That does not seem to be anything new. I’m rather sure that all the recommended Tweets I’ve gotten didn’t come from the very few people I follow on Twitter. They’ve definitely seem to have come from the fact I engaged with a particular person.
Don’t get me wrong, I loathe the recommended tweets. I specifically try to cultivate my feed for a certain type of post. I’ve tried in vain to find a way to block them. But what is described here is exactly why I hate them. If it was just similar stuff to what I’ve already subscribed to, I would find it much less of an issue.
Where did the story that Apple was going to remove twitter come from in the first place? My understanding is that it was entirely Musk who was saying so.
So, the misunderstanding is that Musk was just talking out his ass? Or is he talking out his ass now?
Either he was lying then, he is lying now, or he was and is always lying.
Meanwhile what I hear over on Mastodon is that the influx of Twitter refugees is causing them issues with handling volume and cultural adaptation. It is a decentralized net of “federated instances” many of which are small one-server shops and were never remotely as moderated as Twitter and can get slammed if a loadful of people show up with a hashtag that happens to call on them.
The headline at the least appears to be a fairly biased rendition of the news. The Tweet from Twitter support reads:
We want to ensure everyone on Twitter sees the best content on the platform, so we’re expanding recommendations to all users, including those who may not have seen them in the past.
Nothing directly about increasing the frequency and I have no idea which users haven’t received recommendations in the past. I’m mostly surprised there was any group of users who weren’t already getting recommended tweets left, right and center.
Well, now they will be recommended tweets from people paying $8 a month.
Never mind, wrong forum.
In settings, Privacy and Safety, Mute and Block, Muted words add “suggest_who_to_follow”, “suggest_ranked_timeline_tweet”, “suggest_activity_tweet” and all of those suggestions go away.
Yeah, my suspicion is that the meeting was basically Cook asking to see the email he got saying they were dumping Twitter from the app store, then sent him on his way.
The first rumor I heard was that an Apple exec had closed his Twitter account, which had a lot of conspiracy theorists speculating that it was a sign Apple was up to something. I’d hope Elon wasn’t running with that as a reason to tweet-storm them.
…recommended tweets only show up on the Home View, not in Latest Tweets.
The complaint (from many that I follow) is that the nature of the recommended tweets have shifted and they are now being shown tweets from people from the opposite side of the political spectrum.
I haven’t seen that myself, yet, but I think that’s partly due to the fact that I’ve been very heavy-handed with the block button in the past, and the people that the algorithm tends to push just won’t hit my feed.
I’m not seeing any calculated plan to push those people onto people’s timeline: it seems to be mainly algorithmic failures.
…so the legal battles are about to begin.
There’s this:
The TLDR version is that it is being alleged that Musk and Twitter are not currently complying with the severance terms that originally agreed too both pre-takeover to what they did when they sent the “click x to stay” email.
And there’s this:
TLDR: the Irish-based executive Sinéad McSweeney has received a temporary injunction to stop them from terminating her employment. There will probably be more like this.
So far our threads about this have been very US centric, and since most Twitter users aren’t USians, I’ve been wondering what’s going on elsewhere. Today I found this:
Civil society and human rights groups in countries like India, Poland and Nigeria say they’re frustrated that media attention and public debate over Musk’s dramatic reshaping of Twitter has largely focused on its effects in the United States, such as the restoration of Trump’s account. In a matter of weeks, Musk has reversed hard-fought gains in the site’s ability to moderate content in languages other than English in places where the social media site has previously been used to incite violence against minority groups or subvert protest movements.
In India, Twitter had been working with civil society groups since 2018 to address “dangerous genocidal hate speech on the platform,” said Thenmozhi Soundararajan, executive director of Equality Labs, a Dalit civil rights organization dedicated to ending caste apartheid, gender-based violence, Islamophobia, white supremacy and religious intolerance.
Despite those efforts, Twitter was used to help incite deadly sectarian riots in New Delhi in 2020, in which at least 20 people died after Hindu mobs targeted Muslims. Soundararajan is now worried that any progress made in moderating tweets in India’s multitude of native languages is lost — opening the door to future misuse and even violence.
“We have an American company who is operating in a genocidal market without any oversight,” she said. “That is enabling dangerous speech in an incredibly accelerated way, because they have now basically taken out all of the moderation that was preventing even more copious hate speech.”
It’s mentioned in the article that the contacts these groups had within Twitter are now gone - emails to those contacts are no longer being returned.
There are also far-right groups in Poland that have been objecting to the number of Ukrainians that have come into that country as a result of the war with Russia and have been using Twitter to mobilize others against them.
“The hashtag [‘Stop ukrainization of Poland’] is a part of a far-right campaign against the presence of Ukrainian refugees in Poland with a clear aim to incite hostility and violence,” the group wrote. Twitter later met with the group and said it would not take action.
In subsequent conversations, the most recent at the International Network Against Cyber Hate meeting on Nov. 3, Pankowski said the “Never Again” group received the same response from Twitter — “we don’t consider the hashtag a reason to react.”
That lack of action might just get Twitter banned by the EU.
I would not be sad if the EU went full on, declared that Twitter was now simply a front for the Russian disinformation campaign, and eliminated it completely.
How would that work from a technical standpoint?
It looks like Twitter may not be in compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act, which requires tech firms to tackle problems including abusive posts and disinformation.
Companies not in compliance with the act can be fined, or removed from the marketplace. Fines would seem to be straightforward and would proceed through the court system. Not sure how the technicalities of a ban would work. Prevent carriers in Europe from enabling twitter somehow?
This is a bit of a WAG, but I imagine it wouldn’t be a question of blocking users from accessing Twitter, but Google and Apple would need to remove Twitter from the App store for European users and unless Twitter set up some sort of block themselves they’d get sued for illegally offering services in Europe.
I don’t know if Twitter has any sort of presence in Europe to sell to European advertisers that would be exposed.
That’s what I’m asking, how would they do that? Is it an ISP thing, and ban twitter’s IP from their services? Would they have any way of preventing people from using a VPN to access it?
I would guess that whatever method is used, some people will find way around it. But if those people amount to just a few percent, then you’ve achieved your goal.
Yes, the EU authorities could block access to twitter.com from users who are in the EU. China does it now.
People could get around this with a VPN, but how many people are going to get a VPN just to read tweets?
If those are the problematic few percent, then it doesn’t really achieve anything, and those are the ones that will use a VPN not just to read tweets, but to troll, stir up hatred, and organize violence.