Trump Can’t Hang Up His Hat: Why We Shouldn’t Forget to Say Hide a Pin? Musk and Trump Revisited
Although he has said that his acquisition is not a way to make money, Musk has raised ideas for decreasing costs and increasing revenue. Governments and businesses could be charged a small amount to use the site, there could be job cuts on the table if the expenses are not reduced, and there could be an increase in users. Some of Twitter’s current employees have criticized Musk’s plans for the platform as “incoherent” and lacking in detail.
“I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump; I think that was a mistake,” Musk said at a conference in May, pledging to reverse the ban were he to become the company’s owner.
Relations between the pair seem to have soured, with the men publicly trading barbs this summer. Musk responded by writing, “I don’t hate the man but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset.”
The Why and Why of the Twitter Skinner Campaign, a Critical Review of Musk’s Terms of Incorporation in the Wall Street Journal
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 Nugget will appear, and it usually is repetitive and uninteresting. Skinner states that rats and pigeons are good at generating compulsive behavior because of 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. It’s one reason people should know better how to self-destruct on the site.
If it weren’t obvious before, the latest moves make clear that Musk tends to run this company the way dictators run their states: by making decisions that serve his personal interests rather than those of the public, and capriciously getting rid of people who stand in his way. That’s why tech workers and journalists who have lost their jobs in the past few weeks should come together to create non-profit social networks designed to serve the public interest.
In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform has to be warm and welcoming to all where you can choose your experience according to your 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, the company’s chief customer officer said she had a great conversation with Musk on Wednesday and appeared to endorse his Thursday message to advertisers.
According to The Wall Street Journal, one ad buying agency had already gotten requests from about a dozen clients to stop their advertisements on social media if Musk restores Trump’s account.
Musk said in the letter that his earlier statement that the acquisition is not meant to be a money- making venture is still true.
Legal experts widely believed that Twitter was on strong footing to have the deal enforced in court. The legal battle would go to trial two weeks before it, but Musk said he would follow through on the original deal. As the parties negotiated, Musk’s attorneys asked a judge to stay the legal proceedings, prompting pushback from Twitter, which feared that Musk might not stay true to his promise to close the deal.
While Musk is in a bad position of having to hand over control of the company he just purchased, it would be good for him to return to work at the company and put the distraction behind him.
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.
Twitter Smells Like a Pedestrian: Musk Shuts Down Twitter, or Does Twitter Really Need a Penalty?
The parties were told to close the deal or face a new trial.
“Even slightly loosening content moderation on the platform is sure to spook advertisers, many of whom already find Twitter’s brand safety tools to be lacking compared with other social platforms,” Enberg said.
“The long-term potential for Twitter, in my view, is an order of magnitude greater than its current value,” he said on Tesla’s earnings conference call last week.
Musk immediately fired four of Twitter’s top executives — CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, General Counsel Sean Edgett and Policy Head Vijaya Gadde. Personette and Brand, the company’s chief people and diversity officer, resigned in the middle of the day on Friday.
Many Twitter employees have recently noted the absence of Parag Argawal, their current CEO, who Musk soured on after the two initially started talking about Musk joining Twitter’s board. An employee who requested anonymity to speak about the incident, said that he had been gone for weeks. “He has ghosted us,” said another. There were many comments about Argawal on the employee section of Blind and on the employee section of Slack.
Insider said that the execs got handsome payouts for their trouble and that Personette received $11.2 million.
Musk was scheduled to be deposed on October 6th and 7th, after having moved his deposition from late September. He announced he’d honor the contract his lawyers negotiated after all just days before the deposition was to take place. That deposition was probably going to be uncomfortable; a judge found that Musk likely deleted Signal messages that were relevant to the case. The deposition was delayed as Musk and Twitter worked toward a deal; Musk even received a court order halting proceedings to allow the deal to close by October 28th.
The Supreme Court agreed to take two cases in which it will determine whether or not Twitter is held liable for illegal content.
What Musk and Agrawal Did After Musk’s Three-Year Brexit Bidding Scenario Have Learned About Social Media and Twitter
Although they came very fast, the major personnel moves have been expected and are the first of many big changes the CEO will make.
