The platform has more engagement than anyone has seen in years, and there is finally transparency around the moderation decisions. Twitter is also finally taking child exploitation seriously. The only negative was the haphazard release of Twitter Blue "verification," which felt chaotic and was turned off as a result pending relaunch, but was hardly a fiasco.
> The platform has more engagement than anyone has seen in years...
Yes, you get more photos of a train wreck than a routine train passing through town, too.
> Twitter is also finally taking child exploitation seriously.
There's no real evidence of this (in both that Twitter wasn't, and that Musk changed something). The tweet thread that put this talking point into play was immediately debunked in various spots, like the claim there was no CSAM reporting option when there had been for years.
Can you point me at the clear explanation for why Crimethinc was suspended?
Musk says that Ye was suspended for inciting violence. Does that mean anyone posting a swastika will be suspended? Since Musk says permanent suspensions are bad, does that mean Ye gets to come back at some point? If so, what are the conditions?
Twitter has stated that they’re relying more heavily on automation. Musk claimed he was going to open the algorithms. Are the automated abuse detection algorithms available for inspection? (Hopefully not, since that makes it easier to avoid them, but perhaps Musk should have considered that before making promises.)
> To those who aren’t aware yet, last week Twitter did add a direct reporting option for child sexual exploitation. (ONLY on tweets with content images/videos) this was not previously available and was a separate form that wasn’t easy to find. I’m grateful to see these changes.
> Bleu said following the meeting, they offered her a position on Twitter’s Trust and Safety Committee, but she declined because she refused to “work with or for abusers.”
Do you happen to have any links about Andrea Stoppa and Ghost Data? A Google search seems to find nothing but that story as evidence for their existence which seems a bit weird.
Ah, just noticed that the Daily Wire, bastion of accurate reporting they are, spelt the name wrong - it's "Andrea Stroppa" which returns more useful information and shows that Ghost Data have been around for a few years (although I'd note their reporting seems to be "here's a thing everyone knows presented as SHOCKING EVIDENCE!!! in a many page'd report".)
Nope. I just searched for a counterpoint. It's usually helpful before I swallow anything whole.
My basic point is -- it's too goddamned early to draw any conclusions about Twitter. We're going to find data for one thing or against it, because this just happened, in effective terms, and nothing has shaken out yet.
Yes, I am throwing out a counterbalance with somewhat less vitriol than the usual WARAHGHAGHGH Twitter is Dead! that appeared before the guy stepped foot in the place.
It isn't working. You're quoting someone who is part of a network of Tesla/Musk propaganda agents. Stroppa and Bleu are liars with agendas, one pretending to be a self funded researcher and the other a human trafficking advocate, and both are fielded by Musk's PR news site Teslarati to control a narrative.
"As shown by the infographic summarizing the results of our analysis, Elon Musk is one of the subjects with whom Stroppa interacts most on Twitter, retweeting, replying and quoting several times what, according to the annual Forbes ranking, is the man. richest in the world." | https://www.breakinglatest.news/health/andrea-stroppa-the-go...
Stroppa lied via Reuters months ago when he claimed he and 5 researchers spent two weeks and found only 500 CSAM accounts (those of us adjacent to CSAM research could find 50k in an accidental sneeze). He's being dishonest again in this story by intentionally citing action taken Twitter 2.0 when that action happened (and concluded) two days prior to Musk's takeover. His "reports" have been taken apart by actual CSAM investigators like Carolina Christfoletti (who actually flags his statements as "misinformation) and researchers across several universities.
Eliza Bleu is QANon disinfo agent, daughter of a MAGA Republican, and fundraising partner of Felecia Killings, a literal child rapist. She works with Mike Cernovich, one of the guys behind the Pizzagate conspiracy and the person responsible for getting James Gun fired. The time period she claimed she was trafficked, she was the well known girlfriend of Gerard Way and an American Idol contestant.
Their ruses work on everyone not in Infosec or OSINT who are familiar with their backgrounds because they say the right sounding words. So you buy it, the same way boomers watch CSI and think hacking the internet can be stopped by two people mashing keys or unplugging the power cord of a monitor. People read their bullshit and think they're actually involved in child exploitation research because they "sound" right.
