Why did Elon Musk take Twitter? The story of Twitter and the time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset
When Elon Musk took over Twitter last week, he was in a somewhat similar situation to Jobs in 1998. Twitter has been losing money and gotten stuck as a second-tier social network in terms of audience. But what had originally motivated Musk, according to his own tweets and statements, was that he regarded Twitter as the world’s Town Hall. He was going to allow more free speech on the platform. Adding to the situation was that Musk’s bank loans helped finance his takeover and had to be paid off. Musk immediately began making moves to change Twitter’s fortunes, literally and culturally.
“I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump; I think that was a mistake,” Musk said at a conference in May, pledging to reverse the ban were he to become the company’s owner.
Relations between the pair seem to have soured, with the men publically sparring over the summer. After Trump called Musk a “bullsh*t artist” at a rally in July, Musk responded by tweet, writing, “I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.”
Legal experts said that there was a good chance that the deal would be enforced in court. Two weeks before the contentious legal battle was set to go to trial, Musk said he would follow through with the deal on its original terms after all. The attorneys for Musk asked the judge to stay the legal proceedings as the parties were trying to hammer out the final details of the deal.
legal experts were not surprised by Musk’s U-turn and were not surprised that he had suggested in public statements that he could easily walk away from the deal.
One of the plaintiffs named in the suit, Manu Cornet, tweeted their participation: “Was not planning on doing anything like this initially… But… Look Ma I’m suing Twitter.”
The material that came to light ahead of the trial due to start on October 17 in Delaware’s Chancery Court did not lend much support to that argument. Miller says there’s nothing that looks like fraud here, despite the fact that his best claim is fraud. “They’ve run out of cards to play.”
The trial could affect Musk personally, so his decision to fold might have been influenced by that. The business man watched as the internet devoured his personal text messages with major figures in Silicon Valley. Miller thinks that he would have had a very embarrassing deposition this week.
What is the problem with Twitter? When is Twitter really all legal speech? The founders, the CEOs and the founders of a gambling machine, say it like a Skinner box
Any company that includesTwitter is a function of its people. And the people who have always been drawn to Twitter are kind of strange in the best way possible. You don’t know it until you work for the company. And those people are all the ones who are going to leave. Those are not the people who are going to stay. So all of that is gone.
The author of a book about gambling machine design said she doesn’t know if the engineers at TWITTER ever sat around and said “We are creating a Skinner box”. But that, she said, is essentially what they’ve built. It’s one reason people who should know better regularly self-destruct on the site — 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****.”
Experts who study social networks warn that overhauling Twitter to allow all legal speech would open the floodgates to toxicity, from misogynist, racist and transphobic abuse to false claims about the security of voting and the effectiveness of vaccines.
If you want to see a “keyhole view of whatTwitter will look like,” look at alternative platforms that promise less restrictions on speech, said the president of Media Matters for America.
He said the bug on those sites is the ability to say and do things that other platforms don’t allow. And what we see there is that they are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.”
He agreed to join the company’s board shortly after agreeing to ban all types of accounts, except for ones that advocate violence.
That could mean lifting bans on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was kicked off for abusive behavior in 2018; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., whose account was suspended in January for tweeting misleading and false claims about COVID-19 vaccines; and 2020 election deniers like Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell, who were all banned in early 2021.
The person urged Musk to hire “someone who has a savvy cultural/political view” to lead enforcement, suggesting “a Blake Masters type.” Masters is the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona who has been endorsed by Trump and has echoed his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
Facebook doesn’t really care about Donald Trump: a billionaire with a lot of staff and no advertising for a giant tech company
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 show that when he first invested, he had a friendly relationship with the man but that changed after he told Musk that his criticism of the platform was not helping him.
The leader of the day-to-day operations will likely have a smaller workforce. Hundreds of employees have left the company in the last months, with many inside feeling that Musk’s vision for the company is not realistic.
That is good news for the billionaire who has complained that the company is overstaffed and that it costs too much to keep up.
He said on the earnings call last week that the long-term potential is greater than its current value.
He may have little choice but to find other sources of revenue as there are no advertising and he is trying to make changes to content moderation.
“Advertisers want to know that their ads are not going to appear alongside extremists, that they’re not going to be subsidizing or associating with the types of things that would turn off potential customers,” Carusone said.
