The Social Media Jungle: What Elon Musk’s done with Twitter is about, and what she can do to stop her from complaining about bullying and misinformation
If you’ve been on this social media platform in the past week or so, you might have noticed it has a slightly different vibe. Mostly because everybody on there is talking about how Elon Musk just bought the place. There’s no doubt the company and community are changing. So far Musk has already fired top executives, flirted with adding additional paid tiers of service, tasked employees with finding ways to make the company more money, and spread his own share of misinformation.
Any company, Twitter included, is a function of its people. It’s weird that the people who have always been drawn to Twitter are like that. It’s not something you really know until you work at the company. And those people are all the ones who are going to leave. Those people are not going to stay. So all of that is gone.
“I don’t know that Twitter engineers ever sat around and said, ‘We are creating a Skinner box,’” said Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist at New York University and author of a book about gambling machine design. She said that is essentially what they have built. It is a reason why people who frequently self-destruct on the site can not stay away.
In both public and private, he said that free speech is the most important when someone you don’t like is spouting what you think is bullshit.
“It’s a very complex ecosystem,” says Gianluca Stringhini, who studies cybersecurity and cybersafety at Boston University in Massachusetts. Things will become worse if you get rid of moderation completely.
For a “keyhole view of what Twitter under Musk will look like,” just look at alternative platforms such as Parler, Gab and Truth Social that promise fewer restrictions on speech, said Angelo Carusone, president of the liberal nonprofit watchdog group Media Matters for America.
He said that the bug on those sites is that they’re able to say and do things that aren’t allowed on more mainstream platforms. And what we see there is that they are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.”
He’s restored some accounts that were permanently banned from the platform for violating its rules against hate speech, harmful misinformation or inciting violence.
That could mean lifting bans on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was kicked off for abusive behavior in 2018; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., whose account was suspended in January for tweeting misleading and false claims about COVID-19 vaccines; and 2020 election deniers like Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell, who were all banned in early 2021.
The person urged Musk to hire “someone who has a savvy cultural/political view” to lead enforcement, suggesting “a Blake Masters type.” Masters is the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona who has been endorsed by Trump and echoed his false claims that the presidential election was taken from him.
What Did Musk Tell Us About Twitter After Musk Left Facebook? The Case for Growth and Fat Loss in a Left-Leaning Social Network
Allowing Trump and others to return could set a precedent for other social networks, including Meta-owned Facebook, which is considering whether to reinstate the former president when its own ban on him expires in January 2023.
By bringing Trump and other controversial figures back to the platform, Twitter may have greater appeal to the right-leaning advertisers that do business on alternative platforms like Trump’s Truth Social. While there is a market to advertise to “people buying gold, people buying survivalist home kits, guns and weapons,” Twitter has long been known as a more politically neutral, if not somewhat left-leaning, platform and may struggle to attract such companies, said Michael Serazio, a communications professor at Boston College.
Consolidating strength In less than a week after Musk bought the company, it appears the C-suite has been cleared out through a number of firings and resignations.
What did you do this week? Musk decided to buy the brand instead of joining the board, after he was told that he was not joining.
And what do you make of the characterization that has come from Elon and people around him that Twitter is this kind of bloated, overstaffed, slow-moving company where everything takes way too long to ship, where there’s kind of a culture of sitting on your hands and not really doing much, and where with some quick, decisive action, you could really trim some fat and reestablish the company and make it profitable?
Advertisers are paying attention to the possible loss of their users. Twitter is projected to lose 32 million users over the next two years, according to a forecast by Insider Intelligence, which cited technical issues and the return of accounts banned for offensive posts.
Elon Musk is taking down the thorn in his side: Can you take down the tweet?” Sweeney told CNN that a Twitter billionaire bought WeChat
He might not have a choice but to find other sources of revenue, given the weak state of digital ad market and the changes he wants to make to content moderation.
Advertisers want to know that their ads are not going to be associated with extremists or anything that would turn off potential customers, and that this is not the case, according to Carusone.
What exactly he meant is anyone’s guess. Musk told the staff that the company should copy the “super-app” WeChat, a Chinese one that combines messaging, payments, and ride-sharing on a single platform.
The Chinese style super-apps have not caught on in the United States despite other American tech companies trying this strategy.
Elon Musk has completed his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, a source familiar with the deal told CNN Thursday, putting the world’s richest man in charge of one of the world’s most influential social media platforms.
The acquisition will further 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. He controls a social media platform that has hundreds of millions of users.
The fake and scam accounts that are most likely to be active in the replies to Musk’s social media postings are referred to as the spamming bots or die trying.
The account was a thorn in Musk’s side. According to screenshots Sweeney shared with CNN, Musk reached out to him last December through a Twitter private message asking, “Can you take this down? It’s a security risk.
Musk said in an email to employees Thursday that the company will adhere to both the FTC consent decree and the letter.
The Blue Checks Mob in Elon World, and Why Do We Care About Their Checkmarks? An Empirical Study of Musk and Judge McCormick
Delaware Chancery Court chancellor Kathaleen St. Judge McCormick gave the parties until 5 p.m. on Oct. 28 to close the deal or face a rescheduled trial.
This article originally appeared in theReliable Sources newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.
Musk has chosen to make news through off-the-wall statements like those of Trump. Musk stated that the verification process was being reworked in a reply message to a photographer. Normally, such an announcement would be rolled out in a highly choreographed manner.
Musk has created an information environment that he is now controlling, as well as working to dismantle infrastructure that aids users in sifting through the daily chaos. Recent news reports, including from CNN, indicate that he plans to strip public figures and institutions of their blue verified badges if they do not pay.
