Trump Hitting up the Hat: After Musk and Miller Fleeing Twitter, Trump Shuts Up: He’s Over Trouble with Twitter

Musk is expected to share more about his plan for Twitter with employees on Friday. Hours after the news of him firing execs first broke, he posted the following.

“I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump; I think that was a mistake,” Musk said at a conference in May, pledging to reverse the ban were he to become the company’s owner.

Relations between the pair have soured since, with the men exchanging barbs over the summer. After Trump called Musk a “bullsh*t artist” at a rally in July, Musk responded by tweet, writing, “I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.”

Musk has made an $8 Twitter subscription plan his signature bid to bolster the company’s revenue. The plan was hastily put in place before the company decided to delay the service until after the elections.

Robert Miller, chair of corporate finance and law at the University of Iowa College of Law, says Musk’s attempt to escape the agreement he had signed was always “an uphill climb,” citing how the entrepreneur had switched from arguing over the contract to accusing Twitter of fraud. The company would have to have committed a massive, like Enron type of fraud for the argument to have worked.

Twitter sued him to follow through with the agreement, alleging that Musk was using the bot argument as a pretense to get out of a deal for which he had developed buyer’s remorse. In the weeks following the deal’s announcement, the stock market declined due to concerns about rising inflation and a looming recession. The downturn also hit Tesla and, in turn, Musk’s personal net worth.

There was little support to the argument that the material released prior to the trial in Delaware did not lend itself to. “He knows that his best claim is fraud, but they’ve gotten the evidence from Twitter, and there’s nothing that looks like fraud here,” Miller says. “They’ve run out of cards to play.”

Musk’s decision to fold may also have been influenced by the potential for the trial to damage him personally. The entrepreneur watched the internet chew over a tranche of his personal text messages with major figures in Silicon Valley last week. This week he faced what Miller says would likely have been “a very embarrassing” deposition.

What Do Social Media Users Think about Trump’s Twitter Tweets? A Comment on Gadde’s Investigation of Musk’s “American Patriots” Tweet

Professional utility is just one of the things that ties me to the site. Twitter hooks people in much the same way slot machines do, with what experts call an “intermittent reinforcement schedule.” Most of the time, it’s repetitive and uninteresting, but occasionally, at random intervals, some compelling nugget will appear. Unpredictable rewards, as the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner found with his research on rats and pigeons, are particularly good at generating compulsive behavior.

A cultural anthropologist at New York University and author of a book about gambling machine design says that she don’t know if the developers of social media websites ever said they were creating a Skinner box. But that, she said, is essentially what they’ve built. A reason people shouldn’t stay away from the site is because they can self-destruct regularly.

Twitter did not say what actions US officials may be investigating, and it was not clear which agency or agencies were carrying out the probe. Twitter’s filing merely said authorities are looking into Musk’s “conduct” linked to the deal.

The company’s court filing elsewhere accused Musk’s legal team of failing to produce draft communications with the Securities and Exchange Commission and a slide presentation to the Federal Trade Commission as part of the two sides’ ongoing litigation over whether Musk can walk away from the deal.

Twitter’s then-head of legal, policy and trust, Vijaya Gadde — who, along with Twitter founder and then-CEO Jack Dorsey, was ultimately responsible for content decisions — asked later on January 8 whether Trump’s “American Patriots” tweet “is being used as a coded incitement to further violence,” following up with requests for “any context or insight” and any relevant past research, Weiss’ tweets show. Twitter’s “scaled enforcement” team also got involved with the evaluation, and questioned whether the Trump tweets could be considered glorification of violence, the screenshots show, which would violate the company’s policies.

“Twitter did not ask Zatko to torch his own documents, much less demand that he do so,” Twitter’s filing read. “Twitter had no knowledge of Zatko’s notebooks and no idea what information they contained.”

Barely a year later, Zatko was agitating for Twitter’s top executives to address what he described as “a ticking bomb of security vulnerabilities” and to provide a full accounting of its shortcomings to its board.

His concerns, raised privately at first and later in a whistleblower disclosure that became public, would upend one of the world’s most influential social networks and raise new questions about its pending acquisition by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. He later testified that it would put his career and family at risk.

But some who have worked alongside Zatko over the last three decades paint a picture of him as a principled technologist with a knack for making the complex accessible and an earnest desire to fix problems, as he’s done for much of his career. They say that blowing the whistle is in keeping with the approach.

He’s not doing this for the sake of having fun. Dave Aitel, a computer scientist at the National Security Agency and a colleague of Zatko’s, said it does not get him anything. “That’s actually what integrity looks like when you have to see it up close.”

Zatko may be eligible for a monetary award from the US government because of his whistle blowers activities. The lawyer of Zatko had previously stated that the prospect of a reward did not factor into Zatko’s decision.

What Does Jake Zatko Tell Us About the Internet? When Did he Learned to Hack, and Why Did He Wanna Hack?

Nearly 25 years ago, as a young computer programmer with much longer hair, Zatko told Congress that the internet was woefully insecure. A big part of the issue, Zatko told a Senate panel, was that software and e-commerce companies “want to ignore problems as long as possible. It is cheaper for them.

