After renaming and integrating Jack Dorsey’s business into an opaque and distinct partnership, Musk introduced a quixotic effort earlier this year at Twitter from a simple (albeit bloated) microblogging site to a kind of Swiss Army knife of virtual services. With attempts to integrate crypto payments, YouTube-like content, voice and video calls, long-form typing, and live streaming, Musk has attempted to create what he calls an “app for everything,” a platform that can combine an all-encompassing app. of the wishes and interests of the customers. In interviews, Musk compares this view to that of China’s WeChat, a ubiquitous super app used by more than a billion Chinese citizens.
For the most part, these changes have not gone over well. Recent reports show that the platform has lost as much as 13 per cent of its daily active users during the past year, and X is also thought to have lost billions (maybe tens of billions) in value—meaning it may now only be worth a fraction of what Elon originally paid for it. Many users have complained of a general degradation of feed and content quality, and Musk’s changes—many of which have been laughably bizarre—have rightfully suffered from a maelstrom of criticism.
While it’s easy to blame the billionaire’s efforts, it’s also worth noting that Twitter has never been a fun place to hang out and, I’d even say, rarely a company that has had a particularly positive effect on the platform. of Musk. Actually, Twitter didn’t want to be shitified, because it was still terrible. Of course, the platform may also be more boring now. But conversely, tweaks made through Musk have helped highlight the site’s inherent flaws rather than allowing them to hide and rot behind a veneer of respectability. . In that sense, Musk would possibly have done us all a favor without knowing it.
If you don’t understand me, it might be worth revisiting the platform’s unpleasant history, so you haven’t forgotten all of Twitter’s mistakes. Here’s a modest list of the platform’s sins against the internet.
Let’s start with the basics. I’ve never been a big fan of Twitter for one undeniable reason: I don’t like being on the platform. Overall, many studies show that I am not alone in this regard. We all know that social media does not generate maximum productivity in humanity and that, with a few minor exceptions, being chronically online is rarely very smart for intellectual health. However, aside from its miserable effect, I still can’t help but think that Twitter is actively turning other people into idiots. If you intend to be anything other than an attention-seeking jerk or an angry troll, Twitter’s incentive design is absolutely wrong. People have problems humiliating others, crucifying their enemies, and bragging about their accomplishments. Sure, there’s plenty of comedy and clever humor on Twitter, but it’s all inextricably connected to the platform’s genuine concern, which is self-promotion. As a country, we treat this platform as if it is one of the most optimized places for public discourse when, in reality, it is one of the worst. Media companies – and the journalism industry in particular – have built their entire business models around Twitter when, apart from internet traffic, it has no real positive effect on the final product.
It’s easy to forget that in the beginning, Twitter was not a well-loved platform. When it was first released, it was widely noted as a shallow position where other shallow people shared shallow thoughts. appeal. “Doesn’t it matter what I had for breakfast?” have become a common chorus among critics who felt the platform was a way for other people to tell others about the tedious highlights of their days.
Twitter largely retained this reputation until the Arab Spring, when – amid alleged widespread political organizing via the social network – it was suddenly hailed as a tool for “democratization. ” Soon after, Twitter executives began claiming that their platform wasn’t just a way to tell other people what you had for breakfast, but that it was a revolutionary product that could replace the world. This would give a voice to the voiceless and help marginalized communities spread their reporting to global audiences.
However, as the site gained a reputation as a bastion of relaxed American-style discourse, it was also plagued by a developing challenge: the expansion of inauthentic content. As early as 2010, researchers detected a serious challenge with robots in the company. The open-door policy allowed anyone to enter the site, create a profile, and start posting. As a result, virtual astroturfing emerged: the tendency for organizations to employ fake online interactions to give the impression that there is an active policy or product. – has exploded on the site. Soon, it became apparent that it can be incredibly tricky to distinguish between a genuine user and a Twitter bot.
This defiance has arguably become more pronounced after the 2016 U. S. presidential election, when Russia accused of exploiting U. S. social media to target Americans with disinformation. But the disinformation on Twitter didn’t start with Vladimir Putin. It didn’t stop me from getting there, either. The platform has for years been a cesspool of all kinds of influencer campaigns, which have wreaked havoc not only in the United States but around the world.
Some examples of polluting data on the platform are decidedly more disastrous than others. During the pandemic, for example, the wave of destructive data on the platform exploded to a frightening degree. In 2020, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University published a study stating that: Of some two hundred million tweets involving erroneous COVID-19 data, nearly a portion appeared to have been shared through fake or automated accounts. Another study from the same year showed that, among the major social media platforms, Twitter was the worst in terms of the overall spread of COVID misdata.