Yeah. I mean, look, I have to say, I have long been in favor of letting anyone who wants to verify themselves part of this plan. It’s not just making people pay to keep their badge. You could get a badge if you pay.
Well, here’s my theory about it, real quick, is that I think that inside Elon world, and inside, frankly, a lot of right-wing sort of circles, there’s this idea of the blue checks, right? The people on Fox News are always talking about the blue check mob of people on Twitter who care a lot about their checkmarks.
Musk’s authorized biographer, Walter Isaacson, tweeted in 2018 that “the best thing” one could do to “save social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email, and reduce hacking would be authenticating users.”
On the future of Twitter: from Newswire to Twittermessage, to Twitter Memoods, to False News
At least one exception will be when the service begins charging users a fee for using its data, which will be at least $100 a month.
At their best, these two Twitter styles are complementary. The seriousness of Newswire Twitter heightens the humor and absurdity of Nonsense Twitter, which is able to do things like turn government consumers into memelords. There is room for the occasional dose of chaos, like the fake North Korean propaganda feed that fooled several news outlets.
The system works because verification helps separated order from chaos. A blue checkmark indicates to you that a person or brand is speaking for itself in the game of 140 characters or less. It removes the need to verify an account’s authenticity in a fast-developing situation such as a scandal, an election or a public health emergency. The seal of authenticity gives serious accounts the freedom to be playful, because readers can verify their credentials.
All of which might sound like an argument for Musk’s new plan. If you’re Beyoncé or McDonald’s or the Associated Press, $240 a year isn’t much to pay for preserving that sense of trust.
We talked with a power reporter from WIRED about the potential changes that will affect the future of the social network.
In the next few weeks, researchers are expected to launch studies comparing and analyzing before and after Musk’s takeover, looking at changes in the spread of fake news, and whether users quit the platform in protest at new policies. Tromble plans to keep a watch on coordinated harassment on the micro-blogging site.
House of the Dragon on HBO: Why Do We Have to Follow Them? How Do We Identify Them and What Can We Do About It?
Tori wants you to encourage your male-presenting friends interested in fathering children to watch House of the Dragon on HBO. De Todas las Flores is a new album from Natalia Lafourcade. Lauren recommends reevaluating your relationship with Twitter, and social media in general.
There is a person who can be found on the social media site. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is a fighter. The main hotline needs to be blinged out. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
You can listen to the episode through the audio player on this page, but if you subscribe you can get every episode for free.
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Life under Musk Two Twitter Employees Talk Out: A Memorino from an Unprecedented Time in Silicon Valley for a Tech Company
The speech recognition software created this transcript. It may contain mistakes, even though it has been reviewed by humans. Please email transcripts@ny Times.com with any questions, and review the episode audio before quoting from it.
Typically, we will try to bring people news from around the tech industry, give a more comprehensive sense of what’s happening in Silicon Valley. But right now, the only story that anyone in tech cares about is what’s happening just down the street from us in San Francisco, at Twitter.
So what we’re going to do is talk to them, like have a normal interview. Rather than playing their voice, which would make them look bad, they are going to take what they say and make it public. We are going to feed those words back into a text-to-speech Artificial Intelligence generator that we will use to play a version of their voice.
It was an unprecedented time of very, very stress. I have never heard of this happening at a tech company. And so we have, coming up, interviews with two current Twitter employees who are there witnessing this all from the inside, and we’ll talk to them right after the break.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Tweets Speaker Out: Is There a Print button? An Empirical Analysis of a Robot Podcaster
When we started this show, we said we would never use an artificial intelligence voice unless there was a good reason and a really limited capacity. And now, twice in five episodes —
You were wrong about this not being a bunch of robot podcasters and you were wrong about the purchase of Twitter by the man. So two strikes for Casey.
Yeah. And this is one of the — sometimes as a reporter, you get a tip that sounds so silly, that you think, well, this couldn’t possibly be true. So when I got this tip that Elon and his people were telling people, print out your last 30 to 60 days of code, I thought, well, that can’t be true.
Two of my sources said that that doesn’t sound right to them. OK? But then, I start texting around, start getting on the phone with some folks, and then the two people that told me that I was wrong came back to me and said, oh my god, he’s actually asking people to print out their code!
So why is this funny? Why is it so interesting? This method of evaluating a software engineer is odd and doesn’t take into account how good a person is. People are generally not evaluated by how much code they’ve written, right?
If you show up with a printout of 100 pages of code, that’s not necessarily a good thing. It’s possible you could have done better for the company by eliminating some code. And then, sort of streamlining it. So —
Also, who wrote the code? I was surprised that the coding programs have a Print button. Because that’s, like, not what you’re bringing to your daily review of your code.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
What is a problem with Twitter? Two hours after the release of a whistleblower complaint: When is Twitter going to change its verifications?
Right. Also, they had just been in this situation where their former chief security officer was complaining that they had really lax security practices and filed this whistleblower complaint. And now, the fact that all the Twitter engineers are just printing out the code base and leaving it around Twitter headquarters —
It’s like, two hours later, they get — all the Twitter folks get this new notification. It’s like, change of plans. They still want to see your code. But why don’t you just bring it in on your laptop, and if you have printed out any code, we’re going to need you to shred it.
Like, there’s just this boss in charge who, like, doesn’t really seem to know what he’s doing, and everyone’s just kind of humoring him. But it’s not — it’s not the kind of thing that usually happens at a big tech company.
It is not. The folks at the company are obsessed with figuring out who is a good engineer, right? There is an altar of the engineer by which Elon worships. He considers himself an engineer.
