Twitter now asks some fired workers to come back.

[nlinecomputers]

Hey no hard feelings. LOL.

Elon Musk Walks Back on Twitter Job Cuts, Blue Checks in Second Week

(Bloomberg) -- Twitter Inc. is heading into its second full workweek under Elon Musk with half its workforce, mounting losses and a couple of unexpected reversals to its plans.Most Read from BloombergSam Bankman-Fried’s $16 Billion Fortune Is Eviscerated in DaysMeta to Cut 11,000 Jobs...

finance.yahoo.com

 

[britechguy]

Does this surprise anyone?

I don't know where the idea ever arose that individuals who may have done amazingly well in one (or more) industries utterly unrelated to others can just swan in to any one of those others and assume competent control.

They can swan in and assume control, just incompetent control. Twitter is another QED.

 

[Sky-Knight]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1588622182066057216

Elon Musk blocked Lou Paskalis.

Advertisers pull back from Twitter amid 'uncertainty' Musk's strategy

Advertisers simply do not want to be associated with controversy, one analyst said.

www.nbcnews.com

Lou Paskalis being the CEO of MMA Global. You know... the company that defines the marketing efforts for all the largest companies on the planet.

Lou basically told Elon, he's the reason for the advertisers bailing. And it boils down to you cannot have a messages about moderation, while firing all your moderators.

Elon is going to sink Twitter and himself at the same time, grab your popcorn.

I follow all of this up with this TechDirt article. https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02...ed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/

For those that continue to stupidly conflate freedom of speech with use of private property.

And then finally... https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20...nt-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well/

Content Moderation at scale is literally impossible, and yet if you don't attempt it all your advertisers will bail.

 

[nlinecomputers]

It's kind of amazing that he has been successful at all. Musk is not the businessman he was IMO. And a lot of it is luck. He got pushed out of PayPal for being a nutjob but that gave him a big pile of money. Tesla has always been overrated and overvalued as a company and he has been able to make bank on his foolish investors. SpaceX was a big gamble but it paid off with big government contracts. And the Boring company seems to be digging more debt faster than the tunnels it digs.

 

[britechguy]

Elon is going to sink Twitter and himself at the same time, grab your popcorn.

I follow all of this up with this TechDirt article. https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02...ed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/

For those that continue to stupidly conflate freedom of speech with use of private property.

And then finally... https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20...nt-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well/

Content Moderation at scale is literally impossible, and yet if you don't attempt it all your advertisers will bail.

Indeed to all points.

I have grown tired of the falsehoods thrown about by those who seem to think free speech means either, "I can say what I want, and if there are any negative consequences, you're suppressing my free speech!," or, "Any curtailment of speech on private platforms is censorship."

Private platforms, since they came into existence, have exercised editorial control over what they will, and will not, disseminate. Twitter, Facebook, and all social media are not "public squares" in the literal sense of that term, they are private communications companies that are public facing and are beholden to many stakeholders, including advertisers who supply the vast majority of their funding. Just as I have the right to throw you out of my house if you don't behave in a way I see fit, these platforms have the right to do the same. You have no right, none, to be there just because you want to be. You're there at the pleasure of the site owner (or similar, just as we are here on Technibble). There are rules to be followed, and if they're not, you're gone.

While I agree that moderation at large scale is impossible to do well, what we've had for far too long is not having it done at all. It's really not that difficult to recognize disinformation and misinformation, for starters, and either block it or clearly tag it as such. Just doing that, and that alone, would be a major, major improvement.

 

[britechguy]

It's kind of amazing that he has been successful at all. Musk is not the businessman he was IMO. And a lot of it is luck.

I'd say that's true of any businessman born with a massive inheritance who, somehow, managed to hire the right people at the right time with that money to produce something and then let them produce it.

Elon Musk is clearly both "on the spectrum" and has more than a touch of megalomania. Neither of these things bode well for long term success without some attempt to conform oneself to the world, and not expecting the world is going to conform itself to you.

