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Ladybbird · 14-04-23, 06:56

Twitter Musk Staff Cuts Leave Russian / Chinese Trolls Unchecked

Hundreds of Russian and Chinese state propaganda accounts are thriving on Twitter after Elon Musk wiped out the team that fought these networks, the BBC has found.

BBC 14 APR 2023

The unit worked to combat "information operations", coordinated campaigns by countries such as Russia, China, and Iran, made to influence public opinion and disrupt democracy.

But experts and former employees say the majority of these specialists resigned or were laid off, leaving the platform vulnerable to foreign manipulation. The BBC has spoken to several of them. They asked for anonymity, citing non-disclosure agreements and threats they received online.

"The whole human layer has been wiped out. All Twitter has left are automated detections systems," a former senior employee said.

In a BBC interview on Tuesday, Musk claimed there was "less misinformation [on Twitter] rather than more" under his tenure. He did not comment on active state troll farms on the platform nor the team that used to fight them.

We approached Twitter for comment but received no response other than a poo emoji - the standard auto-reply from the company to any press enquiry.

'Troll Farms'

Organised groups of people posting coordinated messages are called 'troll farms.' The term was first used by Russian reporters who exposed one of roughly 300 paid employees run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary group.

Since then, troll farms influencing elections and public opinion have been uncovered in many countries, from Poland and Turkey to Brazil and Mexico. They have also been used as a propaganda tool in ethnic conflicts and wars.

In January, a cartoon promoting Russia's Wagner Group's actions in Mali went viral on Twitter

Now, a new group of Russian trolls is active on Twitter.

It supports Putin's war in Ukraine, ridicules Kyiv and the West, and attacks independent Russian-language publications, including the BBC Russian Service. Many of these trolls' accounts have been suspended, but dozens are still active.

Darren Linvill, associate professor at the Clemson University Media Forensics Hub in South Carolina, says the network appears to originate from Prigozhin's troll factory.

Mr Linvill and his colleagues have also discovered two similar Russian-language troll networks, but from an opposite camp. One tweets in support of Ukraine, and another promotes Russian opposition, including the jailed Putin critic Alexey Navalny.

While they have all the markings of troll accounts, including random numbers in the Twitter handles and coordinated behaviour, these networks appear to remain undetected by the platform.

The Clemson University team is also tracking pro-Chinese accounts targeting users in both Chinese and English about issues of importance to the Chinese government.

With only a skeleton crew remaining, Twitter does not have resources to swiftly detect, attribute and take down this foreign propaganda, according to former employees.

While the platform also established partnerships with research institutions that detected information operations, scholars say they have not heard anything from Twitter since November.

Punching Above its Weight

Experts have long warned about the dangers of foreign influence on social media.

In 2018, the FBI said that fake accounts impersonating real Americans had played a central role in the Russian effort to meddle in the 2016 election. That was when Twitter and Facebook started hiring "information operations" specialists.

Lakhta-2

Accounts meddling into the Brexit debate and US selections were in part managed from St Petersburg, Russia

"I still remember the rage I felt when I saw accounts with names like "Pamela Moore" and "Crystal Johnson" purporting to be real Americans from Wisconsin and New York, but with phone numbers tracing back to St Petersburg, Russia," recalls Yoel Roth, Twitter's former Trust and Safety head.

Twitter has a fraction of Facebook's reach and budget. But over the years, it built a small but capable team. While it could not match the resources of its rival social network, Twitter "nonetheless punched above its weight", says Lee Foster, an independent expert in information operations.

Twitter hired people with backgrounds in cybersecurity, journalism, government agencies and NGOs who spoke an array of languages including Russian, Farsi, Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish and Portuguese.

One former investigator says: "We needed people who would be able to understand: if Russia is likely to be the responsible actor behind this, what is its motivation to do this particular operation?"

He says he resigned because his team did not fit into 'Twitter 2.0' that Musk was building.

"Our role was to help make the use of Twitter as safe as possible. And it did not feel like that was likely to continue as a priority."

Countering Propaganda Worldwide

The team worked in close contact, but separately from the ones countering misinformation. That is because state-run campaigns can use both fake news and factual stories to promote their messages.

In 2016, Russian trolls targeted black voters in the US using real footage showing police violence. And in 2022, a coordinated network promoted negative - but sometimes accurate - news about the French contingent and United Nations missions in Africa's Sahel region.

Both networks were taken down by Twitter.

