The Ballad of Twitter and that Billionaire Bumpkin, Elon Musk

The routine of a loyal X (formerly known as Twitter) user remains relatively simple.

You open the app and scroll to see what The Discourse is for the day. Someone's thought entices you enough to prompt a glance at the replies.

But as you expand, you are suddenly flooded with throngs of desperate, half-naked women urging you to click their ░L░I░N░K░I░N░B░I░O░. The accounts themselves are usually barren of original posts, with a stolen image as the profile picture and a spammy link to a webcam site in their bio.

Oftentimes they don't have anything else on their profile. Sometimes they have a poetic musing about their interests, like, "I am looking for sex, but do you want?"

Twitter has long had a bot problem, but since moderation on the platform was gutted and paid users were given "prioritization" in replies, the landscape has changed. It's just one sign of the wider decay of social media platforms that's playing out right now.

A nonprofit has canceled the ceremony for an award named after Ruth Bader Ginsburg, after its choice of recipients outraged the late liberal justice's family.

The Dwight D. Opperman Foundation has presented the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Leadership Award to accomplished women including Barbra Streisand and Queen Elizabeth II since its inception in 2019.

But this year, the Opperman Foundation selected four men, including conservative media titan Rupert Murdoch and billionaire Elon Musk, and Martha Stewart.

Ginsburg's family blasted the selection last week, saying the decision is an "affront" to the memory of the late justice and her values.

"This year, the Opperman Foundation has strayed far from the original mission of the award and from what Justice Ginsburg stood for," Jane Ginsburg, daughter of the Supreme Court justice, said in a statement.

By Monday, foundation Chair Julie Opperman issued a release saying it was canceling the April ceremony.

"This year we selected leaders in different fields. We honored men for the first time," Opperman said in a statement. "We thought RBG's teachings regarding EQUALITY should be practiced. We did not consider politics."

Martha Steward may or may not.

A federal judge has dismissed X owner Elon Musk's lawsuit against a research group that documented an uptick in hate speech on the social media site, saying the organization's reports on the platform formerly known as Twitter were protected by the First Amendment.

Musk's suit, "is so unabashedly and vociferously about one thing that there can be no mistaking that purpose," wrote U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer in his Monday ruling, "This case is about punishing the Defendants for their speech."

Amid an advertiser boycott of X last year, Musk sued the research and advocacy organization Center for Countering Digital Hate, alleging it violated the social media site's terms of service in gathering data for its reports.

One of the group's findings, published in June, detailed how "racist, homophobic, neo-Nazi, antisemitic or conspiracy content" from paid users went unmoderated on the site.

During a February hearing, lawyers for Musk asked if the suit could be refiled against the research group, but Breyer declined that request. The judge said claiming the alleged data scraping was harming the platform's safety and security does not "make very much sense."

Judge is skeptical of Musk's claims
Researchers with the center say data was compiled using third-party tools that accessed publicly available information, but Musk contended that the group scraped large amounts of data from X without the company's permission, leading to a loss of advertising revenue in the tens of millions of dollars.

Elon Musk’s tunneling company, The Boring company is destroying Texas’ natural beauty and has worsened the life quality of rural Texans, according to Bastrop residents, where the company is located.

“It is beyond heartbreaking, I could start crying just talking about it,” Flynn, 62, a Bastrop resident, told The London Times. “We had these incredible vistas of outstanding natural beauty. It was breathtaking — you’d pull over and cry because it’s so pretty. And now, it’s gravel mines.”

Boring moved to Bastrop in 2021, the town has about 12,000 people and is located east of Austin.

According to Flynn and her husband, since Boring arrived, the landscape has worsened, with trucks operating everywhere, earth mounds scattered in the fields, heavy machines, and new gravel and sand mines erected to support the company’s operations.

Also, there have been numerous environmental concerns about the company’s operation, the company has applied for a permit to dump 145,500 gallons of treated wastewater per day into the Colorado River. The company has also received complaints regarding its handling of wastewater in the area.

Other residents have expressed concern over the rising cost of living produced by the arrival of more Austin newcomers.

“[T]he Austin people are now having to move to Bastrop, the people in Bastrop are having to move out in the country somewhere,” Kenneth Kesselus, the town’s former mayor, told the Times. “We’ve got some houses that in a giant hurry went from half a million dollars to a million.”

However, Flynn hopes that there still will be people who fight to preserve the environment.

“I have three children and don’t want them to think it’s all over,” Flynn said. “I’m a big believer in the pendulum swinging back, and right now we’re in an extreme time of bullying and bad behavior and bad decisions and greed. But it’s going to swing back.”

Flynn owns a farm in Bastrop and an organic site in Austin.