Musk fired people at twitter working on an initiative with US, NZ government on analysing algorithms affects on people's political beliefs.

[oali24]

Summary

 

So it turns out that some of the people that Elon Musk has fired from twitter were going to work on a project with Microsoft, the US government, and the New Zealand government on developing tools to do with analysing algorithms in the context of how they influence the spread of political ideas, as most of these social media platforms do not publish their algorithms to the public, this project was in the works as recently as last september but Musk seems to have gotten rid of the entire team that was going to handle it. Partnership in this project was also offered to Meta but they declined to be involved.

 

Quotes

Quote

At the end of September, the government announced it would partner with Microsoft, Twitter and the US government to develop technologies that could reveal how algorithms influence users’ political beliefs and potential actions.

 

However, one of Musk’s first actions was to fire Twitter’s head of legal, Vijaya Gadde, and people from the machine learning, ethics, transparency and accountability team headed by Rumman Chowdhury. Seemingly, Musk considers their work and advocacy for algorithmic transparency and content moderation goes against his vision of free speech on the Twitter platform.

 

The entire team the New Zealand government was planning to work with disappeared. And it’s unlikely any work outlined in September will actually eventuate.

Quote

In a statement issued by Ardern six weeks ago, the voice from Twitter welcoming the initiative was Vijaya Gadde, the company’s general counsel and  head of legal, policy, and trust. She called it a “key building block” in better understanding the function of algorithms. She was one of the first people to be fired by Musk.

Quote

“They're considered trade secrets, but that doesn't have to be the way. There's a bunch of movements - including the Algorithmic Justice League, where people are - we need to be able to see what these algorithms are and how they're designed. And we need to be able to compare them,” Henshaw-Plath told Mediawatch.

 

But Meta - the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp - and TikTok’s Chinese parent company Bytedance are not taking part in this Christchurch Call project. 

My thoughts

I know this is really stradling the line between politics and tech so I'm going to be very clear that my thoughts on this here on the forum are going to be just on the tech side. Anyway, It seems really unfortunate that Musk got rid of this team because the algorithms are clearly very important and are affecting societies and we have absolutely no insight into it, I think its only fair that if the social media companies are putting their products out there, we should know what's in them, the same way that food manufacturers list the ingredients of their products.

 

Sources

https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/01-11-2022/unknown-territory-jacinda-ardern-on-elon-musk-and-twitter

https://theconversation.com/elon-musks-twitter-takeover-has-disrupted-the-christchurch-call-nz-needs-to-rethink-its-digital-strategy-195213

https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2018860941/christchurch-call-pushes-against-the-algorithms

[Brooksie359]

I would have to disagree on this one. Everyone knows too much twitter causes people to lose their sanity. Also there is 0 chance I would trust an internal review of this vs having a third party do this. Just like I wouldn't trust first party benchmarks for hardware. Also twitter is currently not profitable and might even go bankrupt so why should they pay for something like this? Ideally there would be a third party investigation that is not funded by twitter but by the governments involved as it would eliminate any possibility of conflict of intests. 

[Arika]

2 hours ago, oali24 said:

Anyway, It seems really unfortunate that Musk got rid of this team because the algorithms are clearly very important and are affecting societies and we have absolutely no insight into it,

you're assuming they would make their algorithms public.

 

2 hours ago, oali24 said:

I think its only fair that if the social media companies are putting their products out there, we should know what's in them

hard disagree. if people knew exactly how the algorithms worked they would 100% be abused and manipulated which would make them useless.

[oali24]

1 hour ago, Arika S said:

you're assuming they would make their algorithms public.

I'm saying they should make their algorithms public, this could have been a movement in the direction of more transparency, because right only they know anything about their algorithm

 

1 hour ago, Arika S said:

hard disagree. if people knew exactly how the algorithms worked they would 100% be abused and manipulated which would make them useless.

How would they be manipulated? do you have any examples of what could happen? By this logic open source software is useless because people have access to the source code and could abuse it.

