How did Elon Musk and his friends get their Twitter attention? The impact of Musk’s Twitter ban on the company $Delta S$, the founder of Twitter, and his apology to Trump

And this idea that Elon Musk and his inner circle seem to have, that Twitter is full of coddled, unproductive people who are left wing political activists who just want to censor people on the right, what do you make of that impression that he and his friends seem to have of who works at Twitter and why?

The bans also shows Musk’s failure to come even close to his claimed commitment to free speech. Musk is a free speech maximalist and has said that he would like to permit all legal speech. Musk once said that he hoped his worst critics stayed on Twitter, because that’s what free speech means.

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.”

Musk has made an $8 Twitter subscription plan his signature bid to bolster the company’s revenue. The new plan was rolled out before the company made the decision to delay the service until after the elections.

Robert Miller is chair of corporate finance and law at the University of Iowa College of Law, and he says Musk’s attempts to escape the agreement he had signed was an uphill climb. For this argument to have worked, he says, the company would have to have committed “a gigantic, like Enron type of fraud,” for which no evidence has surfaced.

Those claims, which predate Musk’s ownership, may already have put Twitter on the hook for billions of dollars in potential FTC fines, legal experts have said.

The material that came to light ahead of the trial due to start on October 17 in Delaware’s Chancery Court did not lend much support to that argument. “He knows that his best claim is fraud, but they’ve gotten the evidence from Twitter, and there’s nothing that looks like fraud here,” Miller says. “They’ve run out of cards to play.”

It was possible that Musk was influenced by the potential damage that the trial could cause him. The entrepreneur watched the internet chew over a tranche of his personal text messages with major figures in Silicon Valley last week. Miller says it would be a very embarrassing deposition, that he faced this week.

What will Twitter tell us about the future? A keyhole view on Twitter’s censorship of the news and the misinformation of the 2020 presidential election

For years, the world has depended on social media to function as a town square, a place for people to debate issues openly. Of course, only 23% of Americans are on Twitter and of those who use the platform, the top 25% of users by tweet volume produce 97% of tweets, according to the Pew Research Center. The conversations that happen ontweet seem to heavily influence what reporters and others talk about offline so the users have an outsize influence.

Piazza says that other social platforms with loose restrictions on speech may be bad business for a platform with mainstream appeal such as Twitter. “Those communities degenerate to the point to where they’re not really usable — they’re flooded by bots, pornography, objectionable material,” says Piazza. “People will gravitate to other platforms.”

“For a keyhole view of what Musk will look like, just look at alternative platforms like Parle, Gab and Truth Social, which promise fewer restrictions on speech,” said the head of Media Matters for America.

He said that the feature of those sites is that they allow you to say and do things that you can’t on mainstream social media platforms. They are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.

“Would be great to unwind permanent bans, except for spam accounts and those that explicitly advocate violence,” he texted Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal shortly after agreeing to join the company’s board (a decision he soon backtracked).

The accounts belonging to CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell and other journalists who have covered Musk aggressively in recent weeks were all abruptly permanently suspended. The account of a progressive independent journalist was also banned.

Someone urged Musk to hire someone who has a political view and has a savvy culture to lead the 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.

What did you do last week? Good news for Musk and the social billionaire who is considering re-irrational bans on Trump

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.

“What did you get done this week?” Musk snapped, before telling Agrawal that he was not joining the board and would make an offer to buy Twitter instead.

When the company was losing over $4 million a day, there was no choice to cut jobs. He did not give details about how much the employees who lost jobs were paid as a result of their dismissal.

That is good news for the billionaire, who has complained that costs outstrip revenue and that the company is overstaffed for its size.

Advertisers are looking at the potential loss of users. Twitter is projected to lose 32 million users over the next two years, according to a forecast by Insider Intelligence, which cited technical issues and the return of accounts banned for offensive posts.

He may have little choice other than to find alternate sources of revenue besides advertising, given the weak state of the digital ad market and the changes he wants to make to content moderation.

“Advertisers want to know that their ads are not going to appear alongside extremists, that they’re not going to be subsidizing or associating with the types of things that would turn off potential customers,” Carusone said.

The Wall Street Journal reveals that Twitter has suspended an Uber user account in connection with the Musk-Facebook-Google super-app deal

Whatever he meant, it’s anyone’s guess. In the summer, Musk told his staff that the company should mimic the Chinese “super-app” that combines social media, messaging, payments, shopping and ride-sharing.

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.

It’s not clear which agencies are carrying out the probe, and there is no indication as to what actions the officials might be investigating. Authorities are looking at Musk’sconduct linked to the deal, which is what the filing says.

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

The account suspensions came on the heels of Twitter’s announcement on Monday that it was disbanding its Trust and Safety Council — a group of outside experts that advised the company on issues like human rights, child sexual exploitation and mental health.

The filing said no one asked Zatko to torch his own documents, and no one demanded that he do so. The social media site had no idea what information Zatko had in his notebooks.

What Free Speech Really Is For Women and Girls: The Story of Kanye West, Parler, and the State of the Social Media Space

Editor’s Note: Kara Alaimo, an associate professor in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University, writes about issues affecting women and social media. 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. She has her own opinions on this commentary. Read more about it on CNN.

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

In a release by Parler, West said that “in a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves.”

The social media platforms will serve as an environment for conservative thought if West and Musk go through with their deals. It is likely that this will change the views of those who remain on them, which could have an effect on our politics. That’s because when people who think similarly come together, they reaffirm and heighten one another’s initial beliefs.

Before becoming Twitter’s CEO, owner, and “Chief Twit,” Elon Musk had often lobbed criticism at the platform for its approach to content moderation, even going so far as to target the company’s former policy chief Vijaya Gadde. But while Musk has expressed his concern about “liberal bias” on the platform, many activists, journalists, and advocates outside the US—where the majority of Twitter’s users reside—have begun to worry about how Twitter, now without a board or shareholders and led by a CEO with multiple business entanglements, will respond to authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning governments that have long sought to control public opinion.

Women who become victims of online hate often stop writing, avoid websites they previously visited, and refrain from engaging in online political commentary according to University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks.

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

Parler is a place where conservative views can flourish, and nonconservatives are not likely to flock to Truth Social because of its association with Trump. It may be possible to leave it as a platform for conservatives if women, people of color and others start leaving. This would likely make the views of those who remain even more zealous.

On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, and What Can Be Done? Musk and Sarah Personette on Twitter

“When like-minded people get together, they often end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk to one another,” Harvard University law professor Cass Sunstein writes in “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, and What Can Be Done.” Sunstein says that their exchanges heighten their beliefs, and make them more confident.

Conservatives will become far right when they get together on social media. The far right views on these social networks could have an impact on our country’s politics, as they did in the 1990s when Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk-show hosts made huge changes in the political landscape. It isn’t hard to imagine that the people who are on these sites could unite to support political candidates who share their beliefs.

We can expect male owners to amplify their own views, even if they are sexist, misogynistic, racist, or otherwise offensive.

He said in the Thursday post that the platform has to be warm and welcoming to everyone and that they can choose their experience according to their preferences. “Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise … Let us build something extraordinary together.”

