Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?

[atomheartbevo 89,787]

16 minutes ago, GenXer said:

Feels like I’m watching the series finale of Silicon Valley

It’s the extra season we never got.

[Reagan1k 3,024]

SIAP - Eli Lilly stock just took a hit over one of those blue check memes posing as Lilly & promising free insulin.

Expect legal filings soon against Elon personally for recklessness (I'm no lawyer) and allowing this shit to spin out of control.

I'd expect other companies to issue public statements that they are not affiliated with twitter in any way, in advertising or as a creator of content.

Shady stock shorters could easily use this to manipulate the markets of any company until this is fixed - if it even can be under his leadership.

[Cheeseweasel 26,438]

Just now, Reagan1k said:

SIAP - Eli Lilly stock just took a hit over one of those blue check memes posing as Lilly & promising free insulin.

Expect legal filings soon against Elon personally for recklessness (I'm no lawyer) and allowing this shit to spin out of control.

That's going to be impossible to prove, first of all. Second of all, this has been the argument from Social Media sites all along--they are not publishers & therefore are not liable for shit posted on their site.

 

[Homercles 10,206]

Maybe they should move for a bad court thingy

[Pig Bellmont 8,736]

1 minute ago, atomheartbevo said:

It’s the extra season we never got.

[Nice Guy Eddie 13,523]

It seems to me that if Elon had just used the first month to fire half the company but keep the tech/functionality the same, he would be in a decent position. I'm sure there would be reports of challenges with losing so many people but he would have avoided all of this drama and lost revenue.

Then once the company stabilized a bit, start making changes. But then again if he was a level-headed person, he might be a middle manager in a big corp instead.

[Goredho 17,419]

21 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Summary: Elon may be the single worst-equipped human on the planet to choose to run Twitter.

None of us have ever seen something like this, or at least seen it displayed so openly and publicly.  It's objectively fascinating to watch.  

I am not saying this is Elon's goal, but if so motivated, a CEO would be hard pressed to more quickly and thoroughly destroy their company while maintaining some semblance of plausible deniability.  And if he does destroy Twitter as a company, it could wind up being Musk's greatest contribution to humanity, lol.  What a world, and yes, fascinating to watch.

[Brisketexan 105,308]

1 minute ago, Cheeseweasel said:

Second of all, this has been the argument from Social Media sites all along--they are not publishers & therefore are not liable for shit posted on their site.

And Twitter's actions these past few days may put that to the test.

When an enterprise has A) an enterprise-created system verifying that an account is actually the account of a third party, and thus by that "blue checkmark" provided by the enterprise is representing to the world that the posts on the third party account are actually from that third party, then the next day, B) changes the policy to let anyone get that "blue checkmark" and impersonate the brand......that's a new fact-pattern that has never been tested under that defense.

The "blue checkmark" is a representation made by Twitter, not by the account.  And changing that representation made by Twitter to accomplish harmful falsehoods.....that's different than just having a neutral bulletin board on which anyone can post anything.  All kinds of unprecedented shit happening here that may change the social media landscape and law, when it all gets sorted out.

[Cheeseweasel 26,438]

1 minute ago, Homercles said:

Maybe they should move for a bad court thingy

Hide yo threefiddy

[G650 14,276]

1 minute ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

It seems to me that if Elon had just used the first month to fire half the company but keep the tech/functionality the same, he would be in a decent position. I'm sure there would be reports of challenges with losing so many people but he would have avoided all of this drama and lost revenue.

Then once the company stabilized a bit, start making changes. But then again if he was a level-headed person, he might be a middle manager in a big corp instead.

No, because Twitter was wildly understaffed already. Just keeping the lights on with half the workforce is going to be almost impossible.

[Prepuce of Doom 21,102]

1 hour ago, Goredho said:

I still wouldn’t discount there being some hidden motivations that would make this all more sensical, though I don’t know what they might be.  I just find it hard to believe Elon became the richest man in the world shepherding Tesla and SpaceX while being this inept as a leader.

Same. I agree that the speed and efficiency in which things have deteriorated suggests that this has been a desired outcome. 

The only parsimonious theory I can come up with is that Saudi Arabia (perhaps also acting as a mouthpiece for other repressive regimes) does not like what Twitter can do in terms of spreading dissent, amplifying rebellion, shining light on abuses, and organizing strategy, and has basically hired him to destroy Twitter altogether. 

[Captainant 27,757]

1 minute ago, Cheeseweasel said:

Second of all, this has been the argument from Social Media sites all along--they are not publishers & therefore are not liable for shit posted on their site.

Unfortunately this is not entirely accurate - algorithmic feeds and promoted posts ala facebook arguably DO turn the platform itself into a form of publisher. Content certainly does not propagate and move through the network organically - there's reams of lawsuits and internal documents and criminal investigations that bear that out.