Musk privately clashed with Agrawal in April, immediately before deciding to make a bid for the company, according to text messages later revealed in court filings.
About the same time, he used Twitter to criticize Gadde, the company’s top lawyer. There was a lot 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. After she was fired the harassment came back to life.
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.”
It’s a realization that having no moderation is not good for business, as it will endanger advertisers and subscribers.
The platform is not responsible for the fact that consumers are simply bombarded with things they don’t want to hear about.
Twitter HQ: Launching the Deal: Musk’s Tweet to Advertisers has Passed on a “Small” Problem
But Musk has been signaling that 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!”
The New York Stock Exchange notified investors that it will be suspending trading in shares ofTwitter before it opens for trading on Friday, in anticipation of the company going private under Musk.
Musk’s enthusiasm about visiting the building this week stood in stark contrast to his earlier suggestion that the building should be turned into a homeless shelter because few employees actually worked there.
The company was losing millions and there was no choice but to cut jobs. He did not provide details on the daily losses at Twitter and said employees who lost their jobs were offered three months’ pay as severance.
Thursday’s note to advertisers shows a newfound emphasis on advertising revenue, especially a need for Twitter to provide more “relevant ads” — which typically means targeted ads that rely on collecting and analyzing users’ personal information.
A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.
But the rollout of Musk’s first signature project, a new version of the Twitter Blue subscription that will allow anyone to get a verification badge, has been a disaster.
Charging for verified badges might appear at first glance as a business story. But the move will have significant ramifications on the information landscape. It will make it difficult for users to know if a account is authentic or not.
The right disliked the term blue checks in their opinion, because they said they represented a group of people who controlled the conversation. Taking away those free blue checks, and the air of authority they give upon the profile they are appended to, will certainly delight some conservatives.
Twitter Exec: What Will the Musk Public Anomalous Data Tell Us? (The New York Times on Tuesday, March 21)
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.”
The investor and the general partner of an investment firm focused oncryptocurrencies have confirmed on social media that they are working with Musk to manage the company and come up with new products.
Nick Caldwell, general manager of core technology, changed his bio to “former Twitter Exec” while Jay Sullivan, general manager of consumer and revenue products, removed his title from his bio. The New York Times also reported Tuesday that Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Berland had left the company; on Tuesday night she tweeted a single blue heart.
Calacanis earlier this week said that he was in New York to meet with the marketing and advertising community. He has also tweeted questions to Twitter users about the platform’s subscription and bookmark features.
Davisson doubts Twitter, which has gutted its moderation staff, would be able to enforce Musk’s new policies announced this week in a way that covers all users.
The Covid Plandemic: Silence is all you, I’m gonna hate it, I am going to cry. But I will not cry. When Donald Trump meets Schumer
Big pharma created The Covid PLANdemic to silence me. Everybody tries to silence me,” she said. Please speaking at a lower volume. I’m sorry, am I too loud for your precious intensive care unit? You are not even sick!
“Hi. Oh my gosh, your profile is so funny. Schumer, dressed in a red dress, said she loves funny guys. It’s insane that they said I was a bot. I’m all woman and I love funny guys like you. In fact, you should check out this website where me and some 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. Trump said it was very great. “And in many ways, also terrible. It is very bad. Very, very bad. It is not easy to crack the phone screen and the automatically draining of the Venmo.
Twitter Blue with Verification: Musk, Griffin, Bertinelli, and other Twitter users have been warned that the new Twitter account had no flight data for Musk’s jet
An account that used publicly available flight data to track Musk’s jet was suspended on Wednesday, despite a pledge by the new owner of the platform to keep it up because of his free speech principles.
A day after changing her screen name to Musk, Kathy Griffin’s account was suspended. She told a Bloomberg reporter that she had also used his profile photo.
It seems that not all the content moderators were let go. Lol,” Griffin joked afterward on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform where she set up an account last week.
Actor Valerie Bertinelli had similarly appropriated Musk’s screen name — posting a series of tweets in support of Democratic candidates on Saturday before switching back to her true name. “Okey-dokey. I’ve had a good time. I believe that I made my point.
