Social Media Companies: Tell it to Earth

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How much longer is Twitter going to last?
	A few weeks
	A few months
	A few years
	About as long as the rest of humanity

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Social media has pretty much become the backbone of media and communications in the modern era. Even here on SA, a huge percentage of posts are just tweet embeds or discussing stuff we saw on Twitter. Social media's got a lot of impact on discourse, and there's a lot of discussion and theorizing about how it might have impacted the current worldwide trends. We already know Facebook's contributed to at least one genocide.

And it's interesting from a business perspective too! Facebook's ad business has had its knees broken by Apple cutting out their ad identifiers, and Zuck has pivoted even harder into disappointing VR worlds with lackluster results:
https://twitter.com/MattNavarra/status/1588285145299095552

And of course, we get around to the immediate reason for creating this thread: a bunch of D&D has been abuzz over Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk! It's been a long journey to get here. First, he said he wanted to be on the board. Then he decided he wanted to buy the company instead, offering a significant premium over the market price and pushing a reluctant Twitter to give him a contract to sign ASAP. Then he decided he didn't want to buy Twitter after all, and got dragged to court, where he fought the deal for months before backing down after being thoroughly embarrassed and humiliated in discovery.

Just over a week ago, the Twitter deal went through, and new owner Elon Musk walked through the doors of Twitter as its owner for the first time. And what a week it's been!

He fired most of the top execs, claiming that it was for-cause firings in order to try to avoid paying out their golden parachutes. He told Twitter employees to print out all the code they wrote in the last sixty days, and brought in Tesla engineers to review the code. He locked down the content moderation tools, revoking access from all but 15 people worldwide (by comparison, D&D has 14 mods). He's converted the blue check to a status symbol, removing the verification requirements and instead making it available to anyone for $8 a month, and he demanded that Twitter employees work weekends and nights to ship it within a week. He laid off half the company, gutting entire teams. He's ranting about how he's going to prioritize free speech over woke political correctness. He's getting into flamewars with AOC. It's been one thing after another.

And advertisers hate it! For some reason, they're jumping ship in droves, pausing or pulling their ad campaigns and wrecking Twitter's cashflow.

What does the future of Twitter look like in the hands of a notoriously erratic billionaire who publicly blames his daughter's unwillingness to associate with him on neo-Marxist university teachers teaching her to love communism and hate the rich and who has vowed to fix Twitter's "far-left bias"? There's gonna be plenty to discuss on this wild ride.

Be careful of rumors and poorly-sourced info, by the way. There's a lot of pranksters and jokers dishing out fake stuff about the Elon buyout. One reporter sitting outside of Twitter's HQ last Friday managed to get some comments from two people calling themselves Rahul Ligma and Daniel Johnson, claiming to be laid-off Twitter engineers.

Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Nov 4, 2022

# ¿ Nov 4, 2022 20:56

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 21, 2024 00:25

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

The Twitter layoffs hit last night and this morning, and the full scope of them is becoming apparent. Entire teams have been cut wholesale, which is starting to give us a look at what Musk doesn't consider important.

https://twitter.com/ShannonRSingh/status/1588591603622772736
https://twitter.com/rdassaly/status/1588526469059223552
https://twitter.com/gerardkcohen/status/1588584479072714752

So right off the bat, human rights, content curation/contextualization, and accessibility have all been completely jettisoned. Off to a good start!

Rumors are flying about other teams, too - someone in YOSPOS was saying that Twitter Asia and Twitter India were decimated, and that Twitter's PR team was almost completely laid off. The full magnitude of the cuts will probably take a bit to become clear, but it's pretty severe.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2022 21:03

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Quorum posted:

Things Twitter doesn't really need right now: a PR team, apparently?

I've seen impetuous man-baby management, and I've seen brutal strip-out-the-wiring hedge fund management, but this looks like it's managing to be both so far and it's incredible.

Honestly, I'm surprised anyone's left at all. Tesla dissolved their entire PR department two years ago, and has been trucking along ever since with Elon as their sole public voice.

Space Cadet Omoly posted:

So, Elon Musk is going to make a lot of bad choices that gently caress up a lot of people's lives and suffer no consequences for his actions, right? Is that where this is all headed?

The entire Machine Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability Team is the latest confirmed casualty of the layoffs. Who needs ethics and accountability?
https://twitter.com/JoanDeitchman/status/1588430085035474944

Politico is reporting that half of Twitter's public policy team was cut, too.

Really, the amazing part is that nobody wins here, except Twitter's shareholders (who all got bought out at far more than the stock was worth). Musk hates this, Twitter's execs hate this, Twitter's workforce hates this, the banks that loaned Musk the money hate this, advertisers hate this, much of Twitter userbase hates this, and hell, even the far right hates it (because Musk isn't going full Gab yet).

But putting that aside, he's driving the company into the ground far faster than even the naysayers expected. Laying off literally half the company literally a week after buying it is guaranteed to be a big disruption to the basic task of keeping the site running, especially when he's also demanding major cuts to infrastructure costs. And sending the advertisers fleeing en masse this quickly isn't easy.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2022 22:02

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Not to be outdone by Twitter, the Zuck is ordering his own round of layoffs.

https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1589360530791272452

This isn't entirely surprising. Meta's stock has plummeted in 2022, and they've had the worst year of any S&P stock.

It's not as bad as Elon's ridiculous mismanagement, but Apple's privacy features have been a big hit to Facebook's revenue, and VR has been a giant money furnace for Meta so far. The markets are not pleased, and Meta's a public company so Zuck has to at least pretend to care. And instead of cutting back on VR, he's engaging in aggressive cost-cutting everywhere else.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2022 23:12

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

When even the New York Times is openly accusing him of posting through it, he's looking real bad. His image is in the toilet, and every tweet he sends just increases the mockery.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/07/technology/elon-musk-twitter-spree.html

quote:

Facing a Tide of Criticism, Elon Musk Is Tweeting Through It
The new owner of Twitter has embarked on a tweeting spree to push back, spar and justify his actions.

