sounds like "conservatives" do get their accounts suspended more and its due to them being more prone to spreading lies and disinfo. https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/tech/is-twitter-really-biased-this-study-takes-a-look/ Is Twitter really biased? This study takes a look Claims of censorship on Twitter, particularly of right-leaning viewpoints, have gained attention in recent years, sparking lawsuits and even Congressional hearings. Accusations of bias and censorship are largely what prompted Tesla CEO Elon Musk to make a highly publicized offer to buy Twitter for $43 billion. But is Twitter actually censoring people’s posts based on political ideology? One new study by professors at MIT and Yale called “Is Twitter Biased Against Conservatives? The Challenge of Inferring Political Bias in a Hyper-Partisan Media Ecosystem” recently took a look. Authors of the study followed 9,000 politically engaged Twitter users, half Democratic and half Republican, in October 2020. The authors continued keeping track of their Twitter habits for six months after the 2020 election. The study did find a disparity between how many users from each party were suspended — 7.7% of the Democrats compared to 35.6% of Republicans. Republicans on Twitter, however, “shared substantially more news from misinformation,” the study found. David Rand, a management professor at MIT who co-wrote the study, said the report didn’t disprove bias allegations but showed how correlated misinformation sharing and partisanship are. “Since 2016, [social media] platforms have been under a huge amount of public pressure to act on misinformation,” Rand said. “If they do that, then necessarily, they’re going to wind up sanctioning conservatives more, and it’s going to look like they’re biased against conservatives.” This can make it seem like there’s “no way” these sites can win, he said. “If they don’t act on this information, then people are upset about that,” Rand said. “But if they do act on misinformation, then people are upset about the conservatives getting” removed. Republican users in the study’s dataset shared news from domains that were on average rated as much more untrustworthy by fact-checkers and a survey of politically balanced lay-people than Democratic users, the authors said. Even with accusations of bias, 80% of the people researchers polled from both parties said social media companies should reduce the spread of misinformation. However, the study noted that people have different definitions of misinformation. “It’s actually really hard to tell what’s bias and what’s not bias in this current media ecosystem where partisanship and misinformation-sharing are bound up together,” Rand said. Social media platforms such as Twitter suspend accounts for violating content standards on violence, hate speech and harmful misinformation. But some question the value in social media sites moderating speech in the first place, and see it as overreach. Conservative author Denise McAllister said in a 2020 interview with USA Today that people needed to be trusted as individuals. “This is a platform, right? You don’t need to act like mama Twitter or mama Facebook. Just let people say what they are going to say, whether it’s true, false, whatever,” she said. Musk has also been a vocal critic of Twitter over what he says are problems with free speech. He’s said that he doesn’t care about making money off Twitter, and wants to buy it because “having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.” During a Thursday TED 2022 conference, Musk said he would be “very cautious” on permanent bans, instead opting for “timeouts,” The Hill reported. “Twitter has become sort of the de facto town square so it’s really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely within the bounds of the law,” he said, according to The Hill. There are some hurdles for Musk to leap through if he wants to realize his vision. Twitter last week adopted a shareholder rights plan, known as a “poison pill,” that would allow existing Twitter shareholders — besides Musk — to buy additional shares at a discount, diluting the billionaire’s stake. This would make it harder for Musk to get a majority of shareholder votes in favor of his acquisition of the social media platform.
Reporting that published personal, stolen data from someone, and was leaked at a time specifically to influence the election. Also, it’s not like the people who cared about the story at the time had any difficulty learning about it. Other news sources exist. Twitter at the time had to weigh “free speech” against other concerns like right to privacy and free/fair democratic elections unmanipulated by foreign actors.
The story was false then and it is false today. I don't think people realize that the authenticity of the emails were not was what was in doubt and they were deemed authentic as far back as 2019.
I've posted links to the articles from the NY Times showing that the emails were deemed authentic long long ago. In any case, Musk is now the Ministry of Truth and will get to shape Twitter to his liking. It will be interesting to see if he loosens the rules on posts and free speech if Twitter will take a hit on advertising dollars. I know that was a big problem a few years back and one of the main impetus to the content moderation of today.
