Moderation matters. It’s human nature that some people don’t grow out of their immaturity and find satisfaction in destroying things, splattering obscenities everywhere, and relishing being purposeless disruptors — it is, apparently, what gives their life meaning, since they are failures at everything else — so policing comments is necessary. That’ll never change for as long as some people savor being terrible human beings.
Elon Musk’s Twitter is being stripped of moderators, rules, and any vestige of sanity in what I can only interpret as self-destruction. Musk is one of those useless vandals who finds virtue in wreckage, and by removing any effective moderation, we’re going to see a steady decay of useful content. Twitter is becoming as lawless and unregulated as Facebook, and now people are rushing to insert misinformation…now blessed with the sacred Blue Checkmark, which can be obtained by anyone for a mere $8/month.
Under Elon Musk’s new direction for Twitter, several anti-vaccine accounts with tens of thousands of followers are now verified by paying $7.99 a month for Twitter Blue.
Hey, if I were a quack trying to sell patent medicines that haven’t been tested and don’t work, that’s what I’d do: pay a pittance for a shingle I could hang for my dangerous advertising, so I could pretend to be a legitimate authority, and that’s what they’re doing.
But the tools are now being used to create a false sense of validity in order to spread dangerous falsehoods, including about vaccines. And groups on other platforms, like Facebook, continue to circumvent moderation by making minor changes to their names and the terms they use to promote anti-vaccine agendas.
Verified accounts are frequently seen as reliable and trustworthy, and Twitter’s algorithm gives them a higher ranking in search results, replies and follow recommendations.
“There’s a sense of legitimacy that comes with it,” said Barry. “By verifying this anti-vaccine account, they’re kind of verifying all of the misinformation it shares … it makes people think, ‘Oh, well, this is a verified account. This must be true.’”
They’re lying to circumvent any restraints on their propaganda, and they openly admit it! Machines can’t detect spotlights in a those silly robot verification tests on the internet, they sure can’t see a cunning liar, like this guy who is determined to spread vaccine misinformation on Facebook. Twitter is just lying there with its immune system demolished, it’s becoming as riddled with this nonsense as Facebook.
Facebook group admins, like Tiago Henrique Fernandes, reconstitute banned groups by using slightly different names, like DSN Official instead of Died Suddenly News, while keeping the same focus on anti-science messages.
Fernandes coaches members not to write certain words that will be picked up by moderators, he explained on a recent show produced by Children’s Health Defense.
Facebook’s algorithms look for keywords – like vaccine, shot and mRNA – to flag potential problems.
“I basically train the members to … get away from that kind of language and get more into undercover, what I call ‘carnival talk’ – that way the algorithms can’t figure it out,” he said.
Group members often refer to the vaccines as food – “cookie”, “peaches”, “cheeseburger” – or use purposeful misspellings, especially for purported side-effects like seizures (“see jures”) or cancer (“can sir”).
One phrase that is picking up steam in the anti-vax world is “died suddenly”, which may be used in official media reports to talk about any sudden death, making it harder to moderate automatically.
This is one of the reasons I bailed out of Facebook — too much garbage being peddled to profit Mark Zuckerberg, and too many stupid or evil people thriving in the stew of dishonesty. Next on the social media chopping block: the disintegrating carcass of Twitter, which is now making life easy for frauds.
The vaccines to prevent severe disease and death from Covid-19 are extremely safe and effective, with millions of people around the world vaccinated.
Even so, anti-vaccine propaganda has increased dramatically during the pandemic. Anti-vaccine activists “were prepared for a pandemic to happen”, and they were prepared to exploit it, Barry said.
Verifying anti-vax accounts and elevating their messages on social networks further entrenches anti-vaccine ideology in our culture, Barry said. “Anything that further legitimizes them, the extent of their influence gets even worse, and people don’t even realize that the origin of it is anti-vax.”
