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#XTownHall: Cracking Xโs Algorithm | ADL v Musk | Censorship
Recorded: Sept. 3, 2023 Duration: 2:24:41Space Recording
Short Summary
The discussion highlights significant trends in platform governance, user engagement strategies, and the influence of organizations like the ADL on social media censorship. Technical aspects of the algorithm, such as reputation scores and deboosting, are explored, reflecting ongoing challenges and updates. The conversation also emphasizes the importance of free speech and the need for strategic coalitions to counteract censorship pressures.
Full Transcription
Hey, Mario, hey Suleiman.
Hey, guys.
Hi, Paul. How's everybody?
Doing well.
Okay, so I think Sleiman's just getting the invite sent out, and then we'll be starting in a minute.
It's been an eventful couple of days, Theo, wouldn't you say, for X and Elon?
Yes and no. I'm curious what specifically you're referring to.
There's been a lot of things, but I don't know how much weight many of them carry.
Yeah, I mean, you know, whether it carries weight or not is a different discussion,
but there's certainly been a lot of, like, activity, wouldn't you say?
I feel like what I've seen most of is them bragging about video usage.
Video usage, did you say?
Yeah, at least the posts that have made it to my feed have mostly been about how they're really proud of
how much the numbers around video have gone up.
I saw one or two things about shadow banning, but not, like, from, like, the Elon or X side.
Like, I'm legitimately not sure what specifically you're referring to.
No, I wasn't referring to anything specifically.
I just think there has been a lot going on.
So, you know, sometimes you can say, okay,
there's any news on the X platform and it'll be a quite couple of days.
But there's been a lot of activity and a lot of news coming out.
So we can go into that as the space gets started.
I'd be interested to hear about your take on the success of videos as well.
I actually got in a debate with Elon about that about a year ago, specifically video advertising.
And he said that I should be kicked off the panel because I have no idea what I'm talking about.
George Hot stood up for me and then later ended up agreeing with me.
So should have some insight there.
So, Abbott, you're very pleased now. Come full circle.
I feel like Theo always tries to defend, like, you know, the minority opinion.
He likes to fight from a corner. I like that, actually.
If I'm not fighting from a corner, why bother fighting?
I'm a huge Theo fan and TypeScript fan.
Me and my brother follow you.
It's my first time kind of being in a space with you.
So for whatever little bit that's worth, I like what you put out.
Means a lot.
Thank you, man.
Right, guys, thanks for joining us.
We've got lots to talk about.
We've had the invites out.
First thing we're going to, well, one of the things that we're going to talk about is we're going to delve into the algorithm.
I know Theo loves the algorithm.
I think Ryan's about a join us.
He loves the algorithm.
We'll talk about some of the things that we found in the code.
And we'll talk about the algorithm pertaining to it.
We may have time and we might jump into the ad revenue because people got payout a few days ago.
And then in addition to that, there's been a bit of a battle on Twitter
between the ADL and Musk pertaining to censorship.
There's been the hashtag ban the ADL
has been trending significantly over the last two days.
Elon Musk has made a couple of posts in regards to that,
one talking about how they were suffocating the platform.
Actually, I think there was three.
And the second one was about,
how whether they should ban the ADL.
So that's something interesting.
And someone we'll talk about because it's linked to censorship.
You know, is the ADL censoring on these social media platforms?
Are they censoring on Twitter?
By banning ADL is one partaking in said censorship.
So we will talk about all those things.
But before we do, we'll talk about the algorithm.
Let me go to you, Theo, because you know the algorithm and it's your thing.
In terms of the algorithm, I mean, there is a tweet going out from Mario's pitch.
It's about to go out, come out soon.
And what that talks about is tweet, Kurp, I think that's what it's called, one second.
And...
What it's saying is that essentially each person has some kind of score that's assigned to them,
depending on what they post, who they interact with, the number of people engaging with them, whom they engage.
But I'm going to pass it over to you because I think you'll be able to provide a more of a concise and caution explanation of what this tweet.
Sorry, it's called TweepCRED is.
Go ahead, Theo.
I'll be honest, I haven't looked too much into this since we were first talking about it two-ish weeks ago,
from my understanding the goal of all of these algorithms is to try and build systems where people
who provide valuable content can be identified and boosted amongst the horde of tweets on the platform.
I'm sure that lots of work is being done to improve this, especially as the shift away from
the For You page being people you follow and towards it being content that they think you will like.
This all comes down to network building. It's...
Like, the reason that the credential system feels as bad as it does is because it's not just based on your network.
It's based on like an arbitrary score that goes up and down.
But I feel like the majority of what the algorithms do another person is.
It's how likely is this person's content to be interesting to you based on who you interact with, who they interact with who likes their posts?
Generally speaking, it seems like Twitter has been moving away from the account model being how posts are identified and ranked,
rather towards the posts themselves being the things that have individual ranks.
I've even seen this myself with posts that go well outside of my circles into others.
in posts that I thought would do really well,
not performing as well because they didn't resonate with the audience that they were shown to.
But in the end,
I think Twitter's focus is going away from an account-based credential model
and towards a post-based model where if two different people posted the same thing,
like whoever has the audience closest to the post might do a bit better,
but generally like,
the post should be the thing that's ranked, not the account.
And I think that's the direction Twitter's moving towards.
Yeah, it does seem like that's the direction
because Elon did post that they were going to get rid of this tweet credit.
One, and so because what that does is,
and again, we're going to have a post coming out about this,
but it does give each account,
a reputational score and then based on that there is possible post deboasting so that looks at
you know the value of your account who you interact with you know what their score and so obviously
there's pros and cons to that because what it does is if
Some people have...
Okay, so let's talk about the other aspect of it.
Or maybe somebody else wants a gym.
Let me go to Paul,
because Paul, you're normally anti-censorship
and, you know, more about giving people the freedom
and all platforms.
Paul, what this...
does is it basically makes people afraid to engage with people who's got a low score.
So what some people are arguing is that's almost like a social credit system within the confines of Twitter.
And so, you know, someone who's got, you know, we've all seen, I don't know if you've all seen Black Mirror, but in one of the episodes of Black Mirror,
everyone had a social score.
And like, what had happened is if someone got a low social score, you try and stay away from them because you didn't want to get infected by their low social score.
And what's your thoughts on that, Paul?
Well, I think the first thing to ask is who's creating this score?
Like, that's the obvious thing, like, who's ranking people?
Like, I'll just give you a sense of myself.
You know, I wrote a piece for the British Medical Journal, the BMJ, about Pfizer's clinical trial for the COVID vaccine.
this was an investigative piece it was totally based upon um uh you know we had internal emails
we had internal um uh private um uh recordings everything the entire thing was based upon documents you know
i mean it was like i'd run investigations for the united states senate i'm gonna let you no no wait
wait i'm i'm gonna get to this point okay when so we run this piece it's an investigative piece
right when it comes out i'm
I'm now, if you look at my Wikipedia page, I'm now called an anti-vaxxer. So I've been ranked now as an
anti-vaxer for writing this investigative piece. And so, you know, I don't, I don't think it's
going to help my social media score. So I just, my thing I ask is, is like, who's ranking people
and based upon what? That's the obvious question. I think you always ask is, who's doing the
ranking? That's the thing I think we're always getting at. It's like, it's,
It's fine to have a score, but who does a score?
Who's paying them to do the score?
It's the same question, I think, almost always, right?
Yeah, and from what I understand, and again,
I hope someone else can elaborate,
but it's also not just that who's doing it,
but of course it's going to be,
it's people who were basically coding in the first Twitter
because I don't know.
from what I understand, it's something that's coded into the algorithm.
And even with this tweak up, tweet credit, whatever it's called,
the concern is that it's going to be hard to get into the algorithm to remove it
because there's so much embedded in.
In terms of COVID, what I was going to say was, like a good friend of mine censored
who's got one of the biggest platforms on Twitter, his page is hyped.
he was like, oh, look, these are like the ban words that I've realized, you know,
because he knows Twitter quite well.
And one of the words, as far as I remember, was COVID-related,
where in the end it does give some form of de-boost.
So that was from censored men.
But so anyway, to continue.
Oh, there's no on that, Mario, I can actually elaborate.
In fact, I just put in a reply for the tweet that you did, you know,
It's currently at the top of my profile, if people want to see it.
It's got all the misinformation classifiers, including medical misinformation,
that you get dinged for tweeting about, at least according to the code as it's been.
Just quickly, if you don't mind, just to sort of piggyback on what Theo and Paul were saying,
You know, this system of the tweet cred appears to be part of the so-called authoritative sources ranking movement that really started after the 2016 election.
This is before COVID happened and they got confident with straight up misinformation censorship.
They were concerned about losing popularity online, losing elections, losing referendums to populist voices who did not have institutional support.
And so they started crafting all these different algorithm rigging methods.
such as Google's Project Owl.
That's what they were doing there.
Meta was doing it through this whole
sort of mis-
this whole sort of credibility
and integrity lexicon.
You had these,
the trust project was started with these trust marks
that NewsGuard later jumped into.
And Twitter seems, this seems to be Twitter's
version of it, which is,
which appears to be designed
to maximize sort of
institutional hegemony in terms of virality online and dinging sort of, you know,
anonymous, you know, people who interact with smaller anonymous accounts.
You know, the analogy here is, you know, the shark was afraid of the minnows all sort of
joining together to form a bigger fish than the shark.
And so the TweetCred system essentially stops people from being able to organize minnows
into any sort of mobilized social narrative.
And so I see this as being a hugely pernicious, highly deliberate technique in order to enshrine
institutional sort of elite capture over the algorithm in response to
the Brexit referendum, losing the 2016 election to Trump,
and other sorts of populist things, both here and all over the world,
including in India, Brazil, and in central Eastern Europe.
Before we go too deep on this, I jump on some misconceptions.
I feel like I've noticed a pattern in these spaces where like a few things will be, like, pieces will be understood.
They'll be conflated in some form of misunderstanding.
And then that misunderstanding gets compounded into some type of like conspiracy where the world's out to get us.
I can absolutely sit here and admit that Twitter put effort into trying to curb Twitter,
curb what they considered COVID misinformation.
I don't want to get into debate about what is or isn't misinformation.
But what Twitter considered.
COVID misinformation, they built systems for individual tweets that were considered misinformation
to downrank the tweets. What we're doing here that I'm concerned about is we're conflating
the TweetCred system with the thing that you linked in the replies here, which is specifically
about tweet ranking, not account ranking. And these things are entirely different. As far as I
understand from all of the code I have read and the people I have talked to, the role of TweetCred is more like a
a binary on or off thing that's used to figure out who should be folded underneath your replies.
I'm sure we've all seen on Twitter the see more button and a bunch of replies being hidden underneath that.
That's what TweetCredit is for for things like that.
For accounts that have a shitload of followers, they're following much people, but they're not followed by as many accounts.
From my understanding, the role of TweetCred is to identify accounts that generally aren't providing value, might be spam, just haven't hit their stride yet.
And they're not being censored. They're being put under the fold. And if you go under the fold and reply those accounts, which I do regularly when I see accounts getting thrown under that, they'll slowly start to get out of that. But TweetPread is less something that is used to censor accounts, more something that's used to put a wall between a brand new account and an account that actually has followers that is known to be providing value, largely as a quality filter and spam card.
Okay, but Theo, so just one thing real quick,
and then I'll turn it over if that's all right, Mario.
So first of all, yes, I'm well aware of that distinction.
That's why I sort of fold the mind into a two-part sort of answer there.
But what we saw with the Twitter files...
Mike, just before you get into that,
because I just want to clarify,
because I think what Theo said is a bit of a misconception.
I think he's not stating the statement.
What he said is not accurate.
So this is a tweet that has coming out,
but basically tweet cred...
What it does is number one, and I'm just reading what's going to be on the tweet.
It gives an account reputation score and post-deboosting via Repetation.caler.
And what it does is this file...
in the code contains a class of code called reputation
that gives a reputation score to each account from zero to 100.
So I'll have a score, Sarah will have a score,
feel have a score, we'll all have scores.
This score is based on what?
It's based on a number of factors,
such as how many following a follower ratio you have,
whether your account's been suspended before,
whether you're verified, et cetera, et cetera.
So there's a number of things
that impact the reputation score.
So it's not the tweet, but it's also the account.
So that's an example of it.
So for example, as Mike, Mike, I'm going to pass it over to you because I think you're
going to talk about this.
This is why I jumped in.
But as Mike was saying, there are people who were censored based on COVID.
And I do believe some of that is still in the code.
And I understand the team is working towards it, but it's still there.
And so what that means is you're a, if.
If you are basically posting that stuff, or you've been suspended based on that stuff, or you've posted anti-LGBQ content being taught in schools, you could get a small suspension and then your reputation score gets decreases significantly.
Anyway, Mike, I'll let you continue.
Right. And again, so, Theo,
I'm totally respecting, you know, the point that there's a distinction between account-based boosting and deb boosting and post-based.
The issue is, is we saw with the Twitter files.
We straight up saw screenshots of people's profiles being labeled do not amplify or being de-boasted at the account level.
So whether that's a third separate thing where people at Twitter would jump in say, and like manually hit a Twitch.
That wasn't the algorithm doing something.
That was a person hitting a button on a dashboard.
Right.
That's not clear though, if that's what happened.
It's totally unclear how things, why things were deboasted.
I'm telling you, like, I've looked through those files.
And like, I think the thing we know is that there was stuff happening.
We still, to this say, I don't think really understand why this stuff happened.
I think the process is still unclear to this day.
There's still definitely a system at play.
You know, as one of the growing accounts, I just started kind of posting in May that will...
For a period, derank your account where all of your replies everywhere are folded under what Theo was talking about, the Showmore replies area.
So you can ruin your reputation from saying or interacting with certain accounts, saying bad keywords.
All of those things can drop your reputation score to where for a while your replies will be completely hidden no matter where you go to talk to.
but it clears with Tom.
And the one thing I want to say, Theo, is like,
I feel like I'm starting to go in too many directions at once,
but like, when I see those feel like, you know,
like they're hidden below, you know,
I will, like, open that up sometimes, and I'll look at some of those tweets and, like, I don't know why they're hidden.
Like, they're just saying, like, normal stuff.
And, like, I'm like, why is this hidden?
Like, that's, to me, it's like, it's like, it's nothing, like, crazy or anything like that.
