Twitter is a Keyhole for the Digital Town Square: What Musk’s Comes to say: Why he’s coming here, and what he wants to say

An internal memo that was reported by several media outlets says that Musk will speak to his employees directly if the deal is finalized. Despite a lack of leadership and confusion over the company’s direction, the leadership at Twitter has at least taken to Musk’s arrival and messaging.

At a conference in May, Musk said he would reverse the ban, if he became the company’s owner.

But relations between the pair seem to have soured since, with the men publicly trading barbs over the summer. After Trump called Musk a “bullsh*t artist” at a rally in July, Musk responded by tweet, writing, “I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.”

More than the professional utility ties me to the site. Twitter hooks people in much the same way slot machines do, with what experts call an “intermittent reinforcement schedule.” It is usually repetitive and uninteresting, but occasionally it will provide a compelling piece of information at random intervals. Unpredictable rewards, as the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner found with his research on rats and pigeons, are particularly good at generating compulsive behavior.

“I don’t know that Twitter engineers ever sat around and said, ‘We are creating a Skinner box,’” said Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist at New York University and author of a book about gambling machine design. That is what they have built, she said. It makes sense that people will self-destruct on the site, they can’t stay away.

In his first big move earlier on Thursday, Musk tried to soothe leery Twitter advertisers saying that he is buying the platform to help humanity and doesn’t want it to become a “free-for-all hellscape.”

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” he said in the official deal announcement.

It is possible that this will have rippling effects across the social media landscape. When it was first to ban President Trump after the January 6 Capitol riot, Twitter acted as a model for how the social media industry handles problematic content.

If you want a “keyhole view” of whatTwitter will look like, just look at alternative platforms that promise fewer restrictions on speech, said the president of Media Matters for America.

On those sites, he said, “the feature is the bug — where being able to say and do the kinds of things that are prohibited from more mainstream social media platforms is actually why everyone gravitates to them. And what we see there is that they are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.”

“Would be great to unwind permanent bans, except for spam accounts and those that explicitly advocate violence,” he texted Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal shortly after agreeing to join the company’s board (a decision he soon backtracked).

That could mean lifting bans on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was kicked off for abusive behavior in 2018; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., whose account was suspended in January for tweeting misleading and false claims about COVID-19 vaccines; and 2020 election deniers like Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell, who were all banned in early 2021.

The person urged Musk to hire “someone who has a savvy cultural/political view” to lead enforcement, suggesting “a Blake Masters type.” Masters is a Republican senate candidate in Arizona who has been endorsed by Trump and supports his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

Facebook and the End of Trump’s Social Media Ban: An Investor’s Perspective on Musk’s Twitter Expansion and How the Company Grows

Allowing Trump and others to return could set a precedent for other social networks, including Meta-owned Facebook, which is considering whether to reinstate the former president when its own ban on him expires in January 2023.

After a video meeting a few weeks later with Agrawal and Musk, Dorsey tersely summed up the situation in a text to Musk: “At least it became clear that you can’t work together. That was clarifying.

The Washington Post reported last week that Musk told prospective investors that he plans to cut three quarters of Twitter’s 7,500 workers when he becomes owner of the company. The newspaper cited documents and unnamed sources familiar with the deliberation.

That is good news for a billionaire who has complained that the company is overstaffed for its size and that it’s costs outstrip revenues.

Costs and staff cuts are part of the equation. According to an investor presentation obtained by The New York Times, in the spring, Musk told investors that his company would triple its annual revenue to $26.4 billion by 2028 and create over one billion new users by that year.

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.

“Advertisers want to know that their ads are not going to be used to promote extremists, that they’re not going to help extremists and that would make potential customers less likely to buy from them,” he said.

What lies are people on social media? One squishy tweet per day, an employee at the University of Washington’s Center for informed public opinion

Anyone’s guess, that’s 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, including Facebook and Uber, have tried this strategy, but so far Chinese-style super-apps haven’t caught on in the United States.

