The takeover of Musk’s social media empire after the acquisition of XMM Securities for a billionaire: Advice from Founder and CEO Jack Dorsey
A cloud of uncertainty hung over the company, employees and shareholders for much of the year as a result of the deal closing. After initially agreeing to buy the company in April, Musk spent months attempting to get out of the deal, first citing concerns about the number of bots on the platform and later allegations raised by a company whistleblower.
Jack Dorsey, who left the company in May after being deposed as CEO in November, could potentially once more exert control over the company if Musk succeeds in taking it over. The founder of the micro-publishing service talked about the takeover with Musk and offered advice.
Musk can singlehandedly upend the media and political environment by changing public discourse online and disrupting the conservative-leaning sphere of social media properties that emerged largely in response to grievances about bans and restrictions on mainstream services.
Musk will also be extended his influence by the acquisition. The billionaire already has stakes in companies that are developing cars, rockets,robots, and satellite internet, as well as experimental ventures such as brain implants. A social media platform he controls shapes how many people communicate and get their news.
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.
The Complex Environment of Twitter and the Detection of Incendiary Speech by the Musk-Mumford-McCormick Deal
Delaware Chancery Court chancellor Kathaleen St. Judge McCormick gave the parties until 5 p.m. on Oct. 28 to close the deal or face a rescheduled trial.
“It’s a very complex ecosystem,” says Gianluca Stringhini, who studies cybersecurity and cybersafety at Boston University in Massachusetts. “But if you go and get rid of moderation on Twitter completely, then things will become much worse.”
“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.
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.
Ndahinda has trained in international law and works in Tilburg, Netherlands as a consultant on issues pertaining to conflict and peace in the African Great Lakes region. He has been watching what a free Twitter can do. He has been monitoring the social-media hate speech for years. Much of that incendiary speech has gone undetected by the systems that platforms, including Twitter, use to identify harmful content, because it is shared in languages that are not built into their screening tools.
Weiss suggested that such actions were taken “all without users’ knowledge.” In some cases, Twitter could apply “strikes” which correspond with suspended accounts for violating its rules, and in others it may limit certain content that violates its policies. Users are notified of their accounts being temporarily suspended in the case of strikes.
Some of the accounts that were banned due to their content have been brought back into existence as a result of Musk’s leadership. Those moves raised concerns that Musk’s Twitter could contribute to a rise in public displays of hate and antisemitism offline.
False narratives begin on these platforms, says Stringhini. Those narratives can explode when they appear on mainstream platforms. “They get pushed on Twitter and go out of control because everybody sees them and journalists cover them,” he says.
“When you have people that have some sort of public stature on social media using inflammatory speech — particularly speech that dehumanizes people — that’s where I get really scared,” says James Piazza, who studies terrorism at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. You can have more violence in that situation.
And regulations on the way from the European Union could make Musk’s ‘free speech’ rhetoric impractical as well, says Rebekah Tromble, a political scientist at George Washington University in Washington DC. The EU will require social-media companies to mitigate risks caused by illegal content when it comes into effect in less than a decade. Tromble thinks that because of how difficult it would be to create separate policies and practices for Europe, it would be hard for platforms to do that. “When it’s fundamental systems, including core algorithms, that are introducing those risks, mitigation measures will necessarily impact the system as a whole.”
Researchers will study the impact of Musk’s takeover on social media in the coming weeks, looking at things like the spread of misinformation and whether or not users quit the platform in protest. Tromble intends to monitor campaigns of coordinated harassment on Twitter.
An analysis showed that after Musk took over, the most popular tweets had a greater prominence with potentially toxic language. For tweets using words associated with anti-LGBTQ+ or antisemitic posts, seven of the top 20 posts in each category were now hateful. For popular tweets using potentially racist language, one of the top 20 was judged to be hate speech.
The new owner plans to introduce an option to make it easier for users to determine if the company restricts 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.
Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status so you know if you have been shadowbanned, the reason, and how to appeal. He did not provide additional details or a timetable.
Eventually, many (if not all) news outlets kicked (if not entirely) the habit of amplifying every wild tweet and got back to doing their real job, which was to report on what Trump’s administration was actually doing—much of which he himself may have been, at best, only dimly aware of. News habits from the early Trump years have come back to life over the past few weeks.
Weiss’ tweets follow the first “Twitter Files” drop earlier this month from journalist Matt Taibbi, who shared internal Twitter emails about the company’s decision to temporarily suppress a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden and his laptop, which largely corroborated what was already known about the incident.
The files contain emails, chats, and other material pre-dating Musk’s ownership. They revealed incomplete glimpses of how Twitter officials deliberated over high-profile decisions, including blocking the Post article and banning then-President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. It was shown how important it is for government officials and law enforcement to communicate with the company, along with other tech platforms, through flagging content that may violate their policies and sharing threat assessments.
Defending Trump from the Times: Covering Right-Leaning Political Leaders with Twitter’s Hateful Controversy
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.
Roth has since been the subject of criticism and threats following the release of the Twitter Files. However, things took a dark turn over the weekend when Musk endorsed a spurious claim of pedophilia made by conspiracy theorists.
Among Roth’s tweets was one he wrote on Election Day 2016 that read, “I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.”
“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.
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 signal of future policy and reported. It was obvious that Trump said many things in order to get a rise out of people. I argued that the reporting on them just fed the fire. The editor pushed back. He said “He is the president” or words to that effect. “What he says is news.”
Here, for instance, we saw a slew of rapid-response news stories about Musk’s tweet on December 11 that “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” a dig at the government’s former chief infectious disease expert, as well as at 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 precisely the way coverage of Trump worked. The liberal-leaning media stories of the candidate’s inability to grasp basic policies were seen as confirmation by the right-wing media that he would only succeed in bringing himself down in flames. There was a lot of good reporting going on in the same time, but these accounts 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.
This is what’s happening with Musk and Twitter. The relationship between the new owner and the journalists who cover him is described by the Atlantic as adysfunctional, where the least defensible statements and claims on all sides are amplified in a never-ending cycle.
At the hearing on Wednesday, which focused on Twitter’s handling of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the leadup to the 2020 election, the Florida Democrat criticized his Republican counterparts for saying “God bless Elon Musk.” Moskowitz asked: “God bless the guys who is allowing Nazis and antisemitism to perpetuate on Twitter?” The Anti-Defamation League stated that there has been an increase in antisemitic comments since Musk took over the platform.
Editor’s note: Kara Alaimo is a professor in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University. Her book “This Feed Is on Fire: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls — The bookAnd How We can Reclaim It” will be published in two years. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. CNN has an opinion on it.
The platform has a policy against posting private information online, but Musk accused journalists of violating that by revealing his location. But none of the banished reporters — including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan and The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell — appeared to have done so. CNN asked Musk and his company for comment.
Reliable information should be found in a healthy town square. But researchers at Tufts University recently found that tweets refuting hate and misinformation were “an order of magnitude greater” on Twitter before Musk took over.
The panel included Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose personal Twitter account was permanently suspended in January 2022 by the company’s previous management for repeatedly violating Twitter’s rules against false claims about COVID-19 and vaccines. (Greene was reinstated in November after Musk bought Twitter.)
It’s clear that we can’t rely on Musk’s Twitter to provide a safe, open forum. We need new, non-profit social networks run by boards responsible for considering the public’s interest when making critical decisions about things like content moderation and community standards. Many of the people with these skills have just lost their jobs. There has been a number of layoffs at tech companies, including Facebook and CNN, in the last few weeks. We desperately need a truly open town hall and some of the professionals should work together to create it.
Former Twitter officials denied claims the U.S. government and Joe Biden’s presidential campaign were involved in the social network’s controversial, short-lived decision to block users from sharing a New York Post story about Biden’s son Hunter just weeks before the 2020 election.
Republicans hold up the incident as a prime example of Silicon Valley’s alleged anti-conservative bias. The Biden campaign and the government may have had something to do with the fact that the story was suppressed on the social media site.
James Comer said during his opening remarks that the federal government was able to limit the free exercise of speech by using a private company.
