Musk has a large following on social media and he is filling in the gaps left by Trump

Trump will hang up his hat and sail into the sunset, Musk tells the X-ray magnate at an e+e- conference

Perhaps most immediately, many will be watching to see how soon Musk could let former President Donald Trump back on the platform, as he has previously said he would do. If this is the case, it could have major implications for the upcoming US elections, as well as the upcoming presidential campaign in two years.

At a conference in May, Musk pledged to overturn the ban if he became the company’s owner.

But relations between the pair seem to have soured since, with the men publicly trading barbs over the summer. After Trump referred to Musk as a bully at a rally, Musk responded by writing, “it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset.”

What is wrong with Twitter? What the public really cares about is what matters: how the Internet is affected by the news, and how it affects the society

Any company, Twitter included, is a function of its people. The people who have always been drawn to the site are kind of weird. It isn’t something that you really know until you work for the company. And those people are all the ones who are going to leave. Those are not the people who are going to stay. So all of that is gone.

An anthropologist who wrote a book on gambling machine design is not sure if engineers ever spoke about creating a Skinner box. She said that is what they have built. It’s one reason people who should know better regularly self-destruct on the site — they can’t stay away.

But recall that last month, before these journalists were de-platformed, Musk — who describes himself as a free speech absolutist — suggested that he could sue activists who he believes caused advertiser boycotts of Twitter. If users can’t hold those in power accountable, then they can’t have debates about how to fix the problems with society — including, of course, the issues created by the very platforms they’re having those debates on.

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****.”

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 “key hole view of what Musk will look like,” look at alternatives such as Gab or Parler that promise less restrictions on speech, said the president of Media Matters for America.

The feature on those sites is the bug and it is why everyone gravitates to them. There are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.

“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).

The ban on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was kicked off for abusive behavior in the middle of last year, could be lifted.

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 agrees with his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

Trump Can’t Rejoin: The Case for Non-Profit Organization in the Era of Social Media and Wall-String Negotiations

Allowing Trump and others to return could set a precedent for other social networks, including Facebook, which might reinstate the ex- president once his ban is lifted in January 2023.

After a video meeting a few weeks later with Agrawal and Musk, Dorsey tersely summed up the situation in a text to Musk: “At least it became clear that you can’t work together. That was clear.

These latest moves show that Musk tends to run this company the way dictators run their states: by making decisions that serve his personal interests rather than those of the public and by tossing out people who stand in his way. That’s why tech workers and journalists who have lost their jobs in the past few weeks should come together to create non-profit social networks designed to serve the public interest.

The billionaire, who has complained that his company is overstaffed and costs are out of whack, will likely be happy with that news.

With the change, Musk believes that the company will be cash flow positive in the next quarter.

He may be forced to look for other sources of revenue other than advertising because he has little choice and the market for digital ads is weak.

“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.

The Times quoted by Musk on Twitter: The voice of the people is the voice of god,” said the eminent tech executive

As always, anyone’s a guess as to what he meant. Musk told the staff that the company should follow in the footsteps of the Chinese app, which combines social media, messaging, payments and shopping into a single application.

Chinese-style super-APPS haven’t caught on in the United States because other American tech companies have tried this strategy.

Shortly after acquiring Twitter, Musk said he would create a “content moderation council” with “widely diverse viewpoints,” and that no major content decisions would be made until it was in place. There is no evidence that a group has formed or that it was involved in Musk’s decisions. Musk restored Trump’s account and used his Latin phrase “Vox Populi” for “the voice of the people is the voice of god.”

Yildirim said that, unlike Facebook, Twitter has not been good at targeting advertising to what users want to see. Musk’s message suggests he wants to fix that, she said.

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.

Twitter Deal. The Times After Elon Musk and the First Three Months: A Surprising Reversal of Profits for a Powerful CEO

It’s the latest in a string of advertisers that have changed plans following the chaos at Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover. According to CNBC, another ad agency recommended clients to stop advertising on the social networking site. Companies like Volkswagen, General Motors, and General Mills have also pulled ad spending from Twitter in recent weeks.

Musk also reiterated in the letter a lofty earlier statement he had made that the Twitter acquisition is not meant to be a money-making venture for him.

Let’s talk about the loans for a while. The banks who helped facilitate the deal keep the debt, which is unusual since most of the time they try to find buyers for the debt. They are stuck with the loans on their balance sheets because of Musk’s lawsuit. When they got into this situation, the interest rates were lower. Anant Sundaram, a professor at the Tuck School of Business, said that the appetite for debt changed around the time the deal closed.

It is a stunning reversal of fortunes for the company, not only for Musk who bought the company for $44 billion, but also for the platform used by some of the most powerful people on the planet.

Delaware Chancery Court chancellor Kathaleen St. Judge McCormick gave the parties until 5 p.m. on Oct. 28 to close the deal or face a rescheduled trial.

The execs received generous payouts for their trouble, Insider reports, showing how much they got for their trouble.

Musk moved his deposition from September to October 6th and 7th. He announced that he would be obeying the contract his lawyers had negotiated just days before the deposition. That deposition was probably going to be uncomfortable; a judge found that Musk likely deleted Signal messages that were 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.

Although they came quickly, the major personnel moves had been predicted for a long time, and it’s almost certain that they’re the first of many changes the CEO will make.

Musk publicly ridiculed the employee who was unsure about whether he had been laid off in a recent round of cuts and seemed to disregard the employee’s disability in a series of tweets Monday night. The billionaire has been openly antagonizing his company’s current and former employees.

He continued: “There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.”

It’s also a realization that without content moderation it’s bad for business, and that will likely put us at risk of losing advertisers and subscribers.

The platform takes no responsibility for a place where consumers simply are bombarded with things that they don’t want to hear about.

Twitter’s Chief Twitterer: The Deal is Going Through – A Note on Musk’s “Chief Twit” Visit to the New York Stock Exchange

The deal is going through, according to Musk. He strolled into the San Francisco headquarters carrying a porcelain sink, changed his profile on the social networking site to “chief twit” and sent a picture of himself with the sink.

The New York Stock Exchange notified investors overnight that it would stop trading in the company’s stock before the market opens on Friday because of CEO Musk’s plan to take the company private.

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 shows a change in emphasis on advertising revenue, with a need for Twitter to provide more “relevant ads” that collect and analyze users’ personal information.

A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. You can sign up for a daily digest to stay up to date on the media landscape here.

In fact, not only has Musk himself contaminated the information environment he now reigns over, but he is apparently working to dismantle the little infrastructure erected to help users sift through the daily chaos. According to recent news reports, he is going to take away public figures’ blue verified badges if they do not pay.

Yeah. I’ve been in favor of letting anyone who wants to verify themselves participate in this plan for a long time. It is not only making people pay to keep their badges. You could get a badges if you pay.

The right has for years lashed out at “blue checks,” whom in their eyes represent elitist gatekeepers who control the conversation, even though many conservatives also don blue badges. Taking away the free blue checks and the air of authority they give upon their profiles will delight some conservatives.

The Best Thing You Can Do to Share Social Media: Authenticating Users to Save Social Networks and Civil Discourse, Democracy, and Hacking

Musk’s authorized biographer, Walter Isaacson, tweeted in 2018 that “the best thing” one could do to “save social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email, and reduce hacking would be authenticating users.”

The new approach to social networking platform will have a lasting impact. 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.

Your male friends should watch House of the Dragon because they’ll be interested in fathering children. Mike recommends the new album from Natalia Lafourcade, De Todas las Flores. Lauren encourages you to reexamine your relationship with social media.

Solar Keys: Podcasting at GadgetLab & Talking to Silicon Valley Tech Experts (Telegraph @telliotter)

Vittoria Elliott can be found on Twitter @telliotter. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Solar Keys is our theme music.

You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:

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This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Email transcripts@ny Times.com with any questions or if you would like to review the audio before quoting from it.

So usually, on this podcast, we’re going to try to bring people news from around the tech industry, give a more comprehensive sense of what’s happening in Silicon Valley. The only story Tech cares about at the moment is what is happening just down the street from us in San Francisco.

We are going to have a normal interview with them. We’re not going to play them their voice, because this would make them sound like criminals, and we’re also not going to get them fired. We will give those words back into a text-to-speechAI generator, and you will be able to hear their voice.

