Donald Trump’s ban on U.S. Airways and the Importance of “Flavoring Freedom” in the Industrial Era

Musk says he is a free speech absolutist, and yet his actions betray this. He hasn’t made the site more equitable or more diverse. He punishes speech, has a large and vociferous fan base, and has removed all forms of accountability to the public.

“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.

Relations between the pair seem to have soured, with the men publicly feuding over the summer. Musk responded by writing, “I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset.”

What do Twitter engineers want to see in their work? The key hole view of the Twitter CEO and the problem of “unlocking the company’s potential”

More than a utility ties me to the site. Twitter hooks people in much the same way slot machines do, with what experts call an “intermittent reinforcement schedule.” Occasionally, it gets interesting at random intervals, though most of the time it is repetitive and uninteresting. Skinner’s research showed that rats and pigeons were more likely to be prone to obsessive behavior than other animals.

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

He promised to “unlock the company’s potential” after he agreed to buy it in April.

In public, he told employees at a meeting that the platform should allow all legal speech, and in private, texting an investor that free speech matters more when it’s a person you hate spouting bullshit.

Piazza said that a rise in extremism and misinformation could be bad business for a platform with a mainstream appeal. “Those communities degenerate to the point to where they’re not really usable — they’re flooded by bots, pornography, objectionable material,” says Piazza. People will gravitate to other platforms.

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

The feature on those sites is the bug, where being able to say or do things that are not allowed on mainstream social media platforms is the reason why people gravitate to them. And what we see there is that they are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.”

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has decided to offer “general amnesty” to suspended accounts starting next week — a gentler way of saying that he’s decided to welcome back some of the site’s worst and most toxic people. It’s the second major moderation decision he’s made since taking over after unbanning former President Donald Trump; both decisions were made after Musk ran an informal poll from his personal Twitter account.

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 urged Musk to hire “someone who has a savvy cultural/political view” to lead enforcement, suggesting “a Blake Masters type.” Masters is a Republican candidate in Arizona who has endorsed Trump, and was one of the people who said that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Twitter is a Medium: Who Owns Them? Musk, SpaceX, Tesla, and other Tech-Arena Influencing Platforms

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

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

In their place, Musk is now the CEO and sole director of the social platform, according to a securities filing, cementing his unique influence over one of the world’s most influential platforms at a time when he is weighing significant changes to how it operates. Musk is also the CEO of several companies, including Musk’s two current companies: SpaceX and Tesla.

And what do you make of the characterization that has come from Elon and people around him that Twitter is this kind of bloated, overstaffed, slow-moving company where everything takes way too long to ship, where there’s kind of a culture of sitting on your hands and not really doing much, and where with some quick, decisive action, you could really trim some fat and reestablish the company and make it profitable?

An exodus of advertisers will only further erode Twitter’s finances and force Musk to unload even more Tesla stock to cover the cash hole, the firm wrote.

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 aren’t going to appear with extremists, that they’re not going to be subsidizing or associating with things that would turn off potential customers, according to Carusone.

What exactly he meant is, as always, anyone’s guess. Musk told staff that the company should emulate WeChat, a Chinese “super-app” that combines social media, messages, payments, and shopping in an app.

In the United States, Chinese-style super-apps have not caught on despite attempts by other American tech companies.

Better laws could help to revive competition, restrain harmful behavior and even realize the potential of social media to strengthen American democracy rather than undermine it. In short, policymakers can ensure the question of who owns Twitter, or Instagram or TikTok, doesn’t matter quite so much.

If you want to limit the power of a specific social media network, you must make room for new ones and third-party sites that allow users to control what they see online.

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 about the dangers of social media for women has become a huge hit. The book, titled And How We Can Reclaim It, will be published in 2024. The opinions she expresses are her own. Read more opinion on CNN.

Parler, Trump and the Digital Hate Crimes: The Impact of Musk’s Doomsday Twitter Decision on the Social Media Landscape

The conservative social media company Parler said on Monday that it is being purchased by the rapper, who was temporarily suspended from the social networking site for making antisemitic statements. 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 comes to own Parler and Musk takes the reins of Twitter, an already-extant conservative ecosystem will be supercharged on social media. These men’s “free speech” policies are likely to drive away people victimized by hate online. Those who remain in these conservative spaces will become even more extreme as a result of their interactions, which could cultivate a dangerous far-right ideology that has far-reaching effects on our politics.

At the same time, he’s reinstated thousands of accounts that had been banned for breaking the rules, including Trump, neo-Nazis, white nationalists and Qanon promoters – but won’t allow conspiracy theorist Alex Jones or Kanye West, who’s been vocally antisemitic, to tweet. It is not known how that squares with Musk’s claims of embracing free speech principles.

A 2020 study of women in 51 countries by The Economist Intelligence Unit found that 38% have been victims of online violence, from stalking to doxxing to violent threats. Women of color are the ones who are most affected by it. There are also antisemitic content online. A report by the center for countering digital hate shows that a sample of 614 anti-Jewish posts on five social networks had been viewed 7.3 million times.

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 is considered to be a place where conservative views can flourish by West and non conservatives are unlikely to flock to Truth Social, since it is associated with Trump. If women, people of color and others start fleeing Twitter, that could leave it as a platform for conservatives as well. This would likely make the views of those who remain even more zealous.

On Falsehoods: How Far Right Is Twitter? Elon Musk’s Response to the CNBC Takeover of SpaceX

“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 thinks that the exchanges make them more confident.

So, when conservatives get together on social media, we can expect them to become more far right. And just as Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk-show hosts radically altered the political landscape in the 1990s in ways that laid the groundwork for Trump’s presidency, the far-right views nurtured on these social networks could have a huge impact on our country’s politics. It is easy to picture the people on these sites supporting and voting for political candidates that share their beliefs.

Even though they are sexist, misogynistic, racist or otherwise objectionable, these male owners can use their platform to amplify their own views.

Advertisers hit pause: Elon Musk wrote an open letter to advertisers just hours before cementing his acquisition of Twitter, explaining that he didn’t want the platform to become a “free-for-all hellscape.” The advertising industry makes up the vast majority of the business, and that attempt to assure them doesn’t seem to be working.

The Head of Safety and Integrity, Yoel Roth, has still been at the company. Musk has urged his followers to follow him for the most accurate understanding of what is happening with trust and safety at the company, following his recent comments about the company’s efforts to address a surge in hate rhetoric on the platform.

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. CNN Business asked for comment, but the company did not reply.

There was uncertainty surrounding the business of the company for much of the year as a result of the deal closing. After agreeing to buy the company in April, Musk spent months trying to get out of the deal after he was made aware of allegations by a company employee.

Even though Musk is in a bad situation of having to relinquish his daily control of the company, it might please some of his supporters who would love for him to return to his job at the electric car company.

CEO Jay Sullivan’s Twitter Absoluteness After Musk Decided to Buy Twitter (and Its Walls, Not His Own)

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

Since Musk suddenly proclaimed he actually wanted to buy Twitter again earlier this month, Twitter’s most internally visible leader has been Jay Sullivan, the general manager of consumer and revenue product. He has been holding regular listening sessions with employees, but on Thursday, shortly after employees received a calendar invite for a “quick informal check in” call with him at 7:35PM ET, the meeting was cancelled “until further notice” without explanation.

Many employees at the micro-blogging site note that the CEO, Parag Argawal, hasn’t been seen recently, despite Musk soured on after he first started talking about joining the board. One current worker at the company said that he had been completely absent for weeks. The person said he has ghosted them. The blind section of Twitter, which is an anonymous message board for tech workers, has similar comments about Argawal.

Insider reports that the execs received handsome payouts for their trouble, with the highest amount of money going to Agrawal, Segal, and Personette.

Musk was questioned in court on Nov. 16 about how he splits his time among Tesla and his other companies, including SpaceX and Twitter. Musk had to testify in Delaware’s Court of Chancery over a shareholder’s challenge to Musk’s potentially $55 billion compensation plan as CEO of the electric car company.

The company filing states that all previous members of Twitter’s board, including recently ousted CEO Parag Agrawal and chairman Bret Taylor, are no longer directors “in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement.” The filing said that Musk was the sole director of the social network.

Twitter HQ Hasn’t Been Formed: Elon Musk and the Future of Social Media Altruism, or Should Facebook Be Formed?

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.

Over the weekend, Musk smeared Twitter’s former head of safety, Yoel Roth, who features prominently in the documents, with homophobic tropes common in anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theories. He also attacked Anthony Fauci, who Musk claims will feature in the future installments of the suspended account of his verified account.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School’s associate professor of marketing said the note is a change from Musk’s previous position about the free speech rights of social media.

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.

