The ‘Skinner Box’: What the Twitter Engineers Really Think about Trump and the Left-Right Sympathy of the White House

And this idea that Elon Musk and his inner circle seem to have, that Twitter is full of coddled, unproductive people who are left wing political activists who just want to censor people on the right, what do you make of that impression that he and his friends seem to have of who works at Twitter and why?

“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 deteriorated since, with the men publicly trading barbs over the summer. Musk responded to Trump by saying it was time for the president to hang up his hat.

For more than a decade, Twitter has been a kind of digital town square, a place where people have sought information, advocacy, community and job opportunities – even love.

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

The fake and scam accounts that are more active in the replies to Musk’s social media posts are referred to as ‘the spam bot’.

Twitter Under Musk: What Happens If You Let Me Go Off-the-Shoes? A Keyhole View of What Twitter Will Look Like Under Musk

For years, so many people around the world have relied on Twitter to function as a town square — a space for people to debate issues openly. Of course, only 23% of Americans are on Twitter and of those who use the platform, the top 25% of users by tweet volume produce 97% of tweets, according to the Pew Research Center. Yet the conversations that happen on Twitter seem to heavily influence what reporters and others talk about offline, so these users have an outsize influence on the public debate.

Enberg said that advertisers would find loosened content moderation on the platform scary, as they already found brand safety tools to be lacking on other social platforms.

For a “keyhole view of what Twitter under Musk will look like,” just look at alternative platforms such as Parler, Gab and Truth Social that promise fewer restrictions on speech, said Angelo Carusone, president of the liberal nonprofit watchdog group 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. We see that there 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).

Musk said last week he would restore the account of Donald Trump after a poll he put out on the platform said he should be brought back to the platform. Conservative Canadian, right-leaning satire website, and comedian Kathy Griffin’s account have been restored by Musk.

Someone urged Musk to hire a person who has a good understanding of culture and politics and is known to work well in an enforcement capacity. 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.

What Has Twitter Learned since Musk’s Twitter Twitter Disruption? The Case Against Trump’s Reionization and Other U.S. Super-Apps

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.

With Musk continuing to fire people, entire teams have been wiped out, and their work is being handed to other over stretched teams that don’t understand the new work that is being assigned to them.

The characterization of the company as bloated, overstaffed and slow moving that has come from the people around the founder is not something that you think of, what do you think?

The previous three months had been incredibly hard, but Musk said that the company is now trending to breakeven.

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

“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. But this summer, Musk told Twitter staff that the company should emulate WeChat, the Chinese “super-app” that combines social media, messaging, payments, shopping, ride-hailing — basically, anything you might use your phone to do.

Chinese-style super-apps haven’t caught on in the U.S., despite other American tech companies trying this strategy.

The SpaceX Deal and Twitter – Continued Brand Safety Concerns: A Note from Musk about Twitter and the Role of Advertisers in SpaceX

Friedersdorf goes on to argue that Musk’s journalistic critics should give him more benefit of the doubt; after all, he did ban Kanye West, he refused to reinstate Alex Jones, he’s right that Twitter helped suppress the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop that later turned out to be at least partly true, and maybe his idea of amnesty for suspended accounts is not such a bad way to reset the clock and rebuild overall trust in the platform. I think it strays from both-sides-ism and misses the point.

You know, working at Twitter is merely a job, on one level. But I know from so many of the employees who I’ve spoken to who work there, there is a real sense of inspiration around the mission of a company that does want to democratize communication, give more people a voice.

The layoffs of staff from the safety team, the resignations of executives, and the slew of fake accounts are key issues for advertisers, according to a memo. “Evidence that the risk to our clients’ brand safety has risen sharply to a level most would find unacceptable,” the memo reads. The platform should stop activity until it can show that safeguards are back to normal and it has regained control of its environment.

Omnicom Media Group is recommending clients “pause activity on Twitter in the short term,” according to a note titled “Twitter – Continued Brand Safety Concerns.” The memo cites recent events in the last few days that have “potential serious implications” for brands running ads on the platform.

His remarks came after CNBC reported Sunday that Musk had ordered “one of the larger advertising packages available from Twitter” for SpaceX, citing unnamed sources who had viewed internal documents related to the matter. The company did not respond to the request for comment.

Before we go, we should say we did reach out to Twitter and ask them to respond to what you just heard from employees about what’s been going on inside the company. They didn’t write back. Since the deal closed the company has had no comment on it.

It was a stunning reversal of fortune, not just for Musk, who bought the company for $44 billion, but also for the platform used by some of the most powerful people on the planet.

Elon Musk, Space X, and Twitter: The Case for a Democratic CEO’s Share of the Fate of the Electric Car Company

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.

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.

Musk was questioned in court on Nov. 16 about how he splits his time among Tesla and his other companies, including SpaceX and Twitter. Musk’s possible $55 billion compensation plan as CEO of the electric car company was challenged in Delaware’s Court of Chancery.

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.

Elon Musk publicly scoffed at a Twitter employee’s uncertainty about whether he had been laid off in a recent round of cuts and spoke dismissively of the employee’s disability in a series of tweets Monday night. The billionaire has openly antagonized his company’s current and former staffers.

He said that the social media could splinter into a far right and left wing echo chamber that could cause 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.

Yildirim stated that consumers do not want a place where they are bombarded with things they don’t want to hear about.

The Blue Check Mob of People on Twitter: Why he’s trying to make a deal with the stock exchange and why he wants to go private

Musk has been saying 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 said it will stop trading in shares of the company before Friday’s opening bell as a result of Musk’s plans to go private.

Musk was enthusiastic about visitingTwitter headquarters this week, but he had earlier advocated turning the building 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.

TheReliable Sources newsletter has a version of this article. 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 have always thought that anyone who wants to verify their part in the plan should be able to. People are being made to pay to keep their badges. You could get a Badge if you pay.

I think there is an idea of blue checks amongst right-wing circles in the Elon world, and so I have a quick theory about it. People on Fox News and other conservative media outlets are always talking about this sort of, like, blue check mob of people on Twitter, mostly journalists and other media figures, who are sort of, like, self-important and care very deeply about their checkmarks.

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.”

We’re going to talk to a few people at work about what’s happening inside of the service, but we can’t tell you whether or not they’re still with it. And we’re going to let you hear them, or hear, to be precise, an AI-generated version of them.

House of the Dragon: An album recommendation from Mike. Is it still a good idea to keep a track of a girl’s life?

House of the Dragon is a good show to watch with your male friends who are interested in fathering children. The new album from Natalia Lafourcade is recommended by Mike. Lauren advises people to rethink their relationship with social media.

The person can be found on the social networking website, 140 Characters or Less. LaurenGoode is who she is. The person is Michael Calore. The main hotline was blinged out. The show is produced by a person namedBoone Ashworth. Solar Keys is our theme music.

This week’s show can be heard through the audio player on this page, but in order to get every episode free, you have to subscribe.

If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can search for Gadget Lab by downloading an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts. If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Podcasts app just by tapping here. We’re on Spotify too. In case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Say Out: An Empirical Analysis of a Silicon Valley Tech Emergency Podcast (with an Excerpt from Casey)

Speech recognition software helped to create this transcript. 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.

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 tech people care about at the moment and that is what has happened just down the road from us in San Francisco.

So 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. We will play you an artificial intelligence-generated version of their voice as the words are fed back into the text-to-speech generator.

But before we get to those interviews, let’s just go over what’s been happening at Twitter this week. Because it has been one crazy thing after another. Casey, on Friday, after our emergency podcast, you reported that Twitter engineers inside the company had been instructed to print out the last 30 to 60 days’ worth of code that they had written, for review.

