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Tag: elon musk

  • Elon Musk’s weekend antics could only further crumble Twitter’s brand value | CNN Business

    Elon Musk’s weekend antics could only further crumble Twitter’s brand value | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Under Elon Musk, Twitter has antagonized multiple major news organizations by labeling them state-funded media, appears to have eased restrictions on Russian government accounts and made crude jokes on the front of its headquarters and on Musk’s own Twitter display name.

    And that’s just this weekend.

    Musk’s antics, which only seem to have escalated this month, threaten to further erode Twitter’s brand value. For months, the company has struggled to retain advertisers and supplement its declining ad business — which previously comprised 90% of its annual revenue — by convincing users to pay up for its Twitter Blue subscription service.

    Musk, who is on the hook for large payments to lenders after buying the company for $44 billion, including with significant debt, must either coax hesitant advertisers back to the platform or boost its subscription business -— or both. But his recent erratic moves may only complicate those turnaround efforts.

    Late last week, Twitter faced backlash for labeling NPR as a “state-affiliated media” organization akin to foreign propaganda outlets such as Russia’s RT and Sputnik, in an apparent violation of its own policies. NPR CEO John Lansing called Twitter’s move “unacceptable,” and said the organization is “supported by millions of listeners.”

    Following the pushback, Twitter changed NPR’s label to “government funded media,” and applied the same designation to British broadcaster BBC over the weekend. Twitter has not given a definition for what it considers “government funded media,” but the BBC pushed back on the label, saying it is independent and “funded by the British public through the license fee.”

    The moves risk alienating some of the best-known media organizations in the world and undermining what has long been a key selling point for the platform: its role as a central hub for news. NPR, in particular, has not tweeted from its main account in nearly a week.

    While Twitter labeled some news accounts as state-funded, it also appears to have removed some restrictions on Russian government accounts that had been put in place following the outset of Russia’s war in Ukraine, again prompting outrage among some users.

    Musk commented on the decision in a tweet Sunday saying: “I’m told Putin called me a war criminal for helping Ukraine, so he’s not exactly my best friend. All news is to some degree propaganda. Let people decide for themselves.”

    Twitter, which laid off much of its media relations team last year, did not respond to a request for comment.

    The controversial moves come as Twitter continues to face significant business challenges. Analysis firm Similarweb last week reported that traffic to Twitter’s ad portal was down nearly 19% year-over-year in March. Many major advertisers have halted spending on Twitter since Musk’s takeover over concerns about increased hate speech on the platform and massive cuts to the company’s workforce.

    Musk has said Twitter is working to improve the platform’s ad targeting to increase value for advertisers. “But all the while there have been distractions,” said Scott Kessler, technology sector lead at research firm Third Bridge, adding that there are “significant questions about the direction that the company is going.” At the same time, online ad spending broadly has contracted over concerns about the economy.

    Against that backdrop, Musk’s Twitter has made several head-scratching announcements this month, some of which might only add to its challenges.

    Musk previously frustrated some of Twitter’s celebrity users, who have long been a key selling point for the platform, with a promise to remove blue checkmarks from accounts who had been verified under Twitter’s previous system. But it didn’t exactly go to plan — instead of removing checks from all previously verified users, Twitter appeared to target a single account belonging to the New York Times.

    Days later, Twitter’s home button was temporarily replaced with doge, the meme representing the cryptocurrency dogecoin, which Musk has promoted. The company also briefly restricted Twitter users from sharing links to a rival platform, upsetting users, including one who had previously reported the so-called Twitter files using documents provided by Musk.

    As if to underscore his unique and questionable impact on the brand, the “Chief Twit” has also apparently been keeping busy with changes to Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. Last week, photos began spreading of a piece of plastic covering the “w” in the sign on the front of the company’s office.

    At nearly midnight on Sunday, Musk tweeted that the company’s landlord “says we’re legally required to keep sign as Twitter & cannot remove ‘w,’ so we painted it background color,” alongside a photo of the “w” painted white against a white background, leaving a more asinine word in its place. “Problem solved!” Musk tweeted.

    If only the same could be said for the platform’s business troubles.

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  • With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. interview, Musk again uses Twitter to promote candidates aligned with his views | CNN Business

    With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. interview, Musk again uses Twitter to promote candidates aligned with his views | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Twitter owner Elon Musk has proposed hosting Twitter Spaces interviews with political candidates of all stripes, reflecting the billionaire’s supposed commitment to ideological neutrality and to promoting Twitter as a true “public square.”

    So far, however, Musk appears to be more interested in platforming candidates that align with his own views rather than those who might challenge them. On Monday, Musk is set to share an audio chatroom with Robert Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist and Democratic candidate for president.

    The decision to host Kennedy again highlights, for the second time in as many weeks, Musk’s unique potential to shape public opinion through a combination of his own personal celebrity and his private control of a social media megaphone. But this time, it also deepens doubts about Musk’s claims to open-mindedness — and his willingness to use Twitter as anything other than a tool for his own activism.

    Musk, who built much of his early reputation as an entrepreneur on a concern for ensuring humanity’s survival, has opposed the Covid-19 vaccine and spent much of the pandemic railing against Anthony Fauci, the government’s former top infectious disease expert. Musk has claimed as recently as January that he is “pro vaccines in general” but that they risk doing more harm than good “if administered to the whole population.”

    Medical experts widely agree that the broad application of vaccines helps prevent the spread of disease not only by making it less likely for an individual to get sick, but also by creating herd immunity at the societal level. In other words, part of the purpose of vaccines is to administer them as universally as possible so that even if one person falls ill, the infection cannot find other suitable hosts nearby.

    For years, Kennedy has pushed back on that consensus, including by invoking Nazi Germany in an anti-vaccine speech in Washington last year. Instagram shut down his account in 2021 for “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” though the company announced Sunday it has restored Kennedy’s account because he is now running for office. Instagram’s parent, Meta, has also banned accounts belonging to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine advocacy group.

    Kennedy has also attacked the closing of churches, social distancing and government track-and-trace surveillance. At the start of the pandemic, churches were closed and social distancing was enforced across the country to contain the spread of coronavirus, while the government used methods to track cases. (Musk, for his part, also objected to state lockdown orders earlier in the pandemic.)

    It’s unclear if Musk has reached out to other candidates. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    According to a CNN poll published last month, 60% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters say they back President Joe Biden for the top of next year’s Democratic ticket, 20% favor Kennedy and 8% back Williamson. Another 8% say they would support an unnamed “someone else.”

    With the national profile and visibility that comes with running for high office, Kennedy’s anti-vaccine ideology and vocal stances against prior Covid policies were already primed to become a topic of the 2024 presidential race. But by putting Kennedy center stage on Twitter, Musk appears poised to promote these views further to his millions of followers.

    Musk took a similar tack in sharing a stage with Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who announced his White House bid with Musk during a Twitter Spaces event last month plagued by technical glitches. Musk declined to endorse a candidate but has previously tweeted that he would support DeSantis if he ran for president.

    As Twitter’s owner, Musk has shared conspiracy theories and welcomed extreme voices back to the platform who had been suspended for violating Twitter’s rules in the past. He has also laid off more than 80% of Twitter’s staff, including many who had previously been responsible for content moderation.

    All of that, combined now with his direct association with Kennedy, could have significant ramifications both for Twitter as a platform and for Musk’s credibility.

    DeSantis at least has the plausible distinction of being a top challenger to former President Donald Trump. But as a marginal candidate who espouses debunked medical claims, Kennedy and his appearance with Musk could further cement the perception that Twitter actively mainstreams extremism.

    That could be the very thing that drives away more moderate candidates from accepting Musk’s “invitation” to appear alongside him.

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  • Twitter’s rebrand is the next stage in Elon Musk’s vision for the company. But does anyone want it? | CNN Business

    Twitter’s rebrand is the next stage in Elon Musk’s vision for the company. But does anyone want it? | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Elon Musk’s move over the weekend to rebrand Twitter and replace its iconic bird logo with an X is just the latest step in his effort to make over the billionaire’s longtime favorite platform in his image.

    When Musk bought Twitter late last year, he laid out a vision for an “everything” app called X, where users could communicate, shop, consume entertainment and more. Last June — prior to his takeover — Musk told Twitter employees that the platform should be more like China’s WeChat, where he said users “basically live on” the app because “it’s so usable and helpful to daily life.”

    The vision for the rebrand may go all the way back to Musk’s creation of the original X.com in 1999, which Musk hoped would be an all-in-one financial platform and which eventually became PayPal.

    Despite Musk’s longstanding ambitions — and the heightened stakes since he shelled out $44 billion to purchase the social network — ditching Twitter’s branding in service of a future super app is a significant risk.

    Twitter still has a long way to go if Musk wants to build out the kind of services WeChat is known for — everything from ordering groceries and booking yoga classes to paying bills and chatting with friends. And that’s not to mention the financial and competitive challenges the company faces merely existing in its current form, let alone launching a massive expansion. It’s also not clear how much demand there is for such a super app outside of China, given that efforts by other platforms to simply sell users on added shopping features have been slow to take off.

