What will the new CEO at Sweeney’s Twitter account say about the decision to shut the company down? A Comment on Musk on Twitter

Employees at the company have been waiting for a message from their new leaders since Thursday afternoon when Musk closed his acquisition of the company. What is changing and what is staying the same? Who will be laid off?

Sweeney had days earlier accused Musk’s Twitter of using a filtering technique to hide his tweets, and revealed what he said were leaked internal communications showing a Twitter content-moderation executive in charge of the Trust and Safety division ordering her team to suppress the account’s reach. The AP has not been able to independently verify those documents.

Alex Spiro, Musk’s attorney, said that it was designed to distract from the company’s own legal problems after Peiter Zatko, the former head of security, accused the company of long-ignore.

Musk reversed the platform’s ban of Trump, following a poll of his followers, and said he would consult a panel of experts on the decision. The Trust and Safety Council, a group of experts who worked with Musk on sensitive issues, was dissolved on Monday.

I don’t like doing management stuff. I don’t think anyone should be in charge of anyone. The co-owner of 6 companies wrote that he loves helping solve technical/product design problems.

Facebook Is Not Your Average Facebook View: Trump and Twitter Have a Role in Free Speech and the FTC Can Come Into Their Own

Yildirim said that since Facebook doesn’t target advertisements to what you want to see, it can’t be a good thing. She said that the message suggests that Musk wants to fix it.

The cache of text messages is revealing, but legal experts who are watching the case closely say there’s more entertainment value than new legal evidence.

The text messages support the idea that his interest in the platform was based on its role in public debate and free speech issues, not because he thought he could make the company profitable, Lipton said.

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

Twitter also showed that Musk’s own data scientists mostly confirmed the company’s estimates about how many human users versus spam accounts are on the platform, which is key to his argument.

Even more money is at stake, as well as possible individual liability for Musk, because of the latest claims of violation by social media giant. Any alleged violations would need to be proved before the FTC would decide if to enforce them. He thinks it is likely that Musk will be named in a future consent order. He has made it clear that he and he alone are making important decisions.

Trump was brought back onto the platform to appeal to right-leaning advertisers, who use alternative platforms such as Trump’s Truth Social. While there is a market to advertise to “people buying gold, people buying survivalist home kits, guns and weapons,” Twitter has long been known as a more politically neutral, if not somewhat left-leaning, platform and may struggle to attract such companies, said Michael Serazio, a communications professor at Boston College.

The bans also shows Musk’s failure to come even close to his claimed commitment to free speech. Musk has said that he would want to permit all legal speech, despite his insistence that he is a free speech maximalist. “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” Musk once tweeted.

But relations between the pair seem to have soured since, with the men publicly trading barbs over the summer. Musk responded by saying it was time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset, after he was called abullsh*t artist at a rally.

With the people who had been his supporters and the journalist ghosting his pleas for a public response, Musk may be looking at putting his overpriced toy in someone elses hands for a while.

The material that came to light ahead of the trial in Delaware’s Chancery Court did not lend support to the argument. Miller says there is nothing that looks like a fraud in the evidence that they have. “They’ve run out of cards to play.”

Musk’s decision to fold may also have been influenced by the potential for the trial to damage him personally. The internet devoured a ton of the businessman’s personal text messages last week in Silicon Valley. Miller says he would likely have been a very embarrassing deposition this week.

Things are likely to be even more difficult for Musk when he is deposed. It could highlight statements that can create more legal issues because of their inconsistent nature.

Tromble expects that the Musk era at Twitter will begin with a period of chaos as Musk and Twitter users test the boundaries. It is likely to settle down into a system similar to theTwitter of old, according to her.

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.” Occasionally, at random intervals, there will be compelling tidbits that will appear. Unpredictable rewards, as the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner found with his research on rats and pigeons, are particularly good at generating compulsive behavior.

“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 who should know better regularly self-destruct on the site — they can’t stay away.

The Tesla CEO has previously said he “hates advertising” and, as Twitter’s owner, professed a desire to make the company more reliant on subscription revenue than advertising dollars. Twitter has always struggled to turn its outsized influence in media, politics, and culture into a highly successful advertising business. The billionaire would be freer to implement his vision without having to please advertisers.

He said in the official announcement that free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy and that is vital to the future of humanity.

Experts who study social networks warn that overhauling Twitter to allow all legal speech would open the floodgates to toxicity, from misogynist, racist and transphobic abuse to false claims about the security of voting and the effectiveness of vaccines.

Looking at alternative platforms that promise less restrictions on speech, such as Parler, Gab and Truth Social, will give you a “keyhole view” of what Musk will look like, said the president of Media Matters for America.

The feature is the bug on those sites, where being able to say and do things not allowed on other sites is the reason people gravitates to them. There is a cauldron of misinformation and abuse there.

The status of Twitter’s new policies, in the meantime, remains unclear — Lorenz is unbanned, and Musk said Paul Graham’s account will be restored as well, while also claiming the link policy “will be adjusted to suspending accounts only when that account’s primary purpose is promotion of competitors, which essentially falls under the no spam rule.”

Musk announced last week that he would restore the account of Donald Trump after another poll he posted on the platform ended slightly in favor of returning the former President, who had been banned following the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, to the platform. Musk has also restored the accounts of several other controversial, previously banned or suspended users, including conservative Canadian podcaster Jordan Peterson, right-leaning satire website Babylon Bee, comedian Kathy Griffin and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The person urged Musk to hire “someone who has a savvy cultural/political view” to lead enforcement, suggesting “a Blake Masters type.” Masters is a Republican candidate for the Senate in Arizona, who has endorsed Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

Twitter banned Trump on January 8, 2021—seemingly permanently. As of yet, Elon Musk, since last week CEO of Twitter, has said that Trump won’t return. No account that has been banned for breaking the rules will be allowed to re-enter, according to the eccentricentrepreneur. Even though the most controversial political figure on the platform won’t be able to spread hate during the congressional elections, there’s still plenty to worry about.

“If Trump is replatformed on Twitter, it makes it easier for [Meta president of global affairs] Nick Clegg and [Meta CEO] Mark Zuckerberg to say, ‘Well, he’s already back on Twitter. We might as well let him back on Facebook,’” said Nicole Gill, executive director of Accountable Tech, a progressive advocacy group.

Things are expected to change internally at the micro-Blogging site. It’s likely that Agrawal, who became the CEO less than a year ago, will be leaving with a $42 million exit package.

After a video meeting a few weeks later with Agrawal and Musk, Dorsey tersely summed up the situation in a text to Musk: “At least it became clear that you can’t work together. That was clear.

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

Costs and cuts are only part of the equation. In the spring, Musk pitched investors that he would quintuple Twitter’s annual revenue to $26.4 billion by 2028 and attract 931 million users by that same year, up from 217 million at the end of 2021, according to an investor presentation obtained by The New York Times.

He may have little choice but to look for other sources of revenue because of the depressed 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.

Twitter’s “Super-App”: Why We Can’t Have Chinese-Style Super-Apps in the U.S., After Musk and Musk

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

Chinese-style super-apps haven’t caught on in the United States despite other American tech companies trying this strategy.

It is not clear which agencies may be carrying out the probe, and Twitter did not identify what specific actions by Musk US officials may be investigating. Authorities looking into Musk’s “conduct” related to the deal were only mentioned in the filing.

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 company is facing billions of dollars in fines from the FTC for alleged privacy misdeeds dating to before Musk’s ownership. The employees were warned that the company could find itself even more legally exposed after the resignations of several executives, including its chief information security officer and privacy officer.

In a separate filing on Thursday, Twitter also maintained that it did not instruct Zatko to burn several notebooks as part of a separation agreement, as Musk’s team had claimed in a filing earlier this month. Instead, Twitter claimed, Zatko destroyed the notebooks of his own volition.

Free Speech is Not a Good Idea: How Parler and Musk Save Twitter from the Censorship of Antisemitic Comments

An associate professor in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University writes about women and social media. She was spokeswoman for international affairs in the Treasury Department during the Obama administration. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. CNN has more opinion on it.

Parler announced on Monday that they were being purchased byKanye West, who was suspended fromTwitter this month for antisemitic comments. West, who changed his name to Ye, was described as having taken a ground-breaking step into the free speech media space and would not have to fear being removed from social media again.

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

If West comes to own Parler and Musk takes the reins of Twitter, an already-extant conservative ecosystem will be supercharged on social media. These men’s “free speech” policies are likely to drive away people victimized by hate online. Those who remain in these conservative spaces will become even more extreme as a result of their interactions, which could cultivate a dangerous far-right ideology that has far-reaching effects on our politics.

At the same time, he’s reinstated thousands of accounts that had been banned for breaking the rules, including Trump, neo-Nazis, white nationalists and Qanon promoters – but won’t allow conspiracy theorist Alex Jones or Kanye West, who’s been vocally antisemitic, to tweet. How that meshes with Musk’s claimed embrace of free speech principles isn’t clear.

A 2020 study on women in 51 countries by The Economist Intelligence Unit has found that 32% have been victims of online violence. Women of color are the most affected. There is also antisemitic material online. According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, 7 million people viewed a sample of anti-Jewish posts on five social networks.

It’s the ugly form of censorship that scares away the voices of people who are attacked by users of these platforms that the so-called free speech policies really boil down to.

West believes that Parler has conservative views that can flourish, and non-conservatives aren’t likely to flock to Truth Social, since it’s associated with Trump. Conservatives could be left out if women, people of color, and others stop using the platform. It is likely that this will make the views of those who remain more zealous.

On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, and What Can Be Done? A Comment on Elon Musk on the State of the Art

“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 this happens because their exchanges heighten their preexisting beliefs and make them more confident.

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.”

We can also expect these male owners to use their platforms to amplify their own views — even when they’re sexist, misogynistic, racist or otherwise hateful.

Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, (@fridaghitis) a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a weekly opinion contributor to CNN, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. CNN has more opinions on it.

If Elon Musk’s actions didn’t have such powerful consequences, we could sit back and enjoy the show. The rest of the world has to wonder whose side he is on since he likes weighing in heavily on consequential matters. What are the principles – moral, ethical, financial – that drive his rambunctious forays into world affairs?

None of Musk’s business achievements suggest that he can do anything about the world’s most dangerous conflicts. But that hasn’t stopped him. Musk has been expounding on the Russia-Ukraine war and on Taiwan’s tensions with Beijing with the self-confidence of someone who knows what he’s talking about.

Musk need not look farther than his own successful enterprises to realize the absurdity of his haste. When he took over the company, it was five years old. Musk came up with a brilliant plan to turn the company around but it didn’t post an annual profit until 2020. Musk deservedly gets a lot of credit for what Tesla has achieved—and for, among other things, his persistence. The other company of Musk, which is private, doesn’t report earnings. Making rocket ships takes years to even launch successfully, and it is only possible if you are patient.

Russia, of course, loved the plan. The spokesman of the Kremlin said that achieving peace without Russia’s conditions is impossible. The plan, he thus confirmed, fulfilled Russia’s conditions.

It suggested that Ukraine (and one assumes the world) accept Russian sovereignty over Crimea, that another referendum be held in Russia-annexed Ukrainian lands, this time under UN supervision (and despite Russian military occupation!), among other ideas.

There was another twist to the social media story. After US political scientist Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group said Musk told him he spoke to Russian President Vladmir Putin before that tweet, Musk denied it.

But the most telling analysis of the relationship between Musk and Putin – those two paragons of excessive self-confidence – came from Fiona Hill, once the top Russia hand in the US National Security Council.

She said that Putin plays egos of big men and gives them a sense that they can play a role. But in reality, they’re just direct transmitters of messages from Vladimir Putin.”

As a former KGB agent, Putin is trained in the art of reading and manipulating people. Some images of Putin plying his craft with world leaders – for instance, bringing his black Labrador to a meeting with the reportedly fearful of dogs then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in 2016 – are indelible.

What is in it for Musk? A warning on democracy and freedom in the era of social media. The case of Space X founder A. K. Musk

What is in it for Musk? The man who put many thousands of people in electric cars, who turned space flight into a for-profit business, is now trying out a different vehicle. This is an ego trip.

He proposed in an interview with the Financial Times how to resolve hostilities between Beijing and Taipei. Musk suggested creating “a special administrative zone for Taiwan,” musing that “they could have an arrangement that’s more lenient than Hong Kong.” You’ll remember that China promised “one country, two systems” for Hong Kong until it broke its word and murdered Hong Kong’s freedom.

As Russia before it, China was quick with praise and thanks for the billionaire. Taiwan’s Washington envoy had a scathing reply, tweeting: “Taiwan sells many products, but our freedom and democracy are not for sale.”

It might be too much to paint the tycoon as a friend of dictators. Life is not Twitter, and in the real world the Starlink internet service made by Musk’s SpaceX has been an invaluable tool for Ukrainians fighting Putin’s invasion.

CNN reported on this a few days ago and it was found that the company wrote to the Pentagon, requesting that they start paying tens of millions of dollars per month.

Musk struck a humanitarian pose, declaring, ‘even so, we should still do good actions.’

Despite his shenanigans, and as a mischievous teenager he sometimes acts like a brat, he still likes to think big about important topics. Some of his business ideas and their execution are deserving of the highest praise.

He claimed he wanted to buy Twitter and put former President Donald Trump back on the platform because he’s a “free speech absolutist.” Free speech in the fast changing world of social media is one topic where experts say he lacks a serious understanding of the issues a major platform has to grapple with.

In a Twitter Spaces event held for advertisers this week, Musk pleaded with brands to keep using the platform, after a growing number of companies paused ads, causing what Musk previously described as a “massive drop in revenue.” In order to appear magnanimous, Musk accepted responsibility for the company’s performance.

On one level, you know, working at 140 Characters or Less is a job. But I know from so many of the employees who I’ve spoken to who work there, there is a real sense of inspiration around the mission of a company that does want to democratize communication, give more people a voice.

The Elon Musk/Trump Deal: Twitter Personnel Changes and the Tracking of the Assassination Coordinates on Twitter

As Musk has said previously, he would let president Donald Trump back on the platform, many will be watching to see how soon that can happen. If there is a move like this, it could have major implications for the upcoming US midterm elections as well as the 2024 Presidential campaign.

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 company has not explained why the accounts were taken down. But Musk took to Twitter on Thursday night to accuse journalists of sharing private information about his whereabouts, which he described as “basically assassination coordinates.” He provided no evidence for that claim.

The departures are happening just before a deadline by a Delaware judge to conclude the deal. If no agreement was reached, she would schedule a trial.

Twitter’s Head of Safety and Integrity, Yoel Roth, has also remained at the company. Musk encouraged users to follow him with the most accurate understanding of what is happening with trust and safety on the platform, after he had discussed a surge in hate speech on the platform.

Insider reports that the execs got lots of cash for their trouble, among them is Personette, who received $11.2 million.

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.

Tweeting about Twitter Disturbing CEO Markovian Harassment and Corporate Responsibility: Why Twitter is Doing What It Used to Do

He used the social network to criticize 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. On Thursday, after she was fired, the harassing tweets lit up once again.

According to the professor at the Wharton School, the note is a shift from Musk’s previous stance that Twitter is violating free speech rights by blocking misinformation.

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

“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.

This proposed shakeup has not gone over well with Twitter power users. Stephen King made a statement that he would be gone like edinburgh rather than pay to be verified. Musk seems undeterred. The Blue Check Rapture is coming.

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.

Personette said she had a “great discussion” with Musk on Wednesday, and that she supported his message to advertisers.

The enthusiasm that Musk has for visiting the building this week is in contrast to his previous suggestion that the building should be turned into a homeless shelter.

According to a note to advertisers on Thursday, a need for more tailored ads is one of the reasons whyTwitter needs to provide more relevant ads.

The Before the Bell: Why central banks shouldn’t raise interest rates after the European Central Bank hikes so late in the second half of the year?

CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter has a version of this story. Are you not a subscriber? You can sign up here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.

When will central banks stop raising interest rates? That question has Wall Street analysts wearing wrist braces and shaking their Magic 8 Balls so hard.

The euro currency experienced its fastest rate of interest rate increase in history as the European Central Bank hiked its key rate by 75% last week. The Fed is going to increase rates for the fourth time in a row this week. The bank of england could join on Thursday.