There is a lot of activity going on atTwitter HQ by the leader of the company, Elon Musk. He has talked about implementing some big changes at his $44 billion acquisition, which includes deleted a conspiracy theory. Here’s what’s happened so far:

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 visiting the headquarters of the social network this week was very different from his suggestion that the building should be turned into a homeless shelter.

Thursday’s note to advertisers shows a newfound emphasis on advertising revenue, especially a need for Twitter to provide more “relevant ads” — which typically means targeted ads that rely on collecting and analyzing users’ personal information.

Is Musk Really Stand Up for His Contribution to the Media? The Case for Meddling with the Media Landscape as Seen by Friedersdorf

Friedersdorf goes on to argue that Musk’s journalistic critics should give him more benefit of the doubt; after all, he did ban Kanye West, he refused to reinstate Alex Jones, he’s right that Twitter helped suppress the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop that later turned out to be at least partly true, and maybe his idea of amnesty for suspended accounts is not such a bad way to reset the clock and rebuild overall trust in the platform. But I think that strays toward both-sides-ism and misses the point.

The article first appeared in theReliable Sources newsletter. The evolving media landscape is chronicled in the daily digest.

Musk himself contaminated the information environment he now reigns over, and he is trying to dismantle the little infrastructure that was built to help users sift through the chaos. He plans to strip public figures and institutions of their blue verified badges if they do not pay, according to recent news reports.

Charging for verified badges might appear at first glance as a business story. The move will have a big impact on the information landscape. It will make it more difficult to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic accounts.

The right has for years lashed out at “blue checks,” whom in their eyes represent elitist gatekeepers who control the conversation, even though many conservatives also don blue badges. Taking away those free blue checks and the authority they give upon it will be welcomed by some conservatives.

The Impact of Twitter on Newswire and Newswire: Why It Matters What You Read, Where You Get Your Information, and How You Can Smell It

The best thing you can do to SAVE social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email, and reduce hacking is to authenticating users, says Walter Isaacson, Musk’s authorized biographer.

But if it seems like we’re taking a long time talking about this, again, worth saying that because Twitter is where so many folks go to get their news and information, it matters that we know who is who on that service. The risk is that there will be more misinformation, confusion, hoaxes, and scam on the social media platform if they start charging for it.

At their best, these two Twitter styles are complementary. The style of Nonsense Twitter bleeds into Newswire tweeting, and they do things such as turning government consumer protection agencies into memelords. There’s even room for the occasional dose of chaos, like DPRK News: the fake North Korean propaganda feed that’s fooled several news outlets, including The Verge.

The blue verification checkmark was the original purpose. 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 your identity had been verified. The scammers would have a harder time pretending to be you.

It might be an idea for Musk’s new plan. If you’re Beyoncé or McDonald’s or the Associated Press, $240 a year isn’t much to pay for preserving that sense of trust.

What Happened on Twitter? Jay Sullivan, Jay Calacanis, Nick Caldwell, Mark Zuckerberg, Jay Musk and the Metamorphosis of Twitter

Jay Sullivan removed the company and his title from the general manager’s social media profile, as well as changing his bio to say “formerTwitterExec.” Nick Caldwell, the general manager of core technology, changed his biography to say he was a former CEO of the company. 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.

Earlier this week, Calacanis posted a picture of himself in New York with the marketing and advertising community. He has asked about the platforms subscription and bookmark features.

A new content moderation council is being set up by the new owner to help determine what is and is not permissible on the site. For now, he has stressed that the platform’s policies have not yet changed.

Bluesky has received at least $13 million in funding from the social networking service, and Jack Dorsey is still a member of the board. There was precious little to show for this investment until only a few weeks ago, when Bluesky unveiled an “improved and simplified” version of its platform, called the AT Protocol, and technical documentation that showed developers how to build on top of the platform. It also set up a waitlist for its app, which will act as a browser for the network and enter private beta testing soon. Bluesky is now independent of Twitter—so as to best provide “public benefit”—but whether or not the dollars keep flowing will be up to Musk.

We’re going to talk to two Twitter employees, or at least two people who were Twitter employees, as of Wednesday morning — not sure what their status is going to be by the time you hear this — about what’s happening inside of Twitter. We will let you hear them, or hear them to be exact, a version of them that has been created using Artificial Intelligence.

House of the Dragon on HBO: How to Subscribe to Get notified when you’re in trouble with Twitter, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

Tori wants you to encourage your male-presenting friends interested in fathering children to watch House of the Dragon on HBO. Mike recommends the new album from Natalia Lafourcade, De Todas las Flores. Lauren recommends reevaluating your relationship with Twitter, and social media in general.

The person can be found on the internet, via social networks. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by a person named Boone Ashworth. Solar Keys is our theme music.

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 use an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, which can be used to find 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.

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Talk Out: An Insider’s View on the Tech Industry at the Twelfth Roundtable

The transcript was made using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

We usually give a bigger sense of what is going on in Silicon Valley by bringing to you news from around the tech industry. 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’re going to have a normal interview with them. But instead of playing you their voice, which would de-anonymize them and risk getting them in trouble or getting them fired, we are going to transcribe what they say. And then, we’re going to feed those words back into a text-to-speech AI generator and play you an AI-generated version of their voice.

But before we get to those interviews, let’s just go over what’s been happening at Twitter this week. It’s been one crazy thing after another. You reported Friday that engineers at the company were told to print out all of the code that they wrote in the last 30 to 60 days for review.

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

What is the Difference between a Coder and a Robot? Why Does an Engineer Want to Print Out Their Code? A Case Study with Elon and his People

We said when we started the show that we wouldn’t use artificial intelligence unless there was a really good reason and a limited capacity. And now, twice in five episodes —

You were wrong about the not being a car show and about the not being a show filled with robot podcastsers. So two strikes for him.

That’s true. 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. So when I got this tip that Elon and his people were telling people, print out your last 30 to 60 days of code, I thought, well, that can’t be true.

And in fact, two of my sources are like, uh, Casey, that doesn’t sound right to me. OK? When I got on the phone with two people who had told me that I was incorrect, they told me that he actually wanted people to print out their code.

There is a reason why this is funny. Why does this interest you? This is a weird way to evaluate how good someone is as a software engineer. People are not evaluated by the amount of code they have written.

If you show up with a printout of 100 pages of code, that’s not necessarily a good thing. Maybe you should have eliminated some code for the company. And then, sort of streamlining it. So —

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

How much do we need to know about Twitter? The FTC audit of a tech company, and what are we going to do with it?

The FTC plans to audit the company this quarter, we’re told, and employees have doubts that Twitter has the necessary documentation in place to pass inspection. “FTC compliance is concerning,” one says.

It’s like, two hours later, they get — all the Twitter folks get this new notification. It’s like, change of plans. They still want to look at your code. If you have printed out code, we need you to shred it, even if you bring it in on your laptop.

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. Now, one thing that we should say is that the Elon folks are obsessed with figuring out who is a good engineer at the company, right? So he worships at the engineer’s altar. He thinks he’s an engineer.

And so I’ve talked to folks who are getting calls late at night from random Tesla engineers, saying things like, who’s really good on your team? Who are the top performers? Who are the low performers?

This code printout exercise was part of a system that they had been attempting to figure out who at this company are we going to keep the service running for?

And who can we lay off? That’s sort of the unspoken piece of this. OK, so we have this code printing fiasco. Then, on Sunday, you reported that Twitter was considering tying verifications to Twitter Blue subscriptions, and explain what that means.

You can get access to a lot of other features if you subscribe to the service. You can see the top articles of the day. You can make use of a new test feature that allows you to modify a post.

Yeah. Stephen King, the horror author, wondered how much it would cost to keep his blue check. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”

Stephen King has written about some of the most terrifying horrors that can be found, and nothing frightened him more than the idea of paying for his verification badges.

A lot of journalists are verified that way. But there’s also a process. You can ask to be verified if you’re a celebrity or something. We should say that the verification is about a status marker rather than about it.

It’s not about, this person’s 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.

This is a necessary feature of the platform and I agree with you. Every platform that is social in some way has a feature like this — Facebook, Instagram, Snap, TikTok, right? You have to say that this is the real Oprah, but that is not the real Oprah.

Right. And I think it’s fair to say that over the years, like, people have come to see these checkmarks next to your Twitter name as sort of a status symbol, right? Like, it means that you’re someone, it means that it —

It’s right, exactly. The idea that people who were verified cared so much about being verified and staying verified, they would pay for the privilege came out of the war room. And so that’s where we get this idea of $20 a month for verification.

Immediately following that, there is a wholeTwitter timeline meltdown where users are saying “no way will we pay $20 a month” That’s more than I pay for Netflix. That’s more than I pay for YouTube.

For them, this appears to be a way to make money, while at the same time punishing the blue checkmarks, which is very different from how other social media platforms treat their creators.

