 You all remember that platform that's formally known as Twitter that used to be rife with politically biased censorship. People getting banned left and right by Twitter admins who were totally just trying to combat misinformation. But then Elon Musk took over Twitter for the cool price of $45 billion and promised to make it a free speech platform. But that never really happened, did it. By any possible way that you can measure free speech. It definitely is not a free speech platform as defined in the United States Constitution because Twitter very quickly cracked down on the hilarious parody accounts that started popping up when they were selling verification badges. Satire is implicitly protected by the free expression clause of the First Amendment as long as a reasonable person can distinguish the parody from what's real. And that's held up fairly recently in Supreme Court decisions. So when Rudy Giuliani Esquire tweets that he stands with Kyrie Irving and Kanye West because George Soros pushed him down in the streets and he was left helpless on his back like a turtle an owner of a true free speech platform would probably leave a like on that tweet possibly even share it instead of banning that account and refusing to refund them for that verification badge that they paid for. Anyone who believes that this is real is clearly not very reasonable and probably just has brain rot from too much screen time and should probably consider turning off their computer and becoming Amish for a bit, maybe churn some butter. Twitter also isn't free as in Libre, okay? What we're talking about when we mean free software which is freedom respecting software specifically respecting your freedoms to run, modify, distribute and distribute modified copies of said software. Now, there are some parts of Twitter that are open source, mostly under Apache licenses and also the algorithm is a GPL3 now which is kind of cool even though its GitHub repo is mostly just dedicated to nerds shit posting these days. I mean, seriously, if you're ever having a rough day at the office, just pull up the issues in the pull request tab of Twitter's the algorithm repo and you can have a good laugh. But if these lacks of freedoms weren't enough for you, Twitter also is no longer free as in price. At least it's not free if you want to be able to have more than 1500 posts per month which might be enough for some people, probably not enough for people who are addicts to Twitter. But hey, what's wrong with profiting off of people's addictions? If you want to spend all day staring at fake news on a glowing handheld rectangle, someone might as well just profit off of you having that addiction. But you see this profit mindset, it doesn't really live up with the free speech town square model that Elon said Twitter should be when he took it over. But even though Twitter has changed hands and changed philosophies, there's still a lot of people who are treating Twitter like the town square of the internet. They go there to get the latest news about events in the world like the earthquake and tsunamis that have been hitting Japan on the very first day of the new year. So this nerve disaster prevention program, it's dedicated to spreading information about earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides and other natural disasters that occur in Japan. And I think that there's other versions of it for other regions as well. But the whole idea is to propagate this information so that people can get to safe locations and literally save their lives and just take appropriate actions. Information is so valuable and you can see on the first page of their website at nerve.app that this early warning system is also available as a mobile app. But if you take a look at its listings here in Google Play Store, they list that they've only been downloaded about a million times so that people can get those direct notifications in the app. However, on Twitter, their main account has over two million followers. So clearly a lot of people even more across the whole Android market are getting that important information from nerve via Twitter. And I guess I can understand why because a lot more people have the Twitter app installed on their phones already. You know, a lot of people are already using Twitter for their news feed, but that API rate limit, it actually limited nerve's ability to transmit real-time life-saving information to people in a crisis. And it's not even like nerve doesn't pay for Twitter at all. They have a blue check mark, so clearly they're paying for the X Premium subscription, I think is what they call it now, which probably looks really sus to an accountant somewhere in Japan who got that bill for the first time for the government paying for X Premium. But they also pay for the basic Twitter API plan to make automated posting easier. And they get 50,000 posts per month with this plan, but it still wasn't enough. And the cost of a pro API plan jumps up to $5,000 per month, which was too expensive according to nerve statements back in August. This is unfortunately one of the darker examples of what can happen when non-free software is relied upon. Several people have called upon Elon to do something about the rate limits for profiles like nerves. And eventually the issue was resolved towards the end of the day. Nerve got upgraded to a public utility account within X to resolve that API rate limit after employees at Twitter actually started tweeting Elon Musk about it. But that didn't happen until many, many hours after the earthquake hit, after the sea level started to rise, and nerve's rate limit was eventually reached. And we'll probably never know how many people could have been saved and gotten into just better positions. You know, made faster decisions to save themselves or save family members if Twitter had actually gone the route of becoming a free speech platform.