Before we get to those interviews, we need to go over what happened this week on social media. Because it has been one crazy thing after another. You wrote on Friday that the engineers inside the company were told to print out their code for review after 30 to 60 days.

A Note on Putting AI Voices on a Podcaster’s Perchance and Telling People to Print their Code (with an Emphasis on Casey)

I like that when we started this show, we said we would never put on AI voices unless we had a really good reason and a really limited capacity. And now, twice in five episodes —

You were incorrect about the fact that this wasn’t a show filled with robot podcastsers and you were incorrect about the fact that it wasn’t a show that was filled with humans. So two strikes for Casey.

Yeah, indeed. Sometimes as a reporter, you get a tip that sounds so silly that you don’t believe it and think, this isn’t true. When I got a tip from him that people were told to print out their code in 30 to 60 days, I thought it was not true.

Two of my sources are saying that it doesn’t sound right. OK? But then, I start texting around, start getting on the phone with some folks, and then the two people that told me that I was wrong came back to me and said, oh my god, he’s actually asking people to print out their code!

So why is this funny? Why is this interesting? This is a weird way to evaluate how good someone is as a software engineer. How much code someone has written doesn’t usually mean they are evaluated.

If you show up with a printout of 100 pages of code, that’s not necessarily a good thing. You might have done better for the company by eliminating some code, right? And then, sort of streamlining it. So —

Also, who prints code? Like, it’s not like — like, I was surprised that the coding programs actually have a Print button in them. Because that’s, like, not what you’re bringing to your daily review of your code.

The Twitter Precession: Closing the Code Printout of the Twitter Blue Account, a Charge for $8 a Month to Obtain a Blue Check from Musk

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

All the people on the platform get this new notification two hours later. It’s like, change of plans. Elon and his folks, they still want to see your code. We need you to shred the code if you have printed it out, so why not just bring it in on your laptop?

Everyone is just kind of humoring the boss, who doesn’t really seem to know what he’s doing. It isn’t the sort of thing that happens at a big tech company.

It is not. Now, one thing that we should say is that the Elon folks are obsessed with figuring out who is a good engineer at the company, right? So Elon very much worships at the altar of the engineer. He considers himself an engineer.

I talked to people who were getting calls late at night and asked if they were really good on their team. Who are the top performers? The people who are low performers.

And so this code printout exercise, as ridiculous as it seems, was all part of this sort of evaluation system where they’ve been trying to figure out, who at this company do we need to keep in order to keep the service running?

And who can we lay off? That is sort of a secret part of this. OK, so we have this code printing fiasco. You reported that on Sunday that there were plans to tie verifications to Twitter Blue subscriptions.

We don’t know how many people subscribe to Twitter Blue. The company has never released a metric. What we know is that 89 percent of this company’s revenues comes from digital advertising, and the bulk of the rest comes from of selling access to their API.

Cashing blue checks’ checks: Musk on Tuesday said he planned to charge $8 a month for Twitter’s subscription service, called “Twitter Blue,” with the promise to let anyone pay to receive a coveted blue check mark to verify their account. His original plan was for users to pay $19.99 a month to have a verified account.

Yeah. People, including Stephen King, the horror author — he tweeted, ”$20 a month to keep my blue check? If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”

Wait, let me just say, Stephen King has written about some of the most terrifying horrors imaginable, and nothing scared him more than the idea of paying $20 a month for his verification badge.

But it also seems strange, because it’s just not that big a moneymaking idea. So I was doing some back-of-the-envelope math on this. There are 400,000 people who have been verified on the social network. That is the most recent number that we have.

And I think that’s how a lot of journalists get verified. But there’s also a process. You can ask that you be verified if you are a celebrity. It is not about a status marker, that is the reason for the verification.

It’s not about, this person’s important. It was literally created because people like Oprah were joining Twitter many, many years ago, and there were already a ton of impostors on Twitter, saying that they were people like Oprah. And so Twitter needed a way to basically allow users to tell whether the person they were talking to was actually the person they purported to be.

I think this feature of the platform is needed. Every platform that is social in some way has this feature, right? This is the real Oprah, but that is not the real Oprah.

Right. And I think it’s fair to say that over the years, like, people have come to see these checkmarks next to your Twitter name as sort of a status symbol, right? It means that you are someone.

Correct, exactly. And so I think the idea initially coming out of the Elon war room was that people who were verified cared so much about being verified and staying verified, that they would pay for the privilege. $20 a month is the amount we get for verification.

Now, that almost immediately results in, as you said, an entire Twitter timeline meltdown, where users are saying, no way will we pay $20 a month. That is more than I pay for. That is more than I pay to watch video on the internet.

Musk doesn’t mind. When our own Tom Warren took a screenshot of the tweet, a user replied, “The beauty of this is each account that gets verified paid $8. The account is suspended due to the fact that twitter keeps the money. It is genius and I hope more people do it. It’s free money for Twitter.” Musk himself replied to that user with a bullseye emoji, a smiley face wearing sunglasses, and a bag of money emoji.

This seems like a way to make money for them and also kind of punish the blue checkmarks, which is very different from how other social media platforms treat their creators.

I think that I’m trying to keep an open mind. This could work. I’ve thought that power users of the website should be paying for some of the features that are being talked about.

It does create a lot of economic value for people like you and me. It matters to us. Software solutions are paid for by news organizations to help them do many things. Maybe there’s a chance that Twitter Blue will be part of that.

Now, apparently, Elon did say something, like they’re going to have maybe some sort of separate legacy verification program for — I don’t know — government entities that aren’t going to pay the $8 a month. So there’s still a lot of details to be worked out here.

A Social Network for Short-Form Video? Vines, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. What do they want to know? A Comment on “Vine’s Last Interview with Vine”

I loved it. People are very nostalgic about Vine for a reason. It ushered in the age of short-form video. And I think many folks listening to the show can probably recite several Vines from memory.

I would say that is not an immediate revenue driver. They are going to have to put a lot of effort into that. You are launching a new social network on the microBlogging service, 140 characters or less. So that’s a huge, heavy lift. It would be great to have a US short-form video network that was not owned by social networking sites like Facebook or YouTube. We will have to see if they can do it.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

What Do We Have to Say About Tech Jobs? Why Are We Here? What Have We Learned in the Last Two Months? How Have We Solved It?

That is correct. You have days to ship this. If this does not ship by this date, in some cases, a date next week, you will be fired. If the deadline is past, you will be fired.

So people are sleeping very little. Some of them are terrified because they are sleeping in their offices. Some of them are here on work visas. If they lose this job, they have 60 days to find another job, or they’re out of the country. So it could not be more serious for the folks who have these jobs.

The book is called “Hard Fork,” and it is the third book in the “Mockingjay” trilogy. So it is about 10:00 AM Pacific on Wednesday right now. What is your day doing so far? Any notable event today?

Every day seems to be the same cycle for the last week, which is everybody wakes up to more panicked messages via various different channels. Most people have been smart enough to move off of slack and into other channels We have had absolutely no communication from anybody inside, so we are trying to chase rumors.

There was more external communication to the site than there has been to the employees. The rumors are what everything is based on. We wake up. We look at our various channels and our friends, cross our fingers and hope for the best.

Stressful. I feel like between trying to maintain this job that I have currently, while clearly looking for a way out, while having zero support and acknowledgment from the people above me, is very stressful. Already, there have been multiple rumor mill-based scares.

First, of course, was that layoffs are supposed to happen Monday. They didn’t happen. There is a rumor it is going to be Friday. It’s exhausting. I know we are all paid really well.

We have some money to sit on. Some people don’t. But it is also just nerve-racking not to know, especially as we’re entering a really tough hiring market in tech. We are entering the holidays.

Life Under Musk Two Tweets Employees Speaker Out: A Case Study of Coms Sparsity, Teamwork and Open Source Problems

The new CEO at your company is something to really highlight. Most of the C-suite has either been fired or resigned, and you have not received one email that says, here’s who’s in charge, and here’s the game plan for the next few days.

That is 100% accurate. We have received zero information, other than what gets trickled down to us. Comms is incredibly sparse. There is not a single person answering in the company channels.

