Kanye West, Trump, Trump and Alternative Social Networks: Can Trump Fail to Discard the Bullsh*t Artist?
And in recent years, several alternative social networks have launched largely targeting conservatives who claim more mainstream services unduly restrict their speech. These services include Trump’s Truth Social and Parler, which Kanye West recently said he would acquire. It is not certain how far Musk will go in fulfilling his free speech dreams, but any loosened content moderation policies may make it easier for some to migrate to the bigger, more popular, services of Twitter and Facebook. Depending on how far Musk goes in his efforts to loosen the content restrictions, he could run into regulatory issues in Europe.
“I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump; I think that was a mistake,” Musk said at a conference in May, pledging to reverse the ban were he to become the company’s owner.
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.”
The Skinner box: Why do we need them? Why do social media companies think differently, and how to take care of them? After Musk’s tweet, Personette responded to Musk
But more than professional utility ties me to the site. Twitter hooks people in much the same way slot machines do, with what experts call an “intermittent reinforcement schedule.” Sometimes, at random intervals, some compelling nuggets will appear, and most of the time it is repetitive and uninteresting. According to B.F. Skinner, rats and pigeons have good problem-solving ability because they have unpredictable rewards.
“I don’t know that Twitter engineers ever sat around and said, ‘We are creating a Skinner box,’” said Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist at New York University and author of a book about gambling machine design. But that, she said, is essentially what they’ve built. Some people should know better if they self-destruct frequently on the site.
The internet’s ability to command larger audiences than the media barons of previous eras is due in part to the fact that they operate under less constraints. That is because government has abandoned the principle that mass media companies have special obligations to society, and it has allowed a few big social networks to suffocate competition, leaving users and advertisers without practical choices or leverage.
The best way to limit the power of any individual social media network is to make room for new networks and, perhaps even more important, for third-party sites that allow users to customize their online experience: combining content from multiple sites, controlling what kids can see and other features someone has imagined and needs a chance to make real.
His announcement came hours after the release of more than a dozen internal documents from Musk’s company, which appeared to support and applaud the practice of limiting the reach of certain, potentially harmful content.
Musk wrote an open letter to advertisers minutes before he bought the company, assuring them that he did not want the platform to become a free-for-all hellscape. The advertising industry, which makes up the vast majority of the company’s business, doesn’t appear to have been reassured by that attempt.
Twitter’s Chief Customer Officer Sarah Personette responded to Musk’s Thursday tweet saying that she had a “great discussion” with Musk on Wednesday. Personette said the commitment to brand safety for advertisers remained unchanged. “Looking forward to the future!”
It was reported by the Wall Street Journal that a number of clients had requested that an ad buying agency stop running ads on social media if Musk restores Trump’s account.
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 deal removes uncertainty that has hung over the company and its employees for much of the year. After initially agreeing to buy the company in April, Musk spent months attempting to get out of the deal, first citing concerns about the number of bots on the platform and later allegations raised by a company whistleblower.
The acquisition also promises to extend Musk’s influence. The billionaire already has significant stakes in a number of companies that are working on cars, rockets, robots, satellite internet and more. Now he controls a social media platform that shapes how hundreds of millions of people communicate and get their news.
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.
The Last Twitter Scenario: Musk’s Twitter Adventure with the Capitol Reaction and the Investigative Investigation of a Top-Tariffee Deal with Agrawal
Delaware Chancery Court chancellor Kathaleen St. Judge McCormick gave the parties until 5 p.m. on Oct. 28 to close the deal or face a rescheduled trial.
Such a move could also have ripple effects across the social media landscape. Twitter, although smaller than many of its social media rivals, has sometimes acted as a model for how the industry handles problematic content, including when it was the first to ban then-President Trump following the January 6 Capitol riot.
He said on the earnings call last week that the long-term potential for the social network is greater than it is currently worth.
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.
Text messages show that Musk had a dispute with Agrawal immediately before he made a bid for the company.
