Elon Musk confirms major tweak for Twitter

 

A phone screen displays a photo of Elon Musk with the Twitter logo shown in the background, on October 4, 2022, in Washington, DC. © OLIVIER DOULIERY / AFP

Source: RT

The current character limit will be increased significantly, the platform's CEO has indicated.

The character limit for Twitter posts will increase from 280 to 4,000, the platform's boss Elon Musk confirmed on Sunday, without providing any further details.

When asked by one user whether it is “true that Twitter is set to increase the characters from 280 to 4,000?” Musk replied, “yes.”

The billionaire has voiced similar plans before. In late November, he said the expansion of the character limit to 1,000 was on his “to-do list.” Around the same time, he described a user plea to put the threshold at 420 as “a good idea.”

The brevity of Twitter posts is considered to be one the platform’s signature features, with heated discussions raging among social media users on whether it should be changed.

At the time of its inception in 2006, Twitter’s character limit amounted only to 140 characters for one post, with another 20 reserved for the username.

In November 2017, the social media giant began allowing 280 characters per message, citing a disparity in tweet length between different languages. It also admitted that the restriction curbed users’ ability to express their thoughts.

Since Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter in late October, he has embarked on a flurry of reforms to reshape the social media platform. In recent months, the billionaire, who describes himself as a “free speech absolutist,” has unbanned several high-profile figures, including former US President Donald Trump. In late November, Twitter also rolled back its policies that sought to tackle misinformation linked to Covid-19.

More recently, Musk released the so-called ‘Twitter Files’ detailing the company’s censorship efforts. The first batch of documents showed how the social media giant made its decision to restrict the New York Post’s reporting on a trove of data from the laptop of Hunter Biden, the son of the incumbent US president.

The second release showcased concerted efforts by the platform to reduce the “visibility” of some users and limit their reach. Following the revelation, Musk promised that users would eventually be able to see their “shadowban” status.
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Twitter Reveals How it Banned Trump

 

FILE PHOTO ©  AP / Jenny Kane

Source: RT

Framework for removal of US president was set long before Capitol riot

A third series of “Twitter Files,” published on Friday evening, offered details into the platform’s decision to ban the personal account of Donald Trump while he was still the sitting US president, with more revelations promised for the weekend.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, who authored the first expose last week, began sharing the saga of Trump’s ban covering the period between October 2020 and January 6, 2021.

“We’ll show you what hasn’t been revealed: the erosion of standards within the company in months before J6, decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies, and more, against the backdrop of ongoing, documented interaction with federal agencies,” Taibbi wrote.

The drop includes Twitter’s internal communications of clear historical importance, as the company employees recognized this was a “landmark moment in the annals of speech,” the first time they suspended a sitting head of state.

Trump was banned on January 8, after a “close review” of how his tweets were “being received and interpreted on and off Twitter,” the company said at the time. His last tweets had included a video message urging his supporters not to break the law and peacefully depart from the US Capitol, but also his claim that the 2020 election had not been legitimate, which Twitter had declared unacceptable.

The “intellectual framework” for the ban was already set up in the months before the January 6 riot at the Capitol. One internal message shows a Twitter executive saying that they need to look at the actions by Trump “over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.”

According to another internal message, if Trump tried to use the official POTUS or White House accounts, Twitter would “take action to limit their use” until they are “transitioned” to the new administration on January 20, but not suspend or ban them otherwise.

Another set of messages from Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth reveals he was using “generic” names in the calendar to hide the increasingly frequent meetings with federal officials ahead of the 2020 election. “DEFINITELY NOT meeting with the FBI I swear,” says one. A special channel was created on October 8, 2020 for senior executives like Roth, Vijaya Gadde and Jim Baker to coordinate election enforcement.

This “smaller, more powerful cadre” of senior executives made decisions “on the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches,” while also “clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content.”

According to Taibbi, Saturday’s revelations will focus on “the chaos inside Twitter on January 7,” while the “secret internal communications from the key date of January 8” will be published on Sunday.

Taibbi began disclosing the “Twitter Files” last week, with the help and endorsement of the platform’s new owner Elon Musk. The second part revealed the practice of “shadowbanning” that ended up affecting overwhelmingly conservative accounts. It was reportedly delayed by a senior lawyer at Twitter who had been “vetting” the drops without Musk’s knowledge or approval. That turned out to be Baker, former FBI general counsel whom Musk fired on Tuesday.

The White House has dismissed the revelations as a “distraction” from the real problem with the platform, which press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre described as “hate speech.”


