Musk has said that free speech on social media is in danger

Twitter, Trump, and “Bullsh*ts”: Musk, Trump and the “Sailing Into the Sunset,” Musk tweeted on June 12, 2015

All eyes are on Twitter as Musk’s plans for the platform come into focus. It is not clear how far he will go towards his pledge to be a “free speech absolutist”, which has raised concerns that he might reduce oversight of offensive or potentially harmful tweeters. But past research offers some pointers as to what the impact of looser restrictions on tweeting could be.

“I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump; I think that was a mistake,” Musk said at a conference in May, pledging to reverse the ban were he to become the company’s owner.

But relations between the pair seem to have soured since, with the men publicly trading barbs over the summer. 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.”

What will Twitter do in the next few months? The Keyhole View of Twitter and the Impact of Musk’s Twitter Disruption Policy

More than professional utility ties me to the site. Twitter hooks people in much the same way slot machines do, with what experts call an “intermittent reinforcement schedule.” Sometimes it is interesting, but most of the time it is boring and repetitive. Skinner found that rats and pigeons have good at generatingcompulsive behavior because they have unpredictable rewards.

A cultural anthropologist at New York University, and author of a book about gambling machine design, said that she did not know that the engineers atTwitter sat down and said they were creating a Skinner box. She said that is what they have built. It’s one reason people who should know better regularly self-destruct on the site — they can’t stay away.

Last month, Musk said Twitter’s “new” policy is “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach,” echoing an approach that is something of an industry standard. Negative/hate chatter will be deboosted and demonetized so no revenue can be gotten from it.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” he said in the official deal announcement.

At Boston University, Stringhini studies cyber safety and is the author of a book on the subject. If you get rid of moderation on the social network, things will become a lot worse.

For a “keyhole view of what Twitter under Musk will look like,” just look at alternative platforms such as Parler, Gab and Truth Social that promise fewer restrictions on speech, said Angelo Carusone, president of the liberal nonprofit watchdog group Media Matters for America.

On those sites, he said, “the feature is the bug — where being able to say and do the kinds of things that are prohibited from more mainstream social media platforms is actually why everyone gravitates to them. And what we see there is that they are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.”

“Would be great to unwind permanent bans, except for spam accounts and those that explicitly advocate violence,” he texted Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal shortly after agreeing to join the company’s board (a decision he soon backtracked).

Alex Jones was kicked off for abusive behavior, but there could be a chance of lifting the ban on him.

Musk was urged to hire someone who has a political view that was similar to that of a Blake Masters type. Masters is the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona and he has echoed claims that the 2020 presidential election were stolen from him, even though he has been endorsed by Trump.

Trump’s Facebook ban and the Chinese-style super-apps haven’t caught on in the United States: Musk’s tweets

Facebook is considering a ban on the former president, but if they allow Trump to return, it would set a precedence for other social networks.

Musk’s texts reveal that an initially cautiously friendly relationship between the two men when Musk first invested quickly soured after Agrawal told Musk that his tweets criticizing the platform were “not helping me make Twitter better.”

The Washington Post reported last week that Musk told prospective investors that he plans to cut three quarters of Twitter’s 7,500 workers when he becomes owner of the company. The newspaper cited documents and unnamed sources familiar with the deliberation.

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.

He stated on the earnings call last week that there was a long-term potential fortwitter that was more than its current value.

With the weak state of the digital ad market and the changes he wants to make to content moderation, he may be forced to look for other sources of revenue.

“Advertisers want to know that their ads are not going to appear alongside extremists, that they’re not going to be subsidizing or associating with the types of things that would turn off potential customers,” Carusone said.

Everyone’s guess, as always, what he meant. Musk told his staff that the company should be replicating the Chinese “super-app” which combines social media, messaging, payment, shopping and ride-sharing in a single app.

Other American tech companies, including Facebook and Uber, have tried this strategy, but so far Chinese-style super-apps haven’t caught on in the United States.