He used his social network to criticize the company’s top lawyer. There was a wave of harassment of Gadde from 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. The harassment started again Thursday after she was fired.
Social Media Changes and the Future of Twitter: An Analysis with MICHAEL SHARP ON GADGETLAB’s Mike (@GadgetLab)
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.”
She said the realization that having no content moderation is bad for business is part of the reason.
The platform takes no responsibility, as Yildirim said that they do not want a place where consumers just are bombarded with things they do not want to hear about.
Musk has been saying the deal is going through. He strolled into the company’s San Francisco headquarters Wednesday carrying a porcelain sink, changed his Twitter profile to “Chief Twit,” and tweeted “Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!”
And overnight the New York Stock Exchange notified investors that it will suspend trading in shares of Twitter before the opening bell Friday in anticipation of the company going private under Musk.
Musk was enthusiastic about visiting Twitter headquarters this week, but he had previously suggested that the building be turned into a homeless shelter because most employees didn’t work there.
Layoffs begin: Elon Musk began laying off Twitter employees on Friday morning, according to a memo sent to staff. The email sent to employees Thursday night said they would get a notice about their employment status on Friday.
In the wake of the chaos at Twitter, there has been discussion about brands quitting the platform to avoid having ads next to objectionable content. But that may not be the only or even primary reason advertisers have walked away — or why attracting new ones could be tricky. Advertisers are likely to be on edge about the stability of the platform as users and former employees are concerned about the mass exodus of staff leaving the platform vulnerable to glitch and outages.
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.
He wants you to encourage your male friends interested in fathering children to watch House of the Dragon. Mike recommends the new album from Natalia Lafourcade, De Todas las Flores. Lauren recommends reevaluating your relationship with Twitter, and social media in general.
How to Join GadgetLab: An English-French Dialogue for Boone Ashworth’s Supermembrane Radio Show
The woman can be found on the social networking site. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. The man is Michael Calore. You can bling the main hotline atGadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music 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 have an iPad, you can open the app called Podcasts, or just tap on the link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. You can find us in the Podcasts app on your phone. We are on the platform as well. In case you need it, here’s the RSS feed.
Premarket Stocks Trading During Fed Meeting: Jerome Powell & the Prospects for Inflation and Housing: A Few Words About the Fed
CNN Business first published a version of the story. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right now. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.
The Federal Reserve has a meeting in December. The Fed will be using hard economic data to make decisions, but analysts can only speculate at this point.
That means key housing, labor, and inflation reports will likely have outsized effects on the market as investors speculate about what they might mean for the future of interest rates.
What’s happening: No one can move markets like Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — with just a few words on Wednesday he crushed investors’ hopes of an interest rate pivot and sent stocks plunging. Powell said that the Fed has a way to go in fighting inflation. It is premature to think about pausing, in my opinion.
The central bank also doesn’t think inflation will start to fall back until next year. That will require more interest rate hikes in the coming months, warned policymakers.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html
The September Employment and Labor Results from the US Economy: Where do We Stand? What Do We Need to Know? How Will We Charge for Our Goods and Services?
The government report is expected to show the economy added another 200,000 positions in October — down from last month, but still a very solid number as demand for employment continues to outpace the supply of labor.
That means more inflation. Businesses have to pay higher wages to attract employees and are able to charge more for their goods and services. The wage growth report will be looked at closely by the Fed. Wages went up by 5% in September.
There is a chance that another jobs report will be published before the Fed meeting. If the reports show that employment is on a downward trajectory, Fed officials could be reassured.
Core CPI prices, which exclude oil and food, rose 0.6% in September month-over-month, matching August’s pace and coming in well above expectations of a 0.4% increase, not a great sign for the Fed. Analysts expect to see an increase in October.
PCE is a way of showing the change in the price of goods and services purchased by US consumers. The Fed says that the measure is more accurate because it accounts for a broader range of purchases.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html
The Bank of England, the Wall Street Wall, and Wall Street Trading: The impact of Wall Street Feds on the Housing Market and the First Month of Inflation
The housing market has been impacted by the Feds efforts to fight inflation, and is one of the first areas of the economy to show signs of cooling.
