Twitter sure is annoying these days. I mean, it's always been annoying thanks to trolls and character limits and mob pile-ons and so forth. But now Elon Musk is determined to make it more annoying still by hiring a few writers to trawl through internal documents in order to show that before he took over it was was a cesspool of woke liberalism and anti-conservative bias.
Fine. It's his company, after all. The problem—one of them, anyway—is that he insists on the results of these investigations being released on Twitter. This may seem natural for the owner of Twitter to do, but it's really not at all a natural environment for this kind of thing. I just finished reading Part 2 of the portentously named "Twitter Files" project, and when I was done I felt like there really wasn't much there. And there wasn't. It was 30 tweets long but that amounts to only about 1,000 words. In most places that's the length of a fluffy feature about a library cat.
To condense those thousand words even more, it's about shadow banning, which is a way of preventing tweets from being seen without the author knowing that anything is going on. For years Republicans have been complaining about this any time a tweet gets less attention than they think it should, and for years Twitter has been denying it. But if you read the fine print, what Twitter really said was that although they didn't shadow ban, they did "de-amplify."
That's a mighty thin distinction, so score one for the Twitter critics. Still, that's not very much all by itself: it's one thing for Twitter to de-amplify folks who break their rules, but what we really want to know is whether they routinely de-amplified conservative voices more than liberal ones. Bari Weiss, a writer whose primary motivation in life seems to be her deep resentment of liberals, is the author of Part 2, and she provides the names of three political actors who were de-amplified:¹
- Charlie Kirk
- Dan Bongino
- Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok)
And that's it. Weiss doesn't explain why she picked these three to highlight. She doesn't say why these three were de-amplified. Nor does she say if she also knows of any liberals who were de-amplified. And even though Musk has given her access to anything she wants to see, she provides no statistics about how many people were de-amplified; the reasons they were de-amplified; how long they were de-amplified; or anything else. She just provides three hand-picked names and that's the end of it.
So once again Elon Musk's peculiar act of revenge has spat forth a mouse. Sure, it's now more widely known that Twitter de-amplifies folks for breaking the rules, but since Musk himself has said he plans to do the same thing this isn't really much of a revelation.
So let's move on to Part 3. You can read it here, but honestly I wasn't able to do much more than skim it. It basically shows Twitter execs talking internally about stuff that seems mostly routine. And then there's Part 4, which is yet more internal discussion about how to handle assholes.
I confess to some ongoing confusion about this whole project. Why is Musk doing it? It's publicity, sure, but not the kind that will do him any good. Nor will it bolster his reputation as a free speech defender unless he makes everything public, not just a few items cherry picked by a trio of lib-hating journalists. Basically, all he's doing is pissing off liberals and getting little in return since conservatives were expecting way bigger smoking guns than this. It is a mystery.
¹There's a fourth, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, but he was de-amplified over some kind of COVID beef.
"Nor will it bolster his reputation as a free speech defender unless he makes everything public, not just a few items cherry picked by a trio of lib-hating journalists."
You appear to be making two false assumptions here, Kevin: 1) that Elmo is making his free-speech proclamations in good faith; 2) that he's not a moron.
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I won't argue your 1. However, re your 2 my view of Musk is that he's clearly an asshole but equally clearly not a moron. He may or may not be a genius but he couldn't have accomplished what he has without being both very bright and obsessively driven.
Musk is an asshole with a mission, or maybe several missions.
That's not how its ever worked. Plenty of very successful people have been not all that bright; they've simply been lucky. Musk was born on third base and has very clearly has that luck.
I don't know how you can look at people doing moronic things and conclude "well, this must not be that moronic, because this person has accomplished other things." It doesn't work that way. And frankly, many of Musk's accomplishments are owed to lying and cheating.
Musk is obsessively driven, sure. I'll give him that.
He's probably trying to distract everyone from some upcoming story he's afraid of.