I think it would be a good idea for most social networks to verify the identity of anyone who wanted to. Like, that would be good for the credibility of the ecosystem overall. But it does come with a lot of questions that, so far, have mostly gone unanswered.

It does create a lot of economic value for people like you and me. It doesn’t matter to us. News organizations pay for all kinds of software solutions that help them do various things. Maybe there’s a chance that Twitter Blue could be part of that.

I am not sure if they will have some kind of separate legacy verification program for government entities that are not going to pay $8 a month. There is still a lot of details to be worked out.

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

Life Under The Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: How Well Do They Get Their Social Media Control? A Pedestrian’s Perspective

For me, it’s back at it again at the Krispy Kreme, one of the great moments of culture for the past 10 years. The culture has also moved on at the same time. The code base is 10 years old, and the idea that it is going to be revived and turned into a TikTok competitor is a really steep hill.

I would say, like, not an immediate revenue driver. That’s something they’re just going to have to put a ton of effort into. You’re essentially launching a new social network within Twitter. That is a very heavy lift. I think it could be fun to have a very popular American short-form video network that wasn’t owned by Facebook or YouTube. But we’ll just 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

What Happens When Two Twitter Employees Speak Out During the First Week of March Break? A Tale of Two Jobs, Two News Stories and How We’re Living

That is correct. They were told that they have days to ship this. If this does not ship by this date, in some cases, a date next week, you will be fired. If it’s past the deadline, you’ll be fired.

So people are sleeping very little. They are sleeping in their offices, and frankly, some of them are terrified. Some of them have 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.

Welcome to “Hard Fork,” Mockingjay. So it is about 10:00 AM Pacific on Wednesday right now. How’s your day going so far? Anything notable happen today?

Every day seems to have the same process, with everyone waking up to more panicked messages via different channels. I think most people have been smart enough to move off of Slack and into other channels. We have had no communication internally, so it is this up- and-down of chasing rumors.

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. We wake up. We look at our various channels, we look at what our friends are telling us, and we hope to make it through another day.

It was very 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. There have been many rumor mill-based scares.

There was supposed to be layoffs on Monday. They didn’t happen. Now, the rumor has it it’s going to be Friday. It’s exhausting. I am aware that we are paid well.

Most of us have some savings to sit on. 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: A Primer and an Inconsistent Report on Code Review Efforts

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. What trickles down to us hasn’t given us any information. Comms is incredibly sparse. There is really nobody answering, even messages in the company-wide channels.

When you wake up, it is almost like a scavenger hunt across seven different apps, to find 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 have seen examples of people saying that code was written entirely by them and not crediting people who collaborated with them, all in hope that they will be on some preferred status list.

Absolutely. What they are asking for is volume, not quality. So everybody is sharing every little bit of code they have ever written, no matter how insignificant or garbage it is. It’s [SIGHS]

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: A Novel Message from a Manager about Working in a Noisy Environment and the Power of Data-Driven Computing

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 any project that you can.

I want to read you a post that someone had sent me from Blind. These chats are pseudonymous and you can have them on Blind if you log in with your work email.

And multiple people have sent me this post. I want to know if you have seen it. And I’m not going to read the whole thing. But the headline is “I can’t cope.”

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

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Seek Out: A Tale Of Two Bodies and Three Things About Me and My Occultations

I am on the team that is working to make all of the dreams of Elon come true. Management have repeatedly threatened to fire us if we miss delivery, even if it’s totally outside our control. If we don’t work at weekends, we’re gone. If we take PTO or leave, we’re gone.

People are working ridiculous hours. I am working around 20 hours per day. I’m waking up in the night to attend status calls. Even when I’m not working, I can’t stop worrying about it. I can not cope. I’m an absolute mess. At a point in my life where I am at a breaking point. This was after only a few days of Elon.

People who are ignored until they are fired and those who are pulled into task forces are both in one camp. I think the better place is to be in the people who are being ignored and will be fired.

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 Example of the Immigrant-Immigrant Correspondence

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.

And I sincerely hope that there is care taken for people who are on visas. Everyone I know who is here on a visa has no idea what will happen to them. They haven’t been told 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. These are people who are trying to immigrate to this country and have gainful employment and do a good job, who are highly skilled.

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

Twitter and the First Five Years: What Have We Learned about the Last Five Years? And What Are the Worst Parts of Its History?

Twitter has gone through phases in its lifetime. But at least leading up to this whole fiasco, I can’t think of a better place to work. People were respectful. People were honest. And people had legitimate goals.

So I do not think, though, it is because engineers and people are sitting on their hands. The way this company is structured makes it difficult to get anything done even if it is trying to get the appropriate approvals by using Byzantine processes. There is some truth in that statement. This is the absolute wrong way to deal with 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 would love to think that everybody on Twitter is going to leave in protest. A lot of people may stay in the situation. But it’s going to be interesting to see who stays.

Less than a quarter of all advertisers on the platform stopped spending in the first fortnight of January, according to data given to CNN by digital marketing analysis firm Pathmatics.

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What have they Don’t Say? What Have They Learned Before They Came Around?

It was frightening and relieved. It will be scary to not have income. But at the same time, I hope that all of us who get fired will just get to chill out for a day or so, and then wake up on a couple of days later and say, all right, got to get that resume out there. Got to be energized about these other jobs, because right now it’s sucking the life out of us.

Uncertainty. There are people who aren’t even certain if they should continue doing the work they’re doing. The pile of unknowns and what have been reported on leads to a general constant stress, because we don’t really know what is going on.

I mean, even in the lowest parts of engineering, people would raise privacy concerns or potential misuse of new features. And their only job is to write random code that no one’s ever going to see, just like the piping behind the scenes. And the company just always kind of had a culture of letting people speak to these things. It caught us on issues before it even made it to the public.

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

Life Under Musk Two Tweetees Speak Out: Why he Just Came In and Hasn’t He Solved His Problem?

That is complicated because no one knew about it. I suppose there was a certain sort of groupthink about the guy, that he was not a nice person. There were a lot of people who believed he should have been banned a long time ago for his behavior. And everything just sort of came from there.

I mean, he’s certainly been more aggressively attaching himself to various political viewpoints and their talking points. And if it serves him, he’ll lean into it.

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. When they say there is probably too many managers, I don’t disagree with them. Delivery may be a little too slow. Management has never been the strong point of the company.

So that aside, you don’t go through any change like this without some massive structural change. If he just came in and did the same thing, like, 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 Speak Out: Does It Really Matter When We Are Moving Faster than We’ve Been?

OK. So there’s an idea there that Twitter should be moving faster than it has been. We have been hearing that you will be fired if you don’t ship this thing by next Monday. What do you think will happen to you when you hear you have a three or four-day deadline?

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’s a little stressful. Might put in a couple extra hours. It needs to be done. Makes sense.

But I think the major differentiator here is just the sheer scale. I would not be asked to completely retool the social network by Friday. That’s just completely absurd.

The amount of engineers that need to be brought in is like raising the Titanic from the bottom of the ocean.

Because it’s not as if there’s just a certain set of code that needs to be written. You have to coordinate across a lot of people, 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. We have to figure out the whole services in the company.

Yeah. If a person came to you, and said they wanted to redoTwitter Blue, what kind of time frame would you be given, so that it would seem reasonable to do that?

It depends. The platform is fairly slow and a lot of infrastructure changes would need to be made. We’re more concerned with reliability than we are moving fast.

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 The Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: A Social Problem at a Large Scale, Free and Non-Monetary Social Network

And not only is this an engineering problem, it’s a social problem. We have 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. What happens with major releases at a social network is that we change this feature, but what about the other 10 things? And you’re essentially saying it sounds like that these deadlines are so short that this stuff may be released without any of that testing or scrutiny, that sort of trying to figure out what could go wrong. They are going to be free.

Yeah. There is a section about privacy and data. And it’s basically, we’re not doing anything with user data, so we don’t worry about that. There is 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’s Two Twitter Employees Say: Where Are We Going? What Do You Think? How Will You Want to Make Sense Of It?

So there’s 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 that was communicated was, ” find something cool that you like.” Hopefully Musk likes it because of its functional qualities.

Think about it. If you present him an idea and he thinks it’s cool, he wants it done within a week. You sacrificed every team around you.

God. What do you think about the various product changes proposed by Musk and his friends, such as the $8 a month fee for verification on the micro blogging service, or the return of the looping video chatting application, short messaging service. What do you make of those proposals? And do you think they’re good ideas?

He made one of the first decisions, which was to change the view to the Explore page. And I don’t know this for certain, but my basic understanding of the goal here was that we might even be able to serve ads to people that aren’t logged in.

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. Maybe you see some ads if you linger and browse through some tweet. I believe a lot of people would agree that he made a quick change that makes sense.

The Vine one isn’t the worst idea. The cynical part of me says that it’s too little, too late. You know? TikTok is TikTok, and that’s a mighty hill to climb.

But sure. I mean, we do have all the original content from Vine. So marketing-wise, the nostalgia factor is huge, which gives us kind of a foothold to at least launch something.

But we at least have the media, and trying to build a product like that, we’ve been working on that for a while. I’m not sure if every tech company has tried. Is this something we can do? There’s been mock-ups.

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

Life Under Musk Two Tweetees Speak Out: What Do You Really Want to Work For? Why Do You Wanna Work At Twitter?

It would be the most boring. You could probably make a movie out of walking around and not having anything to do.

There is no communication. So the only people talking are people in a corner. It isn’t like the whole company went to an all-hands meeting to learn about what’s happening. It is everyone asking if we are ever going to see him. Is it best to do my work? Do they even serve lunch anymore?

We do not know what may happen to your job. As you think about it, do you want to be working at Twitter in three months? Or do you feel like you’re ready to be somewhere else?

Culture is real. I mean, culture seeps through the product. The way the company behaved was a result of people caring so much. That can be hard to take in its own way.

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

What’s going on at Twitter? Is it made sense to talk about what happened in the early Musk era? A conversation with Kevin Roose

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.

He is reading the news to find out about the work hours. He’s been speculating about the kind of labor law lawsuits that will come out.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who previously voiced supported Musk’s takeover of the platform, questioned the policy, saying on Twitter that it “doesn’t make sense.”

You can get big scoops about what is going on at Twitter from people who want to send them to you. His email address is Kevin. Roose —

On “Hard Fork” by D.A. Land, E.M. Szuchman, J.C. Miranda and B.J. Powell

“Hard Fork” is produced by Davis Land. We’re edited by Paula Szuchman. He fact checked the episode. The show was engineered by a man.

Dan Powell wrote the original music. Special thanks to Jeffrey Miranda and all the people who made this possible.

Jobs’ Road Map to Silicon Valley Revisited: Turning Apple Into a Profit Machine and Turning Its Corners on Twitter

At the time, Jobs had been developing personal computers for 20 years, his entire adult life. He knew the company he was running because he had founded it and led the team that created its flagship product. He left Apple and founded another computer company that focused on internet and next- generation operating systems. Also, he was Steve Jobs. If anyone could quickly turn around the near-bankrupt computer giant, it would be him. It took him many months to come up with his plan. 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. In 1998 Jobs did not include the post-PC future on his road map.

Musk need not look farther than his own successful enterprises to realize the absurdity of his haste. When he took over Tesla in 2008, the company was already five years old. After 17 years after it was incorporated, Musk came up with a plan to turn the company around. Musk deservedly gets a lot of credit for what Tesla has achieved—and for, among other things, his persistence. The other company of Musk is privately held and doesn’t report earnings. But making rocket ships is the ultimate test of patience—it takes years to even launch successfully, and cutting corners to go faster can wind up killing people.

In a letter to employees obtained by multiple media outlets, the company said employees would find out by 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time if they had been laid off. An email said no, but did not say how many people would lose their jobs.

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

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

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

A class action lawsuit was filed Thursday in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of one employee who was laid off and three others who were locked out of their work accounts. It alleges that, by failing to give the required notice, it is in violation of the law, and that they intend to lay off more employees.

The layoffs are bad news for social media companies because they are having to contend with advertisers scaling back and new players threatening the older classes of social media platforms.

Meta Platforms Inc., Facebook’s parent company, recently posted its second quarterly revenue decline in history and its shares are trading at their lowest levels since 2015. Meta’s disappointing results followed weak earnings reports from Google parent Alphabet and even Microsoft.

What will the Federal Reserve decide when interest rate data arrives? An investor’s perspective on Powell’s remarks on stock market collapsing

CNN Business had a version of the story. Before the Bell newsletter. You aren’t a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.

What will be done at the Federal Reserve’s meeting in December? Fed officials say that they will use hard data to make their next decision and analysts don’t have to speculate all they want.

That means key housing, labor, and inflation reports will likely have outsized effects on the market as investors speculate about what they might mean for the future of interest rates.

What is happening? The Federal Reserve Chair’s words on Wednesday scuttled investors’ hopes of an interest rate pivot and sent stocks plunging. Powell mentioned that the Fed has a lot of work to do to fight inflation. “It’s very premature, in my view, to think about or be talking about pausing.”

Powell added an important caveat. The Fed could start to slow the pace of those painful hikes as soon as December. “Our decisions will depend on the totality of incoming data and their implications for the outlook for economic activity and inflation,” Powell said on Wednesday.

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

Premarket Stocks Trading With More Jobs, Lower Bounds on Labor and Price Increases in the September U.S. Consumer Price Index

The report is expected to show the economy added another 200,000 jobs in October, but still a very solid number as demand for employment continues to overwhelm the availability of labor.

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

There is a possible upside: Another jobs report in December is expected ahead of the Fed meeting. If both reports show a downward trajectory in employment, then that will be enough to make Fed officials more comfortable.

Core CPI prices, which exclude oil and food, rose 0.6% in September month-over-month, matching August’s pace and coming in well above expectations of a 0.4% increase, not a great sign for the Fed. And analysts expect to see another large 0.5% increase in October.

Changes in the prices of goods and services are tracked by PCE. The Fed believes the measure accounts for a broader range of purchases from a broader range of buyers, and that is more accurate than the inflation rate.

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

The Wall and the WARN Act: The current lords and peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark

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

The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.95% last week, up from 3.09% just a year ago, and elevated borrowing costs are leading to a decline in demand.

Powell said the housing market was very overheated for two years after the Pandemic. “We do understand that that’s really where a very big effect of our policies is.”

The Bank of England raised interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point on Thursday, the biggest hike in 33 years, as it attempts to fight soaring inflation.

A two-year recession would be longer than the one that followed the 2008 global financial crisis, though the Bank of England said that any declines in GDP heading into 2024 would likely be relatively small.

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

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

The Rise of Hate Speech and Incitements on Social Media: How Musk Has Changed His Ownership of the Micro-Messenger Service

Several companies, including General Mills and the North Face, have said they are suspending their ads on social networks because of Musk. Musk said that the growth of advertiser spending has led to a drop in revenue. He blasted the situation as “extremely messed up!”

Felix Ndahinda was concerned when he heard that Musk would free the bird last week.

It’s obvious that the rise of hate speech and conspiracy theories on social media could have contributed to the increase in violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “It is a very difficult thing to work out the casual link from a tweet to violence,” says Ndahinda. “But we have many actors making public incitements to commit crime, and then later those crimes are committed.”

How the company will proceed is still not known. Musk had a meeting with civil-rights leaders about his plan to put a council in charge of policies for hate speech. 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.

There will likely be massive and widespread consequences for areas where the company’s moderation and compliance capacities have been decimated by the company’s new leader.

This fragmentation of the public conversation across many more platforms also has implications for how social media can be misused. It’s making life more complicated, both for threat actors trying to spread propaganda and amplify polarization, and for the people trying to investigate those threat actors, whether they are journalists or researchers or the companies themselves.

“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.”

To find out how Musk’s ownership changed on the micro-messaging service, researchers looked at the 20 most popular posts from March 1 to November 13 of this year and sorted them by their political views, anti-LGBTQ+ and racist. They then reviewed the language of those tweets in each of the three categories and attempted to judge their true intent.

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

Kathy had her account suspended Sunday after changing 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? Lol,” Griffin joked afterward on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform where she set up an account last week.

Twitter’s Head of Product Safety and Integrity: Why the “Pseudodrama” around Corporate Takeover is Suppressing the Oxygen in the Room

After using the same screen name as Musk in support of Democratic candidates on Saturday, the actor reverted back to her real name. “Okey-dokey.” I had fun and I think I made my point.

It said the service would be available in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It wasn’t available on Sunday, and there was no indication when it would be available. Esther Crawford told The Associated Press that it was coming soon, but not yet.

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

Edward Perez was the director of product management at the time. 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. He feels he has to speak out, as Musk guts the staff and allows users to pay to get a coveted blue check on the platform.

“I really am concerned that it feels like the drama around corporate takeover is sucking up all the oxygen in the room,” says Perez, who is now a board member at the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan group devoted to election security and integrity. That focus on the Musk psychodrama “is resulting in potentially inadequate attention on these election-related issues,” he adds.

David Kaye is a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine and a former UN special rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression.

Tiny Talk Town: Defending Violations of Twitter Rules against the Musk-Mumford Era at 10 PM on Thursday, April 22

A relatively small group of people power Twitter. The internal company research shows that heavy users who use English are less likely to account for 10% of the monthly users but are more likely to generate 70% of the global revenue.

In the past, Twitter had required the removal of violative tweets for users to regain access to their accounts, but the journalists in this case strongly dispute that their posts violated Twitter rules.

Musk said that tiny talk felt like it was coming from his own mind, and he fired off at 10 pm last Thursday. Congratulations: We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk.

Quiet quitting is rejecting the obligation to go above and beyond in the workplace and instead opting for a life away from work, which depletes your own funds. 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 one, you have to find a way to use it without being used.

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 journalists.) In reality, nearly half of Twitter users tweet less than five times a month, and most of their posts are replies, not original tweets. They check in on current events or celebrity news and then go about their lives. They’re “lurkers.”

Lurking isn’t doomscrolling, a practice (and phrase) that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when many people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. To sit back and observe is a kind of simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos of NewTwitter. If you are checking in, close your app or browser tab. Send a tweet, then disengage. keep an eye on it during games Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. Save your most original thoughts for another time, another place.

Twitter Blue: The Story of Wall Street, Wall Street Wall Stylophiles, and Wall Street Cyclists: What Has It Learned About Musk?

According to a Wall Street analyst, Musk’s management of Twitter, including the banning of multiple journalists, has severely damaged market sentiment around him, and could cause a backlash from advertisers.

It doesn’t take a cut of the money you send to people you like, despite the fact that there is a way to send cash through tips. It does take a cut of revenue from Super Follows, which is something you can do with a subscription service. Apple takes a bigger slice of the revenue from in-app purchases.

Even though the economy is doing well, a lot of advertisers wouldn’t want to come back to someone with that attitude. I don’t know if users want to stay in that environment because of the new layer of hoaxing and scam. Billionaire Mark Cuban has already complained that the influx of new checkmarked users has made his mentions miserable. Cuban is one of the reasons people stay on the platform.

The employee cited the case of brands being impersonated and top advertisers deserting the platform as examples of how bad Twitter Blue’s relaunch was.

The banks will take an immediate loss if they off of Twitter’s debt. If the market conditions change, Banks may want to hold on to the debt. 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. But I do wonder how long they want to hold these loans and who might buy them. Banks cannot place the debt, that probably makes it hard for any tech buy outs to get done.

From the outside, it might not look like much has changed in the repurposed 1970s office block that serves as Twitter’s European headquarters. But inside, the mood has soured.

There is no list of people who have been fired. Employees have been using the workplace messaging app slack to see if their colleagues are still working. Dublin is not the only European office to be affected by layoffs. Social media posts show employees in both London and Belgium being let go. It’s unclear if employees in Twitter’s other European hubs—Hamburg, Madrid, Utrecht, Paris, Berlin and Manchester—have also been affected.

The Twitter Files: a peek at the sausage-making of content moderation on Twitter after Musk bought Twitter and left his tweet to SpaceX Starlink

There is no bombshell in the The Twitter Files but they provide a peek at the sausage-making of content moderation.

In just the last week, one of the most influential social networks has laid off half of its workforce, lost powerful advertisers and launched new features that were meant to compensate for it.

After the gray badges went into effect, Musk suddenly said that he had killed the feature, forcing subordinates to explain the reversal.

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

“@elonmusk, from one entrepreneur to another, for when you have your customer service hat on. Mark Cuban said he spent too much time muting all the newly purchased checkmarks in an attempt to make them useful again.

According to Musk, SpaceX Starlink bought a small ad package to test the effectiveness of advertising on twitter in Australia and Spain.

The person looks exhausted. The German programmer is behind Mastodon, a new distributed platform that has exploded in popularity in recent weeks, thanks to Musk’s ownership of the platform.

Mastodon allows people to use open-source software to host a community that is less like a platform and more like a service with its own rules. Together those servers form a collective of interlinked communities dubbed the “Fediverse.” People can join a server that matches their interests and community standards, but also connect with users on other servers, or block all content from a particular server completely.

Rodti MacLeary started a Mastodon instance, mas.to, in 2019. It had 35,000 users by November of that year. But since Elon Musk bought Twitter and unleashed one chaotic decision after another, people have signed up for mas.to and other instances, or servers, in surging waves that have sometimes kicked them briefly offline. The influx of users is propelled by each haphazard policy update Musk professes from his own Twitter account. Last week, the owner of the micro-blogging site suspended several high-profile journalists and accused them of dozing him, then banned any links to any other social media competitors, including Mastodon. The mas.to instance had 130,000 total users and 67,000 active users by Tuesday. That is a small percentage of the number of users of Twitter. But it’s a heavy lift for someone like MacLeary, who has a day job and no paid staff, and has funneled time and money into mas.to as a labor of love. As a decentralized, open-source social media platform, Mastodon is markedly different in its construction from Big Tech platforms like Meta, Twitter, and YouTube. That’s part of its appeal, and it’s working its way from a niche into the mainstream consciousness: Mastodon now has more than 9,000 instances and some nearly 2.5 million active monthly users.

The Mastodon founder spoke out for the first time since the link ban, and he mentioned that he had power as the owner of the micro-communications company.

People want to hear that the growth has been great, but I don’t want to be a part of it. There are more fires to put out. It’s incredibly stressful. I’m pulling 14-hour workdays, sleeping very little, and eating very little.

The whole story coincides with the process of releasing a new version of the Mastodon software. You have to put a lot of focus into that. Suddenly, you also need to respond to press inquiries and operate social media accounts in order to take advantage of the opportunity.

At an objective level, it was gratifying. I would like to be able to enjoy the fact that many people are using Mastodon, like Stephen Fry. I don’t have enough time to enjoy that. There has been an increase in funds due to all the new Patreon donations in the past 10 days, it’s been unprecedented.

How to Fool the Machine: Musk’s Twitter Ad Buy, and Why he Might Disturbat the Platform he Built for Starlink

Musk confirmed on Twitter Monday that his aerospace company, SpaceX, bought a package to advertise its Starlink internet service on Twitter, though he downplayed the size of the ad buy.

It’s never been a good advertising platform, so I always thought a subscription business would be a better way to promote the service. 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.

Some 625 of the top 1,000 Twitter advertisers, including major brands such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, Jeep, Wells Fargo and Merck, had pulled their ad dollars as of January, according to estimates from Pathmatics, based on data running through January 25.

A platform is better than an app, or so the theory goes, because you can use a platform to build multiple apps, or enable other developers and companies to build apps from which you might take a 30 percent cut. The failure of the proprietary platform to work should be a sign that it is too risky to trust regardless of how strong the code might be. The liability of intellectual property that makes things proprietary in the first place is also a liability that compromises everything a company might create, because it allows billionaires to kill them. If Musk actually destroys it, that would be a case study in how to destroy something, just as a billionaire might do. Our communication channel is at risk because of the vaccine.

Even though there is no guarantee that capturing the online world’s attention will lead to revenue growth, there is at least some chance that it will.

Social Media Should Not Be Censored by Right-Leaning Particles: The Case of Dan Sheehan and His Novel, Crowdfunding Through the Tweets

Musk and his allies promote these thread as bombshell revelations that proves that conservatives were muzzled because of their political views. Republicans have a claim that social media companies censor them despite ample evidence to the contrary. The researchers at the micro-blogging site found that its computer software favored right-leaning political content.

And Hickey says data tracking 270 of Truth Social’s popular accounts show posts and engagements are trending upward over time, showing a “solid growth trajectory.”

Many users followed suit, tweeting short eulogies 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 I got a few job offers in the copywriting space as a result. That’s how I paid the bills for a very long time,” he says.

Through copywriting, Sheehan was able to dedicate time to writing his novel, a project that was made a reality in part by crowdfunding through his large Twitter following.

He says that the ability to keep the lights on, the bills paid, while writing the book, and then have the book reach that audience of 100,000 people directly, none of that could have been done through traditional means.

Twitter Shutdown – Elion Activism Trump Career: Reach of the Sick Community Through Research, Research Observations, and a Conversation with Muse

“We’ve tended to work within the constraints we’ve had for so long.” There will be new ways to use data from the micro-blogging site. I think that a lot of it is going to be better spent on other platforms.

There are not a lot of ways for us to get our names out there. After starting her career writing music reviews on Facebook, she eventually found a job writing reviews for a local TV station. From there, her audience grew, and she continued getting job offers, which led her to her job today. Rasilla worries that future journalists won’t have similar opportunities.

The diversity problem continues and I don’t know how the communities are going to find each other. She says that the way she saw it was throughTwitter, where she could follow people and read their work.

For several years, Wendi Muse was an active member of ‘Disability Twitter’ as a candidate for a PhD. To help people get masks, she posted resources as well as sent some from the personal inventory she had amassed. She noticed that the demand for N95 masks was going up in the sick community.

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

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

The Twitter Files, Part Duex!, Part II: Musk and Weiss discuss a “Shadowbanned” Tweet

It has been crucial because it has been a way for me and my family to learn more about the disease and for other people who are less fortunate to have access to these resources.

Even as alternative sites such as Mastodon have seen a recent influx in users, the potential end of Twitter would be a big loss for Muse.

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

The move from Musk came after he posted an unscientific poll on his personal Twitter account that concluded Friday night with 59% of participants voting in favor of immediately restoring the accounts.

It will be possible for users to find out if the company restricts how many other users can view their post if it has an option. In doing so, Musk is effectively seizing on an issue that has been a rallying cry among some conservatives who claim the social network has suppressed or “shadowbanned” their content.

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

Musk forced remaining employees to take a pledge to become “extremely hardcore” in their work, and stopped enforcing Twitter’s policy against Covid-19 misinformation.

The second set of the so-called Twitter Files, shared by journalist Bari Weiss on Twitter, focused on how the company has restricted the reach of certain accounts, tweets or topics that it deems potentially harmful, including by limiting their ability to appear in the search or trending sections of the platform.

In both cases the internal documents are provided directly to the journalists by Musk’s team. Musk shared Weiss’ thread on Friday and captioned it, the ‘The Twitter files, Part Duex!’ Along with two popcorn expressions.

How did Donald Trump feed the flames? It wasn’t really what the media had to say about the presidential term, but he did talk about it

Weiss offered several examples of right-leaning figures who had moderation actions taken on their accounts, but it’s not clear if such actions were equally taken against left-leaning or other accounts.

At the time when Trump was inaugurated, I told coworkers in the newsroom that we shouldn’t cover everything he said or did. A president’s every word was assumed to be a signal of the future policy and was reported as such previously. Trump clearly said many things in order to get a rise out of the people. Reporting on them, I argued, just fed the flames. Another editor pushed back. He said that the man was the president. “What he says is news.”

Here, we saw a bunch of rapid-response news stories about Musk taking a jab at the government scientist, as well as at the gender diversity, when he said on December 11 his pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci. 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 lots of good reporting at the same time, but the accounts that everyone was talking about were the ones that weren’t nice. The public was forced to understand what was happening around the country through incompatible narratives about a man in the White House.

What is good news in the world? The good news about Twitter and its impact on the Trump, Biden, and Musculature Files

There’s good news in the world. I’ll tell you why it’s good news to me. It is pleasing that things will become what they are deep down. Twitter has slouched toward porn for years. “Slipping into DMs” is only one salacious meme in what long ago became an orgy of hyperstimulation, with people baring their souls, posting thirst traps, coyly subtweeting, and of course negging and prodding and simultaneously secreting dopamine and cortisol and God knows what other precious bodily fluids.

Porn’s not my cup of tea, but you have to admire its ferocity and cunning. It’s a megagenre, something the poet-philosopher Timothy Morton might call a hyperobject, ungraspable in its ubiquity and scale. In short, porn online behaves like a plant with flesh colors that grows fast and grows large with salt.

Five years after it started as an afro-focused micro-blogging service, it lost its appeal due to porn. 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 create most of the porn that is on OnlyFans, which started in 2016 as a platform for performers to post videos.

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

“What is really coming through in the Twitter Files for me is: people who are confronting high-stakes, unanticipated events and trying to figure out what policies apply and how,” said Renée DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, who studies how narratives spread on social networks.

They are a collection of internal emails and chats from employees talking about the company’s policies. So far they’ve covered the decision to ban Trump, Twitter’s short-lived decision to block a news story in October 2020 drawn from material on Hunter Biden’s laptop, and how the company limits the reach of accounts that break its rules, including some well-known right-wing users.

The selection of Taibbi and Weiss, who share Musk’s criticism of the mainstream media, has caused a lot of controversy. Other news outlets have not been given access to the original documents, which have been presented only in screenshots and excerpts in lengthy tweet threads, often without context.

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 files from Hunter Biden’s laptop were used by the Post to write the article. At the time, it was a mystery whether the 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.

Citing its rules against sharing hacked material containing private information, the company showed a warning to anyone who tried to post a link to the article saying it was “potentially harmful.” The New York Post suspended its own account, too, so that it wouldn’t be associated with the story. Facebook was alarmed by the article but didn’t go as far as Twitter. While it allowed the link to be posted, it only allowed a limited distribution of posts that were reviewed by fact-checkers.

What was essentially a small online riot ensued, with Twitter users from all corners decrying the new policy. The company backtracked and all references to the policy had vanished from the company website and social media feeds. It was a fast time for anyone to see it. (Although if you missed it, I wouldn’t say you missed it, if you know what I mean.)

There was no evidence to support Musk’s assertions that the government helped block the New York Post story.

He believed that everyone acted according to the best information they had at the time. “Of course mistakes were made.”

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

Elon Musk is Using Twitter Files to Discredit Foes and Push Conspiracy Theorem: The Case of Two Former Colleagues

There is a good reason for demand more insight into how social media companies operate. “Often these decisions are quite inscrutable,” she said. “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 that outsiders need more than the “anecdote” Musk’s selected journalists are sharing, as they focus exclusively on charged, highly partisan American political dramas.

She said that it would be beneficial to see discussions about other world leaders who have not been kicked off the platform, 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.

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

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

One Trust and Safety Council member who asked not to be identified said that the CEO’s willingness to target people working to keep the platform’s users safe is creating a chilling effect.

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

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

Twitter isn’t the last frontier of information science: Investigating Musk’s Twitter bans on a campaign by journalists and business insiders

“It’s being processed as something that we own the last regime so that we can see what’s going to be done differently under our watch, and that’s kind of what it is,” DiResta said.

The ElonJet account was banned by Musk after he changed the rules of the social network to prevent the sharing of a person’s location. He accused the journalists of broadcasting “basically assassination coordinates” when he wrote about the jet- tracking account.

Musk had on Thursday banned CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, and The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell. Independent journalist, linette Lopez, former MSNBC host, and progressive journalist were also banned.

Much of what we know about social media discourse is thanks to Twitter’s longtime policy of allowing free access to its data. That made it a treasure trove for researchers seeking to study online behavior, including how conspiracy theories are spread. Kate Starbird remembers that research on the topic dominated between 2010 and 2015.

Musk’s latest power moves are nothing short of dangerous. Recently unemployed tech and journalism workers should take them as a rallying call to 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.

The suspension happened without a warning or explanation as our reporter sought a comment from Musk for a story. Lorenz’s account was restored by midday, but she thought that her suspension was related to a statement she made on social media.

Most of the accounts were back on Saturday. Business Insider’s Linette Lopez was one of only a few who was suspended after the other journalists, with no explanation.

Shortly before being suspended, she said she had posted court-related documents to Twitter that included a 2018 Musk email address. Lopez said the address is not currently current because he changes his email every few weeks.

The Associated Suspensions of the Lattice and the Silicon Valley: CNN, Facebook, Mashable, and the Associated Press

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.

Then, over the weekend, The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz became the latest journalist to be temporarily banned. She said that she was suspended for requesting an interview after using the social networking site to tag Musk.

CNN said in a statement that “the impulsive and unjustified suspension of a number of reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is concerning but not surprising.”

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

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

He has promised to allow free speech, and has brought high-profile accounts back to life that had previously been taken down due to harmful misinformation. He said he would reduce hate and negative vibes by denying some accounts of freedom of reach.

She said that the new regime has the same problem as the old regime because it was governed by its own biases.

If the suspensions lead to the departure of media organizations that are very active on the micro-messaging site, it would change the platform at a fundamental level according to a marketing and media executive who used to work for Bank of America.

CBS briefly shut down its activity on the social networking site due to uncertainty about new management, but media organizations have largely remained on the platform.

It’s time for journalists to see the main tent pole of social media, due to the news breaks that occur on it. “Driving journalists off Twitter is the biggest self-inflicted wound I can think of.”

Some advertisers have already stopped spending on the platform because of Musk’s uncertain direction, and the suspension may be the biggest red flag yet.

After a journalist questioned Musk about reporters’ ousting, the conference chat went down on Thursday night. Musk later said that Spaces had been taken offline to deal with a bug. Spaces came back late Friday.

Musk promised to restore the accounts that he had wrongly accused of sharing his location after a poll showed that people had spoken.

Defending Social Media, the Musk/TSLA Scenario, and the Rupar Response to Harwell’s Call to Resign

“It’s journalism,” Harwell wrote in his appeal, a copy of which was provided to CNN. Harwell added that his tweet did not include a “link to anyone’s private information.”

The whole affair was described as absurd by Rupar, who told CNN that he had decided to just remove the social media post and move on.

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

“We believe banning journalists without consistent defensible standards or clear communication in an environment where many people believe free speech is at risk is too much for a majority of consumers to continue supporting Mr. Musk/TSLA, particularly people ideologically aligned with climate change mitigation,” Rusch wrote.

