What a mess Musk has made Twitter into.

The headline obscures something important—that this is about research, access to data, and Terms of Service. Worrying stuff.

I have thought for years about the way that Twitter research (in the aggregate) serves as a largely unintentional history of Twitter, but I’ve never thought to wonder what that specifically looks like right now.

Looks like Masnick’s (and others’) predictions about Musk’s changes to Twitter are coming true. This isn’t what verification is for.

One paper that I read and reread as I was starting to get into Twitter research was Anatoliy Gruzd, Barry Wellman, and Yuri Takhteyev’s “Imagining Twitter as an Imagined Community,” published in a 2011 issue of American Behavioral Scientist. I thought of this paper again yesterday; more specifically, I thought about the anecdote that the article begins with:

Barry and Beverly Wellman moved to Toronto more than 40 years ago. Not being able to get a public school job at first, Beverly went to teach English-language subjects at a Jewish day school. She lived downtown and commuted to the suburbs. One day the principal asked her,

Free speech absolutism at its finest.

How a platform is managed has real consequences.

One of the Vice journalists currently reporting on the Tim Ballard allegations just followed my (now dormant) Twitter account, and I’m going to take that as validation of my research on far-right Mormonism.

Roth’s perspective is valuable here. Scary stuff.

What a wild story.

What a mess this whole thing has been.

This feels like a page out of Gab’s playbook.

I’ve instinctively never liked t.co links, and this demonstrates what the problem with them are.

I think this is two weeks in a row that I’ve shared Casey Newton’s Platformer column, but that’s because it’s two weeks in a row he’s written something important.

Every semester, I give a guest lecture on internet research methods for an undergrad class in my unit. A few days after scheduling this semester’s lecture, I’ve realized it’s the first time I’m giving it after Musk borked Twitter as a data source.

This is ridiculous.

Yet another wild story in the wild history of Twitter.

It appears that Musk’s “free speech absolutism” continues to be selective and self-serving.

I appreciate Masnick’s thinking, and I’m a big Doctorow fan, so it’s always neat to see them come together.

Helpful summary by Masnick; bookmarking for later.

Perhaps most interesting thing here is official comment from Reddit. It’s not quite “auto-reply with a poop emoji territory,” but it might actually be worse?

This is a real shame.

This is… I don’t know what this is. Besides a whole bunch of nonsense.

I was not familiar with the term “glass cliff,” so this was an insightful read.

This article has been available online for nearly two years, but since I don’t have any previous posts about it, I’m happy to announce that a study of mine with Dan Krutka has just been assigned to an issue at the Journal of Research on Technology in Education. A number of years ago, Twitter released some large datasets of tweets associated with accounts created as part of various governments’ information operation efforts. Neither misinformation nor information operations are a specialty of mine, but I was interested in seeing if these datasets overlapped with work that I was involved in. So, one day, I downloaded the datasets, loaded them all into R, and searched for some terms germane to my research. That’s how, a couple of years ago, I produced a paper on government-sponsored accounts’ invocations of Mormonism as part of efforts to sow discord in the United States.