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

How Many Days of Code Do You Write? What Have You Done About AI Voices? If You Had a Dream, You Could Have Done It!

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.

You were wrong about this not being a place where people would go to talk about things, and you were right about the purchase of Twitter by Elon. 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 the tip that Elon and others were telling people, to print out their last 30 to 60 days of code, I thought it was false.

Two of my sources think that that doesn’t sound right to me. OK? Two people that told me that I was wrong, came back to me and said, “Oh my god, he’s asking people to print out their code!”

So why is this funny? Why is it interesting? This isn’t a good way to evaluate how great a software engineer is. People are not evaluated by how many code they write, right?

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? And then, sort of streamlining it. So —

Also, who prints code? I was surprised that coding programs had a Print button in them. That is not what you will bring to your daily review of your code.

Twitter Blue and the Chief Security Officer’s Explanation of the Beacon’s Fiasco: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Right. They were in this situation where the former chief security officer filed a whistle blower complaint because he was upset about their security practices. The engineers are just printing out the code and leaving it around the headquarters.

It’s like, two hours later, they get — all the Twitter folks get this new notification. It is like a change of plans. Your code still needs to be seen by the people that you are with. We need you to shred the code if you have printed it out, so why not just bring your laptop with you?

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

It’s not. The people at the company are fixated with figuring out who is a good engineer, right? It is at the altar of the engineer that Elon worships. He considers himself an engineer.

I talked to some people who got calls late at night from randomTesla engineers, asking if they were really good on their team. Who are the top performers? Who are the low performers?

The exercise was a part of the evaluation system where they wanted to figure out who we need to keep in order to keep the service running.

And who can we lay off? That is part of the secret of this. OK, so we have this code printing fiasco. Then, on Sunday, you reported that Twitter was considering tying verifications to Twitter Blue subscriptions, and explain what that means.

Although many people subscribe to it, it hasn’t been a major source of revenue. The people who are under huge pressure to start making money in a hurry have been looking for new revenue ideas. And one revenue idea that came up, basically right away, was to make people pay for Twitter Blue in order to keep their verification badges.

Musk on Tuesday said he would charge $8 a month for the service, which would let anyone pay to get a blue check mark to verify their account. That’s a steep haircut from his original plan to charge users $19.99 a month to get or keep a verified account.

Yeah. Stephen King, the horror author, suggested that he might have to pay 20 a month to keep his blue check. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”

Stephen King has written a number of books, some of the most terrifying beings imaginable, but the idea that he would have to pay $20 a month for his verification was frightening to him.

But it also seems strange, because it’s just not that big a moneymaking idea. So I was doing some back-of-the-envelope math on this. Over 400,000 people are verified on the social media site. That’s sort of the latest number that we have.

That is how a lot of journalists are verified. But there’s also a process. If you are a famous person, you can ask to be verified. We should say that the verification is not related to a status marker.

It’s not about, this person’s important. It was created based on the fact that many years ago, people like Oprah and a lot of other people joined social networking site, and now there are many fake Oprahs out there. 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 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. 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 —

Correct, exactly. The idea from the war room was that people who were verified would pay for their privilege if they cared so much about being verified. It is possible for us to get the 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. I pay for a different service. It is more than I pay for movies on the internet.

But Musk doesn’t mind. The beauty of this is that each account that is verified pays $8, according to the user who responded to Tom Warren. The account is suspended and the money is kept. It’s genius and I hope more folks do this. It’s free money for TWITTER. Musk replied to the user with a bag of money, a scowl, a face with sunglasses, and a bullseye.

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.

I am trying to keep an open mind, and it seems to me. 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.

There is a lot of economic value to be had by people like you and me. It matters to us. News organizations spend a lot of money on various software solutions. Maybe Twitter Blue should be part of that.

I am not sure if they said something like they were going to have a separate legacy verification program for government entities that wouldn’t pay the $8 a month. There are a lot of details to be worked out.

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees-Speak Out: Where Do We Stand? Where Do You Stand, Where Are You, and What Do You Want?

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 the app is 10 years old, and the idea of it becoming a TikTok competitor is a really steep hill.

I’d say, like, not an immediate revenue driver. That will need a ton of effort from them. You’re essentially launching a new social network within Twitter. That is a huge lift. I think it would be fun to have a short-form video network that does not belong to YouTube or Facebook. We 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

Hard Fork, How We Are? What Happens When You Wake Up, How Do You Stay? How Have You gotten Your E-mail?

That’s right. You have days to ship it, that was the info they were being told. If this does not ship by this date, in some cases, a date next week, you will be fired. If it is past the deadline, you will be fired.

So people are sleeping very little. Some of them are terrified because they are sleeping in their offices. 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. It’s a serious thing for people who have these jobs.

Welcome to “Hard Fork,” Mockingjay. It is about 10:00 AM Pacific on Wednesday. How’s your day going so far? Anything notable happen today?

Every day, everybody wakes up to more panicked messages via various different channels, which is the same every day for last week. 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.

There has been more outside communication to Twitter.com than there has been to the employees. So everything is just based on rumor. 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.

It was 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. There are many rumor mill-based scares.

Layoffs are supposed to happen on Monday. They did not happen. Now, the rumor has it it’s going to be Friday. It’s tiring. I know we are all paid really well.

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. The holidays are right around the corner.

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Do They Want to Say About Their Work? Is It Really Necessary?

So just to really underline that, you have a new CEO at your company. The majority of the C-suite have either been fired or resigned, but you have not received a game plan for the next few days or who is in charge.

That’s absolutely correct. We have received nothing but information from the other side. Comms is very sparse. 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’ve probably heard about the code reviews and have been reporting on them. Some people say that code was written by them in the hopes that they will be added to the list of preferred status.

Absolutely. volume, not quality, is what they’re asking for. Everyone is sharing any code they have ever written, 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 Speak Out: I Can’t Cop? A Response to a Message from a Manager

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. Don’t just work on anything.

I want to read you a post that someone had sent me from Blind. Blind is this app where you sort of log in with your work email, and then you can have these pseudonymous chats about what’s happening at your company.

Several people have sent me the post. And I wonder if you’ve seen it. I don’t plan 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

How I Met Your Oasis, I Don’t Know What I Can Do, Or Why I Can’t Do It,” he explains

And it reads, “I’m on the 24/7 team working to make all of Elon’s ridiculous dreams come true. Management threaten to fire us multiple times if we miss delivery. We aren’t going if we don’t work at weekends. If we take PTO or leave, we’re gone.

People working a lot of 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 when I don’t work. I can not do it. I am an absolute mess. I’m at a breaking point. This is after just a few days of him.

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

What the hell is happening to a country that is not going to make a new life in this country? A cry of hope for someone who is looking for work in the next few years

My heart goes out to this person. I hope they are able to find gainful employment while they are trying to sleep and take care of themselves.

I hope there is care given to people on visas. All of the people I know who are here on visas have no idea what will happen to them. They haven’t been told anything.

This is more than just techies crying because we are moving from one six-figure salary to another six-figure salary. These are people who are trying to make a new life in this country, have gainful employment, and are highly skilled.

Twitter: Where Are We Going? What Are We worried about? Where Are we going? How do we feel about Twitter? What are we going to do?

The company has gone through phases throughout its existence. It is a good place to work leading up to this fiasco. People were respectful. People were honest. The people have legitimate goals.

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 a good way to deal with it.

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?

It would make me very happy to think that everyone is going to leave because of the situation. But the reality of the situation is a lot of people may stay. But it’s going to be interesting to see who stays.