Sarah Personette said that she had a discussion with Musk on Wednesday. Personette said that their continued commitment to brand safety for advertisers remained unchanged. “Looking forward to the future!”

Insider Intelligence principal analyst Jasmine Enberg said Musk has good reason to avoid a massive shakeup of Twitter’s ad business because Twitter’s revenues have taken a beating from the weakening economy, months of uncertainty surrounding Musk’s proposed takeover, changing consumer behaviors and the fact that “there’s no other revenue source waiting in the wings.”

Musk tried to ease the fears of advertisers when he said that he doesn’t want the platform to become a free-for-all hellscape.

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

The accounts that are often especially active in the replies to his social media posts are called the ‘robots.’ Musk promised to defeat them or die trying.

Tesla CEO J.C. Musk’s Twitter harassment of the top lawyer, Gadde, sparks a furious outburst

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.

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.

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

The note is a shift from Musk’s position that Twitter is unfairly infringing on free speech rights by blocking misinformation or graphic content, said Pinar Yildirim, associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

She stated that having no content moderation is bad for business, and that it might be dangerous for a company to lose 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.

What employees think about Twitter after the Twitter Deal Closing? A response to Musk’s frustration with the media and the right-wing media

We reached out to the social media site to get a response to some of the things employees said about what was happening inside the company. They did not reply back. Since the deal closed, the company hasn’t said anything.

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.

Although Musk was enthusiastic about visiting the headquarters this week, he had previously advocated turning the building into a homeless shelter because so few employees actually worked there.

On Thursday, advertisers received a note which showed a shift in emphasis on revenue and a need for more “relevant ads.” It’s not unusual for targeted ads that collect and analyze users’ personal information to be included in such ads.

It will be fascinating to see whether some of Musk’s supporters in the right-wing media speak out against these bans.

The article was first published in theReliable Sources newsletter. Sign up here for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape.

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

Yeah. I mean, look, I have to say, I have long been in favor of letting anyone who wants to verify themselves part of this plan. It is making people pay to retain their badges. It’s also that if you pay, you could get a badge.

I think there is an idea of the blue checks that goes inside of the world of Eugene and there is a lot of right-wing circles. People on Fox News are always talking about the blue check mob that is on the internet, mainly journalists and other media figures who care very much about their checkmarks.

Musk’s authorized biographer, Walter Isaacson, tweeted in 2018 that “the best thing” one could do to “save social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email, and reduce hacking would be authenticating users.”

We are going to speak to two employees or at least two employees who were at the company as of Wednesday morning, but we are not sure what their status will be at that time. We are going to create an artificial intelligence-generated version of them.

The House of the Dragon: A Men’s Guide to Horoscopes on Twitter, Instagram, and Apple Podcasts (A New Look at House Of The Dragon)

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 recommends reevaluating your relationship with Twitter, and social media in general.

Vittoria Elliott can be found on Twitter @telliotter. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is a fight promoter. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by a man named Boone Ashworth. Solar Keys is our theme music.

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 also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Podcasts app just by tapping here. We are also on the service. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.

Life Under Musk Two Tweetees Speaker Out: The Case Of A Silicon Valley Employees-Augmented-Speak-Out

This transcript was created with speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

Usually, we try to give a more in depth look at what’s happening in Silicon Valley by bringing news from the tech industry. Right now, the only story in tech is what’s happening in San Francisco atTwitter.

We are going to have a normal interview with them. Instead of playing their voice, we are going to record it so that we know what they are saying. We will feed those words back into a text-to-speech AI generator and give you an artificial intelligence-generated version of their voice.

But before we get to those interviews, let’s just go over what’s been happening at Twitter this week. Because it has been one crazy thing after another. Casey, on Friday, after our emergency podcast, you reported that Twitter engineers inside the company had been instructed to print out the last 30 to 60 days’ worth of code that they had written, for review.

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

Why is the tip that Elon told us that he wouldn’t buy Twitter, unless there was a limited capacity, and if there is a good reason, why not?

We said we would never use an Artificial Intelligence voice unless there was a really good reason and a limited capacity. And now, twice in five episodes —

Well, you were wrong about Elon buying Twitter, and you were wrong about this not being a podcast filled with robot podcasters. So two strikes for the man.

Yeah. Sometimes as a reporter, you get a tip which sounds so silly, that you do not believe it and think, well, this cannot possibly be true. So when I got this tip that Elon and his people were telling people, print out your last 30 to 60 days of code, I thought, well, that can’t be true.

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

So why is this funny? Why is it so interesting? This is a way to find out how good a software engineer is. People are generally not evaluated by how much code they’ve written, right?

It is not necessarily a good thing if you show up with a large amount of code. You might have done better for the company by eliminating some code, right? Sort of streamlining it. So —

Who makes the code? I was surprised that the coding programs had a Print button. That is not what you are bringing to your daily review of your code.

It’s like, two hours later, they get — all the Twitter folks get this new notification. Change of plans is like that. He and his people still want to see your code. But why don’t you just bring it in on your laptop, and if you have printed out any code, we’re going to need you to shred it.

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

It’s not. One thing that we should point out is that the company’s people are interested in figuring out who is a good engineer. A lot of worship is done at the altar of the engineer. He considers himself an engineer.

And so I’ve talked to folks who are getting calls late at night from random Tesla engineers, saying things like, who’s really good on your team? Who are the top performers? Who are the low performers?

And so this code printout exercise, as ridiculous as it seems, was all part of this sort of evaluation system where they’ve been trying to figure out, who at this company do we need to keep in order to keep the service running?

And who can we lay off? That is sort of the loneliest piece of this. We have a problem with code printing. Then, on Sunday, you reported that Twitter was considering tying verifications to Twitter Blue subscriptions, and explain what that means.

We don’t know the number of people that subscribe to it. The company has never released a metric. Almost all of the company’s revenues come from online advertising, and most of the rest comes from selling access to their database.

If all of those people pay $8 a month to keep their check marks, that’s $38 million a year, roughly. The second-quarter revenue was more than $1 billion. So this is a drop in the bucket, even if everyone who is currently verified on Twitter pays $8 a month, which I don’t think they will.

Yeah. Stephen King said that it cost $20 a month to keep his blue check. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”

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

But it also seems strange, because it’s just not that big a moneymaking idea. So I was doing some back-of-the-envelope math on this. About 400,000 people are verified on Twitter. That’s sort of the latest number that we have.

A lot of journalists get verified that way. But there is also a process. You can ask to be verified if you’re a celebrity or something. And the reason the verification exists, we should say — like, it’s not about a status marker.

This person is important, and it isn’t about. There were already a lot of people who impersonated Oprah on NASA’s website and it’s been created because they started doing that many years ago. Users were able to tell whether the person they were talking to was the person they claimed to be, using a new feature on the social media site.

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

The right thing to do. I think it’s fair to say that people have seen these checkmarks next to your name as a kind of status symbol over the years. It means that you are someone.

Correct, exactly. And so I think the idea initially coming out of the Elon war room was that people who were verified cared so much about being verified and staying verified, that they would pay for the privilege. We get the idea of $20 a month for verification.