Nowadays “conservative voices” includes white supremacists, anti-semites, and Q lunatics. So any stifling of those types is a deliberate attempt to push a liberal agenda.
Musk is currently pushing to prosecute Fauci. He has gone full lunatic and I suspect he will take a significant number of his fanboys with him.
I would recommend to just sit back and enjoy the best Curb Your Enthusiasm Cosplay this planet has to offer.
I'm a late arrival to the Twitterverse, signing up a few weeks before Musk took over. So my experience is limited. But it appears to me that the platform is going to hell, not because conservative voices have been loosed on the landscape, but because it's infested with tweets that are obviously paid to display. And as to the "free speech" claims of Musk (can you say "fair and balanced?), I had a tweet blocked with a faux-friendly suggestion that I rethink what I say. My sin? Responding to Musk's nonsensical and annoying (intentionally so?) tweet, "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci." To which I remarked how interesting it is that someone who is so brilliant in some context can be such an idiot in another. And I advised him to stick with tech innovation and leave politics and social media alone. BLOCKED. So much for free speech.
I shocked I tell you, shocked.
Chaya Raichik, creator of Libs of TikTok, has in the Twitter bio:
Creator of @libsoftiktok. “Stochastic terrorist.” “absolutely f****** garbage” - German Government. Pronouns: cry/more/libs
========================
There it is. Straight-up: stochastic terrorist. How this account remains active is a mystery. (stochastic terrorist has been in the bio for at least 2 months - and was likely up for a lot more time than that)
Libs of TikTok is hostile to LGBTQ.
It's basically a troll account, small wonder that it was deamplified. Something from it showed up in my feed yesterday. Blocked.
Hmm? Did anyone actually believe Ahadow Banning wasn't a thing?
Also Bari Weiss is a known liar. Right before she got fired by the NYT she talked some shit about internal stuff only it was shown she made it the fuck up.
Did anyone actually believe Ahadow Banning wasn't a thing?
No. Especially because, using the definition Weiss goes with, Twitter was so secretive about doing so that it's in the Terms of Service.
That's not shadow banning. Shadow banning is when you post and nobody else can see it except you. These people's tweets were perfectly visible to anyone who followed them, they just weren't promoted or made trending.
Musk has now tweeted (dishonestly) that his fired head of trust and safety advocated giving children access to "adult online services" (in fact Roth argued that since lots of minors already use these apps, owners should provide safe spaces for them instead of relying on ineffective rules meant to keep them out). Apparently Musk's tweets have triggered a torrent of vicious homophobic abuse.
If his goal is to drive advertisers and rational people away from Twitter, he couldn't be doing a better job.
Why Musk is doing it is not a mystery. It's the same reason Donald does what Donald does, and Putin does what Putin does. Because the only thing Elon cares about is Elon. If all you care about is "me, myself, and I", life is very simple. Your philosophy is "I think I am right, therefore I am right." If things aren't going well, just think "It's not my fault. Ergo, it must be someone else's fault." Problem solved.
Publicity, if it's even a consideration, is merely a rationalization for a bad decision.
However, Musk differs greatly from Trump in that he is (or was) an extremely successful businessman. One can perhaps debate about how much of his wealth is a result of his own ingenuity, but there is no question about it being his wealth. He's now not only shitting away his enormous investment in Twitter, but destroying the value of his other companies.
Remarkably, there seems something even more warped about Musk than Trump, that whatever drive and ambition he had to become so obscenely rich is now being sabotaged from within himself. One would think at some point that the compulsion for more wealth (or at least to preserve what he has) would kick in, but it hasn't so far. How does one get that unhinged?
You’re assuming that Musk’s endgame is the accumulation of wealth. That may not be it. His stated goal is to colonize Mars, but that may not be either.
If you don’t know what the goal of the game is, the player’s moves often don’t make sense.
Last time I checked, we're not supposed to respect or give credit to people who succeed on the back of lies and fraud, and are supposed to regard their success as illegitimate.
