“The internal documents disclosed to Congress by Facebook whistleblowers suggest that “Weens are herd animals,” with references to “the stories” of the addicts that highlight a strong irony and obfuscation. Snapchat seems to have shifted its focus in its efforts to expand its user base.
Drawing from the investigative work of Bloomberg journalist Olivia Carville, this film discusses the endeavors of Minnow’s legal team in seeking justice for social media victims, confronting the predatory practices of Silicon Valley. It tells the harrowing stories of families devastated by extreme online content. This includes children or teenagers who tragically replicated dangerous self-harm or suicide methods from videos, or those who lost their lives after encountering online predators. The struggle here involves challenging Section 230, a legal shield established in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg continues to engage in harmful practices.
The Center’s founder, Matthew Bergman, has compared social media companies to tobacco firms, alleging that these companies put profit above user well-being. While the film effectively illustrates this connection and the consequent harm, it doesn’t imply that the path to accountability is straightforward. Gaining justice for individual cases and proving that tech companies deliberately design their algorithms to provoke our darker tendencies and impulses represents a significant challenge. A crucial goal is to prevent the dismissal of the Snapchat case due to Section 230. This may appear as a minor victory, but it’s a necessary first step. This narrative is a vital piece of public journalism that articulates what many of us only sense.
“Don’t Look Away” is set to shock audiences in British cinemas starting August 8th.
If anything symbolizes the end of Twitter, it’s the rise and fall of Oprah Winfrey’s account.
Oprah joined the platform in 2009. First time tweeting Live from her popular TV show “HI TWITTERS. Thank you for the warm welcome. It feels very 21st century.”
Queensland University of Technology Digital Media Research Center Professor Axel Brands said it was a “landmark moment” for the platform.
“That was really the moment when the numbers skyrocketed.”
Oprah still has an account under the renamed X with 41.7 million followers. But since November 2022, a month after Elon Musk’s acquisition of the site was completed, she posted: Just once – In January 2023, she told Chelsea Clinton that she was “still laughing so hard 😂” about Clinton accidentally wearing two different black shoes at an event.
Debate over X reignited last week after the Australian government took the platform to court to force it to remove a video of a Sydney bishop allegedly being stabbed while leading a church service.
Company X says it complied with the order to delete the footage of the stabbing (though, ironically, just below the post announcing its compliance is a comment saying someone had shared the full graphic video) Musk has been harshly critical of Australia’s request to delete the footage. We asked Mr. X for comment.
But as debate intensifies over what responsibility social media platforms have to stop the spread of violent or extremist content, other questions are emerging. “What is Twitter/X anymore?”
What happened to the site, once a staple of the news cycle and political debate, now increasingly abandoned by those who once religiously followed it?
The beginning: “Utopian vision”
A former Twitter Australia employee, who requested anonymity, said Twitter had lofty goals in its early days.
“I think it was definitely a utopian vision at the time. Like many of these founders, they really thought they were disruptors and creating a space for real public debate. “I was thinking about it,” she says. “I think people really enjoyed it at the time. It was a very fast-moving, innovative platform where you could get the latest news and follow and connect with people you really admired. Even in the early days, it always had parts of it as a toxic swamp, but not entirely.”
“It had a social profile,” she says. “Remember when everyone was obsessed with the existence of blue ticks and pretended that people who didn’t have them didn’t care?”
Although the exact number of monthly active users is unknown, Twitter/X has had a significant impact on the world of news and politics over the years, although it has not had the broad mainstream appeal of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or TikTok. I did.
“It’s a very specific, limited audience,” Brands says. “But the types of audiences that could be reached on Twitter were journalists, politicians, activists, and various forms of experts. Often people who were influential in other communities online and offline.”
Belinda Barnett, senior lecturer in media and communications at Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology, said: In essence, it has become a must-have tool, especially for journalists. ”
This was also because Twitter’s features, especially @mentions and hashtags, are well-suited for breaking news.
For example, Twitter became big in Japan in part because people turned to Twitter as a way to communicate and organize when the country was hit by a devastating tsunami in 2011, said a former Twitter user. Employees speak.
“It became a real lifeline for people and a way for people to be rescued,” she said.
According to a 2021 Pew study, 69% of U.S. Twitter users said they got their news from the site, 46% said the site gave them a better understanding of current events, and 30% said the site made them more interested in politics. They responded that they felt more involved.
The breaking news feature was not without its problems. The immediacy of this platform gave voice to dissidents and citizen journalists, which was crucial for uprisings like those seen in the Arab Spring, but it also allowed politicians to bypass traditional journalistic mediation. Bruns says it’s now possible.