And so I’ve talked to folks who are getting calls late at night from random Tesla engineers, saying things like, who’s really good on your team? Who are the top performers? Who are the low performers?
The evaluation system they are trying to figure out who we need to keep in order to keep the service running was a part of the absurdity of the code printout exercise.
Who can we let go of? That is kind of the main part of this. We have a code printing fiasco. Then, on Sunday, you reported that Twitter was considering tying verifications to Twitter Blue subscriptions, and explain what that means.
We don’t know how many people subscribe to it. The company doesn’t have a metric. What we know is that 89 percent of this company’s revenues comes from digital advertising, and the bulk of the rest comes from of selling access to their API.
Yeah. Stephen King, the horror author, asked if he could pay $20 a month to keep his blue check. I’m going to be like Enron if that gets instituted.
Stephen King has written about many of the most terrifying horrors imaginable and the idea of having to pay $20 a month for his verification was frightening to him.
That is how a lot of journalists are verified. There is more than one process. If you are a celebrity, you can ask to be verified. It isn’t about a status marker, and the reason for the verification exists.
It’s not about, this person’s important. It was literally created because people like Oprah were joining Twitter many, many years ago, and there were already a ton of impostors on Twitter, saying that they were people like Oprah. And so Twitter needed a way to basically allow users to tell whether the person they were talking to was actually the person they purported to be.
Yeah, and I think it’s fair to say, this is a necessary feature of the platform. Every platform that is social has a feature like this, right? You need a way to say, this is the real Oprah, and that is not the real Oprah.
Right. The checkmarks next to your Tweets are a sort of status symbol and have been for a long time. You mean that when you say it means that you are someone.
Right, exactly. The idea of paying to stay verified originally came out of the war room, which was where people would pay to stay verified. That’s where we find the idea of $20 a month for verification.
Now, that almost immediately results in, as you said, an entire Twitter timeline meltdown, where users are saying, no way will we pay $20 a month. That’s more than I pay for Netflix. That’s more than I pay for YouTube.
And so for them, this seems like a way to make money, while at the same time, kind of punishing the blue checkmarks, which is just very, very different from how other social media platforms treat their creators.
And I think it would be good for Twitter and most social networks if anybody wanted to optionally verify their identity. It would be good for the overall credibility of the ecosystem. There are many unanswered questions that come with it.
It does create a lot of economic value for people like you and me. It does matter to us. News organizations pay for all kinds of software to do various things. Maybe Twitter Blue should be part of that.
Now, apparently, Elon did say something, like they’re going to have maybe some sort of separate legacy verification program for — I don’t know — government entities that aren’t going to pay the $8 a month. So there’s still a lot of details to be worked out here.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Live Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: The Krispy Kreme, Vine, and other asynchronous social networks
In fact, there has been more external communication to Twitter.com than there has been to Twitter, the employees. So everything is just based on rumor. So we wake up. We look at our various channels and listen to our friends talk to us.
For me, it’s back at it again at the Krispy Kreme, one of the great moments of culture for the past 10 years. The culture has moved on at the same time. The code base for Vine is 10 years old, and the idea that it is now going to be revived and turn into a TikTok competitor — that’s a really steep hill.
I would also say that it was not an immediate revenue driver. That’s something they’re just going to have to put a ton of effort into. You’re essentially launching a new social network within Twitter. So that’s a huge, heavy lift. I think it could be fun to have a very popular American short-form video network that wasn’t owned by Facebook or YouTube. But we’ll just have to see if they can do it.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Do They Really Need? And Why Do They Need It? The Answer is Hard
That is correct. They’re being told, you have days to ship this. If this does not ship by this time, you will lose your job. You will be fired if the deadline is past one hour.
So people are sleeping very little. They are sleeping in their offices, and frankly, some of them are terrified. Some of them have work visas. If they lose this job, they have 60 days to find another job, or they’re out of the country. So it could not be more serious for the folks who have these jobs.
Welcome to “Hard Fork,” Mockingjay. Right now it is about 10:00 AM Pacific. How’s your day going so far? What are the notable events today?
Everyone wakes up to more panicked messages via various different channels every day for the last week. Most people have been smart enough to leave Slack and go to other channels. And it is this up-and-down of trying to chase rumors, because we have had zero communications from anybody internally.
Stressing. Between trying to maintain this job and clearly looking for a way out, I feel very stressed out because there is no support or acknowledgment from the people above me. Already, there have been multiple rumor mill-based scares.
First, of course, was that layoffs are supposed to happen Monday. They did not happen. There is a rumor that it is going to be Friday. It’s tiring. I know we are all paid really well.
Most of us have money to spare. Some people don’t. But it is also just nerve-racking not to know, especially as we’re entering a really tough hiring market in tech. And also, we’re entering the holidays.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: How Much Should You Give? Why Should You Care? How Do You Choose Your C-suite?
So just to really underline that, you have a new CEO at your company. Most of the C-suite has either been fired or resigned, and you have not received one email that says, here’s who’s in charge, and here’s the game plan for the next few days.
That is correct. We haven’t received anything other than what trickled down to us. Comms is incredibly sparse. There is no one answering in the company-wide channels.
And so what is that like, when, day to day, you wake up, and it’s almost like a scavenger hunt across seven different apps, just to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing?
You may have already heard of some of the vicious code reviews. I have seen examples of people who wrote the code and didn’t credit anyone else who collaborated with them trying to get on a preferred status list.
Absolutely. What they are asking for is more volume than quality. Everyone is sharing code no matter how small or insignificant it is. [SIGHS]
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
I can’t cope: A message from a manager talking out about life under mu-two twitter-employees speak out
Yeah, I reported on a message from a manager who said, basically, if you don’t know what you’re working on right now, work on something. Work on anything.