Now, that almost immediately results in, as you said, an entire Twitter timeline meltdown, where users are saying, no way will we pay $20 a month. That’s more than I pay for Netflix. I pay less forYouTube than that.

Like, just to keep my little check mark — like, that seems insane. Subsequently, Elon responds to Stephen King on Twitter and says, we need to pay the bills somehow. Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How much is $8? So Stephen King is a pricing consultant.

It makes sense that this is a way to make money, but at the same time, punishing the blue checkmarks is very different from other social media platforms.

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

It does create a lot of economic value for people like you and me. It does matter to us. News organizations pay for all kinds of software solutions that help them do various things. Maybe it should be a part of that.

I don’t know what the program is going to be for, but I assume it’s going to be for government entities who don’t pay the $8 a month. There are a lot of details that need to be worked out.

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speaker Out: What Have They Been Saying During the Last Ten Years? (It Is Then Again)

Right. So that’s not all that happened at Twitter this week. We’ve also had a number of other executives departing. Chief Customer Officer Sarah Personette resigned. A number of other senior Twitter executives have also announced that they are leaving.

One of the great moments of culture over the past 10 years was Krispy Kreme, and now I am at it again. At the same time, the culture has also moved on. The code base for Vine is a decade old and the thought that it will be revived and become a TikTok competitor is a really steep hill.

I would say that it wasn’t an immediate revenue driver. They are going to have to put a lot of effort into that. You’re essentially launching a new social network within Twitter. It is a big, heavy lift. It could be fun to have a network of American short-form video that was not owned by a company like Facebook. Will we be able to see if they can do it?

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

Life Under The Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: The Most Important Thing About “Hard Fork”, Mockingjay

That’s right. They’re being told, you have days to ship this. If this does not ship by this date, in some cases, a date next week, you will be fired. If it is one hour past deadline, you will be fired.

People are not sleeping very much. Some of them are terrified as they sleep in their offices. Some of them are here on work visas. If they lose this job, they have 60 days to find another job, or they’re out of the country. It’s serious for the people who have these jobs.

Welcome to “Hard Fork,” Mockingjay. So it is about 10:00 AM Pacific on Wednesday right now. How is your day going so far? What are anything notable happening today?

Every day seems to be the same cycle for the last week, which is everybody wakes up to more panicked messages via various different channels. I believe that most people have been smart enough to switch their channels from Slack to other channels. We have not had any communications internally so we have been trying to chase rumors.

Stressful. I feel like between trying to maintain this job that I have currently, while clearly looking for a way out, while having zero support and acknowledgment from the people above me, is very stressful. Already, there have been multiple rumor mill-based scares.

Layoffs are supposed to happen on Monday. They didn’t happen. The rumor says it is going to be Friday. It’s exhausting. I know we are all paid really well.

Most of us have some savings to sit on. Some people don’t. It is a nerve-racking thing not to know, as we enter a really tough hiring market in tech. We are entering the holidays.

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

The CEO of a large company speaks out: Life under the musk two tweeters-speak-out employees (SIGHS)

You have a new CEO at your company. Most of the C-suite has either been fired, or resigned, and you have not received any email letting you know who is in charge, or what the next few days hold.

That is correct. We have received zero information, other than what gets trickled down to us. The Comms is very sparse. There is really nobody answering, even messages in the company-wide channels.

And so what is that like, when, day to day, you wake up, and it’s almost like a scavenger hunt across seven different apps, just to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing?

You’ve been reporting on code reviews, and you’ve probably heard about them. I’ve seen examples of people saying that code was written by them and not crediting those who collaborated with them in order to get on a preferred status list.

Absolutely. They want volume, not quality. So everybody is sharing every little bit of code they have ever written, no matter how insignificant or garbage it is. [SIGHS]

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

Blind: Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out – Why I Can’t Complele? A Response to a Manager

A manager said if you don’t know what you are working on, you must work on something. Work on anything.

Someone had sent me a post and I would like to read it. Blind is this app where you sort of log in with your work email, and then you can have these pseudonymous chats about what’s happening at your company.

Multiple people have sent this post to me. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. And I’m not going to read the whole thing. The headline is “I can’t cope.”

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

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What I Can Do about it, Why I Can’t Do It, and Why I Don’t

It says I am on the team working to make all of Elon’s ridiculous dreams come true. Management have threatened to fire us if we miss delivery, even though they are outside our control. If we don’t work at weekends, we’re gone. If we take PTO or leave, we’re gone.

People are working long hours. I work 20 hours a day at full speed. I wake up at night to attend status calls. I worry about it even when I am not working. I can’t do it. I am an absolute mess. I am at a breaking point. This is after a few days of Elon.

There are two camps at the moment, people who are ignored until they lose their jobs and people who are being pulled into task forces. I think the better place is to be in the people who are being ignored and will be fired.

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

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: How Many Are These People Trying to Emigrate to the Philippines? What I Mean to These People

My heart goes out to this person. I hope that they are able to find gainful employment and apply for jobs while they try to sleep and care for themselves.

And I sincerely hope that there is care taken for people who are on visas. All of the people I know who are here on visas have no idea what will happen to them. They have not been told anything.

So this is more than just privileged tech people crying because we’re moving from one six-figure salary to another six-figure salary. The people who are attempting to emigrate to this country have a good job, and they are highly skilled.

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

Is Twitter going through a phase of its life? Some people are complaining about the status of Twitter and what they may want to see in the future

Twitter has gone through phases in its lifetime. I can’t think of a better place to work. People were respectful. People were honest. There were legitimate goals for people.

I don’t think it’s because engineers are sitting on their hands. I think it is because of the way this company is structured, it is almost impossible to get anything done if you are trying to get the appropriate approvals by and going through Byzantine processes, without being told how things are changing. There is some truth in that statement. This is the absolute wrong way to deal with it.

I wonder if you have been thinking about the degree to which you might be worried about the future of the service, and what concerns you have about it.

I would love to think that everybody on Twitter is going to leave in protest. But the reality of the situation is a lot of people may stay. It’s going to be interesting to see who stays.

Some users of the platform have already begun migrating to other platforms, such as Counter Social, as a result of the layoffs that began Friday. They are worried that a breakdown of moderation and verification could lead to a lack of reliable communications from public agencies and other institutions.

Life Under Musk Two Tweet Employees Talk Out: How Random Code Makes Us Feel. What Have We Learned Before They Wrong?

Scared and relieved. It will be hard to not have money. But at the same time, I hope that all of us who get fired will just get to chill out for a day or so, and then wake up on a couple of days later and say, all right, got to get that resume out there. Got to be energized about these other jobs, because right now it’s sucking the life out of us.

There may be uncertainty. There are people who aren’t even certain if they should continue doing the work they’re doing. The pile of unknowns, along with the things that have been reported on, and just general constant stress leads to this cognitive dichotomy and just general stress.

Even in the lowest parts of engineering, people would raise concerns over privacy or misuse of new features. Random code is their only job and no one will ever see it. The company allowed people to speak to these things. And more often than not, it caught us on issues before it ever made it to the public like.

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

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees-Speak Out: What Has Happened in the Coca-Cola Company During the Second World War?

