Musk has just fired a top engineer over something on the social networking site

The Deal to Bin Twitter: Musk’s Controversy, His Influence, His Disagreement and His Failure to Defeat the Spam or Die

The deal’s closing removes a cloud of uncertainty that has hung over Twitter’s business, employees and shareholders for much of the year. In the months that followed Musk initially agreed to buy the company and then later attempted to get out of the deal, first citing concerns about the number of bots and then accusations by a company employee.

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.

In taking those steps, Musk could singlehandedly upend the media and political ecosystem, reshape public discourse online and disrupt the nascent sphere of conservative-leaning social media properties that emerged largely in response to grievances about bans and restrictions on Twitter and other mainstream services.

The acquisition will increase Musk’s influence. The billionaire already owns, oversees or 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.

Musk also pledged to “defeat the spam bots or die trying,” referring to the fake and scam accounts that are often especially active in the replies to his tweets and those of others with large followings on the platform.

If the parties don’t close the deal by tomorrow, there will be a new trial.

Free Press in the Digital Town Square: Why Isn’t It Possible? How Big Pharma Creates the Covid Plandemic?

There are a number of questions about the future of the free press on the platform that is referred to as a digital town square. Will media organizations stay on the platform, after Musk banned their reporters without explanation? Will they pull their reporters? They have their content? And what will major advertisers such as Apple and Amazon do?

He said on the earnings call that he believed the long-term potential for the company was greater than its current value.

Big pharma created the Covid Plandemic in order to silence me. Everybody tries to silence me,” she said. Please speak at a lower volume. I apologize, but am I too loud for the intensive care unit? You are not even sick!

A Social Robot Meets a Girl: Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Kathy Griffin: Why Twitter should be allowed for Impersonation

“Hi. Your profile is hilarious. Schumer, dressed as a robot, said that she loved funny guys. “They said I was a bot, which is crazy. I am a woman and I love men like you. I recommend you check out this website where I and other girls hang out.

Donald Trump was the most important person to speak in front of the council, played by James Austin Johnson. Trump had his account banned in 2021.

We love Truth Social, and we have all moved to it. Donald Trump said it was great. It is also terrible in many ways. It is very bad. Very, very bad. It’s a little buggy in terms of making the phone screen crack, and the automatically draining of the Venmo.”

Elon Musk’s commitment to near-absolute free speech has collapsed. When the entrepreneur launched his takeover bid for Twitter earlier this year, he said the platform should permit all legal speech. His shift away from that stance began this month when he blocked a tweet featuring a swastika from rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West. He was more aggressive this week and suspended more than 25 accounts that were posting public flight data, including that for his private jet. Several journalists were kicked off of twitter yesterday, along with Mastodon, who is one of the most notable competitors.

“Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended,” Musk wrote. There won’t be warnings now that the site is rolling out widespread verification.

Kathy Griffin had her account suspended after changing her screen name to Musk. She told a Bloomberg reporter that she had also used his profile photo.

I guess not all of the content moderators were let go? She joked on the alternative social media platform that she set up an account last week.

The SCAMTERs problem, spoofing Musk’s screen name and blatantly misrepresenting herself on Twitter (with a link to the piece by Tertinelli)

While spoofing Musk’s screen name, actor ValerieBertinelli posted a series of tweets in support of Democratic candidates and then switched to her true name. “Okey-dokey. I’ve had fun and I think I made my point,” she tweeted afterwards.

The blue verification checkmark was used for the original purpose. 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. “SCAMTERS have a harder time pretending to be you, since you are already there,” she noted.

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 is coming soon, but it hasn’t launched yet.

If the company stripped verified users of their blue checks, that would make it harder for voters to see what’s happening on the platform.

Are We Still in Tiny Talk Town? Observational Evidence for the Behaviour of the Social Media Platforms of the United States and Other Countries

We don’t have to stay in Tiny Talk Town. All of us know it. There are other places online that are a decent hang. Most users are unlikely to leave on their own. And most of the knee-jerk “I’m outta here” reactions to Musk’s takeover aren’t that compelling, unless you’re a writer assigned to collate celebrity tweets. The smartest move might be a slower burn than an exit that’s loud and crazy. It’s similar to quiet quitting, but for social media.

No one person at twitter is responsible for our policies or enforcement actions and it’s unfortunate that individual employees are targeted for company decisions

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. If users can’t hold those in power accountable, then they can’t have debates about how to fix the problems with society — including, of course, the issues created by the very platforms they’re having those debates on.