[mr moose]

Twitter and facebook have been using their algorithms to change public discourse through all forms of automated "fact checking" and "banning" for quite a few years now.  So I highly doubt this project would have become public anyway. Twitter obviously have a reason/policy/algorithm for banning and fact checking only certain people and opinions, they were hardly going to release a tool that would show everyone what it was.

[Arika]

1 hour ago, oali24 said:

How would they be manipulated? do you have any examples of what could happen?

Say we knew exactly how the youtube algorithm worked. the front page of youtube would be full of just random crap because every new creator now knows exactly how to get their videos out to more people so. instead of youtube now recommending videos based on your likes, your recommended essentially becomes "most recent uploaded" from every creator regardless of whether you follow them or not. if everyone has a leg up, no one does.

 

 

Quote

By this logic open source software is useless because people have access to the source code and could abuse it.

False equivalence. open source software is the content. and algorithm pushes the content in-front of people

[Fasterthannothing]

How about just removing all algorithms and what you see is what you get meaning for instance whatever someone post on Twitter it shows in exactly chronological order on your timeline.

[Mark Kaine]

46 minutes ago, Fasterthannothing said:

How about just removing all algorithms and what you see is what you get meaning for instance whatever someone post on Twitter it shows in exactly chronological order on your timeline.

Good idea in theory, but it would lead to utter chaos... simply too many tweets, do you *really* want to sift through possibly millions of posts (eh, sorry, that's what "tweets" actually are) of random people telling you what they had for dinner,  or would you not rather see things like news, and other things that are relevant to your interests? 

 

btw, it feels weird writing that, because i do not believe twitter has any use or purpose currently or going forward... so trying to "fix" it after it's been purposefully broken seems kinda weird, and certainly not my job lol.

[Fasterthannothing]

23 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Good idea in theory, but it would lead to utter chaos... simply too many tweets, do you *really* want to sift through possibly millions of posts (eh, sorry, that's what "tweets" actually are) of random people telling you what they had for dinner,  or would you not rather see things like news, and other things that are relevant to your interests? 

 

btw, it feels weird writing that, because i do not believe twitter has any use or purpose currently or going forward... so trying to "fix" it after it's been purposefully broken seems kinda weird, and certainly not my job lol.

I mean that's exactly what we are doing on this forum we read through post as they are written. Having it with no algorithm doesn't mean people can't categorize their tweets so people can then filter the timeline down further if they want.

[Doobeedoo]

I don't consider social media sites tech anymore. But just obtuse street spiral degeneracy online.

Man I can't believe people are so emotionally invested in Twitter or whatever. Like who cares about any, what happens to them or not. Just saying. I see so many parrot about this lately like it serves any actual importance in the world. Really it's more American thing in general though.

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, Fasterthannothing said:

I mean that's exactly what we are doing on this forum we read through post as they are written. Having it with no algorithm doesn't mean people can't categorize their tweets so people can then filter the timeline down further if they want.

A forum is not twitter, twitter is not a forum either,  it's a microblogging website (which is an incredible stupid idea by itself,  but that's what it is and with their algorithm they at least managed to make it usable,  otherwise it's total chaos as said)

 

A forum works completely different,  it's chronological,  it's generally not difficult to find what's interesting to you, it has sections (boards) etc...

 

 

1 hour ago, Fasterthannothing said:

Having it with no algorithm doesn't mean people can't categorize their tweets so people can then filter the timeline down further if they want.

Huh, what? How does this work, examples?

[oali24]

1 hour ago, Doobeedoo said:

I don't consider social media sites tech anymore. But just obtuse street spiral degeneracy online.

Man I can't believe people are so emotionally invested in Twitter or whatever. Like who cares about any, what happens to them or not. Just saying. I see so many parrot about this lately like it serves any actual importance in the world. Really it's more American thing in general though.

