Data the dog: Twitter turns its privacy policy into an old-school video game

theguardian.com:

On Friday, Elon Musk announced he was pausing his $45bn purchase of Twitter because he had only just discovered some of the accounts on the site were fake.

But that’s not the strangest thing that has happened to the beleaguered social media platform this week. Because on Tuesday the current top brass, perhaps trying to demonstrate their vision for the site, released a Super Nintendo-style browser game that recaps Twitter’s private policy.

The platform unveiled Twitter Data Dash, which plays like a vintage side-scrollingplatformer that’s been draped with a healthy dose of disinformation anxiety.

You take control of a blue-hued puppy named Data and are tasked with retrieving five bones hidden in each of the game’s day-glo urban environments. (Sonic the Hedgehog 2was the analog I kept returning to during my gameplay.) After you complete your objective, the level ends and Twitter blesses you with a distilled talking point from its ethics board. Case in point: once I collected my first set of bones, a message popped up on screen informing me that I could opt out of Twitter’s targeted advertisements if I wanted. The second time around, I was given instructions on how to filter my DMs.

I get the instincts here. Everyone on the internet has been conditioned to blindly scroll through every terms-of-service agreement we come across, so the idea of condensing some of the finer points into a chibi, interactive browser distraction does make some utilitarian sense. After all, the company has just rewritten its privacy policy and could certainly use some positive PR. But some of the messaging in the game is self-contradictory. In the opening sequence, we are told that Data wants to avoid all of the intrusive “cat ads” in their way. Sure