Posted originally on the CTH on April 11, 2023 | Sundance
Outlining much of what was previously discussed here, Tucker Carlson ponders the effectiveness of rebranding the #1 bestselling domestic beer to a 4% target audience that eliminates 96% of its customer base. The facial expressions at 01:32 are priceless and funny – WATCH:
.
China banned Facebook in 2009, instantaneously eliminating 700 million users from the platform. Mark Zuckerberg was unwilling to give up a piece of his social media empire without a fight. Zuckerberg actually learned to speak Mandarin and toured mainland China, delivering speeches in their native tongue and attempting to align himself with the Chinese.
There was a popular app called Musical.ly with content reminiscent of the original version of TikTok, and Zuckerberg wanted to incorporate that platform into his empire. After 14 months of tough negotiations, ByteDance outbid Zuckerberg for Musical.ly to the tune of $800 million, and that app later merged with the TikTok we have in the US today.
“Until recently, the internet in almost every country outside China has been defined by American platforms with strong free expression values. There’s no guarantee these values will win out,” Zuckerberg said in a speech at Georgetown University. “While our services, like WhatsApp, are used by protesters and activists everywhere due to strong encryption and privacy protections, on TikTok, the Chinese app growing quickly around the world, mentions of these protests are censored, even in the US.”
Ironically, the feeling is mutual as China has always feared the US collecting its personal data. Zuckerberg mentioned his apps offer “strong free expression values,” but we have seen that lie explode numerous times over. He worked with the FBI to hide damning evidence against Joe Biden before his presidential campaign, de-platformed a sitting president, and wiped out hundreds if not thousands of users from the platform during the pandemic for spreading “fake news.” Zuckerberg used “fact-checkers” to ensure his version of the truth was promoted while silencing everything else. He appeased the NWO by promoting COVID-19 regulations and “the science.”
Facebook attempted to release a service similar to TikTok called Reels but failed miserably. Once he realized he could not reach China, Zuckerberg turned his attention toward banning his competitor entirely. Zuckerberg’s lobbying efforts temporarily paid off when Donald Trump signed an executive order to ban TikTok in 2020, primarily to show he was tough on China. TikTok then had an opportunity to be acquired by a US entity to avoid a ban, and Zuckerberg hoped his company would win. Around this time, US lawmakers were considering breaking up the Zuckerberg social media empire for having too much influence. This was when the propaganda against TikTok went into overdrive. He met with countless US senators and politicians to personally push his agenda.
Facebook was caught running a smear campaign against Google. In 2018, Facebook hired PR firm Definers to dig up dirt on its critics, including George Soros. They pinned that debacle on one employee and forced him to resign. Turning its sights to TikTok, the company hired a Republican consulting firm called Targeted Victory to “orchestrate a nationwide campaign” against TikTok. They hired unethical journalists to print op-eds bashing TikTok.
Meta was the largest internet lobbyist last year after spending over $20 million to sway US lawmakers. Zuckerberg hopes that his competition can be eliminated to remain the king of social media. However, the public is not rushing back to Instagram, Meta, or Facebook. In fact, people have begun deleting their accounts on those platforms to show that they will not return in the event of a TikTok ban.
Why do people love TikTok? Free speech. Political ads are banned on the platform but people may speak freely about any topic of their choosing, so long as it does not break obvious laws. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, something sinister is usually at play when both political parties unanimously agree. Zuckerberg is more than willing to hand over all the data he collects to the US government on a silver platter. The US wants to monopolize your data and control the content you view. They cannot break into the TikTok database as easily and that is the main driving factor behind the proposed ban.
The U.S. Dept of Justice (DOJ) has sent a five-page letter to congress, copying Politico for the public distribution therein. [SEE pdf HERE]
The snarky and passive aggressive Lawfare tone inside the letter is rather remarkable in its sanctimony and condescension. Essentially, Main Justice is telling congressional oversight, specifically House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, not to expect any timely responses because there’s a lot going on.
Additionally, as the letter directly implies, Republican oversight is not in the favor of the current administration or DOJ and, well, in general terms, get over it – they aren’t complying. However, feel free to initiate the formal negotiation process that will likely take several years.
