Why Twitter is what you are building, and why you shouldn’t use it, but you can stop and take care of what you’re doing

Musk caused an uproar from conservatives, who accused him of continuing a practice that they opposed. The clash shows that there is tension at the micro-Blogging site as Musk promises a more maximalist approach to free speech and also attempts to assure users that there will still be content moderation guardrails.

It’s more than professional utility that ties me to the site. Twitter hooks people in much the same way slot machines do, with what experts call an “intermittent reinforcement schedule.” Most of the time, it’s repetitive and uninteresting, but occasionally, at random intervals, some compelling nugget will appear. B.F. Skinner’s research showed that rats and pigeons were particularly good at generating compulsive behavior because of 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. She said that it is essentially what they have built. It’s one reason people who should know better regularly self-destruct on the site — they can’t stay away.

Trump Wins The Deal: Musk’s Controversy Comes to an End – And What Else Has the Power to Win?

On the eve of a trial, Musk had tried to exit the deal, and now, on the eve of the trial, Defendants announce they intend to close. ‘Trust us,’ they say, ‘we mean it this time.’”

The acquisition also promises to extend Musk’s influence. The billionaire already owns, oversees or has significant stakes in companies developing cars, rockets, robots and satellite internet, as well as more experimental ventures such as brain implants. He now controls the platform that helps hundreds of millions of people communicate and get their news.

The fake accounts that are most active in the replies to Musk’s tweet and those with large followings were promised to “defeat or die trying.”

Twitter sued him to follow through with the agreement, alleging that Musk was using the bot argument as a pretense to get out of a deal for which he had developed buyer’s remorse. The stock market fell in the weeks after the deal was announced due to rising inflation and a looming recession. Musk’s personal net worth was hit by the downturn.

The initial backlash surrounding the deal between Musk and Disney has faded as the months have gone by. Though controversy continues, many users may feel less of a need to leave today than in October.

Twitter is Not the Answer to the Wall Street Wall: Extremism, Deception, and Misinformation on Twitter in the Age of Facebook and 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.

But judging from other social-media platforms with loose restrictions on speech, a rise in extremism and misinformation could be bad business for a platform with mainstream appeal such as Twitter, says Piazza. “Those communities degenerate to the point to where they’re not really usable — they’re flooded by bots, pornography, objectionable material,” says Piazza. “People will gravitate to other platforms.”

“The long-term potential for Twitter, in my view, is an order of magnitude greater than its current value,” he said on Tesla’s earnings conference call last week.

The first version of the article appeared in the newsletter. Sign up for a daily digest to keep up with the changing media landscape.

Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment and Twitter did not respond to an email for comment. In a tweet, Mr. Musk said Twitter’s rules on “doxxing” — which refers to the sharing of someone’s personal documents, including information such as their address — “apply to ‘journalists’ as well as everyone else.” He didn’t elaborate.

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. Recent news reports, including from CNN, indicate that he plans to strip public figures and institutions of their blue verified badges if they do not pay.

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

Many conservatives also have blue badges, despite the fact that they are lashed out by the right at “blue checks.” Conservatives will be happy that the blue checks and the authority they give upon their profile will be taken away.

How to Stop Hateful Particles on Social Media? Elon Musk and Harassment in the Great Lakes: Predictions from Stringhini

The best thing one could do to save social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email and reduce hacking would be authenticating users.

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 so, Ndahinda expects that Musk’s pledges to reduce Twitter’s oversight of social-media posts would add to the momentum and influence of hate speech in the Great Lakes and beyond. “A permissive culture where anything goes will always increase the trends,” says Ndahinda. “It will embolden actors and increase the virulence in their hate speech.”

Weiss said that such actions were taken without the knowledge of users. But Twitter has long been transparent about the fact that it may limit certain content that violates its policies and, in some cases, may apply “strikes” that correspond with suspensions for accounts that break its rules. In the case of strikes, users receive notification that their accounts have been temporarily suspended.

The bans raise a number of questions about the future of the platform, which has been referred to as a digital town square. It also called into serious question Musk’s supposed commitment to free speech.

According to Stringhini, false narratives start on these platforms. When those narratives creep onto mainstream platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, they explode. He says that they go out of control because everyone is watching them and covering them.

James Piazza is studying terrorism at Pennsylvania State University and he believes that inflammatory speech on social media can be dangerous. “That’s the situation where you can have more violence.”

