The Story of Elon Musk’s Twitter Acquisition and the Controversy of Trump’s Tortuous Media Embedding on Twitter
The owners of social media sites have too much power and that’s why it’s so upsetting to see Elon Musk’s planned acquisition of Twitter. Much of the nation’s public discourse is conducted in sites owned by Mark Zuckerberg and other billionaires and regulated by automated processes hidden from public scrutiny.
“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.
Relations between the pair seem to have soured since, with the men having public disagreements over the summer. Musk responded to Trump calling Musk a bullsh*t artist by writing, “It is time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset.”
The deal closes removes uncertainty that has hung over the company, employees and shareholders for a long time. Musk spent months trying to get out of the deal after first citing concerns about the number of bots on the platform and later allegations from a company employee.
The company would have been damaged if Musk did more damage in court, it seemed like he would end up owning it. That could have adversely affected his relationship with his co-investors, who had taken financial pressure off of him by agreeing to help finance his acquisition deal. “The more this continued, Musk risked not only buying a company that was worse off than when he began this process, but doing it with less equity support,” Lipton says.
Musk has said he wants to loosen Twitter’s reins on speech. A surge in hate speech was reported by the company after he purchased it. The company said that it had removed 1,500 accounts because of these posts by Oct. 31st, and that its moderation policies have not changed.
Why Twitter under Musk is What It Takes to Be: A Critique of the “Skinner Box” he Created in the Early 2000s
There was not much support for the argument in the material that came to light before the trial. Miller says there’s nothing that looks like fraud, even though he knows his best claim is fraud. “They’ve run out of cards to play.”
Musk’s decision to fold may also have been influenced by the potential for the trial to damage him personally. The entrepreneur watched the internet chew over a tranche of his personal text messages with major figures in Silicon Valley last week. This week he faced what Miller says would likely have been “a very embarrassing” deposition.
For more than a decade, Twitter has been a kind of digital town square, a place where people have sought information, advocacy, community and job opportunities – even love.
An anthropology professor at New York University and author of a book on gambling machine design explained that the engineers of social media did not say they were creating a Skinner box. 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.
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****.”
“An increase in moderation on the platform will be sure to frighten advertisers, as they find it harder to protect their brands compared with other social platforms,” Enberg said.
If you want a “keyhole view of whatTwitter under Musk will look like,” just look at alternative platforms like Parler, Gab and Truth Social, which promise fewer restrictions on speech.
The feature on those sites is the bug, where being able to do things that are not allowed on other social media platforms is why everyone gravitates to them. They are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.
In his push to loosen Twitter’s content restrictions, he’s reinstated other high-profile accounts that were permanently banned for breaking Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct, harmful misinformation or incitements of violence.
The accounts belonging to CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell and other journalists who have covered Musk aggressively in recent weeks were all abruptly permanently suspended. The account of an independent journalist was banned as well.
Musk should hire someone who has a good cultural view to lead enforcement, as recommended by the person. 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.
Twitter and the Ruling of the Twitter Particle” By The Ex-President: A Puzzle for Brands and Digital Markets
Allowing Trump and others to return could set a precedent for other social networks, including Facebook, which has a ban on the ex-president.
Musk’s texts reveal that an initially cautiously friendly relationship between the two men when Musk first invested quickly soured after Agrawal told Musk that his tweets criticizing the platform were “not helping me make Twitter better.”
The Washington Post reported a week ago that Musk plans to cut three quarters of the employees of the company when he takes over. The newspaper cited documents and unnamed sources familiar with the deliberation.
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.
In order to free up money, a lot of people have to be fired. The problem with doing that, though, is that you lose a bunch of the engineers who could build cool shit to make Twitter more attractive. This is maybe not a major problem, as all tech companies are cutting people loose right now, so Musk can hire new talent on the cheap if he has to.
He may have little choice other than to find alternate sources of revenue besides advertising, given the weak state of the digital ad market and the changes he wants to make to content moderation.
That creates a challenge for brands, which are sensitive to the types of content their ads run against, an issue made more complicated by social media. Hate speech, pornography and misinformation are topics that most marketers dread the thought of having their ads run.
The Overdose of WeChat: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls – And How We Can Reclaim It
Everyone’s guess is what he meant. But this summer, Musk told Twitter staff that the company should emulate WeChat, the Chinese “super-app” that combines social media, messaging, payments, shopping, ride-hailing — basically, anything you might use your phone to do.
Other American tech companies have implemented this strategy, but it hasn’t been successful in the United States.
The social platform said in a court filing that the federal authorities are investigating Musk and his acquisition of the company.
The company filed an accusation that Musk’s legal team did not give the SEC or the FTC drafts of their communications about the deal.
“Twitter’s executives are under federal investigation,” Spiro said in a statement to CNN. This was a misdirection sent by the company to find out which of their misdeeds they are being investigated for.
“Twitter did not ask Zatko to torch his own documents, much less demand that he do so,” Twitter’s filing read. “Twitter had no knowledge of Zatko’s notebooks and no idea what information they contained.”
Better laws can help to revive competition, get rid of harmful behavior, and strengthen American democracy because of social media’s potential. In short, policymakers can ensure the question of who owns Twitter, or Instagram or TikTok, doesn’t matter quite so much.
If you want to limit the power of a single social media network, make room for new ones, and allow third-party websites that allow you to modify your online experience, such as controlling what kids can see.
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. Her book “This Feed is on Fire: Why Social Media is Toxic for Women and Girls – And How We Can Reclaim It” is to be published in 2024 by Alcove Press. The views expressed in this commentary are hers alone. Read more opinion on CNN.
Kanye West’s alleged antisemitic tweet and his actions on social media are likely to undermine conservative positions on the issue of free speech
The conservative social media company Parler announced on Monday that it is being purchased by Kanye West, who was temporarily suspended from Twitter this month for an antisemitic tweet. The statement from the Parler’s parent company said that West would “never have to fear being removed from social media again” after he legally changed his name to Ye.
In a world where conservatism is considered to be controversial, West said that we have to make sure that we have the right to express ourselves.
If Musk and West co-ownership Parler, then conservatives will have a lot more opportunities to promote their ideas on social media. These men’s “free speech” policies are likely to drive away people victimized by hate online. If the people in these conservative spaces persist in their behaviors, they will become even more extreme, which will have a far-reaching effect on our politics.
While men like West and Musk claim to promote free speech by not favoring moderation of problematic content, it leads to people being harmed by abusive content, which is why it is important for men like Musk and Trump to favor moderation.
More than one in three women have been victims of online violence according to a 2020 study by The Economist Intelligence Unit. As Amnesty International and others have found, women of color are most affected. Online there is antisemitic content. A report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that there had been over seven million views of anti-Jewish posts on five social networks.
