“There are stakes there when our public sphere is governed by private corporations that can be owned and acquired by individuals,” said Acker.
Yet Twitter is where we hear from elected officials, governments communicate about emergencies and regular people post details of their experiences, from the pedestrian to firsthand accounts of war. But those old-school communications formats are governed by laws and expectations that’s not true of social media. Social media sites have grown from internet upstarts to major channels of communication, alongside public radio, television and even newspapers, said Amelia Acker, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Information who studies how new forms of data are preserved. “They’re actually changing the very meaning of the public record.” “Corporate internet giants have taken over the public role of archives and libraries and have their own policies on how the public record will be shaped and who will access it,” said Anat Ben-David, an associate professor at the Open University of Israel who focuses on the history and geopolitics of the web. In 2021, when Twitter banned then-President Donald Trump, it deleted his tweets without sending copies to the National Archives as required by law - and it explicitly refused to let the agency resurrect the tweets for documentation. But the site has already run afoul of archivists and historians. Musk is already proposing major changes to how the site runs, including making its recommendation algorithm open-source and loosening content restrictions. The company said Monday that it would sell itself to Musk, the world’s richest man, for $46.5 billion - in the process transforming it from a public company to one controlled by a lone billionaire. Twitter, which launched in 2006, is one of the web’s older surviving social media platforms and now counts around 400 million users. presidential election, and even Musk himself drawing the ire of the Securities and Exchange Commission over tweets promising to take Tesla private at $420 a share. As people live more and more of their lives online, social media platforms have become massive repositories documenting shifts in society, culture and politics - from blink-and-you’ll-miss-it memes to the disinformation campaigns around the 2020 U.S.
0 kommentar(er)
