Wow. Musk has no idea the DARPA rattlesnake he just stepped on by this doing this…
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) July 1, 2023
My take on @elonmusk’s new rate limit policy, from the lens of the censorship industry: https://t.co/AZ5SPIgHiz pic.twitter.com/Rw4KBZsT9O
Last weekend, Elon Musk announced a limit on Twitter’s post viewing to “address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation” much to the disgust of free-speech patriots. Accounts all across Twitter thought this was another form of censorship and a grab at obtaining more paid blue check marks. Outside of perhaps a small number of Twitter users, this was the overwhelming sentiment one would see while browsing through Twitter feeds (don’t browse too much…800 posts goes by quick!).
Perhaps the best summation of the move by Musk came from Mike Benz of the Foundation for Freedom Online: this was an effort to beat the AI-censorship bots. Benz alludes to an “AI censorship Death Star” that has been under construction and renovation every week, every month, every year for the past 6 or 7 years now. And it all relies on massive scraping of Twitter data in order to build these models and databases to track trending narratives, to systematically surveil and build, sort of, intelligence dossiers, and to track and turn down all at once, communities online.”
Benz talks about the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) that was assembled with the Stanford Internet Observatory “with the narrow aim of defending the 2020 election against voting-related mis- and disinformation”. Benz rhetorically asks how the EIP was able to get 22 million tweets classified as “[mis]information”: