Subterranean birdsite blues

November 18, 2022 3:18 AM

Twitter export: "Do you want to export your Twitter followers, follows or other Tweet data? With our Twitter Export tool you can quickly export followers, following list, retweets or likes of a tweet for free and download it to Excel in CSV format." Via babelfish at Ask Metafilter. Seems timely.

See also: listfollowers.com via Madcaptenor at Ask Metafilter.

posted by nthdegx (563 comments total)

Yeah, Twitter is crashing and burning far faster than anyone expected this morning!

BTW, for what it's worth, if you were following @cstross on twitter you can also find me as @[e-mail] on Mastodon.
posted by cstross at 4:11 AM on November 18, 2022 [41 favorites]

I will be stunned if Twitter survives the weekend. If there's anything on it you care about, don't delay, rescue it now; you might already be to late.
posted by krisjohn at 4:30 AM on November 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

Twitter locks staff out of offices until next week (BBC). That seems ... not good. My dream is some sort of heavy-handed government intervention where Musk is deemed a threat to the economy and Twitter, SpaceX, and Tesla are all turned into worker-owned collectives. Quality and value would go up.

We have a real problem in this country with hero worship. Having an idea (cheap rockets, sexy electric cars, smartphone) does not translate into "the guy with the germ of an idea and lots of money magically designed and built everything". A whole bunch of other smart and hardworking people "invented" SpaceX rockets, Tesla cars, and the iPhone. I'm not a Twitter user but from comments on previous threads it sounds like adventurous users plus Twitter engineers "invented" the platform as it is today (or was till a couple of weeks ago).
posted by caviar2d2 at 5:53 AM on November 18, 2022 [12 favorites]

Often, regarding the existence of billionaires, it seems obvious that there are things we'd have if they didn't exist, but rarely can you point to something specific and say, that. That is something we'd have if billionaires didn't exist.

Well now, regarding one specific billionaire at least, we have an answer. Twitter. We'd have Twitter if Elon Musk didn't exist.
posted by JHarris at 5:56 AM on November 18, 2022 [19 favorites]

I feel like we should have a different front page post for "Twitter is not going to survive the week", if only because I thought it would be funny to call the post How To Kill A Mocking Bird

also Twitter is not going to survive the week
posted by Merus at 6:03 AM on November 18, 2022 [46 favorites]

Over on Twitter, Elon is bragging of record-breaking numbers and posting idiotic memes like a buffoon. Twitter will survive, in the same way that Slashdot survives - a hollow shell with none of the culture.

Twitter has an official tool for exporting all of your tweets (and anything you have liked) which I used last week. Not sure how long it will last though, it seems to useful to live.
posted by AndrewStephens at 6:06 AM on November 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Can Twitter outlast this lettuce?
posted by DreamerFi at 6:17 AM on November 18, 2022 [14 favorites]

Twitter has an official tool for exporting all of your tweets (and anything you have liked) which I used last week. Not sure how long it will last though

I requested my data on Monday, and it still hasn't notified me that it is ready. The button is disabled saying I already requested my data, so don't get your hopes up on using that tool.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 6:20 AM on November 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is reminding me in spirit of the Gamestop short squeeze.

Despite all the billions Musk spent borrowed to buy Twitter, all it takes are a few hundred employees that are tired of his obnoxious behavior to completely ruin his day and hopefully his career.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:27 AM on November 18, 2022 [6 favorites]

I'm skeptical twitter is going to just plain die within a week. Sure, a bunch of individual things might break, but I don't see how the whole thing comes crashing down that quick. It'll limp along, plagued by bugs, hemorrhaging users, and saddled with debt.

I don't see him being CEO for very long, though. He'll find someone else to run it, then try desperately to declare bankruptcy, sell it for whatever he can get, or both.
posted by Room 101 at 6:28 AM on November 18, 2022 [12 favorites]

> I requested my data on Monday, and it still hasn't notified me that it is ready.

It took a couple of days for me - if the tool is still actually working then it is probably getting slammed right now.

For those of use who have made the move to Mastodon, if you have put your Mastodon account details in your Metafilter account as an "Also On" you can do the reverse and link your Mastodon account to your Metafilter profile and it will show up as a verified site (example).
posted by AndrewStephens at 6:28 AM on November 18, 2022 [6 favorites]

If you were able to download your Twitter archive, here's some Python tools that are useful. One converts the archive to markdown and also HTML, with embedded images, videos, and links.

The other, and probably more important now, fixes a weird issue with media in the archive. The normal archive does download media you've tweeted/retweeted, but only in a smaller size than was uploaded, and if you click on one of the images to expand it then it takes you to the Twitter website, which of course requires Twitter operating to work. This other tool will go through your archive, download the full-size versions (if still available), and put them all in a single output folder.
posted by star gentle uterus at 6:42 AM on November 18, 2022 [12 favorites]

Yeah, about that lockout.

I was laid off from Twitter this afternoon. I was in charge of managing badge access to Twitter offices.

Elon just called me and asked if I could come back to help them regain access to HQ as they shut off all badges and accidentally locked themselves out.

posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:42 AM on November 18, 2022 [16 favorites]

that's a joke (just like twitter atm)
posted by simmering octagon at 6:46 AM on November 18, 2022 [17 favorites]

Considering that a few days ago Musk crippled Twitter's 2FA ability as part of his idiot "just shut a bunch of stuff off!" campaign, causing users to be locked out of their accounts, that joke is sadly all too believable.
posted by star gentle uterus at 6:48 AM on November 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

I've found TweetDelete useful in the past. Should anyone prefer to wipe their posting history without outright deleting their account.
posted by nthdegx at 6:48 AM on November 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

So here's why I think Twitter isn't going to survive the week:

• The only real experience we have of social media sites going down like this are what are called "monoliths", where it's all one big server. Lots of sites limp along, irrelevant, because you can just stick them on a server and they'll keep working. Twitter, however is made out of 'microservices', lots of little programs that all do one part of the website, which is easier to update and less prone to all going down at once, but is a lot more complex to run. If one goes down, that part of Twitter will stop working.
• Most of the people who know how most of these programs work have left the company. Elon sure doesn't, he switched 80% of them off.
• At least some of them are probably designed to step in when there's unusually heavy load. The World Cup is next week, and it has historically been one of the heaviest usage periods Twitter sees. It's hard enough when all hands are on deck. Twitter no longer has enough hands.
• They no longer have a payroll team. No-one's getting paid until they're replaced.
• At this point, what we have seen is that Musk does not do things patiently. When things start going bad, there's going to be wild pivots in direction to try and solve the immediate problem, which will likely break other things. We don't know how bad it'll get over the week, but the trendline strongly suggests it's going to keep getting worse. (Two weeks ago when he was talking about selling verification for $8, no-one thought he'd really do it, let alone that in two weeks he'd have lost 3/4 of the staff and locked everyone out of the building.)

Realistically, though, they can probably turn the site back on after they stop getting hammered by football. They'll have lost users, some features will just stop working entirely, but that's fine, at least it's up and possibly serving ads. The other big period of unusually heavy load, I'm told, is New Years', when every user in a timezone tries to post as soon after 12am their time. Their SSL certificate is apparently due to expire soon, which will be Very Bad - I've seen someone say the 8th January, but when I connected I got the 10th of February.
posted by Merus at 6:50 AM on November 18, 2022 [13 favorites]

My money is on Saturday when the World Cup starts, and the few remaining tweeps are not allowed to access the office. That's when it all goes to shit.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:51 AM on November 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

Here's hoping Musk buys New Corp next!
posted by star gentle uterus at 6:52 AM on November 18, 2022 [12 favorites]

What are the chances that by next Tuesday twitter.com will load nothing but a gif meme of a bird cemetery or similar?
posted by UN at 6:55 AM on November 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm skeptical twitter is going to just plain die within a week.

I've seen credible reports that over 75% of the remaining* engineers noped out of the 'hardcore' ultimatum on thursday and took the offered 3 month severance, meaning that they've lost more than 90% of their engineers total since Musk took over, in addition to the near shuttering of e.g. HR, legal and comms departments.

Said pledge: "We will need to be extremely hardcore... This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade". And they had 24 hours to 'opt in' or they'd automatically be sacked.

So all the engineers keeping backend services running? They're pretty much all gone, or going. The fact that the systems are still running largely unattended, despite Musk actively hacking away at the roots, (see his order to turn off ALL microservices which nobbled 2FA for a bit, for example) shows they built in a lot of redundancy and robust infrastructure - they did a good job (plus they use a lot of AWS infrastructure)

But for a big, complex codebase like twitter, with a bajillion features and dependencies, it's like a bunch of plates spinning on closely adjacent poles - it'll all spin on on it's own without maintenance for a bit, but when it starts to crash down it's going to pretty much all come down at once as knock-on effects pile up and there's not enough (or any) people who know how it all fits together to stop it.

As a (former) sysadmin, I'm thinking a week before twitter starts suffering major outages is on the optimistic side if the staff losses from the latest loyalty purge are even vaguely true. Plus World Cup surge traffic, as a treat.

* on top of the 50% initial headcount purge and 80% contractor purge, culling anyone who didn't immediately return to the office from WFH, and the sacking of lead techs who contradicted him when he whinged about completely made-up inherited technical problems.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 6:59 AM on November 18, 2022 [14 favorites]

So, I worked at Twitter for a little while, starting in 2019. My job was basically to wander around and look for problems (largely engineering ones, with a focus on performance and stability). There were a huge number of them, and I of course became interested in what the root cause of these problems was.

One of the things I got interested in was the tool for managing information about the servers that Twitter operated. I was working on a financial model for figuring out TCO of various servers (since the one we had was significantly wrong), and I tried to find a list of all the servers we had, and found out that the list the finance department had was different from the list that engineering department had was different from the list that the datacenter people had.

That seemed like a problem, so I started talking to people about it. I had a meeting with the finance guy who maintained their list, and his response was essentially, "well, I don't see what the problem is, I've got a list!" So then I asked around in engineering to figure out how that list got made (I found this out by talking to the datacenter people, so I already had a pretty good idea of their take). I found a single person who had been around for ages who was basically like "oh yeah that whole system is fucked, I have this ~40 page document on all the problems it has, wanna fix it?" He was, it seemed, the only person who really had any big-picture idea of how the system actually worked.

I talked to him about how things got to this state, and his overall impression was that Twitter's mass layoffs in 2015 (which seem to be significantly smaller than the current ones, ~10% of the company) caused a sort of CYA culture, where no one was even willing to admit that anything had any problems, because they were worried about being next when the next mass layoffs came.

I think it's hard for people outside to imagine how much the layoffs of ~10% of the staff in 2015 (granted, mostly from the engineering department, so it had an outsized impact on them) shaped the dysfunction of the entire organization.

I thought people were overstating Twitter's likelihood of dying a few days ago, but now I'm not as sure. I think there's more likelihood than people think of it limping along with constant bugs and outages before slowly fading into memory while still hanging around for reasons no one can really fathom, like MySpace. But there's a real chance of it just… going out, now — still quite unlikely in the scheme of things, I think, but man it would be funny.
posted by wesleyac at 7:01 AM on November 18, 2022 [82 favorites]

I think that the current level of insanity in management is almost unprecedented, so Twitter will fail in an unprecedented way. Pretty much everyone sees this company that is cratering towards hell and I think can't help but think "well somebody will pull back on the joystick at some point." Maybe they will! Maybe they will. But we are in uncharted territory. There are tons of awful managers out there, but having one who is so bad while being so unaware while having so much power to do what they want...I think it's easy to revert to overly optimistic estimates because it's almost impossible to imagine just how bad this situation is

me and everyone else who used to work at twitter are all mourning. as a once employee, and as a fond user of the website. sigh
posted by wooh at 7:06 AM on November 18, 2022 [23 favorites]

Having worked in tech for a long time, there's rarely much if any extra capacity to do more than keep things running. Pretty much anything (other than features) that improves, automates, or streamlines gets done because engineers are motivated to do it. I have managed lots of ops and dev teams, and in all cases losing even 10% of the team puts you in turtle mode. Hiring replacements or getting needed new reqs is a nightmare, and it's almost impossible to do the obvious thing and spread knowledge out so you are more disaster-proof. Also a lot of things you think are some smooth-running automated process (including keeping apps running) require constant intervention, manual steps, fixes, patches, etc. Someone in a prior thread said something like "Twitter is basically feature complete; why do they even need that many devs?" ... reality is that any system or feature you build using n people is going to require pretty close to n people to maintain, forever. Security fixes, platform upgrades, changes to browser standards, changes to integrated APIs, new privacy regulations in country X requiring a total database redesign, just a million million things.

So whole teams leaving, or teams cut to 50% or less capacity? Stuff is going to just implode. Never mind that the remaining people are not exactly going to be motivated. They'll be lucky if there's no deliberate internal sabotage.

tl;dr; The way you think tech systems work is not how they work.
posted by caviar2d2 at 7:13 AM on November 18, 2022 [34 favorites]

And yeah that badge tweet is a joke but my real guess for the reason is probably that the people responsible for offboarding people all left or were fired, so it's easiest to just cut off everyone's access while they figure shit out.

I don't think it'll actually make a big difference in the scheme of things, everyone is used to remote work (Twitter was actually one of the first companies to go remote during the pandemic), but it is almost as funny as Facebook having to angle grind their way back into their datacenters because no one noticed a circular dependency.
posted by wesleyac at 7:14 AM on November 18, 2022

My spouse is a member of a fandom that is mostly Twitter-based, so I've been helping her scrape as much history as possible. What has worked for me (imperfectly) is:

1. This Python module and tool. (It's a fork of TWINT, which got abandoned a couple of years ago; this fork seems to have kept up.)
2. The Python 'gallery-dl' package.
3. A custom Ruby script that consolidates everything and renders a readable web page.
4. A shell script that runs everything.

The trick is to run twint twice:


twint -u $userid -o $userid.json --json --full-text --count --stats
twint -u $userid -o $userid.json --json --full-text --count --stats --retweet


(For non-Unix-users: "$word" is a shell variable; replace it with the relevant text. E.g. $userid is the name of the twitter account you want to scrape.)

twint can get all of the account's public tweets without --retweet but will only fetch the last ~3200 if retweets are included. Hence, we run it twice; this gives you all of the tweets and some of the retweets. (Note that retweets still don't have the complete text and often don't have media attachements.)

Note also that twint will append new tweets to the output file, so there will be duplicates in $userid.json.

Next, I run gallery-dl:


gallery-dl http://twitter.com/$userid -D $download_directory


This will fetch (most of?) the public media attachments. Each file is named _.jpeg (or equivalent filename extension). So you can associate media files with the tweet but (AFAICT) not in the order they appeared in the tweet.

The tweets also contain URLs of attached pictures. By and large, these are either the same files that gallery-dl downloads or smaller copies of the same image. However, they seem to be in the correct order. My Ruby script (among other things) fetches these as well. I'll try to publish my code later today.
posted by suetanvil at 7:15 AM on November 18, 2022 [15 favorites]

I want to believe that Twitter is going to implode spectacularly, and it sure looks as though it's going to, but I have a stubborn pessimism that bad things persist in mundane ways and rich people are able to slither out of jams.
posted by entropone at 7:15 AM on November 18, 2022 [6 favorites]

I think Twitter as a brand might survive. Perhaps Twitter as a simple instant messaging app (something you likely have on your phone already). Or as a breakfast cereal (with little blue bird marshmallow bits). Or a brand of hard seltzer ("it's sweet to drink some Tweets"). The sky's the limit!
posted by SPrintF at 7:16 AM on November 18, 2022 [16 favorites]

So whole teams leaving, or teams cut to 50% or less capacity? Stuff is going to just implode. Never mind that the remaining people are not exactly going to be motivated. They'll be lucky if there's no deliberate internal sabotage.

The big one for me is security patching - they've lost the people that implement those without breaking stuff (too much), AND the security team has been utterly smashed as well, so no-one checking the intrusion detection systems, suspicious activity, advising staff on phishing attempts etc etc.

Twitter has a giant 'hack me' sign on its back right now, and with desperately short handed and frazzled remaining employees, best security practices are the first thing out the window. So uh, don't use your password on twitter for anything else, m'kay? Their user database may well already be in the hands of hackers-who-sell-to-spammers undetected, and if not, it likely will be soon.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 7:19 AM on November 18, 2022 [19 favorites]

Can't believe this nonsense woke kottke from his Odinsleep.
posted by gwint at 7:21 AM on November 18, 2022 [6 favorites]

From atomicthumbs on Twitter/Cohost, this post has a link to a Twitter search query designed to find alternate services for the people you follow. Handy stuff.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:23 AM on November 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Each file is named _.jpeg (or equivalent filename extension)

By which I mean tweet id (a long number), underscore ("_"), a short number , and the file extension. E.g. "1593487451393183744_1.jpg". I didn't notice the mangling until the edit window had closed.

The important bit is that you can use the first part of the filename to associate a media file with the tweet it came from.
posted by suetanvil at 7:32 AM on November 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

I had trouble with twint, so I spent a few hours roughing out a scraper for twitter accounts, if the official data downloader isn't working this thing will try its best. One nice thing is that it downloads tweets and media and gives you a nice HTML feed of the tweets it finds. But I'd trust twint to more reliably find tweets.
posted by roywig at 7:39 AM on November 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

(my scraper also requires some familiarity with python, relies on both Twitter and nitter, an unofficial frontend, it's liable to overwrite data if you're not careful, I wrote it as fast as possible, and I have no prior experience scraping Twitter. So, ymmv. But it's something, at least. And the HTML output means you can relatively easily eyeball how well it worked)
posted by roywig at 7:42 AM on November 18, 2022

I've read in some of the coverage that some Twitter employees have remained because their immigration status is tied to their visas. Such employees are in a terrible situation, it seems, as I'm sure a lot of the work of keeping the place from falling apart will fall on their shoulders. I imagine that switching jobs is more complicated than just finding another employer willing to sponsor you, which is probably already difficult - presumably, they need to file paperwork on your behalf as well? Does anyone know if there are resources being made available for these workers?
posted by nightcoast at 7:47 AM on November 18, 2022 [12 favorites]

If you look at the @adept256 account you'll see it's a Russian bot created in 2011. That's why I never joined, I wanted my nick and some hacker was squatting on it. What am I supposed to do about that? I can't prove I'm adept256, nobody knows I'm Batman. I'm certainly not going to pay the asshole.

So before I could even create an account some Russian prick was impersonating me. Fuck that, I thought, twitter sucks. Do I really need this thing? Not really.

The adept256 nick goes back to my IRC days in the 90s. Anyone familiar with IRC (early internet chatroom) moderation could tell you that twitter was going to be a shitshow.
posted by adept256 at 7:48 AM on November 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

Wait a sec adept256...

"I'm Batman"
posted by Windopaene at 7:51 AM on November 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

To expand on the notes above about making the Twitter archive more useful: this article about some scripts to convert and improve the archive is useful. A key thing in there; apparently all your links in the archive are to Twitter's t.co redirector, not the actual site you linked. Of course t.co is at risk of going down too. There's a script to resolve all the links and store their real destinations.

Twitter's archive is a pretty great little product btw, something built well years ago when it was launched. It has a nifty little webapp, even a working local-only search. It's one of the better cloud backups I've seen.

As for guesses, I think Twitter will survive in diminished form. I think the systems are resilient enough and there's enough folks left behind to keep it running. And Musk is not a complete idiot (despite evidence); he will extract value from what he bought somehow. But we already know some crucial functions like trust & safety are being abandoned. And it's not hard to imagine things being pretty rough over there for a long time. I can't imagine how Musk thinks they're going to do anything new successfully, at least not without great cost.
posted by Nelson at 7:52 AM on November 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Too much of other people's money is tied up in Twitter, it's not going away. As such, I look forward to everyone tweeting their farewells for the next several months and then continuing to post.
posted by Dark Messiah at 7:55 AM on November 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

The extension Twitter Media Downloader seems to be good, it's available for Firefox and Chrome.
posted by roywig at 8:00 AM on November 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

I mean LJ is still around, Tumblr's is re-assuming its garbage site ethos, and:

Chenchen Zhang - this also reminds me of #douban, where users operate permanently in the expectation that the website might be banned tomorrow. those of us remaining on the bird site could use some douban spirit.

in general folks in China use social media while knowing that their accounts could get suspended any day for political or apolitical content. every time you lose an acct with thousands of connections, you start all over again.
posted by cendawanita at 8:01 AM on November 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

Often, regarding the existence of billionaires, it seems obvious that there are things we'd have if they didn't exist, but rarely can you point to something specific and say, that. That is something we'd have if billionaires didn't exist.

Well now, regarding one specific billionaire at least, we have an answer. Twitter. We'd have Twitter if Elon Musk didn't exist.

That's backwards. Outside the strictly money movers, people only become billionaires by creating the previously unimagined (or just unrealized) "that", whether "that" is Apple, Michael Jackson's song list, Amazon, Harry Potter, or, of course, Twitter itself, the creating of which made Jack Dorsey a billionaire.

Which is not to say that "that" is necessarily a good thing, or that a spare billion dollars or two arising from "that" could not find better uses than that which some billionaires put said billion or two to.
posted by BWA at 8:12 AM on November 18, 2022

It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Twitter.
posted by Western Infidels at 8:14 AM on November 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Too much of other people's money is tied up in Twitter, it's not going away.

So how are the lenders going to step in and change what's happening?

I'm sure plenty of money was lost when the Titanic sank too.

But while money has a lot of power in this society, it's not omnipotent...
posted by overglow at 8:21 AM on November 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

That's backwards.

I think that's the point.

If it wasn't for a petty, narcissistic, manchild of a billionaire, Twitter wouldn't be facing the problems it's currently facing. Everything that's happening to Twitter now is a direct result of one man buying it.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:25 AM on November 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

The sky's the limit!

The only limit is yourself.
posted by fedward at 8:28 AM on November 18, 2022 [8 favorites]

I know how to get my own archive, but is there a way to DL the entirety of other users' public tweets/retweets?
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:31 AM on November 18, 2022

... and the various mastodon servers need to find more resources again.

My god though, this is a trainwreck, it's hard to look away.

My personal hope is this all stays up just long enough for all the artist and journalist communities to archive and find new places to land before the whole thing goes up.
posted by pan at 8:36 AM on November 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

How To Kill A Mocking Bird

How to Mock a Killed Bird
posted by mark k at 8:36 AM on November 18, 2022 [16 favorites]

I know how to get my own archive, but is there a way to DL the entirety of other users' public tweets/retweets?

The entirety is a tall order. The API has some pretty strict limits on historical tweets unless you’re paying for enterprise access.

They’re used to be a commercial archive service (Gnip), but Twitter bought them several years ago.

There are some special purpose archives (eg Trump’s tweets), but for an arbitrary user it’s not really feasible in an automated fashion.
posted by jedicus at 8:52 AM on November 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Please note that if you've ever used Twitter as an authentication proxy to log into any other services - that is, if you've ever clicked the "log in with twitter" button - you need to figure out how to get out from under that as soon as you can, because when that stops working everything downstream of it will stop working too.
posted by mhoye at 9:37 AM on November 18, 2022 [15 favorites]

So how are the lenders going to step in and change what's happening?

During testimony this week in the Delaware Chancery court, he stated he was already looking for someone to hand the role of CEO over to. Baby gets bored with his toys quickly.

I joked (?) that Twitter's patent filing was simply "a button that stokes anxiety". I stand by that now more than ever.

There is no harm in being proactive, download and archive whatever you see fit, but I think it is highly unlikely 44 billion dollars will be set on fire in under a month.
posted by Dark Messiah at 9:46 AM on November 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Science twitter is trying to make a social graph backup: Opencheck.is

Fedifinder tries to figure out if people you follow or have on lists have Mastodon accounts somewhere
posted by foxfirefey at 9:48 AM on November 18, 2022 [9 favorites]

roywig: The link to the Firefox browser extension is in Japanese, might want to get that edited (I just changed "ja" to "en" in the url).
posted by ArgentCorvid at 9:53 AM on November 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

I found a single person who had been around for ages who was basically like "oh yeah that whole system is fucked, I have this ~40 page document on all the problems it has, wanna fix it?" He was, it seemed, the only person who really had any big-picture idea of how the system actually worked.

Did anyone else immediately hear and read this in Gilfoyle's voice?
posted by loquacious at 10:07 AM on November 18, 2022 [11 favorites]

but I think it is highly unlikely 44 billion dollars will be set on fire in under a month.

How much money did FTX just set on fire? 32 billion? It's not quite 44 billion, but it's close...
posted by RonButNotStupid at 10:08 AM on November 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

Regardless of Musk's obvious, and publicly demonstrated ineptitude, I don't think comparing it to a literal Ponzi scheme is fair. FTX didn't set anything on fire, they stole it.
posted by Dark Messiah at 10:11 AM on November 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

Elon just wants to test whether you can reuse a tech company after lighting it on fire and blasting it into the stratosphere.
posted by mbrubeck at 10:29 AM on November 18, 2022 [8 favorites]

I go back and forth on wondering whether this is ... not necessarily four-dimensional chess, but at least like, three-dimensional Candyland or something, where there's a kind of personally-beneficial soft-landing for Musk when the dust settles, or if it's some combination of egotistical incompetence and ... maybe drug abuse? I don't know, the whole saga is so farcical as to be almost incomprehensible to me.
posted by uncleozzy at 10:36 AM on November 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

A good twitter thread on all sorts of ways things can go wrong at Twitter.
posted by fings at 10:43 AM on November 18, 2022 [12 favorites]

people only become billionaires by creating the previously unimagined (or just unrealized) "that", whether "that" is Apple, Michael Jackson's song list, Amazon, Harry Potter, or, of course, Twitter itself

This is a staggeringly, mind-bogglingly untrue statement and suggests you are woefully naive about the actual billionaires of our world. Check out the list of billionaires, click on a few names to see a little bit of their bios, and see for yourself. The myth that the only way to become a billionaire is by inventing or creating some world-changing new thing is pure pro-billionaire propaganda.

Fortunately, if there's one thing Musk is accomplishing (aside from setting a new world record for "most expensive midlife crisis of all time") with this absolute shitshow on the bird site, it's to do tremendous damage to the idea that the world is anything resembling a meritocracy and the billionaires of the world are all brilliant people who deserve their billions.
posted by mstokes650 at 10:52 AM on November 18, 2022 [39 favorites]

Do people really think it's anything but a lot of international actors pooling their money and looking for damning evidence to use against their political enemies -- whether by extortion, blackmail, or other means?

Wouldn't having access to a ton of investigative journalists' DMs bring in top-dollar from nefarious parties looking to quash any legal actions they're currently facing (including Elmo himself)?

IMO, having access to ALL that data and making it available for sale to the highest bidder is likely to net significantly more than the $44-billion outlay, especially if it helps cover up evidence of things like war crimes, governmental corruption, collusion by multinational corps engaged in price-fixing or price-gouging, etc.

And what about all that delicious, profitable user data? Identity theft? There are countless ways to monetize Twitter's user data once it's on the black market. And Elmo allegedly wants to turn it into a payment-processing system?

I see all of this as not a bumbling idiot breaking things, but malicious intent disguised as incompetency -- why else would he urge users to vote Republican in the midterms? Do we really think a GOP-led house is going to investigate whether Twitter's takeover now constitutes a national security risk?

Not to mention that once you wreck it into the ground, there's a shitload of tax breaks that come from declaring business losses for at least a couple years.

I hope I'm wrong, and he's just a gleeful idiot wrecking things because his ego can't handle failure. But I don't have a lot of faith that this is what we're seeing happen here.

Dave Troy has a pretty good (but brief) Twitter thread here: "I believe the Twitter purchase was an act of war and intentional sabotage."
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 11:08 AM on November 18, 2022 [17 favorites]

re: Tweeps who have visas who might lose them if they're laid off:

Does anyone know if there are resources being made available for these workers?

as someone who has gone through the gauntlet of work based immigration and been on both the staff receiving and management distributing side of a layoff, I think it is touching and lovely that you hope that this would happen, but I can tell you that this actually never happens. Not even for the kindest company.

