Social Media Discrimination after the Musk-Trump Deal: How to Conserve Your Words on Twitter and When to Write a Letter to the Editor

Musk allegedly told prospective investors in the deal that he intended to remove almost 75% of the company’s staff, a move that could disrupt every aspect of the company. He discussed a reduction in the workforce in text messages with his friends, but did not dismiss the possibility of layoffs in a call with employees.

Musk said at the conference that he will reverse the ban if he becomes the company’s owner.

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

It is not clear which agencies are carrying out the probe and whether or not Musk is under investigation. Authorities are looking into Musk’s conduct tied to the deal, according to the filing.

The company’s court filing elsewhere accused Musk’s legal team of failing to produce draft communications with the Securities and Exchange Commission and a slide presentation to the Federal Trade Commission as part of the two sides’ ongoing litigation over whether Musk can walk away from the deal.

Legal experts have said that the claims of pre-Musk ownership could lead to Billions of dollars in FTC fines.

Elon Musk completed his $44 billion deal to buy the company last week, which led to massive layoffs and questions about whether the world’s richest man would restore some banned accounts.

The Federal Trade Commission, which is responsible for enforcing the terms of a 2011 consent order with Twitter that Zatko alleges the company violated, has not publicly disclosed an investigation. But its chair, Lina Khan, has told Congress in public testimony that if it’s determined Twitter executives were responsible for legal violations, the FTC “absolutely” would and “won’t hesitate” to hold those executives personally accountable.

The separation agreement Musk’s team claimed in a filing earlier this month, did not require Zatko to burn several notebooks as part of it, according to the filing from Thursday. Instead, Zatko destroyed his notebooks on his own.

Conservatives and Congress have long debated the issue of how and why social media platforms limit the reach of certain content. Twitter has repeatedly said it does not moderate content based on its political leaning, but instead enforces its policies equally in an effort to keep users safe. In an interview with CNN in September, founder and then-CEO Jack Dorsey said the company doesn’t look at content with political viewpoint or ideology. We look at behavior.”

Yildirim said that social networking websites do a better job at targeting advertisements to what users want to see. Musk’s message suggests he wants to fix that, she said.

The email said that the work to make Twitter a safe and informative place would be moving faster than ever before, and that they would continue to welcome your ideas about how to achieve this goal.

Many advertisers have left the platform due to fear that ads would run alongside objectionable content after Musk took over, so the decision to restore many previously banned accounts could further unnerve them. The departures of some key advertisers has led to a massive drop in revenue for the company according to Musk.

Musk said in the letter that the acquisition isn’t meant to be a money-making venture for him.

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.

The fake and scam accounts that are usually active in the replies to Musk’s posts on the platform, will be defeated or die trying.

The Tesla Deal: It’s All in. Twitter is Going After You, And Its Going To Hell With Its Owners, But It Will Fail Without It

The deal will have to be finalized by a Delaware judge on Friday. She threatened to schedule a trial if no agreement was reached.

“Even slightly loosening content moderation on the platform is sure to spook advertisers, many of whom already find Twitter’s brand safety tools to be lacking compared with other social platforms,” Enberg said.

“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 people wouldn’t say if all the paperwork for the deal, originally valued at $44 billion, had been signed or if the deal has closed. But they said Musk is in charge of the social media platform and has fired CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and Chief Legal Counsel Vijaya Gadde. Neither person wanted to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the deal.

Although they came quickly, the major personnel moves had been widely expected and almost certainly are the first of many major changes the mercurial Tesla CEO will make.

In text messages revealed in court, Musk had a conflict with Agrawal immediately prior to making a bid for the company.

YoelRoth, the former head of safety, was smeared by Musk over the weekend as part of a conspiracy theory. He also attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, who Musk says will feature in future installments of the Twitter files, with a tweet amplifying a conspiracy theory about the COVID-19 pandemic.

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 Times are Coming: Musk’s “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!” after the New York Stock Exchange Disruption

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

Ahead of Friday’s opening bell, the New York Stock Exchange will suspend trading in shares ofTwitter because of the private taking of the company by Musk.

