Social Media Thread of Social Media Drama

[chronovore]

I’m about to be Uber-done with X/Twitter

I feel like Tommy Lee Jones talking to Jim Carrey. I simply cannot sanction Musk’s buffoonery.

[Uncle]

what did he do now

[BIONIC]

1694272631[/url]']
what did he do now

ur mom lmao

[benji]

[Polident]

Couple weeks ago I made a burner Twitter account to lurk. Basically no presence, posts, or follows and all that.

I presumed the recommendations were based on what you viewed. But it’s amazing. I don’t read anything about sports but it keeps recommending shit. Say I’m not interested in sports. It recommends football. Say I’m not interested. Recommends specific teams. Not interested. Recommends specific players. Keeps going. I don’t get it. Modern internet really tries to flatten users into fitting specific folders.

[benji]

[benji]

 

[Potato]

Written by fucking Millennials I bet who don't even remember journalism before Twitter when (most) journalists had to actually speak to people and confirm facts before publishing.

[benji]

The article itself is very sparse on what "independent journalism" it's even talking about, focusing instead on weirdos who all agree lazily networking.

[Nintex]

Twitter died so X could live! 

[benji]

When I worked at Twitter, I led the team that placed a fact-checking label on one of Donald Trump’s tweets for the first time. Following the violence of Jan. 6, I helped make the call to ban his account from Twitter altogether. Nothing prepared me for what would happen next.

Backed by fans on social media, Mr. Trump publicly attacked me. Two years later, following his acquisition of Twitter and after I resigned my role as the company’s head of trust and safety, Elon Musk added fuel to the fire. I’ve lived with armed guards outside my home and have had to upend my family, go into hiding for months and repeatedly move.

This isn’t a story I relish revisiting. But I’ve learned that what happened to me wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t just personal vindictiveness or “cancel culture.” It was a strategy — one that affects not just targeted individuals like me, but all of us, as it is rapidly changing what we see online.

Private individuals — from academic researchers to employees of tech companies — are increasingly the targets of lawsuits, congressional hearings and vicious online attacks. These efforts, staged largely by the right, are having their desired effect: Universities are cutting back on efforts to quantify abusive and misleading information spreading online. Social media companies are shying away from making the kind of difficult decisions my team did when we intervened against Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Platforms had finally begun taking these risks seriously only after the 2016 election. Now, faced with the prospect of disproportionate attacks on their employees, companies seem increasingly reluctant to make controversial decisions, letting misinformation and abuse fester in order to avoid provoking public retaliation.

These attacks on internet safety and security come at a moment when the stakes for democracy could not be higher. More than 40 major elections are scheduled to take place in 2024, including in the United States, the European Union, India, Ghana and Mexico. These democracies will most likely face the same risks of government-backed disinformation campaigns and online incitement of violence that have plagued social media for years. We should be worried about what happens next.

 

Up to that moment, no one outside of a few fairly niche circles had any idea who I was. Academics studying social media call this “context collapse”: things we post on social media with one audience in mind might end up circulating to a very different audience, with unexpected and destructive results. In practice, it feels like your entire world has collapsed.

 

The timing of the campaign targeting me and my alleged bias suggested the attacks were part of a well-planned strategy. 

... 

Similar tactics are being deployed around the world to influence platforms’ trust and safety efforts. 

... 

But because local employees had the misfortune of residing within the jurisdiction of the authorities, they were nevertheless the targets of coercive campaigns, pitting companies’ sense of duty to their employees against whatever values, principles or policies might cause them to resist local demands. Inspired, India and a number of other countries started passing “hostage-taking” laws to ensure social-media companies employ locally based staff.

In the United States, we’ve seen these forms of coercion carried out not by judges and police officers, but by grass-roots organizations, mobs on social media, cable news talking heads and — in Twitter’s case — by the company’s new owner.

...

Academia has become the latest target of these campaigns to undermine online safety efforts.

...

Bit by bit, hearing by hearing, these campaigns are systematically eroding hard-won improvements in the safety and integrity of online platforms — with the individuals doing this work bearing the most direct costs.

Tech platforms are retreating from their efforts to protect election security and slow the spread of online disinformation. Amid a broader climate of belt-tightening, companies have pulled back especially hard on their trust and safety efforts. As they face mounting pressure from a hostile Congress, these choices are as rational as they are dangerous.

We can look abroad to see how this story might end. Where once companies would at least make an effort to resist outside pressure, they now largely capitulate by default.

...

It’s hard to fault Mr. Musk for his decision not to put Twitter’s employees in India in harm’s way. But we shouldn’t forget where these tactics came from or how they became so widespread. From pushing the Twitter Files to tweeting baseless conspiracies about former employees, Mr. Musk’s actions have normalized and popularized vigilante accountability, and made ordinary employees of his company into even greater targets.

[benji]

 That escalated.

[Uncle]

[benji]

[Nintex]

You can now save the children on X

[benji]

[Nintex]

[Potato]

Fucking lol. That's near where I used to work.