Layoffs happen because a company is in financial trouble and has to do awful things to itself to stay alive. It will only provide support for departing employees because it's a way of mitigating the morale loss that comes from a layoff and also because states have employee protection laws in place to require measures like 2 months or 3 months severance. There are no laws protecting the ability for immigrants to maintain their status beyond the 90 days that are afforded after a loss of employment status. There are few options for a company to protect these former colleagues and very little upside for a company to do it. All of the money that immigrants pay into social security, unemployment taxes and medicaid will be used to supplement the benefit of citizens, and they will not be able to claim any of that.

We are always going to be left on our own.
posted by bl1nk at 11:09 AM on November 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

Forget that 'closed until Monday' stuff!

NEW: Email from Elon to the engineering team: "Anyone who can actually write software, please report to the 10th floor at 2pm today. Before doing so, please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past 6 months"

Sounds like a trap to me.
posted by JoeZydeco at 11:11 AM on November 18, 2022 [9 favorites]

Do people really think it's anything but a lot of international actors pooling their money and looking for damning evidence to use against their political enemies -- whether by extortion, blackmail, or other means?

Personally, I think that 90% of theories like this are attempts to find a deeper logic, however insidious, to actions which are largely chaotic and stupid. I'm sure that various groups of opportunists will try to take advantage of stuff like this when it arises, but by and large, history suggests that that kind of thing is more tactical than strategic, and involves a lot of flailing around.

A friend of mine has interviewed one-on-one with Musk multiple times, and has spent a fair amount of time with him apart from that. Her take is basically that Elon cares a lot about SpaceX, could give a shit about Tesla, and likely gives even less of a shit about Twitter. He's not a rational actor. His holding power doesn't make him rational, just like his being rich doesn't make him smart.

The "conspiracy" that I believe in is that wealth and power are extraordinarily transformative and ruinous, and also largely exist in the hands of unchecked individuals who can destroy the lives of tens of thousands of people for the same reason that most of us text exes: it's three in the morning, they drank two too many espressos, and they have a phone in their hands. Billionaires have power many orders of magnitude beyond most of us, but they are just as stupid as us, and their impulse decisions are as ruinous. And as much as we'd all like to pretend that that 3am booty call was part of some grand master life plan, it never is. Ditto the bulk of what happens when capital gets thrown about: the thought of insidious master plans is more reassuring than the reality that the driver's asleep at the wheel, and there're an awful lot of things to run into, most of which will suffer a lot worse than the person in the car.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 11:18 AM on November 18, 2022 [50 favorites]

There is no 4D chess at work; he talked some shit to mess with Twitter's stock price, got baited into making an offer -- because he can never back down from any challenge to his image -- and signed it while also waiving due diligence. He perhaps thought he'd be able to ask for a mulligan, or stall court actions long enough for Twitter to settle and let him back out. Then the Delaware Chancery court had all his texts entered in the discovery process and he wisely decided to live up to his obligation rather than spill even more embarrassing details about his life into official court documents for all to see. The Chancery court does not fuck around. He doesn't want to be doing this, but he's too arrogant to do anything but what we're seeing.
posted by Dark Messiah at 11:25 AM on November 18, 2022 [16 favorites]

I know how to get my own archive, but is there a way to DL the entirety of other users' public tweets/retweets?

the archiver I wrote linked upthread tries to do this (tweets and retweets) in a roundabout way. It's not official and it's going to miss tweets, but it's probably better than nothing if you are comfortable with running and probably debugging bad Python code.
posted by roywig at 11:29 AM on November 18, 2022

Forget that 'closed until Monday' stuff!

Oh, the building is still closed and locked. Only the truly worthy people who can actually write code who make it past the locked doors, loose dogs, and laser turrets in order to make the appointment will retain their jobs.

On a more serious note, there's speculation that these emails went out to suspected leakers with watermarking in their spacing, punctuation, etc. so that when the reporters quote the leak verbatim the source can be identified.

he's too arrogant to do anything but what we're seeing.

At this point it's also feeling like there may be a stimulant bender on top of the usual arrogance.
posted by Candleman at 11:30 AM on November 18, 2022 [13 favorites]

If Musk has/had an actual plan for Twitter, I'd guess that he wanted it to be the foundation of a media empire, like buying a newspaper or a cable network. A lot of actual news is/was disseminated via Twitter, so controlling that pipeline has value. If Twitter was the "paper of record," (ie, the verification process was actually worth something), then it would have value if it supplied the world with posts from politicians, captains of industry and celebrities. In this scheme, the posts of "little people" would have no value at all, of course, so the algorithm would bury them. I think Stephen King had the right of it: Twitter should pay him, since he's the one creating content.

Of course, for this scheme to work, Twitter would require more verification and moderation, actual editorial control, not less. And somehow you have to make money doing this. But Elon didn't think about that.
posted by SPrintF at 11:34 AM on November 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

His initial ideas for Twitter appeared to be "bank of Tik-Tok with single-click buying". What I got from that is that he wants money flowing through the place.
posted by clawsoon at 11:38 AM on November 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

my current fascination is how the brigade of Elon supporters who show up in any Twitter/FB/LinkedIn thread criticizing Musk's behavior always reach for the talking points that Twitter employees are mismanaged, coddled, spoiled, and lazy. It's like all of the regular criticisms that folks point at government bureaucrats and liberal elites as they defend the inherent work ethic of capitalists are just being regurgitated to other capitalists who are now the designated enemy.

It's almost like these criticisms aren't based on any truth but are ... projections? of someone's inherent insecurities and class envy? That couldn't be ...
posted by bl1nk at 11:40 AM on November 18, 2022 [23 favorites]

Twitter vs. Musk texts released during discovery -- Exhibit H made for some pretty interesting reading re: buyer intent.
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 11:43 AM on November 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

people only become billionaires by creating the previously unimagined (or just unrealized) "that",

Creating the "previously unimagined (or just unrealized) 'that'" can, sometimes, earn you entry into the millionaire class. Millionaires only become billionaires by theft.
posted by biogeo at 11:49 AM on November 18, 2022 [17 favorites]

If Twitter did go down then it would be like a Brand New Day for everyone. That's not totally a bad thing is it?
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:06 PM on November 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

If Twitter crashes and you need to find me, the hell you will. I've got a two day head start on you, which is more than I need. I speak a dozen languages, know every local custom, I'll blend in, disappear, you'll never see me again. From @PeterBrannen1.
posted by Bella Donna at 12:12 PM on November 18, 2022 [20 favorites]

I don't know Elon Musk but I've known a lot of drug addicts and alcoholics, and it's pretty obvious to me that he's a person with a substance abuse problem and too much money. At this rate it won't be long before he only has the substance abuse problem.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 12:13 PM on November 18, 2022 [13 favorites]

I go by Hanlon's Razor, here as elsewhere. I believe that Musk's bankrollers did assume that the place would be less dangerous to them with the kind of changes he said he'd implement -- a free-for-all with a zone so flooded it was useless to anyone but bottom-feeders who would hatch constant evil rumors. (Usenet became like this, but with pure spam.) But surely they also assumed, being humans, that since he is very rich, he must know on some level what he is doing. They know better now, but that doesn't mean that Musk will no longer be useful to them. He's a Trump figure for the kind of guys who still think "Flying Spaghetti Monster" is funny. And as a Trump figure, he will have countless uses.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:16 PM on November 18, 2022 [8 favorites]

> gwint: "Can't believe this nonsense woke kottke from his Odinsleep."

If this brings back Nicole Cliffe, perhaps it will all be worth it. Really, the only good path out of this I can see is if Nicole Cliffe's husband's hedge fund buys out Elon and puts her in charge.
posted by mhum at 12:36 PM on November 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

A good twitter thread on all sorts of ways things can go wrong at Twitter.

I can't think of a better argument against twitter's existance. At least with a federated system the emotional labor is forced onto the people running an instance.
posted by The Power Nap at 12:54 PM on November 18, 2022

@capitolhunters

Someone has to say it: Elon Musk has lied for 27 years about his credentials. He does not have a BS in Physics, or any technical field. Did not get into a PhD program. Dropped out in 1995 & was illegal. Later, investors quietly arranged a diploma - but not in science.

Threadreader Link
posted by nathan_teske at 1:09 PM on November 18, 2022 [21 favorites]

LOL, the "and they said it was fine" on his graduation just made me snicker a whole lot.
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:14 PM on November 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Moneyquotes from a thread from a Twitter engineer who didn’t have an Musk allergy but who still didn’t stay:

I left because I no longer knew what I was staying for. Previously I was staying for the people, the vision, and of course the money (lets all be honest). All of those were radically changed or uncertain.

Obviously, a 50% cut is hard but my org was cut at 85%+ on the first round. (An admitted mistake by leadership when they were trying to retain the survivors) I was the last one standing in multiple large slack rooms and JIRA boards. The office was depressing.

Nevertheless myself and others were banding together, triaging services, updating on-call, literally saying to my wife on Tuesday “I’ll give it my best shot what do I have to lose?”. Then Wednesday offered a clean exit and 80% of the remaining were gone. 3/75 engineers stayed.

If I stayed I would have been on-call constantly with little support for an indeterminate amount of time on several additional complex systems I had no experience in. Maybe for the right vision I could have dug deep and done mind numbing work for awhile. But that’s the thing…

There was no vision shared with us. No 5 year plan like at Tesla. Nothing more than what anyone can see on Twitter. It allegedly is coming for those who stayed but the ask was blind faith and required signing away the severance offer before seeing it. Pure loyalty test.

…

Finally, there was no retention plan for those that stayed. No clear upside for sticking it through the storm on the horizon. Just “trust us” style verbal promises. But tweeps overall were untrusting after the 7 months of acquisition drama, recent tweets, and leaks etc.

So my friends are gone, the vision is murky, there is a storm coming and a no financial upside. What would you do? Would you sacrifice time with your kids over the holidays for vague assurances and the opportunity to make a rich person richer or would you take the out?

I wonder how much of Elon throwing his weight around with “resign or overtime decide now!!!” is designed to give the remaining engineers a nasty case of sunk cost fallacy or just identify the ones too captive by circumstance to have other options and he just miscalculated how many people (some of who doubtlessly had just had a very cushy payout from his overpayment of their RSUs) were willing to put up with it.
posted by foxfirefey at 1:33 PM on November 18, 2022 [21 favorites]

Dropped out in 1995 & was illegal.

It took me a while to parse this the first time I read it but what they mean is by dropping out he overstayed his student visa not that dropping out was somehow illegal.

as someone who has gone through the gauntlet of work based immigration and been on both the staff receiving and management distributing side of a layoff, I think it is touching and lovely that you hope that this would happen, but I can tell you that this actually never happens. Not even for the kindest company.

I think they were hoping some non company actor might have stepped in to help these people even if it was just a lose collection of former and current visa holders banding together to help each other out.

There is no harm in being proactive, download and archive whatever you see fit, but I think it is highly unlikely 44 billion dollars will be set on fire in under a month.

If Twitter wasn't private what do you think it would be trade at today? $53? $30? $10? I think it would be a lot closer tot he $10 than $50. IE: Musk has already set fire to that much corporate value.
posted by Mitheral at 1:46 PM on November 18, 2022 [6 favorites]

> any portmanteau in a storm: "If Twitter did go down then it would be like a Brand New Day for everyone. That's not totally a bad thing is it?"

Well, you know how when people say goodbye to friends and colleagues when they leave a job or graduate from school they say that they'll write and keep in touch but they never do?
posted by mhum at 1:48 PM on November 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

"Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2 pm today. Before doing so, please email a bullet point summary of what your code commands have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code," Musk wrote in the first of three emails reportedly sent around midnight PT Friday.

Musk's emails were published in full by Business Insider and also reported by Fortune, CNBC, and Reuters. His emails requested in-person meetings with coders despite Twitter informing staff that it was closing all office buildings and disabling employee badge access until Monday.

"If you're working remotely, please email the request below nonetheless and I will try to speak [to] you via video. Only those who cannot physically get to Twitter HQ or have a family emergency are excused," Musk wrote in a second email. "These will be short, technical interviews that allow me to better understand the Twitter tech stack."

Musk prefers that Twitter coders fly to San Francisco for the short interviews. "If possible, I would appreciate it if you could fly to SF to be present in person. I will be at Twitter HQ until midnight and then back again tomorrow morning," he wrote in another email.

Publicly, Musk claimed to be unconcerned about the mass departures. "The best people are staying, so I’m not super worried," Musk wrote.

Screenshots. Of. Code. SCREENSHOTS. Holy fuck.

AND he thinks he's kept 'the best people' by firing a random half of the company and making most of the rest who are capable of finding other work quit with his insane demands. AND all the lead people who tried to tell him how the tech stack worked are gone because his ego wouldn't let anyone tell him his butthead assumptions were wrong without immediately firing them. Whatever he's smoking, he really needs to stop before he injures himself.

Hope no staffer is dumb enough to fly to SF thinking they'll put it on expenses, given the entire payroll department is reportedly gone...
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 1:54 PM on November 18, 2022 [17 favorites]

It will be a bad thing for a lot communities. A fair number may not survive a transition because there isn’t another Twitter. That may sound so obvious as to be stupid, but one of the groups I used to be involved in shifted to a different type of platform from its original home, not Twitter, and it’s just different enough that a fair number of people have left. So it may not be all bad, but if Twitter goes down permanently there will be plenty of pain involved for users.
posted by Bella Donna at 1:56 PM on November 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

Bella Donna: and it’s just different enough that a fair number of people have left.

I'm curious if some of the things from the "all sorts of ways things can go wrong at Twitter" link upthread played a part in it, especially the parts where if something is laggy people will give up on it en masse:

Suddenly it takes a couple dozen milliseconds longer to load the feed. Ever seen the statistics for what happens to retention rate? It's mind-boggling.

You wouldn't believe how many tens of thousands of people will stop using your app, forever, if some Android change adds the slightest lag to scroll times.

If you add 5 seconds to the time it takes to start your app from nothing, you will TANK your onboarding rate. To an unbelievable degree. I mean, push it into the fucking ground. They'll never try the app, ever.

Some Android change makes it where loading the app takes 1 second longer. Suddenly, 25,000 fewer people are using your app every day. Those numbers will start to grow. I know it seems ridiculous, but this shit is REAL.

posted by clawsoon at 2:02 PM on November 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

Twitter Chaos Endangers Public Safety, Emergency Managers Warn:

Though only an estimated 22 percent of U.S. adults use Twitter, its reach extends well beyond them. Users often share screenshots of tweets on other social media sites; some send tweets to their contacts via text or e-mail. “We found that Twitter can be a really, really useful platform, especially during disaster-type events,” says Robert Prestley, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who studies how weather information sources use social media. “It is someplace where you can go and get information that is being updated on a somewhat constant basis,” which is especially important during situations with rapidly changing conditions.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:24 PM on November 18, 2022 [8 favorites]

Moneyquotes from a thread from a Twitter engineer who didn’t have an Musk allergy but who still didn’t stay

The thing is, pretty much everything he laid out is a Musk allergy. I'm sure there were some people at Twitter who just have a visceral hatred for him but most of them had a very rational dislike and bad expectations for him based on his prior antics with things like the Thai cave and his stated intent prior to the advertising. They very rationally knew it was going to play out something like this.

If Twitter wasn't private what do you think it would be trade at today? $53? $30? $10? I think it would be a lot closer tot he $10 than $50. IE: Musk has already set fire to that much corporate value.

I'd put it at more like $3 at this point. If 75% if the remaining half really do leave now, while I'm sure the name will carry on, I'd expect it will need to largely be rewritten and that it'll be just as successful as the Myspace rewrite. Beyond the loss of key personnel, he's also managed to piss off a lot of the key advertisers.
posted by Candleman at 2:26 PM on November 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Musk has become high on his own supply, failing to differentiate between luck and execution, making him believe that he could continue a streak that has involved finding talented people to fix the problems he’s created. While he was able to enter early enterprises like Tesla and SpaceX and create a culture of fear and paranoia, Musk could not impose his will on Twitter. Staffers were not scared of him, as the company was not fundamentally dedicated to Musk’s pursuits, and he had no hand in its success, all while mistakenly believing that most people saw him as a moral and intellectual paragon.

Fundamentally, this situation has also proven Elon Musk to be deeply, painfully uncool. From Ed Zitron. The whole thing is a truly epic read.
posted by Bella Donna at 2:43 PM on November 18, 2022 [12 favorites]

Yeah, those advertisers aren't coming back. In addition to their well-shared concerns about the mass firing of moderation, security, trust, and safety teams, and fake accounts (the whole Elli Lily debacle), and turning into 'child porn and Nazis' twitter, the other big factor is their ad-sales contacts have all quit or been fired, so they'd struggle to place adverts even if they did want to risk burning their brand big time.

It's possible Twitter could survive in a much smaller fashion ala Parler or Truth Social with the scummiest of the scum advertisers, but with that 13 billion in debt servicing he's saddled them with, they're absolutely fucked in the medium term. it's going to be an absolute money pit for him personally, until either he cries uncle, runs out of Tesla stock to draw loans against, or Tesla's other shareholders revolt at his shitstorm antics and kick him out.

And that's assuming the lights just don't go out permanently because of a major systems failure nobody left knows how to fix.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 2:44 PM on November 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Obviously, a 50% cut is hard but my org was cut at 85%+ on the first round. (An admitted mistake by leadership when they were trying to retain the survivors) I was the last one standing in multiple large slack rooms and JIRA boards. The office was depressing.

Waitaminute, twitter uses slack internally?
posted by adept256 at 2:49 PM on November 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Everything coming out of Twitter HQ has strong Death of Stalin vibes, with an alternate-universe plot twist that the motherfucker's still alive and giving orders.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:51 PM on November 18, 2022 [33 favorites]

I would give your comment 1000 favorites if I could, mandolin conspiracy.
posted by Bella Donna at 3:02 PM on November 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

That's a great article from Ed Zitron. My favorite:

Coding Corner: I do not know how to code, but I do understand that Musk’s requests were strange, so I decided to open this one up to those who knew better.

My followers, when asked, described Musk’s request for code as “like asking a car mechanic to show you their 10 best screws,” “completely meaningless without context,” “like asking for screenshots of the top 10 sentence fragments that you’ve written to figure out how good you are at writing articles,” “like asking a librarian for their favourite numbers in the dewy decimal system,” “like asking an aerospace engineer for their most important airplane parts,” or “like judging a non-fiction book by asking to see 10 books referenced in the bibliography.”

posted by Melismata at 3:04 PM on November 18, 2022 [27 favorites]

I'm dying to find out if anyone actually showed up to this meeting. Or was ABLE to. If I were a for-the-minute-employed Tweep, I think I'd pretend I had no idea what coding is today.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:08 PM on November 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

Twitter's built-in archive download doesn't seem to include bookmarks. Or (as far as I can tell) the usernames of the people you follow or who follow you (just their numerical Twitter user IDs). To get those bookmarks and username lists: you can use the open source web archiving tool Webrecorder’s ArchiveWebPage Chrome extension. Log into Twitter and let the tool run for a bit, and it'll scroll & save for you. Blog post & short video about it by Ed Summers -- I do like using this tool because Webrecorder already had name recognition for me and I know it was built by archivists, is meant to be robust, and will continue to be used and supported.
posted by brainwane at 3:15 PM on November 18, 2022 [8 favorites]

"It’s the end of twitter as we know it, and I feel fine": "My love letter to all my fellow twitterers… With love and gratitude for Michael Stipe and REM."

That’s great! It starts with a joke tweet
trolls and bots, an offer made
And Elon Musk is not afraid

Eye of a hurricane, listen to the staff churn
posted by brainwane at 3:17 PM on November 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

Waitaminute, twitter uses slack internally? @adept256

Forgive my ignorance, but why would this be so bad/wrong/fraught/dangerous?

In the same vein, the SCREENSHOTS take? Is that also a kind of vulnerability of some sort?

I'm pretty much a fountain pen, Bank of England black ink, and letter paper sort -albeit eager to learn and grateful to be taught!
posted by dutchrick at 3:38 PM on November 18, 2022

The screenshots thing, assuming a modicum of care is taken not to spray the screenshots across the universe, shouldn't be a vulnerability.

It's just... a really really dimwitted, ineffectual way to assess code and the people who write code. I didn't think there was much worse than Microsoft stack ranking, but here we are.
posted by humbug at 3:50 PM on November 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

the truly worthy people who can actually write code who make it past the locked doors, loose dogs, and laser turrets

And, in the Muppet version, the laser network made of red fuzzy yarn.
posted by clew at 4:06 PM on November 18, 2022 [6 favorites]

The screenshots thing is peculiar like communicating with a Mefite by screenshotting a piece of a metafilter thread and emailing it to them would be, if that helps.

It’s even weirder in context because both the editing programs used by individual programmers and the source code control programs that keep track of thousands of people’s interleaved, overlapping, jazerained source code have been improved over decades to help us understand the code at all the scales. Giving all that up for a disconnected screenshot is just strange.
posted by clew at 4:16 PM on November 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

Imagine telling a painter to zoom in on 0.05% of one of their paintings and take a picture of it and then you're going to fire them or not looking at that fraction of the painting. Now make it a collaborative painting with a dozen or more people all working on it over the course of several years so that many people's output is mixed together so it's hard to carve out a piece that you exclusively worked on.

It's also a stupid format to evaluate code in. What if your font size is too small for Elon's aged eyes or you love purple text and he hates it? If you evaluate code in text format rather than a picture, you can tweak all that stuff. You can cut and paste it. Etc.

And WTF is Elon going to do evaluate a picture of code written in languages that he doesn't understand? Even if he brings in his lovely people from Tesla, as noted above, the backend of Twitter is written in Scala and the odds of him employing people qualified to evaluated advanced Scala are slim (it's a niche but cool language).

And lastly, looking at a screenshot doesn't tell the story of the work involved or the importance. A really difficult and weird performance or security fix might be two or three lines of code but have taken several weeks of careful instrumentation of a complex stack to even figure out what's going on in order to write those few lines.
posted by Candleman at 4:17 PM on November 18, 2022 [11 favorites]

A lot of big tech companies use Slack for internal comms. It costs money to license, but not as much as building out and maintaining a competitor, plus most engineers you'd hire are familiar and productive using it.

As I interpret it, the screenshots take is less "OMG security!" and more "omg looking at images of a couple of bits of code is a terrible way to evaluate someone's impact or ability as an engineer." I write lots of code. In isolation, a line of code is just a line of code. I can't really think of any single line of code that's self-evidently valuable, except for maybe something like the fast inverse square root in Quake or something, and even then that's clever/efficient, but not really going to move the needle in the kind of giant distributed system that Twitter is. The architecture (which makes it maintainble/extensible) is the valuable bit. You can't see that from a couple of screenshots.
posted by Alterscape at 4:21 PM on November 18, 2022 [8 favorites]

I think it's all just an Elon mind trick. He asks you to show up in person to present your work, and instead of looking at the ridiculous printout of disembodied code, he tries to read your worth as a person pawn of capitalism. If you pass, you continue at Twitter and get to hardcore it for Elon for another day. If you fail, he'll zap you with laser eyes like the Oracles in The Neverending Story.
posted by mochapickle at 4:24 PM on November 18, 2022 [11 favorites]

It's also a terrible way to evaluate your company as a whole; even if you want to concentrate on code and ignore marketing, accounting, human resources, plant security and maintenance, administration of databases/servers/networking/etc. There are big chunks of people vital to your codebase that never/rarely contribute any code to the production code. EG: Testers or documentation writers.
posted by Mitheral at 4:29 PM on November 18, 2022 [9 favorites]

> dutchrick: "In the same vein, the SCREENSHOTS take?"

He previously asked for printouts (no more than 50 pages, lol) of code. I'm inclined to believe that Elon is just bad at coding. Like, I can't imagine anyone who's programmed in the last 20 years who thinks looking at a screenshot or printout of code is a reasonable thing to do in anything but the most trivial situations (e.g.: Comp. Sci. 101 or Intro to Programming type classroom exercises), nevermind in the context of "trying to understand Twitter's tech stack". I mean, in an enterprise of Twitter's size (and based on their microservice architecture), the individual snippets of code that you'd capture in a screenshot are not nearly as important as, say, how different components are linked up with each other or how the underlying server infrastructure is set up to serve these components.

I suspect that Elon basically fetishizes programming. He doesn't have any significant understanding or skill at it but recognizes it to be important and further believes it to be almost like a magic power (?) or, at the very least, an demonstration of intrinsic worth/skill/intelligence/whatever. I mean, he clearly thinks that if he just had the right 10 or 12 hardcore coders is all it'll take to fix Twitter (lol good luck with that).
posted by mhum at 4:30 PM on November 18, 2022 [15 favorites]

The purpose of this exercise is to see who will kneel and kiss Elon's ring. Think what a huge flex it would be to hear the news this morning in New York, jump on an airplane and run into the office at 7pm waving printouts of your code saying "am I too late? Will Mr. Musk look at my code please?" Just think how happy that will make Elon.
posted by Nelson at 4:31 PM on November 18, 2022 [17 favorites]

In the same vein, the SCREENSHOTS take? Is that also a kind of vulnerability of some sort?

You can't fit anything meaningful about code in a screenshot, and it blocks out all access to the rest it relies on - you can't follow links or see how it connects, or do anything to investigate further, because it's a tiny dumb picture. Code on any production scale is all about how many, many different parts fit together, written and used by many people, and a single small subsection of actually useful code can easily run into thousands of lines. Trying to diagnose whether a coder is any good, or worse how the code fits together with small snippets is like, well, trying to understand the geography and economy of the USA by looking at a tourist's favourite 10 photos, or learning how to fix a car by getting a mechanic to show you his favourite socket wrench.

PLUS a *really* good coder is often about *removing* code entirely. Code is a liability; it needs to be maintained, secured, updated, and not break when changes elsewhere are made, and old code that hasn't been touched for a while (because bob, who knew how it worked, and wrote clever but really opaque code that didn't interact well with other's, left years ago etc) is often particular risky. Customers are assets, money in the bank is an asset, a brand reputation is an asset; code is what you use to get those, but the code itself - you want it as clean, well-supported, understood, well documented and as little of it as you can get away with. Looking at snippets - especially outside the entire context of what they're for - is about as useful as well, Musk is competent as a leader.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 4:32 PM on November 18, 2022 [10 favorites]

Let's cut him some Slack. He's obviously a visual learner.
posted by bl1nk at 4:33 PM on November 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

As an fyi for those who have managed to download their Twitter archives, I've been going through mine and noticed that many retweets have been truncated.
Something to keep an eye out for, if you're a completist.
posted by cheshyre at 4:35 PM on November 18, 2022

> Absolutely No You-Know-What: "You can't fit anything meaningful about code in a screenshot, and it blocks out all access to the rest it relies on - you can't follow links or see how it connects, or do anything to investigate further, because it's a tiny dumb picture."

Oh yeah, I also mentioned in the one of the other threads that I'd bet that Elon has no idea how to use a modern IDE. Otherwise, why would he be asking for screenshots and printouts? He probably doesn't understand git, either. It would be utterly unsurprising to me if he's basically trapped in the mental model of someone who self-taught themselves just enough C to get by sometime in the mid-1990s and never progressed beyond that.
posted by mhum at 4:39 PM on November 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

I would be very curious to hear Mudge's thoughts on all this. He identified a lot of problems with internal processes and security at Twitter and would presumably have useful suggestions for change. On the other hand, Musk's legal team said that Mudge shouldn't get severance, and Musk doesn't seem to be very focused on security, so I'm guessing the two of them may not be on the best terms. On the other other hand, developers at Twitter might not be fans of Mudge, either, since he said they were doing a bunch of things wrong.
posted by clawsoon at 4:40 PM on November 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Oh yeah, I also mentioned in the one of the other threads that I'd bet that Elon has no idea how to use a modern IDE.