Over the coming weeks, Stringhini expects that researchers will launch studies comparing Twitter before and after Musk’s takeover, and looking at changes in the spread of disinformation, which user accounts are suspended, and whether Twitter users quit the platform in protest at new policies. Tromble intends to monitor campaigns of coordinated harassment on Twitter.

The Covid Pandemic and Donald Trump’s Twitter Profile (with an appendix by J.A. Johnson, P.C. Schumer, D.S.E.P.M.D., Phys

“The Covid PLANdemic was created by Big Pharma to silence me. She said that everyone tries to silence her. “Ma’am, please speak at a lower volume. I am too loud for the intensive care unit. You aren’t sick!

I’m Hi. Oh my god, your profile is so funny. I love funny guys,” Schumer, dressed in a red dress, said as the bot. “They said I was a bot, which is crazy. I love funny guys like you, I am all woman. In fact, you should check out this website where me and some other girls hang out.”

James Austin Johnson’s portrayal of Donald Trump in the movie was the most notable one. Trump had his account banned in 2021.

All of us have moved to Truth Social, we love it. It’s very great,” Johnson’s Trump said. It is also terrible. It’s very bad. Very, very bad. It’s a little bit buggy when it comes to making the phone screen crack and draining the Venmo.

Lurking isn’t doomscrolling on Twitter: What a Town Square should be about Elon Musk, and how to keep it

“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.

In the workplace, quiet quitting is rejecting the burden of going above and beyond, no longer working overtime in a way that enriches your employer but depletes your own metaphorical coffers. It’s about not giving too much to a platform than what 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 relatively small group of people power Twitter. Heavy users who use English and generate 90 percent of all global revenue are the ones who account for less than 10 percent of monthly users.

For years, so many people around the world have relied on Twitter to function as a town square — a space for people to 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.

Lurking isn’t doomscrolling, a practice (and phrase) that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when many people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. To hide and observe for a while is the most simplistic approach to dealing with the chaos and complexity that is NewTwitter. You should check on the new toy from Musk, then close your browser tab. Send a tweet, then disengage. It’s a good idea to keep an eye on it during basketball games. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. Save your most original thoughts for another time, another place.

By early October last year, the company’s newest research was close to being ready, as a court deadline approached for Musk to complete hisTwitter acquisition. It shows that a machine-learning program demoted some users because they said things like Gay, Muslim, anddeaf that the program wanted to limit the views of other users. The finding—and a partial fix Twitter developed—could help other social platforms better use AI to police content. But would anyone ever get to read the research?

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. Musk is taking on an issue that has been a rallying cry for conservatives who claim that the social network suppressed or banned their content.

Musk said on Thursday that a software update will show the true account status, so that you know if you have been shadowbanned. He didn’t give any more details or a timetable.

The second set of the so-calledTwitter Files focused on the fact that the company restricted the reach of certain accounts and topics that it deems potentially harmful, in addition to the fact that they could not be found in the search section of the platform.

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

What Are The Twitter Files Telling Us About Right-Leaning Political Leaders? An Analysis of Musk’s Twitter Controversy

Weiss showed several examples of right-leaning figures who had moderation actions taken on their accounts, but it was not clear if the actions were taken against left-leaning or other accounts.

Twitter’s former head of trust and safety has fled his home due to an escalation in threats resulting from Elon Musk’s campaign of criticism against him, a person familiar with the matter told CNN on Monday.

The situation that he was working on was the suspension of Donald trump’s account in 2021, when he took office. On Monday, Weiss posted a series of screenshots that are said to show internal documents where people discussed banning Trump from the account and if his actions violated platform policies.

There were a number of social media postings critical of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters, which were later surfaced and used to argue that the social media platform was biased against the president.

On the day of the election, he wrote a statement saying that we were going to fly over 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 feels that he has high integrity and we are all entitled to our political beliefs.

Led by Fox News, the right-wing media machine is treating the ongoing series of stories as if they were the next Pentagon Papers, breathlessly hyping each new batch of documents as earth-shattering scoops that illuminate horrific abuses of power by woke Twitter overlords of yesteryear.

The The Wall Street Journal’s former top editor wrote on Monday that the “Twitter Files tell us nothing new.” There is no shocking news about government censorship or political manipulation. They merely bring to the surface the internal deliberations of a company dealing with complex issues in ways consistent with its values.”

