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November 11, 2022

Twitter after Musk's takeover

By Rajan Laad

When Elon Musk clinched a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion, he hailed it as a significant step in facilitating free speech.

Musk wrote that “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy," and hoped that his worst critics remain on Twitter, "because that is what free speech means."

Years after being founded, Twitter became the official channel of communication for governments, leaders, corporate houses, members of the press, and showbiz luminaries. 

However, as Twitter developed a monopoly, the abuse of privilege began.

They started suppressing ideas that stood against liberal groupthink and news adverse to the Democrats.

Back in October 2020, Twitter locked the account of the New York Post for tweeting stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop which included information about his shady business dealings, containing proof that Joe Biden, as vice president, used his influence to enrich his family.

Sharing of these news reports was prohibited and Twitter users who clicked the link were shown an alert claiming that the webpage was “unsafe.”

Twitter suppressed the most important story of the 2020 presidential elections to protect Biden. This was an act of election meddling. A Newsbusters poll revealed that 16% of Biden voters would have voted differently had they known of Hunter’s laptop.

In order to prevent this from recurring, Musk has to eliminate the following restrictions:

  • ·      Suspension or locking or suppression (shadow banning) of accounts that tweet information inconvenient to the establishment.
  • ·      Suppression of tweets that contains information inconvenient to the establishment.
  • ·      Selective application of disclaimers, fact check notes to certain tweets with information inconvenient to the establishment

Musk promised to enhance Twitter by adding new features and making Twitter’s algorithm open source to "increase trust, defeating the spam bots and authenticating all humans."

Musk announced that he planned to give "power to the people" by making the blue check a paid service. So far the blue check was a symbol that verifies the authenticity of individuals of prominence with large numbers of followers.

Musk rolled out the new Twitter Blue with verification where people can pay $8 per month for their blue tick.

But there is a distinction.

Clicking on the check mark of legacy verified profiles will result in a message “notable in government, news, entertainment, or another designated category” while for paying subscribers, clicking on the tick mark causes as a message with text “this account is verified because it’s subscribed to Twitter Blue.”

The question remains if there has to be a distinction between what was wrong with the previous system that verified accounts of prominent people only.

Musk has splurged $44 billion on Twitter, perhaps he is looking for easy ways to get some of his money back.

‘Comedienne’ Kathy Griffin was suspended for attempted to impersonate Musk via her own verified account.

Musk tweeted, “Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying ‘parody’ will be permanently suspended.”

The Twitter blue subscription facility has given rise to other problems.

A verified fake Tesla account using the handle @TesIaReal became active just before 1:00 p.m. Pacific on Thursday. The account has been posting tweets that mocked Musk and Tesla among other things.

A verified Twitter account posing as the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly tweeted Thursday afternoon that "We are excited to announce that insulin is free now." The account, with the handle @EliLillyandCo, used the Eli Lilly logo and had a verified tick.

The tweet received around 1,500 retweets and stayed up for several hours before the account was locked by Twitter. Later in the evening, the account was unlocked. The Eli Lilly logo was removed. The checkmark remained on the desktop version of the site, but not on the app. Now the account has been suspended.

The real Eli Lilly Twitter account, @LillyPad, resolved the confusion:

 

 

An account @BPDeezNutzz that impersonated British oil giant BP Global also managed to secure a blue check without any problem. This account attacked BP for environmental issues and climate change. That account has also been suspended.

In the past several days, fake accounts have popped up impersonating Joe Biden, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Pope Francis, Nintendo, and others; many have been suspended.

Will these individuals be able to sue Twitter for breach of contract?

Musk intervened, declaring that from now on, parody accounts must have parody in their names, not just bios.

 

 

From being a platform where only the left’s narrative was allowed, Twitter seemed to have devolved into a platform where anything goes.

Liberals in the media and beyond who were furious after Musk’s takeover are driving the narrative that Musk has presided over an implosion. It isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that they were among the drivers of this chaos.

But the blame for incorrect assessment of risks lies on the purveyor and not the rogue customer.

Musk seems to be making things up as he goes 

Twitter looks like a country that has just been introduced to democracy after being ruled by an iron-fisted totalitarian regime.

There will obviously be an abuse of freedom, and there will be complete chaos and utter anarchy. It may seem like the plot is lost. A lot of it is the doings of holdovers from the previous regime and their allies

Musk himself conceded the chaos but promise to “keep what works & change what doesn’t.”

 

 

When the Berlin Wall came down, it took decades of hard work to bring matters to normalcy between East and West Germany.

Perhaps we give Musk a few months before we attack him for the chaos?

Image: PXHere / CC0 public domain

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