Musk’s apparent enthusiasm about visiting Twitter headquarters this week stood in sharp contrast to one of his earlier suggestions: The building should be turned into a homeless shelter because so few employees actually worked there.

He has made a lot of cuts to the trust and safety workforce. This week, Twitter disbanded its external Trust and Safety Council, some of whose members had come under online attack after Musk criticized them.

Many large companies have stopped spending money on ad dollars on social networking site, including pharma giant. Large advertising firms are telling clients to pause their campaigns, including Volkswagen and Pfizer.

The article was in theReliable Sources newsletter. You can sign up for a daily digest about the evolving media landscape.

The information environment he is now in has been contaminated by Musk and he is attempting to dismantle the little infrastructure erected to help users sift through the daily chaos. According to recent reports, he will take the blue verified badges from public figures if they don’t pay.

Charging for verified badges might appear at first glance as a business story. The move will have a big impact on the information landscape. It will be difficult for users to differentiate 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 Covid Plandemic: I’m Too Loud to Live Without a One-Parameter Threshold for the ICU

The best way to save social networks, the internet, civil Discourse, Democracy, Email, and reduce hacking would be to authenticating users.

“The Covid PLANdemic was created by Big Pharma to silence me. Everybody tries to silence me,” she said. Please speak at a lower volume. I am too loud for the intensive care unit. You aren’t even sick!”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/06/media/snl-donald-trump-twitter-elon-musk/index.html

The phone is a joke: a female celebrity’s account has been banned from the Truth Social media site (TAULS) since 2021

I am on the phone. Your profile is so funny. Schumer, dressed in a red dress, said she loves funny guys. They said that I was a bot, which is crazy. I’m all woman and I love funny guys like you. In fact, you should check out this website where me and some 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’s account was banned in 2021.

We have all moved to Truth Social, and we love it. It’s very great,” Johnson’s Trump said. And in many other ways terrible as well. It is very bad. Very, very bad. The phone screen cracked, and the Venmo automatically withdrew its funds, it was a little buggy.

The account that used publicly available flight data to track Musk’s private jet was suspended on Wednesday despite the promise that it would be kept up because of his free speech principles.

Kathy is no longer on the account after changing her screen name to Musk. She told a Bloomberg reporter that she had also used his profile photo.

“I guess not ALL the content moderators were let go? She made a joke on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform, after setting up an account.

The Twitter Blue Plan, After A Massive Second Round of Layoffs, Appeared in a Demonstration of Democracy

After changing her profile name to Musk, Bertinelli tweeted and retweeted support for several Democratic candidates and hashtags, including “VoteBlueForDemocracy” and “#VoteBlueIn2022.”

The updated Twitter Blue subscription plan gives paying users the ability to get a blue check mark on their profiles, an option previously available exclusively to verified celebrities, politicians, journalists and other public figures. Musk proposed the new feature as a way to fight spam on the platform.

The service will be available in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. There wasn’t an indication of when it would go live. Esther Crawford, an employee of Twitter, said it is coming soon but it hasn’t launched yet.

On Saturday afternoon, a week after an initial round of layoffs had cut Twitter in half, Platformer was the first to report that a second massive wave of cuts had hit the company. This time, the cuts were aimed at Twitter’s contract workers. Almost 80% of the contractors had lost their jobs, and on a percentage basis, it was even worse.

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.”

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.

The signature bid of Musk, who is CEO of the company, was an $8-a-month subscription plan to his favorite social network. The new plan was immediately put into action over the weekend before the company decided to wait until after the midterms.

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.

The Privacy Message Musk Sents to Sweeney, and if it’s an FTC Violation, It Can Come Into Disrepute

I am a freedom of speech advocate. and I eat doody for breakfast every day,” Silverman tweeted Saturday. Her account also retweeted posts supporting Democratic candidates.

The account was temporarily restricted Sunday, with a warning that there had been some unusual activity shown to visitors before they clicked through to the profile. The comedian then changed her account back to its usual form, complete with her own name and image.

CNN fired Kathy Griffin in January of 2017 after she was photographed with a bloody head. Griffin had co-hosted the New Year’s Eve program alongside Anderson Cooper for a decade.

The account had long been a thorn in Musk’s side. The private message Musk sent to Sweeney was reported by CNN as saying, “Can you take this down?” It’s a security risk.

