tweets – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Legal Subreddit Bans All Ex-Twitter Links Due To Safety Risk

from the time-to-move-on dept

Speech has consequences.

Elon Musk has decided to reenable accounts suspended for posting CSAM while at the same time allowing the most basic of CSAM scanning systems to break. And, that’s not even looking at how most of the team who was in charge of fighting CSAM on the site were either laid off or left.

And, that’s made Ex-Twitter a much riskier site in lots of ways, including for advertisers who have bailed. But also for anyone linking to the site.

r/law, a popular subreddit about the law announced last week that it was completely banning links to Twitter for this reason.

Since Musk took control of Twitter, he mostly eliminated the Trust and Safety group and stopped paying the vendor that scans for CSAM. As a result, CSAM (child sexual abuse material) has apparently been circulating on Twitter recently (from what I’ve read elsewhere, the same notorious video that the feds found on Josh Duggar’s hard drive).

Musk also recently reinstated the account of someone who posted CSAM content.

As a result, we’ll be removing any content here that leads to Twitter, or, as he now calls it, X. Whether it’s an embed link or a direct link to a tweet. Don’t care what outlet is doing it. If you’re a reporter or editor, stop embedding links to Twitter in any of your content.

Note that they’re not just banning links that go directly to Twitter, but also links to news stories that link or embed Twitter content. As that final sentence notes, the subreddit is encouraging journalists to stop linking to Twitter entirely (remember, at Techdirt we banned Twitter embeds last year).

I’m not sure it’s reasonable to ban any news article that merely links to or embeds a tweet, but it’s certainly interesting to see how this subreddit, in particular, is handling the increasing liability that Twitter (er… Ex-Twitter) has become.

I had wondered if the members of that subreddit would be upset about this, but skimming the comments and it seems like they’re pretty overwhelmingly in support of the move. Again, this is, perhaps surprising, but a real indicator of just how much damage Elon has done to Ex-Twitter’s brand, let alone to “X.”

Filed Under: csam, elon musk, links, r/law, tweets
Companies: reddit, twitter, x

The Shrinking Twitter: Most Active Users Posting Less

from the going-down-with-the-tweet dept

It’s already bad news for Elon Musk that advertisers have been abandoning the site in droves. But, Musk keeps trying to claim that it’s worth it so long as users are using the site more. Unfortunately for him, it appears that many users are either leaving or posting a lot less. A new study from the Pew Research Center has lots of bad news for Musk.

Much of it is survey data, which I’m not sure is particularly trustworthy (what people say and what they actually do can differ widely). But, the data on how people are actually using the site seems, well, concerning (as Musk might say).

The Center’s new analysis of actual behavior on the site finds that the most active users before Musk’s acquisition – defined as the top 20% by tweet volume – have seen a noticeable posting decline in the months after. These users’ average number of tweets per month declined by around 25% following the acquisition.

It’s not that all users have left the site, of course. The same study still reports that many of the top posters have remained top posters, but it does suggest that the site may struggle to keep users or find new ones willing to engage.

A minority of adult Twitter users in the U.S. continue to produce the bulk of the content. Since Musk’s acquisition, 20% of U.S. adults on the site have produced 98% of all tweets by this group.

As for the survey part, again, it should at least raise some concerns for Musk, even though (as noted above) survey data may be less reliable than seeing what people actually do.

Six-in-ten Americans who have used Twitter in the past 12 months say they have taken a break from the platform for a period of several weeks or more during that span, while roughly four-in-ten (39%) say they have not done this, according to the survey of U.S. adults, conducted March 13-19, 2023.

[….]

The survey also asked current and recent Twitter users how likely they are to use the platform a year from now. A plurality (40%) say they are extremely or very likely to use the site in a year, and 35% say they are somewhat likely to use it. But a quarter say they are not very or not at all likely to be on Twitter a year from now.

We’ll see what actually happens. I still think inertia is more powerful than most people realize, and it’s still possible that Musk figures out ways to stop driving people away. But, at the very least, these have to be concerning, given that Musk keeps pretending that he doesn’t care about the economics (his actions show otherwise) and he only cares for Twitter to be the main place that people spend their time.

So far, instead, he seems to be driving his users away, including those who provide much of the content for the site.

Filed Under: elon musk, tweets, twitter users
Companies: twitter

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

Saudi Arabia Imprisons An American Citizen For 16 Years Over Critical Tweets

from the evil-empire-stuff dept

The Saudi government, led by crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, doesn’t care to be criticized. It routinely punishes its own citizens for insulting the nation’s ruler. It occasionally murders and dismembers critics for refusing to be silenced. And now it’s prosecuting and imprisoning US citizens for exercising their First Amendment rights.

