Musk might also be considering offering more people a “blue check” - the verification checkmark sported on notable Twitter accounts - like Musk's - to show they're who they say they are. Ramping up mundane identity checks - such as two-factor authentication or popups that ask which of six photos shows a school bus - could discourage anyone from trying to amass an army of bogus accounts. “Spam bots” that mimic real people have been a personal nuisance to Musk, whose popularity on Twitter has inspired countless impersonator accounts that use his image and name - often to promote cryptocurrency scams that look as if they're coming from the Tesla CEO. Too much transparency about how individual tweets are ranked, for instance, can make it easier for “disingenuous people” to game the system and manipulate an algorithm to get maximum exposure for their cause, Diakopoulos said. But such “code-level transparency” gives users little insight into how Twitter is working for them without the data the algorithms are processing, said Nick Diakopoulos, a Northwestern University computer scientist.ĭiakopoulos said there are good intentions in Musk's broader goal to help people find out why their tweets get promoted or demoted and whether human moderators or automated systems are making those choices.
Musk has called for posting the underlying computer code powering Twitter's news feed for public inspection on the coder hangout GitHub. There has been no evidence that Twitter's platform is biased against conservatives studies have found the opposite when it comes to conservative media in particular. This is a supposed invisible feature for reducing the reach of badly behaving users without disabling their accounts. political conservatives about “shadow banning” on social media. Partly driving the distrust, at least for Musk supporters, is lore among U.S. Musk's longstanding interest in AI is reflected in one of the most specific proposals he outlined in his merger announcement - the promise of "making the algorithms open source to increase trust.” He's talking about the systems that rank content to decide what shows up on users’ feeds. His latest criticism has centered around what he described as Twitter’s “incredibly inappropriate” 2020 blocking of a New York Post article on Hunter Biden, which the company has said was a mistake and corrected within 24 hours.
Musk hasn't ruled out suspending some accounts, but says such bans should be temporary.
"That could potentially be hundreds of thousands of people." 6,” said Joan Donovan, who studies misinformation at Harvard University. Should Musk go this direction, it could mean bringing back not only Trump, but "many, many others that were removed as a result of QAnon conspiracies, targeted harassment of journalists and activists, and of course all of the accounts that were removed after Jan. He hasn't specified exactly what he'll do about former President Donald Trump's permanently banned account or other right-wing leaders whose tweets have run afoul of the company's restrictions against hate speech, violent threats or harmful misinformation. He's acknowledged that his plans to reshape Twitter could anger the political left and mostly please the right.