Yeah, but usually I'll check their account.
But you're not looking at their entire account.
You're looking at one tweet.
Their entire account may be objectionable.
Yeah.
10 tweets before, 20 tweets before.
So when it shows up under that show more,
you're looking at just one tweet, not the entire account.
I find that it's much more likely somebody shows up under show more if they're replying a lot and have a bad follower to following ratio, much more so than what specific content they're posting about.
Generally speaking, from all of the code I've read and all of the people I've talked to, there's a pretty strong separation between the content of a tweet, the patterns of a user, and the
and the rank of a user and the likelihood that they fall under that fault.
These are separate things that are all calculated and done in separate ways.
There's a little bit of playing in between them, but the thing that determines your tweet
cred is much less the content of your tweets, much more
the behavior of your tweeting patterns.
How often are you replying versus posting on your main feed?
How often are others replying to you and interacting with you?
How many followers do you have compared to how many people you're following?
What types of people are you replying to?
How often do your tweets have links?
And the tweet credit system isn't meant,
and I think the fact that it's called tweet spread, like,
credentials has us way, way over, like, counting what its value is and what it's doing here.
It's not meant to rank people in, like, many different tiers.
The difference between a person with 100 tweet cred and 80 tweet cred is basically nothing.
The point of this system is to determine which users should be put under the fold and which one shouldn't.
That's well said.
And from my experience in the field has been...
really actualized and seeing it's not what you say.
I try never to cuss or get overly confrontational,
but I'll still get hidden behind that system if I reply too much,
too many days in a row trying to get engagement,
even if I'm really authentic and craft really good posts.
So, Theo, there's a lot of magic in the phrase, you know, like a little bit there when you were talking about the distinction between sort of, you know, posting and the account-based stuff.
And I take what you're saying that the sort of tweet cred is primarily about, you know, replies above and below the fold of responses.
But given that we've seen really monstrous virality-killing account-level classifiers...
And we've seen so many examples of that.
Can you tell us a little bit more with your sort of deep knowledge of, you know, of this particular space?
What, you know,
what other sort of account level, how the account level classifier system was, it sounded like you were saying earlier, that was all sort of manually done by, you know, a sort of handful of politically motivated. Is that what you're, what you're sort of arguing here?
And by the way, can you, can you confirm, because it sounds like you were sort of insinuating this, that there are zero algorithm level account deboosters currently on Twitter?
There's like seven asks in there.
I could try my best to unfold all that.
But like I'm looking at the get user mass code right here.
And here are the factors that are considered for user mass,
which is the core number that's used to calculate TweetCredit.
It's the users, or the user's account age,
Are they restricted? Are they suspended? Are they verified? Do they have a valid device? And what number of followers do they have and how many people are they following? And all of this is put into a basic mathematical formula you can read to generate this number from zero to 100 that is used by.
purely for these types of, like, should I throw you under the folder not?
But like, this is basic math shit.
This isn't some crazy algorithm is being hidden from us.
And it's genuinely dishonest to say that tweet cred is being used to censor people.
That is a fundamental misunderstanding of...
I know you're not, but I just want to make sure I draw a strong line.
Mike, Michael, Mike, I'm just trying to draw a strong line between these things so we could stop talking about TweetCredit and start talking about other things.
Is that understood?
I asked you about the other things.
No, but Theo, Theo, what's then?
Okay.
One second.
Because, let's be clear.
You obviously have that position, but Elon muster-s-dozen
because he has actually said that Tweed Credit is going to be removed
for this exact reason that people are stating,
that it is some form of credit.
Because, let's be clear.
Like, for example, now, if somebody is in the...
It are smaller accounts,
and they don't have a high T-Tweep credit,
what you'll essentially get to is a situation
where people are thinking,
shall I reply to that person or not?
And when you don't reply to that person,
then what happens is...
that person doesn't, A, get an opportunity to have their voice heard,
but also it de-boosts you as well.
And there shouldn't be these aspects that de-boost you.
Now, I understand that you need to have a system in place,
because how are you going to decide which posts are going to go out,
how are you going to decide all these things?
So I understand the checks and balances,
but the fact that, for example, if somebody's account suspended,
so there's a lot of people who are conservatives,
whose account was suspended,
either because of the Jan 6th situation or...
because of Ukraine and Russia situation or because of COVID.
And now these are toxic accounts because if we interact with them,
it's going to cause those problems.
We are going to lose a social rank.
Our posts are not going to get high engagement.
So as much as-
That's not tweet-cred.
That's a different thing.
Here is the code that's just the tweet-red.
I literally just pinned it.
That is TweepCred because, Ryan, you're here.
You wrote this post.
So you said TweepCred incorporates...
Many factors such as follow-a-following ratio, but this is the one that important.
You said also your account suspension status, verification and more.
So, Ryan, is the fact that if you've been suspended, if your accounts been suspended, does that impact your tweet crep score?
Tweet credit score?
What's up, guys?
So, yes, tweet credit goes across 32 different files and incorporates other stuff as well, such as bad reputation, other stuff.
Your suspension status matters.
Your follower following ratio matters.
A ton of different.
Ryan's on your listener right now.
You can't respond.
Can you guys hear me?
No, no, I can hear you.
I can hear you.
So, sorry, Ryan, you said.
So specifically I'm asking about account suspension because Theo said account suspension doesn't have an impact.
So account status?
No, account suspension does.
It absolutely does.
Okay, that's fine.
No, I literally listed, I listed all of the things that are the only things that matter.
I just pinned in the like tweets like thing here, the source code.
I think it's you used to argue in them because I gave you examples of three situations where people's account could be suspended and you were like, that's not accurate.
Suspended and de boosted are different things.
I'm not talking about suspended.
I said suspended.
But that's fine.
You concede it.
Well, I think maybe the main point that I see kind of building the foundation here is,
are there humans doing it or is an algorithm doing it?
And my conception of any system we build this large,
and I'm not as deep in the code as some of the guys and gals up here,
but any system you build this large is going to have to be automated and have...
full systems to handle this stuff.
There's too many humans and too many actions per second
to have people watching it and stamping you.
There's probably a trust and safety team
that does a small amount of that in extreme cases.
But most of it is...
is being handled by layers of computers, um, is where I would stand it on. I don't think
there's a lot of, at this stage, I think they're more hands off and let us talk, but there is
legacy system. That's the thing. Exactly. You're spot on, uh, I believe it's Benjamin speaking. You're
spot on this. There's a lot of the one point O stuff is still in there. That's unfortunately
affecting us. I would just add that like as much as I like Theo stepping in and not being afraid to
take the, uh, the,
the contrary position.
I think the one thing that he does at times is he likes,
he almost pretends that this is all math,
And we have to understand that like this is math and this is code written by people.
And these people have their own biases.
And I think that's the thing we're trying to get at is like the biases of the people writing the code.
And the biases it goes into the code.
But I'm looking at the code and there isn't bias here.
It literally is just looking at have your account been restricted?
Has your account been suspended?
Is your account verified?
What's your following account?
What's your following account?
Where you lack understanding is, Theo.
Because of course, account suspension is on there.
That's not biased.
But then the question becomes, and this is where you're not able to expand from the point, what is the reason why certain accounts are suspended?
So is it random?
Because the reason is that they were reported and somebody reviewed the report and chose to suspend them based on what they found in the report.
So that's not math or code is it.
So someone's been suspended.
based on some ideological position they had,
either it was Ukraine and Russia,
either it was COVID,
either it was January 6th,
which was a lot of people I know on Twitter
who've been suspended for those reasons,
they are now toxic accounts based on this tweet credit.
Is that right, Ryan?
Ryan, you're an expert on the code, isn't it?
So the blacklisted topics and blacklisted accounts are in the code.
They're not directly in tweet credit,
but they incorporate a factor into this because
I'm looking at Ryan.
He's still ranked on his listener.
I don't think he can talk.
Paul, you need to disconnect and reconnect.
This is a bug in spaces where the WebRTC pools don't combine properly,
and some people are in an isolated note.
Okay.
Paul, just drop.
Paul, I'll translate.
Drop down to come back.
The real answer.
A real answer.
Yeah, nice one, Ryan.
Okay.
So...
Brian, he's saying you need to cut it out and then come back in.
No, Paul, you need to.
Paul, I'm going to drop you and bring back.
So I'd answer your question.
There's a ton of, there's a bunch of topics that are in the code that are under blacklisted topics and blacklisted users.
The blacklisted users, we have no idea who these guys are.
But they're users that have been marked from back in the legacy days that are quote unquote bad actors that the code doesn't like.
It doesn't like you interacting with them, and it doesn't like post coming from them.
Two is the topics.
Some of them include...
Bro, tell me who they are, so we could stay there.
Bro, I wish I knew, man.
I wish I knew, man.
I'd protect this all from them.
But the topics are a little bit more transparent.
COVID-19 misinformation is one.
Medical misinformation.
The French election is one of them.
Election misinformation is considered one.
And then there's also stuff in there called experimental.
And this is stuff that we have no clue what it is.
This is behind a layer that we don't know what these are.
So, Ryan, I mean, one thing, one thing Elon has said is that he's going to remove this.
But I think you mentioned to me, because we did have a conversation about this, where you said that the problem is that it's so entrenched in the court you thought is really hard to do.
I mean, if you can expand on that for the...
I think, in my opinion, it's very hard because it's so embedded, right?
This is 32 files that are visibly calling this code.
And then there's other...
factors that go into this like the bad reputation stuff other that that are so embedded that if in order to do this you're going to have to redo a lot of the code in there and pull out chunks and embed newer chunks into there to redo us think of this as like a the the electrical system of a city and then there's a huge chunk of the electrical system that coordinates what's being done and now we hate that because it's giving certain people more electricity than others and we have to now go in there dig the ground out and re put in this brand new system
And it's a very, very uphill battle, especially with what everyone claims that they're understaffed and all this other stuff.
It's a big grind.
And mind you, the last big update that went to the algorithm was back in July.
So nothing has really been pushed to the public repo, to the public algorithm repo since July.
I have so many questions to you, Ryan.
My big ask is, like, do you have anywhere where you've broken down your understanding of the algorithm and how this stuff works,
be it like a blog post, a Twitter thread, a video, something?
So I can like go through that piece by piece because there's just a lot here.
I have not posted.
Yeah.
Go ahead, sorry.
We got a thread.
Haven't you got that thread coming out?
Or does it do you mean something else?
the thread we're about a post or do you mean something more detailed?
That's, that is fine. I just, I need something like focused and factual so I can go through piece by piece to take it down because there's like so many things piling up.
And I can't even like separate the different columns without like having every single detail of every word.
I say questioned indefinitely. I just want to separate the issue so we can actually talk about them and I don't even feel like I can do that right now.
No problem.
I'm sure either he'll have a thread coming out.
And if not,
I'm sure you guys can communicate on DMs.
But moving on.
So like we have got a scenario where we talk about tweet crap.
We are talking about cracking the algorithm.
But also, Ryan,
if you don't tell us a bit more about what other things.
You mentioned about follower to following ratio.
So if your ratio is like...
First of all, you said something about 2,500.
And then if you follow more than 2,500, less than 2,500, your ratio doesn't matter.
Sure, sure, sure.
So if we go into, I'll reference the file for Theo if you want, extract topecred.
Scala, it looks at accounts that are over 2,500 followers, so 2,500.
And it wants your follower-to-pelling ratio to be below 60%.
I hate this factor, but this is a factor that's in there.
If you're under 2,500 followers, it doesn't take this into account.
Now, mind you, this is files that are pushed across multiple different files.
So this could be changing.
Ryan, is that, sorry, I'm only interrupted in just so everyone understand.
So, like, is that you following 2,500 people?
Or for people?
No, it's following 2,500 people.
So if you're following, so solely, if you're following 2,499, it doesn't care.
But if you hit 2,5001, it starts to care.
Like, okay, I need to look at this guy's follow or following ratio.
Okay, I'm working.
I'll continue.
And then what?
It has to be 60%.
60% yes.
So it wants you to only follow 60% of that 2,500.
So if we do the map on that real quick, 0.6.
So you should only be following 1,500 accounts if you're following 2,500 accounts.
So if you're following 25, if 2,500 people are following you,
you should only be following 1,500 to keep that 60% ratio going.
Oh, right.
So I always thought it was the other way around.
No, no, no, no.
I always thought the people following you was always going to be a higher number,
and then those your following has to be 6%.
You're correct.
It wants more people following you than you're following.
It's very weird because for a social network,
I've never heard of it penalizing you for following too many people or interacting with too many people.
But apparently this one, and for some reason, this takes this into account.
Yeah, because numerically, people, there's going to be people who are going to be below the ratio,
just for people to be over the ratio.
Right, right.
But Ryan, it's always been like this, right?
So even before Elon bought Twitter, if you had 3,000 people following you,
but you'd actually got to the 5,000 mark, it wouldn't let you follow one more person,
and it would say you need to get more followers before you can follow anybody else.
That's interesting.
I'd never heard of that one before.
It doesn't stop you from following people.
That's for sure.
No, it is...
The algorithm doesn't stop that.
That's like a back-end, like the actual code that processes that you hit the follow button.
That code is rejecting.
That has nothing to do with the algorithm.
I'm sure the question seems are following like a million people.
Yeah, no, I was actually about to bring up the Crasnstein's because I feel like I can't get their posts out of my feed, and they are well over the 60% rule here.
Like, they just did the math, and they're at 68% or following.
They do so well, and they're not in the 60%.
Yeah, but the thing there is those guys are boosted by Elon heavily.
They get replies at least a few times a week from Elon.
Their interactions are so hard.
But not, but even before, no, no, but one second.
Even before Elon...
What about
his tweet?
but even before
Elon
interacted with them,
they were doing
really well.
So I think
Elon has had an
impact,
but they've always
done really,
really well.
And they used to
follow more people
than they follow now.
They've been dropping.
Yeah,
one thing,
one thing of big note here.
Are you saying it's just
This is just one factor.
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying.
This is just one factor.
Keep this in mind.
This is one factor in TweetCrit.
There's an ocean of factors that go into this.
And we've only dived into, we're focusing on just one.
Their interactions, interactions is also a big one.
That's also part of the thread there.
The likes, the followers, the followers, the replies, the repost, the quote reposts.
All that stuff matters and goes into it.
