EFF: Twitter Has a New Owner. Here’s What He Should Do
eff.org
eff.org
I don't doubt Musk poses critical threats to the old way of doing things. Does EFF get a bunch of corporate type sponsorship? This is such a weird read.
... they aren't aplauding it. They are offering suggestions now that twitter is under new ownership, since the previous owners were inept. It's likely that musk is equally inept (or worse.)
"EFF collaborated with organizations from around the world to create the Santa Clara Principles, which lay out a framework for how companies should operate with respect to transparency and accountability in content moderation decisions. Twitter publicly supported the first version of the Santa Clara Principles in its 2019 transparency report."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/twitter-has-new-owner-... this article
What this really meant was twitter blocked nonapproved content pretty freely while openly tolerating absolutely massive amounts of spam comments / bots / scams with SUPER obvious misuse of usernames and more.
I should note that they've toned their pro-spam stuff way down. Their early early rhetoric was pretty strong, by 2001 I think they'd mellowed out a bit.
"Specifically, any measure for stopping spam must ensure that all non-spam messages reach their intended recipients. Proposed solutions that do not fulfill these minimal goals are themselves a form of Internet abuse and are a direct assault on the health, growth, openness and liberty of the Internet.
...
Email is protected speech. There is a fundamental free speech right to be able to send and receive messages, regardless of medium. ... It is unacceptable, then, for anti-spam policies to limit legitimate rights to send or receive email. To the extent that an anti-spam proposal, whether legal or technical, results in such casualties, that proposal is unacceptable."
So they really really do not like spam folders etc, and they absolutely HATE ip blocks.
Spam and scam is a problem, but conjuring up that threat is much more aligned with corporate interest and ID systems than the other way around.
> Pseudonymity and anonymity are essential to protecting users who may have opinions, identities, or interests that do not align with those in power.
Their suggestion to open the platform up to more 3rd party devs is good, too. I’d love to see Blue Sky become more than vaporware.
And block all the spam stuff. So annoying. At least let me filter between real people who've done something to prove they are a person and the bots. For those who like the bots they can toggle the bots on.
Second this. I only want to see what people I follow actually say or retweet, and nothing else. I don’t care what they like/heart, I don’t care what people they follow say if I’m not following that person too, etc. I only want to see comments and retweets of people I directly follow.
The reason is because you can only fit so much stuff in your timeline, and you have to pare it down somehow. I curate my follow list carefully for this reason, and don’t want any extraneous timeline items that displace the tweets and retweets I want to see.
Now these ideas are important again?
It seems the EFF pays attention to political winds.
I also seem to recall them saying, well, free speech is nice and all, but as a private company, eh, it wasn't actually censorship.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aeff.org+twitter+deplatformi...
!g suggests 238 results.
Had you looked prior to your comment?
Elon is more dangerous to human rights than the Saudi government (partially) owning Twitter?
The reality is their staff looked up people's personal info to dox them. This was concerning because they were willing to kill people who said bad stuff about the Saudi's.
Claiming elon is going to snoop through twitter to try and kill people is ridiculous. That was what TWITTER (corporate version) allowed to happen.
"Ali Alzabarah, a Saudi citizen — was accused of accessing the personal information of more than 6,000 Twitter accounts in 2015 on behalf of Saudi Arabia. "
https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/28/21345794/twitter-employee...
But they won't. To get out the value he poured in, he will need to run it the way Murdoch runs Fox News, the WSJ, and lots else. Twitter is a bigger megaphone than even the Murdoch empire.
Which issues they focus on and how definitely does change over time. Maybe you don't like those changes, but they didn't suddenly become something they weren't before.
Genuinely curious, did EFF write a similar article when Bezos bought the WP? (I searched but couldn't find anything). I hope so because otherwise this is very hypocritical. I'd be glad to be wrong on this but I suspect I'm not.
> Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter highlights the risks to human rights and personal safety when any single person has complete control over policies affecting almost 400 million users.
Doesn't this apply to Bezos and WP?
You could argue WP doesn't have the same reach in terms of raw numbers which is fair but I'd argue both their audiences have a lot of power and the overall point made by EFF applies in both cases.
See: "An Antitrust Exemption for News Media Won’t Take Us Back to the Time Before Big Tech"
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/antitrust-exemption-ne...
That said, it's a fair oversight, though one that seems to apply reasonably to most of the non-digital media --- print, broadcast, and cable. As the line between these and the digital frontier increasingly blurs, perhaps EFF will step up to the challenges presented.