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Tag: elon musk

  • New lawsuit claims Elon Musk’s Twitter owes more severance to former employees | CNN Business

    New lawsuit claims Elon Musk’s Twitter owes more severance to former employees | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    A former Twitter employee on Wednesday filed a new lawsuit against Twitter and its owner, Elon Musk, alleging that the company failed to provide the full amount of severance it had promised employees prior to mass layoffs last November.

    The lawsuit, which was filed in federal district court in California and seeks class action status, asks the court to order Musk and Twitter to pay the additional severance benefits allegedly owed to former employees, in an amount no less than $500 million.

    The complaint was brought on behalf of Courtney McMillian, a former human resources leader at Twitter who was part of the mass layoffs Musk conducted the week after he bought the company last year. It alleges that Twitter made repeated assurances to employees about its severance plan amid Musk’s takeover in an effort to retain workers. In particular, the complaint claims that Twitter had promised senior employees severance of six months of base pay plus one week for every year of service, in addition to other benefits. Instead, Musk’s Twitter provided laid off employees with a total of three months of pay, including the state and federally mandated notice periods.

    In response to a request for comment on the lawsuit, Twitter sent CNN an automated poop emoji.

    Musk has cut around 80% of Twitter’s staff from prior to the takeover in his nine months owning the company.

    The lawsuit is just the latest legal action brought against Twitter by former employees with severance-related claims. More than 1,500 former employees have filed arbitration claims, after Twitter pushed for anyone who had signed an arbitration agreement while working at the company to pursue their claims out of court.

    But Kate Mueting, a lawyer working on the suit, said that Wednesday’s case relies on a federal law, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, that the firm argues was exempt from Twitter’s arbitration agreement. That means that, if the suit is granted its request for class action status, former employees may be able to participate whether or not they signed the arbitration agreement.

    Twitter is also facing lawsuits from vendors, landlords and business partners who claim the company has failed to pay what they are owed, as well as music publishers who have alleged copyright infringement on the platform. A lawyer for the company last week also sent a letter threatening to sue Meta over its new rival platform, Threads.

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  • Jack Dorsey no longer thinks Elon Musk is the right person to run Twitter | CNN Business

    Jack Dorsey no longer thinks Elon Musk is the right person to run Twitter | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey backtracked Saturday on his earlier endorsement of Elon Musk as the right choice to lead the company, speaking out against the billionaire who, for the past six months, has led Twitter through a series of largely self-inflicted crises.

    Asked on Bluesky, Dorsey’s new Twitter-like social media venture, whether he believed Musk has been the best possible steward of Twitter, Dorsey said flatly: “No.”

    Dorsey added that Musk “should have walked away” from acquiring Twitter for $44 billion, and faulted Twitter’s board in hindsight for trying to compel Musk to follow through with the deal despite Musk’s attempts to back out of the purchase last year.

    “It all went south,” Dorsey said. “But it happened and all we can do now is build something to avoid that ever happening again.”

    Twitter, which has cut much of its public relations team under Musk, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Under Musk, Twitter has slashed most of its staff, suffered frequent service disruptions and made a number of controversial changes to its policies and features, including a recent decision to remove blue checks from VIP users who don’t pay to be verified.

    Dorsey’s reflections, outlined in Bluesky posts reviewed by CNN, highlight the Twitter founder’s growing disillusionment with Musk. They also come after numerous exchanges in recent months where Dorsey has publicly questioned some of Musk’s decision-making.

    A year ago, Dorsey was quick to heap praise on Musk. When Musk’s deal to purchase Twitter was first announced, Dorsey said that so long as Twitter had to be owned by a single person or company, “Elon is the singular solution I trust.”

    “I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness,” Dorsey proclaimed at the time.

    Dorsey also rolled over his more than 18 million shares in Twitter (a roughly 2.4% stake) into the new Musk-owned company as an equity investor, rather than receiving a cash payout, according to a securities filing after the deal was completed.