If that's coming in at a much higher volume and we can see the crowds and scenes have great interactions and engagement,
this one factor will get pushed down and those factors will get pushed back pushed those factors will play a bigger role for them and i think that's what's happening there those guys are very opinionated so the interactions with them help significantly
that makes sense cat i know you've a hundred percent a few points jump in what's your thoughts about what we're talking about cat hi yeah i've heard of the tweak cred thing and um the thing i don't like about it is that it
It limits you from kind of freely interacting with accounts because you don't know who has which score and what it is.
So I, like, I'm happy that Elon is working on weeding that out of the code because, like, in my mind, I'm thinking, how can you, for example, expose someone who might need to be exposed without lowering your own score by interacting with that person or by showing what they're saying on Twitter, on X, rather?
Yeah.
Yeah, and one more thing on the TweetCRET thing.
You know, I made the point earlier that this appears to have been set up to essentially boost sort of institutionally backed...
legacy, you know, this sort of legacy blue check world.
And Theo's response to that was, you know, oh, that's very conspiratorial.
I think that's a very...
That's not what TweetCat is.
There's a separate...
There are separate things for all of this,
but TweepCud is very specifically to identify accounts that are providing little to no value
for the average Twitter user and putting them under the fold
so that we don't see a bunch of accounts that, like, have never signed it on a phone
or apply all the time.
But the question is how you determine that, right?
And isn't...
Theo, you seem to, there's two things that you've mentioned now, right?
There's the get user mass and tweet thread, and tweet thread, right?
Those are the two sort of focuses that you've, you've had here.
And is it correct that tweet, because get user mass according to what you posted,
has that sort of, you know, whether you're verified or not makes a difference according to the algorithm of that, right?
That's also true with, with tweet, I always say wrong, tweet,
Cred as well, whether you're verified makes a difference?
User mass is just the main calculation for TweetPCRED.
Like the TweetPCRED function calls user mass.
Well, then that makes my point, right?
Because you have to remember, you know, again, it's disingenuous to sort of say, oh, you guys are being conspiratorial.
When we just lived through five years of high-octane conspiracy against regular users,
So, you know, you're going to have to forgive us for being conspiratorial here.
We just went through a five-year cyclone of being told that people weren't being censored as they systematically were at huge scale.
But the point that I'm making here that I think the audience should take in is that the fact that your verification status,
is in there is exactly the point I was making because in Twitter 1.0, you couldn't buy verification for $8 a month.
It was a legacy system. That's what the whole meme of a blue check journalist was. It was a regime-backed person, an institutionally backed person. Somebody who could be hand-selected, you couldn't just be like a populist person or a, you know, a controversial conservative or anti-war leftist necessarily and get
blue check, you couldn't get verified
even if everyone knew it was your account.
You had hundreds of thousands of followers.
The verification system was rigged
to favor institutional elites.
And we see now that
the algorithm for determining
your credibility is
is based on that legacy system.
So it looks like that's what I was saying,
which is that this appears to be a way
to box out populist or controversial voices
in order to upscale the boosting for...
basically regime favorable personalities.
I applied and I was rejected,
even though I met all the criteria.
That's what I want you know.
I applied and I was rejected too and I met all the criteria.
Like this happens.
I was just a programmer and like they weren't verifying accounts as often.
Like I think that this is so.
Are you really going to argue that they weren't,
that there wasn't disproportional targeting of a verification on the basis of like political personality?
Are you really,
you're not really making that point, right?
I think.
I think that verification was done primarily around the likelihood that an account would be impersonated because that's what the checkmark used to mean.
It meant that this was officially the person's name is next to it, not some like fake account.
There's a lot of work being done by the word primarily here.
Everybody on this, everybody listening to this has experiences of having huge...
I mean, hundreds of thousands of follower account people.
You even had some internal communications around the use of verification as a way of gatekeeping to stop, you know, controversial or borderline content people from being legitimized publicly.
I mean, this is something that's that's...
I think we've been well...
I didn't realize that the talk about TweetCred was entirely coming down to the way in which verified accounts were picked before.
If you want to debate about that, feel free.
I'm not interested in that topic.
I just wanted to talk about the algorithm and how it works here because I'm a code nerd.
And looking at the code, everything you're saying is only applying to one line, which is else if is verified 100.
That is one of the lines...
for calculation. And yes, if you're verified, you basically get opted out of TweetCred.
Because TweetCred's role is primarily to keep the quality of content from hitting the floor
from accounts that were just made by some bot that are following a bunch of accounts,
replying to a bunch of shit. That's what the role of this is. And when you read the code,
it's very clear with things like, like the biggest chunk of code here is about the
amount of valid devices they have in the age of their account.
They're checking to see how likely it is that your account is a real person
versus your account is some crappy bot that's trying to spam people.
That's the role of the yet user mask chunk of TweetCred.
Like this is the majority of what we're talking about here.
We're focusing on the malevolent ones, though.
I am focusing on the majority of the code that is used for CweepCRED.
You're focusing on the word verified and how it's an opt-out for this.
No, I'm talking about the word verified because it clearly goes to the reason that this
you know, this whole system was instituted, which was to prioritize legacy blue check accounts,
which was a part of this whole structure that Twitter 1.0 had.
It was.
It was.
So to be clear, your stance, Mike, is that the role of-
And many other things.
So to be clear, Mike, as far as you understand,
the reason that tweet cred was implemented was to suppress misinformation around COVID
by boosting verified accounts above other accounts.
That's what you're saying right now, correct?
Partially.
I think we've- Okay, that's the stupidest thing I've ever fucking heard, so I can't engage with that point.
Theo, Theo, he's not saying just TweetCredit.
Guys, chill out.
Everyone, chill out, guys.
It's not just TweetCredit.
You want to talk like that?
I mean, that's like, I'll go there.
Theo, don't take this too personally.
I think what Mike's coming from is from the angle of certain accounts that are being censored by stuff that are within that blacklisted topics that we discuss, blacklisted users that we discussed.
It's not just TweetCread that's, that's his, TweepCredit is just one function across.
Okay.
these files. He's talking about other stuff that's
happening within the algorithm.
I appreciate you for making this clarification.
I just want to, can we stop saying the word
TweetCredit if we're not talking about TweetCred?
I don't know if it's just this on an engineer.
These guys are encoders like you,
they're just going off of one thing.
They're just the algorithm across.
Anyway, look, just...
Ryan and Theo, I've got a question for both of you, actually,
and then I will go to Alexandra.
What is, because we wrote on the title,
cracking the X algorithm,
and we are going to go through the thread that we've been referring to.
But before we do, like,
what is the number one advice you can give to people
who are listening on how they can boost their engagement
based on what you've read on the code?
Ryan, go first and then, Theo.
Sure, one thing I would say is easiest thing to do is buy that blue check.
I know it sucks.
It's eight bucks a month, but that will divert you across a lot of different crazy stuff that happens.
It doesn't suck because you could get paid back for it.
Yeah, you can get paid back for it.
And I think it's a motivator.
Plus, it looks good to have that blue check that everyone wanted for so long.
And it gets you out of some of the code that, some of the code checks that happen.
Blue check is my best advice to anyone.
Easiest eight bucks.
And let's be honest, just buy two less coffees a month.
Theo, give us your number one advice.
I'm going to repeat what Wall Street self said the last time we talked about all this, because I think he was really on point.
You got to use the platform.
Be on here.
See what works.
Tweet, reply.
Yeah.
try the, like, ad boosting, try out subscriptions.
Like, if you're not, like, subscribed to at least three people,
are you really, like, using the platform and pushing it?
Oh, shit, he's here. That's awesome.
Yeah, he was, like, without question, the best I heard anyone
talking about the algorithm and how to succeed on the platform.
Like, you just got to use it.
So, actually, Theo, let's go into that because Wall Street did give some advice,
but then I wasn't sure if that was in the algorithm.
So, for example, one of the things he said last week was...
What do you call it?
There was, for example, me, I'm subscribed to 11 people.
So is that in the algorithm?
Like, if you subscribe to a lot of people, it's going to boost your engagement?
Or is there just something that's known or like, what's the situation with that, Theo?
Did Theo mention me
because you were adding me to speak
and then he said something that I think he was talking to me
but I could...
Yeah, yeah, he mentioned that some of the
advices you gave were like really
on point and
brilliant. And so because of that
reason, like some of you,
I'll be honest, I implemented all
all the points you said yeah because man wants to boost his engagement hard right but my point okay look
i i i've cracked this algorithm i'm telling you right now i i know all the tricks if you want to know
them real quick i'm paying for the gold check all right you can see it on my account i pay a thousand
dollars a month for that and it's worth it you really want to crack this algorithm um
Invest in the platform.
Invest in the platform.
Yeah, yeah, I pay for it, whatever.
But it's taken, it gets you around all the street cred
or the tweet credit or any of the other BS.
It, like, it releases the safeties, okay?
It's totally worth it if you have a big enough account that's monetized.
I mean, if you're making enough money from the ad share revenue
where it covers the cost of the gold check,
You'd be stupid not to pay for it.
Just stupid not to pay for it.
I subscribe to 25 people.
It's great content.
I support them.
I pay for ads on the platform.
I suspect maybe Theo can confirm this or not,
but I suspect that the algorithm treats active advertisers more favorably.
I don't know.
Have you seen anything like that, Theo?
I have not.
I'm going to go on a short rant about how the algorithm cares about these things in a bit,
but definitely want to let you go with your advice first.
Well, let me go to Alexander, because she had, I think she had some point to make, and then I will go to the you.
I appreciate that. Thank you very much. So I'm very new to your space, and my content is much more Tesla and finance related. I have about 83,000 followers, have been on Twitter for two years, get from time to time an interaction with Elon, which helps. But...
Numbers have been quite stable.
So one of the questions I want to ask Theo later on is,
do any of the analytics that X provides really help us?
Because I don't think it is.
But before we get there, I want to explain what we did.
We set up four weeks ago a verified organization called the Boomer House,
and people can purchase memberships in the Boomer House.
The lowest one, the lowest level is $55.
Right.
for being a member, you get access to all our perks, whatever, but also obviously the affiliate badge.
So we have now four weeks of experience of what this affiliate badge helps.
Myself, I only have a normal affiliate badge.
It's the Boomer House who has the golden checkmark, which doesn't help that new account a lot.
So that's something else, the golden checkmark.
But the affiliate account, in my case...
tripled ad revenue from the first two weeks where we didn't have it yet to the last two weeks where we were a verified organization.
So I wanted to share that and I wanted also to share that I actually, since I'm an analyst,
I published since February all my numbers month by month and the ad revenue.
So if anybody wants to use that, it's a Google sheet that the link is on my profile.
So people can actually seem...
My statistics and I also subscribe to Fedica.
Are you allowed to sell? Because from what I know, you're not allowed to them.
We're not selling, we're not selling affiliate badges.
We're a membership where they get other stuff.
We're doing events. We're doing, we're doing social media classes.
We have a certain code of conduct.
But part of the membership is the affiliate badge.
Cool.
cool. I don't know what the rules are. I just, I thought you want to like.
Yeah. Oh yeah. We checked this. We checked this thoroughly with X. Don't worry.
We discussed this with them before we did.
Brilliant, brilliant. Yeah, cool. As long as it's in the rules,
I didn't want else to like propagate anything in the space that might break the rules.
But, yeah.
So my question with Theo is, does any of the analytics they give us actually help you understand how ad revenue is calculated?
Or is the real juice, meaning the verified accounts and the interactions and all that, is that something we don't have access to?
I am very confused by the wording of that question.
If it's like, can you go to the analytics page
to calculate exactly how much money you're going to make?
No, that's not doable.
I don't even think like Twitter has that level of accuracy
in their calculations.
I made a dumb Chrome extension that will show you
an estimate based on my payouts as to how much I think
that tweet might be worth.
And it's like a meme because it's just a dumb multiplier and it's rarely correct.
But I made that for myself and it's kind of useful.
But generally speaking, if you get significantly more impressions on your content,
especially if it's video content, you're going to see higher payouts.
And I use the analytics to look at how many impressions I'm getting.
And as the number goes up, my payouts tend to go up alongside it.
Okay, I see.
So is it...
I've talked about this.
A lot of the big accounts who have gotten the big payouts.
And I am 100% convinced it has nothing to do with impressions.
It's 100% replies.
Of course, they go together if you get a lot of impressions...
You're going to get a lot of replies.
But there are people, some of these accounts to do aesthetics or images or memes only with no text.
And those accounts that get so few replies, you know, they get tons of impressions and likes and retweets, but very few replies.
They don't have a lot of ad revenue.
It's the accounts that have massive amounts of replies that are getting the ad revenue.
So the value of impressions for you is irrelevant.
Why do I ask?
Because mine is about 10 cents per thousand impressions, which seems very high.
But I do engage a lot in my replies.
I mean, I'm a real woman getting into all of that.
Yeah, yeah. If, like, Ian Miles Chong, he averages something like 30-something thousand replies per day.
And Elon Parody, he's also in that same ballpark.
I mean, these guys are crushing it with replies, and their payments are outsized relative to their impressions.
Okay, that's what I thought.
There's other guys like CB Doge, or he's Doge designer, you know, Elon's favorite account.
That guy's got an account with 250,000 followers, one quarter of mine, and he's getting a paycheck, a payment that's in the same ballpark as mine at once.
But it's because he's getting like three to five replies from Elon per day that are spiking his replies by thousands of replies every time Elon engages with him.
So, I mean, there's reasons why these things happen.
It's the replies.
100% it's the replies.
And it's the number of blue checks that you have in your replies.
Because the people who don't have a blue check, it doesn't matter if they reply to you in terms of ad revenue.
And Elon Parody told me his little strategy is he goes through all of his tweets and he hits the like button on everyone who has a blue check who replies to him.
And he does this religiously.
He hits the like button on everyone in his replies who has a blue check.
And,
And as a result, they keep coming back and replying to him.
I mean, it's a brilliantly simple strategy.
And as a result, he's just crushing it.
I haven't read the code, so I'm going to gut feel about this.
I'll go straight to you.
We have put a thread on the nest.
It is about the code.
It is about some of the things we discussed in terms of how to crack the algorithm.
It talks about TweetCred.
It talks about the follower to following ratio,
and it talks about how Elon is going to be removing TweetCred.
So it's on the nest above.
