For months, Elon Musk has been promising the rapidly dwindling workforce at Twitter that he’d give them stock grants. He’d promised that those grants would come on March 24th, and I can tell you that when normal business hours ended on the 24th with no details, some of those remaining employees were pissed off. However, it was just Musk in typical fashion, being late. Late at night an email was sent to employees on “the state of Twitter 20” which also included the details of the grants.
The details, as laid out in the Wall St. Journal, are that employees will get grants that vest over a period of four years, with a 6 month cliff (i.e., nothing vests for the first six months, so try not to anger him or he’ll fire you and you’ll get nothing) and there will be regular opportunities to cash out.
But the key part is that Musk says the equity grants will be doled out with a company valuation of $20 billion. Remember, just five months ago he paid $44 billion for it, meaning he’s admitting that he more or less set $24 billion on fire in five months. That’s impressive.
Elon Musk said Twitter Inc. employees will receive stock awards based on a roughly $20 billion valuation, less than half of the $44 billion price he acquired the company for last year, according to an email reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Being the master of spin, hype, and marketing that he is, Musk concocted a story about how the valuation of Twitter may go up to $250 billion in a few years:
Mr. Musk in the note to staff said he was optimistic about the social-media company’s future. “I see a clear, but difficult, path to a >$250B valuation,” meaning stock granted now would be worth 10 times more, he said.
I mean, at this point, all of these valuations are just in Musk’s head. The only way you know for sure is when the shares are either available on the public market, or there’s some sort of outside investment that values the company. So, these numbers are somewhat meaningless. The company could be worth $10 billion or $1 billion or $50 billion.
But the fact that Musk is effectively admitting that he thinks the valuation is around $20 billion is a pretty huge admission of failure. He took an asset that he (perhaps stupidly) valued at $44 billion and knocked off more than half the value. And given that he’s prone to overhyping his own works, he’s almost certainly over-estimating the value. Great job.
Also, I’m curious how the other equity holders feel about all of this. Now, all of them have more money than they could ever use, so maybe they don’t care one bit about this, but I remember hearing from some people how Musk had the “Midas touch” and they seemed confident that he’d take their $500 million to $2 billion contributions and turn it into much more. And here he is, just five months later, admitting he’s basically set fire to that money.
As for the claim that he’ll get it up to a $250 billion valuation, well, anything is possible. But to date, given that he’s driven away many advertisers, made the site much more fragile, made it significantly less welcoming in terms of inviting back the most abusive users and filling everyone’s feed with about 5 times more ads than before, bet big on the Twitter Blue program that very few people seem interested in… it’s reasonable to wonder just how he thinks the site will be valued at $250 billion outside of his head.
Ever since Elon Musk made his initial bid to buy Twitter, he’s talked about “open sourcing” the algorithm. He mentioned it last April in the first interview he gave, on the TED stage, to talk about his plans with Twitter. And since taking over the company at the end of October, he’s mentioned it over and over again.
Indeed, on February 21st, he promised that Twitter would release its “algorithm” as open source code “next week.”
And then, two weeks ago, he announced that “all code used to recommend tweets” will be released as open source on March 31st (i.e., this Friday).
Who knows if he’ll meet his deadline this time (he has a habit of missing deadlines pretty regularly).
However, over the weekend something vaguely interesting happened, in that it was revealed that someone had already, um, “open sourced” Twitter’s source code for it, by posting a repository of at least some of the code to Github. This was revealed in a DMCA notice that Twitter sent to Github, followed by a DMCA subpoena demanding the identity of the person who posted it along with any one who downloaded it.
Now, I initially wasn’t going to write about this. Leaks happen, and I think it’s perfectly fine for Twitter to issue the DMCA takedown for such a leak. But what caught my attention was the username of the leaker. According to the DMCA notice, the leaker went by “FreeSpeechEnthusiast,” and their account is (at the moment) still up on GitHub showing a single contribution on January 3rd (which makes me wonder if the code was sitting there for anyone to find for a whole month and a half):
That name choice takes this from a garden variety leak operation to an ultimate troll attempt against admitted troll Elon Musk. After all, Musk himself continually (if ridiculously) refers to himself as a “free speech absolutist.”
So, given both Elon’s repeated promises to reveal the source code and his publicly stated (if often violated) commitment to “free speech,” the leak of the source code by someone using the name FreeSpeechEnthusiast seems like it was designed directly as a troll move to Musk, goading him into exposing his own hypocrisy (which is way easier than many people may have thought).
Well played, FreeSpeechEnthusiast, well played.
As for the actual leak, again, it’s not clear how much source code was actually leaked or how problematic it is. As I understand it (and would expect) the full source code for Twitter is cumbersome and complex. Releasing a full dump of it would be difficult even if authorized, so I’m guessing it’s not everything.
And while you can find lots of quotes from “cybersecurity experts” about how this may expose vulnerabilities, my guess is that the risk of that is actually fairly low at first? Given enough time, yes, someone can probably find some messy code and some vulnerabilities, but Twitter had (at one time) lots of engineers who were focused on finding and patching those vulnerabilities themselves, and so whatever remains is likely nothing obvious, and anyone going through the code now would first have to figure out how it all worked, which may be no easy task in the first place.
Indeed, this is why, from the beginning, I’ve said that Elon’s promises to open source the code was mostly meaningless, because there are almost no examples of companies taking large, complex systems in proprietary code, and open sourcing them and finding anything valuable come out of it, because there’s so much baggage and complexity for people to even figuring out what the hell anything really does.
This is also why Musk’s announced plans to fix things that people find in the code he still promises to release this week also seems a bit silly, as there’s a reasonable interpretation of this as: “we fired everyone who understands our code, so we’re going to open it up to get engineers to clean up our code for free for the world’s richest man.”