Twitter’s bot problem has always been a hotly debated topic. Prior to Musk’s takeover, Twitter executives frequently claimed that the percentage was likely “less than 5 per cent.” However, researchers have consistently guessed that the real number is much higher. Indeed, many claim that the rate could be as high as 15 to 20 per cent—which, if true, would mean that a whopping 50 million accounts may be fake or automated. Peiter Zatko, former head of Twitter’s security division, has testified that during his tenure with the platform, executives didn’t know how many bots existed and, worse, weren’t particularly interested in finding out. According to him, the company never bothered to create a reliable internal data management system that could quantify which accounts were real and which were fake. Zatko thus concluded that bot accounts were “part of the median user’s experience on the platform,” meaning they were everywhere.
In a whistleblower complaint he later filed with Congress, Zatko noted that Twitter’s leaders are actively hostile to identifying what’s genuine and what’s fake on the platform:
The company may not even provide a precise upper limit on the total number of spambots on the platform. The integrity team gave three reasons for failure: (1) they didn’t know how to measure; (2) they were defeated through constant fights and may simply not react to bots and other abuses of the platform; and, most worryingly, (3) senior managers had no preference for accurately measuring the prevalence of bot accounts, because, as Mudge later learned from some other sensitive source, they feared that if the express metrics were made public, they would damage the company’s symbol. and valuation.
Suffice it to say that it was never in Twitter’s commercial interest to actively verify to solve the misinformation challenge, and as a result, incorrect information flourished on the site. Of course, focusing too much on the scale of inauthentic activities ignores the fact. that beyond a certain point, length is no longer an issue in this context. Even if the number of fake accounts on Twitter is less than, say, 50 million, it doesn’t take a lot of bots to cause a lot of trouble. Even a few dozen automated accounts can generate a news story or specifically influence public opinion around a specific event. Other wealthy individuals and corporations have long understood this, which is why they have continually been glued to Twitter to artificially inflate the visibility of their brands or to shape the narrative surrounding them.
In 2018, a New York Times investigation into the use of fake accounts by celebrities showed examples of how the platform had been reshaped to become little more than a shadow PR service for the rich and famous. In 2019, a leaked video showed Howard Stern explaining to his staff. why they deserve to create fake Twitter profiles to draw attention to their show.
The challenge deserves to be obvious: for those who can, Twitter is an ideal vehicle for whitewashing online manipulations that can have real-world impacts: whether it’s clever PR for a lagging brand, a smear crusade against a competitor, or an attempt to game democratic politics.
It recently emerged that Twitter has obviously helped magnify U. S. propaganda efforts in the Middle East, the same region where the site once promised to allow “free speech” to flourish. The Intercept reported earlier this year that the company had in the past produced a special “whitelist” report, which — in at least one example — allowed the Pentagon’s PSYOP groups to function on the site unhindered through content moderators. While it’s unclear to what extent Twitter has allowed such activities to flourish on its site, the implications of the same whitelisting lifestyles should be clear: Twitter has never been an impartial arbiter of information. Instead, it remains a platform that can be seamlessly co-opted to spread rigged hoaxes.
Since Elon took over Twitter, he has carried out what many saw as an unsettling purge of the platform’s content moderation teams. But even though Musk has been (and will be) criticized for this, it’s worth noting that it’s not as if Twitter ever had a consistent or effective content moderation strategy. In fact, the platform’s pre-Musk efforts helped fuel national polarization and led to some of the worst cases of online radicalization.
At best, one could simply argue that Twitter has opportunistically moderated its activities in the past. For years, the platform actively resisted calls for broader moderation and did little to get rid of most problematic accounts. Indeed, those disappointed by Alex Jones’ return to the platform deserve to remember that Jack Dorsey allowed the conspiracy mogul to remain on the site for years and, in at least one case, defended the resolve to give Jones security. refuge when other sites were actively pushing it out. It was only during the Trump years that, amid the ongoing scandals, companies became decidedly more interested in regulating the flow of conversations on the site. However, even then, it only tended to neutralize users who had been involved in high-profile scandals and who commonly ignored entire ecosystems of other questionable content.
A clever example of this is the site’s resolution to remove the accounts of Qanon and other right-wing figures in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack, arguing that those accounts had dangerously inflamed a portion of the electorate. This resolution is somewhat ironic because, at the same time, the platform allowed Taliban members to maintain an active presence on the site. Similarly, supporters of the Islamic State (you know, the organization known for cutting off people’s heads?) continued to use the site during this same period. The Azov Battalion, a right-wing paramilitary organization affiliated with the Ukrainian Defense Forces and widely known for having neo-Nazi sympathies, was also allowed to continue publishing, despite its members’ propensity to express explicit hatred of homosexuals and blacks. Again, why?? Stupid right-wing influencers are canceled, but real terrorists and neo-Nazis are literally allowed to tweet. How does this make sense?
Musk’s leadership has been criticized for its permissive attitude toward some questionable conservative figures, to the point that it’s easy to say that Twitter before Musk also played a huge role in the Jan. 6 mess. In fact, while right-wing sites like Parler and First Place, Gab bore the brunt of the violent rampage of three years ago; More recent research seems to show that most major social sites, including Twitter, have been serious breeding grounds for the MAGA explosion.
