The Musk/Twitter Files: Trump’s Claims about Twitter’s “Spam Bots” and “Why We Don’t Wanna See It”

In July Musk tried to pull the plug on the deal, saying that his company was in violation of their purchase agreement. Twitter sued Musk to complete the acquisition, accusing the billionaire of using bots as a pretext to exit a deal that he developed buyer’s remorse over following a market decline.

Musk and his allies promote these tweet threads – dubbed the “Twitter Files” – as bombshell revelations proving that Twitter intentionally muzzled conservatives because of their political views. That’s a long-running claim by Republicans who are convinced social media companies censor them, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Twitter’s internal researchers, for example, have found its algorithms favor right-leaning political content.

Ann Lipton, a professor of business law at Tulane University, says some corporate cases yield “juicy and embarrassing internal emails.” It’s funnier because of the fact that Musk is a colorful person and that Twitter has an outsize influence.

Musk initially declined the seat on the board, but accepted a day later and immediately proposed to the board that the platform “unwind permanent bans on users.”

“Frankly, I hate doing mgmt (management) stuff. I don’t think anyone should be in charge of everyone. The person who is the co-owner of six companies writes that they love helping solve technical problems.

Musk has spent months deriding Twitter’s “spam bots” and making sometimes contradictory pronouncements about Twitter’s problems and how to fix them. But he has shared few concrete details about his plans for the social media platform.

Twitter is Not Counting Human Users: Musk’s Account of the Scenarios of the Slepton Trial and the U-turn

Legal experts are watching the case closely and say there is more entertainment value in the text messages than the 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.

Yet by accusing Twitter of fraud, Musk set himself a high legal bar to clear. It’s difficult to prove a fraud allegation, because it needs to be shown that Twitter knew about the problems and wanted to make Musk look bad.

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.

Musk announced in May that his acquisition of Twitter was “temporarily on hold,” saying that the company had downplayed the number of spam and fake accounts on the platform. In an August legal filing, Musk accused Twitter of fraud, claiming that there were more bots on the platform than the company had disclosed. In September, after whistle blower Peiter Zatko testified in front of the Senate, Musk added her allegations to his own suit.

Musk had said in public statements that he could walk away from his $44 billion commitment, but legal experts were not surprised by the U-turn.

Elon Musk and his social media acquisition of Twitter: The court filing on Thursday alleged that Zatko destroyed his notebooks in the separation agreement

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

Musk may have made his decision to fold because of the potential damage from the trial. The internet was able to chew over some of his text messages with major figures in Silicon Valley. Miller said this week’s deposition would likely be a very embarrassing one.

The Financial Times reported that Musk was to be deposed on Thursday morning but both sides agreed to a delay so they could work on the deal. Ahead of the trial’s scheduled start in October, Musk was to be deposed for two days in Austin, Texas, starting at 9:30AM. His deposition had to be pushed back because of exposure concerns.

Federal authorities are investigating Elon Musk in connection with his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, the social media platform said in a court filing Thursday.

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 Trust and Safety Council was an advisory group that consulted on issues like human rights, child sexual exploitation and mental health when it was working for the company.

The filing on Thursday maintained that it had not ordered Zatko to burn several notebooks as a part of the separation agreement Musk claimed in earlier this month. Instead, Twitter claimed, Zatko destroyed the notebooks of his own volition.

In taking those steps, Musk could singlehandedly upend the media and political ecosystem, reshape public discourse online and disrupt the nascent sphere of conservative-leaning social media properties that emerged largely in response to grievances about bans and restrictions on Twitter and other mainstream services.

It’s a stunning reversal of fortunes not just for Musk, who bought the company for $44 billion, but also for a platform used by some of the most powerful people on the planet, including world leaders, CEOs, and the Pope.

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

Within weeks of the acquisition agreement, however, Musk began raising concerns about the prevalence of those same fake and spam accounts on Twitter and ultimately attempted to terminate the deal.

Trump’s Twitter Phenomenology: Does Trump Really Need More Investors to Overpay For Twitter Right Now? A Model for How the Social Media Landscape Gets Noised

If no agreement is reached by 5 pm on October 28 the case will face a new trial.

It’s possible that this move could cause ripples across the social media landscape. Twitter, although smaller than many of its social media rivals, has sometimes acted as a model for how the industry handles problematic content, including when it was the first to ban then-President Trump following the January 6 Capitol riot.

But that decision generated so much immediate criticism, including from past defenders of Twitter’s new billionaire owner, that Musk promised not to make any more major policy changes without an online survey of users.

