...Blackburn, however, says researchers will continue to find a way to scrutinize what’s happening on Twitter. “We’ve been mostly cut off from Facebook for years and we’ve continued to make progress,” he says. “It’s not like science is going to be held hostage by a guy that played himself into burning $44 billion on a website that makes no money, just so he could force all its users to read his shitposts.”
AdObserver is a project of Cybersecurity for Democracy at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. This extension was originally developed by researchers from the Algorithmic Transparency Institute, Quartz, New York University, and the University of Grenoble. Technical advice was also provided by ProPublica, WhoTargetsMe, and The Globe And Mail.
To be clear, people should not be using this thing that has no limits on what data it could be consuming. The CA thing people were upset about was that one user could give CA permission to read their FB data and that meant that CA had access to anything that that user had access to (like data that their friends shared with them). This is the same, without it even pretending to be limited by the restrictions that CA was limited by.
Nope. But he seemed afraid if it, whatever it was. Maybe something that would lead to jail instead of financial losses? That would make sense I guess.
The number everyone threw around was that $1 billion penalty he agreed to. People here on HN said it would never be that high.
$1 billion seems cheap compared to what he’s lost by now.
The only other explanation that makes sense to me is he was so far down the conspiracy rabbit hole he was willing to lose billions to prove an imaginary conspiracy because… it would make him more famous and popular?
I’d love to know the truth of all of this some day.
I don’t think that the FBI recommending that Twitter look into posts that both break Twitter rules and were suspected of being generated by foreign operatives counts as illegal collusion.
I also don’t think Twitter was the deciding factor in Biden winning, and the election certainly wasn’t rigged.
“Twitter was used to rig an election” is just another instances of Twitter users not realising that nobody outside of Twitter cares about it. Musk is very evidently far from immune to this.
Media outlets will share what some famous people say on Twitter. Let’s not conflate that with Twitter mattering. It’s just a press release website.
If we want to look at social networks that actually decide elections, let’s look at Facebook.
FBI was actively monitoring a place identified as being a primary location for foreign operatives to influence our election.
They met weekly with Twitter during the time leading up to election when it was most critical that communication was open and often.
I don’t see a problem with that. Now, if FBI made threats or used other underhanded tactics to force Twitter to censor the speech of Americans, I would see an issue. I’ve seen nothing to indicate that.
No, he spent the money so people would think that’s what he’s doing. All we need to know he’s not actually doing this is to see that his handpick journalists are ignoring evidence of the Trump White House asking Twitter to remove posts.
If the FBI flagging posts to be removed is government weaponization of Twitter, then the White House doing the same must be as well, to an even more egregious degree. And yet crickets from Musk.
If he’s only releasing and reacting to one side, then we must conclude the entire “Twitter Files” is simply a right wing, partisan messaging campaign.
The white house wasn't even doing the same. The fbi was pointing out tweets that violated Twitter's rules and suggesting that they evaluate them but that it was totally up to Twitter about what to do. The white house was pointing out tweets that embarrassed or otherwise hurt Trump's feelings and demanding that Twitter take them down
James Baker worked for the DOJ and FBI directly before becoming high up counsel at Twitter. He was fired for selectively edited the documents and disclosures that became the Twitter Files.
It is possible to criticize Musk and his management of Twitter for completely apolitical reasons. You have to be a sycophant to describe his management style as anything other than chaotic. There are literally employees at the company who don't have any work because there is no one to assign them to a department or team. There are people who don't even know if they work there anymore because the layoffs were handled so poorly. It goes way beyond Musk's opinions on free speech or whatever political opinion you want to blame. The whole purchase has clearly been a train wreck up until this point.
Yes, it's possible. But saying "guy that played himself into burning $44 billion on a website that makes no money, just so he could force all its users to read his shitposts" isn't the way. It just reveals their biases.
I don't know, that seems to be the apolitical reading of the situation. Is there something specific you object to in that quote?
>guy that played himself into burning $44 billion
That seems unquestionable. Twitter wasn't worth that price when he actually took control or he wouldn't have tried so hard to get out of the deal. It is impossible to put an accurate value on Twitter today, but it seems obvious that its value has gone down even further under Musk's leadership.