What sorts of lies and falsehoods are circulating on the internet? Taylor Agajanian used her summer job to help answer this question, one post at a time. It often gets squishy.

She looked at a post where someone had shared a news story about vaccines and the comment “Hmmm, that’s interesting.” The person might have been saying that the news story is not true, or that they were interested in it.

Agajanian worked for the University of Washington’s Center for an informed public and reviewed social media posts to see if there were any false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines.

As the midterm election approaches, researchers and private sector firms are racing to track false claims about everything from ballot harvesting to voting machine conspiracies. But the field is still in its infancy even as the threats to the democratic process posed by viral lies loom. Getting a sense of which falsehoods people online talk about might sound like a straightforward exercise, but it isn’t.

“The broader question is, can anyone ever know what everybody is saying?” says Welton Chang, CEO of Pyrra, a startup that tracks smaller social media platforms. (NPR has used Pyrra’s data in several stories.)

Pyrra uses artificial intelligence to find names, places and topics from social media posts. Using the same technologies that in recent years enable AI to write remarkably like humans, the platform generates summaries of trending topics. The analyst gives a light edit and shares the summaries with clients.

The University of Washington and Pyrra have very different approaches in terms of automation, with the University of Washington using less than 30 people to monitor social media and the Pyrra using more than 50 to have it synthesise material.

Excuses are included in all methods. Manually monitoring and coding content could miss out on developments; and while capable of processing huge amounts of data, artificial intelligence struggles to handle the nuances of distinguishing satire from sarcasm.

The impact of false narratives needs to be assessed for responses to be proportional. Ben Nimmo, who now investigates global threats at Meta, said journalists covered misinformation spreaders who had high total engagement numbers but little impact because they risked spreading further hysteria over the state of online operations.

It’s straight forward to know who’s been following and who’s been passing out pins on social media. The researchers analyze the networks of actors and narratives.

Jevin West is a researcher at the Information School at the University ofWashington and he has studied the beginnings of academic disciplines. He says researchers come from different fields to bring methods that they’re comfortable with.

One of the very first steps of misinformation research – before someone like Agajanian starts tagging posts – is identifying relevant content under a topic. Many researchers start their search with expressions they think people talking about the topic could use, see what other phrases and hashtags appear in the search results, add that to the query, and repeat the process.

“If we’re a qualitative researcher, we’ll actually code everything that we see.” West says something. A lot of quantitative researchers do large scale analysis.

Projects often use a mix of methods. “If [different methods] start converging on similar kinds of…conclusions, then I think we’ll feel a little bit better about it.” West says.

A few teams have built tools to help. A team at Michigan State University manually sorted over 10,000 tweets to pro-vaccine, anti-vaccine, neutral and irrelevant as training data. The team uses the training data to build tools that sort over 120 million words into buckets.

Pang-Ning Tan told NPR in an email that humans need to keep annotating newtweets and feeding them the training set for the automatic sorting to remain relatively accurate.

If you have heard of large social platforms describing processes to moderate content, then you can assume the interplay between machine detection and human review is familiar.

Unlike the platforms, data access is a challenge researchers face. Much misinformation research uses Twitter data, in part because Twitter is one of the few social media platforms that easily lets users tap into its data pipeline – known as Application Programming Interface or API. Researchers can easily download and analyze large numbers of user profiles.

Take the recently-deplatformed Kiwi Farms as an example. The site was used to harass gay and trans people. When it first went down, we had to wait for it to come up again, then people would talk about where that is.

This site has the same structure as something else, so we can say that it is now here. We’re redirecting data ingestion and pulling content from there.

Facebook, Meta, and TikTok: Where Are We Going? What’s the State of Misinformation on the CrowdTangle Data Service?

Facebook’s data service CrowdTangle, while purporting to serve up all publicly available posts, has been found to not have consistently done so. On another occasion, Facebook bungled data sharing with researchers Most recently, Meta is winding down CrowdTangle, with no alternatives announced set to be in place.