What lies are spreaders on social media? Detecting false narratives in a social media post about COVID-19 vaccinations: A case study

What kinds of lies and false information are posted on the internet? Taylor Agajanian was hired to answer the question one post at a time. It can get squishy.

She was looking at a social media post where a news story about vaccines was shared and someone commented, “Hmmm that’s interesting.” Was the person actually saying that the news story was interesting, or insinuating that the story isn’t true?

While working at University of Washington’s Center for an informed public, Agajanian reviewed social media posts and recorded misleading claims about COVID-19 vaccines.

Although incomplete, having a sense of what’s circulating in the online discourse allows society to respond. Research into voting-related misinformation in 2020 has helped inform election officials and voting rights groups about what messages to emphasize this year.

Can anyone ever know what everyone is saying on smaller social media platforms? asks Welton Chang, CEO of Pyrra, a startup that tracks smaller social media platforms. (NPR has used Pyrra’s data in several stories.)

Pyrra uses artificial intelligence to extract names, places and topics from social media posts, using automation to help the University of Washington team. Using the same technologies that in recent years enable AI to write remarkably like humans, the platform generates summaries of trending topics. An analyst weeds out irrelevant items, gives them a light edit and shares the summaries with clients.

The University of Washington and Pyrra’s approaches are on the more extreme ends in terms of automation – few teams have so many staff – around 15 – just to monitor social media, or rely so heavily on algorithms as to have it synthesize material and output.

All methods carry caveats. Manually monitoring and coding content could miss out on developments; and while capable of processing huge amounts of data, artificial intelligence struggles to handle the nuances of distinguishing satire from sarcasm.

For responses to be proportionate, society also needs to evaluate the impact of false narratives. Journalists have covered misinformation spreaders who seem to have very high total engagement numbers but limited impact, which risks “spreading further hysteria over the state of online operations,” wrote Ben Nimmo, who now investigates global threats at Meta, Facebook’s parent company.

It is not uncommon for researchers to use data from Twitter for all kinds of research, but the platform design gives it a unique role in information operations and conspiracy theories. Content can go viral in a way that’s impossible on other platforms, and provides metrics like retweets and likes that make tracking the impact and spread easy to understand.

Automated Filtering and Sorting of Social Media Messages: Implications for Trans-Integrality, Anti-Bias, and Other Discriminating Issues

The plethora of approaches is typical of a field that’s just forming, says Jevin West, who studies the origins of academic disciplines at University of Washington’s Information School. Researchers come from different fields and bring methods they’re comfortable with to start, he says.

Before someone like Agajanian starts researching things, it is important to find relevant content under a topic. A lot of researchers start their searches with expressions they are pretty sure people talking about the topic could use, see what other phrases and words show up in the search results, and repeat the process.

“If we’re a qualitative researcher, we’ll go…and literally code everything that we see.” West says. Large scale analysis is done by more quantitative researchers.

Projects often use a mix of methods. I think that if different methods begin to converge on similar kinds ofclusions, then we’ll feel better about it. West says.

Some teams build algorithmic tools to help. A team at the Michigan State University manually sorted over 10,000 messages to pro-vaccine, anti-vaccine, neutral and irrelevant. The team then used the training data to build a tool that sorted over 120 million tweets into these buckets.

For the automatic sorting to remain relatively accurate as the social conversation evolves, humans have to keep annotating new tweets and feed them the training set, Pang-Ning Tan, a co-author of the project, told NPR in an email.

If the interplay between machine detection and human review rings familiar, it’s because you’ve heard of large social platforms explaining similar processes to moderate content.

Researchers have to face another challenge, data access. Much misinformation research is done using Twitter data because it is one of the few social media platforms that has an application programming interface that can be used by users. This allows researchers to analyze large numbers of user profiles.

The recent deplatforming of the Kiwi farms is an example. Gay and trans people were harassed by anti-LGBTQ activists on the site. When it first went down, we had to wait for it to come back up and for people to talk about where that is.

The site is here because it has exactly the same structure and the same API, but it has been replicated somewhere else. We’re redirecting the data and pulling content from there.

OPINION: A Commentary on CrowdTangle, Meta, TikTok, and the Peculiar Case of the WikiLead

CrowdTangle, which purports to serve up all publically available posts, has been found to not have consistently done so. On another occasion, Facebook bungled data sharing with researchers Most recently, Meta is winding down CrowdTangle, with no alternatives announced set to be in place.

Last year, TikTok said that it was testing a researchAPI and is planning to expand availability in the coming weeks. The company told NPR in an email. The company has come under fire for allowing misinformation to be spread on its platform. It has also faced bipartisan scrutiny due to its Chinese ownership.

In a landscape where there’s no good way to tell what’s the state of misinformation, West says there’s no way to say what the situation is.

Kara Alaimo is an associate professor in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication and she is writing about issues affecting women. She was spokeswoman for international affairs in the Treasury Department during the Obama administration. The opinions she gives in this commentary are her own. You can view more OPINION on CNN.

How Will Parler become a Platform for Conservatives in the Age of Twitter? Comments on the Tweet by Elon Musk and Vijaya Gadde

Parler, a conservative social media company, has been purchased by West, who was previously suspended from the micro network for posting antisemitic comments. The statement announcing the deal described West as having changed his name to Ye so that he wouldn’t have to worry about being removed from social media again.

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.”

Just think about the way these owners already post, with Musk recently suggesting China control Taiwan and Russia keep part of Ukraine and West releasing a music video showing a doppelgänger of ex-wife Kim Kardashian’s then-boyfriend, Pete Davidson, being kidnapped and buried. We should be very worried if this is a preview of what social networks will look like in the future.

Before becoming Twitter’s CEO, owner, and “Chief Twit,” Elon Musk had often lobbed criticism at the platform for its approach to content moderation, even going so far as to target the company’s former policy chief Vijaya Gadde. But while Musk has expressed his concern about “liberal bias” on the platform, many activists, journalists, and advocates outside the US—where the majority of Twitter’s users reside—have begun to worry about how Twitter, now without a board or shareholders and led by a CEO with multiple business entanglements, will respond to authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning governments that have long sought to control public opinion.

The University of Miami law professor, Mary Anne Franks, says when women become victims of online hate, they tend to shut down their websites, avoid websites they used to visit, and refrain from engaging in online political commentary.

These so-called free speech policies are actually an ugly form of censorship, which makes it hard for people who are attacked on these platforms to raise their voice.

West has already described Parler as a place where conservative views can flourish, and nonconservatives are unlikely to flock to Truth Social, given its association with Trump. If people of colour and women start leaving, it’s possible that it’ll be a platform for conservatives as well. This would likely make the views of those who remain even more zealous.

The Case For Trump To Win. The Deal Or Not: How Musk Will Turn Facebook into a Skeptical Anti-Fake Social Media Platform

When like-minded people get together, they often end up thinking of what they thought before they had a chance to talk to each other, according to a Harvard University law professor. Sunstein says this happens because their exchanges heighten their preexisting beliefs and make them more confident.

He said that there was a danger that social media would splintered into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that would cause hate and divide our society.

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.

Within weeks of the acquisition agreement, however, Musk began raising concerns about the prevalence of those same fake and spam accounts on Twitter and ultimately attempted to terminate the deal.

The acquisition will extend Musk’s influence. The billionaire already owns or has stakes in companies that develop cars, rockets, robot and satellite internet as well as more experimental ventures such as brain implants. He controls a social media platform that shapes how a lot of people communicate and get news.

The deadline for the deal to be finalized by the Delaware judge is just hours away. She said a trial was going to be scheduled if there wasn’t an agreement.

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.

Twitter HQ is a Sink in the Wind: Musk’s Twitter Plan to Charge $20 per month for a Verification Verification Badge

The company’s top lawyer was criticized by him on the social networking site. There was a torrent of harassment of Gadde from other accounts. For Gadde, an 11-year Twitter employee who also heads public policy and safety, the harassment included racist and misogynistic attacks, in addition to calls for Musk to fire her. After she was fired, the harassing Tweets lit up once more.