I want to read you a post that someone had sent me from Blind. Blind is this app where you sort of log in with your work email, and then you can have these pseudonymous chats about what’s happening at your company.
And multiple people have sent me this post. And I wonder if you’ve seen it. And I’m not going to read the whole thing. But the headline is “I can’t cope.”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees: A Call to Stop Working and I Wanna Be Afraid Of Them All The Time
I’m on the team trying to make all of Elon’s dreams a reality. If we miss delivery, they threaten to fire us even if they don’t have control over it. If we don’t work at weekends, we’re gone. If we decide to leave, we will be gone.
People are working long hours. I’m working around 20 hours per day at absolutely full velocity. I wake up in the night to attend status calls. Even when I’m not working, I can’t stop worrying about it. I can not cope. I’m an absolute mess. I’m at a breaking point. This is after just a few days of Elon.”
So there are two camps at Twitter right now, the people who are being completely ignored until they get fired and the people who are being pulled into these task forces. I think the better place is to be in the people who are being ignored and will be fired.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
The Impact of Twitter on Millennials: Implications for Job Searches, Immigration to Lattice and Immigration into Cameroon
My heart goes out to this person. I hope they are able to find gainful employment, and in that four hours while they are trying to sleep and take care of themselves, applying to jobs.
And I sincerely hope that there is care taken for people who are on visas. All of the people I know who are here on visas have no idea what will happen to them. They had not been told anything.
We are moving from one six figure salary to another six figure salary and this is not just for privileged tech people crying. These are people who have gainful employment and are skilled who want to emigrate to this country.
Twitter had already leaned more towards different communities from what made Twitter. Some very small percentage of people on Twitter generate all the tweets, right? So even pre-Elon, we’re already starting from a place where it’s actually a very fragile community, a very, very few people creating all of the content that everybody else sits and consumes.
Twitter Disruption After All These Years: What Have You Been Expecting? What Are Some People Worrying About the Future of Twitter?
I don’t think it’s because people are sitting on their hands. I think it is because the company is structured like that, it is almost impossible to get anything done, no one is told how things are changing or even what the appropriate approvals are for. There is some truth in that statement. This is the absolute wrong way to deal with it.
And I wonder, as you’ve been going through all this, if you have been thinking about the degree to which that could be at risk, and what fears you might have around the future of Twitter the service?
I would love to think that everybody on Twitter is going to leave in protest. Many people may stay in the situation. But it’s going to be interesting to see who stays.
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 fear that a breakdown of moderation and verification can lead to a free-for-all on what has been the internet’s main conduit for reliable communications.
Life Under Musk Two Tweetees Speak Out — How a Software Company Can Give Us Its Own (And When We Don’t)
It was scary and relieved. It will be frightening to not have a source of income. But at the same time, I hope that all of us who get fired will just get to chill out for a day or so, and then wake up on a couple of days later and say, all right, got to get that resume out there. Got to be energized about these other jobs, because right now it’s sucking the life out of us.
There is uncertainty. There are people who are not sure if they should keep doing the work. The pile of unknowns, along with what has been reported on, leads to this cognitive dissonance, and just general constant stress.
I mean, even in the lowest parts of engineering, people would raise privacy concerns or potential misuse of new features. They only have one job, and it is to write random code that no one will ever see. And the company just always kind of had a culture of letting people speak to these things. More often than not, we were caught by issues before it made it to the public.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Tweets-Speak Out: What Happened to Josef Limbside at the Fermilab Tevatron Power Plant?
That’s complicated because no one really knew. I think there was group thinking that this guy was not a nice person. You know, there were a lot of people that were of the thought that this should probably have been banned a long time ago for his behavior. Everything came from there.
I mean, he’s certainly been more aggressively attaching himself to various political viewpoints and their talking points. If it helps him, he will lean into it.
I will say, having been there for a number of years, the company has grown in a lot of ways, and some not so good. I agree with people who say there is probably too much managers and engineers. Maybe it’s too slow to deliver. Management has never been the company’s strong point.
So that aside, you don’t go through any change like this without some massive structural change. If he just came in and did the same thing that he had done, what is the point?
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speakers Out: What Do We Need to Do to Get It Done Right? Is It Necessary?
OK. Apparently there is an idea that it should be quicker than it has been. We have been told that if you do not ship this item by next Monday, you will be fired. When you hear a three- or four-day deadline, what does it mean to you?
I lose my mind. We have a three to four-day deadline on something because priorities changed and we need to have this done by Friday. That is a bit of a challenge. Maybe put in a couple more hours. Need to get it done. It makes sense.
The sheer scale is something that distinguishes this from other places. I wouldn’t get asked at work to completely revamp Twitter Blue by Friday. That’s just completely absurd.
It is like lifting the Titanic from the bottom of the ocean with the sheer number of systems that need to be touched on.
There is more than one set of code that needs to be written. You also have to coordinate across presumably dozens of engineers, product managers, and lots of other folks, right?
Yeah. Well, I mean, if you look at some of the feature sets that have been reported on that he wants to add in, like ranking blue check users higher than others, where that ranking occurs in the stack. They have to completely rethink how that whole process works. There are whole services in the company that we have to go figure out.
Yeah. Like if somebody had come to you and said, we want to redo Twitter Blue, what would be the time frame that you would be given that would make you say, yeah, that seems like a reasonable amount of time to do that?
It depends. It could take quite a while if the change requires a large amount of infrastructure changes because the platform is pretty slow. We’re more concerned with reliability than we are moving fast.