Under pressure and facing a wave of criticism, Elon Musk has increasingly turned to his favorite release valve: Twitter.

Since Saturday, Mr. Musk, the world�s richest man and the new owner of Twitter, has embarked on a tweeting spree so voluminous that he is on a pace to post more than 750 times this month, or more than 25 times a day, according to an analysis from the digital investigations company Memetica. That would be up from about 13 times a day in April, when Mr. Musk first agreed to buy Twitter.

His recent tweets have covered an increasingly broad range of topics. Over the last four days, Mr. Musk, 51, needled the comedian Kathy Griffin and beefed with the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey on the platform. He made masturbation jokes aimed at a rival � and much smaller � social media platform. He posted, then deleted, a tweet engaging with a quote from a white nationalist. And he defended his ownership of Twitter, including why he had laid off 50 percent of the company�s staff and why people should not impersonate others on the service.

All in all, Mr. Musk, who described himself in his Twitter profile as �Chief Twit� before later changing the description to �Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator,� has tweeted more than 105 times since Friday, mainly about Twitter, according to a tally by Memetica.

�Birds haven�t been real since 1986,� Mr. Musk tweeted on Sunday in a discussion thread about Twitter, including a meme from an absurdist conspiracy theory that posits that birds are actually robot spies. He did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Musk is under tremendous scrutiny 11 days after completing his $44 billion deal for Twitter, which was the largest leveraged buyout of a technology company in history. On Friday, he cut roughly 3,700 of the company�s 7,500 employees, saying he had no choice because Twitter was losing $4 million a day. At the same time, he has found himself embroiled in the same content debates that have plagued other social media companies, including how to give people a way to speak out without spreading misinformation and toxic speech.

Already Mr. Musk has had to delay the rollout of a subscription product that would have given people check marks on their Twitter profiles. Advertisers have paused their spending on Twitter over fears that Mr. Musk will loosen content rules on the platform. And the midterm elections are set to be a test of how a slimmed-down Twitter will perform in catching inflammatory posts and misinformation about voting and election results.

In a report that was published on Monday, researchers at the Fletcher School at Tufts University said the early signs of Mr. Musk�s Twitter �show the platform is heading in the wrong direction under his leadership � at a particularly inconvenient time for American democracy.�

The researchers said they had tracked narratives about civil war, election fraud, citizen policing of voting, and allegations of pedophilia and grooming on Twitter from July through October. �Post-Musk takeover, the quality of the conversation has decayed� as more extremists and misinformation peddlers have tested the platform�s boundaries, the researchers wrote.

Amid the hubbub, Mr. Musk�s behavior on Twitter suggests that he intends to simply post through it. And while he has always been a prolific tweeter, he has raised the level in recent days.

On Friday, Mr. Musk, who has more than 114 million followers on Twitter, proposed a �thermonuclear name & shame� campaign against brands that had stopped advertising on the platform. He said that he had done everything he could to appease advertisers but that activists had worked against him to cause brands to drop out of spending on Twitter.

At the same time, the billionaire was embroiled in a fight over his plan to charge Twitter users $8 a month for a subscription service, Twitter Blue, which would give a check mark to anyone who paid. The check mark had been free for notable people whose identities had been verified by the company, including celebrities, politicians and journalists, as a way to protect against impersonation.

Critics were unhappy about Mr. Musk�s plans to monetize the check mark, saying it could lead to the spread of misinformation and fraud on the platform. In protest, some Twitter accounts that had check marks changed their display names and photographs to match Mr. Musk�s account over the weekend, a move intended to illustrate why it would be confusing if anyone could buy a check mark.

On Sunday, Mr. Musk announced that he would permanently suspend any account �engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying �parody.�� The billionaire, who had previously criticized Twitter when it permanently barred users, then barred Ms. Griffin, who had posed as him on the service.

Mr. Musk, who has called himself a �free speech absolutist,� is learning the basic expectation of content moderation for popular social networks, said Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford�s Cyber Policy Center.

�His ideas have been incoherent for a while,� she said.

On Sunday night, Mr. Musk responded to a tweet featuring a quote from a white nationalist, before deleting the post and moving on to squabble with Mr. Dorsey over Birdwatch, a feature that lets community members add context to tweets that they believe are misleading. Mr. Musk, who previously lauded the feature, proposed changing the feature�s name to �Community Notes.�

�Community notes is the most boring Facebook name ever,� replied Mr. Dorsey, who owns a $1 billion stake in Mr. Musk�s Twitter.

Then on Monday, Mr. Musk suggested he might pursue civil society groups and activists who were pushing for Twitter advertiser boycotts, when he replied to a right-wing commentator that �we do� have grounds for legal action. Legal experts said the holding of boycotts for social and political goals is protected under the First Amendment.

Mr. Musk also tweeted that people should vote Republican in Tuesday�s midterm elections. �Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic,� he tweeted. He later posted that he was an independent with a �voting history of entirely Democrat until this year.�

He soon moved on. Mr. Musk�s attention became fixed on Mastodon, a Twitter competitor that has gained traction over the past 10 days. Playing off Mastodon�s name, he made several crude jokes about masturbation � then deleted those posts an hour later.

The funniest part is that it's entirely self-inflicted. For all his terrible business decisions, the mockery would have stayed relatively quiet if he did the normal CEO thing and stayed quiet, communicating exclusively through press releases and bland corporate-speak statements. Instead, he's determined to make himself the main character of Twitter and won't stop until he finally convinces people to respect him. It's gonna be a wild ride.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2022 06:46

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1590724257608134657
https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1590724259114291201
https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1590725083294990336

The red flags just keep coming. The regulatory risk Twitter is about to get itself into must be enormous.

It's worth noting here that since 2011, Twitter has been under a consent decree with the FTC that requires them to undergo significant scrutiny of any new features, and which imposes significant financial penalties if they mishandle user data. Moreover, earlier this year, they ate a $150 million fine for not complying with the consent decree, and had even more conditions and restrictions added to it as a result. And the potential penalties for pissing off the FTC can get pretty hefty: Facebook paid out $5 billion in 2019 for violating a FTC consent decree.

