Elon Musk Twitter

[NATI BENGALS]

Was there not a long thread about this already? I can't find it.

[*michaelsean*]

There was, but I can’t find it either on the search. Weird.

[StoneTheCrow]

Is anyone else only seeing “Deleted, my reach is farther than you think. Signed, Elon M.” on this post?

[*Nately120*]

I'd buy this place for $45 billion and resurrect that thread if there weren't so many bots here.

[NATI BENGALS]

Sounds like a pretty smooth transition happening at the twit house.

Fire a bunch of people.
Ask some you just fired to come back.
Open the flood gates of hate, lies, and racism to be posted on your forum.
Lose a bunch of advertising revenue.
Propose changes users don't like.
Users rebel and start leaving.
Top execs who weren't fired quit.

Warn the company it may go bankrupt...

What has it been, two weeks?

Meanwhile, I guarantee the number of people who told themselves they would never buy a Tesla because Musk owned them, went up.

[*Nately120*]

I've never been familiar with the Twitterverse, but is it true that the process of being verified has gone from an actual verification process to simply paying a fee and being "verified" that you are whomever the hell you want to be? That's pretty wacky if so.

We should adopt this in other aspects of life. You're being arrested for driving while impaired, show me your license and registration OR give me $8 and just tell me you are whomever the hell you want to be. Ok, here is your 2 dollars in change....ok, Mr. Trump this is your 153,673rd DUI charge this week.

[GMDino]

(11-11-2022, 12:12 AM)NATI BENGALS Wrote: Sounds like a pretty smooth transition happening at the twit house.

Fire a bunch of people.
Ask some you just fired to come back.
Open the flood gates of hate, lies, and racism to be posted on your forum.
Lose a bunch of advertising revenue.
Propose changes users don't like.
Users rebel and start leaving.
Top execs who weren't fired quit.

Warn the company it may go bankrupt...

What has it been, two weeks?

Meanwhile, I guarantee the number of people who told themselves they would never buy a Tesla because Musk owned them, went up.

It's almost like these really rich guys who were born on third and think they hit a triple fail at everything they try to do on their own.  They're just not as smart as they think they are and no one close to them dare tell them.

SCOOP from @alexeheath: Twitter's chief privacy officer, chief compliance officer, and chief information security officer have all quit. Internal note warns that violating FTC privacy settlement could destroy the company but Elon doesn't seem to care. https://t.co/JLhugR9JvN pic.twitter.com/uyiPq6VmBx

— nilay patel (@reckless) November 10, 2022

 

A Twitter lawyer sent an alarming message to colleagues this morning, saying that Elon Musk “is willing to take on a huge amount of risk in relation to this company and its users” and is at risk of putting the company in violation of its FTC consent decree https://t.co/JeR0jJdOn2

— Alex Heath (@alexeheath) November 10, 2022

 

[*Nately120*]

Maybe I'm over simplifying things, but if I may dust off my marketing resume when you want to take a brand in a new direction you have to look at how existing brands that occupy the space into which you are extending fare, how they operate, and what their consumer base wants.

If you are going to make twitter more like Parler and 4Chan you can't be terribly surprised when your brand becomes more chaotic and less appealing to mainstream advertisers (and overall, less profitable) as a result, because that is what those brands are compared to the space twitter was in prior to this shake up. But I guess this is about freedom, not stability or profitability I guess.

It is amusingly odd that a brand with global users wants to be a free and open town square where the only rule needed came from a single country some 240 years in the past, oh and there are lots of advertisers. This town square is like Times Square with all the billboards I guess.

[Millhouse]

(11-11-2022, 10:02 AM)Nately120 Wrote: I've never been familiar with the Twitterverse, but is it true that the process of being verified has gone from an actual verification process to simply paying a fee and being "verified" that you are whomever the hell you want to be?  That's pretty wacky if so.

We should adopt this in other aspects of life.  You're being arrested for driving while impaired, show me your license and registration OR give me $8 and just tell me you are whomever the hell you want to be.  Ok, here is your 2 dollars in change....ok, Mr. Trump this is your 153,673rd DUI charge this week.

