Trump’s Twitter Story: Why Twitter should stop the Donald Trump hat and sail into the sunset? The Musk-Twiss Case

According to Musk, the company’s efforts to promote what it calls healthy conversations are too restrictive, due to the company’s rules aimed at curbing harassment, hate speech, extremism, and misinformation.

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

But relations between the pair seem to have soured since, with the men publicly trading barbs over the summer. In July, Musk responded to Trump’s comments at the rally by saying, “It’s time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset.”

Musk first attempted to terminate the deal in July, alleging that Twitter violated their mutual purchase agreement by misrepresenting the number of spam and fake bot accounts on its 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.

Robert Miller, chair of corporate finance and law at the University of Iowa College of Law, said Musk was always going to face an uphill climb if he were to escape the agreement he had signed. For this argument to have worked, he says, the company would have to have committed “a gigantic, like Enron type of fraud,” for which no evidence has surfaced.

Musk said in May that the acquisition was on hold because the company downplayed the number of fake accounts on the platform. In an August legal filing, Musk accused Twitter of fraud, claiming that there were more bots on the platform than the company had disclosed. Musk filed his own lawsuit after Peiter “Mudge” Zatko testified in front of the US Senate that at least ten years had passed since industry security standards were put in place.

The material that came to light ahead of the trial due to start on October 17 in Delaware’s Chancery Court did not lend much support to that argument. There is nothing fraudulent here, despite the fact that he knows that his best claim is fraud. They have run out of cards to play.

Musk was scheduled to be deposed on October 6th and 7th, after having moved his deposition from late September. He said he was going to honor the contract his lawyers had negotiated just days before the deposition. That deposition was probably going to be uncomfortable; a judge found that Musk likely deleted Signal messages that were relevant to the case. Musk received a court order stopping the deposition from taking place, which was crucial to allow the deal to close.

Any company, Twitter included, is a function of its people. And the people who have always been drawn to Twitter are kind of strange in the best way possible. It’s not something you really know until you work at the company. All of the people are going to leave. Those are not the people who are going to stay. So all of that is gone.

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

For years, so many people around the world have relied on Twitter to function as a town square — a space for people to debate issues openly. Only 23% of Americans are on the micro-blogging platform and it’s the top 25% who produce the most replies, according to the research center. Users of the social media platform have an outsized influence on the public debate, because the conversations that happen on the platform seem to heavily influence what reporters and others talk about offline.

Twitter faces challenges to its free speech stance in court, as the Supreme Court agreed to take up two cases that will determine its liability for illegal content.

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.

He said that people gravitate to those sites, because they are able to say and do the things that are banned on more mainstream social media platforms. And what we see there is that they are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.”

“Would be great to unwind permanent bans, except for spam accounts and those that explicitly advocate violence,” he texted Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal shortly after agreeing to join the company’s board (a decision he soon backtracked).

That could mean lifting bans on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was kicked off for abusive behavior in 2018; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., whose account was suspended in January for tweeting misleading and false claims about COVID-19 vaccines; and 2020 election deniers like Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell, who were all banned in early 2021.

The person suggested that Musk hire someone who had a “politically correct” attitude to lead enforcement. Masters is the Republican senator candidate in Arizona who has backed the false claims regarding the 2020 election that he made.

Twitter Cannot Work Together: Twitter’s Bounds on Trump and Other Social Media Returns After the Agrawal-Momentum Deal

If Facebook were to allow Trump or others to return, it would be the first time that other networks would allow someone to return while their ban on them remains in place.

After a video meeting a few weeks later with Agrawal and Musk, Dorsey tersely summed up the situation in a text to Musk: “At least it became clear that you can’t work together. That was clarifying.

The deal was originally valued at $44 billion, but no one would say if it closed or if it had been signed. They said that Musk is in charge of the social media platform and has fired several people. The deal’s sensitive nature made neither person want to be identified.

That is likely welcome news to the billionaire, who has complained that Twitter’s costs outstrip revenues and has implied the company is overstaffed for its size.

Musk said that he wants to get rid ofadvertising for revenue, but he is not there yet. A lot of people can not buy the company’s premium Blue subscription service due to the temporary suspension of that program. Musk has said that Twitter is burning through around $4 million a day, and he’s also saddled it with hefty interest payments on the debt he used to purchase it in the first place. Advertisers are hesitant to give money to the site in order to keep it going.

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

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

The case of Zatko, the CEO of a Silicon Valley based social media company: The case against Musk and the FTC

What exactly he meant is, as always, anyone’s guess. This summer, Musk told the staff that his company should integrate social media, payments, shopping, ride-Hailing and other things into its services.

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.

The social media platform said in a court filing that federal authorities are looking into the acquisition by Musk.

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 FTC declined to comment on whether Twitter has submitted any compliance notices since Musk took over the company. A request was not immediately responded to by the social networking company who laid off a lot of its public relations team.

Zatko did not have to torch his own documents, according to the filing. “Twitter had no knowledge of Zatko’s notebooks and no idea what information they contained.”

Is Social Media a Platform for Conservative Thought? The Case of Kanye West, Parler, TWTR, and Truth Social

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 written in this commentary are of her own. CNN has more opinion on it.

The conservative social media company Parler announced on Monday that it is being purchased by Kanye West, who was temporarily suspended from Twitter this month for an antisemitic tweet. A statement from Parler’s parent company announcing the deal described West, who has legally changed his name to Ye, as having taken “a groundbreaking move into the free speech media space” where “he will never have to fear being removed from social media again.”

In a release by Parler, West said that “in a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves.”

If West and Musk go through with their deals, these three social media platforms are likely to serve as ecosystems for conservative thought. This will likely make the views of those who remain on them more extreme — which could have a radical effect on our politics. When people think similarly, they affirm and heighten one. another’s initial beliefs.

Musk wrote a letter to TWTR that said he didn’t want the platform to become a “free-for-all-hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences.”

When women become victims of online hate, they often “shut down their blogs, avoid websites they formerly frequented, take down social networking profiles, (and) refrain from engaging in online political commentary,” according to University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks.

In practice, what these so-called free speech policies really boil down to is an ugly form of censorship that scares away the voices of people who are attacked by users of these platforms.

Parler has been described as a place where conservatives can thrive, and Truth Social is unlikely to attract nonconservatives given it’s association with Trump. If women, people of color, and others leave it as a platform for conservatives, that could leave it as a platform for conservatives as well. Those who remain more adamant are likely to use this as an excuse.

On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, and What Can Be Done? Musk and SpaceX Revisited

“When like-minded people get together, they often end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk to one another,” Harvard University law professor Cass Sunstein writes in “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, and What Can Be Done.” Sunstein says this happens because their exchanges heighten their preexisting beliefs and make them more confident.

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.”

Even though they are sexist, misogynistic, racist or otherwise objectionable, we can expect these male owners to amplify their own views on their platforms.

He said in the post that the platform must be hospitable and welcoming to all, where one can choose their experience according to their preferences. We should build something extraordinary together, because we have the ability to strengthen your brand and grow your enterprise.

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

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.”

His remarks came after CNBC reported Sunday that Musk had ordered “one of the larger advertising packages available from Twitter” for SpaceX, citing unnamed sources who had viewed internal documents related to the matter. SpaceX did not respond to CNN Business request for comment.

It is a stunning reversal of fortunes, not only for Musk, who purchased the company for $44 billion but also for the platform used by some of the most powerful people on the planet.

The fake accounts that are often the most active in the replies to Musk’s tweets are promised to be defeated or else die trying.

Elon Musk’s Twitter: After six months it’s all over and he is the rich guy who owns it (with an email address in Russian)

The departures come just hours before a deadline set by a Delaware judge to finalize the deal on Friday. If no agreement was reached, she was going to schedule a trial.

The council had been scheduled to meet with Twitter representatives Monday night. But Twitter informed the group via email that it was disbanding it shortly before the meeting was to take place, according to multiple members.

Parag Argawal, who Musk soured on after they initially started talking about Musk joining the board, wasn’t there recently. An anonymous employee who works for the company said that he has been absent for weeks. One person said that he has ghosted them. The screenshot from The Verge shows that a section of Blind, an anonymous message board for tech workers, is also full of the same comments about Argawal.

Insider reports that the execs received handsome payouts for their trouble, including Agrawal with $37 million, Segal with $25.4 million, Gadde with $12.5 million, and Personette with $11.2 million.

After six months of wrangling, it’s all over: Elon Musk owns Twitter. How did that happen? Read on — we’ll lay out every step of how it happened and how the billionaire is now in control of Twitter, with several former execs abruptly escorted out of the building and Twitter employees awaiting the first updates from their new “Chief Twit.”

Musk’s Twitter Hides: The Secret Life of a Silicon Valley CEO and the Loss of Free Speech, Public Policy, and Safety

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.

About the same time, he used Twitter to criticize Gadde, the company’s top lawyer. His tweets were followed by a wave of harassment of Gadde from other Twitter accounts. For Gadde, an 11-year Twitter employee who also heads public policy and safety, the harassment included racist and misogynistic attacks, in addition to calls for Musk to fire her. After she was let go on Thursday, the harassment flared up again.

