, so I’m picking an admin at random.

“No fair pointing out that the other guy wants to kill the children and burn the world! I want to know: How good is the alternative. It better be fantastic. Like really good. Or else I don’t care.”

(Kamala Harris’s record is fine, but it barely matters. If one item on the menu is rat poison and the other is edible food, I don’t need to know how many Michelin stars the food got.)

So instead of “Democrats,” it should say “Netanyahu.”

And also, Trump has a machine gun, and the Democrats are sitting in the corner saying, “Hey, don’t do that. I don’t think you should do that.” They don’t seem to be doing much other than that.

And the same people who are screaming about how the Democrats bought the bullets in the first place are also, for the most part, screaming that Trump will do 10 times worse, and please don’t elect him. Also he wants to walk outside and start shooting all kinds of random people all over the apartment complex. Also he wants to give Netanyahu his second machine gun so Netanyahu can go through the apartment finishing off the guy’s family. He’s really mad about the whole “Hey, don’t do that,” thing.

I am glad that you are safe enough to not be able to see a difference between Kamala Harris’s sometime reprehensible foreign policy, and Trump who simply wants to burn the world and kill the children. Not everyone has that luxury. Please don’t subject them to Trump, while you’re making your little meme.

And how the unusual structures of Tesla and SpaceX lead to him being much more difficult to remove as CEO from those companies, as compared to more conventionally organized businesses.

This is a perfect example of the criminally underused word “sophomoric.” Almost all teenagers and young male adults go through a phase of it. It’s why second-year college students are “sophomores,” because right at that age is where it usually hits is peak.

It means that you’re smart enough to know that Elon Musk isn’t the CEO of Twitter, which is significant. Congratulations! But you’re also convinced that what you know is all a person would need to know, and other people being stupid is usually the explanation for things. You don’t take time to read the article which is talking about Tesla and SpaceX, both of which he is the CEO of. Nope, you just see “Elon Musk” and “CEO” and you know that a lot of people aren’t as well-informed as you, so you insert the word “Twitter” and spring to the races, convinced that you are right and this global media empire must just be full of idiots. You don’t even need to read the article. After all, you’re smarter than them.

Usually people grow out of it, eventually, as they contact the real world which contains other people who are also smart, and learn to think twice.

I’m probably fine. I am not in Germany. I just don’t want to make a problem for slrpnk.

Chapter 3: The Battle for the Future - AI

Musk and X seem to have long since spun out of control. These are not good signs for the avalanche that is currently rolling toward social networks, public communication and democracy as a whole: AI-generated content.

Musk is also involved here. After all, he once co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. In 2018, he left, and recently even sued co-founder Sam Altman because the company was no longer developing the technology for the benefit of humanity, but for pure profit.

Publicly, Musk enjoys the role of warning against the dangers of AI. In fact, he has long since launched a new AI company of his own, with a possibly far more dangerous model.

Through xAI, he offers paying X users a generative AI called Grok. The program delivers texts and now also images within seconds. Unlike ChatGPT, for example, there seem to be few moral, ethical or legal boundaries, but answers “to almost any question.” When the latest version of Grok was released in August, users reported that they were able to generate instructions for bomb making and Nazi propaganda without much ado. Or a plan for how a rampage at a school could be made as deadly as possible. In one test, analysts even had the AI draw a picture showing Musk in a classroom - holding an assault rifle.

Musk has since downplayed this, saying Grok is an AI committed to truth and that any errors are being corrected immediately. He touts Grok’s big advantage over the AI competition as the program’s ability to “access X in real time.” However, scientists at Northwestern University near Chicago see this very thing as the danger. “X is not exactly known for its accuracy,” the AI experts write. Musk’s AI could produce “misinformation on a large scale.” Moreover, Grok has no comprehensive safeguards in place to prevent misinformation from spreading uncontrollably.

Examples already exist. After Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the Democratic presidential nomination, Grok spread the false news, shared millions of times, for over a week that candidates could no longer be changed so late in the race. Ministers from five U.S. states complained helplessly to Musk that Grok had lied about the U.S. election process.

