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Elon Musk is Changing What You See on Your Twitter Feed: All You Need to Know

What you’re seeing in your feed on Twitter is changing. But how?
The social media platform’s new owner, Elon Musk, has been trying to prove through giving selected journalists access to some of the company’s internal communications dubbed “The Twitter Files” that officials from the previous leadership team allegedly suppressed right-wing voices.
This week, Musk disbanded a key advisory group, the Trust and Safety Council, made up of dozens of independent civil, human rights and other organisations. The company formed the council in 2016 to address hate speech, harassment, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform.
What do the developments mean for what shows up in your feed every day? For one, the moves show that Musk is prioritising improving Twitter’s perception on the US political right. He’s not promising unfettered free speech as much as a shift in what messages get amplified or hidden.
What are the Twitter files?
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3,37,465 crore) in late October and since then has partnered with a group of handpicked journalists including former Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi and opinion columnist Bari Weiss. Earlier this month, they began publishing — in the form of a series of tweets — about actions that Twitter previously took against accounts thought to have violated its content rules. They’ve included screenshots of emails and messaging board comments reflecting internal conversations within Twitter about those decisions.
Weiss wrote on December 8 that the “authors have broad and expanding access to Twitter’s files. The only condition we agreed to was that the material would first be published on Twitter.”
Weiss published the fifth and most recent installment Monday about the conversations leading up to Twitter’s January 8, 2021 decision to permanently suspend then-President Donald Trump’s account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence” following the deadly US Capitol insurrection two days earlier. The internal communications show at least one unnamed staffer doubting that one of the tweets was an incitement of violence; it also reveals executives’ reaction to an advocacy campaign from some employees pushing for tougher action on Trump.
What’s missing?
Musk’s Twitter Files reveal some of the internal decision-making process affecting mostly right-wing Twitter accounts that the company decided broke its rules against hateful conduct, as well as those that violated the platform’s rules against spreading harmful misinformation about COVID-19.
But the reports are largely based on anecdotes about a handful of high-profile accounts and the tweets don’t reveal numbers about the scale of suspensions and which views were more likely to be affected. The journalists appear to have unfettered access to the company’s Slack messaging board — visible to all employees — but have relied on Twitter executives to deliver other documents.
The Twitter files mention shadowbanning. What’s that?
In 2018, after then-CEO Jack Dorsey said Twitter would focus on the “health” of conversations on the platform, the company outlined a new approach intended to reduce the impact of disruptive users, or trolls, by reading “behavioral signals” that tend to indicate when users are more interested in blowing up conversations than in contributing.
Twitter has long said it used a technique described internally as “visibility filtering” to reduce the reach of some accounts that might violate its rules but don’t rise to the level of being suspended. But it rejected allegations it was secretly “shadowbanning” conservative viewpoints.
Screenshots showing an employee’s view of prominent user accounts disclosed through the Twitter Files show how that filtering works in practice. It’s also led Musk to call for changes to make that more transparent.
“Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal,” he tweeted.
Who’s monitoring posts on Twitter now?
Musk laid off about half of Twitter’s staff after he bought the platform and later eliminated an unknown number of contract workers who had focused on content moderation. Some workers who were kept on soon quit, including Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety.
The departure of so many employees raised questions about how the platform could enforce its policies against harmful misinformation, hate speech and threats of violence, both within the U.S. and across the globe. Automated tools can help detect spam and some suspicious accounts, but others take more careful human review.
It’s likely the reductions will force Twitter to concentrate content moderation efforts on regions with stronger regulations governing social media platforms like Europe, where tech companies could face big fines under the new Digital Services Act if they don’t make an effort to combat misinformation and hate speech, according to Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of global business at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
“The staff has been decimated,” Chakravorti said. “The few content moderators left are going to be focused on Europe, because Europe is the squeakiest wheel.”
Has there been an impact?
Since Musk bought Twitter a number of researchers and advocacy groups have pointed to an increase in posts containing racial epithets or attacks on Jewish people, gays, lesbians and transgender people.