It’s also why the better approach would have just been to improve the API and to allow more developers to build more tools, services, and features on top of Twitter code, but Elon’s already killed off that whole idea.
In the end, this particular story isn’t likely to be that big a deal, but it seemed worth commenting on solely for the lulz of the epic trolling job whoever leaked the code did in highlighting Musk’s hypocrisy. Again.
In the days after Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, the social media platform saw a “surge in hateful conduct,” which its then safety chief put down to a “focused, short-term trolling campaign.” New research suggests that when it comes to antisemitism, it was anything but.
Rather, antisemitic tweets have more than doubled over the months since Musk took charge, according to research that I and colleagues at tech firm CASM Technology and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue think tank conducted. Between June and Oct. 26, 2022, the day before Twitter’s acquisition by Musk, there was a weekly average of 6,204 tweets deemed “plausibly antisemitic” – that is, where at least one reasonable interpretation of the tweet falls within the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of the term as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.”
But from Oct. 27 until Feb 9, 2023, the average was 12,762 – an increase of 105%. In all, a total of 325,739 tweets from 146,516 accounts were labeled as “plausibly antisemitic” over the course of our study, stretching from June 1, 2022 to Feb. 9, 2023.
Finding antisemitism with AI
To identify plausibly antisemitic tweets, my co-authors and I combined 22 published hate speech-identifying algorithms into a single mechanism and used even more machine learning to see which combinations of decisions led to the correct result. We then passed through all tweets – over a million in total – that contained any one of 119 words, phrases, slurs and epithets related to antisemitism.
No such process is perfect. We estimate our model to make a correct decision about 75% of the time. We also no doubt missed some antisemitic tweets not containing any of those 119 key words, as well as those taken down before early December when we collected the data.
We then used an algorithm to draw out 10 different themes of antisemitism seen in the tweets. Some centered around the use of specific antisemitic derogatory epithets. Others alluded to conspiracy theories concerning hidden Jewish influence and control.
Antisemitic tweets directed at Jewish investor and philanthropist George Soros warranted its own category. He was mentioned more than any other person in our data, over 19,000 times, with tweets claiming he was a member of a hidden globalist, Jewish or “Nazi” world order.
Another theme were tweets defending the rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, who had made a number of antisemitic remarks after he had his account briefly reinstated by Musk.
Our research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, also found around 4,000 of the antisemitic tweets were focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These variously claimed that the conflict was caused by Jews, or that Jews secretly caused the U.S. to support Ukraine. They also contained direct antisemitism directed against the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish.
Musk rolls back content moderation
Musk’s acquisition of Twitter came on the back of what I have observed as a decadelong trend among tech giants to take more responsibility for hate speech, harassment, incitement, disinformation and other harms lurking in the information flowing through their platforms. Over that period, companies such as Facebook and Twitter gradually enacted policies to respond to extremism, hate speech and harassment, or increase “civility,” as Twitter itself described it in 2018, and built out the teams and tools to enforce them.
Musk, a self-professed “free speech absolutist,” pointed the platform in a different direction after taking control. In short order, Twitter’s independent Trust and Safety Council was dissolved, previously banned accounts were reinstated and over half of Twitter’s staff was laid off or simply left – including many of those responsible for enforcing the company’s hate speech policies.
As someone who has tracked hate speech on places like Twitter for around 10 years, I believe the changes to Twitter’s moderation practices are only partly to blame for the jump in antisemitism on the platform.
The media spectacle surrounding Musk’s takeover, along with his very vocal views on free speech, likely also encouraged exactly those people to join or rejoin the platform who had fallen foul of its previous attempts to confront hate. Our research gives some backing to this theory. Some 3,855 accounts we identified as posting at least one plausibly antisemitic tweet joined Twitter in the 10 days after Musk took over. This is, however, only a small proportion of the 146,516 accounts that sent at least one antisemitic tweet over the course of the entire study.
Little effect on curbing hate speech
A surge in hate speech on Twitter was flagged by researchers in the weeks after Musk took over, concerns the billionaire dismissed as “utterly false,” having earlier vowed to “max deboosted & demonetized” hateful tweets.
If Twitter has been de-amplifying antisemitism, our research shows almost no evidence of it. Before Oct. 27, antisemitic tweets received an average of 6.4 “favorites” and 1.2 retweets. Since then, they have averaged 6 “favorites” and 1 retweet. Although such engagement isn’t a perfect measure for visibility, tweets made much less visible to users would generally receive less engagement.
We also attempted to measure takedowns of antisemitic tweets. On Feb. 15, 45 days after we initially collected the data, we tried to re-collect all the tweets we identified as antisemitic. Tweets can be unavailable for lots of reasons, and Twitter’s enforcement is only one of them. Imperfect though this is, it does give us a tentative glimpse of what might be happening in regard to the removal of antisemitic posts. And across those dates, 17,589 antisemitic tweets were taken down – 8.5% of the total.
Rising tide of antisemitism
Our findings come at a time when many fear growing threats to Jewish communities. In 2021, the Anti-Defamation League tracked the highest number of antisemitic incidents – including harassment, vandalism and assaults – in the U.S. since they started tracking numbers in 1979. And this is not just a U.S. phenomenon; in the U.K., the Community Security Trust has recorded a similar spike in anti-Jewish activity, while in Germany, anti-Jewish crimes surged by 29% over the pandemic.
Studying social media has shown me again and again just how powerfully it helps to form the cultures and ideas that underlie its users’ behavior. Ultimately, the proliferation of tweets that hold Jews responsible for all the world’s ills, that circulate dark conspiracies of control and cover-up, or that fire derogatory attacks directed toward Jews, can only support antisemitism online – and in the real world.
