[The Arab Spring cemented Twitter’s indispensable role in
fast-moving international stories. Elon Musk has destroyed that and
given us something useless — and dangerous. ]
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TWITTER GAVE US AN INDISPENSABLE REAL-TIME NEWS PLATFORM. X TOOK IT
AWAY.  
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Claire Berlinski
November 8, 2023
Politico
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_ The Arab Spring cemented Twitter’s indispensable role in
fast-moving international stories. Elon Musk has destroyed that and
given us something useless — and dangerous. _

, Twitter

 

I first began using Twitter, now X, after the 2010 earthquake in
Port-au-Prince
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when I could not find my family. I was in Washington, D.C. Within days
of the earthquake, hundreds of volunteers, using a crisis-mapping
platform called Ushahidi (Swahili for “witness”), began logging
calls for help via cellphone texts and Twitter, putting them on a map
and sending that information to search and rescue teams
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I only found my family because Facebook and Twitter worked even when
their phones and email did not.

Not long after came the Arab Spring, when Twitter was a source of
crucial, sometimes lifesaving information and a powerful coordinating
tool for demonstrators. For journalists and analysts, it was matchless
for watching events unfold in real time. I was in Istanbul during the
2013 Gezi Park demonstrations, which began as a protest
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the destruction of a park and turned into a massive uprising against
the Turkish government. Like everyone, I used Twitter to figure out
which streets were safe. No news agency could replicate this function
for citizens on the ground. But I used it, too, to tell the world what
was happening in Turkey.

That was the beginning of an era. Twitter was obviously imperfect, but
it quickly became _the_ central platform for gathering information
and networking in politics and international affairs, especially in
crises where traditional media coverage was thin.

[Protestors use their phones at the Gezi park in Taksim Square in
2013.]

Protestors use their phones at the Gezi Park in Taksim Square on June
6 in Istanbul, Turkey. | Uriel Sinai/Getty Images

The war in Gaza marks the end of that era. X CEO Elon Musk has so
profoundly undermined the functions that made Twitter useful in an
international crisis that it is now counterproductive to turn to it if
you hope to understand what’s happening on the ground when news
breaks around the world. Over the course of 10 years, X has evolved
from indispensable to useless.

It’s fitting that along with his other changes, Musk changed the
name of the company. Literally and figuratively, we’re witnessing
the first post-Twitter major world conflict.

Disinformation and misinformation proliferated on the platform prior
to Musk’s takeover. But the difference in degree is so significant
now as to amount to a difference in kind. Almost every significant
change Musk has made has reduced its value as a source of reliable
information from and for people affected by a disaster, and every
change, similarly, has increased its utility to malicious
propagandists and scammers.

When Musk arrived, he dissolved Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council,
the advisory group of some 100 independent civil, human rights and
other organizations that helped the company to combat
misinformation, and fired its full-time Trust and Safety
employees, including all but one member of the AI ethics team that
monitored algorithmic amplification
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He blew up the old verification system. A blue check once signified
that the account belonged to someone whose identity had been confirmed
and who fell under one of the following categories: government;
companies, brands and organizations; news organizations and
journalists; entertainment; sports and gaming; activists and
organizers; content creators; and influential individuals.

The prevalence on Twitter of verified journalists, academics,
researchers and government sources made it possible, in a crisis, to
quickly find reliable people who were on the ground and who could
probably be trusted to report what they were seeing in reasonably good
faith. Now, the blue checkmark signifies only that the owner has paid
for it. When you buy a blue check, your posts go to the top of the
search results and replies, irrespective of others’ desire to see
them.

[Wounded Palestinians sit in al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, central
Gaza Strip, after arriving from al-Ahli hospital following an
explosion.]

Wounded Palestinians sit in al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, central
Gaza Strip, after arriving from al-Ahli Hospital following an
explosion there on Oct. 17. | Abed Khaled/AP

X now pays users
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number of views they receive, creating a massive incentive to post
sensationalistic and inflammatory lies. On-the-ground witnesses —
and worse, _people who need help _— can’t reach their audiences
unless they have a costly blue check mark and a willingness to compete
with the most outrageous promoted content.

Musk has stripped headlines and summaries off article previews. Images
are no longer accompanied by context, making it that much easier to
misunderstand them and that much less likely that users will read the
article. Meanwhile, Musk promotes — directly, via his own
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algorithmically
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conspiracy theorists, Russian war propagandists, hostile-state media,
foreign and domestic extremists and engagement farmers who exploit
pain and tragedy to gain followers.

Musk has created the conditions for a flood of misinformation and fake
accounts — a problem that has proven particularly acute during the
current war in Gaza. AI-generated images are passed off as real: In a
photo shared millions of times, for example, a man is seen carrying
his children out of the ruins of a bombed building
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says, “An image is worth a thousand words.” The Palestine flag
suggests the image is from Gaza. A BBC fact-checker has confirmed the
image is completely fake, generated by AI.

A massive number of accounts posting images that purport to be from
Gaza are in fact posting images from unrelated conflicts. These tweets
have racked up millions of views and shares.

According to Cyabra, an Israeli analysis firm, pro-Hamas forces have
launched
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coordinated influence operations campaign involving tens of thousands
of fake profiles. As a result, one in five social media accounts
participating in the conversation about the war in Gaza are fake. One
in four pro-Hamas profiles are fake. It’s not clear who is creating
and using these fake profiles to spread disinformation, but it could
be anyone from Russian internet trolls to antisemites to far-right
hucksters who are eager to make a buck.

