Given only a fraction of account bans make the news, the problem was probably much bigger than the news indicates. Maybe 10-100x (what's the ratio of newsworthy to regular folks?). Also, when a prominent user is banned, others see that and clam up on the topic lest they face the same fate; they tread on egg shells, which doesn't constitute a healthy community for them.
The Elon era seems to emphasize hypocrisy and censorship at the command of authoritarian regimes, while Elon himself posts disinformation about election laws in the US.
>The Elon era seems to emphasise truth over sensitivities
I've never heard anyone claim that misinformation went down with the acquisition--Musk infamously gutted that department, and I've seen plenty of claims at least from journalists and the EU that the problem is now worse. Anecdotally, I left Twitter not for ideological reasons, but because my timeline become filled with algorithmic noise from what were clearly bots I wasn't following. Do you have evidence to back up that claim?
>some suspected (but couldn't prove) being shadow banned for having contrarian viewpoints.
I would think we would have seen actual indication of that by now if that were true; given all the "Twitter files" and whatnot that turned out to be a nothingburger, if there was a there there, employees were certainly motivated to air it after the acquisition, if not before. In any case, it's certainly indisputable that Musk has been more than willing to artificially inflate accounts he wants to promote (the latest I know of being the Mr. Beast debacle), which, outside of expressly labelled advertising, I don't remember being a thing before, though again, I'm open to the possibility of being wrong about that.
Community notes are great and an important tool to fact check disinformation from politicians and VIPs to which traditional fact checkers often turn a blind eye. I say this from Brazil so your YMMV. While I'm not familiar with the Mr. Beast debacle on Twitter he and his content are extremely popular so it's natural for his content to be recommended. What wasn't "natural" was Twitter recommendations prior. Though there are many other reasons for not using Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
I can’t stress this enough, for anyone who (like myself) for some reason didn’t think this was possible: Twitter’s community notes are no different from tweets in their ability to spread misinformation.
What makes them worse than tweets (at least the original immutable tweets) at combatting intentional disinformation is that Birdwatch notes 1) are visually formatted to communicate an impression of absolute ground truth, and 2) don’t reflect any controversy or edit history.
A trending tweet with a false “correction” (such as the one that claimed a video of Xinjang police brutality against an Uyghur was showing Taiwanese police) would be viewed by millions of people, 99% of whom would read that note completely uncritically, before it would get corrected. The people who are equipped to recognize the lie, and who care to fight to get it corrected, are few compared to the army of internet trolls spreading that lie.
Eventually the note may get rewritten—but at that point the tweet is no longer trending; the operation was a success and no one even knows that it took place. Since the note gets rewritten with no history maintained, the only evidence of the original malicious, false correction would have to be in that updated note, which is obviously an unpopular choice because it makes the new note harder to read and makes future readers do extra work to untangle what happened there.
(Incidentally, one of the things that could reliably be used to combat bias—labeling tweets from accounts that are known to be associated with governments or such—was nuked by Elon right away.)
>I've never heard anyone claim that misinformation went down with the acquisition
Twitter Japan's recommendations feed was inundated with political bullshit nobody cared about.
Musk came in, fired everyone at Twitter Japan, and the recommendations feed changed to anime, manga, visual novels, games, music, and other such pop cultural subjects that everyone cares about. Japanese Xers love Musk for cleaning house.
The change was obvious to all, and personally I finally could justify making an account to better manage the handful of accounts I always kept tabs on (news postings from games I play, new art from illustrators I like, etc.).
"many were banned for saying things that were unpopular but true"
Can you cite one confirmed example?
There's sifting to be done, but a scan over the top few pages of results (of 35,000,000 news articles total) shows a handful of bans for true but unpopular stances and opinions: https://www.google.com/search?q=banned+from+twitter+-trump+b...
Given only a fraction of account bans make the news, the problem was probably much bigger than the news indicates. Maybe 10-100x (what's the ratio of newsworthy to regular folks?). Also, when a prominent user is banned, others see that and clam up on the topic lest they face the same fate; they tread on egg shells, which doesn't constitute a healthy community for them.
Google provides different results for different users, skimming over my result list, I found nothing. Something concrete please?
2 replies →
The Elon era seems to emphasize hypocrisy and censorship at the command of authoritarian regimes, while Elon himself posts disinformation about election laws in the US.
https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/15/once-again-free-speech-a...
https://popular.info/p/musk-uses-megaphone-to-promote-mislea...
>The Elon era seems to emphasise truth over sensitivities
I've never heard anyone claim that misinformation went down with the acquisition--Musk infamously gutted that department, and I've seen plenty of claims at least from journalists and the EU that the problem is now worse. Anecdotally, I left Twitter not for ideological reasons, but because my timeline become filled with algorithmic noise from what were clearly bots I wasn't following. Do you have evidence to back up that claim?
>some suspected (but couldn't prove) being shadow banned for having contrarian viewpoints.
I would think we would have seen actual indication of that by now if that were true; given all the "Twitter files" and whatnot that turned out to be a nothingburger, if there was a there there, employees were certainly motivated to air it after the acquisition, if not before. In any case, it's certainly indisputable that Musk has been more than willing to artificially inflate accounts he wants to promote (the latest I know of being the Mr. Beast debacle), which, outside of expressly labelled advertising, I don't remember being a thing before, though again, I'm open to the possibility of being wrong about that.
Community notes are great and an important tool to fact check disinformation from politicians and VIPs to which traditional fact checkers often turn a blind eye. I say this from Brazil so your YMMV. While I'm not familiar with the Mr. Beast debacle on Twitter he and his content are extremely popular so it's natural for his content to be recommended. What wasn't "natural" was Twitter recommendations prior. Though there are many other reasons for not using Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
I can’t stress this enough, for anyone who (like myself) for some reason didn’t think this was possible: Twitter’s community notes are no different from tweets in their ability to spread misinformation.
What makes them worse than tweets (at least the original immutable tweets) at combatting intentional disinformation is that Birdwatch notes 1) are visually formatted to communicate an impression of absolute ground truth, and 2) don’t reflect any controversy or edit history.
A trending tweet with a false “correction” (such as the one that claimed a video of Xinjang police brutality against an Uyghur was showing Taiwanese police) would be viewed by millions of people, 99% of whom would read that note completely uncritically, before it would get corrected. The people who are equipped to recognize the lie, and who care to fight to get it corrected, are few compared to the army of internet trolls spreading that lie.
Eventually the note may get rewritten—but at that point the tweet is no longer trending; the operation was a success and no one even knows that it took place. Since the note gets rewritten with no history maintained, the only evidence of the original malicious, false correction would have to be in that updated note, which is obviously an unpopular choice because it makes the new note harder to read and makes future readers do extra work to untangle what happened there.
(Incidentally, one of the things that could reliably be used to combat bias—labeling tweets from accounts that are known to be associated with governments or such—was nuked by Elon right away.)
11 replies →
>I've never heard anyone claim that misinformation went down with the acquisition
Twitter Japan's recommendations feed was inundated with political bullshit nobody cared about.
Musk came in, fired everyone at Twitter Japan, and the recommendations feed changed to anime, manga, visual novels, games, music, and other such pop cultural subjects that everyone cares about. Japanese Xers love Musk for cleaning house.
The change was obvious to all, and personally I finally could justify making an account to better manage the handful of accounts I always kept tabs on (news postings from games I play, new art from illustrators I like, etc.).