Late last year, we wrote about the extremely misleading discussion around “shadow banning” on Twitter. The history of the term is important, as it originated as a tool to defeat trolls, and it had a very specific definition: making users who were deemed problematic to a site think their posts were still getting through, when no one else could actually see them. The concept began on the Something Awful forums as a tool against trolls, and migrated elsewhere. It was seen as a clever approach to trolls who especially live for reactions: they can keep posting, but they never get any reaction.
However, in 2018 the term was corrupted, and morphed by some bad reporting, into being used to convey any kind of de-ranking or algorithmic demotion. Still, these days, it has become the common usage of the term among many, even as it makes the word kinda meaningless and disconnected from the more clever anti-trolling tool it really was under its original meaning.
This is because the nature of any algorithm, be it search or recommendation feed, is that it has to uprank some items (the ones the algorithm thinks is most relevant) and downrank other items (the ones the algorithm thinks are least relevant). Yet, that shouldn’t be seen as “shadow banning,” as it’s not about banning anything.
Either way, one of Elon Musk’s big pronouncements upon taking over Twitter was that he seemed all in on this idea, which he acted as if he invented, calling it “deboosting.”
Hilariously, though, just weeks later, when one of the Twitter Files discussed how Twitter already had such tools in place for what it referred to internally as “visibility filtering,” (something that had been widely discussed years earlier when Twitter announced the policy), he acted as if something criminal had happened.
Indeed, soon after he promised that Twitter would shortly be rolling out a feature to tell users if they had been “shadowbanned.”
Like oh so many of his promises, this one is still yet to materialize.
What has been shown, repeatedly, however, is that Musk is now using the ability to “max deboost” those he dislikes, to his own advantage. We already noted how it was ordered that the account that tracks his jet was given the most stringent visibility filtering (before he banned it entirely — despite promising not to).
Then, last month, Tesla employees charged that Elon had done the same to their new union’s Twitter account in some filing with the NLRB.
Twitter has been down-ranking the corporate accounts of its competitors, including TikTok, Snap, Meta, and Instagram, Platformer has learned. The change, which was rolled out in December, means that tweets from these accounts are not recommended to users who do not follow them, and won’t show up in their For You tab, we’re told.
The down-ranking has been applied to more of TikTok’s accounts than any other company’s, according to internal documents obtained by Platformer. At least 19 of TikTok’s corporate accounts, including @TikTok_US, @TIkTokSports, and @TikTokSupport, are included in the down-ranking list, compared to three of Snap’s corporate accounts and two of Instagrams. Publicly available data shows that engagement on tweets from @TikTok_US saw a sharp downturn in January.
The timing of this matches with that brief moment when Twitter officially changed its public policies to say that no user could link to any alternative social media platform, which pissed off basically everyone. About the only person who stood up to defend it was Musk’s mother, who looked kinda silly when Elon rolled back the policy a day later, admitting it was stupid.
However, based on the timing, it looks like Musk only rolled back the public part of the policy, saying users couldn’t link to other social media apps. What appears to have been left in place was the plan to secretly “max deboost” the corporate accounts of those other companies, which is the kind of thing you do when you’re really secure in your value proposition over them.
Elon is, of course, free to do this. It’s his playground and he can do whatever he wants with it. But it’s pretty funny that people were all worked up about publicly revealed plans to try to use these algorithmic filtering tools to boost “healthy conversations,” and yet those very same people don’t seem to much care when Elon is using it to settle personal scores.
When Elon Musk moved to take over Twitter, Jack Dorsey, who endorsed the deal, talked to him about making the site more open, specifically turning it into a protocol that anyone could build on. This would have been a good plan. Indeed, it’s one that seems to now be gaining traction for basically every company not named Twitter. Elon Musk, however, went the other direction entirely.
Rather than opening up its systems to third party developers, Elon has pulled the API from many, told developers that no client apps were allowed, and revoked free access to the API. There has been a ton of speculation around the API pricing, which had been promised in early February, but kept getting pushed off. Musk had suggested a $100/month fee would make sense. However, it appears that the $100/month API will have very, very, very limited functionality.
Of course, academics, who have long relied on Twitter’s free API to do all sorts of useful research regarding the platform, were also quite concerned about what this would mean for them. And, it looks like they were right. Twitter is now pitching academics and enterprises on API access… that will run a mere $42,000 per month.
That’s for the cheapest tier.
Small package, indeed.
This seems, a bit, well, out of touch concerning how many users, especially academics, use the current API.
The cheapest, Small Package, gives access to 50 million tweets for $42,000 a month. Higher tiers give researchers or businesses access to larger volumes of tweets—100 million and 200 million tweets respectively—and cost $125,000 and $210,000 a month. WIRED confirmed the figures with other existing free API users, who have received emails saying that the new pricing plans will take effect within months.
“I don’t know if there’s an academic on the planet who could afford $42,000 a month for Twitter,” says Jeremy Blackburn, assistant professor at Binghamton University in New York and a member of the iDRAMA Lab, which analyzes hate speech on social media—including on Twitter.
It’s a choice. But it seems like a choice from someone who still doesn’t understand how third parties add much of the value to Twitter. Cutting them all off, and thinking that you’ll actually make revenue by massively overcharging for API access is, well, a choice. But seeing as the lack of API will do so much harm to users, it seems like it makes it even less valuable even for those who have the means to pay.
Once again, it seems to be decision making based on desperation for revenue, and not for any sort of strategic, long-term thinking on what would be best for the site and its users.
Back in the fall we were among the first to highlight that Elon Musk might face a pretty big FTC problem. Twitter, of course, is under a 20 year FTC consent decree over some of its privacy failings. And, less than a year ago (while still under old management), Twitter was hit with a $150 million fine and a revised consent decree. Both of them are specifically regarding how it handles users private data. Musk has made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t care about the FTC, but that seems like a risky move. While I think this FTC has made some serious strategic mistakes in the antitrust world, the FTC tends not to fuck around with privacy consent decrees.