Several years earlier, Zatko had joined the Boston-area hacking collective known as L0pht, according to “The Cult of the Dead Cow,” Washington Post reporter Joseph Menn’s book on how the early hacking scene shaped the cybersecurity industry.

Thomas, who uses his hacker name professionally, said that he had differences with Zatko in the past, adding that he was fired from @stake, the cybersecurity company where he was chief scientist, in 2000. Feelings were hurt, but this does not change who Zarko is or what he does. I think that his moral standards have not changed over time, even after 30 years with him.

His career has shown that “there was more to hacking than just one-upping each other, that there was actually a social good and impact that you could have,” said Song.

Zatko was hired by Twitter in the fall of 2020 to beef up privacy and cybersecurity after a high-profile hack that exposed the accounts of some of the most famous people on the planet, including then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. The senior executive position made Zatko report directly to Dorsey.

“This is about something that everybody should care about with large companies, which is the honesty and the truthfulness of the data that’s being… publicly represented, the national security implications and whether users can trust their data with these organizations,” Zatko told CNN in August of his decision to file the disclosure.

Editor’s Note: Kara Alaimo, an associate professor in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University, writes about issues affecting women and social media. She worked as a spokeswoman for international affairs in the Treasury Department. She does not have to give up her opinions in this commentary. CNN has more opinion on it.

Kanye West’s acquisition of Parler can lead to a far-right ideologies that threaten our freedoms on social media

The conservative social media company Parler announced on Monday that it is being purchased by Kanye West, who was temporarily suspended from Twitter this month for an antisemitic tweet. West, who changed his name to Ye, was described as having taken a “breakthrough” move into the free speech media space where he would never have to fear being removed from social media again.

West believes that in a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial, it is important to have the right to freely express ourselves.

If West comes to own Parler and Musk takes the reins of Twitter, an already-extant conservative ecosystem will be supercharged on social media. These men’s “free speech” policies are likely to drive away people victimized by hate online. Those who stay in conservative areas will become even more extreme because of their interactions, which can result in a dangerous far-right ideology that affects our politics.

The message appeared to be aimed at addressing concerns among advertisers — Twitter’s chief source of revenue — that Musk’s plans to promote free speech by cutting back on moderating content will open the floodgates to more online toxicity and drive away users.

Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at University of Miami, said women who become victims of online hate usually shut down their websites, avoid websites they formerly frequented, and refrain from engaging in online political commentary.

In practice, what these free speech policies are really about is an ugly form of censorship that scares away the voices of people who are attacked by users of these platforms.

West has already described Parler as a place where conservative views can flourish, and nonconservatives are unlikely to flock to Truth Social, given its association with Trump. If women, people of color and others start fleeing Twitter, that could leave it as a platform for conservatives as well. This would make the views of those that remain even more ardent.

Comment on “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe them, and What Can We Expect” [J.C. Sunstein, Elon Musk, R.A. Yildirim,

In his book, “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, and What Can,” Harvard University law professor says that people who are like minded often end up thinking more extreme versions of what they thought before speaking to one another. Sunstein says this happens because their exchanges heighten their preexisting beliefs and make them more confident.

He continued: “There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.”

Even though some male owners are sexist, misogynistic, racist and otherwise offensive, we can expect them to amplify their own views on their platforms.

Yildirim said that, unlike Facebook, Twitter has not been good at targeting advertising to what users want to see. Musk’s message suggests he wants to fix that, she said.

The email said that “our work to make it a safe, informative place will be moving faster and more aggressive than ever before” and that they would continue to welcome ideas for how to achieve the goal.

The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reported that one ad buying agency had already received requests from about a dozen clients to pause their advertisements on Twitter if Musk restores Trump’s account, and other were considering doing the same.

Musk also reiterated in the letter a lofty earlier statement he had made that the Twitter acquisition is not meant to be a money-making venture for him.

Elon Musk completed his $44 billion deal to buy the company last week, which led to massive layoffs and questions about whether the world’s richest man would restore some banned accounts.

Musk pledged that he would fight the bots or die trying, referring to fake and scam accounts that are often especially active in the replies to his posts on the platform.

Twitter CEO Jay Sullivan vs. Musk: Extremism or Misinformation? Comments on Musk’s Twitter disappearance after the Oct. 28 deadline

Delaware Chancery Court chancellor Kathaleen St. Judge McCormick gave the parties until 5 p.m. on Oct. 28 to close the deal or face a rescheduled trial.

Piazza says a rise in extremism and misinformation could be bad for a social-media platform with a mainstream appeal. Piazza thinks that the communities are flooded by pornography and botrytch and not really usable. “People will gravitate to other platforms.”

He said last week on the earnings call that he believed the long-term potential of the company is greater than it is currently worth.

Since Musk suddenly proclaimed he actually wanted to buy Twitter again earlier this month, Twitter’s most internally visible leader has been Jay Sullivan, the general manager of consumer and revenue product. He has been holding regular listening sessions with employees, but on Thursday, shortly after employees received a calendar invite for a “quick informal check in” call with him at 7:35PM ET, the meeting was cancelled “until further notice” without explanation.

