The Ethics and Public Rebuke of Elon Musk in the Twitter-Tumblr Trade: A Plethora of Twitter Disputes

The wild swings at Twitter only seemed to accelerate on Thursday with more executive departures, growing chaos over fake, verified accounts and an unusual public rebuke from the US government. Musk told employees that he could be in trouble soon, a sign that he thinks the company is on the verge.

Musk said at the conference that he would reverse the ban if he became the company’s owner.

But relations between the pair seem to have soured since, with the men publicly trading 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.”

Federal authorities are investigating Elon Musk in connection with his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, the social media platform said in a court filing Thursday.

In a sharp response, Twitter’s lawyers wrote that Musk had been attempting to exit the deal and “now, on the eve of trial, Defendants declare they intend to close after all. They say that they mean it this time.

Legal experts said that the claims may have put the company at risk for billions of dollars in FTC fines.

The original price for the company was previously agreed upon, but last week Musk proposed to purchase it at a higher price. The judge overseeing the dispute later in the week ruled to pause the legal proceedings until Oct. 28 following a request from Musk.

Zatko’s Notebooks: Not to Torch His Own Documents by Twitter, but to Protect His Integral Integrity and Promote His Influence on the Internet

A very, very exhausting time, and an unprecedented time. I’ve never heard about anything like this happening at a major tech company. And so we have, coming up, interviews with two current Twitter employees who are there witnessing this all from the inside, and we’ll talk to them right after the break.

Zatko was not asked to torch his own documents by Twitter, according to the filing. “Twitter had no knowledge of Zatko’s notebooks and no idea what information they contained.”

Musk tried to assure advertisers that he wasn’t buying the platform to make it a free-for-all hellscape, saying he was buying it to help humanity.

Last month, Musk said Twitter’s “new” policy is “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach,” echoing an approach that is something of an industry standard. “Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.”

Sarah Personette responded to Musk saying she had a great discussion with him on Wednesday. “Our continued commitment to brand safety for advertisers remained unchanged,” Personette said. “Looking forward to the future!”

A weak economy, months of uncertainty surrounding Musk’s proposed takeover and changing consumer behaviors make him an excellent choice to stay out of a major shakeup of Twitter’s ad business, said Jasmine Enberg of Insider Intelligence.

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.

The acquisition also promises to extend Musk’s influence. The billionaire has stakes in companies developing cars, rockets, robots and satellite internet, as well as more experimental ventures such as brain implants. He controls a platform that helps hundreds of millions of people communicate and get their news.

It was Musk who said he would dethrone the fake and scam accounts that are often active in the replies to histweets.

The Fate of Twitter: Musk, Segal and Gadde in the Early Stages of the Late Tesla-Tel’Vector Deal

If the parties do not close the deal by 5p.m. on Oct. 28, a new trial will be held.

“If the platform loosens up in moderation, it’s sure to frighten advertisers, who feel that the tools are lacking compared with other social platforms,” Enberg said.

And what do you make of the characterization that has come from Elon and people around him that Twitter is this kind of bloated, overstaffed, slow-moving company where everything takes way too long to ship, where there’s kind of a culture of sitting on your hands and not really doing much, and where with some quick, decisive action, you could really trim some fat and reestablish the company and make it profitable?

The people wouldn’t say if all the paperwork for the deal, originally valued at $44 billion, had been signed or if the deal has closed. But they said Musk is in charge of the social media platform and has fired CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and Chief Legal Counsel Vijaya Gadde. Neither person wanted to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the deal.

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.

According to text messages that were later revealed, Musk clashed with Agrawal in April before deciding to make a bid for the company.

He usedTwitter to criticize the company’s top lawyer. The harassment of Gadde was followed by other 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. On Thursday, after she was fired, the harassing tweets lit up once again.

A Twitter Note About Elon World, Right-Right, and the Blue Checks. I. Musk’s Disappearance in the Washington Post

“Social media is currently at risk of folding into far right and far left wing echo chambers that cause more hate and divide our society,” he said.

But it’s also a realization that having no content moderation is bad for business, putting Twitter at risk of losing advertisers and subscribers, she said.

Yildirim said you don’t want a platform where consumers just simply are bombarded with things they don’t want to hear about.

Before we go, we should say we did reach out to Twitter and ask them to respond to what you just heard from employees about what’s been going on inside the company. They did not write back. The company has also said nothing publicly since the deal closed.

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 enthusiasm about visiting the building this week was vastly different to his previous suggestions that the building should be turned into a homeless shelter because few employees actually worked there.

According to the Washington Post, Musk told prospective investors that he will cut three quarters of the workforce when he becomes the owner of the company. The newspaper cited documents and unnamed sources familiar with the deliberation.

Thursday’s note to advertisers shows a need for more relevant ads on social networking sites, which are usually the ones that collect and analyze user personal information.

A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.

In fact, not only has Musk himself contaminated the information environment he now reigns over, but he is apparently working to dismantle the little infrastructure erected to help users sift through the daily chaos. Recent news reports say he will strip public figures and institutions of their blue verified badges if they don’t pay.

