What Musk plans to do with Twitter after his purchase of the Micro-Networking Site? A Keyhole View of Musk’s Twitter Career and Implications for the FTC

Questions linger about what Musk plans to do with the micro-networking site after he bought it. According to The Washington Post, Musk was planning to lay off 75 percent of his employees. Musk told Twitter staffers that the 75 percent figure was inaccurate, Bloomberg reported. In Musk’s text messages, provided during discovery to Twitter’s lawyers, he and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, a friend of his, discussed cutting staff by requiring a return to office.

Are you going to rid the site of the happy-go-lucky crowd? podcast host Joe Rogan wrote to Musk the day Musk revealed his stake in Twitter. Musk said that he would provide advice, which they could or could not choose to follow.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” he said in the official deal announcement.

It doesn’t seem right to talk about Twitter in a vacuum. There are a lot of different social networks, and they all have the same problems: some technical, political, and social issues, as well as complying with various platform regulations around the world.

For a “keyhole view of what Twitter will look like,” look at alternative platforms like Parler, Gab and Truth Social that promise fewer restrictions on speech, said the president of the liberal nonprofit watchdog group Media Matters for America.

He said that “the feature of those sites is the bug which is where being able to say and do things that are not allowed on mainstream social media platforms is the reason why everyone gravitates to them.” And what we see there is that they are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.”

Musk thinks he’ll change the way. Twitter’s moderation works, potentially relaxing the kinds of policies that saw former President Donald Trump permanently banned from the platform.

He was going to join the company’s board but later changed his mind, saying he would like to end permanently banned accounts except for those that advocate violence.

Alex Jones was kicked off for abusive behavior in the fall of 2018, and that could mean lifting the bans on him and other like-minded people.

Even in the face of scrutiny by theFederal Trade Commission, which publicly warned on Thursday, in a rare forward-looking statement, that it is “tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern,” Musk’s critics have described the billionaire as dismissive of accountability.

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

Trump’s Facebook exit from the Twitter monopoly is a good thing for the billionaire, but what about how it affects Twitter?

Allowing Trump and others to return could set a precedent for other social networks, including Meta-owned Facebook, which is considering whether to reinstate the former president when its own ban on him expires in January 2023.

“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.

Musk is expected to shake things up at the social network. Agrawal, who succeeded Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey in the CEO role less than a year ago, will likely head for the exit, potentially with a $42 million payout.

Musk’s texts reveal that an initially cautiously friendly relationship between the two men when Musk first invested quickly soured after Agrawal told Musk that his tweets criticizing the platform were “not helping me make Twitter better.”

It is good news for the billionaire, who’s complained that the company is overstaffed for its size while also complaining that its costs outstrip revenues.

One of the challenges he has in front of him seems like it would be difficult if I were to rank it. You have to have all these other things figured out first before you get there. I am not sure if or when that will ever happen. He needs more than just the ads business to make good on the hundreds of millions of dollars he has invested in the company, for it to be a $100-billion-market-cap exit. It’s payments. That’s all there is.

He may not have much choice other than to find new sources of revenue since he has little choice except to make changes to the way content is moderation.

The Success of Creating an Empty in Your Life with Social Media: Why Chinese Apps Haven’t caught on in the United States

Ah, thank you. The business of influence is something inherent to the advertising business. “I want to create a desire in you. Maybe you’re perfectly happy and content with your life, but I’m going to create an emptiness in your life — a want or a desire — and you are going to fill that with my toothpaste or my headphones.” That is what advertising does.

More broadly, Musk has talked about using Twitter to create “X, the everything app.” This is a reference to China’s WeChat app, which started life as a messaging platform but has since grown to encompass multiple businesses, from shopping to payments and gaming. Musk told employees in June that they live on the messaging service in China. We will be a success if we can reproduce that with social media.

This strategy has been used by American tech companies, but Chinese-style super-apps haven’t caught on in the United States.

Twitter botched its layoff, and what it might look like inside the company: What did the CEO of Twitter say in the wake of Musk’s deposition?

With Twitter, you have lifers in both the initial cuts and with those who left afterwards because they disagreed with some of the public statements — like the Paul Pelosi tweet, or whatever it was. You hear people talk about missionaries versus mercenaries in companies. There are the folks at companies who are core to the culture; they created the tech and they know it in and out. The people are never allowed to go. You do everything you can to keep them. Perhaps as part of the fog of war in that Twitter acquisition, knowing that they had to make these big cuts, they let some of those people go, which then also caused other people to leave.

Many Twitter employees have recently noted the absence of Parag Argawal, their current CEO, who Musk soured on after the two initially started talking about Musk joining Twitter’s board. One current employee at the micro-publishing service said that he had not been seen for weeks. One person said that he had ghosted them. According to a leaked picture, the employee-only section of Blind and the anonymous message board for tech workers are both full of similar comments about Argawal.

According to Insider, the execs got handsome payouts for their trouble, they included Agrawal who got 38.7 million, Segal who got 25.4 million, and Personette who got $11.2 million.

Musk was scheduled to be deposed on October 6th and 7th, after having moved his deposition from late September. He announced he’d honor the contract his lawyers negotiated after all just days before the deposition was to take place. That deposition was probably going to be uncomfortable; a judge found that Musk likely deleted Signal messages that were relevant to the case. The deposition was delayed as Musk and Twitter worked toward a deal; Musk even received a court order halting proceedings to allow the deal to close by October 28th.

I spoke with many current and former employees who felt that Musk’s erratic leadership gave them a sinking feeling about their company’s future.

Today let’s talk a bit more about how the company botched its layoff process, what happened inside Twitter on Monday, and what that paywall might look like.

Telling the tale of an employee’s job loss: elon musk tweet twitter paywall-possible if employees would like to come back

Managers agonized over the decisions, and jockeyed with their peers in an effort to preserve employment for the most vulnerable among them: pregnant women, employees who have cancer, and workers on visas among them, a former employee told me.

