Why Trump should hang up his hat, but it is time for Trump to sail into the sunset: Musk’s Twitter harassment in the wake of COVID-19

Before we get to Musk’s paywall ambitions. He wants advertisers to make users pay for reach by de-ranking them using the free product. Your average person won’t pay for reach, but people shilling newsletters, crypto scams, and other annoyances will. It degrades the site and possibly means fewer users stick around, making it less valuable for marketers and potentially making them less likely to pay their $8.

“I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump; I think that was a mistake,” Musk said at a conference in May, pledging to reverse the ban were he to become the company’s owner.

But relations between the pair seem to have soured since, with the men publicly trading barbs over the summer. After Trump called Musk a “bullsh*t artist” at a rally in July, Musk responded by tweet, writing, “I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.”

The expected deposition of Musk by the attorneys for Twitter will be delayed until Thursday morning, after both parties agreed to a delay, according to the Financial Times. Ahead of the trial scheduled for October 17th, Musk was set to be deposed for two days in Austin, Texas starting at 9:30AM. His deposition was previously pushed back from its original September 28th date due to COVID-19 exposure concerns.

Musk is trying to get investors to buy at the original price of $54.20 a share for the company, which he purchased before he scared advertisers and banned a bunch of journalists.

The Twitter Skinner Box: The Real Story of a Black Hole in the Slepton Era – Or Why the Internet Is Coming to an End

As it stands, the trial is still scheduled to proceed on October 17th. The Delaware Chancery Court judge overseeing the case stated that no one had moved for a stay in the case. We are going to begin our trial on October 17 and I will continue to work towards that. The current negotiations suggest the trial is almost certain to be put on hold.

More than the professional utility ties me to the site. It’s similar to how slot machines hook people with anittent reinforcement schedule. It is repetitive and uninteresting but occasionally at random intervals there will be a compelling piece of information. B.F. Skinner found that rats and pigeons have good genes for generating compulsive behavior, because they have unpredictable rewards.

“I don’t know that Twitter engineers ever sat around and said, ‘We are creating a Skinner box,’” said Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist at New York University and author of a book about gambling machine design. But that, she said, is essentially what they’ve built. It is one reason that people should be aware of self-destructing on the site.

Musk has been a critic of speech policing on platforms that he feels limits the marketplace of ideas.

He told workers at an all-staff meeting that the platform should allow all legal speech, and then later in the day he sent a text to investor Antonio Gracias telling him that free speech is important when someone you don’t like spouting bullshit.

The experts who study social networks warned that allowing all legal speech on TWITTER would open the floodgates to toxicity and false claims about voting security and the effectiveness of vaccines.

Media Matters for America’s president said that if you want to see what Twitter under Musk will look like, just look at alternative platforms like Parler, Gab and Truth Social.

On those sites, he said, “the feature is the bug — where being able to say and do the kinds of things that are prohibited from more mainstream social media platforms is actually why everyone gravitates to them. And what we see there is that they are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.”

He said that he would be interested in joining the company’s board, but later backpedaled, saying he wanted to “unwinding permanent bans except for the accounts that explicitly advocate violence.”

Alex Jones was kicked off for abusive behavior in the savesay savesay savesay savesay savesay savesay, that could mean lifting bans on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and 2020 election deniers like Michael Flynn.

A person suggested to Musk that he hire a person with a cultural and political view who could lead enforcement. Masters is the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona who has been endorsed by Trump and has echoed his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

Twitter’s finances are not going to get better: Musk’s tweets and his frustrations with Trump and other brands are likely to go elsewhere

If Facebook were to allow Trump and others to return, it would be the first time a social network had allowed someone back when they were banned.

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.”

The employees of the company have been waiting for a message from the new leaders since Thursday afternoon, after the acquisition of the company by Musk. What is happening, and what is staying the same? Who will be laid off, and when?

That is good news for the billionaire, who has complained that the company is overstaffed for its size, and that its costs outstrip revenues.

At a time when its business is facing renewed challenges, the results of the poll come at a good time. A number of brands have paused advertising on the platform since the acquisition by Musk. Musk has stated before that Twitter’s finances are bad. Dan Ives, analyst at Wedbush Securities, predicts that, after advertisers left, Twitter will lose $4 billion a year.

He may have little choice other than to find alternate sources of revenue besides advertising, given the weak state of the digital ad market and the changes he wants to make to content moderation.

“Advertisers want to know that their ads are not going to appear alongside extremists, that they’re not going to be subsidizing or associating with the types of things that would turn off potential customers,” Carusone said.

The Elon Musk Twitter Deal, and Why the U.S. Social Media Has a Super-App? A Reply to Musk on Thursday

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

Other American tech companies, including Facebook and Uber, have tried this strategy, but so far Chinese-style super-apps haven’t caught on in the United States.

It will be interesting — and telling — to see whether some of Musk’s supporters in right-wing media, who have cheered him on for his pro-free speech rhetoric, speak out against these bans.

He said in the Thursday post that the platform must be warm and welcoming to all, where they could choose their preferred experience. “Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise … Let us build something extraordinary together.”

Sarah Personette responded to Musk saying that she had a good discussion with him on Wednesday. “Our continued commitment to brand safety for advertisers remained unchanged,” Personette said. “Looking forward to the future!”

The pressure campaign against Elon Musk and his plans to remake one of the world’s most influential social media sites was intensified on Friday when some groups called on advertisers to stop spending on the platform globally.

Musk also reiterated in the letter a lofty earlier statement he had made that the Twitter acquisition is not meant to be a money-making venture for him.

Musk will have an even bigger influence as a result of the acquisition. The billionaire already owns a significant stake in companies developing cars, rockets, and satellite internet as well as more experimental ventures such as brain implants. He controls a social media platform that helps hundreds of millions of people communicate.

Musk began raising concerns about fake and fraudulent accounts on the social network and eventually tried to pull the plug on the deal.

The CEO of Argawal, the CEO of Twitter, and the Founder of Blind, an anonymous anonymous message board for tech workers, is getting richer than expected

The deadline for the deal to be finalized was set by a Delaware judge. She threatened to schedule a trial if no agreement was reached.

At around 1:45 AM on Monday, engineers from the company were called into an emergency meeting. A new order from Musk ordered the freeze of production changes on the social media platform.

Many people associated with the company have recently noted the absence of their CEO who Musk soured on after they first started talking about him joining the board. “He has been completely absent for weeks,” one current Twitter employee, who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission, said of Argawal. “He has ghosted us,” said another. Both Twitter’s Slack and the Twitter employee-only section of Blind, an anonymous message board for tech workers, are full of similar comments about Argawal, according to screenshots seen by The Verge.

The execs received handsome payouts for their trouble, Insider reports: Agrawal got $38.7 million, Segal got $25.4 million, Gadde got $12.5 million, and Personette, who tweeted yesterday about how excited she was for Musk’s takeover, got $11.2 million.

When he took over the leadership at Twitter, Musk tapped venture capitalists and friends to work with him as he weighed changes to the company. The investor that is included in the list is, of course, Calacanis, along with David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan.

Major personnel moves came quickly and were expected, the first of many changes that the eccentric CEO will make.

Social media harassment of a Silicon Valley employee: Twitter shutting down Thursday night after Musk’s Twitter halted sign-up for the Blue service

About the same time, he used Twitter to criticize Gadde, the company’s top lawyer. A lot of harassment of Gadde from other accounts was followed by his TWo. For Gadde, an 11-year Twitter employee who also heads public policy and safety, the harassment included racist and misogynistic attacks, in addition to calls for Musk to fire her. On Thursday, after she was fired, the harassing tweets lit up once again.

He continued: “There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.”

It’s also realization that having no content moderation is bad for business, because it puts Twitter at risk of losing advertisers.

“You do not want a place where consumers simply are bombarded with things they do not want to hear about and the platform doesn’t take any responsibility,” Yildirim said.

But Musk has been signaling that the deal is going through. He went into the San Francisco headquarters carrying a porcelain sink, changed his profile to “Chief twit” on the social media platform, and said that he was going into the company’s headquarters.

And overnight the New York Stock Exchange notified investors that it will suspend trading in shares of Twitter before the opening bell Friday in anticipation of the company going private under Musk.

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

The pharmaceutical giant is one of many large companies pulling ad dollars from Twitter in recent days. Companies including Volkswagen and Pfizer have paused their campaigns, and large advertising firms like IPG’s Mediabrands and Omnicom Media Group are advising clients to do the same.

A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. There is a daily digest that chronicles the evolving media landscape.

On Thursday evening, after a full day of chaos, Musk halted new sign-up for the Blue service. Offering anyone the chance to slap a “verified” badge on their account had led to widespread impersonation of government officials, corporations, and celebrities. Advertisers pulled out and there was a general sense of chaos on the platform because of the mess which led to fake accounts misrepresenting themselves as Eli Lilly, Lockheed Martin and others.

It may appear as a business story if you charge for verified badges. It will have a significant effect on the information landscape. It will make it difficult for users to differentiate between authentic and inauthentic accounts.

If the company were to strip current verified users of blue checks, that could potentially make the platform even more problematic for Tuesday’s elections.

