[jauntywundrkind]

Twitter had such a strong home team of people trying to monitor the network health.

And they seemed committed to giving researchers and academics lots of access to understand and share how the network was working, look for disinformation & "foreign influence" campaigns.

Now there's no one at the helm and all the researchers and civic interests have been given the boot. They are being threatened by ExTwitter to the tune of 1.5c per tweet accessed if I remember correctly. These people were helping you but there's this sense that finding out what's happening is risky for business, that it could hurt, when in fact the network is just being overrun, turned into the maelstrom, and is deeply into rot and decay stages.

[AnthonyMouse]

You can blame the AI stuff for that. There were so many people scraping the site to do AI training that providing a free firehose API was a request for a denial of service attack.

[mike_hearn]

Not really. I visited Twitter 1.0 HQ some years ago to give them a talk on spam fighting. Actually I went for lunch, and then discovered that a QA session had been volunteered on my behalf by the friend I was visiting.

Twitter's bot fighting teams back then had basically ceased to exist. They had existed once, but at some point the management decided that the biggest abuse problem on the platform wasn't bots or even misinformation but just people being mean to each other. So everyone working in that department had switched to what was basically semi-automated tone policing. By the time I talked to them they were years behind the state of the art in detecting automation.

As for academics and researchers, Twitter 1.0 didn't have the sort of rosy relationship with them you paint here. Researchers had access to the global feed if they paid for it like many other parties did, and Musk started charging much more for that access, but the feed wasn't really useful for finding misbehavior. In fact Twitter 1.0 was pissed off with academia long before Musk arrived on the scene. Academic research into social networks, disinformation and hypothetical foreign influence campaigns is nearly 100% pseudo-scientific garbage pushed for ideological reasons. In 2020 Twitter execs went public with their frustration [1] in a blog post where they pointed out that academics were using an "an extremely limited approach" that was full of useless signals, like:

• Usernames with long strings of digits (the default username generation pattern)

• Lacking info in the bio (even Twitter employees often don't fill it out)

• Posting many times per day (lots of real users do that)

Twitter 1.0: "the threat has evolved and the narrative on what’s actually going on is increasingly behind the curve". Given that there are tens of thousands of such papers coming out of universities, all of them justified by claiming they're ahead of the curve, being constantly behind it is a damning assessment. And that was from people ideologically aligned with academia!

Booting these people off the system was certainly a good move both for Twitter/X's business and frankly, for academia itself. They certainly weren't trying to help.

[1] https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/bot-or-not