for you – Techdirt (original) (raw)
A Whole Bunch Of States File Garbage Grandstanding Lawsuits Against TikTok With The Main Complaint Being ‘Kids Like It’
from the what-a-waste-of-everyone's-time dept
You may have seen the news yesterday about 14 attorneys general filing lawsuits against TikTok. It was covered in a bunch of places, including Reuters, CNBC, the NY Times, the Washington Post, NPR, CNN and more. And, bizarrely, none of them seemed to include links to any actual complaint. It took me a little while to realize why. Partially it’s because the mainstream media often doesn’t link to actual complaints (though a lot of the sources named here are normally better about it). But more likely the issue was that this wasn’t “14 attorneys general team up to file a lawsuit” like we’re used to. It was “14 AGs coordinated to file individual lawsuits in their home state courts, alleging the same thing.”
We’ll get into a bit more detail shortly about what’s in the lawsuit, but the summary is “kids use TikTok too much, so your features that kids like must be illegal.” It’s really that simplistically stupid.
And it’s actually fifteen AGs, because on Friday, Ken Paxton also filed a case against TikTok that has some similarities. This suggests that the organizers of all these cases approached Paxton to join in. Then, like the total asshole he is, he decided to file a few days early to try to steal the thunder.
So, anyway, here are thirteen of these complaints. I am providing them here, despite the fact that Techdirt’s entire budget probably doesn’t cover the cost of coffee in the newsrooms of all of the publications listed above who refused to do the work that just took me quite some time.
Just something to think about when you consider which kinds of news orgs you want to support. It’s thirteen fourteen instead of fifteen because (1) Oregon hasn’t actually filed its yet, and says it will sometime today (a day after the rest), but it wasn’t available as I was writing this and (2) Kentucky doesn’t seem to have put out a press release about its filing (every other state did) (update: thanks to a reader for getting me Kentucky’s lawsuit which has now been added).
Anyway… it’s not worth going through all the complaints other than to note that most of them are quite similar and can be summed up as “TikTok made a product kids like to use, and we’re sure that violates consumer protection laws somehow.”
I’ll pick on New York’s filing out of the batch because it lays out the contents of the argument in a way that’s easy to see and recognize that they’re literally saying “oh, providing features users like is getting kids to use the site more.”
This goes on for another couple pages, but it doesn’t get much better. There’s a heading that “journalists have reported on the harms on TikTok for years.” Which does not mean that TikTok is liable for kids doing stupid shit on TikTok. You would think that these high powered lawyers would also know that journalists aren’t always entirely accurate?
But just looking at the parts above, this lawsuit is laughable. First of all, any business’s focus is to try to maximize customers’ use. That’s… capitalism. Are all these states saying that restaurants that serve good food are violating consumer protection laws by getting people to want to come back frequently?
Again, features that people like are not illegal. We don’t let government decide what features go in software for good reason, and you can’t do that just because you claim it’s a consumer protection issue with no actual evidence beyond whims.
As for the TikTok challenges, that’s not TikTok doing it. It’s TikTok users, and such challenges have long predated TikTok and many of the reports of viral TikTok challenges are the media falling for myths and nonsense. Blaming TikTok for challenges is not just weird, it’s legally incomprehensible. Years ago such challenges would get sent around via email or Usenet forums or whatever. Did we sue email providers? Of course not.
That last section is also scientific nonsense. The Surgeon General’s report makes it quite clear that the scientific evidence does not say that social media is inherently harmful to mental health. And, no “social media addiction” is nothing like substance addiction, which is literally a chemical addiction.
These lawsuits are embarrassing nonsense.
If you file a lawsuit, you have to explain your cause of action. You don’t get to just say “infinite scroll is bad, therefore it violates consumer protection laws.” Notably in the NY complaint it’s 64 pages of screaming about how evil TikTok is and only gets to the actual claims at the very end, with basically no explanation. It just vaguely states that all of the stuff people are mad about regarding TikTok violate laws against “fraudulent” and “deceptive” business conduct.
Honestly, these cases are some of the weakest lawsuits I’ve ever seen filed by a state AG.
In many ways, they’re quite similar to the many, many lawsuits filed over the last couple of years against social media companies by school districts. Those were embarrassing enough, but at least I could understand that those were filed by greedy class action plaintiffs’ lawyers hoping to get a massive payday and not caring about the actual evidence.