Many employees at the company have noted the absence of Parag Argawal, the current CEO, who Musk soured on after they initially started talking about Musk joining the board. One current employee of the social networking site, who asked anonymity to speak without the permission of the company, said that he had been completely absent for weeks. One person said that he had ghosted them. The comments about Argawal were found in both the employee section of Blind and the employee section of slack.

According to Insider, the execs got handsome payouts for their troubles, with Agrawal getting $38.7 million, Segal getting $25.4 million, Gadde getting $12.5 million, and Personette getting $11.2 million.

The Trumps of Twitter: How the Supreme Court ruled Musk’s free speech rhetoric will change how Twitter operates and how it affects the European Digital Services Act

Twitter faces challenges to its free speech stance in court, as the Supreme Court agreed to take up two cases that will determine its liability for illegal content.

In their place, Musk is now the CEO and sole director of the social platform, according to a securities filing, cementing his unique influence over one of the world’s most influential platforms at a time when he is weighing significant changes to how it operates. At the same time, Musk is also running several other companies, including as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.

Although they came quickly, the major personnel moves had been widely expected and almost certainly are the first of many major changes the mercurial Tesla CEO will make.

Musk privately clashed with Agrawal in April, immediately before deciding to make a bid for the company, according to text messages later revealed in court filings.

About the same time, he used Twitter to criticize Gadde, the company’s top lawyer. His tweets were followed by a wave of harassment of Gadde from other Twitter accounts. For Gadde, an 11-year Twitter employee who also heads public policy and safety, the harassment included racist and misogynistic attacks, in addition to calls for Musk to fire her. The harassment resumed on Thursday after she was fired.

And regulations on the way from the European Union could make Musk’s ‘free speech’ rhetoric impractical as well, says Rebekah Tromble, a political scientist at George Washington University in Washington DC. The EU’s Digital Services Act, due to go into effect in 2024, will require social-media companies to mitigate risks caused by illegal content or disinformation. In theory, Twitter and other platforms could try to create separate policies and practices for Europe, but that would probably prove difficult in practice, Tromble says. “When it’s fundamental systems, including core algorithms, that are introducing those risks, mitigation measures will necessarily impact the system as a whole.”

It’s also a realization that no moderation is good for business and puts the social network at risk of losing advertisers and subscribers.

“You do not want a place where consumers just simply are bombarded with things they do not want to hear about, and the platform takes no responsibility,” Yildirim said.

Twitter Goes Private, But Elon Musk Cancels It: The Daily Chaos of the Twitter Life after the New York Stock Exchange Shutdown

The deal is going through, according to Musk. He strolled into the company’s San Francisco headquarters Wednesday carrying a porcelain sink, changed his Twitter profile to “Chief Twit,” and tweeted “Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!”

And overnight the New York Stock Exchange notified investors that it will suspend trading in shares of Twitter before the opening bell Friday in anticipation of the company going private under Musk.

Musk’s apparent enthusiasm about visiting Twitter headquarters this week stood in sharp contrast to one of his earlier suggestions: The building should be turned into a homeless shelter because so few employees actually worked there.

The Washington Post reported last week that Musk told prospective investors that he plans to cut three quarters of Twitter’s 7,500 workers when he becomes owner of the company. The newspaper has sources familiar with the deliberations.

In the last few days, the pharmaceutical giant is among many large companies pulling their ad dollars on the social networking site. Some companies have paused their campaigns and large advertising firms are telling clients to do the same.

Musk was on the platform for 24 hours and gave credence to a fringe theory about the attack on Pelosi. Then, when media outlets reported on his irresponsible behavior, Musk assailed them. He trolled The New York Times and rebuked The Guardian for being a “far left wing propaganda machine”.

The article was in theReliable Sources newsletter. You can sign up for the digest to chronicle the media landscape.

On Thursday evening, after a full day of chaos on the timeline, Elon Musk’s Twitter halted new enrollment into its $8-a-month Blue subscription offering. It’s not uncommon for people to impersonate celebrities, corporations and government officials when they offer anyone the chance to slap a “verified” badge on their account. The resulting mayhem, which led to memorable hoaxes from accounts misrepresenting themselves as Eli Lilly, Tesla, Lockheed Martin and others, had triggered an advertiser pullout and a general sense that the platform had descended into chaos.

Charging for verified badges might appear at first glance as a business story. The move will have significant impact on the information landscape. Most notably, it will make it much more difficult for users to distinguish from authentic and inauthentic accounts.

The right has for years lashed out at “blue checks,” whom in their eyes represent elitist gatekeepers who control the conversation, even though many conservatives also don blue badges. Taking away those blue checks and the air of authority they give upon the profile they are appended to will delight some conservatives.

On the Identity of Twitter and Facebook in the Confronting Hate Speech and Conspiracy Theories: A Case Study in the Democratic Republic of Congo

In his account on his verified website, Musk stated that “the best thing” one could do to save social networks, the internet and civil discourse would be to authenticating users.

