Social Media & Big Tech news and discussions

weatheriscool
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Elon Musk Says Twitter Is Launching A New Color-Coded Verification Scheme Next Week — Here’s What We Know So Far

-snip-
Gold ticks will be given to verified company accounts and gray ticks will be handed to “government” accounts.

Blue checks will now be given to “all” verified individuals, celebrity or not, Musk said, explaining that the boundary of what constitutes notable is “otherwise too subjective.”

-snip-

Musk described the implementation of manual verification as a “painful, but necessary” step to tackle impersonation. Given the mass firing and exodus of staffers since Musk took the reins in October, this process is likely to add considerable strain to Twitter’s already pressured workforce.

Replying to questions on Twitter asking whether the check marks will actually help users differentiate between similar accounts, Musk acknowledged the possibility the scheme will not go to plan and vowed to act accordingly. Deliberate impersonation or deception will result in account suspension, he said, adding that users could use organizational affiliation, biography and follower counts to help distinguish between accounts with the same name. Musk said Twitter could show follower counts under people’s names on tweets and allow filtering based on follower amount “if it actually becomes a problem.”
-snip-

Read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart ... ow-so-far/
weatheriscool
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US FCC bans sales, import of Chinese tech from Huawei, ZTE
Source: AP

2 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. is banning the sale of communications equipment made by Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE and restricting the use of some China-made video surveillance systems, citing an “unacceptable risk” to national security.

The five-member Federal Communications Commission said Friday it has voted unanimously to adopt new rules that will block the importation or sale of certain technology products that pose security risks to U.S. critical infrastructure. It’s the latest in a years-long escalation of U.S. restrictions of Chinese technology that began with President Donald Trump and has continued under President Joe Biden’s administration.

“The FCC is committed to protecting our national security by ensuring that untrustworthy communications equipment is not authorized for use within our borders, and we are continuing that work here,” said FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, in a prepared statement.

Along with Huawei and ZTE, the order affects products made by companies such as Hikvision and Dahua, makers of widely used video surveillance cameras.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/biden-techno ... m=HomePage
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Twitter failed to detect upload of Christchurch mosque terror attack videos
Sun 27 Nov 2022 21.49 EST

Twitter has removed freshly uploaded footage of the Christchurch terror attack that was circulating on the platform, but only after the New Zealand government alerted the company, which had failed to recognise the content as harmful.

The video clips, filmed by the Australian white supremacist who murdered 51 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch in 2019, were uploaded by some Twitter users on Saturday, according to the office of the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern.

A spokesperson for the prime minister said Twitter’s automated reporting function didn’t pick up the content as harmful.

Other users reported the videos and the government separately raised it with Twitter, the office said. “Twitter advised us overnight that the clips have been taken down and said they would do a sweep for other instances.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... ack-videos
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caltrek
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Serious Question: Is Twitter Worth Saving?
by Tim Karr
November 29, 2022

Introduction:
(Common Dreams) Twitter is unraveling at the speed of a SpaceX rocket. Things have gotten so bad under the erratic reign of Elon Musk that the future of the social-media company is in question. What, if anything, should be done to pull Twitter from the brink?

From the moment Musk walked through the door, he’s sought to impose his unique brand of creative destruction on Twitter. But the results have been less than brilliant, and far more damaging.

Musk’s takeover deal itself saddled him and his investors with a $13-billion debt load that could force Twitter to default on payment as early as next April, with the possibility of banks forcing the company into bankruptcy.

Bad financing was only the beginning. To help service his debt Musk drastically slashed costs, including laying off half of Twitter’s staff, thousands of the company’s outside contractors, and forcing more than a thousand others to walk off the job. He decimated Twitter’s trust and safety and human-rights teams, making it all but impossible for the company to uphold and enforce critical user safeguards and content-moderation standards.

Conclusion:
Twitter may be beyond saving, but the idea of a public-interest social network is something worth fighting for, with or without Elon Musk.
Read more here: https://www.commondreams.org/views/202 ... th-saving
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Twitter ends Covid misinformation policy under Musk

4 hours ago

Twitter says it has stopped enforcing its policy on misleading information about coronavirus.

