Thread by @RVAwonk

The issue at the heart of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Media Matters is who is responsible for data voids when they’re discovered. Media Matters identified a bunch of mini-data-voids on Twitter/X where problematic content lives — & then reported on it, rather than exploiting them.

When you search for an obscure or rarely-used hashtag or set of keywords — like what Media Matters did, and what a lot of people are now doing on Twitter/X — you will often stumble upon data voids, or informational dark spaces (IDS). That’s not fraud. This a known phenomenon.

Data voids, or informational dark spaces (IDS), are extremely vulnerable to manipulation & exploitation, often by extremists. In this presentation from Defcon 2022, I explain why. (I gave birth days before this was recorded, so if I sound exhausted…I was)

It’s not fraud when someone searches for and identifies a data void. In this case, Media Matters used the platform’s own search function to identify ads that Twitter itself placed on the platform. Twitter could’ve removed ads from these search terms…but they didn’t.

Another possible outcome here is that extremists or bad actors could’ve found these data voids — aka informational dark spaces (IDS), or places where search algorithms lack sufficient input/output — and exploited them, sort of like what just happened on Tik Tok last week.

There’s a cybersecurity parallel here, in that searching for data voids is like searching for vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit. In both cases, you hope that someone else — anyone else — discovers them before bad actors do. It could’ve been a lot worse for Twitter.

There are researchers studying this phenomenon (*ahem*) & developing proactive responses, but we can’t really do that for Twitter because we can’t access data. Good luck trying to argue that it’s fraudulent to find unflattering content using your own platform’s search feature tho

Also, it’s not a great sign that the head of Twitter doesn’t know what data voids/informational dark spaces (IDS) are. This is basically advertising a vulnerability.

https://twitter.com/lindayax/status/1726747531843915965