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.
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.
Well, the account was allegedly inactive. Sounds like they weren’t on Twitter either.
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
You can’t swim in the toilet and then pretend to be mad you’re covered in shit.
This is one of the best quotes I’ve ever heard. Definitely made my day.
The Other Truth Social.
This sends a clear message: if you still have a valuable handle, sell it now.
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 don’t get how anyone can Take Acid and stay a fascist. It creates the quite opposite feelings to hate.
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.
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Same situation with Joe Rogan. He’s a giant pothead but gets to use in Texas which has some of the strictest regulations in the country.
Some of those drugs will change your brain chemistry permanently or rewire it. They can even make you paranoid and start to believe weird conspiracies.
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. 🙃
Well, you could move to a less shitty state.
It doesn’t matter for the line of work I’m in until it is legalized federally.
You can’t beat musk on his own platform, it’s long since time to use a big boy one.
It just shows what a bunch of lowly thieves this bunch is.
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 really don’t think Trump’s dick can go any further into Musk’s mouth
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I was wondering if it could be an illegal campaign contribution since it has value and was taken and won’t be reported as such
No. First Amendment applies to action by the government.
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Doubt it’s not covered in EULA. Probably has something like
Company reserves the right to cancel your account for any reason, or without reason…
Fine. Cancel it, but don’t appropriate it without clearing everything first.
The posts are the property of X, so legally they can be the biggest douches about it.
Yup. I know. I just wouldn’t want them to co-opt my stuff if I had my name tied to it and then start posting rhetoric. That’s misrepresenting me and I would sue for defamation.
For the record, I do not have a personal X account tied to me. This is all hypothetical.
Lol whatever you say but you’re wrong. Might be a breach of contract but if it’s a private corporation, it has nothing to do with the First Amendment. The rare exception would be where the private entity is merely an agent of the government, such as a private prison.
Not according to Musky Boy.
This is probably the most American thing elon has ever accomplished; taking something that isn’t theirs and using it to hurl feces.
Yea. You would never see that in [insert name of literally any country]
/s
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted, you’re right.
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
I can’t wait until Trump loses interest in Musk.
I hope it’s the final push over the edge Musk needs.
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.
How many people in Trump’s cabinet lasted the whole term?
The only one I recall was Betsy DeVos.
Nope. She left 12 days early because of January 6th.
Just didn’t quite make it.
There will be no caninet to put him on.
Could you imagine come November trump loses and musk just shots himself to Mars for forever. What a good day that’ll be.
to the one place wokeism has not corrupted … SPACE~
Four words too many on that first sentence.
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.
Naw it feels like a mix of 16 and 08. Theres so much energy around harris, but its bogged down by all the hate from trump. But im older, Obama was elected when i was in high school amd thats when i started paying attention to politics
Older than me? I’ve got probably a decade on you. My first (major) political awareness involves blowjobs and dress stains. I vaguely recall Iraq Part 1 and the excitement around it being televised live.
My abandoned Reddit account is older than some of the people I interact with on here.
I hope you’re right. As with all the recent elections where the Democratic Party wins, it’s all down to the youth vote. Also, really hopefully this one has even more extra support from the uterus carrying people amongst us than anticipated by the polls.
It comes down to people in 7 states. And after seeing interviews with some swing voters, they aren’t deep thinkers.
We’re fucked and i’m currently making my escape plan.
Do you not feel the change approach? She hasnt come out and used Obama’s exact phrasing, but it feels like shes going to bring some change that we desperately need.
Her bringing on Tim Walz keeps that hope alive for me. Like even if she somehow disappoints me, there will be Walz who can inject some “mind your own business” socialism at the national stage. I wish he would have more faith in his own speaking abilities though.
Some personal physician will OD him on Special-K because he got tired of his shit.
I’ll donate $5 to their go-fund-me defense.
Not until he has no billions left, like Mike pillow.
Musk Pillow has a nice ring to it. He’s going to do a lot of harm to good tech when he really crashes out after Trump loses.
Do Twitter usernames have value? Could this be considered a massive in kind campaign contribution?
Even if they did, Musk gave it to his own PAC, not the Trump campaign.
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.
Musk is so disgusting.
Elon’s Musk
Can we establish “dismusking” as a new word that means “extremely disgusting”?
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“Let me tell you why I claim to support trump.”
The real reasons would never be spoken aloud.
Musk is a moron. So.
I wouldn’t take that bet. Even if ordinarily you’d be right.
Imagine a world where this shit was illegal
Imagine a world where this shit was irrelevant.
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.