The Newswire, Not So Newswire: How Elon Musk has Been During his $44 billion Acquisition to Buy Blue Checkmarks
Under the new plan, there will be changes to an existing paid service called “Twitter Blue.” Currently, it costs $4.99 a month and is available in four countries including the United States. The pay-for-verification feature would only be implemented in four countries, and would be priced at $19.99 a month, according to internal plans seen by CNN.
“The whole verification process is being revamped right now,” Musk tweeted on Sunday. The billionaire asked a member of his inner circle of how much he would pay to be verified on the platform. A large majority of responders chose not to pay.
Elon Musk has been busy over at Twitter HQ. He talked about changes to his $44 billion acquisition, which included removing a conspiracy theory. Here’s what’s happened so far:
When Musk first conceived of the plan to let people buy the once-coveted and restricted blue checkmarks, he was met with internal resistance from Twitter’s trust and safety experts. They feared that it would be used to spread misinformation by repressive regimes and those who are looking to spread propaganda.
Musk made the topic of fake and anti-spam accounts central to his effort to get out of the deal, and now is moving forward with the acquisition.
Every social network produces a unique posting style, and Twitter’s design incentivizes something slightly paradoxical: it’s one part newswire, one part nonsense. On one hand, Twitter is like a next-generation Bloomberg terminal where journalists post scoops and live coverage before it hits their websites and where politicians, businesses, and government agencies make official announcements about anything from customer service complaints to hurricane alerts. On the other, it’s the home of @horse_ebooks, Weird Twitter, a plethora of pseudonymous crypto evangelists and fandom stans, the Gorilla Channel tweet, and too many parody accounts to list. The first category benefits from Twitter’s default-public feed and rapid-fire text-snippet format — the second from how easily you can create accounts that aren’t tied to a real name or face and fire off bizarre jokes or hot takes.
At their best, these two Twitter styles are complementary. The inherent seriousness of Newswire Twitter heightens the humor and absurdity of Nonsense Twitter, and the style of Nonsense Twitter bleeds into Newswire Twitter, doing things like turning government consumer protection agencies into memelords. There is room for something like the DPRK News: the fake North Korean propaganda feed that fooled several news outlets.
Why Facebook and TikTok Knuds are not the only ones exposing the Musk-Levinsky shakeup. Why do we care about the Blue Check Rapture?
All of which could be an argument for Musk’s new plan. If you work for the Associated Press, McDonald’s, or Beyline, then you can get away with it.
Power users on the micro-blogging site were against this proposed shakeup. Stephen King, for instance, said that he would be going to prison instead of paying to be verified. Still, Musk is not deterred. The Blue Check Rapture is coming.
The blue check system didn’t cure everything for misinformation- it was a part of the problem, as it made a number of mistakes, but it did help the platform. There’s a reason why every other major social platform, including Facebook and TikTok, cribbed the blue badges for their own networks. They have been helpful.
CNN Business: Premarket Stocks Trading in a Dynamical Universe of Low-Energy Decays and High-Rate Rate Rates
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What will the Federal Reserve do at its meeting in December? Analysts can speculate all they want, but Fed officials say they will be using hard economic data to make their next decision.
The market will likely have outsized effects on the market as investors think about what housing, labor and inflation reports might mean for interest rates.
What is happening at the moment? No one can cause the markets to move like Federal Reserve Chair Powell did on Wednesday, when he said he wouldn’t change the Fed’s interest rate policy. The Fed has a long way to go when it comes to fighting inflation, said Powell. It’s premature to be thinking about pausing, in my opinion.
The central bank also doesn’t think inflation will start to fall back until next year. policymakers warned that interest rate hikes are required in the coming months.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html
Premarket Stocks: Implications of the October Employment and Labor Measurements for the Fed and the U.S. Core Core Price Index
The October government report is expected to show 200,000 new jobs added, but it will still be a very good number as demand for labor continues to outdistance 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 wage growth will be looked at by the Fed. Wages climbed by 5% in September from a year ago.
A jobs report in December is likely to increase interest in the Fed meeting. If both reports show a downward trajectory in employment, that could be enough to placate Fed officials, even if the unemployment rate remains historically low.
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. Analysts think that there will be a 4.6% increase in October.
The prices of goods and services are compared to PCE in the U.S. 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 Wall and Wall in the Wall: Employers’ Cuts in the Mortgage-Foreclosure Borrowing Rate Debt Expansion Under Fed Inflation
One of the first areas to show signs of cooling is the housing market, which has been impacted by the Fed’s effort to fight inflation.
The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.95% last week, up from 3.89% a year ago as elevated borrowing costs cause demand to decline.
“The housing market was very overheated for the couple of years after the pandemic as demand increased and rates were low,” said Powell on Wednesday. We understand that the big effect of our policies is in that area.
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 of England stated that a two year recession would be longer than the one that followed the 2008 global financial crisis.
According to a memo sent to staff, the laying off of employees began on Friday. Employees were given a notice by email Thursday night that they would be informed of their employment status on Friday.
The email stated that the offices would be closed and all badges would be suspended in order to protect employees and systems.