Go ahead for you, and then I'll go to Ryan.
So my gut feel about what's happening here with the revenue for replies.
And I want to be clear, like, there's no code that I've seen for this,
as far as I know there's no code out or like being spoken about for this,
is that the way that ads are calculated is based on how much can we credit this particular
ad impression that a user had to your tweets.
When you're scrolling through the home feed, you see like one ad per, let's say, five tweets.
The way that would get split up is they would have to take that ad rev and then divide it across the people who made those five tweets.
When you're in the replies, my guess is that a much higher percentage of the tweets that you're reading through are from the user who made the original tweet.
And as such, the impressions you're going to have as a viewer reading those are going to be paid out to that original like Twitter poster.
So if more people are reading the replies...
you're much more likely to make more money per reader than you would if they were just seeing it on the main feed.
Because they're looking at a subset of content that is higher density of yours and the actual payout as far as it goes from reading that.
It might even just be 100% the OP gets it.
I'm not sure how it works.
I know they put a lot of work into paying you out per ads that are viewed on your profile.
I can't see why that code wouldn't have also been applied to when somebody's reading a thread and reading replies.
It makes intuitive sense to me that the additional ad impressions when reading replies would be paid out at a higher rate because a higher percentage of those ad reads are directly credited to the original poster.
Ryan, jump in. You're an expert on the code.
Sure, thank Theo is good as well.
I've got to give them credit there.
Yeah, yeah.
But you guys are correct.
Interactions matter way more than impressions and interactions from blue checks are what matter towards getting paid.
Elon said that specifically, and he's pointed out that the verified users matter way more than unverified.
He's even made the notion that unverified users don't even matter in this.
calculation and in this. So interactions matter because when you're applying, you're creating a
conversation starts occurring. So people start going back and forth so they keep coming to your
account. And if there's an ad under your reply or an ad under your post or add under your
profile, people are seeing that. So it attributes that ad getting views from your stuff.
Again, there's nothing in the code that I've seen so far that proves this, right? We're just going
based on 100s. But the interaction stuff is in the code. We've seen that.
interactions matter and Elon has told us straight up that verified interactions matter.
To answer Alexander's question,
there is nothing in the analytics that can tell you exactly how many verified
users are in there that are telling you,
that tells you how many verified users are following you yet, but that is coming.
The one thing that I would try to pay attention to, if you want to look at your analytics,
the most powerful thing that I've gotten out from analytics is your best times to post for your account.
If you can kind of harvest that from the analytics and kind of break that down,
that should probably help you out significantly more there.
How do you find that? How do you find the time?
So manually, looking at your top tweets, search over seven days,
look at your top tweets from there and see what times you posted and see if you could find some correlation there.
You're a smoth cookie, too.
You're a smog cookie.
I totally disagree that you time tweets.
I think you do them 24-7 and use the scheduling tool.
but before I go to bed
I schedule eight tweets one to go off
each hour before I fall asleep
I mean there's no reason for you to
time your tweets
I mean I've I mean there's nothing
The only problem with that one is
I mean I do the same as well for a few tweets
and I'm going to start doing it again from like tomorrow
or the day after but you can only schedule tweets
but it has to be less than 280 characters
isn't that right well
That's correct.
You can only do under 280.
Over 280 won't get posted.
Even if you go around the scheduler and you try to schedule and then you hit, it will not post over 280.
Yeah, I tried that.
The timing thing isn't in the code, but this has been found across multiple different stuff.
It's just basic psychology, right?
In the morning, people are checking their accounts.
Around lunchtime, people are checking their accounts.
And the evening people are checking their accounts.
They kind of correlate.
You can correlate with the time people are going to lunch and so on and so forth.
Yes, you can try to post every hour, but sometimes people don't have that amount of content to pump out every single hour.
Like, you might have Wall Street.
I'm just saying for...
But the, I've seen so many times.
This is just my anecdotal observation.
You know, nothing I can prove, but tweets that I'll schedule while I'm asleep that are going off at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. in the morning,
I'll wake up and I'll look at the results of like the six tweets while I was sleeping.
And it's typically just memes or simple stuff or whatever.
Two of them will be, you know, take it.
It'll be two or three duds.
I'll delete those, but I'll let the other four go.
And I'll think, oh, it was mediocre.
But then later in the morning, all of a sudden they launch when people wake up
and they're seeing the tweets that were launched overnight that the algorithm actually liked
because they got served up to all the people waking up.
So something about the algorithm.
Whereas before, my anecdotal observation was,
if it didn't launch strong initially, it's not going to re-wake up.
But I don't know, you know, they keep changing the algorithm.
And I have this sense that now the algorithm doesn't kill tweets right away.
It gives them a longer time frame to...
to launch. That is correct.
It used to be within the first hour, but now
they get pushed out. They take much longer
sometimes to get pushed out. But I still say that, look,
what you said there backwards
us into the timing thing, right? It takes
at a certain time it starts pushing them
out even more. Again, I'm basing
this off of stuff that I've seen on other media
platforms, as well as this one that
Just certain time periods, you'll see a push that pushes tweets out much, much better than other times.
Like, if I post that one in the morning, most of my followers are asleep.
No one's going to see that, right?
And the algorithms takes into account the interactions that come in right off the bat.
But if I post around the time where I know my followers are there, it boost it.
Like YouTube gives you that graph.
Twitter doesn't give you that graph yet.
But hey, man, to each their own, I guess, if it's working for you, stick to it.
Well, there's also something that's like,
There's something in the code called diversity of authorship.
And I talked with one of the algorithm developers at X, and we had a little back and forth about this.
And he explained it this way, and I'll see if I can make sense of it.
There is a certain batch of the audience that logs in every 15 minutes, right?
And if you're pumping out a tweet every 15 minutes and they're a follower of years, they're going to see every tweet you do because they're just on all the time.
But other people who only check in once a day on the X app, if you've pumped out 20 tweets that day, they're not going to see all 20 of your tweets.
They might see your top two or three because the algorithm is not going to show them the other 17 mediocre ones.
It's only going to show you to show them your top three that day.
And if you're the type of user who only checks in once every three or four days,
well, I may have pumped out 100 tweets in that timeframe.
That person who's only logging into the app once every three or four days,
he's only going to see maybe my top two or three out of 100.
So there's different, it's diversity of authorship.
Even if they follow you, they're not going to see all your tweets
based on the amount, how often that person logs in.
So the type of, if there's a huge account,
that only tweets twice a day or once a day.
That person's average performance on their tweet is going to be outrageously high
because a much higher portion of their audience has seen every tweet.
But, you know, so I hope I explained that.
Did that make sense?
It made a lot of sense.
I appreciate that.
I've got another question for you because something you mentioned about deleting posts.
Now, I was told by people that if you delete your post, like think of like all your
posts.
Like when you throw, when you write a post, it goes into the cobweb of Twitter.
And when you delete it, you delete your post.
It impacts your overall engagement.
But then you said you do that.
So have you not seen any kind of impact on your engagement?
I, if there is, I just don't care.
I mean, I'm averaging 25 million to 30 million impressions a day, so I just don't care.
And Walter, your takeaway is if you have like 24 tweets, for example, in your arsenal,
it's better to space them one hour apart a day than saving,
then basically pushing them all out during a sort of prime time.
Well, I used to really think about spacing a lot.
And I used to aim for like 60 minutes or 90 minutes spacing.
And I was thinking that that was important.
And I was obsessed with that for the longest time.
And then after the last...
payout i talked with ian miles strong um because he's crushing it um he crushed everyone's numbers
in the payouts and i so i was talking with him about his strategy and what's he doing different
that i'm not doing
Because he's got a smaller account than me, but he got, he made twice as much as I did.
And I'm like, okay, this guy's doing it right and I'm doing it wrong.
And Ian just doesn't care.
He'll pump out a tweet every five minutes.
He just doesn't care.
And his attitude is the algorithm's going to like some of them and the algorithm's not going to like some of them.
And his idea, his attitude is.
In order to hit home runs, you have to take a lot of swings.
And he doesn't care if he strikes out on a bunch of tweets.
He's taking so many damn swings, though.
He's hitting a fair number of tweets that get over a million impressions per day.
He hits a lot of home runs, but he's taking a ton of swings.
And that's just his attitude.
But his attitude is even a dud tweet.
is still getting 50, 50 replies and has ads in it.
So even the dud tweets are making money for him.
It's a difference in attitude.
He doesn't care about the bad.
But let me go to him.
Did he mention whether he publishes before bed,
like the scheduling thing you mentioned?
No, no.
Ian is sick.
Like, he literally posts.
I think as soon as he wakes up, he'll post loads.
And like Wall Street said, like some of them do.
He's on this app like 18 hours.
Yeah, he smashes it.
And he wakes up to pee at night.
He does three weeks.
Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
Oh, yeah.
No pain post.
But Brian, you also have got a very, like a really good payout.
And your strategy is slightly different.
Like, you don't post as much as Ian.
I think sometimes you post about like three to eight or something.
So, like, what's your strategy?
Yeah, so like I would say I usually leave two to three hours between tweets.
I don't know.
Like I don't actually know if my strategy is better than what Ian does.
I do know that like when I do post too quickly together, it sort of cannibalizes the engagement of the previous tweet.
But at the same time, I think that if you get one that kind of goes viral, if the right people share it, you know,
And it hits like the trends, then it doesn't really matter too much.
I still like, I try to usually space them two to three hours.
I find that that's usually best for my engagement.
But I haven't tried what Ian did, but I think I'd go crazy if I did.
Yeah, you have to be a special type of personality to do what Ian does.
I mean, I can't do what Ian does.
I'll probably never be able to, but I respect...
respect that he's being so successful at it.
Yeah, and remember, his strategy not only gets you add revenue,
but if you see his follower account,
it's increasing significantly as well.
And I think his extreme level of posting does benefit on that
because even if, like, I know he gets add revenue,
but when you're getting, you're doing so many posts
and they may go to different people,
he is, like, if you look at his follow account,
it's going up faster than a lot of people.
The other person I know whose follow account is going up,
as fast as other people is my friend censored men.
He again, post quite regularly.
He posts every, and he said to me, he was like, look, I post every consistently.
So he was posting every two hours, and I think now he's moved it to like every hour
or every hour and a half.
And again, he gets extremely high ad revenue.
And his follow account is like, he's getting like 100,000 followers every 15 days.
So that strategy of posting a lot helps in definitely in terms of getting followers.
And also for some people in terms of ad revenue.
Sarah, go ahead.
I wanted to go back to something really quickly about affiliate badges and that you are not allowed on X to sell access to your affiliate badge.
Ed Krasenstein, maybe it was Brian, had made a joke tweet about selling access to their Krasencast affiliate.
And an ex-employee said that that was against the rules.
Brian...
Do you remember that?
Yeah, so Ed made a, like he was joking around.
Oh, yeah, you can, you can become an affiliate for $500 a month, like just joking around.
And the ex-employee, like, DM me immediately.
And he didn't know if I was joking around or Ed was joking around and said,
just so you know you're not allowed to sell affiliate accounts, the affiliate badges,
it's against the terms of service.
So just to know that.
My anecdotal, you know, I read that thing that when they were selling the verified org
in the little list of features that comes with it, it says 2X more organic reach.
And it says it's for the person who has the gold check, the account that has the gold check
and the affiliate badges.
But I got to be honest with you, we got the verified org for our podcast.
the everything space, and then we put the affiliate tags on 10 different people who are all part of that.
And I didn't see...
So I had it on my account for like three weeks.
I saw no difference at all from the...
I agree.
I haven't seen any difference.
Yeah, but I...
But the gold checks.
And it doesn't make sense to me that the affiliate tag would...
It's only 50 bucks to have the affiliate tag.
It's like if they were doubling your organic reach for 50 bucks, literally everyone would be doing it.
And...
um it they're not they're not doubling your organic reach for 50 bucks now for
wall street what you're rick my heart bro i only put this nerdy badge on because i want you to go two x
Yeah, I'm sorry. They're not giving you 2x organic reach for the affiliate.
But you see it with your gold.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, the gold. The gold not. Your affiliates do not, right?
Yeah, the gold check definitely releases the safeties. At least that's my anecdotal observation so far.
I've had it since Thursday and my numbers are up.
But your affiliates have not noticed and increase.
I don't have any affiliates.
I don't want to, and it's the same thing.
Like, one, if you don't follow Wall Street, Silver, and everything,
spaces and you want to learn how to grow, do that for yourself.
It's a huge favor, not to just plug someone randomly, but they help teach me a lot of what I know.
But two, my verified organization gets a huge boost for a starter account.
I just started it last month.
And then my personal account with an affiliate badge does not.
It's the same engagement, you know, one to two million views per day that I've been getting before is the same as now.
Ryan, jump in.
Yeah, I just wanted to jump in on the note of, we were talking about Ian's account.
One thing that Ian does also that's very good is that for he replies to a lot of these bigger accounts.
He's always, he's in there replying to Elon, replying to a lot of those accounts that are within his like echo chamber style.
It's not echo chamber, the group of people that they interact with, those big payout accounts.
So the reply strategy.
is a big thing that works.
If you get a smaller account
and you can't pay this $1,000 a month,
I mean, that's a lot of money
to ask for someone to get your post boosted.
I would say start replying to these bigger accounts.
If you subscribe to them,
like they were saying,
you'll pop up on the higher end of things.
But interactions matter significantly.
That's why it's really good.
to post content that that encourages uh encourages conversation and engagement
Ian's account is very divisive right full transparency it creates a lot of
conversations for both people that are on his side and people that are against
his side um same thing with the Krasnstein brothers their accounts in bringing in a lot of
discourse and engagement in terms of people come in and discuss either they love what
they're saying or they're attacking them so sometimes
It's a little bit good to be divisive and pick a side of the fence to land on for your account if you're within that political realm or sphere because that engagement brings more people to your post, brings more people to your accounts.
And with memes, they're just funny so people can comment on them.
But I don't know really how that's the thing.
Well, the key, if you're trying to grow your account, like back when I first started two and a half years ago, I was a reply guy for like zero hedge.
The zero hedge account, I was like, in any good, interesting story that was taking off, I'd be in the replies of zero hedge.
Or a few other large accounts that I really like.
So if anyone's looking just to grow your audience and you're below, I don't know, 500 and you're trying to reach that 500 follower level to get monetized.