From the letter to Jim Jordan, “Your January 17 requests—made now in your position as Chairman—initiate the constitutionally mandated accommodation process. Under this process, the Legislative and Executive Branches have a constitutional obligation to negotiate in good faith to meet the informational needs of Congress while protecting the institutional interests of the Executive Branch. We look forward to beginning this process in response to your January 17 letters.” (link)
(Via Politico) – […] The letter, addressed to Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), acknowledges the GOP’s multiple requests for information during the last Congress but doesn’t divulge any new information. Instead, Uriarte outlines how he hopes DOJ could have a “productive relationship” with Republicans in the new Congress, as Jordan had in previous letters accused the DOJ of “stonewalling” their requests, raised the possibility of a subpoena and said the committee could resort to “compulsory practices” to obtain the requested information and documents.
It’s an early marker of DOJ’s position as Republicans pledge to probe President Joe Biden’s administration over a laundry list of issues, including with a select subpanel that has a broad mandate to investigate the federal government. Conservatives have hinted they would use that panel to try to look into certain ongoing law enforcement investigations. (read more)
I think at this point everyone outside the professional political class in the Legislative Branch knew this was going to happen. However, the Republicans in Congress will likely pretend to be stunned by this development, Fox News Sean Hannity will be outraged by it, and then the RNC and RCCC will dispatch fundraising campaigns citing the refusal of the DOJ. Win, win, win… wash – rinse – repeat.
Predicting this approach was exactly why CTH said the House Subcommittee on Weaponized Government should not waste time looking for assistance, documents and or internal support from the various DC silos. Instead, the oversight committees need to go through the formal request process (blah, blah, blah) but focus their efforts at getting documents from the private sector collaborators outside the DC silo system.
If it seems like the Democrats always know how to use power more effectively than Republicans, you would be absolutely correct. However, few people really understand the reason for it. So, I will repeat.
This core truism carries forward beyond electoral politics and into the realm of legislative battles and oversight conflicts. Republicans want money as their primary objective. If the Biden administration wants to get an ideological bill passed, the Democrats simply buy the votes of Republicans (especially Senators).
As an additional outcome, Republicans in congress have no core values, no core objectives, no goals to achieve. After all, their structural goal is money.
Give Republicans power and they don’t know what to do with it, because the voters essentially boosted the dog to catch the car… now what?
What you see in the outcome of elections is that Republicans do not have any plan for power, because it’s not the issue that takes up their intellectual time. That’s reserved for deep analytical thoughts about how to make money from (XXX).
The Democrats know this, they know the main mission of Republicans. Ergo, the Lawfare DOJ pats the Republicans on the head and waits for the frustrated voters to get sick of the GOP doing nothing again, and the Democrats simply wait them out.
We have been in this repetitious abuse cycle for about two decades.
Battered Conservative Syndrome is a very real thing.
There are an enormous amount of codependent enabling voters in this process. I call them Seagull Republicans because they are voters who will fly down and shit over anyone who complains about this reality – then they fly up to their high perches and look down their noses.
In case you missed it, the Seagull Republicans are currently aligned to support Harmeet Dhillon and Ron DeSantis.
One UniParty consisting of two wings, the RNC and the DNC. One bird, two wings.
The GOPe priority around money is the one constant on the right wing. But don’t worry, because the Seagulls are promising that Ron DeSantis will protect us from teh geys.
As our models indicated, November would be a time of great civil unrest throughout the world. The latest incident occurred in Mexico where at least 200,000 people took to the streets to protest President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s (AMLO) proposal to reform the electoral body and Congress. The photo above was taken at Mexico City and shows only a fraction of the protestors.
The National Electoral Institute (INE) that organizes Mexico’s elections is in jeopardy. AMLO accused the INE of fraud back in 2006 and 2012 during his failed elections. He would now like to reduce Congress from 500 to 300 people and slash the Senate from 128 to 96. People are accusing Lopez Obrador of attempting to turn Mexico into a socialistic state like Cuba or Venezuela.