As similar information operations were conducted on different platforms, Twitter employees met with their peers at Meta and other companies to exchange information.

But at such meetings, Twitter's investigators would be reminded of how small their operation was. "Their team would be ten times the size of ours," says an investigator.

Now even those resources are lacking.

Without the team dedicated to fight coordinated campaigns, Twitter "will slowly become more and more unsafe," says Linvill of Clemson University.

Ladybbird · 15-06-23, 05:53

Elon Musk: Twitter SUED by Music Publishers For $250m

A group of 17 music publishers in the US has sued Twitter, claiming the platform enabled copyright violations involving nearly 1,700 songs.

BBC 15 JUNE 2023

The National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA) is seeking more than $250m (£197.7m) in damages.

In a lawsuit filed at the Federal District Court in Nashville, the NMPA claimed Twitter "permits and encourages infringement" for profit.

It says the situation has not improved since Elon Musk bought the company.

The NMPA, which represents firms - including Sony Music Publishing, BMG Rights Management and Universal Music Publishing Group - alleged that Twitter continues to "reap huge profits from the availability of unlicensed music without paying the necessary licensing fees for it".

It added that the infringements have given Twitter an "unfair advantage" over competitors - including TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat - which pay for music licenses.

Twitter "stands alone as the largest social media platform that has completely refused to license the millions of songs on its service," NMPA President David Israelite said in a statement.

Mr Musk, who recently reclaimed the title of the world's richest person, bought Twitter last year for $44bn.

The NMPA also said: "Twitter's change in ownership in October 2022 has not led to improvements in how it acts with respect to copyright."

"On the contrary, Twitter's internal affairs regarding matters pertinent to this case are in disarray," it added.

NMPA cited Twitter's downsizing of "critical departments involved with content review and policing terms of service violations", and the resignations of trust and safety chiefs Yoel Roth and Ella Irwin.

The NMPA also alleged that Twitter "routinely ignores known repeat infringers and known infringements".

Earlier this month, Linda Yaccarino, the former head of advertising at media giant NBCUniversal, became the new boss of the troubled social media firm.

Ms Yaccarino oversees business operations at the platform, which has been struggling to make money.

Since buying Twitter, Musk has cut 75% of its workforce, including teams charged with tracking abuse, and changed how the company verifies accounts.

Ladybbird · 02-07-23, 04:33

Twitter Temporarily Restricts Tweets Users Can See, Elon Musk Announces

Reading Restrictions Imposed on Twitter Users

BBC NEWS 2 JULY 2023

Twitter has applied a temporary limit to the number of tweets users can read in a day, owner Elon Musk has said.

In a tweet of his own, Mr Musk said unverified accounts are now limited to reading 1,000posts a day.

For new unverified accounts, the number is 500. Meanwhile, accounts with "verified" status are currently limited to 10,000 posts a day.

The tech billionaire initially set stricter limits, but he changed these within hours of announcing the move.

Mr Musk said the temporary limits were to address "extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation".

He did not explain what was meant by system manipulation in this context.

"We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users," Mr Musk explained on Friday, after users were presented with screens asking them to log in to view Twitter content.

The move was described as a "temporary emergency measure".

It is not totally clear what Mr Musk is referring to by data scraping, but it appears he means the scraping of large amounts of data used by artificial intelligence (AI) companies to train large language models, which power chatbots such as Open AI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard.

In simple terms, data scraping is the pulling of information from the internet. Large language models need to learn from masses of real human conversations. But the quality is vital to the success of a chatbot. Reddit and Twitter's huge trove of billions of posts are thought to be hugely important training data - and used by AI companies.

But platforms like Twitter and Reddit want to be paid for this data.

In April, Reddit's chief executive Steve Huffman told the New York Times that he was unhappy with what AI companies were doing.

"The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable," he said. "But we don't need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free."

Twitter has already started charging users to access its application programming interface (API), which is often used by third party apps and researchers - which can include AI companies.

There are other potential reasons for the move too.

Mr Musk has been pushing people towards Twitter Blue, its paid subscription service. It's possible he is looking at a model where users will have to pay to get a full Twitter service - and access to unlimited posts.

Signalled by a blue tick, "verified" status was given for free by Twitter to high-profile accounts before Mr Musk took over as its boss. Now, most users have to pay a subscription fee from $8 (£6.30) per month to be verified, and can gain the status regardless of their profile.

