On Musk’s Failure to Admit Free Speech: Twitter, the Bullsh*t Artist, and the Taximan: The Case of Musk vs. Trump

Musk said he never intended to be CEO of Tesla, and that he didn’t want to be chief executive of any other companies either, preferring to see himself as an engineer instead. Musk also said he expected an organizational restructuring of Twitter to be completed in the next week or so. It’s been a while since he said that.

The bans show Musk’s failure to keep his word about his commitment to free speech. Musk has claimed that he is a free speech maximalist and that he would like to allow all legal speech. Musk once suggested that his best critics remain onTwitter, because that’s what free speech means.

The relationship between the pair seems to have soured since, with the men trading barbs over the summer. Musk responded to Trump calling him abullsh*t artist by saying it was time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset.

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. The stock market declined in the weeks after the deal was announced because of fears of a recession and rising inflation. Musk had his personal net worth hit by the downturn.

The same amount of money that Mr. Musk said he would put into the deal is the same amount Morgan Stanley and Bank of America committed to put into it.

On Thursday, April 14th, Elon Musk announced an offer to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share. On April 25th, Twitter accepted the deal. By July 8th, Musk wanted to leave. On October 27th, all accounts show the new owner of the micro-messaging site as Musk.

Before the journalists were de-platformed, Musk said he could file lawsuits against the people who he believes caused the advertiser boycotts. If users can’t hold those in power accountable, then they can’t have debates about how to fix the problems with society — including, of course, the issues created by the very platforms they’re having those debates on.

The material before the trial in Delaware did not lend much support to that argument. Miller claims that there is nothing that appears to be fraud here, even though he knows that his best claim is fraud. They had run out of cards to play.

Musk was scheduled to be deposed on October 6th and 7th, after having moved his deposition from late September. After just a few days before the deposition, he announced that he would honor the contract he had with his lawyers. That deposition was probably going to be uncomfortable; a judge found that Musk likely deleted Signal messages that were relevant to the case. Musk received a court order stopping proceedings so that he could complete the deal by October 28th.

Why Twitter is a digital town square: A keyhole view of the Musk-Movie-Wilson Twitter adversarial deal

I’m at the site because of more than a professional utility. 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. Skinner’s research with rats and pigeons shows that unpredictable rewards are good at generating obsessive behavior.

An anthropologist from the New York University said she didn’t know that the people who worked on the 140-character reply service said they were creating a Skinner box. But that, she said, is essentially what they’ve built. It is one reason people should know how to self-destruct on the site.

Musk also pledged to “defeat the spam bots or die trying,” referring to the fake and scam accounts that are often especially active in the replies to his tweets and those of others with large followings on the platform.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” he said in the official deal announcement.

Currently, Twitter uses a combination of automated and human curation to moderate the discussions on its platform, sometimes tagging questionable material with links to more credible information sources, and at other times banning a user for repeatedly violating its policies on harmful or offensive speech.

For a “keyhole view of what Twitter under Musk will look like,” just look at alternative platforms such as Parler, Gab and Truth Social that promise fewer restrictions on speech, said Angelo Carusone, president of the liberal nonprofit watchdog group Media Matters for America.

On those sites, he said, “the feature is the bug — where being able to say and do the kinds of things that are prohibited from more mainstream social media platforms is actually why everyone gravitates to them. It’s clear to us that they are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.

He said that he would like to get rid of permanent bans but only for accounts that support violence and those that explicitly advocate it.

Alex Jones was kicked out of the show for abusing people and Rep. Marjorie TaylorGreene’s account was suspended for misleading and false claims about vaccine safety.

A person urged Musk to hire someone with a “smart cultural/ political view” to lead enforcement. Masters is the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona who has been endorsed by Trump and has echoed his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

Facebook can’t work together, and what will it teach us about social media? Elmse Musk, the billionaire, and the tech giant

Allowing Trump and others to return could set a precedent for other social networks, including Meta-owned Facebook, which is considering whether to reinstate the former president when its own ban on him expires in January 2023.

After a video meeting with Musk and another guy, he said in a text, ” you can’t work together.” That was clarifying.”

Employees of the company haven’t been told anything about what will happen next since Thursday, when four of its top executives were fired, after Musk closed his acquisition of the company. What’s changing, and what’s staying the same? Who will be laid off, and when?

That is likely welcome news to the billionaire, who has complained that Twitter’s costs outstrip revenues and has implied the company is overstaffed for its size.

It is possible to free up cash by firing a lot of people. The problem with doing that, though, is that you lose a bunch of the engineers who could build cool shit to make Twitter more attractive. This isn’t a problem at all, as all tech companies are cutting people loose right now, so Musk can hire talent on the cheap.

The weak state of the digital ad market and the changes that he wants to make to content moderation means that he will have little choice other than to find alternate sources of revenue.

Advertisers want to know that their ads aren’t going to be associated with anything that would turn off potential customers, that they aren’t going to be subsidizing extremists or something similar, and that they won’t be turning off potential customers,” she said.

The Times of Musk: Twitter, Facebook, and WeChat Will Not Happen In Washington, D.C. Unlike Twitter in the U.S.

What exactly he meant is, as always, anyone’s guess. But this summer, Musk told Twitter staff that the company should emulate WeChat, the Chinese “super-app” that combines social media, messaging, payments, shopping, ride-hailing — basically, anything you might use your phone to do.

Other American tech companies, including Facebook and Uber, have tried this strategy, but so far Chinese-style super-apps haven’t caught on in the United States.

The social media platform said in a court filing that federal authorities are investigating Musk in connection with his $44 billion acquisition of the micro-blogging site.

On Monday, the company announced that it was dissolving its trust and safety council, which was comprised of outside experts that advised the company on issues such as human rights, child sexual exploitation and mental health.

“Twitter did not ask Zatko to torch his own documents, much less demand that he do so,” Twitter’s filing read. They had no idea what information was in Zatko’s notebooks.

Some conservatives were opposed to continuing a practice that Musk had said he would no longer do. The clash coincides with a tension in the company under Musk, as he has promised a more maximalist approach to free speech, while also attempting to assure advertisers and users that there will still be content moderation guardrails.

