Twitter Blue: Predicting the Future of NewsWire, Nose, and Spontaneous News from the Silicon Valley to the Eleventh Industrial Revolution

The number one thing you’re paying for with Twitter Blue is attention. After your account is reviewed, a blue check mark will be stamped onto your profile. One signup page describes the service and says to rocket to the top of replies, mentions, and search. “Tweets from verified users will be prioritized—helping to fight scams and spam.” Reducing in-app ads and the ability to share extended video content are two features that are coming soon to Twitter Blue, according to the company.

The verification process is being changed right now, according to Musk. Later that day, Musk engaged with a poll tweeted out by Jason Calcanis, a member of the billionaire’s inner circle, asking how much they would pay to be verified on the platform. A lot of responders chose the ‘wouldn’t pay’ option.

According to a message posted on the intranet, Musk has shown little concern for the FTC regulators who have ordered the company to maintain a robust cybersecurity program and produce privacy impact reports before launching any new products or services.

Verification was an effort to make celebrities, politicians, corporations and government agencies comfortable on the platform. Early verified accounts include the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kim Kardashian. The media has always been an advocate of verification. For journalists trying to get sources to talk or audience development teams trying to get eyes on a story, it makes sense to want a verified account; it made you look like a person somebody had vetted. Blue checks also assured a journalist’s followers that the story they shared was a real article from the paper and not a hoax.

The trolling activity comes in the wake of Musk purchasing the company and pledging to restore the accounts of users who were previously banned from the platform, most notably former President Donald Trump. Musk said he would impose content restrictions on the company, and require a paid subscription for account verification.

Every social network produces a unique posting style, and Twitter’s design incentivizes something slightly paradoxical: it’s one part newswire, one part nonsense. On the other hand, on the one hand, there’s a situation where politicians and businesses make official announcements about anything from customer service complaints to hurricanes, and on the other hand, there’s a place where journalists post scoops and live coverage before it hits their websites. It is home to a plethora of fake accounts and pseudonymous folks, as well as Horse-ebooks, Weird TWo, and the Gorilla Channel. The first category benefits from Twitter’s default-public feed and rapid-fire text-snippet format — the second from how easily you can create accounts that aren’t tied to a real name or face and fire off bizarre jokes or hot takes.

At their best, these two Twitter styles are complementary. The inherent seriousness of Newswire Twitter heightens the humor and absurdity of Nonsense Twitter, and the style of Nonsense Twitter bleeds into Newswire Twitter, doing things like turning government consumer protection agencies into memelords. There is even room for chaos such as the fakeDPRK News feed that fooled several news outlets.

The Blame of Musk in the FONC: Twitter and Facebook Critics of the Blue Check System, and a New Audio Version of the Bell Newsletter

The argument might be for Musk’s new plan. $240 a year doesn’t much to pay for preserving that sense of trust, if you’re Madonna or Mcdonald’s.

In the face of scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission, Musk is accused of being dismissive of accountability by his critics, who say he is tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern.

The blue check system made some mistakes, but verification helped the platform operate as it should have since it was one of the main reasons for the long history of moderation problems. Facebook and TikTok cribbed blue badges for their own networks because there is a reason. They have been helpful.

CNN Business first had a version of the story. Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? Right here, you can sign up. Clicking on the link will take you to an audio version of the newsletter.

What is Happening to the Federal Reserve? Comment on Powell’s Tweet on Thursday, September 23: Investors’ Expectations and Implications for the Fed

The Federal Reserve will have a meeting in December. The Fed says that it will use hard economic data to make its next decision.

Key housing, labor and inflation reports are likely to have a bigger impact on the market as investors try to figure out what will happen with interest rates.

What is happening? No one can move markets like Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — with just a few words on Wednesday he crushed investors’ hopes of an interest rate pivot and sent stocks plunging. Powell said the current hiking regime meant to fight inflation has a ways to go. “It’s very premature, in my view, to think about or be talking about pausing.”

Inflation will not fall back until next year according to the central bank. That will require more interest rate hikes in the coming months, warned policymakers.

The government report is expected to show that the economy created more jobs in October than it did the previous month, but it was still a very solid number.

More inflation is what it means. Businesses have to pay higher wages to attract employees and are able to charge more for their goods and services. The Fed will scrutinize hourly wage growth in the report. In September, wages rose by 5% from a year ago.

December’s Jobs report is expected to be good, ahead of the Fed meeting. Even if the unemployment rate remains historically low, it could be enough for Fed officials to be appeased by a downward trajectory in employment.

In September, core consumer price inflation rose 0.6% compared to August, matching the pace and coming in well above expectations, not a good sign for the Fed. And analysts expect to see another large 0.5% increase in October.

PCE shows changes in the prices consumers pay for things in the United States. The Fed believes the measure is more accurate than CPI because it accounts for a wider range of purchases from a broader range of buyers.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html

The Bank of England is Higgsless: Premarket Stocks Trading: a Tweet from an E-Memory Employee Advisory Group

Housing: The housing market has been deeply impacted by the Fed’s efforts to fight inflation, and is one of the first areas of the economy to show signs of cooling.

