Honestly a little insulted Musk hasn't banned me yet
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Will Oremus
@WillOremus
Joined June 2010
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Musk's Twitter now appears to be rapidly suspending the accounts of journalists and others who tweet screenshots of tweets from other banned account. It's a free-speech bonanza!
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Amazing. Now Twitter has suspended my colleague, Washington Post tech reporter Drew Harwell, without explanation--apparently for his tweet critical of Musk, which included a screenshot of Mastodon's tweet.
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remember when musk claimed he was a “free speech absolutist” twitter.com/drewharwell/st
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Anyone else seeing their Twitter feeds almost entirely taken over lately by “recommended” tweets from people they don’t follow? I just got a string of 15 tweets in a row of which 11 were from people I don’t follow and the other 4 were ads.
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Twitter in 2006: We've set up this rad new service where you can tell your friends you're at the Roots show at the Fillmore with Nick and Jen and they should come meet up!
Twitter in 2022: That's actually doxxing of Nick, Jen, and all the members of the Roots and is now banned
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to be clear, this is the same strategy of link blocking Twitter applied to the NY Post Hunter Biden story in October 2020 that Elon & the Twitter Files disclosures have said was bad twitter.com/drewharwell/st
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whatever the oklahoma department of wildlife conservation is paying their social media manager, it's not enough
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By the soft glow of the Christmas tree, your friends and family gather.
Your boyfriend, we'll call him Jeremy, of FIVE (not long at all) YEARS - gets down on one knee......
Your mom begins recording on her iPad as your aunt starts screaming.
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It's telling which types of "free speech" Elon Musk supports (neo-Nazis) and which he censors (publicly available data about his own private jet). twitter.com/drewharwell/st
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To close the loop here: An autopsy found that American sports journalist Grant Wahl died of natural causes at the World Cup in Qatar. Wahl's brother has retracted his public suspicions of foul play. Extremely sad but not a scandal.
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elevating the things that annoy him personally to matters of civilizational survival might seem histrionic but i think it’s quite possible he believes it, on some level, and it’s how he justifies the twitter escapade to those who ask why he isn’t focusing on tesla/spacex instead
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and then he added this longtermist rationale where if the woke mind virus continued unabated, great geniuses like him would forever be plagued and smothered by critics and regulators like in an ayn rand novel and then we’d never build rockets and then we’d never make it to mars.
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musk saw twitter as the root of the “woke mind virus” which he blamed for everything from the media criticizing him to his employees complaining about racism & sexism to liz warren pushing a billionaire tax. and he thought buying it could put a stop to all that.
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bizarre as it sounds, i think this is actually the clearest and most plausible explanation yet for how musk justifies this entire twitter boondoggle to himself
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working on my soccer analogies for american sports fans
neymar = iverson
virgil = tim duncan
de bruyne = luka
mbappe = young lebron
ronaldo = kobe but thinks he’s mj
messi = short frumpy magic johnson
modric = steve nash on a bad hair day
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chatgpt is pretty good but it’s not this good
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"People are always waiting for something to be dazzled by..."
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ChatGPT and generative AI are already changing people’s lives. We talked to some of them.
They’re also misleading people, repackaging others’ work as their own, and spewing society’s worst stereotypes as fact.
Our new dive into tech’s next big thing: washingtonpost.com/technology/202
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Folks in tech who say it's easy to criticize but hard to build... Sorry, no. It's easy to build if you don't care about the flaws or societal consequences or ripping off others' work. Idiots get rich all the time doing that. The hard thing is to build something that *isn't* evil.
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The latest AI apps are repeating all the problems of irresponsible automation that past generations of AI/ML tech were criticized for. Either the people building this tech just don't care, or the incentive structure in tech is such that not caring is a prerequisite for success.
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I tried the viral Lensa AI portrait app, and got lots and lots of nudes. I know AI image generation models are full of sexist and racist biases, but this one really hit home. My latest story for @techreview technologyreview.com/2022/12/12/106
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I actually agree on the main takeaway, though. From all we've seen so far, this isn't a story of a conspiracy inside Twitter to suppress the right. It's a story of overmatched mods grappling w/ a situation and a degree of power over speech for which there's no real rulebook.