In comparison, Yildirim said that Facebook was good at targeting advertising to users who were looking for it. Musk’s message suggests he wants to fix that, she said.

Sarah Personette, the company’s chief customer officer, said she had a “great discussion” with Musk on Wednesday and appeared to endorse his Thursday message to advertisers.

Twitter Abuse Agreement Revisited: Musk Has No Interest in Reimagining a Globally Influential Social Media Site (with a Comment on the Letter from Musk)

On Friday, some of those same groups called on Twitter’s advertisers to halt all spending on the platform globally, in what they described as an escalation of a pressure campaign targeting Elon Musk and his plans to remake one of the world’s most influential social media sites.

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.

Musk updated his filing with the SEC to indicate that he would not be a passive player in the affairs of the company. He removed the restriction that he wouldn’t be able to own more than 14.0 percent of the company. In retrospect, this was the first clue that he may attempt something more impactful than just buying some stock of serving as a board member.

The departures come just hours before a deadline set by a Delaware judge to finalize the deal on Friday. She threatened to schedule a trial if no agreement was reached.

Tweets about Silicon Valley CEO Parag Agrawal and Silicon Valley investors: How Twitter changed after he left the Board of a publicly traded tech company

Things got particularly messy, it appears, when current Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal asked Musk to stop tweeting damaging things about the company. Musk decided to take it private after he did not join the board. Dorsey loved the idea; Calacanis had a lot of weird ideas about it; everybody was falling over themselves to give Musk money to make it happen. The texts are funny and worth a read.

The absence of Parag, who Musk soured on after the two initially started talking about him joining the board, has been noted by many employees. A current employees of the company said that Argawal has been gone for weeks. One person said that he had ghosted them. According to The Verge, the anonymous message board for tech workers, Blind, is full of similar comments about Argawal.

The execs received handsome payouts for their trouble, Insider reports: Agrawal got $38.7 million, Segal got $25.4 million, Gadde got $12.5 million, and Personette, who tweeted yesterday about how excited she was for Musk’s takeover, got $11.2 million.

When he took over the reins of the company, Musk enlisted venture capitalists and friends to help him figure out how to change the company. The list includes investor Jason Calacanis, Craft Ventures partner David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan, an Andreessen Horowitz general partner focused on crypto and Twitter’s former consumer teams lead.

The Tesla-Twitter Buyout Trial: Bringing Back the Bolt on Musk’s Legacy of Silicon Valley Efforts

This is a huge story with a lot of fast-moving parts to it. It is a story that will likely stretch out for the next few months. We thought we should create a guide for our readers that can be updated when things get more complicated. We are like you, like Elon.

Jack Dorsey, Joe Rogan, Larry Ellison, Jason Calacanis — Musk texted with a huge number of people about the Twitter deal, and the release of many of those texts gave us some insight into how the deal came together and fell apart.

A few days later, Twitter responded the way it always does: your argument is invalid, Twitter hasn’t breached its side of the deal, and so you can’t either.

The subpoenas ahead of the trial have become a who’s who of the tech industry, including Dorsey, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Tesla, Keith Rabois, and many others. Dorsey was a surprise but seems likely to have plenty of pertinent information, given both his tenure as Twitter CEO and the fact that Dorsey reportedly pushed hard to convince Musk to buy the company in the first place.

Musk’s side wanted more time and for the trial to start in February 2023. Twitter wanted it to start as soon as possible. The trial is expected to last five days and will begin on October 17th. It depends on the two sides don’t settle, and that is anyone’s guess.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23026874/elon-musk-twitter-buyout-news-updates

Putting Twitter to the Test: Musk’s First All-Hands Meeting and the CEO’s Attack on the CEO of a Silicon Valley Company

We wouldn’t normally say it’s worth reading, but a 162 page legal filing that gets deep into the weeds of bot measurement procedures is worth it. But this case has been filled with abnormally spicy legal fighting, much of which was clearly written to be read by a wide audience. It’s a good yarn.

Twitter’s first all-hands meeting after Musk’s bid went public was a weird one. After serenading employees with Backstreet Boys and Aretha Franklin, the company said it would continue to evaluate the offer.

The turmoil has split the company into two groups: those waiting nervously to see if they still have jobs after the cuts are made, and those who are frantically working to ships new features under a threat of being fired.

Casey was right in positing that Twitter’s poison pill provisions may not be enough to stop Musk. But he also assumed that Musk would just continue to troll the company through his tweets.

The major personnel moves were widely expected and will be the first in a number of changes the eccentric CEO will make.

There are many anti-gay conspiracy theories out there, but Musk’s attack on the former head of safety of the company was the most recent example. He went after Dr. Anthony Fauci who Musk says will be in future installments of the Twitter files.

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.”

Having no moderation of content is bad for business as it putstwitter 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 Under Musk: An Insight into the Internet, Politics, and the Public Interests of the Internet and the Challenge of Managing the Information Landscape

But Musk has been signaling that the deal is going through. He strolled into the company’s San Francisco headquarters on Wednesday, carrying a porcelain sink, and also changed his profile to “Chief Twit” on social media.

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.

Thursday’s note to advertisers shows a newfound emphasis on advertising revenue, especially a need for companies to provide more “relevant ads” that collect and analyze users’ personal information

There’s a version of the article in the newsletter. Sign up here for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape.

The information environment that Musk now reigns over has been contaminated and he is trying to dismantle the small infrastructure that was built to help people sift through the chaos. Recent news reports, including from CNN, indicate that he plans to strip public figures and institutions of their blue verified badges if they do not pay.

Charging for verified badges might appear at first glance as a business story. The move will have a huge impact on the information landscape. It will make it more difficult for users to differentiate between authentic and inauthentic accounts.

If the company were to strip verified users of their blue checks, that could cause uproar on the platform in Tuesday’s elections.

The best thing you can do to save social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email, and reduce hacking would be authenticating users, said Walter Isaacson, Musk’s authorized biographer.

Disturbed by Musk’s Discord: What Have You Learned lately about Silicon Valley Hacks? An Empirical Analysis of Musk and Related Employee Discussions

The process has been frightening and disorienting, according to conversations with eight employees today and over the weekend. In the absence of official communications, workers have been hunting for clues in Slack and gathering in private Discords to share the latest rumors.