If you are just a regular person trying to figure it all out, it can be hard. And the solution isn’t so clear. On one hand, if newsrooms covered each installment, they risk giving air to and further amplifying a storyline that has been selectively framed by Musk as he wages an information war. He and others can define a drop in the public square if they don’t dissection it.

I told my colleagues in the newsroom that I wouldn’t cover everything he said or wrote in the first few months after he was inaugurated. Previously every word of a president was assumed to be a signal of future policy and was reported as such. Trump, on the other hand, clearly said many things purely to get a rise out of people. I said that I just fed the fire when I reported on them. Another editor pushed back. “He’s the president,” he said, or words to that effect. “What he says is news.”

This is how the coverage of Trump was done. The liberal-leaning media was drawn to stories about his potential to be the next president, as he would only succeed in bringing himself and the country down in flames. There was plenty of good reporting going on at the same time, but these polarizing accounts tended to dominate the conversation. The public was made to understand what was happening across the country through incompatible narratives around a man in the White House.

This is happening with Musk and his company. The relationship between the new owner and the journalists that cover him was described in an article in the Atlantic by Conor Friedersdorf.

“Musk suspending journalists’ accounts is petty and vindictive and absolutely disgraceful—and especially so because Musk has styled himself, however absurdly, as a champion of free speech,” Jaffer said in a statement.

Musk’s claims are overblown given the documents already known about the messy business of policing a large social network.

Renée DiResta, who studies how narratives spread on social networks and is a research manager of the Palo Alto Internet Observatory, said “what is really coming through in theTwitter Files for me is: people who are facing high-stakes, unforeseen events and trying to figure out what policies

In some instances, getting things wrong, they show how difficult tradeoffs can be and how employees can question the company’s rules.

The selection of Taibbi and Weiss, who both sympathize with Musk’s criticism of mainstream media, has caused a lot of controversy. The original documents have been presented only in snippets in lengthy threads on social media, without any context, and other news outlets have not been given access to them.

The Twitter Files might not be the bombshell Musk teased in popcorn emoji laden tweets – but they offer an illuminating glimpse into the sausage-making of content moderation.

Before the 2020 presidential election,Twitter temporarily blocks users from sharing a New York Post story about Hunter Biden, son of then-candidate Joe Biden, accusing him of shady business dealings in Ukraine.

The article was based on files from Hunter Biden’s laptop, which the Post said it got from Trump’s private attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. It was unclear if 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 warned people who tried to post a link to the article that it was “potentially harmful” because of its rules against sharing hacked material. It also suspended the New York Post’s own Twitter account until it deleted its tweets about the story. Although it was alarmed by the article, Facebook didn’t go that far. It allowed the link to be posted, but limited distribution of those posts while its outside fact-checkers reviewed the claims.)

What was essentially a small online riot ensued, with Twitter users from all corners decrying the new policy. Within hours, not only had the company backtracked, but all mentions of the less-than-day-old policy had been scrubbed from Twitter feeds and the company website. Anyone who was online saw it in a short period of time. If you know what I mean, I wouldn’t say you missed it.

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.

He wrote that he believed everyone acted according to what they knew at the time and there was no ill intent or hidden agendas. “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 nothing to hide and only a lot to learn from.

The Social Media “Secret Knowledge” of two prominent US Senators and a former associate of the FBI: Calling on the CEO of the Social Media Network

DiResta said there’s good reason to demand more insight into how social media companies operate. “Often these decisions are quite inscrutable,” she said. “These are platforms that shape public opinion, and so the question of how they’re moderated and how they’re Designed is very important.”

But she said to get the full picture, outsiders need more than the “anecdotes” Musk’s selected journalists are sharing – which, so far, focus exclusively on charged, highly partisan American political dramas.

She said that to better understand the ban of Trump it would be helpful to see discussions around the accounts of other world leaders who have not been kicked off the platform.

There is value in what’s been revealed to the public but at the same time it is reinforcing a perception of being a partisan individual within the United States,” he said.

Using the phrase ” secret knowledge” can be used well on the social networking site, said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington.

His tweets triggered violent threats against both men. A person familiar with the matter said thatRoth and his family were forced to flee their home.

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

The account suspensions came just one day after the company announced that it was shutting down its Trust and Safety Council, a group of outside experts that advised it on issues like human rights, child sexual exploitation and mental health.