Musk’s authorized biographer, Walter Isaacson, tweeted in 2018 that “the best thing” one could do to “save social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email, and reduce hacking would be authenticating users.”

Elon Going-For-Broke: What Tesla Has Learned in the Shock of Silicon Valley Workplace Loss and Its Effect on Employee Relations

The process has been frightening and disorienting, according to conversations with eight employees today and over the weekend. While official communication is absent, workers are using private channels to get the most recent rumors out.

She said that Musk was threatening to cut off rent payments if workers spoke to the media and did not accept new jobs. Lopez described his behavior as “classic Elon-going-for-broke.”

The Washington Post reported that layoffs would hit 25% of the staff, which was heavily impacting teams such as sales and engineering.

The turmoil has divided the company into two groups, those who are waiting nervously to know if they still have a job after the cuts land, and those who are rushing to ship new features under the threat of being fired.

A second wave of layoffs have hit the company, just a week after the initial round, and was reported on by Platformer on Saturday afternoon. This time, the cuts were aimed at Twitter’s contract workers. About 80 percent of the team lost their jobs on a percentage basis, and this was even more severe with regard to the losses.

Musk has brought more than 50 employees from Tesla into Twitter to help with the transition, CNBC reported. One employee we spoke with said they had received a call from a Tesla engineer late at night who quizzed about their team and which engineers at the company are most highly regarded.

What Should I Do Now? When Should I Start Working on a Small Project or a Large Project? A Slack Message to the CEO of Vine

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

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

Engineers have been asked to finish at least two major projects within days or weeks. It is proposed that users would have to pay to retain their verification badges, which could be as much as $20 a month. The second, which Axios first reported today and which we can confirm, is a plan to revive the short-form video app Vine, either as a standalone product or part of the core Twitter app. In the case of changes to Blue, Alex Heath is reporting that features must ship by November 7th or the team will be fired.

The project is generating moderate enthusiasm, we’re told. After Musk gave the go-ahead Sunday night, more than a dozen engineers agreed to help with the project.

Employees are being told to show off their creations to Musk. In one Slack message we saw, an engineering director urged his team to come up with new products and features and share them directly with their new CEO. At best, you will receive some feedback. You may be asked to ship it asap,” the director wrote. “At worst, you will be asked to stop and work on something else. You worked on something that you love, even if it’s a small project.

Behnam Rezaei sent a note to his team acknowledging “big changes” were coming. “I think most important change is going to be cultural change,” he said, according to a copy of the email obtained by Platformer. “Some good, some bad.”

So if you ask what should I do now: do good engineering work. Write something. Keep the site up and fix bugs. I know the criteria for being at Twitter is that. It was not working on a fancy project. Shipping and delivering is a good culture change. I would encourage you to be more focused on coding, and less on planning, strategy, and documentation. Code and ship 5x as usual, if you want to be in a special group this week. Sexy is not the criteria when it comes to building what Elon asks. Being impactful and changing product and helping our users is the criteria. So you don’t need commands from me. You are all software engineers. You know what needs to be written and improved. Do it. You are in charge.

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

What Musk’s Attention Can Arise When You’re Out There, or Does Twitter Bring Back Curation? – Calacanis in New York

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

The future of VP of operations Lindsey Iannucci and the other members of the top leadership team is unknown. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment about the current employment status of Caldwell, Sullivan, Berland and Iannucci.

Calacanis said he was in New York to meet with the advertising and marketing community. He has asked users about the subscription and bookmark features.

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

The SpaceX CEO, Steve Musk, and the Twitter Outbursts of Silicon Valley Employees: A U.S. Labor Litigation

Jobs has been developing personal computers for the last 20 years. He was intimately familiar with the company he was suddenly running because he had founded it and led the team that created its flagship product. A years away from Apple he founded another computer company that was focused on the internet and next- generation operating systems. Also, he was named Steve Jobs. If anyone could quickly turn around the near-bankrupt computer giant, it would be him. It took him a long time to come up with his plan. He showed me the iMac that day in May and it would help the company return to profitability, but until the introduction of non-PC devices like the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007, it was not a profit machine. And Apple’s post-PC future wasn’t even on Jobs’ road map in 1998.

Musk need not look farther than his own successful enterprises to realize the absurdity of his haste. When he took over Tesla in 2008, the company was already five years old. Musk came up with a brilliant plan to turn the company around—but it didn’t post an annual profit until 2020, 17 years after incorporation. Musk deserves a lot of credit for what his company has accomplished, as well as for his persistence. SpaceX is a private company and doesn’t report earnings. But making rocket ships is the ultimate test of patience—it takes years to even launch successfully, and cutting corners to go faster can wind up killing people.

If employees were laid off, the company wrote a letter telling them they would find out at 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. An email did not say how many people would lose their jobs.

Some employees tweeted early Friday that they had already lost access to their work accounts. The email said that it was necessary to ensure the company’s success.

He was the sole board member and removed the company’s board of directors. On Thursday night, many Twitter employees took to Twitter to express support for each other — often simply tweeting blue heart emojis to signify Twitter’s blue bird logo — and salute emojis in replies to each other.

Barry C. White, a spokesperson for California’s Employment Development Department, said Thursday the agency has not received any recent have not received any recent such notifications from Twitter.

A class action lawsuit was filed on Thursday in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of employees who were laid off and locked out of their work accounts. It alleges that Twitter intends to lay off more employees and has violated the law by not providing the required notice.

I have never seen a talent exodus in my business career. It was surprising that Stripe laid off 15 to 16 percent of its staff, because it is a golden child. You assume that they tried to do that as performance management. They attempted to take off the people who they believed were 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 am sure they were going to because every other tech company has.

Twitter Has Had a Massive Drop in Revenue, and Volkswagen Group is Sufficient to Advertisers: The Impact of Musk’s Twitter Tweet on Social Media

Meta Platforms, the company that owns Facebook, posted its second quarter revenue decline in a row and shares are currently trading at their lowest level since 2015. Weak earnings reports from both Microsoft andGoogle led to Meta’s disappointing results.

The impact is apparently already being felt at Twitter, as Musk tweeted that “Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers” Thursday after many of the advertising announcements were made.

Much of Twitter’s ad sales team has been fired or pushed out. Large companies including General Mills and Macy’s have paused advertising on the platform, and more could follow, after new owner Musk restored the account of former President Donald Trump and other controversial figures. And any cursory scroll of the platform will likely show you fewer big brand ads.

In a separate statement, Volkswagen Group, which owns Audi, Porsche and Bentley, confirmed it had recommended its brands “pause their paid activities on the platform until further notice.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that Pfizer and Mondalez are suspending their ads on the micro-blogging site. The companies have not answered a request for comment.

General Motors had previously stopped paying for advertising on the platform as it looked at the direction of the platform. Toyota previously told CNN it is in discussions with key stakeholders and monitoring the situation on social media.

Towards a Stable Adviser Exodus: Musk’s Planedemic and Sensitive Response to the Colvid Plandemic

The Interpublic Group recommended that clients stop advertising on the platform earlier this week.

The pauses also come days ahead of the US mid-terms as many civil society leaders worry about misinformation and other harmful content on the platform.

In the meantime, Musk is working to stave off a possible advertiser exodus. A member of the inner circle of Musk said the team met with the marketing and advertising community in New York on Monday.

The mass layoffs of staff on Friday are said to be a key factor in their thinking, as they fear that the policies will be rendered meaningless even if they technically remain active.

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

The Factors Behind the Scenes: J. Austin Johnson in a Movie, and I Learned To Stop Being Afraid of Them

“Hi. Oh my god, your profile is so funny. I love funny guys,” Schumer, dressed in a red dress, said as the bot. I am crazy to think they said I was a bot. I’m all woman and I love funny guys like you. In fact, you should check out this website where me and some other girls hang out.”

James Austin Johnson played Donald Trump in a movie, and he spoke before the council. Trump had his account banned in 2021.

We all moved to Truth Social, and we love it. It’s very great,” Johnson’s Trump said. In regards to many other ways, also terrible. It’s very bad. Very, very bad. It’s a little buggy in terms of making the phone screen crack, and the automatically draining of the Venmo.”

Twitter is Not Forgiving: Imposing a Bad Name on a Cosmic Hero is Not a Good Idea, It’s Just Forgiving

Twitter, however, is an acquisition and is not necessarily full of Musk fans. That means it’s a much less forgiving environment for Musk. Like, an early subset of Twitter users are Something Awful forum goons — the most prominent of whom is Dril — and they love fucking with people. Plus, Musk’s Twitter Blue plan to devalue verification check marks motivated a bunch of people who didn’t like Musk to go out with a bang by impersonating him, largely because they knew it would make him mad. And it probably did! That would explain why his first policy change was to increase the punishment for impersonation.

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

I don’t think all the content moderators were let go. She made jokes on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform where she set up an account last week.

On Saturday, the actor changed back to her real name after posting a series of replies in support of Democratic candidates. “Okey-dokey.” I’ve had a good time. She said that she thinks she made her point.