In the middle of the day, you wake up, and it is like a scavenger hunt across seven different apps, figuring out what you are supposed to be doing.

You have probably heard, and you have been reporting on some of the infamous code reviews. A lot of people say that code is written by them and not the people who collaborated with them, in order to get on a preferred status list.

Absolutely. What they are asking for is volume, not quality. So everybody is sharing every little bit of code they have ever written, no matter how insignificant or garbage it is. [SIGHS]

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: I Cannot Compleigh What I Have Learned About a Manager’s Message

Yeah, I reported on a message from a manager who said, basically, if you don’t know what you’re working on right now, work on something. Work on anything.

Someone sent me a post from Blind and I want to read it. Blind is this app where you sort of log in with your work email, and then you can have these pseudonymous chats about what’s happening at your company.

Several people have sent me this post. And I wonder if you’ve seen it. And I’m not going to read the whole thing. The headline is that I cannot cope.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Twitter: Where are the people who aren’t being ignored? Where are we going? What are we doing on Twitter? How do we get there?

It says, “I am on the team that is working to make all of the crazy dreams come true.” If we miss delivery, management will threaten to fire us and it is totally outside our control. We are gone if we don’t work on Saturdays and Sundays. We are gone if we decide to take or leave the country.

People are working long hours. I’m working around 20 hours per day at absolutely full velocity. I’m waking up in the night to attend status calls. I don’t work when I don’t worry about it. I can’t cope. I’m an absolute mess. I’m at a breaking point. It is after a few days of Elon.

So there are two camps at Twitter right now, the people who are being completely ignored until they get fired and the people who are being pulled into these task forces. The people who will be fired are the ones who are being ignored.

What I’m saying about Twitter: “Is the best way to get what you want” and how you can do what you’re trying to do

My heart goes out to this person. I hope they are able to find gainful employment, while they are trying to sleep and care for themselves, in that four hour period.

And I sincerely hope that there is care taken for people who are on visas. All the people who are here on visas don’t know what will happen to them. And they have not been told anything.

So this is more than just privileged tech people crying because we’re moving from one six-figure salary to another six-figure salary. These are the people who are trying to come to this country and have gainful employment, as well as being highly skilled, and doing a good job.

There is a lot to that that I don’t disagree with. I think Twitter, at the end of the day, is structured very poorly. This goes back to a lack of operational leadership, which has been existent in the company for many years. This company does not have good operations, and it shows.

I don’t think it is because engineers are sitting on their hands. I think it’s because it’s nearly impossible to get anything done because of the way this company is structured, it doesn’t know how things are changing and it’s hard to get approvals through Byzantine processes. So there is some truth to that statement. This is not the best way to deal with it.

Why you shouldn’t leave Twitter if you’re going to Musk’s takeover — or what you might think about Twitter without quitting Twitter

And I wonder, as you’ve been going through all this, if you have been thinking about the degree to which that could be at risk, and what fears you might have around the future of Twitter the service?

I would love to think that everybody on Twitter is going to leave in protest. But the reality of the situation is a lot of people may stay. But it’s going to be interesting to see who stays.

We don’t have to be here, in Tiny Talk Town. We all know it. There are places on the internet that have decent hang. But Twitter is unique, and its most fervent users are unlikely to leave en masse. And most of the knee-jerk “I’m outta here” reactions to Musk’s takeover aren’t that compelling, unless you’re a writer assigned to collate celebrity tweets. The smarter move might be a slow burn instead of a pyrotechnic exit—a thoughtful, considered approach to quitting Twitter without quitting Twitter. It’s not as if you’re quitting, it’s for social media.

Life Under Musk Two Tweetees Speak Out: How Much Have They Learned Before They Came to the Rescue? And What Have They Done About It?

Scared and relieved. It will be scary not to have money. I hope that we all wake up after we’ve been fired and say, “All right, got to get that resume out there”, at the same time. Got to be energized about these other jobs, because right now it’s sucking the life out of us.

There is uncertainty. There are people who aren’t even certain if they should continue doing the work they’re doing. The pile of unknowns and things that have been reported on leads to a general constant stress, because the information we have is all we have.

I mean, even in the lowest parts of engineering, people would raise privacy concerns or potential misuse of new features. Their only job is to write random codes that no one can see, just like the piping behind the scenes. And the company just always kind of had a culture of letting people speak to these things. And more often than not, it caught us on issues before it ever made it to the public like.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees-Speak Out: Why Is This Man a Good Person? A Case Study With Three Years After the Barracks

That’s complicated because no one really knew. This guy was not a good person, I suppose, and that was the groupthink. You know, there were a lot of people that were of the thought that this should probably have been banned a long time ago for his behavior. Everything came from there.

He has been more aggressive in attaching himself to various political viewpoints and talking points. And if it serves him, he’ll lean into it.

I’ve been there for a number of years and the company has grown in many ways, but it hasn’t been great. I agree with people when they say there is too many managers. Maybe delivery is too slow. The company’s strong point has not always been management.

So that aside, you don’t go through any change like this without some massive structural change. If he just came in and did the same thing, like, what’s the point?

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speaker Out: Is It Really Necessary if We Are Going Faster Than We Need It?

Well, okay. There is a belief that the service should be moving faster than it has been. We’ve been hearing that Elon is saying, ship this thing by next Monday or else you are going to be fired. When you hear that you have a deadline, what do you think about it?

I get lost in my mind. It is normal to have a three to four day deadline on something so we can get it done by Friday. That’s a little stressful. Might put in a couple extra hours. There is a need to get it done. It makes sense.

I think the main difference is the sheer scale. I wouldn’t get asked at work to completely revamp Twitter Blue by Friday. That is completely nonsensical.

The number of systems that need to be touched on, and the number of engineers that have to be dragged into it, is like raising the Titanic from the bottom of the ocean.

It isn’t as if there is just a set of code that needs to be written. You also have to coordinate across presumably dozens of engineers, product managers, and lots of other folks, right?

Yeah. Well, I mean, if you look at some of the feature sets that have been reported on that he wants to add in, like ranking blue check users higher than others, where that ranking occurs in the stack. That whole process has to be reshifted. We have to figure out the whole services in the company.

Yeah. If somebody said to you that they wanted to redo social media giant Twitter Blue, what time frame would you be given?

It depends. The change could take quite a while due to the slow nature of the platform. We’re more concerned with reliability than we are moving fast.

I guess if I had to give round-about time, there would be something that could possibly be deployed within a quarter to two quarters.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: Are We Really Trying to Get Something Out of It? How a New Social Problem Can Come Into Play

This is an engineering problem as well as a social problem. We want to do testing. We need to figure out how this can be abused. What are people going to do with it? What are the Bitcoin bros going to do to try to steal more of people’s money abusing this feature?

Right. And that’s what goes on with all major releases at a big social network, is trying to figure out, we change this feature, what are the 10 other things that happen? It seems like the deadlines may be so short that this stuff may be released without any testing or scrutiny, that sort of trying to figure out what could go wrong. They are going to be free.

Yeah. There is a section on user privacy and privacy data. We are not doing anything with user data, so we are not concerned about that. And then now it’s just a blue check on a profile.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk and Vine: A New Look at How to Tell Your Employees about a Tech Company Or a Product, or Can We Talk About It?

There are a couple of things. Depending on where you are in the leadership stack, Musk’s people will be more or less equal. Generally the one overarching message that did get communicated was, find something cool that you like. And hopefully Musk likes it functionally.

Think about it. If you propose an idea to him and he likes it, he will approve it within a week. You sacrificed all of the teams around you.

God. I’m curious what you make of the various product changes that have been floated or proposed by Elon Musk and his inner circle, such as the charging $8 a month for Twitter verification, bringing back Vine. What do you make of those proposals? Do you believe they are good ideas?

I mean, one of the first decisions he made was to redirect the logged-out view to the Explore page. And I don’t know this for certain, but my basic understanding of the goal here was that we might even be able to serve ads to people that aren’t logged in.

Now, if you go to Twitter and you’re not logged in, they’ll show you a bunch of tweets which might entice you to sign in, create an account. Maybe you see ads if you linger and browse through some social networking sites. A lot of people would agree that the change was a quick one.