The billionaire took to his platform on Sunday to ask whether or not he should resign as head of the micro-messaging service. I will follow the results of the poll.

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

Twitter has sought to stem some of its user losses by clamping down on sharing on its platform. Last week, it quietly began blocking links to Mastodon. Musk suspended the practice less than 24 hours after it was made explicit on Sunday.

The analyst says that the inconsistent standards application has helped create a “broad public backlash” against Musk and will hurtTesla.

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

The Elephant in the Room: Musk’s Pessimism about Twitter CEO Search During Monday’s Tweet Outburst

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

Rusch added that Musk’s behavior over the past few months as “chief Twit” has created “brand public backlash” that could tarnish Tesla’s brand image — particularly with key consumer groups.

The decision to ban several journalists including Donie O’ Sullivan was a factor that led to the downgrade.

Ross Gerber, a shareholder in both Twitter and Tesla, said over the weekend that he hopes Musk finds a CEO for Twitter during the first quarter of 2023.

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

The evil billionaire attack: Why is it still important? (It isn’t) a success or an ill-prepared future of the Internet

There is a type of vulnerability in information security known as the evil maid attack, in which an untrusted party can gain access to important hardware, including your laptop, when you leave it unattended. The new analog is the same as the old one that can destroy systems and leak data. Call it the “evil billionaire attack” if you’d like. The weapon is money, and more specifically, the likelihood that when the moment arrives you won’t have enough of it to make a difference. The phone is coming from inside the house.

The strategy works due to the fact that most ideas of any consequence are owned by people with more money than you, and therefore whenever possible they strings them together into a network with their specific intent of making the gravity inescapable. The term platform is used frequently by pioneers and investors to describe technical systems with components that can be used to compose new functions and by the power companies that propel the technology industry to find platforms appealing when the bits can be monetized each time they are used.

The problem is fought on the deepest level possible. It would be difficult for Musk to kill off the block cipher if there were enough users who did not want it. Duplicating across many computers means the risk of losing access is infinitesimal; the blockchain is its own API. This comes with different difficulties, but losing information because of a hostile party is not one. When Hic et Nunc marketplace went under in late 2021, another version launched and had the same content. The blockchain acts as a shared resource that forces interoperability, almost like organic self-defense.

Or consider the case of WordPress, the early blogging engine that has since grown into increasingly elaborate general-purpose content management software. It now powers about 40 percent of the open web, with which it is loosely synonymous. Many of the companies that develop websites, the developers who work for them and the independent developers who work for themselves have sprung up around it, because of the huge economy surrounding it. This is possible because of the open source nature of the core. WordPress has been around for a long time and its straightforward RSS feeds decisively lost out to Twitter’s social features, so in 2022 there is a reasonable argument that it is a bit long in the tooth. We have to understand it is a technical success because it is not at risk.

“We are excited to see Mastodon grow and become a household name in newsrooms across the world, and we are committed to continuing to improve our software to face up to new challenges that come with rapid growth and increasing demand,” Rochko wrote.

Mastodon had an app in the social networking category in the Apple store at number 11 and was also on the free version of the Play Store. (Mastodon is a decentralized social network, meaning that there are also numerous third-party apps for the platform beyond its own.)

Why Twitter is so big? The Voice of the People is the Voice of God: Elon Musk’s Twitter Appeals to the President to Restore Covid-19

This is a reminder about how centralized platforms can hold your social graph hostage and impose restrictions on what you can and can’t say.

Editor’s Note: Nora Benavidez is the senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at Free Press, a media and technology justice advocacy organization. Free Press is a founding member of the #StopToxicTwitter coalition. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. CNN has more opinion on it.

We at Free Press agree that Musk must step aside. His replacement needs to be someone who knows that the health and safety of users is a paramount priority for this social media platform, and that it needs to be in the hands of one irresponsible and reckless billionaire.

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

It is necessary that the new leadership at the social network reverses its decision to allow Covid-19 misinformation to spread. The blue checkmark feature thatallows verified users to post longer videos and receive their content at the top of replies, mentions and searches needs to be retired. And they must cease Musk’s “general amnesty” plan on accounts that were suspended before he took over.

When Elon Musk polled Twitter users about whether to reinstate former President Donald Trump’s account, he quickly followed through on the majority’s wish to do so. The voice of the people is the voice of God, according to him.

Likewise, when Twitter users voted on another of his polls to provide “general amnesty to suspended accounts,” he went ahead and did it. He also heeded user votes in a poll to restore the accounts of tech journalists that he had suspended on Friday.

Others who had supported Musk in his bid for the micro-Blogging service were upset at the decision. The policy is the last straw according to Paul Graham. I don’t give up.

“There’s definitely momentum behind it,” MacLeary says. I don’t know if that has pushed it over the tipping point. It reminds me of my experience in early Twitter, which was very positive. You felt like you knew everyone there.”

Volunteer administrators whose hobbies running server have become second jobs are more responsible with the growing number of users.

“There are a lot of people who really don’t realize what they’re getting themselves into,” says Corey Silverstein, an attorney who specializes in internet law. “If you’re running these [instances], you have to run it like you’re the owner of Twitter. People don’t understand how complicated it is to run a platform like this and how expensive it is.

Because Mastodon is decentralized, it relies on various server administrators instead of one central hub to stay online. The admins are more like internet service providers themselves and they have the responsibility of keeping their server compliant with the law. If they fail, they could be on the hook for lawsuits. They must follow legal frameworks around the world.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a law in the US that requires social platforms to take down copyrighted material if they don’t register to protect themselves. There’s a rule about how platforms handle data for children. If there is child exploitation material, admins must report it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Then there’s Europe, with its General Data Protection Regulation, a privacy and human rights law. Mastodon could be subject to the Digital Service Act if they become large enough. In order for administrators to comply with their local laws, they must have accessible laws anywhere on their server. That’s all daunting, experts say, but not impossible.

Facebook burned through billions of dollars trying to make the metaverse happen. Musk bought the company for a lot of money, plunging it into chaos by sending advertisers and power users fleeing. tens of thousands of workers have lost their jobs in Silicon Valley because of the economic downturn.

Mark Zuckerberg thinks that the future of the internet is the metaverse, and that’s why he renamed his company Meta.

What the hell happened to Elon Musk’s Twitter? On the lack of social media a decade after Musk became a billion dollars, and what the heck happened to Twitter?

But within months, the mood changed dramatically. Amid global economic turmoil, higher interest rates, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the online advertising market cratered.

Users are not using social apps the same way. Harbath is a former public policy director at Facebook. “People are going to different places to get their entertainment and advertisers are trying to figure out where those eyeballs are.”

TikTok’s runaway success has companies including Facebook and Google scrambling to copy its features, introducing their own short video formats and pushing more recommendations of posts from people users don’t know or follow.

Sayman, who has worked at both Facebook and Twitter, said there is a “shiny object” in social media that doesn’t involve friends and what they are doing.

That’s left many people looking for alternative ways to keep up with friends. Many are turning to messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal and Discord, others to more private apps like BeReal, where users post one unedited photo a day, that can’t be liked or shared.

A new crop of conservative apps has been created because of the Disillusionment with the legacy social sites.

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

I woke up on Sunday morning to learn that Twitter was going to block all mentions of, or links to, “competing” services, from Instagram to Facebook, to Linktree of all places. It was claimed to be about “preventing free advertising” of the platform’s competitors and to “cut down on spam.” This was a cover story and the great link ban was mainly about controlling speech in the name of Musk, so anyone who had two neurons to rub together could tell that.

My friends on Twitch interrupted their streams to discuss the news, worried that they wouldn’t be able to tweet to announce they were starting a new stream, or add a link to their Twitter bio to help viewers find them. All of these things created the potential for lost income for people who, I would argue, need it more than the folks who made these policy decisions. That is true for the same creators that everyone in Silicon Valley believes to want to promote and empower.

Twitter’s For You timeline has a big impact on what we see and how we act on it: The case of Weinstein, Bean Dad and Jon Ronson

Menswear guy. The lingerie junkie. The woman has a fascination with wolves. Depending on your interests and often not even that, you’ve met one or more of these people in the past few weeks.

It’s part of the platform’s effort to shift users away from a simple feed of people they follow and toward a more curated experience. Twitter’s algorithm-based “For You” timeline became the default choice for users on January 10, part of Elon Musk’s plan to overhaul the platform. The company says the For You feed serves users tweets from accounts and topics they follow, augmented by “recommended tweets” and “suggested content powered by a variety of signals.”

There are signals on the timeline which include how people within a user’s own network of followers interact with it and their popularity on the wider platform. The increased focus on an algorithmically driven timeline means tweets that might previously have only circulated within a niche community, such as menswear, are now breaking into the mainstream of Twitter to be consumed by a wider audience.

