Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[Syt]

 

[DGuller]

  That does seem rather statistically unlikely.

[Josquius]

They lost more than they gained and it works on simple arithmetic?

[Sheilbh]

I mentioned the worry about states like Hungary using these digital regulations, but thought France may be a bigger, quicker risk - and it's already happened.

With the current unrest France has now summoned the platforms to remind them of their legal responsibility to respond to "immediately" state requests including to "remove content inciting hatred and violence" and to "identify infringing users".

This unrest is directed at the state and particularly the police, and was provoked by the shooting of a 17 year old boy (of Algerian descent from a banlieue) who'd been pulled over for a traffic stop. The CRS have been ordered in.

Meanwhile the French police union has issued a statement describing their situation as being "faced with wild hordes", that it isn't enough to call for calm - it and "republican order" must be imposed. It ends "today the police are in combat because we are at war. Tomorrow we will be in resistance and the Government will have to realise this."

Again fully get the need to regulate the platforms and the primacy of democratic states over large multi-nationals, but I'm still a little worried about exactly what authorities can use these laws and to what ends.

[Syt]

So it seems you can't browse Twitter any more without having an account "temporarily":



And I've seen on Reddit that apparently there's now a "Scroll limit", i.e. how often/quickly you can load more Tweets by scrolling down in your feed.

[Jacob]

That I can actually believe.

I mean, I can also believe alternate explanations - but wanting to stop ChatGPT et. al. to build from Twitter data makes sense to me.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah I can believe it.

Publisher sites in the UK have seen a huge increase in the number of crawlers across their sites. It's not always clear who but I think the assumption is that a lot of it are companies building up their language models for AI.

Obviously there are lots of IP issues which is generally an isue at the minute.

It would surprise me if Twitter isn't affected by that as well. Having said that, given the nature of Twitter's business and social media in general, I'm not sure this is a solution that's going to help them.

[Jacob]

Yeah exactly.

What I'd try for if I controlled Twitter would be to build partnerships with some companies and explicitly allow them to use my data, while making a statement that Twitter is not granting any permissions to anyone else (though it's of course unclear whether Twitter can withhold permissions until it's legislated or litigated).

There may, of course, be plenty of reasons why that strategy is unfeasible but playing the "I'm taking my ball and going home" card doesn't seem super congruent with Twitter's business model as I understand it. That said, it seems that Musk's vision of Twitter is more closed and controlled that the previous iteration so maybe it's not that off.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah.

My understanding is that the IP position is really unclear until, as you say, someone litigates or legislates. The AI companies in the US think they're in a far stronger position based on "fair use" but I've no idea how strong that is.

Also from a media perspective, I'm not sure that you'd want to keep embedding tweets in articles/liveblogs now if it's actually just presenting readers with a sign up page.

[FunkMonk]

If this sticks then all the people whose careers are built entirely on Twitter are screwed.

Sorry Fabrizio Romano 

[Jacob]

My understanding is that the IP position is really unclear until, as you say, someone litigates or legislates. The AI companies in the US think they're in a far stronger position based on "fair use" but I've no idea how strong that is.

I wonder if that's Twitter's play then - to require sign up to access and then have a term of service prohibiting crawling/ using in AI training? Does fair use trump terms of service?

Also from a media perspective, I'm not sure that you'd want to keep embedding tweets in articles/liveblogs now if it's actually just presenting readers with a sign up page.

Definitely.

Certainly seems like there's room for some challengers in the Twitter space at the moment.

[grumbler]

I'm perfectly fine with measures that make access to twitter more difficult.  Access causes more problems than it solves.

[Sheilbh]

I wonder if that's Twitter's play then - to require sign up to access and then have a term of service prohibiting crawling/ using in AI training? Does fair use trump terms of service?

Maybe - although all websites even without sign up will have T&Cs which normally include restrictions on using copyrighted material. I think it's more about putting the website itself behind a sign-up/sign on gate which would make it more difficult for bots to access for AI training.

Basically a tecnical rather than a legal solution.

[Tamas]

My access to Ukraine war news and footage would drop very very significabtly without twitter

[Sheilbh]

My access to Ukraine war news and footage would drop very very significabtly without twitter

Yeah - same.

It's the thing that annoys me about all of this. I joined Twitter because of the Arab Spring - and obviously you need to curate who you follow - but it is still one of the best ways to access information about news as it's happening (especially as many journalists are tweet first rather than just posting links to their articles). It is, I think, still a very valuable information space.

Although, as I say, you need to curate/manage it - I always think unless you are prominent with 10,000s of followers (or accidentally go viral) - if you're seeing lots of far-right/conspiracy/hateful content you're basically just telling on yourself.