TikTok announced last year that it’s testing a research API, and is “planning to expand availability in the US in the coming weeks.” In an email the company said that to NPR. The company has come under criticism in the past year for allowing disinformation to spread on its platform. Due to its Chinese ownership, it has faced bipartisan scrutiny.

In such a vast, fragmented, and shifting landscape, West says there’s no great way at this point to say what’s the state of misinformation on a given topic.

Free Speech in the Age of Twitter: A Perspective on Kanye West’s Twitter Management of Antisemitism and Political Controversy

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 — The book is scheduled to be published by Alcove Press in the years to come. Her own opinions are expressed in this commentary. It is possible to read more opinion on CNN.

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. In addition to describing West as a brave move into the free speech space, the statement said he would never have to fear being removed from social media again.

In a release by Parler, West said that “in a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves.”

Just think about the way these owners already post, with Musk recently suggesting China control Taiwan and Russia keep part of Ukraine and West releasing a music video showing a doppelgänger of ex-wife Kim Kardashian’s then-boyfriend, Pete Davidson, being kidnapped and buried. If this is a picture of what social networks will look like in the future, we should be very afraid.

Before becoming Twitter’s CEO, owner, and “Chief Twit,” Elon Musk had often lobbed criticism at the platform for its approach to content moderation, even going so far as to target the company’s former policy chief Vijaya Gadde. Despite Musk’s concern about liberalism on the platform, activists, journalists, and advocates outside the US have begun to worry about how Twitter will be affected by a CEO with more than one business.

When women become victims of online hate, they often “shut down their blogs, avoid websites they formerly frequented, take down social networking profiles, (and) refrain from engaging in online political commentary,” according to University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks.

In practice, what these so-called free speech policies really boil down to is an ugly form of censorship that scares away the voices of people who are attacked by users of these platforms.

Parler has been described by West as a place where conservative views can flourish, and non conservativism is unlikely to flock to Truth Social, given its association with Trump. If women, people of color and others start fleeing Twitter, that could leave it as a platform for conservatives as well. This would likely make the views of those who remain even more zealous.

The Delaware Chancery Court’s Decision to Close the Musk-Stackel Venture: A Case Study of the Far-Right Views on Social Media

When like-minded people get together, they often end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they began to talk to one another. Sunstein says this happens because their exchanges heighten their preexisting beliefs and make them more confident.

So, when conservatives get together on social media, we can expect them to become more far right. The far-right views on these social networks could have an impact on our politics, as they did in the 1990s, when Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk show hosts played a role in changing the political landscape. It isn’t hard to imagine that the people who commune on these sites could band together to support and elect political candidates who share their worldviews.

We can expect these male owners to use their platforms to amplify their views when they are sexist, misogynistic, racist or otherwise offensive.

The Delaware Chancery Court gave Friday’s deadline to close the deal. It’s the continuation of a battle between Musk and the social media company that started in April, when Musk tried to back out of a plan to acquire the company. If the two sides don’t meet Friday’s deadline, the next step could be a November trial that could lead to a judge forcing Musk to complete the deal.

The acquisition will strengthen Musk’s presence. The billionaire already owns, oversees or has significant stakes in companies developing cars, rockets, robots, and satellite internet, as well as more experimental ventures. He is controlling a social media platform that affects how hundreds of million of people communicate and get their news.

The Meltdown of CEO Elon Musk Takes Control of Twitter and Immediately-ousts-Top-Executives

The parties were given five days to complete the deal or face a new trial.

Major personnel shifts that came quickly, and almost certainly are the first of many changes to be made by the CEO, had been expected for a long time.

He used social media to criticize the company’s top lawyer. There was a wave of harassment from other accounts. For Gadde, an 11-year Twitter employee who also heads public policy and safety, the harassment included racist and misogynistic attacks, in addition to calls for Musk to fire her. The harassment started again after she was fired.

