The Case for a Free Speech Magnesium: Trump’s Twitter Controversy and Musk’s Decline to the Black Hole

CNBC, The Washington Post, and Insider are reporting that Musk has added the company to his business empire. He fired executives to celebrate.

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

Relations between the pair seem to have soured since, with the men making public jibes 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.”

Musk had attempted to end the deal in July because he felt that there was an issue with the number of fake bot accounts on the platform. Twitter sued Musk to complete the acquisition, accusing the billionaire of using bots as a pretext to exit a deal that he developed buyer’s remorse over following a market decline.

Now that he is under fire from the same people who supported him in the first place, and the person who ghosted his pleas for a response from the public, Musk may be ready to give up his overpriced toy for a while.

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

The material that came to light did not lend much support to the idea that the Chancery Court would be an appropriate place to hold a trial. “He knows that his best claim is fraud, but they’ve gotten the evidence from Twitter, and there’s nothing that looks like fraud here,” Miller says. “They’ve run out of cards to play.”

After having his deposition moved from September to October, Musk was going to be deposed on October 6 and 7. After his lawyers had negotiated a contract with him, he decided to honor it. That deposition was probably going to be uncomfortable; a judge found that Musk likely deleted Signal messages that were relevant to the case. The deposition was delayed because of the deal Musk was working on and a court order to stop proceedings allowing it to close by October 28th.

Skinner Boxes: A Keyhole for the Landscape of Social Media: The Musk-Coopers Impact on the Internet, and How to Stop Disturbing the Media

But more than professional utility ties me to the site. It’s similar to slot machines with what’s called anittent reinforcement schedule. It is repetitive and uninteresting but occasionally it will come to mind at random intervals. Unpredictable rewards, as the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner found with his research on rats and pigeons, are particularly good at generating compulsive behavior.

“I don’t know that a team of engineers on the micro-Blogging site sat around and said that they were creating a Skinner box,” she said. She said that is what they have built. It’s one reason people who should know better regularly self-destruct on the site — they can’t stay away.

It’s a theme he reiterated both in public, telling Twitter employees at an all-staff meeting that the platform should allow all legal speech, and in private, texting investor Antonio Gracias that “Free speech matters most when it’s someone you hate spouting what you think is bull****.”

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

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

The features are the bug on those sites, which allows you to say and do the things that are banned from other social media platforms. They are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.

A number of high-profile accounts were permanently banned from social media for violating their rules against hate, misinformation and violence, but have now been restored.

The accounts belonging to CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell and other journalists who have covered Musk aggressively in recent weeks were all abruptly permanently suspended. Also banned was the account of a progressive independent journalist.

Someone told Musk to hire someone with a political view and a savvy culture to 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.

Facebook ban bans the ex-president: good news for the billionaire who reportedly has no communication with a colleague before making a bid

Facebook, which is banning the ex-president, may allow Trump and others to return, setting a precedent for other social networks.

Text messages revealed in court documents show that Musk privately clashed with a colleague in April before deciding to make a bid.

The company has 7,500 employees and no such message has been delivered to them. And with Musk reportedly intent on making cuts before Tuesday, when many employees are set to receive new stock grants, it appears that any such decisions will come down to the wire.

It’s good news for the billionaire, who has accused the company of overstaffed for its size and claimed that costs outstrip revenues.

Costs and staff cuts are only two pieces of the equation. The New York Times has obtained an investor presentation which shows that Musk pitched investors on a plan to triple the company’s revenue by the year’s end.

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.

Twitter’s Super-Applications: What Will They Do? Comments on Musk’s Twitter Addressing the “Frontline” and the “Company”

Everyone is unsure of 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 is not clear which agencies will carry out the probe, and no one knows what actions the Musk US officials are investigating. Twitter’s filing merely said authorities are looking into Musk’s “conduct” linked to the deal.

The company’s court filing elsewhere accused Musk’s legal team of failing to produce draft communications with the Securities and Exchange Commission and a slide presentation to the Federal Trade Commission as part of the two sides’ ongoing litigation over whether Musk can walk away from the deal.

The account suspensions came on the heels of Twitter’s announcement on Monday that it was disbanding its Trust and Safety Council — a group of outside experts that advised the company on issues like human rights, child sexual exploitation and mental health.

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

The bans raise a number of questions about the future of the platform, which has been referred to as a digital town square. It also called into serious question Musk’s supposed commitment to free speech.

Yildirim said that there was a lack of good at targeting ads to what the users wanted to see. She said that Musk’s message suggests he would like to fix it.

Yoel is the Head of Safety and Integrity at the company. In recent days, he has tweeted about the company’s efforts to address a surge in hateful rhetoric on the platform, and Musk on Twitter encouraged users to follow him for “the most accurate understanding of what’s happening with trust & safety at Twitter.”

Insider Intelligence principal analyst Jasmine Enberg said Musk has good reason to avoid a massive shakeup of Twitter’s ad business because Twitter’s revenues have taken a beating from the weakening economy, months of uncertainty surrounding Musk’s proposed takeover, changing consumer behaviors and the fact that “there’s no other revenue source waiting in the wings.”

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.

Elon Musk completed his $44 billion deal to buy the company last week, which led to massive layoffs and questions about whether the world’s richest man would restore some banned accounts.

Musk promised to try to fight the fake and scam accounts on the platform who are active in the replies to his tweet and those with a lot of followers.

The Twitter CEO of a billionaire and his tweet staffer: Why is he so unhappy with Twitter? An employee’s comments on Musk’s tweet about his decision to leave Twitter

Delaware Chancery Court chancellor Kathaleen St. Judge McCormick gave the parties until 5 p.m. on Oct. 28 to close the deal or face a rescheduled trial.

Since Musk suddenly proclaimed he actually wanted to buy Twitter again earlier this month, Twitter’s most internally visible leader has been Jay Sullivan, the general manager of consumer and revenue product. He has been holding monthly listening sessions with employees, and on Thursday, he was going to call them and cancel the meeting, but did not give a reason.

Parag Argawal, the current CEO, who Musk soured on after the two started talking about him joining the board, has not been noted by many employees. One current employee who asked anonymity to speak said that Argawal had been completely absent for weeks. One person said that he has ghosted them. 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.

According to Insider, the execs got lots of money for their trouble: Agrawal got $38.7 million; Segal got $25.4 million; Gadde got $12.5 million and Personette got $11.2 million.

Although they came quickly, the major personnel moves had been widely expected and almost certainly are the first of many major changes the mercurial Tesla CEO will make.

Elon Musk publicly scoffed at a Twitter employee’s uncertainty about whether he had been laid off in a recent round of cuts and spoke dismissively of the employee’s disability in a series of tweets Monday night. It’s the latest example of the billionaire openly antagonizing his company’s current and former staffers.

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.”

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

“You don’t want a place where consumers will be bombarded with things they do not want to hear about and the platform won’t take responsibility for that,” Yildirim said.

What is the best thing you could do to save Twitter HQ? A message to advertisers about Musk’s decision to cease trading in Twitter

But Musk has been signaling that the deal is going through. He strolled into the company’s San Francisco headquarters Wednesday carrying a porcelain sink, changed his Twitter profile to “Chief Twit,” and tweeted “Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!”

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

Musk’s enthusiasm about visiting the headquarters was in contrast to his suggestion that the building be turned into a homeless shelter, because very few employees actually worked there.

A note to advertisers Thursday shows a new emphasis on advertising revenue and a need for more relevant ads that rely on collecting and analyzing users’ personal information.

A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.

On Thursday evening, after hours of chaos, Musk halted new recruitment into his $10-a-month subscription service. Offering anyone the chance to have a verified account had led to people being impersonated by others. The platform had descended into chaos after the mess which caused memorable hoaxes from accounts misrepresenting themselves as companies like Eli Lilly and others.

Charging for verified badges might appear at first glance as a business story. But the move will have significant ramifications on the information landscape. It will make it hard for users to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic accounts.

If the company stripped current verified users of their blue checks, there’s a chance that they’d create more confusion on the platform.

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.”

Twitter Discord: What have we learnt lately about Elon Musk, Tesla, and other tech gurus at the Los Alamos?

The process has been frightening and disorienting, according to conversations with eight employees today and over the weekend. In the absence of official communications, workers have been hunting for clues in Slack and gathering in private Discords to share the latest rumors.

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

According to The Washington Post, 25 percent of the staff would have their jobs taken away in this round of layoffs.

