Twitter is not the most well-known advertising platform in the world: Why Trump, the Mascot, and Skinner, should stop Donald Trump from tweeting about social media
Musk has previously expressed distaste for advertising and Twitter’s dependence on it, suggesting more emphasis on other business models such as paid subscriptions that won’t allow big corporations to dictate policy on how social media operates. He told advertisers on Thursday he wants to make his platform the most well-known advertising platform in the world.
“I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump; I think that was a mistake,” Musk said at a conference in May, pledging to reverse the ban were he to become the company’s owner.
But relations between the pair seem to have soured since, with the men publicly trading barbs over the summer. After Trump called Musk a “bullsh*t artist” at a rally in July, Musk responded by tweet, writing, “I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.”
But more than professional utility ties me to the site. Twitter hooks people in much the same way slot machines do, with what experts call an “intermittent reinforcement schedule.” Most of the time, it’s repetitive and uninteresting, but occasionally, at random intervals, some compelling nugget will appear. B.F. Skinner found that rats and pigeons have a good propensity for generatingcompulsive behavior because of unpredictable rewards.
“I don’t know that Twitter engineers ever sat around and said, ‘We are creating a Skinner box,’” said Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist at New York University and author of a book about gambling machine design. She said that it is basically what they have built. It’s one reason people who should know better regularly self-destruct on the site — they can’t stay away.
Musk also pledged to “defeat the spam bots or die trying,” referring to the fake and scam accounts that are often especially active in the replies to his tweets and those of others with large followings on the platform.
It’s a theme he reiterated both in public, telling Twitter employees at an all-staff meeting that the platform should allow all legal speech, and in private, texting investor Antonio Gracias that “Free speech matters most when it’s someone you hate spouting what you think is bull****.”
It is an open question if the changes to Twitter policies will have an effect on real-world behavior. For example, a 2017 study of more than 1200 US Republican and Democratic Twitter users found no significant impact of exposure to accounts operated by the Russian Internet Research Agency on political attitudes and behaviours3. Stringhini says that they measure what types of narratives pick up and how they go viral in their research. The only thing that we can say is that online messaging may be changing opinions in the real world.
If you want to see a view of what Musk will look like, you just have to look at alternative platforms such as Parler, Gab and Truth Social that promise fewer restrictions on speech.
On those sites, he said, “the feature is the bug — where being able to say and do the kinds of things that are prohibited from more mainstream social media platforms is actually why everyone gravitates to them. And what we see there is that they are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.”
Twitter CEO Elon Musk has decided to offer “general amnesty” to suspended accounts starting next week — a gentler way of saying that he’s decided to welcome back some of the site’s worst and most toxic people. It’s the second major moderation decision he’s made since taking over after unbanning former President Donald Trump; both decisions were made after Musk ran an informal poll from his personal Twitter account.
Alex Jones, who was kicked off for abusive behavior in 2018, could possibly have his ban lifted.
The person urged Musk to hire “someone who has a savvy cultural/political view” to lead enforcement, suggesting “a Blake Masters type.” Masters is the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona who has been endorsed by Trump and has echoed his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
What did you get done this week? The tweet of Musk and the company that owns Meta-Owner is a danger to social media
Allowing Trump and others to return could set a precedent for other social networks, including Meta-owned Facebook, which is considering whether to reinstate the former president when its own ban on him expires in January 2023.
“What did you get done this week?” Musk snapped and said he was not joining the board and that he would buy the company.
The people wouldn’t say if all the paperwork for the deal, originally valued at $44 billion, had been signed or if the deal has closed. They said Musk has fired the CEO and CFO of the social media platform. The people were not able to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the deal.
That is likely welcome news to the billionaire, who has complained that Twitter’s costs outstrip revenues and has implied the company is overstaffed for its size.
“The long-term potential for Twitter, in my view, is an order of magnitude greater than its current value,” he said on Tesla’s earnings conference call last week.
The weak state of the digital ad market and changes he wants to make to moderation of content may give him little choice but to find other sources of revenue.
