When Donald Trump Banted Musk, and Why did he Get What he Meant at the BNL Supercongressing Airlines Showcase?

My children ask me a lot why I use social networking site, but I am not very fond of it. The answer is helpful for my job. It’s a way to quickly research what others are saying, a tool for promoting my writing, and sometimes a vehicle for contacting sources. It was on Twitter that I learned that Musk had finally agreed, again, to buy Twitter. When the column is published, I will post it there.

“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.

But relations between the pair seem to have soured since, with the men publicly trading barbs over the summer. Musk wrote that it was time for Trump to give up his hat after he called Musk abullsh*t artist at a rally.

Social Media and the Future of Humanity : Why Social Media is Important to Twitter and What Social Media Can Do to Combat Misinformation and Abuse

The people of any company, includingtwitter, are its most important asset. People who have always been drawn to the social networking site are kind of weird. You can’t really know about it until you work for the company. The ones who are going to leave are those people. Those are not the people that will stay. So all of that is gone.

According to the author of a book about gambling machine design, she doesn’t know when the engineers of the popular messaging service sat around and said they were 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.

And regulations on the way from the European Union could make Musk’s ‘free speech’ rhetoric impractical as well, says Rebekah Tromble, a political scientist at George Washington University in Washington DC. The EU’s Digital Services Act, due to go into effect in 2024, will require social-media companies to mitigate risks caused by illegal content or disinformation. In theory, Twitter and other platforms could try to create separate policies and practices for Europe, but that would probably prove difficult in practice, Tromble says. “When it’s fundamental systems, including core algorithms, that are introducing those risks, mitigation measures will necessarily impact the system as a whole.”

He stated in the official deal announcement that free speech and the digital town square are vital to the future of humanity.

Gianluca Stringhini is an associate professor of cybersecurity and cyber safety at Boston University in Massachusetts. If you eliminate moderation completely on social media, things will get worse.

“If you look at alternative platforms like Parler, Gab and Truth Social, you’ll see that they promise less restrictions on speech and that is what Musk will look like under him,” said Angelo Carusone of Media Matters for America.

On those sites, he said, “the feature is the bug — where being able to say and do the kinds of things that are prohibited from more mainstream social media platforms is actually why everyone gravitates to them. And what we see there is that they are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.”

“Would be great to unwind permanent bans, except for spam accounts and those that explicitly advocate violence,” he texted Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal shortly after agreeing to join the company’s board (a decision he soon backtracked).

Alex Jones was kicked off for abusive behavior, and there could be lifting bans on other conspiracy theorists.

Someone urged Musk to hire someone who had a political view and who was well-versed in culture to lead enforcement. Masters is the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona who has been endorsed by Trump and echoed his false claims that the presidential election was stolen from him.

Trump’s Twitter-Phonon isn’t the Right Thing: He’s Gonna Leave, but You Can’t Get Out of Here

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.

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

Musk immediately fired a number of executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and General Counsel Sean Edgett. Then on Tuesday, Personette and Chief People and Diversity Officer Dalana Brand confirmed in tweets that they’d resigned from the company on Friday.

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

He said on the earnings conference call that the long-term potential for the company was greater than its current value.

The weak state of the digital ad market and the changes he wants to make to provide moderation for content may leave him little choice but to find alternate sources of revenue.

Advertisers want to know that their advertisements are not going to be seen as endorsing extremists, or promoting things that would turn off potential customers, said Carusone.

What Will Trump Tell Us About Social Media? A Commentary on Twitter, Facebook, Uber, Google+, Parler, and a Conversation with Michelle West

As always, anyone can guess what he meant. Musk told his staff that they should try to emulate the Chinese “super-app” called “Weichat”, which combines social media, messaging and payment on your phone.

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 professor in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University is writing about issues affecting women and social media. She worked in the Treasury Department during the Obama administration. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. There is more opinion on CNN.

The conservative social media company Parler announced on Monday it is being purchased by the singer and rapper who was recently suspended fromTwitter for posting an antisemitic message. The statement from the parent company described West, who has legally changed his name to Ye, as having taken a “groundbreaking move” into the free speech media space where “he will never have to fear being removed from social media again.”

