The fate of employees of the social media site is awaiting them under Musk

Twitter Dissolving the Trust and Safety Council: After the Musk-Trump Decay, Trump Has Come to a Closer Look

Elon Musk’s Twitter has dissolved its Trust and Safety Council, the advisory group of around 100 independent civil, human rights and other organizations that the company formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform.

Musk pledged to reverse the ban were he to become the company’s owner.

The men publicly traded barbs over the summer, with relations soured since. Musk wrote “I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset” after Trump called Musk a bull sh*t artist.

The results of the poll come at a time when its business faces renewed challenges. Since Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter in October, a number of brands have paused advertising on the platform. He has stated many times that the finances of the company are dire. According to Dan’s estimates, the company is on pace to lose $4 billion in the next year.

With his decision-making being criticized by people who had supported him, and by a journalist who ghosted his pleas for public comment, Musk might be willing to sell his overpriced toy to someone else.

But privately, Musk’s critics have described the billionaire as dismissive of accountability, even in the face of scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission, which publicly warned on Thursday, in a rare forward-looking statement, that it is “tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern.”

The material that came to light before the trial in Delaware didn’t lend much support to the argument. Miller says there isn’t anything that looks like a fraud here, despite the fact that the man knows his best claim is fraud. “They’ve run out of cards to play.”

Musk was scheduled to be deposed on October 6th and 7th, after having moved his deposition from late September. He said he would honor his contract even though it was 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.

How to Stop Self-Destructing on Twitter, and What to Do About It: A Keyhole to the Social Media Scenario of Musk

Professional utility is only one of many things that ties me to the site. The way slot machines are used is through what experts call a “intermittent reinforcement schedule.” Most of the time, it’s repetitive and uninteresting, but occasionally, at random intervals, some compelling nugget will appear. Animals with unpredictable rewards are particularly good at inducing compulsive behavior, according to B.F. Skinner.

“I don’t know that Twitter engineers ever sat around and said, ‘We are creating a Skinner box,’” said Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist at New York University and author of a book about gambling machine design. She said that is what they have built. People who self-destruct on the site should be aware of the fact that they can’t stay away.

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****.”

Such a move could also have ripple effects across the social media landscape. Twitter, although smaller than many of its social media rivals, has sometimes acted as a model for how the industry handles problematic content, including when it was the first to ban then-President Trump following the January 6 Capitol riot.

For a keyhole view of what Musk will look like, look at alternative platforms such as Parler, Gab and Truth Social, which promise less restrictions on speech.

He said that the bug on those sites is that they allow you to say and do things that can’t be done on other platforms. And what we see there is that they 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).

Alex Jones, who was kicked off for abusive behavior, could be one of the people that the ban could be lifted on.

The person urged Musk to hire someone who had a “sophisticated cultural/Political view” to lead the enforcement. Masters is the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona who has been endorsed by Trump and has echoed his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

Twitter and Trump: Where are we going? How the Musk’s tweets on Twitter are going to be welcomed by the billionaire and the public before the 2023 deadline

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

Musk’s texts reveal that an initially cautiously friendly relationship between the two men when Musk first invested quickly soured after Agrawal told Musk that his tweets criticizing the platform were “not helping me make Twitter better.”

As of press time, though, no such message has been delivered to the company’s 7,500 or so employees. With Musk planning to make cuts before Tuesday, when many employees will receive stock grants, any decisions will come down to the wire.

That is likely welcome news to the billionaire, who has complained that Twitter’s costs outstrip revenues and has implied the company is overstaffed for its size.

Costs and staff cuts are only two pieces of the equation. According to an investor presentation obtained by The New York Times, Musk pitched to investors in the spring that he would triple his company’s revenue to over $26 billion by the end of the century and that it would attract more than one billion users by that year.

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

Advertisers want to know that their ads are not going to be associated with things that are harmful to people, and that they’re not going to subsidize the things that people don’t like.

The Takedown of Twitter: Musk and the FTC Investigate the Acquisition of WeChat on a Chinese Super-Antenna

What exactly he meant is, as always, anyone’s guess. Musk told staff that the company should use the Chinese “super-app” of WeChat, which combines social media, messaging, payments, shopping, and ride-charging in a single app.

Other American tech companies, including Facebook and Uber, have tried this strategy, but so far Chinese-style super-apps haven’t caught on in the United States.

The social media platform stated in a court filing that Musk is under investigation for his acquisition of the company.

The company’s court filing elsewhere accused Musk’s legal team of failing to produce draft communications with the Securities and Exchange Commission and a slide presentation to the Federal Trade Commission as part of the two sides’ ongoing litigation over whether Musk can walk away from the deal.

The agreement with the FTC was announced in the spring of this year after they said that the company used user account security information for advertising purposes. The consent order was added to the one that was signed with the FTC in 2011.

In a separate filing, the company stated that it did not order Zatko to burn any notebooks as claimed by Musk’s team. Zatko destroyed the notebooks of himself, according to a claim from the social networking site.

Jack Dorsey questioned the policy, saying it didn’t make sense.

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.

Twitter’s Chief Customer Officer Sarah Personette responded to Musk’s Thursday tweet saying that she had a “great discussion” with Musk on Wednesday. “Our continued commitment to brand safety for advertisers remained unchanged,” Personette said. Looking forward to the future!

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that an ad buying agency had gotten requests from a number of clients to temporarily stop running advertisements on the social network if Musk restores the account.

Musk said in the letter that theacquisition is not meant to be a money-making venture for him.

Elon Musk completed his $44 billion deal to buy the company last week, which led to massive layoffs and questions about whether the world’s richest man would restore some banned accounts.

Musk pledged that he would eliminate the fake and scam accounts that were often active in the replies to his posts on the platform, as well as the ones with large followings.

Twitter Tradeoff: Wall-to-Blind Negotiations and the Investigation of the Maverick CEO’s Melvyn (McCormick)

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.

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

Many people at the company have noticed that Parag Argawal, the current CEO, who Musk soured on after talking about joining the board, isn’t around anymore. One current employee of the company, who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission, said he had been absent for weeks. “He has ghosted us,” said another. TheTwitter employee-only section of Blind is full of similar comments on Argawal, according to theScreenshot that was seen by The Verge.

The execs got a lot of money for their trouble. According to Insider, they got a total of $68.6 million, and Personette got $11.2 million.

In place of Twitter’s former leadership, Musk tapped venture capitalists and friends to work with him as he weighed a number of significant changes to the company. The list includes investor Jason Calacanis, Craft Ventures partner David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan, an Andreessen Horowitz general partner focused on crypto and Twitter’s former consumer teams lead.

The major personnel moves had been widely expected and they will be the first of many changes the maverick CEO will make.

Twitter has become a social media giant, but not as big as it seems: Musk’s frustration at Twitter’s CEO, Yildirim, a former lawyer

About the same time, he used Twitter to criticize Gadde, the company’s top lawyer. He had a lot of harassment coming from other accounts on the social media site. For Gadde, an 11-year Twitter employee who also heads public policy and safety, the harassment included racist and misogynistic attacks, in addition to calls for Musk to fire her. On Thursday, after she was fired, the harassing tweets lit up once again.

“There is a danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that will cause more hate to divide our society,” he said.

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

“You do not want a place where consumers just simply are bombarded with things they do not want to hear about, and the platform takes no responsibility,” Yildirim said.

But Musk has been signaling that the deal is going through. He showed up at the company’s San Francisco headquarters with a sink, changed his profile to “chief twit” and stated that he was entering the company’s headquarters.

And overnight the New York Stock Exchange notified investors that it will suspend trading in shares of Twitter before the opening bell Friday in anticipation of the company going private under Musk.

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.

“The advertising relevance is the most gigantic thing,” Musk said. This is going to sound weird, but they did not consider relevance in advertising until recently.

TheReliable Sources newsletter first published a version of this article. The evolving media landscape is chronicled in the daily digest.

Musk halted new sign ups into his $8-a-month Blue subscription offering after a full day of chaos on the timelines. Offering anyone the chance to slap a “verified” badge on their account had led to widespread spoofing of government officials, corporations, and celebrities. The platform had descended into chaos due to the resulting mayhem, which led to hoaxes like Eli Lilly and others, and caused an advertiser pullout.

Charging for verified badges appears to be a business story. But the move will have significant ramifications on the information landscape. It will make it hard for users to distinguish authentic and inauthentic accounts.

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 those free blue checks, and the air of authority they give upon the profile they are appended to, will certainly delight some conservatives.

Massive Work Layoffs in Musk and Platformer after the Twitter Disruption Earlier this Month: A Brief Biography of Isaacson

The best thing that one could do to SAVE social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email, and reduce hacking would be authenticating users, stated Musk’s authorized biographer, Walter Isaacson.

According to conversations with eight employees, the process has been frightening and confusing. In the absence of official communication, workers have been searching for clues in chat and sharing their intel in private chats.

As of Thursday, Musk and Twitter had given no public notice of the coming layoffs. That’s even though the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification statute requires employers with at least 100 workers to disclose layoffs involving 500 or more employees, regardless of whether a company is publicly traded or privately held.

The Washington Post reported that layoffs would hit roughly a quarter of the staff, heavily impacting teams including sales, product, engineering, legal, and trust and safety.

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

On Saturday afternoon, a week after an initial round of layoffs had cut Twitter in half, Platformer was the first to report that a second massive wave of cuts had hit the company. The new cuts were directed at contract workers. By the next day, 4,200 contractors had lost their jobs and 80 percent of the team was out of work.

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.

What Happens When You Lose Access to Your Communication Information: A Slack Message to the Chief Engineer of Twitter and Vine, and How to Make a Good Change

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

In other slack channels employees share contact info if they lose access to their communications

Engineers have been pressed to complete the two major projects within a few days or weeks. One is changes to Twitter Blue that would require users to pay to retain their verification badges, possibly as much as $20 a month. The second, which Axios first reported today and which we can confirm, is a plan to revive the short-form video app Vine, either as a standalone product or part of the core Twitter app. In the case of Blue changes, Alex said that the features must be shipped by November 7th or the team will be fired.

The project has generated moderate enthusiasm so far. After Musk gave the go-ahead for the project Sunday night, more than a dozen engineers volunteered to be part of it.

Other employees are being encouraged to go build something — anything — and show it off to Musk. In one Slack message we saw, an engineering director urged his team to come up with new products and features and share them directly with their new CEO. “At best: you will get some feedback. You may be asked to ship it asap,” the director wrote. “At worst, you will be asked to stop and work on something else. Even in this case, at least you worked on something you love.”

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

Do good engineering work, that’s what you should ask me now. Write code. Fix bugs, keep the site up. I know the criteria for being at Twitter is that. It’s not working on a fancy project for Elon. Shipping and delivery is a good culture change. I encourage you to do a better job of rotating on coding and shipping. If you want to be in a “special” group this week, code and ship 5x as [much as] before. Building what Elon asks or thinks sexy is not the criteria. Helping our users is one of the criteria. So you don’t need commands from me. You are all software engineers. You know what needs to be written and improved. Do it. You are in charge.

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

What do Twitter users think about the future of Twitter? A panel discussion with Musk about his controversy with the company and the opinions of some of his former employees

Musk can be very uneasy with his attention. One employee we spoke with said they had mixed feelings about working on a project Musk is known to be focused on, such as Vine.

It’s unclear whether VP of Operations Lindsey Iannucci, the other two members of Twitter’s top leadership team, will remain with the company. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment about the current employment status of Caldwell, Sullivan, Berland and Iannucci.

Calacanis had been in New York this week to meet with the marketing and advertising community. He has also tweeted questions to Twitter users about the platform’s subscription and bookmark features.

The trust and safety and human rights teams that were in place prior to Musk’s mass layoffs should be brought back to ensure that moderation occurs in every major language. It also needs to submit to regular audits to guarantee that policies are equitable and applied consistently.

We talked with WIRED platforms about how the changes being made toTwitter may affect the future of the social network.

You should encourage your male friends to watch the House of the Dragon since they would like to father children. Mike recommends the new album from Natalia Lafourcade. Lauren suggests looking at your relationship with social media.

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Vittoria Elliott can be found on Twitter @telliotter. Lauren Goode is a person. The person is Michael Calore. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is being produced by Boone Ashworth. Solar Keys plays our theme music.

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Apple CEO Steve Musk’s Theorem: A Defendant’s Twitter Teaser: A Class Action Action Against Musk on Twitter

I went to see Steve Jobs in 1998 with his plans for Apple. He had been the interim CEO for a year and a half after coming back to the company that had fired him. He went to the whiteboard and wrote out his solution to the business troubles of the company in the room that he was in. He had a new product plan, a new product, and a workforce that was rejuvenated by an inspiring ad campaign.

Musk does not need to look further than his successful enterprises to realize the absurdity of his haste. When he took over Tesla in 2008, the company was already five years old. 17 years after being incorporated, Musk’s plan to turn the company around didn’t work out. Musk deservedly gets a lot of credit for what Tesla has achieved—and for, among other things, his persistence. Musk’s company is private and doesn’t report earnings. It takes years to make a rocket ship, and it’s dangerous to cut corners and go faster.

The company told employees in the letter that if they had been laid off they would find out by 9 a.m. The number of people who would lose their jobs was not said in the email.

Unlike Twitter’s full-time employees, who at least got the courtesy of an email informing them that layoffs were coming a night before, contractors received nothing. Their managers, who were tasked with making sure vital tasks were completed on time, discovered that people they had been counting on were gone from the company’s systems.

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

Barry White, a spokesman for the Employment Development Department of California, stated on Thursday that there has not been any recent notifications of any recent topics on social media.

A class action lawsuit was filed Thursday in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of one employee who was laid off and three others who were locked out of their work accounts. It claims that there is a violation of law by not giving required notice and that some employees will be laid off.

