News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Elon Musk, Joe Rogan mock MSNBC’s op-ed
linking home workouts to far right’s rise

MSNBC is going viral for warning about “the far right’s obsession with fitness” — with Elon Musk and Joe Rogan among those mocking the left-wing network’s comparison of the health craze to the Nazis.

MSNBC’s tweet Monday re-shared a year-old op-ed by extremism expert Cynthia Miller-Idriss claiming that the “far right has taken advantage of pandemic at-home fitness trends.”

In it, she even compared some fitness influencers to how Adolf Hitler “fixated on boxing and jujitsu” to garner followers.

MSNBC’s tweet soon got more than 34 million views — and a flurry of mockery.

“Being healthy is ‘far right.’ Holy f–k,” tweeted podcaster and UFC commentator Joe Rogan, a self-styled liberal and lifetime fitness fanatic.

Twitter boss Musk — who recently started training martial arts again to take on Facebook rival Mark Zuckerberg — replied to Rogan’s message by saying that “parody & reality are becoming indistinguishable.”

‘Dangerous Rhetoric’: Hunter Biden Lawyers Tell
Trump Cease and Desist Social Media Attacks

Hunter Biden’s lawyers have issued a cease and desist to Donald Trump’s legal team, demanding he not post about Mr. Biden anymore for fear of “physical and violent action” on the part of Mr. Trump’s followers against Mr. Biden or his family.
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Mr. Lowell wrote that Mr. Trump’s followers are “easy-to-trigger” and citing Jan. 6, 2021, events and their “tragic, even fatal, consequences” as a reason why something that would normally be a figure of speech cannot be considered so in Mr. Trump’s case.
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He compared Mr. Biden’s situation with that of Paul Pelosi, husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was attacked in his home last October. Federal officials alleged the attacker, David DePape, was a Canadian citizen who was in the country illegally after overstaying his visa and said he wanted to kidnap the Speaker.

“Mr. Biden was also on that attacker’s hit list,” Mr. Lowell wrote. “This is not a false alarm.”

He did not link the attacker to Mr. Trump’s social media activity, but referenced another case where Taylor Taranto was arrested in the vicinity of former President Barack Obama’s residence after reposting a post of Mr. Trump’s, which contained what he claimed was Mr. Obama’s address.
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Mr. Lowell cited multiple times when Mr. Trump posted about or reposted and commented on news events that involved the Biden family.

On June 22, two days after Mr. Biden pleaded guilty to federal crimes, the House Ways and Means Committee unveiled the testimonies of two whistleblowers from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) who had been part of the investigation into Mr. Biden’s taxes.

The investigators had validated text messages Mr. Biden sent to a Chinese business partner demanding payment and threatening to use his father’s power and influence in retaliation.

“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled,” the younger Biden wrote, according to Shapley’s testimony.

“Now means tonight,” Biden said, warning that if anyone other than Zhao, “Zhang, or the chairman” tried to reach out about the matter, “I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads App Sees Exodus of Users

“The Threads launch really did ‘break the internet,’ or at least the Sensor Tower models,” Anthony Bartolacci, the managing director at Sensor Tower, a marketing intelligence firm, told CNBC.

Bartolacci added that “in the 10-plus years Sensor Tower has been estimating app installs, the first 72 hours of Threads was truly in a class by itself.”

In a statement, Mr. Zuckerberg said on July 10 that Threads was able to obtain about 100 million users in about a week. “That’s mostly organic demand, and we haven’t even turned on many promotions yet,” the Facebook founder said in a Threads post.

At the same time, Matthew Prince, CEO of internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare, shared a graph showing a similar trajectory in a tweet on July 10 and claimed Twitter’s traffic was “tanking.” But Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote Monday that the platform last week had its “largest usage day” since February. “There’s only ONE Twitter,” she tweeted.
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For example, according to Sensor Tower, on Tuesday and Wednesday, Threads’ number of daily active users was down 20 percent from Saturday. More seriously, the time spent by a user was down 50 percent, from 20 minutes to 10 minutes in that same time period, the company told CNBC.

“These early returns signal that despite the hoopla during its launch, it will still be an uphill climb for Threads to carve out space in most users’ social network routine,” Mr. Bartolacci said. “The backing of Meta and the integration with Instagram likely gives Threads a much higher flood than other services, but it will need a more compelling value proposition than simply ‘Twitter, but without Elon Musk.’”

New data from SimilarWeb, another analytics firm that measures web traffic, also showed a decline of more than 25 percent in daily active users between July 7, when it peaked, and Monday, July 10. That accounted for Threads users on Android phones worldwide, the company told CNBC, adding that it has not produced data for iOS devices.

Court Blocks Ruling That Barred Biden Admin
From Demanding Social Media Censorship

A federal appeals court has handed the Biden administration a temporary victory by agreeing to put a temporary hold on an earlier district court’s ruling that prohibited a range of federal agencies and their staff from contacting social media companies with requests to censor constitutionally protected free speech.

On Friday, a three-judge panel for the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans issued a decision granting the Biden administration’s request to put the censorship-by-proxy ban on hold.

The “temporary administrative stay” will be in place until the case is referred to a different appeals panel, which will deliberate on the merits of a ruling that barred Biden administration officials from pressuring social media companies to censor free speech.
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Friday’s decision is the latest chapter in a saga that was sparked by a censorship-by-proxy lawsuit brought by Louisiana and Missouri against Biden administration agencies and top officials after evidence emerged that various federal agencies and some of their senior staff pressured social media companies to censor Americans’ free speech.