I’m afraid it’s more than passive neglect that’s creating the ongoing deterioration, though. I’m convinced that Elon Musk didn’t buy Twitter to save it, he can’t possibly be that stupid (or can he?) I think it was an active act of vandalism. He loves the attention he gets on the site, but simultaneously hates that it opens him up to criticism, so he’s destroying it in a stupid act of self-immolation. How else to explain that he’s letting anti-vaxxers flourish, has allowed Donald Trump and Jordan Peterson to return, and has let James Lindsay out of his cage?
There’s no reason for any of it, except to accelerate the descent into crepitude. It’s surprising because he didn’t have to spend $44 billion to do that, entropy and competition would have disintegrated it eventually, like MySpace, but he seems to be rushing to do in weeks or months what would have normally taken years or decades.
Could he please buy Facebook next?
I’m on Facebook, but only to keep in touch with family. Pretty much ignore anything else.
“Even so, anti-vaccine propaganda has increased dramatically during the pandemic.”
The new thing now is “postvac”, there was a Long Covid congress here over the weekend, and the SM feeds got spammed with all these wankers alleging they had some sort of hence unseen postvaccination condition, and it would get suppressed by the LC mafia yada yada yada.
As to birdsite, I was mildly amused yesterday as people were posting whole movies in 2.20 min clips, such as Hackers or Avatar, because obviously the copyright people were let go, and the automatic filter isn’t working anymore. Can’t be long now.
It’s a whole platform that exists to bring people’s captive eyes to where marketers can lie to them. How did anyone ever mistake that for a good thing?
Not for much longer!
“It’s a whole platform that exists to bring people’s captive eyes to where marketers can lie to them.”
Sure, but that’s not all that it was. It was a people’s journalism platform, just look at Australia where traditional media is completely fucked and people routinely got their political info from the #auspol hashtag, or for scientists, take us medical people, it was an indispensable tool to network and exchange medical news and info in a quick fashion, and last not least it was an education tool, eg in free online medical education. There would be 200 weirdos from all over the world discussing a paediatric ICU case from the UK on Friday night, and we all learned a lot all the time. I don’s see an alternative to all that yet, and if these things get lost, it will be a big loss for all involved.
Rorschach,
You bring up and excellent point. I used to be on Twitter (2 accounts, Silly and Serious!) and my Serious account was used for exactly the sort of thing you discuss. Not front line medicine of course, but trials data, stats discussions etc, professional networking. Very useful. A few of us have Whatsapp groups, but these rapidly get unwieldy and just too big. A colleague is investigating Mastodon and other platforms because, as you say, the loss of this quick and broad communication channel is significant.
Louis
@3 is typical of stupid arrogant Marcus who has no knowledge or understanding of Twitter but acts as though he does because he always thinks his beliefs are true by virtue of being his beliefs.
Twitter, being accessible to everyone on the globe, has many communities and natures. Chris Hayes tweeted the other day that he doesn’t know how he’s going to do his job if Twitter closes down because it’s where he has access to so many voices and so much information. Journalists, politicians, state/local/federal governments, all sorts of institutions, scientists, writers, artists, disadvantaged communities, all sorts of people connect and communicate through Twitter. Many people are trying to switch to Mastodon but are finding that it doesn’t nearly have this level of richness–perhaps it eventually will, Certainly it avoids some of the problems of Twitter by having numerous networked “instances” that are individually managed with their own policies so people can pick and choose, and its feed is under the user’s control and not curated the way Twitter’s is, but it’s also a lot harder to find or discover the sort of information one is looking for — right now, if I try to find a topic through a hashtag, which is really the only way to do it, I’m inundated with introductions from new users who have that tag among their interests. Hopefully as time goes by there will be more substantive content per people looking for that content, the sorts of institutions and knowledgeable, authoritative users who provide such a rich source of information will migrate there, and maybe search will improve in various ways.
Currently many people are asking that folks stay on Twitter and not abandon their connections and not abandon it to the trolls, hoping that spoiled brat Musk doesn’t completely destroy it.
This was discovered and known decades ago on the internet.
Any website not moderated will be overrun and destroyed by trolls.
This is always true.