    “While Musk’s vision is to turn ‘X’ into an ‘everything app,’ this takes time, money, and people -— three things that the company no longer has,” Mike Proulx, research director and vice president at Forrester, said in an investor note. By ditching Twitter’s name, Proulx added, Musk “will have singlehandedly wiped out over fifteen years of a brand name that has secured its place in our cultural lexicon,” leaving him to start fresh at a precarious time for the company.

    The X branding has already started taking over Twitter.

    Musk — who bought Twitter with a company called X Corp. — tweeted on Sunday that X.com now redirects to Twitter. (Musk reportedly bought the X.com domain back from PayPal in 2017.)

    On Sunday night, the new stylized X logo was projected onto the company’s headquarters. And by Monday, the bird logo had been replaced by an X on Twitter’s website. Musk even told followers that tweets should instead be called “x’s.”

    On Sunday, CEO Linda Yaccarino seemed to confirm Musk’s vision for the company. “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity — centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities,” Yaccarino said in a tweet.

    Walter Isaacson, the legendary tech journalist who has been shadowing Musk to write his biography, tweeted on Sunday that Musk told him even before the Twitter acquisition that he wanted to use the social platform to fulfill his original, decades-old vision for X.com. “I am very excited about finally implementing X.com as it should have been done, using Twitter as an accelerant!” Musk texted Isaacson at 3:30 a.m. one morning last October, just ahead of his takeover, according to the writer.

    On Monday, Musk explained the move in a tweet saying, “The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.”

    “In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world,” Musk said. “The Twitter name does not make sense in that context.”

    (The rebrand also seems to be a continuation of a sort of obsession with the letter “X,” which also features in the name of one of Tesla’s cars, the Model X; the name of his rocket company, SpaceX; the name of his new artificial intelligence firm, xAI; and the name of two of his children, X Æ A-Xii and Exa Dark Sideræl.)

    In recent weeks, Twitter has quietly begun its effort to build out a payments business called Twitter Payments — the company was granted money transmitter licenses in four US states since last month, including Arizona and Michigan. Musk has discussed his desire to promote longer videos on Twitter. And he’s tried to shift Twitter’s business model away from advertising by allowing users to pay for verification, a strategy that has resulted in some chaos but only a limited number of actual subscriptions.

    Still, Musk faces obvious hurdles to turning Twitter into a fully-developed super app. Since acquiring Twitter, Musk has fired around 80% of its staff, scared away many of the advertisers that made up its core user base and frustrated many of its users with controversial policy decisions. And now, Twitter faces steep competition from Meta’s rival app Threads, which launched to stunning success, although its usage has petered off slightly in recent days.

    Musk last week also said that Twitter still has negative cash flow because of a 50% decline in ad revenue.

    Even if Musk does add new features to Twitter, many US tech platforms have struggled to succeed in imitating WeChat. Deloitte said in a report published last year that Western markets are unlikely to see “a single, dominant super-app like WeChat in the near term” because the services such apps would aim to bundle together, such as digital payments and ride hailing, already “have too many well-established players.”

    A 2019 effort by the social media giant then known as Facebook to create its own digital currency and payments system that the company said would make it easier to buy things online officially flopped last year following intense regulatory scrutiny. And both TikTok and Instagram have reportedly scaled back their ambitions to incorporate e-commerce onto their platforms after their shopping features failed to gain significant traction with users.

    And until Musk rolls out significant changes to the platform, observers of the company say ditching Twitter’s well-known brand is a risky move.

    “To rebrand without significant new features seems like a desperate attempt for attention,” especially in the wake of Meta’s launch of Threads, said Joshua White, assistant professor of finance at Vanderbilt University. “This is akin to buying Coke and changing the bottle and name without changing the formula — likely a mistake.”

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  • What the chaos at Twitter means for the future of social movements | CNN Business

    What the chaos at Twitter means for the future of social movements | CNN Business

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    Editor’s Note: The CNN Original Series “The 2010s” looks back at a turbulent era marked by extraordinary political and social upheaval. New episodes air at 9 p.m. ET/PT Sundays.



    CNN
     — 

    When thousands of Egyptians marched through the streets during the Arab Spring of 2011, they had a tool at their disposal that earlier social movements didn’t: Twitter.

    A key group of activists used the platform to form networks and organize protests against the authoritarian regime, while many more demonstrators used it to disseminate information and images from the ground for the rest of the world to see. Months later, organizers from the Occupy Wall Street movement took to Twitter to coordinate protests in New York and beyond.

    Twitter fostered public conversation around the Black Lives Matter movement after the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and again after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd. It amplified #MeToo in the aftermath of the sexual assault allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, and catapulted other revolutionary movements around the world to global attention.

    “You can’t underestimate the impact of Twitter to social movements,” Amara Enyia, manager of policy and research for the Movement for Black Lives, told CNN.

    Twitter has often been heralded as a democratizing force, bringing previously marginalized voices to the forefront and giving the public a platform to demand accountability from leaders. (It has also enabled the spread of misinformation, extremist ideas and abusive content.)

    But since Elon Musk acquired Twitter last year and the platform plunged into chaos, some organizers and digital media experts have been bracing for the impact that his controversial policy changes and mass layoffs may have on social movements going forward.

    Though Twitter has often been referred to as a public square, some of Musk’s recent moves challenge that description.

    Through Twitter, organizers and political groups have had a level of direct access to policymakers and leaders that wouldn’t have been possible in person, said Rachel Kuo, an assistant professor of media and cinema studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Verified activists were able to promote certain messages that the algorithm then pushed to the top of users’ feeds, organizers could launch campaigns that caught the attention of high-profile figures and the public could follow along for real-time updates.

    “There are now issues in how people see Twitter as a source of information and a source of political community,” said Kuo, whose research focuses on race, social movements and digital technologies. “It isn’t seen in the same way anymore.”

    Elon Musk's controversial policy changes at Twitter could have implications for social movements, some activists say.

    Musk upended traditional Twitter verification and turned it into a pay-for-play system, leading to the impersonation of government accounts and the spread of fake images. For organizers who opt not to pay the monthly subscription fee for a blue check, that also means a loss of credibility and visibility, Kuo added.

    Twitter, which has cut much of its public relations team under Musk, did not respond to a request for comment.

    Twitter’s role in information-sharing has been disrupted in other ways, too.

    The platform has been plagued by technical glitches after mass layoffs and departures at the company, frustrating many users. People have also reported that the “for you” timeline is showing them content they aren’t interested in.

    As a result of these issues and others, some are leaving Twitter altogether – more than 32 million users are projected to exit the platform in the two years following Musk’s takeover, according to a December 2022 forecast from the market research agency Insider Intelligence. (Twitter reported having 238 million monetizable daily active users last year before Musk acquired it.)

    With fewer people on Twitter, the platform becomes less centralized and the information landscape more fractured, said Sarah Aoun, a privacy and security researcher who works on cybersecurity for the Movement for Black Lives. That makes it harder for activists to connect, exchange tactics and build solidarity in the way they once did.

    Protesters in Cairo gather in Tahrir Square in November 2011.

    Musk’s approach to content moderation has also made Twitter a more hostile environment, Aoun said. Twitter has never been a completely safe space for marginalized voices – women, people of color, LGBTQ people and other vulnerable groups have long been targets of online harassment and abuse – but reports from the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Anti-Defamation League indicate an increase in hate speech on the platform under Musk’s leadership. (Musk has previously pushed back at that characterization by focusing on a different metric.)

    Some are also disillusioned over Musk’s decision to reinstate users who were previously suspended for violating the platform’s rules, including former President Donald Trump and GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

    “The lack of verification, the mass exodus, the inability to coordinate the way that we used to be able to coordinate and the content moderation (gutting) makes it a very difficult platform to be on at the moment,” Aoun said.

    Musk has stepped back as Twitter’s CEO, a role now held by former NBCUniversal marketing executive Linda Yaccarino. But he will maintain significant control over the platform as the company’s owner, executive chairman and chief technology officer.

    The changes at Twitter have prompted some activists and organizers to reassess their relationships with the platform.

    Rich Wallace, executive director of the Chicago-based organization Equity and Transformation (EAT), said that previously, he used to see robust engagement on tweets about social injustice or racial inequity, whether it was from those who agreed with him or didn’t. Now, he finds that substantive posts barely get traction as opposed to tweets he considers more mundane.

    Wallace said his organization, which seeks to build social and economic equity for Black workers in the informal economy, still shares information about community events on Twitter, but the potential to find new allies or engage in meaningful conversation on the platform is largely a thing of the past.

    Twitter is no longer a space for education and community building that it once was, Wallace said. It’s a shift in how he once viewed the platform, but he isn’t especially concerned. For his organization, it simply means a re-emphasis on the grassroots, in-person work they were already doing.

    People raise their fists in June 2020 as they protest the police killing of George Floyd.