If a company with over 100 employees plans to cut 50 jobs or more, it must give 60 days written notice in the WARN Act.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html
Twitter should not become a free for all hellscape: Elon Musk’s response to an ad-hoc filing stating that Twitter is no longer the sole director
The company filing states that all previous members of Twitter’s board, including recently ousted CEO Parag Agrawal and chairman Bret Taylor, are no longer directors “in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement.” The filing says that Musk is the sole director of the social network.
The world’s richest man used an idiosyncrasy about his assessment of the current system for those who have or don’t have a blue checkmark. He said that he wanted to give power to the people. Blue for $8/month.”
Advertisers hit pause: Elon Musk wrote an open letter to advertisers just hours before cementing his acquisition of Twitter, explaining that he didn’t want the platform to become a “free-for-all hellscape.” The advertising industry, which makes up the vast majority of the business of Twitter, seems to have been reassured by that attempt.
The decision to push back the new feature comes one day after the platform launched an updated version of its iOS app that promises to allow users who pay a monthly subscription fee to get a blue checkmark on their profiles, a feature that CEO Elon Musk has proposed as a way to fight spam on the platform.
Musk said that all handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended. He also tweeted that a name change on Twitter will “cause temporary loss of verified checkmark.”
Founder and CEO of Twitter, Inc., Claims about the Black Swan Attack on Pelosi and the Birth of a Nation: A Case Study
“I am a freedom of speech absolutist I eat doody for breakfast every day. Her account also supports democrats.
The account was restricted on Sunday with a warning that there had been some unusual activities shown to visitors before they could click on the profile. The comedian then changed her account back to its usual form, complete with her own name and image.
Television actress Valerie Bertinelli similarly changed her account name to the Twitter CEO’s, tweeting Friday that “[t]he blue checkmark simply meant your identity was verified. It would be a harder time for scammers to try and impersonate you. That no longer applies. Good luck out there!” She said that a blue check mark can be purchased for just $7 per month without being sure of who you are.
Following her changed profile name to Musk, she continued to support the Democratic candidates on her verified account.
Before being suspended, Musk said that users would no longer be given warning. He said that it would be a condition for signing up to the service.
Musk has shared conspiracy theories in the last few months regarding the attack on Pelosi and compared the Democrats to Joseph Stalin, warning that the woke mind virus will destroy civilization.
Within minutes, multiple Twitter accounts claiming to be Kenya Airways tweeted him. All of them offered help, but none of them appeared official. Clicking on their profiles raised red flags because they used the same logo and slogan as the accounts. “Most of their messages were well crafted,” Murphy says. The low number of followers, and the spelling errors or odd choice of characters on their actual handles was the most obvious reason for the poor performance. The accounts included “@_1KenyaAirways” and “@kenyaairways23.”
When there is no clear and genuine way to check identities, cyber criminals can easily use social media to target unbeknown victims, and this will make them a more attractive target for con artists.
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.
The company was bought by Musk for a whopping $44 billion, but also for a platform used by world leaders, CEOs, and the Pope.
Twitter Blue’s suspension came after Musk tweeted he had “killed” his blue checkmark feature, but it was not revealed on Twitter
That paid subscription service, too, was also suspended on Friday with little warning, just two days after its official launch, with the menu option to sign up for Twitter Blue suddenly disappearing from Twitter’s iOS app — the only place the add-on had been offered. It was not immediately clear when the company might restore the offering.
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.
The account’s very next tweet, a day and nine hours later, said exactly the opposite: “To combat impersonation, we’ve added an ‘Official’ label to some accounts.”
When you’re a customer service manager, it’s like being from one entrepreneur to another. I just spent too much time muting all the newly purchased checkmark accts in an attempt to make my verified mentions useful again,” tweeted billionaire Mark Cuban.
Cuban added that the decision is yours 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 Twitter time and information efficient. The other is very bad.
The company is already facing billions in potential fines from the FTC over alleged privacy missteps dating to before Musk’s ownership. It was warned by the employee that the FTC could find itself even more exposed after the abrupt resignations of the company’s privacy officer and information security officer.
Twitter, Facebook, and Apple are Frustrated by the Musk-Apple Tax: How to Prevent Fraud, Illusion and Scams with Identity Verification
The company says the new service will be available for $8 a month on the web or $11 a month if purchased via an app on iPhone andiPad, which typically carry a 30% commission.
The price new tiers follow sharp words from Musk leveled at Apple over its so-called “Apple tax,” a longtime pain point for app developers and cause of concern for regulators around the world who have viewed the fee as excessive and financially damaging to Apple’s rivals. Musk claimed that his dispute with Apple had been resolved following a meeting with the company’s chief executive, Tim Cook.
Musk now says there will be three colors for purchase: gold for companies; grey for governments and a blue check for prominent individuals, including celebrities.
The company has long struggled to grow its service the way larger competitors like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok have and, even before Musk took over, the company’s advertising business had been far from robust.
Twitter has not answered questions about whether it still has the resources to take on such a daunting task after laying off more than half of the company’s staff.
“With a reduced workforce, it remains to be seen if it will be possible to prevent fraud, impersonation and scams with their new identity verification methodology,” Rachel Tobac, the CEO of the cybersecurity firm SocialProof Security, previously told NPR. “Scammers will quickly determine how they can overwhelm or manipulate the identity verification system to get ‘authenticated’ as an entity that they are not.”