TECHNOLOGY
Cesspool or civility? Elon Musk’s Twitter at a crossroads
Published
1 year agoon
The discourse was never all that civil on Twitter. The loudest voices have often drowned out softer, more nuanced takes. After all, it’s much easier to rage-tweet at a perceived enemy than to seek common ground, whether the argument is about transgender kids or baseball.
In the chaos that has enveloped Twitter the platform — and Twitter the company — since Elon Musk took over, it has become clear this isn’t changing anytime soon. In fact, it’s likely to get much worse before it gets better — if it gets better at all.
Musk, with his band of tech industry loyalists, arrived at Twitter just over a week ago ready to tear down the blue bird’s nest and rebuild it in his vision with breakneck speed. He quickly fired top executives and the board of directors, installed himself as the company’s sole director (for now) and declared himself “Chief Twit,” then “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator” on his bio.
On Friday, he began mass layoffs at the San Francisco-based company, letting go about half of of its workers via email to return it to staffing levels not seen since 2014.
All the while, he’s continued to tweet a mix of crude memes, half-jokes, SpaceX rocket launches and maybe-maybe not plans for Twitter that he seems to be workshopping on the site in real time. After floating the idea of charging users $20 a month for the “blue check” and some extra features, for instance, he appeared to quickly scale it back in a Twitter exchange with author Stephen King, who posted, “If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”
“We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?” Musk replied. On Saturday, the company announced a subscription service for $7.99 monthly that allows anyone on Twitter to pay a fee for the check mark “just like the celebrities, companies and politicians you already follow” as well as some premium features — not yet available — like getting their tweets boosted above those coming from accounts without the blue check.
The billionaire Tesla CEO also has repeatedly engaged with right-wing figures appealing for looser restrictions on hate and misinformation, received congratulations from Dimitry Medvedev, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s top associate and tweeted — then deleted — a baseless conspiracy theory about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, who was attacked in his home.
More than three dozen advocacy organizations wrote an open letter to Twitter’s top 20 advertisers, calling on them to commit to halting advertising on the platform if Twitter under Musk undermines “brand safety” and guts content moderation.
“Not only are extremists celebrating Musk’s takeover of Twitter, they are seeing it as a new opportunity to post the most abusive, harassing, and racist language and imagery. This includes clear threats of violence against people with whom they disagree,” the letter said.
One of Musk’s first moves was to fire the woman in charge of trust and safety at the platform, Vijaya Gadde. But he has kept on Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, and has taken steps to reassure users and advertisers that the site won’t turn into a “free-for-all hellscape” that some fear it might.
On Friday, he tweeted that “Twitter’s strong commitment to content moderation remains absolutely unchanged. In fact, we have actually seen hateful speech at times this week decline (asterisk)below(asterisk) our prior norms, contrary to what you may read in the press.” A growing number of advertisers are nevertheless pausing spending on Twitter while they reassess how Musk’s changes might increase objectionable material on the platform.
Musk also met with some civil rights leaders “about how Twitter will continue to combat hate & harassment & enforce its election integrity policies,” according to a tweet he sent Nov. 1.
But representatives of the LGBTQ community were notably absent from the meeting, even though its members are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than those outside of such communities. Twitter did not respond to a message for comment on whether Musk plans to meet with LGBTQ groups.
The mercurial billionaire has said he won’t make major decisions about content or restoring banned accounts — such as that of former President Donald Trump — before setting up a “content moderation council” with diverse viewpoints. The council, he later added, will include “the civil rights community and groups who face hate-fueled violence.” But experts have pointed out that Twitter already has a trust and safety advisory council to address moderation questions.
“Truly I can’t imagine how it would differ,” said Danielle Citron, a University of Virginia law professor who sits on the council and has been working with Twitter since its infancy in 2009 to tackle online harms, such as threats and stalking. “Our council has the full spectrum of views on free speech.”
Some amount of chaos is expected after a corporate takeover, as are layoffs and firings. But Musk’s murky plans for Twitter — especially its content moderation, misinformation and hate speech policies — are raising alarms about where one of the world’s most high-profile information ecosystems is headed. All that seems certain is that for now, at least, as Elon Musk goes, so goes Twitter.
“I hope that responsibility and maturity will win the day,” said Eddie Perez, a former Twitter civic integrity team leader who left the company before Musk took over. “It’s one thing to be a billionaire troll on Twitter and to try to get laughs with memes and to yuk it up. You are now the owner of Twitter and there’s a new level of responsibility.”
For now, though, the memes appear to be winning. This concerns experts like Perez, who worry Musk is moving too fast without listening to people who have been working to improve civility on the platform and instead using his own insular experience as one of the platform’s most popular users with millions of fawning fans who hail his every move.
“You have a single billionaire that is controlling something as influential as a social media platform like Twitter. And you have entire nation states (whose) political goals are inimical to our own, and they are trying to create chaos and they are directly courting favor” with Musk, Perez said.
“There’s just no world in which all of that is normal,” he added. “That should absolutely concern us.”
Twitter didn’t start out as a cesspool. And even now there are pockets of funny, weird, nerdy subgroups on the platform that remain somewhat insulated from the messy and confrontational place it can appear to be if one follows too many hotheaded agitators. But as with Facebook, Twitter’s rise also coincided with growing polarization and a measurable decline in online civility in the United States and beyond.
“The big understanding that occurred between 2008 and 2012 is that the way to get traction, the way to get attention on any social media, Twitter included, was to use incendiary language — to challenge the basic humanity of the opposition,” said Lee Rainie, director of internet and technology research at the Pew Research Center.