I saw it with Usenet, AOL, Yahoo, Facebook, any newspaper article comment thread, and less well known websites.
Without moderation, Twitter will follow the well worn path to irrelevancy and extinction.
You might be giving Elon Musk too much credit for thinking things through.
It was though, clearly an impulse buy and not a wise decision.
He way overpaid for Twitter as shown by no one else showing up to bid on it.
He could have got it for maybe half of the $44 billion he paid for it by bargaining.
It would have been cheaper for Musk to feed his vandalism hobby by buying classic paintings and art and destroying them on Youtube and TikTok videos.
BTW, Musk has created a huge problem for himself.
Some of that money, $13 billion is OPM, Other People’s Money.
The OPM are not going to be happy watching $13 billion disappear in a few weeks.
I’ll make a prediction.
When Musk is sitting in the ruins of Twitter, he will be asked by the other stakeholders to go away and let the adults try to fix the mess he made.
Elon bought Twitter because his wife left him and started dating a trans woman, Elon mouthed off about trans people like the sad rejected loser he is, and a lot of people, including one of his own children, took to Twitter to call him out on his disgusting transphobia. Elon is such a fucking loser that internet-clout is something he really cares about and he’s going to do whatever he can to control internet discourse about him. It’s why parody accounts of Eli Lilly or Lockheed Martin can stay up for days, but parody accounts of him are taken down within minutes.
@7
Just for reference, Twitter isn’t that big of a social media site. It’s active user base is roughly 350-400 million people. By contrast, Snapchat and Telegram each have over 550 million active users, TikTok has around 1 billion, Instagram has nearly 1.5 billion, and Facebook nearly 3 billion. Chris Hayes may wonder how he can do his job without Twitter because he is, deep down, actually very bad at being a journalist. Whatever good or ill there is with Twitter, it is still, relatively speaking, kind of niche among social media sites.
Twitter isn’t just a social media site though.
It’s also a news media outlet and has a unique style.
Breaking news announced in short, concise…tweets.
It is widely used by all the other news media and widely followed.
It owns its space for now by incumbency and critical mass of numbers.
I end up reading Twitter often because it is useful for following things like the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Facebook could disappear and I would just assume the trash took itself out.
I will miss Twitter.
I’m sorry, but I don’t see ANY rhyme of reason to this. You don’t go spending $ 44 billion–that ‘billion” with a “b”–of other peoples money (some of whom are not very nice people) to buy something just to wreck it.
It’s all those mean immature assholes that are giving the rest of us immature people a bad name, amirite?
Per the BBC…Alex Jones is still banned.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t see ANY rhyme of reason to this. You don’t go spending $ 44 billion–that ‘billion” with a “b”–of other peoples money (some of whom are not very nice people) to buy something just to wreck it.”
There are those who posit, among them Andrea Chalupa who is not usually wrong on those things, that Musk’s purchase of Twitter a week before the midterms might have been a contract job orchestrated by a certain Mr Thiel. I can believe that, but I dont’t know if it is true. But look at the results, a tool for the people to fight disinformation, gain knowledge that mainstream media may not give them, and network between specialists, may only have days to live. Who benefits?
I’ll make a prediction. When Musk is sitting in the ruins of Twitter, he will be asked by the other stakeholders to go away and let the adults try to fix the mess he made.
Why haven’t they done that already? It’s not like the extent of the damage has yet to become obvious.
You don’t go spending $ 44 billion–that ‘billion” with a “b”–of other peoples money (some of whom are not very nice people) to buy something just to wreck it.
You do if those other people WANT to wreck it, while getting access to its user information.
rorschach: Thiel himself wouldn’t even have to get personally involved in this. There’s plenty of other reactionaries, tyrants and plutocrats who would be just as happy to kill a platform used by so many people to expose the lies and atrocities of the powerful. Like, oh, I dunno, that Saudi prince and all those banks who actually did kick in for this hit job?
Per the BBC…Alex Jones is still banned.
Expect another “poll” on that question in, maybe, a week or so?
