[ExI] Twitter: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Fri Feb 27 15:43:32 UTC 2026

From: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> 
…

> John your criticism of Twitter seems odd, coming from the person who started Extropolis because of perceived speech restrictions on Extropy-Chat.

>… but you obviously haven't watched the video and I doubt you ever will, so how do you know that I or the video, is criticizing anybody or anything? All I said was that it was an interesting and amusing video about Twitter.

I watched the video.  I didn’t find it interesting however, and only mildly amusing.

> It is not the task of the medium to filter news sources or evaluate sources for truth. 

>…Is it the task of the richest man in the world…

You make it sound like a bad thing to be the richest man in the world.  Clearly he knows his business.  Rich is good.

>… who happens to be the sole owner of one of the largest new sources on the planet…

TwitterX isn’t a news source.  It is a medium.

>… to order 80 engineers at 2:36 am to come to work immediately and tweak the Twitter algorithm because a post by Joe Biden got more views than a post by the richest man in the world made at almost the same Instant?....

He owns the company.  How he filters the content is his business.  I would recommend starting a rival space where you control the content.  Alternative: get a TwitterX account and present your point of view there.  Second alternative: BlueSky is a rival medium to TwitterX.  It has grown to nearly 1% of the active users currently on TwitterX.  Present your POV there.  You can get a big following, for its audience is heavy on those who do not like the richest man in the world.

> Twitter is not a news source.

>…Then why did you say Twitter is where you get your news?  

John K Clark    See what's on my list at  Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> 

rvv

I should have worded it thus: TwitterX is where I find news that contributors generated.  My computer isn’t a news source either, but that is where a get news.  TwitterX is a medium.  My computer is a medium.  Air is the medium thru which the light and sounds travel.

Jack Dorsey demonstrated that an internet medium cannot afford to hire humans to filter content.  He made that perfectly clear by failing to trim staff, even as Twitter was losing money by the millions with no plausible turn around in sight.  Without Musk, there would be no TwitterX today.  

John, we should consider all the ways the richest man on earth has made our lives richer.  Tesla has electric cars whirring all over the place.  I would estimate it built about 20% of the newer cars on the road around here.  This helps prevent global warming from destroying the entire planet.  Heavy lift to orbit was improved greatly by SpaceX.  The Boring Company… well, ok I can’t think of a way it has benefitted me personally, but somebody must be buying its services.  StarLink is huge.

Earlier this week, our local internet provider had an outage that covered most of the town.  Businesses failed, buildings fell to ruins.  Tattered survivors were seen devouring pets and the still-warm corpses of their colleagues.  

Well, OK that is a bit of a stretch.  But I wasn’t out of luck, because I have a StarLink receiver, which I use for camping in the wilderness.  I set it up in minutes, and it was off to the races.  StarLink is good, a great backup for your regular internet provider.  It operates anywhere.  It isn’t even expensive.

The world’s richest man is rich because he has companies like that.  Being rich is a good thing.  If Musk didn’t do good things, he wouldn’t be rich.  Rich people are our friends.

spike

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