Nick Caldwell, general manager of core technology, has changed his bio to include the word “former.” Jay Sullivan, general manager of consumer and revenue products, removed the company’s title from his bio. The New York Times reported that Berland had left the company, on Tuesday and on Tuesday night she sent a single blue heart.

Investor Jason Calacanis and Sriram Krishnan, an Andreessen Horowitz general partner focused on crypto and Twitter’s former consumer teams lead, have both confirmed on Twitter that they are working with Musk to manage the company and brainstorm new products Musk has also reportedly brought in Craft Ventures partner David Sacks, as well as a handful of Tesla engineers.

Calacanis earlier this week tweeted that he was in New York on behalf of Twitter meeting with “the marketing and advertising community.” He has also tweeted questions to Twitter users about the platform’s subscription and bookmark features.

The new owner plans to establish a content moderation council that will have representatives with widely unpopular views to help determine the policies of the company. For now, he has stressed that the platform’s policies have not yet changed.

The threat was going to rise when billionaireentrepreneur Elon Musk said that the bird is freed last week.

To Ndahinda, however, it is clear that the normalization of hate speech and conspiracy theories on social media could have contributed to violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, even if academics have not yet been able to delineate its contribution clearly. It is very difficult to work out a link between a social media post and violence. Many actors make public comments that lead to crimes being committed.

Another user, @lana_lovehall, wondered if hate speech would be dealt with: “Now that Elon Musk owns Twitter let’s see if our reports of racism will be taken (seriously) or continue to be ignored …”

The platforms where false narratives start are usually these. When those narratives creep onto mainstream platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, they explode. “They get pushed on Twitter and go out of control because everybody sees them and journalists cover them,” he says.

James Piazza, who is studying terrorism at the Pennsylvania State University, fears that inflammatory speech that dehumanizes people is what some people on social media use. You can have more violence in that situation.

Before and after Musk took ownership of the company, researchers tracked hate speech on the social media platform. They used a data stream from the platform which is known as the firehose, which is a feed of every public retweet, or reply shared across the platform. The group has used the same approach in previous studies, including one looking at toxicity on Twitter around the US midterm elections.

The Covid Plandemic and the Joke of Pseudoscalar Violence: A Pedestrian’s View

“The Covid PLANdemic was created by Big Pharma to silence me. She said that all of the people try to silence her. “Ma’am, please speak at a lower volume. I’m sorry, am I too loud for your precious intensive care unit? You are not even sick!

“Hi. Oh my god, your profile is so funny. Schumer was dressed as a bot and said that she loved funny guys. “They said I was a bot, which is crazy. I’m all woman and I love funny guys like you. You should look at the website where I and other girls hang out.

But the most notable person to speak in front of the council: former president Donald Trump, played by James Austin Johnson. Trump had his account banned in 2021.

“Yes, we’ve all moved to Truth Social, and we love Truth Social. It’s very great,” Johnson’s Trump said. “And in many ways, also terrible. It’s very bad. Very, very bad. It’s a little buggy in terms of making the phone screen crack, and the automatically draining of the Venmo.”

Opinion: What I’ve Learned in the Last Two Years of Running a Social Media Platform During the Black Athlete Era

Editor’s Note: Roxanne Jones, a founding editor of ESPN The Magazine and former vice president at ESPN, has been a producer, reporter and editor at the New York Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Jones is co-author of “Say it Loud: An Illustrated History of the Black Athlete.” She talks politics, sports and culture weekly on Philadelphia’s 900AM WURD. The views expressed here are solely hers. You can read the opinion on CNN.

I got a message 30 seconds after I deleted my account on the day Musk took control of the platform. It was time to say goodbye and good riddance to a relationship that’s been mostly bad, but brought a few moments of joy.

It doesn’t change a thing in the social network of more than 200 million users. Power and self- care were what prompted me to quit the social media platform. I was setting boundaries for what I will, and will not, allow in my life.

It was an act of silent defiance, because as a media professional I know how much of what we do in the newsrooms are dictated by what the world is saying on social media.

Data points about rising racism on Twitter can be illuminating, but they generally reinforce what we already know to be true. Like many Black women on the site, I can testify about what it feels like to be harassed and threatened with violence. I have experienced it all.

It was claimed by a cyber research organization that use of the N-word jumped by nearly 500% on a day after Musk took over.

I’m sorry, but I’ll try my best not to do that. When Paul Pelosi stepped out to protect himself from bullies on Twitter in the wake of his death

Maybe he’ll even work on his own penchant to promote lies and conspiracy theories to his 114.5 million followers, as he did in a now-deleted tweet regarding the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, in the early hours of October 28 at their San Francisco home.

In a world where everyone craves attention and adulation, there won’t be a greatTwitter exodus. Everyone wants to be a virtual brand ambassador.

Yet Black Twitter — the platform’s community of largely millions of Black users — has remained on the site. There are various reasons for staying against blatant disrespect and hatred. It is possible for people to keep a job. Others may be convinced Twitter is the best way to attain global influence, or that it’s better to stay and fight for change from within.