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

“In order to process it, it’s being processed as if we’re the last regime, and that we’ll be able to see things in the files and make changes under our watch,” DiResta said.

Comments on Musk and Rupar’s Twitter-Suppression of a Geopolitical Journalist Account of Musk’s Private Jet

The accounts of several journalists who have covered Musk intensely in the past few weeks, including CNN’s Donie O’ Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, and Drew Harwell, were all permanently suspended. The account of progressive independent journalist Aaron Rupar was also banned.

Musk’s own plane and accounts that tracked the movement of private jets used by billionaires, government officials and others were suspended on Wednesday after he said they amounted to “doxggling” or sharing of personal information to encourage harassers.

Shortly before his suspension, O’Sullivan tweeted that Twitter had suspended the account of an emerging competitive social media service, Mastodon, which has allowed the continued posting of @ElonJet, an account that posts the updated location of Musk’s private jet.

“We believe banning journalists without consistent defensible standards or clear communication in an environment where many people believe free speech is at risk is too much for a majority of consumers to continue supporting Mr. Musk/TSLA, particularly people ideologically aligned with climate change mitigation,” Rusch wrote.

The president of the Society of Professional Journalists said in a statement that it was concerned about the move and that it affects all journalists.

The changes were made after Musk reinstated previous rule-breakers and the platform stopped prohibiting Covid-19 misinformation.

CNN reporter who was blocked from sharing a Mastodon profile URL on Thursday was given an error message saying that the site was “potentially harmful” and that they had identified it.

Reporters whose accounts were suspended include Donie O’Sullivan of CNN; Ryan Mac of the New York Times; Drew Harwell of the Washington Post; Micah Lee of the Intercept; and journalist Aaron Rupar.

He wrote in a Substack post that he was unsure of why he was suspended. He said he did tweet on Wednesday a link to a Facebook page for the jet-tracking account.

Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls – And How We Can Reclaim It: ElonJet, Musk, and the Town Square

The senior counsel at the group Free Press said that suspending journalists based on their personal animus was a dangerous precedent.

In a statement to NPR, Twitter’s head of Trust & Safety Ella Irwin said sharing people’s real-time location information on Twitter is now a violation of its policies.

“We will put other users at risk if we suspend any account that violates our privacy policies and is used by an individual who is not a user of ours,” he said. “We don’t make exceptions to this policy for journalists or any other accounts.”

Musk also claimed that one account that operated under the handle @ElonJet, run by a 20-year-old University of Florida student, was used by a “crazy stalker” in Los Angeles to follow a car carrying one of Musk’s children.

Replacing the popular messaging service with a network of journalists, politicians and entertainers could be a challenge. While apps like Cohost have seen renewed momentum, their audiences remain a small fraction of the size of Twitter, which had more than 200 million daily active users as of last year.

An associate professor in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at the university, Kara Alaimo, writes about issues affecting women and social media. Her book “This Feed Is on Fire: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls — And How We Can Reclaim It” will be published by Alcove Press in 2024. Her opinions in this commentary are her own. CNN has an opinion on it.

A place where people can find reliable information is a healthy town square. Researchers from Tufts found that before Musk took over, the amount of hate and misinformation being posted was an order of magnitude greater.

Studies of social media platforms and their impact on society have always been difficult, despite the change of policy that has been brought to an end. The problem has always been centered around the curious position social platforms hold in society: They’re quasi-public utilities—the “de facto public town square” that Musk crowed about when he first launched his bid to buy the platform—but are privately owned.

“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.

Several journalists who were suspended due to a technical issue were allowed to attend the Musk-hosted space which was hosted by Notopoulos. Before leaving the call, Musk said “you dox, you get suspended. End of story, that’s it.” The Spaces feature was turned off. While it’s since been restored, Notopoulos says she’s unable to start or join a Space, receiving a message saying “you can’t participate or go live because you violated the Twitter Rules” when she tries.

Hours before the poll was completed and the accounts were reinstated, Musk declared today “freedom Friday” in response to former congressional candidate Lavern Spicer’s comment that accounts were being reinstated at an increasingly fast pace. Several prominent right-to-far-right figures were unsuspended on Friday, including MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and Gateway Pundit editor Jim Hoft, as noted by Shayan Sardarizadeh, a reporter for the BBC. This appears to be part of Musk making good on his promise to give most previously-suspended accounts “general amnesty,” which he also claims is occurring due to the results of a poll.