The teams that were cut the most were those that were wiped out entirely. As it turned out, though, the company went too far. As I was the first to report on Saturday, within hours of the layoffs, some managers were already being told to ask select laid-off employees if they wanted their old jobs back.

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

I’m sorry to everyone on the weekend. We have the opportunity to ask people if they’ll come back, if they were left off. A manager sent a message to employees that said they needed to put together names and rationales by Sunday. I am going to research but if anyone of you are in contact with people we feel might come back and help us, please tell us before 4.

The manager thinks that we may use some tools from the other platforms. The company reached out to both engineers and designers in a bid to get them back, Platformer is told.

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

Twitter’s Comeback after Musk Leaves? Some Employees Are Prompt to Leave, and Other People Are Braving for Their Remnants

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. If more than 33 percent of staff is laid off, businesses with 100 full-time employees are required to give 60 days notice. The notice at Twitter said that people would be paid for the next 60 days, and promised to give them a month of separation.

Some workers have begun to consult with lawyers over their options in the event that they are recalled. Others are in open revolt, tweeting public threads about various aspects of the organization that have been broken after the ready-fire-aim disaster of Musk’s layoffs process.

Manager’s are bracing for a much higher workload than before. A person I spoke with told me that a technical manager should make sure to spend at least half their time writing code and at least 20 individual contributors. Others have been given much higher numbers of direct reports.

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

An Employee Discussion of the Musk Edict: The Succulent Subscription Business Under the Elusive Templar: A Social Media Era in Transition

To learn what they are supposed to do, employees looked to some unusual sources. After a number of celebrities and high-profile accounts began to impersonate him, Musk announced a new policy, via a tweet, that anyone found impersonating someone else would be permanently banned without warning. That was news to what remains of Twitter’s policy team, I’m told, and afterward some employees began discussing how to implement Musk’s edict.

A former employee says the health team was told to listen to a Musk adviser’s podcasts for intel on why half of their colleagues had died. Sacks, a venture capitalist who has been helping to manage the Musk transition, co-hosts the “All-In” podcast with fellow Twitter adviser Jason Calacanis and VC Chamath Palihapitiya.

“The most recent podcast covers the current layoffs happening across tech and provides some insight into why this is happening/necessary,” a vice president told employees. “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 open-enrollment period was supposed to start today, according to the company’s calendar, but there wasn’t any information in the 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.

On the other hand, the company is telling advertisers that it is thriving and they added 15 million daily users since the end of the second quarter.

Many other media properties have struggled with the model of being a subscription based business, so it would need to be successfully restructured into a thriving subscription business to survive. Right out of the beginning Musk has had trouble. The updated version of the subscription service that allowed users to buy a verification checkmark had to be halted after two days when it was being used to impersonate prominent people. Musk said he would launch the service on November 29, but later suggested it might be delayed until there is high confidence of stopping impersonation.

But the new Blue likely faces larger problems. The existing version only had a small amount of active subscribers. The new version will be more expensive, and its value is not clear for most regular users. The company is not certain how it will convince enough people to subscribe.

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.

A person familiar with the matter said that both Musk and Sacks have been discussing the idea in recent meetings. A plan might allow everyone to use the service for a limited time but requires a fee to continue browsing, the person said.

The new blue feature that Musk added at the last minute is known to other employees as a reduction of ad load in theTwitter app by half. The sources said that the change would result in a $6 loss in ad revenue per user in the United States. If the ad-light plan is adopted, Apple and Google would likely lose money on Blue.

Musk has been heavily involved in the chaotic launch of Blue, participating in standup meetings and exchanging regular emails with Esther Crawford, a director of product management at the company. Musk told workers there was one decision-maker and that was him.

It was not known how serious Musk and Sacks were about the paywall. It also does not appear imminent, as the Blue team is wholly occupied with the launch of expanded verification.

Twitter and the CEO of the largest social network: After 40 years, Musk has left the platform ad-supported and totally rebuked

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.

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 known when the offering would be restored.

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 currently putting an official label on accounts, but we are aggressively going after impersonation and deception.

The rocky launch of the paid verification feature caused a lot of criticism from misinformation experts who warned it would make it more difficult to identify trustworthy information during the critical period leading up to the US elections. Some of Musk’s other high-powered users of the platform had tough feedback.

When you have your customer service hat on, it’s from one entrepreneur to another. Cuban said that he had spent too much time muting the newly purchased checkmark mentions, in an attempt to make them useful again.

There’s a decision to be made, Cuban said. The onus is on the users to find out about new things on the site because it’s new. Or bring back Twitter curation. One makes Twitter time and information efficient. The other is awful.”

Large digital platforms “have experienced professionals out there who develop relationships with these advertisers,” Vincent said. The ad platform is basically reduced in value when there is no one to respond to the brands.

Much of Twitter’s ad sales team has been fired or pushed out. After new owner Musk decided to bring back the accounts of controversial figures like former President Donald Trump, some companies, including General Mills, have paused advertising on the platform. A cursory scroll of the platform will show you less big brand ads.

An associate professor of Marketing at the Marshall School of Business thinks that a subscription business would make sense for the social media platform. 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.

So yes, after meeting with Cook, Elon tweeted that there was a misunderstanding about the threat to pull Twitter from the App Store, but maybe Apple was just saying, “We may not approve your relaunch of Blue until you fix X for us.” Actually, I think that’s more likely. They usually hold things up for arbitrary amounts of time for other non related issues.

Actually, thanks to the Twitter stuff, all of our investors are now like, “Wow, you look really smart for doing Tumblr. The metrics are looking pretty good because you spent less. We have definitely had waves of users and advertisers coming over saying, “Hey, we want an alternative. We disagree with some principles or things that Musk has said or done. Can we come spend money with you?” Which is great.