Last month, the Saudi government charged an American citizen currently residing in Saudi Arabia for “disrupting the public order” with social media posts criticizing the government’s handling of domestic matters like divorce and child custody. The US citizen, Carly Morris, was lured back to Saudi Arabia by her ex-husband, a Saudi citizen. Once there, her ex-husband basically kidnapped their daughter, converted her US citizenship to Saudi citizenship, and cut off all contact. Morris was free to leave, but she would have to leave her daughter behind despite a Saudi court granting her full custody. And now she’s possibly facing more than a decade in prison if the government decides to prosecute her.

What’s only theoretical (at this point) in Carly Morris’s case is the reality for US citizen Saad Ibrahim Almadi, a project manager who resides in Florida. Almadi isn’t an anti-Saudi activist. He’s just a regular guy who is understandably (and correctly) critical of the Saudi government and the crown prince. He just made the mistake of trying to visit his family in the country he had criticized a handful of times over the past several years. Here’s Josh Rogin, writing for the Washington Post.

Almadi is not a dissident or an activist; he is simply a project manager from Florida who decided to practice his right to free speech inside the United States. But last November, when he traveled to Riyadh to visit family, he was detained regarding 14 tweets posted on his account over the previous seven years. One of the cited tweets referenced Jamal Khashoggi, the Post contributing columnist who was murdered by Saudi agents in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Other tweets criticized the Saudi government’s policies and the corruption in the Saudi system.

“He had what I would call mild opinions about the government,” his son Ibrahim told me. “They took him from the airport.”

Seems like nothing a crown prince or an oil-rich nation would feel too concerned about. But MBS and his government not only took offense, but also ran him through a rigged justice system that ensure the bullshit charges would stick and take more than a decade of freedom from a man who criticized a foreign government while on his own soil, utilizing his enshrined First Amendment rights.

The charges are indeed bullshit. And they’re even more bullshit than the usual bullshit found in laws that criminalize criticizing the government.

Almadi was charged with harboring a terrorist ideology, trying to destabilize the kingdom, as well as supporting and funding terrorism.

All of that from a handful of critical tweets sent out over a period of seven years. Not only did the Saudi government hit him with these charges, it also rung him up for not surrendering himself to authorities for posting “criminal” tweets.

He was also charged with failing to report terrorism, a charge related to tweets Ibrahim sent on a separate account.

On October 3, Almadi was sentenced to 16 years in prison. He also received a 16-year travel ban. This means Almadi possibly won’t leave prison until he’s 87. And then he has to wait another sixteen years before he can return to United States.

The State Department claims it’s playing hardball with MBS to get Almadi released. But it’s going to take far more than “intensively raising concerns” about Almadi’s imprisonment with senior Saudi officials. This is a government that murdered and dismembered a critic in its own foreign embassy building. And “moving through the process” to determine whether Almadi is actually “wrongfully detained” is a useless waste of time that signals to the Saudi government that it could easily get away with something like this again, although it may mean slightly altering the criminal charges to better meet the State Department’s standards for allowing foreign governments to imprison US citizens.

The Saudi government has nothing to fear from the US government. Former president Donald Trump parroted and amplified the Saudi government’s denials about its involvement in Khashoggi’s murder, helping bury the story to ensure his arms deals with the kingdom remained intact. And the only strong language directed at the Saudi government by President Biden has been over the kingdom’s refusal to keep oil prices low. It’s no wonder the State Department can’t offer anything more than a promise to occasionally complain about this extraterritorial punishment of a US citizen for tweeting government criticism from US soil — an act that broke no local laws and did not take place while Almadi was in a country where such statements are illegal.

Filed Under: carly morris, free speech, mbs, saad ibrahim almadi, saudi arabia, tweets

DOJ Says Trump's Tweets Declassifying All Russia Investigation Docs Doesn't Mean Anything; Judge Says They Better Go Ask Him

from the how's-that-work-again? dept

Investigative reporter/FOIA terrorist Jason Leopold has been suing the US government for a while now, trying to get access to the full Robert Mueller special counsel report investigating President Trump’s alleged ties to Russia. While a version of the report has been released, it was heavily redacted, sometimes in important areas. Leopold and Buzzfeed are seeking the report along with additional interview details, emails, memos, letters, and charts used by Mueller’s office in preparing it. Not surprisingly, the DOJ has been fighting this.

Then, on October 6th, Trump announced on Twitter (naturally) that he had “fully authorized the total declassification of any & all documents” regarding the investigation:

About 40 minutes later, he tweeted that “all Russia Hoax Scandal information was Declassified by me long ago. Unfortunately for our Country, people have acted very slowly”:

That put the DOJ in a bit of a bind, because it had been saying in the lawsuit that it couldn’t reveal this classified information. Leopold and his lawyers quickly filed an emergency motion, pointing out that the President had now declassified this information, and thus the DOJ no longer had any excuse to withhold it:

On October 6, 2020, the President of the United States directed that all documents pertaining to investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which includes the Mueller investigation, be released to the public, and stated that he had, in fact, previously ordered this be done. Twitter, @realDonaldTrump, Oct. 6, 2020 at 8:41pm (?I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!?); Twitter, @realDonaldTrump, Oct. 6, 2020 at 9:21pm (?All Russia Hoax Scandal information was Declassified by me long ago. Unfortunately for our Country, people have acted very slowly, especially since it is perhaps the biggest political crime in the history of our Country. Act!!!?) (attached as Group Exhibit A). As a result, (1) Exemption 1 no longer applies because the records are no longer classified, and (2) any FOIA exemptions have been waived with the exception of disclosures prohibited by the Privacy Act, Rule 6(e), or other statutes that prohibit release.

