The BfDI account (Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information) of the German government has an impressive Mastodon implementation worth following (note the “joined April 2020” tag).
Source: social.bund.de
What is Mastodon? A far better version of social media.
A government’s official use of a distributed architecture in this case exemplifies how any “checkmark” of authenticity ought to be engineered.
When you read posts made by one of the https://social.bund.de/ accounts you inherently know from the domain name (web identity) that you’re not following an impostor.
This all makes far more sense than any government becoming saddled with the overly centralized Twitter platform now operated by an unaccountable political extremist who arbitrarily censors speech when he isn’t trying to tax it.
Jeff Jarvis probably explains all of this better and gets it exactly right in a new blog post:
I am on Mastodon and already enjoying it. Come on in; the water’s fine… Don’t let unhelpful reporters dissuade you with their arm-waving about complexity; you are smarter than they think you are.
[…]
In this distributed future, other services can be offered. Institutions, entrepreneurs, or individuals could provide services including curation and recommendation (of users and content), verification (of users), and authentication (of content). See also our founding webmaster, Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for data vaults that would allow you to hold and control your information; he’s building a service called Inrupt based on the protocol he proposes, Solid.
What is Solid? It offers you the best version of the present Internet because it directly addresses data ownership and digital rights.
The German government use of Mastodon is just one clue for how things can shift right now to a better world. Likewise the Flanders government is rolling out Solid to all its citizens and the BBC has setup a “Taster” for using Solid in the UK.
The word on the street is Elon Musk thought Nazi was spelled with a T, which is why he put it on the hood of his cars.
Elon Musk often sounds a lot like Hitler. Click to enlarge. Source: Twitter (Hitler Speech December 28, 1938)
But seriously, Tesla’s public relations with the German government thus far have its CEO telling people to ignore long-standing rules while he promotes the worst possible failures of history.
Start with the fact that the German government a long time ago offered incentives to buy electric cars, which are expected to change at the end of 2022.
Germany will extend its enviromental subsidy for electric cars [from 2020] until 2025, government and auto industry sources told Reuters on Monday, a day ahead of a German auto industry summit in Berlin. In June, Germany doubled incentives for electric cars, which comprised of a 3,000 euro (£2,693) bonus for electric…
Tesla, the low-quality and racist manufacturer led by a South African habitually caught delayed and lying about its capabilities, two years later has announced it doesn’t care about German government rules (e.g. wants people to ignore 2022 ending as expected).
To put it another way, we all should expect 2023 incentives from the German government to continue on plan… while Tesla thinks people instead should be squeezed to put orders in right now (put money onto Tesla’s dying books before year end — it’s sales in Germany have crashed) even when it knows it can’t deliver the cars.
This is social engineering of the worst kind, trying to pay people to go around long-standing German regulations linked to delivery of actual vehicles.
The incentives, or premiums, paid to buyers of electric cars will expire completely once an allocated sum of 3.4 billion euros ($3.44 billion) from the next two years’ budget is spent, according to government sources. “E-vehicles are becoming more and more popular and will no longer need government subsidies in the foreseeable future,” Economy Minister Robert Habeck said in a statement.
Popular means driven on the roads, not in some fake balance sheet gamed by unethical Tesla accountants. Germans are talking reality, Tesla is begging the market to shift instead towards their selfish fantasy using the well-known Nazi deposit scheme (click to enlarge).
Source: “The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy” by Adam Tooze
Every other electric car manufacturer has delivered in Germany while Tesla falls far behind, so it’s a wonder why anyone at this point would consider buying one from such serial liars and under-performers.
That’s not all, though. Tesla also is being very political in its attempt to reverse history.
Adam Parkhomenko tweeted, “Wait. Elon endorsed Republicans AND shared a picture of a Nazi soldier? So he’s exactly what we thought he was.”
The CEO of Tesla buying Twitter to overtly push political extremism and promote Nazi messaging is exactly what many people expected.
Back in June, mind you, Politico reported that Musk was “leaning” toward Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, as his preferred 2024 presidential candidate. And go figure, he’s not advising Florida voters to vote for Democratic state legislators in the name of divided government. The guy isn’t just a Republican, he’s a Republican who embraces far-right memes and cozies up to neo-Nazis.
As one analyst astutely put it, Tesla’s CEO is calling for the return and rise of Nazism as his idea of “balance” in government.
Gotta balance not-nazis out with some nazis, otherwise the not-nazis will run wild with their not-nazi agenda
In other words, the Tesla CEO doesn’t like the not-Nazis of Germany going unchallenged and repeatedly seems to want to bring Nazism back.
He might as well tell people his cars kill more people in his master plan to “balance” safety on the streets with not-safety.