Musk did not give a public notice of the layoffs. Even though the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification law requires employers with 100 or more workers to report layoffs involving 500 or more employees regardless of whether a company is publicly traded or privately held.

According to the Washington Post, layoffs would hit roughly 25% of the staff, leaving teams including sales, engineering, and trust and safety in the lurch.

Platformer was the first to report that engineers had to print out their last 30 to 60 days of code as soon as possible, making people nervous. It was part of a set of measures Musk and his team have undertaken in an effort to identify Twitter’s highest and lowest performing employees as a precursor to layoffs.

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.

since no leadershippy type appears willing or interested in filling the void: if you’re feeling bleak and dismayed right now, just want you to know you’re not alone. this sucks.

Another employee told us that in other channels, employees are sharing contact information in case they lose access to their communications.

What Should I Do Now? A Conversation with Musk and the Engineers at the Vine Project, Twitter, where Elon Musk and Rezaei met

Musk has pressed engineers to work on at least two major projects, and to complete them within days or weeks. One change to Blue is that users would be required to pay a monthly fee to retain their verification badges. We can confirm that the second plan is to revive the shortform video app, and it’s either as a stand-alone product or part of the core Twitter app. Our colleague at The Verge Alex Heath reported that, in the case of changes to Blue, the features must ship by November 7th or the team will be fired.

The Vine project has generated moderate enthusiasm so far, we’re told. More than a dozen engineers, along with Musk, volunteered to be part of the project after the go-ahead was given Sunday night.

Other employees are being encouraged to go build something — anything — and show it off to Musk. In one Slack message we saw, an engineering director urged his team to come up with new products and features and share them directly with their new CEO. At best, you will get some feedback. You may be asked to ship it asap,” the director wrote. At the very least, you will be told to work on something else. Even in this case, you worked on something that you love.

Similarly, on Monday, Behnam Rezaei, senior director of software engineering at Twitter, sent a note to his team acknowledging “big changes” were coming. According to a copy of the email obtained by Platformer, he said that cultural change would be the most important change. “Some good, some bad.”

So if you ask what should I do now: do good engineering work. Write code. Keep the site up and fix bugs. I know the criteria for being at Twitter is that. It’s not working on a fancy project for Elon. The good culture change is, it’s shipping and delivering. I encourage you to rotate more on coding and shipping, and less on documentation, planning, strategy etc. If you want to be in a “special” group this week, code and ship 5x as [much as] before. Sexy is not the criteria for building something. Being impactful and changing product and helping our users is the criteria. You do not need commands from me. You are all software engineers. You know exactly what needs to be improved. Do it. You are in charge.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/31/23434002/twitter-layoffs-internal-messaging-uncertainty-elon-musk

What are the changes coming to Twitter, and why does it matter if you are not afraid of what the future may be? An honest analysis with Gadget Lab

Musk’s attention also can be unnerving. One employee told us they were not sure if they were for or against the project Musk is known to be focused on.

Nick Caldwell, general manager of core technology has changed his bio to something other than a general manager, and Jay Sullivan is the general manager of consumer and revenue products. The New York Times reported that Berland had left the company, but on Tuesday night she referred to a single blue heart.

Calacanis said on his verified account that he was in New York to meet with the marketing and advertising community. He has asked his followers about the platform’s subscription and bookmark features.

Davisson doubts Twitter, which has gutted its moderation staff, would be able to enforce Musk’s new policies announced this week in a way that covers all users.

On this week’s Gadget Lab, we chat with WIRED platforms and power reporter Vittorio Elliot about some of the changes coming to Twitter, and how they could affect the future of the social network.

Tori wants you to encourage your male-presenting friends interested in fathering children to watch House of the Dragon on HBO. Mike recommends the new album from Natalia Lafourcade, De Todas las Flores. Lauren thinks you should rethink your relationship with social media.

GadgetLab: a web-based interactive experiment with Solar Keys and widgets (by Boone Ashworth and Michael Calore)

There is a person on the internet called “Vittoria” who can be found on the web. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is a fighter. You can call the main hotline atGadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). The theme is by Solar Keys.

You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:

If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can search for Gadget Lab on Overcast or Pocket Casts. We are found in the Google Podcasts app on your phone. We are also on a music streaming service. In case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.

Apple CEO Steve Musk’s Plan for the Rebirth of the Company: a Case Study in High-Redshift Silicon Valley and the Employability of Twitter

In May 1998, I visited Steve Jobs at Apple headquarters to hear his plans for reviving Apple. He had been its interim CEO for almost a year, after returning to the company that fired him over a decade earlier. He went to the whiteboard, scrawling out a solution for the business problems of the company as he greeted me in his suite. He had a new product plan, a new product, and a workforce revitalized by an inspiring ad campaign.

Musk need not look farther than his own successful enterprises to realize the absurdity of his haste. When he took over Tesla in 2008, the company was already five years old. 17 years after it was founded, Musk came up with a plan to turn the company around. Musk deservedly gets a lot of credit for what Tesla has achieved—and for, among other things, his persistence. The other company that Musk has is a private one. When making rocket ships, patience is a must, it takes years to even launch successful, and cutting corners can lead to death.

In a letter to employees obtained by multiple media outlets, the company said employees would find out by 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time if they had been laid off. The email did not say how many people would lose their jobs.

Some employees lost their access to their work accounts early Friday. The email said that the job reductions were needed to ensure the company’s success.

He also removed the company’s board of directors and installed himself as the sole board member. On Thursday night, many employees used blue heart emojis to signify their support for each other in replies to each other.

Barry C. White said the Employment Development Department has not received any recent notification from the micro-blogging website.

A class action lawsuit was filed Thursday in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of one employee who was laid off and three others who were locked out of their work accounts. It alleges that Twitter intends to lay off more employees and has violated the law by not providing the required notice.

Twitter’s Suspension of ad sales on Facebook is the tipping point of the digital age: Volkswagen, General Mills and Tesla are monitoring the situation

Meta Platforms Inc., Facebook’s parent company, recently posted its second quarterly revenue decline in history and its shares are trading at their lowest levels since 2015. Meta’s disappointing results followed weak earnings reports from Google parent Alphabet and even Microsoft.