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.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/27/1132153277/elon-musk-takes-control-of-twitter-and-immediately-ousts-top-executives

Twitter HQ: Hide and Seek: What Else Should We Take Into The Newswire Network? Comments on Musk’s Tweet

But Musk has been signaling that the deal is going through. He strolled into the company’s San Francisco headquarters Wednesday carrying a porcelain sink, changed his Twitter profile to “Chief Twit,” and tweeted “Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!”

And overnight the New York Stock Exchange notified investors that it will suspend trading in shares of Twitter before the opening bell Friday in anticipation of the company going private under Musk.

Sarah Personette, the company’s chief customer officer, said that she had a “great discussion” with Musk on Wednesday and appeared to endorse his Thursday message to advertisers.

Although Musk was enthusiastic about going to Twitter headquarters this week, he still recommended that it be turned into a homeless shelter because few employees actually worked there.

Thursday’s note to advertisers shows a newfound emphasis on advertising revenue, especially a need for Twitter to provide more “relevant ads” — which typically means targeted ads that rely on collecting and analyzing users’ personal information.

The company announced on Thursday that starting in February it would charge at least $100 a month for using its data pipeline, with one exception – users of less than 1,500 times a month.

At their best, these two Twitter styles are complementary. The seriousness of Newswire Twitter makes it possible for it to do things like turn government consumer protection agencies into memelords. There is room for an occasional dose of chaos, like the DPRK News: a fake North Korean propaganda feed that fooled several news outlets.

But the system works (to the extent it does work) because verification helps separate order from chaos. In the game of social media, a blue checkmark means that you can reasonably believe a person is speaking for themselves. It removes the guesswork of scanning an account’s tweets and profile to gauge its veracity, especially in a fast-moving situation like a scandal, an election, or a public health emergency. The seal of authenticity gives serious accounts carte blanche to be playful, because readers can check for their credentials.

All of which might sound like an argument for Musk’s new plan. It is not much of a cost to have that sense of trust if you work for McDonald’s or the Associated Press.

On this week’s Gadget Lab, we talk with WIRED platforms and power reporter about the changes coming toTwitter and the future of the social network.

If you encourage your friends to watch House of the Dragon, they will be interested in fathering children with you. The new album from Natalia Lafourcade is recommended by Mike. Lauren suggests reexamining your relationship with social media.

The Case of Elon Musk’s Boundary on Twitter: The Conversation between Ndahinda, Michael Calore, and Geoffrey Goode

The person can be found on the social networking site. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is a fighter. The main hotline atGadgetLab should be blinged out. A producer of the show is Boone Ashworth. Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

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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.

After Donald Trump supported an insurrection on the Capitol, his account was frozen and he was locked out. Over the years, leaders on the platform have made threats but they have not been banned. In June 2021, Nigeria’s president posted a threatening message against the people of the southwest of the country. The account remained live even though it had been removed.

There is still uncertainty about the company’s future. Musk has met with civil-rights leaders about his plan to put a moderation council in charge of establishing policies on hate speech and harassment. The users who had been banned before Musk took the company would not be allowed to do so until a process was in place for them to do so.

Some of the users who have been banned from twitter are going to go to lesser known platforms They’re more toxic and extreme once they’re there. A community that gets more committed, active, and smaller is what we see.

“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. “That’s the situation where you can have more violence.”

To study how Musk’s ownership changed Twitter, the researchers searched through tweets posted between March 1 and November 13 of this year, collecting the 20 most popular—as determined by a combination of followers, likes, and retweets—with keywords that could indicate anti-LGBTQ+, racist, or antisemitic intent. They reviewed the language in the three different categories to see if they intended to do anything.

“How he treats pressure from countries like Saudi Arabia and India—I think those are key indicators of where he’s going with the platform,” says David Kaye, former UN special rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression and clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine.

While Twitter does not boast nearly as many users as Meta-owned Facebook or Instagram, it is widely used by activists, civil society groups, journalists, and politicians—all of whom are influential in shaping public policy and opinion. The platform has also proved crucial for those organizing protests in places like India, Nigeria, and Argentina, and has provided an avenue for those living in highly controlled societies like Saudi Arabia to voice criticism of their governments.

