Do We Really Need Donald Trump To Fly? A Brief History of Musk and the Post-Coalescence Scenarios of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey
Musk is believed to shake things up at the company. Agrawal, who succeeded Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey in the CEO role less than a year ago, will likely head for the exit, potentially with a $42 million payout.
“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.
Relations between the two seem to have soured since and the men traded barbs in the summer. Musk responded to Trump calling him a bullsh*t artist by writing, “It is time for Trump to sail into the sunset.”
On the eve of the trial, Defendants announce they intend to close the deal, and that they had been attempting to exit it. They said that they mean it this time.
Musk’s impulsiveness and U-turns are familiar. Just as he decided to buy Twitter, then changed his mind, and then changed it even more, he did the same thing on Starlink.
Within weeks of the acquisition agreement, Musk began raising concerns about the prevalence of fake accounts on social networking site, and he ultimately attempted to cancel the deal.
The material that came to light, prior to the trial in Delaware’s Chancery Court, didn’t lend support to the argument. He knows that his best claim is fraud, but they got the evidence from theTwitter, and there’s nothing that looks like fraud here. They have run out of cards to play.
Musk’s decision to fold may have been influenced by the possibility of damage to him from the trial. The internet was interested in a series of text messages that an entrepreneurial had with major figures in Silicon Valley. This week he faced what Miller says would likely have been “a very embarrassing” deposition.
The Skinner Box: A Tale of Two Stories: Twitter Amnesty and the Persistent Destroyer Beneath Alex Jones
More than the professional utility ties me to the site. In the same way that slot machines work, people are hooked on Twitter with anittent reinforcement schedule. Most of the time, it’s repetitive and uninteresting, but occasionally, at random intervals, some compelling nugget will appear. Unpredictable rewards, as the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner found with his research on rats and pigeons, are particularly good at generating compulsive behavior.
A cultural anthropologist at New York University who wrote a book about gambling machine design said that she didn’t know that people would ever say they were creating a Skinner box. But that, she said, is essentially what they’ve built. It’s one reason people who should know better regularly self-destruct on the site — they can’t stay away.
It’s a theme he reiterated both in public, telling Twitter employees at an all-staff meeting that the platform should allow all legal speech, and in private, texting investor Antonio Gracias that “Free speech matters most when it’s someone you hate spouting what you think is bull****.”
The experts who study social networks warn that allowing legal speech on the platform would cause a lot of toxicity, from transphobia and misogynistic abuse to false claims about the efficacy of vaccines.
The president of Media Matters for America said alternative platforms could be seen as a keyhole view of what Twitter under Musk will look like.
The feature on those sites is the bug where people can say and do things that are not allowed on mainstream social media platforms. And what we see there is that they are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.”
Twitter CEO Elon Musk has decided to offer “general amnesty” to suspended accounts starting next week — a gentler way of saying that he’s decided to welcome back some of the site’s worst and most toxic people. It’s the second major moderation decision he’s made since taking over after unbanning former President Donald Trump; both decisions were made after Musk ran an informal poll from his personal Twitter account.
That could mean lifting bans on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was kicked off for abusive behavior in 2018; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., whose account was suspended in January for tweeting misleading and false claims about COVID-19 vaccines; and 2020 election deniers like Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell, who were all banned in early 2021.
The person urged Musk to hire “someone who has a savvy cultural/political view” to lead enforcement, suggesting “a Blake Masters type.” Masters is the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona who has been endorsed by Trump and has echoed his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
Twitter can’t survive the Trump-Mumford saga: What’s next for Twitter? Musk and the Tesla billionaire, after Musk leaves Twitter
Allowing Trump and others to return could set a precedent for other social networks, including Meta-owned Facebook, which is considering whether to reinstate the former president when its own ban on him expires in January 2023.
After a video meeting a few weeks later with Agrawal and Musk, Dorsey tersely summed up the situation in a text to Musk: “At least it became clear that you can’t work together. That was clarifying.”