If social media were just the raw timeline and none of the algorithms that are curating your feed, then I'd 100% agree

[G650 14,276]

3 minutes ago, Goredho said:

And if he does destroy Twitter as a company, it could wind up being Musk's greatest contribution to humanity, lol.

Strong disagree, for saavy new consumers capable of critical thinking Twitter is the single best source of up to date information on the planet by a factor of a bazillion. And add on top of that almost every municipal agency uses Twitter as their primary announcement system, losing it would put an indescribable hole in the information ecosystem.

 

Towns, schools, utilities are all flipping out right now because of this.

[NoName 16,396]

2 minutes ago, Prepuce of Doom said:

The only parsimonious theory I can come up with is that Saudi Arabia (perhaps also acting as a mouthpiece for other repressive regimes) does not like what Twitter can do in terms of spreading dissent, amplifying rebellion, shining light on abuses, and organizing strategy, and has basically hired him to destroy Twitter altogether. 

you aren't seeing the big picture from a despot's point of view.

why destroy the thing that is used when you can use your access to see what's happening from within in real time? especially when it isn't secured with e2e encryption like Signal

[Goredho 17,419]

1 minute ago, Prepuce of Doom said:

Same. I agree that the speed and efficiency in which things have deteriorated suggests that this has been a desired outcome. 

The only parsimonious theory I can come up with is that Saudi Arabia (perhaps also acting as a mouthpiece for other repressive regimes) does not like what Twitter can do in terms of spreading dissent, amplifying rebellion, shining light on abuses, and organizing strategy, and has basically hired him to destroy Twitter altogether. 

Yeah, that's getting into conspiracy theory territory, and I don't want to go there without something more to support a theory than hard-to-comprehend CEO behavior in destroying a company.  But I definitely am not sure we fully understand Elon's motives, and his actions seem incongruous with a motive to Make Twitter Great Again.

[Cheeseweasel 26,438]

4 minutes ago, Prepuce of Doom said:

The only parsimonious theory I can come up with is that Saudi Arabia (perhaps also acting as a mouthpiece for other repressive regimes) does not like what Twitter can do in terms of spreading dissent, amplifying rebellion, shining light on abuses, and organizing strategy, and has basically hired him to destroy Twitter altogether. 

Now THAT is a crazy ass theory. Well done.

1 minute ago, G650 said:

Towns, schools, utilities are all flipping out right now because of this.

[TonyTexas 10,525]

Lol. no one saw that coming 

 

[Cheeseweasel 26,438]

6 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Unfortunately this is not entirely accurate - algorithmic feeds and promoted posts ala facebook arguably DO turn the platform itself into a form of publisher.

100% agree, but THEY have made this argument. If this brings down Facebook. Twitter, etc. I'm all in.

[Goredho 17,419]

2 minutes ago, G650 said:

Strong disagree, for saavy new consumers capable of critical thinking Twitter is the single best source of up to date information on the planet by a factor of a bazillion. And add on top of that almost every municipal agency uses Twitter as their primary announcement system, losing it would put an indescribable hole in the information ecosystem.

 

Towns, schools, utilities are all flipping out right now because of this.

Do you even Arab spring, bro?  We can disagree.  It was hyperbole on my part, but I think for every example you can point to social media promoting the common good, I can find an example of it promoting the common bad.

[F250 28,817]

13 minutes ago, Pig Bellmont said:

Is the dude on the tee shirt sucking a dick?

[Chopper 17,245]

Twitter is not such a complex business, but their website is most definitely highly intricate and requires many sophisticated functions, including systems engineers, network engineers, hardware engineers, database administrators, data center operations, and other technical operations just to support the existing infrastructure. You also need top-tier moderators and tools. You'd have to be a total moron to walk in there on day 1 and fire half the employees AND THEN try to add functionality and new products, particularly when you've just fired or failed to hold onto the entire Senior Leadership Team.

The thing about advertising on twitter is that large advertisers have historically spent a small portion of their ad budgets there just to have a presence. But twitter provides advertisers with few metrics about the effectiveness or views of their ads. It's not a platform advertisers are in love with, they were already just throwing money there and hoping it was effective, and they're not going to be torn up about not spending there or finding other/better places for their ad dollars.

In less than than 2 weeks musk has managed to drive away major advertisers, who aren't going to come running back to him. And he has completely fucked up the company's personnel backbone, as well. Thanks to his changes and the added debt service, twitter is going to be deep in the red for a long time.

Pivot to video? Become a bank? What a joke. If you tried to write this bullshit as a screen play you couldn't because it would be unbelievable.

 

 

[wildcat09 29,378]

Guys, this isn't complicated and Elon isn't hard to comprehend. He's an emotional toddler who was addicted to Twitter but thought he could make it better. Then he pretty quickly had a moment of clarity where he realized he fucked up, tried to get out of it, realized he couldn't, and came back around to convincing himself he could make it better. So he came in and immediately began implementing his much-less-than-half baked ideas, and because he's actually an emotional toddler with no real understanding of how people work, thus making him the worst possible person to run a social media platform, he's flailing.

