Twitter Takeover: Musk’s “Spam Bots or die trying” and “The Case for Trump’s Disappearance in Twitter”
Despite his months-long attempt to get out of buying the company and his own recent remarks that he is “obviously overpaying” for it, Musk has tried to sound optimistic about Twitter’s potential.
Beyond the removal of Twitter’s CEO and other executives, Musk’s takeover could also usher in the return of some measure of influence over the company by founder Jack Dorsey, who stepped down as CEO in November and left its board in May. While Dorsey has said he will not formally return to Twitter, he has privately discussed the takeover with Musk and offered advice.
Many will be watching to see when Musk could let Trump return to the platform, as he previously said he would. If it happened at the right time, this move would have huge implications for the upcoming US midterm elections as well as the 2024 presidential campaign.
Musk will have more authority because of the acquisition. The billionaire already owns, oversees and has significant stakes in companies that develop cars, rockets, robots, and satellite internet as well as more experimental ventures. Now he controls a social media platform that shapes how hundreds of millions of people communicate and get their news.
The fake and scam accounts often used in the replies to Musk’s tweets are referred to as the “spam bots or die trying” by Musk.
The ill-informed State of the Art: Social Media and Twitter as a model for the Capitol-attack in the late ’90s
The parties were ordered by the Chancery Court chancellor to close the deal or face a new trial.
Such a move could also have domino effects on other social media platforms. 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.
“The long-term potential for Twitter, in my view, is an order of magnitude greater than its current value,” he said on Tesla’s earnings conference call last week.
Big pharma created the Covid PLANdemic to silence me. Everybody tries to silence me,” she said. Please speak at a lower volume. I am too loud for the intensive care unit. You aren’t sick!
Trump, Johnson, Sweeney, and Mastodon: a Social Media Campaign against Donald Trump’s Freedom of Speech and its Implications on Twitter
“Hi. Oh my god, your profile is so funny. I love funny guys,” Schumer, dressed in a red dress, said as the bot. I was told I was a bot, which is crazy. I’m all woman and I love funny guys like you. You should check this website where I and some other girls hang out.
But the most notable person to speak in front of the council: former president Donald Trump, played by James Austin Johnson. Trump had his account banned in 2021.
We all moved to Truth Social and we love it. Johnson said it was very great. “And in many ways, also terrible. It is very bad. Very, very bad. It is a little buggy when it comes to making the phone screen crack and the draining of the Venmo.
Elon Musk’s commitment to near-absolute free speech has collapsed. The tycoon said in his takeover bid that the platform should allow all legal speech. His stance changed this month after he blocked a swastika from the account of rapper Ye. He increased his efforts this week, suspending more than 25 accounts that were posting public flight data for his private jet. And yesterday, several journalists who had reported on that purge were kicked off Twitter too, alongside the account of one of Twitter’s most notable competitors, Mastodon.
According to a note shared with the AP, Sweeney was told not to use the services in a way intended to artificially amplify or suppress information. It was different than what Musk explained later in the day.
Comedian Kathy Griffin had her account suspended Sunday after she switched her screen name to Musk. She told the reporter that she had also used his profile photo.
“I guess not ALL the content moderators were let go? She made a joke on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform, after setting up an account last week.
Deriving Musk’s Screen Name from a Democratic Party Effort: An Analysis of an Indirect Detection Campaign by Bertinelli
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.
Before the stunt, Bertinelli noted the original purpose of the blue verification checkmark. Journalists accounted for a majority of recipients and it was free for people to confirm their identity. “It simply meant your identity was verified. Scammers would have a harder time impersonating you,” Bertinelli noted.
It said the service would first be available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. The website wasn’t available on Sunday and no one knew when it would go live. A Twitter employ, Esther Crawford, told The Associated Press it is coming “soon but it hasn’t launched yet.”
If the company removed verified users from the platform, that could encourage more misinformation on the platform that could be used in Tuesday’s elections.
Where do We Go If People Leave Twitter? Yoel Roth, Twitter’s Head of Safety, Integrity, and Human Rights, Revisited
“If people leave, where do they go? According to Karen North, a clinical professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, there is no platform currently available that can take on the function of Twitter. The global user base of the platform is not representative of the people from all walks of life.
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.