A smaller workforce will likely be faced with whoever is in charge of day to day operations. Hundreds of employees have reportedly left in the months since the Musk saga began, with many inside Twitter disheartened by Musk’s plans to overhaul the company.
That is likely welcome news to the billionaire, who has complained that Twitter’s costs outstrip revenues and has implied the company is overstaffed for its size.
“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.
He may have little choice other than to find alternate sources of revenue besides advertising, given the weak state of the digital ad market and the changes he wants to make to content moderation.
Advertisers want to be certain that their ads are not going to be associated with extremists or things that would turn customers off, and that’s why they want to know that,” Carusone said.
Twitter Can Get It Wrong: Elon Musk’s $44 billion Acquisition of Twitter Isn’t Designed to Embrace WeChat
Everyone has a guess about what he meant. But this summer, Musk told Twitter staff that the company should emulate WeChat, the Chinese “super-app” that combines social media, messaging, payments, shopping, ride-hailing — basically, anything you might use your phone to do.
This strategy has been tried by other American tech companies, but not in the United States.
Federal authorities are investigating Elon Musk in connection with his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, the social media platform said in a court filing Thursday.
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.
The company is facing billions of dollars in fines from the FTC for alleged privacy missteps dating to before Musk’s ownership. But, the Twitter employee warned colleagues, Twitter could find itself even more legally exposed after the sudden resignation of multiple top Twitter executives charged with fulfilling the company’s FTC obligations, including its chief information security officer and chief privacy officer.
Musk’s team had claimed in a filing earlier this month that they had evidence that Twitter instructed Zatko to burn several notebooks as part of a separation agreement. The notebooks were destroyed by Zatko.
Free Speech in Social Media: An Opinion Analysis of Parler, Musk, and Other Social Media Embeddings of Conservative Values
Kara ALAimo is an associate professor in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University and she writes about issues affecting women and social media. She worked in the Treasury Department during the Obama administration. The opinions are of her own. View more opinion on CNN.
An announcement was made on Monday that the social media company Parler was being purchased by West, who was banned from the micro-networking site for using antisemitic language. The statement said that West would not have to fear getting kicked off of social media again after changing his name to Ye.
In a release by Parler, West said that “in a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves.”
If West and Musk go through with their deals, these three social media platforms are likely to serve as ecosystems for conservative thought. This will likely make the views of those who remain on them more extreme — which could have a radical effect on our politics. People who think like that heighten one. another’s initial beliefs.
After Musk took over, an analysis showed that the most popular message was often filled with racist or anti-Semitic language. A number of the top posts in each category were now deemed to be antisemitic or anti-gay. For popular tweets using potentially racist language, one of the top 20 was judged to be hate speech.
When women become victims of online hate, they often “shut down their blogs, avoid websites they formerly frequented, take down social networking profiles, (and) refrain from engaging in online political commentary,” according to University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks.
These free speech policies do not really boil down to anything except an ugly form of censorship that scares away the voices of people who are attacked by users of these platforms.
Parler has been described as a place where conservative views can flourish, and nonconservatives are unlikely to flock there given that it is associated with Trump. If women, people of color and others start fleeing Twitter, that could leave it as a platform for conservatives as well. The views of those who remain ardent would likely be made even more so.
Far Right Views on Social Media: A Viewpoint on the Rise and Fall of Censorship in the 21st Century (Extended Commentary)
Harvard University law professor Sunstein says in his book that like minded people end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started talking to one another. Sunstein says this happens because their exchanges heighten their preexisting beliefs and make them more confident.
So, when conservatives get together on social media, we can expect them to become more far right. And just as Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk-show hosts radically altered the political landscape in the 1990s in ways that laid the groundwork for Trump’s presidency, the far-right views nurtured on these social networks could have a huge impact on our country’s politics. It seems like the people who live on these sites would be able to support and vote for candidates who share their beliefs.
We can also expect these male owners to use their platforms to amplify their own views — even when they’re sexist, misogynistic, racist or otherwise hateful.