    Now, though, Dorsey appears to believe Musk was an imperfect choice. Confronted by criticism from other Bluesky users that Twitter could have gone in a different direction, Dorsey argued that there was nothing stopping someone else from outbidding Musk.

    “If Elon or anyone wanted to buy the company, all they had to do was name a price that the board felt was better than what the company could do independently,” he said. “This is true for every public company.”

    Asked whether he felt any responsibility for the role he played in the transaction, Dorsey, who served on Twitter’s board at the time, said he was not the only person who authorized the deal and that Twitter’s “only alternative” to Musk was an acquisition by “hedge funds and Wall Street activists.”

    “The company would have never survived as a public company,” Dorsey claimed, adding: “I wish it were different,” but that some of Twitter’s revenue initiatives prior to Musk’s takeover “would not have mattered given market turn.”

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  • ‘It’s an especially bad time’: Tech layoffs are hitting ethics and safety teams | CNN Business

    ‘It’s an especially bad time’: Tech layoffs are hitting ethics and safety teams | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, as online platforms began facing greater scrutiny for their impacts on users, elections and society, many tech firms started investing in safeguards.

    Big Tech companies brought on employees focused on election safety, misinformation and online extremism. Some also formed ethical AI teams and invested in oversight groups. These teams helped guide new safety features and policies. But over the past few months, large tech companies have slashed tens of thousands of jobs, and some of those same teams are seeing staff reductions.

    Twitter eliminated teams focused on security, public policy and human rights issues when Elon Musk took over last year. More recently, Twitch, a livestreaming platform owned by Amazon, laid off some employees focused on responsible AI and other trust and safety work, according to former employees and public social media posts. Microsoft cut a key team focused on ethical AI product development. And Facebook-parent Meta suggested that it might cut staff working in non-technical roles as part of its latest round of layoffs.

    Meta, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, hired “many leading experts in areas outside engineering.” Now, he said, the company will aim to return “to a more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles,” as part of cuts set to take place in the coming months.

    The wave of cuts has raised questions among some inside and outside the industry about Silicon Valley’s commitment to providing extensive guardrails and user protections at a time when content moderation and misinformation remain challenging problems to solve. Some point to Musk’s draconian cuts at Twitter as a pivot point for the industry.

    “Twitter making the first move provided cover for them,” said Katie Paul, director of the online safety research group the Tech Transparency Project. (Twitter, which also cut much of its public relations team, did not respond to a request for comment.)

    To complicate matters, these cuts come as tech giants are rapidly rolling out transformative new technologies like artificial intelligence and virtual reality — both of which have sparked concerns about their potential impacts on users.

    “They’re in a super, super tight race to the top for AI and I think they probably don’t want teams slowing them down,” said Jevin West, associate professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. But “it’s an especially bad time to be getting rid of these teams when we’re on the cusp of some pretty transformative, kind of scary technologies.”

    “If you had the ability to go back and place these teams at the advent of social media, we’d probably be a little bit better off,” West said. “We’re at a similar moment right now with generative AI and these chatbots.”

    When Musk laid off thousands of Twitter employees following his takeover last fall, it included staffers focused on everything from security and site reliability to public policy and human rights issues. Since then, former employees, including ex-head of site integrity Yoel Roth — not to mention users and outside experts — have expressed concerns that Twitter’s cuts could undermine its ability to handle content moderation.

    Months after Musk’s initial moves, some former employees at Twitch, another popular social platform, are now worried about the impacts recent layoffs there could have on its ability to combat hate speech and harassment and to address emerging concerns from AI.

    One former Twitch employee affected by the layoffs and who previously worked on safety issues said the company had recently boosted its outsourcing capacity for addressing reports of violative content.

    “With that outsourcing, I feel like they had this comfort level that they could cut some of the trust and safety team, but Twitch is very unique,” the former employee said. “It is truly live streaming, there is no post-production on uploads, so there is a ton of community engagement that needs to happen in real time.”