Following the results of a public poll, the company will lift the suspensions. The poll showed 58.7% of respondents favored a move to immediately unsuspend accounts over 41.3% who said the suspensions should be lifted in seven days.

An exodus of advertisers will only further erode Twitter’s finances and force Musk to unload even more Tesla stock to cover the cash hole, the firm wrote.

The Mashable Twitter Exodus: The Impact of Musk’s 2018 Email Address on Business Insider (and The Associated Press)

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.

Shortly before being suspended, she said she had posted court-related documents to Twitter that included a 2018 Musk email address. Lopez said that the address wasn’t current because he changed his email every few weeks.

The U.N.’s Stephane Dujarric said that the move was dangerous at a time when journalists around the world were facing threats and censorship.

Several of the reporters suspended Thursday night had been writing about the policy and Musk’s rationale for including it, as well as his allegations that a stalker affected his family Tuesday night in Los Angeles.

Sally Buzbee said that technology reporter Drew Harwell was ousted from the Washington Post because of accurate reporting about Musk.

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 screenshot showed a statement from the Los Angeles Police Department sent earlier Thursday to multiple media outlets, including the AP, about how it was in touch with Musk’s representatives about the alleged stalking incident.

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 has also said he would suppress negativity and hate by depriving some accounts of “freedom of reach.”

She said the new regime has the same problem as the old one because it was governed by its own biases.

If the suspension leads to a mass exodus of media organizations, the platform would be changed, according to Lou Paskalis, former Bank of America head of global media.

In November, CBS briefly stopped using the platform due to uncertainty, but media organizations have largely stayed on the platform.

The suspensions may be the biggest red flag yet for advertisers, Paskalis said, some of which had already cut their spending on Twitter over uncertainty about the direction Musk is taking the platform.

Advertisers are watching the loss of users on the social networking site. Insider Intelligence said that it expected 30 million users to leave the service over the next two years due to technical issues and the return of banned accounts.

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

What the heck happened last weekend? What the hell happened to Twitter? The day Musk was fired from Twitter, and he said he would not apologize for his tweeting apology

Musk offered to let the journalists back onto the platform if they took down the fake information he had shared on his real-time location.

The two people told CNN on Saturday that they chose to fight the decision, and did not agree to give up their social media identities.

He told CNN he was going to simply remove the post, and move on from the episode.

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

The people are being asked to vote on whether Musk should step down from his role as CEO of the company. Musk said that he would abide by the results.

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

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.

The decision to ban several journalists, including Donie O’ Sullivan of CNN, was cited as a catalyst for the downgrade.

It has been said that the public backlash against Musk is due to an inconsistent standards application on the part of the social networking site.

Ross Gerber, a shareholder in both Musk’s companies and his former company, said over the weekend that he hopes Musk will find a CEO for the micro-messaging site in the first quarter of 2023.

Please forgive me for coming back to it, but for people like me who are dying of online fatigue, please just ask: What the hell happened last weekend?

I discovered on Sunday that all references to services like Facebook, Linktree, and instagram were going to be blocked by the micro-blogging website. It was claimed to be about “preventing free advertising” of the platform’s competitors and to “cut down on spam.” Of course, anyone with two neurons to rub together could tell that this was a cover story—you don’t need a journalist to tell you that—and the great link ban was mainly about stemming the flow of active and popular users to other platforms while controlling speech in the name of Musk’s mission to [checks notes] … protect free speech.

We talk about platforms and power, and this is what we are talking about. The policies and guidelines for any platform, even if it is a CEO, founder, or middle manager, have unendurable job of being set and enforced. That’s not in question. Without such rules, online spaces can go bad fast. What is an issue is when those platforms choose to actively harm their users through policy decisions, and when those changes are large enough to force users to either adapt or abandon ship.

My friends on twitch had to stop their stream to talk about the news, and they worried that they would not be able to announce they were starting a new stream or add a link to their bio on twitter to people looking for them. The potential for lost income for people who need it more than the people who made the policy decisions is something that was created by all these things. Everyone in Silicon Valley believes that the same creators have the type of entrepreneurial spirit that they want to foster and empower.

After Sarah Oh lost her job as a human rights advisor at Twitter late last year in the first round of layoffs following Elon Musk’s chaotic acquisition of the company, she decided to join a friend in building a rival service.

