🧵1/ Musk is making Twitter much less transparent, much less accountable, & thus more vulnerable to manipulation. Many of the often poorly resourced activists & academics using the API to tackle foreign influence ops will no longer be able to. Governments should worry #TwitterAPI
2/ Musk is completely stripping Twitter of the resources required to tackle manipulation. The huge loss of human capital, the commodified verification system, the edgelordism, the drive for users to appease advertisers - all are creating a febrile atmosphere for info manipulation
3/ Twitter's immune system was never great, but it is being thoroughly compromised by Musk. The tacit public-private partnership that allowed researchers API access was a small contribution to innoculation against information warfare. #twitterapi
4/ This is made much more worrying by Musk's indulgence of Russia, his tendency to fall for or spread conspiracy theories, and his misguided libertarianism that leaves minorities and marginalised groups vulnerable to hate speech and harassment
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