According to a researcher at the University of Cambridge, the way in which our social experience is impacted by the way we interact on certain internet platforms is a fact that most people don’t know. “People often complain—not unreasonably—about what ‘the algorithm’ is showing them, but there’s not really any escape from this.”

The inescapability of this new Twitter setup has significant ramifications for who goes viral. Becoming Twitter’s main character has always been a dubious distinction, but it was previously a mantle someone (usually) deserved. Users felt compelled to share something offensive that they saw on the internet, like when Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biology student, took to social media to mock being asked not to consume nuts on a May 2022 flight because of his peanut allergy. Or Bean Dad. Usually, for Twitter’s main characters, when the offense cascaded through enough layers, it broke onto everyone’s timelines for collective upset.

There is a model of virality that promotes dogpiling on people who have committed minor, if bizarre, infraction. Some people had made troubling statements. Journalist Jon Ronson explored its impact on the humans at the center of the storm in his book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, and on an associated podcast of the same name. People felt that the shame they felt was justified because they had done wrong.

Scaling Up the Fediverse: How Facebook Has Been Through the Snow Leopards in the Last Ten-Year Mastodon Community

Mastodon’s active monthly user count dropped to 1.4 million by late January. At the beginning of the year, it had almost half a million fewer registered users. Many newcomers have complained that Mastodon is hard to use. Some have returned to the devilish bird they knew: Twitter.

The lesson of what happened is that Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse are able to scale. Robert Gehl is a professor of communication and media studies at York University in Canada. He says Mastodon has enjoyed peaks of interest followed by slumps before. But that pattern can still add momentum. “Each time, a percentage of the wave sticks,” Gehl says. People convert to it.

“You look at some of the conferences we attended, you know, 50% of the social computing papers would be about Twitter and sometimes even more, because that was the data that we had access to,” says Starbird, a researcher at the University of Washington who studies online information dynamics during crises, including disinformation.

The social networking site did not say how many users could download or post at the $100 a month level. The company did not reveal the pricing of the additional access but those who need it will pay more.

Twitter’s decision to charge for the API will make public-interest research more interesting: A no-go theorem and a response to NPR

The move will make it more expensive to run many automated accounts, known as bots. Some of the bots are useful while others are less, such as those that highlight the new headlines of the New York Times.

No researchers were spared even if some bots weren’t spared. The change makes it hard for researchers such as Starbird who have relied on that platform to study user behavior and operations for a long time.

Earlier this week, after Twitter first announced that it will start charging for the API, a group of research institutions, advocacy groups and individual researchers from around the world issued an open letter calling on Twitter to maintain access for researchers so that public-interest research could continue. It was suggested in a statement that the company should make access to data easier. As of Wednesday, Twitter did not respond to a request from NPR sent last week for more information about its decision.

Users’ timelines are shaped not only by who they follow but also algorithmic recommendation, so players seeking influence can game it to amplify its message.

Users with access to the Twitter API can upload and download data in bulk to and from the platform using a computer program, bypassing the main user interface.

Currently, many Twitter API users can download up to two million tweets from the past seven days for free every month. Academic institutions can download unlimited amounts from the entire archive for free. Researchers can create intricate maps of how clusters of users relate to each other with large datasets, which helps them understand online communities that spread false information.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/09/1155543369/twitters-new-data-access-rules-will-make-social-media-research-harder

Why is Musk’s engagement numbers tanking? A source with direct knowledge of the TWoP engineer’s frustration with his social media account

Researchers will have a harder time going back and examining narratives that they missed in real time without access to that wealth of data.

Users have a more transparent view of the data that they are given on the platform by the giving of documented access to the program. Meta’s offering, CrowdTangle, does not provide straightforward ways to download data in real time and in bulk the way Twitter does. Moreover, the company is reportedly winding it down and has not announced whether it will offer a replacement. Meta did not answer questions from NPR about CrowdTangle’s future.

If the current access ceases, Starbird’s team has ideas about what they can do with the micro-blogging service. They intend to look at Telegram, TikTok, and other platforms while collaborating with teams that watch other platforms.

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at the headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?

“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. I have more than 100 million followers, and I only get tens of thousands of impressions.

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

Musk told the engineer that they were fired. The engineer’s name is being held back because of Musk’s harassment of former TWoP employees.

Musk has been unhappy with the work of engineers so he has asked his employees to track when he recommends a certain number of times, says a current worker.

The view count feature may be making the decline in engagement more obvious, according to sources. The like and retweet buttons were made smaller to accommodate the display of views, making them harder to easily tap.

He said that over 90 percent of the users will read, but shouldn’t do anything on the social media site as those are public actions.

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

Elon Musk: Tweet Fires Engineer Engineer Dense Reach ftc-Concerns Employees Don’t Talk About Work

“We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy,” one employee said. We focus most of our time on three areas: putting out fires, performing impossible tasks, and improving efficiency, without clear guidelines of the end results. We mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective.”

He sleeps late at night and sometimes he says things that aren’t right, said one employee. He’ll come to us and tell us that one person cannot do everything on the platform, and we have to chase some outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make sense.

The San Francisco headquarters has a sad air because of the lawsuit they have been sued for. When people pass each other in the halls, they are told to ask “Where are you interviewing?” and “Where do you have offers?” Employees are required to reserve beds in advance on the eighth floor.

An employee said that people don’t discuss work things anymore. “It’s just heartbreaking. I have more conversations with people on messenger than I do on chat. The team channel talked about what everybody did that weekend before the transition. There’s none of that anymore.”

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

How do you decide what is the least fireable response? Employees in the technology department complain that they are not the smartest people at the company

One person explained that when they are asked a question, they run their head through their head and decide what the least fireable response is.

It is not true for everyone at the company. “There are a handful of true believers that are obviously just ass-kissers and brown-nosers who are trying to take advantage of the clear vacuum that exists,” that same employee says.)

One person said that it might work if the company learned how to put a bit more thought into some of the decisions. “He needs to learn the areas where he just does not know things and let those that do know take over.”

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

“I do think the recent vibe overall in tech, and fear of not being able to find something else, is the primary factor for most folks,” an employee said. Most of my team is doing hardcore interview prep and would jump at any chance to walk away.

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

Wells Fargo, HBO, T2: Why People Haven’t Been Fooled by Ads on Twitter, But They’ve Done Their Part

There is a fear about the review of recent changes by regulators. A series of steps have been taken by the company, including creating a project proposal, conducting security and privacy reviews, and pushing out changes.

Wells Fargo paused their paid advertising on the social network, but they still use it as a way to engage with their customers. The brands didn’t respond immediately to the request.

According to Pathmatics, many top advertisers have reduced their spending on the platform. HBO, for example, was Twitter’s top advertiser in September, spending nearly $12 million on ads that month, but for the month of January (as of January 25), it spent just over $54,000. Warner Bros. Discovery did not reply to a request for comment.

The pushback continues. A coalition of civil society and civil rights groups renewed calls on Thursday for companies to join what they say is more than 500 advertisers who have stopped advertising on Twitter. The latest effort came after a research report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a member of the coalition, raised concerns about ads “appearing next to toxic content” from previously banned accounts.

Sarah Oh lost her job as a human rights advisor at retweet in the first round of layoffs, and later joined a friend in building a new service.

T2 is a currently available in beta, and is the product of Gabor Cselle, who previously worked at both TWITTER and GOOGLE. Like Twitter, it offers a social feed of posts with 280-character limits. But the key selling point, according to Oh, is its focus on safety.

Oh told CNN they wanted to create an experience that allowed people to share what they want to share without fearing harassment, and they felt well positioned to deliver on that.

How to get a Facebook alternative to Twitter? The Case of Artifact, Instagram, CNN, and Cohost, an AI-powered, personalized news feed

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

Last month, for example, the founders of Instagram announced Artifact, “a personalized news feed” powered by artificial intelligence, a description that quickly earned it comparisons to Twitter. CNN recently tested the news app, and it resembled a news reader like Apple News or the doomed Google Reader. Artifact displayed popular articles in a main feed that were tailored to users based on their interests and activity.

But all of these apps appear to be vying for the opportunity to scratch the itch users may feel for a news feed that isn’t Twitter — at least for as long as that itch lasts.

“Something that we’ve heard a lot from people who are moving over from Twitter, either partially or fully, is that it is just for them a nicer experience overall,” said Jae Kaplan, co-founder of Anti Software Software club, the group that develops Cohost, a text-based social media feed similar to Twitter. The service launched publicly in June of last year, after Musk offered to buy Twitter. The platform added 80,000 new users within 48 hours after Musk completed the takeover.

Kaplan said that people refer to us when they do as aTwitter alternative, so it’s an important distinction.