Musk’s private jet is being tracked by the account which has changed rules
What Are You Going to Do if You Can’t Stop Worrying About Twitter? A Keyhole View of Musk and Other Social Media Platforms
“Are you going to liberate Twitter from the censorship happy mob?” podcast host Joe Rogan wrote to Musk the day Musk revealed his stake in Twitter. Musk replied that he would provide advice, which they could choose not to follow.
Any company, Twitter included, is a function of its people. The people who have always been drawn to the social networking site are weird. 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 are not the people who are going to stay. All of that is gone.
The author of a book on gambling machine design said that she was not aware that there was ever an idea of a Skinner box. But that, she said, is essentially what they’ve built. It’s one reason people who should know better regularly self-destruct on the site — they can’t stay away.
In public, he told the staff at the all-staff meeting that the platform should allow all legal speech if it’s someone they hate spouting what they think is bulls**t. He also told the investor in private that free speech is more important than anything when it’s someone
Allowing looser of the hate speech and misinformation policies would allow them to find larger audiences.
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 feature on those sites was the bug, which is when someone can say and do things that are not allowed on other social media platforms. And what we see there is that they are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.”
In his push to loosen Twitter’s content restrictions, he’s reinstated other high-profile accounts that were permanently banned for breaking Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct, harmful misinformation or incitements of violence.
Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist who was kicked off for abusive behavior last year, is one of the people who could be in line to get his ban lifted.
The person urged Musk to hire someone with a political view who could help lead the enforcement. Masters is the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona who has been endorsed by Trump and has echoed his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
Trump’s Twitter Replatforming? Detecting It in an Investor’s Perspective: Musk’s Facebook Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, CEO Nick Clegg, and Todd Carusone
Allowing Trump to return could set a precedent for other companies, and it’s likely that they’ll do the same with the former president.
“If Trump is replatformed on Twitter, it makes it easier for [Meta president of global affairs] Nick Clegg and [Meta CEO] Mark Zuckerberg to say, ‘Well, he’s already back on Twitter. Nicole Gill is executive director of Accountable Tech and she said we might as well let him back on Facebook.
The filing states that all previous members of the board are no longer working for the company, in accordance with the merger agreement. The filing says that Musk is the sole director of the social networking site.
After a video meeting with Musk and another person a few weeks later, it was clear to him that he couldn’t work with them. That was clarifying.”
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?
Costs and staff cuts are only two pieces of the equation. According to an investor presentation obtained by The New York Times, Musk talked to investors in the spring of this year that he would more than double his company’s revenue to $26.6 billion by the year’s end, and more than double his users to over one billion.
He will have no choice but to look for other revenue sources due to the weak state of the digital ad market and the changes he wants to make to content moderation.
“Advertisers don’t want their ads to appear together with extremists and stuff like that that would make potential customers turn them off,” Carusone said.
A Twitter Buyer’s Warn: Musk’s Deal to Buy Twitter at a Japanese Super-Analog of WeChat
It is always difficult to know what he meant. But this summer, Musk told Twitter staff that the company should emulate WeChat, the Chinese “super-app” that combines social media, messaging, payments, shopping, ride-hailing — basically, anything you might use your phone to do.
Other American tech companies, including Facebook and Uber, have tried this strategy, but so far Chinese-style super-apps haven’t caught on in the United States.
Musk then offered to buy Twitter outright at a significant premium, threatened a hostile takeover and signed a “seller-friendly” deal to buy the company that involved waiving due diligence.
It’s a stunning reversal of fortunes not just for Musk, who bought the company for $44 billion, but also for a platform used by some of the most powerful people on the planet, including world leaders, CEOs, and the Pope.
Musk vowed to defeat the fake and scam accounts that were especially active in the replies to his tweeting and those of others with large followers on the platform.
Within weeks of the acquisition agreement, however, Musk began raising concerns about the prevalence of those same fake and spam accounts on Twitter and ultimately attempted to terminate the deal.
Legal experts widely believed that Twitter was on strong footing to have the deal enforced in court. Two weeks before the legal battle was set to go to trial, Musk told people he would follow through with the deal he had originally agreed to. As the parties negotiated, Musk’s attorneys asked a judge to stay the legal proceedings, prompting pushback from Twitter, which feared that Musk might not stay true to his promise to close the deal.
The parties were given until October 28 to close the deal or face a new trial.
The Elon Musk Blue Check Mob: How to Avoid the Reach of Potentially Harmful Content in the News-Wide Social Media Landscape
A version of this article was published in the newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.
He made the announcement after the release of a new set of internal Twitter documents that once again put a spotlight on the practice oflimiting the reach of some potentially harmful content, a practice that Musk himself has seemingly both endorsed and criticized.
