The Bane That Is Social Media

[LFC]

Nov 28, 2022 14:41:19 GMT indy said:

The most amusing part of this is the idea that half the country would ditch their current phones for the chance to buy one that caters to trolls on twitter.

Maybe he can partner with the folks marketing the Freedom Phone!

This was one of the comments on the post. I think I'll be saving this one for later use.

[LFC]

[LFC]

And heeeeere we go. Welcome to the "hellscape" Musk said he wished to avoid but is actively creating.

Twitter said it will no longer enforce its longstanding Covid misinformation policy, yet another sign of how Elon Musk plans to transform the social media company he bought a month ago.

In 2020, Twitter developed an extensive set of rules that sought to prohibit “harmful misinformation” about the virus and its vaccines.

Between January 2020 and September 2022, Twitter suspended more than 11,000 accounts for breaking Covid misinformation rules and removed almost 100,000 pieces of content that violated those rules, according to statistics published by Twitter. The policy received acclaim from medical professionals: In an advisory to technology platforms, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy cited Twitter’s rules as an example of what companies should do to combat misinformation.

Twitter did not appear to formally announce the rule change. Instead, some Twitter users Monday night spotted a note added to the page on Twitter’s website that outlines its Covid policy.

“Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy,” the note read.

Musk has promised to restore many previously banned Twitter accounts as soon as this week. It is possible that among the restored accounts will be some of the 11,000 banned under Twitter’s former Covid misinformation rules.

[LFC]

This.

[LFC]

Musk's wholesale firing of people who would actually keep control of Twitter speech repressing campaigns is turning it into yet more of a right-wing hellscape by allowing false attacks that get lefties booted off the platform.

“What I believe happened is that I and other accounts have been mass reported for the last few weeks by a dedicated group of far-right extremists who want to erase archived evidence of their past misdeeds and to neutralize our ability to expose them in the future,” Loder said. “What I suspect happened is that Twitter’s automatic systems flagged my account for some reason and no human being is reviewing these.”

Since Loder’s account was on a list being passed around by right-wing activists as part of a coordinated campaign to mass-report fabricated violations by left-wing Twitter users, it could have been suspended as a result of that activity. Loder shared screenshots with The Intercept showing that Telegram channels with tens of thousands of followers, including QAnon adherents and Proud Boys, had coordinated a spate of complaints about Loder’s tweets and celebrated Loder’s suspension.

Although Twitter’s Trust and Safety team was made aware of the organized false-reporting campaign against Loder earlier this month — and such coordinated bulk reporting and false-flagging of accounts are violations of Twitter’s pre-Musk policy against “platform manipulation” — that team was subsequently depleted by mass resignations on November 17.

We'll see how concerned this hard-core Republican is now that it's progressives being improperly booted even when they haven't violated Twitter's rules. I wouldn't hold my breath that he'll even mention it much less fix it.

[jackd]

Might be best to abandon twitter and allow it to become an internet Fox News.

[LFC]

The predicted shift to lower quality (so lower dollar value) ads appears to be on its way.

[LFC]

First Musk pulled in Matt Taibbi to expose "The Twitter Files" that would show how those darn libs shut down right-wing voices because they told the truth! The announcement was a massive nothing-burger. Next he pulled in Barri Weiss who went on and on about a handful of suspended accounts but didn't actually produce a scrap of evidence that they were suspended due to some bias. All in all it's just another Musk f***-up, something that looks like it's becoming his norm. It makes you wonder if Tesla and SpaceX are running better now that he's wasting much of his time breaking his new toy.

Unlike Twitter Files one, this update actual included some interesting information. The problem is that Weiss at all listed some examples of accounts which were throttled and then just treated it as established that the whole thing was politically biased against the …
2/ right etc. But she doesn’t really provide any evidence of that at all. But more to the point, what would make the story complete or actually a story would be looking at what basis for decisions was, how the ones making the decisions understood what they were doing, how …
3/ they justified it, etc.

It did become Tuckums fodder. With all this bug-eye, diaper wetting hyperbole you can understand why they had no problem with Brett Kavanaugh's unhinged performance.

[LFC]

No mention of this from a year ago, of course.

A post on Twitter’s blog reveals that Twitter’s algorithm promotes right-leaning content more often than left — but the reasons for that remain unclear. The findings drew from an internal study on Twitter’s algorithmic amplification of political content.