The company filed a case in India, which is its third largest market, to fight the order to remove individual pieces of content as well as whole accounts that the government considers a risk to India’s security or sovereignty.

What does Musk say about Twitter? What does it really matter if you follow Musk? How to keep your Twitter in the naivete

Musk said that small talk felt like it came from his own mind after 10 pm last Thursday. Congratulations: We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk.

Quiet quitting is rejecting the burden of going above and beyond and no longer working overtime because it depletes your own money. It is about not giving more than most people can expect to get. If you want to stick around on this new Twitter—whatever it may become—you need to find a way to use it without it using you.

It is easy for an electric car entrepreneur who follows a lot of very active users to mistake his own experience for that of everyone else. (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 check in on current events or live sports and then get on with 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. Choosing to lurk, to sit back and observe for a while, is basically a heuristic and simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos that is New Twitter. After checking in on his new toy, close your app or browser tab. Send a tweet, then disengage. Keep one eye on it during basketball games. If you have to use messages, direct them to other areas. Save your most original thoughts for another time, another place.

The Twitter Files, Part Duex! Comes to an End: Musk’s Takeover of Twitter and the Conservative Crises of Hunter Biden and the New York Post

For the months prior to Musk’s takeover, the researchers deemed just one tweet out of the three top 20 lists to be actually hateful, in this case against Jewish people. The others were either quoting or using key words from another person’s words in a non-hateful way.

Users will be able to decide if the company has limits on how many other users can view their posts with the new option that will be introduced by Musk. 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 clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal,” Musk tweeted on Thursday. He did not give more information or a timetable.

He made the announcement after Musk gave his approval to the release of internal Twitter documents that were critical of the practice of limiting the reach of certain, potentially harmful content.

Musk was accused by conservatives of continuing a practice that they opposed after he said he now votes Republican. The clash reflects an underlying tension at Twitter under Musk, as the billionaire simultaneously has promised a more maximalist approach to “free speech,” a move cheered by some on the right, while also attempting to reassure advertisers and users that there will still be content moderation guardrails.

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.

In both cases, the internal documents appear to have been provided directly to the journalists by Musk’s team. Musk on Friday shared Weiss’ thread in a tweet and added, “The Twitter Files, Part Duex!!” Along with a few popcorn emojis.

What Do Right-Leaning Figures Admit About Social Media Activities of the China’s Government? And How Many Escort Ads Are Posted on Twitter?

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.

Search results of major cities outside of China also turn up similar escort ads, wrote Ray Serrato, a former member of Twitter’s safety and integrity team, in a blog post.

According to them, other information operations linked to the Chinese government are more likely to engage in flooding and amplify messages aligned with the state’s agenda.

The research team at the DFR lab said that over 72 times a day is bot-like behavior. NPR identified over 3,500 accounts that have done so and mentioned China’s three largest cities at least once a day from Nov 21, 2022 to Nov. 30. The data shows an uptick in the number of these accounts, peaking on Nov. 28.

Researchers say it wouldn’t be surprising if the activity was linked to some government-linked bot accounts. The data has something in it, but it is really hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Linvill said so.

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, raising ire from the Chinese government and generating significant discussion online, fan groups of Korean and Chinese entertainers used hashtags related to the visit to boost their idols’ social media popularity, even when there was no relationship between the pop stars and the hashtags, DFR Lab researchers told NPR.

The Chinese government would probably try to talk about the locations where protesters took place rather than focusing on Shanghai, say two researchers at a university.

Over 900 accounts were identified by Twitter as being linked to the Chinese government. Researchers at the analytic firm Graphika were able to identify patterns of behavior and uncover a network of related accounts across all social media platforms, despite not being specific about how it zeroed in on those accounts. The accounts would come from a variety of narratives, ranging from personal attacks to support for the police.

Some of the bots could also just be advertising sex services, which are banned in China, researchers say. A reporter for Semafor received a response from one of the advertised accounts asking where the potential client is in Beijing.

