The Toll is Taking on Chinese Activists

A Federal Labor Lawsuit Against Musk During the $24 billion-$TeV Deal to Obtain the Right Social Media Constraints

Since taking over at the company, Musk has made a lot of decisions that have led to turmoil at the company. Over the course of the past year, Musk has laid off half of the staff, reinstating the account of former President Trump and made many other decisions, which have not been subject to a lot of scrutiny. Nearly all of Twitter’s top executives have either been fired or quit since Musk took the reins.

The bans also shows Musk’s failure to come even close to his claimed commitment to free speech. Musk has previously said he wants to allow all legal speech and that he was a free speech maximalist. Musk said that free speech means that even his worst critics should stay on the social networking site.

The relationship between the pair seems to have soured, with the men trading barbs over the summer. Musk commented on Trump by writing, “I don’t hate the man, but it was time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset.”

Friday’s deadline to close the deal was ordered by the Delaware Chancery Court in early October. It is the latest step in a battle that began in April with Musk signing a deal to acquire Twitter, then tried to back out of it, leading Twitter to sue the Tesla CEO to force him to go through with the acquisition. If the two sides don’t meet Friday’s deadline, the next step could be a November trial that could lead to a judge forcing Musk to complete the deal.

And while Musk now finds himself in the uncomfortable position of having to hand over daily control of the company he just purchased to the tune of $44 billion, it could please some of his supporters who wish he would get back to work at Tesla and knock off the distractions.

According to the attorney who filed the lawsuit, “Elon Musk is the richest man in the world and he believes complying with federal labor laws is trivial.” “We have filed this federal complaint to ensure that Twitter be held accountable to our laws and to prevent Twitter employees from unknowingly signing away their rights.”

The material that came to light ahead of the trial due to start on October 17 in Delaware’s Chancery Court did not lend much support to that argument. Miller says that there is nothing that looks like a fraud here, despite the fact that he knows his best claim is fraud. They run out of cards to play.

It had been moved Musk was going to be deposed on October 6th and 7th. He decided to honor the contract his lawyers negotiated just days before he was to be deposed. The deposition was going to be uncomfortable, because a judge found that Musk may have deleted evidence relevant to the case. The deposition was delayed as Musk and Twitter worked toward a deal; Musk even received a court order halting proceedings to allow the deal to close by October 28th.

What do we really know about social media? A keyhole view on the twt platform, and how it affects the judiciary, politics and the public

For the last decade or so, a place where you can find information, advocate, community and even job opportunities is the social networking website, twt.

” I don’t know if they ever sat around and said ‘We are creating a Skinner box,'” said an anthropologist who works with gambling machine design. She said it is essentially what they have built. People who self-destruct on the site should know better, because they can’t stay away.

For years, many people around the world have relied on the social media site to debate issues openly. The top 25% of users by volume on the platform produce 97 percent of the post, according to the center. The conversations that happen on social networking sites such asTwitter have an outsize influence on the public debate.

Twitter faces challenges to its free speech stance in court, as the Supreme Court agreed to take up two cases that will determine its liability for illegal content.

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.

The feature of those sites is the bug, which allows them to say and do things that are not allowed on other social media platforms. There are many cauldrons of misinformation and abuse there.

“Would be great to unwind permanent bans, except for spam accounts and those that explicitly advocate violence,” he texted Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal shortly after agreeing to join the company’s board (a decision he soon backtracked).

That could mean lifting bans on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was kicked off for abusive behavior in 2018; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., whose account was suspended in January for tweeting misleading and false claims about COVID-19 vaccines; and 2020 election deniers like Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell, who were all banned in early 2021.

The person urged Musk to hire “someone who has a savvy cultural/political view” to lead enforcement, suggesting “a Blake Masters type.” 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 ban and Facebook’s decision to leave the Big Billionaire adrift: a story from the White House, a newspaper report

Allowing Trump and others to return could set a precedent for other social networks, including Meta-owned Facebook, which is considering whether to reinstate the former president when its own ban on him expires in January 2023.

At least it became clear that you can’t work together after a text from Dorsey to Musk, after a video meeting with them a few weeks later. That was clarifying.

According to the Washington Post, Musk told prospective investors that if he becomes the company’s owner, he’d cut three quarters of the workforce. The newspaper reported on some sources familiar with the deliberations.

It is a positive sign for the billionaire, who has accused the company of being overstaffed for its size.

An exodus of advertisers is only going to erode the finances of a company and make it harder for Musk to sell more stock to cover the cash hole.

He may have little choice other than to find alternate sources of revenue besides advertising, given the weak state of the digital ad market and the changes he wants to make to content moderation.

“Advertisers want to know that their ads are not going to appear alongside extremists, that they’re not going to be subsidizing or associating with the types of things that would turn off potential customers,” Carusone said.

Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition of Twitter is not a matter of science or technology: a state-of-the-art investigation

What exactly he meant is, as always, anyone’s guess. Musk told the staff that the company needs to branch out and build something like WeChat, a Chinese “super- app” that combines social media, messaging, payments, shopping, and ride-sharing.

The US hasn’t caught on to Chinese-style super-apps even though other American tech companies have done the same.

Federal authorities are investigating Elon Musk in connection with his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, the social media platform said in a court filing Thursday.

In a filing in another location, the company claimed that Musk’s legal team had failed to provide draft communications with SEC and slide presentations to FTC as part of the litigation between the two parties.

The Trust and Safety Council is a group of outside experts that advises the company on issues like human rights, child sexual exploitation and mental health.

“Twitter did not ask Zatko to torch his own documents, much less demand that he do so,” Twitter’s filing read. “Twitter had no knowledge of Zatko’s notebooks and no idea what information they contained.”

The note is a shift from Musk’s position that Twitter is unfairly infringing on free speech rights by blocking misinformation or graphic content, said Pinar Yildirim, associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

“In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all, where you can choose your desired experience according to your preferences,” he said in the Thursday post. “Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise … Let us build something extraordinary together.”

Warren, who has clashed with Musk in the past, called out the fact that the social network relies on advertising revenue from its direct rivals.

The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reported that one ad buying agency had already received requests from about a dozen clients to pause their advertisements on Twitter if Musk restores Trump’s account, and other were considering doing the same.

Musk said in his earlier letter that the acquisition was not meant to be a money-making venture for him.

The acquisition will extend Musk’s influence. The billionaire already owned, oversaw or has significant stakes in a number of companies developing cars, rockets,robots and satellite internet as well as more experimental ventures like brain implants. He controls a social media platform that affects how hundreds of millions of people communicate and get their news.

Musk said that he would do everything in his power to battle the fake accounts, which are often especially active in the replies to his account on the platform.

Tweets of Elon Musk and his Twitter Employees: The Chief Engineers of Twitter, or Why We Shouldn’t Let Twitter Be Left Behind

The departures occur just hours before a Delaware judge deadline on Friday to approve the deal. She threatened to schedule a trial if no agreement was reached.

On Monday morning, at around 1:45 AM, Twitter engineers were called into an emergency meeting. A new order had just come down from Musk: freeze all production changes on Twitter systems, effective immediately.

Many Twitter employees have recently noted the absence of Parag Argawal, their current CEO, who Musk soured on after the two initially started talking about Musk joining Twitter’s board. “He has been completely absent for weeks,” one current Twitter employee, who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission, said of Argawal. One person said that he had ghosted them. Both Twitter’s Slack and the Twitter employee-only section of Blind, an anonymous message board for tech workers, are full of similar comments about Argawal, according to screenshots seen by The Verge.

According to Insider, the executives received a lot of money for their trouble, with the highest payouts going to Agrawal, Segal, and Personette.

The major personnel moves are almost certainly the beginning of many changes the CEO will make, they came quickly and had been widely expected.

Elon Musk publicly scoffed at a Twitter employee’s uncertainty about whether he had been laid off in a recent round of cuts and spoke dismissively of the employee’s disability in a series of tweets Monday night. The billionaire has been publicly antagonizing his company’s current and former employees.

He added that there is a danger that social media will become a platform for far left and far right hate in our society.

But it’s also a realization that having no content moderation is bad for business, putting Twitter at risk of losing advertisers and subscribers, she said.

Yildirim said it wasn’t good for a place where consumers are bombarded with things they do not want to hear about and the platform takes no responsibility.

What Will the CEO (and His Son) Do?” Musk discusses the “Chiral Twit” and “Let That Sink In”

But Musk has been signaling that the deal is going through. He went into the company’s San Francisco headquarters, carrying a porcelain sink, changed his biography to ” chief twit”, and then sent a message saying “let that sink in!”

During the night the New York Stock Exchange notified investors that it will cease trading in shares of Twitter prior to the opening bell on Friday because of Musk’s announcement that the company will go private.

The enthusiasm Musk showed about visiting the building this week was very different from the previous suggestion that it should be turned into a homeless shelter.

The note shows a need for more “relevant ads” for social media platforms that collect and analyze users’ personal information, as well as a desire for advertisers to make more money.

A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. Sign up here for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape.

Even though he is the leader of the information environment, Musk is working to dismantle the small infrastructure that was put in to help users 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. The move will have a big impact on the information landscape. It will make it more difficult for users to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic accounts.

If the company were to strip current verified users of blue checks — something that hasn’t happened — that could exacerbate disinformation on the platform during Tuesday’s midterm elections.