As a result, Plaintiffs ask the Court to order the government to reprocess the 302s to remove all redactions or withholdings based on Exemption 1 or any discretionary exemptions like Exemption 5, by October 28, 2020. This should be a simple process that requires no independent analysis or consultation beyond simply reviewing which exemptions were asserted and removing the applicable redactions based solely on which exemption claimed.

It should be noted here (and this is kind of important) that the President of the United States has total freedom to declassify anything on his own whims at any time. And these tweets sure looked like him doing exactly that.

The DOJ has now decided to pretend that the statements from the President are not actually official statements from the President. In its opposition to Leopold’s filing as well as the declaration in support, they argue that the President’s tweets insisting that he is declassifying everything don’t mean jack squat.

There is no basis to require the Federal Bureau of Investigation (?FBI?) to reprocess over 4,000 pages of FD-302s from the Special Counsel?s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election by October 28. The President?s recent statements on Twitter referencing the ?declassification? of information were not an order to the Department of Justice (the ?Department? or ?DOJ?) to declassify the materials in this case…. The Twitter statements do not constitute a self-executing declassification order. …

Oh really? The declaration from the Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer basically says that White House lawyers told them to ignore the tweets.

As concerns the above-referenced tweets from the President, the Department has not received a declassification order from the President related to the materials at issue in this or any other FOIA case. After the President issued his statements on Twitter, I and other Department officials consulted with the White House Counsel’s Office about the matters discussed in those statements, including potential declassification of documents related to the Russia Investigation and Hillary Clinton’s emails, and whether the Twitter statements were meant as an order to alter any redactions that have already been taken on any materials in this case and other FOIA cases. The purpose of this consultation was to obtain the official position of the White House regarding the meaning and effect of the President’s statements.

In other words, the DOJ is saying that it can’t actually follow the plain language of the President’s own tweets, and must check with the White House’s lawyers to ask “did he really mean that?”

The White House Counsel’s Office informed the Department that there is no order requiring wholesale declassification or disclosure of documents at issue in this matter. The Department was further informed that the President’s statements on Twitter were not self-executing declassification orders and do not required the declassification of any particular documents. Instead, the President has authorized the Attorney General to declassify documents as part of his ongoing review of intelligence activities relating to the 2016 Presidential election and certain related matters. The Attorney General has not ordered the declassification and release of any of the redacted material in this case based on the President’s tweets. The Department was further informed that the President’s statements on Twitter do not require altering any redactions on any record at issue in this case, including, but not limited to, any redactions taken pursuant to any discretionary FOIA exemptions. Nor do the President’s statements on Twitter prevent the Department from taking appropriate exemptions and redacting documents consistent with law and the positions the Department takes in FOIA matters.

So: we’re just ignoring what the President tweeted because we want to.

Leopold and Buzzfeed have since responded by pointing out that the President regularly makes decrees by Twitter, and that those are him “conducting official business.” The DOJ can’t just ignore that:

or the last three years and nine months, the President has governed this country by tweet. The President has stipulated that he uses Twitter ?to announce, describe, and defend his policies; to promote his Administration’s legislative agenda; to announce official decisions; to engage with foreign political leaders; [and] to publicize state visits.? Knight First Amendment Inst. at Columbia Univ. v. Trump, 928 F.3d 226, 231-32 (2d Cir. 2019) (emphasis added). His administration describes the President?s Twitter account as ?one of the White House?s main vehicles for conducting official business? and his tweets are ?official statements of the President.? Id. at 232. He has even used his tweets to make ?official? ?legal notice? to Congress. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter (Jan. 5, 2020, 2:25 PM), available athttps://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1213919480574812160 (notifying Congress the United States ?will quickly & fully strike back, & perhaps in a disproportionate manner,? should Iran attack any U.S. target).

It is not at all surprising, therefore, that the President would use Twitter as the means by which he would declassify records and waive FOIA exemptions on behalf of the Executive Branch over which is holds Constitutional authority. Indeed, it would be surprising if he did so by any other means. The Court should reject the Government?s back-pedaling and order DOJ to comply with the President?s clear directive to declassify and remove redactions from the narrative FD-302 forms responsive to Plaintiffs? FOIA requests. And if the Court requires any clarity beyond the President?s unequivocal tweets, it should direct the Office of White House Counsel to appear at the hearing scheduled for Friday.

