The First Content Moderation Council Meeting: Musk and Trump, the Bullsh*t Artist, and the End of the Trump-Trump Era

Musk completed his purchase of TWTR on October 27. On October 28, Musk publicly announced a Content Moderation Council to review previously banned accounts, then promptly fired thousands of Twitter

            (TWTR) employees. So things are going great,” a narrator read on the NBC variety show. The first Content Moderation Council meeting is about to start.

Musk missed his stated commitment to free speech by not agreeing to the bans. Musk has bragged that he is a free speech enthusiast and would like to allow all legal speech. “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” Musk once tweeted.

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.”

What Twitter Has to Offer: A Keyhole View of Musk’s Twitter Effort under the New Policy on Freedoms of Speech, Not Freedom of Reach

But more than professional utility ties me to the site. It’s similar to slot machines, with what experts call anittent reinforcement schedule. Occasionally, at random intervals, some compelling nuggets will appear, but most of the time it is repetitive and uninteresting. Skinner has found that rats and pigeons tend to be good at generating obsessive behavior because of the unpredictable rewards.

“I don’t know that Twitter engineers ever sat around and said, ‘We are creating a Skinner box,’” said Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist at New York University and author of a book about gambling machine design. But that is what they have built, she said. People who self-destruct on the site should know better than to stay away.

Musk said last week that the new policy was freedom of speech, not freedom of reach. Negative/hate tweeters will be demonetized so no ads or revenue is received from them.

Over the years, many people around the world have relied on Twitter to function as a town square, which is where they can debate issues openly. Of course, only 23% of Americans are on Twitter and of those who use the platform, the top 25% of users by tweet volume produce 97% of tweets, according to the Pew Research Center. Yet the conversations that happen on Twitter seem to heavily influence what reporters and others talk about offline, so these users have an outsize influence on the public debate.

In a post last week, the company said that it still had not changed its policies but that it was going to use more de-amplification of violative tweets. Weiss said on Friday that the company already did that. The post stated that freedom of speech isn’t freedom of reach.

For a “keyhole view of what Twitter under Musk will look like,” just look at alternative platforms such as Parler, Gab and Truth Social that promise fewer restrictions on speech, said Angelo Carusone, president of the liberal nonprofit watchdog group Media Matters for America.

He said that the feature of those sites was their ability to say and do things that are not allowed on mainstream social media platforms. And what we see there is that they are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.”

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has decided to offer “general amnesty” to suspended accounts starting next week — a gentler way of saying that he’s decided to welcome back some of the site’s worst and most toxic people. It was the second major moderation decision he made since taking over after unbanning Trump, after Musk ran an informal poll from his personal account.

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 a journalist was also banned.

The person urged Musk to hire someone with a political view that was smart and savvy to lead enforcement. Masters is the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona who has been endorsed by Trump and has echoed his false claims that the election was stolen from him.

Twitter, Mastodon, Twitpic: How Donald Trump is going to leave Facebook after he loses their trust and safety (with an apology)

Allowing Trump to return may lead to other social networks taking a similar stance, especially since Facebook’s ban on the former president is about to expire.

Musk privately clashed with Agrawal in April, immediately before deciding to make a bid for the company, according to text messages later revealed in court filings.

He has taken deep cuts to the company’s trust and safety workforce, which involved teams that were focused on non-English languages. This week, Twitter disbanded its external Trust and Safety Council, some of whose members had come under online attack after Musk criticized them.

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.

Despite the rapid growth of Mastodon, Twitpic remains much larger, reporting more than 200 million daily users. The company has not reported financial data since October, when Musk took it private.

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. Most marketers aren’t fond of the thought of their ads running alongside harmful content such as pornography.

Why Trump can’t have a free speech on Twitter unless he’s bought by a man who’s been intentionally antisemitic

Everyone’s guess, as always, what exactly 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.

An associate professor at the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at the University writes about issues affecting women and social media. She was spokeswoman for international affairs in the Treasury Department during the Obama administration. The opinions expressed in this are not of hers. CNN has more opinion on it.

Parler announced on Monday that it had been purchased by the rapper and activist, who was suspended from the micro-networking site for a month for an antisemitic message. A statement from the company that sponsors Parler described West as having taken a “groundswell into the free speech media space” where he will never have to fear being removed from social media again.

In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial, West said that we must make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves.

If Parler is purchased by West or Musk, there will be an already-extant conservative community on social media. These men’s “free speech” policies are likely to drive away people victimized by hate online. Those who remain in these conservative spaces will become even more extreme as a result of their interactions, which could cultivate a dangerous far-right ideology that has far-reaching effects on our politics.

At the same time, he’s reinstated thousands of accounts that had been banned for breaking the rules, including Trump, neo-Nazis, white nationalists and Qanon promoters – but won’t allow conspiracy theorist Alex Jones or Kanye West, who’s been vocally antisemitic, to tweet. How that squares with Musk’s purported embrace of free speech principles is unclear.

A 2020 study of women in 51 countries by The Economist Intelligence Unit found that 38% have been victims of online violence, from stalking to doxxing to violent threats. Women of color are affected the most. There is a lot of antisemitic content online. A 2021 report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that a sample of 714 anti-Jewish posts on five social networks had been viewed 7.3 million times.

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.

West has already described Parler as a place where conservative views can flourish, and nonconservatives are unlikely to flock to Truth Social, given its association with Trump. If women, people of color and others start leaving, it could cause a platform issue for conservatives as well. This would likely make the views of those who remain even more zealous.

On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, and What Can Be Done? When Trump Decides to Close the Twitter Acquisition, Musk Rejoins

“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 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. And just as Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk-show hosts radically altered the political landscape in the 1990s in ways that laid the groundwork for Trump’s presidency, the far-right views nurtured on these social networks could have a huge impact on our country’s politics. It is hard to imagine that people who are associated with these sites could come together to support and vote for candidates who agree with them.

We can also expect these male owners to use their platforms to amplify their own views — even when they’re sexist, misogynistic, racist or otherwise hateful.

Yildirim said that Facebook was good at targeting advertising to users who they wanted to see. Musk’s message suggests he wants to fix that, she said.

More than 60 civil rights groups formed a coalition after Musk took over to demand better brand safeguards and moderation on the platform. 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.

The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reported that one ad buying agency had already received requests from about a dozen clients to pause their advertisements on Twitter if Musk restores Trump’s account, and other were considering doing the same.