If you can now be suspended from Twitter for reporting fairly straightforward stories, you have to wonder if that’s the tipping point.

Much of Twitter’s ad sales team has been fired or pushed out. Large companies such as General Mills and Macy’s halted advertising on the platform after new owners agreed to restore the account of former President Donald Trump and other controversial figures. And any cursory scroll of the platform will likely show you fewer big brand ads.

In a separate statement, Volkswagen Group, which owns Audi, Porsche and Bentley, confirmed it had recommended its brands “pause their paid activities on the platform until further notice.”

The Wall Street Journal reported the moves and that Pfizer and Mondalez were also suspending ads in social media. The companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

General GM has said it would stop paying for advertising ontwitter while it assesses the platform’s new direction. Toyota, another Tesla competitor, previously told CNN that it is “in discussions with key stakeholders and monitoring the situation” on Twitter.

Stave Off the Publishr Exodus: A Case Study in Musk’s Twitter Disruption after the 2021 Ugandan President Threat

Ad buying giant Interpublic Group, which works with consumer brands such as Unilever and Coca Cola, earlier this week also recommended its clients pause advertising on the platform.

The pauses also come days ahead of the US midterm elections, as many civil society leaders worry that misinformation and other harmful content could spread on the platform and create disruption.

In the meantime, Musk is working to stave off a possible advertiser exodus. Musk’s inner circle says that he met with the marketing andadvertising community in New York on Monday.

Like Griffin, some Twitter users have already begun migrating from the platform — Counter Social is another popular alternative — following layoffs that began Friday that reportedly affected about half of Twitter’s 7,500-employee workforce. They fear that if moderation and verification do not work out, there will be a lot of misinformation on the internet, which has been its main conduit for reliable communications.

Felix Ndahinda was alarmed by the emergence of a threat last week, when billionaire businessman Musk pledged that he would free the bird.

After Donald Trump supported insurrection on the Capitol, his account was frozen and he was locked out. But across the world, leaders have tweeted in support of genocide and threatened violence, yet none of them have been banned from the platform. In June of 2021, the Nigerian president posted a threat against the group of people from the southeast in the country. His account was still live even after he removed it.

Some of the users who have been banned from Twitter will have retreated to lesser-known platforms with fewer regulations on what can be said, says Stringhini. It becomes more toxic and more extreme once they get there. “We see a community that becomes more committed, more active — but also smaller,” he says.

Normally, these platforms are where false narratives start, says Stringhini. 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.

Piazza, a terrorism researcher at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, is concerned about the use of inflammatory speech on social media by people with public stature. There is a situation where you can have more violence.

Over the coming weeks, Stringhini expects that researchers will launch studies comparing Twitter before and after Musk’s takeover, and looking at changes in the spread of disinformation, which user accounts are suspended, and whether Twitter users quit the platform in protest at new policies. Tromble intends to monitor campaigns of coordinated harassment on Twitter.

There is no doubt that the acquisition of TWo is a sign of not being full of Musk fans. That means it’s a much less forgiving environment for Musk. Dril is the most prominent of the Something Awful forum goons and he likes to fuck with people. Many people were motivated by the idea of pretending to be Musk because they knew it would make him angry. It is likely that it did. Certainly, that would explain why his very first policy change was to increase punishment for impersonation.

After she changed her name to Musk, Kathy Griffin had her account suspended. She told a reporter that she used his profile photo as well.

Not all of the content moderators were let go? She made a joke about it on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform where she set up an account last week.

Why does Twitter think “Okey-dokey”? The response of Yoel Roth’s Twitter Safety and Integrity reversal

Actor Valerie Bertinelli had similarly appropriated Musk’s screen name — posting a series of tweets in support of Democratic candidates on Saturday before switching back to her true name. Someone said “Okey-dokey”. I’ve had fun. and I think I made my point,” she tweeted afterwards.

There was no end to the disruption on Friday. In its latest reversal on the matter, Twitter said it would re-introduce a gray “Official” badge for select accounts to help confirm their identities. The decision came after Twitter was forced to fend off a wave of verified-account impostors this week, including some posing as former President Donald Trump, Nintendo, and the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, among others. The reason for these accounts is that Musk gave a blue check mark to anyone who was willing to pay $8 a month and then he raced to 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. There was no indication of when it’d be available or if it’d go live. Esther Crawford told the AP it is coming soon but it 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.

Edward Perez was the Director of Product Management at Twitter until September. Joining the company in September 2021, after more than three decades working in election integrity, Perez’s role was to keep Twitter safe during times of great upheaval—such as elections—from a product perspective. Perez feels like he has to speak out as Musk guts the staff and allows users to pay to get blue checks on the platform.

The OSET Institute is dedicated to election security and integrity and is a board member of Perez, who is concerned that the drama around corporate takeover is draining the oxygen from the room. That focus on the Musk psychodrama “is resulting in potentially inadequate attention on these election-related issues,” he adds.

“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.

It is widely used by civil society groups, activists and politicians, all of whom are influential in shaping public policy and opinion, even though it lacks as many users as other social media platforms. The platform has allowed protesters in places like India, Nigeria, and Argentina to speak out against their governments, while also making it possible for people living in Saudi Arabia to speak out against them.

At Access Now, a senior international counsel and Asia Pacific policy director, Raman Jit Singh Chima worries that Musk might not continue with the lawsuit. (In his August countersuit against Twitter, Musk cited the lawsuit in India as a threat to the company’s presence in its third largest market.) “It would be a vindication of a very problematic, unconstitutional set of actions by the Indian government,” he says. “It also sends a signal to the global tech industry, saying ‘Back off, don’t try to do more.’”

Quiet Quitting Twitter: How to Avoid the Ups and Downs of the Elon Musk Era in the Light of the Covid Pandemic

“Tiny talk is talk so small it feels like it’s coming from your own mind,” Musk fired off shortly past 10 pm last Thursday, a thought so deep it might have bubbled up from a fish-bowled dorm room. Congratulations: All of us live in Tiny Talk Town, where everyone talks about Elon Musk.

