Submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
“Yeah, they’re gone”: Musk confirms cuts to X’s election integrity team — “‘Election Integrity’ Team… was undermining election integrity,” Musk writes::“‘Election Integrity’ Team… was undermining election integrity,” Musk writes.
Incredible. He bought Twitter just to turn it into Truth Social.
That’s been apparent since about a month or two after the same was final. One of the very first things he did was invite Trump back
It should have been obvious before the deal even went through. The regulator position on that was fucked, focusing on “you made an offer, can’t back out now!” instead of how bad it would be for a billionaire to take Twitter private.
conservative doesn’t like being treated like an equal, decides to abolish the group that produced evidence suggesting equality
Sounds about right
Aside from conservatives, what fascist dipshits still use Twitter? It’s just a cesspool of disinformation and bigotry, so I just assume anyone who uses it is a lying bigot.
Most businesses and institutions still use twitter as their primary communication and support channels. My “wokest” friend still uses it every day, while constantly bitching about Elon. Convenience and habit are a hell of a drug…
I walked past an ambulance the other day and noticed that my city’s ambulances have the little bird logo along with the local EMS twitter handle (I live somewhere with publicly funded healthcare). I found myself wondering, “are they going to switch their fleet to use the X logo?” It’s funny how much we allowed this private company’s little bird logo to worm its way into every aspect of our world. People took for granted that it would always exist and always be something people had a positive association with.
I’ve heard about this bizarre behavior. I have decided to not cut slack to users.
It is inappropriate to conduct business with bigots and fascists. It is perfectly reasonable for me to label those who use fascist-owned platforms as fascists.
My wife used it because she has s community of friends she has made there and knows in real life. The same way we both still use Facebook.
Convenience and habit are a hell of a drug…
Twitter, Reddit, World of Warcraft, etc., etc.
If people could just put in the minimal amount of effort to affect positive change, the World would be such a different place.
And that’s why conservatives are violent, both physically and rhetorically: what are you ever gonna do about it?
Unfortunately, there are still functions that Twitter serves that nothing else does. For breaking news, it’s still unmatched. For celebrities, influencers, politicians, journalists, etc there’s no other platform that has the same microblogging function with the user numbers and clout that Twitter does.
Until that changes, its still useful. It gets less and less useful, but as long as the site is up, allows users to post up to the minute updates and allows users to follow posters, there’s only so far it can fall without real competition.
For breaking news,
Which you really don’t actually need. Nobody needs to know whatever bullshit is happening across the planet in .5 nanoseconds.
Iirc Amber Alerts ( not the ones notifying Amber Heard’s coming to town ) are issued over Twitter. There were cases of people not being able to check, because now a login is required?
I never used Twitter. Here in Germany it has never gotten so far, that it would be the only place you would get some of the important government announcements that can save lives.
Seriously though,what has really changed? It’s always been a cesspool
Funny that the worse the Republicans are doing the more some people want to take the filters off of social media.
Right Wingers have always gotten preferential treatment and soft touch moderation on social media, because…
Their user base is fucking morons who click every ad, and buy tons of stupid shit (specially if it has their team name on it) bringing in disproportionate income
They know the bulk of their moderation problems are from Right wingers, and don’t want to look biased and drive them away by holding them to the same standard they hold everyone else, So they just let the right wingers get away with shit that would get cracked down and account bans handed out for anyone else.
The commercial platforms had a dilemma: They had existing policies against hate speech and incitement of violence. They wanted to seem at least mostly neutral on matters of partisan politics. And then one of the major parties started doing a lot of hate speech and incitement of violence.
If Facebook, Twitter, etc. had been following their own stated policies, they would have taken down Trump much earlier. However, those policies were never obligations enforceable against the platform.
Eventually, advertisers communicated with their dollars, that they were not seeing a benefit to their brands from having their ads appear beside the increasingly deranged, criminal, and traitorous Trump.
Maybe that was the plan all along.