Musk also reiterated in the letter a lofty earlier statement he had made that the Twitter acquisition is not meant to be a money-making venture for him.

On the eve of the trial, defendants declared that they intend to close the deal, and in a sharp response, the lawyers for the company claimed that Musk attempted to leave the deal. They say, “We mean it this time.”

It’s a stunning reversal of fortunes not just for Musk, who bought the company for $44 billion, but also for a platform used by some of the most powerful people on the planet, including world leaders, CEOs, and the Pope.

Twitter Wins: Elon Musk Wins the Lottery: Why Do You Need It? How Did He Get What You Want? What Has He Done Recently About Twitter?

Delaware Chancery Court chancellor Kathaleen St. Judge McCormick gave the parties until 5 p.m. on Oct. 28 to close the deal or face a rescheduled trial.

After six months of wrangling, it’s all over: Elon Musk owns Twitter. How did that happen? We will give you a detailed account of how it happened, with former executives escorted out, and employees waiting on the first updates from their new CEO, who is also the wealthiest person in the world.

The major personnel moves came quickly, which is normal, and the changes will almost certainly be the first of many that the CEO will make.

About the same time, he used Twitter to criticize Gadde, the company’s top lawyer. His followers followed his musings with a wave of harassment from other accounts. There were many calls for Musk to fire her because of the harassment she received, along with racist and misogynistic attacks. On Thursday, after she was fired, the harassing tweets lit up once again.

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.

It’s also a realization that no content moderation is good for business, putting the company at risk of losing advertisers and subscribers.

“You want a place that consumers can’t help but want to boycott, because the platform takes no responsibility for that.” Yildirim said.

What the Twitter CEO is saying about Twitter: Why the stock exchange is shut down and what it does with its users’ personal information? Comment on Musk’s Twitter apology

Musk has been saying that the deal is going through. He arrived at the company’s San Francisco headquarters Wednesday carrying a porcelain sink, changing his profile on the social media platform to “ChiefTweet”, and telling fans to “let that sink in!”

The stock exchange notified investors that it will suspend trading of the shares of Twitter before the opening bell on Friday in order to allow Musk to take the company private.

Musk’s earlier suggestion to turn the building into a homeless shelter was in stark contrast to the enthusiasm that he has about visiting the headquarters this week.

Thursday’s note shows a greater emphasis on advertising revenue, especially in light of the fact that targeted ads collect and analyze users’ personal information

Take Musk’s last 24 hours on the platform for example: The billionaire gave credence to a fringe conspiracy theory about the brutal attack on Paul Pelosi. Musk scolded media outlets when they reported his irresponsible behavior. He trolled The New York Times in one tweet and chastised The Guardian as a “far left wing propaganda machine” in another.

The article first appeared in theReliable Sources newsletter. Sign up here for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape.

In fact, not only has Musk himself contaminated the information environment he now reigns over, but he is apparently working to dismantle the little infrastructure erected to help users sift through the daily chaos. He plans to take the blue verified badges from public figures and institutions if they don’t pay, according to recent reports.

Charging for verified badges might appear at first glance as a business story. But the move will have significant ramifications on the information landscape. Most notably, it will make it much more difficult for users to distinguish from authentic and inauthentic accounts.

For years the right has lashed out at the “blue checks.” They claim them to represent snobs who control the conversation, even though many conservatives are also blue badges. Taking away those free blue checks, and the air of authority they give upon the profile they are appended to, will certainly delight some conservatives.

Twitter Phenomenology Revisited: Musk and the Volkswagen Group Haven’t Receded after Musk Takes Over SpaceX

In March of 2018, Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, promised that the best thing one could do to protect social networks, email, and civil discourse would be to authenticating users.

I went to visit Steve Jobs in 1998 to hear his plans for Apple. He had returned to the company that fired him a decade earlier, but he was still the interim CEO. He walked in to the room with me and began writing his solution to the company’s troubles on the whiteboard. He had a new product plan, a new product, and a workforce revitalized by an inspiring ad campaign.

Musk’s successful companies don’t have to pay attention to the absurdity of his haste. When he took over Tesla in 2008, the company was already five years old. 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. rocket ships are the most difficult to make because they take a long time to launch successfully and can end up killing people if you cut corners.

The impact is apparently already being felt at Twitter, as Musk tweeted that “Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers” Thursday after many of the advertising announcements were made.

“We have paused advertising on Twitter,” Kelsey Roemhildt, a spokesperson for General Mills, told CNN in a statement, making it the first company that doesn’t compete with Musk’s Tesla to confirm such a move. “As always, we will continue to monitor this new direction and evaluate our marketing spend,” the spokesperson said.

Volkswagen Group, which owns brands such asAudi,Porsche andJaguar, said it had recommended that its brands stop paid activities on the platform until further notice.

Pfizer and Mondalez are pausing ads on social media, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal. The companies did not immediately respond to a 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.

Facebook Users Have a Problem with Mastodon: How Many Tweets Do They Need to Join? Comment on Musk at a Meeting with the Communications and Advertising Community

Ad buying group Interpublic Group advised clients to pause their advertising on the platform, due to the high rate of opiate overdoses.

Many civil society leaders worry that misinformation could spread on the platform in the days ahead of the US elections, as well as the pauses.

Musk is trying to prevent an advertiser exodus. A member of Musk’s inner circle said that Musk met with the marketing and advertising community in New York on Monday.

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. Representatives who attended the meeting were encouraged that Musk was willing to talk and did not want the company to change its content policies before the midterms, but said he needed to do more to protect the platform.

Like Griffin, some Twitter users have already begun migrating from the platform — Counter Social is another popular alternative — following layoffs that began Friday that reportedly affected about half of Twitter’s 7,500-employee workforce. They fear that the internet’s main conduit for reliable communications could be in danger if moderation and verification are broken.

Roberts said she was inspired to start using Mastodon due to the concerns she had about how Musk might change the moderation of content on 140 characters or less. She suspects some newcomers are simply sick of social media companies that capture lots of user data and are driven by advertising.

Some of the new sign-ups are people who have a lot of followers on social networks, such as actor and comedian Kathy Pilgrim, who joined in early November.

The set up of the network is different. The cost of hosting a Mastodon account depends on how many different people and groups it is hosted for. But that also means users are spread out all over the place, and people you know can be hard to find — Rochko likened this setup to having different email providers, like Gmail and Hotmail.