In that context, it's a massive loving red flag when the C-levels in charge of information security, privacy, and compliance all resign at the same time. Add in a notoriously irresponsible new CEO whose favorite lawyer (Spiro has been working for him for years, both personally and for his companies) is saying he's "not afraid of the FTC", and alarm bells are ringing. Musk is going to burn this poo poo to the loving ground.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2022 16:47

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Rocko Bonaparte posted:

Don't you get a consent decree for loving up in the first place?

Yep. Twitter got caught loving up in 2011 (mostly feeding users' private data like phone numbers into advertising without their consent), and got a consent decree as part of a settlement with the FTC.

In 2022, they got caught loving up again, and they had to pay a $150 million fine and have the consent decree tightened even further as a result.

Musk is absolutely sowing the seeds of future billion-dollar fines right now. When all the people responsible for preventing that sort of thing are running screaming from the company at the same time, that's a sign that the CEO is not listening to them even slightly.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2022 17:37

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Willo567 posted:

So when Twitter is gone, is there a similar platform people will flock to?

There's nothing that really works the same way Twitter does right now, but all the other social media platforms are seeing blood in the water, so they might roll out some new stuff aimed at picking up Twitter refugees.

Mastodon is the closest thing, as a Twitter clone made by open source meganerds. But as you'd expect from an open-source Twitter clone, it's got a lot of UI and usability oddities that make it a pain in the rear end to use and scare off the non-computery types.

Cohost is a rising platform I've heard a lot of good things about, but it's more like Tumblr than like Twitter, and it doesn't even have an app yet.

Even Tumblr is getting in on the feeding frenzy and dunking on Twitter. They recently rolled back the anti-porn rules that drove everyone off, and they just launched a subscription service that'll give you two blue checkmarks for $8/mo, and you can subscribe more than once to increase the checkmarks for two each time.

Willo567 posted:

Well that loving sucks. Couldn't it limp on like MySpace and LiveJournal are doing?

It could, but Musk is wrecking it at a frankly incredible pace. Highly-paid execs are jumping ship like rats fleeing a sinking ship, advertisers are keeping their distance, and the FTC will bankrupt Twitter with fees if Musk violates the consent decree. If Musk was quietly just tinkering in the margins while letting things run as they are, Twitter could hold on for ages, but he's actively wrecking everything.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2022 00:40

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Epic High Five posted:

I'm pretty sure that one of the layoff waves resulted in SA actually having more moderators than Twitter does now.

It was when they locked almost everyone out of the mod tools prior to the layoffs, supposedly in fear of "insider risks" (i.e., Elon doesn't trust the employees).

https://twitter.com/jackiedavalos1/status/1587260948938719232

It's possible that more than 15 people survived the layoffs and were let back into the mod tools. But now that the Head of Trust and Safety (i.e., Twitter's head mod) has quit, who knows?

# ¿ Nov 11, 2022 01:29

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1590872869348978688

Are we sure Musk ever worked at PayPal?

quote:

Elon Musk spoke about offering banking services via Twitter:

"I think there’s this transformative opportunity in payments. And payments really are just the exchange of information. From an information standpoint, not a huge difference between, say, just sending a direct message and sending a payment. They are basically the same thing. In principle, you can use a direct messaging stack for payments. And so that’s definitely a direction we’re going to go in, enabling people on Twitter to able to send money anywhere in the world instantly and in real-time. We just want to make it as useful as possible."

And later offered more detail:

"If you can simply have one balance on Twitter that can simply go positive or a negative, and when it goes positive, the interest rate is better than what you could receive elsewhere, and when it goes negative, the interest rate is lower than what you see elsewhere, now you have a much simpler system.

Then you attach a debit card to the Twitter account so that you have backwards compatibility into the payments system because not everyone will accept Twitter. So if have above a certain balance, you automatically send people a debit card. You want backwards compatibility to the existing financial infrastructure.

In the U.S., there’s still a small number of checks that are used. So if your landlord is demanding that you send a check, you have to have some non-zero number of checks. Then we would send a small number of checks to those that need to have checks. Then you add automatic payment. Then over time, you basically address what are all the things that you’d want from finance standpoint. And if you address all things that you want from a finance standpoint, then we will be the people’s financial institution."

Because it really doesn't look like this guy knows the first thing about payment processing. Comparing payments to DMs, and daydreaming about sending people paper checks instead of talking about security or fraud prevention? I know he got thrown out of Paypal a long time ago now, but there is no practical thinking at all going on there. It's all dreams, no substance.

The whole transcript is too long to quote the whole thing, but there's an absolute ton of ridiculous quotes in it. He's all ideas.

quote:

I think Twitter can perform an incredibly valuable service to the world and be the public town square where people exchange ideas and where once in a while, they change their mind. And where you have a battleground of ideas that can hopefully take the place of the violence in a lot of cases. So people can just be talking instead of physically fighting. I think we could actually be a force for peace, which would be amazing. I think there’s a tremendous amount of good that Twitter can can achieve for humanity. And that’s what we’re going to strive for.

So in order for us to achieve that good, how do we get a lot of people on the platform? There are 8 billion humans. If we don’t have at least a billion humans on the system, then we have a very small percentage of humans. So we want to have, you know, a reasonable percentage of humans. This is not for the sake of of money or anything like that. It’s just in order to do a lot of good, we need a lot of people on the platform and a lot of people talking.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2022 04:46

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

The New York Times has taken their turn at a tell-all article about the Twitter chaos. Unsurprisingly, employees are leaking everything.

https://twitter.com/dodaistewart/status/1591062732857806848

quote:

SAN FRANCISCO � Elon Musk had a demand.

On Oct. 28, hours after completing his $44 billion buyout of Twitter the night before, Mr. Musk gathered several human-resource executives in a �war room� in the company�s offices in San Francisco. Prepare for widespread layoffs, he told them, six people with knowledge of the discussion said. Twitter�s work force needed to be slashed immediately, he said, and those who were cut would not receive bonuses that were set to be paid on Nov. 1.

