Matt Levine writes: Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, and an active Twitter user. When he tweets, he gets a lot of spammy replies, many of which seem to be written by automated bots. He has complained about this a lot. Eventually he decided to do something about it. The thing that… Read More »
Grid reports: When Larry Ellison pledged $1 billion to back Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, Musk got more than just another investor: He also gained a powerful political ally, with ties to the MAGA right and a history of backing the “anti-conservative bias” movement. Behind the scenes, Oracle, which Ellison founded and oversees as chairman of… Read More »
Jeff Kosseff writes: In 1995, Eugene Volokh published a law review article in which he predicted that the rapidly growing internet would “dramatically reduce the costs of distributing speech” and that “the new media order that these technologies will bring will be much more democratic and diverse than the environment we see now.” The concept,… Read More »
Ezra Klein writes: A few weeks ago, I gave a lecture at a Presbyterian college in South Carolina, and asked some of the students where they liked to get their news. Almost every one said TikTok. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. And Chinese companies are vulnerable to the whims and the will… Read More »
The New York Times reports: Elon Musk has never been accused of dreaming small. He has reinvented at least two industries with Tesla, his electronic vehicle company, and SpaceX, the rocket company — and now his ambitions are carrying over to his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, has presented… Read More »
Quinta Jurecic writes: By now, the stories are familiar. Most, though not all, start on social media: a post on Facebook or Twitter identifies a name, and then the threats begin. Shortly after the 2020 presidential election, conspiracy theorists focused on a video of a voting-machine technician at work in Gwinnett County, Georgia. One Twitter… Read More »
The Wall Street Journal reports: Last year when Facebook blocked news in Australia in response to potential legislation making platforms pay publishers for content, it also took down the pages of Australian hospitals, emergency services and charities. It publicly called the resulting chaos “inadvertent.” Internally, the pre-emptive strike was hailed as a strategic masterstroke. Facebook… Read More »
Gizmodo reports: Several key [internal] documents [published by Gizmodo today] concern what Facebook calls “meaningful social interactions,” a term introduced by the company in Jan. 2018. This metric, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained at the time, was meant to help prioritize “personal connections’’ over an endless online dribble of viral news and videos. This “major… Read More »
Renée DiResta, Laura Edelson, Brendan Nyhan, Ethan Zuckerman write: Social media platforms are where billions of people around the world go to connect with others, get information and make sense of the world. These companies, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok and Reddit, collect vast amounts of data based on every interaction that takes place on… Read More »
Anand Giridharadas writes: It is a perfect marriage for an age of plutocracy: Twitter with its serious problems and Elon Musk, the embodiment of those problems. What happens when the incarnation of a problem buys the right to decide what the problem is and how to fix it? Twitter has a disinformation problem — fake… Read More »
Lauren Silva Laughlin and Gina Chon write: There are good reasons for him to get cold feet. The biggest is Tesla. The electric-vehicle maker’s stock has fallen around a fifth since Musk first revealed his stake in Twitter, partly because Musk may sell shares to fund his new adventure. If Tesla’s stock bounces back –… Read More »
David Leonhardt writes: Two years ago, the economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman published a statistic that you don’t normally see. It was the share of wealth owned by the richest 0.00001 percent of Americans. That tiny slice represented only 18 households, Saez and Zucman estimated. Each one had an average net worth of about… Read More »
The New York Times reports: The European Union reached a deal on Saturday on landmark legislation that would force Facebook, YouTube and other internet services to combat misinformation, disclose how their services amplify divisive content and stop targeting online ads based on a person’s ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. The law, called the Digital Services… Read More »
The Verge reports: Twitter levied a new ban today on “misleading” advertisements “that contradict the scientific consensus on climate change.” “We believe that climate denialism shouldn’t be monetized on Twitter, and that misrepresentative ads shouldn’t detract from important conversations about the climate crisis,” the company said in a blog post today. Its decisions about what’s… Read More »
HuffPost reports: Former President Barack Obama said Thursday that disinformation on social media is hurting democracy, and that social media companies should be subject to regulation. “One of the biggest reasons for democracy’s weakening is the profound change that’s taken place in how we communicate and consume information,” Obama said in a speech at Stanford… Read More »
Gizmodo reports: In the hours following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, employees at Facebook tasked with preventing “potential offline harm” found themselves under siege by a mob of a different sort. Reports of abusive content from users were flooding in. As one employee put it in an internal forum, many of the flagged… Read More »