The Wikipedia article doesn't say which languages or development tools Zip2 used, but it does say, "Zip2 allowed for two-way communication between users and advertisers. Users could message advertisers and have that message forwarded to their fax machine."
posted by clawsoon at 4:43 PM on November 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Let's cut him some Slack. He's obviously a visual learner.

So you’re saying he’s asking for the Visual Basics?
posted by nickmark at 4:43 PM on November 18, 2022 [11 favorites]

There are big chunks of people vital to your codebase that never/rarely contribute any code to the production code. EG: Testers or documentation writers.

Not to mention the Accessibility Experience Team.

They were eliminated in the very early going.

Via Gerard K. Cohen (thread):

I am officially no longer the Engineering Manager for the Accessibility Experience Team at Twitter. I have words.

[...]

So, the Accessibility Experience Team at Twitter is no longer. We had so much more to do, but we worked hard! There aren't very many people that have had the opportunity to make such an important global platform like Twitter accessible, but we understood the mission.

The fucked up thing is that I've met people IRL who learned a little bit about accessibility because of changes rolled out by Twitter. They were like "What's this "ALT" thing I see on an image? OH. THAT'S COOL. AND EASY TO DO."

Yeah, easy to do because the company made some investments in making that happen, and people worked on it. And it changed a few minds here and there, and provided simple end-user functionality that people could use with a minimum of friction.

Gone.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 4:45 PM on November 18, 2022 [8 favorites]

Musk has tweeted 7 times in the nearly 3 hours since his 2pm summons to personal review meetings with his eminence started. Perhaps he's multitasking. No, he's just an asshole.
posted by Nelson at 4:52 PM on November 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

His latest tweet being a poll "Reinstate former President Trump"

Currently has 'Yes' at around 65% at just under 400k votes (probably more by the time this posts, it's going fast.

Gives a pretty good idea who his followers are, and looks like Trump will be reinstated.
posted by Buntix at 4:56 PM on November 18, 2022

I take it he's sitting there bored waiting for coders to fly in and show up.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:56 PM on November 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

If he's not playing League of Legends at the same time, I don't know how we can possibly consider him a genius.
posted by clawsoon at 4:56 PM on November 18, 2022 [9 favorites]

His latest tweet being a poll "Reinstate former President Trump"

Perhaps that's his plan for the Content Moderation Council he promised three weeks ago. Twitter polls.
posted by Nelson at 4:58 PM on November 18, 2022 [9 favorites]

His latest tweet being a poll "Reinstate former President Trump"

Considering that Twitter's only profitable years were 2018 and 2019, bringing back the platform's biggest money-maker no doubt makes financial sense.

Perhaps that's his plan for the Content Moderation Council he promised three weeks ago. Twitter polls.

His response to the results is, "Vox Populi, Vox Dei", so maybe.

Though he has said a hard no to Alex Jones, so perhaps there are some legal liability lines he's not going to cross.
posted by clawsoon at 5:02 PM on November 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Like judging a guitar solo by taking a photo of the plectrum.
Like judging a meal by taking a photo of the kitchen knife.
Like judging a poem by taking a photo of the pen.
Like judging a _____ by taking a photo of the _____.

We can play this all day.
posted by adept256 at 5:04 PM on November 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

If I were an engineer at Twitter, I would be seriously tempted to use the code review to troll Elon hard. Write up a little simulation of a thermodynamic system (or at least something that plausibly looks like one from the code alone), couch it in some bullshit about using statistical mechanics to analyze Twitter's network graphs, and force him to pretend that he understands enough physics to evaluate what you're doing.

He'd probably make you CTO just to avoid admitting that he doesn't know what you're talking about.
posted by biogeo at 5:06 PM on November 18, 2022 [20 favorites]

Like judging a meal by taking a photo of the kitchen knife.

Or the kitchen by the [obligatory] free bananas therein.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:17 PM on November 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

If I were an engineer at Twitter

Send it to him anyway. He will have no idea if you are a Twitter engineer. Not even Twitter engineers know if they are Twitter engineers any more.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 5:33 PM on November 18, 2022 [24 favorites]

Haha, ok but seriously? Bring back TFG now, with his value to the GOP all dried up? Yes, this will be good, they can compare all the wrongs done against them.
posted by Glinn at 5:34 PM on November 18, 2022

I would be seriously tempted to use the code review to troll Elon hard.

10 PRINT "Hello World"
20 GOTO 10
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:45 PM on November 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

The thing that's funny about Elon Musk's e-mails to coders is, he sounds basically exactly like I do, except that I always add "or whatever" because I have no idea what I'm talking about. Like, clearly he knows the SDE words you're meant to say, and uses them in a coherency-adjacent way, but equally clearly he is not actually talking to coders.

Elon's like, print out your code so I can "better understand the Twitter tech stack."

I'm like, "So I think your code is doing X, but can you help me better understand the tech stack, or whatever?"

Like, I cannot speak SDE. But I can tell when other people CAN speak SDE and are using the terms in the right way, and I can tell when people are basically me, a liberal arts person who's adjacent to tech and can understand clear explanations, but not deep dive into code. Elon is clearly not a tech guy; he is clearly a me. And like, everyone can tell.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:34 PM on November 18, 2022 [10 favorites]

Let's cut to the real tragedy: darth just went into annual hibernation, and if Twitter dies we may never see them again on the internet, cuz as far as I'm aware they didn't set up any other accounts to follow.
posted by dnash at 6:40 PM on November 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

If you measure by how often I write it, my most significant line of code is almost certainly:
}

posted by aubilenon at 6:47 PM on November 18, 2022 [28 favorites]

The true measure of a senior software developer isn’t lines of code written, it’s lines of code deleted. You’d get that from git commit history, but not from screenshots.
posted by fedward at 6:51 PM on November 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

I'm barely on Twitter, and I follow darth. They only have 230K followers? I would have thought it was at least an order of magnitude higher.
posted by mollweide at 7:22 PM on November 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Elon is clearly not a tech guy; he is clearly a me. And like, everyone can tell.

And how. I've been spending a significant chunk of my coding time teaching non-tech people to tech for the last several months, and I am barely conversant. The code screenshots thing is baffling enough that even the grad student I'm working closely with, who has been coding for maybe a year now, was confused.

It is, mysteriously, more work for less useful information and way less useful output than just, like... checking the git commits would be. Going from dead tree printouts to screenshots is just deeply, deeply weird.
posted by sciatrix at 7:47 PM on November 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

I made a bingo card.

The afternoon of November 14th, a few friends and I were joking, and I made a bingo card of predictions for what would happen next at Twitter. It's in my most recent blog post and Twitter post, and I've posted it on Mastodon. Here are the squares:

Move Twitter HQ to Texas
Acquihire one of his other companies
Ban Unicode; Twitter goes ASCII-only
Premium members get multiple avatars
Sue Mastodon for IP infringement
Require personal loyalty pledges from workers
New head counsel: Rudy Giuliani
Classmates.com model: pay to read each DM you receive
Each tweet is now its own blockchain
Crowdsource moderation with gamification
Users must specify a binary gender in profile
“Real names” policy
FREE SQUARE
All-hands meeting inspirational speaker: Donald Trump
New Twitter-branded mobile OS or handset
Remove light theme
Sue users who have stopped tweeting
Require personal loyalty pledges from users
New head of public relations: Rudy Giuliani
Incite fans to harass @FTC
No more 2FA: “If you’re careful you won’t need it”
Health insurance benefits replaced by CrossFit discount
Ad buys get you git commit access
Move on-prem data centers to Sealand
New CTO: Rudy Giuliani

Since I made this:

* there were 2FA issues with SMS verification
* the "hardcore" pledge demand to workers
* the crowdsourcing-style poll about whether to reinstate Trump's account
* getting closer to a "Real Names" policy

I am dismayed.
posted by brainwane at 7:52 PM on November 18, 2022 [17 favorites]

I made a bingo card of predictions for what would happen next at Twitter. It's in my most recent ... Twitter post

Are you trying to give him ideas??
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:40 PM on November 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

Ban Unicode; Twitter goes ASCII-only
Crowdsource moderation with gamification

Slashdot?
posted by clawsoon at 8:43 PM on November 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

So how are the lenders going to step in and change what's happening?

My guess would be to collect Tesla shares when Elon can’t service Twitter’s debt load because if I were a banker, I wouldn’t hesitate to loan him money to buy Twitter so long as the debt is backed by his personal Tesla shares.

Also makes me think about the $50-odd billion worth of shares he was gifted earned as compensation for superior performance from Tesla’s board.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 9:04 PM on November 18, 2022

What blows my mind is that Elon can essentially throw away $44 Billion, and not really give a shit. And just keep on keeping on, as all that cash crumbles around you...

But, only 44 billion. I've got more where that came from...
posted by Windopaene at 9:16 PM on November 18, 2022

I've thought about making a bingo card except I couldn't possibly have guessed some of this shit.
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:01 AM on November 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

Everyone explaining how code excerpts are a dumb way to judge anything a programmer or developer does are right, but are missing the more obvious criticism:

There idiot wants pictures of text. Pictures. Of text.

Asking eg an editor for a list of their most recent corrected typos is stupid. Asking them to produce a picture of the same makes you dumber then Beavis and Butthead.
posted by Dysk at 12:23 AM on November 19, 2022 [9 favorites]

So Musk has tweeted a pic of that come-if-you-can-code meeting and it's quite the sausage fest...

When if first saw the tweet on my phone I thought it was odd no-one was commenting on it. Just grabbed the URL on the PC and now the top reply is about it, and I thought "yay! finally" -- until I read the second sentence...

Oh my, twitter became a male dominant space, just like in computer science class 🤣 No more activists and crybabys around 💁🏼

posted by Buntix at 4:01 AM on November 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

So Musk has tweeted a pic of that come-if-you-can-code meeting and it's quite the sausage fest...

I did feel like there were more women than men posting #LoveWhereYouWorked goodbye-to-working-at-Twitter tweets, but I didn't bother to count to see if my feeling was correct.

It's not surprising, given how strongly Musk has been pushing ideas that are popular in the manosphere. Other than the moderation council announcement (which he didn't follow up on), his whole vibe has been "sigma male grindset hero." There are plenty of women who work incredibly hard at a high level and sacrifice themselves for a cause (I can immediately think of doctors I know, and I bet there are many women like that on NASA's Artemis project), but "the first thing I'm gonna do is let a bunch of men who despise women back on the platform" is probably not the vision to inspire them.

But I'm not a woman, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here. I'm just spitballing.
posted by clawsoon at 4:26 AM on November 19, 2022 [6 favorites]

I did feel like there were more women than men posting #LoveWhereYouWorked goodbye-to-working-at-Twitter tweets

Watching the tag during the first firings it definitely seemed like it, especially at first (perhaps they were the easier fires for him). He does also seem to have fired some like @thinkingfish, who judging from the replies were absolutely keystone developers, and exactly the ones you'd need to keep if reducing team sizes.

Another way of looking at it from @isislovecruft: "i love that women respect themselves too much to put up with this goat fucker"
posted by Buntix at 4:57 AM on November 19, 2022 [10 favorites]

That fits with my experience of every place I've ever worked that turned toxic - women (and to a lesser extent, other marginalised people/minorities) are absolutely the first to leave, as we're the first to bear the burdens of said toxicity. The breakdown of morale and order always leads to the worst assholes acting out their misogyny as well, and rarely with consequences.
posted by Dysk at 5:20 AM on November 19, 2022 [7 favorites]

I have to say that office decor reminds me of a broken man eating rotisserie chicken on the floor of a furniture-less apartment, and rather than confront how bleak their situation is, they are lying to themselves about how manly this is.
posted by adept256 at 5:58 AM on November 19, 2022 [9 favorites]

andyjda [Hacker News]: "Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product is like if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas."
posted by clawsoon at 6:12 AM on November 19, 2022 [7 favorites]

Appears the tide has turned on the 'reinstate Trump' poll and it's edging ever closer to 'No'.

Musk is claiming it's due to bots.

Someone suggested that it should be possible to do an 'all user' poll that is pushed out to everyone. Musk agreed, and that there should be the option to do it for all users from a country/region. Oh, and...

"Most accurate would be to require access to phone GPS for location-specific polls"

[sideshow_bob_rakes.gif]

So yeah, looking like it's really time to delete the phone app...
posted by Buntix at 6:34 AM on November 19, 2022 [11 favorites]

A thread from Dan Luu (nitter version) on all the technology Twitter developed in-house to do its thing:

The now gutted HWENG group was so good at designing low power servers that, in a meeting with Intel folks, discussing reference designs vs. what Twitter was doing, the Intel folks couldn't believe the power envelope Twitter achieved...

Manhattan, Twitter's in-house DB, has such low tail latency that it caused a problem for Twitter's attempts to move to the cloud and switch to some cloud DB...

In order to make Scala usable at scale without the extreme costs associated with Scala (despite claims to the contrary, Scala is slower than and creates much more GC pressure than Java), the JVM team did cutting edge work on the Scala compiler as well as the JVM JIT...

When I joined Twitter, having previously worked on a major web search engine, I was astounded at how small the search team was...

A similar thread from Vladimir Kostюkov back in May.

They are both now ex-Twitter.
posted by clawsoon at 6:57 AM on November 19, 2022 [11 favorites]

Many thanks for the explanations - they are really helpful. It is good to have a greater awareness of the underlying complexity of these everyday, ostensibly simple, entities. Curious how often learning in any field is an invitation to complexity and the problematising of the hitherto non problematic. Hmmm. I wonder if Elon Musk's experience this week or so has been similar to mine?
posted by dutchrick at 7:29 AM on November 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

learning in any field is an invitation to complexity and the problematising of the hitherto non problematic

No no, that is exactly why you want to stop learning the moment you've grasped some new keywords! Keywords are things you can throw around and sound smart with. Complexity is an obstacle to grandiosity. Clearly you will never be a Musk.
posted by trig at 8:09 AM on November 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

I mean you just know people will be hearing the keywords from this picture many times.
posted by trig at 8:11 AM on November 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

Appears the tide has turned on the 'reinstate Trump' poll and it's edging ever closer to 'No'.

Musk is claiming it's due to bots.

Vox Roboti, Vox Dei
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 8:18 AM on November 19, 2022 [7 favorites]

It is good to have a greater awareness of the underlying complexity of these everyday, ostensibly simple, entities.

It's interesting how much of it revolves around latency. We seem to have a hard time dealing with latency. When we push a button or slide a slider, we want it to do something immediately, for a fairly tight value of immediately. We hate feeling like we're trying to steer a big ship, where there's a big delay between what we do to the rudder and which way the ship goes.

Back in the '70s and '80s there were a bunch of experiments with mainframe users (reviewed in Response Time and Display Rate in Human Performance with Computers (PDF)), pretty much all of which found that users can detect quite short latencies, and once latency goes past 2 seconds users get very frustrated and productivity drops dramatically. If you're on a touchpad, your human hatred of latency is even worse (PDF).

But now you're accessing Twitter or Google and the button you're clicking sets off a chain of events that travels through many machines and wires to somebody else's computer halfway across the continent, and then that computer has to stitch together a whole bunch of semi-random data that's very specific to you. Making all that happen before you notice and get frustrated because you feel like you're dragging the rudder around on a big ship is an engineering challenge.

Dan Luu gets into some of the insanity required by Google to deal with this in Sampling v. tracing:

The diagram shows a single search query coming in, which issues RPCs to over a hundred machines (shown in green), each of which delivers another set of requests to the next, lower level (shown in blue). Each request at that lower level also issues a set of RPCs, which aren't shown because there's too much going on to effectively visualize. At that last leaf level, the machines do 1ms-2ms of work, and respond with the result, which gets propagated and merged on the way back, until the search result is assembled. While that's happening, on any leaf machine, 20-100 other search queries will touch the same machine. A single query might touch a couple thousand machines to get its results. If we look at the latency distribution for RPCs, we'd expect that with that many RPCs, any particular query will see a 99%-ile worst case (tail) latency; and much worse than mere 99%-ile, actually.

That latency translates directly into money.

You type "poo" into Google, and two thousand machines leap into action.
posted by clawsoon at 8:19 AM on November 19, 2022 [12 favorites]

Someone suggested that it should be possible to do an 'all user' poll that is pushed out to everyone. Musk agreed, and that there should be the option to do it for all users from a country/region. Oh, and...

Musk and one of his sycophant rich people friends remarked that with so many people involved in the Trump poll it was probably "statistically significant," revealing yet again that Musk repeatsr buzzwords, but does not understand them.
posted by mark k at 8:24 AM on November 19, 2022 [7 favorites]

This thread from @whstancil puts into words the change in the vibe/zeitgeist over there. What having the manosphere take over, none of them knowing enough to realise what they don't understand (but absolutely confident that they do) feels like.

I’ve figured out why Musk and Twitter bothers me so much:

It’s so distinctly the sensation of being bullied

The cackling refusal to take anything seriously, the loss of autonomy, the cavalier privilege. He’s got something that matters to you and he’s going to torment you with it for the amusement of the worst people in the world

That's aside from the ACTUAL bullying he's doing, obviously. And all the bullying he's enabling. But just his flip attitude towards it all - "Let's run a poll to let Trump back on," "Let's shred the credentialing system so my trolls can run wild" - is the same thing.

Standard rich-boy sociopathy, except the boy is so incredibly rich that he can tease and torture big chunks of society instead the gay kid at prep school or whatever

Like think about it: if he was just a guy with bad, disastrous business ideas, but who was trying to make the site work and bellyflopping, it would be absurd but tolerable, right?

But that's not it. It's the way he's going out of his way to hurt people, break things

posted by Buntix at 8:34 AM on November 19, 2022 [25 favorites]

It is good to have a greater awareness of the underlying complexity of these everyday, ostensibly simple, entities.

I have learned that programming is a wicked problem. More importantly, that people in support roles, like the janitor and secretary, have a lot more awareness of what's going on. Oh, I'm a job creator. Your comfortable c-suite is built on the backs of my brothers and sisters, dude.
posted by SPrintF at 8:37 AM on November 19, 2022 [7 favorites]

Came across some tweets this morning describing how Elon's "hardcore or GTFO" ultimatum is not a legal way to fire employees in Europe, so he's now likely to face labor lawsuits in the EU/UK.
posted by dnash at 8:45 AM on November 19, 2022 [9 favorites]

I hadn't caught that the text messages included in the Delaware pre-trial trove included chats between him and his ex-wife that explicitly reveal the two of them to be motivated by rightwing antisocial reactionary bubble thinking. She had suggested (or joked?) that he should "buy Twitter and then delete it, please" after the Babylon Bee was suspended toward the end of March.
posted by nobody at 8:50 AM on November 19, 2022 [7 favorites]

Appears the tide has turned on the 'reinstate Trump' poll and it's edging ever closer to 'No'.
Musk is claiming it's due to bots.

What's the Latin for "The voice of the people is the voice of God, assuming it's saying what Elon Musk wants to hear"?
posted by Epixonti at 9:17 AM on November 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

It is good to have a greater awareness of the underlying complexity of these everyday, ostensibly simple, entities. Curious how often learning in any field is an invitation to complexity and the problematising of the hitherto non problematic.

Oh honey. You're 10,000 years too late. At least.
posted by heatherlogan at 9:36 AM on November 19, 2022

Musk is claiming it's due to bots.

Well the smartest, most capable people can make the best bots to vote the most times. Meritocracy!
posted by ctmf at 10:03 AM on November 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

Oh honey. You're 10,000 years too late. At least.

For what? Haha. I feel like I 'just' missed a Pleistocene party ! Marginally more seriously, its endlessly intriguing when one steps out of one's own field which in my case has nothing but 'wicked problems' into another's - of which one is utterly, comprehensively ignorant (e.g. IT for me ) only to discover that here too the lovely, level, neat and tidy grass overlays a minefield riddled with potholes for elephants and an army of clever elves defusing, filling, stitching and mending for dear life! :)
posted by dutchrick at 10:10 AM on November 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm also sure, like me, many of the Trump 'no's are refraining from participating in Elon's fucking bullshit and not engaging in the poll. I only saw it on his timeline because I can't look away from the train wreck.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 11:13 AM on November 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

That poll is just as meaningful as Elon's promise three weeks ago to create a Content Moderation Council. He's just making shit up. Or trolling.
posted by Nelson at 11:21 AM on November 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

What blows my mind is that Elon can essentially throw away $44 Billion, and not really give a shit.

If you have $45 Billion and you burn $44 Billion, you still have A BILLION DOLLARS.

A BILLION DOLLARS!

Musk supposedly had $300 Billion in January and now he has $195 Billion or maybe $191 Billion.

You know, give or take SEVERAL BILLION DOLLARS.
posted by straight at 11:34 AM on November 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

f you have $45 Billion and you burn $44 Billion, you still have A BILLION DOLLARS.

Indeed. I get why greedy people trying to *make* a fortune cheat like crazy on taxes and everything. But at some point, you're more than self-sustaining. Your interest and investment returns are more than you can spend on yourself in a year. At another point, you could give away half your fortune and not affect that status at all.

I saw a story recently about Bezos deciding to give a lot of money to charity. If only there were some kind of huge organization you could donate to, supporting public good things like infrastructure, social assistance programs, public safety, etc., run by professionals who know what they're doing, and everyone gets a say in what to prioritize spending money on. And what if 100% of your donation was tax deductable. Oh right, it IS taxes. Pretty sure you're allowed to give more than your accountant can legally (and illegally) get away with.
posted by ctmf at 11:56 AM on November 19, 2022 [10 favorites]

What if every American billionaire decided to put all their charitable giving into extra taxes instead. We could do all kinds of amazing things.
posted by ctmf at 12:00 PM on November 19, 2022 [9 favorites]

The secret is that people of that level of wealth almost never "give" anything away. Most philanthropists are purchasing influence and control with their money. They may desire to use that influence and control to do good things, but a true gift would be allowing others to democratically make decisions about how resources are best used and allocated.

If you just pay your taxes, or even pay extra taxes, you can't buy any influence with it, so I'm sure no billionaire would see any point. Ceding power to democratic control without getting anything in return would be a true gift, and the type of person who derives pleasure and meaning from that type of gift is not the type of person who strives to become a billionaire in the first place.
posted by biogeo at 12:14 PM on November 19, 2022 [15 favorites]

If Trump comes back to Twitter, I've said it, I'm leaving, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. A poll that comes down to 51% in favor of Trump coming back and 49% against probably results in ultimately losing 49% of Twitter's user base.
posted by JHarris at 12:14 PM on November 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

On plus side, Musk isn't so far up his own asshole that he thinks bringing back Alex Jones would be a good idea.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 12:17 PM on November 19, 2022

Is the user base that heavily American, JHarris?
posted by Selena777 at 12:29 PM on November 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

Musk isn't so far up his own asshole that he thinks bringing back Alex Jones would be a good idea.

Well not yesterday. He may change his mind at any time and reverse that decision. His content decisions seem based entirely on his whims and what might make people laugh or be mad at him.
posted by Nelson at 12:41 PM on November 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

Today I note that "Pardon Trump" is trending on Elon's shitshow Twitter...oh, yay.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:59 PM on November 19, 2022

Less than a month ago, many advertisers said that reinstating Trump would be a red line for continuing on the platform. But like a lot of things in Musk and co, they may not know if those advertisers have already left or not.
posted by meowzilla at 2:13 PM on November 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

CBS is bailing on twitter
posted by The Power Nap at 3:18 PM on November 19, 2022 [14 favorites]

Is the user base that heavily American, JHarris?

I mean, I guess not, although I can't help but think that overseas people have to be at least as sick of Trump as we are, I mean you guys didn't even have to have him as your president.
posted by JHarris at 5:04 PM on November 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

Elon Musk just brought Trump back to twitter -- Molly Jong-Fast
posted by valkane at 5:27 PM on November 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

And ..... Musk just announced that Trump will be back ..... and TRUMP JUST RESPONDED TO ELON’S POLL AND SAID “NO THANKS”

As one responder to that link said "When you spend $44b on a ring and he says no"
posted by mbo at 5:30 PM on November 19, 2022 [24 favorites]

Hoping this kicks off some major intra-narcissist conflict.
posted by Artw at 5:32 PM on November 19, 2022 [10 favorites]

Trump said no (embarrassing), but I guess Elon reactivated him anyway.
So the standoff is, does Trump have the willpower to NOT tweet, when it's right there?
posted by ctmf at 5:40 PM on November 19, 2022 [7 favorites]

Pretty sure he'll tweet. But I also think this is like the last season of The Apprentice.
posted by valkane at 5:42 PM on November 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

A reminder https://secateur.app/ can be used to block Trump AND ALL HIS FOLLOWERS now that he's back
posted by mbo at 6:05 PM on November 19, 2022 [7 favorites]

Geez, even TFG doesn't want to be associated with Elon's shitshow.
posted by Mitheral at 6:17 PM on November 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

So a tweet here suggesting Trump is now deleting all his old tweets, with an almost immediate follow-up saying they're back.

And I've been getting that, increasingly, for a while now, you click to view a thread (especially via an external link) and it shows up as the top tweet of the thread being deleted. Reload and it's back again.

Also been getting that thing where you 'like' a post and it rolls up and then immediately back down (which TBF does happen on a dodgy connection) more frequently.

There do seem to be existing problems, and not-seen-before problems accumulating.
posted by Buntix at 6:22 PM on November 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

There are still investors on Truth Social to fleece. Trump doesn't get paid if Elon/Twitter succeeds, and still exerts a strange amount of power over the multi-billionaire.
posted by meowzilla at 6:59 PM on November 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

Is the user base that heavily American, JHarris?

I mean, I guess not, although I can't help but think that overseas people have to be at least as sick of Trump as we are, I mean you guys didn't even have to have him as your president.

Speaking as a Brit, and for my French family also, OH GOD are we so sick of Trump. No offence to current company, but your country is *fucking nuts* that he still has so many supporters. And my country voted for Boris, so I have a pretty high threshold to be able to say that! Trump's fuckery reached well beyond the US border, not least on climate change.

Anyway, I've been saving up deactivating my twitter accounts for this moment, and it is done! I suspect many, many others will do the same. I was mostly a reader, but I'm blackholing twitter in my DNS filter (pi hole) so I don't end sending the uber-rich twat any traffic ever again.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 7:07 PM on November 19, 2022 [17 favorites]

Speaking as a Brit, and for my French family also, OH GOD are we so sick of Trump.

Like, umm, Twitter isn't regional, when someone posts on it it's visible everywhere. If Trump gets reinstated he doesn't just get reinstated on a discrete U.S. American Twitter, and doesn't only impact on U.S. Americans.

That's the equally absurd (but less worrying than his plan to use GPS to locate all users) thing about Musk looking to regionalise polls. At least in this instance.
posted by Buntix at 7:17 PM on November 19, 2022

I thought that Twitter suspended TFG not from the goodness of their heart but because the government, like, kinda put pressure on them because y’know he tried to overthrow the country and all. Won’t something like that come up again, I hope?
posted by Melismata at 7:18 PM on November 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

I wonder to the extent to which the overthrowing the government messages are still in the system. Like, wouldn’t that be his last half dozen tweets?
posted by Artw at 7:24 PM on November 19, 2022

(Active government overthrowing as opposed to soft general government overthrowing)
posted by Artw at 7:24 PM on November 19, 2022

All the tweets seem to be there up to the 8th of Jan.

I'm assuming the government pressure worked because the trust and security team were probably in favour of blocking him anyway, and they gave a damn about Twitter's reputation.

Neither of which is likely true now.