If I had to give a time frame, it could probably be within a quarter to two quarters.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What are We Really Do? How We Can Become Secure and Secure in a Big Social Network
This is an engineering and a social problem at the same time. We need to test ourselves. We need to figure out how this can be abused. What are people going to do with it? What are the guys going to do to steal people’s money using this feature?
It’s right. And that’s what goes on with all major releases at a big social network, is trying to figure out, we change this feature, what are the 10 other things that happen? The deadlines are so short that this stuff may be available without any testing or scrutiny, that sort of trying to figure out what could go wrong. They’re just going to be set loose.
Yeah. One section is about user privacy and privacy data. And it’s basically, we’re not doing anything with user data, so we don’t worry about that. And then now it’s just a blue check on a profile.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
On the Product Changes of Elon Musk and His Inner Circle: So, What do you think of the new Vine product? How do you feel about it?
So there’s a couple of things. It depends on where you’re in the leadership stack and where Musk and his people are. Generally the one overarching message that did get communicated was, find something cool that you like. Hopefully Musk likes it.
Think about it. If you present him an idea and he thinks it’s cool, he wants it done within a week. And you’ve basically just sacrificed every team around you.
There is a God. I’m curious what you make of the various product changes that have been floated or proposed by Elon Musk and his inner circle, such as the charging $8 a month for Twitter verification, bringing back Vine. What do you make of those proposals? And do you think they’re good ideas?
I mean, one of the first decisions he made was to redirect the logged-out view to the Explore page. My understanding of the goal here was that we might be able to serve ads to people that are not in the archives, if we wanted to.
Now, if you go to Twitter and you’re not logged in, they’ll show you a bunch of tweets which might entice you to sign in, create an account. Maybe you see some ads if you linger on and browse through some social media. So that was a relatively quick change that he made that I think a lot of people would agree makes some sense.
The Vine one, it’s not the worst idea. The cynical part of me says, “Too little, too late.” You know? TikTok is TikTok, and that’s a mighty hill to climb.
Yes, but sure. I mean, we do have all the original content from Vine. The nostalgia factor is huge, which means we have a foothold to at least launch something.
We had the media and are trying to create a product like that. I believe that every tech company has tried. Is this something we can do? There have been mock-ups.
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Have We Learned in the Three Months of Twitter’s Behaving?
The most boring would be it. It’s possible to make an etherealhorror movie out of walking around with nothing.
There’s no communications. So the only people talking are people in a corner. But it is not true that the whole company went in and learned what was going on. Are we ever going to see him? Should I continue with my work? Is lunch served anymore?
We don’t know what might happen to your job. As you think about it, do you want to be working at Twitter in three months? Are you ready to be somewhere else?
Culture is not a lie. Culture can be found in the product. For all of Twitter’s faults, a lot of the way the company behaved was because people cared so much. And that can be infuriating in its own ways.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: A Conversation with Kevin Roose on the WSJEU Dispatch Hotline
People have seen this. So now we’re moving into the phase equivalent to “move fast and break things,” with no care for the people who are using it, which just sort of defeats the point.
He is reading the news about the work hours. And he’s been wildly speculating about what kind of labor law lawsuits are going to come out.
So the closest we can get to understanding their point of view is probably from Musk’s Twitter feed, where he’s been tweeting things like, “Twitter’s current lords and peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” and, “To all complainers, please continue complaining, but it will cost $8.” He changed his profile to a complaint hotline operator on social media.
If you want to get a huge scoop about what’s happening at the micro-blogging site, send it over to CASEY. His email address is Kevin. Roose —
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
The First Day of the Fed Meeting: Record-breaking Data from “Hard Fork” Production at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider
“Hard Fork” is produced by Davis Land. Paula Szuchman edits us. There was a fact check on this episode. Today’s show was developed by Cory Schreppel.
Dan Powell wrote the original music, with others contributing music as well. With special thanks to Hanna Ingber, Nell Gallogly, Kate LoPresti, Shannon Busta, Mahima Chablani, and Jeffrey Miranda.
A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Do you not have a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version by clicking on the same link.
The Federal Reserve will meet in December. Fed officials said they will use hard economic data to make their next decision so analysts can speculate all they want.
With housing, labor, and Inflation reports likely to have outsized effects on the market, investors can speculate about what will happen with interest rates.
What’s happening: No one can change the market like Federal Reserve Chair Powell did on Wednesday, when he gave a few words that sent the markets into a tailspin. The Fed’s current hiking regime to fight persistent inflation doesn’t exist yet, said Powell. “It’s very premature, in my view, to think about or be talking about pausing.”
The central bank also doesn’t think inflation will start to fall back until next year. Policy makers warned that there will be more rate hikes in the coming months.
Premarket Stocks Trading: Confronting Labor and Food Demands with Core CPI and Core Precise Equilibrium Measures
The report is expected to show that the economy added more jobs in October, but it was still a solid number as demand for labor continues to exceed supply.
That means more inflation. Businesses have to pay higher wages to attract employees and are able to charge more for their goods and services. The Fed will be looking closely at hourly wage growth in the report. In September, wages rose by 5% from a year ago.
There is a possible upside: Another jobs report in December is expected ahead of the Fed meeting. Even if the unemployment rate stays historically low, a downward trajectory in employment would be enough to satisfy Fed officials.
Core CPI prices, which exclude oil and food, rose 0.6% in September month-over-month, matching August’s pace and coming in well above expectations of a 0.4% increase, not a great sign for the Fed. And analysts expect to see another large 0.5% increase in October.