That’s complicated because nobody really knew. I mean, I guess there was sort of groupthink that existed that was this guy was not a nice person. You know, there were a lot of people that were of the thought that this should probably have been banned a long time ago for his behavior. And everything just sort of came from there.

He has been more aggressive with his political views and talking points. And if it serves him, he’ll lean into it.

I will say, having been there for a number of years, the company has grown in a lot of ways, and some not so good. I don’t disagree with people when they say there’s probably too many managers, too many engineers. Maybe delivery is a little too slow. The company has never had a strong point.

A massive structural change is what you need to go through a change like this. If he just came in and did the same thing, like, what’s the point?

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

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speaker Out: Well, I know what I can do to help me get out of the Twitter world faster than I can

OK. It appears that there is an idea that the messaging service should be faster than it has been. We have been hearing that if you do not ship this item by next Monday, you will be fired. When you hear that you have a three- or four-day deadline, what does that do to you?

I don’t have time for my mind. We need to have this done by Friday because priorities changed, that’s normal. That is a little bit of a challenge. Might add a couple more hours to it. You have to get it done. Makes sense.

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

The number of systems that need to be touched on is equivalent to raising the Titanic from the bottom of the ocean.

There is a lot of code that needs to be written. You also have to coordinate across presumably dozens of engineers, product managers, and lots of other folks, right?

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

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

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

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

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

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Talk Out: What We Don’t Want to Know About Feature Development, How We’re Trying to Fix It

This is an engineering problem and also a social problem. It is necessary that we do testing. We need to figure out how this can be abused. What are people going to do with it? What are the Bitcoin bros going to do to try to steal more of people’s money abusing this feature?

Right. What happens with a big social network is that it tries to figure out what the new feature is going to be, and so on. You are saying that the deadlines are so short that this stuff may be released without some testing or scrutiny, trying to figure out what could go wrong. They’re just going to be set loose.

Yeah. There’s one section about user privacy and privacy data. And it’s basically, we’re not doing anything with user data, so we don’t worry about that. This is just a blue check on a profile.

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

Life Under Musk and His Inner Circle: What Do You Think About the Products That We’ve Learned and What We Can Don’t Know About It?

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

Think about it. If you present him an idea and he thinks it’s cool, he wants it done within a week. You just sacrificed every team around you.

God. I want to know what you think of the various product changes that have been floated or proposed by Musk and his inner circle. What do you make of those proposals? And do you think they’re good ideas?

I mean, one of the first decisions he made was to redirect the logged-out view to the Explore page. My initial idea was that we might be able to serve ads to people who are not in the database.

If you don’t sign up for a account, they’ll show you a bunch of tweets which will entice you to do so. Maybe you see some ads when you browse through the Tweets. So that was a relatively quick change that he made that I think a lot of people would agree makes some sense.

The Vine one, it’s not the worst idea. I mean, the cynical part of me says, too little, too late. You know? TikTok is TikTok, and that’s a mighty hill to climb.

Absolutely, yeah. The original content from vine is what we have. So marketing-wise, the nostalgia factor is huge, which gives us kind of a foothold to at least launch something.

But we at least have the media, and trying to build a product like that, we’ve been working on that for a while. Every tech company has tried it’s darndest. Is this something that we can do? There’s been mock-ups.

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

What do you want to do at Twitter? Why do two Twitter employees don’t care about their jobs? A phenomenological analysis

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

There isn’t any communications. So the only people talking are people in a corner. It is not like the company went to an all-hands meeting and learned what was happening. It’s everybody asking, are we ever going to see him? Should I keep doing my work? Do they even serve lunch anymore?

So as we’re recording this, we don’t know what might happen to your job. As you think about it, do you want to be working at Twitter in three months? Or do you feel like you’re ready to be somewhere else?

Culture is real. Culture can be seen through the product. People care a lot, which is why a lot of the way the company behaved was because of that. And that can be infuriating in its own ways.

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

What’s happening at Twitter Blue, and how to get the scoop: How to get inside the rumor room from Musk? A comment on Roose

People have seen this. We are going to move fast and break things, with no care for the people who are using it, which just defeats the point.

Yeah, because he’s reading the news about the work hours and stuff. He has been speculating on what the labor law lawsuits will look like.

According to an internal Slack message posted by a Twitter employee and viewed by CNN, Musk has shown little fear of the FTC regulators overseeing the company’s multiple, legally binding consent agreements committing it to maintaining a robust cybersecurity program and producing written privacy impact reports before launching any new products or services, a requirement that could cover Twitter Blue.

If you want to get scoops on what’s happening at TWc, you should send them toCasey. The email address he uses is Kevin. The man is named Roose.

When Twitter Becomes a Free Platform, It’s Out of Control, And What Does Elon Musk Really Tell Us About Conflict in the DRC?

Davis Land is the producer of “Hard Fork”. We’re edited by Paula Szuchman. This episode was fact checked by Caitlin Love. Today’s show was engineered by a guy namedCory Schreppel.

Dan Powell wrote and recorded the music for Elisheba Ittoop. Special thanks goes out to Hannah Ingber, Nell Gallogly, Kate LoPresti, Shannon Busta, and Jeffrey Miranda.

A threat was on the horizon when billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk pledged that “the bird is freed” last week.

Ndahinda has trained in international law and works in Tilburg, Netherlands as a consultant on issues pertaining to conflict and peace in the African Great Lakes region. He has already seen what a ‘free’ Twitter can do. For years, he has been tracking the social-media hate speech that swirls amid armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo1. Because of the way in which it is shared in languages other than English, the platforms use systems to identify harmful content that they don’t build into their screening tools.

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

Prior to Musk’s takeover, Twitter typically imposed “strikes” that corresponded with suspensions for escalating periods of time when users repeatedly broke its rules against Covid-19 or civic integrity misinformation, giving users up to nine chances before they were booted from the platform. The platform had other enforcement mechanisms, such as labeling a comment or reducing its reach, for the added rules it had, such as those banning terrorism, threats of violence against individuals or groups, targeted abuse or harassment, and content promoting abuse or self-destructive behavior.

Normally, these platforms are where false narratives start, says Stringhini. The narratives that reach mainstream platforms explode when they do. He says that when they are pushed on social media, they go out of control.

“When you have people that have some sort of public stature on social media using inflammatory speech — particularly speech that dehumanizes people — that’s where I get really scared,” says James Piazza, who studies terrorism at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. “That’s the situation where you can have more violence.”

In the coming weeks, people will be looking at changes to the spread of misinformation, user accounts being suspended, and whether or not users abandon the platform because of changes to policies on the platform. Tromble intends to monitor campaigns of coordinated harassment on Twitter.

The Covid PLANdemic: How bad is it? — former president Donald Trump, who left the White House in 2021 to leave the hospital

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

I’d like to hear from you. Oh my god, your profile is so funny. I love funny guys,” Schumer, dressed in a red dress, said as the bot. “They said I was a bot, which is crazy. I’m all woman and I love funny guys like you. You should look at the website where I and other girls hang out.