This is the same president who is backed by Mexico’s dangerous cartels. He visited “El Chapo’s” mother for her birthday and publicly greeted her. A politician would not enter Sinaloa territory without protection.
The opposition party would need to support AMLO’s measure for it to pass into law. People were warned that this man would never relinquish power after he was elected in 2018. Yet, the Western media praised him as the Mexican Bernie Sanders who was a simple man of the people. The proud Mexican people do not want to lose their freedom. They are standing up for their country and demanding reform.
As anticipated, Blue Check Twitter is big mad today….
(Politico) – Elon Musk began firing hundreds of Twitter employees on Friday, four days before the midterm elections, including members of the teams that work on U.S. elections and content moderation on the high-profile social-media platform.
Tweets flooded the platform on Friday, many using the hashtags #LoveWhereYouWork and #OneTeam, as employees let others know that they had been let go. Many of those posting had previously worked in roles including public policy, trust and safety, communications, engineering, marketing and human resources.
Half of Twitter’s public policy team was cut, including members of a team handling verification of politicians’ accounts, according to a person close to the company who requested anonymity. That work will now be folded into a team rolling out a subscription service that is expected to launch on Nov. 7.
[…] Friday’s layoffs, however, appear to be adding fuel to the anxieties of both users and advertisers that Twitter is gutting its ability to keep tabs on who and what shows up on its platform. And the across-the-board cuts come just as the company’s moderation systems are expected to be tested during the midterms.
In a press call, a coalition of civil rights and activists groups called #StopToxicTwitter called for a global pause on advertising in the light of the mass layoffs on Friday. […] “With today’s mass layoffs, it’s clear that Musk’s actions betray his words,” Jessica González, co-CEO of the media advocacy group Free Press, said on the call. (read more)
I think most people agree, the request from Elon Musk to see the background data from Twitter, used to evaluate bots and fake accounts, was entirely reasonable.
Twitter’s prior position that they would not permit Musk’s team to see the data stream was in ordinary violation of the terms of purchase. It would seem to be commonsense that Musk has every right to inspect the data and evaluate Twitter’s prior assertions.
WASHINGTON POST – After a weeks-long impasse, Twitter’s board plans to comply with Elon Musk’s demands for internal data by offering access to its full “firehose,” the massive stream of data comprising more than 500 million tweets posted each day, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the state of negotiations.
The move aims to end a standoff with the billionaire, who has threatened to pull out of his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter unless the company provides access to data he says is necessary to evaluate the number of fake users on the platform.
The firehose could be provided as soon as this week, the person said. Currently some two dozen companies pay for access to the trove, which comprises not only a real-time record of tweets but the devices they tweet from, as well as information about the accounts that tweet.
[…] Twitter’s leaders are skeptical of Musk’s ability to use the fire hose to find previously undetected information: The data stream has been available for years to some two dozen companies, which pay Twitter for the ability to analyze it to find patterns and insights in the daily conversation. They, along with some analysts and Silicon Valley insiders, say that Musk is using the data requests as a pretext to wiggle out of the deal or to negotiate a lower price. (read more)
The latest developments in the effort to purchase the unsustainable magic coffee shop are quite revealing.
According to the New York Post, “Musk himself is willing to invest between $10 billion and $15 billion of his own cash to take Twitter private, two sources close to the situation said. That’s up from the current 9.1% stake in the company he revealed on April 4, which is worth about $3.4 billion.”
However, more revealing about the overall issue are the comments from the PR firm of the U.S. Intelligence Community, The Washington Post:
(WaPo) […] “Putting so much power in the hands of one company is bad enough, but putting it in the hands of one person, as is largely the case with Facebook shareholder Mark Zuckerberg and would be the case if Twitter were owned by Musk, would be incompatible with democracy.”
“There are simply no checks and balances from any internal or external force,” … “It would leave Musk, like Zuckerberg, with an amount of assembled data about people and the ability to use it to manipulate them “that cannot be compared to anything that has ever existed, and allows intervention into the integrity of individual behavior and also the integrity of collective behavior.” (read more)
People are starting to catch on to the reality that costs for data processing on many social media platforms (the free coffee), exceeds the ability of the platform to generate revenue. People are starting to understand that behind the scenes of the Big Tech consortium, there is something else, some other operational construct and mechanism, that subsidizes & facilitates their existence.
