The Bane That Is Social Media

[LFC]

More fun.

[LFC]

The question on everyone's mind is...

[LFC]

I ... can't ... even.

Twitter has reintroduced the “Official” gray verification badge for high-profile accounts like brands and celebrities, according to the Twitter Support account. The Official badge was first introduced on Wednesday, only to see new CEO Elon Musk get rid of the badge the very same day. But by late Thursday, the official badges started reappearing. And it’s all very confusing for no good reason, thanks to America’s dumbest smart guy, Elon Musk.

The reintroduction of the Official badge appears to be unevenly distributed at the moment, with accounts like the New York Times not getting the verification mark, despite having 56 million followers. The Times does still have a blue checkmark, which it didn’t pay for, though plenty of imposter accounts have popped up in the past two days with a blue verification badge they paid $8 for.

CNBC, on the other hand, does have an Official badge designation along with its blue verification checkmark, as you can see in the screenshots below. Why the discrepancy? Your guess is as good as ours at this point.

Normally, Gizmodo would reach out to Twitter’s communications team for comment. But Twitter no longer has a communications team. In fact, Twitter doesn’t have much of a team at all, according to the latest reports. Several top Twitter executives quit on Thursday, including Twitter’s head of moderation and safety Yoel Roth, chief information security officer Lea Kissner, and chief compliance officer Marianne Fogarty.

[LFC]

Who knows if this guy is truly correct but I suspect he's not more than 2X off.

Just to be clear, Twitter senior secured bank loans- the top of the capital stack- at $0.60 implies that Twitter- for which @elonmusk paid $44 billion- is now worth less than $8 billion.
OMG, the preceding tweet has brought out the corporate finance nerds!

OK fine (aside from looking at recovery values), let’s do the contingent claims analysis. Senior creditors are short an EV put struck at $13B (the face value of their loan) /1

He goes on to explain. I like this flash to the past he finishes with.

Reminds me of the old ‘87 crash story:

“60 bid”

“My machine says it’s worth 100!”

“Well son, sell it to your machine then!”

[LFC]

[indy]

[indy]

[indy]

[indy]

[goldenvalley]

I grudgingly admire the wit that is to be found on Twitter.

[indy]

Yeah, it has a couple of redeeming qualities. I just don't have the patience (or desire really) to spend my time finding the needles in the haystack. Anything I post from twitter came via some other source who is doing all the curating.

[AnBr]

[LFC]

The Chief Twit continues to live down to his handle.

Unlike brands like Nintendo and Eli Lilly, Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) knew who was behind the parody account recently impersonating the lawmaker on Twitter. Washington Post reporter Geoffrey Fowler had asked permission to create the fake Markey account, part of the reporter’s quest to see how hard it could really be to impersonate a public official under Elon Musk’s new paid verification system.

What Fowler found was that it wasn’t hard at all to launch a fake Markey account. As soon as Fowler confirmed the ease with which any public official could be impersonated, an outraged Markey used his real Twitter account to call out Musk for allowing the impersonation because he favors “putting profits over people and his debt over stopping disinformation.”

Musk took almost two days to respond to Markey, opting to troll the Senator rather than take the complaint seriously.

“Perhaps it is because your real account sounds like a parody?” Musk tweeted.

The fake Markey account has been taken down, but that clearly did not settle the matter, and now Musk poking fun at the senator could have consequences that go beyond a tweet thread.

He's a f***ing child.

[LFC]

Yeah, cuz throwing the people who actually know how to make Twitter function out of the door is the smart move. He's just bailing bodies at this point. He has no idea if he needs them or not.

Twitter already faces a class-action lawsuit from some staff that the company laid off without providing federally required notice. Now, rather than realize the error of its ways, Twitter decided this weekend that its next round of layoffs should come with no notice at all.