Yeah. I have always been in favor of allowing people that want to verify themselves to do so. It is more than just making people pay to keep their badges. It’s also that if you pay, you could get a badge.

Well, here’s my theory about it, real quick, is that I think that inside Elon world, and inside, frankly, a lot of right-wing sort of circles, there’s this idea of the blue checks, right? People on Fox News and other conservative media outlets are always talking about this sort of, like, blue check mob of people on Twitter, mostly journalists and other media figures, who are sort of, like, self-important and care very deeply about their checkmarks.

In August of last year, Walter Isaacson, Musk’s authorized biographer, said that the best way to save social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email, and reduce hacking would be to authenticating users.

This week on Gadget Lab, we talk with WIRED platforms and power reporter Vittoria Elliot about the changes coming to Twitter and how they may affect the future of the social network.

House of the dragon is a show your male friends would like to watch. Mike likes Natalia Lafourcade’s new album De Todas las Flores. Lauren suggests changing your relationship with social media.

What’s going on in Silicon Valley, Twitter? An update from the Silicon Valley tech scene in the last few days at GAGgetLab

Vittoria Elliott can be found on Twitter @telliotter. LaurenGoode is the person that Lauren Goode is. Michael Calore is in the fight. The main hotline atGadgetLab was blinged out. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Solar Keys is the music for our theme.

You can always listen to it through the audio player on the page, but if you’d like to subscribe for free, here’s how.

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This transcript was created with speech recognition software. It has been reviewed by humans, but there may be errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

We bring in news from around the tech industry to give a more comprehensive sense of what is going on in Silicon Valley. But right now, the only story that anyone in tech cares about is what’s happening just down the street from us in San Francisco, at Twitter.

So what we’re going to do is talk to them, like have a normal interview. They are not going to use their voice, but we will take what they say and make a video of it. The words will be fed back into a text-to-speech computer program and we’ll play it to you.

Before we go over those interviews, let’s take a peek at what’s been happening at the social media site this week. Because it’s been crazy in one way or another. You reported Friday that engineers were told to print out the last 30 to 60 days of code they wrote for review at the company.

Why is it funny when an engineer tells you to print out their final 30 to 60 days of code? – An episode about AI voices and Twitter

I like that when we started this show, we said we would never put on AI voices unless we had a really good reason and a really limited capacity. And now, twice in five episodes —

You were wrong about the fact that this was not a robot-ridden show and you were wrong about the fact that Elon boughtTwitter. So two strikes for Casey.

Yeah. And this is one of the — sometimes as a reporter, you get a tip that sounds so silly, that you think, well, this couldn’t possibly be true. When I was told that a person had told people to print out their final 30 to 60 days of code, I thought that it was false.

And in fact, two of my sources are like, uh, Casey, that doesn’t sound right to me. Is that okay? But then, I start texting around, start getting on the phone with some folks, and then the two people that told me that I was wrong came back to me and said, oh my god, he’s actually asking people to print out their code!

So why is this funny? Why is this interesting? This is an odd way to assess someone’s talent as a software engineer. People are not evaluated just by how much code they write.

If you show up with a printout of 100 pages of code, that’s not necessarily a good thing. Is that the case, you might have done better by eliminating some code? Sort of streamlining it. So.

Also, who prints code? Like, it’s not like — like, I was surprised that the coding programs actually have a Print button in them. Because that’s, like, not what you’re bringing to your daily review of your code.

It’s like, two hours later, they get — all the Twitter folks get this new notification. It’s like, change of plans. Elon and his folks, they still want to see your code. If you have printed out any code, we need you to shred it, so why not just bring it in on your laptop?

Like, there’s just this boss in charge who, like, doesn’t really seem to know what he’s doing, and everyone’s just kind of humoring him. But it’s not — it’s not the kind of thing that usually happens at a big tech company.

It is not. One thing that we should point out is that the people at the company are obsessed with figuring out who is a good engineer. So Elon very much worships at the altar of the engineer. He considers himself an engineer.

I’ve talked to people who’ve gotten calls at night from randomTesla engineers, asking if they really are good on your team. Who are the top performers? There are people who are performing low.

And so this exercise, which is absurd and also part of an evaluation system in which they are trying to figure out who at the company do we need to keep in order to keep the service running, is part of that.

Who can take the place of us? That’s sort of the unspoken piece of this. OK, so we have this code printing fiasco. On Sunday, you reported that there is a possibility that verifications could be tied to the subscription for the Blue service.

Many people subscribe to it, but it has not been a major source of revenue. The people who are under the huge pressure to start making money have been looking for new revenue ideas. And one revenue idea that came up, basically right away, was to make people pay for Twitter Blue in order to keep their verification badges.

Twitter Blue costs $5 a month. Shortly after I wrote the story, Alex Heath at ” The Verge” reported that they were considering charges of up to $20 a month for the verification badges. I think it was because of that that the entire timeline just melted down.

Yeah. Stephen King, the horror author, asked, “$20 a month to keep my blue check?” If that happens, I will be like Enron.

