Platforms

Twenty-five years ago, on Dec.

The jokes and memes about Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase as proof of a massive midlife crisis are at least partly on point. The internet, for one, is having its own midlife crisis. And as with any midlife crisis, the internet can spiral into the abyss, continuing its own self-destructive pathway, or we can seize the moment to build a better internet founded on the essential principle that the internet belongs to all of us. Twitter isn’t just a platform. It’s how some of us live, work, and survive.

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, slurs against Black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day. After the billionaire became Twitter’s owner, they jumped to 3,876 times a day. Slurs against gay men appeared on Twitter 2,506 times a day on average before Musk took over. Afterward, their use rose to 3,964 times a day. And antisemitic posts referring to Jews or Judaism soared more than 61 percent in the two weeks after Mr.

Tech firms are warning the Supreme Court that weakening liability protections for online speech could put all types of service providers — including those operating offline — at risk of costly, business-wrecking litigation. Companies and parties to the suits made early filings and statements in 

Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, said several factors led to his decision to leave the platform after almost eight years, including the disruptions created by 

UltraViolet, GLADD, Kairos, and Women's March commissioned YouGov to conduct a study of attitudes about hate speech, harassment, and misinformation among Americans. The research finds that respondents are broadly positive about a variety of aspects of the online experience—from the internet providing them a way to stay in touch with family and friends, space to pursue hobbies, and a voice. However, the plurality of respondents across all comparison groups are ambivalent about the risks of being online as well as on the internet's impact on mental health.

Twitter faces a mass of forces abroad and in Washington that aim to compel the company to obey privacy rules, speech limits and other regulations as Elon Musk remakes the service. Musk's word is law inside Twitter now, but his disdain for rules will encounter tough pushback from governments around the world — just as the company has lost most of the people who managed its relationships with regulators and legislators. Twitter's biggest challenges lie abroad, particularly in Europe, which has been steadily tightening tech regulations for years.

Major tax filing services such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly transmitting sensitive financial information to Facebook when Americans file their taxes online. The data, sent through a widely used code called the Meta Pixel, includes not only information like names and email addresses but often even more detailed information, including data on users’ income, filing status, refund amounts, and dependents’ college scholarship amounts. The information sent to Facebook can be used by the company to power its advertising algorithms and is gathered regardless of whether

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is fueling a partisan clash in Washington, as Democrats raise concerns about the platform’s security and Republicans counter that the criticism is a thinly veiled attempt to stamp out conservative voices on the site.

Nothing new Twitter owner Elon Musk has done and undone is nearly as concerning as his decision to suddenly reinstate former President Donald Trump’s account. As someone who has been studying Trump’s Twitter use since before he was elected president, I believe that his return would mean the heightened spread of both misinformation and disinformation, the proliferation of degrading and dehumanizing discourse, the further mainstreaming of hate speech, and the erosion of democratic norms and institutions.