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

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

Quitting Twitter: The Impact of the Free Speech Revolution on Black People’s Online Communication and Social Media: The Case of a Black Person

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

That is the message I was given 30 seconds after I deleted my account on Musk’s new platform. After a mostly dysfunctional 12-year relationship with Twitter that I admit brought some moments of joy, it was time to exercise my freedom of speech to say goodbye and good riddance.

Many media professionals are mandated to have social media accounts. Today, covering trends on the internet is an essential part of journalism. So, in quitting, it’s a given that my media opportunities — and my bank account — could be affected negatively.

And surely, it was an act of silent defiance, because I know as a media professional so much of what we do in newsrooms, the stories we choose to tell, the assumptions we make about the world have depended on what the Twitter-verse is telling us.

Billy Dixon, a black person who uses the service, saved every racist feed he saw to prove the new social networking service was causing harm to black people. People will only understand when they lose money.

According to one cyber research organization, Network Contagion Research Institute, the use of the N-word jumped by nearly 500% on the platform a day after Musk, the self-declared “free speech” absolutist, took over.

What Twitter Can Do to Keep You In My Twitter Life? The Case Of Paul Pelosi, Sentence To All Pseudoscalars

He might work on his own penchant to promote conspiracy theories to his followers, as he did in an now-apprehended message regarding the attack on Paul Pelosi, wife of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

There isn’t a world where everyone craves attention and adulation. Everyone wants to be a virtual brand ambassador.

Black users have been using the site despite its community being largely African American. The reasons vary for staying in the face of blatant disrespect and hatred. For some, it means keeping a job. Others may be convinced Twitter is the best way to attain global influence, or that it’s better to stay and fight for change from within.

The matter of personal safety of my family was the focus of the vile incident that spilled over into my personal life. I remained on the platform to fight my haters and never back down from them.

What a waste of my time. I was kept in beast mode because of the toxic attacks on the site. That’s what the Twitter-verse will do to you — make you angry and keep you distracted from the real work at hand.

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

“Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended,” Musk wrote. While Twitter previously issued warnings before suspensions, now that it is rolling out “widespread verification, there will be no warning.”

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

I think that not all of the content moderators were let go. “I was joking on Mastodon where I set up a account last week,” she said afterwards.

The Blue Verification Checkmark: Progress Report of the Musk Campaign on Twitter and Its Support for the Motorola’ Campaign’

After changing her name to Musk, Bertinelli supported several democrats and their campaigns on social media.

Before the stunt, Bertinelli noted the original purpose of the blue verification checkmark. It was free of charge, but with journalists accounting for a big portion of recipients. “It simply meant your identity was verified. Scammers would have a harder time impersonating you,” Bertinelli noted.

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

On Friday, Yoel Roth, head of safety and integrity, sought to clarify the concerns. The front-line staff of moderation was the least affected by the job cuts.

Trump isn’t kidding: Trump is lying on Twitter, and a protest against Musk’s upcoming Social Media Controversy Plan

“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.

Civil society groups, journalists, and politicians are all influential in shaping public policy and opinion because of the use of social media sites like micro-messaging service, Twitter. The platform has also proved crucial for those organizing protests in places like India, Nigeria, and Argentina, and has provided an avenue for those living in highly controlled societies like Saudi Arabia to voice criticism of their governments.

The Asia Pacific policy director at Access Now thinks that the lawsuit may not continue under Musk. (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.) He says it would be a victory for the Indian government because of their actions. “It also sends a signal to the global tech industry, saying ‘Back off, don’t try to do more.’”

A wave of prominent users impersonated Musk over the Weekend, with the goal of showing potential flaws in the social media company’s plans for a revised verification system.

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

Tweets about Elon Musk: Trump, Zucker, Sweeney, Adele and the Oasis of Tiny Talk Town

“I am a freedom of speech absolutist and I eat doody for breakfast every day,” Silverman tweeted Saturday. Her account also retweeted posts supporting Democratic candidates.

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

CNN fired comedian Kathy Zucker after she held a bloody head like that of then- President Donald Trump. Griffin had co-hosted the New Year’s Eve program alongside Anderson Cooper for a decade.

Musk had been a thorn in the side of the account. According to screenshots Sweeney shared with CNN, Musk reached out to him last December through a Twitter private message asking, “Can you take this down? It is a security risk.”

Musk said that talk is so small it feels like it is coming from his own mind. Congratulations: We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk.

Lurking isn’t Doomscrolling: Regulatory Compliance on Twitter from the Time of the Covid Pandemic

The electric car founder who follows a disproportionate number of very active blue checks would be easy to see why they would mistake his own experience for that of everyone else. Same goes for reporters. 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 are called “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. It is a simple decision to sit back and observe because it is a way to deal with the complexity and chaos that is New Twitter. If you want to check in on Musk’s new toy, close your app or browser tab. Go ahead and send a message, then stop. You should keep an eye out for it during basketball games. If you have to, direct those message threads to another location. For another time, put your original thoughts into another place.

Even if a violation is proven, Musk can still face personal liability as he stumbles through a series of headaches that have been self-inflicted.

There are other, more substantive regulatory obligations that have come into question, too. They include requirements that Twitter produce written privacy assessments of any new “product, service or practice” — or when Twitter updates those things — that could affect user data or put it at risk.

Within 14 days of any such change,Twitter must submit a sworn compliance notice to the FTC. The compliance notice is intended both to advise the FTC of major changes at the company as well as a commitment that it will continue to comply with the order, according to David Vladeck, a former senior FTC official and a law professor at Georgetown University.

Alex Spiro, Musk’s attorney, said Thursday that they are in dialogue with the FTC and will work closely with them to ensure they are in compliance.

The FTC was concerned about the chaotic environment because there were serious deficiencies which caused the consent order to be issued in the first place.

In a message that was seen by CNN, an employee warned coworkers that Musk might be trying to put responsibility for certifying FTC compliance onto individual engineers at the company.

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

The FTC has increasingly signaled it could seek to hold individual executives personally accountable if they’re found to have been responsible for a company’s violations, naming them in future orders and imposing binding requirements on their future conduct, even if they leave the company. (Last month, the FTC showed its willingness to follow through, imposing sanctions on the CEO of alcohol delivery service Drizly.)

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

What Twitter Has Done to Disturb Elon Musk: A Social Media Empirical Report on a Loss of the Twitter Signup Feature

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.

The menu option to sign up for the paid subscription service was gone from the app just two days after its official launch, with only the add-on still available. It was not immediately clear when the company might restore the offering.

Hours after the gray badges launched as a way to help users differentiate legitimate celebrity and branded accounts from accounts that had simply paid for a blue check mark, Musk abruptly wrote on his website that he had killed the feature.

Over the past few days, Twitter has seemingly been doing everything in its power to stop a wave of verified accounts impersonating brands and public figures — including pausing the Twitter Blue signups that allow them to pop up in the first place, and bringing the “Official” grey check marks that were previously announced and then canned by Elon Musk.

The rocky roll out of the paid verification feature was criticized by misinformation experts who warned that it would make it more difficult to find reliable information during the US mid-term elections. Some users of the platform had a difficult time giving feedback.

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.

“Bottom line is that you have a decision to make,” Cuban added. “Stick with the new Twitter that democratizes every tweet by paid accounts and puts the onus on all users to curate for themselves. Or bring back Twitter curation. One makes it easier to stay in touch with friends and family on social media. The other is not good.

