Elon buys Twitter for $44 billion

[rnu]

Press release from Australia's eSafety Commissioner:
Report reveals the extent of deep cuts to safety staff and gaps in Twitter/X’s measures to tackle online hate

Key findings in the report include:

- A 30% reduction in Trust and Safety staff globally following the acquisition in October 2022.
- An 80% reduction in engineers focussed on trust and safety issues globally since the company’s acquisition.
- A 45% reduction in trust and safety staff in the Asia Pacific region
- Content moderators directly employed by Twitter/X were reduced by 52%.
- Public policy staff were reduced by 78% globally, 73% in the APAC region and a 100% reduction in Australia.
- Since the acquisition there had been a 20% slowing in the median time to respond to user reports about Tweets and a 75% slowing in the median time to respond to direct messages. eSafety notes that prompt action on user reports is particularly important given that Twitter solely relies on user reports to identify hateful conduct in direct messages.  
- As of May 2023, X Corp. reported that no tests were conducted on Twitter recommender systems to reduce risk of amplification of hateful conduct. However, X Corp. stated no individual accounts are artificially amplified, and that its enforcement policies apply to Twitter Blue accounts in the same way as other accounts.
- As of May 2023, automated tools specifically designed to detect volumetric attacks or “pile-ons” in breach of Twitter’s targeted harassment policy were not used on Twitter.
- As of May 2023, URLs linking to websites dedicated to harmful content are not blocked on Twitter.
- From 25 November 2022 (the date it was announced)1 to 31 May 2023, 6,103 previously banned accounts were reinstated by Twitter, which eSafety understands relates to accounts in Australia. Of these, 194 accounts were reinstated that were previously suspended for hateful conduct violations.  X Corp. stated that Twitter did not place reinstated accounts under additional scrutiny.

[rnu]

Digital Information World: Inundated: Blue Tick Bots Swarm X, User Reports Confirm

User complaints on X as well as on Threads (by Parker Molloy of Media Matters) showed search results on the social media platform that revealed countless Blue Tick users repeating a phrase used by ChatGPT when it’s asked to do something that violates OpenAI policy.

Many of the accounts that are posting these phrases are actually abandoned profiles that seem to have been brought back to life. This prompted one user to theorize that X itself is behind the phenomenon, with the company allegedly using AI to keep these accounts active in order to make its metrics seem more favorable than might have been the case otherwise.

There is really no remotely plausible explanation for why someone would pay for blue ticks to spam these messages. I'd say the likelihood of these accounts being run by X (or Musk personally) is only infinitesimally lower than 100%. Looks like an attempt at (a) inflating X's user metrics and (b) bad mouthing ChatGPT with which Musk has a well documented beef.

[rnu]

RTE: Irish X employee takes defamation case against Elon Musk

A senior Irish-based employee of the social media platform X has launched defamation proceedings where he seeks damages against its majority shareholder Elon Musk.
Aaron Rodericks, who is the co-lead of Threat Disruption at X, the social media formerly known as Twitter, claims he was defamed and his reputation damaged by Mr Musk in a tweet published on the entrepreneur's personal Twitter handle.

He also intends to sue X's Irish-based subsidiary, Twitter International Unlimited Company, over the alleged defamation.

The judge granted the application and allowed the plaintiff's lawyers, on an ex parte basis, to serve the summons on Mr Musk.

In what are related but separate proceedings, Mr Rodericks claims that he had been subjected to a process that is "a complete sham" over allegations that he "demonstrated hostility" to the company for allegedly liking tweets by third parties that are critical of X, Mr Musk and the firm's CEO Linda Yaccarine.

[Vigilant]

Delicious.

Judge Voids Musk’s $56 Billion Tesla Pay, Citing ‘Deeply Flawed’ Award Process

Cue/queue the shareholder lawsuits.

[JarrBarr]

Wall Street Journal: The Money and Drugs That Tie Elon Musk to Some Tesla Directors.

Board members have reaped hundreds of millions from stock awards and separate investments, even as some have done drugs with Musk; former Tesla director Larry Ellison offered him a chance to dry out

[AndyTheGrump]

[tarantino]

Elon Musk Accuses Stephen King of ‘Deadnaming’ X After Author Insists on Calling It Twitter

Stephen King refuses to call Twitter by the new name Elon Musk picked for the social network, X. In a reply to the legendary horror writer, Musk attempted to make an anti-trans joke — accusing King of “deadnaming” the platform.

