Twitter is Going Great!

The Twitter Blue users described being frustrated with their continued verification, saying they’re subjected to dayslong reviews when they want to change either their profile picture or their display name. Despite still being verified, they no longer have access to an edit button or long-form tweets, which are perks of the subscription.

Pro-climate accounts that gained followers only did so at a relatively low level, compared to the 1 to 2x growth in audience size for the deniers. Of the 26 pro-climate accounts, 13 gained no followers, or lost them. The maximum audience growth in the pro-climate list? Less than one 24th of the average audience growth for the deniers...

A specific change to the algorithm to boost tweets ‘outside’ of one’s political sphere has resulted in far, far more eyeballs on right-wing content (in addition to being the core reason I get ferociously racist responses to innocuous things I post).

Regularly spewing anti-US propaganda, the accounts show how easily authoritarian states and Americans willing to spread their propaganda can exploitsocial mediaplatforms like Twitter in an effort to steer domestic discourse.

Pablo Mendoza, a managing director at Dubai-based Vy Capital, which provided $700m to the $44bn takeover, has been working along with Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sunil Kantaria to assess what to do with existing vendors... When telling vendors that the company does not plan on paying them, Mendoza has often resorted to pleading with them that his job is on the line...

Nevertheless, the intense cuts – and refusal to immediately pay multiple bills – has raised the spectre that Twitter will be hit with belated costs, legal challenges or regulatory scrutiny.

"It's smoke and mirrors," one former senior staffer said. "[Musk] is doing all this deferring of eventual costs – so he can do the victory lap."

The cost of Twitter ads has dropped by about 20% on a per-one-thousand-impressions basis in that time, said Bruce Cran, chief executive of marketing agency Global Performance Commerce...The total number of advertisers on Twitter dropped by more than 50% year-over-year in January and February, according to Pathmatics data.

“Interest in Twitter has all but evaporated in recent months,” said Christopher Spong, supervisor of social media and communications at performance agency Collective Measures, referring to clients focused on driving results rather than awareness.

The cheapest, Small Package, gives access to 50 million tweets for $42,000 a month. Higher tiers give researchers or businesses access to larger volumes of tweets—100 million and 200 million tweets respectively—and cost $125,000 and $210,000 a month. WIRED confirmed the figures with other existing free API users, who have received emails saying that the new pricing plans will take effect within months.

“I don’t know if there’s an academic on the planet who could afford $42,000 a month for Twitter,” says Jeremy Blackburn, assistant professor at Binghamton University in New York and a member of the iDRAMA Lab, which analyzes hate speech on social media—including on Twitter.

“It’s a pressure cooker,” says one remaining staff member, speaking on condition of anonymity. “There are no guidelines. There’s no respect. There’s absolutely zero transparency. It’s awful.”

[I]n a sign of just how deep Elon Musk’s cuts to the company have been, only one site reliability engineer has been staffed on the project, we’re told. On Monday, the engineer made a “bad configuration change” that “basically broke the Twitter API,” according to a current employee... with few knowledgeable workers on hand to restore service, it took Twitter all morning to fix the problem. “This is what happens when you fire 90 percent of the company,” another current employee says."

On average, the 490 superspreader accounts investigated in the study received 44% more interactions post-acquisition.

Musk’s personal account (one of the most followed and engaged-with accounts on Twitter) was responsible for part of that traction increase, as Musk had repeatedly interacted with “four or five accounts that had gained the most influence” after the acquisition.

“It used to be that you’d see smaller things fail, but now Twitter is going down completely for certain regions of the world,” said Saagar Jha, a Twitter engineer who left in May. “When serious things break, the people who knew the systems aren’t there anymore.”

Nonpayment disputes like these are not common after a leveraged buyout, according to Boston College finance professor Edith Hotchkiss. She said in an email to CNBC that they are “more typical of companies that are within a very short window of filing for bankruptcy.”

The cuts hit product managers, data scientists and engineers who worked on machine learning and site reliability, which helps keep Twitter’s various features online. The monetization infrastructure team, which maintains the services through which Twitter makes money, was reduced to fewer than eight people from 30, a person familiar with the matter said.