According to the website Downdetector - which tracks online outages - a peak of 5,126 people reported problems accessing the platform in the UK at 16:12 BST on Saturday.

In the US, roughly 7,461 people reported glitches around the same time.

Initially, Mr Musk announced reading limits of 6,000 posts per day for verified accounts, 600 for unverified accounts, and 300 for new unverified accounts.

In another update Mr Musk said "several hundred organisations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively".

He later indicated there had been a burden on his website, saying it was "rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis".

A server is a powerful computer that manages and stores files, providing services such as web pages for users.

Adam Leon Smith from BCS, the UK's professional body for IT, said the move was "very odd" as limiting users' scroll time would affect the company's advertising revenue.

Mr Musk bought the company last year for $44bn (£35bn) after much back and forth. He was critical of Twitter's previous management and said he did not want the platform to become an echo chamber.

Soon after taking over, he cut the workforce from just under 8,000 staff to about 1,500.

In an interview with the BBC, he said that cutting the workforce had not been easy.

Engineers were included in the layoffs and their exit raised concerns about the platform's stability.

But while Mr Musk acknowledged some glitches, he told the BBC in April that outages had not lasted very long and the site was working fine.

14-04-23, 06:56	#1
Ladybbird Join Date: Feb 2011 Posts: 47,648 Thanks: 27,646 Thanked 14,458 Times in 10,262 Posts Awards Showcase Total Awards: 8	ELON MUSK Restricts Tweets Users Can See on Twitter Twitter Musk Staff Cuts Leave Russian / Chinese Trolls Unchecked Hundreds of Russian and Chinese state propaganda accounts are thriving on Twitter after Elon Musk wiped out the team that fought these networks, the BBC has found. BBC 14 APR 2023 The unit worked to combat "information operations", coordinated campaigns by countries such as Russia, China, and Iran, made to influence public opinion and disrupt democracy. But experts and former employees say the majority of these specialists resigned or were laid off, leaving the platform vulnerable to foreign manipulation. The BBC has spoken to several of them. They asked for anonymity, citing non-disclosure agreements and threats they received online. "The whole human layer has been wiped out. All Twitter has left are automated detections systems," a former senior employee said. In a BBC interview on Tuesday, Musk claimed there was "less misinformation [on Twitter] rather than more" under his tenure. He did not comment on active state troll farms on the platform nor the team that used to fight them. We approached Twitter for comment but received no response other than a poo emoji - the standard auto-reply from the company to any press enquiry. 'Troll Farms' Organised groups of people posting coordinated messages are called 'troll farms.' The term was first used by Russian reporters who exposed one of roughly 300 paid employees run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary group. Since then, troll farms influencing elections and public opinion have been uncovered in many countries, from Poland and Turkey to Brazil and Mexico. They have also been used as a propaganda tool in ethnic conflicts and wars. In January, a cartoon promoting Russia's Wagner Group's actions in Mali went viral on Twitter Now, a new group of Russian trolls is active on Twitter. It supports Putin's war in Ukraine, ridicules Kyiv and the West, and attacks independent Russian-language publications, including the BBC Russian Service. Many of these trolls' accounts have been suspended, but dozens are still active. Darren Linvill, associate professor at the Clemson University Media Forensics Hub in South Carolina, says the network appears to originate from Prigozhin's troll factory. Mr Linvill and his colleagues have also discovered two similar Russian-language troll networks, but from an opposite camp. One tweets in support of Ukraine, and another promotes Russian opposition, including the jailed Putin critic Alexey Navalny. While they have all the markings of troll accounts, including random numbers in the Twitter handles and coordinated behaviour, these networks appear to remain undetected by the platform. The Clemson University team is also tracking pro-Chinese accounts targeting users in both Chinese and English about issues of importance to the Chinese government. With only a skeleton crew remaining, Twitter does not have resources to swiftly detect, attribute and take down this foreign propaganda, according to former employees. While the platform also established partnerships with research institutions that detected information operations, scholars say they have not heard anything from Twitter since November. Punching Above its Weight Experts have long warned about the dangers of foreign influence on social media. In 2018, the FBI said that fake accounts impersonating real Americans had played a central role in the Russian effort to meddle in the 2016 election. That was when Twitter and Facebook started hiring "information operations" specialists. Lakhta-2 Accounts meddling into the Brexit debate and US selections were in part managed from St Petersburg, Russia "I still remember the rage I felt when I saw accounts with names like "Pamela Moore" and "Crystal Johnson" purporting to be real Americans from Wisconsin and New York, but with phone numbers tracing back to St Petersburg, Russia," recalls Yoel Roth, Twitter's former Trust and Safety head. Twitter has a fraction of Facebook's reach and budget. But over the years, it built a small but capable team. While it could not match the resources of its rival social network, Twitter "nonetheless punched above its weight", says Lee Foster, an independent expert in information operations. Twitter hired people with backgrounds in cybersecurity, journalism, government agencies and NGOs who spoke an array of languages including Russian, Farsi, Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish and Portuguese. One former investigator says: "We needed people who would be able to understand: if Russia is likely to be the responsible actor behind this, what is its motivation to do this particular operation?" He says he resigned because his team did not fit into 'Twitter 2.0' that Musk was building. "Our role was to help make the use of Twitter as safe as possible. And it did not feel like that was likely to continue as a priority." Countering Propaganda Worldwide The team worked in close contact, but separately from the ones countering misinformation. That is because state-run campaigns can use both fake news and factual stories to promote their messages. In 2016, Russian trolls targeted black voters in the US using real footage showing police violence. And in 2022, a coordinated network promoted negative - but sometimes accurate - news about the French contingent and United Nations missions in Africa's Sahel region. Both networks were taken down by Twitter. As similar information operations were conducted on different platforms, Twitter employees met with their peers at Meta and other companies to exchange information. But at such meetings, Twitter's investigators would be reminded of how small their operation was. "Their team would be ten times the size of ours," says an investigator. Now even those resources are lacking. Without the team dedicated to fight coordinated campaigns, Twitter "will slowly become more and more unsafe," says Linvill of Clemson University. __________________ PUTIN TRUMP & Netanyahu Will Meet in HELL ..................*SHARKS are Closing in on TRUMP*.......................... *TRUMP WARNS; 'There'll Be a Bloodbath* If I Don't Get Elected'..MAGA - MyAssGotArrested...IT's COMING** PLEASE HELP THIS SITE..Click DONATE & Thanks to ALL Members of ... 1.. THIS SITE IS MORE THAN JUST WAREZ...& TO STOP SPAM-IF YOU WANT TO POST, YOUR FIRST POST MUST BE IN WELCOMES

