Do you guys remember back when Elon insisted he was a Free Speech Absolutist? How he wanted to ensure nobody was censored on Twitter? That shit just gets funnier every day.
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He probably rationalizes it by thinking of Twitter as his personal publishing platform, thus all speech on it is subject to his editorial control. To take away his editorial control would be to violate his free speech rights in his eyes.
If that’s an actual photo from today then I doubt he was grazed much because I skinned my knee biking the day before his rally. I’ve still got a giant scab there.
Also Pete Souza isn’t just anyone. He’s a former director of the White House photo office.
It probably means he's on blood thinners. You'll bleed like you cut an artery even with a tiny nick.
So he probably had a tiny cut that just bleed a lot because of blood thinners.
My thoughts exactly. I was on them for a time and I'd bleed FOREVER if I cut myself shaving. That's when I learned about styptic pencils and alum blocks.
Similarly, I cut the crap out of my hand on a waterslide 2 weeks ago - grabbed the fiberglass side while trying to right myself so my kid wouldn't get dunked - and it's still healing. Close to being back to normal, but you can still clearly see where It was for sure
Journalists need to stop fucking using Twitter for fucks sake.
Even just mirroring their stuff to one of the Twitter alternatives would be nice
When are people actually going to leave that hellsite in meaningful numbers?
When they don't also deepthroat Netflix after they banned password sharing. All the optimistic people, me included, said "oh this will make a huge dent in Netflix what a stupid move." But they read the room like a hawk.
People swallowed the hook and signed up in huge numbers. https://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-password-sharing-crackdown-worked-how-to-increase-subscription-streaming-2024-1
The West has created the perfect neutered, obedient consumers who will drink whatever coolade they are given. Until we have enough people who are willing to challenge convenience and stop bowing at the altar of comfort, we will have no meaningful change.
You even got people on the left saying "I won't vote for the less bad politician unless he makes me excited to vote". When did everyone get so selfish?
Hang on, ~~this guy~~ the AP seriously took a picture where there is no injury to his ear? What was all the blood then? This one needs independent corroboration.
2 weeks is plenty of time for a shallow, skin-only graze to heal. And ear cuts can bleed a ton.
Ears, scalp, cuticles… all places that bleed like crazy.
Especially when you’re on blood thinners
In addition, a competent plastic surgeon would likely make it look like it had never happened. I hope he goes to jail for the crimes he committed, but do people really expect him to wear an ear diaper the rest of his life?
Honestly, I thought he would milk it until the election somehow. We can't be right all the time I guess!
When an octopus gets frightened it releases ink to confuse predators. Due to his love of hamburgers Donnie releases catsup.
Everyone needs to chill out about this ear thing. It's amazing what can be covered with a little bit of makeup. As much as I detest the man, I can see why he wouldn't want to walk around with a visible ear cut. Women cover zits and blemishes with makeup as a matter of course. Do you think the orange douchewipe wants the focus on his ear? All presidents (and "presidents") have makeup up people, and their job is to cover this kind of shit up and make the person look as flawless as possible.
Let's leave the conspiracy theories to the conservatards.
Do you think the orange douchewipe wants the focus on his ear?
I mean, yeah, I kinda do. I expected him to milk the assassination attempt for all it's worth, and I don't think that makes me a conspiracy theorist.
Knowing how Trump has played up his assassination attempt at every opportunity.... He absolutely would want to bring attention to any damage to his ear.
I don't really care one way or another about whatever drama is going on about his ear. I'm just saying, I don't think he'd choose to use makeup to cover up any scars on his ear.
It’s amazing what can be covered with a little bit of makeup.
Because Trump is known for using a "little bit" of makeup. If he was using makeup on his ear, it would be to make it look worse, not to cover it up.
And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.
THIS SHIT ISN'T FUNNY ANYMORE
It's so on-the-nose that I don't even Trump is the parody anymore, it's evangelical Christianity that's the real parody. A group of folks who make a story about a socialist day laborer from the Middle East and use it to justify white supremacy, unfettered capitalism, and wealth as a measure of God's love falling in line behind a cartoonishly accurate representation the "bad guy" in their book...exactly like their book said they would.
I'm assuming all those free-speech nuts are really going after Musk for doing this right?
I'm joking, we all know it's just free-speech for the things they agree with ...
Question: As this is no longer a neutral platform, what would be the legal implications? Is Twitter still a neutral carrier (or whatever the proper term is) and enjoys far-reaching legal protections for this?
There is no such thing as a "neutral carrier" for social media. It's a made-up concept used to pretend that a social media site isn't allowed to be partisan.
There are zero legal ramifications for making Twitter as partisan as musk wants.
Funny how the "free speech" guy bought Twitter and made it more biased and authoritarian than it has ever been.
Can we revoke his government contracts now?
I mean, they didn't even do that when he literally fucked up a Ukrainian operation against Russia.
Money rules this country. It stopped being a democratic republic a long time ago.
It would be pretty funny if the photographer just mirrored the image before uploading it.
Elon Goebbels really seems to be working hard on this one.
Umm his last insta post was two days ago. Can someone ummm check on him?
Last time I saw ‘em, he said something about hanging out with his buddy at Boeing.
I’m sure everything’s fine, they’re prolly just messin with planes & stuff.
Wow, so that bullet BARELY clipped him? And he has all those pictures of him trying to act heroic?
Veterans (AKA "suckers and losers" according to Trump) must hate this guy...
No bullet touched him, it's not like in the movies, if a round had even grazed his ear it would have removed a nice chunk of it. Extremely fast objects don't slice you nice and cleanly.
They were saying it was most likely a piece of the teleprompter that nicked his ear.
For those who care. He wasn't banned, he deleted his account.
I should have made this a top-level comment:
TL;DR: he wasn't banned, he quit:
On Saturday, I was perplexed by photos online of Trump boarding his plane en route to a bitcoin conference. There was no bandage on his right ear. I re-posted one of the photos on Twitter and wrote, “look closely at his ear that was ‘hit’ by a bullet from a AR-15 assault rifle.”
“Fake news,” someone responded. “It’s the wrong ear,” said another, which of course was not true. “This is an old photo,” which I felt the need to reply to. I re-posted a screenshot of New York Times photographer Doug Mills’ Twitter post of the same situation of Trump boarding his plane, which included the date and time of his photo. Doug is one of Trump’s favorite photographers and Trump has publicly called him “my genius photographer.” So I thought the maga world would at least believe Doug Mills.
They didn’t. The comments turned ugly. Mostly about me, but also some that disparaged Doug Mills. Since 2017, I’ve been accustomed to having vile and hateful comments thrown at me. But I had now exposed someone else, Doug Mills, to be the recipient of hateful messages on MY Twitter account. Not cool.
On top of that, I’ve been at a cabin with no Internet and sporadic cell coverage for the past week, which made it difficult to post anything in the first place but also a challenge to push back against the hate.
So I de-activated my Twitter account. It was a gut decision, made only by me. I am still not sure if this is a temporary or a permanent action.
I was unaware that some on Twitter were a responding that Elon Musk had deleted my account. How would I know? I wasn’t able to access Twitter. I did receive a few DMs here on Instagram about this, but didn’t think much about it. Until…late last night, I received a text message from a New York Times reporter asking me to comment about my supposedly “being kicked off X for posting a photo of Trump’s ear.” And then this morning, I received a text message from a childhood friend who asked, in jest, “Is there a Free Pete Souza donation site?”
It was time to respond. I have so much more I want to say about the state of social media, but for now I want to make it clear that I was not kicked off Twitter. I kicked myself off.