In practice, what these free speech policies really say is that censorship is a form of suppression that makes people afraid to speak their minds on these platforms.
West describes Parler as a place where conservative views can flourish, and nonconservatives will not flock to Truth Social, because of its association with Trump. If women, people of color, and others start leaving, it could leave it as a platform for conservatives as well. It’s likely that the views of those who remain more zealous will be made worse by this.
On Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, and What Can Be Done On Twitter,” Cass Sunstein wrote
“When like-minded people get together, they often end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk to one another,” Harvard University law professor Cass Sunstein writes in “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, and What Can Be Done.” Sunstein says that their exchanges increase their beliefs and make them more confident.
Conservatives will become more right when they get together on social media. In the same way Rush and other conservative talk-show hosts changed the political landscape in the 1990s by laying the groundwork for Trump’s presidency, the far right views nurtured on these social networks may have a huge impact on our 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.
Even if they are sexist, misogynistic, racist or otherwise offensive, these male owners will likely use their platforms to amplify their own views.
He said that the platform must be warm and welcoming to all so that they can choose their experience according to their 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.”
Sarah Personette said she had a good discussion with Musk on Wednesday. Personette said that the commitment to brand safety remained unchanged. “Looking forward to the future!”
The decision to restore countless previously banned accounts could further alienate Twitter’s advertisers, many of whom have fled the platform in the wake of the chaos since Musk took over and out of fear that their ads could end up running alongside objectionable content. The departures of key advertisers has led to a drop in revenue at the company, according to Musk.
Musk tried to soothe advertisers who were worried that he wasn’t buying the platform to help humans, saying that he didn’t want it to become a free-for-all hellscape.
Last week, Musk completed his $44 billion deal to buy the company which resulted in massive layoffs and questions as to if he would be able to restore banned accounts.
Musk said that the accounts that are active in the replies to his tweet and others with large followings need to be defeated or die trying.
Tesla’s Takeover of Twitter and the Investigation of its Employee-On Board: Twitter’s Misleading CEO and Dr. Anthony Fauci, Revisited
The deal is due to be finalized by a Delaware judge on Friday. She said she was going to schedule a trial if there wasn’t an agreement.
Since Musk suddenly proclaimed he actually wanted to buy Twitter again earlier this month, Twitter’s most internally visible leader has been Jay Sullivan, the general manager of consumer and revenue product. He has been holding regular listening sessions with employees, but on Thursday, shortly after employees received a calendar invite for a “quick informal check in” call with him at 7:35PM ET, the meeting was cancelled “until further notice” without explanation.
Many Twitter employees have recently noted the absence of Parag Argawal, their current CEO, who Musk soured on after the two initially started talking about Musk joining Twitter’s board. According to one current employee who requested anonymity to speak without the permission of the company, he has been completely absent for weeks. One person said that he had ghosted them. Both Twitter’s Slack and the Twitter employee-only section of Blind, an anonymous message board for tech workers, are full of similar comments about Argawal, according to screenshots seen by The Verge.
The execs received handsome payouts for their trouble, Insider reports: Agrawal got $38.7 million, Segal got $25.4 million, Gadde got $12.5 million, and Personette, who tweeted yesterday about how excited she was for Musk’s takeover, got $11.2 million.
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. He also attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, who Musk says will feature in future installments of the Twitter files, with a tweet amplifying a conspiracy theory about the COVID-19 pandemic.
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.
But it’s also a realization that having no content moderation is bad for business, putting Twitter at risk of losing advertisers and subscribers, she said.
“You do not want a place where consumers just simply are bombarded with things they do not want to hear about, and the platform takes no responsibility,” Yildirim said.
The Trump-Mummint Tweet: Destruction of Twitter and the Information Landscape, and the Stability of the Company’s Stock Exchange
Musk has said 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!”
The stock exchange notified investors that it would suspend trading in the shares of the company on Friday since it was going to be private under Musk.
Musk’s apparent enthusiasm about visiting Twitter headquarters this week stood in sharp contrast to one of his earlier suggestions: The building should be turned into a homeless shelter because so few employees actually worked there.
In the wake of the chaos at Twitter in recent weeks, there has been talk of brands quitting the platform out of concern that their ads could end up next to objectionable content. But that may not be the only reason advertisers are leaving, or why it’s difficult to get new ones. Advertisers are also likely on edge about Twitter’s stability, as users and former employees raise concerns that the mass exodus of staff could leave the platform vulnerable to glitches and outages.
Friedersdorf goes on to argue that Musk’s journalistic critics should give him more benefit of the doubt; after all, he did ban Kanye West, he refused to reinstate Alex Jones, he’s right that Twitter helped suppress the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop that later turned out to be at least partly true, and maybe his idea of amnesty for suspended accounts is not such a bad way to reset the clock and rebuild overall trust in the platform. But I think that strays toward both-sides-ism and misses the point.
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Musk, of course, has contaminated the information environment that he now controls and he is also trying to dismantle the little infrastructure that was erected to help users sift through the daily chaos. He plans to take the blue verified badges of public figures and institutions if they don’t pay.
It may appear as a business story when you first see it. But the move will have significant ramifications on the information landscape. It will be difficult for users to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic accounts.
If the company were to strip current verified users of blue checks — something that hasn’t happened — that could exacerbate disinformation on the platform during Tuesday’s midterm elections.
The best thing one could do to SAVE social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email and reduce hacking would be to authenticating users, according to Musk’s authorized biographer.
Do You Need a New Bio? Why Do We Need to Rethink Your Relationship With Social Media? A Comment on the Times of Tuesday, December 28, 2016
Nick Caldwell, the general manager of core technology at the company, and Jay Sullivan, the general manger of consumer and revenue products, have both changed their names on their bios to something other than the company. The New York Times reported Tuesday that Berland had left, and on Tuesday night she sent out a single blue heart.
According to reports Musk has brought in craft venture capitalist David Sack to help manage the company and come up with new products.
Calacanis is in New York on behalf ofTwitter meeting with the marketing and advertising community. He has also tweeted questions to Twitter users about the platform’s subscription and bookmark features.
Davisson doubts Twitter, which has gutted its moderation staff, would be able to enforce Musk’s new policies announced this week in a way that covers all users.
This new approach will have a lasting impact on Twitter. Journalists have helped keep the platform relevant despite its small size relative to competitors like Facebook: They fuel the platform with free, vetted content when news breaks and speculation and rumors swirl.
They want you to encourage your friends who are interested in fathers to watch House of the Dragon. Mike recommends the new album from Natalia Lafourcade, De Todas las Flores. Lauren thinks you should rethink your relationship with social media.
