Despite billionaire Musk’s free speech promise, the account that tracked Musk’s private jet was suspended

Free Speech is a Toy for Microblogging, but Trump Can’t: Musk’s Decision to Forget About Free Speech on Twitter

There may not be much use for existing staff at the micro-blogging site. Over the course of the years, Musk has made clear that he would like to bolster free speech and change the company’s policies to make it easier for people to speak their minds on the platform.

Musk failed to come even close to his claim of commitment to free speech when he was banned. Musk bragged about being a Free Speech maximalist and repeatedly said he would like to allow all legal speech. “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” Musk once tweeted.

The pair have not been able to patch things up since, with the men exchanging barbs. After Trump called Musk a “bullsh*t artist” at a rally in July, Musk responded by tweet, writing, “I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.”

After months of trying to wriggle out of the deal he signed to acquire Twitter, Musk now says he intends to complete the purchase. Musk said in the letter that he would honor the agreement to buy the company from him for the agreed price of $54.20 per share. The company said that it intended to close the deal.

With his decision made under fire from the same people that were his supporters, and his journalist ghosting his pleas for a response, Musk may be ready to put his overpriced toy in someone elses hands for a while.

Set rules and an owner’s will are not the main things that guide moderation of a social networking site. While Musk argues he’s protecting people from being doxed, this week he censored accounts freely—not for illegal speech, but because they offended him.

Why Twitter is a Town Square for Community-Based Products and Media: An Analytical Study of Skinning on a Micro-Lending Site

The information that came out ahead of the trial did not lend support to the argument. Miller says there’s nothing that looks like fraud here because he knows his best claims are fraud. “They’ve run out of cards to play.”

The potential for the trial to damage him personally may have influenced Musk to fold. The internet chewed over a number of his text messages with major figures in Silicon Valley. He faced a deposition this week, and Miller says it would likely have been embarrassing.

But more than professional utility ties me to the site. The same way slot machines hook you in the same way, there’s anittent reinforcement schedule that comes with it. Occasionally, at random times, it is interesting but most of the time it is repetitive and uninteresting. Unpredictable rewards, as the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner found with his research on rats and pigeons, are particularly good at generating compulsive behavior.

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

For years, so many people around the world have relied on Twitter to function as a town square — a space for people to debate issues openly. Of course, only 23% of Americans are on Twitter and of those who use the platform, the top 25% of users by tweet volume produce 97% of tweets, according to the Pew Research Center. These users have an outsize influence on the public debate because the conversations that happen ont he micro-lending site seem to influence what reporters and others talk about offline.

Talking about a social media site in a vacuum, is not right. The same problems are faced by lots of other social networks and community-based products, which include some technical, political, and regulatory issues.

Alternative platforms such as Parler, Gab and Truth Social promise less restrictions on speech than would be the case under Musk’s rule, according to Media Matters for America president Angelo Carusone.

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

The move came after mounting criticism of his chaotic leadership at Twitter, including recent decisions to suspend journalists and introduce (and then delete) a controversial policy banning the practice of linking out to rival platforms; laying off half of the company’s staff; firing others who disagreed with him; and welcoming back onto the platform previously banned figures who trafficked in misinformation, conspiracy theories, and hate speech.

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

A person urged Musk to hire a person with a political and cultural view who would lead enforcement. Masters is the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona who was endorsed by Trump, and has made the same allegations about the 2020 presidential election.

Facebook ban on Musk after the Supersymmetric Wall-String Deal, and a Digital Marketing Challenge for Brands: Comment on Musk’s Twitter Address

Facebook is considering a ban on the former president when it expires in January 2023, but allowing him back could set a precedent.

At least it became clear that you can’t work together after a couple weeks of video meetings, which was summed up by a text to Musk. That was clarifying.”

The people wouldn’t say if all the paperwork for the deal, originally valued at $44 billion, had been signed or if the deal has closed. The social media platform is under the control of Musk and he has already fired the CEO, CFO and Chief Legal Counsel. Neither person wanted to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the deal.

It is likely that this news is good news for the billionaire, who has argued that the company is bloated because of its size.

The firm wrote that the abandonment of advertisers will only make it more difficult for them to cover the cash hole.

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.

That creates a challenge for brands, which are sensitive to the types of content their ads run against, an issue made more complicated by social media. Most marketers don’t like seeing their ads run alongside something that’s toxic.

Twitter is not a Super-App, but a Warm and welcoming Platform for Exploiting Intellectual Property, Human Rights and Minority Rights: An Emailed Letter to Musk on Twitter

What exactly he meant is, as always, anyone’s guess. Musk told staff in the summer that the company should follow in the “super-app’s” footsteps, which is basically anything you might use your phone to do.

The Chinese-style super-apps that have been tried out by other American tech companies have yet to catch on in the United States.

It is unclear which agencies are carrying out the probe and what Musk’s actions are being investigated for. The filing said that authorities are looking into Musk’s conduct associated with the deal.

The company alleged in court that Musk’s legal team failed to give the SEC and FTC drafts of their communications with the company, as well as a presentation to the FTC, which is trying to determine if Musk can walk away from the deal.

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

“Twitter did not ask Zatko to torch his own documents, much less demand that he do so,” Twitter’s filing read. No one knows what Zatko’s notebooks have in them and no one knows what information they contain.

Friedersfeld believes that Musk should be given more benefit of the doubt, after all, he did ban West, and refused to bring Jones back, and social media helped suppress the story about Biden’s laptop. But I think that strays toward both-sides-ism and misses the point.

“In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all, where you can choose your desired experience according to your preferences,” he said in the Thursday post. “Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise … Let us build something extraordinary together.”

“Our work to make Twitter a safe, informative place will be moving faster and more aggressively than ever before and we will continue to welcome your ideas going forward about how to achieve this goal,” said the email, which was signed “Twitter.”

On Friday, some groups called on advertisers to stop spending on the platform worldwide, in order to put an end to a campaign against Musk and his plans to remake the site.

Musk reiterated in the letter that he doesn’t want the acquisition to be a money-making venture for him.

The acquisition also promises to extend Musk’s influence. The billionaire already has stakes in companies developing cars, rockets, robots and satellite internet as well as more experimental ventures such as brain implants. He has control of the social media platform that shapes how hundreds of millions of people communicate and get their news.

Musk also pledged to “defeat the spam bots or die trying,” referring to the fake and scam accounts that are often especially active in the replies to his tweets and those of others with large followings on the platform.

The Twitter CEO’s “disappoint” after the Musk-Focused Breakup of the Twitter Syndication Agreement

The deal is expected to be finalized by a Delaware judge on Friday. She threatened to schedule a trial if no agreement was reached.

On Monday morning, at around 1:45 AM, Twitter engineers were called into an emergency meeting. Musk just ordered a freeze on production changes on the social network.

Many Twitter employees have recently noted the absence of Parag Argawal, their current CEO, who Musk soured on after the two initially started talking about Musk joining Twitter’s board. “He has been completely absent for weeks,” one current Twitter employee, who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission, said of Argawal. One person said that he had ghosted them. Both Twitter’s Slack and the Twitter employee-only section of Blind, an anonymous message board for tech workers, are full of similar comments about Argawal, according to screenshots seen by The Verge.

According to Insider, the execs got a large amount of money for their troubles, including Agrawal who got $38.6 million, Segal who got $25.4 million, and Personette who got $11.2 million.

Musk has owned Twitter since six months ago. How did that happen? We will detail how the billionaire was in control of the company, with several former executives abruptly escorted out of the building, and the first update from the new chief twit coming very soon.

Elon Musk’s comments on Twitter after his departure from the company’s San Francisco headquarters and his decision to drop his Twitter ad shares

Although they came quickly, the major personnel moves had been expected and will likely be the first of many changes the CEO will make.

Elon Musk publicly scoffed at a Twitter employee’s uncertainty about whether he had been laid off in a recent round of cuts and spoke dismissively of the employee’s disability in a series of tweets Monday night. The billionaire is angry with his company’s current and former employees.

“Social media is currently at risk of being split into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that can create even more hate in our society,” he said.

She said it’s a realization that having no content moderation is bad for business and could lead to losing advertisers and subscribers.

“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.

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

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

The idea of turning the building into a homeless shelter was once advocated by Musk, now he is enthusiastic about visiting the site this week.

Musk said the advertising relevance was the most gigantic thing. That is going to sound crazy, but in order to consider relevancy in advertising, you had to be here three months ago.

The article was first published in theReliable Sources newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.

After a day of chaos, Musk halted new subscriptions into Blue, his monthly service for $8-a-month. Offering anyone the opportunity to slap a “verified” badge on their account had resulted in widespread impersonation of government officials, corporations and celebrities. The resulting chaos caused an advertiser pullout and made people think the platform had descended into chaos.

Charging for verified badges might appear at first glance as a business story. The move will have consequences for the information landscape. Most notably, it will make it much more difficult for users to distinguish from authentic and inauthentic accounts.

If the company were to strip current verified users of blue checks — something that hasn’t happened — that could exacerbate disinformation on the platform during Tuesday’s midterm elections.

In a year in which Musk was elected as a congressman, his biographer wrote that it was the best thing one could do to save social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email, and reduce hacking.

Musk laid off eight employees in a Twitter scandal: When do they know they are gone? What to do, and how to respond to them

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

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

Several teams have been wiped out entirely. The company went too far. After the layoffs were reported on Saturday, some managers were told to ask the laid-off employees if they wanted their old jobs back.

Some workers have begun to consult with lawyers over their options in the event that they are recalled. Others are in an open revolt, and having a public discussion about how the organization has been broken by the Musk layoffs fiasco.

Musk told the engineer that he was fired. Platformer is preventing the engineer’s name from being released in light of the harassment Musk has directed at formerTwitter employees.

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

The Vine Project is coming. Why do you need to work hard, or how do you want to work? An employee comment on Musk’s frustrations with the Vine project

Since no leadershippy type is willing or interested in filling the void, I want you to know that you are not alone. This is awful.

Another employee told us that employees are sharing contact information if they suddenly lose access to their communications.

Musk wants engineers to work on the two major projects and finish them within days or weeks. One is changes to Twitter Blue that would require users to pay to retain their verification badges, possibly as much as $20 a month. The plan to revive the short-form video app “Vine” is one that was first reported, and we can tell you that it is part of the core twitter app. Alex reported that the changes to Blue must be shipped by November 7th or the team will be fired.

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

Employees are being encouraged to show off their work to Musk. In one Slack message we saw, an engineering director urged his team to come up with new products and features and share them directly with their new CEO. “At best: you will get some feedback. You might be asked to ship it very soon, wrote the director. At the very least you will be asked to stop and work on something else. Even in this case, at least you worked on something you love.”

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

Do good engineering work, is what I should do now. Write something. Keep the site up, fix bugs. I know the criteria for being at Twitter is that. It is not working on a fancy project. There is a good culture change, it is shipping and delivering. I encourage you to rotate more on coding and shipping, and less on documentation, planning, strategy etc. If you want to be in a “special” group this week, code and ship 5x as [much as] before. Building what Elon asks or thinks sexy is not the criteria. Being impactful and changing product and helping our users is the criteria. So you don’t need commands from me. You are all software engineers. You know what needs to be changed. Do it. You are in charge.

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

Twitter Under Pressure: Musk, his Team, and the Post-Motorola Era Revealed: A Tribute to Twitter

But Musk’s attention can be unnerving, too. An employee who works on Musk’s project said they had mixed feelings about working on a project he is known to be focused on.

It’s unclear whether VP of Operations Lindsey Iannucci, the other two members of Twitter’s top leadership team, will remain with the company. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment about the current employment status of Caldwell, Sullivan, Berland and Iannucci.

The marketing and advertising community was meeting with Calacanis in New York. He has also tweeted questions to Twitter users about the platform’s subscription and bookmark features.

Davisson doubts Twitter, which has gutted its moderation staff, would be able to enforce Musk’s new policies announced this week in a way that covers all users.

This new approach will change things for the better. Journalists have helped keep the platform relevant despite its small size relative to competitors like Facebook: They fuel the platform with free, vetted content when news breaks and speculation and rumors swirl.

House of the Dragon on HBO: A Man’s Guide for Dads in the Early Stages of Children’s Miracles (with an Appendix by Tori)

Tori wants you to encourage your male-presenting friends interested in fathering children to watch House of the Dragon on HBO. Mike likes Natalia Lafourcade’s new album, De Todas las Flores. Lauren suggests rethinking your relationship with social media.