A former CNN producer and correspondent, Ghitis is a world affairs columnist. She is a weekly opinion contributor to CNN and a columnist for The Washington Post. Her views are her own in this commentary. CNN has more opinion on it.
Elon Musk, the Russian Ambassador to the United Nations, and Fiona Hill: The two paragons of excessive self confidence he has spoken to in the last few years
We could sit back and enjoy the show if Musk had not done such a bad thing. But, since he likes weighing in heavily on consequential matters, the rest of the world has to worry about the impact and wonder whose side he’s on. What are the principles – moral, ethical, financial – that drive his rambunctious forays into world affairs?
None of Musk’s accomplishments suggest that he has the experience to tackle the most hazardous conflicts. But that hasn’t stopped him. The self-confidence of a person that knows what Musk is talking about is something that Musk has emphasized on the Russia-Ukraine war and Taiwan tensions with Beijing.
His proposals received the support of dictators. Musk might operate under the belief he is a genius, like some extremely wealthy men. He is combined with wealth in order to get attention from an egotistical soul.
Reaction was swift. Zelensky asked his followers if they preferred the Musk who supports Ukraine or the one who supports Russia. More to the point,Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany responded “F**k off…@elonmusk”
One suggestion is that a second referendum be held in Russian-occupied Ukrainian lands, under the supervision of the United Nations, despite Russian military occupation.
Then there was another twist to the much-scrutinized tweet. Ian Bremmer, a political scientist from the Eurasia Group, said that Musk had spoken to the Russian President before he posted on his verified account.
But the most telling analysis of the relationship between Musk and Putin – those two paragons of excessive self-confidence – came from Fiona Hill, once the top Russia hand in the US National Security Council.
She believes thatPutin plays the egos of big men and gives them a sense that they can play a role. But in reality, they’re just direct transmitters of messages from Vladimir Putin.”
As a former KGB agent, Putin is trained in the art of reading and manipulating people. The image of Putin bringing his black dog to the meeting with the German Chancellor and reportedly making her fearful of dogs, is an indelible one.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/18/opinions/elon-musk-russia-ukraine-putin-xi-china-ghitis/index.html
What Does Musk Really Want to Say About Taiwan? A Reply to a Tweet from Musk about a Possible Solution to the China/Taipei Problem
What’s in it for Musk? A man who turned space flight into a for profit business is trying out a different vehicle. It is an ego trip.
He said that he had a proposal for resolving the long running hostilities between Beijing and Taipei. Musk suggested creating “a special administrative zone for Taiwan,” musing that “they could have an arrangement that’s more lenient than Hong Kong.” It was promised that China would make one country, two systems for Hong Kong.
China was just as appreciative of the billionaire as Russia was. Taiwan sells many products, but we are not for sale, said Taiwan’s envoy to the US.
Perhaps it’s not fair to paint the Tesla tycoon as a friend of dictators. The internet service developed by Musk and his company, which is called Starlink, has been used by Ukrainians to fight Putin.
CNN reported a few days ago on a letter written by the company to the Pentagon, requesting that it start giving money to Starlink, or it might stop.
Musk posed a humanitarian pose and said that even though no good deed goes unrecognized we should still do good deed.
Despite his shenanigans, and even though he occasionally appears to act as a mischievous teenager, he likes to take himself seriously, thinking of important topics. Some of his ideas are deserving of high praise.
Donald Trump is a free speech fundamentalist, so he wanted to put him back on the platform. Free speech in the complicating, fast-changing age of social media is one of the topics where experts say he lacks a serious understanding of the extraordinarily complex issues a major platform has to grapple with.
In addition to adhering to the law of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all where you can choose your preferred experience according to your preferences, he said in the Thursday post. “Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise … Let us build something extraordinary together.”
Twitter’s Chief Customer Officer Sarah Personette responded to Musk’s Thursday tweet saying that she had a “great discussion” with Musk on Wednesday. Personette said that their continued commitment to brand safety remained unchanged. It’s looking forward to the future!