>a website that makes no money
Maybe hyperbolic depending on your definition of "makes no money", but it hasn't turned a profit in years so it is fair to categorize it as "a website that makes no money".
>just so he could force all its users to read his shitposts
Maybe you object to the "just" there and he had other reasons to make the purchase, but this general accusation seems true[1]. He is at least partially motivated by vanity and getting other people to read his weird jokes.
Is it? I'm not on Twitter and I'm Danish so I'm not really caught up on American identity politics, outside of what you hear online, but is that really revealing any bias of that sort? It sounds like someone who has a dislike for Musk, but really, I think this could be said about most of the billionaires running social media platforms from a certain point of view.
I think we should still put a lot of the blame on ourselves, but really, our political institutions shouldn't be on these centralized social medias if you ask me. They should be running their own instances of something like mastodon, so that it's not an American tech company that gets to moderate Danish politicians. Which isn't really a right or left leaning point of view where I come from.
Frankly saying that Musk burnt $44 billion on a website that makes no money could also just being laughing at the whole situation. I think it's been sort of hilarious to follow, but being Danish, we do have a nice tradition for enjoying watching successful people fail. That being said, you may also be right, but I think it's a bit of stretch to boil this down to political bias of the sort, because there is frankly a bunch of reasons to laugh at twitter right now that have nothing to do with politics.
Other then the term "shitposts" what's wrong with that statement? They did make updates to give him and only him a broader reach and more views. The only reason I say "shitposts" may be an issue with the statement is because I don't feel like seeing if there's a definition for shitposts and if there is cross referencing it with the last couple months of his posts.
All of these moves make sense when you zoom out and realize Musk has no interest in Twitter as a business. It is a megaphone to amplify his own voice and the voices that support his viewpoints. Having third party API consumers able to pull in content and reorder it other than how he wants it presented is counter to that goal.
The genius of Fox News was "why spend money on buying political attack ads when you can just buy the network and run them all day long." Twitter is just becoming that too.
I would love to see this "buying social media company to force everyone to pay attention to you"incorporated into the last season of Succession, although I am sure it was my mostly written before all of this Musk Twitter drama.
> The genius of Fox News was "why spend money on buying political attack ads when you can just buy the network and run them all day long."
No, that's a misunderstanding. What Fox News cares about is growing and maintaining an audience because that's what profitable. In pursuit of that profit, Fox News will foster its community however it can.
And so, driven by profit seeking, Fox News has embraced total nihilism. Fox News will spin any narrative, tell any lie, invent any fiction if it thinks it is what its audience wants to hear. The more Fox News offers its audience comforting fictions, no matter how untrue, the better for the bottom line.
You don't have to believe me on that. It's what Fox News says of itself:
Did he? My understanding was that it was not profitable and that he's been cutting costs and exploring new sources of income (Twitter Blue, API fee, etc.). I don't know if he'll be successful but his actions seem consistent with him caring about Twitter as a business. In fact, he seems to have sacrificed his public image considerably towards that goal (not consistent with him mostly caring about his "megaphone").
It made a profit 2 years before he bought it. And the only reason it made a loss the last complete fiscal year before he bought it was due to a massive > $1Bn FCC (or FTC?) fine.
Twitter’s underlying business was already profitable.
Your understanding is wrong, I’m afraid. Twitter was profitable before the acquisition. (If you look this up don’t be misled by the once-off loss caused by losing a legal case).
> Twitter has been operating at a massive loss for years, failing to book an annual profit since 2019 (Mauer, 2022). For eight out of the last ten years, the company has posted a loss.
It was profitable those 2 years, then they lost a big lawsuit which caused a pretty big loss in 2020. But overall since its IPO 2013 and 2020 were the only years where its cashflow actually got worse - overall it was trending towards a more sustainable cashflow. By silicon valley/US corporation standards that's far from a dumpster fire or anything.
TWTR has underperformed nasdaq by a factor of 2 since going public. It's been a woefully inefficient organization and there's no amount of political bias that can paper over that.
