Rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, returned to Twitter on Sunday, writing “Testing Testing Seeing if my Twitter is unblocked.” Twitter confirmed last month that West had been locked out of his account “due to a violation of Twitter’s policies,”
While Twitter did not specify which policies West had broken, he posted on Oct. 9 “death [sic] con 3″ on Jewish people.” In the tweet — which has since been removed — West also wrote, “The funny thing is I actually can’t be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also.”
West was also restricted by Instagram earlier this month, posting on Parler, the right-leaning social network, that he was “kicked off Instagram for 30 days.” He said the restriction due to a comment he made about Jewish people to Russell Simmons, the co-founder of Def Jam Records and Phat Farm, a clothing line. His Instagram account is still viewable.
West’s return to Twitter comes less than 24 hours after the platform’s new owner, Elon Musk, said he had reinstated several other suspended accounts, including former President Donald Trump. Musk created a Twitter poll asking users if Trump should be reinstated and then posted on Saturday night, “The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.” Trump’s Twitter page, which has not appeared since Jan. 8, 2021, after the attack on the U.S. Capitol two days earlier, was then restored to the platform.
Donald Trump’s Twitter account has been reinstated, after “Chief Twit” Elon Musk dropped a 24-hour poll on Friday asking if the former president should be let back onto the platform.
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Trump’s account reinstatement is the latest in a series of controversial decisions made by the new Twitter owner to shakeup the platform. The former president’s last tweet was on January 8, 2021, when he was banned when Twitter said his tweets incited violence, after the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
Musk reported that roughly 1 million people were voting every hour on the poll. Shortly before the poll closed, the Twitter owner said 134 million people had seen the poll.
Perhaps as the poll demonstrated, Twitter users are divided over Trump’s Twitter renaissance.
Molly Jong-Fast wrote: “Elon way overpaid for this platform. He has decided that controversy (and the traffic from that controversy) will save his investment. That’s why he’s allowing trump back on the platform. Elon also loves trumps people.”
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Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, co-hosts of the podcast “Pivot,” discuss Elon Musk’s decision to reinstate the account of former President Donald Trump, who was suspended after the Jan. 6 attack.
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With his decision on Saturday to restore the personal Twitter account of former President Donald Trump nearly two years after it was permanently banned, Elon Musk could plunge Twitter deeper into chaos — and that may be the point.
In the weeks since Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, the influential social network has shed so much staff that users and employees have raised concerns about its ability to continue operating. It has also suffered a “massive drop in revenue,” according to Musk, as a growing number of brands pause advertising amid uncertainty about the direction and stability of the platform.
Trump’s return won’t help either issue.
The company’s servers are “being put through quite the stress test by @elonmusk right now,” tweeted Sriram Krishnan, a general partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz and former Twitter employee who is working with Musk to manage the company. (He also noted Trump’s return comes a day before the World Cup is set to kick off, a high-traffic event for the platform.)
Also on Saturday, NAACP president Derrick Johnson sent an urgent warning to companies still doing business with Twitter: “Any advertiser still funding Twitter should immediately pause all advertising.”
Some advertisers had previously indicated they could halt spending on the platform if Trump were to be reinstated, potentially dealing a further blow to a company that generates nearly all of its revenue from advertising.
Before buying Twitter, Musk had repeatedly said he would reinstate Trump’s account and rethink the platform’s approach to permanent bans as part of his maximalist vision for “free speech.” But Musk also sought to reassure brands and users that he would establish a “content moderation council” to determine whether Trump and other banned account holders would be brought back on the platform.
There is no indication that group was even established, let alone involved in the decision to restore Trump. Instead, Musk tweeted a poll Friday, asking followers to vote whether or not to restore Trump’s account. “Yes” won, and Musk tweeted Saturday: “The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Latin for “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”
If Musk has any strategy behind the decision and its timing, it appears to be betting that chaos makes for a good show.
Throughout his time as president, Trump was the most high-profile and often the most controversial user on the platform, forcing Twitter to think about how it should handle a sitting world leader taunting North Korea with threats of nuclear destruction (allowed) and encouraging a violent pro-Trump mob to attack the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 (which got him banned).
But Trump also made Twitter into the center of the known media and political universe. His tweets made headlines, moved markets and shaped the agenda in Washington. Celebrities, world leaders, and a long list of critics and supporters often engaged with Trump directly on Twitter. The world could not look away.
It remains unclear whether Trump will tweet as often, or at all, now that he has his own social network, Truth Social. And if he does, his tweets may not get quite as much attention as when he was the sitting president. But Musk’s decision to bring Trump back also comes days after Trump announced he would run for president again, raising the likelihood that Trump’s remarks and his tweets, if he posts them, won’t be ignored.
Musk is clearly still in the early days of setting up his so-called Twitter 2.0. Apart from reorganizing staff and racing to bolster Twitter’s bottom line through subscription products, he also has yet to formalize his policies around bans and suspensions.
But one answer seems clear: Musk appears to be betting that if users can’t turn away from the platform, neither can advertisers. And with enough eyeballs on the site, he may just be able to find new ways to make money from them.
All he has to do is find a way to keep the lights on.
Elon Musk reinstated Donald Trump’s account on Twitter on Saturday, reversing a ban that has kept the former president off the social media site for more than 22 months — since a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress was poised to certify Joe Biden’s election victory.
Musk made the announcement in the evening after holding a poll that asked Twitter users to click “yes” or “no” on whether Trump’s account should be reinstated. The “yes” vote won, with 51.8%.