Tuning GadgetLab with Boone Ashworth on Twitter and Facebook – a Radio Hotline for Solar Keys and Solar Key Searches
Vittoria Elliott can be found on Twitter @telliotter. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. He is Michael Calore. There is a main hotline atGadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme is Solar Keys by Solar Keys.
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If you have an iPad or an iPhone, open the app on it to listen to what’s going on. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Podcasts app just by tapping here. We are on that platform as well. The RSS feed is in case you really need it.
Apple, Steve Jobs, and SpaceX: Two Years after Jobs and a Hurt: How Musk Managed his Post-PC Adventures in Silicon Valley
At the time, Jobs had been developing personal computers for 20 years, his entire adult life. He was intimately familiar with the company he was suddenly running because he had founded it and led the team that created its flagship product. He left Apple and founded a new computer company with a different approach to the internet and operating systems. Plus, he was Steve Jobs. If anyone could quickly turn around the near-bankrupt computer giant, it would be him. Yet it took him months to come up with his plan and years to bring it to fruition. While the colorful iMac he unveiled to me that day in May would help nudge Apple’s bottom line back into the black, it wasn’t until the company’s entry into non-PC devices—like the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007—that it became a profit machine. And Apple’s post-PC future wasn’t even on Jobs’ road map in 1998.
It’s not necessary for Musk to look farther than his successful enterprises to realize the absurdity of his haste. In 2008, the company was five years old, when he took over. Musk came up with a brilliant plan to turn the company around—but it didn’t post an annual profit until 2020, 17 years after incorporation. Musk deservedly gets a lot of credit for what Tesla has achieved—and for, among other things, his persistence. SpaceX, Musk’s other company, is private and doesn’t report earnings. It takes years to even launch a rocket ship, and cutting corners to go fast can lead to death.
When Heidi Klum walkes on the floor: The horror of Halloween when Entertainment Weekly releases a microscopic bait to show you how amazing you are
Heidi Klum stretches out on the floor, prone on a red carpet that’s actually blue while photographers angle for their shots. She can barely walk and it would be a traditional step-and-repeat. She is covered in folds of skin that are almost raw. Yet, when Entertainment Weekly puts a microphone in front of her, the accent is unmistakable as she exclaims “I’m amazing!” Tom Kaulitz pretended to use her as bait while he was in full fishing regalia.
This was not a dream. It was the scene outside the Project Runway star’s infamous Halloween bash. But it might as well have been a hallucination, some bizarre after-effect of prolonged illness.
That is what it felt like when images and video of the scene showed up on social media and became a meme. It was unnerving to think that the images were real, even if they were fake. It was realizing that what’s perceived as “real” is an increasingly nebulous thing.
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/end-of-reality/
The Real Thing About Elon Musk and the #TrumpIsDead Project: Defending the Truth about Trump’s Black Hole Explosion
People are testing the boundaries of what can be said. The name of the film is #TrumpIsDead. As Musk settled in at Twitter this week, users on the platform started spreading rumors that the former president had died, in an apparent attempt to show just how easily misinformation and conspiracy theories could spread under Musk’s watch. The hoax didn’t fool news outlets, but #TrumpIsDead did trend, leading to a Twitter event and at least one fact-check report from Reuters about a duped CNN headline.
The most obvious example is #TrumpIsDead, something that can easily be proven or disproven. The truly nefarious misinformation is the little lies, the things that seem just close enough to reality to reel you in. The conspiracy theories turn non-believers into extremists and mess with their gut instincts. The exact connections may be lost to time, but it seemed that #TrumpIsDead began trending in response to the fact that Elon Musk had tweeted (then deleted) an article full of unfounded rumors about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi.
But truly, asking more questions is what people should be doing. The New Yorker article about the online quest to politically label an alleged attacker was written after Musk. In the days after the incident, internet detectives had been searching his online history for clues to his affiliations. Some claimed he was right-wing, others said he was “on the left.” There are often connections made between mental health and violent acts, and this has little bearing on what actually happened. Often, people look online seeking the truth, but all that matters is what they believe.
A Social Media Employee’s Dispatch: Employee Disengagement, Disappearance of Work, or How Facebook Inc. Leaked Earnings Comes To Light
In a letter to employees obtained by multiple media outlets, the company said employees would find out by 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time if they had been laid off. The email didn’t say how many people would lose their jobs.
Some employees lost access to their work accounts. The email stated job reductions were necessary to ensure company’s success moving forward.
He changed the company’s board of directors and installed himself as the sole board member. On Thursday night, a number of staff members took to the social media platform to express their support for each other and to use blueheart and blue bird symbols to indicate their support.
Barry C. White said the agency has not received any recent notifications from the social networking site.
The employee who was laid off and three others who were locked out of their work accounts were the subjects of a lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco. It alleges that Twitter intends to lay off more employees and has violated the law by not providing the required notice.
Advertisers are scaling back and newcomers are threatening the older class of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, as the layoffs come at a tough time.
Meta Platforms Inc., Facebook’s parent company, recently posted its second quarterly revenue decline in history and its shares are trading at their lowest levels since 2015. Meta’s disappointing results followed weak earnings reports from Google parent Alphabet and even Microsoft.
Comments on Musk’s Twitter Acquisition: The Case for Pseudoscalar and Pistizer, Mondalez, and Pfizer
Several organizations condemned Twitter’s decision, with the head of the American Civil Liberties Union saying: “It’s impossible to square Twitter’s free speech aspirations with the purging of critical journalists’ accounts.”
The remarks came after General Mills and the Volkswagen Group confirmed that they are pausing advertising on Twitter in the wake of Musk’s acquisition of the social media company, in the clearest sign yet of growing advertiser uncertainty about the future of the platform under new ownership.
Volkswagen Group said in a statement that it had stopped paid activities for its brands until further notice.
The Wall Street Journal, which was first to report the moves, also said Pfizer and Mondalez are pausing ads on Twitter. The companies did not respond to the request for comment.
The companies join General Motors, which had previously said it would pause paying for advertising on Twitter while it evaluates the platform’s “new direction.” Toyota, another Tesla competitor, previously told CNN that it is “in discussions with key stakeholders and monitoring the situation” on Twitter.
Ad buying giant Interpublic Group, which works with consumer brands such as Unilever and Coca Cola, earlier this week also recommended its clients pause advertising on the platform.
The pauses also come days ahead of the US midterm elections, as many civil society leaders worry that misinformation and other harmful content could spread on the platform and create disruption.
The fate of Twitter: a message from Elon Musk to campaign against terrorists and terrorists in the UK, France, Germany, and Ireland
In the meantime, Musk is working to stave off a possible advertiser exodus. Musk’s team spent Monday “meeting with the marketing and advertising community” in New York, according to Jason Calacanis, a member of Musk’s inner circle.