Though Twitter has yet to fully collapse, people have already jumped to other social media platforms, leaving the Twitter town square a little less full than it once was.

Life under Musk Two Twitter Employees-Speak Out I: Uncertainty and What I’ve Learned About Software Engineering and How to Deal With It

Scared and relieved. It’s going to be very frightening if you don’t have income. I hope that we get fired and then we wake up a few days later and tell ourselves that we need to get that resume out there. It is sucking the life out of us so we need to be more energetic about these other jobs.

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 leads to constant stress as you don’t really have all the information.

Privacy concerns or misuse of new features are what people would raise in the lowest parts of engineering. Their only job is writing code that no one will ever see and that is what the piping behind the scenes is for. And the company just always kind of had a culture of letting people speak to these things. And more often than not, it caught us on issues before it ever made it to the public like.

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

Life under a Big Bad Thing: Two Tweets Employees Talk Out about a Boy Who Came in to Lead a Change of Management

That’s complicated because no one really knew. I guess that was something that happened, that the 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 attaching himself to various political viewpoints and talking points. If it serves him, he will lean into it.

The company has grown a lot over the years, and there are some not so good things. I agree when people say there is probably too many managers and engineers. Delivery may be a little too slow. Management has never been a strong point in the company.

So that aside, you don’t go through any change like this without some massive structural change. If he came in and did the same thing, what is 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 Speak Out: What Do We Need to Know About Twitter Blue? How Do We Want to Make Them Happen?

OK. There is an idea that it should be moving quicker than it is. 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 don’t have time for my mind. I mean, we have a three to four day deadline because priorities changed, and we need to do it by Friday. That’s a little stressful. It’s possible to put in a couple more hours. Need to get it done. Makes sense.

But I think the major differentiator here is just the sheer scale. I wouldn’t be asked to change the Blue at work 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.

Because it’s not as if there’s just a certain set of code that needs to be written. You have to coordinate across lots of people, right?

Yeah. I mean, if you take a look at some of the feature sets that have been reported on he wants to add in, such as ranking blue check users higher than others where that ranking occurs in the stack, he wants to do that. They have to change how the process works. There are whole services in the company that we have to go figure out.

Yeah. If someone came to you and said that they were going to redo Twitter Blue, how long would it take you to do it?

It depends. If there is a lot of infrastructure change it could take a long time because of how slow the platform is. We’re more concerned with reliability than we are moving fast.

I guess it would be possible for something to 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 The Musk Two Twitter Employees-Speak Out: Why They’re There Probably Someplace Ignoring User Data (Conference Report)

And not only is this an engineering problem, it’s a social problem. We need to do testing. We have to figure out how this can be abused. People are going to use 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? This stuff could be released without any testing or scrutiny because of these short deadlines, which is what you mean by trying to figure out what could go wrong. They are going to be out in the open.

Yeah. There’s one section about user privacy and privacy data. We don’t worry about user data because we’re not doing anything with it. 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 Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Have We Learned Before Musk Came About Us? [An Editorial Note]

So there’s a couple of things. It depends on whether or not you’re in the leadership stack or Musk’s people. The main message was to find something that you like. And hopefully Musk likes it functionally.

Think about it. He likes to have the idea done within a week. And you’ve basically just sacrificed every team around you.

God. I was wondering if you thought of the proposed product changes, such as the $8 per month charge forTwitter verification and the return of the looping app of the same name. What do you make of those proposals? And 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. I have no idea what this means, but my understanding of the goal was that we might even be able to serve ads to people who aren’t logging in.

And so just real quick, so what that means is, before Musk, when you were not logged into Twitter, you’d just basically see a box asking you to log in.

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

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Talk Out: What Will They Ever Tell Us About Vine? An Algorithmic Recommendation

The Vine one, it’s not the worst idea. The cynical part of me thinks that it’s too little, too late. You know? TikTok is TikTok, and that’s a mighty hill to climb.

But also certain. I mean, we do have all the original content from Vine. So marketing-wise, the nostalgia factor is huge, which gives us kind of 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 think every technology company has tried. Is this something we can do? There’s been mock-ups.

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

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

Life Under Must Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: How Do You Get What You Are After? What Do You Want to Do? Where Do You Need to Go?

There is no communication. People in a corner are the only one talking. But it’s not like, oh, the whole company went to an all-hands and learned what’s happening. Everyone is 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. As you think about it, do you want to be working at Twitter in three months? Do you feel like you’re ready to go somewhere else?

Culture is real. Culture trickles down 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.

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.

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

The Work Hours: Casey’s Message to the Editor: Roose – Davis Land’s Producer of “Hard Fork”

The work hours are what he is reading about. He has been speculating on what kind of labor law lawsuits will come out.

According to the internal message posted by a Twitter employee and viewed by CNN, Musk had shown no fear of the FTC when it came to the company’s multiple, legally binding consent agreements.

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

Davis Land is the producer of “Hard Fork”. We’re edited by Paula Szuchman. This episode was fact checked by Caitlin Love. Today’s show was engineered by a man named Coty Schreppel.

Where SpaceX Meets Silicon Valley: A Celebration of 17 Years of Musk’s Successes with SpaceX, a Private Company that Makes Rocket Ships

Original music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, and Marion Lozano. Special thanks goes to all of the people, with special thanks to all of them.

In May 1998, I went to visit Steve Jobs at Apple headquarters. He returned to the company that fired him over a decade earlier as its interim CEO. 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. He had a new product plan, a new product, and a workforce revitalized by an inspiring ad campaign.

Musk doesn’t need to look farther than his successful enterprises to see the absurdity of his haste. He took over a company that was five years old. 17 years after it was incorporated, Musk came out with a brilliant plan to turn the company around. Musk deserves a lot of attention for what he has accomplished with his company. SpaceX, Musk’s other company, is private 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.

What Do Markets Tell About Interest Rates? The Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s Deceleration Sentiments to Stock Prices and Inclusive Rates

A story was first published in CNN Business. The Bell newsletter was published before that. Is it not a subscriber? You will be able to sign up here. You can listen to the audio version of the newsletter, if you choose to do so.

The Federal Reserve will hold a meeting in December. Fed officials say that they will be using hard economic data to make their next decision, even if analysts want all they can get.

That means key housing, labor, and inflation reports will likely have outsized effects on the market as investors speculate about what they might mean for the future of interest rates.

What’s happening: No one can move markets like Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — with just a few words on Wednesday he crushed investors’ hopes of an interest rate pivot and sent stocks plunging. “We have a ways to go,” said Powell of the Fed’s current hiking regime meant to fight persistent inflation. “It’s very premature, in my view, to think about or be talking about pausing.”

The central bank also doesn’t think inflation will start to fall back until next year. That will require more interest rate hikes in the coming months, warned policymakers.

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

The Labor and Housing Markets: Implications of the August Employment and Housing Counts Results for the U.S. Department of Labor

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.

That will bring about more inflation. Businesses have to pay higher wages to attract employees and are able to charge more for their goods and services. The Fed will be looking closely at hourly wage growth in the report. Wages increased by 5% in the month of September.

There is a chance that another jobs report in December will be good enough to get the Fed’s attention. Even if the unemployment rate remains historically low, that will be enough to satisfy Fed officials.

Core CPI prices, which exclude oil and food, rose 0.6% in September month-over-month, matching August’s pace and coming in well above expectations of a 0.4% increase, not a great sign for the Fed. And analysts expect to see another large 0.5% increase in October.