He almost certainly caused some advertisers to leave, but as a reference snapchat had similar decreases in advertising spend, so its hard to argue this is all Musk and not considerably due to economic conditions and apple's privacy changes
"All of these moves make sense when you zoom out and realize Musk has no interest in Twitter as a business. It is a megaphone to amplify his own voice and the voices that support his viewpoints. Having third party API consumers able to pull in content and reorder it other than how he wants it presented is counter to that goal."
I don't remember being a highly profitable venture before, so what was the previous owners intentions with owning the business but not caring if it generated a reasonable return?
> I don’t remember being a highly profitable venture before
It was profitable on an ongoing basis (the most recent reported period had a one-time charge that made it unprofitable, IIRC) though not “highly profitable”. Since the Musk takeover was announced – leading to forward advertising sales drying up even before it was consummated – its been (by Musk’s own description, including as to the timing, though he places the blame elsewhere) hurtling toward bankruptcy.
Except that Fox is profitable, and it isn’t clear how much musk is willing or able to pay out of his own pocket for the privilege. I don’t think he planned for that.
That would be a change of subject, wouldn't it? I suspect you aren't interested in any evidence anyone will present on what Elon has done, given your tu quoque reply.
Your Bloomberg article is a rehash of the verge article discussed down thread.
The twitter files are not a change of subject as they are precisely about the power of the algorithm, censorship, and how it was tinkered with prior to Musk taking over. It is literally your concerns but backed up with actual proof.
Understand something: I think such things are very bad regardless of the direction in which it applies. I am a-political. I would actually be very interested in any actual evidence.
It is a bummer that you think I will just be willing to put my head in the sand if it was Musk doing it, clearly you think I am somehow aligned politically with his views (whatever the hell they are supposed to be) and would be willing to look the other way. Nope, not the case. People do be like that and this is a problem.
Again, regardless of affiliation, it is a problem.
You didn't ask about the pre-Elon days. You asked about Elon, so multiple people have responded accordingly. Being unable to rebut them, you've chosen to try to divert the topic to something else.
>clearly you think I am somehow aligned politically with his views
I do. But I'll disengage at this point, given your insincerity.
Whoah whoah whoa. I don't care for Elon, but let's be intentional about using "far-right". [Caveat: Assume USA left and right parties are discussed] If we keep throwing that around when we mean right leaning or politically right views then anyone on the right is going to be "far-right" and we're never going to work together. I think that the other comments to you are to point out where Elon has fascist or Nazism beliefs. Maybe use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics as a start?
Elon is far-right. I meant what I said and I said what I meant. I'm very familiar with far-right ideology. No need to link to Wikipedia
>If we keep throwing that around when we mean right leaning or politically right views then anyone on the right is going to be "far-right
The GOP is a far-right political party. They are fundamentally anti-democracy.
>and we're never going to work together.
We aren't going to work together regardless because the far-right GOP doesn't want the same things as most Americans. They are a political minority that can wreak havoc on the country due to poorly thought electoral systems.
>I think that the other comments to you are to point out where Elon has fascist or Nazism beliefs.
There is more to the far-right than having Nazism beliefs. American far-right is Christian Fascist. Elon Musk is a fascist a la Henry Ford.
He provides vocal and material support to fascist and far-right causes such as vaccine conspiracies and transphobia. He's anti-labor, anti-safety regulations.
I'm guessing you're one of those folks who want to pretend he's not far-right until he openly wears a swastika.
> In five words, Musk manages to mock transgender and nonbinary people, signal his disdain for public-health officials, and send up a flare to far-right shitposters and trolls.
Heh. I have a disdain for throwing shade and hyperbole, am I also far right cmh89? :)
>Heh. I have a disdain for throwing shade and hyperbole, am I also far right cmh89? :)
I don't know. How often do you pal around with far-right people and help spread their rhetoric? That would be a good indicator. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, its probably a duck.
Likewise, Musk has adopted far-right talking points, wants far-right approval, and supports far-right causes. He's probably a duck huh
> Anyone can post anything, but Musk can and has systemically prioritized his tweets over organic content.