The $8 verified accounts are Musk’s way of democratizing the service, he claims. On Saturday, a Twitter update for iOS devices listed on Apple’s app store said users who “sign up now” for the new “Twitter Blue with verification” can get the blue check next to their names “just like the celebrities, companies and politicians you already follow.”
It said the service would be offered in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. However, it was not available Sunday and there was no indication when it would go live. A Twitter employ, Esther Crawford, told The Associated Press it is coming “soon but it hasn’t launched yet.”
Like Griffin, some Twitter users have already begun migrating from the platform — Counter Social is another popular alternative — following layoffs that began Friday that reportedly affected about half of Twitter’s 7,500-employee workforce. They fear a breakdown of moderation and verification could create a disinformation free-for-all on what has been the internet’s main conduit for reliable communications from public agencies and other institutions.
Yoel’s message Friday was to make sure that there were no fears regarding the head of safety and integrity. The group least affected by the job cuts was the front-line moderation staff.
Edward Perez was the director of product management at retweet where he was responsible for the civic integrity team. Joining the company in September 2021, after more than three decades working in election integrity, Perez’s role was to keep Twitter safe during times of great upheaval—such as elections—from a product perspective. Perez feels that he needs to speak out, as Musk guts the staff at the platform and allows users to pay to get a coveted blue check.
Perez is a board member of the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan group devoted to election security and integrity and he is concerned that the drama around corporate takeover is sucking up oxygen in the room. The focus on the Musk psychodrama is making it hard to focus on the election-related issues.
Given Musk’s propensity for tweeting, and his rapid decisions after previous polls, many expected he would have addressed the elephant in the room by now. But he has not. Musk was silent for most of Monday, refraining from posting for 18 hours.
The company bungled its lay off process, the paywall may or may not look like, and something happened inside the company on Monday.
What Happened When Employees Left Off Appear Overnight? A Rumor on Blind, and the Company’s First Response to the Layoffs
The most vulnerable among us were the pregnant women, employees with cancer and workers on visas that managers jockeyed with to preserve employment for them, according to a former employee.
Several teams were wiped out entirely, but some were cut more than others. As it turned out, though, the company went too far. As I was the first to report on Saturday, within hours of the layoffs, some managers were already being told to ask select laid-off employees if they wanted their old jobs back.
It began as a rumor on Blind, the app where employees of various companies can chat anonymously with their coworkers. Within a day it was posted in public channels.
“Sorry to @- everybody on the weekend We have the chance to ask the people who were left off if they will come back. I need to put together names and rationales by 4 PM PST on Sunday,” one such message from a manager to employees read. “I’ll do some research but if any of you have been in contact with folks who might come back and who we think will help us, please nominate before 4.”
“I think we might use some Android and iOS help,” the manager added. According to Platformer, the company has been in contact with both engineers and designers over the past day to try to get them back.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/7/23446262/elon-musk-twitter-paywall-possible
Getting Twitter Off of Twitter: How Do You Feel? Employees Are Scared by Musk’s On-Demand Layoffs
Some employees are nervous that if Twitter can’t get them to return voluntarily, the company will formally rescind the notice they received Friday laying them off. Businesses with more than 100 full-time employees are required to give 60 days notice if they lay off more than one third of their staff. There was a promise to give people 60 days of pay and 30 days of job security at that time.
Some workers have begun to consult with lawyers over their options in the event that they are recalled. Others are in open revolt, tweeting public threads about various aspects of the organization that have been broken after the ready-fire-aim disaster of Musk’s layoffs process.
Remaining managers are ready for a larger workload than before. A person told me that technical managers need to spend at least half their time writing code in addition to managing at least 20 individual contributors. Others have been given much higher numbers of direct reports.
The employees told me that the teams that are on the pet projects are doing 20-hour days. “But the majority of the company is kind of just sitting around. No chain of command, no priorities, no organization chart, and in many cases, no idea who your manager or team is.”
How Sacks Lost It All: Why the New Blue is Good for Slack and How it’ll Fail to Launch Its App
Sacks has been particularly unflinching in echoing Musks’ talking points, whether it’s justifying a feud with Apple or attempting to stir up outrage about a Twitter account that posted publicly available information about the whereabouts of Musk’s private jet. Sacks responded to the user with a single word, “chess,” when they asked him what he and Musk disagreed about.