There was no end to the disruption on Friday. The micro-messaging website said it would give some accounts a gray Official Badge to help confirm their identities. The decision came after a wave of verified account impostors this week, including some posing as former President Donald Trump, Nintendo and the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. These accounts were the result of Musk’s decision to rush ahead with offering a blue check mark to any account holder willing to pay $8 a month, no questions asked, as he races to find new ways to make money from the platform.

The service would first be available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. It was unavailable Sunday and there was no indication when it would go live. Esther Crawford told The Associated Press that it would be soon, but hadn’t launched yet.

The Musk-Mumford Showcase: Tiny Talk Town in Elon Musk’s 2021 Twitter Comes To Your Eye, Not My Eyes

Yoel Roth, head of safety and integrity, sought to ease some of the concerns in a Friday tweet. He said the company’s front-line content moderation staff was the group least affected by the job cuts.

Edward Perez was the product team’s director until September and focused on civic integrity. Joining the company in September 2021, after more than three decades working in election integrity, Perez’s role was to keep Twitter safe during times of great upheaval—such as elections—from a product perspective. And as Musk guts Twitter of its staff and allows users to pay to get a coveted blue check on the platform, Perez feels he has to speak out.

Perez is a board member at the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan group devoted to election security and integrity and he fears that the drama around corporate takeover is sucking up all the oxygen in the room. The focus on the Musk psychodrama leads to potentially inadequate attention on the election-related issues.

“Tiny talk is talk so small it feels like it’s coming from your own mind,” Musk fired off shortly past 10 pm last Thursday, a thought so deep it might have bubbled up from a fish-bowled dorm room. Congratulations: We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk.

Stop Lurking and Don’t Give Up: The Misleading Case of Elon Musk and the Loss of Profit on Twitter, and How to Identify Your Opinions

Quiet quitting in the workplace doesn’t mean you don’t work overtime, just that you don’t do it in a way that depletes your own money. People can expect to get back if they don’t give more to a platform. If you wish to stay on this new social media platform, you need to find a way not to use it on you.

A relatively small group of people power Twitter. According to internal company research viewed by Reuters, heavy users who tweet in English “account for less than 10 percent of monthly overall users, but generate 90 percent of all tweets and half of global revenue.”

A person who is an electric car entrepreneur, for example, would not be out of place if he mistakenly thought his own experience was worse than that of everyone else. (Same goes for journalists.) In reality, nearly half of Twitter users tweet less than five times a month, and most of their posts are replies, not original tweets. They check in on current events or live sports or celebrity news, and then they go about their lives. They’re “lurkers.”

Lurking isn’t doomscrolling, a practice (and phrase) that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when many people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. To sit and observe is a simplistic approach to dealing with the complex and chaos that is New Twitter. Check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, sure, then close your app or browser tab. Then disengage after you’ve sent a Tweet. One should keep an eye on it during basketball games. Direct those message threads to other areas if you have to. Save your most original thoughts for another time, another place.

It gets worse, and this isn’t Musk’s fault. When the economy slows down, companies spend less money on advertising. If Musk wasn’t doing wild stuff to appeal to advertisers, there’d be no problem with him at all. Musk has identified himself as a loose canon, meaning that even if someone wants to cut advertising spend, they might be inclined to cut the company first.

When you send cash to people on the service, you do not have to give up a cut of the money. Super Follows is a way for users to subscribe to the service, but its revenue is not as significant as Apple makes from in-app purchases.

Even without an economic downturn, I do not believe a lot of advertisers will want to come back to someone with that attitude. I don’t know if the users want to stay in that environment, one that has recently become more of a breeding ground of hoaxing and scam artists. The influx of new checkmarked users has made Mark Cuban’s talking miserable. Cuban’s thoughts are one reason people stay on the platform — drive him off, and Twitter is less valuable.

At the moment, Twitter Blue is far from the money-making initiative Musk had hoped it would be. The money generated by the new service is less important now that Rachel Tobac runs Social Proof Security, a firm focused on preventing the manipulation of social media sites.

Roberts says that the debt is risky and on the lower end of the junk rating spectrum. “Investor appetite for this debt clearly isn’t as large as it was four months ago.” And when Moody’s rated Twitter’s debt, it cited Twitter’s governance — i.e., Elon Musk — as a major driver of risk.

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.

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

The account’s very next tweet, a day and nine hours later, said exactly the opposite: “To combat impersonation, we’ve added an ‘Official’ label to some accounts.”

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

From one entrepreneurial to another, for when you have your customer service hat on. Mark Cuban said he spent too much time muting all of the newly purchased checkmark abbreviations to make them useful.

The company is facing billions in fines from the FTC over alleged privacy misdeeds dating to before Musk’s ownership. But, the Twitter employee warned colleagues, Twitter could find itself even more legally exposed after the sudden resignation of multiple top Twitter executives charged with fulfilling the company’s FTC obligations, including its chief information security officer and chief privacy officer.

But if Musk and his backers deem that Twitter is not worth sinking more money into, the eye-popping debt payment could help make the case that bankruptcy is the best way forward for the company, Wu said.

Investment firm Wedbush Securities said the deal represented “one of the most overpaid tech acquisitions in history,” pegging Twitter’s fair value at closer to $25 billion.

The Phenomenology of Impersonating Elon Musk and the Business of Online Advertising — The Case of Snap, Tobac, and James

“In addition to potential financial returns, my sense is that Musk and his co-investors are ideologically driven, that they’re really driven by values,” Wu said.

But that did not change what Musk sees as a core problem at the company, which is that it has just one primary way of making money: online advertising.

It is an unfortunate reality for the company right now, considering it is a miserable time to be in the online advertising business. A substantial pullback in ad spending has convulsed the tech industry. Over 11,000 people have been laid off by Facebook. Snap let go of 20% of its staff. Tech companies that rely on ads are feeling the squeeze.

It has been the opposite of what the program’s launch had been like. A flurry of accounts impersonating star athletes like Lebron James, former President Trump and companies including Eli Lilly and Pepsi, put a spotlight on just how quickly the blue-check-for-sale option could be used to spread deception.

Imagine, Tobac said, if an emergency service account with a blue check was opened by an impersonator and began dispending harmful advice about, say, where to seek shelter during a natural disaster.

The country is waiting for the final outcome of several important election races and ToBAC fears the outcome could be clouded by agents paying $8 to spread confusion.

“Right now, we have people making jokes, impersonating the president, impersonating Nintendo and Elon Musk is laughing at those jokes because he thinks they’re funny right now,” she said. “What’s not going to be funny is someone impersonating an election official and meddling and causing interference within the election results.”

The enigmatic Musk tweeted: Insider warnings on impersonation, fraud, and the death of Twitter in a high profile user experience

Esther Crawford, a director of product management at the company who has risen to become one of Musk’s top lieutenants, received it. Musk was briefed as well, sources said, as was his attorney Alex Spiro. And while Crawford appeared sympathetic to many of the concerns in the document, sources said, she declined to implement any suggestions that would delay the launch of Blue. Crawford didn’t respond to the request for comment.

The first recommendation of the document indicates a concern in the highest risk category, as well as being an example of whatMotivated Stealers could be willing to pay.

“Impersonation of world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials, and other high profile individuals” represented another P0 risk, the team found. Legacy verification is a crucial signal for enforcing impersonation rules, the loss of which is likely to result in an increase in impersonation of high-profile accounts.

On November 1st, when the document was circulated internally, Musk was considering a $99-a-year annual subscription for Blue; only later, after an exchange online with writer Stephen King, did he lower the cost. The desire to make fun of brands and government officials became an impulse buy of $8 as the move increased the risk for scam.

The team also noted removing the verified badge and its related privileges from high-profile users unless they paid, coupled with the heightened impersonation risk, would potentially drive them away from Twitter for good. “Removing privileges and exemptions from legacy verified accounts could cause confusion and loss of trust among high profile users,” they wrote. “We use the health-related protections … to manage against the risk of false-positive actions on high-profile users, under the assumption that the accounts have been heavily vetted. If that signal is deprecated, we run the risk of false positives or the loss of privileges such as higher rate limits resulting in escalation and user flight.”

The trust and safety team won support for solutions, including retaining verification for some high-profile accounts using the official badges.

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

Why Twitter isn’t giving us enough information about child sexual exploitation in our workplace? An employee’s frustration at the startup of Musk’s Kick

Most of the features that were on the wish list have not been approved.

Despite the warnings, the launch proceeded as planned. With the trust and safety team largely aware, Musk stopped the roll out.

Content moderation, recruiting and ad sales were among the functions affected. At the moment, it’s unclear how the loss of what may have been thousands of moderators will affect the service. It seems that there isn’t as many people on the site to police it for harmful material.

One of the company’s managers said in the company’s channels that a contractor had been deactivated in the middle of making important changes to the child safety workflows. This is particularly worrisome because Twitter has for years struggled to adequately police child sexual exploitation material on the platform, as we previously reported.

The message went out on Blind, a app that allows coworkers to anonymous discuss their workplace, as well as on internal and external Slacks that employees have established to have more candid discussions.

Twitter is not a code freeze anymore: how it affects Slack, Tesla, Boring Company, and the rest of the Google ecosystem

Some employees told us that they had been bracing for cuts ever since the layoffs earlier this month. The abrupt nature of the cuts will cause many former contractors to be scrambling, as they were told their medical benefits would end on their last day of work.