The filing further notes that there is no rule that declassification can’t come by tweet or has to take a special form. If the President says something is declassified it is declassified.

There is nothing in the Constitution, Executive Order 13,526, or otherwise that prohibits a president from declassifying records in whatever way and through whatever form of communication the president sees fit. Thus, an official presidential tweet stating ?I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. . . . No redactions!? is more than sufficient to exercise that Constitutional authority. The government offers nothing indicating that the President did not mean exactly what he said or that he lacked the Constitutional authority to do what he has done. Instead, it claims that Plaintiffs ?have pointed to no order declassifying the documents at issue in this case,? ECF No. 107 at 4, which is plainly wrong: the tweet is the order, and it came in an official statement directly from the President himself.

The filing also notes that what the White House counsel thinks doesn’t matter. The only one who matters here is the President himself:

The Weinsheimer declaration does not support the government?s position, and in fact supports Plaintiffs?. As the declaration makes clear, the question is whether the tweets were ?meant as an order to alter any redactions that have already been taken on any materials in this case and other cases.? …. But the declaration makes clear that neither the DOJ nor the White House Counsel?s Office actually attempted to get an answer to that question from the only person who can definitively answer it: the President. Instead, they sought, apparently without actually asking the President, to determine whether the President issued some further ?self-executing declassification order? beyond the tweets and somehow concluded that the President merely ?authorized the Attorney General to declassify documents as part of his ongoing review of intelligence activities relating to the 2016 Presidential election and certain related matters.?…. But the President himself has already made clear that this interpretation of his intent is wrong: he clearly stated in an official presidential communication that this same material ?was Declassified by me long ago,? but ?people have acted very slowly.?

This morning, in a hearing before Judge Reggie Walton (who is not known for being happy when the government plays games in front of him), it appears that Leopold’s argument is absolutely winning the day. Walton told the DOJ that Trump’s tweets seem pretty clear and he doesn’t see how they can argue he didn’t declassify stuff. He also seemed perturbed that no one actually asked the President what he meant, and postponed the rest of the hearing to tell the DOJ to go ask the President if he actually meant what he tweeted:

HOLY SHIT!

Judge Walton continues this hearing until next week. He specifically wants govt atty to get WH counsel to speak to Trump and find out intent of his declassification tweets and submit with the court

— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) October 16, 2020

Of course, it now seems likely that the White House lawyers and the DOJ will very carefully explain to the President why they want him to say he didn’t mean what he clearly said, potentially allowing him to walk back his fairly unequivocal statements. At the very least, though, that should enable reporters to question the President further on why he falsely claimed to have declassified stuff. At the end of the day, either all of the documents have been declassified or the President will need to admit that he lied about declassifying them.

Filed Under: declassification, doj, donald trump, jason leopold, reggie walton, robert mueller, russia investigation, tweets
Companies: buzzfeed, twitter

Trump, Twitter, And Free Speech

from the trump-impossibility-theorem dept

Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. But, also content moderation of a world leader spewing blatant conspiracy theories may be just as difficult, and that’s not even at scale.

We’re only partway through this week, and Donald Trump has already created a textbook’s worth of content moderation questions to explore. It started with Trump going nuts with a bunch of tweets about a blatantly disproved conspiracy theory regarding a young staffer of TV host Joe Scarborough from back when he was in Congress. That staffer, Lori Klausutis, died from an undiagnosed heart condition years ago. The police and coroner found no evidence of foul play. And suddenly Trump, who used to appear on Scarborough’s show back in the day, decided to spew a bunch of utter nonsense hinting strongly at the blatantly false idea that Scarborough had something to do with Klausutis’ death.

This is straight out of the Trump playbook. It is blatant false news (the accusation he likes to make about anyone who reports accurately on his activities). It is insane conspiracy mongering. It is hurtful. It is hateful. It is potentially dangerous. And it serves Trump in two distinct ways: as a distraction from his ongoing cataclysmic handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and as part of his never-ending intimidation campaign against anyone in the media who dares to point out that the emperor has no clothes. As the Atlantic noted, this is malignant cruelty. It is disgusting.

Many people have been arguing that Twitter should shut down Trump’s account or, at the very least, delete the tweets in question. Indeed, Klausutis’ husband sent a deeply moving letter to Jack Dorsey begging him to remove the President’s tweets:

I have mourned my wife every day since her passing. I have tried to honor her memory and our marriage. As her husband, I feel that one of my marital obligations is to protect her memory as I would have protected her in life. There has been a constant barrage of falsehoods, half-truths, innuendo and conspiracy theories since the day she died. I realize that may sound like an exaggeration, unfortunately it is the verifiable truth. Because of this, I have struggled to move forward with my life.