It’s also possible that the bots were created in anticipation of unrest tied to the 20th Party Congress, where Chinese President Xi Jinping solidified his precedent-breaking third-term rule, DFR Lab’s Kenton Thibaut says.

About half the bot-like accounts NPR identified, both before and after the fire, were created in 2022 – recent creation is a major sign of inauthentic activity. NPR shared a random sample of tweets with researchers at the Social Media Research Foundation, a non-profit that analyzes social media content. A large group of accounts that post escort ads and do not interact with other users is shown in their network analysis. The escort ad group of accounts was the largest group in the search results before the fire and initially after the fire, and they were mostly created from September to October of 2022.

The change is not a surprise. Even before Musk, Twitter had a fraught relationship with bot creators. Some automated accounts were broken when the API changed. Musk has disdain for bots, which is believed to be a cause of scam and junk mail. The company cut off third-party developers from the platform last month due to a change in policy, while reversing some previous decisions. And Twitter has been aggressively adding paid features since its acquisition, which put the company under a heavy debt burden.

Twitter must also reinvest in moderation by bringing back the trust and safety and human rights teams that were in place prior to Musk’s mass layoffs, and it needs to beef up this force to ensure that moderation occurs in every major language. It also needs to submit to regular audits to guarantee that policies are equitable and applied consistently.

As November turned into December, the number of active bot-like accounts returned to pre-protest level. Local governments in China relaxed COVID restrictions, authorities tracked down protest participants and the on-the-ground protests in China subsided.

Trump’s Twitter ban on the India-US social platform is unacceptable, and the role of the trust and safety council members in the fight against hate and misinformation

While Weiss interpreted the reluctance to use such measures against other world leaders as evidence that Trump was treated particularly unfairly, the documents may also reveal the opposite: that the company consistently underestimated the danger its platform posed in contexts outside the US, and only acted forcefully against threats to American democracy. Trump would have imposed his ban on other leaders, too if it had been uniformly implemented across the world.

“Vulnerable communities in far away countries are less important than the relationships with leaders like [India’s Narendra] Modi or others,” says an employee at an organization that was a part of Twitter’s trust and safety council, which was disbanded earlier this month. The employee asked for anonymity due to fear that their organization may be targets by harassment and threats.

Some of the discrepancy may be due to how different governments respond to moderation on social platforms. The ban was imposed on the company by the Federal Government after it removed a threatening message from the president. Instead of banning the leader, the company negotiated with the government to open a local office, pay taxes, and register as a broadcaster in order to get it back. Legislation is being considered to regulate platforms in Nigeria.

Kian Vesteinsson, a senior research analyst at Freedom House, says access to markets is one of the things that go into the trade-off about whether to take enforcement actions.

The accounts were open for public viewing on Saturday but journalists were restricted from posting until Musk removed the offending post.

The town square should be a place where people can find reliable information. 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.

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. In addition to the mass exodus of followers from Twitter, there have been layoffs at a number of tech and journalism companies, including CNN and Facebook. The town hall we desperately need can only be provided by some of these professionals creating new social platforms.

The move from Musk came after he posted an unscientific poll on his personal Twitter account that concluded Friday night with 59% of participants voting in favor of immediately restoring the accounts.

The two people spoke to CNN on Saturday morning and said that they didn’t agree with the decision to take down the tweets, and instead chose an appeal option.

Rupar told CNN that he had ultimately decided to simply remove the tweet and move on from the episode, though he described the whole affair as “kinda [sic] absurd obviously.”

Twitter had torsion in the wake of the O’Sullivan suspension and a poll calling Musk to step down as CEO of Mastodon

The suspension of the journalists had been met with swift condemnation by news organizations, the American Civil Liberties Union, United Nations, Democratic members of Congress and others.

The move marked a significant attempt by Musk, a self-described free speech absolutist, to wield his unilateral authority over the platform to censor the press.