“I’m wondering when people will realize the value of Twitter was the people that worked here,” one employee said, according to screenshots obtained by Platformer.

Employees continue to show a great deal of solidarity among one another. But not to the coterie of volunteer venture capitalists and on-loan engineers from Tesla and the Boring Company that have been carrying out Musk’s orders: those they refer to universally, including on Slack, as “the goons.”

This was more than just a run-of-the-mill code freeze, during which engineers can commit code but not deploy it. Since Musk took over, that has been the case for most of the time. The freezes were meant to reduce the chance of a bug disrupting the system.

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

Engineers at a late-night meeting were confused on the messaging platform. “Is there a ticket I can reference?” asked an engineer who was being tasked with implementing the freeze. I don’t see any context. “We don’t have much context as of now,” a colleague responded. “But this is coming from Elon’s team.”

“I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. The app is doing 1000 poorly batches of RPCs. Musk used the word “remote procedure calls” on Sunday. The number of micro-servers that are employed by the company is thought to prevent the entire website from breaking at regular intervals.

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

It’s not unusual for India to have a higher concentration of low power phones that perform worse in comparison to all of our bigger phones.

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

Why the Code Doesn’t Work: The Damned Twitter Account of Eli Lilly and John Legere, a Senior Advisor at T-Mobile

Why the code doesn’t work? Some are thinking that Musk is paranoia and that disgruntled engineers may try to sabotage the site on their way out.

Eli Lilly paused its ad campaign on Friday after the debacle with Blue. The move potentially cost Twitter millions of dollars in revenue, according to the Washington Post. (A “verified” fake account impersonating Eli Lilly had said insulin would now be free, and it took Twitter six hours to remove the tweet.)

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

The global business lead for Twitter wrote that many of their markets are seeing large declines in the fourth quarter. Please add your questions and commentary to the thread and I will work to raise as many as possible.

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

According to an email and a report, GroupM told its clients that twitter was a high-risk media buy. Twitter’s agency partnerships lead explained the situation in Slack: “Given the recent senior departures in key operational areas (specifically Security, Trust & Safety, Compliance), GroupM have updated Twitter’s brand safety guidance to high risk. While they understand that our policies remain in place, they feel that Twitter’s ability to scale and manage infractions at speed is uncertain at this time.”

He has promised to let free speech go on, and he has re-instated high-profile accounts that previously broke rules against harmful misinformation. He has also said he would suppress negativity and hate by depriving some accounts of “freedom of reach.”

Trump Fails, Scans, and Microscopic Apparatus: Musk Comes to the Final End of the Social Media Feasibility Game

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

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

An associate professor of marketing at USC said that he has always thought that a move to a subscription business would make sense for the micro-publishing service. In part, it was because it didn’t offer the same level of user targeting that it has been smaller in advertising business than rivals.

The former head of trust and safety at the company stated in an op-ed published in the NY Times that failure to comply with Apple and Google’s app store rules could be catastrophic. The app stores have previously removed social media apps for failing to protect their users from harmful content, and Roth suggested that Twitter had already begun to receive calls from app store operators following Musk’s takeover. Over the weekend, the head of Apple’s app store, Phil Schiller, deleted his Twitter account.

There is no guarantee that a continuing capture of the online world’s attention will lead to subscription payments or revenue growth.

A person familiar with the matter told CNN that the former head of trust and safety had left his home because of threats made after Musk criticized him.

Roth has since been the subject of criticism and threats following the release of the Twitter Files. However, things took a dark turn over the weekend when Musk appeared to endorse a tweet that baselessly accused Roth of being sympathetic to pedophilia — a common trope used by conspiracy theorists to attack people online.

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

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

The CEO of Automattic, a company that makes Tumblr,WordPress, Pocket Casts, and Woop, is a reason that the topic of buying a social network is relevant. Give the audience a quick introduction to Automattic and how you think of the company.

I think you are our first repeat CEO guest inside of a year. We discussed a lot of things in March, and also talked 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. When I took over as CEO, we were just rounding that corner of clean up, but people started saying, maybe I need an alternative.

Thank you. We want the web to be a better place with everything that we make. How can we make users more in control? How can we align our business model more with what our customers and users want?”

Everything we do is done with open-source. It is possible to license WordPress as an open-source or general public license. We open-sourced Pocket Casts. We are open-sourcing Tumblr, but it is taking a while. I believe that the last time I said it, I was a little more hopeful. It is just a lot of code and we will get to it.

I think open- source is a fundamental human right. As technology takes up more and more of our lives, it’s just as important as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, or any other freedom. It’s important to have the freedom to see how our software works and to modify it.

What was Automattic? When Social Media turned it around, and how you could use it to improve a business model: WordPress Tumblr Ceo

The employees and the user base is what Automattic cared for, I think. We focused on that. Internally, we budgeted about $100 million that we were going to spend on Tumblr to turn it around.

We’re seeing that happening in real time at Twitter. Someone like Ye will be allowed back on and then taken 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 behooves you to provide a safe environment for everyone there that includes food, water, restrooms, and all those sorts of things. It is your responsibility as a host to provide a safe and healthy environment.

It has no golden handcuffs and that is the most important benefit right now. Everything that is new is good because we can start from the bottom. I don’t understand how a company can struggle with billions of dollars of revenue, and trying to shift their policies.

To see if we could create a social media that didn’t rely on advertising or surveillance capitalism, and that was a mainstream business model. We run ads on Tumblr, but we also have upgrades that turn off ads, and we’re introducing lots of other subscriptions — some fun, some serious. 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.

Totally. In the last few weeks, we have seen some incredible examples of that. It is at its best when it comes to suggesting that people could use their social media time for something like that. It makes it a little more convenient for the users. It’s good to feel good after using it. We bought it and we have been working on it.

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

What Is The Problem Of Tumblr With Advertisers? A Brief History Of The Site, When Verizon Became a Pupil

There was a lot of attrition on the site. Verizon shared a building with Facebook, so good Tumblr engineers were getting poached in the elevator. There was a time when crazy tech comp took place. That has settled down now, but at the time it was a little wild.

Have you heard the expression, “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. The site is burning a bit of cash. People were saying that you could buy an apartment in New York, but it would cost a lot more to run. You would be taking on all of those obligations as well.

You are basically saying that we were given the smallest amount of money possible, by the person who sold it to us. And that you bought it for the smallest amount you would pay, knowing that its carrying costs were so high. Was it a straight conversation? We arenot going to figure out how much money is made and what type of revenue it has, because we can’t do both. This is not in a good place to live, and it requires a good home. We’re going to be that home. What is the smallest number your board of directors can accept?

I would say Tumblr’s struggle with advertisers is actually lack of targeting. Some people might abandon Tumblr because of the kind of silliness that it has. That is fine. We have decided not to do tracking and targeting that everyone else does, which is why we can get a lot of revenue. That means it’s more of an uphill battle to get advertisers to spend money. We are introducing some. There is some tracking I’m totally okay with, like device and country. That sort of stuff isn’t unusual. A bit of it is both users and advertisers. Some of the information that is provided is quite enlightening. If your user base is willing to do it, you could sell ads on the likes of Facebook or Twitter. They all have self-serve tools. The amount of targeting you can do is kind of insane.

How can you not use the bathwater on a baby? We brought the whole team over from day one, and we also tried to switch a bunch of people that were long-tenured Automatticians, which are people who have been at Automattic for a long time. I actually took some of my very best people in the company and switched them over to do different jobs inside of Tumblr — engineers, designers, et cetera. That helped us find things we needed to do and build a team that could do it.

We have made the technology, changed the team, and are starting to remake the product. I’m also very excited because now we’re starting to have some fun. You saw the blue checkmark thing. We are also experimenting on the format a bit. On Tumblr, for example, you can now have a post which has a gallery and a video — it’s basically multimodal social media posting. Blogs have done this for a long time, but we’re bringing it into the social media form and onto mobile. It is fun for me because the creativity that is being expressed there is more than you can do on any other social network.

That timeline is really interesting. It is not until the year 2022, when you are saying, “Now we are having fun,” that you bought it. 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 is the most difficult thing in my business career. 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 the amount of help that we hoped for.

Do you believe 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 wish you had done something like that? Do you think that would have been effective?

By the way, just to provide you cover for this answer, there’s a part of me as a leader that is sometimes like, “Maybe I should just run around saying everything is trash and reset.” There’s something in this way of working that I think every leader finds tempting. Most people are not this maniacal. I’m not. If I did this to my team, I would be unable to sleep at night.

When you are in a leadership position, it is very appealing to say, “Oh man, I wish I could just clear the deck.” I would sometimes wonder if I could fire half the people at my company because I was so mean when I was younger. Would anyone notice? There’s something about a big company that engenders 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

Machine learning on Twitter: Bringing up the conversation of tech companies who haven’t left a tech company — and why we’re talking about it —

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

There will be mistakes made there as an example. You could assume that some percentage of the people they laid off, who they considered to be low performers, were actually quite good, but you would maybe be cautious to hire out of that layoff. We would think these were not the people that had the company say, “We need to keep these people”.