    “As organizers, we’ve been creative in how we organize around barriers,” he said. “This is just one of the newer barriers that we have to assess and organize through.”

    As Kuo sees it, the ways that the changes at Twitter will affect organizing and activism will vary widely. Hyperlocal community organizers or those who work with populations that don’t speak English aren’t typically using Twitter in their day-to-day work, and so the recent shifts likely won’t affect them drastically. But she predicts that mid-to-large nonprofit organizations with communications staff might be rethinking their strategy on the platform.

    “It’s very dependent on organizational structure, form, strategies for change and political vision,” Kuo said.

    Enyia said that on a personal level, she finds that she’s engaging with people on Twitter less often and moreso using the platform to keep up with news. But in her advocacy work with the Movement for Black Lives, it remains an important tool.

    “For us, its utility is in the fact that it creates more access points to our policy platform, to the issues that we’re advocating on,” she said. “And in that regard, it’s still very, very useful.”

    When Musk first took over Twitter, some organizers and activists flocked to other alternatives, such as Mastodon or Bluesky (an app backed by Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey).

    Neither appears to be fulfilling the same purpose that Twitter once did, Aoun and others said. Mastodon and Bluesky are decentralized and fewer people are using them, making it more difficult to build community. And while their numbers are growing, they’re still far smaller than Twitter.

    The Bluesky app is seen on a phone and laptop in June 2023.

    In the case of Mastodon, there are privacy and security issues that concern some activists. Because the social network allows users to join different servers run by various groups and individuals, Aoun said “the privacy, security and content moderation is basically as good as the person behind the server.” Twitter – at least before Musk took over – had dedicated privacy and security teams, offering more transparency about how their systems worked.

    Some activists are using popular social networks such as Instagram and TikTok, but the visual nature of those platforms versus the text-based medium of Twitter changes how people are able to interact and engage with each other, Kuo said.

    Twitter has been an incredibly powerful tool for social movements, Enyia said. But ultimately, the platform is just that – a tool.

    “There is no panacea for just the nuts and bolts work that it takes to meet people, to engage people, to organize and talk to people,” Enyia said. “So even if we recognize that social media is a tool, we don’t put all of our eggs in that basket.”

    Social media platforms come and go, and the same could happen to Twitter. So while Enyia’s organization continues to use the platform for its own ends, it’s prepared for a reality in which Twitter is less relevant.

    “We have to stay on top of it to make sure that the tools are serving their purpose as it relates to our work,” Enyia said. “But then we have to be ready to evolve or to move on or to adapt to different tools when it becomes clear that that’s the direction we have to go.”

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  • Elon Musk says Twitter has ‘no actual choice’ about government censorship requests | CNN Business

    Elon Musk says Twitter has ‘no actual choice’ about government censorship requests | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Criticized for giving into governments’ censorship demands, Elon Musk on Sunday claimed that Twitter has “no actual choice” about complying those requests.

    The comment comes after Musk has previously called himself a “free speech absolutist” and said he wanted to buy Twitter to bolster users’ ability to speak freely on the platform. Shortly after agreeing to acquire Twitter, Musk explained his approach to free speech by saying: “Is someone you don’t like allowed to say something you don’t like? And if that is the case, then we have free speech.”

    He added at the time that Twitter would “be very reluctant to delete things” and “be very cautious with permanent bans,” and that the platform would aim to allow all legal speech.

    But Musk has faced blowback in recent weeks for appearing to cave to government censorship demands, including by removing some accounts and tweets at the behest of the government of Turkey ahead of the country’s elections (which the company later said it would attempt to fight in court). And in an interview with the BBC last month, Musk was asked about whether Twitter had removed a documentary about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the request of the Indian government, and said he didn’t know “what exactly happened.”

    Bloomberg columnist Matthew Yglesias on Sunday tweeted an article suggesting that Twitter has complied with a majority of government takedown requests since Musk took over as the platform’s owner. Musk replied: “Please point out where we had an actual choice and we will reverse it.”

    Musk has previously said the company would comply with laws governing social media companies around the world, although such laws in some cases appear to conflict with his free speech vision. Twitter did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

    In last month’s interview with the BBC, Musk said, “the rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict, and we can’t go beyond the laws of a country … If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we will comply with the laws.” At another point in the interview, Musk said: “If people of a given country are against a certain type of speech, they should talk to their elected representatives and pass a law to prevent it.”

    “By ‘free speech,’ I simply mean that which matches the law,” Musk said in a tweet last year about his vision for Twitter. “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.”

    In some countries, Twitter could risk substantial fines and other penalties — including, potentially, bans of the platform — for not complying with local laws.

    However, prior to Musk’s takeover, Twitter frequently fought government takedown requests in court, including from India and Turkey, in addition to publicly releasing detailed information about such requests and how it handled them. In many cases, Twitter led the charge among social media companies in protecting its users’ rights around the world.

    In last recent removal request report before Musk’s takeover, Twitter said it received more than 47,000 removal requests between July and December 2021, and complied with 51% of them. In many cases, when it did comply with a removal request because of a certain country’s laws, it removed the violating content only in that country, rather than globally.

    Musk was also criticized for backing down on his “free speech” vision when Twitter temporarily banned the accounts of several high-profile journalists in December, claiming that they had violated a new “doxxing” policy on the site. None of the banned journalists appeared to have shared Musk’s precise real-time location — the restrictions came after they reported on Twitter’s removal of an account that posts the updated location of Musk’s private jet.

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  • Meta could become even more dominant in social media with Threads | CNN Business

    Meta could become even more dominant in social media with Threads | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    In less than 48 hours, Meta’s Twitter rival Threads has surpassed 70 million sign-ups, upended the social media landscape and appears to have rattled Twitter enough that it is now threatening legal action against Meta.

    But even as users signed up for Threads in droves, with some clearly eager to flee the chaos of Elon Musk’s Twitter, the sudden success of Meta’s app could raise a new set of concerns.

    Meta has long been criticized for its market dominance, and for allegedly trying to choke off competition by copying and killing rival applications. Now, some competition experts and even some Threads users worry that if the new app’s traction continues, it may simply lead to the accumulation of even more power and dominance for Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

    “The prospect of total monopoly by Meta, yikes,” wrote one user. “It’s a real problem for society when a few dozen people and companies own every single thing so that no alternative paradigms can exist that they don’t co-opt from the cradle,” replied another.

    Twitter had always been much smaller than Meta’s platforms, but it had an outsized influence in tech, media and politics. As Twitter faltered under Musk, though, a cottage industry emerged of smaller apps trying to capture some of its magic. Now more than any of them, Meta seems best positioned to claim the crown.

    Threads’ blockbuster launch this week highlights the uncomfortable reality of the modern digital economy: To potentially beat some of the biggest players in the industry, you might have to be a giant yourself.

    The overnight success of Threads is a testament both to the dissatisfaction with Musk’s ownership of Twitter and to the unique power and reach of one of Meta’s most important properties: Instagram.

    Instagram has more than two billion users, far more than the 238 million users Twitter reported having in the months before Musk took over. When new users sign up for Threads, which they do using an Instagram account, the app prompts them to follow all of their existing Instagram contacts with a single tap. It’s optional, but is easy to accept, and it takes a conscious decision to decline.

    By promoting Threads through Instagram, and by sharing Instagram user data with Threads to let people instantly recreate their social networks, Meta has significantly greased the onboarding process. That frictionless experience has allowed Threads to leapfrog what’s known in the industry as the “cold start” problem, in which a new platform struggles to gain new users because there are no other users there to attract them.

    Thanks to the Instagram integration, “that biggest problem, the chicken-egg problem, has been solved from the jump,” Reddit co-founder and venture investor Alexis Ohanian said in a video Thursday (posted, naturally, on Threads).

    That Threads appeared to clear that hurdle easily, Ohanian said, makes him “bullish” on the new app.

    But that same innovation that made signing up so many users so quickly may raise competition concerns, particularly in Europe where new antitrust rules for digital platforms are set to go into effect in a matter of months.

    “From a competition perspective this can be problematic because Meta can use it to leverage its market power and raise barriers to entry, as other rivals would not have the customer base Meta has via Instagram,” said Agustin Reyna, director of legal and economic affairs at the Brussels-based consumer advocacy organization BEUC.

    Under the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), “digital gatekeepers” — a term that’s expected to cover Meta and/or its subsidiaries — will be prohibited from combining a user’s data from multiple platforms without consent, Reyna said. Another restriction forbids requiring users to sign up for one platform as a condition of using another.

    Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri appeared to acknowledge those issues this week in an interview with The Verge. Threads won’t be launching in the EU for now, he said, because of “complexities with complying with some of the laws coming into effect next year” — a statement The Verge suggested was a reference to the DMA.

    The DMA was passed specifically to deal with the antitrust concerns raised by large tech platforms. That Threads apparently cannot (yet) comply with rules designed to protect competition underscores uncertainty about the app’s potential competitive impact.

    Meta’s approach to Threads could also revive longstanding criticisms about the company’s alleged practice of copying and killing rivals, particularly as Twitter has warned Meta it may sue over claims of trade secret theft (an allegation Meta denies).