The best thing one could do is to authenticating users of social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email, and reduce hacking, was suggested by Walter Isaacson, Musk’s authorized biographer.

The Last Days of Alphabet: Deep Inelastic Scattering at the Fork in the Road? A Conversation with Elon Musk

The process has been frightening and disorienting, according to conversations with eight employees today and over the weekend. In the absence of official communication workers are gathering in private channels to share the latest rumors.

​Have you ever gotten an email at midnight from the boss with ​an ominous subject line like “a fork in the road”? Email decorum today says that bosses are not supposed to send midnight emails. But Elon Musk is no ordinary boss, and it’s safe to assume he didn’t get the memo on empathetic leadership. After laying off nearly half of his staff, Musk brought a sink to work and said he would be sleeping at the office until the organization was fixed. Were they ready to be hard core? They could select “yes” — or opt for three months of severance pay.

A quarter of the staff would see their job security slashed, which would affect teams including trust and safety, according to the Washington Post.

The turmoil has divided the company into roughly two camps: those waiting nervously to see whether they still have a job after those cuts land, and those who are frantically working to ship new features under a threat of being fired if they don’t.

After the first round of layoffs hit the company, Platformer was the first to report that a second wave had hit the company. The cuts were made against Twitter’s contract workers. And on a percentage basis, these losses were even more severe: by the next day, we reported, about 4,400 of 5,500 or so contractors — 80 percent of the team — had lost their jobs.

CNBC reported that Musk brought a lot of employees from his company to help out with the transition. One employee we talked with told us about a late night call they received from an engineer from Musk’s company, who wanted to know if the engineers who were most respected were still at the company.

What Should I Do Now? Why Should I Write Something? An Engineering Director Rejoinds Twitter about a Technicolor Change Sensitive Problem

since no leadershippy type appears willing or interested in filling the void: if you’re feeling bleak and dismayed right now, just want you to know you’re not alone. This is terrible.

In other channels, employees are sharing contact information if they lose access to their communication.

Musk has pressed engineers to work on at least two major projects, and to complete them within days or weeks. One is changes to Twitter Blue that would require users to pay to retain their verification badges, possibly as much as $20 a month. The second, which Axios first reported today and which we can confirm, is a plan to revive the short-form video app Vine, either as a standalone product or part of the core Twitter app. Our colleague at The Verge Alex Heath reported that, in the case of changes to Blue, the features must ship by November 7th or the team will be fired.

The Vine project has generated moderate enthusiasm so far, we’re told. More than a dozen engineers volunteered to be part of the project after Musk gave it the go-ahead Sunday night.

Employees are being encouraged to build something and show it off to Musk. In one Slack message we saw, an engineering director urged his team to come up with new products and features and share them directly with their new CEO. “At best: you will get some feedback. The director stated that he might be asked to ship it asap. You will be told to stop and work on something else. Even in this case, at least you worked on something you love.”

Similarly, on Monday, Behnam Rezaei, senior director of software engineering at Twitter, sent a note to his team acknowledging “big changes” were coming. “I think most important change is going to be cultural change,” he said, according to a copy of the email obtained by Platformer. There were some good and some bad.

So if you ask what should I do now: do good engineering work. Write something. Fix bugs, keep the site up. I know the criteria for being at Twitter is that. It is not working on a fancy project. The good culture change is, it’s shipping and delivering. I would like to see more of you rotating on coding, shipping, planning, strategy, and documentation. If you want to be in a “special” group this week, code and ship 5x as [much as] before. Building what Elon asks or thinks sexy is not the criteria. The criteria for being impactful and changing product is helping our users. So you don’t need commands from me. You are all software engineers. You know what needs to be written and improved. Do it. You are in charge.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/31/23434002/twitter-layoffs-internal-messaging-uncertainty-elon-musk

What’s Happening to Twitter? What Will It Mean to Save Us? A Power Reporter on House of the Dragon with MICHAEL ON WIRED

But Musk’s attention can be unnerving, too. One employee we spoke with said they had mixed feelings about working on a project Musk is known to be focused on, such as Vine.

It’s unclear whether VP of Operations Lindsey Iannucci, the other two members of Twitter’s top leadership team, will remain with the company. It is not known if Caldwell, Sullivan, Berland and Iannucci are still employed by the social network.

Calacanis said on his social media account earlier this week that he was in New York to meet with the marketing and advertising community. He has also tweeted questions to Twitter users about the platform’s subscription and bookmark features.

“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. Or bring back Twitter curation. One makes Twitter time and information efficient. The other is awful.”

This week on Gadget Lab, we talk with WIRED platforms and power reporter Vittoria Elliot about the changes coming to Twitter and how they may affect the future of the social network.

You’re invited to encourage your male-presenting friends to watch House of the Dragon. Mike recommends the new album from Natalia Lafourcade, De Todas las Flores. Reexamining your relationship with social media is recommended by Lauren.

Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram: A Class Action Against Twitter for Violation of the WARN Act (Second Circuit Court of Arbitration and Arbitration)

Vittoria Elliott can be found on Twitter @telliotter. LaurenGoode is the name of the person. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@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:

You can open the app on the iPad or on anios if you want. You can also find an app like Pocket Casts and an app called Overcast. If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Podcasts app just by tapping here. We’re on Spotify too. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.

CNN obtained a copy of the email that said, “If your employment is not impacted, you will receive a notification via your Twitter email.” If your employment is affected, you’ll get a notification via email.

The email added that “to help ensure the safety” of employees and Twitter’s systems, the company’s offices “will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended.”

The class action lawsuit is accusing the social network of being in violation of a federal law after laying off some employees.

The workers were not given enough notice of their firing according to the lawsuit. These acts require that companies give employees at least 60 days of advance notice before a mass firing takes place.

The lawyer who filed the lawsuit said they wanted to make sure employees know they have an avenue for pursuing their rights.

This is not the first time Musk’s management style has led to class-action lawsuits. Two former employees at Tesla sued the company in June for violation of the same WARN Act.

Steve Jobs, the future of Apple, and what he has done with SpaceX, where he is still doing computer work in the early 2000s

At the time, Jobs had been developing personal computers for 20 years, his entire adult life. He had started the company and led the team that developed its flagship product, so he was familiar with it. In his years away from Apple, he had founded another computer company with a forward-thinking approach to the internet and next-generation operating systems. Plus, he was Steve Jobs. If anyone could quickly turn around the near-bankrupt computer giant, it would be him. He took a while to come up with a plan and bring it to fruition. While the colorful iMac he unveiled to me that day in May would help nudge Apple’s bottom line back into the black, it wasn’t until the company’s entry into non-PC devices—like the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007—that it became a profit machine. In 1998, Jobs did not evenmention Apple’s post-PC future on his road map.

Musk need not look farther than his own successful enterprises to realize the absurdity of his haste. The company was five years old when he took over. It took seventeen years for Musk’s plan to turn the company around. Musk deservedly gets a lot of credit for what Tesla has achieved—and for, among other things, his persistence. SpaceX, Musk’s other company, is private and doesn’t report earnings. But making rocket ships is the ultimate test of patience—it takes years to even launch successfully, and cutting corners to go faster can wind up killing people.

According to a letter obtained by media, employees would be told if they were laid off at 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. The email did not say how many people would lose their jobs.

He installed himself as sole board member and removed the company’s board of directors. On Thursday night, many Twitter employees took to Twitter to express support for each other — often simply tweeting blue heart emojis to signify Twitter’s blue bird logo — and salute emojis in replies to each other.

Barry C. White, a spokesperson for California’s Employment Development Department, said Thursday the agency has not received any recent have not received any recent such notifications from Twitter.

Meta, the Covid Pandemic, and the Social Media Company Meta Platforms Inc. Share Shares Are Down after 2 Years of Data Loss

The layoffs come at a tough time for social media companies, as advertisers are scaling back and newcomers — mainly TikTok — are threatening the older class of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Meta Platforms Inc., Facebook’s parent company, recently posted its second quarterly revenue decline in history and its shares are trading at their lowest levels since 2015. Meta’s disappointing results followed weak earnings reports from Google parent Alphabet and even Microsoft.

The Covid PLANdemic was created to silence me. Everybody tries to silence me,” she said. Please speak at a quieter volume, ma’am. I am too loud for the intensive care unit. You aren’t even sick!”

The Facebook Zoo, a site for geeks and geeks to hang out with friends and strangers. (I’m not the only guy that loves funny guys, but I do)

I’d like to join you. Your profile is so funny, my god. Schumer was dressed as a robot and said, “I love funny guys.” “They said I was a bot, which is crazy. I am all woman and love funny guys like you. In fact, you should check out this website where me and some other girls hang out.”

Donald Trump was played by James Austin Johnson in front of the council. The account of Trump was banned in 2021.

“Yes, we’ve all moved to Truth Social, and we love Truth Social. It’s very great,” Johnson’s Trump said. In many ways, also terrible. 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.”

Saying Goodbye and Good Residual on Twitter: A Silent Defeat to the Free Speech Absolutist that Administered Twitter

Editor’s Note: Roxanne Jones, a founding editor of ESPN The Magazine and former vice president at ESPN, has been a producer, reporter and editor at the New York Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer. The two authors of “Say it Loud” are Jones and Kathy O’Connor. She talks politics, sports and culture weekly on Philadelphia’s 900AM WURD. She has sole claim to the views expressed here. CNN has an opinion on it.