Every single other tech company, including us, who said, “We’re slowing down hiring,” has really reached out. I’d be happy to hire 50 or 100 people that left the social networking site. We have publicly said we’ll hire even entire teams. The conversations over the past few weeks have been very intense, with some executives who are helping us navigate the 5000 who left. We’re now in the mode of, “Well, let’s see if we could create an amazing machine learning AI team inside Automattic with some of the folks who left Twitter.” It has been a strange shift. Again, I’ve never seen anything like that in my business career.

It is funny. I feel that way as well. I’ve come up after those moments in tech history. Intel was created because a team of people left a company and now we think of it as an institution. It feels like we are living through that moment again, as tech companies lay people off, because entire teams of people like working together are now available. The team behind the audio design of Spaces said that they wanted to work together. Would you build a live audio product? Would you just go hire that team?

I don’t know if we would do a live audio product, but I think that team is quite good. We put up a dedicated landing page which was basically a distillation of a lot of the conversations I had. The first line on the page is, “We love Twitter,” which is true. I also follow the social media site, 140 characters or less.

The missionaries have been pouring their heart and soul into their job over the years and you don’t do it with a “we’re going to crush Twitter” message. They are not motivated to kill Twitter, because they also love it. What I think is interesting is asking, “Hey, could we do it again, avoid some of the mistakes and create an alternative?”

To me, creating great competition from the outside is the best way to influence the social networking site. I think that will still be around for the next 20 years, but I think that Tumblr will take over and make it better with better user experiences, and just pushing the bleeding edge. I mean, maybe Tumblr will always be the smaller but more innovative network. That is possible. The space was similar to what we have now. It’s cool. Well, guess what? We are going to make the rest of the web better.

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

Towards a Better Tumblr? A Few Quick Questions About the Acquisition and the Determination of the Staff Size: A Comment on the Decoder

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 or are you still burning the same number?

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

The good news is that we are starting to combine some of the teams. For example, Tumblr doesn’t need its own separate trust and safety, or terms of service. It had one but we have the same problems with protecting against illegal content and responding to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, as well as taking down hate speech. 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’s very good. We have talked a bunch about hiring and size, and you said you’ve had 85 percent turnover. Do your acquisition of the team make it bigger or smaller?

The questions like this are part of the Decoder. How is the team structured? 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

What I’m most excited about: Managing Automattic, WordPress.com, and Elon-musk at the Fermilab Detector

The big changes to the structure are because I am running many different things, including Automattic andWordPress.com, separately. A lot of things are pushed onto the leads within the company by my leadership style. I don’t think we need to have a meeting every day with the executive team. I want to get them done, so I have a list of the five most important things. What are your most important things? What am I missing?”

Automattic does a lot of asynchronous communication. There has been no big changes. A chief operating officer and some others from Automattic have helped me out with my day-to-day tasks. I would say that it is a fairly standard structure.

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

What I Missed About Social Media Moderation and the Eating Disorders Pro-ana Community, which I really didn’t know about

This is actually a thing I missed in the “Welcome to Hell” article. I talked about how difficult decisions are. They are not technology decisions. Then you have governments. The speech laws in the United States are very similar to those in Germany. Here in the United States, Florida and Texas have social media moderation laws that are government speech regulations and they are

probably in violation of the First Amendment

. It is very complicated when you are a political actor. Two companies that are more or less lockstep when it comes to moderation will control your primary distribution platform, and they are completely opaque. It’s the thing I missed because it’s maybe the wonkiest thing, but it strikes me as, “Oh boy, I screwed up.”

Oh yeah, I think I tweeted that. I don’t agree with the title headline, although it was a good one. It was spot-on. You did a great job. Everyone who is listening to this, go read that post, because I think you hint at and also link to some of the subtleties of content moderation and doing it at scale.

There is a learning curve. Even if you hire people, even if you know what’s going to happen, whatever user base you attract is going to cause new types of problems. Mental health things are big there because the younger demographic, teenagers, are stereotyped as a little more angsty. If you look for certain tags, we build a lot of stuff so that if you need help, we’ll let you know. Here’s a phone number. It gets better.”

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

By the way, that really works. Some stories depict how technology has made society better. I will discuss two issues. Child exploitation material, people who abuse children, take pictures, etc., has been covered a little bit. Tech companies have basically come together and created technological solutions and data sharing that have become quite good at catching this. It all gets passed into the lap of law enforcement, and they do their job. I think that has helped quite a bit.

There is suicide prevention. If you type in certain terms, they are going to 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. I think tech companies, including competitors, share this quite freely with each other, because we all agree this is something that is part of our responsibility to society.

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

Is it Harsh to be anorexic? When I heard about Tumblr, I was like, ‘When I saw my nails painted’, I wasn’t afraid to post about it, but I didn

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

Right. Women, especially young women, shouldn’t be encouraged to be anorexic. That’s a huge problem in that community. We should intervene in suicides and give resources to stop them. Those moves are aggressive. When we see this stuff, we are going to stop the speech, shut it down, and give you a reason to go to these resources. Aggressive interventions are not controversial.

Then there is a universe of stuff that is totally controversial, where even the slightest intervention gets you in hot water. I think it is easiest to point to pornographic material on the site. There’s a lot of art on Tumblr. It’s famous for being an artistic community. There is a lot of nudity and straight-up porn. At least, it was before.

The reaction was heavy-handed. Verizon is a very conservative company that has better things to deal with, like their hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. They were starting to review every single post and re post on the site with moderation farms in other countries. They were also applying what I would call very faulty machine learning. Famously, someone posted a picture of their manicure — they got their nails painted and posted a picture of their hand — and this got their account locked for being adult content. What the algorithm was looking at was, “Well, there’s a lot of skin tone as a percentage of this image, so this is likely adult content.”

The lines are unclear on whether or not to watch porn on platforms, and who is qualified to say what the platform should be used for. It’s possible that the values inside the company do not match what you want users to do on the platform. There are 8 million external actors with their own values that have influence and existential control over the platform. Walk me through this. I can pick any speech areas that have the same problems, but I am picking on porn.

We introduced a rating system where users can self-tag when they post something. “This contains X, Y, Z,” and X, Y, Z could be drugs, it could be violence, it could be the human form in adult ways. We jokingly call them things going into things or hardcore pornography. Something like that is still not appropriate for the service, but there is a wider aperture or Overton window for what’s allowed, which actually matches what we’ve done at Automattic for a long time. We were kind of unifying Tumblr’s position with ours.

It’s very Tumblr. I believe that Tumblr had moderation issues. 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 suppose Apple wanted to make an example of themselves by closing down Tumblr and not showing up in the App Store even though it is owned by Apple and one of the largest partners in the world. That must have really woken everyone up, like, “Hey, they’re taking this seriously.”

We reopened more adult content that we call artistic expressions of the human form. If you posted a statue of David on the site, your account would be locked or you wouldn’t be allowed to use it. We got good at appeals and everything like that, but we were stuck with these old rules, and we couldn’t really change those rules until we had some better community moderation in place.

It’s interesting, because Elon also talked about bringing the MPAA movie rating system into this, which is actually where we started in the first iteration of this feature. The history of the rating system is fraught, when you begin to understand it. Think about it. If there was one female nipple in a movie, all of a sudden it’s like PG-13 or R, but then there can be any amount of violence, gore, and blood spurting out — which obviously is not great for kids either — and that could be rated PG. The type of classification we went for 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 is an embarrassment for everyone involved. We really thought about it from a user-centric point of view. We have seen that this actually aligns incentives.

Let’s say you’re a burlesque performer in New York City. Bathtub Gin, right? It’s a famous place for Burlesque. You want to post pictures from your performance. You don’t want kids to see these and you can tag them. You know that it will be protected. People who want to see it will find it even if they don’t know it exists. Everyone is happy. The incentives are very aligned.

The violations are for mistagging, not what you post. We take it very seriously, and we know that that is wrong. It could endanger kids. It could do many things. If you’re tagged correctly, we allow you to post a lot more stuff. We have done this while navigating Apple’s App Store, the credit card processors, and everything else.

Yeah. Well, how do Twitter and Reddit get away with it? They allow everything, like “things going into things.” It’s possible to find anything you want on a porn site on both of them. How do they escape with it? One, maybe they’re just too big and they have enough legit content that Apple wasn’t really worried about it. Maybe they made web onlyToggles as well. We decided to make a version of that feature.

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

The App Store is a Black Box and Is Apple Spontaneously Strict About Its Uses? A User’s Perspective

This works for another person, but I do not know if this would work for me. The App Store review process is still a black box and still capricious. You never know what will happen.

I wish we knew more. We don’t really know what goes down when Apple engages in these backroom dealings about the App Store and distribution. Unless you have someone who is willing to talk about it, and even he admitted he was not really sure, then that is.

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 came about. It’s an odd platform. Most of our tech, you could just ship whenever you want. You can take things down if you want to. 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 back with the great tools that are provided by the search engine. Everything is really fast and they allow way more stuff. They aren’t as strict about in-app purchases. It is completely different.