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

On Saturday afternoon, a week after an initial round of layoffs had cut Twitter in half, Platformer was the first to report that a second massive wave of cuts had hit the company. This time, the cuts were aimed at Twitter’s contract workers. The contractors lost their jobs at a rate more severe that it was on a percentage basis.

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

If you are feeling depressed and dismayed right now, just want to know you are not alone, since no leadershippy type seems interested in filling the void. this sucks.

The Vine Project: What’s coming? Share what you’ve been working on with Musk and what you want to do, and what to do next

Employees in the other channels are sharing information if they lose access to their communications.

Engineers must complete two major projects in the next few days or weeks, thanks to Musk. One is changes to Twitter Blue that would require users to pay to retain their verification badges, possibly as much as $20 a month. We can confirm that the second report is a plan to revive the short-form video app, either as a single product or a component of the core Twitter app. In the case of Blue changes,AlexHeath reported, features must be in place by November 7th or the team will be fired.

The Vine project has generated moderate enthusiasm so far, we’re told. More than a dozen engineers volunteered to be part of the project after Musk gave it the go-ahead Sunday night.

Other employees are being encouraged to go build something — anything — and show it off 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’ll get a bit of feedback. You may be asked to ship it asap,” the director wrote. “At worst, you will be asked to stop and work on something else. Even in this case, at least you worked on something you love.

Similarly, on Monday, Behnam Rezaei, senior director of software engineering at Twitter, sent a note to his team acknowledging “big changes” were coming. According to a copy of the email obtained by platformer, he said that cultural change was going to be the most important change. Some good and some bad.

Do good engineering work, if you want to know what to do now. Write a code. Keep the site up and fix bugs. I know what criteria is used for being at the micro-blogging site. It’s not working on a fancy project for Elon. The good culture change is, it’s shipping and delivering. I encourage you to rotate more on coding and shipping, and less on documentation, planning, strategy etc. code and ship 5x if you want to be in a special group this week. Building what Elon asks or thinks sexy is not the criteria. Helping our users is one of the criteria. You don’t need to tell me what to do. 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

Social Media and Musings about Musk and the “Exec” of the Managing Director: The Case of @WilsonChordwell on Twitter

Musk can be frightening if he’s paying attention. The employee we spoke with felt that they were not working on a project that Musk was known to be focused on.

Nick Caldwell, the general manager of core technology, has a new bio on his social media platform that is called “formerTwitter Exec”. Jay Sullivan, the general manager of consumer and revenue products, removed his title from his account on his social media platform. On Tuesday night, The New York Times reported that the Chief Marketing Officer had left the company, but on Tuesday night, she sent out a single blue heart.

Calacanis stated on his website that he was in New York for a meeting with the marketing and advertising community. He has also tweeted questions to Twitter users about the platform’s subscription and bookmark features.

Twitter must also reinvest in moderation by bringing back the trust and safety and human rights teams that were in place prior to Musk’s mass layoffs, and it needs to beef up this force to ensure that moderation occurs in every major language. It also needs to submit to regular audits to guarantee that policies are equitable and applied consistently.

We talk with WIRED platforms as well as the power reporter about the changes coming to the popular social network and how they may affect it.

Encourage your male-presenting friends to watch the House of the Dragon show to see if they are interested in fathering children. Mike recommends the new album from Natalia Lafourcade, De Todas las Flores. Lauren recommends re-examining your relationship with social media.

Lauren Goode: Social Snackfight – Listen to Solar Keys on Facebook, Spotify, and the Twitter E-News Feed

The person can be found on the social networking site. Lauren is referred to as LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. The main hotline should be blinged out. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). The music is by Solar Keys.

If you want to get every episode for free, you need to subscribe to the audio player on the page.

If you have an iPad or iPhone, you can open the app and then tap on the link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. If you use a cellphone, you can find us in the app. We’re on Spotify too. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.

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

The email says that the offices will be temporarily closed and that badges will not be allowed into them.

The class action lawsuit alleges that some employees who were laid off already are in violation of the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.

The lawsuit alleges that the workers were not given enough notice of their firing in accordance with both the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) and California WARN Act. These acts require companies to give employees at least 60 days notice of a mass firing.

The lawsuit was filed in an attempt to “make sure that employees are aware that they should not sign away their rights and that they have an avenue for pursuing their rights,” Shannon Liss-Riordan, the attorney who filed the complaint on Thursday night, told Bloomberg.

Musk has had to contend with class-action lawsuits before. Two former employees at Tesla sued the company in June for violation of the same WARN Act.

Tim Musk, Apple CEO, and the State of the Art: How Apple Has Revisited the Company and Why People Aren’t

I visited Steve Jobs at Apple headquarters in 1998 to hear why he wanted to revive Apple. He had been its interim CEO for almost a year, after returning to the company that fired him over a decade earlier. I was greeting him in the board room of his suite when he went to the whiteboard with a solution for the company’s business problems. He had a new product plan, a new product, and a workforce revitalized by an inspiring ad campaign.

Musk need not look farther than his own successful enterprises to realize the absurdity of his haste. He took over a company that was five years old. Musk came up with a brilliant plan to turn the company around—but it didn’t post an annual profit until 2020, 17 years after incorporation. Musk is in some way to blame for what the company has achieved and for his persistence. According to Musk, the company is private 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.

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

He installed himself as the sole board member after removing the 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.

Following layoffs at the platform, some users are already moving to Counter Social, one of the most popular alternatives. They fear a breakdown of moderation and verification could create a disinformation free-for-all on what has been the internet’s main conduit for reliable communications from public agencies and other institutions.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and the Covid Plandemic: Are We Too Loud for Intensive Care? A Comment on Adele Trump Tweet Twitter Elon Musk

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

Big Pharma created the Covid plandemic to silence me. She said that everyone tries to silence her. “Ma’am, please speak at a lower volume. I’m sorry, am I too loud for your precious intensive care unit? You are not even sick!

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/06/media/snl-donald-trump-twitter-elon-musk/index.html

Is Truth Social the Good, the Bad, the Ugly? Adding insults to the insults of Michael Schumer for his online dating profile

“Hi. Oh my god, your profile is so funny. Schumer was dressed in red and said she loved funny men. “They said I was a bot, which is crazy. 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.”

Donald Trump, played by James Austin Johnson, spoke in front of the council. Trump had his account banned in 2021.

We love Truth Social and we have moved to it. It is great, said Johnson, who played Trump. “And in many 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.”

What Should I Do Now? A Voice for the Media: Elon Musk’s Disruption After 12 Years of Tweeting (and How to Keep It On Twitter)

Roxanne Jones, a founding editor of The Magazine and former vice president at the company, has previously worked at the New York Daily News and Philadelphia Inquirer. Jones is the co-author of “Say it Loud: An Inclusive History of the Black Athlete.” She talks about politics, sports and culture on Philadelphia’s radio station. The views are hers alone. Read more opinion on CNN.

That’s the message I got 30 seconds after I deleted Twitter on the day Elon Musk became the platform’s new owner. After a mostly dysfunctional 12-year relationship with Twitter that I admit brought some moments of joy, it was time to exercise my freedom of speech to say goodbye and good riddance.

Quiet quitting is rejecting the stress of working overtime and not being able to afford it, so that you can spend your time doing what you love. It’s important not to give more to a platform than most people can expect. If you want to stick around on this new Twitter—whatever it may become—you need to find a way to use it without it using you.

I am a media professional and know that most of what we do in newsrooms, the stories we chose to tell, and the assumptions we make about the world have depended on what the Twitter-verse tells us.

Hateful Twitter Users: The Case of a Black Man Who Became a Hater: After Musk’s Takeover of Twitter

Black women are the users that are the most targeted on the platform. They were 84% more likely than White women to be the target of an abusive or problematic tweet. The numbers are from a report before Musk. After he closed his $44 billion deal to buy twitosphere, abuse went up.

The N-word increased by 500% after Musk took over the company, according to a cyber research organization.

He may work on his own habit of promoting lies and conspiracy theories, as he did in his now- deleted tweet regarding the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul.

Don’t expect to see a big social media exodus, not in a world where everyone craves attention and adulation. Everyone wants to be a virtual brand ambassador or aninfluencer.

The site has a community of millions of Black users. The reasons vary for staying in the face of blatant disrespect and hatred. For some, it means keeping a job. Some may think that it is better to stay and fight for change within rather than use social media to achieve global influence.

For the months prior to Musk’s takeover, the researchers deemed just one tweet out of the three top 20 lists to be actually hateful, in this case against Jewish people. The others were either quoting another person’s hateful remarks or using the relevant key words in a non-hateful way.