If you're looking out for number one, you might step in number two. (Dr John, "Why come")
Musk wants to be a player on the biggest stage...he wants to matter, have influence, be Willie Stark, (who evolved from a Robert Penn Warren character in a poem titled...Proud Flesh...{the poem seems to be the truth of Mr Musk to me, or maybe William Randolph Hearst is better).....
But the problem is that Twitter is not that influential. Everyone knew most everything about Hunter Biden from the normal press, blogs, etc...anyone that wanted to know, Knew.
Likewise, amplified, De-amplified, or whatever...Twitter is at best a bit player in the political arena. Twitter neither makes nor de- thrones kings.
Twitter with its restricted character limits, among other issues, lacks "The Heft," to matter in the way Mr Musk wishes
Guess he's hoping being the Fox News of websites is good for business. Shows the bubble these guys exist in. Has to be terrible for Tesla business prospects. It's now the grievance right wing car.
Well, LA Times has a story today saying the next frontier for electric cars is red states like Indiana. So maybe I'm totally wrong. Maybe this Twitter stuff is a loss-leader to convince red states Tesla is on their side.
"And then there's Part 4, which is yet more internal discussion about how to handle assholes" You mean assholes like Musk?
This guy is totally fucking nuts. "Prosecute/Fauci" This is certainly going help to convince advertisers to come back to the platform. Stuff like this will keep Muskrat in the news, but he has at least $25 billion reasons to actually care about the financial health of Tweedy. I am sure the banks holding $13B of debt are positively thrilled with this bullshit. Their lawyers must be scouring the loan covenants to see if and when they can take action against Twitter and the blithering idiot running it.
I can't find the link but Bloomberg had a story last month about how a lot of the debtholders are apparently already quietly writing down that debt.
That said, I've seen speculation that for at least some of them this is an ideological project for which financial return is secondary.
"... to trawl through internal documents..."
I'm betting that more than one of the twitter employees who left or were fired have complete copies of those internal documents. I suspect we will be seeing them fairly soon.
But if you read the fine print, what Twitter really said was that although they didn't shadow ban, they did "de-amplify." That's a mighty thin distinction...
It's actually a huge distinction.
A shadow ban is to make a tweet invisible (but not to delete it). No one can see it, and the user who tweets it doesn't know that nobody can see it. Twitter policy was not to shadow ban, and it did not, contrary to claims that's what it did.
To de-amplify a tweet means Twitter does not push the tweet across the Twitter-verse by whatever algorithm Twitter uses to "amplify" tweets. A de-amplified tweet is still visible to everyone, and it can be read, retweeted, or replied to. Twitter in the past de-amplified tweets, and Twitter under Musk continues to de-amplify tweets too (he calls it "freedom of speech but not freedom of reach"), so for Musk and the Musketeers to say Twitter had been doing something nefarious is hogwash.
Without knowing the specific algorithms, it's hard to say what effect amplifying or de-amplifying tweets has. It's all part of content moderation. But whether Twitter chooses to amplify or de-amplify hate and disinformation is management's discretion.
Why is Musk doing it?
I don't know. But the man lies a lot, so if you're looking for an answer, don't expect to find it in anything he says.
Why Trump bought Twitter is still a curious thing. I think this text exchange with his ex-wife in March, three weeks before he made his original bid, is about as illuminating as anything.
https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1593475994274381824
He's rich, he hates libs, and he's the world's biggest asshole. Buying Twitter has put him in the vortex of the vast right-wing feedback loop, where up is down, bad is good, reactionary grievances fester, and every half-assed conspiracy theory about lib power (and Blacks, Jews, etc.) is taken as gospel. Musk has bought it hook, line, and sinker. He is God with an army of bots, the hero of our times, who will be there at the Rapture to reign o'er the kingdom in the coming Apocalypse. When? 2023, from what I've heard, so fasten your seat belts. How's that supposed to happen? They're still working on that part.
