Twitter: Elon Musk, the Bullsh*t Artist, and the Time to “Hang Up Your Hat & Sailing into the Sunset”
Musk has previously stated his dislike for advertising and the dependence on it he believes big corporations should not have a say in how social media operates. But on Thursday, he assured advertisers he wants Twitter to be “the most respected advertising platform in the world.”
The billionaire, at a conference in May, said he would reverse the ban if he became the company’s owner.
But relations between the pair seem to have soured since, with the men publicly trading barbs over the summer. After Trump called Musk a “bullsh*t artist” at a rally in July, Musk responded by tweet, writing, “I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.”
Musk was questioned in court on Nov. 16 about how he splits his time among Tesla and his other companies, including SpaceX and Twitter. The shareholder’s challenge to Musk’s potentially $55 billion compensation plan as CEO was heard by Delaware’s Court of Chancery.
On Thursday, April 14th, Elon Musk announced an offer to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share. On April 25, the deal was accepted. By July 8th, Musk wanted out. On October 26th, the new owner of the social networking site was reported to be Elon Musk.
The Spinner Box: A Game of Social Media and Micro-Messaging in the Era of the Wall Street Meltdown
As it stands, the trial is still scheduled to proceed on October 17th. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Delaware Chancery Court judge overseeing the case said that no one had filed a stipulation to stay the action. “I, therefore, continue to press on toward our trial set to begin on October 17.” The trial is probably going to be put on hold, given the current negotiations.
More than a professional utility is associated with the site. It is common for slot machines to hook people with anittent reinforcement schedule. Occasionally, at random intervals, there will be some compelling nuggets appearing, even though 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.
In the first big move of his career, Musk tried to assure advertisers that he was buying the platform to help humanity and that it wouldn’t become a free-for-all hellscape.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” he said in the official deal announcement.
It could have ripples across social media. Twitter, although smaller than many of its social media rivals, has sometimes acted as a model for how the industry handles problematic content, including when it was the first to ban then-President Trump following the January 6 Capitol riot.
You can see what alternative platforms will look like for a “keyhole view” of what micro-messaging will look like under Musk, according to the president of Media Matters for America.
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. They are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.
“Would be great to unwind permanent bans, except for spam accounts and those that explicitly advocate violence,” he texted Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal shortly after agreeing to join the company’s board (a decision he soon backtracked).
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 progressive independent journalist Aaron Rupar was also banned.
The person suggested Musk hire someone with a politically minded view to lead the enforcement. Masters is the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona who has been endorsed by Trump and has echoed his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
Donald Musk’s Twitter ban, his resignation, and the challenges of running a social network: The story of Musk and the billionaire Agrawal
Allowing Trump and other individuals to return may set a precedent for other social networks when it comes to banning the former president, who is currently on a ban.
Musk’s texts reveal that an initially cautiously friendly relationship between the two men when Musk first invested quickly soured after Agrawal told Musk that his tweets criticizing the platform were “not helping me make Twitter better.”
The latest actions make it clear that Musk tends to run the company the way dictators run their states: by making decisions that serve his own interests rather than those of the public, and by firing people who stood in his way. Tech workers and journalists who have lost their jobs in the past few weeks need to form a non- profit social network to serve the public interest.
That is likely welcome news to the billionaire, who has complained that Twitter’s costs outstrip revenues and has implied the company is overstaffed for its size.
Costs and cuts are only part of the equation. In the spring, Musk pitched investors that he would quintuple Twitter’s annual revenue to $26.4 billion by 2028 and attract 931 million users by that same year, up from 217 million at the end of 2021, according to an investor presentation obtained by The New York Times.
He may have little choice other than to find other revenue sources, he wants to make changes to content and there is a weak digital ad market.
“Advertisers want to know that their ads are not going to appear alongside extremists, that they’re not going to be subsidizing or associating with the types of things that would turn off potential customers,” Carusone said.
Trump’s Twitter Deal: Why Twitter is Unfairly Infringing on Free Speech Rights and Ad Advertising for Chinese-Style Super-Apps
Anyone’s guess, what exactly he meant. In the summer of 2015, Musk told staff that the company should try and emulate the “super-app” that is WeChat, the Chinese app that combines social media, messaging, payments, shopping and ride-sharing.
This strategy has been tried by American tech companies, but Chinese-style super-apps have not caught on in the United States.
The note is a shift from Musk’s position that Twitter is unfairly infringing on free speech rights by blocking misinformation or graphic content, said Pinar Yildirim, associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
Yildirim said that, unlike Facebook, Twitter has not been good at targeting advertising to what users want to see. Musk’s message suggests he wants to fix that, she said.
Sarah Personette said that she had a great discussion with Musk on Wednesday. Personette said that the commitment to brand safety for advertisers remained unchanged. Looking forward to the future!
According to Jasmine Enberg of Insider Intelligence, Musk has reason to avoid a large shakeup of Twitter’s ad business because they have taken a beating from the weak economy and uncertainty surrounding Musk’s proposed takeover.
Musk stated in the letter that the acquisition was not meant to be a money-making venture for him.
The acquisition also promises to extend Musk’s influence. The billionaire already owns, oversees or has significant stakes in companies developing cars, rockets, robots and satellite internet, as well as more experimental ventures such as brain implants. Now he controls a social media platform that shapes how hundreds of millions of people communicate and get their news.
Within weeks of the acquisition agreement, however, Musk began raising concerns about the prevalence of those same fake and spam accounts on Twitter and ultimately attempted to terminate the deal.
Elon Musk is the CEO of Twitter: Five Years of Warping at a Financial Time in a Ten-Million Dollar Boundary
The departures happen just hours before the deadline set by a Delaware judge to approve the deal. She threatened to schedule a trial if no agreement was reached.
Since Musk said he wanted to buy the company again, Jay Sullivan has been the most visible leader in the company. He had been having listening sessions with employees but on Thursday evening, he canceled the meeting without explanation after employees received a calendar call for a quick informal check in.
