![]() ![]() Musk recently shut down an internal misinformation tool called Smyte and liquidated X’s election integrity team. ![]() It’s clear now that these companies were only ever going to clean up their platforms to a point and, as we’re now learning, it was only temporary. Though, it did manage to fire off this incredible debunk before it got clogged up with Arma 3 gameplay videos. Or worse, he’s outsourced misinformation to the wannabe Wikipedia editors running his Community Notes feature, which completely broke this weekend. An experience that Musk, with his infinite business acumen, is now providing to any X user that accidentally clicks on the app’s For You tab. We also now know that the “moderation” these companies kept pledging to increase via sophisticated AI tools was actually just being outsourced to literal sweatshops in countries like Kenya and South Africa where workers make dollars a day viewing the worst content imaginable until they psychologically can’t take it anymore. But these companies did hire a bunch of former Obama staffers and made them non-apologize to reporters every time one of their products caused a genocide. And they, of course, failed to uphold that responsibility time and time again. One by one, major corporate platforms began to accept that they had a responsibility and a duty to protect users from spam, scams, misinformation and disinformation, harassment, abuse, illegal and malicious material, and extremism. The main framework for how large social platforms have been moderated for the last decade started getting cobbled together around 2014, after 4chan’s massive leak of non-consensual sexual material, dubbed “The Fappening,” and was really formalized in 2015, with the rise of ISIS, and, in 2016, when Facebook launched a factchecking division and acknowledged that Russia’s disinfo factory, the Internet Research Agency, was using the platform to meddle in foreign elections. As Mashable ’s Matt Binder posted today, “Nearly every thing that's gone viral on Twitter over the past few days has been wrong.” If Twitter was the cultural engine of the English-speaking internet in the 2010s, it’s now spewing oil into every other part of the internet and there are no mechanisms in place to contain it. Big subreddits and popular Instagram accounts (and legitimate digital publishers) are full of screenshots of the same stuff I’m seeing on X. Surrounded by ads for hentai mobile games, of course.Īnd this dogshit content swirling inside of X is also still guiding what’s being posted everywhere else. ![]() To say nothing of the endless cascade of horrifying violence X is serving up via the autoplaying videos it bricks my phone’s battery with, posted by verified accounts who are actively monetizing them, whether they’re genuine or not. I’ve seen so much content reported, debunked, and rebunked(?) that I think I’ve reached the limits of my mind’s ability to understand reality. I know more about adult film star Mia Khalifa’s cancelation for tweeting that Hamas should shoot their videos horizontally, right-wing influencers Ben Shapiro and Andrew Tate arguing with each other about who’s tough enough to go fight in Gaza, and unfathomably racist posts from verified losers than I do about anything material that’s happening on the ground. My understanding of what’s going on has not just been muddled by platforms like X, but warped entirely. And it has been, of course, impossible to follow anything. And while I was able to make some sense of the noise online, I still concluded at the time that, “our feeds aren’t meant for content like this and are breaking.” And a year and a half later, those feeds are completely broken.Īs an exercise, I tried to keep track of what I was seeing online this weekend from Israel and Palestine. In February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, I wrote a piece called “ Everything will be all the time and everywhere ,” where I essentially used social media, but mainly Twitter, to construct a ticking clock of the first hours of the invasion. ![]()
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