The executives warned their new boss that his plan could violate employment laws and breach contracts with workers, leading to employee lawsuits, the people said. But Mr. Musk�s team said he was used to going to court and paying penalties, and was not worried about the risks. So Twitter�s human-resource, accounting and legal departments scrambled to figure out how to comply with his command.

Two days later, Mr. Musk learned exactly how costly those potential fines and lawsuits could be, three people said. Delays were also piling up as managers haggled over which employees to let go. He decided to wait on cutting jobs until after Nov. 1.

The order for immediate layoffs, the ensuing panic and the about-face reflect the chaos that has engulfed Twitter since Mr. Musk took over the company two weeks ago. The 51-year-old barreled in with ideas about how the social media service should operate, but with no comprehensive plan to execute them. Then he quickly ran into the business, legal and financial complexities of running a platform that has been called a global town square.

The fallout has often been excruciating, according to 36 current and former Twitter employees and people close to the company, as well as internal documents and workplace chat logs. Some top executives were summarily fired by email. One engineering manager, upon being told to cut hundreds of workers, vomited into a trash can. Others slept in the office as they worked grueling schedules to meet Mr. Musk�s orders.

Twitter, which is under financial pressure from debt and a slumping economy, is now unrecognizable compared with what it was a month ago. Last week, Mr. Musk slashed 50 percent of the company�s 7,500 employees. Executive resignations have continued. Misinformation proliferated on the platform during Tuesday�s midterm elections. A key project to expand revenue from subscriptions hit snags. Some advertisers have been aghast.

Mr. Musk, who did not respond to a request for comment, told employees in a meeting on Thursday that Twitter�s situation was grim.

�There�s a massive negative cash flow, and bankruptcy is not out of the question,� he said, according to a recording heard by The New York Times.

Mr. Musk added that they would need to work strenuously to keep the company afloat. �Those who are able to go hard core and play to win, Twitter is a good place,� he said. �And those who are not, totally understand, but then Twitter is not for you.�

�Let that sink in!�

Mr. Musk arrived at Twitter�s San Francisco offices on Oct. 26, toting a white porcelain sink through the glass doors of the building. �Let that sink in!� he tweeted at the time, along with a video of his grand entrance.

Leslie Berland, Twitter�s chief marketing officer, encouraged employees to say hi to Mr. Musk and escorted him through the office. He was seen chatting with employees at the company coffee bar.

But the vibe quickly changed. The next day, Parag Agrawal, Twitter�s chief executive, and Ned Segal, the chief financial officer, were in the office, two people familiar with the situation said. Once they knew Mr. Musk�s acquisition of Twitter was closing that afternoon, they left the building, uncertain what the new owner would do.

Mr. Agrawal and Mr. Segal soon received emails saying they had been fired, two people familiar with the situation said. Vijaya Gadde, Twitter�s top legal and policy executive, and Sean Edgett, the general counsel, were also fired. Mr. Edgett, who was in Twitter�s offices at the time, was escorted out.

That evening, Twitter hosted a Halloween party called �Trick or Tweet� for employees and their families. Some workers dressed in costume and tried to keep the mood festive. Others cried and hugged one another.

Mr. Musk had brought his own advisers, many of whom had worked at his other businesses, such as the digital payments company PayPal and the electric carmaker Tesla. They parked themselves in the �war room,� on the second floor of a building attached to Twitter�s headquarters. The area, which Twitter used to fete big-spending advertisers and dignitaries, was stocked with company memorabilia.

The advisers included the venture capitalists David Sacks, Jason Calacanis and Sriram Krishnan; Mr. Musk�s personal lawyer Alex Spiro; his financial manager Jared Birchall; and Antonio Gracias, a former Tesla director. Joining in were engineers and others from Tesla; from Mr. Musk�s brain interface start-up, Neuralink; and from his tunneling company, the Boring Company.

At times, Mr. Musk was spotted with his 2-year-old son, X � A-12, at Twitter�s office as he greeted employees.

In meetings with Twitter executives, Mr. Musk was direct. At the Oct. 28 meeting with human-resource executives, he said he wanted to reduce the work force immediately, before a Nov. 1 date when employees would receive regularly scheduled retention bonuses.

One Twitter team began creating a financial model to show the cost of the layoffs. Another built a model to demonstrate how much more Mr. Musk might pay in legal fees and fines if he proceeded with the rapid cuts, three people said.

On Oct. 30, Mr. Musk received word that the rapid approach could cost millions of dollars more than laying people off with their scheduled bonuses. He agreed to delay, four people said.

But he had a condition. Before paying the bonuses, Mr. Musk insisted on a payroll audit to confirm that Twitter�s employees were �real humans.� He voiced concerns that �ghost employees� who should not receive the money lingered in Twitter�s systems.

Mr. Musk tapped Robert Kaiden, Twitter�s chief accounting officer, to conduct the audit. Mr. Kaiden asked managers to verify that they knew certain employees and could confirm that they were human, according to three people and an internal document seen by The Times.

The Nov. 1 bonus date came and went with no mass layoffs. Mr. Kaiden was fired the next day and marched out of the building, five people with knowledge of the situation said.

A trip to New York

As Twitter managers compiled lists for layoffs, Mr. Musk flew to New York to meet with advertisers, who provide the bulk of Twitter�s revenue.

In some advertiser meetings, Mr. Musk proposed a system for Twitter users to choose the kind of content that the service exposed them to � akin to G to NC-17 movie ratings � implying that brands could then target their advertising on the platform better. He also committed to product improvements and more personalization for users and ads, two people with knowledge of the discussions said.

But his outreach was undercut by the departures of two New York-based Twitter executives � Ms. Berland and JP Maheu, a vice president in charge of advertising. They were well known in the advertising community.

Those Twitter executives �had great relationships with the senior-most people at the Fortune 500 � they were incredibly transparent and inclusive,� said Lou Paskalis, a longtime advertising executive. �Those things engender tremendous trust, and those things are now in question.�

Brands including Volkswagen Group, General Motors and United Airlines have said they will pause advertising on Twitter as they evaluate Mr. Musk�s ownership of the platform.