Some people are already moving away from the platform following layoffs that began on Friday that reportedly affected about half of the workforce. They fear a breakdown of moderation and verification could create a disinformation free-for-all on what has been the internet’s main conduit for reliable communications from public agencies and other institutions.

Facebook Ad Sales Shutdown: What Do We Mean by Saying About Yesterday’s Results? The Effects of Musk’s Twitter Dilemma on the Twitter Crowd

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

But I’m not here to speculate on the true motives behind Sunday’s whiplash; I don’t think that’s helpful. After all, intention and impact are separate things. Regardless of someone’s intention when they hit you in the face, they’ve still hit you in the face. Now you have to deal with the situation that they’ve created. So my thoughts instead turn—and I hope yours will also—to the people impacted by the weekend’s policy change. Those Twitter users who spent Sunday wondering whether the platform they used and trusted to find and promote their work, make connections with others in their field, and in many cases, rely on for income, would allow them to continue.

The ad sales team has been fired or pushed out. Large companies from General Mills to Macy’s have paused advertising on the platform, with more potentially following suit after new owner Elon Musk’s decision to restore the account of former President Donald Trump and other controversial figures. There are fewer big brand ads shown on the platform in a cursory scroll.

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 Wall Street Journal, which was first to report the moves, also said Pfizer and Mondalez are pausing ads on Twitter. The companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

General Motors had previously said it would pause paying for advertising on the platform as it examined its new direction. Toyota, another Tesla competitor, previously told CNN that it is “in discussions with key stakeholders and monitoring the situation” on Twitter.

Musk’s Telling Story: Marketing the Interpublic Group in the Post-Wolft Exodus Era Revisited

Ad buying giant Interpublic Group, which works with consumer brands such as Unilever and Coca Cola, earlier this week also recommended its clients pause advertising on the platform.

Civil society leaders in the US are worried that misinformation and other harmful content could spread on the platform and cause disruption, as the election is days away.

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.

The fear wasn’t lost. The majority of researchers at the company quit or lost their jobs. On the META team, Musk laid off all but one person on November 4, and the remaining member, cofounder and research lead Luca Belli, quit later in the month.

“The Covid Plandemic is a terrible, terrible, horrible”, wrote J. Austin Johnson in a TED Talk at the Columbia Medical Center

Big pharma created The Covid Plandemic to silence me. Everybody tries to silence me,” she said. Speak at a lower volume. I’m sorry, am I too loud for your precious intensive care unit? You are not even sick!

“Hi. Oh my god, your profile is so funny. I love funny guys,” Schumer, dressed in a red dress, said as the bot. “They said I was a bot, which is crazy. I’m all woman and I love funny guys like you. There is a website where I and some other girls hang out.

James Austin Johnson played Donald Trump and spoke in front of the council. Trump had his account banned in 2021.

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

An End to the Disruption in Comedian Kathy Griffin, Valerie Bertinelli, and the Akademos-Ulam Cyber-Monopoly Campaign

Weiss suggested that such actions were taken “all without users’ knowledge.” The fact that it allows it to limit certain content that violates its policies is one of the reasons that it’s been so open about it. Users receive notification when their accounts have been temporarily suspended.

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

All of the content moderations were let go. Lol,” Griffin joked afterward on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform where she set up an account last week.

Actor Valerie Bertinelli had similarly appropriated Musk’s screen name — posting a series of tweets in support of Democratic candidates on Saturday before switching back to her true name. “Okey-dokey. I’ve had fun and I think I made my point,” she tweeted afterwards.

An end to the disruption seemed nowhere in sight on Friday. Some accounts that don’t have a verified name will be given a gray official badge to help confirm their identities. The decision was taken after a number of fake accounts, including one purporting to be former President Donald Trump, were exposed this week. There were accounts created as a result of Musk’s decision to give a blue check mark to anyone willing to pay $8 a month for the platform.

It said the service would be made available in the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. However, it was not available Sunday and there was no indication when it would go live. Esther Crawford told The AP that it is coming soon but it hasn’t launched yet.

What is a Twitter Account of? Elon Musk’s Psychodrama, What Has Happened Inside Twitter, and What Paywall Should It Look Like

Twitter defended Roth at the time, saying, “No one person at Twitter is responsible for our policies or enforcement actions, and it’s unfortunate to see individual employees targeted for company decisions.”

The fact that job losses have decimated his former coworkers and that people can’t say what they want on social media aren’t what matters to Perez. It is about protecting democracy, and that is what it is. “It’s not entirely clear to me—particularly in the political context—that Elon Musk fully understands the degree of social responsibility that rests on his shoulders, and the very real harm, political harm, political violence, and division that can come from social media platforms.”

Perez, who is on the board of the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan group devoted to election security and integrity, believes the drama around corporate takeover is draining the oxygen out of the room. He says that the Musk psychodrama leads to inadequate attention to election-related issues.

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.”

Today let’s talk a bit more about how the company botched its layoff process, what happened inside Twitter on Monday, and what that paywall might look like.

Managers agonized over the decisions, and jockeyed with their peers in an effort to preserve employment for the most vulnerable among them: pregnant women, employees who have cancer, and workers on visas among them, a former employee told me.

What Is Happening When Developers and Software Developers Come Back in a Weekend: A Case Study on Blind, the App of an Engineer’s Compiler

It began as a rumor on Blind, the app where employees of various companies can chat anonymously with their coworkers. But within a day it was being posted in public Slack channels.

“Sorry to @- everybody on the weekend but I wanted to pass along that we have the opportunity to ask folks that were left off if they will come back. A manager to employees said that it was important to have names and reasoning for the project by 4 pm on Sunday. “I’ll do some research but if any of you have been in contact with folks who might come back and who we think will help us, please nominate before 4.”

“I think we might use some Android and iOS help,” the manager added. Platformer is informed the company has been reaching out to both engineers and designers in an effort to get them back.

If they don’t return they will be fired and lose their pay, which would have been three months’ pay.

Remaining managers are bracing themselves for a much higher workload than they were used to. According to a person I talked with, a technical manager should be prepared to manage at least 20 individual contributors while spending at least half their time writing code. Others have been given more direct reports.

One of the teams that are doing the pet work is doing 20 hours a day. The majority of the company is in a sitting position. No chain of command, no priorities, no organization chart, and in many cases, no idea who your manager or team is.”

A former employee said that the health team was told to listen to David Sacks, an adviser to Musk, for insights into why they had lost half their colleagues. Sacks, a venture capitalist who has been helping to manage the Musk transition, co-hosts the “All-In” podcast with fellow Twitter adviser Jason Calacanis and VC Chamath Palihapitiya.

“The most recent podcast covers the current layoffs happening across tech and provides some insight into why this is happening/necessary,” a vice president told employees. “I think it is worth listening to in order to understanding the macro environment we are operating in.”

Most employees were more interested in their health benefits, which had suddenly become a question mark. The open-enrollment period was supposed to start today but no information was available in the company’s human-resources system. Employees posted several questions about benefits inside Slack today, but all went unanswered by management.

I was told by some teams that they began to have meetings in which employees were informed about what their managers are, how their organization charts look, and what their priorities will be.

On the new Blue, The Verge, and Musk’s worries about the risk of launching a verified social network in the US midterm elections

On one hand, the company is telling advertisers that it is thriving, The Verge’s Alex Heath reported, adding 15 million daily users since the end of the second quarter.

The new Blue is likely to face bigger problems. The existing version only had a little more than 100,000 active subscribers, Platformer has learned. Most regular users of the platform will not be surprised by the 37.5 percent hike in price of the new version. It’s unclear how the company will persuade enough people to subscribe to justify the effort.

Then, after a debate about the potential effects of unleashing thousands of new verified accounts onto the platforms in the middle of the US midterm elections, the company postponed the launch.

Musk does not seem afraid 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, according to an internal message posted by a twitter employee and viewed by CNN.

Other employees have warned about a secondary feature of the new Blue that Musk added at the last minute: reducing ad load in the Twitter app by half. Sources say that it will cost about $6 in ad revenue per user in the United States, if it becomes necessary to change. If Blue lost money because of the ad-light plan, the loss would be more than made up for by the Apple and Google share of the $8 monthly subscription.

Esther Crawford is a director of product management at the company, who has risen up to become one of Musk’s top lieutenants. Sources said that Musk and his lawyer Alex Spiro were briefed as well. And while Crawford appeared sympathetic to many of the concerns in the document, sources said, she declined to implement any suggestions that would delay the launch of Blue. Crawford did not reply to the request.

It wasn’t known if Musk and Sacks were serious about the paywall. The Blue team is busy with the launch of expanded verification and it doesn’t appear imminent.

Quitting for Social Media: How to Stop Loading, or Why to Stop Lurking (What Happens When You Get Closer) to Home

“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. The people of Tiny Talk Town are all related to Elon Musk.

We don’t have to be here, in Tiny Talk Town. We all know it. There are places online that are worth a visit. It’s not likely that the most fervent users will leave on a mass scale. 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. A deliberate, thought out approach to quitting a social media platform without quitting is a smarter move. It is a kind of quiet quitting for social media.

A relatively small group of people power Twitter. Heavy users who take to the twitosphere in English account for less than 10 percent of monthly overall users, but generate 90 percent of the global revenue according to internal company research.

So active users are a noisy bunch, and it would be easy for, say, an electric car entrepreneur who follows a disproportionate number of extremely active “blue checks” on Twitter to mistake his own Twitter experience for everyone’s experience. It’s the same for journalists. Almost half of the users on the platform only use it for five times a month, and most of their posts are replies. They look at current events, watch live sports, and then talk about their lives. They’re “lurkers.”

Lurking is a practice that took hold when people were stuck at home and didn’t have time to check out social media. It is a simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity of NewTwitter to just lurk and observe for a while. Shut your browser or app down if you want to check in on Musk’s new toy. If you want to disengage, send a retweet. 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.

When Twitter Comes Around: Mark Cuban & the Futility of Real-time Location Information in the Era of a Wall Street Murmur

An analyst with Wall Street warned on Monday that Musk could cause a backlash from advertisers and consumers, if his management of Twitter continues.

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 does take a bit of the revenue from Super Follows, but it is less than Apple’s charges for in-app purchases.

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 question I have is whether users want to stay in that environment, because of the added layer of hoaxing and scam. Billionaire Mark Cuban has already complained that the influx of new checkmarked users has made his mentions miserable. Cuban is one of the reasons people stay on the platform.

And it’s risky debt to boot, B1 rated, which is “on the lower end of the junk rating spectrum,” says Wharton’s Roberts. “Investor appetite for this debt clearly isn’t as large as it was four months ago.” Moody’s cited governance as one of the major driver of risk in its ratings of Twitter’s debt.

But he changed his mind this week, after he claimed a car in which one of his sons was traveling was accosted by a “crazy stalker.” On Wednesday, Mr. Musk announced that any account that posted real-time location info of anyone would be suspended as a physical safety violation. Links to real-time location info can be posted.

The potential violation stems from a reporting obligation Twitter must fulfill whenever the company experiences a change in structure, including mergers and sales.

There is also a sense of unease about how recent changes will be reviewed by regulators. As part of a deal with the Federal Trade Commission, the social media platform promised to follow a number of steps before pushing out any changes.

Alex Spiro told CNN that Musk and the FTC are in a dialogue and will work together to make sure they are in compliance.

The FTC is concerned about the chaos because there were serious deficiencies which led to the consent order in the first place.

The report focused on a series of reports Musk allowed his writers to have access to when writing about internal messages and information. The subcommittee claims that the request of the FTC to the journalists and other media who were given access to the company’s Slack logs is inappropriate.

Before making any statement to regulators, Matt Blaze, a professor of computer Science and law at Georgetown University, urged employees to seek professional legal counsel.

The FTC has increasingly signaled it could seek to hold individual executives personally accountable if they’re found to have been responsible for a company’s violations, naming them in future orders and imposing binding requirements on their future conduct, even if they leave the company. (Last month, the FTC showed its willingness to follow through, imposing sanctions on the CEO of alcohol delivery service Drizly.)

The FTC said that no CEO or company is above the law. Our consent order gives us new tools to ensure compliance, we are prepared to use them.

The Chief Risks of Using Twitter to Combat Impersonation: Musk’s Disruption After the Greenlight Re-launch of the Subscription Service on Twitter

In a week alone, one of the world’s most influential social networks laid off half its workforce, alienated powerful advertisers, blew up key aspects of its product, and even had an exodus of senior executives.

The paid subscription service, too, was suspended on Friday only two days after its official debut, and the only place to sign up was the menu in the app. The company did not say when the offering would be restored.

Hours after the gray badges launched on Wednesday as a way to help users differentiate legitimate celebrity and branded accounts from accounts that had merely paid for a blue check mark, Musk abruptly tweeted that he had “killed” the feature, forcing subordinates to explain the reversal.

The account’s very next tweet, a day and nine hours later, said exactly the opposite: “To combat impersonation, we’ve added an ‘Official’ label to some accounts.”

The paid verification feature’s rocky rollout attracted widespread criticism from misinformation experts who had warned it would make identifying trustworthy information much more difficult, particularly in the critical period following the US midterm elections. Some of Musk’s fellow high-powered users had not good feedback.

It goes without saying that when you have your customer service hat on, it is from one entrepreneur to another. I spent too much time muting newly purchased checkmark accounts to make my verified mentions more useful, wrote billionaire Mark Cuban.

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

“Impersonation of world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials, and other high profile individuals” represented another P0 risk, the team found. “Legacy verification provides a critical signal in enforcing impersonation rules, the loss of which is likely to lead to an increase in impersonation of high-profile accounts on Twitter.”