In one vile incident that spilled over into my personal life and turned into a matter of my family’s personal safety, authorities had to get involved. Never one to back down to bullies, I stayed on the platform and battled haters one tweet at a time for years.

Replied another: “In 2 weeks Twitter has gone from being the most welcoming and healthy workplace I’ve ever known to the most openly hostile and degrading I’ve ever known.”

Twitter will have you fighting anonymous bots meant to misinform the masses and real people who don’t have the courage or the intellect to challenge you in person.

“We’re not currently putting an ‘Official’ label on accounts but we are aggressively going after impersonation and deception,” Twitter’s verified support account tweeted on Wednesday evening.

Comedian Kathy Griffin had her account suspended Sunday after she switched her screen name to Musk. She told a Bloomberg reporter that she had also used his profile photo.

“I guess not ALL the content moderators were let go? Lol,” Griffin joked afterward on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform where she set up an account last week.

The White Room: Sarah Silverman, Donald Trump, Nintendo, Eli Lilly and Other Verified Account Ignoring a Musk-like Campaign on Twitter

Comedian Sarah Silverman used her verified account to troll Musk, copying his profile picture, cover image and name. The only thing distinguishing a Sarah KSilverman account from others was her handle.

On Friday, there was no end to the disruption. The latest reversal on the matter was that of the grey “OFFICIAL” Badge that will be re-introduced for select accounts. The decision came after a wave of verified-account imposters this week, including some pretending to be former President Donald Trump, Nintendo and Eli Lilly. The accounts were created as a result of Musk offering a blue check mark to any account holder willing to pay $8 a month, no questions asked, so that he could find new ways to make money from the platform.

It said the service would first be available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. However, it was not available Sunday and there was no indication when it would go live. A Twitter employ, Esther Crawford, told The Associated Press it is coming “soon but it hasn’t launched yet.”

Tweeting about Twitter Safety and Integrity: Why Does Musk’s Twitter Phenomenon Feel Like He’s Getting What It Needs?

platformer was first to report that a second wave of layoffs had hit the company after an initial round of layoffs cut the company in half. This time, the cuts were aimed at Twitter’s contract workers. About four thousand of the team’s contractors lost their jobs the next day, and that was on a percentage basis.

Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, sought to assuage such concerns in a tweet Friday. The company’s front-line moderation staff was the least affected by the job cuts.

The job losses that have decimated his former coworkers, as well as the ability for people to say what they want on their social media accounts, are just some of the things that matter to Perez. It is about guaranteeing and protecting democracy. “I don’t think it’s clear that Musk fully understands the social responsibility that rests on his shoulders, and the very real harm, political harm, political violence, and division that can come from social media platforms.”

“I really am concerned that it feels like the drama around corporate takeover is sucking up all the oxygen in the room,” says Perez, who is now a board member at the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan group devoted to election security and integrity. The Musk psychodrama is resulting in potentially inadequate attention on the election-related issues.

“How he treats pressure from countries like Saudi Arabia and India—I think those are key indicators of where he’s going with the platform,” says David Kaye, former UN special rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression and clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine.

Turkey, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan, which are all very large online populations, are attractive markets for the company as it looks to grow its revenue and increase its user base. But all of those countries have had arguments with Twitter specifically or with social media companies more broadly, he says. The Nigerian government ordered all Internet Service Providers to block the platform after it deleted a president’s account in the country. The government lifted the ban only after Twitter agreed to open an office in the country and pay local taxes.

The company filed a case in India earlier this year to challenge a government order that it remove individual pieces of content and whole accounts because they were considered to be a risk to India.

Griffin appeared to be the first celebrity to lose her tweeting privileges after a wave of prominent users impersonated Musk over the weekend, with the goal of underscoring potential flaws in the social media company’s plans for a revised verification system.

But the partially rolled-out plan faced widespread backlash, and in a display of defiance, some celebrities on the platform posed as Musk over the weekend, complete with a blue check mark on their profiles.

Twitter is Not Enforcing a Personal Liability Term: The Effects of a Complaint against Musk on the FTC

I am an adherent of free speech. and I eat doody for breakfast every day,” Silverman tweeted Saturday. Her account also has support for Democratic candidates.

Silverman’s account was labeled as “temporarily restricted” Sunday, with a warning that “there has been some unusual activity from this account” shown to visitors before clicking through to the profile. The comedian then changed her account back to its usual form, complete with her own name and image.

CNN fired comedian Kathy Griffin after she held up a bloody head and compared President Donald trump to Hitler. For a decade, Griffin and Anderson Cooper co-hosted the New Year’s Eve program.

Musk bought the company and promised to restore accounts of people banned from the platform, most notably Trump. The company’s content will be limited, and Musk has said he will require a paid subscription for account verification.

If proven, a violation could ultimately lead to significant personal liability for Musk, escalating the risks he faces as he stumbles through a morass of business and content moderation headaches, most of which have been self-inflicted.

The potential violation stems from a reporting obligation Twitter must fulfill whenever the company experiences a change in structure, including mergers and sales.

