Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

[EnterpriseSovereign]

If Musk is too stupid to see he needs them more than they need him, he deserves to have Twitter go belly-up.

[LadyTevar]

Worker asks Musk on Twitter "Have I Been Fired?"

The Iceland-based entrepreneur had sold his company, Ueno, a creative design agency, to Twitter in early 2021 - after founding the firm in Reykjavik in 2014.

As part of the acquisition he (Halli Thorleifsson) became a full-time employee at Twitter.

"I decided to sell for a few reasons but one of them is that I have muscular dystrophy and my body is slowly but surely failing me," he told the BBC.

"I have a few good work years left in me so this was a way to wrap up my company, and set up myself and my family for years when I won't be able to do as much."

[Ralin]

Worker asks Musk on Twitter "Have I Been Fired?"

The Iceland-based entrepreneur had sold his company, Ueno, a creative design agency, to Twitter in early 2021 - after founding the firm in Reykjavik in 2014.

As part of the acquisition he (Halli Thorleifsson) became a full-time employee at Twitter.

"I decided to sell for a few reasons but one of them is that I have muscular dystrophy and my body is slowly but surely failing me," he told the BBC.

"I have a few good work years left in me so this was a way to wrap up my company, and set up myself and my family for years when I won't be able to do as much."

Yeah, I've been reading about that elsewhere. He's apparently something of a national hero because he spent the money from his Twitter buyout improving disability access in Iceland. He was on the Do Not Fire list because his salary was in lieu of payment for the company on the grounds that he didn't want it to be taxed as capital gains because then he'd pay lower taxes and he thought that wasn't enough. He's also pro-trans rights and pays legal fees for sexual assault victims. And was knighted.

[bilateralrope]

Musk suspends “overzealous” rightsholders for “weaponizing” DMCA on Twitter

Musk considers "egregious, repeated" takedown notices "a plague on humanity.”
ASHLEY BELANGER - 3/8/2023, 10:04 AM

Yesterday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk declared that Twitter will now be temporarily suspending any accounts found to be “engaging in repeated, egregious weaponization” of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Musk’s tweet came at the same time that an intense copyright dispute was unfolding that resulted in the suspension of a rightsholder’s Twitter account. The suspension came after a professional photographer and Twitter user, @NightLights_AM, submitted a takedown notice to a hobbyist Twitter user, @Rainmaker1973, who posted one of the photographer’s videos without permission.

It’s difficult to track down the full story here because the suspended account’s tweets are unavailable, and some of the hobbyist account’s tweets have been deleted. And it’s unclear if Musk was aware of this particular dispute or the subsequent account suspension of the rightsholder. But TorrentFreak documented the DMCA Twitter saga in great detail, gathering archived and cached tweets to piece together what happened.

According to TorrentFreak, @NightLights_AM is run by Norway-based nature and astrophotographer Adrien Mauduit, whose Twitter feed was full of colorful videos and photos that he took as an “Aurora chasing specialist.” In early March, Mauduit uploaded a video of a geomagnetic storm that was then embedded in a tweet sent by @Rainmaker1973, which is run by an Italy-based Twitter user named Massimo.

Massimo, who is an engineer who uses Twitter to “build the big picture of #science via selected & curated pics, videos & links,” credited Mauduit’s account and linked to the original tweet. But that didn’t stop Mauduit, according to Massimo, from sending a takedown notice.

Seemingly hoping to resolve the dispute, Massimo contacted Mauduit, who then asked for money, according to Massimo. Ars could not immediately reach Mauduit for comment, but so far he has not confirmed or denied any of the allegations Massimo has made about their exchanges. TorrentFreak noted that Mauduit may have intended to ask for licensing fees, but Massimo’s story is that Mauduit is one of many content creators who have “blackmailed” him for sharing content for educational purposes over the years.

“I was hit by DMCA tens of times since 2014 and I was suspended once for 3 weeks,” Massimo tweeted. I paid more than $1,500 to keep this account open, I’ve paid all those have blackmailed me. I’ve been blocked in error several times, and I’m struggling going on like this.”

But with Musk's new declaration to suspend excessive DMCA use, he appears to be more sympathetic to Twitter users like Massimo than to Twitter creators like Mauduit. Twitter did not respond to Ars’ request to clarify, but TorrentFreak speculated that Musk may have been directly behind Mauduit's account suspension.

