The IT Nerd

We all wondered what would happen to content moderation on Elon Musk’s Twitter during last night’s election. And now we have our answer:

A watchdog group has said Elon Musk’s Twitter took little action against high-profile election posts they flagged as problematic, Reuters reported.

Common Cause, a nonpartisan group that monitors social media for voter suppression, told Reuters that posts from some Republican candidates should have included warning labels under Twitter’s current policy.

False claims and conspiracy theories have already been emerging around Maricopa County in Arizona, where voting machines experienced a “technical glitch” that led to some votes not being correctly tabulated, CNN reported. Some people took to social media to blame Democrats for the technical difficulties.

Common Cause said tweets by candidates such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who also publicized the glitch on Twitter, should have been marked with a warning under Twitter’s civic integrity policy, per Reuters. 

The watchdog also told the news outlet that Twitter’s response time had decreased since mass layoffs last Friday saw 50% of staff axed.

The group said Twitter’s response time used to be around one to three hours, but now the company was “hopeless” and “going dark on it for days.”

This I believe is proof positive that Twitter under Elon Musk is becoming the hellscape that he promised it would not be. You cannot simply fire the people who are responsible for stopping this sort of thing from happening, and not expect anything bad to happen. It’s just another sign that Musk’s “Ready, Fire, Aim” mentality is going to kill Twitter.

This whole Twitter Blue which includes verification as part of the deal is turning out to be a gong show. In order to calm people down over having a whole bunch of verified people out there and the potential damage that can cause, Esther Crawford who is Director of Product Management at Twitter posted this series of Tweets hoping to clear up how verification will work under Twitter Blue:

Maybe I am looking at this wrong, but here’s what I see based on those Tweets:

• Elon Musk says that he must democratize verification.
• Elon Musk creates an unvetted blue check for all, with no ID verification.
• Elon Musk creates a verification scheme for government accounts, commercial companies, business partners, major media outlets, publishers and some public figures that adds “official” label to those accounts.

So what’s the point of the checkmark exactly? It seems me that charging $8 a month for it gives me a blue checkmark that says that I paid Twitter $8 a month. That’s it. There’s zero semblance of clout or status or whatever that Twitter’s current verification system gave to one who got what I called “the blue checkmark of validity.” So why should I fork over $8 a month based on that? That makes no sense. Besides, with this scheme there’s nothing stopping a rogue nation who say, wants to spread misinformation, from giving a bunch of bot accounts Twitter Blue subscriptions to get the check mark and as a bonus their Tweets will show up on more timelines more often because that’s a feature of Twitter Blue. What could go wrong there?

This is half baked scheme cooked up by Elon Musk. In fact, I would go as far as saying that this is a farce at this point. Maybe someone should tell Musk to take a time out and come back when he has some real ideas that would stop people and advertisers from fleeting the platform. Or alternately, he could sell Twitter to a bunch of people who know how to run a business and simply get out of their way. I’m good with either option at this point.