Censorship: Twitter Takeover Totally Panics Political Regime of LeftLibDemSocMediaTechPol

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Tue Dec 20 21:29:17 PST 2022


Moving en masse to Distributed Uncensorable P2P
Social Media platform networks solves all this.


Twitter Files Point To Urgent Need For Platform Transparency

https://www.realclearwire.com/articles/2022/12/20/twitter_files_point_to_urgent_need_for_platform_transparency_148626.html

https://api.gdeltproject.org/api/v2/summary/summary?d=iatv&t=summary&k=%28%22twitter+files%22+OR+taibbi+OR+weiss%29&ts=custom&sdt=20221202000000&fs=station%3ABLOOMBERG&fs=station%3ACNBC&fs=station%3ACNN&fs=station%3AFBC&fs=station%3AFOXNEWS&fs=station%3AMSNBC&fdn=raw&svt=zoom&svts=zoom&swvt=zoom&ssc=yes&sshc=yes&swc=yes&stcl=yes&c=1

Hypocrite Jack Dorsey ass-covers and re-engineers himself to look good...
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1600469184755822597
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1602800290876588032

https://assets.realclear.com/files/2021/10/1892_leetaru-social-media-digital-censorship-and-the-future-of-democracy-working-paper.pdf

December has been a whirlwind month in the Twitterverse. A new
academic study argued that hate speech was surging on the platform,
while new company owner Elon Musk countered that such tweets were
being quietly hidden, so they didn’t count. High-profile journalists
were abruptly suspended and restored with little explanation, with
condemnations from the EU and UN. All the while, the so-called
“Twitter Files” allowed an unprecedented inside look at the messy and
controversial world of platform moderation. What can we learn from all
of this about the how the social platforms at the heart of our digital
democracies are run?

Twitter is unique among major social platforms in that outside
researchers can access a real-time data feed of every tweet ever sent.
This enables external audits of its content and is the means by which
researchers have been able to document a significant rise in hate
speech. But there’s a catch: Because Twitter does not make available
the number of views each tweet gets, it’s impossible to distinguish
between a tweet that received millions of views and one that was seen
by three people. This difference between production (sending a tweet)
and consumption (how many users see that tweet) lies at the heart of
the dispute over Twitter’s changes to its moderation practices.
Researchers claim hate speech is soaring because that is what they can
measure, while Musk claims those tweets aren’t being seen, based on
data that only Twitter itself possesses. If Twitter were to make such
viewership data available, it could both generate rich new revenue
streams and demonstrate to its critics that its visibility filtering
is as effective as it claims.

In one of the company’s most controversial moderation decisions since
Musk took ownership, Twitter suspended a group of journalists last
week, before restoring some of them just days later, leaving others
banished and suspending new ones. Musk’s explanation, delivered after
the fact with little specificity, was that he was only silencing
journalists who were engaged in “doxxing” behavior that put his own
family at risk.

This wasn’t necessarily true: Some of those suspended were merely
covering the controversy. But what was undeniably true was that only
days earlier, the legacy media had largely ignored the revelations of
the recent “Twitter Files.” The mainstream outlets that did cover it
were mostly dismissive, arguing that Twitter is a private company that
has the right to decide which voices to allow or disallow and does not
owe any explanation to conservatives banished in the past.

Yet when their own voices were suddenly silenced, the same mainstream
media condemned the idea that voices could be silenced “without
warning, process, or explanation” and denounced the “zero
communication from the company on why I was suspended or what terms I
violated.” Buzzfeed reporter Katie Notopoulos best summarized the
reactions in her comment to Musk himself: “It's highly unusual for a
journalist at The Washington Post and The Washington Times to have
their Twitter account suspended.”

In other words, Twitter is a private company that can silence whomever
it likes – until it comes for them. In this way, the “Twitter Files”
served as a kind of Rorschach test, as Musk likely knew it would.
Working with a hand-picked set of journalists, he granted access to
selected internal correspondence and data to offer a never-before-seen
glimpse into how Twitter has conducted some of its most controversial
moderation decisions.

The first release, on Dec. 2, offered more detail on the company’s
decision-making around suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story and
the degree to which partisan players with an interest in the outcome
influence how Twitter prioritizes content removals. While containing
no bombshell revelations, the tranche of internal emails nonetheless
documented the routineness of external influence in Twitter’s
enforcement. Yet the larger, unanswered question is what this
landscape of external takedown requests really looks like: Who is the
cast of characters that has access to this direct line into Twitter’s
removal teams? Releasing the entire archive of these requests would
enable journalists and scholars to form a more complete picture of
what was taking place.

The second release, on Dec. 8, focused on how Twitter quietly adjusts
the visibility of tweets, accounts, and even entire topics in
real-time to nudge its platform away from speech it views as allowable
but “harmful.” While this was seized on as a newly uncovered
revelation, the company has for years openly touted this “visibility
filtering” as a powerful tool for addressing speech it believes
detracts from its community. The real story is whether this filtering
has been applied more to some constituencies than others. If Twitter
were to release a master list of everything that has ever been subject
to visibility filtering over time, this would go a long way toward
answering this existential question. As a first step towards such
transparency, Twitter says it will soon alert users about whether they
themselves are subject to filtering.

The third, fourth, and fifth releases, Dec. 9-12, documented Twitter’s
banishment of Donald Trump in January 2021. While offering slightly
more detail on his removal, the emails largely match what had already
been widely reported.

The sixth release, on Dec. 12, focused on Twitter’s engagement with
law enforcement, specifically the FBI. Combined with earlier
revelations of government-requested visibility filtering, it revealed
the deference the company granted government agencies and select
outside organizations. While any Twitter user can report a tweet for
removal, officials at the platform provided more direct and expedited
channels for select organizations, raising obvious ethical questions
about the government’s non-public efforts at censorship. It also
captured the degree to which law enforcement requested information –
from the physical location of users to foreign influence – from social
platforms outside of formal court orders, raising important questions
of due process and accountability.

Despite this trove of internal documents raising profound questions
about the role of outside influence in platforms’ decisions, the
amount of media coverage the Twitter Files received was almost utterly
dependent on the partisan orientation of the media outlet itself. As
of Sunday, Fox News had mentioned them 943 times, compared to just 33
mentions on CNN and just 29 on MSNBC. In contrast, the 2021 “Facebook
Files,” in which internal communications and documents from the
company were released to the public by a whistleblower, garnered
global media coverage.

Besides ideological considerations, the biggest difference is that the
Facebook Files consisted of a vast tranche of internal documents that
were released under embargo to a wide array of mainstream news outlets
who could all review and report on them, contact sources for comment,
contextualize them, etc. Those documents were provided in their
entirety to newsrooms, enabling reporters to see their full context
and counteract claims of cherry-picked statements.

And Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey himself has called for all of the
underlying Twitter Files documents to be released to the public –
sidestepping why he is only now embracing the idea of moderation
transparency when these actions occurred under his watch. Releasing
the documents in full would address the emerging consensus in the
media world that might be best summarized as “Musk is baiting
mainstream media companies to cover a manufactured scandal about
something that happened years ago” with “cherry-picked so-called
evidence.”

In the end, the Twitter Files provide few revelations that were not
already widely known and reported on. That Twitter’s moderation
practices and external engagements are so surprising to the American
public offers a stark reminder of just how little the public
understands about the way social platforms work. In the end, however,
perhaps their greatest lesson is just how urgently we need
transparency into the inner workings of the social platforms that form
our modern digital public square.


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