On Saturday, Platformer’s Casey Newton tweeted that a large number of Twitter contract workers based inside and outside the US had been laid off. This decision was seemingly made so abruptly that not even the contractors’ managers were told they’d be losing workers. Business Insider published the email sent out to contract workers, coldly informing them that Monday would be their last day and no work was required of them that day. The Verge estimated that 4,500 to 5,500 workers were affected from content moderation, marketing, engineering, and other teams. By some estimates, this represents 80 percent of all Twitter contract workers.

"One of my contractors just got deactivated without notice in the middle of making critical changes to our child safety workflows," one manager wrote in Slack, according to Newton’s tweet thread.

One contract worker messaged Newton directly to confirm his reporting, claiming, “I learned I was laid off by reading your tweets.”

Insider spoke to two contract workers who were laid off. They said that they noticed that they lost access to their Twitter email accounts before they got the email informing them that they were fired. During the prior round of layoffs, the same thing reportedly happened to Twitter staff.

One of the recently laid-off contract workers told Insider that Twitter’s callous method of conducting layoffs is inappropriate, saying, "I don't understand how they didn't learn from their previous week's debacle of laying off full-time employees without telling them.”

[LFC]

I guess that buying from yourself is one way to bail out a bad investment.

Elon Musk has seemingly decided that one way to inspire confidence in Twitter as an advertising platform is to become an advertiser himself. Yesterday, CNBC reported that SpaceX purchased one of Twitter’s premium advertising packages—when typically SpaceX rarely invests in Twitter advertising—as Musk's other company plans to begin advertising Starlink satellite Internet to customers in Spain and Australia. According to internal documents CNBC reviewed, SpaceX has so far spent $160,000 on the Twitter ad campaign and in total could end up investing up to $250,000.

According to Musk, SpaceX buying this advertising package is nothing special. The CEO of both SpaceX and Twitter took issue with CNBC describing the advertising investment as “large.”

“SpaceX Starlink bought a tiny—not large—ad package to test effectiveness of Twitter advertising in Australia & Spain,” Musk tweeted. “Did same for FB/Insta/Google.”

While Musk more recently has been dealing with Twitter's advertising woes, it's true that Musk has also been motivated this year to grow Starlink’s customer base. In February, Forbes reported that Starlink could be generating $25 million a month if there were really 250,000 people using it, which Musk had indicated that there were. That could yield $300 million annually, allowing SpaceX to quickly recoup costs of launching the service, so long as Musk kept finding new customers, Forbes said.

“Clearly there’s a real business here, and additional customers will continue to amortize the company’s costs faster over time,” Forbes reported, crediting Musk with launching premium Internet services that could make up for SpaceX's debt even faster. Those premium options ranged from SpaceX newly offering $500 per month higher-bandwidth Internet services for rural businesses to most recently unveiling $5,000 per month Internet services for yachts and oil rigs.

Despite SpaceX’s interest in reaching more customers, Twitter has rarely been considered a source of new customers by SpaceX. Current and former SpaceX employees told CNBC that “SpaceX has not typically purchased large advertising packages from Twitter”—until now.

[LFC]

The Musk Meltdown continues. Now the bastion of American free speech is firing employees for making him feel butthurt.

By all appearances, there seems to be very little trust left between Elon Musk and Twitter’s remaining employees, particularly Twitter engineers. After Musk publicly fired a Twitter engineer by tweet yesterday, it’s now being reported that more than a dozen employees have been terminated for either posting critically about Musk’s leadership or simply supporting other people who posted critically.

Workers told The Verge that under Musk, Twitter has transformed into an “openly hostile” environment. And Musk—who already told employees that he would be relying on his paranoia to push through this difficult time—has possibly become so paranoid about Twitter engineers messing with Twitter code, he’s taken the drastic step of freezing them out from altering it. This happened during an “emergency meeting” held at 1:45 am on Monday, and Musk has provided no other explanation for the code freeze, The Verge reported.