Wait, let me just say, Stephen King has written about some of the most terrifying horrors imaginable, and nothing scared him more than the idea of paying $20 a month for his verification badge.

Twitter needs a little blue check mark: How to be honest with the creators? Stephen King’s reply to Elon on Twitter on Thursday

It is important that we know who is on the service, because so many people use it to get their news and information. If they charge for it and then introduce this new confusion into it, the risks are going to be way too high.

A lot of journalists get verified by that. There is more than one process. If you are a celebrity, you can ask to be verified. The verification exists because it’s not a status marker.

It’s not about, this person’s important. It was created because Oprah was one of the first people to join Twitter, so there were a lot of people pretending to be Oprah on the site. When users talk to someone they want to know if the person is actually the person they are pretending to be.

This is a necessary feature of the platform and I think it’s fair to say. Every platform that is social in some way has a feature like this — Facebook, Instagram, Snap, TikTok, right? You need a way to say, this is the real Oprah, and that is not the real Oprah.

The updated Twitter Blue subscription plan gives paying users the ability to get a blue check mark on their profiles, an option previously available exclusively to verified celebrities, politicians, journalists and other public figures. Musk proposed the new feature as a way to fight spam on the platform.

Exactly. The idea was that people who stayed verified and were verified enough to pay for the privilege, would care so much about being verified that they would pay for it. And so that’s where we get this idea of $20 a month for verification.

Now, this almost immediately leads to a huge Twitter timeline meltdown where users are saying they won’t pay $20 a month. That is more expensive than the service I pay for. I pay for it more than you do.

It seems crazy to keep my little check mark. On Thursday, Stephen King wrote a reply to Elon on the social media site. Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8? Stephen King is a pricing consultant.

It seems like this is a way for the creators to make money while at the same time punishing the blue checkmarks, which is very different from other social media platforms.

It seems to me that I am trying to keep an open mind. This could work. I have often thought that people who are power users of Twitter should be paying something for some of the features that are being talked about here.

It creates economic value for people like you and me. It matters to us. News organizations pay for all kinds of software solutions that help them do various things. Maybe Twitter Blue should be part of that.

Now, apparently, Elon did say something, like they’re going to have maybe some sort of separate legacy verification program for — I don’t know — government entities that aren’t going to pay the $8 a month. There are still some details to be worked out.

The Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees: A Reflection on What Happened in Technicolor During the First 10 Years

The people of any company are a key part of that company. And the people who have always been drawn to Twitter are kind of strange in the best way possible. It’s not something you know until you work for the company. They are all going to leave. Those are not the people who are going to stay. It’s all gone.

For me, it’s back at it again at the Krispy Kreme, one of the great moments of culture for the past 10 years. At the same time, the culture has also moved on. The code base for Vine is 10 years old, and the idea that it is now going to be revived and turn into a TikTok competitor — that’s a really steep hill.

I would also say, like, not an immediate revenue driver, right? That’s something they’re just going to have to put a ton of effort into. You are launching a new social network with the help of Twitter. So that’s a huge, heavy lift. I think it could be fun to have a very popular American short-form video network that wasn’t owned by Facebook or YouTube. We have to see if they can do it.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Mockingjay: Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Stop Talking Out of the Cold War, And How Have We Been?

That is correct. They are being told that there are days to ship this. If this does not ship by this date, in some cases, a date next week, you will be fired. If it is more than an hour past deadline, you will be fired.

So people are sleeping very little. They are sleeping in their offices, and frankly, some of them are terrified. Some of them have work visas. If they lose the job, they can either leave the country or find a new one within 60 days. So it could not be more serious for the folks who have these jobs.

Welcome to “Hard Fork,” Mockingjay. It is about 10:00 AM Pacific on Wednesday. So far, how is your day? Anything notable happen today?

Every day seems to be the same cycle for the last week, which is everybody wakes up to more panicked messages via various different channels. I think most people have been smart enough to move off of Slack and into other channels. And it is this up-and-down of trying to chase rumors, because we have had zero communications from anybody internally.

It was very Stressful. I feel like between trying to maintain this job that I have currently, while clearly looking for a way out, while having zero support and acknowledgment from the people above me, is very stressful. Multiple rumor mill scares have been on the rise.

First, of course, was that layoffs are supposed to happen Monday. The things that were supposed to happen did not happen. According to a rumor, it is going to be Friday. It’s exhausting. I know we are all paid really well.

We have some money that we can sit on. Some people don’t. We are entering a really tough hiring market in tech, so it is nerve-racking not to know. And also, we’re entering the holidays.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: A Game Plan for the Next Five Days and a Secret Group to “Speak Out”

You have a new CEO at your company. Most of the C-suite has either been fired or resigned, and you have not received one email that says, here’s who’s in charge, and here’s the game plan for the next few days.

That is correct. We have received zero information, other than what gets trickled down to us. The Comms is very sparse. Nobody is answering in any of the company’s channels.

When you wake up, it’s almost like having a scavenger hunt with seven different apps to find what you are supposed to be doing.

