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Tag: Freedom of speech

  • As Musk is learning, content moderation is a messy job

    As Musk is learning, content moderation is a messy job

    Now that he’s back on Twitter, neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin wants somebody to explain the rules.

    Anglin, the founder of an infamous neo-Nazi website, was reinstated Thursday, one of many previously banned users to benefit from an amnesty granted by Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk. The next day, Musk banished Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, after he posted a swastika with a Star of David in it.

    “That’s cool,” Anglin tweeted Friday. “I mean, whatever the rules are, people will follow them. We just need to know what the rules are.”

    Ask Musk. Since the world’s richest man paid $44 billion for Twitter, the platform has struggled to define its rules for misinformation and hate speech, issued conflicting and contradictory announcements, and failed to full address what researchers say is a troubling rise in hate speech.

    As the “ chief twit ” may be learning, running a global platform with nearly 240 million active daily users requires more than good algorithms and often demands imperfect solutions to messy situations — tough choices that must ultimately be made by a human and are sure to displease someone.

    A self-described free speech absolutist, Musk has said he wants to make Twitter a global digital town square. But he also said he wouldn’t make major decisions about content or about restoring banned accounts before setting up a “ content moderation council ” with diverse viewpoints.

    He soon changed his mind after polling users on Twitter, and offered reinstatement to a long list of formerly banned users including ex-President Donald Trump, Ye, the satire site The Babylon Bee, the comedian Kathy Griffin and Anglin, the neo-Nazi.

    And while Musk’s own tweets suggested he would allow all legal content on the platform, Ye’s banishment shows that’s not entirely the case. The swastika image posted by the rapper falls in the “lawful but awful” category that often bedevils content moderators, according to Eric Goldman, a technology law expert and professor at Santa Clara University law school.

    While Europe has imposed rules requiring social media platforms to create policies on misinformation and hate speech, Goldman noted that in the U.S. at least, loose regulations allow Musk to run Twitter as he sees fit, despite his inconsistent approach.

    “What Musk is doing with Twitter is completely permissible under U.S. law,” Goldman said.

    Pressure from the EU may force Musk to lay out his policies to ensure he is complying with the new law, which takes effect next year. Last month, a senior EU official warned Musk that Twitter would have to improve its efforts to combat hate speech and misinformation; failure to comply could lead to huge fines.

    In another confusing move, Twitter announced in late November that it would end its policy prohibiting COVID-19 misinformation. Days later, it posted an update claiming that “None of our policies have changed.”

    On Friday, Musk revealed what he said was the inside story of Twitter’s decision in 2020 to limit the spread of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

    Twitter initially blocked links to the story on its platform, citing concerns that it contained material obtained through computer hacking. That decision was reversed after it was criticized by then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Facebook also took actions to limit the story’s spread.

    The information revealed by Musk included Twitter’s decision to delete a handful of tweets after receiving a request from Joe Biden’s campaign. The tweets included nude photos of Hunter Biden that had been shared without his consent — a violation of Twitter’s rules against revenge porn.

    Instead of revealing nefarious conduct or collusion with Democrats, Musk’s revelation highlighted the kind of difficult content moderation decisions that he will now face.

    “Impossible, messy and squishy decisions” are unavoidable, according to Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety who resigned a few weeks into Musk’s ownership.

    While far from perfect, the old Twitter strove to be transparent with users and steady in enforcing its rules, Roth said. That changed under Musk, he told a Knight Foundation forum this week.

    “When push came to shove, when you buy a $44 billion thing, you get to have the final say in how that $44 billion thing is governed,” Roth said.

    While much of the attention has been on Twitter’s moves in the U.S., the cutbacks of content-moderation workers is affecting other parts of the world too, according to activists with the #StopToxicTwitter campaign.

    “We’re not talking about people not having resilience to hear things that hurt feelings,” said Thenmozhi Soundararajan, executive director of Equality Labs, which works to combat caste-based discrimination in South Asia. “We are talking about the prevention of dangerous genocidal hate speech that can lead to mass atrocities.”

    Soundararajan’s organization sits on Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, which hasn’t met since Musk took over. She said “millions of Indians are terrified about who is going to get reinstated,” and the company has stopped responding to the group’s concerns.

    “So what happens if there’s another call for violence? Like, do I have to tag Elon Musk and hope that he’s going to address the pogrom?” Soundararajan said.

    Instances of hate speech and racial epithets soared on Twitter after Musk’s purchase as some users sought to test the new owner’s limits. The number of tweets containing hateful terms continues to rise, according to a report published Friday by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a group that tracks online hate and extremism.

    Musk has said Twitter has reduced the spread of tweets containing hate speech, making them harder to find unless a user searches for them. But that failed to satisfy the center’s CEO, Imran Ahmed, who called the rise in hate speech a “clear failure to meet his own self-proclaimed standards.”

    Immediately after Musk’s takeover and the firing of much of Twitter’s staff, researchers who previously had flagged harmful hate speech or misinformation to the platform reported that their pleas were going unanswered.

    Jesse Littlewood, vice president for campaigns at Common Cause, said his group reached out to Twitter last week about a tweet from U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene that alleged election fraud in Arizona. Musk had reinstated Greene’s personal account after she was kicked off Twitter for spreading COVID-19 misinformation.

    This time, Twitter was quick to respond, telling Common Cause that the tweet didn’t violate any rules and would stay up — even though Twitter requires the labeling or removal of content that spreads false or misleading claims about election results.

    Twitter gave Littlewood no explanation for why it wasn’t following its own rules.

    “I find that pretty confounding,” Littlewood said.

    Twitter did not respond to messages seeking comment for this story. Musk has defended the platform’s sometimes herky-jerky moves since he took over, and said mistakes will happen as it evolves. “We will do lots of dumb things,” he tweeted.

    To Musk’s many online fans, the disarray is a feature, not a bug, of the site under its new ownership, and a reflection of the free speech mecca they hope Twitter will be.

    “I love Elon Twitter so far,” tweeted a user who goes by the name Some Dude. “The chaos is glorious!”

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  • China’s security apparatus swings into action to smother Covid protests | CNN

    China’s security apparatus swings into action to smother Covid protests | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    China’s vast security apparatus has moved swiftly to smother mass protests that swept the country, with police patrolling streets, checking cell phones and even calling some demonstrators to warn them against a repeat.

    In major cities on Monday and Tuesday, police flooded the sites of protests that took place over the weekend, when thousands gathered to vent their anger over the country’s tough zero-Covid policy – some calling for greater democracy and freedom in an extraordinary show of dissent against Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

    The heavy police presence has discouraged protesters from gathering since, while authorities in some cities have adopted surveillance tactics used in the far western region of Xinjiang to intimidate those who demonstrated at the weekend.

    In what appears to be the first official response – albeit veiled – to the protests, China’s domestic security chief vowed at a meeting Tuesday to “effectively maintain overall social stability.”

    Without mentioning the demonstrations, Chen Wenqing urged law enforcement officials to “resolutely strike hard against infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces, as well as illegal and criminal acts that disrupt social order,” the state-run news agency Xinhua reported.

    The tough language may signal a heavy-handed crackdown ahead. While protests over local grievances do occur in China, the current wave of demonstrations is the most widespread since the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement of 1989. The political defiance is also unprecedented, with some protesters openly calling for Xi, the country’s most powerful and authoritarian leader in decades, to step down.

    Some of the boldest protests took place in Shanghai, where crowds called for Xi’s removal two nights in a row. The sidewalks of Urumqi Road – the main protest site – have been completely blocked by tall barricades, making it virtually impossible for crowds to congregate.

    A protester is arrested by police in Shanghai on Sunday night.

    Ten minutes’ drive away, dozens of police officers patrolled the People’s Square – a large plaza at the heart of the city where some residents had planned to gather with white paper and candles on Monday evening. Police also waited inside a subway station there, closing off all but one exit, according to a protester at the scene.

    CNN is not naming any of the protesters in this story to protect them from reprisals.

    The protester said he saw police checking the cell phones of passersby, and asking them if they had installed virtual private networks (VPNs) that can be used to circumvent China’s internet firewall, or apps such as Twitter and Telegram, which though banned in the country have been used by protesters.

    “There were also police dogs. The whole atmosphere was chilling,” the protester said.

    Protesters later decided to move their planned demonstration to another location, but by the time they arrived, the security presence had already been stepped up there, the protester said.

    “There were too many police and we had to cancel,” he said.

    On Tuesday, a widely circulated video appears to show police officers checking passengers’ mobile phones on a Shanghai subway train.

    Another Shanghai protester told CNN they were among “around 80 to 110” people detained by police on Saturday night, adding they were released 24 hours later.

    CNN cannot independently verify the number of protesters detained and it is unclear how many people, if any, remain in custody.

    The protester said the detainees had their phones confiscated on board a bus that took them to a police station, where officers collected their fingerprints and retina patterns.

    According to the protester, police told those detained they had been used by “ill-intentioned people who want to start a color revolution,” pointing to nationwide protests breaking out on the same day as evidence of that.

    The protester said police returned their phone and camera upon their release, but officers had deleted the photo album and removed the WeChat social media app.

    In Beijing, police vehicles, many parked with their lights flashing, lined eerily quiet streets on Monday morning throughout parts of the capital, including near Liangmaqiao in the city’s central Chaoyang district, where a large crowd of protesters had gathered Sunday night.

    The demonstration, which saw hundreds marching down the city’s Third Ring Road, ended peacefully in the early hours of Monday under the close watch of lines of police officers.

    But some protesters have since received phone calls from the police inquiring about their participation.

    One demonstrator said she received a phone call from a man who identified himself as a local police officer, asking her whether she was at the protest and what she saw there. She was also told that if she had any discontent with authorities, she should complain to the police, instead of taking part in “illegal activities” such as the protest.

    “That night, the police mostly adopted a calm approach when dealing with us. But the Communist Party is very good at meting out punishment afterward,” the demonstrator told CNN.

    She said she did not wear a face mask during the demonstration. “I don’t think Omicron is that scary,” she said. But her friends who wore masks to the protest also received calls from the police – some as late as 1 a.m., she added.

    Still, the protester remained defiant. “It is our legitimate right (to protest), because the constitution stipulates that we have freedom of speech and freedom of congregation,” she said.

    Another protester, who has not heard from the police, told CNN that concern she could be the next to be called upon weighs heavily on her mind.

    “I can only seek consolation by telling myself that there were so many of us who took part in the protest, they can’t put a thousand people in jail,” she said.

    Meanwhile, some universities in Beijing have arranged transportation for students to return home early for winter break and take classes online, citing an effort to reduce Covid risks for students taking public transportation.

    But the arrangement also conveniently discourages students from gathering, following demonstrations on a series of campuses over the weekend, including the prestigious Tsinghua University where hundreds of students shouted for “Democracy and rule of law! Freedom of expression!”

    Given the long history of student-led movements in modern China, authorities are particularly concerned about political rallies on university campuses.

    Beijing’s universities have been the source of demonstrations which kicked off the May Fourth Movement in 1919, to which the Chinese Communist Party traces its roots, as well as the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, which were brutally crushed by the Chinese military.

