Twitter Blue Service: Delayed Verification Plan and its Impact on the Popular Controversy under Musk During the Prevagantary Remnant

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. The monthly verification fee will be added to the price of the company’s twitter blue service. Current verified accounts will lose their status after 90 days if they don’t pony up.

The decision to delay the rollout comes as the entire decision to charge users for verification has faced wide public backlash. In a display of defiance, some celebrities on the platform posed as Musk over the weekend and revealed a potential flaw in the “Blue Check” system.

Consolidating strength: In less than a week since Musk acquired Twitter, the company’s C-suite appears to have almost entirely cleared out, through a mix of firings and resignations.

The Blue Check Rappture: Why Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter aren’t the Blue Checks of the Week? The Case of Twitter in the Light of Musk

Verification was a way to keep prominent people and organizations, from celebrities to politicians to multinational corporations and government agencies, comfortable on the platform. There are early verified accounts, including the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The media has always loved verification. It makes sense for journalists and audience development teams to have verified accounts because you look like you’re from a trusted source. Blue checks also assured a journalist’s followers that the story they shared was a real article from the paper and not a hoax.

The platform promised to restore the accounts of users who were previously banned, most notably former President Donald Trump, in the wake of Musk purchasing the company. Musk has also said he will limit the company’s content restrictions and require the paid subscription for account verification.

I think that the importance of knowing who is on that service is worth noting because so many people go there to get their news and information. And so it’s like, if they’re starting to charge for it, if they’re introducing this new confusion into it, then the risk is that within a month or so, there’s just going to be way more misinformation, confusion, hoaxes, and scams on Twitter, because nobody knows who’s who.

At their best, these two Twitter styles are complementary. The style of Nonsense Twitter is funnier and more absurd because of the seriousness of NewswireTweets. There’s even room for the occasional dose of chaos, like DPRK News: the fake North Korean propaganda feed that’s fooled several news outlets, including The Verge.

All of that seems to be an argument for Musks new plan. $240 a year isn’t much for preserving that sense of trust, if you’re a celebrity or an employer.

This proposed shakeup has not gone over well with Twitter power users. Stephen King said on his website that he would not pay to be verified. Still, Musk appears undeterred. The blue check rapture is coming.

Despite its long history of moderation problems, the blue check system was not a panacea for fraud, lies, and other misinformation. There’s a reason why every other major social platform, including Facebook and TikTok, cribbed the blue badges for their own networks. They have been helpful.

What Has Elon Learned About Putting Its Robots on Twitter? An Analysis using the Signal-to-Speech Protocol

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. It could contain errors, but it has been reviewed by humans. Please email transcripts@ny Times.com if you have questions, and review the episode audio before quoting from it.

We attempt to provide a more complete picture of what is happening in Silicon Valley, by bringing news from around the tech industry. At the moment, the only story people in tech care about is what’s happening just down the street from us in San Francisco.

But before we get to those interviews, let’s just go over what’s been happening at Twitter this week. It’s been one crazy thing after another. You reported on Friday that engineers at the company were told to print out the last 30 to 60 days of code so that they could review it.

We are going to interview them, like a normal interview. Instead of playing them their voice, we are going to transcribe what they say, which will save them from getting in trouble or being fired. We’re going to give those words back into a text-to-speech generator and play the voice of the person back to you.

We said we would never put on artificial voices unless we had a good reason and a 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. There are two strikes for the man.

Yeah. Sometimes as a journalist, you get a tip that sounds so silly you don’t think it’s true. I was told by this tip that people were told to print out their last 30 to 60 days of code, but I didn’t think that was true.

And in fact, two of my sources are like, uh, Casey, that doesn’t sound right to me. OK? After I got on the phone with some people, and after they told me that I was wrong, they asked me to print out their code because he was asking them.

Why is this funny? Why is this interesting? It’s weird how to judge how good someone is as a software engineer. People are generally not evaluated by how much code they’ve written, right?

If you show up with a large quantity of code, it is not a good thing. You might have done better for the company by eliminating some code, right? Sort of streamlining it. So.

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

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

Getting your Twitter Blue Verification badge without paying $10 a month to keep Your Blue Check? Exactly. How many tweets do you need to keep your Twitter blue?