The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.95% last week, up from 3.09% just a year ago, and elevated borrowing costs are leading to a decline in demand.
“The housing market was very overheated for the couple of years after the pandemic as demand increased and rates were low,” said Powell on Wednesday. We understand the effect of our policies on that area.
The Bank of England raised their interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point in an effort to fight inflation.
The bank warned in a stark way. It said that economic output is already contracting and that it expects a recession to continue through the first half of 2024 “as high energy prices and materially tighter financial conditions weigh on spending.”
The email added that “to help ensure the safety” of employees and Twitter’s systems, the company’s offices “will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended.”
Several employees have already filed a class action lawsuit against the companies they worked for.
TheWARN Act requires any company with more than 100 employees to give 60 days notice if it wants to cut 50 jobs or more at a single site of employment.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html
The Twitter Disruption “Power to the People! Blue for $8 / month”: After Musk’s Acquisition, Twitter Returned
The company filing states that the previous members of the board are no longer members, in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement. The filing says that Musk is the sole director of the social networking site.
There was no semblance of an 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. A wave of verified-account imposters, including some posing as Nintendo and former President Donald Trump, forced the social network to make a decision. These accounts were the result of a rush by Musk to offer a blue check mark to account holders willing to pay $8 a month, no questions asked, as he searches for new ways to make money from the platform.
The richest man in the world used a swastika to describe the current system of lords and peasants that do not have blue checkmarks. He added: “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”
A growing number of companies have suspended their advertising on the social networking site in the wake of Musk’s acquisition.
Sex Workers in the Light of Musk’s New Twitter: Lurkers are Not Doomscrolling, but They Will Lurk
Sex workers are perceived as threats to children due to the oppression of homophobia, transphobia, and whorephobia. Online sex work is not immune from this bias. The idea of a “Onlyfans-style” subscription project was in the works, but it was held back by fears about child sexual abuse material. A contingent of in-house researchers dubbed the Red Team determined that Twitter couldn’t safely roll out the project, titled Adult Content Monetization (ACM), before getting a handle on CSEM, which they believed ACM would exacerbate. The project was tabled in May, only a few weeks after Musk’s offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion.
Musk thought it was coming from his own mind when he said that tiny talk felt like it was coming from your own mind. I’m happy: All the talk is about Musk in Tiny Talk Town.
Quiet quitting is rejecting the need for going above and beyond, no longer working overtime in a way that benefits your employer, but depletes your own personal financial resources. It is about not giving too much to a platform than most people would expect to get back. If you want to stick around on this new Twitter—whatever it may become—you need to find a way to use it without it using you.
A relatively small group of people use social media. According to internal company research viewed by Reuters, heavy users who tweet in English “account for less than 10 percent of monthly overall users, but generate 90 percent of all tweets and half of global revenue.”
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. That is the case 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 is not doomscrolling, a term that was used in the early days of the Covid epidemic when many people were stuck at home and didn’t have much access to social media. To sit back and observe is an easy way to deal with the complexity and chaos that is NewTwitter. Check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, sure, then close your app or browser tab. Send a tweet, then disengage. Keep one eye on it during basketball games. If you have to, use reply messaging (DMFs) and then direct the message threads somewhere else. The more original thoughts you can keep, the better.
One of the world’s most influential social networks has laid off half its workforce, alienated powerful advertisers, and blown up key parts of its product in the past week alone.
Twitter Spaces: Why Is Twitter so Awful? When the Premium Blue Feature Failed to Launch, and Why We Shouldn’t Use It
That paid subscription service, too, was also suspended on Friday with little warning, just two days after its official launch, with the menu option to sign up for Twitter Blue suddenly disappearing from Twitter’s iOS app — the only place the add-on had been offered. It was not immediately clear when the company might restore the offering.
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.