Twitter’s Safest Alternative: Reviewing the Musk-King Email and Implications for the Safety, Security, and Safety of Blue

On November 1st, Musk was considering a yearly subscription to Blue for $99, but he changed his mind after seeing an email from writer Stephen King. The move wound up increasing the risk for scams, as the desire to make fun of brands and government officials became an impulse buy at $8.

The team identified several other risks for which Twitter has yet to identify any solutions. The company doesn’t have an automated way to remove verified badges from user accounts. “Given that we will have a large amount of legacy verified users on the platform (400K Twitter customers), and that we anticipate we’ll need to debadge a large number of legacy verified accounts if they decide not to pay for Blue, this will require high operational lift without investment.”

Some solutions, such as retaining verification for some high-profile accounts using the official symbol, were supported by the trust and safety team.

For the most part, though, the document offers a wish list for features that would make the product safer and easier to use, most of which have not been approved.

The launch went ahead as planned despite warnings. The trust and safety team largely realized their predictions a few days later, so Musk decided to stop the roll out.

Content moderation, recruiting, ad sales, marketing, and real estate were among the functions affected. It’s not known how the loss of thousands of moderators will affect the service. It looks like there are fewer police officers available for the site when it comes to harmful material.

A company manager said that one of his contractors had been cut off without notice in the middle of making major changes to the child safety process. This is particularly worrisome because Twitter has for years struggled to adequately police child sexual exploitation material on the platform, as we previously reported.

Slowness on Twitter and the Goons: An Employee Reply for Musk and Other Employees, and a Public Apologise

Over the course of the day, there were similar messages on Blind, a app that allows coworkers to talk in secret about their workplace, and on external chats that employees can use to have more candid discussions.

Some employees said they had been bracing for cuts since the layoffs. Many contractors will be scrambling to find new jobs, because they were told via email their medical benefits would end on their final day of employment.

“I’m wondering when people will realize the value of Twitter was the people that worked here,” one employee said, according to screenshots obtained by Platformer.

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

The company is working to get some parts of its website up and running again. The internal change we made had some consequences.

Engineers were not allowed to write any code until further notice according to an internal email obtained by Platformer. An email sent to employees states that exceptions can be granted if an urgent change is necessary to resolve an issue with a production service, including any changes reflecting hard promised deadlines for clients.

Engineers who attended the late-night meeting were confused. “Is there a ticket I can reference?” asked an engineer who was being tasked with implementing the freeze. “I don’t see any context.” “We don’t have much context as of now,” a colleague responded. This is coming from the team of the University of Elon.

I want to make a public apology for the slowness on TWITTER in a lot of countries. App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!” Musk referred to remote procedure calls on Sunday. Musk also complained about the number of microservices Twitter employs, which are generally understood to prevent the entire site from breaking every time one part of it goes down.

Instead, the experience is not great in India, for example. That’s because the payload gets delivered from further away (laws of physics come into effect) and that back-and-forth data transfer between the phone and the data center starts compounding.

Not to mention that places like India have a higher concentration of low power phones that tend to perform worse in general — as opposed to all of our overpowered iPhones and such.

Why Does the Code Freeze? What Do Some Twitter Users Think? A Note on Eli Lilly’s Decline of Twitter after the Blue Debacle

Why does the code freeze? No one knows for sure, but some are speculating that Musk has grown paranoid that some disgruntled engineers may intend to sabotage the site on their way out.

On Friday, after the disaster of the Blue rollout, Eli Lilly paused all its ad campaigns on Twitter. The move potentially cost Twitter millions of dollars in revenue, according to the Washington Post. It took Twitter six hours to remove a fake account that said it would now be free of injections for diabetes.

The news has left the ad teams at social media company in a lurch, according to internal conversations with current employees.

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

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

According to an email and a report, GroupM, the largest media buying agency in the world with $60 billion in annual media spend told its clients that there was a high-risk media buy. Twitter’s agency partnerships lead explained the situation in Slack: “Given the recent senior departures in key operational areas (specifically Security, Trust & Safety, Compliance), GroupM have updated Twitter’s brand safety guidance to high risk. They understand that the policies are in place, but they don’t know how fast the social media website can manage its users.

He has promised to let free speech reign and has reinstated high-profile accounts that previously broke Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct or harmful misinformation. He has also said he would suppress negativity and hate by depriving some accounts of “freedom of reach.”

The Twitter Decay: Where do we go from here? What will the next billionaire decide? Why is Twitter better than Facebook, or how could it be a bad platform?

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

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

“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. Twitter’s advertising business has long been smaller than that of rivals like Facebook, in part because it didn’t offer the same level of user targeting.

It’s been said that a platform is better than an app because you can use it to build multiple apps, or have other developers and companies work on them for you, which will save you 30 percent on development costs. Whatever its advantages, the Twitter debacle should spell the end of the proprietary platform as a serious technical undertaking, a high profile illustration that they are too risky to trust no matter how strong the code might be. The overly conservative approach to intellectual property that makes things proprietary in the first place is also a liability that compromises everything a company might create because it empowers billionaires to kill them. The case study of the next billionaire who fancies a social media empire is possible if Musk actually destroys it. Our communication channel for the next vaccine we might need is now at risk.

Even still, there is no guarantee that continuing to capture the online world’s attention will translate into subscription payments or other revenue growth.

Twitter Files: Questions About Donald Trump’s Suspension of President Donald Trump from the 2020 New York Post Associated With the Hunter-Biden Explosion

Requests for a response from Mr. Musk were not responded to. In December, Mr. Musk announced that he would improve transparency on the issue of visibility restrictions on some users.

Musk said on Thursday that a software update will show your true account status so you can see if you have been shadowbanned. 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.

The so-called Twitter Files, a bundle of internal documents that Musk claimed to expose a censorship scandal but actually revealed messy internal discussions about tricky subjects, has also been used by Musk to promote his new platform.

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

A person with knowledge of the situation told CNN on Monday that the former head of trust and safety had left his home due to threats from Musk.

The suspension of President Donald Trump’s account was a sensitive issue that he worked on. Some employees were questioning if the platform’s policies had been violated when Weiss said that internal documents show discussions about banning Trump’s account.

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

I want to be clear that I support Yoel, no one has made me any more questionable than I have. My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs,” Musk tweeted.

The Twitter Trust and Safety Council: After Musk and Musk sent an Email to Twitter about a Panel Action on Child Sexual Exploitation on Twitter

The members of the council gave The Associated Press images of the email, which they fear would be retaliated against.

The group of volunteers provided expertise and guidance on how to combat Hate, harassment, and other harms but they didn’t have authority to make any decisions and did not review specific content disputes.

Twitter, which is based in San Francisco, had confirmed the meeting with the council Thursday in an email in which it promised an “open conversation and Q&A” with Twitter staff, including the new head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin.

Those former council members soon became the target of online attacks after Musk amplified criticized of them and Twitter’s past leadership for allegedly not doing enough to stop child sexual exploitation on the platform.

A growing number of attacks on the council led to concerns from some remaining members who sent an email to Twitter on Monday demanding the company stop misrepresenting its role.

The Trust and Safety Council, in fact, had as one of its advisory groups one that focused on child exploitation. The National Center for missing and Exploited Children, the Rati Foundation, and YAKIN were included.

The First Chief Operating Officer in a Large Social Network, When Do We Come to a Price? When Is It Really Worth It, or How Do We Get It?

You are the first repeat CEO guest in a year. We talked a lot about themes and content when you were there in March. I wanted to have you back because you are one of the few people I know who has ever purchased a social network, and it seems like a really good time to talk about the challenges that come along with purchasing a large, at-scale social network with millions of passionate users. So glad you’re back.

It is slightly different. There was a bunch of different ownership changes after Yahoo bought Tumblr for more than $1 billion. Then you,

Automattic, bought it from Verizon for $3 million in 2019

. How did you come to a price for a social network? We’re all talking about the $44 billion for Twitter. You actually evaluated a social network, its technology, and its user base, and you said, “You know what, this isn’t $1 billion, it’s not even $100 million, it’s $3 million.” How did you come to that price?

Automattic is a deep-tech infrastructure company, so we were able to bring it onto our infrastructure, rewrite a lot of things, make it faster, make it more stable, and also bring our experience and our values in terms of moderation. We were just rounding that corner of all the clean up work when the people began saying, “Well, maybe I need an alternative.”

Thank you very much. We are trying to make the web a better place with everything that we make. We wonder how we can put users in control. How do we make our business model compatible with what our customers and users want?

That is also WordPress’s thing. I want to create something that is completely open-sourced. There are lots of great proprietary competitors. We had to open them up by being the open alternative, which meant that they could open up their software, such as not allowing changes to default. Android forces iOS to be better. You need a good competitor and a good nemesis to survive in business.

I believe open-source is a human right. As technology takes up more and more of our lives, it’s just as important as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, or any other freedom. It is important for us to have the freedom to modify our software.

What are the risks of running a social network? How to host a party, or how to provide a safe and healthy environment for everyone?

I think the future of social is more and more subscription based, no matter what social network it is. We’re seeing it across the creator economy. Everyone wants that direct relationship and to not be disrupted by an ad. Apple is always going to be a intermediary until something happens there.

We’re seeing that happening in real time at Twitter. They will take him off again after allowing Ye back on. We use a phrase that is lawful but awful when we use a lot of speech. It is not technically illegal, but might hurt people’s mental health and be mean. We’re a private company, so we can host it, but you have to think about your responsibility to society and to your users. It’s as if you were hosting a party. It is vital that you give a safe environment for everyone that includes food, water, restrooms and all sorts of things. I feel like when you’re hosting a social network, it’s your responsibility to provide a safe and healthy environment.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Why you bought a website? Why you may not know what to do next, but you can do what you want, when you feel like you are comfortable with it

I would love to get to that place. Honestly, I want to spend most of our conversation talking about what those kinds of decisions are like. I think far too often the casual observer thinks they’re easy, and far too often Elon Musk acts like they’re easy. Even if you try to make those decisions, you’ll discover they’re very complicated. Everyone will hate you after you make the tradeoffs. But let’s start at the beginning. Why did you purchase a website?

The weekly active users of Tumblr is larger than any US city. We are one-tenth the size of social networks like Facebook and 140 characters long, but we can still have things happen on our networks in a week. People are not anticipating that. You also see all the new social networks — the Parlers, the Gabs, the Substacks, and even the Posts or whatever — struggle with this early on.

Two, I wanted to see if we could create a mainstream social media that wasn’t reliant on surveillance capitalism or advertising as its primary business model. We run ads on Tumblr, but we also have upgrades that turn off ads, and we’re introducing lots of other subscriptions — some fun, some serious. If we are able to make it a subscription supported thing then we can truly be aligned. The business model would align with users even if I were no longer running it.

Absolutely. We have seen some amazing examples of that, even in the last few weeks with Goncharov. It might be better if there was something people could go to on their social media time. It puts a little more control into the hands of users. You should feel good after using it and you feel creatively charged. We have been working on that since we bought it.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

When Tumblr Got Locked? What Happens When You Signed Up Your Nail and Your Account Was Locked Out Of Your Hand

When we bought Tumblr, they had a six month wait for support tickets. Imagine you are an active user of the site and post a picture of your manicure, and then your account is locked up in a really mean way. It was like, “You have violated blah, blah, blah. You’re locked out.” You appeal it, and say, “Hey,no, this was just a picture of my hand.” But you don’t hear back for months. What a perfect formula to destroy a user base. That is where it was.

You are saying that you got it for the smallest amount possible when you say it is de minimis. And that you bought it for the smallest amount you would pay, knowing that its carrying costs were so high. Was that a straight conversation? We won’t figure out how much money the site makes and how much revenue it brings in to make a valuation. This is in dire need of a good home. We’ll be that home. The board of directors will take the smallest number it can accept.

A lot of people stopped using the site. Good engineers were getting poached in the elevator because the building was shared with Facebook. This was also the time when there was crazy tech comp. That has settled down now, but at the time it was a little wild.

I think the toughest part about an acquisition is buying it for a reason. If it was doing well, it wouldn’t be a turnaround. Obviously, some of the existing employee base has not been as successful as they or you would have hoped, which is a nice way of saying some of them probably shouldn’t be there. But we also bought it because it was working. Tumblr still had this really vibrant user base, despite what I would say was corporate mismanagement and misalignment of incentives. It was growing, and still has a large amount of mobile ties, which was very interesting to us.

I would say Tumblr’s struggle with advertisers is actually lack of targeting. The younger user base and the kind of silliness of it may cause some people to not use it. That’s fine. I would say we can unlock a lot of revenue, but we have decided to not do the tracking and targeting that everyone else does. That means it’s more of an uphill battle to get advertisers to spend money. We are introducing some. There is some tracking I’m totally okay with, like device and country. That kind of stuff is not unusual. Both users and advertisers are part of it. There’s some that is actually quite enlightening. Your user base could do it or your radio audience could do it. They all have self-serve tools. It’s kind of crazy that you can do so much targeting.

How do you not throw the baby out with the bathwater? We brought the whole team over and tried to get people who had been at Automattic for a long time to join us. I took some of my very best people in the company, and switched them over to do different jobs at the company in order to make sure I didn’t lose anyone. It helped us to identify the low performance that was needed in order to restructure the team.

We remake the team, have made the tech, and are starting to remake the product. I’m also very excited because now we’re starting to have some fun. You saw the blue checkmark thing. We are also beginning to introduce new ideas to the format a bit. There is a new option on the site that allows you to have a post with a gallery and video. Blogs have done this for a long time, but we’re bringing it into the social media form and onto mobile. The creativity that is being expressed there is more than you can do on any other social network, so it’s fun for me.