The vice president told the employees that the most recent podcast discussed the current layoffs happening across tech, and provided some insight into why they were happening. It’s worth listening to in order to understand the macro environment.
Most employees were more interested in their health benefits, which had suddenly become a question mark. The open-enrollment period was supposed to begin today, but no information was available within the company’s human-resources system. Employees posted several questions about benefits inside Slack today, but all went unanswered by management.
I was told that by the end of the day, some teams were starting to have meetings in which employees were given information on who their managers were, what theirorganization charts looked like, and what their priorities were.
The company told advertisers that it is flourishing, but on the other side, it has lost 15 million users since the end of the second quarter.
But the new Blue likely faces larger problems. The existing version only had a little more than 100,000 active subscribers, Platformer has learned. The new version will be 37.5 percent more expensive, and its value seems murky for most regular users of the platform. The company may not have enough people who will subscribe to justify the effort.
Then, after a debate about the potential effects of unleashing thousands of new verified accounts onto the platforms in the middle of the US midterm elections, the company postponed the launch.
According to an internal message that was seen by CNN, Musk has not shown any fear of the regulators who oversee the company’s many, legally binding consent agreements.
The second feature of the new blue that Musk added at the last minute is a halving of the ad loading in the retweet app. It is thought that change will result in a loss of ad revenue per user in the United States. If the ad-light plan is adopted, it will lose money on Blue, because of the fact that Apple andgoogle each have a share of the $8 monthly subscription.
It was not known how serious Musk and Sacks are about the paywall. The Blue team is fully occupied with the launch of expanded verification, which does not appear imminent.
Why did Twitter lose its ad platform? The impact of Musk’s loss on the company’s trusted users and the trustworthiness of its users
One of the most influential social networks in the world laid off half its workforce over the last week, and blew up key parts of its product, in order to compensate for its decline, and saw an exodus of senior executives.
The paid subscription service was also stopped two days after it was launched, but the menu option to sign up for the add-on disappeared from the app a short time later. The company was not clear when it would resume the offering.
After gray badges went live on Wednesday, Musk said that he had killed the feature and forced subordinates to explain the reversal.
The account’s very next tweet, a day and nine hours later, said exactly the opposite: “To combat impersonation, we’ve added an ‘Official’ label to some accounts.”
The paid verification feature’s rocky rollout attracted widespread criticism from misinformation experts who had warned it would make identifying trustworthy information much more difficult, particularly in the critical period following the US midterm elections. Even some of Musk’s fellow high-powered users of the platform had tough feedback.
“@elonmusk, from one entrepreneur to another, for when you have your customer service hat on. Mark Cuban, a billionaire, says he spent too much time muting the newly purchased checkmarks in an attempt to make their useful again.
Large digital platforms “have experienced professionals out there who develop relationships with these advertisers,” Vincent said. When a staff is let go with no one to reply to those brands, the value of the ad platform goes down.
Most of the ad sales team has been fired or pushed out. Many large companies like General Mills and Macy’s have paused advertising on the platform, with more potentially following suit after new owner Musk restores the account of President Donald Trump and other controversial figures. And any cursory scroll of the platform will likely show you fewer big brand ads.
The associate professor of marketing at USC thinks that a move to a subscription based business would be good forTwitter. Because it didn’t give the same level of user targeting,Twitter’s advertising business has always been smaller than those of rivals.
The former head of trust and safety at the social network wrote in the New York Times that the company’s failure to adhere to the rules could be “catastrophic”. The app stores have previously removed social media apps for failing to protect their users from harmful content, and Roth suggested that Twitter had already begun to receive calls from app store operators following Musk’s takeover. Over the weekend, the head of Apple’s app store, Phil Schiller, deleted his Twitter account.
What Is Trump Saying or Tweeted About Trump? Reporting On His Tweets, His Facebook Messenger, and Other Controversies
Even still, there is no guarantee that continuing to capture the online world’s attention will translate into subscription payments or other revenue growth.
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. An assumed signal of future policy was that a president’s every word was reported as such. Trump, on the other hand, clearly said many things purely to get a rise out of people. Reporting on them, I argued, just fed the flames. Another editor pushed back. He said, or words to that effect, he is the president. “What he says is news.”