I'd be interested in any sort of proof.
> Musk is very vocal about his far-right views. He's anti-union, anti-public health, etc.
Please show specific examples of his far-right views, so I can understand what specifically you mean by that term other than things you personally find disagreeable.
The question was to understand how Elon has far-right views (e.g. Nazism). What you provided is an article that shows Elon as narcissistic. I wouldn't call that the same.
This is such a classic "just asking questions" move. You could save a lot of time in your day if you concern trolled a little less.
In any case, you sure did a lot of creative reading to avoid reading this sentence:
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.
But that doesn't matter, does it? You're just going to construct something out of precision-selected tidbits anyway as a rebuttal. Really, I think that if you have something to say, you should just say it out loud from the outset instead of leading people around by the nose and wasting everyone's time.
> This is such a classic "just asking questions" move. You could save a lot of time in your day if you concern trolled a little less.
If only I would go along with mindless gossip without asking questions.
The artificial boosts applied to his account remain in place, although the factor is now lower than 1,000, we’re told.
Alas.
Nevermind breathless verge articles the dude was literally tweeting about all of this as they were tinkering.
> Really, I think that if you have something to say, you should just say it out loud from the outset instead of leading people around by the nose and wasting everyone's time.
It is very obvious to me and most here that some people hate Musk now so much they are willing to do exactly what you accused me of - construct something out of precision-selected tidbits - and throw shade that he is some far-right type. To certain people anybody they don't like is "far right" and <insert bad term here>.
This is very lame behavior. Cancel culture is canceled my friend. The ends do not justify the means.
>Stands to reason that 90 percent of followers should see tweets for a person they chose to follow..
It's difficult to take this kind of response in good faith. You asked for any proof and the article puts it pretty directly that he pressed for changes to systematically prioritize his own tweets (including to non-followers) and then do a strawman argument against one statement to dismiss the whole thing.
Seems like a reading comprehension issue. Difficult as it may be, try to re-read in good faith with your programmer hat on.
To me the key part of the article is this bit:
> he seemed to suggest that the changes would be walked back, at least in part. “Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… “algorithm,” he tweeted.
> Absurd as Musk’s antics are, they do highlight a tension familiar to almost anyone who has ever used a social network: why are some posts more popular than others? Why am I seeing this thing, and not that one?
I actually saw this unfold in real time as he was tweeting about all of this in the open as it was happening (not just the milk meme) -- a lot of people tweeted at him that the algorithm was b0rked and he was replying and saying they were tinkering until they arrived at a place where, according to the very article, 90 percent of his and other peoples followers actually started seeing tweets from people they followed. This simply makes sense, no?
I don't see a smoking gun where he over prioritized his own tweets maliciously. They even deboosted his magic number as part of the cowboy debugging session.
Recall the original claim I was replying to is:
> It is a megaphone to amplify his own voice and the voices that support his viewpoints.
I just don't buy this narrative, forgive my skepticism. You can go look at his reply timeline and see for yourself and draw your own conclusions no need for the verge editorializing.
I understand some people view him as a malicious actor but going out of your way to ascribe the least charitable interpretation to everything is just not convincing to people who aren't invested in the politics. You're even directing this attitude towards me for not automatically agreeing with this viewpoint.
>Musk is very vocal about his far-right views. He's anti-union, anti-public health, etc.
When any amount of right wing is far right, it just show how far left your perspective is. And if you think far right is in any way worse than far left, that's just more evidence of the same. They're the same people, just with opposite causes.
The far right as grown MUCH crazier over the last 30 years than the far left, mainly thanks to dedicated propaganda outlets like Fox News brainwashing people.
What an absurd statement - everything he's done is to make twitter profitable and viable as a business - reduced headcount, reduced systems, reduced perks, .... He was already high profile in numerous spheres so no amplification was required. It's obvious that you don't share his viewpoints, and so you're simply slinging mud. It's the opinion of many that Musk didn't even want twitter, as a megaphone or otherwise, that he screwed up, obligating himself, and now has to make a successful business of it.