    The issue isn’t limited to the realm of social media. As the world races to develop artificial intelligence, Threads represents a huge new opportunity for Meta to gather training data for its own AI technology, in a way that could help it catch up to industry leaders such as OpenAI and Google. That could complicate any attempt at a comprehensive analysis of what Threads means for competition in tech.

    Part of what makes the debate so complicated is Threads’ seemingly very real threat to Twitter.

    If Threads puts pressure on Twitter to improve its service, that is a form of competition between apps, said Geoffrey Manne, founder of the Portland, Oregon-based International Center for Law and Economics.

    But, he added, if it leads to a concentration of power in the social media industry more broadly, it could mean a reduction in competition overall. It all depends on how you define the market.

    “I’m inclined to say it does both simultaneously, and the ultimate consequences aren’t so clear,” Manne said.

    Rather than viewing it through the lens of a social media market, one helpful way to look at the issue is from the perspective of the advertising market, he said. It’s possible that once Threads introduces advertising — which Zuckerberg has said won’t happen until the app has increased to significant scale — Threads simply reinforces Meta’s advertising market power, Manne said. That could lead to further antitrust scrutiny for Meta even if the question about competition in social media is ambiguous.

    Jeff Blattner, a former DOJ antitrust official, said it can only benefit consumers to have Threads as a rival to Twitter.

    “Two platforms run by maniac billionaires are better than one,” he wrote on Threads — though if Threads is so successful as to effectively knock out Twitter altogether, then in some ways the original question about Meta’s dominance will still stand.

    Threads has one thing going for it that may nip any competition concerns in the bud: A commitment to integrate with the same open protocols used by other distributed social media alternatives, such as Mastodon.

    That would give users the option to migrate their accounts, along with all their follower data intact, to a rival like Mastodon that isn’t controlled by Meta.

    While that interoperability isn’t available yet, Mosseri has repeatedly highlighted it as a priority on his to-do list.

    When and if it happens, that could be a significant step. What may appear now as an audience grab by Meta could someday wind up being how millions of people were onboarded to a massive, decentralized social networking infrastructure that is not controlled by any single company, individual or organization.

    “This is why we think interoperability requirements are so important,” said Charlotte Slaiman, a competition expert at the Washington-based consumer group Public Knowledge. If users could port their entire social graph from one rival to another whenever they wanted, she said, “we could have more fair competition based on the quality of the product, not just incumbency advantage.”

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  • TikTok brings in text posts to rival Elon Musk’s X | CNN Business

    TikTok brings in text posts to rival Elon Musk’s X | CNN Business

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    London
    CNN
     — 

    TikTok will now allow users to post text-only content for the first time in a challenge to Elon Musk’s beleaguered X, formerly known as Twitter.

    Announcing the new post format Monday, the video streaming platform said it would broaden “options for creators to share their ideas and express their creativity.”

    “With text posts, we’re expanding the boundaries of content creation for everyone on TikTok, giving the written creativity we’ve seen in comments, captions, and videos a dedicated space to shine,” the company said in a statement.

    Users are now able to share “stories, poems, recipes, and other written content,” which can be customized by adding sound, stickers and background colors, among other features.

    In perhaps the most direct challenge to the X platform, text posts on TikTok will allow users to tag other accounts and add hashtags that relate to trending topics.

    The latest move by TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, may prove to be another knock for Musk, whose takeover of X in October has resulted in mass layoffs, a huge drop in advertising revenue and controversial changes to the platform’s verification policy.

    Earlier this month, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, launched Threads, a rival social media site. Threads surpassed 100 million user sign-ups in its first week.

    Musk re-branded Twitter to X Monday, giving the platform a new website domain and logo.

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  • Musk’s Twitter promised a purge of blue check marks. Instead he singled out the New York Times | CNN Business

    Musk’s Twitter promised a purge of blue check marks. Instead he singled out the New York Times | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Some VIP Twitter users woke up on Saturday expecting to have lost their coveted blue verification check marks in a previously announced purge by Elon Musk. Instead, Twitter appeared to target a single account from a major publication Musk dislikes and changed the language on its site in a way that obscures why users are verified.

    Twitter had said it would “begin winding down” blue checks granted under its old verification system — which emphasized protecting high-profile users at risk of impersonation — on April 1. In order to stay verified, Musk said, users would have to pay $8 per month to join the platform’s Twitter Blue subscription service, which has allowed accounts to pay for verification since December.

    Most legacy blue check holders found this weekend that their verification marks had not disappeared, but rather had been appended with a new label reading: “This account is verified because it’s subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a legacy verified account.” The language, which shows up when users click on the check mark, makes it unclear whether verified accounts are actually notable individuals or simply users who have paid to join Twitter Blue.

    But one high-profile account did lose its blue check over the weekend: the main account for the New York Times, which had previously told CNN it would not pay for verification.

    After an account that often engages with Musk posted a meme this weekend about the Times declining to pay for verification, Musk responded in a tweet saying, “Oh ok, we’ll take it off then.” Musk then lashed out at the Times — just the latest instance of the billionaire slamming journalists or media outlets — in a series of tweets that claimed the outlet’s coverage is boring and “propaganda.”

    The weekend moves are just the latest example of Twitter creating confusion and whiplash for users over feature changes — and in this case, not just any users, but many of the most high-profile accounts that have long been a key selling point for the platform. It also highlights how Musk often appears to guide decisions about the platform more by whims than by policy.

    Although the New York Times’ main account lost its blue check, its other accounts, such as those for its arts, travel and books content, remained verified. After its blue check was removed, a spokesperson for the New York Times reiterated to CNN that it does not plan to pay for verification.

    Twitter, which laid off most of its public relations staff last fall, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Musk has been threatening to take away “legacy” blue check marks from users verified under Twitter’s old system since shortly after he bought Twitter last fall.

    In early November, Twitter launched the option for people paying for its Twitter Blue subscription service to receive blue checks. The program was quickly put on pause after being plagued by a wave of celebrity and corporate impersonators, and was relaunched in December.

    Twitter also rolled out a color-coded verification system with differently colored marks for companies and government entities, but Musk continued to say that individual users would eventually have to pay for blue checks.

    In the days leading up to the blue check purge that wasn’t, prominent users such as actor William Shatner and anti-bullying activist Monica Lewinksy pushed back against the idea that, as power users that draw attention to the site, they should have to pay for a feature that keeps them safe from impersonation.

    By muddying the reason accounts are verified, the new label could risk making it easier for people to scam or impersonate high-profile users. Experts in inauthentic behavior have also said it’s not clear that reserving verification for paid users will reduce the number of bots on the site, an issue Musk has raised on and off over the past year.

    Musk, for his part, has previously presented changes to Twitter’s verification system as a way of “treating everyone equally.”

    “There shouldn’t be a different standard for celebrities,” he said in a tweet last week. The paid feature could also drive revenue, which could help Musk, who is on the hook for significant debt after buying Twitter for $44 billion.

    Musk last week also said that starting on April 15, only verified accounts would be recommended in users’ “For You” feeds alongside the accounts they follow.

    –CNN’s Oliver Darcy contributed to this report.

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  • #TwitterDown: Thousands of users hit with ‘rate limit exceeded’ error message | CNN Business

    #TwitterDown: Thousands of users hit with ‘rate limit exceeded’ error message | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Thousands of Twitter users across several countries were unable to access the social media site, or faced difficulty and delays, Saturday.

    “Rate Limit Exceeded” and “#TwitterDown” are the two top trending topics on the app in the US, for those who have use of it. The former had over 40,000 tweets as of Saturday noon.

    Reports of outages began around 8 am EST, according to DownDetector, and shot up through the morning. As of noon EST, DownDetector showed more than 7,400 outage reports across the website.

    Users, including CNN journalists, flagged that their feeds weren’t loading and that they were met with an error message saying, “Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again.” Others reported errors saying the site cannot retrieve tweets.

    Hours after users began reporting the problems, billionaire owner Elon Musk tweeted that the site had applied temporary limits “to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.”

    Verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, he tweeted, while unverified accounts are limited to just 600. New unverified accounts are at 300 posts a day.

    Musk began offering a blue verification check mark for users who sign up for its Twitter Blue subscription service to grow revenue.

    Many expressed their frustration ith the connection problems. Other trending topics in the US included: “Wtf twitter” and “Thanks Elon.”

    Just yesterday, Twitter appeared to be restricting access to its platform for anyone not logged into an account. It was not clear whether the change was an intentional policy update or a glitch. Most of the reported problems Saturday were on the website, at 44%, followed by 39% of problems reported on the app.

    CNN has reached out to Twitter for comment, but the platform responded with an automated poop emoji.

    Twitter users faced similar wide-ranging service disruptions in March, one of the largest outages since Elon Musk took over. More than 8,000 users reported disruptions in that instance.

    Musk is trying to turn around the platform, which faced an exodus of advertisers, with the onboarding of a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino.