The decision to restore hundreds of banned accounts could further hurt advertisers, who have fled the platform in the wake of the chaos due to fear that their ads could end up running alongside objectionable content. The company has seen a drop in revenue due to the departure of key advertisers.
The letter makes it clear that Musk did not mean the acquisition to be a money-making venture for him.
The deal to buy the company was done last week, which led to massive layoffs and uncertainty about whether the world’s richest man would restore banned accounts.
The fake and scam accounts that are especially active in the replies to Musk’s tweet can be defeated or they can die trying.
The Tesla Deal: The Meltdown on Twitter About the Censorship and Exploitation of a High-Energy Silicon Valley
A judge gave the parties time to close the deal, or a new trial will be held.
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.
About the same time, he used Twitter to criticize Gadde, the company’s top lawyer. A wave of harassment of Gadde from other accounts followed his tweets. 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. She was fired Thursday, and then the harassment started again.
The note is a shift from Musk’s position that Twitter is unfairly infringing on free speech rights by blocking misinformation or graphic content, said Pinar Yildirim, associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
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.
What Will President Musk Tell Us About The New York Stock Exchange and Where Are We Going? How Do We Want to Dismantle the Infrastructure?
But Musk has been signaling that the deal is going through. He walked into the company’s San Francisco headquarters carrying a porcelain sink, then changed his profile to “chief twitt” on social media, and then “Let that sink in!”
The New York Stock Exchange has notified investors that it will stop trading in the company’s stock before Friday’s opening bell in anticipation of it going private under Musk.
Musk’s enthusiasm about going to the headquarters this week was vastly different to his earlier suggestion that the building be turned into a homeless shelter since few employees actually worked there.
Thursday’s note to advertisers says that a need for more “relevant ads” is a need, which typically means targeted ads that collect and analyze users’ personal information.
Friedersdorf claims that Musk deserved more benefit of the doubt since he banned West, refused to restore Jones, and helped block the story about Biden’s laptop. But I think that strays toward both-sides-ism and misses the point.
This article was published in theReliable Sources newsletter. There is a daily digest that covers the evolving media landscape.
Musk has ruined the information environment that he is in and he is also attempting to dismantle the little infrastructure constructed 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.
There is a charging for verified badges that appears to be a business story. The move will have a huge effect on the information landscape. It will make it hard 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 will definitely be a delight for some conservatives.
Elon Musk isn’t a Fan of Twitter: He’s Trying to Make Sense of Newswire and Other Newswire News Feeds
The best thing one could do to save social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email, and reduce hacking would be authenticating users.
Elon Musk wants Twitter to make money, and apparently, the first place he’s looking is its power users. Over the weekend, we learned that Musk plans to charge $20 per month for a Twitter verification badge, an update that might be rolled out next month. It fits in with Musk and his plans to make the premium service more valuable for active users. But verification serves a central trust-building role for Twitter — and Musk’s proposal could erode that trust just as the platform threatens to spiral out of control.
At their best, these two Twitter styles are complementary. The inherent seriousness of Newswire Twitter heightens the humor and absurdity of Nonsense Twitter, and the style of Nonsense Twitter bleeds into Newswire Twitter, doing things like turning government consumer protection agencies into memelords. There is room for an occasional dose of chaos, like the DPRK News: fake North Korean propaganda feed that has fooled several news outlets.
The Future of Social Media: From Beyoncé to the Associated Press, to House of the Dragon on HBO, to Tori and De Todas las Flores
Verification was used to make prominent people and organizations comfortable on the platform. Early verified accounts include the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kim Kardashian. The media has always loved verification. For journalists trying to get sources to talk or audience development teams trying to get eyes on a story, it makes sense to want a verified account; it made you look like a person somebody had vetted. Blue checks assured the journalist’s followers that the story they shared was real and not a hoax.
All of which might sound like an argument for Musk’s new plan. If you’re Beyoncé or McDonald’s or the Associated Press, $240 a year isn’t much to pay for preserving that sense of trust.