One of my favorite analyst paragraphs ever about Tesla being built on lies has this anecdote:
Elon Musk demanded that Tesla stop testing brakes on June 26. Doug Field, chief engineer, resigned on June 27. Is this a coincidence? Of course not—Doug Field doesn’t want to be responsible for killing people.
That should sound familiar to anyone who has studied Hitler’s leadership. And not very long ago the Tesla CEO ran into heavy criticism while presenting himself as a Hitler apologist.
He tweeted an image of Adolf Hitler that said, “Stop comparing me to Justin Trudeau. I had a budget.”
Despite all these unforced errors, and despite all the opportunities in the world to be an anti-Nazi while engaging with the German government, the Tesla CEO has presented himself only as open to a return to Nazism.
A penchant to promote and coddle Nazism continues unrepentant and growing at the worst times.
Take for example how the U.S. has been dealing with news of anti-semitism promoted by celebrities.
Incidents of bias and hate speech have also been rising in the U.S., including recent comments by the singer Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and a social media post shared by NBA star Kyrie Irving.
What would you expect the German government to want to see next from a car company leader? Perhaps silence. Perhaps concern for safety. Certainly not Nazi memes.
Within this context of concern the Tesla CEO jumped up and…
Wait for it…
…used his giant giant bully pulpit to openly promote Nazism as if a show of approval during the reported rise in anti-semitism. And he even took such action during the memorial week of Kristallnacht.
BERLIN (AP) — Holocaust survivors from around the world are warning about the reemergence of antisemitism as they mark the 84th anniversary on Wednesday of Kristallnacht — the “Night of Broken Glass” — when Nazis terrorized Jews throughout Germany and Austria. In the campaign #ItStartedWithWords by the organization that handles claims on behalf of Jews who suffered under the Nazis, several Holocaust survivors have recounted on video how antisemitic speech led to actions that nearly saw the mass extermination of Jews in Europe in the last century.
Could a car company get any more wrong than its CEO pumping support for Nazism into Germany during the start of November, while admitting delivery failures and trying to tell people that government rules don’t matter?
To be fair, in one case the CEO “deleted the tweet after a number of users informed him that he wasn’t quoting a famous French philosopher, but a neo-Nazi pedophile.”
Or to put it another way Germany under strict occupation by militant anti-Nazis became famous for producing the best cars in the world. Coincidence? Given how bad Tesla engineering is and how much their CEO seems to always end up fiddling around with Nazism… Germany might as well look in the mirror for why allowing Tesla’s allergic reaction to law and order (“permanent improvisation“) will end badly for everyone.
Elon Musk is known mostly for being an unaccountable liar, so his personal brand of chaos now blanketing the unfortunate staff at Twitter was easily predictable.
Nothing the man says can be believed, which is what historians in the past described as the “permanent improvisation” symptom of dictators doomed to fail.
Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended.
He went on to add that there would be no warning to comedians having their speech censored.
Kathy Griffin, an obviously well-known comedian, was being personally and specifically targeted by the CEO’s back-breaking flip-flops.
…by 5 p.m. Hollywood time, Griffin was back on the platform speaking from the grave of her deceased mother’s account, @maggiegriffin. Griffin’s mom Maggie died in 2020, aged 99, but her daughter maintains the account. A one-word tweet read: “#FreeKathy”. By this morning at 7:30, Griffin’s dead mother was more loquacious: “Elon, this is Maggie contacting you from the spirit world to tell u… you’re a douchebag. This is not parody. This is the actual ghost of Kathy Griffin’s boxed wine loving mother saying I’m gonna get tipsy & throw my bingo cards at you.! NOT A PARODY. To the moon, a**hole.” Star Wars’ Mark Hamill retweeted “#FreeKathy” with a thumbs up.
Haha, to the moon, a**hole. She should have said Uranus.
In case it’s unclear what’s going on at this point, Tesla was a brand that said it was about safety yet we all know (ancient history now) that its CEO lied and lied and lied year after year in a mess of unsafe contradictions.
The company plummeted to the bottom of safety and quality rankings, dumping one of the worst engineered cars on the road.
Now the same CEO is saying Twitter will be about freedom and… we should expect it to plummet into being the least free platform of any.
Twitter’s product was content moderation. It’s what they offered as value.
This tragedy of permanent improvisation undermines the value of moderation completely, making it unsafe at any tweet.
Not unlike how Tesla is unsafe at any speed.
He said he would buy Twitter to bring forward his vision of absolute free speech, then he started censoring comedians (inconsistently). Of all the people in the world to target for censorship, going after comedians is the worst possible move — extreme opposite of protecting free speech. Fail.
He said he would buy Twitter to bring forward his vision of absolute free speech, then he started trying to charge for speech (before reversing). Joking his critics must pay him a tax to speak is not only NOT funny, again it’s the extreme opposite of protecting free speech. Fail.