I received a message 30 seconds after I deleted my account on the day that Musk assumed control of the platform. After a relationship that I admit brought some moments of pleasure, it was time to say good-bye and good riddance.

Quiet quitting in the workplace is rejecting the burden of going beyond the norm, no longer working overtime in a way that will enrich your employer but depletes your own financial resources. Most people don’t expect to get back from a platform likeTwitter, so it’s important to not give more. If you want to stick around on this new Twitter—whatever it may become—you need to find a way to use it without it using you.

And surely, it was an act of silent defiance, because I know as a media professional so much of what we do in newsrooms, the stories we choose to tell, the assumptions we make about the world have depended on what the Twitter-verse is telling us.

In the weeks after Musk took over Twitter, the same analysis found that hateful tweets became much more prominent among the most popular tweets with potentially toxic language. For tweets using words associated with anti-LGBTQ+ or antisemitic posts, seven of the top 20 posts in each category were now hateful. One of the top 20 that uses potentially racist language is considered to be hate speech.

According to one cyber research organization, Network Contagion Research Institute, the use of the N-word jumped by nearly 500% on the platform a day after Musk, the self-declared “free speech” absolutist, took over.

When Twitter Goes After Its Oscillation: The Case of Michael P. Pelosi: a Call to Arms?

He might even try to promote his own lies and conspiracy theories, as he did last month when he called for an attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, in a now- deleted message.

But don’t expect a great Twitter exodus — not in a world where everyone craves attention and adulation. Everyone is interested in being a virtual brand ambassador.

Black users still use the site, even though it has remained on the site. The reasons vary for staying in the face of blatant disrespect and hatred. For some, it means keeping a job. Others may be convinced Twitter is the best way to attain global influence, or that it’s better to stay and fight for change from within.

The researchers thought that only one of the three top 20 lists had been actually offensive toward Jewish people, before Musk took over. The others were using the key words that were relevant to the person who said them in a non-threatening way.

In one particularly vile incident that spilled over into my personal life and became a matter of my family’s personal safety, authorities had to get involved. I never back down from fighting back against all my critics, I battled them single handedly on the platform for years.

What a waste of time. Waking up to toxic attacks on Twitter kept me in beast mode, on and off the site. That’s what the Twitter-verse will do to you — make you angry and keep you distracted from the real work at hand.

You will have to fight real people who don’t have the resources or the courage to challenge you in person.

The verified support account of the micro-messaging service stated that they are not currently putting an “OFFICIAL” label on accounts, but they are aggressively going after impersonation and deception.

Kathy Griffin’s account was suspended on Sunday as she changed her name to Musk. She told the reporter that she had used his picture as well.

Not all the content editors were let go? The account she created last week on Mastodon was used by her as a joke.

The Twitter CEO’s challenge: Can we get a blue checkmark without guaranteeing anyone’s identity? A tweet by Bertinelli

After changing her profile name to Musk, Bertinelli tweeted and retweeted support for several Democratic candidates and hashtags, including “VoteBlueForDemocracy” and “#VoteBlueIn2022.”

Television actress Valerie Bertinelli similarly changed her account name to the Twitter CEO’s, tweeting Friday that “[t]he blue checkmark simply meant your identity was verified. A dishonest person would have to work harder to impersonate you. That no longer applies. Good luck out there! She said that anyone can buy a blue check mark for $8 a month, without guaranteeing who they are.

The service would first be available in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. However, it was not available Sunday and there was no indication when it would go live. Esther Crawford, a public relations person for the company, said it is coming “soon but it hasn’t launched yet.”

Twitter Under Musk: Why Do We Need to Back Off? Yoel Roth Rejoinds on Twitter During the India Courtsruption

In a tweets Friday, Yoel Roth, the head of safety and integrity, sought to alleviate the concerns. He said the front-line moderation staff was the group least affected by the job cuts.

For Perez, the matter at hand isn’t simply the job losses that have decimated his former coworkers, nor the ability for people to say what they want on Twitter. Enhancing and protecting democracy is what it’s about. “It’s not entirely clear to me—particularly in the political context—that Elon Musk fully understands the degree of social responsibility that rests on his shoulders, and the very real harm, political harm, political violence, and division that can come from social media platforms.”

“I really am concerned that it feels like the drama around corporate takeover is sucking up all the oxygen in the room,” says Perez, who is now a board member at the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan group devoted to election security and integrity. That focus on the Musk psychodrama “is resulting in potentially inadequate attention on these election-related issues,” he adds.

An employee at an organization that was a part of Twitter’s trust and safety council saidVulnerableCommunities in far away countries are less important than relationships with leaders. The employee asked for anonymity because they are concerned their organization may be targeted by harassment and threats like those faced by former Twitter staffers.

David Kaye, the former UN special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression is a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine.

In India, Twitter’s third largest market, the company filed a case earlier this year to contest the government’s order to remove individual pieces of content as well as whole accounts that the government considers a risk to India’s security or sovereignty.

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 posed a danger 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 shows that the global tech industry should back off and not try to do more.

In the first instance, a celebrity has lost her social media privileges after a wave of prominent users impersonated Musk with the goal ofunderlying potential flaws in the revised verification system.

But the partially rolled-out plan faced widespread backlash, and in a display of defiance, some celebrities on the platform posed as Musk over the weekend, complete with a blue check mark on their profiles.

Elon Musk and the Secret Life of a Tiny Town Comet: How Donald Trump fired Griffin in 2017 confronted the CNN investigation of Pelosi’s bloody head

I’m a freedom of speech sceptic. On Saturdays, I eat doody for breakfast. Her account also retweeted posts supporting Democratic candidates.

Silverman’s account was labeled as “temporarily restricted” Sunday, with a warning that “there has been some unusual activity from this account” shown to visitors before clicking through to the profile. The comedian then changed her account back to its usual form, complete with her own name and image.

CNN fired Griffin in 2017 after the comedian was photographed holding up a bloody head resembling that of then-President Donald Trump. Both Anderson Cooper andGriffin co-hosted the New Year’s Eve program for a decade.

The account was a problem for Musk. According to screenshots Sweeney shared with CNN, Musk reached out to him last December through a Twitter private message asking, “Can you take this down? It is a security risk.”

In recent months, Musk has shared conspiracy theories about the attack on Paul Pelosi, called Democrats the party of “division & hate,” compared Twitter’s former CEO to Joseph Stalin and warned that “the woke mind virus will destroy civilization.”

“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. In Tiny Talk Town, we all talk about the same thing: Elon Musk.

Lurking isn’t Doomscrolling: Managing Twitter Lags with the Power of the Chief Executives: The Case of a Public Company

A group of people are the power behind a social networking site. 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. It goes for the journalists as well. 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 are described as 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. Open your browser or app and check in on Elon Musk’s new toy. Send a tweet, then disengage. Keep one eye on it during basketball games. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. You have to save your most original thoughts for another time.

In the past week alone, one of the world’s most influential social networks has laid off half its workforce; alienated powerful advertisers; blown up key aspects of its product, then repeatedly launched and un-launched other features aimed at compensating for it; and witnessed an exodus of senior executives.

Twitter Blue’s Successes and Challenges: Avoiding the Misinformation that Comes with the Blue Badge Add-on on Twitter

That paid subscription service, too, was also suspended on Friday with little warning, just two days after its official launch, with the menu option to sign up for Twitter Blue suddenly disappearing from Twitter’s iOS app — the only place the add-on had been offered. It was not clear when the offering would be restored.

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.

On the very same day, the account said that they had added a “official” label to some accounts to combat impersonation.

misinformation experts had warned that the paid Verification feature would make identification of trustworthy information much harder, particularly in the critical period following the US mid-term elections. Many high-powered users of the platform had a tough time with the feedback.

“@elonmusk, from one entrepreneur to another, for when you have your customer service hat on. I just spent too much time muting all the newly purchased checkmark accts in an attempt to make my verified mentions useful again,” tweeted billionaire Mark Cuban.

In a meeting for advertisers held this week, Musk urged brands to stay on the platform after a growing number of companies stopped running ads, which he said caused a drop in revenue. Musk was keen to appear magnanimous in his responsibility for the company’s performance.

When his CEO poll ended, Musk suggested that only those who pay for a subscription to the service will be able to vote. After one Twitter user said, “Blue subscribers should be the only ones that can vote in policy related polls,” Musk responded, “Good point. That change will be made by tweets.

A seven-page list of recommendations for Musk to avoid the consequences of his plans for Blue was prepared a few days before the launch. The document, obtained by Platformer, predicts some of the events that will follow.

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

The team found that pretending to be a world leader, advertisers, brand partners, election Officials and other high profile individuals was a P0 risk. “Legacy verification provides a critical signal in enforcing impersonation rules, the loss of which is likely to lead to an increase in impersonation of high-profile accounts on Twitter.”

The Sky is Blue: Towards Better Online Safety for Teens with Explosive Sexual Exploitation in the U.S. Twitter Era

After an exchange online with author Stephen King, Musk decided to slash the price of Blue to 99 dollars a year on November 1st. The move made it easier to make fun of brands and government officials, as an impulse buy of $8 became a higher risk for scam.

The team also noted removing the verified badge and its related privileges from high-profile users unless they paid, coupled with the heightened impersonation risk, would potentially drive them away from Twitter for good. They wrote that removing privileges and exemptions from legacy verified accounts could cause confusion and loss of trust. “We use the health-related protections … to manage against the risk of false-positive actions on high-profile users, under the assumption that the accounts have been heavily vetted. If it’s not possible to get that signal back, there’s a risk of false positives or lost privileges that could lead to user flight.