Meanwhile, Musk has started turning to Twitter as a platform to publicly discuss his concerns and questions about how Twitter functions—rather than discussing privately with Twitter engineers. This appears to be the breaking point that one Twitter employee told The Verge felt so “degrading” to Twitter staff, leading multiple Twitter engineers to correct Musk’s ignorant tweets publicly.

Most visibly, Twitter engineer Eric Frohnhoefer became the first Twitter employee that Musk fired by tweet when he responded to Musk’s incorrect tweet explaining why Twitter was slow on Android.

“I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong,” Frohnhoefer said in a now-deleted tweet.

Read the rest to see how utterly out of control he's become. This sums things up from the employees' viewpoint.

The Verge reported that one Twitter employee said on the company Slack, “In 2 weeks Twitter has gone from being the most welcoming and healthy workplace I’ve ever known to the most openly hostile and degrading I’ve ever known.”

[LFC]

Way to motivate people, Elon! Demand they give up their lives for your greater glory!

New Twitter CEO and sole director Elon Musk sent a companywide email to remaining employees of the social media business on Wednesday, demanding they commit to working “long hours at high intensity” or receive “three months of severance,” if they did not consent to these conditions, or support his vision for “Twitter 2.0.”

[goldenvalley]

Here's the actual tweet:

[LFC]

Musk was warned. Who's shocked?

Elon Musk ignored internal warnings from Twitter's trust and safety team when he rolled out his failed paid verification scheme, according to an article co-published by Platformer and The Verge. About a week before the November 9 launch of Musk's revamped Twitter Blue subscription, which gave users who pay $8 per month a blue checkmark even if they weren't previously verified, the trust and safety team circulated "a seven-page list of recommendations intended to help Musk avoid the most obvious and damaging consequences of his plans for Blue," the article said.

"Motivated scammers/bad actors could be willing to pay... to leverage increased amplification to achieve their ends where their upside exceeds the cost," the document said. This warning was "labeled 'P0' to denote a concern in the highest risk category," the Platformer/Verge article said.

Detailing another P0 risk, the trust and safety team warned the paid checkmarks could lead to "impersonation of world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials, and other high-profile individuals... Legacy verification provides a critical signal in enforcing impersonation rules, the loss of which is likely to lead to an increase in impersonation of high-profile accounts on Twitter."

The problems Twitter employees warned of arose quickly after the Twitter Blue rollout, as scammers eagerly paid $8 for checkmarks that made it easy to impersonate prominent accounts. Musk halted the paid verification scheme after only two days, although Musk said it would "probably" be reinstated by the end of next week.

[LFC]

Collapse and surrender?

EDIT: If true his tenure lasted roughly two Scaramuccis.

[indy]

He is already being sued by Tesla shareholders who say that he is collecting too much compensation from Tesla since he doesn't work full time there and splits his time between numerous other ventures (ironic given his Twitter employee demands, eh?). He also is using Tesla engineers at Twitter, only on a volunteer basis he says, which made me do a spit take because when he asks for volunteers he isn't asking...anyway, this will enrage Tesla shareholders further.

That suit apparently wasn't going too well for him even BEFORE he added Twitter to the CEO pile.

He also has a consent decree with the SEC and Twitter has a consent degree with the SEC, both of which he is busy violating.

This might actually be the first good decision he has made with Twitter.

BTW, he also made me laugh when the shareholder lawyer asked him about the consent decree with the SEC and he said that it was made under duress so it wasn't legally binding. Well, yes, they were going to put you in jail so you made an agreement to avoid jail...that's generally the kind of duress your average criminal would like to be put under.

[LFC]

Musk firing employees who pissed him off isn't new with Twitter.

Former SpaceX employees say they were fired in June for writing and circulating an open letter criticizing the behavior of the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, as well as the content he posts on Twitter. The eight ex-employees have filed unfair labor practices charges with the National Labor Relations Board. They claim SpaceX retaliated against them for writing the letter and that their dismissals were illegal.