Apple is the leading player in the US. They are the only players in the market. They have complete control over everything. They’re also good at what they do. 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. 30 minutes is how long it takes to chat with someone. It’s like canceling a gym membership. It is terrible. It is a terrible 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. They have some things we probably all agree on, like canceling subscriptions, and a section that they do. It seems like they still think they are the favorite.

They still think that they have a chance of dying at any moment. Because Apple has a lot of cash in their bank, I am excited. They’re more powerful than the governments and one of the most powerful entities. I’m seeing them starting to shift into more of a benevolent role and realizing their size and their power.

What you’re describing are people who didn’t come up as the underdogs. The current executives were at that time when Apple was the favorite. You can see their culture over time.

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

What have you learnt from taking over Tumblr? How much have you learned? When did you learn? Where are you? What are you doing now?

You have described taking over Tumblr as the most humbling experience. It’s 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 the right to make decisions, and what limits do you think are there? When you say humbling, it seems like that’s at the heart of it. You’re not a tech executive who’s saying, “Make the button blue.” You’re a politician who’s saying, “I hope I’m going to make a policy decision that is expressed out through all these constituents and will achieve the result I want.”

I guess the best way to probably summarize where I am in 2022 — and this has evolved over the past year and the past 10 years — is that I’m extremely libertarian in terms of what people should be allowed to say. I am okay with things I don’t like about someone or other people. I’m a public figure. Great.

I think I have become more conservative in this area. Of course, calls to violence are pretty noncontroversial. I think it’s more in the middle between bully and troll. In the early days of the web, if you remember, Stewart Butterfield, Caterina Fake, Heather Champ, and others were some of the first people to contribute to the community through commenting on what was highlighted.

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

What is the name of the posters in New York? Mark Zuckerberg and other leaders of Twitter use Tumblr and elon-musk

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 keeps growing. What is the name of the posters put up in New York? I saw a picture yesterday that showed a picture of a poster.

He’s goofing. He is uploading a meme. You’re obviously deeply aware of Tumblr and the community. You’re in it. Are you the leader who should be consuming the service as a member of the audience? I think it cuts both ways.

One hundred percent, yeah. There is a little bit where I do understand. Mark Zuckerberg and other leaders of social media use the platforms a lot but probably under a secret account. They have an alternate name.

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

The State of Social Media and Democracy: What do we really want to do about it? How do we live in the 21st Century? Why should we care about what we do?

You also need to be sensitive. My preferences are not what I impose on the entire community. I am liberal and all those sorts of things. That is me. I’m going to be open about that. I’m also not saying people who disagree with me aren’t welcome.

I think there are two levels to this. One is overt pressure. Advertisers say, “I disagree with xyz”, and leave. They vote with their wallets, which they’re welcome to do. It’s a free market. It’s capitalism. That’s kind of the expression of it.

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

I think we are grappling with the intersection of that and democracy. If democracy says that free, informed citizens are able to vote on people and vote on how they’re governed, I like that model. I think social networks and private companies miss out on the fact that everyone can agree to be in the system, and that there is a social contract. 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 good is the TikTok algorithm? How good are Instagram ads? “Gosh, they know me so well. I buy more stuff off Instagram than any other place. They’ve got me dialed in.” Political influence is playing off in both official and unofficial ways. China, Iran, Russia and many other countries are using our open society to influence Americans. It’s the whole thing.

It is easier to hack the people and influence the voters than it is to hack the voting machines.

We were worried about hacking the machines but it was easier to hack the people and get them to vote for you. The voting machines are used to influence voters. It happens in every election. We are aware of this for a fact. It isn’t a conspiracy. When the business models of the networks are designed around engagements and influence, how do we protect society against that?

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

Tuning Tumblr to Feed the Brains of Advertisers: A Case Study on Micro-WordPress/Microsoft/SmallStacks and Other Social Networks

What we’re trying to do is create a model where half or more than half of Tumblr’s revenue is from subscribers. I think that gives us the ability to not be unduly influenced by advertisers. There is not as much incentive to tune the algorithms in ways that will create engagements and change peoples’ minds. If you work up, you will be more willing to change your toothpaste brand. That’s science. That’s fact. That’s human psychology. It’s our lizard brain.

We are attempting to balance it. Advertising is the only business model if you provide a free service. Social networks cost a lot to run. When you buy web hosting, you have to pay money and get some space and bandwidth, but that’s not the only cost you have to pay. When you sign up for a social network, you have the option of uploading unlimited videos which you can view at will, and it is an all-you-can eat-for-nothing plan.

Companies have to pay those bills. They have to build the data centers, they have to pay for the network, they have to do all that stuff. The real costs associated with it are subsidized by advertisers.

Especially when the advertisers are saying you have to keep moderating as much as you have been, and your entire stated purpose of buying the thing is to moderate less. There is a problem that I think is very difficult. Are big companies telling you that you need to make sure your brand is sound before they show up and give you money?

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

Does The Government Really Need to Be There? A Commentary on Ben Thompson’s “A Framework for Moderation,” published in Theoretical (1986)

The telecom companies are worse than the tech companies. You can target and serve cable ads to a specific group of houses with the help of Comcast. 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. capitalism is not self-regulating well in the area, because the amount of data that gets shared is where we need to step in.

I would like to know if you think moderation should be in the stack. I will point out that there is a distinction between your enterprise customers that usewordpress.com and those usingtumblr.com. There is this idea that the closer you are to the pipes of the internet, the less moderating you should do. So Comcast and AT&T should not look at the bits that are going across their network. Maybe it should not, right? Infrastructure providers ride on top of the rails. AWS has a set of policies, like they won’t host white supremacist sites, but that’s basically it. That is the entire line.

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

Do you believe the United States government should be involved? Everyone wants someone else to make these decisions or solve the problem. The most likely set of actors that would do that are government officials, and they shouldn’t. Especially in this country, they should not make those rules. The First Amendment

says, “Do not make speech regulations.” I’m just frustrated.

Okay, but I think this is the disconnect between basically everyone. The government should make rules in order to protect the First Amendment.

That’s a line of dicta from a case that was overturned. Everyone points at it, but

there’s 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 around hate speech. We have laws around certain types of crimes.

Sure, yeah. I am with you, but it has been decided that you murdered someone. There’s no law against hate speech. There are people of other races who are bad. You can do it.

Sure, in other countries. But in this country here, most people are like, “The government should make some rules,” and almost every example that I’m given is like yelling “fire” in a crowded theater or whatever, which is not actually a rule. The law in this country changed because of the Brandenburg case, which said that yelling of fire in a crowded cinema was not a threat to public safety. If you want to shout fire in a crowded theater, you are not going to cause lawless action. You are going to get people to leave. That is what I mean.

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

More bad laws have been in the US than good ones. Those will change over time. How can we change the First Amendment over time? It would require a new amendment, which would require states to ratify. Changing these things requires a high bar.

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

The Slowness of Government and the Digital Natives: What have we learnt in the last few decades of the content moderation problem? A reflection from Beto O’Rourke

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

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

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

I’m all for it and I want to be a better system for what I do and what I can do as a citizen: a case for a dynamic republic

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

It isn’t that I want to be removed from responsibility or pressure, at least speaking for myself. I think that the responsibility and power put on me and our team is beyond what is warranted by the social contract in our society or from our users. I just think there is a better system for this.

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

TikTok: Is it a moderation of a platform to make you look like you’re talking about video content?

Yeah, and I’m terrified of government speech regulations. It’s my open bias as a journalist. I think they are bad on their appearance. I see them in places where they work. Germany has a long tortured history and it is brought up by everyone. They are difficult in that country. We are thousands of miles away and we are like, that looks pretty good. From the perspective of many people in Germany, this is more complicated than you think.

TikTok does not incentivize you to make text posts. It does not want them on its platform. It gives incentive to watch videos. There’s a lot of them, but they’re hacks, which is fascinating to think about. The platform itself is not geared to make you post text. It seeks to make you post videos. I think it’s a moderation of the content. The users have done other things inside of that platform.

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

How did the New York Post take down its links to WordPress? Is it a good idea to do that? The case of the Hunter Biden laptop

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 do. It is humans. Humans are fallible and they will make mistakes. Mistakes that really matter are how you correct them. We’re at the center of a lot of these stories, as well, with the Hunter Biden laptop stuff that’s now the Twitter files. Twitter decided to remove links to the story to the New York Post. Who hosts the New York Post? We do.

If you host a major American newspaper, you should probably treat these platform companies differently than something else. Those decisions are not transparent to us. I don’t even know if they’re transparent to the New York Post or whatever. I thought that was really remarkably telling and brave of Matt, as the CMS provider of the New York Post, to say, “We have the ability to take their links down.” We discussed it in the case of the 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. Yeah, absolutely. There is a lot of discussion and reports. People contact us saying, “Take this down,” or, “This is violating your policy.” The policies are just a start. I believe the art and science of the policies are where they are supposed to be.

Mistakes will also be made by us. We’ve accidentally taken down blogs, either by some script that went wrong, or by a human who clicked the wrong button or made a mistake interpreting our policies. It’s all about how you fix it.