That timelines is really fascinating. You bought it in 2019, but it’s not until the very end of 2022 when you’re saying, “Now we’re having fun.” That is a long time to integrate the cultures, reset the expectations and get to product innovation. It may be a long time from a user viewpoint but from yours it may be lightning fast. Which one do you think it is?

I said it earlier and I’ll say it again: it’s the most humbling thing in my business career. I have been doing this for a while. This acquisition has been more difficult than any we have done before, and that is the reason why I took over in February. We weren’t seeing the amount of turnaround that we had hoped for.

Do you think that part tracks with the Twitter timeline? There is a huge culture change and massive public comments about how the company was trash, after Musk took over. Do you regret doing something like that? Do you think that would have been effective?

There is a part of me that sometimes thinks, “Maybe I should just run around saying everything is trash and reset.” There’s something in this way of working that I think every leader finds tempting. A lot of people are not this crazy. I’m not. I would be unable to sleep at night if I did this to my team.

There is something appealing about saying to someone, “Oh man, I wish I could clear the deck.” When I was younger, I wondered if I could fire half the people on this floor at the company I worked for. Would anyone notice? Something about a company makes that kind of thinking possible. Do you think you should have done something different after I provided you cover?

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Creating Machine Learning AI Teams Inside Automattic after the Google+Tumblr Turnaround: How Many People Left Social Media? What Have We Learned?

I don’t know. It’s very hard to play it back again. About 85 percent of the team is new to Tumblr, or not at all. Over a couple of years, that was a pretty big switch. Some of it was natural attrition and some was performance management.

As an example, there will be mistakes there. You could assume that some percentage of the people they laid off, who they considered to be low performers, were actually quite good, but you would maybe be cautious to hire out of that layoff. If we were targeting this, we would assume that the people we were targeting were not the people that had Stripe say, “These are the crucial people we need to keep.”

The other tech companies reached out to us after we said we were slowing down hiring. I would be interested in hiring 50 or 100 people that left the social networking site. We have made it clear that we’ll hire entire teams. Those conversations have been quite intense over the past few weeks, and they include some executives who are helping us navigate the 5,000 people who left. We’re now in the mode of, “Well, let’s see if we could create an amazing machine learning AI team inside Automattic with some of the folks who left Twitter.” It has been kind of an odd shift. I have never seen anything like that in my career.

It is funny. I feel like you and I have come up after those moments in tech history. Intel was created because a team of people left Fairchild Semiconductor, so now Intel exists and we think of it as an institution. It feels like maybe we’re living through that moment again as tech companies have these gigantic layoffs, where entire teams of people who like working together are now available. The Twitter Spaces audio team that built Spaces is just like, “We’ll come do this for you again, but we want to work together.” Would you build a live audio product? Would you just go hire that team?

I think that team is pretty good, and I don’t know if we would do a live audio product. A lot of the conversations I had led us to put up a dedicated landing page. It’s true that the first line of the page is, “We love TWITTER.” I also love Twitter.

If you’re hiring the missionaries, you don’t do it with a “we’re going to crush Twitter” message, because they have poured their heart and soul into Twitter over the past however-many years. They love it so much that they don’t want to kill it. What I think is interesting is asking, “Hey, could we do it again, avoid some of the mistakes, and create an alternative?”

Acquisition Story of Tumblr: Are You Now Closed? Or Have You Solved Your Avatar? How Are Your Teams Structured?

The acquisition story requires a few quick questions. You said the burn when you bought it was $60 million-ish a year. Are you closer to profitability now or is that burn the same number?

No. We brought it down but we would need to grow revenue by another $20 or $30 million a year to break even.

Now, the good news is that one thing we’re starting to do is combine some of the teams. For example, Tumblr does not need to have separate trust and safety or terms of service. It had one problem, but it is one of many like protecting against illegal content, responding to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and taking down hate speech. We can use some of the same back-end tools to monitor each and every uploads. It’s not only a Tumblr cost at that point.

That is very good. We have talked a bunch about hiring and size, and you said you’ve had 85 percent turnover. Is the Tumblr team bigger or smaller than when you acquired it?

This is one of the questions that is part of the Decoder. How is that team structured? Is it structured the same way as when you acquired it, or have you reallocated some of those numbers?

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Is It Really Necessary to Have an Eating Disorder in My Organization? The Chief Operating Officer of a Social Media Company — What Do You Want to Do About It?

I am the CEO, and the structure has changed because I am separate from Automattic and other things. I very much have a leadership style that pushes a lot of things onto the leads within the company. I do not think it is necessary to have a meeting with the executive team every day. I want to get the five most important things done. What are your most important things? What am I missing?”

Automattic does a lot of asynchronous communication. There haven’t been big changes. I brought Automattic to help me out with the day-to-day, including a chief operating officer and others. I would say it’s a fairly standard structure other than that.

I have a thesis that the actual central product of a social network is content moderation. Every piece of the puzzle of the social network is trying to incentivize the people who create for you to make things that are good that you want, and then trying to show the user, the audience, the best stuff on the social network. Obviously, what comes along for that ride is, “When people post bad stuff, I want it to go away. I want to disincentivize the bad stuff in ways that are kind to it, but I definitely don’t want to show it to an audience. That’s the part we almost always focus on.

Oh yeah. I’m pretty sure I wrote that. I think the title headline was a good one, but I disagree with it. It was spot-on. You really nailed it. I would recommend that you read that post, because you give a hint of some of the nuances of moderation and do it at scale.

There is a learning curve. Even if you hire people, even if you know what is going to happen, the user base you attract will cause new problems. For example, Tumblr has a younger demographic, teenagers, that are maybe stereotypically a little more angsty, so mental health things are really big there. We build a lot of stuff in so that if you search for certain tags, before we show you, you will get a message that says, “Hey, do you need help? Here’s a phone number. It gets better.

I learned that the pro-ana community has a short name for an eating disorder. This community of people were using a social network in a way that was not illegal, but was encouraging anorexic behaviors. I’m not an expert in this, but I know that it’s a mental health challenge and is quite physically difficult for people who suffer from it. If you’re hosting and promoting content that’s encouraging that, what are you doing to those kids, those people, as a society? It is not illegal, but you have to control how that is distributed, try to provide pointers to resources, and keep it under control if people are posting it. We can point out the professionals at many nonprofits and try to get them to move in the right direction.

By the way, it really works. Tech has made society better, there are some untold stories. I’ll talk about two issues. Child abuse and exploitation material has been covered a little bit. Tech companies have come together to create solutions and data sharing has become better at catching this. The stuff gets passed on to law enforcement. I think that has helped quite a bit.

Then there’s suicide prevention. When you type in certainKeywords on social networks and search engines, they will jump in and give you pointers to resources. There has been a lot of sharing on what people click more, what resources are best, how to provide a phone number, how to do this internationally, how to do this in every language, et cetera. I think tech companies, including competitors, share this quite freely with each other, because we all agree this is something that is part of our responsibility to society.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

What Is the Problem With Tumblr? What Are the Core Values Of Automattic and What Are They Necessary?

Those are things where Automattic as a company has a set of internal values, and you are shaping the product in line with those values. Those things are horrible, I don’t mean to diminish them at all, but preventing them is universally agreed upon, right?

Right. Young women should not be encouraged to be anorexic. That’s a huge problem in that community. We should intervene in suicidal thoughts and give resources to stop it. Those are aggressive moves. You are telling people that you will stop the speech and show up when you see some of the other stuff, to get people to use the resources. They are aggressive interventions, but they’re not controversial.

Then there is a universe of stuff that is totally controversial, where even the slightest intervention gets you in hot water. The one that I think is easiest to point to in regards to Tumblr is porn. There’s a lot of art on Tumblr. It is an artistic community. There’s also a lot of nudity and a lot of straight-up porn. Before, at least.

I think this is as good of a summary of the problem as we can get to. You start with, “I bought Tumblr for the smallest amount of money that Verizon would sell it to me for,” and you end up with, “I’m hopeful for a more dynamic republic because we need to reform the speech laws of the country.” When you say it’s the most humbling experience of your career, that seems like the journey. Many tech executives run networks like this. They get to a place where they want a more accountable external force to give cover for moderation decisions because the pressure is so high, and the only actor they can think of to do that is the government. Then you go into the first amendment and point out that you wish we had some leaders.

There are still no clear lines on what porn is or what not to look at on platforms. The values inside the company might not line up with what you want users to be able to do on the platform. There are 8 million external actors with their own values that have influence and existential control over the platform. Walk me through this. I’m picking on porn, but I can pick any number of other speech areas that have the same exact problems.

I’ll let you know the name of the game. I wrote a post about this and it was titled, “Why ‘Go Nuts, Show Nuts’ Doesn’t Work in 2022.” There was a prior policy on adult content that was called “go nuts, show nuts”.

It’s very Tumblr. I believe that Tumblr had content moderation issues. Part of why they got shut down by Apple is that they were not doing a good job policing illegal content, in addition to the porn stuff. I suppose Apple wanted to make an example out of shutting down Tumblr and removing the App Store because it is owned by one of Apple’s largest partners in the world. That must have really woken everyone up, like, “Hey, they’re taking this seriously.”

Since our last episode, we’ve reopened more adult content, specifically artistic expressions of the human form. If you had posted literally Michelangelo’s statue of David on Tumblr before, the content moderation rules would have locked the post or locked your account. We got good at appeals and everything like that, but we were stuck with these old rules, and we couldn’t really change those rules until we had some better community moderation in place.

It’s interesting, because Elon also talked about bringing the MPAA movie rating system into this, which is actually where we started in the first iteration of this feature. It is difficult to get into the history of the rating system. Don’t think about it. If there was one female nipple in a movie, all of a sudden it’s like PG-13 or R, but then there can be any amount of violence, gore, and blood spurting out — which obviously is not great for kids either — and that could be rated PG. A new kind of classification, a Taxonomy, was a little more nuanced.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

What Is the Use of Tumblr and How Does It Become a Web-Only toggle? The Case of Bathtub Gin

So if you sign up for Tumblr, all that stuff is off by default. If you go to the web you can choose whether to see this stuff normally or not, since you can not turn it on inside the app.

In New York City, you are a Burlesque performer. Right? Bathtub gin, right? It is an awesome, well-known, Burlesque place. You want to post pictures from your performance. You want kids to not see these, so if you tag it you know that it will be protected. Folks under 18 won’t even know it exists, but people who want to see this can find it. Everyone is happy. The incentives are very aligned.

For mistagging, the violations are not for what you post. We take mistagging very seriously because it’s wrong. It could endanger kids. There are a lot of things it could do. If you’re tagged correctly, we allow you to post a lot more stuff. We have browsed the Apple App Store, the credit card processors and all else while doing this.

Yeah. How do they get away with it? Things going into things are allowed by them. Pretty much anything you could find on a porn site is also on Twitter and Reddit. How do they get away with it? Maybe they are too large and there is enough legit content that Apple isn’t worried about. Maybe they also made web-only toggles. We decided to just copy that feature.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

What goes down in the app stores? Apple’s biggest player in the US: the New York Times is a monopoly, but what does it have to do?

Did you have to go to meetings with the App Store review committees, with Phil Schiller or Tim Cook, to get this stuff through? Or did you just submit the app and hope?

That is the thing, I wish we knew more. We don’t know what goes down when Apple engages in backroom dealings with the distribution of apps. That is, unless you have someone like Matt who’s willing to talk about it, and even he kind of admitted he’s not really sure exactly what goes down.

I believe there was a mistake in the submission of the app that resulted in another week. Then Thanksgiving happened. It is an odd platform. Most of the tech in the store could be shipped whenever you want. You can do something, like put things up or take them down. In the app stores, it goes through a person, and depending on who the person is, they might interpret the rules differently.

It is said that moderation is always present in Apple’s and Google’s app store. With Google, you get awesome tools, where you can roll out to percents of users and then roll it back. Everything is very fast and they can allow more stuff. They’re not as draconian about forcing in-app purchases. It is completely different.

Apple is the most powerful player in the US. They are a monopoly. They control everything. They’re also opinionated. My interpretation is that Apple takes its users’ responsibility very seriously, so they are strict about these things. There are examples of this.

If you sign up for a New York Times subscription on The New York Times’ website, they make it really hard to cancel it. You have to chat with someone and it takes 30 minutes of your time. It’s like canceling a gym membership. It is terrible. It’s a horrible user experience. If you subscribe to The New York Times through Apple though, you can just click a button to cancel your subscription. I think that is Apple’s opinion on what is user-friendly. They have a section that they do that we probably all agree on, like canceling subscriptions. It seems like they still think they are the favorite.

They still don’t know if they’re going to be killed any time soon. Apple has more cash in their bank than most countries, so I am excited. They are one of the most powerful entities on the planet, even more than most governments. I’m seeing them starting to shift into more of a benevolent role and realizing their size and their power.

People who didn’t come up as the underdog are what you’re describing. Most of the current executives were there when Apple was considered an underestimated company. You can see the culture over time.

What am I allowed to say about Tumblr and what I dislike about about it? A conversation with Stewart Butterfield about Flickr in the early days

You have described taking over Tumblr as the most humbling experience. It is this stuff. I’m the politician in charge of a large city or a small country. The users are doing whatever they want, and all I can do is incentivize them to do good things and not bad things. There are a lot of other people who also have an interest in whatever I do. Where do you have authority to make decisions, and what do you think the limits are in that authority? It looks like that is at the center of it. You’re not a tech executive who’s saying, “Make the button blue.” You’re a politician who’s saying, “I hope I’m going to make a policy decision that is expressed out through all these constituents and will achieve the result I want.”

I guess the best way to probably summarize where I am in 2022 — and this has evolved over the past year and the past 10 years — is that I’m extremely libertarian in terms of what people should be allowed to say. I agree with people saying bad things about me, but I also agree with people disagreeing with me. I’m a public figure. Great.