We saw many rapid-response news stories about Musk, who wrote a “My pronouns are Prosecute/ Fauci” reply to the former chief infectious disease expert, as well as at gender diversity. There is a picture of his bedside table with two fake guns, as well as a few more facts about his controversial comments on social media.
This is how coverage of Trump was done. The liberal-leaning media were often drawn to stories confirming the belief that a person so clearly unfit to be president would only succeed in bringing himself (or the country) down in flames, while the right-wing media treated his evident egomania, corruption, and lack of interest in grasping basic policy issues or actually doing the job as at best irrelevant and at worst essential qualities for reforming Washington. The good reporting went on at the same time as these polarizing accounts dominated the conversation. The losers were the public, whose understanding of what was actually happening across the country was forced through incompatible narratives around the behavior of one unhinged man in the White House.
This is what is going on with Musk. Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic describes a “dysfunctional relationship between Twitter’s new owner and so many of the journalists who cover him … where the least defensible statements and claims on all sides are relentlessly amplified in a never-ending cycle that predictably fuels disdain and negative polarization.”
Several of the reporters suspended Thursday night had been writing about the new policy and Musk’s rationale for imposing it, which involved his allegations about a stalking incident he said affected his family Tuesday night in Los Angeles.
But by later Wednesday, Twitter suspended all of them, including Sweeney’s personal account. He runs accounts on rival social platforms that are used to follow Musk’s jet.
He saw a notice on the account that it had been permanently suspended because of violating the rules. The note didn’t say how it broke the rules.
And then hours later, the flight-tracking account was back again, before it was shut down anew. Musk and Twitter’s policy team attempted to explain that they have new rules.
Musk said that doxing real-time location info is a physical safety violation. “This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info. Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok.”
There was no response to a request for comment. Sweeney’s was labeled as such by the social network but Musk promised to eradicate automatic generated junk mail.
Musk has previously criticized the technique of “shadow banning” and claimed it was unfairly used to suppress right-wing accounts. He says the new service will still limit the reach of hate, but will be more transparent about it.
In the weeks since the Tesla CEO took over Twitter, the @elonjet account has chronicled Musk’s many cross-country journeys from his home base near Tesla’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, to various California airports for his work at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters and his rocket company SpaceX.
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.
In a January post pinned to the top of the feed before it was suspended, Sweeney wrote that the data is public and that every aircraft in the world is required to have a transponder.
For a long time, so many people around the world have turned to the micro-bruch to keep themselves up to date on the news. 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. Yet the conversations that happen on Twitter seem to heavily influence what reporters and others talk about offline, so these users have an outsize influence on the public debate.
John Davisson, Director of litigation and senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center says that Musk is responding to events that affect him personally and placing new limits on what can be disseminated through the platform. The thing is being carried out in a self-centered way. Musk has announced new policies on live location sharing and privacy that appear designed largely to help himself, not to protect its users.
The Space is Close to Home: Why Twitter Is On Fire: Why Women and Girls Are Toxic for Their Social Media, and How We Can Reclaim It
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. The opinions expressed in this commentary are of her own. Read more opinion on CNN.
A healthy town square should also be a place where people can find reliable information. But researchers at Tufts University recently found that tweets refuting hate and misinformation were “an order of magnitude greater” on Twitter before Musk took over.
It’s clear that we can’t rely on Musk’s Twitter to provide a safe, open forum. We need new, non-profit social networks run by boards responsible for considering the public’s interest when making critical decisions about things like content moderation and community standards. And many of the people who have these skills have just been laid off from their jobs. There have been layoffs at a number of tech and journalism companies lately, including The Washington Post and Facebook, with more to come. Some of these professionals should work together to create new social platforms designed to provide the truly open town hall we so desperately need.
After the suspensions, Musk ran a 30-minute long poll asking when he should unsuspend the journalists. In that poll, “Now” won with 43 percent of responses, but Musk said he would redo it because it had too many options.
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 he left the call, Musk said that he would be suspended. End of story, that’s it.” The space feature was turned off by micro-blogging site. When Notopoulos tried to join a Space she received a message saying she couldn’t do so because she violated the rules.