“Advertisers want to know that their ads are not going to appear alongside extremists, that they’re not going to be subsidizing or associating with the types of things that would turn off potential customers,” Carusone said.
Investigation of Musk’s $44 billion Twitter Deal and the Social Media Site Zatko’s Debris Burning Misdeeds
It’s always difficult to say what he meant. Musk told staff that the company should be similar to the Chinese “super-app” that combines social media, messaging, payments and shopping.
Other American tech companies have tried this approach, but so far it hasn’t worked in the United States.
Federal authorities are investigating Elon Musk in connection with his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, the social media platform said in a court filing Thursday.
Legal experts believed that the deal would be enforced in court. Two weeks before the contentious legal battle was set to go to trial, Musk said he would follow through with the deal on its original terms after all. Musk asked for a stay of the legal proceedings as the parties negotiated, causing concern from the social network that he might not close the deal.
Musk agreed to buy the company at a price of $54.20 per share last week, but he proposed to go ahead and do it. The judge overseeing the dispute later in the week ruled to pause the legal proceedings until Oct. 28 following a request from Musk.
The executives of the social network are under investigation, Spiro told CNN. This misdirection was sent to uncover which of their assorted misdeeds they are being investigated for.
In a filing on Thursday, the social media company maintained that it didn’t instruct Zatko to burn several notebooks as Musk’s team had claimed. Zatko destroyed his notebooks, claimed the social media site.
Free speech on social media: The role of parler and Musk in the fight against a far-right ideology, and what they can do to stop them
Editor’s Note: Kara Alaimo, an associate professor in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University, writes about issues affecting women and social media. She was spokeswoman for international affairs in the Treasury Department during the Obama administration. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. CNN has more opinion on it.
The company that Parler is purchasing is a conservative one and has been the subject of controversy in the past. West, who has now legally changed his name to Ye, was described as being in the free speech media space where he would never have to fear being removed from social media again.
In a release by Parler, West said that “in a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves.”
If West buys Parler and Musk takes over Twitter, conservative users will be able to use the site even more. These men’s “free speech” policies may lead to people being targeted by hate online. They will become more extreme because of their interactions in the conservative space which may result in a far-right ideology that has far-reaching effects on our politics.
The issue of how and why Twitter — like other major platforms — limits the reach of certain content has been long been a hot button issue on Capitol Hill and among some prominent social media users, especially conservatives. It’s been said many times that the company does not moderate content based on political affiliation, but enforces its policies equally in an effort to keep users safe. Jack said in the interview that his company doesn’t look at content with regards to political viewpoint or ideology. We look at behavior.”
University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks says when women are online victims of online hate, they usually stop writing, take down websites, and refrain from doing online political commentary.
These free speech policies make it clear that the most important thing to remember is that they are an ugly form of censorship that scares away the voices of people who are attacked by users of these platforms.
West has already described Parler as a place where conservative views can flourish, and nonconservatives are unlikely to flock to Truth Social, given its association with Trump. If women, people of color, and others leave the social media platform, it could be used by conservatives as well. This would make them even more passionate.
How Trump Met Donald Trump on Twitter: An Analysis of Musk’s Twitter-Adversarial Memorandum Against a Black-Box Deal
Harvard University law professor and author of “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread,Why We Believe Them, and What Can” writes that people who are like minded might end up thinking more extreme versions of their thoughts before talking to one another. Sunstein says that their exchanges elevate their beliefs and make them more confident.
So, when conservatives get together on social media, we can expect them to become more far right. In ways that laid the groundwork for Trump’s presidency, far-right views nurtured on these social networks could have a big impact on our country’s politics. It isn’t hard to imagine that the people who commune on these sites could band together to support and elect political candidates who share their worldviews.
We can expect these male owners to amplify their own views, even if they are sexist, misogynistic, racist, or otherwise offensive.
In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming, where you can choose your experience according to your preferences. “Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise … Let us build something extraordinary together.”