Even so, there is no surety that continuing to capture online world attention will lead to subscription payments or revenue growth.

How Did You Buy a Social Network, and What Do You Mean to Buy It? A Brief Introduction to Automattic and About Tumblee and WPP

Before we talk about buying a social network, we should mention you are the CEO of Automattic, a popular e-Commerce buying solution that makes products like “Tumblee” and “WPP”. Just give the audience a really quick refresher on what Automattic is and how you think about the company.

I think you’re the first repeat CEO guest of the year. You were on in March

, and we talked a lot about WordPress and a little bit about Tumblr. 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.

Automattic is a deep-tech infrastructure company, so we were able to bring it onto our infrastructure, rewrite a lot of things, make it faster, make it more stable, and also bring our experience and our values in terms of moderation. I took over as CEO in February, and we were just rounding that corner of all the cleanup work when all the Twitter stuff started happening and people started saying, “Well, maybe I need an alternative.”

Thank you. 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 make sure that our business model works for our customers and users?

Open-source is obviously at the core of everything we do. The general public license to the open-sourced software is called the GPL. We also publish Pocket Casts on the internet. We are not closed-sourced, we are open-sourced. Sorry, I think the last time I said it I was a little more optimistic. It’s just a lot of code, but we will get to it.

I believe open-source is a fundamental human right. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion and any other freedom are important as technology is taking up more and more of our lives. It is important that we can modify our software to make it work better.

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

How to Make a Social Media Platform for Free and Healthy People and Is It Possible to Create a Safe and Healthy Environment for People Who Live in the Silicon Valley

I found this striking, because Matt is a good CEO — he is a long-tenured, extremely well-regarded, extremely effective CEO in Silicon Valley who makes a product that millions of customers use. He was like, “Buying Tumblr has been the most humbling experience in my career.” Content moderation is a huge part of it. He sees it as libertarian when it comes to what people are allowed to say and he is more to the left on some issues. He was like “On speech, I’m libertarian. I can not do that to run the service. We have to stop a lot of things.

We’re seeing that happening in real time at Twitter. They will allow someone like Ye back on, 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’s important for you to provide a safe environment for everyone there, that includes food, water, and restrooms. I think hosting a social network is your responsibility to provide a safe and healthy environment.

If you post text and images they will be rewarded. I think a blog post is a little work of art. I’m like you, I’m a blogger. Tumblr incentivizes you to make that thing. If we would just agree that the platform should be transparent about how they are moderating and what the rules are, we would stop yelling inanely about the First Amendment as applied to private companies and have the platforms compete. I think we would find most people want to go places where there are not a bunch of racists and sexists and trolls. They want to have a nice time and make art, which I think is the dream.

I wanted to know if there was a way to create a mainstream social media that did not rely on advertising as its primary business model. We also have improvements that turn off ads, and we have a lot of other subscriptions to offer. If we can make it a subscriber-supported thing, then we can truly be aligned. Even if I were no longer running Automattic or Tumblr, the business model would align the users with its business.

Absolutely. We have seen some amazing examples of that, even in the last few weeks with Goncharov. It would be amazing if people could go to something like that on their social media time. It puts more control in the hands of users. You should feel good after using it and you feel creatively charged. That is what we have been working on since we bought it.

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

How Did You Go to Tumblr, and Why Did You Get What You Want? The Thing that Your Board of Directors Will Not Tell You About 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. I’m the third CEO of Tumblr; it was David Karp, then Jeff D’Onofrio, then myself. I’m stewarding it for the next generation. I will not be the CEO of Tumblr for a long time. I will find someone to take it over at some point. It should be 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 is this strange thing that fills a role on the internet.

Have you ever heard the phrase “free like a puppy”? The transaction cost for us buying Tumblr was de minimis. But it was a deal in which we took on all of its liabilities and all of its legal cases, we kept all the employees and all the costs to run it. Tumblr was, and still is, burning quite a bit of cash. People were like, “Oh, you could buy an apartment in New York for that,” but you would be buying something that costs $60 or $70 million a year to run. You would be taking on all of those obligations as well.

You are referring to it being de minimis when you say it is sold to you for the smallest amount they could. And that you bought it for the smallest amount you would pay, knowing that its carrying costs were so high. Was that a straight conversation? “Hey, we’re not going to figure out how much money Tumblr makes and do a multiple of revenue to come to a valuation. This is in a bad position, and needs to have a good home. We’ll be that home. What is the smallest number your board of directors will accept?

I would say Tumblr’s struggle with advertisers is actually lack of targeting. Some people would prefer to not use the site because of its silliness and younger user base. That is fine. I would say we can unlock a lot of revenue, but we have decided to not do the tracking and targeting that everyone else does. It becomes more of a challenge to get advertisers to spend money. We’re introducing some. I’m okay with tracking things like device and country. That sort of stuff is very natural. Users and advertisers are both a part of it. There’s some that is actually quite enlightening. Your user base could do it or your listeners could go in and buy an ad on Facebook or Twitter. They have their own self-serving tools. The amount of targeting you can do is kind of insane.

How do you not throw the baby out with the bathwater? We brought the whole team with us from day one and tried to switch some 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.

So we have remade the team, we have made the tech, and we’re starting to remake the product. We are starting to have fun and I am very excited. You could see the blue checkmark. We’re also starting to improve on the format. You now have the ability to have posts on social media that have a gallery and a video. Blogs have done this for a long time, but we’re bringing it into the social media form and onto mobile. The creativity being expressed on that social network is more than what can be done on any other social network right now.

That time period is very interesting. After you buy it, you want to say, “Now we’re having fun.” But it’s not until the end of 2022, at the earliest. That is a long time to integrate the cultures, reset the expectations, and then get to product innovation. Or maybe from a user perspective it’s a long time, but from your perspective maybe it’s lightning fast. Which one do you think it is?