In many cases, the posts were written by users who said they were trying to test Twitter’s new boundaries.
According to Musk, Twitter acted quickly to reduce the overall visibility of the posts, and that overall engagement with hate speech is down since he purchased the company, a finding disputed by researchers.
The most obvious sign of change at Twitter are the formerly banned users whose accounts have been reinstated, a list that includes Trump, satire site The Babylon Bee, the comedian Kathy Griffin, Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and, before he was kicked off again, Ye. Twitter has also reinstated accounts of neo-Nazis white supremacists including Andrew Anglin, the creator of the white supremacist website Daily Stormer — along with QAnon supporters whom Twitter’s old guard had been removing in masses to prevent hate and misinformation from spreading on the platform.
In addition, some high-profile tweeters like Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who were previously banned for spreading misinformation about COVID-19 have resumed posting misleading claims about vaccine safety and sham cures.
Musk, who has spread false claims about COVID-19 himself, returned to the topic this with a tweet this week that mocked transgender pronouns while calling for criminal charges against Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and one of the leaders of the country’s COVID response.
Calling himself a “free-speech absolutist,” Musk has said he wants to allow all content that’s legally permissible on Twitter but also that he wants to downgrade negative and hateful posts. Instead of removing toxic content, Musk’s call for “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” suggests Twitter may leave such content up without recommending it or amplifying it to other users.
But after cutting out most of Twitter’s policy-making executives and outside advisers, Musk often appears to be the arbiter of what crosses the line. Last month, Musk himself announced that he was booting Ye after the rapper formerly known as Kanye West posted an image of a swastika merged with a Star of David, a post that was not illegal but deeply offensive. The move led to questions about what rules govern what can and can’t be posted on the platform.
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YouTube Announces AI-Enabled Editing Products for Video Creators

YouTube will roll out a slew of artificial-intelligence-powered features for creators, the latest effort from parent company Alphabet to incorporate generative AI — technology that can create and synthesize text, images, music and other media given simple prompts — into its most important products and services.
Among the new products YouTube announced Thursday is a tool called Dream Screen that uses generative AI to add video or image backgrounds to short-form videos, which the company calls Shorts. It also announced new AI-enabled production tools to help with editing both short- and long-form videos on its platform.
“We’re unveiling a suite of products and features that will enable people to push the bounds of creative expression,” Toni Reid, YouTube’s vice president for community products, said in a blog post timed to the announcement Thursday. The Google-owned video platform first announced that it was developing the tools in March.
Google has been under pressure to show results and practical applications for its generative AI products. Some critics have been wary the company, which has long been seen as a leader in artificial intelligence, was falling behind upstarts like OpenAI or rival Microsoft, and that the products Google was rolling out weren’t yet ready for public consumption. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and a new Bing chatbot from Microsoft — which has invested $13 billion (nearly Rs. 1,08,100 crore) in OpenAI since 2019 — have been wildly popular and gained mainstream favour.
Over the past few months, Google launched its own ChatGPT competitor, Bard, and released a steady flow of updates to the product. It’s also incorporated experimental generative AI features into its most important services, including its flagship search engine, in what the company calls its experimental “search generative experience.” The product generates detailed summaries based on information it’s ingested from the internet and other digital sources in response to search queries.
The announcement of the new features also comes as YouTube is locked in fierce competition with ByteDance‘s TikTok and Meta Platforms‘s Instagram Reels to gain more share of the vertical, short-form video market. YouTube said it now sees more than 70 billion daily views on Shorts, and the new generative AI tools appear to be aimed at attracting even more users and creators and gaining a competitive edge over its rivals.
The company also announced YouTube Create, a mobile app aimed at helping the platform’s creators make video production work easier. The app includes AI-enabled features like editing and trimming, automatic captioning, voiceover capabilities and access to a library of filters and royalty-free music. The app is currently in beta on Android in “select markets,” the company said, and will be free of charge.