    Such outsourced teams, as well as automated technology that helps platforms enforce their rules, also aren’t as useful for proactive thinking about what a company’s safety policies should be.

    “You’re never going to stop having to be reactive to things, but we had started to really plan, move away from the reactive and really be much more proactive, and changing our policies out, making sure that they read better to our community,” the employee told CNN, citing efforts like the launch of Twitch’s online safety center and its Safety Advisory Council.

    Another former Twitch employee, who like the first spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of putting their severance at risk, told CNN that cutting back on responsible AI work, despite the fact that it wasn’t a direct revenue driver, could be bad for business in the long run.

    “Problems are going to come up, especially now that AI is becoming part of the mainstream conversation,” they said. “Safety, security and ethical issues are going to become more prevalent, so this is actually high time that companies should invest.”

    Twitch declined to comment for this story beyond its blog post announcing layoffs. In that post, Twitch noted that users rely on the company to “give you the tools you need to build your communities, stream your passions safely, and make money doing what you love” and that “we take this responsibility incredibly seriously.”

    Microsoft also raised some alarms earlier this month when it reportedly cut a key team focused on ethical AI product development as part of its mass layoffs. Former employees of the Microsoft team told The Verge that the Ethics and Society AI team was responsible for helping to translate the company’s responsible AI principles for employees developing products.

    In a statement to CNN, Microsoft said the team “played a key role” in developing its responsible AI policies and practices, adding that its efforts have been ongoing since 2017. The company stressed that even with the cuts, “we have hundreds of people working on these issues across the company, including net new, dedicated responsible AI teams that have since been established and grown significantly during this time.”

    Meta, maybe more than any other company, embodied the post-2016 shift toward greater safety measures and more thoughtful policies. It invested heavily in content moderation, public policy and an oversight board to weigh in on tricky content issues to address rising concerns about its platform.

    But Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that Meta will undergo a second round of layoffs is raising questions about the fate of some of that work. Zuckerberg hinted that non-technical roles would take a hit and said non-engineering experts help “build better products, but with many new teams it takes intentional focus to make sure our company remains primarily technologists.”

    Many of the cuts have yet to take place, meaning their impact, if any, may not be felt for months. And Zuckerberg said in his blog post announcing the layoffs that Meta “will make sure we continue to meet all our critical and legal obligations as we find ways to operate more efficiently.”

    Still, “if it’s claiming that they’re going to focus on technology, it would be great if they would be more transparent about what teams they are letting go of,” Paul said. “I suspect that there’s a lack of transparency, because it’s teams that deal with safety and security.”

    Meta declined to comment for this story or answer questions about the details of its cuts beyond pointing CNN to Zuckerberg’s blog post.

    Paul said Meta’s emphasis on technology won’t necessarily solve its ongoing issues. Research from the Tech Transparency Project last year found that Facebook’s technology created dozens of pages for terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda. According to the organization’s report, when a user listed a terrorist group on their profile or “checked in” to a terrorist group, a page for the group was automatically generated, although Facebook says it bans content from designated terrorist groups.

    “The technology that’s supposed to be removing this content is actually creating it,” Paul said.

    At the time the Tech Transparency Project report was published in September, Meta said in a comment that, “When these kinds of shell pages are auto-generated there is no owner or admin, and limited activity. As we said at the end of last year, we addressed an issue that auto-generated shell pages and we’re continuing to review.”

    In some cases, tech firms may feel emboldened to rethink investments in these teams by a lack of new laws. In the United States, lawmakers have imposed few new regulations, despite what West described as “a lot of political theater” in repeatedly calling out companies’ safety failures.

    Tech leaders may also be grappling with the fact that even as they built up their trust and safety teams in recent years, their reputation problems haven’t really abated.

    “All they keep getting is criticized,” said Katie Harbath, former director of public policy at Facebook who now runs tech consulting firm Anchor Change. “I’m not saying they should get a pat on the back … but there comes a point in time where I think Mark [Zuckerberg] and other CEOs are like, is this worth the investment?”