PCE reflects changes in the prices of goods and services purchased by consumers in the United States. The Fed believes the measure is more accurate than CPI because it accounts for a wider range of purchases from a broader range of buyers.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html
The Bank of England: The Case for Inflation after the Big Crunch: Job Losses in a Time-Dependent Loan Market
Housing: The housing market has been deeply impacted by the Fed’s efforts to fight inflation, and is one of the first areas of the economy to show signs of cooling.
Demand for loans is declining due to elevated borrowing costs, which averaged 6.89% last week, up from 3.05% a year ago.
Powell said that the housing market was very overheated for a short time after the Pandemic. That is where a very big effect of our policies is.
The Bank of England raised interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point on Thursday, the biggest hike in 33 years, as it attempts to fight soaring inflation.
The bank issued a very clear warning. It said that economic output is already contracting and that it expects a recession to continue through the first half of 2024 “as high energy prices and materially tighter financial conditions weigh on spending.”
Musk tweeted late Friday that there was no choice but to cut jobs “when the company is losing over $4M/day.” He did not provide details on the daily losses at Twitter and said employees who lost their jobs were offered three months’ pay as severance.
The trust and safety council, a group of outside experts that advised the company on issues like human rights, child sexual exploitation and mental health, is no longer with the company.
Why social media is out of control: a case study of Elon Musk, a Norwegian billionaire who was killed by armed conflict in the African Great Lakes region
The WARN Act requires any company with over 100 employees to give 60 days’ written notice if it intends to cut 50 jobs or more at a “single site of employment.”
The world’s richest man expressed his displeasure with the current lords and peasants system of social networking site, using an expletive. He added: “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”
Musk risks a break with media organizations, which are among the most active on the platform, because of the abandonment of advertisers over questions about content moderation.
When billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter and pledged that “the bird is freed” last week, Felix Ndahinda saw a threat rising on the horizon.
Ndahinda works in the Netherlands as aconsultant on issues related to conflict and peace in the African Great Lakes region. It was already apparent that a free social media tool can do great things. For years, he has been tracking the social-media hate speech that swirls amid armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo1. Much of that incendiary speech has gone undetected by the systems that platforms, including Twitter, use to identify harmful content, because it is shared in languages that are not built into their screening tools.
How the company will proceed is still uncertain. Musk has met with civil-rights leaders about his plan to put a moderation council in charge of establishing policies on hate speech and harassment. Musk said that users who had been banned would not be reinstated until there was a process in place for them to be allowed to do so.
Some users that have been banned from the social networking service will use lesser-known websites with fewer regulations. Their social-media activity becomes more extreme once there. “We see a community that becomes more committed, more active — but also smaller,” he says.
Normally, these platforms are where false narratives start, says Stringhini. Those narratives will explode on mainstream platforms. He says that people go out of control on social media because they are pushed onto it.
“When you have people that have some sort of public stature on social media using inflammatory speech — particularly speech that dehumanizes people — that’s where I get really scared,” says James Piazza, who studies terrorism at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. There can be more violence in that situation.
A policy change that was at the center of the account is called elon jet and it is run by Jack Sweeney a college student. Sweeney has said Musk previously offered him money to take down the account, but Musk said in November, after he took control of Twitter, that he would allow it to stay online. The suspended reporters come from organizations including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. Even links to Mastodon have been blocked, with Twitter identifying the site as “potentially harmful.”
We are going after impersonation and deception, but we are not putting a label on accounts that are official at the moment.
Kathy had her account taken off after changing 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.
Tiny Talk Town: Where is all the talk? When is the talk about Musk? A Twitter comment on Bertinelli’s response to Musk
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. She said she thought she made her point, after she had had fun.
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 be available, as it wasn’t available Sunday. A Twitter employ, Esther Crawford, told The Associated Press it is coming “soon but it hasn’t launched yet.”
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, sought to assuage such concerns in a tweet Friday. He said the company’s front-line content moderation staff was the group least affected by the job cuts.
“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. We’re all in Tiny Talk Town, a place where all the talk is about Musk.
Quiet Quitting on Social Media: What is it All about? Some Refreshing Points on the Real Problems of Occupying Your Twitter Account
Quiet quitting is rejecting the burden that goes with going above and beyond in the workplace, no longer working overtime in a way that makes your employer wealthier but also 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 stick around on this new Twitter—whatever it may become—you need to find a way to use it without it using you.
There is a small group of people that influence social networking site, Twitter. According to internal company research, heavy users who use English make up less than a tenth of monthly users, but make up 90 percent of all the revenue from social networking websites.
So active users are a noisy bunch, and it would be easy for, say, an electric car entrepreneur who follows a disproportionate number of extremely active “blue checks” on Twitter to mistake his own Twitter experience for everyone’s experience. (Same goes for journalists.) In reality, nearly half of Twitter users tweet less than five times a month, and most of their posts are replies, not original tweets. They check in on current events or live sports or celebrity news, and then they go about their lives. They are referred to as lurkers.
Lurking isn’t doomscrolling, a practice (and phrase) that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when many people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. Choosing to lurk, to sit back and observe for a while, is basically a heuristic and simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos that is New Twitter. Check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, sure, then close your app or browser tab. Send a tweet, then disengage. Keep one eye on it during basketball games. If you have to use it, then direct the thread to another location. Save your most original thoughts for a different place.
In the past week alone, one of the world’s most influential social networks has laid off half its workforce; alienated powerful advertisers; blown up key aspects of its product, then repeatedly launched and un-launched other features aimed at compensating for it; and witnessed an exodus of senior executives.