The Vine one, it’s not the worst idea. The cynical part of me says it’s too little, too late. You know? The hill to climb is called TikTok.

But sure. We have all of the original content from vine. The nostalgia factor is huge and it’s kind of a way to at least launch something.

But we at least have the media, and trying to build a product like that, we’ve been working on that for a while. I believe all tech companies have at least tried. Is this something we can do? There’s been mock-ups.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

A Tale of Two TWiC Employees Talking Out: How Were They Really Meant to Tell Us?

It would most likely be boring. You could probably make a really interesting ethereal horror movie out of just constantly walking around with nothing.

There’s no communications. The people are in a corner. But it’s not like, oh, the whole company went to an all-hands and learned what’s happening. It’s everybody asking, are we ever going to see him? Should I keep doing my work? Do they even serve lunch anymore?

So as we’re recording this, we don’t know what might happen to your job. Do you want to be working at TWiC in three months? Or do you feel like you’re ready to be somewhere else?

The culture is a reality. Cultures can be seen through the product. A lot of the way the company behaved was because people cared so much. And that can be infuriating in its own ways.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Rulee: Communicating with the public on Twitter, and how to stop complaining about the work hours (review by Casey Rosengren)

I mean, people have seen this. The point of this is to move fast and break things, with no care for the people who are using it.

He is reading the news about the work hours. He was speculating about what labor law lawsuits were going to be.

According to an internal Slack message posted by a Twitter employee and viewed by CNN, Musk has shown little fear of the FTC regulators overseeing the company’s multiple, legally binding consent agreements committing it to maintaining a robust cybersecurity program and producing written privacy impact reports before launching any new products or services, a requirement that could cover Twitter Blue.

And if people want to send you any huge scoops about what’s happening at Twitter, you can send those right over to Casey. His email address is Kevin. The person is called rulee.

“Hard Fork” with Davis Land and Paula Szuchman, edited by Cory Schreppel, J. L. Land – An epoch of discovery

Davis Land is the producer of “Hard Fork”. Paula Szuchman is the editor. This episode was fact checked by a third party. The show was engineered today by Cory Schreppel.

Original music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, and Marion Lozano. Special thanks to all the people who made it possible.

Apple became a profit machine in Musk’s 20-year tenure away from Apple, but it didn’t make an annual profit until 2020

At the time, Jobs had been developing personal computers for 20 years, his entire adult life. He was well acquainted with the company he was running because he founded it and led the team that created its flagship product. 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. He was also Steve Jobs. If anyone could quickly turn around the near-bankrupt computer giant, it would be him. Yet it took him months to come up with his plan and years to bring it to fruition. When I was shown the iMac on May 1, it would help bring Apple back into the black but it wasn’t until it entered non-PC devices that it became a profit machine. In 1998 Apple wasn’t even on Jobs’ road map.

The absurdity of Musk’s haste cannot be found farther than his own successful enterprises. When he took over Tesla in 2008, the company was already five years old. After 17 years after founding, Musk came up with a plan to turn the company around, but it did not make an annual profit until 2020. Musk deservedly gets a lot of credit for what Tesla has achieved—and for, among other things, his persistence. Musk has another company, which 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.

What will the Federal Reserve decide when the stock market starts to fall? A CNN Business analysis of Powell’s reaction to an interest rate pivot on Wednesday

CNN Business first published a version of the story. Before the Bell newsletter. I’m not a subscriber. You can sign up here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.

What will the Federal Reserve do at its meeting in December? Analysts can speculate all they want, but Fed officials say they will be using hard economic data to make their next decision.

That means key housing, labor, and inflation reports are likely to have a large impact on the market, as investors speculate on what they might mean for interest rates.

What’s happening: Federal Reserve Chair Powell crushed investor hopes of an interest rate pivot with a few words on Wednesday, causing stocks to plunge. The Fed has a long way to go in fighting inflation according to Powell. “It’s very premature, in my view, to think about or be talking about pausing.”

The central bank doesn’t think inflation will go down anytime soon. That will require more interest rate hikes in the coming months, warned policymakers.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html

Wage Growth and Wall Street Demand in the U.S. After More Jobs and More Jobs: An Estimate of Core Core Price Data Using PCE

The government report is expected to show the economy added another 200,000 positions in October — down from last month, but still a very solid number as demand for employment continues to outpace the supply of labor.

That means more inflation. Businesses have to pay higher wages to attract employees and are able to charge more for their goods and services. The wage growth will be looked at by the Fed. In September, wages rose by 5% from a year ago.

There is a possible upside: Another jobs report in December is expected ahead of the Fed meeting. If both reports show a downward trajectory, that could be enough to appease Fed officials even if the unemployment rate remains historically low.

Core CPI prices, which exclude oil and food, rose 0.6% in September month-over-month, matching August’s pace and coming in well above expectations of a 0.4% increase, not a great sign for the Fed. Analysts expect to see another increase in October.

PCE is used to show the prices of goods and services purchased in the United States. It accounts for a broader range of buyers and the Fed thinks the measure is more accurate than the consumer price index.

Wall Street Wall Street: The Effect of Inflationary Policies on the Real Estate Market and the Banks of England’s Large-Scale Rate of Interest Rates

One of the first areas to show signs of cooling after the Fed fights inflation is the housing market.

The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.95% last week, up from 3.09% just a year ago, and elevated borrowing costs are leading to a decline in demand.

“The housing market was very overheated for the couple of years after the pandemic as demand increased and rates were low,” said Powell on Wednesday. There is a large effect of our policies on that area.

The Bank of England raised interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point on Thursday, the biggest hike in 33 years, as it attempts to fight soaring inflation.

The Bank of England said that if GDP goes down in the next couple of years, it won’t be as bad as the 2008 global financial crisis.

Several Twitter employees have already filed a class action lawsuit claiming that the layoffs violate the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.

The company’s offices will be temporarily closed and badges will be suspended in order to make sure the safety of employees and systems.

The WARN Act requires a company with 100 employees or more to give at least 60 days written notice if it intends to cut 50 jobs or more.

Ross Gerber said over the weekend that he would like to see Musk put a CEO in place fortwitter in the first quarter of 2023.

The world’s richest man said expletives about his assessment of the current system for people who don’t have a blue checkmark. He added: “Power to the people! The price for blue is $8/month.

Did Musk and Volkswagen Hit You in the Face? Explaining the Decline of Facebook Advertising on Social Media During the Sunday Evening Rejuvenation

General Mills, the North Face, and several car companies have announced that they are suspending ads on social network sites due to the controversy surrounding Musk. Musk said the drop in revenue was the result of the decline in advertiser spending. The situation was blasted as messed up by him.

But I’m not here to speculate on the true motives behind Sunday’s whiplash; I don’t think that’s helpful. Both intention and impact are not the same thing. Regardless of someone’s intention when they hit you in the face, they’ve still hit you in the face. You have to deal with that situation. My thoughts turn towards the people who have been impacted by the weekend’s policy change. Sunday was a day when many people on the social media platform were wondering if the platform they relied on to find and promote their work, make connections with others in their field, and rely on for income would allow them to continue.

In a separate statement, Volkswagen Group, which owns Audi, Porsche and Bentley, confirmed it had recommended its brands “pause their paid activities on the platform until further notice.”

The companies join General Motors, which had previously said it would pause paying for advertising on Twitter while it evaluates the platform’s “new direction.” Toyota, another Tesla competitor, previously told CNN that it is “in discussions with key stakeholders and monitoring the situation” on Twitter.

Tiny Talk Town: The ad buying platform that promotes civil society and the big bang: Timing the exodus from Twitter

Interpublic Group, an ad buying company, had recommended that its clients pause advertising on the platform.

The pauses also come days ahead of the US midterm elections, as many civil society leaders worry that misinformation and other harmful content could spread on the platform and create disruption.

In the meantime, Musk is working to stave off a possible advertiser exodus. Musk’s team spent Monday “meeting with the marketing and advertising community” in New York, according to Jason Calacanis, a member of Musk’s inner circle.

“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. Congratulations: We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk.

Quiet quitting is rejecting the guilt of working overtime in a way that depletes your own money and doesn’t help your employer’s bottom line. It’s not about giving more to the platform than people can expect to get back. If you want to stay on, you need to find a way to use it without using you.

