The Deal Does Not Mean to Hurry: Trump Has Come to an End, but it’s Time for Trump to Hang Up His Hat and sail into the Sunset
If the deal is finalized, Musk could take over the company within weeks. The company’s board and shareholders approved the deal, but uncertainties remain. Twitter will have to decide how to play ball with Musk, taking into account his prior waffling on the deal — a negotiation process that could come down to how to ensure the world’s richest man will actually cut a check this time.
“I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump; I think that was a mistake,” Musk said at a conference in May, pledging to reverse the ban were he to become the company’s owner.
But relations between the pair seem to have soured since, with the men publicly trading barbs over the summer. After Trump called Musk a “bullsh*t artist” at a rally in July, Musk responded by tweet, writing, “I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.”
The Skinner Box: A Place for Antisemitism, Hate, and Defection: A Commentary on the Twitter Deal between Parler and Musk
More than the professional utility ties me to the site. Slot machines have similar hooks, as experts say it’s anittent reinforcement schedule. Most of the time, it’s repetitive and uninteresting, but occasionally, at random intervals, some compelling nugget will appear. Unpredictable rewards, as the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner found with his research on rats and pigeons, are particularly good at generating compulsive behavior.
“I don’t know that Twitter engineers ever sat around and said, ‘We are creating a Skinner box,’” said Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist at New York University and author of a book about gambling machine design. That is essentially what they have built, she said. It’s one reason people who should know better regularly self-destruct on the site — they can’t stay away.
An associate professor at the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University has written about issues affecting women and social media. She was in charge of international affairs in the Treasury Department. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. You can give your opinion on CNN.
The conservative social media company Parler announced on Monday that it was going to be bought by the rapper and reality television star, who was banned from using the micro-publishing platform for antisemitic statements. A statement from Parler’s parent company announcing the deal described West, who has legally changed his name to Ye, as having taken “a groundbreaking move into the free speech media space” where “he will never have to fear being removed from social media again.”
In a release by Parler, West said that “in a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves.”
If West and Musk go through with their deals, these three social media platforms are likely to serve as ecosystems for conservative thought. It is likely that this will make the views of those on them more extreme, which could have a drastic effect on politics. That’s because when people who think similarly come together, they reaffirm and heighten one another’s initial beliefs.
Even so, Ndahinda expects that Musk’s pledges to reduce Twitter’s oversight of social-media posts would add to the momentum and influence of hate speech in the Great Lakes and beyond. A permissive culture will always have a positive effect on the trends. The increase in virulence in their hate speech will be encouraged by it.
When women become victims of online hate, they often “shut down their blogs, avoid websites they formerly frequented, take down social networking profiles, (and) refrain from engaging in online political commentary,” according to University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks.
In practice, what these so-called free speech policies really boil down to is an ugly form of censorship that scares away the voices of people who are attacked by users of these platforms.
Parler has been described as a place where conservative views can flourish by West and non conservatives will stay away from Truth Social due to it association with Trump. It could be left as a platform for conservatives if the women, people of color, and other people start leaving. This will likely make people even more passionate about their views.
How Far Right Are the Feasible Falsehoods Spreading, Why We Believe Them, and What Can They Mean? When Social Media and Politics Meet on Twitter
In his book “On Rumors: How Falsehoods spread, Why we Believe Them, and What Can”, Harvard University law professor, Cass Sunstein states that when like minded people get together, they often end up thinking more extreme versions of what they had thought before. Sunstein says that the exchanges increase their beliefs and make them more confident.
We can expect conservatives to get more far right when they connect on social media. And just as Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk-show hosts radically altered the political landscape in the 1990s in ways that laid the groundwork for Trump’s presidency, the far-right views nurtured on these social networks could have a huge impact on our country’s politics. It is difficult to imagine that the people who live on these sites could unite to vote for people with the same beliefs.
Even when they are sexist, misogynistic, racist or otherwise objectionable, we expect these male owners to use their platforms to amplify their own views.
“In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all, where you can choose your desired experience according to your preferences,” he said in the Thursday post. “Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise … Let us build something extraordinary together.”
Twitter’s Chief Customer Officer Sarah Personette responded to Musk’s Thursday tweet saying that she had a “great discussion” with Musk on Wednesday. Personette said the company’s commitment to brand safety remained unchanged. “Looking forward to the future!”
