General Elon Musk Fukkery Thread

MushroomX

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:blessed: Jason Vorhees killed Musk's platform.

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Redwood

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www.theatlantic.com

This War Shows Just How Broken Social Media Has Become

The global town square is in ruins.
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com

This War Shows Just How Broken Social Media Has Become​

The global town square is in ruins.

By Charlie Warzel

Irene Suosalo for The Atlantic

OCTOBER 12, 2023
SAVED STORIESSAVE

Social media has, once again, become the window through which the world is witnessing unspeakable violence and cruelty in an active war zone. Thousands of people, including children and the elderly, have been killed or injured in Israel and the Gaza Strip since Hamas launched its surprise attack on Saturday—you have probably seen the carnage yourself on X, TikTok, or Instagram.

These scenes are no less appalling for their familiarity. But they are familiar. As my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote last year, the history of war is a history of media. The Gulf War demonstrated the power of CNN and the 24/7 cable-news format, foreshadowing the way infotainment would permeate politics and culture for the next 20 years. A series of contentious election cycles from 2008 to 2020, as well as the Arab Spring, the Syrian civil war, and the rise of the Islamic State, showed how social-media platforms democratized punditry and journalism, for better and worse. Commentators were quick to dub Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the “first TikTok war,” as the internet filled with videos from Ukrainians documenting the horrors of war in profoundly personal, often surreal ways.

Read: The myth of the “first TikTok war”


If such conflicts are lenses through which we can understand an information environment, then one must surmise that, at present, our information environment is broken. It relies on badly maintained social-media infrastructure and is presided over by billionaires who have given up on the premise that their platforms should inform users. During the first days of the Israel-Hamas war, X owner Elon Musk himself has interacted with doctored videos published to his platform. He has also explicitly endorsed accounts that are known to share false information and express vile anti-Semitism. In an interview with The New York Times, a Hamas official said that the organization has been using the lack of moderation on X to post violent, graphic videos on the platform to terrorize Israeli citizens. Meanwhile, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram and the unofficial lead on the company’s Twitter clone, Threads, has received requests from journalists, academics, and news junkies to make his product more useful for following the war. He has responded by saying that his team won’t “amplify” news media on the platform: “To do so would be too risky given the maturity of the platform, the downsides of over-promising, and the stakes,” he wrote. (Neither Meta nor X responded to requests for more information regarding their platforms’ plans to handle conflict-related posts.)

These are new cracks in an already crumbling foundation, as major social platforms have grown less and less relevant in the past year. In response, some users have left for smaller competitors such as Bluesky or Mastodon. Some have simply left. The internet has never felt more dense, yet there seem to be fewer reliable avenues to find a signal in all the noise. One-stop information destinations such as Facebook or Twitter are a thing of the past. The global town square—once the aspirational destination that social-media platforms would offer to all of us—lies in ruins, its architecture choked by the vines and tangled vegetation of a wild informational jungle. This may be for the best in the long run, although the immediate effect for those of us still glued to these ailing platforms is one of complete chaos.


Their transformation has not been an accident. For nearly a year, Musk has worked to dismantle his site’s previous architecture, including the platform’s verification system for public figures, journalists among them. Musk’s antics and layoffs have contributed to the diminishing of its trust and safety team. Now anyone can pay for a verification badge to make one’s posts more visible. (Some of the site’s new blue-check users are scam artists or disinformation peddlers, a number of whom are pawning off fake, old, or misleading footage as verified reports from Gaza.) Musk has also reinstated accounts that were banned for rules violations. And last week, in a supremely poorly timed move, the platform stripped auto-populating headlines from news stories; the result has been a substantial loss of legibility and the further erosion of trusted media sources on the platform. Musk has turned X into a deepfake version of Twitter—a facsimile of the once-useful social network, altered just enough so as to be disorienting, even terrifying.


Since 2018, Facebook and its parent company, Meta, have changed their news-feed algorithm to emphasize personal posts over news media. After the January 6 insurrection, the company deemphasized political news links from publishers; the move, according to The Wall Street Journal, caused an influx of complaints about misinformation. At the same time, Facebook’s user base began to erode, and the company’s transparency reports revealed that the most popular content circulating on the platform was little more than viral garbage—a vast wasteland of CBD promotional content and foreign tabloid clickbait. What’s left, across all platforms, is fragmented. News and punditry are everywhere online, but audiences are siloed; podcasts are more popular than ever, and millions of younger people online have turned to influencers and creators on Instagram and especially TikTok as trusted sources of news.


The previous status quo was deeply flawed, of course. Social media, especially Twitter, has sometimes been an incredible news-gathering tool; it has also been terrible and inefficient, a game of do your own research that involves batting away bullshyt and parsing half truths, hyperbole, outright lies, and invaluable context from experts on the fly. Social media’s greatest strength is thus its original sin: These sites are excellent at making you feel connected and informed, frequently at the expense of actually being informed. That’s to say nothing of the psychological toll that comes from staring at the raw feed. I’ve personally witnessed beheadings and war crimes through my screen—an experience no person should endure merely to stay informed about the world.