Can you please make your substantive points without name-calling ("what an absurd statement") or swipes ("It's obvious that you don't share his viewpoints, and so you're simply slinging mud")? The site guidelines specifically ask commenters to avoid those things, and your post would be just fine without them.
I'm not the greatest Musk fan but IMHO his approach to charge those who benefits from Twitter is spot on and I'm actually rooting for him to be able to find a viable business model which does not rely on selling my attention to highest bidder.
If you are going to influence people, pay for the reach and If you are going to mine data, pay for the data. I guess the exact pricing can be adjusted according to the market needs but I agree with the paid access approach.
Academics don't resell the data to others. In fact, their existing agreements with Twitter requires their published datasets (for reproducibility) to be anonymized precisely to ensure they don't become a commercial goldmine.
Given that most of the article is about the pricing tiers for academic use, based on marketing communications to universities, your comment seems strangely indifferent to the context of this news. These proposed costs are unaffordable precisely because academics are not running a business around the data. If the article were about enterprise data sales, your point would make sense.
As you say, Academics are pretty used to paying for access to data, services, material, etc., but $42k-per-month for limited access to Twitter sounds more like a "fuck off" price than anything else.
How many researchers can and will pay $42k per month for access? What's the market size here? Is this anything more than a drop in the bucket for Twitter?
doesn't have to be free but with every increase there will be less research that can afford to pay for the data and with the proposed pricing of $500.000 for 0.3% of tweets it seems that no-one will be willing to pay the price
Except if I want to buy some piece of academic research, they sell articles for as high at $60. Why aren’t academics complaining about the absurd costs for the public accessing their information?
Academics don't make money from academic publishing. In fact, they often have to pay exorbitant review fees to journals. There have been many, many HN threads about this part of the the publishing industry.
Most academics (at least in Sweden). Get a lot of their articles from their University Library. Scihub is also an option if needed. If those options aren't possible then either request the library to buy it or to do it themselves. Besides it is way less than $43k.
Even then a lot of people are against the high cost
They do? Every single academic in the country supports open-access, lobbies their institutions to pay for the costs of open access. Every researcher will send you a copy of their article if you are paywalled and want to read it. And you, like all academics, know about Sci-Hub, so you should do what most academics do and use Sci-Hub to pirate the article to begin with.
When I was in college we used it to try and try a sentiment analysis model since they are notoriously bad at detecting sarcasm and Twitter was full of sarcasm.
We also used the API to try and determine the most impacted areas after a natural disaster. Basically it would use the model we trained to try and read tweets of people that needed help or people tweeting about severe damage and group them by their coordinates.
The first one I agree isn’t really positive since it is just using other people’s data to train a model, but the second one could’ve been a useful tool to help EMS during a natural disaster.
sigh this is just straight up wrong, I was an RA that worked on a real time social media analytics software. We were able to pick up on things like likely covid infections sites etc.
Academia has flooded the literature with >10,000 research papers based on the Twitter API feed. Virtually none of it is reproducible, it's frequently based on circular logic, the methodologies are unscientific and the conclusions are usually deeply partisan, but it nonetheless gets amplified by the media as "proof" of various false claims.
Count me in the camp of people who is happy Musk is doing this. I've been writing for years about the plague of "social bot" research coming out of academia that's based on the Twitter API:
Maybe your specific work on COVID was good, but it was certainly drowned out by the work that was sharply net negative for both society and science. Academic institutions were clearly never going to get the problem under control, so booting them out whilst allowing search engines and the like to continue accessing the feed seems like a good solution.
This is absurd; you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Certainly, it is easy to find social science papers with terrible methodology that use the Twitter API, or that build on the sand of papers with terrible methodology.
But you conclude from that that all academic use of the Twitter API is garbage, which is nonsensical, and that preventing academics from studying Twitter at scale is the ideal solution. Your hyperbolic language (here and in your two medium articles, which I read thoroughly, along with the SSRN paper you cited*) does nothing for your own credibility.