In a event for advertisers held this week, Musk pleaded with brands to keep using the platform, after a growing number of companies paused ads. In the event, Musk sought to appear magnanimous in accepting responsibility for the company’s performance.

A tweet from @Roblox_US announces the addition of sex to the game popular with young adults. It has been up since Thursday morning. If 1000 people follow a now deleted account pretending to be Coke, it will put cocaine back in Coca-Cola. It got those retweets.

An account parodying Ohio Governor Mike Dewine has also managed to escape a ban, despite its ten-hour old tweet with over 2,000 retweets announcing the governor’s plan for “eradicating the people of Columbus.”

It is bad for the company that these fake brands stayed up for so long. As of right now, the company relies on advertising as its main source of revenue. Advertisers have shown that they are not very fond of a platform that lets people impersonate them. There have been several very brand-unsafe viral tweets — perhaps one of the most infamous was someone impersonating pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, announcing that insulin was free.

The company apologized for people being fooled by the faker. Both Eli Lilly and Lockheed Martin, which had an imposter of its own, have seen dramatic drops to their stock prices on Friday, though it’s impossible to say for sure if the tweets were even partially responsible for that.

Musk replied to someone talking about fake posts from Nintendo and President Joe Biden with two laughing emojis, and as a result, many of them have been banned from the micro-blogging site. I don’t think he’s laughing at all today, as evidenced by the fact that Omnicom, one of the biggest ad firms with clients such as Apple, Coca Cola and McDonalds, issued a memo advising its clients to refrain from buying advertising on twitter for a little while.

The Deep State in Action: Hunter Biden, Matt Taibbi, Twitter Files, and a Qnon/Webmaster Correspondence

The poll, which closed around 12:45 pm ET on Thursday, finished with 72.4% voting in favor of the proposition and 27.6% voting against. More than 3 million votes were cast in the poll.

When he bought the company, Musk promised a council with widely diverse viewpoints and no major content decisions would be made until it was in place. There is no evidence that such a group has been formed or was involved in Musk’s replatforming decisions. Musk referred to the voice of the people as the voice of god after restoring Trump’s account.

A large majority (47%) of respondents in the poll voted yes to unbanning accounts, from a pool of over 3 million votes. It is unclear who voted, but it is worth remembering that Musk spent a lot of time trying to get out of buying Twitter because of the claims that it was filled with inauthentic accounts.

Weiss’ tweets follow the first “Twitter Files” drop earlier this month from journalist Matt Taibbi, who shared internal Twitter emails about the company’s decision to temporarily suppress a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden and his laptop, which largely corroborated what was already known about the incident.

Foreign intelligence officials identified the laptop as possible Russian interference, and major news outlets, unable to corroborate its contents, held off on the story. Twitter went a step further, temporarily forbidding its users from sharing the Post story, even in their DMs.

Fans of Trump suspected there was more to Twitter’s actions. They believed the FBI and the Democratic National Committee, which they believed colluded to rig the 2016 election with allegations of the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia, were meddling in the 2020 vote as well: the Deep State in action.

One Qnon writer wrote, “The Twitter files confirm Q’s entire main narrative.” “Balenciaga confirms the rest.” That message, which references the fantastical claims about fashion brand Balenciaga’s role in child trafficking, was seen more than 120,000 times on Telegram. Despite some optimism that his account would be restored, that particular QAnon influencer is still suspended on the micro-blogging site. Taibbi shared a photo of the custom top-level domain.pizza which was used by the personal email of formerTTER CEOJACK DOYLES.

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.

Part of the problem lies in the actual definition of “shadowban.” The term has come to mean whatever people want it to mean, with all the ideologically useful flexibility of words like “woke.” This has allowed Musk’s fans to play gotcha with a old false claim by TWITTER. But, aha! they seem to say, “Now intrepid journalist Bari Weiss has shown this is not so!” Weiss took advantage of this deliberate slipperiness when she claimed,  “What many people call ‘shadowbanning,’ Twitter executives and employees call ‘visibility filtering’ or VF,” and implied her sources said they were exactly the same thing.

His announcement came amid a new release of internal Twitter documents on Thursday, sanctioned and cheered by Musk, that once again placed a spotlight on the practice of limiting the reach of certain, potentially harmful content — a common practice in the industry that Musk himself has seemingly both endorsed and criticized.

The “Twitter Files” are to journalism what cosplay is to superheroism: an occasionally convincing imitation of the real thing. While cosplayers bring joy and beauty to public life, theTwitter files are proving to be a source of amusement for the likes of QAnon and other extremely online individuals addicted to viral outrage. The latest round was meant to show that far-right imagining was avaiable, but could not be seen by the general public.

But Weiss revealed both less and more than she wished, and in the process helped confirm what should already have been obvious after Matt Taibbi’s first round of Twitter Files posting: The confected scandals supposedly revealed by this PR-friendly access to Twitter’s internal systems offer a theatrical transparency that occludes the lack of the real thing under Musk’s leadership.

Weiss was able to show several examples of moderation actions being taken on the accounts of right-leaning figures, but he did not know if those actions were taken against other accounts.

But all she showed was that Twitter was doing what it had always said it was doing. First and foremost, “visibility filtering” covers everything, including user-generated filtering. They have been visibility filters for you if you have blocked or muted anyone. It talks about how the public would not be able to see any of the suspended accounts. Weiss quotes from a letter written by former leaders of trust and safety that said people are asking them if they shadow ban. We don’t.

This ranking is explained in further detail with examples and an FAQ about a recent incident where some Republican politicians (along with Democratic politicos and a whole lot of other non-conservatives) were temporarily unable to be autosuggested through search. That was quickly fixed, but Gadde and Beykpour were clear that Twitter always had, and always would, engage in ranking and filtering based on a variety of factors. In other words, the thing that Weiss actually “uncovered” was something Twitter admitted to over four years ago. It is included in the terms of service.

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

Roth’s position involved him working on sensitive issues including the suspension of then-President Donald Trump’s account in 2021. Weiss posted a series of photos purportedly showing internal documents whereRoth and others discussed banning Trump from using the platform and people questioned if the former president’s statements violated the platform’s policies.

On the day of the election, he wrote on his account that he was just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist.

I want to make it clear, I support Yoel. I have made some questionable social networking posts but I want you to know that. Musk thinks that he has integrity, and that we are entitled to our political beliefs.

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, the report on a president’s every word assumed that it was a signal of future policy. Trump clearly stated many things to get a rise out of people. Reporting on them, I argued, just fed the flames. An editor pushed back. “He’s the president,” he said, or words to that effect. “What he says is news.”

Here, for instance, we saw a slew of rapid-response news stories about Musk’s tweet on December 11 that “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” a dig at the government’s former chief infectious disease expert, as well as at gender diversity. 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 was the way the coverage of Trump was done. The right-wing media treated him as an egomania, corruption, and lack of interest in grasping basic policy, while the left-wing media was more interested in showing how bad he was for the country. There was plenty of good reporting going on at the same time, but these polarizing accounts tended to dominate the conversation. The losers were the public, whose understanding of what was actually happening across the country was forced through incompatible narratives around the behavior of one unhinged man in the White House.