“CPI is the big inflation report that affects markets more than any other,” he said. “The Fed pays more attention to PCE [the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index], but consumers and investors pay a lot of attention to the CPI. It is the one that moves markets the most.

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.”

Power to the People: When Musk’s Cuts Make Twitter Work For Themselves Work for Human Rights, Public Works and Mental Health

On Thursday the Bank of England increased its interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point, in the biggest hike in 33 years as it tries to fight inflation.

The Bank of England believes a two-year recession is longer than the one after the financial crisis, and that any declines in GDP would be relatively small.

Organizations including the ADL, Color of Change, Free Press and GLAAD pointed to Friday’s mass layoffs of Twitter staff as a key factor in their thinking, citing fears that Musk’s cuts will make Twitter’s election integrity policies effectively unenforceable, even if they technically remain active.

The account suspensions came on the heels of Twitter’s announcement on Monday that it was disbanding its Trust and Safety Council — a group of outside experts that advised the company on issues like human rights, child sexual exploitation and mental health.

If a company with 100 or more employees plans to cut 50 jobs or more at a single site of employment, it must give 60 days written notice.

According to a shareholder in the companies, he wishes Musk would find a CEO for the company in the first quarter of 2023.

The world’s richest man used an abusive word to describe the current system of Twitter for those who have or don’t have a blue checkmark. He said: power to the people. It is blue for $8/month.

General Mills

            (GIS), Mondelez International

            (MDLZ), Pfizer

            (PFE) and Audi

            (AUDVF) have reportedly joined a growing list of companies hitting pause on their Twitter advertising in the wake of Musk’s acquisition.

I don’t think it’s helpful to speculate on the true motives behind Sunday’s whiplash Both impact and intention are separate things. Regardless of someone’s intention when they hit you in the face, they’ve still hit you in the face. Now you have to deal with the situation that they’ve created. I hope your thoughts do the same as I turn to the people affected by the policy change. Whether the platform they used to find their work, make connections with others in their field, and rely on for income would allow them to continue was among the questions that Twitter users spent Sunday wondering.

“Tiny talk is talk so small, it feels like it’s coming from your own mind”: Elon Musk at an event on Twitter

Volkswagen Group said it had halted paid activities by its brands on the platform until further notice.

GM had previously said it would stop paying for advertising on the platform while it looked at its new direction. Toyota, another Tesla competitor, previously told CNN that it is “in discussions with key stakeholders and monitoring the situation” on Twitter.

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

A lot of civil society leaders worry that misinformation and other harmful content could spread on the platform and cause disruption in the upcoming US Midterm elections.

Musk held a event for advertisers this week, where he pleaded with them to keep using the platform, after a growing number of companies paused ads. In the event, Musk sought to appear magnanimous in accepting responsibility for the company’s performance.

“Tiny talk is talk so small it feels like it’s coming from your own mind,” Musk fired off shortly past 10 pm last Thursday, a thought so deep it might have bubbled up from a fish-bowled dorm room. Congratulations: We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk.

Persistent Quitting on Twitter: How to Survive in the Chaos of New TWo. A Simple Approach to Face the Noisy Part of Twitter

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. On Twitter, it’s about not giving more to a platform than most people can expect to get back. If you want to stick around on this new Twitter—whatever it may become—you need to find a way to use it without it using you.

There is a relatively small group of people who are making a difference in the world. According to internal company research viewed by Reuters, heavy users who tweet in English “account for less than 10 percent of monthly overall users, but generate 90 percent of all tweets and half of global revenue.”

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. The same goes for journalists. In reality, nearly half of Twitter users tweet less than five times a month, and most of their posts are replies, not original tweets. They keep a close eye on current events, sports and celebrity news, and then get on with their lives. They’re “lurkers.”

During the early days of the Covid outbreak, when a lot of people found themselves stuck at home and getting information on Social Media, laissez faire is a practice that took hold. It is a simple approach to deal with the complexity and chaos of New TWo. If you check in on Musk’s new toy, close your app or browser tab. Send a tweet, then disengage. It is advisable to keep an eye on it during a basketball game. Direct the message threads to other places if you have to. Save your most original thoughts for another time, another place.

What do Twitter users really want to keep them on Twitter? A question for investors and regulators in the wake of Musk’s Twitter Blue decision

Musk fans are not necessarily included in the popularity of the social networking site as an acquisition. That means it’s a much less forgiving environment for Musk. A group of people on the Something Awful forum are very fond of people and love to fuck with them. Plus, Musk’s Twitter Blue plan to devalue verification check marks motivated a bunch of people who didn’t like Musk to go out with a bang by impersonating him, largely because they knew it would make him mad. It probably did. Certainly, that would explain why his very first policy change was to increase punishment for impersonation.

Almost two months later, though, view counts have had the opposite effect, emphasizing how little engagement most posts get relative to their audience size. A recent study found that there has been a 9 percent decline in US usage of Twitter since Musk took the company over.

Now, Twitter did set up Tips — a way to send cash to people you like — but it doesn’t take a cut of that money. It takes a cut of the Super Follows revenue, but it is less than what Apple charges for in-app purchases.

Well, no, because there is forum drama and this is the internet. The blue users get a blue check mark, which is exactly what the verified users get, and this is how an account with a blue check mark and display name “Nintendo of American” managed to put up a message about Mario. To an unwary user, that might look sufficiently like the actual Nintendo account to do brand damage.

I think a lot of advertisers would not even consider returning to someone that was just pretending to be a person. There is a question I have for you: Do users really want to stay in that environment? Mark Cuban claimed that the influx of new checkmarked users made his mentions less interesting. Cuban’s thoughts are one reason people stay on the platform — drive him off, and Twitter is less valuable.

The federal government requires full documentation in writing of any risks of “any product or service impacting commerce” as part of the consent decree. The changes to Twitter Blue rolled out less than two weeks after Musk bought Twitter. Do you believe there is full documentation about its risks? Sounds like the lawyers are concerned.

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

In the past week alone, one of the world’s most influential social networks has laid off half its workforce; alienated powerful advertisers; blown up key aspects of its product, then repeatedly launched and un-launched other features aimed at compensating for it; and witnessed an exodus of senior executives.

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

The account said that it had been added to some accounts to combat impersonation, but it was a different story the next day.

Misinformation experts warned that the paid verification feature would make it hard to identify trustworthy information in the run-up to the US mid-term elections. Some of Musk’s other high powered users had a tough time with the platform.

elonmusk, from one entrepreneurial to another, for when you need your customer service hat on. Mark Cuban said that he spent too much time muting all the newly purchased checkmark certificates in an attempt to make his verified mentions useful again.

“Bottom line is that you have a decision to make,” Cuban added. It’s better to stick with the new platform that makes it easy to find out what’s happening on your account and puts the onus on them to do it themselves. Or return to the days when you could find a lot oftweeting on the micro-Blogging site. One can make it more efficient to use Twitter. The other is awful.”

Some 625 of the top 1,000 Twitter advertisers, including major brands such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, Jeep, Wells Fargo and Merck, had pulled their ad dollars as of January, according to estimates from Pathmatics, based on data running through January 25.

Musk downplayed the size of the ad buy, though he confirmed that his company bought a package to advertise its Starlink internet service on the social networking site.

Twitter is not a great advertising platform, but Musk has stepped up to protect consumers from harmful content in the social media age of the mobile app stores

GroupM works with companies like Google, L’Oréal, Bayer, Nestle, Unilever, Coke, and Mars. If you’ve ever seen that graphic about how a few brands make pretty much everything you buy at the grocery store, you’ll notice a lot of Venn diagram overlap with GroupM’s list of clients.

