Why do I use Twitter? When Donald Musk blasted him last year to leave the company, and why he wouldn’t take his hat seriously
An obvious question — one my kids ask me all the time — is why I use Twitter if I detest it so much. The easy part of the answer is that it’s useful for my job. It gives me a chance to quickly survey what many different people are saying, a tool for promoting my writing, and sometimes a vehicle for contacting sources. It was on Twitter that I learned that Musk had finally agreed, again, to buy Twitter. I’ll post the column there once it’s published.
“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 abullsh*t at a rally in July, Musk responded by writing that it was time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset.
Why Twitter shouldn’t be a free-for-all-hellscape, but rather a platform for advertisers to take over ad revenue
But more than professional utility ties me to the site. Twitter hooks people in much the same way slot machines do, with what experts call an “intermittent 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.
The author of a book about gambling machine design said that she didn’t know that they were creating a Skinner box. But that, she said, is essentially what they’ve built. It’s one reason people who should know better regularly self-destruct on the site — they can’t stay away.
In a letter posted to Twitter
(TWTR), Musk said he doesn’t want the platform to become a “free-for-all-hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences,” despite his stated promise to rethink on its content moderation policies and bolster “free speech.”
Yildirim said that, unlike Facebook, Twitter has not been good at targeting advertising to what users want to see. Musk’s message suggests he wants to fix that, she said.
Twitter’s Chief Customer Officer Sarah Personette responded to Musk’s Thursday tweet saying that she had a “great discussion” with Musk on Wednesday. “Our continued commitment to brand safety for advertisers remained unchanged,” Personette said. I am looking forward to the future.
Insider Intelligence principal analyst Jasmine Enberg said Musk has good reason to avoid a massive shakeup of Twitter’s ad business because Twitter’s revenues have taken a beating from the weakening economy, months of uncertainty surrounding Musk’s proposed takeover, changing consumer behaviors and the fact that “there’s no other revenue source waiting in the wings.”
Musk also reiterated in the letter a lofty earlier statement he had made that the Twitter acquisition is not meant to be a money-making venture for him.
The people wouldn’t say if all the paperwork for the deal, originally valued at $44 billion, had been signed or if the deal has closed. They said Musk fired the CEOs and CFO of the platform, and was in charge of it. Neither person wanted to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the deal.
The acquisition is going to have Musk extend his influence. The billionaire already owns, oversees or has significant stakes in companies developing cars, rockets, robots and satellite internet, as well as more experimental ventures such as brain implants. He controls a social media platform that helps hundreds of millions of people communicate and get their news.
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 Mercurial Musk-Agrawal Deal and the Higgs Boson’s Social Media Harassment of the Safety and Health of the Tesla Company
Delaware Chancery Court chancellor Kathaleen St. Judge McCormick gave the parties until 5 p.m. on Oct. 28 to close the deal or face a rescheduled trial.
But judging from other social-media platforms with loose restrictions on speech, a rise in extremism and misinformation could be bad business for a platform with mainstream appeal such as Twitter, says Piazza. “Those communities degenerate to the point to where they’re not really usable — they’re flooded by bots, pornography, objectionable material,” says Piazza. “People will gravitate to other platforms.”
“The long-term potential for Twitter, in my view, is an order of magnitude greater than its current value,” he said on Tesla’s earnings conference 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.
Musk privately clashed with Agrawal in April, immediately before deciding to make a bid for the company, according to text messages later revealed in court filings.
About the same time, he used Twitter to criticize Gadde, the company’s top lawyer. His tweets were followed by a wave of harassment of Gadde from other Twitter accounts. Racist and misogynistic attacks, along with calls for Musk to fire Gadde, were some of the harassment that an 11-year employee who also heads public policy and safety was subject to. On Thursday, after she was fired, the harassing tweets lit up once again.
Elon Musk is exiting Twitter HQ: a warning warning against the social-media elitism in the United States and the Democratic Republic of Congo
He added that there was a danger that social media would become far left wing and far right wing echo chambers, which would generate more hate and divide the society.
But it’s also a realization that having no content moderation is bad for business, putting Twitter at risk of losing advertisers and subscribers, she said.
“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.