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.”

If proven, a violation could ultimately lead to significant personal liability for Musk, escalating the risks he faces as he stumbles through a morass of business and content moderation headaches, most of which have been self-inflicted.

There are other, more substantive regulatory obligations that have come into question, too. They include the requirement that when a product or practice is added, it must be accompanied by a written privacy assessment of its potential to affect user data or pose a risk.

Under the FTC consent order, which was implemented this year, you have to give a sworn compliance notice within 14 days of any change. David Vladeck is a law professor at Georgetown University and a former senior FTC official.

Alex Spiro told CNN on Thursday that Musk is in talks with the FTC and will work closely with the agency to make sure he is in compliance.

“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. (Last month, the FTC showed its willingness to follow through, imposing sanctions on the CEO of alcohol delivery service Drizly.)

The FTC says that no CEO or company is above the law. “Our revised consent order gives us new tools to ensure compliance, and we are prepared to use them.”

Twitter Spaces: When Facebook Shuts Down, Twitter Blue Does Not Count On Its Popularity. Musk’s CEO David Musk Rejoins on the Failure of Twitter Blue

One of the world’s most influential social networks has lay off half its workforce in the last week alone, alienated powerful advertisers, bombed up key parts of its product and launched a slew of other features in a bid to compensate.

That paid subscription service, too, was also suspended on Friday with little warning, just two days after its official launch, with the menu option to sign up for Twitter Blue suddenly disappearing from Twitter’s iOS app — the only place the add-on had been offered. It was not immediately clear when the company might restore the offering.

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 account’s very next tweet, a day and nine hours later, said exactly the opposite: “To combat impersonation, we’ve added an ‘Official’ label to some accounts.”

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.

It was from one to another for when you have customer service hat on. Mark Cuban, a billionaire, said he spent too much time muting his newly purchased checkmark mentions to make them useful.

“Bottom line is that you have a decision to make,” Cuban added. Keep with the newTwitter that puts the onus on each user to use their own account in order to create their own buzz. Or bring back the popular social network. One makes Twitter time and information efficient. The other is not good.

In a Twitter Spaces event held for advertisers this week, Musk pleaded with brands to keep using the platform, after a growing number of companies paused ads, causing what Musk previously described as a “massive drop in revenue.” Musk was magnanimous in taking responsibility for the company’s performance.

According to the internal message seen by CNN, Musk has shown no fear in the FTC regulators that oversee the company’s multiple, legally binding consent agreements to maintain a robust cybersecurity program and produce written privacy impact reports before launching any new products or services.

The trust and safety team prepared a seven-page list of recommendations in the days leading up to the November 9th launch of Blue, intended to assist Musk in avoiding the most obvious and damaging consequences of his plans. The document, which was obtained by Platformer, predicts with eerie accuracy some of the events that follow.

“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.

The team found that posing as a world leader, advertisers, brand partners, election officials, and other high profile individuals was a P0 risk. Increased impersonation of high-profile accounts is likely to result in the loss of legacy verification, a critical signal in the enforcement of impersonation rules.

Tweeting about Musk’s Redux for Blue: Implications for Trust and Safety, and the Impact on Online Child Sexual Exploitation

The document was sent internally on November 1st and Musk thought of a yearly subscription of 99 for Blue. After an exchange online with Stephen King, Musk did lower the annual subscription price for Blue to 99. The move wound up increasing the risk for scams, as the desire to make fun of brands and government officials became an impulse buy at $8.

The team also noted removing the verified badge and its related privileges from high-profile users unless they paid, coupled with the heightened impersonation risk, would potentially drive them away from Twitter for good. Privileges and exemptions from legacy verified accounts could cause confusion and loss of trust, they wrote. We use the health-related protections to manage against the risk of false- positive actions on high-profile users under the assumption that the accounts have been heavily vet. If that signal is deprecated, we run the risk of false positives or the loss of privileges such as higher rate limits resulting in escalation and user flight.”

The trust and safety team won some support for solutions such as keeping verification for high-profile accounts using the official Badge.

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 proceeded as planned despite the warnings. A few days later, with the trust and safety team’s predictions largely realized, Musk stopped the roll out.