Right. Also, they had just been in this situation where their former chief security officer was complaining that they had really lax security practices and filed this whistleblower complaint. And now, the fact that all the Twitter engineers are just printing out the code base and leaving it around Twitter headquarters —

All the followers of the social networking website get a new notification two hours later. Change of plans is like that. They still want to look at your code. But why don’t you just bring it in on your laptop, and if you have printed out any code, we’re going to need you to shred it.

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. It isn’t the sort of thing you’d find at a big tech company.

It’s not. Let’s say that we say that the people at the company are obsessed with determining who is a good engineer. Elon worships at the engineer altar. He considers himself an engineer.

And so I’ve talked to folks who are getting calls late at night from random Tesla engineers, saying things like, who’s really good on your team? Who are the top performers? Who are the performers with the low skills?

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’s sort of the unspoken piece of this. So we have a malfunctioning code printing system. On Sunday you said that there was a proposal to tie verifications to Twitter Blue subscriptions.

Yes, it’s a subscription service that gives you access to other features. You can see the top articles of the day. You have this new test feature that lets you edit tweets.

Yeah. Stephen King, a horror author, asked, “$20 a month to keep my blue check?” I’m gone like Enron if that gets instituted.

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.

A lot of journalists are verified that way. But there’s also a process. If you have a celebrity status, you can ask to be verified. It is not that the verification is about a status marker.

It’s not about, this person’s important. It was literally created because people like Oprah were joining Twitter many, many years ago, and there were already a ton of impostors on Twitter, saying that they were people like Oprah. And so the social network needed a way to let users know if they were talking to the person they claimed to be.

I think this is a necessary feature of the platform. A feature like this is found on every platform that is social in some way. There is a way to say this is Oprah, and that is not the real Oprah.

Right. People have seen the checkmarks next to your name as a kind of status symbol over the years, right? It means that you are someone.

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. And so that’s where we get this idea of $20 a month for verification.

Now, that almost immediately results in, as you said, an entire Twitter timeline meltdown, where users are saying, no way will we pay $20 a month. That’s more than I pay for Netflix. That’s more than I pay for YouTube.

It seems crazy to keep my little check mark. Subsequently, Elon responds to Stephen King on Twitter and says, we need to pay the bills somehow. Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8? Stephen King is a pricing consultant.

There is an idea of the blue checks that is associated with right-wing circles in the outside world, but inside there is a lot of it. People on Fox News and other conservative media outlets talk about a group of people that they think are self- important and care a lot about their checkmarks.

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.

Yeah. I mean, look, I have to say, I have long been in favor of letting anyone who wants to verify themselves part of this plan. It’s not just making people pay to keep their badge. It is also possible for you to get a badge if you pay.

And I think it would be good for Twitter and most social networks if anybody wanted to optionally verify their identity. Like, that would be good for the credibility of the ecosystem overall. There are a lot of questions that have gone unanswered so far.

And it also just seems to me, like — 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 does matter to us. News organizations pay for many software solutions that help them do things. Maybe that should be a part of the plan.

When we reached out to them, we asked them to respond to what you heard from employees about the situation in the company. They didn’t write back. The company has also said nothing publicly since the deal closed.

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

Life Under The Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Are They Really Want to Learn from Each Other? An Empirical Analysis of Vine

For me, it’s back at it again at the Krispy Kreme, one of the great moments of culture for the past 10 years. 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 also say, like, not an immediate revenue driver, right? That’s something they’re just going to have to put a ton of effort into. You’re essentially launching a new social network within Twitter. So that’s a huge, heavy lift. I think it would be nice to have a very popular American short-form video network owned by someone other than Facebook or YouTube. We 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

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speaker Out: A Commentary on “Mockingjay’s Journey Through the Dark Side of Silicon Valley”

That is correct. They’re being told, you have days to ship this. If this does not ship by this date, in some cases, a date next week, you will be fired. If it is one hour past deadline, you will be fired.

People are not sleeping a lot. They are sleeping in their offices, and some of them are terrified. Some of them have work visas. They have 60 days to find another job or they will be out of the country. So it could not be more serious for the folks who have these jobs.