Turn Twitter into a turd soup
Educated people who don’t click ads stop using Twitter
Save unproductive bandwidth
By quitting twitter I’ve gone along with Musk’s plan. Damn it.
2024 is going to be a bad, bad year.
As will be every year after that. It’s all downhill from here folks.
Pessimism literally helps nobody, it just makes people more depressed and less likely to do anything about a bad situation. Don’t forget that last election had one of the highest young voter turnouts ever recorded, and was by far a huge swing to liberal. Since then the Republican party hasn’t even been close to as organised as they were during 2016 and 2020.
Change can and will happen. It already is, albeit slowly and with bumps along the road, just like any progression in society.
but there well be a brief period where we can swim in late autumn and early spring. so won’t that be nice.
No, I’m banking on the younger generations coming out of the woodwork. They’ve dealt with so much and really hoping they realize their vote could really send these dinosaurs into extinction.
Taylor Swift seems to be doing a good job with that.
Didn’t she get like 150k people to register in a day with an Instagram story or something
I agree, I have some hope as common folk get more and more tuned in, especially as obscure runs like the Wisconsin Supreme Court judgeship and Ohio constitutional amendment process change get overwhelming positive outcomes.
This reminds me about how the head of Salem Media Group said “well if you look at fact checkers, they’re all liberal!”, completely oblivious that he just admitted conservatives are bald faced liars.
The truth and facts have left leaning bias. The right has no choice but to lie. They policies are unpopular and unsupported.
When you’ve lived a life of privilege, equality seems like oppression.
If 4chan made Trump win in 2016, Twitter might make Trump win in 2024. Which is a scary thought. Just imagine the level of control one rich man can have over the information highway, Twitter, one of the biggest social media sites in the world, used still by many politicians, journalists and reporters on both sides. It’s happening.
Twitter made Trump win in 2016. Like, did people seriously forget about „Trump tweeted“ headlines that dominated daily news for years? The same news that would then claim a small obscure website like 4Chan made Trump president single-handedly. I mean I almost can‘t blame you for memory holing those years, but claiming Twitter wasn‘t absolute dog water before Musk is simply wrong.
In a documentary made during the 2016 election cycle Trump talks about how much better his PR team is because he doesn’t have to use traditional channels to reach his base, he can just tweet it when ever he wants to tell the world something.
He was very much using twitter as a primary communication channel from the begining, and this time around, he has both twitter and truth social as his basically his own.
Mueller has me convinced Russian social media farms made Trump win.
Just imagine the level of control one rich man can have over the information highway.
Rupert Murdoch 2: Information Highway to Hell.
Goverments should have their own fediverse instances and delete all their twitter accounts 🤷
I think they will and the history books will say “In retrospect, having politicians use a privately owned platform to speak to their constituents was a bad call, as Traitor and Child Murderer Elon Musk demonstrated.”
It’s not…? It’s literally just another social media site, it doesn’t hook into ActivityPub or any cross-broadcast protocol. I don’t know why you’re throwing around the word “fediverse” here.
Nah, more like this social.network.europa.eu
This is a very strange comparison, considering Truth Social is not owned by any government.
this American life had a good segment about a content moderator at twitter www.thisamericanlife.org/797/…/act-two-7
This week’s On with Kara Swisher has back to back interviews with Yoel Roth (the guy in the TAL ep) and the new CEO of Twitter, Linda Yaccarino and it’s worth a listen.
The juxtaposition of the two interviews is something. Roth comes across as a smart, serious person trying to (and admittedly sometimes failing) be a good steward of the internet and tackles the challenges using facts and data. Yaccarino follows up by literally being the definition of a stooge. Very clearly not attached to reality, doesn’t know things that Musk has tweeted in spite of saying at the top of the interview they’re 100% attached and in the loop with everything Elon’s doing. Absolute clown show.