For some time, it was thought that 2023 would bring lower interest rates and a return to dovish monetary policy. But a mountain of mixed data is clouding that outlook. Now, some analysts think that central banks will take less of a flash-fry approach to policy decisions and instead opt for sustained, smaller hikes over a longer period.

Across the globe, central bankers have shifted overnight borrowing rates higher in the hopes that they can cool the economy and temper rampant inflation by making it more expensive to borrow money. So far, the impact has been lackluster.

The Eurozone’s annual rate of inflation hit a record 9.9% in September, up from 9.1% in August. Inflation in October was shown to be at 10.7% by a flash estimate.

The “unexpected and extraordinary” rise in inflation surprised policymakers, ECB President Christine Lagarde told reporters on Thursday. She thinks that retail energy prices can cause inflation to increase in the future.

The US economy grew by 2.5% in the first quarter, which shows it isn’t getting weaker, while there are signs that a slowdown is imminent. America is still facing elevated prices despite new data from the Federal Reserve showing personal consumption expenditures. Europe continues to grow, too.

The recent rate increases we implemented would not be in the best interest of households or businesses, and it would not be appropriate to move rates up until inflation returns to 2%. The effects of the first rate hike in March of this year have been passed through to the economy, because of the tightened financial condition based on Fed communications. We need to raise rates further because of high inflation.

Because of a lag in data, central bankers aren’t sure if they’ve done enough yet. They are at risk of inflation becoming entrenched on the global economy if they don’t stop rate hikes soon. If they over-correct, they could get into a recession.

Wall Street tends to favor big events but the future of central bank policy may be more nuanced. To butcher T.S. Elliot: The tightening won’t end with a bang but a sigh.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/31/investing/premarket-trading-stocks/index.html

Matt Egan and the State of the Middle East: An Update on the U.S. – Saudi Arabia Relationship in Light of Recent Oil Prices and Oil Prices

Over the years, he has tweeted misleading claims about Covid-19 and made a baseless accusation that a man who helped rescue children from a cave in Thailand was a sexual predator. He has also tweeted a (since deleted) photo comparing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler and has compared the now-ousted Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to Joseph Stalin.

He could work on his own penchant to promote lies and conspiracy theories to his 114.5M followers, as he did in a now- deleted Tweet about the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul.

One of the most important relationships on the planet is between the United States and Saudi Arabia. And lately, it’s also been one of the most awkward, reports my colleague Matt Egan.

The officials in Washington are angry at the Saudi-led oil production cut after the price of gas rose just weeks before the elections.

The US could ban weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the DOJ could file a lawsuit against the country for involvement in Iran’s nuclear program, both unthinkable a few years ago.

If this decades-old relationship devolves into a full-blown break-up, there could be enormous consequences for the world economy, not to mention international security.

The Blue Check Mob: Kicking journalists from Twitter after Musk’s recent disclosure of the assassination coordinates on a private jet

Musk didn’t reply to my email. But he appeared to claim that the sanctioned accounts had violated his new “doxxing” policy and shared what he said amounted to “assassination coordinates” on him, even though none of the journalists had, of course, done such a thing. The ban on the account that posted real-time updates on Musk’s private jet was reported by O’Sullivan, Mac, and Harwell. That is vastly different than doling out punishment to him.

The article was first published in theReliable Sources newsletter. You can sign up for a daily digest of the media landscape.

Musk took the highly unusual move of booting journalists from Twitter following a sudden change in policy about accounts that share the travels of private jets using publicly available information.

As Musk took over, news broke that he was working on scrapping the company’s current verification process, in which a blue check marks someone who they say they are. People will have to pay a monthly fee for verification in order to receive the service from the company. If it does not happen by 90 days, current verified accounts will lose their status.

It might appear as a business story when you first see it. Significant ramifications will be had by the move. It will make it much more difficult for users to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic accounts.

I think there is an idea of the blue checks within a lot of right-wing circles, and that it is happening inside the world of Elon. People on Fox News have been talking about the sort of blue check mob of people, mostly journalists, who care a lot about their check marks.

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.”

Tweets From Musk: What Have Twitter Learned and What Are They Trying To Tell Us About The Company’s Layoffs?

As of press time, no such message had been delivered to the companys employees. With much of Musk’s workforce set to receive stock grants next week, it seems likely that any cuts will be made at the last minute.

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. Most people have been smart enough to leave Slack and move onto other channels. We have had no communication internally, so we are trying to chase rumors.

Elon Musk will begin laying off Twitter employees on Friday morning, according to a memo sent to staff, as several Twitter employees file a class action lawsuit alleging the layoffs are in violation of labor law.

Several teams were wiped out entirely, but some were cut more than others. The company went too far. I was the first to report on the layoffs on Saturday and within hours some managers were being told to ask employees if they wanted to return to work.

Those who are nervously waiting to discover if they have a job after the cuts land or those who are rushing to ship new features under a threat of being fired are both in the second camp.

This week, we have seen a lot of stuff at the social network, and we will get to those interviews. 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.

While Musk has not commented on his new hires, Calacanis and Krishnan confirmed that they are working with Musk to manage the company and develop new products.

How Can You Help Elon? The Case for a Change in the Culture of the Micro-Blogging Site: Axios and Vine

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

In other Slack channels, employees are sharing contact information in case they suddenly lose access to their communications, another employee told us.

Engineers were told to work on two major projects and finish them in days or weeks. The changes to the Blue program will require users to pay in order to keep their verification badges. The second, which Axios first reported today and which we can confirm, is a plan to revive the short-form video app Vine, either as a standalone product or part of the core Twitter app. If the features don’t ship by November 7th then the team will be fired, according to Alex, who works at The Verge.

We are told that the project has generated moderate enthusiasm so far. More than a dozen engineers volunteered to work on the project after Musk gave the go-ahead Sunday night.

They are telling other employees to build something and show it off to Musk. An engineering director of a company told his team to share their new ideas with their new CEO in a message we saw. At best, you will get feedback. You may be asked to ship it asap,” the director wrote. “At worst, you will be asked to stop and work on something else. Even in this case, at least you worked on something you love.”

Similarly, on Monday, while he was at work, a note sent to his team by the senior director of software engineers at the company acknowledging the big changes that were coming. He said cultural change was going to be the most important change. “Some good, some bad.”

Do good engineering work, if you want to know what to do now. Write code. Fix bugs, keep the site up. I am aware of the criteria for being at the micro-Blogging site. It’s not working on a fancy project for Elon. The good culture change is, it’s shipping and delivering. I encourage you to rotate more on coding and shipping, and less on documentation, planning, strategy etc. If you want to be in a “special” group this week, code and ship 5x as [much as] before. Building what Elon asks or thinks sexy is not the criteria. Being impactful and changing product and helping our users is the criteria. You don’t need to get commands from me. The software engineers are you. You know what needs to be written and improved. Do it. You are in charge.

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

Tuning Twitter to get the scoop: When Musk turns to employees: What will he want to hear? What will they tell us when they hear them?

But Musk’s attention can be unnerving, too. One employee told us they had mixed feelings about working on a project that Musk was known to be focused on.

In their place, Musk is now the CEO and sole director of the social platform, according to a securities filing, cementing his unique influence over one of the world’s most influential platforms at a time when he is weighing significant changes to how it operates. At the same time, Musk is also running several other companies, including as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.

Nick Caldwell, general manager of core technology, has changed his name to “formerTwitter Exec” and Jay Sullivan, general manager of consumer and revenue products, removed the title from his biography on social networking site. 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 tweeted that he was in New York on behalf of Twitter meeting with “the marketing and advertising community.” He asked about the platform’s subscription and bookmark features on the social networking site.

The new Twitter owner has said he plans to establish a new content moderation council, comprised of “representatives with widely divergent views” to help determine Twitter’s policies. He has said that the platform’s policies aren’t changed yet.

Bluesky wants to create a system that will allow users to see how the social media platforms work, and will allow them to use a single profile on multiple apps. The idea of Bluesky was pitched to Musk by Dorsey earlier this year, after he proposed that the social media platform be turned into an open source protocol. What would Musk respond to? “Super interesting idea.”

We’re going to talk to two or more employees at some point by Wednesday morning, but we don’t know what their status is going to be at the time. We will let you hear them, or hear, to be precise, an artificial intelligence generated version of them.

House of the Dragon on HBO: Taking a Stand and Playing with Social Media. I. The Hotline at GadgetLab

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. Reexamining your relationship with social media is recommended by Lauren.

They can be found ontwitter by the name of Vittoria Elliot. Lauren is known as LaurenGoode. You can find Michael Calore on social media. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The producer is Boone Ashworth. Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

You can always listen to the show via the audio player, but if you want to subscribe and get every single show, here’s how.

You can open the app if you have an iPad or an iPhone. You can also find an app called Overcast or Pocket Casts, if you search for Gadget Lab. You can find us in the app if you use an operating system that allows it. We’re on Spotify too. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.

Workplace Disruption Requirements and Twitter Workplace Retraining Notification (WARN) Act: A CNN E-Mail Attempt to Inform Employees

“If your employment is not impacted, you will receive a notification via your Twitter email,” a copy of the email obtained by CNN said. If your employment is impacted you will receive a notification via email.

Some employees lost access to their work accounts. The email to staff said job reductions were “necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.”

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. Under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, businesses with more than 100 full-time employees are required to give 60 days notice if they lay off 33 percent or more of the staff. At Twitter, that notice included a promise to pay people for the next 60 days and give them a month of severance.

60 days of advanced written notice is required by the WARN Act for an employer with more than 100 employees.

The Blue Checkmark Did Not Give You Authorized Identification, But Why Did You Become a Legend? Valerie Bertinelli Explains

Television actress Valerie Bertinelli similarly changed her account name to the Twitter CEO’s, tweeting Friday that “[t]he blue checkmark simply meant your identity was verified. Scammers would have a harder time impersonating you. That no longer applies. Good luck out there!” She then answered a follower who asked how the checkmark no longer applies, writing, “[y]ou can buy a blue check mark for $7.99 a month without verifying who you are.”

There’s another reason why blue checks spread around platforms: Blue checks make people feel important. They tell the world who sits in the VIP section. Another reason they were copied by other networks. They all wanted a velvet rope.) It appears Musk sees them as the digital equivalent of a fancy watch or rare sneaker. Why not charge for that? A clout tax looking logical is viewed as a premium accessory.

Tech Talk to Silicon Valley Managers and Executives: What have we Learned in a Few Hours at the Silicon Valley, if We Can Explain It?

The transcript was created with speech recognition software. It may have errors that have been reviewed by human transcribers. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

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

So what we’re going to do is talk to them, like have a normal interview. We are going to transcribe what they say instead of playing you their voice, because it would make them more difficult to track down and get rid of. We are going to feed those words back into the text-to-speech engine and show you a version of their voice.

So you said that there’s been very little communication from managers and executives at Twitter in the past week. What was said? What’s happening?

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Happens When You Don’t Know Unless You Know Your Code Isn’t

I like that we said from the beginning that we wouldn’t use Artificial Intelligence unless we had a 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. Two strikes for CASEY.

Yeah. Occasionally as a reporter, you get a tip that sounds so silly that you think, well, this could possibly be true. I thought that the tip that was given to me was false because people were being told to print out their last 30 to 60 days of code.

And in fact, two of my sources are like, uh, Casey, that doesn’t sound right to me. OK? I started texting and getting on the phone and then two people told me that I had been wrong and that they wanted me to print off their code.

So why is this funny? Why is this interesting? This is a weird way to evaluate how good someone is as a software engineer. People are not generally evaluated by how much code they write.

If you show up with a printout of 100 pages of code, that’s not necessarily a good thing. You might have done better for the company by eliminating some code, right? And then, sort of streamlining it. So.

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

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

The Twitter Verification Fiasco: Tim and Elon vs Alex Heath on Twitter Blue, and the Telling Stephen King on Twitter

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

It is not. The company’s people are obsessed with figuring out who is a good engineer, right? So Elon very much worships at the altar of the engineer. He thinks of himself as an engineer.

I’ve talked to some people who are getting calls at night and asked, “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’s sort of the unspoken piece of this. We have a code printing fiasco. You reported on Sunday that there was a possibility of attaching verifications to blue accounts, and explain what that means.

Well, we’ll potentially know by the time this podcast comes out if they have relaunched Twitter Blue. They’re working on relaunching it as we speak. The reporting that I have seen and heard is that they will try to charge more for Blue in-app on iOS than they will on the web. As far as I know, Apple doesn’t usually like that, so I wonder if that was the thing that Elon and Tim talked about. Only they are aware of it.

Twitter Blue costs $5 a month. A few hours after the story was published, Alex Heath at ” The Verge” reported that they were considering charging $20 a month for the verification badge. I think it was fair to say that made the whole timelines melt down.

Yeah. Stephen King, the horror author, asked on his social media how he could pay for his blue check. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”

Stephen King was scared more by the idea of paying $20 a month for his verification badges than anything he had written.

Twitter Keeps It All: A Free Money For The Micro-Blogging Site Oprah and Nadiah Sacks And Merely What I Mean

Many people on the platform use business accounts to reach large numbers, so they were attempting to sell Musk and Sacks the idea of asking them to pay for additional features. But they were dismissed in favor of offering wide-scale verification first, I’m told.

A decade ago, I got verified because someone at my old company put my name on a list of people that they wanted to get in touch with.

It’s not about, this person’s important. It was created because Oprah and a lot of other people were already on the social media platform and people were saying that they were Oprah. In order for users to know whether or not the person they were talking to was actually the person they had been told was, they need to be able to tell.

There is a necessary feature of the platform. Every platform that is social has a feature like this, right? You need a way to say, this is the real Oprah, and that is not the real Oprah.

Right. So, I think it is fair to say that people come to see these checkmarks next to yourTwitter name as a status symbol over the years. Like, it means that you’re someone, it means that it —

Right, exactly. The idea that people who were verified cared so much about being verified, that they would pay for the privilege came from the war room. So that is the place we get the idea of $20 a month for verification.

That almost immediately results in an entire timeline meltdowns, as you said, where users say no way will we pay $20 a month. I pay for the same thing. That’s more than I pay to watch it.

But Musk is fine with that. The beauty of this is each account that gets verified paid $8, replied a user when TomWarren took a snapshot of the tweet. Twitter keeps the money and suspends the account. I hope more people do this. It is free money for the micro-blogging site. Musk responded to that user with a pile of money, a face wearing sunglasses, and a bullseye.

And so for them, this seems like a way to make money, while at the same time, kind of punishing the blue checkmarks, which is just very, very different from how other social media platforms treat their creators.

Both Musk and Sacks have discussed the idea in recent meetings, according to a person familiar with the matter. A plan might allow for a limited amount of time on the site, but requires a subscription to continue browsing, the person said.

It does create a lot of economic value for people like you and me. It does matter to us. News organizations pay for software that helps them do their jobs. It is possible that it should be part of that.

Apparently, there is some sort of legacy verification program for government entities that don’t pay an $8 a month and it was said by Elon. So there’s still a lot of details to be worked out here.

Twitter.com Revisited: What’s Happening Now? What Happens at the Krispy Kreme, Where is Vine?

In fact, there has been more external communication to Twitter.com than there has been to Twitter, the employees. So everything is just based on rumor. We wake up. We look at all of our various channels, we look at what our friends are messaging us, and we cross our fingers and hope to make it through another day.

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

I would say it’s not an immediate revenue driver. They are going to have to put a lot of effort into that. You are launching a brand new social network. So that’s a huge, heavy lift. I think it could be fun to have a very popular American short-form video network that wasn’t owned by Facebook or YouTube. We need to see if they can do it.

How Are You Sleeping? Two Tweets a Day in the Life Under Musk: Why Are They Speak Out? What Happens When They Sleep?

That’s right. They know they 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.

So people are sleeping very little. 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 is serious for people who have these jobs.

This is the page for the book, “Hard Fork,” and the author is Mockingjay. So it is about 10:00 AM Pacific on Wednesday right now. How is your day going so far? Anything notable happen today?

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: The Conjecture in the Light of Recent Opinions on Wall Street, Wall Street and Wall Street Journal

Stressful. I feel like between trying to maintain my job while clearly looking for a way out and having zero support and acknowledgment from the people higher up than me it is very difficult. There have been many rumor mill-based scares.