I'm not a goddamn American, but of course I care about twtitter, its how activists and rights groups here in middle east coordinate action, Elon Musk killing Twitter will have extreme ramifications that people in say America do not realise. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/twitter-collapse-fear-arab-activists-scrambling

[divito]

6 hours ago, oali24 said:

How would they be manipulated? do you have any examples of what could happen? By this logic open source software is useless because people have access to the source code and could abuse it.

SEO.

[Doobeedoo]

22 minutes ago, oali24 said:

I'm not a goddamn American, but of course I care about twtitter, its how activists and rights groups here in middle east coordinate action, Elon Musk killing Twitter will have extreme ramifications that people in say America do not realise. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/twitter-collapse-fear-arab-activists-scrambling

I mean yeah definitely for sure other use sure. I was just pointing out how there's a lot of cesspool use in forefront of the site and it's image, how it's majority of it. Also it's definitely bad to rely only on a single site for X reason that's for sure. Just saying, because it's like newsflash to people once shit goes nuclear.

[oali24]

8 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

I would have to disagree on this one. Everyone knows too much twitter causes people to lose their sanity. Also there is 0 chance I would trust an internal review of this vs having a third party do this. Just like I wouldn't trust first party benchmarks for hardware. Also twitter is currently not profitable and might even go bankrupt so why should they pay for something like this? Ideally there would be a third party investigation that is not funded by twitter but by the governments involved as it would eliminate any possibility of conflict of intests. 

 

3 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Good idea in theory, but it would lead to utter chaos... simply too many tweets, do you *really* want to sift through possibly millions of posts (eh, sorry, that's what "tweets" actually are) of random people telling you what they had for dinner,  or would you not rather see things like news, and other things that are relevant to your interests? 

 

btw, it feels weird writing that, because i do not believe twitter has any use or purpose currently or going forward... so trying to "fix" it after it's been purposefully broken seems kinda weird, and certainly not my job lol.

 

2 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

I don't consider social media sites tech anymore. But just obtuse street spiral degeneracy online.

Man I can't believe people are so emotionally invested in Twitter or whatever. Like who cares about any, what happens to them or not. Just saying. I see so many parrot about this lately like it serves any actual importance in the world. Really it's more American thing in general though.

 

22 minutes ago, aerospacesocletycommIss1on said:

US company privately owned from what I understand. If you don't like it take your complaints somewhere else.

Guys, I'm sorry to break it you but for as much shit is on twitter, twitter is one of the most important mass communications tools in the current day, the ramifications of the algorithm is so huge that it is difficult to comprehend. People here do not realise that there are places other than America where twitter is one of the only ways for people to communicate with lots of other people without being straight up put in danger. There is a program on BBC arabic news wher they show the reactions of people on twitter to news and its so liberating for people, twitter really is the "town square" as Musk puts it for people like us. If you don't like twitter then don't use it, but why cheer on its demise?

[Fasterthannothing]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

Huh, what? How does this work, examples?

Well people already tag their post with hashtags and so based on that you can make a filtering system. So for example if you want to see what's happening with a sports team you would filter it down to that team and see a condensed chronological timeline of tweets relating to that team simple as that. No boosting down voting brigading or algorithmic manipulation.

[oali24]

6 hours ago, Arika S said:

Say we knew exactly how the youtube algorithm worked. the front page of youtube would be full of just random crap because every new creator now knows exactly how to get their videos out to more people so. instead of youtube now recommending videos based on your likes, your recommended essentially becomes "most recent uploaded" from every creator regardless of whether you follow them or not. if everyone has a leg up, no one does.

 

 

False equivalence. open source software is the content. and algorithm pushes the content in-front of people

why not make it that people can control what how the algorithm works? then spam would be less effective since there would be so many slightly different algorithms for recommendation that spammers couldn't manipulate it as effectively as not everyone would be on the same algorithm,

[solado]

54 minutes ago, oali24 said:

twitter is one of the most important mass communications tools in the current day,

This makes me feeling violently unwell.

 

9 hours ago, Arika S said:

hard disagree. if people knew exactly how the algorithms worked they would 100% be abused and manipulated which would make them useless.