The frequency, intensity, ugliness, and promulgation of these horrifying lies ever increases on the internet. These conspiracy theorists, including most recently the President of the United States, continue to spread their bile and misinformation on your platform disparaging the memory of my wife and our marriage. President Trump on Tuesday tweeted to his nearly 80 million followers alluding to the repeatedly debunked falsehood that my wife was murdered by her boss, former U.S. Rep. Joe Scarborough. The son of the president followed and more directly attacked my wife by tweeting to his followers as the means of spreading this vicious lie.

I?m sure you are aware of this situation because media around the world have covered it, but just in case, here it is:

My request is simple: Please delete these tweets.

I?m a research engineer and not a lawyer, but I?ve reviewed all of Twitter?s rules and terms of service. The President?s tweet that suggests that Lori was murdered ? without evidence (and contrary to the official autopsy) ? is a violation of Twitter?s community rules and terms of service. An ordinary user like me would be banished from the platform for such a tweet but I am only asking that these tweets be removed.

I am now angry as well as frustrated and grieved. I understand that Twitter?s policies about content are designed to maintain the appearance that your hands are clean you provide the platform and the rest is up to users. However, in certain past cases, Twitter has removed content and accounts that are inconsistent with your terms of service.

I?m asking you to intervene in this instance because the President of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him ? the memory of my dead wife ? and perverted it for perceived political gain. I would also ask that you consider Lori?s niece and two nephews who will eventually come across this filth in the future. They have never met their Aunt and it pains me to think they would ever have to ?learn? about her this way.

My wife deserves better.

The letter was first published in a NY Times article by Kara Swisher in which she, too, backs the idea that the tweets should be deleted. Swisher’s article is carefully argued — and she notes that Twitter is facing a Gordian knot (though, not quite sure that’s the right metaphor) with no good solution. She points out that kicking Trump off Twitter is a non-starter. As she says, it “would be pointless and too drastic,” and (perhaps more importantly), “the firestorm it would set off would alone be disastrous for Twitter to manage.” She also feels that labeling the tweets as false wouldn’t do very much at all (more on that in a moment…) and concludes that the best of a bunch of not-good options is to delete the specific tweets. As she notes, it would be different if this was just about two public figures, like Scarborough and Trump. But the inclusion of a non-public figure makes it much trickier.

I am supportive of the suggestion Mr. Klausutis makes in his letter to simply remove the offending tweets.

While the always thoughtful Mr. Dorsey has said previously that he has to hew to Twitter?s principles and rules, and that the company cannot spend all of its time reacting, its approach up until now results only in Twitter?s governance getting gamed by players like Mr. Trump, in ways that are both shameless and totally expected.

So why not be unexpected with those who continue to abuse the system? Taking really valuable one-off actions can be laudable since they make an example of someone?s horrid behavior as a warning to others. While it is impossible to stop the endless distribution of a screenshot of the tweets, taking the original ones down would send a strong message that this behavior is not tolerated.

I think that Swisher’s analysis is thoughtful, but I come to a different conclusion. I think that deleting those tweets would set off a shit storm almost as big as closing Trump’s account.

And to make that case, let’s look no further than the second big content moderation case study that Trump has kicked off this week. Trump spewed some more of his usual nonsense, claiming that mail-in ballots would result in widespread voter fraud — a laughable claim not supported by any of the data out there, including among states that already do universal mail-in ballots. Given Twitter’s policies regarding misinformation directly around elections, as well as its recently launched tools to label certain tweets as misleading, Twitter (for the first time with a Trump tweet, but not the first time using this feature) put an additional note on Trump’s tweet that simply said “Get the facts about mail-in ballots” and linked to a Twitter Moments page detailing the facts regarding mail-in ballots.

This is a pro-free speech approach to handling these matters. It’s a “respond to bad speech with more speech” approach. Hell, even the notes on Trump’s tweets were incredibly tame. I’ve seen other ones that directly claim that certain tweets are “misleading.” The note on Trump’s tweet didn’t even say that — it just said “get the facts” (indeed, I saw some people who thought the wording of the notification almost looked like it was in support of Trump’s tweet.

And yet the crybaby in chief still threw a ridiculously stupid temper tantrum:

This is ridiculous on many, many different levels. First off, and most importantly, adding more speech is literally the opposite of “stifling free speech.” Second, all they’re doing is providing an opinion and more information to a statement by the President — which is itself quintessential protected free speech under the 1st Amendment. Third, because of that, there’s nothing that the President can do about this, no matter how big a temper tantrum he throws. Fourth, the idea that providing factual information is “interfering with the election” seems to be an “I know you are but what am I” kind of childish taunt from the President.

And yet, the President’s usual lapdogs immediately went to work in support of the Emperor and his missing clothes. Spineless Marco Rubio jumped up with some nonsense about “forums” and “publishers” that suggests that he is either ignorant of the law, or simply playing dumb to get a pat on the head:

Twitter is already held legally liable from content that they themselves publish. So if they added something to a tweet, they would be liable if that content violated any law. But they are not liable for moderation decisions and it would be totally counterproductive if they were.