Things continued to devolve as the 2016 U.S. presidential election approached and passed, and the new president cemented his reputation as one of Twitter’s most incendiary users. After it was revealed that Russia used social media platforms to try to influence elections in the U.S. and other countries, the platforms found themselves became central figures in the political debate.
“Do they have too much power? Do their content moderation policies privilege one side or another?” Rainie said. “The companies themselves found themselves in the thick of the most intense arguments in the culture. And so that’s the environment that Elon Musk is entering now.”
And beyond the bluster and the outsized personality, Musk’s own description of his new job — “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator” — may turn out to be his biggest challenge yet.
TECHNOLOGY
How much YouTube pays for 1 million views, according to creators
Published
12 months agoon
May 6, 2023
- YouTube creators earn money from Google-placed ads on their videos.
- A number of factors determine how much money they make, including video views.
- Creators said how much YouTube pays for 1 million views ranged from $3,400 to $30,000.
While many factors — content niche and country, among them — determine how much money a YouTuber earns on any particular video, the number of views it gets is perhaps the most significant.
When a YouTube video hits 1 million views, there’s almost a guaranteed big payday for its creator. In some cases, creators can make five-figures from a single video if it accrues that many views.
Three creators explained how much money YouTube had paid them. YouTube pays $3,400 to $30,000 for 1 million views, these creators said.
When tech creator Shelby Church spoke with Insider, she had earned $30,000 from a video about Amazon FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon). At the time, the video had accrued 1.8 million views.
Her RPM rate — or earnings per 1,000 views — are relatively high, she said, because of her content niche. Business, personal finance, and technology channels tend to earn more per view.
“YouTubers don’t always make a ton of money, and it really depends on what kind of videos you’re making,” she said.
Influencers can earn 55% of a video’s ad revenue if they are part of YouTube’s Partner Program, or YPP. To qualify for the program, they must have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time on their long-form videos.
They can also make money from shorts, YouTube’s short-form video offering. In order to qualify, creators need to reach 10 million views in 90 days and have 1,000 subscribers. YouTube pools ad revenue from shorts and pays an undisclosed amount to record labels for music licensing. Creators receive 45% of the remaining money based on their percentage of the total shorts views on the platform.
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TECHNOLOGY
Tesla employees shared sensitive images recorded by cars – Reuters
Published
1 year agoon
April 8, 2023Some pictures were turned into memes and distributed through internal chats, former workers told the agency
Tesla workers shared “highly invasive” images and videos recorded by customers’ electric cars, making fun of them on internal chat groups, several former employees of Elon Musk’s company have told Reuters.
The electric-car manufacturer obtains consent from its clients to collect data from vehicles in order to improve its self-driving technology. However, the company assures owners that the whole system is “designed from the ground up to protect your privacy,” the agency pointed out in its report on Thursday.
According to nine former workers who talked to the agency, groups of employees shared private footage of customers in Tesla’s internal one-on-one chats between 2019 and 2022.
One of the clips in question captured a man approaching his electric car while he was completely naked, one of the sources said.
Tesla recalls over 360,000 cars over self-driving threat
Others featured crashes and road-rage incidents. One particular video of a Tesla hitting a child on a bike in a residential area spread around the company’s office in San Mateo, California “like wildfire,” an ex-employee claimed.
“I’m bothered by it because the people who buy the car, I don’t think they know that their privacy is, like, not respected… We could see them doing laundry and really intimate things. We could see their kids,” another former worker told the agency.
Seven former employees also told Reuters that the software they used at work allowed them to see the location where the photo or video was made, despite Tesla assuring its customers that “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.”
The agency noted that it could not obtain any of the pictures or clips described by its sources, who said they were all deleted. Some former employees also told the journalists that they had only seen private data being shared for legitimate purposes, such as seeking assistance for colleagues. Tesla did not respond when approached for comment on the issue by Reuters.
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TECHNOLOGY
Nordic nation’s military bans use of TikTok – media
Published
1 year agoon
March 27, 2023Sweden’s Defense Ministry has reportedly barred employees from using the Chinese-owned app on their work phones
Sweden’s military has reportedly cracked down on TikTok, decreeing that staff members are no longer allowed to use the Chinese-owned video-sharing application on their devices at work because of security concerns.
The Swedish Defense Ministry on Monday issued its decision, which was viewed by Agence-France Presse, banning the use of TikTok. Security concerns were raised based on “the reporting that has emerged through open sources regarding how the app handles user information and the actions of the owner company, ByteDance,” the ministry said.
The move follows similar restrictions imposed by other EU countries in recent weeks. For example, France banned government employees from downloading “recreational applications,” including TikTok, on their work phones. Norway barred use of the app on devices that can access its parliament’s computer network, while the UK and Belgium banned it on all government phones. Denmark’s Defense Ministry and Latvia’s Foreign Ministry imposed their TikTok bans earlier this month.
China responds to TikTok allegations
“Using mobile phones and tablets can in itself be a security risk, so therefore we don’t want TikTok on our work equipment,” Swedish Defense Ministry press secretary Guna Graufeldt told AFP.
The US, Canada and New Zealand previously banned their federal employees from using TikTok on government-issued devices, citing fears of ByteDance’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Members of Congress may try to ban the app from the US market altogether after testimony at a congressional hearing last week by TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew failed to ease their security concerns. “They’ve actually united Republicans and Democrats out of the concern of allowing the CCP to control the most dominant media platform in America,” US Representative Mike Gallagher said on Sunday in an ABC News interview.
Chinese officials have denied claims that TikTok is used to collect the personal data of its American users. “The Chinese government has never asked and will never ask any company or individual to collect or provide data, information or intelligence located abroad against local laws,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told reporters last week. She added that Washington has attacked TikTok without providing any evidence that it threatens US security.
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