“The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted, using a Latin phrase meaning “the voice of the people, the voice of God.”
Shortly afterward Trump’s account, which had earlier appeared as suspended, reappeared on the platform complete with his former tweets, more than 59,000 of them. However his followers were gone, at least initially, but their numbers topped 2 million in about an hour and a half.
It was not clear whether Trump would actually return to Twitter, and although his account was restored, he had not tweeted as of 9:30 p.m. Eastern time Saturday.
Musk’s decision came four days after Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency in 2024.
In a speech at an auto conference in May, Musk asserted that Twitter’s ban of Trump was a “morally bad decision” and “foolish in the extreme,” and that he would allow Trump back on if he bought the company.
In late October, following his $44 billion takeover of Twitter, Musk declared he would form what he called a “content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints,” adding that no one whose account has been banned would be reinstated before that group has a chance to meet.
However, Trump’s account was restored without any input from such a council, and there was no evidence that such a council has yet been formed. The poll, posted on Musk’s own Twitter account, drew more than 15 million votes in the 24 hours in which it ran.
In response to the move, NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement that “any advertiser still funding Twitter should immediately pause all advertising. If Elon Musk continues to run Twitter like this, using garbage polls that do not represent the American people and the needs of our democracy, God help us all.”
Several high profile companies have already paused advertising on Twitter since Musk’s takeover, including General Mills, Eli Lilly, General Motors and Audi.
On Friday, Musk tweeted that the suspended Twitter accounts for the comedian Kathy Griffin, the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and the conservative Christian news satire website Babylon Bee had been reinstated. He added that a decision on Trump had not yet been made. He also responded “no” when someone on Twitter asked him to reinstate the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ account.
An irrepressible tweeter before he was banned, Trump has said in the past that he would not rejoin Twitter even if his account was reinstated. He has been relying on his own, much smaller social media site, Truth Social, which he launched after being blocked from Twitter.
And on Saturday, during a video speech to a Republican Jewish group meeting in Las Vegas, Trump said that he was aware of Musk’s poll but that he saw “a lot of problems at Twitter,” according to Bloomberg.
“I hear we’re getting a big vote to also go back on Twitter. I don’t see it because I don’t see any reason for it,” Trump said, Bloomberg reported. “It may make it, it may not make it,” he added, apparently referring to Twitter’s recent internal upheavals.
Trump lost his access to Twitter two days after his supporters stormed the Capitol, soon after the former president had exhorted them to “fight like hell.” Twitter dropped his account after Trump wrote a pair of tweets that the company said cast further doubts on the legitimacy of the presidential election and raised risks for the Biden presidential inauguration.
After the Jan. 6 attack, Trump was also kicked off Facebook and Instagram, which are owned by Meta Platforms, and Snapchat. His ability to post videos to his YouTube channel was also suspended. Facebook is set to reconsider Trump’s account suspension in January.
Throughout his tenure as president, Trump’s use of social media posed a significant challenge to major social media platforms that sought to balance the public’s interest in hearing from public officials with worries about misinformation, bigotry, harassment and incitement of violence.
This also comes as Trump is facing two criminal probes from the Justice Department. One is related to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, and the other to the classified documents seized during an FBI search at his Mar-a-Lago estate back in August.
On Friday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that he had named a special counsel to oversee both investigations: John “Jack” Smith, who is currently the chief prosecutor for the special counsel in the Hague.
Meanwhile, Musk’s purchase of Twitter has fanned widespread concern that the billionaire owner will allow purveyors of lies and misinformation to flourish on the site. Musk has frequently expressed his belief that Twitter had become too restrictive of freewheeling speech.
The billionaire’s efforts to reshape the site have been both swift and chaotic. Musk has fired many of the company’s 7,500 full-time workers and an untold number of contractors who are responsible for content moderation and other crucial responsibilities. His demand that remaining employees pledge to “extremely hardcore” work triggered a wave of resignations, including hundreds of software engineers.
By Thursday night, the deadline Musk gave for workers to stay or go, hundreds had turned in their resignations, leaving the company in “disarray,” the New York Times reported.
“It’s extremely chaotic and the morale is extremely low,” Melissa Ingle, a content moderator who was recently laid off, told CBS News’ John Dickerson Friday.
Shortly after the deadline, a self-described activist digitally projected statements criticizing Musk onto the side of Twitter’s San Francisco offices.
“Musk’s hellscape,” read one statement. “Launching to bankruptcy,” said another.
Users have reported seeing increased spam and scams on their feeds and in their direct messages, among other glitches, in the aftermath of the mass layoffs and worker exodus. Some programmers who were fired or resigned this week warned that Twitter may soon fray so badly it could actually crash.
In a tweet Friday, the Tesla CEO described the company’s new content policy as “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.”
He explained that a tweet deemed to be “negative” or to include “hate” would be allowed on the site but would be visible only to users who specifically searched for it. Such tweets also would be “demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter,” Musk said.
Former US President Donald Trump’s Twitter account has been reinstated on the platform.
The account, which Twitter banned following the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, was restored after Twitter CEO and new owner Elon Musk posted a poll on Twitter on Friday night asking the platform’s users if Trump should be reinstated.
“The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated,” Musk tweeted Saturday night. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Latin for “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”
The final poll results on Saturday night showed 51.8% in favor and 48.2% opposed. The poll included 15 million votes.