You have to join a specific server, one that’s open to everyone, or you’re not allowed to sign up, which is one of the reasons on Mastodon. I can access Mastodon on the web from a server called Mstdn.social that is only open to a small group of users, however it is not accepting more users.

If your Mastodon friends follow the same server you are signed up with, then you can see who the followers are, but only if they happen to be on the same server.

How did you start to follow me? Laughing at the realization of how quickly I became a million followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Twitter

It felt like I was starting over, as a complete newcomer to social media. As Roberts said, it is quite similar to Twitter in terms of its look and functionality, and the iOS app is easy to use.

Roberts, too, hasn’t yet decided if she will close her Twitter account, but she was surprised by how quickly her following grew on Mastodon. Within a week of signing up and alerting her nearly 23,000 Twitter followers, she has amassed over 1,000 Mastodon followers.

I wondered what it would be like to start over again. She asked. “It’s kind of interesting: Oh that person is here! So-and-so! I’m so glad they’re here so we can be here together.”

How the Covid PLANdemic impacted the public opinion of the U.S. Department of Health and the former president Donald Trump, played by James Austin Johnson

“The Covid PLANdemic was created by Big Pharma to silence me. “They try to silence me.” she said. “Ma’am, please speak at a lower volume. I’m sorry, am I too loud for your precious intensive care unit? You aren’t even sick!”

I am hi and I would appreciate it. Your profile is hilarious. Schumer, who wore a red dress, said she loved funny guys. They said I was a bot, which is crazy. I’m all woman and I love funny guys like you. You should check out the website where I and other girls hang out.

But the most notable person to speak in front of the council: former president Donald Trump, played by James Austin Johnson. Trump did not have his account allowed to be used again in 2021.

“Yes, we’ve all moved to Truth Social, and we love Truth Social. It’s very great,” Johnson’s Trump said. In a lot of ways it’s also terrible. It is very bad. Very, very bad. It’s a little buggy in terms of making the phone screen crack, and the automatically draining of the Venmo.”

Impersonating a Comedian and Changing her Screen Name to Musk on a Social Media Site: “Supporting Impersonation on Twitter”

“Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended,” Musk wrote. Before suspensions, there were warnings given, now that it is rolling out widespread verification.

Comedian Kathy Griffin had her account suspended Sunday after she switched her screen name to Musk. She told a Bloomberg reporter that she had also used his profile photo.

I don’t understand, not all the content moderators were let go. Lol,” Griffin joked afterward on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform where she set up an account last week.

As if Musk hadn’t already been appropriated, actress Valadee Bertinelli took his screen name and then switched it back to her actual name after supporting Democratic candidates on Saturday. “Okey-dokey.” I’ve had fun and I think I made my point,” she tweeted afterwards.

How Will Twitter Let Us Know? Elon Musk, the Blue Checkmark of Twitter, and the Politics of Tiny Talk Town, Revisited

Before the stunt, Bertinelli noted the original purpose of the blue verification checkmark. It was free of charge for people whose identity Tweeted it, and a large part of recipients were journalists. It meant that your identity had been verified. Scammers would have a harder time impersonating you,” Bertinelli noted.

It stated that the service would be available in the US, Canada, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. However, it was not available 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.”

Twitter defended Roth at the time, saying, “No one person at Twitter is responsible for our policies or enforcement actions, and it’s unfortunate to see individual employees targeted for company decisions.”

“Tiny talk is talk so small it feels like it’s coming from your own mind,” Musk fired off shortly past 10 pm last Thursday, a thought so deep it might have bubbled up from a fish-bowled dorm room. Congratulations: We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk.

Quiet Quitting on Twitter: How to Be Lurking on a New Social Network (Why We Are here, Why We Are Here)

Quiet quitting is rejecting the burden of going above and beyond, no longer working overtime, in order to have more time with your spouse, friends, and family. On Twitter, it’s about not giving more to a platform than most people can expect to get back. 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.

A group of people have the power on the social networking site. According to internal company research, heavy users who use English make up less than 10 percent of monthly users, but generate 90 percent of allTwitter and half of global revenue.

It makes sense that an electric car magnate would follow a large number of blue checks on social media, because they are a noisy bunch. It’s the same thing 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 or celebrity news, and then they go about their lives. They are referred to as 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. Go check in on the new toy, then close your browser tab. Go ahead and send a message, then stop. Keep one eye on it during basketball games. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. For another time, save your most original thoughts.

Tesla Sentiment Behaviour and the Cost of a Large-Scale Social Media Account? A Critical Analysis of Musk, Apple, and Twitter

Elon Musk’s management of Twitter, including the banning of multiple journalists, has “severely damaged” market sentiment around Tesla, and risks sparking a backlash from advertisers and consumers The analyst warned on Monday.

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 takes a cut of the revenue from Super Follows, a way to make yourtwitter a subscription service, but the fees taken by Apple for in-app purchases makes it less beneficial than it could be.

I don’t think a lot of advertisers would want to come back to someone with that attitude toward impersonation, even without an economic downturn. The open question I have is whether users want to stay in an environment that has just gotten a new type of hoaxing and scam. Billionaire Mark Cuban has already complained that the influx of new checkmarked users has made his mentions miserable. Cuban’s thoughts are one reason people stay on the platform — drive him off, and Twitter is less valuable.

The team identified several other risks for which Twitter has yet to identify any solutions. The company doesn’t have a way to remove badges from user accounts. “Given that we will have a large amount of legacy verified users on the platform (400K Twitter customers), and that we anticipate we’ll need to debadge a large number of legacy verified accounts if they decide not to pay for Blue, this will require high operational lift without investment.”

The banks are going to take an immediate loss if they decide to leave the debt behind. If the market conditions change, banks may decide to keep on with the debt. The debt unloading becomes even harder if it’s not possible to get Twitter to stop hitting the bed. Musk is the richest man in the world, and banks might be willing to negotiate terms with him about debt repayment. But I do wonder how long they want to hold these loans and who might buy them. If banks can’t place the debt, that probably does make it difficult for any other leveraged buy-outs in tech to get done.

Science with Mastodon: What Should Scientists Tell Us About Open-Source Software? A Review of Pros and Consequences

The open-source platform has almost half a million users in just a week, but should scientists use it? We looked at the pros and cons.

Instead of creating a single unified platform, the Mastodon protocol allows anyone to use open-source software to boot up a server that hosts a Twitter-style community with its own rules. The communities called theFediverse are a collective of interlinked communities. People who join a server that matches their interests can block all content from the server they joined and connect with other users on other server’s.