Although Twitter is required to respond to copyright complaints, Musk has long been a critic of what he considers DMCA weaponization and, even more generally, is opposed to upholding online norms where creators seek credit for original content. In 2021, when Musk was criticized for cropping out creators’ names and stealing the memes that he shared, Musk claimed “no one should be credited with anything ever,” The New York Times reported. And in May 2022, he tweeted that “overzealous DMCA is a plague on humanity” and “current copyright law in general goes absurdly far beyond protecting the original creator.” So, it’s not necessarily surprising that he would shift Twitter policy to prevent such overzealousness on his own platform.

Musk is not completely against creators with valid complaints, of course, tweeting that “reasonable media takedown requests are, of course, appropriate and will always be supported.” Where the line will be drawn between reasonable and unreasonable has yet to be seen, though. [Update: Twitter trust and safety chief Ella Irwin told Ars, "Twitter handles DMCA complaints from rightsholders on a regular basis and we review each complaint to ensure they are valid and if so, we take down the reported content. For all complaints, DMCA and otherwise, we look for evidence of bad faith reporting such as someone claiming to be a rights owner when they actually do not own the rights to the content in question or someone threatening to get a user suspended unless they pay them money immediately, which often turns out to be a fraud scam. If we see evidence of bad faith reporting, we will suspend the reporter."]

An hour after tweeting about Twitter's new efforts to prevent DMCA weaponization, Musk seemed to realize that his tweet did not reassure content creators that the Twitter CEO hopes will be part of his overall Twitter monetization strategy. He later tweeted that supporting content creators is still a “major priority,” saying that he understands that “people need to make a living and prosper from their work.”

No one’s sure how much money Mauduit was making by uploading his original content to Twitter, but it seems clear that as long as his account is suspended, the photographer will be missing opportunities to promote his work and prosper from it.

How long before a copyright holder goes after Twitter because Musk blew up their DMCA safe harbour protection ?

[Ralin]

Update: Apparently it got bad enough that Musk apologized to the Icelandic disability saint. Though I've only seen screenshots and not the actual tweet.

[bilateralrope]

EU tells Elon Musk to hire more staff to moderate Twitter

Regulators are concerned that platform aims to use more volunteers and AI for moderation.
JAVIER ESPINOZA, CRISTINA CRIDDLE, AND HANNAH MURPHY, FT - 3/9/2023, 3:44 AM

Elon Musk and the EU are in a dispute over the Twitter owner’s plan to use more volunteers and artificial intelligence to help moderate the social media platform, as the company responds to strict new rules designed to police online content.

According to four people familiar with talks between Musk, Twitter executives, and regulators in Brussels, the billionaire has been told to hire more human moderators and fact-checkers to review posts.

The demand complicates Musk’s efforts to reorganize the lossmaking business he acquired for $44 billion in October. The new owner has slashed more than half of Twitter’s 7,500 staff, including the entire trust and safety teams in some offices, while seeking cheaper methods to monitor tweets.

Twitter currently uses a mix of human moderation and AI technology to detect and review harmful material, in line with other social media platforms. However, it does not employ fact checkers, unlike larger rival Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.

Twitter has also been using volunteer moderators for a feature called “community notes” to tackle the deluge of misinformation on the platform—but the tool is not used to address the illegal content.

Musk also told EU commissioner Thierry Breton last January that it will lean further on its AI processes, said people with direct knowledge of the talks.

Those people said Breton advised that, while it was up to Twitter to come up with the best way to moderate the site, he was expecting the company to hire people to comply with the Digital Services Act.

Twitter said in a statement to the Financial Times: “We intend to comply fully with the Digital Services Act and have had several productive discussions with EU officials on our efforts in this area.”

“We will continue to utilize a mixture of technology and expert staff to proactively detect and remove illegal content, while community notes will enable people to learn more about potential misinformation in a way that is informative, transparent and trustworthy,” the company added.

The DSA is landmark legislation that will force Big Tech groups to police their sites more aggressively for illegal content. Major platforms, including Twitter, will have to be fully compliant by September this year at the latest. Those in breach face fines of up to 6 percent of global turnover. Musk told Breton that hiring will take time but staff will be in place to comply with the DSA this year.

Following their January meeting, Musk tweeted: “Good meeting with @ThierryBreton regarding EU DSA. The goals of transparency, accountability & accuracy of information are aligned with ours. @CommunityNotes will be transformational for the latter.”

