The Rise of Hate Speech on Twitter During the Black Hole Era of Elon Musk and the Black Holes in the Democratic Republic of Congo

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.

Even if academics are not able to clearly explain the link between hate speech and violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it is clear that it was a consequence of the rise of conspiracy theories on social media. It is difficult to work out a link between a social media post and violence. We have many actors who are making public calls for people to commit crimes, and later those crimes are committed.

“The impact is potentially devastating,” says David Lazer, a computational social scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. “Twitter had been the most common source of data for studying the information ecosystem, especially misinformation, to understand what content was flowing out there and why.”

There were rapid shifts in the online conversation that had to be moderated. It’s a problem that seems likely to worsen now that Musk has made cuts to the company’s staff and its safety systems.

In a widely shared study from 2018, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge studied Twitter and found that false news stories on the site spread much faster than do true news stories — possibly because, they reported, the false news items had more ‘novelty’ than the true news6. Fear, disgust and surprise were some of the emotions aroused by the false news.

James Piazza is a terrorism researcher at Pennsylvania State University and he says that he gets really scared when people use inflammatory speech on social media. “That’s the situation where you can have more violence.”

The move also runs counter to the spirit of the EU’s Digital Services Act, which came into force last November, says Claes de Vreese, who studies political communication at the University of Amsterdam. The data transparency and access legislation that is eventually going to be put in place is going to apply to a very large social-media platform.

Tromble expects a chaotic beginning to the Musk era at twitter as Musk and users test the boundaries. She thinks that it will settle down into a system similar to the old one on social media.

In November, Vince Knight decided he’d had enough of Twitter. Knight was concerned about the site’s direction after more than 10 years on the platform and was concerned about the number of layoffs soon after the new owner, Musk, purchased it. On the platform, Knight said that he was jumping to Mastodon, which was a competing service. He said he didn’t want to support Musk anymore.

On 11 December, Musk’s ‘pronouns’ were in an apparent attempt to mock the transgender and gender-non conforming rights movement and to malign the departing director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Social Media as a Platform for Research Communication: From #IAmAscientistBecause to #BlackInTheIvory

There are a lot of scientists at Tel Aviv University, but they wouldn’t be as well-versed without it. It gives you more opportunities because it increases democracy in science.

The changes show why it is concerning that scientists are using a private platform for their communication, says an information scientist at a Canadian university. The actors that we are in the hands of do not care about scholarly communication at all.

It has also given an influential voice to people who might otherwise be excluded, and has helped to broker support networks for those who don’t see people like them in their own departments, says Sigourney Bonner, co-founder of the #BlackinCancer community and a PhD student at Cancer Research UK’s Cambridge Institute. “I didn’t meet a Black woman with a PhD until I started my own,” she says. Movements united by hashtags — from #IAmAScientistBecause to #BlackInTheIvory — have often seen Twitter acting as a rallying point for discussing key problems in academia, such as racism, sexism, harassment and bullying.

Bergstrom thinks that there are positives and negatives to be had on the social networking site. During the pandemic, it gave the public more transparency about the uncertain process of science progressing in real time, he says. If some audiences wanted to leap on to messages of scientific certainty where there was not, it was not their fault, he says.

He doesn’t think that science teachers have done a good job teaching about the social process of science. Science looks very different when you see it in action.

Fauci and Mastodon on a platform that isn’t a science: Why scientists should continue working on the social media platform?

Musk mockingly wrote about Fauci after Bergstrom spoke to Nature. He wrote that it wasn’t possible to have meaningful and productive scientific collaboration on a platform where a right-wing troll denied science because the results were inconvenient to him.

The way things are changing, and we have been having conversations to make sure that we are able to continue to exist. “At this moment in time, I don’t know.”

“A social network is always only successful if it’s got enough people, and if it’s got the right people,” says Haustein. Millions of people have to move from one place to another. Even if that happens, she says, you need to rebuild your network and structures just like you did before even if it is Mastodon that takes over and you can’t get back in touch.

Despite being ten times more popular on social media, the things that I posted is still getting the same amount of engagement on Mastodon.

And, although the platform’s worst qualities are becoming more common, say researchers who spoke to Nature for this article, there is still a need for trained scientists to provide their expertise and point people to the best sources of evidence-based information. In her response to Bergstrom, a health scientist at the University of Oxford, UK argued that people like him are still needed and that they should carry on with their work. I’m not leaving.

What does Twitter say about social media? An algorithmic perspective on what people perceive as a social phenomenon and how they interact with it (and why they don’t)

A guy is wearing clothes. The lingerie addict. The weird, NSFW woman who has a fascination with wolves. If you are interested in particular things, you might have seen one or more of these people in the past few weeks.

It’s part of the platform’s effort to shift users away from a simple feed of people they follow and toward a more curated experience. Twitter’s algorithm-based “For You” timeline became the default choice for users on January 10, part of Elon Musk’s plan to overhaul the platform. The company says the ForYou feed serves users from accounts that they follow, augmented by “recommended” and “suggested” content.

Those signals, according to Twitter’s FAQ on the timeline, include a tweet’s popularity on the wider platform and how people within a user’s own network of followers interact with it. It’s become known that the focus on the timeline has made it possible for lesser known, niche, and niche-focused posts to make it into the mainstream by a wider audience.