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I don't agree, by the way, that the files amount to a "nothingburger." There's a lot of new insight into the sausage-making of content moderation. It's just hard to shake the feeling that it's being neatly packaged & gift-wrapped to the grievance-mongers and conspiracy theorists.
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Of the Twitter Files authors, Weiss seems most interested in crafting a dramatic narrative, weaving quotes & anecdotes selectively to make a specific interpretive case. That's fine for a lawyer or advocate but feels at odds w/ the idea that this is an exercise in transparency.
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please dont put in the newspaper that i got booed twitter.com/elonmusk/statu
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ChatGPT and generative AI are already changing people’s lives. We talked to some of them.
They’re also misleading people, repackaging others’ work as their own, and spewing society’s worst stereotypes as fact.
Our new dive into tech’s next big thing:
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Does this seem like a guy who’s genuinely concerned about social media companies cooperating with political candidates?
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Wahl’s brother suspects foul play. Obviously too early to tell. Tragic regardless.
At the very least, his death should be an occasion to pay attention to his reporting on both Qatari World Cup organizers’ attitude toward both migrant workers and gay rights.
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Eric Wahl, the brother of sportswriter Grant Wahl who died in Qatar while covering the World Cup, is asking for help.
Grant was detained in Qatar for wearing a rainbow shirt two weeks ago
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As some have noted, Wahl had said a couple times in recent days that he wasn’t feeling well, for what that’s worth. grantwahl.substack.com/p/world-cup-da
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This is chilling. We don’t know yet why US sportswriter Grant Wahl, 48, died suddenly in his seat while covering the Argentina match today. But he had just written this story blasting Qatari officials’ apathy toward the many migrant workers who died to make this World Cup happen.
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NEW: World Cup Daily, Day 25. They just don't care. Qatari World Cup organizers don't even hide their apathy over migrant worker deaths, including the most recent one.
grantwahl.substack.com/p/world-cup-da
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This is the most substantive of the Twitter Files so far.
Still no smoking gun proving wrongdoing, on first read. But if you put aside the hype and conspiracy-mongering, it’s a fascinating peek into the thorny, high-stakes, secretive work of modern online content moderation.
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1. THREAD: The Twitter Files
THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP
Part One: October 2020-January 6th
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“secret group” and “without overview” are very funny ways to describe a group of decision-makers at a company that included the CEO, CTO, general counsel, and head of trust and safety.
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BREAKING: Twitter Files released by Elon Musk, Matt Taibbi & Bari Weiss, have suggested that a secret group headed by Vijaya Gadde, the Head of Legal, Yoel Roth, the Head of Trust, CEOs Jack Dorsey & Parag, & others, made decisions secretly & without overview to moderate Twitter.
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Here's Twitter's former head of product reacting to Weiss selectively quoting from the 2018 blog post he co-authored while leaving out the entire context. Notably, Weiss opted not to link to or even mention the post, which contradicts much of her framing.
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Replying to @bariweiss
wow. did you even read the blog post? We never denied de-amplifying things. In fact we made clear that we do rank. We defined exactly what we meant by “shadow banning” (b/c there are many definitions) and made very clear that we didn’t do *that*…
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Weiss's thread has a few interesting if not surprising new details, e.g. on the escalation team and some internal deliberations on enforcement. Transparency is good! But her framing is *deeply* misleading and sensationalistic, and ultimately obscures far more than it illuminates.
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To make this incredibly long story of Twitter being open about its filtering practices a bit shorter: As *many* have pointed out already, Musk himself has publicly endorsed the "free speech, not free reach" approach that these features embody.
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Soon after my 2019 story about Satan, Twitter found--and publicly acknolwedged--that once again it had been filtering/shadowbanning some accounts by mistake, including his, which it reinstated. I wrote about that too.
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When I pressed Twitter comms on "Satan's" shadowban in 2019, they again objected to the term but fully acknowledged the moderation features and how they worked, and that they aren't perfect. We had long convos about it. To act like any of this was ever a secret is just bizarre.
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In 2019, I wrote an in-depth profile of a Twitter parody account, "Satan," that discovered it had been, for lack of a better word, "shadowbanned." Again I criticized the opacity of the practice and showed how unfair it can feel.
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