You have probably heard, and you have been reporting on some of the infamous code reviews. I have seen examples of people saying that code was written entirely by them and not crediting people who collaborated with them, all in hope that they will be on some preferred status list.

Absolutely. What they are asking for is volume, not quality. Everybody is sharing every little bit of code they have written, even if it is just a few words. There’s a secret group called the “SIGHS.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life under the Musk Two Tweetees Speak Out: Does It Really Matter if I Know What I’m Working on Right Now?

Yeah, I reported on a message from a manager who said, basically, if you don’t know what you’re working on right now, work on something. Work on anything.

I want to read you a post that someone had sent me from Blind. Blind is an app where you log in with your work email and then have private chats with your friends about what is happening at your company.

There are multiple people that have sent this post. I wonder if you have seen it. And I’m not going to read the whole thing. There is a headline that says I can’t cope.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: Why I Am Trying to Help Elon, Not Because I Am The Right Thing

And it reads, “I’m on the 24/7 team working to make all of Elon’s ridiculous dreams come true. If we miss delivery we will be fired, even if it is totally outside our control. If we don’t work at weekends, we’re gone. If we leave or take PTO, we are gone.

The people are working long hours. I work at a constant rate of 20 hours per day. In the night I attend status calls. Even though I am not working, I still worry about it. I am unable to cope. I’m an absolute mess. I’m at a breaking point. This is after just a few days of Elon.”

So there are two camps at Twitter right now, the people who are being completely ignored until they get fired and the people who are being pulled into these task forces. I think the better place is to be in the people who are being ignored and will be fired.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

My heart is broken for the person who is trying to immigrate to the U.S. with a $Two-Twitter$ job

My heart is broken for this person. I hope that they can find gainful employment in that four hours while they are trying to sleep and take care of themselves.

I hope that people on visas are taken care of. I know many people who are here on visas who do not know what will happen to them. They have not been told anything at all.

This is more than just a cry for help because we are making more money with another six-figure salary. These are people who are trying to immigrate to this country and have gainful employment and do a good job, who are highly skilled.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

What are the problems in Twitter? Why are they bothering me? What have I heard about Twitter? How many tweets did you read?

Twitter has gone through phases in its lifetime. I can not think of a better place to work. People were respectful of each other. People were honest. And people had legitimate goals.

I don’t think it’s the problem, because engineers and people are sitting. I think it is the way that this company is structured, it is nearly impossible to get anything accomplished, whether it is trying to get appropriate approvals by and going through Byzantine processes, or not being told how things are changing from day to day. So there is some truth to that statement. This is the absolute wrong way to deal with it.

I wonder if you have thought about the degree to which it could be at risk, and what you might think about the future of the service.

I would love to think that everybody on Twitter is going to leave in protest. The situation is not as dire as it may seem. But it’s going to be interesting to see who stays.

That community is being changed. The platform has heavy sounds coming from it. And it’s not just people leaving the platform. The popular content on the platform is changing to more niche communities. So there is part of this that was an unfortunate direction that Twitter, pre-Elon, was already headed in anyway.

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees-Speak Out: The Case Against Privacy and Other Perturbations in the Cryptanalysis

Scared and relieved. It will be hard not to have an income. But at the same time, I hope that all of us who get fired will just get to chill out for a day or so, and then wake up on a couple of days later and say, all right, got to get that resume out there. It is sucking the life out of us and we need to be more active in these other jobs.

There is uncertainty. Some people are not sure if they should continue doing the work. And that pile of unknowns, along with the things that have been reported on, which is all the information we really have, it leads to this cognitive dissonance and just general constant stress.

I mean, even in the lowest parts of engineering, people would raise privacy concerns or potential misuse of new features. And their only job is to write random code that no one’s ever going to see, just like the piping behind the scenes. And the company just always kind of had a culture of letting people speak to these things. And more often than not, it caught us on issues before it ever made it to the public like.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: An Analysis of the Case Of Ivan R. Macaulay-Jacobi

No one really knew about that. I think there was a thought that this guy was not a nice person. You know, there were a lot of people that were of the thought that this should probably have been banned a long time ago for his behavior. And everything just sort of came from there.

He’s been more aggressive in attaching himself to political viewpoints and talking points. If it serves him, he will lean into it.

I will say, having been there for a number of years, the company has grown in a lot of ways, and some not so good. I agree with people when they say there are too many managers and engineers. Maybe it takes too long to get delivery. Management has never been the company’s strong point.

So that aside, you don’t go through any change like this without some massive structural change. If he just came in and did the same thing, like, what’s the point?

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Is Needed at Work and What I Need to Do?

OK. There is a belief that since it has been there, it should move faster than it has been. If you do not ship this thing by next Monday, you are going to be fired. As an engineer, when you hear that you have a three – or four-day deadline, what does that do to you?

I lose my mind. There is a three to four day deadline on something because priority shifted, and we need to have this done by Friday. That is a little anxious. Might put in a couple extra hours. I need to get it done. Makes sense.