You can post up to 11,000 words in a Mastodon message, which is known as a toot. Another difference is how users encounter content: The recommendations on Mastodon are not included in the algorithmic recommendations. What they share and who you follow is what dictates what you see.

People coming into Mastodon are like going for drinks after a conference. People who understand academics and ground rules for academic conversations are the ones you chat to. She compares it favourably with Twitter, where it feels like everyone is listening in and the world is watching. Ian Brown, a cybersecurity researcher at Getúlio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, thinks that a considerable number of Mastodon users are probably academics.

Brown says that one of Twitter’s strengths is users’ ability to broadcast their messages to a wide range of people. This is important for scientists who are interested in communicating their research to large, non-specialist audiences. That is one of the more democratizing effects of social media.

There are more than one issues that might cause a pause. Mastodon categorizes conversations more frequently because it lacks recommendations on what to say. But there isn’t an obvious way to corral conversations about a particular academic paper, using a DOI reference as a hashtag, because of the way that the platform’s technical architecture works. A user has reported the issue and asked for a feature to be added.

Twitter and the FTC: Implications of Musk’s Twitter Consent Order on User Account Security and Communication Laws in the 21st Century

The FTC alleges that the company used user account security information for advertising purposes, with the latest consent agreement announced this spring. The resulting consent order expanded on a 2011 consent agreement Twitter signed with the FTC committing the company to maintaining a robust cybersecurity program.

If a violation is found to be true, it could potentially lead to Musk being sued for personal injuries, which has been self-inflicted on Musk’s part as he stumbles through a plethora of business headaches.

Under the FTC consent order from this year, a sworn compliance notice must be submitted within 14 days of any change. The compliance notice is intended both to advise the FTC of major changes at the company as well as a commitment that it will continue to comply with the order, according to David Vladeck, a former senior FTC official and a law professor at Georgetown University.

Spiro told CNN that they are in a constant dialogue with the FTC and will work together to ensure they are in compliance.

There are other regulatory obligations that have come into question. They include requirements that Twitter produce written privacy assessments of any new “product, service or practice” — or when Twitter updates those things — that could affect user data or put it at risk.

“The chaos there is something the FTC is going to be worried about,” said Vladeck, “because there were serious deficiencies which led to the consent order in the first place, and the FTC is going to want to make sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to do.”

Internal concerns about Twitter’s compliance obligations were reflected in a Slack message viewed by CNN earlier this week, in which an employee warned colleagues that Musk could try to put responsibility for certifying FTC compliance onto individual engineers at the company.

Matt Blaze, a professor of computer science and law at Georgetown University, urged Twitter employees to seek professional legal counsel “before signing anything or making any statement to regulators.”

The FTC has increasingly signaled it could seek to hold individual executives personally accountable if they’re found to have been responsible for a company’s violations, naming them in future orders and imposing binding requirements on their future conduct, even if they leave the company. The CEO of Drizly was subjected to sanctions by the FTC last month.

The FTC said that no CEO or company was above the law. We are prepared to use the new tools in our revised consent order.

When Twitter Shuts Down: Musk’s Twitter Discrimination Feature Has been Killed, and What Should I Do About It?

In the previous week alone, one of the most influential social networks laid off half its workforce; blew up key aspects of its product, then repeatedly launched and un-launching other features to compensate for it; and saw an exodus of senior executives.

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 next day, the account wrote that they have added an official label to some accounts to combat impersonation.

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.

The Cuban said there is a decision to be made. The onus is on all users to choose what to read on the service, so if you haven’t already, stick with the new system. Or bring back Twitter curation. One makes it easier to stay up to date on social media. The other is awful.”

Timing Mastodon: What he learned from Eugen Rochko’s first tweet, and where he wants to take it

Eugen Rochko looks exhausted. The 29-year-old German is the founder of Mastodon, a distributed alternative toTwitter that has exploded in popularity in recent weeks as Musk’s ownership of the platform has rained chaos on its users.

In the blog post, which reflect the Mastodon founder’s first remarks since the link ban, Rochko highlighted Musk’s significant power as owner and CEO of Twitter.

I would prefer to be in the background, because people would like to hear that it’s been great. There is more work, there are more fires to put out. It’s incredibly stressful. I’m pulling 14-hour workdays, sleeping very little, and eating very little.

The whole story coincides with the process of releasing a new version of the Mastodon software. You need to put a lot of focus on that. And then suddenly, you also have to deal with responding to press inquiries and running social media accounts to take advantage of the opportunity.

It was good and gratifying at the same time. I would love to just lean back and just enjoy the fact that so many new people are using Mastodon, like Stephen Fry. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to lean back and enjoy that. There has been an increase in funds due to all the new Patreon donations in the past 10 days, it’s been unprecedented.

The launch of Blue, and the public response to Musk, his top lieutenant, Esther Crawford, wrote in an opinion-of-the-company document

It was presented to Esther Crawford, a director of product management at the company who in recent weeks has risen to become one of Musk’s top lieutenants. Musk was briefed as well, sources said, as was his attorney Alex Spiro. Crawford was sympathetic to many of the concerns in the document, but she would not allow suggestions to delay the launch of Blue. Crawford didn’t reply to a request for comment.

“Motivated scammers/bad actors could be willing to pay … to leverage increased amplification to achieve their ends where their upside exceeds the cost,” reads the document’s first recommendation, which the team labeled “P0” to denote a concern in the highest risk category.

“Impersonation of world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials, and other high profile individuals” represented another P0 risk, the team found. “Legacy verification provides a critical signal in enforcing impersonation rules, the loss of which is likely to lead to an increase in impersonation of high-profile accounts on Twitter.”

After an exchange online with Stephen King, Musk lowered the price for Blue to 99 dollars a year, from what he had originally been considering. The move made fun of brands and government officials more likely to lead to a scam as the impulse buy became $8.

The team said that removing the verified badges and privileges from high-profile users would drive them away from the site for good. “Removing privileges and exemptions from legacy verified accounts could cause confusion and loss of trust among high profile users,” they wrote. We use the health-related protections to manage against the risk of false-positive actions on high-profile users. If that signal is no longer there, we run the risk of false positives or privileges being lost that can lead to user flight.

The company’s trust and safety team did win support for some solutions, including retaining verification for some high-profile accounts using the “official badge.”