GroupM didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment. Twitter no longer has a communications department to reach out to with such requests. The internal message shows that GroupM is being worked through with leadership.

Those requests are, to put it bluntly, zero percent surprising. Companies don’t want to advertise on platforms where their messages, carefully crafted to be as inoffensive and enticing to as many people as possible, appear next to blatant hate speech, conspiracy theories, or, perhaps worst of all, a fake-yet-verified version of their profile posting pictures of their beloved mascot giving people the middle finger.

“I’ve always thought that a move to a subscription business would make sense for Twitter … it’s never been a great advertising platform,” said Larry Vincent, associate professor of marketing at USC’s Marshall School of Business. The size of the advertising business of Twitpic has been smaller than that of Facebook due to it not offering the same level of user targeting.

Many of the employees who worked on the campaigns have been let go or fired, and the brands may be upset about it.

The former head of trust and safety at the company, Yoel Roth, wrote an op-ed last week in a New York Times that warned about the company’s failure to adhere to Apple and Google app store rules. In the past, the app stores have removed social media apps for failing to protect their users from harmful content, and that is what happened with Musk’s takeover. The head of Apple’s app store deleted his account on the weekend.

Twitter Lets You Go: A Tale of Many Successes and Little Losses for Dan Sheehan and Azucena Rasilla

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

Many users followed suit, tweeting short eulogies for the platform. For some, like writer Dan Sheehan, gaining a platform on Twitter later allowed them to excel in their personal and professional lives.

“I built this following for myself, and that got me some of my first job offers just in the copywriting space. “That’s how I paid the bills for a long time.”

He was able to dedicate his time to writing his novel thanks to the help of his large Twitter following and through copywriting.

“The fact that I was able to keep the lights on, the bills paid, while writing the book, and then have the book reach that audience of over 100,000 people directly, none of that could have been done through traditional means,” he says.

Creative fields have been cornered by the children of wealthy people for the longest time. It was possible for you to make your mark on the people holding the keys to that.

Twitter also helped Azucena Rasilla, an arts and community reporter for The Oaklandside, to gain a platform and open a door into the journalism industry outside of traditional routes.

“It’s just unfortunate that the diversity problem continues, and I don’t know how now, those communities are going to find each other… She says that by following people and reading other people’s work, she was able to see it right there.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/23/1138605036/twitter-shutdown-elon-activism-trump-career

Detecting Multiple Sclerosis using Disability Twitter: A Personal Inventory of Masks and Masks for the Prevention of AIDS, and the Importance of Using Social Media

Wendi Muse, a Ph.D candidate with multiple sclerosis, was an active member of ‘Disability Twitter’ for years. She posted resources to help people get masks, and sent some from the personal inventory she had amassed. Earlier this year, she noticed a greater demand for reliable N95 masks in the immunocompromised community.

“In total, it’s going to be more than 12,000 masks that I sent out just on my own, literally from my living room since January of this year,” Muse says. She doesn’t think she would have been able to reach that many people if she didn’t use social media.

It has been crucial because it allowed me and my family to learn more about the epidemic and be able to reach out to other people who are not as fortunate.

Even as alternative sites like Mastodon and Discord have seen a recent influx in users, Muse would lose a big source of revenue if the end oftweets is what it takes.

“I think that uneasiness of not knowing is making it more difficult, especially for people who are disabled, elderly, who maybe don’t have social networks in person right now.”

It’s not clear how Musk’s team will sort out which accounts are banned for illegal or inappropriate content, and how many are restored.

The poll, which closed around 12:45 pm ET on Thursday, finished with 72.4% voting in favor of the proposition and 27.6% voting against. More than 3 million votes were cast in the poll.

Shadow Banned or Harsh? The Twitter Files, Part Duex!, by Elon Musk and Bari Weiss

Up to nine chances before they were kicked off of the platform were given to users if they broke its rules against Covid-19 or civic misrepresentations, before Musk took over. The platform also had other enforcement mechanisms — such as labeling a tweet or reducing its reach — for its additional rules including those prohibiting terrorism, threats of violence against individuals or groups of people, targeted abuse or harassment, publishing another person’s private information, and content promoting abuse or self-harm.

According to Musk, the company will make it possible for users to determine if the company has limited how many other users can view their posts. Musk is effectively taking on an issue that has been a cause of concern for conservatives who say that the social network has suppressed or banned their content.

“Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal,” Musk tweeted on Thursday. He did not provide additional details or a timetable.

A second set of the so-called Twitter Files was shared by journalist Bari Weiss and focused on how the company restricts the reach of certain accounts, especially those that it deems to be potentially harmful.

The internal documents appeared to have been given to the journalists by Musk’s team. Musk on Friday shared Weiss’ thread in a tweet and added, “The Twitter Files, Part Duex!!” along with two popcorn emojis.

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

Covering Trump with Twitter: The Disagreement theorem in the House of Representatives of the Senate Judicious Selectman

When Trump was inaugurated, I told colleagues in the newsroom that they should not cover everything he said or said on the internet. When a president made a comment, it was assumed they would be a signal of future policy. Trump used many of the same things to get a rise out of people. Reporting on them, I argued, just fed the flames. Another editor was pushing back. He said that he was the president. “What he says is news.”

Here, for instance, we saw a slew of rapid-response news stories about Musk’s tweet on December 11 that “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” a dig at the government’s former chief infectious disease expert, as well as at gender diversity. Here’s another bunch about the picture of his bedside table with two replica guns on it, and some more about his tweeting a far-right Pepe the Frog meme.

This is how coverage of Trump was done. The liberal-leaning media were often drawn to stories confirming the belief that a person so clearly unfit to be president would only succeed in bringing himself (or the country) down in flames, while the right-wing media treated his evident egomania, corruption, and lack of interest in grasping basic policy issues or actually doing the job as at best irrelevant and at worst essential qualities for reforming Washington. There was good reporting at the same time, but these accounts were more polarizing and dominated the conversation. The losers were the public, whose understanding of what was actually happening across the country was forced through incompatible narratives around the behavior of one unhinged man in the White House.

This is what’s happening with Musk and Twitter. Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic describes a “dysfunctional relationship between Twitter’s new owner and so many of the journalists who cover him … where the least defensible statements and claims on all sides are relentlessly amplified in a never-ending cycle that predictably fuels disdain and negative polarization.”

Of All the threats posed by Twitter since it fell under sketchy new management in October, one of them doubles as a promise. It’s going to turn into pornography.

Porn’s not my cup of tea, but you have to admire its ferocity and cunning. It is a megagenre, and Timothy Morton might call it a hyper object. In effect, porn online behaves like a predator plant, saturating the pixels with flesh colors, choking off biodiverse memes, and sowing vast digital acreage with salt.

Tumblr, which started as an artsy microblogging service in 2007, lost its allure when it was overrun by porn five years later. Chatroulette, which was founded in 2009 as a whimsical way to meet strangers, traded its lightheartedness for dick pics and leering goons almost immediately. Sex workers create the majority of the porn on OnlyFans, a platform that began in 2016 as a platform for performers to post videos.

The Taxonomy of Social Media: Why We Shouldn’t Let a Tech Company Disclose What Happened on Twitter After Musk’s Takeover

“Musk is responding to events that affect him personally to reshape that policy and place new limits on what could be disseminated through the platform,” says John Davisson, director of litigation and senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit that focuses on privacy and free expression. It is being carried out in a self-centered way. Musk has announced new policies on live location sharing and privacy that appear designed largely to help himself, not to protect its users.