Very much this, it's why no body knows how the YouTube algo 100% works because people just game it. Like back in 2010 when people figured out back linking and page rank on Google and you got spammed with all those low quality, crappy affiliate infested repost websites from Amazon.

 

 

Either way, it's clear that algorithms have clear usage when it comes to pollical sway, feed people who veer off into one camp some nice bait and you have yourself a hardline left / right leaning person. Musk killing off this department doesn't really do much for society anyway as it's already clear you can feed people information and it will skew their perception of the world.

[Doobeedoo]

1 hour ago, oali24 said:

Guys, I'm sorry to break it you but for as much shit is on twitter, twitter is one of the most important mass communications tools in the current day, the ramifications of the algorithm is so huge that it is difficult to comprehend. People here do not realise that there are places other than America where twitter is one of the only ways for people to communicate with lots of other people without being straight up put in danger. There is a program on BBC arabic news wher they show the reactions of people on twitter to news and its so liberating for people, twitter really is the "town square" as Musk puts it for people like us. If you don't like twitter then don't use it, but why cheer on its demise?

I get it in terms of certain important events and such to be heard in the world that is needed. I was mainly saying about other side how it gets abused completely and all that, how nothing should be seen as some perfect outlet for anyone, because anything in the end can fail or be abushed and changed like we see. Anything new can also replace it as well. When people heavily depend on one thing from a big company, it's bad, also can't expect a company to care about anything than profit in the end.

56 minutes ago, Caroline said:

Sure. But it's not an american thing at all. You should see all the smartphone zombies where I live, on it almost 24/7 like junkies, it's not an american thing anymore, it's widespread.

No for sure I get it, mean how there's a lot of US thing on it that is toxic, the general being horrible person online and all that, a lot of brainwashing trash too. But yes, younger gens sadly either stay away and do better things or get consumed by filth through media or degenerate games.

[SansVarnic]

*edit: Warning this is lengthier than I intended it to be, I apologize.

 

13 hours ago, oali24 said:

because the algorithms are clearly very important and are affecting societies and we have absolutely no insight into it,

This is 100% opinion and, in some ways, a little strawman.

In what manner has this changed? Was the algorithm public prior to Musk's acquisition, and was it going to be made public had the acquisition not been made? In what way has this deal been changed due to the acquisition other than it being reviewed and reconsidered?

Elon has been overly transparent about his position with twitter, sans the obvious legal stuff there is no question about what he is doing. From a business perspective he is making changes for the better of the product as whole from his perspective. The prior executives had no problem making it public they were willing to censor people based on their viewpoint. The twitter CEO was incredibly open about his position on anti-free speech and how he wanted to capitalize on that. Elon just happens to completely oppose that view and believes in zero censorship sans the obvious calls for violence and illegal activity.

 

I am no Elon Musk fanboy, and I don't pretend to be, I am stating my position on what I have seen and heard from interviews with both parties. I know I am big on linking for context but in this instance, I don't have the time and I iirc some are political, so I'll let it be for now.

 

Imo, people are getting worked up over something that has yet or not going to have a direct impact on the public or in a very small way. The only thing I can see happening is when twitter is re-opened for public trading again it will be more profitable than it was before. Elon is no fool, maybe a little socially inept, but no fool.

 

4 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

Really it's more American thing in general though.

This is an incredibly ignorant thing of you to say. There are a great many assumptions about Americans that go around that very unlikely and untrue. It's human nature to become easily affected by circumstance, swayed by convenience and chose laziness over hardship, history proves this time and time again. There are more stigmas that are placed on Americans that I can point out are more European than American. Just because a current trend is occurring in one place doesn't make it natural to that group of people. For example, there are many trends taking place today in the US that started in the UK or other countries and vice versa. 

Take two seconds to think before you generalize openly.