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  • Elon Musk claims Apple has ‘threatened to withhold’ Twitter from its app store | CNN Business

    Elon Musk claims Apple has ‘threatened to withhold’ Twitter from its app store | CNN Business


    New York
    CNN Business
     — 

    Elon Musk on Monday claimed that Apple has “threatened” to pull Twitter from its iOS app store, a move that could be devastating to the company Musk just acquired for $44 billion.

    “Apple

    (AAPL)     has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why,” Musk said in one of several tweets Monday taking aim at Apple

    (AAPL)     and its CEO for alleged moves that could undermine Twitter’s business.

    In another tweet, Musk claimed that Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. “Do they hate free speech in America,” he said, in an apparent reference to his oft-stated desire to bolster his idea of free speech on the platform. “What’s going on here [Apple CEO Tim Cook]?” Musk added in a follow-up tweet. He also criticized Apple’s size, claimed it engages in “censorship,” and called out the 30% transaction fee Apple charges large app developers to be listed in its app store.

    The tweetstorm highlights the tenuous relationship between Musk and Apple, which along with Google serves as the major gatekeepers for mobile applications. Long before taking over Twitter, the Tesla CEO said that when the car company was struggling, he considered selling the company to Apple, but that Cook refused to take a meeting with him.

    Removal from Apple’s app store, or that of Google, would be detrimental to Twitter’s business, which is already struggling with a loss of advertisers following Musk’s takeover and a rocky initial attempt at expanding its subscription business.

    Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Musk’s tweets. The company has previously shown it’s willing to remove apps from its app store over concerns about their ability to moderate harmful content or if they attempt to circumvent the cut Apple takes from in-app purchases and subscriptions.

    In January 2021, Apple removed Parler, an app popular with conservatives, including some members of the far right, from its app store following the US Capitol attack over concerns about the platform’s ability to detect and moderate hate speech and incitement. Parler was returned to Apple’s app store three months later after updating its content moderation practices.

    In its official app store review guidelines, Apple lists various safety parameters that apps must adhere to in order to be included in the store, including an ability to prevent “content that is offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste, or just plain creepy” such as hate speech, pornography and terrorism. “If you’re looking to shock and offend people, the App Store isn’t the right place for your app,” the guidelines state.

    Various civil society groups, researchers and other industry watchers have raised concerns about Twitter’s ability to effectively moderate harmful content and maintain the platform’s safety following widespread layoffs and mass employee exits at the company. Musk has also claimed he wants to amplify “free speech” on the platform and has begun to restore some accounts that were previously banned or suspended for repeatedly violating Twitter’s rules. Musk himself has shared a conspiracy theory and several other controversial tweets since taking over as Twitter’s owner.

    Musk, long a prolific and antagonistic tweeter, has not let up at all since taking over the company. And what it may have lost in revenue, he has claimed it has made up for in engagement. Part of the strategy appears to be relentlessly taking aim at enemies, either of him personally or of “free speech.”

    In an interview with CBS earlier this month, Cook was asked whether there are any ways in which Twitter could change that would cause Apple to remove it from the app store. “They say that they’re going to continue to moderate and so … I count on them to do that,” Cook responded. “Because I don’t think that anybody really wants hate speech on their platform. So I’m counting on them to continue to do that.”

    In an op-ed published in the New York Times last week, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, who left the company earlier this month, suggested that Twitter had already begun to receive calls from app store operators following Musk’s takeover. Roth said the company’s failure to adhere to Google and Apple’s app store rules could be “catastrophic.”

    And last weekend, the head of Apple’s app store, Phil Schiller, deleted his Twitter account.

    While the state of Apple and Twitter’s relationship is unclear, the iPhone maker was running Black Friday ads on the platform as recently as last Thursday, according to posts viewed by CNN.

    Many companies have pulled back on digital ad spending in recent months as the economy declined, and Twitter has likely always only been a small portion of Apple’s ad budget. Apple’s impact on Twitter, however, could be much more significant, including if Musk succeeds in shifting its core business to being more reliant on subscription revenue, and potentially has to pay a 30% cut to Apple.

    In one tweet Monday, Musk asked his nearly 120 million followers if they know “Apple puts a secret 30% tax on everything you buy through their App Store?” In another tweet, he posted a picture of a highway exit: one lane headed toward “pay 30%,” the other pointed toward “go to war.” An old car labeled “Elon” skidded toward the latter.

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  • Culture clash? Conservative Qatar preps for World Cup party

    Culture clash? Conservative Qatar preps for World Cup party

    On the Instagram accounts of fashion models and superstars last month, the sheikhdom of Qatar looked like one glittering party.

    High-heeled designers descended on exhibition openings and fashion shows in downtown Doha. Celebrities, including a prominent gay rights campaigner, snapped selfies on a pulsing dance floor.

    “As-salaam ’alykum Doha!” Dutch model Marpessa Hennink proclaimed on Instagram, using the traditional Muslim salutation.

    The backlash was swift. Qataris went online to vent their anger about what they called a dangerous and depraved revelry, saying it threatened Qatar’s traditional values ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The Arabic hashtag, Stop the Destruction of Our Values, trended for days.

    The episode underscores the tensions tearing at Qatar, a conservative Muslim emirate that restricts alcohol, bans drugs and suppresses free speech, as it prepares to welcome possibly rowdy crowds for the first World Cup in the Middle East.

    “Our religion and customs prohibit indecent clothing and behavior,” Moheba Al Kheer, a Qatari citizen, said of the avant-garde artists and flamboyant models who mingled with Qatari socialites in late October. “It’s normal for us to worry when we see these kinds of people.”

    World Cup organizers say everyone is welcome during the tournament. Already, foreigners outnumber citizens 10 to one in Qatar. Some Qataris are liberal and open to mixing with foreigners. Many are thrilled about the tournament. But human rights groups have raised concerns over how police will deal with foreign fans’ violations of the Islamic laws criminalizing public drunkenness, sex outside of marriage and homosexuality.

    Qatar, a tiny Persian Gulf country that once was a dust-blown pearling port, transformed at almost warp-speed into an ultra-modern hub following its 1990s natural gas boom. Expats, including Western consultants and engineers and low-paid South Asian construction workers and cleaners, poured into the country.

    Glass-and-steel skyscrapers, luxury hotels and massive malls soon sprung up in the desert. In an effort to diversify away from a carbon-based economy, Qatar’s ruling family bought up stakes in things ranging from global finance and technology to the French soccer club Paris Saint-Germain and London real estate.

    The ruling emir’s sister, Sheikha Al Mayassa Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, became one of the world’s most important art buyers. His mother, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al-Missned, became a global style icon and bought several luxury brands, including Valentino.

    But even as Qatar, among the world’s wealthiest countries per capita, looked to the West for inspiration, it faced pressure from within to stay true to its Islamic heritage and Bedouin roots. Qatar’s most powerful clan originates from the Arabian Peninsula’s landlocked interior, where the ultraconservative form of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism was born.

    Qatari rulers treaded the tightrope between placating its conservative citizens and tribes and shoring up soft power as a major global player.

    “Doha’s religious discourse to its citizens is very different from its liberal discourse to the West,” said 38-year-old Qatari Mohammed al-Kuwari. “It cannot always succeed at both.”

    The glaring spotlight of the World Cup — which requires Qatar to relax access to alcohol, create fun outlets for fans and comply with FIFA rules promoting tolerance and inclusion — raises the stakes.

    In years past, the World Cup has turned host countries into the world’s biggest party, with joyous crowds drinking heavily and celebrating together. When emotions run high, fans can be euphoric — or rude and violent.

    This will shake up quiet Qatar, where such behavior is deeply taboo and virtually unheard of. Doha is not known for its nightlife. Despite its rapid development over the years, its entertainment offerings remain slim and its public spaces limited.

    Some foreign fans fret about how Qatar will handle hordes of drunken hooligans in the streets, given the nation’s public decency laws and strict limits on the purchase and consumption of alcohol.

    Swearing and making offensive gestures, dressing immodestly and kissing in public may normally lead to prosecution in Qatar. Anti-gay sentiment runs deep in society, like elsewhere in the Arab world. A senior security official has warned rainbow flags may be confiscated to protect fans from being attacked for promoting gay rights.

    Fan anxiety is apparent in recent Reddit message boards: “How would the government know if someone is gay?” “How bad is it to wear short pants (Can I get arrested)?” “Is it true that people who say negative things about Qatar on social media get arrested?”

    At the same time, conservative Qataris fret about how much their society can bend to accommodate World Cup guests. Doha plans to throw giant electronic music festivals. Authorities say they’ll turn a blind eye to offenses like public intoxication, intervening only in response to destruction of property and threats to public safety.

    “I hope that the World Cup will not strip society of its religion, morals and customs,” said a 28-year-old Qatari man who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

    He said he found comfort in a promise from the country’s advisory Shura Council last month that authorities will “ensure the building of a strong society that adheres to its religion” and reject “any excessive behavior” that breaks local taboos.

    But because the tournament fulfills the vision of the country’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, to develop the country, experts say the tiny population of Qataris have little choice but to accept whatever comes.

    The emirate brooks no dissent. Qatar’s oil and gas wealth has generated a social contract where citizens benefit from a cradle-to-grave welfare state and political rights come after state paternalism.

    “If Qatar wants to be on the world map they have to adhere by global standards and values,” said Andreas Krieg, an assistant professor of security studies at King’s College London. “The government will stand its ground on certain issues, and the population will fall in line.”

    Al-Kuwari, the citizen, was blunter.

    “There is fear,” he said. “If a citizen thinks to criticize, a (prison) sentence awaits him.”

    ———

    Follow Isabel DeBre on Twitter at www.twitter.com/isabeldebre.

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  • Elon Musk pleads with advertisers to stay on Twitter | CNN Business

    Elon Musk pleads with advertisers to stay on Twitter | CNN Business



    CNN
     — 

    Twitter owner Elon Musk pleaded with advertisers to keep using his platform on Wednesday as he sketched out his plans for user verification, content moderation and even his intention to add banking features to Twitter in front of a live audience of over 100,000 users.

    During an hour-long Twitter Spaces session attended by representatives from Adidas, Chevron, Kate Spade, Nissan and Walgreens, Musk said he wanted Twitter to “be a force that moves civilization in a positive direction.”

    An indicator of success, he said, would be whether his decisions lead to growth in users and advertising, while failure would mean the opposite.

    The collection of major advertisers and brands listening to Musk’s remarks underscored the intense interest — and perceptions of risk — generated by Musk’s erratic management of the company over the past week, from launching (and then un-launching) product changes to his sweeping layoffs that hit half the company.

    To his critics, and to companies that have paused advertising on Twitter, Musk asked to be given a chance.

    “I understand if people want to give it a minute and see how things are evolving,” he said. “But really, the best way to see how things are evolving is just use Twitter. And see how your experience has changed. Is it better? Is it worse?”

    Musk repeatedly urged skeptics to use the platform while addressing questions about his proposal to offer blue check marks to users who agree to pay $8 a month — a plan whose rollout has been marred by uncertainty and abrupt changes.