Further talks have been held between Twitter and EU regulators regarding its moderation plans in recent weeks. At those, officials have admitted pursuing the community notes model could work to weed out a large proportion of misleading information in the same way editors achieve similar results on Wikipedia.

But concerns have been raised that the site does not have hundreds of thousands of volunteer editors, as Wikipedia does, and that Twitter has a poor record on non-English language content moderation, an issue that plagues other social networks.

“Community notes is not a terrible idea but Musk needs to prove that it works,” said a person with direct knowledge of the talks.

A person familiar with the community notes project said the feature is only one part of Twitter’s wider disinformation moderation approach.

“Platforms should be under no illusion that cutting costs risks cutting corners in an area that has taken years to develop and refine,” said Adam Hadley, director of Tech Against Terrorism, a UN-backed organization that helps platforms police extremist content online. “We are worried about the signal Twitter’s latest move sends to the rest of the industry.”

The European Commission said: “We believe that ensuring sufficient staff is necessary for a platform to respond effectively to the challenges of content moderation, which are particularly complex in the field of hate speech. We expect platforms to ensure the appropriate resources to deliver on their commitments.”

© 2023 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

Looks like the EU has reminded Musk that moderation is not optional and they expect him to hire as many people as required to make it effective.

The only way I can see Musk bringing Twitter into compliance by September is if Twitter suffers a permanent outage before then.

[bobalot]

Twitter is going through this slow decline with regular intervals of disaster as a result of Dear Leader Elon Musk's latest idea from a cocaine binge.

[ismailkho]

Mr Musk has also been accused of neglecting his electric car company Tesla, which is where most of his wealth is. Tesla shares have lost more than 60% in value this year, with some saying his obsession with Twitter is destroying the brand.

Last week, Leo KoGuan, the third largest individual shareholder in Tesla, called for Mr Musk to step down as the boss of the electric car maker.

[Zaune]

I'm bringing this blog update forward a couple of days because the Shitlord of Twitter himself, Dilbert Stark, has announced that during April he'll be stripping the blue ticks from verified but non-paying Twitter accounts like mine and drop us from being boosted by the all-powerful algorithm. So if I wait a couple of days longer, my tweet linking to this post will sink like a stone.

Charles Stross, bringing us news of Musk's latest visit from the good idea fairy.

I mention this mainly because "Dilbert Stark" is the best nickname for Musk I've ever heard.

[bilateralrope]

Twitter posts the code it claims determines which tweets people see, and why

Posted algorithm code includes "is_democrat," "is_republican," and "is_elon."
KEVIN PURDY - 4/1/2023, 11:24 AM

Twitter has made good on one of CEO Elon Musk's many promises, posting on a Friday afternoon what it claims is the code for its tweet recommendation algorithm on GitHub.

The code, posted under a GNU Affero General Public License v3.0, contains numerous insights as to what factors make a tweet more or less likely to show up in users' timelines.

In a blog post accompanying the code release, Twitter's engineering team (under no particular byline) notes that the system for determining which "top Tweets that ultimately show up on your device's For You timeline" is "composed of many interconnected services and jobs." Each time a Twitter home screen is refreshed, Twitter pulls "the best 1,500 Tweets from a pool of hundreds of millions," the post states.

The largest source of those tweets are "In-Network Sources," or users someone follows. The top tweets from that pile are ranked on the likelihood of a user's engagement with that tweet's author; the more likely, the more their tweets show up in For You. For the "Out-of-Network Sources," those not followed by the user, Twitter says it considers tweets that attracted engagement from people users follow and tweets liked by those who like tweets similar to a user.

Already, those who have looked through the code have spotted considerations that raise many more questions. Many have posted them, naturally, on Twitter itself.

Ólafur Waage, a senior software developer at Norwegian software consulting service TurtleSec, noted that inside "HomeTweetTypePredicates.scala," some of the seeming considerations for a tweet to be a candidate for the "For You" section are:

• author_is_elon
• author_is_power_user
• author_is_democrat
• author_is_republican

Elsewhere in the code, a code comment presumably left by a Twitter engineer clarifies that those identification values are "used purely for metrics collection." The comment reads as follows:

These author ID lists are used purely for metrics collection. We track how often we are serving Tweets from these authors and how often their tweets are being impressed by users. This helps us validate in our A/B experimentation platform that we do not ship changes that negatively impacts one group over others.