According to the company's website, it stopped taking action against tweets breaching its Covid rules, on Wednesday, 23 November.

Twitter had previously reported suspending more than 11,000 accounts for Covid misinformation as of September this year.

BBC News has approached Twitter for comment.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-63796832
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caltrek
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LinkedIn Rolls Out Focused Inbox and Messaging Safety Tools as It Gets to Grip with Spam and Scams
by
December 1, 2022

Introduction:
(TechCrunch) LinkedIn, the social platform for the working world for networking and recruitment, hasn’t been the biggest name in headlines when it comes to how social media is leveraged for spam, scams, toxicity and fake news, but they’re all significant problems on the platform that will only get bigger as traffic grows (as it’s doing currently, at a rate of 34%/year); and as businesses and people fly from other social networks and look to the likes of LinkedIn, which now has some 875 million members, for more targeted business interactions.

Today the company made a couple of announcements related to its direct messaging service — your private inbox that sits alongside your public feed — that speak to this theme: LinkedIn is rolling out a “focused” option for incoming messages with others relegated to an “other” box; and it’s turning on new automatic spam and harassment detection and a new feature to report unwanted messaging.

The new features are critical for the health of LinkedIn and its wider business.

The company says that there are some 21 inMails — direct messages — sent every second with job opportunities at the moment. (For those of you who feel like you get a lot of unwanted solicitations… that’s a global figure, not just for you!) Having an experience full of spam and other junk will turn off people from using the service, which will make it less effective for outreach for recruiters, and thus less likely they pay send those messages on LinkedIn.

But the kernel within that business logic is the other reason: it’s important for everyday users’ experience. LinkedIn’s transparency report from earlier in the year found that LinkedIn proactively removed 70.8 million spam and scam messages on its platform, and that users reported a further (mere) 179,000. I’m guessing that this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what people could report were it easier to do so.
Read more here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/01/link ... nd-scams/
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caltrek
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Left-Wing Voices Are Silenced on Twitter as Far-Right Trolls Advise Elon Musk
by Robert Mackey and Micah Lee
November 29, 2022

Introduction:
(The Intercept) ELON MUSK CLAIMS to be “fighting for free speech in America” but the social network’s new owner appears to be overseeing a purge of left-wing activists from the platform.

Several prominent antifascist organizers and journalists have had their accounts suspended in the past week, after right-wing operatives appealed directly to Musk to ban them and far-right internet trolls flooded Twitter’s complaints system with false reports about terms of service violations.
As the Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin noted on Twitter, the suspended users include Chad Loder, an antifascist researcher whose open-source investigation of the U.S. Capitol riot led to the identification and arrest of a masked Proud Boy who attacked police officers. The account of video journalist Vishal Pratap Singh, who reports on far-right protests in Southern California, has also been suspended.

Among the other prominent accounts suspended were the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, an antifascist group that provides armed security for LGBTQ+ events in North Texas, and CrimethInc, an anarchist collective that has published and distributed anarchist and anti-authoritarian zines, books, posters, and podcasts since the mid-1990s.

All four accounts had been singled out for criticism by Andy Ngo, a far-right writer whose conspiratorial, error-riddled reporting on left-wing protests and social movements fuels the mass delusion that a handful of small antifascist groups are part of an imaginary shadow army called “antifa.” In a public exchange on Twitter on Friday, Musk invited Ngo to report “Antifa accounts” that should be suspended directly to him.
Read more of The Intercept article here: https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/el ... ifascist/

One of the banned accounts is CrimethInc Ex-Workers’ Collective, an anarchist network that publishes everything from books to podcasts about a variety of topics. To read a description from the collective concerning its ban: https://crimethinc.com/2022/11/25/elon ... ght-troll

Jacobin also has an article out on this topic: https://jacobin.com/2022/11/elon-musk- ... g-accounts
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caltrek
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Don't mourn, organize.

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