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

Censorship vs. Freedom: The Case for the Hunter Biden Laptop – Is It Really Existing? – The Case of the iPhone

I think we’re in a weird period where particularly the right in America is incentivized to say that there’s a huge censorship problem or that they’re being suppressed. Donald Trump was the leader of the free world, the most powerful person in the US, and he would play the victim. That is a shtick that I’m amazed continues to work, but is the problem actually there? Does he actually not have a platform? The Hunter Biden laptop is a topic that should have a robust discussion. Are there not endless articles, endless testimonies, et cetera?

Maybe we need to say this is working right now, and ask if there is something fundamentally broken or wrong here in the first place. The current system will make mistakes. It is not flawless but usually gets right in a matter of hours or days.

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

What do you want to tell Elon Musk about his experience with social media and the tech world? I’m afraid it is not the last question

That’s actually the perfect last question. For the past few years, you have done this. You paid for a social network. 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 Elon Musk?

I believe he will open his mind and do so. He is someone who can update his views when new facts come to light. Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen that happening on the social networking site. He will end up where the rest of us are and whereTwitter was before him. I wish he could have avoided a lot of pain along the way, but do you know the saying, “There are no atheists in foxholes”? I don’t believe there is a need for free speech absolutists who run social networks as they are starting to realize how messier it is and how much responsibilities there are.

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

That’s awesome. 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. It will be important to see if we can set a faster record for you next time.

You have been reporting on social media, and so I wanted to speak to you. I want to close the loop on some of what you have heard from Matt and what you are hearing from Musk on a daily basis.

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

X.com: Turning it into a Bank: A Study of Elon’s Aspiration for a Social Platform to Turn it into an Internet Bank

There were leaked emails betweenParler and Apple that said “You need to better your moderation”, and it was vague, even after Parler was dumped from the Apple store. It is the thing with Apple. These threats are always vague.

What about the payment side of it? They are talking about payments. They would like you to send money to other 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 get why you’d be interested in that, but it is also the most boring product for a social network. I don’t know if I would want to be sending money on 50 different platforms.

It depends. If you have a system where creators post more content and are asking for money, then you might want to have money in it. The original idea for X.com was written by Elon and existed prior to the invention ofPayPal. I reported on a meeting recently where he told employees that PayPal was just phase one of what he actually wanted to do. He has every aspiration and intention to complete this Project X, as he calls it on Twitter, which is to turn it into a bank. No one has been successful with that.

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

What are the next 10 years? What are we going to tell you about Apple? A follow-up question for Matt Sweeney on Twitter

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

It’s good to be the platform, right? Money is being taken out of the apps that sit on top of the phone by Apple. I’m curious, when Matt was talking about this, does he feel like Apple deserves this money? Did you get that indication from him?

I get the impression that every CEO knows there is a line, and they will walk up to it. The line for Matt is longer than what many other CEOs have. They are not willing to go over that line. Matt is willing to say, “Apple has a lot of power, they hold us up in reviews, and we get it, because there are nipples on Tumblr.” They recreated a system to allow nudity on Tumblr by putting toggles on the web. They’re like, “This complies with Apple.” He is willing to discuss that. I don’t think he’s willing to go one step further because Apple can destroy his business.

The line of what CEOs are going to say about Apple is discovered many times on this show. I think that’s just utterly fascinating. I think it’s amazing that the line doesn’t exist for him.

I think that the conversation is shifting from, “Apple control is a business issue for everyone,” to, “It’s actually a speech issue.” Tim Sweeney and other CEOs are 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 think Apple isn’t ready to engage with that level of attacking.

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

What is the problem with Twitter? An analysis of the suspension of @ElonJet, a tweet account run by Jack Sweeney

@ElonJet, an account run by college student Jack Sweeney that uses public flight-tracking data to tweet the location of the entrepreneur’s private jet, is at the heart of these policy changes. Musk once offered to take the account down, but after he took control of the company, he said that he would allow it to stay online. The suspended reporters come from organizations including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. Mastodon has been blocked, with the site being identified as potentially harmful.

You said the Twitter files have been disseminated by Elon. It’s unclear how they’re being generated or vetted. There are many question marks. What they basically show, from what has been publicly revealed, is well-meaning people earnestly debating difficult decisions and arriving at some conclusions. Maybe you disagree with that entirely. Maybe you think they’re not well-meaning. Even if you think it’s a shadowy liberal conspiracy, you can’t really disagree with, “Yeah, they’re talking about hard decisions and reaching a conclusion, while also talking about how to justify their conclusion.”

He is not there right now. The mantra inside Twitter is that you could essentially say the most hateful thing, and unless it’s illegal, it’s going to be on the site. We want to corner that speech off to the follower graph of that account so that we don’t amplify it.

Right now their baseline for success is, “We are not amplifying hateful, racist, misogynistic tweets and we’re not putting them next to ads.” That hasn’t happened yet, but that’s 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.

Who wants to be on a platform with people who are bad? 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.” There is 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. So if you need to grow the user base and have payments, don’t you need to do more than wall it off? Don’t you think it’s time to let it go?

A town square should be a good place to find reliable information. The researchers from the University noted that before Musk came to power, hate and misinformation was an order of magnitude greater on the social networking site.

The concept of shadow banning and limiting your reach is what you just described. “We’re going to detect the content of your tweets and make sure we don’t show them to anyone.” Maybe they will be more transparent about it, but they will limit you because they do not like how racist you are. That is very hard and qualitative to make a judgement on. I don’t think that you can automate it. Is there a clue as to how they will implement that?

They don’t know. You are correct that there is more than the worst of the worst, they hope to automate it. There is no platform that does this automated de-amplification 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.

You are a benevolent dictator regardless of whether you want to be or not after being the head of a social network. I think Elon’s like, “Screw it, I’ll just be the dictator,” in a way that Jack Dorsey kind of didn’t want to be, for example.

What’s up with Jack, the way we look at the internet? What happened on Twitter, and how did it start to get heated?

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

The power of where you sit and the content you make, is a topic that hasn’t really come to mind as a culture.

It is important that we remember now that we are deep into it. If you want a laptop, you can get it from Hunter Biden. There is an Apple store. There was a time when no one understood the provenance of the laptop, and no one understood what was on it. Mostly it was a bunch of non-consensual nudes being shared, and people thought that it was a Russian operation. The conversation probably started because of the over-heatedness of that moment. It is remarkable for the technical ability of the conversation to be present.

And that we’re still discussing it. I guess it’s because it’s such an uncomfortable thing that could have happened and did happen on Twitter. When something is super political, we realize it in the heat of the moment like, “Whoa. We actually have these platforms that sit at various layers of the stack that have tremendous power to literally just wipe that off of the internet. If they actually do, what will happen?

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

Melting the Flames with Matteo Musk: Keeping the Coolino on Facebook and tweeting at the bedside of a social network

All right, this has been a fascinating episode. I am curious to see how fast Elon comes back around to the baseline of operating a social network. Matt’s a smart guy. Zuck, for all of his faults, is a very smart person and he has arrived at a place that looks a lot like the place 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.

I told my coworkers in the newsroom that we shouldn’t cover everything he said or did after he was inaugurated. Previously, a president’s every word was assumed to be a carefully chosen signal of future policy, and was reported as such. Many of the things Trump said were meant to get the attention of people. I argued that I just fed the flames by reporting on them. Another editor pushed back. He meant to say that he is the president. “What he says is news.”

There were a lot of rapid responses about Musk’s message on December 11 that “My pronouns are Prosecute/Falu”, a dig at the former chief infectious disease expert, and at gender diversity. Here’s another bunch about the picture of his bedside table with two replica guns on it, and some more about his tweeting a far-right Pepe the Frog meme.

This is precisely the way coverage of Trump worked. The liberal media was drawn to stories that confirmed the idea that a person so clearly bad for the country would only succeed in bringing himself down in flames, while the right-wing media ignored his obvious egomania and lack of interest in grasping basic policy The good reporting went on while the accounts that were controversial dominated the conversation. The losers were the public, whose understanding of what was actually happening across the country was forced through incompatible narratives around the behavior of one unhinged man in the White House.

This is what is happening with Musk. According to the Atlantic, a relationship between the new owner and the journalists who cover him is a mess, where the least defensible statements and claims on both sides are amplified in a never-ending cycle.

Why CNN and Mastodon are banned: The Donie O’Sullivan, Elon Jet, and Eduardo Rupar have complained about the suspensions

The value of those shares has been decreasing in recent months. It has been a tough year for shares of the electric car maker. The drop in the value of Tesla shares is a major reason that he recently lost his title as the richest person on the planet.

“The impulsive and unjustified suspension of a number of reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is concerning but not surprising. The increased instability and variability of the service should concern everyone who uses it.

Musk said the journalists had violated his policy by sharing his live location, and that he thought they were going to kill him. CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan did not share the billionaire’s live location.

After its main account posted about the Elon Jet controversy, it took action to block links to Mastodon. In the last week or so, Mastodon has grown in stature for users who are upset with Musk’s new management of the company, since he bought the company for a whopping $44 billion in late October.

Those words ring very empty today. As Harwell told me, “Elon says he is a free speech champion and he is banning journalists for exercising free speech. I think that calls into question his commitment.”