Personette replied to Musk on Thursday, saying she had had a great discussion with him on Wednesday. Personette said that the commitment to brand safety for advertisers remained unchanged. “Looking forward to the future!”
The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reported that one ad buying agency had already received requests from about a dozen clients to pause their advertisements on Twitter if Musk restores Trump’s account, and other were considering doing the same.
Musk said in the letter that he had made a lofty statement about the acquisition not being meant to be a money-making venture.
The lawsuit alleges that Musk was trying to get out of a deal for which he had developed buyer’s remorse and that he was using the bot argument as a ruse. In the weeks after the deal was announced, the stock market declined as people worried about rising inflation and a recession. Musk’s personal net worth was also hit by the downturn.
It is a reversal of fortune for Musk who acquired the company for $44 billion, but also for the platform used by some of the most powerful people on the planet.
Tesla CEO Yoel Roth’s Twitter hysteria after the first day of the Deal: a new viewpoint on the role of social media
The parties were given a deadline of 5 pm on Oct. 28 to complete the deal or face a new trial.
Although they came quickly, the major personnel moves had been widely expected and almost certainly are the first of many major changes the mercurial Tesla CEO will make.
Over the weekend, Musk smeared Twitter’s former head of safety, Yoel Roth, who features prominently in the documents, with homophobic tropes common in anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theories. The doctor Musk attacked is Anthony Fauci, who Musk says will feature in future installments of the 140 character file on social media.
The note is a shift from Musk’s position that Twitter is unfairly infringing on free speech rights by blocking misinformation or graphic content, said Pinar Yildirim, associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
She said it’s also a realization that no moderation is good for business and that could cause advertisers and subscribers to desert the micro-blogging site.
Yildirim said consumers should not be bombarded with things they do not want to hear about, and that the platform takes no responsibility.
But Musk has been signaling that the deal is going through. He strolled into the company’s San Francisco headquarters Wednesday carrying a porcelain sink, changed his Twitter profile to “Chief Twit,” and tweeted “Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!”
And overnight the New York Stock Exchange notified investors that it will suspend trading in shares of Twitter before the opening bell Friday in anticipation of the company going private under Musk.
It was not clear from Musk’s enthusiasm about visiting the headquarters this week if it was a sign of a change in his views on turning the building into a homeless shelter.
Thursday’s note to advertisers shows that the emphasis is now on advertising revenue, specifically the need for more “relevant ads” that rely on collecting and analyzing users’ personal information.
With that announcement, Musk, who has said he now votes Republican, prompted an outcry from some conservatives, who accused him of continuing a practice they opposed. The clash reflects an underlying tension at the company under Musk, as the billionaire promised a more maximalist approach to free speech and also tried to reassure advertisers and users that there will still be content moderation guardrails.
Why Social Media Should not be Used to Destroy Democracy: A Comment on Musk, Isaacson, and the War on Social Media in the Democratic Republic of Congo
A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.
Musk has ruined the information environment he’s now overseeing, but he is also trying to tear down the little infrastructure that was erected to help users sift through the daily chaos. CNN and other news organizations have reported that he wants to strip public figures and institutions of their blue verified badges if they do not pay.
A business story can appear as a charging for verified badges. But the move will have significant ramifications on the information landscape. Most notably, it will make it much more difficult for users to distinguish from authentic and inauthentic accounts.
The right has for years lashed out at “blue checks,” whom in their eyes represent elitist gatekeepers who control the conversation, even though many conservatives also don blue badges. Taking away those free blue checks, and the air of authority they give upon the profile they are appended to, will certainly delight some conservatives.
Musk’s authorized biographer, Walter Isaacson, tweeted in 2018 that “the best thing” one could do to “save social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email, and reduce hacking would be authenticating users.”
When billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter and pledged that “the bird is freed” last week, Felix Ndahinda saw a threat rising on the horizon.
To Ndahinda, however, it is clear that the normalization of hate speech and conspiracy theories on social media could have contributed to violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, even if academics have not yet been able to delineate its contribution clearly. It is difficult to identify the casual link from a social media message to violence. “But we have many actors making public incitements to commit crime, and then later those crimes are committed.”
What Happened to Twitter in Musk’s Transition? The Language of the Most Popular Tweets in Anti-Gay, Racist and Sexist Categories
The company’s future is still uncertain. Musk has met with civil-rights leaders about his plan to put a moderation council in charge of establishing policies on hate speech and harassment. Users who had been banned before Musk’s takeover of the company would not be reinstated until a process had been set up for allowing them to do so, Musk has said.
Some of the users who have been banned from Twitter will have retreated to lesser-known platforms with fewer regulations on what can be said, says Stringhini. Social-media activity becomes more toxic once there. He says that they see a community growing more committed, but also smaller.
False narratives start on these platforms, according to Stringhini. Those narratives explode when they are on a mainstream platform. “They get pushed on Twitter and go out of control because everybody sees them and journalists cover them,” he says.
James Piazza, who studies terrorism at Penn State University in University Park, is scared of people using inflammatory speech on social media. “That’s the situation where you can have more violence.”
To study how Musk’s ownership changed, the researchers searched through every single one of the 20 most popular posts between March 1 andNovember 13 of this year, looking for any that were anti-gay, racist or sexist. They then reviewed the language of those tweets in each of the three categories and attempted to judge their true intent.
The Big Pharma Plan to Silence Me: A Signal to the Global tech Industry to Backtrack on the ISP/SIG Acts of the Indian Government
Big pharma created a plan to silence me. Everybody tries to silence me,” she said. “Ma’am, please speak at a lower volume. I am sorry but am I too loud for the intensive care unit? You are not sick!
I’ll reach out to you. Oh my god, your profile is so funny. I love funny guys,” Schumer, dressed in a red dress, said as the bot. They said that I was a bot. I like funny guys like you. You should check out the website where I and other girls hang out.
But the most notable person to speak in front of the council: former president Donald Trump, played by James Austin Johnson. The account of Trump was banned in 2021.
“Yes, we’ve all moved to Truth Social, and we love Truth Social. It’s very great,” Johnson’s Trump said. “And in many ways, also terrible. It is very bad. Very, very bad. It’s a bit buggy in terms of making the phone screen crack and the automatically draining of the Venmo.
“How he treats pressure from countries like Saudi Arabia and India—I think those are key indicators of where he’s going with the platform,” says David Kaye, former UN special rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression and clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine.
Piele says that countries like Turkey, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan, which have large, increasingly online populations are all attractive markets as the company looks to grow its revenue and increase its user base. He says that all of those countries have had arguments with social media companies. Last year, the Nigerian government ordered all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block Twitter after the platform deleted a tweet from the country’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, for violating its policies. The government lifted the ban only after Twitter agreed to open an office in the country and pay local taxes.
Chima worried that the lawsuit may not continue with Musk as the owner. The lawsuit in India was cited by Musk in his August countersuit as a threat to the company’s presence in its third largest market. “It would be a vindication of a very problematic, unconstitutional set of actions by the Indian government,” he says. It sends a signal to the global tech industry to back off, don’t try to do more.
Where Do We Live? Elon Musk’s Takeover, and How to Quit on Social Media (The Case Study of New Twitter)
“Tiny talk is talk so small it feels like it’s coming from your own mind,” Musk fired off shortly past 10 pm last Thursday, a thought so deep it might have bubbled up from a fish-bowled dorm room. Congratulations: We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk.
We don’t have to be here, in Tiny Talk Town. We all know it. There are other places online that are a decent hang. The most fervent users are unlikely to leave on their own. Most of the responses to Musk’s takeover aren’t compelling unless you’re a writer. A more thoughtful approach to quitting would be to use a slow burn, instead of a hasty exit. It’s a quiet quitting, but for social media.
It would be easy for an electric car mogul to make a mistake by mistakenly thinking that his own experience on the social network was related to that of everyone else. (Same goes for journalists.) Most of the time, the replies that people write are not originaltweets, and more than half of the users don’t post any original ones. They check in on current events or live sports or celebrity news, and then they go about their lives. They are known as lurkers.
Lurking is not doom and is a practice that took hold during the early days of the Covid outbreak, when many people felt stuck at home and needed info on social media. To sit and observe for a while is an approach to dealing with the chaos and complexity of New Twitter. Check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, sure, then close your app or browser tab. The best way to send atweet is by disengage. During basketball games, keep an eye on it. If you must, direct those message threads away from you. For another time, save your most original thoughts.
In the last week alone, one of the most influential social networks has laid off half of its workforce, alienated powerful advertisers, blew up key aspects of its product, and launched and un-launched other features designed to compensate for it.
Social Media Users Don’t Live in the Wild: Comments on Musk’s Twitter “Fields of Democraticity” and the “Twitter Files”
The account the next one to speak said they had added an Official label to some accounts to combat impersonation.
That paid subscription service, too, was also suspended on Friday with little warning, just two days after its official launch, with the menu option to sign up for Twitter Blue suddenly disappearing from Twitter’s iOS app — the only place the add-on had been offered. The company may resume the offering in the near future.
misinformation experts warned that thePaid Verification feature would make identification of trustworthy information much more difficult during the critical period in the lead up to the US midterm elections. Some of Musk’s fellow high powered users had a hard time giving feedback.
elonmusk, from one person to another, for when you have your customer service hat on. I just spent too much time muting all the newly purchased checkmark accts in an attempt to make my verified mentions useful again,” tweeted billionaire Mark Cuban.
“Bottom line is that you have a decision to make,” Cuban added. “Stick with the new Twitter that democratizes every tweet by paid accounts and puts the onus on all users to curate for themselves. Or return to the time when you used to have access to recaps of the social media giant, back on a micro-level. One makes it easy to stay on top of all the news. The other is terrible.
In an event held for advertisers this week, Musk begged brands to keep using the platform, after a number paused ads, causing a drop in revenue. In the event, Musk sought to appear magnanimous in accepting responsibility for the company’s performance.
According to a internal message posted on the website, Musk has showed little fear of the FTC regulators overseeing their multiple, legally binding consent agreements, making it clear that he won’t launch any new products or services until they’re certain that there is a robust cybersecurity program in place.
The “Twitter Files” are bombshell revelations that show that conservatives were muzzled because of their political views. That’s a long running claim by Republicans, who are convinced social media companies censor them despite ample evidence to the contrary. Twitter’s internal researchers, for example, have found its algorithms favor right-leaning political content.
The poll was a blowout, with 72.4% of respondents voting “yes” toward unbanning accounts, from a pool of slightly more than 3 million votes. It’s difficult to know who voted, but it’s worth remembering that Musk spent a long time trying to get out of buying Twitter based on claims that the service was filled with bots and inauthentic accounts.
The lack of explosive new details is coupled with the fact that Musk refuses to open up the “Twitter Files” to the press at large. He only shared the documents with writers of his choice, instead of giving multiple news outlets access to them. The raw materials and context of the Musk story have been locked away, while relying on a group of gatekeeping writers to cover it. That has without question increased skepticism.
The article was based on files from Hunter Biden’s laptop, which the Post said it got from Trump’s private attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. It was not clear if that material was authentic. After being burned by the Russian hack and leak of Democratic National Committee emails in 2016, tech companies were on edge over the possibility of a repeat – and so Twitter decided to restrict the Post story.
Foreign intelligence officials identified the laptop as possible Russian interference, and major news outlets, unable to corroborate its contents, held off on the story. Twitter went a step further, temporarily forbidding its users from sharing the Post story, even in their DMs.
Fans of Trump suspected there was more to Twitter’s actions. They believed the FBI and the Democratic National Committee, which they believed colluded to rig the 2016 election with allegations of the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia, were meddling in the 2020 vote as well: the Deep State in action.