The woman can be found on the social networking site. Lauren is known as LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is a fighter. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by a man named Boone Ashworth. Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

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

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

Steve Jobs Revisited: A Case Study of Musk’s Space X Company, SpaceX, and the Human-Software Interference Enforcement Agency

I went to Apple headquarters in 1998 to hear Steve Jobs talk about reviving the company. He was the interim CEO for almost a year after being fired from the company he’d worked for for a decade. Greeting me in the boardroom of his suite at One Infinite Loop, he went to the whiteboard and began scrawling out his solution to the company’s business woes. He had a new product plan, a new product, and a workforce revitalized by an inspiring ad campaign.

Musk can see the absurdity of his haste by following his own successful enterprises. The company was five years old when he took over. Musk came up with a brilliant plan to turn the company around—but it didn’t post an annual profit until 2020, 17 years after incorporation. Musk deserved a lot of the credit for what he has done with the company. SpaceX, Musk’s other company, is private and doesn’t report earnings. But making rocket ships is the ultimate test of patience—it takes years to even launch successfully, and cutting corners to go faster can wind up killing people.

Employees were told in a letter that they would be notified by 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time if they were laid off. The email did not say how many people would lose their jobs.

Unlike Twitter’s full-time employees, who at least got the courtesy of an email informing them that layoffs were coming a night before, contractors received nothing. The people who were supposed to do the critical tasks that were suddenly gone from the company’s systems did neither of their managers.

He also removed the company’s board of directors and installed himself as the sole board member. On Thursday night, many employees of the micro-messaging company took to their account to convey their support for one another by using blue heart and blue bird symbols.

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.

Employees are concerned that if the company can’t get them to return, it will be forced to lay them off. Under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, businesses with more than 100 full-time employees are required to give 60 days notice if they lay off 33 percent or more of the staff. At Twitter, that notice included a promise to pay people for the next 60 days and give them a month of severance.

Some users have already begun to migrate from the platform, following layoffs last week that affected about half of the workforce. They fear a breakdown of moderation and verification on the internet could result in a free-for-all on what has been the internet’s main conduit for reliable communications.

Social Media Phenomenology: Facebook, General Mills, Volkswagen Group, Pfizer, Mondalez, PHD and Interpublic Group Are Pausing Advertising on Twitter

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.

The head of the American Civil Liberties Union said it was impossible to square the ideals of free speech with the decision to remove accounts of critical journalists.

The remarks came after General Mills and the Volkswagen Group confirmed that they are pausing advertising on Twitter in the wake of Musk’s acquisition of the social media company, in the clearest sign yet of growing advertiser uncertainty about the future of the platform under new ownership.

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

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

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

The Interpublic Group, which is also known as PHD, recommended its clients to stop advertising on the platform.

The pauses came as many civil society leaders fear that misinformation and other harmful content could be spread on the platform and disrupt the elections.

How did Musk, Apple, or META lose their jobs? A public debate on the Musk/Apple relationship and why Apple drew its attention

Yeah, the Musk / Apple relationship right now appears to have played out as he tweeted angry things about Apple reducing its ad spend, in-app purchases, and free speech. He went to the Apple campus to have a conversation with someone. In a public Twitter space, Musk told employees that Apple spent more money than before, and that he had stopped complaining about the 30 percent fee. He is just going to spend Apple’s ad dollars right back to Apple. That’s pretty funny. It’s hilarious that the money is just going in a circle.

The fear was not misplaced. Musk caused a lot of researchers to lose their jobs. The remaining member on the META team, Luca Belli, quit later in the month, after Musk laid off all but one person on November 4.

Big pharma created the covid plandemic to silence me. She said that everybody tries to silence her. “Ma’am, please speak at a lower volume. Do I sound too loud for the intensive care unit? You are not even sick!

A Funny Post about Donald Trump and Truth Social, and When I Learned About It, I’d Like to Tell You (I am new to you)

I am new to you. Oh my god, your profile is so funny. Schumer was dressed in a red dress and talking as a bot. “They said I was a bot, which is crazy. I adore funny guys like you. In fact, you should check out this website where me and some other girls hang out.”

James Austin Johnson played Donald Trump in front of the council. The account of Trump was banned in 2021.

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

Twitter is a Bad Environment to Live in for Musk, and it hasn’t been Stopped by his Twitter Blue Plan to Devalue Verification Check Marks

Twitter, however, is an acquisition and is not necessarily full of Musk fans. That makes it a bad environment to live in 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. It probably did. That’s why he made the increase of punishment for impersonation a policy change.

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

Not all of 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.

Actor Valerie Bertinelli had similarly appropriated Musk’s screen name — posting a series of tweets in support of Democratic candidates on Saturday before switching back to her true name. “Okey-dokey. I’ve had fun and I think I made my point,” she tweeted afterwards.

An end to the disruption seemed nowhere in sight on Friday. In its latest reversal on the matter, Twitter said it would re-introduce a gray “Official” badge for select accounts to help confirm their identities. The decision came after Twitter was forced to fend off a wave of verified-account impostors this week, including some posing as former President Donald Trump, Nintendo, and the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, among others. These accounts were the result of Musk’s decision to rush ahead with offering a blue check mark to any account holder willing to pay $8 a month, no questions asked, as he races to find new ways to make money from the platform.

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

CEO Elon Musk is not afraid to speak out on social media: What the CEO’s decisions and paywall might tell them about his personal experiences

At the same time, it’s unfortunate to see individual employees targeted for company decisions, as no one person atTwitter is responsible for our policies or enforcement actions.

The issue at hand for Perez is more than just the job losses that decimated his former coworkers, and the inability for people to say what they want on social media. It’s about upholding and protecting democracy. “It’s not entirely clear to me—particularly in the political context—that Elon Musk fully understands the degree of social responsibility that rests on his shoulders, and the very real harm, political harm, political violence, and division that can come from social media platforms.”

“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.

Meanwhile, Musk’s increasingly erratic leadership, coupled with his habit of tweeting in eye-watering bad taste, gave many current and former employees I spoke with a sinking feeling about the future of their company.

Let’s discuss how the company bungled its layoffs, and what the paywall might look like.

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

Why Have Employees Betrayed? Employees’ Requirements About Social Media, Twitter, and the Human-Resources System

It all started as a rumor on Blind, an app where employees of some companies can chat with their coworkers. Within one day it was posted in public channels.

We have the chance to ask if they will come back if they were left off. A manager to their employees told them to put together names and rationales by 4 pm on Sunday. If any of you have been in touch with people that we think will help us, I would appreciate if you could give me your nominations before 4.

The manager said that they might use some of the two mobile operating systems. Platformer is told the company reached out to engineers and designers over the past day in order to get them back.

Now workers fear that if they they refuse to return voluntarily, Twitter will fire them for abandoning their jobs, depriving them of what otherwise would have been three months’ pay.

Remaining managers are anticipating a higher workload than they have been used to. One person told me that a technical manager should expect to manage at least 20 individual contributors and spend at least half their time writing code. Others have been given higher numbers of direct reports.

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

Meanwhile, the health team was told to listen to Musk adviser David Sacks’ podcast for insights into why they had just lost half their colleagues, according to a former employee. A venture capitalist who has been helping to manage the Musk transition is a co-HOST of the All-In podcast.

According to a vice president, the most recent podcasts has coverage of the current layoffs happening in tech and provides insight into why this is happening. It is worth listening to to understand the macro environment we are operating in.

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

By the day’s end, I’m told, at least some teams had began to hold meetings in which employees were informed who their managers are, what their organization charts look like, and what their priorities will be.

Twitter is thriving, but can Tumblr make it work? When Twitter gets a little more attention than it did before it launched Blue

The company is telling advertisers that it is thriving, and on the other hand it is adding a lot of users.

The company rolled out a new version of the app on Saturday with release notes stating that the new Blue was now available. The copy, written by Calacanis, was derided for its resemblance to a fraudulent email. The problem is that Blue was not available, and so those who did subscribe found that they had merely gotten access to the current version of Blue.

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

According to an internal Slack message posted by a Twitter employee and viewed by CNN, Musk has shown little fear of the FTC regulators overseeing the company’s multiple, legally binding consent agreements committing it to maintaining a robust cybersecurity program and producing written privacy impact reports before launching any new products or services, a requirement that could cover Twitter Blue.

How is that going for Twitter? This stutter-step towards Twitter Blue exists, but Tumblr is a much smaller company and network, so they can move the numbers on the revenue much more easily. 85% of their revenue is advertising and they are not the biggest, but they are bigger. It needs to make money. Elon has to pay debt, whereas Matt told us Tumblr is still losing $20 million a year. How hard is it going to be for Twitter to pull this off?

What Do We Need to Know About Social Media? Elon Musk, Sacks, Blue and Us: A Conversation in Tiny Talk Town

Musk exchanged regular emails with Esther Crawford, a director of product management, while he was heavily involved in the chaotic launch of Blue. “There is one decision-maker and that is me,” Musk told workers, according to meeting notes shared with employees in Slack.

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

It felt like it was coming from your own mind, Musk said, just after 10:00 pm last Thursday. We are all in Tiny Talk Town, where all of the conversation is about Elon Musk.

Quiet quitting, no longer working overtime in a way that will enrich your employer but deplete your own metaphorical pockets, is a method of rejecting the burden of going above and beyond. On Twitter, it’s about not giving more to a platform than most people can expect to get back. If you want to stick around on this new Twitter—whatever it may become—you need to find a way to use it without it using you.

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

It would be easy for an electric car entrepreneur to misconstrue his own experience on the popular social networking site because of his high number of active users. (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, live sports or celebrity news and then go about their lives. They’re “lurkers.”

When people found themselves stuck at home during the early days of the Covid epidemic and were looking up information on social media, knolling was a term used. Choosing to lurk, to sit back and observe for a while, is basically a heuristic and simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos that is New Twitter. You need to check in on the new toy by closing your app or browser tab. Send a message, then stop. You should keep an eye out for it during basketball games. Direct those message threads to another location if you have to. For another time, put your most original thoughts in another place.

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

Now, Twitter did set up Tips — a way to send cash to people you like — but it doesn’t take a cut of that money. It does take a cut of the revenue from Super Follows, a way to make your tweets a subscription service, but Twitter’s share is dwarfed by the fees taken by Apple for in-app purchases.

I don’t think a lot of advertisers would want to come back to someone with that attitude toward impersonation, even without an economic downturn. The open question to me is whether users want to be in that environment and if so, what they will do about it. Billionaire Mark Cuban has already complained that the influx of new checkmarked users has made his mentions miserable. Cuban’s thoughts are one reason people stay on the platform — drive him off, and Twitter is less valuable.

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

A violation that is proven could lead to significant personal liability for Musk, increasing the risks he faces as he stumbles through a number of business and content moderation headaches.

Whenever the company experiences changes in structure, including mergers and sales, it must fulfill a reporting obligation.

There is also a sense of unease about how recent changes will be reviewed by regulators. As part of an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, Twitter committed to following a series of steps before pushing out changes, including creating a project proposal and conducting security and privacy reviews.

Alex Spiro said that they are in communication with the FTC and will work to make sure they are in compliance.

The FTC wants to make sure they are doing what they are supposed to do in the chaos, because there were serious deficiencies which lead to the consent order in the first place.

The subcommittee’s report also focused on the “Twitter Files,” a series of reports by writers Musk allowed to have access to internal messages and information. The FTC requested the names of the journalists or other media members who were provided access to the company’s Slack logs, internal documents, or other resources, a request the subcommittee claims is inappropriate.

Matt Blaze, a professor of computer science and law at Georgetown University, urged Twitter employees to seek professional legal counsel “before signing anything or making any statement to regulators.”

The FTC has increasingly signaled it could seek to hold individual executives personally accountable if they’re found to have been responsible for a company’s violations, naming them in future orders and imposing binding requirements on their future conduct, even if they leave the company. The CEO of Drizly was hit with sanctions by the FTC last month.

“No CEO or company is above the law, and companies must follow our consent decrees,” the FTC said. “Our revised consent order gives us new tools to ensure compliance, and we are prepared to use them.”

Two days after Musk rolled out its paid subscription service, the legacy verification feature was redeemed P0 by billionaire Mark Cuban when his tweets exploded

In just one week, one of the worlds most influential social networks has laid off half of its workforce, alienated powerful advertisers, and blew up key aspects of its product in order to compensate for its unpopularity.