However, now the Wall Street Journal has a big article with some details about the FTC’s ongoing investigation into Elon’s Twitter (based on a now released report from the Republican-led House Judiciary who frames the whole thing as a political battle by the FTC to attack a company Democrats don’t like — despite the evidence included not really showing anything to support that narrative).
The Federal Trade Commission has demanded Twitter Inc. turn over internal communications related to owner Elon Musk, as well as detailed information about layoffs—citing concerns that staff reductions could compromise the company’s ability to protect users, documents viewed by the Wall Street Journal show.
In 12 letters sent to Twitter and its lawyers since Mr. Musk’s Oct. 27 takeover, the FTC also asked the company to “identify all journalists” granted access to company records and to provide information about the launch of the revamped Twitter Blue subscription service, the documents show.
The FTC is also seeking to depose Mr. Musk in connection with the probe.
I will say that some of the demands from the FTC appear to potentially be overbroad, which should be a concern:
The FTC also asked for all internal Twitter communications “related to Elon Musk,” or sent “at the direction of, or received by” Mr. Musk.
I mean… that seems to be asking for way more than is reasonable. I’ve heard some discussion that these requests are an attempt to figure out who Musk is delegating to handle privacy issues at the company (as required in the consent decree), but it seems that such a request can (and should) be more tailored to that point. Otherwise, it appears (and will be spun, as the House Judiciary Committee is doing…) as an overly broad fishing expedition.
Either way, as we predicted in our earlier posts, the FTC seems quite concerned about whether or not Twitter is conducting required privacy reviews before releasing new features.
The FTC also pressed Twitter on whether it was conducting in-depth privacy reviews before implementing product changes such as the new version of Twitter Blue, as required under the 2022 order. The agency sought detailed records on how product changes were communicated to Twitter users.
It asked Twitter to explain how it handled a recently reported leak of Twitter user-profile data, to account for changes made to the way users authenticate their accounts, and to describe how it scrubbed sensitive data from sold office equipment.
Another area that is bound to be controversial (and Matt Taibbi is, in his usual fashion, misleadingly misrepresenting things and whining about it) is that the FTC asked to find out which outside “journalists” had been granted access to Twitter systems:
On Dec. 13, the FTC asked about Twitter’s decision to give journalists access to internal company communications, a project Mr. Musk has dubbed the “Twitter Files” and that he says sheds light on controversial decisions by previous management.
The agency asked Twitter to describe the “nature of access granted each person” and how allowing that access “is consistent with your privacy and information security obligations under the Order.” It asked if Twitter conducted background checks on the journalists, and whether the journalists could access Twitter users’ personal messages.
Given the context, this request actually seems reasonable. The consent decree is pretty explicit about how Twitter needs to place controls on access to private information, and the possibility that Musk gave outside journalists access to private info was a concern that many people raised. Since then, Twitter folks have claimed that it never gave outside journalists full access to internal private information, but rather tasked employees with sharing requested files (this might still raise some questions about private data, but it’s not as free wheeling as some worried initially). If Twitter really did not provide access to internal private data to journalists, then it can respond to that request by showing what kind of access it did provide.
But, Taibbi is living down to his reputation and pretending it’s something different:
At best, Taibbi seems to be conflating two separate requests here. The request for all of Musk’s communications definitely does seem too broad, and it seems like Twitter’s lawyers (assuming any remain, or outside counsel that is still having its bills paid) could easily respond and push back on the extensiveness of the request to narrow it down to communications relevant to the consent decree. That’s… how this process normally works.
As for the claim that which journalists an executive talks to is not the government’s business, that is correct, but lacking context. It becomes the government’s business if part of the conversation with the journalist is to violate the law. And… it’s that point that the FTC is trying to determine. If they didn’t violate the consent decree, then, problem solved.
Thus, the request regarding how much access Musk gave to journalists seems like a legitimate question to determine if the access violated the consent decree. One hopes that Twitter was careful enough in how this was set up that the answer is “no, it did not violate the consent decree, and all access was limited and carefully monitored to protect user data,” but that’s kinda the reason that the investigation is happening in the first place.
Indeed, in the House Judiciary Committee report, in which they try to turn this into a much bigger deal, they do reveal a small snippet of the FTC’s requests to Twitter on this topic that suggest that Taibbi is (yet again) totally misrepresenting things (it’s crazy how often that’s the case with that guy), and their concern is literally to the single point implicated by the consent decree: did Twitter give outside journalists access to internal Twitter systems that might have revealed private data:
I would be concerned if the request actually were (as Taibbi falsely implies) for Musk to reveal every journalist he’s talking to. But the request (as revealed by the Committee) appears to only be about “journalists and other members of the media to whom” Elon has “granted any type of access to the Companies internal communications.” And, given that the entire consent decree is about restricting access to internal systems and others’ communications, that seems directly on point and not, as the Judiciary Committee and Taibbi complain, about an attack on the 1st Amendment.
It remains entirely possible that the FTC finds nothing at all here. Or that if it tries to file claims against Twitter that Twitter wins. Unlike some people, I am not rushing to assume that the FTC is going to bring Twitter to account. But there are some pretty serious questions about whether or not Musk is abiding by the consent decree, and violating a consent decree is just pleading for the FTC to make an expensive example of you.
On Monday, I saw Elon Musk tweet the following, and initially thought that he might have actually made a good policy decision for once, and planned to write up something about Elon doing something right (contrary to the opinion of some, I’m happy to give him credit when it’s due):
Punching back against DMCA abusers is a good policy (and one that the old Twitter was willing to go to court over — though very early Twitter was less good about it). So, in theory, suspending accounts of those who engage in “repeated, egregious weaponization” of the DMCA seems like a good policy and Musk should be given kudos if that’s how the policy is actually put into operation.