During the study, Twitter looked at millions of tweets posted between April 1st and August 15th, 2020. These tweets were from news outlets and elected officials in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, the UK, and the US. In all countries studied, except Germany, Twitter found that right-leaning accounts “receive more algorithmic amplification than the political left.” It also discovered that right-leaning content from news outlets benefit from the same bias.

Twitter says that it doesn’t know why the data suggests its algorithm favors right-leaning content, noting that it’s “a significantly more difficult question to answer as it is a product of the interactions between people and the platform.” However, it may not be a problem with Twitter’s algorithm specifically — Steve Rathje, a Ph.D. candidate who studies social media, published the results of his research that explains how divisive content about political outgroups is more likely to go viral.

The Verge reached out to Rathje to get his thoughts about Twitter’s findings. “In our study, we also were interested in what kind of content is amplified on social media and found a consistent trend: negative posts about political outgroups tend to receive much more engagement on Facebook and Twitter,” Rathje stated. “In other words, if a Democrat is negative about a Republican (or vice versa), this kind of content will usually receive more engagement.”

If we take Rathje’s research into account, this could mean that right-leaning posts on Twitter successfully spark more outrage, resulting in amplification. Perhaps Twitter’s algorithm issue is tied to promoting toxic tweeting more than a specific political bias. And as we mentioned earlier, Twitter’s research said that Germany was the only country that didn’t experience the right-leaning algorithm bias. It could be related to Germany’s agreement with Facebook, Twitter, and Google to remove hate speech within 24 hours. Some users even change their country to Germany on Twitter to prevent Nazi imagery from appearing on the platform.

[LFC]

For another alternative universe view on Musk's Twitter nothing burgers, heeeere's Rod!

Blockbuster Twitter news from Bari Weiss and her team. Starts like this:

BWAHAHA! I should send him a t-shirt that says "Straight Outa' CPAC!"

At least it's not attached to gay bashing. What? Oh. Never mind.

The thread cites specific examples of how Twitter banned or shadowbanned conservative accounts while publicly denying that it was doing any such thing. Why did they do it? The internal reason was "safety". Yoel Roth was a far-left extremist who was in charge of safety for Twitter until Musk pushed him out (Roth resigned):

Roth, a gay man whose Ivy League academic work was all about gay sex (Wes Yang jokes that Roth got a Penn PhD in his own Grindr usage), queer theory, and the like, has gone public after leaving Twitter, has gone public about how he ran Twitter. Strongly recommend you watching Glenn Greenwald's show ripping Roth a new one, using Roth's own recent words from his November 29 interview with Kara Swisher (from where I took the screenshot illustrating this post). It's very, very important:

Shorter Rod (double entendre intentional): "AAAAAHHHH!!!!! THE ELITE FAGS ARE COMING FOR US!"

[LFC]

Musk is completely gone. He's reached full right-wing utter nutter.

I’ve already written about the narcissism/radicalization cycle that took hold of Elon Musk at some point for whatever reasons and has been accelerating at a rapid pace since he finalized his acquisition of Twitter six weeks ago. It keeps accelerating, and in two distinct but interrelated ways I would like to note.

The first is that Musk is now in near constant dialogue with the most rabid conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites in the digital space. He’s jumped head first into the “globalist”/pedophile vortex which was at the heart of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory and later the entire QAnon movement. He now accuses former Twitter management of intentionally allowing the platform it to become a breeding ground of pedophilia and child sex trafficking. He claims he’s shutting the offending accounts down after previous management refused to do so. These accusations have become so totalizing that yesterday Musk drew a rebuke from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who has been one of Musk’s bigger supporters during the takeover.

Many people take these claims at face value. But if you step back you see that the message Musk is now broadcasting is indistinguishable from the far-right claims of Pizzagate and QAnon propaganda: our “globalist” enemies are behind a vast network of pedophiles preying on our children. This shouldn’t surprise us because Musk’s main interlocutors are now literally the people who brought us Pizzagate and related conspiracy theories and blood libels.

Musk now regularly engages with and affirms the various claims and attacks of Mike Cernovich, the main promoter of the circa-2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory which posited that Democratic elites were using a D.C. pizza shop as the center of a child sex ring. Pizzagate eventually evolved into QAnon. He’s also affirming the claims of disgraced journalist Lara Logan who was recently banned form Newsmax of all places for repeatedly claiming that World Economic Forum “elites” were “dining on the blood of children.” In other words, literally blood libels. (It takes a lot to get banned from Newsmax.) This is now Musk’s milieu. These are just a couple examples.

[goldenvalley]

Dec 10, 2022 18:30:49 GMT LFC said:

Musk is completely gone. He's reached full right-wing utter nutter.