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23459244/twitter-elon-musk-blue-verification-internal-warnings-ignored

Twitter Has a Problem Coping with Sexual Explosive Content: The Case of a Non-Perturbative Customer Support Team at Tevatron

For the most part, though, the document offers a wish list for features that would make the product safer and easier to use, most of which have not been approved.

The launch went ahead despite the warnings. A few days later, with the predictions of the trust and safety team largely realized, Musk belatedly stopped the rollout.

The contractors did not receive anything compared to the full-time employees who were sent an email about layoffs on the night of the layoffs. Managers of the company that they had been counting on to perform critical tasks suddenly disappeared from the company’s systems over the weekend.

Functions affected included content moderation, recruiting, ad sales, marketing, and real estate, among others. At the moment, it’s unclear how the loss of what may have been thousands of moderators will affect the service. But it seems clear that Twitter now has dramatically fewer people available to police the site for harmful material.

One of the company’s managers noted that one of their contractors had just been terminated without any notice in the midst of making important changes to their child safety workflows. This is particularly worrisome because Twitter has for years struggled to adequately police child sexual exploitation material on the platform, as we previously reported.

Open and Closed: Why TWITTER and Twitter are not doing well in India, nor do we? An employee complaint about Musk’s job performance in Silicon Valley

Similar messages trickled in on Blind, an app for coworkers to anonymously discuss their workplace, as well as on external Slacks, where employees have established to have more candid discussions.

Several workers said they had learned about their employment status after seeing our tweets, attempting to log in to Gmail and Slack, and finding that they no longer had access.

Some employees told us that they had been bracing for cuts ever since the layoffs earlier this month. As Platformer reported, the medical benefits of many former contractors were going to end today, and they were told via email.

Replied another: “In 2 weeks Twitter has gone from being the most welcoming and healthy workplace I’ve ever known to the most openly hostile and degrading I’ve ever known.”

The employees show a lot of support. But not to the coterie of volunteer venture capitalists and on-loan engineers from Tesla and the Boring Company that have been carrying out Musk’s orders: those they refer to universally, including on Slack, as “the goons.”

The employee stated that T-Mobile asked to stop the campaigns due to brand safety concerns. Three days later, John Legere asked Musk to let him run TWITTER, but Musk responded “no”.

According to an internal email obtained by Platformer, engineers were told they couldn’t write any code until further notice. The email mentioned that exceptions will be given if there is an urgent change to resolve an issue with a production service, including any changes reflecting hard promised deadlines for clients.

Engineers who were at the late-night meeting thought they were on Slack. “Is there a ticket I can reference?” asked an engineer who was being tasked with implementing the freeze. I do not see any context. A colleague said they didn’t have much context as of now. This is coming from the team of Elon.

I apologize for the slowness of the service in a number of countries. The app is not doing well and only needs a small amount of RPCs to render a home timeline. Musk referred to remote procedure calls on Sunday. Microprocessors are used to prevent the entire site from going down, which is what Musk complained about.

Instead, the experience is not great in India, for example. That’s because the payload gets delivered from further away (laws of physics come into effect) and that back-and-forth data transfer between the phone and the data center starts compounding.

Not to mention that places like India have a higher concentration of low power phones that tend to perform worse in general — as opposed to all of our overpowered iPhones and such.

Why is the code freeze? A comment on Twitter’s global business lead on the Facebook ad platform after the Blue rollout of Q4

So why the code freeze? No one knows for sure, but some are speculating that Musk has grown paranoid that some disgruntled engineers may intend to sabotage the site on their way out.

On Friday, after the disaster of the Blue rollout, Eli Lilly paused all its ad campaigns on Twitter. The Washington Post said the move could have cost the company millions of dollars in revenue. It took six hours for the fake Eli Lilly account to be removed, after it had said thatinsulin would be free.

Large digital platforms “have experienced professionals out there who develop relationships with these advertisers,” Vincent said. “When you let go of a staff that was as veteran as Twitter’s and there’s no one there to respond to those [brands], you basically reduce the value of the ad platform.”

“I know that many of your markets and clients are seeing large declines in Q4 and in particular L7D,” wrote Twitter’s global business lead in Slack. Please reply to any questions in this thread, and I will try to raise as many as possible.

GroupM, the largest media-buying agency in the world, told its clients that they were a high risk for media buys, according to an email obtained by Platformer. Twitter’s agency partnerships lead explained the situation in Slack: “Given the recent senior departures in key operational areas (specifically Security, Trust & Safety, Compliance), GroupM have updated Twitter’s brand safety guidance to high risk. They understand that we have policies in place, but feel that they can’t scale quickly at this time.

He has promised to let free speech reign and has reinstated high-profile accounts that previously broke Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct or harmful misinformation. He said he would suppress negative vibes by leaving out some accounts of “freedom of reach.”

Why Should Musk Take over Twitter? A Case Study in How to Discard Something, or Why to Become a Social Media Empirical

After Musk announced that he would be cutting ties with up to 80 percent of the rest of the world, some users said they were unable to use two-factor Authentication. Others reported that their archives were difficult to download.

People who know how to fix things but don’t work for the company are usually not allowed to ship new code. Engineers were haunted at the end of the day, not by whether any cracks in the service would appear, but by how many and when.

A move to a subscription business for the social media platform would make sense according to Larry Vincent, an associate professor of marketing at USC. It has been found that the business of advertising on the site has been smaller because it did not offer the same level of user targeting as Facebook.

A platform is better than an app, or so the theory goes, because you can use a platform to build multiple apps, or enable other developers and companies to build apps from which you might take a 30 percent cut. Whatever its advantages, the Twitter debacle should spell the end of the proprietary platform as a serious technical undertaking, a high profile illustration that they are too risky to trust no matter how strong the code might be. The overly conservative approach to intellectual property that makes things proprietary in the first place is also a liability that compromises everything a company might create because it empowers billionaires to kill them. Whether or not he actually destroys it, Musk’s takeover of Twitter is a case study in how to destroy something, a model for the next billionaire who fancies a social media empire. Our communication channel is at risk.

Even still, there is no guarantee that continuing to capture the online world’s attention will translate into subscription payments or other revenue growth.

Twitter’s Misleading Leader apologizes: “Do We Really Want to Win” or “I Wanna Win” Elon Musk’s Twitter Account?”

Shortly afterwards the account was suspended again. That came after Musk tweeted that a “crazy stalker” attacked a car in Los Angeles carrying his young son.