Mr. Musk elevated some managers at Twitter. He tapped Esther Crawford, a product manager, to revamp a subscription service called Twitter Blue. Mr. Musk wanted a new version of the service, which would cost $8 a month and include premium features and the verification check mark that was previously assigned for free to the accounts of celebrities, journalists and politicians to convey their authenticity.

He laid down a deadline: The team must finish Twitter Blue�s changes by Nov. 7 or its members would be fired.

Last week, Ms. Crawford shared a photo of herself sleeping at Twitter�s San Francisco offices in a sleeping bag and an eye mask, with the hashtag #SleepWhereYouWork.

Her message rubbed some colleagues the wrong way. They wondered in private chats why they should commit long working hours to a man who could fire them, according to five people and messages seen by The Times. On Twitter, Ms. Crawford responded to what she called �hecklers� by saying she had received supportive messages from other entrepreneurs and �builders of all types.�

The ax falls

The scope of layoffs was a moving target. Twitter managers were initially told to cut 25 percent of the work force, three people said. But Tesla engineers who reviewed Twitter�s code proposed deeper cuts to the engineering teams. Executives overseeing other parts of Twitter were told to expand their layoff lists.

Twitter executives also suggested assessing the lists for diversity and inclusion issues so the cuts would not hit people of color disproportionately and to avoid legal trouble. Mr. Musk�s team brushed aside the suggestion, two people said.

On Nov. 2, employees stumbled upon an open channel in the internal Slack messaging system where human resources and legal teams were discussing the layoffs. In a message seen by The Times, one employee said 3,738 workers could be laid off, or about half the work force. The message was widely shared internally.

That evening, Mr. Musk met with some advisers to settle on the reduction, according to a calendar invitation seen by The Times. They were joined by employees from Twitter�s human resources and staff from his other companies.

Anticipating the cuts, employees began bidding farewell to their colleagues, trading phone numbers and connecting on LinkedIn. They also pulled together documents and internal resources to help workers who survived the layoffs.

One engineering manager was approached by Mr. Musk�s advisers � or �goons,� as Twitter employees called them � with a list of hundreds of people he had to let go. He vomited into a trash can near his feet.

Late on Nov. 3, an email landed in employees� inboxes. �In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global work force,� the email, signed �Twitter,� said.

Pandemonium followed. While the note said employees would receive a follow-up email the next morning about whether they still had jobs, many found themselves locked out of email or Slack that night, an indication they had been laid off. Those who remained in Slack posted saluting emojis en masse as a send-off for co-workers.

The cuts were enormous. In Redbird, Twitter�s platform and infrastructure organization, Mr. Musk shed numerous managers. The unit also lost about 80 percent of its engineering staff, raising internal concerns about the company�s ability to keep its site up and running.

In Bluebird, Twitter�s consumer division, dozens of product managers were laid off, leaving just over a dozen of them. The new ratio of engineers to managers was 70 to 1, according to one estimate.

The aftermath

As layoffs unfolded, tech recruiters sensed opportunity. Top managers at rival companies such as Meta and Google sent messages to some of the employees being let go from Twitter, said two people who received the notes.

Most of Mr. Musk�s subordinates remained quiet throughout the process. But Mr. Calacanis, the venture capitalist, had been active on Twitter responding to product suggestions and concerns.

Last week, Mr. Musk dispatched a lieutenant to the �war room� to ask Mr. Calacanis, who was there, to cool it on Twitter and stop acting as if he were leading product development or policy, people familiar with the exchange said.

�To be clear, Elon is the product manager and CEO,� Mr. Calacanis later tweeted. �As a power user (and that�s all I am!) I�m really excited.�

By last Saturday, Mr. Musk�s advisers realized that the cuts may have been too deep, four people said. Some asked laid-off engineers, designers and product managers to return to their old jobs, three people familiar with the conversations said. The tech newsletter Platformer earlier reported the outreach.

At Goldbird, Twitter�s revenue division, the company had to bring back those who ran key money-generating products that �no one else knows how to operate,� people with knowledge of the business said. One manager agreed to try rehiring some laid-off workers, but expressed concerns that they were �weak, lazy, unmotivated and they may even be against an Elon Twitter,� two people familiar with the matter said.

On Monday, some Twitter employees arrived at work to find that certain systems they had relied on no longer worked. In San Francisco, an engineer discovered that some contracts with vendors that provide software for managing user data had been put on hold or had expired, and that the managers and executives who could fix the problem had been laid off or resigned.

On Wednesday, workers in Twitter�s New York office were unable to use the Wi-Fi after a server room overheated and knocked it offline, two people said.

Mr. Musk plans to begin making employees pay for lunch � which had been free � at the company cafeteria, two people said.

An internal clash

Inside Twitter, some employees have clashed with Mr. Musk�s advisers.

This week, security executives disagreed with Mr. Musk�s team over how Twitter should meet its obligations to the Federal Trade Commission. Twitter had agreed to a settlement with the F.T.C. in 2011 over privacy violations, which requires the company to submit regular reports about its privacy practices and open its doors to audits.

On Wednesday, a day before a deadline for Twitter to submit a report to the F.T.C., Twitter�s chief information security officer, Lea Kissner; chief privacy officer, Damien Kieran; and chief compliance officer, Marianne Fogarty, resigned.

In internal messages later that day, an employee wrote about the resignations and suggested that internal privacy reviews of Twitter�s products were not proceeding as they should under the F.T.C. settlement.

Some engineers could be required to �self-certify� that their projects complied with the settlement, rather than relying on reviews from lawyers and executives, a shift that could lead to �major incidents,� the employee wrote.

�Elon has shown that his only priority with Twitter users is how to monetize them,� the person wrote in the message, which was viewed by The Times.