Twitter must also reinvest in moderation by bringing back the trust and safety and human rights teams that were in place prior to Musk’s mass layoffs, and it needs to beef up this force to ensure that moderation occurs in every major language. It also needs to submit to regular audits to guarantee that policies are equitable and applied consistently.
“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.
Jason Pielemeier, executive director of the Global Network Initiative, says Musk’s goal to build Twitter’s user base to more than a billion people could also affect his willingness to battle it out with foreign governments to keep content on the platform.
In January of 2021, after Donald Trump supported an insurrection on the Capitol, his account was frozen and he was locked out. Across the globe, leaders have supported violence and genocide, yet they have not been banned from the platform. Less than six months later, in June 2021, Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari posted a tweet threatening violence against Biafran separatist groups in the country’s southwest. Buhari’s tweet was removed, but his account remained live.
The Asia- Pacific policy director at Access Now is worried that the lawsuit may not continue under Musk. (In his August countersuit against Twitter, Musk cited the lawsuit in India as 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 makes a statement to the global tech industry, that back off, don’t try to do more.
What is lurking on Twitter? Elon Musk’s “twizzle” for lurkers and a simple tool for determining how the tech giant is using Twitter
Musk said that the small talk feels like it is coming from his own mind, and that he had thought of a fish-bowled dorm room. Congratulations: We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk.
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. It is important that people do not give more to a platform than they can expect. If you’re going to stick around on this new one, you should find a way to use it without using you.
The group of people that powerTwitter are relatively small. According to internal company research viewed by Reuters, heavy users who tweet in English “account for less than 10 percent of monthly overall users, but generate 90 percent of all tweets and half of global revenue.”
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’re called lurkers.
Lurking isn’t doomscrolling, a practice (and phrase) that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when many people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. To sit back and observe for a while is basically a heuristic approach to deal with the complexity and chaos of New Twitpics. Check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, sure, then close your app or browser tab. Then disengage, send a twizzle. Keep one eye on it during basketball games. If you have to, direct those message threads to another location. Save your most original thoughts for another time, another place.
Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk on Thursday said he plans to introduce an option to make it possible for users to determine if the company has limited how many other users can view their posts. Musk is effectively seizing on an issue that conservatives say social networks have suppressed, and that is the issue of Shadow Banning.
An update will show you your true account status, so you can see why you were shadowbanned, according to Musk. He did not provide additional details or a timetable.
The Twitter Files, Part Duex, a View of Right-Leaning Figures and The Musk/Weiss Controversy
“Musk is responding to events that affect him personally to reshape that policy and place new limits on what could be disseminated through the platform,” says John Davisson, director of litigation and senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit that focuses on privacy and free expression. The way it is carried out is really ham-fisted and self-centered. The new policies on live location sharing appear intended to help Musk, not to protect his users.
In a post last week, the company said it had not changed its policies, but had changed its approach to enforcement, which was heavily influenced by de-amplification. “Freedom of speech,” the blog post stated, “not freedom of reach.”
Some conservatives accused Musk of continuing a practice that they opposed when he said he now votes Republican. The clash reflects an underlying tension at Twitter under Musk, as the billionaire simultaneously has promised a more maximalist approach to “free speech,” a move cheered by some on the right, while also attempting to reassure advertisers and users that there will still be content moderation guardrails.
The second set of the so-called Twitter Files, shared by journalist Bari Weiss on Twitter, focused on how the company has restricted the reach of certain accounts, tweets or topics that it deems potentially harmful, including by limiting their ability to appear in the search or trending sections of the platform.
In both cases, the internal documents appear to have been provided directly to the journalists by Musk’s team. Musk on Friday shared Weiss’ thread in a tweet and added, “The Twitter Files, Part Duex!!” There are two popcorn emojis.
Weiss offered several examples of right-leaning figures who had moderation actions taken on their accounts, but it isn’t clear if those actions were taken against left-leaning or other accounts.
Why a racist tangerine doesn’t make a difference: Reporting Musk on the rise of the flames after Trump became president
A person familiar with the matter told CNN on Monday that a former head of trust and safety was forced to flee his home due to increased threats after he was criticized by Musk.