The note is a shift from Musk’s position that Twitter is unfairly infringing on free speech rights by blocking misinformation or graphic content, said Pinar Yildirim, associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

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 do not want a place where consumers just simply are bombarded with things they do not want to hear about, and the platform takes no responsibility,” Yildirim said.

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!”

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

Musk’s enthusiasm about coming to the building this week was very different to the idea that the building should be turned into a homeless shelter because so few employees actually worked there.

The Blue Check Mob: Why GroupM and Twitter Blue are the best places to monetize free speech and hacking, and why Elon is the best

GroupM, the world’s biggest ad company, is telling its clients that buying ads on the platform is “high-risk,” and it may be in trouble for generating advertising revenue. It’s the third advertising company to warn big companies that they might want to take their money out of the country if they continue to use the platform.

With that announcement, Musk, who has said he now votes Republican, prompted an outcry from some conservatives, who accused him of continuing a practice they opposed. The clash reflects the tension at the social network caused by Musk’s promise of a maximalist approach to free speech while also trying to assure advertisers and users that there will still be content moderation guardrails.

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

But the rollout of Musk’s first signature project, a new version of the Twitter Blue subscription that will allow anyone to get a verification badge, has been a disaster.

Yeah. I mean, look, I have to say, I have long been in favor of letting anyone who wants to verify themselves part of this plan. People must pay to keep their badges. It’s also that if you pay, you could get a badge.

I think that there is an idea of the blue checks in the world of Elon, and that there is a lot of right-wing sort of circles. Many people on Fox News and other conservative media outlets talk about this kind of blue check mob of people, mostly journalists, who are very self- important and care a lot about their checkmarks.

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.”

Why did Nick Caldwell and Jay Sullivan leave Twitter? On the future of Twitter, and why they should rethink their relationship with social media

Nick Caldwell, general manager of core technology, has changed his Twitter bio to “former Twitter Exec,” and Jay Sullivan, general manager of consumer and revenue products, removed the company and his title from his Twitter bio. The New York Times also reported Tuesday that Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Berland had left the company; on Tuesday night she tweeted a single blue heart.

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.

Calacanis earlier this week tweeted that he was in New York on behalf of Twitter meeting with “the marketing and advertising community.” He has also tweeted questions to Twitter users about the platform’s subscription and bookmark features.

“Bottom line is that you have a decision to make,” Cuban added. The onus is on users to create their own curation of their own feeds on the new, pay-as- you-go,Twitter platform. Or return to the old way of posting on social networking websites like Twitter. One makes Twitter time and information efficient. The other is terrible.

We speak with a power reporter from WIRED about the changes coming to the social network and how they might affect it.

Tori wants you to encourage your male-presenting friends interested in fathering children to watch House of the Dragon on HBO. The new album from Natalia Lafourcade, De Todas las Flores is recommended by Mike. Lauren says that you should rethink your relationship with social media.

What’s happening at Silicon Valley, a talk show about robot podcasting on Twitter (Telliotter, Lauren Goode, Snackfight)

Vittoria Elliott can be found on Twitter @telliotter. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by a man. Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:

If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Podcasts app just by tapping here. We’re on Spotify too. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.

The transcript was created with speech recognition software. Human reviewers may contain errors while they review it. Please email [email protected] with questions if you need to quote from the episode audio.

On this podcast, we try to bring people news from other parts of the tech industry and give a sense of what is happening in Silicon Valley. But right now, the only story that anyone in tech cares about is what’s happening just down the street from us in San Francisco, at Twitter.

We are going to talk to them and have a normal interview. Instead of playing their voice, we are going to take what they Say and make a transcript. We will give the words back into the generator and then we will play you a version of their voice.

These voices are not going to sound like they are just a bunch of human beings. It is going to be a little weird and robotic. But just remember, as you listen, that these words were spoken by actual human Twitter employees, and that this is really the only way to get them on the record and get a real picture of what’s happening inside Twitter right now.

I like that when we started this show, we said we would never put on AI voices unless we had a really good reason and a really limited capacity. And now, twice in five episodes —

You were wrong to think that this wasn’t a talk show filled with people who make robot podcastsers and you were wrong to think that this was not going to be a talk show. So two strikes for Casey.

Yeah. And this is one of the — sometimes as a reporter, you get a tip that sounds so silly, that you think, well, this couldn’t possibly be true. I was surprised when I heard that people are told to print out their last 30 to 60 days of code.

That doesn’t sound right to me, and in fact two of my sources are telling me that. OK? But then, I start texting around, start getting on the phone with some folks, and then the two people that told me that I was wrong came back to me and said, oh my god, he’s actually asking people to print out their code!

So why is this funny? Why is this interesting? This is a weird way to evaluate how good someone is as a software engineer. People are not evaluated by how much code they have written.

If you show up with a printout of 100 pages of code, that’s not necessarily a good thing. You might have done better for the company by eliminating some code, right? Sort of streamlining it. So —

Also, who creates the code? Like, it’s not like — like, I was surprised that the coding programs actually have a Print button in them. That is not what you are bringing to your daily review of your code.

It’s like, two hours later, they get — all the Twitter folks get this new notification. It’s like, change of plans. You still want to see your code. You can bring it in on your laptop and we will have you shred it if you have printed any code.

Like, there’s just this boss in charge who, like, doesn’t really seem to know what he’s doing, and everyone’s just kind of humoring him. But it’s not — it’s not the kind of thing that usually happens at a big tech company.

It is not. One thing that should be stated is that the folks of the company are interested in determining who is a good engineer at the company. So Elon very much worships at the altar of the engineer. He considers himself an engineer.

I have talked to people who are getting calls late at night from random engineers, asking them who is really good on their team. Who are the top performers? Who are the low performers?

And so this code printout exercise, as ridiculous as it seems, was all part of this sort of evaluation system where they’ve been trying to figure out, who at this company do we need to keep in order to keep the service running?

And who can we lay off? That is kind of the secret part of this. We have a code printing problem. Then on Sunday you reported that on Sunday it was going to be tied to the subscription of the company’s Blue service.

In his first email to employees, Musk stated that half of the company’s revenue would need to come from subscriptions. In the last few days,Twitter Blue, the premium tier for $7.99 a month, has undergone tumultuous changes in the short time it has been live. As of today, the suspended service can be found on the internet, though who knows what will happen in an hour.

If all of those people pay $8 a month to keep their check marks, that’s $38 million a year, roughly. Twitter’s second-quarter revenue was $1.18 billion. This is not a serious amount of money even if everyone pays $8 a month, because I do not think they will.

Yeah. People, including Stephen King, the horror author — he tweeted, ”$20 a month to keep my blue check? If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”

Wait, let me just say, Stephen King has written about some of the most terrifying horrors imaginable, and nothing scared him more than the idea of paying $20 a month for his verification badge.

And I think it would be good for Twitter and most social networks if anybody wanted to optionally verify their identity. That would be a positive for the credibility of the whole thing. A lot of questions have gone unanswered so far.

I got verified, like, a decade ago, because someone at the news company that I worked at put my name on a list, and all of a sudden, I had a checkmark by my name.

What are the beauty of Twitter blue checkmarks and how do they affect the spam? The case of Oprah, Musk, Warren, Sacks

It isn’t about this person, they are important. It was literally created because people like Oprah were joining Twitter many, many years ago, and there were already a ton of impostors on Twitter, saying that they were people like Oprah. And so Twitter needed a way to basically allow users to tell whether the person they were talking to was actually the person they purported to be.

Yeah, and I think it’s fair to say, this is a necessary feature of the platform. Every platform that is social in some way has a feature like this — Facebook, Instagram, Snap, TikTok, right? You need to say that this is Oprah, but that’s not her.

The updated Twitter Blue subscription plan gives paying users the ability to get a blue check mark on their profiles, an option previously available exclusively to verified celebrities, politicians, journalists and other public figures. Musk proposed the new feature as a way to fight spam on the platform.

Right, exactly. And so I think the idea initially coming out of the Elon war room was that people who were verified cared so much about being verified and staying verified, that they would pay for the privilege. That is where we get the idea of $20 a month for verification.

Now, that almost immediately results in, as you said, an entire Twitter timeline meltdown, where users are saying, no way will we pay $20 a month. That is more than I pay for. That is more than I pay for things on the internet.

But Musk doesn’t mind. When our own Tom Warren took a screenshot of the tweet, a user replied, “The beauty of this is each account that gets verified paid $8. The account is suspended by the account keeping the money. I hope more people do this. It is free money for you to use. Musk replied with a bag of money and a smilfy face wearing sunglasses, along with a bullseye.

And so for them, this seems like a way to make money, while at the same time, kind of punishing the blue checkmarks, which is just very, very different from how other social media platforms treat their creators.

A person familiar with the matter said Musk and Sacks had talked about the idea recently. A person said one plan would allow someone to use a small amount of time on social media, but also would require them to subscribe to continue browsing.

It has a lot of economic value for people like you and me. It does matter to us. News organizations pay for all kinds of software solutions that help them do various things. Maybe Twitter Blue should be part of that.

Now, apparently, Elon did say something, like they’re going to have maybe some sort of separate legacy verification program for — I don’t know — government entities that aren’t going to pay the $8 a month. So there’s still a lot of details to be worked out here.