Musk also met earlier this week with a group of leaders of civil society organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, Free Press and the NAACP, to address concerns about a rise in hate on the platform. The representatives at the meeting were encouraged that Musk was willing to talk, but still want him to take more steps to protect the platform.
Even before the takeover, the company was facing a wave of scrutiny across the bloc. Hate speech and defamation trials are going on in France, Germany, and the Netherlands. There is privacy. There is also concern in Ireland that Twitter did not follow the country’s strict employment rules while carrying out mass layoffs. Ireland’s Tánaiste (or deputy head of the government), Leo Varadkar, has still not received a collective redundancy notification in relation to potential redundancies at Twitter as required by law, a spokesperson for Ireland’s Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment told WIRED. The European parliament is uneasy about Musk complying with Europe’s Digital Services and Digital Markets Acts as its policy team has been reduced to a skeleton staff.
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.
In January 2021, after former US president Donald Trump tweeted in support of an insurrection on the Capitol, his account was frozen and he was locked out. But across the world, leaders have tweeted in support of genocide and threatened violence, yet none of them have been banned from the platform. The Nigerian president posted on his social media account a threat to violence against the groups in the southwest. The account remained live despite its being taken down.
Twitter on Thursday evening banned the accounts of several high-profile journalists from top news organizations without explanation, apparently marking a significant attempt by new owner Elon Musk to wield his unilateral authority over the platform.
Normally, these platforms are where false narratives start, says Stringhini. When those narratives creep onto mainstream platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, they explode. He says they get pushed on social media and go out of control because everybody sees them and covers them.
James Piazza, a terrorism expert at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, says he gets really afraid when he sees inflammatory speech being used on social media. There is a situation where you can have more violence.
The researchers at the Digital Planet group tracked the hate speech on the social network before and after Musk took ownership. A data stream the platform provides is referred to as the firehose and it is a feed of every public reply shared across the platform. The group has used the same approach in previous studies, including one looking at toxicity on Twitter around the US midterm elections.
The Covid Plandemic: All You Ever Wanted to Know About Your Dad, My Mom, and Your Husband. I’m All You
“The Covid PLANdemic was created by Big Pharma to silence me. Everybody tries to silence me,” she said. Please speak at a lower volume. I apologize, but I am too loud for the intensive care unit. You aren’t sick!
It’s me. Oh my god, your profile is so funny. I love funny guys,” Schumer, dressed in a red dress, said as the bot. I am crazy that they said I was a bot. I am all woman and I love strange men like you. In fact, you should check out this website where me and some other girls hang out.”
James Austin Johnson played former president Donald Trump in the movie. Trump’s account was banned in 2021.
We love Truth Social, and we all moved to it. Johnson’s Trump said it was very great. “And in many ways, also terrible. It is very bad. Very, very bad. The phone screen crack and the automatic draining of the Venmo are a little buggy.
Why I’m Sorry, I’ve Done a Thing About Twitter, but What Have I Done Recently? A Conversation with Roxanne Jones
Editor’s Note: Roxanne Jones, a founding editor of ESPN The Magazine and former vice president at ESPN, has been a producer, reporter and editor at the New York Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Jones is one of the authors of “Say it Loud: An Important History of the Black Athlete.” On Philadelphia’s 900AM WURD, she talks about politics, sports and culture. The views expressed here are hers alone. Read more opinion on CNN.
I deleted my account on the day that Musk became the platform’s owner. After a mostly dysfunctional 12-year relationship with Twitter that I admit brought some moments of joy, it was time to exercise my freedom of speech to say goodbye and good riddance.
Quiet quitting in the workplace is rejecting the burden of going above and beyond for your employer when you are no longer working overtime to make ends meet. It’s about not giving more to the platform than most people can expect to get back. It is necessary for you to find a way to use this new social media platform without using you.
I know as a media professional so much of what we do in newsrooms, the stories that we choose to tell, the assumptions we make about the world have depended on what the internet is telling us, it was surely an act of silent defiance.
Data points about rising racism on Twitter can be illuminating, but they generally reinforce what we already know to be true. Like many Black women on the site, I can testify about what it feels like to be harassed and threatened with violence. I’ve experienced it all.
The use of the N-word jumped by 500% on the platform a day after Musk took over, according to one cyber research organization.
Black Twitter has no great exodus, nor should it be a great platform for lying to the masses, or is it a bad idea to take seriously the Twitter-verse?
Maybe he’ll even work on his own penchant to promote lies and conspiracy theories to his 114.5 million followers, as he did in a now-deleted tweet regarding the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, in the early hours of October 28 at their San Francisco home.
But don’t expect a great Twitter exodus — not in a world where everyone craves attention and adulation. Everyone, it seems, wants to be a virtual brand ambassador or an influencer.
Yet Black Twitter — the platform’s community of largely millions of Black users — has remained on the site. There are different reasons for remaining in the face of disrespect and hatred. It is possible to keep a job. Others may be convinced Twitter is the best way to attain global influence, or that it’s better to stay and fight for change from within.
Can we see if reports of racism will be taken seriously by Musk now that he has a stake in the network?
In one vile incident that spilled over my personal life and became a matter of my family’s personal safety, authorities had to get involved. I battled my critics on the platform every now and then but never back down from being a bully.
I must have wasted a lot of my time. I was in beast mode on and off the site when I was wakening up to toxic attacks. That’s what the Twitter-verse will do to you — make you angry and keep you distracted from the real work at hand.
Twitter will have you fighting anonymous bots meant to misinform the masses and real people who don’t have the courage or the intellect to challenge you in person.
Additionally, Musk said Twitter users will no longer receive warning before being suspended. “This will be clearly identified as a condition for signing up to Twitter Blue,” he tweeted.
After changing her screen name to Musk, Kathy Griffin had her account suspended. She told the reporter she had also used his photo.
There were not all the content moderators let go. She said it on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform where she set up an account last week.
“Okey-Dokey” — A Remark by Elaine Musk on a “Blue Checkmark” of Musk’s Screen Name Change
After posting a series of posts in support of Democratic candidates on Saturday, the actor replaced Musk’s screen name with her real one. “Okey-dokey.” I’ve had fun She said that she thought she made her point.
A blue checkmark simply meant your identity was verified as television actressValerie Bertinelli did with her account name change. Scammers would have a harder time impersonating you. That no longer applies. Good luck out there! She wrote that anyone can purchase a blue check mark for $7.99 a month without knowing who they are, and she also answered a follower who asked how the checkmark no longer applies.
The service would first be available in the U.S, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. It was not available on Sunday, and there was no indication when it would go live. A Twitter employ, Esther Crawford, told The Associated Press it is coming “soon but it hasn’t launched yet.”
Yoel Roth, CEO of Twitter, apologizes for his role in the election induced by Musk’s outburst and the Indian government
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, sought to assuage such concerns in a tweet Friday. He said the company’s front-line content moderation staff was the group least affected by the job cuts.