No? Okay, maybe this will ring a bell: Remember the third quarter earnings call fromTesla? The one where Musk said he and other investors were “obviously overpaying for Twitter right now?” I guess he is looking for more investors to overpay.

The biggest personnel moves were expected, and it’s likely that the first of many major changes will come from the CEO.

Elon Musk resigned from Twitter in a lawsuit against Agrawal over anti-adversarial posts about a high-rank lawyer

Musk privately clashed with Agrawal in April, immediately before deciding to make a bid for the company, according to text messages later revealed in court filings.

He used social media to criticize a company’s top lawyer. There was a wave of harassment against him from other accounts. For Gadde, an 11-year Twitter employee who also heads public policy and safety, the harassment included racist and misogynistic attacks, in addition to calls for Musk to fire her. The harassment was back again on Thursday after she was fired.

Musk has previously expressed distaste for advertising and Twitter’s dependence on it, suggesting more emphasis on other business models such as paid subscriptions that won’t allow big corporations to dictate policy on how social media operates. But on Thursday, he assured advertisers he wants Twitter to be “the most respected advertising platform in the world.”

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.”

Elon Musk’s commitment to near-absolute free speech has collapsed. When the entrepreneur launched his takeover bid for Twitter earlier this year, he said the platform should permit all legal speech. This month, he switched away from that stance, after blocking a post featuring a swastika from rapper Ye. He stepped up his efforts and suspended more than 25 accounts that published flight data for his private jet. And yesterday, several journalists who had reported on that purge were kicked off Twitter too, alongside the account of one of Twitter’s most notable competitors, Mastodon.

Many advertisers abandoned Twitter over content moderation questions after Musk acquired it in October, and he now risks a rupture with media organizations, which are among the most active on the platform.

Yildirim said that consumers would not want a place where they are bombarded with things they don’t want to hear about.

Twitter Goes Private: Twitter Layoffs Are Bringing Back Some Refreshing Pieces of Musk’s Brain: A View from Inside the Company

Some people are not upset about the company being more urgent. Twitter has long suffered from a slow pace of product development; some employees we’ve spoken to have found Musk’s breakneck approach to product development at least somewhat refreshing.

There will be a suspension of trading on the New York Stock Exchange in anticipation of the company going private under Musk on Friday, according to an announcement overnight.

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

Musk’s apparent enthusiasm about visiting Twitter headquarters this week stood in sharp contrast to one of his earlier suggestions: The building should be turned into a homeless shelter because so few employees actually worked there.

The Washington Post reported last week that Musk told potential investors he plans to cut about a quarter of the company’s work force when he takes over. The newspaper cited documents and unnamed sources familiar with the deliberation.

Thursday’s note shows a need for advertisers to be more focused on advertising revenue, and a need for advertisers to be more aware of targeted ads that collect users’ personal information.

The process was frightening and confusing according to conversations with eight employees over the weekend. In the absence of official communications workers have been using private social networks to get the latest rumors out.

The Washington Post reported that layoffs would hit roughly a quarter of the staff, heavily impacting teams including sales, product, engineering, legal, and trust and safety.

The turmoil has divided the company into roughly two camps: those waiting nervously to see whether they still have a job after those cuts land, and those who are frantically working to ship new features under a threat of being fired if they don’t.

One thing that made people nervous was the instruction on Friday afternoon that engineers print out the last 30 to 60 days of code they had written, as Platformer was the first to report. It was part of a set of measures Musk and his team have undertaken in an effort to identify Twitter’s highest and lowest performing employees as a precursor to layoffs.

Investor Jason Calacanis and Sriram Krishnan, an Andreessen Horowitz general partner focused on crypto and Twitter’s former consumer teams lead, have both confirmed on Twitter that they are working with Musk to manage the company and brainstorm new products Musk has also reportedly brought in Craft Ventures partner David Sacks, as well as a handful of Tesla engineers.

What Should You Do Now? Tell Your Engineers How to Make the Most Out of Your Opinion: A Slack Message to the CEO of Twitter

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.

We are told that the project created moderate enthusiasm so far. Engineers volunteered to take part in the project after Musk gave the go-ahead Sunday night.

Other employees are being encouraged to go build something — anything — and show it off to Musk. An engineering director urged his team to come up with new products and features and give them to the new CEO in a Slack message. At best, you will receive some 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. At least you worked on a project that you love.

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

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

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

Comments on Twitter: Where is he? The India lawsuit is a serious threat to the Indian government, and how Musk is dealing with it

Musk’s attention can also be unnerving. One employee said they had mixed feelings about working on a project that Musk is known to be focused on.

