Merge pull request #1020 from enginer/main

Twitter renamed to X

contents/english/2-0-information-technology-and-democracy-a-widening-gulf.md

@@ -101,7 +101,7 @@ More central to the heart of governmental responsibility in democracies, however
 
 [^EGDI]:_United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs_. E-Government Knowledge Database, 2022 available at https://publicadministration.un.org/egovkb/Data-Center
 
-Digitization of conventional public services is perhaps the least ambitious dimension along which one might expect democracies to advance in adopting technology.  Technology has redefined what services are relevant and in these novel areas, democratic governments have almost entirely failed to keep up with changing times.  Where once government-provided postal services and public libraries were the backbone of democratic communication and knowledge circulation, today most communication flows through social media and search engines.  Where once most public gatherings took place in parks and literal public squares, today it is almost a cliché that the public square has moved online.  Yet democratic countries have almost entirely ignored the need to provide and support digital public services.  While privately-owned Twitter is the target of constant abuse by public figures, its most important competitor, the non-profits [Mastodon](https://joinmastodon.org/)  and the open [Activity Pub](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/) standard on which it runs have received a paltry few hundreds of thousands of dollars in public support, running instead on Patreon donations.[^Mastodonsupport]  More broadly, open source software and other commons-based public goods like Wikipedia have become critical public resources in the digital age; yet governments have consistently failed to support them and have even discriminated against them relative to other charities (for example, open source software providers generally cannot be tax-exempt charities).  While authoritarian regimes [plow ahead](https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/cbdctracker/) with plans for Central Bank Digital Currencies, most democratic countries are only beginning explorations.
+Digitization of conventional public services is perhaps the least ambitious dimension along which one might expect democracies to advance in adopting technology.  Technology has redefined what services are relevant and in these novel areas, democratic governments have almost entirely failed to keep up with changing times.  Where once government-provided postal services and public libraries were the backbone of democratic communication and knowledge circulation, today most communication flows through social media and search engines.  Where once most public gatherings took place in parks and literal public squares, today it is almost a cliché that the public square has moved online.  Yet democratic countries have almost entirely ignored the need to provide and support digital public services.  While privately-owned X (formerly Twitter) is the target of constant abuse by public figures, its most important competitor, the non-profits [Mastodon](https://joinmastodon.org/)  and the open [Activity Pub](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/) standard on which it runs have received a paltry few hundreds of thousands of dollars in public support, running instead on Patreon donations.[^Mastodonsupport]  More broadly, open source software and other commons-based public goods like Wikipedia have become critical public resources in the digital age; yet governments have consistently failed to support them and have even discriminated against them relative to other charities (for example, open source software providers generally cannot be tax-exempt charities).  While authoritarian regimes [plow ahead](https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/cbdctracker/) with plans for Central Bank Digital Currencies, most democratic countries are only beginning explorations.
 
 [^Mastodonsupport]: Sara Perez, "Amid Twitter chaos, Mastodon grew donations 488% in 2022, reached 1.8M monthly active users", *Tech Crunch*, October 2, 2023 at https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/02/amid-twitter-chaos-mastodon-grew-donations-488-in-2022-reached-1-8m-monthly-active-users/)
 

contents/english/2-2-the-life-of-a-digital-democracy.md

@@ -44,7 +44,7 @@ Many Sunflower participants devoted themselves to the open government movement;
 
 #### vTaiwan and Join
 
-During this process of institutionalization of g0v, there was growing demand to apply the methods that had allowed for these dispute resolutions to a broader range of policy issues.  This led to the establishment of [vTaiwan](https://vtaiwan.tw/intro/), a platform and project developed by g0v for facilitating deliberation on public policy controversies.  The process involved many steps (proposal, opinion expression, reflection and legislation) each harnessing a range of open source software tools, but has become best known for its use of the at-the-time(2015)-novel machine learning based open-source "wikisurvey"/social media tool Polis, which we discuss further in our chapter on [Augmented Deliberation](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-4/eng/?mode=dark) below.  In short, Polis functions similarly to conventional microblogging services like Twitter/X, except that it employs dimension reduction techniques to cluster opinions as shown in Figure B. Instead of displaying content that maximizes engagement, Polis shows the clusters of opinion that exist and highlights statements that bridge them. This approach facilitates both consensus formation and a better understanding of the lines of division.
+During this process of institutionalization of g0v, there was growing demand to apply the methods that had allowed for these dispute resolutions to a broader range of policy issues.  This led to the establishment of [vTaiwan](https://vtaiwan.tw/intro/), a platform and project developed by g0v for facilitating deliberation on public policy controversies.  The process involved many steps (proposal, opinion expression, reflection and legislation) each harnessing a range of open source software tools, but has become best known for its use of the at-the-time(2015)-novel machine learning based open-source "wikisurvey"/social media tool Polis, which we discuss further in our chapter on [Augmented Deliberation](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-4/eng/?mode=dark) below.  In short, Polis functions similarly to conventional microblogging services like X (formerly Twitter), except that it employs dimension reduction techniques to cluster opinions as shown in Figure B. Instead of displaying content that maximizes engagement, Polis shows the clusters of opinion that exist and highlights statements that bridge them. This approach facilitates both consensus formation and a better understanding of the lines of division.
 
 <figure>
 <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/vtaiwan-polis-ai.png" width="70%" alt="Diagram of an opinion displayed by polis on vtaiwan, with similar views clustered.">