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.

She said it’s a realization that having no moderation is bad for business and that might lead to loss of advertisers and subscribers.

“You don’t want a place where consumers are bombarded with what they don’t want to hear about and the platform doesn’t take responsibility for that,” Yildirim said.

Musk has said 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!”

The New York Stock Exchange told investors overnight that they will suspend trading in Twitter shares before its opening bell on Friday in anticipation of the company going private under Musk.

Sarah Personette, the company’s chief customer officer, said that she had a “great discussion” with Musk on Wednesday and appeared to endorse his message to advertisers.

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.

Thursday’s note to advertisers shows a newfound emphasis on advertising revenue, especially a need for Twitter to provide more “relevant ads” — which typically means targeted ads that rely on collecting and analyzing users’ personal information.

The first place he is looking is its power users, as he wants it to make money. 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’s a change that fits with Musk’s plans to make Twitter’s premium subscription service more valuable for its most active users. Even though verification serves a central role for the platform, Musk could endanger that trust just as the platform gets 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’s even room for the occasional dose of chaos, like DPRK News: the fake North Korean propaganda feed that’s fooled several news outlets, including The Verge.

The system works because it helps separate order from chaos. A blue checkmark indicates that you can reasonably believe that a person, agency, or brand is speaking for itself. It eliminates the need for someone to check an account’s profile in a hurry, especially during a scandal or a public health emergency. It’s the seal of authenticity that gives serious accounts license to be playful, trusting that readers can check for their credentials.

It sounds like an argument for Musk’s 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.

This week on Gadget Lab, we talk with WIRED platforms about how the changes coming to Twitter may affect the future of the social network.

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. Reexamining your relationship with social media is recommended by Lauren.

Tweeting about telliotter: The @GadgetLab podcast on Twitter and the afterglow of Musk’s Twitter account

The person can be found on the social media site, #telliotter. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

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. If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Podcasts app just by tapping here. We are also on the service. Here’s the RSS feed, if you really need it.

When billionaire businessman Musk completed his purchase of the micro-payment platform last week, he promised that the bird would be freed.

In January 2021, after former US president Donald Trump tweeted in support of an insurrection on the Capitol, his account was frozen and he was locked out. But across the world, leaders have tweeted in support of genocide and threatened violence, yet none of them have been banned from the platform. Less than six months later, the Nigerian president posted a threatening message about violence against the groups in their southwest. His account remained live even after it was taken down.

The company is not sure how it will proceed. Musk has met with civil-rights leaders about his plan to put a moderation council in charge of establishing policies on hate speech and harassment. Musk said that users who were banned before his takeover would not be returned until a process was in place to allow them to do so.

The account suspensions came on the heels of Twitter’s announcement on Monday that it was disbanding its Trust and Safety Council — a group of outside experts that advised the company on issues like human rights, child sexual exploitation and mental health.

“When you have people that have some sort of public stature on social media using inflammatory speech — particularly speech that dehumanizes people — that’s where I get really scared,” says James Piazza, who studies terrorism at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. There is a situation where you can have more violence.

After Musk bought the company, researchers from the DigitalPlanet group tracked hate speech on the micro-networking site. The data stream the platform gives is known as the firehose, and it is a feed of every public social media post on the platform. The group has used the same approach in previous studies, including one looking at toxicity on Twitter around the US midterm elections.

Tiny Talk Town: How Musk and the India-India Correspondence triggered the Mumbai-Indian Trilateral Superstring Fission

“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.

The social media landscape has changed in the last few years but not so much that a guide post can’t be found on Twitter.

The Asia Pacific policy director at Access Now is concerned that the lawsuit can’t go on under Musk. (In his August countersuit against Twitter, Musk cited the lawsuit in India as a threat to the company’s presence in its third largest market.) He says it would be a validation of the Indian government’s actions. “It also sends a signal to the global tech industry, saying ‘Back off, don’t try to do more.’”