He said he would improve integrity of the profiles on Twitter and then he removed almost all the teams who worked on it, and introduced instead a basic monthly charge for a “checkmark” with no integrity that directly undermined site-wide trust. Fail
He said he would bring profitability by focusing on productivity, then fired about half the company in such a rushed and incoherent way (as if American Psycho was an instruction guide) that thousands of managers spent copious time scrambling to find a way to days later attempt rehire the same people just fired or cover for them without knowing even where or how… FAIL.
The sheer money desperation driving all this cruel flip-flopping in chaos crisis — I mean the result of “spending” $44 billion that he doesn’t even have and then claiming he is desperate for money and everyone else will pay — is just more proof that Tesla’s “vision” is all just unintelligent seat-of-pants fraud and should be banned from roads.
Severe lack of engineering quality as well as high rates of crashes are symptomatic of this endemically bad leadership. We may as well expect Twitter to try and attempt an even worse impact on the world as the fraud of Tesla unravels.
The elephant in the room is thus whether Musk can continue to lead a company while already showing a penchant for unforced errors that directly cause widespread harms. Such a question is like asking whether the GOP or their man Putin can win another election. It depends on who is in position to hold the man accountable, really measure integrity on a basic humanitarian scale, let alone correct any of the wrongs being done by him.
As you may remember, I’ve explained before why and how Elon Musk constantly stands accused of enabling racism while doing absolutely nothing to help anti-racism (e.g. he’s racist).
Elon Musk increasingly has shown himself to be racist since immigrating to America from South Africa. Like many around the world he saw how being racist can still lead to a very successful career path in the United States.
It’s a wonder how such unsafe vehicles are allowed to operate on public roads. Uber had the good sense to terminate its entire driverless program after it killed just one pedestrian, while Tesla is so dumb it’s killing unprecedented numbers of innocent people and shows no intention to slow down. In fact, the explosion of serious safety complaints to regulators from new Tesla owners is shocking. Complaints even went up after attempting to do safety recalls, to give you some idea how bad Tesla engineers are at their job.
Tesla quickly rolled out an over-the-air update to address the issue, yet, since that recall reports of phantom or unintended braking are higher than ever. In fact, the single highest reported cases of phantom breaking analyzed by the Post occurred just one month after the recall.
Banning Tesla is the right move in any region concerned with its safety, as such a vehicle has little to no self-regulation. Such a ban will prevent easily predictable accidents and reduce serious harm.
Now we’re watching Twitter being turned into a toxic white nationalist organization, to gestate and coddle terrible ideas even worse than Tesla.
Blocking Twitter thus is the right move in any region concerned with its safety, as such a vehicle has little to no self-regulation. Such a block will prevent easily predictable accidents and reduce serious harm.
History is the right guide here. The unregulated empire of Ford (infamous for enabling racism while doing absolutely nothing to help anti-racism) very noisily bought a newspaper to spread hateful disinformation, which led directly to the rise of Nazi Germany and genocide.
Arguably Henry Ford loved to breed hate so much he created an industrial engine for it that directly influenced and aided Adolf Hitler. Source: The Dearborn Historian
For those who don’t remember Henry Ford purchased his hometown newspaper (The Dearborn Independent) in 1918 specifically to viciously spread his vision of hate (e.g. personally promote baseless political conspiracies) such as a bogus conspiracy about America being “infected” by Jews. Ford pushed nearly 100 issues of his garbage ideas, bound them all into four volumes imaginatively titled “The International Jew,” and distributed half a million copies via his own network of dealerships and subscribers, not to mention by Nazi leaders in Germany.
Speaking in 1931 to a Detroit News reporter, Hitler said he regarded Ford as his “inspiration”, explaining his reason for keeping Ford’s life-size portrait next to his desk.
Steven Watts wrote that Hitler “revered” Ford, proclaiming that “I shall do my best to put his theories into practice in Germany”…
50,000 American autoworkers and their children in 1941 protested Ford’s relationship with Hitler. Source: Wayne State University
Henry Ford the rich automobile man thus bought a media company to breed and spread hateful disinformation that otherwise would have had far less authority. His tragic history and direct role in the rise of Nazism thus brings an obvious lesson in what to do now to avert global suffering from Elon Musk.
Banning Tesla and Twitter would immediately enable the market to produce far higher quality goods, as well as protect consumers, expanding the market for more ideas at the same time as improving it with better ones.
After all, we have seen courts clearly regulate online hate speech as equivalent to physical harassment, right?
…online campaigns of hate, threats and intimidation have no place in a civil society and enjoy no protection under our Constitution.
Or more to the point of how regulation drives innovation, after America occupied Japan and Germany to explicitly ban Ford-like fascism (remove violent cheaters and liars from the market) those countries rose rapidly to produce the highest quality and most trusted cars in the world.
