The original @America user was a critic of both Musk and Trump.
X owner Elon Musk has once again hijacked a rare coveted username from its original user.
This time, however, the takeover wasn’t for the good of X the company, it was so Musk could promote Donald Trump for president.
On Saturday, Musk appeared at Donald Trump’s rally in Butler Pennsylvania. However, earlier that day, Musk began promoting his pro-Trump Super PAC, called America PAC, using a brand new handle @America.
“Read @America to understand why I’m supporting Trump for President,” Musk’s new bio said as of approximately 1:30pm ET on Saturday, Oct. 5.
The @America handle appeared attached to a brand new account setup just this month, in October 2024. However, this rare, one-word geographic handle had already been long registered by another X user more than 14 years prior to Musk taking the handle from them, in September 2010.
According to a person familiar with the situation, X took the handle from the user much like how Musk’s social media company took the @X handle from its original registrant last year.
I’m not interested in what a drug-addled white supremacist has to say. I’m not allowed to use edibles on my days off because it can put my job at risk but this piece-of-shit uses ketamine, acid, shrooms and cocaine and is still allowed to have expensive government contracts.
I used to think this until I met an acidhead who would dose every weekend. Most racist person I've ever met and, if anything, the acid made him more racist.
Because they think they can control him. Possibly why he’s so hell bent on this now too. It would explain some things. But he’s still a piece of shit no matter what. 🙃
After this, I don't know what more proof anyone could possibly need that Xitter is purely a right-wing propaganda platform exactly equivalent to the likes of Truth [sic] Social. Anyone who continues to use Xitter supports this behavior. Continued use of accounts like @POTUS or @KamalaHarris or these is effectively an endorsement of equating Donald Trump with America. It has to stop! The platform has to be fully abandoned by every single person, organization, or government entity that isn't fascist; there is no choice now.
Those non-fascist influencers, celebs, and other "must have" content sources for the remaining audience need to talk amongst themselves, decide on a new platform, and leave together. Their audience will see it, momentarily snap out of the inertia, download a new app, and barely notice the difference. Non-fascist politicians and news orgs who have to go to where the people are will have cover and can follow suit. It can be over in a week.
If you're still on Xitter at this point, you deserve all the bullshit you get. That place is a cesspool. You can't swim in the toilet and then pretend to be mad you're covered in shit.
yeah, don't know why they're so mad. 90% of people don't know what lemmy even is, much less mastodon. And those numbers are very generous considering there are ~40k people using lemmy
Indeed. I feel sorry for those people that feel compelled to still be on it for their jobs, or for their side-hustle/main-hustle or whatever, but yeah, anyone still on there just because? I have no idea, unless they are Nazis or Nazi adjacent.
It'd be a weird world unless X/Twitter was government run. But at some point we're going to hit the mother of all lawsuits... email is a standard communication medium for folks and lots of people still, and have forever, used @ hotmail, yahoo or gmail addresses.
It will be really fucking interesting the first time one of those companies seizes an address and diverts some critical notification.
At this point though, I have a sinking suspicion that Trump is going to win. I hope I'm wrong but I'm in a swing state and it feels more like 2016 than 2020 to me. America is full of ignorant people who are too prideful to realize how absolutely ignorant they are.
Nah, Trump will put Musk on his cabinet, possibly Secretary of Transportation. Which is ironic that Musk has an electric car company but the GOP is all about fossil fuel. We've seen gas guzzling pick ups block multiple super chargers to fuck with Tesla owners.
Fully weaponizing "his platform" to influence the election. Painting a target on his back, making more enemies by the day. (Only this time, it's not just his drug-induced paranoia.) Gambling everything, once again. Accidentally buying "the town square" was his biggest mistake.
I'm not up to speed on what Twitter is doing these days outside of what's reported here on lemmy.
Unless Musk starts saying things like "Polls are closing early so don't bother voting because Trump won" or things that will suppress votes, his actions and tweets are going to be categorized as political free speech, which has broad interpretation in the US. Sad, but true.
We, as well as our government officials, should remember that Twitter is not the public town square. It's a dumpster fire that is owned by a private entity that permits users to throw their shit into. That private entity is within their right to do whatever they want within the confines of the law.
I don't think she'll have to. MAGA will implode along with Truth Social, Twitter, and maybe even Tesla as I'm sure Elon has turned off many potential buyers just as competing car companies are getting closer in value as Tesla.
See you don't get it, it's totally fine for musk to take the @America tag and push Twitter for Trump. Twitter was SUPER biased before because you couldn't say the N-word whenever you want. It's not biased at all now because it's completely far right which is obviously the Correct Way to Be™ so it can't be biased.
I would argue if the users don't hold value, and the content is made by the uses, the company would need a re-evaluation of near zero value. Then again .. Lemmy has no value to usernames. As you and I can have the same username, as we are on different instances. But that is attached to the idea of disenfranchising the value behind the instance ownership.
Sure it sucks, but it can't be a surprise anymore.
The username @X was also taken from a user. Same with @Music, who if I recall correctly, was a fan of Musk and was even subscribing to Twitter at the time. They even continued to do what @Music was doing with music recommendations, so it was barely a rebrand. It was basically just hijacking the work someone else put into establishing their social media presence.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but... this isn't quite as bad as it looks.
although clearly they could have handled the situation better.
Agreed, but I mean has been the general theme with the new owner. Everything could have been handled better, but nothing was.
Users do not technically own their handles on X.
Another reason why the fediverse is better. We have better control over this, simply by owning our own instances. Then admins on another instance can't simply seize our usernames.
It appears the original owner hasn’t posted on X since it was called Twitter, in May 2020.
So basically they released a handle that otherwise wasn't going to be used and would have gone to waste.
It would be better if they had a general policy about these things .. but considering the owner...
as it pertains to the @X handle, the company had a good case that they should have ownership of it
Less good as the user was actively using it beforehand but the justification is also stronger in this case.
Now I'm no legal expert, but wouldn't appropriating someone's social media account to post your own political propaganda literally be a violation of that user's 1st amendment rights? Isn't Musk really into freedom of speech?
Nope. Your first amendment rights can absolutely be violated by a private corporation in a context that isn't directly related to criticizing the government. This person literally had their page appropriated by Musk, which is absolutely not covered on the EULA, to spread political propaganda. This isn't the same thing as right wing people crying about being banned from Facebook for posting nazi crap.
I'm all for hating on musk/trump. But do we know if he actually stole the handle/tag or if he paid an obscene amount of money to the original owner?
I hate Twitter and deleted my account a long time ago but facts matter and assuming he stole the tag is just as bad as what he is doing. We may never know what actually happened but I'm curious