The names of the objects in question such as "DDGStatsDemocratsFeature" or "DDGStatsElonFeature" seem to support this interpretation, but it may not be possible to confirm that with the available code. It's interesting that Twitter is checking and collating these variables, however. During a Twitter Spaces audio session, a Twitter engineer noted that the Democrat and Republican labels were used for metrics. Musk, who claimed he was unaware of the labels before today, suggested they should not be there.

Other things considered about a tweet include whether it's less than 30 minutes old, if it has pictures, and whether it's from a "power user," which some believe means a "legacy" verified account.

Musk tweeted alongside the company's blog post that the recommendation algorithm, claiming that the "acid test" will be if "independent third parties" can "determine, with reasonable accuracy, what will probably be shown to users."

Twitter's posting of its algorithm code comes just days after the social network's broader source code was discovered on GitHub, potentially having been there for months, according to The New York Times. Twitter then obtained a subpoena forcing GitHub to reveal the GitHub poster's information.

A report from Platformer earlier this week suggested that Twitter utilized a secret list of 35 top Twitter users, including President Biden, LeBron James, Ben Shapiro, and Musk. Evidence of that list's implementation, reportedly spurred partly from Musk's dissatisfaction with his own engagement, has not been found so far in Twitter's posted code base.

Most notably, the code arrives just hours before "legacy verified" users—those given a blue checkmark to indicate authenticity or notability before Musk's purchase of the service—are to be un-verified in favor of paying Twitter Blue subscribers. While some users connected to governments and large organizations may apply for checkmarks of other colors, only Twitter Blue subscribers, at $8 per month, will receive "prioritized ranking in conversations," among other features.

All of those changes happen to arrive on April 1, or April Fool's Day.

No explanation of how people get labelled as republicans/democrat within Twitters code. Nor do we get to see the code that shows how those labels are used. All we can do is guess at how Musk would want Twitter to treat them.

[Zaune]

I never was a fan of Facebook's tendency to only show you news articles that said things you wanted to hear, or at least what Facebook's algorithms thought you wanted to hear. But from comments Dilbert Stark has made elsewhere (the source for which I can't lay my hands on just now) it's possible that Twitter's algorithm is going to be tailored towards showing you articles that will wind you up instead. This does not strike me as an improvement.

[madd0c0t0r2]

I never was a fan of Facebook's tendency to only show you news articles that said things you wanted to hear, or at least what Facebook's algorithms thought you wanted to hear. But from comments Dilbert Stark has made elsewhere (the source for which I can't lay my hands on just now) it's possible that Twitter's algorithm is going to be tailored towards showing you articles that will wind you up instead. This does not strike me as an improvement.

Facebook's does that as well. Trans friend getting shown a lot of hate groups based on 'shared interests or your connection commented in this group '

[Ralin]

I never was a fan of Facebook's tendency to only show you news articles that said things you wanted to hear, or at least what Facebook's algorithms thought you wanted to hear. But from comments Dilbert Stark has made elsewhere (the source for which I can't lay my hands on just now) it's possible that Twitter's algorithm is going to be tailored towards showing you articles that will wind you up instead. This does not strike me as an improvement.

Facebook's does that as well. Trans friend getting shown a lot of hate groups based on 'shared interests or your connection commented in this group '

Yeah I was under the impression that was a widely known mechanism social media uses to drive engagement. Especially Facebook and Twitter.

[bilateralrope]

TECH
Dogecoin jumps more than 30% after Musk changes Twitter logo to image of shiba inu

PUBLISHED MON, APR 3 20234:27 PM EDTUPDATED MON, APR 3 202311:33 PM EDT
Rohan Goswami
@ROGOSWAMI

Lora Kolodny
@LORAKOLODNY

• Dogecoin rose over 30% after Twitter changed its logo to an image of a shiba inu dog, the digital coin’s symbol.
• Twitter CEO Elon Musk has touted the token for years.
• On Friday, Musk asked a judge to dismiss a $258 billion racketeering lawsuit accusing him of pumping the cryptocurrency.

Niche cryptocurrency dogecoin spiked more than 30% on Monday after Twitter CEO Elon Musk replaced the blue bird on his company’s website with an image of a shiba inu, the digital coin’s logo.