A relatively small group of people power Twitter. According to internal company research viewed by Reuters, heavy users who tweet in English “account for less than 10 percent of monthly overall users, but generate 90 percent of all tweets and half of global revenue.”

It is easy for a person to make a mistake when following a lot of active users on a social network, since they are all noisy and tend to mistake their own experience for that of others. (Same goes for journalists.) In reality, nearly half of Twitter users tweet less than five times a month, and most of their posts are replies, not original tweets. They check in on the latest events or live sports or celebrity news and then they go about their lives. They’re “lurkers.”

Lurking is not doomscrolling, a practice 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. The choice to hide, to sit back and look for a while, is basically a way of dealing with the complexity and chaos that is New Twitter. After you check in on the toy, close your app or browser tab. If you want to disengage, send a message on your phone. Keep one eye on it during basketball games. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. Save your most original thoughts for another time, another place.

Twitter Blue: What Do People Want to Learn About a Musk-Faced Online Business? An Analysis of Musk’s Management of Twitter

Twitter, however, is an acquisition and is not necessarily full of Musk fans. It is a less accommodating environment for Musk. Dril is a forum goon who loves fUCKING with people, he is one of the early subsets of those who follow the Something Awful forum. Plus, Musk’s Twitter Blue plan to devalue verification check marks motivated a bunch of people who didn’t like Musk to go out with a bang by impersonating him, largely because they knew it would make him mad. And it probably did! That would explain why his first policy change was to make it more difficult to impersonate.

A Wall Street analyst warned Monday that Musk’s management ofTwitter, including the banning of multiple journalists, has damaged market sentiment aroundTesla and risks provoking backlash from advertisers and consumers.

Now, Twitter did set up Tips — a way to send cash to people you like — but it doesn’t take a cut of that money. It takes a bit of the revenue from Super Follows, but it is not enough to cover the costs of in-app purchases.

The disruption did not seem to be over on Friday. The company said it would re-introduction a gray official badge for certain accounts to help confirm their identities. Some people posed as President Donald Trump and Nintendo to set off a wave of verified accounts on the social networking site. These accounts were the result of Musk’s decision to rush ahead with offering a blue check mark to any account holder willing to pay $8 a month, no questions asked, as he races to find new ways to make money from the platform.

I don’t think a lot of advertisers would want to come back to someone with that attitude toward impersonation, even without an economic downturn. The open question to me is whether users want to stay in that environment — one that’s just gotten a new layer of hoaxing and scammers. Mark Cuban has been complaining about the new users making his mentions miserable. Cuban’s thoughts are a reason for people to stay on the platform.

The federal government has a requirement of full documentation, in writing, of any foreseeable risks of “any product or service affecting commerce” under the consent decree. The changes to Twitter Blue rolled out less than two weeks after Musk bought Twitter. Do you think there’s complete documentation about its risks? Sounds like Twitter’s lawyers are worried!

The banks have to take an immediate loss when the debt is off. Banks may choose to hang on to the debt for a while to see whether the market conditions change. It gets harder to unload debt if there is a person on the bed. Musk has the richest guy in the world so banks might be willing to negotiate with him about debt repayment. But I do wonder how long they want to hold these loans and who might buy them. If banks can’t place the debt, that probably does make it difficult for any other leveraged buy-outs in tech to get done.

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.

After gray badges were launched on Wednesday as a way to help users distinguish legitimate celebrity and branded accounts from accounts that merely paid for blue check marks, Musk abruptly canceled the feature and forced subordinates to explain.

On the same day, the account said that it had added an ” official label to some accounts” to combat impersonation.

Misinformation experts warned that the shaky launch of the paid verification feature would make it harder to identify trustworthy information during the crucial period following the US mid-term elections. Even some of Musk’s fellow high-powered users of the platform had tough feedback.

When you have your customer service hat on, please send it toelonmusk. 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.

“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. Bring back the commentary from the social networking site. One makes Twitter time and information efficient. The other is awful.”

According to estimates from Pathmatics, some 625 of the top 1,000 Twitter advertisers, including major brands, pulled their ad dollars by January 25.

“SpaceX Starlink bought a tiny – not large – ad package to test effectiveness of Twitter advertising in Australia & Spain,” Musk wrote in a reply to one Twitter user, adding that he did the same on competitors such as Facebook, Instagram and Google.

GroupM and Twitter: The Consequences of Elon Musk’s Takeover of Twitter (and its Impact on Facebook, Google, Apple, and Mars)

GroupM works with companies like Google, L’Oréal, Bayer, Nestle, Unilever, Coke, and Mars. If you’ve ever seen that graphic about how a few brands make pretty much everything you buy at the grocery store, you’ll notice a lot of Venn diagram overlap with GroupM’s list of clients.

GroupM is reportedly concerned about several specific things following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter; in a document, it cites the large numbers of Twitter executives leaving or being fired (especially those in charge of safety, security, and compliance), the wave of high-profile impersonations by “verified” users, and also raises concerns about Twitter’s abilities to follow the Federal Trade Commission’s orders. There’s a document that GroupM wants to see if it wants to get rid of its high-risk label. The list includes:

Zero percent surprised those requests are. Companies don’t want to advertise on platforms where their messages, carefully crafted to be as inoffensive and enticing to as many people as possible, appear next to blatant hate speech, conspiracy theories, or, perhaps worst of all, a fake-yet-verified version of their profile posting pictures of their beloved mascot giving people the middle finger.

“I’ve always thought that a move to a subscription business would make sense for Twitter … it’s never been a great advertising platform,” said Larry Vincent, associate professor of marketing at USC’s Marshall School of Business. The level of user targeting that is offered by Facebook and other rivals has made Twitter’s advertising business smaller than it should have been.

Large digital platforms “have experienced professionals out there who develop relationships with these advertisers,” Vincent said. “When you let go of a staff that was as veteran as Twitter’s and there’s no one there to respond to those [brands], you basically reduce the value of the ad platform.”

In an op-ed published in the New York Times last week, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, who left the company earlier this month, said the company’s failure to adhere to Google and Apple’s app store rules could be “catastrophic.” App store operators are known to take away social media apps for failing to protect users from harmful content, and following Musk’s takeover, it is believed that they will have begun to get calls from them. The head of the app store at Apple, Phil Schiller, deleted his account on Saturday.

Crowdfunding a Novel for the Arts and Community Reporter: How Twitter helped Azucena Rasilla and Dan Sheehan

There is no sure bet that taking online attention will translate into revenue growth.

Many users followed suit, tweeting short eulogies for the platform. Dan and others like him, gained a platform on the micro-messaging site that allowed them to excel in their personal and professional lives.

“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.

“For the longest time, creative fields have been cornered by the wealthy, or the children of the wealthy… You were able to build an audience on the social network because of the people holding the keys to that.

Twitter also helped Azucena Rasilla, an arts and community reporter for The Oaklandside, to gain a platform and open a door into the journalism industry outside of traditional routes.

I’m not sure how the diverse communities are going to find each other. She says that she could start to follow people on social media and start reading other people’s work from there.

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

From Mastodon to Disability Twitter: A Contribution to the Help of Wendi Muse, a Veteran of MSW, in the Dialogue of H1N1

Wendi Muse, who has multiplesclerosis, was an active member of ‘Disability Twitter’ for a long time. She made use of the resources that she has on hand to help people get masks, and sent some from her personal stock. Earlier this year, she noticed a greater demand for reliable N95 masks in the immunocompromised community.

In total, they’ve sent out more than 12,000 masks from my living room since January. 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’s given me and my family information about the H1N1 epidemic, and it’s also given me and other less fortunate people access to some resources.

Thanks to dedicated admins, many instances survived the flood of sign-ups and came back stronger. Mastodon was never, and never will be, a verified account on the social networking site. Mastodon is valuable for some because of that. To others, it’s a barrier. But the Twitter migration showed that Mastodon can adapt—and quickly.

“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.”

Comments on Musk’s Twitter Files, Part Duex, and the First Tweet Drop from Hunt Biden: What Has Happened?

Musk’s followers were told of the announcement on Wednesday, a day after he asked them whether or not to offer general amnesty to suspended accounts if they haven’t broken the law.