“There are quite a few politicians who have essentially stopped giving interviews to journalists, leaving them exposed to critical questions and basically just posting their announcements on Twitter.”
Barnett said misinformation and trolls have always been a problem, but the company is committed to what she calls the “three pillars”: user blue checkmarks, moderation policies, and trust and safety. team.
“All of these things worked together to give us some credibility during breaking news, so people went there. Twitter in the old days certainly spread misinformation, but it started trending before it spread.” I often ended up crushing it,” she said.
Now: Musk’s Wild West
Barnett said all three pillars were quickly dismantled after Musk acquired the platform at the end of 2022.
The trust and safety teams were among those who were abruptly fired within weeks of Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the company, showing up to work at headquarters with a ceramic sink on their first day. A video of Mr. Musk’s entrance was posted on the site with the caption, “Let it sink in.”
Many people who were blocked from the site for violating online rules, including Donald Trump, had their accounts reinstated (although Trump’s account was later blocked again).
The verification process has changed dramatically. Instead of being given blue ticks for being a celebrity or working for a popular news site, you can now buy them.
My approach to moderation has also changed. Mr. Musk’s spat with the Australian government reveals something about his vision for X, which he sees as a bastion of free speech.
“They’re very reluctant to engage in any kind of arbitration,” Brands said. “To some extent, this reflects the broader sense that free speech in the United States is an absolute good above all else. On the other hand, in Australia, Europe, and many other regions, the right to free speech and protection from harmful speech are And that would essentially sound like censorship to many otherwise very liberal people in the United States.”
Ironically, in 2022, X suspended the accounts of people who criticized Musk, including those of several prominent journalists from CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. account has been banned Track the whereabouts of your private jet using public data.
“Elon wants it both ways,” Barnett says. “He wants it to be the original Twitter, which was certainly absolutely critical to the news cycle,” but he also wants to “remove the pillars and processes that Twitter has spent years building up and make it more… We also want it to promote community. ”
“I think it’s becoming a toxic mess,” Barnett says.
The future: a place out of control
A Pew study found that 60% of U.S. Twitter users left the platform for more than a few weeks in the first few months after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. A quarter of those surveyed said they had not used the site at all in the past year.
Even the most prolific tweeters saw their use of the platform decrease, with the number of tweets per month dropping by 25%.
Whether this trend continues is a difficult question to answer, but one reason is that it has become prohibitively expensive for researchers studying social media to continue their work under Musk. That’s what happened.
For many years, Twitter has provided application programming interfaces (APIs) to academic researchers and private sector organizations for a fee. About a year ago, the cost of accessing these APIs skyrocketed.
Aaron Smith, director of Pew’s Data Lab, said the center has developed a “pretty rich body of research” on Twitter over the years, but that access to the API is now limited due to the price increase for accessing Tweets. He said that such annual fees have become expensive. “It’s bigger than our team’s entire research budget for several years” – they couldn’t do any more research on the platform.
Bruns says academics are in the same position. “We cannot conduct particularly exploratory research, such as looking for hate speech bots or misinformation on the platform. [X] Almost priced out of the market. ”
This is unfortunate, as academic research on Twitter has shown that the platform was able to identify and dispel some hate speech and misinformation in the past, but will now go even further unchecked. he says.
“Certainly, it’s already starting to turn into platforms like Gab and Parler and things like that. [Trump’s] In True Social, people on the far right vehemently agree with each other and ferociously hate everyone else. ”
Even former employees have since deactivated their accounts. “I think it’s a really dangerous space right now and it’s out of control,” she says.
“I miss it sometimes. I always thought this was a great newswire for journalists and citizen journalists…I don’t know, but I found myself sitting watching breaking news and wondering where to go. There’s a hole left, and I’m hoping someone will try to fill that gap.”
Does Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian have any regrets about his creation? The entrepreneur and founder of venture fund Seven Seven Six spoke at an event at the University of Virginia, where he asserted a rather negative view of the current social media environment and the creator economy. The environment, he says, is one in which everyone is “very trained and now conditioned to just getting likes, retweets and upvotes…More optimistic We want to be, and we see it happening before our eyes. Still, he ultimately described himself as a “techno-optimist.” This is a clear nod to a16z general partner Marc Andreessen’s recent accusation that technology can solve all problems.
“He is guilty as charged,” Ohanian said at the hearing. interview With Kara Swisher. “I think the pendulum will swing back. We’re thinking even faster than we think.” To understand the world, we need better platforms than we have today. He theorized that a war in the Middle East could even be a turning point because it is “so clear” that something is needed.