The much-anticipated decision from the new owner sets the stage for the former president’s return to the social media platform where he was previously its most influential, if controversial user, with almost 90 million followers and tweets that often moved the markets, set the news cycle and drove the agenda in Washington.
Trump has previously said he would remain on his platform, Truth Social, instead of rejoining Twitter, but a change in his approach could hold major political implications. The former president announced this month that he will seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, aiming to become only the second commander in chief ever elected to two nonconsecutive terms.
Asked on Saturday what he thought of Musk purchasing Twitter and his own future on the platform, Trump praised Musk but questioned whether the site would survive its current crises.
“They have a lot of problems,” Trump said in Las Vegas at the Republican Jewish Coalition meeting. “You see what’s going on. It may make it, it may not make it.”
Still, Trump said he liked Musk and “liked that he bought (Twitter.)”
“He’s a character and I tend to like characters,” the former president said of Musk. “But he’s smart.”
Throughout Trump’s White House tenure, Twitter was central to his presidency, a fact that also benefited the company in the form of countless hours of user engagement. Twitter often took a light-touch approach to moderating his account, arguing at times that as a public official, the then-president must be given wide latitude to speak.
But as Trump neared the end of his term – and increasingly tweeted misinformation alleging election fraud – the balance shifted. The company began applying warning labels to his tweets in an attempt to correct his misleading claims ahead of the 2020 presidential election. And following the US Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, the platform banned him indefinitely.
“After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” Twitter said at the time. “In the context of horrific events this week, we made it clear on Wednesday that additional violations of the Twitter Rules would potentially result in this very course of action.”
The decision followed two tweets by Trump that, according to Twitter, violated the company’s policy against glorification of violence. The tweets, Twitter said at the time, “must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from this account in recent weeks.”
The first tweet – a statement about Trump’s supporters, who he called “75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me” – suggested that “he plans to continue to support, empower, and shield those who believe he won the election,” Twitter had said.
The second, which indicated he did not plan to attend Joe Biden’s inauguration, could be viewed as a further statement that the election was not legitimate and could be interpreted as Trump saying that the inauguration would be a “safe” target for violence because he would not be attending, according to Twitter.
Soon after Trump’s Twitter ban, he was also restricted from Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, which could also restore his accounts as soon as January 2023.
On November 18, Musk tweeted that he had reinstated several controversial accounts on the platform, but that a “Trump decision has not yet been made.”
“New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach,” he said at the time. “Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter. You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet.”
Musk had previously said he disagreed with Twitter’s permanent ban policy, and could also return other accounts that had been removed from the platform for repeated rules violations.
“I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump; I think that was a mistake,” Musk said at a conference in May, pledging to reverse the ban were he to become the company’s owner.
Jack Dorsey, who was the CEO of Twitter when the company banned Trump but has since left, responded to Musk’s comments saying he agreed that there should not be permanent bans. Banning the former president, he said, was a “business decision” and it “shouldn’t have been.”
NAACP President Derrick Johnson called on advertisers still funding Twitter to immediately stop all ad buys.
“In Elon Musk’s Twittersphere, you can incite an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, which led to the deaths of multiple people, and still be allowed to spew hate speech and violent conspiracies on his platform,” Johnson said in a statement. “If Elon Musk continues to run Twitter like this, using garbage polls that do not represent the American people and the needs of our democracy, God help us all.”
While the poll was ongoing, Musk also seemed to side with users who claimed that the votes against Trump’s return were part of a bot campaign—kind of the entire 2020 election in microcosm, making it once again painfully easy to see why Musk and Trump might get along:
What first made us think Elon Musk would allow Trump to return to Twitter?
Elon Musk own words
Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints.
No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.
Straight from the mouthpiece (or flapping jaws) of Twitter’s CEO, Elon Musk has previously called Trump being banned from Twitter “a mistake” and outright said he would restore the former president’s Twitter. Musk tweeted out in October that “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints. No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.” No one knows who or what the content moderation council will be, but Musk has already shown to be playing fast and loose with content moderation on the platform. He has also stated that banning Trump from Twitter was a mistake.
Twitter is already losing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue due to an “Impersonation Epidemic,” that made large companies lose faith in the company. Doubling down on the toxicity by allowing the head insurrectionist back onto the platform would almost certainly lead to a mass exodus of advertisers and the revenue they bring.
General populace
If trump or ye get a 13th chance – I’m out.
I will not participate on a platform where hate speech and violence is a game.
Many Twitter users have already left the platform in protest of the lax policies that have allowed hate speech to run rampant and both celebrities, and average users have stated their likelihood to leave the platform if Trump were to return.
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In the same vein, the Babylon Bee account was banned for misgendering Rachel Levine, a four-star admiral of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, and the nation’s highest-ranking openly transgender official. Kathy Griffin’s ban was brief; she was suspended on November 7 after changing her account name to Elon Musk. While impersonating Musk, she tweeted: “After much spirited discussion with the females in my life. I’ve decided that voting blue for their choice is only right (They’re also sexy females, btw.) #VoteBlueToProtectWomen”
Musk said he would let her back on the platform if she agreed to pay $8 for a blue checkmark.
The controversial poll fell a few days after 1,200 Twitter employees fled from the platform. Earlier this month, he slashed half of the then 7,500-person staff and four top executives, begging the question: how many people still work at Twitter? The remaining staff is estimated to total less than 2,000.
The resignations follow Musk’s incendiary email earlier this week. He told employees they “need to be extremely hardcore” for “Twitter 2.0,” and will require “working long hours at high intensity.” Musk added, “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.” Employees were asked to respond whether they would stay at the company by Thursday at 5pm.
