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Twitter takeover: how a year of Elon Musk rendered the platform useless | Pranav Dixit
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
He’s booted journalists he doesn’t like from the service, labeled NPR as “state-affiliated media”, throttled traffic to news sites, reinstated previously-banned white nationalists, resurrected Donald Trump’s account, unleashed threats and harassment on former staff members, killed the best bots, feuded with the Anti-Defamation League, deprecated headlines, toyed with putting the whole site behind a paywall, installed a CEO who will forever be known for a disastrous first public interview, and destroyed one of the world’s most recognizable brand names – Twitter – by changing it to X.
Devoid of moderation teams, X’s official safety account suggested that people rely on crowdsourced Community Notes to figure out truth from lies (it didn’t work).
A recent analysis by NewsGuard showed that X’s verified users, who had paid for their blue checks, were responsible for 74% of Israel and Hamas war-related falsehoods that went viral on the platform.
Before she was one of the thousands of employees Musk laid off from Twitter at the end of last year, Melissa Ingle worked on a team responsible for civic integrity and tackling the spread of political misinformation on the platform.
Instead of showing you posts from people you follow, the platform now defaults to a “For You” mode filled with grifters, recycled memes, idiots, AI hustlers, cat videos, car accidents and far-right influencers.
Sensible, informative posts appear to get virtually no engagement – links are explicitly deprioritized, stifling the news while viral garbage floats to the top, thanks to an algorithmic tweak that Musk says optimizes for time spent on the platform above anything else.
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