“Tiny talk is talk so small it feels like it’s coming from your own mind,” Musk fired off shortly past 10 pm last Thursday, a thought so deep it might have bubbled up from a fish-bowled dorm room. We are all living in Tiny Talk Town, and all of the chatter is about Musk.

Lurking isn’t Doomscrolling: Quitting on New Twitter if you’re already a lurker

Quiet quitting in the workplace doesn’t mean you won’t work overtime but it means you won’t make your employer rich or your own coffers empty. It’s about not giving too much to a platform than people can expect. If you want to stick around on this new Twitter—whatever it may become—you need to find a way to use it without it using you.

It would be very easy for a person who follows hundreds of people on the micro-messaging site to mistake his own experience for that of others. It’s the same for journalists. 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 current events or live sports or celebrity news, and then they go about their lives. They are referred to as 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. Choosing to lurk, to sit back and observe for a while, is basically a heuristic and simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos that is New Twitter. Check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, sure, then close your app or browser tab. Then disengage with a social media post. During basketball games, keep an eye on it. Direct the message threads to another location if you have to. For another time, give your most original thoughts a rest.

The Twitter Files, Part Duex!, Part 1: Musk’s Response to Weiss’ Tweet about the 2021 Insurrection

The research showed that only one of three top 20 lists of hate speech was actually against Jewish people. The others were quoting someone else’s comments or using relevant keywords in a non-hateful way.

It will be possible for users to know if the company is limiting how many other users can see their posts, because of the new option Musk plans to introduce. Some conservatives claim that social network has suppressed or “shadowbanned” their content, and Musk is taking on the issue.

“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 give a timetable or provide any more details.

In the most recent file dump published through Bari Weiss, the founder and editor of media organization The Free Press, Musk released several documents that revealed how Twitter’s policy and trust and safety teams came to the decision to ban Trump in the wake of the insurrection on January 6, 2021.

Conservative critics accused Musk of continuing the practice of voting Republican after he said that he now votes Republican. The clash reflects an underlying tension at Twitter under Musk, as the billionaire simultaneously has promised a more maximalist approach to “free speech,” a move cheered by some on the right, while also attempting to reassure advertisers and users that there will still be content moderation guardrails.

Weiss’ tweets follow the first “Twitter Files” drop earlier this month from journalist Matt Taibbi, who shared internal Twitter emails about the company’s decision to temporarily suppress a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden and his laptop, which largely corroborated what was already known about the incident.

In both cases, the internal documents appear to have been provided directly to the journalists by Musk’s team. Musk on Friday shared Weiss’ thread in a tweet and added, “The Twitter Files, Part Duex!!” along with two popcorn emojis.

Mixing the Weed from the Chaff: A Network of Government-Linked Bots During the November 2021 – 30, 2020 Cybercrime in China

Weiss offered several examples of moderation actions taken on the accounts of right-leaning figures, but it’s unclear if they were taken against left-leaning or other accounts.

The data was divided into three groups of equal amount of time and was downloaded by NPR. NPR’s analysis can be found here.

Using irrelevant spam content from automated accounts (known as bots) to drown out material targeted for suppression – or “flooding” – is a known tactic that the Chinese government has used during protests in Hong Kong and COVID lockdowns, say researchers at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. A hallmark of information operations is the activation of long-dormant accounts.

The DFR Lab has found that 69 times a day is bot-like behavior. NPR identified over 3,500 accounts with the same name that have mentioned China’s three largest cities at least once a day from Nov 21, 2022 to Nov 30. The data shows an increase in the number of accounts.

Ultimately, researchers say it wouldn’t be surprising if some government-linked bot accounts were part of the activity in November. “I bet there is something in that data, but separating the wheat from the chaff is really hard.” Linvill says.

Fans of Korean and Chinese entertainers used certain phrases related to Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan to increase their popularity on social media, even though there was no link between the two.

