The End of Twitter? When Donald Trump and Musk blasted each other in a public apology for their role in the Twitter Spike-Off
Musk has been trying to rule on Twitter by posting on the social networking site. Musk has away from the traditional, more formal style of corporate governance used by his predecessors. He did blow that model up. The platform has made lots of news since Musk took over, but it has yet to issue a formal press release.
“I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump; I think that was a mistake,” Musk said at a conference in May, pledging to reverse the ban were he to become the company’s owner.
But relations between the pair seem to have soured since, with the men publicly trading barbs over the summer. Musk wrote “I don’t hate the man but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset” after Trump referred to Musk as abullsh*t artist at a rally.
Twitter is Locked in a Pseudoscalar-Muslim Scenario, but the Musk Deal Can Be Cancelled
In a tweet, the Anti-Defamation League said, “Power. Disloyalty. Greed. Deicide. Blood. Denial. Anti-Zionism. All of these are antisemitic tropes that we break down in our #AntisemitismUncovered Guide at antisemitism.adl.org. Many of these myths have influenced @KanyeWest’s comments recently, and it’s dangerous.”
Weiss believed that the actions were taken without the knowledge of the users. It’s been clear for a long while that there are certain rules that may be broken and that it will apply strikes that correspond with the suspension of accounts that do. Users get notification that their accounts have been temporarily suspended in the case of strikes.
It is not clear which agencies may be carrying out the probe, and Twitter did not identify what specific actions by Musk US officials may be investigating. Twitter’s filing merely said authorities are looking into Musk’s “conduct” linked to the deal.
It was stated by the lawyers that Musk had tried to leave the deal and now they said they would close after the trial. They say that they mean it this time.
Within weeks of the acquisition agreement, however, Musk began raising concerns about the prevalence of those same fake and spam accounts on Twitter and ultimately attempted to terminate the deal.
Last week, Musk proposed following through with his deal to buy the company at the originally agreed upon price of $54.20 per share. The judge overseeing the dispute later in the week ruled to pause the legal proceedings until Oct. 28 following a request from Musk.
Twitter Policy: Does Trump Really Need to Become a Coded Incitement to Further Violence? In response to Gadde, Musk, and TWi
Twitter’s then-head of legal, policy and trust, Vijaya Gadde — who, along with Twitter founder and then-CEO Jack Dorsey, was ultimately responsible for content decisions — asked later on January 8 whether Trump’s “American Patriots” tweet “is being used as a coded incitement to further violence,” following up with requests for “any context or insight” and any relevant past research, Weiss’ tweets show. Twitter’s “scaled enforcement” team also got involved with the evaluation, and questioned whether the Trump tweets could be considered glorification of violence, the screenshots show, which would violate the company’s policies.
In a separate filing on Thursday, Twitter also maintained that it did not instruct Zatko to burn several notebooks as part of a separation agreement, as Musk’s team had claimed in a filing earlier this month. Zatko destroyed his notebooks on his own, according to the claims by TWi.
Benavidez said that Musk had a long record of trying to silence people who he dislikes or is critical of him.
“New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, not freedom of reach,” Musk said in a tweet last week, echoing an approach that is something of an industry standard. “Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.”
Top sales executive Sarah Personette, the company’s chief customer officer, said she had a “great discussion” with Musk on Wednesday and appeared to endorse his Thursday message to advertisers.
According to the Wall Street Journal, one ad buying agency had received requests from a number of clients to stop running their ads on behalf of them if Musk restored Trump’s account.
Musk stated in the letter that the acquisition is not meant to be a money-making venture for him.
The acquisition also promises to extend Musk’s influence. The billionaire already owns a lot of companies, including companies developing cars, rockets,robots, and satellite internet as well as more experimental ventures like brain implants. He controls a social media platform that affects the way hundreds of millions of people communicate.
It was promised by Musk that he would destroy thebots or die trying, referring to the fake and scam accounts that are often especially active in the replies to his tweets.
A Tweet from Musk and Gadde: Exploring Twitter for Perturbation of B-Benard and X-ray Metrics
If the parties do not close the deal by October 28, the trial will have to be held again.
Advertisers will be alarmed by a loosened content moderation on the platform and they’ll find similar tools to be lacking compared to other social platforms, Enberg said.
He said on the earnings conference call that the potential was more than the current value of the company.
Musk said there was no choice but to cut the jobs because the company was losing money. He did not say how many employees lost their jobs on a daily basis, only that they were offered three months’ pay as severance.