First, of course, was that layoffs are supposed to happen Monday. They didn’t happen. The rumor is that it is going to be Friday. It is tiring. I’m aware we are paid well.

Most of us have some savings to sit on. Some people don’t. It is nerve-racking to know that we are entering 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

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Have They Learned? How Do They Live Underlying the C-suite?

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

That is 100% accurate. We have received zero information, other than what gets trickled down to us. Comms is incredibly sparse. No one is answering messages in the company-wide channels.

It is almost like a scavenger hunt across seven different apps, if you want to find out what you are supposed to be doing.

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

Absolutely. Volume is what they are asking for. Everybody is sharing every bit of code they’ve ever written no matter how insignificant it is. [SIGHS]

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

I can’t cope with that: A Message from a Manager about working on something that you don’t know what you are doing at the moment

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

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

And multiple people have sent me this post. I want to know if you have seen it. I don’t want to read the whole thing. The headline is that I can’t cope.

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What do we really need to do next? A warning warning to everyone, not to ignore anyone

And it reads, “I’m on the 24/7 team working to make all of Elon’s ridiculous dreams come true. Management have repeatedly threatened to fire us if we miss delivery, even if it’s totally 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’m working around 20 hours per day at absolutely full velocity. To attend status calls I have to wake up in the night. When I am not working, I still have to worry about it. I can not do it. I am an absolute mess. I am at a breaking point. This was just a few days ago.

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

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

Do Some People Come from Silicon Valley and Tell Me What Happens When You’re Going to Work, Or Are You Trying to Get What You Want?

My heart goes out to this person. I hope that they can find gainful employment after that four hours when they are trying to sleep and take care of 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. And 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. These people are trying to join the US and have gainful employment and do a good job and are highly skilled.

So I do not think, though, it is because engineers and people are sitting on their hands. The way the company is structured makes it nearly impossible to get anything done even if it is trying to get the appropriate approvals by going through Byzantine processes. There are some facts to that statement. This is not the best way to deal with it.

What Do Social Workers Really Need to Know About Its Future? Worrying about the Future of the Twitter-Focus on the Future Of The Service

I am wondering if you have thought of the degree to which you might be worried about the future of the service.

Now workers fear that if they they refuse to return voluntarily, Twitter will fire them for abandoning their jobs, depriving them of what otherwise would have been three months’ pay.

The layoffs at the social network affected about half of the workforce, which led to some users already moving to Counter Social and other alternatives. 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.

It was scary and relieved. It will be scary to not have income. It would be wonderful if all of the people who are fired get a day or two to chill out and then come back with their resume out there. Right now it’s sucking the life out of us, so I need to be excited about other jobs.

What a good Twitter employee has to say about the design of the twitter gamma-ray server and how to use it to get away from the public domain

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

Twitter has gone through phases in its lifetime. But at least leading up to this whole fiasco, I can’t think of a better place to work. People were respectful. People were willing to tell the truth. There were legitimate goals for people.

People raise privacy concerns and potential misuse of new features even in the lowest parts of engineering. Their only occupation is to write random code that no one will ever see, like the piping behind the scenes. And the company just always kind of had a culture of letting people speak to these things. It caught us on issues before it was made public.

Life Under Musk Two Tweetees Speaker Out: The Case Of A Guy Who Hasn’t Been Bound For Two Teeth

That is complicated because no one really knew. I think there was a thought that the 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. Everything came from there.

He has been more involved with various political viewpoints and their talking points. And if it serves him, he’ll lean into it.

The company has grown in many ways over the course of many years, but some are not so good. I don’t disagree with people when they say there’s probably too many managers, too many engineers. Delivery might be a little too slow. The company has never had management as a strong point.

You need massive structural change to go through a change like this. If he did the same thing again, what is the point?

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

Life Under the Muscle of Two Twitter Employees: How Much Time Do We Need to Reconstruct a Change? Is it Really Necessary?

Alright. There is an idea that the site needs to be moving faster. We’ve been hearing that Elon is saying, ship this thing by next Monday or else you are going to be fired. As an engineer, when you hear that you have a three – or four-day deadline, what does that do to you?

I am losing my mind. I mean, having a three – to four-day deadline on something because priorities shifted, we need to have this done by Friday, that’s normal. It is a little difficult. Maybe put in a couple more hours. Need to get it done. It makes sense.

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

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

Because it’s not as if there’s just a certain set of code that needs to be written. You 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 the way that 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. reliability is more important than moving fast.

But feature-wise, I guess if I had to give a round-about time frame, there would probably be something that could possibly 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 Speak Out: Reheating With My Fail-Saw-Jansky Is It Safe?

This is an engineering problem and a social problem at the same time. We need to do testing. We need to figure out how this can be abused. Do you know what people will do with it? What are the Bitcoin bros going to do to try to steal more of people’s money abusing this feature?

Right. And that’s what goes on with all major releases at a big social network, is trying to figure out, we change this feature, what are the 10 other things that happen? It seems like these deadlines are so short, that we may be able to release this stuff without any testing or scrutiny, which may make it hard to figure out what could go wrong. They are just going to be free.

Yeah. There is a section for user privacy and privacy data. We are not doing anything with user data so we do not worry about that. It is 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: Bringing Back Social Media Servicevine, or Why We Don’t Have to Log In? A Question for the CEO

There are a couple of things. And it depends on where you are in the leadership stack, as far as Musk and his people. The message was to find a cool thing that you like. Hopefully Musk likes it.

Think about it. If you present him an idea and he thinks it’s cool, he wants it done within a week. You sacrificed all of the teams around you.

God. I am curious what you think of the product changes that have been proposed by Musk and his inner circle, such as charging $8 a month for social media verification, bringing back six-month-old social networking servicevine, and other things. What do you make of those proposals? Do you think they are good ideas?

He made the decision to bring the log-out view to the Explore page. I don’t know if it’s possible, but my basic understanding is that we might be able to serve ads to the people who aren’t log in.

Now, if you go to Twitter and you’re not logged in, they’ll show you a bunch of tweets which might entice you to sign in, create an account. And if you linger and browse through some tweets, maybe you see some ads, right? A lot of people would agree that it makes sense that he changed it so quickly.

It is 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.

It is definitely but sure. I mean, we do have all the original content from Vine. So marketing-wise, the nostalgia factor is huge, which gives us kind of a foothold to at least launch something.

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

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

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Spoke Out: What Do You Want to Be Working At? What Can Happen To The Company?

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

There’s no communications. There are people in a corner. It isn’t like the whole company went to an all-hands meeting and learned what was happening. Everybody is wondering, are we ever going to see him? Should I keep doing my work? Are they still serving lunch anymore?

As we are recording, we don’t know what could happen to your job. As you think about it, do you want to be working at Twitter in three months? Do you feel ready to go somewhere else?

Culture is not a lie. Culture is something that can be found in the product. A lot of the way the company behaved was the result of how people cared. It can be very frustrating in its own way.

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

Casey Musk on Twitter: Current Lords and Peasants System for Who Has or Doesn’t Have a Blue Checkmark is Bullshit

People have seen this. The point of moving into the phase of moving fast and breaking things was lost because we had no care for the people using it.

He is looking at the news about the work hours. He has been trying to guess what labor law lawsuits would look like.

So the closest we can get to understanding their point of view is probably from Musk’s Twitter feed, where he’s been tweeting things like, “Twitter’s current lords and peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” and, “To all complainers, please continue complaining, but it will cost $8.” He also recently changed his bio to “Twitter complaint hotline operator” and his location to “Hell.”

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

The Production of a CD with a Strangeness-Theoretical-Improvement-Induced Phenomenon

“Hard Fork” is produced by Davis Land. We’re edited by Paula Szuchman. In this episode, it was checked by Caitlin Love. The show was made today by Cory Schreppel.

Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, and other artists created original music. Special thanks to Jeffrey Miranda and the others.

How did Steve Jobs get his personal computer? How Facebook laid him off and how he removed his job from the social media site Meta Platforms

At the time, Jobs had been developing personal computers for 20 years, his entire adult life. He was intimately familiar with the company he was suddenly running because he had founded it and led the team that created its flagship product. In his years away from Apple, he had founded another computer company with a forward-thinking approach to the internet and next-generation operating systems. Plus, he was Steve Jobs. If anyone could quickly turn around the near-bankrupt computer giant, it would be him. It took him years to bring his plan to fruition. While the colorful iMac he unveiled to me that day in May would help nudge Apple’s bottom line back into the black, it wasn’t until the company’s entry into non-PC devices—like the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007—that it became a profit machine. And Apple’s post-PC future wasn’t even on Jobs’ road map in 1998.

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

He also removed the company’s board of directors and installed himself as the sole board member. In order to show their support for one another, many employees wrote blue heart emojis and saluted them in their replies.

The Employment Development Department in California has not received any recent notifications from the social networking site, according to Barry White.

The layoffs come at a tough time for social media companies, as advertisers are scaling back and newcomers — mainly TikTok — are threatening the older class of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

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

Felix saw a threat on the horizon when billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk promised that the bird is freed last week.

Ndahinda trained in international law and worked in Tilburg, Netherlands as a consultant on issues relating to conflict and peace in the African Great Lakes region. He has already seen what the micro-messaging service can do. He has been watching the hate speech on social media during the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo for years. Much of that incendiary speech has gone undetected by the systems that platforms, including Twitter, use to identify harmful content, because it is shared in languages that are not built into their screening tools.

CNN’s Donie O’ Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac and The Washington POST’s Drew Harwell were all banned on Thursday evening from using the account on the micro-blogging site.

These are the platforms where false narratives start, says Stringhini. The narratives on mainstream platforms explode when they are on them. He says that when they are pushed on social networking sites 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. There is a situation in which you can have more violence.

Researchers at Tufts University’s Digital Planet group tracked hate speech on Twitter before and after Musk took ownership of the company in late October. They used a data stream that the platform gives that is called the firehose and includes a feed of all public posts on it. The group has used the same approach in previous studies, including one looking at toxicity on Twitter around the US midterm elections.

The Covid Pandemic is a Bad Place to Disturb the Instability of the PCI Mental Health System: The Case of Donald Trump

“The Covid PLANdemic was created by Big Pharma to silence me. Everybody tries to silence me,” she said. Please speak at a lower volume. I’m sorry, am I too loud for your precious intensive care unit? You are not sick!

I’ve got a hello. 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 check out this website where I and other girls hang out.

Donald Trump, played by James Austin Johnson, was the most well known person to speak at the council. The account of Trump was banned in 2021.

We all moved to Truth Social, and we love it. It’s very great,” Johnson’s Trump said. In many ways it’s also terrible. It is very bad. Very, very bad. It’s buggy when it comes to making the phone screen crack, and the draining of the Venmo.

Silent Defiance of the Twitter Paradigm: Roxanne Jones’ Message and the First 30 Seconds of Measuring Trends on Twitter

Roxanne Jones was the founding editor ofESPN The Magazine, as well as a producer, reporter, and editor at the New York Daily News. The co-authored book is called “Say it Loud: An Illustrating History of the Black Athlete.” She talks sports and culture on Philadelphia radio. The views here are hers only. CNN has opinions on it.

It was 30 seconds after I abandoned the micro-blogging site that I received that message. It was time to conclude my 12-year relationship with the social networking site after a series of feuds, disagreements and occasional moments of joy.

Many media professionals are mandated to have social media accounts. In fact, covering trending stories on Twitter is an integral part of journalism today. It is a given that my media opportunities could be affected if I quit.

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.

The Social Media Controversy: When Elon Musk’s Private Jet Becomes a Billionaire, Is It Worth It?

Women of color are the most hate- Targeted users of social media. They were 84% more likely than White women to be the target of an abusive or problematic tweet. The numbers are from the report before Musk. After he closed his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter on October 27, that abuse has skyrocketed.

According to one cyber research organization, the use of the N-word soared by nearly 500% on a day after Musk took over.

Not in a world where everyone is looking for attention and adulation, don’t expect a large Twitter exodus. Everyone wants to be a virtual brand ambassador.

Yet Black Twitter — the platform’s community of largely millions of Black users — has remained on the site. 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.

One user asked if the reports of racism that they made would be taken seriously now that Musk is in charge of the company.

Authorities had to get involved in my personal life because of a vile incident that spilled over into my family’s personal safety. I was never going to back down from being bullied and I battled thehaters on and off the platform for years.

What a waste of my time. Waking up to toxic attacks on Twitter kept me in beast mode, on and off the site. If you use the Tweetsverse you will get made angry and distracted from the real work at hand.

You can fight anonymous bots that are meant to distract the world and real people who aren’t smart or brave who challenge you in person.

The platform’s new owner, who happened to be a billionaire, issued a warning after celebrities changed their account names to protest the billionaire’s decision to offer verified accounts for $8 a month.

Twitter on Wednesday permanently suspended an account that tracked the location of Elon Musk’s private jet, despite the social media company’s owner last month vowing, “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk.”

Kathy Griffin lost her account Sunday after she changed her screen name to Musk. She told a Bloomberg reporter that she had also used his profile photo.

“I guess not ALL the content moderators were let go? Lol,” Griffin joked afterward on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform where she set up an account last week.

The Musk Psychodrama on Twitter: Where Are We Going With Twitter? The Case of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Mob and the MuskMoon Mob

After changing her name to Musk, she supported several Democratic candidates with a series of online posts.

It said the service would first be available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. It wasn’t available Sunday and had no idea when it would go live. Esther Crawford, an employee of the social networking site, told The Associated Press it is coming soon but it hasn’t launched yet.

Twitter defended Roth at the time, saying, “No one person at Twitter is responsible for our policies or enforcement actions, and it’s unfortunate to see individual employees targeted for company decisions.”

The aftermath of the last major election cycle in the United States played out like a car crash on Twitter. In late 2020 and January 2021, as Donald Trump riled up his supporters through his Twitter account after roundly losing the presidential election, the social media company felt paralyzed about how to act. After Donald Trump used his account to order a mob to storm the US capitol, it was only after that the platform decided to move.

As director of product management, Edward Perez was in charge of the product team devoted to civic integrity. 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. And as Musk guts Twitter of its staff and allows users to pay to get a coveted blue check on the platform, Perez feels he has to speak out.

“I really am concerned that it feels like the drama around corporate takeover is sucking up all the oxygen in the room,” says Perez, who is now a board member at the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan group devoted to election security and integrity. That focus on the Musk psychodrama “is resulting in potentially inadequate attention on these election-related issues,” he adds.

“How he treats pressure from countries like Saudi Arabia and India—I think those are key indicators of where he’s going with the platform,” says David Kaye, former UN special rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression and clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine.

Comments on Twitter under Musk and the Indian High-Energy Social Media Ombudsmanship (Preliminary Twitter User Observations)

A group of people are at the forefront of the social networking website. According to internal company research viewed by Reuters, heavy users who tweet in English “account for less than 10 percent of monthly overall users, but generate 90 percent of all tweets and half of global revenue.”

Jason Pielemeier, executive director of the Global Network Initiative, says Musk’s goal to build Twitter’s user base to more than a billion people could also affect his willingness to battle it out with foreign governments to keep content on the platform.

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

A wave of prominent users impersonated Musk over the weekend, in order to highlight potential flaws in the revised verification system that the social media company plans to introduce.

Some celebrities on a platform posed as Musk over the weekend in defiance of the widespread backlash to the partially rolled-out plan.

Twitter Chief Operating Officer Kathy Griffin Describes the Times of Donald Trump’s Anomalous Decay: What Has She Done Recently?

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

A warning that there has been some strange activity from the account was shown to visitors before they clicked on the profile. Her name and image were replaced with her own, as the comedian changed her account back to its previous form.

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

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

Meanwhile, Musk’s increasingly erratic leadership, coupled with his habit of tweeting in eye-watering bad taste, gave many current and former employees I spoke with a sinking feeling about the future of their company.

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.

Managers jockeyed with their peers in order to keep jobs for people who are vulnerable, such as pregnant women and employees with cancer, according to a former employee.

Employees at the company that lost a day: How they are feeling now? What they can tell us about their jobs at a tech giant

It began as a rumor on Blind, the app where employees of various companies can chat anonymously with their coworkers. Within one day it was posted in public channels.