The Chinese government might try to get more attention to the locations where the protests happened, if they focus more on the city of Shanghai.

A prominent example is from 2019 when Twitter identified over 900 accounts the company said were linked to the Chinese government. While Twitter was never specific about how it zeroed in on those accounts, researchers at the analytics firm Graphika identified patterns of behavior and unearthed a network of related accounts across other social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter. Graphika’s report identified narrative themes the accounts would coalesce around, ranging from personal attacks to support for the police.

Some of the bots could also just be advertising sex services, which are banned in China, researchers say. A reporter for Semafor reached out to one of the advertised accounts and received a response asking where in Beijing the potential client is.

It’s possible the bots were created to disrupt the 20th Party congress where Chinese President Xi Jinping solidified his third term rule.

After the fire, about half of the bot-like accounts NPR identified were created in the year 2022. NPR shared a random sample of tweets with researchers at the Social Media Research Foundation, a non-profit that analyzes social media content. A large group of accounts are repeatedly posting escort ads and do not interact with other users, according to their network analysis. The escort ad group of accounts was the largest group in the search results before the fire and initially after the fire, and they were mostly created from September to October of 2022.

The change is not a surprise. Even before Musk, Twitter had a fraught relationship with bot creators. API changes in 2018, for instance, broke some automated accounts. Musk has shown a strong dislike toward bots, which he believes is a major cause of scam and fraud. Some previous decisions have been reversed, but last month it was decided that third-party developers wouldn’t be allowed to use the same platform as the company. The company is under a heavy debt burden because of the added paid features.

To ensure moderation occurs in all languages, it must invest in moderation by bringing back trust and safety teams, as well as beefing up this force to make sure moderation occurs in every language. To ensure that policies are applied consistently, it needs to submit to regular audits.

The number of active accounts went back to pre-protest levels as November turned into December. In China, authorities tracked down protest participants and local governments relaxed COVID restrictions.

Defending Hate on Social Platforms: The Case of the Weiss-Bushman-Mumford-Sutherland-Israel Electoral Commission

While Weiss interpreted the reluctance to use such measures against other world leaders as evidence that Trump was treated particularly unfairly, the documents may also reveal the opposite: that the company consistently underestimated the danger its platform posed in contexts outside the US, and only acted forcefully against threats to American democracy. The ban would have gone to other leaders if the rules had been uniformly applied across the world.

One of the employees at an organization that was part of the trust and safety council says that the relationships with leaders such as Narendra Modi are more important than vulnerable communities in distant countries. The employee asked for anonymity because they are concerned their organization may be targeted by harassment and threats like those faced by former Twitter staffers.

Some of this discrepancy may come down to how different governments react to moderation by social platforms. After Twitter removed Buhari’s threatening tweet against Biafran separatists, the company was slapped with a ban. The company later negotiated with the government to open a local office, pay local taxes, and register as a broadcast station in order to be restored, instead of banning the president. Legislation to regulate platforms is being contemplated by Nigeria.

A lot of calculations go into the trade-off between enforcement actions and access to markets, according to Kian Vesteinsson, senior research analyst at Freedom House.

CNN’s Donie O’ Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, and The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell were banned by Musk. Independent progressive journalist, Linette Lopez, former MSNBC host, and other individuals were banned.

A healthy town square should also be a place where people can find reliable information. But researchers at Tufts University recently found that tweets refuting hate and misinformation were “an order of magnitude greater” on Twitter before Musk took over.

The power moves of Musk are dangerous. Tech and journalism workers who recently lost their jobs should be used as a call to unite to create healthier online spaces. We have nothing to lose except our dependence on a mercurial, egotistical czar to set the terms of our public debates.

“The people have spoken,” Musk wrote Friday night after his poll, pledging to restore the accounts he had falsely accused of sharing his “exact real-time” location.

Why did Musk decide to take his Twitter account down in order to investigate the suspension of his private jet from the social media site CNN? The case of Harwell

Harwell provided a copy of his appeal to CNN. He added that his post did not include a link to anyone’s private information.