What exactly he meant is, as always, anyone’s guess. In the summer, Musk told the staff of his company’s desire to use the same technology as China’s “super-app” for messaging, payments, shopping and ride-sharing.
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.
A note on Twitter, a platform for the development of safety and integrity for free speech and free speech infringers, says Pinar Yildirim
The note is a shift from Musk’s position that Twitter is unfairly infringing on free speech rights by blocking misinformation or graphic content, said Pinar Yildirim, associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
You know, on one level, working at Twitter is just a job. There is a real sense of inspiration in the mission of the company, from so many employees that I have spoken to, it is clear to me there is a desire to give people a voice.
Twitter’s Head of Safety and Integrity, Yoel Roth, has also remained at the company. In recent days, Musk has been encouraging people to follow him on social media for a more accurate understanding of trust and safety on the platform.
According to the Wall Street Journal, one advertising agency has already gotten requests from a number of clients to stop their ads from being seen if Musk restores Trump’s account.
Musk also reiterated in the letter a lofty earlier statement he had made that the Twitter acquisition is not meant to be a money-making venture for him.
Musk will be given more influence by the acquisition. The billionaire has significant stakes in companies that are developing cars, rockets,robots and satellite internet, as well as more experimental ventures like brain implants. Now he controls a social media platform that shapes how hundreds of millions of people communicate and get their news.
Musk also pledged to “defeat the spam bots or die trying,” referring to the fake and scam accounts that are often especially active in the replies to his tweets and those of others with large followings on the platform.
On Twitter and the Meltdown of Musk: After his Twitter Takeover, Jay Sullivan and The Verge Tune Their Twitter Profiles
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.
Since Musk suddenly proclaimed he actually wanted to buy Twitter again earlier this month, Twitter’s most internally visible leader has been Jay Sullivan, the general manager of consumer and revenue product. He has been holding regular listening sessions with employees, but on Thursday, shortly after employees received a calendar invite for a “quick informal check in” call with him at 7:35PM ET, the meeting was cancelled “until further notice” without explanation.
Parag Argawal, the current CEO of the company, left after Musk soured on him after they initially started talking about Musk joining the board. “He has been completely absent for weeks,” one current Twitter employee, who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission, said of Argawal. Another said that he had ghosted them. Both Twitter’s Slack and the Twitter employee-only section of Blind, an anonymous message board for tech workers, are full of similar comments about Argawal, according to screenshots seen by The Verge.
The execs received handsome payouts for their trouble, Insider reports: Agrawal got $38.7 million, Segal got $25.4 million, Gadde got $12.5 million, and Personette, who tweeted yesterday about how excited she was for Musk’s takeover, got $11.2 million.
Although they came quickly, the major personnel moves had been widely expected and almost certainly are the first of many major changes the mercurial Tesla CEO will make.
Tweeting about Twitter: Musk’s tweets at the New York Stock Exchange and how it’s going to break the Twitter deal with Gadde
He criticized Gadde, the company’s top lawyer, on the social networking site. His tweets were followed by a wave of harassment of Gadde from other Twitter accounts. Racist and misogynistic attacks were just one of the things that harassment, including calls for Musk to fire her, included for Gadde. She was fired on Thursday and it was harassment that lit up again.
He continued: “There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.”
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 strolled into the company’s San Francisco headquarters Wednesday carrying a porcelain sink, changed his Twitter profile to “Chief Twit,” and tweeted “Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!”
The New York Stock Exchange informed investors that it would suspend trading in the shares ofTwitter before the opening bell because of Musk’s intentions to take the company private.
Musk’s apparent enthusiasm about visiting Twitter headquarters this week stood in sharp contrast to one of his earlier suggestions: The building should be turned into a homeless shelter because so few employees actually worked there.
Thursday’s note to advertisers shows a new emphasis on advertising revenue, with a particular need for the social networking website to give more “relevant ads” that use user data.
A version of this article was published in theReliable Sources newsletter. The daily digest is dedicated to the evolving media landscape.
Can We Continue the Verification Process? On Twitter and the Elon Musk-Manton Powered Micro-Publishing Site, Part 2: Update
Last weekend, as Musk’s reign began, news broke that he was implementing a plan to scrap the company’s current verification process, where a blue check mark signifies that someone is who they say they are. Under the new scheme, people will have to pay a monthly fee for verification if they want to use the service. Current verified accounts must pony up or lose their status in 90 days.