I’ve already written about the narcissism/radicalization cycle that took hold of Elon Musk at some point for whatever reasons and has been accelerating at a rapid pace since he finalized his acquisition of Twitter six weeks ago. It keeps accelerating, and in two distinct but interrelated ways I would like to note.

The first is that Musk is now in near constant dialogue with the most rabid conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites in the digital space. He’s jumped head first into the “globalist”/pedophile vortex which was at the heart of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory and later the entire QAnon movement. He now accuses former Twitter management of intentionally allowing the platform it to become a breeding ground of pedophilia and child sex trafficking. He claims he’s shutting the offending accounts down after previous management refused to do so. These accusations have become so totalizing that yesterday Musk drew a rebuke from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who has been one of Musk’s bigger supporters during the takeover.

Many people take these claims at face value. But if you step back you see that the message Musk is now broadcasting is indistinguishable from the far-right claims of Pizzagate and QAnon propaganda: our “globalist” enemies are behind a vast network of pedophiles preying on our children. This shouldn’t surprise us because Musk’s main interlocutors are now literally the people who brought us Pizzagate and related conspiracy theories and blood libels.

Musk now regularly engages with and affirms the various claims and attacks of Mike Cernovich, the main promoter of the circa-2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory which posited that Democratic elites were using a D.C. pizza shop as the center of a child sex ring. Pizzagate eventually evolved into QAnon. He’s also affirming the claims of disgraced journalist Lara Logan who was recently banned form Newsmax of all places for repeatedly claiming that World Economic Forum “elites” were “dining on the blood of children.” In other words, literally blood libels. (It takes a lot to get banned from Newsmax.) This is now Musk’s milieu. These are just a couple examples.

He's an undisciplined child..."you can't tell me what to do" which is why he bought Twitter in the first place.  He is criticized so he blames it on the globalist enemies and adopts the viewpoint of anyone that is against them.  No thought, no plan, just a live nerve reacting to stimuli.  He and Trump are similar in that regard.

[LFC]

Elon Musk Worried He Won’t Have Enough Twitter Employees Left To Fire On Christmas Eve

[LFC]

[LFC]

Musk shows the now classic right-wing obsession with pedophiles, not for the first time.

We’ve discussed at some length in the past how there’s a far-right alternative universe in which pedophilia and child sexual exploitation are not those actual things but cudgels to be used against political enemies, “globalists” and anyone even proximate to supporting the rights of the LBGT community. This is the wellspring of things like the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory and much of what is now labeled QAnon.

For years on the far right of anti-Twitter “free speech” activism there have been hate campaigns targeting Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former General Counsel, and Yoel Roth, head of Trust and Safety. Since Roth is gay and Jewish he’s been a particular target for the far-right spaces which have been the foot soldiers of this variety of “free speech” activism.

Roth stayed on during Musk’s early weeks at Twitter and Musk frequently put him forward to defend against claims he was opening the floodgates of hate on the platform. Roth was awesome. But then in recent days Roth took the fateful step of mildly criticizing Musk in public. Last night Musk retaliated by insinuating that Roth himself might be a pedophile and that that might explain Twitter’s purported laxity toward “groomers” and pedophiles before he acquired the company.

That NY Times piece asserting that Musk's positions are "more complicated" than just being bog standard utter nuttery was bad from the get-go. Now it's aging horrendously in a matter of days.

[LFC]

Gee, what a shock. Looks like somebody decided to test his Musk's speech credentials.

A Twitter account tracking Elon Musk’s private jet across the world suddenly flew under the radar earlier this month, with users finding they could no longer search for the automated account, or tag it in tweets through suggested usernames.

The reason for the heavy restriction on its accessibility, according to the bot’s creator, Jack Sweeney, was that Twitter staffers had dampened the account in a targeted effort—and he had the receipts to prove it.

“Thanks whistleblowers,” he tweeted on Saturday before posting a thread he called “My Twitter Files.”

Internal company messages shared with Sweeney by an “anonymous Twitter employee” reflected that the @elonjet account had been “visibility limited/restricted to a severe degree” beginning Dec. 2. A screenshot of what he claimed was an internal Slack channel showed Ella Irwin, the person appointed to replace Yoel Roth as Twitter’s new head of trust and safety, asking a “Team” to “please apply heavy VF to @elonjet immediately.”

“VF” stands for “visibility filtering,” a means of blacklisting or shadow-banning certain accounts and shielding their content from other users. That the term is used by Twitter employees internally was first reported by former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss on Thursday.