“We’re not currently putting an ‘Official’ label on accounts but we are aggressively going after impersonation and deception,” Twitter’s verified support account tweeted on Wednesday evening.
misinformation experts were critical of the paid verification feature, which they said would make it much harder to identify trustworthy information, particularly in the critical period following the US mid-term elections. Some of Musk’s fellow high-powered users had tough feedback.
“@elonmusk, from one entrepreneur to another, for when you have your customer service hat on. I just spent too much time muting all the newly purchased checkmark accts in an attempt to make my verified mentions useful again,” tweeted billionaire Mark Cuban.
Cuban said that you have a decision to make. “Stick with the new Twitter that democratizes every tweet by paid accounts and puts the onus on all users to curate for themselves. They might bring back social media. One makes Twitter time and information efficient. The other is awful.”
In a Twitter Spaces event held for advertisers this week, Musk pleaded with brands to keep using the platform, after a growing number of companies paused ads, causing what Musk previously described as a “massive drop in revenue.” Musk was supposed to appear magnanimous in accepting responsibility for the company’s performance.
“I’ve always thought that a move to a subscription business would make sense for Twitter … it’s never been a great advertising platform,” said Larry Vincent, associate professor of marketing at USC’s Marshall School of Business. Twitter’s advertising business has long been smaller than that of rivals like Facebook, in part because it didn’t offer the same level of user targeting.
Many of the employees who were involved in managing the campaigns were let go or fired Monday, and brands may be not happy about that.
Yoel Roth, who was the head of trust and safety at the time he left, wrote in the New York Times last week that the lack of adherence to the app store rules could be catastrophic. The app stores have previously removed social media apps that didn’t protect their users from harmful content, and in response to Musk’s takeover, the app store operators have already begun calling. Over the weekend, the head of Apple’s app store, Phil Schiller, deleted his Twitter account.
Shadowbanned Content from the Top of the Twitter Files: Musk and Weiss discuss a case for de-amplification of violating tweets
Even still, there is no guarantee that continuing to capture the online world’s attention will translate into subscription payments or other revenue growth.
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. 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.
A software update will show you your real account status, so you know why you were shadowbanned and how to appeal, according to Musk. He did not provide additional details or a timetable.
The second set of the so-called Twitter Files, shared by journalist Bari Weiss on Twitter, focused on how the company has restricted the reach of certain accounts, tweets or topics that it deems potentially harmful, including by limiting their ability to appear in the search or trending sections of the platform.
In a blog post last week, Twitter said it had not changed its policies but that its approach to enforcement would rely heavily on de-amplification of violative tweets, something that Twitter already did, according to both the company’s previous statements and Weiss’ Friday tweets. The post stated that freedom of speech wasn’t freedom of reach.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/09/tech/musk-twitter-shadowbanning/index.html
The Twitter Files, Part Duex! and Why Does it Matter if It is Left or Right? The Good News for Torn and Chatroulette
In both cases, the internal documents appear to have been provided directly to the journalists by Musk’s team. Musk on Friday shared Weiss’ thread in a tweet and added, “The Twitter Files, Part Duex!!” along with two popcorn emojis.
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.
How in the world is this good news? I can tell you why it is good news. It is pleasing to see that things become what they are, and it will make Twitter2 easily quittable. The social media giant has moved toward porn for a long time. Many people have started to bar their souls, post thirst traps, coyly subtweeting, and of course negging and prodding and simultaneously secreting dopamine and cortisol since the days of the orgy of hyperstimulation.
Porn’s not my cup of tea, but you have to admire its ferocity and cunning. It’s a megagenre, something the poet-philosopher Timothy Morton might call a hyperobject, ungraspable in its ubiquity and scale. porn online behaves as though it is a predator plant, as it saturates the pixels with flesh colors and wipes out the biodiverse meme.
Five years later, the service was overrun by porn and lost its appeal. Chatroulette, which was founded in 2009 as a whimsical way to meet strangers, traded its lightheartedness for dick pics and leering goons almost immediately. Sex workers are the main creators of porn on OnlyFans, which was started in 2016 as a platform for performers to post videos.