The president of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) said in a statement it was “concerned” about the suspensions, and that the move “affects all journalists.”

Musk reinstated previous rule-breakers and stopped enforcement of the platform’s policies prohibiting Covid-19 misinformation.

CNN reporter was blocked from sharing a Mastodon profile URL and was given an error message, saying that the site had been identified as potentially harmful.

Other reporters whose accounts have been suspended include Donie O’ Sullivan from CNN and Ryan Mac of the New York Times.

In a post on Substack, Rupar wrote that he is unsure why he was suspended. He said he has a link on his Facebook page to the jet- tracking account.

Comment on “Suspensions of a Journalist Based on Personal Anismus” on Twitter”, tweeted ElonJet, an “arbitrary suspension of another Post journalist”

“Suspensions of journalists based on personal animus sets a dangerous precedent, ” said Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press.

In a statement to NPR, Twitter’s head of Trust & Safety Ella Irwin said sharing people’s real-time location information on Twitter is now a violation of its policies.

“Without commenting on any specific user accounts, I can confirm that we will suspend any accounts that violate our privacy policies and put other users at risk,” Irwin said. “We don’t make exceptions to this policy for any other accounts or journalists.”

Musk also claimed that one account that operated under the handle @ElonJet, run by a 20-year-old University of Florida student, was used by a “crazy stalker” in Los Angeles to follow a car carrying one of Musk’s children.

CNN said that it is unsure of its future on the social media platform. CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan was suspended in a “provocative and unjustifiable manner.” A spokesman says it’s concerning but not surprising. Everyone who uses TWITTER should be worried by the increasing instability and variability of the service. We have asked Twitter for an explanation, and we will reevaluate our relationship based on that response.”

Sally Buzbee, The Washington Post’s executive editor, called it an “arbitrary suspension of another Post journalist” that further undermined Musk’s promise to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech.

The Debacle on Twitter Spaces After Musk’s Takeover: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls – And How We Can Reclaim It

The time whenMusk bought a McLaren F1 for $1 million and then drove it into a ditch while trying to show off is one that I have been thinking about a lot lately. According to Max Chafkin, Musk said he had read stories about people who made money and bought sports cars and crashed them. “But I knew it could never happen to me, so I didn’t get any insurance.”

Man, look, after the debacle on Twitter Spaces last night, can we please stop pretending that this is anything but flailing? There is no insurance after he crashed the McLaren.

“We are all aware of news breaks on the site, and it is important for journalists to see the main tent pole of the site in order to perform their jobs,” he said. “Driving journalists off Twitter is the biggest self-inflicted wound I can think of.”

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

We can’t rely on Musk to provide a safe, open forum. We need new, non-profit social networks run by boards responsible for considering the public’s interest when making critical decisions about things like content moderation and community standards. And many of the people who have these skills have just been laid off from their jobs. In addition to the mass exodus from Twitter since Musk’s takeover, there have been layoffs at a number of tech and journalism companies lately, including Facebook and CNN, with more coming at The Washington Post. Some of these professionals should work together to create new social platforms designed to provide the truly open town hall we so desperately need.

After the suspensions, Musk ran a 30-minute long poll asking when he should unsuspend the journalists. He said he would re-do the poll because it had too many options.

On Thursday, Musk also attended a Twitter Space hosted by Buzzfeed News’ Katie Notopoulos, which was also attended by several of the suspended journalists, who had apparently been allowed to join due to a technical glitch. Before leaving the call, Musk said “you dox, you get suspended. End of story, that’s it.” The Spaces feature was turned off. Notopoulos received a message saying that she couldn’t join a Space because she violated the rules, when she tried.

Hours before the poll was completed and the accounts were reinstated, Musk declared today “freedom Friday” in response to former congressional candidate Lavern Spicer’s comment that accounts were being reinstated at an increasingly fast pace. Several prominent right-to-far-right figures were unsuspended on Friday as noted by Shayan Sardarizadeh, a reporter for the BBC. This seems to be a part of Musk giving some formerly-suspended accounts a general amnesty which he says is happening due to the results of a poll.

Musk tweeted late Friday that the company would lift the suspensions following the results of a public poll on the site. Over half of the respondents preferred to unsuspend accounts immediately, and over a third said the suspensions should be lifted in seven days.

The accounts were back by Saturday. The only other exception was Business Insider’s Linette Lopez, who was suspended after the other journalists, with no explanation.

She said that she posted the court documents on her account and included a Musk email address. That address is not current, Lopez said, because “he changes his email every few weeks.”

Mastodon, an ad-free social media platform with a growing number of users, has already been suspended three months. The case against Musk’s alleged stalking

The move sets “a dangerous precedent at a time when journalists all over the world are facing censorship, physical threats and even worse,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

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

According to Matt Binder, who is a suspended journalist at the technology news outlet Mashable, he was banned Thursday night after sharing a screenshot of a post that O’ Sullivan had made.

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

The old regime was governed by its own biases, and it looks like the new regime has the same issue, she said.

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

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

Some of the advertisers that have already cut their spending on the social network due to uncertainty over the direction it’s taking may be caught off guard by the suspension.

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

A Re-election Referendum on Elon Musk’s Chaotic Leadership of Twitter (and a Response to his Tweet Sunday)

The answer to the question, “Should Musk step down as head of Twitter?”, came early Monday morning, with most respondents voting in the affirmative.

Replying to a tweet Sunday, in which MIT artificial intelligence researcher Lex Fridman said he would take the CEO job, Musk hinted he hasn’t been completely happy with his new gig.

After haphazardly establishing a ban on links out that put his site at odds with both The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz and his own supporters, like Silicon Valley venture capitalist Paul Graham, Elon Musk’s doxxing, banning, and moderation outburst ended — predictably — with an apology and a promise it “won’t happen again.”

Musk may be ready to put his overpriced toy in someone else’s hands after his decision-making was criticized by the same people who had supported him.

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

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

The rating on the company was lowered by the investment bank because of the risks associated with Musk’s ownership and management of the social networking site.

According to a policy change announced by Twitter, users will no longer be able to link to any other platforms.

Rusch, the Oppenheimer analyst, said the “inconsistent standards application” for Twitter users has helped create a “broad public backlash” against Musk that will in turn hurt Tesla.

The action to block competitors was the latest attempt by Musk to restrict speech after he shut down a account on his private jet last week.

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

The test case was that of venture capitalist Paul Graham, he told his 1.5 million followers that he was going to use Mastodon to find Musk, who had praised him before. His Twitter account was promptly suspended, and soon after restored as Musk promised to reverse the policy implemented just hours earlier.

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

Questions were raised about securities or other laws being violated by Musk.

Warren wants the board to respond to a series of questions by January 3, saying that they need to fulfill their legal obligations.

O’Sullivan, Oppenheimer, Sacks, Silicon Valley and Musk: Why do we need a CEO? Why are we sorely concerned about Musk?

Oppenheimer specifically cited Twitter’s decision last week to ban several journalists, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, as a catalyst for the downgrade.

A shareholder in both of the companies said over the weekend that he hopes Musk finds a CEO for the micro-blogging site in the first quarter of 2023.

Calacanis is an investor who has backed well-known companies likeUber and Robinhood, when he was a reporter. He has several media properties, one of which is a podcasts with Sacks.

Calacanis tweeted on Sunday night asking, “Who would like the most miserable job in tech AND media?! Who is insane enough to have a place to post on social media? Calacanis ran a poll on his website, asking his followers if Sacks should run the company himself, or if someone else should. The majority of the respondents said they’d rather not say so.

Sacks and Musk were part of the original team at PayPal and Musk has experience managing a social network. He founded and ran enterprise communications platform Yammer, before selling it to Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion.

Sacks has been quite explicit in its statements about Musk, whether it is justifying a spat with Apple or trying to stir up outrage about the public release of information about Musk’s private jet. A Twitter user asked Sacks last month what he and Musk disagree about, and Sacks responded with just one thing: “Chess.”

A Twitter Meets the Elephant: Jared Kushner, a Trump Son-in-Law During the Super Soccer World Cup with Musk

The most obvious choice of the group would be Krishnan. He has direct experience working on the Twitter product, having previously helped manage the teams responsible for features of the platform such as search and the home timeline. He also previously worked on mobile ad products for Snap and Facebook.

It could give him experience that could help fulfill Musk’s goal of making it more than just a social media app.

Krishnan is arguably the least well-known — and therefore perhaps the least controversial — of Musk’s current Twitter leadership team, which could help deflect some of the recent negative attention the company has received.

Some Twitter users have speculated about other possible leaders for the social media company, including Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was spotted watching the World Cup with Musk over the weekend.

Kushner is friendly with the Saudi Royal Family, one of Twitter’s largest investors. During his professional career before joining the White House, he worked for his family’s real estate development company and said he would leave politics and start an investment firm. The New York Observer was previously owned by Kushner.

With Musk’s rapid decisions after previous polls, and his penchant for posting online, many assumed he would address the elephant in the room by now. But he did not. It took Musk eighteen hours to not post on his verified account, but he was quiet most of Monday.