But I think the major differentiator here is just the sheer scale. I wouldn’t get asked at work to completely revamp Twitter Blue by Friday. That’s just completely absurd.

And the sheer number of systems that need to be touched on, the number of engineers that have to be dragged in, that’s like raising the Titanic from the bottom of the ocean.

Because it’s not as if there’s just a certain set of code that needs to be written. You have to coordinate across many engineers, product managers, and other people, right?

Yeah. Well, I mean, if you look at some of the feature sets that have been reported on that he wants to add in, like ranking blue check users higher than others, where that ranking occurs in the stack. They need to change how the entire process works. There are lots of services that we have to figure out.

Yeah. Like if somebody had come to you and said, we want to redo Twitter Blue, what would be the time frame that you would be given that would make you say, yeah, that seems like a reasonable amount of time to do that?

It’s up to you. If the change requires a ton of infrastructure changes, it could take quite a while because the Twitter platform is generally pretty slow. We’re more concerned with reliability than we are moving fast.

If I had to give a time frame, there would be something that could be deployed within a quarter to two quarters.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Talk Out: Social Issues at Large Social Networks, Part I: Non-Gaussianities

And not only is this an engineering problem, it’s a social problem. We need to do testing. We need to figure out how this can be abused. What will people do with it? What are the Bitcoin bros going to do to try to steal more of people’s money abusing this feature?

Right. And that’s what goes on with all major releases at a big social network, is trying to figure out, we change this feature, what are the 10 other things that happen? And you’re essentially saying it sounds like that these deadlines are so short that this stuff may be released without any of that testing or scrutiny, that sort of trying to figure out what could go wrong. They’re just going to be set loose.

Yeah. There is one part about privacy and data. We don’t worry about user data because we’re not doing it. And then now it’s just a blue check on a profile.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk and the Vine: What Do We Think About Bringing Back Vine and Charge $8 a Month for Twitter Verification?

So there’s a couple of things. And it depends on where you are in the leadership stack, as far as Musk and his people. Generally the one overarching message that did get communicated was, find something cool that you like. And hopefully Musk likes it functionally.

Think about it. He wants the idea to be done in a week. You just sacrificed every team around you.

God. I am curious what you think of the product change that is being floated by Musk and his inner circle, such as charging $8 a month for twitter verification and bringing back vine. What do you think about those proposals? Do you think they are good ideas?

The first decision he made was to change the log-out view to the Explore page. And I don’t know this for certain, but my basic understanding of the goal here was that we might even be able to serve ads to people that aren’t logged in.

Now, if you go to Twitter and you’re not logged in, they’ll show you a bunch of tweets which might entice you to sign in, create an account. Maybe you see some ads, if you linger and browse through some tweets. So that was a relatively quick change that he made that I think a lot of people would agree makes some sense.

The best idea is the one on the vine. I mean, the cynical part of me says, too little, too late. You know? It’s not difficult to climb the mighty TikTok.

It is, but definitely. All of the original content from Vine is here. So marketing-wise, the nostalgia factor is huge, which gives us kind of a foothold to at least launch something.

But we at least have the media, and trying to build a product like that, we’ve been working on that for a while. I think every tech company has at least tried. Is it possible for us to do this? There have been several mock-ups.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Why do two Twitter employees speak out? A simple explanation of the common misconceptions about their work at a tech giant, but also how to stay in touch

It’d probably be the most boring. You could probably make a really interesting ethereal horror movie out of just constantly walking around with nothing.

There isn’t any communications. People are in a corner. But it’s not like, oh, the whole company went to an all-hands and learned what’s happening. Everybody is wondering if we are ever going to see him. I wonder if I should continue to do my work. Do they even serve lunch anymore?

While recording this, we can’t say what might happen to your job. Is it important to you that you be working at Twitter in three months? Or do you feel like you’re ready to be somewhere else?

The culture is alive and well. I mean, culture seeps through the product. Most of the way the company behaved was due to people caring. It can be frustrating in its own way.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Casey Musk’s Tweets about the Labor Law lawsuits are going to be massively public if they aren’t blue checks

I mean, people have seen this. So now we’re moving into the phase equivalent to “move fast and break things,” with no care for the people who are using it, which just sort of defeats the point.

Yeah, because he’s reading the news about the work hours and stuff. And he’s been wildly speculating about what kind of labor law lawsuits are going to come out.

The closest we can get to understanding their point of view is probably from Musk’s twitter account, where he’s been saying things like “Twitter’s a bullshit” and “To the peasants who don’t own a blue checkmark”. He had changed his bio to that of a complaint hotline operator.

And if people want to send you any huge scoops about what’s happening at Twitter, you can send those right over to Casey. His email address is Kevin. Roose —

The Covid Plandemic: I Am Soooooooooooooo Loud When I Get Up, I’m Sooooooo Stupid

“Hard Fork” is produced by Davis Land. We’re edited by Paula Szuchman. This was fact checked by Caitlin Love. The show was engineered today by Cory Schreppel.

Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, and MARION LOSPAN have written original music. Special thanks to all these people and Jeffrey Miranda.

The Covid PLANdemic was created by Big pharma to silence me. She said that everybody tries to silence her. Please speak at a lower volume. I’m sorry, am I too loud for your precious intensive care unit? You are not even sick!

The Truth Social Happens When You’re in a Neighborhood, and You See It Like a Black Hole, Not a Robot

I’ll be glad to help. Oh my god, your profile is so funny. Schumer wore a red dress 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 check out the website where I and some other girls hang out.

James Austin Johnson was playing former president Donald Trump and he spoke in front of the council. Trump had his account banned in 2021.

Truth Social is where we all moved, and we love it. It was very nice, said Johnson’s Trump. “And in many ways, also terrible. It is very bad. It was very, very bad. It is a bit buggy in terms of making the screen crack on the phone and the draining of the Venmo.

The suspension of Kathy Griffin’s Twitter account after changing her name to Musk and the blue verification checkmark of a social media site: “It wasn’t a sign that the site was fake”

Weiss claimed that the actions were taken without users’ knowledge. Although it has been made public that it may limit certain content that violates its policies and that it may apply strikes that correspond with suspensions for accounts that break its rules, the fact is that it is not completely transparent about it. In the event of strikes, users receive a notification that their accounts have been temporarily suspended.

The account of Kathy Griffin was suspended after she changed her 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.

After changing her profile name to Musk, Bertinelli tweeted and retweeted support for several Democratic candidates and hashtags, including “VoteBlueForDemocracy” and “#VoteBlueIn2022.”

The blue verification checkmark was supposed to be a way for people to verify the validity of something. It was free of charge for people who had confirmations from employees of the social networking site. “It simply meant your identity was verified. It would be harder for scammers to impersonate you.

Twitter Safety and Integrity Chief Yoel Roth Responds to Impersonations of Musk and a Controversy Attempt in a Post by Esther Crawford

It mentioned that the service would be available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. However, it was not available Sunday and there was no indication when it would go live. Esther Crawford told The Associated Press it is coming soon but hasn’t launched yet.

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

After a wave of users impersonated Musk over the weekend, the social media company decided to give up her privileges in order to underscore their 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.

“I am a freedom of speech absolutist I like to eat doody for breakfast every day. Her account also retweeted posts supporting Democratic candidates.

The account was restricted Sunday with a warning that there had been some unusual activity from the account, and visitors should click through to the profile. The comedian then changed her account back to its usual form, complete with her own name and image.

A Conversation with Alastair Musk on Trump and the FTC: What Do We Need to Know Before Bringing Up the Murmurs?

CNN fired comedian Kathy Griffin after he was photographed holding up a bloody head that resembled that of then- President Donald Trump. Griffin had co-hosted the New Year’s Eve program alongside Anderson Cooper for a decade.

The announcement comes after Musk on Wednesday polled his followers about whether to offer “general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.”

Roth has since been the subject of criticism and threats following the release of the Twitter Files. However, things took a turn for the worse over the weekend when Musk appeared to endorse a fraudulent accusation of pedophilia made by a conspiracy theorist.

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.

Whenever the company experiences changes in structure, including mergers and sales, it must fulfill a reporting obligation.

The FTC consent orders give the force of law and any violations that are found could involve major fines and even potential sanctions against individual executives.

The attorney for Musk told CNN on Thursday that he and the FTC were talking and they would make sure that Musk was in compliance.

“The chaos there is something the FTC is going to be worried about,” said Vladeck, “because there were serious deficiencies which led to the consent order in the first place, and the FTC is going to want to make sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to do.”

CNN viewed a message on slack earlier in the week in which an employee said that Musk could try to place responsibility for certifying FTC compliance onto individual engineers at the company.

Before signing anything or making any statement to regulators, a professor at Georgetown University told employees, they should seek professional legal counsel.

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, a delivery service of alcohol.

The FTC said that no CEO is above the law. “Our revised consent order gives us new tools to ensure compliance, and we are prepared to use them.”

Frustrated Customers and Chief Executives after an Unsuccessful Social Network Service Launch: Musk Turns the Other Side Of The Twitter Blue App

In the past week alone, one of the world’s most influential social networks has laid off half its workforce; alienated powerful advertisers; blown up key aspects of its product, then repeatedly launched and un-launched other features aimed at compensating for it; and witnessed an exodus of senior executives.

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.

The gray badges, which were supposed to be used to distinguish legitimate celebrity and branded accounts from accounts with only a blue check mark, went off the rails on Wednesday, forcing Musk to kill the feature.

The account’s very next tweet, a day and nine hours later, said exactly the opposite: “To combat impersonation, we’ve added an ‘Official’ label to some accounts.”

The paid verification feature was not well received by misinformation experts who warned it would make identification of trustworthy information much harder in the critical period after the US elections. A few of Musk’s high-powered users had tough feedback.

elonmusk, from one entrepreneur to another, for when you have customer service hat on. Mark Cuban said that he had spent too much time muting all the newly purchased checkmark account to make them useful again.

