OT: Is Twitter now blocked for those who don't have an account?
- Thread starter DJ Spanky
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The US government's real interest in social media moderation has largely to do with sophisticated disinformation tracked back to fake accounts in China and Russia, along with some less sophisticated attacks by other nations not on the friendliest term with the US. That all started well before the Trump admin, but increased greatly during the Trump admin in the midst of the pandemic. And it's continued to increase under the Biden admin.
When you have a nation full of rabidly partisan people who already deeply distrust those news organizations that report stuff contrary to their viewpoints, that nation is a target rich environment for spreading viral disinformation about censorship and all manner of paranoia-exacerbating material. Virtually nobody reads a social media post that comports closely with their ideological beliefs and then distrusts it and goes out of their way to try and determine origins and veracity of the "information" in that post. They just accept it at face value. Twitter is the perfect disinformation machine.
Social media platforms have various techniques to determine when an account is fake and exists solely to start viral disinformation campaigns. Problem is, with sophisticated attacks, it can take a while to sniff out the fakes and take corrective action. Once the platform detects it, they delete the account and often some degree of the reposts of that fake account's original posts. But by then, the "story" has gone viral and done its damage.
And this is where so many people form their claims of censorship, trimming back regular people's reposts of stuff they already believed in so fervently is widely perceived as censorship. When in fact it's merely eliminating downstream reposted fake material 100% known to have originated in a fake accounts somewhere in Russia or China or North Korea, etc.
This is a broadly bipartisan problem, has zero to do with "censorship" and everything to do w/addressing foreign disinformation campaigns against American citizens. It's a national security issue.
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram all have only one agenda. To sell as many ads as possible for the most money.
The idea that there are people working at these companies who sit and cherry pick posts to censor is laughably ignorant of the scale of the data managed by the various platforms. If every single human who worked for those companies spent 24 hours a day 7 days a week, they couldn't come anywhere near possibly reading and evaluating even the tiniest fraction of a fraction of a fraction of all the posts. They simply can't address enough to create enough influence to intentionally push some political/ideological agenda.
And people who say they can manipulate their algorithms to "have an agenda" are way out of their depth with respect to the technology in question. Put simply, such a thing is vastly more difficult than people imagine. If they tried, it would blow up in their faces.
They sell ads and that's the only agenda.
He's known to lie about stuff like that. I used to trust him but he's been caught lying too often to trust him anymore. I wish he'd establish good management at his companies, retire and focus the rest of his life enjoying his wealth and spreading it around to people who who need it the most.
I can't think of anything more rewarding than that for someone with his intelligence and wealth. He will never be as happy doing anything else as he'd be doing that.
When it's a national security issue it should be stopped. When its a company stopping opinions or censoring stuff the US government doesn't want its citizens discussing or goes against the governments narrative, then its censorship. And lots of evidence out there showing this. Take a moment and read the Twitter files.
Musk bought into a massive psyop unawares.
Now he knows the true scope of twitter abuse and threw a wrench into the gears.
Limits are not about monetization
Twitter's global reach is fast and far, so its used to tune-up the AI algorithms that are being set-up for control.
Musk knows all this.
In Musk's tweets about new twitter limits he references the insights from a guy named Mike Benz.
Mike Benz is a former State Department diplomat who oversaw the Economic Bureau's Information Technology & International Communications division. Benz is sharp as a tack and knows exactly what's going on.
Now he knows the true scope of twitter abuse and threw a wrench into the gears.
Limits are not about monetization
Twitter's global reach is fast and far, so its used to tune-up the AI algorithms that are being set-up for control.
Musk knows all this.
In Musk's tweets about new twitter limits he references the insights from a guy named Mike Benz.
Mike Benz is a former State Department diplomat who oversaw the Economic Bureau's Information Technology & International Communications division. Benz is sharp as a tack and knows exactly what's going on.
Former State Dept Official: “Elon Musk has no idea the DARPA rattlesnake he stepped on by doing this”…
There are roughly 500 million tweets per day. 200 billion tweets per year.
To prove there's a censorship problem at twitter, you need to produce a stat telling us how many tweets were censored. Nobody knows that, and it's impossible to prove. But for the sake of argument, let's go with one million censored tweets last year.
