X

Twitter has spent years and millions of dollars fighting falsehoods with a now well-worn arsenal—fact-checks and warning labels and context labels and algorithmic tweaks and bans and bans on the President of the United States—but this week the company unveiled a totally new weapon: us. Select Twitter users who participate in the new program, called Birdwatch, can identify tweets they believe are misleading, write notes that provide context to the tweet, and rate the quality of other participants’ notes, the company says. The eventual goal is to add community-written notes directly beneath Tweets, through what Twitter calls “consensus from a broad and diverse set of contributors.” (The pilot starts with 1,000 qualified users; you can apply here.) It’s actually an old idea, harnessing the wisdom of the crowd that powers Wikipedia and a range of decades-old digital forums. But Twitter is not Wikipedia, and within minutes of the debut of Birdwatch many people, well, took to Twitter. “Unlike Wikipedia, Twitter is not one cohesive community, and users are not dedicated to a common purpose of sharing knowledge,” contended Tiffany C. Li, a professor at Boston University School of Law. “Imagine the harassment and disinfo you already see in replies and…

The social network is better than ever. Why not block all heads of state?Jan. 28, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit...Jordan AwanOfficially, Donald Trump left office only last week, but in truth the frenetic, ALL-CAPS soul of the Trump presidency took flight weeks before, when @realdonaldtrump, the president’s Twitter feed and the purest expression of his id, finally met an unceremonious end under Jack Dorsey’s long-reluctant banhammer.For the better part of five years, Trump’s Twitter was an instrument of power as frightening as it was bizarre: the federal government’s most consequential public-address system that also happened to be a grumpy old man’s favorite method for yelling at his TV. Trump used Twitter to hire and fire, negotiate war and peace, get out the vote, conjure conspiracies and finally to incite an insurrection, but mostly he used it to mint his favorite currency — attention — by goading and trolling the global media into talking only and ever about him.I had long been ambivalent about banning Trump’s tweets; as the president, Trump enjoyed near-infinite access to media, so shutting down this single channel didn’t seem worth the trouble.But weeks into Trump’s absence from Twitter, I have come around to the wisdom of banishment. I…

Sophomore forward Jalen Hill yells and points during the game against No. 15 Texas Tech on Dec. 22. Sophomore forward Jalen Hill yells and points during the game against No. 15 Texas Tech on Dec. 22. Ty Russell/OU Athletics/Pool photo No. 24 Oklahoma (10-4, 6-3 Big 12) narrowly upset No. 5 Texas (11-3, 5-2), 80-79, in Austin on Tuesday evening.The win marks the Sooners' second-straight victory over an Associated Press top-10 opponent, after they defeated then-No. 9 Kansas in Norman Saturday. Here's how Twitter reacted to an OU win over the Longhorns that went down to the wire:🗣 GO SOONERS!No. 24 Oklahoma knocks off No. 5 Texas in Round 1 of the Red River Rivalry! #Sooners pic.twitter.com/q3gsah8FGI— NCAA March Madness (@marchmadness) January 27, 2021 BOOM! SOONERS TAKE DOWN #5 TEXAS IN AUSTIN— Barstool Sooners (@OUBarstool) January 27, 2021Oklahoma starts a big week with a big win. Sooners over Texas by one in Austin. Next up for Lon Kruger's squad? Alabama on Saturday in Norman. The buzz is already palpable.— Jon Rothstein (@JonRothstein) January 27, 2021Blake Nevins on the inbounds throw. Uh, ok. Game over.— Cedric Golden (@CedGolden) January 27, 2021Sooners got 32 free throw attempts compared to Horns' 19. pic.twitter.com/3U82fL1uJv— Brian Davis…

The Kentucky Wildcats lose yet another game, their second loss of the season to the Alabama Crimson Tide, 70-59. After a good showing against LSU on Saturday, the bad version of the Wildcats reared its ugly head again, and the Wildcats could not crack 60 points, as has been a trend all season long. Kentucky battled for most of the game, around 37 minutes or so, before another total collapse in the final minutes for the second straight week. It’s apparent that Kentucky has no real closer on the team and has no way to close any team out In a back-and-forth scenario. Olivier Sarr was the main focal point of the offense tonight, as was Davion Mintz, before Calipari stopped going with the lineup that had kept them in the game all night long. Missed shots and costly turnovers in the final minutes ruined any hopes for a win in this game, and the season as a whole. Here is what Twitter had to say about Kentucky’s 10th loss of the season: Every offensive trip for Kentucky feels like the equivalent of converting a 3rd and long.— Chris Fisher (@ChrisFisher247) January 27, 2021 Total collapse the last 4 minutes…