The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reported that one ad buying agency had already received requests from about a dozen clients to pause their advertisements on Twitter if Musk restores Trump’s account, and other were considering doing the same.
In his first big move earlier on Thursday, Musk tried to soothe leery Twitter advertisers saying that he is buying the platform to help humanity and doesn’t want it to become a “free-for-all hellscape.”
In a sharp response, Twitter’s lawyers wrote that Musk had been attempting to exit the deal and “now, on the eve of trial, Defendants declare they intend to close after all. They say, “we mean it this time.”
Musk has a mixed reputation in the technology industry despite his erratic history on the platform. He is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious and successful innovators and entrepreneurs of this era. But he has also courted controversy, often from his own Twitter profile, where he has more than 100 million followers.
Musk also pledged to “defeat the spam bots or die trying,” referring to the fake and scam accounts that are often especially active in the replies to his tweets and those of others with large followings on the platform.
The departures of Musk and Agrawal after he won’t discuss the stock price of the epoch of a new tech giant
The departures come just hours before a deadline set by a Delaware judge to finalize the deal on Friday. She threatened to schedule a trial if no agreement was reached.
“It’s likely that even a slight loosenment of the moderation of the content on the platform is going to spook advertisers, who are already suspicious of the brand safety feature on the platform compared with other social platforms,” Enberg said.
The long-term potential for Twitter is greater than its current value, according to him on the earnings call last week.
Although they came quickly, the major personnel moves had been widely expected and almost certainly are the first of many major changes the mercurial Tesla CEO will make.
According to text messages, Musk clashed with Agrawal immediately before he made a bid for the company.
He used the social networking site to criticize the company’s top lawyer. The harassment of Gadde was accompanied by another wave of harassment. For Gadde, an 11-year Twitter employee who also heads public policy and safety, the harassment included racist and misogynistic attacks, in addition to calls for Musk to fire her. The harassment continued on Thursday after she was fired.
A professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School said the note is a shift from Musk’s position, which was that Twitter violates free speech rights by blocking misinformation or graphic content.
She said that having no moderation is bad for business, and could lead to lost advertisers and subscribers.
“You do not want a place where consumers just simply are bombarded with things they do not want to hear about, and the platform takes no responsibility,” Yildirim said.
Twitter and Musk’s Plan to Discard a Shelter Object: Twitter’s Chief Twit, the Times of the Bell, Revisited
Musk has been saying that the deal is going through. He walked into the San Francisco headquarters carrying a porcelain sink and changed his name to “chief twit.”
And overnight the New York Stock Exchange notified investors that it will suspend trading in shares of Twitter before the opening bell Friday in anticipation of the company going private under Musk.
The building should be turned into a shelter for homeless people if it is not used by many of the employees who worked there, Musk had previously suggested.
The Washington Post reported last week that Musk told prospective investors that he plans to cut three quarters of Twitter’s 7,500 workers when he becomes owner of the company. The paper cited documents and people involved in the deliberations.
The new emphasis on revenue for advertisers is seen inThursday’s note to advertisers, which suggests that targeted advertisements rely on collecting and analyzing users’ personal information.
A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.
Inflationary Constraints from Central Bank Rate Rises: How Do Central Banks Have Been Overcoming the Fed Cycle?
When will central banks stop raising interest rates? That’s the multi-trillion dollar question that has Wall Street analysts wearing wrist braces from shaking their Magic 8 Balls so hard.
The next policy move of the Federal Reserve will be decided on Tuesday and Wednesday. Fed Chair Jerome Powell will address reporters directly after the decision is announced at 2 p.m. ET on Wednesday. On Thursday, the Bank of England will announce its rate decision.
“We think the market is too confident that 2023 will feature both an early Fed pause and a large increase in rates in Europe and the Antipodes,” wrote Goldman Sachs analysts in a recent note. “If the economy stays out of recession in the next few months, which we think is likely, this would raise the risk of a more gradual but extended Fed cycle into 2023.”
In order to temper rampant inflation and cool the economy, central bankers across the globe moved overnight borrowing rates higher. So far, the impact has been lackluster.