The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage went up to 6.95% last week from 3.05% a year ago, and demand is falling because of higher borrowing costs.

Powell said that the housing market was very overheated for a few years after the swine flue. The big effect of our policies is located in that area.

The Bank of England hiked interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point on Thursday in a bid to ward off inflation, its biggest hike in 33 years.

The bank issued a stark warning. It said that economic output is already contracting and that it expects a recession to continue through the first half of 2024 “as high energy prices and materially tighter financial conditions weigh on spending.”

The memo sent to staff states that the layoffs began on Friday. The email sent Thursday evening notified employees that they will receive a notice by 12 p.m. ET Friday that informs them of their employment status.

The email added that “to help ensure the safety” of employees and Twitter’s systems, the company’s offices “will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html

Twitter slee director,’” a comment on Twitter about a “trolling” CEO in the wake of Musk’s resignation

The WARN Act requires any company with over 100 employees to give 60 days’ written notice if it intends to cut 50 jobs or more at a “single site of employment.”

According to the company filing, all previous members of the board, including recent ousted CEO Parag Agrawal, are no longer directors. That makes Musk, according to the filing, “the sole director of Twitter.”

In a tweet, the world’s richest man used an expletive to describe his assessment of “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark.” He said that power could be given to the people. Blue for $8/month.”

General Mills, Mondelez International and Pfizer are among the companies that are pausing their social media advertising after Musk’s acquisition.

The decision to push back the new feature comes one day after the platform launched an updated version of its iOS app that promises to allow users who pay a monthly subscription fee to get a blue checkmark on their profiles, a feature that CEO Elon Musk has proposed as a way to fight spam on the platform.

Sarah Silverman trolled Musk by copying his profile picture, cover image and name. The handle of SarahKSilverman is the only distinguishing feature of her account.

“I am a freedom of speech absolutist and I eat doody for breakfast every day,” Silverman tweeted Saturday. She also encourages her followers to support Democratic candidates.

The account was temporarily restricted on Sunday with a warning that “there has been some unusual activity from this account.” Before clicking on the profile, visitors were warned of some unusual activity from the account. The comedian then changed her account back to its usual form, complete with her own name and image.

The blue checkmark that indicates your identity was verified was why the actress changed her name to the CEO’s. 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.”

After changing her profile name to Musk, Bertinelli tweeted and retweeted support for several Democratic candidates and hashtags, including “VoteBlueForDemocracy” and “#VoteBlueIn2022.”

Additionally, Musk said Twitter users will no longer receive warning before being suspended. This is going to be identified as a condition for signing up to the social network.

In recent months, Musk has shared conspiracy theories about the attack on Paul Pelosi, called Democrats the party of “division & hate,” compared Twitter’s former CEO to Joseph Stalin and warned that “the woke mind virus will destroy civilization.”

Within minutes, multiple Twitter accounts claiming to be Kenya Airways tweeted him. All of them offered help, but none of them appeared official. The accounts used Kenya Airways’ logo and slogan, but clicking on their profiles raised red flags. “Most of their messages were well crafted,” Murphy says. “However, the low number of followers coupled with the spelling errors or odd choice of characters in their actual Twitter handles was the main giveaway.” The accounts were labeled with the words “@kenyaairways23.”

“Cybercriminals very easily use social media as the perfect vehicle to target unbeknown victims, but when there is no clear and genuine way to check identities, you open up a path to impersonated accounts, which will no doubt be abused by threat actors in the search of a con,” says Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at security firm ESET.

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.

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.

Twitter is ready for you to hand over some cash, whether it’s subscribing to the relaunched Twitter Blue service or buying one of the blue bird statues from its San Francisco office. Twitter Blue is one of Elon Musk’s strategies to monetize the social media company and shake up platform dynamics since his April acquisition.

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

We are not putting an “OFFICIAL” label on accounts at the moment, we are aggressively going after impersonation and deception.

When you have your customer service hat on, it’s from one person 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.

“Bottom line is that you have a decision to make,” Cuban added. “Stick with the new Twitter that democratizes every tweet by paid accounts and puts the onus on all users to curate for themselves. Or bring back Twitter curation. One makes it more efficient to publish information on social networks. The other is awful.”

The company is already facing billions in potential fines from the FTC over alleged privacy missteps dating to before Musk’s ownership. The employee warned colleagues that the company could be more exposed as a result of the recent resignation of its chief privacy officer and chief information security officer.

Twitter Hasn’t Solved Musk’s “Apple Tax”: Rejuvenating Apple with a 30 % Commission

The company says the revamped service will cost $8 a month on the web, or $11 a month if purchased through an app on iPhones and iPads, where in-app transactions are processed through the company’s App Store, which generally levies a 30% commission.

The price new tiers follow sharp words from Musk leveled at Apple over its so-called “Apple tax,” a longtime pain point for app developers and cause of concern for regulators around the world who have viewed the fee as excessive and financially damaging to Apple’s rivals. Following a meeting with Tim Cook at the company’s Cupertino headquarters, Musk claimed he had resolved his row with Apple.