Edward Perez was the director of product management at the time. Perez had worked for three decades in election integrity and joined the company in September of 2021, to aid in keeping the product safe during times of great upheaval. And as Musk guts Twitter of its staff and allows users to pay to get a coveted blue check on the platform, Perez feels he has to speak out.
“I really am concerned that it feels like the drama around corporate takeover is sucking up all the oxygen in the room,” says Perez, who is now a board member at the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan group devoted to election security and integrity. That focus on the Musk psychodrama “is resulting in potentially inadequate attention on these election-related issues,” he adds.
David Kaye, the UN special rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression and clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, thinks that how he handles pressure from countries such as Saudi Arabia and India will have a big impact on where he ends up.
A few people are in control of #shame. According to internal company research, heavy users who communicate in English generate 90 percent of all global revenue, and account for less than 10 percent of monthly overall users.
In India, Twitter’s third largest market, the company filed a case earlier this year to contest the government’s order to remove individual pieces of content as well as whole accounts that the government considers a risk to India’s security or sovereignty.
After a wave of prominent users impersonated Musk over the weekend, the social media company lost the ability to keep her account open.
But the partially rolled-out plan faced widespread backlash, and in a display of defiance, some celebrities on the platform posed as Musk over the weekend, complete with a blue check mark on their profiles.
The Tiny Town is Talk about Elon Musk. Why he didn’t apologize for his tweets on CNN Dec. 19 2017, after he sued
I am a freedom of speech sceptic. I eat doody for breakfast all the time. Her account also retweeted posts supporting Democratic candidates.
Silverman’s account was labeled as “temporarily restricted” Sunday, with a warning that “there has been some unusual activity from this account” shown to visitors before clicking through to the profile. The comedian changed her account back to what she was used to, complete with her name and image.
CNN fired Griffin in 2017 after the comedian was photographed holding up a bloody head resembling that of then-President Donald Trump. Griffin had co-hosted the New Year’s Eve program alongside Anderson Cooper for a decade.
Musk asked his followers to tell him if he should offer general commutation to suspended accounts if they had not broken the law.
“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. You have beenCONGRATULATIONS. We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk.
Lurking with Twitter: The Story of Musk and His Company, the Electric Car Founder, and a New Layer of Fake News
The electric car entrepreneur who follows a disproportionate number of extremely active blue checks would be easily confused with his own experience, since he would have a lot of noisy active users. (Same goes for journalists.) In reality, nearly half of Twitter users tweet less than five times a month, and most of their posts are replies, not original tweets. They look at current events, live sports and celebrity news, and then they go about their lives. They’re “lurkers.”
Lurking isn’t doomscrolling, a practice (and phrase) that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when many people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. To sit back and watch, is a simplistic approach to dealing with the chaos that is New Twitter. Check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, sure, then close your app or browser tab. Send a tweet, then disengage. During the basketball games, watch for it. Direct those message threads to another location if you have to. Save your most original thoughts for another time, another place.
It does get worse, and this part isn’t Musk’s fault. Companies spend less on advertising as the economy slows. So even if Musk weren’t doing wild stuff to alienate advertisers, such as tweeting conspiracy theories about Paul Pelosi, Twitter might have been in trouble anyway. But Musk has essentially identified himself and his company as a loose canon, which means that anyone looking to trim advertising spend might be inclined to cut Twitter first.
Now, Twitter did set up Tips — a way to send cash to people you like — but it doesn’t take a cut of that money. It does take a cut of the revenue from Super Follows, a way to make your tweets a subscription service, but Twitter’s share is dwarfed by the fees taken by Apple for in-app purchases.
I don’t believe many advertisers would want to bring someone back who thought they were legitimate without an economic downturn. The open question to me is whether users want to stay in that environment — one that’s just gotten a new layer of hoaxing and scammers. Billionaire Mark Cuban has already complained that the influx of new checkmarked users has made his mentions miserable. One of the reasons people stay on the platform is because of Cuban’s thoughts.
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. It wasn’t clear when the company would return to offering.
And it’s risky debt to boot, B1 rated, which is “on the lower end of the junk rating spectrum,” says Wharton’s Roberts. “Investor appetite for this debt clearly isn’t as large as it was four months ago.” Moody’s noted thatTwitter’s governance is one of the major driver of risk.
Similar to in the US, the teams across Europe have suffered heavy layoffs. War terminology is being used by staff in the Dublin office of 1 Cumberland Place, which used to house around 500 employees of the social networking site. A person with knowledge of the situation says that people who remain employees aresurvivors and that people who have been let go arefallen. The first time employees in Ireland heard from the company’s new owner, Elon Musk, was on November 10, almost two weeks after his takeover. They were told that they would have to work from the office 40 hours a week.
There is no centralized list of who has been fired. Instead employees have been looking at their colleagues’ statuses on workplace messaging app Slack to see if they are still working. Dublin is just one of many European offices that are affected by layoffs. A few posts on social media show employees being let go. It is not known if employees in the other European hubs have also been affected.
The Digital Age is Coming: Musk’s Social Media Shutdown and the Perils of Adding an Official Label to a Crowdsourced Account
We can’t depend on Musk to provide a safe, open forum. We need new, non-profit social networks run by boards that consider public interest when making critical decisions about things such as content moderation. Many people who have these skills have just been laid off. In addition to the mass exodus from Twitter since Musk’s takeover, there have been layoffs at a number of tech and journalism companies lately, including Facebook and CNN, with more coming at The Washington Post. The town hall we desperately need is not provided by the current social platforms and some of these professionals should work to create new ones.
In the last week alone, one of the world’s most influential social networks laid off half its workforce, alienated powerful advertisers and then blew up key aspects of its product in a failed attempt to make up for the lost revenue.
Hours after the gray badges launched on Wednesday as a way to help users differentiate legitimate celebrity and branded accounts from accounts that had merely paid for a blue check mark, Musk abruptly tweeted that he had “killed” the feature, forcing subordinates to explain the reversal.
The account’s very next tweet, a day and nine hours later, said exactly the opposite: “To combat impersonation, we’ve added an ‘Official’ label to some accounts.”
The paid verification feature’s rocky rollout attracted widespread criticism from misinformation experts who had warned it would make identifying trustworthy information much more difficult, particularly in the critical period following the US midterm elections. Even some of Musk’s fellow high-powered users of the platform had tough feedback.
“@elonmusk, from one entrepreneur 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.
A professor in the USC Marshall School of Business thought a move to a subscription model would be good for the social media platform. It wasn’t a good fit for its business because it didn’t offer the same level of user targeting.