The ultimatum email came just days after Twitter paused its controversial Twitter Blue subscription service, which sparked massive impersonation—à la Griffin—and backlash for ridding the identity verification feature. Musk tweeted that Twitter will see the service return “probably at the end of next week.”
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As Twitter became knotted with parody accounts and turmoil, Rachel Terlep, who runs an account for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources that intersperses cheeky banter with wildfire and weather warnings, watched with equal parts trepidation and fascination.
“It kind of feels like a supernova moment right now — a big, bright flash before it all goes away,” she said.
So the department stepped into the fray, taking advantage of the moment with some of its signature humor. “Update: The Twitter wildfire is 44 billion acres and 0% contained,” they posted.
But under the joke, it linked to a thread that gave helpful tips about how to review a handle to see if it’s real. Some of the suggestions included looking at how old the account is and checking to see if the public safety agency’s website links to the profile.
It underscored the challenge for the people tasked with getting public safety information out to communities. Now, they don’t only have to get information out quickly. On the new Twitter, they also have to convince people they are actually the authorities.
Government agencies, especially those tasked with sending messages during emergencies, have embraced Twitter for its efficiency and scope. Getting accurate information from authorities during disasters is often a matter of life or death. For example, the first reports this week of a deadly shooting at the University of Virginia came from the college’s Twitter accounts that urged students to shelter in place.
Disasters also provide fertile ground for false information to spread online. Researchers like Jun Zhuang, a professor at the University of Buffalo who studies how false information spreads during natural disasters, say emergencies create a “perfect storm” for rumors, but that government accounts have also played a crucial role in batting them down.
During Hurricane Harvey in 2017, for example, an online rumor spread that officials were checking people’s immigration status at storm shelters, potentially dissuading people from seeking safety there. However, crisis communication researchers have also found that the city’s mayor reassured residents and helped the community pull together with a constant stream of Twitter messages.
Amid the slew of changes at one of the world’s most influential social media platforms, the public information officers who operate government Twitter accounts are cautiously waiting out the turmoil and urging the public to verify that it really is their accounts appearing on timelines. While it’s an issue they’ve always had to contend with, it’s especially worrisome now as a proliferation of brand impersonations spreads across the platform and changes to verification take hold.
Darren Noak, who helps run an account for Austin-Travis County emergency medical services in Texas, said Twitter’s blue checkmark has often been discussed among those who operate government Twitter accounts. The badge — up until a week ago — indicated an account was verified as a government entity, corporation, celebrity or journalist.
The AP reviewed dozens of government agencies responsible for responding to emergencies from the county to the national level, and none had received an official label — denoted by a gray checkmark — by Friday. Spoof accounts are a concern, Noak said, because they create “a real pain and a headache, especially in times of crisis and emergency.”
Government accounts have long been a target of copycats. Fairfax County in Virginia had to quash fake school closures tweeted from a fraudulent account during a 2014 winter storm. And both the state of North Carolina and its city of Greensboro have had to compete with accounts appearing to speak for their governments.
It has become even harder in recent days to verify that an account is authentic.
In the span of a week, Twitter granted gray checkmark badges to official government accounts — then rescinded them. It next allowed users to receive a blue checkmark through its $8 subscription services — then halted that offering after it spawned an infestation of imposter accounts. Over the weekend, Twitter laid off outsourced moderators who enforced rules against harmful content, further gutting its guardrails against misinformation.
Twitter hasn’t responded to media requests for information since Elon Musk took over, but its support account has posted: “To combat impersonation, we’ve added an ‘Official’ label to some accounts.”
Twitter’s changes could be deadly, warned Juliette Kayyem, a former homeland security adviser at the state and national levels who now teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Twitter has become a go-to source of localized information in emergencies, she said. But imposter accounts could introduce a new level of misinformation — or disinformation when people intentionally try to cause harm — in urgent situations. When instructing the public how to respond, the right instructions — such as sheltering in place or evacuating a certain area — can be a matter of life or death.
“In a disaster where time is limited, the greatest way to limit harm is to provide accurate and timely information to communities about what they should do,” Kayyem said. “Allowing others to claim expertise — it will cost lives.”
In the past, Kayyem had worked with Twitter to research how government agencies can communicate in emergencies. She said the leadership at Twitter’s trust and safety department “thought long and hard” about its public service role. But Twitter has lost those high-level leaders responsible for cybersecurity, data privacy and complying with regulations.
Some agencies are pushing audiences to other venues for information.
Local government websites are often the best place to turn for accurate, up-to-date information in emergencies, said April Davis, who works as a public affairs officer and digital media strategist at the Oregon Department of Emergency Management. She, like many others at emergency management agencies, said her agency doesn’t yet plan to change how it engages on Twitter, but also emphasized that it’s not the best place to turn to in emergencies.
“If it goes away, then we’ll migrate to another platform,” said Derrec Becker, chief of public information at the South Carolina Emergency Management Division. “It is not the emergency alert system.”
Twitter accounts for emergency management in Washington, South Carolina and Oregon provide public service information on preparing for disasters and weather alerts. They also tweet about evacuation and shelter orders.
Becker, who has cultivated the agency’s sizeable Twitter following with a playful presence, said emergency alerts broadcast on TV, radio or cell phones are still the go-to methods for urgent warnings.
