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Free speech award
Crypto collapses, Mone’s masks and golden
goodbyes: the 2022 Observer business awards
Jasper
Jolly
@jjpjolly
Sun 1 Jan
2023 00.05 GMT
Free speech award
Elon Musk, a regular feature of Business Agenda’s
annual award ceremony.
We honour
Elon Musk for a commitment to “free speech absolutism” that lasted about as
long as it took him to fire half of the company’s workers.
Musk has
made a big deal of Twitter’s uneven moderation policies (some of that
justified). However, that has not stopped him from imposing his own
inconsistency, including suspending the Twitter accounts of: a private jet
tracker that used public data; journalists who posted links to other sources
for that data; rival social media companies; people who posted links to other
social media companies. The public square just got even messier.
Dec. 22, 2022: Musk Lifted Bans for Thousands on Twitter. Here’s What They’re Tweeting.
Musk Lifted Bans for Thousands on Twitter. Here’s
What They’re Tweeting.
Many reinstated users are tweeting about topics that
got them barred in the first place: Covid-19 skepticism, election denialism and
QAnon.
Stuart A.
Thompson
By Stuart
A. Thompson
Dec. 22,
2022
Since Elon
Musk bought Twitter in October, the self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist”
has ad-libbed his way through the company’s moderation policies.
He
initially argued that bans should be reserved for spam accounts, offering
“amnesty” to thousands of suspended users and reinstating former President
Donald J. Trump. Last week, he suspended several journalists, claiming they had
shared public flight data revealing his private location. (Many of the bans
were later reversed.)
To gauge
how Mr. Musk’s content decisions influenced Twitter’s content, The New York
Times analyzed tweets from more than 1,000 users whose accounts were recently
reinstated. The posts were collected for The Times by Bright Data, a social
media tracking company, using a list of reinstated users identified by Travis
Brown, a Berlin-based software developer who has tracked extremism on Twitter.
Most of the
reinstated accounts were deeply partisan — often vocal supporters of Mr. Trump
— and they appeared eager to bring their fiery takes back to the social
network. It was not clear from the data why the users were originally suspended
or why they were reinstated, though their post histories suggest many were
barred as Twitter cracked down on Covid-19 and election-related misinformation.
Imran
Ahmed, the founder and chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital
Hate, said the message that Mr. Musk had sent to the formerly suspended users
was clear: “Welcome back, welcome home.”
Twitter and
Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
“I finally
got this account back after being banned for being a #Republican thanks
@elonmusk,” one user tweeted. Just 10 minutes later, the same person wrote:
“Joe Biden is an illegitimate president and the 2020 election was stolen.”
Here is
some of what these users have been saying on Twitter since their return.
Covid-19 misinformation and vaccine doubts
During the
pandemic, Twitter introduced a policy that banned misinformation about the virus,
suspending over 11,000 accounts, including many prominent users, after they
pushed falsehoods. But last month, after Mr. Musk took control of the company,
Twitter said it would no longer enforce that policy.
Several
reinstated users who were barred after the Covid-19 policies went into effect
started posting again about the virus and its vaccines. Some raised doubts
about the effectiveness of vaccines or suggested, without evidence, that
vaccines kill people.
Several
posts mentioned “Died Suddenly,” a misleading documentary released this year
that claimed people were dying from the vaccine. Others shared their own
unsupported anecdotes.
“If you
watched ‘Died Suddenly’ here is more confirming evidence,” one user tweeted,
adding a link to a website titled “Covid Jab Side Effects.” Before being barred
in January 2021, the user had posted several times about Covid-19, including
posts that the virus was not dangerous.
Election
fraud
Twitter
cracked down on election fraud conspiracy theories after the 2020 election,
suspending thousands of accounts that pushed false and misleading ideas about
the election results. Hundreds of users have since returned to Twitter, pushing
those ideas again.
Many
reinstated users focused on close races in the midterm elections, including the
governor’s race in Arizona and the Senate race in Pennsylvania. Kari Lake, the
Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, lost her race but has refused to
concede, citing problems with the voting process and claiming fraud. Many
reinstated users echoed her ideas.
Those
tweets recycled falsehoods and conspiracy theories from the 2020 election,
including that voting machines were rigged to influence the outcome.
“Voters,
not voting machines, used to decide elections in Arizona,” one reinstated user
tweeted. “That’s no longer the case.”
QAnon
QAnon, the
online conspiracy theory, appeared to reach its peak on Jan. 6, 2021, when
hundreds of Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol. Twitter suspended over
70,000 accounts linked to the group afterward. But many of the movement’s core
ideas have continued playing a significant role in the far-right imagination.