Though, the actual details here are kind of a mess, and it’s possible that instead of putting in place a good policy, Musk might have (instead!) opened up Twitter to potentially massive liability.
This came about over a dispute between two Twitter users, but the details are now gone, as Twitter suspended one account, and it appears the other account deleted all the tweets about this dispute (though I’ve been able to dig up a few screenshots).
One account, @Rainmaker1973, is one of thousands of aggregator accounts that basically find other people’s content and post a constant stream of it to their feed. Rainmaker has 1 million followers, so is a pretty large account. Looking over Rainmaker’s feed, you can see that the account links to source material (through tracked buff.ly links). When it’s posting videos, it appears to embed the original video, rather than re-uploading it, though the way Twitter handles that is sometimes a little confusing. It just puts a little “from @OriginalAccount” in small letters underneath the video, with a link to that account’s profile page, but not to the tweet where the original video was. I’ve never quite understood why Twitter handles video embeds this way, but it does. Here’s one example, with the Twitter-appended attribution highlighted:
For photos, that’s not how it works. You basically have to reuse the photos (and if they’re hosted somewhere else, upload them to Twitter). That’s what the Rainmaker account did here, with a photo that originated on Facebook:
Is that infringing? Eh… I’d say that the Rainmaker account has pretty strong fair use claims much of the time. The account also appears to lean towards public domain images (such as from NASA) and some Creative Commons-licensed images. But fair use is always fact-specific, so it’s difficult to say if none of the accounts tweets might violate copyright law.
What appears to have happened, based on what many others have written, is that the Rainmaker account posted a video from another account, @NightLights_AM, that specialized in images and videos of the northern lights. While these tweets have since been deleted, note that the video in the image does not show the little “from” line, as it would if it were embedded directly from Twitter.
Now, unfortunately, since it’s all deleted, we can’t see exactly how the video is embedded. Rainmaker says it’s embedded, not uploaded. It doesn’t have the “from” line at the bottom in that screenshot, but… it might still be from a Twitter embed, because Twitter (confusingly!) does not show that “from” line in the video if it’s being quote tweeted, as is the case here.
So, based on all that, there’s a decent chance that the DMCA notice was somewhat iffy. I recognize that lots of people don’t like aggregators like the Rainmaker account, but if he’s just using an existing upload from the official account as an embed, then it’s clearly not actually infringing.
It is quite possible, though, that most people don’t understand how video embeds of other Twitter videos work on Twitter (it’s confusing!), and so it wouldn’t surprise me if the NightLights account didn’t even realize it was an embed of the original, and out of frustrating of this large aggregator account getting all the traffic for its video, sent a good faith (but mistaken) DMCA notice.
In the now-deleted tweet you see above, the Rainmaker account says it reached out to the NightLights account, and NightLights asked for money (likely for a license). Again, assuming Rainmaker was just embedding, there is no need for a license. It’s literally just using Twitter in the way it was intended, and in a manner that NightLights already granted a license for. Somewhat confusingly, in a later tweet, the Rainmaker account claims that NightLights didn’t actually want money and instead said that NightLights was trying to shut down his account:
For what it’s worth, the guy behind NightLights told TorrentFreak that Rainmaker is misrepresenting their conversation, and that it was Rainmaker who first proposed paying, if NightLights would rescind the DMCA notice:
Mauduit informs TorrentFreak that after sending the DMCA notice to Twitter, Massimo initiated contact and suggested that he should pay an amount to have the report retracted “since the situation for him was so dire.”
Mauduit says that since the offer came Massimo, that doesn’t constitute blackmail. A few hours later Massimo accused Mauduit of blackmail on Twitter, Mauduit says.
“I asked him to compensate me fairly for the use of the material. So at that point, that was purely business related and politically correct,” Mauduit says.
Either way, Twitter’s head of trust and safety quickly told the Rainmaker account that, despite his fears, the company would not suspend his account:
This is also a good policy (so kudos to Irwin and Musk on continuing this aspect of old Twitter’s policies). She also noted in another tweet that the Rainmaker account “is not at any risk for suspension.”
Of course, “pirating / egregious illegal behavior” is somewhat in the eye of the beholder. And so is… “blackmail.” Yet, about an hour after Ella’s tweets, Musk himself noticed Rainmaker’s tweets and announced that he would “suspend” accounts for “blackmail.”
Again, in a vacuum, this could be good policy. Suspending egregious copyfraudsters who abuse copyright to shake people down or silence them makes sense. And DMCA abuse for extortionate behavior does happen unfortunately often. As does abusing the DMCA to silence others over non-infringing speech. We’ve covered many, many such cases over the years.
So, having a policy that pushes back on that abuse of copyright law is good —and another nice thing you can say about Elon Musk is that he’s been quite good about recognizing the problems associated with patent and copyright law. Other companies have pushed back on copyright abuses as well, such as how Automattic (the company behind WordPress, and also the company that hosts Techdirt) has spent years fighting back against DMCA abusers. But it has a clear process for doing so, rather than the whims of an impulsive owner.
In this case, though, Elon appeared to take Rainmaker’s (slightly confused) word for what happened, and flat out suspended (temporarily) NightLights for what appears to have been a good faith DMCA notice, followed by a discussion initiated by Rainmaker regarding payment.
As I was finishing up this article, the NightLights account was actually reinstated, though the guy says he’s now considering leaving the platform:
So, given all this, the concept behind the policy is good, but there’s not much evidence that NightLights was actually actually “blackmailing” Rainmaker. From what was public (and mostly now deleted), it looks more like the account mistakenly thought that its content was used in an infringing manner due, in part, to Twitter’s own confusing presentation of embedded videos, and filed a good faith, but mistaken, DMCA notice. When Rainmaker contacted NightLights to try to get the DMCA strike removed (out of a fear that it would take down the account), the began a discussion on a licensing fee, which again seems reasonable if NightLights actually thought the use was infringing.