Shortly after Becker fielded questions from The Associated Press on his agency’s plans Monday, the department tweeted: “Leave Twitter? Disasters are kind of our thing.”
Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said Koo, the Indian microblogging platform, should take over Twitter at an event on Saturday.
“Every day when I see what is going on with Twitter and the mess they are in, I’m so happy I’m one of the first to join Koo. And I think Koo should take over Twitter. This is the strength of Indian entrepreneurs and our startups and and I absolutely have no doubt that these tough times the world is facing today is an opportunity that India should not miss,” said Goyal at ET Startup Awards’ event.
Goyal’s remarks come close on the heels of Koo co-founder saying the firm is interested in hiring people laid off by Elon Musk after he acquired Twitter. Twitter has either laid off employees or people have walked out voluntarily from the company in the recent past.
The co-founder of Koo, Mayank Bidawatka tweeted: “Very sad to see #RIPTwitter and related # to this going down. We’ll hire some of these Twitter ex-employees as we keep expanding and raise our larger, next round. They deserve to work where their talent is valued. Microblogging is about people power. Not suppression.”
The homegrown microblogging platform Koo is all set to go global. Earlier this week, Aprameya Radhakrishna, the co-founder, and chief executive of Koo, confirmed that Koo will soon launch in the United States.
Koo was launched in March 2020 and the platform said it had become the second largest multi-lingual microblogging platform available to the world.
Since taking over Twitter, billionaire Elon Musk has set in motion massive changes, sacking employees and talking of levying a $8 charge for ‘verified’ handles.
Koo, on the other hand, offers Aadhaar-based self-verification and a free-of-cost yellow verification tag for eminent persons.
Elon Musk has been saying for months that he wants to stamp out spam and fake accounts on Twitter, but a subtle change he’s planning to make to the platform could complicate that goal.
In a tweet this week, Musk said Twitter will stop showing notations such as “Twitter for iPhone” and “Twitter Web App” at the bottom of tweets, which are intended to indicate where users’ messages originate. The change might seem small compared to the many other ways the billionaire is upending the company, but it’s a move that experts say could actually make it trickier to spot inauthentic activity on the social network.
Musk announced the plan on Monday alongside several tweets in which Twitter’s new owner apologized for the platform being “super slow in many countries” and explaining that he will turn off some unnecessary parts of Twitter’s architecture. As part of this, he wrote: “We will finally stop adding what device a tweet was written on (waste of screen space & compute) below every tweet. Literally no one even knows why we did that …”.
But even if Musk doesn’t see the value in it, some academics do. Experts in malicious online activity and misinformation told CNN that knowing how a tweet was posted can serve as one of many signals that accounts are coordinating posts on the social network, which can be a sign of suspicious activity such as spam or phishing.
Filippo Menczer, a professor at Indiana University and director of the school’s Observatory on Social Media, explained that even though source data can be spoofed, it’s still one of the measures he can use to track similarities between accounts in order to spot coordinated behavior. He said researchers can consider it along with other factors, such as the specific tweets accounts post, the time frames in which the posts went up, and the sources they quote.
“It could build evidence in combination with something else,” he said. “Or you might look at a very large number of accounts that are already looking highly suspicious and that field might confirm they’re using some kind of automation.”
The decision to potentially stop displaying source details is just one of many changes Musk has said he plans to make to the platform as he moves quickly to cut costs, boost revenue and rethink how one of the most influential social networks functions. In the process, however, Musk has already eliminated staff and tested changes — including an option to pay for verification — that some worry could make it harder to combat bots and misinformation.
Musk didn’t make clear in his tweet this week when these source labels will disappear. It’s also unclear whether Twitter will simply stop showing this information to its users, or if it will also stop providing this data via its application programming interface, or API, which lets third parties access many types of Twitter data for their own applications and research. Many academic researchers use Twitter’s API to study bots and misinformation on the social network.
Twitter, which recently laid off a substantial amount of its public relations team, did not respond to a request for clarification or comment.
Apart from helping to spot bots, a tweet’s source details can provide a strong indicator for whether an account has been hacked, according to Gianluca Stringhini, an assistant professor at Boston University and co-director of its Security Lab.
For instance, in April 2013, stocks plunged after a hacker accessed the main Twitter account for the Associated Press and tweeted about a false attack on the White House. One thing that stood out, Stringhini said, was that the fake tweet was sent from Twitter’s traditional website, which is not what the AP used to publish tweets at the time (it was using third-party software called SocialFlow).
Twitter itself also points out the utility of the feature to users in a publicly available guide, which states that these “tweet source labels,” in addition to helping users understand how a tweet was posted, give users key context about posts. If a tweet was marked “Mastodon-Twitter Crossposter”, for instance, it would be clear that the post had been published both on Twitter and social network Mastodon.
According to the company’s “How to Tweet” document, “If you don’t recognize the source, you may want to learn more to determine how much you trust the content.”
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
The fallout from Elon Musk’s request that Twitter staff commit “hardcore” to make Twitter 2.0 or get out revealed that given a choice, some people would rather get out. Following the Tesla mogul’s declaration earlier this week that staff make it clear they were all in or leave (with severance), as many as 1,200 of the remaining 3,700 workers chose to resign.
The exodus was so rapid that Musk and remaining execs were spooked into locking down Twitter headquarters and deactivating security badges until November 21st.
According to the New York Times, Twitter’s “employee numbers are likely to remain fluid as the dust settles on the exits, with confusion abounding over who is keeping a tally of workers and running other workplace systems.”