Welcome to the book, “mockingjay.” It is about 10:00 AM Pacific on Wednesday. How has your day gone so far? Today, anything notable will happen?

Every day seems to be the same cycle for the last week, which is everybody wakes up to more panicked messages via various different channels. I don’t believe most people are smart enough to be on Slack. And it is this up-and-down of trying to chase rumors, because we have had zero communications from anybody internally.

It was stressed out. I feel like I’m trying to maintain this job while looking for a way out, while not getting the support and acknowledgment that I need 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. It is rumored that it is going to be Friday. It’s exhausting. We are paid really well and I am sure we are.

We have some savings that we can put to good use. Some people don’t. But it is also just nerve-racking not to know, especially as we’re entering a really tough hiring market in tech. And also, we’re 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: How Do New Co-Owners and Managers Learn to Communicate Out?

A new CEO at your company is important to underline that. Most of the C-suite has either been fired, resigned, or both, and you haven’t received one email that says who is in charge, and what the game plan is for the next few days.

That is correct. We have received zero information, other than what gets trickled down to us. Comms is incredibly sparse. Nobody is answering any 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 reported on some of the notorious code reviews. I have seen people say that their code is theirs and not credit the others who collaborated with them, all in the hope that they will be put on a preferred status list.

Absolutely. They are asking for volume not quality. Everyone else is sharing every tiny bit of code that they have ever written. 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 Speaker Out: I Can’t Cohabitate a Message from a Management Message

I reported on a message from a manager, who said if you don’t know what you’re doing, work on something. Work on anything.

I want to read you a post that someone had sent me from Blind. You can use Blind to have anonymous chats about what is happening at your company after logging in with your work email.

And multiple people have sent me this post. And I wonder if you’ve seen it. I am not going to read the whole thing. 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. A Brief History of Elon’s Life Under Pressure and his Persistent Work

And it reads, “I’m on the 24/7 team working to make all of Elon’s ridiculous dreams come true. We were threatened to be fired, even if it was completely outside our control. If we don’t work at weekends, we’re gone. If we take PTO or leave, we’re gone.

People are working ridiculous hours. I work 20 hours a day at full speed. I’m waking up in the night to attend status calls. Even when I’m not working, I can’t stop worrying about it. I can not handle it. 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 will be fired are the ones who are being ignored.

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 Happens When Two Tongues Are Enrolled and Get Accepted? An Invitation to Interacting Engineers

My heart goes out to this person. I hope they are able to find gainful employment, and in that four hours while they are trying to sleep and take care of themselves, applying to jobs.

I hope that people on visas are well taken care of. All of the people I know who are here on visas have no idea what will happen to them. And they have not been told anything.

This is more than a cry for help by people who are moving from a six-figure salary to another six-figure salary. These are people who are trying to immigrate to this country and have gainful employment and do a good job, who are highly skilled.

So I do not think, though, it is because engineers and people are 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 not the right way to deal with it.

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: When Do You Want to Go On Twitter? What Have You Meant? Why Have You Gone? How Do You Think?

Over the course of its existence, TWITTER has gone through phases. I can think of a better place to work. People were respectful. People were honest. Some people had legitimate goals.

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

I would love to think that everybody on Twitter is going to leave in protest. Many people may stay in the situation. It will be interesting to see who stays.

Both of them were scared and relieved. It will be scary to not have income. But at the same time, I hope that all of us who get fired will just get to chill out for a day or so, and then wake up on a couple of days later and say, all right, got to get that resume out there. Because at the moment it is sucking the life out of us, we have to be excited about these other jobs.

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: A Tale Of Two Pseudoscalars in a Cognitive Dissonance

Uncertainty. There are people who are not sure if they should do the work that they are doing. And that pile of unknowns, along with the things that have been reported on, which is all the information we really have, it leads to this cognitive dissonance and just general constant stress.

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’s culture was to allow people to speak to these things. And more often than not, it caught us on issues before it ever made it to the public like.

No one really knew about that. I mean, I guess there was sort of groupthink that existed that was this guy was not a nice person. Many people believed that this should have been banned for a long time because of his behavior. Everything came from there.

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: Is There Really a Role for Managers, Engineers or Employees?

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

The company has grown in many ways over the years, but some aren’t so good. 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. The company’s strong point has never been management.