“Like, oh, I dunno, that Saudi prince and all those banks who actually did kick in for this hit job?”
That Saudi prince the US government just declared immune from prosecution for ordering the dismemberment of a WaPo journalist? Yes, that one, who gave Elno a lot of money to help buy Twitter. Quite right.
@11
Twitter’s main function seems to be posting headlines with links to other websites, the way you describe it. If that’s a relatively common perception of Twitter, it’s no wonder that it doesn’t have near the same user base as Tiktok, Instagram, or Facebook.
350-400 million active users is enough to keep it afloat, so Twitter will have staying power due to that as well as the momentum of having been around for over a decade. It’s not going anyway any time soon. But, again, it’s still an order of magnitude fewer active users than Facebook, which itself has morphed into a social media site that allows one to basically do all of the things one does on Twitter (back when I had a Facebook account, I could share links to other websites with the best of them!), but with more privacy controls and other customization abilities to tailor the experience to exactly what the user wants (with all the benefits and drawbacks of doing that).
Facebook sucks, you’ll get no argument from me on that. But Twitter sucks for many of the exact same reasons AND is far less popular than Facebook. The biggest advantage Twitter has over Facebook, owing to its relative lack of privacy controls and how by default everything is public, is for freelance workers – ranging from video editors to graphic designers to sex workers to independent journalists – to advertise themselves and eek out some existence in the disastrously exploitative capitalist economy we’ve got going. That’s important, that’s good. Those people deserve to find work to make money to live. But that’s the only unique utility that Twitter has.
Um, note the words “Twitter isn’t just … It’s also …” in that description.
Copyright detection is also down, although the acccount that posted that seems to have been suspended.
I love that URL – “twitterisgoinggreat.com.” That’s almost as good as “welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com.”
@Akira MacKenzie
You’re assuming that Musk is acting rationally, though. That’s a mistake in itself, especially with someone who obviously already believes himself to be personally ‘too big to fail’.
Also, he did have to be sued into actually completing the deal. In all likelihood, he didn’t actually want to buy Twitter when he started this, he just wanted to make them give him special treatment and ‘prove’ that all the accounts saying nasty things about him were actually bots. When none of that worked and Twitter had jumped through all the hoops he had forced them through in his ‘due diligence’, they weren’t going to let him back out without either making him actually complete the sale or at least making him pay them for all the time and effort spent on that hoop-jumping.
And as kome pointed out above, it’s more that Musk wanted to control what Twitter said about him because letting other people say mean things about him is the worst thing in the world. Free speech means consequence-free speech for him and to hell with everybody else, and if he had to own the platform to enforce that, then that’s what it would take.
The thing that’s going to do Twitter in is having so much of the company’s workforce axed. Last Thursday, it was reported that entire departments of the company have no staff. You can’t keep things running like that, especially since most of the senior software and hardware engineers were fired after Muskrat officially took over. There’s no longer the people there who know what to do when something goes wrong.
Musk has allowed MTG back too now :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-22/live-news-blog-the-loop-indonesia-earthquake-biden-turkey-latest/101681366
TYT has a video or plenty up on Musk’s Twitter vandalism and there does seem tobe anargument that he purchased it inorder to destroy it because he can. Ie this is deliberate sabotage by the boss.
Re: Raging Bee @ #18…
What I’ve read about Musk vs. Jones is that Musk’s first kid died of SIDS, so he has empathy for parents who have lost children and objects to the kids being used to advance someone else’s political agenda. Makes one wish that Musk had some empathy for people who have had personal tragedies in their lives that he hasn’t.
So Muskrat just fired Twitters head of sales. After he’d begged her not to resign. This is not the behavior of someone with a cunning plan, this is the behavior of an angry, entitled manbaby who doesn’t understand US labor laws.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-fired-twitter-head-sales-after-begging-stay-report-2022-11?fbclid=IwAR0_FVlEOZo9irJE2wGBsNgW47p104ox5Ima57FVMMTyl99tOYwdSsMzOK0
@ my 26. : Specifically TYT’s clip here Did Musk intentionally destroy Twitter & Elon Muks ego trip justgot even more embarassing plus most recently -indeed justan hour ago Desperate Musk begs Trump to rejoin Twitter among quite a few others by The Young Turks channel.