Is this the political battlefield of the future? Social networks in which an unrestrained and unbridled AI is at the service of trolls and enemies of democracy, autocrats and despots of any color and provenance, giving them the opportunity to produce lies in unprecedented quantity and convincing quality? Does truth, does democracy even stand a chance against this?

The beauty for Musk is that he can’t even be held liable for such madness.

“The original sin,” says German media scholar Joseph Vogl, currently teaching at Princeton University in the U.S., was the year 1996. That’s when the U.S. government restructured its telecommunications law so that platform operators can no longer be held liable for the content distributed on them - but their users can. The calls for violence and discrimination that exist today on X and at Musk’s behest are an effect of this privilege, he says: “In a democratic media world, this liability privilege would have to be abolished.”

Meanwhile, Musk is creating facts, shifting resources, talent and money from his companies toward xAI for months. He’s building the next big thing, a “computer gigafactory” that’s growing on the site of an old industrial factory on the outskirts of Memphis. Nothing less than the “world’s largest supercomputer” is what it’s supposed to become.

Theoretically, he could one day feed this monstrous machine with the unimaginable mass of data his various companies collect all over the world. For example, the data that his millions of Teslas record daily on the world’s roads. Or the data generated by SpaceX’s rocket launches. Or possibly the data that Neuralink will soon collect from human brains.

Artificial intelligence could be the interface for Elon Musk to connect his previously rather disparate empire. Someone like him has all the resources to be at the forefront of the AI race as well. Especially if he saves everything that makes the technology expensive and complicated: a well-positioned security department that contains the machine and protects humanity. xAI would thus become a powerful central hub in Musk’s empire, a data cockpit at whose control knobs the billionaire himself would sit. Next to him perhaps his buddy Trump. Possibly as president. Duo infernale.

All done.

Whatever. If this is inappropriate, let me know and I’ll delete them.

Chapter 2: The Attack on Democracy

In a former factory hall in Palo Alto, Peter Barrett strolls past a gigantic indoor slide before slumping into a chair in a conference room and crossing his legs. Barrett is founder and chief technologist of Playground, one of those venture capitalists that turn startups into corporations and their founders into multimillion-dollar CEOs with their investments in Silicon Valley. Barrett was once one of those himself. His computer games forge Rocket Science Games wanted to combine the best of Hollywood and Silicon Valley on the screen. To do that, he brought some of the country’s most talented programmers on board, including a certain Elon Musk.

The company flopped a few years later, Musk moved on. Even then, Barrett says, he could see that Musk actually wanted to “do his own thing.” “He was very, very smart. Each of us knew that one day he would become an entrepreneur.” To this day, Barrett has a noticeable fascination for Musk’s drive. SpaceX and Tesla are “incredible companies,” Barrett says. Elon’s curiosity, his unbridled will paired with modesty, were “outstanding.” Then he pauses rhetorically.

“But his political views are a mystery to me.” His former friend Musk, now “not the boy I knew. And that’s very confusing and perplexing to me.” Today, South African-born Musk, once an immigrant to the U.S. himself, rails against migrants, denies climate change with Trump, which he once wanted to fight with Tesla.

Why? Barrett, long financially independent himself, shakes his head. Being a billionaire can be a challenge. “Because suddenly you can do anything you want.” There are no more limits for “messianic characters.” Musk apparently thinks “only of himself,” no longer of the common good. “And that’s very human. When people cheer you long enough, you start to believe some of it at some point.” Money corrupts character, the saying goes. But does that make his former employee Musk a danger to humanity? Barrett doesn’t have to search long for an answer. X is “not a good way” for Elon to use his technical talent. But a “real challenge” - because the platform can be “used as a weapon to threaten democracy.”

When Elon Musk took over Twitter two years ago, he made two promises to the world: the platform would be politically “neutral” under him - and free of any censorship. He hoped he would thereby “promote democracy and civil discourse.”