According to the company’s data, Twitter has seen increased latency — the time between taking an action like refreshing the timeline and seeing new tweets populate in your feed — during times when more people are using the service. Singlepane showed latency spikes during the halftime show of the Super Bowl, for example, and in the aftermath of the recent earthquake in Turkey.

By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his tweets will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed...

“He bought the company, made a point of showcasing what he believed was broken and manipulated under previous management, then turns around and manipulates the platform to force engagement on all users to hear only his voice,” said a current employee. “I think we’re past the point of believing that he actually wants what’s best for everyone here.”

As a result of the pullback, monthly revenue from Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers plummeted by more than 60% from October through January 25, from around $127 million to just over $48 million, according to the data...Even among the top advertisers that remain, many have dramatically reduced their ad spending on the platform, according to Pathmatics data. HBO, for example, was Twitter’s top advertiser in September, spending nearly $12 million on ads that month, but for the month of January (as of January 25), it spent just over $54,000.

The code is voluntary. But by complying, social media companies can ease some of their compliance obligations under the Digital Services Act (DSA) and avoid fines of up to 6 percent of their global revenues if they fall foul of the standards.

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

It has now been seven weeks since Twitter added public view counts for every tweet... Almost two months later, though, view counts have had the opposite effect, emphasizing how little engagement most posts get relative to their audience size.

"Elon Musk sent an email to Twitter employees telling them to write a one pager on what they accomplished in January, what they plan to accomplish in February, and "any ideas you have for improving Twitter." Twitter has also implemented another change freeze."

“Twitter’s policies and practices in the trust and safety space were built around defending the rights of users around the world, especially the most vulnerable and marginalized communities... Since the acquisition, the company’s only actions have been to silence critics of Elon, to expose journalists and others to harm, and to violate basic ethical standards and privacy laws.”

According to the SMI data, ad spending on Twitter in November fell 55% from last year despite these months traditionally being a time of higher ad spending as brands promote their products during the holiday season.

The landlord said it drew from most of Twitter’s letter of credit security deposit of $3.6 million to satisfy the December rent payment, but Twitter still owes $3.1 million in unpaid rent from January.

Muhammad Jalal, who previously identified as a Taliban official, praised the new owner of Twitter on Monday, declaring that Elon Musk was "making Twitter great again".

Bankers and experts observing the deal said Musk was unlikely to file for bankruptcy, which would risk him losing control of the business.

Instead, his options include cutting a new deal with lenders, such as a debt-for-equity exchange at a discount to the debt’s face value, or finding alternative ways to fund its interest payments as he plays for time to turn around the business. “It is more likely [Musk] would ask Twitter’s creditors for a forbearance and try and work something out,” said one restructuring banker.

…

Technology equity analyst Dan Ives at Wedbush Securities said that Twitter was worth closer to $15bn today than the $44bn Musk paid for it.

[A] senior software engineer wrote Thursday night that “Third-party app suspensions are intentional,” in an internal Twitter command center Slack channel, used by employees to handle outages and interruptions to Twitter’s services.

"What bothers me about Twitterrific’s final day is that it was not dignified. There was no advance notice for its creators, customers just got a weird error, and no one is explaining what’s going on. We had no chance to thank customers who have been with us for over a decade. Instead, it’s just another scene in their ongoing shit show. But I guess that’s what you should expect from a shitty person."

Clients of WPP-owned GroupM, the world’s largest ad-buying firm, have cut their spending on Twitter by between 40% and 50% since Elon Musk took control of the company in late October, according to people familiar with the matter...

[A]d executives meeting with Twitter ad sales representatives were told they had to become comfortable with Musk’s unpredictability and uncertainty.

Tweets using terms associated with climate denial such as “climate fraud,” “climate hoax” and “climate scam” more than tripled in 2022, up 300% from 2021, according to Advance Democracy, a research organization that studies misinformation.

Separately on Monday evening, Mike Clancy, general secretary for the UK trade union Prospect, wrote to Twitter raising the same concerns as Winckworth and urged the platform to “pause the redundancy process” and meet the union, according to a copy of the letter seen by the FT.

Metro officials said they weren’t told why the social media company suspended the account. Before the suspension, Metro officials said, the account had not posted anything other than standard content, which includes delay and detour updates, customer-service-related tips, and replies to customer complaints or concerns.