Within 14 days of any change, the FTC will be able to see the sworn compliance notice thatTwitter has to submit. The notice is meant to give the FTC an idea of changes at the company as well as ensure that the company complies with the order.

Alex Spiro, Musk’s lawyer, told CNN that they are in talks with the FTC to ensure they are in compliance.

There were serious deficiencies which led to the consent order and the FTC will want to make sure they are doing what they are supposed to do.

CNN viewed a message from an employee who told colleagues that Musk might try to impose responsibility for certifying FTC compliance onto individual engineers at the company.

Matt Blaze, a professor of computer science and law at Georgetown University, urged Twitter employees to seek professional legal counsel “before signing anything or making any statement to regulators.”

The FTC has increasingly signaled it could seek to hold individual executives personally accountable if they’re found to have been responsible for a company’s violations, naming them in future orders and imposing binding requirements on their future conduct, even if they leave the company. The FTC imposed sanctions on the CEO of Drizly last month.

“No CEO or company is above the law, and companies must follow our consent decrees,” the FTC said. Our revised consent order gives us new options to ensure compliance.

Changing the CEO of Twitter Blue: Avoiding the Recommendations from Musk at an adversarial event on Friday

One of the most influential social networks in the world laid off half of its workforce over the past week, alienating powerful advertisers, blew up key aspects of its product, and launched and un-launched other features in an effort to compensate for it.

That paid subscription service, too, was also suspended on Friday with little warning, just two days after its official launch, with the menu option to sign up for Twitter Blue suddenly disappearing from Twitter’s iOS app — the only place the add-on had been offered. It was not immediately clear when the company might restore the offering.

After the gray badges went live to help users differentiate legitimate celebrity and branded accounts from those that had merely paid for a blue check mark, Musk killed the feature just hours later, forcing his subordinates to explain what had happened.

The account responded nine hours later that they have added an “OFFICIAL” label to some accounts to fight impersonation.

After the US midterm elections, misinformation experts warned that the paid verification feature could make it difficult to find reliable information, since it would make identification much more difficult. Even some of Musk’s fellow high-powered users of the platform had tough feedback.

“@elonmusk, from one entrepreneur to another, for when you have your customer service hat on. Mark Cuban said he spent too much time muting all the newly purchased checkmark accounts in an attempt to make them useful again.

Musk urged brands to keep using the platform at an advertisers event held this week, after a large number of companies stopped advertising on the platform. In the event, Musk sought to appear magnanimous in accepting responsibility for the company’s performance.

There are several risks that the team identified, but none of the solutions have been identified. The company has no automated way to remove verified badges from user accounts. If we don’t charge for Blue, we’ll need a big amount of legacy verified accounts to be de-credentialed, and this requires high operational lift without investment.

The trust and safety team at the company had prepared a seven-page list of recommendations to help avoid Musk’s plans for Blue. The document, which was obtained by Platformer, predicts with eerie accuracy some of the events that follow.

The first recommendation on the document was to use increased amplification to achieve their ends where their upside surpasses the cost, and it was labeled P0 by the team.

The team found that perjury of world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials and other high profile individuals represented another P0 risk. “Legacy verification provides a critical signal in enforcing impersonation rules, the loss of which is likely to lead to an increase in impersonation of high-profile accounts on Twitter.”

Twitter Elon Musk’s Blue Verification Internal Warnings: Where Are We Going? How Well Did Twitter Respond to Musk?

On November 1st, when the document was circulated internally, Musk was considering a $99-a-year annual subscription for Blue; only later, after an exchange online with writer Stephen King, did he lower the cost. The move wound up increasing the risk for scams, as the desire to make fun of brands and government officials became an impulse buy at $8.

The team also noted removing the verified badge and its related privileges from high-profile users unless they paid, coupled with the heightened impersonation risk, would potentially drive them away from Twitter for good. “Removing privileges and exemptions from legacy verified accounts could cause confusion and loss of trust among high profile users,” they wrote. To manage against false- positive actions on high-profile users, we use the health-related protections. If that signal is deprecated, we run the risk of false positives or the loss of privileges such as higher rate limits resulting in escalation and user flight.”

The company’s trust and safety team did win support for some solutions, including retaining verification for some high-profile accounts using the “official badge.”

Most of the features on the wish list for the product are not approved and thus aren’t included in the document.

Despite the warnings, the launch proceeded as planned. Musk stopped the roll out a few days later, despite the predictions of the trust and safety team.

Functions affected included content moderation, recruiting, ad sales, marketing, and real estate, among others. It is not clear how the loss of thousands of moderators will affect the service. But it seems clear that Twitter now has dramatically fewer people available to police the site for harmful material.

“One of my contractors just got deactivated without notice in the middle of making critical changes to our child safety workflows,” one manager noted in the company’s Slack channels. This is troubling as it means that the platform has been hard at work to adequately police child sexual exploitation material.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23459244/twitter-elon-musk-blue-verification-internal-warnings-ignored

An Employee-Friendly Discussion on Twitter: Why a Code Freeze is Hard for the Goons? Musk and Frohnhoefer Revisited

Over the course of the day, messages trickled in on both Blind and external Slacks, telling employees how to have a more candid discussion at work.