Yes, unless you are already verified I believe. And I think it's a yearly fee, but don't know if that's for everyone verified or just newer ones.

[*Nately120*]

(11-11-2022, 11:56 AM)Millhouse Wrote: Yes, unless you are already verified I believe. And I think it's a yearly fee, but don't know if that's for everyone verified or just newer ones.

But that's the funny part...it's not verification it's the opposite of it.  If you pay me I will NOT verify you are who you say you are.  

[Arturo Bandini]

It's like watching the Titanic sink in real time. That guy is not as smart as he proclaims. Just a billionnaire kid buying other people's talents.

[GMDino]

I thought this was a good description of what's happening...and funny.

A message from Twitter's Head of Communications pic.twitter.com/XDE1QyVr8U

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) November 14, 2022

 

[*Nately120*]

(11-15-2022, 02:46 PM)GMDino Wrote: I thought this was a good description of what's happening...and funny.

A message from Twitter's Head of Communications pic.twitter.com/XDE1QyVr8U

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) November 14, 2022

 

I still can't grasp why Musk would spend $45 billion to buy an established brand if he just wanted to turn it into something completely different.  It's like buying the MLB so you can turn it into the XFL.  Buying Twitter to make it the next Parler or 4chan doesn't add up to me, if his goal is to actually make money.

[GMDino]

(11-15-2022, 03:11 PM)Nately120 Wrote: I still can't grasp why Musk would spend $45 billion to buy an established brand if he just wanted to turn it into something completely different.  It's like buying the MLB so you can turn it into the XFL.

That's what happens when you're really rich but think that makes you really smart.

[Au165]

Musk calling the micro services "bloatware" and eliminating them all only find out it's what controlled two factor authentication and locked out massive corporations and heads of state was a pretty funny occurrence yesterday. It's almost like every day he does something new and stupid to make it worse.

[*Nately120*]

(11-15-2022, 04:48 PM)Au165 Wrote: Musk calling the micro services "bloatware" and eliminating them all only find out it's what controlled two factor authentication and locked out massive corporations and heads of state was a pretty funny occurrence yesterday. It's almost like every day he does something new and stupid to make it worse.

What is strange is that he bought this company at a premium price himself before doing this.  His methods and his manner of doing things are more akin to someone leaving a business to his dumbass son who takes over and has no idea what he's doing and runs things directly into the ground because he insists he knows what is best. 

[GMDino]

(11-15-2022, 04:48 PM)Au165 Wrote: Musk calling the micro services "bloatware" and eliminating them all only find out it's what controlled two factor authentication and locked out massive corporations and heads of state was a pretty funny occurrence yesterday. It's almost like every day he does something new and stupid to make it worse.

Even better: He didn't even know about it until he was told and he fired the guy who told him. 

Musk declares something he knows nothing about, is corrected by an employee who explains the problem, and then fires that employee and presents their ideas as his own. If this doesn't sum up his entire career I don't know what does. https://t.co/ss5N67dxve

— David C Bell (@MovieHooligan) November 14, 2022

 

[GMDino]

Who could have thought putting a narcisit in charge of a social media network that would provide him with the attention he craves could go bad when he stopped getting the attention?

https://www.platformer.news/p/elon-musk-fires-a-top-twitter-engineer

Quote:Elon Musk fires a top Twitter engineer over his declining view count
Inside Twitter 2.0, turmoil leaves employees stretched to the max


Zoë Schiffer
 and 
Casey Newton


19 hr ago

156

[/url]
4






[url=https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd6cac20c-f3e0-427f-99a8-d0912f1f0d4e_512x512.png]“Elon Musk dissolving” / Stable Diffusion

For weeks now, Elon Musk has been preoccupied with worries about how many people are seeing his tweets. Last week, the Twitter CEO took his Twitter account private for a day to test whether that might boost the size of his audience. The move came after several prominent right-wing accounts that Musk interacts with complained that recent changes to Twitter had reduced their reach.

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

“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.  

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.
Musk did not take the news well. 

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer. (Platformer is withholding the engineer’s name in light of the harassment Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.)

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

It has now been seven weeks since Twitter added public view counts for every tweet. At the time, Musk promised that the feature would give the world a better sense of how vibrant the platform is. 

