[Air-L] Will Academic Twitter Exist Under Elon Musk?

[Shulman, Stu]

Will academic Twitter exist under Elon Musk? Will there be more or less
data? More or less urgent issues to study? Will the "Fail Whale" show up
again after 75% of the staff is gone? Who will do content moderation? Is
this a FastTrack to the next violent uprising in the US?

I am curious what people on this particular list think is about to happen.
After 12 years featuring the formal study of Twitter data I am completely
burned out. Not on the challenges, nor the art and science of the tasks. I
still love talking to students and faculty who have chosen Twitter as the
object of their research. The data has never been more widely available and
the positive uses of it can be inspiring.

It's the voluminous amounts of hate I see in my own research. Also the
systemic weaponization of Twitter against democratic systems of government
globally. As an original Board Member and the Treasurer of a 501 (c)(6)
called "The Big Boulder Initiative" I was working as a liaison to academia
with a group of industry people on the "long term preservation of the
social data industry." The industry survived, but the ideals aspired to
have not. We offered this 2-minute Lawrence Lessig-inspired vision of the
challenges about 7 years ago:

"Why Texifter Joined the Big Boulder Initiative"
https://vimeo.com/129423037

Lessig was right. On the Internet, architecture is the most powerful
regulator. The architecture of Twitter, with corporate ads featured on
insurrectionist and other problematic timelines, is now a persistent threat
to democratic systems of government without a single day of Musk
governance. The insurrection January 6, 2021 was planned in the open on
Twitter. There were advertisements from familiar brands in every seditious
timeline. Evolving tactics using Twitter trains (tagging 30 like-minded
users), notification-rich replies, the ReTweet functionality, gamification,
domestic and foreign meme warfare, the idolatry of influence via
misinformation, bots and trolls, as well as paid amplifiers of all manner
and variety. The "digital soldiers" we found in the Canadian election of
2019 (fake Americans who hated Trudeau but liked RT, Russia Today and
Southfront) were openly planning a QAnon-inspired "storm" which ultimately
was the first coup attempt in two centuries of American democracy. I
briefed the US/UK Intelligence Community (staff from the Joint Chiefs,
JSOC, etc.) February 12, 2020 via the Strategic Multilayer Assessment using
open source information from Twitter. Things have since gotten much worse,
not better, since that briefing. These were the slides in early February
2020:

https://tinyurl.com/huntingbotsandtrolls

Looking at the current threat-relevant data, I have a sick-to-my-stomach
feeling about the next 60 days in U.S. history. We may be late to notice
the end of small "d" democracy is imminent or inevitable because of the
Internet effects we cannot fully see, capture, measure, or control.

-- 
Dr. Stuart W. Shulman
Founder and CEO, Texifter
Editor Emeritus, *Journal of Information Technology & Politics*