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

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

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speaker Out: What Do We Need to Do? It’s Not Necessary, but Is Need to Start Soon

OK. The idea is that the company should be moving faster than it is. We have been told by someone that if you don’t ship this thing by next Monday, you will be fired. What happens to an engineer when he hears that he has a three- or four-day deadline?

I lose my mind. It’s normal for a three to four day deadline to be had on something because priorities shift. That’s a little stressful. Might put in a couple extra hours. Need to get it done. Makes sense.

But I think the major differentiator here is just the sheer scale. I wouldn’t get asked at work to completely revamp Twitter Blue by Friday. That’s just 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.

There is more than one 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. They have to completely reshift how that entire process works. We have to figure out why there are so many services in the company.

Yeah. Like if somebody had come to you and said, we want to redo Twitter Blue, what would be the time frame that you would be given that would make you say, yeah, that seems like a reasonable amount of time to do that?

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 are more worried about reliability than our speed.

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

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

Life under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: A Primer on a Top-Feedback Application for Blackberry Approvals

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

Right. And that’s what goes on with all major releases at a big social network, is trying to figure out, we change this feature, what are the 10 other things that happen? It sounds as if these deadlines are so short that no testing or scrutiny is needed to see what will happen, so it could be released in a hurry. They will be set loose.

Yeah. There’s one section about user privacy and privacy data. We don’t do anything with user data, so we don’t worry about that There 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: Why Do They Need Us? How Do We Want to Make Sense of It? What Do We Need to Say About It?

There are a couple of things. Depending on where you are in the leadership stack, it depends on Musk and his people. Generally the one overarching message that did get communicated was, find something cool that you like. Hopefully Musk likes it.

Think about it. If you present him an idea and he thinks it’s cool, he wants it done within a week. You have sacrificed every single 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 they’re good ideas?

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

If you don’t log in to your account, they will give you a bunch of twitters which may lead you to create an account. So if you stay and browse through some of those messages, maybe you can see some ads? So that was a relatively quick change that he made that I think a lot of people would agree makes some sense.

The one on vine is not the worst idea. I think the cynical part of me says that too little, too late. You know? TikTok is TikTok, and that’s a mighty hill to climb.

It’s definitely but sure. We have all the original content from Vine. The nostalgia factor makes it possible to at least launch something, because it’s huge.

We have the media, and trying to build a product like that has been going on for a while. I think every tech company has at least tried. Is this something we can do? There have been mock-ups.

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

What Happens to Two Twitter Employees: An Ethereal Horror Movie, or What Happened When You Can’t Get Your Work at Twitter?

It’d probably be the most boring. You could possibly make an interesting ethereal horror movie, out of just walking around with nothing.

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

So as we’re recording this, we don’t know what might happen to your job. Do you want to be in a position to work at Twitter in three months? Do you think you are ready to be someplace else?

Culture is real. Culture is present in the product. A lot of the way the company behaved was because people cared. In its own ways, that can be frustrating.

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: Kevin (Roose) and Caitlin Love (Stephen)

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. He has been making a lot of assumptions about labor law lawsuits.

If people want to give you scoops on what is happening at the micro-blogging site, they can send them to you. Kevin is his email address. Roose —

“Hard Fork” is produced by Davis Land. Paula Szuchman is the editor. Caitlin Love fact checked this episode. Today’s show was engineered by Cory Schreppel.

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

What will the Federal Reserve do when it decides to hike? An interview with Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittepar, and Jeffrey Miranda

Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittepare, and a number of others have written original music. With special thanks to Hanna Ingber, Nell Gallogly, Kate LoPresti, Shannon Busta, Mahima Chablani, and Jeffrey Miranda.

Before the Bell newsletter contained a version of the story. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. The audio version of the newsletter can be heard by clicking the link.

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

The effects of key housing, labor, and inflation reports will likely be larger than the rest as investors speculate on what those reports will mean for interest rates.

What is happening? No one can change the markets like Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell did with just a few words on Wednesday. Powell said the Fed has a ways to go in fighting inflation. It’s premature to think about or talk about pausing, in my opinion.