The Times alsoreported that some “who quit said they were separating themselves from the company by disconnecting from email and logging out of the internal messaging system Slack because human resources representatives were not available.”
Employees leaving en masse could easily set off a series of cascading disasters for the social media site, characterized by top Twitter trends from Thursday night, such as #TwitterMigration and #TwitterTakeover. As the Associated Press (via the L.A. Times) reported Friday evening:
Three engineers who left this week described for the Associated Press why they expect considerable unpleasantness for Twitter’s more than 230 million users now that well over two-thirds of Twitter’s pre-Musk core services engineers are apparently gone. Although they don’t anticipate near-term collapse, Twitter could get very rough at the edges — especially if Musk makes major changes without much off-platform testing.
The A.P. went on to note that cybersecurity is also a growing concern. For example, an NBC report published a week ago cited fraud tracking firm Proofpoint, which “said it had detected a ‘notable’ increase in scammers operating on Twitter, including a ruse designed to drain people of their savings.”
For his part, Musk has been tweeting through it, sometimes appearing to acknowledge that things aren’t going great but also making moves that provoked broad and often contentious discussion site-wide, including a survey he tweeted Friday evening to see whether users thought he should allow former President Donald Trump to return to the platform.
As of 11 p.m. Eastern Time on November 18th, the poll was 55 percent in favor of Trump’s return and 44 percent against it.
Imprisoned Russian dissident Alexey Navalny has been transferred into a solitary prison cell, according to tweets from himself and his staff, in what he described as a move designed to “shut me up.”
Navalny, a prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, explained what happened in a Thursday Twitter thread: “Congratulations, I’ve moved up one more level in the hierarchy of prison offenders,” Navalny wrote with irony, adding that prison officials moved him to a cramped “cell-type room.”
Cell-type rooms are used as punishment or to separate the most dangerous offenders in the Russian penitentiary system. Inmates in Russian penal colonies are more typically housed in barracks instead of cells according to a report by Poland-based think tank the Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW).
In his isolation, Navalny said that he is allowed just two books and can use prison commissary, “albeit with a very limited budget.”
But the “real indescribable bestiality, very characteristic of the Kremlin, which manually controls my entire incarceration,” is the blocking of visits, he said. His parents, children and wife were due to visit, but he will no longer get to see them, Navalny wrote.
“Alexey Navalny was transferred to a cell-type room. It’s like a punishment cell, only not for 15 days, but forever,” wrote his spokesperson Kira Yarmysh on Twitter.
According to the Russian penal code, detention in a cell-type room cannot exceed six months. CNN has reached out to Russian penitentiary services for comment.
Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent in 2020, an attack several Western officials and Navalny himself openly blamed on the Kremlin. Russia has denied any involvement.
After a five-month stay in Germany recovering from the Novichok poisoning, Navalny last year returned to Moscow, where he was immediately arrested for violating probation terms imposed from a 2014 case.
Earlier this year, Navalny was sentenced to nine years in prison on fraud charges he said were politically motivated.
While Judge Margarita Kotova read out the accusations against him, footage showed Navalny as a gaunt figure standing beside his lawyers in a room filled with security officials. He appeared unmoved by the proceedings, looking through some court documents on a table in front of him.
Navalny was then transferred in June from a penal colony where he was serving his term to a higher security prison facility in Melekhovo in the Vladimir Region.
“They’re doing it to shut me up,” Navalny said in Thursday’s Twitter thread about his new prison conditions. “So what’s my first duty? That’s right, to not be afraid and not shut up,” he writes, urging others to do the same.
“At every opportunity, campaign against the war, Putin and United Russia. Hugs to you all.”
New Twitter owner Elon Musk is scrambling to prevent the social media platform from collapsing, after hundreds of vital employees quit. Jonathan Vigliotti spoke with an engineer who was fired about what is going on inside Twitter headquarters.
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Twitter continued to bleed engineers and other workers, after new owner Elon Musk gave them an ultimatum: Either pledge to “hardcore” work or resign with severance pay by 5 p.m. Eastern on Thursday. Many have opted for the latter.
Some took to Twitter to announce they were signing off after Musk’s deadline to make the pledge. A number of employees took to a private forum outside of the company’s messaging board to discuss their planned departure, asking questions about how it might jeopardize their U.S. visas or if they would get the promised severance pay, according to an employee fired earlier this week who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Hundreds of Twitter employees took Musk up on his offer to leave with severance pay, according to The New York Times, although the exact number isn’t clear. The newest round of departures means the platform is continuing to lose workers just at it is gearing up for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, one of the busiest events on Twitter that can overwhelm its systems if things go haywire.
The wave of resignations is sparking concern about Twitter’s ability to continue to operate with a skeleton crew, especially as some “critical” teams have either completely resigned or have only a few people remaining, The Verge reported.
“To all the Tweeps who decided to make today your last day: thanks for being incredible teammates through the ups and downs. I can’t wait to see what you do next,” tweeted one employee, Esther Crawford, who is remaining at the company and has been working on the overhaul of the platform’s verification system.
Amid the reports of layoffs, Twitter announced via email that it would close “our office buildings” and disable employee badges until Monday, the New York Times reported.
Tumultuous takeover
Since taking over Twitter less than three weeks ago, Musk has booted half of the company’s full-time staff of 7,500 and an untold number of contractors responsible for content moderation and other crucial efforts. He fired top executives on his first day as Twitter’s owner, while others left voluntarily in the ensuing days. Earlier this week, he began firing a small group of engineers who took issue with him publicly or in the company’s internal Slack messaging system.