I think I have become more conservativism in the area of hate speech. Of course, calls to violence are pretty noncontroversial. I would say bullying, or trolling, is maybe more in the middle. If you remember Flickr in the early days — like with Stewart Butterfield, Caterina Fake, Heather Champ, and Derek Powazek — they fostered an amazing community, often manually, by going and commenting on new users or choosing what they highlighted.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Goncharov posters and what they’re trying to tell us about Twitter and Tumblr and what we’ve learned in the last few years

The amazing thing happened partly because we created a place where you could have a good time and not have to worry about bad people ruining it. I think we will see more of that in the future. It actually keeps growing, too. What are those posters called that they put up in New York? There are actual posters of Goncharov now after I saw a picture yesterday.

He is goofing. He is posting on the internet. You are really knowledgeable of Tumblr and the community. You are in it. Do you think it’s important for you, as the leader, to be consuming the service as a member of the audience? Because I think it cuts both ways.

It’s one hundred percent. There is some sort of understanding where I am. My guess is that they’re like Mark Zuckerberg and Parag Agrawal. A lot of the leaders of social media use the platforms but are probably just using a secret account. They have an alt.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Why Aren’t We All So Popular? How Electronic Do We Live in today and how We are using the Internet to Influence the World?

You also need to be aware of your surroundings. I do not impose preferences on the entire community. I’m liberal all the time. That is me. I will be open about that. I am not saying people who don’t like me aren’t welcome.

I think there are two levels to this. One is putting too much pressure. This is advertisers saying, “I disagree with xyz,” and they leave. They vote with their wallets, which they’re welcome to do. It is a free market. It’s capitalism. That’s kind of the expression of it.

I don’t know if I agree with that name and shame. I think it’s important for all of us to do more capitalist activism. We should vote with our wallets and try to support companies that agree with our principles, not spend money with those who don’t. There is a second level inherent to the business model that I talked about earlier. Sorry, I’m blanking on the name of the author who wrote the book on this.

We are grappling with the intersection of that and democracy. If democracy says that free, informed citizens are able to vote on people and vote on how they’re governed, I like that model. There’s a social contract and a principle morality to it that we can all agree to as participants in the system, which I think social networks and private companies miss. You can vote for policies, but not the leaders of Facebook.

Technology’s ability to influence you becomes amazing as personalization, targeting and machine learning become so good. We are seeing this today. How good is the TikTok algorithm? How good are Instagram ads? They know me very well. The place that I purchase more stuff off than any other place is instagram. They have me dialed in. The application of political influence is playing off in both ways. Actors like China, Iran, Russia are taking advantage of our free and open society to influence Americans. It is the whole thing.

“We were all worried about hacking the voting machines because that was a good story, but it’s way easier to just hack the people and influence the voters.”

We were worried about hacking the voting machines because of the good story but it was easy to just hack the people and influence them. The voting machines do not affect the voters. It happens in every election. We know this and it’s true. It isn’t a conspiracy. How do we protect and inoculate society against that, when the business models of these networks are designed around the engagements and the influence, essentially?

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Tuning Tumblr to be creatively charged: what do advertisers want to tell you about your business? A comment from the CEO of a social network

We want to create a space which is much more creatively charged. We want Tumblr to be like going to a music show or a museum. You are going to discover something you haven’t seen before, and you are also going to leave creatively charged. That is not a good mindset for advertising, but we can find advertisers and products that fit well with that.

We’re trying to balance it. If you give a free service, advertising is the only business model you can use. It is costly to run a social network. You pay a certain amount of money and get space and bandwidth, but there is a hard cost. When you sign up for a social network, you can upload unlimited video which can be viewed an unlimited amount of times, and it’s essentially an all-you-can-eat-for-nothing plan.

The bills still need to be paid. They have to build the data centers, they have to pay for the network, they have to do all that stuff. Advertisers subsidize the real cost of it.

When the advertisers say that you have to keep moderation as high as you’ve been, and your purpose in buying the thing is not to moderate less, it’s not a good sign. I think there is a lot of tension there. As the CEO of a startup company trying to build an advertising business, do you hear from corporations that they want you to measure your brand safety before they give you money?

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Is the First Amendment in the States? A Line of Dilemma about a Case that was Overturned by an Overturned High School Shooting Case

By the way, for all the stuff the tech companies do, the telecom companies are way worse. You can effectively target a number of houses and serve cable ads to just them using the technology that Comcast has. Credit card companies and banks use your data to correlate whether or not you spent your money in the store. The amount of tracking is insane. The amount of geo data that gets shared is where we need governance to actually step in, because capitalism is not self-regulating well there.

I want to know if you think moderation belongs in the stack. I thought I would explain the difference between you have for enterprise customers where you host for them and you do not. There is this idea that the closer you are to the pipes of the internet, the less moderating you should do. So Comcast and AT&T should not look at the bits that are going across their network. Cloudflare maybe shouldn’t, right? They ride on top of the rails. Amazon doesn’t host white supremacist sites, but has a set of policies. That’s the whole line.

I understand what you are saying. The First Amendment doesn’t apply to us because we’re not a public company. We can choose who we do business with. It is one of the most common misunderstandings. You’re quite good at clarifying that whenever it comes up. I think that the government should be more involved. The checks and balances are related to the feedback mechanisms.

Are you in favor of the United States government getting involved? That seems to me like everyone wants someone else to solve the problem. The most likely set of actors that would do that are government officials, and they shouldn’t. In this country, they should not make those rules. The First Amendment says not to make speech regulations. I’m just frustrated…

This is the gap between all of them. Your position on the First Amendment is that the government should make some rules.

That’s a line of dicta from a case that was overturned. Everyone points at it, there is no law against shouting fire in a crowded theater.

If you are creating harm, there are laws around voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. There are laws for hate speech. Some laws are related to certain crimes.

Yes, definitely. Now I’m with you, but you’ve gotten all the way to “you murdered someone.” There’s no law against hate speech. You can just say that people of other races are bad. You can do it.

Sure, in other countries. In this country, most people are like, “Government should make some rules, but they’re not actually a rule.” and almost all examples of yelling “fire” in a crowded theater are not actually a rule. The law in the country changed after the case that overturned the yelling of fire in a crowded theater. You can shout “fire” in a crowded theater all you want, you are not going to cause imminent lawless action. You are going to get people to leave. That is what I mean.

Germany is a good example. Germany has decided that because of their history they will not tolerate Nazi- type stuff, which is sort of funny when you think about it. As a society they have decided that. That might change over time.

More bad laws have been foisted upon the US than good ones. Those will evolve over time. How might the First Amendment be changed over time? It would require a new amendment, which would require states to ratify. There’s a really high bar for changing these things.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

What can the slowness of government do to help them reach a middle? — A view from Beto O’Rourke on Twitter

By the way, that’s a good thing. I think sometimes the slowness of government can be an advantage, because hopefully that deliberation helps forge a better outcome. It’s not a good example for that right now, with the polarization and the way the parties fight, but ideally, they reach a middle. Companies don’t do that. If you look at content moderation boards and everything companies try to do, they are essentially trying to recreate government a little bit in a private sector, which lacks accountability, lacks feedback mechanisms, and lacks courts. It is a weird system.

So yes, I kind of do wish that governments had clearer and better laws around this. I agree that when they attempted to wade into this, there were some bad outcomes. There are a lot of terrible laws that have come out of the government trying to regulate this stuff, but I remain hopeful as new generations of leaders come up. They are digital natives. Gosh, Beto O’Rourke used to be a hacker. He was a member of the cult. He said that he used to be a web designer.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Do we live in a democratic society? Why are we so different? How do we feel about the power and accountability of government? A comment on tweet by Ceo Mullenweg and Leon Musk

I know, but there are others who are coming up who can. We have an issue where people are holding onto power for a long time since the 70s or ‘80s. We don’t have anything quite like this gerontocracy in history. I think that we will start to see a more dynamic republic as that starts to shift. At least that’s what I’m hoping for. That’s who I’m donating to and who I’m voting for. As a citizen, I want to advocate for that more.

I don’t want to be removed from the responsibility or the pressure. The responsibility and power that I and our team have is not justified in the way that society or users justify it. I think there is a better system for this.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Why the German government is so bad looking and how we are trying to make a difference in Germany: I’m afraid of government speech regulations

I am terrified of government speech regulations. It’s my open bias, I’m a journalist. I think they are bad looking. I can see them at work. Germany has a long, tortured history. They’re still complicated and difficult in that country. We are thousands of miles away, and we think from our perspective that it looks good. This is more complex than you might think, from the standpoint of many people in Germany.

TikTok doesn’t reward you for making text posts. They don’t want to be on its platform. It incentivizes videos. It’s fascinating to think about the hacks that are a lot of them. The platform itself is not geared to make you post text. It’s geared to make you post videos. I think that is a form of moderation. That the users have done something else is just a fascinating dynamic inside of that platform.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

What do we do when we take a picture of a Hunter Biden laptop down to the New York Post, or what should we do?

Also, is this as big of a deal as we’re making it out to be? The issues we talk about have had robust public discussions. I will say that the only thing I’m certain about in content moderation is that you make mistakes, 100 percent.

You do. It’s humans. Humans are fallible and they will make mistakes. It’s how you correct the mistakes that really matters. The Hunter Biden laptop stuff is at the center of a lot of these stories. Twitter decided to remove links to the story to the New York Post. Guess who hosts the New York Post? We do.

We are wondering if we should block the links or take the story down. What should we do? We had an internal discussion about that and decided, “This is the New York Post, blah blah blah. It does fit in with the rules against hacked material, and is a big news organization, so it also fits in with public interest. We made a decision there to not touch it.

Wait. The New York Post is hosted by the same website that hosts the Huffington Post. When the New York Post published a story about a Biden laptop, it led to a meeting about whether to take the links down.

A discussion occurred. Absolutely. There are reports and a discussion. People contact us saying, “Take this down,” or, “This is violating your policy.” All of the policies are just a starting point. The interpretation of the policies is really where I think the art and science of it is.

We will make mistakes as well. Sometimes, we have taken down the site by mistake, like if a script went wrong or if a human clicked the wrong button. How you fix it is all that matters.

Does Donald Trump really have a platform? It is not. It is the problem. Is it the problem there, is it the solution?

I think we’re in a weird period where particularly the right in America is incentivized to say that there’s a huge censorship problem or that they’re being suppressed. Donald Trump would famously play the victim while he was also the leader of the free world, the most powerful person in the United States, the president. That is a ruse, that continues to work but is the problem there? Does he actually not have a platform? Is there not a robust discussion around the Hunter Biden laptop? Are there not endless articles, endless testimonies, et cetera?

Maybe we should question the idea that something is fundamentally broken here in the first place if this is working right now. The current system will make mistakes. It is not perfect, but it gets to correctness very quickly, usually within a matter of hours or days.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

What have you learned from Matt from running a social media company, and what has he learned from him in his job? An interview with Matt Heath on Decoder

That’s actually the perfect last question. For the past few years, you have been doing this. You are a member of a social network. When you bought tumblr you were a good tech executive. You were very successful with WordPress and all the other companies, so for you to say that this is the most humbling experience of your business career, I think that is very meaningful. You’ve done it for three years. Do you have any advice for Musk?

I believe he will keep an open mind. I believe he can update his views when new facts come along, regardless of whether I agree or disagree with him. Over the last few weeks, we have seen that happen on social media. He will end up where the rest of us are and where he started on the internet. I wish he would have avoided a lot of pain as he went, but did you know there was no anabaptist in foxholes? I think that there’s no free speech absolutists who run social networks, because you start to realize the nuance of that public square and the responsibilities to the users and society, and the fact that it’s a lot messier.

I know that we’re going to mess up, so I won’t criticize anyone on Facebook or other sites. I’m looking at how fast they correct, not whether they are perfect or not, because that’s not a standard anyone should be held to. It’s how quickly we course-correct. So that’s what I want to do. I think he’s working on important things. I hope Twitter doesn’t distract him too much from space, the cars, the solar panels, and everything else.

That is great. I could talk to you about this topic for hours and hours. I’m fascinated by the actual experience of running these companies, so thank you for coming on Decoder. We will see if we can do a faster record for you next time.

Alex Heath is the deputy editor of the Verge. He is going to tell me about how this is connected to Musk. Alex, I welcome you to the site.

I wanted to speak to you, because you have been reporting on social media. I want to wrap up some of the things you have heard from Matt and the things you have heard from Musk.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

X.com: How a Social Media Platform Can Help to Turn It Into a Bank? Or How to Obtain Money from Apple?

When they also booted Parler from the Apple store, there were some leaked emails between Parler and Apple that were like, “You need to improve your moderation,” and it was very vague. That’s the thing with Apple. These threats are very vague.

They are trying to build towards what they have in mind. It’s remarkable how similar they are. They would like to get away from advertising entirely and use paid products like tipping on websites. One of the funniest social media products is calledtumblr, which has fake verified badges.

What about the payment side of it? All of them are talking about payments. They want to be able to make you send money to other people on the network. It seems like it might be possible for us to take cents out of every transaction. I get why you would be interested in that, but it is not a good product for a social network. I don’t know if I want to be sending money on 50 different platforms.

It depends. If you have a thriving creator system where creators are posting more and asking for more money, you may want to have some money in the system. The original idea for X.com was the one that predated PayPal by a long way. I reported on a meeting recently where he told employees that PayPal was just phase one of what he actually wanted to do. He calls it “Project X” because he wants to turn it into a bank. No one has done that successfully.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

What Do CEOs Think About Apple? A Conversation During the First Three Years of Apple-Apple Co-Owning: Podcast with Matt

The question was going to be a follow-up. Is there anything else? Is it, “Okay, I saw a good tweet, I’m going to kick a couple bucks towards the person who wrote the tweet”? That’s the baseline of it, but I’m not sure why I would do that.