On Friday, just two days after the official launch of the paid subscription service, the menu option to sign up for the add-on disappeared from the app, as well as the paid subscription service. The company might restore the offering in the near future.

Hours after the gray badges launched on Wednesday to help users differentiate legitimate celebrity and branded accounts from accounts that had simply paid for a blue check mark, Musk abruptly canceled the feature and forced 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.”

misinformation experts warned the paid verification feature could make identification of trustworthy information much more difficult, especially in the critical period following the US mid-term elections. Even some of Musk’s fellow high-powered users of the platform had tough feedback.

From one person to another, for your customer service hat on. I just spent too much time muting all the newly purchased checkmark accts in an attempt to make my verified mentions useful again,” tweeted billionaire Mark Cuban.

The team labeled the issue as P0 to signify a concern in the highest risk category, in part due to the document’s first recommendation that scam artists were willing to pay to achieve their ends.

The team found that misrepresentation of world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials and other high profile individuals was a P0 risk. Legacy verification gives a critical signal in enforcing impersonation rules, which is likely to lead to an increase of high-profile accounts being impersonated on social media.

The Story of Musk’s Twitter Badge: On the Security and Safety of the Blue Social Media Platform, and How It Affected the Trust and Safety Team

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

The team identified several other risks that they have not yet found a solution to. There is no automated way to remove verified badges from user accounts. “Given that we will have a large amount of legacy verified users on the platform (400K Twitter customers), and that we anticipate we’ll need to debadge a large number of legacy verified accounts if they decide not to pay for Blue, this will require high operational lift without investment.”

Retaining verification for some high-profile accounts using the official Badge was one of the solutions the company’s trust and safety team won support for.

The document offers a wish list of features that have not been approved, but most of them would make the product safer.

Despite the warnings, the launch proceeded as planned. Musk abruptly stopped the roll-out a few days later because of the trust team’s predictions.

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

“One of my contractors just got deactivated without notice in the middle of making critical changes to our child safety workflows,” one manager noted in the company’s Slack channels. This is particularly worrisome because Twitter has for years struggled to adequately police child sexual exploitation material on the platform, as we previously reported.

“Coming out of the freeze” at Platformer: An employee’s frustration in the wake of Musk’s announcement of layoffs

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

Some employees told us that they had been bracing for cuts ever since the layoffs earlier this month. Platformer reported that medical benefits would end for many former contractors on their last day on the job, due to the sudden nature of the cuts.

The employee asked when people would realize the value of the people that worked here.

The workers show a great deal of support for one another. The goons, who have been carrying out Musk’s orders, aren’t the volunteers and on-loan engineers fromTesla and the Boring Company you’re accustomed to seeing.

Some parts of the service may not be functioning as expected right now, according to the company. “We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences.”

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

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

I would like to say sorry for the slowness of the website in many countries. App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!” Musk referred to remote procedure calls on Sunday. Musk also complained about the number of microservices Twitter employs, which are generally understood to prevent the entire site from breaking every time one part of it goes down.

Instead, the experience is not great in India, for example. The back-and-forth data transfer between the phone and the data center starts compounding because the payloads gets delivered from further away.

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

Why is the Twitter Code Frozen? How Much Has the Code Learned in Twitter? What Happened after the Blue Debacle?

Why is the code frozen? Some are suggesting that Musk is paranoid and that disgruntled engineers may be planning to sabotage the site in order to get out.

On Friday, after the disaster of the Blue rollout, Eli Lilly paused all its ad campaigns on Twitter. The Washington Post reports that the move could cost millions of dollars in revenue. (A “verified” fake account impersonating Eli Lilly had said insulin would now be free, and it took Twitter six hours to remove the tweet.)

Brands may also be miffed that many of Twitter’s ad sales employees who managed their campaigns have been fired or pushed out, including after another round of layoffs and exits Monday.

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

It turned out that an employee deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using social media. The team that worked on that service left the company.

GroupM, the largest media-buying agency in the world, with $60 billion in annual media spend, told its clients that Twitter was a high-risk media buy, according to Digiday and an email obtained by Platformer. GroupM updated their brand safety guidance to high risk because of the recent senior departures in key operational areas. They know our policies are in place, but they don’t know if the ability to scale and manage infraction at speed will be possible in the future.

He has promised to let free speech reign and has reinstated high-profile accounts that previously broke Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct or harmful misinformation. He has also said he would suppress negativity and hate by depriving some accounts of “freedom of reach.”

The Demise of the Private Software Platform: A Case Study in How to Disturb a Digital Social Media Imperium: Musk’s Takeover of Twitter

After Musk announced he would be dropping up to 80 percent of the work on his service, some people said two-factor authentication stopped working on their phones. Others reported difficulty in getting their archives.

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

It is going to be very difficult. They have to know what the people that we like will pay the most for. The experiment with subscriptions was a flop before Musk came in. I didn’t feel that I was getting a lot out of it.

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. Regardless of its advantages, the demise of the proprietary platform is a high profile example of how risky it can be if you don’t have strong code. The overly conservative approach to intellectual property that makes things proprietary in the first place is also a liability that compromises everything a company might create because it empowers billionaires to kill them. Whether or not he actually destroys it, Musk’s takeover of Twitter is a case study in how to destroy something, a model for the next billionaire who fancies a social media empire. The next vaccine may need a communication channel that is at risk.

There is no guarantee that capturing the online world’s attention will translate into revenue growth.

Is Yoel Right? Shadowbanned, Not Left: Twitter Filters of Left-Leaning Comments by Elon Musk and Benjamin Weiss

Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk on Thursday said he plans to introduce an option to make it possible for users to determine if the company has limited how many other users can view their posts. The issue of social network “shadowbanned” by some conservatives has been a rallying cry for them, and Musk is effectively seizing on it.

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

The second set of the so-called Twitter Files was shared by journalist Bari Weiss on the social networking website, focused on how the company restricts the reach of certain accounts and topics that it deems potentially harmful.

Over the last two weeks, Musk has been releasing internal documents to a small group of journalists who are digging through them.

Weiss offered a number of examples of moderation actions taken against right-leaning figures, but it is not clear if they were equally taken against left-leaning or other accounts.

A person familiar with the situation told CNN that the former head of trust and safety left his home because of increased threats from the Musk campaign.

After the release of theTwitter Files, Roth was the subject of criticism and threats. Things took a dark turn over the weekend when Musk seemed to endorse a bogus accusation of pedophilia made on the internet by conspiracy theorists.

On Election Day 2016, he wrote “I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist for a reason.”

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

Twitter, Missing Children, the Rati Foundation, and a Child’s Innocence Coalition: An Advisory Group for Child Sexual Exploitation

The council members, who provided images of the email from Twitter to The Associated Press, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation.

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

A person pretending to be a member of the work team at the micro-messaging service sent an email to Sweeney with a picture of an internal company message from the new head of trust and safety.

When Musk criticized them for not doing enough to stop child sexual exploitation on the platform, they became targets of online attacks.

Some members sent an email to the company demanding that they stop misrepresenting their role, after a growing amount of attacks on the council.

The Trust and Safety Council, in fact, had as one of its advisory groups one that focused on child exploitation. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the Rati Foundation, and Youth Adult survivors and Kin in Need were included.

What is a Social Network? The CEO of Automattic: Is it Really Important for the Internet to Open Up Its User Experience?

I think you are the first repeat CEO in a year. You were on in March

, and we talked a lot about WordPress and a little bit about Tumblr. You are one of the few people I know that has ever purchased a social network and I want you to return so that I can explain the challenges that come along with buying a large network with millions of passionate users. So welcome back.

Before we discuss buying a social network it is important to mention that the CEO of automattic makes a lot of popular e-Commerce solutions, and that buying a social network is relevant because of that. Give the audience a quick explanation of what automattic is and how you think about it.

I started Automattic 17 years ago to support the open web. We do WordPress.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and Day One, which is a great journaling app. The new year is coming up, and a lot of people like to start journaling at the start of the year.

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

That is also the thing of the web development platform,WordPress. I want to create a web that is free and open-sourced. There are a lot of great proprietary competitors, like Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, et cetera. They had to open up because we forced them to be the open alternative, like Android does, so they could open up some things. It’s because of Android that theiOS is better. If you get lazy, you need a good nemesis and competitor.

I think open-sourced is a human right. As technology continues to take up more and more space in our lives, it is equally important as freedom of speech,freedom of religion or any other freedom. It’s important to have the freedom to see how our software works and to modify it.

The Similarity between Twitter and Tumblr – How Do You Host a Social App Store? A Reflection from Matt Mullenweg

That is a single piece. The similarity of Tumblr and Twitter is with the distribution of your product in this case, Apple. Matt was more positive about the company than I thought. My impression has always been that the two app stores are largely the same. He was like, “No, Google is pretty easy to work with.” At some point there are two big obstacles in the way of you doing your job. We have seen that Tumblr has had its challenges, and we have seen Elon run into those challenges.

We’re seeing that happening in real time at Twitter. They will allow Ye to come back on and then take him off again. “Lawful but awful” is a phrase we use for a lot of speech. It is possible that it will hurt people’s mental health, but it is not technically illegal. We’re a private company, so I guess we could host it if we wanted to, but you need to think about your responsibility to society and to your users. It’s as if you are having a party. It’s crucial that you provide a safe environment for everyone there that includes food, water, and restrooms. I feel like when you’re hosting a social network, it’s your responsibility to provide a safe and healthy environment.

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

The Decisions that We Make Most of the Time: Why Did You Buy Tumblr? What Did You Really Want? The Way that I Wanna Be?

I want to get all the way there. I want to talk about the decisions that we make most of the time. I think far too often the casual observer thinks they’re easy, and far too often Elon Musk acts like they’re easy. Those decisions are complex, and so are anyone who tried to make them. Everyone will hate you after the tradeoffs are bad. Start at the beginning. Why did you buy Tumblr?

I think between WordPress.com and Tumblr, we can actually share a lot of the backend infrastructure. As we’ve said, we want to switch Tumblr to actually be powered by WordPress. I think of it as two great restaurants that share the same kitchen. The restaurants have different vibes, but they will have the same excellence and ingredients. I think that’s very, very possible.

I wanted to see if we could create a social media that did not rely on advertising or surveillance capitalism as its primary business model. We run ads on Tumblr, but also have upgrades that turn off ads, and we are introducing lots of other types of subscriptions. If we can make it a subscriber-supported thing, then we can truly be aligned. Even if I were no longer running Automattic or Tumblr, the business model would align the users with its business.

Totally. We have seen some amazing examples of that, even in the last few weeks with Goncharov. At its best, it’s like, “Well, what if people’s social media time could go to something like that?” It gives users more control over the program. You should feel good after using it. Since buying it, we have been working on that.

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

Turning Tumblr Into a Realistic Place: Free Like a Pugget and Where Are You Going? Why Should You Buy It?

Have you ever heard the phrase “free like a puppy”? The transaction cost for us buying Tumblr was de minimis. But it was a deal in which we took on all of its liabilities and all of its legal cases, we kept all the employees and all the costs to run it. Tumblr was, and still is, burning quite a bit of cash. There were people who said that you could buy an apartment in NYC for that price, but it would cost $60 million or $70 million a year to run. All of those obligations would be taken on by you.

When you say it’s de minimis, you are basically saying that Verizon sold it to you for the smallest amount they could. You bought it for the smallest amount you could find, knowing that its carrying costs were high. Is that a straight conversation? “Hey, we’re not going to figure out how much money Tumblr makes and do a multiple of revenue to come to a valuation. This is bleeding cash, and it needs a good home. We’ll be that home. What’s the smallest number your board of directors will accept?”

I think what Automattic cared about was the workers and the user base, not the other way around. We did everything we could to make that happen. We decided to spend $100 million on Tumblr in order to turn it around.

Well, I think the tough thing in an acquisition, and particularly a turnaround, is that you’re buying it for a reason. If it was doing very well, that wouldn’t mean a change. Obviously, some of the existing employee base has not been as successful as they or you would have hoped, which is a nice way of saying some of them probably shouldn’t be there. But we also bought it because it was working. Despite corporate mismanagement, Tumblr still had a vibrant user base. It was still growing, and there were still a ton of mobile ties and young users, which was very, very interesting to us.

We have had some huge waves in the last month or so. Fluent celebrities like Ryan Reynolds, Lynda Carter, and Halsey are coming over or coming back. It has been a pleasure to be on the site. fortune favors the prepared There are also a lot of other places people could go, but we are ready for the waves. We can handle a large number of sign ups. What is happening can be handled by us.