One million tweets would represent 0.0005% of all tweets made that year. 99.9995% would have been uncensored. Do you really want to try to claim that shows a serious and significant problem? I sure wouldn't.
Pick your favorite purportedly censored tweet. There will be at least thousands, if not millions or hundreds of millions of similar tweets on the exact same subject that made it through. Yet somehow, the dozen you know about are significant evidence?
C'mon now. Everybody who thinks there's a bias problem at twitter now or in the past has bought into a ridiculous false narrative so trivially easy to disprove mathematically that it's laughable (thus my LOL earlier).
The "twitter files" are a very carefully curated subset of internal correspondence produced on Musk's order to make a point Musk wanted made. In the absence of all internal communications, it's useless as evidence and is itself likely disinformation.
And even if we for some reason forfeit healthy skepticism and just believed them to not be a heavily biased sampling, there is widespread disagreement that what was released proved institutional bias or problematic at all. In other words, the meaning of what was released is entirely subjective. So... worthless.
Here's the source for the stats:
Gee, you must have missed the reporting a few months ago where a whole bunch of those "Russian" fake accounts in fact turned out to be those of American citizens
Not sure what your point is. All social media platforms make filtering mistakes all the time. That's not news, and not evidence of a bias. Of course mistakes occur - that hardly means numerous fake accounts aren't created from IP addresses inside Russia.
Due to the numbers, and the inherent complexities, and the sophistication of some bad actors in question, filtering is a truly massive data processing problem for social media. There will continue to be plenty of mistakes until the relevant technologies improve quite a bit.
Decentralized platforms (e.g. Bluesky's) that seek to apply lessons learned might have some advantages over established platforms. But until they achieve the same scale of data, it is a much easier thing to deal with and nothing's been proven.
This post is full of crap and disinformation and there are receipts to prove your wring about censorship arbout covid and political matters'as'well as social issues
You said the same thing about the deep state, memo boy. How’d that work out for you?
Oh wait, I know how it worked out. 2,355 days without a single arrest, indictment or conviction.
I forgot more in the last two minutes about this subject than you could possibly learn in 10 lifetimes. But I’m sure you have some subjective anecdotes that represent “research“ to you.
The problem with this theory is he references an AI-based “Censorship Death Star” as though it’s a centralized thing controlled by the government and a censorship industry….then goes on to ramble about university researchers and says they are really working as operatives of this same industry.
But if there are both public and private universities all around the country with research departments creating AI-based systems to scrape Twitter and internet content in order to feed their data models….isn’t that the very definition of a de-centralized system?
These theories always fail to understand how technology works or the epic competition built into our system.
They conflate Gov’t agencies, Non Profits, Publishers and Private enterprises and act as though they are working together when nothing could be further from the truth.
He got it right when he said Elon is just cynically trying to make money.
Elon is just trying to create the walled garden, app strategy and pay-to-use model while at the same time Meta is introducing a competitive product that will NOT be a walled garden.
It’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic except it’s not the boat that’s sinking, but our nation’s economy and system of education.
All the while, the owners pretend to be maverick innovators from the safety of shore and set up MMA PR fights/play dates.
And they wonder why their mommy’s aren’t more proud of them.
No they have myriad different business models. Recall Cambridge analytica - selling data and API access is good for biz.
My takes are rooted in both hatred and facts.
You might be willfully ignorant of Musk, his companies and how free speech, journalism, publishers, media industry, ad tech, data mining and privacy work, but I’m not.
I’m certainly not afraid of the concept of free speech.
But we should all be afraid of powerful men whenever they claim to be arbiters of “truth marketplaces” but their moral compass and their power solely revolves around money.
Musk and Trump are similar in this regard.
Willfully ignorant- nope. Whiff for you.
You spewed plenty of hatred, but no facts. Another whiff.
For the record, I am indifferent on Musk. I couldn't care what happens to him or his businesses. All I know is that a lot of wacky stuff was uncovered in the Twitter files by independent journalists. Stuff that should concern anyone who likes free speech. But when people get their narratives from MSM, CNN, NYT, etc, they get brainwashed with a different narrative.
