Andrew, I am solely responsible for the interpretation that firing the small academic Twitter team (along with other service and content oriented teams) is a precursor to ending the academic program. There is no reporting I have seen to that effect. It was based on private conversations. I would be pleased to be 100% wrong; the program has been amazing and I love working with academics on the data. However, the program has specific compute costs associated with it. Currently academics with credentials can pull undeleted and unprotected Tweets from the complete history of Twitter for free. That query and the data pull itself are not frictionless. Searching many billions of Tweets and then retrieving the matches when there are 60+ fields of text and metadata and hundreds of millions of rows of data per day, over more than a decade of Twitter online, is costly. I run one rack, with one server, and one disk array, holding about one half billion Tweets, and the electricity bill is a real cost of making our tools free for academics. When Musk is done kicking people off Twitter for not labeling their jokes as parody (so much for free speech leadership) he may look at the cost of the free data access for academics, or anyone else, and choose to curtail or monetize it. Will the Twitter Search API remain free and or operational? Nobody knows. From what I have heard from folks still inside and recently departed, some of the critical functions of the platform are currently under- or unstaffed, not just the academic program. Certain key people who are bearers of institutional knowledge about what keeps Twitter servers running, insanely complicated and in parts aging tech, are now focused on planning a group trip to Disney with the buyout cash, which, not to go too far astray, appears to be one of the largest money laundering operations in history. My point was if you have the academic credentials, have not used them to the full extent, and you have a PhD thesis or scholarly publication dependent on that access, the program is unstaffed, the group in charge of Twitter is fretting about losing $4M US/day, advertisers are bailing out, and we are entering what some political science and history professors call a historically contingent moment with potential for a major ideological realignment or worse. Democracy in the US is under specific and well documented threats and some rightly say social media is an enabling factor for authoritarianism and dystopian politics. If we go into 6 weeks of civil unrest over election denial and another bigger and better violent insurrection is organized on Twitter, does anyone think Elon Musk will want academics or journalists fully empowered to document the role of weaponized Twitter functionalities in that? I am an election worker. People are making violent threats on Twitter about election workers. The folks in charge of regulating that "free speech" are now gone or have diminished resources. Public statements from the Trust & Safety team aside, on Twitter, you can call for the assasination of political leaders all over the world, the killing of vaccine advocates, mob violence against election workers, blatantly false election denial, and some other entirely anarchic, anti-Semitic, and racist stuff, and that was all before Elon fired everyone who was responsible for keeping a lid on such things. Twitter is a loaded weapon. There is no Board of Directors. Literally anything could happen with no check or balance. I remain of the view that Monday will be one of the strangest days in the history of the Internet. Truly, I hope I am wrong about all of it. Stu On Mon, Nov 7, 2022 at 3:17 AM Andrew Lowenthal via Air-L < air-l@listserv.aoir.org> wrote:
Wonderful to see so many people (re)embracing open source/non-corporate social media etc. Ultimately alternatives that don't place us at the whim of one oligarch or the other are the best solution.
One question however - the thrust of the Musk criticism is that he will be too libertarian. With that in mind, where does the assumption come from that he will shut off access to academic twitter? Has there been a statement? It would seem to go against his anti-censorship ethos. Or is it more that it would not be in his interest to serve an overwhelmingly left-wing academia?
Anything tangible as to known intentions of already concluded Twitter actions would be helpful.
Thanks, Andrew
On 11/7/22 01:28, Paul Levinson via Air-L wrote:
Just followed ISOC on Mastodon -- thanks!
-- PL
On Sun, Nov 6, 2022 at 7:19 PM Joly MacFie <joly@punkcast.com> wrote:
Not that you don't see enough of them already, but ISOC LIVE announces go out at @jolynyc@mastodon.social
I'm interested to see if EM messes with Twitter live (ex-Periscope) which I quite like.
Joly -- -------------------------------------- Joly MacFie +12185659365 -------------------------------------- -
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