Although they came quickly, the major personnel moves had been expected, and that’s probably where the first of many changes will come from.
According to court filings, Musk clashed with Agrawal in April before deciding to bid on the company.
About the same time, he used Twitter to criticize Gadde, the company’s top lawyer. His tweets were followed by a wave of harassment of Gadde from other Twitter accounts. For Gadde, an 11-year Twitter employee who also heads public policy and safety, the harassment included racist and misogynistic attacks, in addition to calls for Musk to fire her. On Thursday, after she was fired, there was a lot of harassment on social media.
Twitter as a Platform for Protecting Users from Hate, Hate and Disagreement: A Comment on Thursday’s Tweet to Advertisers
He continued: “There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.”
But it’s also a realization that having no content moderation is bad for business, putting Twitter at risk of losing advertisers and subscribers, she said.
“You do not want a place where consumers just simply are bombarded with things they do not want to hear about, and the platform takes no responsibility,” Yildirim said.
The deal is going through, according to Musk. He strolled into the company’s San Francisco headquarters Wednesday carrying a porcelain sink, changed his Twitter profile to “Chief Twit,” and tweeted “Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!”
The New York Stock Exchange notified investors that it would be suspending trading in the company’s shares on Friday because of Musk’s intention to take the company private.
The building should be turned into a homeless shelter due to the number of employees who didn’t work there, as suggested by Musk earlier this year.
He has made deep cuts to the company’s trust and safety workforce, including teams focused on non-English languages and state-backed propaganda operations. Several members of the external Trust and Safety Council were attacked on the internet after Musk criticized them.
Thursday’s note to advertisers states that the emphasis is on advertising revenue as well as the need for more tailored ads onTwitter that use users’ personal information.
A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.
In addition, Musk is working to disassemble the little infrastructure that helps users sift through the daily chaos, as he has contaminated the information environment he now reigns over. 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 consequences for the information landscape. It will make it hard for users to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic accounts.
The right has for years lashed out at “blue checks,” whom in their eyes represent elitist gatekeepers who control the conversation, even though many conservatives also don 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.
The Donald Donald Trump Twitter Twitter Twitter Elton Musk: What Should We Do to Suppress The Covid PLANdemic?
Musk’s authorized biographer, Walter Isaacson, tweeted in 2018 that “the best thing” one could do to “save social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email, and reduce hacking would be authenticating users.”
“The Covid PLANdemic was created by Big Pharma to silence me. She said that all of them tried to silence her. You must speak at a lower volume. I am sorry, but am I too loud for the intensive care unit? You are not even sick!
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/06/media/snl-donald-trump-twitter-elon-musk/index.html
Hey, where are all the funny guys? A comment on the Facebook profile of a black man, James Austin Johnson, and the resignation of Kathy Griffin
I’m Hi. Oh my god, your profile is so funny. Schumer, wearing a red dress, said she was a fan of funny guys. “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 is the man who plays former president Trump in front of the council. In 2021, Trump’s account was banned.
“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’s 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.”
It is not immediately clear how Musk and his team at Twitter will sort out which accounts had been banned for illegal or spam content versus other violations, nor how many total accounts will be restored.
Kathygriffin had her account suspended after changing her screen name to Musk. She told a Bloomberg reporter that she had also used his profile photo.
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.
Twitter Under Musk: Back off, don’t try to do more, or why the Indian government doesn’t want to re-investigate
After changing her name to Musk, she continued to support several Democratic candidates on her own account.
Before the stunt, Bertinelli noted the original purpose of the blue verification checkmark. It was granted free of charge to people whose identity Twitter employees had confirmed; with journalists accounting for a big portion of recipients. It simply meant that your identity was verified. Scammers would have a harder time impersonating you,” Bertinelli noted.
It said the service would first be available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. There was no indication when it would go live, as it was not available Sunday. A Twitter employ, Esther Crawford, told The Associated Press it is coming “soon but it hasn’t launched yet.”
Following layoffs that started on Friday, many users of the platform are moving to Counter Social and other alternatives. The internet’s main conduit for reliable communication is at risk because of a breakdown of moderation and verification.
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.”
The head of the American Civil Liberties Union was against the decision, saying it was impossible to square free speech ambitions with the deletion of critical journalists accounts.
“How he treats pressure from countries like Saudi Arabia and India—I think those are key indicators of where he’s going with the platform,” says David Kaye, former UN special rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression and clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine.
In India, Twitter’s third largest market, the company filed a case earlier this year to contest the government’s order to remove individual pieces of content as well as whole accounts that the government considers a risk to India’s security or sovereignty.
But Raman Jit Singh Chima, senior international counsel and Asia Pacific policy director at Access Now, worries that Twitter under Musk may not continue with the lawsuit. (In his August countersuit against Twitter, Musk cited the lawsuit in India as a threat to the company’s presence in its third largest market.) He says it would be a validation of actions taken by the Indian government. “It also sends a signal to the global tech industry, saying ‘Back off, don’t try to do more.’”
Griffin appeared to be the first celebrity to lose her tweeting privileges after a wave of prominent users impersonated Musk over the weekend, with the goal of underscoring potential flaws in the social media company’s plans for a revised verification system.
Musk is making a signature effort to bolster company revenue by creating an $8 plan on his social networking site. The company decided to delay the service until after the midterms after hastily introducing the new plan over the weekend.
But the partially rolled-out plan faced widespread backlash, and in a display of defiance, some celebrities on the platform posed as Musk over the weekend, complete with a blue check mark on their profiles.
Twitter: Trump vs. Musk: Tweeting about a freedom of speech absolutist, Doomsday for Democracy and the Death of Democracy
“I am a freedom of speech absolutist and I eat doody for breakfast every day,” Silverman tweeted Saturday. Her account encourages support for Democratic candidates.
Silverman’s account was labeled as “temporarily restricted” Sunday, with a warning that “there has been some unusual activity from this account” shown to visitors before clicking through to the profile. The comedian changed her account back to its normal form and included her name and image.
CNN fired Griffin in 2017 after the comedian was photographed holding up a bloody head resembling that of then-President Donald Trump. For a decade, they co-hosted the New Year’s Eve program.
The announcement comes after Musk on Wednesday polled his followers about whether to offer “general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.”
In recent months, Musk has shared conspiracy theories about the attack on Paul Pelosi, called Democrats the party of “division & hate,” compared Twitter’s former CEO to Joseph Stalin and warned that “the woke mind virus will destroy civilization.”
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.
Did Trump tweet against Twitter? Comments on Musk’s Facebook, Twitter and Facebook attacks on the Capitol attack on January 6, 2016: Weiss’ “We Fly Over” tweets
Weiss did not mention in his Monday thread that on January 6 tweets had warned Trump that it could result in a permanent ban. The thread does not mention that other social platforms, likeSnapchat and Facebook, had to remove Trump from their platforms in the days after the Capitol attack.
The changes came after Musk removed the platform’s policy prohibiting Covid-19 misinformation.
It will be possible for users to determine whether the company has limited how many other users are allowed to view posts, if a new option is introduced by Musk. Musk is taking on an issue that has been something of a rallying cry among some conservatives who say that the social network has suppressed or shadow banned their content.
A software update will show you the true status of your account, so you know whether you have been shadowbanned or not. He didn’t give a timetable or additional details.
These reports are based on documents that appear to have been supplied by Musk’s team, and include internal messages from Musk about the New York Post story and the company’s decision to suppress it.
Musk’s use of his new platform to promote the so-calledTwitter Files, a collection of internal documents that he claimed to expose a censorship scandal but in fact revealed messy internal debates about other contentious subjects more than anything else, makes it all the more believable that he wants to expose a
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 familiar with the matter told CNN on Monday that the former head of trust and safety has left his home due to an increase in threats after Musk launched his campaign of criticism against him.
The criticism of then- President Trump that was posted in 2016 and 2017, was used to argue that there was a bias against the president.
On Election day in 2016 he wrote a note saying, “I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist for a reason.”
I want to make sure that everyone knows that I support Yoel. Musk believes that he has integrity and that we all have a right to our political beliefs.
Weiss’ tweets suggest that in the wake of January 6, there were Twitter employees both in favor of and against the idea of banning Trump. A screenshot from an internal Twitter slack conversation, where employees’ names have been redacted, shows one employee raising concerns about “censorship” while another notes that “we impose far stricter rules on effectively everyone else on the platform.” Weiss did not state whether the employees in this discussion were involved in the decision making process that led to Trump’s ban.
“I also am not seeing clear or coded incitement” to violence, Twitter safety staffer Anika Navaroli said in a slack message about Trump’s January 8 tweet saying: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They won’t be treated unfairly or disrespected in any way.
(Navaroli later testified to the House committee investigating January 6 that she and other staffers had been alarmed by content posted on Twitter by the Proud Boys and other extremist groups that echoed statements by Trump, and had worried about the risk of violence ahead of the attack.)