In fact, not only has Musk himself contaminated the information environment he now reigns over, but he is apparently working to dismantle the little infrastructure erected to help users sift 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.
Charging for verified badges might appear at first glance as a business story. Significant ramifications on the information landscape will be caused by the move. Most notably, it will make it much more difficult for users to distinguish from authentic and inauthentic accounts.
Well, my theory is that there is a lot of right-wing sort of circles inside the world of Elon, and that there is an idea of the blue checks. People on Fox News and other conservative media outlets are always talking about this sort of, like, blue check mob of people on Twitter, mostly journalists and other media figures, who are sort of, like, self-important and care very deeply about their checkmarks.
Musk’s authorized biographer, Walter Isaacson, claimed that the best thing one could do to save social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email, and reduce hacking would be to authenticating users.
But if it seems like we’re taking a long time talking about this, again, worth saying that because Twitter is where so many folks go to get their news and information, it matters that we know who is who on that service. So if they start charging for it, if they put new confusion into it, then the risk is that over a month or so, there will be more misinformation, confusion, hoaxes, and scam on the site.
These styles are similar at best. 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’s even room for the occasional dose of chaos, like DPRK News: the fake North Korean propaganda feed that’s fooled several news outlets, including The Verge.
“Elon Musk’s cleaning house”: The impact of Twitter’s blue verification checkmark on micro-messaging and social media users
Before the stunt, Bertinelli noted the original purpose of the blue verification checkmark. It was granted free of charge to people whose identity Twitter employees had confirmed; with journalists accounting for a big portion of recipients. “It simply meant your identity was verified. It would be harder for scam artists to impersonate you.
It sounds like they are arguing for Musk’s new plan. $240 a year isn’t too much to pay to preserve a sense of trust if you’re a celebrity or a fast food chain.
We can not say for certain what will happen to at least two people who used to work at the micro-messaging service. We will let you hear a version of them, that is, an Artificial Intelligence-generated version.
Vittoria covered the news of the takeover deal closing. Users are flocking to other platforms because of Elon’s ownership of Twitter. Read more about the potential privacy risks that could arise from Elon cleaning house. The power shift was commented on by users of the micro-blogging site. You can read all of the stories with the title “Elon Musk.”
The House of the Dragon on HBO, Recommender to Men and Women, and How to Join the Conversation on Twitter and Social Media (Extended Abstract)
Tori wants you to encourage your male-presenting friends interested in fathering children to watch House of the Dragon on HBO. Natalia Lafourcade’s new album is recommended by Mike. Lauren recommends reevaluating your relationship with Twitter, and social media in general.
A person can be found on a social networking site. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. The person is Michael Calore. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The producer of the show is #booneashworth. Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:
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Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: A Podcast about Silicon Valley in the Light of the Silicon Valley Data Science and Artificial Intelligence
This transcript was created using a software program. It has been looked at by people, but it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.
So usually, on this podcast, we’re going to try to bring people news from around the tech industry, give a more comprehensive sense of what’s happening in Silicon Valley. The only story that anyone in tech is interested in is what happens in San Francisco at the social networking site.
We are going to have a normal interview with them. But instead of playing you their voice, which would de-anonymize them and risk getting them in trouble or getting them fired, we are going to transcribe what they say. We are going to create an artificial intelligence version of their voice and give it back to you.
A very busy time with lots of stress. I’ve never heard about anything like this happening at a major tech company. We will talk to two current Twitter employees who are witnessing this all from within, and they will be talking 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 Are Speak Out: Why Do Some People Think That They Are Printing Their Codes? The Case Of A Robot Podcaster
When we first started, we said we would never have an Artificial Intelligence voice on the show unless there was a really good reason and a limited capacity. And now, twice in five episodes —
Well, you were wrong about Elon buying Twitter, and you were wrong about this not being a podcast filled with robot podcasters. 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 think that that doesn’t sound right. OK? I start texting around and getting on the phone with people but then two people came back to me and said that he wants the people to print their code.
So why is this funny? Why do you think this is interesting? This is a weird way to evaluate how good someone is as a software engineer. 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. You might have done better for the company by eliminating some code, right? Sort of streamlining it. So —
Also, who prints code? I was surprised that the coding programs had a Print button. That is, not what you bring 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
The Elon Sensitive Problem in a Security Company, a Tenth-Secret Code Printer, and a Twist of the Blue
Right. They had just been in this situation where their former chief security officer had filed a complaint against them and they also had a Whistle blower complaint against them. The engineers just printed the code base and left it around the headquarters.
The new notifications are sent two hours later. It is like a change of plans. You still want to see your code, from Elon and his folks. 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. It is not the kind of thing that happens at a big tech company.
It is not. Now, one thing that we should say is that the Elon folks are obsessed with figuring out who is a good engineer at the company, right? The engineer is worshiped at the altar. He thinks of himself as 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? The top performers, what are they? Who are the low performers?