Now it's probably more about whether the govt. can afford, and are willing, to pull their subsidies from Tesla and SpaceX. Going after Twitter itself may be a lost cause as Musk seems OK with letting it burn, and death-by-cop/FTC would probably make him a free-speech martyr and hero to the alt-right.
posted by Buntix at 7:31 PM on November 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

Can you imagine being a con man and having the world's richest person desperately seek your approval?
posted by meowzilla at 7:33 PM on November 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

No, seriously. Why can’t the government just say HE IS A GODDAMN HUGE NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY RISK REINSTATE THE SUSPENSION PER FAVORE ? What am I missing here?
posted by Melismata at 7:37 PM on November 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

Because then Elon will say absolutely not, there's no law requiring it, freeze peach 4eva! And the fanboys and conservatives will go wild and twitter will become even more monstrous.
posted by mochapickle at 7:41 PM on November 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

This is about Journa.host but seems applicable here:

The worst, most dreadful and damaging thing that a single member of your online community does or says, that you do not PROMPTLY erase, becomes a benchmark of what your community defines as acceptable.

Overthrowing the US government is now the benchmark for Twitter. Congratulations to any remaining(?) advertisers for being sponsors of that and to the US government via SpaceX on also being a sponsor of that.
posted by Artw at 7:44 PM on November 19, 2022 [12 favorites]

No, seriously. Why can’t the government just say HE IS A GODDAMN HUGE NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY RISK REINSTATE THE SUSPENSION PER FAVORE ? What am I missing here?

Because right now he probably has more leverage over them than they have over him.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/22/elon-musk-ukraine-russia-washington-lawmakers/

Though Musk needs Washington less now that he is a global powerhouse, Washington continues to depend on him. The U.S. military uses his rockets and satellite communications services for its drones, ships and aircraft. NASA currently has no way to get American astronauts to the International Space Station without his space capsule. And, at a time when climate change is a top White House priority, he has more electric cars on U.S. roads than any other manufacturer.

Several top government officials said they are working on decreasing their reliance on Musk, including partnering with and nurturing competitors with government contracts and subsidies. “There’s not just SpaceX. There are other entities that we can certainly partner with when it comes to providing Ukraine what they need on the battlefield,” Sabrina Singh, deputy Pentagon press secretary, told reporters last week.

I mean they could just grassy-knoll him, but at this point they're probably best off just waiting a week or so till the Twitter collapses or goes bankrupt.
posted by Buntix at 7:48 PM on November 19, 2022 [5 favorites]

maybe the IP lawyers will be the ones to take him out:

Chad Loder - @[e-mail]

@chadloder

Twitter's copyright strike system is no longer working. People are tweeting entire movies.

mods asleep, post hackers @AsleepMods - 3h Hackers (1995) full movie official twitter thread 1/49
(Video)

posted by sebastienbailard at 7:57 PM on November 19, 2022 [12 favorites]

The U.S. military uses his rockets and satellite communications services for its drones, ships and aircraft. NASA currently has no way to get American astronauts to the International Space Station without his space capsule.

Sounds like the best argument to nationalize SpaceX, if it’s essential to national security.

I'm blackholing twitter in my DNS filter (pi hole) so I don't end sending the uber-rich twat any traffic ever again.

I’m reiterating my request that no further links to Twitter should be allowed on the site, posters should either be encouraged to replace with Nitter links instead or it should be auto-replaced. It’s rapidly descending into an alt-right hate site with poor security, why give Musk our web traffic?
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 8:38 PM on November 19, 2022 [25 favorites]

A Physics professor's take: skullsinthestars @[e-mail] on Twitter

He goes into it with the same bluster that he used to boost his car and space companies: act like the genius "disruptor" that can fix anything. But those companies are not ad-based, and advertisers immediately become spooked by his approach. 7/

posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:03 PM on November 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

I thought that Twitter suspended TFG not from the goodness of their heart but because the government, like, kinda put pressure on them because y’know he tried to overthrow the country and all.

Trump was suspended when he was still President (and the Republicans had the Senate) and thus had control over the government agencies that might provide that kind of pressure. The Democrats had the House but that doesn't grant the ability to talk a major company into banning someone. Let's give that team at Twitter a little credit for making a right but difficult call.
posted by Candleman at 10:05 PM on November 19, 2022 [7 favorites]

> Twitter's copyright strike system is no longer working. People are tweeting entire movies.

Chad Loder - @chadloder@kolektiv... @chadloder

Automatic copyright flagging is a labor-saving system designed to spare Twitter staff (and copyright holders) from having to respond individually to DMCA takedown requests, a laborious process.

If the automatic system is not working, Twitter staff will be unable to keep up.

8:37 PM Nov 19, 2022 Twitter for iPhone

posted by sebastienbailard at 11:04 PM on November 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

No, seriously. Why can’t the government just say HE IS A GODDAMN HUGE NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY RISK REINSTATE THE SUSPENSION PER FAVORE ? What am I missing here?

Well, they let him buy Twitter just a few weeks ago, do I don't think that...

Oh wait, that's not what you meant.

At this point, Musk is a bigger threat to the security of all nations than Trump is. He is a threat to international security. He should be in a sound- and signal-proof box.
posted by Dysk at 1:48 AM on November 20, 2022 [6 favorites]

And ..... Musk just announced that Trump will be back ..... and TRUMP JUST RESPONDED TO ELON’S POLL AND SAID “NO THANKS”

God, this retrospectively feels like the only possible way this could have ever gone. Elon Musk is a loser—specifically the kind of wannabe-alpha-male suck-up that Trump loves abjectly humiliating. (And already has humiliated: remember when he tweeted that photo of Elon Musk and basically called him a bootlicker?)

Twitter banned Trump, and therefore, according to Trump logic, Twitter is a loser platform. It's even more of a loser platform now that Elon Musk has bought it, which was an embarrassing business decision that tanked Tesla stock, lost Musk $44,000,000,000, and has led to his being publicly humiliated by his own company. I get the logic of "Elon Musk is a bully flaunting his power," but his loser suck-ups are conspicuously some of the most pathetic people in existence. Even his rich tech friends, like Jason Calcanis, are the sorts of rich people who people in the tech world relentlessly mock, not just because they're dumb hacks but because they have this desperate need to be liked.

Trump's whole appeal to his fanbase is not needing to give a shit about whether or not people like you. Elon's whole shtick, meanwhile, is desperately seeking validation—and his dumb Twitter followers aren't even MAGA-style sadists, they're "well Actually" nerds who can't help pointing to charts and figures in the desperate hope that that'll win them the debate. That weird gross phenomenon of Twitter employees openly calling Musk an idiot and his fans leaping into their replies saying shit like "ooooooh daddy's gonna fire you, fire him daddy please please please!!" is—pardon my invoking this awful framework—the most beta shit imaginable. And that's the thing about Elon: he's not the school bully, he's the sniveling suck-up to the school bully who by all accounts should be powerful and assertive and literally is so devoid of charisma or self-confidence that none of the material trappings in the world can stop him from coming off like a pathetic fucking coward. He's such a nobody that his idea of a "good tweet" is to post the kind of thing that makes for a top-voted comment on Reddit—i.e. memey and cornball and lowest-common-denominator—and he can't even pull *that* off because he lacks the slightest bit of wit or imagination. Even the 200,000 followers who like his every tweet can't mask the fact that he sucks shit.

Trump is a hack and a fraud and a terrible man, but his shamelessness is the opposite of Elon's. Elon is shameless in that he lacks all dignity, to the extent that even his attempts to garner respect are cringeworthy. Trump is shameless in the classic psychopathy sense that he literally could not care less about other people; he is thin-skinned and narcissistic, but basically lives in a cartoon world where he is the only human being alive. Which is why, imo, he was a world-class poster: his tweets were deranged, rooted in nothing but whatever the fuck was flitting through his head, and mired in such weird grievances and neuroses that any other living person would hold themselves in check way before they hit post. Elon is entitled in that he feels like he deserves things; Trump is entitled in that the question of "deserve" would never cross his mind to begin with.

That doesn't mean Trump would never come back to Twitter, but honestly I'd be unsurprised if he stayed away. I bet it's tempting, at the very least, to frame this as a narrative of Twitter collapsing in the wake of the mighty and powerful Truth Social: Elon Musk as the loser who needed to buy Twitter and still gets owned on it, the rich "businessperson" who can't even run a tech business, contrasted to Trump, who built a whole social network just by screaming TRUTH!!!! at the sky until it manifested itself out of nowhere. And Trump has a history of humiliating any man who thinks that the key to being "strong like Trump" is to pander to Trump for his approval; the act of seeking his approval is the proof that they're not Trumplike, and Trump loves rubbing their faces in it. (See: Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, every single person in his former administration.)

I remember someone saying, during the 2016 primary, that the reason even people who hated and feared Trump enjoyed his antics was that he basically Oompa Loompa'd every single other candidate, one by one; it was a festival of despicable people letting themselves get abjectly humiliated by one of the weirdest and most embarrassing human beings in existence. I'm torn right now, because on the one hand I don't want Trump to reclaim an ounce of power and find him a uniquely terrifying human being, and on the other hand, the thought of him humiliating Elon Musk is really fucking satisfying. I'm not sure anybody's pain is more enjoyable than Elon's, and it would be the funniest fucking thing in the world if he spent half a year trying to hype the world up about a possible Trump/Twitter fascist-death-pit reunion, lost a fortune and a reputation trying to make that happen, and Trump let him get up to that point and then just said "nah" and spat in Elon's face.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 6:22 AM on November 20, 2022 [40 favorites]

He doesn't have a lot of discipline. No matter how much money Truth Social will lose when he does, he will return to Twitter. I shut down my account yesterday.
posted by Selena777 at 7:12 AM on November 20, 2022 [10 favorites]

I also shut down my account yesterday. I was try to export the people my follow list first, but I decided the very fascination I had watching the meltdown was reinforcing shit I didn't want to reinforce (and distracting me from reading a book or something.)

But I liked twitter. I mostly used it passively. I avoided getting sucked in to the all-outrage use. Covered some hobby stuff, cute animal stuff, followed some academics and writers I like in addition to people doing politics. Discovered new writers. The 'algorithm' was decently trained by now and my twitter feed had no more hot takes and easy dunks than my metafilter reading.

So sorry to see it go.
posted by mark k at 8:16 AM on November 20, 2022 [9 favorites]

I'm picking up habits right as we speak of refreshing "recent activity" and the "best of" twitter page like crazy, wanting more, more, more meltdown news. I never got into social media, I don't know where this is coming from, but it doesn't feel healthy.

I don't have a twitter account to delete, but I think I should probably try for some perspective on this whole mess.
posted by tigrrrlily at 8:32 AM on November 20, 2022 [7 favorites]

I'm still on twitter for now, but probably not for much longer. I'm getting several DMs or mentions a day from crypto/nft scams in a way that I never did before now.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 9:31 AM on November 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

Oh, I hate Twitter/don't have an account, but this is a fascinating trainwreck/soap opera and I keep watching it hoping something bad finally happens to Elon. I'm addicted to the stupid drama.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:09 AM on November 20, 2022 [5 favorites]

As posted in the previous twitter thread (forgive the lack of cite, I am mortal and later for something..)
posted by The Power Nap at 10:10 AM on November 20, 2022 [5 favorites]

If Trump returns, it'll make many people very happy. There's many liberals & lefties who miss the glory days of easy dunks and easy clout. They seem to be positively giddy at those days returning. I was angrily blocked by one when I suggested he refrain from relentless Trump quote retweets for the benefit of his readers' mental health.

Twitter's income stream also misses Trump. The only years that the company has been profitable were 2018 and 2019.
posted by clawsoon at 10:18 AM on November 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

Discovered something interesting, it looks like Twitter may well be close, or at, the point where they become an H-1B dependent company, with the extra restrictions that brings. [https://www.immi-usa.com/h1b-visa/h-1b-dependent-employer/]

@paul_griffiths [nitter of https://twitter.com/paul_griffiths/status/1594187334387630081]:

In 2022, Twitter had 300 people as H-1B visas.

Assume they all stayed:

7,500 - 3750 (layoffs) - 1200 (quit) = 2550
so 300/2550

H1Bs are 12% of Twitter.

(H-1B figure from CNN.)

---

Do nitter.net instances save copies of the tweets they are serving?

If so it may be worth adding Nitter links (and going through the archives with a script to populate all existing Twitter links with Nitter versions) in case Twitter really does disappear without a trace and take all the remotely referenced content with it. Thinking in particular of things like the Ukraine threads where there are a lot of comments that could be made fairly useless without the supporting info on linked Twitter threads.

I notice that some of the functionality must already be there for the Labs projects, although might be something better done split up between a bunch of volunteers rather than @coretex having to go all hardcore to get it done while Twitter is still up.
posted by Buntix at 10:18 AM on November 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ooops, got side-tracked with the nitter stuff, also meant to mention that presumably the 2550 figure is all Twitter staff globally, so the U.S.-based ones may already be at or over the 15% limit to make them H-1B dependent.
posted by Buntix at 10:20 AM on November 20, 2022

I don't think Nitter is a mirror of Twitter. I believe that it requests data from Twitter and just displays the data without all the tracking and Javascript and login requirements. If Twitter goes down (or the specific way Nitter works is removed, which may also happen), Nitter won't display anything.
posted by meowzilla at 10:35 AM on November 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

Twitter's income stream also misses Trump. The only years that the company has been profitable were 2018 and 2019.

It was mentioned (huge thread) previously, but that's not because of decreasing income (huge PDF). Revenue was apparently rising significantly every year, and was around $2B higher in 2021 than in 2018.
posted by trig at 10:47 AM on November 20, 2022 [8 favorites]

Sooner or later Trump will ask how much Musk is willing to pay him to come back, if he hasn't already.
posted by Pryde at 12:45 PM on November 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

I think Trump would pay a dollar if he gets the keys to the building as part of the deal.
posted by UN at 1:35 PM on November 20, 2022

Twitter may well be close, or at, the point where they become an H-1B dependent company, with the extra restrictions that brings.

It seems likely Twitter has lost a lot of the people responsible for making sure they are compliant with regulations like that. So Twitter will probably coast along for a while breaking a bunch of laws until the government can catch up and start enforcing them.
posted by straight at 2:37 PM on November 20, 2022 [6 favorites]

Musk doesn't have to worry about those laws. When you're a star, they let you do it.
posted by tigrrrlily at 3:48 PM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

All this Twitter stuff has got me watching Twitter engineer tech talks. I think if Musk had listened to Yao Yue instead of firing her - e.g. her talk Lies, Damned Lies, and Timeouts - he might've had some more nuanced things to say about microservices.

She talks about how microservices make developers more productive because they can work within a well-defined domain which has well-defined interfaces to other services without having to think about the system as a whole.

However, she says, lack of awareness of the system as a whole can make positive feedback cascades which take the whole system down (as the Ellen tweet that took down Twitter did) more likely. The timeouts and retries that we typically use to deal with black boxes that we're communicating with - the other microservices - exacerbate that. She's a fan of backpressure in communication protocols, letting other services know how stressed your service is so they can back off, but says it's rarely implemented.

She says that diagnosing problems in microservice systems also tends to be much more difficult, because we don't have tools that can see the entire state of the system the way that tools to debug monolithic services can.

Around 23:45 she shows a graph of all the microservices that Twitter uses and how data flows between them (and compares it to a plate of spaghetti). It looks pretty crazy. I'm not sure if a picture like this is where Musk's "1200 RPC calls" comment came from, but the number of nodes on the graph looks like it's getting close to that.
posted by clawsoon at 5:40 PM on November 20, 2022 [15 favorites]

elon turning up the cringe to woo trump

ha ha, the advertisers are never coming back

screenshot for when he deletes it
posted by ryanrs at 6:24 PM on November 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

Least surprising bad outcome: Twitter fails to delete 99% of racist tweets aimed at footballers in run-up to World Cup
posted by clawsoon at 6:30 PM on November 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

He's also brought back Kanye, who's got straight back to the anti-Semitism, and Project Veritas who are now advertising an upcoming report about child trafficking in the federal government.

Libs of TikTok are pretty much openly celebrating the Colorado shooting, and posting moral panic fearmongering about another Colorado org that does drag.

Nate Silver's gone full-on Musk sycophant and all the RW types seem to have gone full mask-off and aren't being moderated in the slightest.

It's remarkable how fast it's going downhill from a social perspective.

It really is now a tossup between whether it becomes entirely unusable because of that, or due to software/hardware issues, or just not being able to keep the lights on when all the advertisers bail.
posted by Buntix at 6:54 PM on November 20, 2022 [7 favorites]

Nate Silver, who’d have thought it.
posted by Artw at 6:57 PM on November 20, 2022 [6 favorites]

Someone on reddit is reporting Twitter's NOC has been unresponsive for over a month.
(I'm not entirely certain what this signifies, but doesn't sound good.)
posted by cheshyre at 7:43 PM on November 20, 2022

BTW, regarding Trump, apparently he's made some contractual agreements to primarily post on Truth Social. And, given his financial stake in that company, Elon's actions seem all the more futile.
posted by cheshyre at 7:51 PM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

I just think he's fired the one person who remembers his password
posted by mbo at 8:26 PM on November 20, 2022

BBC reports:

Elon Musk says he will not allow the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to return to Twitter.....

Mr Musk responded to tweets asking if Jones could be next.

He wrote that his own child had died, and that he "had no mercy" for anyone who "would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame".

(I had not known that Musk had been a parent of a child that died, several years ago. The article has a little more info.)
posted by brainwane at 8:40 AM on November 21, 2022

Or as this person characterized it

it’s not that he’s against banning speech that harms people, it’s just that he doesn’t believe anybody but himself is a person

"Twitter bans this guy because of my personal tragedy" is a terrible basis for a policy.
posted by Nelson at 8:41 AM on November 21, 2022 [15 favorites]

Elon Musk says he will not allow the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to return to Twitter.....

I absolutely don't believe this. Give it what, two days? Also, since when has he had principles?
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:46 AM on November 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

Elon probably could not tell you how many kids he has and most of them probably hate him, I do not believe his story in the slightest.
posted by Artw at 8:48 AM on November 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

he "had no mercy" for anyone who "would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame".

Guess he's fucking lucky the "pedo guy" managed to help orchestrate a successful rescue a few years ago then, because Musk was sure as shit using that situation for those ends.
posted by Dysk at 8:59 AM on November 21, 2022 [17 favorites]

Twitter's NOC has been unresponsive for over a month

For NOCs, you really have to know the secret handshake / phone number. Someone in that thread is pointing out that unless you are pushing a certain number of gigabits per second, you're beneath notice... and I could see it.

I used to get "East NOC, $wifesfirstname speaking" when I'd call asking if my ex wanted lunch (no cell reception in the belly of the beast). Didn't cross my mind what a pain in the ass it would have been if I'd shared that number with anyone.
posted by tigrrrlily at 9:09 AM on November 21, 2022

unless you are pushing a certain number of gigabits per second, you're beneath notice

Hence the definition of NOC as "No One Cares"...
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:28 AM on November 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

If only there was a department that could respond to these sorts of rumors in a professional, media friendly manner.
posted by Mitheral at 12:58 PM on November 21, 2022 [6 favorites]

Phil Schiller, who runs Apple's App Store, recently deactivated his Twitter account. I'm sure it's no big woop
posted by zenon at 1:34 PM on November 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

Phil Schiller, who runs Apple's App Store, recently deactivated his Twitter account. I'm sure it's no big woop

Also, @Apple have deleted all their tweets, although their various sub-accounts still have theirs up.
posted by Buntix at 6:28 PM on November 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

Interesting.

Earlier tonight I did a quick scan of a few lefty voices to see if they were still tweeting; Jacobin, various writers for other progressive mags, etc. All seemed to be going strong. But Apple (following my lead, no doubt) bails out.

The risk to a commercial brand is a lot bigger than the risk to individuals or orgs known for their political views, it seems. Makes some sense.
posted by mark k at 6:40 PM on November 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

@Apple have deleted all their tweets

I think this is not true; Apple never had tweets. Or more accurately only ever had Sponsored Tweets which don't show up in the regular timeline. So no change because of Musk. I am curious what their future ad buy plans are on a site that's welcoming Nazis back though.
posted by Nelson at 6:51 PM on November 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

The risk to a commercial brand is a lot bigger than the risk to individuals or orgs known for their political views, it seems. Makes some sense.

Isn't being concerned with things beyond just yourself meant to be a major part of left wing politics? Then again, being continually disappointed in self-described left wing organisations and individuals for failing to prescribe what they preach is hardly new.
posted by Dysk at 12:19 AM on November 22, 2022

(prescribe? practice. I hate modern phones.)
posted by Dysk at 1:36 AM on November 22, 2022

Twitter's France head has stepped down
posted by sebastienbailard at 2:17 AM on November 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

Twitter Africa employees accuse Elon Musk of discrimination over severance terms
posted by valetta at 2:43 AM on November 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

I logged into twitter for the first time in a while — to delete my account of course.

The initial feed I encountered was full of Musk (who I definitely never followed) tweeting things like 'more new users than ever!' and 'twitter is doing great!'. Whatever. Scrolling down a bit: bunch of suggestions to follow right-wing US politicians (who I definitely definitely do not follow or care about beyond recognizing their names ... a Trump Jr. was one of them). Nope.

I hit that delete button hard and fast.
posted by UN at 3:30 AM on November 22, 2022 [8 favorites]

A company that has lots of money to spend on advertising chooses to leave Twitter and spend that money on ads in other venues, while leftist organizations that do not have lots of money to spend on advertising have to balance "this venue has changed and is becoming less safe on multiple dimensions" with "we can post here for free and reach the audience that is still here and that we have built up over time, most of whom will not follow us If we move entirely elsewhere." The comparison to Apple needs to take into consideration that advertising budget makes a difference here.

By the way, here is why Tall Poppy advises most of its clients to NOT entirely delete their Twitter accounts.
posted by brainwane at 3:35 AM on November 22, 2022 [5 favorites]

Isn't being concerned with things beyond just yourself meant to be a major part of left wing politics? Then again, being continually disappointed in self-described left wing organisations and individuals for failing to prescribe what they preach is hardly new.

This question only makes sense if you assert that "boycott Twitter" is the only objectively decided proper course of action. If they just disagree with that conclusion, it's neither hypocrisy nor betrayal.

I closed my account personally, but I get that not everyone of good will on twitter is necessarily going to agree that going silent on twitter helps anyone at this point. People post content on youtube, a hotbed of extremism and conspiracy mongering, with zero apparent concern.

AFAICT the main argument for a twitter boycott is looking at it through a consumer choice lens, which is not always the best frame for interactions in the public sphere. The calculation is different for an advertiser, both from a public good perspective and from their own self-interest.
posted by mark k at 7:37 AM on November 22, 2022 [7 favorites]

This question only makes sense if you assert that "boycott Twitter" is the only objectively decided proper course of action. If they just disagree with that conclusion, it's neither hypocrisy nor betrayal.

I was referring to all the many, many people cheering the downfall of twitter... on twitter.
posted by Dysk at 9:07 AM on November 22, 2022

Twitter Africa employees accuse Elon Musk of discrimination over severance terms

Not just discrimination - he also ignored the labor laws of the country the branch was based in (apparently Ghana belongs on the long list of countries with more worker protections than the US).
posted by trig at 9:50 AM on November 22, 2022 [9 favorites]

Around 23:45 she shows a graph of all the microservices that Twitter uses and how data flows between them (and compares it to a plate of spaghetti). It looks pretty crazy. I'm not sure if a picture like this is where Musk's "1200 RPC calls" comment came from, but the number of nodes on the graph looks like it's getting close to that.

Well, I can tell that one of the microservice calls that isn't updating as regularly is the one that refreshes my feed. Right now the feed that I see in the morning is pretty much the feed that I will see for at least half the day. This was not the case before the Musk takeover.

This might also be why Musk's graph about engagement with hateful content as dropped. Basically, if you don't refresh feeds as often fewer people will see the content. There may well be less engagements with anything and everything.

Also this reduced-refreshing feed is just the kind of dopamine hit tapering that will help me quit twitter.
posted by srboisvert at 10:41 AM on November 26, 2022 [3 favorites]

Huh. That would mean mastodon.social, the biggest and therefore slowest instance, is currently outperforming Twitter. Which is interesting.
posted by Artw at 11:37 AM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

Right now the feed that I see in the morning is pretty much the feed that I will see for at least half the day.

I just assumed it was because almost nobody was tweeting anymore...
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:06 PM on November 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Tangential, but interesting:

Patrick S. Tomlinson on Twitter

Thread time. Here's the thing about @tesla. It's not a car company. Tesla is a company that has to make cars in order to sell its real product: Emissions Credits.

Let me explain. Back in 2012, the EPA put out new, strident emissions standards for new vehicles fleetwide. 1/

posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 5:34 PM on November 26, 2022 [3 favorites]

Once again many of the same people pointing out the problems, that continued participation was gross, still weren’t deleting their accounts. To be clear, I am one of those people. My rationale is that I need to leave my profile up because in this age of anyone-can-be-verified-as-anyone-for-$8, my timeline is proof of my identity. But also, I have 26,000 followers, an audience built up over a decade of my life, and as a full-time freelance writer, it’s hard to reckon with losing that suddenly. The problem I am trying to articulate now is one that grips me also, which is that many of us are running the same calculation I posed above: can we afford this refusal? Is it really “resistance” to stay generating content and activity that ultimately benefits a billionaire sociopath who is actively promoting racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia?
posted by Artw at 6:42 PM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

Twitter VP in Ireland gets court injunction against firing: Ireland’s High Court grants interim order to Sinead McSweeney, Twitter’s global vice president for public policy

The court order temporarily prevents Twitter from terminating McSweeney's employment contract.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 7:55 PM on November 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Tesla is a company that has to make cars in order to sell its real product: Emissions Credits.

Tomlinson's comments appear to be dated. Further down the thread, there's a link showing that Tesla profits no longer depend on credits, and also some graphs suggesting those credits will become an ever-shrinking part of Tesla revenue.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:57 PM on November 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

Not convinced he can run a company without SOME kind of government subsidy scam, but I had heard there’s been some tightening of loopholes there.
posted by Artw at 9:33 PM on November 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Tomlinson's comments appear to be dated. Further down the thread, there's a link showing that Tesla profits no longer depend on credits, and also some graphs suggesting those credits will become an ever-shrinking part of Tesla revenue.

Except that as Tomlinson points out, Tesla's fucked coming and going there - the car industry is transitioning to EVs in a major way now, meaning that their credit buyers not only won't need as many credits because they have EVs, but they're also now directly competing with Tesla and have competitive products with features such as "we won't beta test self driving software that's been implicated in a number of fatal crashes on your car." There's also the fact that Tesla and Musk's public images are joined at the hip, which is why the latter's fucking around and finding out at Twitter has caused the market cap of the former to jart.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:53 AM on November 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Elon posted slides from a company talk. One that says "User Active Minutes also at an all-time High" with a graph whose x-axis ends at Nov 2020. Some other wild stuff too.
posted by achrise at 4:20 PM on November 27, 2022

These sure are some metrics.
posted by Artw at 4:49 PM on November 27, 2022

"advertising as entertainment"
posted by glonous keming at 6:57 PM on November 27, 2022

FWIW the small print on that Nov ‘20 slide says it goes until 2022. My guess is just a typo.
posted by wemayfreeze at 7:11 PM on November 27, 2022

The small print also says the plotted data starts in 2021, not 2020. In either case, it's suspicious that the previous graph shows data starting in 2014. When you see variations in the axes ranges like that, always ask yourself why. My guess is that "all-time high" is misleading or an outright lie in ways that plotting the full range of data would make obvious.
posted by biogeo at 7:36 PM on November 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Showcasing misleading or false or over-optimistic data in a business presentation? Elon Musk?
posted by UN at 2:59 AM on November 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

New user signups could be mostly bots. Active user minutes could be people downloading posts and networks. Hate speech impressions might be lower if you've changed there definition of hate speech.

It's pretty meaningless without more transparency.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:09 AM on November 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

WaPo this morning has a graph of the change in follower counts for the past month [gift link]. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have both lost over 100K followers, presumably liberals leaving Twitter. OTOH, counts for Ted Cruz and MTG have increased by over 200K.