So yeah, expect literally everyone to have a hand in the cookie jar come the '24 election. There isn’t enough competence in the company to fill a thimble at this point, and leadership at the company probably is either entirely ignorant of the problem(Yacco), or actively engaging in sabotage in tandem (Musk.)
Fucking hate this man.
I’m going to be so happy when Musk gets brought up on election charges.
That would require us to actually have some semblance of regulatory oversight to prevent this kind of behavior by tecu companies in the first place.
This country BARELY held together through the fire-hose of falsehoods during the last election. It is mighty bold (and dare I say naive) of you to believe we will be so lucky the next time. I do not share your optimism on either front.
Meh. You worry too much. According to your narrative they were telling us the truth before this…. Haha
That might never happen if Twitter becomes as obscure as myspace or tumblr.
Wait, so the team in charge of misinformation got misinformed about getting fired instead of expanded?
Guy sure loves his irony…
The people in charge of sacking the people responsible for the credits have been sacked.
Guess they should have fact checked it.
He fired the current people to hire new people to the team for what I’ve heard. It’s not a removal but a replacement.
People who will help him spread election misinformation for Trump’s next attempt at a coup.
The Russian misinfo version: ℤ
Elon Musk is a fucking Neo Nazi aka “The Modern Day Republican”, anything that even acknowledges the Democrats as a viable political party is “Extremist Far Left Nonsense” to these deplorables.
When will the Tesla board of directors move against Musk as CEO to save the company?
I just bought a new electric car. Didn’t even consider Tesla because of this guy.
Same when I bought mine last year. I’m very irked by the fact that most manufacturers are changing to their charging plug too. I want nothing to do with anything Tesla/Musk.
They can’t because the company is propped up entirely by his cult of personality. If he goes, Tesla and SpaceX will collapse
I don’t know where you got the idea that SpaceX is propped up by musks personality, SpaceX is propped up by currently being the most revolutionary space company in the world.
Musk is a dickhead but the spaceX engineers are doing incredible things and advancing humanities space access forward. What SpaceX has done for the global space access can’t be understated.
Tesla at this point is fine standing on its own. The management at Tesla for years has run interference between musk and the actual engineers. Musk did a lot of necessary fund raising early.on but at this point he is a mass.liability and sales are falling. Tesla has more competition than ever, and he is driving away people who.would buy tesla cars. The right doesn’t buy electric vehicles.
Tbf they’re a social media company. If they shut down completely the world wouldn’t really skip a beat.
How much do you think Linda Yaccarino is enjoying her job as CEO?
Forgot she even existed.
I don’t completely doubt that it wasn’t working.
Question is how bad will the PsyOps and interference get?
ah our dayli reminder that Elon Musk is a cunt and he always deliver!
So Putin told you to do this? I mean, why else would you do something so blatantly stupid?
🤡
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Elon Musk-owned social network formerly named Twitter has reportedly cut half of its election integrity team just weeks after saying it would expand the group.
Now operating under the name X, Musk’s firm “is cutting around half of the global team devoted to limiting disinformation and election fraud on the platform, including the head of the group, according to three people familiar with the situation,” The Information reported yesterday, adding:
The cuts hit all four Dublin-based members of the team, including Aaron Rodericks, its leader, who is based in Ireland, the people familiar with the matter said.
In response he said he received “a barrage of threatening, and abusive messages” from persons who wrongly believed the posts were an attempt by X to censor free speech and influence election outcomes.
But on August 29, X said it was “expanding our safety and elections teams to focus on combating manipulation, surfacing inauthentic accounts and closely monitoring the platform for emerging threats.”
Using nearly identical language as last month’s announcement, she said X is “expanding the safety and election teams all around the world to focus on combating things like manipulation, surfacing of inauthentic accounts and closely monitoring the platform for any emerging threats.”
The original article contains 739 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
They were being fair and balanced, not favoring a particular candidate or party. This of course is not what Musk intended, so they got the axe.
I have run out of surprised reactions to his bullshit.
It’s modern social media, not pedalling conspiracy theories is bad for business.
