Social Media & Big Tech news and discussions

[weatheriscool]

Elon Musk proposes to buy Twitter at original offer: report
Twitter originally accepted Musk's $44B offer in April
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/elo ... 175be38b67

The company originally accepted Musk's $44 billion offer in April. However, the billionaire notified Twitter in July that he was planning to terminate the deal after claiming the company breached its obligations by misrepresenting the number of spam and fake accounts on the platform. Twitter maintains that spam and fake accounts make up less than 5% of its total users.

In response, Twitter filed a lawsuit against Musk accusing him of refusing to honor his obligations under the agreement because "the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests." Musk has since filed a countersuit, which was amended last month to include allegations from whistleblower and Twitter's former security chief Peiter "Mudge" Zatko.

[Time_Traveller]

Elon Musk Twitter deal - live: Tesla CEO says $44bn buyout will kickstart ‘everything app’

27 minutes

Elon Musk on Tuesday revived his offer to buy social networking site Twitter for $44bn, after previously attempting to back out of the high-profile deal.

The Tesla billionaire proposed the price, which equals the original valuation of $54.20 a share, in a letter to Twitter filed on Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Mr Musk broke his silence on the deal on Twitter late Tuesday, writing: “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app”. He added that buying Twitter “accelerates X by 3 to 5 years”.

In July, Twitter sued Mr Musk for what it said was his “wrongful” attempt to cancel his offer, a case that may force the entrenpreneur into acquiring the company.

Without an agreement, proceedings in the case are set to begin within days, with Mr Musk scheduled to be deposed in Texas later this week.

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/elon ... 95758.html

[wjfox]

TikTok profits from livestreams of families begging

7 hours ago

Displaced families in Syrian camps are begging for donations on TikTok while the company takes up to 70% of the proceeds, a BBC investigation found.

Children are livestreaming on the social media app for hours, pleading for digital gifts with a cash value.

The BBC saw streams earning up to $1,000 (£900) an hour, but found the people in the camps received only a tiny fraction of that.

TikTok said it would take prompt action against "exploitative begging".

The company said this type of content was not allowed on its platform, and it said its commission from digital gifts was significantly less than 70%. But it declined to confirm the exact amount.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-63213567

[weatheriscool]

Google approves Truth Social for the Google Play Store
Source: CNN Business

CNN Business
—

Truth Social, the social media app backed by former President Donald Trump, has been approved for the Google Play Store, Google said Wednesday.

The decision means Truth Social will now be downloadable to Android smartphones via Google’s proprietary app store, after Truth Social moved to implement stronger content moderation policies.

Google had previously said Truth Social could not appear in its app store until it had implemented policies that sufficiently addressed incitement and threats of violence. It had also said social media apps on the Google Play store must provide an in-app system for reporting objectionable content. (Truth Social had already been available to some Android devices via non-Google sources, such as the Samsung Galaxy store.)

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/12/tech/tru ... index.html

[caltrek]

Washington Post Report Alleges Further Mayhem at Trump Media
by Arianna Coghill
October 15, 2022

Introduction:

(Mother Jones) The Washington Post reported Saturday that a former executive with Trump Media, which owns Donald Trump’s struggling social media platform, Truth Social, is alleging the company broke federal security laws, and that another executive was ousted for refusing Trump’s demand that he give his shares in the venture to Trump’s wife, Melania.

Will Wilkerson, who was fired by Trump Media on Thursday, passed along hundreds of documents, photos, and audio files to the Washington Post and to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Post‘s exclusive report details the chaos allegedly taking place at the company.

The report details how cofounder Andy Litinsky was allegedly fired after refusing a personal demand by Trump, who already owned 90 percent of Trump Media shares, to give his shares to Melania. More broadly, the report portrays a company in disarray, one in which decisions were based not on logic or business savvy, but bitterness and spite. Five months after refusing Trump’s demands, writes tech reporter Drew Harwell…

• Litinsky, who first met Trump in 2004 as a contestant on the TV show “The Apprentice,” was abruptly removed from the company’s board. Wilkerson said he believes it was payback for his refusal to turn over a small fortune to the former president’s wife. Litinsky thought so, too, according to an email Wilkerson and his attorneys shared with The Washington Post and the Securities and Exchange Commission. In that email, Litinsky complained that Trump was “retaliating against me” by threatening to “ ‘blow up the company’ if his demands are not met.

Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... h-social/

[weatheriscool]

Co-founder of Trump's media company details Truth Social's bitter infighting
Source: Washington Post (No Paywall)

Will Wilkerson, one of Trump Media & Technology Group’s first employees, alleges the company violated securities laws and that Trump pressured executives to hand over their shares to his wife. He shared a cache of internal documents with The Post and federal investigators that he says support his claims.

Will Wilkerson, then an executive at former president Donald Trump’s start-up Trump Media & Technology Group, was at a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., coffee shop with company co-founder Andy Litinsky last October when Trump called Litinsky with a question: Would he give up some of his shares to Trump’s wife, Melania?

Litinsky tried to brush it off, telling Trump “the gift would have meant a huge tax bill he couldn’t pay,” Wilkerson said in an interview. “Trump didn’t care. He said, ‘Do whatever you need to do.’ ”

Five months later, Litinsky ... was abruptly removed from the company’s board. Wilkerson said he believes it was payback for his refusal to turn over a small fortune to the former president’s wife.

Read more: https://wapo.st/3D0g4eQ

[caltrek]

Experts Grade Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube on Readiness to Handle Midterm Election Misinformation
by Dan Hee Kim, Anjan Susaria, and Scott Shackleford
October 17, 2022

Introduction:

(The Conversation) The 2016 U.S. election was a wake-up call about the dangers of political misinformation on social media. With two more election cycles rife with misinformation under their belts, social media companies have experience identifying and countering misinformation. However, the nature of the threat misinformation poses to society continues to shift in form and targets. The big lie about the 2020 presidential election has become a major theme, and immigrant communities are increasingly in the crosshairs of disinformation campaigns – deliberate efforts to spread misinformation.

Social media companies have announced plans to deal with misinformation in the 2022 midterm elections, but the companies vary in their approaches and effectiveness. We asked experts on social media to grade how ready Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube are to handle the task.

Here is a list of basic grades given:

Grader: Dam Hee Kim, Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Arizona
Facebook/Meta: C
Twitter: B
TikTok: D
YouTube: B-

Grader: Anjana Susarla, Professor of Information Systems, Michigan State University

Facebook/Meta: B-
Twitter: B
TikTok: D
YouTube: B-

Grader: Scott Shackelford, Professor of Business Law and Ethics, Indiana University

Facebook/Meta: C
Twitter: B (with a notation that Twitter’s pending change of ownership could affect this scoring).
TikTok: F
YouTube: C+

Read more here: https://theconversation.com/experts-gr ... on-191249

[caltrek]

Dark Personality Traits Make People Susceptible to Fake News
October 20, 2022

Introduction:

(EurekAlert) These are the findings of a new study at the Human-Computer-Media Institute at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) in Bavaria, Germany. "Some people believe Fake News even when the scientific facts clearly contradict them," says psychologist Jan Philipp Rudloff. "We wanted to know why this is the case and investigate the role played by our ideas about the nature of knowledge and facts."

Further Extract:

The study showed that the less the participants believed in the existence of facts, the more difficult it was for them to distinguish true statements from false ones. In addition, there was a second finding: the stronger the "dark factor of personality" of the participants was, i.e. the more pronounced their self-interest at the expense of others, the more they doubted that there was a difference between scientific findings and mere opinions.

"You could call their beliefs post-factual; they only believe what feels true to them," Jan Philipp Rudloff emphasizes. Accordingly, they find it difficult to distinguish true statements from false ones, so they particularly often believe fake news to be true. "People with dark personality traits bend reality to their own liking. For example: I don't wear a mask because the coronavirus was just invented by the media anyways," Rudloff explains. "Bending the facts based on selfish motives works especially well when people are convinced that there are no independent scientific facts anyways.”

In another study published in spring 2022, Rudloff and Appel, together with Dr. Fabian Hutmacher from the JMU department of Psychology of Communication and New Media, were already able to show that people with dark personality traits were more likely to endorse to COVID-19 conspiracy theories during the pandemic.

Rudloff emphasizes, however, that it is by no means only this group that is susceptible to conspiracy theories and fake news. "Epistemic beliefs are the decisive factor," he says. "People who don't believe in the power of sound evidence and arguments won't be swayed by even the most impressive fact-checking – regardless of their other personality traits."

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/968567

[weatheriscool]

Documents detail plans to gut Twitter's workforce
Source: Washington Post

Twitter’s workforce is likely to be hit with massive cuts in the coming months, no matter who owns the company, interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Post show, a change likely to have major impact on its ability to control harmful content and prevent data security crises.

Elon Musk told prospective investors in his deal to buy the company that he planned to get rid of nearly 75 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 workers, whittling the company down to a skeleton staff of just over 2,000.