The TWITTER files confirm Q’s entire main narrative, a QAnon influencer wrote. “Balenciaga confirms the rest.” There was a message that was seen more than 100,000 times on Telegram. (Despite some optimism that his account would be restored, that particular QAnon influencer remains suspended on Twitter.) The custom top-level domain.pizza was used by the personal email Jack Dorsey sent, which Taibbi did not censor in a screenshots he shared.
It was the first day of April 2022, and I was sitting in a law firm’s midtown Manhattan conference room at a meeting of Meta’s Oversight Board, the independent body the scrutinizes its content decisions. For a few minutes it seemed like despair had set in.
The meeting I witnessed was part of that reckoning. And the tone of the discussion led me to wonder if the board would suggest that Meta shut down the program altogether, in the name of fairness. The policies should be for everyone. one board member cried out.
That did not happen. The social media world had a break this week as the Oversight Board finally delivered its Cross Check report, delayed because Meta did not give enough information. It never gave the board a list of people who were given special permission to avoid a takedown, at least until someone looked at the post. The conclusions were scathing. Meta claimed that the program’s purpose was to improve the quality of its content decisions, but the board determined that it was more to protect the company’s business interests. Meta never set up processes to monitor the program and assess whether it was fulfilling its mission. The lack of transparency to the outside world was appalling. Finally, all too often Meta failed to deliver the quick personalized action that was the reason those posts were spared quick takedowns. There were simply too many of those cases for Meta’s team to handle. They frequently remained up for days before being given secondary consideration.
The prime example, featured in the original WSJ report, was a post from Brazilian soccer star Neymar, who posted a sexual image without its subject’s consent in September 2019. Because of the special treatment he got from being in the Cross Check elite, the image—a flagrant policy violation—garnered over 56 million views before it was finally removed. The program was supposed to reduce the impact of mistake in content, but it turned out to be more than that.
It wasn’t recommended that Meta shut down Cross Check. Instead, it called for an overhaul. The reasons are in no way an endorsement of the program but an admission of the devilish difficulty of content moderation. The report made it seem like it was possible to get things right. Meta, like other platforms that give users voice, had long emphasized growth before caution and hosted huge volumes of content that would require huge expenditures to police. Meta spends hundreds of millions on moderation but still makes a lot of errors. Seriously cutting down on those mistakes costs more than the company is willing to spend. The idea of Cross Check is to minimize the error rate on posts from the most important or prominent people. When a celebrity or statesman used its platform to speak to millions, Meta didn’t want to screw up.
The Twitter Files, Part Duex!, Part 2: Elon Musk’s New VP, Has He Leaped His Twitter Account?
Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk on Thursday said he plans to introduce an option to make it possible for users to determine if the company has limited how many other users can view their posts. In doing so, Musk is effectively seizing on an issue that has been a rallying cry among some conservatives who claim the social network has suppressed or “shadowbanned” their content.
If you’ve been shadowbanned you know the reason and how to appeal, according to Musk. He did not provide additional details or a timetable.
His announcement came amid a new release of internal Twitter documents on Thursday, sanctioned and cheered by Musk, that once again placed a spotlight on the practice of limiting the reach of certain, potentially harmful content — a common practice in the industry that Musk himself has seemingly both endorsed and criticized.
There are some examples of the damage caused by the TWo files, in which incomplete censoring leaked contact info for politicians, and Dorsey himself, was present.
In both cases, the internal documents appear to have been provided directly to the journalists by Musk’s team. Musk on Friday shared Weiss’ thread in a tweet and added, “The Twitter Files, Part Duex!!” The popcorn and two popcorn things are there.
Weiss offered several examples of right-leaning figures who had moderation actions taken on their accounts, but it’s not clear if such actions were equally taken against left-leaning or other accounts.
Twitter’s former head of trust and safety has fled his home due to an escalation in threats resulting from Elon Musk’s campaign of criticism against him, a person familiar with the matter told CNN on Monday.