If 4chan made Trump win in 2016, Twitter might make Trump win in 2024. Which is a scary thought. Just imagine the level of control one rich man can have over the information highway, Twitter, one of the biggest social media sites in the world, used still by many politicians, journalists and reporters on both sides. It’s happening.
I’m about 75% certain this guy has no idea which words are coming out of his mouth.
Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I have a hunch that in the terrifyingly near future, we’re going to see the internet absolutely dominated by enshitification.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s bad now …because like the frogs in hot water, we collectively just tolerate changes for the worse. But it used to be small incremental changes over a long period.
Then this Musk asshole comes along, looks at the frogs ever so slow cooking… and cranks the stove to max, pisses in frog-pot, supplements the heating element with a welding torch, and flips the frogs off as he pours gasoline all over the kitchen.
And the frogs JUST FUCKING TAKE IT.
What message does that send to the rest of the internet?
CeeBee@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Here’s a bit of good news. The idea that frogs just wait to get boiled is proven false. Every animal has a limit to what they will tolerate due to self preservation. The from will jump out when it gets too hot.
That being said, I just recently watched Idiocracy… I’m a bit worried.
Hyggyldy@sffa.community 1 year ago
Just remember that, regardless of the creators’ intents, Idiocracy is essentially pro-eugenics.
triclops6@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
You should be worried, in the movie they recognized their stupidity and made way for the smarter character to lead.
our timeline is worse than idiocracy
tabular@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It is not a real phenomenon, though a useful tale for expressing a concept.
WrittenWeird@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’ve been reading more books.
thisisnotgoingwell@programming.dev 1 year ago
Most everyone I know doesn’t have a Twitter or Instagram. Obv I deleted my reddit. What are people supposed to do except just not use the platform? Most authors I want to follow are on substack or mastodon.
I think that as the platforms further enshittify, people will realize there are no intelligent conversations happening on platforms like X, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Ragebait content can only captivate audiences for so long before they either abandon it or are brainwashed by it. If everyone on X is a musk dickrider right wing lunatic then it makes it easier for sane people to stay off of it.
HRDS_654@lemmy.world 1 year ago
There never was intelligent conversation. People mostly used Twitter to talk about the news. Twitter has gotten worse, but it’s always been full of L takes.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
You know… it would be funny but also sad and believable if he’s doing all of this just to spite the internet because we wouldn’t let that one emo leather longboat pic die.
prole@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
It’s like Trump running for president because Obama and Seth Meyers roasted him in front of the world… So much awful shit in our world is a direct result of rich, whiney narcissists making things worse for everyone as collateral damage in whatever petty feud they’ve mostly invented in their heads.
slowwooderrunsdeep@lemmy.world 1 year ago
well now you have to share this picture and keep it going
mibo80@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Let’s hope the FCC and whatever other agencies applicable, get teeth and clamp down hard on how these social media giants. the way they operate its damn near treasonous at this point how open they are with allowing other governments to influence their policies. Especially with advertising and to children.
vasametropolis@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It has been predicted for years that the Internet would split and I’m all for it at this point.
Willy@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
That’s an interesting take. I’m kind of curious what you mean by the split. It seems like it’s already split a few times, and I sort of see Lemmy as another split. I think the biggest craziness that will get thrown into the mix is serious amounts of AI content, which I know people are tired of hearing about now, but it’s a huge deal. I think people are underestimating its power.
postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Don’t panic until it smells like butter and garlic?
LucidNightmare@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Your point still stands, but as far as I can tell in my city, no one really cared about or used Twitter. Even more so after Elongated Muskrat took over. Twitter was always an echo chamber for the most part when it came to mainstream stuff. Sure, there are a few niche cases, but with those cases there was usually already an alternative. Twitter was never as popular to normal people as it is to influencers, celebs, and for some weird reason government personnel or groups. That’s just my experience with the platform at least. I do not know a single person who even used Twitter once in my entire life.