Elected officials file these cases using taxpayer money. For what? Well, obviously for election season. Every single one of these AGs is at least a good enough lawyer to know that the lawsuits are absolute fucking garbage and are embarrassing.
But golly, it’s one month from election day. So why not get that press release out there claiming that you’re “protecting kids from the evils of TikTok”?
It’s cynical fucking nonsense. All of the Attorneys General involved should be ashamed of wasting taxpayer money, as well as valuable court time and resources, on such junk. There are plenty of legitimate consumer protection issues to take up. But we’re wasting taxpayer money because TikTok has a “for you” feed that tries to recommend more interesting content?
Come on.
Filed Under: addictive feeds, california, child safety, consumer protection, dc, for you, ken paxton, letitia james, moral panic, new york, rob bonta, state attorneys general, texas
Companies: tiktok
Engineers Gave Elon’s Tweets Special Treatment Because Elon Freaked Out That A Joe Biden Tweet Got More Engagement
from the catering-to-the-bossman's-ego dept
What’s the opposite of shadowbanning? Maxboosting? I dunno, but whatever it is, that’s what Twitter’s frustrated and exhausted engineers gave Elon Musk after he whined (for not the first time) that people might like someone more than they like Elon. By now you know the basics: last week it was reported that Elon was getting frustrated that the views on his tweets were dropping, and he apparently fired an engineer who suggested that maybe, just maybe, Elon wasn’t quite so popular any more. Then, on Monday, suddenly lots of people found that their “For You” algorithmic feed (something Musk insisted was evil before he took over, but now is pressuring people to use) basically was just The Elon Musk show, with every tweet being something from Elon.
Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton are back with the inside scoop on what happened. Basically, it sounds like Elon threw yet another tantrum, this time because a Joe Biden Super Bowl tweet got more engagement than an Elon Musk tweet. So, in the middle of the night after the Super Bowl, Mr. Nepotism had his cousin send a message to everyone at Twitter, saying this was a “high urgency” issue.
At 2:36 on Monday morning, James Musk sent an urgent message to Twitter engineers.
“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” wrote Musk, a cousin of the Twitter CEO, tagging “@here” in Slack to ensure that anyone online would see it. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”
When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.
Of course, for any person who can understand basic things like “what people like” you can kinda see why Biden’s tweet about the Super Bowl got more attention than Musk’s. Biden posted a sweet message noting that while he wasn’t taking sides, he had to root for the Eagles because Jill Biden apparently is a huge Eagles fan. It’s a cute tweet.
Musk’s tweet, on the other hand, was just straight up “Go @Eagles” with a bunch of American flags, and there was little reason to interact with it.
And, I mean, even funnier is that after the Eagles lost (despite leading for much of the game) Musk… deleted his tweet. Like a true fan. Hardcore.
Still, most normal human beings would recognize that one of those tweets is endearing, and one is just “Look at me, I am embracing your sports team. Love me.” So, it’s not really a surprise that one got more engagement than the other. It wasn’t “the algorithm.” It wasn’t even who is popular and who is not. One is just clearly a more engagement-worthy tweet.
But Musk’s always hungry ego must be sated, so his cousin sent out the “high urgency” issue, and Musk allegedly threatened to fire his remaining engineers if they didn’t solve the problem of his tweets not getting enough engagement:
Platformer can confirm: after Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to ensure that Musk — and Musk alone — benefits from previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.
[….]
His deputies told the rest of the engineering team this weekend that if the engagement issue wasn’t “fixed,” they would all lose their jobs as well.
Musk told them directly that making his tweets popular again was the top priority project. This is entering mad king territory:
Late Sunday night, Musk addressed his team in-person. Roughly 80 people were pulled in to work on the project, which had quickly become priority number one at the company. Employees worked through the night investigating various hypotheses about why Musk’s tweets weren’t reaching as many people as he thought they should and testing out possible solutions.
The solution, basically hard code into the system that every tweet that Elon Musk ever sends must be considered crazy popular by the algorithm, to a level that it must mean that everyone wants to see it, and therefore everyone will:
By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his posts will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed.
Internally, this is called a “power user multiplier,” although it only applies to Elon Musk, we’re told. The code also allows Musk’s account to bypass Twitter heuristics that would otherwise prevent a single account from flooding the core ranked feed, now known as “For You.”