“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.

“The incumbent has the advantage of scale, and even in a situation where you have kind of a polarizing figure like Musk take over Twitter, people are realizing that the newer platforms are not nearly as effective from a one-to-many, getting your message out there,” said Tom Forte, a senior research analyst at D.A. Davidson. “Despite the fact that there may be disgruntled consumers, they’re still tweeting.”

Though they are not a huge part of the revenue stream, countries such as Turkey, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan, which have large online populations, are attractive to the company as it looks to increase its user base. The countries have had arguments with social media companies more broadly, he says. Last year, the Nigerian government ordered all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block Twitter after the platform deleted a tweet from the country’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, for violating its policies. The government lifted the ban only after Twitter agreed to open an office in the country and pay local taxes.

But Raman Jit Singh Chima, senior international counsel and Asia Pacific policy director at Access Now, worries that Twitter under Musk may not continue with the lawsuit. Musk stated in his countersuit that the lawsuit in India was threatening 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 sends a signal to the global tech industry, saying ‘Back off, don’t try to do more.’”

What is it like to Lurk? The simple rules govern what you do on Twitter and when you don’t use it: Doomscrolling is not a practice

“Tiny talk is talk so small it feels like it’s coming from your own mind,” Musk fired off shortly past 10 pm last Thursday, a thought so deep it might have bubbled up from a fish-bowled dorm room. Now that we are all living in Tiny Talk Town, it’s time for our conversation to move on to other things.

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. On Twitter, it’s about not giving more to a platform than most people can expect to get back. If you want to stay on, you have to find a way to use it without using you.

A relatively small group of people power Twitter. According to internal research, heavy users who use English will account for less than 10 percent of monthly overall users but generate 90 percent of all Tweets and half of global revenue.

It would be simple for an electric car inventor to make a mistake when he followed a large amount of extremely active users on the social network, because they are noisy. Same goes for reporters. 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. Choosing to lurk, to sit back and observe for a while, is basically a heuristic and simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos that is New Twitter. If you want to check in on Musk’s new toy, close your browser tab. If you are going to send a tweet, it’s best to disengage. Keep one eye on it during basketball games. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. Save your most original thoughts for another time, another place.

Shadow Banned: Twitter Files Are Part Duex! Musk, Weiss and the Musk/Twitter Files Containment Controversy

Davisson doubts Twitter, which has gutted its moderation staff, would be able to enforce Musk’s new policies announced this week in a way that covers all users.

If you have been shadowbanned, a software update will show you the real account status so you know how to appeal. He did not provide additional details or a timetable.

Musk claimed that journalists had violated the new policy by leaking his precise location, which he described as “assassination coordinates.”

Musk said last month that the new policy at Twitter is freedom of speech, not freedom of reach, which is something of an industry standard. There will be no ads or other revenue when the negative/hate posts are demonetized.

With that announcement, Musk, who has said he now votes Republican, prompted an outcry from some conservatives, who accused him of continuing a practice they opposed. The clash shows the tension at Twitter under Musk, as the billionaire promises a more maximalist approach to “free speech,” while trying 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. On Friday, Musk shared Weiss’ thread with his followers and captioned it, “TheTwitter Files, Part Duex!!” Along with a popcorn symbol.

Is What Donald Trump Says is News? How Left-Right Media Have Been Covered in the Suppressed 2021 Flyout of Donald Trump’s Twitter Account

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.

A person with knowledge of the matter tells CNN that the former head of trust and safety left his home due to threats that were made after Musk criticized him.

The suspension of Donald Trump’s account in 2021 was one of the sensitive issues that he worked on. Weiss posted a set of straces on Monday that claimed to show internal documents relating to whether to ban Trump from the platform, as some employees wondered if the former president violated its policies.

On Election Day in 2016 he wrote, “I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist for a reason.”

“We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel. My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs,” Musk tweeted.

I told colleagues in my newsroom that they shouldn’t cover everything Trump said or wrote while he was in office. Previously, a president’s every word was assumed to be a carefully chosen signal of future policy, and was reported as such. Donald Trump said many things in order to get a rise out of people. Reporting on them was just feeding the flames, I argued. Another editor tried to push him back. He said that the man was the president. “What he says is news.”

There were a number of news stories about Musk, including one about his use of pronouns that referred to the government’s former chief infectious disease expert. There are more about his bedside table picture with two replica guns on it and the far right meme that he was involved in.

This is how coverage of Trump was done. 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. The same amount of good reporting was going on at the same time, but it was these accounts that dominated the conversation. The public was made to understand what was happening across the country through incompatible narratives relating the behavior of a man in the White House.

Elon Musk’s abrupt suspension of several journalists who cover Twitter widens a growing rift between the social media site and media organizations that have used the platform to build their audiences.

Musk suspending journalists’ accounts is “petty and vindictive and absolutely scandalous”, since he has styled himself as a champion of free speech.

The journalists were offered the ability to return to the site if they did not publish any more nonsense after Musk banned them earlier this week for defaming him.

Shortly before his suspension, O’Sullivan tweeted that Twitter had suspended the account of an emerging competitive social media service, Mastodon, which has allowed the continued posting of @ElonJet, an account that posts the updated location of Musk’s private jet.

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 after he never deleted his account. Their exchange was first reported by tech news outlet Protocol earlier this year.

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.

Musk falsely claimed that the journalists had violated his new “doxxing” policy by sharing his live location, amounting to what he described as “assassination coordinates.” CNN did not share the location of the billionaire.

Someone didn’t reply to the request for comment. Musk has promised to eradicate automatically generated spam from the platform, but Twitter allows automated accounts that are labeled as such — as Sweeney’s were.

Musk’s many cross-country journeys have been chronicled by theelonjet account, which is dedicated to documenting Musk’s travels to and from his work in San Francisco as well as his home in Austin, Texas.

It showed Musk flying to East Coast cities and New Orleans a day before he was to have a meeting with the French President.

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.

“The impulsive and unjustified suspension of a number of reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is concerning but not surprising. Twitter’s increasing instability and volatility should be of incredible concern for everyone who uses Twitter,” the spokesperson said.

Doxxing refers to the practice of sharing someone’s home address or other personal information online. The banned account had instead used publicly available flight data, which remain online and accessible, to track Musk’s jet.

The move marked a significant attempt by Musk, a self-described free speech absolutist, to wield his unilateral authority over the platform to censor the press.

It’s very empty today, those words ring very hollow. Harwell said that 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.”

The platform stopped enforcing its policies prohibiting Covid-19 misinformation after Musk reinstated previous rule-breakers.

“I do think this is very important for the potential chilling impact this can have for freelance journalists, independent journalists around the world, particularly those who cover Elon Musk’s other companies, like Tesla and SpaceX,” O’Sullivan told CNN Thursday after his account was suspended.

The journalists as well as Mastodon, a social media site that is seen as an alternative to the internet, had their accounts suspended on Thursday. Mastodon was among the sites the creator of the ElonJet account went following Musk’s crackdown.

Reporters whose accounts were suspended include Donie O’Sullivan of CNN; Ryan Mac of the New York Times; Drew Harwell of the Washington Post; Micah Lee of the Intercept; and journalist Aaron Rupar.

In a post on Substack, Rupar wrote that he is unsure why he was suspended. He said he did tweet on Wednesday a link to a Facebook page for the jet-tracking account.

Twitter is ready to take on the challenge of the EU’s media freedom laws and fundamental rights: an analysis with a warning from the Swedish Foreign Ministry

“Suing journalists based on personal animus sets a dangerous precedent that needs to be changed,” said Free Press’s Senior Counsel, Mr. Benavidez.

“Freedom of the press cannot be switched on and off as you please,” Germany’s foreign ministry tweeted on Friday. These journalists are no longer able to follow us, to criticize or comment. We have a problem with that @Twitter.”

“The EU’s Digital Services Act requires respect of media freedom and fundamental rights. This is reinforced under the Media FreedomAct, and Musk should be aware of that, according to Jourov.

The social media platform was warned in late November that it must take significant steps to comply with the EU’s content moderation laws.

“Twitter will have to implement transparent user policies, significantly reinforce content moderation and protect freedom of speech, tackle disinformation with resolve, and limit targeted advertising,” Breton said at the time. “All of this requires sufficient AI and human resources, both in volumes and skills. I look forward to progress in all these areas and we will come to assess Twitter’s readiness on site.”

When Social Media Meets Wall Street: A Comment on Co Host, Donie O’Sullivan, and Co-Host

A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. You can receive a daily digest of the changing media landscape.

CNN said in a statement that its future on the platform is uncertain. CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan was suspended without warning and the suspension is concerning but not surprising. Everyone who uses the social network should be concerned by the recent increase in instability and volatility. We will reexamine our relationship after asking for an explanation and getting a response.

While Weiss interpreted the reluctance to use such measures against other world leaders as evidence that Trump was treated particularly unfairly, the documents may also reveal the opposite: that the company consistently underestimated the danger its platform posed in contexts outside the US, and only acted forcefully against threats to American democracy. The ban that Trump imposed would have applied to other leaders as well.

“I think there are a lot of calculations that go into the trade-off about whether to take enforcement actions, and of course access to markets is one of them,” says Kian Vesteinsson, senior research analyst for tech and democracy at Freedom House, a nonprofit research and advocacy group focused on democracy and political freedoms.

It may be difficult to replace it with a network of journalists, politicians, entertainers and users that are interested in real-time news. Although Co Host has seen renewed popularity, it is still a small fraction of the number of active users on TWp which had over 200 million daily users last year.

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. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. CNN has an opinion on it.

Reliable information can be found in a healthy town square. 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.

Following a public poll on the site, the company will lift the suspension that was put in place. Over one third of the respondents said the accounts should be unsuspended immediately, while a smaller number said the suspensions should be ended in seven days.

The accounts were back early Saturday. Linette Lopez, a journalist with Business Insider, was suspended after the other reporters with no explanation.

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 “classic Elon-going-for-broke behavior.”

The Twitter Suspensions of Spaces and the Washington Post: A Warning to a Red Flag for Advertisers and Censors

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.

Another suspended journalist, Matt Binder of the technology news outlet Mashable, said he was banned Thursday night immediately after sharing a screenshot that O’Sullivan had posted before his own suspension.

The Los Angeles Police Department sent out a statement to multiple media outlets, including The AP, about how they were in contact with Musk’s representatives about the 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 stated that he would suppress both hate and negative sentiment by taking away some of their freedom of reach.

She said that she opposed both the old and new regimes, saying that the old regime was governed by its own biases and the new one had the same problem.

If the suspension leads to a loss of media organizations’ use of the platform, it will be changed at the fundamental level, according to Lou Paskalis, a marketing and media executive.

CBS temporarily stopped its activity onTwitter in November because of uncertainty about new management, but media organizations have largely 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.

On Thursday night, the Spaces conference chat fell over after Musk abruptly signed out of a session hosted by a journalist during which he was questioned about the reporters’ ousting. Musk later tweeted that Spaces had been taken offline to deal with a “Legacy bug.” Late Friday, Spaces returned.

Advertisers are also monitoring the potential loss of Twitter users. Insider Intelligence forecast shows that over the next two years, there will be a loss of 32 million users on the micro-blogging site.

When Musk took ownership of the social networking site, it had 3.4 million users but on Friday it had more than 6 million. 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 are crowd-funded. The platform is designed to be ad-free.

“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.

Twitter’s CEO and Censor: What Has He Learned from the Harwell Explanation of Musk’s Covid-19 Outburst?

Harwell wrote in his appeal that it was journalism and provided a copy to CNN. Harwell added that his post did not include a link to anyone’s private information.

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.”

Musk asked people to vote on if he should step down as the leader of the micro-messaging service. Musk said he would abide by the poll’s results.

Musk said in a statement that he hasn’t been entirely happy with his new position, after MIT artificial intelligence researcher Lex Fridman said he would take the CEO job.

We at Free Press agree that Musk must 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.

Neo-Nazis such as Andrew Anglin and right-wing activists like Laura Loomer have been given a new lease on life due to his pardon ofsuspended accounts.

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. The blue checkmark feature, which allows verified users to post longer videos and have their content priority at the top of replies, mentions, and searches, needs to be retired. They have to stop Musk’s plan on accounts that were suspended before he took over.

Musk brought a group of engineers and advisors into a room at the headquarters to look for answers. His engagement numbers are tanking.

Several sources with direct knowledge of the meeting say that he said this was ridiculous. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

Employees gave Musk’s internal data on engagement with his account. In April of last year, they told him that Musk was at his peak popularity in search rankings. He’s at a score of nine. Engineers investigated whether the reach was limited but found no evidence of bias against Musk.

Musk told the engineer that they were fired. (Platformer is withholding the engineer’s name in light of the harassment Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.)

One current worker says Musk has told people to track the number of times he recommends his followers to read his latest musings.

It has now been seven weeks since Twitter added public view counts for every tweet. Musk promised at the time that the feature would let the world see 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.

It turns out that an employee had inadvertently deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter. In November, the team worked on that service left the company.