Some of these may be bots, but some may also people returning to Twitter from Parler, Gab, and Truth Social, now that they perceive it's "safe" to return. Greene, in particular, has increased her following by 330,000, a 28 percent gain since Musk restored Donald Trump's account.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:30 AM on November 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

I’d say presumptions around losses are probably a lot safer than presumptions around gains, given that spam accounts are probably going wild while moderation is absent. Could even be that the losses are bigger but offset by spam account gains.
posted by Artw at 6:53 AM on November 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

From my morning feed*:

• Search Twitter for any major Chinese city (in Chinese) and you will see a cascade of spam tweets making it impossible to get any legitimate news about the ongoing protests
• NZ Govt had to force Twitter to remove freshly uploaded video of the Christchurch massacre because Twitter's automated reporting systems didn't recognize the content as harmful
• This morning at 3am Pacific time, Twitter employees received an email from Musk informing them of another round of code reviews will be happening tonight. They're supposed to showcase what they've done the last "10 days" since the previous code review, even though it's only been 5 business days. Email includes a reminder "all managers are expected to write a meaningful amount of software themselves"
• Elon Musk tweeted a photo of 4 empty Diet Coke cans and two replica pistols captioned "my bedside table"

And it's barely 10am Eastern Time, Monday morning after a holiday weekend.

* btw, make sure your feed is set to show Latest Tweets rather than the algorithmic view
posted by cheshyre at 7:08 AM on November 28, 2022 [6 favorites]

Elon Musk tweeted a photo of 4 empty Diet Coke cans and two replica pistols captioned "my bedside table"

Caffeine Free Diet Coke, to be exact. The most hardcore of soft drinks!

Saw the image posted a few hours ago, sans who-posted-it context, and figured it was related to some sort of weird AITA-Alpha related post. Which I guess technically...

Other (anecdotal) observations (based on my current ecosystem):

* The quality of posts I see isn't really dropping (if anything improving???).
* The comments are increasingly a troll shitshow, though.

I really do hope someones out there are sucking the API dry to save data tracking the changes.
posted by Buntix at 7:44 AM on November 28, 2022

Some links for cheshyre's roundup: Chinese propaganda, Christchurch murder video. The Chinese attack is a big deal, the government using Twitter to suppress information about the protests there. Musk's non-serious response: talking about making $8 / propaganda account, then a Pepe meme.

Worth noting that both of these failures yesterday are a combination of tech and staffing. Twitter has automated systems to catch and block both scenarios but the tech failed either because it isn't perfect or because something is simply broken right now. The backstop for this is Twitter's Trust & Safety staff, the moderators who would see this happening and take manual action. Musk fired almost all of them.
posted by Nelson at 7:53 AM on November 28, 2022 [7 favorites]

Twitter’s $5bn-a-year business hit as Elon Musk clashes with advertisers. Deep dive from the FT on ad problems. Not just the reputation concerns that have been widely reported. Also advertisers are having a hard time without help from Twitter's business staff; Musk fired most of the ads sales folks. And apparently the website companies use to buy ad campaigns isn't working reliably.
posted by Nelson at 8:42 AM on November 28, 2022

Twitter’s $5bn-a-year business hit as Elon Musk clashes with advertisers. Deep dive from the FT on ad problems.

I'm sure calling out Apple will help with that.
posted by nubs at 10:30 AM on November 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

Trying to bully companies into advertising with you is certainly a thing like a business strategy.

The indignities are coming so fast I can't keep up. Last night Musk tweeted a faked screenshot purporting to be a CNN news story. CNN called him out on the fakery. Musk's response was Lmaoooo.
posted by Nelson at 10:42 AM on November 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

Trying to bully companies into advertising with you is certainly a thing like almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a business strategy.

FTFY
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:51 AM on November 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

Twitter is now having trouble paying some employees on time (Chris Stokel-Walker, Ars Technica).

While staff in the UK and Germany have not been paid, those in the Netherlands and Ireland have been—suggesting that the problem is one of staffing and operations, rather than a systematic refusal to pay workers. “The company is just not run well,” said one former UK staff member affected.

posted by mbrubeck at 10:56 AM on November 28, 2022 [4 favorites]

So is the plan here to go to chapter 11 and walk away?
posted by nubs at 11:04 AM on November 28, 2022

Musk has now disclosed that the iOS Twitter app is at risk.

Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why

Musk is in full public meltdown mode right now so I can't keep up with it all. But he's also complaining about Apple censorship and apparently has just discovered Apple's 30% cut of revenue on the platform.
posted by Nelson at 11:14 AM on November 28, 2022 [5 favorites]

So is the plan here to go to chapter 11 and walk away?

Go fully fash and get subsidized with Thielbucks would be my bet.
posted by Artw at 11:30 AM on November 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

"While staff in the UK and Germany have not been paid, those in the Netherlands and Ireland have been—suggesting that the problem is one of staffing and operations, rather than a systematic refusal to pay workers."

Which largely does not matter -- late pay oopsies still get you lots of late pay penalties. Even the US is really strict about this. This is one of the most fundamental baseline things your company has to be doing correctly -- paying people the right amount, on time.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 12:06 PM on November 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why

So, it's fascinating that Mr. Musk is the only person on the entire planet who's confused as to why the App Store is thinking about ditching Twitter. That probably means that either a) he's lying and he actually does know, or b) he's delusional. And the delusional thing is kind of fascinating. Consider this excerpt from an article called The Missing Missing Reasons

She told you in a language you understand what the problem is, and you understood her meaning. That you disagree with the problem is immaterial. It's still a problem whether you agree with it or not. It will be a problem forever until you deal with it. Saying, "I don't understand the problem" when you really mean, "I don't agree this is a problem" will not make the problem go away. It will make the person who DOES think it a problem go away...

...Anything tinged with negative emotion, anything that makes them feel bad about themselves, shocks them so deeply that they block it out. They really can't remember anything but screaming. This emotional amnesia shapes their entire lives, pushing them to associate only with people who won't criticize them, training their families to shelter them from blows so thoroughly that the softest protest feels like a fist to the face.

In case you were wondering, it's an article about dealing with narcissists.
posted by MrVisible at 12:37 PM on November 28, 2022 [14 favorites]

Which largely does not matter -- late pay oopsies still get you lots of late pay penalties. Even the US is really strict about this.

*laughs in British*

Maybe "even the US" is strict about it, but there are zero automatic consequences for UK employers for paying wages late. Anyone who has ever worked for an agency probably has a dozen stories similar to mine. In theory you could take legal action, but in practice it would have to be a sustained and systematic refusal to fix an ongoing problem, or outright wage theft for anything to be done, and you'd still be legal fees out of pocket, which in all but the most egregious cases will dwarf any awards. Employers can absolutely get away with semi-regularly paying wages late without consequence here.
posted by Dysk at 1:12 PM on November 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

Soooooooooo I was just trying to check the Nitter drama updates and got "451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons Nitter is currently unavailable due to illegal content"

Uh-oh.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:28 PM on November 28, 2022 [6 favorites]

Same about Nitter. I’m logged out of Twitter for good but did appreciate being able to use Nitter to keep up with a topic list I’d made.
posted by chimpsonfilm at 2:37 PM on November 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

Interesting you can still access Nitter.net and search, and find, users. But when you click on their profile you see their pinned tweet and then a message that say, "No items found". Maybe even that will close off soon.
posted by vac2003 at 2:43 PM on November 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

So as not to abuse the edit window, some instances of Nitter still appear to be working, e.g. https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/. As of now that is....
posted by vac2003 at 2:45 PM on November 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

That nitter instance may be having problems, but nitter is opensource and there are tons of instances out there. You can host your own. Here’s the code.
posted by antinomia at 2:51 PM on November 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

There's also apparently an open-source android nitter app (I haven't tried it).
posted by trig at 3:20 PM on November 28, 2022

Director of a B2B company: I told my team to pause our $750K/month Twitter ads budget last week

Bullet points:

- Performance fell significantly. CPMs didn’t drop but our engagement went way down. Maybe it’s a shift in users on the platform, maybe it’s ad serving related.
- Serious brand safety issues. Our organic social and CS teams got dozens of screenshots of our ads next to awful content. Replies to our posts with hardcore antisemitism and adult spam remained up for days even when flagged.
- Our entire account team turned over multiple times in 2 weeks. We had multiple people (AE, AM, analyst, creative specialist) supporting our account and they all vanished without so much as an email. We finally got an email with a name for an AM last week but they quit and we don’t have a new one yet.
- Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken. One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. Campaign changes don’t save. These things cost us real money.

posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 6:35 PM on November 28, 2022 [13 favorites]

Seen on Mastodon.

A colleague informed me that it's now impossible for a blind person to sign up for a new account on the bird site because the human verification test is now only visual. I fear this is just the start of what we'll see since musk fired the entire accessibility team.

I mean, none of us are surprised at this, but it's just so wilfully petty, so mean spirited, so awful.
Edit:Formatting
posted by vac2003 at 8:27 PM on November 28, 2022 [9 favorites]

I'm sure that Apple is worried about twitter because snuff films are now a thing there. Largely because they fired all the people who's job it was to stop them
posted by mbo at 8:44 PM on November 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

I've decided that if I ever get to have a superpower, it should be the ability to stay "Stop. You don't get to do this anymore. Go home. Stay there." and then the person I said it to as to do it.
posted by Servo5678 at 5:09 AM on November 29, 2022

Servo5678: I've decided that if I ever get to have a superpower, it should be the ability to stay "Stop. You don't get to do this anymore. Go home. Stay there." and then the person I said it to as to do it.

Xi, that you?
posted by clawsoon at 5:31 AM on November 29, 2022 [7 favorites]

I would only use it for good, I swear.
posted by Servo5678 at 5:52 AM on November 29, 2022

Seen on Mastodon.

A colleague informed me that it's now impossible for a blind person to sign up for a new account on the bird site because the human verification test is now only visual. I fear this is just the start of what we'll see since musk fired the entire accessibility team.

A number of countries where Twitter does business have regulations about website accessibility, so I wonder if that'll have consequences (I'm not sure how it works for websites based outside the country). Meanwhile in the US there's the ADA Title III requirements; their examples of "businesses open to the public" are still very brick-and-mortar-y, but apparently there's precedent for enforcement.

Maybe it's too much to hope that regulatory agencies will come down hard on stuff like this, but a company at Twitter's scale haphazardly removing existing accommodations (and demonstrating blatant disregard for legal regulations at all levels) seems like a very appropriate candidate for penalties.
posted by trig at 6:22 AM on November 29, 2022

Musk on COVID disinfo killing people: ”everybody dies”
posted by Artw at 6:51 AM on November 29, 2022

The latest Platformer is something:

One reason the right has found so much joy in Musk’s takeover of Twitter is the fantasy that you could erase that history, just as easily as you can throw a bunch of old T-shirts away. To them, Dorsey represented a new, bad way of doing business, dropping everything to go protest in his home state, explicitly linking his businesses (if only symbolically) to fights for justice and equality. And Musk represents a good, old way of doing business: ignoring everything but his principles, his product roadmap, and his path to profitability.

Set aside for the moment that this vision of Musk — clear-headed, focused, stable — is largely at odds with the man who has been running Twitter for the past few weeks. That Musk might be this person has proven to be hugely influential for some of his fellow CEOs, and the ramifications of his leadership could resonate across the tech industry for some time to come.

There’s a lot of ugh in this one. Be prepared.
posted by fedward at 8:40 AM on November 29, 2022 [5 favorites]

Yeah seem Ms like the entire C suite and VC class is violently insane and addicted to racist conspiracy theories right now, I have no idea how the fuck to navigate that.
posted by Artw at 8:48 AM on November 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

...Yeah, I didn't enjoy reading that Platformer either.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:50 AM on November 29, 2022

Maybe this whole capitalism thing and subsequent consolidating of all money and power into like 300 odd dorks was a bad idea.
posted by Artw at 9:16 AM on November 29, 2022 [11 favorites]

"And Musk represents a good, old way of doing business: ignoring everything but his principles, his product roadmap, and his path to profitability."

This Platformer actually made me laugh. I mean, not that some of these tech guys are horrible atavisms of early 2000s brogrammers (we all knew that and it sucks), but that Musk is so thoroughly beclowning himself by betraying zero knowledge of how to run a company (big "first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" energy), zero knowledge of how "software" or "coding" works in 2022 (the part where he thinks it's just a matter of flipping a switch to unban someone!), zero evidence that he did ANY due diligence whatsoever (uh, yeah, guy, the whole WORLD knew that the App Store took a 30% cut, and much bigger companies than Twitter are already fighting with them about it).

But what Musk very clearly doesn't know, and what his fanboi also completely misses when he says, "Every tech product you use came out between 2000-2010. Nothing was built from 2010-2020. The culture was so broken. PMs, MBAs, SJWs, and entitlement. But the culture is changing." -- is that what changed wasn't the arrival of SJWs. It was governments catching up to tech companies and beginning to regulate them, and tech companies becoming big and powerful enough not to squeak by ignored.

The culture IS changing -- and Musk and his fanboi Hotz seem not to have noticed that it's changing in a regulatory-and-compliance direction. They can denounce SJWs all they want, but the EU regulators are going to demand they provide certain kinds of gender equity. They can extol free speech, but they can't let Nazi speech appear in Germany. They can just take their hands off the controls, but they're under a bunch of consent decrees and court orders not to. They can claim they're going to solve all of this with algorithms, but the EU will demand extremely explicit details about those algorithms, their training data, their outputs, etc., and will issue existential fines if the algorithms are bad.

And if Musk and his fanbois want to just, like, ignore the EU? ALSO existential fines. And they've removed so many compliance and legal people that they're gonna end up in contempt of court in some US jurisdiction where there's a subpoena attached to a criminal case for online harassment. And with Uber's CISO criminally convicted for ... following a pretty normal procedure after a breach? The infosec and data world in the US is currently very unsettled (because it sure looked like Uber's CISO was following the US's laws), and there are not that many COMPETENT infosec people who will work for Elon, which is going to mean that Elon's going to have to personally take on the criminal liability.

This is Wiley Coyote when he's run off the cliff end and is still running because he hasn't noticed yet. There's going to start to be an avalanche of legal processes coming after Twitter, one after another after another, maybe right at the start of 2023. Musk will either have to return it to status quo antebellum, where it existed due to that delicate dance of balancing users, advertisers, and legal regulations; or resell Twitter at a massive loss; or ride that crashing Tesla into the wall while claiming the brakes are fine. Legal processes are slow! Maybe Elon has enough runway for reality to smack him upside the head before Twitter goes bankrupt and/or Elon gets criminally charged and/or EU regulators really get moving. But I sort-of doubt it. (I will say, unfortunately, I think Twitter is done for; so much damage has been done, and so many laws and legal orders violated, that it's hard to imagine how new ownership (who?) would put in place a CEO (who?) who could reassure regulators enough to give them time to fix the damage, especially since Twitter's finances are going to be a disaster.)

And look, when you're the sort of stooge in a CEO seat who gives quotes in the international press about how excited you are to get back to the Wild West internet, EU regulators NOTICE, and you're going to get to talk to a lot of them, very personally, and if they don't like your answers or think you're dodging, they're going to ask again. And again. And they're going to send people to your offices to pick through your systems and see where you're lying. It's not going to go well.

So, sure, complain about the SJWs wrecking the internet and making software unfun. But in my experience, the guys doing that are actually white lawyers in their 60s who work for CNIL and are coming for your ass.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:51 AM on November 29, 2022 [20 favorites]

The other thing is everyone is striving for five nines in terms of reliability, uptime and quality, and Elon? He’s all about pushing shit onto the market that most people would consider an advanced tech demo and dealing with consequences later (or ignoring them, or whining about people bringing them up) He’s pretty much a one nine kind of guy on all of that. I’m not sure one nine works outside of his niche companies.
posted by Artw at 11:14 AM on November 29, 2022

That Platformer article is bleak, but it feels like it's extrapolating very hard from a sampling of a few noisy assholes -- DHH, geohotz -- to the industry as a whole? and is probably ascribing them more influence than they have or deserve.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:21 AM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

also, here we go again: @ZoeSchiffer:

NEW: Email from Elon to Twitter engineers and designers: "Anyone writing software or doing design should be on the 10th floor of SF HQ. It is intended to be dense and intense. Thanks, Elon."

posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:23 AM on November 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

It is intended to be dense and intense.

No doubt it will be.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 11:26 AM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

I’m not sure one nine works outside of his niche companies.

As noted in the Blind link above, chaos mode unreliability very much doesn't work for advertisers.

Again though I don't think Musk cares to be in the service of big advertisers; it's noticeable that although Twitter HQ leaks like a sieve there have been no further reports about him meeting with advertisers, and he's continued to degrade brand safety with his tweets and actions. I think he's given up on brand advertising -- too high-touch, too demanding, too much feeling like he's at their beck and call. I am seeing a lot more low-quality promoted ads for content farms etc.

Apple cutting ad spending stings him though as they have three levers of control over him: their ad spend -- which was reportedly the biggest on the platform?; their App Store gatekeeping; and their in-app-purchase levy which oops, he's only just realized applies to in-app Twitter Blue subscriptions. How humiliating that must feel to the self-styled Technoking.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:54 AM on November 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

It is intended to be dense and intense.

Great for spreading more covid!
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:08 PM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

Apple also allows for refunds - probably how most of the pranksters got their money back.
posted by Artw at 12:13 PM on November 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

It is intended to be dense and intense.

Can’t wait to see the whiteboard.

“We’re going to make a tweetPhone!”
posted by Artw at 12:31 PM on November 29, 2022

Wonder how the people doing localization for, oh, idk, France, feel about moving to SF and going hard.
posted by Mitheral at 1:15 PM on November 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

"Every tech product you use came out between 2000-2010. Nothing was built from 2010-2020. The culture was so broken. PMs, MBAs, SJWs, and entitlement."

Hahaha, the boomer dumbass hasn't even heard of Discord.
posted by Dysk at 1:38 PM on November 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

George Hotz, who wrote that tweet, is 32. But no less a dumbass.
posted by fedward at 1:43 PM on November 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

(I'm older than that, and well aware that he's younger than me. The home was that anyone over about 16 is a boomer to the Discord set.)
posted by Dysk at 1:48 PM on November 29, 2022

From what we’ve seen of him stumbling through trying to do a search widget I would conclude dumbass also. Certainly not someone you have to pay attention to as a Titan of industry.

DHH had some kind of mental breakdown in 2913 and is generally considered a weirdo to be avoided now as well.

So not a great sample set.
posted by Artw at 1:48 PM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

I’m not sure one nine works outside of his niche companies

Speaking of them, I used to have a very low opinion of test-in-prod against the unconsenting public for software that can crash cars into us. But after seeing this dude's approach to reliability, safety, compliance, and general scruples, I have THE LOWEST OPINION.

Multi-ton high-speed robots with chaotic "everybody dies" edgelord software: fuck you.
posted by away for regrooving at 2:46 PM on November 29, 2022 [5 favorites]

Nothing was built from 2010-2020.

SJWs or tech monopolies enabled by a toothless FTC?
posted by migurski at 2:56 PM on November 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

If Nazis are the source of creativity we had a veritable explosion of them 2010-2020, so that theory needs a little work.
posted by Artw at 2:58 PM on November 29, 2022

Via Mastodon, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:51 PM on November 29, 2022

Twitter workers are being mistakenly fired so often under CEO Elon Musk's leadership that human resources created a new internal category to identify and rehire them quickly. (Business Insider), Archive link

Other tidbits from the article:

* Apparently some people who were fired in the Thanksgiving Eve Massacre were mistakenly fired and then had to be brought back on Monday.

* Twitter has told their remaining employees to recruit some of the previously-laid-off workers, I guess in their copious free time when they're not being hardcore.

Honestly, I feel really bad for anyone who needed their job at Twitter for whatever reason, but for everyone else, it sounds like the first people to be laid off were the lucky ones, because they didn't have to deal with the ever-escalating bullshit and incompetence.
posted by creepygirl at 11:46 PM on November 29, 2022 [9 favorites]

Three months' severance and then the exact same job back (though maybe you negotiated better pay since twitter are clearly desperate) sounds like a pretty good deal (if you ignore the fact that you're working for an evil psychopath).
posted by Dysk at 12:00 AM on November 30, 2022 [5 favorites]

Three months' severance and then the exact same job back

I have to imagine it’s not even close to the exact same job anymore.
posted by notoriety public at 6:20 AM on November 30, 2022 [7 favorites]

I'm The Guy Behind The Viral "Insulin Is Free" Tweet

...an informative video.
posted by clawsoon at 7:33 AM on November 30, 2022 [7 favorites]

I have to imagine it’s not even close to the exact same job anymore.

Same job on paper, same job title. You've already fucked off ice, why not coast for a month or two collecting two paycheques while you look for your actual next job?
posted by Dysk at 8:03 AM on November 30, 2022

why not coast

You're being told to show up at the office. Presumably the higher-ups still at the company will be of the type to hover around glancing at your screen. If you're home, they'll call you into spontaneous meetings without notice and at odd times.

You can only get so far making up fictional dairy entries of what you did this week.

You may get some severance but if you spread it over the additional 'hardcore' hours you're told to do, that severance can get eaten up quick. We're talking double hours or more. That's an entire second job!

I shudder thinking about it.
posted by UN at 4:10 AM on December 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

One country labour dispute episode 1 done: Twitter has reinstated senior Irish executive Sinéad McSweeney following generic ‘firing’ email, High Court told

Meanwhile: Twitter's chaos could make political violence worse outside of the U.S.
posted by cendawanita at 4:26 AM on December 1, 2022 [2 favorites]

You're being told to show up at the office. Presumably the higher-ups still at the company will be of the type to hover around glancing at your screen. If you're home, they'll call you into spontaneous meetings without notice and at odd times.

Ignoring a lot of that might get you fired after a few weeks. That's a few weeks of severance from when you were let go plus the pay from the re-hiring. It might take them longer given they've no meaningful HR at the moment.

Basically, I'm advocating taking the piss 100% not actually doing what they expect now. If they want to give you another job while you're still being paid severance, soak them for what you can without doing any real work until you get fired (again).
posted by Dysk at 5:34 AM on December 1, 2022 [2 favorites]

(Not sure how much it changes what's being argued here, but I'm nearly certain this sort of severance is structured such that being hired back would stop those severance checks flowing. I think it was reported to be two months of "continuing employment" followed by a one month severance check, in which case during those first two months you'd still be an employee, and probably still technically have your same title, even though in this case you'd no longer have building/system access.)

(In other situations I've also seen someone reporting they'd found a new job at another company triggering the end of those "continuing employment" payments.)
posted by nobody at 7:50 AM on December 1, 2022 [3 favorites]

I think a lot of that will depend on where you are - what you describe might apply to US based employees, but it would not be a legal setup in (most of?) Europe.
posted by Dysk at 10:23 AM on December 1, 2022

but I'm nearly certain this sort of severance is structured such that being hired back would stop those severance checks flowing

If it were me, they'd have to make a better offer than "for the next two months you get paid the same amount as you would if you didn't come back to work for us"
posted by aubilenon at 12:52 PM on December 1, 2022 [5 favorites]

Just imagine how much worse this would all be if he was drinking regular diet coke with caffeine!
posted by srboisvert at 3:17 PM on December 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

So today Kanye was praising Hitler on Alex Jones, and then he tweeted something Alex Jones wrote for him on a piece of paper about Jesus, and then Elon responded to him by saying nice things about Jesus.

So that was today.
posted by clawsoon at 3:58 PM on December 1, 2022 [3 favorites]

Shit's getting real with employee legal action. Apparently Musk is looking to weasel out of paying the promised severance. A legal firm is threatening aggressive action soon unless Musk promises to make good on the promises. Apparently the employees have binding arbitration clauses, so the lawyer is threatening to file a separate arbitration claim for each employee in a way that will be very expensive for the company to answer.
posted by Nelson at 6:02 PM on December 1, 2022 [12 favorites]

Yeah, that was quite the entertaining demand letter.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 6:20 PM on December 1, 2022 [5 favorites]

Despite buttoning my own twitter account, I'm a bit undecided on whether this is the best approach for progressive voices who actually comment there, so Karen Attiah on not leaving Twitter was interesting to me:

Twitter is probably the only global digital platform where elite institutions and powerful individuals share space with marginalized people, including the working and lower classes. It has the power to quickly focus enormous amounts of attention on crucial issues.

She says it's mostly White people buttoning their accounts on principle. (Applies in my case.) Marginalized voices are more likely to decide that access to a platform is important.

(In other situations I've also seen someone reporting they'd found a new job at another company triggering the end of those "continuing employment" payments.)

IIUC in California it's really hard to do an agreement that keeps someone from working at a different job. Just not generally enforceable on its own. So if you're getting paid to "work" zero hours a week at Twitter I don't believe any limits on what you do with your other 168 hours/week will hold up.

In other states corporations get away with boiler plate non-compete agreements on burger flipping.
posted by mark k at 9:15 PM on December 1, 2022 [8 favorites]

One interesting thing in the lawyers letter linked by Nelson is that the acquisition agreement included promises on accelerated vesting of RSUs (paid in cash at $54.20) in the event of firings within a year of takeover.

That's potentially a quite expensive subclause.
(and predictably it's subclause 6.9)
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 2:40 AM on December 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

Elon has officially banned Kanye.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:03 AM on December 2, 2022

Kanye is reportedly only banned for 12 hours. That'll show him. Musk says he was banned for "incitement to violence" but the specific tweet cited does not incite violence, in fact it says "love everyone". It is vile hate speech, specifically anti-Jewish, and under old Twitter rules probably would have warranted action. But it doesn't meet what Musk is saying now. Just emphasizing how incoherent his policies are.
posted by Nelson at 8:11 AM on December 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

Wait, where did you see 12 hours?
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:22 AM on December 2, 2022

If he does get let back in Elon is now his 24hr babysitter and I couldn’t wish it on a better guy.
posted by Artw at 8:24 AM on December 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find (NYT)

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, slurs against Black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day. After the billionaire became Twitter’s owner, they jumped to 3,876 times a day.

Slurs against gay men appeared on Twitter 2,506 times a day on average before Mr. Musk took over. Afterward, their use rose to 3,964 times a day.

And antisemitic posts referring to Jews or Judaism soared more than 61 percent in the two weeks after Mr. Musk acquired the site.

These findings — from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Anti-Defamation League and other groups that study online platforms — provide the most comprehensive picture to date of how conversations on Twitter have changed since Mr. Musk completed his $44 billion deal for the company in late October. While the numbers are relatively small, researchers said the increases were atypically high.

There's more in the article about related problems, but that's the core of it.
posted by fedward at 8:55 AM on December 2, 2022 [6 favorites]

Wait, where did you see 12 hours?

The Daily Beast says West posted on Truth Social that his Twitter suspension was for 12 hours.

(The article also says that Kanye tweeted the unflattering shirtless Musk photo with the caption "Let's always remember this as my final tweet." Not clear if that was a sign that the ban was actually permanent or if Kanye was doing a Trumpesque "Truth Social is so much better than Twitter, so I'm not going back to Twitter" tantrum.)
posted by creepygirl at 9:15 AM on December 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

I dunno if I believe Kanye, though. I guess we'll see in 13 hours.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:10 AM on December 2, 2022

The Verge also reports that the suspension appears to be permanent:

While Ye returned to Twitter in recent weeks, his latest suspension appears to be permanent. “I tried my best,” says Elon Musk. “Despite that, he again violated our rule against incitement to violence. Account will be suspended.”

Ye also posted an uncomplimentary photo of Elon Musk shortly before his suspension, prompting Musk to clarify “that his account is being suspended for incitement to violence, not an unflattering pic of me being hosed by Ari.”

And in related news:

Ye had also planned to purchase Parler, a social media site that styles itself as a “free speech” alternative to Twitter. Parlement Technologies, the parent company of Parler, confirmed on Thursday that Ye will no longer be purchasing the platform. The announcement came shortly after Ye went on an antisemitic rant while appearing on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars program. Ye also praised Adolf Hitler on the show, saying “I see good things about Hitler.”