Twitter Takes the Backseat: Musk’s Twitter Takeover and the App Stores’ Failure to Follow Google and Apple’s Rules
The paid subscription service was suspended just two days after its official launch, with the menu option to sign up for the add-on vanishing from Twitter’s mobile app. It was not clear when the offering would be restored.
Hours after the gray badges launched on Wednesday as a way to help users differentiate legitimate celebrity and branded accounts from accounts that had merely paid for a blue check mark, Musk abruptly tweeted that he had “killed” the feature, forcing subordinates to explain the reversal.
Cuban said that you have a decision to make. “Stick with the new Twitter that democratizes every tweet by paid accounts and puts the onus on all users to curate for themselves. Or bring back Twitter curation. One makes it easier to find information on the social media site. The other is awful.
The layoffs and exits of many of the ad sales employees that managed their campaigns is a source of ire for brands.
In an op-ed published in the New York Times last week, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, who left the company earlier this month, said the company’s failure to adhere to Google and Apple’s app store rules could be “catastrophic.” The app stores have removed social media apps from their stores in the past for failing to protect users from harmful content and after Musk’s takeover, there were already calls from app store operators. Phil Schiller, the head of Apple’s app store, deleted his tweeter account over the weekend.
The Musk-Mountain Files, Part Duex!: Twitter’s Shadowbanning Attacks on Right-Wing Accounts
Even still, there is no guarantee that continuing to capture the online world’s attention will translate into subscription payments or other revenue growth.
Musk has previously criticized that filtering technique — nicknamed “shadowbanning” — and alleged that it was unfairly used by Twitter’s past leadership to suppress right-wing accounts. He stated that the new version of the service will be more transparent and will still reduce the reach of bad messages.
“Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal,” Musk tweeted on Thursday. He did not provide additional details or a timetable.
The first leak of the “Twitter files” took place earlier this month when journalist Matt Taibbi shared internal emails from the company about their decision to prevent a New York Post story about Hunter Biden from being published.
In both cases, the internal documents appear to have been provided directly to the journalists by Musk’s team. On Friday Musk shared Weiss’ thread with a caption, “TheTwitter Files, Part Duex!!” Along with popcorn and other things.
Weiss offered several examples of right-leaning figures who had moderation actions taken on their accounts, but it’s not clear if such actions were equally taken against left-leaning or other accounts.
Jet-Tracing Account Suspension After Musk Returned: A Communication Dispute with Sweeney and the Internet Archive
The jet-tracing account was brought back after Musk imposed new conditions on all of them, including not sharing their current location.
The account was offered to be shut down by the billionaire. Sweeney said it would be great help in college and that he could possibly get a car if he were to accept the offer. After some back and forth, Musk responded, “Doesn’t feel right to pay to shut this down.”
He also threatened legal action against Jack Sweeney, the 20-year-old college sophomore and programmer who started the @elonjet flight-tracking account, and “organizations who supported harm to my family.” Musk could take legal action against Sweeney for posting public flight information on his account.
Sweeney’s personal account was suspended by the micro-blogging site. He operates accounts on rival platforms to track Musk’s jet.
Data from the Internet Archive shows the company updated its “private information and media policy” to add a clause that prohibited the sharing of live location data, ” we will remove any tweets or accounts that share someone’s live location,” it read.
Musk stated his reasons for the new policy. Any account that doxes real-time location info of anyone will be suspended as it is a physical safety violation. The links are with real-time location info. It isn’t a safety problem if someone travels on a slightly delayed basis, he wrote.
Sweeney told CNN that he would begin to delay posting Musk’s jet location for 24 hours only, but only on the social networking site.
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.
On Twitter and the Disruption of Twitter During Musk’s Dec. 3 Takeaway from the Twitter Airshow: Why Facebook is Toxic for Women and Girls and How We Can Reclaim It
The account @elon jet chronicled Musk’s many cross-country journeys since he took over the role of CEO atTwitter in the weeks since.
It showed Musk flying to East Coast cities ahead of major events, and to New Orleans shortly before a Dec. 3 meeting there with French President Emmanuel Macron.
An Associate professor in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University wrote about issues affecting women and social media. Her book “This Feed Is on Fire: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls — The book, titled And How We Can Reclaim It, will be published in the years to come. Her own opinions are included in this commentary. Read more opinion on CNN.
The move marks a attempt by Musk to make the platform less friendly to the press.
A healthy town square should be where people can find trustworthy information. Prior to Musk taking over, it was found by researchers at the University that hate and misinformation were more frequently posted on the social networking site than before.
It’s clear that we can’t rely on Musk’s Twitter to provide a safe, open forum. We need new, non-profit social networks run by boards responsible for considering the public’s interest when making critical 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. The town hall we desperately need can be found on new social platforms created by some of these professionals.
The company would lift the suspension after the results of the public poll on the site, according to Musk. The poll showed that 58.7% of respondents agreed with the move to immediately unsuspend accounts, compared to 41.3% who disagreed.
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.
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.”
Twitter and Mashable reporters suspended for tweeting about Musk’s alleged stalker: Stephane Dujarric, Sally Buzbee, and Matt Binder
Stephane Dujarric said the move set a dangerous precedent because journalists all over the world are facing threats andcensorship.
A lot of the reporters who were suspended on Thursday night were writing about the new policy and the reasons behind it, which involved Musk’s claim that a stalker affected his family in Los Angeles.
The official Mastodon account was banned because of its use of hate speech. The reason was unclear, though it had tweeted about the jet-tracking account. In some cases, the links to Mastodon accounts were found to be a potential threat to public safety.
Sally Buzbee is the executive editor of the Washington Post and said Drew Harwell was removed from his post after the publication of accurate reporting about Musk.