In a thread on the subject, Weiss said a “senior Twitter employee” had told her, “‘Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool.’”

The alleged move to restrict @elonjet’s visibility comes just one month after Musk publicly announced his commitment to free speech on the platform.

“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” the billionaire tweeted at the time. Flight records are considered public information, as taxpayers pay for runways, towers, and air traffic controllers.

[LFC]

[goldenvalley]

Dec 12, 2022 18:18:28 GMT LFC said:

That's the kind of elitist talk that MTG's followers hate.  They are all in on the buzz from use of the words Fauci and prosecution and have some vague understanding that pronouns are woke.

[goldenvalley]

[LFC]

Musk is a genius, just like Trump!

There’s no getting around it. Elon Musk is a business genius. Show the man a box, and he’ll think outside of it. The CEO scared away all of Twitter’s advertisers, so lately, he’s been trying to come up with a way for his company to make money.

Twitter is working on a plan that would force users to opt in to targeted ads, removing a years-old privacy setting that gives users more control over their data, according to a report in the Platformer newsletter. But that’s not all! The new strategy may mandate that you share your location information and let Twitter sell your data to third-parties. What’s more, the company may compel your consent for targeted advertising using your contacts and the phone number you provided for two-factor authentication. These aren’t just brilliant ideas; they are also almost certainly illegal.

[indy]

Reports are that Twitter has permanently banned a number of journalists this evening. Some CNN, NYT, and WaPo reporters are included.

It seems from third hand reports (questionable reliability) that the common thread is that they have been critical of Musk in some way.

ETA:

www.businessinsider.com/twitter-suspends-multiple-journalists-whod-been-covering-elon-musk-2022-12

[LFC]

A few weeks ago George Takei was already preparing for the Musk Meltdown. He has this up as a permanent post with a link to get to his Mastodon page.

George Takei
@georgetakei

I’ve got a Plan B! #Mastadon

I clicked on it just to take a look. Apparently Twitter is calling Mastodon a potentially unsafe site. The utter hypocrisy of bullet points #2 and #3 is almost Onion worthy.

[LFC]

More on the Musky Meltdown from TPM. Marshall explains the first tantrum over tracking his private jet using publicly available information and the new tantrum over what appears to simply be journalists covering that story and the fact that his claim about his son being attacked appear to be a lie.

That was Wednesday night’s tantrum. Now on to Thursday night’s. Over a period of a couple hours, more than a half dozen high-profile journalists had their accounts permanently banned. Twitter hasn’t said officially why these bans happened. But piecing the timelines together it appears each was tied either to raising questions about Musk’s “attack” story or linking to other platforms where the ElonJet account still exists — Facebook, the Twitter rival Mastodon, etc. Indeed, Twitter appears now to have listed the entirety of the Mastodon ecosystem as “unsafe” based on this. So if you click on a Mastodon account you get one of those “This is an unsafe site. Are you sure you want to proceed?” messages.

(Mastodon isn’t a company or a site, per se. It’s a distributed group of servers operating under a common protocol, somewhat like the core internet itself. Point being, there’s no authoritative figure or owner making policy for it in the way Twitter does.)

So to collapse this down to essentials, the journalists in question were, in some cases, banned for linking to other platforms like Facebook or Mastodon where the ElonJet account still exists and which, if you went to those platforms, you could still see updates on when Musk flies from San Francisco to Austin. So very indirect pointers to the same safety-irrelevant information. In other cases, they appear to have been banned for noting that the LAPD says they have no report of any attack like Musk described.

As you can see, the entire drama is a sort of perfect tableau of early 21st century neo-Gilded Age inequality drama. I’m tempted to say class war. But the whole thing is simply too silly to merit that. Likely nothing captures the vast gulf separating ordinary mortals who transit our separate corners of the globe in cramped planes, trains and automobiles and those who do so on private jets. The story does capture one key dimension of neo-Gilded Age life: the degree to which billionaires and plutocrats argue that their very wealth and power and all the static it generates requires or entitles them to even more protections and privacy. One example of this is the increasing demand for anonymity for donors who gives hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to candidates and campaigns on the argument that, without that anonymity, they’ll be targeted. In other words, their very heft and power entitles them to special levels of protection.

[LFC]

Posted by Adam Kinzinger.

[indy]

I guess many of the 'permanently' suspended journalist accounts are unsuspended.

Doesn't make Musk look like an impulsive, non-trustworthy toddler who deplores free speech at all.