Beyond creation, YouTube said it would also provide creators with more tools to get AI-powered insights, help with automatic dubbing of videos and assist with finding music and soundtracks for videos.
© 2023 Bloomberg LP
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WhatsApp Passkey Support Reportedly Rolling Out to Beta Testers on Android: How It Works

WhatsApp has begun rolling out support for a new feature that will allow you to log in to your account using the biometric authentication mechanism on your smartphone. The messaging service will soon allow you to create a passkey — a kind of login credential that eliminates the need to use or remember a password — on your device and use it to securely log in to apps and services using the facial recognition or fingerprint scanner on your device.
Feature tracker WABetaInfo spotted the new passkey feature on WhatsApp beta for Android 2.23.20.4 on Tuesday, that is rolling out to beta users. However, not all users who have updated to the latest beta release will have access to the feature, which is reportedly rolling out to a “limited number of beta testers”. Gadgets 360 was unable to access the feature on two different Android smartphones that are both enrolled in the beta program.
The new Passkeys feature on WhatsApp
Photo Credit: WABetaInfo
The new passkey feature is described as a “simple way to sign in safely” to WhatsApp in a screenshot shared by the feature tracker. This suggests that it could be used to help sign in to other devices via secure authentication on your primary device.
Authenticating using passkeys isn’t a novel concept and the technology is slowly gaining traction online— Google already allows you to log in to a new device by using fingerprint-based biometric authentication for passkeys in place of a password. These passkeys are securely stored on your device and used when biometric authentication is provided.
The screenshot posted by WABetaInfo also states that WhatsApp will store the passkey in the device’s password manager — for most users, that would be the device’s default password store that is handled by Google with autofill support. The feature is also expected to make its way to iOS, where it is likely to be stored in the iOS Keychain.
It is currently unclear whether WhatsApp will also support storing passkeys in third-party apps like Bitwarden, 1Password, or Dashlane. We can expect to learn more about how the feature works when it is rolled out to more users in the beta program and the feature is expected to arrive on all smartphones on the stable channel in the future.
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Meta Urged Not to Roll Out End-to-end Encryption on Messenger, Instagram by UK

Britain urged Meta not to roll out end-to-end encryption on Instagram and Facebook Messenger without safety measures to protect children from sexual abuse after the Online Safety Bill was passed by parliament.
Meta, which already encrypts messages on WhatsApp, plans to implement end-to-end encryption across Messenger and Instagram direct messages, saying the technology re-enforced safety and security.
Britain’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman said she supported strong encryption for online users but it could not come at the expense of children’s safety.
“Meta has failed to provide assurances that they will keep their platforms safe from sickening abusers,” she said. “They must develop appropriate safeguards to sit alongside their plans for end-to-end encryption.”
A Meta spokesperson said: “The overwhelming majority of Brits already rely on apps that use encryption to keep them safe from hackers, fraudsters and criminals.
“We don’t think people want us reading their private messages so have spent the last five years developing robust safety measures to prevent, detect and combat abuse while maintaining online security.”
It said it would update on Wednesday on the measures it was taking, such as restricting people over 19 from messaging teens who do not follow them and using technology to identify and take action against malicious behaviour.
“As we roll out end-to-end encryption, we expect to continue providing more reports to law enforcement than our peers due to our industry leading work on keeping people safe,” the spokesperson said.
Social media platforms will face tougher requirements to protect children from accessing harmful content when the Online Safety Bill passed by Parliament on Tuesday becomes law.
End-to-end encryption is a bone of contention between companies and the government in the new law.
Messaging platforms led by WhatsApp oppose a provision that they say could force them to break end-to-end encryption.
The government, however, has said the bill does not ban the technology, but instead, it requires companies to take action to stop child abuse and as a last resort develop technology to scan encrypted messages.
Tech companies have said scanning messages and end-to-end encryption are fundamentally incompatible.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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