A professor in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University, Kara Alaimo, is writing about issues affecting women and social media. Her book “This Feed Is on Fire” explores the toxicity of social media for women and girls. And How We Can Reclaim It” will be published by Alcove Press in 2024. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. There is more opinion on CNN.

A healthy town square should also be a place where people can find reliable information. The researchers found that before Musk took over, there was more of a shift towards refuting hate and misinformation on the site.

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

On Wednesday, Musk banned the ElonJet account, and then changed theTwitter rules to stop others from sharing their current location without their consent. He then took aim at journalists who were writing about the jet-tracking account, which can still be found on other social media sites, alleging that they were broadcasting “basically assassination coordinates.”

Most of the accounts were back early Saturday. Business Insider’s Linette Lopez, who had been suspended, had no explanation, she told The Associated Press.

Shortly before being suspended, she said she had posted court-related documents to Twitter that included a 2018 Musk email address. That address is not current, Lopez said, because “he changes his email every few weeks.”

Lorenz’s Twitter Suspension after Musk Peeks Out: Media Freedom and the Washington Post’s Technological Reporter Timing

The move sets “a dangerous precedent at a time when journalists all over the world are facing censorship, physical threats and even worse,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

Then, over the weekend, The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz became the latest journalist to be temporarily banned. She said she was suspended after posting a message on Twitter tagging Musk and requesting an interview.

Mainstream websites such as Facebook andInstagram were not included in the banned platforms. There was no explanation as to why the seven websites were included on the blacklist.

Sally Buzbee, the Washington Post’s executive editor, said technology reporter Drew Harwell was removed without warning after accurate reporting about Musk.

CNN said in a statement that “the impulsive and unjustified suspension of a number of reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is concerning but not surprising.”

Another suspended journalist, Matt Binder of the technology news outlet Mashable, said he was banned Thursday night immediately after sharing a screenshot that O’Sullivan had posted before his own suspension.

The screenshot showed a statement from the Los Angeles Police Department sent earlier Thursday to multiple media outlets, including the AP, about how it was in touch with Musk’s representatives about the alleged stalking incident.

Twitter Sensitivities to Donald Trump’s “Big Bad News”: The Impact of Twitter’s Spaces Disagreement

He promised to let free speech reign, and has reinstated accounts that had been banned for hate speech or misinformation. He said he would suppress the negative vibes by not giving the accounts of freedom of reach.

“The old regime at Twitter governed by its own whims and biases and it sure looks like the new regime has the same problem,” she tweeted “I oppose it in both cases.”

If the suspensions lead to the exit of media organizations that are active on Twitter, the platform would be changed at the fundamental level, according to Lou Paskalis, a marketing and media executive.

CBS shut down its account on the social network in November because of unknown new management, but media organizations mostly stayed on the platform.

“We all know that news comes out of social media, and to now go after journalists really saws at the main tent pole of social media,” she said. I can’t think of a more self-destructive wound that journalists can suffer.

Some advertisers have already cut their expenditures on the platform because of the Musk uncertainty, and the suspensions may be the biggest red flag yet.

On Thursday night, Twitter’s Spaces conference chat went down shortly after Musk abruptly signed out of a session hosted by a journalist during which he had been questioned about the reporters’ ousting. Musk later said that the Spaces was taken offline due to a bug. Spaces came back late Friday.

Mastodon on Friday had more than 6 million users, nearly double the 3.4 million it had on the day Musk took ownership of Twitter. On many of the thousands of confederated networks in the open-source Mastodon platform, administrators and users solicited donations as disaffected Twitter users strained computing resources. Many networks are crowd-funded. The platform was designed to be ad-free.

Twitter banter after a billionaire steps down: Musk says he’ll quit his job in the early 2020s and he hasn’t

After the poll ended on Monday, more than half of the people who responded voted in favor of Musk stepping down.

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

On Monday morning, Twitter users logged on to find a thicket of connected issues. Clicking on links would no longer open them, as users would see a mysterious error message that stated that access to this Endpoint is not included in your currentAPI plan. Images stopped loading as well. Other users reported that they could not access TweetDeck, the Twitter-owned client for professional users.

But that decision generated so much immediate criticism, including from past defenders of Twitter’s new billionaire owner, that Musk promised not to make any more major policy changes without an online survey of users.

The action to block competitors was another attempt by Musk to control his own speech after he shut down a Twitter account last week that was following his private jet flights.

A test case was the prominent venture capitalist Paul Graham, who in the past has praised Musk but on Sunday told his 1.5 million Twitter followers that this was the “last straw” and to find him on Mastodon. His Twitter account was promptly suspended, and soon after restored as Musk promised to reverse the policy implemented just hours earlier.

In public banter with Twitter followers Sunday, Musk expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO, saying that person “must like pain a lot” to run a company that “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy.”

Oppenheimer & Co. downgraded its rating on Tesla, where Musk is the CEO, solely because of risks posed by the billionaire’s ownership and management of Twitter.

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

The Evil Billionaire Attack: How the Evil Fools End up Getting Weaned, And Why We Don’t Wanna Attack

The evil maid attack is a vulnerability in security where a party who doesn’t know anything can gain physical access to important hardware, such as your laptop, if you leave it unattended. The new analog is equally capable of damaging systems and leaking data. If you want, you can call it the “evil billionaire attack”. The weapon is money, and more specifically, the likelihood that when the moment arrives you won’t have enough of it to make a difference. The call is coming from inside the house.

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

The problem is fought by cripts on the deepest level possible. It would be extremely difficult for Musk to kill off a network if a few users refused to support it. The risk of losing access is infinitesimal because it is the same across many computers. Losing information because of a hostile party is not one of the complicated things this comes with. For example, when the Hic et Nunc marketplace for NFTs went under in late 2021, another version relaunched, putting a new wrapper around the same content. The shared resource that is the blockchain forces interoperability, which is almost like organic self defense.

Or consider the case of WordPress, the early blogging engine that has since grown into increasingly elaborate general-purpose content management software. Roughly 40 percent of the open web is powered by it. There are many companies that develop websites, developers who work for those companies, and other people who work for themselves and write their own coding which can be unlocked or extended with licensing fees. This is possible because the core is open source, and encourages the same nature of its network. There is an argument that says that it is a bit long in the tooth since its simple RSS feeds lost out to the more advanced social features of Twitter. But we must now understand it to be a bigger technical success than Twitter, simply because it is not at risk.

“We are excited to see Mastodon grow and become a household name in newsrooms across the world, and we are committed to continuing to improve our software to face up to new challenges that come with rapid growth and increasing demand,” Rochko wrote.

The app was one of the top 10 free social networking apps on the Apple app store, as of Tuesday morning, and it was also among the top 10 free social networking apps on the Google play store. (Mastodon is a decentralized social network, meaning that there are also numerous third-party apps for the platform beyond its own.)

The Mastodon #StopToxic Twitter Covid-19 Outage: An Underpaid, Unresolved CEO and a Misdemeanor

In the blog post, which reflect the Mastodon founder’s first remarks since the link ban, Rochko highlighted Musk’s significant power as owner and CEO of Twitter.

“This is a stark reminder that centralized platforms can impose arbitrary and unfair limits on what you can and can’t say while holding your social graph hostage,” Rochko wrote.

There is a senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at a media and technology justice advocacy organization. Free Press is a founding member of the #StopToxicTwitter coalition. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. CNN has more opinion on it.

At Free Press we agree that Musk needs to step aside. If he is to be the new CEO, he needs to know that this social media platform only succeeds when it puts the health and safety of its users before the whims of one erratic and reckless billionaire.