[A]t least dozens of accounts have continued to post hundreds of tweets in aggregate using terms, abbreviations and hashtags indicating the sale of what Twitter calls child sexual exploitation material, according to a count of just a single day’s tweets. The signs and signals are well known among experts and law enforcement agencies that work to stop the spread of such material.

Musk laid off roughly 50% of Twitter’s more than 7,000 employees on Nov. 4, just a week after taking control of the company. Almost 1,000 of those who were terminated lived in California, according to documents filed with the state. Those workers were required under state and federal law to keep receiving regular paychecks over the past two months.

But that 60-day period ended on Wednesday, the official termination date for California employees. Employees have still not heard any details about additional severance, or continuation of health coverage, known as COBRA, according to three laid-off workers.

Under Musk’s leadership, Twitter users face a greater risk of seeing something fake and thinking it is real. I don’t know if Twitter is going to die any time soon, but I’m spending less time on a service I can’t trust.

[This leak] poses threats of exposure, arrest or violence against people who used Twitter to criticize governments or powerful individuals, and it could open up others to extortion, security experts said.

“Which should come first, limiting functions to the minimum so that they can be run by fewer people, or having the existing system become dysfunctional? It’s not something that will break in a day or two. But you will see how things will work out in the coming months”

The sources with knowledge of Musk's decision to order the removal of the feature declined to be named because they feared retaliation. One of them said millions of people had encountered #ThereIsHelp messages.

He has been holed up in a 10th-floor conference area with a staging room for visitors — where they often remain for more than an hour before being called in. They are instructed not to speak until Musk does. And when they do finally meet with him, he’s sometimes watching YouTube videos.

...When one executive met with Musk and voiced concerns about the Federal Trade Commission’s consent decree, Musk assured that person there was nothing to worry about. He said Tesla had plenty of experience on privacy matters, and pointed to his deep knowledge and awareness of the constraints Twitter was under.

Minutes after the meeting concluded, a subordinate of Musk emailed: Would the executive be willing to send over a copy of the consent decree they had just discussed?

Rather than commenting on the results of the poll in the hours after it concluded, Musk took to Twitter on Monday morning and encouraged questions about whether the results were legitimate. He engaged in a Twitter thread by a user suggesting that a “deep state” bot army was rigging the poll against him. Musk replied to another user in the same thread who suggested that only paid subscribers to Twitter Blue should be able to vote in polls. He said, “Twitter will make that change.”

The scale of the layoffs is unclear, but some engineers took to Twitter yesterday to say they were told over email their contribution was no longer required. The latest cuts come after The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Musk had laid off Nelson Abramson, Twitter’s head of infrastructure, among a handful of other high-ranking employees at the company.

"Twitter blocked traffic from roughly 30 mobile carriers around the world, effectively cutting off access to hundreds of thousands of accounts, primarily in the Asia-Pacific region, including vast swaths of Russia, Indonesia, India, and Malaysia... [R]ather than work to remove individual offenders, the company identified mobile networks associated with large spam networks in specific countries, and blocked users who relied on those networks from receiving SMS messages from Twitter, impacting people with two-factor authentication. Then it blocked traffic from those carriers completely.

From 5:35 AM to 6:45 AM PT on Sunday, Twitter shut down access to the primary telecom providers in India and Russia, as well as the second biggest telecom company in Indonesia.

Worryingly, even Twitter’s aggressive incentives might not be helping. Similarweb’s latest data show that for the first few days of December, the platform’s ad manager domain traffic trends have continued to decline with traffic volume now so low it doesn’t even meet the firm’s threshold necessary to track and measure it.

• Popular author and vlogger John Green
• Bill and Ted actor Alex Winter
• Lawyer and social commentator Popehat
• Nilay Patel, Editor in Chief of The Verge
• Casey Newton, co-founder of Platformer
• Brandy Zadrozny, journalist at NBC

"Musk’s attacks immediately put Roth in harm’s way. Last night on patriots.win, the current iteration of /r/the_donald, the top-rated comment on a thread about #TheTwitterFiles was, “we need to see people hang.” Scrolling through the site, I found multiple violent threats targeting Roth specifically."