It is very revealing how the intelligence apparatus of the United States had no issue with Twitter data and influence, until the potential for private ownership, perhaps uncontrolled private ownership, surfaced. Do not be naïve in pretending not to know how The Washington Post represents the interests of the intelligence apparatus.
In the long arc of history, I truly believe we will discover the inflection moment for the merge of U.S. Deep State (intel community) and U.S. Social Media, will be identified in the early moments of the Arab Spring of 2010/2011. That was when Facebook and Twitter became tools for the State Dept operation in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, Bahrain and beyond. That was the beta-test of synergy.
It was from that original, albeit misguided and manipulative partnership, when the actual details about how to create the social surveillance state was first tested. Everything after those events more than a decade ago, has been this rapidly evolving blend of social media technology and the capacity of the U.S. intelligence apparatus to create and fund the underlying structures.
Daily, we see numerous examples of the ideological control that surfaces as a direct result of this public-private partnership, the closed-conversations between deep government interests (the Fourth Branch) and social media companies which are dependent on the subsidized technology for them to exist.
Perhaps 2022 represents the first time the commonsense of the American electorate begins to recognize the fallacy of the ‘free coffee’ business model. Personally, I am very optimistic people will soon recognize what many have suspected for a long time.
Ultimately the question becomes, how far will the U.S. Fourth Branch of Government go to stop people from understanding?
Marc Andreessen believes Govt and Big Tech will double, triple and quadruple down to keep their public-private partnership, the backbone of the Free Coffee Shop, hidden. I cannot say I disagree, because ultimately it is still only the minority of people who understand the stakes. However, on the upside, the number of people who are starting to understand it, is growing almost exponentially thanks to Elon Musk.
This is one of those situations where we should all welcome being called ‘conspiracy theorists’, because no matter how big the crowd is that refuses to believe it, ultimately the impossible business model of Jack’s Magic Coffee Shop will reveal everything.
That’s why the public-private partnership must stop Elon Musk. As the Washington Post noted, this level of revelation “cannot be compared to anything that has ever existed.”
“Very shadowy” indeed.
Put this in the tracking file for ratios and such. Axios is reporting that CNN+ is likely to collapse as Warner Bros has suspended all external marketing and product development and fired the Chief Financial Officer. The network has spent $300 million, and only generated 150,000 subscribers. A major fail by any measure.
(Via Axios) Warner Bros. Discovery has suspended all external marketing spend for CNN+ and has laid off CNN’s longtime chief financial officer as it weighs what to do with the subscription streaming service moving forward, five sources tell Axios.
• Why it matters: Inside CNN, executives think the launch has been successful. Discovery executives disagree.
• CNN+ has roughly 150,000 subscribers so far.
• Warner Bros. Discovery wants to eventually build one giant service around HBO Max.
• New leadership has replaced CNN CFO Brad Ferrer with Neil Chugani, Discovery’s current CFO for streaming and international, as part of a broader finance team restructuring.
• Other high-level positions at WarnerMedia across different business functions are likely to be eliminated to cut costs and streamline leadership in coming weeks.
What to watch: Sources say a plan is being considered to replace Chris Cuomo’s 9:00pm EST primetime slot with a live newscast, instead of personality-driven perspective programming. (read more)
April 14, 2022 | sundance | 553 Comments
The richest man in the world, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, made an offer to purchase the Twitter platform for a price of $41 billion. The offer represents a value of 38% more than the current evaluation. [SEC FILING HERE] The offer is filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission proposing a full takeover for $54.20 per share in cash.
Within the filing Elon Musk states his intentions:
“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy. However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.
As a result, I am offering to buy 100% of Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash, a 54% premium over the day before I began investing in Twitter and a 38% premium over the day before my investment was publicly announced. My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder. Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it. (SEC LINK)
What Elon Musk appears to be doing is perhaps the biggest story that few understand.