In a release by Parler, West said that “in a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves.”

If West and Musk go through with their deals, these three social media platforms are likely to serve as ecosystems for conservative thought. If this happens, it will make the views of those still on them more extreme, which could have a big effect on our politics. When people think that they can, they heighten one. They had their initial beliefs.

The fact that West and Musk did not favor moderation of problematic content is why the people who were victims of abusive content were pushed away from it.

When women become victims of online hate, they often “shut down their blogs, avoid websites they formerly frequented, take down social networking profiles, (and) refrain from engaging in online political commentary,” according to University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks.

The policy of free speech that is supposed to come about is a form of censorship that scares away people who are attacked by users of these platforms.

Parler is described by West as a place where conservative views can flourish, and non conservatives will likely stay away from Truth Social due to its association with Trump. Even if women, people of color, and other minorities abandon the social network, it could still be used as a platform for conservatives. The views of those who are more zealous would likely be made even more zealous with this.

TWm CEO Sarah Personette Responds to Musk’s Uncertainty Concerns about the Enberg-Pomega Takeover

A Harvard University law professor wrote about how people who are like-minded can get together and come up with extreme versions of themselves. Sunstein says that the exchanges increase their beliefs and make them more confident.

Conservatives will become far right when they get together on social media. The far-right views nurtured on these social networks could have a huge impact on our country’s politics just as Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk show hosts did in the 1990s. It isn’t hard to imagine that the people who commune on these sites could band together to support and elect political candidates who share their worldviews.

We can expect the male owners to amplify their own views on their platforms, even when they are sexist, misogynistic, racist or otherwise offensive.

You know, on one level, working at Twitter is just a job. There is a sense of inspiration from the employees that I talk to, that the company wants to give more people a voice in communication and so on.

Sarah Personette said in her response to Musk that she had a great discussion with him on Wednesday. “Our continued commitment to brand safety for advertisers remained unchanged,” Personette said. “Looking forward to the future!”

TWm’s revenues have taken a beating as the economy weakens, and there’s the fact that there’s a lot more uncertainty about Musk’s proposed takeover, according to Jasmine Enberg.

Musk’s earlier statement that the acquisition is not meant to be a money making venture for him was reiterated in the letter.

A cloud of uncertainty hung over the company, employees and shareholders for much of the year, after the deal closed. After initially agreeing to buy the company in April, Musk spent months attempting to get out of the deal, first citing concerns about the number of bots on the platform and later allegations raised by a company whistleblower.

The acquisition also promises to extend Musk’s influence. The billionaire already owns, oversees or has significant stakes in companies developing cars, rockets, robots and satellite internet, as well as more experimental ventures such as brain implants. Now he controls a social media platform that shapes how hundreds of millions of people communicate and get their news.

Twitter’s Jay Sullivan and the Deal with the Bell Company: Why is Musk Interested in the Acquisition of Twitter? The Case Against Musk’s Deposition

The departures are about to take place just hours before a Delaware judge sets a deadline to approve the deal. She threatened to schedule a trial if no agreement was reached.

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.

Many Twitter employees have recently noted the absence of Parag Argawal, their current CEO, who Musk soured on after the two initially started talking about Musk joining Twitter’s board. One current employee who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s consent said that Argawal had been completely absent for weeks. “He has ghosted us,” said another. Seemingly similar comments about Argawal are found in both the anonymous message board for tech workers and the employee-only section of Blind.

According to Insider, Agrawal got $38.7 million, Segal received $25.4 million, the others got $12.5 million, and Personette got $11.2 million.

Musk was scheduled to be deposed on October 6th and 7th, after having moved his deposition from late September. He was going to honor the contract his lawyers had negotiated, even though he was going to be deposed. That deposition was probably going to be uncomfortable; a judge found that Musk likely deleted Signal messages that were relevant to the case. Musk got a court order to stop proceedings so he could close the deal by October 28th.

Although they came quickly, the major personnel moves had been anticipated for a while and are likely to be the first of many changes the electric car company’s CEO will make.