Sorry to all of you on the weekend. but I wanted to pass along that we have the opportunity to ask folks that 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 will do some research but let me know if any of you have any contacts with people who may come back and help us.

“I think we might use some Android and iOS help,” the manager added. The company has reached out to both designers and engineers over the past few days to get them back, according to Platformer.

While remaining managers are anticipating a higher workload than they were used to. One person I spoke with was told that any technical manager should expect to manage at least 20 individual contributors, while also spending at least half their time writing code. Others have been given a lot of direct reports.

“The couple of teams that are on his pet projects are doing 20-hour days,” one employee told me. the majority of the company is just sitting. No chain of command, no priorities, no organization chart, and in many cases, no idea who your manager or team is.”

Meanwhile, the health team was told to listen to Musk adviser David Sacks’ podcast for insights into why they had just lost half their colleagues, according to a former employee. Sacks has been helping manage the Musk transition and he is one of the co-hosts of the “All-In” show.

A vice president told employees that a recently published podcasts covers the layoffs happening across tech and provides some insight into why they are happening. “I think it is worth listening to in order to understanding the macro environment we are operating in.”

Most employees were more interested in their health benefits, which had suddenly become a question mark. The company’s open-enrollment period was supposed to begin today, according to its global calendar, but no information was available in the company’s human-resources system. Employees posted several questions about benefits inside Slack today, but all went unanswered by management.

By the day’s end, I’m told, at least some teams had began to hold meetings in which employees were informed who their managers are, what their organization charts look like, and what their priorities will be.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/7/23446262/elon-musk-twitter-paywall-possible

The Blue, Red, and Blue: What will it take to get the public’s attention? An assessment of its risks in the early stages of the Blue project

The company is boasting to advertisers that it is thriving with the addition of 15 million users since the start of the year.

The new Blue is likely facing bigger problems. The existing version only had a little more than 100,000 active subscribers, Platformer has learned. The new version will be a bit more expensive and it seems like it’s not very useful to most regular users. It’s unclear how the company will persuade enough people to 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.

It’s worth mentioning that the federal government has a consent decree requiring full documentation of any foreseeable risks of any product or service affecting commerce. The changes to the Blue version took less than two weeks to roll out. Do you think there’s full documentation about its risks? That sounds like the lawyers are worried.

A seven-page list of recommendations for the company was prepared days before the launch of Blue to help Musk prevent some of the worst consequences of the project. The document, which was obtained by Platformer, predicts with eerie accuracy some of the events that follow.

It was not known how serious the paywall is, or if it was a joke by Musk and Sacks. The Blue team is occupied with expanded verification, which makes it appear that it’s not imminent.

Lurking isn’t Doomscrolling: Learning from a Toy Model on Social Media (Extended Abstract)

A thought so deep it may have bubbled up from a fish bowled dorm room, was fired off by Musk shortly past 10 pm last Thursday. Congratulations: We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk.

In order to get the most out of an active user, it would be easy for an electric car creator who follows a disproportionate number of very active users to 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 find out what’s going on with current events, live sports, and celebrity news, and then they move on to their lives. They’re “lurkers.”

Lurking isn’t doomscrolling, a practice (and phrase) that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when many people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. Choosing to lurk, to sit back and observe for a while, is basically a heuristic and simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos that is New Twitter. If you want to check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, close your browser tab. Send a tweet, then disengage. Keep one eye on it during basketball games. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. If you want your most original thoughts to be saved, go to a different place.

Twitter has slashed its Twitter staff after the European Union unveils its new technology rules – is Cuban still unhappy with Twitter?

It doesn’t take a cut of that money to send money to people you like via tips, even if you set it up. It does take a cut of the revenue from Super Follows, a way to make your tweets a subscription service, but Twitter’s share is dwarfed by the fees taken by Apple for in-app purchases.

A lot of advertisers would not want to work with someone with that attitude during an economic downturn. The open question to me is whether users want to stay in that environment — one that’s just gotten a new layer of hoaxing and scammers. Billionaire Mark Cuban has already complained that the influx of new checkmarked users has made his mentions miserable. Cuban’s thoughts are one reason people stay on the platform — drive him off, and Twitter is less valuable.

So for the banks, offloading Twitter’s debt now means taking an immediate loss. Banks may choose to hang on to the debt for a while to see whether the market conditions change. But if Twitter is obviously shitting the bed, unloading that debt gets even harder. Now, Musk is the richest guy in the world, so banks might be willing to negotiate terms with him about debt repayment. But I do wonder how long they want to hold these loans and who might buy them. If banks can’t place the debt, that probably does make it difficult for any other leveraged buy-outs in tech to get done.

That means Twitter has slashed its team as the European Union introduces landmark new technology rules, says Mathias Vermeulen, director of Brussels-based consultancy AWO. It’s not a great idea at a time when many obligations are going to be assessed on companies, and regulators expect meaningful relationships with people based in Brussels. Between 20 and 30 people are employed by Meta and Google in the city. The social media site did not reply to WIRED’s request to comment.

There is no centralized list of who has been fired. Instead employees were looking at their colleagues’ status on the workplace messaging app to see if they were still working. Dublin is the only European office that is affected by layoffs. Employees in London and Brussels have been let go according to social media posts. It’s unclear if employees in Twitter’s other European hubs—Hamburg, Madrid, Utrecht, Paris, Berlin and Manchester—have also been affected.

The FTC is serious about its enforcement, and what we are going to do to ensure that we are in compliance with the blocs’ content moderation laws

The EU official warned Musk in late November that he must take steps to comply with the blocs content moderation laws.

The risks Musk faces as he stumbles through a mess of business and content moderation headaches, most of which have been his own fault, could be greatly escalating if a violation is proven.

There are other regulatory obligations that are coming into question. They require that when a new product, service or practice is launched, or when someone updates it, that they have written privacy assessments in place to make certain that user data is not at risk.

FTC consent orders carry the force of law and any violations, if proven, could involve significant penalties including fines, restrictions on how Twitter can run its business and even potential sanctions on individual executives.

Alex Spiro, Musk’s attorney, told CNN on Thursday that “we are in a continuing dialogue with the FTC and will work closely with the agency to ensure we are in compliance.”

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

An employee warned colleagues that Musk could put responsibility for certifying FTC compliance onto individual engineers, in a message that was viewed by CNN.

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 could seek to hold individual executives personally accountable for the company’s violations, naming them in future orders and imposing binding requirement 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. The revised consent order gives us new tools that we are prepared to use.

Dispelling the Misinformation from a Social Network Users’ Viewpoint: A Recommendation against the Loss of Legacy Verification and Exemptions

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

That paid subscription service, too, was also suspended on Friday with little warning, just two days after its official launch, with the menu option to sign up for Twitter Blue suddenly disappearing from Twitter’s iOS app — the only place the add-on had been offered. It was not immediately clear when the company might restore the offering.

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

The paid verification feature’s rocky rollout attracted widespread criticism from misinformation experts who had warned it would make identifying trustworthy information much more difficult, particularly in the critical period following the US midterm elections. Some of Musk’s fellow users had a tough time with the feedback.

“Motivated scammers/bad actors could be willing to pay … to leverage increased amplification to achieve their ends where their upside exceeds the cost,” reads the document’s first recommendation, which the team labeled “P0” to denote a concern in the highest risk category.

“Impersonation of world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials, and other high profile individuals” represented another P0 risk, the team found. The loss of legacy verification is likely to cause an increase in impersonation of high-profile accounts on the micro- networking site.

The team was of the opinion that removing the verified Badge and its related privileges from high profile users would potentially drive them away from the site. “Removing privileges and exemptions from legacy verified accounts could cause confusion and loss of trust among high profile users,” they wrote. “We use the health-related protections … to manage against the risk of false-positive actions on high-profile users, under the assumption that the accounts have been heavily vetted. If that signal is no longer working, we can run the risk of false positives and loss of privileges such as higher rate limits.

The company’s trust and safety team won support for their solutions, which included keeping verification for high-profile accounts.

Twitter Elon Musk Blaze Verification Internal Warnings Ignored: Platformer’s Unusual Deployment and the Failure of a Child Safety Advocate

Most of the features on the document have not been approved, but they are still on the wish list.

The launch went ahead despite the warnings. Musk stopped the deployment a few days later after the trust and safety team largely realized their predictions.

Functions affected included content moderation, recruiting, ad sales, marketing, and real estate, among others. It is not known at the moment how the lost of thousands of moderators will affect the service. The website for harmful material has dramatically fewer police on it.

“One of my contractors just got deactivated without notice in the middle of making critical changes to our child safety workflows,” one manager noted in the company’s Slack channels. This is particularly worrisome because Twitter has for years struggled to adequately police child sexual exploitation material on the platform, as we previously reported.

Several workers said they had learned about their employment status after seeing our tweets, attempting to log in to Gmail and Slack, and finding that they no longer had access.

The employees said that they had been bracing for cuts since the layoffs. But the abrupt nature of the cuts will likely send many former contractors scrambling: as Platformer was first to report, vendors told them via email their medical benefits would end today, their final day of employment.

Employees show their support for one another. But not to the group of volunteer venture capitalists, on loan engineers from the Boring Company, and other goons who have been carrying out Musk’s orders: they are all referred to as the goons.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23459244/twitter-elon-musk-blue-verification-internal-warnings-ignored

Twitter Experies an Internal Warning: Why Musk & I don’t understand What Elon Tells Us About the Code Freeze

This was more than just a code freeze, where engineers cannot commit code but not deploy it. Most of the time since Musk took over, tweet has been under one. The purpose of the freeze is to reduce the chance of a bug disrupting the system.

This time, however, engineers were told they couldn’t even write any code — “until further notice,” according to an internal email obtained by Platformer. Exceptions will be granted if there is an “urgent change that is needed to resolve an issue with a production service, including any changes reflecting hard promised deadlines for clients,” the email said, and employees get “approval from VP level and Elon explicitly stating that the change needs to be made.”

On Slack, even engineers who attended the late-night meeting were confused. An engineer who was tasked with implementing the freeze asked, “Is there a ticket I can reference?” I don’t think there is a context. A colleague responded, “We don’t have much context as of now.” “But this is coming from Elon’s team.”

Eric Frohnhoefer wrote a detailed thread about why some places loads faster than others and how he was able to push back against Musk. Musk fired him by the end of the day, Bloomberg reported, along with a second engineer who commented on the affair: “As the former tech lead for timelines infrastructure at Twitter, I can confidently say that this man has no idea wtf he’s talking about.”

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23459244/twitter-elon-musk-blue-verification-internal-warnings-ignored

Why do we need a smartphone? Why don’t we need to lose money? Why did Twitter start putting it on hold after the Blue Debacle?

Instead, the experience is not great in India, for example. That’s because the payload gets delivered from further away (laws of physics come into effect) and that back-and-forth data transfer between the phone and the data center starts compounding.

In India, for example, there’s a higher concentration of low power phones that perform worse in general than we do, as opposed to our more powerful phones.

Why does the code freeze? No one knows for sure, but some are speculating that Musk has grown paranoid that some disgruntled engineers may intend to sabotage the site on their way out.

All Eli Lilly ads were put on hold on Friday after the Blue debacle. The move potentially cost Twitter millions of dollars in revenue, according to the Washington Post. The fake account that impersonated Eli Lilly had said on its account that there would be no cost for the drug.

“I know that many of your markets and clients are seeing large declines in Q4 and in particular L7D,” wrote Twitter’s global business lead in Slack. “Please add any commentary, questions, issues in this thread and I’ll endeavor to raise as many as possible TY!”

One employee responded that T-Mobile had requested to “pause the campaigns due to brand safety concerns.” (Three days later, former T-Mobile CEO John Legere asked Musk to let him run Twitter, to which Musk responded simply “no.”)

Another Twitter employee said General Motors had also asked to pause campaigns. The initial reason they gave is elections, but it looks like an open-ended pause because the team requested to meet next week to argue why they shouldn’t. This employee added that GM should be paused til the end of the year. The reason now is brand safety.”

GroupM, the largest media-buying agency in the world with $60 billion in annual media spend, has told clients that it is a high risk media buy, according to an email obtained by Platformer. Twitter’s agency partnerships lead explained the situation in Slack: “Given the recent senior departures in key operational areas (specifically Security, Trust & Safety, Compliance), GroupM have updated Twitter’s brand safety guidance to high risk. While they understand that our policies remain in place, they feel that Twitter’s ability to scale and manage infractions at speed is uncertain at this time.”

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

Twitter Will Not Disconnect: What Happens If You Unlock Two-Factor Authentication or SMS Goes Unnoticed?

Mid-afternoon on Monday, after Musk announced he would begin disconnecting up to 80 percent of unspecified microservices, some users said two-factor authentication temporarily stopped working via SMS. Others reported noticing partial site outages and difficulty downloading their archives.

There are people who know how to fix all those things, but they either no longer work for the company or have been told not to ship any new code. And the question haunting engineers at the end of the day was not whether any new cracks in the service would emerge, but how many, and when.

LarryVincent, associate professor of marketing at USC’s Marshall school of business, thought that a move to a subscription business would make sense for Twitter. Twitter’s advertising business has long been smaller than that of rivals like Facebook, in part because it didn’t offer the same level of user targeting.

Large digital platforms “have experienced professionals out there who develop relationships with these advertisers,” Vincent said. “When you let go of a staff that was as veteran as Twitter’s and there’s no one there to respond to those [brands], you basically reduce the value of the ad platform.”

After meeting with the CEO of Apple, he said, “We may not approve your relaunch of Blue until you fix X for us.” Actually, I think that’s more likely. As Matt talked about, they usually hold things up in review for arbitrary amounts of time because of other non-related issues.

The Musk/Jersey Puzzle: How a Social Media User Can Now Get Their Posts Using Their Social Media Accounts and Share Their Tweets

There is no guarantee that capturing the online world’s attention will translate into revenue growth.

To Mr. Musk, “hard core” meant “long hours at high intensity,” a workplace where only the most “exceptional performance” would be accepted and a culture in which midnight emails would be just fine. It immediately conjured images of sweaty Wall Street bankers collapsing at their desks, Silicon Valley wunderkinds sleeping under theirs, and the high-rollers who didn’t want to work were turned off by the philosophy behind that statement. It’s a prepandemic mind-set that, sure, some bosses may long for but many more employees are determined never to go back to.

72.4% of the votes were in favor of the proposition and 28.6% were against it. There was a poll that received more than 3 million votes.

Shortly after acquiring Twitter, Musk said he would create a “content moderation council” with “widely diverse viewpoints,” and that no major content decisions would be made until it was in place. There is no evidence that a group was formed or involved in Musk’s replatforming decisions. Instead, after Musk restored Trump’s account, he tweeted “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Latin for “the voice of the people is the voice of god.”

The move from Musk came after he posted an unscientific poll on his personal Twitter account that concluded Friday night with 59% of participants voting in favor of immediately restoring the accounts.

It’s still not clear which accounts will be allowed back. Musk said the accounts that had broken the law or engaged in egregiousspam would not be granted “amnesty”. But doing something illegal is an extremely high bar for moderation since most people don’t break the law by simply being awful people. While he has sparred with right-wingers, Musk has shown some opposition to reinstating Jones on his website, as he feels that it’s unfair to allow someone like Jones back on his website.

Users will soon be able to determine if the company has limited how many other users can view their posts, if an option is included in the new owners plan. Musk is effectively taking on the issue that has been a rally cry among conservatives who claim the social network has suppressed or banned their content.

Musk said that a software update will show you if you have been shadowbanned, the reason and how to appeal. He did not provide additional details or a timetable.

The second set of the so-called Twitter Files, shared by journalist Bari Weiss on Twitter, focused on how the company has restricted the reach of certain accounts, tweets or topics that it deems potentially harmful, including by limiting their ability to appear in the search or trending sections of the platform.

The internal documents seem to have been given to the journalists by Musk’s team. Musk on Friday shared Weiss’ thread in a tweet and added, “The Twitter Files, Part Duex!!” Along with a couple of popcorn characters.

Twitter Files: How Donald Trump blasted a racist tangerine to protest a presidential inauguration and supported a peaceful transition

Weiss offered several examples of right-leaning figures who had moderation actions taken on their accounts, but it’s not clear if such actions were equally taken against left-leaning or other accounts.