On Twitter,
reinstated users have returned to familiar themes in QAnon lore, raising
questions about prominent Democrats and their association with Jeffrey Epstein,
a former financier who was charged with child sex trafficking and is a central
figure in QAnon conspiracies.
They have
claimed without evidence that Democrats and Hollywood personalities are engaged
in widespread sex trafficking and pedophilia. And they have also repeated
claims that liberals are “grooming” children using drag performances and sex
education.
“I just was
reinstated today after 2 years of permanent suspension,” wrote one reinstated
user with “QAnon” in his user name. “I guess I owe that to the new owner thank
you Elon Musk.”
Stuart A.
Thompson is a reporter on the Technology desk covering misinformation and
disinformation. @stuartathompson
What’s Gone at Twitter? A Data Center, Janitors, Some Toilet Paper.
What’s Gone at Twitter? A Data Center, Janitors,
Some Toilet Paper.
Elon Musk has reduced the company to a bare-bones
operation, and employees are under a “zero-based budgeting” mandate to justify
any spending.
By Kate
Conger, Ryan Mac and Mike Isaac
Kate
Conger, Ryan Mac and Mike Isaac have reported on Elon Musk and Twitter since
early this year.
Dec. 29,
2022
Elon Musk’s
orders were clear: Close the data center.
Early on
Christmas Eve, members of the billionaire’s staff flew to Sacramento — the site
of one of Twitter’s three main computing storage facilities — to disconnect
servers that had kept the social network running smoothly. Some employees were
worried that losing those servers could cause problems, but saving money was
the priority, according to two people who were familiar with the move but not
authorized to talk about it.
The data
center shutdown was one of many drastic steps Mr. Musk has undertaken to
stabilize Twitter’s finances. Over the past few weeks, Twitter had stopped
paying millions of dollars in rent and services, and Mr. Musk had told his
subordinates to renegotiate those agreements or simply end them. The company
has stopped paying rent at its Seattle office, leading it to face eviction, two
people familiar with the matter said. Janitorial and security services have
been cut, and in some cases employees have resorted to bringing their own
toilet paper to the office.
Mr. Musk
bought the social network for $44 billion in late October, saddling it with
debt that will require him to pay about $1 billion in interest annually.
Speaking on a live forum on Twitter last week, Mr. Musk compared the company to
a “plane that is headed towards the ground at high speed with the engines on
fire and the controls don’t work.” Twitter was on track to have a “negative
cash flow situation” of about $3 billion in 2023, he said, citing a depressed
advertising environment and increased costs, like the debt payments.
“That’s why
I spent the last five weeks cutting costs like crazy,” he said.
Those cuts
may be yielding consequences. On Wednesday, users around the world reported
service interruptions with Twitter. Some were logged out, while others
encountered error messages while visiting the website. Twitter has not
explained what caused the temporary outage. Three people familiar with the
company’s infrastructure said that if the Sacramento facility had still been
operating, it could have helped alleviate the problem by providing backup
computing capacity when other data centers failed.
Twitter,
which has eliminated its communications department, and Mr. Musk did not
respond to a request for comment.
Although he
has said he will appoint a new chief executive at Twitter, Mr. Musk remains
closely involved at the social networking firm even as problems crop up at his
electric vehicle company, Tesla. And his tight control of the daily management
of Twitter calls into question just how much power he would cede to a new
chief, who would inherit a bare-bones business that he still owns.
Since early
November, Mr. Musk has sought to save about $500 million in nonlabor costs,
according to an internal document seen by The New York Times. He has also laid
off or fired nearly 75 percent of the company’s work force since completing the
purchase.
During the
live forum on Twitter last week, Mr. Musk said Twitter had “a little over 2,000
people.” The discussion occurred shortly after he laid off about 50 people,
mainly from the company’s infrastructure division. Last week, he cut half of
the public policy team’s 30 employees.
Cost-cutting
has been overseen by Steve Davis, the head of Mr. Musk’s tunneling start-up,
the Boring Company, and Jared Birchall, the head of the billionaire’s family
office. Twitter managers who didn’t lose their jobs in mass layoffs last month
have been told to approach their spending with a tactic known as “zero-based
budgeting,” or operating under the assumption that spending should start at
nothing and teams should justify individual costs, according to the
costs-savings document.
Mr. Davis
has directed Twitter employees to delay paying various contractors or vendors
and try to negotiate those bills to smaller amounts, according to two people
familiar with his instructions. The cost of one of the company’s largest
contracts, with the consulting megafirm Deloitte, has been a point of
particular concern for Twitter’s leadership, which wants to reduce the fees the
company pays for security, tax preparation and other services, the two people
said. The company has skipped payments to KPMG, an accounting and consulting
firm that had been working on matters related to compliance with the Federal
Trade Commission, they said.
