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Twitter Neutrality Called Into Question as Elon Musk Posts Partisan Tweets Ahead of US Midterm Elections
Elon Musk used his Twitter megaphone to appeal to “independent-minded voters” on Monday, urging them to vote Republican in Tuesday’s US midterm elections and stepping into the country’s political debate that tech company executives have largely tried to stay out of — so their platforms wouldn’t be seen as favouring one side over the other.
Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3,37,465 crore), has expressed political views in the past, on and off the platform. But a direct endorsement of one party over another now that he owns it raises questions about Twitter’s ability to remain neutral under the rule of the world’s richest man.
“Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic,” Musk tweeted.
It’s one thing for the CEO of Wendy’s or Chick-fil-A to endorse a political party, said Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a professor at Syracuse University who studies social media and politics. It’s a whole other thing, though, for the owner of one of the world’s most high-profile information ecosystems to do so.
“These social media platforms are not just companies. It’s not just a business. It is also our digital public sphere. It’s our town square,” Stromer-Galley said. “And it feels like the public sphere is increasingly privatised and owned by these companies — and when the heads of these companies put their finger on the scale — it feels like it’s potentially skewing our democracy in harmful ways.”
Musk’s comments come as he seeks to remake the company and amid widespread concern that recent mass layoffs at the social media platform could leave the company unable to deal with hate speech, misinformation that could impact voter safety and security and actors who seek to cast doubt on the legitimate winners of elections. Though Musk has vowed not to let Twitter become a “free-for-all hellscape,” advertisers have left the platform and Musk himself has amplified misinformation.
It’s not a secret that when it comes to tech workers and executives, the political mix tends to favour the left, with a good amount of Silicon Valley libertarianism thrown in. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, has donated to candidates on both sides of the political spectrum, but in recent years he’s veered more toward Democrats. Publicly he’s stayed away from pledging allegiance to either party.
But in their platform policies and content moderation, tech companies such as Facebook (now Meta), Google and even Twitter have taken great pains to appear politically neutral, even as they are routinely criticised — largely by conservatives but also by liberals — for favouring one side over the other.
“Now, you might say, look, Rupert Murdoch owns Fox News and that’s his voice amplified,” said Charles Anthony Smith, a professor of political science and law at The University of California at Irvine. “But the difference is that gets filtered through a variety of different script writers and on-air personalities and all this other sort of stuff. So it’s not really Rupert Murdoch. It may be people that agree with him on things, but it’s filtered through other voices. This is an unadulterated direct contact. So it’s an amplification that is unrivaled.”
Musk’s tweets could also stir up trouble in global politics outside of the US elections. On Sunday, the billionaire signalled willingness to explore reversing decisions blocking some accounts of Brazilian right-wing lawmakers. The nation’s electoral court last week ordered their suspension; all are supporters of Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, who on October 30 lost his reelection bid by a narrow margin, and most had aired claims of election fraud.
Paulo Figueiredo Filho, a political analyst who often defends Bolsonaro on social media and is also the grandson of the military dictatorship’s final president, tweeted that Twitter has become a strict and spontaneous censor.
“Your moderators are currently being more dictatorial than our own courts!” Figueiredo wrote.
Musk responded: “I will look into this.”
The suspended accounts include that of Nikolas Ferreira, who garnered more votes in the October race than any other candidate for a seat in the Lower House. According to orders issued by the electoral authority, Ferreira’s account and most others were blocked for sharing a live video from an Argentinian digital influencer questioning the reliability of Brazil’s electronic voting system. The video was largely shared by allies of Bolsonaro, who himself has often claimed the system is susceptible to fraud, without presenting any evidence.
Twitter’s policies, as of Monday, prohibit “manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes.”
In a tweet just two days after he agreed to buy Twitter in April, Musk said that for “Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.”
And to attract the largest possible number of advertisers and users, Big Tech has tried to go this route, with varying degrees of success. For years, it managed to succeed. But the 2016 US presidential elections changed online discourse, fueling the country’s increased political polarisation.
In early 2016, a tech blog quoted an anonymous former Facebook contractor who said the site downplayed news that conservatives are interested in and artificially boosted liberal issues such as the “BlackLivesMatter” hashtag. The blog did not name the person, and no evidence was provided for their claim.
But in the explosive political climate that preceded the election of former President Donald Trump, the claim quickly took a life of its own. There was plenty of media coverage, as well as inquiries from GOP lawmakers, then, later, congressional hearings on the matter. In the years since, as social media companies began to crack down on far-right accounts and conspiracy theories such as QAnon, some conservatives have come to see it as evidence of the platforms’ bias.
Musk himself is at least listening to such claims, and he’s repeatedly engaged with figures on the right and far right who would like to see a loosening of Twitter’s misinformation and hate speech policies.
Evidence suggests those voices are already being heard. In an October study, for instance, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that “Twitter gives greater visibility to politically conservative news than it does content with a liberal bent.”
Musk’s tweet garnered hundreds of thousands of likes and many retweets Monday on the day before the final votes are cast in thousands of races around the country. But in replies and retweets, many prominent (and not so prominent) Twitter personalities expressed criticism for the Tesla CEO — often poking fun at him. For Smith, that’s a sign Musk may not quite be a billionaire political kingmaker that some of his peers, like venture capitalist Peter Thiel, are aspiring to be.
“I wonder if we’re we’re having the emergence of a new type of billionaire, the ones who want to decide what happens and get credit for deciding what happens,” Smith said. “So this more like an oligarchy approach than the old school billionaires who would drop lots of money but then they didn’t want anybody to know their names.”
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WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger to Get AI Assistants; Meta Shows Off Image Generation Tool Emu
Meta showcased a host of new products and services, including the Meta Quest 3 mixed reality headset and a pair of smart glasses made in collaboration with Ray-Ban, at its Meta Connect annual conference on Wednesday. Alongside the hardware, the company also announced its own AI assistant, Meta AI, and a variety of AI experiences across Meta’s suite of apps and devices, including AI stickers in Meta apps and AI editing tools for Instagram. Meta AI, a conversational generative AI assistant much like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Bing, will be available on WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram.
Meta AI will be powered by the company’s custom model that borrows from Meta’s large language model, Llama 2. The AI assistant, Meta said, will provide real-time information in response to text-based queries, trawling the internet via Bing search. Meta AI will also generate images based on text prompts. The AI assistant can help plan hiking trips with your friends in a group chat, prepare recipes, or help with your shopping list. Users can type in “@MetaAI /imagine” inside their chat box and follow it up with descriptive text prompts for what they want the AI assistant to do. Meta AI is also coming to the company’s latest devices, the Meta Quest 3 and the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
In addition to its default AI assistant, the company also showed off AI avatars with distinct personalities. Meta is bringing 28 AI characters, each with a unique backstory and behaviour. These AI characters can be conversed with in WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, and will also include some public figures and influencers that Meta has partnered up with for their likenesses. Famous people coming as AI characters include Dwayne Wade, Kendall Jenner, Mr. Beast, Snoop Dogg and more.
Emu can generate stickers based on user prompts
Photo Credit: Meta
Meta is calling its image generation tool ‘expressive media universe’, or Emu. The tool can also quickly generate AI stickers based on a user’s text prompts inside apps like WhatsApp or Instagram to share with friends. “It’s high-quality, photorealistic,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the presentation. “But, one of the coolest things is the Emu generates that fast. It’s not a minute. It takes five seconds to generate one of these,” he added. This custom sticker generation feature will roll out to select English-language users over the next month in WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and Facebook Stories.
The Facebook parent is also bringing new AI-powered image editing tools, specifically two new features — Restyle and Backdrop — that utilise technology from the Emu tool. Restyle acts as a kind of custom filter that works based on user prompts. Based on single descriptor or a more detail prompt, Restyle will edit your images to reflect a particular mood. And as the name suggests, Backdrop will let users change the background of their images based on custom prompts. Images created using both tools will carry markers that indicate the image is AI-generated. Meta said that Restyle and Backdrop were coming soon to Instagram but did not provide a concrete release date for the same.
