Dead Birds Tell No Tales

While Elon Musk was acquiring his initial 9% stake in Twitter, the company was facing a devastating blow from the FTC. Twitter was caught, and tried, over several years, for a massive phishing scam. They lied to users about how email addresses (and passwords) were used, stored, and kept safe, in an effort to gain mass adoption. It turns out that the company allowed Twitter employees to log-in as user accounts, via the Twitter.com portal that every other user uses. Some employees posted content, removed content, and spied on communications in private DM’s. Yes. They did that. A lot. It is Twitter’s business.

Elon Musk’s own 100,000,000+ follower account makes it certain the he has purchased fake followers in his time. What he learned during the FTC situation was the real value of Twitter: an email/password list. Not a list of user account handles which could disappear in a moment. But the log-in credentials most people use which are of a personal or professional nature. Plus a password, which users may use elsewhere.

Twitter paid a fine, and was supposed to make an announcement to their entire user base about this in March. If you missed it, that’s because it never happened. The company also made a promise not to do anything to (including on their own platform) inflate the value of Twitter while addressed their massive crime and unwound it.

Instead of Elon Musk using his platform to announce that the company he was trying to buy had a major problem with phishing illegally for users (including children) he decided to cover it up, and take it private. The entire Twitter platform may get dismantled and it will look like a failure. Which it is from a certain perspective.

Twitter Is Just A Black Market Contact List

Effectively, Elon Musk paid $44,000,000,000 for 150,000,000 illegally obtained email addresses and passwords in direct defiance of the FTC order. Now that the company is private and their reported troubles are of a political nature, it may never be addressed federally.

Elon Musk paid ~$293/per illegally obtained email address/password combination. All the users can flee. He doesn’t seem to care. All the employees who built the “company” are going to be fired, or have quit. He doesn’t care. Why? He didn’t buy any of them, nor that.

There may be no amount of money in the world to obtain 150,000,000 email addresses and passwords without subterfuge. So for Musk, obtaining all of that data is more important than any free speech issue. He will be able to stalk, clone, find, target, and otherwise probe 150,000,000 people via their email address, password, and past content published on the platform. Take a look at how many users Snapchat and TikTok claim to have. It’s about the same amount. How do you think they achieved such a feat? It’s not because their product is so revolutionary. Their customer service isn’t good. All of these platforms have been blamed for undoing Democracy. They all have a child predation problem. So what are they worth?

It cost Jack Dorsey about $5,000,000,000 in capital raising to build a platform that got dumped on the public market where he then used advertiser funds and investor money to keep phishing.

So for all of the celebrities…tweeting…that they’re leaving Twitter…Twitter ain’t leaving you. They have your email address and password, and you should expect to be hearing a lot from/about Elon Musk in ways you won’t recognize. If you want to actually stop this guy, and this company, a large effort needs to be made to force transparency on the phishing scam at Twitter, regardless of the fact that it is now a private company. It was public when Elon Musk bought it, and they are still in possession of effectively stolen information. Not to mention the nightmare of unwinding who technically owned shares of TWTR now that it’s going private. I imagine money managers hiding everything.

TikTok is no better. It’s basically a clone. Anybody still clinging to the “social media” category is effectively not living in reality anymore. They can’t see the bubble popped, and the public is over it. It is time to return to normal valuations for websites, and it is time for an end to email phishing scams from software programmers and their sycophantic following.

The public needs to be better educated on this, and any future message board sites need to be closely watched as to how they handle all information & data they are given.