On this week’s Gadget Lab, we chat with WIRED platforms about the future of the social network and how it will affect them.
Tori wants you to encourage your male-presenting friends interested in fathering children to watch House of the Dragon on HBO. Mike recommends the new album from Natalia Lafourcade, De Todas las Flores. Lauren recommends reevaluating your relationship with Twitter, and social media in general.
Tuning GadgetLab with Vittoria Elliott (@telliotter) and Michael Calore (@snackfight)
Vittoria Elliott can be found on Twitter @telliotter. Lauren is the daughter of Lauren Goode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Solar Keys is our theme music.
You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:
If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. You can find us in the Podcasts app if you use the same phone as us. We’re on Spotify too. You can get the RSS feed if you need it.
The first night of Halloween, Heidi Klum’s amazing life was a clout tax on the red carpet, and her husband Tom Kaulitz faked
Blue checks make people feel important, which is the reason why they spread around platforms. They tell the world who sits in the VIP section. There are other reasons why they were copied. They wanted a rope. It appears Musk sees them as the digital equivalent of a fancy watch or rare sneaker. Why not pay for it? This would- be clout tax looks logical and it’s viewed as a premium accessory.
Heidi Klum stretches out on the floor, prone on a red carpet that’s actually blue while photographers angle for their shots. She can barely walk, and it would be a traditional step-and-repeat. She’s covered in folds of skin that look very raw. When Entertainment Weekly makes a microphone out of her, the accent is noticeable as she proclaims “I’m amazing!” Nearby, her husband, musician Tom Kaulitz, is in full fishing regalia, pretending to use her as bait.
This was not a dream. Outside of the Project Runway star’s Halloween bash, there was a scene. But it might as well have been a hallucination, some bizarre after-effect of prolonged illness.
Or, at least, that’s how it felt when images and video of the scene ricocheted through social media this week, instantly becoming a meme. The images were not that weird; it was just that they were very likely to be fake. It was realizing that what’s perceived as “real” is an increasingly nebulous thing.
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/end-of-reality/
Deception can be dangerous: The case of David DePape after Musk’s attack on Nancy Pelosi via the #TrumpIsDead trend
People are already testing the boundaries of what can be said. Like, for example, #TrumpIsDead. In an apparent attempt to show how quickly misinformation and conspiracy theories can spread under Musk, users on the platform started spreading rumors that the former president had died. The #TrumpIsDead trend, as well as a fact check report fromReuters about a fake CNN headline, came about because of the hoax.
TrumpIsDead is the most obvious example, something easily proven or disproven through myriad sources. The lies that seem close enough to reality to reel in you is the truly deceptive misinformation. Those theories turn non-believers into zealots, and can mess with the gut instincts of even the most tried and true skeptics. The exact connection was lost to time but it seems as though #TrumpIsDead started trending because of the fact that an article about the attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was written by someone other than Musk.
But truly, asking more questions is what people should be doing. The online quest to politically label the alleged attacker, David DePape, was published by a New Yorker writer. The days after the incident, internet detectives searched his online history for clues to his affiliations. Some claimed he was right-wing, others said he was “on the left.” Kang, though, had a different take, noting that often the connections made between political rhetoric or mental health and violent acts have little bearing on what really happened. Often, people look online seeking the truth, but all that matters is what they believe.
Felix Ndahonda was concerned about a threat growing after billionaireentrepreneur Musk pledged last week that the bird would be freed.
Ndahinda has a masters degree in international law and is a consultant on peace and conflict issues in the African Great Lakes region. He has seen the potential of a free social networking site. He has been watching the hate speech on social media over the years. Much of the talk on the internet has gone undetected because it’s shared in other languages that are not part of the platforms’ screening tools.
It is uncertain how the company will proceed. Civil-rights leaders met with Musk about his plan to put a moderation council in charge of establishing policies on hate speech and harassment. Musk has said that users banned before his takeover wouldn’t be allowed back in until a process was created for them to do so.