Twitter should not have handled the Hunter Biden Laptop Attack during the 2016 Democratic National Committee hearing: a “Badah! No have I seen this before”
The Post article about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop at the time wasn’t clear on how much of the material was authentic. Tech companies, intelligence agencies and federal law Enforcement were on edge regarding a possible Russian “hack and leak” operation, similar to what they did in 2016
“I believe Twitter erred in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016,” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, told the panel, alluding to Russia’s hacking of Democratic National Committee emails that year that were selectively leaked to the public in the final months of the campaign.
“I’m aware of no unlawful collusion with or direction from any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation,” James Baker, who served as Twitter’s deputy general counsel, told the committee.
The White House slammed Wednesday’s hearing as “a bizarre political stunt” and the latest effort by hardcore Republicans to “relitigate the outcome of the 2020 election.”
The release of the “Twitter Files” by Musk added to the GOP’s allegations of colluding with Democrats in order to defeat them in the election.
A witness called as a witness by the committee Democrats said that the phrase “go back to where you came from” had been removed from the policy on abuse of immigrants.
The witness said the Trump White House had asked the social networking site to take down a picture of an insult to the president. Twitter declined to do so, but Democrats seized on her testimony to rebut Republicans’ claims of political bias.
Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former chief legal officer, told the committee that she had approved the decision to block the link to the Post story on Twitter. She said in retrospect, Twitter should have immediately unlocked the newspaper’s account when it reversed that decision.
Citing its rules against sharing hacked material containing private information, Twitter showed a warning to anyone who tried to post a link to the article saying it was “potentially harmful.” It also suspended the Post’s Twitter account until it deleted its tweets about the story.
On Wednesday, Roth testified that potential Russian interference was the frame through which Twitter viewed the Post story – even though he personally did not believe the Post article broke Twitter’s rules.
He said that the decisions here weren’t straightforward, and hindsight was 20/20. “It’s not obvious what the proper response is to a suspected but not confirmed cyberattacks on another government in relation to a presidential election.”
The split-screen format that’s become the norm when lawmakers grill tech executives follows the hearing, which was interrupted by a power outage, with Republicans accusing witnesses of censoring while Democrats argued tech platforms don’t do enough to stop harmful content.
The panel was attacked by Greene for her ban and by the former executives for their allegations. That included echoing smears against Roth previously amplified by Musk. Roth testified the threats that had resulted from Musk’s airing of those smears have forced him to sell his home.
Committee Democrats blasted the premise of the hearing, accusing their Republican colleagues of wasting time and taxpayers’ money on a political crusade.
Raskin and fellow Democrats said lawmakers should be focused on how Twitter was used to whip up violence ahead of Jan. 6, how the platform continues to be the target of state-backed manipulation campaigns by Russia, Iran and China, and how it’s been used to foment transphobia and attacks on marginalized communities.
To drive home that point, the Democrats called Collier Navaroli as witness. She testified before a select committee about the role that the platform played in the insurrection.
Social Media Abundance and Antisemitism: After the Greenblatt Report, Moskowitz blasted the Twitter CEO at the Mar-a-Lago White House
The congressman said that it proves that antisemitism is real after he received a lot of racist comments on the social media site.
Moskowitz and many other Democrats on the subpanel used their allotted time to grill the former Twitter executives testifying at the hearing about the company’s policies for policing hate on the platform. During his questioning, Moskowitz also rebuked former President Donald Trump for hosting white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago last year. He brought a large copy of a hateful post that Fuentes had tweeted at Moskowitz, telling the room, “No, not all Republicans are Nazis, but I gotta tell you, Nazis seem really comfortable with Donald Trump. I have some questions about that.
The warning from the Department of Homeland Security about terror threats to multiple groups, including the Jewish community, is evidence of his heightened concern, Moskowitz said. “DHS notes that threat actors have recently mobilized to violence, and there is an ‘enduring threat’ to the Jewish community,” he writes.
“These findings, combined with Twitter gutting its trust and safety operations, suggest serious issues will continue to persist on the platform as it pertains to effective content moderation and the proliferation of antisemitism,” Greenblatt said.