Life Under Muscle Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Will They Tell Us About Short-Form Video Networks? A Comment on Vine

In fact, there has been more external communication to Twitter.com than there has been to Twitter, the employees. So everything is just based on rumor. So we wake up. We look at all of our various channels, we look at what our friends are messaging us, and we cross our fingers and hope to make it through another day.

Well, yeah, I loved it. People fondly remember Vine because of that. It kind of established the idea of short-form video. Many people listening to the show can probably recall some of the best lines from the movie.

I would also say, like, not an immediate revenue driver, right? They are going to have to put a lot of effort into that. You are launching a brand new social network. So that’s a huge, heavy lift. I think it would be great if a popular American short-form video network wasn’t owned by a social networking site. We will have to see if they can do it.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

“Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speaker Out” – An Empirical Analysis of Rumors about Job Descriptions in the United States

That is correct. They are being told you have a few weeks to ship this. If this does not ship by this date, in some cases, a date next week, you will be fired. If you are not fired within one hour, it will be because you are late.

So people are sleeping very little. They are sleeping in their offices, and frankly, some of them are terrified. Some of them are in the country on work visas. If they lose this job, they have 60 days to find another job, or they’re out of the country. So it could not be more serious for the folks who have these jobs.

You are at “Hard Fork,” Mockingjay. It’s about 10:00am Pacific on Wednesday. How’s your day going so far? Anything notable happen today?

Every day seems to be the same cycle for the last week, which is everybody wakes up to more panicked messages via various different channels. I think most people have been smart enough to move off of Slack and into other channels. It’s not easy to chase rumors because we don’t have a single communication from anyone inside.

Stressful. I feel like between trying to maintain this job that I have currently, while clearly looking for a way out, while having zero support and acknowledgment from the people above me, is very stressful. Already, there have been multiple rumor mill-based scares.

First, of course, was that layoffs are supposed to happen Monday. They did not happen. Now, the rumor has it it’s going to be Friday. It is tiring. I know that we are paid well.

We all have a few dollars to spare. Some people don’t. But it is also just nerve-racking not to know, especially as we’re entering a really tough hiring market in tech. And also, we’re entering the holidays.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: The C-suite Doesn’t Communicate When You’re In Charge

So just to really underline that, you have a new CEO at your company. Most of the C-suite has either been fired or resigned, and you have not received one email that says, here’s who’s in charge, and here’s the game plan for the next few days.

That is 100% accurate. We have received zero information, other than what gets trickled down to us. The Comms is very sparse. In the company-wide channels, there is no one answering.

It is almost like a scavenger hunt of sorts when you wake up and have to figure out what you are supposed to be doing.

You have probably heard, and you have been reporting on some of the infamous code reviews. I’ve seen examples of people who claim they wrote the code themselves but didn’t credit anyone else who worked on it, all in hopes that they’ll be on a preferred status list.

Absolutely. The volume they are asking for is not quality. Everyone is sharing code they have ever written, no matter how unimportant or garbage it is. [SIGHS]

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Why you need to work so hard, if you don’t know what you’re working on, then I’m all you. I can’t do that

Yeah, I reported on a message from a manager who said, basically, if you don’t know what you’re working on right now, work on something. Work on anything.

Over the course of the day, similar messages trickled in on Blind, an app for coworkers to anonymously discuss their workplaces, and on external Slacks that employees have established to have more candid discussions.

There are multiple people who have sent this post. I wonder if you have seen it. I will not read the whole thing. The headline is, I can’t cope.

I am on the team working to make all of the dreams of Elon come true. If we miss delivery, management will threaten to fire us, even if it is outside their control. If we aren’t working on weekends, we’re gone. We will not be gone if we takePTO or leave.

People are working ridiculous hours. I work at a full rate of 20 hours per day. In the evening, I attend status calls. I cant stop worrying about it even when I am not working. I can’t cope. I am an absolute mess. I am at a point of no return. This is something after a few days of Elon.

The people that are ignored until they get fired and the people pulled into these task forces are both at the same camp. The best place to be is in the people who will be fired if they are ignored.

Life Under Musk Twitter Employees Speak Out: How Does the Company Get Its Approvals and Its Operational Leadership?

My heart goes out to this person. I hope they are able to find gainful employment, and in that four hours while they are trying to sleep and take care of themselves, applying to jobs.

I hope that people are taken care of while on visas. I know a lot of people with visas who have no idea what will happen to them. They have not been made aware of anything.

So this is more than just privileged tech people crying because we’re moving from one six-figure salary to another six-figure salary. A group of people trying to migrate to this country, who are highly skilled, have gainful employment and are willing to work hard.

So there is a lot to that I do not necessarily disagree with. I think Twitter, at the end of the day, is structured very poorly. This goes back to a lack of operational leadership, which has been existent in the company for many years. The company shows that it does not have good operations.

So I do not think, though, it is because engineers and people are sitting on their hands. I think it is because the way this company is structured, it is nearly impossible to get anything done, whether it is trying to get the appropriate approvals by and going through Byzantine processes, literally not being told how things are changing from day to day. There is some truth in that statement. This is the absolute wrong way to deal with it.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Twitter or Quitting? Why do we care? What are you worried about? When are you afraid of something? What can you do about it?

And I wonder, as you’ve been going through all this, if you have been thinking about the degree to which that could be at risk, and what fears you might have around the future of Twitter the service?

I hope that everybody is leaving in protest, and that it is a peaceful protest. But the reality of the situation is a lot of people may stay. It will be interesting to see who stays.

We don’t have to be here, in Tiny Talk Town. We all know it. Other places online are a little bit better. But Twitter is unique, and its most fervent users are unlikely to leave en masse. It is impossible to make a compelling response to Musk’s takeover, unless you’re a writer. The smarter move might be a slow burn instead of a pyrotechnic exit—a thoughtful, considered approach to quitting Twitter without quitting Twitter. Think of it as quiet quitting, but for social media.

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: A Tribute to “LambdaWrong” Software Engineers

I was scared and relieved. Not having income will be scary. I hope that all of us who get fired will chill out a bit, and then wake up a few days later and say, all right, I have to get that resume out there. Right now our life is being sucked out of us, so we need to be more focused on these other jobs.

Uncertainty. Some people are not sure if they should continue doing the work they are doing. And that pile of unknowns, along with the things that have been reported on, which is all the information we really have, it leads to this cognitive dissonance and just general constant stress.

Privacy concerns and misuse of new features would be raised even in the lowest parts of engineering. Their job is to write random code that nobody will ever read, just like the piping behind the scenes. The company allowed people to speak to these things. And more often than not, it caught us on issues before it ever made it to the public like.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees-Speak Out: A Brief History Of The Interaction Between a Former President of the Sloan Digital Employees and a General Manager

That’s complicated because no one really knew. I mean, I guess there was sort of groupthink that existed that was this guy was not a nice person. You know, there were a lot of people that were of the thought that this should probably have been banned a long time ago for his behavior. Everything came from there.

He has been more aggressively attaching himself to various political viewpoints and talking points. He will lean into it if it serves him.

I will say, having been there for a number of years, the company has grown in a lot of ways, and some not so good. I don’t disagree with people when they say there’s probably too many managers, too many engineers. Delivery may be a little too slow. The company has never had a strong point in management.

You need a huge structural change in order to go through a change like this. If he just came in and did the same thing, what’s the point?

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speakers Out: Is It Worth the Time to Move Faster than It Needs to Be?

I’m okay. It has been thought that it should be moving faster than it has been. We’ve heard that if you don’t ship this thing by next Monday, you’ll be fired. When you hear about a four- or three-day deadline, what does it do to you?

I lose my mind. I mean, having a three – to four-day deadline on something because priorities shifted, we need to have this done by Friday, that’s normal. That is a little heavy handed. Maybe put in a couple more hours. Need to get it done. It makes sense.

But I think the major differentiator here is just the sheer scale. It wouldn’t bother me if they didn’t ask about a complete revamp of Twitter Blue by Friday. That is absolutely absurd.

The sheer number of systems that need to be worked on and the number of engineers that have to be used, that is something like lifting the Titanic from the bottom of the ocean.

It is not as if there is only one set of code that needs to be written. You also have to coordinate across presumably dozens of engineers, product managers, and lots of other folks, right?

Yeah. Well, I mean, if you look at some of the feature sets that have been reported on that he wants to add in, like ranking blue check users higher than others, where that ranking occurs in the stack. They have to completely reshift how that entire process works. There are whole services in the company that we have to go figure out.

Yeah. Imagine if someone said to you that they would be willing to give you a period of time to redo TWoblue and you were able to say, “Yeah, that seems like a reasonable amount of time to do that.”

It’s not certain. If the change requires a lot of infrastructure changes, it could take quite a while. Reliability is more important than moving fast.

I think if I had to give a time frame there would probably be something that could be deployed within a quarter to two quarters.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees-Speak Out: What We Know and Where We Can Learn About It (Social Issues of Social Media)

The social problem is also an engineering problem. We need to do testing. We need to figure out how this can be abused. What will people do with it? What are the Bitcoin bros going to do to try to steal more of people’s money abusing this feature?

Right. When a major release is made at a big social network, they try to figure out what the features are, and then they change them. This stuff may be released without any testing or scrutiny, that kind of thing, if the deadlines are so short. They’re just going to be set loose.