T2 is currently available in alpha and was launched with Gabor Cselle, who previously worked at both TWITTER and GOOGLE. It has a social feed with 140-character limits. But the key selling point, according to Oh, is its focus on safety.

We feel that we are well positioned to deliver on our vision of creating an experience that allows people to share what they want to share, without fearing abuse and harassment, Oh told CNN.

In the months since Musk completed his takeover, a small but growing number of services have launched or gained traction by appealing to users who are uncomfortable with the billionaire’s decisions to slash Twitter’s staff, rethink content moderation policies and reinstate numerous incendiary accounts that were previously banned, among other moves.

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

Last month, for example, the founders of Instagram announced Artifact, “a personalized news feed” powered by artificial intelligence, a description that quickly earned it comparisons to Twitter. In CNN’s recent test of the app, however, it resembled news reader applications like Apple News or the defunct Google Reader. Artifact displayed popular articles from large media organizations and smaller websites in a main feed tailored to users based on their activity and interests.

For at least as long as users feel for a news feed that isn’t TWiTTER, all of these apps are vying for the opportunity to scratch that itch.

The co-founders of Anti Software Software club, said that a lot of people who are moving over from social networking service likeTwitter are just looking for a nicer experience overall. The service launched publicly in June of last year, after Musk offered to buy Twitter. In November, after Musk completed the takeover, the platform saw a surge in activity, adding 80,000 users within 48 hours.

When people refer to us as an alternative to twitter, I think it’s an important distinction.

In November, shortly after taking over the company, Musk repeatedly claimed Twitter continued to hit “all-time high” user numbers despite the initial wave of users calling to abandon the social network. As a consequence of the acquisition, Musk took the company private and no longer reports user numbers in quarterly securities filings.

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

On February 13, Twitter is expected to end free access to its API, or application programming interface, the backend access that lets people build bots to automatically post and respond to tweets on the site. Elon Musk, who took over Twitter in October last year, has long said he wants to scour the platform of bots, and has said that charging a minimum of $100 a month to access the API will “clean things up greatly.”

The risks have made social networks reluctant to grant researchers access to their data. If an academic uses free access to a platform’s API to identify a massive issue with state-sponsored disinformation, or problems with content moderation that allow hate speech to fester unchecked, it could cause headaches for the site. Many social media platforms choose to lock out or limit researchers from analyzing their platforms in order to charge higher prices for access to their platforms. That dependence is an “intolerable situation for independent research,” says Lorenz-Spreen.

Academic researchers have been using free access to the platform to track activity in a single day, map insurrectionists who attempted to destroy the government in the US on January 6, and estimate the number of bot users. This kind of research will now become much harder.

David Lazer is a computational social scientist at Northeastern University. “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.”

The Climate on Twitter: Why Do We Need to Become More Ethical on Twitter? The Case of Blackburn and the iDRAMA Lab

Cambridge Analytica accessed data of millions of users to use for political advertisements, leading to the restriction of access to the Facebook application programming interface.

“At best it’s an immense lack of understanding of how academic funding works,” says Jeremy Blackburn, assistant professor at Binghamton University in New York and a member of the iDRAMA Lab, which analyzes hate speech on social media. At worst, it is a way for him to get more taxpayer money via federal funding agencies.

two years ago, Twitter launched what is perhaps the tech industry’s most ambitious attempt at algorithmic transparency. The researchers wrote a few papers that showed that white faces and women were favored in the way that the social network gave them prominence, as well as showing that posts from the political right received a bigger boost than those from the left.

The researchers wanted to preserve the knowledge discovered at Twitter for anyone to use and make other social networks better. “I feel very passionate that companies should talk more openly about the problems that they have and try to lead the charge, and show people that it’s like a thing that is doable,” says Kyra Yee, lead author of the moderation paper.

“We were rightfully worried about what this leadership change would entail,” says Rumman Chowdhury, who was then engineering director on Twitter’s Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability group, known as META. A lot of people don’t understand the kind of work ethics teams do, being a part of a woke liberal agenda, versus actually being scientific work.

The team on another study worked through the night to make final edits before hitting Publish on Arxiv the day Musk took Twitter, one researcher says, speaking anonymously out of fear of retaliation from Musk. “We knew the runway would shut down when the Elon jumbo jet landed,” the source says. “We knew we needed to do this before the acquisition closed. We can stick a flag in the ground and say it exists.”