The company’s trust and safety team did win support for some solutions, including retaining verification for some high-profile accounts using the “official badge.”

Most of the features that were offered in the document have not been approved and are not on the wish list.

Despite the warnings, the launch proceeded as planned. A few days later, with the predictions of the trust and safety team largely realized, Musk belatedly stopped the rollout.

Functions affected included content moderation, recruiting, ad sales, marketing, and real estate, among others. It’s not clear how the loss of thousands of reviewers will affect the service. It appears that there is less availability for police to patrol the site for harmful material.

“One of my contractors just got deactivated without notice in the middle of making critical changes to our child safety workflows,” one manager noted in the company’s Slack channels. We previously reported thatTwitter has been hard at work in trying to adequately police child sexual exploitation material on the platform.

What Have Employees Really Learned About Musk, Slackers, Slack, and Blind? Where have They Gone? Where do they stand? Where are they?

Over the course of the day, similar messages trickled in on Blind, an app for coworkers to anonymously discuss their workplaces, and on external Slacks that employees have established to have more candid discussions.

Some employees told us that they had been bracing for cuts ever since the layoffs earlier this month. The final day of employment for many former contractors will likely send them scrambling, because vendors told them via email that their medical benefits were about to end.

The perks that made Twitter an attractive place to work pre-Musk have been eradicated. Food at the office? “Sucks — and now we have to pay for it. They seem to have obtained the absolute worst coffee vendors on the planet.

Employees continue to show a great deal of solidarity among one another. But not to the coterie of volunteer venture capitalists and on-loan engineers from Tesla and the Boring Company that have been carrying out Musk’s orders: those they refer to universally, including on Slack, as “the goons.”

Twitter’s Slowly Breaking Mobile App: Where Do We Stand? How Our Support Team Becomes More Concise and Empirical

“Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now,” the company’s support account tweeted. “We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences.”

Engineers were told to stop writing code until further notice in an email obtained by Platformer. Exceptions will be granted if there is an “urgent change that is needed to resolve an issue with a production service, including any changes reflecting hard promised deadlines for clients,” the email said, and employees get “approval from VP level and Elon explicitly stating that the change needs to be made.”

On Slack, even engineers who attended the late-night meeting were confused. “Is there a ticket I can reference?” asked an engineer who was being tasked with implementing the freeze. “I don’t see any context.” As of now, we don’t have a lot of context. This is coming from the rest of the team.

“I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. The app is rendering a home timeline using 1000 poorly batched RPCs. Musk tweeted on Sunday morning, referring to remote procedure calls. The number of Microprocessors that are employed to keep the rest of the site from breaking is thought to prevent the entire site from breaking every time.

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

Not to mention the fact that low power phones in places like India tend to be less reliable than their high power counterparts, as opposed to all of our iPhones and such.

Why the Code Freeze? Eli Lilly’s Twitter Anomaly and the Loss of $K_L7$

So why the code freeze? Some people think that Musk is worried that disgruntled engineers will attempt to sabotage the site on their way out.

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

According to conversations with currentemployees, the news has taken a toll on the ad teams who are responsible for managing ad agency relationships.

“I know that many of your markets and clients are seeing large declines in Q4 and in particular L7D,” wrote Twitter’s global business lead in Slack. “Please add any commentary, questions, issues in this thread and I’ll endeavor to raise as many as possible TY!”

An employee accidentally deleted data from a service that sets rate limits for using 140 characters or less on TWITTER. The team that worked on that service left the company in November.

How General Motors ceased to Be in office after Musk announced a Top-Channel Disruption Plan for Twitter on Monday (after Musk and Musk)

Another Twitter employee said General Motors had also asked to pause campaigns. The team asked for a meeting next week to make a case for why they should not be in office, and it looks like the initial reason is elections. Later, this same employee made a statement that GM should be paused till the end of the year. The reason now is brand safety.”

GroupM, the largest media-buying agency in the world, with $60 billion in annual media spend, told its clients that Twitter was a high-risk media buy, according to Digiday and an email obtained by Platformer. Twitter’s agency partnerships lead explained the situation in Slack: “Given the recent senior departures in key operational areas (specifically Security, Trust & Safety, Compliance), GroupM have updated Twitter’s brand safety guidance to high risk. They understand that our policies are in place but feel that it is difficult to scale and manage issues at lightning speeds at the moment.

He promised to let free speech go and has reinstated high-profile accounts that broke the rules. He said he would suppress negative vibes by not giving some accounts of freedom of reach.

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

There are people who know how to fix all those things, but they either no longer work for the company or have been told not to ship any new code. And the question haunting engineers at the end of the day was not whether any new cracks in the service would emerge, but how many, and when.

Tweeting About Hard Core and WeWork: Dan Sheehan, a CEO, and a Success Story About Sleeping When You’re Dead

To Mr. Musk, “hard core” meant “long hours at high intensity,” a workplace where only the most “exceptional performance” would be accepted and a culture in which midnight emails would be just fine. I’d wager that more than a few workaholics, bosses or otherwise, weren’t entirely turned off by the philosophy behind that statement, and yet it immediately conjured images of sweaty Wall Street bankers collapsing at their desks, Silicon Valley wunderkinds sleeping under theirs and the high-intensity, bro-boss cultures of companies like Uber and WeWork, with their accompanying slogans about doing what you love and sleeping when you’re dead. It’s a prepandemic mind-set that, sure, some bosses may long for but many more employees are determined never to go back to.

Many users followed along with short necrologies on the platform. Dan Sheehan was able to excel in his professional and personal lives after gaining a platform onTwitter.

“I built this following for myself, and that got me some of my first job offers just in the copywriting space. That’s how I paid the bills for a very long time,” he says.

Through copywriting, Sheehan was able to dedicate time to writing his novel, a project that was made a reality in part by crowdfunding through his large Twitter following.

“The fact that I was able to keep the lights on, the bills paid, while writing the book, and then have the book reach that audience of over 100,000 people directly, none of that could have been done through traditional means,” he says.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/23/1138605036/twitter-shutdown-elon-activism-trump-career

Tweeting About Brown Reporter Elon Activism: How Did Rasilla and Wendi Muse Get Their Attention, and Why Should They Have Theirs?

There aren’t many ways for brown reporters to get their names out there. At the start of her career, Rasilla posted her work to Twitter, mainly music reviews, and eventually landed a job writing those reviews for a local TV station. From there, her audience grew, and she continued getting job offers, which led her to her job today. Future journalists won’t have the same opportunities as this one.

“It’s just unfortunate that the diversity problem continues, and I don’t know how now, those communities are going to find each other… She says that she could follow people and look up other people’s work on Facebook because of her use of social networking site.

Wendi Muse, a Ph.D candidate with multiple sclerosis, was an active member of ‘Disability Twitter’ for years. She spent the pandemic posting resources to help people get masks, as well as sending some from the personal stockpile she had amassed. Earlier this year, she noticed a greater demand for reliable N95 masks in the immunocompromised community.

Since January, Muse has sent out more than 12,000 masks from his living room. She doesn’t think she would’ve been able to reach that many people if it hadn’t been for her reach on Twitter.

It’s been crucial because it helped me learn more about the disease, as well as reach out to other people who don’t have access to these resources, or who don’t have a lot of money.

For Muse and many other people, the potential end oftwitter would be a big loss as alternative sites have seen a recent influx of new users.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/23/1138605036/twitter-shutdown-elon-activism-trump-career

Shadowbanned LinkedIn and Bloom’s Clients: Arbitration Action on Twitter, the Times of Justice, and a Memorino from Musk

“I think that uneasiness of not knowing is making it more difficult, especially for people who are disabled, elderly, who maybe don’t have social networks in person right now.”

Though Twitter has yet to fully collapse, people have already jumped to other social media platforms, leaving the Twitter town square a little less full than it once was.

And Bloom’s clients are not alone. Last week, Akiva Cohen, a lawyer representing another group of Twitter employees, notified the company that his clients, too, would be filing arbitration suits if the company did not “unequivocally confirm” that former employees would be given the full severance they say Twitter promised them.

“Nobody really expects to go into a workplace setting, especially a new job that you’re really excited about, thinking you’re going to end up suing your employer one day or your employer is going to treat you in a way that deserves legal action,” says Lee.

Musk has previously criticized that filtering technique — nicknamed “shadowbanning” — and alleged that it was unfairly used by Twitter’s past leadership to suppress right-wing accounts. He has said the new Twitter will still downgrade the reach of negative or hateful messages but will be more transparent about it.

“Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal,” Musk tweeted on Thursday. He did not provide additional details or a timetable.

The first release from the “Twitter Files” came earlier this month from journalist Matt Taibbi, who shared internal emails about the company’s decision to temporarily suppress a New York Post story about Hunter Biden and his laptop.

Over the past two weeks, Musk has been releasing internal documents to a handpicked group of journalists who are digging through them and posting excerpts on Twitter.

How the Chase Center Crowd Booed a Right-Leaning Activist: The Way Out of the Culture Wars and Why Trump Has Been Suspicious

Weiss offered several examples of right leaning figures who had moderation actions taken on their accounts, though it was not clear if such actions were taken against left leaning or other accounts.