It’s the most challenging thing in my business career, I said it earlier. I have been doing this for 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 didn’t see enough of the change that we hoped for.

Do you think that part tracks with the Twitter timeline? Musk comes in, he takes over Twitter, he’s like, “screw it,” and then there’s a gigantic,

sweeping culture reset

and gigantic, sweeping public comments about how the company was trash at every level. Do you think you could have done that? Would that have been effective?

I sometimes feel like I should say that everything is trash and reset, because I think there is part of me that thinks that. There’s something in this way of working that I think every leader finds tempting. Most people are not like this. I am not. I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I did this to my team.

There is an appealing feeling about saying, “Oh man, I wish I could clear the deck” if you are in a leadership position. I used to wonder if I could fire half the people at the company I worked for when I was younger. Would anyone even notice?” There is something about a company that encourages that kind of thinking. Now that I have provided you cover, do you think that you should have done something more drastic?

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

Twitter Talent Exodus: A Golden Child or a Mistake of Twitter, or Does Twitter Really Care About the People It Recruits?

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. That is a pretty big switch that happened over a couple of years. Some of it was natural attrition, and some of it was performance management.

There is also something that I’ve just never seen in my business career, which is the talent exodus. As an example, Stripe laid off 15 to 16 percent of its staff, which was surprising, because Stripe is a golden child. You assume that they tried to do that as performance management. They attempted to take off the people they thought of to be low performers. I would guess that Twitter was probably going to do a layoff anyway, though probably not as big as it was nor as sloppy. I’m sure they were going to, because every other tech company has.

Now as an example, Stripe will make mistakes there. You might be cautious to hire out of a layoff if you know that some people who were laid off, were quite good. 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.”

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

What Is Going On? The First Tweet from a Tumblr Landing Page, and How We Are Trying to Make the Web Better

It’s funny. I know you feel this way as well. and I have come up after those moments in tech history. The team of people that created Intel left the company, and so now Intel is considered to be an institution. It feels like maybe we’re living through that moment again as tech companies have these gigantic layoffs, where entire teams of people who like working together are now available. The Twitter Spaces audio team that built Spaces is just like, “We’ll come do this for you again, but we want to work together.” Would you build a live audio product? If you could hire that team, what would you do?

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

If you’re hiring the missionaries, you don’t do it with a “we’re going to crush Twitter” message, because they have poured their heart and soul into Twitter over the past however-many years. They love it, therefore they are not motivated to kill it. I think it is worth asking, “Hey could we do it again, avoid some of the mistakes, and create an alternative?”

To me, the best way to actually influence Twitter now is by creating great competition from the outside. I think Twitter will survive and will still be around 20 years from now, but I think it will be made better if Tumblr is there nipping at its heels with some really excellent user experiences, maybe innovating the forms, and just pushing the bleeding edge. I don’t think it will be the bigger network, but more innovative. That’s entirely possible. That is the kind of space it was before. It’s cool. Guess what? We will make the rest of the web better.

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

A few questions about Tumblr after you buy it: What are you doing? How are you today? What have you learned? How did you lose? When did you start?

A few quick questions, just to complete the acquisition story. You said the burn when you bought it was $60 million-ish a year. Are you closer to profitability now or are you still burning the same number?

No. We brought it down, but it will take at least 20 or 30 million more dollars a year to break even.

Now, the good news is that one thing we’re starting to do is combine some of the teams. It doesn’t need to have a separate trust and safety or terms of service. It had a problem with protecting against illegal content, but we also have similar problems across our properties, like taking down hate speech and responding to the DMCA quickly. Those are similar issues, so we’re able to use some of the same backend tools to monitor every upload and other things. It’s not only a Tumblr cost at that point.

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

The question is one of the classic Decoder questions. How is the team made up? Is it structured the same way as when you acquired it, or have you reallocated some of those numbers?

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

Why is Twitter so popular? The pro-ana community: a community that promotes anorexic behaviors in a way that attracts new types of users

I mean, I have come in as CEO, and naturally the big changes to the structure are because I’m running a lot of different things, including Automattic and WordPress.com, separately. I’m a leader that pushes things onto the leads in the company. I don’t think we need to have meetings with the executive team every day. I’m more like, “Here are the five most important things to me, get them done. What are the most important things to you? What am I missing?”

There is a lot of asynchronous communication. There have not been big changes. Some of the people from Automattic are helping me out on a daily basis, including a chief operating officer. I think it’s a standard structure other than that.

There are also other set of incentives. Here are the things that we want from you and here are the things we want to show people. The content moderation puzzle has the positive incentives as part of it. Is that right to you? Is it fair to be that reductive and say the product people at social networks are basically making content moderation?

Oh yeah, I think I’m the one who sent it. The title headline was good, but I do not agree with it. But man, it was correct. You really nailed it. I think you mention some of the nuances of moderation and do it at a scale, so if you want to listen to this, go read that post.

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. When you search for certain tags, we build stuff in so that if you need help, you’ll get a message. Here is the phone number. It gets better.

There was one thing that I learned about called the pro-ana community, ana being short for anorexia. 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. If you’re hosting and promoting content that’s encouraging that, what are you doing to those kids, those people, as a society? It is not illegal, but it is your responsibility to control distribution, to discourage posting, and to give people pointers to resources once they have seen it. We can point out people who are professionals at this, as well as try to convince them to go in the right direction.

That really works. There are a lot of stories where tech has made society better. I’ll talk about 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 basically come together and created technological solutions and data sharing that have become quite good at catching this. Then it all gets passed to law enforcement and they do their thing. I think it has helped a bit.

Then comes 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.” There has been a lot of sharing on what people click more, what resources are best, how to provide a phone number, how to do this internationally, how to do this in every language, et cetera. This is something we all agree is part of our responsibility to society, and tech companies are willing to share this with each other.