Even if Musk’s Twitter deal falls through — and there’s little indication now that it will — big cuts are expected: Twitter’s current management planned to pare the company’s payroll by about $800 million by the end of next year, a number that would mean the departure of nearly a quarter of the workforce, according to corporate documents and interviews with people familiar with the company’s deliberations. The company also planned to make major cuts to its infrastructure, including data centers that keep the site functioning for more than 200 million users that log on each day.

The extent of the cuts, which have not been previously reported, help explain why Twitter officials were eager to sell to Musk: Musk’s $44 billion bid, though hostile, is a golden ticket for the struggling company — potentially helping its leadership avoid painful announcements that would have demoralized the staff and possibly crippled the service’s ability to combat misinformation, hate speech and spam.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... taff-cuts/

[caltrek]

Social Media Platforms Brace for Midterm Elections Mayhem
October 21, 2022

Introduction:

(AP) — A Facebook search for the words “election fraud” first delivers an article claiming that workers at a Pennsylvania children's museum are brainwashing children so they'll accept stolen elections.

Facebook's second suggestion? A link to an article from a site called MAGA Underground that says Democrats are plotting to rig next month's midterms. “You should still be mad as hell about the fraud that happened in 2020," the article insists.

With less than three weeks before the polls close, misinformation about voting and elections abounds on social media despite promises by tech companies to address a problem blamed for increasing polarization and distrust.

While platforms like Twitter, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube say they've expanded their work to detect and stop harmful claims that could suppress the vote or even lead to violent confrontations, a review of some of the sites shows they're still playing catch-up with 2020, when then-President Donald Trump's lies about the election he lost to Joe Biden helped fuel an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

“You would think that they would have learned by now,” said Heidi Beirich, founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism and a member of a group called the Real Facebook Oversight Board that has criticized the platform's efforts. “This isn't their first election. This should have been addressed before Trump lost in 2020. The damage is pretty deep at this point.”

Read more here: https://www.courthousenews.com/social- ... s-mayhem/

caltrek's comment: While I don't support government censorship on such issues, I am tired of right-wing individuals abusing their free speech rights by engaging in irresponsible speech. I am also tired of corporations being derisively accused of "woke" policies simply because they try to introduce a little truth and justice into our society.

[caltrek]

Meta Hit With Antitrust Breach Order in turkey for Combining User Data Across Fb, WhatsApp and Instagram
by Natasha Lomas
October 26, 2022

Introduction:

(TechCrunch) Meta won’t be quaking at the size of the penalty it’s just been handed by Turkey’s competition authority, which announced a 346.72 million lira sanction today.

The circa $18.6M fine pales in comparison to a number of recent stings hitting it from European regulators. Such as the $267M fine for WhatsApp in the European Union just over a year ago — for transparency breaches of the bloc’s data protection framework; or the $70M spank a year ago from the UK’s competition authority after it said Meta failed to comply with information requests during scrutiny of its purchase of Giphy. It was subsequently ordered by the UK’s CMA to undo that acquisition too, so the whole sorry saga will likely cost it considerably more.

Plenty more data protection complaints are still hanging over its head too, such as the one targeting its EU-US data flows that could see an order to suspend those transfers — and essentially shutter its service in Europe — in the coming months unless a looming replacement for the defunct Privacy Shield framework can be rushed into place first.

Still, it’s the crux of the Turkish fine — that Meta holds a dominant position in social media and sought to obstruct competitors by combining data between separate services it operates — that’s likely to send a chill down the social networking giant’s spine because its business runs on people profiling. And that runs on its ability to obtain people’s data and flesh out detailed ad profiles. So any regulatory roadblocks that cut into its ability to conduct its unfettered surveillance of Internet users poses an existential threat to its core microtargeting ad model.

The Turkish action is also of note because Germany’s competition regulator has had a similar concern for years.

Read more here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/26/face ... st-order/

[weatheriscool]

Elon Musk, nearing Twitter deal, says site will continue to police hateful content
Source: ABC News

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who appears set to acquire Twitter, said on Thursday that he plans to police some content on the platform that falls short of breaking the law, signaling that he will preserve more content moderation than he had previously indicated.

Musk, an avowed proponent of free speech, has faced questions from some analysts over the potential loss of users and advertisers if a more permissive approach to content allows hate speech and false information to proliferate on the platform.

[snip]

"The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence," Musk said.

"Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape where anything can be said without consequences!” he added. “In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all, where you can choose your desired experience according to your preferences."