This was all incredibly predictable. I and many others predicted it. The speed at which it's happening may seem shocking, but none of this should be remotely surprising.

[Brisketexan 105,308]

3 minutes ago, Chopper said:

In less than than 2 weeks musk has managed to drive away major advertisers, who aren't going to come running back to him. And he has completely fucked up the company's personnel backbone, as well. Thanks to his changes and the added debt service, twitter is going to be deep in the red for a long time.

Pivot to video? Become a bank? What a joke. If you tried to write this bullshit as a screen play you couldn't because it would be unbelievable.

As a business case, these short paras are why Twitter and Elon are in a pickle that I can't see them getting out of.  He has utterly fucked the primary revenue stream, with no ready or sufficient replacement in the offing.  I think that most business-minded folks would see that as, ummm, bad.

[G650 14,276]

12 minutes ago, Goredho said:

Do you even Arab spring, bro?  We can disagree.  It was hyperbole on my part, but I think for every example you can point to social media promoting the common good, I can find an example of it promoting the common bad.

That's not what this is about. It's functionally a utility at this point. Not social media, but specifically Twitter. School closings, traffic updates, weather report, etc...

 

If anyone wanted to burn Facebook to the ground I'll light the match.

 

ETA: It's critical to understand Twitter is not a two way street. It's a big ass announcements board. Nobody cares about your random tweets or Joe Q Anon trying to circulate Oath Keeper memes. It's a mega information aggregator which keeps you from going to 50 websites a day to get enough information to function adequately.

Edited November 11, 2022 by G650

[atomheartbevo 89,787]

22 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

Then once the company stabilized a bit, start making changes. But then again if he was a level-headed person, he might be a middle manager in a big corp instead.

If he was level-headed, he wouldn’t have bought Twitter, and Tesla stock would, be doing better.

[Firemans4Horn 18,119]

 

[DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12,301]

I think my favorite part of the timeline is the @Humble Beast’s of the world taking a premature victory lap (“finally we have a leader who will allow us to disseminate  our hate filled propaganda!) and then disappearing once it was clear their newly anointed hero had no fucking clue what he was doing.

[Chopper 17,245]

45 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Reuters: Elon Musk braces for $56 billion battle with heavy metal drummer

 

Ya gotta love the heavy metal drummer and I wish him god's speed

 

[Goredho 17,419]

5 minutes ago, G650 said:

That's not what this is about. It's functionally a utility at this point. Not social media, but specifically Twitter. School closings, traffic updates, weather report, etc...

 

If anyone wanted to burn Facebook to the ground I'll light the match.

 

ETA: It's critical to understand Twitter is not a two way street. It's a big ass announcements board. Nobody cares about your random tweets or Joe Q Anon trying to circulate Oath Keeper memes. It's a mega information aggregator which keeps you from going to 50 websites a day to get enough information to function adequately.

Disagree.  See below for why.  I won't keep debating, you are entitled to your opinions.

 

[elfenix 34,332]

1 hour ago, Cheeseweasel said:

Everyone needs to chill, sit back, and enjoy the dismantling of 'trusting information posted on the internet".

Return it to dancing babies and cat memes like it was designed.

 

 

[SizzleChest 8,284]

26 minutes ago, F250 said:

Is the dude on the tee shirt sucking a dick?

And he has another dick tucked behind his ear for later, like a snack dick.

[Michael Knight 12,994]

44 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

It seems to me that if Elon had just used the first month to fire half the company but keep the tech/functionality the same, he would be in a decent position. I'm sure there would be reports of challenges with losing so many people but he would have avoided all of this drama and lost revenue.

Then once the company stabilized a bit, start making changes. But then again if he was a level-headed person, he might be a middle manager in a big corp instead.

If his daddy didn't own an emerald mine he'd be working at a call center doing tech support

[aggie08 21,529]

So, to summarize: the richest man in the world was goaded into dramatically overpaying for a new company that he had absolutely no tangible plan on how to run, despite the process taking the better part of a year? 

Trying to workshop a better word than "dumb"

[Francisco 2.0 32,426]

So bad, no one knew how to tweet from the company's official @Twitter account

 

https://www.platformer.news/p/inside-the-twitter-meltdown

 

Spoiler

Everything went from bad to worse at Twitter on Thursday. Today let’s talk about a truly chaotic 24 hours at the company, and the mounting fears over what it means for the service that still serves as the heartbeat of the global news cycle.

I.

On Wednesday morning, amid mounting concerns from advertisers that the new Twitter would not prove to be a safe home for brands, Elon Musk held an hour-long Spaces call designed to reassure them. 

