2023-05-25 01:08:31
Seven months ago Elon Musk bought Twitter, paid 44,000 million dollars. Trina followed and thinks about all the topics, responds to messages, confirms rumors about changes in the social network. He makes adjustments to the functions, molds it to his liking. He has made this platform his own amusement park.
One of the most complex issues has been the censorship of content after the arrival of Musk. The most recent: Twitter blocked accounts criticizing Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, two days before the elections held in that country. In India, the picture was just as dark: the accounts of two of the main media outlets were suspended for no apparent reason. They have already been restored.
And it is that expressing yourself freely in India is a rather worrying matter. Recently it became known that the government of that country asked Twitter to remove posts that included images or links to a documentary which questions the leadership of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, during the 2002 Gujarat riots. Musk said he did not know “what exactly happened.” Among the posts removed by Twitter were comments by a local parliamentarian.
According to the NGO Reporters Without Borders, freedom of expression in the Asian country has drastically decreased, with a drop of eight points in the last year to 150th place in the international ranking. What happened? The Government of India, for example, raided the offices of the British channel BBC, after the blocking of the documentaryin a raid by the tax authorities.
In an article published by El País of Spain it is said that Twitter’s help to autocratic regimes is not an exaggeration. And more if one takes into account that after Musk’s landing, the company has received 971 requests from governments (compared to only 338 in the semester from October 2021 to April 2022) and has fully agreed to 808, and partially to 154.
In general, the conversations on this platform, which has more than 500 million users each month, have always been politicized. Even when Musk was not the owner, he criticized this: he said that the directors at that time had a very pro-liberal, Democratic Party-like thought. Now, when he is on the other side of the story, he seems to agree with the issue of content moderation or what is not convenient for the services of the social network.
Carlos Cortés is co-director of Green Lantern, an organization dedicated to analyzing discourse and trends in social networks. For him, it is a fact that you have to moderate the content on this and any other similar social media. “When Musk arrived, he promised a new beginning and an ecosystem would never silence anyone, but what we have seen in these months is that he did not have the solutions either.Arbitrating a space for the exchange of people is not easy”.
And he added: “The problem that is clearest at the moment is that there is a lot of arbitrariness and lack of transparency regarding what content is being moderated, what accounts are suspended, what content we are seeing more than others. Undoubtedly, in some cases it is censorship, but it is necessary to arbitrate what its users do in their spaces”.
For his part, the Spanish Ferran Lalueza, professor and researcher at the Open University of Catalonia, said that it is important to take into account that, like other social networks, Twitter also has its own community policies or standards.. However, he commented that “here the pressure against inappropriate content has certainly been eased, which is not necessarily positive, quite the contrary, the restriction rules are reasonable and it is good that they are complied with.”
In addition, he pointed out that in recent months the content control systems on Twitter “have relaxed”, among other things, because the people and resources dedicated to this function have been drastically reduced. “From that perspective, we could understand that censorship, the control of inappropriate content, is less.”
It must be taken into account that Twitter and any social network are required to comply with the legal regulations of the countries where it operates. In this sense, the regimes have the power to condition the contents that are available to local citizens. “Already if there is too much productivity in the restriction, it would become a critical aspect because it does not respect freedom of expression and more when Elon Musk presented himself as a supporter of those freedoms,” said Lalueza.
Other things that Elon Musk did in order to cause spectacularity or media impact was that he disclosed a part of the operation of the recommendations algorithm, which made it possible to confirm that the algorithm rewards more if retweets or likes are given, actions that give increased traffic or movement, for example.
Now, since the billionaire is in and looking for a new business model, has been rewarding accounts that pay for verification (blue pimp) or people who do not put external links. The “For you” tab, his great idea that he copied from TikTok, changed the way of consuming on this social network.
Elon Musk and his handling of Twitter will continue to be talked about, it seems that his policies and peculiarities will be a never-ending topic.
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