15-06-23, 05:53	#2
Ladybbird Join Date: Feb 2011 Posts: 47,648 Thanks: 27,646 Thanked 14,458 Times in 10,262 Posts Awards Showcase Total Awards: 8	Musk: Twitter SUED by Music Publishers For $250m Elon Musk: Twitter SUED by Music Publishers For $250m A group of 17 music publishers in the US has sued Twitter, claiming the platform enabled copyright violations involving nearly 1,700 songs. BBC 15 JUNE 2023 The National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA) is seeking more than $250m (£197.7m) in damages. In a lawsuit filed at the Federal District Court in Nashville, the NMPA claimed Twitter "permits and encourages infringement" for profit. It says the situation has not improved since Elon Musk bought the company. The NMPA, which represents firms - including Sony Music Publishing, BMG Rights Management and Universal Music Publishing Group - alleged that Twitter continues to "reap huge profits from the availability of unlicensed music without paying the necessary licensing fees for it". It added that the infringements have given Twitter an "unfair advantage" over competitors - including TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat - which pay for music licenses. Twitter "stands alone as the largest social media platform that has completely refused to license the millions of songs on its service," NMPA President David Israelite said in a statement. Mr Musk, who recently reclaimed the title of the world's richest person, bought Twitter last year for $44bn. The NMPA also said: "Twitter's change in ownership in October 2022 has not led to improvements in how it acts with respect to copyright." "On the contrary, Twitter's internal affairs regarding matters pertinent to this case are in disarray," it added. NMPA cited Twitter's downsizing of "critical departments involved with content review and policing terms of service violations", and the resignations of trust and safety chiefs Yoel Roth and Ella Irwin. The NMPA also alleged that Twitter "routinely ignores known repeat infringers and known infringements". Earlier this month, Linda Yaccarino, the former head of advertising at media giant NBCUniversal, became the new boss of the troubled social media firm. Ms Yaccarino oversees business operations at the platform, which has been struggling to make money. Since buying Twitter, Musk has cut 75% of its workforce, including teams charged with tracking abuse, and changed how the company verifies accounts. __________________ PUTIN TRUMP & Netanyahu Will Meet in HELL ..................*SHARKS are Closing in on TRUMP*.......................... *TRUMP WARNS; 'There'll Be a Bloodbath* If I Don't Get Elected'..MAGA - MyAssGotArrested...IT's COMING** PLEASE HELP THIS SITE..Click DONATE & Thanks to ALL Members of ... 1.. THIS SITE IS MORE THAN JUST WAREZ...& TO STOP SPAM-IF YOU WANT TO POST, YOUR FIRST POST MUST BE IN WELCOMES