On Friday, attorneys for Twitter and Musk asked a federal judge to toss out a $258 billion lawsuit from 2022 that accused the billionaire of manipulating dogecoin’s price and driving it up over 36,000%.

After the Twitter logo was altered to a shiba inu image, Musk shared a meme about the change to his 133.5 million followers on Twitter. The dog appeared only for some users of Twitter, including those on its website.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

Musk started touting dogecoin years ago. He periodically tweets about the token, which was created as a joke in 2013, predictably causing volatility each time. According to CoinMarketCap.com, dogecoin is the eighth-most valuable cryptocurrency, with a market cap of over $13 billion.

Musk’s lawyers described his public statements about the coin as “innocuous and often silly tweets,” in a court filing Friday.

But Musk’s public endorsement of the coin goes further than social media messages. Two of Musk’s other companies, Tesla
and the Boring Company, are named in the lawsuit.

In December 2021, Tesla announced it would accept dogecoin for some merchandise. At the time, Musk said on Twitter that Tesla would “see how it goes.”

Dogecoin rose more than 20% following that tweet. In January 2022, when Musk announced on Twitter that dogecoin payments were live, the cryptocurrency jumped as much as 15%.

Tesla does have digital assets on its books, including bitcoin, and still accepts dogecoin as payment for some merchandise.

“We have not sold any of our dogecoin,” Musk said on an earnings call last year. “We still have it.”

Musk has indicated that he personally holds dogecoin as well.

In a recent tweet, responding to a photograph of himself next to News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, Musk simply wrote: “Dogecoin.”

Pushing crypto won't save Twitter.

[Straha]

No, it won't. But it may clog the search functions given that Musk is currently being sued over his relationship with Dogecoin for quite a healthy sum of money.

[bobalot]

Dogecoin? Musk is such a fucking dork.

The utter cringe would be amusing except for the many people whose livelihoods he had screwed over.

[Ralin]

Man. When Musk eventually sells or defaults and the new owners put someone else in charge Musk's meltdown over the stock price shooting up purely on the basis of not-him making the decisions going forward is going to be a sight to behold. Especially if they do the smart thing and ban his account.

[bobalot]

Loving that Musk screwed over his chief sycophant, Matt Taibbi.

Taibbi basically gave up his journalistic reputation and Musk threw him under a bus about his blocking / throttling of substack (which Taibbi has a blog/journal). Taibbi has quit Twitter as a result.

Musk lying about not throttling substack and falsely accusing Taibbi of being a substack employee

Response from the substack CEO refuting all of Musk's lies


Taibbi getting shredded by Medhi Hasan about his various false claims about the "Twitter files".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3e9aeibwzo

[Straha]

Gotta edit the thread so that every mention of twitter gets replaced with X now.

[Ralin]

Western WeChat.

I'm not clear on whether this was a long-term goal of Musk's or something he latched onto while high last month.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Elon Musk talks to the BBC
He describes his ownership of Twitter as being stressful, he certainly looks like he's aged ten years since taking it over And he says he's not the CEO, his dog is.

[Batman]

His dog is the CEO? Even Terry Pratchett didn't try that.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

His dog is the CEO? Even Terry Pratchett didn't try that.

The original broadcast, at 19:50 he says "I'm not the CEO of Twitter, my dog is the CEO of Twitter". I don't know if you're able to view the BBC iPlayer where you are but that's where he says it.

[bilateralrope]

Western WeChat.

I'm not clear on whether this was a long-term goal of Musk's or something he latched onto while high last month.

I've seen some people say that he started talking about this "everything app" around the time he realized he couldn't back out of the Twitter purchase agreement.

[bilateralrope]

House Republican tries to protect Musk and Twitter from FTC investigation

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) subpoenas FTC, claims it "harassed" Twitter and Musk.
JON BRODKIN - 4/13/2023, 9:12 AM

A Republican lawmaker who chairs a key House committee subpoenaed Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan today in an attempt to rein in the agency's ongoing investigation into Twitter.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the newly created Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, told Kahn today that his committee's research shows "the FTC harassed Twitter in the wake of Mr. Musk's acquisition" and "abused it [sic] statutory and enforcement authority."

Jordan teamed up with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) last month to demand documents from the FTC about what they called "inappropriate and burdensome demands coinciding with Elon Musk's acquisition of the company." Jordan wasn't happy with Khan's response, so he followed up with today's subpoena.