Pick your favorite three accounts on here on this platform.
Big accounts, stuff that's people who are between 500,000 and a million followers.
And turn on notifications.
You've got to hit that notification bell because the sooner you get a reply in, the better.
You know, hopefully within the first two minutes after a tweet goes out.
Don't just do an emoji.
Do something thoughtful with one or two sentences or if you have a meme that's relevant to whatever the tweets about, throw that in there.
You want to be noticed.
You want people to be doing likes on your reply or replying to your reply.
And that boost you up in the filter.
There's a sorting order of the replies.
Now, anyone who has a blue check, obviously, is at the top.
If you subscribe to that person, that little pink symbol, you also have an advantage in the sorting order.
You're going to appear higher in the replies.
So you're going to get more impressions.
So, you know, if you really want to grow, the way that the algorithm is designed is have the blue check for $8 a month.
and subscribe to three, your three favorite accounts.
And turn on notifications for those three so you can get your replies in as soon as possible on them.
It's really just that simple.
Until you reach a couple thousand followers where you get enough organic reach on your own tweets that it starts to,
generate your own impressions.
And also as well, I'm going to go to Brian
because I know you're unmuted,
but also as well, like, for example,
sub-in to people because I know, for example,
myself, always dropped,
but I know myself, I,
anyone who subscribes to me,
I follow them.
So, like, when you follow them,
then, again, you're going to have
more chance of a big account replying to you.
I know not every big account,
subscribe.
People do that, but a lot of people who have got subscribers services do do that.
So I follow all my subscribers.
So there's like different ways of making sure that even if you're a tiny account,
you get the opportunity for people to reply to, for people to basically engage with you.
Confluence.
Sorry, go ahead.
What I do is after I do a tweet,
and I'll go back to it like an hour later and I'll look at all my subscribers who are who are in there replying to it.
All the ones who have the little pink symbol.
And I'll pick like the best five to ten of them and I'll reply to them, which will boost them up to the top of the replies.
So if it's a viral tweet that's taking off and getting one million to 10 million impressions,
You know, those people who I actually replied to in the replies, they end up getting, you know, between 20,000.
And I had one guy get half a million impressions from a reply to me, just because it was a tweet that actually got, I don't know, almost 10 million impressions itself.
So he got 500,000 for being the top reply in the sorting thing, in the sorting process.
So, yeah.
You know, that's what I do for my subscribers is I go in and I hit the like button for a lot of them in the replies and I'll reply to five to ten of them.
on each post. And if it's a viral post that's going into multi-million impressions, then I'll go through and I'll reply to like 20 of them to give 20 different subscribers a huge boost to their impressions. And the replies that I reply to are typically the best replies, people who put some thought into their reply. If you're just doing an emoji, I got I got nothing to work with to reply to you on.
Yeah, I agree.
And that's why it's good to subscribe.
Because, same, like, I know there's a lot of people who give a lot of things out to the subscribers.
Either it's like, for example, following him back or applying to them or whatever it may be.
So, yeah, it is one of the reasons why it's good to subscribe to people.
Confluence, jump in, bro.
You've got your hand up.
Yeah, brother. So one thing, spaces have been just a great vehicle to grow followership.
You get to hear what's behind these accounts and get a taste of their insights.
And I think it's just a far more intimate experience.
And follower growth and growth strategy has been completely upended, I think, by these things.
And one's ability to participate and excel in them.
And then on the other side of the spectrum, I'm wondering, we still have a lot of accounts
that Elon's yet to fulfill his unbanned everybody position that he stated at one point.
A lot of people, namely, that were around the election, there was a big purge.
I think it was October 19th, maybe.
It was right around the Hunter Biden laptop.
And anything that was like proxy Q adjacent, anything that they could try to stain with anything that they could to cast as wide a net to get rid of as many people as possible, I know a lot of those people have yet to return.
Any news on those people or anyone have any insight on that batch of still censored folk?
I have no idea, but if anybody does just jump in.
But the point I was going to make to you was in terms of your first point,
which was, what was your first point again?
Just that spaces as a vehicle for...
I agree with you.
I agree with you.
Spaces are such a good place to be in terms of,
A, to grow your following.
I know my following increased significantly from being in these spaces,
although threads obviously made a much more of an impactful situation
in terms of followers.
Right.
But in addition to that as well, like getting subscribers,
I get a huge amount of subscribers from the smaller spaces.
When you go to smaller spaces, you're having a chill, you're having a laugh,
you're demonstrating your personality.
You get much more like subscribers.
So yeah, people want to see who's behind, like who's behind that subscription service.
I think, and that's when I think what I believe is once videos come in,
that's going to be fire.
I feel like subscription services
are going to be miles better.
They'll be amazing.
I don't know if they're going to be able
to put ads in videos.
If they do again,
that's going to be fire.
It could be a bit like the Twitch service
where you can pay a certain amount of money
and not get ads and whatever.
There's like so much opportunities there
for videos and for all these things.
So I'm looking forward to that.
And I agree with you.
Like Twitter spaces are fire
and a fire way to do it.
We are going to be taught,
confluence.
We are going to be moving on
to what you just talked about,
which is censorship.
We're going to be talking about
the ADLV Musk battle.
So let me go to Ryan.
Let's wrap up this segment in terms of how to crack the X algorithm and then we'll move on to that.
Go ahead, Ryan, Jim.
Sure, man.
I just wanted to make a note on what you said about the video.
Some videos, I am starting to see ads before the video play.
So that is being incorporated slowly.
It's on the organization accounts that I've seen them.
I haven't seen them on individuals accounts.
So that is hopefully being rolled out more.
And to comment on that space is a big deal because people get to know who you are and get to understand you.
on a personal level, this is outside of the algorithm,
this is a psychology.
If people get to know you and like who you are,
they're going to interact with you more,
they're going to follow you,
you're going to want to be part of your journey.
So that's a psychological thing that I think plays a big pack.
Like, for example, solely,
like I used to read his threads and I loved him and I followed him,
but when I got to know him more,
through spaces i interacted with them way more same thing with k um with all the
these other people that you see me interacting with so definitely try to like listen to these people
and then as you get to know them you can comment stuff or reply to their stuff in a more
personal matter that could get them to reply back to you to help you boost again i'm trying i'm
trying to come from the angle of the affordable way to kind of boost your boost your account
that you don't have to buy this stuff but no i definitely suggest uh if you guys have
and read the thread that mario just put out in the it's in the nest it's really really good um
And yeah, I just wanted to give that, but slowly back to you.
Yeah, that thread, and Theo, check the thread out.
It talks about this tweet credit, talks about certain things.
And then if there's some things that you need more elaboration on, Ryan's there.
You guys can DM each other.
But, Theo, like, obviously you know the code really well.
You gave people number one insight into, like, how to boost your engagement.
But just overall, what kind of advice can you give people before we move on to the next segment?
Make the type of content that you would interact with.
I have to leave, but thank you very much.
I got to leave.
I got to go over to a different space.
I appreciate you letting me speak.
I appreciate.
Thanks for coming, Wall Street.
I appreciate the information you've given everybody.
Please go ahead, Theo.
The best thing you can do is make compelling content and get people in the funnel.
I have a little bit of content I've posted on my, before about the importance of the content
Twitter is a really powerful discovery platform, but you want people to go from seeing your
content to engaging with your content, doing things like posting videos, hanging out in spaces
and giving your followers and the people who are seeing your content more reason to engage
a deeper way is going to
continue to show the Twitter algorithm of whatever state it's in, that if more people see your
account, they end up using Twitter more and enjoying their time on Twitter more. If you come out
with the goal of making content that makes people enjoy Twitter more, be on Twitter more, engage with
you more, and just generally enjoy their experience on the platform, that's when you win.
And the more compelling and exciting content you can make, especially if it's...
like truly novel content that nobody else is doing,
you're going to start succeeding really quickly.
And that's always what it comes down to is,
are people enjoying the stuff that you're posting?
If so, you'll probably do well.
Yeah, and I think what you said, Theo, is on point.
Like, no jokes.
Like, everybody knows I'm not a person who shills Elon all the time.
I'm not the person who attacks Elon,
because I just think both are lame.
But one thing is, like, there is certain things that can be improved for sure.
But look, like,
We all can play the game.
And what I mean by that is we all get an opportunity to tweet.
We all get an opportunity to basically put things out into Twitter.
And then if they do well, they do well.
And if they don't, they don't.
I know my tweets blew up and I knew and didn't know anybody.
I was a very tiny account.
So the opportunity is there.
You need to find something which makes you unique.
What makes you interesting?
That what...
that you provide something different to somebody else because now Twitter's been on for so long
you've got already meme accounts you've already got certain accounts you need to provide
something that is different and interesting so I did the same I think I blew up in a very
short bit I started using Twitter very recently and similarly we're a censored man he again
blew up because he was providing content on a regular basis found a niche and then did it
and I think everyone has that opportunity so one shouldn't moan about it now in terms of
add revenue and maybe it's slightly ideological driven or maybe it's not and maybe
my concerns about that I've already clarified so I see it from just to provide like a balanced
perspective on what we talked about but yeah guys appreciate this aspect and now for the more
a controversial aspect of it is the ADLV must so
Elon Musk posted or tweeted out a couple of points.
One was that the ADL he felt was suffocating him.
And the second point, he said more recently,
should we ban the ADL from X?
Mike or Paul, I've got to Paul first.
Paul, I mean, you were part of the Twitter files.
You released a number of threads about censorship.
What's your thoughts about EDL's role A in censorship and B, whether...
You know, there should be a poll about whether to ban him or not.
Ban them or not.
Well, first off, I'm not, I'm against banning the ADL.
Like, I don't necessarily agree with a lot of things they do.
And so, like, you're coming at me.
I can tell you're not American, Salaman.
And so let me tell you a little bit of how the ADL fits in.
And then I also want to bump into police because she was actually, was kicked off
for something that she had actually said, which I was probably offended the ADL.
You know, the ADL, it's called the American Defamation League.
So arguably, it's against...
people making any Semitic, you know, attacks on Jews in America.
But essentially what it really does is it serves as a front group for, you know, Israel.
And so I think these are very different issues.
And, you know, I'm, you know, I have some kind of equivocal views about Israel and the occupation.
I'm totally, obviously, 100%.
100% against people making a tax on Jews, whether specifically, you know, if they're religious or because they don't like Jews.
But, you know, again, this is an issue that, you know, it's something that's often not talked about.
But, you know, it essentially serves as a front group for, you know, Israel.
And this is in a country in which, you know, if you look at, you know, who is in support of Israel, you know, amongst,
you know, younger Jews right now, that support is falling. You know, it's mostly something
that's concentrated amongst older Jews and then right-wing Christians, you know, who have their
own issues, which is a totally different issue. So, again, I'm against banning the ADL, but I am glad
that Musk is dealing with this. But I think we want to bounce to do. I think we should talk to
Kaleesi what happened with her when she made comments about what happened when she made some comments about
the occupation
what happened in the occupied
territories and what happened with her
because I think this really plays into
the exact issue that I think we're talking about
Kalifah
Okay, so, I mean, she's probably away from the mic, but the, but what, what interests me on this issue is the, and actually let me go to Mike as well, because I know you're only mute in your mic.
For me, it's this issue of, like, and I haven't done a, Paul, I haven't actually looked into the ADL and I've done a number of posts about them.
What is quite clear is that they use their strength and it isn't just about Brizakar.
for example, protecting a certain class of people or wherever it may be.
I mean, I had Lauren Luma on spaces where she, who is also a Jewish person, had been censored by them.
There's an ex-prosecutor called Ben, who also had been censored by the ADL, had been banned or something by them.
And so that I want to talk about this from the angle of,
censorship. And what ADL I've done, and there's a number of videos about that,
is that they've basically put pressure on social medias to censor people. And it could be
based on the issues of what you said, but the overall issue is about censorship.
And I guess the real question is this, because I understand, because your argument is,
if you're free speech, then why would you want to ban? But then the question becomes,
if you've got people who are censoring people and stopping free speech,
should you try and stop them from stopping free speech? So that's like kind of like the conundrum of what we're
talking about. Mike, jump in because I know you are quite passionate about censorship as well.
Yeah. Yeah. No, I probably know more about the censorship, stylistic and history sort of evolution of the
ADL than almost anyone on Earth. The ADL, you know, I mean, not to go over the whole history lesson, but the
The ADL is, first of all, I don't think the ADL is going to get banned.
I think if there is action taken by Musk, it will be in a sort of temporary, symbolic sort of way.
And even that, I think, is going to be the subject of intense negotiation between Linda and the ADL.
You know, I...
I view this a little bit differently than the way Paul just laid it out.
I don't see the ADL as being a stand-in for Israel.
The ADL, for many years, attempted to sort of thread the needle
and trying to make sure it presented itself.
even when it was behaving in a corrupt and sort of misanthropic way,
it always sort of held on to a patina of bipartisanship.
After the 2016 election, that completely went away.
And unlike other sort of Jewish advocacy organizations,
like APEC, for example, or many of the Jewish federations,
or I would say, for example, you know, like,
ADL is different than Zoha, Zionist Organization of America, which is sort of a more of a right-wing Jewish advocacy organization, whereas ADL has now all but explicitly gone partisan political.
And it has more to do, I think, with the sort of NATO hate speech political power play, which is playing out all over the world, which we're also seeing with the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
So, you know, the Center for Countering Digital Hate was the group more than any other civil society activist censorship group responsible for the censorship of RFK and, you know, the disinformation doesn't.
Now, they were called the Center on Countering Digital Hate.
even though their focus was disinformation.
That wasn't even in their name, but that was what their focus was.
But hate speech became a useful tool by the national security state and by stakeholders in the private sector
to eliminate populist political movements all around the world by killing their ability to have news organizations and a social media voice,
which was deemed a huge threat after the 2016 election.
Remember, Imran Khan, who Mario hosted a space with an incredible interview with.
Imran Khan was, his speeches were banned in Pakistan last year for reasons of hate speech.
Hate speech was also what got Marine Le Pen on criminal trial for the French election that, as we talked about earlier, was in Twitter's code as a sort of deamplifier. That was also, again, a NATO-backed operation around supporting Macron and stopping so-called disinformation, which, of course, 100% of it went one way.