Employees told us they had been anticipating cuts since the layoffs earlier this month. The email that the vendors sent former contractors was the first to report on the cuts and it was the last time they would get their medical benefits.

According to a document obtained by Platformer, one employee stated that they were wondering when people would realize the worth of the people who worked here.

Employees continue to show a lot of their love for one another. But not to the coterie of volunteer venture capitalists and on-loan engineers from Tesla and the Boring Company that have been carrying out Musk’s orders: those they refer to universally, including on Slack, as “the goons.”

This was more than just a run-of-the-mill code freeze, during which engineers can commit code but not deploy it. Those are fairly common, and Twitter has been under one for most of the time since Musk took over. Such freezes are generally intended to reduce the chances that a bug disrupts Twitter’s systems.

This time, however, engineers were told they couldn’t even write any code — “until further notice,” according to an internal email obtained by Platformer. The email said that if an urgent change needed to resolve an issue with a production service, including changes reflecting hard promised deadlines for clients, employees would be granted exceptions.

Engineers who were at the late night meeting were confused. An engineer who was helping with the implementation of the freeze asked if he could reference a ticket. I don’t see any context. A colleague said they don’t have much context at the moment. “But this is coming from Elon’s team.”

Engineer Eric Frohnhoefer pushed back on Musk’s criticism, and offered a detailed thread about why Twitter loads more slowly in some places than others. Musk fired him by the end of the day, Bloomberg reported, along with a second engineer who commented on the affair: “As the former tech lead for timelines infrastructure at Twitter, I can confidently say that this man has no idea wtf he’s talking about.”

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23459244/twitter-elon-musk-blue-verification-internal-warnings-ignored

Why Twitter has a Code Frozen? Why Does Eli Lilly Do It That Way? Or Why Does Twitter Have a High Risk Media Buy?

Instead, the experience is not great in India, for example. The laws of physics come into effect when the phone and the data center are both in the same location.

It’s no wonder that India has a higher concentration of low power phones which tend to perform worse in general than our over powered iPhones and such.

So why the code freeze? Some are speculating that Musk has become paranoid that disgruntled engineers may attempt to damage the site on their way out, though no one knows for sure.

Eli Lilly stopped all of its ad campaigns on Friday because of the Blue debacle. The move potentially cost Twitter millions of dollars in revenue, according to the Washington Post. After a fake account claiming to be Eli Lilly said it would now be free, it took six hours for Twitpics to remove it.

The news has caused the ad teams to be confused and disorganized according to conversations with current employees.

“I know that many of your markets and clients are seeing large declines in Q4 and in particular L7D,” wrote Twitter’s global business lead in Slack. “Please add any commentary, questions, issues in this thread and I’ll endeavor to raise as many as possible TY!”

One employee stated that T-Mobile asked to halt the campaigns due to brand safety concerns. (Three days later, former T-Mobile CEO John Legere asked Musk to let him run Twitter, to which Musk responded simply “no.”)

A person who works at the micro-blogging site said that General GM asked to halt campaigns. They gave an initial reason for elections, but asked to meet next week to discuss why they shouldn’t. Later, this same employee added: “Pause on [GM] til end of year confirmed and implemented. The reason now is brand safety.”

GroupM, the largest media-buying agency in the world, with $60 billion in annual media spend, told its clients that Twitter was a high-risk media buy, according to Digiday and an email obtained by Platformer. Twitter’s agency partnerships lead explained the situation in Slack: “Given the recent senior departures in key operational areas (specifically Security, Trust & Safety, Compliance), GroupM have updated Twitter’s brand safety guidance to high risk. They know that our policies are in place but they don’t know if we can scale and manage incidents at the same time.

A commitment to effective moderation and the enforcement of currentTwitter Rules areDemonstrated.

Twitter’s Lost Password: The Failure of Google and Apple to Adopt New Codes, and What Will It Tell Us About It?

A number of users said they lost their password via text on Monday afternoon after Musk announced he would be cutting off up to 80% of the service. Some other people reported partial site disruptions and difficulty with their archives.

There are people who know how to fix all those things, but they either no longer work for the company or have been told not to ship any new code. And the question haunting engineers at the end of the day was not whether any new cracks in the service would emerge, but how many, and when.

“I’ve always thought that a move to a subscription business would make sense for Twitter … it’s never been a great advertising platform,” said Larry Vincent, associate professor of marketing at USC’s Marshall School of Business. The same level of user targeting didn’t draw as many advertisers to Twitter as rivals like Facebook.

In an op-ed published in the New York Times last week, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, who left the company earlier this month, said the company’s failure to adhere to Google and Apple’s app store rules could be “catastrophic.” The app stores have previously removed social media apps for failing to protect their users from harmful content, and Roth suggested that Twitter had already begun to receive calls from app store operators following Musk’s takeover. Over the weekend, the head of Apple’s app store, Phil Schiller, deleted his Twitter account.

