After Elon Musk assuming the role of Twitter’s chief moderator a week before the US legislative elections, the White House withdrew a tweet on Wednesday for lack of “context.”
It was the social network itself that added context to the message, thus relativizing the extent of the information provided by President Joe Biden’s communications service.
“The elderly have earned the largest increase in their pensions in 10 years for the leadership of President Biden, “the official White House account tweeted.
But Twitter added a mention to the message, specifying it pensions are indexed to the inflation rateaccording to a 1972 law ratified by Richard Nixon (Republican president).
According to the latest data released two weeks ago by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the annual inflation rate fell for the third consecutive time in September and stood at 8.2%, despite consumer prices rising by four tenths a month.
The US Social Security Administration announced this in October the cost of living adjustment will be 8.7% in 2023, the largest increase since 1981.
In a press conference, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre acknowledged that the message “was incomplete” and that the initial tweet had already been deleted.
What are “context” notes.
Twitter adds “context” notes to some messages that receive a lot of visibility on the social network and that may not have information to be understood exactly, the company explains on its blog.
They are written by independent contributors to the Birdwatch program, an initiative of the bluebird social network a “fight disinformation”and are supported by relevant posts if enough different people find them “useful”.
“This means that the algorithm takes into account not only how many contributors rated a note as ‘useful’ or ‘not useful’, but also whether the people who rated it represent different perspectives,” Twitter explained in a statement on June 6. October, when the Californian company launched this program in the United States.
“The community notes system is fantastic,” Elon Musk, the new owner of the social network, reacted Wednesday in response to a user who shared a screenshot of the deleted tweet along with the contextual note.
“Our goal is to make Twitter the most accurate source of information in the world, regardless of political affiliation,” added the South African-American billionaire.
Musk, the richest man in the world and boss besides the companies Tesla and SpaceX, bought the influential Twitter platform last Thursday, after six months of back and forth with many users, managers of the social network (now fired) and NGOs.
Musk advocates less stringent content moderation than currently, he says, to promote greater freedom of expression.
The American right, which considers itself censored on the main social networks, approves this view. But its critics believe that the limits set by the rules, which specifically prohibit harassment, hate speech and disinformation, do not prevent it from generating useful debates.
They denounce an alleged favoritism towards liberals
A conservative political commentator on an online show shared examples of the platform allegedly favoring liberals and secretly silencing conservative voices, a common criticism that Twitter’s management had called inaccurate.
The relationship continued when the daughter of the Canadian psychologist Giordano Peterson – whose provocative criticisms of “politically correct” culture and feminism are cherished by some right-wing activists – asked Musk to restore his father’s account after a tweet about the transgender actor Elliot’s page apparently broke Twitter’s rules on hateful conduct.
“All people suspended for minor and dubious reasons will be released from Twitter jail,” Musk promised. Months earlier, Musk had said in reference to Peterson that Twitter “was going too far in silencing dissenting views.”
One of Musk’s first big actions was to address an open letter to advertisers – Twitter’s main source of income – in which he vowed not to allow the platform to become a “horrible arena of bickering” as he advances his plans to encourage free expression on the platform.
With information from agencies
DB
Source: Clarin
