X (social network)

File:X logo 2023.jpg

Logo.

X, formerly called Twitter, is a corporation and social networking service where people share brief status updates.

In October 2022, businessman Elon Musk acquired Twitter for US$44 billion, gaining control of the platform and becoming CEO. Linda Yaccarino succeeded Musk as CEO on June 5, 2023, with Musk remaining as Chairman and CTO. In July 2023, Musk announced that Twitter would be rebranded to X and that the bird logo would be retired.

Musk has described himself as a “free speech absolutist” and says he bought Twitter to create a space where “a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner.”

Censorship

"In the latest undercover Project Veritas video investigation, current and former Twitter employees are on camera explaining steps the social media giant is taking to censor political content that they don’t like. [...] “One strategy is to shadow ban so you have ultimate control. The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don’t know they’ve been banned, because they keep posting and no one sees their content. So they just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it.” [...] more left-leaning content would go through their selection process with less political scrutiny [...] this selection process wasn’t exactly Twitter policy, but rather they were following unwritten rules from the top: “A lot of unwritten rules, and being that we’re in San Francisco, we’re in California, very liberal, a very blue state. You had to be… I mean as a company you can’t really say it because it would make you look bad, but behind closed doors are lots of rules.” [...] details how the shadow-banning algorithms targeting right-leaning are engineered: "Yeah you look for Trump, or America, and you have like five thousand keywords to describe a redneck. Then you look and parse all the messages, all the pictures, and then you look for stuff that matches that stuff.” When asked if the majority of the algorithms are targeted against conservative or liberal users of Twitter, Singh said, “I would say majority of it are for Republicans.”"

In 2016 Twitter was criticized for censoring conservatives or more specifically that "on closer inspection it appears that Twitter’s war on free speech is directed at a specific generation of libertarians and alternative conservative voices, many of whom are vocal and enthusiastic supporters of Donald Trump."

In 2016 Twitter unveiled a "Trust and Safety Council" which included many controversial organizations.

After Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Twitter conducted a mass purge of prominent Alt-Right accounts. Another mass purge occurred in December 2017.

Twitter permanently suspended Donald Trump’s twitter account in January 2021.

Networks

Former British Liberal politician Nick Clegg became employed by the social media giant Facebook after leaving parliament and is now head of their international political operations. In May 2021 he joined forces with google to persuade British government ministers against appointing Paul Dacre, former editor of the Daily Mail newspaper, and Boris Johnson's favourite for the post, as Chairman of the media watchdog OFCOM. Dacre had in 2018 called for the tech giants to be broken up. OFCOM has the power to block the likes of Facebook and Twitter from operating in the UK and/or to sting them with huge fines worth up to a tenth of their turnover.

See also

• Gab

External links

• Project Veritas Founder James O’Keefe Is Suing Twitter after His Account Is Banned for Releasing Explosive CNN Video