I share this perspective having spent thousands of hours in the past several years deep in the weeds of tech operating systems, communication platforms, and the issue of simultaneous users. What Twitter represents, and what Musk is attempting, is not what most would think.
In the big picture of tech platforms, Twitter, as an operating model, is a massive high-user commenting system.
Twitter is not a platform built around a website; Twitter is a platform for comments and discussion that operates in the sphere of social media. As a consequence, the technology and data processing required to operate the platform does not have an economy of scale.
There is no business model where Twitter is financially viable to operate…. UNLESS the tech architecture under the platform was subsidized.
In my opinion, there is only one technological system and entity that could possibly underwrite the cost of Twitter to operate. That entity is the United States Government, and here’s why.
Unlike websites and other social media, Twitter is unique in that it only represents a platform for user engagement and discussion. There is no content other than commentary, discussion and the sharing of information – such as linking to other information, pictures, graphics, videos url links etc.
In essence, Twitter is like the commenting system on the CTH website. It is the global commenting system for users to share information and debate. It is, in some ways, like the public square of global discussion. However, the key point is that user engagement on the platform creates a massive amount of data demand.
Within the systems of technology for public (user engagement) commenting, there is no economy of scale. Each added user represents an increased cost to the operation of the platform, because each user engagement demands database performance to respond to the simultaneous users on the platform. The term “simultaneous users” is critical to understand because that drives the cost.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Twitter has approximately 217 million registered daily users, and their goal is to expand to 315 million users by the end of 2023. Let me explain why things are not what they seem.
When people, users, operate on a tech platform using the engagement features, writing comments, hitting likes, posting images, links etc, the user is sending a data request to the platforms servers. The servers must then respond allowing all simultaneous users to see the change triggered by the single user.
Example: when you hit the “like” button feature on an engagement system, the response (like increasing by one) must not only be visible to you, but must also be visible to those simultaneously looking at the action you took. If 100,000 simultaneous users are looking at the same thing, the database must deliver the response to 100,000 people. As a result, the number of simultaneous users on a user engagement platform drives massive performance costs. In the example above, a single action by one person requires the server to respond to 100,000 simultaneous users with the updated data.
As a consequence, when a commenting platform increases in users, the cost not only increases because of that one user, the cost increases because the servers need to respond to all the simultaneous users. Using CTH as an example, 10,000 to 15,000 simultaneous commenting system users, engaging with the servers, costs around $4,500/mo.
This is why most websites, even big media websites, do not have proprietary user engagement, i.e. commenting systems. Instead, most websites use third party providers like Disqus who run the commenting systems on their own servers. Their commenting systems are plugged in to the website; that defers the cost from the website operator, and the third party can function as a business by selling ads and controlling the user experience. [It also sucks because user privacy is non existent]
The key to understanding the Twitter dynamic is to see the difference between, (a) running a website, where it doesn’t really matter how many people come to look at the content (low server costs), and (b) running a user engagement system, where the costs to accommodate the data processing -which increase exponentially with a higher number of simultaneous users- are extremely expensive. Twitter’s entire platform is based on the latter.
There is no economy of scale in any simultaneous user engagement system. Every added user costs exponentially more in data-processing demand, because every user needs a response, and every simultaneous user (follower) requires the same simultaneous response. A Twitter user with 100 followers (simultaneously logged in) that takes an action – costs less than a Twitter user with 100,000 followers (simultaneously logged in), that takes an action.
If you understand the cost increases in the data demand for simultaneous users, you can see the business model for Twitter is non-existent.
Bottom line, more users means it costs Twitter more money to operate. The business model is backwards from traditional business. More customers = higher costs, because each customer brings more simultaneous users….. which means exponentially more data performance is needed.
User engagement features on Twitter are significant, because that’s all Twitter does. Not only can users write comments, graphics, memes, videos, but they can also like comments, retweet comments, subtweet comments, bookmark comments, and participate in DM systems. That is a massive amount of server/data performance demand, and when you consider simultaneous users, it’s almost unimaginable in scale. That cost and capacity is also the reason why Twitter does not have an edit function.