    While tech companies must balance their growth with the current economic conditions, Harbath said, “sometimes technologists think that they know the right things to do, they want to disrupt things, and aren’t always as open to hearing from outside voices who aren’t technologists.”

    “You need that right balance to make sure you’re not stifling innovation, but making sure that you’re aware of the implications of what it is that you’re building,” she said. “We won’t know until we see how things continue to operate moving forward, but my hope is that they at least continue to think about that.”

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  • Twitter’s own lawyers refute Elon Musk’s claim that the ‘Twitter Files’ exposed US government censorship | CNN Business

    Twitter’s own lawyers refute Elon Musk’s claim that the ‘Twitter Files’ exposed US government censorship | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    For months, Twitter owner Elon Musk and his allies have amplified baseless claims that the US government illegally coerced Twitter into censoring a 2020 New York Post article about Hunter Biden. The foundation for those claims rests on the so-called “Twitter Files,” a series of reports by a set of handpicked journalists who, at Musk’s discretion, were given selective access to historical company archives.

    Now, though, Twitter’s own lawyers are disputing those claims in a case involving former President Donald Trump — forcefully rejecting any suggestion that the Twitter Files show what Musk and many Republicans assert they contain.

    In a court filing last week, Twitter’s attorneys contested one of the most central allegations to emerge from the Twitter Files: that regular communications between the FBI and Twitter ahead of the 2020 election amounted to government coercion to censor content or, worse, that Twitter had become an actual arm of the US government.

    In tweets last year, Musk alleged that the communications showed a clear breach of the US constitution.

    “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?” he said of a screenshot purportedly showing Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020 asking Twitter to review several tweets it suggested were violations of the company’s terms. Some of the tweets in question included nonconsensual nude images that violated Twitter’s policies.

    In another push to promote misleading allegations of government malfeasance stemming from the Twitter Files, Musk also claimed that the “government paid Twitter millions of dollars to censor info from the public.”

    Legal experts have said the claim of a constitutional violation is weak because the First Amendment binds the government, not political campaigns, and Trump was president at the time, not Biden. The Twitter Files also show the Trump administration made its own requests for removal of Twitter content. And the payments to Twitter have also been identified as routine reimbursements for responding to subpoenas and investigations, not payments for content moderation decisions.

    “Nothing in the new materials shows any governmental actor compelling or even discussing any content-moderation action with respect to Trump” and others participating in the suit, Twitter argued.

    The communications unearthed as part of the Twitter Files do not show coercion, Twitter’s lawyers wrote, “because they do not contain a specific government demand to remove content—let alone one backed by the threat of government sanction.”

    “Instead,” the filing continued, the communications “show that the [FBI] issued general updates about their efforts to combat foreign interference in the 2020 election.”

    The evidence outlined by Twitter’s lawyers is consistent with public statements by former Twitter employees and the FBI, along with prior CNN analysis of the Twitter Files.

    Altogether, the filing by Musk’s own corporate lawyers represents a step-by-step refutation of some of the most explosive claims to come out of the Twitter Files and that in some cases have been promoted by Musk himself.

    Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Even as the filing undercuts Musk’s effort to portray the Twitter Files as a smoking gun, the filing may still work to his benefit because, if successful, it may save Twitter from a costly re-litigation of its handling of Trump’s account and others.

    The communications in question, some of which also came out in a deposition of an FBI agent in a separate case, were invoked last year as part of a bid to revive litigation over Twitter’s banning of Trump following the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol. The lawsuit had been dismissed last summer, after the federal judge overseeing the case said there was no evidence of a First Amendment violation.

    Musk’s release of company files has given lawyers for Trump and other plaintiffs in the case another shot. If the court decides the new evidence is enough to suspend the prior judgment, the lawyers for Trump and others said in May, then they might decide to file a fresh amended complaint.

    But Twitter argued last week that the judge should not allow the case to be reopened because nothing in the Twitter Files supports the already dismissed claim of federal coercion.