    Users who pay for Twitter Blue, the platform’s subscription service, will not be required to provide identifying information other than a credit card and a phone number, Musk confirmed. Twitter will eventually default to displaying tweets from Twitter Blue subscribers, while tweets from users who do not pay for a blue check mark, he said, would be relegated to a separate page on the site and effectively buried unless viewers sought out that material.

    Brands will be expected to foot the bill for their own verification on Twitter Blue, Musk said. He did not go into specifics about a separate, gray verification badge Twitter is developing for major brands, government accounts and media outlets — a feature the company has said will not be available for purchase but rather bestowed on high-profile accounts to distinguish them from those who paid for blue check marks. On Wednesday Twitter briefly appeared to have rolled out the grey check mark feature for some users, though Musk soon after tweeted that he had “killed it.” A Twitter product manager working on the feature left the door open for its eventual release.

    Musk also argued, contrary to some of his critics, that well-resourced purveyors of mis- and disinformation would not be able to game the system because they would quickly run out of phone numbers and credit cards, or eventually tire of the effort.

    Musk sought to distill many of the challenges of running a social media platform into a binary.

    “Thinking of it as an information problem, truth is signal and falsehood is noise,” he said. “And we want to improve the signal-to-noise ratio as much as possible.”

    Musk’s expansive plans for Twitter include adding financial products to the mix. It could begin, he said, with Twitter allowing users to pay each other through the platform, with the company setting up each user with an initial gift of $10 to test it out. Over time, Musk added, Twitter will offer the ability for users to transfer money out of its system to third-party banks — and then to market its own banking services.

    “The next step would be a money market account so you can get an extremely high yield on your balance,” Musk said, adding that debit cards and checks could also be a part of the plan.

    Last week, Twitter submitted registration paperwork to the US government that indicated its intent to join the payments industry, and to comply with certain banking regulations. A copy of the paperwork viewed by CNN showed that the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network received the registration filing by “Twitter Payments LLC” on Nov. 4. A FinCEN spokesperson declined to comment on Twitter’s filing, which had been first reported by the New York Times on Wednesday.

    Musk acknowledged brands’ concerns about the presence of hate speech and other offensive content on the platform.

    “I don’t think having hate speech next to an ad is great, obviously,” he said with a chuckle.

    Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of integrity and safety, said Twitter is increasing its investment in ideas to battle hateful content.

    “We think there’s a lot of other stuff we can do, from warning messages to interstitials, to reducing the reach of that content, that we haven’t fully explored in the past,” Roth said, vowing to implement those ideas quickly. Twitter has implemented many of these steps in the past, particularly in response to election and Covid-19 misinformation.

    Musk said he and his teams are at work changing much of Twitter’s existing codebase, partly to support new features such as longform video. That feature, he said, will initially allow paid users to download 10 minutes of high-definition video before gradually lengthening that time limit to 40 minutes and then several hours.

    And he emphasized the importance of Community Notes, formerly known as Birdwatch, a crowdsourced fact-checking feature that Twitter has been testing with some of its users.

    Community Notes, he said, “will obviate the need for a lot of the content stuff that’s currently in place, I think.”

    The sprawling question-and-answer session occasionally delved into the metaphorical and philosophical.

    At one point, Musk appeared to acknowledge that his commitment to “free speech” was not absolute.

    “There’s a giant difference between freedom of speech and freedom of reach,” he said.

    Musk also described Twitter’s existing verification system as a “lords and peasants situation” and compared it to the American Revolutionary War.

    “In the United States, we fought a war to get rid of that stuff,” he said. “Maybe this is a dumb decision, but we’ll see.”

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  • Alex Jones ordered to pay $473M more to Sandy Hook families

    Alex Jones ordered to pay $473M more to Sandy Hook families

    HARTFORD, Conn. — Infowars host Alex Jones and his company were ordered by a judge Thursday to pay an extra $473 million for promoting false conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook school massacre, bringing the total judgment against him in a lawsuit filed by the victims’ families to a staggering $1.44 billion.

    Connecticut Judge Barbara Bellis imposed the punitive damages on the Infowars host and Free Speech Systems. Jones repeatedly told his millions of followers the massacre that killed 20 first graders and six educators was staged by “crisis actors” to enact more gun control.

    “The record clearly supports the plaintiffs’ argument that the defendants’ conduct was intentional and malicious, and certain to cause harm by virtue of their infrastructure, ability to spread content, and massive audience including the infowarriors,” the judge wrote in a 45-page ruling.

    Christopher Mattei, a lawyer for the Sandy Hook families, said he hopes the award sends a message to conspiracy theorists who profit from lies.

    “The Court recognized the ‘intentional, malicious … and heinous’ conduct of Mr. Jones and his business entities,” Mattei said in a statement.

    On his show Thursday, Jones called the award “ridiculous” and a “joke” and said he has little money to pay the damages.

    “Well, of course I’m laughing at it,” he said. “It’d be like if you sent me a bill for a billion dollars in the mail. Oh man, we got you. It’s all for psychological effect. It’s all the Wizard of Oz … when they know full well the bankruptcy going on and all the rest of it, that it’ll show what I’ve got and that’s it, and I have almost nothing.”

    Eight victims’ relatives and the FBI agent testified during a monthlong trial about being threatened and harassed for years by people who deny the shooting happened. Strangers showed up at some of their homes and confronted some of them in public. People hurled abusive comments at them on social media and in emails. Some received death and rape threats.

    Six jurors ordered Jones to pay $965 million to compensate the 15 plaintiffs for defamation, infliction of emotional distress and violations of Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act.

    Jones, who lives and works in Austin, Texas, has bashed the trial as unfair and an assault on free speech rights. He says he will appeal the verdicts. He also has said he doesn’t have the money to pay such huge verdicts, because he has less than $2 million to his name — which contradicted testimony at a similar trial in Texas. Free Speech Systems, meanwhile, is seeking bankruptcy protection.

    Jones said Thursday that he has only a “couple hundred thousand dollars” in his savings account.

    Jones’ lawyer, Norm Pattis, wrote in a text message to the The Associated Press, “To paraphrase Karl Marx, the verdict was tragedy, this latest ruling is farce. It makes our work on appeal that much easier.”

    Bellis found Jones and Infowars’ parent company liable for damages without a trial last year, as a consequence for what she called his repeated failures to turn over many financial documents and other records to the plaintiffs. After the unusual “default” ruling, the jury was tasked only with deciding on the amount of compensatory damages and whether punitive damages were warranted.

    Jones says that he turned over thousands of documents and that the default ruling deprived him of his right to present a defense against the lawsuit.

    The punitive damages include about $323 million for the plaintiffs’ attorney fees and costs and $150 million for violations of the Unfair Trade Practices Act.

    In Connecticut, punitive damages for defamation and infliction of emotional distress are generally limited to plaintiffs’ legal fees. The Sandy Hook plaintiffs’ lawyers are to get one-third of the $965 million in compensatory damages under a retainer agreement.

    But there is no cap on punitive damages for violations of the Unfair Trade Practices Act. The plaintiffs had not asked for a specific amount of punitive damages, but under one hypothetical calculation they said such damages could be around $2.75 trillion under the law.

    In a similar trial in Texas in August, Jones was ordered to pay nearly $50 million to the parents of another child killed in the Sandy Hook shooting for calling the massacre a hoax. A forensic economist testified during that trial that Jones and Free Speech Systems have a combined net worth as high as $270 million.

    Jones hawks nutritional supplements, survival gear and other products on his show, which airs on the Infowars website and dozens of radio stations. Evidence at the Connecticut trial showed his sales spiked around a time he talked about the Sandy Hook shooting, leading the plaintiffs’ lawyers to say he was profiting off the tragedy.

    In documents recently filed in Free Speech Systems’ bankruptcy case in Texas, a budget for the company for Oct. 29 to Nov. 25 estimated product sales would total $2.5 million, while operating expenses would be about $740,000. Jones’ salary was listed at $20,000 every two weeks.

    On Wednesday, Bellis, the Connecticut judge, ordered Jones to not move any of his assets out of the country, as the families seek to attach his holdings to secure money for the damages. Jones, meanwhile, has asked the judge to order a new trial or at least reduce the compensatory damages to a “nominal” amount.

    A third and final trial over Jones’ hoax claims is expected to begin around the end of the year in Texas. As in Connecticut, Jones was found liable for damages without trials in both Texas cases because he failed to turned over many records to the plaintiffs.

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  • Hong Kong court upholds veteran journalist’s conviction

    Hong Kong court upholds veteran journalist’s conviction

    HONG KONG — An award-winning Hong Kong journalist lost her appeal Monday against her conviction over making false statements in obtaining information for her investigation of a violent attack during widespread pro-democracy protests in 2019.

    Bao Choy was found guilty in April 2021 of deceiving the government by getting vehicle ownership records for journalistic purposes after she had declared in her online application that she would use the information for “other traffic and transport related issues.” She was trying to track down perpetrators of a mob attack on protesters and commuters inside a train station for her documentary for public broadcaster RTHK.

    That ruling sparked outrage among local media professionals over the city’s shrinking press freedoms. Choy — who was fined 6,000 Hong Kong Dollars ($765) for two counts of making false statements — called it “a very dark day for all journalists in Hong Kong.”

    High Court Justice Alex Lee upheld the verdict in a written judgment, saying there are only three options available in the application form for conducting such searches: transport or traffic-related matters, legal matters, or vehicle purchases or sales. Journalism is not an option.

    “I don’t deny that the appellant was trying to obtain the information with good intentions. But as the magistrate had pointed out, in terms of conviction, having good intentions is not a justification,” Lee said.

    Flanked by veteran journalists who held up placards printed with “Fearless, Selfless,” Choy said she was disappointed with the judgement.

    “It’s a decision that really hinders the access to free information in the city, which means that will create obstacles for the press to act as a brake on the abuse of power, and to monitor and hold the powerful accountable,” she said.

    The judgement also called into question whether other activities such as some due diligence searches would be considered illegal, she said, and the ruling’s implication should be discussed by the wider society.

    Choy added she would make a decision on whether to take the case to the Final Court of Appeal within a month.

    The story Choy co-produced, titled “7.21 Who Owns the Truth,” won the Chinese-language documentary award at the Human Rights Press Awards in 2021. The judging panel hailed it as “an investigative reporting classic” that had chased “the smallest clues, interrogating the powerful without fear or favor.”

    In the months after the journalist was convicted, two media outlets — Apple Daily and Stand News — were forced to shut down during an ongoing crackdown on dissents following the 2019 protests in the semi-autonomous Chinese city. Hong Kong, a former British colony, returned to China’s rule in 1997 with the promise by Beijing that it would keep the city’s freedoms, but critics say that’s no longer the case.

    Some of the top management of the two outlets also have been prosecuted. Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai faces collusion charges under a sweeping National Security Law enacted in 2020. A trial of two former Stand News editors charged under a colonial-era sedition law that has been used increasingly to snuff out critical voices is underway. One of them, acting editor-in-chief Patrick Lam, has been granted bail on Monday after being detained for more than 10 months.