A securities filing stated that Musk is the sole director of the social platform and he is now the CEO, cementing his unique influence over one of the world’s most influential platforms. At the same time, Musk is also running several other companies, including as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.

It isn’t clear if Lindsey Iannucci, one of the other two members of the top leadership team, will remain with the company. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment about the current employment status of Caldwell, Sullivan, Berland and Iannucci.

Calacanis said he was in New York on his way to meet with the marketing and advertising community. He had questions for users on the subscription and bookmark features.

It is unfortunate to see individual employees being targeted for company decisions, but no one is responsible for our policies or enforcement actions.

While Twitter does not boast nearly as many users as Meta-owned Facebook or Instagram, it is widely used by activists, civil society groups, journalists, and politicians—all of whom are influential in shaping public policy and opinion. Those living in countries like India, Nigeria, Argentina, and Saudi Arabia have used the platform to voice their criticism of their governments.

“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.

According to the executive director of the Global Network Initiative, Musk may be less likely to fight foreign governments that want to keep their content on the platform if he builds his user base to over a billion people.

In India, the company filed a case to challenge the government’s order to remove individual pieces of content and whole accounts that they considered a risk to India’s security or sovereignty.

The policy director for Asia Pacific at Access Now is worried that Musk may not continue with the lawsuit. In his August countersuit, Musk stated that the India lawsuit was 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.’”

In the past week alone, one of the world’s most influential social networks has laid off half its workforce, alienating powerful advertisers, blown up key aspects of its product, and launched un-launched other features in an attempt to compensate for it.

Bringing back Twitter curation after Trump: Why do some conservatives think that Twitter has banned or suppressed their posts? Comment on Musk on Twitter

The account posted a message a day and nine hours later saying that they had put an official label on some accounts.

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. The company might restore the offering in the future.

Misinformation experts had warned that the paid verification feature would make it more difficult to find trustworthy information in the critical period following the US mid-term elections. Even some of Musk’s fellow high-powered users of the platform had tough feedback.

It goes without saying that when you are a customer service hat on, it’s from one entrepreneur to another. I just spent too much time muting all the newly purchased checkmark accts in an attempt to make my verified mentions useful again,” tweeted billionaire Mark Cuban.

Cuban said that you have a decision to make. “Stick with the new Twitter that democratizes every tweet by paid accounts and puts the onus on all users to curate for themselves. Or bring back Twitter curation. One makes Twitter time and information efficient. The other is awful.”

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

If you have been shadowbanned, there is a software update forthcoming that will show you the reason and how to appeal. He did not provide any further information.

Many news outlets started to do their actual jobs and report on what the adminstration was actually doing after they went back to spurring on every wildTwitter post that they could. News habits from the early years of the Trump presidency have reappeared around Musk over the past few weeks.

Musk said Twitter will still suspend some accounts according to the policy but “only when that account’s (asterisk)primary(asterisk) purpose is promotion of competitors.”

While he said that he now voted Republican, Musk angered some conservatives who accused him of following through on a practice they opposed. The clash reflects an underlying tension at Twitter under Musk, as the billionaire simultaneously has promised a more maximalist approach to “free speech,” a move cheered by some on the right, while also attempting to reassure advertisers and users that there will still be content moderation guardrails.

The chief reason most news organizations aren’t up in arms about the story is because the releases have largely not contained any revelatory information. So far, the files have failed to do much outside highlight exactly how messy content moderation can be — especially when under immense pressure and dealing with the former President of the United States. That was the case on Monday, when the fifth iteration of the files were released, revealing the debate that preceded the ban.

Weiss suggested that such actions were taken “all without users’ knowledge.” But Twitter has long been transparent about the fact that it may limit certain content that violates its policies and, in some cases, may apply “strikes” that correspond with suspensions for accounts that break its rules. Users get notification that their accounts have been temporarily suspended in the case of strikes.

The Twitter Files, Part Duex, and the Politics of Right-Leaning Figures: Comments on Musk from the Fox News Newsroom

In both cases, internal documents were provided to reporters by Musk’s team. Musk shared a thread with Weiss, and then added the word, “The Twitter files, part duex!!” along with two popcorn emojis.

Weiss offered a number of examples of moderation actions taken on the accounts of right- leaning figures but it was not clear if those actions were taken against left leaning or other accounts.

The recent release of the twitter files caused a lot of criticism and threats to be made against him. There was a dark turn over the weekend when Musk appears to endorse a false accusation that is used in conspiracy theorists to attack people online.