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  • Twitter’s former CEO has a new app that looks a lot like Twitter | CNN Business

    Twitter’s former CEO has a new app that looks a lot like Twitter | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    The buzzy new social media app of the moment looks so much like Twitter it’s almost hard to distinguish the two. The profiles, timelines and colors are nearly identical. Even the creator is the same.

    But under the hood, Bluesky, developed by Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, is vastly different.

    The app, which launched in a closed beta on iOS in February and on Android this month, runs on a decentralized network which provides users with more control over how the service is run, data is stored, and content is moderated.

    In recent days, it’s gained traction among journalists, politicians and celebrities, from Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to model Chrissy Teigan and the 90s band Eve 6.

    Here’s what you should know:

    Bluesky calls itself “a new social network for microblogging.” With the app, users can post and follow short updates on a timeline, just as they would on Twitter, though with some differences. There are currently no hashtags – a central feature on Twitter – and no direct messages.

    Bluesky was formed independently of Twitter while Dorsey was serving as CEO but it was funded by the company until it became an independent organization in February 2022. In a tweet introducing the idea in 2019, Dorsey said it also plans to “build an open community around it, inclusive of companies & organizations, researchers, civil society leaders,” but warned “this isn’t going to happen overnight.”

    In a tweet last year, Dorsey said the “biggest issue and my biggest regret is that [Twitter] became a company.” He later clarified that if a service was a protocol it “can’t be owned by a state, or company.”

    If the idea of a decentralized social network sounds familiar, it’s likely because of Mastodon, another Twitter alternative that also gained attention late last year.

    Like Mastodon, Bluesky appeals to a number of Twitter users who are frustrated with the direction of the platform under owner Elon Musk. In the six months since Musk took over Twitter, he has made a number of controversial changes to its features and policies, including the removal of blue check marks from prominent users.

    Some of the same high-profile users now testing out Bluesky have also been openly critical of Musk’s moves at Twitter.

    According to data.ai, the company formerly known as App Annie, Bluesky has been downloaded more than 375,000 times from the Apple App Store and the waitlist continues to be flooded with signup requests. On the Google Play Store, Bluesky is described as having been downloaded more than 100,000 times. (By comparison, Twitter reported having more than 200 million monetizable daily active users last year before Musk completed his acquisition.)

    Bluesky did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    It’s unclear if Bluesky has staying power or will lose steam as Mastodon did. But Mark Bartholomew, a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law who writes about online privacy, said the early shift toward Bluesky is a positive one, as it gives social media users more choice over where they spend their time.

    “Competition might actually help users find the product features they want, like greater privacy protection, portability, and more significant content moderation,” he said. “Social media platforms have features that users dislike but they still feel like they must accept them to just be in the online space where everyone else is.”

    All it took, he said, was Musk taking steps “to sabotage his own platform.”

    For now, Bluesky is invite-only as it ramps up support for the implementation of its network. Existing users get one invite code to share with someone for every two weeks they’re on the app. Not surprisingly, the sense of exclusivity has only added to the excitement of joining Bluesky.

    As Eve 6 wrote on Twitter: “Bluesky invite codes are the new blue check.”

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  • Six months into Elon Musk’s Twitter: The fall of verification and birth of Twitter Blue in one very long chart | CNN Business

    Six months into Elon Musk’s Twitter: The fall of verification and birth of Twitter Blue in one very long chart | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    In the six months since Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter, the billionaire has turned the platform on its head by overhauling how it decides which accounts to verify.

    Once given out to authenticate a limited number of accounts from celebrities, government agencies and media organizations, the coveted check mark is now available for purchase through the company’s subscription service, Twitter Blue. The result: more checks and more confusion.

    There were at least 550,000 Twitter Blue subscribers as of April 23, just days after Musk stripped all users of legacy blue checks, according to estimates provided to CNN by Travis Brown, a Berlin-based software developer. By comparison, more than 400,000 accounts were verified with the legacy blue checks before the purge.

    But with Musk gifting some celebrities with the service, it’s unclear how many are actually paying customers. It’s also unclear how much more Twitter can grow subscriptions, which Musk has made central to his plan to boost Twitter’s revenue.

    The change to Twitter’s verification process is just one of many ways Musk has shaken the company’s core after taking the helm of Twitter in October. He eliminated over 80% of its staff and reshaped the site’s policies, drawing criticism for the impact these moves could have on safety and transparency. Many top advertisers have left the platform, and Musk valued it last month at around $20 billion, less than half of what he paid for it.

    But one of Musk’s boldest and biggest changes has been Twitter Blue. Touted as the successor to the old verification system, the subscription model lets anyone pay $8 per month for a blue badge and other features, like prioritized rankings in conversations and search.

    The blowback has been swift. Twitter Blue has stoked chaos and confusion. The program was initially paused only days after its launch when an account impersonating pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Company tweeted “insulin is free now,” causing the stock to nosedive.

    More recently, the purge of blue checks has led to a cultural change on the platform. Once a sought-after status symbol, many users find the blue badge is no longer cool. Last week, after the blue check began popping up on famous accounts, celebrities such as Lil Nas X and Chrissy Teigen vehemently denied paying for the service.

    Here’s a look back at the rise and fall of Twitter’s blue badge:

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  • The man behind ChatGPT is about to have his moment on Capitol Hill | CNN Business

    The man behind ChatGPT is about to have his moment on Capitol Hill | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    For a few months in 2017, there were rumors that Sam Altman was planning to run for governor of California. Instead, he kept his day job as one of Silicon Valley’s most influential investors and entrepreneurs.

    But now, Altman is about to make a different kind of political debut.

    Altman, the CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company behind viral chatbot ChatGPT and image generator Dall-E, is set to testify before Congress on Tuesday. His appearance is part of a Senate subcommittee hearing on the risks artificial intelligence poses for society, and what safeguards are needed for the technology.

    House lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are also expected to hold a dinner with Altman on Monday night, according to multiple reports. Dozens of lawmakers are said to be planning to attend, with one Republican lawmaker describing it as part of the process for Congress to assess “the extraordinary potential and unprecedented threat that artificial intelligence presents to humanity.”

    Earlier this month, Altman was one of several tech CEOs to meet with Vice President Kamala Harris and, briefly, President Joe Biden as part of the White House’s efforts to emphasize the importance of ethical and responsible AI development.

    The hearing and meetings come as ChatGPT has sparked a new arms race over AI. A growing list of tech companies have deployed new AI tools in recent months, with the potential to change how we work, shop and interact with each other. But these same tools have also drawn criticism from some of tech’s biggest names for their potential to disrupt millions of jobs, spread misinformation and perpetuate biases.

    As the CEO of OpenAI, Altman, perhaps more than any other single figure, has come to serve as a face for a new crop of AI products that can generate images and texts in response to user prompts. This week’s hearing may only cement his stature as a central player in AI’s rapid growth – and also add to scrutiny of him and his company.

    Those who know Altman have described him as a brilliant thinker, someone who makes prescient bets and has even been called “a startup Yoda.” In interviews this year, Altman has presented himself as someone who is mindful of the risks posed by AI and even “a little bit scared” of the technology. He and his company have pledged to move forward responsibly.

    “If anyone knows where this is going, it’s Sam,” Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, wrote in a post about Altman for the latter’s inclusion this year on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people. “But Sam also knows that he doesn’t have all the answers. He often says, ‘What do you think? Maybe I’m wrong?’ Thank God someone with so much power has so much humility.”

    Others want Altman and OpenAI to move more cautiously. Elon Musk, who helped found OpenAI before breaking from the group, joined dozens of tech leaders, professors and researchers in signing a letter calling for artificial intelligence labs like OpenAI to stop the training of the most powerful AI systems for at least six months, citing “profound risks to society and humanity.”

    Altman has said he agreed with parts of the letter. “I think moving with caution and an increasing rigor for safety issues is really important,” Altman said at an event last month. “The letter I don’t think was the optimal way to address it.”

    OpenAI declined to make anyone available for an interview for this story.

    The success of ChatGPT may have brought Altman greater public attention, but he has been a well-known figure in Silicon Valley for years.

    Prior to cofounding OpenAI with Musk in 2015, Altman, a Missouri native, studied computer science at Stanford University, only to drop out to launch Loopt, an app that helped users share their locations with friends and get coupons for nearby businesses.

    In 2005, Loopt was part of the first batch of companies at Y Combinator, a prestigious tech accelerator. Paul Graham, who co-founded Y Combinator, later described Altman as “a very unusual guy.”

    “Within about three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking ‘Ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19,’” Graham wrote in a post in 2006.

    Loopt was acquired in 2012 for about $43 million. Two years later, Altman took over from Graham as president of Y Combinator. The position allowed Altman to connect him with numerous powerful figures in the tech industry. He remained at the helm of the accelerator until 2019.

    Margaret O’Mara, a tech historian and professor at the University of Washington, told CNN that Altman “has long been admired as a thoughtful, significant guy and in the remarkably small number of powerful people who are kind of at the top of tech and have a lot of sway.”