Accounts that were once clearly labeled as state-affiliated, such as
that of Iran’s Press TV, are no longer distinguished from others. In
September, an EU report found
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and influence” of Kremlin-backed accounts on social media, and on X
in particular, had increased in 2023.

In another study, the EU found that disinformation was more easily
found on X than on any other social media platform
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It also received more engagement than it did on any other platform.

That report found that X had the highest ratio of what the authors
called “disinformation actors” to real posts. “The average
engagement with mis/disinformation content found on X is 1.977 times
as high as the average engagement with non-mis/disinformation,” the
authors wrote. In other words, X users are twice as likely to engage
with lies as the truth.

Snuff videos have proliferated on the platform, too. A pro-Kremlin
account shared a video of a beheading in Ukraine in April
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Endless videos of atrocities purportedly committed by Hamas or by
Israel clatter across my feed: It is all but impossible to use X now
without seeing a video that shows, or purports to show, the murder of
a human being.

Meanwhile, good sources of information are leaving the platform. Many
of the most useful voices are now gone. Reporters have fled, largely
moving to Bluesky. But Bluesky can’t replace X yet; its network is
too small. You can use it to talk to other journalists, not so much to
find sources or promote your work to your readers.

To judge by the responses to the fake tweets, most people have no idea
they’re fake. Musk certainly doesn’t. Recently, he recommended
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a since-deleted tweet) that his followers follow two well-known
disinformation accounts — one of them, for example, provides such
helpful analysis as, “The overwhelming majority of people in the
media and banks are zi0nists.” When Musk suggests something like
this, it is not just his 162 million followers who see it. You can
mute him, but unless you do, everything Musk says is now forced into
the timeline of every user of the platform, whether or not they follow
him.

Some will reply, correctly, that the mainstream media hasn’t covered
itself in glory during this conflict either. Many news organizations
have made serious mistakes in the past weeks. But the difference
between sloppy or biased news coverage and millions
of _deliberate _lies — none retracted — is significant. If you
read the former, you’ll still be on this planet. If you read the
latter, you’ll be in an alternate universe.

As for Israelis or Palestinians hoping to use the platform to exchange
lifesaving information? Forget it. For eight bucks, anyone can
impersonate the official account of the IDF. (Impersonation is still
officially against X’s rules, but the lack of a real verification
system makes it easier to do for longer.) How could Israelis trust
warnings and updates from their government or from each other on X
when Hamas or Iranian operatives can so readily pretend to be anyone
they please? How would Palestinian rescuers use X to locate people who
need help when every image they see directs them to Syria?

This state of affairs is massively deleterious to American national
security. Members of Congress are as vulnerable to hostile
disinformation as anyone else. One morning, I watched a number of
Russian accounts, including that of former Russian President Dmitry
Medvedev
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begin simultaneously to push out the line that Israel had been
attacked with weapons the U.S. sent to Ukraine, which Israelis
immediately denied. By afternoon, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene
(R-Ga.) was asserting this as fact. 

Organized, state-sponsored information operations aim to generate
support in the U.S. for policies that are not in our interest and
dampen support for policies that are. “Feel the difference,” wrote
Medvedev on X recently on a post that showed two photos: on the left,
a vast sea of protesters against Israel — a U.S. ally — and, on
the right, a pitiful handful of protesters against Russia’s actions
in Ukraine. That Russian information operations on social media have
inflamed the global orgy of antisemitism we’ve seen since Hamas’
attack goes without saying.

[Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks with reporters.]

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks with reporters at the U.S. Capitol
on Oct. 12. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

X has long been a critical source of information for journalists, and
the news cycle now demands reporting at X speed. For most users, the
website was a diversion. For journalists, it was essential. We built
our audiences and our careers on Twitter. We invested years of our
labor and creativity — for free. _We_ built it, and _we_ made it
valuable.

The degeneration of the quality of information on X means that
journalists who are still on the platform waste far more time looking
for the signal in the noise. They waste more time running down rumors.
They are at greater risk of sharing fake information. They are
doubtless absorbing narratives and framings from X shaped by
disinformation, even if they’re not sharing falsehoods. It’s far
from clear how the media will adapt to a post-Twitter world.

At least in the short term, the market won’t be able to solve this
problem because Twitter’s value to consumers was owed to its market
dominance. Everyone used it. A number of competitors are now trying to
fill the void, but because the microblogging market is now fractured,
no company can play the central role Twitter played.

That might be why some governments are stepping in to fix these
problems instead. On Oct. 13, the EU launched a probe of X
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the spread of disinformation and violent content related to the
Israel-Hamas conflict, the first step in an investigation to determine
whether the platform is violating the EU’s new Digital Services Act.

Congress should do the same. The situation is intolerable to a
democracy. Musk is harming American security by gift-wrapping X and
handing it over to terrorists and hostile governments who are running
information operations against democratic ones. In the long term,
it’s finalizing the divorce between the public and reality.

But Congress seems incapable. It was hard enough for the House to
elect a speaker. X has been left to govern itself, and it has no
interest in preserving the uniquely important role Twitter played by
allowing real people, around the world, instantly to find and
communicate with one another during a crisis.

It’s fashionable to be cynical about X, but at its height, it was an
astonishing human achievement. It cannot be rebuilt and it’s hard to
see how it could be built again. One man destroyed it. It is one of
history’s great acts of vandalism.

We still badly need reliable, real-time information about global
conflicts on a platform with the reach that Twitter once had. But X
won’t ever again be that platform.

_Claire Berlinski is a Paris-based journalist and the editor of the
Cosmopolitan Globalist._

 

 

 

* twitter
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* X
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* Elon Musk
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* community destruction
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