A person familiar with the situation told CNN that the former head of trust and safety has left his home due to threats and criticism from Musk.

A person familiar with Roth’s situation told CNN threats made against the former Twitter employee escalated exponentially after Musk engaged in the pedophilia conspiracy theory.

Among Roth’s tweets was one he wrote on Election Day 2016 that read, “I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.”

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

The documents — shared by journalist Bari Weiss as the latest installment of the so-called Twitter Files — appear to show that there was at least some debate among various employees about whether Trump’s final tweets violated the social network’s policies prohibiting inciting violence. But they stop short of showing that Twitter ignored its own rules in implementing the ban.

Anika said in a message that she wasn’t seeing clear or code words for violence in Trump’s January 8 post. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

(Navaroli later testified to the House committee investigating January 6 that she and other staffers had been alarmed by content posted on Twitter by the Proud Boys and other extremist groups that echoed statements by Trump, and had worried about the risk of violence ahead of the attack.)

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

The process of involving multiple staffers and teams and relying on research for high-profile decisions is in line with how social platforms make content moderation decisions.

The establishment press, however, has shown far less interest in the documents themselves, with most news organizations outright ignoring various entries in the continuing series. The mainstream media is made up of left-wing hacks who want to hide the truth according to the right-wing media apparatus pushing the story.

The Wall Street Journal’s former top editor stated on Monday that there was no new information contained in theTwitter Files. There’s no shocking revelation in there about government censorship or covert manipulation by political campaigns. They simply show the internal deliberations of a company that is dealing with complex issues in ways that are consistent with its values.

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

Twitter Countdown on Sexual Exploitation and the Adoption of Child Homosexuals: Reply to Sweeney, Musk, and the Associated Press

The council members, who provided images of the email from Twitter to The Associated Press, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation.

The volunteer group gave expertise and guidance on how to better combat hate, harassment, and other harms, but didn’t have any authority to make decisions about specific content disputes.

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

Musk criticized the council members and others for their alleged failure to do enough to stop child sexual exploitation on the platform.

Some remaining members of the council sent an email to Twitter on Monday, demanding that the company stop misrepresenting its role, after a number of attacks on the council.

The Trust and Safety Council had an advisory group that focused on child exploitation. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Child, the Rati Foundation, and the Youth Adult Survivors & Kin in Need were included.

An Introduction to Automattic and Tumblr (A Reply to “Comment on ‘At-Scale Social Networks for Consumers and Developers’)

I think you’re the first repeat CEO in a year. a person with a document In March, we talked a lot aboutWordPress and some things about the site. I wanted to have you back because you are one of the few people I know who has ever purchased a social network, and it seems like a really good time to talk about the challenges that come along with purchasing a large, at-scale social network with millions of passionate users. So welcome back.

I remember we did an entire episode with Matt in March about Automattic. If you want to learn more about it, go back and listen to that episode. We are going to focus pretty narrowly on Tumblr today. You know that Automattic is a holding company. You are also the CEO of a couple of the companies inside of that holding company. You only

recently bought Tumblr a couple of years ago

. When you purchased it, you ran into some issues — some of which are unique to Tumblr, and some of which, to me, just seem like the problems of owning a social network. Can you quickly go through that? You bought it from Verizon, which had come into owning Tumblr because Yahoo had bought Tumblr. The parallels toTwitter seem to be striking to me.

17 years ago I founded a company called Automattic to support the open web. We do WordPress.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and Day One, which is a great journaling app. People like to start journaling at the start of the year as the new year is coming up.

Thank you very much. We are trying to make the web a better place with everything that we make. We’re always asking, “How can we put users more in control? How can we align our business model more with what our customers and users want?”

It is also part of the theme of the website. I want to create a website that is open-sourced. There are a lot of great proprietary competitors, like Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, et cetera. We forced them to open up by being the open alternative, much like Android kind of forces iOS to unclench a little bit and open up some of the things they do, like not allowing changes to defaults. Android forces iOS to be better. You must have a good nemesis and competitor in order to succeed in business.

I think open-source is a fundamental human right. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and any other freedom are equally important as technology is. It’s important to have the freedom to see how our software works and to modify it.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

What is happening on Twitter? Evaluating what you’re doing, and what you need to do to make sure that you are running a safe and healthy social network

It is also a plan. We are open-sourced the algorithm since we bought a company that does that. We are doing a lot of things that are on the path forTwitter, and I feel like they are on the right path. I will say that it was probably the most humbling thing in my business career. I assumed I had seen it all when we were runningWordPress, a system that powers a good portion of the websites on the internet. Tumblr is a large-scale social network that is only a fraction of the size of Facebook, but we started encountering issues that were beyond my previous understanding of content moderation and free speech.

We’re seeing that happening in real time at Twitter. They will allow someone like Ye to come back, and then take him off again. There’s a phrase we use for a huge amount of speech, and that is “lawful but awful.” It might hurt people’s mental health, incite harm, or be really mean, like bullying, but it’s not technically illegal. We’re a private company, so I guess we could host it if we wanted to, but you need to think about your responsibility to society and to your users. It’s as if you were hosting a party. It is important that the place is safe for everyone to visit and that includes food, water, restrooms, and other things. I feel like when you run a social network, you need to provide a safe and healthy environment.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Why did you buy Tumblr? Why didn’t you buy? How do you think? What did you learn from the Goncharov experience?

I want to get all the way there. I really want to talk about what those decisions are like. I think the casual observer just thinks they are easy, and too often Musk is acting like they are easy. In reality, people who have tried to make those decisions, like yourself, find them very hard to understand. The tradeoffs are bad and everyone is going to hate you after. Let’s start at the beginning. Why did you purchase a site?

Tumblr was always WordPress’s best competitor. I think that Tumblr was the best part of the two, it combined the very best parts of both of those things, and it innovated the form of social media by introducing multimodal posts. One, I was excited to bring some of the fun back to blogging, because I think that everyone should blog more.

I wanted to see if we could make a mainstream social media that did not rely on advertising as a primary business model. We run ads but also have upgrade that turn off ads, and are introducing lots of other subscriptions. We can truly be aligned if we can make it a subscriber-supported thing. Even if I were no longer running Automattic or Tumblr, the business model would align the users with its business.

Totally. Even in the last few weeks with Goncharov, we have seen some amazing examples. At its best, it’s like, “Well, what if people’s social media time could go to something like that?” It’s something that puts a little more control in the hands of users. You should feel good after using it and you feel creatively charged. That’s what we have been working on since we bought it.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Tumblr – What Has Your Board of Trustees Done Recently? What Do They Care About? Why Did You Buy It? How Did You Get It?

There were definitely people who would have paid more for Tumblr, but to the credit of Verizon and CEO Hans Vestberg, they really cared about it going to a place where the community would be well-stewarded. I very much think about that. The second and third CEO were David Karp andJeff D’Onofrio. I am caring for it for the next generation. I will not be CEO of the company forever, but I will find someone to take it over at some point. I hope it is around 30 to 40 years from now. As we can see, kids still need it — Tumblr’s user base is still primarily under 25. It’s weird that there is a role on the internet that only one thing does.

You are saying that it was sold to you for the smallest amount that they could, when you say de minimis. And that you bought it for the smallest amount you would pay, knowing that its carrying costs were so high. Was it a straight talk? We don’t know how much money Tumblr makes or how much revenue they make to arrive at a valuation. It needs a good home and it is bleeding cash. We’ll be that home. What is the smallest number your board of directors will accept?

I think what Verizon cared about was the employees and the user base, which is also what Automattic cared about. That is what we focused on. There was a $100 million budget that we’re going to use to turn it around.

When you consider the burn and everything, that was our calculation. It wasn’t the $3 million, so people made a big deal about that number. It is too good to be true in business. You couldn’t buy something like that for that amount. You are responsible for cleaning up the mess when you buy naval bases or missile silos that are cheap. We did a lot of clean up when we bought the website. They were behind on moderation of hate speech on the platform. I think the technical infrastructure had started to degrade quite a bit. We’ve spent the first couple years really just rebuilding things.

In the last month or two we’ve seen huge waves of users. Fluent celebrities like Ryan Reynolds, Lynda Carter, and Halsey are coming over or coming back. It has been a fun time to be on Tumblr. fortune favors prepared people, that’s what I tell them. There are also a lot of other places people could go, but we are ready for the waves. We are able to sign up 200,000 to 300,000 people a day. We can handle what’s happening.

How do you protect the baby from the bath water? We brought the whole team over from day one, and we also tried to switch a bunch of people that were long-tenured Automatticians, which are people who have been at Automattic for a long time. I actually took some of my very best people in the company and switched them over to do different jobs inside of Tumblr — engineers, designers, et cetera. That helped us merge our cultures, identify low performance, and reshape the team for what was needed now.

We made the technology, we re-made the team, and we are starting to remake the product. I am excited because we are starting to have some fun. You saw the blue checkmark thing. We are also experimenting a bit with the format. It is now possible to have a post which has a gallery and a video on a social media platform. This is already done in the blogs, but now we are bringing it into social media and onto mobile. That’s fun for me, because the creativity that is being expressed there is more than what you can do on any other social network right now.

That timeline is really interesting. You bought it in 2019, but it’s not until the very end of 2022 when you’re saying, “Now we’re having fun.” That is a long time to integrate the cultures, reset the expectations, and then get to product innovation. It is a long time from a user perspective, but from your perspective, it may be very fast. Which one do you think it is?

I said it earlier and I will repeat it here: it is the most difficult thing to do in my business career. I have been doing this a while. We have done successful acquisitions, like WooCommerce and other things, but this has been harder than anything I’ve done before, which is why I stepped in to run it directly in February. We did not see the amount of progress that we had hoped for.

Do you think that part tracks with the Twitter timeline? There is a sweeping culture reset and huge public comments regarding how the company was trash at every level after Musk takes over. Do you wish you had done something like that? Do you think that would have been effective?

It is a part of me that sometimes thinks it would be better if I just said everything is trash and reset. There’s something in this way of working that I think every leader finds tempting. This is not the case for most people. I am not. If I did that it would make me unable to sleep at night.

If you’re in any leadership position though, there is something appealing about saying, “Oh man, I wish I could just clear the deck.” When I was much younger and meaner, I worked at another large company — which shall remain nameless — and I would often think, “I wonder if I could just fire half the people on this floor? Would anyone notice? There’s something about a big company that engenders that kind of thinking. I have provided you cover, do you think you should have done more crazy things?

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Creating a Machine Learning Team with People Who Leave a Social Media Company: What Do We Want to Learn From Its Successes?

I don’t know. It’s very hard to play it back again. About 85 percent of the team is new on Tumblr, or was not there at the acquisition. Over the course of a few years, that is a pretty big switch. Some of it was natural attrition, and some of it was performance management.

As an example, Stripe will make mistakes there. You could assume that some percentage of the people they laid off, who they considered to be low performers, were actually quite good, but you would maybe be cautious to hire out of that layoff. If we were targeting that, we would assume that these were not the folks that had Stripe saying, “These are the crucial people we need to keep.”

We were the only tech company who reached out when we said we were slowing down hiring. I would be more than happy to hire a lot of people who left the social network. We have publicly said we’ll hire even entire teams. Over the past few weeks, there have been intense conversations with some executives who are helping us navigate the 5,000 people who left. We are now trying to figure out if a machine learning team could be created at Automattic with people who were part of the social media company. It’s been kind of a weird shift. Again, I’ve never seen anything like that in my business career.

It’s funny. I feel the same way you do. Those are some of the moments in tech history. The team of people who created Intel left Fairchild Semiconductor, so we think of Intel as an institution. It feels like it happened again, as tech companies are laying off entire teams of people who like working together. The team of audio experts that built Spaces is hoping to work with each other again. Would you make a live audio product? Would you just go hire that team?

I don’t know if we would do a live audio product, but I think that team is quite good. We created a landing page that was basically a representation of all the conversations I had. The first line on the page is, “We love Twitter,” which is true. I also love Twitter.

The missionaries have poured their heart and soul into the social network over the past many years, and they don’t do it with a “We’re going to crush” message if you hire them. They love it and are not motivated to kill it. What I think is interesting is asking, “Hey, could we do it again, avoid some of the mistakes, and create an alternative?”

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

What Have You Learned About the Acquisition of Tumblr? A Few Quick Questions about the Acquisition Story and the Stakeout of the Blogosphere

The acquisition story is finished with a few quick questions. You said the burn when you bought it was $60 million-ish a year. Are you closer to profitability now than you were a few years ago?

No. We brought it down, but we would need to grow Tumblr’s revenue by another $20 or $30 million a year to get it to break even at its current people cost.

Now, the good news is that one thing we’re starting to do is combine some of the teams. Tumblr doesn’t need its own terms of service. It did have one, but we actually have similar problems across all of our properties, like protecting against illegal content, responding to DMCAs quickly, and taking down hate speech. Some of the same tools we use to monitor the other things are also used to monitor the uploads. It’s not only a Tumblr cost at that point.

That’s very good. We have talked a bunch about hiring and size, and you said you’ve had 85 percent turnover. Is the Tumblr team bigger or smaller than when you acquired it?

This is one of the classic Decoder questions. How is that team structured? When you acquired it, was it structured the same way as now?

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

How Do I Get Things Done? What Is The Most Important Thing That I’m Looking For in Twitter? Why Is It Important to Me? Why Do I Need Someone to Help?

The structure is different because I have become the CEO, and I am running several different things, including automattic and WordPress.com. I push a lot of things onto the leads within the company because of my leadership style. I’m not like, “We need to have a meeting every day with the executive team and blah, blah, blah.” I’m more like, “Here are the five most important things to me, get them done. What are the most important things in your life? What am I missing?

A lot of asynchronous communication can be done by Automattic. There haven’t been a lot of changes. I brought over some people from Automattic to help me and help with the day to day. I think it is a fairly standard structure other than that.

India has a government that will put you in jail if you criticize them, it is just the end of that road. I don’t think there is benefit to our version of democracy. Maybe this is where we should stop because it would be better if all of us were more competitive and competitors were more moderate. If we all just admitted what social networks make is content moderation, both in terms of recommendations and creator tools that would incentivize you to make something.

Yeah, yeah. I think I used to use that phrase. I don’t agree with the title headline, although it was a good one. It was spot-on. You did a great job. If you are listening to this, then you should read that post because I believe you hint at and also link to the nuances of moderation and doing it at a scale.

There is a learning curve. Even if you hire people, even if you know what’s going to happen, whatever user base you attract is going to cause new types of problems. For example, Tumblr has a younger demographic, teenagers, that are maybe stereotypically a little more angsty, so mental health things are really big there. We build a lot of stuff in so that if you search for certain tags, before we show you, you will get a message that says, “Hey, do you need help? The number is a phone number. It gets better.”

There is a pro-ana community, which is short for an eating disorder. This was a community of folks who were using a social network in a way that’s not illegal, but was basically encouraging anorexic behaviors. I’m not an expert in this at all, but my understanding is that it is a mental health challenge and ultimately quite physically debilitating for people who suffer from this. What do you do to the kids, those people, as a society, if you are promoting content that encourages that? Again, it’s not illegal, but it is your responsibility to control the distribution of that, to tamp it down if people are posting it, and to try to provide them pointers to resources — because we’re a tech company, we can’t help with that. There are lots of nonprofits and people we can point to that are actually professionals at this, and we can try to nudge people in the right direction.

That works by the way. There are some untold stories where tech has made society undeniably better. I will discuss two issues. One that has been covered a little bit is around child exploitation material — people who abuse children, take pictures, et cetera. Tech companies have created innovative solutions and data sharing has improved to catch this. After it gets passed to law enforcement, they do their job. I think that has helped quite a bit.

Then there’s suicide prevention. On pretty much every social network and search engine, if you type in certain terms, they will jump in and say, “Hey, here’s pointers to resources.” What people click more, what resources are the best, how to provide a phone number, how to do this in every language are just some of the things that have been shared. I think tech companies, including competitors, share this quite freely with each other, because we all agree this is something that is part of our responsibility to society.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Stop Anorexic Communication and Push the Bounds on Pornography, Facebook, YouTube, Google+Google+Chirpios

Those are things where Automattic as a company has a set of internal values, and you are shaping the product in line with those values. Those things are awful, I don’t mean to diminish them, but preventing them is universally agreed upon, right?

