“when Musk changed his mind about buying Twitter, many believed he would somehow get out of it, even if his legal justification seemed flimsy. But this time, Musk didn’t get out of it. That’s because, in large part, of the Delaware Court of Chancery, the business court overseeing Twitter’s lawsuit against Musk.
If he kept fighting the case, Musk would risk having to disclose more potentially embarrassing texts from his friends that could damage his image. And he was facing a judge with a no-nonsense reputation who might rule against him in the end. Even with a nearly endless supply of money to fund the best legal team, Musk ultimately backed down and closed the deal with Twitter on the original terms he’d agreed to in April.
This was a win for the rule of law, showing that even if you’re the richest man in the world, sometimes you do have to follow through on your obligations.”
“On Tuesday, Twitter announced that it had filed suit against the Indian government alleging that it interpreted a suite of 2021 laws too broadly when ordering the company to censor dissident users in the country. The lawsuit comes in response to increased pressure from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which in recent weeks has ordered Twitter to block the posts and accounts of dissidents. According to CNN, a source familiar with the suit said that the company will attempt to show that the government’s orders “demonstrate excessive use of powers and are disproportionate.”
The 2021 regulations Twitter is now fighting gave India’s government the ability to demand that social media companies block certain posts or accounts in the country. Further, the Indian government has required social media companies to locate their compliance officers within the country so that they can be held criminally liable if the company fails to comply with government orders.
While Twitter has complied with orders, the suit marks a major act of resistance against the Indian government’s calls to censor dissident content. In 2021, WhatsApp filed a similar suit, attempting to prevent the government from forcing the company to make all messages “traceable” upon request. That order, according to the company, would “severely undermine the privacy of billions of people who communicate digitally[.]” WhatApp’s suit is still ongoing.”
“Twitter is, in many ways, a platform of the elite. While it can sometimes elevate the voices of ordinary people who don’t command massive followings on the platform, it’s most powerful as a communication tool for already prominent and influential people.
Though it has about 200 million daily users, Twitter has had an outsized role in shaping politics, particularly in the US as the former platform of choice for Trump until the end of his presidency, when he was permanently suspended for tweeting in support of the January 6 Capitol riot.”
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“Twitter is distinct from Facebook and Google in that the financial markets don’t truly reflect its full power, which is why Musk can entertain the idea of buying the entire company with a fraction of his total estimated net worth of over $220 billion.”
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“In its new era, Twitter has begun balancing its commitment to letting people say what they want and minimizing the harms that people can do using its platform. For Musk, there’s value in being the person who sets those terms, and he has made it clear that he will err on the side of allowing as much controversial speech as possible.”
“Facebook always was hugely important to Trump in his political rise and reign. Twitter, which has booted him forever, tended to be more front and center — it was for Trump a rough, running focus group, and a real-time, utterly un-private diary. But if Twitter was the loudspeaker, Facebook was the less flashy but nonetheless critical organizing, advertising and fundraising infrastructure. Compared to Twitter’s noisy café, Facebook was the underground pipes. It’s hard to see how Trump would have become president without it.
“I understood early that Facebook was how Donald Trump was going to win,” Brad Parscale, the digital media director on Trump’s 2016 campaign who then started as his campaign manager in 2020, said in 2017. “Facebook was the method — it was the highway which his car drove on.”
“… large numbers of conservative voters, ability to broadcast all day, multiple times to the same audience, and the numbers were showing in the consumer side that people were spending more and more hours of their day consuming Facebook content,” he said in 2018. “Being able to show a message directly from President Trump talking… talking directly to camera was very important. I could get it right there not filtered by the media, not filtered by anyone. It was his face. It was the person you wanted to hear from talking directly to you.”
A New Yorker headline in March of 2020 referred to “Trump’s Facebook Juggernaut.”
“He arguably has the best fundraising list in Republican politics right now, which means he has the best email lists and text messaging lists, but there’s a half-life on that — because people change emails, change cell phone providers. So it’s important that he keeps filling that pipeline with new contacts, and that’s where Facebook comes in,” Wilson said, noting that polling he’s done suggests that 60 percent of voters log on to Facebook every day.”
“As the coronavirus pandemic rages in India, claiming thousands of lives, many Indians are turning to social media to demand that the government handle the public health crisis better. And now, the government is silencing these critics in its latest threat to the future of free speech on the internet in the world’s second-most populous country.
In recent weeks, the Indian government has requested that companies like Twitter take down content that it says contains misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic. But critics say that India’s political leadership under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is using the premise of misinformation to overreach and suppress criticism of the administration’s handling of the pandemic.”