This code printout exercise is part of the evaluation system where they are trying to find out who is going to stay at this company and keep the service running.
And who can we lay off? That isn’t the main part of the story. OK, so we have this code printing fiasco. Then, on Sunday, you wrote about what this means, and how verification would be tied to Blue subscription.
Yes, so Twitter Blue is a subscription service that gives you access to a handful of other features. You are able to see the top stories of the day. You have a test feature that allows you to make changes to 140 characters or less.
Yeah. Stephen King, the horror author, suggested on his website that he should subscribe to a $20 a month plan to protect his blue check. I’m gone the same way if that gets instituted.
Stephen King has written about many of the most terrifying horrors, but his idea of paying $20 a month to receive his verification badge was frightening to him.
A lot of reporters get verified by that. There is also a process. You can ask to be verified if you’re a celebrity or something. The verification exists so that we can say it is not about a status marker.
It’s not about, this person’s important. It was created due to the fact that Oprah joined social media many years ago and a lot of impostors were already on social media pretending to be her. 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 in some way has a feature like this — Facebook, Instagram, Snap, TikTok, right? You need a way to say, this is the real Oprah, and that is not the real Oprah.
Right. The checkmarks next to yourtwitter name have been viewed as a status symbol by the people who have come to see them. Like, it means that you’re someone, it means that it —
Right, exactly. The idea that people would pay for the privilege of being verified was first proposed by the war room. We get the idea of $20 a month for verification there.
That almost immediately causes an entire Twitter timeline meltdown where people are not willing to pay $20 a month. That is more than I pay for. That’s more than I pay for YouTube.
This seems like a way to make money while at the same time punishing the blue checkmarks, which is 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. Like, that would be good for the credibility of the ecosystem overall. But it does come with a lot of questions that, so far, have mostly gone unanswered.
It creates economic value for people like you and me. It does matter to us. News organizations pay for all kinds of software solutions that help them do various things. Maybe Twitter Blue should be part of that.
I don’t know if you know, but we are going to have a separate legacy verification program for government entities that don’t 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
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees-Speak Out: What Have They Learned About Vine? And What Has She Done Recently?
Right. So that’s not all that happened at Twitter this week. We’ve also had a number of other executives departing. Chief Customer Officer Sarah Personette resigned. A number of other senior Twitter executives have also announced that they are leaving.
Well, look, I loved Vine. People are very nostalgic about Vine for a reason. It kind of ushered in the era of short-form video that we’re living in now. Many people listening to the show are capable of remembering a lot of things.
I would also say, like, not an immediate revenue driver, right? 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. A network that wasn’t owned by Facebook or YouTube could be fun to have. 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
Hard Fork, Mockingjay: Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employers – Speak Out and Say What Happens When You Can’t Sleep
That’s right. They were told that they had a few days to ship this. If this does not ship by this date, in some cases, a date next week, you will be fired. If it is one hour past deadline, you will be fired.
People are not sleeping very much. They are sleeping in their offices, and frankly, some of them are terrified. Some of them are here on 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. So it is about 10:00 AM Pacific on Wednesday right now. How’s your day going so far? Anything notable happen today?
Everybody wakes up to more panicked messages via various different channels every day, which is the same cycle as the last week. I think that most people have been smart enough to move away from slack. And it is this up-and-down of trying to chase rumors, because we have had zero communications from anybody internally.
It’s stressful. I feel a lot of stress when I have no support from the people above me or acknowledgment that I’m doing well in my current job while clearly attempting to find a way out. The rumors have been based on scares.
First, of course, was that layoffs are supposed to happen Monday. They didn’t happen. The rumor says it is going to be Friday. It’s exhausting. I know we are all paid really well.
Most of us have some savings to sit on. Some people don’t. It is also nerve-racking to not know at a time when we are entering a difficult hiring market in tech. We are 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: Are You Really Glad You Were Here? I’m sure you will, but what you aren’t
It’s a big deal 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 have received zero information, other than what gets trickled down to us. Comms is incredibly sparse. There is really nobody answering, even messages in the company-wide channels.
When you wake up, you are almost like a scavenger hunt in that you have seven different apps to find what you are supposed to be doing.
You have probably heard, and you have been reporting on some of the infamous code reviews. I have seen examples of people saying that code was written entirely by them and not crediting people who collaborated with them, all in hope that they will be on some preferred status list.
Absolutely. What they are asking for is volume, not quality. Everyone is sharing their 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
Life Under Musk Two Tweetees Speak Out: A Message from a Manager at a Linearly Increasing Employer Number
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. You can have pseudonymous chats about what’s happening at your company if you log in with Blind, a app where you sort of log in with your work email.