The employee added that Mr. Spiro, Mr. Musk�s lawyer, had said the billionaire was willing to take risks. Mr. Spiro, the employee said, told workers that �Elon puts rockets into space � he�s not afraid of the F.T.C.�

The F.T.C. said that it was tracking the developments at Twitter with �deep concern� and that �no C.E.O. or company is above the law.� Mr. Musk later sent employees an email saying Twitter will adhere to the F.T.C. settlement.

On Thursday, more Twitter executives resigned, including Kathleen Pacini, a human-resource leader, and Yoel Roth, the head of trust and safety.

At the meeting with employees that day, Mr. Musk tried to sound a note of optimism about Twitter�s future.

�Twitter can form an incredibly valuable service to the world and be the public town square,� he said, noting it should be a �battleground of ideas� where debate could �take the place of violence in a lot of cases.�

There's a lot going on here, but one thing that particularly stands out to me is how paranoid Musk is. It's been a recurring theme in the Twitter change of management: Musk deeply distrusts Twitter's existing employees and appears to be perpetually scared that they'll try to pull one over on him if he stops terrifying them for even a second. This is a guy who straight-up closed the offices on layoffs day, and claimed "insider risks" as his excuse for locking everyone out of the mod tools. And now we're hearing that he made managers prove that their employees actually existed and weren't just fake accounts made to embezzle money. It's no wonder he brought in Tesla engineers, he doesn't trust anyone at Twitter!

# ¿ Nov 11, 2022 16:32

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

kliras posted:

on a slightly different note, deviantart is up to some poo poo and will use all art on its platform to train an ai unless people explicitly opt out

https://twitter.com/IanFayArt/status/1591116114926653440

can't even leave your old work to rot on a dead website these days

The funniest part is that the opt-out doesn't actually work anyway.

It works exactly the same as the do-not-track browser header, which politely notified advertising servers that the user did not want to be tracked and did not want their data harvested. Except that the do-not-track header is a complete failure, because there was no incentive at all for advertisers to respect it. It depended on advertisers going out of their way to program their tracking tools to voluntarily stop tracking the user if the header was included in the tracking data. In the end, do-not-track was largely abandoned.

There's no reason to think that DeviantArt's "noimageai" header will fare any better. The dataset crawlers have no idea it exists, and will completely ignore the opt-out unless dataset creators go out of their way to intentionally add support for opting out. And I severely doubt they'll do that, because the big dataset creators are assholes who don't have any intention of shrinking their datasets by giving people new ways to opt out.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2022 20:34

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

That Italian Guy posted:

So instead of peer code review they're going to have the Inquisition checking code for malicious backdoors and whatnot. An healthy way to run a company.

Also what would have access to the office have to do with sabotaging Twitter? I would expect the only employees that need physical access for their duties are like physical security and facilities people. I would expect Twitter not to run anything on prem, or at least nothing that is related to its frontend at the very minimum. EDIT: are they worried about people that have had their priviledges revoked physically accessing servers with like a console cable?

Maybe planting physical hardware to maintain network access or something? I don't know. He closed the offices for the initial layoff wave, too. I guess with layoffs at this scale, it's not like you can just have security show up and walk everyone out.

It really does stand out how much Musk deeply distrusts Twitter employees, too. We saw a lot of that during the transition too - nearly the entire moderation staff was locked out of their mod tools for a few days, and he sent managers scouring their payrolls to make sure that their teams existed and that there weren't any nonexistent "ghost employees" drawing a salary.

It's bizarre - I haven't heard of him being nearly this paranoid in his other companies. Is it because he inherited the workforce and didn't have a chance to stuff it with toadies from the very beginning? Or is he just scared that it's full of liberal operatives out to destroy free speech at any cost? Who the gently caress knows, but it's honestly impressive how quickly he's tanked employee morale.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2022 03:51

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

haveblue posted:

"Everyone who doesn't attend this meeting will be fired."

"No one can attend the meeting. No one can get into the building. We're having this conversation in the parking lot because even your badge doesn't work."

"EVERYONE WHO DOESN'T ATTEND THIS MEETING WILL BE FIRED."

It seems like someone eventually explained to him that cross-country flights on a few hours' notice are not a routine or easy thing for people who don't have their own private jets.
https://twitter.com/ZoeSchiffer/status/1593665774744350721

Still incredibly ridiculous though.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2022 19:35

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

haveblue posted:

It would be really funny if some disgruntled twitter engineer got into the database and deleted all of that account�s follows, rendering it worthless even if he logged back in and tweeted

Even when Trump was banned from Twitter, his press releases and Truth Social posts would all be immediately reposted to Twitter. Aside from having his extremely dedicated superfans, the entire political world and much of the news media is eagerly hanging on his every word. Having all his followers deleted wouldn't really slow him down at all.

Which is also why I think it's entirely plausible that he's not coming back to Twitter despite his account being unbanned. He doesn't actually need a Twitter account to have a wide reach.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2022 06:00

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Automata 10 Pack posted:

I'm looking at Hive and Mastodon and .Social and I'm reminded once again how after Trump and his cronies got kicked off of Twitter they immediately created a replica of Twitter instead of this leftist response of fracturing into a half dozen websites that are kinda like twitter but not really.

This is just selective memory.

First off, the right fractured into plenty of sites as well, including several Mastodon instances (of which Truth Social is one). The media just focuses on the one Trump is on.

Second off, all these social media sites aren't a "leftist response", they're just "the response". These Twitter alternatives are being run by people of all types, from capitalist liberals to free-software libertarians.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2022 18:19

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Space Cadet Omoly posted:

What I'm wondering is why the bank gave him the loan in the first place.

He told investors that he would double Twitter's userbase and more than double their revenue by 2025, and then double them both again by 2028.

His pitch deck to investors claimed that by 2028, Twitter would have 931 million users and would be making $10b/yr from subscriptions, $12b/yr from advertising, and $1.3b/yr from payment processing.

For reference, last year, Twitter had 217 million users last year and made $5 billion total revenue.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2022 19:07

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Timeless Appeal posted:

Doesn't get that Leftwing lies on twitter are something akin to Europe has completely 100% free healthcare for all citizens or the Earth will be completely inhabitable by 2025. Whereas right wing lies are things vaccines are a Jewish conspiracy or a drag performer is trying to indoctrinate a trans army by reading Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus.