    Hong Kong fell more than 60 places to 148th place in Reporters Without Borders’ latest World Press Freedom Index released in May.

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  • Settlement reached in suits over FBI posing as AP reporter

    Settlement reached in suits over FBI posing as AP reporter

    WASHINGTON — The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press will get a $145,000 settlement following a pair of lawsuits filed after an FBI agent posed as a reporter for The Associated Press and created a fake story.

    The long-running Freedom of Information Act cases led to appeals court decisions that will help bolster access to public records, said Adam Marshall, an attorney for the group. The cases also shed light on FBI agents posing as members of the media, a tactic that free press advocates say undermines media credibility and blurs lines between law enforcement and the press.

    The agency failed to follow its own rules over such undercover operations when an agent posed as an AP reporter and sent a link to a fake story in an investigation in Washington state in 2007, according to documents uncovered in the lawsuit filed along with The Associated Press.

    Then-FBI Director James Comey called the technique “proper and appropriate” under FBI guidelines at the time, though he said it would require higher-level approvals when the incident came to light seven years later, in 2014. No actual story was published and it led to an arrest, he maintained.

    The agent posing as an AP reporter sent a link to the fake article to a 15-year-old suspected of making bomb threats at a high school. When the teen clicked the link, a tracking tool revealed his computer’s location and helped agents confirm his identity.

    The FBI declined to comment Friday.

    Kathleen Carroll, then executive editor of the AP, said in 2014 that the FBI’s “unacceptable tactics undermine AP and the vital distinction between the government and the press.” A letter signed by two dozen news organizations called the revelations “inexcusable” and the Reporter’s Committee specifically called out the use of the AP’s name as “cover for delivery of electronic surveillance software.”

    Lauren Easton, an Associated Press spokeswoman, declined additional comment Friday.

    The lawsuits were filed as part of an effort to get records about FBI news-media impersonations, and eventually resulted in important court decisions about how far agencies must go in searching for requested documents and the standards they must meet in order to withhold documents, Marshall said. The settlement will cover attorney’s fees and costs.

    “This has shown that there are significant, concerning and ongoing issues with respect to federal law enforcement impersonation of the press in the United States,” Marshall said. The cases have also “shown that the Reporters Committee and The Associated Press were committed to finding out as much as we could about what happened here for the public to know.”

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  • Groups say they’ll sue Georgia over ‘divisive concepts’ ban

    Groups say they’ll sue Georgia over ‘divisive concepts’ ban

    ATLANTA — Education and civil rights groups said Friday that they will sue to overturn Georgia’s law banning the teaching of certain racial concepts, claiming it violates First Amendment rights to free expression and 14th Amendment rights to equal protection.

    The Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Education Association and the Georgia Association of Educators sent a notice to Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr notifying Carr of their intent to sue in federal court.

    Kara Richardson, a spokesperson for Carr, said the office had received the letter but declined comment, as did a spokesperson for state schools Superintendent Richard Woods. Both Carr and Woods are up for reelection on Tuesday.

    Gov. Brian Kemp earlier this year signed House Bill 1084 into law. The measure, based on a now-repealed executive order from President Donald Trump, attracted opposition from teacher groups and liberal groups. But Republicans said it was absolutely necessary to ban critical race theory, a term stretched from its original meaning as an examination of how societal structures perpetuate white dominance to a broader indictment of diversity initiatives and teaching about race.

    Banned “divisive concepts” include claims that the U.S. is “fundamentally or systematically racist,” that any people are “inherently racist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,” and that no one “should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of his or her race.” Bills using identical language have been proposed in dozens of states — backed by the Center for Renewing America, a think tank led by former Trump administration officials.

    School districts must respond to complaints, and people who don’t like the outcome can appeal to the state Board of Education. If the board finds the school district in the wrong, it could suspend some or all of its waivers from state regulation.

    Suits have been filed challenging similar laws in states including Florida, Ohio, Oklahoma and New Hampshire.

    Opponents of the law argue that it’s classroom censorship, saying it limits the ability of educators to teach accurate history and the ability of students to receive an accurate education. The opponents said Friday that it violates a First Amendment right for students to receive information and ideas and also violates First and 14th Amendment prohibitions on punishing people for speech.

    “As a classroom teacher I am confused and concerned about how this law will impact not only my classroom, but my career,” history teacher Jeff Corkill said in a statement. “Like many educators in Georgia, I can’t figure out what I can or can’t teach under the law, and my school district’s administrators don’t seem to understand the law’s prohibitions either.”

    Other Georgia laws pushed through this year in a flurry of conservative election-year activity included allowing the state athletic association to ban transgender girls from playing high school sports, codifying parental rights, forcing school systems to respond to parental challenges of books and increasing tax credits for private school scholarships.

    “Efforts to expand our multicultural democracy through public education are being met with frantic efforts in Georgia to censor educators, ban books, and desperate measures to suppress teaching the truth about slavery and systemic racism,” Georgia Association of Educators General Counsel Mike McGonigle said in a statement.

    ———

    Follow Jeff Amy on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jeffamy.

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  • Alex Jones trial moves to punitive damages phase

    Alex Jones trial moves to punitive damages phase

    HARTFORD, Conn. — Infowars host Alex Jones is facing the possibility of having more penalties heaped onto the amount he already owes for spreading conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, as the punitive damages phase of his Connecticut trial is set to begin Friday in a lawsuit filed by the victims’ families.

    A jury last month ordered Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, to pay nearly $1 billion in compensation to the Sandy Hook families for the harm they suffered when he persuaded his audience that the 2012 shooting that killed 26 people was a hoax perpetrated by “crisis actors.”

    The jury also said punitive damages should be awarded. That amount will be determined by Judge Barbara Bellis following evidentiary hearings set for Friday and Monday.

    The plaintiffs’ lawyers, in court filings, suggested punitive damages could total $2.75 trillion based on one hypothetical calculation, but have not asked for a specific amount.

    “Justice requires that the Court’s punitive damages award, punish and deter this evil conduct,” attorneys Alinor Sterling, Christopher Mattei and Joshua Koskoff wrote in a motion. “Only a punitive damages assessment of historic size will serve those purposes.”

    Jones’ lawyer, Norm Pattis, is arguing that any punitive damages should be minimal, in part because the $1 billion compensatory damages award is the functional equivalent of punitive damages due to its extremely large amount.

    “Few defendants alive could pay damages of this sum,” Pattis wrote. “Indeed, most defendants would be driven into bankruptcy, their livelihood destroyed, and their future transformed into the bleak prospect of a judgment debtor saddled for decades with a debt that cannot be satisfied. To regard this as anything other than punishment would be unjust.”

    Pattis did not return a message seeking comment. Mattei declined to comment.

    All the plaintiffs, including relatives of eight of the shooting victims and an FBI agent who responded to the school, gave emotional testimony during the trial, describing how they have been threatened and harassed for years by people who believe the shooting didn’t happen.

    Strangers showed up at some of their homes and confronted some of them in public. People hurled abusive comments at them on social media and in emails. And some said they received death and rape threats.

    Jones was found liable last year for damages to the families for defamation, infliction of emotional distress and violating Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act. Although punitive damages are generally limited to attorneys’ fees for defamation and infliction of emotional distress, there are no such limits for punitive damages under the Unfair Trade Practices Act.

    In a calculation in a plaintiffs’ court filing, they said Jones’ comments about Sandy Hook were viewed an estimated 550 million times on his and Infowars’ social media accounts from 2012 to 2018. They said that translated into 550 million violations of the Unfair Trade Practices Act.

    “If each of the 550 million violations were assessed at the $5,000 statutory maximum, the total civil penalty would be $2,750,000,000,000 ($2.75 trillion),” their attorneys wrote.

    They also said punitive damages for violations of the unfair trade practices law typically are multiple times more than compensatory damages.

    As for legal fees, the plaintiffs and their lawyers have a retainer agreement stipulating the law firm, Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder, will get one-third of any compensatory damages recovered from Jones and Free Speech Systems. The firm says its legal costs in the case have been nearly $1.7 million so far.

    Jones has said on his Infowars show that it doesn’t matter how large the damages awards are, because he doesn’t have $2 million to his name and he wouldn’t be able to pay the full amounts.

    That contradicted testimony at a similar trial in Texas in August, when a jury ordered Jones to pay nearly $50 million to the parents of one of the children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting due to his lies about the massacre.

    A forensic economist testified that Jones and Free Speech Systems, Infowars’ parent company, have a combined net worth as high as $270 million, which Jones disputes. Free Speech Systems filed for bankruptcy protection in the middle of the trial in Texas, while a third trial over the hoax conspiracy is planned around the end of the year.

    Jones hawks nutritional supplements, survival gear and other products on his show. Evidence at the Connecticut trial showed his sales spiked around the time he talked about the Sandy Hook shooting — leading the plaintiffs’ lawyers to say he was profiting off the tragedy.

    In documents recently filed in Free Speech Systems’ bankruptcy case, a budget for the company for Oct. 29 to Nov. 25 estimated product sales would total $2.5 million, while operating expenses would be about $740,000. Jones’ salary was listed at $20,000 every two weeks.

    Jones has vowed to appeal all the verdicts against him related to Sandy Hook.

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  • Musk emerging as Twitter’s chief moderator ahead of midterms

    Musk emerging as Twitter’s chief moderator ahead of midterms

    NEW YORK — Days after taking over Twitter and a week before the U.S. midterm elections, billionaire Elon Musk has positioned himself as moderator-in-chief of one of the most important social media platforms in American politics.

    Musk has said he won’t make major decisions about content or restoring banned accounts before setting up a “content moderation council” with diverse viewpoints. But his own behavior as a prolific tweeter has signaled otherwise.

    He’s engaged directly with figures on the political right who are appealing for looser restrictions, including a Republican candidate for Arizona secretary of state who credits Musk with enabling him to begin tweeting again after his account was briefly suspended Monday.

    Musk even changed his profile to “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator” — with a photo of himself when he was a toddler holding a telephone. But it is almost impossible for those outside of Twitter to know what strings he is pulling or whose accounts have been suspended: The company has stopped responding to media questions, except for the few that Musk answers by tweet.

    Musk’s promised interventions started last week on his first full day as Twitter’s owner. A conservative political podcaster shared examples of the platform allegedly favoring liberals and secretively downgrading conservative voices — a common criticism that Twitter’s previous leaders dismissed as inaccurate. “I will be digging in more today,” Musk responded.

    It continued when the daughter of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, whose provocative critiques of “politically correct” culture and feminism are popular with some right-wing activists, appealed for Musk to restore her father’s account after a tweet about transgender actor Elliot Page that apparently ran afoul of Twitter’s rules on hateful conduct.

    “Anyone suspended for minor & dubious reasons will be freed from Twitter jail,” Musk pledged. He had months earlier said in reference to Peterson that Twitter was “going way too far in squashing dissenting opinions.”