The back-and-forth with Mosseri over news on Threads illustrates the awkwardness of the moment. Mosseri’s position is reasonable enough, and there’s a genuine cognitive dissonance in asking Meta—a company with an atrocious track record of having its platform used to foment political unrest and supercharge propaganda—to build a safe space for journalism. And yet it is also understandable in turbulent moments for people to want something from the organizations that begged for our attention, monetized it, and, over time, influenced the way we found information. At the center of these pleas for a Twitter alternative is a feeling that a fundamental promise has been broken. In exchange for our time, our data, and even our well-being, we uploaded our most important conversations onto platforms designed for viral advertising—all under the implicit understanding that social media could provide an unparalleled window to the world.

Social media is not just a vector for information. Or misinformation. It’s a place to bear witness, to express solidarity, and to fight for change. All of that is harder now than it was just a year ago. What comes next is impossible to anticipate, but it’s worth considering the possibility that the centrality of social media as we’ve known it for the past 15 years has come to an end—that this particular window to the world is being slammed shut.
 
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techcrunch.com

X changes its public interest policy to redefine 'newsworthiness' of posts | TechCrunch

X, formerly Twitter, has changed its policy to redefine what posts are newsworthy and could be kept up despite defying the platform's rules.
techcrunch.com techcrunch.com

X changes its public interest policy to redefine ‘newsworthiness’ of posts​

Ivan Mehta@indianidle / 8:11 AM EDT•October 10, 2023
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a pattern of the X (formerly Twitter) logo on a cracked wall

Image Credits: TechCrunch

X, formerly Twitter, has changed its “Public interest expectations” policy to redefine which posts are newsworthy and could be kept up despite the posts defying the platform’s rules.

The company has removed the requirement of having at least 100,000 followers for posts to be newsworthy. The earlier policy said only verified accounts would be considered for newsworthy posts. But since X has made it possible for people to get verified by paying for a subscription under Elon Musk’s leadership, the new version of the policy says posts only by “a high-profile account” counts as a newsworthy post. However, the updated page doesn’t give any details on what kind of accounts are considered “high-profile.”

The earlier version of the policy said that exceptions were limited to elected and government officials.

“At present, we limit exceptions to one critical type of public-interest content—Tweets from elected and government officials—given the significant public interest in knowing and being able to discuss their actions and statements,” the policy said earlier.

The new policy removes the wording about restricting exceptions to posts from only one category of profiles.

The Musk-owned social media platform said it is making changes as the Israel-Hamas conflict is unfolding. The company noted that users have posted 50 million posts on the topic.




X said it has been removing “newly created Hamas-affiliated accounts” under its Violent and Hateful Entities Policy. Further, it stated that it is partnering with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) to prevent the contribution of “terrorist content.” The company’s Safety account added that it is proactively monitoring for antisemitic speech, but didn’t say what kind of action it has taken until now.


The company has relied heavily on Community Notes, its crowdsourced moderation tool, to allow users to post contextual info on posts. X said that these notes now “typically appear within minutes of content posting.”

There have been multiple reports about X hosting misinformation about the situation. NBC News reported multiple verified accounts posting fake news about Joe Biden approving an $8 billion military grant for Israel. A Wired report noted that X’s algorithm boosted posts — including video game clips being passed off as war footage — with misinformation from paid users. In a now-deleted post, Musk recommended people follow accounts which have posted antisemitic comments and false information in the past.
 
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www.theverge.com

Now X posts can lock replies to only allow comment from verified accounts

Pay to post.
www.theverge.com www.theverge.com

Now X posts can lock replies to only allow comment from verified accounts​

/

The reply paywall is supposed to make paying for verification more appealing.​

By Richard Lawler, a senior editor following news across tech, culture, policy, and entertainment. He joined The Verge in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget.

Oct 9, 2023, 9:40 PM EDT|17 Comments / 17 New
An image showing the X logo superimposed on the Twitter logo

Image: The Verge

The latest turn in the Elon Musk-directed platform X, previously known as Twitter, is that users can now block unverified accounts from replying to their posts.

This change arrives about 11 months after Musk launched paid verification for Twitter Blue, apportioning blue checkmark labels to people willing to part with $7.99 per month. It also means it could be harder for those who don’t pay for the service (with the exception of accounts forced into verified status) to refute misinformation, which researchers report has continued to increase.

Related​


Screenshot of X on a mobile device showing a screen with options for who can reply to a new post, listing the choices of either everyone, verified accounts, accounts you follow, or only accounts mentioned.

The new menu for locking replies. Image: X

There’s an argument that limiting replies to accounts verified by payment, phone number, or perhaps even government ID could reduce harassment, trolling, and misinformation.

However, that argument is quickly undone, whether by the continued presence of bots with verified labels or a quick look at the current state of the platform. Since X already prioritizes replies from verified accounts, it’s easy to evaluate the quality of threads populated by paid checkmark posters. One response to X’s post announcing the feature’s availability, from “Dave the reply guy,” gleefully called it “pay to win mode.”
 
Conz

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how many people who don't have twitter are about to sign up for twitter? what the fukk are they gonna make from this newest stunt? a million bucks if they're lucky? dude is fukkin collecting cans to recoup his terrible investment. i hate this fukkin guy so much
 
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