Elon Musk's Twitter is still making changes that weaken democracy and boost propaganda

Elon Musk has made a lot of noise about “transparency” when describing what he’s going to be turning Twitter into, now that he’s bought the place and is neatly augering it into the ground, but it’s been clear that Musk was bullshitting from the start on that one. He doesn’t even appear to have a grasp of what the word means; you would think that a man willing to spend $40 billion on a media company so that his meme tweets get more views could hire a Victorian wastrel to carry around an old-timey dictionary, if Captain Online himself can’t muster the effort to type the word into a search bar.

Twitter’s moves to harm transparency, however, keep coming at a rapid clip. A new Politico analysis shows that Twitter’s alleged efforts to track and disclose paid political advertising on the platform don’t include some specific ads that Politico itself was able to find. That means Twitter’s own data on the site’s political advertisers is wrong—or, as Politico phrases it, raises “doubts about the integrity of the platform’s data and how many other political ads could go unreported.”

The three promoted tweets reporters saw that weren’t included in Twitter’s data shouldn’t have been hard to spot. Two of them included links to Democratic-aligned donation portal ActBlue, and the other to Republican competing site WinRed. It’s difficult to see how a Twitter algorithm meant to find paid political ads could miss any of them, and that’s why the Politico story is raising serious questions about the robustness of Twitter’s alleged attempts.

On the other side of the coin, however, Musk’s Twitter continues to make great strides when it comes to intentionally backing foreign disinformation efforts.