Musk pledges to accept results of the poll he lost on whether to remain as a CEO of the micro-blogging site
Warren Musk on Twitter: Managing the Company’s Shared Resources and Social Media Under the Influence of the Decline and Insurrection
According to Warren, Musk may decide to run the company to maximize badly-needed revenue even if that means great deals for competitors and injury to his own company. “Or, perhaps the opposite will occur. Mr. Musk could subtly change the way he writes on social media to benefitTesla, for example, and that would cause more attention to the company.
There are files that show internal emails, chat rooms, and other material prior to Musk’s ownership. They revealed incomplete glimpses of how Twitter officials deliberated over high-profile decisions, including blocking the Post article and banning then-President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. They also showed the degree to which government officials, law enforcement and politicians regularly communicate with Twitter, along with other tech platforms, by flagging content that may violate the company’s policies and sharing threat assessments.
Robert Miller, chair of corporate finance and law at the University of Iowa College of Law, says Musk’s attempt to escape the agreement he had signed was always “an uphill climb,” citing how the entrepreneur had switched from arguing over the contract to accusing Twitter of fraud. He says the company must have committed a huge fraud in which no evidence has surfaced for this argument to have worked.
Musk accepted a seat on the board a day later and immediately proposed that the platform “unwind permanent bans on users.”
“Frankly, I hate doing mgmt (management) stuff. I kinda don’t think anyone should be the boss of anyone. The co- founder of six companies wrote he loves helping solve technical/product design problems.
Last month, he apologized for the mass layoffs that started when Musk became the CEO, saying they were necessary because he grew the company too fast. Dorsey said earlier in the year that he trusted Musk’s “mission to extend the light of consciousness” and that he believed Musk was the “singular solution” to run the company. He has challenged Musk’s statements outside of his latest post, while he does not seem to have fully walked back that statement yet.
The Cache of Twitter and the Trump-Motov-Twiss Agreement: Are Text Messages Funnel than Evidence?
The cache of text messages shows some things, but legal experts who are watching the case say that there is more entertainment value than new evidence.
The text messages support the idea that his interest in the platform was based on its role in public debate and free speech issues, not because he thought he could make the company profitable, Lipton said.
At a Tuesday hearing, lawyers for tweets said that Musk and his financial adviser erased evidence about the reasons he wanted to pull out of the deal.
Twitter also showed that Musk’s own data scientists mostly confirmed the company’s estimates about how many human users versus spam accounts are on the platform, which is key to his argument.
Twitter sued him to follow through with the agreement, alleging that Musk was using the bot argument as a pretense to get out of a deal for which he had developed buyer’s remorse. In the weeks after the deal was announced, much of the stock market, including social media companies, declined amid concerns about rising inflation and a looming recession. The downturn also hit Tesla and, in turn, Musk’s personal net worth.
Musk had said in public statements that he could walk away from the $44 billion agreement, but legal experts were not surprised by his reversal.
The Musk Trial is still going to take place: Does it matter what you think? An update on Musk’s deposition of Musk in the Delaware Chancery Court
The trial is still going to take place on October 17th. “The parties have not filed a stipulation to stay this action, nor has any party moved for a stay,” the Delaware Chancery Court judge overseeing the case, Kathaleen McCormick, wrote on Wednesday as reported by the Wall Street Journal. The trial is going to begin on October 17 and I am continuing to press on. It is almost certain that the trial will be put on hold given the current negotiations.
Musk’s decision to fold may be influenced by the possibility that his trial will damage him. The entrepreneur watched the internet chew over a tranche of his personal text messages with major figures in Silicon Valley last week. Miller said that this would likely have been a very embarrassing deposition.
The Financial Times, citing unnamed sources, reported that Musk would not be deposed in person on Thursday morning, after the two sides agreed to a delay. Musk was scheduled to be deposed for two days in Tesla’s home of Austin, Texas starting at 9:30AM, ahead of the trial’s scheduled start on October 17th. The deposition was originally scheduled for September 28, but was changed due to exposure concerns.
Conservatives have been targeted by several alternative social networks in the past because they claim thatmainstream services force them to restrict their speech. These services include Trump’s Truth Social and Parler, which Kanye West recently said he would acquire. Musk may be able to fulfill his dreams for free speech by tweaking existing policies, but it is not certain if changing the policies would makeTwitter more attractive to users who have moved to fringe services. Depending on Musk’s efforts to loosen content restrictions, he could run into regulatory issues in Europe.
It’s a theme he reiterated both in public, telling Twitter employees at an all-staff meeting that the platform should allow all legal speech, and in private, texting investor Antonio Gracias that “Free speech matters most when it’s someone you hate spouting what you think is bull****.”
“Even slightly loosening content moderation on the platform is sure to spook advertisers, many of whom already find Twitter’s brand safety tools to be lacking compared with other social platforms,” Enberg said.
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.
On those sites, he said, “the feature is the bug — where being able to say and do the kinds of things that are prohibited from more mainstream social media platforms is actually why everyone gravitates to them. And what we see there is that they are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.”
@ElonJet, an account run by college student Jack Sweeney that uses public flight-tracking data to tweet the location of the entrepreneur’s private jet, is at the heart of these policy changes. Sweeney has said Musk previously offered him money to take down the account, but Musk said in November, after he took control of Twitter, that he would allow it to stay online. CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post are some of the organizations that suspended reporters. The site is “potentially harmful.” links to Mastodon have been blocked.
“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).
Alex Jones, who has been kicked off for abusive behavior in 2018, could be in line for a lift on his ban.
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.
Musk might leave Facebook if he’s re-Platformed: A presentation on his Twitter fortunes and digital ad revenue
Facebook might not ban the former president when his ban expires in January 2020, but it could allow Trump and others to come back.