Of course, it bears consideration that pretty much all of the big social media platforms are terrible at content moderation. I’m not arguing that Twitter is uniquely terrible in this respect, only that the difference between the site’s hapless attempts at moderation and Musk’s willful disengagement with it doesn’t appear to be all that meaningful in the grand scheme of things.
In the months leading up to Musk’s successful acquisition of the platform, Twitter was suffering from one of the worst cybersecurity scandals in history. The site’s former head of security, infamous hacker Peiter Zatko (aka “Mudge”), had exposed the security and privacy deficiencies within the company, revealing a tangle of misconduct, lies, and what can only be described as natural corporate laziness. The implications of Zatko’s claims transcended the platform’s undeniable security flaws and gave the impression of revealing institutional bugs in Twitter’s way of acting. business.
Twitter has never been smart when it comes to cybersecurity. In fact, since its inception, the company has suffered one data breach after another, many of which seemed completely avoidable. The platform’s security fiascos, which added up to a serious one in 2020, involving teenage hackers. hijacking the profiles of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, predated Musk’s takeover. But Mudge’s revelations last year revealed security flaws of another kind. The whistleblower’s disturbing allegations revealed a platform that, in addition to being the best vehicle for laundering propaganda and data operations, was also deeply vulnerable to a more complicated bureaucracy of malign influence: espionage.
According to Mudge, governments see Twitter as a powerful platform that can be leveraged to both spy on and control populations. “If you are not placing foreign agents inside Twitter — because it’s very difficult to detect them [and] it is very valuable to a foreign agent to be inside there — as a foreign intelligence company, you’re most likely not doing your job,” the former security executive said during his testimony to Congress last year. Indeed, Mudge’s report claims that, beginning in 2021, he became aware that Twitter had likely been “penetrated by foreign intelligence agencies and/or was complicit in threats to democratic governance.” Multiple spy scandals—including one involving operatives from Saudi Arabia—have shown that his suspicions were right.
In many ways, it seemed like Twitter was simply begging for this to happen. As any security professional will tell you, access is a vital component of a company’s cybersecurity. Being able to figure out who sees what is a key component to maintaining a business. sure. On Twitter, it turns out that no one won this memo. A surprising number of the platform’s workers had free access not only to the site’s user data, but also to its engineering environment.
In fact, according to Mudge’s complaint, “approximately half” of Twitter’s more than 10,000 workers had access to “sensitive live production formulas and user data. “the production environment of the site. In other words, any engineer in the company can simply make software tweaks to the platform and there will be no record of what happened or who did it, according to Mudge. It’s like a bank publishing access codes. for its high-value vaults on the lobby wall and inviting workers to wander around and do what they need inside.
If Mudge’s claims are anything to be overlooked, it’s evident that this has left the user’s knowledge to the vagaries of an incredibly vulnerable security environment. According to Mudge’s complaint, Twitter workers were. . .
…repeatedly found to be intentionally installing spyware on their work computers at the request of external organisations. Twitter learned of this several times only by accident, or because of employee self-reporting. In other words, in addition to a large portion of the employee computers having software updates disabled, system firewalls turned off, and remote desktop enabled for non-approved purposes, it was repeatedly demonstrated that until leadership would stumble across end-point (employee computer) problems, external people or organisations had more awareness of activity on some Twitter employee computers than Twitter itself had.
Overall, the Mudge affair seemed to reveal grim realities about Twitter: namely, that in addition to being a money-driven platform capable of impacting political and cultural conversations in the United States and elsewhere, it was dangerously insecure. Far from being a platform that can barely end censorship and state control, it appears to be a much larger vehicle for the deployment of government censorship, propaganda, and surveillance.
In this author’s opinion, saying that Twitter is worse off now is a bit like saying that a paper bag full of dog poop is worse off after being set on fire. Yes, of course it’s worse, but at first it wasn’t wonderful.
Long before Musk took over, the kindest assessment of the platform was that it was a fun position to read about the news and watch memes. I admit that the experience of being on X/Twitter, especially as a journalist, can be exhilarating. Addicts, the onslaught of data the site is able to pump into your brain is probably the closest thing our demographic has to taking a puff from a crack pipe. That said, a more sober assessment of the pre-Musk era might be that, at least at worst, Twitter was a dangerously insecure and poorly controlled platform, which seemed structurally designed to spread misinformation and propaganda. While it has repositioned the speed at which data can be transmitted to a global audience, this convenience would arguably not compensate for the multitude of risks. that the site has also brought to the web.
One thing that Musk’s flailing reforms have done is to relieve Twitter of the reputation of being a reputable site—which is something it probably never deserved in the first place. Indeed, it bears some consideration that while X has lost a substantial amount of money over the past year and is suffering mightily as a brand, it doesn’t seem that much different than its predecessor. What has changed is the public perception of the platform. When the verification fiascos of Musk’s early days were happening, I couldn’t help but laugh. It seemed like the pretence of seriousness around the site was evaporating, allowing Twitter to be revealed for what it always was: a fictional place, guided by arbitrary rules, that is mostly filled with bullshit.
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