The suspension of president Donald Trump’s account in 2021., was one of the sensitive issues that he worked on. On Monday, Weiss posted a series of screenshots purported to show internal Twitter documents where Roth and others discussed whether to ban Trump’s account, with some employees questioning if the former president’s tweets violated the platform’s policies.
Some of the anti-presidential messages written about the president by Roth in 2016 were later found to be biased against the president.
On Election Day 2016 he wrote that we would fly over the states that voted for a racist, saying that he was just saying.
“We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel. My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs,” Musk tweeted.
The former editor of The Wall Street Journal wrote Monday that the recent social media revelations tell us nothing new. There is no shocking revelation about government censorship or political manipulation. They bring to the surface the deliberations of a company with complex issues that are in line with its values.
Weiss’ tweets suggest that in the wake of January 6, there were Twitter employees both in favor of and against the idea of banning Trump. A screenshot from an internal Twitter slack conversation, where employees’ names have been redacted, shows one employee raising concerns about “censorship” while another notes that “we impose far stricter rules on effectively everyone else on the platform.” Weiss did not say whether the employees in this discussion were involved in making the decision that led to Trump’s ban.
In a message on January 8th, Anika wrote “I also am not seeing clear orcoded incitement to violence.” She was talking about a statement that the 75,000,000 American voters who voted for Trump would have. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
(Navaroli later testified to the House committee investigating January 6 that she and other staffers had been alarmed by content posted on Twitter by the Proud Boys and other extremist groups that echoed statements by Trump, and had worried about the risk of violence ahead of the attack.)
The staffer who removed his name from the screen said that a day after Trump had posted about not going to the inauguration of Biden, it was also a clear no-violation. But a different staffer questioned whether that tweet could be “proof that [Trump] doesn’t support a peaceful transition,” according to Weiss’ tweets.
It doesn’t seem out of line with how social platforms make content moderation decisions, especially in crises, when you use multiple staffers and teams and use research for high-profile decisions.
Led by Fox News, the right-wing media machine is treating the ongoing series of stories as if they were the next Pentagon Papers, breathlessly hyping each new batch of documents as earth-shattering scoops that illuminate horrific abuses of power by woke Twitter overlords of yesteryear.
If you’re just a regular person trying to make sense of what is going on, it can be awfully difficult. The solution is not clear. On one hand, if newsrooms covered each installment, they risk giving air to and further amplifying a storyline that has been selectively framed by Musk as he wages an information war. On the other hand, not dissecting each drop allows him and others to define it in the public square.
Around the time Trump was inaugurated in 2017, I said to colleagues in the newsroom where I worked at the time that we shouldn’t cover everything he said or tweeted. Previously, a president’s every word was assumed to be a carefully chosen signal of future policy, and was reported as such. Many things were clearly said by Trump in order to get a rise out of people. Reporting on them was just feeding the flames, I argued. An editor was pushed back. “He’s the president,” he said, or words to that effect. “What he says is news.”
For instance, we saw a lot of rapid-response news stories about Musk using pronouns that were in reference to a former chief infectious disease expert and gender diversity. Here’s another bunch about the picture of his bedside table with two replica guns on it, and some more about his tweeting a far-right Pepe the Frog meme.
This is how the coverage of Trump was done. The liberal-leaning media were often drawn to stories confirming the belief that a person so clearly unfit to be president would only succeed in bringing himself (or the country) down in flames, while the right-wing media treated his evident egomania, corruption, and lack of interest in grasping basic policy issues or actually doing the job as at best irrelevant and at worst essential qualities for reforming Washington. There was a lot of good reporting going on, but it was these accounts that dominated the conversation. The losers were the public, whose understanding of what was actually happening across the country was forced through incompatible narratives around the behavior of one unhinged man in the White House.
Twitter, Bitcoin, and Mobile: Musk, Bluesky, and a Survey of Key Issues with the Digital Enterprise Space Telegram (Dorsey)
It is not the entire post about Twitter that is important. He also uses it to announce that he’s giving a million dollars a year to encrypted messaging app Signal and asks for suggestions about other grants he should make in the areas of “social media and private communication protocols, bitcoin, and a web-only mobile OS.”