    One of Musk’s first big moves was an open letter to advertisers — Twitter’s chief revenue source — promising that he would not let Twitter descend into a “free-for-all hellscape” as he follows through with his plans to promote free speech on the platform. And he’s suggesting asking users to pay $8 for a coveted verified blue check mark as a way to diversify revenue.

    The check mark has been criticized as a symbol of elitism on the platform. But its primary purpose has been to verify that accounts in the public eye — such as politicians, brands and journalists — are who they say they are. It’s been a tool to prevent impersonation and help stem the flow of misinformation.

    But some still have their worries about Musk opening the platform to a flood of online toxicity that’s bad for their brands. General Motors has said it will suspend advertising on Twitter as it monitors the platform under Musk, and others are facing pressure to review their own plans. On Tuesday, more than three dozen advocacy organizations sent an open letter to Twitter’s top 20 advertisers, calling on them to commit to halting advertising on the platform if Twitter under Musk undermines “brand safety” and guts content moderation.

    Over the weekend, the billionaire posted — then deleted — an article that contained baseless rumors about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. And much of his commentary in recent days has been a response to appeals from conservative voices.

    In a text exchange with The Associated Press, Mark Finchem, the Republican running to become Arizona’s secretary of state, said his access to the platform was restored quickly after reaching out to Musk via his personal Twitter handle. Asked why his account was suspended, Finchem said: “Perhaps you should reach out to Elon Musk. We were banned for an unknown reason, we reached out to him and 45 minutes later we were reinstated.”

    Finchem, who questions the results of the 2020 presidential election and was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has drawn national attention for his statements about election security and his ability to change election rules if he wins the state’s top election post next week.

    Musk tweeted Monday evening that he was “Looking into it” in response to a complaint about Finchem’s apparent suspension. The complaint came from attorney Jenna Ellis, who was a legal adviser to former President Donald Trump’s campaign. About 40 minutes later, Finchem posted a “test” tweet on his account, which was followed by a lengthier post thanking Musk for restoring his ability to use the site.

    “Thank you @elonmusk for stopping the commie who suspended me from Twitter a week before the election,” Finchem wrote in the Tweet. “Twitter is much better with you at the helm.”

    Jared Holt, a senior research manager at The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said big social media companies have typically operated on the whims of their owners. But “that problem is especially glaring when somebody like Elon Musk takes the reins and kind of establishes himself as king of the platform, rather than an owner trying to run a coherent business,” Holt said.

    At the same time, Musk has sent mixed signals about his intentions. Despite overt examples of appealing to conservative calls and complaints about Twitter’s policies, there’s also plenty of evidence that the platform’s policies on combating misinformation are still in effect. Separately, Musk has defended Twitter’s ongoing head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, after some conservative users called for his firing over past comments expressing liberal views.

    Roth remained on the job this week after other top executives were fired or resigned. And apart from Musk, he appeared to be the chief public voice of Twitter’s content moderation, explaining that the company spent the weekend working to remove a “surge in hateful conduct” following Musk’s takeover.

    “We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel,” Musk tweeted in response to a complaint from another conservative commentator. “My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs.”

    Some longtime Twitter observers have expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of Musk’s planned content moderation council. In part, that’s because Twitter already has a trust and safety advisory council to address moderation questions.

    “Truly I can’t imagine how it would differ,” said Danielle Citron, a University of Virginia law professor who sits on the council and has been working with Twitter since 2009 to tackle online harms, such as threats and stalking. “Our council has the full spectrum of views on free speech.”

    Citron said she’s still waiting to hear if the council will be having its next meeting, scheduled for the day after the midterms.

    ——-

    O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.. AP Writer Bob Christie in Phoenix contributed to this report.

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  • Musk emerging as Twitter’s chief moderator ahead of midterms

    Musk emerging as Twitter’s chief moderator ahead of midterms

    AP Business Writers — Days after taking over Twitter and a week before the U.S. midterm elections, billionaire Elon Musk has positioned himself as moderator-in-chief of one of the most important social media platforms in American politics.

    Musk has said he won’t make major decisions about content or restoring banned accounts before setting up a “content moderation council” with diverse viewpoints. But his own behavior as a prolific tweeter has signaled otherwise.

    He’s engaged directly with figures on the political right who are appealing for looser restrictions, including a Republican candidate for Arizona secretary of state who credits Musk with enabling him to begin tweeting again after his account was briefly suspended Monday.

    Musk even changed his profile to “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator” — with a photo of himself when he was a toddler holding a telephone. But it is almost impossible for those outside of Twitter to know what strings he is pulling or whose accounts have been suspended: The company has stopped responding to media questions, except for the few that Musk answers by tweet.

    Musk’s promised interventions started last week on his first full day as Twitter’s owner. A conservative political podcaster shared examples of the platform allegedly favoring liberals and secretively downgrading conservative voices — a common criticism that Twitter’s previous leaders dismissed as inaccurate. “I will be digging in more today,” Musk responded.

    It continued when the daughter of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, whose provocative critiques of “politically correct” culture and feminism are popular with some right-wing activists, appealed for Musk to restore her father’s account after a tweet about transgender actor Elliot Page that apparently ran afoul of Twitter’s rules on hateful conduct.

    “Anyone suspended for minor & dubious reasons will be freed from Twitter jail,” Musk pledged. He had months earlier said in reference to Peterson that Twitter was “going way too far in squashing dissenting opinions.”

    One of Musk’s first big moves was an open letter to advertisers — Twitter’s chief revenue source — promising that he would not let Twitter descend into a “free-for-all hellscape” as he follows through with his plans to promote free speech on the platform. And he’s suggesting asking users to pay $8 for a coveted verified blue check mark as a way to diversify revenue.

    The check mark has been criticized as a symbol of elitism on the platform. But its primary purpose has been to verify that accounts in the public eye — such as politicians, brands and journalists — are who they say they are. It’s been a tool to prevent impersonation and help stem the flow of misinformation.

    But some still have their worries about Musk opening the platform to a flood of online toxicity that’s bad for their brands. General Motors has said it will suspend advertising on Twitter as it monitors the platform under Musk, and others are facing pressure to review their own plans. On Tuesday, more than three dozen advocacy organizations sent an open letter to Twitter’s top 20 advertisers, calling on them to commit to halting advertising on the platform if Twitter under Musk undermines “brand safety” and guts content moderation.

    Over the weekend, the billionaire posted — then deleted — an article that contained baseless rumors about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. And much of his commentary in recent days has been a response to appeals from conservative voices.

    In a text exchange with The Associated Press, Mark Finchem, the Republican running to become Arizona’s secretary of state, said his access to the platform was restored quickly after reaching out to Musk via his personal Twitter handle. Asked why his account was suspended, Finchem said: “Perhaps you should reach out to Elon Musk. We were banned for an unknown reason, we reached out to him and 45 minutes later we were reinstated.”

    Finchem, who questions the results of the 2020 presidential election and was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has drawn national attention for his statements about election security and his ability to change election rules if he wins the state’s top election post next week.

    Musk tweeted Monday evening that he was “Looking into it” in response to a complaint about Finchem’s apparent suspension. The complaint came from attorney Jenna Ellis, who was a legal adviser to former President Donald Trump’s campaign. About 40 minutes later, Finchem posted a “test” tweet on his account, which was followed by a lengthier post thanking Musk for restoring his ability to use the site.

    “Thank you @elonmusk for stopping the commie who suspended me from Twitter a week before the election,” Finchem wrote in the Tweet. “Twitter is much better with you at the helm.”

    Jared Holt, a senior research manager at The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said big social media companies have typically operated on the whims of their owners. But “that problem is especially glaring when somebody like Elon Musk takes the reins and kind of establishes himself as king of the platform, rather than an owner trying to run a coherent business,” Holt said.

    At the same time, Musk has sent mixed signals about his intentions. Despite overt examples of appealing to conservative calls and complaints about Twitter’s policies, there’s also plenty of evidence that the platform’s policies on combating misinformation are still in effect. Separately, Musk has defended Twitter’s ongoing head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, after some conservative users called for his firing over past comments expressing liberal views.

    Roth remained on the job this week after other top executives were fired or resigned. And apart from Musk, he appeared to be the chief public voice of Twitter’s content moderation, explaining that the company spent the weekend working to remove a “surge in hateful conduct” following Musk’s takeover.

    “We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel,” Musk tweeted in response to a complaint from another conservative commentator. “My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs.”

    Some longtime Twitter observers have expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of Musk’s planned content moderation council. In part, that’s because Twitter already has a trust and safety advisory council to address moderation questions.

    “Truly I can’t imagine how it would differ,” said Danielle Citron, a University of Virginia law professor who sits on the council and has been working with Twitter since 2009 to tackle online harms, such as threats and stalking. “Our council has the full spectrum of views on free speech.”

    Citron said she’s still waiting to hear if the council will be having its next meeting, scheduled for the day after the midterms.

    ——-

    O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.. AP Writer Bob Christie in Phoenix contributed to this report.

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  • Musk takes over Twitter and faces social media crash course

    Musk takes over Twitter and faces social media crash course

    Twitter’s newly minted owner, the self-described “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk, is about to get a crash course on global content moderation.

    Among his first moves after completing his $44 billion takeover Thursday was to fire the social media platform’s top executives, including the woman in charge of trust and safety at the platform, Vijaya Gadde.

    He also posted a conciliatory note to wary advertisers, assuring them he won’t allow Twitter to devolve into a “free-for-all hellscape.”

    The problem is, not even the world’s richest man can have it both ways.

    Lightly moderated “free speech” sites such as Gab and Parler serve as cautionary tales of what can happen when the guardrails are lowered. These small, niche sites are popular with conservatives and libertarians fed up with what they see as censorship of their viewpoints on mainstream platforms like Facebook. They are also full of Nazi imagery, racist slurs and other extreme content, including calls to violence.

    Some conservative personalities jumped on Twitter Friday after Musk’s takeover to recirculate long-debunked conspiracy theories in an apparent attempt to see if the site’s policies on misinformation were still being enforced.

    Advertisers don’t want to promote their products next to disturbing, racist and hateful posts — and most people don’t want to spend time on chaotic online spaces where they are barraged by racist and sexist trolls.

    On Friday, GM announced it would be pausing advertising on Twitter while it figures out the direction of the platform under Musk. But Lou Paskalis, former head of media for Bank of America, said Twitter’s most loyal advertisers, many Fortune 100 companies, believe in the platform and probably won’t leave unless “some really untoward things” happen.

    But it’s not just ads and jokes that are at stake.

    Eddie Perez, a former Twitter civic integrity team leader, said Musk seems to consider Twitter a digital public square where everyone has equal voice. It’s a “quaint idea of the modern-day version of the town square,” Perez said.

    But that’s not how the major social media platforms work. They have instead become powerful tools of asymmetric warfare, and many of their users don’t realize they are being manipulated with disinformation by nation states and bad domestic actors — many with significant resources.

    “The danger here is that in the name of ‘free speech,’ Musk will turn back the clock and make Twitter into a more potent engine of hatred, divisiveness, and misinformation about elections, public health policy, and international affairs,” said Paul Barrett, deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.