@18. Raging Bee : Musk has given a pretty firm “no” to reinstating Alex Jones isn’t so there is some limit :
https://www.axios.com/2022/11/20/elon-musk-alex-jones-twiter
Better source for MTG reinstatement here : https://www.axios.com/2022/11/21/marjorie-taylor-greene-twitter-reinstated
Plus a hopefully interesting article from ABC news here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-22/elon-musk-twitter-collapse-war-in-ukraine-social-media/101677932
@ raven : “Facebook could disappear and I would just assume the trash took itself out.” (#11.)
I would really miss Facebook and use it a lot for sharing news, memes, activism – notably local Refugee Vigil group, life stuff in general e.g. dog & cat photos, plant and local species stuff. There are good groups and people on it still. It certainly has its flaws and I know I’m in the minority among the Horde’s community here but fb is a big part of my life. For whatever little that may be worth.
& “Any website not moderated will be overrun and destroyed by trolls.
This is always true. I saw it with Usenet, AOL, Yahoo, Facebook, any newspaper article comment thread, and less well known websites.” (#8) – Emphasis added.
Actually Facebook is moderated at least by algorithims if not by many humans. One of its current problems is that fb moderation is pretty badly done, arbitrary and unfair with some users getting (temporarily usually) banned for things they wrote literally years ago and some nasty trolls seeming to go unpunshed. There are definitely issues with fb moderation and their reporting system which seems not only open to abuse but frequently abused but there is at least some moderation. I can’t speak for those other platforms (if that’s the word for them?) not having been on them much that I can recall and accept your verdicts there and in general re trolls always wrecking things without moderation. So just a minor nit on a point where we otherwise agree here.
PS. Just seen thsi :
https://proxy.freethought.online/atrivialknot/2022/11/21/ten-things-on-twitter-that-are-already-breaking/
From Siggy’s A Trivial Knot FTB blog here too.
I like the idea that’s going round that goes something like this: Musk has form for stock manipulation via his social media accounts. He only made the original $44B “offer” for Twitter to try to manipulate the price of the shares, so he could then sell the 9% of the company he already owned at a profit. Allegedly. Of course this plan backfired and he was forced into making the purchase anyway; now he’s burning the thing to the ground rather than admit failure.
To follow up kome’s comment at 20 the only reason I bothered to link my Google account to Twitter this year was to make it easier to view the accounts of some of the Japanese bands I’ve been listening to lately. Being an international platform Twitter allows foreign listeners to follow their activities a lot more easily than trying to puzzle through Japanese social media.
Can we we just change its name to “Shitter” and move on?
@5 “It was a people’s journalism platform,”
aaaand now I’ve just thrown up. Jesus H Christ on a bicycle, does Rupert Murdoch really own everything in Oz? US journalism has fallen pretty low, no mistake, we are far from the days of Lowell Bergman… but Twitter as a primary news source? This is hell and we are in it.
@10 “Chris Hayes may wonder how he can do his job without Twitter because he is, deep down, actually very bad at being a journalist. ”
Chris Hayes cosplays as a journalist. Hair spray killed a lot of brain cells that he might have otherwise wanted to keep around. Or not. If you can’t “do your job as a journalist” without Twitter, then you aren’t really a journalist. Boots on the ground, three sources or it isn’t real. And no, those three sources cannot be from Twitter.
Also, he isn’t all that deep.
@19 You mean MBS, who still has Khashoggi’s relatives hostage in Saudi Arabia and is pressuring Khashoggi’s relatives who are living outside SA or who otherwise escaped, to not prosecute or make waves? TFG? Color me shocked that he was instrumental in helping a fellow shitbird oligarch buy Twitter and burn it to the ground.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the-agonizing-decision-faced-by-prisoners-relatives-in-saudi-arabia-whether-to-speak-out/2019/04/29/0bb8faa4-5d4a-11e9-98d4-844088d135f2_story.html
To say nothing of the current US administration which is busy sucking up to MBS because oil.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/11/18/saudi-crown-prince-immunity-khashoggi-murder/
silvrhalide, huh.
