Misinformation is the point

Elon as court jester. Source: Midjourney.

The news out of Israel is heartbreaking and horrific. I honestly cannot bear to watch any of it. I end up following what's happening through the observations of people online. What I'm seeing is a lot of people clawing at each other, much of it over bad, misleading, or deliberately false information. And the service formerly known as Twitter is playing a big part in that.

Some observers are saying that Musk's Twitter/X [1] has failed its first big test during this crisis by allowing disinformation to spread across the network like wildfire. These observers are wrong. This is exactly what Musk intended Twitter/X to do from the moment he took over, almost one year ago. This is not failure for Space Karen. It's success.

Per Wired:

The people whose job it was to stop the flow of disinformation were, of course, driven out of Twitter/X by Musk, who also promoted some of these bogus sources to his own 158 million followers. An accident? I think not.

It is the perfect embodiment of the Steve Bannon [2] approach to the media: "Flood the zone with shit."

When you make it impossible for people to know what sources of information to trust, they eventually learn to trust no one. And that means people in power can no longer be held accountable by journalists, fact checkers, watchdog organizations, or ordinary citizens. We've seen this happening, like a slow motion train wreck, for a while now. Twitter is one of the last pillars to fall. [3]

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Listen. If Musk's latest toy went into the toilet tomorrow and took his $44 billion with it, he'd still be the richest biped on the planet by more than $40 billion. Yes, he'd have to make his Saudi lenders whole, but I'm sure he can figure out a way to do that. This is, after all, the man who invented Tesla Fart Mode — the ability to generate flatulent sounds by pressing a button on the touchscreen of a $120K car.

He wanted to break Twitter. That was the point. He wanted a zone that could be easily flooded with bullshit. That's why he eviscerated his Trust & Safety team and replaced trusted information sources with an army of $8 a month Blue Checks, whose crazy-ass conspiracy theory bullshit rises to the top of everyone's timelines.

And he's succeeded beyond even his own flatulent dreams.

What info? Dis info.

The other thing we're starting to see is mis- and disinformation about the situation in the middle east being generated by AI. So far, it's largely been audio fakes, says Rijul Gupta, who is founder and CEO of DeepMedia, a company that provides deepfake detection services to organizations like the US Department of Defense. [4]

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The reason? Audio fakes are cheaper and easier to make. There are free tools online that let you take a few minutes of someone speaking and then create a fake of them saying anything you want them to say. Gupta says the number of audio deepfakes has increased by a factor of ten over the past year.

Earlier this month, talk show host Gayle King posted an example of an ad using her face and a deepfake audio to her Insta account.

Fakers are also taking genuine video and appending deep fake soundtracks to them. So far, these attempts have been pretty crude — the words and the lips rarely sync up — but that's about to change, says Gupta.

"Over the next year we're going to see that same uptick happen with faces," he says. "By 2024, there's going to be a tenfold increase in deepfakes that can do face and lip manipulation."

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So if you think bogus information about the Israel/Hamas conflict is bad, just wait until the 2024 elections.

"2024 is going to be the deep fake election, no doubt about it," Gupta says.

X is for eXodus [5]

In response to the Elon Musk Shitshow, many people who've resisted giving up on Twitter are starting to finally see the light. Threads, for example, is full of people saying their follower accounts have virtually doubled overnight. (I've seen it myself, on a smaller scale.)

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In an article about misinformation mitigation, writer M. Mitchell Waldrop notes that "If a platform doesn't make some effort to moderate the discussion — as virtually all the reputable ones still do — reasonable users will leave."

That leaves the unreasonable ones, and those who've invested a considerable amount of time building their Twitter audience and don't want to lose it.

From Elon's perspective, Twitter/X is working exactly as planned. And if you're still on there — posting new content, getting in fights with crazy people, acting as if nothing has changed — you're really just working for him.

Do you get your news from social media? Fess up in the comments below.

[1] Or Xitter (pronounced shitter), if you prefer.

[2] AKA, the human carbuncle.

[3] Musk's approach to Twitter is analogous to hedge funds like Alden Global Capital buying up regional newspapers all over the country and then gutting them. Why would profit-hungry hedge funds spend hundreds of millions to acquire companies in a struggling low-margin industry? To kill them. To limit peoples' access to information. To further the aims of billionaires who seek to avoid accountability.

[4] DeepMedia's other business is creating synthetic media — specifically, a service called Dubsync that can take audio or video in one language and translate it to one of 20 other languages in real time. Think Star Trek's universal translator, only real.

[5] Credit/blame for that one goes to WSJ tech columnist @technicallymims.