Large digital platforms have experienced professionals who help develop relationships with advertisers. When you reduce the value of the ad platform by eliminating veteran staff who were able to respond to brands, that’s when you diminish the worth of the platform.
Yoel Roth, who left the company earlier this month, wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times that the company was at risk if it failed to comply with the app store rules. Following Musk’s takeover, the app stores have removed social media apps from their stores for failing to protect users from harmful content, and this is not the first time they have done this. Over the weekend, the head of Apples app store, Phil Schiller, decided to ditch his twitter account.
Twitter-Shutdown: Building a Knowledge Base for Writers and Arts Reporters: Dan Sheehan and Azucena Rasilla
Even still, there is no guarantee that continuing to capture the online world’s attention will translate into subscription payments or other revenue growth.
Many users followed suit, tweeting short eulogies for the platform. For some, like writer Dan Sheehan, gaining a platform on Twitter later allowed them to excel in their personal and professional lives.
“I built this following for myself, and that got me some of my first job offers just in the copywriting space. That’s how I paid the bills for a very long time,” he says.
Through the writing process, he was able to devote time to writing a novel that was made a reality thanks to the help of his large following on social media.
“The fact that I was able to keep the lights on, the bills paid, while writing the book, and then have the book reach that audience of over 100,000 people directly, none of that could have been done through traditional means,” he says.
The fields of creativity have long been cornered by the wealthy. Twitter allowed you to build this audience that made you undeniable to the people holding the keys to that.”
Twitter also helped Azucena Rasilla, an arts and community reporter for The Oaklandside, to gain a platform and open a door into the journalism industry outside of traditional routes.
“It’s just unfortunate that the diversity problem continues, and I don’t know how now, those communities are going to find each other… She says it was like a way to see it and start following people and reading other people’s work.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/23/1138605036/twitter-shutdown-elon-activism-trump-career
An update on the “Disability” campaign: How many people would you like to see?” Ms. Wendi Muse recalls donating N95 masks to the pandemic
Wendi Muse was an active member of ‘Disability’ for many years. She spent the resources that were available to help the people get masks from her personal stock. Earlier this year, she noticed a greater demand for reliable N95 masks in the immunocompromised community.
“In total, it’s going to be more than 12,000 masks that I sent out just on my own, literally from my living room since January of this year,” Muse says. She isn’t sure she would have been able to reach that many people if it hadn’t been for her use of the social media platform.
“It has been crucial because it’s been a way not only to learn more about the pandemic, myself and my family, but also to reach out to other people who are less fortunate and maybe either don’t have the information, or don’t have the access [to these resources].”
Even with the recent influx of new users, Muse and others would be a big loss if it was to end.
“I think that uneasiness of not knowing is making it more difficult, especially for people who are disabled, elderly, who maybe don’t have social networks in person right now.”
People have already switched to other social media platforms, meaning the town square is less full than it once was.
The poll, which closed around 12:45 pm ET on Thursday, finished with 72.4% voting in favor of the proposition and 27.6% voting against. The poll garnered more than 3 million votes on Twitter.
Twitter Files Confirm Q, the Main Narrative of Q, and the Russian-Russian Connection: Musk, Trump and the Post
Shortly after acquiring Twitter, Musk said he would create a “content moderation council” with “widely diverse viewpoints,” and that no major content decisions would be made until it was in place. There is no evidence that this group was involved in Musk’s replatforming decisions. Instead, after Musk restored Trump’s account, he tweeted “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Latin for “the voice of the people is the voice of god.”
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.
It’s still not clear which accounts will be allowed back. Musk said that accounts that broke the law will not be given anamnesy. But doing something illegal is an extremely high bar for moderation since most people don’t break the law by simply being awful people. Even Musk has expressed some bare-minimum standards beyond breaking the law; while he has spent a lot of time engaging with right-wing complaints, he has signaled opposition to the idea of letting someone like Alex Jones back on his website.
The Post claimed that it got its information from files on Hunter Biden’s laptop and from Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s private attorney. At the time, it was unclear whether that material was authentic. Tech companies were on edge after the Russian hack of the DNC and the leak of its emails and so they 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. Users of the micro-messaging service were temporarily banned from sharing the Post story in their messages.
Fans of Trump suspected there was more to Twitter’s actions. They thought that the FBI and the Democratic National Committee would attempt to undermine the 2020 election if they knew about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
“The Twitter Files confirm Q’s entire main narrative,” one QAnon influencer wrote. “Balenciaga confirms the rest.” That message, which references the fantastical claims about fashion brand Balenciaga’s role in child trafficking, was seen more than 120,000 times on Telegram. Despite some optimism, the particularQAnon influencer’s account remains suspended. The fact that Taibbi shared a photo of the custom top level domain used by the former CEO of Twitter was seized upon by many other qanon commenters.
Musk has previously criticized that filtering technique — nicknamed “shadowbanning” — and alleged that it was unfairly used by Twitter’s past leadership to suppress right-wing accounts. He said that the new Twitter will still lower the reach of messages that are negative, but they will be more transparent about it.
Musk wrote that a software update would show account status and why you were shadowbanned. He did not provide additional details or a timetable.
In the most recent file dump published through Bari Weiss, the founder and editor of media organization The Free Press, Musk released several documents that revealed how Twitter’s policy and trust and safety teams came to the decision to ban Trump in the wake of the insurrection on January 6, 2021.
The second set of the so-called Twitter Files, shared by journalist Bari Weiss on Twitter, focused on how the company has restricted the reach of certain accounts, tweets or topics that it deems potentially harmful, including by limiting their ability to appear in the search or trending sections of the platform.
The internal documents are believed to have been provided to the journalists by Musk. On Friday Musk shared a thread from Weiss and wrote, “The twitter files, part duex!!” along with two popcorn emojis.
Is Trump Disturbed by a Right-Leaning Individual or Another? A Report on Yoel Roth, the Head of Trust and Safety, on Twitter in 2016
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.
The head of trust and safety left his home due to increased threats from the campaign of negative comments made about him by Musk, according to a person familiar with the matter.
In both 2016 and the first part of this year, there was a couple of critical statements about then- President Trump and his supporters that were later found to be false.
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. Musk said he thought he had high integrity and we were all entitled to our political beliefs.
According to the documents, which were shared by journalist Bari Weiss, employees discussed whether or not Trump had violated the social network’s policies by using his final statement to inciting violence. They stop short of showing that the ban was implemented without adhering to its rules.
The staffer said she was not seeing clear orcoded instuction to violence, after Trump said on January 8 that the 75,000,000 Americans who voted for him would have bloodshed. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
In her testimony to the House committee investigating January 6,avaroli said she and other staffers were worried about the risk of violence due to the Proud Boys and other groups that shared statements by Trump.
The staffer with the name removed said that a later statement from Trump that he wouldn’t be attending the inauguration of Biden was also a no violation. Weiss asked if that could be proof that Trump doesn’t support a peaceful transition.
One former executive told CNN the process was not out of the ordinary, noting that the teams would push each other to consider context and information they might not have thought of. “I think these conversations look like people were trying to be really thoughtful and careful,” the former executive said.
The establishment press, however, has shown far less interest in the documents themselves, with most news organizations outright ignoring various entries in the continuing series. The right-wing media apparatus pushing the story has, naturally, asserted that the mum reaction is effectively because the mainstream press is made up of left-wing hacks who want to hide the truth from the public.
The conservative former top editor of The Wall Street Journal said on Monday there was nothing new in the Twitter Files. There is no shocking revelation about the political campaigns that are being manipulated by the government. They merely bring to the surface the internal deliberations of a company dealing with complex issues in ways consistent with its values.”
If you’re just a regular person trying to make sense of what is going on, it can be awfully difficult. And the solution isn’t so clear. newsrooms have to weigh the risks of airing a storyline that has been framed by Musk as he continues to wage an information war. The public square is a good place for him and others to define it.
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 believed to be a carefully chosen signal of policy in the future. Trump, on the other hand, clearly said many things purely to get a rise out of people. Reporting on them, I argued, just fed the flames. Another editor pushed him back. He said that he was the president. He says what he says is news.
Here, we saw a lot of rapid-response news stories about Musk’s December 11th message that read, “My pronouns were Prosecute/Fauci,” a dig at the government’s former chief infectious disease expert, and at gender diversity. A few more things have been written about the picture of his bedside table with replicas of guns on it.
This is precisely the way coverage of Trump worked. There were stories from the liberal media that show that a person so bad for the country that he would only succeed in bringing it to a halt, while the right-wing media shows that he didn’t understand basic policy. There was a lot of good reporting going on, but it was the 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.
A Porn-Like Predator Plant: Changing Micro-Blogging for the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
How in the world is this good news? I will explain how it is good news to me. It will make it easy to quit the messaging service, and it is pleasing to see things turn into what they are. For a long time, the micro-Blogging website has been leaning towards porn. You can find salacious meme, like the one about slipping into DMs, and many more like it, as an orgy of hyperstimulation with people posting thirst traps, coyly subtweeting, and of course revealing dopamine and cortisol and God.
Porn’s not my cup of tea, but you have to admire its ferocity and cunning. It’s a megagenre, something the poet-philosopher Timothy Morton might call a hyperobject, ungraspable in its ubiquity and scale. In effect, porn online behaves like a predator plant, saturating the pixels with flesh colors, choking off biodiverse memes, and sowing vast digital acreage with salt.
Five years later, after being overrun by porn, the microblogging service, known astumblr, lost its appeal. Chatroulette, which was founded in 2009 as a whimsical way to meet strangers, traded its lightheartedness for dick pics and leering goons almost immediately. OnlyFans, which began in 2016 as a platform for performers to post videos, now consists mostly of porn created by sex workers.
Musk’s claims are over-hyped because the documents so far corroborate what is already known about the messy business of policing a large social network, say many tech journalists and social media experts.
Renée DiResta is the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, and she said that what’s coming through is people who are facing high-stakes, unanticipated events and trying to figure out what policies apply and how.
Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone, and Bari Weiss, a former New York Times opinion columnist, were granted exclusive access to a small group of independent journalists, but only if they first posted about the documents on social media.
In some instances, getting things wrong, they show employees and executives grappling with tradeoffs and questioning the company’s rules.
Take Twitter’s decision right before the 2020 presidential election to briefly block users from sharing a New York Post story alleging shady business dealings by then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, in Ukraine.
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.” It also suspended the New York Post’s own Twitter account until it deleted its tweets 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.)
There was a huge backlash on the political side after Twitter’s aggressive stance. The company was slammed for taking a heavy-handed approach to a story that, while controversial, was being reported by a major news outlet, and for offering little justification for its decision. The block was reversed days later with a change to the policy on hacked materials. Soon after, then-CEO Jack Dorsey said the company had made a mistake.
And it does not show any evidence that there was government involvement in the move to block the New York Post story, despite assertions by Musk and others.
“I continue to believe there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time,” he wrote. “Of course 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.”
Elon Musk is using the Twitter Files to disccredit the perpetrators’ foes and conspirators: The impact of the tweet files on Trump’s decision to ban Trump
DiResta said that there is good reason to demand more info on how social media companies operate. She said decisions are often inscrutable. “These are platforms that shape public opinion, and so the question of how they’re moderated and how they’re designed is impactful.”
She stated that outsiders need more than Musk’s journalists to get the full picture and they should not focus solely on the politics of American politics.
To better understand the decision to ban Trump, for example, it would help to see discussions around the accounts of other world leaders who have not been kicked off the platform, she said.
“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.
The threats against both men were violent. 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, wrote the author on Tuesday. “If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.”
The CEO’s willingness to target people working to keep the platform’s users safe, including through the Twitter Files releases, is creating a “chilling effect,” according to one Trust and Safety Council member, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation.
But with his drumbeat of Twitter Files releases and gleeful tweets dunking on the company’s former employees, Musk has successfully hijacked the conversation.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/14/1142666067/elon-musk-is-using-the-twitter-files-to-discredit-foes-and-push-conspiracy-theor
How much do [Musk] and Twitter know about the @ElonJet account? A student’s story on Twitter about a squabble with Musk
“It is being processed as something to be proud of, something to be possessive of, something that we can see in the files, and how it will be different under our watch,” DiResta said.
The @ElonJet account, run by Jack Sweeney, a 20-year-old Florida college student, used publicly available flight tracking information to build a Twitter bot that tweeted every time Musk’s Gulfstream took off and landed at an airport. The last post from the account prior to the suspension showed Musk’s jet taking off from Oakland, California, on Monday and landing in Los Angeles 48 minutes later.
For Sweeney, it was the latest in a series of squabbles with the billionaire. The university student said Musk sent him a private message offering to take the account down due to security concerns. Musk later stopped communicating to Sweeney, who never deleted the account. Their exchange was first reported by tech news outlet Protocol earlier this year.
He setup the jet because he was a fan of Musk. “It gives you just another view that a lot of people don’t know about where [Musk] is going and might give you clues into what new business is going on,” he said.
Sweeney said he received an email from an anonymous person purporting to be a person at the site, which contained a message from the head of trust and safety, asking staff to apple-thin VF toelonjet immediately.
Twitter also shared a thread on its @TwitterSafety account to further explain the changes. The company said that it would suspend accounts dedicated to sharing live location info. The company now deems ahistorical locations to be “not same-day”, and so you can share your live location with someone else.