This man brings up good points in his thread. TLDR... Musk already has a history of banning opinions about him on social media in China. What happens if China tells Musk to go after any criticism or else Tesla is banned? This would be similar to how China tried to flex on the NBA telling them to fire Morey or else they pull the NBA out of China Stories of course of Musk silencing people that have been critical of him. Silencing workers trying to unionize Going after investors critical of him I think many on the right are being way too celebratory about this. At the end of the day, Twitter is at his mercy. I do think if he does try to do this it will be exposed and hurt Twitter's credibility once and for all but Musk doesn't seem to be the 'free speech' advocate he claims to be. Musk isn't going to always be on your side and some would argue he's more left of center if anything. What if the next GOP candidate is openly against any climate change policies and the DNC candidate wants to regulate automobiles to where Tesla massively benefits? I wonder what stories Musk's twitter will promote then and what stories he'll bury?
I seen so much no name woke a dopes crying and saying it’s the last time they are tweeting- Newsflash *** no one cares ***
Elon was granted 23b in stock options he can’t sell (5year lock)from Tesla. He is leveraging them as debt to extract value from them immediately. Morgan Stanley is loaning most of it (the rest) again as a loan. Twitter will go from .3 debt/EBITDA ratio to 9 debt/EBITDA and the interest payment alone is a billion dollars a year taken out of Twitter itself. Twitter lost 200m last year. He will remove all free speech limits. Hooray right!? Users will leave the platform but not as fast as advertisers will because no one really wants to advertise on a platform that allows Nazis. Twitter implodes and Musk will say “oh wow I guess corporate America hates freedom” as he files chapter 11, sells the 14b in assets to himself and then sells the company to META to recoup the loss. Literally nobody is talking about how he’s not buying **** but getting loans to buy it. He’s not paying a dollar. The SEC filing is public. It’s all a loan and finances through his Tesla stock that is locked up. And he will use the loses of Twitter to avoid paying his income taxes. DD
Musk is mostly a fraud...going to take some people a few more years to figure it out though...but one thing he's good at is manipulating the stock market and finances.
"With better content moderation, apparently we’d all be enjoying President Hillary Clinton’s second term." lol https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-h...melber-11651006771?mod=hp_opin_pos_3#cxrecs_s More Hilarious Wailing at Elon Musk Wait, you mean Twitter could ban one party’s political speech? By The Editorial Board April 26, 2022 6:36 pm ET My, what a progressive panic Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter has inspired. MSNBC host Ari Melber warns that Mr. Musk could hack the political debate by having the website “secretly ban one party’s candidate” or “turn down the reach of their stuff, and turn up the reach of something else, and the rest of us might not even find out about it until after the election.” Uh, hello? Twitter has banned President Trump. A month before the 2020 election, it movedto “turn down the reach” of the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Those actions weren’t secret, but Mr. Melber’s alarm echoes what conservatives have been saying for years about big tech’s censorship. As long as the usual Silicon Valley overlords controlled all of social media, progressives didn’t mind. But Elon Musk buys Twitter, and suddenly freer speech is a national crisis. “Musk and his apologists say if consumers don’t like what he does with Twitter, they can go elsewhere,” tweeted former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich. “But where else would consumers go to post short messages that can reach millions of people other than Twitter?” Yet conservative critics of Twitter have long been told to build their own sites. We’ll friend you later on ReichBook. Here’s a paragraph from the news pages of the New York Times : “The 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote that same year gave Silicon Valley executives, U.S. elected officials and the public a peek into what can go wrong when social media companies opt not to wade too deeply into what people say on their sites. Russian propagandists amplified the views of deeply divided Americans and Britons, further polarizing the electorate.” With better content moderation, apparently we’d all be enjoying President Hillary Clinton’s second term. Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey tweeted that Congress “must pass laws to protect privacy and promote algorithmic justice.” For the record, Mr. Musk says his plan for Twitter includes “making the algorithms open source to increase trust.” He’s risking billions of his own money, so he hardly wants users and advertisers to flee. There’s no digital Berlin Wall keeping people trapped in the Twitterverse. Appeared in the April 27, 2022, print edition.
Opinion: Elon Musk's move threatens to bring Trump back to the White House https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/26/opinions/twitter-trump-musk-politics-filipovic/index.html