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.

In the following weeks, Musk said he would create a “content moderation council” with wide-ranging opinions and that no major decisions would be made until then. There is no proof that a group was formed or involved in Musk’s 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.”

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. Less than six months later, in June 2021, Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari posted a tweet threatening violence against Biafran separatist groups in the country’s southwest. His account was live even though it had been removed.

From a pool of over 3 million votes, 72%) of respondents voted “yes” to unbanning accounts. It is difficult to know who voted because they did not provide any information, but it is worth remembering that Musk spent a long period of time trying to get out of buying the service because of claims it was filled with fake accounts.

A blanket restoration of most suspended accounts will have huge consequences, especially in regions where the company has been destroyed by its new leader.

Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk on Thursday said he plans to introduce an option to make it possible for users to determine if the company has limited how many other users can view their posts. It is Musk who is taking on the issue of social network suppression of conservative content, an issue that has been a point of pride among some conservatives.

If you have been shadowbanned, you will know that quickly if a software update shows you your true account status. He did not provide additional details or a timetable.

Musk has also used his new platform to promote the so-called Twitter Files, a tranche of internal documents that he claimed to expose a censorship scandal, but in fact revealed messy internal debates about thorny subjects more than anything else.

The second set of the so-called Twitter Files, shared by journalist Bari Weiss, focused on how the company restricted the reach of certain accounts and the topics they discussed, including limiting their ability to appear in the search or trending sections of the platform.

In both cases the internal documents appear to have been provided directly to the journalists. Musk shared a thread with Weiss, and wrote, “The retweeted files, part duex!!” There were two popcorn emojis as well.

Reporting on Trump’s Twitter Behaviour: Politics, Corrupt Practice, and the Unhinged Left-Right Scenario

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.

A person with knowledge of the situation tells CNN that there has been an increased amount of threats against the former head of trust and safety.

Some of the unflattering comments about Trump and his supporters were posted byRoth in 2016 and he was subsequently accused of being biased against the president.

On Election Day of 2016 he wrote that they fly over the states that voted for a racist.

“We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel. Musk believes that he has integrity and that we’re all entitled to political beliefs.

At the time Trump was inaugurated, I told colleagues in the newsroom where I worked that we should not cover everything he said or did. The president’s every word used to be assumed to be a signal of future policy and reported as such. Trump said many things to get a rise out of people. Reporting on them, I argued, just fed the flames. Another editor pushed back. He said that he was the president. He says it is news.

There was a lot of fast-response stories about Musk using his pronouns, a dig at the former government expert on infectious disease, and at gender diversity. He had a picture of his bedroom table with two replica guns on it, and he used a far-right meme.

The way that Trump was covered was the same way as this. The liberal-leaning media were often drawn to stories confirming the belief that a person so clearly unfit to be president would only succeed in bringing himself (or the country) down in flames, while the right-wing media treated his evident egomania, corruption, and lack of interest in grasping basic policy issues or actually doing the job as at best irrelevant and at worst essential qualities for reforming Washington. There was plenty of good reporting going on at the same time, but these polarizing accounts tended to dominate 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.

The Tweet Files: How the Internet Becomes a Pornographic Platform to Analyze and Curse the Public Goods of Social Media

Of All the threats posed by Twitter since it fell under sketchy new management in October, one of them doubles as a promise. Twitter will devolve into pornography.

I don’t like porn, but I have to admire its cunning and ferocity. 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.

Tumblr, which started as an artsy microblogging service in 2007, lost its allure when it was overrun by porn five years later. 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.

There are many tech journalists and social media experts who don’t agree with Musk’s claims because the documents already know about the mess of policing a large social network.

“What is really coming through in the Twitter Files for me is: people who are confronting high-stakes, unanticipated events and trying to figure out what policies apply and how,” said Renée DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, who studies how narratives spread on social networks.

They are a collection of emails and chats that capture employees discussing company policies and difficult moderation calls. The decision to ban Trump, the decision to block a news story based on material on Hunter Biden’s laptop, and how the company limits the reach of accounts that break its rules have been covered so far.

Musk has given exclusive access to a small group of independent journalists including Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone, and Bari Weiss, a former New York Times opinion columnist, under the condition they first post about the documents on Twitter.

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. To ensure that policies are applied consistently, it must submit to regular audits.

Before the 2020 presidential election,Twitter temporarily blocked its users from sharing a New York Post story that was about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, who was a contestant on the show.

The Post said it got its information from files from Hunter Biden’s laptop, which was used in the article. At the time, it was unclear whether that material was authentic. After being burned by the Russian hack and leak of Democratic National Committee emails in 2016, tech companies were on edge over the possibility of a repeat – and so Twitter decided to restrict the Post story.

The company’s rules against sharing hacked material containing private information forced it to warn anyone who tried to post a link to the article. It also suspended the New York Post’s own Twitter account until it deleted its tweets about the story. Facebook was also concerned by the article but didn’t go as far as twitt. It allowed the link to be posted, but limited distribution of the posts while the outside fact-checkers reviewed the claims.

The backlash came from across the political spectrum. The company’s approach to a story that was controversial was slammed for taking a heavy-handed approach, and for offering little justification for its decision. Within a few days, a block was reversed and policies changed on hacked materials. Jack 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 said there was little to hide, only a lot to learn from.

Elon Musk is Using the Twitter Files to Discredit Footes and Push Conspiracy Theorem: How the CEO and his followers are misusing the social media platform

There’s a reason to demand more info into how social media companies operate. She said the decisions are often inscrutable. These are platforms which shape public opinion and so the question of how they’re moderated is important.

She said to get the full picture, outsiders need more than “anecdotes” Musk’s journalists are sharing and so far focus on charged, highly partisan American political dramas.

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.

“The public knows what’s been revealed but at the same time, it’s only reinforcing a perception of partisan individuals within the U.S.” DiResta said.

Framing the disclosures as secret knowledge plays particularly well on Twitter, said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.

His tweets triggered violent threats against both men. A person familiar with the situation said that the family had been forced to flee their home.

“The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn’t solve anything,” Dorsey wrote on Tuesday. If you want to blame, direct it at me or my actions.

The Trust and Safety Council member who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation said that the CEO willingness to target people working to keep the platform safe was creating a chilling effect.