Right. Young women shouldn’t be encouraged to be anorexic. That is a big problem in that community. And we should aggressively intervene in suicidal ideation or communication to stop it and provide resources. Those are not passive moves. You’re saying, “We’re going to stop the speech, we’re going to shut it down, we’re going to show up when we see this stuff to get in your way and say, ‘Go to these resources.’” They are aggressive interventions, but they’re not controversial.

You get all the way up to “Tumbln should directly intervene when people are encouraging anorexia”, which is different than what you think about Comcast. Do you think WordPress is at a different layer of that stack? Is it easier? WordPress sites are just sites. You can say, “There’s some stuff we won’t do, but on your WordPress site, you can do whatever you want. On Tumblr, which is a service we run — that we monetize directly with advertisers and everybody else — we have to turn the screws even tighter.”

I think the owner, being a telecom company, was like, “No, this is not us.” Then there’s Tumblr itself, which has some values that might support pushing the boundaries of allowed speech past what a platform like Facebook or Instagram might allow. Then there’s Apple, which says, “We won’t let this app on the store if it has content that we object to.” Visa and other credit card processing companies say that they will not accept transactions for pornography.

But most companies aim to marginalize porn. OnlyFans has surrendered, but the stand taken by both chatroulette and tumblr is still strong. Advertisers who don’t want brands debased by unwholesome adjacencies are willing to use Facebook’s and YouTube’s artificial intelligence and humans to get rid of porn. 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.

Users are able to self-tag when they post something. “This contains X, Y, Z,” and X, Y, Z could be drugs, it could be violence, it could be the human form in adult ways. We do not allow things going into things or what people might call hardcore pornography. Something like that doesn’t fit in with the service, but there is more space for what is allowed, which we have done for a long time at Automattic. We were working to unify the position of Tumblr with ours.

It’s very Tumblr. I think it was a problem with content moderation. Part of why they got shut down by Apple is that they were not doing a good job policing illegal content, in addition to the porn stuff. My guess is that Apple wanted to demonstrate that they care about the community, even if it’s owned by one of their largest partners, by shutting down Tumblr and removing it from the App Store. That must have really woken everyone up, like, “Hey, they’re taking this seriously.”

The last podcast we did, there was actually more adult content that we reopened, specifically what we call artistic expressions of the human form. If you had posted literally Michelangelo’s statue of David on Tumblr before, the content moderation rules would have locked the post or locked your account. We got good at appeals, but they were still stuck with the old rules, and we couldn’t really change them until we had better community moderation in place.

It’s interesting, because Elon also talked about bringing the MPAA movie rating system into this, which is actually where we started in the first iteration of this feature. The rating system history is quite fraught when you get into it. Think about it. If there was one female nipple in a movie, all of a sudden it’s like PG-13 or R, but then there can be any amount of violence, gore, and blood spurting out — which obviously is not great for kids either — and that could be rated PG. There is a form of classification called a Taxonomy that is slightly more nuanced.

On Tumblr, Twitter, and Reddit Including Mistagging Violations of the Bathtub Gin Perturbation Policy

So if you sign up for Tumblr, all that stuff is off by default. If you go to the web, there are options to say, “I would like to see this stuff normally” or, “If this loads on my feed, I would like it blurred out by default.”

Let’s say you’re a burlesque performer in New York City. Bathtub Gin, right? It is an amazing, well-known and well-preserved Burlesque place. You would like to post a picture from your performance. You want kids to see these, so you can tag them. Now you know that it will be protected. Folks under 18 won’t even know it exists, but people who want to see this can find it. Everyone is happy. The incentives are very aligned.

The mistagging violations are not related to what you post. We take it very seriously, because we obviously think that mistagging is wrong. It is possible that it endangers kids. It could do lots of things. We allow you to post a lot more things if you are tagged correctly. We have done this while navigating Apple’s App Store, the credit card processors, and everything else.

Yeah. Well, how do Twitter and Reddit get away with it? Things going into things are allowed by them. Pretty much anything you could find on a porn site is also on Twitter and Reddit. How do they get away with it? They have enough legitimate content that Apple wasn’t really worried about, perhaps because they’re too big. Two, maybe they also made these web-only toggles. We decided to just copy that feature.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Moderation in the App Store: Is Apple Really Trying to Make the Most of its Customers? I Don’t Know What Happened

I don’t know if that will work for me. The App Store review process is not straight forward. You never know what will happen.

I wish we knew more, that is the thing. We don’t know what goes down when Apple deals with the App Store and distribution. Unless you have a guy like Matt who is willing to talk about it, you won’t be able to figure it out.

I think we made a mistake in submitting the app one time where we set a toggle wrong, so that then creates another week. Then Thanksgiving happened. It’s an odd platform. You could ship whenever you wanted, the majority of our tech. You can test, you can put things up, you can take them down. In the app stores, it goes through a person, and depending on who the person is, they might interpret the rules differently.

I believe that moderation is done at night and day on the Apple and Google app stores. You can roll a tool out to a certain percentage of users and then roll it back. Everything is fast, and they allow a lot of stuff. They’re not as draconian about forcing in-app purchases. It is completely different.

Apple is the most powerful player in the market, especially in the US. They’re a monopoly. They control everything. They are also critical of others. My interpretation of why Apple is so strict about these things is they take their responsibility to their users quite seriously. There are examples of this.

If you sign up for a New York Times subscription on The New York Times’ website, they make it really hard to cancel it. You have to chat with someone and it takes 30 minutes of your time. It’s like canceling a gym membership. It’s terrible. It’s a horrible user experience. If you subscribe to The New York Times through Apple though, you can just click a button to cancel your subscription. I think that is Apple advocating on behalf of users for something that is user-friendly. Now, they have things we probably all agree on, like canceling subscriptions, and they have a section that they do. It feels like they still think of themselves as being the favorites.

It’s like they still think they are at risk of dying. I’m excited because Apple has more cash in their bank than most countries. They are the most powerful entity on the planet, much more than most governments. They are starting to shift into more of a benevolent role and realizing how big and powerful they are.

What you’re describing are people who didn’t come up as the underdogs. Most of the current executives were there when Apple was the underdog. Over time, you get to see their culture.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

What do you think about taking over Tumblr? A personal perspective on the most humbling experience of running a city or small country

You have described taking over Tumblr as the most humbling experience. It’s this stuff. I am the politician in charge of a large city or small country. The users are doing whatever they want, and all I can do is incentivize them to do good things and not bad things. There’s also a host of other constituents — app stores, credit card processors, whoever — who are deeply interested in whatever I do.” What do you think are the limits of your authority to make decisions? When you say humbling, it seems like that’s at the heart of it. You don’t say, “Make the button blue.” You’re a politician who’s saying, “I hope I’m going to make a policy decision that is expressed out through all these constituents and will achieve the result I want.”

I think it is probably the best way to summarize my life in five years, because I am very libertarian in what people should be allowed to say. By the way, I’m totally okay with things I disagree with strongly or with people saying bad things about me. I’m a public figure. Great.

Where I think I have become more conservative is in bullying and hate speech, that sort of stuff. Of course, the calls to violence are not controversial. I would say it’s more in the middle. If you remember Flickr in the early days — like with Stewart Butterfield, Caterina Fake, Heather Champ, and Derek Powazek — they fostered an amazing community, often manually, by going and commenting on new users or choosing what they highlighted.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Seeing improv on Tumblr: Where do we come from? Where are we going? What do we need to know? What are the names of goncharov posters?

That whole fun, amazing, beautiful thing happened partially because we created a space where you could have a “yes, and…” improv environment, with people riffing off each other and without a few bad actors coming in and spoiling it. I think we’ll see a lot more stuff like that on Tumblr in the future. It actually keeps growing, too. What are the names of the posters they put up in New York? There are actual Goncharov posters now after I saw a picture yesterday.

He is goofing. He’s posting memes. You’re obviously deeply aware of Tumblr and the community. You are in it. Do you think it is important for you, as the leader, to be a part of the audience? I think it cuts both ways.

Yes, there’s one hundred percent. There is a little bit where I do understand. I think that the leaders of social media are mostly using the platforms under a secret account. They have an alt.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Social Media, Democracy, and Political Intelligence: How Sensitive Are We to Vote? Why Is It Necessary to Hitch Social Media?

You also need to be very sensitive. My preferences are not the preferences I’m imposing on the entire community. I’m super liberal, all those sorts of things. That’s me. I’m going to be open about that. I am not saying that people with differing views are not welcome.

I think there are two levels to this. One is too much pressure. advertisers leave when they say “I disagree with xyz.” They’re welcome to use their money to vote. It’s a free market. It’s capitalism. That’s kind of the expression of it.

I don’t know if I agree with that name. I would call that more capitalist activism, which I think it behooves all of us to do. We should vote with our wallets and try to support companies that agree with our principles, not spend money with those who don’t. There’s a second level though that I think is just inherent to the business model, which I talked about with surveillance capitalism earlier. Sorry, I’m blanking on the name of the author who wrote the book on this.

The intersection of that and democracy is something I think we’re grappling with. If democracy says that free, informed citizens are able to vote on people and vote on how they’re governed, I like that model. There’s a social contract and a principle morality to it that we can all agree to as participants in the system, which I think social networks and private companies miss. You don’t necessarily vote for the policies and elect the leaders of Facebook.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence become better every day, and technology’s ability to influence you gets better. We are seeing this today. How good is the TikTok algorithm? How good are the social networks’ ads? “Gosh, they know me so well. I buy more stuff off Instagram than any other place. They have put me in the correct position. Political influence is playing off in both official and unofficial ways. China, Iran, Russia are using our open society to influence Americans. It’s the whole thing.

It is easy to hack the voting machines and influence the voters, even though they are a good story.

It’s easier to hack the people and influence voters than it is to hack the voting machines. The voting machines are fine, just influence the voters. Every election it happens. This is something we know for a fact. It is not a conspiracy. How do we protect and inoculate society against that, when the business models of these networks are designed around the engagements and the influence, essentially?

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Has the Issue of Brand Safety Been an Issue for You? How Do You Deal With Advertisers? What Do They Have to Say About Us?

Has this been an issue for you with the site? That you need to serve advertisers? Obviously, they are the money. You’ve only just rolled out some creator monetization tools, but advertisers are still money. Are those revenues growing, or are you saying, “Gosh, this is kind of icky, we need to get away from this”? The advertisers are coming to you because they are leaving other platforms. Do you find yourself trying to navigate that balance?

The companies still have to pay those bills, though. They need to pay for the network, construct the data centers, and do all those other things. There is a real cost associated with it, and advertisers subsidize that.

When advertisers say you have to moderate more, it’s even harder to see why you want to buy something that will moderate less. I think there is a tension that is difficult. Do you hear from big corporations that you have to measure brand safety before they show up and give you money, since you are trying to build an advertising business?

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Why the US Government should step in to regulate tech companies? A comment on a case of overturned the First Amendment, by Ben Thompson of Stratechery, for “A Framework for Moderation”

For all the things tech companies do, the telecom companies are worse. You can target a set of three or four houses with Comcast, and serve cable ads to them, and then track that. Credit card companies and banks correlate your data with your purchases at the store. The amount of tracking is insane. We need governance to step in because capitalism isn’t self regulating as well as we would like it to be.

To wrap this up, I want to ask where you specifically think moderation belongs in the stack. I will draw the distinction between your enterprise customers who need to use your hosting services forWordPress.com, as well as you enterprise customers who use your hosting services fortumblr. The idea is that if you are close to the internet’s pipes, you should do less moderating. The bits that are going across their network should not be looked at by the two companies. Maybe that should be the case. Infrastructure providers ride on top of the rails. A set of policies is held by Amazon Web Services, but they won’t host white supremacist sites. That’s the whole line.

Yeah. I think you presented it well. Ben Thompson of Stratechery wrote “A Framework for Moderation,” where he laid this out really well. It is true that at the base layers, you want to defer more to governments when it comes to what should be allowed or not, rather than the companies making arbitrary, unilateral decisions. Governments have checks and balances. We have elections, courts, and we all have things that say we should have a feedback mechanism, for the rules and for what not to exist or not.

Do you think the US government should be involved? That seems to me like everyone wants someone else to solve this problem or make these decisions. The most likely set of actors that would do that are government officials, and they shouldn’t. Especially in this country, they should not make those rules. There is a The First Amendment

says, “Do not make speech regulations.” So I’m just like, my frustration…

Okay, but I think this is the disconnect between basically everyone. The government is supposed to make rules under the First Amendment.

That is a quote from a case that was overturned. Everyone points it out but there is no law against shouting fire in a theater.

There are laws that can be used if you are creating harm. Hate speech is covered by laws. We have laws around certain types of crimes.

Yes, definitely. You have gotten all the way to murder someone. There isn’t a law against hate speech. You can just say that people of other races are bad. You can just do it.

It is possible in other countries. In this country, most people think that the government should make some rules, and almost every time I see one, it is like yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. The law in this country, the case that overturned the yelling of “fire” in a crowded theater,

Brandenburg v. Ohio

, changed the standard from, “You’re going to cause clear and present danger,” to, “Your speech is directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” You can shout at a crowd in a crowded theater but you are not going to cause any lawlessness. You’re just going to get people to get the hell out. That is what I mean.

Germany is a good example. Germany, as a society, has decided that because of their history, they will take a firmer stance against Nazi-type stuff than America does — which is kind of funny when you think about it. As a society they have decided that. That could change over time.

The US has had tons of horrible laws in its history, maybe more bad ones than good ones. They will change over time. Perhaps even the First Amendment needs to evolve over time, but how would we change that? It would require a new amendment, which would require states to ratify. There is a high bar for changing these things.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

What is the slowness of government doing in the digital age? An insight from a hacker friend of the Dead Cow, Beto O’Rourke

That is a good thing. I think sometimes the slowness of government can be an advantage, because hopefully that deliberation helps forge a better outcome. It is not a good example for that right now, with the way the parties are fighting, but ideally, they reach a middle. Companies do not do that. If you look at content moderation boards and everything companies try to do, they are essentially trying to recreate government a little bit in a private sector, which lacks accountability, lacks feedback mechanisms, and lacks courts. So it’s a weird system.

So yes, I kind of do wish that governments had clearer and better laws around this. I also agree that when they have tried to wade into this, there have been some terrible outcomes, like FOSTA/SESTA. There are a lot of terrible laws that have come out of the government trying to regulate this stuff, but I remain hopeful as new generations of leaders come up. They are digital natives, that’s a fact. Gosh, Beto O’Rourke used to be a hacker. He was part of Cult of the Dead Cow. I spoke to him, and he was like, “I used to be a web designer.”

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

I’m sorry to disappoint, but I’ll try to improve the system for me and my family in the Era of the Democratic Reionization

I know that there are other people who can do it. We definitely have an issue where people are holding onto power for a really long time, since the ‘70s or ‘80s. We don’t have anything quite like this gerontocracy in history. I think we’ll see a more dynamic republic as that starts to shift. I hope that is what I am hoping for. That’s who I’m donating to and who I’m voting for. I am trying to advocate for more of that as a citizen.

I don’t want to be removed from the responsibility or the pressure. The responsibility and power given to me and our team is not justified by the social contract with our users, I think. I think that there’s a better system for this.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

What is the problem with government speech rules in Germany? A study of TikTok’s video platform (tumblr), Ceo Mullenweg’s elon-musk

Yeah, and I’m terrified of government speech regulations. It’s my open bias as a journalist. I think they’re bad on their face. I see them in places where they work. Everyone brings up Germany, which has this long, tortured history. They are difficult in that country. I think from our perspective, thousands of miles away, we’re like, “That seems pretty good.” This is more difficult than you think for many people in Germany.

TikTok does not incentivize you to make text posts. It does not want them on its platform. The videos are rewarded with it. There’s a lot of them, but they’re hacks, which is fascinating to think about. The platform doesn’t have a plan to make you post text. It’s meant to make you post videos. I think it’s a moderation of content. That the users have done something else is just a fascinating dynamic inside of that platform.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

What are we supposed to do in content moderation? The story of the Hunter Biden laptop ad removal from the New york post and the New York Post

Is it as big a deal as we are making it out to be? All of the issues we have discussed in the public have had vigorous discussions. I don’t know what can be done in content moderation but I am certain of one thing: you make mistakes.