The poll, which closed around 12:45 pm ET on Thursday, finished with 72.4% voting in favor of the proposition and 27.6% voting against. The poll garnered more than 3 million votes on Twitter.

Weiss believed that actions were taken without the knowledge of users. But Twitter has long been transparent about the fact that it may limit certain content that violates its policies and, in some cases, may apply “strikes” that correspond with suspensions for accounts that break its rules. In the case of strikes, users receive notification that their accounts have been temporarily suspended.

Users will be able to determine if the company limits how many other users can view their posts under an option that will be introduced by the new owner. Musk is taking on an issue that has been championed by conservatives who claim the social network has suppressed or banned their content.

If you were shadowbanned on account, you will now know the reason and how to appeal through a software update, Musk stated on Thursday. He did not provide additional details or a timetable.

Weiss’ tweets follow the first “Twitter Files” drop earlier this month from journalist Matt Taibbi, who shared internal Twitter emails about the company’s decision to temporarily suppress a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden and his laptop, which largely corroborated what was already known about the incident.

In both cases, the internal documents appear to have been provided directly to the journalists by Musk’s team. Musk on Friday shared Weiss’ thread in a tweet and added, “The Twitter Files, Part Duex!!” along with two popcorn emojis.

Trump fed the flames: Reporting what he said and tweeted about the public, or his role in the political life of the United States

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

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. The reports of every word that a president said was considered to be a signal of future policy. 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. The other editor pushed him back. He said that he was the president. “What he says is news.”

Here, for instance, we saw a slew of rapid-response news stories about Musk’s tweet on December 11 that “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” a dig at the government’s former chief infectious disease expert, as well as at gender diversity. There is a picture of his bedside table with two replica guns on it, in addition to a number of other things.

This is precisely the way coverage of Trump worked. The right-wing media gave a lot of attention to his obvious egomania, corruption, and lack of interest in grasping basic policy, while the liberal-leaning media paid attention to his clear fit to be president, the belief he would only succeed in bringing the country down in flames, and There was plenty of good reporting going on at the same time, but these polarizing accounts tended to dominate the conversation. The losers were the public, whose understanding of what was actually happening across the country was forced through incompatible narratives around the behavior of one unhinged man in the White House.

This is what Musk is doing. The relationship between the new owner of the social networking website and the journalists who cover him is described by the Atlantic author as a “dysfunctional relationship with the journalists who cover him, where the least defensible statements and claims on all sides are amplified in a never-ending cycle that predictably fuels

Companies aim to exclude porn. While OnlyFans has surrendered, Chatroulette and Tumblr appear to take a firmer stand than ever against it. Advertisers want brands to be based on unwholesome adjacencies and that is the reason why porn is being removed from both Facebook and YouTube. While other big social media services allow users to post something called intimate media, it is not one of them. Users are suspended from the platform for upskirts, creeps, revenge porn, nonconsensual erotica and images shot with hidden cameras. Pornographic images, which make up about 13 percent of all tweets, cannot yet be directly sold.

Porn’s not my cup of tea, but you have to admire its ferocity and cunning. Timothy Morton might say that it’s a megagenre, which is a hyper object that’s not graspable in its scale. In effect, porn online behaves like a predator plant, saturating the pixels with flesh colors, choking off biodiverse memes, and sowing vast digital acreage with salt.

The service lost its appeal five years after its start when it was overrun by porn. After it was founded in 2009, Chatrouette had a lightheartedness about it that quickly traded for dick pics and goons. Sex workers are the most prolific contributors of porn on OnlyFans, which began in 2016 as a platform for performers to post videos.

Why Live Location Sharing is On Fire: Why Facebook Has Been Afraid of Women and Girls, and How We Can Reclaim It

John Davisson is director of litigation and senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center and he says that Musk is responding to events that affect him personally to reprogram that policy and place new limits on what could be disseminated through the platform. It is being carried out in a self-centered way. Musk has announced new policies on live location sharing that appear to be designed for himself rather than for his users.

Editor’s Note: Kara Alaimo, an associate professor in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University, writes about issues affecting women and social media. Her book “This Feed Is on Fire: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls — And How We Can Reclaim It” will be published by Alcove Press in 2024. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. CNN has an opinion on it.

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 is evident that we cannot rely on Musk 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. Many people with these skills have recently been laid off from their jobs. The Washington Post is reporting that there have been layoffs at a number of tech and journalism companies recently, including Facebook and CNN. Some of these professionals should work together to create new social platforms designed to provide the truly open town hall we so desperately need.

Why the accounts were taken down was not explained by the company. Musk claimed that journalists shared his location with him, which was basically assassination coordinates, on Thursday night. He did not give any evidence for that claim.

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.

This time, there was no warning or explanation, as our reporter only sought comment from Musk for a story. By midday Sunday, Lorenz’s account was restored, as was the tweet she thought had triggered her suspension.

The investigation of the alleged stalking of a CNN journalist by the U.S. Consultative Security Service (SUSY). Dujarric and Buzbee

Stephane Dujarric, a spokesman for the UN, said that the move sets a dangerous precedent at a time when journalists around the world are facing even worse threats.

Several of the reporters suspended Thursday night had been writing about the new policy and Musk’s reasons for imposing it, which was related to his allegations about a stalker in Los Angeles.

Mastodon’s official account was banned because it was an alternative social network where a lot of people are fleeing. The reason wasn’t known, but it did post about the jet- tracking account. Some users were prevented from posting links to Mastodon accounts by the social media company.

Sally Buzbee, the executive editor of The Washington Post, stated that Drew Harwell was removed from his job after accurate reporting about Musk.

CNN said in a statement that “the impulsive and unjustified suspension of a number of reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is concerning but not surprising.”

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 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.

Twitter and Spaces: What are the rules? The case of Musk and the new regime and what will it take to get him out of the Twitter jungle

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 said he would suppress negative feelings and hate by limiting 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.”

If the suspensions lead to the mass exodus of media organizations, the platform will be changed at the fundamental level, according to a marketing and media executive who was once a head of global media.

CBS stopped using the platform in November due to unknown new management, but media organizations have remained on the platform.

“So we’re going after journalists who really sees at the main tent pole of TWITTER.”, Paskalis said. Driving journalists off the internet is the worst self-imposed wound I can think of.

Advertisers have already cut spending on the platform over uncertainty about the direction Musk is taking it, so the suspensions may be the biggest red flag yet.

The Spaces conference chat was down less than an hour after Musk signed out of the session at which he had been questioned about reporters’ ousting. Musk said that Spaces had been taken offline to deal with a bug. Late Friday, Spaces returned.

Mastodon user numbers are going down according to CNN, and they say a platform cannot continue to go viral forever. The cycle of media and social media attention stops after awhile, but behind it we still have organic growth, which is what we had before November.

The Last Straw of Mastodon: Elon Musk’s Twitter Debate on the “Lasinia” of Paul Graham

Elon Musk tweeted a poll Sunday evening asking people to vote on whether he should step down as Twitter’s CEO. Musk said he would abide by the results.

Replying to a tweet Sunday, in which MIT artificial intelligence researcher Lex Fridman said he would take the CEO job, Musk hinted he hasn’t been completely happy with his new gig.

In another policy change, the company has decided that it won’t allow users to link to other platforms.

The analyst said the backlash against Musk will hurt his company because of the inconsistent standards application.

Last week, Musk attempted to block competitors after shutting down a verified account that was monitoring the flights of his private jet.

The test case was the prominent venture capitalist, Paul Graham, who told his 1.5 million followers on Sunday that it was the “last straw” to find Musk on Mastodon. Soon after, Musk promised to reverse the policy that had been implemented just hours before and the account was immediately suspended.

In public banter with Twitter followers Sunday, Musk expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO, saying that person “must like pain a lot” to run a company that “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy.”

Oppenheimer & Co. downgraded its rating on Tesla, where Musk is the CEO, solely because of risks posed by the billionaire’s ownership and management of Twitter.

A catalyst for the downgrade was the ban of several journalists, including Donie O’ Sullivan of CNN.

The Evil Billionaire Attack: How Blockchains Get Their Ideas Out of the House and from the Prison Prisoner’s Companion’s Pockets

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 here a new analog, just as capable of wrecking systems and leaking data. If you want, call it an evil billionaire attack. Money is the weapon because it is likely that you won’t have enough of it to make a difference when the moment arrives. The call is coming from the house.