If Trump is re-Platformed, it’s easier for the Meta president and the CEO to say, “Well, he’s already back on the social media platform.” We might as well let him back on Facebook,'” said Nicole Gill, executive director of Accountable Tech, a progressive advocacy group.
It’s expected that Musk will shake things up internally at the social network. Agrawal, who succeeded Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey in the CEO role less than a year ago, will likely head for the exit, potentially with a $42 million payout.
Musk’s texts reveal that an initially cautiously friendly relationship between the two men when Musk first invested quickly soured after Agrawal told Musk that his tweets criticizing the platform were “not helping me make Twitter better.”
That is likely welcome news to the billionaire, who has complained that Twitter’s costs outstrip revenues and has implied the company is overstaffed for its size.
Costs and staff cuts are only two pieces of the equation. According to an investor presentation obtained by The New York Times, Musk told investors in the spring that he would increase the number of users by 931 million in one year, which would make it the second-most popular internet service after Facebook.
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 appearing alongside extremists and that they aren’t subsidizing or branding with things that could turn off potential customers.” he said.
The Twitter scandal that followed Musk during the Y2U deal: A new reversal of fortunes for tech giants, CEOs, and the Pope
What exactly he meant is, as always, anyone’s guess. In the summer, Musk told the staff that he wanted the company to go after the Chinese “super-app” of everything on your phone.
This strategy has been used by American tech companies, but so far, Chinese-style super-apps have not caught on in the United States.
It is not clear which agencies may be carrying out the probe, and Twitter did not identify what specific actions by Musk US officials may be investigating. Authorities are looking into the conduct of Musk with respect to the deal, according to a filing by the social media company.
The company claimed in court that Musk and his legal team didn’t produce communications with the Securities and Exchange Commission and slide presentations to the FTC as part of the litigation over whether Musk can leave the deal.
On January 8, Vijaya Gadde, who was the then head of legal, policy and trust at Twitter, asked if Donald Trump’s “American patriots” statement was being used as a code to inflame the electorate. Twitter’s “scaled enforcement” team also got involved with the evaluation, and questioned whether the Trump tweets could be considered glorification of violence, the screenshots show, which would violate the company’s policies.
“Twitter did not ask Zatko to torch his own documents, much less demand that he do so,” Twitter’s filing read. Zatko had notebooks that had no idea what information they contained.
It is a stunning reversal of fortunes for Musk and the company, as well as for some of the world’s most powerful people, including world leaders, CEOs, and the Pope.
Within weeks of the acquisition agreement, Musk began raising concerns about the availability of fake and fraudulent accounts on the social network and attempted to withdraw from the deal.
Tweets of Tesla CEO Yoel Roth, the harassment and the U.S. Senate Minority Report on the Environment, Public Policy and Safety, and their Implications
The parties were told by the judge to make a deal by October 28 or face another trial.
Yoel Roth has been at the company for a long time. In the last few days, Musk has urged users to follow him and to know what is happening with trust and safety on the platform.
Although they came quickly, the major personnel moves had been widely expected and almost certainly are the first of many major changes the mercurial Tesla CEO will make.
He used the internet to criticize the company’s top lawyer. His tweets were followed by a wave of harassment of Gadde from other Twitter accounts. For Gadde, an 11-year Twitter employee who also heads public policy and safety, the harassment included racist and misogynistic attacks, in addition to calls for Musk to fire her. The harassing account lit up again after she was fired.
There is a danger that social media will splinter into far right wing or far left wing echo chambers that will generate more hate in our society.
A professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School said that the note was a shift from Musk’s position that free speech rights were unfairly violated by blocking misinformation or graphic content.
It’s a realization that having no moderation for content is bad news for business, which would be a serious blow to the micro-messaging service.
“You do not want a place where consumers just simply are bombarded with things they do not want to hear about, and the platform takes no responsibility,” Yildirim said.
Twitter Goes Private: The Long Walk from Silicon Valley to Silicon Valley with Musk and an Empirical Letter of Indication to Advisers
But Musk has been signaling that the deal is going through. He walked into the company’s San Francisco headquarters on Wednesday carrying a porcelain sink, and changed his public profile to “Chief Twit,” which is now on his official account.
And overnight the New York Stock Exchange notified investors that it will suspend trading in shares of Twitter before the opening bell Friday in anticipation of the company going private under Musk.
Top sales executive Sarah Personette, the company’s chief customer officer, said she had a “great discussion” with Musk on Wednesday and appeared to endorse his Thursday message to advertisers.
Musk’s apparent enthusiasm about visiting Twitter headquarters this week stood in sharp contrast to one of his earlier suggestions: The building should be turned into a homeless shelter because so few employees actually worked there.
Thursday’s note to advertisers shows an increase in the emphasis on revenue and a need for twitter to provide more relevant ads which use users’ personal information
In their place, Musk now serves as the CEO and sole director of the social platform, cementing his influence at a time when he is weighing major changes to the way it operates. At the same time, Musk is also running several other companies, including as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.
It’s unclear whether VP of Operations Lindsey Iannucci, the other two members of Twitter’s top leadership team, will remain with the company. The employment status of Caldwell, Sullivan, Berland and Iannucci was not commented upon by the social networking site.
Calacanis earlier this week tweeted that he was in New York on behalf of Twitter meeting with “the marketing and advertising community.” He has also tweeted questions to Twitter users about the platform’s subscription and bookmark features.
Today let’s talk a bit more about how the company botched its layoff process, what happened inside Twitter on Monday, and what that paywall might look like.