The OnlyFans Porn Files: Conservatives, Politicians, and Theoretical Analogues of Top Quotients

Most companies don’t like porn. While OnlyFans has surrendered, Chatroulette and Tumblr appear to take a firmer stand than ever against it. Facebook and YouTube conscript armies of algorithms and humans to banish porn in deference to advertisers who don’t want brands debased by unwholesome adjacencies. Alone among the big social media services, Twitter allows users to post what it calls “intimate media.” But the platform also permanently suspends users who post upskirts, creepshots, revenge porn, nonconsensual erotica, images shot with hidden cameras, or media accompanied by incitements to violence. Pornographic images, which make up about 13 percent of all tweets, cannot yet be directly sold.

Porn’s not my cup of tea, but you have to admire its ferocity and cunning. Timothy Morton thinks that it’s a megagenre, an object that’s ungraspable in its ubiquity and scale. In effect, porn online behaves like a predator plant, saturating the pixels with flesh colors, choking off biodiverse memes, and sowing vast digital acreage with salt.

After it was overrun by porn a few years later, there was no longer appeal to the service. In just a few short years, chatrounette had traded its fun side for sex and goons. Sex workers make some of the porn on OnlyFans, which was started as a platform for performers to post videos.

For many conservatives and Musk fans, the existence of these internal discussions is itself a smoking gun. The fact that mainstream outlets are not covering the TWiP without large degree of skepticism is fueling righteous indignation.

“What is really coming through in the Twitter Files for me is: people who are confronting high-stakes, unanticipated events and trying to figure out what policies apply and how,” said Renée DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, who studies how narratives spread on social networks.

But while the accounts were made publicly viewable on Saturday, the journalists were restricted from posting until they removed the tweets Musk had claimed violated Twitter’s rules.

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.

They show Twitter executives and rank and file employees grappling with difficult tradeoffs, questioning the company’s rules and how they should be applied – and in some cases, getting things wrong.

The New York Post had a story about shady business deals by Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, that was briefly blocked by Twitter before the 2020 presidential election.

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.” It also suspended the New York Post’s own Twitter account until it deleted its tweets about the story. (Facebook was alarmed by the article, too, but didn’t go as far as Twitter. It permitted the link to be posted, and limited the distribution of those posts as its fact-checkers reviewed the claims.

Quick recap of what led to this: since acquiring Twitter in October (was it really only October?), Musk has insisted that the platform would be a haven of free speech absolutism, leading to a rise in the level of hate speech. Meanwhile, he has quashed accounts making fun of him, fired employees who dared to be critical on the platform, and banned an account tracking his private jet despite having previously said he would not ban it. The account, @ElonJet, used publicly available information to track the jet’s whereabouts. Harwell and other journalists linked to the information on the ban from their accounts. On Thursday night they were banned as a result.

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

He stated that there was no ill intent and everyone acted according to the best information at the time. “Mistakes were made.”

He said he would have preferred the internal files to be “released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider.” He added: “There’s nothing to hide…only a lot to learn from.”

elon Musk is using the Twitter Files to discredit the foes and push the conspiracies theorem: The role of the CEO and of his former colleagues

There are good reasons to demand more insight into how social media companies operate. She said that the decisions are often inscrutable. These platforms shape public opinion, and so the question of how they’re moderated and designed is important.

She believed that outsiders need more than “anecdotes” Musk’s selected journalists are sharing to get the full picture.

She said it’s important to see discussions about the other world leaders who have not been kicked off the platform in order to understand the decision to ban Trump.

“There’s value in what’s been revealed to the public, but at the same time, it is primarily reinforcing a perception in large part based on your pre-existing opinions as partisan individuals within the United States,” DiResta said.

The framing of the disclosures as secret knowledge plays well on social media sites, says Mike Caulfield, a researcher at the University of Washington.

Both men were the subject of violent threats. A person close to the matter says thatRoth and his family have been forced to leave their home.

“The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn’t solve anything,” Dorsey wrote on Tuesday. You should direct the blame at me or my actions.

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

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

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

What Twitter reveals about the Jet-Tracking Account Jack Sweeney, and the Case for a Killing of a Billionaire

“It is being processed as punitive and sort of owning the last regime, as opposed to saying, ‘Here are things that we can see in these files and here is how it’s going to be done differently under our watch,’” DiResta said.

On Wednesday, Musk suspended accounts that track the movement of private jets used by billionaires, government officials and others, including Musk’s own plane, claiming the accounts amounted to “doxxing,” or the sharing of personal information to encourage harassers.

For Sweeney, it was the latest in a longtime tangle with the billionaire. The University of Central Florida student said Musk last year sent him a private message offering $5,000 to take the jet-tracking account down, citing security concerns. Musk stopped communicating with Sweeney, who continued to use the account. Their exchange was first reported by tech news outlet Protocol earlier this year.

He threatened legal action against Jack Sweeney, the 20-year-old college sophomore and programmer who started the flight- tracking account, and organizations who supported harm to my family. It’s not clear what legal action Musk could take against Sweeney for an account that automatically posted public flight information.

Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment. Musk has promised to eradicate automatically generated junk mail from the platform but it’s unclear if he will be able to.

Twitter has updated its private information policy to state that sharing live location information is a violation of the policy. Here is the full addition to what now counts as a violation:

Musk claimed that journalists had violated his new policy by sharing his location and that it was an attempt to kill him. CNN did not show the billionaire’s location.

In a January post pinned to the top of the jet-tracking account’s feed before it was suspended, Sweeney wrote that it “has every right to post jet whereabouts” because the data is public and “every aircraft in the world is required to have a transponder,” including Air Force One that transports the U.S. president.

I was able to use an alternative link to a version of the tracker on theinstagram, which did not have an ironclad filters for this. It appears that Sweeney and his accounts are being targeted by the social media network even though it promised to not ban the accounts following his plane.

Some other accounts tracking the jets of billionaires, including Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, have been suspended and remain so. Sweeney told The New York Times that he had seen about thirty of his accounts banned, and that he was the creator of many of them.

He was able to find a notice that the account was permanently suspended for breaking the rules. The note couldn’t explain how it broke the rules.

Twitter bans follow-up tweets from Musk, Mac, and Haram-Olbermann: “We don’t use Twitter to censor the press”

In the past few weeks, the account “elonjet” has documented Musk’s travels from his home base in Austin, Texas, to various airports in the US for his work as both a CEO and as a rocket scientist.

It showed Musk flying to East Coast cities ahead of major events, and to New Orleans shortly before a Dec. 3 meeting there with French President Emmanuel Macron.

At the time the journalists were suspended, Twitter head of trust and safety Ella Irwin told The Verge: “We don’t make exceptions to this policy for journalists or any other accounts.” Musk also made his feelings on the matter clear with the language of his poll, and through various follow-up tweets. He also implied that the flight tracker had some connection to a “crazy stalker” who encountered a car that was carrying one of his children, and that the person “blocked car from moving & climbed onto hood.” However, the LAPD says no crime report has been filed about such an incident, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Doxxing refers to the practice of sharing someone’s home address or other personal information online. The banned account had instead used publicly available flight data, which remain online and accessible, to track Musk’s jet.