The reason this strategy works is that most ideas of any consequence are owned by people with more money than you, so whenever possible they put them together into a network with the intent of making the gravity inescapable. The term platform is used to describe technical systems with components that can be used to compose new functions, and power sources prefer platforms that can be monetized on a yearly basis.

Blockchains fight this problem 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. A new version of the Hic et Nunc marketplace was put around the same content when the market went under. The shared resource of the internet, known as the blockchain, is almost like self-defense.

Or consider the case of WordPress, the early blogging engine that has since grown into increasingly elaborate general-purpose content management software. It now powers about 40 percent of the open web, with which it is loosely synonymous. A huge economy has sprung up around it: businesses that develop websites,developers who work for those companies, and even independent developers who writing products which can be unlocked with licensing fees. This can happen because the core is open source and encourages the same of its community. WordPress has been around for a long time and its straightforward RSS feeds decisively lost out to Twitter’s social features, so in 2022 there is a reasonable argument that it is a bit long in the tooth. It’s not at risk so we must understand that it’s a bigger technical success.

“We are excited to see Mastodon grow and become a household name in newsrooms across the world, and we are committed to continuing to improve our software to face up to new challenges that come with rapid growth and increasing demand,” Rochko wrote.

As of Tuesday morning, Mastodon’s app stood at number 8 among free social networking apps on the Google Play Store and at number 11 in the social networking category on Apple’s app store. Mastodon is a social network that can be used for other purposes than its own.

On Musk’s Great Link Ban, Democracy, and the Goals of [Checks Notes] “Protearing Free Speech”

In the blog post, which reflect the Mastodon founder’s first remarks since the link ban, Rochko highlighted Musk’s significant power as owner and CEO of Twitter.

Centralized platforms can impose arbitrary and unfair limits on what you can and can’t say while holding your Social graph hostage, as was reminded by this.

The senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at Free Press is not new to the organization. Free Press is a founding member of the #StopToxicTwitter coalition. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

We at Free Press agree that Musk must step aside. Someone who understands that a social media platform needs to succeed only if it puts the health and safety of its users before that of one erratic and reckless billionaire is needed as his replacement.

Neo-Nazis like Andrew Anglin and right-wing activists like Laura Loomer have returned because of his restoration of previously suspended accounts.

With regard to reversals, Twitter’s potential new leadership needs to undo its decision to allow Covid-19 misinformation and disinformation to spread unchecked across the social network. If they do not retire the blue checkmark feature, verified users will no longer be able to post longer videos and have their content prioritized at the top of replies. And they must cease Musk’s “general amnesty” plan on accounts that were suspended before he took over.

Monday’s glitch was 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.

I woke up on Sunday morning to learn that I will no longer be able to mention or link to “competing” services, such as Facebook and Linktree. It was said to be related to cutting down on spam and preventing free advertising of the platform’s competitors. Of course, anyone with two neurons to rub together could tell that this was a cover story—you don’t need a journalist to tell you that—and the great link ban was mainly about stemming the flow of active and popular users to other platforms while controlling speech in the name of Musk’s mission to [checks notes] … protect free speech.

The new policy caused a small online riot with users decrying it. All mentions of the policy had been scrubbed from the company website and the company’s social media accounts within hours. 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.

When we at WIRED talk about “platforms and power,” this is what we’re talking about. Of course, any steward of any platform, whether it’s a CEO, founder, or middle manager, has the unenviable job of setting and enforcing the policies and guidelines for that platform’s safe and legal use. That is not in question. Without such rules, online spaces can go bad fast. 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 the service were worried that they wouldn’t be able to broadcast the news in time, and that viewers would miss them, so they had added a link to their bio to help find them. I think that all of these things create a potential for lost income for people who are in need, not people who made the policy decisions. After all, these same creators have the kind of disruptive, entrepreneurial spirit that everyone in Silicon Valley claims to want to foster and empower.

The For You Feed on Twitter, and the Impact It Has Onformed On Some People Who Have Been Publicly Shamed (Think You Can’t Eat Nuts)

A guy wears clothes. The lingerie addict. The woman has a fascination with wolves. Depending on your interests—and often not even that—you have likely encountered one or more of these people during your sojourns on Twitter in the past few weeks.

It’s part of the platform’s effort to shift users away from a simple feed of people they follow and toward a more curated experience. The default timeline for users was the “For You” one on January 10, part of the plan by Musk to update the platform. The company says the For You feed helps users find their way into the world of social media by providing them with accounts and topics they follow, as well as suggested content from a variety of signals.

The popularity of a single text message on the wider platform and how it is received within a users own network of friends are two of the signals that are included in the FAQ. The increased focus on an important part of the internet, the timeline, means that tweets that were previously not seen by a wider audience are now seen by more people.

According to researchers at the University of Cambridge, our social experience can be influenced by a number of factors, such as platforms we use and what we watch. “People often complain—not unreasonably—about what ‘the algorithm’ is showing them, but there’s not really any escape from this.”

The impact of the new setup on people who go viral is significant. It has been a bad distinction to be Twitter’s main character, but it has been a good one in the past. Either they posted something offensive that users felt compelled to share with their followers—see, for instance, Bret Weinstein, who despite spending two decades studying evolutionary biology had never heard of a peanut allergy and tweeted his offense at being asked not to consume nuts on a May 2022 flight. Or Bean Dad. When the offense cascaded through many layers, it broke onto everyone’s timelines for collective upset.

It was not a perfect model of virality and promoted dogpiling onto people who had committed minor, if bizarre, offenses. (And sometimes people who had made troubling statements.) Journalist Jon Ronson explored its impact on the humans at the center of the storm in his book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, and on an associated podcast of the same name. But there was a sense that the shame people felt was justified, because They Had Done Wrong.

The Rise and Fall of Twitter: The Story of the Mastodon Engine and its Users, and the Mistakes It Entails Its Employees

Mastodon’s active monthly user count dropped to 1.4 million by late January. It now has nearly half a million fewer total registered users than at the start of the year. Many newcomers have complained that Mastodon is hard to use. Some have returned to the devilish bird they knew: Twitter.

Mastodon and all of the Fediverse can scale, which is the biggest lesson of what happened. Robert Gehl is a professor of communication and media studies at York University in Canada. He has studied Mastodon and says it’s enjoyed peaks of interest followed by slumps before. The pattern can still bring more light to the night. “Each time, a percentage of the wave sticks,” Gehl says. People convert to it.

A lot of admins worked to get the server online again during Mastodon. They crowdfunded money to pay for increased hosting bills and updated their policies on content moderation.

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. The engagement numbers are tanking.

“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 regarding engagement with his account along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers investigated if Musk’s reach had been restricted but failed to find evidence that it was biased against him.

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

Dissatisfied with the work of engineers so far, Musk has instructed employees to track how many times each of his tweets are recommended, according to one current worker.

Twitter sources say the view count feature itself may be contributing to the decline in engagement and, therefore, views. The buttons were made smaller so that they could not easily be used to tap.

He said that it showed how much more alive the site is than people think, but that the public actions should be avoided.

Meanwhile, the platform appears to be struggling to stay online. On Monday, Twitter experienced one of its biggest outages since Musk’s takeover, with many users entirely unable to access the site, and others facing issues clicking links or viewing photos, for about an hour. It was the third major technical glitch Twitter has faced in less than a month, as Musk has slashed staff from around 7,500 workers before his takeover to fewer than 2,000 and engaged in a series of other cost-cutting efforts.

One 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 (mostly caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that), performing impossible tasks, and ‘improving efficiency’ without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. From my viewpoint, we move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire.

“There’s times he’s just awake late at night and says all sorts of things that don’t make sense,” one employee said. “And then he’ll come to us and be like, ‘this one person says they can’t do this one thing on the platform,’ and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make any sense.”

There is a sadness in the San Francisco headquarters that is related to the lawsuit filed against them by their landlord. The standard greeting when people pass each other in the halls is where are you interviewing and where do you have offers. The eighth floor still has beds and employees have to reserve them in advance.