Yeah. I have always been in favor of allowing anyone who wants to verify themselves to do so. It’s not just making people pay to keep their badge. It also means you could get a Badge if you pay.
If the company strips verified users of blue checks, that could add to the spread of misinformation on the platform.
Musk’s authorized biographer, Walter Isaacson, tweeted in 2018 that “the best thing” one could do to “save social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email, and reduce hacking would be authenticating users.”
It’s unclear whether VP of Operations Lindsey Iannucci, the other two members of Twitter’s top leadership team, will remain with the company. The current employment status of Caldwell, Sullivan, Berland, and Iannucci was not given a comment by the micro-publishing site.
Investor Jason Calacanis and Sriram Krishnan, an Andreessen Horowitz general partner focused on crypto and Twitter’s former consumer teams lead, have both confirmed on Twitter that they are working with Musk to manage the company and brainstorm new products Musk has also reportedly brought in Craft Ventures partner David Sacks, as well as a handful of Tesla engineers.
Calacanis earlier this week tweeted that he was in New York on behalf of Twitter meeting with “the marketing and advertising community.” He has also tweeted questions to Twitter users about the platform’s subscription and bookmark features.
The new owner has said he will establish a council made up of people with differing opinions to help make decisions on whether to allow nudity on the site. For now, he has stressed that the platform’s policies have not yet changed.
Twitter is being sued in a class-action lawsuit filed by former employees laid off as part of a mass firing instigated by the company’s new owner, Elon Musk.
A copy of the email obtained by CNN said if your employment wasn’t impacted you would receive a notification via yourtwitter email. You will be notified via email if your employment is affected.
Some employees tweeted early Friday that they had already lost access to their work accounts. The email to staff said job reductions were “necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.”
The class action lawsuit filed Thursday alleges Twitter is in violation of the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN Act) after laying off some employees already.
The WARN Act requires that an employer with 100 or more employees give 60 days’ advanced written notice of mass layoffs.
Twitter Verification Doesn’t Matter: The Clout Tax is a High-Lambda Censorship
You know, Twitter verification started because Tony La Russa, the baseball manager, sued the company, because he was being impersonated. And he was basically like, this is harmful to my reputation, that you have these fake Tony La Russas running around. So it’s only natural that such a thing would exist. And now, the question is, are you really going to charge people for that privilege of just not being impersonated?
There’s another reason why blue checks spread around platforms: Blue checks make people feel important. They tell the world who is sitting in the section. They were copied by other networks. All of them wanted a rope. It appears Musk sees them as the digital equivalent of a fancy watch or rare sneaker. Why not charge for that? Viewed as a premium accessory, this would-be clout tax looks logical enough.
Using Robot Voices to Come Out and Tell You What Happened in Silicon Valley, I Laughe When You Think You Can’t
This transcript was generated using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please email transcripts@ny Times.com if you have any questions about this transcript and the episode audio.
So usually, on this podcast, we’re going to try to bring people news from around the tech industry, give a more comprehensive sense of what’s happening in Silicon Valley. There is only one story that anyone in tech cares about at the moment.
And we should say up front, like, these voices — they’re not going to sound 100 percent exactly human. It’s going to be a little weird and, frankly, robotic. But just remember, as you listen, that these words were spoken by actual human Twitter employees, and that this is really the only way to get them on the record and get a real picture of what’s happening inside Twitter right now.
We are going to have a normal interview with them. But instead of playing you their voice, which would de-anonymize them and risk getting them in trouble or getting them fired, we are going to transcribe what they say. The words will be fed back into a text-to-speech machine and you will be able to have your own version of their voice.
I like that when we started this show, we said we would never put on AI voices unless we had a really good reason and a really limited capacity. Twice in five episodes.
Well, you were wrong about Elon buying Twitter, and you were wrong about this not being a podcast filled with robot podcasters. So two strikes for Casey.
Yeah. And this is one of the — sometimes as a reporter, you get a tip that sounds so silly, that you think, well, this couldn’t possibly be true. When I got a tip that people would be told to print out their last 30 to 60 days of code, I thought that it was not true.
Two of my sources have said that it doesn’t sound right. OK? But then, I start texting around, start getting on the phone with some folks, and then the two people that told me that I was wrong came back to me and said, oh my god, he’s actually asking people to print out their code!
Why is it funny? Why is this interesting? It’s weird to evaluate how good a software engineer is. The way people are evaluated is not based on how much code they have written.
