Day: January 11, 2023

Concerns linger over Twitter’s stance on free expression and safety since Elon Musk took over the platform in a $44 billion deal.

Since taking ownership in late October, Musk has instituted changes including dissolving an oversight review channel, laying off a large portion of the team focused on combating misinformation, and suspending the accounts of several U.S. journalists.

Two media advocacy groups on Wednesday called on Musk to reverse course and implement policies to protect the right to legitimate information and press freedom.

In a joint letter to Twitter, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) voiced “alarm” that Musk had undermined the legitimacy of Twitter by dissolving the site’s oversight review panel that checked postings for their truthfulness and laying off the majority of Twitter staff who helped combat misinformation.

The journalists’ groups also criticized Musk for “arbitrarily reinstating the accounts of nefarious actors, including known spreaders of misinformation,” and its suspension of several reporters, including VOA’s chief national correspondent, Steve Herman.

“Twitter’s policies should be crafted and communicated in a transparent manner … not arbitrarily or based on the company leadership’s personal preferences, perceptions and frustrations,” said the two organizations.

The groups also said Musk should reinstate Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council to review content posted on the site and better monitor attempts to censor information and penalize some individuals, including many journalists.

“Transparency and democratic safeguards must replace Musk’s capricious, arbitrary decision-making,” said Christophe Deloire, secretary-general of RSF.

In December, Twitter notified members of the Trust and Safety Council that the advisory group had been dissolved.

The email to the group said Twitter would work with partners through smaller meetings and regional contacts, said CPJ, a media rights organization that was a member of the council along with RSF.

“Mechanisms such as the Trust and Safety Council help platforms like Twitter to understand how to address harm and counter behavior that targets journalists,” CPJ President Jodie Ginsberg said in a statement. “Safety online can mean survival offline.”

Twitter also has continued its suspension of some journalists, saying it will restore their accounts only if certain posts are deleted.

Those suspended had tweeted about @ElonJet, an account that uses publicly available data to report on Musk’s private jet. That account was also suspended.

Musk had said on Twitter that the @Elonjet account and any accounts that linked to it were suspended because they violated Twitter’s anti-doxxing policy.

Doxxing is maliciously publishing a person’s private or identifying information — such a phone number or address — on the internet.

The @Elonjet Twitter account, however, used publicly available data. Additionally, none of the journalists who had tweeted about Musk and his shutdown of the account had tweeted location information for his plane. They did report that the @Elonjet account had moved to another platform and named the platform.

Some of the journalists have had their accounts restored after removing content. But VOA’s Herman is still suspended from the platform after refusing to remove tweets.

The veteran correspondent said he was notified this week that his appeal against the permanent suspension was denied. The reason: violating rules against “posting private information.”

Before the account was suspended, Herman had more than 111,000 followers.

“Based on what Musk has previously tweeted and recent media reports, I have concerns that if I don’t give into the demand to delete several posts and reactivate @W7VOA, my Twitter account will eventually be deleted for inactivity or auctioned off,” he told VOA.

Herman, like other journalists, migrated to other social media platforms including Mastodon, where he gained 40,000 followers. But, he said, “Neither platform has yet to achieve critical mass and thus the influence of Twitter, especially for journalists and policymakers.”
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Russia said Wednesday that it will send an empty spacecraft to the International Space Station next month to bring home three astronauts whose planned return vehicle was damaged by a strike from a tiny meteorite.

The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, made the announcement after examining the flight worthiness of the Soyuz MS-22 crew capsule at the space station, which sprang a radiator coolant leak in December.

Roscosmos and NASA officials said at a joint press briefing that an uncrewed Soyuz spacecraft, MS-23, would be sent to the station February 20 to bring Russian cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin and Sergei Prokopyev and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio back to Earth.

“We’re not calling it a rescue Soyuz,” said Joel Montalbano, the space station program manager at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “I’m calling it a replacement Soyuz.

“Right now, the crew is safe onboard the space station,” he added.

MS-22 flew Petelin, Prokopyev and Rubio to the space station in September. They were scheduled to return home in the same spacecraft in mid-March.

But MS-22 began leaking coolant on December 14 after being hit by what U.S. and Russian space officials said they believed was a micrometeorite.

“Everything does point to a micrometeorite,” Montalbano said.

Sergei Krikalev, executive director of human space flight programs at Roscosmos, said the “current theory is that this damage was caused by a small particle about 1 millimeter in diameter.”

Krikalev said the decision to use MS-23 to fly the crew home was made because of concern over high temperatures in MS-22 during reentry. 

“The main problem to land the current Soyuz with crew would be thermal conditions because we lost heat rejection capability,” he said. “We may have a high temperature situation on Soyuz in the equipment compartment and in the crew compartment.”

Montalbano said discussions were also underway with SpaceX officials about potentially returning one or more crew members on the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule currently docked with the space station.

Four astronauts were flown to the station by a SpaceX rocket in October for a mission expected to last about six months.

“We could safely secure the crew members in the area that the cargo normally returns on the Dragon,” Montalbano said.

“All that is only for an emergency, only if we have to evacuate ISS,” he stressed. “That’s not the nominal plan or anything like that.”

Krikalev said MS-22 would return to Earth after the two cosmonauts and the NASA astronaut leave on MS-23. It would bring back equipment and experiments that are not “temperature sensitive,” he said.

Soyuz MS-23 had been initially scheduled to fly Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub and NASA’s Loral O’Hara to the space station on March 16.

Space has remained a rare venue of cooperation between Moscow and Washington since the start of the Russian offensive in Ukraine and ensuing Western sanctions on Russia.

The space station was launched in 1998 at a time of increased U.S.-Russia cooperation following the Cold War space race.

Russia has been using the aging but reliable Soyuz capsules to ferry astronauts into space since the 1960s.
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