Twitter HQ: What’s wrong with Twitter? A note on Musk’s harassment of the New York Stock Exchange, whose tweet went public after he left

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

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.

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.

Musk is 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 will suspend trading in shares of the company before it opens on Friday in anticipation of the company going 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 newfound emphasis on advertising revenue, especially a need for Twitter to provide more “relevant ads” — which typically means targeted ads that rely on collecting and analyzing users’ personal information.

The Blue Check Mob of Right-Wing Media Figures, as stated by Elon Musk in a tweet about the Paul Pelosi attack

Take Musk’s last 24 hours on the platform for example: The billionaire gave credence to a fringe conspiracy theory about the brutal attack on Paul Pelosi. Musk assailed the media outlets that reported on his irresponsible behavior. He trolled The New York Times in one tweet and chastised The Guardian as a “far left wing propaganda machine” in another.

The article was first published in theReliable Sources newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.

In fact, not only has Musk himself contaminated the information environment he now reigns over, but he is apparently working to dismantle the little infrastructure erected to help users sift through the daily chaos. Recent news reports, including from CNN, indicate that he plans to strip public figures and institutions of their blue verified badges if they do not pay.

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’s also that if you pay, you could get a badge.

There is a lot of right-wing sort of circles in the world of Elon, and I think that there is an idea of the blue checks. The blue check mob of journalists and other media figures who use their social media accounts to promote themselves are talked about a lot on the conservative media outlets.

The best thing one could do is to authenticating users, according to Walter Isaacson, Musk’s authorized biographer.

If all of those people pay $8 a month to keep their check marks, that’s $38 million a year, roughly. The second-quarter revenue was more than $1 billion. Even if everyone is verified on the site and pays $8 a month, it is still a drop in the bucket.

Twitter or Newswire? Two Twitter Employees are Unsure of the Status of Musk’s Twitter Exec & Chief Marketing Officer Jason Calacanis

At their best, these two Twitter styles are complementary. The style of Nonsense Twitter bleeds into Newswire Twitter, which does things like turning consumer protection agencies into memelords. There is a possibility for a dose of chaos, like the fake North Korean propaganda feed called DPRK News, which fooled several news outlets.

The system works because it helps separate order from chaos. A blue checkmark is important for the sake of confidence, signaling that you can reasonably believe a person, agency, or brand is speaking for itself. It removes the guess work of analyzing an account’s profile for its veracity, especially in a quick-changing situation, like a scandal or an election. It’s the seal of authenticity that gives serious accounts license to be playful, trusting that readers can check for their credentials.

All of which might sound like an argument for Musk’s new plan. It isn’t much to pay for a sense of trust at Mcdonald’s or Associated Press.

Nick Caldwell, general manager of core technology, has changed his Twitter bio to “former Twitter Exec,” and Jay Sullivan, general manager of consumer and revenue products, removed the company and his title from his Twitter bio. The New York Times also reported Tuesday that Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Berland had left the company; on Tuesday night she tweeted a single blue heart.

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.

The marketing and advertising community was being met by Calacanis in New York on his behalf. He has asked users about the subscription and bookmark features on the platform.

The new owner of the mobile messaging service has said that he will set up a council comprised of people with differing views to decide on the company’s policies. For now, he has stressed that the platform’s policies have not yet changed.

We’re going to talk to two Twitter employees, or at least two people who were Twitter employees, as of Wednesday morning — not sure what their status is going to be by the time you hear this — about what’s happening inside of Twitter. And we’re going to let you hear them, or hear, to be precise, an AI-generated version of them.

House of the Dragon on HBO, starring Tori, and Boone Ashworth (aka SNackfight) at GadgetLab

Tori wants you to encourage your male-presenting friends interested in fathering children to watch House of the Dragon on HBO. Mike recommends the new album from Natalia Lafourcade, De Todas las Flores. Lauren recommends reevaluating your relationship with Twitter, and social media in general.

A person can be found on a social media site. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. The main hotline atGadgetLab will be blinged out. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

This week’s show can be heard through the audio player on this page, but if you want to receive every episode for free, you have to subscribe.