Meanwhile, Musk’s increasingly erratic leadership, coupled with his habit of tweeting in eye-watering bad taste, gave many current and former employees I spoke with a sinking feeling about the future of their company.
A former employee said managers jockeyed with their peers in an effort to preserve employment for vulnerable people, such as pregnant women, employees with cancer, and workers on visas.
Some teams were cut more than others; several were wiped out entirely. As it turned out, though, the company went too far. In the hour after the layoffs, some managers were being told to ask some of their old employees if they wanted their old jobs back.
Rejoinder: Getting Back to work after Musk’s layoffs, and why IT is so hard to keep it up despite all the work done
It began as a rumor on Blind, the app where employees of various companies can chat anonymously with their coworkers. Within a day it was posted in public channels.
“Sorry to @- everybody on the weekend but I wanted to pass along that we have the opportunity to ask folks that were left off if they will come back. One message was read to employees by the manager that they needed to put together rationales by 4pm on Sunday. If you know anyone who might come back and help us, please let me know before 4.
The manager suggested that we might use some assistance from some mobile platforms. The company has been in contact with both engineers and designers over the last day in an effort to get them back.
The company has laid off some employees because they couldn’t come back voluntarily, and they fear that could change if they don’t get them back. If a business with 100 full-time employees decides to lay off at least 33 percent of their staff, they must give 60 days’ notice. At Twitter, that notice included a promise to pay people for the next 60 days and give them a month of severance.
Some workers are going to consult with their lawyers on their options in the event that they are recalled. Others are in open revolt, tweeting public threads about various aspects of the organization that have been broken after the ready-fire-aim disaster of Musk’s layoffs process.
Remaining managers are expecting a higher workload than they were used to. I was told by someone that any technical manager should spend half of their time writing code, while also managing at least 20 individual contributors. Others have been provided with a lot of direct reports.
“The couple of teams that are on his pet projects are doing 20-hour days,” one employee told me. “But the majority of the company is kind of just sitting around. No chain of command, no priorities, and no organization chart are some of the things that can be found.
An Employee’s View on Musk, Twitter, and the Status of a Space-Based Privacy-Locking Company. David Sacks, the All-In Podcast, and The Verge
The reporters were suspended after Musk banned an account that tracked the flights of his private jet using publicly available data. That also led Twitter to change its rules for all users to prohibit the sharing of another person’s current location without their consent.
According to a former employee, the health team was told to listen to the David Sacks show for insights into why they had just lost half their colleagues. Sacks, a venture capitalist who has been helping to manage the Musk transition, co-hosts the “All-In” podcast with fellow Twitter adviser Jason Calacanis and VC Chamath Palihapitiya.
“The most recent podcast covers the current layoffs happening across tech and provides some insight into why this is happening/necessary,” a vice president told employees. I think it is important for us to understand the macro environment we are operating in.
Most employees were more interested in their health benefits, which had suddenly become a question mark. The company’s open-enrollment period was supposed to begin today, according to its global calendar, but no information was available in the company’s human-resources system. Employees posted several questions about benefits, but the management did not answer them.
By the day’s end, I’m told, at least some teams had began to hold meetings in which employees were informed who their managers are, what their organization charts look like, and what their priorities will be.
On one hand, the company is telling advertisers that it is thriving, The Verge’s Alex Heath reported, adding 15 million daily users since the end of the second quarter.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/7/23446262/elon-musk-twitter-paywall-possible
The Social Media Bound on the Conformity of the Twitter Ad-Light Program with Musk’s First Signature, and if it is Violation, the FTC Could Be Sufficient
The new version of the blue subscription, Musk’s first signature project, has been a disaster.
But the new Blue likely faces larger problems. The existing version only had a little more than 100,000 active subscribers, Platformer has learned. The new version will be 37.5 percent more expensive, and its value seems murky for most regular users of the platform. It is not certain how the company will convince enough people to subscribe.
Then, following a debate about the impact of thousands of new verified accounts on election outcomes, the company decided to delay the launch.
Twitter employees tried to sell Musk and Sacks on the idea of asking business accounts to pay for extra features, since many of them use Twitter to reach large audiences. I’m told they were dismissed for offering wide-scale verification first.
Other employees have warned about a secondary feature of the new Blue that Musk added at the last minute: reducing ad load in the Twitter app by half. It was estimated by sources that the change to 140 characters would cost the social networking website about $6 in ad revenue per user. Factoring in Apple and Google’s share of the $8 monthly subscription, Twitter would likely lose money on Blue if the ad-light plan is enacted.
If a violation is proved, it could result in significant personal liability for Musk as he stumbles through a number of business and moderation headaches that have been his own fault.
If the FTC finds that Twitter isn’t complying, the company could face steep fines and additional consent decrees, Vladeck says. Because the company has already been fined for breaching its original consent decree, the punishment for another breach would be significant, and could place Twitter under even more stringent requirements to ensure security is maintained.
In that assessment, Twitter must also identify employees the FTC can contact to ensure future compliance. The report and other documents sent to the commission in relation to the 2022 order must be submitted as true and correct under penalty of perjury. Every four months, a vulnerability testing is done, and there is an independent audit every two years for a decade.
Alex Spiro, Musk’s attorney, told CNN on Thursday that “we are in a continuing dialogue with the FTC and will work closely with the agency to ensure we are in compliance.”
“The chaos there is something the FTC is going to be worried about,” said Vladeck, “because there were serious deficiencies which led to the consent order in the first place, and the FTC is going to want to make sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to do.”
The subcommittee’s report also focused on the “Twitter Files,” a series of reports by writers Musk allowed to have access to internal messages and information. The FTC requested the names of the journalists or other media members who were provided access to the company’s Slack logs, internal documents, or other resources, a request the subcommittee claims is inappropriate.