The reaction prompted Chappelle, who has also been criticized for jokes he’s made aimed at transgender people, to tell Musk that it “sounds like some of those people you fired are in the audience.”

The crowd at the Chase Center loudly booed Musk, who had spent much of the weekend wading into the culture wars, making transphobic statements and seemingly echoing QAnon tropes.

“Booing is not the best thing you can do,” he said. I would like to wish that everyone in this auditorium felt free, and that their pursuit of happiness set them free. Amen.”

Musk on Monday appeared to nod to the incident in response to a user tweeting at him about “a crowd full of boos.” Musk claimed that it “was 90% cheers & 10% boos (except during quiet periods), but, still, that’s a lot of boos, which is a first for me in real life (frequent on Twitter).”

The staff had to agree to a lot of hard work in order to keep the people there awake. San Francisco is looking into the reports that Musk converted some areas of the office building into makeshift bedrooms.

This incident happened at the Chase Center, just one day after Musk waded into the culture wars. The outgoing director of the National Institutes of Health should be sentenced to prison, according to Musk. Musk has been vocal of Fauci’s response to the Covid pandemic, including lockdowns that have affected his Tesla plants.

The former head of trust and safety left his home due to threats caused by the campaign of criticism against him, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Tweets posted by Roth in 2016 and 2017 that were critical of then-President Trump and his supporters were later surfaced and used to argue that Roth and Twitter were biased against the president.

Among Roth’s tweets was one he wrote on Election Day 2016 that read, “I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.”

“We have all made questionable statements, 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.

Around the time Trump was inaugurated in 2017, I said to colleagues in the newsroom where I worked at the time that we shouldn’t cover everything he said or tweeted. Previously, a president’s every word was assumed to be a carefully chosen signal of future policy, and was reported as such. Trump, on the other hand, clearly said many things purely to get a rise out of people. Reporting on them, I argued, just fed the flames. A second editor pushed back. “He’s the president,” he said, or words to that effect. “What he says is news.”

This is the way coverage 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. There was a lot of reporting going on but it was these accounts that dominated the conversation. The public was made to understand what was going on in the country by incompatible narratives about a man in the White House.

This is what’s happening with Musk and Twitter. The relationship between the new owner and the journalists who cover him can be described as a “dysfunctional” one where the least defensible statements can be amplified in a never-ending cycle.

Some conservatives and Musk fans think the existence of internal discussions is a smoking gun. The fact that many mainstream outlets are steering clear of covering the retweets without much skepticism is fueling righteous indignation.

Renée DiResta is a research manager at theStanford Internet Observatory, who studies how narratives spread on social networks, and she said that what she was seeing in the Twitter Files for her were people who are confronting high-stakes, unforeseen events.

They’re a collection of internal emails and Slack chats capturing Twitter employees discussing company policies and fraught moderation calls. So far they’ve covered the decision to ban Trump, Twitter’s short-lived decision to block a news story in October 2020 drawn from material on Hunter Biden’s laptop, and how the company limits the reach of accounts that break its rules, including some well-known right-wing users.

But while the accounts were made publicly viewable on Saturday, the journalists were restricted from posting until they removed the tweets Musk had claimed violated Twitter’s rules.

Take Twitter’s decision right before the 2020 presidential election to briefly block users from sharing a New York Post story alleging shady business dealings by then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, in Ukraine.

The Post said that it got the information from files on Biden’s laptop from Giuliani, and that he was an adviser to Trump. At the time, it was unclear whether that material was authentic. After being burned by the Russian hack and leak of Democratic National Committee emails in 2016, tech companies were on edge over the possibility of a repeat – and so Twitter decided to restrict the Post story.

The company is against sharing hacked material containing private information and has warned anyone who tried to link to the article that it was potentially harmful. It also suspended the New York Post’s own Twitter account until it deleted its tweets about the story. Facebook was alarmed by the article, but didn’t go too far. While it allowed the link to be posted, it limited the amount of posts that could be viewed by the public.

What was a small online riot, with users from all corners thundering against the new policy. Within hours, not only had the company backtracked, but all mentions of the less-than-day-old policy had been scrubbed from Twitter feeds and the company website. It was a whirlwind for anyone who was online to see it. If you know what I mean, I wouldn’t say you missed it.

And it does not show any evidence that there was government involvement in the move to block the New York Post story, despite assertions by Musk and others.

He wrote that he believed there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and that everyone acted according to the best information they had at that time. “Mistakes were made.”

He said he wished the internal files had been “released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider.” He added: “There’s nothing to hide…only a lot to learn from.”

Elon Musk is Using Twitter Files to Discredit Foes and Push Conspiracy Theorem: a Reflection from the Centre for an Informed Public

DiResta said there’s good reason to demand more insight into how social media companies operate. She said decisions are often inscrutable. “These platforms shape public opinion, the question of how they’re moderated and how they’re designed is significant.”

She said outsiders need more than Musk’s selected journalists to get the full picture, and they should focus on charged, highly partisan American political dramas.

It would be helpful to see discussions about the accounts of world leaders who were not kicked off the platform in order to better understand the decision to ban Trump.

The value of what’s been revealed to the public is that it reinforces a perception that you are a partisan individual within the United States, said DiResta.

The Centre for an Informed Public at the University of Washington found that framing the disclosures as secret knowledge worked well on the microBlogging site.

There were threats against both men. The person familiar with the situation said that the family was forced to flee their home.

The current attacks on my former colleagues might be dangerous, but they don’t solve anything. “If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.”

According to one Trust and Safety Council member, the willingness of the CEO to target users working to keep the platform safe is creating a chilling effect.

Musk has hijacked the conversation with his manic releases on the company’s former employees.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/14/1142666067/elon-musk-is-using-the-twitter-files-to-discredit-foes-and-push-conspiracy-theor

Tweeting about the Twitter Disturbation of Jack Sweeney’s Twitter Account: Comments on a Twitter Account Sustained by the Assassination Coordinates

“It is being processed as punitive and sort of owning the last regime, as opposed to saying, ‘Here are things that we can see in these files and here is how it’s going to be done differently under our watch,'” DiResta said.

Sweeney woke up Wednesday morning to a message from Twitter informing him @ElonJet had been permanently suspended. Later in the day his personal account was also shut down by the company.

The billionaire has been in a tangle with Sweeney for a long time. The University of Central Florida student said Musk last year sent him a private message saying he would take the account down due to security concerns. Musk later stopped communicating to Sweeney, who never deleted the account. Their exchange was first reported by tech news outlet Protocol earlier this year.

He was threatening legal action against Jack Sweeney and organizations who supported harm to my family, as well as the 20-year-old college sophomore who started the flight tracking account. It’s unclear what legal action Musk could take against Sweeney for posting flight information on his account.

There was no reply to a 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.

Twitter also shared a thread on its @TwitterSafety account to further explain the changes. It said that it would suspend accounts that were dedicated to live location info. The company says that sharing your live location with someone else is not the same-day location.

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’s Donie O’Sullivan did not share the billionaire’s live location.

CNN asked Sweeney if he would comply with the new policy and he told them he would delay posting the jet’s location for 24 hours.

I was able to send an alternate link to the IG version of the tracker as my ironclad filters did not currently work for this. It seems that despite Musk said in November that he wouldn’t ban the account following his plane, Twitter is making more changes to its policies against Sweeney and his accounts.

Some accounts that track billionaires, including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, have been suspended. Sweeney operates many of them, as noted within his Discord, and has seen about 30 of his accounts banned, he told The New York Times’ Ryan Mac.

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.

The Tesla CEO of the electric car company is under mass ban ban ban: Donie O’Sullivan, a reporter from the Mastodon website, and a spokesperson for Musk

Musk was questioned in court on Nov. 16 about how he splits his time among Tesla and his other companies, including SpaceX and Twitter. Musk had to testify in the Delaware’s Court of Chancery over the shareholder’s challenge to his compensation plan as CEO of the electric car company.

Musk flew to New Orleans just before a meeting with the French President and then to East Coast cities just before a big event.

The mass bans are questioned and unfortunate, and neither The Times nor Ryan have received an explanation about why it happened. We hope that all of the journalists’ accounts are restored and that we get an explanation for the action.

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.

“We believe banning journalists without consistent defensible standards or clear communication in an environment where many people believe free speech is at risk is too much for a majority of consumers to continue supporting Mr. Musk/TSLA, particularly people ideologically aligned with climate change mitigation,” Rusch wrote.

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 changes came after Musk reinstated previous Twitter rule-breakers and stopped enforcing the platform’s policies prohibiting Covid-19 misinformation.

CNN said in a statement that the suspension of Donie O’ Sullivan is concerning but not surprising.

Those reports were confirmed Thursday evening by a CNN reporter who was blocked from sharing a Mastodon profile URL and was given an automated error message that said Twitter or its partners had identified the site as “potentially harmful.”

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.

In his post on Substack, he said he wasn’t sure why he was suspended. He said on Wednesday that he had linked to a Facebook page for the jet- tracking account.

Free Press: Why the EU Digital Services Act hasn’t changed in 18 years, and why Social Media is not a Tool for the Reform of the Media Freedom Act

Editor’s Note: Nora Benavidez is the senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at Free Press, a media and technology justice advocacy organization. The Free Press is a founding member of the coalition. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

The freedom of the press cannot be turned on and off, says Germany’s foreign ministry. “As of today these journalists are no longer able to follow us, to comment or criticize. There is a problem with that account.