The Eurozone’s annual rate of inflation hit a record 9.9% in September, up from 9.1% in August. A flash estimate for October released Monday showed inflation accelerating to 10.7%.
Christine Lagarde said that the rise in inflation surprised policymakers. If retail energy prices stay the same in the future, that could push inflation even higher.
The US economy grew 2.6% last quarter, which is consistent with the fact that the economy hasn’t softened yet. The Federal Reserve prefers to measure inflation by personal consumption expenditures and they showed on Friday that America is still grappling with high prices. Europe continues to grow, too.
“It is unlikely that we have seen the full effects on households and businesses of the latest rate increases we have implemented, and it would not be appropriate to continue moving rates up until inflation is back down to 2 percent.” She said, “But it is also the case that based on Fed communications, financial conditions began to tighten well before our first rate increase in March and those effects have been passing through to the economy. It’s an indication that we need to increase rates further.
Because of a lag in data, central bankers aren’t sure if they’ve done enough yet. If they ease up on rate hikes too soon, they risk inflation becoming further entrenched in the global economy. If they over-correct, they risk sinking their countries into recession.
Wall Street tends to favor big events, while the future of central bank policy may be more nuanced. To butcher T.S. Elliot. The tightening will come to an end with a whimper.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/31/investing/premarket-trading-stocks/index.html
Twitter Criticism of Donald Trump’s Tweets about Covid-19 and Their Implications for the World Economic System and the Saudi-Arabian War
He has been making false claims about Covid-19, such as that a man who helped rescue kids from a cave in Thailand was a sexual predator. He has also tweeted a (since deleted) photo comparing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler and has compared the now-ousted Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to Joseph Stalin.
On Sunday, he gave credence to a conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi by tweeting a link to an article full of baseless claims. He kept on writing, but deleted the post and had 28,000 and 100,000 likes.
The United States and Saudi Arabia have one of the world’s most important relationships. It has been one of the most awkward lately, according to my colleague Matt Egan.
The officials in Washington were angry at the Saudi-led cuts in oil production, which caused pump prices to go up before the election.
US lawmakers are threatening steps that were unthinkable not long ago, including banning weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and unleashing the Justice Department to file a lawsuit against the country and other OPEC members for collusion.
If this decades-old relationship devolves into a full-blown break-up, there could be enormous consequences for the world economy, not to mention international security.
Melon Musk, Pelosi, Blue Checks, the Times, and the Information Landscape: A Comment on the Irresponsibility of the Media
Take Musk’s last 24 hours on the platform for example: The billionaire gave credence to a fringe conspiracy theory about the brutal attack on Paul Pelosi. Then, when media outlets reported on his irresponsible behavior, Musk assailed them. He trolled The New York Times and chastised The Guardian as a far left wing propaganda machine.
A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. There is a daily digest that covers the media landscape here.
In fact, not only has Musk himself contaminated the information environment he now reigns over, but he is apparently working to dismantle the little infrastructure erected to help users sift through the daily chaos. According to recent news reports, he is going to take away the blue verified badges of public figures if they don’t pay.
Charging for verified badges might appear at first glance as a business story. But the move will have significant ramifications on the information landscape. It will make it much harder for users to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic accounts.
The right has for years lashed out at “blue checks,” whom in their eyes represent elitist gatekeepers who control the conversation, even though many conservatives also don blue badges. Taking away the free blue checks will delight some conservatives.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/31/media/elon-musk-tweets-reliable-sources/index.html
The Impact of Section 230 Reform on Online Privacy and the Freedom of Speech: A Brief Account of Musk’s Perspective on Social Media, Cyberbullying, and Hacking
The best way to save social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email, and reduce hacking is to authenticating users, says WalterIsaacson, Musk’s biographer.
The concerns and concern-trolling around “cancel culture” and “illiberalism” have never been louder. Yet, at the same time, the freedom of speech — the actual civil liberty protected by the First Amendment, not just a theoretical Enlightenment value — is being gutted by legislatures and judges.
When lawmakers do take up serious issues around platform regulation, it’s often with the blatant ulterior motive of punishing “Big Tech” for perceived political misdeeds. Section 230 of the EARN IT Act was the subject of a debate in which some claimed that it was a gift to Facebook or any of the popular tech companies that reported child sexual abuse. Omnibus Section 230 reform bills are strange because they push sites to moderate more and less at the same time.