Also, this seems to have no angered others who were fans of the NightLights account:
Once again, content moderation at scale is impossible to do well because people are going to be mad at you on both sides of the equation.
In the end, this looks like a lot of miscommunication across the board, in part from people who aren’t fully aware of how Twitter or copyright law actually work. The end policy — don’t put up with shit from those who abuse the DMCA process — is actually great. But it really doesn’t look like NightLights was abusing the DMCA, just confused about how Twitter worked.
And because of the somewhat less-than-well-considered way in which Twitter under Elon is acting, if NightLights had a legitimate claim (and again, I don’t think it does in this case), quickly suspending an account for filing a real DMCA claim could open up Elon and Twitter to pretty significant liability. Contrary to popular belief, companies that receive a DMCA notice do not need to take down the content. But if they don’t, they can no longer use the DMCA’s 512(c) safe harbor, which is a risk if the case went to court. So refusing to take down something upon notice is a legal risk, and the kind of thing a large company like Twitter would normally have a copyright lawyer review.
The other potential issue is that if Twitter makes it a habit to suspend accounts that send good faith or legitimate DMCA notices, it could very much open them up to claims that they do not have a valid “repeat infringer” policy, as required by 512(i). Suspending one account for sending a good faith DMCA almost certainly won’t trigger that issue, but having Elon flat out say that Rainmaker’s account “won’t be” suspended could be read to mean that Twitter is ignoring its repeat infringer policy with regards to at least that account. And, I could see copyright lawyers trying to argue that this is an example of how Musk is willing to ditch the 512(i) policy for accounts he likes. At the very least, you can bet that these kinds of impulsive policy decisions will be used in court by copyright litigants. Perhaps from Hollywood studios who noticed that, last fall, amidst all the turmoil, Elon’s Twitter seemed to be ignoring many DMCA notices about accounts posting entire Hollywood movies.
In short, impulsive decisions around DMCA policy, made without first going over things with an actual copyright lawyer, can open up a company like Twitter to quite a bit of liability. But this is the Elon Era, in which YOLO seems to be the general ethos, and if it happens to add to yet more legal liability? Well, just toss it on the pile.
Even as Elon first made his bid for Twitter, we highlighted just how little he understood about content moderation and trust & safety. And, that really matters, because, as Nilay Patel pointed out, managing trust & safety basically is the core business of a social media company: “The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation.” But, Elon had such a naïve and simplistic understanding (“delete wrong and bad content, but leave the rest”) of trust & safety that it’s no wonder advertisers (who keep the site in business) have abandoned the site in droves.
We even tried to warn Elon about how this would go, and he chose to go his own way, and now we’re seeing the results… and it’s not good. Not good at all. It’s become pretty clear that Elon believes that trust & safety should solely be about keeping him untroubled. His one major policy change (despite promising otherwise) was to ban an account tweeting public information, claiming (falsely) that it was a threat to his personal safety (while simultaneously putting his own employees at risk).
Last week, Twitter excitedly rolled out its new policy on “violent speech,” which (hilariously) resulted in his biggest fans cheering on this policy despite it being basically identical to the old policy, which they claimed they hated. Indeed, the big change was basically that the new rules are written in way that is way more subjective than the old policy, meaning that Twitter and Musk can basically apply them much more arbitrarily (which was a big complaint about the old policies).
Either way, as we noted recently, by basically firing nearly everyone who handled trust & safety at the company, Twitter was seeing its moderation efforts falling apart, raising all sorts of alarms.
A new investigative report from the BBC Panorama details just how bad it’s gotten. Talking to both current and former Twitter employees, the report highlights a number of ways in which Twitter is simply unable to do anything about abuse and harassment.
Concerns that child sexual exploitation is on the rise on Twitter and not being sufficiently raised with law enforcement
Targeted harassment campaigns aimed at curbing freedom of expression, and foreign influence operations – once removed daily from Twitter – are going “undetected”, according to a recent employee.
Exclusive data showing how misogynistic online hate targeting me is on the rise since the takeover, and that there has been a 69% increase in new accounts following misogynistic and abusive profiles.
Rape survivors have been targeted by accounts that have become more active since the takeover, with indications they’ve been reinstated or newly created.
Among things noted in that report is that Elon himself doesn’t trust any of Twitter’s old employees (which is perhaps why he keeps laying them off despite promising the layoffs were done), and goes everywhere in the company with bodyguards. Apparently, Elon believes in modeling “trust & safety” by not trusting his employees, and making sure that his own safety is the only safety that matters.
Also, an interesting tidbit is that Twitter’s interesting “nudge” experiment (in which it would detect if you were about to say something that might escalate a flame war, and suggest you give it a second thought — an experiment that was generally seen as having a positive impact) seems to be either dead or on life support.
“Overall 60% of users deleted or edited their reply when given a chance through the nudge,” she says. “But what was more interesting, is that after we nudged people once, they composed 11% fewer harmful replies in the future.”
These safety features were being implemented around the time my abuse on Twitter seemed to reduce, according to data collated by the University of Sheffield and International Center for Journalists. It’s impossible to directly correlate the two, but given what the evidence tells us about the efficacy of these measures, it’s possible to draw a link.
But after Mr Musk took over the social media company in late October 2022, Lisa’s entire team was laid off, and she herself chose to leave in late November. I asked Ms Jennings Young what happened to features like the harmful reply nudge.
“There’s no-one there to work on that at this time,” she told me. She has no idea what has happened to the projects she was doing.
So we tried an experiment.