Parag Argawal has been absent from the company recently, in part due to Musk souring on the CEO after he initially started talking about Musk joining the board. “He has been completely absent for weeks,” one current Twitter employee, who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission, said of Argawal. 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.
The execs received handsome payouts for their trouble, Insider reports: Agrawal got $38.7 million, Segal got $25.4 million, Gadde got $12.5 million, and Personette, who tweeted yesterday about how excited she was for Musk’s takeover, got $11.2 million.
After six months of wrangling, it’s all over: Elon Musk owns Twitter. How did that happen? We will explain everything that happened and show you how the billionaire has now control of the company, with several former execs escorted out of the building.
The Case for Zatko: Do We Know How to Detect a Bose-Einstein Relationship? A First Look at a High-Violation Case
There is a lot of fast- moving parts to this big story. It’s also a story that will likely stretch out over the next few months, maybe even longer. We decided to put together a guide for you, the readers, that can be changed as things progress. Because, like Elon, we ❤️ you.
The way you always get responded is that the argument you made is invalid and so you can’t either.
In early September, Delaware Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick said that Musk’s side can include Zatko’s claims in its case but denied yet another effort to delay the trial. I believe that even a four week delay would harm the site even more. And as we continue to learn more about the brain drain happening at Twitter, it seems she might be right.
In early 2022, Zatko was fired from his position as head of security. In July he filed a report saying that he had information that showed how negligent the security practices are at the micro-messaging service. The allegations made by Zatko are sure to have an impact on the way we think about and behave in the cyber world. Congress, for one, has already said it is investigating Zatko’s claims.
There are a lot of people in the tech industry, including Larry Ellison, Dorsey, Musk, and many others. Dorsey was a surprise but seems likely to have plenty of pertinent information, given both his tenure as Twitter CEO and the fact that Dorsey reportedly pushed hard to convince Musk to buy the company in the first place.
We wouldn’t normally tell you it’s worth reading a 162-page legal filing that gets deep into the weeds of bot measurement procedures. But this case has been filled with abnormally spicy legal fighting, much of which was clearly written to be read by a wide audience. The yarn is a good one.
Musk’s Twitter “Positive” Tweets and the Misconception of Twitter’s Discussion of Musk: Casey’s Theoretical Mistakes
Twitter’s first all-hands meeting after Musk’s bid went public was a weird one. The company said it would continue to evaluate the offer after serenading employees with some entertainers.
The turmoil has divided the company into roughly two camps: those waiting nervously to see whether they still have a job after those cuts land, and those who are frantically working to ship new features under a threat of being fired if they don’t.
Casey was right in positing that Twitter’s poison pill provisions may not be enough to stop Musk. But he also assumed that Musk would just continue to troll the company through his tweets.
Although they came quickly, the major personnel moves had been widely expected and almost certainly are the first of many major changes the mercurial Tesla CEO will make.
He criticized the company’s top lawyer on his social media accounts. His tweets were followed by a wave of harassment of Gadde from other Twitter accounts. For Gadde, an 11-year Twitter employee who also heads public policy and safety, the harassment included racist and misogynistic attacks, in addition to calls for Musk to fire her. The harassing replies lit up once again after she was fired.
He stated that there is a danger that social media will divide our society due to far right and far left echo chambers.
It’s a realization that having no content moderation is bad for business and puts Twitpic at risk of losing advertisers.
“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.
What’s the matter with Twitter? Social media coverage of Musk’s “Chief twit,” his first Twitter signature project, and its impact on the information landscape
But Musk has been signaling that the deal is going through. He walked into the company’s headquarters in San Francisco with a porcelain sink, changed his twitter profile to “Chief twit,” and then gave a shout out to “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 building should be turned into a homeless shelter because so few people worked there, but that was one idea that Musk had in the past.
Many large companies have pulled their ad money from micro-messaging platform,Twitter, in recent days. Companies including Volkswagen and Pfizer have paused their campaigns and large advertising firms are advising clients to do the same.
A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. The daily digest chronicles the evolving media landscape here.
The new version of the Twitter Blue subscription, Musk’s first signature project, has been a disaster.
Charging for verified badges might appear at first glance as a business story. The move will have dire ramifications on the information landscape. It will make it difficult for users to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic accounts.
The right has for years lashed out at the “blue checks,” which they see as an inferior form of communication that is controlled by a few people. Taking away those free blue checks, and the air of authority they give upon the profile they are appended to, will certainly delight some conservatives.
What Else is a Social Machine? Employee grievances over the weekend after Musk’s social media layoffs: Comments on a piece of the puzzle
The best thing a person can do is to save social networks, internet, civil discourse, democracy, email and reduce hacking, said Walter Isaacson, Musk’s authorized biographer.
The process has been frightening to employees according to conversations they had over the weekend. Workers have been looking for clues in chat rooms and gathering in private chat rooms to share rumors.
Friday’s layoffs had been brutal for all involved, including those involved in planning them — many of whom themselves lost their jobs. Managers were told to submit one sentence for what the employee did and one sentence explaining why they were still at the social network.
Some teams were cut more than others; several were wiped out entirely. It was found that the company went too far. On Saturday, after I reported on the layoffs, some managers had been told to ask laid off employees if they wanted their old jobs back.
One thing that made people nervous was the instruction on Friday afternoon that engineers print out the last 30 to 60 days of code they had written, as Platformer was the first to report. The measures Musk and his team have taken are intended to identify those employees who are likely to be laid off in the near future.
Both Sriram Krishnan and investor Jason Calacanis stated on the social media platform that they were working with Musk to manage the company and come up with new products.
The Vine Project: What Happens When You Close Your Eyes and Your Perceptions Get Closed, Or Why You Aren’t Interested in Working at a Technicolor Site
since no leadershippy type appears willing or interested in filling the void: if you’re feeling bleak and dismayed right now, just want you to know you’re not alone. This is a suck.