Roth has since been the subject of criticism and threats following the release of the Twitter Files. However, things went down in smoke over the weekend when Musk endorsed a meme used by conspiracy theorists to attack people online, accusing him of being sympathetic to pedophilia.
Among Roth’s tweets was one he wrote on Election Day 2016 that read, “I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.”
I want to be clear that I support Yoel and that I have made some questionable statements, but more than most. My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs,” Musk tweeted.
I told colleagues in the newsroom where I worked that we shouldn’t cover everything he said or wrote after Trump became president. 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 pushed back. “He’s the president,” he said, or words to that effect. “What he says is news.”
We saw a lot of rapid-response news stories about Musk, which included his dig at the government’s former chief infectious disease expert, as well as at gender diversity. There are a bunch of things about his bedside table with two replica guns, as well as about his retweeting of the far-right memePepe the Frog.
This is precisely the way coverage of Trump worked. The liberal-leaning media were often drawn to stories confirming the belief that a person so clearly unfit to be president would only succeed in bringing himself (or the country) down in flames, while the right-wing media treated his evident egomania, corruption, and lack of interest in grasping basic policy issues or actually doing the job as at best irrelevant and at worst essential qualities for reforming Washington. There was plenty of good reporting going on at the same time, but these polarizing accounts tended to dominate the conversation. The losers were the public, whose understanding of what was actually happening across the country was forced through incompatible narratives around the behavior of one unhinged man in the White House.
This is what Musk is doing. 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.”
Several high-profile reporters have been suspended from their accounts by Musk after he ordered a purge of his staff on the social media site.
New Twitter owner Elon Musk offered several of the journalists he banned from the social media website earlier this week the ability to return to the platform if they deleted the tweets he falsely claimed shared his “exact real-time” location.
Mastodon, a new social media service that was suspended by the company, had allowed the posting of the location of Musk’s private jet, an account that was on display before O’ Sullivan’s suspension.
For Sweeney, it was the latest in a longtime tangle with the billionaire. A University of Central Florida student claimed that Musk sent him a private message offering $5,000 to take the account away due to security concerns. Musk stopped talking to Sweeney after he never deleted his account. Protocol reported their exchange earlier this year.
The online form he filed was used to appeal the suspension. He had his personal account suspended, with a message saying it violated the rules against platform manipulation.
Musk accused the journalists of violating the platform’s policy by sharing his exact real-time location. But none of the banished reporters — including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan and The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell — appeared to have done so. CNN did not receive a reply from Musk or the social networking website, Twitter.
A request for comment was never responded to. Musk has promised to eradicate automated generated messages from the platform, but he does not allow accounts that are labeled as such.
In the weeks since the Musk took over, the account has chronicled his many cross-country journeys from his home base in Texas to various California airports for his work.
It showed Musk flying to the East Coast before a meeting with the French President in New Orleans.
In a January post pinned to the top of the jet-tracking account’s feed before it was suspended, Sweeney wrote that it “has every right to post jet whereabouts” because the data is public and “every aircraft in the world is required to have a transponder,” including Air Force One that transports the U.S. president.
Other reporters suspended Thursday had also recently written about the plane-tracking account, which Twitter permanently suspended the day before as it rolled out a new policy prohibiting the sharing of live location data.
In order to doxxing, a home address or other online information is shared. The banned account had instead used publicly available flight data, which remain online and accessible, to track Musk’s jet.
The move was significant in that it signaled an attempt by Musk to control the platform to censor the press.
Those words ring very empty today. As Harwell told me, “Elon says he is a free speech champion and he is banning journalists for exercising free speech. I think that calls into question his commitment.”
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.”
Musk halted enforcement of the platform’s policies prohibiting Covid-19 misinformation after he reinstated previous rule-breakers.
CNN’s Donie O’ Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, and The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell have been banned by Musk. Independent progressive journalist Aaron Rupar, former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, and Insider columnist Linette Lopez were also banned.
Some users reported that the platform began intervening when they attempted to post their own links to their own profiles on other social networks.
The news organizations, United Nations, Democratic members of Congress and others condemned the suspension of the journalists.
In a post on Substack, Rupar wrote that he is unsure why he was suspended. He said on Wednesday that he used a link to the Facebook page for the jet- tracking account.
Jaffer vs Benavidez: “We have a problem with that @Twitter” and Musk’s warning on social media
Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at the advocacy group Free Press, echoed Jaffer’s remarks, saying suspending journalists based seemingly on personal animus “sets a dangerous precedent.”
Germany’s foreign ministry says that freedom of the press cannot be switched on and off. “As of today these journalists are no longer able to follow us, to comment or criticize. We have a problem with that @Twitter.”
“The EU’s Digital Services Act requires respect of media freedom and fundamental rights. This is reinforced by our media freedom act and Musk should be aware of that.
Thierry Breton, a top EU official, warned Musk in late November that the social media platform must take significant steps to comply with the bloc’s content moderation laws.
At that time, she said that the platform needed to implement transparent user policies, reinforce content moderation, tackle misinformation, and limit targeted advertising. All of this requires enough human and Artificial Intelligence in volumes and skills. I look forward to progressing all these areas and we will go to see if they are ready.
The Trump Era: Why Twitter Is On Fire: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls – And How We Can Reclaim It
A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. The daily digest will chronicle the evolving media landscape.
CNN said in a statement that the future of its on-air work is unknown. “The impulsive and unjustified suspension of a number of reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is concerning but not surprising,” a spokesperson said. It is of great concern to everyone who uses Twitter that the stock market is on the rise. We have asked Twitter for an explanation, and we will reevaluate our relationship based on that response.”
Weiss believed the company didn’t use such measures against other world leaders to prove that Trump was treated unfairly, but the documents may show the opposite, that the company underestimated the danger of its platform in other parts of the world. If Twitter had implemented its rules uniformly across the world, Trump’s ban would have extended to other leaders, too.
Kian Vesteinsson is a senior research analyst for tech and democracy at Freedom House, a nonprofit research and advocacy group focused on technology.
Replacing Twitter, with its robust network of journalists, politicians and entertainers and sizable audience of users obsessed with real-time news, may be a challenge. Cohost’s audience is still less than 200 million daily active users, which is comparable to Twitter, which has over 200 million daily active users.
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 by Alcove Press in 2024. Her own opinions are expressed in this commentary. Read more about this thing on CNN.
A healthy town square should also be a place where people can find reliable information. But researchers at Tufts University recently found that tweets refuting hate and misinformation were “an order of magnitude greater” on Twitter before Musk took over.
Musk’s latest power moves are nothing short of dangerous. Recently unemployed tech and journalism workers should take them as a rallying call to unite to create new, healthier online spaces. We have nothing to lose except our dependence on a mercurial, egotistical czar to set the terms of our public debates.
The company’s suspension would be lifted after the result of the public poll on the site. The poll shows that close to 50% of respondents thinksuspend accounts should be unsuspended immediately, and the rest think they should be lifted in seven days.
The accounts were back on Saturday. Linette Lopez, a Business Insider journalist, was suspended after the other journalists with no explanation, according to The Associated Press.
The same day, she cited reports that Musk was reneging on severance for laid-off Twitter employees, threatening workers who talk to the media and refusing to make rent payments. Lopez described his actions as going forbroke.
The Misleading Damned Case of Musk: A New Red Flag for Twitter and its Effect on Advertisers’ Engagement with the Media
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.
The Washington Post’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, said technology reporter Drew Harwell “was banished without warning, process or explanation” following the publication of accurate reporting about Musk.
The suspended journalist from Mashable, Matt Binder, was banned Thursday night after sharing a screen grab from O’ Sullivan’s post.
The screenshot showed a statement from the Los Angeles Police Department sent earlier Thursday to multiple media outlets, including the AP, about how it was in touch with Musk’s representatives about the alleged stalking incident.
He has promised to let free speech reign and has reinstated high-profile accounts that previously broke Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct or harmful misinformation. He has also said he would suppress negativity and hate by depriving some accounts of “freedom of reach.”
She says the new regime at social media site has the same problem as the old one because of its own biases.
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 shut down its activity on Twitter in November due to uncertainty, but media organizations have 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 walked out of the journalist-hosted session where he was questioned about the reporters’ ousting, the conference chat on the social network went down. Musk later tweeted that Spaces had been taken offline to deal with a “Legacy bug.” Spaces came back late Friday.
Advertisers are looking at the possibility of users leaving on social networks. 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.