Joining Musk on the call were his head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, a seven-year veteran of the company who had served as a steady hand during a tumultuous transition; and Robin Wheeler, the company’s de facto head of sales, who had spent a decade selling ads for the company across several key roles.

On the call Musk performed his usual routine, offering a scattershot set of product announcements that were almost certainly news to the people who would soon be called upon to build them. Soon the timeline would comprise mostly tweets from paid subscribers, he said, with the rest relegated to a zone comparable to Gmail’s spam filter. The site would soon enable … longer video downloads? 

And, of course, Twitter would remain brand-safe: pressuring users to subscribe, he said, would (somehow) reduce the number of bots and spam on the site, making the service more welcoming to advertisers.

A day later, Roth was gone, the company’s new verification scheme had introduced a variety of serious new brand risks onto the platform, and a company that had already been battered by massive layoffs had lurched into a fresh crisis. 

So let’s talk about the events that set this crisis into motion.

II.

The dramatic unwinding of the company’s senior ranks began overnight, in the hours after Twitter’s new owner made his first official communication to the entire company.

The email came at 11:39 PM PT, long after most employees around the world had gone to bed. “Sorry that this is my first email to the whole company,” Musk began, “but there is no way to sugarcoat the message.”

The message: that Twitter’s future is “dire,” Musk wrote, an effect of a worsening economy and the company’s dependence on brand advertising. “Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn. We need roughly half of our revenue to be subscription.”

Musk linked to the Spaces he had held with Roth and Wheeler, and ended with a bombshell: every remaining Twitter employee was expected to return to their offices to work beginning Thursday. (“Obviously, if you are physically unable to travel to an office or have a critical personal obligation, then your absence is understandable,” he added.)

Seventeen minutes later, Musk followed up with a one-sentence email to the team labeled “Top Priority.” “Over the next few days,” he wrote, the absolute top priority is finding and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam.” 

Over the next few hours, Twitter employees began to wake up to the news. It had been paired with another change, announced elsewhere, in the company’s 2023 benefits package: the same day Twitter told employees to return to the office after telling them last year they could work remotely forever, Twitter ended its practice of giving a commuter subsidy to employees outside of California.

“What is the guidance for tweeps with children and other dependents who need to arrange childcare etc?” one employee asked in a Slack channel. “These are not arrangements that can realistically be changed at a moment’s notice, for example enrolling in daycare, hiring nannies, arranging managed care facilities, etc. This new policy seems designed to penalize parents, guardians, and other caregivers who may have designed their whole lives around full or partial remote work.”

No guidance was forthcoming, though.

III.

About six hours later, a lawyer on Twitter’s privacy team posted a rebuttal to Musk on the company’s Slack. “Twitter is a remote-first workplace, and has operated as such for years,” wrote the attorney, whose name Platformer is withholding to protect their privacy. “It is a fundamental change to our employment contracts to require a 40hr a week in-office requirement. I do not, personally, believe Twitter employees have an obligation to return to office. Certainly not on no notice at all.” 

We checked in with Vincent P. White, a labor lawyer in New York, who said if Twitter employees were promised remote work in their contracts, Musk’s order could constitute a breach of contract, and they’d have grounds to sue. But he doubted whether the contract language was that strong. “Simply calling a position remote isn’t necessarily enough to make it binding,” he said. 

In the internal note this morning, the Twitter lawyer offered another jolting bit of news: as Platformer was first to report, its chief privacy officer, Damien Kieran; its chief information security officer; Lea Kissner; and its chief compliance officer, Marianne Fogarty, had all resigned. 

As if that weren’t concerning enough, the lawyer reported that Twitter appeared poised to de-prioritize various privacy and safety considerations, likely in violation of a consent decree that the company has with the Federal Trade Commission. 

The Verge posted the entire note. The attorney wrote:

Elon has shown that his only priority with Twitter users is how to monetize them. I do not believe he cares about the human rights activists. the dissidents, our users in un-monetizable regions, and all the other users who have made Twitter the global town square you have all spent so long building, and we all love.

I have heard Alex Spiro (current head of Legal) say that Elon is willing to take on a huge amount of risk in relation to this company and its users, because “Elon puts rockets into space, he’s not afraid of the FTC.” I have heard another leader in the Legal department say that because of the tight SLA’s (of two weeks?!) between product inception > launch, Legal will “have to shift the burden to engineers” to self-certify compliance with FTC requirements and other laws. This will put huge amount of personal, professional and legal risk onto engineers: I anticipate that all of you will be pressured by management into pushing out changes that will likely lead to major incidents.

All of this is extremely dangerous for our users. Also, given that the FTC can (and will!) fine Twitter BILLIONS of dollars pursuant to the FTC Consent Order, extremely detrimental to Twitter’s longevity as a platform. Our users deserve so much better than this.

The attorney, who said they would be taking the remainder of the day off, ended with a link to Whistleblower Aid, and encouraged any employee who felt uncomfortable with what the Musk regime had asked them to do to call the FTC directly.

