Posted on 06/01/2023 6:37:09 AM PDT by Red Badger
Elon Musk Reveals Line of Code Used to Censor Tweets Containing Certain Key Words
Twitter owner Elon Musk revealed that engineers at the social media company discovered a line of code, which was more than ten years old, which appeared to suppress tweets containing specific words.
During an interview with The Babylon Bee, editor-in-chief Kyle Mann asked Musk:
“One of the craziest things you did when you took over Twitter was start releasing the Twitter files,” he began.
“Who takes over a company and then says, ‘Look, how horrible all this stuff is that’s going on’?”
“If we’re not going to expose the things that were done wrong, why should people believe us in the future? That’s why we’re trying to be as transparent as possible,” Musk responded.
“Don’t take my word for it – literally look at the algorithm; you should be able to recreate the results that you see on Twitter using that algorithm.”
“So we’re trying to make sure that everything is brought to light, not just so there’s no hidden layers or anything,” Musk added.
“We just discovered last week some hidden layer of censorship that was written in 2012.”
The Twitter owner said that “‘censorship’ is probably the wrong word” to describe the code; Twitter had a list of words it would use to evaluate Tweets.
“If you put ‘suck’ in a tweet, then it does not get amplified on the platform,” he explained.
“And that was literally code from, like 2012. We found this relic of code last week.”
Musk later confirmed the line of code was being applied to all tweets, with a thousand words on the list used to suppress tweets.
Watch: VIDEOS AT LINK.................
The news comes just days after Musk pulled his platform out of the EU bloc’s online censorship project, angering EU officials.
Musk pulled Twitter out of the EU’s “Code of Practice,” a pro-censorship project aimed at tackling so-called “disinformation” online,
The move comes after months of mixed messages from Elon Musk, who stated that he wanted to support free speech while insisting that Twitter would support the EU in its censorship program.
I would consider such a statement unnecessarily provocative. I think most reasonable would. Is that the ‘backyard bbq’ rule?
Got it. Wonder if the backyard BBQ analogy is applicable. I hold a BBQ for myself and some friends. Neighbors hear things they don’t like? Too damn bad. But it is my house and if I don’t like a friend using the N word I can warn them then tell him to leave. I think that would describe Free Republic and what the owner expects here. Twitter of course is not free republic so I think we are going to have a myriad of opinions on how free speech should be handled there.
Yeah but now I have said that, the backyard BBQ rule might be too restrictive for Twitter. See what you just said is where I get into arguments from liberals. I guess I am a bit of a free expression (better term that speech) absolutist. I guess now that you said that I realize that the problem is balancing civility without it becoming censorship. And in that is a general distrust of most people when it comes to free expression that I have. You can bet the enemies of free speech will use the “civility” excuse to dampen free speech.
Elon has accomplished the industrialist stature equal to Henry Ford and Henry Kaiser...
I’ll side with him on 90% of the issues...
Good post!
About 2 decades ago, I was part of a small group of conservatives participating on a small site.
The host, a nationally know guy, let 2 libs join and post.
The libs basically destroyed the site, until the owner let us block them.
The blocking took about a week before the liberal thugs left.
I was banned temporarily about 6 months ago, then 3 days ago I was banned permanently. Why? who knows. I suppose telling the truth about trannies, and black thugs. Twitter is not free at all. It is ultra woke, they just hide behind the facade of free speech.Good for you for getting somebody's attention! I'd bet most of the complaints against you were by bots that seek out certain phrases or words.
“You cannot have a true free-speech platform, because it will be overrun with people trying to ruin it by posting neo-Nazi crap and all kinds of other stuff. There has to be some level of moderation.”
I thought that was what the blocking feature is for?
So when are you going to get rid of it, Elon?
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