Just tap this link to open the Podcasts app on your iPhone or iPad. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. If you use the app on your phone, you will be able to find us. We are also on the music service. Here’s the RSS feed if you really need it.

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Talk Out: What Can We Learn About Silicon Valley from Conversations with People Inside the Tech Company? (A New Look at What Happened at the Silicon Valley Post 9/11 Times)

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

We will usually attempt to bring people the latest news from around the tech industry and give a better idea of what is happening in Silicon Valley. Even though we are in San Francisco, there is only one story that people in tech care about.

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. And then, we’re going to feed those words back into a text-to-speech AI generator and play you an AI-generated version of their voice.

A very difficult time, and an unprecedented time. I have never heard of this happening at a major tech company. And so we have, coming up, interviews with two current Twitter employees who are there witnessing this all from the inside, and we’ll talk to them right after the break.

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 Really Need to Know About Putting On AI Voices? An Analytical Analysis

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

Well, you were wrong about Elon buying Twitter, and you were wrong about this not being a podcast filled with robot podcasters. So there are two strikes for that person.

Yeah. Sometimes as a reporter, you get a tip that seems silly, and you just think, this couldn’t possibly be true. So when I got this tip that Elon and his people were telling people, print out your last 30 to 60 days of code, I thought, well, that can’t be true.

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

So why is this funny? Why is this interesting? This is not a very good way to evaluate someone as a software engineer. How much code they’ve written doesn’t affect how people are evaluated.

If you have a lot of code, that is not a good thing. You might have done better for the company by eliminating some code, right? And then, sort of streamlining it. So.

Also, who makes the code? I was surprised the coding programs had a Print button. That is not what you are 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

What are the weakest performers at a big tech company? Stephen King was scared of something like $20 a month for a verification badge

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. The engineers are just printing the code base and leaving it on the ground around the headquarters.

It was two hours after they received the new notification. Change of plans is like that. Elon and his folks, they still want to see your code. If you printed out any code, we need you to shred it, but you should just bring it in on your laptop.

There’s a boss in charge who does not seem to know what he is doing and everyone is kind of laughing at him. But it’s not — it’s not the kind of thing that usually happens at a big tech company.

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

I chatted with people who were receiving late night calls from randomTesla engineers, asking about their team strengths and weaknesses. Who are the top performers? They 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?

Who are we going to lay off? That is sort of a secret part of this. There is a code printing fiasco. Then, on Sunday, you reported that Twitter was considering tying verifications to Twitter Blue subscriptions, and explain what that means.

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.

Yeah. Stephen King, a famous author, asked if he needed $20 a month to keep his blue check. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”

Stephen King was scared of paying $20 a month for his verification badges, even though he’d written about terrifying horrors, and he was also scared of stories like that.

That is how a lot of reporters get verified. But there’s also a process. If you are a famous person, you can ask to be verified. And the reason the verification exists, we should say — like, it’s not about a status marker.

It is not about this person. It was created because Oprah and a lot of the other people on her account were being used as fakes by others on social media. And so Twitter needed a way to basically allow users to tell whether the person they were talking to was actually the person they purported to be.

Yeah, and I think it’s fair to say, this is a necessary feature of the platform. Every social platform has a feature like this, right? You need a way to say, this is the real Oprah, and that is not the real Oprah.

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

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

That immediately results in a completeTwitter timelinesmeltdown with users saying no way will we pay $20 a month. That’s more than I pay for Netflix. I pay for the video sharing site.

It seems like this is a way to make money while at the same time punishing the blue checkmarks, which is different from how others treat their creators.

And I think it would be good for Twitter and most social networks if anybody wanted to optionally verify their identity. It would be great for the credibility of the system as a whole. Many of the questions that have gone unanswered have arisen from it.

It does create a lot of economic value for people like you and me. It does matter to us. News organizations pay for different software solutions that help them do their jobs. Maybe there’s more to that than that.

Now, apparently, Elon did say something, like they’re going to have maybe some sort of separate legacy verification program for — I don’t know — government entities that aren’t going to pay the $8 a month. 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: A Moment of Culture and Fun for Vine, a New Social Network, and for Facebook

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 over 10 years old, and people think it will be turned into a TikTok competitor.