Functions affected had to do with ad sales, marketing, and real estate. 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 said that one of their contractors was removed in the middle of making critical changes to their child safety workflows. We previously reported on the difficulty of adequately police child sexual exploitation material on the platform.

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

Employee complaints about workplace layoffs: The platformer, Slack, and Twitter don’t look like Musk – even in India

Over the course of the day, similar messages trickled in on Blind, an app for coworkers to anonymously discuss their workplaces, and on external Slacks that employees have established to have more candid discussions.

Employees said they had been bracing for cuts since the layoffs. Platformer reported that vendors told former contractors via email their medical benefits would be ended today, causing many to scramble for a new job.

They show Twitter executives and rank and file employees grappling with difficult tradeoffs, questioning the company’s rules and how they should be applied – and in some cases, getting things wrong.

Employees are very supportive of one another. The goons of the volunteer venture capitalist group and on loan engineers from the Boring Company are not considered by them to be the same as Musk.

The employee said that T-Mobile had asked to pause the campaigns due to brand safety concerns. Three days later, John Legere asked Musk to let him run Twitter, and Musk responded ‘no.’

According to an internal email obtained by platformer, engineers were told to stop writing code until further notice. Exceptions will be granted if there is an “urgent change that is needed to resolve an issue with a production service, including any changes reflecting hard promised deadlines for clients,” the email said, and employees get “approval from VP level and Elon explicitly stating that the change needs to be made.”

The engineers who attended the late-night meeting were confused. A engineer who was tasked with implementing a freeze asked if he could reference a ticket. I don’t see anything. “We don’t have much context as of now,” a colleague responded. “But this is coming from Elon’s team.”

I apologize for how long it took me to respond to my followers in many countries. The application is doing poorly, and they are making a home timeline. Musk stated on Sunday morning that he referred to remote procedure calls. Musk also complained about the number of microservices Twitter employs, which are generally understood to prevent the entire site from breaking every time one part of it goes down.

It is not a great experience in India. 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 Did Twitter Close? Why Did the Code Freeze after Blue? The Washington Post Says Eli Lilly Didn’t and Why Do We Care About It

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 Blue, Eli Lilly paused all of its ad campaigns. The move potentially cost Twitter millions of dollars in revenue, according to the Washington Post. (A “verified” fake account impersonating Eli Lilly had said insulin would now be free, and it took Twitter six hours to remove the tweet.)

The news has left Twitter’s ad teams — particularly those responsible for managing ad agency relationships — in a lurch, according to internal screenshots and conversations with current employees.

“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 add any commentary, questions, and issues in the thread and I’ll try to raise as much as I can.

Another worker said General GM asked to stop campaigns. “The initial reason they gave is elections, but it looks like an open-ended pause, because the team requested to meet next week to help them make a case to global on why they shouldn’t.” Later, this same employee added: “Pause on [GM] til end of year confirmed and implemented. Brand safety is the reason right now.

Groupm, the largest media-buying agency in the world, told its clients that it was a high-risk purchase, 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. While they understand that our policies remain in place, they don’t know if it’s possible to scale and manage infraction at a fast pace.

–Demonstrated commitment of effective content moderation, enforcing current Twitter Rules (e.g. account impersonation, violative content removal timing, intolerance of hate speech and misinformation)

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

The Last Twitter Files: How Many of Your Accounts Are Disconnected? Comments on Musk’s New Twitter Managing Director Elon Musk

Mid-afternoon on Monday, after Musk announced he would begin disconnecting up to 80 percent of unspecified microservices, some users said two-factor authentication temporarily stopped working via SMS. Others reported noticing partial site outages and difficulty downloading their archives.

Some people who know how to fix things but don’t work for the company are told not to ship any new code. The question at the end of the day was not if any new cracks in the service would emerge but how many and when.

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 received more than 3 million votes.

In a push to change the rules of his company, he’s put reinstated high profile accounts that were banned for violating rules against offensive conduct, harmful misinformation or inciting violence.

According to documents shared by journalist Bari Weiss, there was at least some debate about whether or not Trump violated the social network’s policies by inciting violence in his final piece of the so-called Twitter Files. But they stop short of showing that Twitter ignored its own rules in implementing the ban.