We don’t have to be here, in Tiny Talk Town. We all know it. There are places online that offer good hang. But Twitter is unique, and its most fervent users are unlikely to leave en masse. And most of the knee-jerk “I’m outta here” reactions to Musk’s takeover aren’t that compelling, unless you’re a writer assigned to collate celebrity tweets. The smarter move might be a slow burn instead of a pyrotechnic exit—a thoughtful, considered approach to quitting Twitter without quitting Twitter. Quiet quitting is also used for social media.

So active users are a noisy bunch, and it would be easy for, say, an electric car entrepreneur who follows a disproportionate number of extremely active “blue checks” on Twitter to mistake his own Twitter experience for everyone’s experience. (Same goes for journalists.) In reality, nearly half of Twitter users tweet less than five times a month, and most of their posts are replies, not original tweets. They check in on current events or live sports or celebrity news, and then they go about their lives. They’re “lurkers.”

Lurking isn’t doomscrolling, a practice (and phrase) that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when many people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. If you decide to sit back and observe for a while, it is basically a simplistic approach to deal with the complexity and chaos inherent in NewTwitter. It is a good idea to check in on the new toy before shutting your browser tab. If you’d like to send a tweet, you need to disengage. You should keep an eye on it during basketball games. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. Save your most original thoughts for another time, another place.

It does get worse, and this part isn’t Musk’s fault. When the economy slows down, companies spend less money on advertising. Even if Musk wasn’t doing wacky stuff to get advertisers attention, there’s a good chance he’d still be in trouble. But Musk has essentially identified himself and his company as a loose canon, which means that anyone looking to trim advertising spend might be inclined to cut Twitter first.

You can send money via tips on the social network but you don’t get a cut of it. It does take a cut of the revenue from Super Follows, but the fees Apple takes for in-app purchases is more than the share of revenue that can be made from it.

I don’t think a lot of advertisers would want to come back to someone with that attitude toward impersonation, even without an economic downturn. The open question to me is whether users want to stay in that environment — one that’s just gotten a new layer of hoaxing and scammers. Mark Cuban found the influx of new checkmarked users to be make his mentions miserable. People stay on the platform to drive Cuban off, because of his thoughts.

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.

And it’s risky debt to boot, B1 rated, which is “on the lower end of the junk rating spectrum,” says Wharton’s Roberts. “Investor appetite for this debt clearly isn’t as large as it was four months ago.” At one time, Moody’s claimed that the governance of TWoR was a major driver of risk.

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.

Hours after the gray badges launched on Wednesday as a way to help users differentiate legitimate celebrity and branded accounts from accounts that had merely paid for a blue check mark, Musk abruptly tweeted that he had “killed” the feature, forcing subordinates to explain the reversal.

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’s rocky rollout attracted widespread criticism from misinformation experts who had warned it would make identifying trustworthy information much more difficult, particularly in the critical period following the US midterm elections. Some high-powered users of the platform had poor feedback.

It’s from one entrepreneurial to another, for your customer service hat on. Cuban said that he spent too much time muting the newly purchased checkmarks in order to make his verified mentions useful again.

The First Five Twitter Files — How Facebook and Twitter Overcame the Donald Trump Conjecture on Masquerading and Hate Speech

The associate professor of marketing at USC’s Marshall School of Business has always thought that a move to a subscription business would be good for the company. The advertising business of both Facebook and Twitter has been smaller because they don’t offer the same level of user targeting.

After another round of layoffs and exits Monday, some of the ad sales employees who were hired by brands have been fired or pushed out.

The New York Times reported on an op-ed written by the former head of trust and safety at the company, Yoel, who left earlier this month. 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 assurance that capturing the attention of online world will lead to revenue growth.

The analysis found that after Musk took over, the most popular message on the platform was likely to be a message with bad language. For tweets using words associated with anti-LGBTQ+ or antisemitic posts, seven of the top 20 posts in each category were now hateful. For popular tweets using potentially racist language, one of the top 20 was judged to be hate speech.

Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk on Thursday said he plans to introduce an option to make it possible for users to determine if the company has limited how many other users can view their posts. Musk is effectively taking on an issue that has been a rallying cry among some conservatives who claim that the social network has suppressed or banned their content.

If you have been shadowbanned, Musk promised that a software update would show why and how to appeal. He didn’t give additional details or a timetable.

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. The fifth edition of the Twitter Files was released on Monday and revealed some of the behind-the-scenes debate prior to Donald Trump’s ban.

Musk used his new platform to promote the so-calledTwitter files, a bunch of internal documents he claimed to expose a censorship scandal, but in fact revealed messy internal debates about thornier subjects more than anything else.

Left or Right? The Musk/Focus of the Trump Era: Implications for Left-Leaning and Right-Right Media Relations

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.

A person familiar with the matter told CNN that the former head of trust and safety fled his home due to threats stemming from Musk’s campaign of criticism.

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. Musk feels that he has integrity, and that everyone is entitled to their political beliefs.

Led by Fox News, the right-wing media machine is treating the ongoing series of stories as if they were the next Pentagon Papers, breathlessly hyping each new batch of documents as earth-shattering scoops that illuminate horrific abuses of power by woke Twitter overlords of yesteryear.

The Former Top Editor of The Wall Street Journal said on Monday, “TheTwitter Files tell us nothing new.” There’s no shocking revelation in there about government censorship or covert manipulation by political campaigns. They merely bring to the surface the internal deliberations of a company dealing with complex issues in ways consistent with its values.”

The lack of explosive new details is coupled with the fact that Musk refuses to open up the “Twitter Files” to the press at large. He has decided not to provide multiple news outlets with access to the documents and instead gives them to his own writers. In other words, Musk has relied on a set of handpicked gatekeeping writers to cover the story, while keeping the raw materials — and context — locked away from the rest of the news media and broader public. That has led to increased skepticism.

If you are a regular person trying to understand what is going on, it can be difficult. And the solution isn’t so clear. On one hand, if newsrooms covered each installment, they risk giving air to and further amplifying a storyline that has been selectively framed by Musk as he wages an information war. On the other hand, not dissecting each drop allows him and others to define it in the public square.