There are some proposed changes to the speech law that are upfront about their aims, like the New York Attorney General’s call to ban distributing live videos from mass shooting. Legal experts like Danielle Citron have also proposed fixing specific problems created by Section 230, like its de facto protections for small sites that solicit nonconsensual pornography or other illegal content. These approaches are honest attempts to address real legal tradeoffs despite their serious criticisms.
The publisher or speaker of any information that is provided by an interactive computer service will be someone other than the provider or user.
The law was passed in 1996, and courts have interpreted it expansively since then. It effectively means that web services — as well as newspapers, gossip blogs, listserv operators, and other parties — can’t be sued for hosting or reposting somebody else’s illegal speech. The law was passed after two defamation cases, but has been found to cover everything from harassment to gun sales. In addition, it means courts can dismiss most lawsuits over web platform moderation, particularly since there’s a second clause protecting the removal of “objectionable” content.
The thing is, these complaints get a big thing right: in an era of unprecedented mass communication, it’s easier than ever to hurt people with illegal and legal speech. But the issue is far bigger and more complicated than encouraging more people to sue Facebook — because, in fact, the legal system has become part of the problem.
But making false claims about pandemic science isn’t necessarily illegal, so repealing Section 230 wouldn’t suddenly make companies remove misinformation. There is a good reason why the First Amendment protects shaky scientific claims. Think of how constantly our early understanding of covid shifted — and now imagine researchers and news outlets getting sued for publishing good-faith assumptions that were later proven incorrect, like covid not being airborne.
Removing Section 230 protections is a sneaky way for politicians to get around the First Amendment. The cost of operating a social media website in the US would increase due to litigation if 230 were not in place. If they are not able to invoke a straightforward 230 defense, they could end up facing long lawsuits over legal content. When it comes to certain forms of speech that are riskier, web platforms would be willing to take down posts that might be illegal if they would have won the court case. All of that would burn a lot of time and money. It’s no wonder platform operators do what it takes to keep 230 alive. When politicians gripe, the platforms respond.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/23435358/first-amendment-free-speech-midterm-elections-courts-hypocrisy
Why Social Media Has a Bad Importance: How Democratic Legislators Blocked Section 230 and their First Circuit Courts Obtained Its Utmost Concern
It’s also not clear whether it matters. Sandy Hook families had to go through corporate bankruptcy when Jones declared it, as he tied up most of his money indefinitely. He treated the court proceedings contemptuously and used them to hawk dubious health supplements to his followers. Legal costs have hurt his finances, but the legal system has not been able to change his behavior. It provided another chance for him to declare himself a martyr.
This is the same year as the big defamation case in which Johnny Depp sued amber Heard for defamation because she identified herself as a victim of abuse. She lacked Jones’s social media prowess but was less cut-and-dried. The case turned into a ritual public humiliation of Heard — fueled partly by the incentives of social media but also by courts’ utter failure to respond to the way that things like livestreams contributed to the media circus. Defamation claims can meaningfully hurt people who have to maintain a reputation, while the worst offenders are already beyond shame.
Up until this point, I’ve almost exclusively addressed Democratic and bipartisan proposals to reform Section 230 because those at least have some shred of substance to them.
Republican-proposed speech reforms are ridiculous. We’ve learned just how bad over the past year, after Republican legislatures in Texas and Florida passed bills effectively banning social media moderation because Facebook and Twitter were using it to ban some posts from conservative politicians, among countless other pieces of content.
The bans should be rendered unconstitutional by the First Amendment. They are government speech regulations! But while an appeals court blocked Florida’s law, Texas’ Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals threw a wrench in the works with a bizarre surprise decision to uphold its law without explaining its reasoning. Ken White, a legal commentator, called that court’s opinion “the most angrily incoherent First Amendment decision I have ever read.”
The Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Texas law, but hasn’t been very reassuring about its recent statements on speech. It is almost certain that it will be heard by a court that includes Clarence Thomas, who has argued for years that the government should be able to treat all social networking sites as public utilities. (Leave aside that conservatives previously raged against the idea of treating ISPs like a public utility in order to regulate them; it will make your brain hurt.)
