The 146th Block: Twitter limits 2FA, force feeds tweets
Engagement is more importanter than user security – Elon Musk, probably
This week…
A little bit of grumble from readers about the back-to-back(-to-back?) coverage of ChatGPT, so a short break from that now to turn our focus on… what else, if not Twitter. Hopefully, when this issue is automatically posted to my Twitter, it will not get me banned from that platform.
So here’s a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
New Twitter Blue verification system threatens to drown out reliable sports coverage
Morgan Campbell for CBC:
Trades, free agent signings, fight announcements, significant injuries — they all get reported on Twitter minutes before they hit big outlets’ websites, and hours before they appear in highlight shows and newspaper pages.
As long as Twitter is the first option for breaking news, and for keeping the 24/7 sports news cycle churning, the platform, and how it operates, will matter for journalists and sports fans alike.
Twitter’s old verification gave us all a simple way to distinguish a reliable source from a troll seeking a megaphone for their iffy sports opinions. But in the current setup, where verified accounts are notable only for their willingness to pay for an otherwise free website, means Twitter might willingly help drown out trustworthy reporting and solid analysis with half-baked, bad takes.
True, and not just for sports news.
Twitter will limit uses of SMS 2-factor authentication. What does this mean for users?
Jaclyn Diaz for NPR:
Only users who pay a monthly fee for Twitter’s subscription service will get to use text message authentication in order to keep their accounts secure, the social media company says.
Two-factor authentication is not required to be a user on Twitter, but it is a proven and easy way to help keep accounts secure. It makes it so if someone wants to hack into an account they’d have to have the password and access to the account owner's device.
Twitter Blue costs $11 a month on Android and iOS in the U.S. It’s $8 a month for web users. Users have 30 days to sign up or they will see their SMS two-factor authentication (2FA) turned off automatically, the company said.
Several issues here:
Max Walden points out that users from countries that need 2FA the most, such as Indonesia—where Internet freedom and safety have eroded significantly in recent years—cannot afford the subscription rate.
As a matter of fact, many vulnerable users do not even have the option to subscribe. Blue is only available in selected countries: the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the UK, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, India, Indonesia, and Brazil.
Nonetheless, SocialProof Security’s Rachel Tobac indicates that only 2.6 per cent of Twitter users have 2FA at all according to Twitter’s transparency data (as of December 2021).
Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first
Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton for The Verge:
At 2:36 on Monday morning, James Musk sent an urgent message to Twitter engineers.
“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” wrote Musk, a cousin of the Twitter CEO, tagging “@here” in Slack to ensure that anyone online would see it. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”
When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.
Biden’s tweet, in which he said he would be supporting his wife in rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles, generated nearly 29 million impressions. Musk, who also tweeted his support for the Eagles, generated a little more than 9.1 million impressions before deleting the tweet in apparent frustration.
In the wake of those losses — the Eagles to the Kansas City Chiefs, and Musk to the president of the United States — Twitter’s CEO flew his private jet back to the Bay Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team.
Within a day, the consequences of that meeting would reverberate around the world, as Twitter users opened the app to find that Musk’s posts overwhelmed their ranked timeline. This was no accident, Platformer can confirm: after Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to ensure that Musk — and Musk alone — benefits from previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.
Musk now wants to sue the ‘disgruntled employee’ for this ‘bogus’ article.
What I read, listen, and watch…
I’m reading how doctors die. Revisiting this 2011 essay by Ken Murray on Zócalo.
I’m listening to how The Star broke the story on John Tory.
I’m watching Star Trek: Picard. The third and final season is here!
Reviews, opinion pieces, and other stray links:
The problem with trauma culture by Catherine Liu for Noema.
The Girl Internet and the Boy Internet by Rebecca Jennings on Beccacore.
If racial identity can be fluid, who changes their race? by Alexander Agadjanian for Psyche.
English as a curse on the development of tech in the Spanish-speaking Americas by Alex González Ormerod for Rest of World.
Demystifying Sufism—and gaining millions of YouTube viewers by Adil Rashid for Rest of World.
Chart of the week
Gallup and Knight Foundation published a report showing half of Americans surveyed believe that the news deliberately misleads.
And one more thing
Not sorry; ChatGPT found its way into this edition after all.