Seems Elon may be backing himself into a hole. People who have been the
biggest buyers of Tesla vehicles are now being repulsed by his antics.
People who have not, and probably will not buy electric vehicles aren't
going to start buying them because, well, they're electric.
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/02/15/tesla-troubles-mount-as-musk-goes-full-rogue/
bp
<part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com>
On 2/15/2025 3:58 PM, Ken Hohhof wrote:
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-website-is-just-one-big-x-ad/
DOGE’s Website Is Just One Big X Ad
*The source code for the new Department of Government Efficiency’s
“official US government website” points to X as its primary source of
authority, while sharing links to the site sends users to x.com.*
At a press conference in the Oval Office
<https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/12/tech/elon-musk-x-oval-office/index.html> this
week, Elon Musk promised the actions of his so-called Department of
Government Efficiency (DOGE) <https://www.wired.com/tag/doge/> project
would be “maximally transparent,” thanks to information posted to its
website.
At the time of his comment, the DOGE website was empty
<https://bsky.app/profile/joncooper-us.bsky.social/post/3lhwsmk4iac2u>.
However, when the site finally came online Thursday morning, it turned
out to be little more than a glorified feed of posts from the official
DOGE account on Musk’s own X platform, raising new questions about
Musk’s conflicts of interest in running DOGE
<https://www.npr.org/2025/02/12/nx-s1-5293382/x-elon-musk-doge-cfpb>.
DOGE.gov claims to be an “official website of the United States
government,” but rather than giving detailed breakdowns of the cost
savings and efficiencies Musk claims his project is making, the
homepage of the site just replicated posts from the DOGE account on X.
A WIRED review of the page’s source code shows that the promotion of
Musk’s own platform went deeper than replicating the posts on the
homepage. The source code shows that the site’s canonical tags
<https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization> direct search engines to
x.com rather than DOGE.gov.
A canonical tag is a snippet of code that tells search engines what
the authoritative version of a website is. It is typically used by
sites with multiple pages as a search engine optimization tactic, to
avoid their search ranking being diluted.
In DOGE’s case, however, the code is informing search engines that
when people search for content found on DOGE.gov, they should not show
those pages in search results, but should instead display the posts on X.
“It is promoting the X account as the main source, with the website
secondary,” Declan Chidlow, a web developer <https://vale.rocks/>,
tells WIRED. “This isn't usually how things are handled, and it
indicates that the X account is taking priority over the actual
website itself.”
Advertisement
All the other US government websites WIRED checked used their own
homepage in their canonical tags, including the official White House
website. Additionally, when sharing the DOGE website on mobile
devices, the source code creates a link to the DOGE X account rather
than the website itself.
“It seems that the DOGE website is secondary, and they are prodding
people in the direction of the X account everywhere they can,” Chidlow
adds.
Alongside the homepage feed of X posts, a section of Doge.gov labeled
“Savings” now appears. So far the page is empty except for a single
line that reads: “Receipts coming soon, no later than Valentine's
day,” followed by a heart emoji
<https://www.wired.com/story/heart-emoji-lost-all-meaning/>.
A section entitled “Workforce” features some bar charts showing how
many people work in each government agency, with the information
coming from data gathered by the Office of Personnel Management in
March 2024.
A disclaimer at the bottom of the page reads: “This is DOGE's effort
to create a comprehensive, government-wide org chart. This is an
enormous effort, and there are likely some errors or omissions. We
will continue to strive for maximum accuracy over time.”
Another section, entitled “Regulations,” features what DOGE calls the
“Unconstitutionality Index,” which it describes as “the number of
agency rules created by unelected bureaucrats for each law passed by
Congress in 2024.”
The charts in this section are also based on data previously collected
by US government agencies. Doge.gov also links to a Forbes article
from last month that was written by Clyde Wayne Crews, a member of the
Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that pushed climate
change disinformation
<https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/heartland-institute-leak-exposes-strategies-of-climate-attack-machine/> and
questioned the links between tobacco and lung cancer
<https://www.tobaccotactics.org/article/heartland-institute/>. It is
also a major advocate for privatizing government departments
<https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/in-shift-key-climate-denialist-group-heartland-institute-pivots-to-policy/>.
The site also features a “Join” page which allows prospective DOGE
employees to apply for roles including “software engineers, InfoSec
engineers, and other technology professionals.” As well as requesting
a Github account and résumé, the form asks visitors to “provide 2-3
bullet points showcasing exceptional ability.”
The website does not list a developer, but on Wednesday, web
application security expert Sam Curry outlined in a thread on X
<https://x.com/samwcyo/status/1889527715029557607> how he was able to
identify the developer of the site as DOGE employee Kyle Shutt.
Curry claims he was able to link a Cloudflare account ID found in the
site’s source code to Shutt, who used the same account when developing
Musk’s America PAC
<https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-america-pac-election-denial-community-x/> website.
On Thursday, Drop Site News
<https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/doge-fema-funding-access-social-security-numbers> reported,
citing sources within FEMA, that Shutt had gained access to the
agency’s proprietary software controlling payments. Earlier this week,
Business Insider reported
<https://www.businessinsider.com/doge-staff-list-white-house-2025-2> that
Shutt, who recently worked at an AI interviewing software company, was
listed as one of 30 people working for DOGE.
Neither Shutt, DOGE, nor the White House responded to requests for
comment.
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