 

Yes, I took offense. In my time in service, I got the chance to see how the world sees the US and how the US sees the world, it's appallingly ignorant in both directions. And I will add, there is 4 major areas in the US that add to confusion of things, we have the East coast, Midwest, West coast and Southern California. If you want to generalize Americans, be sure to know of whom you speak before clumping it together. Not to mention, there are also Canadians, Mexicans and every country in Central/South America as well.  

 

3 hours ago, oali24 said:

I'm not a goddamn American, but of course I care about twtitter, its how activists and rights groups here in middle east coordinate action, Elon Musk killing Twitter will have extreme ramifications that people in say America do not realise. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/twitter-collapse-fear-arab-activists-scrambling

If Musk closed twitter, it would be for the better. It was a cesspool of a company and software since its inception.

That said, Musk is not shutting it down, anyone that thinks otherwise is blowing more hot air out their arse than a 100 hot air balloons.

 

1 hour ago, Caroline said:

Wasn't twitter made with that in mind? for people to write short messages, but somehow it (d)evolved into a cesspool of toxic political fanatics, MSM shitposting, internet "celebrities", pr0n and conspiracy theorists.

Absolutely.

 

2 hours ago, oali24 said:

Guys, I'm sorry to break it you but for as much shit is on twitter, twitter is one of the most important mass communications tools in the current day, the ramifications of the algorithm is so huge that it is difficult to comprehend. People here do not realise that there are places other than America where twitter is one of the only ways for people to communicate with lots of other people without being straight up put in danger. There is a program on BBC arabic news wher they show the reactions of people on twitter to news and its so liberating for people, twitter really is the "town square" as Musk puts it for people like us. If you don't like twitter then don't use it, but why cheer on its demise?

 your not giving people the benefit of understanding here, but to be as helpful as I can be. Twitter never should have been what it is today. As I stated earlier in my comment about the past ceo being openly supportive of censorship and anti-free speech. There are a plethora of reasons for twitter and facebook and a few other to die off. Have you ever heard the phrase, be the fool but don't open your mouth and prove it? well twitter opens the door to those who enjoy opening their mouths. React rather than act. People today worldwide post in twitter based on immediate feelings or emotion rather than giving some thought and using some sense or logic beforehand.

 

Your argument, though it has little legitimacy, is weak in this case. It's based on a large assumption of what may or could happen rather than what is or has happened. As I stated before "Musk is not shutting it down, anyone that thinks otherwise is blowing more hot air out their arse than a 100 hot air balloons."  As ridiculous as Twitter is, it's not going away. 

 

Lastly your opinion on America has zero to do with twitter, this is not and American thing it's a worldwide thing and your extremely poor understanding is limiting your ability to grasp your ignorance on this subject. You're making this about you (your country) rather than the bigger picture of things and finger pointing the US as a scapegoat <insert strawman comment> in your argument. Do better. Americans, the majority of us that have lives, dont care about social media, and the ones you are so candidly pointing a finger at are a bunch sissy pant nit wits that spend more time engaging in mediocracy than paying attention their own life, children, mentally and physically. Or those whom have caught themselves up in things that have no frugal value other than a place for them to open their thoughts to the world for the nitpickers to judge.

 

You're fighting the wrong battle. 

Quote

People here do not realise that there are places other than America where twitter is one of the only ways for people to communicate with lots of other people without being straight up put in danger.

.... that is another immense assumption. People here in this forum are from all over the world and are very aware of this, even in the US. Don't presume to think that because you believe this to be true that it is. I am from the US and even before my time in the service I was aware of the dangers present in other countries with speech limitations. First world countries aren't blind, we have many idiots that turn a blind eye, but we are not blind.

 

I feel you are fighting a battle on behalf of others ... trend lightly I warn you as these are battles people tend to "take up the fight" with little actual understanding of those whom they are taking a stand for.

 

"Just because a man is homeless doesn't mean he is there by circumstance; it may be by choice." - Anonymous

Edited November 27, 2022 by SansVarnic

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, Caroline said:

I mean. Wasn't twitter made with that in mind?

Probably. Maybe! I actually don't know lol.