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

What Should We Do About the First Amendment? Freedom of Speech vs. Freedom of Reach: Explaining Why We Need a More Dynamic Republic

In those situations, you are shaping the product in line with the internal values of the company. They are horrible 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. We should aggressively intervene to stop it and provide resources. Those are aggressive moves. When we see this stuff and you don’t want it in your way, we’re going to show up and stop the speech. They are aggressive interventions, but they’re not controversial.

I believe that all the layers ofWordPress andtumblr do. So what should you be allowed to post? That, again, I’m pretty open to. Even if I do not approve of it, it will be allowed in the laws of the country. We talk about freedom of speech versus freedom of reach. Freedom of reach is like, are you providing distribution to it? Is your post on the search pages? I’m not sure if it’s in the feed. I don’t know if I am giving distribution to it. I think that any company that does that has to be more thoughtful in its moderation stack. As long as governments abdicate their responsibility here, we’re probably going to disagree some or all of the time with the decisions that companies make.

I think this is a good summary of the problem. You start out with a small amount of money and then you say to yourself, “I want a more dynamic republic because speech laws need to be changed in the country.” When you say it’s the most humbling experience of your career, that seems like the journey. Many tech executives run networks like this. The only actor they can think of to cover moderation decisions, is the government, because the pressure is high and they want a more accountable external force to give cover. Then, you say to the First Amendment, “Okay, I wish we had some leaders.”

The lines are unclear on what porn is, who is qualified to say what people on platforms should be looking at, and whether they should watch porn or not. The company’s values don’t match what you want the users to be able to do on the platform. Eight million external actors have control over the platform with their own values. This is where you can take me through it. I’m picking on porn, but I can pick any number of other speech areas that have the same exact problems.

I’ll give you the TL;DR. I wrote a post about this and it was titled, “Why ‘Go Nuts, Show Nuts’ Doesn’t Work in 2022.” The old policy on adult content was that of go nuts, show nuts.

It is very popular. I think there were issues 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. I wasn’t there at the time, but my guess is that Apple also wanted to make an example by shutting Tumblr down and removing it from the App Store, even though it’s owned by Verizon, which is one of Apple’s largest partners in the world. That must have woke everyone up and told them to take this seriously.

Since our last edition of the show, we have reopened more adult content that 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 were stuck with the old rules until we had some better community moderation in place, after which we could change those rules.

It is interesting that he talked about bringing the Motion Picture Association of America rating to this, which is where we began the feature. When you get into the history of the rating system though, it’s actually quite fraught. Just 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. We went to a form of classification, a taxonomy, that was a little more nuanced.

Yeah. You open your Tumblr and you’re browsing through, you don’t want that stuff popping up when someone walks by. That’s embarrassing for everyone involved. From a user point of view we thought about it. We have already seen that the incentives are aligned.

Let’s say you’re a burlesque performer in New York City. Bathtub Gin, right? It is an awesome, famous place. You want to post pictures from your performance. These are mature, you don’t want kids to see these, so you can tag this Now that you know it will be protected, you’re in a good spot. Folks under 18 won’t even know it exists, but people who want to see this can find it. Everyone’s happy. The incentives are all aligned.

The violations now are not for what you post, but for mistagging. We take mistagging very seriously, because, obviously, that’s wrong. It is possible to endanger kids. It could do a lot of things. If you’re tagged correctly, we allow you to post a lot more stuff. We have accomplished this while browsing the App Store, credit cards, and everything else.

Yeah. Well, how do they get away with it? They allow everything, like “things going into things.” Pretty much anything you could find on a porn site is also on Twitter and Reddit. How do they escape with the crime? They have enough legit content that Apple wasn’t worried about, and maybe they’re too big. They might have also made these internet only toggles. We decided to take the same feature.

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

Why aren’t Apple and Google so Strict about the App Store Distribution and Moderation? I don’t think that’s the case

That works for Elon but I don’t know if it would work for me. The App Store review process is still not straight forward. You never know what’s going to happen.

I wish we knew more. Whenever Apple engages in these backroom dealings about the App Store and distribution, even for apps as large as Tumblr or Twitter, we don’t really know exactly what goes down. Unless you have someone like Matt who is willing to discuss it, and he admits that he doesn’t really know what goes down.

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 is an odd platform. Most of the technology we have is easy to ship whenever you want. You can take things down, and test them. In the app stores, it goes through a person, and depending on who the person is, they might interpret the rules differently.

I would say Apple’s and Google’s app store moderation is night and day. You can roll it out to a percent of users and then roll it back with the awesome tools that you get with Google. Everything is really fast and they allow way more stuff. They are not as strict about making in-app purchases. It is completely different.

Apple is the most powerful player in the market, especially in the US. They are a monopolist. They control everything. They’re also opinionated. 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 seems like they still think they are the only ones who have a chance.

They think they still have a risk of being killed. I’m excited actually, because Apple has more cash in their bank than most countries. They are one of the most powerful entities on the planet. They are realizing their size and power as they shift into more of a benevolent role.

What you’re describing are people who didn’t come up as the underdogs. Most of the present executives were in Apple when it was a major player in the industry. You just see their culture over time.

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

What do you think about taking control of Tumblr, or how you feel about it? A candid conversation with Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake

You have described taking over Tumblr as the most humbling experience. It is this stuff. “Now I’m the politician who is in charge of a large city or a 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.” Where do you have authority to make decisions, and what do you think the limits are in that authority? It seems like that is at the center of it. You aren’t a tech executive who says “Make the button blue.” You think you will make a policy decision that will be expressed out in the community and will achieve the result you want.

I am extremely libertarian and have changed over the past year and ten years, but I think the best way to describe where I am in 2020 is that I will be in a place where people can speak their mind. I like things people say about me, or things I don’t agree with strongly. I am a public figure. It was great.