For a guy who insisted he was going to “open source” the Twitter algorithm to stop it from artificially promoting one story over another, he’s literally done the opposite. All because he can’t admit that maybe someone else’s tweet was better than his? What a pathetic insecure little brat.
There’s a lot more in the Platformer/Verge piece, but the closing quote from an engineer working on this is the most telling by far:
Terrified of losing their jobs, this is the system that Twitter engineers are now building.
“He bought the company, made a point of showcasing what he believed was broken and manipulated under previous management, then turns around and manipulates the platform to force engagement on all users to hear only his voice,” said a current employee. “I think we’re past the point of believing that he actually wants what’s best for everyone here.”
Elon is, of course, free to do whatever nonsense he wants with the site. He owns it. But people need to realize that he’s been incredibly hypocritical and gone back on nearly every single promise he’s made in running the site, and each time he goes back on a promise, rather than going back in a manner to benefit all users, he only goes back such that it benefits him, and him alone.
Of course, to give credit where credit is due, Matt Levine totally called this back when Elon first bought his original 9% stake in Twitter. Levine predicted how the first meeting with then CEO Parag Agarwal and Musk (as his largest shareholder) would go:
Twitter’s relatively new chief executive officer, Parag Agrawal: Welcome, Mr. Musk. We’re so glad that you are our biggest shareholder. We have prepared a presentation showing how we are executing on our strategy of being more technically nimble, building new products and growing revenue and active users. Here on slide 1 you can see—
Elon Musk: Make the font bigger when I tweet.
Agrawal: What?
Musk: I am your biggest shareholder, I want the font on my tweets to be bigger than the font on everyone else’s tweets.
Agrawal: That’s not really how we—
Musk: And I want 290 characters. Again, just for me.
Agrawal: …
Musk: And it should play a little sound when I tweet so everyone knows.
Agrawal: I just feel like we want to make a good product for all of our millions of users? I feel like that is going to improve profitability in the long run and, as our largest shareholder, you in particular stand to benefit from—
Musk: Oh I don’t care even a little bit about that, if your stock doubles that is rounding error on my net worth, I just love tweeting and want to meddle a bit to optimize it for my personal needs.
I honestly didn’t think Musk could possibly be that vain and that petty. But I guess I was wrong.
Filed Under: algorithm, elon musk, engagement, for you, joe biden, tweets
Companies: twitter
Twitter’s Remaining Engineers Appear To Solve Elon Musk’s Complaint That His Tweets Aren’t Getting Enough Views By… Making The Algorithm Forcefeed All Of Elon’s Tweets To Everyone
from the the-for-you-page-is-now-the-from-elon-page dept
Last week we highlighted an amazing story of how Elon apparently threw a tantrum at Twitter HQ because the amount of “engagement” on his tweets was declining. Also in that article were details about how Musk sends engineers totally random bullshit requests all the time and they feel they have to deal with it, dropping whatever else they might be working on.
Anyway, with Twitter delaying for a second time the planned shut-off of the free version of Twitter’s API, it appears that at least someone at Twitter HQ was making sure the boss man would be happier, setting up the much-maligned “for you” feed (i.e. the Twitter algorithmic feed that Musk hated and told users to turn off before he bought the site — only to change so that you could no longer switch it off and were forced to open to it, even as the quality got worse) so that it’s basically now just showing everyone all of Elon Musk’s personal tweets.
This seemed to turn Twitter into… all people complaining about how all they see are Elon tweets. Just a few examples:
Anyway, if Elon wants to turn Twitter into just his own personal blog by hijacking everyone’s feed, that’s no problem. Other sites are happy to take people who don’t want that kind of thing pushed to them. I’m sure that this won’t quite stay this way, but I am also hoping that it was a frustrated engineer doing a “fine, you want more views, I’ll give you more views!” kinda thing.
Elon tweeted a few things last night somewhat joking about this and then tweeted that adjustments are being made. Though, it still doesn’t explain how this all happened.
But, also, who knows, as there are even more reports of advertisers bailing on Twitter. I’m half expecting Elon to offer to shove all of some advertisers tweets into everyone’s “for you” feed as a special one day promotion or something.
Filed Under: elon musk, engagement, for you, the algorithm
Companies: twitter