![]() “How can we ensure the people from at-risk regions who have to be under pseudonyms to enjoy the freedom to express the truth while authenticating they’re real humans without blowing their cover?,” she wrote in a tweet. The engineer Jane Manchun Wong pointed out the risks of authentication for people in countries with more oppressive governments. Everybody being authenticated may not actually inspire discourse.” “You can look at some common theories like the ‘spiral of silence’. “Minorities on the platform can face a ton of harassment, so maybe you don’t want to have your real name out there,” they say. Grygiel, at Syracuse, says that the removal of anonymity could put people in marginalized groups, including racial minorities and those in the LGBT+ community, at risk. I’ve made it this far without ever associating my government name with my extracurricular activities,” wrote one user in response to Musk. “I would rather have spam bots than have to “authenticate” my human identity. But this idea has raised the ire of many Twitter users who like the app precisely for its pseudonymity. Read More: Elon Musk-2021 Person of the YearĪt the moment, Musk seems to believe that the best solution to the bots problem is to authenticate “all real humans,” or to have accounts overtly linked to other personal identifiers, whether it be a phone number, an email address or a photo. One 21-year-old, for instance, repeatedly impersonated Trump family members on Twitter for a year, even tricking the President. Meanwhile, it’s much harder to sniff out manual fakes, in which real people create fake accounts to spread disinformation or defraud people. But botmakers are getting more slippery and sophisticated, allowing many to pass through Twitter’s censors undetected. Twitter already has a rigorous process for weeding out fake accounts: the company uses software during the registration process to detect patterns of automation. Bots, which often promote crypto-based scams these days, flood users’ feeds in an attempt to lure unsuspecting victims. ![]() Musk called spam bots the “ single most annoying problem” on Twitter. In order to service his debt, he will likely need to not just preserve Twitter’s ad revenue, but grow it. At a TED conference this month, he said that his interest in Twitter “is not a way to make money.” But he will need for the platform to continue to earn revenue, because he paid for more than half of it in financing from Morgan Stanley and other institutions. Musk has expressed support for a subscription model, but wants it to be cheaper than it currently is now. In November, the company rolled out its first consumer subscription package, Twitter Blue, which costs $3 a month for access to “premium features.” But Chief Executive Parag Agrawal said in February that Blue is “not critical” to meeting its revenue projections, according to the Wall Street Journal. In Q4 2021, the company reported advertising revenue of $1.41 billion out of $1.57 billion in total revenue during that quarter. Twitter is almost wholly reliant on ads to stay afloat financially. “There’s a lot of political maneuvering that will have to take place.” Removing ads “Zuckerberg and Musk are still subject to operating at the country level and have to, in some ways, appease governments around the world,” says Jennifer Grygiel, an associate professor at Syracuse University who specializes in social media. Musk will also have to contend with the wishes of national governments, who all have their own definition of what kind of speech is and isn’t acceptable. While Musk has said that hate speech would be banned, he has yet to parse out the gray areas, and it seems possible that more lenient policies for content moderation could lead to more of the toxic behavior that Twitter has been trying to stamp out for years.Īnd fewer guardrails around speech could be bad for Twitter’s bottom line: advertisers might be less likely to pay money for posts that might sit next to racism, bigotry or sexism. Read More: What Elon Musk’s Purchase of Twitter Could Mean for Donald Trump’s Accountīut misinformation, propaganda and extremist views are still omnipresent on the site, especially surrounding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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