He told CNN he decided to take the account down and move on from it.

News organizations, the American Civil Liberties Union, United Nations, Democratic members of congress, and others denounced the suspension of the journalists.

The move marked a significant attempt by Musk, a self-described free speech absolutist, to wield his unilateral authority over the platform to censor the press.

A CNN spokesperson previously said on Thursday that the network had asked Twitter for an explanation over O’Sullivan’s suspension and it would “reevaluate our relationship based on that response.”

Shortly before his suspension, O’Sullivan tweeted that Twitter had suspended the account of an emerging competitive social media service, Mastodon, which has allowed the continued posting of @ElonJet, an account that posts the updated location of Musk’s private jet.

The plane- Tracking account, which was permanently suspended on Thursday, was one of the stories written recently by other reporters.

Musk asked people to vote on his future as CEO of the social media site. Musk said that he would abide by the results.

On Sunday, after MIT artificial intelligence researcher Lex Fridman said he would take the CEO job, Musk said he hadn’t been completely happy with his new gig.

The World isn’t Going To Hell: Musk, the Anglin-Loomer-Fragmented-Minor Campaign, and the Rise and Fall of Twitter

Editor’s Note: Nora Benavidez is the senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at Free Press, a media and technology justice advocacy organization. Free Press is a founding member of the coalition. The opinions she expresses in this commentary are her own. More opinions on CNN can be found.

We at Free Press agree that Musk must step aside. But his replacement as CEO needs to be someone who understands at the most basic level that this social media platform will succeed only when it puts the health and safety of its users before the whims of one erratic and reckless billionaire.

Neo-Nazis like Andrew Anglin, right-wing activists such as Laura Loomer and other figures have returned to the scene after his suspension of their accounts.

After Musk took over, dozens of civil rights groups formed the #StopToxicTwitter coalition to urge advertisers to pull their advertisements from the platform until the company commits to better brand safeguards and moderation standards. Within weeks, 50 of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers pulled their ads or announced they would do so, and dozens of other companies curtailed spending on the platform.

The potential new leadership of the social network needs to reverse its decision to allow Covid-19 misinformation to spread. They need to retire Twitter’s pay-to-play blue checkmark feature, which allows verified users to post longer videos and have their content prioritized at the top of replies, mentions and searches. Musk had a plan to grant general amnesty on accounts that were suspended before he took over.

According to the announcement, it is primarily interested in building relationships with companies who want to view and analyze content rather than posting it. Bots are a tiny market in comparison. “If you’re building a service on someone else’s platform, and it’s doing something where there’s not an obvious way that they’re making money from you doing that, then you’re building on sand,” says Buckenham. “It is going to last a certain amount of time, and then it’s going to die.”

Why Twitter Shouldn’t Be Making Money from You: Why It’s Taking So Long to Make It Work for You and Your Users

“If you’re building a service on someone else’s platform, and … there’s not an obvious way that they’re making money from you doing that, then you’re building on sand.”

If next week is the case, users might wake up to a feed that is less fun and threatens to decimate the arts on its platform.

At some conferences we went to, 50% of the papers would be about Twitter and even more so, because of the data that we had access to.

There was no information on how many users could download or post at $100 a month. The company didn’t reveal the pricing, but those who need additional access will have to pay more.

The move will make it more expensive to run automated accounts. Some tools, such as those that highlight every change in the New York Times’ headlines or flag an earthquake, can be useful to many users.

No researchers were spared if some bots were spared. The change will also limit what is possible for researchers such as Starbird who have relied on that pipeline, known as an application programming interface or API, to study user behavior and information operations on the platform for years.

A group of research institutions, advocacy groups, and individual researchers from all over the world wrote an open letter requesting that there be continued access to the platform so that the public interest can continue. In a statement, U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) said that Twitter should be making data access easier, not harder. As of Wednesday, Twitter did not respond to a request from NPR sent last week for more information about its decision.