It’s good to be the platform, right? Apple is getting money out of the apps that sit on its phone. I wondered if Matt felt like Apple deserved this money. Did he give you an indication?

Matt is a good leader, he is a good CEO, and he makes a product that millions of customers use. He was like, “Buying Tumblr has been the most humbling experience in my career.” Content moderation is a large part of it. He is libertarian-leaning when it comes to what people are permitted to say and even if he is more to the left on some issues. He said that he is libertarian on speech. To run Tumblr, I can’t do that. We have to shut a bunch of stuff down.”

On this show, we find out what CEOs are going to say about Apple. I think that is fascinating. I think the thing with Elon that is fascinating is that line does not exist for him.

I believe that the conversation is now shifting from “Apple’s control is a business issue for everyone,” to “It’s actually a speech issue.” We are seeing CEOs pile on this. I think this is the next phase. Even if you aren’t saying that you’re threatening free speech, you may have a problem with it, even if it is a PR issue. I don’t think Apple can engage with that level of attacking.

I believe they are ready for it. I think they will show you some of the apps. They’re full of bad things you don’t want your kids to see. We sit in the middle and make sure that your kids don’t see that stuff. If you want to see that stuff, go use our web browser.” That’s been their answer for a long time.

The @ElonJet Twitter Files are an Exercise in Free Speech and Freedom of Reach for the Persecuted Founder: Jack Sweeney, Markovian Musk, and the Media

@ElonJet, an account run by college student Jack Sweeney that uses public flight-tracking data to tweet the location of the entrepreneur’s private jet, is at the heart of these policy changes. Sweeney has said Musk previously offered him money to take down the account, but Musk said in November, after he took control of Twitter, that he would allow it to stay online. The suspended reporters come from organizations including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. Even links to Mastodon have been blocked, with Twitter identifying the site as “potentially harmful.”

He brought up “lawful but awful” and all these sorts of tropes that we hear from the trust and safety community. He said that Elon would end up right back in the middle of it all, where the micro-blogging site began. I think the Twitter files are somewhat of an exercise in this. Elon is out there saying it’s freedom of speech, not freedom of reach. Then the Twitter files are Twitter implementing exactly that idea in various ways to a first approximation. Do you think Elon is going to end up right back where he started, or do you think he’s going to end up someplace radically different?

He’s not there right now. The mantra inside Twitter is that you could essentially say the most hateful thing, and unless it’s illegal, it’s going to be on the site. Our job now is to not amplify it, to not suggest it in the timeline, and to basically corner that speech off to the follower graph of that account.

They are not putting racist, misogynistic, andHOT statements next to ads, but they are the baseline for success. That hasn’t happened yet, but that’s what they want. They think they are adhering to their freedom of speech but not freedom of reach, even though no platform has shown that is enough.

Also, who wants to be on a platform with bad people? That part is weird to me. It is funny. To some extent, with overt racism, overt sexism, and overt transphobia — and Matt brought up the pro-ana community, which says, “anorexia is good” — on the whole, people are like, “Yeah, that stuff is bad.” Then there’s a lot in the gray area. People do not want to be on platforms that have bad stuff on a regular basis. So if you need to grow the user base and have payments, don’t you need to do more than wall it off? Is it necessary for you to just leave it alone?

A healthy town square should also be a place where people can find reliable information. At least one study found that refuting hate and misinformation on Twitter before Musk took over was larger than before.

Then there’s this concept of shadow banning and limiting your reach, and what you just described is exactly that. We are going to make sure you don’t show them to anyone. They’re going to limit you because they don’t like how racist you are, and maybe you will know, but maybe they’ll be more transparent. That is a difficult kind of judgement. I think you can’t automate it. Do you know how they are going to implement that?

They don’t know. They hope to automate the worst of the worst, but there isn’t a lot of nuance and tone. There’s no platform that is doing this automated de-amplification of nuanced, potentially sarcastic but hateful speech at scale. It is quite ironic that he is having these files being dumped so that they can show him exactly what they are doing.

You become the benevolent dictator, regardless of whether you want to be or not, once you become the head of a social network. I believe that he wants to be the dictator in a way that he doesn’t want to be.

Where Was Jack? On Twitter, where were you and what did we learn from Twitter? What did he learn? What happened in the case of Hunter Biden’s laptop

He tried not to be. Almost for the worse. He tried to be involved, but now we are seeing that. It’s like “Where was Jack?” That’s a whole other tangent though.

“As a culture, we haven’t even really come to reckon with the ramifications of the power of where you sit in the stack and the content decisions you make.”

I do think it is important for everyone to remember now that we’re deep into it. If you want it, you can get Hunter Biden’s laptop. Apple sells it in the store. At one point, no one understood the provenance of the laptop and nobody understood what it was written about. Mostly it was a bunch of non-consensual nudes being shared, and people thought that it was a Russian operation. The over-heatedness of that moment probably led to that conversation. It is also remarkable for the technical capability of that conversation to even exist.

We’re still talking about it. I guess it’s because it’s such an uncomfortable thing that could have happened and did happen on Twitter. When something is super political, we realize it in the heat of the moment like, “Whoa. The platforms that are sitting at various layers of the stack have the power to wipe that off of the internet. What does it mean if they actually do?

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Melting the Flares: What Happens When We Know You Are the President, but What Do You Know? When Did Elon Come to the Bottom of Running a Social Network?

All right, this has been a fascinating episode. I am curious to see how fast Elon comes back around to the baseline of operating a social network. Matt is a smart guy. Zuck, for all of his faults, is a very smart person and he has arrived at a place that looks a lot like the place Twitter was at. I am curious to see if the constraints allow all of these smart people to arrive at the same place.

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. When a president’s every word was assumed to be a signal of policy, it was reported as such. Trump stated a lot of things to get a rise out of people. I argued that reporting on them fed the flames. Another editor pushed back. He spoke to the effect that he is the president. “What he says is news.”

On December 11th, we saw a lot of rapid-response news stories about Musk saying that his pronouns were Prosecute and Fauci, a dig at the government’s former chief infectious disease expert. Here are more stories about a picture of his bedside table with two replica guns, and the far-right meme.

The way coverage of Trump was done was the same as this. The liberal-leaning media were often drawn to stories confirming the belief that a person so clearly unfit to be president would only succeed in bringing himself (or the country) down in flames, while the right-wing media treated his evident egomania, corruption, and lack of interest in grasping basic policy issues or actually doing the job as at best irrelevant and at worst essential qualities for reforming Washington. There was 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 is happening with Musk. The relationship between the new owner and many of the journalists is described in an Atlantic article as a “dysfunctional one” where the most defensible statements and claims from both sides are amplified in a never-ending cycle.

The existence of these discussions is a big red flag for Musk’s fans. It’s only fueling righteous indignation that mainstream outlets are steering clear of covering the 140-character micro-blogging service.

Renee DiResta, research manager at theStanford Internet Observatory who studies how narratives spread on social networks said that people who are confronting high-stakes, unexpected events and trying to figure out what policies apply and how are in the Twitter Files.

The requested information included emails, memos, and Slack conversations that either related to Elon Musk or were sent by him, messages about the FTC, information about former Twitter deputy general counsel Jim Baker, and details about Twitter’s sales of computers and office equipment.

While the accounts were made public, the reporters were not allowed to post until they had removed Musk’s statement that the rules were violated.

By early October last year, as Musk faced a court deadline to complete his acquisition of the social networking site, the newest research was almost ready. The program that demoted the mentions of gay, Muslim, anddeaf was intended to limit views oftweets by making them less likely to slur marginalized groups. The finding—and a partial fix Twitter developed—could help other social platforms better use AI to police content. But would anyone ever get to read the research?

Shortly before the 2020 presidential election, in order to briefly block users from sharing a story about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, who was accused of shady business dealings by a New York Post newspaper, there was a decision done by the micro-messaging service.

The article was based on files from Hunter Biden’s laptop, which the Post said it got from Trump’s private attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. At the time, it was unclear whether that material was authentic. After the Russian hack and leak of Democratic National Committee emails, tech companies were on edge over the possibility of a repeat, and so Twitter decided to restrict the Post story.

In an argument outlined over Twitter, Weiss alleges that the decision to ban Trump was unprecedented, deviating from the site’s reactions to other heads of state who also incited or supported violence with their tweets. Weiss cited examples from leaders in Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, and Iran that, she asserted, showed restraint on Twitter’s part when deciding whether or not to keep prominent political figures on the platform, even after violations. It is not clear if the documents detailing the decision to keep other public figures on the site have been released.

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

“I think everyone did the right thing, I still believe there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time,” he wrote. “Yes, mistakes were made.”

He said he wanted the internal files to be released with more eyes and interpretations to consider. There is nothing to hide and only a lot to learn from.

Elon Musk is Using Twitter Files to Discredit False Claims and Push Conspiracy Theorem: A Brief Analysis of the “Trump Trial”

There’s good reason to demand more information about how social media companies operate. She said that many of the decisions are inscrutable. “These are platforms that shape public opinion, and so the question of how they’re moderated and how they’re designed is impactful.”

But she said to get the full picture, outsiders need more than the “anecdotes” Musk’s selected journalists are sharing – which, so far, focus exclusively on charged, highly partisan American political dramas.

She said it would be helpful to see the discussions around other world leaders who have not been kicked off of the platform to better understand the decision to ban Trump.

There are value in what’s been disclosed to the public, but it’s also reinforcing a perception that’s based on your pre-existing opinions within the United States,” DiResta said.

Mike Caulfield is a research scientist at the University of Washington and said that framing the disclosures as secret knowledge is a good idea on social media.

He gave rise to violent threats against the men. Someone familiar with the situation said that Roth and his family were forced to flee their home.

The current attacks on my former colleagues couldn’t have come at a worse time. “If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.”

The CEO’s willingness to target people working to keep the platform’s users safe, including through the Twitter Files releases, is creating a “chilling effect,” according to one Trust and Safety Council member, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation.

But with his drumbeat of Twitter Files releases and gleeful tweets dunking on the company’s former employees, Musk has successfully hijacked the conversation.

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

Twitter bans tracking Musk’s jet from Twitter and the Times-Newton obtained by ignoring tweets in a search for an exact location

“It is being processed as though it’s owning the last regime, because it has the ability to see things we don’t see in the past,” DiResta said.

Musk permanently banned the @ElonJet account on Wednesday, then changed Twitter’s rules to prohibit the sharing of another person’s current location without their consent. The journalists who were writing about the jet- tracking account, which can still be found on other social media sites, were accused of broadcasting “basically assassination coordinates.”

All of them, including Sweeney’s personal account, were suspended by late Wednesday. He also operates accounts tracking Musk’s jet on rival social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

Sweeney said he setup @ElonJet initially because he was a Musk fan. He said it gave you another view that a lot of people don’t know about, and possibly gave you clues into what new business is going on.

You can still use Twitter to share your location. “Tweets that share someone else’s historical (not same-day) location information are also not prohibited by this policy.”

In tweets, Musk accused the journalists of violating the platform’s policy against doxing — or posting private information online — by sharing his “exact real-time” location. CNN and The Washington Post reporters did not appear to have done so. CNN wanted to know if Musk andTwitter would give a comment.

When asked if he would comply with the new policy, Sweeney said he would delay posting the whereabouts of Musk’s jet for 24 hours but only on the internet.

The account was suspended for breaking the rules when he tried to use it. The note did not say how it broke the rules.

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

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

The suspension of Twitter on Thursday night: “I hope the New York Times/Random Mac account” is restored and that Twitter’s Mastodon account had been banned for violating Twitter policies

Musk was shown flying to the East Coast ahead of events and New Orleans before a meeting with the president of France.

The Times said in a separate statement of its own, “Tonight’s suspension of the Twitter accounts of a number of prominent journalists, including The New York Times’s Ryan Mac, is questionable and unfortunate. Neither The Times nor Ryan have received any explanation about why this occurred. We hope that the journalists’ accounts are restored and that they provide an explanation for why they were taken down.

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

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

Věra Jourová, the European Commission’s vice president for values and transparency, said the “arbitrary suspension” of journalists was “worrying,” and she indicated that the company could face penalties as a result.

Several of the reporters suspended Thursday night had been writing about the new policy and Musk’s rationale for imposing it, which involved his allegations about a stalking incident he said affected his family Tuesday night in Los Angeles.

Twitter previously took action to block links to Mastodon after its main Twitter account tweeted about the @ElonJet controversy last week. Mastodon has grown rapidly in recent weeks as an alternative for Twitter users who are unhappy with Musk’s overhaul of Twitter since he bought the company for $44 billion in late October and began restoring accounts that ran afoul of the previous Twitter leadership’s rules against hateful conduct and other harms.

A comment on the suspension of journalists on Substack: “Why the journalists can’t follow us, nor do we want to follow them,” tweeted Jourová

The suspension of the journalists had been met with swift condemnation by news organizations, the American Civil Liberties Union, United Nations, Democratic members of Congress and others.

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

Editor’s Note: Nora Benavidez is the senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at Free Press, a media and technology justice advocacy organization. Free Press is a founding member of the #StopToxicTwitter coalition. Her own opinions are reflected in this commentary. CNN has more opinions on it.

Germany’s foreign ministry said that freedom of the press can’t be switched on and off. “As of today these journalists are no longer able to follow us, to comment or criticize. We have a problem with that.

“The EU’s Digital Services Act requires respect of media freedom and fundamental rights. This is reinforced under our #MediaFreedomAct,” Jourová said in a post on Twitter, adding that Musk “should be aware of that.”

