The name of the social network may have changed, but the, uh, entertainment continues in the latest X roundup. This includes the full extent of the Trump disclosures serving as a warning about the perils of unencrypted messaging services …
Trump disclosures serve as warning
You’re probably aware that special counsel Jack Smith asked X for a wide range of data from Donald Trump’s account, as part of the investigation into alleged criminal conspiracies surrounding the 2020 presidential election.
X had initially wanted to alert Trump to the request, which would, of course, have provided the defendant with an opportunity to delete incriminating evidence – something with which the indictee has been charged in another criminal case.
We didn’t initially know just how much data might be obtained. Trump is famous for his aversion to putting things in writing, so it seemed exceedingly unlikely that he would have used an unencrypted direct messaging service. But it seems that he did, as Engadget notes.
Newly unsealed court filings reveal how much data Xwitter has handed over to the January 6 investigation. This includes all tweets sent, drafted, liked and retweeted – even if they were subsequently deleted – by Donald Trump’s official account. This cache also included DMs sent, received or stored in draft form, as well as linked accounts used on the same device. Even more interesting is the company handed over records of all searches made by the account, too.
The average X user probably isn’t engaged in too many criminal conspiracies to defraud the United States, but all the same, it’s a handy warning that if a messaging service doesn’t use end-to-end encryption, you don’t want to use it for any sensitive information.
Brand ads appear next to alt-right posts
When Elon Musk said that he was a “free speech absolutist” shortly after purchasing Twitter, and backed that by firing most of the platform’s moderation and safety team, advertisers left in droves – including Apple.
The company subsequently admitted that it had lost around half its ad revenue. Since then, the company’s relatively new CEO Linda Yaccarino has been trying to reassure brands that X is again a safe place to be, and many have returned, Apple included.
That may be set to change again. CNN reports that two brands have pulled all their X advertising after their ads were shown against alt-right posts.
At least two brands have said they will suspend advertising on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, after their ads and those of other companies were run on an account promoting fascism […]
Ads for brands including Adobe, Gilead Sciences, the University of Maryland’s football team, New York University Langone Hospital and NCTA-The Internet and Television Association were run alongside tweets from the account that had garnered hundreds of thousands of views, CNN observed.
Spokespeople for NCTA and pharmaceutical company Gilead said that they immediately paused their ad spending on X after CNN flagged their ads on the pro-Nazi account.
Scientists leaving X
A survey of thousands of scientists carried out by Nature found that some 7% had quit X altogether, while 47% had reduced their usage of the site.
Engadget reports that Mastodon has so far been the main alternative network.
Mastodon, which has seen significant growth since Musk’s takeover of Twitter was announced, was the most widely used. About 47 percent of researchers said they had started using the open-source platform in the past year. LinkedIn and Instagram were the next most popular, drawing 35 and 27 percent of researchers, respectively. Interestingly, Meta’s Twitter competitor, Threads, took the number four spot even though the app launched only days before Nature conducted the poll
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