Trevor Noah on Musk’s scrambling:
Musk reminds me of Trump throwing his plates of ketschup and fries against the Oval Office walls to see what might stick:
Elon Musk’s latest attempt to stamp out bots on Twitter backfired spectacularly when the new verification system led to a wave of users impersonating household names.
Twitter recently rolled out its controversial paid-for verifications, making the site’s blue marks of authenticity purchasable for $8 a month.
Musk argued that the new system would make the platform more equal between regular users and those who had existing check marks, like celebrities, companies, politicians and journalists. He also said charging users for verification was “the only way to defeat the bots and trolls.”
I’m sure Nintendo loves seeing this “verified” $8.00 account out there destroying their brand:
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At first I had some hope that Musk’s chaotic approach would be tempered as he settled into the role; his other companies have also gone through periods of intense tumult. But the latest zigs and zags suggest something deeply amiss with what the world’s richest man is doing to Twitter.
Now he is raising the ire of the nation’s top privacy regulator, the Federal Trade Commission. Three Twitter executives in charge of privacy and information security resigned on Wednesday. According to The Verge, a company lawyer warned fellow employees that Musk’s urgency in pushing changes to the service risked violating a consent order that Twitter signed with the F.T.C. stemming from previous security lapses. Violations of the decree could lead to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in fines for Twitter.
“We are tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern,” an F.T.C. spokesman said in a statement on Thursday. “No C.E.O. or company is above the law, and companies must follow our consent decrees. Our revised consent order gives us new tools to ensure compliance, and we are prepared to use them.”
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Scuttlebutt on Twitter yesterday by many saying the banksters who lent Elon credit for the purchase of Twitter are now trying to offload the IOUs for .60 cents on the dollar:
And if you are to believe posts from former fanbois and girls who are still Liberal and who refused to vote Republican per Elon’s urging, the Tesla badge is now an embarrassment to flash in traffic:
Can you imagine what it is like to be one of the few Twitter employees who go to work daily wondering, "What will he destroy today? So, no more $8.00 blue check marks for the hoi polloi? Where is all this fun the Chief Twit was telling us about two weeks ago?
From today, the Twitter hits continue to show $TSLA workers aren’t made for running a social media company - or simple emails for that matter.
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One of Musk’s fanbois crying on Twitter now that he’s stuck with his new (parody) name.
I’ve never known a billionaire who wanted $8.00 so badly
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Two or three weeks ago, Gary Black, one of three biggest pumpers of all things Tesla, was telling his minions to hold and add more as the “Twitter overhang” would be over by this week. John Engle, here, is hanging Gary Black out to dry:
Wired Magazine dunks the stable genius on his privately owned social media.
Now the State of Washington is getting into the fun on Twitter:
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No surprise.
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One large consumer packaged-goods company, which is planning to be dark on Twitter throughout at least the first quarter, is shifting roughly $10 million dollars to TikTok, streaming services and Google, said a person close to the company.
Many ad executives don’t expect the same quick ad rebound that Meta’s Facebook experienced in 2020 when many brands boycotted the platform for a month over concerns about hate speech and misinformation. Many companies found they couldn’t resist coming back to Facebook, because the return on investment from advertising—in the form of sales—was so pronounced.
“With Twitter, there just isn’t the same co-dependency” that exists between advertisers and Facebook, said Shiv Singh, chief marketing officer at online lender LendingTree Inc.
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Unless you own the largest media property in the game, you are not indispensable. It’s possible to “buy around” you, should the situation arise.
Now I would say that there was a point where Facebook was just that big, an advertiser couldn’t get that critical mass any other way, but with the proliferation of other options that day may also be past.
There was a time, of course, when the local newspaper stood in that near-monopoly position, there was simply no other (economic) way to get your ad or your coupons in consumers’ hands. That time has passed, as well. (Not to mention The Yellow Pages).
Twitter was ever in that league in the first place, except perhaps for a few narrow categories where the marketeers thought it important to engage “thought leaders” in politics or economics. But as for the general market - which is where the big marketing bucks live - Twitter has never been indispensible
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A reporter spent $8.00 and unbelievably was rewarded with a blue checkmark as he posed as Senator Ed Markey (who has been a critic of FSD).
So the reporter engages Musk. Musk goes off on this fake Senator as though he were the real Senator. The real Senator Markey finds out and addresses the new owner of Twitter.
The new CEO of Twitter, shows his arse - yet again - and instead of apologizing, Musk makes a cut about the Senator’s real account.
And people still think Musk is one of the smartest men on this planet?
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Read this retweet to the bottom:
It’s bad, you know?
After laying off 50 percent of the company’s employees, Elon Musk has turned his attention to Twitter’s contract workers. According to separate reports from Platformer’s Casey Newton and Axios, the social media platform began reducing its contingent staff on Saturday afternoon. After a period of uncertainty about the scale of the job cuts, Newton put the number at approximately 4,400 affected individuals. The move is expected significantly impact Twitter’s ability to moderate content and keep its platform up and running.
Twitter also appears to have provided no notice to those who lost their job this weekend. Many found out they weren’t working for the company anymore after they abruptly lost access to Twitter’s internal systems. “One of my contractors just got deactivated without notice in the middle of making critical changes to our child safety workflows,” one manager posted in the company’s Slack, according to Newton. Yet others found out by reading the reports about the cuts. Some workers are now worried they may not get paid for their last two weeks of work. Following Twitter’s November 4th layoffs, many contractors ended up on teams with no full-time staff, leaving no one to sign off on their time sheets.
If Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk is going to antagonize U.S. senators, he might want to think twice about taunting Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who sits on numerous subcommittees with oversight into his companies.
After a Washington Post reporter was able to create a verified Twitter account impersonating Markey on Saturday, the senator wrote a letter to Musk demanding an explanation. “Selling the truth is dangerous and unacceptable. Twitter must explain how this happened and how it will prevent it from happening again,” Markey wrote, adding that Twitter has become the “Wild West of social media.”
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