Such a management style is the opposite tack that leaders should take in a time of uncertainty, noted Ben Wigert, director of research and strategy of workplace management at Gallup. Poor leadership provides an opportunity for employees to quit, especially when the job market remains tight, as it currently is.
“Saying ‘work harder,’ especially coming out of a pandemic, is tone deaf and it’s hard to undo that damage to your culture,” Wigert said.
Musk’s implication that Twitter workers aren’t doing their jobs does not “reflect a strong employer brand and culture,” he added. “They don’t reflect that inspiring organization you want to work for.”
“Extremely hardcore”
Then overnight on Wednesday, Musk sent an email to the remaining staff at Twitter, saying that it is a software and servers company at its heart and he asked employees to decide by Thursday evening if they want to remain a part of the business.
Musk wrote that employees “will need to be extremely hardcore” to build “a breakthrough Twitter 2.0” and that long hours at high intensity will be needed for success.
But in a Thursday email, Musk backpedaled on his insistence that everyone work from the office. His initial rejection of remote work had alienated many employees who survived the layoffs.
He softened his earlier tone in an email to employees, writing that “all that is required for approval is that your manager takes responsibility for ensuring you are making an excellent contribution.” Workers would also be expected to have “in-person meetings with your colleagues on a reasonable cadence, ideally weekly, but not less than once per month.”
As of 7 p.m. Pacific Time, the No. 1 topic trending in the United States was “RIPTwitter” followed by the names of other social media platforms: “Tumblr,” “Mastodon” and “MySpace.”
Twitter did not respond to a message seeking comment.
On Thursday night, following another exodus of Twitter employees, the outage detection site Down Detector showed a spike in users reporting issues accessing the social media platform. A chart of the sharp increase in outage reports was shared by some users on Twitter, appearing to validate a growing fear that the site would struggle to stay online with fewer staff. But that wasn’t exactly the case just yet.
In fact, Twitter did not appear to be facing an outage, but rather Down Detector was automatically registering hundreds of tweets from users wondering whether the site might go “down” or if the company would be “shutting down.” The apparent confusion highlighted a very real anxiety about Twitter’s imminent demise, just weeks after it was acquired by the world’s richest man.
After new owner Elon Musk demanded that Twitter employees agree to work “extremely hardcore” or leave the company by 5 p.m. ET on Thursday, many opted for the latter option, with one former executive referring to the exits as a “mass exodus.”
“They will struggle just to keep the lights on,” the former executive, who recently exited the company, added.
As users digested the news late Thursday and early Friday, the platform had the air of the last day of high school. People on the platform mused about the possibility that they could be sending their final tweets if Musk and his remaining team struggled to keep the platform functioning. This week’s departures came after Musk had already laid off around 3,700 Twitter employees, or about half the staff, earlier this month.
Multiple Twitter users suggested that any followers who have a secret crush on them come forward in case the platform goes down for good. Others posted links to follow them on alternative platforms. Former employees held a “therapy” Twitter spaces to discuss better times working for the platform before Musk’s takeover catapulted it into chaos, and what they are planning to do now that they’ve left.
Musk posted a meme seeming to make fun of the fact that people were discussing the death of Twitter on the platform itself. He also said in a separate tweet that “the best people are staying, so I’m not super worried.”
Already, however, Twitter users have reported glitches with the platform in recent days, including issues with two-factor authentication and an apparent test page that showed up live in its trending section Thursday. On Friday morning, an element of the feature that allows users to download their data from the site appeared to be broken.
Twitter, which has largely cut its public relations team, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As of Friday morning, the platform remained up and running, and almost certainly won’t face an immediate demise. But Thursday’s exits — which included key infrastructure engineers as well as important roles in finance, user safety and other areas of the business, according to employee tweets — do raise legitimate questions about the platform’s ability to continue functioning without service interruptions.
“It’s a morgue,” one employee who remains at Twitter told CNN about the mood inside the company Friday, adding, “and yes we are still doing what we can today although the pace is painfully slow.”
The uncertainty also comes at a particularly bad moment for Twitter: the World Cup, which is often one of Twitter’s busiest times for the platform’s global usage, is set to kick off on Sunday.
On Friday morning, Musk sent an email to Twitter’s remaining staff instructing anyone “who actually writes software” to report to the 10th floor of the company’s San Francisco headquarters at 2 p.m. PT, despite having previously said the company’s offices would be closed through Monday. They were instructed to send an email prior to the meeting detailing “what your code commits have achieved in the past ~6 months.”
In a follow-up email, he asked remote workers to prepare for virtual meetings but noted “only those who cannot physically get to Twitter HQ or have a family emergency will be excused.” The email continued: “These will be short, technical interviews that allow me to better understand the Twitter tech stack,” according to a copy of the email provided to CNN by a former employee who asked not to be identified.
In a third email, Musk said he would “appreciate” if any remote employees could fly to the San Francisco headquarters to meet in person.
Twitter employees who are relying on the company for work visas have been left in limbo, finding themselves at the whims of its new billionaire owner, knowing if they quit, they may have to leave the United States.
Earlier this week, Elon Musk gave remaining staff an ultimatum to commit to working “hardcore” or to leave. But some staff who would like to leave the company feel like they can’t because doing so, may leave them no choice but to depart the US, multiple former Twitter employees told CNN.