“It probably isn’t news to many people by this point that when we’re on platforms like Twitter or TikTok or YouTube, our social experience is mediated by algorithms,” says Jennifer Cobbe, a researcher at the University of Cambridge who studies the way algorithms shape our digital lives. “People often complain—not unreasonably—about what ‘the algorithm’ is showing them, but there’s not really any escape from this.”

A model of virality was promoted by dogpiling on people who had committed some minor, odd, infraction. People who had made troubling statements. Jon Ronson wrote a book called “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” about its impact on humans at the center of the storm. The shame people felt was justified, because they had done wrong.

Much of what we know about social media discourse is thanks to Twitter’s longtime policy of allowing free access to its data. That data makes it a great place for researchers to study online behavior, such as how falsehoods and conspiracy theories circulate. Kate Starbird remembers that there was a dominant research activity in the field between 2010 and 2015.

Starbird, a researcher at the University of Washington who studies online information dynamics during crises says that half of the social computing papers they attended would be about micro-messaging.

There was no mention of how many users could download or post at $100 a month. Those who need additional access will have to have to pay more though the company didn’t disclose the pricing.

Musk’s “Bot Armies”: Why Twitter Has Been Open for 10 Years and Why We Can’t Go to Harvard to Study the Future of Research

The move will make it more expensive to run automated accounts. Some bots promote scams and propaganda, while others are useful or fun for many users, such as those that highlight every change the New York Times makes to its story headlines or flag an earthquake.

Musk wants to end the platform of “bot armies.” When Twitter first announced last Thursday that it will start charging for API usage without information of pricing or exceptions, bot watchers on the platform bemoaned the imminent demise of creations they loved. Musk said that bots will keep free access if they respond to feedback.

No researchers would have been spared by some bots. The changes will limit what is possible for researchers like Starbird who have depended on that platform for years to study user behavior and information operations.

If well funded researchers can get the data they need, the policy change will make it hard for low-income people to afford studies that last a long time. “Twitter is a global platform, and this decision has global ramifications,” says Renee DiResta, research manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory at Stanford University in California. “Discontinuing free access will break free tools developed to democratize research.”

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 world of social media has changed in the past few years, however, you can still find a guide post on the micro-messaging site.

The main user interface of the platform can be bypassed by users who are granted access to the twitpic app.

The future of social media: Starbird, TikTok, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Facebook and other social media platforms aren’t going away

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.

By giving its users access to the data in a way that is documented, the social media platform has made its data more transparent. The way to download data in real time and in bulk isn’t straightforward with Meta’s offering, CrowdTangle. The company is winding it down and has not said if it will offer a replacement. NPR questioned Meta about CrowdTangle’s future.

TikTok announced last year that they were testing a research program, and were planning to bring it to the US in the coming weeks. the company told NPR in an email. The company has come under criticism in the past year for allowing disinformation to spread on its platform. It has also faced bipartisan scrutiny due to its Chinese ownership.

If their access ceases, Starbird’s team is going to have to think about what they can do with social media. They intend to focus on Telegram, TikTok and Reddit along with Twitter for the 2024 presidential election while collaborating with teams that monitor other platforms.

“We’ve worked within constraints for a long time.” There may be new ways to use the data. A lot of that creativity is going to be better spent on other platforms.

In the last few weeks, Academic researchers have used free access to track all activity on the platform in a single day, as well as estimate how many people are bots on the platform. This kind of research is going to become harder.

The risks of granting access to their data discourages social networks from doing so. Problems with moderation of content that allows hate speech to be put down may cause headaches for the site if an academic uses a platform’s free access to identify a massive issue. As a result, many social media platforms choose to simply lock out or limit researchers from analyzing their platforms, or place unfeasibly large prices on getting API access. Independent research dependence is an intolerable situation.

Facebook restricted access to its API in 2018, after it was found that the consultancy  Cambridge Analytica had accessed the data of millions of users to use for targeted political advertising.

The Impact of Twitter on Geo-Mechanics: a Case Study of Aid and Relief in Turkey After the February 6 February Insurrection

A lack of understanding of how academic funding works is a problem, according to the iDRAMA Lab, which analyzes hate speech on social media. “At worst it’s an attempt to grift more taxpayer money via federal funding agencies like he’s done with his other companies.”

Akin Ünver has been using Twitter data for years. He studies politics, fake news, and online extremism, as well as other social science issues. But earlier this month, he had to set aside time to focus on a pressing emergency: helping relief efforts in Turkey and Syria after the devastating earthquake on 6 February.

Aid workers are trying to rescue people trapped by debris, and provide supplies to those displaced by the tragedy. nver, a computational social scientist who works at zyein University in Istanbul, says that Twitter has been useful in collecting real-time data and generating important maps.

He was surprised when he heard about the impending end of the free access to the application programming interface that could allow for large amounts of data to be pulled from the platform. Couldn’t come at a worse time. Most analysts and programmers that are building apps and functions for Turkey earthquake aid and relief are reliant on the twitosphere to do it.

The change in policy will make it difficult for large European Union-funded projects, whose proposals were written with the assumption that access would remain free. And prices could quickly mount if each researcher on a project had to pay the monthly fee.

Further data difficulties can be created by restriction of access. De Vreese says that his colleagues have been frantically collecting data since word of the API change broke. He says that limits on new information could render the field less reliant on downloaded data.

There was enough data in Lazer’s lab to produce at least one academic paper, which looked at the impact of banning certain users after a mob attacked the US Capitol. “In the longer run, none of that work can be replicated,” he says. If another insurrection happens, researchers won’t be able to study it the same way.