You see the 80, so when you see, you know, the hate speech thing being tried on Bolsonaro in Brazil, on Salvini and company in Italy, on the Brexit movement people in the UK, it is a geopolitical wedge weapon in order to achieve political success for your...
for your government actors, which is being sponsored essentially by private sector and civil society stakeholders,
and ADL is one of those.
The issue is ADL is massively tied into the advertisers.
And I hesitate to overly applaud the monetization that's happening right now because of the dependencies it creates on advertisers.
The more...
celebration there is over the sort of amazing payouts going on right now, the more leverage shifts
to the ADL because they work very deeply with the brands.
And so I know that there was a negotiation earlier with Linda and the ADL.
But the last thing I'll just say before I turn it over is, if you haven't seen it already,
there's two things I'll direct people to.
One is the ADL so-called online hate index, which they started several years ago.
which was this vast lexicon of words, concepts, memes, hashtags, to build into the algorithm
in order to censor people's voices.
Now, the extent to which that was implemented at Google or at Facebook or Twitter or Reddit and TikTok, I'm sure that it was disparate implementation across different platforms, but that's what they did.
They laundered it through a center called the ADL's Center for Technology and Society.
And if you look that up, you will see that that institution...
which they set up in the heart of Silicon Valley and Bragg is deeply embedded in all the tech companies,
all the universities, all the government institutions, including the FBI and the DHS.
There are very, very deep institutional ties.
And until the ADL is wedged off from those institutions, my concern is Musk,
maybe a little over his head
thinking that there's a
sort of easy fixed solution here.
I think you need to come into this
with a coalition
and work with the institutions
above the ADL
rather than just thinking
you can eliminate the ADL
and then they come back
with a cavalry of institutions
that can crush you.
Guys, I know, I have to
pinned a tweet on the top, which asked the same question.
Should the ADL be banned?
Why?
What is the reason for why you make that choice?
But Mike, what do you think about specifically that question?
I know you've explained in detail, but do you think there should be banned on Twitter,
or do you think that's like a censorship in itself?
Or should you censor those who try to censor, Mike?
Real quick, I need to run, but I...
don't have anything to say on this topic.
I just don't want to be political at all
because Mike's already went through my tweets
from four years ago to try to find any
instance of me talking about politics to try and
discredit me. So it is what it is.
Yeah, you literally tweeted twice.
First of all, yeah, I'll be, I'm happy to talk about this.
dude, someone DM to me a message about you just sort of doing this very weird flex, by the way,
about how like a Trump supporter, I mean, just for people, okay, he dropped out, but if people don't
know, go to my timeline, you'll see it.
I mean, it's a statement against interest.
While he's calling us conspiracy theorists for complaining about potential censorship, after all
of us just watch tens of millions of tweets get censored in under Twitter 1.0 in a highly partisan
way, you know, he's like doing these weird flexes the week before the 2020 election where he's talking about how
You know, he started a clan in some World of Warcraft thing or whatever, where, which was for Biden people to flame out Trump people.
And he hopes Trump people in World of Warcraft lose as badly as Trump's going to lose the election.
And I just thought it was funny.
I mean, I quote tweeted his own tweet.
It's not digging through four years of it.
I mean, but whatever.
The point is, just get back to Sillamon's question here.
I think it.
There is a value to a temporary action to send a message.
If it's done in a way that says this is not, you know, this is just to send a message.
I think it's a bad idea.
If you're making this based on principles and I think that it's, it's,
If you were to give a one week suspension to say, hey, we're capable of this, so don't fuck with us too hard.
Pardon my language.
But we're not, you know, just to let you know, this is what it feels like, ADL, when people get censored.
Here, taste your own medicine for one minute and then come back to the table with us with some empathy.
for how it feels like to have the same punishment that you ask us to dole out,
doled out on you, I think that is something that is consistent with the principles that
Mast is trying to communicate here.
And frankly, I think it would be a powerful message if the messaging is done along with that.
But in a permanent way, I think that that ultimately will actually โ
harm the ability to create that necessary wedge because the way to take on the ADL is to go upstream of them to the institutions they're attached with and form partnerships with those and show how the ADL is bad for business because it's screwing with their their X dollars.
Doc Jumpin?
Yeah, so I was in the space with you and Calisi and Laura, and Brian,
Ryan and I had another space yesterday that Laura came into.
And I did ask the same question of everyone that came up and asked them to post down in the pill,
whether or not the ADL should be banned.
And, of course, this is anecdotal and it's not scientific, but I was actually very comforted
by the fact that the vast majority of people said do not ban the ADL.
even in the face of their active attempts to leverage their connections with corporations and ad agencies to disincent engagement with conservative accounts or with accounts, I think that I've seen enough to convince me that Twitter's
old code or whatever whatever is controlling the the engagement and the monetization now is just
favoring Muslims and favoring Jewish accounts and you know some of the some of the tweets I've seen
the payout side seen um it I would have to be convinced that it's not the case at this point and I
think that's a shame I don't I don't think monetization or engagement or
or anything should be influenced by a person's religion on this platform.
Let me go to a name.
So Doc, actually, before I do, Doc, so the argument on the other side is,
the reason why you should ban the ADL is because if you've got an organization that is so entrenched in
In all aspects of social media, including censoring people, including banning people, including getting people banned, including getting their accounts throughout.
They are basically the arbitrators or the cause of censorship.
So if you had an opportunity to remove that thing, the censors, by censoring it, would you not do it?
So I had originally said yes because I don't like the gaming of the system.
I don't like the powerful being able to get over on the weaker or the poor.
And I think that's an aspect of what we're seeing with the ADL's attempts.
And they're bragging about the attempts.
They're trying to shut people down, right?
It's not about anti-defamation.
It's about content control.
And, but at the end of the day, I was impelled both by my own principles and instincts and the reaction to my audience in that space, that, you know, being free, just because Elon isn't a free speech absolutist at this point doesn't mean I shouldn't be as well.
And so I do believe, and it has always believed that speech should not be constrained that the benefit of allowing what I'll call bad speech.
or offensive speech, the benefit of having that exist in the public square,
whether that be in a park around the time of 1774 or here today on Twitter,
is if this is going to be the public square, we have to be tolerant of speech that we abhorred.
I just wish that we could separate out the issue relative to ADL.
But, Doc, it's not about speech.
The question is, so it's not about ADL speech,
it's that you're removing a company that is destroying speech.
So it's like basically, I'm not saying, I'm just, this is just a metaphor.
I'm not saying they evil.
But it's like, would you use evil to destroy evil, basically?
That's the question is now.
Would you ban someone who is literally going to ban everyone?
Not everyone, ban a lot of people.
Answering it.
It's an eye for an eye question,
and that's a principle that I generally stand behind.
But I can't pull apart.
ADL's right to their free speech, as toxic as it is, as beneficial as I think it might be,
because it brings awareness to the public exactly who they are,
who they are behind the face of the organization that's existed for 100 years,
that they're not who they pretended to be in the past.
I wish those two things could be pulled apart, but at the end of the day,
I think if I don't want to be banned, I have to advocate for other people not being banned.
Yeah, but also, like, what is the strategic benefit of doing it?
The ADL is not going to go away if you ban them.
If anything, that's going to give them ammunition for their upstream conversations with the institutions they're partnered with to say, see, they don't even believe in free speech.
So they're happy to take down accounts.
So they should have just taken down the hateful accounts that we identified.
And without a value proposition to those upstream institutions, that's just giving it to them.
ADL's tweets are not what's damaging Twitter, okay?
It's the relationships with the institutions.
That's what I mean, look at ADL.
Yeah, and that's why you would ban them, but they're going to defend, and so are the defenders
are going to respond by saying, you're just squelching speech because you're, you're anti-Semitic.
That's been their defense, and that's been the tactic.
No, no, that's one of them.
Mike's making a good point.
Mike's saying that.
By their Twitter account, that doesn't actually stop what they're doing.
What they're doing isn't based on them post in a tweet.
What they're doing is far bigger than that.
And if anything, by banning their account, you're basically given them more power
to basically contact advertisers, go through Twitter and various mechanisms that they do
and ban people and censor people and so and so forth.
So, Mike, yeah, I think you make a very bad.
Let's give an example.
Just to drive this home, let me give an example of a strategy shift that I recommend here.
The ADL works closely with every state government in the country, including the state of Florida.
Now, Musk has had increasingly convivial relations with Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida establishment also in Texas.
The ADL receives grant money from the state of Florida and from the state of Texas.
That can be politicized.
That can be something that conversations upstream with institutions saying, listen, ADL is trying to destroy free speech.
I know Florida believes in free speech make their government grants contingent on them ceasing censorship advocacy.
This is what I'm saying.
You need trench warfare and to come at this with the coalitions.
Because the ADL is not, you know, they're not like, if you've seen the movie 300, you know how there's the villain is Xerxes with this huge army.
And at the beginning, a messenger sort of comes to the Spartans and says, listen, Xerxes is going to get you.
And he kicks, he kicks the messenger down the, you know, down the well in that sort of dramatic scene.
The enemy is not the messenger. The enemy is the Xerxes here. It's that relationship with the institutions. You're not going to win the war by kicking the messenger down the well. It might feel good. But the strategy here involves a lot more work. X has to start working with state governments. You got to have a strong relationship with Greg Abbott in Texas. Ronda Sanders and Florida, got to build a 27 state coalition as many as possible.
You got to start chopping, chopping them off, wedging the ADL off, capture a few universities.
Right now, DeSantis is doing that with some Florida universities.
Just put Chris Rufo in charge.
Wedge them out.
I mean, you got to think about this like a sort of in a sort of total war way.
I don't mean to be dramatic, but in a sort of totally, you got to look at the strategy on the whole here.
and work with the institutions from where ADL draws its power.
Once you start creating wedges there, that power can drop off.
Now, it's going to be a dogfight.
But, you know, an easy, there's no, you know, Band-Aid solution.
You can't put a Band-Aid over a bullet hole.
year. You know, you've got, you've got a hundred years. You have a century of deeply
burrowed, powerful institutional connections. And until those connections are worked on and
transfer it over, so they're more favorable to X than they are to ADL, institution by institution.
That's the way to cut the ADL's power off or at least start that.
That makes sense, Mike.
And I'm just going to go to name, but just before I do, guys, I mean, a lot of you guys are saying that the ADL shouldn't be banned.
I did a poll on it's attached to the top, and 87% of people said that they should be banned with 13% saying they shouldn't.
Sorry, name, go ahead and jump in.
You wanted to add some thoughts?
Yeah, so we have a very interesting situation here.
I'm going to put out a tweet in a few hours about this,
but I have found, and Mike, you'll appreciate this,
that a top sensor at another platform
Okay, member of Council of Foreign Relations, Atlantic Council, formerly Department of Defense.
This person is the top sensor at another platform.
I just found this person today.
And I have a tweet from this person.
I'm going to read it.
Okay.
I think the person was trying to be funny, but I don't find it funny.
But when I tweet this out, we'll see what Elon and the ADL thinks about this.
Here's what the tweet says.
Fewer Hitler was right.
He built walls to create ghettos.
It's segregated Jews so they could be deported and killed.
Great success.
Yes.
with an American flag in the swastika.
So this is a top sensor at another social media platform that tweeted this out many years ago.
I found it. I archived it.
And we'll be naming this person.
And to be honest, by their own rules, that tweet itself would cause that person to be suspended from this platform.
But this person is a top sensor at another social media platform right now today.
Now, but is it how is this linked to ADLMMM isn't something?
Well, I'm just, we're telling us, well, it's a censorship at the top too.
So I'm talking about a current person that is a,
that is a top sensor at another platform going by the rules of the ADL or certain violent extremism.
And they themselves are tweeting out things like that.
I get you.
I get you.
Yeah, I think the point he's making is the sort of anti-cometic hate speech sort of argument is sort of a smoke screen for a political operation.
And look, you know this because of the Ukraine situation.
right i mean can we just be honest here the fact is is the adl is not up in arms over the asloff
battalion center for countering digital hate has done specials on anti-semitic hate speech in i think like
thirteen countries
They are totally dead silent on the issue of Nazi hate speech around the Azov Battalion.
In fact, the Azov Battalion was on the list of banned organizations, the Voldemort organizations on Facebook,
that you were not allowed to mention without getting banned or throttled unless you spoke of them, you know, calling them reprehensible.
When this war just kicked off last year,
as off was unband and taken off the dangerous organizations list because the Nazis were suddenly helpful to NATO.
And so, you know, this is one of these things where hate speeches used as a geopolitical cudgel.
You can never take that on face value.
And the ADL has obviously burned its credibility to the ground.
I think what I agree with what I'm like saying.
I think the issue is, is how this term hate, especially the center for counting,
I've sort of, you know, my head is the center for creating digital hate.
You know, they just create this idea of like, well, this is hate and based on what, you know,
and, you know, this term hate is just used.
as a sword
and it's beat pulled down and you look and see
it always moves in one direction
like Mike said with with Ukraine
you can almost predict
I don't know if this is true or not
Mike just said this like you know they never
say anything about Ukraine but like
it totally what I would expect
you know because I just understand how they operate
Sounds good Joe I know you
I like to hear your perspective on this
Go ahead
Yeah, I mean, if you want to stop the ADL, ADL's power comes from political ties and from ties with putting pressure on advertisers, which then put pressure on platforms.
If you want to fight the ADL, what you do is you let advertisers know that you believe in free speech over hate speech.
And that it should be a free speech platform.
And if they don't support it, you're not supporting their brand.
Because look, they want the advertising space.
They want to advertise everywhere they can.
They don't want to be associated with what other people consider hate speech.
But if we show them that we consider it that it's free speech, they'll have no problem advertising there.
They'll be more than happy to it.
They just don't want to cause brand damage to themselves.
So give them the excuse to be able to advertise without fear.
that it's just supporting free speech.
It's not hate speech.
And that cures a lot of it.
That takes away their power.
Mike,
he's bringing something up again,
which I brought up,
and you kind of brought out too.
It was like,
and you pay attention much more this
than anyone else here.
Have you ever seen one of these groups
that argue about hate speech
explain and define
what they consider to be hate?
They use this term,
which is abstract,
to, you know, for, like, have they ever defined it?
Have they ever seen, like, here's what we define is hate.
They put it on their website.
No. And of course, they, you know, it's the same thing with misinformation, disinformation,
disinformation, malinformation. You know, they, they took extreme pains to try to find these things.