Tech companies in the US, including Twitter, have leaned on an employment-based visa, known as H-1B, to bring skilled foreign workers into the country. The program allows companies in the US to employ foreign workers in high-skilled occupations like architecture, engineering, mathematics, among other fields.
In fiscal year 2022, Twitter had nearly 300 people approved to work on H-1B visas, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services data. It’s unclear how many have chosen to stay.
Facebook – another company that’s undergoing mass layoffs – had more than 1,300 people approved to work on H-1B visas, the data shows.
Employees on temporary visas, like H-1B or other work visas, are especially vulnerable to the layoffs happening at Twitter and across the tech industry. Some staff who were on employment-based visas and have already been laid off by Musk have found themselves scrambling.
“Firing folks who are on a H-1B in a major economic downturn is not just putting them out of the job, it’s tantamount to ruining their lives,” one former employee told CNN, adding that some people who had accepted Musk’s ultimatum had accepted it “out of self-preservation.”
Twitter users are flocking to Mastodon. What is it?
Fiona McEntee, an immigration lawyer based in Chicago, represents immigrants who are on H-1B visas and are part of the recent tech layoffs.
While McEntee stressed everyone’s situation is unique, one of the primary challenges employees on H-1B visas face is that they have a limited window of time to find a new employer, adjust to another visa, or leave the United States. The 60-day grace period usually starts from the last day of employment.
“It’s a short time period to line these things up.” McEntee said, noting that filing a visa transfer, for example, can take time. McEntee’s firm has been receiving multiple calls from people affected by the layoffs who are concerned about next steps.
“A layoff is hard enough on people to begin with but when you’re faced with having to leave what’s been your home for a significant time, it adds a whole layer of trauma to this,” she told CNN.
One former Twitter employee described the challenges facing a former colleague who is in the US with his family on an employment-based visa and now faces the prospect of having to leave.
For that reason, some staff at Twitter who are on H-1B visas are staying on despite wanting to leave the company, a former employee told CNN, adding that they’re “concerned with being forced into a flooded job market where they may be unable to find a job and before being forced out of the country.”
The US Department of Homeland Security issues 65,000 H-1B visas annually as mandated by Congress, in addition to another 20,000 for those who have a masters’ degree or doctorate from a US university. The visa can be granted for up to six years.
“These are people who didn’t just necessarily arrive last year or the year before, or even when they were approved,” said David Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. Bier noted that some people may have been working for Twitter under a different visa before being hired on an H-1B.
“Many of these people will have been in this country for over a decade,” Bier said.
One former Twitter employee stressed the importance of visa holders and their contribution to US innovation and technological leadership.
“For companies to turn their backs on them now is particularly callous and destructive and undermines the trust talented people have around in the world in the hope of America and its opportunities,” they added.
Elon Musk emailed Twitter staff on Friday asking that any employees who write software code report to the 10th floor of Twitter’s office in San Francisco at 2 p.m., according to an email reviewed by Reuters.
“There will be short, technical interviews that allow me to better understand the Twitter tech stack,” Musk wrote in the memo.
The billionaire said, “I would appreciate it if you could fly to SF to be present in person,” adding that he would be at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters until midnight and would return Saturday morning.
Musk ordered employees to email him a summary of what their software code has “achieved” in the past six months, “along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code.”
He added that he would try to speak with remote employees by video. Musk also said that only people who cannot physically get to the company’s headquarters or have a family emergency would be excused.
The Twitterverse is abuzz with speculation about the social media platform’s uncertain future, with the hashtag #RIPTwitter trending on Friday amid an exodus of employees.
Twitter users shared memes related to looking for a new social media service or returning to decades-old chat rooms to keep connecting with people online.
The furor in turn reflected the mounting chaos at Twitter since Musk took control of the company late last month, with reports that employees were locked out of its offices on Friday for unspecified reasons. The buildings are expected to remain shuttered all weekend.
Since Musk took over the platform, employee numbers have plummeted as the Tesla CEO first laid off some 3,700 workers, then fired engineers who disagreed with him and then issued an ultimatum that remaining Twitter workers should be ready for an “extremely hard core” workload or else tender their resignation.
By Thursday night, the deadline for workers to stay or go, hundreds had turned in their resignation, leaving the company in “disarray,” the New York Times reported.
“It’s extremely chaotic and the morale is extremely low,” Melissa Ingle, a content moderator who was recently laid off, told CBS News’ John Dickerson.
Shortly after the deadline, a self-described activist digitally projected statements criticizing Musk onto the side of Twitter’s San Francisco offices.
“Musk’s hellscape,” read one statement. “Launching to bankruptcy,” said another.
Someone is projecting multiple messages onto Twitter headquarters building in SF from a neighboring building. pic.twitter.com/VuFqLvDyxT
Among the projections was a scrolling line of insults directed at the executive. “Elon Musk: bankruptcy baby, supreme parasite, petulant pimple,” the tirade began.
Some observers asked whether hysteria among Twitter users really indicated the site was shutting down, or whether it is a case of anti-Musk tweeters being dramatic.
Venture capitalist Bill Gurley was one of many to suggest that the site could essentially run on its own. People who are “rooting for Twitter to ‘functionally fail’ are going to be disappointed,” he said, noting that the company had only 1,000 employees a decade ago and has much better systems now.
This is also why everyone rooting for Twitter to “functionally fail” are going to be disappointed. The company had 1,000 employees in 2012 and had 200 MAUs. And the systems are way better now. If they go back to that count they will survive. You are NOT seeing the “fail whale.”