The EU Digital Services Act requires respect for media freedom and fundamental rights. The media freedom act reinforced this, and Musk should have been aware of that, according to Jourov.

Thierry Breton, a top EU official, warned Musk in late November that the social media platform must take significant steps to comply with the bloc’s content moderation laws.

The Future of Twitter is Up in the Air: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls — The Free, Open, Respectful Public

CNN said in a statement that its future on Twitter is up in the air. “The impulsive and unjustified suspension of a number of reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is concerning but not surprising,” a spokesperson said. Everyone who uses social media should be concerned byTwitter’s increasing instability and volatility. The relationship will be reexamined based on the response that we have received from the micro-blogging site.

Sally Buzbee, the Washington Post’s executive editor said that the suspension was “arbitrary and undermined Musk’s promise to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech.”

The documents show that the company underestimated the threat its platform posed in other parts of the world, and acted forcefully against threats to American democracy, despite Weiss’ belief that Trump was treated unfairly. If they had uniformly implemented their rules around the world, it would have been the same ban as Trump’s.

“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.

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 — The book, “And How we Can Reclaim It”, will be published in the year 2024. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. CNN has an opinion on it.

A healthy town square should also be a place where people can find reliable information. But researchers at Tufts University recently found that tweets refuting hate and misinformation were “an order of magnitude greater” on Twitter before Musk took over.

It’s clear that we can’t rely on Musk’s Twitter to provide a safe, open forum. We need new, non-profit social networks run by boards responsible for considering the public’s interest when making critical decisions about things like content moderation and community standards. 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. Some of these professionals should work together to create new social platforms designed to provide the truly open town hall we so desperately need.

Musk has not commented on the results of the poll. Musk was absent from his social media accounts for a very long time on Monday. But even if Musk doesn’t immediately honor his own poll, the Tesla CEO will likely only continue to face pressure from the carmaker’s investors to hand the reins to someone else sooner than later. Tesla stock is down 34% since his deal to buy Twitter closed and more than 63% since the start of this year, as investors worry about his many competing priorities. For years, Musk mused about finding a successor to run the company with no obvious progress.

The conference chat on Thursday night went down after Musk left a session where he was questioned about the reporters’ ousting. Musk later tweeted that Spaces had been taken offline to deal with a “Legacy bug.” Spaces came back late Friday.

A former congressional candidate stated that accounts were being reinstated at an increasingly fast pace, which led to Musk announcing that Friday would be “freedom Friday”. The Gateway Pundit editor Jim Hoft was unsuspended on Friday, as noted by the reporter for the corporation, Shayan Sardarizadeh. This appears to be part of Musk making good on his promise to give most previously-suspended accounts “general amnesty,” which he also claims is occurring due to the results of a poll.

“Again, the suspension occurred with no warning, process or explanation — this time as our reporter merely sought comment from Musk for a story,” Buzbee said. By midday Sunday, Lorenz’s account was restored, as was the tweet she thought had triggered her suspension.

Most of the accounts were back early Saturday. One exception was Business Insider’s Linette Lopez, who was suspended after the other journalists, also with no explanation, she told The Associated Press.

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 every few weeks and that address is not current, Lopez said.

The Fate of Twitter: Why We’re So Close to Wall Street and How We’ve Been There, and What Will Mastodon Do?

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.

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 a statement to multiple media outlets, including AP, about how they had spoken to Musk’s representatives about the alleged stalking incident.

The old regime at Twitter was governed by its own biases and whims, and it looks like the new one has the same problem, she said.

If the suspensions lead to the exodus of media organizations that are highly active on Twitter, the platform would be changed at the fundamental level, said Lou Paskalis, longtime marketing and media executive and former Bank of America head of global media.

CBS briefly shut down its activity on Twitter in November due to “uncertainty” about new management, but media organizations have largely remained on the platform.

“Now we want reporters to look for news on the main tent pole ofTwitter, since we all know news on the micro-bruch,” he said. “Driving journalists off Twitter is the biggest self-inflicted wound I can think of.”

Advertisers have already cut back on spending on Twitter because of uncertainty about the platform’s direction, and the suspensions may be the biggest red flag yet.

Mastodon had 3.4 million users on Thursday, but by Friday had over 6 million users. Many of the Mastodon networks were used to solicit donations as disgruntled TWo followers strained computing resources. “Instances” are networks which are crowd-funded. The platform is designed to be ad-free.

Twitter rebounces after Musk says he no longer works at the Singular Intelligence Research Institute (SIGINTS)

O Sullivan and Harwell told CNN on Saturday that they had chose to appeal the decision, even though they did not agree to take the tweets down.

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.”

Most people voted in favor of the poll asking if Musk should step down as head of a service he’s built.

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.

After putting his site at odds with both the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz and his own supporters of Silicon Valley venture capitalist Paul Graham, there was an apology and a promise.

All Musk needs from his captive audience is some attention, with a promise of votes on major policy changes in the future.

If his tenure as CEO ended the same way he started it, it would be appropriate and timely.

Since Musk disclosed in early April that he had taken a major stake in Twitter, the Tesla’s shares have plunged by about 58%, a selloff that has erased nearly $800 billion of market value. In the past year, Musk has unloaded more than $4 billion worth of his company’s stock.

Over 17 million votes were cast in the unofficial referendum on his chaotic leadership of Twitter that has been marked by mass layoffs, the replatforming of suspended accounts, the suspension of journalists, and whiplash policy changes made and reversed in real time.

Musk promised not to make any more major policy changes without an online survey of users, even though that decision generated so much immediate criticism.

The action to block competitors was Musk’s latest attempt to crack down on certain speech after he shut down a Twitter account last week that was tracking the flights of his private jet.

The banned platforms included mainstream websites such as Facebook and Instagram, and upstart rivals Mastodon, Tribel, Nostr, Post and former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social. The blacklist included seven websites, but not others like Parler or TikTok.

A test case was the prominent venture capitalist Paul Graham, who in the past has praised Musk but on Sunday told his 1.5 million Twitter followers that this was the “last straw” and to find him on Mastodon. After his account was suspended, Musk promised to reverse the policy which he did just hours earlier.

In a public conversation on Sunday, Musk expressed pessimism about the future of the company he’s been CEO of for over a year.

In a letter to Tesla

            (TSLA) Chair Robyn Denholm, the Massachusetts Democrat argued Tesla

            (TSLA) shareholders may be hurt by its CEO’s ownership of Tesla

            (TSLA) and questioned whether the electric car maker’s board is doing enough to address the issues it poses.

Noting that the board has legal obligations, Warren asked it to respond to a number of questions by January 3.

The risks of Musk having ownership of Twitter and being the CEO of the company caused the rating to be lowered.

The decision to ban CNN reporter Donie O’ Sullivan, which was made last week, was cited as a catalyst for the downgrade.

A Conversation with Ross Calacanis, Founder of Twitter and Tesla, and the CEO Heavily Influenced by Musk at the 2023 Silicon Bowl

Ross Gerber, a shareholder in both Twitter and Tesla, said over the weekend that he hopes Musk finds a CEO for Twitter during the first quarter of 2023.

Calacanis, who emerged in the tech world as a reporter during the dot com boom, is an early-stage investor who has backed well-known companies such as Uber and Robinhood. He has also launched several media properties and hosts two podcasts (one in partnership with Sacks).

On Sunday night, Calacanis asked, “Who would like the most miserable job in tech and media?” Who is insane enough to run a social networking site? The question Calacanis posed to his followers was “Do I or Sacks run the company separately or together?” The majority of respondents were in favor of other.

The original founding team of PayPal, which included Sacks, Musk and other people, used to manage a social network. He sold Yammer to Microsoft in 2012 for more than a billion dollars.

Sacks has been particularly unflinching in echoing Musks’ talking points, whether it’s justifying a feud with Apple or attempting to stir up outrage about a Twitter account that posted publicly available information about the whereabouts of Musk’s private jet. Sacks responded to a question regarding his disagreements with Musk with one word: chess.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/19/tech/twitter-alternate-ceo/index.html

Krishnan, the Elephant in the Room: Addressing Musk’s Tweeting Problem on Twitter During Trump’s Pre-World Cup Reheating

On paper, Krishnan may be the most obvious choice of the group. He is well-versed in working on the product and worked previously on features of the platform such as search and the home timeline. He also previously worked on mobile ad products for Snap and Facebook.

He has invested in some coins that could provide him with the experience to fulfill Musk’s desire to make it more than just a social media app.

Krishnan is the least controversial member of Musk’s current leadership team which could help divert attention from recent negative publicity for the company.

Some Twitter users have speculated about other possible leaders for the social media company, including Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was spotted watching the World Cup with Musk over the weekend.

One of the largest investors in Twitter is the Saudi Royal Family. Prior to working as an advisor in Trump’s White House, Kushner worked for his family’s real estate development company, and last year he said he would leave politics and start an investment firm. Kushner also previously owned the weekly New York newspaper, the New York Observer.

Given Musk’s propensity for tweeting, and his rapid decisions after previous polls, many expected he would have addressed the elephant in the room by now. But he hasn’t. In fact, Musk spent most of Monday conspicuously quiet, refraining from tweeting for a remarkable 18-hour period.