With 217 million users, you could expect 50 million simultaneous users on Twitter during peak operating times. My back of the envelope calculations, which are really just estimations based on known industry costs for data performance and functions per second, would put the data cost to operate Twitter around at least $1 billion per month (minimum). In 2021, Twitter generated $5.1 billion in revenue, according to the Wall Street Journal.
There is no business model, even with paying subscribers, for Twitter to exist. As the business grows, the costs increase, and the costs to subscribers would grow. So, what is going on?
The only way Twitter, with 217 million users, could exist as a viable platform is if they had access to tech systems of incredible scale and performance, and those systems were essentially free or very cheap. The only entity that could possibly provide that level of capacity and scale is the United States Government – combined with a bottomless bank account.
If my hunch is correct, Elon Musk is poised to expose the well-kept secret that most social media platforms are operating on U.S. government tech infrastructure and indirect subsidy. Let that sink in.
The U.S. technology system, the assembled massive system of connected databases and server networks, is the operating infrastructure that offsets the cost of Twitter to run their own servers and database. The backbone of Twitter is the United States government.
There is simply no way the Fourth Branch of Government, the U.S. intelligence system writ large, is going to permit that discovery.
Black Lives Matter (BLM) has become a money-laundering operation. The problematic organization used a catchy slogan to spread hate while the people in charge became millionaires. It recently came to light that the group purchased a mansion in Los Angeles for $6 million in October 2020 with charitable donations. Dyane Pascall, a BLM member with close ties to co-founder Patrisse Cullors, purchased the mansion in cash before transferring the deed to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation days later.
Pascall simply stated, “I don’t owe you an explanation,” when questioned about the illegal transaction. “This home is not just a home — it’s, like, four structures,” Pascall told the Washington Examiner. “It’s a film studio, sound stage, commercial space, office space. It’s a campus. It’s got 20 parking spaces so people can come and work. It’s not a home per se. It’s an actual campus space for people to work from.” The 6,500 square foot mansion boasts six bedrooms and room for over 20 cars. Is that not a red flag?
Worsening matters, some news agencies are reporting that Dyane Pascall purchased the nearly $6 million mansion days after another BLM member purchased it for nearly half the price. This is not the only mansion that the organization owns under the tax-exempt status that was provided to them in December of 2020. Interesting that self-proclaimed Socialists would be interested in high-end luxury real estate. But as with all Socialists, the problem becomes when they run out of other people’s money.
BLM has become untouchable because people are afraid to be labeled racist. In reality, BLM has caused more harm than good for their own community. Since the left is desperate for voters, they have pandered to this organization and turned a blind eye to the blatant crime. BLM burned down shops and toppled police cars, yet there was never an investigation, and the protests were permitted to continue. The money that was supposed to help uplift those who they believe are systematically oppressed was instead used to make the founders multi-millionaires. California threatened to sue the organization for failing to report its finances, and Amazon removed the organization from its AmazonSmile charity program. The Department of Justice needs to investigate, and the donors should be outraged. Politicians such as Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau needed the BLM organization to create a racial divide and secure the minority vote instead of actually implementing policies that would help their cause.
I have created this site to help people have fun in the kitchen. I write about enjoying life both in and out of my kitchen. Life is short! Make the most of it and enjoy!
De Oppresso Liber
A group of Americans united by our commitment to Freedom, Constitutional Governance, and Civic Duty.
Share the truth at whatever cost.
De Oppresso Liber
Uncensored updates on world events, economics, the environment and medicine
De Oppresso Liber
This is a library of News Events not reported by the Main Stream Media documenting & connecting the dots on How the Obama Marxist Liberal agenda is destroying America
Australia's Front Line | Since 2011
See what War is like and how it affects our Warriors
Nwo News, End Time, Deep State, World News, No Fake News
De Oppresso Liber
Politics | Talk | Opinion - Contact Info: stellasplace@wowway.com
Exposition and Encouragement
The Physician Wellness Movement and Illegitimate Authority: The Need for Revolt and Reconstruction
Real Estate Lending
Centinel2012 