Authorities had to get involved in the vile incident that occurred in my personal life and became a matter of my family’s safety. Never one to back down to bullies, I stayed on the platform and battled haters one tweet at a time for years.

In 2 weeks, I have never known a workplace that was more hostile and degrading.

There will be people who do not have the courage or the intellect to challenge you in person onTwitter, who are using anonymous bots designed to misinform the mass.

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

Comedian Kathy Griffin had her account suspended Sunday after she switched her screen name to Musk. She told the reporter that she had used his photo as well.

“I guess not all the content moderators were let go?” She made a joke about it on Mastodon, a social media platform she set up last week.

The Twitter Blue Checkmark is Coming: Do We Really Need to Pay for the Blue Check? An Afterthought on Musk, Bertinelli, and OSET

Sarah has a verified account and used it to troll Musk. The only thing distinguishing a tweet coming Silverman’s account was the @SarahKSilverman handle.

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

Initially, the service will be available in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.K. There was no indication when it would go live, even though it was not available Sunday. A Twitter employ, Esther Crawford, told The Associated Press it is coming “soon but it hasn’t launched yet.”

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

Edward Perez, the director of product management at the time, oversaw the product team devoted to civic integrity. Perez joined the company in September 2021, after more than three decades working in election integrity, and was tasked with keeping the product safe during times of great upheaval. 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.

The OSET Institute is devoted to election security and integrity and Perez, who is now a board member, fears that the drama around corporate takeover is taking up too much oxygen in the room. The focus on the Musk psycho drama is resulting in a lack of attention to the election-related issues.

Timing the 2021 Nigerian President’s Twitter Warfare: The Case for a Re-visited Verification System and Impossible Claims in India and Saudi Arabia

Civil society groups, journalists, and politicians are all influential in shaping public opinion and policy because of the ways in which Twitter is used. The platform has been used to organize protests in a number of countries, including India, Nigeria, Argentina, and Saudi Arabia.

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

Donald Trump’s account was frozen and he was locked out in January of 2021, after he supported an insurrection on the Capitol. In support of genocide and threatened violence, many world leaders have publicly voiced their support on the internet, but never have they been banned from the platform. Less than six months later, in June 2021, the Nigerian president issued a threat to violence against the groups in the southwest. He still had an account, even though his tweet was removed.

Senior international counsel and Asia Pacific policy director at Access Now is concerned that Musk may not continue with the lawsuit. (In his August countersuit against Twitter, Musk cited the lawsuit in India as a threat to the company’s presence in its third largest market.) “It would be a vindication of a very problematic, unconstitutional set of actions by the Indian government,” he says. It also means that the global tech industry should back off and not try to do more.

Griffin appeared to be the first celebrity to lose her tweeting privileges after a wave of prominent users impersonated Musk over the weekend, with the goal of underscoring potential flaws in the social media company’s plans for a revised verification system.

But the partially rolled-out plan faced widespread backlash, and in a display of defiance, some celebrities on the platform posed as Musk over the weekend, complete with a blue check mark on their profiles.

Twitter Users Are Not the Same as Facebook Users: Skeptics and Anomalies Tweeted Silverman after Trump’s Bose-Man Melted a Bloody Head

“I am a freedom of speech absolutist and I eat doody for breakfast every day,” Silverman tweeted Saturday. Her account is a supporter of Democratic candidates.

Silverman’s account was labeled as “temporarily restricted” Sunday, with a warning that “there has been some unusual activity from this account” shown to visitors before clicking through to the profile. The comedian then changed her account back to its usual form, complete with her own name and image.

CNN fired comedian Kathy Griffin after she was photographed holding up a bloody head resembling that of President Donald Trump. Anderson Cooper had co-hosted the New Year’s Eve program with the man himself for a decade.

The crackdown on accounts comes in the wake of Musk purchasing the company and pledging to restore the accounts of users who were previously banned from the platform, most notably Trump. Musk has also said he will limit the company’s content restrictions and require the paid subscription for account verification.

Musk also repeated a trope of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement by falsely suggesting that Twitter’s former trust and safety executive Yoel Roth’s doctoral dissertation made him an advocate for child sexualization. The abuse and abusive behavior was reported by those who’ve taken to the internet.

Lurking on Twitter: How a Toy Model Revisited to Help Eliminate Perturbations of the Global Internet of Things

“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. Everyone in Tiny Talk Town is very interested in the topic of Elon Musk.

A relatively small group of people power Twitter. Heavy users who use English can account for less than 10% of monthly users, but they are responsible for over half of global revenue.

An electric car enthusiast who is following a lot of extremely active people on social media would be easy to mistake his experience for those of other people. 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 and live sports 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. Choosing to lurk, to sit back and observe for a while, is basically a heuristic and simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos that is New Twitter. If you want to check in on him, close your browser tab and look for his new toy. Send a tweet, then disengage. It’s important to look on during basketball games. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. Save your most original thoughts for another time, another place.

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.

After Twitter Blue went Live, a prominent user complained about Twitter’s rocky rollout: “To combat impersonation, we’ve added an ‘Official’ label to some accounts”

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

The feature that enabled users to distinguish legitimate celebrity and branded accounts from accounts that merely paid for a blue check mark was abruptly killed by Musk hours after it went live.

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. Some of Musk’s fellow high-powered users received negative feedback.

“@elonmusk, from one entrepreneur to another, for when you have your customer service hat on. Mark Cuban said he spent too much time muting his new checkmark mentions in order to make them useful again.

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

Mr. Musk did not respond to any questions. In December, Mr. Musk acknowledged the visibility restrictions on some users and announced plans to improve Twitter’s transparency on the issue.

Internal Warnings on Twitter: What Elon Musk Wants to Learn from the Platformer Paper on a November 9, 2016 Launch of Blue

Before the launch of Blue on November 9th, the company had prepared a seven-page list of recommendations intended to help Musk keep his plans in check. A document obtained by Platformer predicts many of the events that follow.

The team labeled the concern in the highest risk category as P0, meaning that they thought it was a problem.

“Impersonation of world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials, and other high profile individuals” represented another P0 risk, the team found. The loss of legacy verification likely will lead to an increase in impersonation of high-profile accounts, which is a critical signal in enforceing the rules.

On November 1st, Musk was considering a $100-a-year annual subscription for Blue, which was later reduced after an exchange online with writer Stephen King. The move was made in order to make fun of brands and government officials as an impulse purchase, which increased the risk of 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. They said removing privileges from legacy verified accounts could cause confusion and loss of trust. “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 company got some support for their trust and safety team, including the retention of verification for some high-profile accounts.

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

Twitter is Down: When Musk and Blind re-opened their Platformer app to discuss workplace safety and employee engagement, in the light of Silicon Valley Data Retrieval

For the most part, though, the document offers a wish list for features that would make the product safer and easier to use, most of which have not been approved.

The launch proceeded as planned despite the warnings. A few days later, with the predictions of the trust and safety team largely realized, Musk belatedly stopped the rollout.

The change had cascading consequences inside the company, bringing down much of Twitter’s internal tools along with the public-facing APIs. As engineers raced to fix the problem, they had differing responses to “crap” and “Twitter is down – the entire thing”.

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

Similar messages trickled in on Blind, an app for coworkers to anonymous discuss their workplaces and on external Slacks that employees have established to have more candid discussions.

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

Why is Twitter so slow compared to other social media communities? Musk’s frustrations on the “goons” of Tesla and the Boring Company

“For the longest time, creative fields have been cornered by the wealthy, or the children of the wealthy… Twitter allowed you to build this audience that made you undeniable to the people holding the keys to that.”

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.”

“Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now,” the company’s support account tweeted. There were some unforeseen consequences from the internal change we made.

Engineers were told they could not write any code until further notice according to an internal email obtained by Platformer. The email said that exceptions would be granted if there is an immediate change that is needed to resolve an issue with a production service and employees have approval from VP level and Elon explicitly stating that the change needs to be made.

On Slack, even engineers who attended the late-night meeting were confused. “Is there a ticket I can reference?” The engineer was tasked with implementing the freeze. “I don’t see any context.” A colleague replied, “We don’t have a lot of context at the moment.” “But this is coming from Elon’s team.”

Engineer Eric Frohnhoefer pushed back on Musk’s criticism, and offered a detailed thread about why Twitter loads more slowly in some places than others. The engineer who commented on the affair said the man had no idea what he was talking about.

Why is Twitter Keeping Customers in Mind? Why the Code Freezes, Where Do They Go? How Do Ads are Going? Why Did Twitter Get Its Own? Why Does Twitter Give Us More Power?