Only six months later, say, actually, you know, just forget all these definitions.
We should all just sort of think of it as one big hodgepodge so that it, so that we're able to sort of flexibly respond, you know, to narrative threats.
But to Joe's point, Joe, I'm not just trying to disagree with you here, man.
I'm not trying to like, you know, bring previous things in.
But, um, uh, is.
So maybe I'll try to frame this in a more genteel way.
But one of the issues is, is I'm not convinced, in fact, I'm sort of convinced the opposite,
that brands are retreating from X because they don't want their, you know,
their post to appear near, you know, hateful speech. And that's the reason for them not, not having a positive ROI on ads there.
The thing that hurts their brand reputation is not that their tweets appear next to, you know, Trump supporters.
It's that the ADL then goes into the market, goes into civil society, goes into their institutional Rolodex, and says, this company, this brand is in bad standing.
So it is nothing to do with the content itself. It has to do with the ADL's institutional power.
It has, what Mike's saying is it has to do with these campaigns that these, like, it's not just ADL, like Center for County Digital Hate.
They run campaigns against people or against, you know, based upon what they do.
It's the campaigns and radicisms they use.
It's not like, they're not looking to see like, whoa, what, where did I tweet appear?
Someone's bringing that up and they say like, hey, your tweet appeared next to this or you're now affiliated with this and they're bad.
It's the campaign that's run on the back end.
That's the thing that's causing the property.
Yeah, exactly it.
Right guy.
It's a classic vehicle for narrative control.
Just as the Germans under Hitler had no idea the outside worldview due to the capable hands of Lenny Reefinstall and the propagandists under Gerbil's care.
So are we mind-fucked, and not necessarily us, but we have the same objective to control the narrative.
Now, under the guise of hate, using whatever word it can charge up and imbue with its magical power, whether positive or negative.
And then they use this as a vehicle for narrative control and other political ends.
The pillar of hate under which they claim to care is purely a vehicle to outside political agenda and ends in narrative control.
So to see it as anything else than a propaganda vehicle is to misunderstand it.
And one of the things that always comes to mind when I think about this is, you know, if a father says I don't want my child to be gay,
is that hate speech, right?
And it could easily be classified as such
as not supporting the LGBTQ movement.
But then it could be positioned the other way also,
where, you know, like, you're going to get into topics
where anyone can point at almost anything and define it as hate speech if they really want to.
It's really difficult not to.
Like if I talk about, you know, that the Fed has way too much power, you know, I'm hating against the U.S. government.
Like, when does it end?
Right.
And that's why I don't think, I think a lot of us just need to support free speech.
And that doesn't include, to me, it doesn't include...
banning the Twitter account. I don't think that's going to do anything for ADL at all.
That's not where their power comes from.
I mean, what I found the greatest irony of this is, is like I said to, we've had a number of people on this basis from the Jewish community who said that, look, they've ADL has actually tried to ban us.
So this isn't an issue about any kind of race or religion.
This is ADL using their political power in order to censor people.
And what I found interesting was conservatives who always complain about the liberals, how they use identity politics.
And yet, when it came down to this, the first thing they were saying was, oh, this is anti-Semitism.
So again, that's identity politics.
So I find it quite interesting that the very same people who complain about liberals for using identity politics are then using identity politics themselves in order to censor even this conversation.
And I think it's.
brilliant that on X, we've been in a situation.
We're able to have this conversation over the last few days.
The hashtag ban the ADL has been trending.
Elon Musk got involved as well, made a couple of comments.
And that's important because that brilliant thing about Twitter is
that we're able to talk about things.
Because as soon as you censor anybody,
What happens is even if that person's wrong, even if that person's talking nonsense, people automatically assume that the person has something to say, which is based on merit, and then you're not able to break down and demonstrate the fallacies of their points.
So I think this is a very important point to know that this is why we need a platform where we can basically...
talk about things and there isn't censorship and ADL is a major problem.
There's been significant exposรฉs on them.
I've tweeted about it.
Calisi's been tweeted about it.
A number of people have been tweeting about it.
And a chief, I think chief did a threat on it if I remember.
Where it talks about exposes ADL, exposes their actions and exposes the fact that they
admit that they were using social media platforms.
engaging and basically pressuring social media platforms
to censor people, to ban accounts, to de-boost accounts.
So this is something that we should talk about.
Chief, I know you wrote a thread on this.
What's your thoughts?
Well, the ADL has a very long history of not only advocating for the suppression of Twitter accounts, but also Facebook, YouTube, all social media platforms.
They actually go further than just that.
They advocate for debanking and getting people kicked off of GoFundMe and Stripe, as was shown in undercover video just recently.
And of course, also, they work hand-in-hand with their law enforcement agencies and other types of things, even schools and other types of academic institutions to push propaganda.
This ADL, they are evolved in many different areas, and they will try to censor, try to ban you, de-platform you, debank you, get you fired, and, of course, try locking them up.
They actually gave the FBI intelligence and actually got some of the Gen 6 people arrested.
Right.
um as they said in their own report so this group is has a lot of resources is very powerful
um and they've been trying to get through a ban for a very long time they were trying to get
trump banned they're trying to get a lot of high profile you know um conservatives like nick
yay um even out's jones
All of them kind of banned.
And now we have a whole movement of people saying this ownership campaign is just enough.
We can't have this on X.
If Elon values free speech and he says on his interviews that he's a free speech absolutist,
then he has to stick by that.
He has to go and stand for the users of X who have been to platform and say that on this platform, we value speech.
As long as you're not inciting violence or attacking people in a way that's criminal, you know, and breaking the law, then it should be allowed on X.
Now, I'm not sure if you'll abide by that, of course, but it's pretty clear.
The ADL is a pro-centreship pro-shutting-down group.
We must call it out is what it is.
Do you not think that when you look at what's happened here over the last couple of days,
that Elon is falling on the right side of this?
I, you know, I was very, very critical, okay, over the last few months and kind of skeptical,
not really sure where Elon was coming from, what's going on.
But I've drastically changed my perspective on this because I think he's kind of put it out there in black and white.
that look, and I'm sharing my opinion here, that I have a, you know, I have a view here.
This is what I'd like to do.
But guys, I'm being transparent.
This is what I'm up against.
If you look at the tweet that Jonathan Greenblatt did, and he's the CEO of ADL, he did this tweet, what, two or three days ago.
And it just, for me, it's not the spirit in which this tweet has been done.
You know, he talks about, I'm just going to read it out very quickly for our listeners.
So he says, I had a very frank and productive conversation with Linda Yaccarino yesterday about X.
What works and what doesn't and where it needs to go to address hate effectively on the platform.
I appreciated her reaching out, and I'm hopeful that the service will improve.
ADL will be vigilant and give her and Elon Musk credit if the service gets better,
and reserve the right to call them out until it does.
Now, when you look at the actual kind of service advisory board that Elon put together,
he did have two people from EDL on it.
He also had somebody from the head of the Latino organization, someone head of Asian organization, black organization.
I haven't seen any of those other people do a tweet like this.
This is a very kind of what, for me, when I read that, I thought it was a very poor taste.
I think to say, look, you know, Linda reached out to us because we hold that much power and we are telling them where they're going right and where they still have to do more to please us.
And I just found that really distasteful.
And the way that Elon's played that, since that, I think that was the trigger thing, actually, for the whole ADL hashtag and everything that got trending.
But I think the way Elon's played it to make it more transparent to us, what's going on behind the scene, is it's really, really good.
And I think he's won a lot of people over.
What are your thoughts on that, Chief?
And just before you go, Chief, I have posted in The Nest, and that was...
an expose by someone called Kyle Undercover.
And what he was doing,
what he demonstrated was that there was extreme censorship,
where the ADL were essentially boasting
about the level of censorship and control.
They had over social media platforms.
But yeah, go ahead, Chief.
What was your thoughts?
So that's been pinned in the nest above.
Yeah, so I think what Elon's doing, you know, and I do think that he's done a good thing in terms of bringing some accounts that were banned back.
I don't think, you know, he's taking all the steps necessary to remove their influence.
It's pretty clear, you know, what ADL says, things like, you know, we will reserve the right to criticize or reserve the right to hold judgment and we demand expectations.
There are a couple of very crazy interviews where the CEO of saying,
We expect him to do this.
We expect him to do that.
And it's so arrogant for them to, you know, lecture a billionaire tech genius who, you know, has done a lot of great things, creating, you know, Tesla, Uber.
I'd rather big tech, you know, technology and other big corporations to tell them.
oh, Elon has to do this and do that to meet our demands.
It's pretty much a ransom at this point,
and it's pretty much a spin the face to Elon
and, you know, for what he stands for.
And if he doesn't let them lecture him and walk him around,
you know, kind of shows that, you know,
right now at least, the ADL is making demands,
and he's kind of complying with it.
Now, I mean, I think that Elon has done good things.
I think that he's kind of exposing,
or at least giving voice to people by proposing a question saying,
well, you know,
The ADL should be banned them, should the poll about that, you know, and they've been a problem.
That's good for awareness, but if he wants to really go and put his foot down and say,
this group here has been attacking, it's been suppressing, it's been kind of vilifying users,
it's been antagonizing them, and we should say know that.
He has to go and say you have to ban the ADO.
We have to go and get this group and their influence off of X.
I think that he's done good things, but I don't think he's gone all the way, if that makes sense.
And we're also a bit of a look behind.
Is he only doing it is the only doing it because it's affected bottom line.
Right now we're seeing what they've been doing for months.
This is something that is clear now.
But every single time you see a company going woke, there are groups like this behind it.
Every single time we've seen people getting banned, we've seen social media companies
caving, there are groups like this behind it.
And for us to see kind of how that works and Elon Musk exposing it, I think that's extremely
healthy.
But.
the ADL should receive a punishment much worse than getting banned.
And that is they should be forced to have their comments on Twitter turned on
and let the roasting commence.
I think that would be much more fun if the choices get banned or get roasted.
I think we can have a good time with the second one.
I mean, there's also two, there's two arguments here, right?
The first is that the ADL is directly telling people on a career video,
that they are lobbying to debank people, get them off of Stripe and GoFundMe, to ban users,
to put their propaganda in schools through K-12, high school, the whole nine yards.
They are trying to have a lot of influence over our lives, and we should fight fire and fire.
If they want to ban all users that, you know, say crazy things,
and whatever they define is crazy or hate speech, then they should ban.
Now, their side of it is called the heckler's veto.
in which if someone comes in the private event with a megaphone and try to drown speech out,
you have the right to kick that user out or that person out.
So that person would be the ADL.
The ADL has the, you know, been a heckler for a very long time.
They've been, you know, sniping at Elon and trying to tell Elon what to do and antagonize him, cost in business.
billions of dollars so he has every right to kick them off the platform they're costing him money
and if he is going to value free speech he should get them off i think they've been going out for us
for a very long time they go out there many people for no reason they just you know say hate speech
and that's it and you have to buy it i don't but but she sorry let me just interrupt here okay so
let's just say that that tweet um the the jonathan um green black one that i read out which uh
I think we're going to put it in the nest in a second.
It was on the 30th of August.
Taking what Matt has just said,
let's say the hashtag got trending within 12 hours after that.
And Elon said, yeah, do you know what?
I'm going to kick them off.
The hashtag, I'm just speaking hypothetically here, okay?
The hashtag is trending, ban ADL.
You know, they've made my life difficult over the last six months, seven, eight months.
I'm just going to throw them off.
And he threw them off.
That wouldn't achieve anything, would it really cheap?
Because if you think about the awareness that's been raised, you know, there are things that people have been wanting to talk about, things that are there where they've got the receipts, but they've never had the opportunity to get any credibility to talk about it. That has happened over the last time.
three days and keeps happening, this space being case in point.
So I think Matt's got a point, right, that it's just too easy to suspend an account.
There are other alternatives.
One of the ones that Matt gave was forced them to open their comments,
open their comments, and let people really express their opinions.
Because this is not an isolated instance where an organization like ADL yields this power.
There are other such organizations.
So do you not think that just...
banning their account would be the easier easy way out.
Well, here's why, I think, you know, to be quite clear, there should, this, this ADL is not just the one bad group.
There's ADL, media matters, there's right wing watch, there's, you know, HRC.
There's lots of different groups out there that, you know, go in this hate speech monitoring.
But the issue with the ADL is that they have such power over.
over various institutions, more so than most of the other anti-hate groups or whatever they label themselves as.
I think that with the hat, you know, the, if they got them off of Twitter or X, would that be the end of the ADL?
No, they have money, resources, power, everything like that.
But it does do send a message that if they're going to have corporations or these anti-hate groups make demands and tell Elon what to do, like he's just some errand boy.
that can't happen.
It's sending a message.
And I think the biggest thing to hashtag is that people are waking up to what the ADL really is.
There's a long history of the ADL.
Its foundation is horrible.
You can read a couple threads about that with Mary Fagan and all the Lili-O-Frank and all that.
But in general, we have to go and say ban the ADL.
Get them gone, set an example, and that's that.
So when you're saying ban the ADL, you're talking, um,
holistically like outside of just this platform, right?
You're not just saying throw them off the platform and that's it.
So I think what they should admit on the, you know, the platform there should get rid of immediately.
But I think we should go beyond just, you know, talking about BAM the ADL and had on Twitter,
but say all the people out there who are kind of blind this issue, raise awareness,
tell them, hey, the ADL is doing this and this and that.
I'd rather go from point A to point B and say, let's,
Let's first ban the ADL from Twitter and then go into the next step.
That's a very reasonable approach because they've been lobbying for people.
They are engaging in heckling, the heckler of Vito, basically, which is pretty clear groundless
to get them off a platform like X.
So I think she'll least first start with banning them from Twitter.
And then more so, we can go and make a whole, you know, more so about exposing what they've
done, their spying campaigns, they spy on anti-Israel activists.
Right.
in the San Francisco, 1990s, actually.
They've made demands of countries, other corporations.
It's a very large group.
They've got a lot of power.
We're not going to go away with just abandon them off of Twitter.
But I think we can go and take large strides to changing perception of what they are.
The ADL is a group that hates most people who engage in free speech.
Let's get them off Twitter.
That's my kind of opinion, I guess.
Yeah.
I think the one thing, Kleece, you said they're on some sort of advisory board for Twitter.