Cohost currently has 130,000 users, only 20,000 of which are what Cohost considers active users, according to Kaplan. Oh states that T2 has a steady number of people on their waiting list in the five digits. In November, Mastodon had 2.5 million users, but now has less than 1.5 million as a cautionary tale.
The People have Stopped, but the CEO of Twitter Needs to re-think the tweet from Musk on Sunday night in an unscientific poll
“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 told CNN that they had not agreed to remove the post and would be appealing 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.”
So when Musk asked his followers Sunday night in an unscientific poll whether he should step down as the head of Twitter, it likely wasn’t surprising to many that more than 57% of respondents answered “yes” – though that probably wasn’t the result Musk expected from a site that’s home to some of his most ardent fans.
Replying to a tweet Sunday, in which MIT artificial intelligence researcher Lex Fridman said he would take the CEO job, Musk hinted he hasn’t been completely happy with his new gig.
At Free Press, we agree with Musk that he needs to step aside. But his replacement as CEO needs to be someone who understands at the most basic level that this social media platform will succeed only when it puts the health and safety of its users before the whims of one erratic and reckless billionaire.
Racist figures such as Andrew Anglin and Laura Loomer have returned to the scene after he gave them an opportunity to get their accounts back.
With regard to reversals, Twitter’s potential new leadership needs to undo its decision to allow Covid-19 misinformation and disinformation to spread unchecked across the social network. They need to stop the pay-to-play blue checkmark feature thatallows verified users to post longer videos and have their content prioritized. They must stop Musk from giving any general amnesty on accounts that were suspended before he took over.
Almost two months later, though, view counts have had the opposite effect, emphasizing how little engagement most posts get relative to their audience size. A recent study found that there has been a decrease in usage of the social media platform in the United States.
“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
Employees showed Musk some data about his account engagement, along with a chart of trends. They told him that Musk was at his peak in popularity in the search ranking, with a score of 100. He is at a score of nine. Engineers investigated if Musk’s reach was artificially restricted but found no evidence of it being biased against him.
“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer. Platformer is withholding the engineer’s name because of Musk’s harassment of former TWoP employees.
Employees were told to track how many times each of Musk’s tweets were recommended by him, according to one current worker.
It has now been seven weeks since Twitter added public view counts for every tweet. At the time, Musk promised that the feature would give the world a better sense of how vibrant the platform is.
“Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions,” he tweeted.
The employee had accidentally deleted data from the internal service that sets rate limits for using social media. The team left the company in November.
What is going on in the Oakland headquarters? Employee complaints on Twitter about dumpster fires and business opportunity opportunities in ftc-concerns
“We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy,” one employee said. “Most of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires (mostly caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that), performing impossible tasks, and ‘improving efficiency’ without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. From my point of view, we move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire.
He can be very awake late at night and say all sorts of things that don’t make sense. “And then he’ll come to us and be like, ‘this one person says they can’t do this one thing on the platform,’ and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make any sense.”
The San Francisco headquarters has a sad air as their landlord has sued them for not paying rent. When people pass each other in the halls, we’re told that the standard greeting is “where are you interviewing?” and “where do you have offers?” Employees have to reserve some of the beds on the eighth floor in advance.
“People don’t even chat about work things anymore,” the employee said. “It’s just heartbreaking. I have more conversations with my colleagues on Signal and WhatsApp than I do on Slack. In the team channel, it wasn’t uncommon for everyone to talk about what happened during the weekend. There is nothing left of that.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-twitter-fires-engineer-declining-reach-ftc-concerns
How are companies getting their ftc attention? An employee’s perspective on Twitter fires engineer-declining-reach concepts with a technologist
“When you’re asked a question, you run it through your head and say ‘what is the least fireable response I can have to this right now?’” one employee explained.
(Of course, that’s not true for everyone at the company. A few of the true believers are just ass-kissers and brown-nosers that are trying to take advantage of the clear vacuum that exists.
The employee cited the disastrous relaunch of Twitter Blue, which resulted in brands being impersonated and dozens of top advertisers fleeing the platform.
“If Elon can learn how to put a bit more thought into some of the decisions, and fire from the hip a bit less, it might do some good,” the employee said. He needs to know how to let people know he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
The employee said that at the same time, he really doesn’t like to believe that there isn’t anything in technology he doesn’t know. You can’t be the smartest person in the room all the time.