Musk falsely claimed that the journalists had violated his new “doxxing” policy by sharing his live location, amounting to what he described as “assassination coordinates.” CNN didn’t share the location of the billionaire.
Asked if he planned to follow the new policy, Sweeney said he would delay posting the jet location for 24 hours, but only on his social media accounts.
It seems Twitter doesn’t currently have an ironclad filter for this, as I was able to tweet an alternate link to the Instagram version of the tracker. But it appears that Twitter is stepping up its actions against Sweeney and his accounts, despite Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s “commitment” to free speech, which he said in November extended to “not banning the account following my plane.”
Some accounts that tracked the jets of billionaires, including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, have been suspended. There are many of them and Sweeney has seen a number of his accounts banned, he told The New York Times.
He logged into Twitter and saw a notice that the account was permanently suspended for breaking Twitter’s rules. But the note didn’t explain how it broke the rules.
Twitter is not to blame: Elon Musk’s tweet-tracking account of the New York Times’ Ryan Mac has been suspended by neither Twitter nor Twitter
In the weeks since the Tesla CEO took over Twitter, the @elonjet account has chronicled Musk’s many cross-country journeys from his home base near Tesla’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, to various California airports for his work at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters and his rocket company SpaceX.
It showed Musk flying to East Coast cities ahead of major events, and to New Orleans shortly before a Dec. 3 meeting there with French President Emmanuel Macron.
Neither Musk nor Twitter responded to a request for comment Thursday evening, and the platform did not explain precisely why the journalists were exiled from the platform.
Sharing a person’s home address online is called doxxing. The account that was banned used publicly accessible flight data to track Musk’s jet.
“Tonight’s suspension of the Twitter accounts of a number of prominent journalists, including The New York Times’s Ryan Mac, is questionable and unfortunate,” said Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesman for The Times. Ryan has not received an explanation about why this happened. We hope that all of the journalists’ accounts are reinstated and that Twitter provides a satisfying explanation for this action.”
Press freedom advocates on Thursday criticized Twitter owner Elon Musk, who has suspended the accounts of several high-profile journalists who cover the billionaire and his chaotic leadership of the social media site.
In a statement, the president of the society of professional journalists said that they were concerned and that the move affects all journalists.
The changes came after Musk reinstated previous Twitter rule-breakers and stopped enforcing the platform’s policies prohibiting Covid-19 misinformation.
In addition to the journalists, a Twitter account for Mastodon, a social media site seen as an alternative to Twitter, was also suspended on Thursday. Mastodon was among the sites the creator of the ElonJet account went following Musk’s crackdown.
In a post on Substack, Rupar wrote that he is unsure why he was suspended. He said he did tweet on Wednesday a link to a Facebook page for the jet-tracking account.
Twitter Spaces is a digital town square, but it’s not for free speech: When Drew Harwell is banished from Twitter, not for iOS or Android
The senior counsel of the advocacy group Free Press said suspending journalists for personal animus was a dangerous precedent.
I can confirm that any account that violates our privacy policies and puts other users at risk will be suspended. “We don’t make exceptions to this policy for journalists or any other accounts.”
“Freedom of the press cannot be switched on and off as you please,” Germany’s foreign ministry tweeted on Friday. “As of today these journalists are no longer able to follow us, to comment or criticize. We have a problem with that @Twitter.”
The bans also raise a number of serious questions about the future of the free press on Twitter, a platform that has been referred to as a digital town square. Will news and media organizations remain on the platform, while Musk hastily bans their reporters without explanation? Will they pull their reporters? Do they have their content? Apple and Amazon are major advertisers.
Sally Buzbee is the Executive Editor of The Post, she said the suspension of Drew Harwell’s account directly undermines the claim that he intends to run twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech. Harwell was banished from Twitter without warning, process or explanation, following the publication of his accurate reporting about Musk. Our journalist should be reinstated immediately.”
Within hours, Twitter Spaces was at least partially removed from the platform, with users saying they were unable to access it on iOS or Android. The feature was deleted in order to fix a bug that allowed banned users, like Harwell, to join a Spaces chat. But under normal circumstances, it’s easy to imagine this bug being quietly updated when the fix was ready. It feels personal to remove the vertical until it is fixed.
Last week I reported that he got rid of most of the Spaces team through layoffs and purges. It’s still down on the App Store. It appears to be available to at least some Android users, and desktop users can listen in on Spaces chats (but not participate).
The only company that can make live audio work on a sustained basis isTwitter, who has done so for years. The live audio feature of Facebook has changed beyond recognition while Spotify Live is a shell. It is easy to use, and it is located in the exact right place to get a lot of people who just want to have fun. But assuming that Spaces comes back, today or otherwise, there will inevitably be something else in there that pushes Musk to the edge. He will take it away or impose rules to protect his ego when it happens.
The employee at the organization, who was part of the trust and safety council, says that vulnerable communities are less important than the relationships with the leaders in far away countries. An employee wanted to be anonymous due to their concern that an organization may be targeted by harassment and threats like the one faced by ex-Twitter staffers.
Some of this discrepancy may come down to how different governments react to moderation by social platforms. After Twitter removed Buhari’s threatening tweet against Biafran separatists, the company was slapped with a ban. The company was able to get the government’s consent to open a local office, pay taxes, and register as a broadcaster after agreeing to ban the president. Legislation to regulate platforms is being considered by Nigeria.
Elon Musk’s Freedom Friday: What he should do about it, and why he is going after his promise to give everyone general amnesty
There are lots of calculations that go into the trade-off about whether to take enforcement actions and access to markets is one of them.
A healthy town square should also be a place where people can find reliable information. Researchers at Tufts University found that before Musk took over, there was an order of magnitude of greater hate and misinformation on the micro-blogging site.
Musk’s power moves are dangerous. Recently unemployed tech and journalism workers should take them as a rallying call to unite to create new, healthier online spaces. Our dependence on the czar to set the terms of public debates makes us vulnerable.
Elon Musk has started to lift the suspensions of some journalists on Twitter after re-running a poll asking if he should “Unsuspend accounts who doxxed my exact location in real-time.” (The journalists did not reveal his real-time location.) In 7 days, 58.7 percent of the respondents said it was now that won, beating out “now” with 58.7 percent of the responses. There were almost 3.7 million responses to the poll.
Hours before the poll was completed and the accounts were reinstated, Musk declared today “freedom Friday” in response to former congressional candidate Lavern Spicer’s comment that accounts were being reinstated at an increasingly fast pace. Several right-to-far-right figures, including Gateway Pundit editor Jim Hoft, were not suspended on Friday, according to Shayan Sardarizadeh, a reporter for the BBC. This appears to be part of Musk making good on his promise to give most formerly-suspended accounts “general amnesty”, which he also claims is occurring due to the results of a poll.