Gizmodo obtained a copy of the charge filed by former SpaceX employee Paige Holland-Thielen, who is one of five employees fired one day after sending the open letter to SpaceX leadership. She is represented by attorney Anne Shaver at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein.

Holland-Thielen argues that SpaceX employees who participated in the open letter were carrying out a “concerted protected activity.” Under the National Labor Relations Act, federal law bars employers from taking action against employees engaged in protected concerted activities. Holland-Thielen’s states in her complaint that SpaceX didn’t stop searching for employees involved in the open letter even after it fired her and others in June.

“After this initial wave of wrongful retaliatory terminations, over the next two months SpaceX continued its campaign of retaliation and intimidation by interrogating dozens of employees in private meetings and falsely telling them that the conversations were attorney client privileged and could not be disclosed to anyone,” Holland-Thielen’s said in her complaint.

She goes on to say that SpaceX used the information gained from “its unlawful coercive interrogations” to terminate four additional employees in July in August “in retaliation for their conduct of drafting and/or sharing the Open Letter with other SpaceX employees on internal company channels.”

Holland-Thielen’s complaint and those of other former SpaceX employees were first reported in a Thursday report published by the New York Times, which also revealed new details about what happened at SpaceX after the employees sent executives their open letter. The letter was drafted in the wake of a May story alleging Musk had exposed his genitals to a flight attendant and asked her for sex in exchange for a horse. Musk has denied the allegations, including the claim that SpaceX paid the flight attendant a $250,000 settlement to keep quiet.

The Times report illustrates how Musk-led companies are inextricably linked to his identity and highlights the billionaire’s iron grip on how they’re run. Furthermore, the report underscores how Musk deals with dissent at his companies, a topic of high public interest at the moment given his treatment of Twitter employees, some of whom he’s firing via the social network they work on.

[indy]

Apparently, the ultimatum didn't go over very well.

Twitter's offices abruptly shut down on Thursday as hundreds of employees refused to continue working under Elon Musk's new vision for the social platform.

Company officials told employees all buildings were being temporarily closed, effective immediately, and that their ability to renter with ID access was being suspended for the time being, two people familiar with the company's action told Insider. The offices are expected to reopen Monday.

A current employee noted the closing of offices is a dramatic move, but intended to "prevent physical sabotage while they sort out access revocations," according to a Slack message seen by Insider. The closure was first reported on Twitter by Zoe Schiffer of the Platformer newsletter.

The closure came about an hour after Musk's 5 pm ET deadline for Twitter workers to officially sign on to his new "extremely hardcore" plans for the company. Less than 50% of the company's remaining staff of roughly 4,000 people signed up to work at "Twitter 2.0,"as Insider reported, meaning they effectively resigned under the terms Musk offered in a Tuesday ultimatum.

www.businessinsider.com/twitter-offices-shutting-down-after-elon-musk-ended-remote-work-2022-11

[andydp]

Nov 18, 2022 13:12:32 GMT indy said:

Apparently, the ultimatum didn't go over very well.

Twitter's offices abruptly shut down on Thursday as hundreds of employees refused to continue working under Elon Musk's new vision for the social platform.

The closure came about an hour after Musk's 5 pm ET deadline for Twitter workers to officially sign on to his new "extremely hardcore" plans for the company. Less than 50% of the company's remaining staff of roughly 4,000 people signed up to work at "Twitter 2.0,"as Insider reported, meaning they effectively resigned under the terms Musk offered in a Tuesday ultimatum.

www.businessinsider.com/twitter-offices-shutting-down-after-elon-musk-ended-remote-work-2022-11

I posted this some time ago:

“Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.”

― Maya Angelou

Random comment I've seen suggest Musk should buy FOX news next.

[indy]

I'm guessing the vast majority of the resignations were in the engineering departments as they are most likely to be financially stable enough to resign effective immediately. It'd be (kinda) funny if the majority of the remaining employees are the HR people...

I wonder if Musk is enjoying freedom of expression as much as he thought he might?