The professor of computer science and law at Georgetown University urged the employees to seek legal counsel before signing their statements to regulators.
The FTC may try to hold individual executives personally accountable if they are found to have been responsible for the company’s violations, as well as Naming them in future orders and imposing binding requirements on their future conduct even if they leave the company. The CEO of alcohol delivery service Drizly was given sanctions by the FTC last month.
The FTC says that there is no CEO or company above the law. The revised consent order gives us new tools to make sure we are following all the rules.
What Will Twitter Do When You Get Your Social Media Account? After Musk’s Disruption on Friday, September 17, 2009, Twitter Turns into a Shameful Disaster
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.
That paid subscription service, too, was also suspended on Friday with little warning, just two days after its official launch, with the menu option to sign up for Twitter Blue suddenly disappearing from Twitter’s iOS app — the only place the add-on had been offered. It was not immediately clear when the company might restore the offering.
Hours after the gray badges launched on Wednesday as a way to help users differentiate legitimate celebrity and branded accounts from accounts that had merely paid for a blue check mark, Musk abruptly tweeted that he had “killed” the feature, forcing subordinates to explain the reversal.
The account’s very next tweet, a day and nine hours later, said exactly the opposite: “To combat impersonation, we’ve added an ‘Official’ label to some accounts.”
The paid verification feature’s rocky rollout attracted widespread criticism from misinformation experts who had warned it would make identifying trustworthy information much more difficult, particularly in the critical period following the US midterm elections. Some of Musk’s fellow high-powered users had a bad experience on the platform.
For when you have your customer service hat on, from one entrepreneurial to another. Mark Cuban, a billionaire, said he just spent too much time muting all the newly purchased checkmarks in an attempt to make them useful again.
Cuban said that there was a decision to be made. The onus is on all users to put on their own curations and stick with the new Twitter that allows paid accounts to share their content. Or bring back Twitter curation. One makes Twitter time and information efficient. The other is terrible.
Warren, who has clashed with Musk in the past, specifically called out the fact that that Twitter relies on advertising revenue from General Motors, Ford, Chevrolet and other direct rivals of Tesla.
If the president of the United States offered you $500 in free gasoline, would you take it? That’s the question Barack Obama’s Twitter followers had to ask themselves in 2009 when his was one of several high-profile accounts taken over by an attacker who got a Twitter employee’s corporate login.
The FTC is trying to get these details according to the consent order that the company agreed to when it agreed to use people’s security phone numbers to target ads. That agreement (PDF) also required Twitter to create and document “a comprehensive privacy and information security program” to secure users’ information.
Twitter violates Twitter rules against a racist tangerine: A testimony of Musk, Trump, and the Anika tweet on January 6
“This is one of those cases where, if there’s an additional order, there will be personal responsibility for Musk,” Vladeck says. His neck may be on the chopping block if there is another consent decree, and personal responsibility for other significant people within the organization.
A person familiar with the matter told CNN on Monday that the former head of trust and safety had left his home because he was getting death threats because of Musk’s criticism.
A person with knowledge of the situation told CNN that threats against the former employee spiked after Musk commented on the pedophilia conspiracy theory.
On Wednesday, Roth testified that potential Russian interference was the frame through which Twitter viewed the Post story – even though he personally did not believe the Post article broke Twitter’s rules.
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 some questionable posts, 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.
The testimony of the former executives of the social media company give the Republicans the chance to raise other questions about the company that was recently purchased by Musk. Conservative hardliners within the Oversight Committee complain about the suppression of conservative voices in the sphere of social media.
On January 6, Twitter had also warned Trump that additional violations of its rules could result in a permanent ban, something Weiss’ Monday tweet thread did not mention. The thread does not say that other social platforms, including Facebook, have not restored his account, as well as that they suspended him from their platforms after the Capitol attack.
Anika said in her comment that she was not seeing clear or code words to violence from the president on January 8. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
(Navaroli later testified to the House committee investigating January 6 that she and other staffers had been alarmed by content posted on Twitter by the Proud Boys and other extremist groups that echoed statements by Trump, and had worried about the risk of violence ahead of the attack.)
The staff member who had his name removed in the screenshot said that a day after Trump said he would not go to Biden’s inauguration, he also said in a message that he did not violate any rules. Weiss said that a different staff person questioned whether that was proof thatTrump doesn’t support a peaceful transition.
The way the entire process went is not unusual, according to a formerTwitter executive who spoke to CNN. “I think these conversations look like people were trying to be really thoughtful and careful,” the former executive said.
“Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council was a group of volunteers who over many years gave up their time when consulted by Twitter staff to offer advice on a wide range of online harms and safety issues,” tweeted council member Alex Holmes. ” At no point was it a governing body or decision making.”
The council members, who provided images of the email from Twitter to The Associated Press, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation.
The email was signed, “Twitter”, and it said that the work to make a safe, informative place on the site will be moving faster and more aggressively than before.
The volunteer group provided advice and expertise on how to fight hate, harassment, and other harms but didn’t have the power to make decisions or review content disputes.
Those former council members soon became the target of online attacks after Musk amplified criticized of them and Twitter’s past leadership for allegedly not doing enough to stop child sexual exploitation on the platform.
A growing number of attacks on the council led to concerns from some remaining members who sent an email to Twitter on Monday demanding the company stop misrepresenting its role.
One of the advisory groups of the Trust and Safety Council was focused on child exploitation. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the Rati Foundation, and the Youth Adult Survivors & Kin in Need were included.
