Musk & Twitter
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It was my understanding that blue checks largely showed ideology, not identity, given the manner in which they were handed out.
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Well Bruce Daisley seemed to agree with me:
Daisley acknowledged that validating certain accounts (with a blue tick) was a mistake. “One of the things we felt we got wrong was verification. The intention was for a badge to say, ‘this is the real one’. What happened over time is that when these people sent things that were egregious and politically offensive, people would say to us, ‘Oh, so you’re endorsing that?’”
Twitter rescinded blue ticks not from accounts shown to be fake, but because people didn't like what the accounts said.
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@barbarian said in Musk & Twitter:
Oh well if Bruce Daisley said it then it must be right.
Who to trust, rando or ex-European vice-president of Twitter?
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Organizations, governments, etc have their own check now, so that’s still possible to use to filter your lists. News organisations are encouraged to subscribe to pass on those checks to their employees.
So easy to spot journalists if that’s what you want to do.
Blues checks are now just subscribers, so if anything there is now a greater ability to differentiate sources.
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@booboo said in Musk & Twitter:
Maybe it's my ideological leanings, but I trust X more nowadays.
Just saying.
The community notes feature is awesome, even turns up on ads (and Elons posts from time to time).
When people that have disagreed in the past agree on something, a note is surfaced. The code behind them is open sourced so people can recreate notes.
It’s fantastic for providing context when people try to misrepresent something or exclude context.
Often includes link to sources so you can do a deep dive on a subject.
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@Tim said in Musk & Twitter:
Still blocked by some loser 50 year old Guardian music columnist, after I responded to his claim that "Taylor Swift's new album was as good as anything by Fleetwood Mac" by asking him if he was "still banned from going within 100m of any schools?"
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@Frank said in Musk & Twitter:
I find it rather odd that some people don't believe that there wasn't a massive ideological bias against more right wing views at the old Twitter.
Shows the extent to which we probably all live in our own bubbles.
If they don’t believe it they can read through the Twitter employee slack messages where they discussed how to bend their rules to ban users they didn’t like.
Or look at the cubicle of the engineer that had a USSR flag on the wall.
Every now and then I hop onto threads (where most the woke moved to) and my god it was insufferable. Non ironic posts about Elon should be jail, etc, etc
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@Victor-Meldrew I laughed
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The problem with the blue check verification wasn't that they gave blue checks to accounts they shouldn't have, from that perspective it worked well and you knew if someone had a blue check then they had been verified.
The system itself was fine, the problems arose when:
- They refused to give large long standing accounts a blue check because they didn't like what that account was posting, and
- They actually removed the blue check from some accounts that had posted opinions they didn't like.
That completely undermined the whole system, as how could an account become unverified based on something they posted, even though there was nothing to suggest they were not the person they claimed to be? It meant it had become not a verification system, but a system that could be used against accounts they didn't like.
I agree that it has now become a bit of a mess, though at the same time I don't have a lot of difficulty working out if an account is legitimate or not so it doesn't bother me that much.
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If anyone wants to dig into the math, this is super interesting.
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/08/16/communitynotes.html
Key takeaways for me is you can review the notes voting and see why it was surfaced or hidden. That sort of transparency is crucial for a context based system like this.
Algorithmic based fact checking is a great way to handle the current polarisation where each side is trying to promote its own facts.
In any case, this is a dramatically better system than the previous regime.
The avalanche of new features is also a benefit to the app for me. Some will hit, others won’t.
I’m tempted by the grok summary of news events and how they are going to expand that. Some interesting kernels of features starting to emerge.
We had a good ten years of very little innovation, certainly not the case anymore. Almost too much to keep up with.
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The issue it had is the same, but the opposite direction. Lefties used to get recommendations / for you of other lefties. And that’s what they liked, as they were close minded to other views.
Now they get a selection it’s a “right wing” platform.
So the left used to like it as it was clear where Twitter allegiances lied. Now with Musk owning it, the view is that it’s a right wing platform as that’s where his allegiances lie.
The truth is that real truth seekers shoukd read a variety of opinions, which I believe is what Musk is trying to do. However, his posts are so anti woke, it’s easy to disagree with that …
Personally I think most who leave will come back, as they realize they were addicted to getting upset at things on Twitter.
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@Frank said in Musk & Twitter:
I find it rather odd that some people don't believe that there wasn't a massive ideological bias against more right wing views at the old Twitter.
Shows the extent to which we probably all live in our own bubbles.
i do have my own unproven theory on that and might be due not being a hugely active user in some way. I see the comments from say a right leaning person that all they see is left leaning stuff...we'll im left leaning generally and i most see right leaning stuff (the little i use it), some sort of quirk in the algorithm if you dont actually follow or interact with many people
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@Kiwiwomble said in Musk & Twitter:
@Frank said in Musk & Twitter:
I find it rather odd that some people don't believe that there wasn't a massive ideological bias against more right wing views at the old Twitter.
Shows the extent to which we probably all live in our own bubbles.
i do have my own unproven theory on that and might be due not being a hugely active user in some way. I see the comments from say a right leaning person that all they see is left leaning stuff...we'll im left leaning generally and i most see right leaning stuff (the little i use it), some sort of quirk in the algorithm if you dont actually follow or interact with many people
The way it should work is that if you follow left leaning, they recommend right leaning and vice versa.
I only follow about 10 people, of which I'd say 3 are left, 3 are right, and the others are centred / news feeds. So I think I just confuse the algorithm. Under the "For You" tab I do get a wide range of suggestions.
One lefty/Corbynite they've got me following is Aaron Bastani. I don't agree with much he says, but I acknowledge that his writings/views do make me think a bit more.
Which is how it should work, right?
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interesting word 'should' isn't it? Seems to me that social media is first and foremost about clicks and views, and you achieve this by feeding people's base fears and arguments, making you think critically doesn't really feature in their ambitions - that's therefore what the algos are designed to do. I'd say the majority of people who post in this politics forum are more engaged and more aware of the strength of arguments than the average user of social media and therefore our use patterns of Twitter don't match the average.