I would say it is not an immediate revenue driver. They are going to have to put a great deal of effort into that. You are about to launch a new social network within Twitter. That is a huge, heavy lift. I think it could be fun to have a very popular American short-form video network that wasn’t owned by Facebook or YouTube. But we’ll just have to see if they can do it.

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

Life Under The Musk Two Twitter Employees’ Bound: What Are They Expect? How Are They? What Have They Don’t Want? What Do They Want?

That is correct. They’re being told that they have days to ship it. 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 sleeping very little. They are sleeping in their offices, and frankly, some of them are terrified. There are some on work visas here. If they lose this job, they have 60 days to find another job, or they’re out of the country. So it could not be more serious for the folks who have these jobs.

“Hard Fork” is the sequel to “The Hunger Games.” It is about 10:00 AM Pacific on Wednesday. How’s your day going so far? Is anything notable happening today?

Every day seems to be the same cycle for the last week, which is everybody wakes up to more panicked messages via various different channels. Most people have been smart enough to move from Slack to other channels. And it is this up-and-down of trying to chase rumors, because we have had zero communications from anybody internally.

In fact, there has been more external communication to Twitter.com than there has been to Twitter, the employees. Everything is based on rumors. So we wake up. We look at all of our various channels, we look at what our friends are messaging us, and we cross our fingers and hope to make it through another day.

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

The layoffs were supposed to happen on Monday. They didn’t happen. Now, the rumor has it it’s going to be Friday. It’s tiring. We are all paid well, I know that.

Most of us have some savings to sit on. Some people don’t. But it is also just nerve-racking not to know, especially as we’re entering a really tough hiring market in tech. 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: A Game Theoretical Analysis of How a New CEO Speaks Out

Also, you have a new CEO at the company. Most of the C-suite has either been fired or resigned, and you haven’t received a single email that contains the game plan for the next few days.

That is 100% accurate. We didn’t receive any information other than what trickled down to us. Comms is incredibly sparse. There is really nobody answering, even messages in the company-wide channels.

It’s almost like a scavenger hunt with seven different apps, trying to figure out what to do in the morning.

You have probably heard, and you have been reporting on some of the infamous code reviews. Some people say that code was written entirely by them and not crediting other people who collaborated with them, all in hopes of being put on a preferred status list.

Absolutely. They are not asking for quality. So everybody is sharing every little bit of code they have ever written, no matter how insignificant or garbage it is. The Special Investigation Horns System.

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

Life Under Musk Two Tweetees Speaker Out: I Can’t Compleve a Tweet from a Manager (I can’t cope)

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

I received a post from Blind and want to read it. Blind is an app where you type in your work email and then chat with people who are not your actual co-workers.

And multiple people have sent me this post. I wonder if you have 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: How Do We Get What They Are Saying and How They Are Expecting to Say Out?

I am on the team that is working to make all of the dreams of Professor Elon come true. If we miss delivery, management will fire us even if they don’t control it. If we don’t work at weekends, we’re gone. If we take PTO or leave, we’re gone.

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

There are two different groups of people at the site, one of which is being completely ignored until they are fired and the other who is being pulled into these task forces. I think the better place is to be in the people who are being ignored and will be fired.

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 I Mean to a Tech Professional who is Emigrated to the US

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

And I sincerely hope that there is care taken for people who are on visas. All the people I know are on visas, and no one knows what will happen to them. And they have not been told anything.

We are moving from one six-figure salary to another six-figure salary, which makes us cry because we are privileged tech people. These people are trying to emigrate to the US and have gainful employment and do a good job, who are highly skilled.

So there is a lot to that I do not necessarily disagree with. I don’t think it’s well structured at the end of the day. The lack of operational leadership in the company has existed for many years. This company doesn’t have good operations.

I think it is not because people are sitting on their hands. I believe it is because the way this company is structured, it is nearly impossible to get any work done, no matter if it is trying to get the appropriate approvals by and through Byzantine processes, or simply not being told how things are changing. It is true that there is some truth to it. This is the absolute wrong way to deal with it.