Where I think I have become more conservative is in bullying and hate speech, that sort of stuff. Of course, calls to violence are pretty noncontroversial. I think there’s more to it than that, maybe more in the middle. Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake were part of the early days of Wikimedia which helped foster an amazing community when they chose to comment on new users.

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

Why does improvation work on Twitter? A question that the leader needs to take part in the service as a member of the audience?

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 is the name of the posters that have been put up in New York? I saw a picture yesterday, and there’s actually Goncharov posters now.

He’s goofing. He’s posting memes. You are very familiar with the community and the site. You are in it. Do you think it’s important for the leader to consume the service as a member of the audience? Because I think it cuts both ways.

One hundred percent, yeah. There is a bit of understanding that I do not have. I think that many of the leaders of social media use the platforms a lot, but only under a secret account. They have an alt.

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

Democracy and Democracy: The Case for Using Social Media and Machine Learning to Influence the Global Vulnerability (The case of TikTok)

You also need to be 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’m also not saying people who disagree with me aren’t welcome.

There are two levels to this. One is overt pressure. This is advertisers saying, “I disagree with xyz,” and they leave. They can vote with their money. It’s a free market. It is capitalism. That is kind of the expression of it.

I don’t know if I agree with that name and shame. I would call that more capitalist activism, which I think it behooves all of us to do. We should vote with our money and support companies that agree with us, not companies who do not. 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.

I think we are grappling with the intersection of democracy and that. I like that model if it says that citizens can vote and vote on the way that they are governed. 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.

As personalization, targeting, and machine learning and AI become so good, technology’s ability to influence you becomes amazing. This is what we are seeing today. How are the TikTok algorithm? Is it good to post on the photo sharing site, the social media site, the IG accounts, or something? They know me so well. I buy a lot of things off the photo sharing site. They have made me dial in. That being applied to political influence is playing off in both sanctioned and unsanctioned ways. Russia, China, Iran, and other countries use our free and open society to influence Americans. It’s the whole thing.

“We were all worried about hacking the voting machines because that was a good story, but it’s way easier to just hack the people and influence the voters.”

We were all worried about hacking the voting machines because that was a good story, but it’s way easier to just hack the people and influence the voters. The voting machines are used to influence voters. It happens in every election. We know this for a fact. It’s not a conspiracy. How do we protect society against that if the business models of these networks are designed around influence and engagements?

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

Is it possible to create a space that is more creatively charged than what you want to advertise? A study on Twitter by Ceo Mollenweg and Elon Musk

A space that is more creatively charged is what we want to create. We want Tumblr to be like going to a music show or a museum. You will discover new stuff, you will see something that you have never seen before, and you will leave creatively charged. That mindset is not a good way to think about advertising, but I think we can find advertisers and a set of products that fit well with that.

We’re trying to balance it. advertising is the only business model if you provide a free service. Running a social network is incredibly expensive. You will pay money, get some space and bandwidth, but there will be a hard cost. When you sign up for a social network, you can upload unlimited video which can be viewed an unlimited amount of times, and it’s essentially an all-you-can-eat-for-nothing plan.

Companies have to pay those bills. They must pay for the network and build the data centers. Advertisers subsidize it because it is a real cost.

The advertisers are saying that when you buy the thing you want to moderate less, and that’s why it’s important to keep moderation as much as possible. There’s a tension there that I think is really difficult. Do you hear from big companies that they need you to measure your brand safety before giving you money, as the chief executive of a website trying to build an advertising business?

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

Why is the First Amendment so important? Why the US government should take action against the tech giants and the tech companies, and why I have no respect for the government

By the way, for all the stuff the tech companies do, the telecom companies are way worse. Using Comcast you can target a group of 3 or 4 homes and then track the cable ads that go to them. Credit card companies and banks all share your financial data, and they’ll then correlate that with whether you spent money in the store. The amount of tracking is insane. The amount of geo data that gets shared is where we need governance to actually step in, because capitalism is not self-regulating well there.

I would like to know where you think moderation belongs in the stack. There is a distinction between the two, the difference between the two is that you have for enterprise customers a place where you host theWordPress website, and the one you do not. The idea is that if you’re closer to the internet’s pipes, you have less control over it. So Comcast and AT&T should not look at the bits that are going across their network. Is it possible that Cloudflare should not, right? They are an infrastructure provider that rides on top of those rails. AWS has a set of policies, like they won’t host white supremacist sites, but that’s basically it. That’s all the line is.

Content moderation boards aim to recreate government in the private sector, which lacks accountability, feedback mechanisms and courts.

Do you think the United States government should get involved, though? That seems to me like everyone wants someone else to solve this problem or make these decisions. The set of actors that would do that are government officials. They should not make those rules in this country. 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. Your position on the First Amendment is that the government should make some rules.

A line ofdicta came from that case that was overturned. Everyone says it but there is no law against shouting fire in a crowded theater.

If you are creating harm, there are laws around voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. There are laws about hate speech. We have laws around certain types of crimes.

Sure, yeah. Now I’m with you, but you’ve gotten all the way to “you murdered someone.” There is no law against hate speech. People of other races are not good. You can do it.

Sure, in other countries. In this country, most people are saying, “The government should make some rules,” and almost every example I’m given is something like yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. The case that changed the law was the yelling of fire in a crowded theater. You can shout “fire” in a crowded theater all you want, you are not going to cause imminent lawless action. You’re just going to get people to get the hell out. So that’s 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. Great, as a society they have decided that. That might change over time.

There are more bad laws in the US than good ones. Those will evolve over time. The First Amendment needs to evolve, but how would we do that? It would require a new amendment, which would require states to ratify. There’s a really high bar for changing these things.