How does a Social Media Employee Describe the Ghost Town: From Dumpster Fires to Teleportation Fires – An Employee’s Viewpoint

One employee said that they haven’t seen much in the way of cogent strategy. We devote most of our time to three areas: putting out fires, performing impossible tasks, and Improving efficiency without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. From my perspective, we mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire.

“There’s times he’s just awake late at night and says all sorts of things that don’t make sense,” one employee said. When he comes to us he will say one person can’t do one thing on the platform and we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make any sense.”

The office of the landlord of San Francisco has a sad disposition. 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?” The eighth floor is still stocked with beds, but employees have to reserve them in advance.

The epicenter of social media’s open culture, where employeesdiscussedanything and everything, has gone quiet. A current employee describes it as a ghost town.

“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.

It is not true for everyone at the company. “There are a handful of true believers that are obviously just ass-kissers and brown-nosers who are trying to take advantage of the clear vacuum that exists,” that same employee says.)

The employee cited the disastrous launch of the new platform, which resulted in brands being impersonated, and dozens of top advertisers fleeing the platform.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-twitter-fires-engineer-declining-reach-ftc-concerns

T2 and Twitter: Exploiting Musk and its employees to improve the safety of the social services we serve (and they shouldn’t) listen to Musk

An employee said that if the company learns to put more thought into some decisions and less into others, it might do some good. “He needs to learn the areas where he just does not know things and let those that do know take over.”

At the same time, “he really doesn’t like to believe that there is anything in technology that he doesn’t know, and that’s frustrating,” the employee said. You can not be the smartest person in the room all the time.

With Musk continuing to fire people impulsively, entire teams have been wiped out, and their work is being handed to other overstretched teams that often have little understanding of the new work that is being assigned to them.

“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 that most of my team is going through a lot of hardcore interviewprep and would jump at the chance to walk away.

The FTC plans to audit the company this quarter, we’re told, and employees have doubts that Twitter has the necessary documentation in place to pass inspection. “FTC compliance is concerning,” one says.

After she lost her job as a human rights advisor at the company, Sarah Oh decided to work on a rival service with a friend.

With Gabor Cselle, who previously worked at Twitter and Google, she launched T2, currently available in beta. It offers a social feed with a 280-character limit. Oh said that the key selling point was its focus on safety.

Oh told CNN that they were well positioned to deliver on the idea of creating an experience that allowed people to share what they wanted to share without fearing abuse and harassment.

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.

The list of newer entrants in the markets includes apps created by former Twitter employees, a startup backed by one of Musk’s Twitter investors, and a service from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. While some apps like T2 strongly resemble Twitter, others take a different approach.

Artifact, a news feed powered by artificial intelligence that was announced last month by the founders of the photo sharing service, earned them comparisons to the micro-blogging service. In CNN’s recent test of the app, however, it resembled news reader applications like Apple News or the defunct Google Reader. Artifact displayed popular articles from large media organizations and smaller bloggers in a main feed, tailored to users based on their activity and selected interests.

All of these apps are vying for a chance to give users a news feed that is not social media related at the very least.

The Anti Software Software club co-founder says they have heard a lot of people that are moving over from the micro-blogging site say it is just for them a nicer experience. The service launched publicly in June of last year, after Musk offered to buy Twitter. In November, after Musk completed the takeover, the platform added 80,000 users in 48 hours.

“People have been referring to us when they do as a Twitter alternative, which I think is an important distinction from a Twitter replacement,” Kaplan said.

In November, after taking over the company, Musk claimed that it had hit “all-time high” user numbers, despite a wave of users calling to quit the network. Musk used to report user numbers in the quarterly securities filings, but now the company is private.

These systems were once routinely monitored, with mistakes regularly addressed by staff. But a team that cleaned up spam and countered influence operations and had about 50 people at its peak, with about a third in Asia,  was cut to single digits in recent layoffs and departures, 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.

The people said when some systems failed to distinguish between a fake account and a real account, some accounts of Chinese dissidents were difficult to find.

Since the departure of Mr. Musk, the account named bestofdyingtwit has been posting about the platform’s problems. She said she had trouble seeing her followers’ tweet, with notifications either Delayed or sent twice.

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.

Why is China so banned in the mainland? A survey of human rights activists, human rights advocates and dissidents based on Beijing’s censored speech

It has been banned in China for a long time. But it has been a gathering place in recent years for Chinese dissidents, human rights activists and overseas Chinese communities seeking to debate topics censored on the mainland.