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Comment by eapressoandcats | Hacker News Reader

To be clear, the thing that’s keeping them from being disadvantaged against Musk/X is cozying up to the Trump and the government. That’s going to make a much bigger difference in stock performance than any personnel impact of these changes.

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Surely nothing can go wrong with authoritarians backed by trillionaires with social media in their hands, rapidly talking over power. I doubt Orwell could have predicted how the 2020s are turning out.

"Trillionaire" media moguls were on board with the previous regime for at least the last decade. They are realigning now, not particularly surprising.

Hardly. Social media algorithms optimising for engagement is surely one of the main reasons we're in this hyper-polarised environment. So yes, their marketing said DEI, but their algos pushed far-right propaganda onto my screen.

if we are in a dangerous political situation I wouldn’t know because trump alarmism has been turned up to 100 since 2015, so I have to discount what your saying to “mild political irritation”.

Yes it's called boiling the frog + shifting the Overton window. Threatening to invade allies, or having an unelected halftrillionaire direct the government of the US and openly push for regime change across Western Europe (to give two examples from just the past week), would be unthinkable in 2015. Now it's just "oh there's this guy again, anyway what's on" / "mild political irritation".

So yes, you're right that it's a bad strategy to keep the alarmism on 11 for a decade (because this normalisation is what eventually happens), but wrong to think that it's not actually a true problem.

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