Need help? Contact us We've detected unusual activity from your computer network To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot. Why did this happen? Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review our Terms of Service and Cookie Policy. Need Help? For inquiries related to this message please contact our support team and provide the reference ID below. Block reference ID:

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell chats with President Donald Trump in the White House in 2017. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo Twitter has pulled the plug on the account of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. A spokesperson for Twitter said, "This account was suspended for repeated violations of our civic integrity policy.” Twitter confirmed late Monday that the ban on the entrepreneur from Minnesota is a permanent one. The ban is the latest in a series of disciplinary actions taken by Twitter that include, most notably, the banning of former President Donald Trump in an effort to reduce the spread of blatant political lies and punish those who incited violence, particularly in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Lindell has been a vocal backer of Trump, and reports surfaced earlier this month that he suggested the president declare martial law in the wake of what he saw as widespread election fraud. Among other things, Lindell alleged that the voting machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems were part of a conspiracy to rig the election against Trump. Upon threat of lawsuit from Dominion, Lindell told the New York Times: "I would really welcome them to sue me because I have…

How should we respond to Facebook and Twitter banning political speakers who knowingly repeat factual falsehoods?I have some experience with deciding what to publish, but no good ideas about what to do with these two Internet age companies.For a half-century at newspapers, my job included deciding whether to print stories or letters that contained ... “hogwash.”But I am still puzzling about Facebook and Twitter. They do not fit within traditional laws and limits.As an editor, I allowed some upsetting stuff to be published, following the hoary cliché that newspapers should “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”I disallowed some stuff, too. When a Ku Klux Klan member yammered from near Punxsutawney, we published a news story about his demonstration in DuBois. We did not print direct quotations, photos of hooded Klansmen or of crosses. We told readers what happened. We drew the line at what might promote his vile, racist bigotry.I also got into a hassle about an obituary. The deceased had three surviving brothers. His obituary named two. His widow said he insisted in not naming the third brother because of a feud. That brother was a subscriber to our newspaper. We decided that either the obituary would name…

Even before public announcements of the first cases of COVID-19 in Europe were made, at the end of January 2020, signals that something strange was happening were already circulating on social media. A new study of researchers at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, published in Scientific Reports, has identified tracks of increasing concern about pneumonia cases on posts published on Twitter in seven countries, between the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020. The analysis of the posts shows that the "whistleblowing" came precisely from the geographical regions where the primary outbreaks later developed. To conduct the research, the authors first created a unique database with all the messages posted on Twitter containing the keyword "pneumonia" in the seven most spoken languages of the European Union - English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, and Dutch - from December 2014 until 1 March 2020. The word "pneumonia" was chosen because the disease is the most severe condition induced by the SARS-CoV-2, and also because the 2020 flu season was milder than the previous ones, so there was no reason to think it to be responsible for all the mentions and worries. The researchers then made a number of adjustments…

There are few consolations to Covid, but it is at least interesting having a celebrity disease. We’ve become objects of fascination to friends and family who’ve not yet had it, and who’ve taken to quizzing us on our symptoms as if they’re small-town yokels who’ve heard we’re in Disneyland.One small mercy of Covid’s lethargy is that it has reduced – though not ceased – my Twitter use, since focusing on backlit screens has been taxing, and it’s surprising how much my brain has enjoyed the break from doom scrolling. Luckily, others are on hand to inform us of every new stat, graph and grim tiding.Weirdly, I’d not noticed that every single person I know has spent the past year doing a correspondence course in epidemiology and each now knows more about the symptoms – our symptoms – than we do. At every stage, and with something not entirely disconnected from glee, we’ve been reliably informed that the worst is probably yet to come. On Day 4, I was solemnly informed, ‘Day 5 is where it gets messy,’ and a few days later: ‘Beware day 8.’ Having now regained just a little get-up-and-go around day 14, I was today reminded that,…

US President Donald Trump and Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini | Bloomberg and http://english.khamenei.ir/ Text Size: In the aftermath of the US elections and ensuing ruckus and violence at the Capitol on 6 January, social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram blocked or barred accounts of then sitting US president Donald Trump. Now, Twitter has banned Iranian Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s account. The Twitter handle @khamenei_site was linked to a website of Khamenei. This site had posted a picture of Trump with the caption, “Revenge is Certain”. Twitter later clarified that the handle it took down was fake, without giving any further explanation on how it concluded the account was fake. This has raised concern about the users’ agency on social media vis-a-vis the owners of the platforms. Banning, blocking, or barring users from posting content on social media, and that too without any legal process is problematic. Restricting certain people and ideas can cause a cascading effect that may herald the demise of social media as universal platforms for conversation. Universality is the masonic stone of the entire edifice, which we know as social media. Once this masonic stone is gone, the whole structure could crumble…