This Week in Misinformation: Uncle Elon Liberates Twitter's Huddled Masses, Uncle Sam Glowers at Russian Disinfo, Anons Bake for TRUTH
28 April 2022
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We did a fun thing this week, hosting expert fact-checkers in an audio chat on Twitter to talk about a range of issues in the business of debunking! Check it out.
Now, on to our top stories.
Twitter is going to belong to Elon Musk, who plans to take the platform private and make any number of changes to its content moderation and functionality.
The Twitter board of directors accepted the offer Musk made last week (Wall Street Journal, 45.35) to buy the company for nearly $44 billion and will recommend the deal to its shareholders.
Some analysts see signs that Musk might not be serious, though, and there are other reasons the deal could fall apart, too (Washington Post, 42.87).
But users who don’t like Elon Musk believe it’s happening, as evidenced by the thousands who immediately left the platform (Fortune, 44.49) after the buyout was announced, boosting signups on alternative platforms (NBC News, 45.78).
Also believers, and enthused ones at that, are advocates of a less-fettered “public square,” which Musk has pledged to bring about.
Twitter’s new owner took to the platform to share thoughts, some in the form of cartoons, about how the company has failed to establish credibility (New York Post, 32.67) through political neutrality. And that what it should really do is upset both far left and far right “equally,” whatever that means. Oh, and he replied approvingly to a notorious Pizzagate truther who was accusing a Twitter employee of some involvement in a convoluted conspiracy theory. Great.
Musk’s philosophy is more laissez-faire than Twitter’s current management, who have evolved their thinking in the years since first building the platform. Trust and safety executives at Twitter, who learned the hard way why entirely free speech makes for terrible user experience (New York Times, 44.31) and opens the company to legal liabilities, are understandably worried that the incumbent regime will dismantle much of what they have worked on (NBC News, 45.78). And Musk’s already gone out of his way to attack the top lawyer at Twitter for her measured, calm explanations to podcast co-hosts Joe Rogan and Tim Pool about why certain moderation decisions were taken. Great again.
With this direction set, it’s really just a question of who among the permanently banned disinformationists (Media Matters, -) and serial Terms of Service violators Musk plans to replatform. Many are wondering about Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who earned their bans by advocating for the end of democracy, but let’s not forget about openly racist Nazi accounts (@nickmartin via Twitter), either! Right-wing personalities from Mark Levin to Tucker Carlson (New York Post, 32.67) are positively giddy about Musk taking over, which they see as a great victory for free speech.
The U.S. Government stood up a new disinformation “board” under the Department of Homeland Security.
The concept itself is essentially to coordinate government efforts to counter foreign--including Russian--information attacks and do more about misinformation related to human smuggling (c|net, 45.68).
Former director over that part of DHS, Chris Krebs, tweeted what he saw as the merits of standing up this initiative (via Twitter). Some elected Republicans saw something much more nefarious (Bloomberg Government, -) and launched ad hominem attacks (@NovelSci via Twitter) against Nina Jankowicz, the respected disinformation and national security expert who has been tapped to head up the effort (Newsweek, 38.36).
Related: A conservative YouTube guy compared the DHS board to something Nazis would do, and Elon Musk replied, “disheartening.”
Get your grab bag, folks: an MSNBC tried, kind of poorly, to cover conspiracy theory news in a new segment; in the Q forums, people are finding patterns in Musk's tweets about Trump's TRUTH; Russian soldiers appear to have mixed up ‘The Sims’ with SIM cards; heavy-hitters take to Scientific American to call for social platform transparency; unruly youths threw eggs at the ‘People’s Convoy’ so furiously that the truckers had to flee; the U.S. announced a multilateral declaration saying the Internet should remain open; Trump-era COVID adviser Deborah Birx is trying to rehabilitate her image by finally telling us Trump was wrong about disinfectant as a treatment; Twitter downranked posts about the Q documentary last year; it took Republicans a lot of work to make so many people believe the election was stolen; the greatest threats to election integrity in 2020 were Trump allies breaching U.S. voting systems in search of fraud ‘evidence’; Trump’s man in the House of Representatives got caught lying about what he said he told people after January 6th; and the House committee investigating the Capitol attack plans to lay out its case in a series of eight hearings in June.
That, and a lot more, below. This is This Week in Misinformation.
-- Kevin