Instead, the experience is not great in India, for example. The back-and-forth data transfer between the phone and the data center starts compounding due to thelaws of physics coming into effect.

India has a higher amount of low power phones that perform worse in general, as compared to all of our bigger phones and such.

Why does the code freeze? No one knows for certain, but Musk is worried that disgruntled engineers may try to take over the site on their way out.

All Eli Lilly ad campaigns were stopped on Friday after the Blue debacle. The Washington Post reported that the move could have cost the company millions of dollars. It took six hours for the fake Eli Lilly account to be taken down.

The news has left Twitter’s ad teams — particularly those responsible for managing ad agency relationships — in a lurch, according to internal screenshots and conversations with current employees.

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

It turns out that an employee had inadvertently deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter. The team that worked on that service left the company.

A Twitter Employee’s On-line Response to Musk’s Comments on the Digital Advertising and Content Policy Challenges in the 21st Century

Another Twitter employee said General Motors had also asked to pause campaigns. The initial reason they gave is elections, but it looks like an openended pause as the team requested to meet next week to make a case for why they shouldn’t. Later, this same employee added: “Pause on [GM] til end of year confirmed and implemented. The reason now is brand safety.”

GroupM, the largest media-buying agency in the world, with $60 billion in annual media spend, told its clients that Twitter was a high-risk media buy, according to Digiday and an email obtained by Platformer. The situation was explained by the agency partnerships lead, who said that the brand safety guidance had been changed due to the recent senior departures. They realize that our policies are in place but feel that the ability to scale and manage infraction at a faster pace is uncertain at the moment.

–Demonstrated commitment of effective content moderation, enforcing current Twitter Rules (e.g. account impersonation, violative content removal timing, intolerance of hate speech and misinformation)

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

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

Tweeting About Musk and WeWork: Why You Shouldn’t Always Worry About It, But You Can Keep the Light On And Pay Your Bills

Mr. Musk felt that the word “hard core” meant a culture where the most ” exceptional performance” would be accepted and that midnight emails would be fine. I’d wager that more than a few workaholics, bosses or otherwise, weren’t entirely turned off by the philosophy behind that statement, and yet it immediately conjured images of sweaty Wall Street bankers collapsing at their desks, Silicon Valley wunderkinds sleeping under theirs and the high-intensity, bro-boss cultures of companies like Uber and WeWork, with their accompanying slogans about doing what you love and sleeping when you’re dead. It is a prepandemic mind-set that many more employees are not willing to go back to.

Many users followed suit and wrote short stories for the platform. For some, like writer Dan Sheehan, gaining a platform on Twitter later allowed them to excel in their personal and professional lives.

I built this following for myself and that helped me get some first job offers in the copywriting space. That’s how I paid the bills for a very long time,” he says.

Through copywriting, Sheehan was able to dedicate his time to writing his novel, which was made a reality with the help of his large following on social media.

He says that he was able to have the book reach a crowd of more than 100,000 people directly because he was able to keep the lights on and pay his bills.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/23/1138605036/twitter-shutdown-elon-activism-trump-career

Tweeting about the pandemic, and why we need Twitter now more than just brown reporters: How we might lose the end of Twitter?

“For brown reporters, there aren’t that many ways for us to get our names out there and get poached by publications.” At the start of her career, Rasilla posted her work to Twitter, mainly music reviews, and eventually landed a job writing those reviews for a local TV station. From there, her audience grew, and she continued getting job offers, which led her to her job today. Future journalists won’t have the same opportunities that Rasilla has.

“It is unfortunate that the diversity problem continues, and I don’t know how those communities will find each other.” She says that it is a good way to see it immediately and to start following other people’s work.

Wendi Muse was an active member of ‘Disability Twitter’ for a number of years. She spent the pandemic posting resources to help people get masks, as well as sending some from the personal stockpile she had amassed. She noticed in the summer that there was a higher demand for N95 masks.

“In total, it’s going to be more than 12,000 masks that I sent out just on my own, literally from my living room since January of this year,” Muse says. She doesn’t think she’d be able to reach as many people if it weren’t for her use of social media.

“It has been crucial because it’s been a way not only to learn more about the pandemic, myself and my family, but also to reach out to other people who are less fortunate and maybe either don’t have the information, or don’t have the access [to these resources].”

For Muse, and many others, the potential end of Twitter would be a big loss, even as alternative sites like Discord or Mastodon have seen a recent influx in new users.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/23/1138605036/twitter-shutdown-elon-activism-trump-career

Shadow-Banned Twitter Files: The Bombshell Discovery of Left-Right Symbolism on Social Media Embeddings

“I think that uneasiness of not knowing is making it more difficult, especially for people who are disabled, elderly, who maybe don’t have social networks in person right now.”

Though Twitter has yet to fully collapse, people have already jumped to other social media platforms, leaving the Twitter town square a little less full than it once was.

It may be a small group of former employees, but they could soon be forced to pay millions of dollars in legal fees because of similar cases. The legal strategy of filing multiple arbitration suits is a way to get around the limits of a dispute resolution agreement, and will pile pressure on Twitter, says a California employment lawyer. “Just the arbitration fees alone could be massive,” he says.

“Nobody really expects to go into a workplace setting, especially a new job that you’re really excited about, thinking you’re going to end up suing your employer one day or your employer is going to treat you in a way that deserves legal action,” says Lee.

Musk has criticized the technique of “shadow-banning” and accused it of being used to suppress right-wing accounts. He has said the new Twitter will still downgrade the reach of negative or hateful messages but will be more transparent about it.

“Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal,” Musk tweeted on Thursday. He didn’t offer any additional information or a timetable.

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

Musk was able to promote the so-calledTwitter Files, a collection of internal documents he claims to expose a censorship scandal, but in fact revealed messy internal debates about prickly subjects more than anything else.

A Conversation with Musk about the Chase Center Scenario at the Chappelle Show: Nod to Fauci’s Twitter Threats, or Why we Shouldn’t Give Up on Trump

Weiss brought up several instances of moderation actions taken against right-leaning figures, but it’s not clear if those actions were taken against left-leaning or other accounts.

At Sunday’s Chappelle show, the contentious owner of the micro-messaging service took the stage and yelled: “I’m rich, b—h!” as people in attendance recorded the incident. Musk was loudly booed for several minutes.

The crowd at the Chase Center booed Musk, who had spent the weekend wading into the culture wars and making transphobic statements.

He said that Booing was not the best thing to do. “I wish everybody in this auditorium the joy of feeling free and may your pursuit of happiness set you free. Amen.

Musk on Monday appeared to nod to the incident in response to a user tweeting at him about “a crowd full of boos.” Musk claimed that it was mostly cheers, but there were some boos, which was a first for him in real life.

The remaining staff had to agree to a lot of hardcore work that left some people sleeping. San Francisco is investigating reports that Musk converted several areas of the office building into makeshift bedrooms.

This incident at the Chase Center capped off a weekend in which Musk, who has a history of erratic behavior and incendiary remarks, waded fully into the culture wars. Fauci should be prosecuted, Musk wrote, because his “pronunciations are Prosecute/Fauci.” Musk has been vocal of Fauci’s response to the Covid pandemic, including lockdowns that have affected his Tesla plants.

A person familiar with the matter said on Monday that the former head of trust and safety at Twitter had fled his home due to threats stemming from Musk’s campaign against him.

Thesuspension of then- President Donald Trump’s account was one of the sensitive issues that he worked on. Weiss posted a series of photos purporting to show internal accounts at the site where managers discussed whether to ban Trump from using it.

On the day of Election Day, he wrote, “I’m just saying we fly over those states that voted for a racist 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 he thought he had high integrity and we were all entitled to our political beliefs.

I used to work at a newsroom where I told my colleauges that we should not cover everything Trump said or said on his account. Previously, every word of a president was assumed to be a signal of future policies, and reported as such. Trump stated many things to get a rise out of people. Reporting on them, I argued, just fed the flames. An editor pushed back. He said he was the president and words to that effect. “What he says is news.”

This is how the coverage of Trump was done. The liberal-leaning media used stories to show the fact that a man who is clearly unqualified to be president would only be able to bring his country down in flames, while the right-wing media used him as an example of how poor he is. There was plenty of good reporting going on at the same time, but these polarizing accounts tended to dominate the conversation. The losers were the public, whose understanding of what was actually happening across the country was forced through incompatible narratives around the behavior of one unhinged man in the White House.

This is what’s happening with Musk and Twitter. The relationship between the new owner and the journalists who cover him is described in the Atlantic as a “dysfunctional relationship”, where less defensible statements and claims of all sides are constantly amplified.