The main 'methodology' of the SSRN paper is combing through other papers' datasets, contacting some of the identified 'bot' accounts, and establishing that they're operated by real people; the accounts as misidentified as bots when in reality the account operators were just aggressively quote-tweeting by using copy & paste to spread (eg) political or Qanon messages 200 times an hour. The authors point out that by really making an effort, Twitter users can tweet spam up to 25 times a minute, with no bots in sight! While the authors are quite correct to point out that people can be misidentified as bots, this completely ignores the fact of the unwanted spamming behavior. Pointing out the scientific flaws of 'tools' like Botometer is wholly valid, but the effort to research and develop tools for bot identification are a response to the fact of systematic information pollution, and most papers that try to address this issue are careful to offer caveats and qualifications about the limitations of their methods. It is not the fault of academics if media pundits over-simplify the fruits of their research.
Here are some examples of high quality research using data from Twitter:
1. Ephemeral Astroturfing Attacks: The Case of Fake Twitter Trends
A good start! It makes relatively limited claims (they aren't trying to assert whole elections are being distorted by Twitter bots) and is indeed higher quality than the ones I've been citing. It actually makes its data available, which is a step forward. But it's had limited impact (28 citations), and it's also not particularly useful. All they're doing is revealing that there is ordinary spam, hijacking and SEO on Turkish Twitter, which was never in doubt. All social media sites have these problems and the authors were tipped off by some amateur third party that highlights these campaigns. Most of what they find is plain commercial spam, there's also some politics in there related to local Turkish issues like cab drivers protesting against Uber but there's no evidence presented that this is actually having a real impact on politics.
The main question here is why are universities spending grant money on subsidizing Twitter? The only people who can do anything with this paper are Twitter's spam team, there isn't generalizable new scientific knowledge coming out of it.
2. Political Astroturfing on Twitter: How to Coordinate a Disinformation Campaign
This one starts with a big claim, so it can at least say it's doing important research. But I really wonder why you suggested it because it actually agrees with us and even destroys the underlying premise of the entire field! A pretty useful paper that might be worth citing in future articles on the topic, in fact.
Firstly, their conclusion is that "if even a powerful and well-financed organization like the South Korean secret service cannot instigate a successful disinformation campaign, then this may be more difficult than often assumed in public debates". In other words, the supposed problem motivating this entire field of >10,000 papers doesn't actually exist: even government agencies fail to have impact when they try to sway opinions with Twitter.
Secondly, they accept that our criticisms of the field are correct. "We argue that past research’s predominant focus on automated accounts, famously known as “social bots” ... misses its target since reports on recent astroturfing campaigns suggest that they are often at least partially run by actual humans" and "Because a ground truth is rarely available, systematic research into astroturfing campaigns is lacking".
They also dunk on ML models on page three, and admit that "these studies still largely focus on anecdotes and lack a theory-driven framework" i.e. are more like blog posts than scientific research. These were all points being made by Gallwitz, Kreil and myself years ago.
The paper does have issues! Still, they should get some cred for being honest about their findings, albeit on the penultimate page of a 25 page study. The first sentence of the paper is phrased in a misleading way: they assert that astroturfing on Twitter has the potential to influence politics, but their conclusion is that it actually doesn't. That's a problem that you see a lot when reading papers in some fields.
Paper 3. QAnon Propaganda on Twitter as Information Warfare.
Note that this paper also isn't about bots. It's a complaint about the behavior of real American people. Where is the actual science? Why are you picking this as an example of high quality research? It's not only blatantly partisan, reading more like a Guardian op-ed than a research paper, it starts by citing paper (2), the one that wrecks the whole premise of the field! They are happy to cite it as evidence that they should look for astroturfing instead of bots, but forget to mention that it shows that even an intelligence agency was unable to have any impact on politics by running Twitter campaigns. Yet that doesn't stop them asserting that their line of research is important due to the "innovative misuse of social media towards undermining democratic processes by promotion of magical thinking".
This sort of problem is rampant in published research. I've seen it so often that a paper cites another paper which directly undermines the conclusions of the first, yet the authors don't address or even mention it. This sort of thing is just deceptive. If they want to cite paper (2) then they need to tackle its conclusion.
The rest of it is just US Democratic Russiagate talking points. Getting into the accuracy of that is a book-sized job and and not about science, so I won't do that here, there are many such debates on the internet.
So that's your three papers. One is OK but not very valuable, one ends up (unintentionally?) wrecking the premise of the other ~10,000+ papers and one isn't even scientific research. It's unclear how they were picked but if these are really the best examples of high quality research from the field then, indeed, who really cares if Musk cuts it all off.
I'll try and find time to look at the papers you cite as high quality later today.
> you conclude from that that all academic use of the Twitter API is garbage, which is nonsensical
"All" no, a vast amount of it, yes. Is it nonsensical? Twitter themselves concluded this exact same thing even before Musk, both in public blog posts and internal emails (see the Twitter Files for examples).
But we don't really need to cite Twitter as an authority here. Just try to answer this question: what mechanisms exist that are stopping bad science outside the field of social bot research, and why have those mechanisms failed within it? It can't be peer review, university hiring committees and so on because those are all existing within social studies as well.
> Your hyperbolic language ...
What language do you think is hyperbolic, exactly, and why?
> Pointing out the scientific flaws of 'tools' like Botometer is wholly valid, but the effort to research and develop tools for bot identification are a response to the fact of systematic information pollution
This is exactly the sort of problem I'm talking about: this justification is circular. We do bad bot research because we know there are bots, we know there are bots because we do bad bot research. If there were actually big problems with social bots then it would be easy to find them and research them; we wouldn't see this situation where basically all papers are seeing patterns in noise.
Botometer is a good example of that. You admit that it's "scientifically flawed" but with respect, that language is not "hyperbolic" enough. It's not merely flawed, it's outright useless. It had an FP rate of 50% when tested against a known human dataset. Yet the Botometer paper has been cited over 900 times now (up from ~700 when I previously wrote about it). When exactly does the rest of the world get to call time on this bad behavior by the academy? These people are changing the opinions of world leaders on the back of misinformation, the exact problem they claim to be fighting.
> It is not the fault of academics if media pundits over-simplify the fruits of their research.
It wasn't media pundits that made academics cite the Botometer paper over 900 times, or write outright deceptive papers like the one I reviewed. The problem here is academia and the institutions need to start taking responsibility for it. Otherwise you're going to get situations like this one: academia will just get cut off from data. People don't have time to try and figure out which little subsections of the academy are following the rules to separate them from the rest.
There is literally only couple of US universities having that, for smaller universities 42k a month for a research or two doesn't make any financial sense at all. This price is just basically a huge gatekeeper to prevent most people using it.
Indiana University a Midwest US state school has a 3+ Billion Dollar endowment behind it and ranks 16th right now. University of Texas is #1 at $42B and Berkeley is 20th at $2.6B. These are just state schools. Stanford is at $38B and Yale is at $42B. There is plenty of money out there in the university endowments. They just need to spend it on things like research and professors rather than Golf Courses and sports stadiums.
It is for Twitter. Our attention is a synonym for showing ads. If advertisers step away because they got nervous about the behavior of the new owner then it's better for Twitter to have other sources of income than not.
The free users remain being the product though, don't we? We are the reach and the mined so the company can sell that but at least maybe there's a chance of not being interrupted.
Ideally, everyone would pay to use the service and nothing would be mined for manipulation but that world is hard to imagine in 2023.
> When does Twitter start paying it's users who produce the data?
Never.
Having a business in the capitalist system is about maximising profits.
Musk spent ~$44bn USD or so to buy Twitter (and tried to back out of the deal too). Do you really think Twitter is gonna fairly compensate any of the users any time soon?
You’d be better off migrating to Mastodon. Maybe some instance in that ecosystem will figure out how to use crypto for good, and to compensate its content creators.
>I'm not the greatest Musk fan but IMHO his approach to charge those who benefits from Twitter is spot on and I'm actually rooting for him to be able to find a viable business model which does not rely on selling my attention to highest bidder.
If there is money to be made, he's not going to pass it up. Why not charge and sell your attention to the highest bidder at the same time? It's the literal cable model and it's proven to work for 50 years.