Thanks to the fact that Musk is obsessively replying to right-wing conspiracy theorists, we're getting a look at some of the kinds of things he apparently considers to be "left-wing lies":
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1595108378375618560

# ¿ Nov 23, 2022 01:48

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Tuxedo Gin posted:

https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1595684664228052992

So he apparently fired a bunch of devs based on his 'code review', the day before Thanksgiving, and gave them 4 weeks severance. If they had chosen to leave instead of clicking 'yes' to Twitter Hardcore, they would have gotten 3 months severance.

It's an example of the power of labor laws in action.

The people who said no to Twitter Hardcore were part of a mass layoff, which means they were covered under the WARN Act requirement of 60-day warning for layoffs. So technically, they're getting paid for two months to do nothing, right up until their official layoff in January, after which point they get one month severance.

The people getting fired right now are not part of a mass layoff, which means that they get just the one-month severance.

# ¿ Nov 25, 2022 03:51

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Owling Howl posted:

His obsession with code is bizarre. Twitter works fine. There's nothing technically wrong with it. It doesn't sell enough ads to be profitable.

It's not like he actually bought Twitter to make technical upgrades in the first place. He's been clear all along that he's aiming at social/cultural issues like "there's too many bots in my replies" and "right-wingers I agree with get banned and left-wingers I disagree with don't".

It's reputation management. Rather than looking like an incompetent fool who ran the company into the ground within a month and is now desperately slashing expenses to stave off cashflow disaster, he'd rather portray himself as a HARDCORE programmer who's driving out the weak, the lazy, and the incompetent to turn Twitter into a super lean startup staffed exclusively by 100x genius programmers willing to put in real work.

The thing is that he's extremely reliant on the image he's cultivated as the genius technical guy who brilliantly solves technical problems and has gotten rich off his technical mastery. Regardless of whether it's true or not, he's managed to successfully craft that reputation in popular culture, and that reputation is a large part of why anyone gives him the time of day. He gets a lot more slack than other CEOs would, his customers put up with a lot of poo poo they wouldn't take from other companies, and he's got his own personality cult filled with dedicated fanboys. A lot of people don't buy it, of course, but enough do - especially in the corners of Silicon Valley culture that practically idolize that sort of person. So for everything he does with Twitter, he has to do it in a way that cultivates and reinforces that image in the eyes of extremely credulous and naive business types and "I loving LOVE TECHNOLOGY" types.

# ¿ Nov 25, 2022 07:57

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Remember how he was threatening to publicly call out companies who cut their Twitter advertising, and how it was extremely obviously a terrible idea?

Not only has he decided to do it after all, but he picked one heck of a first target.

Picking an Extremely Not Mad public spat with Apple of all companies is a move that has me wondering if he's more high on his own supply than I thought he was.

# ¿ Nov 28, 2022 20:30

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

nine-gear crow posted:

Yeah, on the one hand he is simply replying to the tweet and quoting the number back at it, but on the other hand why did he just pick this random as poo poo "look at cool science thing" twitter account to reply to with the Hitler Number? For as random as the man is, he's equally calculated when it comes to just being an rear end in a top hat who thinks he's being clever.

He responds to random as poo poo "look at cool science thing" twitter accounts all the time, because his entire public persona is crafted to appeal to people who loved Popular Science as kids and never really grew up, and also because he's basically one of those people himself.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2022 02:52

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Unsurprisingly, the exodus of Twitter users to alternative platforms which previously had barely any users hasn't gone that smoothly.

The funniest story so far is that of Hive Social, an iOS-only social network which was particularly beloved by journalists, streamers, and other social media influencers and was thus rapidly growing in popularity - despite a sketchy and secretive leadership team and a number of technical problems.

About a week ago, as a bunch of notables were signing up on Hive so someone else couldn't snipe their username and set up a fake account, a lot of people learned the hard way that Hive doesn't have unique usernames. And no verification system, either - anyone can make an identical copycat account and it's literally impossible to distinguish them.
https://twitter.com/siracusa/status/1595251572656680960

Hive said they were adding a system to address that, but I'm not sure if they've implemented it because we've already moved on to the next technical disaster: they put user authentication on the client side rather than the server side, so anyone who knew how to access the API directly could access other users' accounts as if they were their own. That meant being able to view anyone's private posts and private messages, and even being able to edit other people's posts:
https://twitter.com/zerforschung/status/1598070384825610240

It's apparently not easy to fix either, because it's bad enough that Hive took their entire service down and are planning for the entire thing to be down for days:
https://twitter.com/TheHIVE_Social/status/1598119071907991552

# ¿ Dec 1, 2022 20:00

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Alkydere posted:

Haven't heard very much the last few days from Musk/Twitter, or the media reacting to it. Has it just been white noise of "meh, you've already done worse" or has he actually been relatively silent?

There's still new stuff coming out about it pretty much every day, but it's pretty hard to top what he's already done so far. Just in the last week or so, he issued a "general amnesty" for right-wing hatemongers while happily banning whoever Andy Ngo tells him to, he threw a public tantrum about Apple (one of Twitter's biggest advertisers) pulling their ads, and he's holding weekly "code reviews" for literally everyone in the company while the advertiser portal is reportedly falling to pieces behind the scenes. And of course he's still being a reply guy for various right-wingers, and highlighting random things like app store fees as plots to destroy America by destroying free speech..

His current random tangent is being mad that tweets get a lot more views than likes, which he apparently blames on the fact that the audience doesn't believe "likes/RTs don't imply endorsement".

# ¿ Dec 1, 2022 21:09

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Bari Weiss got Twitter's Deputy General Counsel fired, because she told Elon that she thought he was obstructing the process of handing all of Twitter's internal emails and documents over to her and Matt Taibbi so that they could hunt for evidence that Twitter's previous management was conspiring with the libs.