The Evil Billionaire Attack: A Case Study in the Defavor of the Platform and the Information Security of the Internet (The Musk Debacle)

In the field of information security, there’s a kind of vulnerability known as the evil maid attack whereby an untrusted party gains physical access to important hardware, such as the housekeeping staff coming into your hotel room when you’ve left your laptop unattended, thereby compromising it. We have a newAnalog which is capable of damaging systems and leaking data. If you like, you can call it the evil billionaire attack. The weapon is money, and more specifically, the likelihood that when the moment arrives you won’t have enough of it to make a difference. The call is coming from inside the house.

The reason this strategy works is that most ideas of any consequence are owned by people with more money than you, and then whenever possible they string them together into a network with the specific intent of making the gravity inescapable. The term platform can be used to describe technical systems with components that can be used to compose new functionality, as well as being particularly appealing when those bits can be monetized each time they are used, according to the power sources propelling the technology industry.

A platform is better than an app, or so the theory goes, because you can use a platform to build multiple apps, or enable other developers and companies to build apps from which you might take a 30 percent cut. Whatever its advantages, the Twitter debacle should spell the end of the proprietary platform as a serious technical undertaking, a high profile illustration that they are too risky to trust no matter how strong the code might be. The liability of intellectual property that makes things proprietary is also a liability, as it allows billionaires to kill a company if they choose. Musk taking over the company is a case study in how to destroy something, a model for the billionaire who wants to build a social media empire. Our communication channel is at risk because of the vaccine.

The problem is fought by the ledgers on the deepest level possible. It would be vastly more difficult, or perhaps impossible, for Musk to kill off a blockchain so long as a handful of users objected enough to continue operating independent nodes. Duplicating across many computers means the risk of losing access is infinitesimal; the blockchain is its own API. This comes with different complications, of course, but losing information outright due to a hostile party is not one of them. For example, when the Hic et Nunc marketplace for NFTs went under in late 2021, another version relaunched, putting a new wrapper around the same content. It’s a shared resource that causes interoperability, almost like organic self-defense.

We agree that Musk needs to step aside. But his replacement as CEO needs to be someone who understands at the most basic level that this social media platform will succeed only when it puts the health and safety of its users before the whims of one erratic and reckless billionaire.

Trump’s Twitter Outage and the Power of the Voice: Trump and the Executive Chairman’s Failure to Return the Sustained Twitter Blue Feature

Neo-Nazis like Andrew Anglin and right-wing activists like Laura Loomer were allowed to resume their activities thanks to the earlier suspension of their accounts.

The new leadership needs to reverse their decision to allow misinformation to spread across the social network. The blue checkMark feature allows verified users to post longer videos and have their content prioritized at the top of replies, mentions and searches. They need to cease Musk’s plan on accounts that were suspended before he took over.

After considering the results of a poll, Musk decided on the side of the majority when it came to reinstating Donald Trump’s account. The voice of the people is the God’s voice, he said through his social media accounts.

He went ahead and did it when people voted on another poll to give general amnesty to suspended accounts. He also heeded user votes in a poll to restore the accounts of tech journalists that he had suspended on Friday.

While it’s unclear how he would restrict voting to only those who pay for the company’s subscription service, such a change could dramatically reduce the number of Twitter users who could vote in polls. It would also skew those who can vote to the users who are willing to pay up for Twitter Blue, which includes the controversial paid verification feature Musk pushed to introduce. Musk’s Monday tweet immediately prompted comparisons to poll taxes.

Over a matter of days, Twitter launched, and then was forced to un-launch, a paid verification feature that was instantly manipulated by satirical accounts impersonating verified major brands, athletes and other public figures on the platform.

The new policy of the world’s second largest social media company was met with a mixture of shock and surprise, after it said that it would no longer allow links to other social media sites.

In many ways, Monday’s outage represented the culmination of Musk’s leadership at the company so far. In a single-minded effort to cut costs on his $44 billion purchase, he has been slashing the staff and reducing Twitter’s free offerings.

Let me explain: I’m lucky enough to know a lot of creatives as well as a lot of journalists and tech workers. When I woke up on Sunday morning, I got a warning from artists who were afraid they would not be able to use the website for their work due to a ban on linking to their own portfolios. I read horror stories from authors who were terrified that the Linktrees their publishers asked them to create to promote their books, reviews, and Goodreads profiles were suddenly bannable offenses on Twitter.

When we at WIRED talk about “platforms and power,” this is what we’re talking about. The steward of any platform is responsible for setting and enforceing the policies and guidelines for that platform’s safe and legal use. That isn’t in question. Without such rules, online spaces can go bad fast. When platforms decide to harm their users through policy decisions and when the changes are large enough to force users to adapt, that is an issue.

My friends on the video game streaming service interrupted their streams for a while to talk about the news, worried that it would be hard for viewers to find them if they didn’t already have a link to theirs in their bio. All of these things created the potential for lost income for people who, I would argue, need it more than the folks who made these policy decisions. In Silicon Valley, the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that creators have is what everyone claims to want to foster and empower.

Elon Musk’s Twitter needs every penny. With millions of dollars in allegedly unpaid rent and bills, plus $13 billion owed to lenders who financed his takeover, there is “still much work to do” if the company is to avoid bankruptcy, Musk said last month.

Eric Frohnhoefer, a California software engineer fired in November after confronting Musk via tweet, says he has not heard a peep about returning his company-issued Apple MacBook Pro M1 Pro laptop from 2021 (8/10 WIRED Recommends). “It’s still sitting in a closet,” he says. He was locked out of his laptop like the laptops of thousands of employees that Musk has let go or resigned from.

Businesses typically want their devices back quickly from departing staff to protect proprietary data and save money, by cutting leases for the equipment or through reuse and resale. There are exceptions. Snap and Airbnb confirmed that they allowed workers laid off during the pandemic to keep their corporate laptops.

The ex-employees said they sent gear back after reaching out to the company for boxes. Others within the past few days received generic emails asking them to fill out a “Twitter Device Collection Survey,” multiple people say. But four out of five who spoke with WIRED had not received the email themselves and are still babysitting Musk’s property.

The address that is asked for in the survey is not the only place that a box for returnable items can be sent to.

When WIRED wrote to a Twitter email address for equipment returns that was shared by an ex-worker, an unsigned response came back after about three hours linking to the form and saying that further instructions and a box would arrive within 30 days of submission. One laid-off worker claims they are not rushing to fill it out. Elon can wait.

The CEO of Twitter Fires Engineers: Why Twitter is More Active than It Seems, and Why Users Become More Engaged

An even more obvious reason for the decline in engagement is Twitter’s increasingly glitchy product, which has baffled users with its disappearing mentions, shifting algorithmic priorities, and tweets inserted seemingly at random from accounts they don’t follow. On Wednesday, the company had its first major outage since Musk took over, with users being told that they were over their daily limit for using the service.

“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. I have around 100 million followers, and I only get a few thousand impressions.

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account along with a Google Trends chart. They told him that in search rankings, Musk was at its highest point in popularity. Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers investigated whether Musk’s reach was restricted or not and found no evidence of bias against him.

Twitter sources say the view count feature itself may be contributing to the decline in engagement and, therefore, views. The like and retweet buttons were made smaller to accommodate the display of views, making them harder to easily tap.

“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.

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

From dumpster fire to dumpster fire: An employee’s perspective on Twitter elon-musk and how they talk with colleagues at the San Francisco headquarters

The employee said that they had not seen much in the way of cogent strategy. Most of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires, performing impossible tasks, and improving efficiency, without proper guidelines for the end results. We move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective.

“There’s times he’s just awake late at night and says all sorts of things that don’t make sense,” one employee said. He will come to us and say that one person can’t do it on the platform and then we have to run around looking for a different use case. It doesn’t make any sense.”

The San Francisco headquarters, whose landlord has sued Twitter for nonpayment of rent, has a melancholy air. The standard greeting when people pass each other in the halls is where are they interviewing and where are they looking for a job. Employees have to reserve beds in advance on the eighth floor.

The employee stated that the people don’t discuss work things anymore. “It’s just heartbreaking. I have more conversations with my colleagues on Signal and WhatsApp than I do on Slack. Before the transition, it was not uncommon in the team channel to talk about what everybody did that weekend. There’s none of that anymore.”

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

Identifying the Most Fireable Response to Questions in the Conveners — An Employee’s View on Twitter Fires Engineering Reach ftc

One employee explained that when they are asked a question, they run it through their heads and decide what is the most fireable response.

That is not true for everyone at the company. There are a few people who are trying to take advantage of the clear vacuum that exists and they are just ass-kissers and brown-nosers.

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

The employee said it would be beneficial if the company learnt how to put more thought into some of the decisions. “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’t be the smartest person in the room about everything, all the time.”

“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 the people on my team are doing a lot of hardcore interview prep and would jump at the chance to walk away.

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

Twitter as a playground for anti-Semitism: Rep. Jared Moskowitz in a hearing on the ftc anti-Hate policy

There is also a sense of unease about how recent changes will be reviewed by regulators. As part of an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, Twitter committed to following a series of steps before pushing out changes, including creating a project proposal and conducting security and privacy reviews.

“What happened on Twitter directly after the hearing proves my exact point that antisemitism is real and Twitter has become a hate-filled playground for Nazis and anti-Semites,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz told CNN about the hateful comments he received.