Cuban said that there was a decision to be made. “Stick with the new Twitter that democratizes every tweet by paid accounts and puts the onus on all users to curate for themselves. Or return to the way we did it on the micro-blogging website, by bringing back the original 140 character limit. One is useful when it comes to time and information. The other is awful.”

Musk asked brands to keep using the platform in an event held for advertisers this week after a growing number of companies paused ads, causing a massive drop in revenue. Musk wanted to appear magnanimous in acknowledging responsibility for the company’s performance.

Shadowbanned: Can Twitter See What Happened When Elon Musk Voted to Save a Black Hole from the Presidency?

72.4% of the people who participated in the poll voted in favor of the proposition and 27.6% voted against. There were more than 3 million votes cast in the poll.

Hours after suspending @ElonJet, an account that tracked the trips taken by Elon Musk’s private plane, Twitter banned the account’s creator, Jack Sweeney, and dozens of other accounts he operates. Twitter then un-suspended @ElonJet, which was briefly tweeting to try and get its account back before Twitter banned it again.

According to the documents, there was a debate among employees about whether or not Trump had violated the social network’s policy on inciting violence. But they stop short of showing that Twitter ignored its own rules in implementing the ban.

Users will be able to use an option to determine if the company limits how many other users can view their posts under a new plan being introduced by Musk. In doing so, Musk is effectively seizing on an issue that has been a rallying cry among some conservatives who claim the social network has suppressed or “shadowbanned” their content.

If you’ve been shadowbanned, you’ll know the reason and how to appeal when a software update is released later this year, according to Musk. He did not provide additional details or a timetable.

Earlier this month, journalist Matt Taibbi shared internal emails that were related to the company’s decision to suppress a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden and his laptop.

Over the past two weeks, Musk has been releasing internal documents to a handpicked group of journalists who are digging through them and posting excerpts on Twitter.

Trump’s Twitter ban on November 8, 2016: a representative of the right-left and right-leaning communities of the 21st Century

Weiss offered different examples of moderation actions taken against right-leaning people, but it is not clear if these actions were taken against left-leaning people as well.

Twitter’s former head of trust and safety has fled his home due to an escalation in threats resulting from Elon Musk’s campaign of criticism against him, a person familiar with the matter told CNN on Monday.

Tweets posted by Roth in 2016 and 2017 that were critical of then-President Trump and his supporters were later surfaced and used to argue that Roth and Twitter were biased against the president.

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.”

“We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel. My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs,” Musk tweeted.

The idea of banning Trump was both supported and opposed by the employees of the social network. A redacted picture from an internal slack conversation shows an employee raising her concerns about “censorship” while another tells her she must follow strict rules on the platform. It’s not clear from Weiss’ tweets whether the employees in this discussion were in any way involved in the decision making process that led to Trump’s ban.

Anika said that she wasn’t seeing clear or coded insinuation to violence as a result of Trump’s January 8th statement “The 75,000,000 great AmericanTaxpayers who voted for me, America First and Make America Great Again, will have.” They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

(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.)

Another staffer, whose name was removed in the screenshot, said in Slack that a subsequent tweet that day from Trump saying he would not attend President Joe Biden’s inauguration was also “a clear no vio[lation].” But a different staffer questioned whether that tweet could be “proof that [Trump] doesn’t support a peaceful transition,” according to Weiss’ tweets.

The Twitter Files might not be the bombshell Musk teased in popcorn emoji laden tweets – but they offer an illuminating glimpse into the sausage-making of content moderation.

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.

I told my co-workers in the newsroom at the time Trump was inaugurated that we shouldn’t cover everything he said. It used to be reported that a president’s words would be used as a signal of future policy. The other person, Trump, clearly said a lot of things to get a rise out of people. Reporting on them, I argued, just fed the flames. The editor pushed back. “He’s the president,” he said, or words to that effect. “What he says is news.”

Here, for instance, we saw a slew of rapid-response news stories about Musk’s tweet on December 11 that “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” a dig at the government’s former chief infectious disease expert, as well as at gender diversity. There is another picture of his bedside table with guns on it, and there is more about him posting a meme of a frog.

The way coverage of Trump was done was exactly like this. The liberal leaning media often followed stories about how a man like that would only be able to bring himself down in flames if he was elected president, while the right-wing media portrayed him as corrupt and lacking in interest in grasping basic policy. There was plenty of good reporting going on at the same time, but these polarizing accounts tended to dominate the conversation. The losers were the public, whose understanding of what was actually happening across the country was forced through incompatible narratives around the behavior of one unhinged man in the White House.

This is what’s happening with Musk and Twitter. Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic describes a “dysfunctional relationship between Twitter’s new owner and so many of the journalists who cover him … where the least defensible statements and claims on all sides are relentlessly amplified in a never-ending cycle that predictably fuels disdain and negative polarization.”

Many conservatives and Musk fans think the existence of these internal discussions is proof that he is a genius. Many mainstream outlets are steering clear of covering the Twitter Files without much skepticism, which is fueling righteous indignation.

Renée DiResta who studies how narratives spread on social networks said, “What is coming through in theTwitter Files are people who are confronting high-stakes, unforeseen events and trying to figure out what policies apply and how.”