If you show up with a printout of 100 pages of code, that’s not necessarily a good thing. You might have done better for the company by eliminating some code, right? Sort of streamlining it. So —
Who prints the code? I was surprised that coding programs had a Print button in them. It is not what you will be bringing to your daily review of your code.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
The Twitter Blue Barcode Printout Experiment — Is It Really a Drop in the Bucket for the Security Practices of a Big Tech Company?
Right. In this particular situation, their former security officer was complaining that they have really lax security practices and filed a whistle blower complaint. And now, the fact that all the Twitter engineers are just printing out the code base and leaving it around Twitter headquarters —
Two hours later, they get the new notification from all the Twitter people. It’s like, change of plans. Elon and his folks, they still want to see your code. We need you to shred it if you printed it out, so why not bring it in with your laptop?
Like, there’s just this boss in charge who, like, doesn’t really seem to know what he’s doing, and everyone’s just kind of humoring him. But it’s not — it’s not the kind of thing that usually happens at a big tech company.
It is not. Well, one thing that we should point out is that the company is obsessed with figuring out who is a good engineer. So Elon very much worships at the altar of the engineer. He considers himself an engineer.
I have talked to some people who are getting calls late at night from random Tesla engineers, asking if they are really good on their team. What are the top performers? Who are the low performers?
And so this code printout exercise, as ridiculous as it seems, was all part of this sort of evaluation system where they’ve been trying to figure out, who at this company do we need to keep in order to keep the service running?
And who can we lay off? That is sort of the quiet part of this. OK, so we have this code printing fiasco. You reported on Sunday that there was a possibility of tying verifications to Twitter Blue subscriptions.
We don’t know how many people subscribe to Twitter Blue. The company has never released a metric. What we know is that 89 percent of this company’s revenues comes from digital advertising, and the bulk of the rest comes from of selling access to their API.
If all of those people pay $8 a month to keep their check marks, that’s $38 million a year, roughly. Revenue was over a billion dollars in the second quarter. So this is a drop in the bucket, even if everyone who is currently verified on Twitter pays $8 a month, which I don’t think they will.
Yeah. Stephen King, the horror author, asked if he could pay $20 a month to keep his blue check. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”
Wait, let me just say, Stephen King has written about some of the most terrifying horrors imaginable, and nothing scared him more than the idea of paying $20 a month for his verification badge.
You then receive more new people who are paying to be verified for the first time. Say, you have 800,000 people paying for verification. It is a small amount to a company like Twitter.
A decade ago, I got verified because someone at the news company that I worked at put my name on a list so suddenly that I had a check mark by my name.
When Oprah and I discovered Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Instagram, I realized I was a little bit lucky when Stephen King signed off on Twitter
It’s not about, this person’s important. It was created because Oprah joined the social networking site many, many years ago and there was already a lot of people pretending to be her. So they needed to know whether the person they were talking to was actually the person they claimed to be.
This is a necessary feature of the platform. Every platform that is social in some way has a feature like this — Facebook, Instagram, Snap, TikTok, right? You need a way to say, this is the real Oprah, and that is not the real Oprah.
Right. Over the years, people have come to see these checkmarks next to their name as sort of a status symbol, right? It means that you are someone.
Right, exactly. And so I think the idea initially coming out of the Elon war room was that people who were verified cared so much about being verified and staying verified, that they would pay for the privilege. The idea is that of $20 a month for verification.
It quickly leads to an entire timeline crisis where users are saying they will not pay $20 a month. I pay for more than that. I pay for the videos on the website.
That seems insane, like, to keep my little check mark. On social media, after Stephen King wrote a letter to Elon said we need to pay the bills somehow. Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. Is $8 the right number? So Stephen King has become the pricing consultant for Twitter verification.
And so for them, this seems like a way to make money, while at the same time, kind of punishing the blue checkmarks, which is just very, very different from how other social media platforms treat their creators.
It seems to me that I’m trying to keep an open mind. This could work. I have often thought that people who are power users of Twitter should be paying something for some of the features that are being talked about here.
It does create a lot of economic value for people like you and me. It matters to us. News organizations pay for a wide range of software solutions. Maybe Twitter Blue should be part of that.
I don’t know if they’re going to have a separate program for government entities that aren’t going to pay $8 a month or something, but they did say something like that. There is still a lot of work to be done.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: How The CEO and Vine are going to be able to launch a Social Network?