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

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

Monday’s outage was Musk’s culmination of leadership at the company so far. He is trying to cut costs by reducing staff and free offerings on the site.

Let me explain: I’m lucky enough to know a lot of creatives as well as a lot of journalists and tech workers. When I woke up on Sunday, I was sent a warning from the artists that they wouldn’t be allowed to use social media anymore for linking to their own portfolios and accepting commission work. I hear horror stories of authors who were scared that their books would be banned on the micro-blogging service due to the Linktrees they were asked to create.

The online riot was caused by users decrying the new policy. Within hours, not only had the company backtracked, but all mentions of the less-than-day-old policy had been scrubbed from Twitter feeds and the company website. It took just minutes for anyone who was online to see it. If you know what I mean, I wouldn’t say you missed it.

This is what we are talking about when we talk about platforms and power. Of course, any steward of any platform, whether it’s a CEO, founder, or middle manager, has the unenviable job of setting and enforcing the policies and guidelines for that platform’s safe and legal use. That isn’t in question. Without rules, online spaces can go bad very quickly. When those platforms choose to harm their users through policy decisions and when those changes are large enough to force users to adapt or abandon ship, it is an issue.

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

The For You Twitter timeline and the consequences for why you should follow a micro-Blogging site: From Weinstein to Bean Dad, and Beyond

The guy is wearing clothes. The lingerie addict. The weird, NSFW woman who has a fascination with wolves. Depending on your interests—and often not even that—you have likely encountered one or more of these people during your sojourns on Twitter in the past few weeks.

The platform is attempting to shift users away from a simple feed of people they follow and towards a morecurated experience. As part of Musk’s plans to make the platform more user-friendly, the “For You” timeline became the default one on January 10. The company says the For You feed features recommend content and powered content from a variety of signals.

Those signals, according to Twitter’s FAQ on the timeline, include a tweet’s popularity on the wider platform and how people within a user’s own network of followers interact with it. The increased focus on an account’s timeline means they are more likely to be consumed by a wider audience than in the past.

“It probably isn’t news to many people by this point that when we’re on platforms like Twitter or TikTok or YouTube, our social experience is mediated by algorithms,” says Jennifer Cobbe, a researcher at the University of Cambridge who studies the way algorithms shape our digital lives. “People often complain—not unreasonably—about what ‘the algorithm’ is showing them, but there’s not really any escape from this.”

The inescapability of this new Twitter setup has significant ramifications for who goes viral. It has always been a dubious distinction to be the main character on the micro-Blogging site. Either they posted something offensive that users felt compelled to share with their followers—see, for instance, Bret Weinstein, who despite spending two decades studying evolutionary biology had never heard of a peanut allergy and tweeted his offense at being asked not to consume nuts on a May 2022 flight. Or Bean Dad. Usually, when the offense cascaded through the layers, it moved onto everyone’s timelines for collective upset.

This model was not perfect but promoted dogpiling on people who had committed a small amount of minor, if bizarre, infraction. (And sometimes people who had made troubling statements.) Journalist Jon Ronson explored its impact on the humans at the center of the storm in his book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, and on an associated podcast of the same name. There was a belief that the shame people felt was justified because they had done wrong.

Why are Mastodon and Twitter so Successful? A Study of Musk and the Evolution of Social Media During and After Musk’s Musk Bump

Mastodon’s active monthly user count dropped to 1.4 million by late January. It now has nearly half a million fewer total registered users than at the start of the year. Many newcomers have complained that Mastodon is hard to use. Some people are going back to the devilish bird they know best: social media.

The biggest lesson was that Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse can scale. A professor at York University in Canada, Robert Gehl, said this was a big question. He says Mastodon has enjoyed peaks of interest followed by slumps before. That pattern can still be used to add more strength. When the wave sticks, a percentage of it. People will convert to it.

During Mastodon’s Musk bump, admins worked hard to get servers swamped by new users back online. They crowdfunded money so that they could increase hosting bills and update their policies on moderation.

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

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

Employees showed employees data about Musk’s engagement with his account. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” He had a score of nine today. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

The engineer was told that he was fired by Musk. The name of the engineer has been removed fromPlatformer because of Musk’s harassment of formerTwitter employees.

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

Since 7 weeks ago, public view counts have been added to every twit. At the time, Musk promised that the feature would give the world a better sense of how vibrant the platform is.

He noted that over 90 percent of followers read what they say, but do not reply or even hint at things that are public.

“Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now,” the company’s support account tweeted. The change we made in our internal structure had some unforeseen consequences.

The Los Angeles headquarters of Twitter fires engineering research ftc-concerns: Where are you? How do you answer questions? What can you do about Twitter?

One employee said they haven’t seen much in the way of cogent strategy. “Most of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires (mostly caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that), performing impossible tasks, and ‘improving efficiency’ without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. From my point of view, we mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire.

One employee said there are times when he is awake late at night and says things that don’t make sense. “And then he’ll come to us and be like, ‘this one person says they can’t do this one thing on the platform,’ and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make sense.

The San Francisco headquarters has a sad air because they have been sued for rent. The standard greeting when passing each other in the halls is, “where are you interviewing?” and “where do you have offers?” The eighth floor is still stocked with beds, and employees have to reserve them in advance.

pre-Musk, there were perks that made working at Twitter attractive. What about food at the office? Stinks, and now we have to pay for it. And, I know this sounds petty, but they appear to have obtained the absolute worst coffee vendors on earth.”

The epicenter ofTwitters open culture, where employees discussed anything and everything, has gone quiet. The employee described it as a ghost town.

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

On the lack of firepower in IT: an employee’s frustrations and what he wants to see in next-to-leading tech

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

(Of course, that’s not true for everyone at the company. An employee says there are a group of believers who are trying to take advantage of the clear vacuum that exists.

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

At the same time, “he really doesn’t like to believe that there is anything in technology that he doesn’t know, and that’s frustrating,” the employee said. It is not possible to be the smartest person in the room at all times.

An employee said that the recent vibe in tech and fear of not being able to find something else was the main reason for most people. It is my understanding that most of my team is doing very hardcore interview prep, and would jump at the chance to leave.

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

Wells Fargo halted its paid advertising on Twitter in the first round of layoffs after Elon Musk’s acquisition of the wells fargo company

A sense of uneasiness exists around how recent changes will be reviewed by regulators. As per the agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, you can expect a number of steps before pushing out changes, including creating a project proposal and conducting security and privacy reviews.

Wells Fargo said it “paused our paid advertising on Twitter” but continues to use it as a social channel to engage with customers. The brands did not respond to our request for comment.

The monthly revenue from the top 1,000 advertisers on the site plunged by more than half from October through January, to less than $48 million.

After Sarah Oh lost her job as a human rights advisor at Twitter late last year in the first round of layoffs following Elon Musk’s chaotic acquisition of the company, she decided to join a friend in building a rival service.

T2 was launched with the help of Gabor Cselle, an individual who had worked at both AdWords and social networking sites. Like Twitter, it offers a social feed of posts with 280-character limits. But the key selling point, according to Oh, is its focus on safety.

“We really do want to create an experience that allows people to share what they want to share without fearing risk of things like abuse and harassment, and we feel like we’re really well positioned to deliver on that,” Oh told CNN.

What Are New Market Entrants Competing with Twitter: Artifact, a Text-based News Feed, and Wall Street Predictions

The list of new entrants in the markets include a company backed by a Musk investor, a service from a former boss of the company, and an app created by former employees. Some apps like T2 are similar to Twitter and other apps are different.