They’re a collection of internal emails and Slack chats capturing Twitter employees discussing company policies and fraught moderation calls. In the meantime they have covered the ban of Trump, the decision to block a news story from October 2020, and how the company limits reach of accounts that break its rules, including some well-known right-wingers.

The selection of Taibbi and Weiss, who both share Musk’s criticisms of the mainstream media and what they see as progressive censoriousness, has itself caused controversy. Other news outlets were not given access to the original documents, which have been presented in straces and excerpts in long threads without context.

The New York Post reported that the son of former Vice President Joe Biden had shady business dealings in Ukraine, and that they were brought to the attention of then-candidate Barack Obama.

The Post said the article was based on files from Hunter Biden’s laptop, along with files from Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon. At the time, it was unclear whether that material was authentic. After being burned by the Russian hack and leak of Democratic National Committee emails in 2016, tech companies were on edge over the possibility of a repeat – and so Twitter decided to restrict the Post story.

The company warned anyone who attempted to post a link to the article that it was potentially harmful. The New York Post’s own account was suspended until it deleted its TWotter about the story. (Facebook was alarmed by the article, too, but didn’t go as far as Twitter. It allowed the link to be posted, but limited distribution of those posts while its fact checkers looked into the claims.

And it does not show any evidence that there was government involvement in the move to block the New York Post story, despite assertions by Musk and others.

“I continue to believe that everyone acted according to the best information we knew at the time and that there was no ill intent or hidden agendas,” he wrote. “Of course mistakes were made.”

He said he wished the internal files had been “released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider.” There is nothing to hide, only a lot of to learn from.

The CEO of Twitter is using the Twitter Files to discredit foes and push conspiracy theorem: Report on the attacks on Caulfield and Roth

There is good reason to demand more insight into how social media companies operate. “Often these decisions are quite inscrutable,” she said. “These are platforms that shape public opinion, and so the question of how they’re moderated and how they’re designed is impactful.”

She said that the outsiders need more than Musk’s journalists are sharing in order to get the full picture, which so far is focused exclusively on charged, partisan American political dramas.

It would be good to see discussions about the accounts of other world leaders who have not been kicked off the platform, to better understand the decision to ban Trump.

There is value in the information that is revealed to the public, but at the same time it perpetuates a perception of partisan individuals within the United States,” DiResta said.

Framing the disclosures as secret knowledge plays particularly well on Twitter, said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.

His messages caused threats against both men. Roth and his family have been forced to flee their home, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous, and not solve anything. If you want to be blamed, direct it to me and my actions.

The CEO’s willingness to target people working to keep the platform’s users safe, including through the Twitter Files releases, is creating a “chilling effect,” according to one Trust and Safety Council member, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation.

But with his drumbeat of Twitter Files releases and gleeful tweets dunking on the company’s former employees, Musk has successfully hijacked the conversation.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/14/1142666067/elon-musk-is-using-the-twitter-files-to-discredit-foes-and-push-conspiracy-theor

Why did ElonJet shut down Covid-19? A tweet from an employee in Musk’s hometown: How he setup the plane and how to post the whereabouts

“It is being processed in a way whereby we own the last regime, and we have the ability to see things that we can see differently under our control,” DiResta said.

The ElonJet account, which had over 500,000 followers, was taken offline after the company posted a new set of instructions that seemed to justify the removal of the jet-tracking account. The move comes after Musk has reinstated previous Twitter rule-breakers and stopped enforcing the platform’s policies prohibiting Covid-19 misinformation.

The billionaire offered to shut down the account. Sweeney countered the offer, raising it to $50,000, writing, “It would be great support in college and would possibly allow me to get a car maybe even a [Tesla] Model 3.” Musk said he didn’t feel right to shut this down.

Sweeney said he setup the plane because he was a fan of Musk. It gives a lot of people a new view of where Musk is going and will give them some clues into what is going on at the company.

According to Sweeney, he got an email from an anonymous person purporting to be an employee that included a screenshot showing an internal company message from the new head of trust and safety.

Twitter also shared a thread on its @TwitterSafety account to further explain the changes. Live location info will be removed and suspended from accounts dedicated to it. If you share your location, the company will allow somebody else to share theirhistorical location, which they define as not same day.

He posted his rationale for the new policy. “Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. Links to sites with real-time location info are posted. Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok,” he wrote.

Asked if he planned to comply with the new policy, Sweeney told CNN he would begin delaying posting the whereabouts of Musk’s jet for 24 hours, “but just on Twitter.”

I was able to add a link to the version of the tracker that was on Instagram, and I think that it’s unfair to think that there isn’t an ironclad filtering for this. But it appears that Twitter is stepping up its actions against Sweeney and his accounts, despite Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s “commitment” to free speech, which he said in November extended to “not banning the account following my plane.”

The accounts that tracked the jets of billionaires such asJeff Bezos and Bill Gates have been suspended. Sweeney told The New York Times that he has seen about 30 of his accounts banned and that he operates many of them.