The November 9th Twitter-News Launch of the Blue, Musk, Trust, and Safety Platform: The Recommendation of Trust, Safety, and Legacy Verification

This latest round of layoffs is at least the fourth one since Musk assumed ownership of Twitter last November. In addition to well above 50 people, the layoffs were spread throughout multiple departments. The founder of the now-shuttered Revue newsletter platform was included.

Many employees of the company have noted that the current CEO has not been present since Musk soured on him after they started talking about him 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. “He has ghosted us,” said another. According to a report in The Verge, there are many of the same comments that were made about Argawal on both Slack and Blind.

After a chaotic day on the timelines, Musk halted new sign-ups on Thursday evening for the Blue subscription. Offering anyone the chance to slap a “verified” badge on their account had led to widespread impersonation of government officials, corporations, and celebrities. The resulting mayhem, which led to memorable hoaxes from accounts misrepresenting themselves as Eli Lilly, Tesla, Lockheed Martin and others, had triggered an advertiser pullout and a general sense that the platform had descended into chaos.

As the significance of all this began to register with Musk, he encouraged satirical accounts to include “parody” in their name and bio. It is not possible for Musk to say they weren’t warned if any of the consequences came as a shock.

Days before the November 9th launch, the company’s trust and safety team had prepared a seven-page list of recommendations intended to help Musk avoid the most obvious and damaging consequences of his plans for Blue. The document, which was obtained by Platformer, predicts with eerie accuracy some of the events that follow.

“Motivated scammers/bad actors could be willing to pay … to leverage increased amplification to achieve their ends where their upside exceeds the cost,” reads the document’s first recommendation, which the team labeled “P0” to denote a concern in the highest risk category.

“Impersonation of world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials, and other high profile individuals” represented another P0 risk, the team found. The loss of legacy verification is likely to result in an increase in high-profile accounts being impersonated on the social networking site.

When Twitter Stops, it’s All You Need: How Safe is Blue for Kids? The Case of Musk and the State of the Art

After an online altercation with writer Stephen King, Musk lowered the price of Blue from $119 a year to $100 a year. The move wound up increasing the risk for scams, as the desire to make fun of brands and government officials became an impulse buy at $8.

The team identified several other risks for which Twitter has yet to identify any solutions. The company does not have an automated way of removing verified badges from user accounts. We anticipate we will need high operational lift without investment if a large number of legacy verified accounts don’t pay for Blue, because of the large amount of verified users on the platform.

Retention of verification for some high-profile accounts using the official Badge was one solution that the company won support for.

The document offers a wish list for features that can make the product safer and simpler to use, but a majority of them haven’t been approved.

The launch went ahead despite the warnings. After the trust and safety team’s predictions were mostly realized, Musk finally stopped the roll out.

The email that was sent to full-time employees notifying them of layoffs was not received by contractors. Neither did their managers, who discovered one by one over the weekend that people they had been counting on to perform critical tasks had suddenly disappeared from the company’s systems.

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

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

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

The Musk-Trump Code Freeze: What Has It Learned? Employees of Tesla and the Boring Company from Twitter to Slack and Gmail

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.

Several workers said they had learned about their employment status after seeing our tweets, attempting to log in to Gmail and Slack, and finding that they no longer had access.

Some employees told us that they had been bracing for cuts ever since the layoffs earlier this month. As Platformer first reported, the medical benefits for many former contractors would end on their final day of work.

In two weeks, I have never known a more hostile and degrading workplace in my life.

Employees are showing a great deal of solidarity. 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.”

The code freeze was more than just a restriction on when engineers can commit and deploy code. Those are fairly common, and Twitter has been under one for most of the time since Musk took over. The goal of the freezes is to reduce the chance of a bug disrupting the system.

Engineers were told they couldn’t write anything until further notice in 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.”

On Slack, even engineers who attended the late-night meeting were confused. “Is there a ticket I can reference?” A engineer was asked if he was going to implement the freeze. “I don’t see any context.” The colleague said they didn’t have much context as of now. “But this is coming from Elon’s team.”

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

Instead, the experience is not great in India, for example. The back-and-forth data transfer between the phone and the data center starts compounding after the law of physics comes into effect.

Not to mention that India has a higher concentration of low power phones that perform worse in general than ours, which is why we prefer ourphones to do better there.

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

Why the Code Freeze? Why Twitter, General Motors and Pfizer Did not pause their ad campaigns after the Blue Debacle

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

The ad campaigns of Eli Lilly were paused on Friday after the Blue debacle. The move potentially cost Twitter millions of dollars in revenue, according to the Washington Post. (A “verified” fake account impersonating Eli Lilly had said insulin would now be free, and it took Twitter six hours to remove the tweet.)

The pharmaceutical giant is one of many that have pulled their ad dollars from social networking site. Companies including Volkswagen and Pfizer have paused their campaigns, and large advertising firms like IPG’s Mediabrands and Omnicom Media Group are advising clients to do the same.

According to internal messages and conversations with employees, the news has left those in the ad team in a lurch.

“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. I will raise as many as possible if there are any questions and commentary in this thread.

Another Twitter employee said General Motors had also asked to pause campaigns. The team requested to meet next week to help them make a case to global on why they shouldn’t, but the initial reason they gave was elections. 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 Twitter was a high risk media buy. The situation in the agency partnerships lead has arisen because of recent senior departures in certain areas. While they understand that our policies remain in place, they feel that Twitter’s ability to scale and manage infractions at speed is uncertain at this time.”

Adherence to effective moderation of content, enforce current rules, and watch out for hate speech and misinformation.

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

How Twitter Lost a Pin? An Inside Look at Musk and Musk’s Layoffs in the WikiLeading Hour after Musk Takes Over

Mid-afternoon on Monday, after Musk announced he would begin disconnecting up to 80 percent of unspecified microservices, some users said two-factor authentication temporarily stopped working via SMS. Others had site problems and had difficulty getting their archives.

There are people who know how to fix all those things, but they either no longer work for the company or have been told not to ship any new code. At the end of the day, engineers wondered if there were any more cracks in the service and how many would emerge.

Esther Crawford no longer works at the company after another wave of layoffs, as first reported by Zo Schiffer. Crawford headed up various projects at Twitter, including the company’s Blue with verification subscription as well as Twitter’s forthcoming payments platform.

Crawford “began angling for a bigger role” shortly after Musk’s takeover, as documented in this inside look at Twitter from Schiffer, Casey Newton, and Alex Heath. She also commented on Musk’s massive layoffs that halved the company’s workforce last year, and at the time wrote on Slack that “drastic cuts were going to be required to survive, no matter who owned the company.”