Another employee told us that if they lose access to their communication, employees are sharing contact information in other channels.
Musk has pressed engineers to work on at least two major projects, and to complete 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. A plan to revive the short-form video app vine, which was previously a part of the core tweets app, was reported today by Axios. Our colleague at The Verge Alex Heath reported that, in the case of changes to Blue, the features must ship 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.
The employees are being encouraged to build something, and show it to Musk. The engineering director told his team to come up with new products and share them with the new CEO, in a message we saw. “At best: you will get some feedback. You may be asked to ship it asap,” the director wrote. At the worst, you’ll 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.”
When you ask, do good engineering work. Write code. Fix bugs, keep the site up. It’s something I know for sure about being at a micro-blogging site. It’s not working on a fancy project for Elon. The good culture change is, it’s shipping and delivering. I encourage you to rotate more on coding and shipping, and less on documentation, planning, strategy etc. If you want to be a part of a special group this week, code and ship 5x as usual. Sexy doesn’t mean building what the man asked or thinks is sexy. 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 improved. Do it. You are in charge.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/31/23434002/twitter-layoffs-internal-messaging-uncertainty-elon-musk
Twitter and Musk: Is the Universe Necessary for a Sustainable Next-to-Leading Energy Generation? A Conversation with Calacanis
Musk’s attention can be frightening. One person we spoke with, who works for Musk, said that they had mixed feelings about working on the project.
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.
Calacanis met with the marketing and advertising community while in New York. He has also tweeted questions to Twitter users about the platform’s subscription and bookmark features.
Davisson doesn’t believe that Twitter would be able to enforce Musk’s policies in a way that covers all users.
Steve Jobs, Silicon Valley, and Tesla: Tesla Takes a toll on the employees of a Silicon Valley computer giant, and then loses his job
Jobs had been developing personal computers for 20 years and his entire adult life. He was intimately familiar with the company he was suddenly running because he had founded it and led the team that created its flagship product. He had left Apple and started a computer company that looked at internet and operating systems in a different way. He was Steve Jobs. If anyone could quickly turn around the near-bankrupt computer giant, it would be him. Yet it took him months to come up with his plan and years to bring it to fruition. The iMac he showed to me that day in May would help Apple get back in the black, but it was the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007 that made it a profit machine. In 1998 there was no post-PC future for Apple.
Musk need not look farther than his own successful enterprises to realize the absurdity of his haste. When he took over Tesla in 2008, the company was already five years old. 17 years after founding, Musk came up with an idea that turned the company around but did not post an annual profit until 2020. Musk deservedly gets a lot of credit for what Tesla has achieved—and for, among other things, his persistence. SpaceX, Musk’s other company, is private and doesn’t report earnings. It takes years to be successful in making rocket ships, and you don’t want to go faster than necessary because it can wind up killing people.
In a letter to employees obtained by multiple media outlets, the company said employees would find out by 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time if they had been laid off. The email did not say how many people would lose their jobs.
Several workers said they had learned about their employment status after seeing our tweets, attempting to log in to Gmail and Slack, and finding that they no longer had access.
He also removed the company’s board of directors and installed himself as the sole board member. On Thursday night, many Twitter employees took to Twitter to express support for each other — often simply tweeting blue heart emojis to signify Twitter’s blue bird logo — and salute emojis in replies to each other.
The Employment Development Department of California has not received any notifications recently from the social network, according to Barry White.
Some employees are afraid that if they cannot get them to return they will be laid off, and the company will officially withdraw the notice they received. 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.
Facebook’s fuckin’ Twitter: Impersonating Musk, or why he didn’t like to go out with a bang
The parent company of Facebook recently reported a revenue decline and its shares are at their lowest levels in two years. Weak earnings reports from the likes of Alphabet and Microsoft led to Meta’s disappointing results.
The acquisition oftweets is not necessarily full of Musk fans. That means it’s a much less forgiving environment for Musk. Dril is the most prominent of the Something Awful forum goons, and they love fuck 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. It’s likely that the reason for his first policy change was increased punishment for impersonation.
Comedian Kathy Griffin had her account suspended Sunday after she switched her screen name to Musk. She said she used his profile photo as well.
“I guess not ALL the content moderators were let go? Lol,” Griffin joked afterward on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform where she set up an account last week.
The Twitter reversal: Yoel Roth apologizes for Twitter’s decision to re-start displaying verified account impostors
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.
There was no end to the disruption 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 claimed that the service would be available in the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. However, it was not available Sunday and there was no indication when it would go live. Esther Crawford told The Associated Press that it’s coming soon but it’s not yet launched.
Like Griffin, some Twitter users have already begun migrating from the platform — Counter Social is another popular alternative — following layoffs that began Friday that reportedly affected about half of Twitter’s 7,500-employee workforce. They worry that a breakdown of moderation could make it easier for people to create and spread false information on the internet.
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, sought to assuage such concerns in a tweet Friday. He said the company’s front-line content moderation staff was the group least affected by the job cuts.
Until September, Edward Perez was director of product management at Twitter, overseeing the product team devoted to civic integrity. After more than three decades working in election integrity, Perez joined the company in September of 2021. He was to keep the service safe during times of great upheaval. And as Musk guts Twitter of its staff and allows users to pay to get a coveted blue check on the platform, Perez feels he has to speak out.
Perez is a board member at the OSET Institute, which is devoted to election security and integrity and is concerned about the drama around corporate takeover sucking up all the oxygen. That focus on the Musk psychodrama “is resulting in potentially inadequate attention on these election-related issues,” he adds.
The American Civil Liberties Union condemned the decision, and said it was impossible to square the freedom of expression with the removal of critical journalists’ accounts.
“How he treats pressure from countries like Saudi Arabia and India—I think those are key indicators of where he’s going with the platform,” says David Kaye, former UN special rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression and clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine.
In India, the third largest market, the company filed a case to challenge the government’s order to take down individual pieces of content as well as whole accounts that the government considers a risk to India’s security or sovereignty.
The Asia Pacific policy Director at Access Now is worried that the lawsuit may not continue under Musk’s leadership. Musk alleged in the countersuit that the lawsuit in India was a threat to the company’s presence in its third largest market. “It would be a vindication of a very problematic, unconstitutional set of actions by the Indian government,” he says. “It also sends a signal to the global tech industry, saying ‘Back off, don’t try to do more.’”
In public banter with Twitter followers Sunday, Musk expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO, saying that person “must like pain a lot” to run a company that “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy.”
Today let’s talk a bit more about how the company botched its layoff process, what happened inside Twitter on Monday, and what that paywall might look like.
Getting the Most Out of Your Work: What Have You Done Last Minute to Tell Us About Your Work? An Employee’s Elon Musk Tweet About Paywall Possible
Managers tried to preserve employment for pregnant women, employees who have cancer, and workers on visas because they were the most vulnerable, according to a former employee.
It began as a rumor on Blind, the app where employees of various companies can chat anonymously with their coworkers. Within a day, it was posted in public channels.
Sorry to all of you on the weekend. I wanted to let you know that we have the ability to ask people who were left off if they will come back. One of the messages that a manager to employees read was that they had to put together names and rationales by 4 PM on Sunday. “I’ll do some research but if any of you have been in contact with folks who might come back and who we think will help us, please nominate before 4.”
“I think we might use some Android and iOS help,” the manager added. The company has been in touch with both engineers and designers in the past day in an attempt to get them back, Platformer is told.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/7/23446262/elon-musk-twitter-paywall-possible
How Do Managers Get Their Tools? An Employee Benefits Survey in a Silicon Valley High-Energy Co-Operator
Remaining managers are getting used to a workload they were not used to. A person I spoke with told me that a technical manager should spend half their time writing code and at the same time manage at least 20 individual contributors. Others have been given much higher numbers of direct reports.
There are two teams that do 20-hour days on his pet projects. Most of the company is sitting around and not doing anything. No chain of command, no priorities, no organization chart, and in many cases, no idea who your manager or team is.”
The health team was told to listen to the David Sacks program for insights into why they lost half their colleagues. Sacks, a venture capitalist who has been helping to manage the Musk transition, co-hosts the “All-In” podcast with fellow Twitter adviser Jason Calacanis and VC Chamath Palihapitiya.
“The most recent podcast covers the current layoffs happening across tech and provides some insight into why this is happening/necessary,” a vice president told employees. It is worth listening in order to understand the environment we are operating in.
The health benefits were becoming a question mark due to the more interest in them from employees. 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. Today, employees asked about their benefits, but 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.
The Launch of Blue, the Verge, and the Twitter Problem: An Analysis of Musk and Sacks’ Implications for the News Corpora
On one hand, the company is telling advertisers that it is thriving, The Verge’s Alex Heath reported, adding 15 million daily users since the end of the second quarter.
The new Blue could face bigger problems. The existing version only had 100,000 active subscribers, according to Platformer. The new version will be 37.5 percent more expensive, and its value seems murky for most regular users of the platform. It is not known how the company will persuade enough people to pay for it.
A debate about the potential effects of unleashing thousands of new verified accounts onto the platforms in the midst of the US midterm elections led the company to delay the launch.
Twitter employees tried to sell Musk and Sacks on the idea of asking business accounts to pay for extra features, since many of them use Twitter to reach large audiences. They were rejected because they wanted to offer wide-scale verification first.
According to some employees, Musk added a second feature to the Blue that reduced the ad load in the app by half. Estimates showed that Twitter will lose about $6 in ad revenue per user in the United States by making that change, sources said. If the ad light plan is enacted, Apple and Google would likely lose money on Blue, which is part of their $8 monthly subscription.
It was presented to Esther Crawford, a director of product management at the company who in recent weeks has risen to become one of Musk’s top lieutenants. Sources said that Musk and his attorney Alex Spiro were also briefed. Sources say that while Crawford appeared sympathetic to many of the concerns in the document, she did not approve of any suggestions that would delay the launch of Blue. (Crawford did not respond to a request for comment.)
It is not known how serious Musk and Sacks are when it comes to the paywall. It also does not appear imminent, as the Blue team is wholly occupied with the launch of expanded verification.
Tiny Talk Town: Leaking on Twitter During the Covid Epidemic, or How an Electrically Stopped Electric Car Owner Ever Wanted to Shut Down
“Tiny talk is talk so small it feels like it’s coming from your own mind,” Musk fired off shortly past 10 pm last Thursday, a thought so deep it might have bubbled up from a fish-bowled dorm room. Congratulations: All of us live in Tiny Talk Town, where discussion about Musk is all that’s happening.
In the workplace, quiet quitting is rejecting the burden of going above and beyond, no longer working overtime in a way that enriches your employer but depletes your own metaphorical coffers. On Twitter, it’s about not giving more to a platform than most people can expect to get back. If you want to stay on it, you need a way to use it without being used.
A relatively small group of people own a social networking site. Heavy users who post in English account for less than 10 percent of monthly overall users but account for 90 percent of all tweets and half of global revenue, according to internal company research.
So active users are a noisy bunch, and it would be easy for, say, an electric car entrepreneur who follows a disproportionate number of extremely active “blue checks” on Twitter to mistake his own Twitter experience for everyone’s experience. (Same goes for journalists.) In reality, nearly half of Twitter users tweet less than five times a month, and most of their posts are replies, not original tweets. They check in on sports and celebrity news and then go about their lives. They’re “lurkers.”
During the early days of the Covid epidemic, rking is a practice that took hold because people were stuck at home and didn’t want to go out. 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. After you check in on the new toy, close your browser tab. It’s better to send a retweet and then disengage. Keep one eye on it during basketball games. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. Save your most original thoughts for another time, another place.
It does get worse, and this part isn’t Musk’s fault. Businesses spend less money on advertising when the economy slows. Even if Musk weren’t doing wild stuff to piss off advertisers, it might have been a problem. Musk’s company is essentially a loose canon and anyone looking to cut advertising spend might be inclined to do it 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 most advertisers would want to bring back someone with that attitude in an economic downturn. The open question is whether users would want to stay in that environment, because of the new layer of hoaxing and scam. Billionaire Mark Cuban has already complained that the influx of new checkmarked users has made his mentions miserable. Cuban’s thoughts are one of the reasons people stay on the platform.
The banks are going to take an immediate loss because of the debt they have on the social media site. Banks may choose to hang on to the debt for a while to see whether the market conditions change. It gets even harder to unload that debt if there’s a social media company that hits the bed. Banks may be willing to negotiate with Musk over his debt repayment as he is the richest man in the world. But I do wonder how long they want to hold these loans and who might buy them. If banks can’t place the debt, that probably does make it difficult for any other leveraged buy-outs in tech to get done.
One of the world’s most influential social networks laid off half of its workforce, blew up a key part of its product, launched other features that are meant to make up for it, and witnessed an exodus of senior executives over the past week.
Twitter is not Your Average Customer Service, But You Can Make Sense of It: The Case against Bankruptcy for Wedbush Securities
The paid subscription service was also suspended just two days after launch with no warning, and the menu option to sign up for it disappeared from the app on Friday. It was not immediately clear when the company might restore the offering.
After gray badges launched as a way to help distinguish celebrity and branded accounts from accounts that only paid for blue check marks, Musk abruptly killed 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.”
The paid verification feature’s rocky rollout attracted widespread criticism from misinformation experts who had warned it would make identifying trustworthy information much more difficult, particularly in the critical period following the US midterm elections. Even some of Musk’s fellow high-powered users of the platform had tough feedback.
“@elonmusk, from one entrepreneur to another, for when you have 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.
Large digital platforms “have experienced professionals out there who develop relationships with these advertisers,” Vincent said. “When you let go of a staff that was as veteran as Twitter’s and there’s no one there to respond to those [brands], you basically reduce the value of the ad platform.”
The company could be in trouble with the FTC over alleged privacy violations dating to before Musk’s ownership. The resignations of several top executives, including the Chief Information Security officer and the Chief Privacy officer, meant that there could be more legal exposure for the company.
But if Musk and his backers deem that Twitter is not worth sinking more money into, the eye-popping debt payment could help make the case that bankruptcy is the best way forward for the company, Wu said.
Investment firm Wedbush Securities said the deal represented “one of the most overpaid tech acquisitions in history,” pegging Twitter’s fair value at closer to $25 billion.
The Puzzle of Online Advertising: How to Sow Confinement and Flavor in a Company with a Big Anomaly, or What Elon Musk Wants
Adding even more pressure on the company is the mayhem unfolding internally, with the departure of a slew of top executives, some of whom were responsible for things like the safety of the platform and complying with federal regulations.
“My sense is that Musk and his co- investors are really driven by their values, and in addition to potential financial returns, my sense is that they are very ideological,” he said.
The core problem with the company is that it does not have any other way to make money other than online advertising.
It is an unfortunate reality for the company right now, considering it is a miserable time to be in the online advertising business. Tech industry has been badly impacted by a decline in ad spending. There are 11,000 people who have been laid off by Meta. The company let go of 20% of its staff. Tech companies reliant on ad revenue, likeSpotify and Youtube, are feeling the squeeze.
The program’s launch has had a completely different effect so far. The blue-check for sale option could be used to spread deception quickly, thanks to a flurry of accounts that impersonate star athletes like Lebron James and former President Trump.
Imagine an emergency service account with a blue check being opened by a person pretending to be them and then spending time looking at where to stay during a natural disaster.
Tobac also fears disinformation agents paying $8 to sow confusion and discord in connection with an election — something fresh on her mind, as the country awaits the final outcome of a number of key midterm election races.
“Right now, we have people making jokes, impersonating the president, impersonating Nintendo and Elon Musk is laughing at those jokes because he thinks they’re funny right now,” she said. “If someone is mimicking an election official, and interfering with the election results, that’s not going to be funny.”
Internal Warnings Concerning the Impersonation Risk of High-Profile Users on Social Networks: The Elon Musk vs. Blue Verification
The first recommendation of the document mentioned that bad actors could use increased amplification to reach their ends with their upside above the cost.
“Impersonation of world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials, and other high profile individuals” represented another P0 risk, the team found. If legacy verification is lost, it is likely that more high-profile accounts will become impersonated on the social networking site.
When the document was circulating internally, Musk was thinking about a subscription of 99 cents per year for Blue. After an exchange online with writer Stephen King, he decided to reduce the price. The move to make fun of brands and government officials resulted in an impulse buy of $8, increasing the risk of scam.
The team also noted removing the verified badge and its related privileges from high-profile users unless they paid, coupled with the heightened impersonation risk, would potentially drive them away from Twitter for good. They wrote that removing privileges and exemptions from legacy verified accounts could cause confusion. “We use the health-related protections … to manage against the risk of false-positive actions on high-profile users, under the assumption that the accounts have been heavily vetted. If that signal is deprecated, we run the risk of false positives or the loss of privileges such as higher rate limits resulting in escalation and user flight.”
The company’s trust and safety team did win support for some solutions, including retaining verification for some high-profile accounts using the “official badge.”
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23459244/twitter-elon-musk-blue-verification-internal-warnings-ignored
Insider Warnings: The Musk-Bloe Launch of Platformer and Other Social Media Platforms During the June 12, 2015 Black Hole Event
Most of the features on the wish list aren’t approved, so the product is less safe and easier to use.
Despite the warnings, the launch proceeded as planned. A few days later, with the predictions of the trust and safety team largely realized, Musk belatedly stopped the rollout.
Functions affected included content moderation, recruiting, ad sales, marketing, and real estate, among others. It is not yet known how the loss of thousands of moderators will affect the service. It appears that there is less staff available to police the site for harmful material.
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. But the abrupt nature of the cuts will likely send many former contractors scrambling: as Platformer was first to report, vendors told them via email their medical benefits would end today, their final day of employment.
“I’m wondering when people will realize the value of Twitter was the people that worked here,” one employee said, according to screenshots obtained by Platformer.
Employees continue to show a great deal of solidarity among one another. But not to the coterie of volunteer venture capitalists and on-loan engineers from Tesla and the Boring Company that have been carrying out Musk’s orders: those they refer to universally, including on Slack, as “the goons.”
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23459244/twitter-elon-musk-blue-verification-internal-warnings-ignored
Twitter is Slowly Loading, and if It Isn’t, How Does Elon Become Vice-President of Twitter?
This was more than just a run-of-the-mill code freeze, during which engineers can commit code but not deploy it. Most of the time since Musk took over,Twitter has been under one. Such freezes are generally intended to reduce the chances that a bug disrupts Twitter’s systems.
Engineers were not allowed to write any code until further notice according to an internal email obtained by platformer. Exceptions will be granted if there is an “urgent change that is needed to resolve an issue with a production service, including any changes reflecting hard promised deadlines for clients,” the email said, and employees get “approval from VP level and Elon explicitly stating that the change needs to be made.”
Engineers at the late-night meeting were confused. The engineer asked if there was any ticket he could reference to implement the freeze. “I don’t see any context.” “We don’t have much context as of now,” a colleague responded. “But this is coming from Elon’s team.”
Engineer Eric Frohnhoefer pushed back on Musk’s criticism, and offered a detailed thread about why Twitter loads more slowly in some places than others. Musk fired him by the end of the day, Bloomberg reported, along with a second engineer who commented on the affair: “As the former tech lead for timelines infrastructure at Twitter, I can confidently say that this man has no idea wtf he’s talking about.”
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23459244/twitter-elon-musk-blue-verification-internal-warnings-ignored
Why is Twitter so bad? Why has Twitter been so bad in India? Why have engineers paused their ad campaigns after the Blue rollout?
In India, the experience is not great. That’s because the data transfer between the phone and the data center starts compounding and the laws of physics come into effect.
There is a higher concentration of low power phones in India that perform worse in general than in the US and other places.
So why the code freeze? Some are suggesting that Musk has grown paranoid that some engineers may sabotage the site on their way out.
On Friday, after the disaster of the Blue rollout, Eli Lilly paused all its ad campaigns on Twitter. The Washington Post reports the move might cost Twitter 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.)
Many of the team that works on ad sales have been fired or pushed out. Large companies from General Mills to Macy’s halted advertising on the platform after Musk decided to restore the account of former president Donald Trump and other controversial figures. And any cursory scroll of the platform will likely show you fewer big brand ads.
“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 reply to any questions in this thread, I will try to raise as many as possible.
One employee said that T-Mobile requested to stop the campaigns due to brand safety concerns. (Three days later, former T-Mobile CEO John Legere asked Musk to let him run Twitter, to which Musk responded simply “no.”)
Another Twitter employee said General Motors had also asked to pause campaigns. The first reason they gave is elections, but it seems like an open-ended pause because the team wanted to speak to global about why they shouldn’t. Later, this same employee added: “Pause on [GM] til end of year confirmed and implemented. The reason now is brand safety.”
According to an email obtained by platformer, GroupM told its clients that it was a high-risk media buy. Twitter’s agency partnerships lead explained the situation in Slack: “Given the recent senior departures in key operational areas (specifically Security, Trust & Safety, Compliance), GroupM have updated Twitter’s brand safety guidance to high risk. They understand that policy remains in place, but feel that the speed with which it can be scaled is uncertain.
–Demonstrated commitment of effective content moderation, enforcing current Twitter Rules (e.g. account impersonation, violative content removal timing, intolerance of hate speech and misinformation)
What he’s done with Twitter after Musk’s takeover of Twitter isn’t about how he wants to kill a billionaire
After Musk announced he was going to cut off 80 percent of the company’s work, some users said two-factor verification stopped working. Others reported that the site had partial downtime and it was difficult to download their archives.
There are some people who understand how to fix things, but don’t work at the company or don’t have to ship new code. At the very end of the day, the engineers were still wondering if there would ever be any new cracks in the service.
LarryVincent is an associate professor of marketing at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. Because it doesn’t have the same level of user targeting as rivals like Facebook, there’s not as much advertising business from the micro-publishing service.
The idea is that the platform is more valuable than an app, because you can use the platform to build multiple apps, or enable other developers and companies to build apps from which you might take a 30 percent cut. The end of the proprietary platform should be seen as a high profile illustration that they are too risky to trust regardless of how strong the code is. 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. Our communication channel for the next vaccine we might need is now at risk.
There is no certainty that continuing to capture the attention of online readers will result in subscription payments or other revenue growth.
Twitter Is Not For Sale: The Story of Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at the time of the Musk campaign of harassment
The former head of trust and safety left his home due to increased threats that resulted from the Musk campaign of harassment, a person familiar with the matter told CNN on Monday.
There have been threats againstRoth since the release of theTwitter Files. However, things took a dark turn over the weekend when Musk appeared to endorse a tweet that baselessly accused Roth of being sympathetic to pedophilia — a common trope used by conspiracy theorists to attack people online.
He wrote on Election Day 2016 that they should fly over the states that voted for a racist.
We have all made some questionableTwitter but I want to be clear, I support Yoel. Musk says he believes that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs.
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.
In the email, which was dated Thursday and was addressed to the council, Twitter said that it would have an “open conversation and Q&A” with its staff.
Those former council members soon became the target of online attacks after Musk amplified criticized of them and Twitter’s past leadership for allegedly not doing enough to stop child sexual exploitation on the platform.
Some members of the council worried about how the company was portraying itself after they sent an email to the company.
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 & Exploited Children, the Rati Foundation, and Youth Adult Survivors & Kin in Need were included.
The Story of Donald Trump and Twitter: The Dilemma of the Newsroom, the Politics of the Divide, and the Clues About Trump
Around the time Trump was inaugurated in 2017, I said to colleagues in the newsroom where I worked at the time that we shouldn’t cover everything he said or tweeted. Previously, a president’s every word was assumed to be a carefully chosen signal of future policy, and was reported as such. Trump, on the other hand, clearly said many things purely to get a rise out of people. Reporting on them, I argued, just fed the flames. Another editor tried to push him back. He said that he was the president. “What he says is news.”
Here we saw many rapid-response news stories about Musk’sDecember 11 statement that “My pronouns are prosecute/fascist,” a dig at the government’s former chief infectious disease expert, and at gender diversity. Here’s another bunch about the picture of his bedside table with two replica guns on it, and some more about his tweeting a far-right Pepe the Frog meme.
This is precisely the way coverage of Trump worked. The liberal-leaning media was drawn to stories about the belief of a person so well-equipped to be president that they would only succeed in bringing the country down in flames. There was lots of good reporting at the same time, but the accounts that were divisive seemed to dominate the conversation. The public’s understanding of what’s happening across the country was forced through incompatible narratives about the behavior of one man in the White House.
This is what’s happening with Musk and Twitter. 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.”
The New York Times and Ryan didn’t get an explanation for the mass bans, says a New York Times spokesman. We hope that the journalists have their accounts restored and that there is a satisfying explanation for this action.
On Wednesday, Musk suspended accounts that track the movement of private jets used by billionaires, government officials and others, including Musk’s own plane, claiming the accounts amounted to “doxxing,” or the sharing of personal information to encourage harassers.
Twitter previously took action to block links to Mastodon after its main Twitter account tweeted about the @ElonJet controversy last week. The number of Mastodon accounts has gone up in the last couple of weeks, and is an alternative for some users who are unhappy with Musk’s changes to the company.
In an environment where many people believe free speech is at risk, it’s too much for most consumers to continue supporting Mr. Musk/TSLA.
The president of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) said in a statement it was “concerned” about the suspensions, and that the move “affects all journalists.”
Covid-19 is No longer tolerated on Twitter: Reporters, News Editors, and Twitter Head of Trust & Safety Ella Irwin
The employees were told to become extremely hardcore in their work, and that they no longer could enforce the policy against Covid-19 misinformation.
Users may be suspended for showing their handles on any of the social media platforms if they violate the new policy.
The accounts of reporters have been suspended including: Donie O’ Sullivan of CNN, Ryan Mac of the New York Times, Drew Harwell of the Washington Post, and Micah Lee of the Intercept.
In a post on Substack, Rupar wrote that he is unsure why he was suspended. He shared a link to the jet-tracking account on Facebook.
A senior counsel at the advocacy group Free Press said suspending journalists based on their personal animus was a dangerous precedent.
In a statement to NPR, Twitter’s head of Trust & Safety Ella Irwin said sharing people’s real-time location information on Twitter is now a violation of its policies.
“Without commenting on any specific user accounts, I can confirm that we will suspend any accounts that violate our privacy policies and put other users at risk,” Irwin said. We do not make exceptions for journalists or any other accounts.
Musk also claimed that one account that operated under the handle @ElonJet, run by a 20-year-old University of Florida student, was used by a “crazy stalker” in Los Angeles to follow a car carrying one of Musk’s children.
The Social Media Disruption After Musk Takes over Twitter: Why Women and Girls Should Work Together to Create a Healthy, Open Town Hall
The impact of this approach will last a long time. 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.
Editor’s Note: Kara Alaimo, an associate professor in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University, writes about issues affecting women and social media. Her book, “This Feed Is on Fire: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls, And How We Can Reclaim it” will be published in a few years. Her own opinions are expressed in this commentary. Read more opinion on CNN.
A healthy town square should also be a place where people can find reliable information. Before Musk took over, the researchers at Tufts University found that a lot of hate and misinformation was being posted on the site.
It’s clear that we can’t rely on Musk’s Twitter to provide a safe, open forum. We need new social networks run by boards that consider the public interest when making decisions about things like content moderation and community standards. And many of the people who have these skills have just been laid off from their jobs. In addition to the mass exodus from Twitter since Musk’s takeover, there have been layoffs at a number of tech and journalism companies lately, including Facebook and CNN, with more coming at The Washington Post. Some of these professionals should work together to create new social platforms designed to provide the truly open town hall we so desperately need.
After the results of a public poll, the suspensions of the company would be lifted, according to Musk. 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 early Saturday. One exception was Business Insider’s Linette Lopez, who was suspended after the other journalists, also with no explanation, she told The Associated Press.
She said that shortly before being suspended she posted court-related documents to her followers that included a Musk email address. That address is not current, Lopez said, because “he changes his email every few weeks.”
The Suspension of a Tech News Editor and the Future of Twitter as a Platform to Promote Free Speech: A Dangerous Significance for Advertisers
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.
Sally Buzbee, The Washington Post’s executive editor, called it an “arbitrary suspension of another Post journalist” that further undermined Musk’s promise to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech.
Sally Buzbee, executive editor of the Washington Post, said that technology reporter Drew Harwell was kicked out of the paper after the publication of accurate reporting about Musk.
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 activity on Twitter in November due to “uncertainty” about new management, but media organizations have largely remained on the platform.
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.
Shortly after Musk agreed to leave the session hosted by the journalist who had questions for him, the Spaces conference chat went down. Musk later tweeted that Spaces had been taken offline to deal with a “Legacy bug.” Spaces came back late Friday.
When the CEO of Twitter succumbed to Musk, Tesla, and the Washington Post: The case against a billionaire who didn’t want to take over Twitter
Mastodon grew from 300,000 users to 2.5 million in just a few weeks, according to a post on the platform’s founder, Eugen Rochko.