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. 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
Living Under Musk Two Twitter Employees: The Case That Is Born Out Without a Cause And A Man Who Is. When I Am Working I’m Not The Only One
I am on the team working to fulfill all of the ridiculous dreams of Elon. If we miss delivery they will fire us, even if it is outside our control. If we don’t work at weekends, we’re gone. We’re gone if we leave or take the time to do it.
People are working many hours a day. I work at full speed for 20 hours per day. I wake up in the night to attend status calls. I worry about it even when I’m not working. I can not. I am an absolute mess. I am at a breaking point. This is just a few days after the event.
The people who are completely ignored until they are fired are in the second camp, while the people who are being pulled into these task forces are in the first camp. 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
I’m a technologist and I know you are technicolor, but I don’t know what you’re doing at Twitter
My heart goes out to this person. I hope they are able to find gainful employment and that they apply for jobs at the same time as they sleep and take care of themselves.
I hope that the people on visas are taken care of. All of the people I know who are here on visas have no idea what will happen to them. And they have not been told anything.
So this is more than just privileged tech people crying because they are moving up to another six-figure salary. These are people who are trying to immigrate to this country and have gainful employment and do a good job, who are highly skilled.
So there is a lot to that I do not necessarily disagree with. I don’t think that Twitter is structured very well. This goes back to a lack of operational leadership, which has been existent in the company for many years. This company does not have good operations, and it shows.
I don’t believe it is because engineers and people are sitting. I think it is because the way this company is structured, it is nearly impossible to get anything done, whether it is trying to get the appropriate approvals by and going through Byzantine processes, literally not being told how things are changing from day to day. There is some truth in that statement. This is the absolute wrong way to deal with it.
How many Twitter users are leaving to protest? A case study on Counter Social, and its impact on the social media site MUse@Twitter
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 like to think that everyone on the social media site is leaving to protest. But the reality of the situation is a lot of people may stay. Who stays is going to be interesting.
Following the layoffs that affected half of the company’s staff, some users have begun moving to Counter Social, another popular alternative. They fear a breakdown of moderation and verification could create a disinformation free-for-all on what has been the internet’s main conduit for reliable communications from public agencies and other institutions.
I was scared and relieved. It will be scary to not have income. The hope is that once we are out of work, we will be able to relax and get that resume out there, and hopefully we will be able to find a new job. Got to be energized about these other jobs, because right now it’s sucking the life out of us.
Life Under The Musk Two Twitter Employees Talk Out: Managing Uncertainty in a Large-Scale System with Automated Machine Learning and Machine Learning
Uncertainty. There are people who don’t know if they should keep doing the work. And that pile of unknowns, along with the things that have been reported on, which is all the information we really have, it 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. And their only job is to write random code that no one’s ever going to see, just like the piping behind the scenes. And the company just always kind of had a culture of letting people speak to these things. It caught us off guard on a lot of the issues before they became public knowledge.
It is complicated due to no one really knowing. I mean, I guess there was sort of groupthink that existed that was 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. It just sort of came from there.
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: Where Are We Going? What Have We Done About It? How Did he Become the CEO?
I mean, he’s certainly been more aggressively attaching himself to various political viewpoints and their talking points. He will lean into it if it serves him.
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 don’t disagree with people when they say there’s probably too many managers, too many engineers. Maybe it’s a little too slow. 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, like, what’s the point?
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under The Musk Two Twitter Employees Speaker Out: Why Is It Necessary? How Much Time Should I Have to Deal With It?
Okay. There is an idea that as well as being moving faster than it has been, there should be more of it. We’ve been hearing that Elon is saying, ship this thing by next Monday or else you are going to be fired. When you hear that you have a three- or four-day deadline, what does it do to you?
I lose my mind. We need to have this done by Friday, it’s normal because we have a three to four day deadline. That’s a little stressful. It might be able to put in a couple more hours. Need to get it done. Makes sense.
The sheer scale is the major differentiating factor here. I wasn’t asked at work to do a full remake of Twitter Blue by Friday. That’s just completely absurd.
And the sheer number of systems that need to be touched on, the number of engineers that have to be dragged in, that’s like raising the Titanic from the bottom of the ocean.
There is more than one set of code that needs to be written. You have to coordinate across a lot of people, right?
Yeah. A feature set that he wants to add in is ranked blue check users higher than others, where that ranking takes place in the stack. They have to change the way that entire process works. We have to figure out what all the services are in the company.
Yeah. If someone had come to you and said that they wanted to redo the show, what amount of time would you be given?
It depends. If the change requires a large amount of infrastructure changes, it will take a long time. We are concerned with reliability more than we are moving fast.
It is possible that something could be put in place within a quarter to two quarters if I had to give a round-about time frame.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Say Out: A Social Problem. What Can We Learn from It? And How Does It Get Disturbed?