I think that would be if I don't like I don't want them off of Twitter.
I think that's fine.
But like why does he have them on his advisory board?
Like that to me is like to be a first step.
Get them off the advisory board.
Let them have their Twitter account, but get them off their advisory board.
Yeah, see, Paul, that was done back in November 22.
And now with what's happened over the last few days, when I look back at that, I do believe that Elon obviously knew how ADL, let's just say, operates with social media companies.
and federal agencies and, you know, politicians
and the power that they yield across the spectrum
of American organizations to really make someone's life difficult.
And knowing that, he put them on the advisory board,
now I believe, because he thought we'd be able to find a happy medium ground.
Maybe it's just about reassuring them.
You know, maybe it's just about working with them on this.
So, yeah.
He's tried and he's tried and he's tried.
If you just search for Elon Musk on Jonathan Greenblatt's Twitter handle, you'll see it.
Jonathan has, you know, there's something right.
So, okay, so if I'm taken on as an advisor, I will advise and guide in a private kind of spectrum.
This guy, Jonathan Greenblatt, has called out Elon time and again publicly.
Right.
I just think it just lacks grace in some ways as well
but let me just go to Joe really quickly
because I know he kind of did ask the question
but we missed it in the talk
go ahead Joe up
Yeah, I mean, I'm actually kind of surprised, Kalee, that you kind of change your view on him because I don't believe he did it for any other reason except for the fact that it hurt that it's hurting his revenue or else he wouldn't do it because if it was really about free speech and protecting free speech, bring back yay.
Bring back his account.
You want to show the ADL that you're not going to play their game?
Bring back the accounts that you have banned that have done hate speech.
The only reason why he's making it public is because it affects his revenue
and he wants the public to put pressure on them.
That's the only reason why he's bringing it up because he has not been a warrior for free speech.
He hasn't done that.
Yeah, I agree with you, Joa.
I'm not saying he has been a warrior for free speech at all.
What I was saying to you is that Roman wasn't built in a day.
And given what ADL have exposed themselves to be over the last couple of days,
the things that I have learned further about them from people like Chief and across many other spaces,
you know, I sense people had an inbuilt frustration where they really wanted to speak about their personal experiences and experiences over the last time.
you know, whatever decade of them being suspended and banned and what ADL have done to their lives.
And this is some real kind of large conservative accounts.
So when I look at all of that, I think, okay, do you know what?
This isn't about free speech.
This is about something bigger than that.
And it's about the power that ADL yields.
and flexes its muscles to say we have this power,
we will tell you what to do.
I read an article yesterday,
and it was literally saying that this meeting between Linda and Jonathan
came about days, within days,
of some case coming against Elon,
and the reason why Elon's under investigation now for Tesla and Stirlington,
and all these are different kind of cases coming at him,
is because he's not yielding to the ADL power,
and he needs to yield.
So he had a choice.
We talk about whether it's for advertising revenue, what it was,
but the thing is he's called them out.
Um, what is the case?
Wait, can I just say one thing, just to piggyback on that?
I just put this at the top of my feet on my profile here, but I just pulled up a tweet from Elon Musk on January 18th of this year, where he said, the World Economic Forum is increasingly becoming an unelected world government that the people never asked for and don't want.
Three months later, he picked the head of advertising partnerships from the World Economic Forum as the CEO of the company who he handed it all to.
So I think that we can infer from this that Musk has a strategy.
Well, it's hard to really decipher.
There's a lot of possibilities.
One is that it's sort of a philosophy of keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
Another is that having dialogue.
is potentially a way to generate leverage or even to buy time.
Like, for example, you know, I, you guys heard me earlier rant about how
It's very dangerous to build the foundation of what Musk is trying to do on advertiser revenue.
But the fact is, as subscriptions still have a long way to go before they make the company self-sufficient,
this sort of dialogue might be a way to buy time, you know, with the ADL,
so that they can sort of censor-proof themselves more efficiently with more of a time buffer to build up
non-ad revenue to the point where it's relatively self-sufficient.
There's a lot of strategic calculus that goes into it,
but I guess what I'm trying to say here is, you know,
Musk's sort of whimsical day-to-day sort of speech about the ADL
or Center for Countering Digital Hate and other sort of pop-up civil society activist groups
is very much...
You know, we just saw that happen with the World Economic Forum, and now they're the CEO.
So, you know, it's one of these things that is always in flux, and I wouldn't attach to, I wouldn't, I don't think it's a great victory that Musk is, I mean, it's good symbolically.
And even the trending of the hashtag is good that it shows these things.
But, you know, any sort of student of ADL history will know that people have been catching on to the ADL's mafia techniques for 100 years now.
that that has not has never dented it the only difference right now is that it has lost its bipartisanship
which allows a moment for coalition building that didn't exist before i would like to see more
avenues i would like to see a tweet not from musk about the adl but musk to a third party institution
like coca cola or pepsi or the state or the state of florida government or some other brand saying hey
What are you doing about the ADL?
Cut the ADL out of your advisory council.
That would have a lot more impact than talking about the ADL directly.
Go upstream of them.
I think one thing that Musk has is Musk has these aspirations.
I think what Mike's pointing on is he has these aspirations and then he runs right into economic reality.
And economic reality, as we always know, wins with adults, you know, and business people.
But I don't think, Matt, isn't it the case that he is still trying to push back?
Because really, what would have been the economic reality is for him to bend the knee,
counter to the ADL, and then he wouldn't have any problems.
But obviously, it does seem like there is a case where there is some kind of pushback occurring,
hence why they've got him to a situation, possibly, where he's got frustrated and wrote that tweet
about the antics of the ADL.
What do you think, Matt?
A lot of people think Elon is focused on money, and that is kind of true, but it's more so he wants the platform to succeed.
So he will make some decisions that aren't exactly pro free speech if he thinks that will help the platform succeed more regardless of that's profitable or not.
So we really want to try to convince Elon here that being anti-EDL will be positive for the platform.
And if the majority of people don't support the ADL on Twitter,
uh slash x then i think that's going to be a step in our direction a lot of people don't know this
by the way the edel actually played a big role and when youtube turned off the like button
they are trying to get companies to look less bad in the public eye so they can push woke
things and other things along those lines they spend about 100 million or more per year a lot of
that is donated to get these messages
across, they formed so many relationships with a lot of influential people.
And so it's a very big juggernaut to try to tackle.
Elon, however, is in a position where he can tackle it.
I think you're 100% right for him to go out there and tell other people to stop listening to the ADL,
for him to be that influence in people's ears because there isn't one.
There is no big group.
And that's why what I'm proposing right now,
So we all come together and we start the pro defamation league.
The PDL.
The PDL will have one mission to encourage defamation of all types
against all sorts of people, of all backgrounds.
All groups will be defamated against constantly and regularly.
The pro defamation group, if anyone is opposed to that,
then we will certainly send our lawyers to your doorstep.
You'll be getting some mail.
So pro defamation league, hopefully we can get this thing up and running.
Matt and...
Sorry, Joe, one second, one second,
because I don't want to really address this point.
I've heard a lot of conversations, okay, about this,
and all we can do, we don't know what's happening behind closed doors.
So each of us is actually making an assessment on how we see things.
And I've heard a lot of conversations about all Elon needs to do
is do this and build this and, you know, get rid of these app stores
and then he'll be independent and then he can do his own thing
and then he can put two fingers up and all of this.
I think that when you go, and I'm not saying you did, Matt,
but I've heard that conversation by so many people across so many spaces
about what Elon needs to do from a technological perspective to have independence,
away from, you know, to not have reliance on any other platform.
And I just think it's a nonsensical argument for two reasons.
Number one, because you're assuming that these organisations, such as ADL,
don't have the power to still come out after you no matter what,
And number two, because you're missing the point of what's going on here right now.
If Elon were able to do that, number one, I don't think he'll be able to.
And somebody actually mentioned Gap on one of our spaces the other day.
And Cahillowell, well, Gab were able to.
And the chief executive of Gap, he actually came up and said, I was able to.
But then, you know, 5 million turn over company, et cetera, et cetera,
they will not be able to.
They've got three massive global organizations, the power, the information,
the data that's held there.
They will not let Elon do that.
And even if he did, they would not let his businesses survive.
It's just a nonsensical rabbit hole.
And I feel that's a distraction because it's not about the technology.
This is not what we're talking about here.
What we're talking about is a long-standard organization that is funded by Congress in America,
taxpayers' money to in turn around and censor the citizens of the United States of America and therefore globally as well.
because I'm also here.
I'm not, you know, a US citizen.
I'm British.
And so to take it down a technology route,
it just is to dilute.
And I think what needs to be addressed here is, you know, Elon's exposed something.
Whatever he's done it for, as Joa said, advertising revenue, free speech, censorship, did he mean it?
Did he not?
I just think that is still, it's important to talk about those things.
But Elon has exposed something and he's validated what thousands of people on this platform
have been talking about for a long time.
He has validated that and said, guys, you're right.
Here it is in black and white.
Right.
So with that, sorry, let me go to Joe,
because I know who was going to do it.
Yeah, I mean, look, I don't think Elon has the power.
I think we do because he's too vulnerable.
He needs air rights for Starlink.
He needs carbon credits for Tesla.
You know how many things from the government he needs
just to operate that they can attack him on?
He can't do anything, right?
Like, it's not going to be coming from him.
He showed us the light.
Either we take the bait and make him push it through pressure,
or I don't think it's going to happen because Elon cannot do it on his own.
Even if he doesn't depend on advertisers on Twitter,
he still needs air rights for Starlink.
He still needs other things.
He still needs carbon credits that ADL can put pressure on the government not to give Tesla.
There's a lot of ways to attack Elon.
He's not the one that can drive us forward, in my opinion.
It has to be us.
I think I agree and I think Matt just said, right?
What was it, Pro Defense League or something?
Matt, what was your suggestion?
It's the option of the Anti-Defamation League, the Pro-Defamation League.
That's what we need to start together.
Yeah, so that's actually what Joe is actually endorsing as well,
that the power sits for the people.
I see Doc was giving some thumbs down.
I'm hoping Doc's not going to go down that what Elon needs to do,
route is, well, let's go to Doc because he's waited for a while.
Go ahead, Doc.
No, I just think that Elon is singularly positioned to fight politics and the politicians and the abusive exercise of political power here.
You know, Joe, you said he needs some rights for Sarlink, for example.
Well, look, I mean, if those rights were unreasonably withheld,
for what would be obviously political justifications given what elon has done in cooperation for
example with ukraine and providing telecommunications you know for the u.s and ukraine
operations in that country they can't they can't just singularly go well we're going to pull this license
right the courts are there to protect elon and he's spending a ton of money on lawyers in courts
And he's laughing.
Sorry, Doc, I'm just going to stop you there because are you not the one of the loudest, you know,
and somebody who I really agree with on this, but loudest conservative voices talking about how the courts,
despite the money that, you know, President Trump is spending and influence he has,
how the courts are not there to protect him, how they are complicit in the stitch up.
So why do you think it would work differently for somebody like Elon Musk if organizations such as ADL
and other such organizations went after him?
Well, that's not exactly my criticism of the courts.
My criticism of the Justice Department and the Justice system is the prosecution, the abuse of the prosecutorial power that we're seeing coming to the Department of Justice, the city of New York and the city of Georgia.
that's where the abuse is.
Right.
The courts haven't weighed in on any of these indictments,
and although my faith in the court's new justice system
has been shaken over the past four years,
where there reticence to take up some of these election challenge issues
on the merits rather than letting the court's sidesteps the issues
with procedural processes.
Right.
like you don't have Cianney or it's moot.
That's where my disappointment has been in the courts.
But I do think that once these four cases and Elon, if Elon has law on his side,
he also has an addition to fighting that in the courts,
he can start donating money the way that Zuckerberg did in 2020
and dump a half a billion dollars into a, to a,
voter turnout. He can target certain jurisdictions like Soros did and bring in DAs that will help him
deal with a prosecutorial misconduct on some people's parts. So Elon is, you know, with $250 billion in the banks,
and an almost unlimited credit can really has the power to fight both the political attacks on him and the economic ones.
It's just a question of if that's what he really wants to do.
I do want to start wrapping up, but just to like summarize my view on this.
I think I did say it earlier
but what it seems like
is on whatever again as Kalises said
we were unsure of the motive behind it
whether it's financial or whether it's pressure
whether Elon had enough
But what we do know is that the ADL is quite obvious and quite clear that ADL have been exerting a significant amount of pressure on various social media platforms in order to silence and censor anybody who opposes or any form of opposition.
And it seems like there is this pressure to basically do the same thing on Twitter slash X.
And what's happened is, depending on how far, and obviously it's quite clear that Twitter has been amiable to some kind of conversations with them, but it's got to a point where obviously Elon Musk has made a couple of tweets, one saying that they were suffocating and the second tweet talking about whether they should be banned.
And obviously, he's not going to ban the ADL.
So this was more to, again, drum up.
support against the ADL and that has worked because a lot of people have been
tweeting we have been tweeting I've been tweeting there have a lot of people have been
tweeting the hashtag ban the ADL um hashtag so there is this kind of stand-up and let's hope that
there is some kind of benefit to this and there is a lack of censorship now and there is this kind of
you know, free speech that continues to be occur on this platform.
Anyway, guys, I do appreciate everybody joining the space.
It was a long one.
We started off talking about cracking X's algorithm.
We learned so much cool stuff, how to improve your engagement,
how to improve your algorithms.
I myself already start scheduling some tweets because the more you post,
the better engagement you're going to get,
the more comments you're going to get.
So, yeah.
try the different types of advices that were given there was also a thread posted on mario's
page that you can see on marius page and
uh and orion uh helped with that tweet so check it out and um that what tweet talks about
the different aspects of the algorithm because then you know what you need to avoid some of
that a lot of that stuff was from twitter 1.0 and twitter 2.0 have clearly stated that they're
removing that but
And I know there'll be efforts to do so, but again, that'll take time.
So, guys, appreciate you joining us.
Appreciate your thoughts.
And we are about a wrap-up.
Kaleisi, any last thoughts before we do wrap up?
No, I think it was a great discussion.
Thanks, Suleiman.
And thank you for everyone who's contributed.
A quick closing thoughts, Suleiman.
I think we all just need to realize that this is the emperor wears no clothing here.
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