Musk has hijacked the conversation with his gleeful twitpics dunking on company’s former employees.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/14/1142666067/elon-musk-is-using-the-twitter-files-to-discredit-foes-and-push-conspiracy-theor

Twitter is Stepping Up Against Sweeney: A Longtime Tempering Controversy About Twitter and the Musk/Mum’s Jet Whereabouts

“It is being processed as punitive and sort of owning the last regime, as opposed to saying, ‘Here are things that we can see in these files and here is how it’s going to be done differently under our watch,’” DiResta said.

Musk said that the accounts were used to encourage harassers, by sharing personal information, and they were suspended on Wednesday.

I was able to send an alternative link to the tracker on my own, as I was able to find out that the filter didn’t currently exist. 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.”

live location information, including information shared on Twitter directly or links to 3rd-party URL(s) of travel routes, actual physical location, or other identifying information that would reveal a person’s location, regardless if this information is publicly available;

He saw a notice on his phone that his account was permanently suspended for breaking the rules. But the note didn’t explain how it broke the rules.

Journalists shared Musk’s live location, which Musk claimed was evidence of what he described as “assassination coordinates”. CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan did not share the billionaire’s live location.

For Sweeney, it was the latest in a longtime tangle with the billionaire. The University of Central Florida student said Musk told him to take the account down due to security concerns. Musk stopped communicating with Sweeney after he never deleted his account. Their exchange was first reported by tech news outlet Protocol earlier this year.

The @elonjet account chronicled Musk’s cross-country journeys from his home in Texas to various California airports for work at his rocket company, as well as his work at the San Francisco headquarters of Twitter.

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.

In a January post pinned to the top of the jet-tracking account’s feed before it was suspended, Sweeney wrote that it “has every right to post jet whereabouts” because the data is public and “every aircraft in the world is required to have a transponder,” including Air Force One that transports the U.S. president.

The journalists all had the same thing: their ability to report aggressively on the billionaire or criticize him on social media. Not only will the bans chill free speech, but they will also chill it for those who report on Musk’s other companies as well.

Doxxing is the practice of sharing someone’s address or other personal information online. The account that was banned used publicly available flight data to track Musk’s jet.

The move marked a serious attempt by Musk to exert his authority over the platform in order to censor the press.

The New York Times said in a statement that the suspension of the accounts of prominent journalists is questionable and unfortunate. The Times and Ryan have not received an explanation for why this happened. We hope that all of the journalists’ accounts are reinstated and that Twitter provides a satisfying explanation for this action.”

Today, those words are very empty. As Harwell told me, “Elon says he is a free speech champion and he is banning journalists for exercising free speech. I think it’s a good idea to question his commitment.

The vice president for values and transparency at the European Commission, Vra Jourov, said the suspension of journalists was worrying and indicated that the company could be fined.

A CNN reporter who was blocked from sharing a Mastodon profile URL was given an automatic error message that said they had identified the site as potentially harmful.

Twitter is a platform for free speech: Benavidez notes on the suspension of Dr. Rupar’s Jet Tracking Twitter account

In a post on Substack, Rupar wrote that he is unsure why he was suspended. He posted a link to a Facebook page for the jet- tracking account on Wednesday.

The Editor has a note about it. The senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at Free Press is Nora Benavidez. Free Press is a founding member of the #StopToxicTwitter coalition. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

“Without commenting on any specific user accounts, I can confirm that we will suspend any accounts that violate our privacy policies and put other users at risk,” Irwin said. “We don’t make exceptions to this policy for journalists or any other accounts.”

Germany’s foreign ministry said that freedom of the press cannot be switched on and off. “As of today these journalists are no longer able to follow us, to comment or criticize. We have a problem with that @Twitter.”

The Digital Services Act of the European Union requires respect of fundamental rights and media freedom. Jourov said that Musk should be aware that this is reinforced by the Media FreedomAct.

Thierry Breton, a top EU official, warned Musk in late November that the social media platform must take significant steps to comply with the bloc’s content moderation laws.

And The Post’s Executive Editor, Sally Buzbee, said: “The suspension of Drew Harwell’s Twitter account directly undermines Elon Musk’s 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.”

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. If Twitter had implemented its rules uniformly across the world, Trump’s ban would have extended to other leaders, too.

The employee at the organization that was part of the trust and safety council said that vulnerable communities in far away countries were less important than the relationships they had with leaders like Modi. The employee asked for anonymity because they are concerned about their organization being hit by harassment and threats like those faced by former 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. But instead of banning Buhari in turn, the company later negotiated with the government to be reinstated by agreeing, among other things, to open a local office, pay local taxes, and register as a broadcaster. Nigeria is now considering legislation to regulate platforms.

Defending Hateful Memes on Twitter: A Tale of Two Discriminants: The Case for a More Open, Open, and Safe Twitter

Kian Vesteinsson, a senior research analyst for tech and democracy at Freedom House says access to markets is one of the calculation that goes into the trade-off between taking enforcement actions and not.

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.

Reliable information should be located in a healthy town square. But researchers at Tufts University recently found that tweets refuting hate and misinformation were “an order of magnitude greater” on Twitter before Musk took over.

It’s clear that we can’t rely on Musk’s Twitter to provide a safe, open forum. We need a new breed of social networks that are run by boards that consider the public’s interest when making critical decisions. Many people with these skills have been laid off from their jobs. There have been layoffs at a number of tech and journalism companies recently, with more to come at The Washington Post. The town hall is so desperately needed that some professionals should work together to create new social platforms.

Twitter is No More Strange than the Real Thing: Linette Lopez’s Suspension after a Reporter’s Outburst

Most of the accounts were back early Saturday. One exception was Business Insider’s Linette Lopez, who was suspended after the other journalists, also with no explanation, she told The Associated Press.

“Again, the suspension occurred with no warning, process or explanation — this time as our reporter merely sought comment from Musk for a story,” Buzbee said. By midday Sunday, Lorenz’s account was restored, as was the tweet she thought had triggered her suspension.

The move sets “a dangerous precedent at a time when journalists all over the world are facing censorship, physical threats and even worse,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

Another suspended journalist, Matt Binder of the technology news outlet Mashable, said he was banned Thursday night immediately after sharing a screenshot that O’Sullivan had posted before his own suspension.

The Los Angeles Police Department sent a statement to several media outlets about how it got in touch with Musk’s representatives about the alleged stalking incident.

The old regime at the micro-messaging service was ruled by its own biases and it seems like the new one has the same problem.