King on Wednesday wrote, “According to the New York Times, terrorists may be paying for blue check marks on Twitter (I refuse to call it X).”

Musk — instead of addressing the allegation that his company is taking money from known terrorist organizations — took the opportunity to mock deadnaming, in which someone uses a former name of a transgender person without their consent.

“Stop deadnaming 𝕏… Respect our transition ,” Musk wrote in response to King. The right-wing Libs of TikTok account chimed in, asking facetiously, “Is Stephen King transphobic?” Musk has previously ridiculed people who indicate their preferred pronouns and said that X/Twitter has deemed “cis” and “cisgender” to be anti-heterosexual “slurs.” Musk is estranged from his daughter Vivian Wilson, who in 2022 changed her name and gender; in an October 2022 interview with the Financial Times, Musk blamed his daughter’s decision to distance herself from him on the “takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists.”

[rnu]

Mashable: The majority of traffic from Elon Musk's X may have been fake during the Super Bowl, report suggests

This week, Super Bowl 2024 shattered records, with the NFL championship broadcast on CBS becoming the most-watched televised event in U.S. history.
Also riding high from the big game? Elon Musk's X. The company formerly known as Twitter published its own press release, lauding Super Bowl LVIII as one of the biggest events ever on the social media platform with more than 10 billion impressions and over 1 billion video views.
However, it appears that a significant portion of that traffic on X could be fake, according to data provided to Mashable by CHEQ, a leading cybersecurity firm that tracks bots and fake users.
According to CHEQ, a whopping 75.85 percent of traffic from X to its advertising clients' websites during the weekend of the Super Bowl was fake.

Out of more than 40 million visits from TikTok, only 2.56 percent were determined to be fake. Facebook sent 8.1 million visits and 2.01 percent of the monitored visits were classified as inauthentic. And over on Instagram, only 0.73 percent of the 68,700 visits from the platform were fake.

CHEQ also provided Mashable with fake traffic data from the entire month of January 2024. TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram all had very similar stats to each platform's respective Super Bowl weekend numbers. Slightly more than 2.8 percent of the 306 million visits sent from TikTok were determined to be fake. Out of the 90 million visits that came from Facebook, a bit more than 2 percent were fake. And Instagram's traffic was only 0.96 percent fake, based on 749,000 visits.
But, X once again fared the worst. Of the 759,000 visits from X, 31.82 percent of that traffic was determined to be fake.

X didn't always have a bot problem of this magnitude, according to CHEQ, something Tytunovich demonstrated by providing Mashable with data from last year's Super Bowl. During the comparable weekend in February 2023, fake traffic from the platform then-known as Twitter only accounted for 2.81 percent out of 159,000 visits. That's around 72 percent less than this year's game.

[Vigilant]

Elmo continues to be in the running for the worst person on the planet.

[Randy from Boise]

Elmo continues to be in the running for the worst person on the planet.

It's a close race.

t

[Vigilant]

Elmo continues to be in the running for the worst person on the planet.

It's a close race.

t

sigh

Yeah.

[Vigilant]

Elon's sockpuppet account on Xhitter

[rnu]

Elmo continues to be in the running for the worst person on the planet.

It's a close race.

t

And a very crowded field.

[Vigilant]

Elon Musk is being investigated by the SEC for felony securities fraud.

Waiting for the court docs to drop.

[AndyTheGrump]

Elon Musk is being investigated by the SEC for felony securities fraud.

Waiting for the court docs to drop.

This should be fun.

[rnu]

The blue badge of shame:

Guardian: Dismay as X’s most-followed accounts given blue ticks for free

The entrepreneur and one-time “Chief Twit” had tweeted last week that the service would grant free “premium” status to any user with more than 2,500 “verified subscriber follows” and accounts with more than 5,000 would get “premium+”. That policy is now being enacted.

Now, though, it has taken the opposite approach: as the “free” ticks roll out, users who had never paid are expressing dismay at their new status.
“Shit. I’ve been forcibly bluechecked,” posted Marcy Wheeler, a journalist. The Wired writer Lauren Goode said: “My blue check is back and I just want to make clear I am not paying El*n M*sk for this thanks very much.”