Is Section 230 a “Get Out of Jail Free” Card for Social Media Companies?

The Supreme Court is hearing a case this week where family members of victims of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks and 2017 Turkey terrorist attack are suing Google and Twitter for not doing enough to remove dangerous content from their sites. Shelly Palmer talks to John Vause on CNN International about rumors of narrowing the scope of Section 230 and what that would mean for tech companies. Continue Reading →

Elon’s Learning How Twitter Works

According to The Verge, Elon Musk on Tuesday gathered a group of engineers and advisors asking why his engagement numbers have been tanking. He fired the engineer (one of his top two) who delivered the news that only a tiny fraction of your followers ever see your tweets. The view counter he forced the company to place on every tweet proves it. According to those in the room, Elon was shocked – and really mad. Continue Reading →

Who sees your tweets?

I woke up this morning and noticed that Elon was still CEO of Twitter. I went back and looked at his final poll results (see below) and noticed that while @elonmusk has 122,383,027 followers, there were only 17,502,391 votes tallied (a dismal 14.3% response rate). I have to assume that a fair amount of these votes were done by bots and multi-account trolls, which raises the question: How many people saw his tweet? Continue Reading →

Elon’s Binary Fate

Is there a 60/40 chance that Elon Musk steps down as Twitter CEO today? Who's to say? ICYMI: Yesterday, @elonmusk tweeted out a yes/no poll asking, "Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll." By the time you read this, we may have heard from Elon. Continue Reading →

The Boy Who Cried Checkmark, Part Deux

It seems that Elon is so mad about the Apple App Store's 30% commission that he is raising the price of Twitter Blue on iOS devices to cover the cost. Although the service is on hold right now, when it resumes, reports say it will cost $7 if you subscribe on the website and $11 if you subscribe using the Twitter iOS app. Continue Reading →

Twitter Content Moderators Reassigned

According to transparency.twitter.com, "Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy." I'm not sure when this was posted, but I learned about it this morning. Continue Reading →

The Boy Who Cried “Check Mark!”

Will you get a gray, gold, or blue check mark? No, it's not your 4th grade spelling test, but instead Elon's new idea for verification: gray for governments, gold for companies, and blue for people and bots and trolls. Oh, wait. Maybe he won't verify the bots… but how will he know? Elon has not shared how he plans to make this work better than his initial attempt at verification (which was an epic fail). Continue Reading →

The Ultimate Content Moderation Challenge

CNN obtained an internal memo to Meta's (formerly Facebook's) content moderation team that noted that “political speech is ineligible for fact-checking. This includes the words a politician says as well as photo, video, or other content that is clearly labeled as created by the politician or their campaign.” The memo was in direct response to requests for guidance from Meta's internal and external fact checkers. Continue Reading →