CNN said in a statement that “the impulsive and unjustified suspension of a number of reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is concerning but not surprising.”
Matt Binder of Mashable said he was banned Thursday night after sharing a screen grab 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.
Twitter Shutdown and Instances: The First Day of Musk’s Disciplinary Reionization of Mastodon
He promised that he would allow free speech and have reinstated high-profile accounts that had previously broken the rules. He wants to suppress negative vibes and hate by giving up some of the freedom of reach.
She said the old regime ruled by its own quirks and biases and the new regime has the same problem.
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 temporarily halted its activity on the social network due to uncertainty about the new management, but media organizations have stayed on the platform.
News breaks on the social network are what we all know, but now to go after the journalists who saw the main tent pole. I can’t think of a worse self-destructive wound to lose journalists off social media.
Some advertisers have already cut their spending on the platform due to the uncertainty surrounding Musk’s direction, so the suspension may be the biggest red flag yet for advertisers.
The conference chat on Thursday went down after Musk signed out of a session where he had been questioned about the reporters’ ousting. Musk later tweeted that Spaces had been taken offline to deal with a “Legacy bug.” Friday was the return of Spaces.
Musk’s company Mastodon had 3.4 million users on the day he took ownership of the company. Many Mastodon networks were used to solicit donations, as disgruntled users strained computing resources. Crowd-funded networks are known as “instances”. The platform is designed to be ad-free.
The Associated Editors of the Silicon Valley Micro-Blogging Site (CNN/The Washington Post/The New York Times, Rupar, and Lopez) vowed to Step Down
In the past, Twitter had required the removal of violative tweets for users to regain access to their accounts, but the journalists in this case strongly dispute that their posts violated Twitter rules.
Musk had on Thursday banned CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, and The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell. Independent progressive journalist Aaron Rupar, former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, and Insider columnist Linette Lopez were also banned.
“The people have spoken,” Musk wrote Friday night after his poll, pledging to restore the accounts he had falsely accused of sharing his “exact real-time” location.
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.
Rupar told CNN that he had ultimately decided to simply remove the tweet and move on from the episode, though he described the whole affair as “kinda [sic] absurd obviously.”
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.
Musk asked people to vote on whether he should step down as the CEO of the micro-blogging site. Musk said he would abide by the poll’s results.
In reply to one of his followers who said he would take the CEO job, Musk mentioned that he wasn’t happy with his new job.
Twitter and the “Bot Armies”: Explaining Twitter’s decision to remove the application programming interface from public-interest research in the wake of Musk’s announcement
Starbird, a researcher at University of Washington who studies online information dynamics during crises, said that half of the social computing papers used data from micro-blogging site, Twitter.
Twitter did not say how many tweets users can download or post at the $100 a month level. Those who need additional access will have to have to pay more though the company didn’t disclose the pricing.
The move will make it more expensive to run many automated accounts, known as bots. Some bots are helpful for users, such as those that point out the changes to the New York Times story, while some are less useful and more fun.
Musk has long expressed his desire to rid the platform of “bot armies.” When Twitter first announced last Thursday that it will start charging for API usage without information of pricing or exceptions, bot watchers on the platform bemoaned the imminent demise of creations they loved. On Saturday, Musk tweeted that “responding to feedback,” bots “providing good content” will keep free access.
If some bots were spared, no researchers were. The change will also limit what is possible for researchers such as Starbird who have relied on that pipeline, known as an application programming interface or API, to study user behavior and information operations on the platform for years.
An open letter was issued by research institutions, advocacy groups and individual researchers from around the world in order to maintain access to public-interest research after Twitter first announced it would start charging for the application program interface. Rep. Trahan believes that data access should be easier on a social media platform. As of Wednesday, Twitter did not respond to a request from NPR sent last week for more information about its decision.
Players seeking influence can game the timelines to amplify their message if they follow more than one person.
In the past few years, the social media landscape has splintered, butTwitter still serves as a good guide post because of the smaller platforms that have sprung up.
Users with access to the Twitter API can upload and download data in bulk to and from the platform using a computer program, bypassing the main user interface.
It’s possible for users of the account to get up to two million messages for free every month. Academic institutions can download unlimited amounts from the entire archive for free. With a large amount of data, researchers can make maps of how users relate to each other, which is helpful for understanding online communities, like those that spread false information.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/09/1155543369/twitters-new-data-access-rules-will-make-social-media-research-harder
The Starbird Project: Exploring the Future of CrowdTangle, Telegram, TikTok, Reddit, and Twitter
Without access to that wealth of data, researchers will have a less comprehensive picture and less ability to go back and investigate narratives that they’ve missed in real time, Starbird says.
Users have been able to access the data in more detail than other major social media platforms. Meta’s offering, CrowdTangle, does not provide straightforward ways to download data in real time and in bulk the way Twitter does. Moreover, the company is reportedly winding it down and has not announced whether it will offer a replacement. Meta was not asked about CrowdTangle’s future.
Last year the company announced that it’s testing a research platform and that it’ll be added to the US soon. the company told NPR in an email. The company has come under criticism in the past year for allowing disinformation to spread on its platform. It has also faced bipartisan scrutiny due to its Chinese ownership.
If Starbird’s current level of access ceases, the team is likely to come up with new ideas to keep the service alive. They intend to focus on Telegram, TikTok and Reddit along with Twitter for the 2024 presidential election while collaborating with teams that monitor other platforms.
“We’ve tended to work within the constraints we’ve had for so long.” Starbird says, and maybe there will be new creative ways to use Twitter data. “Unfortunately, I think a lot of that creativity is going to be better spent on other platforms.”