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

Beto O’Rourke and the Content Moderation Boards: a tale of two cities in New York City and New York, and what you may want to hear about

That is a good thing. Sometimes the slowness of government can be an advantage as long as you consider the consequences. It’s not a great example of that right now with the way the parties fight, but ideally, they reach a middle. Companies don’t do that. In the private sector, where there are no accountability, feedback or courts, companies are attempting to recreate government in a similar way with content moderation boards and everything else that they try to do. It is a weird system.

So yes, I kind of do wish that governments had clearer and better laws around this. Some terrible outcomes have been achieved when they tried to wade into this. There are a lot of terrible laws coming out of the government trying to regulate this stuff, but I remain optimistic as new leaders come up. They are digital natives. Gosh, Beto O’Rourke used to be a hacker. He was part of a cult. He said that he used to be a web designer.

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

There is a better system for that: the legacy of Martin Luther King and Matt Mullenweg-elon-musk on Twitter

I know, but there are others who are coming up who can. We definitely have an issue where there are people who hold on to power for a long time. There is nothing quite like this gerontocracy in history. As that starts to shift, I think that we’ll start to see a more dynamic republic. At least that’s what I’m hoping for. I am donating to and voting for that person. As a citizen, I’m trying to advocate for more of that.

I am not interested in being removed from the responsibility or the pressure. The power and responsibility put on me and our team is not justified by what is expected of us by the social contract in our society. I’m just philosophically saying that there’s a better system for this.

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

Is Germany afraid of government speech regulations? An analysis of Twitter users’ reactions to the TikTok-based video content platform (Tumblr)

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. They work in places where I can see them. Germany is the subject of a lot of discussion because of its long, tortured history. They’re still complicated and difficult in that country. We are thousands of miles away, so we’re not quite sure what to think. This is more complex than people think, and it’s the perspective of many Germans.

TikTok does not incentivize you to make text posts. It does not want them on its platform. It raises the price of video content. There’s a lot of them, but they’re hacks, which is fascinating to think about. The platform isn’t meant to make you post text. It’s geared to make you post videos. That is a content moderation, I think. It is fascinating that the users have done something else on that platform.

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

The Hunter Biden Laptop Case: When Twitter Discrepancies Turn On Its Face and Its Real Implications (Invited Discussion by Matt Mullenweg)

Also, is this as big of a deal as we’re making it out to be? All the issues we’ve talked about have had quite robust public discussions. I will say that the only thing I’m certain about in content moderation is that you make mistakes, 100 percent.

You always do. It’s humans. Humans are fallible and they will make mistakes. It’s how you correct the mistakes that really matters. We are at the center of a lot of these stories, with the Hunter Biden laptop stuff. Twitter decided to remove links to the story to the New York Post. Who hosts the New York Post? We do.

The Hunter Biden laptop story has been the focus of theTwitter files, and I wanted to hear Matt talk about it. I didn’t know they hosted the New York Post, but that they even debated potentially pulling that… The power of where you sit and the content decisions you make are not taken into account as a culture. What a company like WordPress could do is arguably even more of a powerful thing than taking down a tweet of a story.

Wait. So WordPress VIP hosts the New York Post. 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. Absolutely. There is a lot of discussion and reports. People contact us saying, “Take this down,” or, “This is violating your policy.” All of the policies are just a starting point. The art and science of policies is what I believe to be the core of it.

We will also make mistakes. Sometimes we take down a website by mistake, like by a person who clicked the wrong button or a script that went wrong. It all depends on how you fix it.

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

Is There a Problem with Censorship? The Times of Broken Integrity and the Real CP Violation in the U.S

I think we are in a weird time in which the right in America is being put under pressure to say that there’s a problem with censorship. Donald Trump was the most powerful person in the United States and he had to play the victim. I am amazed that that shtick still works, but is the problem actually there? Does he actually not have a platform? Is there not a robust discussion around the Hunter Biden laptop? Is there a lot of articles, testimonies and things?

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 perfect, but it gets to correctness in a matter of hours or days.

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

What do you think about launching a successful business? The things that Musk has been saying about blogging over Twitter and Facebook, and how he’s been using Twitter

That’s actually the perfect last question. You have done this for the past few years. You bought a platform for socializing with other people. You were a very good 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 now done it for three years. What advice do you have for the tech billionaire?

To keep an open mind and that is what he will do. I believe that he can update his views when new facts come, whether I agree or disagree with him. We have already seen that happen over the past few weeks on Twitter. I think he will end up in the same spot as the rest of us. I wish he’d avoided a lot of pain, but do you know that there are no unbelievers in foxholes? I don’t think there is a free speech fanatic who can run social networks, because you begin to realize the messier nature of that public square and the responsibilities to users and society.

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. It’s how quickly we course-correct. I would like to do that. I also think that he is doing other things. I hope that he doesn’t distract himself from space, the cars, the solar panels, and everything else.

That is wonderful. Well, Matt, obviously I could talk to you for hours and hours about this stuff. I’m fascinated by the actual experience of running these companies, so thank you for coming on Decoder. We’ll see if we can set a faster record for you to come on next time than we did this last year.

I wanted to speak to you because you’ve been doing a lot of reporting on your adventures on social media. I wanted to tell you all about the things you have been hearing from Matt and about the things that Musk has been saying.

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

What is a guy who wants to make X.com into a bank by doing what he wants to do on social media?

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. It is the thing with Apple. These threats are always vague.

What about the payment side of it? They are all talking about payments. They want to be able to make you give money to people on the network. It seems like, “What if a bunch of people are sending money around and we took cents out of every transaction?” I understand why you are interested in that, but it is not very interesting. I don’t know if I want to be sending money on 50 different platforms.

It is up to the person. If you run a creator system where creators are posting more and asking for money, you may want to give some of the money to them. Elon is obsessed with recreating his original idea for X.com, which predated PayPal. I reported on a meeting where he told his employees that the first thing he wanted to do was start an online payment service. He is going to turn this into a bank by doing what he calls Project X, as he calls it on social media. No one has done that well.