On Election Day, 2016 he wrote a sign saying, “I am just saying, we fly over the states that voted for a racist.”

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

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

A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. The daily digest is for the evolving media landscape.

The Wall Street Journal’s former top editor wrote Monday that there was nothing new coming from the accounts on social media. There is no shocking revelation about politics or government censorship in there. They merely bring to the surface the internal deliberations of a company dealing with complex issues in ways consistent with its values.”

It can be difficult if you are just a regular person trying to understand what is happening. The solution isn’t 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.

I told my colleagues at the newsroom that we should not cover everything he said or did during the time that he was in office. 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. I argued that I had just fed the flames by reporting on them. Another editor pushed back. “He’s the president,” he said, or words to that effect. “What he says is news.”

Here, for instance, we saw a slew of rapid-response news stories about Musk’s tweet on December 11 that “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” a dig at the government’s former chief infectious disease expert, as well as at gender diversity. There is a picture of his bedside table with replicas of guns on it, as well as some more about his behavior on social media.

This is precisely the way coverage of Trump worked. The liberal-leaning media were drawn to stories about the man’s ability to bring himself down in flames, while the right wing media ignored his lack of interest in grasping basic policy. There was plenty of good reporting going on at the same time, but these polarizing accounts tended to dominate the conversation. The losers were the public, whose understanding of what was actually happening across the country was forced through incompatible narratives around the behavior of one unhinged man in the White House.

Elon Musk’s abrupt suspension of several journalists who cover Twitter widens a growing rift between the social media site and media organizations that have used the platform to build their audiences.

Friedersdorf goes on to argue that Musk’s journalistic critics should give him more benefit of the doubt; after all, he did ban Kanye West, he refused to reinstate Alex Jones, he’s right that Twitter helped suppress the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop that later turned out to be at least partly true, and maybe his idea of amnesty for suspended accounts is not such a bad way to reset the clock and rebuild overall trust in the platform. I believe that strays away from both-sides-ism and misses the point.

There are internal discussions that are a smoking gun for conservatives and Musk fans. righteous indignation is being fed because many mainstream outlets are steering clear of covering theTwitter Files without a large degree of skepticism.

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

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

Exclusive access was given to a group of independent journalists including Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, but only if they first posted about the documents on social media.

Take Twitter’s decision right before the 2020 presidential election to briefly block users from sharing a New York Post story alleging shady business dealings by then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, in Ukraine.

The article was based on files from Hunter Biden’s laptop that the Post said it got from Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. At the time, it was unclear whether that material was authentic. After being burned by the Russian hack and leak of Democratic National Committee emails in 2016, tech companies were on edge over the possibility of a repeat – and so Twitter decided to restrict the Post story.

Citing its rules against sharing hacked material containing private information, the company showed a warning to anyone who tried to post a link to the article saying it was “potentially harmful.” The New York Post’s own account on the social networking website was suspended until it deleted its post about the story. Facebook was alarmed by the article, but did not go as far as Twitter. The link was allowed to be posted, but only a limited distribution of the posts while the fact checkers looked at them.

Twitter’s aggressive stance immediately created a huge backlash across the political spectrum. The company was slammed for taking a heavy-handed approach to a story that, while controversial, was being reported by a major news outlet, and for offering little justification for its decision. Within a few days, the block was reversed and the policies on hacking were changed. Jack said that the company had made a mistake.

Despite assertions by Musk and others, it doesn’t show any evidence that the government had anything to do with blocking the New York Post story.

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

He wished the internal files had been released in a way where more people could see and understand them. He added: “There’s nothing to hide…only a lot to learn from.”

Trump’s tweets about a family knife attack in the United States have triggered a violent threat against two men, and a person living in Washington

There is good reason to want more insight into how social media companies operate. “Often these decisions are quite inscrutable,” she said. “These are platforms that shape public opinion, and so the question of how they are moderated and how they’re designed is important.”

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

It is important to understand the decision to ban Trump and to see discussions around other world leaders who have not been kicked off the platform.

There’s value in what has been disclosed, but it’s also reinforcing a perception within the United States of partisan individuals,” Di Resta said.

A research scientist at the University of Washington says framing the disclosures as secret knowledge plays well on the social networking site.

His tweets triggered violent threats against both men. A person familiar with the situation said the family was forced to flee their home.

“The current attacks on my former colleagues can be dangerous and just won’t fix anything,” he wrote on Tuesday. “If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.”

The Trust and Safety Council member who requested anonymity said the willingness of the CEO to target people 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.