Entire teams have been wiped out and work is being handed off to teams that don’t know what they are doing, because Musk is continuing to fire people impulsively.
“I do think the recent vibe overall in tech, and fear of not being able to find something else, is the primary factor for most folks,” an employee said. “I know for a fact that most of my team is doing hardcore interview prep and would jump at likely any opportunity to walk away.”
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-twitter-fires-engineer-declining-reach-ftc-concerns
Social Media (T2): How the Musk-backed startup T2 is positioning itself to make a better platform for people’s interests and interests
There is a sense of uneasiness about recent changes being reviewed by regulators. As part of an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, Twitter committed to following a series of steps before pushing out changes, including creating a project proposal and conducting security and privacy reviews.
After Sarah Oh lost her job as a human rights advisor at Twitter late last year in the first round of layoffs following Elon Musk’s chaotic acquisition of the company, she decided to join a friend in building a rival service.
T2 was launched by Gabor Cselle, who was previously at both GOOGLE and TWITTER. Like Twitter, it offers a social feed of posts with 280-character limits. Oh says the key selling point is its focus on safety.
“We really do want to create an experience that allows people to share what they want to share without fearing risk of things like abuse and harassment, and we feel like we’re really well positioned to deliver on that,” Oh told CNN.
In the months since Musk completed his takeover, a small but growing number of services have launched or gained traction by appealing to users who are uncomfortable with the billionaire’s decisions to slash Twitter’s staff, rethink content moderation policies and reinstate numerous incendiary accounts that were previously banned, among other moves.
Some of the newer entrants to the market include apps created by former employees, a startup backed by Musk, and a service from a former CEO. Some apps like T2 are similar, but others are different.
Last month, for example, the founders of Instagram announced Artifact, “a personalized news feed” powered by artificial intelligence, a description that quickly earned it comparisons to Twitter. The CNN app resembled news reader applications of the past, such as Apple News. In a main feed of Artifact, users can find popular articles from large media organizations and smaller bloggers based on their activity and interests.
It looks like all of the apps are trying to get one of the two things done, at least for a long time: to make the news feed more interesting and to make users feel less guilty about it.
The co-founder of Anti Software Software club, a group that develops Co Host, says that most people who are moving over from a social media platform are for a nicer experience overall. The service launched publicly in June of last year, after Musk offered to buy Twitter. In November, after Musk completed the takeover, the platform saw a surge in activity, adding 80,000 users within 48 hours.
Kaplan said that people referring to them as a Twitter alternative is an important distinction.
In November, shortly after taking over the company, Musk repeatedly claimed Twitter continued to hit “all-time high” user numbers despite the initial wave of users calling to abandon the social network. When the acquisition took place, the company stopped reporting user numbers for the quarter.
These systems were once routinely monitored, with mistakes regularly addressed by staff. In recent months, there have been layoffs and departures from the team which had about 50 people when it was at its peak, two of the people said. The division head for the Asia-Pacific region, whose responsibilities include the Chinese activist accounts, was laid off in January. Twitter’s resources dedicated to supervising content moderation for Chinese-language posts have been drastically reduced, the people said.
So when some Twitter systems recently failed to differentiate between a Chinese disinformation campaign and genuine accounts, that led to some accounts of Chinese activists and dissidents being difficult to find, the people said.
“It’s tough being a Twitter user nowadays,” said Jenn Takahashi, who runs the Twitter account @bestofdyingtwit, which has logged the platform’s shortcomings since Mr. Musk took the helm. She said that she has trouble seeing her retweets because of delayed or sent twice notifications, and direct messages become cluttered with so much trash.
Non-English language moderation has been a particular challenge for American social media companies, which often do not have enough staff in those areas and rely on imperfect machine translations, said Gabriel Nicholas, a research fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology who studies content moderation and disinformation on social media.
The Social Network: A Forum for China’s Dissidents, Human Rights Activists, and Overseas Chinese
The world’s most populous country, China, has long banned the social networking site. In recent years it has been a gathering place for Chinese dissidents, human rights activists and overseas Chinese communities who want to discuss topics that are not allowed on the mainland.