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Hello and welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, Guardian US tech news editor. Today in the newsletter: the final form of X, learnings from a week full of profits and specialized online Halloween costumes. Thanks for joining me.
With the US elections, the transformation of X into Elon Musk’s weapon reaches its peak. He has managed to bend his social network to his will.
Last week, Musk tasked his followers with reporting any “possible cases of election fraud and irregularities,” tweeting and linking to a forum within X called the “election integrity community.” Experts told my colleague Johana Bhuiyan that the community, which has more than 50,000 members, resembled the Stop the Steal Facebook group of 2020 with its conspiratorial tone and morass of uncorrected misinformation.
Users posting to the independent feed quickly began pointing out what they saw as evidence of fraud and election interference.
Tweets showing everything from ballots arriving broken, a test of the ABC News system, and a postal worker doing his job and delivering mail-in ballots, were presented as evidence that the presidential election had been compromised. Among the tweets are attempts to dox and identify people whom users falsely accuse of stuffing ballot boxes or preventing Trump supporters from voting. Before anyone can determine whether the claims are true or false, users take over the posts and assume that the often unsuspecting person is guilty.
Musk is weaponizing the features of X. He is subjecting others’ posts to his political will, adapting the discussion to an alternate reality. It’s favoring the posts of some while hiding those of others: The Washington Post reported last week that of the 100 most tweeting congressional accounts, only those of Republicans are going viral. When he first bought Twitter, Musk used Twitter’s internal documents to reshape his public image with the Twitter Archives. Then, when he endorsed Donald Trump, he made himself his spear. He bombarded his followers with pro-Trump messages and a botched Trump interview on Twitter Spaces.
We have never seen a transformation like that of X: a billionaire who is not afraid of campaigning and naked partisanship that bends a connection network used by tens of millions according to his vision of reality. Elon Musk was the surprise of October.
In the absence of financial success with his forced purchase, Musk has turned to politics to make his $44 billion bet bear fruit. As my colleague Dan Milmo put it: “ richest in the world. only on financial benchmarks.” Think of the restoration of Trump’s account and all of Musk’s pro-Trump tweets as in-kind contributions, which Musk will cash in on during a Trump presidency.
When the elections are over, will they ever be over? – The value of X will decrease. It will be less important that the richest man in the world is babbling about election fraud conspiracies. Traffic to We will see the effects of Musk’s use of weapons in the clear light of day.
Earnings learnings
Five of the Magnificent Seven (Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Apple) reported their quarterly earnings last week. All beat Wall Street’s earnings expectations, although not all stocks rose. From their stellar performances, we can draw some lessons.
1. Ads are still the lifeblood of the Internet economy.
Google’s, Meta’s, and even Amazon’s profits show that digital ads can still sustain an empire.
2. Investment in AI is paying off, especially for the cloud business
Bully for Google, Microsoft and Amazon! All three, as well as Meta, have increased their capital expenditures by tens of billions to pay for their AI products, but investors seem to think it is worth it. Each reported strong growth in their cloud business. Meta’s investment in open source AI has also seen it claim the title of most used AI by embedding Meta AI on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. Investors loved that.
3. Both outcomes benefit a particular company
Reddit, which turned a profit for the first time as a public company last week, posted a whopping 68% revenue increase compared to the same quarter last year. The company makes most of its money from advertising, so a strong market means Reddit makes more money even as a smaller player than Google and Meta. Reddit’s ad revenue increased by 56%.
Reddit boss Steve Huffman also attributed the company’s better-than-expected performance to a new source of revenue: deals with artificial intelligence companies. Everyone who wants to create a large language model that generates English text uses Reddit to train that AI. That social network is a vast and well-organized corpus of text written by human beings. Reddit licenses that data set to Google, OpenAI and others for tens of millions of dollars. That source of cash may not last forever, but it won’t be gone anytime soon.
Reddit, in turn, benefits from AI. The social network’s monthly users increased by half in this quarter alone, to a staggering 97 million. Huffman attributed the dramatic increase to the social network’s new translation feature, which uses artificial intelligence to rewrite English posts into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and German. The company plans to expand the feature in the coming months.
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new york magazine John Herrman points out that RedditAs a repository of human-written material, it also benefits from people wanting to be sure that what they’re reading wasn’t written by AI. As such, Reddit has become “Google’s favorite website,” Herrman writes, a throne that comes with its own sword of Damocles. Huffman said Reddit had become the sixth most searched word on Google. Many digital media outlets have reached the same high place only to fall to earth with a crash.
This week on my iPhone
Niche Halloween costumes got the meme treatment with the proliferation of jokes starting with “I hate gay Halloween… ” on X and Instagram. The meme seems to point to something bigger: online culture has reached a point where not only is the appeal of a specific individual reference debated, but NeNe Leakes and a white refrigeratorfor example, but also discussing the appropriateness of taking Internet inside jokes into real life. Is it worth carrying a bulky cardboard box all night while shouting, “It’s from an early season of The Real Housewives!”? There’s a bit of self-deprecation involved in starting your own tweet about your costume with “I hate.” I predict that next year we will see more witches and cats.
Although maybe not. TO refutation of in the name of joy: “I love everyone’s specialized Halloween costumes!! I love the specificity. I love creativity. “I love it when you put a lot of time and effort into something that is literally just to make you laugh and I really love it when I don’t understand it and I have to explain it to myself.”
For my part, I dressed as a skeleton for the third year in a row.