There were three justices, including Thomas, who voted against putting the law on hold. (Liberal Justice Elena Kagan did, too, but some have interpreted her vote as a protest against the “shadow docket” where the ruling happened.)
But only a useful idiot would support the laws in Texas and Florida on those grounds. The rules are rigged to penalize political figures at the expense of consistency. They attack “Big Tech” platforms for their power, conveniently ignoring the near-monopolies of other companies like internet service providers, who control the chokepoints letting anyone access those platforms. Disney was spared from speech laws because of how much it spent in Florida, then the movement proposed to destroy the system in order to penalize the company for being out of line.
And even as they rant about tech platform censorship, many of the same politicians are trying to effectively ban children from finding media that acknowledges the existence of trans, gay, or gender-nonconforming people. On top of that, a republican state delegate in Virginia used an obscenity law to stop Barnes & Noble from selling the graphic memoir Gender Queer and the novel A Court of Mist and Forrester, which is a young adult novel. A disingenuous panic over “grooming” doesn’t only affect LGBTQ Americans. The state of Texas is attempting to prevent violent insurrectionists by kicking off Facebook, but it is also suing the movie distributor for violating a law against child erotica.
There is a tradeoff here: if you read the First Amendment at its broadest potential reading, almost all software coding is speech, meaning software-based services cannot be regulated. An approach that has not always worked but still remains open for companies whose core services are speech and not software, is Section 230 which has been used to defend against claims of providing faulty goods and services.
The law is oversimplified. Internet platforms change us because they reward specific kinds of posts. But still, the internet is humanity at scale, crammed into spaces owned by a few powerful companies. Human beings at scale can be really ugly, it turns out. Vicious abuse can come from one person or it could be spread into a campaign of threats, lies, or terrorism involving thousands of different people, not becoming a viable legal case.
House of the Dragon at GadgetLab: What changes will come to Twitter in the era of Twitter? A report from WIRED at the Fermilab Tech Lab
On this week’s Gadget Lab, we talk with a WIRED reporter about changes coming to twitter, and how they may affect the future of the social network.
House of the Dragon is a show that’s great for men who want to father children. Mike recommends the new album from Natalia Lafourcade, De Todas las Flores. Lauren recommends reevaluating your relationship with Twitter, and social media in general.
Vittoria Elliott can be found on Twitter @telliotter. Lauren Goode is on a social networking site. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). The music is by Solar Keys.
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/gadget-lab-podcast-573/
Catching Ndahinda in the Wild: Tracking Hate Speech on Social Networks with the Gadget Lab and Spotify Apps
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When billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter and pledged that “the bird is freed” last week, Felix Ndahinda saw a threat rising on the horizon.
Ndahinda has trained in international law and works in Tilburg, Netherlands as a consultant on issues pertaining to conflict and peace in the African Great Lakes region. He already knew what a free account on the social networking site could do. For years, he has been tracking the social-media hate speech that swirls amid armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo1. Some of the speech shared in languages that aren’t built into the platforms’ screening tools has gone undetected.
At times, when there is too much discussion on the platform, or when there is too little evidence to back up what a user posts, a combination of automated and human moderation can be used.
How the company will proceed is still uncertain. Musk has met with civil-rights leaders to discuss his plan to put a moderation council in charge of creating policies on hate speech. Before a process could be set up for allowing them to do so, users who were banned before Musk took over would not have their ban lifted.
Explosions of Narratives on Social Media: How Terrorists Get Their Kicks and their Punishments On Twitter, Facebook and Twitter
Stringhini says these platforms are the most likely places to start false narratives. When those narratives creep onto mainstream platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, they explode. “They get pushed on Twitter and go out of control because everybody sees them and journalists cover them,” he says.
“When you have people that have some sort of public stature on social media using inflammatory speech — particularly speech that dehumanizes people — that’s where I get really scared,” says James Piazza, who studies terrorism at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. “That’s the situation where you can have more violence.”
Over the coming weeks, Stringhini expects that researchers will launch studies comparing Twitter before and after Musk’s takeover, and looking at changes in the spread of disinformation, which user accounts are suspended, and whether Twitter users quit the platform in protest at new policies. Tromble intends to monitor campaigns of coordinated harassment on Twitter.