Social media - echo chambers and politics

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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... 234684941/

Musk has also promised, over and over again, to build a more transparent Twitter — one that makes it clear when a government agency requests a user’s data, or asks to take an account offline. “Transparency is the key to trust,” he tweeted around the same time.

For a decade, Twitter published rundowns twice a year of all of those government requests. But under Musk, that appears to have ended.

Despite Musk’s rhetoric about government bullying of social media, his company hasn’t published one of the formerly regular transparency reports detailing what governments are demanding from Twitter — and whether the company is bending to them.

It’s a development that’s horrified privacy advocates and former Twitter employees alike.

“We entrust our most sensitive, private, and important information to tech companies — they’re privy to the conversations, photos, social connections, and location data of almost everyone online,” Josh Richman, a spokesperson for the Electronic Freedom Foundation, said in a statement. “The reports shed crucial light on whether or not tech companies have users’ backs, or if they’re rolling over and compromising users’ data. Any company that walks away from making such reports is taking a big step backward.”

Musk did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment on this story.

In years past, Twitter routinely published data about how many demands it had received from governments, and how many enforcement actions it had taken against users accounts or tweets. The reports also detailed how and when Twitter fought the government over requests or gag orders. In 2014, the company even sued the Obama administration to quash a gag order and disclose its receipt of National Security Letters, which allow law enforcement to obtain information from Internet service providers without a warrant.