(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Elon Musk's Twitter is still making changes that weaken democracy and boost propaganda [1]

['Daily Kos Staff', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']

Date: 2023-04-10

A year ago, pre-Musk Twitter responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by altering its algorithms so that Russian government and state media accounts on the site would be delisted in search results and “For You” recommendations of accounts to follow; plainly, the Russian government was using Twitter to boost wartime disinformation about its invasion and cloud reporting on what would soon become an unending series of Russian war crimes.

We don’t expect much out of our glorious capitalist overlords at this point, but even the most craven of companies would draw the line at boosting Russian war disinformation during an active and bloody conflict. It wasn’t a hard call to make. For them.

For Elon, though? Nope. Under Elon, the restrictions against Russia’s government and propaganda accounts have quietly been lifted. The Telegraph reports that as of last week, “Russian government tweets appeared in Twitter’s algorithmically-driven ‘For You’ feed for a newly created account, even when it did not follow them.” Russian propaganda is back, baby.

Twitter also has reportedly removed restrictions from Russian and Chinese state-run media accounts—even as Musk’s site slaps new, utterly false “state-affiliated” and “government funded” labels on American media nonprofit NPR and sneeringly removes the “verified” account status of one of Musk’s favorite media enemies, The New York Times.

While Russian government accounts are now being recommended to new Twitter users, programmers digging through Twitter source code have discovered that Twitter Spaces that refer to Ukraine are systemically downranked so as to be less visible. What problem that is intended to solve is, ahem, unknown.

It’s tempting to blame all of these little tics of Elon’s Twitter on Musk-enforced incompetence, and there’s certainly something to that. If algorithms meant to monitor and report on paid political spending aren’t catching tweets that overtly include links to top fundraising sites, it suggests that whatever Twitter claims to be doing to monitor such advertising, it’s not putting much time into the effort. Musk’s eagerness to throw up his hands at disinformation and proclaim that that’s just how Twitter will be run now may be ideological, in theory, but after Musk’s mass firings of the vast majority of Twitter’s workforce, there’s simply not enough people to moderate the site content to begin with.

Of course disinformation is running rampant on Twitter. Musk’s fired all but a scant few of the employees who were supposed to be combating it, and those who are left are instead sent on assorted quests from the boss that include “rewrite the algorithm so that I, personally, get more views” and “put this new label on a media organization that has offended me.” These are probably frantic days for anyone with the misfortune to be still employed there.

But Musk’s enforced incompetence only goes in one direction. He bleats plenty about the supposed censorship of the “alt-right” accounts he spends so much time courting, but sends Twitter engineers off on banning sprees when those same alt-right accounts give him a list of anti-fascism journalists and watchdogs that they consider to be enemies. It presumably takes extra work to remove Russian propaganda accounts from Twitter’s lists of dangerous state-sponsored disinformation peddlers; it certainly takes extra work for engineers to target NPR and The New York Times on Musk’s orders.

There’s simply no question that Musk is redesigning Twitter as a disinformation outlet that caters to his own narrow ideological niche, which flits between pot-smoking libertarianism and neo-Nazi conspiracy theories. But he’s also doing it so crudely that he may not even get a site stable enough to accomplish that.

And advertisers, in the meantime, aren’t going to come flocking to a site where brand spoofing is rampant, dangerous hoaxes abound, and site ownership is infamous for retaliating against companies, reporters, and everyday people who the boss wakes up with a grudge against on any random Tuesday.

Watching Musk’s site burn to the ground will remain a good source of entertainment for a while yet, but don’t count on it existing a year from now. Eventually, Elon will realize that he’s still not getting the adoration he was hoping for and will either stop paying the company’s bills or just light the office on fire as a publicity stunt.

RELATED STORIES:

Elon Musk's pathetic Twitter tantrum against NPR shows no signs of stopping

Billionaire whiner Elon Musk might regret starting a fight over who's 'state-affiliated'

Twitter pulls verification check mark from main New York Times account

At the same time Musk opens doors to far-right trolls and conspiracists, leftist accounts suspended

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/10/2163134/-Elon-Musk-s-Twitter-is-still-making-changes-that-weaken-democracy-and-boost-propaganda

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.