A staffer in the office removed his name from the screen, saying that the previous day’s message from Trump that he would not attend Biden’s inauguration was also a clear violation. Weiss questioned if that was proof that Trump does not support a peaceful transition.
One former Twitter executive told CNN that the process of figuring out what to say to users wasn’t unusual and that the teams involved in the decision would push each other to think on their feet. “I think these conversations look like people were trying to be really thoughtful and careful,” the former executive said.
According to the decision taken by the social network, at the time of Trump’s ban, its statement about his plans to continue to support, empower, and shield those who believe he won the election could be viewed as a further statement that the election was not legitimate.
I told my colleagues in the newsroom where I worked that we shouldn’t cover everything Trump said and did after he became president. Previously, a president’s every word was assumed to be a carefully chosen signal of future policy, and was reported as such. In order to get a rise out of people, Trump said many things. I argued that reporting on them fed the fire. Another editor wasn’t happy about it. “He’s the president,” he said, or words to that effect. He says it is news.
Here we saw lots of quick-response news stories about Musk’s December 11 “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fuci”, a dig at the government’s former chief infectious disease expert, and at gender diversity. Here’s another bunch about the picture of his bedside table with two replica guns on it, and some more about his tweeting a far-right Pepe the Frog meme.
This is precisely the way coverage of Trump worked. The left-leaning media reported on stories about the fact that a person so clearly unqualified to be president would succeed in bringing himself down in flames, while the right-wing media treated his egomania, corruption, and lack of interest in grasping basic policy. There was plenty of good reporting going on at the same time, but these polarizing accounts tended to dominate the conversation. The public’s understanding of what was happening across the country was made up of incompatible narratives around the behavior of one man in the White House.
This is what is happening with Musk. Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic describes a “dysfunctional relationship between Twitter’s new owner and so many of the journalists who cover him … where the least defensible statements and claims on all sides are relentlessly amplified in a never-ending cycle that predictably fuels disdain and negative polarization.”
While the documents Musk has shared so far corroborate what’s already known, many tech reporters and social media experts think his claims are overblown.
Renée DiResta, a research manager at the internet observatory, said that people who are trying to figure out what policies apply and how will be coming through in the tweets files.
The videos show employees of the company trying to balance hard tradeoffs with questions of the company’s rules and how they should be applied.
The selection of Taibbi and Weiss, who share Musk’s criticisms of the mainstream media, has caused a lot of controversy. Other news outlets have not been given access to the original documents, which have been presented only in screenshots and excerpts in lengthy tweet threads, often without context.
Take Twitter’s decision right before the 2020 presidential election to briefly block users from sharing a New York Post story alleging shady business dealings by then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, in Ukraine.
The Post said it got the information fromHunter Biden’s laptop, which had files from Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Steve Bannon. It was unclear at the time if that material was legit. The Post story was restricted by Twitter because the company was on edge over a possible repeat of the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee emails.
The company warned people that attempting to post a link to the article 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. It was alarmed by the article, but 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.)
No evidence has been found to support claims by Musk that there was a government involvement in blocking the New York Post story.
“Everyone acted according to the best information at the time, and I still believe that there was no ill intent or hidden agendas,” 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.” There’s nothing to hide, just a lot to learn from.
Elon Musk is using the Twitter Files to discredit the foes and push conspiracies-theory, according to Caulfield
DiResta said there’s good reason to demand more insight into how social media companies operate. She said that some decisions are quite inscrutable. “These are platforms that shape public opinion, and so the question of how they’re moderated and how they’re designed is impactful.”
She believed outsiders needed more than just the “anecdotes” Musk’s selected journalists were sharing and said they needed to get the full picture.
To better understand the decision to ban Trump, for example, it would help to see discussions around the accounts of other world leaders who have not been kicked off the platform, she said.
“There’s value in what’s been revealed to the public, but at the same time, it is primarily reinforcing a perception in large part based on your pre-existing opinions as partisan individuals within the United States,” DiResta said.
Framing the disclosures as secret knowledge plays particularly well on Twitter, said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
His tweets triggered violent threats against both men. Roth and his family have been forced to flee their home, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and they aren’t going to solve anything. “If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.”
The CEO’s willingness to target people working to keep the platform’s users safe, including through the Twitter Files releases, is creating a “chilling effect,” according to one Trust and Safety Council member, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation.