Hell, if Rubio or others removed Twitter’s Section 230 protections, it seems quite likely that Trump’s tweets about Klausutis would be among the first removed, because without that protection, the site might face legal liability.

But all this brings us back around to the question of what Twitter should do in this situation. If merely adding a link to more information causes Trump and his cadre of yes-men to freak out to this level, imagine the insanity that would rain down on us if Twitter actually did delete one of his tweets. It seems highly unlikely that it would create a good outcome. Everyone who already thinks Trump is a giant man-baby who shouldn’t be anywhere near the halls of power wouldn’t be any better off. But Trump and his fans would be able to play the victim, which is about the only role he seems able to play. There’s no need to give him that martyrdom. It would just entrench the false belief that Twitter is targeting a particular political viewpoint, and do little to help anyone.

Again: there are no good answers here. Trump is spewing utter nonsense that is deliberately malicious and harmful to people. But he does remain the President. His comments won’t disappear even if his tweets do. And the utter shit storm that would be unleashed by deleting those tweets would drown out whatever flicker of excitement it would create among Trump haters. It’s a short-term feel-good move with massive long-term consequences. Twitter should stand its ground here, even while recognizing that Trump is going to continue to work the refs to make sure more of his nonsense is left unimpeded. But taking down one of his tweets seems only likely to make things worse, not better.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, content moderation, content moderation at scale, donald trump, fact checking, joe scarborough, lori klausutis, marco rubio, section 230, tweets
Companies: twitter

HHS' New Spokesman So Good At Communications Strategy That He Thinks He Can Delete Tweets From The Internet

from the noooooooope dept

It never ceases to amaze me how often people that really should know better seem to think that they can simply remove their own histories from the internet effectively. It seems the be a lesson never learned, be it from major corporations or even the Pope, that the internet never forgets. Thanks to tools like The Wayback Machine and others, attempts to sweep history under the rug are mostly fruitless endeavors. And, yet, people still try.

Such as Michael Caputo, the new spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. That department is just a tad important at the moment, given the COVID-19 pandemic we’re all enduring. Well, Caputo got the job and decided he better get to Twitter to delete all that racist and conspiratorial shit he said so that we all don’t find out about it.

The new spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services in a series of now-deleted tweets made racist and derogatory comments about Chinese people, said Democrats wanted the coronavirus to kill millions of people and accused the media of intentionally creating panic around the pandemic to hurt President Donald Trump.

Michael Caputo, a longtime New York Republican political operative who worked on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, was appointed last week as Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at HHS, a prominent communications role at the department which serves a central role in the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Caputo, a prolific user who often tweeted insults and profanity, recently erased nearly his entire Twitter history from before April 12. CNN’s KFile used the Internet Archive’s “The Wayback Machine” to review more than 1300 deleted tweets and retweets from late February to early April many of which were regarding the rapidly spreading coronavirus.

If you feel like wallowing in the muck, you can see more of Caputo’s once-musings from Twitter here, where someone saved them. Now, I know precisely what you’re thinking: But, Tim, how can we go and see these tweets when Caputo very smartly and correctly deleted them?

Great question, Michael Caputo, and thanks for coming to Techdirt to read this. See, the internet isn’t a piece of paper in front of you that you can crumple up and light on fire after you’ve finally written down all the hateful stuff you’ve wanted to say but never had the guts to say out loud. Instead, it’s made up of computers and servers and probably lots of other things too! Like transistors or something, who knows! But what I do know is that there are ways to go back and capture things that are deleted on the internet. And then, you know, discuss them out loud like we are now.

It’s called The Streisand Effect. It’s how you go from “Hey, I’ll just delete these tweets” to “Holy shit, CNN now has an article discussing those tweets I didn’t want anyone to see!”

In Caputo’s defense, his comments to CNN after the publication amount to him telling CNN he doesn’t really mind if anyone sees the tweets he went and deleted.

After publication, Caputo responded to CNN’s request for comment by saying that reporting on his past tweets is “fair game, dude. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me at all.” He claimed that he deletes his tweets “every month and I do it because it drives people mad.”

He added “when you tweet in spirited fashion, KFile is going to have them. I’ve known that all my days. So I don’t mind what you’ve done.” Caputo defended his past Twitter behavior saying he was “a defender of the President” tweeting in a “spirited manner” that included calling out reporters, but he said he’s “now a servant of the American people and some might be disappointed, but my tweets will be different.”

And we’ll look for those different tweets to get deleted every month on the month, too, I’m sure.