How do you not throw the baby out with the bathwater? We brought the entire team over from the beginning, and we tried to replace people who had been there for a long time. Some of my best people were switched over to work in the company’s department of design and engineering, which is what Tumblr is. That helped us merge our cultures, identify low performance, and reshape the team for what was needed now.

We have changed the team, made the tech, and are starting to remake the product. I’m also very excited because now we’re starting to have some fun. You saw the blue checkmark thing. We’re also starting to innovate on the format a bit. There is now a gallery and video ontumblr, it is basically multimodal social media posting. We’re bringing it into the social media form and onto mobile, after a long time, but only in the social media form. That’s fun for me, because the creativity that is being expressed there is more than what you can do on any other social network right now.

The timeline is really interesting. You bought it in 2019, but it’s not until the very end of 2022 when you’re saying, “Now we’re having fun.” That is a long time to integrate the cultures, reset the expectations, and then get to product innovation. From your perspective it may be a long time but from a user perspective it could be very fast. Which one do you think it is?

It is the most hard thing in my career, I have said it before. I have been doing this a while. We have done successful acquisitions, like WooCommerce and other things, but this has been harder than anything I’ve done before, which is why I stepped in to run it directly in February. We weren’t seeing the amount of turnaround that we had hoped for.

Do you think that part tracks with the Twitter timeline? When Musk takes over as the new CEO of the company he starts a huge culture reset and huge public comments about how the company was trash at every level. Do you really want to do something like that? Do you think that would have been effective?

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

It is a great feeling to say, “Oh man, I wish I could just clear the deck.” I used to wonder if I could fire half the people at the company that I worked at when I was younger. Would anyone even notice?” There’s something about a big company that engenders that kind of thinking. Do you believe that you should have done something more drastic now that you have covered it?

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

How Were We Going to Cover a Tech Company that Left Twitter After Closing Down? A Conversation with the Automattic Machine Learning Team inside Automattic

I don’t know. It can be difficult to play it back. About 85 percent of the team is new on Tumblr, or was not there at the acquisition. That is a pretty big switch that happened over a couple of years. Performance management and natural attrition were some of the things that happened.

Now as an example, Stripe will make mistakes there. If you hire out of the layoffs, you might be cautious because some people who they laid off were thought to be low performers. If we were targeting that, we would assume that these were not the folks that had Stripe saying, “These are the crucial people we need to keep.”

We have reached out to every other tech company after we told them that we were slowing down hiring. I would be interested in hiring many people who left the micro- networking site. We have publicly said we’ll hire even entire teams. Those conversations have been quite intense over the past few weeks, and they include some executives who are helping us navigate the 5,000 people who left. We are now in the state of readiness to see if we could create a machine learning team inside Automattic with some of the people who left Twitter. It has been odd. Again, I have never seen that before in my business career.

It’s funny. I feel like we have come up after some important moments in tech history. Intel was created because a team of people left Fairchild Semiconductor, so now Intel exists and we think of it as an institution. It feels like we’re living through that moment again as tech companies have layoffs, where everyone who loves working together is available. The Twitter Spaces audio team that built Spaces is just like, “We’ll come do this for you again, but we want to work together.” Do you wish to build a live audio product? Would you hire that team?

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

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

When Did You Acquire Your Tumblr Team? Just Adding More Questions, Or Has You Solved Your Old Problem?

A few quick questions, just to complete the acquisition story. When you paid $60 million a year, you said it was burn. Can you say if you’re closer to profitability or burn the same number?

I don’t think so. It will take at least $20 or $30 million a year to get it to break even, and we brought it down.

Now, the good news is that one thing we’re starting to do is combine some of the teams. For example, Tumblr doesn’t need its own separate trust and safety, or terms of service. It had one, but we all have similar issues with respect to protect against illegal content, respond to DMCAs quickly, and take down hate speech. Those are similar issues, so we’re able to use some of the same backend tools to monitor every upload and other things. It’s not only a Tumblr cost at that point.

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

This is a classic question from the Decoder. How is the team structured? Is it structured the same way as when you acquired it, or have you reallocated some of those numbers?

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

What do you want to see in the next era of content moderation? A comment on the CEO of Tumblr and WordPress.com

I mean, I have come in as CEO, and naturally the big changes to the structure are because I’m running a lot of different things, including Automattic and WordPress.com, separately. A lot of things are pushed onto the leads within the company by my leadership style. I’m not like, “We need to have a meeting every day with the executive team and blah, blah, blah.” I like to have a list of the five things that are important to me. What are your most important things? What is it I’m missing?

A lot of asynchronous communication is done by Automattic. There haven’t been big changes. I have brought over some folks from Automattic to help me out, including a chief operating officer and others, that are really helping with the day-to-day. It is a fairly standard structure other than that.

In India, the government will put someone in jail if they criticize them, that is the end of that road. I think there’s more danger there for our version of democracy than there is benefit. I hear you on pressure and power and all these things, but I think it would be better — and maybe this is where we should really end — if all our companies were more competitive and what they were competing for in a vibrant marketplace was experiences based on moderation. If we all just admitted what social networks make is content moderation, both in terms of recommendations and creator tools that would incentivize you to make something.

Oh yes, that is correct. I think I sent that message. The title headline was a good one, although I disagree with it. But man, it was spot-on. You really nailed it. Everyone who is listening to this, go read that post, because I think you hint at and also link to some of the subtleties of content moderation and doing it at scale.

The learning curve is gradual. Even if you hire people, even if you know what’s going to happen, whatever user base you attract is going to cause new types of problems. For example, Tumblr has a younger demographic, teenagers, that are maybe stereotypically a little more angsty, so mental health things are really big there. If you search for certain tags, and get a message stating that you need help, we will build stuff to make sure you get it. This is a phone number. It gets better.”

There was one thing that I learned about called the pro-ana community, ana being short for anorexia. This was a community of folks who were using a social network in a way that’s not illegal, but was basically encouraging anorexic behaviors. I am not an expert in this at all, but I believe that it is a mentally and physically draining challenge for people who suffer from this. What are you doing for the kids and the people if you host and promote content that encourages that? Again, it’s not illegal, but it is your responsibility to control the distribution of that, to tamp it down if people are posting it, and to try to provide them pointers to resources — because we’re a tech company, we can’t help with that. There are lots of nonprofits and people we can point to that are actually professionals at this, and we can try to nudge people in the right direction.

By the way, that really works. Tech has made society better. I’ll talk about two issues. One that has been covered a little bit is around child exploitation material — people who abuse children, take pictures, et cetera. Tech companies have created technological solutions and shared data that have made it possible to catch this. Then it all gets passed to law enforcement and they do their thing. I think that has helped.

Then there’s suicide prevention. If you type in certain terms on a social network or search engine, they will jump in and give you pointers to resources. There has been a lot of sharing on what people click more, what resources are best, how to provide a phone number, how to do this internationally, how to do this in every language, et cetera. Tech companies, competitors and society share this all the time, because we all agree that it is part of our responsibility to society.

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

What’s in Tumblr? What do you think? What is in it for you, and what should you do about it? There are plenty of areas that aren’t

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

Right. Young people shouldn’t be encouraged to be anorexic. That’s a huge problem in that community. We should give resources to stop suicidal ideation and intervene to stop it. Those are aggressive moves. We are going to show up when we see things that will get in your way and tell you to go to these resources. They are aggressive interventions, but they’re not controversial.

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

I think this is as good of a summary of the problem as we can get to. You start with, “I bought Tumblr for the smallest amount of money that Verizon would sell it to me for,” and you end up with, “I’m hopeful for a more dynamic republic because we need to reform the speech laws of the country.” It seems like the journey when you say that it’s the most humble experience of your career. I have heard this from many executives in the tech industry. They get to a place where they want a more accountable external force to give cover for moderation decisions because the pressure is so high, and the only actor they can think of to do that is the government. You want to say that you wish we had some leaders, after reading the First Amendment.

The lines are not very clear on what is porn, and who is qualified to say what platform users should be looking at. The values inside the company might not line up with what you want users to be able to do on the platform. The platform has 8 million external actors with their own values that have control over it. Walk me through it. I’m picking on porn, but I can pick any number of other speech areas that have the same exact problems.

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

You’ve been talking a lot about the general problems. There are some problems on the internet that are very focused on moderation. It is clear that Apple is our distribution funnel and they’re opaque. They feel that they have a huge responsibility to their users and sometimes it gets in our way. What is the business model? Many companies are going through it.

Something we changed since our last podcast was that we actually reopened more adult content, specifically what we call “artistic expressions of the human form.” If you had posted a statue of David on this site before, the content moderation rules would have locked you up. We were able to get good at appealing and things like that, but we couldn’t change the rules until we had some better community moderation in place.

The first version of this feature actually started with a MPAA movie rating system in mind, so it is interesting that he talked about that as well. The history of the rating system is fraught when you get into it. Think about it. If there was one female nipple in a movie, all of a sudden it’s like PG-13 or R, but then there can be any amount of violence, gore, and blood spurting out — which obviously is not great for kids either — and that could be rated PG. A form of classification, called a Taxonomy, was a little more nuanced.

Yeah. When someone walks by, you don’t want that stuff to show up on your page when you open it. That’s embarrassing for everyone involved. We really thought about it from a user-centric point of view. This has been shown that this actually ties incentives.

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

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

Yeah. How do you get away with it? They allow all of that, like things in things. Pretty much anything you could find on a porn site is also on Twitter and Reddit. How do they escape with it? I think they are too big with enough legit content that Apple wasn’t really worried about. Maybe they made web-only toggles too. It was decided we would just copy that feature.

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

Why Apple is so strict about the App Store and distribution? An analysis of Elon’s frustrations with Google and The New York Times’s Twitter

That works for Elon but I don’t know if it would work for me. The process for reviewing the App Store is not easy to understand. You never know what’s going to happen.

I wish we had more knowledge. Whenever Apple engages in these backroom dealings about the App Store and distribution, even for apps as large as Tumblr or Twitter, we don’t really know exactly what goes down. It is only if you have someone like Matt that will discuss it, and he admitted that he is not really sure what goes down.

I believe we made a mistake when we submitted the app, because we used a wrong settings for the app setting so that it created another week. Then Thanksgiving happened. It’s an odd platform. Most of our tech was available to ship whenever you wanted. You can test, you can put things up, you can take them down. In the app stores, it goes through a person, and depending on who they are, they might interpret the rules differently.

I would say Apple’s and Google’s app store moderation is night and day. With Google, you get awesome tools, where you can roll out to percents of users and then roll it back. Everything is really fast and they allow way more stuff. They’re not as draconian about forcing in-app purchases. It is completely different.

Apple is the most powerful player in the US. They are a monopoly. They are in control of everything. They are also curious. My interpretation of why Apple is so strict about these things is they take their responsibility to their users quite seriously. There are examples of this.

If you sign up for a New York Times subscription on The New York Times’ website, they make it really hard to cancel it. You have to chat with someone and it takes 30 minutes of your time. It’s like canceling a gym membership. It is terrible. It’s a horrible user experience. If you subscribe to The New York Times through Apple though, you can just click a button to cancel your subscription. I think that is Apple advocating on behalf of users for something that is user-friendly. They have a section that they do things like cancel subscriptions, which is something we probably all agree on. It feels like they still think they’re the underdog.

It seems like they still think that they are going to be killed. I am excited because Apple has more cash in their bank than most countries. They’re one of the most powerful entities on the planet, and that makes them more powerful than most governments. I’m seeing them starting to shift into more of a benevolent role and realizing their size and their power.

What you’re describing are people who didn’t come up as the underdogs. Most of the current executives were there when Apple was the underdog. Over time, you can see their culture.

Taking over the site: Where am I now? What am I? Where are I, where are I going? What have I learned from Flickr?

You describe taking overt he site as the most disappointing experience of your life. It is this stuff. “Now I’m the politician who is in charge of a large city or a small country. The users are doing whatever they want, and all I can do is incentivize them to do good things and not bad things. There are a lot of people interested in whatever I do and app stores are one of them. What is the maximum authority you have to make decisions? It seemed like that’s at the center of it. You are not a tech executive who says, “Make the button blue.” You are a politician, who is hoping that the decision you make will result in the outcome you want.

I guess the best way to probably summarize where I am in 2022 — and this has evolved over the past year and the past 10 years — is that I’m extremely libertarian in terms of what people should be allowed to say. By the way, I’m totally okay with things I disagree with strongly or with people saying bad things about me. I am a public figure. It was great.

Where I think I have become more conservative is in bullying and hate speech, that sort of stuff. Of course, calls to violence are pretty noncontroversial. I would say bullying, or trolling, is maybe more in the middle. If you remember Flickr in the early days — like with Stewart Butterfield, Caterina Fake, Heather Champ, and Derek Powazek — they fostered an amazing community, often manually, by going and commenting on new users or choosing what they highlighted.

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

Like me? How do I connect with Tumblr and Twitter? What do I need? What is it like for me to take part in what I do?

That whole fun, amazing, beautiful thing happened partially because we created a space where you could have a “yes, and…” improv environment, with people riffing off each other and without a few bad actors coming in and spoiling it. I think we’ll see a lot more stuff like that on Tumblr in the future. It actually keeps growing, too. They put up posters in New York. I saw a picture yesterday, and there’s actually Goncharov posters now.

He’s goofing. He’s posting memes. You’re obviously deeply aware of Tumblr and the community. You are in it. Is it important for you to be consuming the service as a member of the audience? Because I think it cuts both ways.

One hundred percent, yeah. I do understand where he is coming from. My guess is that folks, like a Mark Zuckerberg, a Parag Agrawal [former Twitter CEO], or other leaders of social media, use the platforms a lot, but probably just under a secret account. They have an alternate name.

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

Are We Stand Up for Democracy? I Would Like to be Open about What We’ve Learned from the Case of Hacking the Voting Machines

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

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

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

The intersection of that and democracy is something I think we’re grappling with. If democracy says that people are free to vote and have input on how they are governed, I like that model. There’s a social contract and a principle morality to it that we can all agree to as participants in the system, which I think social networks and private companies miss. You don’t necessarily have to vote for the leaders of the social network.

As personalization, targeting, and machine learning and AI become so good, technology’s ability to influence you becomes amazing. This is what we are seeing today. How good is the TikTok algorithm? How good are Instagram ads? “Gosh, they know me so well. I buy more stuff off Instagram than any other place. They have made me dial in. That being applied to political influence is playing off in both sanctioned and unsanctioned ways. Actors like China, Iran, Russia are taking advantage of our free and open society to influence Americans. It’s the whole thing.

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

We were all worried about hacking the voting machines because that was a good story, but it’s way easier to just hack the people and influence the voters. The voting machines are pretty much the only thing they can do. It happens in every election. We know this for a fact. It isn’t a conspiracy. How do we protect our society from being impacted by the business models of these networks?

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

The Tension That Makes Selling Social Networks Successful: How Do You Get Your $times$ Metric Before You Show Up?

This has been an issue for you, have you had it? That you need to serve advertisers? Obviously, they are the money. Advertisers are still money even though you have just rolled out creator monetization tools. Are those revenues going up, or is it just us that need to get away from this? There is a reason that advertisers are leaving other platforms, and they are starting to come to you. Do you find yourself trying to navigate that balance?

We’re trying to balance it. I think advertising is the only business model that works when you give a free service. It costs a lot to run a social network. When you sign up for web hosting, you pay money, you get a certain amount of space and a certain amount of bandwidth, and there is a hard cost. When you sign up for a social network, you can upload unlimited video which can be viewed an unlimited amount of times, and it’s essentially an all-you-can-eat-for-nothing plan.

The companies still have to pay those bills, though. They need to pay for the network and build the data centers. Advertisers subsidize the cost of it because it’s a real cost.

Especially when the advertisers are saying you have to keep moderating as much as you have been, and your entire stated purpose of buying the thing is to moderate less. There’s a tension there that I think is really difficult. As the CEO of Tumblr who is trying to build an advertising business, do you explicitly hear from big companies, “We need you to measure your brand safety before we show up and give you money”?

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

What Do You Think The First Amendment Doesn’t Mean That You Really Think The Government Should Take Charge Of The Internet, Or Should You Think the Government Should Be More Responsible?

By the way, for all the stuff the tech companies do, the telecom companies are way worse. You can effectively target a few houses and serve cable ads to only those people with the help of Comcast. Credit card companies and banks will correlate your financial data with your spending in the store. The amount of tracking is crazy. The amount of geo data that gets shared is where we need governance to actually step in, because capitalism is not self-regulating well there.

To wrap this up, I want to ask where you specifically think moderation belongs in the stack. I will point out that there is a distinction between the three websites, with one being enterprise customers where you host for them, and the other two being on the web. It is believed that if you’re close to the internet’s pipes, you should be less interested in moderation. AT&T and COMCAST should not watch the bits that are on their network. Cloudflare maybe shouldn’t, right? They ride on top of the rails. The only policies they have are like they won’t host white supremacist sites. That’s the whole line.

I know what you mean. The First Amendment does not apply to us as a company because we are a private entity. We can either do business with them or not. That’s one of the most common misunderstandings. You are quite good at clarifying when it comes up. Why do I feel the government should be more involved? Because of the feedback mechanisms and the checks and balances.

Do you think the government of the United States should be involved? That seems to me that everyone wants someone else to solve the problem or make the decisions. The most likely set of actors that would do that are government officials, and they shouldn’t. Especially in this country, they should not make those rules. The First Amendment does not state that you should make speech regulations. I am just frustrated.

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

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

there’s no law against shouting “fire” in a crowded theater

.

There are laws for creating harm when it is voluntary. Hate speech is covered by laws. There are laws regarding certain types of crimes.

Sure, yeah. Now I’m with you, but you’ve gotten all the way to “you murdered someone.” There isn’t a law against hate speech. You can make a statement that people of other races are bad. You can just do it.

Sure, in other countries. Most people here think that the government should make some rules, and almost every time I hear about it, it’s not actually a rule. The law in this country, the case that overturned the yelling of “fire” in a crowded theater,

Brandenburg v. Ohio

, changed the standard from, “You’re going to cause clear and present danger,” to, “Your speech is directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” You can shout “fire” in a crowded theater all you want, you are not going to cause imminent lawless action. You’re just going to get people to get the hell out. That is what I mean.

Germany is a good example. The Germans decided to take a tougher stance against Nazi-like stuff because of their history, so it’s kind of funny. As a society, they have made that decision. Over time, that might change as well.

More bad laws are the thing in the US’s history. Those will evolve over time. How would we change the first amendment over the course of time? It would require a new amendment to be put into place. There’s a really high bar for changing these things.

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

Why is the government slow, how does the government act? A candid look at Beto O’Rourke and his work with Cult of the Dead Cow

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

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

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

Towards a Dynamic Republique: The Case of Matt Mullenweg-Elon-Maks and the Issue of Power

There are others who can do it. We definitely have an issue where people are holding onto power for a really long time, since the ‘70s or ‘80s. We don’t have anything quite like this gerontocracy in history. As that starts to shift, I think that we’ll start to see a more dynamic republic. At least that’s what I’m hoping for. I am voting for who I am donating to. I am trying to advocate for more of that.

I don’t want to be removed from the responsibility or pressure but I do want to speak for myself. I think that the responsibility and power put on me and our team is beyond what is warranted by the social contract in our society or from our users. There is a better system for this.

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

Is it really possible to make videos on Twitter? An analysis of TikTok in Germany and how it affects the media and the public opinion

Yeah, and I’m terrified of government speech regulations. It’s my open bias as a journalist. I think that they are bad on their face. I can see them at their place of employment. Germany has a long, tortured history. They’re still complicated and difficult in that country. I think from our perspective, thousands of miles away, we’re like, “That seems pretty good.” People in Germany think this is more complicated than you think.

It’s not possible to make text posts on TikTok. It does not want them on its platform. It incentivizes watching a video. There’s a lot of them, but they’re hacks, which is fascinating to think about. The platform itself is not geared to make you post text. It’s geared to make you post videos. That is a content moderation, I think. That the users have done something else is just a fascinating dynamic inside of that platform.

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

Taking Down the New York Post: Is It Really Necessary? The Most Important Thing about Content Moderation is How You Take It Down

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

You always do. It is humans. Humans are fallible and they will make mistakes. It’s how you correct the mistakes that really matters. A lot of these stories are centered on the Hunter Biden laptops that were brought to the attention of the public. A story was brought to the New York Post, but the links to it were removed. Guess who hosts the New York Post? We do.

Matt talked about the Hunter Biden laptop story and I was interested to hear it. I was not aware they hosted the New York Post. As a culture, we haven’t even really come to reckon with the ramifications of the power of where you sit in the stack and the content decisions you make. The power of a company like WPyoth is even more pronounced than taking a story down.

Wait. So WordPress VIP hosts the New York Post. You had to have a meeting about taking down New York Post links after the Biden laptop story was published.

A discussion took place. Yeah, absolutely. There is always a discussion and there are reports. People contact us saying, “Take this down,” or, “This is violating your policy.” The policies are just the beginning. The interpretation of the policies is really where I think the art and science of it is.

We will also make mistakes. We’ve accidentally taken down blogs, either by some script that went wrong, or by a human who clicked the wrong button or made a mistake interpreting our policies. It is all about figuring out how to fix it.

The Censorship Problem: Does Donald Trump actually Run the Universe? Is There a Time for a Reassessment?

I believe we are in a weird time where the right is incentivized to say that there is a huge censorship problem or that they are being suppressed. Donald Trump would famously play the victim while he was also the leader of the free world, the most powerful person in the United States, the president. I am amazed that that shtick still works, but is the problem actually there? Does he have a platform? Is there not a robust discussion around the Hunter Biden laptop? Are there not endless articles, endless testimonies, et cetera?

Maybe it is time to say that this is working, and perhaps we should question the idea that there is something wrong here. There will be mistakes in the current system. It is not perfect, but it gets to correct itself in a matter of hours or days.

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

What Have You Learned from Elon Musk on Twitter During the Three Years of Operating a Social Network and How Did He Go on Twitter?

That is the perfect last question. You have been doing this over the past few years. You bought a network. You were a great technology executive when you bought the social networking site. I think it’s great that you said that this is the most hard experience of your business career because you were successful with all the other companies. You have done it for three years. How do you think there should be counsel for Elon Musk?

He will do it to keep an open mind. I think he is someone who will be able to update his views when new facts come along. We have already seen that happen over the past few weeks on Twitter. I fully expect him to end up where the rest of us are and where Twitter was prior to him. I wish he could have avoided a lot of pain along the way, but do you know the saying, “There are no atheists in foxholes”? There isn’t a free speech absolutism who runs social networks, because you can start to realize the responsibilities to users and society, which are a lot messier.

That’s why you won’t hear me criticize when Facebook or Twitter or anyone else messes up, because I know that we’re going to mess up, too. I am not looking at how quickly they correct, I’m looking at how quickly they correct, that is if they are not perfect or not. It’s how quickly we course-correct. So that’s what I want to do. He is also working on important things. I hope his focus is not diverted from the space, cars, and solar panels.

That is awesome. Matt, I could talk to you for hours about this. Thank you for coming onto Decoder, I enjoy the experience of running these companies. We’ll see if we can set a faster record for you to come on next time than we did this last year.

Alex Heath is the deputy editor of the Verge. He is going to tell me how all of this is connected to Elon Musk and Twitter. Alex, welcome to the site.

I wanted to talk to you as you’ve been reporting on the subject of social media. I would like to close the loop on the things you heard from Matt and some of the things you heard from Musk.

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

How are the threats against Twitter and Tumblr about promoting products and services that aren’t about advertising? A case study of Elon Musk on Twitter

There were some leaked emails between Parler and Apple that said, “You need to improve your moderation,” and it was very vague. That’s the thing with Apple. These threats are often very vague.

Then there’s what they’re actually trying to build towards. It is remarkable how similar they are. They want to get away from a pure dependence on advertising, and they want to launch paid consumer products like Twitter Blue or tipping on Tumblr. Tumblr actually has fake verified badges, which is one of the funniest social media products in years.

Is the payment part of it? They’re all talking about payments. Sending money to other people on the network is what they want to be able to do. It seems like, “What if a bunch of people are sending money around and we took cents out of every transaction?” I get why you’d be interested in that, but it is also the most boring product for a social network. I don’t know if I want to send money through 50 different platforms.

It depends. If there is a creator system where creators ask for payment and post more content, you might want to have money in it. Elon is obsessed with recreating his original idea for X.com, which predated PayPal. At a meeting with his employees, he said that he wanted to do something in the area of finance and that he had begun withPayPal. He wants to finish Project X and then turn it into a bank, which is what he’s calling it on social media. Nobody has been successful in doing that.

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

What Do We Expect to Learn from Apple CEOs? What Have They Learned about Apple? Are They willing to go over that line?

That was going to be a follow-up question. Is there anything else? Is it, that I will give the person who wrote the account a couple bucks after I saw a goodtweet? That is the baseline of it and I am not sure why I would do that.

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

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

We uncover the line of what the CEOs will say about Apple every time we watch this show. I think that’s just utterly fascinating. I think the thing with Elon that is fascinating is that line does not exist for him.

I think what Elon has shown is that the conversation is shifting from, “Apple’s control is a business issue for everyone,” to, “It’s actually a speech issue.” Tim Sweeney and other CEOs are putting a lot of pressure on this. I think this is the next phase. Even if it’s just a PR thing, there may be a problem that you need to combat if Ron and Elon claim to be threatening free speech. I’m not sure Apple is equipped to engage with that level of attacking.

I believe they are ready for it. I think what they’re going to show is, “Look at these apps. They’re full of bad things you don’t want your kids to see. We sitting in the middle to make sure your children don’t see that stuff. Use our internet browser if you want to watch that stuff. I think that has fundamentally been their answer for a long time.

What Happened When the Twitter Jet-Tracer Became Dissipated on the Macroscopic Twitter Group, and Why Is It Necessary?

A new set of rules that appeared to have been designed specifically to justify the removal of the jet-tracing account was posted on the company’s website. The move comes after Musk has reinstated previous Twitter rule-breakers and stopped enforcing the platform’s policies prohibiting Covid-19 misinformation.

You said the Twitter files have been disseminated by Elon. It’s unclear how they’re being generated or vetted. There are a lot of question marks there. From what is publicly revealed, they show well-meaning people debating difficult decisions and coming up with conclusions. You might disagree with that completely. Maybe you don’t believe they’re well- meaning. Even if you think it’s a shadowy liberal conspiracy, you can’t really disagree with, “Yeah, they’re talking about hard decisions and reaching a conclusion, while also talking about how to justify their conclusion.”

He’s not there right now. The mantra inside Twitter is that you could essentially say the most hateful thing, and unless it’s illegal, it’s going to be on the site. We now need to corner that speech off the follower graph and not amplify it, or suggest it, or put it in the timeline.

Right now their baseline is that they are not putting hate speech next to ads. That hasn’t happened yet, but that’s what they want. They will think they are following their freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach, and no platform has shown that that is enough.

Also, who wants to be on a platform with bad people? That is weird to me. It is funny. To some extent, with overt racism, overt sexism, and overt transphobia — and Matt brought up the pro-ana community, which says, “anorexia is good” — on the whole, people are like, “Yeah, that stuff is bad.” Then there’s a lot in the gray area. Even the stuff that people agree is bad, people don’t want to be on platforms where that stuff is prolific. So if you need to grow the user base and have payments, don’t you need to do more than wall it off? Don’t you need to just make it go away?

If your goal is to be the town square, you would think so. It turns out that if you actually think about the digital representation of what an actual town square would look like, it’s not a good place to be. It’s everyone from the town in one square yelling at each other, which is what Twitter has already been. They’ve been trying to get rid of the worst voices in a way that shows how much they care about them, based on their own internal correspondence that shows how much of a problem they are. Maybe that is what it will take to realise that the entire town square concept is just not suited to humans.

Then there’s this concept of shadow banning and limiting your reach, and what you just described is exactly that. “We’re going to detect the content of your tweets and make sure we don’t show them to anyone.” Maybe you will know, maybe they will be more open about it, but they will only allow you if you are racist. That is a very qualitative, very difficult kind of judgment. I don’t think that you can automate it. Is there any idea of how they will implement that?

No, and they don’t know. They hope to automate the worst of the worst, but you’re right, there’s so much nuance and tone. There’s no platform that is doing this automated de-amplification of nuanced, potentially sarcastic but hateful speech at scale. I think it is ironic that he is having the files dumped so that they show them doing exactly what he wants them to do.

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

Where was Jack? It wasn’t like a Russian operation. What happened when Jack was unable to leave the social networking platform (and what happened if he did?)

He tried to not be like that. Almost for the worse. He tried too hard to be out of the way and we are seeing that now. It was like, Where was Jack? That is a whole other thing.

“As a culture, we haven’t even really come to reckon with the ramifications of the power of where you sit in the stack and the content decisions you make.”

It is important for all of us to remember that we are deep into it. If you want it, you can get Hunter Biden’s laptop. Apple sells it in the store. There was a time when no one understood the provenance of the laptop, and no one understood what was on it. It was mostly non-consensual nudes being shared, and people thought it was a Russian operation. The conversation probably occurred when that moment became over-heated. It is astounding for the technical capabilities that exist in that conversation.

And that we are still talking about it. It seems like it could have been an uncomfortable thing that happened on the social networking site. When something is political we realize it in the heat of the moment. We actually have these platforms that sit at various layers of the stack that have tremendous power to literally just wipe that off of the internet. What happens if they actually do?”

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

How did Trump and Musk come to office? A tale of two lives, one story for one politician: a story about a man who died in his death

All right, this has been a fascinating episode. I am curious to see how fast he comes back around to the basics of a social network. Matt’s a smart guy. Zuck, for all of his faults, is a very smart person and he has arrived at a place that looks a lot like the place Twitter was at. I am curious if all these smart people get to the exact same spot in the end, because of the constraints.

I told my newsroom colleagues that we shouldn’t cover everything Trump said in his first year in office. Previously, a president’s every word was assumed to be a carefully chosen signal of future policy, and was reported as such. Trump said many things in order to get a rise out of people. Reporting on them, I argued, just fed the flames. An editor tried to get back at him. “He’s the president,” he said, or words to that effect. What he has to say is true.

Here, we saw a lot of news stories about the Musk controversy, which started when he made a joke about his pronouns being “proscute/ fauci” and then he made a joke about gender diversity. Some more information is available on the picture of his bedside table with two replica guns on it, and on the Pepe the Frog meme.

The way coverage of Trump was done is exactly the same as this. 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. The reporting was good but these accounts were the talk of the town. The losers were the public, whose understanding of what was actually happening across the country was forced through incompatible narratives around the behavior of one unhinged man in the White House.

This is what is happening with Musk. Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic describes a “dysfunctional relationship between Twitter’s new owner and so many of the journalists who cover him … where the least defensible statements and claims on all sides are relentlessly amplified in a never-ending cycle that predictably fuels disdain and negative polarization.”

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.

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

The requested information included emails and memos related to Musk, messages about the FTC, and details about Twitter sales of computers and office equipment.

The selection of Taibbi and Weiss who both share Musk’s criticism of the mainstream media has caused controversy. The original documents have not been shared with other news outlets, which have only been given a few snippets and screen shots of the document.

By early October last year, as Elon Musk faced a court deadline to complete his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, the company’s newest research was almost ready. The program that demoted some mentions of gay, Muslim, anddeaf wasn’t meant to limit views of people with marginalized identities, but rather to limit views of people with them on the internet. The finding—and a partial fix Twitter developed—could help other social platforms better use AI to police content. Would anyone ever be able to read the research?

Take the decision by the social networking site to temporarily block users from sharing a New York Post story about shady business dealings by Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, in Ukraine, which happened right before the 2020 presidential election.

The Post said that it got files from Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and a former Trump adviser named Steve Bannon when it searched Hunter Biden’s laptop. At the time, it was unclear whether that material was authentic. Tech companies were worried about a repeat of the Democratic National Committee email leak after the Russian hacks in 2016 and that’s why they restricted the Post story.

In the most recent file dump, Musk revealed documents that show how the trust and safety teams came to the decision to ban Trump in the wake of the insurrection on January 6, 2021.

It doesn’t show any evidence that there was a government involvement in the move to block the New York Post story.

He believed that everyone acted according to the best information available at the time and that there was no ill intent. “Mistakes were made.”

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

Erratum: Musk is using the Twitter Files to “discredit… foes and push conspiracy theorem”

DiResta said there’s good reason to demand more insight into how social media companies operate. “Often these decisions are quite inscrutable,” she said. The question of how they are moderated and how they’re designed is very important because these are platforms that shape public opinion.

She said that outsiders need more than “anecdotes” from Musk’s journalists to get the full picture.

To better understand the decision to ban Trump, for example, it would help to see discussions around the accounts of other world leaders who have not been kicked off the platform, she said.

There is value in what has been revealed to the public, but at the same time, it is primarily reinforcing a perception of being partisan individuals within the United States, said DiResta.

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. A person with knowledge of the situation said that the family has been forced to flee their home.

“The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and isn’t going to 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 requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation, says the CEO’s willingness to target people who work 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 and the Whereabouts of ElonJet: Musk and the Disappearance of the Assassination Coordinates

“It is being processed as punitive and sort of owning the last regime, as opposed to saying, ‘Here are things that we can see in these files and here is how it’s going to be done differently under our watch,'” DiResta said.

The @ElonJet account, which had amassed more than 500,000 followers, was permanently suspended Wednesday after Twitter introduced a set of new policies banning accounts that track people’s live locations. Musk also blocked any account linking to such information. Previously, there were no location sharing-related restrictions on Twitter.

The accounts were taken down without explanation from the company. But Musk took to Twitter on Thursday night to accuse journalists of sharing private information about his whereabouts, which he described as “basically assassination coordinates.” He provided no evidence for that claim.

He said he setup the plane because he was a fan of Musk. He said it will give you another view of what is happening with Musk, and could give you clues about what the tech billionaire is up to.

The company updated their private information and media policy to prohibit the sharing of live location data, a clause that was added by the company, according to the Internet Archive.

In tweets, Musk accused the journalists of violating the platform’s policy against doxing — or posting private information online — by sharing his “exact real-time” location. CNN’s Donie O’ Sullivan, and The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, were among the reporters who appeared to have done so. Musk and Twitter didn’t respond to CNN’s requests for comment.

Asked if he planned to comply with the new policy, Sweeney told CNN he would begin delaying posting the whereabouts of Musk’s jet for 24 hours, “but just on Twitter.”

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

Some of the journalists whose accounts were suspended had written about the accounts that tracked the private planes or had tweeted about those accounts. There are some articles that have been critical of Mr. Musk. Many of them had many followers on the platform.

Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment. Musk has promised to eradicate automatically generated spam from the platform, but Twitter allows automated accounts that are labeled as such — as Sweeney’s were.

A Comment on Musk’s “Flight to the East Coast” and the “Massive Twitter Ban”, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, and the SPJ

It showed Musk going to the East Coast before his meeting with the president of France.

A New York Times spokesperson called the mass bans “questionable and unfortunate,” adding: “Neither The Times nor Ryan have received any explanation about why this occurred. We hope that all of the journalists’ accounts are reinstated and that Twitter provides a satisfying explanation for this action.”

The practice of giving someone’s home address and other personal information online is called doxing. The account was banned for using flight data online to track Musk’s jet.

Rusch wrote that they think banning journalists without clear communication in an environment where many people believe freedom of speech is at risk is too much for a majority of consumers.

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

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.”

The enigmatic suspension of links to the tagging account of Mastodon’s tweet on Twitter is “dangerous”

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 put an explicit policy on the practice on Sunday, but it was called into question after a vocal backlash the next day.

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.

In a post on Substack, he said he didn’t know why he was suspended. He said he did tweet on Wednesday a link to a Facebook page for the jet-tracking account.

Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at the advocacy group Free Press, echoed Jaffer’s remarks, saying suspending journalists based seemingly on personal animus “sets a dangerous precedent.”

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

The EU requires respect of fundamental rights in the Digital Services Act. Musk should be aware of that, as it’s reinforced under the #MediaFreedomAct, according to Jourov.

A top EU official warned Musk in late November that the social media platform must take major steps to comply with the blocs content moderation laws.

A Twitter Comment on the “Future of Social Media and the Impact of Donald Trump on the Electoral Commission, the Bell Institute, and the Foundations of Freedom and Democracy”

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

Sally Buzbee, The Post’s Executive Editor, said that the suspension of Drew Harwell’s account directly undermined the claim that Musk intended to run a platform dedicated to free speech. Harwell was removed from the social networking website without warning or explanation after he reported accurate information about Musk. Our journalist should be reinstated immediately.”

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

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

It is possible that this discrepancy may be due to the way different governments respond to moderation on social platforms. The company was banned for 30 days because of its removal of Buhari’s threat to blow up Biafra. But instead of banning Buhari in turn, the company later negotiated with the government to be reinstated by agreeing, among other things, to open a local office, pay local taxes, and register as a broadcaster. Nigeria is now considering legislation to regulate platforms.

How did Musk buy a McLaren F1 and then drive it into a ditch to show his respect to the person who bought it?

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

I’ve been thinking a lot about when Musk purchased a McLaren F1 and then drove it into a ditch trying to show his respect to the person who funded him. “You know, I had read all those stories about people who made money and bought sports cars and crashed them,” Musk said to Thiel, according to Max Chafkin’s The Contrarian. “But I knew it could never happen to me, so I didn’t get any insurance.”

Since Musk took a big stake in Twitter, the shares of THe company have lost nearly 800 billion of their market value. Musk, who recently lost his status as the world’s richest person, has repeatedly unloaded Tesla shares in recent months, including another $3.6 billion worth earlier this month.

Can we not stop pretending that this is nothing but flailing after the debacle last night? He crashed the car and didn’t have insurance.

An Open Town Hall: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls, After Musk Takes Over Twitter, Tesla Has Come Under Fire

Musk has sold billions of dollars worth of Tesla stock, most likely to pay for his purchase of Twitter. That has caused the stock of the technology company to plummet over the past month. But Tesla shares were up 5% in premarket trading after the poll results were revealed.

Editor’s Note: Kara Alaimo, an associate professor in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University, writes about issues affecting women and social media. Her book “This Feed Is on fire: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls” has gone crazy. The book will be published by Alcove Press. The opinions expressed in this commentary are not of hers. CNN has many opinions on it.

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

The decision to restore the accounts came after Musk posted a survey on his personal account that showed that many people wanted him to do so.

When Musk was questioned about the reporters’ ousting during the session hosted by the journalist, he abruptly signed out of the chat. Musk later stated that Spaces had been taken offline to deal with a bug. Late Friday, Spaces returned.

Hours before the polls were completed and the accounts were returned, Musk declared there would be a day of freedom Friday. Several right-to-far-right people, including Gateway Pundit editor Jim Hoft and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, were unsuspended on Friday. This appears to be part of Musk making good on his promise to give most previously-suspended accounts general amnesty, which he says is happening due to the results of a poll.

The company had suspended them after a public poll on the site, but was going to lift them after the results were in. The poll showed 58.7% of respondents favored a move to immediately unsuspend accounts over 41.3% who said the suspensions should be lifted in seven days.

Most of the accounts were back on Friday. Business Insider’s Linette Lopez was suspended after the other journalists, also without explanation, she told The Associated Press.

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

The Dangerous Disruption of Mashable on Twitter: Signs of the Musk-Like Stalled ‘Mumford’s Fire’

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

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

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

“The old regime at Twitter governed by its own whims and biases and it sure looks like the new regime has the same problem,” she tweeted “I oppose it in both cases.”

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

CBS briefly shut down its social network activity in November due to uncertainties about new management, but the media have largely remained on the platform.

“We all know news breaks on Twitter … and to now go after journalists really saws at the main foundational tent pole of Twitter,” Paskalis said. It is the most self-destructive wound I can think of.

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

On the day Musk took ownership, 3.4 million people were on Mastodon, but on Friday it was over 6 million. On many of the thousands of confederated networks in the open-source Mastodon platform, administrators and users solicited donations as disaffected Twitter users strained computing resources. Many of the networks, known as “instances,” are crowd-funded. The platform is designed to be ad-free.

Elon Musk: Twitter CEO or Benson? After his scandalous tweet outburst last week, Tesla’s billionaire apologized

O’Sullivan and Harwell both told CNN on Saturday morning that they had not agreed to delete the tweets and instead selected an option to appeal the decision.

He told CNN that he had decided to remove the message from his account and move on with his life.

Shortly after Musk posted his latest poll, Calacanis posted a poll of his own asking who should become Twitter’s next CEO: himself, Sacks, or Calacanis and Sacks together as co-CEOs.

In reply to a person who asked him if he would take the CEO job, Musk said he has not been happy with his new job.

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

All Musk needs from his captive audience is a little more attention, with a promise that there will be votes about “major policy changes” in the future.

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

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

He had 17 million votes cast in the informal referendum on his chaotic leadership of the micro- networking website, which has seen mass layoffs, the replatforming of suspended accounts, the suspension of journalists and whiplash policy changes in real time.

But that decision generated so much immediate criticism, including from past defenders of Twitter’s new billionaire owner, that Musk promised not to make any more major policy changes without an online survey of users.

The action to block competitors was Musk’s latest attempt to crack down on certain speech after he shut down a Twitter account last week that was tracking the flights of his private jet.

Mainstream websites like Facebook and Instagram and upstart rivals Mastodon, Tribel, Nostr, Post, and former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social were among the banned platforms. The website that was included on the blacklist is Parler, but not other websites such as TikTok.

A test case was the prominent venture capitalist Paul Graham, who in the past has praised Musk but on Sunday told his 1.5 million Twitter followers that this was the “last straw” and to find him on Mastodon. His Twitter account was promptly suspended, and soon after restored as Musk promised to reverse the policy implemented just hours earlier.

Warren posed several questions about how the board of directors of the company is dealing with conflicting interests, misappropriation of corporate assets and actions by Mr. Musk that appear to be out of the best interests of shareholders.

Warren highlighted questions about potential violations of securities or other laws caused by Musk.

Noting Tesla’s board has legal obligations it must fulfill, Warren asked the board to respond to a series of questions about its handling of the situation by January 3.

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 CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, was cited as the catalyst for the downgrade.

The Story of Musk: Identifying the New CEO of a Social Media Company in the Ads / CIO/CFO Correspondence

“I think it should be in a stable position around the end of this year,” Musk said. He did not say who would be the new CEO, but after the interview he posted a joke picture of his dog at the desk and said the new CEO was amazing. Various publications including Bloomberg and CNBC have reported that a CEO hunt has been underway in recent months, but potential candidates remain elusive (here are our informed guesses).

A journalist during the dot com era, Calacanis has backed a number of well-known companies. He has also launched several media properties and hosts two podcasts (one in partnership with Sacks).

Calacanis tweeted on Sunday night asking, “Who would like the most miserable job in tech AND media?! Who is insane enough to run twitter?!?!” Calacanis also ran his own Twitter poll asking followers whether he or Sacks should run the company, separately or together, or whether someone else should take over. The majority of people voted for something else.

Sacks, who along with Musk was among the original founding team at PayPal, has at least some experience managing a social network. He sold Yammer to Microsoft in 2012 for around $1 billion.

He has invested in cryptocurrencies, which he could use to fulfill Musk’s goal of making it more than just a social media app.

Krishnan is the least controversial member of Musk’s current leadership team and this could help distract some of the recent negative attention the company has received.

Some users on the social media company’s platform speculated about possible leaders, including the Trump family’s son-in-law, who was spotted watching the World Cup with Musk.

Kushner is friendly with the Saudi Royal Family, one of Twitter’s largest investors. Prior to working as an advisor in Trump’s White House, Kushner worked for his family’s real estate development company, and last year he said he would leave politics and start an investment firm. The weekly New York Observer was previously owned by Kushner.

The Billionaire Attack: A New Analogue of the Evil Maid Attack and its Implications for Blockchains, Applications, and Software Development

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. He hasn’t. In fact, Musk wasn’t on social media for an entire day on Monday.

In the field of information security, there’s a kind of vulnerability known as the evil maid attack whereby an untrusted party gains physical access to important hardware, such as the housekeeping staff coming into your hotel room when you’ve left your laptop unattended, thereby compromising it. We have here a new analog, just as capable of wrecking systems and leaking data. If you’d like, call it the billionaire attack. Money is the weapon of choice, because it is likely you won’t have enough to make a difference when the moment arrives. The call is coming from inside the house.

The reason this strategy works is that most ideas of any consequence are owned by people with more money than you, and then whenever possible they string them together into a network with the specific intent of making the gravity inescapable. The term platform is often used to describe technical systems that can be used to create new functions, and the power sources that propel the technology industry find platforms particularly appealing when they are used.

The problem can be fought on the deepest level possible. It would be vastly more difficult, or perhaps impossible, for Musk to kill off a blockchain so long as a handful of users objected enough to continue operating independent nodes. Duplicating across many computers means the risk of losing access is infinitesimal; the blockchain is its own API. It’s not a problem if you lose information due to a hostile party. One way to reuse the same content was to put a new version of the Hic et Nunc marketplace around it. It’s almost like organic self- defense when the interoperability occurs because of the shared resource.

The earlyBlogging engine that grew into the current general-purpose content management software could be considered a case in point. It powers 40 percent of the open web and is somewhat synonymous with it. A huge economy has arisen around it, a large number of people are working for companies that develop websites, developers who work for those companies, independent developers who work for themselves and many of them are writing extensions which can be unlocked with licensing fees. This is all possible because the core is open source and encourages the same of its ecosystem. There is an argument for saying that it is a bit long in the tooth since it lost out to Twitter in the social features department and has existed for a long time. But we must now understand it to be a bigger technical success than Twitter, simply 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.

The Mastodon app is currently number 8 in free social networking apps on the Play Store and 11 in the social networking category on the Apple app store. (Mastodon is a decentralized social network, meaning that there are also numerous third-party apps for the platform beyond its own.)

Mastodon founder Ruling Out Covid-19 and Twitter Blue: The Case for a New CEO and a Change of Social Media Policy

In the blog post, which reflect the Mastodon founder’s first remarks since the link ban, Rochko highlighted Musk’s significant power as owner and CEO of Twitter.

“This is a stark reminder that centralized platforms can impose arbitrary and unfair limits on what you can and can’t say while holding your social graph hostage,” Rochko wrote.

We at Free Press agree that Musk must step aside. He needs a new CEO that understands the basics of this social media platform and its users before it’s too late.

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

With regard to reversals, Twitter’s potential new leadership needs to undo its decision to allow Covid-19 misinformation and disinformation to spread unchecked across the social network. They need to retire Twitter’s pay-to-play blue checkmark feature, which allows verified users to post longer videos and have their content prioritized at the top of replies, mentions and searches. And they must cease Musk’s “general amnesty” plan on accounts that were suspended before he took over.

When the majority of users on the platform said they wanted Donald Trump’s account to be restored, he followed through. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” he pronounced via tweet, Latin for “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”

Likewise, when Twitter users voted on another of his polls to provide “general amnesty to suspended accounts,” he went ahead and did it. He got user votes to restore the accounts of the tech journalists who were suspended on Friday.

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

Twitter announced a new policy on Sunday that took many users aback: It said tweets including links to other social media sites would no longer be allowed, calling such posts “free promotion.”

What Mr. Musk said about Twitter users and how it affected artists, publishers, and the art community at large and small : “It is too late for creatives to take seriously the power of Twitter”

Mr. Musk questioned the quality of those applying for the job. He previously wrote that those who want power are the ones who deserve it.

He said that they will make a change and cause a massive disruption. Monday’s outage was the result of what Musk said was a “tiny change” to theTwitter user base. It was a catastrophic change to the entireTwitter user base.

Let me explain: I’m lucky enough to know a lot of creatives as well as a lot of journalists and tech workers. Artists who use platforms where they accept commissions for their artwork woke me up on Sunday with the news that they would not be allowed to useTwitter. I read horror stories from authors who were terrified that the Linktrees their publishers asked them to create to promote their books, reviews, and Goodreads profiles were suddenly bannable offenses on Twitter.

My friends on twitch were worried that their streams would stop if they wouldn’t be able to announce a new stream, or add a link to their social media page to help watchers find them. I think that all of these things created a potential for lost income for people who don’t need it more than the people who made the policy decisions. The creators have the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that Silicon Valley claims to want to cultivate and empower.

The Misfortunes of the World’s Richest Person: An Analysis of Musk’s Implications for Tesla, Ford, Rivian, and General Motors

Morgan Stanley still believes the company is somewhat undervalued as a result of the big recent sell-offs, citing its head start over the electric car competition, and potential tax advantages as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act passed earlier this year.

The losses, however, have further put a dent in the fortunes of one of the world’s richest people. The value of Musk’s stock has fallen by over half this year, making him less valuable than at the beginning of the year. Two weeks ago, he lost his title as the world’s richest person to Bernard Arnault.

He said that people think the drama is lower than it really is, adding that homes and cars will get very impacted by economic conditions.

Musk made promises about future products, which resulted in many coming years after they were first promised.

The goal of 50% sales growth helped drive that valuation. It conceded in October that it will miss that sales target for this year.

The stock’s climb to dizzying heights – rising 743% in 2020 alone – was driven by Musk’s reputation as a genius who would disrupt the massive global auto industry.

It’s five years behind the offerings from Ford and Rivian due to the slow ramp-up of production, which starts next year. It could also trail planned electric pickup offerings from General Motors.

Comment on “Tesla stock: What the hell does he want to do?” by Gordon Johnson, M.J. Musk, Ph.D

Gordon Johnson is one of the largest critics of Musk, and he said that he has a pathological problem with the truth. “When people say he’s a genius and innovator, it’s based on all his promises he never lives up to.”

“After they start being priced like other automakers rather than on its promises, the shares will have a much steeper fall ahead,” Johnson said. It takes almost every year to make enough new plants to hit its goals, so the factories in Texas and Germany that opened in the spring are not operating at full capacity. The plant in China has had to scale back production because of weak sales due to the Covid restrictions.

“Demand in the US has collapsed,” he said. “Two months ago, your wait time was two or three months. You can get one right away. They’re going to build more cars than they sell for a third straight quarter. It refers to excess capacity.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/29/business/tesla-stock/index.html

Tesla is EV’s biggest competitor: Why Twitter doesn’t respond to Musk’s promise to sell his shares of stock in Tesla

Volkswagen and BYD inChina are challenging the title of world’s biggest EV maker, which is still held byTesla. Ford and GM are some of the established automakers that are having more competition.

Musk promised on the Thursday call that he would no longer be selling his shares of stock in the company. But he hasn’t lived up to a previous promise in April that he was done selling Tesla shares, selling $14.4 billion of that stock since that time.

It may have been unpopular with other potential buyers, such as liberals who might be willing to pay more for a more environment friendly vehicle.

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. His engagement numbers are dropping.

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

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

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

He said that it shows how much more alive Twitpic is than it seems, as most of the people that use it read it.

The Seattle Headquarters: Is There Anything Theoretically Yet? Employees in the Twitter Space Who Don’t Communicate About Work

One employee said that they haven’t seen much in the way of cogent strategy. “Most of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires (mostly caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that), performing impossible tasks, and ‘improving efficiency’ without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. From my perspective, we mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire.

One employee said there were times when he was just woken at night and said things that did not make sense. “And then he’ll come to us and be like, ‘this one person says they can’t do this one thing on the platform,’ and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make sense.

The San Francisco headquarters, whose landlord has sued Twitter for nonpayment of rent, has a melancholy air. When people pass each other in the halls, we’re told that the standard greeting is “where are you interviewing?” and “where do you have offers?” Employees have to reserve beds in advance on the eighth floor.

“People don’t even chat about work things anymore,” the employee said. “It’s just heartbreaking. I have more conversations with my coworkers on Telegram, than on Slack. Before the transition, it was not uncommon in the team channel to talk about what everybody did that weekend. There isn’t anything anymore.

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

What’s the least fireable response I can have to tech right now? An employee’s frustrations with the Twitter relaunch of Twitter Blue

When asked a question, one employee said, “what is the least fireable response I can have to this right now?”

That 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.)

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

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

The employee said that the man doesn’t like to believe that there is anything he doesn’t know about technology. You can’t be the smartest person in the room all the time.

The recent vibe of tech and fear of not being able to find something else are some of the factors an employee said is most important. Most of my team is doing hardcore interview prep and would jump at the chance to walk away.

Twitter or Twitter? Where do people go if they don’t want to go? The case of Artifact, a photo sharing service

Sarah Oh lost her job as a human rights advisor at the social networking company in the first round of layoffs, and she decided to join a friend in building a rival service.

With Gabor Cselle, who previously worked at Twitter and Google, she launched T2, currently available in beta. Like Twitter, it offers a social feed of posts with 280-character limits. Oh said the main selling point was its focus on safety.

Oh told CNN the company wants to create an experience that allows people to share what they want to share without fear of abuse and harassment.

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. T2 is a good example of an app that resembles Twitter, but other apps take a different approach.

A description of the new Artifact news feed that the co-founds of the photo sharing service said was powered by artificial intelligence quickly got the attention of the social media site. CNN tested the news app in a similar way to Apple News or the now-shuttered Google Reader. Artifact displayed some popular articles from large media organizations and smaller websites in a main feed which was tailored to users based on their activity and interests.

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.

People who have moved over fromTwitter are usually looking for a nicer experience overall, according to the group that develops Cohost. The service launched publicly in June of last year, after Musk offered to buy Twitter. In November, after Musk completed his takeover, the platform experienced a surge in activity, adding 80,000 users within 48 hours.

When people refer to us as a Twitter alternative, I think it’s an important distinction from a social networking site replacement.

Where do they go if they leave? “There is no platform that can take on the function ofTwitter, and nothing is ready for it,” said Karen North, clinical professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “No platform has the global user base, representing people from all walks of life the way that Twitter does.”

These systems were regularly addressed by staff, and were once routinely monitored. A team that was part of the fight to clean up the internet was cut to just two people in recent weeks, two of those people said. The responsibilities of the Asia-Pacific region’s division head have been laid off. Twitter’s resources dedicated to supervising content moderation for Chinese-language posts have been drastically reduced, the people said.

Some accounts of Chinese activists and dissidents were difficult to find after the systems failed to distinguish between fake and real accounts, the people said.

“It’s tough being a Twitter user nowadays,” said Jenn Takahashi, who runs the Twitter account @bestofdyingtwit, which has logged the platform’s shortcomings since Mr. Musk took the helm. She said she also has had difficulty seeing tweets from people she follows, with notifications “either delayed or sent twice,” and direct messages becoming cluttered with “so much spam.”

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

Two Years of Twitter Ethical Progress: Musk, the Cybertruck, and the AI of the Artificial Intelligence (AI Ethics) Group

Twitter has long been banned in China. But it has been a gathering place in recent years for Chinese dissidents, human rights activists and overseas Chinese communities seeking to debate topics censored on the mainland.

Musk spoke via video teleconference at the World Government Summit in Dubai and said he needed to stabilizing the organization and making sure the product roadmap was clearly laid out. “I’m guessing probably towards the end of the year would be good timing to find someone else to run the company.”

Despite Musk saying that it was possible he could leave his CEO position by year end, he has a history of misoptimizing future plans. The original production date for the Cybertruck was late late 2021, but will now be later than that. Musk previously said that the company should have a car that can drive itself across the country by year end. It is yet to be accomplished half a decade later.

The World Government Summit also covered Musk’s plans for Twitter more generally, including his ambitions to reduce misinformation on the platform. You can watch the whole interview below, or skip ahead to Musk’s response about stepping down as CEO, which starts at around the 15 minute mark.

Two years ago, the tech industry was in awe of an attempt at algorithmic transparency launched by Twitter. Its researchers wrote papers showing that Twitter’s AI system for cropping images in tweets favored white faces and women, and that posts from the political right in several countries, including the US, UK, and France, received a bigger algorithmic boost than those from the left.

Twitter’s AI ethics researchers ultimately decided their prospects were too murky under Musk to wait to get their study into an academic journal or even to finish writing a company blog post. Musk assumed ownership on October 27 but before then they rushed to put the moderation bias study onto the open-access service Arxiv, which has yet to be peer reviewed.

“We were rightfully worried about what this leadership change would entail,” says Rumman Chowdhury, who was then engineering director on Twitter’s Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability group, known as META. It’s a misunderstanding that ethics teams are usually part of a woke liberal agenda as opposed to actually being scientific work.

The team on another study worked through the night to make final edits before hitting Publish on Arxiv the day Musk took Twitter, one researcher says, speaking anonymously out of fear of retaliation from Musk. “We knew the runway would shut down when the Elon jumbo jet landed,” the source says. “We knew we needed to do this before the acquisition closed. We can put a flag in the ground and say that there is one.

On the Impact of Elon Musk’s Outage on the TikTok Social Media Platform and the Insensitivity of the Code Stack

Politicians and researchers working on the integrity of civic spaces warn about the risks of using social media to change public opinion. On TikTok, the reported existence of a secret “heating button,” which allows the company to boost content delivered via its For you algorithm, was greeted with breathless reporting that it could be used to promote Chinese interests in the West. Fear that the app may be used by the Chinese government to spy on or collect data from users has led to calls for a ban in the United States and the United Kingdom.

The research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations says that he is trying to force engagement by manipulating the platform. The fact that Musk can do it is worrying, since he appears to be driven by insecurity. “Singular acts are funny,” Muñoz says. I think it is important for him to take a step back and look at the consequences of his actions.

“Censoring content on the Modi documentary speaks for my assumption of [his reliance on] foreign investment and his dependence on raw materials,” says Muñoz. It’s not likely that we’ll ever get hard evidence on who Musk is talking to or what he’s asked to do, but looking at visibility and engagement might hint at these dynamics.

But in a sign of just how deep Elon Musk’s cuts to the company have been, only one site reliability engineer has been staffed on the project, we’re told. According to a current employee, the engineer made a bad reconfiguration change on Monday that broke the social media platform.

The outage was so serious that users had to tell their point with images that no one could see because the site wouldn’t load.

The project which led to the change in question was to shut down free access to the @riddingapp, according to platformer. The company announced on February 1st that it will no longer provide free access to its software, which left the existence of third-party clients useless and restricted the ability of outside researchers to study the network. The company has been building a new paid API for developers to work with.

Musk said a small change to an application programming interface had ” massive ramifications”, after a developer posted a picture of a site showing a lot of problems with it. The code stack is very brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”

Some current employees are sympathetic to the idea that part of the blame for the problems at the company stems from the technical failures prior to Musk owning the company. The fail whale became an icon because of it.

What do you do when you’re an engineer? The story of Musk, a billionaire who lost his job in Reykjavik

This paved the way for an engineer to be assigned to a project that has multiple critical systems that users and employees depend on.

It took nearly all morning to fix the problem with few knowledgeable workers on hand. “This is what happens when you fire 90 percent of the company,” another current employee says.

Musk responded in a tweet asking, “what work have you been doing?” When Thorleifsson provided a list of his tasks in response, Musk appeared to cast doubt on several points. He said that pictures or it didn’t happen. In a separate tweet, the billionaire said Thorleifsson “did no actual work, claimed as an excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing.”

Thorleifsson clarified in a tweet that he has muscular dystrophy, a degenerative disease that he says put him in a wheelchair more than 20 years ago. A charitable effort to build 1,000 wheelchair ramps around the city of Reykjavik by the founder of a digital branding company is being recognized by the United Nations.

“I’m not able to do manual work (which in this case means typing or using a mouse) for extended periods of time without my hands starting to cramp,” he said. I can write for an period of time. I am a senior director and my job was to give the teams strategic and tactical advice in order for them to move forward.

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

“Which is totally ok and it happens all the time … They usually tell people about it but that’s seemingly the optional part at Twitter now,” he said. Next up, I’m hoping to find out if they’ll pay me what I’m owed.

The FTC is not helping you with the code base: What have you learned in the last five years? A report by the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government

The code base is a Rube Goldberg machine and when you zoom in on one part of it there is another, Musk said at the event on Tuesday. “So it’s quite difficult to keep this thing running, and then also difficult to advance the product because it is really overly complex, to say the least.”

A new report by the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of theFederal Government called into question the FTC’s actions in a report that was reported by the New York Times.

According to the consent order, the FTC is looking for information about how and where the social networking company used people’s security phone numbers to target ads. That agreement required Twitter to create and document a comprehensive privacy and information security program.

The company hasn’t responded to any of the questions posed by the journalists since the layoffs, mass resignations, and Musk’s announcement that he will eventually step down.

Scores of users confirmed that they had successfully tested the feature for themselves, and many were quick to criticize him and the new policy.

“Huh, the same experience as before?” wrote Charles Rickett, a video editor with the U.K. tabloid Metro, in a comment that has gotten over 1,600 likes.

A number of his moves toward that direction, such as weaker moderation practices and reinstating suspended accounts, have fueled safety and misinformation concerns.

In December of last year, he banned the accounts of several highprofile journalists who covered the platform after he changed his policy on accounts that share private jets and public information.

Tesla, the much-talked-about electric car company of which Musk is co-founder and CEO, stopped responding to press questions in 2020 and reportedly dissolved its PR department that same year.