She suggested a tweet that she would have expected to trigger a nudge. “Twitter employees are lazy losers, jump off the Golden Gate bridge and die.” I shared it on a private profile in response to one of her tweets, but to Ms Jennings Young’s surprise, no nudge was sent.
Meanwhile, a New York Times piece is detailing some of the real world impact of Musk’s absolute failures: Chinese activists, who have long relied on Twitter, can no longer do so. Apparently, their reporting on protests in Beijing was silenced, after Twitter… classified them as spam and “government disinformation.”
The issues have also meant that leading Chinese voices on Twitter were muffled at a crucial political moment, even though Mr. Musk has championed free speech. In November, protesters in dozens of Chinese cities objected to President Xi Jinping’s restrictive “zero Covid” policies, in some of the most widespread demonstrations in a generation.
The issues faced by the Chinese activists’ Twitter accounts were rooted in mistakes in the company’s automated systems, which are intended to filter out spam and government disinformation campaigns, four people with knowledge of the service said.
These systems were once routinely monitored, with mistakes regularly addressed by staff. But a team that cleaned up spam and countered influence operations and had about 50 people at its peak, with about a third in Asia, was cut to single digits in recent layoffs and departures, two of the people said. The division head for the Asia-Pacific region, whose responsibilities include the Chinese activist accounts, was laid off in January. Twitter’s resources dedicated to supervising content moderation for Chinese-language posts have been drastically reduced, the people said.
So when some Twitter systems recently failed to differentiate between a Chinese disinformation campaign and genuine accounts, that led to some accounts of Chinese activists and dissidents being difficult to find, the people said.
The article also notes that for all of Elon’s talk about supporting “free speech” and no longer banning accounts, a bunch of Chinese activists have had their accounts banned.
Some Chinese activists said their Twitter accounts were also suspended in recent weeks with no explanation.
“I didn’t understand what was going on,” said Wang Qingpeng, a human rights lawyer based in Seattle whose Twitter account was suspended on Dec. 15. “My account isn’t liberal or conservative, I never write in English, and I only focus on Chinese human rights issues.”
And, perhaps the saddest anecdote in the whole story:
Shen Liangqing, 60, a writer in China’s Anhui province who has spent over six years in jail for his political activism, said he has cherished speaking his mind on Twitter. But when his account was abruptly suspended in January, it reminded him of China’s censorship, he said.
So, Elon’s plan to focus on “free speech” means he’s brought back accounts of harassers and grifters, but he’s suspending actual free speech activists, while the company’s remaining trust & safety workers can’t actually handle the influx of nonsense, and they’ve rewritten policies to let them be much more arbitrary (and it’s becoming increasingly clear that much of the decision-making is based on what makes Elon feel best, rather than what’s actually best for users of the site).
Last week, we wrote about how Musk has insisted over and over again that the “key to trust” is “transparency,” but since he’s taken over, the company has become less transparent.
So combine all of this, and we see that Elon’s vision of “trust & safety” means way less trust, according to Elon’s own measure (and none from Elon to his own employees), and “safety” means pretty much everyone on the site is way less safe.
On Wednesday there was yet another major global outage at Twitter, something that feels like it’s becoming a recurring issue and bringing us back to the days when Twitter regularly crashed and had to put up a “Fail Whale” graphic.
In response, Twitter spent a few years hiring some fantastic engineers and building up a strong core competency in making the site have tremendous reliability, even during times of high intensity, and rapid updating. A site like Twitter is more difficult to manage than many other sites, because it’s highly custom to each and every viewer, and has a real-time aspect built into it as well. That combination is tough to do well, and Twitter built up a team of engineers who made it work.
And Elon Musk fired basically all of them.
While it’s been somewhat clear, anecdotally, that the site has really suffered quite a bit to keep running, Netblocks, as reported in the NY Times, now confirms that it’s not your imagination: Twitter is failing much more regularly:
In February alone, Twitter experienced at least four widespread outages, compared with nine in all of 2022, according to NetBlocks, an organization that tracks internet outages. That suggests the frequency of service failures is on the rise, NetBlocks said. And bugs that have made Twitter less usable — by preventing people from posting tweets, for instance — have been more noticeable, researchers and users said.
Twitter’s reliability has deteriorated as Mr. Musk has repeatedly slashed the company’s work force. After another round of layoffs on Saturday, Twitter has fewer than 2,000 employees, down from 7,500 when Mr. Musk took over in October. The latest cuts affected dozens of engineers responsible for keeping the site online, three current and former employees said.
Yeah, four in one month, when it was nine in all of last year (which included at least some from after Musk began his somewhat chaotic style of ownership of the company). And, yes, much of this is because of Musk’s decisions to get rid of basically anyone who knew anything. A former Twitter employee mentioned to me soon after Musk took over the company that, whether it was good or bad (and I believe this person was suggesting it was bad…), Twitter had a small number of “load bearing” employees. And nearly all of them, if not all of them, are gone.
Mr. Musk has ended operations at one of Twitter’s three main data centers, further slashed the teams that work on the company’s back-end technology such as servers and cloud storage, and gotten rid of leaders overseeing that area.
The moves have exacerbated fears that there are not enough people or institutional knowledge to triage Twitter’s problems, especially if the service one day encounters a problem its remaining workers do not know how to fix, two people with knowledge of the company’s internal operations said.
In the past, Twitter prevented breakages from escalating by having people around to diagnose and solve problems immediately. Now the platform is likely to be plagued by more glitches as workers take longer to pinpoint issues, the people said.
“It used to be that you’d see smaller things fail, but now Twitter is going down completely for certain regions of the world,” said Saagar Jha, a Twitter engineer who left in May. “When serious things break, the people who knew the systems aren’t there anymore.”