Despite being a hellhole, Twitter has served an important role for the liberal side of our political divide. It's a meeting place where (some) important conversation gets done. I'm not so sure everyone is going to Mastodon. I think most people will tend to stick around as long as possible. The habit and the relationships are there at Twitter. Musk can disrupt the experience, make it ugly, but probably not shut it down. He can't turn Twitter into Fox. Fox is for morons. Twitter users are generally better educated. Only ~20% of the country uses Twitter, but 80% of journalists do. So maybe the game is to influence the influencers. It's not about free speech, and it's not about making money either.
Why Trump bought Twitter is still a curious thing.
Freudian slip? You mean Musk, right?
Because he was forced to is why, in a court of law. That's the real reason. It doesn't strike me as all that unusual that the ego of a very egotistical and very rich man—the richest on the planet at the time—would momentarily entertain the idea of buying a platform that purportedly has a lot of influence on what the media covers.
He realized upon reflection that the project would be a headache that wasn't worth it. But by then it was too late. Moral of the story: people with obscene wealth should practice a modicum of discretion and self-control.
These people are so exhausting.
Can't we send Elmo to Mars now?
Musk is just another resentful, glibertarian, anti (small d) democratic tech bro. Except he has $150 billion.
I'm just grateful he's ineligible for the presidency.
The lack of anything even resembling a "study" - despite full access to the source material - totally destroys any pretense that Taibbi / Barri Weiss are honest participants in public discourse. It's not just a question of bias in there focus etc (we all have biases) but their total avoidance of any honest framing of the situation.
Mastodon is, oddly enough, very closely aligned to libertarian dogma of granting freedom for people to shout into the wild without the risk of being deplatformed. While you may be kicked off an instance (server), there are many more instances you can join, with the ultimate option of creating your own.
Yet, most conservatives are not actual libertarians. They really do want a centralized system which they control. They only purport to support a decentralized system when they can't control it.
That's what makes Mastodon so frustrating for conservatives. Without a centralized system which they control, content from Gab, Truth Social, or any conservative haven, is just an isolated echo chamber. It has no influence.
People retweeting Musk and adding a comment onto it, are just feeding the troll in his goal to boost traffic. He is Palpatine, encouraging people to let their hate and anger flow through them to reach the dark side, and people are obliging.
So, I'm not sorry to say this, but I'm cheering on the acceleration of Twitter's demise and the end of centrally-controlled social media in general. The first task to support this is to install an ad-blocker and use it specifically on Twitter. Alternatively, you can block every ad account you see in your feed. The next step is to download an archive of your data then start deleting older tweets.
Whether you get caught off-guard when Twitter shuts down, is up to you.
Whether you get caught off-guard when Twitter shuts down, is up to you.
Sadly this is unlikely. It will still run even in bankruptcy. It's with us for better or worse for the long haul, I think. The best outcome is that it's either A) completely discredited as a Murdochian shit show that nobody pays attention to and is largely abandoned by people who value decency or, B) it changes hands one day and the new ownership is more responsible and civic-minded.
Explain.
The more he shrinks the user base and annoys advertisers, the more he'll have to sacrifice his personal assets as they're what's securing the bank/investor loans. Declaring Chapter 11 won't do a thing to protect him against those creditors.
If he declares Chapter 11, it's the subcontractors, suppliers, rents, services folks -- those doing business with Twitter -- who'll get screwed. But that only goes so far, as you need to have a plan to reach solvency.
Are you saying that he has a solvency plan and he's playing 4th dimensional chess? Because you know, he spent a few million dollars trying to get out of the deal before the judge basically told him he wasn't going to wiggle out of it without penalties.
Declaring Chapter 11 won't do a thing to protect him against those creditors.
I'm saying it's extremely unlikely the scenario you describe actually stops the service from operating because it's an asset that's intrinsically valuable (an extremely well-known site with gigantic quantities of traffic) and would continue to be run by a new owner who buys it from a creditor (situation "B" from my comment above).