    Though he’d been expected to reinstate banned accounts — ranging from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — Musk said on Friday that no decisions on content or reinstatements will be made until a “content moderation council” is put in place. The council, he wrote, would have “diverse viewpoints,” but he gave no further details.

    Musk may be starting from scratch, but Twitter has spent years building up its content moderation system, which is still far from perfect. As such, experts have expressed grave concern’s about Musk’s efforts — after all, the Tesla CEO has little experience navigating the temperamental and geopolitical world of social media, even if he is a constant and wildly popular user of the site he just bought.

    “I am most concerned about Musk’s decision to summarily fire Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal policy, trust, and safety — a senior executive who was trying, however imperfectly, to keep the platform from spreading even more harmful content than it does,” Barrett said.

    Many are looking to see if he will welcome back a number of influential conservative figures banned for violating Twitter’s rules — speculation that is only heightened by upcoming elections in Brazil, the U.S. and elsewhere.

    “I will be digging in more today,” Musk tweeted early Friday, in response to a conservative political podcaster who has complained that the platform favors liberals and secretively downgrades conservative voices.

    Former President Donald Trump, an avid tweeter before he was banned, said Friday he was “very happy that Twitter is now in sane hands” but promoted his own social media site, Truth Social, that he launched after being blocked from the more widely used platform.

    Trump was banned two days after the Jan. 6 attacks for a pair of tweets that the company said continued to cast doubts on the legitimacy of the presidential election and raised risks for the presidential inauguration that Trump said he would not be attending.

    Another task for Musk: delivering on his promise to clean up the fake profiles, or “spam bots” that have preoccupied him and bedeviled Twitter since long before he expressed interest in acquiring it.

    The bot count matters because advertisers — Twitter’s chief revenue source — want to know roughly how many real humans they are reaching when they buy ads. It’s also important in the effort to stop bad actors from amassing an army of accounts to amplify misinformation or harass political adversaries.

    ———

    Associated Press writers Frank Bajak, Jill Colvin and Mae Anderson contributed to this story. Follow AP’s coverage of Elon Musk: https://apnews.com/hub/elon-musk

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  • Musk now gets chance to defeat Twitter’s many fake accounts

    Musk now gets chance to defeat Twitter’s many fake accounts

    Twitter’s unending fight against spam accounts is now a problem for new owner Elon Musk, who pledged in April to defeat the bot scourge or “die trying!”

    He later cited bots as a reason to back out of buying the social platform. Now that the billionaire has completed the deal, he’s faced with the task of delivering on his promise to clean up the fake profiles that have preoccupied him and bedeviled Twitter since long before he expressed interest in acquiring it.

    The challenge carries high stakes. The bot count matters because advertisers — Twitter’s chief revenue source — want to know roughly how many real humans they are reaching when they buy ads. It’s also important in the effort to stop bad actors from amassing an army of accounts to amplify misinformation or harass political adversaries.

    “The bigger picture in my mind is: How do we make Twitter a better place for everybody,” said bot-counting expert Emilio Ferrara, who worked over the summer to investigate the problem for Musk. He cited the “value of the platform as a societal experience, as a collective place to have civilized discourse and talk freely without interference from nefarious accounts,” or scams, spam, pornography and harassment.

    To find out just how bad the bots are, Musk hired Ferrara and other data scientists to investigate. At the time, he sought to prove that Twitter was misleading the public when it said fewer than 5% of its daily active users are fake or spam accounts. If Twitter lied or withheld crucial information about the bot count, Musk could argue that he was justified in terminating the $44 billion agreement.

    Ferrara, an associate professor of computer science and communications at the University of Southern California, said he had no real interest in whether Musk ultimately ended up owning the platform.

    Instead, he hoped that “any findings would be able to help improve the platform,” Ferrara told The Associated Press, speaking for the first time about his planned role as Musk’s expert trial witness.

    The question now is what Musk will do with that information. Ferrara’s presentation — some 350 pages of analysis and supporting documents — is locked up in confidential court filings, and he said he can’t disclose his conclusions.

    Twitter’s former leaders and its lawyers said Musk wildly exaggerated the problem because he had buyer’s remorse. Precise counts are “almost impossible” because any bot estimate is based on assumptions that can lead to bias, said Filippo Menczer, a researcher who was not working for either side in the dispute.

    “Nobody knows exactly how bad the problem is,” said Menczer, director of Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media. “I would guess it’s not as bad as Musk said and not as good as Twitter claimed.”

    Many experts also doubt Musk’s ability to easily make improvements, which he’s suggested would rely on using algorithms to track and remove fake accounts and implementing new measures to “authenticate” real people.

    Earlier this month, Ferrara was preparing to travel to the East Coast to testify in Delaware, where Musk was defending against Twitter’s lawsuit asking a court to force him to close the deal. But two weeks before the scheduled Oct. 17 trial, Musk changed his mind and said he would go ahead with the $44 billion acquisition. It closed Thursday.

    Most legal experts didn’t think Musk had much of a case. The court’s head judge seemed likely to side with Twitter based on the specific terms and conditions of the April purchase agreement.

    But that’s not to say Musk didn’t have a point about the bots, according to Ferrara and other researchers hired by Musk’s legal team.

    The analysis firm CounterAction, which worked with Ferrara, said it concluded in a July 18 report submitted to the court that Twitter’s spam rate for monetizable accounts — those of value to advertisers — was at least 10% and could be as high as 14.2%, depending on how the rate is measured.

    Trevor Davis, the firm’s founder and CEO, said that analysis was based on a “firehose” of internal data that Twitter gave to Musk, but the company declined to provide additional data sought by Musk’s team.

    “We expect that access to the withheld data would reveal an even higher true spam rate,” Davis said in a prepared statement.

    Musk has long been preoccupied with Twitter spambots promoting cryptocurrency schemes, in part because as a celebrity user with more than 110 million followers, he sees a lot of them. Some scammers have opened accounts mimicking Musk’s name and likeness to try to get people to think he’s endorsing something.

    Not all bots are bad. Twitter encourages the use of automated accounts that report the weather, earthquakes or post humor or lines from literary classics. Twitter also allows for anonymity, which protects free speech and privacy — especially in authoritarian regions. But that practice can make it harder to root out malicious fake accounts.

    Ferrara first caught Twitter’s attention in the aftermath of revelations that Russia used social media to meddle in the U.S. presidential election in 2016, when he led a research group that estimated that 9% to 15% of Twitter’s active English-language accounts were bots.

    In a blog post soon after, Twitter complained that such outside research “is often inaccurate and methodologically flawed.” The company has repeatedly reported the under-5% number in its quarterly filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, though it also cautions that it could be higher.

    Before Musk’s takeover, Twitter said it removed 1 million spam accounts each day. To calculate how many accounts are malicious spam, Twitter reviews thousands of accounts sampled at random, using both public and private data such as IP addresses, phone numbers, geolocation and how the account behaves when it is active.

    But over the past months, Musk and Twitter have tussled over the methodology. Twitter uses a metric it calls mDAU, for monetizable daily active usage.

    That “is literally a metric they invented,” Ferrara said. “You cannot contrast and compare that metric with any other service.”

    When Musk first started publicly raising questions about the bot numbers after agreeing to buy the company, another firm, Israel-based Cyabra, said it had the answer.

    “That elusive number you are looking for … we have it. It’s 13.7%,” the firm tweeted on May 17, flagging Musk’s Twitter handle to get his attention.

    Cyabra’s machine-learning technology works by scanning a large number of social media profiles to track behavioral patterns, trying to pick out which are behaving like humans. Such guesswork can misfire — but the tweet caught the attention of people close to Musk, if not the billionaire himself.

    Cyabra CEO Dan Brahmy said the company started working with the Musk camp by the end of May. Regardless of what the true count is, he said it’s not going to be an easy problem to solve.

    “Some bots are definitely nefarious,” Brahmy said. “The trade-offs are between being extremely high on sign-up standards and information security versus being extremely open minded in a way” that fosters freedom of speech and creativity.

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  • Musk now gets chance to defeat Twitter’s many fake accounts

    Musk now gets chance to defeat Twitter’s many fake accounts

    Twitter’s unending fight against spam accounts is now a problem for new owner Elon Musk, who pledged in April to defeat the bot scourge or “die trying!”

    He later cited bots as a reason to back out of buying the social platform. Now that the billionaire has completed the deal, he’s faced with the task of delivering on his promise to clean up the fake profiles that have preoccupied him and bedeviled Twitter since long before he expressed interest in acquiring it.

    The challenge carries high stakes. The bot count matters because advertisers — Twitter’s chief revenue source — want to know roughly how many real humans they are reaching when they buy ads. It’s also important in the effort to stop bad actors from amassing an army of accounts to amplify misinformation or harass political adversaries.

    “The bigger picture in my mind is: How do we make Twitter a better place for everybody,” said bot-counting expert Emilio Ferrara, who worked over the summer to investigate the problem for Musk. He cited the “value of the platform as a societal experience, as a collective place to have civilized discourse and talk freely without interference from nefarious accounts,” or scams, spam, pornography and harassment.

    To find out just how bad the bots are, Musk hired Ferrara and other data scientists to investigate. At the time, he sought to prove that Twitter was misleading the public when it said fewer than 5% of its daily active users are fake or spam accounts. If Twitter lied or withheld crucial information about the bot count, Musk could argue that he was justified in terminating the $44 billion agreement.

    Ferrara, an associate professor of computer science and communications at the University of Southern California, said he had no real interest in whether Musk ultimately ended up owning the platform.

    Instead, he hoped that “any findings would be able to help improve the platform,” Ferrara told The Associated Press, speaking for the first time about his planned role as Musk’s expert trial witness.

    The question now is what Musk will do with that information. Ferrara’s presentation — some 350 pages of analysis and supporting documents — is locked up in confidential court filings, and he said he can’t disclose his conclusions.

    Twitter’s former leaders and its lawyers said Musk wildly exaggerated the problem because he had buyer’s remorse.

    Other experts doubt Musk’s ability to make improvements, which he’s suggested would rely on using algorithms to track and remove fake accounts and implementing new measures to “authenticate” real people.

    Earlier this month, Ferrara was preparing to travel to the East Coast to testify in Delaware, where Musk was defending against Twitter’s lawsuit asking a court to force him to close the deal. But two weeks before the scheduled Oct. 17 trial, Musk changed his mind and said he would go ahead with the $44 billion acquisition. It closed Thursday.

    Most legal experts didn’t think Musk had much of a case. The court’s head judge seemed likely to side with Twitter based on the specific terms and conditions of the April purchase agreement.

    But that’s not to say Musk didn’t have a point about the bots, according to Ferrara and other researchers hired by Musk’s legal team.

    The analysis firm CounterAction, which worked with Ferrara, said it concluded in a July 18 report submitted to the court that Twitter’s spam rate for monetizable accounts — those of value to advertisers — was at least 10% and could be as high as 14.2%, depending on how the rate is measured.

    Trevor Davis, the firm’s founder and CEO, said that analysis was based on a “firehose” of internal data that Twitter gave to Musk, but the company declined to provide additional data sought by Musk’s team.