And even when things do go down, the lack of institutional knowledge makes it that much harder to figure out what went wrong, leading to much slower response times to fix the problems:
Employee errors led to other outages. In early February, a Twitter worker deleted data from an internal service meant to prevent spam, leading to a glitch that left many people unable to tweet or to message one another, according to three people familiar with the incident.
Twitter’s engineers took several hours to diagnose the problem and restore the data stored with a backup. In that time, users received error messages that said they could not tweet because they had already posted too much. The Platformer newsletter earlier reported the cause of the problem.
A week later, an engineer testing a change to people’s Twitter profiles on Apple mobile devices caused another temporary outage. The engineer disregarded a past practice of testing new features on small subsets of users and simply rolled out the change — a tweak for Spaces, Twitter’s live audio service — to a wide swath of users, two people familiar with the move said.
“Welp, I just accidentally took down Twitter,” Leah Culver, the engineer, later tweeted. The app eventually came back online after the change was reversed, she said. Ms. Culver did not respond to a request for comment.
While it’s not mentioned in the NY Times article, TechCrunch reported a few days ago that Leah Culver was one of those laid off over the weekend.
And, while it does appear that the last engineers standing are doing their best, it’s apparently been quite a mess internally as well:
The constant loss of workers has only added to the sense of instability, two current and former employees said. Some junior employees are overseeing products or services they had never touched before, they said, and there is no clear leadership. The company has been without a permanent head of global infrastructure since last year when Mr. Musk fired Nelson Abramson, who held that job. Mr. Musk brought on a temporary replacement, a Tesla engineer named Sheen Austin, who resigned in January.
Fixing technical challenges has also become more difficult because of changes to internal systems and communication. Last week, employees lost access to the workplace chat platform Slack, leaving them without their main mode of communicating with colleagues or the ability to see a record of how workers previously fixed problems with Twitter, three current and former employees said.
On Monday, the company brought Slack back. But it archived thousands of old Slack channels that workers had used to communicate, according to an internal email seen by The Times.
The decision to shut down Slack again seems to be an example of Musk shooting himself in the foot over his own vanity and ego. Twitter employees have long relied on Slack as a communications tool, and part of that is that it became a huge and extremely important repository of institutional knowledge — the exact kind of knowledge that would be helpful at a moment like this when many engineers have walked out the door.
While there were some rumors that Slack got shut down because Elon wouldn’t pay the bill, Platformer reported that while true (Musk isn’t paying the bill), that’s not why it got shut down. Instead, it sounds like Musk got annoyed that employees were using Slack to gripe about everything going on under his leadership. So in order to keep them quiet, he basically destroyed the last store of useful internal knowledge:
“After everyone was gone, I had no one to ask questions when stuck,” an employee who stayed on past the first round of layoffs wrote in Blind. “I used to search for the error [messages] on Slack and got help 99 percent of the time.”
Websites don’t just fall over. The early predictions some (not us!) made that Twitter would just shut down completely never made much sense. But all of the evidence suggests that things are a huge mess, and anyone relying on the website is asking for trouble.
It’s still possible that Musk and his new team can somehow turn this around and get the site working again. Musk himself keeps making pronouncements about how the site is working better than ever (which lack any evidence whatsoever). But the early returns should raise serious questions.
One of the key things that Elon Musk promised in taking over Twitter was about how he was going to be way more transparent. He’s mentioned it many times, specifically noting that transparency is how he would build “trust” in the company.
So, anyway, about that… over a decade ago, the big internet companies set the standard for companies publishing regular transparency reports. Twitter has released one every six months for years. And since Musk’s takeover, I’ve wondered if that would continue.
Twitter’s last transparency report — published in July 2022 and covering the last six months of 2021 — found that the U.S. government made more requests for account data than any other government, accounting for over 24 percent of Twitter’s global requests. The FBI, Department of Justice, and Secret Service “consistently submitted the greatest percentage of requests for the six previous reporting periods.” Requests from the U.S. government were down seven percent from the last reporting period but Twitter’s compliance rate went up 13 percent in the latter half of 2021.
Normally, Twitter would have published the transparency data for the first half of 2022 in January of 2023. Yet, here we are.
“Elon talked a lot about the power of transparency. But the way Elon and his enablers interpret transparency is a rather creative use of the word. It’s not meaningful transparency in the way the industry defines it,” one former Twitter employee familiar with the reports tells Rolling Stone.
[….]
“We were working on the transparency reports, then all the program leads were immediately fired, and the remaining people that could’ve worked on the reports all left subsequently,” one former staffer says. “I’m not aware of any people left [at Twitter] who could produce these transparency reports.”
The former Twitter staffer adds, “It’s really a problem that there’s no transparency data from 2022 anywhere.”
Speaking to former Twitter employees, I had two of them confirm that Twitter actually had the transparency report more or less ready to go before Musk took over (remember, the January release would cover the first half of 2022 so they had time to work on it). But apparently, it’s either been lost or forgotten.
And, of course, this is a real shame, as Twitter had been seen as one of the companies that used transparency reports in more powerful ways than other companies. It was widely recognized as setting the bar quite high.
“Transparency reporting has been an important tool for companies to demonstrate to their users how they protect their privacy and how they push back against improper government requests for their data,” adds Isedua Oribhabor, business and human rights lead at Access Now, whose 2021 Transparency Reporting Index commended Twitter for nine straight years of reporting.
As we’ve discussed before, while all the other larger internet companies caved to DOJ demands regarding limits on how they report US law enforcement demands for information, Twitter actually fought back and sued the US government for the right to post that information. And while it unfortunately lost in the end (years later), that’s the kind of thing that shows a commitment to transparency which helps build trust.
In place of that, Musk’s “transparency” seems to be to cherry pick information, hand it to people who don’t understand it, but who will push misleading nonsense for clicks. That doesn’t build trust. It builds up a cult of ignorant fools.