"To date, your voluntary compliance has been woefully insufficient. Accordingly, the Committee is issuing a subpoena to compel the production of documents necessary to inform our oversight," Jordan wrote in a letter to Khan today.

Khan: We “enforce the law without fear or favor”

In response, an FTC spokesperson told news outlets that "we have made multiple offers to brief Chairman Jordan's staff on our investigation into Twitter. Those are standing offers made prior to this entirely unnecessary subpoena."

Khan reportedly told Jordan in a March 27 reply that FTC investigations are confidential and that the agency "will continue to faithfully discharge our statutory obligations and enforce the law without fear or favor." She also wrote that ensuring compliance is especially critical "when dealing with recidivists," referring to Twitter's earlier privacy transgressions.

Jordan did not release a copy of today's subpoena, but last month's letter requested all documents and communications "referring or relating to the FTC's investigation(s) of Twitter for the period April 1, 2022, to the present," and all communications "referring or relating to Mr. Musk's purchase of Twitter or the FTC's investigation of Twitter."

Musk is apparently concerned about the investigation into Twitter's privacy and data practices, as he requested a meeting with Khan late last year. Khan declined the meeting request and told Twitter that she was "troubled by Twitter's delays and the obstacles that these delays are creating for the FTC's investigation."

The FTC investigation reportedly focuses on whether Twitter is complying with conditions in a May 2022 settlement with the agency in which it agreed to pay a $150 million penalty for targeting ads at users with phone numbers and email addresses collected from those users when they enabled two-factor authentication. Twitter was already subject to a 2011 settlement that prohibited the company from misrepresenting its privacy and security practices.

Jordan dismisses FTC answer as “pretextual”

Jordan claims the FTC has gone beyond the stated purpose of the investigation. "On March 27, 2023, you sent a response letter seeking to justify the scope of the FTC's inquiry into Twitter by linking it to the terms of a narrower FTC Order related to Twitter's privacy practices," Jordan wrote, arguing that "the FTC's requests to Twitter were not limited to the scope of the Order, making the FTC's justification pretextual at best."

Jordan objected to the FTC asking for "the identities of the journalists with whom it was engaging." That's a reference to a December 13, 2022, request the FTC made related to Musk's release of the so-called "Twitter Files."

The FTC asked Twitter to identify any journalists who were "granted any type of access to the Company's internal communications (e.g., Slack, emails)" or to internal documents and files since Musk bought the company. The FTC request noted that journalist Bari Weiss "was reportedly given access to Twitter's employee systems, added to its Slack channel(s), and given a company laptop," and that she and other journalists were provided "extensive, unfiltered access to Twitter's internal communication and systems."

The FTC request was shown in the Judiciary Committee staff report titled, "The weaponization of the Federal Trade Commission: An agency's overreach to harass Elon Musk's Twitter." As reported by The Wall Street Journal today, the FTC letter also asked Twitter to say "whether the journalists were background-checked, and what steps the company took to ensure they didn't gain unauthorized access to sensitive user data."

Khan told Jordan in her reply letter last month that the FTC was concerned about journalists potentially being given access to user information. "Since the threat to Twitter users' privacy and security can arise any time anyone outside of Twitter is accessing users' personal information, there is no journalist exemption to the FTC's order," she wrote.

GOP accused of pushing Musk’s narrative

At a hearing last month, Democrat Stacey Plaskett reportedly accused Republicans of using "cherry-picked, out-of-context emails and screenshots designed to promote [Musk's] chosen narrative."

Plaskett is a nonvoting delegate to the House from the US Virgin Islands. According to The Wall Street Journal, she said that "Musk is helping you out politically, and you're going out of your way to promote and protect him."

The Jordan-chaired Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government was created in January after Republicans took control of the House. In February, Jordan subpoenaed Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft for documents related to what he called "the federal government's reported collusion with Big Tech to suppress free speech."

Separately, New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg sued Jordan and other members of the Judiciary Committee in a federal court yesterday over their alleged attempts to interfere with the prosecution and investigation of former President Donald Trump. Bragg's lawsuit criticized Jordan and his committee for overstepping their authority, saying that "Congress has no power to supervise state criminal prosecutions."

I wonder what Jim Jordan thinks he's going to get out of this.