LINKS:

Matt Taibbi THREAD: The Twitter Files - THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP (Part One: October 2020-January 6th)


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Twitter's ‘secret blacklists’ exposed

Original Source: RT

A new investigation details the practice of “shadow bans,” known internally as “visibility filtering”

Twitter has created a series of barriers and tools for moderators to prevent specific tweets and topics from trending, or limit the visibility of entire accounts without users’ knowledge, according to internal correspondence and interviews with multiple high-level sources within the company.

Despite repeated public assurances by top Twitter officials that the company does not “shadow ban” users, especially not “based on political viewpoints or ideology,” the practice actually existed under the euphemism of “visibility filtering,” according to journalist Bari Weiss, who published the second installment of the so-called ‘Twitter Files’ in a lengthy thread on Thursday night.

“Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee said, while another admitted that “normal people do not know how much we do.”

Twitter moderators have the power to add the user to categories such as “Trends Blacklist,” “Search Blacklist” and “Do Not Amplify,” to limit the scope of a particular tweet or entire account’s discoverability – all without users’ knowledge or any warning.

Weiss noted that the tools were even used to limit the reach of academics, including Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who courted controversy after challenging the effectiveness of Covid-19 lockdowns and other pandemic mandates. He ended up on Twitter's “Trends Blacklist,” keeping his posts out of the site’s trending section, the documents show.

However, above the common moderators was another “secret group” that handled issues concerning “high follower,” “controversial” and other notable users. Known as “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,” the team included high-level executives such as former Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust, Vijaya Gadde, the Global Head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth and CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal.

In one notable example, the top-level moderation team was involved in decisions to repeatedly suspend the Libs of TikTok account, which routinely posted material mocking liberals and progressives, and has racked up more than 1.4 million followers. While the account was told it had violated Twitter’s policy against “hateful conduct,” an internal company memo circulated in October acknowledged that it had not “directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy” after all.

The ‘Site Integrity Policy’ group took up a new argument, instead saying the woman running the Libs of TikTok account, Chaya Raichik, “encouraged online harassment.” However, when Raichik’s personal information was exposed online, Twitter refused to take action, concluding that posts containing her home address and photos of her residence did not break any of the platform’s rules.

The release of the documents was endorsed by the company’s new CEO Elon Musk, who after taking over Twitter in October fired several top executives, including Gadde and Roth, and reversed some of Twitter’s previous decisions, such as permanently blocking former President Donald Trump’s account.

“We're just getting started on our reporting,” Weiss concluded, promising that the next installment of the Twitter Files will soon be published by journalist Matt Taibbi, who opened the series last week with revelations about a company-wide effort to suppress a damaging report about Joe Biden’s family.

Musk promises Twitter ‘shadow ban’ reform

The social media platform will soon tell users their “true account status”

Twitter owner Elon Musk has said users will eventually be able to see their “shadowban” status, after reporters published internal company documents showing that the company engaged in the practice despite years of denials under its prior management.

On the heels of the second installment of the ‘Twitter Files’ – which revealed that the platform previously engaged in concerted efforts to reduce the “visibility” of some users and limit their reach – Musk vowed to create new tools offering more transparency into their account.

“Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal,” he said on Thursday.

Published on a rolling basis by journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and others, the Twitter documents have uncovered a number of explosive revelations about the tech giant following Musk’s multi-billion buyout deal, completed in October.

While Twitter’s senior management under former CEO Jack Dorsey vehemently denied that the site engaged in ‘shadowbans’ to hide certain posts, the latest batch of files appears to show otherwise. Moderators were previously provided with a series of tools to blacklist content which did not explicitly violate Twitter’s policies, including options to prevent posts from appearing in searches, the ‘trending’ section and an overall “Do Not Amplify” feature.

The documents also indicate users were targeted for shadowbans based on their political affiliations, noting several examples of high-profile conservative accounts whose posts were hidden from a broader audience.

The first round of files, shared by Taibbi last week in coordination with Musk himself, revealed details about Twitter’s decision in 2020 to suppress the reach of a New York Post story on then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and his foreign business dealings. The call to ban the story – including in users’ direct messages – was made without the knowledge of Dorsey, who was reportedly kept out of the loop for many major decisions.

Taibbi has also posted material showing that hold-overs from Dorsey’s team have attempted to hobble the Twitter investigation, with the company’s top lawyer Jim Baker fired by Musk earlier this week after he was found to have held up the publication process without authorization. Baker previously served as the FBI’s general counsel under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, and was heavily involved in allegations that Trump ‘colluded’ with Russia to win the 2020 presidential race.
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[03] How the 'Twitter Files' have exposed a senior FBI official’s role in manipulating the outcome of the 2020 US election

[04] Musk’s Twitter files: What have we learned from the Hunter Biden laptop story?