PS—I'd be elated to be proved wrong in the fullness of time if Twitter shuts down: Twitter is now a right wing cesspool and megaphone for fascism. But I really doubt I will be.
PS—I should point out that, if Twitter eventually comes under new ownership, there's obviously no guarantee it won't be owned and operated by someone just as egregiously awful as Musk (Murdoch?). Also, I was reading through some analysis of Musk's financing arrangements yesterday (and possible strategy if the firm becomes insolvent), and, long story/short, he could potentially, ultimately emerge as the "new" owner (ie, a new corporate vehicle?) after BK proceedings.
I would challenge the notion that it is intrinsically valuable, or at the very least, recognize that any intrinsic value that it may have, fluctuates (and in this case, is constantly being reduced).
Its tangible assets have intrinsic value. Its IP has intrinsic value. The company itself may not hold any value outside of those things, in four months.
Twitter is the smallest of the main social media outlets as measured by traffic, and seems quite likely shrinking by the hour. Advertising traffic is so tiny, one can block accounts that advertise on Twitter in less than 30 minutes and never have to use an ad-block thereafter.
As for a sale to creditors, I'm not seeing why they'd do this. Musk guaranteed loans using his personal assets as collateral. While an outsider might buy the company on the cheap, Musk is still on the hook for those loans.
As I see it, this is an all-or-nothing gamble by Musk. If he cannot transform Twitter, he will shut it down.
I have read people alluding to Musk devaluing the company to buy it out. I find this implausible for the above reason that he has guaranteed those outstanding loans. Can he get out of Twitter's prior debt? Maybe. But, that assumes that debt is not secured
As such, would you kindly point to the analysis showing how he can buy out Twitter on the cheap after he has devalued it?
I get the impression that the right gets angry when liberals don’t read and talk about what they posted. I mean who cares about Hunter’s pictures? Even if Twitter had disseminated them, so what? Of course, the company thought that it would have suffered injury to its reputation had it post them, which begs the question, is Twitter now posting photos of Hunter’s member? As to Musk, his postings are frankly demented.
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"Conxervatives expect way bigger smoking guns"
Boy do I wish this were true.
In fact conservatives will make do with guns that don't smoke at all. Have done so since the Clinton era.
They don't even need that much. "Look! There's something over there that might be smoke! That proves it, because there must be a gun somewhere!"
+1
Too true!
So called conservatives forget history. Ronald Reagan got elected twice with no Fox News, no Breitbart, and no conservative talk radio.
Sure, at one time, the mainstream media was the only media. I know, I was there.
But you can only push the fallacy that "the mainstream media" is lying so far. Its not accurate.
So today, what is accurate is you have a fully functioning conservative propaganda media across multiple platforms, and conservatives are still apparently unhappy.
I mean, which politician did Twitter help the most, I got news for the
Fox Gang, it was Trump. It takes a lot to get banned as the f ing president, only advocating the violent overthrow of the gov will get you there.
Anyway, now, Trump added, as a full part of the R platform, hatred of libs. Since hatred of libs, unlike say, abortion discussions or whatever, is, by definition "hate speech" no wonder there are issues with amplification.
Oh well, the only bright spot is certain Rs have learned that saying you hate 60% of more of the population is not a winner.
OK, this keeps getting left out of the discussion: There are TWO ways to view your Twitter feed. 1 - "Top Posts" and 2 - "Latest Posts." My feed has been set to "Latest Posts" ever since... oh, the Pliocene epoch. For whatever reason, I like things to be in chronological order. Same over on Facebook, by the way, where it's no longer an option, but where this backdoor (https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr) gets you there. Deamplification has no effect on my feed. So this particular fuss has never made any sense to me.
"but what we really want to know is whether they routinely de-amplified conservative voices more than liberal ones. "
That's not what I really want to know. I want to know whether the rules were applied equally to both sides.
After all, it's conceivable that Republicans broke the rules against encouraging violence or spreading disinformation more often than Dems, in which case there SHOULD be more right-wing bans than left-wing bans.