Players seeking influence can game the timelines of users to amplify their messages if they follow the right people and use the right recommendation.

What can we learn from Twitter, and how to use it in the future? A Human Rights Advisor’s Perspective on Twitter and How to Organize a World Without Walls

Users with access to the Twitter API can upload and download data in bulk to and from the platform using a computer program, bypassing the main user interface.

Currently, many Twitter API users can download up to two million tweets from the past seven days for free every month. For free, academic institutions can download the entire archive. With large data sources, researchers can make maps of how people relate to each other, which is useful in understanding online communities that spread false information.

Without access to that wealth of data, researchers will have a less comprehensive picture and will not be able to investigate narratives that were missed in real time.

By giving users well-documented API access, Twitter’s data has been more transparent than other major social media platforms. Meta’s offering, CrowdTangle, doesn’t provide straightforward ways to download data in real time or in bulk in the way Twitter does. Moreover, the company is reportedly winding it down and has not announced whether it will offer a replacement. Meta didn’t respond to questions about CrowdTangle’s future.

Starbird’s team is throwing ideas around what they can do with Twitter if their current level of access ceases. They want to focus on Telegram, TikTok and others along with other platforms in a bid to win the presidential election of 2024.

“We’ve tended to work within the constraints we’ve had for so long.” There will be new ways to use the data, Starbird says. A lot of that creativity is going to go to other platforms.

After Sarah Oh lost her job as a human rights advisor at Twitter late last year in the first round of layoffs following Elon Musk’s chaotic acquisition of the company, she decided to join a friend in building a rival service.

T2 was launched with Gabor Cselle, who was once employed by Twitter and was also a co-author of the book “Bringing the World Home.” It has a 140-characters limit on its social feed. Oh says the key selling point is its focus on safety.

“We really do want to create an experience that allows people to share what they want to share without fearing risk of things like abuse and harassment, and we feel like we’re really well positioned to deliver on that,” Oh told CNN.

Where do people go if they leave Twitter? Alternatives to Twitter and Facebook: Artifact, Facebook, Google Reader, and Cohost

A startup backed by one of Musk’s investors and apps created by formerTwitter employees are some of the newer entrants in the markets. While some apps like T2 strongly resemble Twitter, others take a different approach.

Artifact, a news feed powered by artificial intelligence, was described as a “personalized news feed” by the founders of Facebook’s photo-sharing service. In CNN’s recent test of the app, however, it resembled news reader applications like Apple News or the defunct Google Reader. Artifact displayed popular articles from large media organizations and smaller websites in a main feed which was tailored to the users activity and interests.

But all of these apps appear to be vying for the opportunity to scratch the itch users may feel for a news feed that isn’t Twitter — at least for as long as that itch lasts.

Kaplan stated that only 20,000 of the 130,000 Cohost users are considered active users. Oh says that there is a waitlist in the five digits. In November, Mastodon reached a peak of 2.5 million users, but has since fallen to just over 1.5 million in a possible cautionary tale.

When people refer to us as a alternatives, I think they are referring to us as a substitute for the 140-character limit on the micro-messaging service.

Where do people go if they leave? Karen North is a clinical professor of communication at the USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism and she said that there was no platform that was able to take on the role of Twitter. “No platform has the global user base, representing people from all walks of life the way that Twitter does.”

“A platform cannot continue to go viral perpetually,” Rochko recently told CNN about Mastodon’s sagging user numbers. After awhile, the cycle of media and attention on socialmedia simply goes away, but behind it is organic growth which we still have now.

Analyzing Hate Speech on Facebook and the iDRAMA Lab: How Funding Works in the UK and How Universities Can Get Their Ideas Out There

Facebook restricted access to its API in 2018, after it was found that the consultancy  Cambridge Analytica had accessed the data of millions of users to use for targeted political advertising.

It is an abysmal lack of knowledge of how academic funding works, says a member of the iDRAMA Lab, which analyzes hate speech on social media. His companies have been grifted more taxpayer money by federal funding agencies.