This is a social problem, as well as an engineering problem. We have to do testing. We need to figure out how this can be abused. What are they going to do with it? What will the miners do to steal more money from the people using this feature?
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? It sounds like these deadlines are too short that this stuff won’t be tested or scrutinized, that sort of figuring out what could go wrong. They’re just going to be set loose.
Yeah. There is a section about user privacy and privacy data. We don’t use user data so we don’t worry about that. There is a blue check on a profile.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
What Has Happened in Musk’s Leadership Effort? How Did he Publish an Idea or a Move? How To Redirect a Logout View to the Explore Page?
So there’s a couple of things. The difference between Musk and his people is dependent on where you sit in the leadership stack. The main message that most people got was to find something 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. You sacrificed every team around you.
Musk is at the company’s headquarters. He has talked about implementing some big changes at his $44 billion acquisition, that he deleted a conspiracy theory about. Here’s what’s happened so far:
I mean, one of the first decisions he made was to redirect the logged-out view to the Explore page. And I don’t know this for certain, but my basic understanding of the goal here was that we might even be able to serve ads to people that aren’t logged in.
Before Musk you would see a box if you were not already a member of the social networking site.
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: An Ethereal Horror Movie Or What Happens When You’re Walking Around with Nothing?
The one on the vine isn’t the worst idea. The cynical part of me says that it’s too little, too late. You know? TikTok is TikTok, and that’s a mighty hill to climb.
But sure. I mean, we do have all the original content from Vine. The nostalgia factor is huge in the marketing field and gives us a foothold to at least launch something.
We have the media, and we’re trying to build a product like that. I think every tech company has at least tried. Is this something we can do? There’s been mock-ups.
It would be the most boring. You could possibly make an ethereal horror movie out of walking around with nothing.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life under the Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: How Do We Get Our Heads? What Happens When Is Not There?
There is no communication. There are people in a corner. But it’s not like, oh, the whole company went to an all-hands and learned what’s happening. It’s everybody asking, are we ever going to see him? Should I keep doing my work? Do they even serve lunch anymore?
So as we’re recording this, 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? Is it time to be somewhere else?
Culture is real. Culture can be seen through the product. Many of the way the company behaved was due to the care people had for it. And that can be infuriating in its own ways.
I mean, 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.
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: The Casey Cory Schreppel Interview (with Cory Szuchman)
He is reading the news about the work hours. He has been speculating about what kinds of labor law lawsuits will 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 also recently changed his bio to “Twitter complaint hotline operator” and his location to “Hell.”
And if people want to send you any huge scoops about what’s happening at Twitter, you can send those right over to Casey. Kevin is his email address. There was a person named roye.
“Hard Fork” is produced by Davis Land. We’re edited by Paula Szuchman. The episode was fact checked by the person who did it. The show was engineered today by Cory Schreppel.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Jerome Powell, the Fed, and the Stock Market: After the Wall Street Walls Shutdown, What Will We Do in December?
Original music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, and Marion Lozano. With special thanks to Hanna Ingber, Nell Gallogly, Kate LoPresti, Shannon Busta, Mahima Chablani, and Jeffrey Miranda.
CNN Business first published a version of the story. Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? It is possible to sign up here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.
What will be done by the Federal Reserve in December? Analysts can speculate all they want, but Fed officials say they will be using hard economic data to make their next decision.
That means key housing, labor, and inflation reports will likely have outsized effects on the market as investors speculate about what they might mean for the future of interest rates.
What’s happening: No one can move markets like Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — with just a few words on Wednesday he crushed investors’ hopes of an interest rate pivot and sent stocks plunging. Powell said that the Fed’s current hiking regime had some ways to go in fighting inflation. “It’s very premature, in my view, to think about or be talking about pausing.”
Powell added an important caveat. The Fed could start to slow the pace of those painful hikes as soon as December. “Our decisions will depend on the totality of incoming data and their implications for the outlook for economic activity and inflation,” Powell said on Wednesday.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html
Pre-Market Stocks Trading: Labor Markets, Periphery, and the Rise of the U.S. Carrier Price Index
The unemployment rate is expected to remain steady at 5.1 percent in the October government report, despite the fact that the economy added 200,000 jobs last month.
That means more inflation. Businesses have to pay higher wages to attract employees and are able to charge more for their goods and services. hourly wage growth will be looked at by the Fed. Wages rose in September by 5% compared to a year ago.
There is a possible upside: Another jobs report in December is expected ahead of 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 there’s going to be a large increase in October.
PCE reflects changes in the prices of goods and services purchased by consumers in the United States. The Fed thinks the measure is more accurate than theCPI because it accounts for more 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 Housing Market, and the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act: Twitter Employees Suspensions from the WARN Act
The housing market has been negatively impacted by the Feds efforts to fight inflation, and is one of the first areas of the economy to show signs of cooling.