Filed Under: deleting tweets, erasing history, health and human services, hhs, michael caputo, tweets

Several Pro And College Sports Teams Suspended From Twitter Over Mystery DMCA Notices

from the overkill dept

We’ve had many long discussions here, and have replicated those discussions through more official channels, as to how there are severe problems with the DMCA when it comes to its collision with free speech. One of the core issues is the way the DMCA sets up a system in which service providers feel forced to proactively take down the speech of others based on accusation in the form of a DMCA notice, rather than this working the way it does in nearly every other aspect of American law in which an accusation does not result in a penalty. And penalty truly is the right word, as the American system recognizes that speech is among the most fundamental of freedoms. And, yet, when service providers like Twitter get sent DMCA notices over copyright claims, they are heavily incentivized to take down the content and take action against the account holder — or face potentially massive liability.

Such as the Twitter account for the Houston Rockets, which found itself suspended over a series of DMCA notices for old tweets that apparently contained some unlicensed music. The Rockets also weren’t alone.

On Monday, the Houston Rockets Twitter account found itself among a handful of official sports team accounts, most of which were college team Twitters. The accounts were temporarily shut down due to DMCA complaints against them for the use of copyrighted music without obtaining those rights. The Rockets were joined by Auburn football, Rutgers football, Iowa State football, and Iowa football and gymnastics as prominent official accounts to be shut down either this weekend or on Monday.

“Our Twitter account has been temporarily suspended due to a few prior social media posts with copyrighted music,” the Rockets said in a statement. “We are working to correct the issue now.”

To my immense frustration, nobody appears to have any details as to what the tweets in question were, what music they contained, or who issued the DMCA notices. That is, frankly, fairly strange. It’s also worth noting that the Rockets at one point had something of a rogue managing their Twitter account, and even fired that individual for behavior unrelated to copyright.

Still, it’s instructive to witness what happened here. Twitter gets DMCA notices claiming infringement on the part of a rather marquis account for the Houston Rockets, does whatever review of the tweets in question it does, and then shuts down the account, ostensibly over the volume of tweets contained in the DMCA notice. In case it isn’t obvious: that’s crazy. Think of all the speech that got shut down that wasn’t infringing when that occurred. And, yes, you might not be terribly concerned with the speech emanating from the account of an NBA team, but its more than 2 million followers did.

And it’s also terribly frustrating that this system is set up in a way that shrouds all of this from the public, as though a matter of public speech should be treated like some kind of mystery of national security proportions. The public has an interest in the deletion or suspension of speech, and an interest in the fact that the DMCA is written in a way, and enforced in a way, that not only encourages service providers to take this proactive heavy-handed action, but also leaves those issuing DMCA notices when they shouldn’t without punishment.

Today that was a bunch of sport team accounts. Tomorrow it could be speech you might care about.

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, dmca, safe harbors, takedowns, tweets
Companies: houston rockets, twitter

Another Week, Another Hollywood Company Files A Takedown Against TorrentFreak

from the a-weekly-occurrence dept

The news site TorrentFreak tends to get more false DMCA copyright notices than other sites, in part because of its name. It seems that people who don’t bother investigating anything jump to the wrong conclusion that because it has “Torrent” in its name, it must be a “piracy” site, rather than a news site that reports on news about copyright and filesharing. So last week, TorrentFreak got some attention after Starz not only sent a bogus DMCA takedown over a TorrentFreak news article about leaked TV shows, but then started DMCAing anyone who even tweeted that Starz was abusing the DMCA this way. Starz eventually admitted it had made a mistake and issued a pretty lame apology.

You might think that others in Hollywood would at least pay a little attention to this sort of thing — but apparently not. This weekend TorrentFreak reported that yet another tweet of yet another of its stories was removed due to a copyright claim — this time from Warner Bros. Just like last time, where Starz utilized an awful third party service (The Social Element) to handle these takedowns, this time Warner Bros employed a company called Marketly, one of a few such companies who claim they’re in the “brand protection” business and go around issuing often dubious takedowns.

The takedown notice, sent by Warner Bros? anti-piracy partner Marketly, accused us of posting a tweet that made ?computer program(s)? available ?for copying through downloading,? without permission of the copyright owner.

?We hereby give notice of these activities to you and request that you take expeditious action to remove or disable access to the material described above, and thereby prevent the illegal reproduction and distribution of this software via your company?s network,? the notice added.

Except that nothing in the tweet in question made a “computer program” available for copying. The tweet was pointing to a story from last month entitled Former Kinox.to & Movie4k.to Admin Freed, Tax Office Retrieves €1.75m:

While it is a story about former pirate streaming sites, you’d think it’s the kind of story a company like Warner Bros. would like to keep up, as it talks about the operator of such a site going to prison and handing over a ton of money.

I sent Marketly a bunch of questions regarding this takedown, and the company got back to me actually defending the takedown and insisting it was appropriate. The argument was that because Twitter automatically turns URLs into links, so the headline itself was “linking” to two pirate sites:

The hyperlinks Twitter inserted in TorrentFreak?s tweet directed users to webpages that are infringing on Warner Bros. content causing Marketly to issue a notice as noted in TorrentFreak’s article.