    “We expect that access to the withheld data would reveal an even higher true spam rate,” Davis said in a prepared statement.

    Musk has long been preoccupied with Twitter spambots promoting cryptocurrency schemes, in part because as a celebrity user with more than 110 million followers, he sees a lot of them. Some scammers have opened accounts mimicking Musk’s name and likeness to try to get people to think he’s endorsing something.

    Not all bots are bad. Twitter encourages the use of automated accounts that report the weather, earthquakes or post humor or lines from literary classics. Twitter also allows for anonymity, which protects free speech and privacy — especially in authoritarian regions. But that practice can make it harder to root out malicious fake accounts.

    Ferrara first caught Twitter’s attention in the aftermath of revelations that Russia used social media to meddle in the U.S. presidential election in 2016, when he led a research group that estimated that 9% to 15% of Twitter’s active English-language accounts were bots.

    In a blog post soon after, Twitter complained that such outside research “is often inaccurate and methodologically flawed.” The company has repeatedly reported the under-5% number in its quarterly filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, though it also cautions that it could be higher.

    Before Musk’s takeover, Twitter said it removed 1 million spam accounts each day. To calculate how many accounts are malicious spam, Twitter reviews thousands of accounts sampled at random, using both public and private data such as IP addresses, phone numbers, geolocation and how the account behaves when it is active.

    But over the past months, Musk and Twitter have tussled over the methodology. Twitter uses a metric it calls mDAU, for monetizable daily active usage.

    That “is literally a metric they invented,” Ferrara said. “You cannot contrast and compare that metric with any other service.”

    When Musk first started publicly raising questions about the bot numbers after agreeing to buy the company, another firm, Israel-based Cyabra, said it had the answer.

    “That elusive number you are looking for … we have it. It’s 13.7%,” the firm tweeted on May 17, flagging Musk’s Twitter handle to get his attention.

    Cyabra’s machine-learning technology works by scanning a large number of social media profiles to track behavioral patterns, trying to pick out which are behaving like humans. Such guesswork can misfire — but the tweet caught the attention of people close to Musk, if not the billionaire himself.

    Cyabra CEO Dan Brahmy said the company started working with the Musk camp by the end of May. Regardless of what the true count is, he said it’s not going to be an easy problem to solve.

    “Some bots are definitely nefarious,” Brahmy said. “The trade-offs are between being extremely high on sign-up standards and information security versus being extremely open minded in a way” that fosters freedom of speech and creativity.

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  • Musk took over Twitter. Then some users began testing chaos

    Musk took over Twitter. Then some users began testing chaos

    NEW YORK — Confusion, concern, conspiracies, celebration.

    In the hours after Elon Musk took control of Twitter, reaction on the platform ranged from triumph to despair.

    While no immediate policy changes had been announced by Friday afternoon, that didn’t stop users from cheering — or criticizing — what they expected to be a quick embrace of Musk’s pledges to cut back on moderation in what he has said is an effort to promote free speech.

    Conservative personalities on the site began recirculating long-debunked conspiracy theories, including about COVID-19 and the 2020 election, in a tongue-in-cheek attempt to “test” whether Twitter’s policies on misinformation were still being enforced.

    Popular right-wing pundits tweeted buzzwords such as “ivermectin,” and “Trump won” to see whether they’d be penalized for content they suggested would previously have been flagged. Ivermectin, a cheap drug that kills parasites in humans and animals, has been promoted by some Republican lawmakers and conservative talk show hosts as an effective way to treat COVID-19. But health experts have been pushing back, warning there’s scant evidence to support the belief that it works.

    “Ok, @elonmusk, is this thing on..?” Steve Cortes, a former commentator for the conservative TV network Newsmax and adviser to former President Donald Trump wrote in a tweet, where he included a microphone emoji. “THERE ARE TWO SEXES TRUMP WON IVERMECTIN ROCKS.”

    In a letter aimed to soothe the fears of advertisers, Musk vowed Thursday that Twitter won’t be a “free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences.”

    But the jury is still out on what will become of the social media platform — and what it will tolerate. Observers are eyeing who stays, who goes and who might potentially come back from the list of people the platform has banned over the years. They range from Trump, to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke — none of whom have returned to the platform so far.

    The Associated Press checked at least a dozen other Twitter accounts that were suspended by the platform — including those used by right-wing activist James O’Keefe and MyPillow Chief Executive Mike Lindell — and each turned up an “account suspended” message as of Friday afternoon.

    At least one still found a way to get his message out.

    “I am very happy that Twitter is now in sane hands, and will no longer be run by Radical Left Lunatics and Maniacs that truly hate our country,” Trump said Friday morning in a post on his social media platform Truth Social, leaving no indication of whether he’d return to the platform or not even though Musk has said he would allow it.

    “I LOVE TRUTH!,” he said, adding Twitter will be “better” if it works to get rid of bots and fake accounts “that have hurt it so badly.”

    In a Tweet posted on Friday afternoon, Musk said Twitter will be forming a “content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints,” and “no major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.”

    Earlier in the day, news outlets reported Kanye West, the rapper legally known as Ye, appeared to be back on Twitter after being locked out of his account earlier this month over his antisemitic posts on the social media platform.

    But there was no evidence to suggest the status of his account had changed or that Musk played a role, and there was no sign of recent activity. Twitter did not immediately reply to a request for comment on whether Ye was back on the platform. The rapper and fashion designer had also been suspended from Instagram, where his account there was recently reinstated.

    Meanwhile, dozens of extremist profiles — some newly created — circulated racial slurs and Nazi imagery while expressing gratitude to Musk for his new leadership. One such post shared a breaking news update about Musk taking over the company, tweeting a racial slur and the message, “thank you Elon.” Another anonymous account tweeted, “Elon now controls Twitter, unleash the racial slurs,” along with several derogatory comments.

    “His acquisition of Twitter has opened Pandora’s box,” the advocacy group Ultraviolet said in a prepared statement on Friday, while also urging Musk, Twitter executives and the company’s board of directors to continue to enforce the ban on Trump “as well as violent right-wing extremists and white supremacists.”

    Some users reacted to the news by threatening to quit, and others made fun of them for doing so. The terms “Elon,” and “deleting,” appeared in Twitter’s top trends Friday as users discussed the fallout. Speculation also permeated the platform. Some worried the number of their Twitter followers was plunging, theorizing that Twitter may be cleaning up bots. Other users posted unverified reports that their “like” counts were dwindling.

    “Elon Musk bought a platform, he didn’t buy people,” said Jennifer Grygiel, a social media expert and professor at Syracuse University. “And we still have a choice in how we get our news, our information and how we communicate.”

    Grygiel said there will be a flight to quality if Twitter descends into further chaos under Musk, and maybe that isn’t a bad thing as the platform has increasingly come to serve corporate and state media interests.

    And as always, users were quick to crack jokes — aiming to cut through the disorder in more comical ways.

    “In honor of Elon now owning this site, I’d like to start utter chaos,” CNN commentator Bakari Sellers wrote in a Tweet on Friday morning. “Which is better Popeyes or Bojangles and why?”

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  • Elon Musk takes over Twitter but where will he go from here?

    Elon Musk takes over Twitter but where will he go from here?

    Elon Musk has taken control of Twitter after a protracted legal battle and months of uncertainty. The question now is what the billionaire Tesla CEO will actually do with the social media platform.

    The $44 billion takeover means Twitter is becoming a private company that everyday investors will no longer be able to buy shares in. The New York Stock Exchange suspended trading in the company’s stock on Friday, and the shares will be delisted on Nov. 8, according to a filing with securities regulators.

    Major personnel shakeups are widely expected — and Musk ousted three top Twitter executives on Thursday, according to two people familiar with the deal. But the tech guru and self-proclaimed “Chief Twit” has otherwise made contradictory statements about his vision for the company — and shared few concrete plans for how he will run it.

    That has left Twitter’s users, advertisers and employees to parse his every move in an effort to guess where he might take the company. Many are looking to see if he will welcome back a number of influential conservative figures banned for violating Twitter’s rules — speculation that is only heightened by upcoming elections in Brazil, the U.S. and elsewhere.

    “I will be digging in more today,” he tweeted early Friday, in response to a conservative political podcaster who has complained that the platform favors liberals and secretively downgrades conservative voices.

    Former President Donald Trump, an avid tweeter before he was banned, said Friday he was “very happy that Twitter is now in sane hands” but promoted his own social media site, Truth Social, that he launched after being blocked from the more widely used platform.

    Trump was banned two days after the Jan. 6 attacks for a pair of tweets that the company said continued to cast doubts on the legitimacy of the presidential election and raised risks for the presidential inauguration that Trump said he would not be attending.

    Trump has repeatedly said that he will not return to Twitter even if his account is reinstated, though some allies wonder if he’ll be able to resist as he moves closer to announcing another expected presidential campaign. His Twitter account remained suspended Friday.

    Meanwhile, conservative personalities on the site began recirculating long-debunked conspiracy theories, including about COVID-19 and the 2020 election, in a tongue-in-cheek attempt to “test” whether Twitter’s policies on misinformation were still being enforced.

    The mercurial Musk has not made it easy to anticipate him.

    He has criticized Twitter’s dependence on advertisers, but made a statement Thursday that seemed aimed at soothing their fears. He has complained about restrictions on speech on the platform — but then vowed he wouldn’t let it become a “hellscape.” And for months it wasn’t even clear if he wanted to control the company at all.

    After Musk signed a deal to acquire Twitter in April, he tried to back out of it, leading the company to sue him to force him to go through with the acquisition. A Delaware judge had ordered that the deal be finalized by Friday.

    Wedbush analyst Dan Ives estimated that Musk and his investors overpaid. Even Musk has said the $44 billion price tag for Twitter was too high but that the company had great potential.

    The payment “will go down as one of the most overpaid tech acquisitions in the history of M&A deals on the Street, in our opinion,” Ives wrote in a note to investors. “With fair value that we would peg at roughly $25 billion, Musk buying Twitter remains a major head scratcher that ultimately he could not get out of once the Delaware Courts got involved.”

    After months of uncertainty, a series of moves by Musk this week signaled that the deal would in fact go through.

    On Wednesday, he strolled into the company’s San Francisco headquarters carrying a porcelain sink and tweeted “Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!” Then on Thursday, he tweeted, “the bird is freed,” a reference to Twitter’s logo.

    That same day, the people familiar with the deal said Musk had fired CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and Chief Legal Counsel Vijaya Gadde. Both people insisted on anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the deal. Segal confirmed his departure in a series of tweets Friday.

    At the same time, Musk sought to assuage advertisers — Twitter’s chief source of revenue — that he didn’t want the platform to become a “free-for-all hellscape.” His letter was an attempt to address concerns that his plans to promote free speech by cutting back on moderating content will open the floodgates to more online toxicity and drive away users.

    Musk has previously expressed distaste for advertising and Twitter’s dependence on it, suggesting more emphasis on other business models such as paid subscriptions that won’t allow big corporations to dictate policy on how social media operates. But on Thursday, he assured advertisers he wants Twitter to be “the most respected advertising platform in the world.”