(Around 4PM, Musk emailed the staff to say “Twitter will do whatever it takes to adhere to both the letter and spirit of the FTC decree.”)

IV.

Just after lunchtime on the West Coast, Musk held an unannounced all-hands meeting with staff — his first as CEO. Musk had given employees just one hour’s notice; he arrived 15 minutes late.

Over the next hour Musk shared more bad news with the company. Depending on the length and severity of the recession, he said, the company could lose several billion dollars next year. He would not speculate how much runway Twitter had left. “Bankruptcy isn’t out of the question,” he said, as we were also first to report. 

Around that time, someone put a poll into Twitter’s Slack channel: “Is it too early for vodka?” the poll asked. (It was a little after 1PM PT.)

Musk also took a pugnacious tone with employees who questioned the wisdom of a forced return to the office. Speaking of the value of in-person work, he said: “If you can physically make it to an office and you don’t show up, resignation accepted.” 

Those last two words would loom larger in the hours afterward, when Roth tendered his resignations. So did John Debay, director of software engineering. That left massive holes in the product, trust and safety, and sales organizations, further increasing the difficulty for Musk as he attempts to retain and recruit advertisers.

That difficulty of growing the ad business had already been increased by Musk’s decision, against the advice of many employees on his team, to proceed with an ill-considered plan to make verification checkmarks available to anyone willing to pay $8 for a subscription to Twitter Blue.

The flaws in the plan were numerous, and obvious. Ever since the white-on-blue checkmark was introduced in 2009, it has signified that the account belongs to who it says it belongs to. The process has always been flawed, and was ripe for an overhaul, but at least the badge’s meaning has been clear.

Musk insisted on re-using that same checkmark, but applied no requirements to who could ask for one. As a result, like clockwork, as soon as the new program rolled out yesterday people began to abuse it. 

A fake but “verified” account for Eli Lilly tweeted: “We are excited to announce insulin is free now,” forcing the real Eli Lilly to respond that (alas) no it isn’t. A fake but “verified” basketball journalist tweeted falsely that the controversial player Kyrie Irving had been released. A fake but “verified” Canadian Broadcasting Company account appeared. 

There was also, inevitably, a fake but “verified” Tesla account, and you can probably guess the kind of thing it tweeted.

It wasn’t exactly mayhem — you can imagine worse uses of this technology — but at the very least it hinted of darker abuses to come. 

V. 

One of Musk’s other ideas, discussed during his Spaces event Wednesday, was to turn Twitter into a payments company.

“Now we can say like, OK, you’ve got a balance on your account, do you want to send money to someone else within Twitter?” Musk said, as transcribed by CNBC. “And maybe we pre-populate their account with and say, OK, we’re gonna give you 10 bucks, and you can send it anywhere within Twitter.”

The company has been working to make that a reality. On Nov. 4 the company named Esther Crawford, who has been leading the rollout of the new Blue, CEO of Twitter Payments, according to a screenshot viewed by Platformer. The company is currently seeking a money transmitter license in Washington, according to the message.

It seems likely that work will be hampered by Thursday’s exodus of employees. It’s difficult to imagine a the company launching a payments business without competent executives working on privacy, information security, compliance, and other functions that the company lost today. 

Platformer has also learned that much of the security governance risks and compliance team has left — leaving Twitter with few employees to gather documents and evidence should the FTC come calling.

On one hand, the situation is moving so quickly at Twitter that any predictions seem especially unwise. On the other, a real sense of doom began to pervade the timeline today, as some users began to ponder for the first time a world with a defunct or deserted Twitter. 

Musk’s whim-based approach to product development, his rapidly depleting executive ranks, and the very real likelihood of hundreds or even thousands of additional departures at the company in coming weeks threaten to leave Twitter a shadow of its former self. And much of the reason for that is Musk himself: the way he treated his employees and the product they built; the sage advice he ignored; the business fundamentals that he misunderstood. 

Musk’s takeover of the company had been so brutish and poorly planned that, we’re told, there was not even a proper handover of the company’s social accounts. As a result, having spent $44 billion to acquire Twitter, for his first week-plus of owning the company, Musk and his team were unable even to tweet from the @twitter account.

The team finally managed to access the account on Wednesday, sources tell us. But @twitter has been silent since October 13. 

And with the way things are going, people are beginning to contemplate a world in which Twitter at large goes silent as well.

 

[Serak The Preparer 3,431]

27 minutes ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

I think my favorite part of the timeline is the @Humble Beast’s of the world taking a premature victory lap (“finally we have a leader who will allow us to disseminate  our hate filled propaganda!) and then disappearing once it was clear their newly anointed hero had no fucking clue what he was doing.

I'd like to give an honorable mention to the @Ag with kids's and @Trey3216's of the world who were giddy with anticipation of the beatdown Elon was going to give Twitter during discovery.