Democrats on the subpanel used their allotted time to grill the former executives of the company who testified about their policies for policing hate on the platform. During his questioning, Moskowitz also rebuked former President Donald Trump for hosting white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago last year. He brought a large copy of a hateful post that Fuentes had tweeted at Moskowitz, telling the room, “No, not all Republicans are Nazis, but I gotta tell you, Nazis seem really comfortable with Donald Trump. I have some questions about that.

The November 30 National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin warned of domestic terror threats to multiple groups, including the Jewish community, but Moskowitz said it showed his heightened concern. The Department of Homeland Security says threat actors are now mobilized to violence and there is an ongoing threat to the Jewish community.

“Antisemitism has no place on any social media platform that doesn’t want to further the harassment and exclusion of marginalized communities,” Greenblatt told CNN Thursday. It is unclear if the degree to which the anti-Hate policy is being enforced is being done.

Sarah Oh lost her job at Twitter during the first round of layoffs, and then joined a friend to build a rival service.

T2 was launched with Gabor Cselle, who was previously atTwitter andgoogle. Like Twitter, it offers a social feed of posts with 280-character limits. But the key selling point, according to Oh, is its focus on safety.

“We really do want to create an experience that allows people to share what they want to share without fearing risk of things like abuse and harassment, and we feel like we’re really well positioned to deliver on that,” Oh told CNN.

Artifact vs. TWo: Twitter as a News Platform and its Impact on the Asia-Pacific Region and the Chinese-language Disinformation Campaign

Two of the newer entrants in the markets are a startup backed by one of Musk’s investors and an app that was created by former tweets employees. While some apps like T2 strongly resemble Twitter, others take a different approach.

A description of Artifact, a news feed powered by artificial intelligence, was compared to that of the micro-blogging site. 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 the apps that are out there are vying for a chance to make it easier for users to find and stay in touch with their friends and family.

Replacing Twitter, with its robust network of journalists, politicians and entertainers and sizable audience of users obsessed with real-time news, may be a challenge. While apps like Cohost have seen renewed momentum, their audiences remain a small fraction of the size of Twitter, which had more than 200 million daily active users as of last year.

“People refer to me when they say they are a TWo alternative, which I think is an important distinction from a TWo replacement,” Kaplan said.

“If people leave, where do they go? By all accounts, there is no platform right now that is able to take on the function of Twitter, and nothing is really prepared for it,” said Karen North, a clinical professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. You don’t have a platform that represents people from all walks of life on the same platform.

The systems were routinely monitored and corrected for their mistakes. 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 divisionhead for the Asia-Pacific region, which includes the Chinese activist accounts, was laid off in January. Twitter’s resources dedicated to supervising content moderation for Chinese-language posts have been drastically reduced, the people said.

So when some Twitter systems recently failed to differentiate between a Chinese disinformation campaign and genuine accounts, that led to some accounts of Chinese activists and dissidents being difficult to find, the people said.

“It’s tough being a Twitter user nowadays,” said Jenn Takahashi, who runs the Twitter account @bestofdyingtwit, which has logged the platform’s shortcomings since Mr. Musk took the helm. She said she also has had difficulty seeing tweets from people she follows, with notifications “either delayed or sent twice,” and direct messages becoming cluttered with “so much spam.”

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 was Musk on Twitter? How many Twitter employees quit or why he didn’t quit? The case of Musk and the Chowdhury team

Twitter has long been banned in China. It has been a place for Chinese dissidents, human rights activists and overseas Chinese communities to gather to discuss issues that aren’t allowed in mainland China.

Researchers wanted to make other social networks better by making the knowledge discovered at Twitter more accessible. “I feel very passionate that companies should talk more openly about the problems that they have and try to lead the charge, and show people that it’s like a thing that is doable,” says Kyra Yee, lead author of the moderation paper.

“We were rightfully worried about what this leadership change would entail,” says Rumman Chowdhury, who was then engineering director on Twitter’s Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability group, known as META. There’s a lot of misconception as to what ethics teams do and what they really are, as being part of a liberal agenda versus actually being scientific work.

The team on another study worked through the night to make final edits before hitting Publish on Arxiv the day Musk took Twitter, one researcher says, speaking anonymously out of fear of retaliation from Musk. “We knew the runway would shut down when the Elon jumbo jet landed,” the source says. “We knew we needed to do this before the acquisition closed. We can stick a flag in the ground and say it exists.”

The fear was not overstated. Most of Twitter’s researchers lost their jobs or resigned under Musk. On the META team, Musk laid off all but one person on November 4, and the remaining member, cofounder and research lead Luca Belli, quit later in the month.

He is using the platform to push engagement around his content, says Katja Muoz, research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations. While Musk’s use of algorithmic heating appears to be driven by insecurity, the fact that he can do it is alarming. Muoz says thatSingular acts are funny. I think it is important to take a second and think about the consequences of his actions.

Muoz assumed that his dependence on foreign investment and reliance on raw materials was a result of the Modi documentary. It’s unlikely that we will ever get hard evidence on which Musk talks to or whether he is asked to do something, but looking at the visibility and engagement on or lack of topics might hint at these dynamics.

What Happened on Platformer? The Twitter Outage How It Happenened Engineer API Shutdown And Its Effects On Users and Developers

The story behind how the website broke suggests there are likely to be similar issues in the near future as it breaks in novel new ways.

Users were vociferous about the issues with the outage, and often used images that nobody could see because they wouldn’t load.

The change in question was part of a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API, Platformer can now confirm. On February 1st, the company announced it will no longer support free access to its API, which effectively ended the existence of third-party clients and dramatically limited the ability of outside researchers to study the network. The company has been building a new paid API for developers to work with.

“A small API change had massive ramifications,” Musk tweeted later in the day, after Twitter investor Marc Andreessen posted a screenshot showing that the company’s API failures were trending on the site. “The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will need a complete rewrite.

Some current employees sympathize with the idea that part of the blame for the company’s problems is on the technical failures that preceded Musk’s ownership. The fail whale is an icon of the old social media site.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/6/23627875/twitter-outage-how-it-happened-engineer-api-shut-down

After Musk’s Acquisition, Social Media Engineer Michelle Armstrong, a Silicon Valley Employee, Was Out Of Work Seven Months After the Deal With Musk

A single engineer could be staffed on a major project that is linked to several critical interdependent systems that both the users and employees depend on.

Within weeks of Musk’s acquisition occurring, Ali was laid off as part of the first round of mass job cuts under the new owner.

Ali said that he was really happy and loved his team. Although she was pregnant, she didn’t make sense to leave because maternity leave wouldn’t be guaranteed at a different company.

For seven months we were on the Twitter-coaster. During this time, he was out, it wasn’t happening.

“I wasn’t a software engineer or an executive,” said Michele Armstrong, a former senior audio video engineer, who was laid off seven months after joining the company. “I made a decent wage in San Francisco, but if I don’t find another job, I will have to move out of my apartment because I was paid just enough to live in San Francisco … but I wasn’t one of the people that could sock away a bunch of money.”

The day that news broke that Musk had agreed to purchase the company, she was in an orientation session at her new job. The company was very welcoming. I didn’t have that anywhere else in tech, and I was respected.

“I thought, well then, I don’t have anything to worry about since I’m a significant contributor,” she said, adding that she had previously considered starting to look for another job. and it kind of changed my mind.”

“It would have been really good to have spent the time in the substantially better tech market while it still existed,” de Caires said. “The market is hot garbage right now. I was sitting down earlier this week after a wave of rejections and I was thinking maybe I should join the fire service or something, because the tech jobs are not happening.

Some former employees say the company’s severance promises had encouraged them to stay at the company last summer amid the uncertainty around Musk’s acquisition, only to regret that as the tech industry entered its most severe downturn in recent memory later in the year.

In lawsuits and arbitration claims, numerous former Twitter employees have alleged that the company had promised if layoffs did occur following Musk’s takeover, the severance benefits provided would be at least equivalent to what had been offered prior to his acquisition, including two-months base pay, three months accelerated equity vesting, annual bonuses and some continued health insurance coverage.

De Caires said that they lost half their compensation due to the fact that part of the severance package was not equity vested. They and other workers are now hoping to recoup those alleged losses through their arbitration claims.

What Have You Been Doing lately? Musk, the billionaire who grew up in Reykjavik, Sweden, was forced to work for 20 years in a wheelchair

Musk responded in a tweet asking, “what work have you been doing?” Musk appeared to doubt several points when the list of tasks was given to him. He said that pictures or it didn’t happen. The billionaire said that he did no work, claimed to have a disability that made typing hard, and it was an excuse.

Thorleifsson clarified in a tweet that he has muscular dystrophy, a degenerative disease that he says put him in a wheelchair more than 20 years ago. Thorleifsson, who founded a digital branding company acquired by Twitter in 2021, has been recognized by the United Nations and the president of Iceland for spearheading a charitable effort to build 1,000 wheelchair ramps around Reykjavik to increase the city’s accessibility.

“I’m not able to do manual work (which in this case means typing or using a mouse) for extended periods of time without my hands starting to cramp,” he said. I can write for an hour or two at a time. This wasn’t a problem in Twitter 1.0 since I was a senior director and my job was mostly to help teams move forward, give them strategic and tactical advice.”

Thorleifsson did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment. The public relations department is among the areas that has been slashed by the company.

It happens all the time. They usually tell people about it but that’s seemingly the optional part at Twitter now,” he said. “Next up though is finding out if Twitter will pay me what they owe me per my contract.”