RIP my Twitter research. Glad I have other irons in the fire…

Twitter just gets worse and worse. What a joke.

This is dumb and worrying. The CEO of Gab has been promising to develop “based AI,” but he’s a bit player. Musk has the resources and influence to make this a bigger problem.

This is just so petty. I don’t know how his leadership at Twitter is defensible anymore.

Every time I think this acquisition can’t get dumber, it does.

Of all the dumb responses to perfectly legitimate content moderation, this is perhaps the dumbest.

I presume this decisuon also cuts off academics; this is going to have a huge impact on research, and not in a good way. I’m glad I’ve pivoted to other platforms, but this is still infuriating.

Ah, the kind of answer that only raises more questions.

Repeat after me: Content moderation is a good thing.

Although it’s been a real delight to see so many people joining Mastodon over the past few weeks, I’ve found that there’s also a disadvantage that I hadn’t expected: I’m spending a lot more time scrolling through Mastodon these days than I ever have since setting up my Mastodon accounts. When I began setting up Mastodon accounts and shifting away from Twitter back in April, I felt like I had made a big leap forward in terms of my online consumption.

What a weird week it has been in Twitterland.

Just when you thought this couldn’t get any worse. Will be really interested to see if Dorsey gets banned.

This has been one of the most delightful moments I’ve experienced in my relatively short time on Mastodon. This week has been a good one for Mastodon: Musk’s continued missteps have brought more people, and a meme like this one helps give the fediverse more of a shared culture.

I’ve posted a bunch of articles about this already, but Masnick’s take is super helpful.

Free speech is genuinely important, but it’s hard to take the ideal seriously when its advocates twist it to mean something specific and self-serving.

I’ve been trying to avoid dire predictions for Twitter since Musk took over, but this seems more and more like a turning point in the identity and reputation of the platform.

I got my job largely because I can work with Twitter data, and my tenure application is built on the premise that I do good Twitter research. I probably shouldn’t take as much pleasure as I do from watching the platform fall apart right now, but I was ready to move on anyway.

I mean, I’m willing to wait a bit and see what Twitter and Musk have to say about this, but this sure doesn’t seem like the approach that a free speech absolutist would take.

Musk is getting pettier and more self-centered.

Streisand Effect must be real, because I’ve never cared this much about a single plane in my whole life.

How does such an already bad story get so much worse over the course of a single day?

Twitter left up other flight tracking accounts but took down Musk’s?

This is petty and concerning.

I think this headline captures one of the worst parts of all of this: Musk isn’t just dismissing concerns about behavior, he’s fueling that behavior.

I haven’t been following Ken White as much as I used to, but this reminds me why I appreciate his perspective. This is someone who knows what free speech is and advocates for it, not someone who uses it as a buzzword justification for reprehensible behavior, à la Musk.

If I could pick one story to demonstrate that Musk’s Twitter tenure has been blundering and inconsistent…

I have deliberately not been following the Twitter Files stuff, but I did read this and found it helpful.

For over three years now, I’ve been getting increasingly involved with research projects that involve the online far right in one way or another. One of the most interesting ways that I’ve developed as a researcher during this time is having to think through in greater detail my commitments to research ethics. Because my research typically focuses on public social media data, I am rarely required to obtain informed consent from those whom I study.

Infertility sucks, and stories like this make me even more upset about Musk’s callous and chaotic Twitter takeover.

Is he serious? Does he really think this is a good idea? Also, I love the increasing sass that The Verge and other outlets are putting into their comments about Twitter no longer having a communications team to respond to requests for comment.

This seems petty, immature, and misguided.

I didn’t expect 1,200 resignations!

Oh good, so on top of the unexpected chaos, the expected chaos is also still happening.

This doesn’t surprise me at all. So much of the current Twitter chaos is predictable.

What an absolute mess this whole thing has been.

Move fast and break things, indeed. Checks as verification and checks as business model are inherently at odds with each other, and I get the vibe that Musk (team business model) is unhappy with internal pushback from team verification.