And the moment it became inevitable that Musk took over Twitter I deleted my account. And that was one of many reasons.
The only two social media sites that I partake in are HN and up to Elons acquisition Twitter and that is because I had/have a fairly high degree of faith in their ability to at least try to do the right thing. With Musk, Zuckerberg and several others I have the conviction that given the opportunity that they will do the wrong thing.
Would you bet that Musk has not already abused his position to gain information from private communications on Twitter?
We haven't seen Twitter arbitrarily leak DMs yet. Even Matt Taibbi said they only have access to screenshots of admin interfaces directly related to their specific stories around uncritical FBI/DHS access, shadowbanning for questionable political purposes, and the whole Trump thing. It's far from the ideological free-for-all people are comparing it to (how it was before).
But Elon has already shown he's willing to play dangerous games with his power. So far we haven't seen the FUDy stuff yet beyond the stupid new doxxing rule for which he's burned tons of good will. Nothing comes without costs.
Unless you mean purposeful 'hacks' with a specific agenda that only leaks private DMs of a select group? Yes, that would be bad.
Under normal circumstances I would agree, but after firing so many people I can't imagine that security at Twitter is still priority #1, they likely have trouble keeping the lights on.
I mean NSA has had this capability for 25 years.
They were never "your" DMs.
(I had a typo in my original comment btw; I said "surprising" but meant "unsurprising".)
Just another incentive to act with integrity and keep personal correspondence out of corporate systems.
They banned Babylon Bee for literal satire but they knowingly allowed child sexual exploitation. They censor the Hunter Biden story and now “journalists” are mad when they get censored for doxing. Taylor Lorenz can dox Libs of TikTok with zero consequences — and yet Twitter was doing “the best job they could in difficult circumstances?”
Their priorities were so blatantly partisan. They blatantly ignored people calling for assassination of Supreme Court justices and ignored child exploitation but they found the time to censor conservative journalists and activists with profound regularity and intention. They even coordinated with the Katie Hobbs campaign to remove tweets at her request in her capacity as Secretary of State for Arizona.
Why would anyone defend this?
Normal people think it's not enough to not profit from it - you need to try very hard to remove it.
> Employees say that Twitter’s executives know about the problem, but the company has repeatedly failed to act.
> Twitter still has a problem with content that sexually exploits children. Executives are apparently well-informed about the issue, and the company is doing little to fix it.
https://www.theverge.com/23327809/twitter-onlyfans-child-sex...
https://nypost.com/2021/01/21/twitter-sued-for-allegedly-ref...
It doesn’t seem like there are good answers on how to resolve this issue sadly. I wish there was more transparency on how much these social media giants are spending on this issue, how much is removed per year and average time the content was accessible. It’s hard to judge on the outside the size and scope of this problem and the resources being thrown at it. And that doesn’t even get into the psychological issues that this has to do for the reviewers. This is truly some of the darkest stuff that humanity has and scale makes it hard to resolve.
Actually, the article highlights the internal working group of 84 employees that spent months evaluating Twitter's ability to suppress this exploitive material , concluding that Twitter had major problems in this area and submitting a list of recommendations to fix them that were mostly ignored.
> Aside from enabling in-app reporting of CSE, there appears to have been little progress on the group’s other recommendations.
> Employees say that Twitter’s executives know about the problem, but the company has repeatedly failed to act.
Uh, what? The documents so far have confirmed an actively hostile cadre of idiots serving at the behest of the government decided what you could/could not say in the public square.
I'm sure reddit, facebook, and others are full of these same types. Reddit is absolutely complicit.