A CNN spokesperson previously said on Thursday that the network had asked Twitter for an explanation over O’Sullivan’s suspension and it would “reevaluate our relationship based on that response.”

The account of Mastodon, a competitive social media service, was suspended by the social media giant, which gave the account that posts the location of Musk’s private jet the ability to continue.

Other reporters suspended Thursday had also recently written about the plane-tracking account, which Twitter permanently suspended the day before as it rolled out a new policy prohibiting the sharing of live location data.

A poll was asking people to vote on whether Musk should step down as CEO of the company. Musk said he would follow the results of the poll.

Replying to a tweet Sunday, in which MIT artificial intelligence researcher Lex Fridman said he would take the CEO job, Musk hinted he hasn’t been completely happy with his new gig.

Free Press: The Case for a Change in the Social Media Platform after Musk Takes Over Twitter and the #StopToxicTwitter Coalition

Free Press is a media and technology justice advocacy organization that has the senior counsel and director for digital justice and civil rights. Free Press is a founding member of the #StopToxicTwitter coalition. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. You can view more opinions on CNN.

Free Press agrees with Musk that he must step aside. But his replacement as CEO needs to be someone who understands at the most basic level that this social media platform will succeed only when it puts the health and safety of its users before the whims of one erratic and reckless billionaire.

His amnesty to previously suspended accounts has given us the return of neo-Nazis like Andrew Anglin, right-wing activists like Laura Loomer and other figures who have spread hate to millions of followers.

More than 60 civil rights groups formed the #StopToxic Twitter coalition after Musk took over, in order to urge advertisers to stop buying ads on the platform until they get assurances about brand safeguards and moderation standards. Within weeks, 50 of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers pulled their ads or announced they would do so, and dozens of other companies curtailed spending on the platform.

In regards to reversals, there is a need for a new leadership to reverse its decision to allow Covid-19 misinformation to be spread on the social network. The blue checkmark feature allows verified users to post longer videos and has their content prioritized at the top of replies, mentions and searches. They must not allow Musk to have a plan on accounts that were suspended before he took over.

Next week, there will be no free access to its third-party services, with a paid tier that will be available on February 9th. One of the things that could be affected by the news is a lot of bot accounts, which are automated and can be used to post cute animals, fictional character quotes, and more. Many bot creators have resigned themselves to shutting down, because they did not know the details of the change.

The Damage to Twitter from the Decay of a Fun Social Feed? How Starbird Will Lose The Fun, But You Might Don’t Want It

“If you’re building a service on someone else’s platform, and … there’s not an obvious way that they’re making money from you doing that, then you’re building on sand.”

So next week, Twitter users might wake up to a feed that’s suddenly a lot less fun — and Twitter might have decimated one of its platform’s finest arts.

“You look at some of the conferences we attended, you know, 50% of the social computing papers would be about Twitter and sometimes even more, because that was the data that we had access to,” says Starbird, a researcher at the University of Washington who studies online information dynamics during crises, including disinformation.

Twitter did not say how many tweets users can download or post at the $100 a month level. Those who need additional access will pay more even though the company didn’t reveal the pricing.

The increased cost of running automated accounts will be made more expensive by the move. Some bots are useful, such as the ones that help highlight the change in the New York Times, while others are just for fun.

No researchers would be spared if some bots were spared. The change will limit what’s possible for Starbird researchers who’ve depended on the application programming interface to study user behavior for years.

The group of research institutions, advocacy groups and individual researchers from around the world issued an open letter requesting that the same access be maintained for researchers after the first announcement that there would be a fee for the service. Representative Trahan said in his statement that the data should be easy to access. As of Wednesday, Twitter did not respond to a request from NPR sent last week for more information about its decision.

Users’ timelines are shaped not only by who they follow but also algorithmic recommendation, so players seeking influence can game it to amplify its message.

The Starbird Project – Using Micro-Messaging to Identify Clues to Political Frauds on Twitter

Users with access to the Twitter API can upload and download data in bulk to and from the platform using a computer program, bypassing the main user interface.