Hours before the poll was completed and the accounts were reinstated, Musk declared today “freedom Friday” in response to former congressional candidate Lavern Spicer’s comment that accounts were being reinstated at an increasingly fast pace. Several prominent right-to-far-right figures, including Gateway Pundit editor Jim Hoft, were unsuspended on Friday. 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.
After the results of a public poll were received, the company would lift the suspensions. The poll shows 58.7% of respondents want to unsuspend accounts quickly, while 42% would rather see the suspensions lifted in seven days.
Accounts were back by early Saturday. Business Insider’s Linette Lopez was suspended after the other journalists, with no explanation, according to The Associated Press.
The same day, she cited reports that Musk was reneging on severance for laid-off Twitter employees, threatening workers who talk to the media and refusing to make rent payments. Lopez described his actions as “classic Elon-going-for-broke behavior.”
Spaces, Mashable, Spaces and CNN: “Teach me how I feel,” Musk tweeted about a “Dangerous Phenomenon”
The move sets “a dangerous precedent at a time when journalists all over the world are facing censorship, physical threats and even worse,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
The Washington Post’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, said technology reporter Drew Harwell “was banished without warning, process or explanation” following the publication of accurate reporting about Musk.
CNN said in a statement that the impulsive suspension of a number of reporters, including Donie O’ Sullivan, is concerning but not surprising.
Another suspended journalist, Matt Binder of the technology news outlet Mashable, said he was banned Thursday night immediately after sharing a screenshot that O’Sullivan had posted before his own suspension.
The Los Angeles police department sent out a statement about the alleged stalking incident to multiple media outlets, including the AP, and it was in contact with Musk’s representatives.
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 said he would suppress both hate and negative vibes by not giving some accounts of freedom of reach.
“The old regime at Twitter governed by its own whims and biases and it sure looks like the new regime has the same problem,” she tweeted “I oppose it in both cases.”
If a large number of media organizations left the platform as a result of the suspensions, the platform would be changed fundamentally, said Lou Paskalis in an interview.
CBS temporarily stopped using Twitter in November, due to unclear management, but media organizations have largely remained on the platform.
The suspensions may be the biggest red flag yet for advertisers, Paskalis said, some of which had already cut their spending on Twitter over uncertainty about the direction Musk is taking the platform.
Shortly after Musk signed out of a session with a journalist at which he had been asked about reporters’ ousting, the Spaces conference chat went down. Musk later tweeted that Spaces had been taken offline to deal with a “Legacy bug.” Late Friday, Spaces returned.
Advertisers are also monitoring the potential loss of Twitter users. Insider Intelligence forecasts that the service will lose 32 million users over the next two years due to technical issues as well as the return of banned accounts.
It had more than 3.4 million users when Musk took over, but on Friday it had more than 6 million. On many of the thousands of confederated networks in the open-source Mastodon platform, administrators and users solicited donations as disaffected Twitter users strained computing resources. Many of the networks, known as “instances,” are crowd-funded. The platform has been designed to be ad-free.
The incident is yet another example of the inconsistencies and chaos in Musk’s management of Twitter since acquiring the company in October. After coming under fire this weekend for a controversial new policy, Musk promised to make major policy changes at the company by polling users about them and started a poll to see if he should stay as CEO.
Replying to a tweet Sunday, in which MIT artificial intelligence researcher Lex Fridman said he would take the CEO job, Musk hinted he hasn’t been completely happy with his new gig.
Musk needs attention from his audience with a promise that there will be votes on major policy changes in the future.
If his time as the company’s CEO ended the same way, it would be appropriate because he started with a poll and tried desperately and unsuccessfully to get out.
Unmentioned in his tweets, but looming over this week’s entire episode, is the fact that Tesla’s stock price has dropped to a 52-week low of about $150 per share, down nearly 50 percent from a year ago. Musk recently dropped to number two on Forbes’s list of the world’s richest people.
The Twitter Debate on Elon Musk’s Management of the Internet, and the Impact on Facebook, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and other Platforms
More than 17 million people voted in an informal referendum on his leadership of Twitter, which has been marked by mass layoffs, the rescreening of suspended accounts, the suspension of journalists, and whiplash policy changes made in real time.