For many conservatives and Musk fans, the existence of these internal discussions is itself a smoking gun. The fact that many mainstream outlets are steering clear of covering the Twitter Files without a large degree of skepticism is only fueling righteous indignation.

Renée DiResta, a research manager at the internet observatory, studies how narrative spread on social networks and said that people confronting high-stakes, unforeseen events are what is coming through in the Twitter Files for her.

They’re a collection of internal emails and Slack chats capturing Twitter employees discussing company policies and fraught moderation calls. They have covered the ban of Trump, the decision to block a news story in October 2020 and how the company limits the reach of accounts that break its rules.

But while the accounts were made publicly viewable on Saturday, the journalists were restricted from posting until they removed the tweets Musk had claimed violated Twitter’s rules.

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

According to the Post, the article was based on files from Hunter Biden’s laptop, which it got from Rudy Giuliani, and Steve Bannon, who were both working for Trump. It was not clear at the time if that material was authentic. Tech companies were concerned over the possibility of a repeat after the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee, which resulted in the release of thousands of emails.

The company is against sharing material with private information and warned anyone who tried to post the link to the article it was potentially harmful. The New York Post’s own account was suspended as well until it deleted its messages about the story. (Facebook was alarmed by the article, too, but didn’t go as far as Twitter. It allowed the link to be posted, but limited distribution of those posts while its outside fact-checkers reviewed the claims.)

The documents Musk released show how the trust and safety team made the decision to ban Trump after the insurrection on January 6, 2021, as a result of the recent file dump.

It didn’t show government involvement in blocking the New York Post story, despite assertions by Musk and others.

“I continue to believe there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time,” he wrote. “Mistakes were made.”

He said he wished the internal files had been “released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider.” He added: “There’s nothing to hide…only a lot to learn from.”

Melon Musk is using Twitter Files to “push conspiracies” and “discredit perpetrators”: A Viewpoint from the Trust and Safety Council

DiResta said there’s good reason to demand more insight into how social media companies operate. “Often these decisions are quite inscrutable,” she said. There is a question of how they are moderated and how they’re designed, which is an important aspect of these platforms.

But she said to get the full picture, outsiders need more than the “anecdotes” Musk’s journalists are sharing.

She said that to better comprehend the decision to ban Trump, it would be beneficial to see discussions around his accounts of other world leaders who were not kicked off the platform.

“There’s value in what’s been revealed to the public, but at the same time, it is primarily reinforcing a perception in large part based on your pre-existing opinions as partisan individuals within the United States,” DiResta said.

Mike, a research scientist at the Center for an informed public, said framing the disclosures as secret knowledge is a great idea on social media.

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

The attacks on my former colleagues don’t solve anything and could be dangerous. “If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.”

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

But with his drumbeat of Twitter Files releases and gleeful tweets dunking on the company’s former employees, Musk has successfully hijacked the conversation.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/14/1142666067/elon-musk-is-using-the-twitter-files-to-discredit-foes-and-push-conspiracy-theor

Twitter is Stepping Up Against Sweeney and the Jet-Tracking Account: Musk’s “Commitment” to “Free and Open” Twitter

“It’s being processed as the last regime, as opposed to the new regime, and it will be done differently under our watch,” DiResta said.

Journalists from a lot of outlets, including The New York Times and CNN, had their accounts suspended on Thursday after they were involved in a public disagreement over the use of private jets. The Musk account was suspended fromTwitter prior to the strike, but still exists on other platforms, which is a possible reason you can’t link to Mastodon, a dzimon alternative.

For Sweeney, it was the latest in a longtime tangle with the billionaire. The University of Central Florida student said Musk last year sent him a private message offering $5,000 to take the jet-tracking account down, citing security concerns. Musk later stopped communicating to Sweeney, who never deleted the account. Protocol first reported on their exchange earlier this year.

Sweeney said he setup @ElonJet initially because he was a Musk fan. It gives you another view that a lot of people do not know about, and that may give you clues into what new business is going on.

All of them were suspended, including Sweeney’s personal account. He operates accounts on social platforms that track Musk’s jet.

“You can still share your own live location on Twitter,” it said. Sharing someone else’s historical location information is not banned by this policy.

Musk claimed the journalists had violated his policy by leaking his location, which he described as “assassination coordinates.” CNN’s O’Sullivan did not share the billionaire’s live location.

In a January post pinned to the top of the jet-tracking account’s feed before it was suspended, Sweeney wrote that it “has every right to post jet whereabouts” because the data is public and “every aircraft in the world is required to have a transponder,” including Air Force One that transports the U.S. president.

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

Some other accounts tracking the jets of billionaires, including Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, have been suspended and remain so. Sweeney operates many of them, as noted within his Discord, and has seen about 30 of his accounts banned, he told The New York Times’ Ryan Mac.

He saw that the account was permanently suspended for breaking rules when he was a member of TWo. But the note didn’t explain how it broke the rules.

The Journalists Who Bounded The Mastodon Account and Their Social Media Accounts After Musk’s Decree: The Case for Sunday’s Whislash

In court Musk was questioned about how he splits his time between his companies. Musk had to testify in Delaware’s Court of Chancery over a shareholder’s challenge to Musk’s potentially $55 billion compensation plan as CEO of the electric car company.

It showed Musk flying to the east coast before his meeting with the president of France in New Orleans.

Over the weekend, The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz became the latest journalist to be banned. She claimed to have been suspended after she posted a message on TWo to ask for an interview.

Sharing someone’s home address or other personal information online is called doxxing. The account banned used publicly available flight data to track Musk’s jet.

In an environment where many people think free speech is under threat, it is too much for a majority of consumers to continue supporting Mr. Musk/TSLA.

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.”

But I’m not here to speculate on the true motives behind Sunday’s whiplash; I don’t think that’s helpful. The intent and the impact are separate things. Regardless of someone’s intention when they hit you in the face, they’ve still hit you in the face. Now you have to deal with the situation that they’ve created. So my thoughts instead turn—and I hope yours will also—to the people impacted by the weekend’s policy change. Those who use the social networking site to find and promote their work wondered on Sunday if the platform would allow them to continue, as they relied on it for income.

Several reporters were suspended Thursday night for writing about Musk’s rationale for imposing the new policy and his claims that a stalker affected his family in Los Angeles.

Journalists as well as a Mastodon account, a social media site which is seen as an alternative to tweet, were suspended on Thursday. Mastodon was among the sites the creator of the ElonJet account went following Musk’s crackdown.

The suspension of the journalists had been met with swift condemnation by news organizations, the American Civil Liberties Union, United Nations, Democratic members of Congress and others.

He wrote that he is unsure of why he was suspended. He said he did tweet on Wednesday a link to a Facebook page for the jet-tracking account.

A dangerous precedent of journalist suspension for personal animus, criticized by the Free Press, and repeated calls for reform of the Digital Services Act (and Musk’s warning)

“Suspension of journalists for seemingly personal animus is a dangerous precedent,” said Nancy Benavidez of the advocacy group Free Press.

“Freedom of the press cannot be switched on and off as you please,” Germany’s foreign ministry tweeted on Friday. “As of today these journalists are no longer able to follow us, to comment or criticize. We’ve got a problem with that.

The Digital Services Act requires respect of media freedom and fundamental rights. Musk should be aware of this because it’s reinforced under our #MediaFreedomAct, said Jourov.

Thierry Breton, a top EU official, warned Musk in late November that the social media platform must take significant steps to comply with the bloc’s content moderation laws.

Twitter is Doomed: Why Social Media Is On Fire is Toxic for Women and Girls – And How We Can Reclaim It

CNN said in a statement that it is unsure about its future on the platform. The suspension of a number of reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’ Sullivan is concerning but not surprising. “Twitter’s increasing instability and volatility should be of incredible concern for everyone who uses Twitter. We asked for an explanation from the social network and will reexamine our relationship based on that.

The Washington Post’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, said technology reporter Drew Harwell “was banished without warning, process or explanation” following the publication of accurate reporting about Musk.

While Weiss interpreted the reluctance to use such measures against other world leaders as evidence that Trump was treated particularly unfairly, the documents may also reveal the opposite: that the company consistently underestimated the danger its platform posed in contexts outside the US, and only acted forcefully against threats to American democracy. Trump’s ban would have extended to other leaders if it were implemented uniformly across the world.

“I think there are a lot of calculations that go into the trade-off about whether to take enforcement actions, and of course access to markets is one of them,” says Kian Vesteinsson, senior research analyst for tech and democracy at Freedom House, a nonprofit research and advocacy group focused on democracy and political freedoms.