    During the Trump administration, Altman gained new attention as a vocal critic of the president. It was against that backdrop that he was rumored to be considering a run for California governor.

    Rather than running, however, Altman instead looked to back candidates who aligned with his values, which include lower cost of living, clean energy and taking 10% off the defense budget to give to research and development of future technology.

    Altman continues to push for some of these goals through his work in the private sector. He invested in Helion, a fusion research company that inked a deal with Microsoft last week to sell clean energy to the tech giant by 2028.

    Altman has also been a proponent of the idea of a universal basic income and has suggested that AI could one day help fulfill that goal by generating so much wealth it could be redistributed back to the public.

    As Graham told The New Yorker about Altman in 2016, “I think his goal is to make the whole future.”

    When launching OpenAI, Musk and Altman’s original mission was to get ahead of the fear that AI could harm people and society.

    “We discussed what is the best thing we can do to ensure the future is good?” Musk told the New York Times about a conversation with Altman and others before launching the company. “We could sit on the sidelines or we can encourage regulatory oversight, or we could participate with the right structure with people who care deeply about developing A.I. in a way that is safe and is beneficial to humanity.”

    In an interview at the launch of OpenAI, Altman explained the company as his way of trying to steer the path of AI technology. “I sleep better knowing I can have some influence now,” he said.

    If there’s one thing AI enthusiasts and critics can agree on right now, it may be that Altman clearly has succeeded in having some influence over the rapidly evolving technology.

    Less than six months after the release of ChatGPT, it has become a household name, almost synonymous with AI itself. CEOs are using it to draft emails. Realtors are using it to write iistings and draft legal documents. The tool has passed exams from law and business schools – and been used to help some students cheat. And OpenAI recently released a more powerful version of the technology underpinning ChatGPT.

    Tech giants like Google and Facebook are now racing to catch up. Similar generative AI technology is quickly finding its way into productivity and search tools used by billions of people.

    A future that once seemed very far off now feels right around the corner, whether society is ready for it or not. Altman himself has professed not to be sure about how it will turn out.

    O’Mara said she believes Altman fits into “the techno-optimist school of thought that has been dominant in the Valley for a very long time,” which she describes as “the idea that we can devise technology that can indeed make the world a better place.”

    While Altman’s cautious remarks about AI may sound at odds with that way of thinking, O’Mara argues it may be an “extension” of it. In essence, she said, it’s related to “the idea that technology is transformative and can be transformative in a positive way but also has so much capacity to do so much that it actually could be dangerous.”

    And if AI should somehow help bring about the end of society as we know it, Altman may be more prepared than most to adapt.

    “I prep for survival,” he said in a 2016 profile of him in the New Yorker, noting several possible disaster scenarios, including “A.I. that attacks us.”

    “I try not to think about it too much,” Altman said. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”

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  • First on CNN: A new group of Twitter vendors is suing the company for alleged unpaid bills | CNN Business

    First on CNN: A new group of Twitter vendors is suing the company for alleged unpaid bills | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    A group of Twitter vendors on Tuesday filed a proposed class action lawsuit alleging that the company has failed to pay tens of thousands of dollars in overdue bills.

    The four firms — captioning services company White Coat Captioning, consulting group YES Consulting and public relations firms Cancomm and Dialogue México — allege that Twitter is in breach of their contracts and has yet to pay bills ranging from around $40,000 to $140,000 for services they provided the company last year.

    Tuesday’s lawsuit, which was filed in California Northern District Court and first reported by CNN, refers to the companies suing Twitter as “small businesses without the resources, time, and money to litigate these claims on their own.”

    The lawsuit comes as new Twitter owner Elon Musk attempts to slash costs after buying the company for $44 billion, a significant amount of which came from debt financing. It also adds to the growing list of legal actions Twitter is facing from landlords, business partners and former employees claiming the company has failed to pay what they are owed since Musk’s takeover.

    Twitter is also facing lawsuits from at least one landlord claiming it has missed rent payments, a private jet company for unpaid bills for executive flights and an event production company who said Twitter failed to pay it after canceling the “Chirp Conference” it had been set to organize in November after Musk took over the company.

    The latest suit was filed by Shannon Liss-Riordan, who has also filed four proposed class action lawsuits and hundreds of arbitration demands on behalf of Twitter employees laid off following Musk’s takeover in pursuit of additional severance they allege they were promised by the company prior to Musk’s takeover. Some former workers have also alleged sex and disability discrimination and other issues, which the company has argued in court are without merit.

    Twitter has moved to dismiss many of the lawsuits in court. Twitter, which fired much of its media relations team last fall, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the new lawsuit.

    “Elon Musk told Twitter vendors that, if they want to get paid, then sue,” Liss-Riordan said in a statement to CNN, referring to comments reportedly made by the Twitter owner. “Well, he’s now getting his wish. Businesses, like employees, should not have to sue to get paid what they are owed.”

    In the new lawsuit, White Coat Captioning said it provided real-time captioning services for events and classes for Twitter employees who were hard of hearing or spoke languages other than English. The company alleged that it began contacting Twitter in November about overdue and pending invoices for services rendered under a contract signed in March 2022.

    “Twitter reassured White Coat Captioning it had processed and would pay these invoices, but it never did,” the firm alleged in the complaint. In January, the firm claims that Twitter said it was conducting an “additional review” of the invoices. Twitter owes the captioning company around $42,000, according to the complaint.

    YES Consulting, which said it provided leadership training to Twitter employees per an agreement signed in March 2022, alleges that Twitter owes it approximately $49,000 for services provided between August and November last year.

    Latin American public relations firm Dialogue also alleges that Twitter has failed to pay approximately $140,000 for eight invoices for services provided in November and December of last year.

    The vendors are seeking damages in the amount each company is allegedly owed by Twitter, as well as interest.

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  • Elon Musk says he’s found a new CEO for Twitter | CNN Business

    Elon Musk says he’s found a new CEO for Twitter | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Elon Musk on Thursday said he’s found a new CEO to take over Twitter, months after he first promised to step back from the role.

    The new CEO will assume the role at Twitter Inc., which recently changed its name to X Corp., in the coming weeks, Musk said. He did not provide a name.

    “Excited to announce that I’ve a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!” Musk said in a tweet.

    Musk, who has had a chaotic reign as “Chief Twit” since buying the company in October, said he will become Twitter’s executive chair and chief technology officer, overseeing product, software and system operations.

    In December, Musk ran a poll on the platform asking users whether he should step back as Twitter’s CEO, which ended with the majority of users voting in the affirmative. Musk said he would abide by the results of the poll but later backtracked, saying he would hand over the role “as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” In February, he reiterated that he planned to find a replacement by the end of the year.

    Musk has faced criticism for a series of policy changes at Twitter, which often came without clear justification and raised concerns about the impact on Twitter’s users.

    He has also been attempting to convince advertisers to rejoin the platform, after many fled over concerns about hateful conduct on the platform, Twitter’s mass layoffs or questions about the company’s future. At the same time, he has been trying to sell users on a new paid subscription platform that includes the ability to pay for a blue verification check mark, but appears to have limited traction so far.

    Musk — who runs or is involved in numerous other companies, including Tesla

    (TSLA)     — has also faced criticism from Tesla

    (TSLA)     shareholders concerned that he is distracted by Twitter.

    Musk recently said that Twitter is now “trending to breakeven,” after previously saying it was at risk of bankruptcy. Now, the company’s new CEO will be tasked with trying to help turn around the struggling company and help Musk recoup some of the $44 billion spent acquiring the platform.

    Even as Musk prepares to step back from the CEO role, he will likely maintain significant control over the future direction of the company. After taking over the company in October, Musk cleared out the C-Suite, dissolved the board and became both the CEO and sole director of the platform.

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  • A new CEO won’t fix Twitter’s biggest problem | CNN Business

    A new CEO won’t fix Twitter’s biggest problem | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    During his six months as Twitter’s CEO and owner, Elon Musk decimated its ad business, alienated some news publications and VIP users, and plunged the platform into a constant state of chaos.

    Now, a new chief executive will be tasked with trying to turn things around.

    Musk announced on Friday that he would in the coming weeks hand the CEO role over to Linda Yaccarino, a longtime media executive and former chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal. Yaccarino has said little publicly so far, beyond noting her excitement to “transform this business together.”

    Twitter is in desperate need of stability from a leader. And Yaccarino brings the ad industry chops that Twitter sorely needs to lure back top advertisers and boost its business after a turbulent period. But she may struggle to address Twitter’s biggest problem: Elon Musk.

    Although Musk is handing off the CEO title — and, perhaps, trying to shed some of the accountability that comes with it — the billionaire remains firmly in charge of the company as its owner and executive chair. Musk will still be in the C-Suite as Twitter’s chief technology officer. And he continues to be Twitter’s most-followed user, meaning his controversial statements to his nearly 140 million followers could still create headaches for the company.

    In tech, the CEO is often the public face of the brand. But Musk will almost certainly continue to fill that role, with or without the title, likely to Twitter’s detriment.

