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埃隆马斯克
440亿收购推特
Twitter, on April 25, announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company.
4月25日，推特董事会宣布与马斯克达成最终协议，马斯克将以每股54.2美元的价格对其进行收购，交易总价值约为440亿美元。交易完成后，推特将成为一家私人控股公司。
"Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," said Mr. Musk. "I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans."
马斯克表示：“言论自由是民主运作的基石，而推特则是一个数字公共领域，人们在这里讨论与人类的未来紧密相关的问题。我还想通过增加新功能来增强产品属性，将推特算法运作机制公开，以提高使用者的信任度，严厉打击垃圾邮件账户和机器账户，并对所有用户进行身份验证，帮助Twitter更上一层楼。”
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骑虎难下的亿万富翁
马斯克被指违反保密协议
Twitter's legal department accused Elon Musk of violating its non-disclosure agreement via a tweet, Musk tweeted Saturday.
5月14日，马斯克发文表示，法务部门指控他违反了保密协议。
The social media giant's complaint, per Musk: that he violated its NDA "by revealing the bot check sample size is 100," he tweeted.
马斯克说，推特控诉他“因为泄露虚假账户占比核验的样本检查量为100”，从而违反了保密协议。
"To find out, my team will do a random sample of 100 followers of @Twitter," he tweeted. "I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover."
马斯克还称：“为了找到推特虚假账户的真正占比，我们团队将随机抽取100名推特用户测试虚假用户的占比，观察结果是否与推特的核验结果的一致。”
推特希望迅速完成收购
The company has said that less than 5% of its daily active users are spam accounts. Without citing a source, Musk claimed in a tweet that Twitter is "20% fake/spam accounts" and suggested Twitter's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission were misleading. The company has said that less than 5% of its daily active users are spam accounts.
此前, 推特称其每日活跃用户中垃圾邮件账户占比不超过5%。在没有公开信息源的情况下，马斯克声称推特拥有“ 20 %的虚假/垃圾邮件账户”，并暗示推特向美国证券交易委员会提交的文件具有误导性。
He said on Tuesday that he will not go through with his $44 billion takeover of Twitter unless the social media platform offers definitive proof that less than 5% of its daily users are spam and bot accounts.
马斯克周二发布推文称，除非推特能拿出确凿证据证明机器人虚假账户数量占比不到5%，否则他以440亿美元收购推特的交易将无法进行。
Twitter responded hours later by insisting that it was committed to completing the deal at the agreed price “as promptly as practicable.”
推特在几个小时后做出回应，坚称该公司致力于“尽可能迅速”地以商定的价格完成交易。
怎么看：
改造推特大可不必？
而就在当地时间5月13日，马斯克在推特表示，推特的一份财务文件称，预计该平台垃圾或虚假账户在其第一季度“可盈利的日活跃用户”中所占比例不到5%，而他对这一数据表示怀疑，因此暂停了对推特的收购，推特股价当天暴跌9.67%。
推特给用户带来了什么？
The novelist Alexander Chee identified one of the network’s most appealing qualities: “it’s a text based social app ultimately, and so it’s perfect for readers and writers.”
小说家亚历山大·齐指出了推特最吸引人的品质之一:“它本质上是一个基于文本的社交应用程序，因此对于读者和作家来说是完美的。”
Twitter, Chee said, had introduced him to a world of readers and writers, stories and poems, while also showing him how “an algorithm can turn someone I like and might ordinarily see a few times a year into the Internet equivalent of the roommate you see too much of.”
齐说，推特把他引入了一个由读者和作家、故事和诗歌组成的世界，同时也向他展示了“算法如何突破时间的限制把一个我喜欢的、但一年见只能几次面的人，变成一个你经常见的室友。”
Taylor Lorenz, the Washington Post columnist, wrote that Twitter was “similar to New York City,” in that “the people who spend time there often actively hate it, but refuse to leave.” Even as users are “trauma bonded by collectively suffering through years of bad moderation decisions and regular onslaughts of harassment,”she wrote, Twitter remains “the single most effective real time news platform and the one social media app about ideas rather than aesthetics.”
《华盛顿邮报》专栏作家泰勒·洛伦茨写道，推特“类似于纽约市”，“身处其中的人往往非常讨厌它，但同时却又难以离开它”。她认为，尽管用户“多年来共同承受了糟糕的审核决定和定期的骚扰攻击，受到创伤”，但推特仍然是“唯一最有效的实时新闻平台，也是唯一一个注重观念而非美学的社交媒体应用。”
也有些人试图不去过多地思考推特的社交局限性，而是聚焦于它的名字本身。
The historian Kevin Kruse compared Twitter to “the Star Wars cantina”—a polyglot bar full of aliens, in which fights break out and “everyone hates the bots.”
历史学家凯文·克鲁斯(Kevin Kruse)把推特比作“星球大战酒吧”——一个满是外星人的多语种酒吧，“人人都恨机器人”， 争端不断。
在他们列举推特的诸多优点时，也有人对马斯克改善服务的能力也表现出了质疑。
Kate Klonick, a legal scholar, argued that Musk might be like Icarus, whose feather-and-wax wings melted when he flew too close to the sun—“a man foolish enough to think they can control an organic process shaped by decades of natural evolution.” Icarus risked only himself, but to change Twitter is to experiment with a key part of the world’s communications infrastructure.
法律学者凯特·克洛尼克认为，马斯克很像希腊神话里的伊卡洛斯，当他飞得太靠近太阳时，羽毛和蜡制的翅膀就会融化——马斯克就是“一个愚蠢到认为自己可以控制几十年自然进化形成的有机过程的人”。伊卡洛斯只是那自己的生命犯险，但改变推特则是在拿世界通信基础设施的一个关键部分做实验。
伊卡洛斯 Icarus
Icarus was the son of Daedalus in Greek mythology. When he fled Crete, he was buried on an island as his wings made of wax and feathers melted by the sun and fell into the water.
伊卡洛斯,希腊神话中代达罗斯的儿子，与代达罗斯使用蜡和羽毛造的翼逃离克里特岛时，他因飞得太高双翼上的蜡遭太阳融化跌落水中丧生，被埋葬在一个海岛上
/重点词汇/
spam bot：
n.网络水军/僵尸粉/垃圾机器账户
The behavior of such a spam bot is easy to identify as it spews millions of spam messages.
algorithm：
n.运算发法则
The genius of the original plan is this algorithm.
polyglot：
n. 通晓数种语言的人adj. 通数国语言的
The polyglot culture is fractured among communities speaking three major languages and 30 minor ones.
原文链接：
https://www.newyorker.com/newsletter/the-daily/how-should-Twitter-change
https://apnews.com/article/business-media-social-elon-musk-1aa6c720f5a8ba834985eaa965fa4b84
https://apnews.com/article/spacex-technology-business-media-social-333b14be1eb0f8c7353f1158d8adfb95
https://fortune.com/2022/05/15/did-elon-musk-break-twitters-nda-with-tweet/
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/Twitter-says-committed-enforcing-elon-034301886.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9uZXdzLmdvb2dsZS5jb20v&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAA1SHVZNgiNSzXS5szgJinm6UDT-Lse7IB7xTGb_wcc6ZUvFzkV1n1HVgpQjNZjV1v5hq0pO5qLsa0eFSumfgukV7XHbRtRaZ4v3zcdOZ8FGsrh7MDhCn6VIMv_s1frc8AwQHE6j3NhTfbRtCypSl7-rxOBR1u9RDvjCRdGkYWSW
编译 | 温馨 沈佳璐 周奕言
排版 | 温馨