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

A healthy town square should also be a place where people can find reliable information. Researchers found that before Musk came over, hate and misinformation were refuting an order of magnitude greater.

We can’t rely on Musk for a safe, open forum. We need new, non-profit social networks that are run by boards that consider the public’s interest when making critical decisions like moderation of content and community standards. Many people with these skills have just lost 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 professionals should combine their skills to create new platforms that will give us a truly open town hall.

The move from Musk came, after he posted a poll on his personal account that concluded Friday night, and the participants voted in favor of immediately restoring the accounts.

Several suspended journalists who were given permission to join due to a technical glitch, were also in attendance at the Musk Space hosted by Notopoulos. Musk told him that he was going to be suspended before leaving the call. It is the end of the story. The Spaces feature was turned off. Notopoulos received a message saying that she couldn’t participate or go live because she violated the rules when she tried to join a Space.

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, including MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and Gateway Pundit editor Jim Hoft, as noted by Shayan Sardarizadeh, a reporter for the BBC. Musk claims that this is a result of a survey, as he promised to give most previously-suspended accounts general amnesty.

The suspension happened without warning, process, or explanation as our reporter merely sought comment from Musk for a story. By midday Sunday, Lorenz’s account was restored, as was the tweet she thought had triggered her suspension.

Most of the accounts were back early Saturday. Business Insider’s Linette Lopez was suspended after the other journalists with no explanation, she told The AP.

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

The Dangerous Associated With Musk’s Twitter Suspensions: The Case Against Mashable, Binder and Binder

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.

Another suspended journalist, Matt Binder of the technology news outlet Mashable, said he was banned Thursday night immediately after sharing a screenshot that O’Sullivan had posted before his own suspension.

A statement from the LA Police Department was sent to multiple media outlets, including the AP, about contacting Musk’s representatives regarding the alleged stalking incident.

She says she oppose the new regime atTwitter because it looks like it has the same problem as the old one.

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 ceased its activity on the platform in November due to uncertainty, but most media organizations have remained on it.

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

The suspensions may be the biggest red flag yet for advertisers, Paskalis said, some of which had already cut their spending on Twitter over uncertainty about the direction Musk is taking the platform.

Elon Musk isn’t the CEO of TWITTER: An Outburst Aftermath from Musk’s Twitter Soap Opera

It is not possible for Mastodon’s user numbers to continue to go viral. The cycle of media and attention on social media stops after a while, but behind it leaves organic growth which we had before November.

Harwell wrote in his appeal that it was journalism, a copy of which was provided to CNN. Harwell didn’t include a link to anyone’s private information.

Rupar told CNN that he had ultimately decided to simply remove the tweet and move on from the episode, though he described the whole affair as “kinda [sic] absurd obviously.”

Elon Musk tweeted a poll Sunday evening asking people to vote on whether he should step down as Twitter’s CEO. Musk said he would follow the results of the poll.

After a MIT artificial intelligence researcher said on Sunday that he would take the CEO job, Musk indicated he hasn’t been completely happy with his new job.

His ban on links put his site at odds with The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz, and it ended with an apology and a promise.

All Musk needs from his captive audience is a promise of votes in the future on major policy changes.

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.

“This has been a black eye moment for Musk and been a major overhang on Tesla’s stock which continues to suffer in a brutal way since the Twitter soap opera began with brand deterioration related to Musk a real issue,” Ives said in a note to clients Monday.

More than 17 million votes were cast in his informal referendum on his chaotic leadership of TWITTER, which included mass layoffs, the replatforming of suspended accounts, the suspension of journalists who cover him, and whiplash policy changes made and reversed in real time.

The decision to change the policy was criticized so much, Musk promised not to make any more changes without an online survey.

Last week, Musk shut down his private jet’s account on the social network to prevent him from talking about it.

Mainstream websites such as Facebook and Instagram, and upstart rivals Mastodon, Tribel, Nostr, Post and former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social were banned. There was no explanation for why those seven websites were included on the blacklist.

Others who were in favor of Musk’s bid appeared to be upset about it. Venture capitalist Paul Graham wrote of the policy, “This is the last straw. I give up.”

Musk said that a new CEO must like pain a lot and that his company had been in the fast lane to Chapter 11.

Senator Elizabeth Warren is raising concerns about conflicts of interest and potential legal violations for Tesla following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.

Warren asked the board to respond to questions about its handling of the situation by January 3, citing that the board has legal obligations.

Elon Musk’s management of Twitter, including the banning of multiple journalists, has “severely damaged” market sentiment around Tesla, and risks sparking a backlash from advertisers and consumers, a Wall Street analyst warned on Monday.

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

Jason Calacanis: CEO of Twitter, founder and CEO of Yammer, Craft Ventures, and a Twitter user asks: “Chess?”

The most obvious potential candidates for a new Twitter CEO are the Musk lieutenants who have been helping to run the company since his takeover. The short list likely includes investor Jason Calacanis, Craft Ventures partner David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan, an Andreessen Horowitz general partner focused on crypto and Twitter’s former consumer teams lead.

Calacanis, who emerged in the tech world as a reporter during the dot com boom, is an early-stage investor who has backed well-known companies such as Uber and Robinhood. He has also launched several media properties and hosts two podcasts (one in partnership with Sacks).

Calacanis was asking, “who would enjoy the most miserable job in tech and media?” Who is crazy enough to run a social networking site? Calacanis also ran his own Twitter poll asking followers whether he or Sacks should run the company, separately or together, or whether someone else should take over. The majority of respondents voted for “other.”

Sacks, who along with Musk was among the original founding team at PayPal, has at least some 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 particularly bold in conforming to Musks’ talking points, whether it is justifying a fight with Apple or trying to stir up outrage about a public 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.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/19/tech/twitter-alternate-ceo/index.html

On the Elephant in the Room: Musk’s Late-Weekly Posterous Tweet During the LEP1 Supercontest with Jared Kushner

Krishnan is likely the most obvious choice of the group. He has experience working with teams responsible for features of the platform such as search and home, having previously helped manage them. He also previously worked on mobile ad products for Snap and Facebook.

He has invested in several tHe companies that are working on building payment capabilities for tweeting, which could help him fulfill Musk’s goal.

Krishnan is one of the least controversial people on Musk’s leadership team, which could help mitigate 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.

One of the largest shareholders in the company is the Saudi Royal Family. Before working in the White House, according to reports, he previously worked for his family’s real estate company, and last year he said he would leave politics and start an investment firm. The New York Observer was previously owned by Kushner.

Given Musk’s propensity for tweeting, and his rapid decisions after previous polls, many expected he would have addressed the elephant in the room by now. But he has not. In fact, Musk spent most of Monday conspicuously quiet, refraining from tweeting for a remarkable 18-hour period.

The Evil-Billionaire Attack: A New Analog of Self-Defense in the Age of Crowdsourcing, and in the 21st Century

A kind of vulnerability in the field of information security is known as the evil maid attack, where a party can gain physical access to important hardware such as a laptop if it is left unattended. We have here a new analog, just as capable of wrecking systems and leaking data. If you want, call it the evil billionaire attack. The weapon is money, and more specifically, the likelihood that when the moment arrives you won’t have enough of it to make a difference. The call comes from inside the house.

Most of the ideas of any consequence are owned by people with more money than you, and so whenever possible they tie them into a network with specific intent of making the gravity inescapable. Founders and investors and excitable technology writers like myself frequently use the term “platform” to describe technical systems with granular components that can be used to compose new functionality, and the power sources propelling the technology industry find platforms particularly appealing when the bits can be monetized each time they are used.

Consider the case of WordPress, the first blogging platform that later became a general-purpose content management software. It now powers about 40 percent of the open web, with which it is loosely synonymous. A huge economy has sprung up around it: companies that develop websites, developers who work for those companies, indie developers who work for themselves, many of them writing plugins which can be unlocked or extended with licensing fees. This is all possible because the core is open source and encourages the same of its ecosystem. It is logical to argue that it is a bit long in the tooth given how long it has been around. But we must now understand it to be a bigger technical success than Twitter, simply because it is not at risk.

Blockchains fight this problem on the deepest level possible. It would be difficult for Musk to kill off a network if a few users refused to use it. Duplicating across many computers means the risk of losing access is infinitesimal; the blockchain is its own API. Losing information simply due to a hostile party is not one of them. A new version of the Hic et Nunc marketplace was launched when the previous version went out of business. It is almost like organic self-defense when the shared resource acts as a shared resource.