Read more: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/elon-mu ... d=92198352

[raklian]

Well, that escalated rather quickly.

[wjfox]

I have a really bad feeling about this.

[ººº]

I have a really bad feeling about this.

Life always finds a way.

[raklian]

I have a really bad feeling about this.

I think in the not too far future Elon and Twitter will receive a cease and desist notice from the Government after those whose bans were reversed start inciting violence with their tweets. Elon apparently holds a romanticist view of free speech that is not grounded in reality. The approach Twitter was using in addressing hate speech before Elon took over was optimal under the circumstances, in my view.

[joe00uk]

I think in the not too far future Elon and Twitter will receive a cease and desist notice from the Government

Probably true. It seems the regime cannot defend its dogmas when it's forced to actually engage with alternative ideas. Instead it must resort to censorship and raw state power to preserve itself. If Elon does manage to restore freedom of speech, that will not be easily forgiven.

But in the meantime, it will be fun to see all those liberals who defended previous censorship with the idea that "it's a private company so they can do what they want" have to go back on themselves now that this private company, doing what it wants, seems set to remove much of its censorship.

[Time_Traveller]

I have a really bad feeling about this.

So, glad i left it awhile ago after my 30 day break then ended up extending it permenantly. I am only on FB now of the bigger social platforms the rest are smaller ones. (Break will be done by 9 December from my 90 days away from it)

[caltrek]

I think in the not too far future Elon and Twitter will receive a cease and desist notice from the Government

Probably true. It seems the regime cannot defend its dogmas when it's forced to actually engage with alternative ideas. Instead it must resort to censorship and raw state power to preserve itself. If Elon does manage to restore freedom of speech, that will not be easily forgiven.

But in the meantime, it will be fun to see all those liberals who defended previous censorship with the idea that "it's a private company so they can do what they want" have to go back on themselves now that this private company, doing what it wants, seems set to remove much of its censorship.

Meanwhile, the anticorporation ill-liberals will now discover the benefits of advocating for free speech.

Speaking of the actions of private companies:

GM Pauses Paid Advertising on Twitter as Chief Twit Elon Musk Takes Ownership
by Kirsten Korosec
October 28, 2022

Introduction:

(TechCrunch) General Motors has temporarily paused paid advertising on Twitter, one day after billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk finalized a $44 billion acquisition of the social media platform.

CNBC was the first to report GM’s decision. TechCrunch confirmed the U.S. automaker’s decision.

“We are engaging with Twitter to understand the direction of the platform under their new ownership,” the company said in an emailed statement to TechCrunch. “As is normal course of business with a significant change in a media platform, we have temporarily paused our paid advertising. Our customer care interactions on Twitter will continue.”

It’s unclear what percentage of GM’s total advertising budget is dedicated to Twitter.

Most, if not all, automakers have a presence on Twitter. Although not all of them opt for paid advertising.

Read more here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/28/gm-p ... wnership/

[caltrek]

Meanwhile, it might be jumping to conclusions to assume what the new "free speech" mode will look like.

Elon Musk Says Twitter Will Form a Content Moderation “Council” Before Deciding on Trump
by Taylor Hatmaker
October 28, 2022

Introduction:

(TechCrunch) Elon Musk has only been in control of Twitter for a short time, but he’s already making big moves. Musk fired a number of key executives on day one, including Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, but in a new tweet he claims he’ll be moving more slowly when it comes to making content moderation decisions.

Musk hasn’t said much since taking over at Twitter, but he will apparently form some kind of policy advisory body to oversee content moderation decisions. Musk said the group will reflect “diverse viewpoints,” though we’ll certainly have to wait and see on that one. “To be super clear, we have not yet made any changes to Twitter’s content moderation policies,” Musk tweeted later Friday evening.

Importantly, Musk says he won’t be making any major decisions or account reinstatements — i.e. restoring former President Donald Trump — before the council is put in place. Because it’s Musk, that might happen within hours or it might not happen at all, it’s hard to say. Hours later, Musk undermined his own claims about a formalized policy decision making system, flexing his own power to make big content moderation calls.

In a reply to controversial right wing academic and self help author Jordan Peterson’s daughter, Musk made the sweeping claim that “anyone suspended for minor & dubious reasons will be freed from Twitter jail.” Peterson’s Twitter account was limited after going on a transphobic tirade about actor Elliot Page earlier this year, so in this context tweeting hate about a trans person and his doctor counts as “minor and dubious” in Musk’s book, apparently.

Read more here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/28/elon ... -council/