As you may recall, the founder notably resigned from Reddit’s board in 2020, citing disagreements over moderation and a desire to police the community on violence and hate. It was a moment when he seemed to be thinking about what his platform had brought him. At the time, he called for his board seat to be replaced by a black director. The company agreed and appointed Y Combinator partner Michael Seibel as its first black board member.
Reddit has since also banned several toxic communities, including r/donaldtrup, in the wake of the violence at the U.S. Capitol, but Ohanian said the site has “definitely gotten better” since then, and that the business He also said that he had improved.
But when it comes to social media as a whole, of which Reddit will be a part, Ohanian said social media brings out “the worst parts of human nature in many ways.” Additionally, he is concerned that with any leaderboards the platform has, people have a desire to be first and want to win, which can lead to situations where misinformation can be spread. I announced.
Humans have evolved to trust familiar faces and voices around the campfire. The idea of believing in something from an expert or institution you’ve never met is actually new to our species.
“There’s so much pressure to be number one right now, and UGC (user-generated content) always wins. But that doesn’t mean it’s always true. But it becomes the epicenter of the conversation. And what percentage of our population is going to really seriously take a breath and say, “Let me stop doomscrolling, and people can do the work and integrate it and then help me react.” Do I want to say, “Let’s just wait until it happens?” he continued.
“Also, we are deeply involved in all these storylines, whether they come from traditional media, user-generated ones, or posts on Telegram groups on our phones. We’re overwhelmed, we’re overloaded, and unfortunately that appeals to our worst instincts,” Ohanian added.
Part of the problem with how social media platforms were developed had to do with how companies originally developed them. For example, Ohanian said Reddit grew out of running his site online, a forum in college where he believed the community felt just as real as offline. He said when Reddit became a multibillion-dollar business with hundreds of millions of users, he never imagined the site would one day become so influential. That idea would be “ridiculous,” he says. And he never could have imagined that his startup would be so successful as to influence elections and democracy.
“It takes a level of delusion that even I, as a first-time CEO, can’t think to think, “Oh my god, I’m going to be this successful, that I can have such a huge impact on our democracy,” he said. Stated. . “Was that a blind spot? Of course,” he admitted.
Ohanian noted that another part of the problem is that there are more people online today than early technology founders imagined. While he’s happy to see greater access to technology, it also comes with many complications.
“I don’t like the idea that the Internet, which I’m so nostalgic about, was actually an ivory tower,” he said, but on the other hand, he said, we’re exposed to more people in real time. said. More than we could have imagined. And that can pit people against each other and against their different versions of the truth — even if their version of the truth believes in something as far-fetched as the Earth is flat, he said. He cited one example that has supporters on Reddit.
On the other hand, he said, getting platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit to take on the responsibility of verifying truth and accuracy is a challenge. Ohanian also described TikTok as a “weapon of the Chinese government” that is very good at “giving us what we want, when we want”, meaning it is always a fountain of truth. He also said that there is no limit.
If anything, Ohanian credits Twitter (now called X) with devising the best moderation system ever.
“I personally think community notes are a good thing. It’s the best instrument I’ve ever seen. And frankly, I wish we had thought of it in the first place. I think so,” he said.
Still, he championed the notion that platforms like the X could become town squares.
“The public square is [analogy]…I feel depressed. I mean, if you mean the public square, I mean, what? Is it a town or a city? If you’re in charge, you’re the mayor. But there are no democratic elections,” Ohanian said. “You’re the CEO. So you’re like a king? If you want to lean into the town square, fine. Just own it and say, yeah, this is the town square and I’m Just say that there is an endless dictator, a tyrant.”
Despite the challenges and urgency of social media, Ohanian believes there is still hope in terms of social impact. For example, he noted that the founders his fund 776 invests in are much smarter and more aware of the issues than they were at their age. Perhaps the next platform will still be addictive, but in a way that “doesn’t disrupt democracy further,” he mused.
He also believes that if everything on social media is perfectly curated for us, our brains will start craving things that aren’t. “I think live gatherings and in-person experiences will return. The bright side of this is that I hope we can reconnect with our humanity and the things that no amount of AI can replace.”
“I’m trying to be an optimist about it,” Ohanian added. “And I think we still have a way to go, but we’re fighting a very, very powerful human thing. And if we can solve that, we’ll have a very good outcome. Because we… Because you can see that they have more in common than they don’t have,” he said.
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