Category: Social Media

Amanda Silberling, writing at TechCrunch, on Twitter’s supposed plans to charge users $20/month to be verified:

Musk and his buddies view this plan as a way to get people to actually give Twitter money. But by monetizing a symbol that currently has value, they will ultimately remove all of that existing value.

Blue checks exist on social platforms as a means of combating misinformation. Currently, if someone makes a fake account pretending to be a world leader, journalist or celebrity, it’s easy to tell it’s a fake if the account doesn’t have a blue check. But under this newly proposed system, there’s not much incentive to pay the $20 per month to stay verified, especially since the once-coveted symbol would be available to anyone willing to pay. It’s quite possible that bad actors trying to pose as journalists to spread fake news would be more incentivized to pay the $20 than actual journalists.

Of course, Musk doesn’t seem to care about misinformation — just this weekend, he shared a link to an article that included baseless claims about the recent horrific attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

For better or for worse, Twitter has become the hub for a lot of news, and while it’s not a perfect system, verification is a signal to users that the source they are reading are legitimate. Upsetting that balance is only going to bring more even more misinformation — or worse — to Twitter.

Nilay Patel, in a fantastic piece about the challenges that You Know Who faces with his purchase of Twitter:

Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.

[…]

The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to incentivize good stuff, disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff. Do you know why YouTube videos are all eight to 10 minutes long? Because that’s how long a video has to be to qualify for a second ad slot in the middle. That’s content moderation, baby — YouTube wants a certain kind of video, and it created incentives to get it. That’s the business you’re in now. The longer you fight it or pretend that you can sell something else, the more Twitter will drag you into the deepest possible muck of defending indefensible speech. And if you turn on a dime and accept that growth requires aggressive content moderation and pushing back against government speech regulations around the country and world, well, we’ll see how your fans react to that.

Anyhow, welcome to hell. This was your idea.

I really don’t see how any of this ends well.

Alex Heath, in the best lede I’ve read all week:

Meta’s VR social network Horizon Worlds — the company’s flagship “metaverse” app — is suffering from too many quality issues and even the team building it isn’t using it very much, according to internal memos obtained by The Verge.

On a day of record-temperature hot takes, Casey Newton has the best coverage of the Musk/Twitter deal I’ve seen so far.

John Gruber:

I mean what happens to Twitter’s share price if Musk dumps all his stock and tweets something like “I tried to help Twitter but the company is run by a bunch of bozos. I’m out.” That’s just 76 characters and I bet it would tank Twitter’s stock.

I think we’ve all known Facebook is a cesspool, but now we have hard numbers, as Kate Cox writes at Ars Technica:

As Facebook scrambles to deal with its most problematic groups in the wake of January’s assault on the US Capitol, a new report finds that leaders inside the company knew as long ago as August that 70 percent of its top “civic” groups had too much hate speech, misinformation, violent rhetoric, or other toxic behavior to be recommended to other users.

Researchers inside the company warned executives months ago that top groups were plagued with misinformation and calls to violence, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. “We need to do something to stop these conversations from happening and growing as quickly as they do,” the researchers wrote in internal documents obtained by the WSJ.

Of the top 100 most-active US civic groups, 70 percent “are considered non-recommendable for issues such as hate, misinfo, bullying, and harassment,” the presentation said. “Our existing integrity systems aren’t addressing these issues.”

Seems about right.

Hamza Shaban at The Washington Post, writing about a study that looked at the effects of leaving Facebook:

In the latest study measuring the effects of social media on a person’s life, researchers at New York University and Stanford University found that deactivating Facebook for just four weeks could alter people’s behavior and state of mind. The study found that temporarily quitting Facebook led people to spend more time offline, watching TV and socializing with family and friends; reduced their knowledge of current events and polarization of policy views; and provoked a small but significant improvement in people’s self-reported happiness and satisfaction with their lives.

What’s more, the researchers found that the deactivation freed up on average an hour per day for participants. And the people who took a break from Facebook continued to use the platform less often, even after the experiment ended.

I left the site last year, and while I do feel disconnected from some people I used to only keep tabs on via Facebook, in reality, most of those weren’t real friendships anyway. It’s more work to stay connected without it, but I do feel better without Facebook in my life.

That’s not to say I’ve left it all behind. I do have an active Instagram account that I quite enjoy. Instagram feels like one of the few public places left on the web that hasn’t been completely ruined yet, but I know its days are probably numbered.

Of course, many find Instagram to be depressing. If you follow a bunch of fancy traveling influencers, it make your life seem dull. The trick is not to do that.

I present two pieces of evidence, just from this week’s news:

• Ashley Feinberg’s interview with Jack Dorsey, in which Twitter’s CEO said they company would “certainly talk about” removing a hypothetical tweet in which Trump called for murder.
• An early look at some of Twitter’s possible future features by Sarah Perez and Ingrid Lunden show that as messy as the current version of Twitter is, the ideas bubbling to the top within the company all look pretty bad.

This is hard for me. I like my little community on Twitter, but I know it is a hellscape of abuse for many. I use it to promote my work and to talk with my audience, but every time I open my replies, I brace myself for something terrible to be there, waiting for me to see it.

Regardless of all of that, I think it’s clear the leadership at Twitter has no idea what they are doing, and I think the network’s time is ticking away faster than ever.

Jacob Kastrenakes at The Verge:

As Facebook works to contain the fallout from its biggest-ever data breach, the company is introducing a product that will bring a camera and microphone into your living room. Facebook Portal, and the larger Portal Plus, are smart displays that are laser-focused on video chatting.

The first hardware products marketed under the Facebook brand, the Portals can be used to call other Portal users, or anyone who has Facebook or Facebook Messenger. The Portals can play music through Spotify and Pandora, or stream video from Facebook Watch, but these are intentionally limited devices. For better and for worse, you can’t even browse Facebook.

Nope, nope, nope.