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

Is it worth leaving Tiny Talk Town? Quitting is not the worst thing you can do if you want to be a part of it

I wondered if you have been worried about the degree to which that could endanger the service, and what beliefs you might have about its future.

I would love to see that everybody is leaving the platform in protest. The situation is a lot of people may stay. But it’s going to be interesting to see who stays.

We don’t have to be here, in Tiny Talk Town. We all know it. There are other places online that are a decent hang. The most fervent users are not likely to leave en mass. And most of the knee-jerk “I’m outta here” reactions to Musk’s takeover aren’t that compelling, unless you’re a writer assigned to collate celebrity tweets. A thoughtful approach to quitting than quitting may be the smarter move. For social media, it is known as quiet quitting.

Life Under The Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: How We Met Your Uncertainty, and How You Met Your Occam

Both were scared and relieved. Not having income will be scary. I hope that all of us who are let go will chill out for a day or so and then get our resume out there so that we can find another job. We need to be focused on other jobs because right now it takes the life out of us.

There is uncertainty. Some people don’t know if they should keep doing their work. The pile of unknowns, along with the things that have been reported on, leads to this constant stress, because we don’t really know what’s happening.

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 had a way of allowing people to speak to these things. It caught us off guard and we had to deal with it before it got to the public.

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 The Former CEO Lose His Job? What Happened When He Came in?

That’s complicated because no one really knew. I mean, I guess there was sort of groupthink that existed that was this guy was not a nice person. You know, there were a lot of people that were of the thought that this should probably have been banned a long time ago for his behavior. And everything just sort of came from there.

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

I will say, having been there for a number of years, the company has grown in a lot of ways, and some not so good. I will not disagree with anyone who says there are too many managers and engineers. Maybe it’s too slow. The company’s strong point has never been management.

You have to have some massive structural change in order for a change like this to happen. 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: How Much Time do You Need to Rethink? What Happens If I Can’t Get notified by Monday?

Well, OK. So there’s an idea there that Twitter should be moving faster than it has been. We were told that if this thing wasn’t received by next Monday, 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 lose my mind. It is normal for a three to four day deadline on something to be changed because of priorities shifting. That’s a little stressful. Maybe put in a couple more hours. I need to get it done. Makes sense.

The sheer scale is the major differentiating factor. I wouldn’t get asked at work to completely revamp Twitter Blue by Friday. That’s just completely absurd.

Raising the Titanic from the bottom of the ocean was similar to the number of systems that have to be touched on.

There is 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. They have to completely change the way that process works. We have to figure out what the whole services are 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 lot of infrastructure changes it could take quite a while because the platform is slow. We are worried about reliability more than we are speeding up.

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: Is There a Catch-up on User Privacy and User Data at a Large Social Network?

And not only is this an engineering problem, it’s a social problem. We have to do testing. We need to figure out how this can be abused. What are people going to do with it? What are the Bitcoin bros going to do to try to steal more of people’s money abusing this feature?

Right. And that’s what goes on with all major releases at a big social network, is trying to figure out, we change this feature, what are the 10 other things that happen? These deadlines are so short that if it goes wrong, it may be released without any testing or scrutiny, and that is trying to figure out what could go wrong. It is going to be set loose.

Yeah. There is a segment about user privacy and privacy data. And it’s basically, we’re not doing anything with user data, so we don’t worry about that. And then now it’s just a blue check on a profile.

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

Life Under Musk and Vine? What Are They Trying to Teach Us? What Do They Really Mean? Why Did Elon Musk and his Leadership Team Talk About It?

So there’s a couple of things. It depends on where you’re in the leadership stack, as far as Musk and his people. Generally the one overarching message that did get communicated was, find something cool that you like. And hopefully Musk likes it functionally.

Think about it. If you present him an idea and he thinks it’s cool, he wants it done within a week. You have sacrificed every team around you.

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

He made the decision to make the log-out view to the Explore page. And I don’t know this for certain, but my basic understanding of the goal here was that we might even be able to serve ads to people that aren’t logged in.