Powell added an important caveat. The pace of those hikes could be slowed down by the Fed in December. “Our decisions will depend on the totality of incoming data and their implications for the outlook for economic activity and inflation,” Powell said on Wednesday.

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

Premarket stock markets: Expected increase in wages in the September 3rd quarter of the year ending September 30th, and a possible upside in the October report

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

It means more inflation. Businesses are able to charge more for their goods and services by paying higher wages. The Fed will be looking closely at hourly wage growth in the report. In September, wages rose by 5% from a year ago.

There is a possible upside: Another jobs report in December is expected ahead of the Fed meeting. If both reports show a downward trajectory in employment, that could mean that the Fed is not worried about the unemployment rate.

The core inflation, which excludes food and energy, rose 0.6% in September, matching the pace in August, but not a good sign for the Fed. Analysts expect to see another large increase in October.

PCE reflects changes in the prices of goods and services purchased by consumers in the United States. The Fed believes the measure is more accurate because it accounts for a larger range of purchases.

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

Fed-Fed Housing Rates, Mortgages and Wall Street Walls: Musk and the Bank of England and the Company’s Employees

Housing: The housing market has been deeply impacted by the Fed’s efforts to fight inflation, and is one of the first areas of the economy to show signs of cooling.

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

“The housing market was very overheated for the couple of years after the pandemic as demand increased and rates were low,” said Powell on Wednesday. “We do understand that that’s really where a very big effect of our policies is.”

The Bank of England hiked interest rates by 75% on Thursday in the largest rate hike in 33 years to fight inflation.

The bank warned in a very strong way. In its most recent report, it said that the economy is already in a recession and it predicts that it will continue through the first half of next year.

In a memo to staff, Musk said that he was laying off employees on Friday. The email sent Thursday evening stated that employees would get a notice Friday about their employment status.

The email added that “to help ensure the safety” of employees and Twitter’s systems, the company’s offices “will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended.”

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

Twitter Cuts 50 Jobs in One Week: CEO Elon Musk Can Rejoin the Board of the Micro-Blogging Platform for Who Has a Blue Checkmark?

If a company with 100 employees or more is going to cut more than 50 jobs at a single site, they must give 60 days’ written notice.

The previous board members, including the ousted CEO and chairman, are no longer directors according to the company filing. According to the filing, Musk is the only person who has full control of the micro-blogging site.

In a tweet, the world’s richest man used an expletive to describe his assessment of “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark.” He added that the power was with the people. Blue for $8/month.”

Advertisers hit pause: Elon Musk wrote an open letter to advertisers just hours before cementing his acquisition of Twitter, explaining that he didn’t want the platform to become a “free-for-all hellscape.” But that attempt at reassuring the advertising industry, which makes up the vast majority of Twitter’s business, doesn’t appear to be working.

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.

Doody for Breakfast, Twitter CEO’s Valerie Bertinelli, and the Musk-McKay Account Suspension on Twitter

On Sunday, Musk told his followers that he would permanently suspend any handles that engage in impersonation without specifying “parody”. A name change on the social network will result in a temporary loss of verified checkmark.

“I am a freedom of speech absolutist The comedian ate doody for breakfast every day. Her account also retweeted posts supporting Democratic candidates.

Silverman’s account was labeled as “temporarily restricted” Sunday, with a warning that “there has been some unusual activity from this account” shown to visitors before clicking through to the profile. The comedian went back to her normal account with her own name and image.

Television actress Valerie Bertinelli similarly changed her account name to the Twitter CEO’s, tweeting Friday that “[t]he blue checkmark simply meant your identity was verified. Scammers would have a harder time impersonating you. That is no longer applicable. Good luck out there!” She answered a follower who asked about the checkmark no longer being valid, writing that anyone can buy a blue check mark for only $7.99 a month without checking their identity.

After changing her profile name to Musk, Bertinelli tweeted and retweeted support for several Democratic candidates and hashtags, including “VoteBlueForDemocracy” and “#VoteBlueIn2022.”

Musk said that there would be no warning before being suspended on the site. He says that it will be clear that this is a condition for signing up to the service.

Musk has shared theories about the attack on Paul Pelosi, compared the Democrats to Joseph Stalin and warned that the woke mind is going to destroy civilization.