While
missed payments to those firms have now been paid, according to a person
familiar with the expenditures, it’s unclear if the company will retain their
services beyond this year. Representatives for Deloitte and KPMG did not
respond to requests for comment.
The company
missed payments to and then renegotiated its contract with Carrot, a benefits
provider for fertility services including egg and sperm freezing and in vitro
fertilization, according to two people close to the company. On Thursday,
Carrot notified Twitter employees that the fertility benefit amount would be
halved in the new year. A representative for Carrot did not respond to requests
for comment.
Last week,
Twitter got rid of the cleaning staff at its New York offices and 10 people
from corporate security, signaling that it may close one of its two buildings
there, said two people familiar with the move.
At
Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, where the company has missed rent
payments, Mr. Musk has done the same, consolidating workers onto two floors and
closing four. He also canceled janitorial services this month, after those
workers went on strike for better wages.
That has
left the office in disarray. With people packed into more confined spaces, the
smell of leftover takeout food and body odor has lingered on the floors,
according to four current and former employees. Bathrooms have grown dirty,
these people said. And because janitorial services have largely been ended,
some workers have resorted to bringing their own rolls of toilet paper from
home.
Mr. Musk’s
erratic and hands-on style has thrown off a number of workers, as he often
interrupts meetings seemingly at random, talking for long stretches and asking
some top leaders to be sounding boards for his ideas, two people familiar with
his management of Twitter said.
He has also
asked some leaders to snuff out the sources of leaks to the press and anonymous
posts on social media sites, three people said, and is focused on eliminating
people inside the company he believes are opposed to him.
Workers
expect more layoffs. Because the sales staff was cut less than other teams in
earlier rounds of dismissals, some people anticipate further cuts to the
division. U.S. revenue numbers continue to flag, with advertising revenue down
significantly over the first week of December compared with where it was one
year ago, two people said.
Despite the
steep cuts, Mr. Musk has continued to spend in some areas. Twitter has hired
several new employees in recent weeks, replacing workers who were terminated
during mass layoffs in November.
But the
training process for new employees has been significantly reduced, cutting to
90 minutes what was once three days of orientation that included information on
compliance with privacy and security agreements with global regulators, three
people said. In one case, a new hire contacted a former employee on LinkedIn to
get an understanding of how services worked at the company, according to the
former worker.
Mr. Musk
has also brought in dozens of engineers from his other companies, including
Tesla and SpaceX, to work at Twitter. While Tesla engineers are not on
Twitter’s payroll, the automaker has billed the social media firm for some of
their services as if they were contractors, according to documents seen by a
former Twitter manager.
Those who
have been brought in recently, according to a document seen by The Times,
include Omead Afshar, one of Mr. Musk’s right-hand men, who previously oversaw
the construction of Tesla’s factory in Austin, Texas, and is now, Bloomberg
reported, a vice president at SpaceX. Mr. Afshar did not respond to a request
for comment.
Some human
resources and other employees have agreements to stay until January or February
to help the transition to Mr. Musk’s ownership before leaving, two people
familiar with the department said.
The
shutdown of the Sacramento data center, known as SMF1, set off alarm bells at
Twitter, with employees being summoned to work on Christmas Eve as internal
systems went down, according to Slack messages viewed by The Times. While users
did not experience any immediate disruptions to the social network, three
people who used to work on the company’s infrastructure called Mr. Musk’s moves
reckless, potentially leading to the loss of internal data and about 30 percent
of the company’s computing power that could be needed in times of high site
traffic.
Mr. Musk
tweeted that Twitter remained online, “even after I disconnected one of the
more sensitive server racks.” That evening, the system Twitter uses to triage
reports of illegal and harmful content went offline briefly, according to an
internal message written by Ella Irwin, the company’s head of trust and safety.
“All agent
tools are down,” she said of the system.
The Twitter Files should disturb liberal critics of Elon Musk – and here’s why
The Twitter Files should disturb liberal critics
of Elon Musk – and here’s why
Kenan Malik
Leaked messages show an unhealthy link between social
media and state security
Sun 1 Jan
2023 07.00 GMT
Half the
room is jumping up and down, screaming “Gotcha!”. The other half shrugs its
shoulders, muttering “So what’s new?”. Welcome to the war over the so-called
Twitter Files.
Over the
past month, Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, has made available to a handpicked
group of journalists internal documents and conversations that took place
before his takeover. They are mainly discussions about who and what should be
moderated or banned, ranging from the Hunter Biden laptop story to the question
of whether to remove Donald Trump from the platform. The journalists have made
public selected slices of the data through a drip feed of Twitter threads.