The poll was a blowout, with 72.4% of respondents voting “yes” toward unbanning accounts, from a pool of slightly more than 3 million votes. It’s difficult to know who voted, but it’s worth remembering that Musk spent a long time trying to get out of buying Twitter based on claims that the service was filled with bots and inauthentic accounts.

Nonetheless, a blanket restoration of most suspended accounts will likely have immense and widespread unintended consequences — particularly in regions where Twitter’s moderation and compliance capacities have been eviscerated by the company’s 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. In doing so Musk is using an issue that has been a rallying cry for some conservatives who claim the social network has suppressed or shadowbanned their content.

“Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal,” Musk tweeted on Thursday. He did not provide additional details or a timetable.

A series of reports, based on internal documents that appear to have been provided by Musk’s team, include internal email detailing the company’s decision to suppress a New York Post story about Hunter Biden and his laptop.

Over the past two weeks, Musk has been releasing internal documents to a handpicked group of journalists who are digging through them and posting excerpts on Twitter.

Twitter is Not a Role for Racial Extremism: Employee Discussions Prior to the January 6, 2016 Abelian Attack on the US Capitol

Weiss gave examples of right-leaning figures who had moderation actions taken on their accounts, but it might not be clear if the actions were taken against other accounts as well.

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.

A series of internal Twitter documents shared on the social media platform Monday offer a glimpse into internal debates among some of the company’s employees ahead of its decision to ban then-President Donald Trump following the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.

One ofRoth’s postings on Election Day 2016 read, ” I’m just saying that we fly over those states that voted for a racist for a reason.”

“We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel. My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs,” Musk tweeted.

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 single employee raising concern about “censorship” while another states that we impose “far stricter rules on effectively everyone else on the platform.” It’s not clear from Weiss’ tweets whether the employees in this discussion were in any way involved in the decision making process that led to Trump’s ban.

The administrator of the safety team at the social media site said that she is not seeing clear orcoded instuction to violence, after Donald Trump issued a January 8 message saying the 75 million people who voted for him would have violent reactions. They will not be treated unfairly in any way, shape or form.

Natalia testified to the House committee that she and other staffers were concerned about the risk of violence ahead of the attack because of the Proud Boys’ and other groups’ postings on social media that echoed statements by Trump.

Another staffer, whose name was removed in the screenshot, said in Slack that a subsequent tweet that day from Trump saying he would not attend President Joe Biden’s inauguration was also “a clear no vio[lation].” Weiss said that a different staffer wondered if that statement could be proof that Trump does not support a peaceful transition.

The process of making content decisions was not out of the ordinary according to a former executive of the company. The former executive thought that the conversations looked like they were being thoughtful and careful.

At the time of Trump’s ban, it was pointed out by the company that his post about American patriots suggested that he planned to continue to protect those who believed he won the election, and that his inauguration statement could be seen as a statement about the legitimacy of the election.

The council of the city of San Francisco was confirmed by an email from the company on Thursday which promised an “open discussion and Q&A” with staff, including the head of trust and safety.

The council members, who provided images of the email from Twitter to The Associated Press, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation.

The group gave advice on how to better fight hate and harassment, but they did not have authority to review specific content disputes.

Those former council members soon became the target of online attacks after Musk amplified criticized of them and Twitter’s past leadership for allegedly not doing enough to stop child sexual exploitation on the platform.

A growing number of attacks on the council led to concerns from some remaining members who sent an email to Twitter on Monday demanding the company stop misrepresenting its role.

The Trust and Safety Council had advisory groups that focused on child exploitation. This included the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the Rati Foundation and YAKIN, or Youth Adult Survivors & Kin in Need.

The Twitter Files: Investigating the New York Post News Story on Hunter Biden’s Laptop, Twitter’s Decay of a White Man in Ukraine, and a Case Study in Musk’s DiResta

For many conservatives and Musk fans, the existence of these internal discussions is itself a smoking gun. The fact that the mainstream media are steering clear of covering thetwitter files without a lot of skepticism is fueling righteous indignation.