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Meta Smart Glasses in collaboration with Ray-Ban were introduced on Wednesday alongside the Meta Quest 3 and other products. Users can livestream videos to Facebook and Instagram using the smart glasses, hands-free. The frame comes with a 12-megapixel camera sensor and an LED unit. This smart wearable succeeds the Ray-Ban stories, which were the company’s first smart glasses and was released in September 2021. However, unlike AR/VR headsets, the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses do not feature a display unit.
Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses with standard lenses start at $299 (roughly Rs. 24,999), while Polarized lenses and transition lenses are priced at $329 (roughly Rs. 27,400) and $379 (roughly Rs. 31,500), respectively. It is offered in 150 different custom frame and lens design combinations.
The Ray-Ban Meta Smart glasses are currently available for pre-orders in 15 countries, including the US, Canada, Australia, and European markets. The sale of the smart glasses will start from October 17 in these regions. Meta has not revealed the India launch date of the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses.
Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses specifications, features
A 12-megapixel sensor and an LED light, which doubles as a recording indicator are placed within two circular cutouts on either side of the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses frame. Users can use the camera to take photos with a resolution of 3,024 x 4,032 pixels and 1080p videos of up to 60 seconds. With the Meta View app, the users can then share these media files to any other image/ video sharing apps.
The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses also enable first person perspective livestreaming in which a user can stream whatever they are looking at with the glasses on in real time, to their respective Instagram and Facebook profiles. Users can also use the ‘Hey Meta’ prompt to enable handsfree functions.
Even though the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses do not come with a display, the company claims, that compared to Ray-Ban Stories, the dual open-ear speakers in the new glasses offer less audio leakage and is said to bring up to 50 percent louder sound, deeper bass, and more clarity.
The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses are powered by the new Qualcomm Snapdragon AR1 Gen1 Platform SoC and packs 32GB of inbuilt storage. Claimed to be sleeker in design than its preceding model, Meta says that the glasses come with up to four hours of battery life, and an additional 32 hours with the charging case. One full charge is claimed to take 75 minutes. The glasses also come with an IPX4 rating.
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WhatsApp is redesigning the chat interface on the Android version of its application, according to details shared by a feature tracker. The popular chat service is working on changing some of the colours in the app — this change will also affect how the app looks in dark mode. Meanwhile, some of the icons and buttons in the app are also being updated along with new colours. A redesigned version of WhatsApp for iOS is also in the works, with similar changes to colours and icons in the app.
On version 2.23.20.10 of WhatsApp beta for Android, feature tracker WABetaInfo spotted a refreshed version of the app’s interface that is still being developed by the Meta-owned chat platform. This means that you won’t be able to try out the new interface, even if you install the latest version of the app.
The redesigned chat list screen with updated icons and colour accents
Photo Credit: WABetaInfo
WhatsApp is working to introduce a redesigned camera icon in the main chat screen, while the solid video call and voice call, and camera icons inside individual chats and group chats have been replaced with outlines of the older ones. WABetaInfo has also shared screenshots showing the new icons in both light and dark modes.
The screenshots published by the feature tracker also show a new green colour in use across the app, that is slightly brighter than the existing shade. This applies to both the dark and light modes and includes the floating action button at the bottom right corner of the screen and the WhatsApp text at the top of the app.
The updated chat interface with updated icons, without the green bar at the top
Photo Credit: WABetaInfo
Last month, the feature tracker revealed that WhatsApp was planning on replacing its iconic green bar at the top of the app with white — allowing the app interface to turn black or grey in dark mode. Earlier this year, WhatsApp moved the chat, calls, and other tabs to the bottom of the app on Android, to match the app’s functionality on iOS.
These changes to the icons and colour palette were previously spotted by the feature tracker on WhatsApp beta for iOS 23.19.1.72. Both the iOS and Android versions of the app are expected to gain support for chat filters such as All, Unread, Contacts, and Groups. However, just like the changes to the colours and icons in the app, there’s no word on when we can expect to see the new chat filters on WhatsApp for iOS and Android.
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