The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged more than seven percentage points higher last week than a year ago, as elevated borrowing costs lead to a decline in demand.
“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. Our policies have a very big effect on that.
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.
A two-year recession would be longer than the one that followed the 2008 global financial crisis, though the Bank of England said that any declines in GDP heading into 2024 would likely be relatively small.
Several Twitter employees have already filed a class action lawsuit claiming that the layoffs violate the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.
The account suspensions came on the heels of Twitter’s announcement on Monday that it was disbanding its Trust and Safety Council — a group of outside experts that advised the company on issues like human rights, child sexual exploitation and mental health.
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.”
What Twitter is about? Tracking the social-media hate of the current lords & peasants system on Twitter and the elephant in the room
In a tweet, the world’s richest man used an expletive to describe his assessment of “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark.” He added: “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.
Large digital platforms “have experienced professionals out there who develop relationships with these advertisers,” Vincent said. “When you let go of a staff that was as veteran as Twitter’s and there’s no one there to respond to those [brands], you basically reduce the value of the ad platform.”
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.
He works as a consultant for issues pertaining to conflict and peace in the African Great Lakes region, as well as training in international law. He has already seen what a ‘free’ Twitter can do. He has tracked the social-media hate speech for years as conflict rages in the Democratic Republic ofCongo. 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.
It’s still not certain how the company will proceed. 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 let back in until there was a process in place to allow them to do so.
Some of the users who have been banned from Twitter will have retreated to lesser-known platforms with fewer regulations on what can be said, says Stringhini. Once there, their social-media activity tends to become more toxic and more extreme2. “We see a community that becomes more committed, more active — but also smaller,” he says.
Stringhini says that these platforms are the starting point for false narratives. The narratives explode when they are on mainstream platforms. “They get pushed on Twitter and go out of control because everybody sees them and journalists cover them,” he says.
“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 is a situation where you can have more violence.
“Show me how to catch up” with Twitter and what to do about it, Musk tells a Comedian on an alternative social media platform
“@elonmusk, from one entrepreneur to another, for when you have your customer service hat on. Mark Cuban said he had spent too much time muting all the newly purchased checkmark account and that he wanted to make them useful again.
Its note to Sweeney about the suspension, which he shared with the AP, said “You may not use Twitter’s services in a manner intended to artificially amplify or suppress information or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts people’s experience on Twitter.” But that rationale was different from what Musk explained later Wednesday.
Comedian Kathy Griffin had her account suspended Sunday after she switched her screen name to Musk. She told a reporter that she had used his picture as well.
“I guess not ALL the content moderators were let go? Lol,” Griffin joked afterward on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform where she set up an account last week.
After posting a series of critical statements about the Democratic candidates on Saturday, the actor reverted back to her real name. “Okey, dokey.” I’ve had fun and think I made a point, that is what she said.
Lurking on Twitter: What the heck is it about? Elon Musk’s “Lurkers” have the potential to be rude on Twitter
It said the service would first be available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. However, it was not available Sunday and there was no indication when it would go live. Esther Crawford told The Associated Press that it’s coming soon but it hasn’t launched yet.
Yoel Roth, the head of safety and integrity, attempted to address these concerns in a Saturday morning message. The most affected by the job cuts was the company’s front-line moderation staff.
Musk had a thought that was so deep it could have been from a fishbowled dorm room. Congratulations: We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk.
Quiet quit is rejecting the burden of going above and beyond on top of being a good employee, but still depletes your own metaphorical coffers. It’s not about giving more to a platform, it’s about getting back. If you want to stay on the new social networking site, you need to find a way to use it without you.
A relatively small group of people power Twitter. 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 “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. It is a simplistic approach to deal with the complexity and confusion that is NewTwitter by hiding and observing. Check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, sure, then close your app or browser tab. If you want to engage in a conversation, then send a Twitter message. Keep one eye on it during basketball games. Direct those message threads to another place if you have to. To save your most original thoughts, go to another place.
In the past week, one of the world’s most influential social networks laid off half of its workforce, lost powerful advertisers and launched several other features in a bid to make up for its poor performance.
Twitter Shutdown: It’s Far Away! Twitter Blue Has Been Shunted for Two Months, and an Apple Store CEO Deleted His Twitter Account
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.
“Bottom line is that you have a decision to make,” Cuban added. “Stick with the new Twitter that democratizes every tweet by paid accounts and puts the onus on all users to curate for themselves. You could bring back the curation from Twitter. One makes it easier to keep up with all the news on social media. The other is awful.”
After another round of layoffs and exits Monday, many of the ad sales employees that managed their campaigns have been fired or pushed out.