Some of the users who have been banned from Twitter will have retreated to lesser-known platforms with fewer regulations on what can be said, says Stringhini. The activity of their social-media tends to get more extreme once there. He says that they see a community that becomes more committed but also smaller.
Normally, these platforms are where false narratives start, says Stringhini. When narratives make their way to mainstream platforms like Facebook, they explode. They get pushed on Twitter because everybody is watching them, and journalists are covering them.
James Piazza, who studies terrorism at Penn State University in University Park, says he gets scared when he sees people on social media using inflammatory and dehumanizing speech. There can be more violence in that situation.
The research team wanted to understand how Musk’s ownership changed Twitter, and so they searched for all of the 20 most popular posts between March 1 and November 13 of this year, collecting any that were anti-gay, racist, or sexist. They looked at the language in each category and then tried to find out their true intent.
The Covid PLANdemic: How Many of Us Live in a City? When James Austin Johnson and I met Tom Schumer, an RN at the Tevatron
The Covid PLANdemic was launched by Big Pharma to silence me. Everybody tries to silence me,” she said. Please speak at a lower volume. I’m sorry, am I too loud for your precious intensive care unit? You aren’t even sick!”
“Hi. The profile is so funny. Schumer, dressed in red, was talking about how she loves funny guys. I’m crazy that they said I was a bot. 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 had his account banned in 2021.
“Yes, we’ve all moved to Truth Social, and we love Truth Social. It was very good, said Johnson’s Trump. “And in many ways, also terrible. It is very bad. Very, very bad. It’s a little buggy in terms of making the phone screen crack, and the automatically draining of the Venmo.”
Twitter is Adversarial: a comedian’s behavior after a Twitter account switched to Musk’s username and user name: Griffin had fun on Mastodon
“We’re not currently putting an ‘Official’ label on accounts but we are aggressively going after impersonation and deception,” Twitter’s verified support account tweeted on Wednesday evening.
The comedian had her account suspended after she switched 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? Lol,” Griffin joked afterward on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform where she set up an account last week.
After using Musk’s screen name to post a series of supportive messages for Democratic candidates, the actor changed her name back to her real one. “Okey-dokey. I’ve had fun and I think I made my point,” she tweeted afterwards.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/07/1134689246/musk-threatens-to-boot-twitter-account-impersonators
Why is Twitter out of business? The CEO of Twitter says he is frustrated with corporate takeover. But he feels like he should go, too
The service would be offered in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. However, it was not available Sunday and there was no indication when it would go live. A Twitter employ, Esther Crawford, told The Associated Press it is coming “soon but it hasn’t launched yet.”
We can go somewhere else in Tiny Talk Town. All of us know it. There are other places online that are a decent hang. The most fervent users are unlikely to leave. And most of the knee-jerk “I’m outta here” reactions to Musk’s takeover aren’t that compelling, unless you’re a writer assigned to collate celebrity tweets. A thoughtful, considered approach to quitting Twitter without quittingTwitter might be the smarter move. Don’t think of it as quiet quitting, but for social media.
Yoel Roth, who resigned from the social media company in November, has in recent weeks faced a storm of attacks and threats of violence following the release of the so-called “Twitter Files” — internal Twitter communications that new owner Musk has released through journalists including Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.
Edward Perez was the director of product management at the time. Perez had been working in election integrity for more than 30 years when he joined the company in September 2021. And as Musk guts Twitter of its staff and allows users to pay to get a coveted blue check on the platform, Perez feels he has to speak out.
“I really am concerned that it feels like the drama around corporate takeover is sucking up all the oxygen in the room,” says Perez, who is now a board member at the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan group devoted to election security and integrity. That focus on the Musk psychodrama “is resulting in potentially inadequate attention on these election-related issues,” he adds.
“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.
Access Now: The Case against Musk’s Arbitrary Discrimination in the Indian Embassy and the Competition of Micro-Networking Users with the Government of India
A relatively small group of people are on the micro-networking website. Heavy users who make more than $100,000 a year and account for less than 10% of monthly total users, but generate 70% of all revenue, are shown in internal company research.