> The platform has more engagement than anyone has seen in years
Yeah, but so does every dumpster fire, or car wreck. Everyone is looking at those.
> The only negative was the haphazard release of Twitter Blue "verification,"
I'm not even sure how to respond to this. He's been firing people left and right, and everything points to the overall system being about to collapse under it's own stress (because there isn't the staff to support it).
I would love if there was actual evidence provided for this claim and its actual effectiveness because this seems to be the sort of "think of the children!" claim that is emotionally very satisfying but ultimately rings hollow.
Why would you want to see the evidence of this? I believe the claim is still true, but it's one of the few claims I don't want to verify for myself. Maybe that makes it unpersuasive as an argument. It seems to be a more serious priority for the new regime over the old one.
Because if you're going to mark that as a measure of the new leadership's success the only way to judge that it is by having evidence that the claim matches the reality. Saying "the claim is about something I don't need verification that it's real" is a really strange stance to take. I'd argue that the most important claims are the ones that should require the best evidence.
Funny you should use that word, seeing how it has gotten more and more obvious that focusing on "engagement" is the reason why most social media is so awful.
Making a deal to pay 44 billion dollars for a 30 billion dollar company with no cancellation clause, and then spending 6 months desperately, and very loudly trying to back out of that deal is definitively a fiasco.
Whether or not his stewardship of it will turn a 30 billion dollar company into a... Much less valuable company... is, however, not a question that we can definitively answer - at this time.
How does the financial side translate at all into the user-experience side? Their relationship is tenuous at most.
Also, the macroeconomic conditions between April and July were entirely different. I can see why someone would go along with a bad deal in a world where interest rates are quite low, then get cold feet when interest rates spike up. Maybe that's not optimal deal-making, but it's hardly a "fiasco."
> How does the financial side translate at all into the user-experience side?
It doesn't, but I never said that I was talking about fiascos for the customers. Time will tell with Twitter on that subject.
That would be something alongside blatant lies like "FSD next year" and "Your tesla will taxi people around while you sleep", but if I pointed at that, someone would certainly come along, point at the Tesla stock price, and tell me that this is not actually a fiasco because he's the richest man in the world.
> I can see why someone would go along with a bad deal in a world where interest rates are quite low, then get cold feet when interest rates spike up.
I cannot see why they would go in to buy one of the sickest of the big tech firms, at a premium, in an economy built on funny money, with no escape hatch, and then proceed to piss on everyone within shouting distance when they get buyers' remorse.
Or rather, I can see why they would do that, but it doesn't reflect very well on them.
All that and with 50%+ less overhead. It being an unequivocal success is breaking people that have built their personality around hating someone and are desperate to see them fail.
I mean... FSD has rolled out to every vehicle in North America that bought the feature. It's definitely not perfect, but it's getting better every update. Yes the timelines have been much longer than Musk claimed, but you can watch tons of YouTube videos of the cars driving themselves. Failure seems to be less and less likely as time goes on.
But this time, it's not wait a few years for something to maybe happen, but wait a few years to see how Twitters numbers develop. If Twitter has a quarter of the market share in 2 years we can say that yes, Elon failed, but right now it's hard to judge.
Well if you're impatient like me you'll be happy to know that once they miss the first $1.5 billion interest payment they'll either default, or he'll have to sell off massive chunks of Tesla shares or stake in Spacex, potentially blowing up multiple companies in the process. So it might take a singular year or less to see how it goes.
As an end user what’s even changed? Seems the same to me.
Just Bluechecks and journalists angry that they’ll no longer be a special class of user on the site so they’re claiming it’s over and a disaster when really it hasn’t changed to the end user.
It's funny that the reaction to the twitter moderation team being reduced to still enormous was to move to Mastodon, with no moderation teams other than the guy who runs the node.
I think the big difference is on Mastodon, you have way finer-grained control over what content you are exposed to. Twitter is more like one giant global state, so if there is toxic content, it can leak to way more eyeballs that don't want to see it.