    As concerns rise about the direction of Twitter’s content moderation, European Union Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton tweeted to Musk on Friday that “In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules.”

    Breton and Musk met in May and appeared in a video together in which Musk said he agreed with the 27-nation bloc’s strict new online regulations. Its Digital Services Act threatens big tech companies with billions in fines if they don’t police their platforms more strictly for illegal or harmful content such as hate speech and disinformation.

    Musk has also spent months deriding Twitter’s “spam bots” and making sometimes conflicting pronouncements about Twitter’s problems and how to fix them.

    Thursday’s note to advertisers shows a newfound emphasis on advertising revenue, especially a need for Twitter to provide more “relevant ads” — which typically means targeted ads that rely on collecting and analyzing users’ personal information.

    Musk is expected to speak to Twitter employees directly Friday, according to an internal memo cited in several media outlets, amid internal confusion and low morale tied to fears of layoffs or a dismantling of the company’s culture and operations.

    ———

    This story has been updated to correct the language in the tweet by Musk to “the bird is freed,” not “the bird has been freed.”

    ———

    Associated Press writer Jill Colvin contributed to this story from New York. Follow AP’s coverage of Elon Musk: https://apnews.com/hub/elon-musk

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  • Timeline of billionaire Elon Musk’s bid to control Twitter

    Timeline of billionaire Elon Musk’s bid to control Twitter

    On Oct. 4, Elon Musk reversed himself and offered to honor his original proposal to buy Twitter for $44 billion — a deal he had spent the previous several months trying to wriggle out of. He made the latest offer just two weeks before a Twitter lawsuit aimed at forcing Musk to go through with the deal was scheduled to go to trial in Delaware Chancery Court. After receiving Musk’s offer, Twitter said it intends to close the transaction.

    The two parties now have to close the deal Friday. If they don’t, the Delaware Chancery Court judge overseeing the case plans to reschedule the trial in November.

    If the case has your head spinning, here’s a quick guide to the major events in the saga featuring the billionaire Tesla CEO and the social platform.

    January 31: Musk starts buying shares of Twitter in near-daily installments, amassing a 5% stake in the company by mid-March.

    March 26: Musk, who has tens of millions of Twitter followers and is active on the site, says he is giving “serious thought” to building an alternative to Twitter, questioning the platform’s commitment to “free speech” and whether Twitter is undermining democracy. He also privately reaches out to Twitter board members including his friend and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

    March 27: After privately informing Twitter of his growing stake in the company, Musk starts conversations with its CEO and board members about potentially joining the board. Musk also mentions taking Twitter private or starting a competitor, according to later regulatory filings.

    April 4: A regulatory filing reveals that Musk has rapidly become the largest shareholder of Twitter after acquiring a 9% stake, or 73.5 million shares, worth about $3 billion.

    April 5: Musk is offered a seat on Twitter’s board on the condition he amass no more than 14.9% of the company’s stock. CEO Parag Agrawal said in a tweet that “it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our Board.”

    April 9: After exchanging pleasantries and bonding by text message over their love of engineering, a short-lived relationship between Agrawal and Musk sours after Musk publicly tweets “Is Twitter dying?” and gets a message from Agrawal calling the criticism unhelpful. Musk tersely responds: “This is a waste of time. Will make an offer to take Twitter private.”

    April 11: Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announces Musk will not be joining the board after all.

    April 14: Twitter reveals in a securities filing that Musk has offered to buy the company outright for about $44 billion.

    April 15: Twitter’s board unanimously adopts a “poison pill” defense in response to Musk’s proposed offer, attempting to thwart a hostile takeover.

    April 21: Musk lines up $46.5 billion in financing to buy Twitter. Twitter board is under pressure to negotiate.

    April 25: Musk reaches a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion and take the company private. The outspoken billionaire has said he wanted to own and privatize Twitter because he thinks it’s not living up to its potential as a platform for free speech.

    April 29: Musk sells roughly $8.5 billion worth of shares in Tesla to help fund the purchase of Twitter, according to regulatory filings.

    May 5: Musk strengthens his offer to buy Twitter with commitments of more than $7 billion from a diverse group of investors including Silicon Valley heavy hitters like Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.

    May 10: In a hint at how he would change Twitter, Musk says he’d reverse Twitter’s ban of former President Donald Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, calling the ban a “morally bad decision” and “foolish in the extreme.”

    May 13: Musk declares his plan to buy Twitter “temporarily on hold.” Musk says he needs to pinpoint the number of spam and fake accounts on the social media platform. Shares of Twitter tumble, while those of Tesla rebound sharply.

    June 6: Musk threatens to end his $44 billion agreement to buy Twitter, accusing the company of refusing to give him information he requested about its spam bot accounts.

    July 8: Musk says he will abandon his offer to buy Twitter after the company failed to provide enough information about the number of fake accounts.

    July 12: Twitter sues Musk to force him to complete the deal. Musk soon countersues.

    July 19: A Delaware judge says the Musk-Twitter legal dispute will go to trial in October.

    August 23: A former head of security at Twitter alleges the company misled regulators about its poor cybersecurity defenses and its negligence in attempting to root out fake accounts that spread misinformation. Musk eventually cites the whistleblower as a new reason to scuttle his Twitter deal.

    October 5: Musk offers to go through with his original proposal to buy Twitter for $44 billion. Twitter says it intends to close the transaction after receiving Musk’s offer.

    October 6: Delaware judge delays Oct. 17 trial until November and gives both sides until Oct. 28 to reach agreement to close the deal.

    October 20: The Washington Post reports that Musk told prospective Twitter investors that he plans to lay off 75% of the company’s 7,500 employees.

    Wednesday, October 26: Musk posts a video of himself entering Twitter headquarters carrying a kitchen sink, indicating that the deal is set to go through.

    Thursday, October 27: In a message to advertisers, Musk says Twitter won’t become a “free-for-all hellscape.”

    Thursday, October 27: Musk ousts CEO Parag Agrawal along with other top executives and takes control of Twitter, according two people familiar with the deal.

    Thursday, October 27: Musk tweets “the bird is freed”

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  • Judge sides with California baker over same-sex wedding cake

    Judge sides with California baker over same-sex wedding cake

    BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — A California judge has ruled in favor of a bakery owner who refused to make wedding cakes for a same-sex couple because it violated her Christian beliefs.

    The state Department of Fair Housing and Employment had sued Tastries Bakery in Bakersfield, arguing owner Cathy Miller intentionally discriminated against the couple in violation of California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act.

    Miller’s attorneys argued her right to free speech and free expression of religion trumped the argument that she violated the anti-discrimination law. Kern County Superior Court Judge Eric Bradshaw ruled Friday that Miller acted lawfully while upholding her beliefs about what the Bible teaches regarding marriage.

    The decision was welcomed as a First Amendment victory by Miller and her pro-bono attorneys with the conservative Thomas More Society.

    “I’m hoping that in our community we can grow together,” Miller told the Bakersfield Californian after the ruling. “And we should understand that we shouldn’t push any agenda against anyone else.”

    A spokesperson said the fair housing department was aware of the ruling but had not determined what to do next. The couple, Eileen and Mireya Rodriguez-Del Rio, said they expect an appeal.

    “Of course we’re disappointed, but not surprised,” Eileen told the newspaper. “We anticipate that our appeal will have a different result.”

    An earlier decision in Kern County Superior Court also went Miller’s way, but it was later vacated by the 5th District Court of Appeal, which sent the lawsuit back to the county.

    The decision comes as a Colorado baker is challenging a ruling he violated that state’s anti-discrimination law by refusing to make a cake celebrating a gender transition. That baker, Jack Phillips, separately won a partial U.S. Supreme Court victory after refusing on religious grounds to make a gay couple’s wedding cake a decade ago.

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  • Saudis Sentence U.S. Citizen To 16 Years Over Tweets: Family

    Saudis Sentence U.S. Citizen To 16 Years Over Tweets: Family

    DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — An American citizen has been arrested in Saudi Arabia, tortured and sentenced to 16 years in prison over tweets he sent while in the United States, his son said Tuesday.

    Saad Ibrahim Almadi, a 72-year-old retired project manager living in Florida, was arrested last November while visiting family in the kingdom and was sentenced earlier this month, his son Ibrahim told The Associated Press, confirming details that were first reported by the Washington Post. Almadi is a citizen of both Saudi Arabia and the U.S.

    There was no immediate comment from Saudi officials.

    State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel, speaking to reporters in Washington, confirmed Almadi’s detention Tuesday.

    “We have consistently and intensively raised our concerns regarding the case at senior levels of the Saudi government, both through channels in Riyadh and Washington DC as well and we will continue to do so,” he said. “We have raised this with members of the Saudi government as recently as yesterday.”

    It appeared to be the latest in a series of recent cases in which Saudis received long jail sentences for social media posts critical of the government.

    Saudi authorities have tightened their crackdown on dissent following the rise of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is seeking to open up and transform the ultraconservative kingdom but has adopted a hard line toward any criticism.

    JEDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA – SEPTEMBER 27: The new Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman meets with King of Saudi Arabia Salman bin Abdulaziz (not seen) after the change in the cabinet with the Royal Decree of Saudi Arabia in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on September 27, 2022. The new cabinet, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman became Chairman of the Council of Ministers and Khalid bin Salman became the Minister of Defense. (Photo by Royal Court of Saudi Arabia / Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

    Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

    A Saudi court recently sentenced a woman to 45 years in prison for allegedly damaging the country through her social media activity. A Saudi doctoral student at Leeds University in England was sentenced to 34 years for spreading “rumors” and retweeting dissidents, a case that drew international outrage.

    Ibrahim says his father was detained over 14 “mild tweets” posted on Twitter over the past seven years, mostly criticizing government policies and alleged corruption. He says his father was not an activist but a private citizen expressing his opinion while in the U.S., where freedom of speech is a constitutional right.

    President Joe Biden traveled to the oil-rich kingdom in July for a meeting with Prince Mohammed, in which he said he confronted him about human rights. Their meeting — and a widely criticized fist-bump — marked a sharp turnaround from Biden’s earlier vow to make the kingdom a “pariah” over the 2018 killing of Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

    Ibrahim said his father was sentenced to 16 years in prison on Oct. 3 on charges of supporting terrorism. The father was also charged with failing to report terrorism, over tweets that Ibrahim had posted.

    His father was also slapped with a 16-year travel ban. If the sentence is carried out, the 72-year-old would be 87 upon his release and barred from returning home to the U.S. unless he reaches the age of 104.

    Ibrahim said Saudi authorities warned his family to stay quiet about the case and to not involve the U.S. government. He said his father was tortured after the family contacted the State Department in March.

    Ibrahim also accused the State Department of neglecting his father’s case by not declaring him a “wrongfully detained” American, which would elevate his file.

    “They manipulated me. They told me to stay quiet so they can get him out,” Ibrahim said, explaining his decision to go public this week. “I am not willing to take a gamble on the Department of State anymore.”

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