Latinoamérica21: The renewal of Twitter and misinformation

With the purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk has two major challenges to solve: making the platform finally profitable and capable of establishing content moderation that guarantees freedom of expression without further fueling misinformation.

However, the challenges seem to be incompatible, since by conditioning the verification of a user account to the subscription payment of US$ 8 (R$ 43), this would inevitably lead to any user being verified and thus disseminating any type of information. In this way, it would undermine the legitimacy and influence of “contents and users” that this social network has achieved.

The uncertainty generated by the monetization proposal is not fortuitous. Since its founding, Twitter has managed to transform the digital political conversation, as it has facilitated the circulation of ideas and actions by different social and political actors, among others, reaching the point of being cataloged as the main public square or digital sewer in the world.

However, this extensive circulation of true and inaccurate information meant that this platform saw, at the same time, the need to become an arbiter of its users’ behavior, developing limits to the flow of violent and disinformational content that has plagued it.

Until now, weeding out misinformation has been a quixotic task for Twitter.

There were two main content moderation strategies. The first is the label of content or users, as with media affiliated with democratic and non-democratic countries such as Russia (RT, Sputnik) or China (CGTN), among others. The second, somewhat controversial, was the suspension of the accounts of media outlets, journalists, ordinary users or political leaders such as former US President Donald Trump for spreading inaccurate information or content that incites violence.

Both strategies certainly mitigated misinformation and violence in the digital conversation, but they failed to eradicate them.

Renewal or stagnation

Musk has made it relatively clear what he wants to do with Twitter. First of all, he wants to improve its functionality by developing open-source algorithms that allow, among other things, to eradicate bots – automated accounts – and authenticate all humans and thus increase user confidence. However, its first decisions deviated from this objective, as the purchase of membership resulted in profiles that had not achieved the desired verification obtaining it, despite having already propagated disinformation and hateful content towards minorities and political parties in the past.

As a result of this “economic check”, misinformers and hatemongers immediately gained more visibility, which is potentially dangerous. The pandemic, for example, has revealed that unverified accounts produce more disinformational content and its reach depends on the level of coordination to disseminate it. When a verified account produces inaccurate content, its reach is more harmful.

At a glance, it becomes clear that the goal of increasing trust in the platform’s users is not a simple task and that, in order to put an end to existing misinformation, user verification cannot simply be submitted to an economic rubric.

Furthermore, if the verification proposal does not succeed in circumventing this economic perspective, it is possible that the private industry of disinformation in the world will become even stronger, as these actors will be able to influence public opinion in their favor much more easily, since their strategies do not are limited to the use of fake accounts and bots, but are also incurring and sophisticated their coordinated actions in the area of ​​online advertisements. Of the latter, Elon hasn’t mentioned much so far.

Nor did it mention access to the API, or Twitter’s Application Programming Interface. This aspect of the platform is not well known by common users. It is focused on researchers and developers, and its objective is to facilitate access to specialized information that, among other things, allows identifying anomalous behavior on the platform. By itself, access to this data has become limited in recent years, and the only option to access a significant set of data is by paying the membership offered by the platform, which is certainly high and only large digital marketing companies are able to afford it. finance.

Will Twitter survive?

It is irremediable, the digital public square is in crisis for economic reasons and tensions over content moderation. Thankfully, Elon backed away from “economic verification”, as its damaging effects on the spread of hate speech and misinformation, especially in the United States, manifested themselves within hours.

Musk’s quest to make the platform more reliable is reasonable, but it cannot be taken lightly as these and other actions taken so far have shown.

How will the company manage to deal with economic and content matters? This is the question that still needs to be answered. What is certain is that in order to survive, “user verification” on this platform is a standard of credibility that must be maintained, as it has been one of the few most consistent shields against outbreaks of misinformation.

However, if Twitter fails to keep up, in a few years we will see the emergence of a new square or a digital sewer like Mastodon or whatever.