Why social media is toxic for women and girls — the story of Musk and his crash McLaren F1 into a ditch

I am thinking a lot about when Musk drove a $1M McLaren F1 into a ditch while trying to impress Peter Thiel. Musk said that he had heard stories about people making money and buying sports cars and crashing them, according to Chafkin. I didn’t get insurance because I knew it wouldn’t happen to me.

Tesla investor Ross Gerber is on the record in the Semafor story, saying he was contacted yesterday about another funding round — he’d already dropped some nonzero but less than $1 million amount on Twitter. Gerber, you will be pleased to know, is considering this generous offer to put more money into an asset the owner has himself said is overpriced. “One could argue he has created value or destroyed value at Twitter,” Gerber told Semafor. It’s hard to say at this point.

Is it possible we can stop pretending that this is nothing but flailing? There is no insurance after he crashed the McLaren.

Musk has sold a number of his shares in the company, which could mean that he is about to pay debt or that he is getting margin called on some of his loans as the price of Tesla shares falls.

“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.”

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

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

In tweets, Musk accused the journalists of violating the platform’s policy against doxing — or posting private information online — by sharing his “exact real-time” location. CNN’s Donie O’ Sullivan, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, and other reporters did not seem to have done so. CNN didn’t hear anything from Musk or the company.

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

Musk’s power moves are very dangerous. Recently unemployed tech and journalism workers should take them as a rallying call to unite to create new, healthier online spaces. Our dependence on a czar to set our public debates’ terms is all we have to show for it.

Musk tweeted late Friday that the company would lift the suspensions following the results of a public poll on the site. A majority of respondents in the poll favor the move to immediately unsuspend accounts and only a small percentage prefer the suspension to 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 cited reports that Musk was threatening people who had lost their jobs on the micro-blogging site and wouldn’t make rent payments. Lopez described his actions as “classic Elon-going-for-broke behavior.”

The Twitter Abrupt Decay of Donie O’Sullivan in the wake of Musk’s Twitter-Legacy Contagion

Stephane Dujarric said that the move sets a dangerous precedent in a time when journalists all over the world are facingcensorship and even worse.

Sally Buzbee, the Post’s executive editor, said that technology reporter Drew Harwell was kicked out without warning after the publication of accurate reporting about Musk.

CNN said in a statement that “the impulsive and unjustified suspension of a number of reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is concerning but not surprising.”

Matt Binder said he was banned by his employer, the technology news outlet Mashable, after sharing a picture that O’Sullivan had posted before his suspension.

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

He promised to allow free speech, and has allowed high-profile accounts that were previously banned from using it to return. He has also said he would suppress negativity and hate by depriving some accounts of “freedom of reach.”

“The old regime at Twitter governed by its own whims and biases and it sure looks like the new regime has the same problem,” she tweeted “I oppose it in both cases.”

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

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

Some advertisers have stopped spending on the platform due to Musk’s suspension, which may be the biggest red flag yet for advertisers.

On Thursday night, Twitter’s Spaces conference chat went down shortly after Musk abruptly signed out of a session hosted by a journalist during which he had been questioned about the reporters’ ousting. Musk later tweeted that Spaces had been taken offline to deal with a “Legacy bug.” Spaces came back late Friday.

Advertisers are keeping a closer eye on the possible loss of Twitter users. According to Insider Intelligence, there will be 32 million lost users on top of technical issues and the return of accounts banned for offensive posts.

Mastodon on Friday had more than 6 million users, nearly double the 3.4 million it had on the day Musk took ownership of Twitter. On many of the thousands of confederated networks in the open-source Mastodon platform, administrators and users solicited donations as disaffected Twitter users strained computing resources. Many of the networks, known as “instances,” are crowd-funded. The platform is designed to be ad-free.

Musk’s Chaos on Twitter: His Last Tweet, His Failure to Stand Up and His Role at the Board of the Electric Car Company (Electron Cars)

In response to a Sunday message in which an MIT researcher said he would take the CEO job, Musk said he hasn’t been happy with his new job.

More than half of 17.5 million users who responded to a poll that asked whether billionaire Elon Musk should step down as head of Twitter voted yes when the poll closed on Monday.

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

Since the start of the Musk feud, the stock of the electric car company has been in a state of ruin and continues to perform poorly according to the note to clients.

Shortly after Musk posted his latest poll, Calacanis posted a poll of his own asking who should become Twitter’s next CEO: himself, Sacks, or Calacanis and Sacks together as co-CEOs.

The company said that it would no longer be possible for users to link to other platforms.

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

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

Warren posed a series of questions about how the board deals with conflicts of interests and other actions by Musk that seem not to be in the best interests of the company.

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