In an op-ed published in the New York Times last week, YoelRoth, who left the company earlier this month, said that failure to adhere to the guidelines of the Google and Apple app stores could be catastrophic. Prior to Musk taking over, app store operators had previously removed social media apps for failing to protect their users from harmful content. Over the weekend, the head of Apple’s app store, Phil Schiller, deleted his Twitter account.
Twitter Files, Part Duex!: Elon Musk’s View of Right-Leaning Black Holes and Other Social Media Influencers
Even if online attention continues to increase, there is no guarantee that it will translate into revenue growth.
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 has effectively taken up an issue that has been championed by some conservatives, who claim that the social network has suppressed or banned their content.
A software update that will show your true account status so you know if you have been shadowbanned, and how to appeal, is being developed by Musk. He did not say when additional information or a timetable would be provided.
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 a thread by Weiss and added the caption “Thetwitter Files, Part Duex!!” The popcorn and the popcorn emojis were on hand.
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.
But shortly afterward, the account was suspended again. Musk said that a stalker attacked a car in Los Angeles where he was travelling with his son.
For Sweeney, it was the latest in a longtime tangle with the billionaire. The University of Central Florida student said Musk last year sent him a private message offering $5,000 to take the jet-tracking account down, citing security concerns. Musk stopped communicating with Sweeney, who never deleted his account. Protocol reported on their exchange earlier this year.
He said he setup the jet because he was a fan of Musk. “It gives you just another view that a lot of people don’t know about where [Musk] is going and might give you clues into what new business is going on,” he said.
A person claiming to be aTwitter employee sent an email to Sweeney that included a message from the new head of trust and safety asking staff toapple heavy VF toelonjet immediately.
“You can still share your own live location on Twitter,” it said. Sharing someone else’s historical location information is not prohibited by this policy.
In tweets, Musk accused the journalists of violating the platform’s policy against doxing — or posting private information online — by sharing his “exact real-time” location. Not a single reporter including CNN’s Donie O’ Sullivan and The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell had done so. CNN didn’t get a response from Musk or the social media company.
The data is public and every aircraft in the world is required to have a transponder, according to a January post pinned to the top of the jet- tracking account’s feed.
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.
Is the Twitter Mass Exodus from Musk Before You Take It Seriously? The Case for a Non-Profit, Open Town Hall
In the weeks since the Tesla CEO took over Twitter, the @elonjet account has chronicled Musk’s many cross-country journeys from his home base near Tesla’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, to various California airports for his work at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters and his rocket company SpaceX.
It showed Musk travelling to the East Coast and New Orleans before a meeting with the president of France.
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 — In 2024 a book called And How We can Reclaim it will be published. The opinions come from her, not from this commentary. Read more opinion on CNN.
But recall that last month, before these journalists were de-platformed, Musk — who describes himself as a free speech absolutist — suggested that he could sue activists who he believes caused advertiser boycotts of Twitter. Users are not allowed to have debates on how to fix society if they cannot hold those in power accountable.
A healthy town square could also be a place where people can get 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.
It is clear that we can’t rely on Musk to provide a safe, open forum. We need new, non-profit social networks run by boards that are responsible for considering the public’s interest when making critical decisions. 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. We desperately need to create a new social platform designed to provide the true open town hall we so desperately need.
The move from Musk came after he posted an unscientific poll on his personal Twitter account that concluded Friday night with 59% of participants voting in favor of immediately restoring the accounts.
Most of the accounts were back early Saturday. Linette Lopez, a Business Insider journalist, was suspended after other journalists with no explanation.
Shortly before being suspended, she said she had posted court-related documents to Twitter that included a 2018 Musk email address. He changes his email regularly, so that address is not currently current, Lopez said.
Twitter and CNN are stepping up to combat the alleged stalking of a UN spokesman and the suspension of Mastodon’s Twitter account
Stephane Dujarric, a UN spokesman said the move was a dangerous precedent and that journalists around the world were facing censorship, threats and even worse.
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.
Mastodon’s official account was banned because many users are leaving the network. The reason was unclear, though it had tweeted about the jet-tracking account. Twitter also began preventing users from posting links to Mastodon accounts, in some cases flagging them as potential malware.
Sally Buzbee, the Washington Post’s executive editor, said that technology reporter Drew Harwell was removed without warning after accurate reporting about Musk.
On Thursday CNN askedTwitter for an explanation of O’ Sullivan’s suspension and it would not be renewing its relationship, a CNN spokesman said.
Matt Binder, who has been suspended from his job, said he was banned immediately after sharing a screen shot that O’ Sullivan had posted.
The screenshot showed a statement from the Los Angeles Police Department sent earlier Thursday to multiple media outlets, including the AP, about how it was in touch with Musk’s representatives about the alleged stalking incident.