For some,
the Twitter Files provide evidence of collusion between tech companies, liberal
politicians and the “deep state” to silence conservatives. For others, they
constitute little more than a publicity exercise that told us nothing that we
did not know. As someone who has long made a case for the importance of free
speech, I think we should take the Twitter Files seriously, but also look at
the discussion with a sceptical eye, given that much of it is framed by the
culture wars.
Consider
the controversy over “shadow banning”. It’s a phrase much bandied about in
debates about social media, but its meaning is contested. For the curators of
the Twitter Files, “shadow banning” means using algorithms to “deamplify”
tweets – that is, stop them reaching a wider audience.
For the old
pre-Musk Twitter, however, it meant something different – “deliberately making
someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it”,
as a 2018 blog post put it. The conflicting definitions have allowed the
critics to accuse former Twitter executives of lying, although they seem as
interested in putting the old Twitter regime in the dock as in uncovering the
truth.
The
journalists curating the Twitter Files have presented deamplification as a
secret process. Certainly, the internal mechanisms of moderation have been
veiled in secrecy. As a practice, however, Twitter has long been open about
deamplification – or “visibility filtering” as it also calls it – noting even
in its terms of service that “we may… limit distribution or visibility of any
Content”.
It’s a
practice championed not just by old Twitter but new Twitter, too. Shortly after
buying the platform, Musk tweeted that his policy would be one of “freedom of
speech, but not freedom of reach”, adding that “negative/hate tweets will be
max deboosted” – in other words, deamplified.
But is it a
good policy? Who decides who or what should be “deamplified”? By what criteria?
And how different is this from straightforward censorship? Unfortunately, the
polarisation of the debate seems to have overridden a nuanced debate around
such questions.
The Twitter
Files also reveal some of the processes by which users are banned. Twitter
insists that it does not suspend accounts for “political reasons”. That’s hard
to square with the evidence.
Take the
controversy over Trump. Twitter executives held anguished discussions about how
to deal with the president, recognising the dangers of banning a democratically
elected leader. Nevertheless, as one executive put it, “the narrative that
trump [sic] and his friends have pursued over the course of this election and
frankly last 4+ years must be taken into account”. In other words, Trump’s
politics mattered. After the 6 January riot at the Capitol, the pressure that
Twitter faced led to the second argument taking precedence over the first.
All this
has strengthened the view on the right of tech companies as fomenting a liberal
conspiracy against conservatives. Within Twitter, Musk tweeted, “rules were
enforced against the right, but not against the left”.
Yet a 2021
study suggested the opposite. Looking at millions of tweets in seven countries
– Britain, America, Canada, France, Germany, Spain and Japan – researchers
found that, with the exception of Germany, Twitter algorithms amplified
rightwing politicians more than the left. They also found that in America,
conservative news sources were boosted more than liberal ones.
These
results cut against the grain of conventional wisdom. It may be that there’s a
sharp divide between algorithmic decisions and those made by human moderators.
It may also be that the high-profile censoring of rightwing voices is not
representative of the mass of decisions. In the last six months of 2021 alone,
Twitter censored an extraordinary 4m tweets – a figure that itself should give
us pause. The political bias in those 4m decisions is unknown. There is little
discussion, for instance, about the suppression of Palestinian voices, a
practice that has continued under Musk.
At the very
least, we need more transparency about moderation. Yet, when Alex Stamos, of
Stanford University’s Internet Observatory, asked Musk to allow not just
handpicked journalists but academic researchers to inspect the data, Musk
dismissed him on the bizarre grounds that “you operate a propaganda platform”.
Musk seems more interested in being seen to “own the libs” than in opening up
Twitter’s inner workings.
The most
worrying issue the Twitter Files have exposed is the level of contact between
the social media company and state security organisations. The FBI regularly
holds meetings with Twitter executives, pressuring them to take action against
“misinformation”, even when this amounted to little more than a satirical
tweet, and demanding the personal data of users. Twitter, to its credit, often
pushed back. Nevertheless, the Twitter Files do show an unhealthy relationship
between social media and state security.
Equally
unhealthy is the response of many liberals who have become sanguine about the
work of the security apparatus. There has been a remarkable partisan shift in
American attitudes towards the FBI, with a huge swing in Democratic support for
the organisation. Many now view the FBI as an essential weapon against
populism. Many seem to have forgotten the sordid history of the FBI in
undermining radical movements from unions to civil rights organisations. The
insouciance of liberals and many on the left to such state interference in
public life is disquieting.
Twitter, we
are constantly told, is not real life. That’s true. But, like all social media,
it plays an inordinately large role in real life, a private company that has
become an intimate part of the global public square. We need to keep that
public square as open as possible. That is why the revelations of the Twitter
Files matter. And that is why we need to understand their significance beyond
the clamour of the culture wars.
Kenan Malik
is an Observer columnist
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