If the suspensions lead to the exodus of media organizations that are highly active on Twitter, the platform would be changed at the fundamental level, said Lou Paskalis, longtime marketing and media executive and former Bank of America head of global media.

CBS briefly shut down its activity on Twitter in November due to “uncertainty” about new management, but media organizations have largely remained on the platform.

A number of advertisers have already cut their spending on the platform because of the uncertainty over Musk’s direction.

The conference chat on the social network went down after Musk walked out of a session in which he was asked about the reporters’ ousting. Musk said Spaces was offline to deal with a bug. The spaces came back late Friday.

Musk had banned CNN, The New York Times, and Drew Harwell. Independent progressive journalist Aaron Rupar, former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, and Insider columnist Linette Lopez were also banned.

“The people have spoken,” Musk wrote Friday night after his poll, pledging to restore the accounts he had falsely accused of sharing his “exact real-time” location.

O’ Sullivan and Harwell both told CNN on Saturday that they chose the option to appeal the decision and did not agree to remove the tweet.

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 and Truth Social Will Follow a Policy to Harness the Influence of China on News, Media, and the News-Conference Lobby

The news organizations, the American Civil Liberties Union, the United Nations, Democratic members of Congress, and others condemned the suspension of the journalists.

In an apparent effort to stem user defections to competitors, the company will ban links to other social media services and suspend accounts that try to direct users to alternative platforms.

The policy does not allow links to other websites, including Facebook and posts on emerging alternatives like Mastodon and Post. The rule also covers Truth Social, the Twitter clone backed by former President Donald Trump.

Twitter’s move signals a shift toward a more closed environment, one that still accepts incoming traffic from other sites but makes it more difficult for users to leave Twitter’s website for other destinations.

TikTok, which is one of the internets fastest-growing social media platforms, is not on the list because of its links to China. Musk has a significant stake in China through his other company, and the fact that he would not stand up to China if they tried to apply pressure on social media is raising doubts among critics.

Attempts to circumvent that policy will also be enforced against, the company said. For example, use of link-shortening services to obscure the true destination of a URL or attempts to spell out a URL in plain text will also run afoul of Twitter’s rules, the company said.

The company said that users may continue using the third-party software to simultaneously publish their social media content to multiple sites.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, as well as Truth Social’s parent Trump Media & Technology Group, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Twitter Disruption After Musk Shuts Down Twitter: Musk’s Facebook Page vs. Crowdsourced Sites, Trump’s Truth Social, and the Search for a CEO

When the poll concluded on Monday, more than half of the users that responded voted in favor of removing Musk from his role as head of the micro networking site.

In a reply to a Sunday statement by MIT artificial intelligence researcher, Musk said he wasn’t very happy with his new job.

But that decision generated so much immediate criticism, including from past defenders of Twitter’s new billionaire owner, that Musk promised not to make any more major policy changes without an online survey of users.

The action to block competitors was Musk’s latest attempt to crack down on certain speech after he shut down a Twitter account last week that was tracking the flights of his private jet.

The banned platforms included mainstream websites such as Facebook and Instagram, and upstart rivals Mastodon, Tribel, Nostr, Post and former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social. Twitter gave no explanation for why the blacklist included those seven websites but not others such as Parler, TikTok or LinkedIn.

A test case is the venture capitalist Paul Graham who said on Sunday that he was going to find Musk on Mastodon, after having praised Musk in the past. His Twitter account was promptly suspended, and soon after restored as Musk promised to reverse the policy implemented just hours earlier.

In public banter with Twitter followers Sunday, Musk expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO, saying that person “must like pain a lot” to run a company that “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy.”

Oppenheimer & Co. downgraded its rating on Tesla, where Musk is the CEO, solely because of risks posed by the billionaire’s ownership and management of Twitter.

During the first quarter of 2023, Ross Gerber would like to see Musk find a CEO for Twitter, he stated over the weekend.

The Evil Billionaire Attack and its Impact on Open-Source Software, Blogs, and Other Platforms: How to Make the Most Outcomes of a Blockchain

In the field of information security, there’s a kind of vulnerability known as the evil maid attack whereby an untrusted party gains physical access to important hardware, such as the housekeeping staff coming into your hotel room when you’ve left your laptop unattended, thereby compromising it. There is a new analog that can destroy systems and leak data. Call it the “evil billionaire attack” if you’d like. Money is the weapon, and the likelihood that you will not have enough money to make a difference, is more than just that. The call is coming from inside the house.

Most ideas of any consequence, even if they are not specifically related to you, are owned by people with a lot of money who want to make the gravity inescapable. Founders and investors and excitable technology writers like myself frequently use the term “platform” to describe technical systems with granular components that can be used to compose new functionality, and the power sources propelling the technology industry find platforms particularly appealing when the bits can be monetized each time they are used.

Blockchains fight this problem on the deepest level possible. It would be vastly more difficult, or perhaps impossible, for Musk to kill off a blockchain so long as a handful of users objected enough to continue operating independent nodes. The risk of losing access to a computer is infinitesimal, due to the fact that it is the fork in the road of the ledger. This comes with different complications, of course, but losing information outright due to a hostile party is not one of them. When the Hic et Nunc marketplace went under in late 2021. another version relaunched, putting a new wrapper around the same content. The blockchain acts as a shared resource that forces interoperability, almost like organic self-defense.

Or consider the case of WordPress, the early blogging engine that has since grown into increasingly elaborate general-purpose content management software. It powers around 40 percent of the open web. There has been a huge economy around it, with companies that develop websites, developers who work for those companies, independent developers who work for themselves and many of them writing add-ons that can be unlocked or extended. The core is open source and encourages the same things as the other parts of it. WordPress has been around for a long time and its straightforward RSS feeds decisively lost out to Twitter’s social features, so in 2022 there is a reasonable argument that it is a bit long in the tooth. But we must now understand it to be a bigger technical success than Twitter, simply because it is not at risk.

The reminder was that centralized platforms can impose arbitrary and unfair limits on what you can and cannot say while holding your social graph hostage.

The role of Musk’s tweets in preventing Covid-19 from spreading hate to millions of followers and destroying neo-Nazis

Free Press agrees with Musk that he should 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.

The potential new leader of the social network needs to reverse its decision to allow Covid-19 misinformation to spread. They need to retire Twitter’s pay-to-play blue checkmark feature, which allows verified users to post longer videos and have their content prioritized at the top of replies, mentions and searches. They must stop Musk from carrying out his general amnesty plan on suspended accounts.