Now, if you go to Twitter and you’re not logged in, they’ll show you a bunch of tweets which might entice you to sign in, create an account. 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 one on vine is not the worst idea. I mean, the cynical part of me says, too little, too late. You know? There is a hill to climb called TikTok.

It’s definitely but sure. I mean, we do have all the original content from Vine. The nostalgia factor gives us a lot of clout, and allows us to at least launch something.

We have the media, and are trying to build a product that is similar to that. I think every tech company has at least tried. Is this something that 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 Musk Two Twitter Employees Speaker Out: Are You Ready to Be Here or Are You Going to Work At Twitter? A Reappraisal

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

There is no communication. The people in the corner are the only ones talking. 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? Is it better to 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. As you think about it, do you want to be working at Twitter in three months? Or do you feel like you’re ready to be somewhere else?

Culture is something that is real. Culture can be seen through the product. For all of Twitter’s faults, a lot of the way the company behaved was because people cared so much. And that can be infuriating in its own ways.

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

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employers Speak Out: An Analysis of Casey Roose’s Tweeting About the Labor Law Suspense

I mean, 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 speculating about what the labor law lawsuits will look like.

So the closest we can get to understanding their point of view is probably from Musk’s Twitter feed, where he’s been tweeting things like, “Twitter’s current lords and peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” and, “To all complainers, please continue complaining, but it will cost $8.” He also recently changed his bio to “Twitter complaint hotline operator” and his location to “Hell.”

And if people want to send you any huge scoops about what’s happening at Twitter, you can send those right over to Casey. Kevin is his email address. Roose —

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

The Making of a Bird: The Case of Felix Ndahinda and the Victory of Steve Jobs in Developing a Peaceful World

“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.

Original music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, and Marion Lozano. With special thanks to Hanna Ingber, Nell Gallogly, Kate LoPresti, Shannon Busta, Mahima Chablani, and Jeffrey Miranda.

In 1998, I went to Apple headquarters to talk to Steve Jobs about 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. Greeting me in the boardroom of his suite at One Infinite Loop, he went to the whiteboard and began scrawling out his solution to the company’s business woes. A workforce was rejuvenated and a new product plan was created with the assistance of an inspiring ad campaign.

Musk should not look further than his own successful enterprises because of the absurdity of his haste. When he took over Tesla in 2008, the company was already five years old. 17 years after it was incorporated, the company didn’t post an annual profit. Musk deservedly gets a lot of credit for what Tesla has achieved—and for, among other things, his persistence. The other company from Musk is privately held and doesn’t report earnings. But making rocket ships is the ultimate test of patience—it takes years to even launch successfully, and cutting corners to go faster can wind up killing people.

Felix Ndahinda felt a threat was on the horizon when Musk pledged last week that the bird was freed.

A lecturer at the Tilburg School of International law, Ndahinda works as a consultant on conflicts and peace issues in the African Great Lakes region. He has already seen the impact of a free social networking website. For years, he’s tracked the social-media hate speech that swirls amid armed conflict in the country. Much of that incendiary speech has gone undetected by the systems that platforms, including Twitter, use to identify harmful content, because it is shared in languages that are not built into their screening tools.

The company is still unclear on how it will proceed. Musk has met with civil-rights leaders about his plan to put a moderation council in charge of establishing policies on hate speech and harassment. Users who had been banned before Musk’s takeover of the company would not be reinstated until a process had been set up for allowing them to do so, Musk has said.

The users who were banned from Twitter will use lesser known platforms that have less regulations on what can be said. The social-media activity that they do will get more toxic and extreme once there. He says that the community becomes more committed and active, but also smaller.

According to Stringhini, false stories usually start on these platforms. The narratives that make up those platforms explode when they are on them. They go out of control because everyone sees them and covers them on social media.

James Piazza is a terrorism researcher at Pennsylvania State University and he says that he is very worried about inflammatory speech being used on social media. That is the circumstance where you could have more violence.

Over the coming weeks, Stringhini expects that researchers will launch studies comparing Twitter before and after Musk’s takeover, and looking at changes in the spread of disinformation, which user accounts are suspended, and whether Twitter users quit the platform in protest at new policies. Tromble intends to monitor campaigns of coordinated harassment on Twitter.

“Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended,” Musk wrote. There won’t be any warning after the introduction of “widespread verification.” That’s a change from previously issuing warnings before suspensions.

Comedian Kathy Griffin had her account suspended Sunday after she switched her screen name to Musk. She said that she used his profile photo as well.

“I guess not ALL the content moderators were let go? Lol,” Griffin joked afterward on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform where she set up an account last week.

Why does Twitter need a public voice? The issue of Donald Musk’s tweet on election-related issues in Europe and Asia, says David Kaye

It wasn’t the first time a celebrity had appropriated a Musk’s screen name, with actor and comedian wittingly doing the same on Saturday before reverting to her true name. Okey-dokey. I’ve had a good time. I think that I made my point.

It said the service would first be available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. On Sunday it was not available and no one knows when it will go live. A Twitter employ, Esther Crawford, told The Associated Press it is coming “soon but it hasn’t launched yet.”

In a message posted on Friday, YoelRoth sought to clarify some of the concerns. The front-line content moderation staff was the group that was least affected by the job cuts.

The product team devoted to civic integrity was headed by the director of product management, Edward Perez. Joining the company in September 2021, after more than three decades working in election integrity, Perez’s role was to keep Twitter safe during times of great upheaval—such as elections—from a product perspective. And as Musk guts Twitter of its staff and allows users to pay to get a coveted blue check on the platform, Perez feels he has to speak out.

“I really am concerned that it feels like the drama around corporate takeover is sucking up all the oxygen in the room,” says Perez, who is now a board member at the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan group devoted to election security and integrity. The focus on the Musk psychodrama is resulting in potentially inadequate attention to the election- related issues.

David Kaye, a law professor at UC Irvine and the former UN special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, thinks it’s important to understand how he handles pressure from countries like Saudi Arabia and India.

Although they may not represent a huge share of Twitter’s revenue stream right now, countries like Turkey, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan, which have very large, increasingly online populations, are all attractive markets as the company looks to grow its revenue and increase its user base, according to Pielemeier. But all of those countries have had arguments with Twitter specifically or with social media companies more broadly, he says. Last year, the Nigerian government ordered all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block Twitter after the platform deleted a tweet from the country’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, for violating its policies. The government lifted the ban only after Twitter agreed to open an office in the country and pay local taxes.

But Raman Jit Singh Chima, senior international counsel and Asia Pacific policy director at Access Now, worries that Twitter under Musk may not continue with the lawsuit. (In his August countersuit against Twitter, Musk cited the lawsuit in India as a threat to the company’s presence in its third largest market.) He says it would be a way of showing that the Indian government’s actions were unconstitutional. It also means to the global tech industry that they need to back off and not try to do more.

Lurking isn’t just a Toy: Lurking on Twitter at the End of the Covid Pandemic (Review in Russian)

Musk thought it might have been a fishbowled dorm room when he said that tiny talk is so small, it feels like it comes from your own mind. It’s good to celebrate: All of us live in Tiny Talk Town, and it’s all about Elon Musk.

In the workplace, quiet quitting is rejecting the burden of going above and beyond, no longer working overtime in a way that enriches your employer but depletes your own metaphorical coffers. Most people can’t expect more than they’ll get from a platform. If you want to stay on this new social networking site, you have to find a way to use it without using you.

So active users are a noisy bunch, and it would be easy for, say, an electric car entrepreneur who follows a disproportionate number of extremely active “blue checks” on Twitter to mistake his own Twitter experience for everyone’s experience. (Same goes for journalists.) In actuality, more than 50% of users don’t use their usual five times a month method of communication, with most of their posts being replies. They check in on current events or live sports or celebrity news, and then they go about their lives. They are known as “lurkers.”

Lurking isn’t doomscrolling, a practice (and phrase) that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when many people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. It’s easy to sit back and observe for a while when you decide to lurk, because it’s simply a simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos that is New Twitter. Check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, sure, then close your app or browser tab. Send a tweet, then disengage. Don’t let it go to your head during basketball games. Direct those message threads to other destinations if you need to. For another time, take your most original thoughts.