Access Now’s international counsel and policy director worries that Musk may not continue with the lawsuit. Musk said in the countersuit that the lawsuit in India would threaten the company’s presence in its third largest market. “It would be a vindication of a very problematic, unconstitutional set of actions by the Indian government,” he says. The signal was that the global tech industry should back off and not try to do more.
Musk launched off a thought that was 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465, suggesting that tiny talk is so small it feels like it comes from your own mind. You have been successful. We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk.
Quitting on Twitter isn’t Doomscrolling: An Example of How New Social Media Has Took Down the Lurkers
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 away too much to a platform that most people can expect to return to. It’s important to find a way to avoid being used on the newTwitter, whatever it becomes.
It’s easy for an electric car entrepreneur who follows a lot of very active blue checks to mistake his own experience for that of everyone else. For journalists, the same goes. In reality, nearly half of Twitter users tweet less than five times a month, and most of their posts are replies, not original tweets. They check in on news and current events and then they go on with their lives. They’re “lurkers.”
Lurking isn’t doomscrolling, a practice (and phrase) that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when many people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. The approach of opting to sit back and observe for a bit is basically a simplification of dealing with the complexity of New social media. Check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, sure, then close your app or browser tab. Send a tweet, then disengage. During basketball games, keep an eye on it. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. You can save your thoughts for another place.
In the past week alone, one of the world’s most influential social networks has laid off half its workforce; alienated powerful advertisers; blown up key aspects of its product, then repeatedly launched and un-launched other features aimed at compensating for it; and witnessed an exodus of senior executives.
Why Twitter Blue was shut down two days after its official launch? The case against impersonation with Twitter Blue, an organization that never charges for a blue check mark
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.”
It is only right that you have your customer service hat on. I just spent too much time muting all the newly purchased checkmark accts in an attempt to make my verified mentions useful again,” tweeted billionaire Mark Cuban.
“Bottom line is that you have a decision to make,” Cuban added. The onus is on each user to care for their own account and keep it free with the new twitter that doesn’t charge for accounts. Or bring back Twitter curation. One makes it easier for people to stay up to date with social media. The other is awful.”
Musk told brands to keep using the platform after a growing number of companies paused ads, which led to a drop in revenue. Musk took responsibility for the company’s performance in order to appear magnanimous.
According to an internal Slack message posted by a Twitter employee and viewed by CNN, Musk has shown little fear of the FTC regulators overseeing the company’s multiple, legally binding consent agreements committing it to maintaining a robust cybersecurity program and producing written privacy impact reports before launching any new products or services, a requirement that could cover Twitter Blue.
When it came to the top 20 lists of hate speech, only one of them was actually objectionable against Jewish people. The others were quoting another person’s comments or using what they said in a non- hateful way.
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.”
The Twitter Files Confirm Q’s Main Narrative: Donald Musk, The Post, and the Russian-Possible Coordinated Censorship Operations
The survey had 72.4% of the votes in favor, and 27.6% of the votes against. The poll garnered more than 3 million votes on Twitter.
Shortly after acquiring Twitter, Musk said he would create a “content moderation council” with “widely diverse viewpoints,” and that no major content decisions would be made until it was in place. There is no evidence that a group was formed or involved in the decisions made by Musk. Instead, after Musk restored Trump’s account, he tweeted “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Latin for “the voice of the people is the voice of god.”
Almost 70% of people who took part in the survey voted for unbanning accounts, from a pool of over 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.
In the years since, that paranoia has only grown. Trump took to calling Hunter Biden’s computer the “laptop from hell”—a quip that would later become the title of a book from a Post columnist. The book promised to uncover the “coordinated censorship operation” by Big Tech, the media establishment, and former intelligence operatives, in what it called one of the greatest coverups in media history. (While the book castigates Twitter for suppressing the story, including suspending the Post’s account, it acknowledges the platform “admitted after the election that it had made a mistake.”)