So, I routinely check people’s claims — and this sometimes leads to people claiming I’m trolling if I find those claims… um, dubious.
Anyway. I check.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hayes#Journalism_career
Tell ya what — if he’s cosplaying, he’s fucking brilliant at it.
(I don’t think he’s a career cosplayer)
@36 Having a CV isn’t the same thing as having skills. Or a work ethic.
Lowell Bergman, Ted Koppel, David Brancaccio, Christiane Amanpour are all better journalists than Chris Hayes is or ever will be.
And this is what happens when you are a lazy journalist with no interest in actually working at your profession.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunge_speak
https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/11/8/16615842/grunge-new-york-times-slang
and this is what happens when sloppy lightweight journalism (make that “journalism”) becomes the norm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Glass
but real journalists actually do research and find out facts
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelnoer/2014/11/12/read-the-original-forbes-takedown-of-stephen-glass/?sh=5235feb1683a
which admittedly is not as quick, easy and cheap as doing “research” on Twitter.
The Boston Globe is one of the smaller “large” newspapers but they do stunning investigative work, on a shoestring budget.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/spotlight-50th-anniversary/
Chris Hayes’ show is invariably long on opinion and short on facts.
Nicholas Kristof is an opinion writer and a journalist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Kristof
His opinion pieces still managed to cram in more facts in a few paragraphs than you can find in the entire hour of Chris Hayes fluff.
“Tell ya what — if he’s cosplaying, he’s fucking brilliant at it.”
He might very well be a brilliant cosplayer.
That doesn’t make him a journalist.
silvrhalide:
Well, no. But it’s not just a CV, is it? It’s the record.
Again: Someone who can demonstrably cosplay a journalist for more than two decades and make a living at it must be a most excellent cosplayer.
I get that to you that seems so much more likely than that he actually is a journalist, since that would mean he doesn’t actually have to cosplay.
I mean, what’s less estimable: a brilliant cosplayer or a mediocre journalist? ;)
@38 “Again: Someone who can demonstrably cosplay a journalist for more than two decades and make a living at it must be a most excellent cosplayer.”
You seem to have confused longevity with actual skills and work in the field.
Bill O’Reilly was employed in broadcast TV from 1973 to 2017, mostly but not completely, on Faux News. Does that make him a journalist? He certainly portrayed himself as one and got paid as one. But the bulk of his broadcast work has been talk show/opinion, not actual news. Same as Chris Hayes.
But O’Reilly unquestionably cosplays one, given that, among other things, he claimed to have been broadcasting from the Falkland Islands when he was actually in Buenos Ares. (Hardly the first or last lie.)
Chris Hayes is the epitome of Malcom Gladwell’s “excellent sheep”.
silvrhalide,
Do I really? An interesting perception on your part.
Same process. <clickety-click> Same source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_O%27Reilly_(political_commentator)
So, no. It makes him a political commentator.
(But hey, in either case you’re welcome to edit Wikipedia to reflect your perceptions)
I do like your pomposity; almost as if you were unaware to what ‘epitome’ refers.
(Hint: you used the definite article there)
Now… <clickety-click> [Nice to be on the internet]
“This Excellent Sheep summary explains why even elite schools like Harvard are broken, and what students really must do in and after college.”
Well, I get the gist of your allusion. Very erudite of you.
(Do correct me if I’m wrong about that)
Thing is, you’re so very reluctant to even consider that he may be some sort of journalist of any sort (even a really shitty one) than to concede that maybe, just maybe, he could be a shitty journalist rather than a cosplayer.
(I notice that sort of stuff)
[To be clear; if you claimed a Chihuahua only pretended to be a dog and instead merely cosplayed one, I’d address you similarly]