The Story of Mastodon: A Free and Open-Source Confederated Network in the Light of Musk’s Twitter Resummation
He has promised to let free speech reign and has been restoring accounts that previously broke rules against harmful misinformation. He has also said he would suppress negativity and hate by depriving some accounts of “freedom of reach.”
She said the new regime appeared to have the same problem as the old one and she opposed it in both cases.
The platform would be changed at fundamental level if the media organizations stop being active on micro-blogging site.
CBS briefly shut down its activity on Twitter in November due to “uncertainty” about new management, but media organizations have largely remained on the platform.
“We all know that reporters watch at the main tent pole of Twitter when news breaks, so we are going to go after them and try to find out what they saw,” he said. Driving journalists off of the social media platform is the most self-destructive wound I can think of.
Some advertisers had already stopped spending on the platform because of uncertainty about what direction Musk was taking it, so the suspensions could be the biggest red flag yet.
Shortly after Musk signed out of a session hosted by a journalist he had been questioned about, the Spaces conference chat went down. Musk later tweeted that Spaces had been taken offline to deal with a “Legacy bug.” Spaces came back Friday.
Mastodon on Friday had more than 6 million users, nearly double the 3.4 million it had on the day Musk took ownership of Twitter. On many of the thousands of confederated networks in the open-source Mastodon platform, administrators and users solicited donations as disaffected Twitter users strained computing resources. Many of the networks, known as “instances,” are crowd-funded. The platform is free of ads.
Elon Musk hasn’t been completely happy with his new job in Twitter according to a CNN/WNN/NPR editor’s tweet
In the past, users were required to get their accounts back if they were not careful, but the journalists do not think their postings violated the 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 journalist and Insider columnist Linette Lopez was 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.
“It’s journalism,” Harwell wrote in his appeal, a copy of which was provided to CNN. Harwell added that his tweet did not include a “link to anyone’s private information.”
He told CNN that he was going to remove the tweet and move on with the episode, despite describing the whole thing as absurd.
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.
Elon Musk tweeted a poll Sunday evening asking people to vote on whether he should step down as Twitter’s CEO. Musk said he would abide by the poll’s results.
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.
The Twitter Story of Musk: User Response to Musk’s Decay of the Starbird Platform and the “Distribution of Bots on Twitter”
While researchers have used Twitter data for all kinds of research, Twitter’s platform design gives it a unique role for researchers focusing on information operations and conspiracy theories. Content can go viral in a way that’s impossible on other platforms, and provides metrics like retweets and likes that make tracking the impact and spread easy to understand.
Twitter did not say how many tweets users can download or post at the $100 a month level. The company did not disclose the pricing, so those with more access will have to pay more.
The move will make it more expensive to run many automated accounts, known as bots. Some bots promote scams and propaganda, while others are useful or fun for many users, such as those that highlight every change the New York Times makes to its story headlines or flag an earthquake.
Musk has a long-standing aspiration 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. Musk said that “providing good content” will keep free access.
No researchers were spared if some bots were spared. The change will make it difficult for researchers such as Starbird who’ve relied on that method to study user behavior and information operations on the platform for years.
A group of research institutions, advocacy groups and individual researchers from around the world had an open letter sent to the company earlier this week in response to its plans to start charging for the service. In a statement, U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) said that Twitter should be making data access easier, not harder. NPR sent a request for more information from the company last week, but as of Wednesday, they hadn’t responded.
Users’ timelines are shaped not only by who they follow but also algorithmic recommendation, so players seeking influence can game it to amplify its message.
While social media has splintered in recent years, it’s still possible for narratives to come from smaller platforms onTwitter.
Using a computer program can be used by users of the Twitter platform to upload and download data in bulk to and from the platform.
Currently, many users can download over two million hits from the past seven days for free every month. Academic institutions can download unlimited amounts from the entire archive for free. With large datasets, researchers can make intricate maps of how clusters of users relate to each other, which is invaluable for understanding online communities, including those that spread falsehoods.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/09/1155543369/twitters-new-data-access-rules-will-make-social-media-research-harder
CrowdTangle, Twitter and the Starbird API: How is the data used in real-time? The future of the Twitter, Instagram and Twitter Micro-Breaking
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.
By giving users well-documented API access, Twitter’s data has been more transparent 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 did not answer questions from NPR about CrowdTangle’s future.
TikTok announced last year that it’s testing a research API, and is “planning to expand availability in the US in the coming weeks.” 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. Due to its Chinese Ownership, it’s faced bipartisan scrutiny.
If their access ceases, the Starbird team is going to come up with new ways to use the site. 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 thinks that there will be new ways to use the data ont he micro-bruch. “Unfortunately, I think a lot of that creativity is going to be better spent on other platforms.”