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

Does Musk or Sweeney Really Feel Apple? What do CEOs think about the Apple/Apple relationship? A follow-up question

That was going to be a follow-up question. Is there anything else? Is it, “Okay, I saw a good tweet, I’m going to kick a couple bucks towards the person who wrote the tweet”? That’s the baseline of it, but I’m not sure why I would do that.

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. While talking to employees in a public space on social media, Musk said Apple’s spend was all the way back up, and 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. The money is moving in a circle.

It is good to be the platform. The apps that sit on top of the phone are making money for Apple. I’m curious, when Matt was talking about this, does he feel like Apple deserves this money? Did he tell you that?

Every CEO knows that there’s a line and that they will walk up to it. I talk to a lot of other CEOs but their line is closer to Matt’s. They are not willing to go over the line. Apple has a lot of power and they hold us up in reviews because of nipples on the website, said Matt. The system used to allow nudity on the site was recreated by them. They’re like, “This complies with Apple.” He would like to talk about that. I don’t think he is going to go one step further because Apple can destroy his business.

Over and over again, we discover the line of what the CEOs are going to say about Apple. I think that’s just utterly fascinating. I think it’s fascinating that the line doesn’t exist for him.

I think what Elon has shown is that the conversation is shifting from, “Apple’s control is a business issue for everyone,” to, “It’s actually a speech issue.” Tim Sweeney is among the CEOs who are kind of piling on this. I think this is the next phase. If Ron DeSantis and Elon are saying that you’re threatening free speech, you may have a problem that you need to combat, even if it’s just a PR one. I am not sure that Apple can engage in that level of attacking.

I think that they are ready for it. I think they are going to show how good these apps are. They have bad things you don’t want your kids to see. We sit in the middle to make sure your kids don’t see it. If you want to see that stuff, go use our web browser.” I believe that has been the answer for a long time.

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

What Do They Say About Twitter? How Do They Really Say Their Words? Elon, Matt, and the Twitter Files are Dissipated

It’s their brand. Content moderation is what we talked about at length about this. For better or worse, there’s a chance that Elon is attempting to restart from first principles at the micro-Blogging site. We can talk about

the Twitter files

at some length if you want to. Matt’s point was that he is going to end up right back at the beginning. He spoke this many times in the conversation.

You said that the files have been disseminated by the man. It’s unclear how they’re being generated or vetted. There are a lot of question marks there. The show shows people who are well- meaning debating difficult decisions and arriving at conclusions. Maybe you disagree with that entirely. You may believe they are not well- meaning. Even if you don’t believe it’s a liberal conspiracy, you can argue that they’re talking about hard decisions and reaching a conclusion.

He isn’t there right now. Unless you are breaking any rules, it’s going to be on the site. Our job is to corner that speech off to the follower graph of the account so we don’t have to amplify it.

As Matt told you, that’s a very nice libertarian view of speech and how it should work, but it’s not how an ad-supported platform can function at scale, at least from what I have seen. Elon, his head of trust and safety, and the people implementing this stuff, they’re not there yet. I know this for a fact. Will the advertiser business of Twitter completely collapse for them to realize that? I don’t know.

They haven’t put them next to ads yet but they do have a baseline for success. That has not happened yet, but that is what they want. They will think they’re adhering to their “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach” principle, and no platform has shown that that’s enough.

Also, who wants to be on a platform with bad people? That’s the weird part to me. 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.” Then there’s a lot in the gray area. Even the stuff that people agree is bad, people don’t want to be on platforms where that stuff is prolific. Is it possible that you have to do more than just wall it off if you need to grow the user base? Don’t you just make it go away?

You would think so, especially if your goal is to be the town square. It turns out that if you actually think about the digital representation of what an actual town square would look like, it’s not a good place to be. It’s everyone from the town in one square yelling at each other, which is what Twitter has already been. It seems like they are trying to get rid of the worst voices in a way that seems measured from the internal correspondence that Elon has had with his friends. Maybe that is what’s going to have to be discovered — that this whole town square concept just doesn’t work, because humans don’t actually want that.

What you just described is exactly the same as the concept of shadow banning and limiting your reach. We will make sure we don’t show you your Tweets to anyone. Maybe you will know, maybe they’ll be more transparent about it, but they’re going to limit you because they don’t like how racist you are. That is a qualitative kind of judgment. I do not think you can automate it. Do you have any sense of how they will actually implement that?

No, and they don’t know. They hope to automate the worst of the worst, but you’re right, there’s so much nuance and 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.

Once you’re the head of a social network, you’re the benevolent dictator, whether you want to be or not. I believe that he will be the dictator, in a way that Jack did not want to be.

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

What Happened When Jack and I Met Matt Mullenweg Elon Musk in a Micro-Messaging Exchange? How Apple Markets and the Internet Has Been Done

He tried not to be. 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’s a whole other tangent though.

“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.”

Now that we are deep into it, I believe it is important for everyone to remember. You can just get Hunter Biden’s laptop if you want it. Apple sells it in the store. There was a time when no one knew who owned the laptop and what was on it. Most of it was non-consensual nudes being shared, and people thought it was a Russian operation. The over-heatedness of that moment probably led to that conversation. It is astounding for the technical capabilities of that conversation to exist.

We are still talking about it. It was an uncomfortable thing that could have happened on the micro-messaging site. When something is super political, we realize it in the heat of the moment like, “Whoa. These platforms sit at different levels of the stack and have a lot of power to wipe that off of the internet. What happens if they actually do?”

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

How fast does Matt come to the base of operating a social network and how does he arrive at the same point in the end of Twitter?

This has been an interesting episode. I would like to know how fast he returns to the baseline of operating a social network. Matt’s a smart guy. Zuck is, for all of his troubles, a very smart person and he has arrived at a place that looks very much like the one that Twitter was 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.