Advertising & Marketing

Will you get a gray, gold, or blue check mark? No, it's not your 4th grade spelling test, but instead Elon's new idea for verification: gray for governments, gold for companies, and blue for people and bots and trolls. Oh, wait. Maybe he won't verify the bots… but how will he know? Elon has not shared how he plans to make this work better than his initial attempt at verification (which was an epic fail). Continue Reading →

At a dinner party the other night, a very accomplished business person told a story about how he and his wife were certain that their devices were listening to their conversations. “I was talking to my wife about a pair of designer shoes that she wanted to purchase, and not 10 minutes later while she was doing some online research for work, she saw an ad for that exact pair of shoes. She hadn’t searched for the shoes; the ad just appeared. Clearly, our computers or our phones are listening.” Some people nodded in agreement, and others began to chime in. Continue Reading →

Last night, I searched for a specific item on Amazon. There were several sellers for the item, and the listing with the lowest price was at the top. I was about to purchase the one with the lowest price when I noticed that it was not being shipped from the manufacturer or from a highly rated seller; both the "ships from" and the "sold by" transaction information were all in Chinese characters. For this particular item, that didn't make sense. Continue Reading →

This morning, I woke up to two tweets from @elonmusk that would be funny if they didn't ring true. Continue Reading →

CNN obtained an internal memo to Meta's (formerly Facebook's) content moderation team that noted that “political speech is ineligible for fact-checking. This includes the words a politician says as well as photo, video, or other content that is clearly labeled as created by the politician or their campaign.” The memo was in direct response to requests for guidance from Meta's internal and external fact checkers. Continue Reading →

Social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok are all over the news today. Facebook is continuing to implode and is about to lay off a lot of staff. I've been writing about Twitter every day. TikTok, because it is owned by a Chinese company, is under intense scrutiny after admitting that its workers can see the data they collect. Continue Reading →

I've been joking that my blog has become the "Elon Channel," where it's "All Elon, All the Time." In case you missed it, the organization we knew as Twitter is gone. It took Elon less than a week to fire half the staff and demolish years of goodwill. All that remains is a tech stack and a skeleton crew. Oh, and the threat of thermonuclear name & shame. Continue Reading →

Welcome back to the "Elon Channel," where it's "All Elon, All The Time." Today is pink slip day – with an Elon twist, of course. If you wake up to a work email, you still have a job. If Twitter HR sends an email to your personal email address… you're fired. This is twisted. Continue Reading →

Holly+, the AI-generated digital twin of experimental musician Holly Herdon, does a pretty good job singing "Jolene," Dolly Parton's country classic. Continue Reading →

Welcome to day five of the "Elon Channel," where it's "All Elon, All The Time." After taking over as Chief Twit (his words, not mine), Elon wrote, "Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences." He followed that with, "Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world." I won't pretend to guess what Elon was thinking when he wrote these words, but his actions betray any hope of Twitter regaining the trust of major advertisers. Continue Reading →