Yeah. There’s one section about user privacy and privacy data. We don’t do user data anymore, so we don’t worry about that And then now it’s just a blue check on a profile.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk and Vine: Two Tweets Employees Speak Out? What Do You Think? How Has Elon Musk Done?

There are a couple of things. And it depends on where you are in the leadership stack, as far as Musk and his people. One overarching message was to find something cool that you like. Hopefully, Musk likes it.

Think about it. He wants your idea to be done within a week. And you’ve basically just sacrificed every team around you.

God. I’m curious what you make of the various product changes that have been floated or proposed by Elon Musk and his inner circle, such as the charging $8 a month for Twitter verification, bringing back Vine. What do you think about those proposals? And do you think they’re good ideas?

I mean, one of the first decisions he made was to redirect the logged-out view to the Explore page. I didn’t know about this goal, but my initial thought was that we might be able to serve ads to people who aren’t registered.

Now, if you go to Twitter and you’re not logged in, they’ll show you a bunch of tweets which might entice you to sign in, create an account. And if you linger and browse through some tweets, maybe you see some ads, right? A lot of people would agree with the change that he made.

The Vine one, it’s not the worst idea. I mean, the cynical part of me says, too little, too late. You know? The hill to climb is called TikTok.

Yes, but sure. We have all the original content from Vine. The nostalgia factor is huge and gives us a foothold to at least launch something.

We have the media, and we are working on a product that is similar to that. I believe every tech company has at least tried. Is this something we can do? There have been a number of mock-ups.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life under Musk Two Tweet Employees Speak Out: What Can They Teach Us About Twitter and Why Does Facebook Describe Their Work?

It would be the most boring. You can make a really interesting ethereal horror movie by walking around with nothing.

There’s no communications. The only people talking are in a corner. It is not like the whole company went to an all-hands meeting and learned what was happening. It’s everybody asking, are we ever going to see him? Should I keep doing my work? Do they even serve lunch anymore?

We do not know what will happen to your job. Is there a chance that you’ll be working at the social media site in three months? Or do you feel like you’re ready to be somewhere else?

Culture is not a lie. Culture is reflected through the product. For all of Twitter’s faults, a lot of the way the company behaved was because people cared so much. And that can be infuriating in its own ways.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Casey: Breaking the FTC: What Do Social Networks Really Know About Labor and the Tradeoffs? A remark on casey’s apology to Musk

People have seen this. So now we’re moving into the phase equivalent to “move fast and break things,” with no care for the people who are using it, which just sort of defeats the point.

Yeah, because he’s reading the news about the work hours and stuff. And he’s been wildly speculating about what kind of labor law lawsuits are going to come out.

In an internal message posted by a social networking company employee, it was reported that Musk showed little fear of the FTC in overseeing the company’s various consent agreements and privacy impact reports.

And if people want to send you any huge scoops about what’s happening at Twitter, you can send those right over to Casey. His email address is Kevin. Roose —

“Hard Fork” with a Contribution of Cory Schreppel, Caitlin Love, and J. Paula Szuchman

Davis Land produced the song “Hard Fork”. Paula Szuchman is the editor. This episode was fact checked by Caitlin Love. The show was engineered today by Cory Schreppel.

Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittipo, and MARION LO SPANo wrote original music. With special thanks to Hanna Ingber, Nell Gallogly, Kate LoPresti, Shannon Busta, Mahima Chablani, and Jeffrey Miranda.

Steve Jobs: What Has Happened in the Space X, Macy’s, Apple, Spotify, Google, Volkswagen, Porsche, Bentley, Volkswagen?

At the time, Jobs had been developing personal computers for 20 years, his entire adult life. He was intimately familiar with the company he was suddenly running because he had founded it and led the team that created its flagship product. He founded a new computer company that looked at the internet and next- generation operating systems in a way that was forward- thinking. He was named Steve Jobs. If anyone could quickly turn around the near-bankrupt computer giant, it would be him. Yet it took him months to come up with his plan and years to bring it to fruition. While the colorful iMac he unveiled to me that day in May would help nudge Apple’s bottom line back into the black, it wasn’t until the company’s entry into non-PC devices—like the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007—that it became a profit machine. And Apple’s post-PC future wasn’t even on Jobs’ road map in 1998.

Musk need not look farther than his own successful enterprises to realize the absurdity of his haste. When he took over, the company was just five years old. Musk came up with a plan to turn the company around but it wasn’t implemented until 16 years after it was incorporated. Musk gets a lot of credit for what he’s done for the company. SpaceX, Musk’s other company, is private and doesn’t report earnings. It can take years to launch successfully, and cutting corners to go faster can end up killing people.

“Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists,” he said in a tweet. “Extremely messed up! They are trying to destroy free speech in America.

The ad sales team at the social network has been terminated or pushed out. Large companies from General Mills to Macy’s have paused advertising on the platform, with more potentially following suit after new owner Elon Musk’s decision to restore the account of former President Donald Trump and other controversial figures. There will be less big brand ads when you scroll through the platform.

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

The Wall Street Journal said that Pfizer and Mondalez are stopping their advertisements on the social networking site. The companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The companies join General Motors, which had previously said it would pause paying for advertising on Twitter while it evaluates the platform’s “new direction.” Toyota, another Tesla competitor, previously told CNN that it is “in discussions with key stakeholders and monitoring the situation” on Twitter.

Elon Musk is attempting to stave off an advertiser exodus on Twitter, according to Calacanis, a member of Musk’s inner circle

Ad buying giant Interpublic Group, which works with consumer brands such as Unilever and Coca Cola, earlier this week also recommended its clients pause advertising on the platform.

The pauses also come days ahead of the US midterm elections, as many civil society leaders worry that misinformation and other harmful content could spread on the platform and create disruption.

In the meantime, Musk is working to stave off a possible advertiser exodus. Musk’s team spent Monday “meeting with the marketing and advertising community” in New York, according to Jason Calacanis, a member of Musk’s inner circle.

How the company will proceed is still uncertain. Civil-rights leaders have met with Musk about his proposal to put a moderation council in charge of establishing hate speech and harassment policies. Users who had been banned before Musk’s takeover of the company would not be reinstated until a process had been set up for allowing them to do so, Musk has said.

Organizations including the ADL, Color of Change, Free Press and GLAAD pointed to Friday’s mass layoffs of Twitter staff as a key factor in their thinking, citing fears that Musk’s cuts will make Twitter’s election integrity policies effectively unenforceable, even if they technically remain active.

When billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter and pledged that “the bird is freed” last week, Felix Ndahinda saw a threat rising on the horizon.

Ndahinda has trained in international law and works in Tilburg, Netherlands as a consultant on issues pertaining to conflict and peace in the African Great Lakes region. He has already seen the benefit of free communication on the internet. He has been watching the social-media hate speeches that have been made amid the fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Much of the speech is not seen by platforms due to the fact that it is shared in other languages and not built into their screening tools.

Two days after the attack on the Capitol by some of Trump’s supporters, he lost his account on the micro-networking website. The ban was due to the risk of further incitement of violence, said Twitter at the time. The decision came after Twitter had long resisted calls to suspend or remove Trump’s account — and instead applied information labels to provide context around his tweets — on the basis that it was important for users to be able to hear directly from a world leader.

Normally, these platforms are where false narratives start, says Stringhini. When those narratives appear on mainstream platforms, they explode. They go out of control because everybody sees them and covers them on social media.

“When you have people that have some sort of public stature on social media using inflammatory speech — particularly speech that dehumanizes people — that’s where I get really scared,” says James Piazza, who studies terrorism at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. “That’s the situation where you can have more violence.”

Over the coming weeks, Stringhini expects that researchers will launch studies comparing Twitter before and after Musk’s takeover, and looking at changes in the spread of disinformation, which user accounts are suspended, and whether Twitter users quit the platform in protest at new policies. Tromble intends to monitor campaigns of coordinated harassment on Twitter.

“It’s a bad thing”: The story of the Covid Pandemic and the exclusion of a woman who loves to be funny

“The Covid PLANdemic was created by Big Pharma to silence me. She said that everyone tries to silence her. Please speak at a lower volume. Are you too loud for the intensive care unit? You are not sick!

“Hi. Your profile is so funny. Schumer, dressed as a robot, said that she loves funny guys. “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.”

But the most notable person to speak in front of the council: former president Donald Trump, played by James Austin Johnson. Trump had his account banned in 2021.

We all love Truth Social, we have moved to it. It is very great, said Johnson’s 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.”

The suspension of the Musk account and the use of Silverman’s Twitter handle in trolling of “comedian Kathy Griffin”

It was not possible to follow the location of Musk’s private jet on Wednesday even though the account had been suspended, despite the promise of free speech made by the owner.

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

“I guess not ALL the content moderators were let go? A week ago, she set up an account on Mastodon and made a joke about it.

Comedian Sarah Silverman used her verified account to troll Musk, copying his profile picture, cover image and name. The only thing distinguishing a tweet coming Silverman’s account was the @SarahKSilverman handle.

There was an original purpose for the blue verification checkmark. It was granted free of charge to people whose identity Twitter employees had confirmed; with journalists accounting for a big portion of recipients. “It simply meant that your identity was confirmed.” Scammers would have a harder time impersonating you,” Bertinelli noted.

Edward Perez is not afraid to take the lead on Twitter: What he’s telling us about the Mumbai protests and what India’s Indian government wants

The service would first be available in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. There was no indication when it would be live, and it was not available Sunday. Esther Crawford told The Associated Press it is coming soon but it hasn’t launched yet.

At the time, the company said it was unfortunate to see individual employees targeted for company decisions, but that no one atTwitter was responsible for policies or enforcement actions.

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

Perez is now a board member at the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan group dedicated to election security and integrity, and he is concerned that the drama around corporate takeover is taking all the oxygen out of the room. That focus on the Musk psychodrama “is resulting in potentially inadequate attention on these election-related issues,” he adds.

“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.

Civil society groups, journalists, and politicians are all influential in shaping public policy and opinion due to their use of the social network, though it does not boast as many users as other social networks. The platform has also proved crucial for those organizing protests in places like India, Nigeria, and Argentina, and has provided an avenue for those living in highly controlled societies like Saudi Arabia to voice criticism of their governments.

But Raman Jit Singh Chima, senior international counsel and Asia Pacific policy director at Access Now, worries that Twitter under Musk may not continue with the lawsuit. In August, Musk stated that the lawsuit in India was a danger to the company’s presence in its third largest market. He believes it would be a vindication of the actions of the Indian government. It is also a signal that the global tech industry should back off and not try to do more.

A wave of famous users impersonated Musk over the weekend, in order to highlight a potential flaw 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.

The Day Twitter Losses: A Memorino about the Future of Twitter, and Why I am a Freedom of Speech Absolutist I Eat Doody

“I am a freedom of speech absolutist I eat doody for breakfast every day. Her account also retweeted posts supporting Democratic candidates.

On Sunday, his account was briefly restricted with a warning that there has been some unusual activity showing to visitors before clicking through to his profile. The comedian renamed her account back to her normal form, complete with her name and image.

CNN fired a comedian who was photographed holding up a bloody head that resembled President Donald Trump. The New Years Eve program was co-hosted by AndersonCooper andGriffin for a decade.

The platform has been called a digital town square because of the number of questions it raises about the future. It also raised questions about Musk’s commitment to free speech.

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. About 80% of the team lost their jobs, and by the next day, 4,400 of them, on a percentage basis, had lost their jobs.

Many current and former employees spoke to me with a feeling of doom about the future of their company because of Musk’s erratic leadership.

Many of the planners who lost their jobs were involved in Friday’s layoffs. While the process varied by team, some managers were asked to submit to Musk’s team two sentences about all of their direct reports: one sentence explaining what the employee did, and one sentence justifying their continued employment at Twitter.

A former employee told me that managers were jockeying with one another to preserve employment for vulnerable groups like pregnant women, employees who have cancer, and workers on visas.

Some teams were cut more than others; several were wiped out entirely. The company went too far. Within hours of the layoffs, some managers were told to ask certain employees if they wanted to keep their jobs.

When will people on Twitter come back? An employee feedback message on the rumor on Blind, where people can anonymously chat with coworkers and colleagues

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

Everyone on the weekend, I apologize. I wanted to pass along that we have the chance to ask the people who were left off if they’ll come back. A message to employees from a manager said that they need to put together names and rationales before 4 pm on Sunday. “I’ll do some research but if any of you have been in contact with folks who might come back and who we think will help us, please nominate before 4.”

“I think we might use some Android and iOS help,” the manager added. The company has been reaching out to both engineers and designers over the past day in an effort to get them back, Platformer is told.

Some employees are nervous that if Twitter can’t get them to return voluntarily, the company will formally rescind the notice they received Friday laying them off. Under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, businesses with more than 100 full-time employees are required to give 60 days notice if they lay off 33 percent or more of the staff. The notice promised to pay the people for the next 60 days and give them a month of separation.

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

Why are some IT professionals working so hard? Some examples from a tech employee’s experience in navigating the tech-technology transition: “I don’t know how I am, but I can tell you what I do”

Remaining managers are bracing themselves for a much higher workload than they used to. One person I spoke with was told that any technical manager should expect to manage at least 20 individual contributors, while also spending at least half their time writing code. Others have been given much higher numbers of direct reports.

The employee told me that some of the teams on his pet projects are doing 20 hours a day. “But the majority of the company is kind of just sitting around. No chain of command, no priorities, no organization chart, and in many cases, no idea who your manager or team is.”

Meanwhile, the health team was told to listen to Musk adviser David Sacks’ podcast for insights into why they had just lost half their colleagues, according to a former employee. Sacks, a venture capitalist who has been helping to manage the Musk transition, co-hosts the “All-In” podcast with fellow Twitter adviser Jason Calacanis and VC Chamath Palihapitiya.

The vice president told employees that the recent podcasts covered the current layoffs happening across tech and that it provided some insight into why this is happening. I think it’s worth paying attention to the macro environment that we are operating in.

The health benefits of most employees have suddenly become a question mark. The company’s open-enrollment period was supposed to begin today, according to its global calendar, but no information was available in the company’s human-resources system. The employees asked a few questions about benefits, but management didn’t reply.

I am told that some teams started holding meetings in which their employees were informed about their managers, their organization charts and what their priorities will be.

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

Why Twitter Blue? Why Does Musk Want to Keep Twitter Away? How to Predict What Happens After Musk Has Solved the Twitter Problem

On one hand, the company is telling advertisers that it is thriving, The Verge’s Alex Heath reported, adding 15 million daily users since the end of the second quarter.

The app was new on Saturday and had release notes that said it was now available. (The copy, written by Calacanis, was widely derided for sounding like a phishing email.) The problem is that Blue was not available, and so those who did subscribe found that they had merely gotten access to the current version of Blue.

Then, after a debate about the potential effects of unleashing thousands of new verified accounts onto the platforms in the middle of the US midterm elections, the company postponed the launch.

Federal government requires full documentation in writing of any foreseeable risks of “any product or service affecting commerce.” The changes to Twitter Blue rolled out less than two weeks after Musk bought Twitter. Do you think it has full documentation about its risks? Lawyers for the social network are worried.

The company’s trust and safety team prepared a seven-page list of recommendations to help Musk avoid damaging consequences of his plans for Blue. Some of the events that follow are predicted in a document obtained by Platformer.

Does Musk Really Live on Twitter? Lurking isn’t Doomscrolling – It’s OK to be Lush

The thought of Musk floating a thought so deep that it could have come from a fish-bowled dorm room came to him late Thursday night. Congratulations: All of us live in Tiny Talk Town, where all of the discussion is about Musk.

Quiet quitting in the workplace means not working overtime and not having your money taken out of you by your employer. On Twitter, it’s about not giving more to a platform than most people can expect to get back. 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.

So active users are a noisy bunch, and it would be easy for, say, an electric car entrepreneur who follows a disproportionate number of extremely active “blue checks” on Twitter to mistake his own Twitter experience for everyone’s experience. Same goes for reporters. In reality, almost half of users have less than 5 times a month where they send a message on the social network. They check out current events or live sports, then go about their lives. They are called 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. Check in on the new toy then close the app or browser tab. Do you want to send a message or disengage? It is important to keep one eye on it. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. Save your most original thoughts for another time.

It does get worse, and this part isn’t Musk’s fault. When the economy slows down, companies spend less money on advertising. If Musk wasn’t doing crazy stuff to get advertisers to sign up, it’s possible that the company would have been in trouble. But Musk has essentially identified himself and his company as a loose canon, which means that anyone looking to trim advertising spend might be inclined to cut Twitter first.

In order to send money to people that you like, you must pay Tips, which doesn’t take a cut of the money. It does take a cut of revenue from Super Follows in order for it to make your account a subscription service, but Apple makes more money by charging for in-app purchases.

I don’t think a lot of advertisers would want to come back to someone with that attitude toward impersonation, even without an economic downturn. The open question to me is do users want to stay in that environment? they have gotten a new layer of hoaxing. Mark Cuban has complained that the new checkmarked users have made his mentions miserable. Cubans thoughts are one of the reasons why people stay on the platform.

So for the banks, offloading Twitter’s debt now means taking an immediate loss. Banks may choose to hang on to the debt for a while to see whether the market conditions change. But if Twitter is obviously shitting the bed, unloading that debt gets even harder. Now, Musk is the richest guy in the world, so banks might be willing to negotiate terms with him about debt repayment. How long do they want to hold these loans, and who will buy them? If banks can’t place the debt, that probably does make it difficult for any other leveraged buy-outs in tech to get done.

If proven, a violation could ultimately lead to significant personal liability for Musk, escalating the risks he faces as he stumbles through a morass of business and content moderation headaches, most of which have been self-inflicted.

The potential violation stems from a reporting obligation Twitter must fulfill whenever the company experiences a change in structure, including mergers and sales.

The FTC consent order that was implemented this year requires a sworn compliance notice to be submitted within 14 days of any change. The compliance notice is intended both to advise the FTC of major changes at the company as well as a commitment that it will continue to comply with the order, according to David Vladeck, a former senior FTC official and a law professor at Georgetown University.

Alex Spiro, Musk’s attorney, told CNN on Thursday that they are working closely with the FTC to make sure they are in compliance.

“The chaos there is something the FTC is going to be worried about,” said Vladeck, “because there were serious deficiencies which led to the consent order in the first place, and the FTC is going to want to make sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to do.”

Internal concerns about Twitter’s compliance obligations were reflected in a Slack message viewed by CNN earlier this week, in which an employee warned colleagues that Musk could try to put responsibility for certifying FTC compliance onto individual engineers at the company.

It is recommended that employees seek professional legal counsel before making any statement to regulators.

The FTC may be able to hold individual executives accountable if they are found guilty of a company’s violations, naming them in future orders, even if they leave the company, and imposing binding requirements on their future conduct if they leave the company. Last month, the FTC imposed sanctions on the CEO of alcohol delivery service Drizly.

“No CEO or company is above the law, and companies must follow our consent decrees,” the FTC said. The revised consent order gives us new powers to make sure that we are following the rules.

Twitter: CEO Mark Musk had a rough day on Twitter after the suspension of a paid verification feature last week and the Twitter customer service resummation

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.

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

After the launch of gray badges, which help users distinguish legitimate celebrity and branded accounts from accounts that had merely paid for a blue check mark, Musk abruptly killed the feature, forcing subordinates to explain the reversal.

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

The rocky roll-out of the paid verification feature was criticized by misinformation experts, who warned that it would make it more difficult to identify trustworthy information during the crucial period leading up to the US mid-term elections. Even some of Musk’s fellow high-powered users of the platform had tough 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 the newly purchased checkmarks in an effort to make them useful again.

Omnicom, one of the world’s biggest ad firms, representing brands like McDonald’s, Apple, and PepsiCo, is recommending clients pause spending on Twitter, according to an internal memo obtained by The Verge.

“SpaceX Starlink bought a tiny – not large – ad package to test effectiveness of Twitter advertising in Australia & Spain,” Musk wrote in a reply to one Twitter user, adding that he did the same on competitors such as Facebook, Instagram and Google.

Internal warnings against false-positive actions on high profile users: Elon Musk’s Blue Verification Campaign on November 1st, 2017

The document’s first recommendation said that bad actors could pay to achieve their ends where their upside exceeds the cost.

In addition, the team found that the fraudulent presence of world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election Officials and other high profile individuals represented another P0 risk. Legacy verification is critical for the enforcement of impersonation rules and the loss of it likely will cause an increase in high-profile accounts being impersonated on the social networking site.

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

It was noted that if the verification privileges were taken away from users unless they paid, then they’d likely leave the site for good. “Removing privileges and exemptions from legacy verified accounts could cause confusion and loss of trust among high profile users,” they wrote. We use the health related protections to manage against false- positive actions on high-profile users, under assumptions that the accounts have been heavily vetting. 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.”

Retaining verification for high-profile accounts using the official Badge of Honor was a solution that was supported by the company’s trust and safety team.

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

What Twitter Elon Musk Blue Verification Internal Warnings Were Not Providing: After Platformer’s Unannounced Deactivation, Platformer Revisited

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 went ahead despite the warnings. The trust and safety team’s predictions were mostly realized a few days later.

Content moderation, recruitment, ad sales, marketing, and real estate were some of the functions affected. At the moment, it’s unclear how the loss of what may have been thousands of moderators will affect the service. But it seems clear that Twitter now has dramatically fewer people available to police the site for harmful material.

One manager noted in the company’s Slack channels, “one of my contractors just got deactivating without notice in the middle of making critical changes to our child safety workflows.” This is particularly worrisome because over the last few years, Twitter had trouble policing child sexual exploitation material on the platform.

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.

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.

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

Internal Warning in Twitter: How Elon Musk and the Platformer Team Meteorized an India-based Workplace During the First Two Months

In just 2 weeks, the most welcoming and healthy workplace of my career has become the most hostile and degrading one I have ever known.

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

This was more than simply a code freeze, where engineers are able to commit code but not deploy it. Those are fairly common, and Twitter has been under one for most of the time since Musk took over. Such freezes are generally intended to reduce the chances that a bug disrupts Twitter’s systems.

Engineers were told they couldn’t even write code until further notice according to an internal email obtained by Platformer. If there is an urgent change that’s needed to resolve an issue with a production service, including changes that reflect hard promises for clients, employees will get approval from VP level, according to the email.

On Slack, even engineers who attended the late-night meeting were confused. An engineer who was supposed to implement the freeze asked if he could reference a ticket. I don’t know what the context is. “We don’t have much context as of now,” a colleague responded. “But this is coming from Elon’s team.”

“I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. The app is doing poor batches of RPCs in order to create a home timeline. Musk referred to remote procedure calls on Sunday. Microprocessors are employed to prevent the whole website from breaking whenever one part goes down.

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

Not to mention that places like India have a higher concentration of low power phones that tend to perform worse in general — as opposed to all of our overpowered iPhones and such.

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

Why Does the Code Freeze? Why Did T-Mobile Stop It, and Why Does Twitter Want to Shut It Down? The Case of Eli Lilly

Why does the code freeze? No one knows for sure, but some are speculating that Musk has grown paranoid that some disgruntled engineers may intend to sabotage the site on their way out.

Eli Lilly stopped its ad campaigns on Friday because of the Blue debacle. The move potentially cost Twitter millions of dollars in revenue, according to the Washington Post. A fake Eli Lilly account made a statement that it would be free for people with Diabetes, but it took six hours to remove the post.

Many of your markets and clients are seeing large declines in the last part of the year. “Please add any commentary, questions, issues in this thread and I’ll endeavor to raise as many as possible TY!”

T-Mobile asked for the campaigns to be paused due to brand safety concerns, according to an employee. John Legere, a former T-Mobile CEO, asked Musk to let him run his own company, but Musk said no.

GroupM is reportedly concerned about several specific things following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter; in a document, it cites the large numbers of Twitter executives leaving or being fired (especially those in charge of safety, security, and compliance), the wave of high-profile impersonations by “verified” users, and also raises concerns about Twitter’s abilities to follow the Federal Trade Commission’s orders. If Twitter wants to lose its high-risk label, there’s several things GroupM reportedly wants to see, according to a document viewed by Digiday and a Slack message from Twitter’s agency partnerships lead seen by Platformer. The list includes:

Content moderation and enforcement of current rules is aDemonstrated commitment.

GroupM and the Twitter Community: What do users think after Musk decides to shut down social microservices? The impact on Twitter, Apple, and Google

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.

Some people who know how to fix those things, are no longer employed by the company or they’ve been told not to ship new code. Engineers were haunted at the end of the day by a single question: how many cracks in the service would emerge, and when.

GroupM works with a number of companies. There is a lot of overlap between GroupM’s list and a graphic about how a few brands make everything you buy at the grocery store.

Zero percent surprising is what those requests are. Companies don’t want to advertise on platforms where their messages, carefully crafted to be as inoffensive and enticing to as many people as possible, appear next to blatant hate speech, conspiracy theories, or, perhaps worst of all, a fake-yet-verified version of their profile posting pictures of their beloved mascot giving people the middle finger.

GroupM didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment. Twitter no longer has a communications department to reach out to with such requests. An internal message seen by Platformer says that the company is working through GroupM’s requirements.

“I’ve always thought that a move to a subscription business would make sense for Twitter … it’s never been a great advertising platform,” said Larry Vincent, associate professor of marketing at USC’s Marshall School of Business. Twitter’s advertising business has long been smaller than that of rivals like Facebook, in part because it didn’t offer the same level of user targeting.

Large digital platforms “have experienced professionals out there who develop relationships with these advertisers,” Vincent said. You reduce the value of the ad platform when you let go of a staff with experience that can respond to brands.

In an op-ed published in the New York Times last week, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, who left the company earlier this month, said the company’s failure to adhere to Google and Apple’s app store rules could be “catastrophic.” The social media sites have previously been removed by the app stores for not adequately protecting their users from harmful content, and after Musk’s takeover, it is already receiving calls from app store operators. Over the weekend, the head of Apple’s app store, Phil Schiller, deleted his Twitter account.

Tweeting to Shutdown the Elon Activism Trump-Carer: How Dan Sheehan and his Novel Generated a Wide-Social Follow

There is no guarantee of revenue growth, even if you keep capturing the online world’s attention.

Many users followed suit and wrote short online reviews 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 got a few first job offers in the copywriting space. That’s how I paid the bills for a very long time,” he says.

Through copywriting, he was able to devote some of his time to writing his novel, a project that was made a reality thanks to his large social media following.

“The fact that I was able to keep the lights on, the bills paid, while writing the book, and then have the book reach that audience of over 100,000 people directly, none of that could have been done through traditional means,” he says.

The children of the wealthy have cornered creative fields for the longest time. The people with the keys to that allowed you to create this audience.

Azucena was able to open a door to the journalism industry by gaining a platform and use of social media.

It’s unfortunate that there is a diversity problem, and I don’t know how the communities are going to find each other… Twitter was such a way to see it right there and start following people and start reading other people’s work,” she says.

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

Reaching More People with Disabilities Through Twitter: Wendi Muse’s Ph.D. Candidate with Multiple Sclerosis

Wendi Muse, a Ph.D candidate with multiple sclerosis, was an active member of ‘Disability Twitter’ for years. She spent the resources from the personal stock she had amassed to help people get masks. She noticed that there had been a demand for N95 masks in the community.

Over 12,000 masks were sent out from my living room alone since January, according to Muse. She doesn’t think she would’ve been able to reach that many people if it hadn’t been for her reach on Twitter.

“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].”

Even with the recent rise in new users, Muse would lose out on something if the end of Twitter was ever to happen.

“It is more difficult for people who are disabled, elderly, and possibly not have any social networks in person right now because of the uneasiness of not knowing.”

The poll, which closed around 12:45 pm ET on Thursday, finished with 72.4% voting in favor of the proposition and 27.6% voting against. The poll garnered more than 3 million votes on Twitter.

How the ‘Twitter Files’ Defend Left-Right Symmetry: What Twitter Does Not Know About Right-Wing Analogies

Shortly after acquiring Twitter, Musk said he would create a “content moderation council” with “widely diverse viewpoints,” and that no major content decisions would be made until it was in place. There is no evidence that such a group has been formed or was involved in Musk’s replatforming decisions. Instead, after Musk restored Trump’s account, he tweeted “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Latin for “the voice of the people is the voice of god.”

A large majority of respondents decided to unbanning accounts, from a pool of more than 3 million votes. It is hard to know who voted, but the fact is that Musk spent a long time trying to get out of buying a service that was filled with fake accounts.

It’s still not clear which accounts will be allowed back. Musk said accounts that have “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam” would not be granted “amnesty”. But doing something illegal is an extremely high bar for moderation since most people don’t break the law by simply being awful people. Even Musk has expressed some bare-minimum standards beyond breaking the law, but he has signaled opposition to the idea of letting Alex Jones back on his website.

Musk has previously criticized that filtering technique — nicknamed “shadowbanning” — and alleged that it was unfairly used by Twitter’s past leadership to suppress right-wing accounts. He has said that the newTwitter will be more transparent, and that it won’t reduce the reach of negative messages.

A software update will show your true account status so you can clearly understand the reason why you have been shadowbanned. He didn’t give any additional details or a timetable.

Musk used his new platform to promote a collection of internal documents, called the ‘Twitter Files’, which he claimed to expose a censorship scandal, but in actuality revealed messy internal debates about thornier subjects.

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 is a long-running claim by Republicans who are convinced that social media companies censor them. Twitter’s internal researchers, for example, have found its algorithms favor right-leaning political content.

The internal documents seem to have been given to the journalists by Musk’s team. Musk on Friday shared Weiss’ thread in a tweet and added, “The Twitter Files, Part Duex!!” Along with a few popcorn emojis.

Twitter is Not Evil: Trump’s Vote for AMERICA FIRST is Not the Same as Trump Against Left-Leaning and Other Accounts

Weiss offered many examples of moderation actions taken on accounts, but it is not clear if similar actions were taken against left-leaning or other accounts.

Twitter’s former head of trust and safety has fled his home due to an escalation in threats resulting from Elon Musk’s campaign of criticism against him, a person familiar with the matter told CNN on Monday.

Some of the company’s employees had internal debates about banning Donald Trump ahead of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

On Election Day 2016 he wrote that they would fly over states that voted for a racist.

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

Weiss’ tweets suggest that in the wake of January 6, there were Twitter employees both in favor of and against the idea of banning Trump. A screenshot from an internal Twitter slack conversation, where employees’ names have been redacted, shows one employee raising concerns about “censorship” while another notes that “we impose far stricter rules on effectively everyone else on the platform.” It’s not clear from Weiss’ tweets whether the employees in this discussion were in any way involved in the decision making process that led to Trump’s ban.

“I also am not seeing clear or coded incitement” to violence, Twitter safety staffer Anika Navaroli said in a slack message about Trump’s January 8 tweet saying: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

On January 6,avaroli testified to the House committee investigating the incident that she and other staffers were alarmed by the Proud Boys and other extremists who had made statements in support of Trump, and who had worried about the risk of violence.

Another staffer, whose name was removed in the screenshot, said in Slack that a subsequent tweet that day from Trump saying he would not attend President Joe Biden’s inauguration was also “a clear no vio[lation].” Weiss wondered if that statement could be proof that Trump doesn’t support a peaceful transition.

It seems like the process of involving multiple staffers and teams and using research to make high-profile decisions is not out of line with how other social platforms make moderation decisions.

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

The former editor of The Wall Street Journal said the social media site told him there was nothing new. There is no shocking information about government censorship, political manipulation, or hidden government funding. They simply bring to the surface the inner deliberations of a company dealing with complex issues which are consistent with its values.

If you are just a normal person attempting to understand what is happening, it can be difficult. The solution is not clear. On one hand, if newsrooms covered each installment, they risk giving air to and further amplifying a storyline that has been selectively framed by Musk as he wages an information war. On the other hand, not dissecting each drop allows him and others to define it in the public square.

Twitter Shouldn’t Be Forbid Me: The Email from an Employee of Twitter’s Head of Trust and Safety for a Child Prolific Exploitation

The members of the council who provided images of the email were on anonymity because they did not want to offend anyone.

The volunteer group provided expertise and guidance on how Twitter could better combat hate, harassment and other harms but didn’t have any decision-making authority and didn’t review specific content disputes.

Sweeney said he received an email from an anonymous person purporting to be a Twitter employee that included a screenshot showing an internal company message from Ella Irwin, Twitter’s new head of trust and safety, asking staff to “apple heavy VF to @elonjet immediately.”

Those former council members became the targets of online attacks after Musk criticized them for not doing enough to help prevent child sex exploitation on the platform.

A number of attacks against the council resulted in concerns from some remaining members, who sent an email to the company demanding that it stop misrepresenting its role.

The Trust and Safety Council had an advisory group that focused on child exploitation. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and the Rati Foundation were included.

Reporting Trump didn’t feed the flames: What did Trump say, or what did he tweet about his term at the White House?

Around the time Trump was inaugurated in 2017, I said to colleagues in the newsroom where I worked at the time that we shouldn’t cover everything he said or tweeted. In the past, every word of a president was assumed to be a signal of future policy, and reported as such. Many things were said by Trump to get a rise out of people. Reporting on them, I argued, just fed the flames. The editor pushed back. “He’s the president,” he said, or words to that effect. “What he says is news.”

Here, we heard about a lot of rapid-response news stories about Musk saying on December 11 that “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci” and about his disagreement with the government’s former chief infectious disease expert. Here’s another bunch about the picture of his bedside table with two replica guns on it, and some more about his tweeting a far-right Pepe the Frog meme.

This is precisely the way coverage of Trump worked. The liberal-leaning media were often drawn to stories confirming the belief that a person so clearly unfit to be president would only succeed in bringing himself (or the country) down in flames, while the right-wing media treated his evident egomania, corruption, and lack of interest in grasping basic policy issues or actually doing the job as at best irrelevant and at worst essential qualities for reforming Washington. There was plenty of good reporting at the same time but these accounts were the ones that dominated the conversation. The public’s understanding of what is happening across the country was forced through incompatible narratives because of the behavior of a man in the White House.

The Right Time for Porn: The Twitter Files Concerning the Politics of Social Media and the Crimes of Hunter Biden’s Son

Without advertisers or the ability to moderate, swaths of Twitter are now mangy empty lots with vandals, men and swastikas. The right time for porn is now. Porn abhors a vacuum. Especially where it can be ennobled as constitutional duty.

Porn’s not my cup of tea, but you have to admire its ferocity and cunning. It is a megagenre, something the poet-philosopher Timothy Morton calls a hyper object that is ubiquity and scale. In effect, porn online behaves like a predator plant, saturating the pixels with flesh colors, choking off biodiverse memes, and sowing vast digital acreage with salt.

Tumblr, which started as an artsy microblogging service in 2007, lost its allure when it was overrun by porn five years later. Chatroulette, which was founded in 2009 as a whimsical way to meet strangers, traded its lightheartedness for dick pics and leering goons almost immediately. Sex workers are mostly responsible for the porn on OnlyFans, which was a platform for performers to post videos.

Many people in the tech and social media industries say Musk’s claims are overblown because documents so far confirm what’s already known about the business of policing a large social network.

The people who are facing high-stakes, unexpected events and trying to figure out what policies apply and how are the ones that are coming through for my research in the Twitter Files.

They show how difficult it is for executives and employees to agree on tradeoffs and how the company’s rules should be applied.

Musk has given exclusive access to a small group of independent journalists including Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone, and Bari Weiss, a former New York Times opinion columnist, under the condition they first post about the documents on Twitter.

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

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

The company showed a warning to people who tried to post a link to the article, saying it was potentially harmful. It also suspended the New York Post’s own Twitter account until it deleted its tweets about the story. After the article, Facebook was alarmed, but didn’t go as far as it should have. It allowed the link to be posted, but limited the distribution of the post while it checked the claims.

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

And it does not show any evidence that there was government involvement in the move to block the New York Post story, despite assertions by Musk and others.

Everyone acted according to the best information at the time, I believe, and there was no ill intent or hidden agendas. “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.”

Elon Musk Is Using Twitter Files to Discredit Foes and Push Conspiracy Theorem: A Comment on the “The Case of Trump and His Families”

It’s good reason to demand more information on how social media companies operate. She said that many decisions are inscrutable. “These are platforms that shape public opinion, and so the question of how they’re moderated and how they’re designed is impactful.”

She said outsiders need more than just “anecdotes” to get the full picture, as Musk’s journalists are focusing exclusively on charged political dramas in the US.

It would be helpful to see discussions of the accounts of world leaders who have not been kicked off the platform in order to better understand the decision to ban Trump.

“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.

Framing the disclosures as secret knowledge plays particularly well on Twitter, said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.

The threats against the men were violent. According to a person familiar with the situation,Roth and his family were forced to flee their home.

“The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn’t solve anything,” Dorsey wrote on Tuesday. If you want to be blamed, direct it at me or my actions.

The CEO’s willingness to target people working to keep the platform’s users safe, including through the Twitter Files releases, is creating a “chilling effect,” according to one Trust and Safety Council member, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation.

Musk has hijacked the conversation with his enthusiasm for the company’s former employees.

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 its actions against Jack Sweeney, the creator of Twitter jet tracking, and Musk’s commitment to free speech

The last regime is being processed as if it’s the previous one, and that way it will be done differently under the new regime.

Jack Sweeney, the creator of the account that tracked the flights taken by Musk’s private plane, had his account banned by the microblogging site hours after it was suspended. A brief attempt by the account to get it back was unsuccessful before it was banned again.

Sweeney was offered $5,000 to close the account by the billionaire. Sweeney said that $50,000 would allow him to purchase a Model 3 car, which he said would be great support in college. After some back and forth, Musk responded, “Doesn’t feel right to pay to shut this down.”

He also threatened legal action against Jack Sweeney, the 20-year-old college sophomore and programmer who started the @elonjet flight-tracking account, and “organizations who supported harm to my family.” It’s not clear what legal action Musk could take against Sweeney for an account that automatically posted public flight information.

live location information, including information shared on Twitter directly or links to 3rd-party URL(s) of travel routes, actual physical location, or other identifying information that would reveal a person’s location, regardless if this information is publicly available;

Musk stated why he was in favor of the new policy. Real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info. He said that posting locations isn’t a safety problem and is ok.

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.

It seems Twitter doesn’t currently have an ironclad filter for this, as I was able to tweet an alternate link to the Instagram version of the tracker. 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.”

The accounts that tracked the jets of billionaires, including Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, were suspended. According to Ryan Mac of The New York Times, Sweeney has seen about 30 of his accounts banned and operates many of them.

He logged into Twitter and saw a notice that the account was permanently suspended for breaking Twitter’s rules. But the note didn’t explain how it broke the rules.

Twitter Bans on Journalists for Reporting on the Tesla CEO and CEO: Comments on Musk’s Tweets, SpaceX, and Tesla

In the weeks since the Tesla CEO took over Twitter, the @elonjet account has chronicled Musk’s many cross-country journeys from his home base near Tesla’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, to various California airports for his work at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters and his rocket company SpaceX.

It showed Musk flying to East Coast cities ahead of major events, and to New Orleans shortly before a Dec. 3 meeting there with French President Emmanuel Macron.

The journalists all had the same tenacity to report aggressively on the billionaire or criticize him in commentary, and to do so through the medium of social media. It’s without question that these bans will serve to chill free speech, not only for those who report on Twitter, but also for those who report on Musk’s other companies, such as Tesla and SpaceX.

Doxxing refers to the practice of sharing someone’s home address or other personal information online. The banned account had instead used publicly available flight data, which remain online and accessible, to track Musk’s jet.

CNN and The New York Times are among the news organizations the thin-skinned new owner banned from their accounts. Progressive journalist Aaron Rupar and pundit Keith Olbermann were also banned, as were others.

He told CNN that Elon said he was a free speech champion and he was banning journalists for exercising their free speech. I believe that question his commitment.

Vra Jourov, the vice president for values and transparency at the European Commission, said that the suspension of journalists was “worrying.” She said that the company could face penalties as a result.

Comments on Musk’s Twitter bans: a digital town square for the free press after the Covid-19 bans were confirmed Thursday night by a CNN reporter

The changes came after Musk reinstated previous Twitter rule-breakers and stopped enforcing the platform’s policies prohibiting Covid-19 misinformation.

Those reports were confirmed Thursday evening by a CNN reporter who was blocked from sharing a Mastodon profile URL and was given an automated error message that said Twitter or its partners had identified the site as “potentially harmful.”

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

A senior counsel at the advocacy group Free Press said suspending journalists based on personal animus is a dangerous precedent.

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

Germany said that freedom of the press cannot be turned on and off as you please. These journalists no longer have the ability to comment or criticize, as of today. We have a problem with that @Twitter.”

“The EU’s Digital Services Act requires respect of media freedom and fundamental rights. This is reinforced under our #MediaFreedomAct,” Jourová said in a post on Twitter, adding that Musk “should be aware of that.”

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.

The bans also raise a number of serious questions about the future of the free press on Twitter, a platform that has been referred to as a digital town square. Will news and media organizations remain on the platform, while Musk hastily bans their reporters without explanation? Will they pull their reporters? What is their content? What will major advertisers like Apple and Amazon do?

And The Post’s Executive Editor, Sally Buzbee, said: “The suspension of Drew Harwell’s Twitter account directly undermines Elon Musk’s claim that he intends to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech. Harwell’s reporting about Musk caused him to be removed from the account without warning or explanation. Our journalist should be reinstated immediately.”

Despite being banned from posting, some sort of glitch on Spaces allowed ElonJet and Harwell to show up to the chat. He definitely didn’t like that and he is still reeling from getting booed in real life at a Dave Chappelle show. After Musk appeared, Spaces was at least partially disabled. “We’re fixing a Legacy bug. Should be working tomorrow,” Musk tweeted in response to a user asking why the feature was no longer available.

That timeline may prove tricky because, as I reported last week, he got rid of most of the Spaces team through layoffs and “hardcore” purges. It is still down on the App Store. It may be available to some users, and some users can listen in on Spaces chats, but not participate.

The unfortunate thing about the Spaces shutdown is that Twitter is pretty much the only company that has managed to make live audio work on a sustained basis. The live audio feature of Facebook has been changed beyond recognition, while the live audio feature ofSpotify is a shell and the live audio feature of Clubhouse is falling from its peak. Spaces is easy to use and is in the exact right place to get a bunch of people who just want to run their mouths. But assuming that Spaces comes back, today or otherwise, there will inevitably be something else in there that pushes Musk to the edge. He will not hesitate to take it away or to institute arbitrary rules to protect himself.

“Vulnerable communities in far away countries are less important than the relationships with leaders like [India’s Narendra] Modi or others,” says an employee at an organization that was a part of Twitter’s trust and safety council, which was disbanded earlier this month. The employee asked for anonymity because they are concerned their organization may be targeted by harassment and threats like those faced by former Twitter staffers.

Some of this discrepancy may come down to how different governments react to moderation by social platforms. The company was banned by the government after it removed the threat of Biafran Sepoys. The company agreed to open a local office, pay taxes, and register as a broadcaster in exchange for being allowed to continue broadcasting despite banning the president. Nigeria is now considering legislation to regulate platforms.

Left or Right: Elon Musk’s Power Moves to Lift the Suspensions of MyPillow and Gateway Pundit Accounts

“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.

People can find reliable information in a healthy town square. A new study by Tufts University found that before Musk took over, there was a huge increase in the refuting of hate and misinformation on the social networking site.

The latest power moves by Musk are very dangerous. Tech and journalism workers that have recently been out of work should unite to create new, healthier online spaces. We have nothing to lose except our dependence on a mercurial, egotistical czar to set the terms of our public debates.

Elon Musk has started to lift the suspensions of some journalists on Twitter after re-running a poll asking if he should “Unsuspend accounts who doxxed my exact location in real-time.” (The journalists did not reveal his real-time location.) Out of the two poll options, “now” won with 58.7 percent of the responses, beating “in 7 days.” There was a lot of responses to the poll.

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. MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, Gateway Pundit editor Jim Hoft and other right-to-far-right figures were unsuspended on Friday, as noted by Shayan Sardarizadeh. Musk has said that most previously-suspended accounts would be given general amnesty due to the results of a poll.

The company would lift the suspensions after a public poll on the site, Musk said late Friday. The poll showed the majority of people were in favor of a move to unsuspend accounts immediately and the others wanted them to be suspended for seven days.

The accounts came back early Saturday. The only exception was Linette Lopez, who was suspended after all the other reporters, also with no explanation.

She pointed to reports of Musk threatening to cut off employees who spoke to the media and wouldn’t pay rent as evidence that he was back in business. Lopez described his actions as “classic Elon-going-for-broke behavior.”

The “Stillation of Twitter” and the ‘Mask’s Anomalous Stalled Journalist’s Associated Post

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.

A suspended journalist from a technology news outlet said he was banned Thursday night after sharing a screen shot of a post by another person.

The Los Angeles Police Department sent a statement to several media outlets, including the AP, about getting in touch with Musk’s team about the alleged stalking incident.

The old regime at Twitter was dominated by its own biases and so it seems like the new one has the same problem, she said.

If the suspensions cause a mass exodus of media organizations that are very active on the micro-messaging network, then the platform would have to be completely changed according to Lou’s opinion.

CBS temporarily shut down its activity on the site in November because of unknown new management, but media organizations have remained on the platform.

“We all know about the main tent pole of Twitter, and to now go after the journalists who actually saw it,” he said. “Driving journalists off Twitter is the biggest self-inflicted wound I can think of.”

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.

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