[Eric Cartman]

Fucking lol. That's near where I used to work.

At least you didn't give them back the $500

[Potato]

Fucking lol. That's near where I used to work.

At least you didn't give them back the $500

My arse ain't that flat

[benji]

[Nintex]

[benji]

I'm not seeing the problem

[benji]

BlueSky has fallen, unapproved people can read it:

[Polident]

Had a journalism teacher who was an old school salt of the earth type. Said if you’re a journalist and not getting death threats, you’re doing something wrong. But in his case, it was mob types doing it in paper or in person. Not anonymous tweets.

[benji]

[benji]

[jorma]

deboosted by bot follower manipulation? is that a real thing with meaning or does it just mean "elon nuked my bots"?

[benji]

No, it doesn't mean anything. She's been claiming that Elon has been deliberately suppressing her getting followers ever since the Saudi's bought the platform for him to steal the 2022 election.

I assume it's that kind of keen insight that leads the White House to repeatedly invite her.

[benji]

One week into the war between Israel and Gaza, social media is inducing a fog of war surpassing previous clashes in the region — one that’s shaping how panicked citizens and a global public view the conflict.

But now, a volatile, months-long fight over Israel’s democratic future has primed conspiracies and false information to spread within its borders. Tech platforms, diminished from waves of layoffs, have receded from policing falsehoods, disinformation and hate speech online. Electricity outages and strikes on telecommunications infrastructure in Gaza threaten Palestinians’ connectivity, according to human rights organizations.

While social media has been a critical tool for disseminating wartime information in recent days, a barrage of images, memes and testimonials is making it difficult to assess what is real. Activists in the region warn that viral horror stories that turn out not to be true may lead people to further distrust authority figures — and could spark hate, violence and retaliation against innocent people.

“I’m terrified,” Marwa Fatafta, a policy analyst at Al Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank and regional policy manager for the nonprofit digital human rights group Access Now. “There’s a lot of information being shared that is not verified, a lot of calls to violence and dehumanization. And all this is fanning the flames for further massacres [of Palestinians].”

Foreign disinformation — a key element of Russia’s global strategy — has been a major feature of the protracted war in Ukraine.

But in the current Middle East war, researchers have so far found only minimal evidence of disinformation originating abroad, said John Hultquist, chief analyst with the Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant.

Instead, much misinformation about the war is directed inward.

And unlike in 2021, Palestinians in Gaza are already losing access to the internet, she said, compromising their ability to tell their story to the world.

“People don’t have enough electricity to charge up their devices,” she said. “There are people who can’t send SMS messages, some telecommunications infrastructure has been damaged … It’s becoming an information blackout.”

Hamas’ swift and violent attack is more difficult to parse than the events in 2021. “No one knows what really happened on the border,” Schatz said. “It was too big, too fast and too brutal.”

This void is being filled by misinformation that appeals to people’s rage — which researchers warn could lead to more antisemitic attacks or violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel — and to justify a more brutal retaliation in Gaza.

Another WhatsApp voice memo featured the voice of a man claiming to be a soldier with intelligence that the country’s Arab citizens — roughly 20 percent of Israel’s population — were planning a coordinated attack. The audio message, which was played for The Washington Post, said Palestinian citizens were going to show up in vehicles with Israeli plates and “start shooting people.”

WhatsApp, a Meta-owned messaging platform, is the default communication across the region and enables people to forward audio messages to many groups, each of which can include more than a thousand members. But the source of such messages, and the extent of their spread, is nearly impossible to trace.

Now even our wars aren't safe from disinformation.

A Palestinian digital rights organization called 7amleh says it has detected more than 19,000 cases of hate speech and violent incitement against Palestinians in the Hebrew language on X since Oct. 7, the first day of escalations. The organization’s executive director, Nadim Nashif, said he wasn’t able to flag the content to X because the organization’s former points of contact at the company had been fired by Elon Musk
...
But over the last year, tech companies’ abilities to field these complaints has been compromised by waves of layoffs in units responsible for policing problematic content. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has laid off many members of a global operations team that monitors the platform, including Arabic speakers, according to a person familiar with the layoffs who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them. Under the leadership of Musk, X has fired the teams that acted as point people on the ground for advocates in the region. On Wednesday the European Union announced a probe into X for failures to moderate potentially illegal content and disinformation on its service.

Schatz said there is little communication from Meta-owned WhatsApp because the messaging platform is viewed as a private, encrypted service. And at X, he echoed Nashif’s account that, over the last year, “there has been no one to talk to” due to the firings.
...
But Eric Feinberg, vice president for content moderation at the Coalition for a Safer Web, noted that Hamas and its supporters have been able to use X to share antisemitic propaganda across the Arab world relatively unchecked. He provided screenshots of pro-Hamas accounts using WhatsApp and X in English to rally support for the organization’s attacks on Israel in Pakistan.

They really want secret backchannels to powerful unnamed people within these companies to control everything said on the platforms don't they. (But not hate speech from the Palestinians losing access that we're also supposed to be upset about.)