The difficulty is, people can still scrape the data. That data scraping is likely to cost Twitter more than the API did, as they have to serve up the full page.
Yes, you can try to block people doing that, but historically people haven't succeeded.
scrapping data at scale is much harder that you are making it sounds like. Especially is the company is trying hard to prevent that. Much cheaper just to pay for the api.
LinkedIn tries hard to prevent scraping, but there are third parties doing it, and then re-selling it. Each user is presumably paying a fraction of what the scraping cost.
Fully agree, I just wish I knew who these people are, because clearly he has looked at some data that suggests they'll pay up, or his hosting costs will be significantly lowered.
If drive everyone important off for good with a ridiculous price before “the market adjusts” (Musk changes his mind) you’ve done permanent damage to your operation.
you're opposed to selling your attention to the highest bidder but you think it's a good business model to sell all of "your data" to any "market rate" bidder?
Alas the zombie entity will persist, people will stay here, but this is absolutely the death of this as a public social space, and the start of a dark new pay-to-play world for Twitter where only the very-few have real capabilities.
This is the death of the spirit of the project. May it hopefully wreck & burn fast.
The pretense of Twitter's usefulness will take too long to flail fade & fail, and it's not so instantly notable to consumers, but this is the most epic & rapid grade #enshittification a once valuable & once core internet service that the planet has ever witnessed. This is a complete fall from grace & capability. Nothing remains, nothing of value is left to the world.
Tim O'Reilly famously said, "create more value than you capture." Twitter is no longer a place that creates value. It is now a Scrooge McDuck potemkin village, profiteering off an image that it no longer deserves. Burn, fucker, burn, burn the fuck down, you vile traitorous, disrespectful pieces of shit that have ruined everything about the idea. Perish. New Twitter stands against humanity.
Anyone who wants to do research will just end up using Twitter's data from non official sources.
Last I checked web scraping and using undocumented but public APIs used in web/apps is still legal.0
Sorry, I guess I thought Musk had already removed legacy checks. The whole thing seems a little silly. King obviously doesn't need Twitter, but I'm sure he receives more value out of Twitter than $8/mo even so (or whatever they're charging now).
But accounts like his are what _drives_ people to Twitter. I already left months ago, but I'd definitely be leaving if the company that profits off of me wants to charge me for the privilege.
At the very least, they should be allowing Blue subscribers enough API access to do basic Zapier style workflows running a few times a day. There are a lot of folks out there who want to do the same simple personal uses of the Twitter API they have been doing for 10+ years.
He's probably getting some benefit out of this approach:
1. Some fun (the 420 comments) and shocking people.
2. Market research to see how people react to various prices (A/B testing while trying and backing out of bad decisions)
3. Free press - good or bad, it's in the news and he must be getting some benefit out of the attention.
Not a fan of this approach and hoping everything lands in a fair place.
I'm surprised that nobody has noticed that the price was set at 42k because it's another one of Musk's 420 (aka weed) jokes, and not because of any specific data showing that is the optimal price point for this offering.
He will run on the vague impression people had of him being a cool guy who smokes weed for the next 2 decades. I hope he goes to Mars so we don't have to hear about him, or at least we'll have an 8 minute delay?
Thank you for reminding me why I dislike this place so much.
I've literally got the email right here:
"As I mentioned on the phone, we structure them as a monthly subscription based on an annual agreement. Variables that affect pricing are the APIs you use to get data and the amount of data you consume each month. Our smallest packages fall between $5,000-$8,000 per month."
The price they quoted me, over the phone, was 6k. Doesn't mean we took it (we didn't) but that was what they were asking for. I know others that were paying 5k/mo.
And I know others who still had free accounts from way back in the day. Everyone is being swept up now.
I don't know what you mean about it being false. If you circumvent the API license by making tons of tokens and connecting from different IPs it is possible- much in the same way that a bank has free money if you rob it.
Given that Twitter data has been becoming less valuable due to recent events, I don't think Twitter has as much leverage to raise the price, even for businesses specializing in such data.
All this daily anti musk rhetoric veiled in pro science narratives and not one comment on every other entity milking academic budgets. There’s plenty of examples.