The thin-skinned new Twitter owner on Thursday banned the accounts of several high-profile journalists from the nation’s top news organizations, including: CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan; The New York Times’ Ryan Mac; and The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell. Among those banned were progressive journalist, and pundit, Haram and Olbermann.

The move marked a significant attempt by Musk, a self-described free speech absolutist, to wield his unilateral authority over the platform to censor the press.

The president of the Society of Professional Journalists said it was concerned about the suspensions and that it affects all journalists.

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

Some users reported that the platform began intervening when they attempted to post links to their own profiles on other social networks.

In a post on Substack, Rupar wrote that he is unsure why he was suspended. He told us that he did have a link on Wednesday to a Facebook page for the jet-tracking account.

The Future of Twitter: The Free Press, the Town Square, the Irregular Social Media, the Media, and the Freedom of the Press

Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at the advocacy group Free Press, echoed Jaffer’s remarks, saying suspending journalists based seemingly on personal animus “sets a dangerous precedent.”

“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 make exceptions to this policy for journalists, or any other accounts.”

“Freedom of the press cannot be switched on and off as you please,” Germany’s foreign ministry tweeted on Friday. They are no longer able to follow us and comment on what we say. We have a problem with that @Twitter.”

“The EU’s Digital Services Act requires respect of media freedom and fundamental rights. This is reinforced under our #MediaFreedomAct,” Jourová said in a post on Twitter, adding that Musk “should be aware of that.”

Thierry Breton, a top EU official, warned Musk in late November that the social media platform must take significant steps to comply with the bloc’s content moderation laws.

There are questions about the future of the free press on the platform that is referred to as a town square. Will news and media organizations still be on the platform after Musk’s ban? Will they remove their reporters? What is their content? And what will major advertisers such as Apple and Amazon do?

Sally Buzbee, Executive Editor for The Post, says that the suspension of Drew Harwell’s account undermines Elon Musk’s claim that he intends to run a platform dedicated to free speech. Harwell was banished from Twitter without warning, process or explanation, following the publication of his accurate reporting about Musk. Our journalist should be reinstated immediately.”

On Thursday, Musk also attended a Twitter Space hosted by Buzzfeed News’ Katie Notopoulos, which was also attended by several of the suspended journalists, who had apparently been allowed to join due to a technical glitch. Before leaving the call, Musk said “you dox, you get suspended. End of story. Twitter later turned off the Spaces feature. Notopoulos got a message saying that she could not join a Space or go live because she violated the rules, after it was restored.

That timeline may prove tricky because, as I reported last week, he got rid of most of the Spaces team through layoffs and “hardcore” purges. As of 1PM ET, it’s still down on iOS. It appears to be available to at least some Android users, and desktop users can listen in on Spaces chats (but not participate).

The sad thing about the shutdown is that it’s not much of an issue for people to use live audio on a daily basis. Spotify Live is a shell, Clubhouse has fallen from its pandemic highs, and Facebook’s live audio feature has been transformed beyond recognition. Spaces is perfect for people who just want to have fun and are easy to use. But assuming that Spaces comes back, today or otherwise, there will inevitably be something else in there that pushes Musk to the edge. He’ll take it away or institute new rules to protect his ego when that happens.

An employee at an organization that was part of the trust and safety council says that it’s more important to have relationships with leaders like India’s Modi than vulnerable communities in far away countries. The employee requested anonymity because of their concern that their organization may be hit by harassment and threats the same way as those faced by people who worked on social networking site.

The discrepancy may be related to the government reaction to moderation on social platforms. The company was banned after it removed the threat from the presidential candidate. But instead of banning Buhari in turn, the company later negotiated with the government to be reinstated by agreeing, among other things, to open a local office, pay local taxes, and register as a broadcaster. Nigeria is now considering legislation to regulate platforms.

Left or right? Why did Musk and the Left lose their freedom in a campaign to stop hate and make our voices heard? The case of Freedom House

One aspect of the trade-off between taking enforcement actions and not is access to markets, as stated by Kian Vesteinsson, senior research analyst for tech and democracy at Freedom House.

There is 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.

Musk’s latest power moves are nothing short of dangerous. Recently unemployed tech and journalism workers should take them as a rallying call to unite to create new, healthier online spaces. We have nothing to lose except our dependence on a mercurial, egotistical czar to set the terms of our public debates.

When Musk suspended the journalists, he ran a long poll asking if he should be allowed back in. He said that he would redo the poll because it had too many options.

After a former congressional candidate claimed that accounts were being quickly reinstated, Musk declared freedom Friday, in response to the fact that the polls had been completed. 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 appears to be part of Musk making good on his promise to give most previously-suspended accounts “general amnesty,” which he also 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. The poll showed 58.7% of respondents favored a move to immediately unsuspend accounts over 41.3% who said the suspensions should be lifted in seven days.

Most of the accounts were back early Saturday. One exception was Business Insider’s Linette Lopez, who was suspended after the other journalists, also with no explanation, she told The Associated Press.

She said that Musk was threatening workers who talk to the media and wouldn’t make rent payments because he was reneging on a promised severance for laid off employees. Lopez described his actions as “classic Elon-going-for-broke behavior.”

The Mashable journalist suspended for tweeting about the ‘Stalling of the O’ Sullivan’ incident’ and the Mastodon crowdfunded network

Stephane Dujarric said the move sets “a dangerous precedent” at a time when journalists all over the world are facing threats.

The suspended journalist from the technology news outlet Mashable, Matt Binder, was thrown out Thursday night after sharing a screen shot of the O’ Sullivan post.

The Los Angeles Police Department sent a statement to several media outlets, including the AP, saying that they had been 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 the new regime seems to have the same problem as the old one, and that she opposed it in both cases.

If the suspensions lead to the exodus of media organizations, the platform would be changed at the fundamental level, it was said by a marketing and media executive.

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 breaking news happening on social media and we have to go after the journalists for it. Driving journalists off social media is the biggest self- inflicted wound I can think of.

The suspension may be the biggest red flag yet for advertisers as some have already cut their spending due to uncertainty about Musk’s direction on the platform.

The number of Mastodon users on Friday more than doubled the 3.4 million they had on the day Musk took ownership. Administrators and users on Mastodon networks solicited donations when they were overwhelmed by the demand for computing resources. Many of the networks, known as “instances,” are crowd-funded. The platform is designed to be ad-free.

How the Musk bans CNN, Mac, and Harwell responded to Rupar: “Cosmology is a mess” and “there’s no justice”

Musk had on Thursday banned CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, and The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell. Independent progressive journalist Aaron Rupar, former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, and Insider columnist Linette Lopez were also banned.

Harwell provided a copy of his appeal to CNN. Harwell said that his message did not contain a link to anyone’s private information.

Rupar told CNN that he had ultimately decided to simply remove the tweet and move on from the episode, though he described the whole affair as “kinda [sic] absurd obviously.”

The suspension of the journalists had been met with swift condemnation by news organizations, the American Civil Liberties Union, United Nations, Democratic members of Congress and others.