Wahaj Siraj’s Post

The story about Elon Musk openly insulting advertisers and the reactions that followed prove once again that even the smartest of us are vulnerable to becoming idol worshippers. It's one thing that he accused the advertisers of doing evil while looking good while regularly doing exactly that himself. But it's another thing when too many otherwise smart people don't seem to realize it and just blindly believe in what he says. He presented himself as the advocate of free speech and a "free speech absolutist". However, as soon as he bought Twitter, the first thing he did was remove many people whose opinions he didn't like. The story with the Turkish election is very telling. He removed the posts made by the Turkish opposition as soon as the Turkish government threatened to throttle Twitter in Turkey. The same thing happened to his predecessors and they didn't comply. So who is the defender of free speech now? When pushed on this subject, he came up with some lame excuses, such as what he defines as "free speech" is what can be said within the confines of the law in any given country. And many of his followers just accepted this without any questions. However, if they did even some rudimentary research, they would find that those posts didn't violate any laws and that the rule of law doesn't even work in autocratic countries. The wish of the autocrat overrides any written laws. Some people may have forgotten, but he also promised to make Twitter "bot-free" when he was about to buy it. That was definitely a problem, but now this problem is much worse. He made it incredibly easy to buy the blue tick, which means that now you get many bots who are supposedly "verified accounts", which dupes people even more. Another example of him doing actual evil while trying to look good is using his influence to spread russian state propaganda while talking about how he cares about humanity. Well, maybe he should watch "20 Days in Mariupol". I can provide many more examples of him doing literally what he has been accusing others of doing. But you get the idea. The moral of the story is that you should never just blindly follow someone who says something that sounds good. You should also look at what he or she does. As the Bible says, you can always recognize the tree by its fruits.

📣 #AI, Innovation, and Reimagining the Workforce 🤖💼📚 In light of the Elon Musk's recent changes in Twitter, I've been contemplating the deeper questions about our attitudes towards innovation. Why do new technologies like AI often instill a sense of fear? Whether it was cars replacing horses, or the internet revolutionizing information, each wave of innovation has been met with resistance and fear. People naturally fear what they don't understand, especially when it threatens the status quo. Thinking about Musk, it's hard not to consider how job markets might change. Consider a secretary eating candies at a desk and a university faculty member. Why should the former earn more than an educator shaping the minds of our future? Could AI help us re-balance the value we place on different types of work? For instance, replacing administrative roles with AI in educational settings could potentially free up resources, making education more affordable and accessible. Educators, in turn, could be paid more in line with the societal value they provide. The scrutiny Musk faces isn't just about his influence on Twitter: we should question whether the pushback is genuinely for public interest or if it reveals something more—a resistance against innovations that challenge existing power structures. Like Musk, should we be more willing to challenge conventional norms? Can we replace “useless” positions with AI, and redirect those funds to better pay those who are making a more meaningful impact? And if we can, what’s stopping us? #Innovation #AI #FutureOfWork #ElonMusk #Education #Politics 🔗 For those interested in diving deeper

Excerpts: Musk is working to specifically elevate and legitimize extreme conservative ideas and ideologues. He has made a point of interacting with — and thus elevating — some of the most toxic conservative voices on the platform. He has reopened the platform to dangerous white supremacist leaders, insurrectionists and anti-vaccine misinformation agents. As one of Musk’s first actions as Twitter CEO, he spread a false story about the violent attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. Unsurprisingly, hate speech has surged to unprecedented highs on Musk’s Twitter. From the New York Times: These changes are alarming, researchers said, adding that they had never seen such a sharp increase in hate speech, problematic content and formerly banned accounts in such a short period on a mainstream social media platform. “Elon Musk sent up the Bat Signal to every kind of racist, misogynist and homophobe that Twitter was open for business,” said...chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. “They have reacted accordingly.” With extreme conservatives unable to create a successful social media platform, Musk has innovated by buying Twitter and turning it into the dangerous and hateful free-for-all conservatives see as essential to their twisted definition of freedom.[...]He is working to create a social media echo chamber that forces everyone to engage the worst of extreme conservative ideas in order to make such ideas seem mainstream. He is shifting the discourse to favor election deniers, racists and insurrectionists, and to privilege lies over truth, thus turning Twitter into a social media version of Fox News.

Twitter, now X, to remove blocking feature Elon Musk says the feature "makes no sense", but users are concerned about protection from abuse. You can read more about it here: https://lnkd.in/gPUcsNMh HOWEVER, as an owner, director or manager, you may be having a hard time, or know someone who is having a hard time generating inspiring, high quality branded social posts and SEO optimised blog content. Our low cost service can help you captivate current customers and future potential customers. We will increase your brand visibility, and foster higher levels of human interaction. Inform, entertain, advise, introduce, persuade, educate, build rapport, inspire, instruct, motivate… whilst driving traffic and sales on auto-pilot. It just takes one click to learn more: https://lnkd.in/gyFhgvZu #SmallBizOwnerSuccess #SmallBizOwnerHustle #MarketingDirectorGoals #MarketingDirectorInspiration #MarketingDirectorSkills #SmallBusinessGrowth #SmallBusinessSuccess #SmallBusinessTips #SmallBusinessStrategy #BusinessOwnerCommunity #BusinessOwnerInspiration #SmallBizOwnerCommunity #MarketingDirectorCommunity #MarketingDirectorInspire #MarketingDirectorSuccess #SmallBusinessMarketingIdeas...

Next up from Musk: all copy characters should be no more than 10 and please avoid hyper use of exclamation marks.