You do. It’s humans. Humans are fallible and they will make mistakes. Correcting the mistakes that really matter is how you do it. The Hunter Biden laptop stuff is at the center of a lot of these stories. Links to the story were removed from the social media networking site. Who hosts the New York Post? We do.

If you are hosting a major American newspaper, you should treat these platform companies differently. Those decisions aren’t open to us. I am not sure if they are transparent to the New York Post. I thought that was really remarkably telling and brave of Matt, as the CMS provider of the New York Post, to say, “We have the ability to take their links down.” We talked about it in the story.

Wait. The New York Post is hosted by a website. And when the Post published the Biden laptop story you had to have a meeting about whether to take down New York Post links?

There was a discussion. Yeah, absolutely. There are reports and there is always a discussion. People contact us saying, “Take this down,” or, “This is violating your policy.” The policies are just the beginning. The interpretation of the policies is really where I think the art and science of it is.

We will also make mistakes. We’ve accidentally taken down blogs, either by some script that went wrong, or by a human who clicked the wrong button or made a mistake interpreting our policies. It is up to you how you fix it.

Why is the Hunter Biden laptop a tumblr phenomenon? What does it tell us about the right now, when does the right decision make a difference?

We are in a weird period where the right in America is incentivised to claim there is a big censorship problem or that they are being suppressed. Donald Trump would famously play the victim while he was also the leader of the free world, the most powerful person in the United States, the president. That is a funny thing that continues to work for me. I am not quite sure what is going on. Does he not have a platform? There isn’t a robust discussion about the Hunter Biden laptop. Is there always an article, testimonies, or something else?

Maybe we just need to say that this is actually working right now, and perhaps we should question the framing that there’s something fundamentally broken or wrong here in the first place. The current system will make mistakes. It is not flawless but it gets to correctness quickly, usually within a matter of hours or days.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

The Last Question: Decoder and What Happened to Musk in Your 30+ Years of Social Media Efforts? An Introductory Talk at Verge

That is the perfect last question. You have done this for the past few years. You bought a social network. You were an excellent tech executive when you bought Tumblr. You were very successful with WordPress and all the other companies, so for you to say that this is the most humbling experience of your business career, I think that is very meaningful. You have completed it for three years. What advice do you have for Musk?

To keep an open mind, which I actually believe he will do. Whether I agree with him or disagree with him, I believe he’s someone who can update his views when new facts come. We have already seen that happen over the past few weeks on Twitter. I expect him to end up in the same place as the rest of us and with the same site as prior to him. He should have avoided the pain of the journey, but I don’t think he knows the saying “There are no atheists in foxholes”. I don’t believe that there is a need for people to run social networks if they don’t understand the responsibilities to users and the messier nature of the public square.

That’s why you won’t hear me criticize when Facebook or Twitter or anyone else messes up, because I know that we’re going to mess up, too. What I am looking at is how quickly they correct, not whether they are perfect or not, because perfection is not a standard that anyone should be held to. How quickly we course-correct is that. I want to do that. I also think he’s working on important things otherwise. I hope he is not distracted by the things on his mind, like space, the cars, and the solar panels.

That’s awesome. I would talk to Matt for hours and hours about this. I’m fascinated by the actual experience of running these companies, so thank you for coming on Decoder. We will see if we can beat last year’s record by a long shot.

Now to put all this in context I’m joined by Verge deputy editor Alex Heath. He is going to show me how this is connected to Musk. Alex Heath, welcome to Decoder.

I wanted to talk to you because you have been reporting deeply on Twitter. I want to just close the loop on some of the things you heard from Matt and some of the things you’re hearing out of Elon Musk’s version of Twitter.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

How Do They Threaten to Turn Twitter into a Bank? The Case of Elon Mellenweg — A Fool’s Advocate for Tumblr

When they also booted Parler from the Apple store, there were some leaked emails between Parler and Apple that were like, “You need to improve your moderation,” and it was very vague. That’s the thing with Apple. These threats are always vague.

There is something they are attempting to build towards. It is quite remarkable how similar they are. They want to get away from a pure dependence on advertising, and they want to launch paid consumer products like Twitter Blue or tipping on Tumblr. Tumblr actually has fake verified badges, which is one of the funniest social media products in years.

Payment side of it? They’re all talking about payments. They want you to make money sending money on the network. It seems like, “What if a bunch of people are sending money around and we took cents out of every transaction?” It is a great product, but it is also boring for a social network. I don’t know if I want to be sending money to 50 different places.

It depends. It is possible that you want to have money in the creator system where creators are posting more content because they are asking for money. Elon is obsessed with recreating his original idea for X.com, which predated PayPal. I reported on a meeting recently where he told employees that PayPal was just phase one of what he actually wanted to do. He has every aspiration and intention to complete this Project X, as he calls it on Twitter, which is to turn it into a bank. No one has been successful at it.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

What Happens When Apple Gets Its Away? After the Musk/Apple Relationship Kicks Off, Is It Going To Happen Again?

That was going to be a follow-up question. Is there anything else? Is it, I saw a good tweets and I am going to pay the author of it a small amount of money? I don’t know why I would do that, but it’s the baseline.

Yeah, the Musk / Apple relationship right now appears to have played out as he tweeted angry things about Apple reducing its ad spend, in-app purchases, and free speech. He then went to the Apple campus and they had some sort of conversation. Apple is all the way back up, and Musk has stopped complaining about the 30 percent fee. He is just going to spend Apple’s ad dollars right back to Apple. That’s pretty funny. It’s hilarious that the money is just going in a circle.

It’s good to be the platform, right? The Apple phones are packed with apps that make money out of them. Matt was talking about this and I am curious if he thinks Apple deserves this money. Did you hear about that from him?

Matt is a great CEO because he makes a product that millions of customers use, and he is well known in Silicon Valley. He was like, “Buying Tumblr has been the most humbling experience in my career.” Content moderation is a big part of it. His perspective is that he’s a very libertarian-leaning person when it comes to what people are allowed to say, even if on some other issues he’s more to the left. He was like “On speech, I’m libertarian. I can’t do that. A bunch of things have to be shut down.

Over and over again on this show, we can see the line of what CEOs are going to say about Apple. That’s absolutely fascinating. I think the fascinating thing is that the line does not exist for him.

I think that the conversation has shifted from “Apple’s control is a business issue for everyone” to “It’s actually a speech issue.” We’re seeing Tim Sweeney and other CEOs kind of pile on this. I think this is the next phase. Even if you do not need to fight it, there may be a problem that you need to fight if you say you are threatening free speech. I am not sure whether Apple is able to engage with that level of attacking.

I think they’re ready for it. I think what they’re going to show is, “Look at these apps. There are bad things you don’t want your kids to see. We sit in the middle to make sure your kids can’t see it. You can use our browser to see that stuff. I think that has fundamentally been their answer for a long time.

It’s important that we do more to peel back how these companies actually deliberate, and either almost or don’t do something like that. I can not agree with the way the files are being handled. I agree with the core nut of that idea, but the way it’s being done is not great. I am glad Matt talks about it because it shows the discussions we don’t know about could affect speech on the internet.

Right now, he is not there. The mantra inside Twitter is that you could essentially say the most hateful thing, and unless it’s illegal, it’s going to be on the site. Our job now is to corner that speech in the follower graph and not amplify it or suggest it in the timelines.

They have a baseline for success where they state, “We’re not putting them next to ads, and we won’t amplify misogynistic, racist, and racist postings.” That hasn’t happened yet, but that’s what they want. They will think they are adhering to the principles of their freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.

Do you mean people who are on a platform with bad people? That is something to me that is weird. It is funny. To some extent, with overt racism, overt sexism, and overt transphobia — and Matt brought up the pro-ana community, which says, “anorexia is good” — on the whole, people are like, “Yeah, that stuff is bad.” There is a lot in the gray area. People don’t want to be on platforms that have a lot of bad stuff. If you need to grow the user base and make payments, you need to do more than wall it off. You shouldn’t have to make it go away.

Shadow banning and limiting your reach is exactly what you just described. We will make sure we don’t show your posts to anyone, and we’re going to detect the content of your tweets. They are going to restrict you because they don’t like how racist you are, and maybe you’ll know, but maybe they will be more transparent. That kind of judgment is very difficult to make. You cannot automate it, that’s what I think. How will they implement that?

No, and they don’t know. They hope to automate the worst of the worst, but there is a lot of nuanced tone. There’s no platform that is doing this automated de-amplification of nuanced, potentially sarcastic but hateful speech at scale. I think it’s deeply ironic that as he’s tweeting “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach,” he’s having these cherry-picked files being dumped that show them doing exactly that.

If you want to be a benevolent dictator, you have to be the head of a social network. I think Jack did not want to be the dictator, that is why he did not join the company.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Where Was Jack? What Happened when he Was Not There, and What Happens if You Did? A Conversation that Wasn’t

He tried not to be. It was almost for the worse. He tried too hard to not be involved, and we’re seeing that now. It’s like, “Where was Jack?” That is a whole other thing.

“As a culture, we haven’t even really come to reckon with the ramifications of the power of where you sit in the stack and the content decisions you make.”

I do think it is important for everyone to remember now that we’re deep into it. If you want the laptop, you can just get it. Apple sells it in the store. There was a time when no one understood the provenance of the laptop, and no one understood what was on it. Mostly it was a bunch of non-consensual nudes being shared, and people thought that it was a Russian operation. That conversation probably occurred because of the over-heated moment. It is also remarkable for the technical capability of that conversation to even exist.

We’re still talking about it. It was an uncomfortable thing that could have happened and did happen on social media. When something is political, you can feel it when the temperature is high. We have platforms that are at a number of different levels in the stack that have great power to wipe that off the internet. What happens if they actually do?”

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Reporting on Trump: How the Newsroom Spent Too Much Time Covering the First Four Years of World War II. The Effects of Politics On The Media and Politics

This has been a fascinating episode, all right. I am curious to see how fast Elon comes back around to the baseline of operating a social network. Matt is a smart guy. Zuck is a smart person and has come to a place that looks a lot like the place that he used to work at. If the constraints are such that all these smart people sort of arrive at the same spot, I’m curious to see if Elon arrives at that same general position in the end.

I said to my colleagues in the newsroom that we shouldn’t cover everything Trump said after he was inaugurated. Previously, a president’s every word was assumed to be a carefully chosen signal of future policy, and was reported as such. Trump, on the other hand, clearly said many things purely to get a rise out of people. Reporting on them, I argued, just fed the flames. An editor pushed back. He said that he was the president. He says it is news.

This is precisely the way coverage of Trump worked. 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. There was plenty of good reporting going on at the same time, but these polarizing accounts tended to dominate the conversation. The public was the loser, because they were forced to understand what was happening across the country through incompatible narratives around one man in the White House.

Porn is a monster. The case against Musk’s allegations of censorship over-hyped: Tech journalists, Twitter employees and tech journalists confronting the messiness of social media

There are now mangy empty lots crawling with con men and swastikas, without advertisers or moderators. The time is perhaps right for porn, then. Porn hates vacuums. Especially where it can be ennobled as constitutional duty.

Porn’s not my cup of tea, but you have to admire its ferocity and cunning. Timothy Morton may call it a megagenre, because it is un Grasable in its ubiquity and scale. porn online is like a predator plant in that it saturates the pixels with flesh colors, kills off biodiverse meme and sowing vast digital expanse with salt.

Tumblr, which started as an artsy microblogging service in 2007, lost its allure when it was overrun by porn five years later. Chatroulette, which was founded in 2009 as a whimsical way to meet strangers, traded its lightheartedness for dick pics and leering goons almost immediately. OnlyFans, which began in 2016 as a platform for performers to post videos, now consists mostly of porn created by sex workers.

But many tech journalists, social media experts and former Twitter employees say Musk’s claims are over-hyped, given that the documents shared so far largely corroborate what is already known about the messy business of policing a large social network.

“What I find is people who are confronting high-stakes, unforeseen events and trying to figure out how to handle them in an effective manner” said Renée DiResta, who studies how narratives spread on social networks.

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

The selection of Taibbi and Weiss, who both share Musk’s criticisms of the mainstream media and what they see as progressive censoriousness, has itself caused controversy. The original documents have been presented in a number of different ways, but other news outlets have not been given access to them.

In case you were wondering, the New York Post story about shady business dealings by then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, was temporarily blocked from being shared on Twitter before the 2020 election.

The Post said it got the files from Hunter Biden’s laptop, which was also shared with Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon. At the time, it was unclear whether that material was authentic. The Post story was restricted because of the fear that a repeat of the hack and leak of Democratic National Committee emails could happen.

A huge backlash was created by Twitter’s stance. The company was slammed for taking a heavy-handed approach to a story that, while controversial, was being reported by a major news outlet and for giving little justification for its decision. Within days Twitter reversed the block and changed its policies on hacked materials. Jack Dorsey said the company had made a mistake.

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 said that he believed everyone acted according to the best information at the time. Mistakes were made.

He said he wished the internal files had been “released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider.” There is a lot to learn from, he said.

The Times of Trump: The Case Against Musk and Other Societal Influencers on Twitter During the First Three Months of Bingo

There’s a reason for more insight into how social media companies operate. “Often these decisions are quite inscrutable,” she said. The question of how they’re moderated and how they’re designed is crucial because they are platforms that shape public opinion.

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

To better understand the decision to ban Trump, for example, it would help to see discussions around the accounts of other world leaders who have not been kicked off the platform, she said.

It’s worth exposing the public but at the same time it’s reinforcing a perception of being partisan within the United States,” DiResta said.

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

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

The current attacks on my former colleagues aren’t going to solve anything, said Dorsey in an email on Tuesday. “If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.”

He has made deep cuts to the company’s trust and safety workforce, including teams focused on non-English languages and state-backed propaganda operations. Some of the members of the Trust and Safety Council had come under online attack after Musk criticized them.

A member of the Trust and Safety Council who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation said that the CEO’s willingness to target people who are working to keep the platform’s users safe is creating a chilling effect.

“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.

Twitter is Stepping Up its Actions against Jet Tracking on Twitter: Elon Musk Shuts Down the Twitter Account Following Musk’s Plane

Then, hours later, Musk brought back the jet-tracking account after imposing new conditions on all of Twitter’s users — no more sharing of anyone’s current location.

The billionaire then offered Sweeney $5,000 to shut down the account. Sweeney countered the offer, raising it to $50,000, writing, “It would be great support in college and would possibly allow me to get a car maybe even a [Tesla] Model 3.” Musk said that he didn’t feel right to shut this down.

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

live location information, including information shared on Twitter directly or links to 3rd-party URL(s) of travel routes, actual physical location, or other identifying information that would reveal a person’s location, regardless if this information is publicly available;

At the time of writing, the accounts for CNN’s Donie O’ Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan mac, Mashable’s matt binder, and The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell were all visible on the platform. Linette Lopez, Micah Lee and ElonJet are just some of the accounts that remain suspended. Musk said that the account who didxx his location will have their suspension lifted now.

By the end of Wednesday, they were all suspended, including Sweeney’s account. He operates accounts on different social platforms that are used to track Musk’s jet.

It seems Twitter doesn’t currently have an ironclad filter for this, as I was able to tweet an alternate link to the Instagram version of the tracker. But it appears that Twitter is stepping up its actions against Sweeney and his accounts, despite Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s “commitment” to free speech, which he said in November extended to “not banning the account following my plane.”

Some of the accounts that tracked the jets of billionaires, such as Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, have been suspended. Sweeney told the New York Times that he had banned about 30 of his accounts and that he operated many of them.

The account was permanently suspended for breaking the rules after he entered into the service. The note did not explain how it broke the rules.

Is Elon Jourová “Worrying” about the Reporting of Musk’s Cross-Country Travels?

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.

Musk flew to New Orleans just before the meeting with the French president, and to the east coast just ahead of a major event.

The journalists all had the same desire to report on the billionaire, criticize him in commentary, and use social media to do so. The banning of the reporting on Musk’s companies will serve to chill free speech for everyone, not only those who report on Musk’s companies.