    Even the FBI’s flagging of specific problematic tweets were merely suggestions that they might violate Twitter’s terms of service, not a request that they be removed or an implication of retribution if Twitter failed to take the tweets down, Twitter’s lawyers said.

    Citing another case, Twitter wrote: “The FBI’s ‘flags’ cannot amount to coercion because there was ‘no intimation that Twitter would suffer adverse consequences if it refused.’”

    Twitter also objected to the claim, amplified by Musk, that Twitter was paid to censor conservative speech when it sought reimbursement for complying with government requests for user data.

    “The reimbursements were not for responding to requests to remove any accounts or content and thus are wholly irrelevant to Plaintiffs’ joint-action theory,” Twitter wrote.

    It added: “The new materials demonstrate only that Twitter exercised its statutory right—provided to all private actors—to seek reimbursement for time spent processing a government official’s legal requests for information under the Stored Communications Act. The payments therefore do not concern content moderation at all—let alone specific requests to take down content.”

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  • Twitter removes transgender protections from hateful conduct policy | CNN Business

    Twitter removes transgender protections from hateful conduct policy | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Twitter appears to have quietly rolled back a portion of its hateful conduct policy that included specific protections for transgender people.

    The policy previously stated that Twitter prohibits “targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” But the second line was removed earlier this month, according to archived versions of the page from the WayBack Machine.

    Twitter also removed a line from the policy detailing certain groups of people often subject to disproportionate abuse online, including “women, people of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual individuals, and marginalized and historically underrepresented communities.”

    The platform first introduced its policy prohibiting misgendering and deadnaming (referring to a person’s pre-transition name) of transgender people in 2018 as part of a broader overhaul of its hateful conduct policy.

    The change to the hateful conduct policy is one of a number of updates Twitter has made to its safety and content moderation practices since Elon Musk took over the company last fall. Twitter has also restored the accounts of users who had previously been banned for violating its rules, stopped enforcing its Covid-19 misinformation policy, allowed users to purchase blue verification checkmarks and applied controversial new labels to the accounts of several news organizations.

    LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD called out the hateful conduct policy change in a Tuesday statement.

    “Twitter’s decision to covertly roll back its longtime policy is the latest example of just how unsafe the company is for users and advertisers alike,” GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said. “This decision to roll back LGBTQ safety pulls Twitter even more out of step with TikTok, Pinterest, and Meta, which all maintain similar policies to protect their transgender users at a time when anti-transgender rhetoric online is leading to real world discrimination and violence.”

    Twitter did not respond to a request for comment about the change, although the platform did announce earlier this week some other updates to how it enforces its hateful conduct policy. The platform said it plans to start applying labels to some tweets that violate its hateful conduct policy and reduce their visibility, a similar practice to the one used under the company’s previous leadership, under which it either reduced the visibility of or removed violative tweets.

    “Restricting the reach of Tweets helps reduce binary ‘leave up versus take down’ content moderation decisions and supports our freedom of speech vs freedom of reach approach,” the company said in a tweet. Twitter also said it will not place ads next to content that has been labeled as violative.

    Musk has been in the process of trying to encourage advertisers to return to the platform, after many paused their spending over concerns about Musk’s policy changes, increased hate speech on the platform and massive cuts to the company’s workforce, threatening the company’s core business.

    The billionaire tried to assuage advertisers about Twitter’s approach to hateful conduct at a marketing conference Tuesday, saying, “If somebody has something hateful to say, it doesn’t mean you should give them a megaphone,” according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

    Musk has faced a number of criticisms from some in the transgender community, most notably from his transgender daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson. Last year, she petitioned a court in California to change her last name to that of of her mother, Justine Wilson, Musk’s ex-wife and mother of five of his seven children, because she no longer wanted to be related to her father “in any way, shape or form.”

