Twitter Calls Elon's Bluff...What Now? [Content Made Simple]
Twitter Calls Elon's Bluff...What Now? [Content Made Simple]
Issue #273: Minors on dating apps, the harmfulness(?) of social media, and more.
TOP OF THE WEEK:
Twitter will give Elon Musk ‘firehose’ data access to settle bot complaints
Quote:
Twitter is preparing to grant Elon Musk unprecedented access to platform data in an effort to address his concerns about automated accounts, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday. Citing a person familiar with the company’s thinking, the report says Twitter is preparing to give Musk access to the so-called “firehose” API that contains every tweet as it is posted.
In April, Musk legally committed to purchasing Twitter but has grown increasingly vocal about possible bot activity on the platform, in what some see as an effort to cancel or renegotiate the deal on more favorable terms.
Commentary:
Man. As I wrote a number of weeks ago: no one knows what’s going to happen with Elon Musk and Twitter, but we can bet that it will be a wild ride. So it has been.
It seems that Elon is trying to make the deal more favorable or squirrel out of it entirely. I have bet since the beginning that the deal wouldn’t actually happen, and it may not. But truly no one knows. Will be interesting to see how Elon responds to Twitter basically giving him the ability to see every tweet posted in real time.
HITTING THE LINKS
Link #1: How The Internet Is Like A Dying Star
A great article from Charlie Warzel elaborating on another great article from L. M. Sacasas.
“What we’re focused on is not the particular event or movement before us, but the one right behind us,” Sacasas told me when I called him last week. “As we layer on these events, it becomes difficult for anything to break through. You’re trying to enter the information environment and the debate, and you find layer upon layer of abstraction over the initial point of conflict. You find yourself talking about what people are saying about the thing, instead of talking about the thing. We’re caking layers of commentary over the event itself and the event fades.” This is, if you ask me, a decent description of the last five years of news cycles.
Link #2: The Teens Slipping Through the Cracks on Dating Apps
A worthy concern!
To some, having minors on dating apps might seem harmless. Many young people start accounts hoping to find other people around their age. Queer teens in particular sometimes come searching for a sense of community that they can’t find at home. But these apps are made for adults, some of whom are too eager to meet someone so young. I spoke with three young people who said they online-dated while under 18, easily lying about their age to create profiles. Though their experiences differed, our conversations painted a concerning picture of a process in which they sought romantic validation and exploration but instead wound up feeling used.
Link #3: How Harmful Is Social Media?
Wow! So many interesting insights in this New Yorker article.
Another study, led by Nejla Asimovic and Joshua Tucker, replicated Gentzkow’s approach in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and they found almost precisely the opposite results: the people who stayed on Facebook were, by the end of the study, more positively disposed to their historic out-groups. The authors’ interpretation was that ethnic groups have so little contact in Bosnia that, for some people, social media is essentially the only place where they can form positive images of one another. “To have a replication and have the signs flip like that, it’s pretty stunning,” Bail told me. “It’s a different conversation in every part of the world.”
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