Right. So that’s not all that happened at Twitter this week. We have had a lot of other executives leave. Chief Customer Officer Sarah Personette resigned. A number of other senior Twitter executives have also announced that they are leaving.
For me, it’s back at it again at the Krispy Kreme, one of the great moments of culture for the past 10 years. At the same time, the culture has also moved on. The code base for Vine is 10 years old, and the idea that it is now going to be revived and turn into a TikTok competitor — that’s a really steep hill.
I would say it’s not an immediate revenue driver. They have to put a lot of effort into that. The social network is meant to be launched within Twitter. That is a heavy lift. It could be a lot of fun to have a network that was not owned by the major video-sharing websites. We just need to see if they can do it.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Life Under the Musk Two Twitter Employees Speaker Out (Mockingjay)
That’s right. You must have days to ship this. If this does not arrive by this date, you may be fired next week. If it is one hour past deadline, you will be fired.
So people are sleeping very little. They are sleeping in their offices, and frankly, some of them are terrified. Some of them are here on work visas. If they lose this job, they have 60 days to find another job, or they’re out of the country. The seriousness of this is not lost on the people who have these jobs.
Welcome to “Hard Fork,” Mockingjay. It is about 10:00 AM on Wednesday. How is your day going so far? Anything notable happen today?
Everyone wakes up to more panicked messages via various different channels each day, which is why it seems as if it is the same cycle every day. I think most people have been smart enough to move off of Slack and into other channels. And it is this up-and-down of trying to chase rumors, because we have had zero communications from anybody internally.
Stressful. I feel stressed because I’m trying to maintain this job while clearly looking for a way out and not getting any support from the people above me. Already, there have been multiple rumor mill-based scares.
First, of course, was that layoffs are supposed to happen Monday. They didn’t happen. The rumor is that it will be Friday. It’s exhausting. I am aware that we are paid well.
We have a lot of money to sit on. Some people don’t. It is nerve-racking not to know as we enter a tough hiring market in tech. As well, we are entering the holidays.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: An Analysis of the Scavenger Hunt Across the E-Mail and Social Media Channels
It’s important to point out that you have a new CEO at your company. Most of the C-suite has either been fired or resigned, and you have not received one email that says, here’s who’s in charge, and here’s the game plan for the next few days.
That is 100% accurate. We have not had anything other than what trickles down to us. The Comms is quite small. There is really nobody answering, even messages in the company-wide channels.
And so what is that like, when, day to day, you wake up, and it’s almost like a scavenger hunt across seven different apps, just to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing?
You have probably heard, and you have been reporting on some of the infamous code reviews. I have heard examples of people saying that they wrote the code on their own but not crediting anyone who collaborated with them in an attempt to get on the preferred status list.
Absolutely. What they are asking for is volume, not quality. Everyone is sharing every little part of their code, no matter how insignificant or garbage it is. [SIGHS]
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees: “I Can’t Cohabitate”: a Reply to a Message from a Manager
I reported on a message that a manager sent to people saying if they don’t know what they’re doing, work on something. Work on anything.
I received a post from Blind and I want to read it. Blind is an app that allows users to have private chats about what is going on at their company through their work email.
A number of people have sent me this post. I am curious if you have seen it. I am not going to read the whole thing. But the headline is “I can’t cope.”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Have We Learned? Why Do We Need To Learn? Why Should We Care?
I am on the 24/7 team that is trying to make all of Elon’s ridiculous dreams come true. Management have repeatedly threatened to fire us if we miss delivery, even if it’s totally outside our control. If we don’t work at weekends, we’re gone. We’re not going if we take anything or leave.
People are working long hours. I’m working around 20 hours per day at absolutely full velocity. In the night, I attend status calls. Even when I’m not working, I can’t stop worrying about it. I can’t cope. I am an absolute mess. I’m at a breaking point. This is after just a few days of Elon.”
So there are two camps at Twitter right now, the people who are being completely ignored until they get fired and the people who are being pulled into these task forces. The people who are being ignored will be fired and that’s the better place to be.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speaker Out: A Techie Crying over a $600$-figure Salary
My heart goes out to this person. I hope that they are able to find gainful employment while they are applying to jobs and taking care of themselves.
And I sincerely hope that there is care taken for people who are on visas. There are people on visas who have no idea what will happen to them. They haven’t been told anything.