 

[Sky-Knight]

It's really not that difficult to recognize disinformation and misinformation, for starters, and either block it or clearly tag it as such. Just doing that, and that alone, would be a major, major improvement.

That's actually not true sadly. It's like defining porn... all but impossible.

The best we can hope for is some sort of fact checker that nukes common misquotes and proven lies or falsehoods. But when you try to do this across all media available to a site that allows user posted content the problem just gets too large.

The final link in my above post talks about this. Even if you magic up something that's 99.9% accurate, which isn't currently possible... but let's say it's 99.9% accurate. Facebook gets 350 million photos uploaded to it daily, so 350,000 of those photos are going to either be scrubbed due to being a false positive, or have some other problem wherein they're simply missed. And that margin for error is where the human mind that gets caught will insist the platform is unjust.

It doesn't help that the general public is utterly ignorant in these spaces, and in far too many cases their first direct exposure was Trump's lies being flagged in view of the public on Twitter before the platform removed him.

Perhaps if we weren't all collectively stupider thanks to lead poisoning we'd have a better chance at this, but being collectively dumber in this specific environment is just fuel to the fire.

My twitter account was created in March of 2022, never had one previously. It was banned a bit more than a month later, and I never posted anything. Why? Probably because the platform thought I was a bot account, and I got scrubbed. A report later and my account was released, only took a day or two... but that still happened. But that was when Twitter had a moderation team! The one that Musk just fired...

 

[britechguy]

The best we can hope for is some sort of fact checker that nukes common misquotes and proven lies or falsehoods.

Which, for me, pretty much defines what constitutes misinformation or disinformation. And that's far from impossible.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Which, for me, pretty much defines what constitutes misinformation or disinformation. And that's far from impossible.

Sadly it is, due to intentional misspelling and obfuscation.

 

[britechguy]

Sadly it is, due to intentional misspelling and obfuscation.

Oh, for the love of heaven, you know very well that intentional misspelling is simple to recognize. Depending on what the obfuscation is, it may not be recognizable.

There is tons of stuff that is obviously misinformation or disinformation that goes about, unabated, because there is no moderation, human or otherwise. And it's a cancer. Doing nothing really isn't an option that helps to keep society from falling apart.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Oh, for the love of heaven, you know very well that intentional misspelling is simple to recognize. Depending on what the obfuscation is, it may not be recognizable.

There is tons of stuff that is obviously misinformation or disinformation that goes about, unabated, because there is no moderation, human or otherwise. And it's a cancer. Doing nothing really isn't an option that helps to keep society from falling apart.

No... it is not. If it was the captcha systems we use wouldn't be doing what they do. It's obvious you know nothing of automation or now bots work.

And they aren't "doing nothing", you've read nothing of the links I posed. They're doing a TON, they're just down to that last 1% which like that last 1% of Spam is all but impossible to deal with.

There is some bleeding edge ML stuff helping make this better, but it's not perfect either.

 

[britechguy]

No... it is not.

If Google can nearly perfectly catch spam in the manner they do, then catching misinformation/disinformation is no more difficult.

There are plagiarism checkers that use massive corpuses of text to ferret it out, and handling misinformation/disinformation is directly analogous to that.

I'll believe that we're down to the "last 1%" that you claim when I see anything near to the effectiveness of spam filtering, and I don't. Not even close.

 

[nlinecomputers]

How? What's considered fake can be invented from whole cloth and take time to get big enough to be an issue. " Senator Smith caught paying undertakers to have sex with dead people!".

It's fake until charges are filed. It's fake until convicted.

And then there's the who issue of famous quotes where the quote is real but it is attributed to the wrong person. Snopes exists for a reason. This stuff can be very hard.

 

[britechguy]

And then there's the who issue of famous quotes where the quote is real but it is attributed to the wrong person.

And that's not disinformation or even the kind of misinformation that requires moderation. Misattribution happens, and in the case of famous quotations doesn't really require correction in order to prevent damage.