In late November, a top EU official warned Musk that the social media platform was going to have to take significant steps to comply with the bloc’s content moderation laws.

The future of Twitter is up in air: the story of CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Sally Buzbee and the Washington Post

CNN said in its statement that the future of it’s social media presence is up in the air. “The impulsive and unjustified suspension of a number of reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is concerning but not surprising,” a spokesperson said. “Twitter’s increasing instability and volatility should be of incredible concern for everyone who uses Twitter. We have asked for an explanation, and will reexamine our relationship based on that.

Sally Buzbee, The Washington Post’s executive editor, called it an “arbitrary suspension of another Post journalist” that further undermined Musk’s promise to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech.

Weiss interpreted the reluctance to use such measures against other world leaders as evidence that Trump was treated unfairly, but the documents show the opposite: that the company underestimated the danger its platform posed in contexts outside the US and acted forcefully against threats to American democracy. If Twitter had implemented its rules uniformly across the world, Trump’s ban would have extended to other leaders, too.

An employee at an organization that was a part of the trust and safety council says that vulnerable communities are more important than relationships with leaders like Modi or others. The employee asked for anonymity because they are concerned their organization may be targeted by harassment and threats like those faced by former Twitter staffers.

The difference may be caused by how different governments deal with moderation on social platforms. After Twitter removed Buhari’s threatening tweet against Biafran separatists, the company was slapped with a ban. But instead of banning Buhari in turn, the company later negotiated with the government to be reinstated by agreeing, among other things, to open a local office, pay local taxes, and register as a broadcaster. Nigeria is now considering legislation to regulate platforms.

When Elon Musk and I Driven a McLaren into a ditch: Are We There? The Debacle on Twitter Spaces

Kian Vesteinsson, senior research analyst for tech and democracy at Freedom House says access to markets is one of the things that go into the trade-off about whether to take enforcement actions.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about that time when Elon Musk bought a McLaren F1 for $1 million and then immediately drove it into a ditch while trying to show off to Peter Thiel. According to Max Chafkin’s TheContrarian, Musk stated that he had read stories about people who made money buying sports cars and crashing them. “But I knew it could never happen to me, so I didn’t get any insurance.”

Musk is a shareholder in both Musk andTesla and Ross hopes that he will find a CEO for the company in the first quarter of 2023.

Man, look, after the debacle on Twitter Spaces last night, can we please stop pretending that this is anything but flailing? He’s crashed the McLaren, and there’s no insurance.

Musk has been offloading a bunch of his Tesla shares, which might mean he’s planning to buy or personally pay Twitter’s debt or might mean he’s getting margin called on some of his loans as the price of Tesla shares falls.

The Spaces feature was shut down by Twitter after Musk and Spicer left for the NYPD, the Washington Post, and the Associated Editorial Board

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” is a best seller. And How We Can Reclaim It” will be published by Alcove Press in 2024. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. Read CNN’s opinion.

It’s clear that we can’t rely on Musk’s Twitter to provide a safe, open forum. We need new, non-profit social networks run by boards responsible for considering the public’s interest when making critical decisions about things like content moderation and community standards. And many of the people who have these skills have just been laid off from their jobs. In addition to the mass exodus from Twitter since Musk’s takeover, there have been layoffs at a number of tech and journalism companies lately, including Facebook and CNN, with more coming at The Washington Post. Some of these professionals should work together to create new social platforms designed to provide the truly open town hall we so desperately need.

After the journalists were suspended, Musk asked if he should unsuspend them. But Musk said he would redo the poll because it had too many options.

Several of the suspended journalists, who had apparently been allowed to join after a technical glitch, were at Musk’s room at the space hosted by Notopoulos. Before leaving the call, Musk said “you dox, you get suspended. It was the end of the story. The Spaces feature was turned off by twitter. While it’s since been restored, Notopoulos says she’s unable to start or join a Space, receiving a message saying “you can’t participate or go live because you violated the Twitter Rules” when she tries.

Hours before the poll was completed and the accounts were reinstated, Musk declared today “freedom Friday” in response to former congressional candidate Lavern Spicer’s comment that accounts were being reinstated at an increasingly fast pace. Several prominent right-to-far-right figures were unsuspended on Friday, including MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and Gateway Pundit editor Jim Hoft, as noted by Shayan Sardarizadeh, a reporter for the BBC. This seems to be part of Musk making good on his promise to give most previously-suspended accounts general amnesty, which he claims is happening because of the results of a poll.

Musk tweeted late Friday that the company would lift the suspensions following the results of a public poll on the site. The poll showed 58.7% of respondents favored a move to immediately unsuspend accounts over 41.3% who said the suspensions should be lifted in seven days.

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

Shortly before being suspended, she said she had posted court-related documents to Twitter that included a 2018 Musk email address. He changes his email frequently and that address isn’t currently current, Lopez said.

Dujarric, Binder, and Paskalis: “Scenarios of Uncertainty-Induced Stalking on Twitter”

Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for the United Nations, said that the move is dangerous at a time when journalists are facing threats and even worse.

The suspended journalist, Matt Binder of the technology news outlet, Mashable, said he was banned 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.

“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 media organizations leave the platform because of the suspensions, the platform would be changed at the fundamental level, said Lou Paskalis, a former Bank of America head of global media.

CBS briefly put its activity on the platform halt in November due to uncertainty, but the media organizations have largely remained on the platform.

“We know that journalists see the main tent pole of Tweets, and that’s why we need to investigate them even more,” he said. Driving journalists off of the platform is a self-inflicted wound.

The suspensions may be the biggest red flag yet for advertisers, Paskalis said, some of which had already cut their spending on Twitter over uncertainty about the direction Musk is taking the platform.

Why he’s going to CEO? The Twitter-Frenchman story of Musk’s ‘Closed’ Twitter Account

Cohost currently has 130,000 users, only 20,000 of which are what Cohost considers active users, according to Kaplan. According to Oh, T2 has a waitlist with a number in the five digits. Mastodon, the most high-profile recent Twitpic rival, hit 2.5 million users in November, but it has since declined to about 1.5 million users, in a possible cautionary tale.

O’ Sullivan and Harwell told CNN on Saturday that they had not agreed to take down the tweets, but rather an option to appeal the decision.

He told CNN he had decided to take the account down and move on from the episode, even though he described it as ‘kinda crazy’.

Musk seems to be ignoring the results of the CEO poll as he looks to reform how polls work without first asking users about their feelings about policy changes.

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

After setting his site at odds with both The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz and his own supporters, the doxifying, banning, and moderation incident ended with an apology and a promise.

All Musk needs from his captive audience is a little more attention, with a promise that there will be votes about “major policy changes” in the future.

His takeover of the company started with a poll, which would be good for his time as chief executive if he ended his time there the same way.

The Story of Musk’s Chaos on Twitter: Tesla’s Board of Supervisors has a Responsibility to the Shareholders and the Investors

Part of the problem with Tesla’s stock price is that critics question whether it was ever worth the trillion-dollar valuation it had at the start of the year. At its peak, Tesla was worth more than the 12 largest automakers on the planet combined, despite having a fraction of the sales of any of them. Today it is worth $399 billion.

More than 17 million people voted in an informal referendum on his chaotic leadership of the social media site, which has included mass layoffs, the re-platforming of suspended accounts, the suspension of journalists who cover him, and policy changes made and reversed in real time.

The analyst believes that the public backlash against Musk is because of the inconsistent standards application that Twitter users use.

Musk has tried to block certain speech in the past, such as when he had a account that was tracking his private jet shut down last week.

Mainstream websites such as Facebook and IG, and upstart rivals Mastodon, Tribel, Nostr, Post, and Donald Trump’s Truth Social were banned. Twitter gave no explanation for why the blacklist included those seven websites but not others such as Parler, TikTok or LinkedIn.

Others who backed Musk’s bid were upset with the decision. Paul Graham, a Venture capitalist, said the policy was the last straw. I give up.”

Warren posed a series of questions about how Tesla’s board is dealing with “conflicts of interest, misappropriation of corporate assets and other actions by Mr. Musk that appear not to be in the best interests of Tesla and its shareholders.”

Warren highlighted questions about potential violations of securities or other laws caused by Musk reportedly pulling key Tesla software engineers and other employees into Twitter.

Noting Tesla’s board has legal obligations it must fulfill, Warren asked the board to respond to a series of questions about its handling of the situation by January 3.

Over the past few months, Musk has created a “brand public backlash” that could tarnish the brand image ofTesla.

Oppenheimer specifically cited Twitter’s decision last week to ban several journalists, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, as a catalyst for the downgrade.

The Next CEO of the Saudi Real Estate Investment Company: Sriram Krishnan, an Investment Expert on Blockchains, Social Networks and a Twitter Poll

The lieutenants who have been assisting with running the company since Musk takeover are likely to be the next CEO of the company. Sriram Krishnan, a general partner focused on crypts and consumer teams, is believed to be on the short list.

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

Calacanis asked on Sunday night, “Who would like the most miserable job in tech and media?” Who is insane enough to run twitter?!?!” Calacanis also ran his own Twitter poll asking followers whether he or Sacks should run the company, separately or together, or whether someone else should take over. The majority of the respondents were against it.

Sacks, who along with Musk was among the original founding team at PayPal, has at least some experience managing a social network. He sold his enterprise communications platform, Yammer, to Microsoft for $1.2 billion.

More recently, he has invested in crypto startups at Andreessen Horowitz, which could give him experience helpful to fulfill Musk’s goal of building payment capabilities for Twitter and making it more than just a social media app.

The recent negative attention the company has received could be mitigated by the fact that Krishnan is the least controversial member of Musk’s current leadership team.

The son-in-law of Donald Trump was spotted with Musk at the World Cup and some people have speculated about who will be the next leader of the company.

The Saudi Royal Family is one of the largest investors in the company. Prior to working in the White House, he was employed by his family real estate development company and left politics last year to start an investment firm. Kushner also previously owned the weekly New York newspaper, the New York Observer.

How to Avoid the Evil Billionaire Attack: Musk Refused to Tweet about the Elephant in the Room after the Musk’s Tweets on Monday

Given Musk’s propensity for tweeting, and his rapid decisions after previous polls, many expected he would have addressed the elephant in the room by now. But he has not. Musk refrained from sending out any tweets for 18 hours on Monday.

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. The new analog is just as capable of destruction as the old one. If you want, call it theevil billionaire attack. The weapon is money, and more specifically, the likelihood that when the moment arrives you won’t have enough of it to make a difference. The call is coming from inside the house.

The reason this strategy is successful is that most ideas of any consequence are owned by people with more money than you, and that they put them together into a network with the specific intent of making the gravity inescapable. Founders and investors and excitable technology writers like myself frequently use the term “platform” to describe technical systems with granular components that can be used to compose new functionality, and the power sources propelling the technology industry find platforms particularly appealing when the bits can be monetized each time they are used.

The problem is hard to fight on the deepest level possible. It would be hard for Musk to kill off the chain if a few people refused to continue using it. If you Duplicate across a lot of computers you will have a risk of losing access. Losing information due to a hostile party isn’t one of them. When the Hic et Nunc marketplace went under in late 2021, a different version was launched, putting a new wrapper around the same content. The blockchain acts as a shared resource that forces interoperability, almost like organic 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. Many of the companies that work on websites, developers who work for them, and independent developers writing their own add-ons can be found in an economy that has sprung up around it. This is all possible because the core is open source and encourages the same of its ecosystem. 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. But we must now understand it to be a bigger technical success than Twitter, simply because it is not at risk.

“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 decentralized social network, meaning that there are also numerous third-party apps for the platform beyond its own.)

The Mastodon founder of Twitter must step aside, but the centralized platforms must follow the lead. After the first tweet ban, Musk apologizes to Twitter Blue

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.

By imposing arbitrary limits on what you can and can’t say, centralized platforms can hold your social graph hostage.

We at Free Press agree that Musk must step aside. The replacement for his job as CEO needs to be a person who understands the importance of keeping people’s health and safety uppermost in their minds.

His amnesty to previously suspended accounts has given us the return of neo-Nazis like Andrew Anglin, right-wing activists like Laura Loomer and other figures who have spread hate to millions of followers.

The decision to allow Covid-19 misinformation to spread across the social network needs to be reversed by the new leadership. They need to retire Twitter’s pay-to-play blue checkmark feature, which allows verified users to post longer videos and have their content prioritized at the top of replies, mentions and searches. And they must cease Musk’s “general amnesty” plan on accounts that were suspended before he took over.

In a matter of moments, the majority of the users who responded to a recent Musk poll asked him to reinstate President Donald Trump’s account. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” he pronounced via tweet, Latin for “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”

Likewise, when Twitter users voted on another of his polls to provide “general amnesty to suspended accounts,” he went ahead and did it. He also heeded user votes in a poll to restore the accounts of tech journalists that he had suspended on Friday.

If he restricted voting to only those who paid for the service, there would be fewerTwitter users who could vote in polls. It would also skew those who can vote to the users who are willing to pay up for Twitter Blue, which includes the controversial paid verification feature Musk pushed to introduce. Musk drew comparisons to the poll taxes after he posted Monday.

Many users were surprised by the new policy of the service, which said links to other social media sites would not be allowed.

An Insight into the Impact of Twitter Outage on Artist-Artist Collaborations: State of the Art in the 21st Century

Mr. Musk questioned the quality of those applying for the role. Beyond the “foolish” crack in Tuesday’s tweet, he previously wrote, “Those who want power are the ones who least deserve it.”

“We’ll make a change, what appears to be a small change somewhere, that then causes a massive disruption,” he said. Musk said Monday’s outage was the result of “what was supposed to be a small change to 1% of the Twitter user base That was a major change to the entire user base of the social media networking site.