I'll put what I said another way then, growing subscribers and luring more eyeballs is the primary goal of the social media giants. That in turn drives ad revenue and also provides the data they can gather, bundle and sell to aggregators and whomever else is interested.
The point is that fostering or even permitting widespread institutional political bias in moderation or filtering would alienate large numbers of current or potential users which runs counter to any social media business model. Makes no sense.
Ironically, that could theoretically all change if enough viable competitors to twitter and FB surface. Because, in that case much like as happened with cable news, it's not hard to see political leans emerge and eventually take over. Then, like the cable news networks have found, having a rabidly partisan user base might wind up being the best way to maintain a healthy "inventory" of users.
But for now, it's not a thing despite the politically obsessed delightedly hallucinating about it.
How convenient for you to not have an opinion of Musk.
How’s this for his commitment to independent Journalism & facts?
I'm much less concerned about Trump or Musk than I am about their respective cult-like worshipers. There's a very strange social behavior taking place, first with Trump, and now with Musk, that is eerily similar to what took place in Germany pre-WWII.
It's a strangely unhealthy behavioral disorder on a large scale. I'm not really sure what either public figure should or could do about it (other than just taking themselves out of the limelight).
Wow the TDS must be going strong again. Some people are just filled with hate sadly. They honestly need mental help.
I don't know what point you are trying to prove, but you are doing a lousy job.
I wasn't aware of the dust up between Taibbi and Musk. I like Taibbi's work as an independent journalist. He is a little volatile and has some weird stuff in his history, but so does Musk, and that does not really matter to me, as most of it has been small potatoes.
Taibbi tweets multiple times per day, so whatever happened at that point in time seems to be in the past. You can read all about it in the link below, and come back with twenty gotchas if you want to, but frankly, this is tiresome and not interesting at all.
There is harm, but there is none so blind that they refuse to seeWhat harm?
people believing some of the BS put on it and that trash allowed to stay up
Twitter is used to spread misinformation and false rumors, often unintentionally because of the person believing what they seen on twitter and spreading it on other social media sites.
Let the buyer beware applies, but some buyers don't care about anything except the agenda they want to be the rule.
You might think it's the best thing since sliced bread, but refuse to see the mold growing between slices.
As it turns out, Elon hasn't paid his AWS bill. They throttled the site's URLs, as is SOP for customers who are in arrears.
He also owes Google hundreds of millions of dollars, so they've been in the process of shutting down access to some internal Twitter dev platforms & tools.
I remain mystified as to how "I'm just not going to pay the bills" is interpreted by some as "brilliant financial strategy".
He also owes Google hundreds of millions of dollars, so they've been in the process of shutting down access to some internal Twitter dev platforms & tools.
I remain mystified as to how "I'm just not going to pay the bills" is interpreted by some as "brilliant financial strategy".
Save the characterizations of me, pal. I have no agenda. Unlike the mass of puppets who believe the narrative spewed by "news" organization, some of us are smart enough to discern data and statistics to figure out when we are being told lies. Many people are quite aware of the use of Twitter to spread misinformation. Exhibit A- the former CDC Director, and good riddance to her:
negotiating payment for less, the old if you take less now and I'll pay on time from here on out..
Getting part of what is owed now and keeping a customer, seems to be the idea
Most of the problem is the New Media business model.
More and more all of the online outlets - including the majors with presence on television - have abandoned career journalists in favor of glorified bloggers as they look to cut costs. The net result is that nobody is asking relevant questions.
I didn't actually hear the Walensky quote in real time - i.e. absent all of the editing that invariably happens as one side looks to spin a remark to fit their narrative - but if it's accurate, it's absurd enough that someone in the room should have immediately pressed for clarification.
The simple fact is that no one in the industry could have made that claim. In the 2 years that I spent in J&J's clinical trial it was repeatedly made clear that vaccinated patients a) could get Covid and b) could infect others.
The advantage of vaccines, in a very practical sense, has always been "reduce virulence so as to reduce severe illness and death".
So she's an idiot and said a stupid thing. But this MAGA appropriation of stupid things as a means to claim some sinister plot or intentional misleading of the public... It's logically inexplicable. It's pandering to the lowest common denominator for the sake of some votes and that sort of behavior is despicable, regardless of who's doing it.
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