As to Senator Smith, the old adage, "Consider the source," comes to mind. It must come to mind in order to perform any sort of vetting, in any venue. Such a claim on social media, alone, should be blocked as far as I'm concerned. The speed of news cycles for the mainstream press that actually does fact-checking is on the order of minutes to a couple of hours, at most. If you can't find it there to check against, then it's either held until you can, or rejected.

It's the algorithmic application of fairly simple critical thinking skills and source verification. And it can be done at a speed and scale via computer algorithms that no number of humans could ever come close to being able to do by hand. The "by hand" part would be very minimal indeed, as what is considered a reliable source for verification and vetting would be part of the algorithm, too.

This is not rocket science.

 

[Sky-Knight]

If Google can nearly perfectly catch spam in the manner they do, then catching misinformation/disinformation is no more difficult.

There are plagiarism checkers that use massive corpuses of text to ferret it out, and handling misinformation/disinformation is directly analogous to that.

I'll believe that we're down to the "last 1%" that you claim when I see anything near to the effectiveness of spam filtering, and I don't. Not even close.

You think Google's spam filer is perfect?

The only response I have to that is to laugh, long... hard... and fully. It's good, just as M365's filters are good, but they are not perfect. AND they do fail ~1% of the time, presenting exactly the same order of magnitude problem.

Furthermore, spam filters on both platforms DO NOTHING to stop Phishing attempts. Misinformation on a social media platform is in effect, a phishing attempt.

This problem is beyond our means to solve. And again, the fact that you fail to recognize that is simply because you do not understand the limits of modern automation.

Phishing is dealt with via training programs for a reason, because we have to patch the human brain also for a reason. The same applies to misinformation.

Now what we can possibly do is prevent people from profiteering on misinformation to some degree. But that requires some solid terms of service, a reporting system, and a transparent auditing system enforced with some sort of fine or platform access denial. There is actionable stuff in here, but we have no means of fully automating it, and the scale of human input required here makes social media at large impossible to monetize.

We MIGHT be able to make things work if social media was limited to within a specific nation. But that concept also all but defeats the purpose of social media as we know it.

 

[britechguy]

You think Google's spam filer is perfect?

I have not received a single piece of spam under Gmail for years, literally.

So while it may not be perfect, literally, it's so close, functionally, as to be so for all practical intents and purposes.

And, so I am abundantly clear, social media as we know it is a cancer. It's "purpose" needs to be defeated.

 

[Sky-Knight]

I have not received a single piece of spam under Gmail for years, literally.

So while it may not be perfect, literally, it's so close, functionally, as to be so for all practical intents and purposes.

And, so I am abundantly clear, social media as we know it is a cancer. It's "purpose" needs to be defeated.

To the former, you're lucky. To the latter, we agree. There are 4 pieces of obvious spam in my nexgenappliances.com mailbox from today alone. And yeah, that's gmail.

But that's irrelevant, because anecdotal evidence is no evidence at all. Besides, email senders have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC among other things to establish themselves as an authority for their own names. Combine that authority with heuristics and yeah you wind up in a solid place. Social media has no authority anywhere.

The recent Twitter change to sold checkmarks is proof of that.

 

[GTP]

I have not received a single piece of spam under Gmail for years, literally.

Lucky you...
I get ~80 spam messages per week in Gmail. Mostly from ebay, amazon, people wanting to sell me penis enlargement pills and "Asian ladies that will go all night."
Funny thing is that a lot of them address me by my first name; thanks Google...?

 

[britechguy]

I get ~80 spam messages per week in Gmail.

In your inbox?

That sort of thing arrives in Gmail for me, too, but is virtually invariably in the spam folder.

 

[nlinecomputers]

Lucky you...
I get ~80 spam messages per week in Gmail. Mostly from ebay, amazon, people wanting to sell me penis enlargement pills and "Asian ladies that will go all night."
Funny thing is that a lot of them address me by my first name; thanks Google...?

If you have ever done business with eBay or Amazon then they are not sending you spam. Business have an expectation of being able to communicate with past customers.