In fact, right after the purchase, Musk began rebuilding Twitter into a political agitation machine. The price of $44 billion seemed grotesque. But the economic consideration falls short. Musk can now undisturbed create the reality in which he apparently lives - or wants to live.

With the takeover, Musk fired the majority of the international teams that had previously moderated the most blatant content. At the same time, he reactivated numerous blocked user accounts, including many of conspiracy ideologues and right-wing extremists. When authoritarian regimes like Turkey demand deletions and bans, Musk readily complies. Journalists he doesn’t like are sometimes blocked. Musk parted ways with a well-known U.S. TV moderator who was supposed to get a new format on X before the first episode aired: He didn’t like the questions for the talk show guest - that was Musk himself.

Like an authoritarian guru, Musk rants on X against illegal migrants, established media and the “woke” zeitgeist. He regularly spreads conspiracy myths that are suitable for undermining trust in democracy and its institutions.

According to an analysis by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk posted 50 misleading or false posts about the U.S. election via his channel from January to July of this year. They were viewed around 1.2 billion times. The secret services of the GDR called this strategy “erosion.” Under Musk, Twitter has become a “home for hate and disinformation,” law professor Maya Wiley tells DER SPIEGEL. The billionaire directly promoted the accounts of white racists and neo-Nazis, says the chair of the largest association of U.S. civil rights movements.

Musk biographer Walter Isaacson describes a “demon mode” that Musk sometimes slips into. A kind of dark tunnel the billionaire gets into. “Then he gets dark and retreats into the storm in his head,” is how Musk’s ex-partner, Canadian musician Grimes, describes it. She talks about Musk’s emotional awareness being developed differently than in average people. “He has different moods and many quite different personalities, and he switches between them extremely quickly.”

For X, the new boss is damaging to business. Almost all major advertising clients, such as Apple and Disney, have now withdrawn from the platform. Musk announced he would sue them, accused them of “blackmail” and threw a “Fuck yourself” after them. According to investment firm Fidelity, X’s market value is now only around $9.4 billion - not even a quarter of the purchase price.

From his fans, however, Musk gets frenzied applause for his course. They like and retweet every crude claim, many admire him unconditionally. When Musk spread in July that voting machines and mail-in ballots were too insecure and only in-person voting should be allowed, only agreement was found among the most widely circulated comments. Recently, he made the claim that Democrats want to import millions of migrants, who then allegedly vote for them by a majority. This nonsense was read more than 100 million times.

Wait, is this legal? It’s starting to feel like I am breaking a rule here. There’s more.

Chapter 1: Personal Radicalization

Paige Holland-Thielen chooses a restaurant with a gluten-free menu, heads for a table in the garden, orders a sandwich. She recently moved here with her partner, to Rochester, Minnesota. Far away from California or Texas, far away from Elon Musk. The places where Musk’s companies are located, says the woman with long, curly hair, are beautiful. But nothing would bring her back there.

Holland-Thielen has been through an odyssey. For four and a half years, the engineer worked in a leadership position at Musk’s space company SpaceX, accompanying rocket launches and satellite flights. When she started in Austin, Texas, in 2018, Holland-Thielen says, SpaceX was “a dream job.” “I’ve always loved space. Now I had the chance to really make something happen, to shoot real rockets into space.”

At least since Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, humanity has known how close genius and madness can sometimes be. And listening to Holland-Thielen, it was similar with Musk as in the novel, in which the evil, murderous alter ego of Dr. Jekyll gradually breaks through.

Dr. Elon and Mr. Musk? “That Elon can be an asshole,” Holland-Thielen says, she knew when she signed on with SpaceX. Only the extent and speed of his radicalization were unimaginable to her.