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

Almost two months later, though, view counts have had the opposite effect, emphasizing how little engagement most posts get relative to their audience size. At the same time, Twitter usage in the United States has declined almost 9 percent since Musk’s takeover, according to one recent study.

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

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.”

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.

“As the adage goes, ‘you ship your org chart,’” said one current employee. “It’s chaos here right now, so we’re shipping chaos.”

Interviews with current Twitter employees paint a picture of a deeply troubled workplace, where Musk’s whim-based approach to product management leaves workers scrambling to implement new features even as the core service falls apart. The disarray makes it less likely that Musk will ever recoup the $44 billion he spent to buy Twitter, and may hasten its decline into insolvency. 

“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.”

Musk’s product feedback, which comes largely from replies to his tweets, often baffles his workers. 

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

The San Francisco headquarters, whose landlord has sued Twitter for nonpayment of rent, has a melancholy air. When people pass each other in the halls, we’re told that the standard greeting is “where are you interviewing?” and “where do you have offers?” The 8th floor is still stocked with beds, and employees have to reserve them in advance. 

“Most weeknights, they are fully booked,” another current employee said.

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

Slack – once the epicenter of Twitter’s open culture, where employees discussed anything and everything – has gone dormant. One current employee described it as a “ghost town.” 

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

When Musk or the goons ask questions, employees are torn between giving the right answer and the safe answer. 

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

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

Despite the turmoil, remaining employees say that what they call “Twitter 2.0” has managed to improve on its predecessor in at least some ways. 

“In the past, Twitter operated too often by committees that went nowhere,” one employee said. “I do appreciate the fact that if you want to do something that you think will improve something, you generally have license to do it. But that’s a double edged sword — moving that fast can lead to unintended consequences.” 

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

“If Elon can learn how to put a bit more thought into some of the decisions, and fire from the hip a bit less, it might do some good,” the employee said. “He needs to learn the areas where he just does not know things and let those that do know take over.” 

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.”

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

“They have to become code archaeologists to dig through the repo and figure out what’s going on,” one employee said.
Meanwhile, the recent wave of layoffs in the tech industry have contributed to a feeling of paralysis among those who remain at Twitter. 

“I do think the recent vibe overall in tech, and fear of not being able to find something else, is the primary factor for most folks,” an employee said. “I know for a fact that most of my team is doing hardcore interview prep, and would jump at likely any opportunity to walk away.”

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

Since Musk took over, those steps have become an afterthought, employees said. “His stance is basically ‘**** you regulators,’” we’re told. 

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

Last year, before Musk took over, the FTC fined Twitter $150 million for breaking its agreement. Another breach would almost certainly result in millions of dollars in additional fines, and a flurry of news coverage — just the thing, perhaps, to get the views on Musk’s tweets trending up again.

[GMDino]

Wanted to share this without starting a new thread about the gop "hearings" into Twitter and social media companies.

There's enough comedy coming out of the "witnesses" and republicans merely spouting their laundry list of complaints about anything they disagree with.  

But for Jim Jordan (sans jacket...of course) to be called out for being wrong and then doubling down on it...with a voice that sounds artificially sped up (it isn't) is glorious.  Best laugh I've had in a while about politics.

LOL pic.twitter.com/nFZKlDvpzI

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 8, 2023

 

[GMDino]

https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-orders/

Quote:Twitter is complying with more government demands under Elon Musk
The company has not refused a single request since Musk took ownership, according to self-reported data.

[color=var(--ash,#555)]Patrick Pleul/Pool/AFP/Getty Images[/color]

By RUSSELL BRANDOM
27 APRIL 2023
 

TRANSLATE

• Since Musk took ownership, the company has received 971 government demands, and fully complied with 808 of them.
• Before Musk, Twitter's full compliance rate hovered around 50%; since the takeover, it is over 80%.
  

It’s been exactly six months since Elon Musk took over Twitter, promising a new era of free speech and independence from political bias. But Twitter’s self-reported data shows that, under Musk, the company has complied with hundreds more government orders for censorship or surveillance — especially in countries such as Turkey and India.