Free Press agrees with Musk that he should step aside. But his replacement as CEO needs to be someone who understands at the most basic level that this social media platform will succeed only when it puts the health and safety of its users before the whims of one erratic and reckless billionaire.

Elon Musk’s Twitter: What the Hell Happened Last Weekend? A Comment on Musk and Other Concerns about Covid-19 and Twitter Blue

His amnesty to previously suspended accounts has given us the return of neo-Nazis like Andrew Anglin, right-wing activists like Laura Loomer and other figures who have spread hate to millions of followers.

With regard to reversals, Twitter’s potential new leadership needs to undo its decision to allow Covid-19 misinformation and disinformation to spread unchecked across the social network. They need to retire Twitter’s pay-to-play blue checkmark feature, which allows verified users to post longer videos and have their content prioritized at the top of replies, mentions and searches. They must stop Musk’s plan to allow suspended accounts to reopen.

When a majority of users said they would like to have Donald Trump’s account back, Musk followed through. He pronounced it with a Latin phrase which means the voice of the people is the voice of God.

He did it when his followers voted to provide general amnesty to suspended accounts. He listened to user votes to restore the accounts of tech journalists that he had suspended on Friday.

While it’s unclear how he would restrict voting to only those who pay for the company’s subscription service, such a change could dramatically reduce the number of Twitter users who could vote in polls. It would also skew those who can vote to the users who are willing to pay up for Twitter Blue, which includes the controversial paid verification feature Musk pushed to introduce. Musk’s Monday tweet immediately prompted comparisons to poll taxes.

Over a matter of days, Twitter launched, and then was forced to un-launch, a paid verification feature that was instantly manipulated by satirical accounts impersonating verified major brands, athletes and other public figures on the platform.

A new policy announced on Sunday took many users by surprise, as they were told that links to other social media sites would not be allowed.

WIRED has written frequently of late about Elon Musk’s Twitter, so forgive me for coming back to it—but for those of us as terminally online as I am, let me just ask: What the hell happened last weekend?

I know a lot of creatives, journalists and tech workers, and I am fortunate to do so. When I woke up on Sunday to the news, it was delivered to me by tweets from artists terrified they’d be banned from Twitter for linking to their own portfolios and to platforms where they accept commissions for their artwork. I have read horror stories of authors who were afraid to promote their books after their publishers asked them to create profiles on social media that would be banned.

When we at WIRED talk about “platforms and power,” this is what we’re talking about. Of course, any steward of any platform, whether it’s a CEO, founder, or middle manager, has the unenviable job of setting and enforcing the policies and guidelines for that platform’s safe and legal use. That is not in question. Without such rules, online spaces can go bad fast. When those platforms choose to harm their users with policy decision and when those changes are large enough to force users to adapt or abandon ship, is that an issue?

My friends on Twitch interrupted their streams to discuss the news, worried that they wouldn’t be able to tweet to announce they were starting a new stream, or add a link to their Twitter bio to help viewers find them. I believe that the people who made these policy decisions lost more income than the people who need it. After all, these same creators have the kind of disruptive, entrepreneurial spirit that everyone in Silicon Valley claims to want to foster and empower.

Elon Musk’s Twitter needs every penny. With millions of dollars in allegedly unpaid rent and bills, plus $13 billion owed to lenders who financed his takeover, there is “still much work to do” if the company is to avoid bankruptcy, Musk said last month.

New versions of the model can be purchased for twice as much as the refurbished ones. Frohnhoefer is not in a hurry to return the machine and doesn’t feel indebted to Musk. “I’m happy letting it sit there and be a brick,” he says. Two ex-Tweeps are worried that Musk’s expensive paperweights might be used to delay their compensation or even cause legal problems down the line because they are still owed their former jobs. One of those sources said that brave souls discussed trying to break their laptop lock code on ex-employee chat groups.

Badges, credit cards, corporate credit cards, and cell phones can be returned, according to a survey seen by WIRED. According to the form monitors, keyboards, mice, display cables, and stands do not have to be collected. There is not a clear idea of what ex-workers should be doing with their laptops.

Some of them said they sent back their gear after contacting the company for pre-paid boxes. People say that others received generic emails during the past few days asking them to fill out a survey. Four out of five people who talked with WIRED have not yet received the email, and are babysitting Musk’s property.

The survey asks for an address where a shipping box for returnable items can be sent, but it also provides options to drop equipment at some Twitter offices.

After about three hours, the unsigned response came back saying that a box and further instructions would be received within 30 days of submission. One laid-off worker says they’re not rushing to fill it out. Elon is able to wait.

The CEO of Twitter Fires Engineers: Declining Reach Concerns about Musk’s Twitter Engagement and the Company’s First Major Outage

An even more obvious reason for the decline in engagement is Twitter’s increasingly glitchy product, which has baffled users with its disappearing mentions, shifting algorithmic priorities, and tweets inserted seemingly at random from accounts they don’t follow. On Wednesday, the company suffered one of its first major outages since Musk took over, with users being told, inexplicably, “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.”

Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting say he said that it was ridiculous. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

Twitter sources say the view count feature itself may be contributing to the decline in engagement and, therefore, views. The buttons were made smaller to make them harder to use.

Over ninety percent of users read, but don’t reply or like, as those are public actions, so this is a good example of how much more alive it is.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-twitter-fires-engineer-declining-reach-ftc-concerns

When does the employee talk about work? A case study on dumpster fires engineer declining reach ftc-concerns

One employee said that they haven’t seen much long term cogent strategy. We devote most of our time to putting out fires, performing impossible tasks and improving efficiency without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. We mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective.”

There are times when he says things that don’t make sense even though he is awake at night. “And then he’ll come to us and be like, ‘this one person says they can’t do this one thing on the platform,’ and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make any sense.”

The San Francisco headquarters has a bad air, since it is being sued for not paying rent. The standard greeting when people walk through the halls is, “Where are you interviewing?” and “Where do you have offers?” The eighth floor is still stocked with beds, and employees have to reserve them in advance.

People don’t talk about work anymore, according to an employee. “It’s just heartbreaking. I have more conversations with my colleagues on Signal and WhatsApp than I do on Slack. In the past, it was not uncommon for people on the team channel to talk about what transpired over the weekend. There is nothing left of that.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-twitter-fires-engineer-declining-reach-ftc-concerns

Fire from the Hip: What are the best fireable answers in Twitter? An employee’s frustration at a company where people can’t know what to do

“When you’re asked a question, you run it through your head and say ‘what is the least fireable response I can have to this right now?’” one employee explained.

That is not the case for everyone at the company. An employee said there were a few true believers who were trying to take advantage of the clear vacuum that existed.

The employee cited the disastrous relaunch of Twitter Blue, which resulted in brands being impersonated and dozens of top advertisers fleeing the platform.

“If Elon can learn how to put a bit more thought into some of the decisions, and fire from the hip a bit less, it might do some good,” the employee said. He needs to let people that know what he doesn’t know take over and learn the areas he does not know.

At the same time, “he really doesn’t like to believe that there is anything in technology that he doesn’t know, and that’s frustrating,” the employee said. “You can’t be the smartest person in the room about everything, all the time.”

Fear of not being able to find something else is the main factor for most people, an employee said. “I know that most of my team is doing hardcore interview prep, and would jump at any chance to walk away.”

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-twitter-fires-engineer-declining-reach-ftc-concerns

The Fate of Twitter: What Do Former Twitter Executives Think? An Analysis of the FTC Hearing on Antisemitism and Hate

There is also a sense of unease about how recent changes will be reviewed by regulators. As part of an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, twitter committed to following a number of steps before pushing out changes.

“What happened on Twitter directly after the hearing proves my exact point that antisemitism is real and Twitter has become a hate-filled playground for Nazis and anti-Semites,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz told CNN about the hateful comments he received.

Moskowitz and many other Democrats on the subpanel used their allotted time to grill the former Twitter executives testifying at the hearing about the company’s policies for policing hate on the platform. Moskowitz criticized Trump for hosting white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago. He told the room, “No, not all Republicans are Nazis, but I gotta tell you, Nazis seem really comfortable with Donald Trump.” I have some questions about that.

The warning from the Department of Homeland Security that domestic terror threats to the Jewish community had been issued as evidence of Moskowitz’s heightened concern. “DHS notes that threat actors have recently mobilized to violence, and there is an ‘enduring threat’ to the Jewish community,” he writes.

The findings show that serious issues will continue to persist on the platform, as it pertains to effective content moderation and the proliferation of antisemitism.

After Sarah Oh lost her job as a human rights advisor at Twitter late last year in the first round of layoffs following Elon Musk’s chaotic acquisition of the company, she decided to join a friend in building a rival service.