My point is due to the amount of users this doesn't work... it does work in some kind of microcosm, sure (like if you only add rl friends or some specific,  umm "tweeters'...)

 

but then you will lose out a lot of information (which you may say you don't care about) and it will be very hard to actually find new and interesting stuff (which is defacto how twitter has been used until *recently*) unless you really want to sift through the aforementioned millions of "what i had to dinner" posts, err, "tweets".

 

you know? im not even sure twitter was ever supposed to be like this (but i don't know,  maybe at the very beginning) ... i always thought that's what fb is for lol... (never used fb, so i certainly don't know that either, hah)

 

 

[Brooksie359]

2 hours ago, oali24 said:

 

 

 

Guys, I'm sorry to break it you but for as much shit is on twitter, twitter is one of the most important mass communications tools in the current day, the ramifications of the algorithm is so huge that it is difficult to comprehend. People here do not realise that there are places other than America where twitter is one of the only ways for people to communicate with lots of other people without being straight up put in danger. There is a program on BBC arabic news wher they show the reactions of people on twitter to news and its so liberating for people, twitter really is the "town square" as Musk puts it for people like us. If you don't like twitter then don't use it, but why cheer on its demise?

Im sorry but too much usage of Twitter is not good for you as much as you want to call it the most important mass communication tool today. I for one thought that was the internet but I guess Twitter replaced the internet at some point. Regardless you didn't even address what I said about doing this through a third party as again a first party investigation into their own algorithm sounds like its full of conflicts of interest and I would not trust the results. 

[Mark Kaine]

1 minute ago, Brooksie359 said:

Im sorry but too much usage of Twitter is not good for you as much as you want to call it the most important mass communication tool today. I for one thought that was the internet but I guess Twitter replaced the internet at some point. Regardless you didn't even address what I said about doing this through a third party as again a first party investigation into their own algorithm sounds like its full of conflicts of interest and I would not trust the results. 

I agree, i also would wager a guess that the people who use twitter regularly and think its the most important thing ever and a "communications tool" (actually tweet implies a rather one way kind of "communication" btw...) is pretty small, millions for sure, but not billions...

and that number will keep getting smaller and smaller too... it's absolutely inevitable (since someone who recently bought it is trying their hardest for this to happen,  including like loosing half of their advertisers "for the lols" lol)

[Doobeedoo]

20 minutes ago, SansVarnic said:

This is an incredibly ignorant thing of you to say. There are a great many assumptions about Americans that go around that very unlikely and untrue. It's human nature to become easily affected by circumstance, swayed by convenience and chose laziness over hardship, history proves this time and time again. There are more stigmas that are placed on Americans that I can point out are more European than American. Just because a current trend is occurring in one place doesn't make it natural to that group of people. For example, there are many trends taking place today in the US that started in the UK or other countries and vice versa. 

Take two seconds to think before you generalize openly.

 

Yes, I took offense. In my time in service, I got the chance to see how the world sees the US and how the US sees the world, it's appallingly ignorant in both directions. And I will add, there is 4 major areas in the US that add to confusion of things, we have the East coast, Midwest, West coast and Southern California. If you want to generalize Americans, be sure to know of whom you speak before clumping it together. Not to mention, there are also Canadians, Mexicans and every country in Central/South America as well.  

What? Twitter is literally primarily used by US people by far dude. Not sure what you're on about further, has nothing to do about what I stated, which is true in fact.

 

 

[oali24]

4 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

I agree, i also would wager a guess that the people who use twitter regularly and think its the most important thing ever and a "communications tool" (actually tweet implies a rather one way kind of "communication" btw...) is pretty small, millions for sure, but not billions...

and that number will keep getting smaller and smaller too... it's absolutely inevitable (since someone who recently bought it is trying their hardest for this to happen,  including like loosing half of their advertisers "for the lols" lol)

I don't use twitter and I still think its really important, people in my country use twitter to communicate things that they would not be allowed to say or even get detained for saying, if Elon Musk threatens twitter's continued operation then those people will lose their outlet of expression.