Around the time Trump was inaugurated in 2017, I said to colleagues in the newsroom where I worked at the time that we shouldn’t cover everything he said or tweeted. Previously, every word of a president was assumed to be a signal of future policy and was reported as such. Trump, on the other hand, clearly said many things purely to get a rise out of people. I argued that reporting on them fed the flames. An editor pushed back. “He’s the president,” he said, or words to that effect. “What he says is news.”

This is where we saw a lot of news stories about Musk referring to the former chief infectious disease expert as “poop” and “fuci” and other matters, as well as gender diversity. Here’s another bunch about the picture of his bedside table with two replica guns on it, and some more about his tweeting a far-right Pepe the Frog meme.

This is precisely the way coverage of Trump worked. The liberal-leaning media were frequently drawn to stories that stated that a person like him would only succeed in bringing himself down in flames, as the right-wing media treated his obvious egomania, corruption, and lack of interest in grasping basic policy. At the same time there was lots of good reporting, but these accounts were the ones that dominated the conversation. The public was made to understand that what was happening in the country was not real, due to incompatible narratives surrounding the behavior of the president.

This is what is happening with Musk. 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.”

Renée Di Resta, research manager at theStanford Internet Observatory, who studies how narratives spread on social networks, said that people are confronting high-stakes, sudden events and trying to figure out what policies apply.

They’re a collection of internal emails and Slack chats capturing Twitter employees discussing company policies and fraught moderation calls. So far they’ve covered the decision to ban Trump, Twitter’s short-lived decision to block a news story in October 2020 drawn from material on Hunter Biden’s laptop, and how the company limits the reach of accounts that break its rules, including some well-known right-wing users.

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. The original documents have not been given to other news outlets because they were presented in a way that was not in context and in a way that did not correspond with reality.

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.

In the closing weeks of the 2020 presidential election, the New York Post published a story saying that Hunter Biden, son of then-candidate Joe Biden, had been involved in shady business dealings.

The Post said it obtained the files from the laptop of Hunter Biden and from Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon, who were both associated with President Trump. 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.

Citing its rules against sharing hacked material containing private information, the company showed a warning to anyone who tried to post a link to the article saying it was “potentially harmful.” The New York Post temporarily suspended its own account on social media because of the story. Facebook wasn’t as alarmed by the article, but didn’t go that far. The link was allowed to be posted, but not all the posts were distributed.

Twitter’s aggressive stance immediately created a huge backlash across the political spectrum. The company was slammed for taking a heavy-handed approach to a story that, while controversial, was being reported by a major news outlet, and for offering little justification for its decision. The block was reversed within a few days, along with the policies on hacked materials. Soon after, then-CEO Jack Dorsey said the company had made a mistake.

It did not show that there was government involvement in the move to block the New York Post story.

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

He said he wished the files had been released in a way that would allow more of an open mind. There is nothing to hide and a lot to learn.

An update on the threats against Roth and his family in the Twitter Files attacks on the CEO of the US Post-Trump Reputation Observatory

There is a good reason to want to know more about how social media companies operate. She said that the decisions are often inscrutable. “These are platforms that influence public opinion, and so the question of how they are moderated and designed is important.”

But she said to get the full picture, outsiders need more than the “anecdotes” Musk’s selected journalists are sharing – which, so far, focus exclusively on charged, highly partisan American political dramas.

She said that it would be beneficial to see discussions surrounding the accounts of world leaders who were not kicked off the platform, to better understand the decision to ban Trump.

It is beneficial to the public to know that there is a lot going on, but it is also reinforcing a perception of being partisan in the United States.

The Centre for an informed public is a research lab at the University of Washington.

threats against both men were made due to his tweets. 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 doesn’t solve anything,” Dorsey wrote on Tuesday. “If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.”

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.

It’s being processed in a way that says, ‘Here are things that we can see in these files and here is how it will be done differently under our watch’.

Jack Sweeney: Delaying the Whereabouts of Musk, the Tesla CEO, on Twitter, and the Phenomenology of Trust and Safety

Jack Sweeney is a 20-year-old college student in Florida who runs the ElonJet account, which uses publicly available flight data to build a bot that speaks loudly whenever Musk’s plane lands at an airport. The last post from the account showed Musk’s plane taking off from Oakland, California, and hitting the ground in Los Angeles 48 minutes later.

The billionaire offered Sweeney $5,000 to close the account. Sweeney said that it would be great if he could get a car, even a Model 3, because of the support he would get in college. Musk said it wasn’t right to shut this down.

Sweeney said he setup ElonJet because he was a fan of Musk. “It gives you just another view that a lot of people don’t know about where [Musk] is going and might give you clues into what new business is going on,” he said.

Sweeney said he received an email from an anonymous person purporting to be a Twitter employee that included a screenshot showing an internal company message from Ella Irwin, Twitter’s new head of trust and safety, asking staff to “apple heavy VF to @elonjet immediately.”

Sharing real-time location information on the social networking website is now a violation of its policies, according to a statement from a head of Trust & Safety.

In tweets, Musk accused the journalists of violating the platform’s policy against doxing — or posting private information online — by sharing his “exact real-time” location. None of the reporters who were kicked out appeared to have done so. Musk and Twitter didn’t respond to CNN’s requests for comment.

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.”

Since Musk disclosed in early April that he had taken a major stake in Twitter, the Tesla’s shares have plunged by about 58%, a selloff that has erased nearly $800 billion of market value. Musk has unloaded his shares in the company more than once in the past months, including another $3.6 billion worth earlier this month.

This week, he did not mention the fact that the stock price of the company has fallen to a low of $150 per share, down 50 percent from a year ago. Forbes recently placed Musk second on its list of the world’s richest people.

Several of the reporters suspended Thursday night had been writing about the new policy and Musk’s rationale for imposing it, which involved his allegations about a stalking incident he said affected his family Tuesday night in Los Angeles.

Sharing someones home address is called doxxing and is a practice online. The account was banned for using publicly available flight data to track Musk’s jet.

The Future of the Free Press on Twitter: The Case for Mastodon and the @ElonJet Controversy (with a Comment by Mac and O’Sullivan)

Ryan Mac and Donie O’Sullivan of CNN are two of the reporters whose accounts have been suspended.