Musk has successfully hijacked the conversation with his enthusiasm for the company and his gleeful activity on the social networking site.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/14/1142666067/elon-musk-is-using-the-twitter-files-to-discredit-foes-and-push-conspiracy-theor
Twitter Dishonesty: The Status of a Twitter Account Tracking the Elon Jets of the Bjorken University of Central Florida
“It is being processed as a collection of things that we can see in the last regime and that are going to be done differently under our watch,” DiResta said.
You will see a message that the account has been suspended if you try to visit it. Twitter has also been blocking links to versions of the Elon Jet tracker on other platforms, like Instagram and Facebook. Attempting to post certain links to Sweeney and Musk on another platform will display a message that the link is potentially harmful.
For Sweeney, it was the latest in a longtime tangle with the billionaire. The University of Central Florida student said Musk last year sent him a private message offering $5,000 to take the jet-tracking account down, citing security concerns. Musk stopped communicating with Sweeney after he never deleted his account. Protocol reported on their exchange earlier this year.
In the beginning, Sweeney said he setup the airline because he was a Musk fan. “It gives you just another view that a lot of people don’t know about where [Musk] is going and might give you clues into what new business is going on,” he said.
Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment. Musk pledges to eliminate automatically generated spam from the platform but he allows automated accounts that are labeled as such.
“You can still share your own live location on Twitter,” it said. The policy does not prohibit the sharing of historical location information on social media.
But this week he changed his mind after he said that one of his sons’ car had been accosted by a crazy stalker. Any account that posted real-time location info of anyone will be suspended as a physical safety violation, according to Mr. Musk. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.”
Sweeney was asked if he would obey the new policy, and he replied that he would delay posting Musk’s jet location for at least 24 hours.
It seems Twitter doesn’t currently have an ironclad filter for this, as I was able to tweet an alternate link to the Instagram version of the tracker. It appears that the actions against Sweeney and his accounts have been stepped up by the company despite Musk’s commitment to free speech.
Some other accounts tracking the jets of billionaires, including Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, have been suspended and remain so. According to The New York Times, Sweeney has seen about thirty of his accounts banned after he was reported to be operating many of them.
In the weeks since the Tesla CEO took over Twitter, the @elonjet account has chronicled Musk’s many cross-country journeys from his home base near Tesla’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, to various California airports for his work at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters and his rocket company SpaceX.
It showed Musk flying to East Coast cities ahead of major events, and to New Orleans shortly before a Dec. 3 meeting there with French President Emmanuel Macron.
Neither Musk nor Twitter responded to a request for comment Thursday evening, and the platform did not explain precisely why the journalists were exiled from the platform.
Doxxing refers to the practice of sharing someone’s home address or other personal information online. The banned account had instead used publicly available flight data, which remain online and accessible, to track Musk’s jet.
“I do think this is very important for the potential chilling impact this can have for freelance journalists, independent journalists around the world, particularly those who cover Elon Musk’s other companies, like Tesla and SpaceX,” O’Sullivan told CNN Thursday after his account was suspended.
Press freedom advocates on Thursday criticized Twitter owner Elon Musk, who has suspended the accounts of several high-profile journalists who cover the billionaire and his chaotic leadership of the social media site.
The president of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) said in a statement it was “concerned” about the suspensions, and that the move “affects all journalists.”
As the furor over the account suspensions unfolded, some Twitter users reported the platform had begun intervening when they attempted to post links to their own profiles on alternative social networks, including Mastodon.
In a recent post on Substack, the man wrote that he was unsure of why he was suspended. He said he had a link to a Facebook page for the jet- tracking account.
The Free Press and the European Commission: What Do Journalists Really Know About Digital Media Freedom and Fundamental Rights? A Comment on Jaffer’s Remarks
Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at the advocacy group Free Press, echoed Jaffer’s remarks, saying suspending journalists based seemingly on personal animus “sets a dangerous precedent.”
“We will suspend any accounts that violate our privacy policies and put other users at risk, I can only confirm that, without saying anything about any specific user accounts,” he said. “We do not make exceptions for journalists or any other accounts.”
“Freedom of the press cannot be switched on and off as you please,” Germany’s foreign ministry tweeted on Friday. They are no longer able to comment or criticize, as of today. That is a problem for us.
The Digital Services Act requires respect of media freedom and fundamental rights. “This is reinforced under our # MediaFreedomAct, and it should be noted by Musk,” said Jourov.
Musk was warned by a European Union official in late November that social media platforms are required to take steps to conform with EU content moderation laws.