MUSK BANS HEADLINES ON X. IS THE MOVE BASED ON BLIND STUPIDITY?  OR A CYNICAL WAY TO GAG HIS DETRACTORS? Elon Musk has banned news and article headlines on Twitter. According to the ‘champion of free speech’, getting rid of eyeball grabbing headlines will make the platform prettier (he should have thought about that when he introduced X, the Quasimodo of logo designs). Now when articles are posted on Twitter, they appear as an image. Musk said the decision to scrap link headlines had come directly from him and would "greatly improve the aesthetics of X." X users don’t agree (except for the 2 year old toddlers on the platform who are still grappling with reading and writing – and prefer pictures, ga ga). "Incredibly annoying," Joseph Politano, an economics writer said of the change. "Just an unfathomably stupid change and another way this site is getting more hostile to journalists." Many users believe people will just assume the images are memes and skip by the articles altogether. And they’re probably right. In my view (and I’m not alone in this), Musk is cynically trying to distract readers from consuming news written by publications that have been critical of him. Headlines convey a message in a second. Chop off the headline and readership (as we have learned in advertising) will go down by 80%. David Ogilvy, the head of my old agency, would say, “An ad without a headline is like a chicken without a head”. So journalists, you know what’s coming. You’ll be putting all that blood, sweat and tears into writing articles that nobody will read. I guess it’s just another reason for publications to get off the platform. And here’s the big question. Will Musk apply the same rule to advertisers? I doubt it. Many Musk fans will say hear, hear to the new change. All I can say is, cluck, cluck. #writing #creativity #journalism

"Elon Musk fired 6,500 employees at Twitter. A little birdie told me it's down to: - 2 designers - 6 iOS developers - 20 web developers - Around 1,400 sales and operations people How is it possible that we are still using this website? Two words: Parkinson's Law. Have you ever wondered why seemingly simple tech companies have tens of thousands of employees? Sometimes, it's because they have huge sales forces or tech support/operations people. But often it's also due to Parkinson's Law. Parkinson's law is like lighter fluid for bureaucracy. It's a business tapeworm that slowly eats away at companies, making them less and less efficient and innovative over time. Parkinson's Law is the idea that the work will generally expand to the amount of time, budget, and number of people allocated to it, and no matter how many people you allocate to it, those people will feel busy. They'll feel busy because, due to the excess time/slack in the system, they'll start focusing on less and less important tasks. Here's how it manifests on an individual level: Let's say you have a report due in a week. The report might only take you around five hours to finish if you really focus and work efficiently. However, because you know you have a week to complete it, you might find yourself spending a lot more time on it than you need to. You'll be more prone to distractions, take longer breaks, or perhaps decide to add more details, tables, graphs, and so forth. Essentially, the task becomes more complex and time-consuming purely because you have more time in which to do it. And here's how it manifests across organizations: Imagine a big tech company. A social media company with various departments. Each department has tasks that it must complete to contribute to the overall productivity of the company. Now, suppose each department is given a budget and a set amount of time to complete its tasks for the year. According to Parkinson's Law, each department will use its entire budget and the entire allotted time, even if the tasks could have been completed more efficiently. This is because as resources and time increase, departments tend to become more complex and less efficient. For example, a department might add more steps to its procedures, requiring more approvals and creating more paperwork, which slows down the process. Or it might use the full budget on additional personnel or equipment that doesn't necessarily improve productivity. The department might also use the full budget to justify the same or larger budget for the next year, since budgets in many organizations are often determined based on the previous year's spending. This is a phenomenon known as budget padding or spend it or lose it mentality. I have seen this occur over and over again in my career. The larger the team, the larger the budget, the longer the timeline, the less gets accomplished. So often, good times + revenue growth = Parkinson's Law." @Awilkinson

"The Consequences of Elon Musk’s Ownership of X" https://lnkd.in/eP74jeU8 "When Elon Musk bought Twitter a year ago, he said he wanted to create what he called a “common digital town square.” “That said,” he wrote, “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape.” A year later, according to study after study, Mr. Musk’s platform has become exactly that. Now rebranded as X, the site has experienced a surge in racist, antisemitic and other hateful speech. Under Mr. Musk’s watch, millions of people have been exposed to misinformation about climate change. Foreign governments and operatives — from Russia to China to Hamas — have spread divisive propaganda with little or no interference. Mr. Musk and his team have repeatedly asserted that such concerns are overblown, sometimes pushing back aggressively against people who voice them. Yet dozens of studies from multiple organizations have shown otherwise, demonstrating on issue after issue a similar trend: an increase in harmful content on X during Mr. Musk’s tenure. The war between Israel and Hamas — the sort of major news event that once made Twitter an essential source of information and debate — has drowned all social media platforms in false and misleading information, but for Mr. Musk’s platform in particular the war has been seen as a watershed. The conflict has captured in full how much the platform has descended into the kind of site that Mr. Musk had promised advertisers he wanted to avoid on the day he officially took over. “With disinformation about the Israel-Hamas conflict flourishing so dramatically on X, it feels that it crossed a line for a lot of people where they can see — beyond just the branding change — that the old Twitter is truly gone,” Tim Chambers of Dewey Square Group, a public affairs company that tracks social media, said in an interview. “And the new X is a shadow of that former self.”"

Work can be a grind. Growing a business is a constant struggle. Sometimes.. we all just need a laugh. And watching Elon run Twitter ...err X into the ground is so fun to watch 🍿 https://lnkd.in/gh7HvVBM #twitter #businessadvice #advertising