    Just this week, Musk drew backlash for baselessly attacking billionaire George Soros, a frequent target for antisemitic conspiracy theories, saying the financier “hates humanity.” Musk’s Twitter also faced criticism in recent days for removing some tweets and accounts at the behest of Turkey’s government amid the country’s election; the company later said it would object to the removal requests in court.

    On Tuesday, Musk said he “didn’t care” if his controversial tweets drew the ire of Twitter advertisers or Tesla shareholders. “I’ll say what I want to say, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it,” Musk said in an interview with CNBC.

    “The question is: can she help balance [Musk]?” said Tim Hubbard, management professor at University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. He added that top ad buyers are more likely to take calls from Yaccarino than from Musk, who has previously said he hates advertising.

    But “the big problem with Twitter right now is, they’re on a pathway that turns advertisers off, turns users off,” Hubbard said. “Unless there are fundamental changes at Twitter, I don’t think [the leadership change] is going to have the immediate effect that Elon is hoping it will have.”

    Twitter did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

    The Musk issue was on full display at NBCU’s ad upfront this week, which was held shortly after Yaccarino resigned from the company following rumors of her appointment as Twitter’s CEO. On stage at the event, which aimed to promote NBCU’s platforms to advertisers, a talking bear sang to audience members: “Twitter may seem like the place to begin, but Twitter just let all the crazies back in.”

    Even if Musk pulls back on his tweeting, a feat he seems constitutionally incapable of achieving, it will be no easy task for Yaccarino to revive Twitter’s advertising business — let alone expand it.

    Many major advertisers left the platform following Musk’s takeover over concerns about an uptick of hate speech, frustrations over layoffs of much of the company’s ad and safety teams and general uncertainty about the platform’s future. Just 43% of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers as of September, the month before Musk’s takeover, were still advertising on the platform as of last month, according to data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

    But for many, leaving Twitter may not have been a particularly difficult call.

    Even in the best of times, Twitter was an also-ran in the digital ad space compared to tech giants like Meta and Google, with a smaller user base and less sophisticated ad targeting technology. And Musk’s takeover came as many advertisers have pulled back their digital ad spending across the board during a precarious moment for the economy. That could only add to the difficulty Yaccarino will face in shoring up Twitter’s business.

    Musk, for his part, has been attempting to supplement, and potentially largely replace, Twitter’s ad business with subscriptions, but it appears that only a tiny fraction of Twitter users have bought in. The selection of Yaccarino suggests a recognition on his part that the company he bet $44 billion on will continue to be reliant on ad sales for the foreseeable future.

    It’s unclear how much freedom Yaccarino will have to hire additional staff to support her likely remit to revive advertising on Twitter after Musk laid off around 80% of the company’s staff last year. And even if she is able to hire, top talent may be wary of joining Twitter after Musk upended the company’s culture and reportedly rolled back benefits like work-from-home and extended parental leave.

    “Personnel is going to be a huge challenge for her … if tech workers are looking for a stable working environment, they will probably stay away from Twitter,” Hubbard said.

    But Musk’s ongoing influence remains the biggest potential hurdle.

    Musk has said he will oversee product, technology and software and systems operations, while Yaccarino will focus on business operations. The announcement has left open the question of whether Musk will remain in charge of controversial policy decisions, many of which — including allowing users to buy blue verification checks and restoring the accounts of rule violators, including white supremacists — have threatened Twitter’s popularity with users and advertisers.

    “Cleaning up Twitter requires reversing Musk’s dangerous policy decisions, reinvesting in content moderation and enforcement, and restructuring the platform’s governance,” Jessica Gonzalez, co-CEO of media watchdog Free Press who helped found the #StopToxicTwitter campaign encouraging advertisers to avoid the platform, said in a statement.

    “Musk is setting future CEO Linda Yaccarino up to fail — as long as he continues to make the platform toxic, it will be impossible to lure back advertisers and users,” she said.”

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  • Elon Musk says Tesla is coming to India ‘as soon as humanly possible’ | CNN Business

    Elon Musk says Tesla is coming to India ‘as soon as humanly possible’ | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Tuesday the company is looking to invest in India “as soon as humanly possible,” following a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New York.

    “[Modi] really cares about India because he’s pushing us to make significant investments in India, which is something we intend to do. We are just trying to figure out the right timing,” Musk told reporters.

    “I am confident that Tesla will be in India and will do so as soon as humanly possible,” he said, without specifying a timeline. Musk said he tentatively plans to visit India next year.

    Musk’s push into the Indian market has been in the works for a long time. Back in 2017, the CEO said that Tesla

    (TSLA)     was planning to sell cars in India as soon as that summer.

    But that plan has been delayed because of Tesla’s efforts to negotiate lower import duties with local government. Musk tweeted in 2021 that Tesla wanted to enter India, “but import duties are the highest in the world by far of any large country.”

    Tesla had sought to slash the duties, but the Indian government reportedly wants the company to make cars locally before considering any tax breaks, according to Reuters.

    On Tuesday, Musk said he had a “fantastic meeting” with the Modi and feels “incredibly excited about the future of India.”

    “[Modi] really wants to do the right thing for India. He wants to be open, he wants to be supportive to the companies. And obviously, at the same time, make sure that it accrues to India’s advantage,” Musk said.

    Tesla currently has one gigafactory in Asia, which is located in Shanghai. The Shanghai factory is Tesla’s biggest car manufacturing plant outside the United States and accounted for more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries in 2022.

    Last month, Musk said at an event that the company would likely pick a location for a new Tesla factory by the end of the year and that India was an interesting option, Reuters reported at the time.

    Both China and India have been trying to attract global EV investment and boost the EV industry.

    On Wednesday, China announced it would extend tax breaks for consumers buying new energy vehicles — which include battery electric cars, plug-in hybrids, and fuel-cell vehicles — through 2027, in its latest effort to boost sales and production in the world’s biggest EV market. The current policy allows purchase tax exemption on NEVs until the end of 2023.

    The tax break is estimated to reach 520 billion yuan ($72.3 billion) from 2024 to 2027, said Xu Hongcai, vice minister of finance, at a press conference in Beijing on Wednesday.

    The move follows a State Council meeting earlier this month, during which senior officials said they would study policies to promote NEV development and optimize tax exemption.

    From May 30 to June 1, Musk made his first visit to China since the pandemic and met a string of government officials to discuss EV development and Tesla’s operations in the country.

    He also visited the Shanghai gigafactory, thanking the workers and saying that they make the “highest quality” Tesla cars around the world, with the “most efficient production.”

    Before leaving, Musk also met Chen Jining, the Communist Party chief of Shanghai, who encouraged him to boost investment and operations and “bring more new products, new technologies and new services” to the city, according to a statement by the government.

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  • Elon Musk rebrands Twitter as X | CNN Business

    Elon Musk rebrands Twitter as X | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    In a radical rebranding, Twitter owner Elon Musk has replaced Twitter’s iconic bird logo with X.

    Musk made the shock announcement of his plans early Sunday. By Monday morning US time, he tweeted that X.com now points to Twitter.com.

    “Interim X logo goes live later today,” he wrote, shortly before sharing a photo of Twitter’s headquarters lit up by a giant new X.

    The Twitter website now features the same logo, while the familiar blue bird is gone.

    Previously, Musk said he was bidding “adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”

    Twitter

    (TWTR)    , founded in 2006, has used its vivid, globally recognized blue bird emblem for more than a decade.

    The renaming could be seen as something of a brand overhaul “Hail Mary” for the company: Musk in recent months has repeatedly warned that Twitter, facing steep losses in ad revenue, was on the edge of bankruptcy.

    Increasing the pressure, earlier this month rival social media platform Threads launched from Facebook

    (FB)     parent Meta. It surpassed 100 million user sign-ups in its first week.

    Twitter had 238 million active users prior to being taken private by Musk in October 2022.

    One of the world’s richest men, Musk was once best known for his innovative efforts through companies SpaceX and Tesla

    (TSLA)     to launch rockets and build electric cars.

    Now, many of the headlines he makes are for his eccentric remarks on his personal Twitter account – often sharing conspiracy theories and getting into public spats on the social media platform.

    Musk overhauled the site after acquiring it for $44 billion in late October, then followed with mass layoffs, disputes over millions of dollars allegedly owed in severance and Musk’s note to employees that remaining at the company would mean “working long hours at high intensity.” He wrote: “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”

    The upheaval prompted organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, Free Press and GLAAD, to pressure brands to rethink advertising on Twitter.

    The groups pointed to the mass layoffs as a key factor in their thinking, citing fears that Musk’s cuts would make Twitter’s election-integrity policies effectively unenforceable, even if they technically remain active.

    Musk also began overseeing controversial policy changes which led to frequent service disruptions at Twitter and upended his own reputation in the process.

    In June, Musk named Linda Yaccarino, a former NBCUniversal marketing executive, CEO of the company.

    She commented on the name change on Twitter Sunday afternoon: “It’s an exceptionally rare thing – in life or in business – that you get a second chance to make another big impression. Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square.”

