My take on  Elon Musk's new rate limit policy [video]
For those who can&#x27;t be bothered with twitter - It&#x27;s a 9 minute long video of someone talking during a walk.<p>tl;dr of the talk: whether musk realizes or not, by rate-limiting twitter he&#x27;s also stalled an AI censorship apparatus and seeing how this plays out is going to be interesting.<p>Transcript:<p>Good morning, i am here out for a hike in the beautiful coldwater canyon in hollywood and - but i would record my take on this rate-limit controversy happening right now on twitter, with elon musk limiting twitter access to 6000 and now 8000 tweets per day for verified users and 600 to 800 to unverified, and i&#x27;m gonna sort of adress this issue from the perspective of the censorship industry, because it&#x27;s a really fascinating thing that musk just did, with wide-ranging implications for the science of censorship.<p>So, uh, for those who&#x27;ve been following me and foundation for freedom online for some time, you know that, uh, AI censorship is where all of the magic happens, you know, the twitter files showed how the FBI might come in and set in, get in, get uh 22 [million] tweets censored, but you know how AI was how uh, EIP and other, third party censorship groups were able to get 22 million tweets censored - so the order, you know- that&#x27;s 6 orders of magnitude right, there&#x27;s, it&#x27;s a completely different animal, you could not censor the internet before 2016 at the kind of scale you do now because you have AI censorship models, that is there is a AI censorship death star that has been under construction and innovation and renovation, uh, every week, every month, every year for the past, 6,7, years now.<p>And it all relies on massive scraping of twitter data in order to build these models and databases to track trending narratives, to systematically surveil and build sort of intelligence dossiers and to track and to turn down all at once, communities online, you know-political communities, uh, social and public health communities, you know, climate communities, you name it-whatever the sensitive policy issue of the day is, you can use this massive twitter scraping capacity to ingest everyone&#x27;s tweets, and then disambiguate out all of the words that they&#x27;re using, the hashtags, the themes, the memes, and to build this sort of codebook of, of online communities that can then be used for mass censorship-that <i>is</i> used for mass censorship.<p>So, a good example for this is how did EIP ended up getting 22 million tweets classified misinformation. well first, they didn&#x27;t flag 22 million by hand, this is something that mehdi hasan, the MSNBC host, uh-flagrantly deceived his millions of viewers about, they-when he said &quot;oh, they only flagged 3 thousand, not 22 million heartyheartyheart so you&#x27;re only off by 21.7 mill-- uh, <i>no</i>, you butthead, uh-actually what happened was is they used AI to designate 22 million <i>because they scraped</i> 859 million tweets, to build their AI model of which they said 22 million constituted, uh, misinformation, okay? so yeah, the 3 thousand was just the tip of the 22 million iceberg, because, back in the twitter iteration before today, these third party censorship consortiums, could just mass-ingest hundreds of millions of tweets all at once, in order to build these vast censorship models in order to control all public conversation all at once.<p>Now, look, at that time, they also captured the trust and safety teams at twitter, so it was very easy for them to build that model and then, you know, basically target those 22 million tweets and all of the hundreds of thousands of accounts and have those be automatically throttled because they were controlling the actual enforcement arms as well. It&#x27;s unclear if that continues to be the case, but the fact is is that twiter is, by far and away, the intelligence agency, the state department, the defense department and the NGOplex. um, social media platform par excellence; they much prefer the intel they could scrape from twitter than from any other social media company and there&#x27;s good reason for this, i guess other than linkedin, i&#x27;d say, and they would say.<p>And part of that is because twitter is not a walled garden like facebook. Facebook is also a social media, you know, platform, obviously, but its most private accounts, you can only access if you are friends with that person, or friends of a friend. Twitter does-did not have that. um, and youtube, there&#x27;s a giant divide between producers and consumers. umm, consumers on youtube are not content creators. That&#x27;s not the case on twitter, every twitter user is a content creator when they click the retweet button. And so you can-you can map real-time,  narrative emergence on twitter, in a way that you can&#x27;t do on any other social media platform, and that&#x27;s been used by the CIA, the state department, the defense department, hundreds of censorship government-funded NGOs, uh, uh, centers, non-profits, foundations, university quote-unquote &quot;research&quot; centers and uh, the works.<p>It&#x27;s, uh, in order to build their social media censorship deathstar, they need to be able to scrape hundreds of millions of tweets, and what musk is doing here is very interesting because on the one hand, you could argue it&#x27;s a sort of form of, i wouldn&#x27;t say censorship necessarily because it&#x27;s not like a particualr person that&#x27;s singled out but you are, you are limiting the openness of the internet by doing this. But on the other hand you are actually potentially preserving the openness of the internet, by preventing the construction of this censorship death star that is getting more and more refined every day and has been funded by, your tax dollars to the tunes of tens of millions from DARPA and the national science foundation, to say nothing about the state department and USA, national endowment for democracy grants.<p>So it&#x27;s all very interesting um, that is just one thing to keep in mind on top of the fact that this is obviously, you know going to be a revenue generator for musk as he sees it in the sense that he drew a distinction between verified accounts and unverified accounts, where you can sort of have normal twitter if you got a verified account because that 8000 rate limit is-is pretty substantial but 800 is not a lot, and so it highly incentivizes people to get- pardon me [sound of jet aircraft flying overhead] verified accounts, so obviously this could- i&#x27;m not sure that is doing this to throttle the AI censorship death star constructed, out of the censorship industry.<p>He may just be doing this for cynical business reasons, you know in order to pump up the subscription base. uh, where-whereas, you know, a privacy reason independent of censorship-but whether he knows it or not, uh, there are going to be <i>hundreds</i> of censorship operatives housed within the university research centers this week, <i>howling at the moon.</i> that this <i>is an attack on democracy</i>, for musk to limit their access because, it has been for years now it has been a <i>big</i> bugaboo of all of the-the university censorship operatives, who cloak themselves as so-called &quot;researchers&quot; when what they are is they&#x27;re operatives, uh that the, that if they lose access to the underlying data on which their AI censorship models are built, then they will not be able to do their jobs as effective fast and precise and comprehensive, social media censors.<p>So they had, they&#x27;ve been having a big fight about this exact issue in europe because of europe&#x27;s, uh, GDPR laws, t-their data privacy laws, and and other sovereign european state restrictions on third-party access to, uh, to, social media, user-level data. and so they had to get around that by having, you know, certain &quot;journalists and researchers&quot; they sort of designated <i>privileged class</i> to get so that only <i>they</i>, uh, can be sort of trusted keepers of this, uh, of this information that used to be public but now is not.<p>So the fact that musk is doing this now here and in the united states, uh you are going to see the censorship industry <i>howl</i> over this, whether musk knows it or not he, uh he has stepped into a rattlesnake, um, and uh. We&#x27;ll see how it plays out but i am very curious to see how the rattlesnake reacts to this new boot, um, and in a weird way even though the boot may be, may be cutting off some amount of openness of twitter, uh it may also represent in some way, the boot of freedom so, we&#x27;ll see.