T2 was launched with Gabor Cselle, who was previously at the two companies. The social feed of posts has 280-character limits. But the key selling point, according to Oh, is its focus on safety.

“We really do want to create an experience that allows people to share what they want to share without fearing risk of things like abuse and harassment, and we feel like we’re really well positioned to deliver on that,” Oh told CNN.

Where are the Best Twitter Alternatives? View from the Perspective of Artifact, an Alternative News Feed Based on Artificial Intelligence Powered by Musk

The list of newer entrants in the markets includes apps created by former Twitter employees, a startup backed by one of Musk’s Twitter investors, and a service from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. While some apps like T2 strongly resemble Twitter, others take a different approach.

Last month, for example, the founders of Instagram announced Artifact, “a personalized news feed” powered by artificial intelligence, a description that quickly earned it comparisons to Twitter. In CNN’s recent test of the app, however, it resembled news reader applications like Apple News or the defunct Google Reader. Artifact displayed popular pieces from large media organizations in a main feed tailored to users’ activity and interests.

It is thought that all of the apps are vying for the chance to give users a news feed that isn’t mundane, at least for a while.

“People who are moving over from Twitter, either partially or fully, is that it is just for them a nicer experience overall,” said the co-founding member of Anti Software Software club. The service launched publicly in June of last year. The platform had 80,000 new users within 48 hours after Musk completed the takeover.

When people refer to us as a Twitter alternative, they’re referring to us in a different way.

Where would people go if they left? Karen North, a clinical professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, said that there isn’t a platform that is prepared to take over the function ofTwitter. No platform has a worldwide user base that represents people from all walks of life.

These systems were once routinely monitored, with mistakes regularly addressed by staff. The team that countered influence operations, which had about a third of its workforce in Asia, has been cut to only six people in recent layoffs and departures. The head of the division for the Asia-Pacific region has been laid off. The people said that the resources dedicated to moderation have been reduced.

Some accounts of Chinese dissidents and activists were difficult to find, because there was a failed to distinguish between a Chinese fake account and a real one, the people said.

Since Mr. Musk took the helm of the platform, it has been hard to be a user, according to the account@bestofdyingtwit. She said that she has difficulty seeing the messages she sends on her social media accounts and that they are becoming cluttered with so much garbage.

Non-English language moderation has been a particular challenge for American social media companies, which often do not have enough staff in those areas and rely on imperfect machine translations, said Gabriel Nicholas, a research fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology who studies content moderation and disinformation on social media.

Why the Twitter boycott of China is so big that Chinese researchers are worried about what the Musk regime is about, and why he’s doing it

Twitter has long been banned in China. In recent years it has been a gathering place for dissidents in China, as well as for human rights activists and overseas Chinese groups who seek to discuss topics that are not accessible on the mainland.

A group of former employees say that fear of the Musk regime prompted researchers to put out a flurry of studies much sooner than planned. The results spanned topics including misinformation and recommendation algorithms. The published papers, and the frantic push have not been reported before.

“We were rightfully worried about what this leadership change would entail,” says Rumman Chowdhury, who was then engineering director on Twitter’s Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability group, known as META. There’s a lot of ideology and misunderstanding about the kind of work ethics teams do as being part of a woke liberal agenda, versus actually being scientific work.

A researcher out of fear of retaliation from Musk said that the team on the study worked all night to make final edits before hitting publish on arxiv. The runway would close down when the jumbo jet landed, the source says. We knew we had to do this before the acquisition closed. We can stick a flag in the ground and say it exists.”

The fear wasn’t unwarranted. Under Musk, most of the researchers resigned or lost their jobs. Only one person was left on the META team, Luca Belli, who quit later in the month.

“He is manipulating the platform to force engagement centered around him and his content,” says Katja Muñoz, research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations. While Musk’s use of algorithmic heating appears to be driven by insecurity, the fact that he can do it is alarming. Muoz says thatSingular acts are funny. “But I think it’s important to take a step back and look at the implications of his commitments or actions.”

“Censoring content on the Modi documentary speaks for my assumption of [his reliance on] foreign investment and his dependence on raw materials,” says Muñoz. “It is highly unlikely that we will ever get hard evidence on whom Musk talks to or whether he is asked to do something, but looking at the visibility and engagement on, or lack of, topics might hint at these dynamics.”

Twitter Outage How Musk Happed Engineer Engineer API Shut-Down: What Happened to Musk’s Tweets on February 1st?

On Monday morning, Twitter users logged on to find a thicket of connected issues. Clicking on links would no longer open them, as users would get an error message saying their current plan doesn’t include access to this endpoint. Images stopped loading as well. Some people reported that they could not use the client for professional users.

There are only service disruptions. In addition, issues such as the one that caused Musk’s Tweets to be seen more by other users on their timelines, has upset the user base.

Platformer can now confirm that it was part of a project to shut down free access to the TwitterAPI. It was announced on February 1st that the company would no longer give away free access to its platform, which ended the existence of third-party clients and severely limited the ability of researchers to study the network. The company has been building a new paid API for developers to work with.

Musk said there was a big impact after an investor posted a screen shot showing the company’s failures on the site. The code stack is very brittle. Will need a complete rewrite.

Some current employees are sympathetic to that view, which places at least part of the blame for Twitter’s problems on technical failures that predate Musk’s ownership of the company. The fail whale became an icon of oldtwitter because of it.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/6/23627875/twitter-outage-how-it-happened-engineer-api-shut-down

Elon Musk: What have we learnt from an engineer’s experience with a major software company? An employee’s frustrations about the timing and compensation of her new job

This paved the way for a single engineer to be staffed on a major project which is linked to several critical systems that both users and employees depend on.

But in November, shortly after Musk completed his acquisition and weeks before she was set to start her five-month maternity leave, Ali was laid off as part of the first round of mass job cuts under the new owner.

On January 4, the separation date from social media, it was decided that Ali would have to go without health insurance for her family. Her baby was born a week after. She has yet to start searching for a new job, as she spends time with her newborn.

“We were on the Twitter-coaster, the Elon Musk chapter, for seven months. He was out during that time, and it wasn’t happening.

The man who was laid off seven months after joining the company was a former senior audio video engineer. “I made a decent wage in San Francisco, but if I don’t find another job, I will have to move out of my apartment because I was paid just enough to live in San Francisco … but I wasn’t one of the people that could sock away a bunch of money.”

On the day news broke that Musk had agreed to buy the company, she was in the first day of orientation for her new job. “It was very welcoming,” Armstrong said of the company. I hadn’t had that before at any other place working in tech.

She said she had considered looking for another job but that he said that she had nothing to worry about, because she was a significant contributor. and it kind of changed my mind.”

“The market is hot garbage right now. I was sitting down earlier this week after a wave of rejections and I was kind of like, maybe I should go be a firefighter or something… because the tech jobs are just not happening.”

A few former employees said the company had encouraged them to stay at the company, only to regret that as the tech industry entered its most severe downturn in recent memory later in the year.

Several former employees are claiming that the company promised to give them the equivalent of what was offered prior to Musk’s takeover, in addition to two- months base pay.

De Caires said that they lost part of their compensation due to the fact that only half of their compensation was composed of equity. They and other workers are seeking to recover their loses through their claims in the arbitration process.

What Have You Be Doing lately? A Twitter Viewpoint on Musk’s Work-Phenomenology Twitter Following his 20 Years in a Wheelchair

Musk responded in a tweet asking, “what work have you been doing?” When Thorleifsson provided a list of his tasks in response, Musk appeared to cast doubt on several points. He did not say if it happened or if it was pictures. The billionaire said that he did no actual work, as an excuse that he had a disability that stopped him from typing.

Thorleifsson clarified in a tweet that he has muscular dystrophy, a degenerative disease that he says put him in a wheelchair more than 20 years ago. A charitable effort to build 1,000 wheelchair ramps around the capital city of Iceland, which was spearheaded by Thorleifsson, was recognized by the United Nations and the president of the country.

“I’m not able to do manual work (which in this case means typing or using a mouse) for extended periods of time without my hands starting to cramp,” he said. “I can however write for an hour or two at a time. This wasn’t a problem in Twitter 1.0 since I was a senior director and my job was mostly to help teams move forward, give them strategic and tactical advice.”

Thorleifsson did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment. Twitter, which has cut much of its public relations department, also did not respond.

It happens all the time. They usually tell people about it, but it is now an optional part of social media. “Next up though is finding out if Twitter will pay me what they owe me per my contract.”