    Musk has also had several tweets where he mocked the idea of use of people choosing the pronouns they want to apply to them. He had one tweet in December 2020, which he later deleted, that said “when you put he/him in your bio” alongside a drawing of an 18th century soldier rubbing blood on his face in front of a pile of dead bodies and wearing a cap that read “I love to oppress.”

    And this past December, a vocal critic of many Covid restrictions and protocols, Musk tweeted, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”

    But in other tweets, Musk has insisted he had no problems with transgender people, saying that his problem is with “all these pronouns” which he called an “esthetic nightmare.” He also pointed out that his auto company Tesla

    (TSLA)     has repeatedly scored a 100% rating from the Human Rights Campaign as being one of the “Best Places to Work for LGBTQ+ Equality.”

    — CNN’s Chris Isidore contributed to this report

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  • Twitter’s future is in doubt as Threads tops 100 million users | CNN Business

    Twitter’s future is in doubt as Threads tops 100 million users | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Twitter has weathered months, if not years, of mismanagement as well as mass layoffs, frequent service disruptions and an exodus of top advertisers, but the launch of a rival app from Meta could prove to be the final straw.

    Threads surpassed 100 million users this weekend, less than a week after it launched, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Monday, marking a staggering feat for any social network and one that puts it on pace to rapidly pass Twitter’s audience size.

    Meanwhile, multiple internet traffic analysts reported noticeable declines in Twitter usage in just the past few days. The results underscore the risk Meta poses to Twitter’s business and raise questions about how, or if, Twitter can stem its losses.

    Twitter traffic had already been trending downward for months, according to data from the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare and the web analytics firm Similarweb. But the pace of decline appears to have accelerated in recent days, both companies said, likely reflecting strong interest in Threads and a mass migration from the platform owned by Elon Musk to the one run by Zuckerberg.

    Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

    On Sunday, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince shared a chart showing Twitter’s popularity relative to other websites it tracks. “Twitter traffic tanking,” Prince said as he posted the chart.

    The chart showed that in January, Twitter was ranked 32nd on the list; the next month, it had fallen to 34th. For much of the spring, Twitter fluctuated between 35th place and 37th. But the beginning of July showed a rapid falloff in popularity, as Twitter plunged to 40th place. (Cloudflare defines popularity as the “size of a population of users that look up a domain per unit of time.”)

    Similarweb told CNN Monday it has witnessed comparable trends in Twitter traffic.

    “In the first two full days that Threads was generally available, [last] Thursday and Friday, web traffic to twitter.com was down 5% compared with the same days of the previous week and down 11% compared with July 6 and 7, 2022,” said David Carr, a senior insights manager at Similarweb. “We’ve been reporting for a while that Twitter is down compared with last year – June traffic was down 4% – but Threads seems to be taking a bigger bite out of it.”

    Bolstering the traffic reports were the anecdotal experiences of some Threads users. Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, said Saturday he ran an “unscientific test” of how the same post he shared on Twitter, Threads and Mastodon, another rival, performed with his audience over a 23-hour period.

    The identical content Stamos created on each platform saw significantly more engagement on Threads than on Twitter as measured by likes and replies — despite having a fraction of his usual reach on the newer platform, he said.

    Stamos, who has more than 100,000 followers on Twitter but only a tenth of that number on Threads, added that strong Threads engagement with his posts describing the “research” also supported the original findings. The quality of the replies to his posts were also much higher on non-Twitter platforms, he observed.

    “From my perspective, Twitter is done as a platform for serious tech conversations,” Stamos said, who previously was the chief security officer at Facebook.

    Fueling Threads’ rapid growth has been Meta’s use of Instagram as a springboard to sign up new users, along with what many Threads users have identified as a dissatisfaction with Twitter.

    Threads started out with a number of celebrity accounts prepopulating its platform but has since gained additional high-profile users including Kim Kardashian and Jeff Bezos. An account that had been banned from Twitter that tracks the movements of Musk’s private jet has also joined the new platform.

    More than 100 US lawmakers have signed up as well, Axios reported last week, though few world leaders appear to be on Threads at the moment.

    Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri have emphasized that Threads is about more than replacing Twitter and that the app seeks to tap audiences outside of Twitter’s traditional user base. That means Threads will not actively elevate news or political content, Mosseri said, describing those topics as “not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.”

    Over the weekend, Mosseri’s stance on news and politics triggered a debate over Threads’ approach to those topics. Some users praised it as a way to make the platform more accessible to average users, who may never have embraced Twitter before. Others argued that many of the topics Mosseri characterized as non-political, including music, fashion and entertainment, are their own source of news and can be inherently political.

    Even as Meta’s executives look to put some daylight between Threads and Twitter, the rapid rise of Threads only appears to have deepened Musk’s longtime feud with Zuckerberg. The app’s launch prompted threats of litigation as Twitter has accused Meta of trade secret theft, not to mention talk of a physical cage fight between Musk and Zuckerberg.

    On Sunday, Musk, who is known for erratic behavior and incendiary remarks, made it even more personal as he lobbed a sexual insult at Zuckerberg and proposed comparing the size of their respective genitalia.

    Zuckerberg has not directly responded to the insult. But after a Threads user pointed out that the new app was not featured in Twitter’s trending topics tab, Zuckerberg replied “Concerning” with a crying-laughter emoji. And he used the same emoji to reply to a post by the fast-food brand Wendy’s, which had suggested Zuckerberg should “go to space just to really make him mad lol.”

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  • 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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  • Whistleblower Discloses Shocking New Intel: Humans on Mars Since the 1930s Says Gaia.com

    Whistleblower Discloses Shocking New Intel: Humans on Mars Since the 1930s Says Gaia.com

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    President Obama, Boeing CEO and Elon Musk Are Competing to Place the First Human on Mars, But According to Leaked Intel by Whistleblower Corey Goode, They Lost The Space Race Decades Ago

    Press Release
    –

    Oct 13, 2016


    Richardson, Texas, October 13, 2016 (Newswire.com)
    –
    On Tues, Oct. 11th President Barack Obama wrote an Opinion Editorial via CNN.com announcing to the citizens of the United States that, “America has set a clear goal to send humans to Mars by the 2030s…we do what’s possible before anyone else.” The problem here is that during a Nov. 2015 video interview with Gaia.com, whistleblower Corey Goode from the US Secret Space Program (SSP) said, “There are humans already on Mars and it’s been colonized.” In Dec. 1986, Goode was recruited into SSP – UNSAP (Un-Acknowledged Special Access Programs) under Project Solar Warden. He was assigned to a research vessel in space to study the solar system from Dec. 1986 – Dec. 2007.

    President Obama and the US government join a heavy-hitter list of private-sector visionaries, such as Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg and Elon Musk (SpaceX), as they compete to make a historical dent in space. On Oct. 4th, according to Bloomberg Technology, Muilenburg said, “It’s my company that’s sending the first humans to Mars, not Musk. I’m convinced the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding a Boeing rocket.”

    “Mars was first visited by the Germans as far back as the 1930s, but during the 70s, US space programs were actively exploring Mars and other planets to establish bases.”

    Corey Goode , SSP Whistleblower

    “Mars was first visited by the Germans as far back as the 1930s, but during the 70s, US space programs were actively exploring Mars and other planets to establish bases. In 1980 the US SSP became – Solar Warden. Under Project Solar Warden, vast development and colonization occurred on Mars and other planets. Goode continues, “Bases on Mars were built under the surface.”

    Alongside New York Times best-selling author and researcher David Wilcock (“Ascension Mysteries”), Goode is co-host of Gaia’s successful original show: Cosmic Disclosure. With over 70 episodes and a viewership reaching over 68,000 per episode, the show reveals in-depth access to Goode’s astounding, yet controversial, revelations during his 20-year service.

    For more information on Corey Goode please visit: www.gaia.com/bio/corey-goode and www.spherebeingalliance.com  

    Source: Gaia.com

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