The perks that made Twitter an attractive place to work pre-Musk have been eradicated. Food at the office? It’s a shame and now we have to pay for it. And, I know this sounds petty, but they appear to have obtained the absolute worst coffee vendors on earth.”

People no longer talk about work things, an employee said. It is 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.”

What Are The Most Fireable Responses at the CIO? An Employee’s Viewpoint on “Technology and Technicolor”

One employee said that it was easier to run a question through your head and say what was the least fireable response.

(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 said that if Elon learns to put more thought into some of the decisions and less fire from the hip it might do some good. “He needs to learn the areas where he just does not know things and let those that do know take over.”

According to an employee, there is something that he really doesn’t like to believe in technology that he doesn’t know. “You can’t be the smartest person in the room about everything, all the time.”

The recent vibe in tech, as well as the fear of not being able to find something else, is the primary factor for most people, 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.”

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

T2: Predicting the consequences of Twitter’s decision to end paid advertising on social media for people with a sexually-aggravated background

There is a sense of uneasiness about how the changes will be reviewed. 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.

Wells Fargo said it “paused our paid advertising on Twitter” but continues to use it as a social channel to engage with customers. The other brands did not reply right away.

As a result of the pullback, monthly revenue from Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers plummeted by more than 60% from October through January 25, from around $127 million to just over $48 million, according to the data.

Sarah Oh decided to join a friend in starting a new service after she lost her job as a human rights advisor at the social media company.

T2 was launched by Gabor Cselle, who worked at both of the internet’s major companies. Like Twitter, it offers a social feed of posts with 280-character limits. Oh says the main selling point 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: A Twitter alternative to Twitter, Apple News, Twitter, Google Readers and Wall Street Markets: An analysis by Charles Schwab

The list of new entrants in the markets has a service from Jack Dorsey, a startup backed by one of Musk’s investors, as well as apps created by former Twitter employees. Some apps, like T2, have the same look and feel, but others take a different approach.

Artifact, a news feed that was powered by artificial intelligence and was described as a “personalized news feed”, became a hit when it was announced last month. In CNN’s test of the app, it resembled a news reader application like Apple News or the discontinued 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.

But all of these apps appear to be vying for the opportunity to scratch the itch users may feel for a news feed that isn’t Twitter — at least for as long as that itch lasts.

People who are moving over from Twitter, either partially or completely, are usually looking for a nicer experience overall, according to the Anti Software Software club, which develops Cohost. The service was launched publicly after Musk offered to buy the social networking site. In November, after Musk completed the takeover, the platform saw a surge in activity, adding 80,000 users within 48 hours.

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

A Valentine’s Day surprise doesn’t usually include egg and gas prices, but the heart wants what the heart wants, and Wall Street is entranced by January’s Consumer Price Index.

The Fed policy isn’t the only thing that’s going to affect markets: traders love interest in inflation, and it could affect markets more than the Fed policy. It is good to keep that in mind because it could lead to a roller coaster ride on Wall Street.

Either way, expect a bit of volatility, says Randy Frederick, managing director at Charles Schwab. The market has had a lot of swings over the past few months.

On Monday, markets closed higher as investors expressed optimism, but they might be getting ahead of themselves. It wouldn’t shock me if the report surprises on the downside and markets give up their gains on Tuesday, said Frederick.

The Trail of Disinflation: Inflation in the Consumer’s Car Market and Core Services Pricing, as Revealed by Chaudhuri

The report could show the path of dis inflation that Fed Chair Powell talked about in an interview last week.

The price of goods has come down in the last few months, but there may be signs that the biggest contributors to the drop in inflation have already stopped.

The decline in new and used car prices may be ending, said Chaudhuri, with new car sales hitting their most brisk pace since May 2021. The weakening of the US dollar since November could also mean the prices of imported goods will rise.

An increase in energy and gasoline prices will likely cause headline numbers to go up. Data from AAA shows that gas prices rose by 4.4% in January.

Inflation in the services sector is even more worrisome. The analysts from Bank of America believe that the cost of core services is likely to have increased by 2.5% from December.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html

The Future is Now: The Electric Trucks Are Coming: Introducing the Barney Effect, the Mattel and Match Group Franchises, Facebook, Bumble and Grindr

The pickup trucks are going electric. Ram revealed the production version of its electric pickup on Sunday. The Ram 1500 Rev, due out in late 2024, will join the ranks of Ford’s F-150 Lightning, Chevy’s Silverado EV and GMC’s Sierra EV.

Ford will be taking advantage of more federal tax credits for electric vehicles after announcing it will invest 3.5 billion dollars to build a battery plant in Michigan. The battery plant will be in addition to plants in Kentucky and Tennessee that Ford announced in 2021.

Barney, the toy company’s largest purple dinosaur, is returning to the small screen next year, they announced on Monday.

Mattel said that the new franchise will include TV, film and Alphabet (GOOGL

            (GOOG))-owned YouTube content as well as music and a vast array of merchandising, including toys (of course), clothing and books. And yes, that includes apparel for adult fans too.

Nothing says love better than popping a bottle of booze, taking a chocolate tour and scrolling through a dating app.

The National Retail Federation thinks that consumers will spend $25-9 billion on love in just 3 years, which would be one of the highest spending years on record.

Chocolate: Candy is the top VDay gift, according to the NRF. But Hershey, Nestlé, or Mondelez International shares can provide satisfaction without all of that extra sugar.

The Hershey Company’s stock rose in early February after beating fourth quarter earnings expectations and forecasting strong growth through 2023. Mondelez International, maker of Cadbury chocolate, delivered better-than-forecasted quarter.

Jewelry: A diamond is forever, but forever is a long time and some people prefer to stay liquid. There’s a chance that those people would like investing in jewelry stocks. Pandora and Signet Jewelers (Kay Jewelers, Zales, Blue Nile) are some of the largest brands on the market. There’s also Tiffany’s, owned by Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, for those looking to go a bit more high-end.

There are apps for dating. Match Group’s shares are up more than 10% so far this year. Bumble, meanwhile, is up 19% and Grindr has gained 22%.

The Breakdown of the Twitter Blue Micro-Messaging Service: Musk vs. Musk after the February 1st Outage

Here is where I’ll caveat that Musk gave a similar deadline to revamp Twitter Blue when he first bought the company that wasn’t met. He may want to change his opinion about how ads work on the micro-Blogging site. He didn’t respond to an email asking for comment.

Do you know more about what is happening on the micro-messaging service? I’d love to chat confidentially. You can communicate with me via email at alex.heath@ theverge.com or the contact form on my Linktree. Then we can set up a secure thread on Signal.

The story behind how the site broke suggests that there will be similar problems in the future, and it was not long after the most recent problem that the company was able to recover.

Users graphically demonstrated their points with images that couldn’t be seen because they wouldn’t load when they vociferously expressed their displeasure about the outage.

The change in question was part of a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API, Platformer can now confirm. On February1st, the company announced it will no longer allow free access to its tool kit, and that it would dramatically reduce the ability of outside researchers to study the network. A company is building a new paid API.

Later in the day Musk claimed a change to the company’s application programming interface had massive consequences, after someone posted a screen shot of a failed application. “The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”

On Twitter, what do you do when you lose your job? A conversation with Musk about his time in a wheelchair and his experience in working with a billionaire

This made the way for one engineer to be staffed on a major project that is tied 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. “This is what happens when you fire 90 percent of the company,” another current employee says.

Musk asked, what work have you been doing? When Thorleifsson provided a list of his tasks in response, Musk appeared to cast doubt on several points. He said that pictures or it didn’t happen. The billionaire stated that he did no actual work, claimed as an excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing.

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.

He said that he couldn’t do manual work because his hands had started to cramp. I can write up to two hours 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.”

The man didn’t immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment. The public relations department of the company has been cut.

“Which is totally ok and 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.”

Exciting the Rube Goldberg machine at the LHC: Is it hard to run it, and how difficult is it to advance it?

“The code base is like a Rube Goldberg machine, and when you zoom in on one part of the Rube Goldberg machine, there’s another Rube Goldberg machine, and then there’s another one,” Musk said at the event on Tuesday. “So it’s quite difficult to keep this thing running, and then also difficult to advance the product because it is really overly complex, to say the least.”