Renée DiResta, research manager at theStanford Internet Observatory, who studies how narratives spread on social networks, says that people who are confronting high-stakes, unanticipated events and trying to figure out what policies apply and how are coming through in the Twitter Files.

They’re a collection of internal emails and Slack chats capturing Twitter employees discussing company policies and fraught moderation calls. So far they’ve covered the decision to ban Trump, Twitter’s short-lived decision to block a news story in October 2020 drawn from material on Hunter Biden’s laptop, and how the company limits the reach of accounts that break its rules, including some well-known right-wing users.

Musk has given exclusive access to a group of independent journalists including Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone, and Bari Weiss, who used to be an opinion columnist for the NY Times.

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 files from Hunter Biden’s laptop, as well as from Trump’s private attorney, Rudy Giuliani. It was not certain 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 anyone who posted a link to the article that it was “potentially harmful” because of the rules against sharing hacked material. It also suspended the New York Post’s own Twitter account until it deleted its tweets about the story. Facebook was alarmed by the article but didn’t go too far. It allowed the link to be posted, but limited distribution of those posts while its outside fact-checkers reviewed the claims.)

It does not show government involvement in the New York Post blocking 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 added: “There’s nothing to hide…only a lot to learn from.”

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

Beneath Musk: Using Twitter Files to Discredit Foes and Push Conspiracy Theoretical Efforts

DiResta said there’s good reason to demand more insight into how social media companies operate. “Often these decisions are quite inscrutable,” she said. The question of how they’re moderated and how they’re designed is very significant when you consider that platforms shape public opinion.

She told us that we need more than Musk’s journalists to get the full picture, which is why they are focusing only on charged, highly partisan American political dramas.

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

“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.

Explaining the disclosures as secret knowledge is a great way to communicate it, according to Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the center for an informed public.

There were 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 are not 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.

But with his drumbeat of Twitter Files releases and gleeful tweets dunking on the company’s former employees, Musk has successfully hijacked the conversation.

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

Twitter bans linked to Sweeney’s Elon Musk jet tracker and a student allegedly stalked by a stalker

“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.

You will get a message saying 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 tweet certain links to Sweeney’s Elon Musk jet tracker on other platforms will display a message that the link is “potentially harmful,” as spotted by Tony Webster.

For Sweeney, it was the latest in a longtime tangle with the billionaire. The student at the University of Central Florida claimed that Musk sent him a private message offering to take the account down because of security concerns. Sweeney never deleted his account and Musk stopped communicating with him. Their exchange was first reported by tech news outlet Protocol earlier this year.

He threatened legal action against Jack Sweeney and organizations who supported harm to his family, as well as threatening legal action against the young college student who started the flight- tracking account. It’s not clear how legal action Musk could take against Sweeney for posting public flight information.

Sweeney was suspended for violating Twitter’s rules against “platform manipulation and spam,” according to a screenshot shared by a Mastodon account belonging to Sweeney. Musk said that the ban might have been for something else. “Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation,” Musk tweeted. Later, he added that a car carrying one of his children had been followed by a stalker thinking it was him and that he is taking legal action against Sweeney.

Data from the Internet Archive shows the company updated its “private information and media policy” to add a clause that prohibited the sharing of live location data, ” we will remove any tweets or accounts that share someone’s live location,” it read.

The new policy was posted by Musk. “Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info. Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok,” he wrote.

Asked if he planned to comply with the new policy, Sweeney told CNN he would begin delaying posting the whereabouts of Musk’s jet for 24 hours, “but just on Twitter.”

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. While Musk said in November that he would not ban the account after he flew, it looks like the actions taken against Sweeney are increasing.

The jets of billionaires including Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates have not been tracked by some other accounts. Sweeney operates many of them, as noted within his Discord, and has seen about 30 of his accounts banned, he told The New York Times’ Ryan Mac.

He saw that the account was permanently suspended as a result of breaking the rules. The note did not explain how it broke the rules.

The @elonjet account of Musk’s cross-country trips to New Orleans, France, and a meeting with the president of France

The @elonjet account has chronicled Musk’s many cross-country journeys since he took over and he is currently employed at various California airports, including San Francisco and Los Angeles.

It showed Musk flying to New Orleans before a meeting with the president of France.