More than half of 17.5 million users who responded to a poll that asked whether billionaire Elon Musk should step down as head of Twitter voted yes when the poll closed on Monday.
After it was reported that MIT researchers would take the CEO job, Musk suggested he wasn’t 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.”
With his decision-making under fire from the people who supported him, Musk may be ready to put his expensive toy in someone elses hands for a little while.
It would have been appropriate and timely if he’s time as the company’s CEO ended the same way, as his takeover of the company started with a poll.
More than 17 million people voted in an informal referendum on whether or not to stick with his chaotic leadership of the social networking site, which has been marked by mass layoffs, the suspension of journalists who cover him, and policy changes that reversed in real time.
Over the past few months, Musk has acted as chief twit, which has created brand public backlash, which could cause a problem with key consumer groups.
In yet another significant policy change, Twitter had announced that users will no longer be able to link to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and other platforms the company described as “prohibited.”
Rusch, the Oppenheimer analyst, said the “inconsistent standards application” for Twitter users has helped create a “broad public backlash” against Musk that will in turn hurt Tesla.
The action to block competitors was the latest attempt by Musk to silence certain speech after he took down his TWo account last week for tracking his private jet flights.
The banned platforms included mainstream websites such as Facebook and Instagram, and upstart rivals Mastodon, Tribel, Nostr, Post and former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social. Twitter gave no explanation for why the blacklist included those seven websites but not others such as Parler, TikTok or LinkedIn.
The test case was that of the prominent venture capitalist Paul Graham, who told his 1.5 million followers on social media that it was the “last straw” and that he was looking for Musk. His account was temporarily shut down, and then restored just hours later, as Musk promised to reverse the policy that he instituted just hours earlier.
Oppenheimer specifically cited Twitter’s decision last week to ban several journalists, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, as a catalyst for the downgrade.
Crowdsourcing Musk: Who is insane enough to run twitter? A conversation with Gerber about the Saudi royal family and his early-stage investor Jared Kushner
Ross Gerber, a shareholder in both Twitter and Tesla, said over the weekend that he hopes Musk finds a CEO for Twitter during the first quarter of 2023.
Calacanis, who emerged in the tech world as a reporter during the dot com boom, is an early-stage investor who has backed well-known companies such as Uber and Robinhood. He has also launched several media properties and hosts two podcasts (one in partnership with Sacks).
Calacanis asked on Sunday night who would like the most miserable job in tech and media. Who is insane enough to run twitter?!?!” Calacanis asked his followers on his website whether he or Sacks should run the company separately or together, and if someone else should take over. The majority of respondents preferred a different option.
While at PayPal, Sacks was part of the originalfounding team and he has some experience managing a social network. He founded and ran enterprise communications platform, before selling it to Microsoft for $1 billion.
Krishnan may be the most obvious choice of the group. He has direct experience working on the Twitter product, having previously helped manage the teams responsible for features of the platform such as search and the home timeline. He also previously worked on mobile ad products for Snap and Facebook.
He has invested in several startups in the past that have potential to fulfill Musk’s goal of making the service more than just a social media app.
Krishnan is arguably the least well-known — and therefore perhaps the least controversial — of Musk’s current Twitter leadership team, which could help deflect some of the recent negative attention the company has received.
Some Twitter users have speculated about other possible leaders for the social media company, including Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was spotted watching the World Cup with Musk over the weekend.
One of the largest investors intwitter is the Saudi Royal Family. Last year, after working for the family real estate development company, Kushner left politics and started an investment firm. Kushner also previously owned the weekly New York newspaper, the New York Observer.
The Evil Billionaire Attack: Getting the Evil in the Room and Leaving the Public Out of the Elum of the Room (before he Tweeted)
Many thought Musk would address the elephant in the room by now since he was known for his swift decisions after previous polls. But he has not. In fact, Musk spent most of Monday conspicuously quiet, refraining from tweeting for a remarkable 18-hour period.
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. It can be called the evil billionaire attack. Money is the weapon and is more likely to be unavailable at the moment when you need it most. 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 with components that can be used to make new features, and the power sources behind the technology industry find platforms appealing when they can be monetized on a regular basis.
The problem is fought on the deepest level possible. It would be hard for Musk to kill off aBlockchain if a small group of people objected to it. It is very difficult to lose access to a computer due to the randomness of Duplicating across many computers. This comes with different complications, of course, but losing information outright due to a hostile party is not one of them. A new version of the Hic et Nunc marketplace was put around the same content after it went under. The blockchain acts as a shared resource that forces interoperability, almost like organic self-defense.
Or consider the case of WordPress, the early blogging engine that has since grown into increasingly elaborate general-purpose content management software. It now powers about 40 percent of the open web, with which it is loosely synonymous. A huge economy has sprung up around it: companies that develop websites, developers who work for those companies, indie developers who work for themselves, many of them writing plugins which can be unlocked or extended with licensing fees. This is all possible because the core is open source and encourages the same of its ecosystem. WordPress has been around for a long time and its straightforward RSS feeds decisively lost out to Twitter’s social features, so in 2022 there is a reasonable argument that it is a bit long in the tooth. 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.
As of Tuesday morning, the free social networking app on the Play Store had Mastodon at number 8 and number 11 on the social networking category on the Apple store. Mastodon is a platform that there are many third-party apps for.
The Face of Social Media: After the Link Ban, Elon Musk Has a Comment to Address the Post-Biasing of His Twitter Account
The Mastodon founder said in a post his first comments since the link ban.
“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.
When Elon Musk polled Twitter users about whether to reinstate former President Donald Trump’s account, he quickly followed through on the majority’s wish to do so. “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 also heeded user votes in a poll to restore the accounts of tech journalists that he had suspended on Friday.
The change could affect the number of people voting in the polls because they would only be able to vote for those who pay for the service. 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.