02-07-23, 04:33	#3
Ladybbird Join Date: Feb 2011 Posts: 47,648 Thanks: 27,646 Thanked 14,458 Times in 10,262 Posts Awards Showcase Total Awards: 8	Re: ELON MUSK Restricts Tweets Users Can See on Twitter Twitter Temporarily Restricts Tweets Users Can See, Elon Musk Announces Reading Restrictions Imposed on Twitter Users BBC NEWS 2 JULY 2023 Twitter has applied a temporary limit to the number of tweets users can read in a day, owner Elon Musk has said. In a tweet of his own, Mr Musk said unverified accounts are now limited to reading 1,000posts a day. For new unverified accounts, the number is 500. Meanwhile, accounts with "verified" status are currently limited to 10,000 posts a day. The tech billionaire initially set stricter limits, but he changed these within hours of announcing the move. Mr Musk said the temporary limits were to address "extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation". He did not explain what was meant by system manipulation in this context. "We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users," Mr Musk explained on Friday, after users were presented with screens asking them to log in to view Twitter content. The move was described as a "temporary emergency measure". It is not totally clear what Mr Musk is referring to by data scraping, but it appears he means the scraping of large amounts of data used by artificial intelligence (AI) companies to train large language models, which power chatbots such as Open AI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard. In simple terms, data scraping is the pulling of information from the internet. Large language models need to learn from masses of real human conversations. But the quality is vital to the success of a chatbot. Reddit and Twitter's huge trove of billions of posts are thought to be hugely important training data - and used by AI companies. But platforms like Twitter and Reddit want to be paid for this data. In April, Reddit's chief executive Steve Huffman told the New York Times that he was unhappy with what AI companies were doing. "The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable," he said. "But we don't need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free." Twitter has already started charging users to access its application programming interface (API), which is often used by third party apps and researchers - which can include AI companies. There are other potential reasons for the move too. Mr Musk has been pushing people towards Twitter Blue, its paid subscription service. It's possible he is looking at a model where users will have to pay to get a full Twitter service - and access to unlimited posts. Signalled by a blue tick, "verified" status was given for free by Twitter to high-profile accounts before Mr Musk took over as its boss. Now, most users have to pay a subscription fee from $8 (£6.30) per month to be verified, and can gain the status regardless of their profile. According to the website Downdetector - which tracks online outages - a peak of 5,126 people reported problems accessing the platform in the UK at 16:12 BST on Saturday. In the US, roughly 7,461 people reported glitches around the same time. Initially, Mr Musk announced reading limits of 6,000 posts per day for verified accounts, 600 for unverified accounts, and 300 for new unverified accounts. In another update Mr Musk said "several hundred organisations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively". He later indicated there had been a burden on his website, saying it was "rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis". A server is a powerful computer that manages and stores files, providing services such as web pages for users. Adam Leon Smith from BCS, the UK's professional body for IT, said the move was "very odd" as limiting users' scroll time would affect the company's advertising revenue. Mr Musk bought the company last year for $44bn (£35bn) after much back and forth. He was critical of Twitter's previous management and said he did not want the platform to become an echo chamber. Soon after taking over, he cut the workforce from just under 8,000 staff to about 1,500. In an interview with the BBC, he said that cutting the workforce had not been easy. Engineers were included in the layoffs and their exit raised concerns about the platform's stability. But while Mr Musk acknowledged some glitches, he told the BBC in April that outages had not lasted very long and the site was working fine. __________________ PUTIN TRUMP & Netanyahu Will Meet in HELL ..................*SHARKS are Closing in on TRUMP*.......................... *TRUMP WARNS; 'There'll Be a Bloodbath* If I Don't Get Elected'..MAGA - MyAssGotArrested...IT's COMING** PLEASE HELP THIS SITE..Click DONATE & Thanks to ALL Members of ... 1.. THIS SITE IS MORE THAN JUST WAREZ...& TO STOP SPAM-IF YOU WANT TO POST, YOUR FIRST POST MUST BE IN WELCOMES

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