Musk said the three colors for purchase will be gold for companies, grey for governments and a blue check for prominent individuals.

Even before Musk took over the company’s advertising business was not strong enough, as it had long struggled to grow its service in the way larger competitors have.

Twitter has not answered questions about whether it still has the resources to take on such a daunting task after laying off more than half of the company’s staff.

“With a reduced workforce, it remains to be seen if it will be possible to prevent fraud, impersonation and scams with their new identity verification methodology,” Rachel Tobac, the CEO of the cybersecurity firm SocialProof Security, previously told NPR. “Scammers will quickly determine how they can overwhelm or manipulate the identity verification system to get ‘authenticated’ as an entity that they are not.”

A new note has started to appear on some accounts that were verified before Musk took over. It might or might not be noteworthy.

What Do You Want to See When You Are a Tweeter? Discovering What You Need in Twitter Blue (and What You Can Do About It)

What do you get right now? You instantly get the ability to edit your Tweets multiple times within the first half-hour of posting, a long-requested feature. While you can’t watch all of them, you can upload files at a better quality. Do you still hold onto that bored ape, crazy kitty, loudmouth larva or whatever the latest NFT collection is? Show it off as your profile picture with Twitter Blue.

Musk initially said the relaunch of the new system would take place at the end of November, but it was delayed several times over concerns about the safety of the feature.

The additional gold and gray verification categories appear aimed at addressing some of those concerns, but it’s not clear what a requirement for individuals to pay to be verified would mean for trust in prominent individual users.

“All verified individual humans will have same blue check, as boundary of what constitutes ‘notable’ is otherwise too subjective,” Musk tweeted last month. If they are verified by that organization, individuals can have a small logo showing they’re a member.

Not sure what exactly you receive for that monthly subscription? Is it possible that you’re confused as to what all these different colored check marks mean? This is everything you need to know.

The upgraded service allows you to make aesthetic changes to your experience. Change the appearance of the icon on your smartphone or tweak the in-app colors. For anyone who bookmarks an overwhelming assortment of Tweets, you can now sort through those bookmarked posts and organize them into private folders.

The new gray checkmark is used for government and multilateral accounts. You might be able to see it already on the @WhiteHouse account. The company said that it would be rolling out the gray badges.

After everything, are you ever still sure you want to be on Twitter? If you’re after something new, check out WIRED articles that can help you get started on Mastodon, discover new server on Discord, or give LinkedIn a second chance.

Twitter has officially announced Blue for Business, a subscription geared toward companies that want to “verify and distinguish themselves on Twitter,” as its press release says. The service will let companies link their main accounts with those of their employees to make it easier to show that someone actually does work for them.

What Elon Musk said about the Blue Verified program and why he wants to make sure he isn’t a CEO or an employee

Some of the features started showing up before the announcement — we’ve already dug into the rounded-square profile pictures and affiliate badges, which started appearing earlier on Monday.

Meta is testing a subscription service which will allow Instagram and Facebook users to pay to get verified, Mark Zuckerberg announced on Instagram Sunday.

To avoid fake accounts, customers who want to get the blue badge would need to provide a government ID which matches their profile name and picture. Users must also be above 18 to be eligible.

Meta said there won’t be changes to accounts that are already verified. Verification was previously for users who are “authentic and notable.”

“We are evolving the meaning of the blue badge to focus on authenticity so we can expand verification access to more people,” a Meta spokesperson said. In the future, we will display follower count more places so that people can distinguish accounts that share the same name.

On February 3rd, Elon Musk made a big announcement. You will have to be subscribed to Blue Verified to get your cut, as they will give ad revenue with ads that appear in their reply threads. We waited for more information about the program and for official support documents to explain how the whole thing would work.

This wouldn’t be the first time that he’s made an announcement with little to no follow-up, even if you’re just looking at Twitter. Remember when he lied about having a content moderation council that would vet any major policy changes at the company — and then tried to sell that same story again but with voting instead of a council? He also said that the feature of voting in policy polls would need to be done by a subscriber to the micro-networking service.

It is not to say that Blue subscribers have not gotten any new features since Musk took over. They can now upload 60-minute videos instead of being limited to 10 minutes, and they can write 4,000-character tweets.

Since November, the CEO and owner has mentioned the feature as an essential to defeat the scam. Musk wanted to make employees work in hardcore conditions, it hasn’t materialized. The same is true for some of the things he has promised, such as open source of the company’s algorithm and the announcement that he would begin sharing ads with Blue subscribers on February 27th. He is promising it will happen on March 31st.

A grey check for the energy, material and energy balances of governmental and organizational accounts in the U.S., Japan and New York

The company also announced on Thursday that it’s started accepting applications from governmental and organizational accounts that want a grey checkmark. The accounts that are eligible include heads of state and members of congress, according to its documentation. The National Park Service and the US president both have a grey check.