A Response to Musk and Other Left-Right Critics about the Silicon Valley Scandal and Silicon Valley Cosmic Microwave Background Censorship
Musk himself has suggested that the internal communications released as part of his so-called “Twitter files” show government censorship, suggesting Twitter acted “under orders from the government” when it suppressed the laptop story. The “Twitter files” have fueled Comer’s belief that the government may have been involved in the suppression of the story.
One particularly eyebrow-raising statement from Dorsey reads “any content produced by someone for the internet should be permanent until the original author chooses to delete it,” adding that “content takedowns and suspensions should not be possible.” He admits that it could create issues when it comes to illegal activity, but he believes that the ideal would allow for far better solutions than we have today.
The selection of Taibbi and Weiss, who both share Musk’s criticisms of the mainstream media, has caused a lot of controversy. The original documents have not been given to other news outlets because they were only presented in screenshot and excerpts in lengthy thread on social media.
There are facts that are damned in the world we live in. Musk’s claim has absolutely saturated right-wing media. If you use Fox News, talk radio or one of the online outlets that form the right-wing media, you will believe the biggest scandal since 1972’s Watergate. A sitting Republican congressman even said on Tuesday he was in favor of halting “all funding” for the FBI over the story. And the poisoning of that information well is also confusing others, who hear the nonsense and aren’t sure what to believe.
How Joe Biden’s son discovered a Russian “hack and leak” in a NY Post investigation of a business hacking operation by a son of Joseph Biden
Renée DiResta, the research manager at the internet observatory, said that what she’s seeing is people who are confronted with high-stakes, unexpected events trying to figure out what policies apply and how.
They show employees at the company grappling with tradeoffs, questioning the company’s rules, and sometimes getting things wrong.
The New York Post article about shady business dealings by Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, was the basis for the block on users from sharing the story on social media.
At the time of the article, it was uncertain how much of the material on Biden’s laptop was real. Tech companies, intelligence agencies and federal law enforcement were on edge over the possibility of a Russian “hack and leak” operation, similar to what they carried out in 2016.
Citing its rules against sharing hacked material containing private information, Twitter showed a warning to anyone who tried to post a link to the article saying it was “potentially harmful.” The post’s account was suspended until it deleted its statements about the story.
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.
“I continue to believe there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time,” he wrote. “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.”
How the Twitter Files are being exposed: a Chilling Effect on a Social Media CEO’s Belief of an American Senator and two former colleagues
DiResta said there’s good reason to demand more insight into how social media companies operate. She said that decisions are often inscrutable. These are platforms that shape public opinion and the question of how they are moderated is very important.
She said that Musk’s journalists need more than “anecdotes” to get the full picture, so they focus solely on political dramas in the US.
She said it would be beneficial to see discussions about the accounts of other world leaders who have not been kicked off the platform.
“There’s value in what’s been revealed to the public, but at the same time, it is primarily reinforcing a perception in large part based on your pre-existing opinions as partisan individuals within the United States,” DiResta said.
Framing the disclosures as secret knowledge plays particularly well on Twitter, said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
His tweets triggered violent threats against both men. A person familiar with the situation said the family had been forced to flee their home.
The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous, and don’t solve anything. “If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.”
The CEO’s willingness to target people working to keep the platform’s users safe, including through the Twitter Files releases, is creating a “chilling effect,” according to one Trust and Safety Council member, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation.
“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.
A Twitter Critique of the Jet-Tracking Account, a Carlyptical, and a Cryptographer in Los Angeles
The flight-tracking account was back up again later in the day. Musk and his policy team tried to clarify that they have new rules.
Musk later brought back the jet- tracking account after imposing new conditions on all of the users, including no more sharing their location.
Musk also claimed that one account that operated under the handle @ElonJet, run by a 20-year-old University of Florida student, was used by a “crazy stalker” in Los Angeles to follow a car carrying one of Musk’s children.
The account was permanently suspended for violating the rules after he saw a notice on his computer. The note said it broke the rules, but it didn’t say how.
In a statement to NPR, Twitter’s head of Trust & Safety Ella Irwin said sharing people’s real-time location information on Twitter is now a violation of its policies.
Musk has previously criticized the technique and said that it was unfairly used by the previous leadership of the company. He has said that the new social networking site will be more open about its policies, but won’t change the reach of its negative messages.
In the wake of Musk’s recent takeover of Twitter, theelonjet account has chronicled Musk’s cross-country travels that included his work in San Francisco and his rocket company, as well as his home base.
It showed Musk flying to New Orleans just before he was to have a meeting with the President of France.
In a January post pinned to the top of the jet-tracking account’s feed before it was suspended, Sweeney wrote that it “has every right to post jet whereabouts” because the data is public and “every aircraft in the world is required to have a transponder,” including Air Force One that transports the U.S. president.
Then, over the weekend, The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz became the latest journalist to be temporarily banned. She said she was suspended after posting a message on Twitter tagging Musk and requesting an interview.
In a post on Substack, Rupar wrote that he is unsure why he was suspended. He gave a link to a Facebook page for the jet- tracking account on Wednesday.
“We will suspend any user accounts that violate our privacy policies and put others at risk, so I can’t speak on specific user accounts,” he said. “We don’t make exceptions to this policy for journalists or any other accounts.”
Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at the advocacy group Free Press, echoed Jaffer’s remarks, saying suspending journalists based seemingly on personal animus “sets a dangerous precedent.”
The Mastodon Controversy After Musk Revisited: Twitter Follows the @ElonJet Scenario on Twitter
Twitter previously took action to block links to Mastodon after its main Twitter account tweeted about the @ElonJet controversy last week. Mastodon has grown rapidly in recent weeks as an alternative for Twitter users who are unhappy with Musk’s overhaul of Twitter since he bought the company for $44 billion in late October and began restoring accounts that ran afoul of the previous Twitter leadership’s rules against hateful conduct and other harms.