The data, drawn from Twitter’s reports to the Lumen database, shows that between October 27, 2022 and April 26, 2023, Twitter received a total of 971 requests from governments and courts. These requests included orders to remove controversial posts, as well as demands that Twitter produce private data to identify anonymous accounts. Twitter reported that it fully complied in 808 of those requests, and partially complied in 154 other cases. (For nine requests, it did not report any specific response.)


Most alarmingly, Twitter's self-reports do not show a single request in which the company refused to comply, as it had done several times before the Musk takeover. Twitter rejected three such requests in the six months before Musk's takeover, and five in the six months prior to that.

More broadly, the figures show a steep increase in the portion of requests that Twitter complies with in full. In the year before Musk's acquisition, the figure had hovered around 50%, in line with the compliance rate reported in the company's final transparency report. After Musk's takeover, the number jumps to 83% (808 requests out of a total of 971).
The full dataset used in this reporting is available here.

The orders vary widely in scope and subject, but all involve a government asking Twitter to either remove content or reveal information about a user. In one case from January, India’s information ministry ordered Twitter to take down all posts sharing footage from a BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Dozens of posts were removed, including one from a local member of parliament.

Indian MP Derek O'Brien said one of his tweets was taken down in January. [color=var(--ash,#555)]@derekobrienmp
The figures are drawn from the Lumen database, a public clearinghouse for takedown requests and other government orders received by online speech platforms. Maintained by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Lumen has collected government requests to online platforms for more than 20 years, with participation from Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Reddit, among other platforms.[/color]

Twitter hasn’t published a transparency report since Musk took ownership, but the company has continued to make automated submissions to Lumen as part of its system for processing government requests. Lumen also collects data on content removed for defamation or intellectual property disputes, but for the purposes of this analysis, Rest of World focused solely on court orders and direct requests from government agencies.

Lumen's data consists entirely of self-reporting by platforms, and there's no legal requirement that the reports be complete. Nonetheless, the data is considered to be canonical within the industry, and outside surveys have largely confirmed its accuracy. "Historically, it seems Twitter has sent a copy of everything they've received to us," Adam Holland, who manages the project for the Berkman Klein Center, told Rest of World. "My understanding is that they have a small team of people that work on this and it’s a largely automatic process."

The biggest irregularity came earlier this month when Twitter's self-reports abruptly stopped. After averaging over a 100 copyright claims a day, the flow of new reports halted on April 15, and Twitter has not made a submission to the database in 12 days. Holland is still determining the cause of the halt and is unsure whether it's the result of a technical issue or a deliberate choice by Twitter. "I would be saddened if it turned out they decided to stop sharing," he said, "because a lot of really good research is being done."

To put the data in context, Rest of World compared Lumen reports from Twitter’s Musk era (October 2022 to April 2023) against the previous two six-month spans. The results show government requests to Twitter more than doubling, from 348 to 971, when we compare Musk’s first six months to the same period a year earlier. There’s no similar increase in the number of resisted requests over that same period.

The rise in overall requests may have been driven by forces outside Twitter’s control. The bulk of the recent requests come from countries that have recently passed restrictive speech laws — most notably, India, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. Germany, which generated 255 requests, recently increased enforcement after revisions to a 2017 law prohibiting hate speech and extremism.

Under previous ownership, Twitter actively resisted requests from many of these same regimes. For two weeks in 2014, the platform was banned from Turkey, in part due to its refusal to globally block a post accusing a former government official of corruption. (The executive who led that charge was Vijaya Gadde, one of the first executives fired after Musk took over.) In July 2022, the company sued the Indian government over an order to restrict the visibility of specific tweets. After Musk’s takeover, however, Twitter complied with more than 100 block orders from the country, including those against journalists, foreign politicians, and the poet Rupi Kaur.

Twitter replied to Rest of World’s email with an automated emoji response; the company offered no further comment.

As part of the drastic reduction in Twitter’s employee count, Musk has decimated many of the departments that process government requests, which may have reduced the company’s ability to resist such orders. At the same time, Musk has made clear in interviews that his vision of free speech does not extend to legal requests.

“We can’t go beyond the laws of a country,” he said in a recent interview with the BBC. “If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we’ll comply with the laws.”