I have even more respect for Dr. Malone after reading this substack article. It is very detailed and heavily sauced, and worth reading for a deeper understanding of Twitter and cyber warfare generally. An excerpt from a summary section near the end:

What they do not know is that Twitter and some of the others have capabilities which make them more appropriately categorized as Cyber Weapons. These Cyber Weapons target human and group behavior and thought. They are deployed by industry, governments, non-governmental organizations, intelligence agencies, anyone who can afford to pay.

First off, please recognize that if you are using a cell phone to communicate in any region with multiple cell phone towers, your precise location can be readily identified by signal triangulation. And of course that can then be coupled with high resolution satellite imaging. If you are using a social media tool in that environment, then who you are, what you are concerned about, and where you are in space is all public information and can be readily determined. And here is where things get even more interesting. The Arab Spring protests were most definitely used as a test bed for these capabilities.

The emotional content of your social media communications can be abstracted. Not just what you are “tweeting”, but your underlying feelings, and the strength of those feelings. And, through your connections, you can be positioned in a cloud map as an influencer, outlier, follower etc. within your group of connections. These maps have proven useful to identify those who are shaping the behavior of factions or crowds (including flashmobs). Those individuals who are shaping crowd behavior in ways which the manipulating organization wishes to increase can be amplified using social media algorithms to further drive the crowd behavior in the desired direction, and those shaping behavior in undesirable directions can be suppressed. Because of the geospatial location capabilities, individuals can also be physically targeted using kinetic weapons or other assets if so desired. Think drone missile strikes, and decentralized drone clouds. Still with me?

The algorithmic manipulations of communication which so many of us have observed during the COVIDcrisis are merely a small component of the overall cyber weapon capabilities of Twitter and other “social media” communication platforms (Tic Tock, Telegram, Facebook, etc.). Multilingual analytical capabilities are now routinely deployed in “elections” all over the world, in protests and “color revolution”-type movements (I suspect including in some of the protest movements over the last few years in the USA), and for mundane commercial activities like selling drugs and (of course) vaccines. This Cyber Warfare technology is values and ethics neutral. It can be used to advance agendas which may seem good or evil. In my opinion, any and all of this intentional manipulation of human thought and emotions is evil, just to be clear. The power of this technology, when deployed, appears to make abstract human concepts such as freedom, sovereignty, ethics and individual autonomy obsolete.

. . . Every time you interact with Twitter, you feed its machine learning/deep learning tool development. So opt out. Or at the very least understand and accept the fact that you are helping build a more powerful Cyber Weapon with every tweet. You, your thoughts, and your behavior are the product.