This new approach will have a lasting effect on the micro-networking site. Journalists have helped keep the platform relevant despite its small size relative to competitors like Facebook: They fuel the platform with free, vetted content when news breaks and speculation and rumors swirl.
“Musk is responding to events that affect him personally to reshape that policy and place new limits on what could be disseminated through the platform,” says John Davisson, director of litigation and senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit that focuses on privacy and free expression. It is being carried out in a way that is self-centered. Musk has announced new policies on live location sharing and privacy that appear designed largely to help himself, not to protect its users.
“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. Lorenz’s account was restored by midday, as she thought her suspension had been triggered by a message on her account.
The accounts were back early Saturday. Linette Lopez was suspended after the other journalists without an 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. That address is not current, Lopez said, because “he changes his email every few weeks.”
The Mastodon Crowdfunded Network: The Harmless Report on the Musk “Instances” of Spaces, Twitter, and the Washington Post
The move sets “a dangerous precedent at a time when journalists all over the world are facing censorship, physical threats and even worse,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
The Washington Post’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, said technology reporter Drew Harwell “was banished without warning, process or explanation” following the publication of accurate reporting about Musk.
The journalist who shared the screenshot that O’ Sullivan posted was banned immediately after, according to Matt Binder.
The screenshot showed a statement from the Los Angeles Police Department sent earlier Thursday to multiple media outlets, including the AP, about how it was in touch with Musk’s representatives about the alleged stalking incident.
He has promised to let free speech reign and has reinstated high-profile accounts that previously broke Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct or harmful misinformation. He has also said he would suppress negativity and hate by depriving some accounts of “freedom of reach.”
“The old regime at Twitter governed by its own whims and biases and it sure looks like the new regime has the same problem,” she tweeted “I oppose it in both cases.”
The platform would be changed at a fundamental level if the media organizations stop using the platform because of the suspension, said Lou Paskalis, who was head of global media at Bank of America.
CBS temporarily shut down its activity on the social media platform due to uncertainty, but media organizations have largely remained on the platform.
The suspensions may be the biggest red flag yet for advertisers, Paskalis said, some of which had already cut their spending on Twitter over uncertainty about the direction Musk is taking the platform.
Shortly after Musk abruptly signed out of a session in which he had been asked about the ousting of the reporters, the Spaces conference chat went down. The Spaces platform had been taken offline to deal with a bug. Late Friday, Spaces returned.
Mastodon on Friday had more than 6 million users, nearly double the 3.4 million it had on the day Musk took ownership of Twitter. On many of the thousands of confederated networks in the open-source Mastodon platform, administrators and users solicited donations as disaffected Twitter users strained computing resources. Crowd funded networks are known as “instances”. The platform has been designed in a way that it’s ad-free.
What Has Musk Done recently? A Comments on CNN’s X-ray Outburst and the Cosmic Twitter Files
In a statement on his new job, Musk said he has not been completely happy with it.
Dean Obeidallah is the host of a daily show on SiriusXM radio. Follow him @[email protected]. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. If you’re interested in viewing more opinions on CNN, you can do so here.
The revelations include the bureau allegedly pressuring Twitter to moderate content and corresponding with it to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering “of all kinds.”
In response to the documents known as the “Twitter Files,” GOP Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told Fox News that the FBI “needs to be dismantled.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Ted Lieu of California — recently elected vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus — slammed one of the journalists that Musk picked to share the files, disputing the allegation that the FBI had stopped investigating “child sex predators or terrorists” to focus on a “surveillance operation” of people using the platform.
The relationship between these two journalists and Musk is unclear. Taibbi told me Sunday morning via a Twitter direct message that “I do not work for Musk in any way, shape, or form.”
Why the FBI should know about potential threats from foreign actors to influence our elections? Apparently the FBI didn’t warn the New York Post about an impersonated Billy Baldwin
Beyond that, the FBI’s leadership should testify after this fact-finding has been completed. The FBI had its own ministry of propaganda and the bureau should welcome this opportunity.
For starters, in the run-up to the 2020 election, representatives of the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security met with social media giants such as Twitter to discuss threats posed by foreign actors to influence our elections.
Why did the administration of Donald Trump raise concerns about a possible release of misinformation about Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden?
It’s odd that the FBI — which is under the umbrella of the Department of Justice, then headed by Attorney General William Barr, appointed by Trump — would flag this knowing that warning might become public before the election and rile up the Trump base? The documents do not show that the FBI, the Biden campaign, or the Democratic officials had a hand in banning the New York Post from reporting on Hunter Biden.
Beyond that, Taibbi alleges that the FBI began flagging certain Twitter accounts because of their content, starting in January 2020 — again under the Trump administration.
Billy Baldwin, brother of Alec Baldwin, was the target of some of the requests over the last month. Billy Baldwin had impersonated Alec Baldwin on SNL and was often attacked by Trump.
The President said the FCC should investigate the show, and asked if the department could do the same, The Daily Beast reported.
In the end, the bureau may simply be protecting our nation from threats — as it should. Or Musk could be trying to attract more users on the right by going after the FBI, given that some celebrities and others have left the platform since he took over in late October. Or there could be FBI wrongdoing.
The Tesla board of a micro-publishing company was shut down after Musk’s takeover of Twitter on April 21st, 2015
When the poll was closed on Monday, more than half of the 17 million users who responded voted in favor of Musk stepping down.