[elfenix 34,332]

 

[elfenix 34,332]

58 minutes ago, Cheeseweasel said:

That's going to be impossible to prove, first of all. Second of all, this has been the argument from Social Media sites all along--they are not publishers & therefore are not liable for shit posted on their site.

 

well, section 240 gives them immunity from suit over what users have posted regardless of whether they are a publisher or not.  they are still liable for their own acts which is why the algorithm cases don't get 12(b)(6)'ed. 

[Trey3216 15,355]

6 minutes ago, Serak The Preparer said:

I'd like to give an honorable mention to the @Ag with kids's and @Trey3216's of the world who were giddy with anticipation of the beatdown Elon was going to give Twitter during discovery.

Maybe Elon is so convinced we're living in a simulation that he's trying to one up Sam Bankman-Fried. Twitter is a pile of shit for the most part.  It's the worst part of our society on steroids, and I thought ridding the bots would be a good thing.  

[Captainant 27,757]

7 minutes ago, elfenix said:

well, section 240 gives them immunity from suit over what users have posted regardless of whether they are a publisher or not.  they are still liable for their own acts which is why the algorithm cases don't get 12(b)(6)'ed. 

*section 230

[elfenix 34,332]

Just now, Captainant said:

*section 230

[NoName 16,396]

42 minutes ago, Firemans4Horn said:

 

here is a link if you don't have a NYT sub: https://archive.ph/BsfDr

[Chopper 17,245]

 

[NoName 16,396]

20 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

So bad, no one knew how to tweet from the company's official @Twitter account

 

https://www.platformer.news/p/inside-the-twitter-meltdown

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Everything went from bad to worse at Twitter on Thursday. Today let’s talk about a truly chaotic 24 hours at the company, and the mounting fears over what it means for the service that still serves as the heartbeat of the global news cycle.

I.

On Wednesday morning, amid mounting concerns from advertisers that the new Twitter would not prove to be a safe home for brands, Elon Musk held an hour-long Spaces call designed to reassure them. 

Joining Musk on the call were his head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, a seven-year veteran of the company who had served as a steady hand during a tumultuous transition; and Robin Wheeler, the company’s de facto head of sales, who had spent a decade selling ads for the company across several key roles.

On the call Musk performed his usual routine, offering a scattershot set of product announcements that were almost certainly news to the people who would soon be called upon to build them. Soon the timeline would comprise mostly tweets from paid subscribers, he said, with the rest relegated to a zone comparable to Gmail’s spam filter. The site would soon enable … longer video downloads? 

And, of course, Twitter would remain brand-safe: pressuring users to subscribe, he said, would (somehow) reduce the number of bots and spam on the site, making the service more welcoming to advertisers.

A day later, Roth was gone, the company’s new verification scheme had introduced a variety of serious new brand risks onto the platform, and a company that had already been battered by massive layoffs had lurched into a fresh crisis. 

So let’s talk about the events that set this crisis into motion.

II.

The dramatic unwinding of the company’s senior ranks began overnight, in the hours after Twitter’s new owner made his first official communication to the entire company.

The email came at 11:39 PM PT, long after most employees around the world had gone to bed. “Sorry that this is my first email to the whole company,” Musk began, “but there is no way to sugarcoat the message.”

The message: that Twitter’s future is “dire,” Musk wrote, an effect of a worsening economy and the company’s dependence on brand advertising. “Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn. We need roughly half of our revenue to be subscription.”

Musk linked to the Spaces he had held with Roth and Wheeler, and ended with a bombshell: every remaining Twitter employee was expected to return to their offices to work beginning Thursday. (“Obviously, if you are physically unable to travel to an office or have a critical personal obligation, then your absence is understandable,” he added.)

Seventeen minutes later, Musk followed up with a one-sentence email to the team labeled “Top Priority.” “Over the next few days,” he wrote, the absolute top priority is finding and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam.” 

Over the next few hours, Twitter employees began to wake up to the news. It had been paired with another change, announced elsewhere, in the company’s 2023 benefits package: the same day Twitter told employees to return to the office after telling them last year they could work remotely forever, Twitter ended its practice of giving a commuter subsidy to employees outside of California.

“What is the guidance for tweeps with children and other dependents who need to arrange childcare etc?” one employee asked in a Slack channel. “These are not arrangements that can realistically be changed at a moment’s notice, for example enrolling in daycare, hiring nannies, arranging managed care facilities, etc. This new policy seems designed to penalize parents, guardians, and other caregivers who may have designed their whole lives around full or partial remote work.”

No guidance was forthcoming, though.

III.

About six hours later, a lawyer on Twitter’s privacy team posted a rebuttal to Musk on the company’s Slack. “Twitter is a remote-first workplace, and has operated as such for years,” wrote the attorney, whose name Platformer is withholding to protect their privacy. “It is a fundamental change to our employment contracts to require a 40hr a week in-office requirement. I do not, personally, believe Twitter employees have an obligation to return to office. Certainly not on no notice at all.” 