Holland-Thielen sips her water, then reports on Musk’s escalation, at first slow, then progressing ever faster. There’s this scene from the early 2020s, for example. Holland-Thielen was a team leader, responsible for the organizational process of rocket launches at SpaceX, when she learned through a colleague that Musk was currently on the way to a customer in a private jet with his - male - team leaders. “Everyone was there. Except me. Even though everything converged with me,” Holland says. An oversight? That’s when she first realized how Elon ticked, Holland-Thielen says. But when she told her manager about it, suggesting complaining directly to Musk about his sexism, he advised against it: That would lead directly to dismissal. He and the team, however, could not afford to lose Holland-Thielen at the moment.

Soon Holland-Thielen found out that it wasn’t just happening to her. She and her colleagues had to put up with sexual harassment in the workplace several times. One higher-ranking employee, for example, once reacted to a graphic with a “sexual allusion to an erect penis,” asking her, “How can we get it up, higher, highest?” Musk himself had spoken many times on X and in internal emails about his “wiener,” his sausage - and wanted that to be understood as a joke in hindsight. That’s also what it says in a letter to the board of directors and a lawsuit Holland-Thielen and other employees filed against Musk in 2022. Both are available to DER SPIEGEL. She and seven other SpaceX managers were fired as a result. Almost nothing is left of Musk’s once-touted “No Asshole” and “Zero Tolerance” policy toward foul-mouthed, abusive bosses, the employees complain in the letter. SpaceX’s “current systems” and “culture do not live up to the company’s stated values.” Musk, who considers the lawsuits unfounded, mocks people based on their gender, sexual orientation, age or religion. The billionaire treats and judges women according to their bra size, runs “his company in the dark Middle Ages” and offers “those who question the ‘Animal House’ environment that they can find another job if they don’t like it.”

All of this, the employees conclude, leaves only one conclusion: “SpaceX must quickly and expressly distance itself from Elon’s personal brand.”

In fact, SpaceX is farther from that than ever. As with Tesla, Musk has filled the company’s supervisory bodies with friends and relatives, at least people loyal to him. No objection is to be expected. Musk, the largest shareholder himself, exercises three roles simultaneously: Chief Executive Officer, Chief Technical Officer, and Chairman of the Board.

Equipped with such omnipotence, Musk has shed any shyness about using his company as a means of coercion. SpaceX is indispensable not only for NASA. With Starlink, Musk also has enormous blackmail potential - against democrats as well as despots.

The company appears in almost every global crisis: Starlink is used by paramilitary forces in Sudan, to fight Houthi rebels in Yemen, or in a hospital in the Gaza Strip. When Russia invaded Ukraine two and a half years ago and destroyed communications infrastructure across the board, it was Musk who, in an allegedly generous act, quickly restored Internet access to Ukrainians: He had Starlink activated there and donated receiving antennas. And when Hurricane “Helene” recently hit the southern U.S. states, President Joe Biden had to call on Musk for help to provide 30 days of free Starlink use for the areas affected by the hurricane.

The more chaotic and insecure conditions become in the world, the better for Musk. From this perspective, too, Donald Trump would be a blessing for him. Global Internet traffic via his satellites has tripled in the past year alone. Starlink now has three million customers in 99 countries. More than six and a half billion dollars, analysts estimate, Musk is likely to turn over with them per year. 7,000 of his satellites circle the Earth today in low orbits, accounting for about 60 percent of all active spacecraft. One could say: Musk has long dominated space as well.

How far he goes with this arsenal was recently shown in Brazil. When a constitutional judge there dared to ban Musk’s short message service X from the country because the platform was continuously spreading disinformation and thus endangering public order, Musk insulted and threatened the court and Brazil’s president - and finally picked a bizarre fight over his Internet provider Starlink, which is essential for local farmers, for example, who often control their machines with the help of the service. In the end, Musk accepted the millions in fines to get X unlocked again. But that seems to have only reinforced him in his furor - as his enthusiasm for Brazil’s former right-wing populist president Jair Bolsonaro shows.

For Holland-Thielen, her former boss is now a “dangerous person.” She says she can’t understand how people can still work in his companies and drive his cars. “I never want to give Elon another dollar or get one from him,” she says. “I’m very, very shocked by what he’s become.”