But Musk has been signaling that the deal is going through. He strolled into the company’s San Francisco headquarters Wednesday carrying a porcelain sink, changed his Twitter profile to “Chief Twit,” and tweeted “Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!”
The New York Stock Exchange notified investors that it would suspend trading in the company’s shares before the opening bell on Friday because it was going private under Musk.
Musk’s idea to turn the building into a homeless shelter had been floated earlier, but his enthusiasm about visiting Twitter headquarters this week stood in stark contrast to it.
The Washington Post reported that Musk told prospective investors that he plans to eliminate three quarters of Twitter’s work force when he acquires the company. The newspaper cited documents and unnamed sources familiar with the deliberation.
Thursday’s note to advertisers shows a newfound emphasis on advertising revenue, especially a need for Twitter to provide more “relevant ads” — which typically means targeted ads that rely on collecting and analyzing users’ personal information.
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 is a consultant on issues pertaining to conflict and peace in the African Great Lakes region, who has trained in international law. He has already seen what a ‘free’ Twitter can do. For years he has tracked the social-media hate speech in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A lot of that inflammatory speech has gone undiscovered because the systems that platforms use to identify harmful content do not include languages in their screening tools.
Currently, Twitter uses a combination of automated and human curation to moderate the discussions on its platform, sometimes tagging questionable material with links to more credible information sources, and at other times banning a user for repeatedly violating its policies on harmful or offensive speech.
Normally, these platforms are where false narratives start, says Stringhini. The narratives on mainstream platforms explode once they make it onto them. “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. Thats 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.
What I Learned from Quitting Twitter During Elon Musk’s 12 Years with the NFL: A Reflection on Black Lives, Sports and Culture
Editor’s Note: Roxanne Jones, a founding editor of ESPN The Magazine and former vice president at ESPN, has been a producer, reporter and editor at the New York Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Jones is co-author of “Say it Loud: An Illustrated History of the Black Athlete.” She talks about politics, sports and culture on Philadelphia’s 900AM WURD. The views expressed here are solely hers. Check out the opinion on CNN.
That’s the message I got 30 seconds after I deleted Twitter on the day Elon Musk became the platform’s new owner. After a mostly dysfunctional 12-year relationship with Twitter that I admit brought some moments of joy, it was time to exercise my freedom of speech to say goodbye and good riddance.
It is unlikely that that act will change much in the 236 million users on the social network. But for me, quitting Twitter was an act of power and self-care. I was setting boundaries that I would not allow in my life.
I know as a media professional how important the stories we tell are to the world we live in, and that’s why it is an act of silent defiance.
Billy Dixon, who is a Black pastor, said he would save every racist tweets to prove the new internet was causing harm and violence to Black people. People only understand when they lose money.”
According to one cyber research organization, Network Contagion Research Institute, the use of the N-word jumped by nearly 500% on the platform a day after Musk, the self-declared “free speech” absolutist, took over.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/07/opinions/quitting-twitter-elon-musk-jones/index.html
What he tweeted about the Pelosi attack against his husband Paul on Twitter? I didn’t tweet about Musk, but I fought for change
Maybe he’ll even work on his own penchant to promote lies and conspiracy theories to his 114.5 million followers, as he did in a now-deleted tweet regarding the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, in the early hours of October 28 at their San Francisco home.
But don’t expect a great Twitter exodus — not in a world where everyone craves attention and adulation. Everyone, it seems, wants to be a virtual brand ambassador or an influencer.
Yet Black Twitter — the platform’s community of largely millions of Black users — has remained on the site. There are different reasons why you should stay in the face of disrespect and hatred. For some, it means keeping a job. Others may be convinced Twitter is the best way to attain global influence, or that it’s better to stay and fight for change from within.
One user wondered if anyone would take reports of racism seriously now that Musk owned the social media site.
In one particularly vile incident that spilled over into my personal life and became a matter of my family’s personal safety, authorities had to get involved. Never one to back down to bullies, I stayed on the platform and battled haters one tweet at a time for years.
I didn’t use my time at all. On and off the site, I was in beast mode because of the toxic attacks on the site. That’s what the Twitter-verse will do to you — make you angry and keep you distracted from the real work at hand.
Twitter will have you fighting anonymous bots meant to misinform the masses and real people who don’t have the courage or the intellect to challenge you in person.