The practice of giving someone’s home address or other personal information online is called doxxing. The account was banned because of its use of publicly available flight data to track Musk’s jet.

CNN said in a statement that it was not surprising that CNN’s Donie O’ Sullivan had been suspended.

Harwell told CNN that Elon was banning journalists for exercising free speech because he thought he was a free speech champion. I think that he has doubts about his commitment.

Věra Jourová, the European Commission’s vice president for values and transparency, said the “arbitrary suspension” of journalists was “worrying,” and she indicated that the company could face penalties as a result.

The Future of Twitter as a Platform for Free Press: The Suspense of Drew Harwell and Elon Musk After Covid-19

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

When the account suspensions began, there were reports that the platform had begun intervening when users tried 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 said he did tweet on Wednesday a link to a Facebook page for the jet-tracking account.

“Suspension of journalists based on personal animus sets a dangerous precedent,” said senior counsel at the advocacy group Free Press, Rita Benavidez.

“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 don’t make exceptions to this policy for journalists or any other accounts.”

The freedom of the press can’t be turned on and off, according to Germany’s foreign ministry. They can no longer follow us, to comment or criticize. We have a problem with that social networking site.

The future of the free press on the platform is in question as a result of the bans. Will news and media organizations remain on the platform, while Musk hastily bans their reporters without explanation? Will they pull their reporters? Their content? And what will major advertisers such as Apple and Amazon do?

And The Post’s Executive Editor, Sally Buzbee, said: “The suspension of Drew Harwell’s Twitter account directly undermines Elon Musk’s claim that he intends to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech. Harwell was removed from the social networking site without any notice, process or explanation, after he accurately reported on Musk. A journalist needs to be immediately reinstated.

Despite being banned from posting, some sort of glitch allowed Harwell and ElonJet to show up to the chat. Musk didn’t like being put on the spot, he is still reeling from being booed during a Dave Chappelle show, and he definitely didn’t like being put on the spot. Musk caused a catastrophic appearance, and Spaces was partially disabled without warning. We are fixing a bug. Should be working tomorrow,” Musk tweeted in response to a user asking why the feature was no longer available.

He got rid of most of the Spaces team through layoffs and purges, which may be difficult to complete on time. As of 1PM ET, it’s still down on iOS. It’s possible that it is available to some Android users and thatdesktop users can listen in on chats but not participate.

The company that has managed to make live audio work on a sustained basis is the one that is currently working on the Spaces shut down. Facebook live has been transformed beyond recognition, a shell, and Clubhouse has fallen from its highs. It is in the right place for a group of people who just want to run their mouths. But assuming that Spaces comes back, there will inevitably be something else in there that pushes Musk to the edge. He will not hesitate to take it away or impose rules to protect his ego when that happens.

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

Some of this discrepancy may come down to how different governments react to moderation by social platforms. The company was banned after it removed the threat against the South-East. 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. Legislation to regulate platforms is being considered by Nigeria.

Freedom House: When Do Politicians Get Their Oasis? After Musk and Spicer Revised Friday, the Daily Mail reported that Twitter users voted to lift Musk’s Twitter suspensions

Kian Vesteinsson is a senior research analyst at Freedom House, and she says access to markets is one of the calculations that go into the debate about whether or not to take enforcement actions.

People can find reliable information in a town square that is healthy. The researchers at the University noted that before Musk took over, the discourse onTwitter was more critical of bad things than it is now.

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

After the suspensions, Musk ran a 30-minute long poll asking when he should unsuspend the journalists. In that poll, 43 percent of responses said that “Now” was their favorite, but Musk said that he would redo it because it had too many options.

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 right-to-far-right figures were notsuspended on Friday, including MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and Gateway Pundit editor Jim Hoft, noted 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 claimed that she posted court related documents to the internet, which also included a Musk email address. Lopez said that the address isn’t current because he changes his email frequently.

The Mashable journalist suspension came after he complained about the swastika-laden tweet he had left with the UN and asked for donations

Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for the UN, said that the move sets a dangerous precedent at a time when journalists all over the world are facing censorship and even worse.

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 had sent a statement to media outlets about how they were talking to Musk’s representatives about the alleged stalking incident.

She says the new regime has the same problem as the old one, and that she doesn’t oppose it in both cases.

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

The media organization remained on the platform despite CBS temporarily shutting down its activity due to uncertainty about new management.

“We all know news breaks on Twitter … and to now go after journalists really saws at the main foundational tent pole of Twitter,” Paskalis said. “Driving journalists off Twitter is the biggest self-inflicted wound I can think of.”

The suspension could be the most red flag yet for advertisers, as some of them have already cut their expenditures on the platform due to uncertainty about the direction Musk is taking the platform.

On the day Musk took ownership, he had 3.4 million users, but on Friday he had over 6 million. The admins of many of the networks in the Mastodon platform asked for donations as the users strained their computing resources. Many networks are crowd-funded. The platform has been designed to be ad-free.

Musk offered to allow several of the journalists he banned from the website to return to the platform, if they deleted any of the swastika-laden messages that he claimed shared his location.

CNN, The New York Times, Ryan Mac, and Drew Harwell were banned by Musk on Thursday. The banned include linette Lopez, a writer for Insider, and former MSNBC hostKeith Olbermann.

“It’s journalism,” Harwell wrote in his appeal, a copy of which was provided to CNN. He stated that his tweet had no link to anyone’s private information.

The whole episode was considered to be “kinda silly obviously.” Rupar told CNN that he had decided to simply remove the Tweets and move on from the episode.

Remarks on the CNN weekly column “Spring and All”, a tribute to William Carlos Williams, George Orwell, and Issac Bailey

The journalists’ suspension had been condemned by news organizations, the American Civil Liberties Union, UN and others.

You can get this weekly column as a newsletter if you sign up. We look back at the best opinions of the week from CNN and other outlets.

William Carlos Williams is known for the red wheelbarrow, but his 1923 book, “Spring and All,” is also about how language can recreate the world, through its own slow renewal. “It is the imagination on which reality rides,” Williams wrote. “To whom then am I addressed? To the imagination.

The Library of Congress named ‘Spring and All’ one of 88 books which shaped America in 2012 and it feels like a prescient gesture as we prepare to take on the world in years to come.

Sometimes the past speaks directly from the page. George Orwell predicted in his book, “Nineteen Eighty Four,” that freedom of expression was the most important, and most vulnerable, of all the freedoms, because of the reality of “reality control.” For Issac Bailey, a free copy of Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” opened his imagination in ways a childhood stutter had kept locked inside – and prompted him to speak out against ongoing efforts to ban books.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/18/opinions/year-in-culture-opinion-column-carr/index.html

The Word of the Year: Precarity, Misuse, Violence, and the Power of Perturbations in America, and in Mississippi, during the 2016 Louisiana School Shootout

Or it’s a single word. The word of the year is gaslighting. Its selection was a statement on the precarity of truth in our lives, but Nicole Hemmer, who wrote one of the first pieces connecting the term to then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016, objected to synonymizing “gaslighting” with lying without emphasizing its origins as a form of psychological abuse against women. “This loss of context for a single word might not feel urgently important – after all, words evolve as they work their way from novel to commonplace to, eventually, trite (as the word ‘gaslighting’ now feels after years of overuse). Hemmer said the erasure of abuse histories feels significant, even after five years. Changing one word’s meaning can empower women to claim their experiences and take one more step toward justice and equality.

Consider also how cultural figures have loomed large this year in our most painful moments. As Peniel E. Joseph reminded us, cultural icons including basketball coach Steve Kerr and actor Matthew McConaughey spoke out after the massacre of 19 schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas, serving in Joseph’s words “as courageous models for a progressive White male identity that challenges systems of oppression, speaks truth to power and confronts the divisions of our current moment by publicly highlighting the gap between the nation’s professed values and a more bitter reality that allows 19 children to be killed in such grotesque fashion.”

And during the Jackson water crisis, W. Ralph Eubanks recounted how the richness of Mississippi’s literary and cultural heritage informed his conviction that “Mississippi has something to say … Mississippi matters.” And yet, while in Jackson to celebrate that heritage, he instead encountered “a new way the past and the present are colliding in Mississippi. The place that I love so much was confronted by remnants of Jim Crow Mississippi, instead of the cultural charm that I love so much.

Reality rides the back of imagination because it contains a source of joy and revelation that can be stimulating to the soul. After the last few years, don’t we deserve a little more of that?

In March, absurdist dramedy “Everything Everywhere All At Once” – led by Michelle Yeoh playing Evelyn Wang – took the screen by storm, offering what Jeff Yang described as a “perfect metaphor for this thing we call Asian America.” In the film, the character could conjure up any reality she imagined and brought substance to the outrageous worlds of her imagination, by drawing power from the infinite diversity of her multiple selves. And we, as Asian Americans, are in the process of doing the same, building a cultural collage out of mixed media and lived experiences,” wrote Yang.

Summer romance took an unconventionally sexy (and equally dramedic) turn with Emma Thompson’s “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” which chronicled her recently-widowed protagonist’s quest for sexual pleasure and her first orgasm – with a sex worker. This is a new kind of romance, affirmed Sara Stewart – a romance between Thompson’s Nancy and her own post-60 body: “Talk about a message at odds with our current political moment, where women’s bodily and autonomy and power are under siege.”

Come fall, noted Stewart, it was time to be served some “eat the rich” satire in “The Menu” and “Triangle of Sadness.” She wrote that it was Predictable, given that billionaires got richer while millions died. But while investing any film with “single-handedly dismantling capitalism seems too heavy a lift … Mark Twain said, ‘the human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter.’ We can at least capitalize, so to speak, on these films’ painting their ultra-rich subjects as inherently ridiculous. We can begin to puncture the idea that obscene wealth is the ultimate American aspiration,” argued Stewart.

Emmy glory and the second season premiere of “Abbott Elementary,” the beloved comedy set in a Philadelphia school, was a triumph for an underdog that “has earned its stature – and then some,” wrote Gene Seymour, who has lived in the City of Brotherly Love off and on for 40 years. He insisted that the show is more than just a show about teaching, it is a show that teaches you. It’s important to give each person a bit of time to think and figure themselves out, because one of it’s lessons is not to understand anyone too quickly.

“TheCrown” was a drama where love was nowhere to be found and, as Thomas noted, fiction is putting history in the corner. (In other streaming period drama-drama of the Regency variety, Thomas also praised the Jane Austen “adaptation” of “Persuasion” for being a so-bad-it’s-brilliant work of sneaky genius.)

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/18/opinions/year-in-culture-opinion-column-carr/index.html

The Light We Carry: Embracing the Endures of the First Lady’s Legacy in a Post-Roe America

In June, a student at Catholic University wrote about how the Dobbs decision was a triumph for those who identify as pro-life. “After Roe, I believe it will be possible for our nation to be one that doesn’t cast judgment on women who become pregnant, but one that embraces them with love and compassion,” she reflected.

Anxieties over the realities of a post-Roe America touched families who fear the rollback of rights around contraception and same-sex marriage. During her first interracial marriage to a black man and in her later same-sex union to a woman, she survived the legalmarital shadows. “I wonder and worry: are they coming for my marriage next?” They touched our daily lives as directly as the phones in our pockets do (as Katherine Yao and Megan L. Ranney noted in citing the vulnerability of data gathered by period-tracker apps) – or as routinely as our kids’ activities (as Ranney also wrote after a Florida school’s request for athletes’ period data raised legal and security issues).

The death of Queen Elizabeth II was more than just a turning point for a country that has lost its global prominence but will never fall out of love with its people. The wave of public grief was intense, and the opposition to and conflictingness around it was equally passionate. The seven decades of her reign in its unparalleled longevity were marked by Britain, closing a chapter on its past and farewelling members of the wartime generation.

“The Light We Carry” was the second best-selling book of 2015, and what made it interesting was that it wasn’t a follow-up to her memoir “Becoming.” Hemmer classified it as a self-help book, except instead of a life coach, readers get a former first lady. Unlike Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote an advice column for two decades, or more recent first ladies’ children’s books or policy statements, Hemmer wrote that Obama picks up where Betty Ford left off, sharing her own authenticity in service of a social purpose and building a brand beyond the limitations of her political role: “She has an intuitive sense of how blurred the lines have become between not only the personal and the political, but between influencer and politician. In this book, Obama shows her desire to use that tangle of emotion and power to bring people together, but the ease with which feelings and politics now blend is also a reminder of how easily that combination could also be used to divide.”

The dismissal of a renowned adjunct chemistry professor from New York University in October after a spate of student complaints about his teaching reinvigorated a series of long-standing questions about the modern academy, wrote Jill Filipovic. Are academic standards going down? Are professors and administrators too close to the students and their families? And what’s wrong with kids these days, anyway?” The university got it wrong, despite the fact that Dr. Jones was an effective teacher for medical students. NYU is avoiding questions about whether academic rigor and student well-being are compatible.

When it comes to mental health on campus, the stakes couldn’t be higher, noted David M. Perry, who classified recent lawsuits against Yale and Stanford Universities as a necessary spotlight on the need to do better at caring for students with mental health disabilities. “The good news is that there are solutions,” he wrote. “Which is good, because the bad news is that as Generation Covid arrives on campus, students whose entire high school experience has been shaped by living through an ongoing global mass death event, the quotidian pressures of college life are only going to get worse.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/18/opinions/year-in-culture-opinion-column-carr/index.html

Taking Baseball Apart from Greed: Aaron Judge’s Legacy to the Beginning – Celebrating Morocco’s History in the Light of the First World Cup

In a year of sports largely bookended by a second Beijing Olympics and the first FIFA World Cup held in the Middle East, it was clear that in between, some of the biggest milestones were in arenas beyond the playing field.

In August, Serena Williams rewrote what retirement means in an essay in Vogue. Roxanne Jones applauds Serena for using the word “evolve” to help women who excel early in their careers leave on their own terms and lean into themselves. Watching women realize their limitless capacity for greatness is a beautiful thing. … Many women of all economic backgrounds, including those in my own peer group, are reimagining and expanding what success looks like in our lives. It is not an easy choice to make.

After years of sweeping rampant DOPING under a rug of greed, Jeff Pearlman had harsh words for Major League Baseball’s myth-making attempts to benefit from the magic created by the bat of Judge. Aaron Judge “has had a season for the ages,” wrote Pearlman. This should be the start of a new era for baseball. This should be an historic time for Aaron Judge. Baseball’s history was taken with it by greed.

At a Qatar World Cup staggeringly diminished by human rights protests and the untimely death of legendary US soccer journalist Grant Wahl, the Moroccan national team brought light by praying and joyously kissing the covered heads of their mothers – in a year when in France (whose team are the defending World Cup champion), women athletes had been banned from wearing hijab while playing sports (a move Shaista Aziz contended dehumanized French Muslim women). Morocco’s victory in the World Cup has been seen by some as vicarious redemption against former colonial overlords such as Spain, Portugal and France. While much of France remains largely trapped within a dark history of its own making, Morocco is remaking its own history, claiming its place in the world and the World Cup.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/18/opinions/year-in-culture-opinion-column-carr/index.html

Tess Taylor, Amy Bass, and the Tesla stock price drop after Lex Fridman left in December 2012 a tribute to her and her friend

Tess Taylor read three books – by a poet, a psychoanalyst and a priest (who really should walk into a bar together, she noted) – about radical joy to ready herself the holidays. She also reflected on a recent conversation with friends, all of whom are grinding through a time of suffering, that brought her to tears. “It’s ok to be fragile,” her friend told her. “We’re all fragile now.” She thought that maybe we are ready to be joyful as well. It is winter. It’s cold. There are holidays in the near future. We’re about to try to find light in darkness.”

Amy Bass is going to rock concerts with her friends, and she will also have two teenage daughters. “It has been an amazing experience. I loved watching the girls fight for the position in the pit. Bass said that his daughters were part of the generation of fans that looked out for one another when he walked out of a U2 concert. Getting tickets to concerts has never been easy, recalled Bass, who remembers sleeping outside in the cold to stay in line for tickets and getting Joey Ramone’s guitar pick after her mom accompanied her into a venue at age 15 due to her lack of ID. This amazing generation of kids deserves more magic, according to Bass. She promised to stay with her child, trying to support her love for music like her mother did for her.

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.

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

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. Forbes recently ranked Musk as the second richest person in the world.