Currently, many Twitter API users can download up to two million tweets from the past seven days for free every month. Academic institutions can download unlimited amounts from the entire archive for free. With large datasets, researchers can make intricate maps of how clusters of users relate to each other, which is invaluable for understanding online communities, including those that spread falsehoods.

Without access to that wealth of data, researchers will have a less comprehensive picture and less ability to go back and investigate narratives that they’ve missed in real time, Starbird says.

The data that users have access to on the micro-messaging platform is more transparent than other major social media platforms. Meta’s offering, CrowdTangle, does not provide straightforward ways to download data in real time and in bulk the way Twitter does. Moreover, the company is reportedly winding it down and has not announced whether it will offer a replacement. Meta did not answer questions from NPR about CrowdTangle’s future.

Starbird’s team is considering how to use social media if they don’t have access anymore. They plan to focus on Telegram, TikTok and Reddit and collaborate with teams that watch other platforms when they run for president.

We’ve had constraints for so long that we have tended to work within them. Starbird says that there will be new ways to use the data. “Unfortunately, I think a lot of that creativity is going to be better spent on other platforms.”

Sarah Oh lost her job as a human rights advisor at twitter in the first round of layoffs, so she joined a friend in building a rival service.

With Gabor Cselle, who previously worked at Twitter and Google, she launched T2, currently available in beta. Like Twitter, it offers a social feed of posts with 280-character limits. Oh says that the key selling point is its focus on safety.

Oh told CNN that they are well prepared to deliver on the idea of creating an experience thatallows people to share what they want to share without fearing abuse and harassment.

How to Escape from Twitter: How Artifact and Musk Launched a Facebook-based News Feed Reveal What Facebook and Twitter Don’t

The list of newer entrants in the markets includes apps created by former Twitter employees, a startup backed by one of Musk’s Twitter investors, and a service from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. While some apps like T2 strongly resemble Twitter, others take a different approach.

Artifact, a personalized news feed powered by artificial intelligence that was announced last month, quickly earned comparisons to the micro-messaging service. CNN tested the app and it resembled news reader applications like Apple News or the now-debunked, albeit useful, Google Reader. Artifact displayed popular articles from large media organizations and smaller bloggers in a main feed, tailored to users based on their activity and selected interests.

But all of these apps appear to be vying for the opportunity to scratch the itch users may feel for a news feed that isn’t Twitter — at least for as long as that itch lasts.

“Something that we’ve heard a lot from people who are moving over from Twitter, either partially or fully, is that it is just for them a nicer experience overall,” said Jae Kaplan, co-founder of Anti Software Software club, the group that develops Cohost, a text-based social media feed similar to Twitter. The service launched publicly in June of last year, after Musk offered to buy Twitter. In November, after Musk completed the takeover, the platform saw a surge in activity, adding 80,000 users within 48 hours.

Kaplan pointed out that when people refer to them as a parody of Twitter, it’s not necessarily a replacement for it.

“If people leave, where do they go? Karen North, clinical professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, said that since there is no platform that is able to take on the function of social media, nothing is prepared for it. “No platform has the global user base, representing people from all walks of life the way that Twitter does.”

“A platform cannot continue to go viral perpetually,” Rochko recently told CNN about Mastodon’s sagging user numbers. “The cycle of media news and attention on social media just simply goes away after awhile, but behind it leaves organic growth which is what we had before November and which we still have now.”

How Academic Funding Works: Comment on Blackburn’s iDRAMA Lab and Facebook Hate Speech on the Technicolor Facebook Group

Cambridge Analytica was found to have accessed the data of millions of Facebook users, and the social networking site restricted access to its application programming interface.

Jeremy Blackburn, an assistant professor at a New York university and a member of the iDRAMA Lab which analyzes hate speech on social media says that there is a lack of understanding of how academic funding works. “At worst it’s an attempt to grift more taxpayer money via federal funding agencies like he’s done with his other companies.”