We checked in with Vincent P. White, a labor lawyer in New York, who said if Twitter employees were promised remote work in their contracts, Musk’s order could constitute a breach of contract, and they’d have grounds to sue. But he doubted whether the contract language was that strong. “Simply calling a position remote isn’t necessarily enough to make it binding,” he said. 

In the internal note this morning, the Twitter lawyer offered another jolting bit of news: as Platformer was first to report, its chief privacy officer, Damien Kieran; its chief information security officer; Lea Kissner; and its chief compliance officer, Marianne Fogarty, had all resigned. 

As if that weren’t concerning enough, the lawyer reported that Twitter appeared poised to de-prioritize various privacy and safety considerations, likely in violation of a consent decree that the company has with the Federal Trade Commission. 

The Verge posted the entire note. The attorney wrote:

Elon has shown that his only priority with Twitter users is how to monetize them. I do not believe he cares about the human rights activists. the dissidents, our users in un-monetizable regions, and all the other users who have made Twitter the global town square you have all spent so long building, and we all love.

I have heard Alex Spiro (current head of Legal) say that Elon is willing to take on a huge amount of risk in relation to this company and its users, because “Elon puts rockets into space, he’s not afraid of the FTC.” I have heard another leader in the Legal department say that because of the tight SLA’s (of two weeks?!) between product inception > launch, Legal will “have to shift the burden to engineers” to self-certify compliance with FTC requirements and other laws. This will put huge amount of personal, professional and legal risk onto engineers: I anticipate that all of you will be pressured by management into pushing out changes that will likely lead to major incidents.

All of this is extremely dangerous for our users. Also, given that the FTC can (and will!) fine Twitter BILLIONS of dollars pursuant to the FTC Consent Order, extremely detrimental to Twitter’s longevity as a platform. Our users deserve so much better than this.

The attorney, who said they would be taking the remainder of the day off, ended with a link to Whistleblower Aid, and encouraged any employee who felt uncomfortable with what the Musk regime had asked them to do to call the FTC directly.

(Around 4PM, Musk emailed the staff to say “Twitter will do whatever it takes to adhere to both the letter and spirit of the FTC decree.”)

IV.

Just after lunchtime on the West Coast, Musk held an unannounced all-hands meeting with staff — his first as CEO. Musk had given employees just one hour’s notice; he arrived 15 minutes late.

Over the next hour Musk shared more bad news with the company. Depending on the length and severity of the recession, he said, the company could lose several billion dollars next year. He would not speculate how much runway Twitter had left. “Bankruptcy isn’t out of the question,” he said, as we were also first to report. 

Around that time, someone put a poll into Twitter’s Slack channel: “Is it too early for vodka?” the poll asked. (It was a little after 1PM PT.)

Musk also took a pugnacious tone with employees who questioned the wisdom of a forced return to the office. Speaking of the value of in-person work, he said: “If you can physically make it to an office and you don’t show up, resignation accepted.” 

Those last two words would loom larger in the hours afterward, when Roth tendered his resignations. So did John Debay, director of software engineering. That left massive holes in the product, trust and safety, and sales organizations, further increasing the difficulty for Musk as he attempts to retain and recruit advertisers.

That difficulty of growing the ad business had already been increased by Musk’s decision, against the advice of many employees on his team, to proceed with an ill-considered plan to make verification checkmarks available to anyone willing to pay $8 for a subscription to Twitter Blue.

The flaws in the plan were numerous, and obvious. Ever since the white-on-blue checkmark was introduced in 2009, it has signified that the account belongs to who it says it belongs to. The process has always been flawed, and was ripe for an overhaul, but at least the badge’s meaning has been clear.

Musk insisted on re-using that same checkmark, but applied no requirements to who could ask for one. As a result, like clockwork, as soon as the new program rolled out yesterday people began to abuse it. 

A fake but “verified” account for Eli Lilly tweeted: “We are excited to announce insulin is free now,” forcing the real Eli Lilly to respond that (alas) no it isn’t. A fake but “verified” basketball journalist tweeted falsely that the controversial player Kyrie Irving had been released. A fake but “verified” Canadian Broadcasting Company account appeared. 

There was also, inevitably, a fake but “verified” Tesla account, and you can probably guess the kind of thing it tweeted.

It wasn’t exactly mayhem — you can imagine worse uses of this technology — but at the very least it hinted of darker abuses to come. 

V. 

One of Musk’s other ideas, discussed during his Spaces event Wednesday, was to turn Twitter into a payments company.

“Now we can say like, OK, you’ve got a balance on your account, do you want to send money to someone else within Twitter?” Musk said, as transcribed by CNBC. “And maybe we pre-populate their account with and say, OK, we’re gonna give you 10 bucks, and you can send it anywhere within Twitter.”