"People started asking more questions, and then one employee started getting visibly upset and started having a panic attack — she was crying and was on the floor. Alex didn’t know how to handle the situation so pretty much ignored her and the conversation essentially ended at that point."

"I can't exactly say why because it's one of those things where, it's like: my biological neural nets said, 'It is important to buy Twitter' and just like with a digital neural net, you can't really exactly explain why the neural net is able to understand an image or text – the collective result of the neural net says this is an important decision, or this is the right action, and my biological neural net concluded that it was important to buy Twitter, and that if Twitter was not bought and steered in a good direction, it would be a danger for the future of civilization, and so that's why I bought it."

"Anyone who uses Twitter has noticed the proliferation of extremist posts in their daily feed. Many of these handles were previously banned by Twitter because they spread hatred and bigotry. Now they are back. That is not free speech. It is a cynical marketing strategy.

"Mr. Musk is hiding behind the curtain of being a defender of balanced public dialogue. Yet he himself has used Twitter to spread hatred and bigotry. In a now-deleted Tweet, Mr. Musk used the antisemitic meme Pepe the Frog. If antisemitism is okay, then so is homophobia, misogyny, and racism. That may help Mr. Musk make money. But it can erode our democracy and destroy our country by dividing Americans against each other."

• A very long thread showing internal debate at Twitter about how to handle a tricky moderation question
• An accidentally doxxing of the personal email addresses of Twitter's former CEO Jack Dorsey, and Representative Ro Khanna, as well as the names of junior Twitter employees, who are now receiving death threats
• An implication without evidence that Twitter employees must be biased because some of them had donated to Democrats
• Evidence that the tweets that were removed following a request from the Biden campaign contained nonconsensual pornography

• Anything related to the First Amendment, as Joe Biden was only a candidate at the time, and there is no implication that his campaign did anything other than request the removal of certain tweets
• Any evidence of wrongdoing

“I don’t think there’s anyone left to tell him [that the polls are basically bogus],” one former Twitter employee, who asked to remain anonymous, told Rolling Stone. “The number of people who understand polls that are left – it’s basically zero.”

"You can't use ML [machine learning] for all of it, you can't automate it, there is no 'set it and forget it' when it comes to trust and safety. I think Twitter's challenge going forward is not can the platform build machine learning — sure, they can— but are there enough people who understand the emergent malicious campaigns that happen on the service and understand it well enough to guide product strategy and policy direction. I don't think there are enough people left at the company who can do that work to keep pace."

• behavior that harasses or intimidates or is intended to shame or degrade others
• calling for serious harm on a person or group of people
• unwanted sexual advances
• encouraging others to harass or target specific individuals or groups with abusive behavior
• denying mass casualty events took place
• inciting fear or spread fearful stereotypes about a protected category
• repeated and/or non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes
• hateful imagery

According to reporting by security site infoRisk Today, Twitter's two-factor authentication (2FA) can be disabled by spoofing the phone number an account uses and sending the word “STOP” via SMS. This makes the account extremely vulnerable to hackers. Perfect timing.

After announcing verification checkmarks for Twitter Blue users, some profiles temporarily showed an additional “Official” checkmark.

• Techdirt: Elon’s Twitter: Classist Blue Check System… Reinvented As Even More Elitist Gray Checks, Goes Live, Then Elon Says He’s Killed It
• TechCrunch: Twitter begins to roll out, then kills, grey checkmarks for high-profile accounts

• The Verge: Another major ad agency recommends pausing Twitter ad campaigns
• Reuters: Major ad firm Omnicom recommends clients pause Twitter ad spend - memo

Hours after the layoffs, which impacted Twitter’s site reliability engineering team heavily, first reports of Twitter behaving weirdly emerge. MIT Technology Review talks to a former Twitter engineer who says that it will break in the coming weeks.

• Bloomberg: Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks

Musk cut Twitter’s workforce by approximately 50%, and that still wasn't enough, reports said.

• Bloomberg: Musk Plans to Eliminate Half of Twitter Jobs to Cut Costs
• New York Times: Elon Musk Is Said to Have Ordered Job Cuts Across Twitter