    As the new venture begins, it faces challenges. Musk recently disclosed that the platform still has a negative cash flow due to a 50% drop in advertising revenue and heavy debt loads.

    Criticizing the exit, or pause, of such Twitter advertisers as General Mills

    (GIS)    , Macy’s

    (M)     and some car companies that compete with Tesla, Musk has called himself a “free speech absolutist” and said he wanted to buy Twitter to bolster users’ ability to speak freely on the platform.

    Musk explained his approach to free speech by saying: “Is someone you don’t like allowed to say something you don’t like? And if that is the case, then we have free speech.”

    He added that Twitter would “be very reluctant to delete things” and that the platform would aim to allow all legal speech. Many users have worried that could mean a rise in hate speech.

    Meanwhile, the initial frenzy around rival Threads appears to have come back to earth, especially as it has been plagued with spam and lacks several user-friendly features Twitter, or, now X, offers.

    Adam Mosseri, who is overseeing the Threads launch for Meta, has hinted at plans to add features such as a desktop version of the app, a feed of only accounts a user follows and an edit button.

    Its ability to draw advertising support is, as yet, unproven.

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  • Pay $84 a year for Twitter Blue or lose your checkmark beginning April 1, Twitter says | CNN Business

    Pay $84 a year for Twitter Blue or lose your checkmark beginning April 1, Twitter says | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Twitter’s free blue “verified” checkmarks for notable users may finally be coming to an end.

    Ever since Elon Musk took control of the company in October, he’s been threatening to remove the “legacy” checkmarks that confirmed the identities of users like government officials, corporations, journalists, celebrities and other high-profile tweeters.

    Now Musk may follow through: “On April 1st, we will begin winding down our legacy verified program and removing legacy verified checkmarks,” the company wrote in a tweet Thursday.

    A caveat, however: Twitter says this policy will go into effect starting on April Fool’s Day. Musk in particular has been known for April 1 trolling, including in 2018 when he falsely tweeted that his electric vehicle company Tesla

    (TSLA)     had gone bankrupt.

    “To keep your blue checkmark on Twitter, individuals can sign up for Twitter Blue,” the company’s tweet continued.

    Twitter Blue is a subscription service that Musk relaunched late last year that costs individuals $84 a year or $8 a month. Charging fees provides a revenue stream for Twitter — and a needed one, as Twitter currently collects virtually all of its revenue from advertisers, who have been fleeing the social media platform since he took over.

    Charging for Twitter verification provides both additional revenue to Twitter and a way for Musk to show his disdain for government agencies, journalists and others. Yet building a replacement for the legacy verification program has proved to be fraught.

    Twitter Blue first launched in the pre-Musk days of 2021, as a subscription service offering “power features” like undoing a tweet and saving bookmarks to folders. Musk relaunched the program in November 2022, including a blue checkmark in the features for paying users.

    Immediately the program was flooded with users who paid for counterfeit accounts pretending to be users such as former President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, LeBron James and Nintendo.

    Before being suspended, the impostor Nintendo account tweeted an image of video game character Mario giving the viewer the middle finger. The LeBron James account falsely claimed the athlete had requested a trade. The fake Trump account tweeted, “This is why Elon Musk’s plan doesn’t work.”

    Musk pulled the Twitter Blue program for a few weeks and relaunched it yet again in December, with additional steps for reviewing and approving subscribers. Beyond the checkmark, Blue also lets paying users edit a tweet up to 5 times within 30 minutes, create tweets up to 4,000 characters long and post HD videos.

    The company also says Twitter Blue users will see 50% fewer ads in their home timelines, and that their tweets will be prioritized among replies, mentions and searches.

    For companies and other organizations, Twitter Blue costs $1,000 a month for the main account and $50 a month for each additional related account.

    – CNN’s Brian Fung contributed to this report.

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  • Twitter loses its top content moderation official at a key moment | CNN Business

    Twitter loses its top content moderation official at a key moment | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Twitter has lost its top content moderation official just weeks before the company is set to undergo a regulatory stress test by European Union officials focused on its handling of user content, in the latest sign of turbulence at the company under owner Elon Musk.

    On Thursday, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, told Reuters she had left the company. Irwin has not addressed the reasons for her departure, but the move coincided with the company’s content moderation dispute with the Daily Wire, a conservative outlet.

    The dispute focused on the forthcoming release of a self-described documentary, “What Is a Woman?” that Twitter warned would be labeled as “hateful content” due to two instances of misgendering, according to Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing. Musk intervened later Thursday, calling the content moderation decision “a mistake by many people at Twitter” and that the video would be “definitely allowed.”

    Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Irwin’s departure.

    But the sudden and unexpected vacancy at Twitter could leave the company without a key content moderation official at a sensitive moment. Later this month at Twitter’s San Francisco offices, EU officials are set to review whether the platform is likely to be compliant with a sweeping content moderation law that could eventually trigger millions of dollars in fines for Twitter if it’s found to be noncompliant.

    That law, known as the Digital Services Act, will require so-called “very large online platforms” including Twitter to abide by tough content moderation standards by as early as August. It’s far from clear whether the company can meet those requirements by the deadline, and recent developments at Twitter seem to have further alarmed EU regulators in that respect.

    For months, as Musk has increasingly welcomed more incendiary speech onto the platform Twitter had previously restricted, EU officials have been reminding Twitter of its content moderation obligations under the DSA. The warnings have also come amid mass layoffs at the company that have eliminated entire teams, including much of its content moderation staff.

    Last month, Twitter pulled out of the European Union’s code of conduct on disinformation, a series of voluntary commitments to combat mis- and disinformation that the EU has said would be considered as part of any evaluation of a platform’s compliance with the overall Digital Services Act (DSA).

    Although Twitter said it was “committed to fully complying with the Digital Services Act” and would meet its DSA obligations with respect to misinformation “in a manner that reflects Twitter’s unique service,” the company told EU officials “we feel we have no alternative” but to withdraw from the code.

    The announcement prompted swift backlash from Thierry Breton, a top EU commissioner and digital regulator, who appeared to regard Twitter’s decision as an attempt to evade responsibility.

    “Obligations remain,” Breton said. “You can run but you can’t hide.”

    Irwin’s departure could undercut the EU’s confidence further. Without a trust and safety head who would otherwise be expected to attend the EU stress test, Twitter’s ability to effectively respond to the evaluation may be constrained. A spokesperson for the European Commission didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

    On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Twitter’s head of brand safety and ad quality also departed the company this week.

    All of this could be problematic for Twitter and Musk in the long run – and could also create an added headache for Linda Yaccarino just as she takes over as the company’s new CEO.

    Companies that fail to abide by the DSA risk fines of up to 6% of their global annual revenue. For Twitter, which is already struggling to regain its financial footing amid significant debt and an advertiser backlash, that’s a cost it can ill afford.

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  • Twitter accused of failing to pay millions in employee bonuses after Musk takeover | CNN Business

    Twitter accused of failing to pay millions in employee bonuses after Musk takeover | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Twitter failed to pay out annual bonuses to staff after its acquisition by billionaire Elon Musk despite repeated assurances from executives in the lead-up to the deal closing that the company would do so, according to a new lawsuit filed on behalf of employees.

    The lawsuit was filed in a San Francisco federal court on Tuesday by Mark Schobinger, who was a senior director of compensation at Twitter until he left the company late last month. The suit is seeking class action status for former and current Twitter employees who did not receive their 2022 bonus.

    “We estimate about a couple thousand employees would have been eligible for the bonuses,” Shannon Liss-Riordan, the attorney representing Schobinger, said in a statement to CNN. “While I don’t have an exact number, we expect the amount owed is in the tens of millions.”

    Twitter, which has cut much of is public relations team, did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

    The complaint states that after it was announced that Musk was acquiring the social media company last April, “many employees raised concerns” over the fate of “their compensation and annual bonus” if and when the deal closed.

    In the months leading up to Musk completing his acquisition of Twitter, company executives repeatedly promised employees that 2022 bonuses would be paid out at 50% of the target, according to the complaint. “The promise was repeated following Musk’s acquisition,” the complaint said.

    Despite the promises, however, Twitter has yet to pay out bonuses, the lawsuit says. Schobinger left the company last month following “Twitter’s reneging on various promises it had made to employees, including its failure to pay promised bonuses,” according to the complaint.

    The lawsuit is the latest in a string of legal actions taken by former Twitter employees after Musk’s acquired the company and slashed 80% of the staff in an urgent bid to cut costs.

    Liss-Riordan previously brought multiple proposed class action suits against Twitter, including on behalf of female employees and disabled employees. Another suit was filed by a group of former employees who accused Twitter of breach of contract because it allegedly failed to follow through on promises to allow remote work and provide consistent severance benefits after the acquisition.

    Twitter has denied the breach of contract allegations in the lawsuit brought by former employees about remote work and severance. The proposed class action suits on behalf of female and disabled employees were dismissed by federal judges last month. The suits were later refiled.

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