(The Verge also makes note in every article that he is "now legally known as Ye," hence the way they refer to him).
posted by fedward at 10:25 AM on December 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

The Verge also has an article about the increase in hate speech on Twitter for those who don't have NYT access, although it doesn't add much more information than the excerpt I provided above.
posted by fedward at 10:28 AM on December 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

"why do we keep losing advertisers I can't figure it out"
posted by Artw at 10:58 AM on December 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

And again… imagine spending 44 billion dollars just so you can personally reactivate the Twitter account of the Daily Stormer guy. That is a lot of money for hate.
posted by Artw at 11:00 AM on December 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

Yeah, but think how bad you have to get for Elon to ban you personally over hate speech, his favorite topic.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:24 AM on December 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

He didn't get banned for hate speech, he got banned for insulting the knock-off Bezos personally. That's about the only banable offense on twitter now.
posted by Dysk at 12:20 PM on December 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

This recap of the Alex Jones show is the worst one I've seen yet. "At one time, Jones appeared suspicious that he was in the company of a Ye imposter, openly questioning “is this really Ye?” and demanding he remove his hood (to no success) to show his face. "

Kanye West’s Massive Reddit Page Overtaken By Taylor Swift Appreciation, Holocaust Awareness Content as Fans Abandon Him “This is now a Taylor Swift Subreddit. We had a good run fellas,” "
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:50 PM on December 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Ryan Broderick in today's issue of Garbage Day makes a decent point:

I’ve hit this point a few times since Musk took over Twitter, but I want to ask it again. For those who plan on sticking around on Twitter and fighting to hold your ground, why aren’t you doing the same on Facebook or YouTube or Instagram? They’re bigger websites. What exactly is it about Twitter that makes it worth this much? I mean, aren’t you tired of having to use a website where the word “Hitler” trends every day?

posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email at 1:50 PM on December 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

It would be great if Musk understood that many things that are said on Twitter about trans people also act as incitements to violence.

It would be great.
posted by clawsoon at 2:20 PM on December 2, 2022 [4 favorites]

It would be great if Musk understood that many things.
posted by biogeo at 2:43 PM on December 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think Elon likes incitements to violence. That's a feature, not a bug.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:00 PM on December 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

A Snapshot of the #TwitterMigration. Data on where people are going. (Mastodon, it turns out.)
posted by Nelson at 3:25 PM on December 2, 2022 [5 favorites]

Elon responding to overt antisemitism with something other than “this is overt antisemitism” is one of the reasons I’ve largely fucked right off from Twitter despite years of friendships there that I will miss.
posted by cortex at 4:21 PM on December 2, 2022 [6 favorites]

Elon Brings One of America’s Most Prominent Nazis Back to Twitter. (It's Andrew Anglin, of the Daily Stormer.)

Right now on Twitter Musk and Matt Taibbi are live tweeting a dribble of confidential internal information about Twitter moderation of the Biden laptop story. It's not terribly interesting. They're careful to name lots of Twitter employees in the process of doing their job and I worry about their safety.
posted by Nelson at 4:37 PM on December 2, 2022 [6 favorites]

So basically there’s no data that Twitter has, including confidential internal documentation, that Elmo won’t hand over on a whim to Matt Taibbi or the leader of the Daily Stormer.

Which should have been everyone’s assumption from the get go but hey, it’s there in black and white now.
posted by Artw at 6:20 PM on December 2, 2022

From the Atlantic: The Far Right is getting What it Asked For, proposing that those who make a living laundering far right hate into something palatable to an (alarmingly) larger segment of the country are feeling more than a bit uncomfortable with the recent further widening of the explicit hate floodgates.
posted by nobody at 6:44 PM on December 2, 2022

For those who plan on sticking around on Twitter and fighting to hold your ground, why aren’t you doing the same on Facebook or YouTube or Instagram?

Can't speak for other countries on all of them, but FB is worse for us in terms cytros and actual rightwingers AND they can write screeds of much length (this one is like the Philippines). Not sure about IG, everyone's scampered off to TikTok and posting stuff in Stories. And about TT and also Telegram, being neither American, Chinese nor Russian content, it's barely detected so it's worse (incitement to racial riots was happening on TT for example, after the general elections 2 weeks ago, but video makes it hard for citizens to track and call out; otoh there's enough fascists there when a guy tried to do basic Crash Course type videos on our parliamentary system he kept being reported and it's not like TT cares much, not as much as pre-Musk Twitter did). YouTube is an interesting idea, but in a country where you can get arrested the less anonymous you are or just basic social-driven brigading, you tell me which kind of people dare to make videos?

Our angst is different, because the calculation is different. Already Twitterjaya is getting quiet but even now I can't recreate the community on Masto. Barely anything I tagged with my country on more serious matters moves out of my own account.
posted by cendawanita at 8:02 PM on December 2, 2022 [7 favorites]

This is not the main point of the thread, but I rarely get to vent about this: Matt Taibbi has fucking sucked since he was with the eXile in 1998 and writing super fucking gross and exploitative shit about women who had to work for him, AND ALSO his much-lauded Russia reporting in the era involved political stances that blinded him to the actual situation on the ground, where his desired politics blinded him to actual events. (I had a 75-minute throwdown about him with a fanboi in 1999 in a college classroom, GOD I hate that dude.) He was a shit person AND a shit reporter. I'm sure he sucked before 1998, but that's when I became aware that he sucked.

It is zero percent surprising that he is carrying water for the revanchist right, and pretending it serves some imaginary philosophical form of The Left (he probably even talks about Horseshoe Theory): He was NEVER an ally of actual leftist causes. He has ALWAYS been eager to sacrifice women on the altar of his politics -- I really cannot express how fucking disgusting the eXile was in 1998. I don't know how much of it is online, but it's not even "rape culture," it's just "hey let's fucking rape some people, here's some graphic descriptions, ha ha, sexual assault is hilarious." And he was ALWAYS eager to sacrifice ordinary Russians seeking democracy on the altar of his philosophical leftism/Marxism, and declare everyone imperfect capitalists, and mock them for their democratic aspirations, and cozy up to the elites -- who didn't share his beliefs, but who shared his CYNICISM, which was far more important.

Like, look, I know this guy occasionally has incisive points about American politics. But he SUCKS. He's in the same shitty part of the ostensible left as Glenn Greenwald (who sucks so hardcore), Matt Yglesias, Chapo Trap whatever, etc. Any of these dudes (especially white dudes) who have Big Theories of Politics and were important voices during the Bush era, but who hated women even then, are ALWAYS going to come around the other end as asshole fascists. It's not even surprising. These guys never loved freedom or democracy; they were just reflexively in opposition to everything they thought was mainstream, because it seemed smart to buck mainstream ideas.

Now that "respecting women" and "not being racist" are mainstream, they're TOTALLY going to be misogynist racists, because their idea of critical thought is "rejecting whatever the sheeple think." And they think they're smart and avant garde! They have NEVER been critical thinkers who rejected right-wing thought in a principled or thoughtful way: They have ALWAYS been assholes who think intelligence is signaled by a contrarian hot take.

Anyway, summary: I've hated Matt Taibbi since 1998 and this is not a surprise. He fuckin' sucks.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:05 PM on December 2, 2022 [34 favorites]

Twitter Keeps Missing Its Advertising Targets as Woes Mount. Revenue down 20%, advertisers down 40%.

Here's an even handed summary of the Twitter / laptop story. Not a lot of news pickup. Fox News and NY Post tried writing outrage articles about it and even they fell flat.

Friday Twitter was supposed to launch its new new verified system, the one with various colors of checkmarks. That didn't happen.
posted by Nelson at 7:39 AM on December 3, 2022 [5 favorites]

For those who plan on sticking around on Twitter and fighting to hold your ground, why aren’t you doing the same on Facebook or YouTube or Instagram?

This feels a little like asking Democrats in Florida who are still trying to win elections there why they don't give up and move to Mississippi or Alabama.
posted by straight at 10:26 AM on December 3, 2022 [3 favorites]

This does not seem a useful analogy. I’m not going to ask people to stop giving money and attention to Florida so Florida dies, because people live there. Nobody lives in Twitter and it absolutely needs to die.
posted by Artw at 10:35 AM on December 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

Why do you say that after multiple people in this thread and elsewhere have explained why they absolutely need it to not die?
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:42 AM on December 3, 2022 [4 favorites]

I say it because it’s true. It needs to die.

This is not exactly a boiling frog situation here, nobody should be unclear on what is going on. On its current path it is toxic waste and a hazard and any upsides to parts of it remaining in service are vastly outweighed by it. Anything untouched will not be untouched for long.
posted by Artw at 10:49 AM on December 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

Here's an even handed summary of the Twitter / laptop story. Not a lot of news pickup. Fox News and NY Post tried writing outrage articles about it and even they fell flat.

The CNN article linked, which is certainly closer to even-handed that most, still contains this nonsense:

Musk tweeted Friday night, amid the Taibbi posts, that Twitter had acted “under orders from the government.”
Taibbi said in his series of tweets that “there is no evidence - that I’ve seen - of any government involvement in the laptop story.”

All of which is predicated on forgetting who was running the government over the time of the 2020 election.
posted by bcd at 11:15 AM on December 3, 2022 [6 favorites]

who was running the government

The (((Deep State))), of course.
posted by tigrrrlily at 11:27 AM on December 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

Nobody lives in Twitter and it absolutely needs to die.

"Twitter" refers to:

1. a social media company/service currently owned and run by Elon Musk;

2. a contingent network of people who have used that service.

#1 is a hellsite. #2. includes millions of worthwhile relationships. If #1 dies, #2 also dies.

There is definitely a sense in which a lot of people "live in Twitter."
posted by straight at 11:39 AM on December 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

No, it WAS a community.
posted by Artw at 11:54 AM on December 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

I didn't call it a community. I just said there's worthwhile connections between people that won't exist anymore if/when Twitter goes away.
posted by straight at 12:33 PM on December 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

@bborrman Congratulations @mtaibbi! You shared the name of a junior employee who had no role in any decisions and now her photos are being shared and people are calling for her death.

Way to stand up for the little guy

Of those relationships are useful people need to find ways to set them up elsewhere. Elmo’s fash propaganda and harassment machine needs to die.
posted by Artw at 1:07 PM on December 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

I get why people need Twitter, at least for emergency alerts if nothing else (I still hate tweetstorm threads where I just wish people had written out a page and tweeted a link to their one thought). However, with Musk running it, the place is becoming very unsafe, very rapidly. I'd rather lose all my Internet friends/community and leave Twitter than say, get doxxed/stalked/harassed by all the right wing crazies being welcomed on that won't get stopped whatsoever.

You can form relationships elsewhere, even if it won't be the same. But once you get an Internet stalker, or a bunch of them, those people are probably going to be after you for life. And then you'll lose your beloved Twitter community anyway when you need to flee.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:47 PM on December 3, 2022 [6 favorites]

heh, remember when people were all "if he brings trump back, I'm definitely out!"

that was so, so long ago
posted by ryanrs at 5:15 PM on December 3, 2022

heh, remember when people were all "if he brings trump back, I'm definitely out!"

that was so, so long ago

A lot of people have closed their accounts; the loss of followers for left/liberal accounts is enormous. And a lot of other people never said that in the first place. (I'm technically in both categories.)

The idea that everyone on twitter was saying what you thought they should say, so that now everyone remaining now is a hypocrite, is pretty fatuous.
posted by mark k at 7:01 PM on December 3, 2022 [3 favorites]

Biz Stone, Twitter founder, tweets

He’s not a serious person. He does things for sport that have serious consequences for real people. This is an open, global service. US politics is not much of Twitter. (K-pop might be bigger.) Also, in other places lives are at stake.

Further discussion talks about how Twitter is even now being used in, say, Iran and how Musk's recklessness could easily get people killed. His flirting with Bolsonaro in Brasil yesterday is also dangerous. Musk seems entirely ignorant or contemptuous of the responsibility he has acquired.
posted by Nelson at 7:19 PM on December 3, 2022 [8 favorites]

Also while he has technically let Trump come back ,Trump still hasn't, as I understand it he's contractually required to use his own echo chamber
posted by mbo at 7:30 PM on December 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

Many, many other neonazis have been let back in and are active, however.
posted by Artw at 7:34 PM on December 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

First Kanye let’s him down by posting fash shit too obviously, then Trump lets him down by posting fash shit somewhere else. What a week.
posted by Artw at 7:51 PM on December 3, 2022

Mark K, I didn't call you or anyone else a hypocrite. I am not so involved in Metafilter that I remember which posters have twitter accounts or not.

My comment was more of an observation on Twitter's rapid descent. A week(?) ago, unbanning Trump was a red line for many. Now, we've got non-consensual dick pics. Imagine what we'll see next week.
posted by ryanrs at 8:08 PM on December 3, 2022

The most recent thing I found in English about Koo - is interesting about multi-lingual design, maybe unconvincing about monetization, and doesn’t have any of the "users increased during the World Cup" charts that wild success would suggest.
posted by clew at 10:37 PM on December 3, 2022

Sorry for misreading you, ryanrs. I thought you were complaining about people who said they were leaving and didn't, not just pointing out the extreme rapidity of the changes.

In any event, I didn't say I was leaving and did, so I didn't take it personally! A lot of people I admire are still there so I got snippy.
posted by mark k at 10:46 PM on December 3, 2022

[If] those relationships are useful people need to find ways to set them up elsewhere.

But that won't happen for a large number of those connections. As Twitter dies or is abandoned, many of them will just be gone.
posted by straight at 1:48 AM on December 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

heh, remember when people were all "if he brings trump back, I'm definitely out!"
that was so, so long ago

I was one of the people who said that. While I haven't completely left, neither is Trump really back yet. Rather than leave followers I have there in the lurch, I have set up Moa Party to crossspost my mefi.social account there. mefi.social is so much fun for me!

I have watched with dismay as left-leaning voices I admired have been banned. Foremost among these is Chad Loder, who is amazing and has long been high on the alt-right's hitlist. I also discovered that 4am, brilliant cracker and explainer of Apple II copy protection formats, was actually banned months ago, long before Elmo, because Twitter's algorithms misidentified a disk image he posted as porn and they refused to examine and reverse their decision.

The following are just by observation and I haven't checked their posting history, but I have seen them on Mastodon lately. George Takei is gone. foone is gone. da share z0ne is gone. Really importantly, lots of advertisers are gone.
posted by JHarris at 2:12 AM on December 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

heh, remember when people were all "if he brings trump back, I'm definitely out!"

I deactivated my account as soon as Pony Stark did that, pending auto deletion. I then learned that it's worth considering hanging onto the handle because they're getting re-used by bad actors. So I've reactivated it yesterday before it was deleted, so my username I use a lot of places (except here) doesn't end up as a chinese porn bot/fash bot etc. But I'm done. Twitter is DNS blackholed on all my devices, and I won't be going back. TFG might not be spewing his hate on twitter, but there's plenty of his followers who are. I suspect Ye wasn't banned for his star of david swastika but only because he posted unflattering things about Musk.

Cutting yourself off from a network of friends and shared interests definitely hurts, but it was the only choice for my mental health. I'm not going to condemn others for putting up with the bilge hose in order to try to hang on to those remaining.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 5:05 AM on December 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

(I think both George Takei and da share z0ne have posted in the past day?) (That's not to take away from your point though!)
posted by mittens at 5:06 AM on December 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

Remember to take and archive and use a deletion service to get rid of all your old tweets. Also get rid of the app (everyone should be getting rid of the app).
posted by Artw at 6:39 AM on December 4, 2022

> [If] those relationships are useful people need to find ways to set them up elsewhere.

But that won't happen for a large number of those connections. As Twitter dies or is abandoned, many of them will just be gone.

That's true. But I think that's all the more reason to start setting up in new places sooner rather than later. People can do that while still keeping up their Twitter presence and connections for now - like when you move to a new apartment or house but still keep the old one for a bit so you can do the move comfortably, set up mail forwarding, etc.

If existing connections and communities on Twitter are important, then it's even more important to not leave them reliant on a single system, whether or not that single system is run by a capricious and apparently quite hate-ful Randian psychopath who surrounds himself with white nationalists and has already demonstrated that he's happy to divulge confidential information because he thinks he owns it and could not care less if anyone gets hurt as a result.

Specific platforms only last so long. Communities have got to develop ways to absorb these kinds of changes flexibly. Which takes time, so best to at least start working on it now, and stop being so deeply wedded to single platforms in the future. Even if that's less easy.
posted by trig at 8:23 AM on December 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

But that won't happen for a large number of those connections. As Twitter dies or is abandoned, many of them will just be gone.

Also, I've noticed over many (cyber) incarnations, that even if you retain the individual/group connections in another place, as often as not* it ceases to be a community as much as just somewhere you occasionally go to check up on people you used to know (a.k.a. Facebook).

* I was going to say I couldn't think of any exception, but actually the migration of the El Reg/Inquirer forums from Delphi to the OS Beehive forums if anything resulted in the community intensifying.
posted by Buntix at 10:04 AM on December 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

A Tumbler post by someone who says they were at SpaceX:

He was surrounded by people whose job was, essentially, to manipulate him into making good decisions.

Managing Elon was a huge part of the company culture. Even I, as a lowly intern, would hear people talking about it openly in meetings. People knew how to present ideas in a way that would resonate with him, they knew how to creatively reinterpret (or ignore) his many insane demands, and they even knew how to “stage manage” parts of the physical office space so that it would appeal to Elon.

The funniest example of “stage management” I can remember is this dude on the IT security team. He had a script running in a terminal on one of his monitors that would output random garbage, Matrix-style, so that it always looked like he was doing Important Computer Things to anyone who walked by his desk. Second funniest was all the people I saw playing WoW at their desks after ~5pm, who did it in the office just to give the appearance that they were working late.

People were willing to do that at SpaceX because Elon was giving them the money (and hype) to get into outer space, a mission people cared deeply about. The company also grew with and around Elon. There were layers of management between individual employees and Elon, and those managers were experienced managers of Elon.

* * *
If existing connections and communities on Twitter are important, then it's even more important to not leave them reliant on a single system

This is, in practical terms, like saying if you love your local neighborhood it's too important to let it be tied to a single geographical location.
posted by mark k at 11:59 AM on December 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

This is, in practical terms, like saying if you’re freinds with people at a local bar and it closes down you cut them dead in the streets afterwards.
posted by Artw at 1:25 PM on December 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

>If existing connections and communities on Twitter are important, then it's even more important to not leave them reliant on a single system

This is, in practical terms, like saying if you love your local neighborhood it's too important to let it be tied to a single geographical location.

Sure! Except for a few tiny differences in constraints.

...

I'm going to assume the main difficulty you're talking about is the problem of splitting your time/attention between multiple locations, because that's the only way this analogy makes any sense short of spherical cows. It is a real difficulty, and it's why I acknowledge that right now it's legitimately not easy to set up any kind of flexibility and redundancy. Right now, moving a community to even one new place can take a fair investment of time and attention, let alone setting up any kind of tools for or culture of resiliency. Which I know goes against the easy seamlessness people have come to expect from the general online experience, and in the short term there will be lots of individuals who drop out rather than taking part.

But (a) realistically, online communities (and individuals) have got to figure this out, because if we stick with your analogy then all local neighborhoods have an extremely high likelihood of being destroyed by lava, earthquakes, or lack of fresh water after just a few years, so maybe it's time for community culture and expectations to take that into account; and (b) tools and cultural norms that help preserve connections seem pretty doable, and likewise tools for cross-posting and aggregating content from multiple sources, so hopefully this particular source of friction can at least be eased sooner rather than later.

tl;dr - I'm not saying that leaving Twitter is easy. I'm saying that if preserving a community or set of connections is truly so important that it could theoretically justify continuing to effectively support a platform and business like Twitter (or FB or Instagram or TT or...) and to continue to brave the abuse that a platform condones and amplifies, then it's also important enough to justify the time and effort it takes to reduce dependence on that platform. So that at least the community and connections can survive when they can't survive there anymore. And that now is the time to at least start working on that, even if for the time being you're still going to be active on that platform.
posted by trig at 1:38 PM on December 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Assume you’re a member of a vulnerable or marginalized group, and you and your cohort have become accustomed to always meeting in the same bar. It’s “your bar”. You have your usual table, usual drink order, you know you will always find someone there whose lived experience and perspectives are similar to yours.

One day the owner lets skinheads in the bar. They cause problems, but the owner isn’t keen on kicking them out. There are bouncers, they could be kicking out the skinheads, but they won’t, because the owner likes the money that the skinheads are dropping.

Then eventually the owner sells the bar to someone who actively courts the skinhead dollar. As in, they openly advertise that they will be a skinhead friendly bar. Suddenly it doesn’t matter anymore how long you’ve been a customer, how much time and money you’ve spent, or how much of a hassle it would be to find a new place. You and your marginalized, vulnerable friends are drinking at a skinhead bar. At any point, the clientele and owner could actively endanger you and your friends, because it’s their bar now and your presence is only tolerated until they turn on you.

Stop meeting at the skinhead bar.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 1:54 PM on December 4, 2022 [9 favorites]

Okay, but:

Assume you’re a member of a vulnerable or marginalized group [...] Stop meeting at the skinhead bar.

1. Assume we've been trying to find a place with no skinheads
2. Assume all we've been living in is a place with nothing but active support or ignorance of skinheads
3. This bar? Is still about the usual level of skinheads

Do you really think the Chinese, the Iranians, the Ukrainians, the Brazilians, the Filipinos have no idea of oh gosh fascist trolls (ETA: and actual govt forces) amongst them?

But go ahead. It's nice that you guys can afford to be dismayed.
posted by cendawanita at 4:53 PM on December 4, 2022 [6 favorites]

And specific to my point, @neolithicsheep, who is now on Masto, has a thread with so far preliminary but good responses (which I'll share on the active masto thread):

I think one of the reasons I'm so fascinated with the pitfalls of mastodon is that being an anarchist I tend toward suspicion of centralized power structures. The ultimate problem I'm seeing is that people aren't thinking decentralization through far enough and often assume that good intentions make up for exhaustive preparation.

Eg there is not enough recognition that decentralization of control also means decentralization of legal risk - we anarchists may not believe in the state but the state sure does believe in us when it comes to enforcing laws against child sexual exploitation material that may get federated onto a server. Disney's lawyers sure will believe in us if we don't conform to the DMCA.

Another concern is the ability of instance owners to fight a subpoena for user info. Twitter and Meta have lawyers for that shit. I'm betting most instance owners don't have the money for the lawyers to fight a govt subpoena, let alone have a relationship with those lawyers already in place.

Twitter was never "safe" for activists but as long as legal risk on masto has been decentralized to people without the resources necessary to effectively manipulate any given legal system (I know it's expensive here in the US and suspect it is elsewhere) then masto is going to be that much worse.

You'll note much of the viable solutions being discussed includes accessing public funds elsewhere (my example countries have no such recourse) or clubbing funds to locate nonprofit or retail legal services (similar problems but in a different direction related to the entanglement of private money and public interests and low socioeconomic capacity)
posted by cendawanita at 4:59 PM on December 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

Mod note: Several deleted. Artw, back way the hell off, and take a day off.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 6:32 PM on December 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

Twitter isn't a group of 50 people I'm acquainted with at a local bar. It's the 200 people I follow filtering things to me from the 10-1000 people each of them follow, each of whom are filtering from the dozens/hundreds/thousands of people they follow.

It's not a place; it's not a group or community; it's a network.

Even if I could follow all the same people on Mastodon that I do on Twitter, they wouldn't be the same people unless they're also still following all the same people following the same people following the same people...

You can't just pick it all up and move it somewhere else. That would be like trying to bring someone back from the dead by attempting to duplicate each of the connections between their brain's synapses in some other medium.
posted by straight at 7:03 PM on December 4, 2022 [8 favorites]

I've definitely found that when I talk with Mastodon proponents/evangelists, I get the same sort of vibe from them as I do from people who live in suburbs or exurbs who characterize cities as a nonstop lawless warzone. I get that for some, the chaotic noise of an environment where you are constantly bumping up against strangers might be considered a negative, but it's also the exact thing that I like about Twitter. This kind of dovetails with the pithy descriptions I've seen of Mastodon of "for people who do not actually like social media" and "Twitter with HOAs," which are not necessarily fair but also not necessarily untrue.

Mastodon asks me to choose a server based on a shared interest or whatever, but the thing I have enjoyed most about Twitter is encountering people and perspectives that are fundamentally different from who I am and what I'm already familiar with. That's the sort of serendipity that I feel much less likely to encounter on Mastodon, more or less precisely by design.
posted by DoctorFedora at 11:55 PM on December 4, 2022 [7 favorites]

I'm not sports person, but I have a Twitter list of entertaining Red Sox beat reporters.

I'm not a scientist, but I have a Twitter list of trusted epidemiologists.

I'm a white man, but I follow a lot of black women and learn a lot from them.

I'm basically cis-het, but I follow a lot of trans activists.

I'm far left progressive, but I follow some never Trump conservatives.

I also sprinkle my follows with beautiful artwork, geological formations, and climate news.

I enjoy it when people I follow from different fields get into conversations with each other.

What Mastodon instance should I join?
posted by Winnie the Proust at 8:22 AM on December 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

Any of them? Assuming the people you want to follow are on Mastodon, you can (generally) follow them from any instance.
posted by sagc at 8:26 AM on December 5, 2022 [5 favorites]

Mastodon asks me to choose a server based on a shared interest or whatever

My background sense is this a second-order effect from Mastodon trying to create a more guided onboarding process compared to the old days when it was the more like "so first thing you need to join an instance" "okay but how do I know what instance to join" "just PICK one, jeez". And for the folks who want that little bit of formal guidance, of "hey, you can pick a topic!", it has probably been a big improvement.

But for folks with an omnibus/generalist interest in their social media consumption, it becomes this messaging roadblock: that you have to pick, that there's some explicit constraint on generalist interest because everything is siloed. Which isn't really true: you're not stuck with a given instance's vibe or topic, you can interact across the whole big sphere of Masto stuff. But that's the onboarding presentation a lot of people get anyway and it's its own source of confusion and frustration.

So the instance for someone who doesn't have one core topic they are interested in is: whatever instance you join, it really doesn't mostly matter at all. You really just...join an instance and then follow whomever and consume whatever.

As someone who joined up like six years ago when there was no onboarding beyond "hey you should join masto", it's been both interesting and sort of disconcerting to see how the first impression experience has changed over time, particularly during major moments of egress and migration. A lot of people have written explainers trying to tackle the WTF Is Mastodon and the How Do I Even Start questions and there's definitely more and better info out there but the emphasis on thematic instances has created new complications in folks perceptions in the process.
posted by cortex at 8:33 AM on December 5, 2022 [6 favorites]

The Ask A Manager Twitter employee responds--they did not push the button--and mentions someone having a panic attack on the floor and being ignored.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:45 AM on December 5, 2022 [7 favorites]

Musk did a long live video chat yesterday and said a bunch of stupid or outrageous things. But the one that lept out at me is Elon Musk reassures the public he's not suicidal for a second time this year. There's several ways to read his statement, all suggesting alarming things about his state of mind.
posted by Nelson at 9:00 AM on December 5, 2022 [4 favorites]

(A very hamhanded metaphor for this, since metaphors are the rule when discussing Mastodon migration: every instance is like an apartment building. There's a door out to the street, where the world is, and you can go out and wander around the entire world, no matter what apartment building you happen to live in currently. But in every apartment building there's also a common room, this one door you can open if you feel like it and there's everybody else in the building yammering at once. And, like, if you have a specific crowd you want to yammer with, that might matter for convenience's sake. But you never have to open that door, and you can walk out into the world any time you want.

I feel like the impression a lot of people have gotten from the onboarding process is that you're going to be locked into the apartment building and the common room will be the only place to go.)
posted by cortex at 9:27 AM on December 5, 2022 [3 favorites]

Nelson: But the one that lept out at me is Elon Musk reassures the public he's not suicidal for a second time this year. There's several ways to read his statement, all suggesting alarming things about his state of mind.

What was it somebody said about "man with deep insecurities buys website dedicated to verbal bullying"?
posted by clawsoon at 9:32 AM on December 5, 2022

I feel like the impression a lot of people have gotten from the onboarding process is that you're going to be locked into the apartment building and the common room will be the only place to go.

It doesn't exactly help that Mastodon evangelists tout things like anti-virality and defederation as positives for their platform. There's a sense that they buy hard into the frontier myth as conflict resolution, and that does influence how they come across.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:34 AM on December 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

I mean the predictable tedious back and forth between hardcore Masto evangelists and hardcore Masto skeptics of "federation is the future!" vs. "masto will NEVER replace twitter!" is the least interesting and also somehow loudest aspect of the entire last month or so of migration discourse. Everybody else, which is in fact almost everybody, is just having to navigate through that fuckin' racket while they try to figure out what their social media situation is gonna be next month and next year.
posted by cortex at 9:42 AM on December 5, 2022 [12 favorites]

What If Failure Is The Plan – interesting perspective on Twitter possible end states.
posted by migurski at 10:58 AM on December 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

Mastodon asks me to choose a server based on a shared interest or whatever

The approach I've gone with to cover (some of my) multiple interests is just joining multiple instances such as musician.today and neurodifferent.me. Figure I can use the various local timelines for finding/interacting with topic specific things and people to follow. Admittedly it's probably not an approach that's going to work for most...
posted by Buntix at 11:07 AM on December 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

Found this interesting: https://web.archive.org/web/20221204114846/https://www.wired.com/story/musk-denial-true-cost-twitter-implosion/ (SLWired via archive.org)
posted by timlimfimbim at 3:26 PM on December 5, 2022 [6 favorites]

As if Twitter HQ wasn't already an overflowing garbage pile,
Twitter just fired the union janitors who went on strike this morning.

The company already announced plans to switch cleaning companies and indicated their new contractor will not be rehiring the current janitorial staff, despite county and state requirements.

Strikers were using the hashtag #TakeOnTheTwit and @JortsTheCat has also been covering the story.
posted by cheshyre at 6:47 PM on December 5, 2022 [6 favorites]

I won't link to it because it is a derail but will note that Musk appears to be a garbage manager at every company he ostensibly runs, including Neuralink, which according to Reuters is under federal investigation over its animal testing. "The investigation has come at a time of growing employee dissent about Neuralink’s animal testing, including complaints that pressure from CEO Musk to accelerate development has resulted in botched experiments, according to a Reuters review of dozens of Neuralink documents and interviews with more than 20 current and former employees."

In short: Of course that fucker fired union workers. What else would he do? Reporting from a local Bay Area news outlet Monday evening includes this: "Janitors said they've been locked out since Friday and had no warning.

“Our cleaning contractor at Twitter was told by Twitter that they are cutting the contract,” said Olga Miranda, the janitor’s union president. “So we have about 48 families out of work. And it just so happens that it's three weeks before Christmas.”

They said they'd like to talk to Twitter's new owner about all this but haven't heard any kind of response. I find this nonsense infuriating and discouraging because legal remedies take such a long time.
posted by Bella Donna at 6:28 AM on December 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

Elon Musk gambled big on Twitter. Tesla is going to pay the price. Deep dive into Twitter's new debt structure. Major themes: Musk has a history of using money from other companies he owns to fund whatever new interest he has. (Tesla and SolarCity, SpaceX and Boring.) Also Tesla's financials are shaky.
posted by Nelson at 7:26 AM on December 6, 2022 [4 favorites]

The billionaire CEOs remind me a bit of the historian Bret Devereaux's take on medieval kingship.

In essence, your vassals have a sense of what kind of extravagance is necessary to look kingly in their social context, and they will judge you for the degree to which you match up to that expectation. Our sources tend to read financially responsible rulers as ‘miserly.’ The easy example of this is how you all likely know King John ‘Lackland’ of England as the miserly ‘Prince John’ of Robin Hood infamy; in part that was because the foolish (but very kingly) military adventurism of his elder brother Richard I (the Lionheart) had practically bankrupted the kingdom and John, as his successor, was left little room for magnanimity. But of course legitimacy does not care for financial constraints and a king that fails to act appropiately kingly, even for good reasons, tends to suffer in the sources.

The primary thing that a tech CEO has to do is to raise money, from stock markets, venture capitalists and bankers.

But doing that isn't about creating viable business plans, because especially in new industries, nobody knows anything and luck is a huge factor. An important way to help you raise money is to play the role of a tech CEO: be bold, cruel, arrogant, extravagant (and of course white and male). If you don't play that role, vassals will not support you.

In some ways, Musk seems a bit trapped by his own constraints. Once he started down the road of trying to buy Twitter, he couldn't afford to do the sensible thing and back down or back away, because he has to maintain a particular image among a particular group of people who buy into the ideas behind it.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:35 AM on December 6, 2022 [9 favorites]

Elon Musk Has Outfitted Twitter’s Headquarters With Bedrooms For Employees.

Elon Musk's “extremely hardcore” vision for Twitter seems to have manifested itself in conference-room sleeping quarters reminiscent of sad hotel rooms at the company's recently depopulated headquarters.

No word on whether one of the rooms is reserved for Elon's "massages". Perhaps the horse deeds are in a drawer in the bedside table.
posted by Nelson at 8:43 AM on December 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

The Musk Bump: Quantifying the rise in hate speech under Elon Musk, another independent measurement of the growth of hate speech on Twitter. Finds 3-4x increases in engagement with tweets containing slurs and accounts that trade in offensive tweets since Musk took over.
posted by Nelson at 9:50 AM on December 6, 2022 [4 favorites]

In a just world, the Twitter employees would have run this guy out of town by now. Hell, probably after that first weekend.
posted by Servo5678 at 10:41 AM on December 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

Once he started down the road of trying to buy Twitter, he couldn't afford to do the sensible thing and back down or back away, because he has to maintain a particular image among a particular group of people who buy into the ideas behind it.

The Chancery Court of Delware required the purchase be completed. He fucked around and found out.
posted by StarkRoads at 11:35 AM on December 6, 2022 [6 favorites]

Amazon, Uber ads appear on Twitter pages of white nationalists restored by Musk. Snap and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services are also among the victims.
posted by Nelson at 7:16 PM on December 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

Found this interesting: https://web.archive.org/web/20221204114846/https://www.wired.com/story/musk-denial-true-cost-twitter-implosion/

In addition:

We don’t need another Twitter - Twitter never fulfilled its promise. Don’t expect its current crop of replacements to, either.

And also Tressie McMillan Cottom on TDS last night (?) on Twitter as a pseudo-public space.
posted by cendawanita at 9:07 PM on December 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

The primary thing that a tech CEO has to do is to raise money, from stock markets, venture capitalists and bankers.

This sort of claim is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, because it adopts the world view of financialization of the economy, instead of the actual productive work finance is supposed to enable. And is kind of how we get people like Musk lionized.

I just deleted an overly long draft post on this, but the short version is: Running the damn company is the CEO's primary job. Startups? Part of running the company is getting funding, sure. But for an established profitable company with an income stream, raising money is generally either irrelevant or technical question for the CFO.
posted by mark k at 10:02 PM on December 6, 2022 [19 favorites]

Hey mark k, I would love to see a FPP on exactly the topic of your deleted comment. Strictly optional, of course, but I think it would be a barnburner. We need more pushback on this topic.
posted by Bella Donna at 3:44 AM on December 7, 2022 [8 favorites]

This Chris Dillow post on irrationality in the boardroom is a good starting point on why CEO's ability to "run the company" is overrated. He has more on leadership in general.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 4:04 AM on December 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against Twitter for Allegedly Targeting Female Employees in Layoffs

Chaos reigns at Twitter as Musk manages 'by whims'
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:22 PM on December 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

Elon Musk keeps bringing in new people to Twitter, like enthusiastic interns, cousins, and even Bari Weiss. Also his two year old kid is running around the office a lot, although presumably not working. At least not hardcore.
posted by Nelson at 4:13 PM on December 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Bari Weiss can read your DMs. That’s going to go well.
posted by Artw at 4:19 PM on December 8, 2022

Do you have specific evidence for that Artw or are you just speculating? Asking because I care in detail; the security of our DMs on Twitter is something I'm paying very close attention to. There's no way for a user (former or current) to delete them.
posted by Nelson at 4:58 PM on December 8, 2022

Twitter is able to see the contents of direct messages. So technically, Elon can read anything and let anyone he wants read anything. It would probably violate the terms of service and maybe be illegal. So the question is really whether Musk will be able to resist the temptation. Your call.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 5:16 PM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Anyone with employee level access can, so Bari Weiss can, yes.

Currently they are using internal tools to gin up gamergate style conspiracy theories about the moderation team there but there’s no reason she couldn’t move on to messing with other people she has vendettas against.
posted by Artw at 5:30 PM on December 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

According to this screenshot of a businessinsider article, Bari Weiss has been given employee-level access and a company laptop.

Edit: looks like it might be the same article linked above.
posted by umber vowel at 5:34 PM on December 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

She’s posting screenshots of internal tools as we speak.
posted by Artw at 5:35 PM on December 8, 2022

So the question is really whether Musk will be able to resist the temptation.

He already looked at Grimes's and admitted it. So...no.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:49 PM on December 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

Is the penalty for Twitter violating its TOS anything but a shrug and statement they'll try to do better ( sorry forgot the communications team has been fired).
posted by Mitheral at 8:36 PM on December 8, 2022

Anyone with employee level access can, so Bari Weiss can, yes.

Do you have a source for this claim? It's certainly not in the linked Forbes article, for example.
posted by mark k at 9:22 PM on December 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

From the Business Insider article: Weiss has been given access to Twitter's employee systems, added to its Slack, and given a company laptop, two people familiar with her presence said.

Though, and I do not know if this is better or worse, all the screenshots of the admin system that Weiss are watermarked eirwin4903ZWlyd21u863, most likely Ella Irwin, Twitters current head of Trust and Safety. So either Weiss is sitting over their shoulder snapping pictures or is simply just logged in as them. Either would be a firing offense at a normal non-compromised company.
posted by Artw at 9:47 PM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Anyone with employee level access can, so Bari Weiss can, yes.

I don't think that's true.

I am also concerned about the privacy of user DMs on Twitter. But I don't think what's been described as Bari's access would give her unfettered access to any users DMs. I was hoping you had more evidence but it seems you are just speculating
posted by Nelson at 10:02 PM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

No, I mean the claim that all employee accounts can read all DMs.
posted by mark k at 10:04 PM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Ella Irwin has confirmed that that is her watermark in Weiss' screenshots.

Also: virulent transphobe Abigail Shrier was also given access. The agenda here is pretty clear, and it's ugly.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 4:44 AM on December 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

Screen shot posted by Bari Weiss showing her dashboard view of the Libs of TikTok account. It includes a menu option "Direct Messages".

This leaves many questions unanswered. Will the Direct Messages link actually show her the DMs, or will there be a security barrier? Can she vie any account, or just selected accounts that she's requested access for.

As far as I know, these questions haven't been answered. Given the way Musk has behaved, it seems sensible to assume the worst. Musk has shown that he doesn't even know what responsible behavior would be.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 6:35 AM on December 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

Ella Irwin, Ella Irwin, VP, Product - Trust and Safety says

For security purposes, the screenshots requested came from me so we could ensure no PII was exposed. We did not give this access to reporters and no, reporters were not accessing user DMs.

She might be outright lying about the DM access but I think it's unlikely.

This paragraph is speculation: I doubt average Twitter employees or even folks working in trust and safety have blanket access to DMs. I expect such access is restricted with some controls on access. ~10+ years ago it was more common for tech company employees to have access to everything, but after a series of scandals at Facebook and Uber (and maybe Twitter?) industry practice has been to have some safeguards in place.

Access to DMs is a very sensitive and important topic. Twitter has enormous caches of user conversations which both users believed were entirely private. In practice they mostly were. Until Musk took over, who cannot be trusted. And it is not possible to delete DMs from Twitter, even if you delete your whole account. There's an enormous risk here and the moment someone at Twitter breaches that trust I expect it to be serious hellfire.
posted by Nelson at 7:20 AM on December 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

She might be outright lying about the DM access but I think it's unlikely.

I know next to nothing about Ella Irwin. Is she generally trustworthy? My default for anyone hired by Musk is suspicion, and lying in a tweet is pretty low stakes, liability-wise.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 7:56 AM on December 9, 2022

We can speculate, She could be lying and didn’t actually take the screenshots despite the watermark. Bari may actually have access to not only DMs but the big switch they turns on and off Twitter (bad). It’s possible their head of trust and safety is a secretly a spy (this has been speculated) and Bari is working, covertly, for an underground team of supervillains, some with superpowers.

…

I’m not trying to downplay the risk of Weiss being given weird access. But this started with ArtW confidently saying she has access to DMs and now that it’s been disavowed it’s “yes but possibly the made up fact is still correct”?
posted by wemayfreeze at 8:08 AM on December 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

lying in a tweet is pretty low stakes, liability-wise.

Not sure that's true, not for a Vice President when talking about user privacy. The GDPR and CCPA both have real teeth. I think it unlikely she'd deliberately lie about a factual case when asked directly about it. But I'm speculating. And I ask anyone else who adds information to this discussion to clearly delineate between speculation and things that are established fact (with sources, ideally.)
posted by Nelson at 8:12 AM on December 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

I doubt average Twitter employees or even folks working in trust and safety have blanket access to DMs. I expect such access is restricted with some controls on access.

I'm sure that in the past Twitter had an access control system to prevent misuse of PII, including Direct Messages. But that's like saying "in the past, the president of the United States didn't use the IRS to target enemies." People like Donald Trump and Elon Musk have made it clear that they don't give a rats arse about appropriate controls and how things were done in the past. In this case, it appears that Bari Weiss wasn't given direct access (or any access) to DMs. But it would be foolish for any Twitter user to think their data will remain private if Elon Musk sees an advantage to making it public.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 8:24 AM on December 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

Mudge's report was pretty clear that Twitter's internal controls are terrible, especially wrt employee access and access auditing.
posted by ryanrs at 9:28 AM on December 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

The the watermark in the screenshots show that Weiss did not have access to the tool via their own account, which renders some of this moot, but as noted access controls being dogshit at Twitter is a well known issue.

TBH Weiss having indirect access to a tool that allows viewing DMs is quite bad enough and you should absolutely consider DMs compromised if for some weird reason you didn’t before.

(I could not guarantee you that her lack of access to it is not simply a matter of technical confidence. Also Ella Irwin‘s story is made extremely weird by several of the players directly contradicting her and those being phone pictures rather than regular screenshots. There is a lot here we will not know without a federal investigation.)
posted by Artw at 9:58 AM on December 9, 2022

Twitter apparently still had a Trust and Safety council, three members of which have just resigned.
posted by Artw at 10:02 AM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

I could not guarantee you that her lack of access to it is not simply a matter of technical confidence

As I too can not guarantee that Weiss's behavior is not simply a matter of being controlled by some advanced (alien?) species of zombie fungus.

I have no trust in Twitter, in Weiss, in Musk. Literally. I think they're clowns acting out of their own blinkered narcissism. But the way that you're talking about these phone photos is VERY conspiracy theory. "Hey well we have no proof of anything but these things have a certain ~vibe~ so they're probably evidence of the very bad thing" is bad logic and makes for bad conversation. It makes for good confirmation bias, though, if that's what you're looking for.
posted by wemayfreeze at 10:21 AM on December 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

We are literally looking at screenshots of internal tools formerly considered sensitive being made by a known bad actor. We know that the access controls are bad and that more and more bad actors are being given an unspecified level of employee access.

So I’m going to stand by that as maybe being a bit more substantive than “space aliens might have heads made of jello”.
posted by Artw at 10:28 AM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

I feel like activists and similar on twitter should consider that screenshot a threat to their privacy. That screenshot is Elon Musk threatening you.
posted by ryanrs at 10:33 AM on December 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

We know that the access controls are bad and that more and more bad actors are being given an unspecified level of employee access.

And we also know that they're actively grievance-farming here; they are very selectively digging into moderation histories of high-profile right-wingers looking for evidence that supports their TWITTER SUPPRESSED MAH FREE SPEACH agenda and studiously ignoring any evidence to the contrary.

(Most notably, the "do not take action without consulting upper management" flag on LibsOfTikTok's account which is very much evidence that the account received special treatment, but not in the way that they think it is...)

I'm sure Twitter does have access controls that limit employee's access to PII -- one thing I noticed in the screenshots was that the "show IP addresses" was a button that probably does an access check and logs the access? -- but can we trust that current management won't abuse that? Especially as they're also digging around in Slack and email histories which may well contain PII that's outside the controls of the Twitter account management system?

I mean yeah, it's all speculation, but it does also have to go to motive here: we have a right-wing CEO feeding internal information to a trio of right-wing reporters via his newly-recruited head of trust in pursuit of an "old Twitter had a left-wing bias" agenda; they have every incentive to go digging deeper and there is nobody left to put a "hey, this is a bad idea" check on them.

(And also yeah, this is Musk's latest hobby-horse and who knows, in another week he might lose interest and tack to another bad idea; cancelling Christmas for Twitter devs, maybe.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:16 AM on December 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

Me six weeks ago:

One thing that became clear in the Mudge thread is that Twitter has egregiously bad internal data controls and logging. Musk & friends will be digging around in his enemy's DMs (past and present). It probably turns into a secret group of Twitter employees who forward him stuff.

I don't know that he'd even try to pretend about it. He might just pick an unpopular target and release their private messages as a show of power / feeling out what he can get away with. He will be so tempted to wink about it.

In the last couple weeks we've learned:
- He read all of Grimes's DMs.
- The secret group who forwards him stuff is the alt right.
- The unpopular target he's going to hit are trans people.

Now we're just waiting to see who he targets, specifically.
posted by ryanrs at 12:20 PM on December 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

Where can I learn more about Musk reading Grimes' DMs?
posted by Nelson at 3:06 PM on December 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

He tweeted that he did it. I don't know that anything came of it.

e: I'm not trying to hold out on sources, but you try googling for musk tweeting re. grimes, ha ha. I think it was in the last week or so?
posted by ryanrs at 3:09 PM on December 9, 2022

If you find it please let me know. I hate sounding like a scold about sources. But I'm using these discussions as pointers for verified public material to then amplify and share in other forums. (And thank you all for that, it's helpful!) Rumors like this one about Grimes are very interesting to me but I'm hoping for confirmation so I can share it on.

I spent 10 or so minutes looking and couldn't find it in Twitter or Google searches. As you say, there's a lot of noise on related search terms. A bunch of stuff about Azealia Banks, also the oft-repeated story about "Musk slid into Grimes DMs". But I found nothing about this particular story about Musk reading Grimes' DMs.
posted by Nelson at 3:54 PM on December 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

I found it off Best of Dying Twit Nitter, but it's hard to cite something that "old" in Twitter time or else I would have cited it.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:55 PM on December 9, 2022

I have been trying to find it via search and Google and dear god, that's excruciating and coming up with fuckall.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:59 PM on December 9, 2022

Found it!
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:00 PM on December 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

Thanks, jenfullmoon! That's the one.
posted by ryanrs at 4:06 PM on December 9, 2022

omg that's even grosser than I imagined. bleh.
posted by mochapickle at 4:22 PM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm 99.99% sure that is a fake screenshot of a nonexistent tweet.
posted by Roommate at 4:22 PM on December 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

> jenfullmoon: "Found it!"

The text in the screenshotted tweet reads as follows (all punctuation and lack of capitalization in the original) :

just got done reading all of grimes dms. which i am allowed to do because of the first amendment i'm pretty sure. i don't want this job anymore

So, for me, I'm gonna need just a skosh more evidence that this was actually tweeted by Elon. For one thing, it's actually kinda funny if you read it as a jokey, mocking fake tweet (and Elon is rarely funny on purpose). For another, it's written in the all-lower-caps, Tumblr-esque style that I'm not sure Elon has ever commonly used. And lastly, there's the last "i don't want this job anymore" bit (perhaps echoing the I Think You Should Leave Now sketch) which seems to me to be an extremely non-Elon kind of thing to say.
posted by mhum at 4:31 PM on December 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

Yeah, you are probably right. I guess that's why it was so hard to dig up.

(since most search engines don't OCR image text, and if it's a photoshop, it never existed in text form)
posted by ryanrs at 4:37 PM on December 9, 2022

Also, I just skimmed Elon's tweets from Dec. 2 through Dec. 4 and if he had ever tweeted this, it's gone now. But having looked at (I think) everything he tweeted in that period, as far as I can tell, he's never tweeted without an initial capital letter. If it was tweeted sincerely, the style and format of the tweet is notably different from the rest of his tweets in this period. If it was tweeted as a joke or a hoax, it'd be a significant departure from his other attempts at humor (more Tumblr, less Reddit).
posted by mhum at 4:38 PM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm so sorry I made everyone read so many of that guy's tweets.
posted by ryanrs at 4:40 PM on December 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

I have no idea if it's a hoax or not.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:42 PM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

There’s nothing there in that link now - tweet not found.
posted by njohnson23 at 5:34 PM on December 9, 2022

He didn’t read Grime’s DMs but he DID just interact with Lara Logan in accusing the trust and safety members who resigned today of abetting child trafficking. So, par for the course for pedo guy.
posted by Room 101 at 6:01 PM on December 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

Well, all we've discovered is that he didn't actually brag on Twitter that he'd read her DMs.
posted by straight at 7:19 PM on December 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

So no,. there is no evidence Musk read Grimes DMs. A couple of you fell for a hoax. What a waste of time that was.

There are many real bad things happening on Twitter. The privacy of user DMs is really at risk. But confusing documented reality for speculation and repeating hoaxes just undermines a meaningful discussion.
posted by Nelson at 10:06 PM on December 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

Critics Say Musk Has Revealed Himself as a Conservative. It’s Not So Simple. NYT synthesis of Musk's political musings, highlighting his embrace of nihilism and memery over a clear agenda. Musk reminds me of Trump in his politics; it's not clear he has any strongly held personal agenda, he's iterating on what gets him the most attention.
posted by Nelson at 6:47 AM on December 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

‘Twitter Files’ 3 on Trump Ban Proves Trilogies Are a Letdown. Another Taibbi Twitter thread last night. Link is to Rolling Stone, which is critical; naturally the Daily Mail and Fox News are much more excited about it. Marjorie Taylor Green called it "evidence of a coup", apparently because Twitter did not actively help Trump while he was conducting his coup attempt.

Meanwhile on the grapevine I hear about harassment of former Twitter employees. Whose names somehow keep getting included in screenshots Musk is giving to the press.
posted by Nelson at 7:01 AM on December 10, 2022

Are there no laws protecting the right to privacy and safety of employees and former employees in the US?

Edit: serious question. Where I'm sitting this behavior would be an absolute no-go.
posted by UN at 8:02 AM on December 10, 2022

Elon's got some real "they mocked and humiliated me at the Correspondents dinner so I'm gonna run for president and wreck everything" energy going on.
posted by straight at 8:13 AM on December 10, 2022 [4 favorites]

Josh Marshall's TPM: Musk Goes Full Pizzagate

"Musk is now in near constant dialogue with the most rabid conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites in the digital space. He’s jumped head first into the “globalist”/pedophile vortex which was at the heart of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory and later the entire Qanon movement. He now accuses former Twitter management of intentionally allowing the platform it to become a breeding ground of pedophilia and child sex trafficking. He claims he’s shutting the offending accounts down after previous management refused to do so."
posted by dnash at 9:20 AM on December 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

Are there no laws protecting the right to privacy and safety of employees and former employees in the US?

Possibly?

Elon operates on the basis that laws do not apply to him and historically that’s pretty much always worked out for him and is likely to work out in this case - he is thorny to regulate and if there is even an attempt at it he’ll either did in and delay or hum and his surrounding weirdos will put up such an unholy screeching it won’t be worth it - so people mostly don’t both.

Yes, this is the exact same playbook as fellow far right troll Donald Trump, though that may just be because all far right trolls are like this if you let them get far enough.
posted by Artw at 9:22 AM on December 10, 2022 [7 favorites]

Are there no laws protecting the right to privacy and safety of employees and former employees in the US?

There are some, but they cover things like your social security number or health records. AFAIK nothing that would prevent anyone from talking about your normal work duties or communications. My employer "owns" all the e-mails I wrote; if they want to release them to show I singlehandedly torpedoed their big project because of my poor technical skills I don't think there's anything stopping them except I could sue for defamation (if they are lying).

Might be a GDPR violation if it's happening to any European citizens? Not sure.
posted by mark k at 9:39 AM on December 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

Musk is escalating attacks against former Twitter employees. In this case, Yoel Roth. (A former head of trust & safety who actually worked at Musk Twitter and carried water for him briefly.) In particular there's this tweet where he accuses Yoel of sexualizing children inappropriately based on something he wrote 12 years ago in a PhD thesis.

I'm very angry about it. Partly because it's so dangerous and irresponsible. Specifically because an ignorant bully is cherry picking one quote from a nuanced argument about creating safe environments for queer youth to fulfill his nasty personal agenda. I hope Yoel has a good lawyer and I fear he probably needs personal protection.

Meanwhile, more casually, Musk directly implicates his own company in crimes.
posted by Nelson at 2:17 PM on December 10, 2022 [5 favorites]

Yes, this is the exact same playbook as fellow far right troll Donald Trump, though that may just be because all far right trolls are like this if you let them get far enough.

My sense is not that it's far-right per se, it's just that they have figured out some vulnerabilities in the US political system. I have been holding the view that like a door without a lock, there may be no way to stop them, unless someone figures out a way to address it head on by adding a lock (legislation) or by wielding a gun (the media, public humiliation). Right now, prosecuting a Trump here and a Q Shaman there is just whack-a-mole. The movement is continuing, the vulnerable server hasn't been patched, and the system is still getting hammered day after day. As an example look at Trump not having a care in the world about what he says even now.

In this way I figure Mitch is part of the strategy, the guy who a) puts a responsible face on official proceedings; and b) prevents legislation from moving through any process, which prevents (or helps prevent) a lock being added to the door.
posted by rhizome at 2:36 PM on December 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

In case anyone might still need it, here's further confirmation, from an employee townhall (Twitter link, because the equivalent nitter.net page doesn't seem to be loading the image), that he bought Twitter with concerns about (implicitly right-wing) "free speech" primarily in mind, though it also includes this kind of amazing caveat:

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.

I mean, I can relate to that feeling, I guess, but I think maybe we just shouldn't have billionaires anymore.
posted by nobody at 9:57 PM on December 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

tell me you're high on your own supply without demonstrating awareness that you have supply
posted by away for regrooving at 11:37 PM on December 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

In other news, someone just murdered the shit out of Roko’s Basilisk:

@[e-mail]:
computer boys are really like "imagine a boot so big that logically we must start licking it now in case it might possibly exist someday"

(Roko’s basilisk is the dumb AI twist on Pascal’s wager that assorted reactionary tech types and apparently Grimes are enamored with. It is monumentally stupid and the kind of thing that appeals to dumb people who think they are really smart)
posted by Artw at 12:50 AM on December 11, 2022 [14 favorites]

Last night's 3am Musk tweet bender is him signaling an embrace of Covid conspiracy theorists. Including tweeting "Prosecute / Fauci" and threatening to release more internal documents, this time related to Covid false information policy.
posted by Nelson at 8:06 AM on December 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

If he’s not far right any differences are meaningless - everything he is boosting is far right.
posted by Artw at 8:18 AM on December 11, 2022 [7 favorites]

If he’s not far right any differences are meaningless - everything he is boosting is far right.