This is more than just a techie crying because they are moving from one six-figure salary to another six-figure salary. These are people who are trying to come to this country and find gainful employment, and are highly skilled.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
What Have You Learned About Twitter after the Twitter Fiasco? How Many of Your Friends & Families Used Social Media Have Done? Why Do They Want to Stay?
Twitter has gone through phases in its lifetime. But at least leading up to this whole fiasco, I can’t think of a better place to work. People were respectful of each other. People were honest. And people had legitimate goals.
I don’t think it is due to people sitting on their hands. I think it is because the way this company is structured, it is nearly impossible to get anything done, whether it is trying to get the appropriate approvals by and going through Byzantine processes, literally not being told how things are changing from day to day. So there is some truth to that statement. This is the absolute wrong way to deal with it.
I wonder if you have been considering the degree to which the service may be in jeopardy, and what your fears are about the future of it?
I would like to think the people who are on the social media site will leave in protest. But the reality of the situation is a lot of people may stay. But it’s going to be interesting to see who stays.
Some users have already begun moving to Counter Social because of the layoffs that began Friday, affecting roughly 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.
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out, or What Happens When We Don’t Know How to Write a Random Code
I was scared and relieved. It will be scary to not have income. When we are fired, I hope that we get to chill out for a day or so and then wake up the next day and get that resume out there. Got to be energized about these other jobs, because right now it’s sucking the life out of us.
Depends on uncertainty. There are people who aren’t even certain if they should continue doing the work they’re doing. A pile of unknowns along with the things that have been reported on lead to a general constant stress, even though we have all the information.
I mean, even in the lowest parts of engineering, people would raise privacy concerns or potential misuse of new features. And their only job is to write random code that no one’s ever going to see, just like the piping behind the scenes. The company always allowed its staff to speak to these things. It caught us on issues before it was even in the public eye.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Tweetees Speak Out: How Did I Meet Ying-Yane? — An Empirical Analysis of a ‘Great Idea’
That is complicated because nobody really knew. I mean, I guess there was sort of groupthink that existed that was this guy was not a nice person. There were a lot of people who thought this should have been banned long ago for his behavior. Everything came from there.
He’s been attaching himself to a variety of political viewpoints and talking points. He will lean into it if it serves him.
The company has grown a lot and some not so great over the years that I have been there. I don’t disagree with people when they say there’s probably too many managers, too many engineers. Maybe delivery is a little too slow. Management has never been the company’s strong point.
You don’t go through a change like this without a huge structural change. What is the point if he just came in and did the same thing?
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Do We Need to Do to Recommend Twitter? Why Are We Getting There Faster than We Have Meant?
Okay. So there’s an idea there that Twitter should be moving faster than it has been. We’ve been hearing that Elon is saying, ship this thing by next Monday or else you are going to be fired. As an engineer, when you hear that you have a three – or four-day deadline, what does that do to you?
I get lost in my mind. It is normal to have a three to four day deadline on something, we have to complete it by Friday. That’s a little stressful. Might put in a couple extra hours. Need to get it done. Makes sense.
The sheer scale is the major differentiating factor here. I wouldn’t get asked at work to completely revamp Twitter Blue by Friday. That is completely absurd.
And the sheer number of systems that need to be touched on, the number of engineers that have to be dragged in, that’s like raising the Titanic from the bottom of the ocean.
Because it’s not as if there’s just a certain set of code that needs to be written. You also have to coordinate across presumably dozens of engineers, product managers, and lots of other folks, right?
Yeah. Well, I mean, if you look at some of the feature sets that have been reported on that he wants to add in, like ranking blue check users higher than others, where that ranking occurs in the stack. The entire process has to be completely reshifted. There are whole services in the company that we have to go figure out.
Yeah. If someone phoned you and said that they wanted to redoTwitter Blue, what time frame would you be given, so that you would say that it seems like a reasonable amount of time?
It depends. If the change requires a ton of infrastructure changes, it could take quite a while because the Twitter platform is generally pretty slow. We’re more concerned with reliability than we are moving fast.
If I had to give a round- about time frame, there would be something that could potentially be deployed within a quarter to two quarters.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Are They Really Trying To Tell Us About the Release of a New Privacy Rule?
This is an engineering problem and a social problem at the same time. We need to do testing. We don’t know how this can be abused. There are some unanswered questions about what people will do with it. What are the Bitcoin bros going to do to try to steal more of people’s money abusing this feature?