But that’s questionable on multiple levels. First of all, no one is using those particular links to magically discover pirate websites. Second, they are still news articles, reporting on news about these sites, and the fact that those should be censored raises serious 1st Amendment questions. Third, even if those links do go to the sites, they are still not links directly to Warner Bros. infringing material. Instead, they are links to sites whereby people might find Warner Bros. infringing material. But that’s also true of Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter itself and much, much more. Does Marketly take it upon itself to block links to those sites as well?

The DMCA does let you block links to specifically infringing content, but not to entire sites across the board, yet Marketly (and apparently) Warner Bros., don’t much seem to care about the specifics of the law. Like so many in Hollywood, the incorrect assumption they make is that if a site has some infringing material, then there’s no problem with wiping out the entire site.

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, reporting, takedown, tweets
Companies: marketly, torrentfreak, twitter, warner bros.

Starz Issues Laughably Unbelievable Excuse And Apology For Taking Down Tweets

from the not-how-it-works-guys dept

Earlier today, I posted my article about how Starz was issuing obviously bogus takedowns concerning tweets about a news story on TorrentFreak concering how a social media agency, The Social Element, had issued bogus DMCA takedown notices to Twitter, about another story on TorrentFreak about some TV shows leaking online.

Last night I had reached out to Twitter, The Social Element, and Starz, but had not received a real response by the time the story went out (Starz had emailed back suggesting that I did not give them enough time to respond, but had somehow managed to issue a weird apology statement to others). Eventually, more than half an hour after my story went out, Starz emailed me the following statement:

STARZ takes piracy and copyright infringement very seriously and must take steps, when necessary, to protect our content and creative IP as it is the core of our business. As such, we engage a third-party vendor to seek out and remove social media posts that provide access to illegally acquired content. The techniques and technologies employed in these efforts are not always perfect, and it appears that in this case, some posts were inadvertently caught up in the sweep that may fall outside the DMCA guidelines. That was never our intention and we apologize to those who were incorrectly targeted. We are in the process of reviewing all of the impacted posts as well as the scope and procedure for the previous takedowns and are working with our vendors to reinstate any such content that was inappropriately targeted for removal.

This statement appears to differ, slightly, from the one they gave to Variety, where they sort of tried to imply that mysterious hackers were responsible, saying that the company had ‘recently incurred a security breach” which somehow (why?!?) “prompted the company to hire a third party for copyright enforcement.” I don’t see how a security breach would necessitate such a hiring. Nor do I see what that has to do with sending bogus takedowns, many of which appeared to come directly from Starz, and not from any third party. At the very least, Starz didn’t use the “security breach” claim in the statement it sent me.

However, that does not make the statement any more believable. By my count, using Lumen Database (which might not be complete), The Social Element sent 42 DMCA takedowns to Twitter over this topic between April 8th and April 11th. Then Starz itself took over on Saturday the 13th and sent another 31 notices on Saturday and Sunday, for a total of 73 such notices. Both of the notices are notable for the lack of any information other than the links to the tweets, which would at least suggest that they may have been sent by the same individual or firm, who then changed who it claimed to actually be sending the takedowns.

I asked Starz if it could say if The Social Element was the third-party vendor in question, and Starz informed me that it “cannot confirm which vendor” was involved. The Social Element itself has not responded to multiple emails (and a phone call).

Meanwhile, the other aspects of Starz’s statement are similarly unbelievable. We agree with Starz that the “techniques and technologies” employed by companies who file DMCA takedowns are not always perfect (though, it’s nice for a Hollywood company to finally acknowledge as much), but the idea that it was not Starz’s intention to target people reporting on news and that the tweets were “incorrectly targeted” is literally unbelievable given the notices that Twitter users received. Multiple ones stated that the takedown demand forwarded to them by Twitter noted that the takedown was specifically because the tweet “leads to article containing unreleased show imagery.” In other words, they knew exactly what they were doing.

The other problematic part of the statement from Starz is the claim that some of those “caught up in the sweep… may fall outside the DMCA guidelines.” No, it’s not the “DMCA guidelines” that are the problem. It’s the actual law. Copyright law does not allow you to censor news articles you don’t like, or tweets about those news articles, and yet that’s exactly what Starz has done.

I responded to Starz by pointing out these problems with the statement and suggesting, politely, that the statement would come off as entirely unbelievable, and that the company might want to consider putting out a more believable statement. The company declined to do so, simply reiterating:

“… we are reviewing and addressing all of the processes and procedures by which we are identifying and acting on social posts and activity that may have triggered these notices being sent, as there were clearly individuals and posts being targeted that should not have been per the guidelines.”

Again, it’s not “guidelines” that are the issue here, but copyright law itself.

Either way, thanks to Starz for, once again, demonstrating why demanding more aggressive copyright and enforcement almost always leads to out and out censorship.

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, dmca, takedowns, tweets
Companies: starz, the social element, twitter