Last month, for example, the founders of Instagram announced Artifact, “a personalized news feed” powered by artificial intelligence, a description that quickly earned it comparisons to Twitter. CNN tested the app and found it to be similar to news reader applications such as Apple News or even the now-pleaded-murder of Osama bin Laden. Artifact displayed popular articles from large media organizations and smaller bloggers in a main feed, tailored to users based on their activity and selected interests.

But all of these apps appear to be vying for the opportunity to scratch the itch users may feel for a news feed that isn’t Twitter — at least for as long as that itch lasts.

“Something that we’ve heard a lot from people who are moving over from Twitter, either partially or fully, is that it is just for them a nicer experience overall,” said Jae Kaplan, co-founder of Anti Software Software club, the group that develops Cohost, a text-based social media feed similar to Twitter. The service was publicly launched in June of last year. Within 48 hours after Musk completed his takeover, the platform added 80,000 users.

“People have been referring to us when they do as a Twitter alternative, which I think is an important distinction from a Twitter replacement,” Kaplan said.

A Valentine’s Day surprise doesn’t usually include egg and gas prices, but the heart wants what the heart wants, and Wall Street is entranced by January’s Consumer Price Index.

If inflation comes in higher than expected, there will be some heartbreak on Wall Street as it could mean that the Fed has more work to do. If disinflation increases, there will be a big boost to market sentiment and traders commitment to equities.

Randy Frederick says that you should expect a bit of volatility. Market swings have been significant on CPI release days over the past few months.

Markets closed higher on Monday ahead of the report as investors expressed optimism — but they might be getting ahead of themselves. “It wouldn’t shock me in the least,” if the CPI report surprises on the downside and markets give up all of their gains on Tuesday, said Frederick.

Economic Outlook of the United States: Implications of Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s Unresolved “Bumpy” Disinflation

The report could exemplify the long and “bumpy” path of disinflation that Fed Chair Jerome Powell referenced last week in an interview with the Economic Club of Washington DC.

The price of goods has dropped over the past few months as supply chain pressures have abated, but there are signs that the largest contributors to a drop in prices have already stopped.

The decline in new and used car prices may be ending, said Chaudhuri, with new car sales hitting their most brisk pace since May 2021. The falling of the US dollar could increase the price of imported goods.

An increase in energy prices, driven by higher gasoline prices, will also likely drive monthly headline numbers higher. The price of gas went up by 4.4% in January.

Even beyond housing, the services sector has seen year-over-year inflation higher than 3.9% every month since March 2021, said Chaudhuri. And as Powell noted in Washington last week, the stickiness of core services inflation is his greatest concern.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html

Beauty and Beauty: What Happens When the Love is in the Air? The Story of Barney, Lambda, Mattel, and Grindr

The pickup cars are electric. Ram revealed the production version of its electric pickup on Sunday. The Ram 1500 Rev, due out in late 2024, will join the ranks of Ford’s F-150 Lightning, Chevy’s Silverado EV and GMC’s Sierra EV.

Ford has said it plans to be able to produce 2 million electric vehicles globally by late 2026. The company wants to have 600,000 electric vehicles built by the end of the year.

The toy company announced on Monday that Barney (the big purple dinosaur from the 1990s), is making his triumphant return to the small screen — and toy shelves — next year.

Mattel said that the new franchise will include TV, film and Alphabet (GOOGL

            (GOOG))-owned YouTube content as well as music and a vast array of merchandising, including toys (of course), clothing and books. Adult fans have apparel as well.

Nothing says romance quite like popping a bottle of champagne and scrolling through the app on your phone.

Even though the economy feels a bit wobbly at the moment, love is in the air: The National Retail Federation forecasts that consumers will spend $25.9 billion on Valentine’s Day in 2023 — that would be one of the highest spending years on record.

Chocolate: Candy is the top VDay gift, according to the NRF. But Hershey, Nestlé, or Mondelez International shares can provide satisfaction without all of that extra sugar.

The Hershey Company’s stock rose in early February after beating fourth quarter earnings expectations and forecasting strong growth through 2023. Mondelez International had a better-than-expected quarter.

Jewelry: A diamond is forever, but forever is a long time and some people prefer to stay liquid. Those people may want to invest in jewelry stocks. Signet and Kay are two of the largest brands on the market. For those who want to go a bit higher up, there is also Tiffany’s, which is owned by Louis Vuitton.

Dating Apps: The shares of Match Group have risen more than 10% so far this year. Bumble, meanwhile, is up 19% and Grindr has gained 22%.

The Twitter API’s Breakdown Revisited: Musk’s Tweets about a Deadline and its Implications on the Company’s Knowledge Base

In a tweet on Saturday, Marcin Kadluczka, the laid-off engineering manager for monetization who reported directly to Musk, hinted at the infeasibility of the one-week deadline in a tweet: “I believe Twitter can really improve ads in 2-3 months (no necessarily in a week though).” I’ve been able to confirm that Musk gave a deadline before Kadluczka and others were laid off last Friday.

Do you know what’s going on in the world of cyberspace? I want to chat without the public seeing it. You can reach me via [email protected] or through the contact form on my Linktree. Then we can set up a secure thread on Signal.

Twitter’s website is breaking in novel new ways — and while the company managed to recover from its latest outage within a couple of hours, the story behind how it broke suggests there are likely to be similar problems in the near future.

And those are only the service outages. Other issues, such as the one that led Musk’s tweets to be made more visible on the timeline than any other user’s, have also roiled the user base.

The change in question was part of a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API, Platformer can now confirm. On February 1st, the company announced it will no longer support free access to its API, which effectively ended the existence of third-party clients and dramatically limited the ability of outside researchers to study the network. The company has been building a new paid API for developers to work with.

“A small API change had massive ramifications,” Musk tweeted later in the day, after Twitter investor Marc Andreessen posted a screenshot showing that the company’s API failures were trending on the site. The code stack is not good. Will need a complete rewrite.

What Have You Been Doing Recently? An Employee Asks: Why Do You Have to Work a Single Hour to Fix a Critical Problem?

A single engineer was going to be staffed on a major project which is linked to several critical systems that both users and employees depend on.

It took hours to fix the problem with few knowledgeable workers on hand. “This is what happens when you fire 90 percent of the company,” another current employee says.

Musk responded in a tweet asking, “what work have you been doing?” Musk appeared to question several points when the list of his tasks was given to him. “Pics or it didn’t happen,” he tweeted. The billionaire said that the man claimed to have a disability that prevented him from typing, but did no actual work.

He said that he has muscular dystrophy, and that it has put him in a wheelchair more than 20 years ago. A charitable effort to build 1,000 wheelchair ramps around Reykjavik led to the recognition by the United Nations and the president of Iceland of the founder of a digital branding company.

He said that he couldn’t do any manual work without his hands getting sore, and that he was not able to use the mouse. “I can however write for an hour or two at a time. This wasn’t a problem in Twitter 1.0 since I was a senior director and my job was mostly to help teams move forward, give them strategic and tactical advice.”

Thorleifsson did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. The public relations department has been cut and it did not reply.

Which is fine and happens all the time. They usually tell people about it but that’s seemingly the optional part at Twitter now,” he said. Next up is to find out if there is anything they owe me.

A Rube Goldberg Machine, Is It Hard to Keep It Running? Musk’s Comment on Code Bases and the Reliability of Algorithms

“The code base is like a Rube Goldberg machine, and when you zoom in on one part of the Rube Goldberg machine, there’s another Rube Goldberg machine, and then there’s another one,” Musk said at the event on Tuesday. It is very difficult to keep this thing running, and also difficult to advance the product because of its complexity, to say the least.