The files were handed over to specific journalists and they then posted excerpts on their websites, taking issue with how it was done. In a post on Medium, which is his official account, he writes that he still wishes for everyone to become more transparent in their actions. It seems likely that he is fully aware of what type of decision making process a full document-dump would reveal, as he is asking for receipts on his own company.
The founder of Bluesky is also working on a new protocol that is intended to create a more sustainable way for social media to work, which is why he wasn’t able to implement it at TWo. Keeping governments and corporations out of conversations is one of his tenets, as is making sure moderation decisions happen on a local basis or not using one at all.
One particularly eyebrow-raising statement from Dorsey reads “any content produced by someone for the internet should be permanent until the original author chooses to delete it,” adding that “content takedowns and suspensions should not be possible.” He does admit that stance could create “significant issues” when it comes to things like “illegal activity” (what happens when this stance collides with someone posting child sexual abuse material, or revenge porn?), but says that the ideal would “allow for far better solutions than we have today.”
But many tech journalists, social media experts and former Twitter employees say Musk’s claims are over-hyped, given that the documents shared so far largely corroborate what is already known about the messy business of policing a large social network.
The research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory said that what’s coming through in the tweeter files is people who are confronting high-stakes, unexpected events and trying to figure out what policies apply.
Musk has provided exclusive access to a small group of independent journalists, including Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi who are required to first post information about the documents on the internet.
They show Twitter executives and rank and file employees grappling with difficult tradeoffs, questioning the company’s rules and how they should be applied – and in some cases, getting things wrong.
The New York Post story about shady business dealings of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, was briefly blocked by Twitter before the 2020 presidential election.
Citing its rules against sharing hacked material containing private information, the company showed a warning to anyone who tried to post a link to the article saying it was “potentially harmful.” The post’s own account was also suspended until it deleted it’s posts about the story. (Facebook was alarmed by the article, too, but didn’t go as far as Twitter. It allowed the link to be posted, but limited distribution of those posts while its outside fact-checkers reviewed the claims.)
Twitter’s aggressive stance immediately created a huge backlash across the political spectrum. The company was slammed for taking a heavy-handed approach to the story that was controversial but was reported by a major news outlet and for offering little justification for its decision. Within days Twitter reversed the block and changed its policies on hacked materials. The company had made a mistake, said the CEO at the time.
It shows no evidence that the government had anything to do with the block of the New York Post story.
Everyone acted according to the best information at the time, and I still believe there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, he wrote. “Mistakes were made.”
He said he wished the internal files had been “released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider.” He added: “There’s nothing to hide…only a lot to learn from.”
What have we learned from Musk? It’s important to talk about what we’ve learned and how we can improve it, but what we don’t know how
There’s a good reason to demand more information from social media companies. “Often these decisions are quite inscrutable,” she said. “These are platforms that shape public opinion, and so the question of how they are moderated and how they’re designed is important.”
But she said to get the full picture, outsiders need more than the “anecdotes” Musk’s selected journalists are sharing – which, so far, focus exclusively on charged, highly partisan American political dramas.
She said that it would be beneficial to see discussions about other world leaders who did not get kicked off the platform.
“There’s value in what’s been revealed to the public, but at the same time, it is primarily reinforcing a perception in large part based on your pre-existing opinions as partisan individuals within the United States,” DiResta said.
Framing the disclosures as secret knowledge plays particularly well on Twitter, said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
His tweets triggered violent threats against both men. Roth and his family have been forced to flee their home, according to a person familiar with the matter.
“The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn’t solve anything,” Dorsey wrote on Tuesday. “If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.”
A member of the Trust and Safety Council who requested anonymity said the CEO’s willingness to target people working to keep users safe is creating a chilling effect.
It is being processed as if we own the last regime, in contrast to saying ‘Here are things that we can see in these files and here is how it’s going to be done differently under our watch.’