In yet another significant policy change, Twitter had announced that users will no longer be able to link to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and other platforms the company described as “prohibited.”
Rusch, the Oppenheimer analyst, said the “inconsistent standards application” for Twitter users has helped create a “broad public backlash” against Musk that will in turn hurt Tesla.
Musk had taken a different approach to cracking down after shutting down a Twitter account last week that was tracking the flights of his private jet.
The banned platforms included mainstream websites such as Facebook and Instagram, and upstart rivals Mastodon, Tribel, Nostr, Post and former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social. The seven websites that were included in the blacklist were not others such as Parler, TikTok or LinkedIn.
Twitter previously took action to block links to Mastodon after its main Twitter account tweeted about the @ElonJet controversy last week. Mastodon has grown rapidly in recent weeks as an alternative for many people who are upset with Musk’s new policies on the company, including restoring accounts that had been banned for being anti-Semitic.
In public banter with Twitter followers Sunday, Musk expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO, saying that person “must like pain a lot” to run a company that “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy.”
Elon Musk’s management of Twitter, including the banning of multiple journalists, has “severely damaged” market sentiment around Tesla, and risks sparking a backlash from advertisers and consumers An analyst with Wall Street warned on Monday.
The reason for the downgrade was the decision to ban several journalists, including CNN’s Donie O’ Sullivan.
Rusch believes the ban of journalists without clear communication in an environment that many believe free Speech is at risk is too much for a majority of consumers to continue supporting Mr. Musk.
Twitter Inc. Founder Jason Calacanis and Former Consumer Team Lead Sacks: Bringing the Company to the Foreground with Musk
The most obvious potential candidates for a new Twitter CEO are the Musk lieutenants who have been helping to run the company since his takeover. The short list likely includes investor Jason Calacanis, Craft Ventures partner David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan, an Andreessen Horowitz general partner focused on crypto and Twitter’s former consumer teams lead.
Calacanis, who came to the tech world during the dot com bubble, has backed a number of companies. He has launched several media properties, one of which is with Sacks.
Calacanis tweeted on Sunday night asking, “Who would like the most miserable job in tech AND media?! Who is crazy enough to run a social networking site? Calacanis also ran his own Twitter poll asking followers whether he or Sacks should run the company, separately or together, or whether someone else should take over. The majority of the people voted for something else.
Sacks and Musk were members of the original team atPayPal and they have experience managing a social network. He founded and ran enterprise communications platform Yammer, before selling it to Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion.
On paper, Krishnan may be the most obvious choice of the group. He was responsible for managing teams who were responsible for features of the platform that included search and the home timeline. He worked for both Facebook and Facebook’s mobile ad products.
More recently, he has invested in crypto startups at Andreessen Horowitz, which could give him experience helpful to fulfill Musk’s goal of building payment capabilities for Twitter and making it more than just a social media app.
Musk’s current leadership team, led by Krishnan, is perhaps the least controversial of which will help distract some of the recent negative attention the company has received.
Some Twitter users have speculated about other possible leaders for the social media company, including Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was spotted watching the World Cup with Musk over the weekend.
Kushner is friendly with the Saudi Royal Family, one of Twitter’s largest investors. After working for his family’s real estate development company, a year ago he said he would leave politics and start an investment firm. The weekly New York Observer was previously owned by Kushner.
Repaining Trump’s Account: Musk and the Technicolor Suspension he Promoted in a Twitter Campaign on Election Taxes
The majority of users who were surveyed said they wanted Musk to restore former President Donald Trump’s account. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” he pronounced via tweet, Latin for “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”
Likewise, when Twitter users voted on another of his polls to provide “general amnesty to suspended accounts,” he went ahead and did it. The accounts of tech journalists were suspended on Friday, and he accepted the user votes in a poll to bring them back.
If he restricted voting to only those who pay for the company’s subscription service, it would make voting on polls much harder for people who don’t pay. It would also skew those who can vote to the users who are willing to pay up for Twitter Blue, which includes the controversial paid verification feature Musk pushed to introduce. Musk’s Monday tweet immediately prompted comparisons to poll taxes.