“We believe banning journalists without consistent defensible standards or clear communication in an environment where many people believe free speech is at risk is too much for a majority of consumers to continue supporting Mr. Musk/TSLA, particularly people ideologically aligned with climate change mitigation,” Rusch wrote.

The president of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) said in a statement it was concerned about the suspensions, and that they affect all journalists.

The changes came after Musk reinstated previous Twitter rule-breakers and stopped enforcing the platform’s policies prohibiting Covid-19 misinformation.

Twitter previously took action to block links to Mastodon after its main Twitter account tweeted about the @ElonJet controversy last week. Mastodon has grown fast since the acquisition of Twitter by Musk in late October and is an alternative for people who are unhappy with Musk’s changes to the service.

In a post on Substack, Rupar wrote that he is unsure why he was suspended. He said on Wednesday that he had a link on his Facebook page to the jet- tracking account.

“Suspensions of journalists for seemingly personal animus sets a dangerous precedent,” said the senior counsel at the advocacy group Free Press.

“Without commenting on any specific user accounts, I can confirm that we will suspend any accounts that violate our privacy policies and put other users at risk,” Irwin said. “We do not allow exceptions to this policy for any other accounts.”

A number of serious questions are being asked about the future of the free press on the platform which is referred to as a digital town square. Will news and media organizations remain on the platform, while Musk hastily bans their reporters without explanation? Will they pull their reporters? Their content? And what will major advertisers such as Apple and Amazon do?

Sally Buzbee, The Washington Post’s executive editor, said that the suspension of another journalist undermined Musk’s promise to run a platform dedicated to free speech.

While Weiss interpreted the reluctance to use such measures against other world leaders as evidence that Trump was treated particularly unfairly, the documents may also reveal the opposite: that the company consistently underestimated the danger its platform posed in contexts outside the US, and only acted forcefully against threats to American democracy. If Twitter had implemented its rules uniformly across the world, Trump’s ban would have extended to other leaders, too.

“Vulnerable communities in far away countries are less important than the relationships with leaders like [India’s Narendra] Modi or others,” says an employee at an organization that was a part of Twitter’s trust and safety council, which was disbanded earlier this month. The employee asked for anonymity because they are concerned their organization may be targeted by harassment and threats like those faced by former Twitter staffers.

Some of this discrepancy may come down to how different governments react to moderation by social platforms. It was banned by the company after they removed the threat of war from the President of the country. Instead of banning him, the company agreed to open an office, pay taxes, and register as a television host in exchange for the return of the government. Nigeria is now considering legislation to regulate platforms.

The Case for Tesla Investor Ross Gerber on Twitter Spaces after the Semafor Debale: Can We Just Stop Flailing?

“I think there are a lot of calculations that go into the trade-off about whether to take enforcement actions, and of course access to markets is one of them,” says Kian Vesteinsson, senior research analyst for tech and democracy at Freedom House, a nonprofit research and advocacy group focused on democracy and political freedoms.

I have been thinking a lot about the time when Elon Musk bought a McLaren F1, drove it into a ditch, and then tried to show off to Peter Thiel. “You know, I had read all those stories about people who made money and bought sports cars and crashed them,” Musk said to Thiel, according to Max Chafkin’s The Contrarian. I didn’t get insurance because I knew it wouldn’t happen to me.

Tesla investor Ross Gerber is on the record in the Semafor story, saying he was contacted yesterday about another funding round — he’d already dropped some nonzero but less than $1 million amount on Twitter. Gerber, you will be pleased to know, is considering this generous offer to put more money into an asset the owner has himself said is overpriced. One could argue he has destroyed the value of the site. It is not clear at this point.

Man, look, after the debacle on Twitter Spaces last night, can we please stop pretending that this is anything but flailing? He crashed the McLaren and there is no insurance.

Musk is selling off a bunch of hisTesla shares, which could mean he will buy or personally pay the debt, or he might be getting margin called on some of his loans as the price of the shares falls.

Elon Musk and the Spaces Conference: Facebook, CNN, and the Collaborative Action of “This Feed Is on Fire”

Kara Alaimo was an associate professor in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University, and she wrote about women and social media. Her book ” This Feed Is on Fire: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls, And How We Can Reclaim it” will be published by Alcove Press in 2024. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. Read more opinion on CNN.

A healthy town square should also be a place where people can find reliable information. But researchers at Tufts University recently found that tweets refuting hate and misinformation were “an order of magnitude greater” on Twitter before Musk took over.

We can not depend on Musk to provide a safe, open forum. The boards of new social networks need to consider the public’s interests when making critical decisions about things like content moderation and community standards. Many people with these skills have been laid off from their jobs. Facebook and CNN have been laying off people recently, as well as a number of other tech and journalism companies, including The Washington Post. Some professionals should work with each other to build new social platforms that will provide a truly open town hall.

Elon Musk has started to lift the suspensions of some journalists on Twitter after re-running a poll asking if he should “Unsuspend accounts who doxxed my exact location in real-time.” The journalists did not reveal his actual location. Out of the two options, “now” was the winner with 58.7 percent of the responses. There were almost 3.7 million responses to the poll.

The Spaces conference chat stopped shortly after Musk signed out of a session in which he had been asked about the reporters’ ousting. Musk said that Spaces was offline to deal with a bug. Late Friday, Spaces returned.

Hours before the poll was completed and the accounts were reinstated, Musk declared today “freedom Friday” in response to former congressional candidate Lavern Spicer’s comment that accounts were being reinstated at an increasingly fast pace. Several prominent right-to-far-right figures were unsuspended on Friday, including MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and Gateway Pundit editor Jim Hoft, as noted by Shayan Sardarizadeh, a reporter for the BBC. This is consistent with Musk making good on the promise he made to give most previously-suspended accounts general amnesty, which he claims is occurring due to the results of a poll.

Musk tweeted late Friday that the company would lift the suspensions following the results of a public poll on the site. 58.7% of respondents favored immediately unsuspend accounts, while 4% said the suspension should be lifted in seven days.