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“under the Modi administration of the past several years, the country has expanded its internet regulation laws, giving it more power to censor and surveil its citizens online. The government has several levers to pressure US-based tech companies into compliance: It could arrest Facebook and Twitter staff in India if their employers don’t follow orders. Even further, India could yank Twitter or Facebook off the local internet in India entirely, as it recently did with TikTok and several major Chinese apps in June. And the government resorted to effectively shutting down the internet in Kashmir in February 2020 when it wanted to quiet political dissent in the region.”
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“Facebook confirmed that it temporarily blocked posts with a #ResignModi hashtag in India, but it later said it was a mistake because of content associated with the hashtag that violated its policies. Facebook has since restored access to the hashtag.
Facebook declined to comment on how many or what takedown requests it has received from the Indian government in recent weeks. A source familiar with the company said Facebook only took down a small portion of the total requests it received.”
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“Recode reviewed the more than 50 tweets that Twitter blocked or deleted at the request of the Indian government in recent weeks. While some could be considered misleading — including one viral image showing devastation in India supposedly related to the pandemic which Indian fact-checker AltNews reported to be outdated — it wasn’t clear what was misleading about several other posts, which appeared to be straightforward news and political commentary.”
“China has a new weapon in its global information warfare arsenal: “wolf warriors.”
Named after a popular Chinese nationalistic film franchise, “wolf warriors” are official government diplomats whose duties go beyond the traditional diplomatic functions of closed-door negotiating and hosting fancy embassy soirees — and into the cutthroat world of Twitter.
Armed with 280 characters and access to a platform that has millions of users worldwide but is blocked for most people in China, they fiercely defend China against its foreign critics, ruthlessly taunt countries and leaders who have displeased the Chinese government, and shamelessly spread misinformation that serves Beijing’s interests.
In other words, they’re professional diplomatic trolls.”
“In the 1950s, Hollywood studios — under pressure from the right — promised they would not “knowingly employ a communist.” This blacklist eventually became notorious, especially in Hollywood, which came to lionize its victims in several films. And yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the blacklist policy from the emerging current treatment of right-wingers.
Earlier this week, Gina Carano, an actor in The Mandalorian, was fired from her job after a controversy over an allegedly anti-Semitic social-media post. In short order, UTSA, her talent agency, dropped her as a client.”
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“The post in question, which triggered a social-media firestorm that quickly led to her firing and loss of representation, was not anti-Semitic by any reasonable definition. The post simply argued (uncontroversially) that the Holocaust grew out of a hate campaign against Jews, which it then likened (controversially) to hatred of fellow Americans for their political views”
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“I don’t find this post especially insightful. But overheated comparisons to Nazi Germany are quite common, and, more to the point, not anti-Semitic. There is no hint anywhere in this post of sympathy for Nazis or blame for their victims.
Many of the reports of Carano’s termination string together the trumped-up offense of her post about Nazism with a series of controversial posts. The worst of them is a post insinuating elections are rife with voter fraud and should impose photo ID — a claim that, while provably false, is also a standard-issue Republican belief. The second-most controversial post in her history is a very small joke, in which she added “boop/bop/beep” to her Twitter profile, before apologizing for the insensitivity of seeming to mock the practice of including pronouns in social-media biographies.”
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“If you think blacklisting is only bad if its targets have sensible views, I have some bad news for you about communism. While some victims of the McCarthy-era blacklist were liberals or progressives who refused to turn in the names of their colleagues, others were bona fide communists. Dalton Trumbo — a Hollywood writer who was blacklisted, then wrote under front names, and whose story was told in a recent hagiographic movie starring Bryan Cranston — followed the Communist Party line in the Stalin era. When many fellow communists dropped out of the movement after Stalin formed an alliance with Hitler, Trumbo followed the new party line.
Trumbo gained some martyrdom when he was hauled to Washington to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. “This is the beginning of the American concentration camp,” he warned. (Fortunately for Trumbo, his antagonists, unlike Carano’s, were not witless enough to confuse hyperbolic Nazi comparisons with anti-Semitism.)”
“But despite the recent attention, some say the rise of Parler fits into the larger history of American conservatives and their relationship with the media.
“This follows a pattern of what the right wing has done [since] the rise of talk radio in the ’80s, and then through live cable TV, and then the rise of social media,” Lawrence Rosenthal, the chair of the University of California Berkeley’s Center for Right-Wing Studies, told Recode. “In each case, what you found is that the right wing gives up on participating in mainstream media and creates an alternative universe.””
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“Based in Nevada, the company behind Parler is run primarily by two people: Matze and Jared Thomson, who serves as CTO. Neither of them had a particular public profile before creating the app. Jeffrey Wernick, a bitcoin enthusiast and early Airbnb investor, serves as the company’s chief operating officer. But there are other people funding the app.
Earlier this month, Parler confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that conservative megadonor Rebekah Mercer was the company’s lead investor and agreed to fund Parler only if it gave users control over what they saw on the platform.”