Elon Musk has said that “almost every conspiracy theory” that had emerged regarding Twitter and other Big Tech companies has now “turned out to be true.”
Musk set the record straight on the “All-In” podcast yesterday about the groundbreaking “Twitter Files” he has released through some independent journalists.
Musk said:
“I think it’s important to… if we’re going to be trusted in the future, to kind of clear the decks of stuff that happened in the past.
“To be totally frank, almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true.”
“Is there a conspiracy theory that didn’t turn out to be true?
“So far they’ve all turned out to be true and if not more true than people thought,” Musk said.
Elon Musk
"To be totally frank, almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true." pic.twitter.com/zBDY3AcrRq— Gretchen 🇺🇸 (@GretchenOO8) December 25, 2022
Today Musk released The Twitter Files about COVID.
David Zweig from The Free Press reported:
“The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19.
“Internal files at Twitter that I viewed while on assignment for @thefp showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes.
“At the onset of the pandemic, according to meeting notes, the Trump admin was especially concerned about panic buying.
“They came looking for ‘help from the tech companies to combat misinformation’ about ‘runs on grocery stores.’
“But . . . there were runs on grocery stores.
“When the Biden admin took over, one of their first meeting requests with Twitter executives was on Covid. The focus was on ‘anti-vaxxer accounts.’ Especially Alex Berenson…
“A December 2022 summary of meetings with the White House by Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s Head of U.S. Public Policy, adds new evidence of the White House’s pressure campaign and cements that it repeatedly attempted to directly influence the platform.
“Culbertson wrote that the Biden team was ‘very angry’ that Twitter had not been more aggressive in de-platforming multiple accounts. They wanted Twitter to do more.
“Twitter executives did not fully capitulate to the Biden team’s wishes.
“An extensive review of internal communications at the company revealed employees often debating moderation cases in great detail, and with more care than was shown by the government toward free speech.
“But Twitter did suppress views—many from doctors and scientific experts—that conflicted with the official positions of the White House. As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing.
“There were three serious problems with Twitter’s process: First, much of the content moderation was conducted by bots, trained on machine learning and AI – impressive in their engineering, yet still too crude for such nuanced work.
“Second, contractors, in places like the Philippines, also moderated content.
“They were given decision trees to aid in the process, but tasking nonexperts to adjudicate tweets on complex topics like myocarditis and mask efficacy data was destined for a significant error rate.”
16. Second, contractors, in places like the Philippines, also moderated content. They were given decision trees to aid in the process, but tasking non experts to adjudicate tweets on complex topics like myocarditis and mask efficacy data was destined for a significant error rate pic.twitter.com/lTISX00mo7
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
17 Third, most importantly, the buck stopped with higher level employees at Twitter who chose the inputs for the bots and decision trees, and subjectively decided escalated cases and suspensions. As it is with all people and institutions, there was individual and collective bias
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
25. A tweet by @KelleyKga, a self-proclaimed public health fact checker, with 18K followers, was flagged as “Misleading,” and replies and likes disabled, even though it displayed the CDC’s *own data.* pic.twitter.com/8ABQzYGpXf
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
35. Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of Trust & Safety, had to explain that optimism wasn’t misinformation. pic.twitter.com/1pj8uvzWR1
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