There is no guarantee that capturing the attention of online people will translate into revenue growth.

The Twitter Files, Part Duex! – Musk apologizes for the tweeting of Donald Trump’s racist and sexist anti-social campaign

For the months prior to Musk’s takeover, the researchers deemed just one tweet out of the three top 20 lists to be actually hateful, in this case against Jewish people. The others were quoting another persons comments or using relevant words in a non hateful way.

It will be possible for users to figure out if the company has limited how much other users can see their posts, if an option is introduced by the new owner. Musk is seizing on a particular issue that has been a popular cry among some conservatives, that the social network has suppressed their content.

A software update will show if a person has been shadowbanned and how to appeal, according to Musk. He didn’t give a timetable or additional details.

A new release of internal documents on Thursday, which Musk cheered and endorsed, gave rise to a spotlight on the practice of limiting the reach of certain, potentially harmful content, a practice that Musk has seemingly both endorsed and criticized in the past.

The chief reason most news organizations aren’t up in arms about the story is because the releases have largely not contained any revelatory information. So far, the files have failed to do much outside highlight exactly how messy content moderation can be — especially when under immense pressure and dealing with the former President of the United States. On Monday, some of the behind- the-scenes debate that precededDonald Trump’s ban were disclosed in the fifth edition of the Twitter Files.

In both cases, the internal documents appear to have been provided directly to the journalists by Musk’s team. Musk commented on the thread with a message, “The Twitter Files, Part Duex!!” along with two popcorn emojis.

Trump isn’t just a racist tangerine: Trump is right about American patriots, and we are all entitled to protect those who voted for Trump

Weiss offered several examples of right-leaning figures who had moderation actions taken on their accounts, but it’s not clear if such actions were equally taken against left-leaning or other accounts.

CNN reports that a person with knowledge of the situation says that the former head of trust and safety was forced to flee his home due to threats he received.

A person familiar with Roth’s situation told CNN threats made against the former Twitter employee escalated exponentially after Musk engaged in the pedophilia conspiracy theory.

Among Roth’s tweets was one he wrote on Election Day 2016 that read, “I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.”

I want to be clear that I support Yoel, even though I have made some questionable retweets. Musk thinks he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs.

Twitter ultimately said at the time of Trump’s ban that his tweet about American patriots suggested that “he plans to continue to support, empower, and shield those who believe he won the election,” and that the tweet concerning the inauguration could be viewed as a further statement that the election was not legitimate or that the inauguration would be a “safe” target for violence because he would not be attending.

On January 8th, President Donald Trump wrote in a flurry of words that the 75,000,000 great American voters who voted for him would have violence on their hands. They will not be treated unfairly or disrespected in any way.

(Navaroli later testified to the House committee investigating January 6 that she and other staffers had been alarmed by content posted on Twitter by the Proud Boys and other extremist groups that echoed statements by Trump, and had worried about the risk of violence ahead of the attack.)

A staff member of a company where the name was removed in the screenshot said that a subsequent statement from Trump saying he would not attend the inauguration of Biden was a clear no violation. But a different staffer questioned whether that tweet could be “proof that [Trump] doesn’t support a peaceful transition,” according to Weiss’ tweets.

The process of using multiple staffers, teams, and research to make high-profile decisions does not seem to be out of line with how social platforms make content moderation decisions.

The establishment press, however, has shown far less interest in the documents themselves, with most news organizations outright ignoring various entries in the continuing series. The right-wing media apparatus pushing the story has, naturally, asserted that the mum reaction is effectively because the mainstream press is made up of left-wing hacks who want to hide the truth from the public.

The Wall Street Journal’s former top editor wrote on Monday that the “twirp files tell us nothing new.” There’s no shocking revelation in there about government censorship or covert manipulation by political campaigns. They bring to the surface the internal deliberations of a company dealing with complex issues and in ways that jive with its values.

If you’re just a regular person trying to make sense of what is going on, it can be awfully difficult. And the solution isn’t so clear. They risk giving air to a storyline that was framed by Musk as he wages his information war if they covered each of the installments. He and others can define it in the public square if they don’t dissection each drop.

The Trust and Safety Council of Twitter: Comments on Musk’s “Cosmic Kid Exploitation” after the Musk Email Dispatch

The council members, who provided images of the email from Twitter to The Associated Press, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation.

The volunteer group provided expertise and guidance on how Twitter could better combat hate, harassment and other harms but didn’t have any decision-making authority and didn’t review specific content disputes.

Twitter, which is based in San Francisco, had confirmed the meeting with the council Thursday in an email in which it promised an “open conversation and Q&A” with Twitter staff, including the new head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin.

The former council members became targets of online attacks after Musk criticized them for not doing enough to stop child sexual exploitation on the platform.

Some remaining members of the council sent an email to TWyt on Monday asking the company to stop misrepresenting their role after a number of attacks.

The Trust and Safety Council, in fact, had as one of its advisory groups one that focused on child exploitation. This included the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the Rati Foundation and YAKIN, or Youth Adult Survivors & Kin in Need.