On Monday, there were many issues to find on the micro-blogging site. Clicking on links would no longer open them; instead, users would see a mysterious error message that said the current plan doesn’t include access to this endpoint. Images stopped loading as well. Other users said that they couldn’t access the professional version of the client.
Musk promised not to make any more major policy changes without an online survey of users after the decision to change the policy drew so much immediate criticism.
Musk’s attempt to shut down a twitter account that was tracking his private jet came days after he took action to block competitors.
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. Parler was one of the websites that were on the blacklist but not others.
Musk had joked Sunday that the person running the company ” has to like pain a lot.” He was referring to the person who has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy.
Senator Elizabeth Warren is raising concerns about conflicts of interest and potential legal violations for Tesla following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
In the month of April, when Musk revealed that he had taken a big stake in the micro-publishing company, the value of the shares of the electric car manufacturer fell by nearly $800 billion. Musk, who recently lost his status as the world’s richest person, has repeatedly unloaded hisTesla shares in recent months.
Noting Tesla’s board has legal obligations it must fulfill, Warren asked the board to respond to a series of questions about its handling of the situation by January 3.
What the hell happened last weekend when Twitter ceased to issue a refund policy for identifying artists with commissions for their work? A wakeup message from Shellenberger
In those files, Shellenberger published a redacted screenshot of a 2021 email showing that Twitter’s Safety, Content and Law Enforcement division had instituted a “reimbursement program” for its work responding to information requests from the FBI. The document said that there had been over 3 million dollars in reimbursements to the social network.
A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. The media landscape is evolving and you can sign up for the daily digest.
Similar to Donald Trump, Musk and right-wing media continue to take relatively mundane procedures, such as a company receiving reimbursement for processing legal requests, and put them in the worst possible light, portraying them as nefarious.
I apologize for coming back to it, but for those of you as dying as I am, you need to ask: What the hell happened last weekend?
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 to the news, it was delivered to me by tweets from artists terrified they’d be banned from Twitter for linking to their own portfolios and to platforms where they accept commissions for their artwork. Authors who were afraid that they were being asked to promote their books, reviews and profiles on social networks were horror stories I read.
The new policy caused a small online riot with users from all over the world condemning it. 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. Anyone who was online was able to see it. If you know what I’m talking about, I won’t say you missed it.
This is what we talk about when talking about platforms and power. Setting and enforcing the policies and guidelines for any platform is an unenviable job for any steward, no matter who they are. That isn’t in question. Online spaces can go bad fast without such rules. What is an issue is when those platforms choose to actively harm their users through policy decisions, and when those changes are large enough to force users to either adapt or abandon ship.
My friends on Twitch interrupted their streams to discuss the news, worried that they wouldn’t be able to tweet to announce they were starting a new stream, or add a link to their Twitter bio to help viewers find them. I believe that there is more to it than just the people who made the policy decisions. The creators of these things have the same kind of entrepreneurial spirit that everyone in Silicon Valley wants to foster and empower.
A group of former social media executives will testify Wednesday at the House Oversight Committee against the suppression of a New York Post story pertaining to Hunter Biden, an individual within the administration of President Joe Biden.
The chairman of the House Oversight Committee has launched a wide-scale investigation into the business dealings of the Biden family, and he is probing the new owners of the social media giant.
The opening statement that Baker will testify about contains statements that he plans to say are in line with what he said during the trial. The public record reveals that my client acted in a way that was consistent with the First Amendment, even though I disagree with how they handled the Hunter Biden matter.
“We basically want to know what the Twitter policy was with respect to how they determined what was disinformation,” Comer said. We want to know what role the government played in encouraging the suppression of certain stories. We would like to know the amount of tax dollars spent by the federal agencies on the social networking site.
In addition to Baker, Twitter’s former Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde and former Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth are appearing before the committee.
To drive home that point, the Democrats called Collier Navaroli as witness. She testified last year to the Jan. 6 select committee about the platform’s role in the insurrection.
“Here’s the serious issue, what happens when a social media platform is actually used for the incitement of violent insurrection against the government of the United States? What are we going to do about that? The top Democrat on the Oversight Committee told CNN that they learned from the person who blew the whistle. “So, I think the gravity of her testimony is pretty extraordinary compared to the trivia that the majority is engaged in.”
In his opening statement, he plans to state that in the lead up to January 6, 2021 there was a global platform for seditious violence against our government and a forum for coordinating logistical movements and tactical maneuvers in the mob violence against our.
“I’ll get to ask the executives of Twitter why they felt they could ban a member of Congress — permanently being a member of Congress. My Twitter account was permanently banned for nearly a year,” said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican.
The account was suspended for repeated violations of the Covid-19 misinformation policy. Her account was restored in November.
The Mackey Hearing: Investigating Twitter’s “weaponization” of the Biden administration against the 2016 Black Hole Hunter Biden Laptop
The Republicans have made allegations about the laptop story, but Democrats say they intend to poke holes in it and question the decision to hold the hearing.
Ahead of the hearing, Musk went to Capitol Hill and met with a number of GOP legislators, among them House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. The Kentucky Republican said that Musk offered him tips on lines of questioning, though he declined to give more details about the hearing.
Republicans say the incident is an example of Silicon Valley’s anti-conservative bias. More recently, seizing on the Twitter Files, they’ve pushed the claim that the government and the Biden campaign pressured Twitter to suppress the story – even though the Twitter Files disclosures do not include any evidence that was the case.
The federal government’s attempt to limit the free exercise of speech was accomplished by the testimony of the witnesses that formed the basis of the committee, said the chair.
The American people witnessed a campaign to suppress the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents immediately after the story was published, he said.
“I believe Twitter erred in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016,” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, told the panel, alluding to Russia’s hacking of Democratic National Committee emails that year that were selectively leaked to the public in the final months of the campaign.