The company has been working to make that a reality. On Nov. 4 the company named Esther Crawford, who has been leading the rollout of the new Blue, CEO of Twitter Payments, according to a screenshot viewed by Platformer. The company is currently seeking a money transmitter license in Washington, according to the message.

It seems likely that work will be hampered by Thursday’s exodus of employees. It’s difficult to imagine a the company launching a payments business without competent executives working on privacy, information security, compliance, and other functions that the company lost today. 

Platformer has also learned that much of the security governance risks and compliance team has left — leaving Twitter with few employees to gather documents and evidence should the FTC come calling.

On one hand, the situation is moving so quickly at Twitter that any predictions seem especially unwise. On the other, a real sense of doom began to pervade the timeline today, as some users began to ponder for the first time a world with a defunct or deserted Twitter. 

Musk’s whim-based approach to product development, his rapidly depleting executive ranks, and the very real likelihood of hundreds or even thousands of additional departures at the company in coming weeks threaten to leave Twitter a shadow of its former self. And much of the reason for that is Musk himself: the way he treated his employees and the product they built; the sage advice he ignored; the business fundamentals that he misunderstood. 

Musk’s takeover of the company had been so brutish and poorly planned that, we’re told, there was not even a proper handover of the company’s social accounts. As a result, having spent $44 billion to acquire Twitter, for his first week-plus of owning the company, Musk and his team were unable even to tweet from the @twitter account.

The team finally managed to access the account on Wednesday, sources tell us. But @twitter has been silent since October 13. 

And with the way things are going, people are beginning to contemplate a world in which Twitter at large goes silent as well.

 

this is a good read. this is also the most elon thing ever. if you can't be on time as CEO for a meeting you call that is your first all-hands on meeting, then it says a lot about what you think about the entire company's time.

or, you know, you could just schedule it ahead of time like any normal CEO of a company with more than like a 1000 employees spread across the entire world.

Quote

Just after lunchtime on the West Coast, Musk held an unannounced all-hands meeting with staff — his first as CEO. Musk had given employees just one hour’s notice; he arrived 15 minutes late.

 

[Pato del Muerto 52,583]

Hello, world. 
 

I don’t have a Twitter account and the only interaction I’ve ever had is clicking on imbedded tweets here to read threads and replies of interest via browser. 
 

is ignorance bliss in this case, or should I endeavor to understand what is going on here, as an important current event?

[G650 14,276]

I'd recommend it if nothing else for the lulz

[Chopper 17,245]

29 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Hello, world. 
 

I don’t have a Twitter account and the only interaction I’ve ever had is clicking on imbedded tweets here to read threads and replies of interest via browser. 
 

is ignorance bliss in this case, or should I endeavor to understand what is going on here, as an important current event?

I'd say ignorance is bliss at this point. No doubt the best moments that platform will ever see are far in the past. One exception is if you really want the lulz or to watch a car crash. The other exception is if you want to follow the high level blow-by-blow details of Ukraine kicking Russia's ass. But you can get that without an account. In fact unless you want to interact with people on twitter you don't need to an account, just go to anyone's twitter feed and use the search bar to search by topic or for a person.

[DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12,301]

Imagine spending $44 BILLION DOLLARS on a business without having an actual plan on how to run the business. THEN, absent an actual plan, you decide the best course of action is to blow the entire thing up.

What in the actual fuck is he thinking?

[Celery Man 20,996]

 

[G650 14,276]

14 minutes ago, Chopper said:

The other exception is if you want to follow the high level blow-by-blow details of Ukraine kicking Russia's ass.

Absolute highlight of this year on Twitter. Just keep up with guys like Mark Hertling, Illia Ponomarenko, Rob Lee, Phillips Obrien and a few others and it is a front row seat.

 

Honestly the only reason to have an account is to follow people easily in your feed.

 

Eta: Intel Crab is another fantastic OSINT guy. Like a 19 year old kid too

Edited November 11, 2022 by G650

[Francisco 2.0 32,426]

37 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Hello, world. 
 

I don’t have a Twitter account and the only interaction I’ve ever had is clicking on imbedded tweets here to read threads and replies of interest via browser. 
 

is ignorance bliss in this case, or should I endeavor to understand what is going on here, as an important current event?

 

I've had a twitter account since 2009 or so.  I've maybe tweeted a dozen times, and I've replied back to others maybe 100 times in those years.

Twitter is probably the greatest thing ever for breaking news (of all kinds), sports info, and some truly hilarious shit (ThreeYearLetterman, for example).   

Twitter is also probably one of the worst things ever, for other reasons. I hate to see its demise, and honestly Elon owning it and allowing it to continue as it was would have been fine.  However, he is intent to fuck it into something it was never envisioned to be (banking?).