Let me explain: I’m lucky enough to know a lot of creatives as well as a lot of journalists and tech workers. When I woke up on Sunday, I was told that artists who link to their own portfolios and to platforms where they accept commission for their artwork would be banned from being on the site. Authors were scared when their publishers asked them to create Link trees to promote their books, reviews, and Goodreads profiles, and suddenly they were banned from using the social networking site.

My friends on Twitch interrupted their streams to discuss the news, worried that they wouldn’t be able to tweet to announce they were starting a new stream, or add a link to their Twitter bio to help viewers find them. All of these things created the potential for lost income for people who, I would argue, need it more than the folks who made these policy decisions. After all, these creators have the entrepreneurial spirit that everyone in Silicon Valley claims to want to perpetuate and empower.

Elon Musk in the epoch of growth: How much is the world’s richest CEO? The case for electric pickups from Ford and Rivian

Morgan Stanley still believes that the company is a bit overvalued because it has a head start over the electric car competition and the Inflation Reduction Act passed earlier this year gives it tax advantages.

The losses, however, have further put a dent in the fortunes of one of the world’s richest people. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, CEO Elon Musk is now worth $132 billion — less than half what he was worth at the beginning of the year. Two weeks ago, Bernard Arnault of French luxury goods giant LMVHF overtook him as the world’s richest person.

“I think there is going to be some macro drama that’s higher than people currently think,” he said, according to Reuters, adding that homes and cars will get “disproportionately impacted” by economic conditions.

Many of the future products that Musk promised came years later, as part of a scheme to artificially inflate its valuation.

It was the target of 50% sales growth that helped drive the valuation. In October, it was conceded that it will miss the sales target.

The stock’s climb to dizzying heights – rising 743% in 2020 alone – was driven by Musk’s reputation as a genius who would disrupt the massive global auto industry.

Now production is slated to start next year, with a ramp-up in production in 2024, putting it years behind other electric pickup offerings from Ford and upstart EV maker Rivian, both of which have electric pickups available for purchase today. It could also trail planned electric pickup offerings from General Motors.

The problem of Elon Musk with the truth, and what does he really know about Tesla, and where does it stand in the face of the Covid restrictions?

“Elon Musk has a pathological problem with the truth,” said Gordon Johnson, one of the largest critics of Tesla among analysts. “When people say he’s a genius and innovator, it’s based on all his promises he never lives up to.”

Once it starts being priced like other manufacturers than it is on promises, the price will plummet, said Johnson. He believes that for Tesla to meet its growth targets, it needs to build more plants every year, but those in Germany and Texas that opened in the spring are still not operating at full capacity. And he said that its plant in China has had to scale back production due to weak sales in the market in the face of the Covid restrictions.

“Demand in the US has collapsed,” he said. Two or three months ago your wait time was two or three months. You can get a one immediately. They will be building more cars than they sell for a third straight quarter. It is the definition of excess capacity.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/29/business/tesla-stock/index.html

Tesla, Twitter, and the First Outages: Tesla’s Failure to Sell Shares of Tesla and Why Twitter has Been Alive since Musk took Over

Tesla is still by far the largest EV maker worldwide, although that title is being challenged in some key markets, by Volkswagen in Europe and by BYD in China. Ford and GM are some of the established manufacturers that are competing.

On Thursday, Musk promised to stop selling shares of the stock if he hadn’t already done it. But he hasn’t lived up to a previous promise in April that he was done selling Tesla shares, selling $14.4 billion of that stock since that time.

It may have endeared him to some but angered other potential buyers, including liberals who might be willing to pay a premium for a more environmentally friendly vehicle.

An even more obvious reason for the decline in engagement is Twitter’s increasingly glitchy product, which has baffled users with its disappearing mentions, shifting algorithmic priorities, and tweets inserted seemingly at random from accounts they don’t follow. On Wednesday, the company suffered one of its first major outages since Musk took over, with users being told, inexplicably, “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.”

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

Employees 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.” He has a score of nine today. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

The decline in engagement and views may be due to the view count feature. The bigger the buttons were, the harder it was to easily tap them.

“Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions,” he tweeted.

Social Media, Firefighting, and Putting Out Fires on Twitter: One Ghost Town Employee, and the Effects of Brand Improperty

“We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy,” one employee said. “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. We mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective.”

“There’s times he’s just awake late at night and says all sorts of things that don’t make sense,” one employee said. Then we have to run around chasing some outlier use cases for only one person because he came to us and said they couldn’t do it on the platform. It doesn’t make any sense.”

The San Francisco headquarters, whose landlord has sued Twitter for nonpayment of rent, has a melancholy air. When people pass each other in the hall, they are supposed to say where they are interviewing and where they have offers. Employees must reserve beds in advance on the eighth floor, since the beds are still available.

In the old days, slack was the epicenter of an open culture. One current employee described it as a “ghost town.”

“When you’re asked a question, you run it through your head and say ‘what is the least fireable response I can have to this right now?’” one employee explained.

(Of course, that’s not true for everyone at the company. An employee says there are a few believers that are just ass-kissers and brown-nosers who are trying to take advantage of the clear vacuum that exists.

The employee pointed out that a lot of advertisers decided not to use the platform after seeing brands being impersonated.

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

Learning Something New, Something New for Human Resources: The Case of Tameena and Sula: A Human Rights Advisor at a Rival Service

If we can learn how to put a little more thought into some of the decisions and fire a bit less, it could do us some good, said the employee. He should learn the areas where he does not know, and let those that know take over.

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

An employee said that fear of not being able to find something else is the main factor for most people. Most of my team is doing hardcore interview prep and would jump at the chance to walk away.

Sarah Oh lost her job as a human rights advisor at the company in late last year and decided to join a friend in building a rival service.

Gabor Cselle, who worked at both of the mentioned companies, launched T2, currently available in t2n. It gives a social feed of posts with a 280-character limit. According to Oh, the focus of safety is the key selling point.

Oh told CNN, “we really do want to create an experience that allows people to share what they want to sharing without fearing risk of things like abuse and harassment.”

The Artifact Project: Facebook, Twitter, T2 and Instagram Are Vying for the Cancellation of the Micro-Expressions Censorship

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

The Artifact, a personalized news feed powered by artificial Intelligence, was announced last month by the creators of IG and it was swiftly compared to the microblogging site. In CNN’s recent test of the app, however, it resembled news reader applications like Apple News or the defunct Google Reader. Artifact displayed popular articles from large media organizations and smaller bloggers in a main feed, tailored to users based on their activity and selected interests.

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.

A lot of people who are moving over from the micro-expressions site are choosing to do so as a nicer experience overall, according to the Anti Software Software club. The service launched publicly in June of last year, after Musk offered to buy Twitter. In November, after Musk completed the takeover, the platform saw a surge in activity, adding 80,000 users within 48 hours.

Kaplan said that people refer to us when they do as atwitter alternative, and that is an important distinction.

“If people leave, where do they go? By all accounts, there is no platform right now that is able to take on the function of Twitter, and nothing is really prepared for it,” said Karen North, a clinical professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. No platform has a global user base that is representative of everyone in the world.

The systems were regularly monitored and the staff addressed mistakes. But a team that cleaned up spam and countered influence operations and had about 50 people at its peak, with about a third in Asia,  was cut to single digits in recent layoffs and departures, two of the people said. The division head for the Asia-Pacific region, whose responsibilities include the Chinese activist accounts, was laid off in January. Twitter’s resources dedicated to supervising content moderation for Chinese-language posts have been drastically reduced, the people said.

The people said that some accounts of Chinese activists and dissidents were hard to find because some systems failed to distinguish between a fake account and a real one.

“It’s tough being a Twitter user nowadays,” said Jenn Takahashi, who runs the Twitter account @bestofdyingtwit, which has logged the platform’s shortcomings since Mr. Musk took the helm. She said she found it difficult to see her followers’ direct messages due to the way they were formatted, and that they had notifications either delayed or sent twice.

Non-English language moderation has been a particular challenge for American social media companies, which often do not have enough staff in those areas and rely on imperfect machine translations, said Gabriel Nicholas, a research fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology who studies content moderation and disinformation on social media.

Twitter Ethics: Two Years after Musk Takes the Podolski Road : A Demonstration of the Right to Improve Transparency in China

Twitter has long been banned in China. In the last couple of years it has been a gathering place for Chinese dissidents, human rights activists and overseas Chinese communities seeking to debate issues that are taboo on the mainland.

In the video, Musk said he needs to stabilize the organization and make sure the product roadmap is clearly laid out. It would be good to get someone else to run the company by the end of the year.

Musk has a habit of misestimating future plans despite his comments about possibly leaving his CEO position by year end. The original late 21st century date for the launch of theTesla Cybertruck has been pushed back two years. Musk also previously said that a Tesla should be able to drive itself across the country by the end of 2017. It has yet to be achieved a decade later.

Musk has ambitions to reduce misrepresentation on the platform, which was covered in more detail by the World Government Summit. You can watch the whole interview below, or skip ahead to Musk’s response about stepping down as CEO, which starts at around the 15 minute mark.

Two years ago, in an attempt to become more transparent, the tech industry launched the biggest attempt of its kind. The researchers wrote papers showing that, for example, the US, UK, and France received a larger boost from the left than from the right, while the white faces and women postings favored by them were the favored by the same system.

Twitter’s AI ethics researchers ultimately decided their prospects were too murky under Musk to wait to get their study into an academic journal or even to finish writing a company blog post. They put the moderation bias study onto the open-access service Arxiv less than three weeks before Musk assumed ownership.

“We were rightfully worried about what this leadership change would entail,” says Rumman Chowdhury, who was then engineering director on Twitter’s Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability group, known as META. The kind of work ethics teams do is different from real scientific work due to being part of a woke liberal agenda.

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

TikTok’s Hidden Heating: A Threat to the World, or What Elon Musk Has inferred from its Facebook Page?

Politicians and researchers have been warning about the dangers of social media platforms being used to change public opinion for years. The report of a hidden heating button on TikTok, which allows the company to boost content delivered via its For you algorithm, was greeted with breathless reporting that it would be used to promote Chinese interests in the West. Fears that the Chinese government might use the app to spy on or collect data from users have led to calls to ban TikTok in the United States and the United Kingdom.

The research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations says that he is manipulating the platform to force engagement. While Musk’s use of algorithmic heating appears to be driven by insecurity, the fact that he can do it is alarming. “Singular acts are funny,” Muñoz says. It is important to take a step back and think about the consequences of his actions.

“Censoring content on the Modi documentary speaks for my assumption of [his reliance on] foreign investment and his dependence on raw materials,” says Muñoz. It is unlikely that we will ever get hard evidence on whether or not Musk talks to anyone, but if we look at the visibility and engagement on, or lack of, topics, we may have a clue as to what’s going on.

But in a sign of just how deep Elon Musk’s cuts to the company have been, only one site reliability engineer has been staffed on the project, we’re told. On Monday, the engineer made a “bad configuration change” that “basically broke the Twitter API,” according to a current employee.

Users used images that weren’t seen because they wouldn’t load to show their points, as Chaos took over the timeline.

The change in question was part of a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API, Platformer can now confirm. The company announced on February 1st that it was no longer able to provide free access to its application programming interface, effectively ending the existence of third-party clients and limiting outsiders’ ability to study the network. The company paid developers to work with a new paid API.

“A small API change had massive ramifications,” Musk tweeted later in the day, after Twitter investor Marc Andreessen posted a screenshot showing that the company’s API failures were trending on the site. The code stack is very brittle. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”

Some current employees are sympathetic to that view, which places at least part of the blame for Twitter’s problems on technical failures that predate Musk’s ownership of the company. The fail whale was an icon of the oldTwitter.

When an engineer starts working: What work have you been doing lately? A comment on Musk’s tweet on the accessibility of Reykjavik

This paved the way for a single engineer to be staffed on a major project — one that is linked to several critical interconnected systems that both users and employees depend on.

It took a long time to repair the problem with few knowledgeable workers on hand. When you fire 90 percent of the company, that’s what happens, says a current employee.

Musk responded in a tweet asking, “what work have you been doing?” When Thorleifsson provided a list of his tasks in response, Musk appeared to cast doubt on several points. “Pics or it didn’t happen,” he tweeted. In a separate statement, the billionaire said that the man claimed 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.

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

CNN asked for comment from Thorleifsson, but he did not respond immediately. Much of the public relations department was cut by the company and it didn’t respond.

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.”

The FTC’s Actions on the Wreathization of the Federal Government: a Report on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Weaponization and Overreach

The code base is like a Rube Goldberg machine and when you zoom in, there are more Rube Goldberg machines than one. It is difficult to keep the product running and also difficult to advance it due to it being overly complex.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government — part of the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee — revealed the requests in a new report (PDF), calling the FTC’s actions harassment and overreach.

The FTC wants these details because of the consent order that was first reached in 2011 and which expanded in 2022, where it was found that there had been improper use of peoples security phone numbers to target ads. That agreement (PDF) also required Twitter to create and document “a comprehensive privacy and information security program” to secure users’ information.

It has not responded to the journalists’ questions about the layoffs, mass resignations, and major changes to the user experience since then.

Scores of Twitter users confirmed that they had successfully tested the feature for themselves, and many were quick to criticize him and the new policy.

A video editor for the Metro newspaper in the UK commented that the experience was the same as general user experience.

But many of his moves in that direction — from weakening its content moderation practices to reinstating accounts that had been suspended for rule violations — have fueled safety and misinformation concerns.

In December, he took the highly unusual step of banning the accounts of several high-profile journalists who cover the platform after an abrupt change in policy about accounts that share the locations of private jets (including his own) using publicly available information.

Tesla, the much-talked-about electric car company of which Musk is co-founder and CEO, stopped responding to press questions in 2020 and reportedly dissolved its PR department that same year.