“I’m aware of no unlawful collusion with or direction from any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation,” James Baker, who served as Twitter’s deputy general counsel, told the committee.
The hearing is among the first efforts by House Republicans to use their newly-regained majority to launch a series of investigations into the Biden administration and what they describe as the “weaponization” of the federal government against conservatives.
A tech witness testifying against a possible cyberattack on the Post: “We’ve come to where we came from”, the committee reads
The witness told the committee that there was a change in the policy on abuse of immigrants after Trump said that “go back to where you came from”.
The witness testified that the White House had asked the social media site to take down a celebrity’s insult to the president. Twitter declined to do so, but Democrats seized on her testimony to rebut Republicans’ claims of political bias.
“The decisions here aren’t straightforward, and hindsight is 20/20,” he said. “It isn’t obvious what the right response is to a suspected but not confirmed cyberattack by another government on a presidential election.”
The decision to block the link to the Post story ontweeting was made by the chief legal officer, according to the committee. She said that when it decided to reverse the decision, it should have unlocked the account.
The hearing, which was interrupted by a power outage, followed the split-screen format that’s become the norm when lawmakers grill tech executives: Republicans spent their time accusing witnesses of censorship, while Democrats argued tech platforms have not done enough to crack down on harmful content.
The panel was attacked by the woman for her ban and she made accusations against the former executives. That included echoing smears against Roth previously amplified by Musk. Roth testified the threats that had resulted from Musk’s airing of those smears have forced him to sell his home.
Republicans were accused of wasting time and money on a political crusade by the committee Democrats.
The CEO of Twitter Fires an Engineer: Telling Us Why you are not at the Top of Google Search Rankings? A Comment on Musk’s Twitter Declination
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 suffered one of its first major outages since Musk took over, with users being told, inexplicably, “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.”
“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
Employees showed Musk internal data about how well he is doing on his account. They told him that they were at the top of search rankings, indicating a score of 100. He is currently at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.
Musk told the engineer that he had been fired. The engineer is not being named because of the harassment Musk directed at former employees.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-twitter-fires-engineer-declining-reach-ftc-concerns
Twitter Is Not Where I Live, but It Isn’t: When I’m Going to Lose My Twitter Friend, or How I Lost My Twitter Account
The view count feature may be to blame for the decline in engagement, according to sources. The like and retweet buttons were smaller to accommodate the view of the view, making them harder to use.
He bragged about how much more alivetwitter is than it seems, as over 90 percent of users read, but don’t send a reply, or say anything else.
It turns out that an employee had inadvertently deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter. The team that worked on that service left the company in November.
“We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy,” one employee said. We devote most of our time to putting out fires, performing impossible tasks, and improving efficiency without clear guidelines of what the end results are. We move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire most of the time.
One employee says that there are times when he is just asleep late at night and says silly things. The one person that said they can’t do this one thing on the platform, and then we have to run around trying to find another use case, was the reason he came to us. It doesn’t make sense.
The San Francisco headquarters, whose landlord has sued Twitter for nonpayment of rent, has a melancholy air. When people are walking through the halls, the standard greeting is where are you interviewing and where would you like to work. The eighth floor is still stocked with beds, and employees have to reserve them in advance.
The epicenter of the open culture where employees discussed anything and everything has gone quiet. A current employee said it was a ghost town.
What is the least fireable response you can have to tech right now? An employee’s perspective on the Twitter relaunch of Twitter Blue
“When you’re asked a question, you run it through your head and say ‘what is the least fireable response I can have to this right now?’” one employee explained.
(Of course, that’s not true for everyone at the company. “There are a handful of true believers that are obviously just ass-kissers and brown-nosers who are trying to take advantage of the clear vacuum that exists,” that same employee says.)
The employee cited the disastrous relaunch of Twitter Blue, which resulted in brands being impersonated and dozens of top advertisers fleeing the platform.
“If Elon can learn how to put a bit more thought into some of the decisions, and fire from the hip a bit less, it might do some good,” the employee said. “He needs to learn the areas where he just does not know things and let those that do know take over.”
The employee said that he doesn’t like believing that there is anything in technology that he doesn’t know. You can’t be the smart one in the room 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 for a fact that most of my team is doing hardcore interview prep and would jump at likely any opportunity to walk away.”
The Fail Whale of Twitter: When the Company ceased to Support Free Access to its API, and How it Started to Suppress Its Employees, and Why It Happened
It is possible that there will be similar issues in the near future as the company is breaking in new ways and it was able to recover from its latest outage in a couple of hours.
And those are only the service outages. Other issues, such as the one that led Musk to be more visible on the timeline than any other user, have caused a lot of unrest in the user base.
The change in question was part of a project to shut down free access to the mobile phone application. 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 brittle for no good reason. Will eventually need a full rewrite.
Some current employees are sympathetic to that view, which places at least part of the blame for Twitter’s problems on technical failures that predate Musk’s ownership of the company. The fail whale became an icon of the old social media network because of it.
When Musk took over the company, he promised to make the site more stable and fast. His associates screened the existing staff for their technical prowess, ultimately cutting thousands of workers who were deemed not “technical” enough to succeed under Musk’s leadership.
This enabled a single engineer to be hired on a major project, one that is linked to several critical systems that both users and employees depend on.
And with few knowledgeable workers on hand to restore service, it took Twitter all morning to fix the problem. The current employee says that when you fire 90 percent of the company things will happen.
The FTC’s actions are harassment and overreach: a report by the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government
As reported by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government — part of the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee — revealed the requests in a new report (PDF), calling the FTC’s actions harassment and overreach.