Right. And that’s what goes on with all major releases at a big social network, is trying to figure out, we change this feature, what are the 10 other things that happen? You are saying that if the deadlines are so short, there is no need for any testing or scrutiny, it will be released without any of that. They’re just going to be set loose.
Yeah. There is a section about user privacy. And it’s basically, we’re not doing anything with user data, so we don’t worry about that. It is a blue check on a profile.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk and Vine: Two Twitter Employees Speak Out? What Do They Think? How Will Elon Musk Learn to Communicate?
So there’s a couple of things. And it depends on where you are in the leadership stack, as far as Musk and his people. Finding something cool that you like is the main message that was communicated. And hopefully Musk likes it functionally.
Think about it. If you present him an idea and he thinks it’s cool, he wants it done within a week. And you’ve basically just sacrificed every team around you.
God. I’m curious what you make of the various product changes that have been floated or proposed by Elon Musk and his inner circle, such as the charging $8 a month for Twitter verification, bringing back Vine. What do you make of those proposals? Do you think the ideas are good?
One of his first decisions was to change the view from thelogged-out to Explore page. And I don’t know this for certain, but my basic understanding of the goal here was that we might even be able to serve ads to people that aren’t logged in.
If you don’t log in, they will show you a bunch of posts that might prompt you to create an account. And if you linger and browse through some tweets, maybe you see some ads, right? So that was a relatively quick change that he made that I think a lot of people would agree makes some sense.
The Vine one, it’s not the worst idea. The cynical part of me says there is too little, too late. You know? TikTok is TikTok, and that’s a mighty hill to climb.
But sure. I mean, we do have all the original content from Vine. The nostalgia factor gives us a foothold to at least launch something.
But we at least have the media, and trying to build a product like that, we’ve been working on that for a while. I believe all the tech companies have tried. Is this something we can do? There’s been mock-ups.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under The Muck Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Do You Want to Do? Why Do You Wanna Be Working At Twitter? What Should I Do?
It would be the most boring. It is possible that you could make a really interesting ethereal horror film out of just walking around and not knowing what is happening.
There’s no communications. There are people in a corner. It isn’t like the company went all-hands and learned what was happening. Everyone is asking if we will ever see him. Should I keep doing my work? Do they still serve lunch?
So as we’re recording this, we don’t know what might happen to your job. As you think about it, do you want to be working at Twitter in three months? Or do you believe that you can be somewhere else?
The culture is real. I mean, culture seeps through the product. People care so much that a lot of the way the company behaves was because of that. That can be very upsetting in its own way.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: An Empirical Analysis of Musk and some Other Disturbing Facts in the Work Hours System
People have seen this. So now we’re moving into the phase equivalent to “move fast and break things,” with no care for the people who are using it, which just sort of defeats the point.
Yeah, because he’s reading the news about the work hours and stuff. And he’s been wildly speculating about what kind of labor law lawsuits are going to come out.
The closest we can get to understanding the point of view is through Musk’s social media, where he has been quoted as saying that the current system for who has a blue checkmark is bullshit. He also recently changed his bio to “Twitter complaint hotline operator” and his location to “Hell.”
You can send big scoops regarding what’s happening at Twitter to a friend like CASEY. His email address is Kevin. Roose —
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
The Real Story of Musk and the New Opportunity: A Case Study in High-Dimensional Space-X, Tesla, and SpaceX
“Hard Fork” is produced by Davis Land. We’re edited by Paula Szuchman. This episode was fact checked by Caitlin Love. The show was engineered today by Cory Schreppel.
The music is by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, and a couple of others. With special thanks to Hanna Ingber, Nell Gallogly, Kate LoPresti, Shannon Busta, Mahima Chablani, and Jeffrey Miranda.
Shannon said the lawsuit was filed to inform employees that they have an avenue for pursuing their rights, and to make them aware that they should not sign away their rights.
This is not the first time Musk’s management style has led to class-action lawsuits. The company was sued in June by two former employees for violating the WARN Act.
In May 1998, I visited Apple headquarters to hear Jobs’ plan for reviving the company. He had been its interim CEO for almost a year, after returning to the company that fired him over a decade earlier. He greeted me in his suite at One Infinite Loop and then went to the whiteboard and wrote a plan for the company. He had a new product, a new plan, and a refreshed workforce, thanks to the ad campaign.