Foreign intelligence officials identified the laptop as possible Russian interference, and major news outlets, unable to corroborate its contents, held off on the story. Twitter went a step further, temporarily forbidding its users from sharing the Post story, even in their DMs.
Fans of Trump suspected there was more to Twitter’s actions. The Deep State and the FBI were thought to be trying to influence the 2020 elections as well as the 2016 election, because they believed the FBI colluded with the Trump campaign to rig the election.
“The Twitter Files confirm Q’s entire main narrative,” one QAnon influencer wrote. The rest is confirmed by balenciaga. That message was seen more than 100,000 times by Telegram users, and it referred to the claims of child traffickers in the fashion industry. Despite some optimism his account would be restored, that particular qanon influencer is still suspended on the social networking site. The custom top level domain.Pizza was used by the personal email that former social media titan Jack Dorsey sent to his friends.
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 effectively seizing on an issue that has been a rallying cry among some conservatives who claim the social network has suppressed or “shadowbanned” their content.
If you have been shadowbanned, you should know that there is a software update that will show your true account status. He didn’t give more information or a timetable.
Musk praised the release of the internal documents on Thursday, which placed a spotlight on the practice of limiting the reach of certain, potentially harmful content, a practice he himself has seemingly both endorsed and criticized.
The second set of the so-calledtwitter files focused on how the company restricts the reach of certain accounts, topics, and even the search section of the platform if they are deemed to be potentially harmful.
In both cases, the internal documents appear to have been provided directly to the journalists by Musk’s team. Musk shared Weiss’ thread with his followers and said, “The Twitter Files, Part Duex!!” along with two popcorn emojis.
Why do we care about the Twitter Files? Left-Leaning, Right-Wing & Left-Right Campaigns are at the Center of Truth
Weiss said there were examples of right-leaning figures who had moderation actions taken on their accounts, but it was not known if such actions were taken against left-leaning or other accounts.
A person familiar with the matter told CNN that the former head of trust and safety has fled his home due to increased threats made against him by Musk.
While there were some positive comments about the president’s supporters posted by Roth in 2016 and 2017, they used to argue thatRoth andTwitter were biased against the president.
Among Roth’s tweets was one he wrote on Election Day 2016 that read, “I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.”
I want to point out that I support Yoel and that I have made a lot of questionable social media posts. Musk says he believes he has high integrity and we are all entitled to be political.
The establishment press, however, has shown far less interest in the documents themselves, with most news organizations outright ignoring various entries in the continuing series. The mainstream press is made up of left-wing hacks who want to hide the truth from the public according to the right-wing media apparatus.
Gerard Baker, the conservative former top editor of The Wall Street Journal, wrote Monday: “The Twitter Files tell us nothing new. There’s no shocking revelation in there about government censorship or covert manipulation by political campaigns. They merely bring to the surface the internal deliberations of a company dealing with complex issues in ways consistent with its values.”
If you’re just a regular person trying to make sense of what is going on, it can be awfully difficult. There is a solution that is not 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 it in the public square, if they didn’t analyse each drop.
Around the time Trump was inaugurated in 2017, I said to colleagues in the newsroom where I worked at the time that we shouldn’t cover everything he said or tweeted. Previously, a president’s every word was assumed to be a carefully chosen 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. Reporting on them, I argued, just fed the flames. The editor pushed back. “He’s the president,” he said, or words to that effect. “What he says is news.”
There were a lot of rapid-response news stories about Musk saying that his pronouns were 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 how the coverage of Trump worked. The liberal-leaning media were often drawn to stories confirming the belief that a person so clearly unfit to be president would only succeed in bringing himself (or the country) down in flames, while the right-wing media treated his evident egomania, corruption, and lack of interest in grasping basic policy issues or actually doing the job as at best irrelevant and at worst essential qualities for reforming Washington. There was plenty of good reporting going on at the same time, but these polarizing accounts tended to dominate the conversation. The losers were the public, whose understanding of what was actually happening across the country was forced through incompatible narratives around the behavior of one unhinged man in the White House.