Most of the accounts were back early Saturday. Linette Lopez was suspended from Business Insider after the other journalists, with no explanation, she said.

She said she had posted court documents to the internet that had a Musk email address. He changes his email several times per week, Lopez said.

The Mashable CEO quit Twitter after the Associated Slepton Stalking Event: An Analysis of a “Dangerous” Case

Stephane Dujarric said that the move is a dangerous precedent and sets a bad example for journalists around the world.

Matt Binder of the technology news outlet Mashable said he was banned Thursday night after he shared a screen grab of O’ Sullivan’s post.

The screenshot showed a statement from the Los Angeles Police Department sent earlier Thursday to multiple media outlets, including the AP, about how it was in touch with Musk’s representatives about the alleged stalking incident.

He has promised to let free speech reign and has reinstated high-profile accounts that previously broke Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct or harmful misinformation. He has also said he would suppress negativity and hate by depriving some accounts of “freedom of reach.”

She said that the old regime was governed by it’s own biases and that the new one had the same problem.

If the suspensions lead to the exodus of media organizations that are highly active on Twitter, the platform would be changed at the fundamental level, said Lou Paskalis, longtime marketing and media executive and former Bank of America head of global media.

CBS briefly shut down its activity on Twitter in November due to “uncertainty” about new management, but media organizations have largely remained on the platform.

We all know about the main tent pole of tweets, and we are ready to go after the journalists who really saw it. “Driving journalists off the Internet is the biggest self inflicted wound that I can think of.”

The suspensions may be the biggest red flag yet for advertisers, Paskalis said, some of which had already cut their spending on Twitter over uncertainty about the direction Musk is taking the platform.

It had more than 4 million users on the day Musk took ownership of the social networking site. Many of the networks in the open- source Mastodon platform asked for donations as disaffected users strained computing resources. Some of the networks are crowd-funded. The platform is designed to be ad-free.

Elon Musk’s Chaotic Leadership of Twitter: The Ubiquitous Case of a Twitter Chief Executive, Paul Graham, Paul Lorenz, and Tesla CEO Paul Musk

More than half of the people who responded to the poll voted yes when it was over on Monday.

In reply to a user who said the MIT artificial intelligence researcher was going to become the CEO, Musk said he hadn’t been happy with his new job.

After haphazardly establishing a ban on links out that put his site at odds with both The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz and his own supporters, like Silicon Valley venture capitalist Paul Graham, Elon Musk’s doxxing, banning, and moderation outburst ended — predictably — with an apology and a promise it “won’t happen again.”

All Musk needs from his captive audience is a little more attention, with a promise that there will be votes about “major policy changes” in the future.

His $44 billion takeover of the company — that he tried desperately and unsuccessfully to get out of — started with a poll, and it would be both appropriate and timely if his time as its CEO ended the same way.

More than 17 million votes were cast in the informal referendum on his chaotic leadership of Twitter, which has been marked by mass layoffs, the replatforming of suspended accounts that had violated Twitter’s rules, the suspension of journalists who cover him and whiplash policy changes made and reversed in real time.

Oppenheimer & Co. downgraded its rating on Tesla, where Musk is the CEO, solely because of risks posed by the billionaire’s ownership and management of Twitter.

Musk promised to not make any more major policy changes without an online survey of users even after the initial criticism that followed the decision.

Musk’s move to block competitors was his latest attempt to control discourse after he shut down a Twitter account last week that was tracking his private jet flights.

Mainstream websites such as Facebook and IG, and upstarts Mastodon, Tribel, Post, and former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social were banned. Twitter gave no explanation for why the blacklist included those seven websites but not others such as Parler, TikTok or LinkedIn.

This was the test case because of the fact that Paul Graham had previously praised Musk but on Sunday he said that this was the last straw and to find him on Mastodon. His Twitter account was promptly suspended, and soon after restored as Musk promised to reverse the policy implemented just hours earlier.

Musk was questioned about how he splits his time between different companies while in court. The shareholder’s challenge to Musk’s potentially $55 billion compensation plan was heard in Delaware’s Court of Chancery.

In public banter with Twitter followers Sunday, Musk expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO, saying that person “must like pain a lot” to run a company that “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren is raising concerns about conflicts of interest and potential legal violations for Tesla following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.

Noting Tesla’s board has legal obligations it must fulfill, Warren asked the board to respond to a series of questions about its handling of the situation by January 3.

A Twitter Hero: Jared Kushner, His Son-In-Law, and the Silicon Ventures He Heterogeneous

On paper, Krishnan may be the most obvious choice of the group. He has direct experience working on the Twitter product, having previously helped manage the teams responsible for features of the platform such as search and the home timeline. He worked on mobile ad products before.

As a reporter, Calacanis emerged in the tech world during the dot com boom and later went on to invest in a few companies. He has launched a number of media properties and is the host of two podcasts.

Calacanis tweeted on Sunday night asking, “Who would like the most miserable job in tech AND media?! Who is insane enough to run twitter?!?!” Calacanis also ran his own Twitter poll asking followers whether he or Sacks should run the company, separately or together, or whether someone else should take over. The majority of respondents said that they didn’t agree with it.

The founding team at PayPal had some experience managing a social network and were joined by Sacks. He founded and ran enterprise communications platform Yammer, before selling it to Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion.

Sacks has been particularly unflinching in echoing Musks’ talking points, whether it’s justifying a feud with Apple or attempting to stir up outrage about a Twitter account that posted publicly available information about the whereabouts of Musk’s private jet. Sacks replied with “chess” when asked about the differences between him and Musk.

More recently, he has invested in crypto startups at Andreessen Horowitz, which could give him experience helpful to fulfill Musk’s goal of building payment capabilities for Twitter and making it more than just a social media app.

The recent negative attention the company received could be helped by Krishnan, who is arguably the least controversial of the current leadership team.

Some Twitter users have speculated about other possible leaders for the social media company, including Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was spotted watching the World Cup with Musk over the weekend.

Kushner is friendly with the Saudi Royal Family, one of Twitter’s largest investors. Last year, while working for his family real estate development company, he left politics to start the investment firm, which is where he now works as an advisor in the White House. Kushner also previously owned the weekly New York newspaper, the New York Observer.