Which is why the NYT article that Nelson linked to above (archive.ph link if you don't want to give the Times any page views) so maddeningly (or deliberately) misses the point. It recites a huge litany of Elol's fascist or fascist-adjacent words and actions, but the big negating reveal is that (a) he believes in anthropogenic climate change (big fuckin surprise when he makes his money from an electric car company) and (b) he's given modest amounts of money (a total of $1 million over the past 20 years) to candidates on BOTH sides of the political spectrum, particularly safe centrist nonthreatening Democratic senators like Chris Coons, Gary Peters, and the 'liberal' Dianne Feinstein. When you replatform and amplify all kinds of violent Nazis you don't get to call yourself “middle-of-the-road” and “socially very liberal."
posted by hangashore at 9:39 AM on December 11, 2022 [5 favorites]

There’s an entire strain of fash that believes in anthropogenic climate change. They believe, big surprise that it’s the fault of all their usual enemies and the only response to it is to do more fascisms. Pretty much expect this to become their dominant point of view as things get too bad to ignore.
posted by Artw at 9:49 AM on December 11, 2022 [5 favorites]

Not exactly an alternative Ex platoon for the far right conspiracy spreading, so much as a self serving parallel explanation: When the 'Chute Fails: Golden Parachutes, Bad Faith Arguments, and the Rise of Norm Busters
posted by Artw at 10:11 AM on December 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

More embrace of Covid lunacy: Musk praising Jay Bhattacharya. Who was one of the bad science voices against public health measures in 2020, along with John Ioannidis.
posted by Nelson at 2:34 PM on December 11, 2022

Elon Musk’s self described crime scene
posted by Artw at 2:56 PM on December 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

Musk going further down the Covid conspiracy rabbithole in this tweet. The first half is an anti-trans insult I won't bother to repeat. The second half reads

As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.

I believe what he's saying is that Covid is man made and Fauci somehow personally bears responsibility for its creation. There's no conclusive evidence of the former and the latter is a very bizarre interpretation of responsibility.
posted by Nelson at 6:56 PM on December 11, 2022 [5 favorites]

The seditionists have been harping on "gain of function" and "Fauci lied" crap for years, ever since the CDC modified ("reversed") their mask guidance at the beginning.
posted by rhizome at 8:11 PM on December 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

So what would work better:

"He's not well, is he?"

"Doesn't he look a little tired?"
posted by porpoise at 8:12 PM on December 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

Sadly the latter one only works on women. I'm not sure what, if anything, works on men.

Maybe we just wait for Elon to go full Nazi, I guess.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:42 PM on December 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

Apparently Musk decided to do a guest appearance at a Dave Chappelle show.

It did not go well for him.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:09 AM on December 12, 2022 [12 favorites]

I’m trying to figure out what that Venn diagram looks like, where you’re a-ok with Chappelle’s trans jokes and antisemitism but Elon’s a step too far.
posted by mochapickle at 5:26 AM on December 12, 2022 [11 favorites]

That Gizmodo article is pure delight. I can't figure out if Dave suddenly turned on Elon when the booing wouldn't stop, though?

“Do you hear that sound, Elon? That’s the sound of pending civil unrest. I can’t wait to see what store you decimate next, motherfucker. You shut the fuck up.”
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:54 AM on December 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

Pretty sure the "you shut the fuck up" from the famously thin-skinned and vindictive Chappelle was directed at the people in cheap seats that he later insulted for "being poor."
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 6:16 AM on December 12, 2022 [6 favorites]

Gizmodo knifing him so hard in their coverage Peter Thiel will probably want to sue them and gut them all over again.
posted by Artw at 7:26 AM on December 12, 2022 [7 favorites]

Gizmodo got the end of that quote wrong. Listening to the video, Chapelle's telling the audience to "shut fuck up, with your boos".
posted by ishmael at 7:57 AM on December 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

Critics Say Musk Has Revealed Himself as a Conservative. It’s Not So Simple. NYT synthesis of Musk's political musings, highlighting his embrace of nihilism and memery over a clear agenda. Musk reminds me of Trump in his politics; it's not clear he has any strongly held personal agenda, he's iterating on what gets him the most attention.

Ben Rosen:

musk: we must stop the woke mind virus, i hate unions and trans people, we need a republican congress, i will vote for ron desantis (R)

NYT: it is impossible to identify this mans politics, we fed his info into our politics identifier computer and it got so confused it exploded

posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 8:20 AM on December 12, 2022 [5 favorites]

It’s amazing how much the Trump playbook applies here with the “we cannot identify hus politics” thing as well, which they managed to keep rolling way past 2016.
posted by Artw at 8:38 AM on December 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

It’s amazing how much the Trump playbook applies here

And meanwhile every time he opens his mouth with random (ridiculous) opinions on things he knows nothing about, like his "peace plan" for Ukraine, it makes front page news as though he's a voice worth listening to. The guy doesn't need to be given any airtime, he already owns his own global loudspeaker, but it feels like the Trump pattern is playing out all over again.
posted by trig at 9:13 AM on December 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Of course it makes front page news, controversy == clicks.
posted by Pendragon at 9:53 AM on December 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

It’s the combination of “we must follow every last fart and squeak this guy makes” and “we must make the most positive possible interpretation of those farts and squeaks, often directly ignoring things that were clearly said, as suggesting any norms were violated would violate some kinds of ‘both sides’ principle. “
posted by Artw at 10:30 AM on December 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Musk now claiming "technically it was 90% cheers and 10% boos" as he shrinks into a corncob. Not linking because fuck that guy.

I know this is meaningless fluff but damn, him getting a visceral reminder that he is not at all liked by people outside his weird-nerds/sycophants/MAGA-chuds echo chamber is delicious; as is the knowledge that the boo-ing clip is likely to join the Ghislaine Maxwell photo as a frequent flier in his replies.

Can't help but wonder whose idea this was and how they misjudged it so much.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:05 AM on December 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

Chappelle's idea, probably, and that answers your second question :P
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:14 AM on December 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

"Technically it was 90% Cheers and 10% booze" — me having a sitcom viewing party

(Eleanor Morton on Twitter)
posted by straight at 11:43 AM on December 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

"Boo-urns" was trending for a while. That'll keep me warm through the winter.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 11:50 AM on December 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

I'm not sure Dave misjudged it. He didn't take Elon's side or anything, aside from the "cheap seats" crack. I wouldn't be surprised if it came together by Elon's personal assistant setting it up with Dave's PA. "Dave, you care if this happens? He'll give you a million dollars."
posted by rhizome at 12:59 PM on December 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure Dave misjudged it.

Shouting "fuck off" to your audience seems like a bit of a misjudgement to me.
posted by Pendragon at 1:05 PM on December 12, 2022 [6 favorites]

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.


Ahahahahahaha. This is hilarious for two reasons:

1) Elon Musk doesn't know the difference between neural nets and real general intelligence like a human brain. This explains a lot of things wrt Tesla's FSD strategy.

2) Elon Musk does appear to run his companies like a ChatGPT bot, with superficially-coherent statements and actions, but no real understanding of anything.


Someone please write a biography of Elon Musk as an AI that almost became self-aware, but didn't quite make it.
posted by ryanrs at 1:08 PM on December 12, 2022 [14 favorites]

I can assure you that SF's radical leftists, or whoever Muskrat thinks he pissed off, do not attend Dave Chapelle shows.
posted by gingerbeer at 1:33 PM on December 12, 2022 [19 favorites]

They managed to re-launch the not-verified checkmarks. Now it's called Twitter Blue and includes "verified phone numbers" but is not the previous verification program.

Meanwhile, Musk's attacks against his former employee have succeeded. Former top Twitter official forced to leave home due to threats amid ‘Twitter Files’ release .

A person familiar with Roth’s situation told CNN threats made against the former Twitter employee escalated exponentially after Musk engaged in the pedophilia conspiracy theory.

posted by Nelson at 3:44 PM on December 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

More details in this report from SFGate:

The evening got even stranger when Chris Rock and openers, including comedian and “Chappelle’s Show” cast member Donnell Rawlings and rappers Yasiin Bey and Talib Kweli, came back out to end the night. On stage were five legends of Black pop culture. And Elon Musk. 

For the honor of bringing him on stage, Chappelle did ask the Tesla co-founder for a favor, to unban his friend Kweli from Twitter. Kweli was standing five feet away from Musk during the request so the Twitter CEO didn’t have much choice but to agree.

As Chappelle attempted to end the show on a high note, a difficult task given the chaos he had just unleashed, another distraction erupted.

A fight in the stands in the lower bowl broke out, which Chappelle pointed to and the stadium jumbo screen inexplicably cut to on camera. Trying to salvage the show from getting completely out of hand, Chappelle quipped that the fighters must be antifa protesters. "Antifa" stands for "antifascist," an umbrella term for left-leaning militant groups who protest against white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

Clearly annoyed at the mayhem taking place, Chappelle told the audience, in a joking manner, “Everything wrong with this show is y’alls fault.”

And with that, Chappelle, Rock, the openers and Musk exited the stage.

posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 4:33 PM on December 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

Platformer newsletter today is "How Elon botched his war on bots". (Subscribers only email) The IP address banning went exactly as well as expected.

in the hours that followed, 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. 

The project was part of Elon Musk’s attempt to rid Twitter of spam. But rather 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, Platformer has learned. ...

posted by Nelson at 5:35 PM on December 12, 2022 [6 favorites]

Casey Newton also announced on Platformer that he is essentially leaving Twitter. He will tweet his Platformer updates, but won't be tweeting otherwise, or engaging with others on the site.

Now, awaiting Musk’s latest tweets, I find myself anxious that one of his former employees could be physically assaulted or worse over what the CEO is posting. I don’t know how, in that environment, [I can] make little jokes about Google’s latest failed messaging app, or bad PR pitches, or any of the other bits I have been doing on Twitter forever. I don’t know how to pretend that what is happening is not actually happening. I don’t want to provide, even in the smallest of ways, a respectable backdrop against which hate speech against my fellow LGBTQ people, or Black or Jewish or any other people, can flourish.

posted by Winnie the Proust at 6:37 PM on December 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

The Washington Post reports: Twitter dissolves Trust and Safety Council

Twitter on Monday night abruptly dissolved its Trust and Safety Council, the latest sign that Elon Musk is unraveling years of work and institutions created to make the social network safer and more civil.


Members of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council received an email with the subject line, “Thank You,” that informed them the council was no longer “the best structure” to bring “external insights into our product and policy development work.”


The email dissolution arrived less than an hour before members of the council were expecting to meet with Twitter executives via Zoom to discuss recent developments, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans.



Dozens of civil rights leaders, academics and advocates from around the world had volunteered their time for years to help improve safety on the platform.


“We are grateful for your engagement, advice and collaboration in recent years and wish you every success in the future,” said the email, which was simply signed “Twitter.”

posted by fedward at 7:08 PM on December 12, 2022 [8 favorites]

Yoel Roth seems to be a step beyond the pale for yet more people. Two of the more centrist (and entertaining) people I followed--Dan Drezner and Ken White (aka Popehat)--have bailed Twitter, though Drezner is calling it a sabbatical. Popehat says on substack he'll likely delete his content, since he's sickened by the idea of nuTwitter profiting off it.

About 500k followers total (if you just add the counts together; obviously there's overlap.)
posted by mark k at 10:59 PM on December 12, 2022 [5 favorites]

Of course, White's whole "see, you deal with fascists who are threatening the actual lives of people by discourse and not by actually fighting back by getting the government to stop that abuse" commentary really undermines his move, and is an illustration of how severe the brain poison that is the Reaganite "government is the problem" position really is.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:16 AM on December 13, 2022 [3 favorites]

Twitter breaking Ukrainian 2FA? - probably accidentally as part of their ham handed anti bot efforts of late, but I might be extending too much benefit of the doubt to a known Putin admirer and war profiteer there.

Everyone who can’t leave the thing because it is “essential” better be working on ways to make it less essential because it can be turned off or turned against them in the blink of an eye.
posted by Artw at 7:42 AM on December 13, 2022 [7 favorites]

As we're approaching the 30-day mark, is there another post for continued conversation on Musk's Twitter?

From today's NYTimes, meanwhile,

To cut costs, Twitter has not paid rent for its San Francisco headquarters or any of its global offices for weeks, three people close to the company said. Twitter has also refused to pay a $197,725 bill for private charter flights made the week of Mr. Musk’s takeover, according to a copy of a lawsuit filed in New Hampshire District Court and obtained by The New York Times.
...
Mr. Musk’s team has also deliberated the merits of not paying severance to the thousands of people who have left the company since he took over, when there were about 7,500 full-time employees. While Mr. Musk and his advisers had previously considered forgoing any severance when discussing cuts in late October, the company ultimately decided that U.S.-based employees would be given at least two months of pay and one month of severance pay so that the company would be compliant with federal and state labor laws.

Mr. Musk’s team is now reconsidering whether it should pay some of those months, according to two people familiar with the discussions, or just face lawsuits from disgruntled former employees. Many former employees still have not received any paperwork formalizing their separation from Twitter, five people said. Mr. Musk has already refused to pay millions of dollars in exit packages to executives he claims were terminated “for cause.”

posted by cheshyre at 2:18 PM on December 13, 2022 [5 favorites]

It's clearly the employees' fault for not being corporations. Otherwise Delaware would have their back.
posted by tigrrrlily at 2:42 PM on December 13, 2022 [4 favorites]

I think California labor law will do ok.
posted by ryanrs at 2:44 PM on December 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

The lovely thing about these claims is that every single one is worth taking to court, individually. You don't need to be part of some huge class action lawsuit. You can hire a a local employment law firm to pursue your case hourly, or on contingency. And these cases are just the right size (~3 months pay?) for a lot of people to pursue them solo just because Fuck Elon Musk.

Every employment lawyer in CA should walk away from this with a piece of Elon's ass.

I dunno about employees in other legal jurisdictions, but I assume EU employment lawyers are salivating, too.
posted by ryanrs at 2:56 PM on December 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

Could someone with a better understanding explain how liability protections work in cases like this? From what I understand, which may be totally off because this is not an area I know much about, (a) a guy like Musk can take on personal debt to buy a company and then somehow make the company liable for paying that debt rather than him personally, and (b) when a privately owned company stiffs employees and service providers on the grounds that it can't afford to pay them, but the owner of the private company can in fact abundantly afford to pay them, that owner cannot be held personally liable for those debts and whatever injuries they cause? Is this as privatize-profit-but-externalize-loss as it seems, or is my understanding just superficial/wrong? (Can Musk the individual in fact be personally sued over all this, rather than Twitter the company?)
posted by trig at 3:03 PM on December 13, 2022 [6 favorites]

ctrl+f "boo-urns"
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 4:17 PM on December 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

This would be a good time to repost the epic demand letter from labor attorney Akiva Cohen threatening Musk with thousands of arbitration cases across the US if he attempts to renege on his severance commitments.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 4:43 PM on December 13, 2022 [4 favorites]

And Casey Newton tweets:

Twitter has a plan to force you to opt in to personalized ads to continue using this app.

Can't read the linked article on Platformer, but the image pullquote mentions requiring location sharing & permitting Twitter to share your data.
posted by cheshyre at 5:31 PM on December 13, 2022

Ah, would it be the Saudis who dropped that in the suggestion box?
posted by ryanrs at 6:20 PM on December 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

[_] Bonesawing consent.
posted by Artw at 6:24 PM on December 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

Mr. Musk’s team has also deliberated the merits of not paying severance to the thousands of people who have left the company since he took over, when there were about 7,500 full-time employees.

CALLED IT!
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 7:16 PM on December 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

"Twitter has a plan to force you to opt in to personalized ads to continue using this app."

Cool, cool cool cool. Look forward to their complete withdrawal from the EEA.

"Where processing is based on consent, the controller shall be able to demonstrate that the data subject has consented to processing of his or her personal data. [...] When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract."

GDPR Article 7

Because meanwhile, back in the real world, literally 7 days ago, the EDPB ruled Meta could not force people to accept personalized advertising as a condition of using the service: "The decision means that Meta must allow users to have a version of all apps that does not use personal data for ads. The decision would still allow Meta to use non-personal data (such as the content of a story) to personalize ads or to ask users for consent to ads via a yes/no option. Users must be able to withdraw consent at any time and Meta may not limit the service. While this will limit Meta's profits dramatically in the EU, it would not fully prohibit ads."

And like, not for nothin', but California's coming for "cross-context behavioral advertising" January 1, 2023, as is Virginia. Colorado enters the chat (with a more stringent regulation w/r/t advertising, IMO) in July 2023. Everyone expects California to start flexing its muscles in January, to show its preeminence in US tech regulation and rulemaking -- Google has already announced its intent to stop cross-context advertising in Chrome browsers by January 1, and you may have already noticed a change in your ads. If a company HQ'd in San Francisco was refusing to pay its rent, violated the WARN Act, and was running all over the world announcing its intent to flout the brand-new law, I know what any ambitious young attorney with political ambitions who was working for the CPPA would do ....

(Not that ANY of those things work fast enough for the amount of harm Musk is doing, but he's just going to draw more and more and more regulator and prosecutor attention to more and more of his companies, and it feels like one of those things that is going to start slow and then collapse all at once in a landslide.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:18 PM on December 13, 2022 [9 favorites]

Ukrainian Charity Coordinator UNITED24.media on Twitter

Hey @elonmusk, it seems like it's no longer possible to have a Ukrainian number verify a Twitter account/two-factor authentication. Ukraine is not in your list of countries, see our screenshot.

It's vital for us to keep showing the world what's going on in our country.

[Screenshot]

posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 8:01 PM on December 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

GOD, WHAT A FUCKING ASSHOLE.

Oh, hey, tying one other story in with another, that lady who reported the racist behavior at the Palace? Her entire charity is being targeted now...via, of course, Twitter.

Yeah, I'd be down with another "what fresh hell has Elon dealt today" thread when this ends.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:06 PM on December 13, 2022 [7 favorites]

Revisiting the Elon being booed show, I was already raising my eyebrows at the rest of slate (Chris Rock, Yassin Bey, and also Talib Kweli) and per Tressie McMillan Cottom: That’s what this was about. Kweli targeted, harassed and all-out defamed a Black woman on this app for years. It’s why I took issue with Luminary picking up their podcast. Of course this is what it’s about for Dave., referring to the bit where Chapelle asked Musk to unban Kweli.
posted by cendawanita at 8:16 PM on December 13, 2022 [7 favorites]

Couple of interesting articles on Wired.

For Black Folks, Digital Migration Is Nothing New:

Among Black folks, on the occasion of being invited to an event, a common question is, “Who gone be there?” In other words, the essential question for determining whether to attend a gathering is knowing who else will be in attendance. If the answer is that there will be no other (or too few) Black folks, or if other people in attendance are hostile to our existence, the answer about our presence is often a resounding “no.” In some significant ways, this is how we might frame questions over whether to remain on Twitter or abandon the platform. Over the past several weeks, there have been several notable Black folks providing their rationale for leaving or staying. Jelani Cobb explained in The New Yorker why he quit Twitter, and Karen Attiah in The Washington Post explained her reasons for staying. There’s a wide discrepancy among Black folks about whether to stay or go, as shown by the fact that we are two Black academics who have made different choices. 

The Trumpification of Elon Musk:

The point isn’t that Musk may not be as terrible as you think. He is definitely terrible. Just as Trump was unequivocally unfit to be president, Musk is unequivocally cruel, vindictive, a heartless manager, and a troll who amplifies extremists...

The point is that the focus on Musk is a mistake. Arguably not as much of a mistake as it was with Trump; an owner-CEO has more power over their company than a president does over their country. But trying to report on what’s happening by expecting either his abject failure or resounding success and then using his most attention-grabbing tactics as evidence for that thesis is not doing anyone a service. 

As with Trump, the real story is often what’s going on below the level of newsmaker in chief. It’s about the actual numbers around Twitter’s advertising, not Musk’s claims that advertisers are coming back. It’s about who’s actually joining and leaving Twitter, not about who’s threatening to leave. It’s about Twitter’s role in the world—its importance to natural-disaster management or to any number of communities for whom it’s a store of social wealth—rather than just how much money it will lose.

posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:48 PM on December 13, 2022 [6 favorites]

Researchers at the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group (@WebSciDL) at Old Dominion University report that Twitter DM Videos Are Accessible to Unauthenticated Users.
posted by FallibleHuman at 9:42 PM on December 13, 2022 [4 favorites]

And in the continuing self-mortification of Jack Dorsey, he now apologizes for having moderation:

In a blog post, Dorsey wrote “The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves.”

He also laid out three points that exemplify his social media philosophy: that social media should be kept out of any corporate or government control, that only an author should have the option to remove content they produce on a platform, and that moderation is best implemented by “algorithmic choice,” which is essentially ranking content based on user preferences. It’s an idea that’s been championed by the Dorsey-fronted Bluesky social app.

Pull the cilice harder, Jack - maybe they'll like you when they see blood.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:28 AM on December 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

Brianna Wu replied:

Jack, one of the things that happened on your watch at Twitter during Gamergate was people openly planning the murder of my family here.

They were sharing my address, maps of the house, the bed where I would be sleeping.

This approach would not have helped.

posted by cheshyre at 9:09 AM on December 14, 2022 [16 favorites]

@[e-mail]

Tempted to say that should be an FPP all on its own.
posted by Artw at 9:15 AM on December 14, 2022 [7 favorites]

Twitter’s New Head of Trust and Safety Offers to Partner with Controversial Anti-Trafficking Group

So I guess now publicity hungry QAnon adjacent fake anti-trafficking groups now have direct or indirect access to internal tools via Ella Irwin. What could possibly go wrong?
posted by Artw at 7:45 AM on December 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Also now suspended @joinmastodon's Twitter account after linking to @[e-mail] and then WaPo reporter Drew Harwell, for noting that @joinmastodon had been suspended.

Also Aaron Rupar, presumably for an article yesterday criticising Musk.
posted by Buntix at 4:48 PM on December 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Other reporters also banned this afternoon, Ryan Mac (NYT), Drew Harwell (WP), Donie O'Sullivan (CNN), and doubtless more I'm not aware of.

Feels like an inflection point to me.
posted by bcd at 5:00 PM on December 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Another two: Donie O'Sullivan from CNN and Ryan Mac from the NY Times.

Anarchist / anti-fa media site https://itsgoingdown.org/ was suspended probably at the request of Andy Ngo.
posted by Buntix at 5:01 PM on December 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Sorry, wasn't Elon's whole reason for buying Twitter to promote free speech?
posted by Reverend John at 5:18 PM on December 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

A bunch more journalists: Kieth Olbermann, Matt Binder, @micahflee (Intercept), @webster.

The common factor does seem to be criticising Musk.
posted by Buntix at 5:32 PM on December 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Elon Musk starts banning critical journalists from Twitter: A list of the suspensions is being compiled by NBC’s Ben Collins
posted by 1970s Antihero at 5:34 PM on December 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

wint @dril - Jul 25, 2017
once a year on every forum some guy posts a thread called like "Im done with wiping my ass" and all the people who get mad at him are banned

posted by Buntix at 5:48 PM on December 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Regarding the banning of journalists on the Elon beat, Josh Marshall from TPM offers the following sarcastic tweet:

One saving grace here is that @taibbi and @weiss are gonna be on this like flies on shit and they’ll get the whole story out.

Also, Matt Taibbi's Twitter handle is @mtaibbi not @taibbi and Bari Weiss's is @bariweiss not @weiss.
posted by mhum at 5:50 PM on December 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Silver lining? The list of journalists that Elon bans today on Twitter makes a good starter collection of journalists to follow on Mastodon.
posted by bcd at 5:53 PM on December 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

He seems to have switched fully from "let's pretend to care about doing the right thing" into the mode of, "I don't have to care what people think, I'm a billionaire. Ban them."
posted by clawsoon at 5:57 PM on December 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Are we at free for all hellscape yet? Asking for the world.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:59 PM on December 15, 2022

We have this response from Elon regarding the journalists getting banned:

Same doxxing rules apply to “journalists” as to everyone else

They posted my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter terms of service

Once again, let's pull up the old Who Would Win meme template and put "Free Speech Absolutism" on one side and "Perfectly Ordinary Journalism" on the other side. Some people are speculating that the real event that triggered these journalists' banning was not reporting on Elon's location but rather reporting that Elon never even made a police report about his alleged stalker attack, the alleged incident that Elon used as a pretense to ban the @elonjet account.
posted by mhum at 7:19 PM on December 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Giant thread of people on r/investing talking about how they are now embarrassed to be seen in their Teslas.
posted by clawsoon at 7:25 PM on December 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Most Divorced Man In The World doesn't have enough focus apparently: Elon Musk Is Dumping Billions in Tesla Stock
Tesla’s third-largest shareholder tweeted that Musk had “abandoned Tesla” and that the company “has no working CEO"
posted by cendawanita at 7:26 PM on December 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

about time journalists abandoned the platform, tbh
posted by ryanrs at 7:58 PM on December 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

We'll get to see how much solidarity there is in the journalist class. If a few people are banned, basically kicked out of the hot news club, does everyone still there realize "oh no, a petulant billionaire manchild can basically screw us out of a job" and stay ... or flip the table and walk out with them?
posted by introp at 8:25 PM on December 15, 2022

The chatter on Mastodon is that maybe media organizations should each spin up their own Mastodon instance, which then solves the problem of verification since [e-mail] would then make clear that you're a CNN reporter.

This got me thinking back to the days of setting up on-premise email servers for companies, before companies switched all their email hosting over to Gmail and Outlook 365.

...which then got me thinking that there are surely people at Google and Microsoft thinking about how they could offer managed Mastodon instances, where the client company chooses the domain name and manages moderation, while Google or Microsoft handles the servers.
posted by clawsoon at 8:42 PM on December 15, 2022 [8 favorites]

how they could offer managed Mastodon instances, where the client company chooses the domain name and manages moderation, while Google or Microsoft handles the servers.

Good idea, but the sense I get from (current) fediverse culture this would result in many (small and left) instances opting for an auto-defederate policy. Likely this will still happen (corporate hosting) since Eternal September is a basic fact when you have many people from many cultures joining. But setting up accounts across instances isn't too hard, so there'll probably be Normie Fediverse and... Well, i can't figure out the nomenclature yet.

ETA: sorry i forgot to spell out the implication for journalism: i don't think it's a bad idea but the age of real identity+one account will change.
posted by cendawanita at 8:51 PM on December 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

And now Musk is doing a poll asking when the suspended accounts should be reinstated.

I wonder if it will bring them back as effectively as his Trump poll brought back Trump.
posted by clawsoon at 9:31 PM on December 15, 2022

Twitter is blocking links to many Mastodon servers (Jay Peters, The Verge).
posted by mbrubeck at 10:00 PM on December 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

The best part? He did a poll, the plurality answered "Now", but then he responded "Sorry, too many options. Will redo poll" and is now running a new poll between 'now' and 'in 7 days'. (All while trying to pretend the suspensions were never going to be permanent.) He is so pathetic.
posted by bcd at 10:00 PM on December 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

From @ForeverEversley:

Holy Shit. Elon Musk just popped into a Twitter Spaces chat with a bunch of journalists. He was called out by journalist Drew Harrell, who he banned, for lying about posting links to his private information, then leaves almost immediately after being pressed. Here is the exchange

Within the tweet is a 02:36 screen-recorded clip of that Twitter space. It also seems that the Twitter Space event was ended abruptly and the usual playback ability has been disabled on that Twitter Space.
posted by mhum at 10:18 PM on December 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Also, after watching that clip, I have the unsettling feeling that the (second?) richest man in the world and current owner of Twitter has the affect and ethos of a 15-year-old, edgelord Reddit mod who let the power get to his head.
posted by mhum at 10:23 PM on December 15, 2022 [8 favorites]

capitalism, lmao
posted by ryanrs at 11:03 PM on December 15, 2022

FYI, I made a new FPP; this seems like big news and a good jumping off point for further discussion, on top of this thread closing in three days and having 565 comments.
posted by Superilla at 11:22 PM on December 15, 2022 [14 favorites]