Musk need not look farther than his own 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, the company did not post an annual profit until 2020. Musk deservedly gets a lot of credit for what Tesla has achieved—and for, among other things, his persistence. SpaceX, Musk’s other company, is private and doesn’t report earnings. The test of patience is the creation of rocket ships, which can take years to launch successfully and can wind up killing people.
Twitter Has Not notified Employees By 9 AM Pacific Standard Time if They’re Being Layoff: A Critical Break in the Social Media Landscape
In a letter to employees obtained by multiple media outlets, the company mentioned that they would be told by 9 am Pacific Standard Time if they had been laid off. The people would lose their jobs, but they weren’t told how.
He placed himself as sole board member and removed 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 C. White, a spokesperson for California’s Employment Development Department, said Thursday the agency has not received any recent have not received any recent such notifications from Twitter.
As advertisers are scaling back and newcomers are threatening the older class of social media platforms, it’s a tough time for social media companies.
The parent company of Facebook recently reported a revenue decline for the second time in history and its shares are currently trading at their lowest levels since 2015. Weak earnings reports from Microsoft and Alphabet followed Meta’s disappointing results.
According to a source with knowledge of the decision, account verifications for the paid Twitter Blue plan will not be launched until after the elections.
The decision to push back the new feature comes one day after the platform launched an updated version of its iOS app that promises to allow users who pay a monthly subscription fee to get a blue checkmark on their profiles, a feature that CEO Elon Musk has proposed as a way to fight spam on the platform.
CNN’s testing of the service on Saturday afternoon suggested the rollout was not yet complete ahead of Sunday’s decision. A fresh Twitter account created by CNN that opted for the paid feature did not show the checkmark on its public profile. There is still a price of $4.99 that is outdated.
Twitter Blue: Valerie Bertinelli Adopts Musk’s Screen Name to Support Democratic Candidates, Hashtags, and Freedoms of Speech
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.
I am a freedom of speech fundamentalist. and I eat doody for breakfast every day,” Silverman tweeted Saturday. Her account also retweeted posts supporting Democratic candidates.
On Sunday, Silvermans account was restricted with a warning that visitors would see “some unusual activity from this account” before clicking on the profile. Her name and image were taken out of her account, and she reverted back to her usual form.
After changing her profile name to Musk, Bertinelli tweeted and retweeted support for several Democratic candidates and hashtags, including “VoteBlueForDemocracy” and “#VoteBlueIn2022.”
Musk also said that users will not receive warning before being suspended. He said, “This will be identified as a condition for signing up to Twitter Blue.”
The trolling activity comes in the wake of Musk purchasing the company and pledging to restore the accounts of users who were previously banned from the platform, most notably former President Donald Trump. Musk has also said he will limit the company’s content restrictions and require the paid subscription for account verification.
In recent months, Musk has shared conspiracy theories about the attack on Paul Pelosi, called Democrats the party of “division & hate,” compared Twitter’s former CEO to Joseph Stalin and warned that “the woke mind virus will destroy civilization.”
The Covid PLANdemic: A High-Dimensional Truth Social Network for Human Sexual Explosions and Crime Against Humans
“The Covid PLANdemic was created by Big Pharma to silence me. Everybody tries to silence me,” she said. You can speak at a lower volume. I apologize, but am I too loud for the intensive care unit? You aren’t sick!
I’d like to hello. Your profile is so funny. I love funny guys,” Schumer, dressed in a red dress, said as the bot. I was a bot and they said it was crazy. I am a woman and I adore funny guys like you. You should visit this website where I hang out with some other girls.
James Austin Johnson, who plays Donald Trump in this movie, spoke in front of the council. Trump had his account banned in 2021.
We love Truth Social, we have all moved to it. It’s very great,” Johnson’s Trump said. “And in many ways, 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.”
Disturbing Twitter’s “Chayyathia’s Twitter Account”, a Twitter Activist Comment on a Decline of Moderation
KathyGriffin had her account suspended for changing her screen name to Musk. She told a Bloomberg reporter that she had also used his profile photo.
I think that not all the content editors were let go. The comedian commented on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform where she set up an account last week.
It stated that the service would be first available in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. However, it was not available Sunday and there was no indication when it would go live. Esther Crawford told The Associated Press it’s coming soon but it hasn’t launched yet.
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, sought to assuage such concerns in a tweet Friday. The front-line moderation staff was the least affected by the job cuts.