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1600243756074049537
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1600244722819543040
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1600246202619944961

If there's one thing we can say about Elon's stewardship of Twitter, it's that the garbage fire has mostly been pretty funny. Firing a lawyer for thinking this process needs any kind of oversight at all isn't going to wreck Twitter worse than everything he's already done, but it still belongs solidly in the Bad Ideas column.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2022 01:47

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Levitate posted:

Was there anything interesting in the “twitter files”
Seems like absolutely toning has come of it or been worth a drat

They unearthed a bunch of emails along the lines of "the Biden campaign sent us a list of tweets to remove" followed by a bunch of tweet URLs with no descriptions. The tweets were all deleted, of course, and Taibbi doesn't tell us what they were, so the reader could only imagine what important info Twitter was suppressing on the Biden campaign's behalf.

Unless, of course, the reader goes and looks up the tweets on an archival service, which revealed that they were all photos of Hunter's dick.

The rest of the Twitter Files so far was p much the same way: Taibbi throwing a scary narration over the most innocuous poo poo. A good chunk of it was just "Republican politicians were pissed" and "Twitter employees aren't even thinking about the First Amendment".

# ¿ Dec 7, 2022 06:43

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

the other hand posted:

As much fun as it is to dump on Elon, not sure we should leap to conclusions in this particular case. We don�t and likely never will know the details here, assuming Elon/Twitter isn�t bent on destroying attorney-client privilege.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, but Musk has chimed in and corroborated Taibbi's claims.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1600237095364096000

# ¿ Dec 7, 2022 17:44

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Prism posted:

What's SIP-PES in this context? Can I call them sippies?

According to Weiss, SIP-PES was a committee that the CEO, the head of Legal, and the head of Trust and Safety sat on. It was the top arbiter on all content moderation decisions, the last level of appeal. Moderation actions on "politically sensitive" accounts would require their signoff.

In other words, Twitter mods weren't allowed to touch LibsOfTikTok's account without the direct approval of the CEO, the head mod, and the head lawyer.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2022 15:32

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

funkymonks posted:

I thought they (Apple) didn�t allow you to charge different rates in iOS vs out of iOS. Wasn�t there some fight between them and Epic about this?

Epic's problem was that they put in an in-app option to bypass the App Store payment system altogether, and was really obviously picking a fight about it. Here's the example they gave of what their new in-app payment screen would look like:

Charging one price on iOS and another price on desktop is fine. Giving both prices as options to iOS users, on the other hand, is a blatant "gently caress you" to Apple.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2022 18:54

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

For anyone who was wondering how long it would take for Musk to go full mask-off with his transphobia, here we gooooooo

I suspect there won't be much point in reporting misgendering on Twitter anymore.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2022 05:46

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Electric Phantasm posted:

What the gently caress does that even mean? This is like the Dilbert guy going "everything is on the table" talking like some lovely movie villain.

Matt Taibbi promised another Twitter Files drop at 4pm Eastern, so probably that.

Though the Twitter Files project might be in jeopardy now that Bari Weiss has betrayed him by saying he shouldn't have banned all those journalists:

Imagine publicly feuding with someone he gave employee-level access to Twitter's systems to a week ago.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2022 22:15

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

haveblue posted:

That requires there be somewhere for the conversation to go, and it's not clear that there is.

Mastodon is the closest of them all, is it permitted to link from Twitter to Mastodon again or is that still blocked?

New links to any Mastodon instance Twitter knows about are blocked, and existing ones throw up an "unsafe link" warning. He's so incredibly mad.

It's just simple string matching, though. Capitalizing a letter in the URL or adding a bit of junk at the end is enough to bypass both filters.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2022 22:27

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Young Freud posted:

Guess this is the line in the sand moment: Twitter defederating from all social media platforms, including up to removing accounts with links in their usernames or bios.
https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1604531261791522817?s=20&t=IDYWqoJuHz3Dt_gHytZ8dg
https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1604531268493795329?s=20&t=IDYWqoJuHz3Dt_gHytZ8dg

If they enforce this, they are absolutely going to kill their golden goose. Pissing off advertisers, pissing off journalists, and now pissing off basically anyone with more of a social media presence than "gets into petty fights about politic in random people's replies".

# ¿ Dec 18, 2022 19:29

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Republicans posted:

I mean like would it make sense financially and not just be the funniest act of petulance in modern history.

I don't see how. He can shut down Twitter whenever he wants, but there's no way he'd recoup the billions of dollars he spent on it. At most, he could sell it to someone else, but nobody's going to pay the same amount he did. And even if they did, that wouldn't restore Tesla's stock price (which is where the bulk of his wealth is).

# ¿ Dec 19, 2022 02:55

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Young Freud posted:

Looks like who Musk puts in charge won't matter. In Musk's own words, Twitter has been in a bankruptcy state since May and he's looking at ending the company
https://twitter.com/richsignorelli/status/1604637381696552960?t=qLdWPjaJsV9bb6X_KQ6bxw&s=19

Musk has been threatening Twitter bankruptcy constantly since he bought it. It's just bluster.

It's one of his management tactics. The threat of bankruptcy is one of his favorite sticks. He tells people that they have to accept his whims uncritically and do whatever he wants without complaining, because only he and his grand plans can save the company from bankruptcy. It "motivates" staff with a sense of impending crisis to justify his crunchtime demands, it convinces investors and stakeholders that maybe his sudden drastic changes are necessary, and when the threatened bankruptcy doesn't happen he can claim it's because his genius moves saved the company.

He said it to Twitter staff after the buyout, insisting that they had to accept the massive layoffs and "hardcore" scheduling demands or else Twitter would go bankrupt. But he's used that threat frequently at his other companies too. At the end of 2021, he told SpaceX employees that SpaceX faced a "risk of bankruptcy" if it couldn't meet a Starship launch rate of "once every two weeks" in 2022...and then demanded that everyone cancel their Thanksgiving vacations and return to the office immediately to do crunchtime on engine production issues. Well, we're at the end of 2022, and Starship's launch rate this year was zero, yet bankruptcy is nowhere to be seen. It was likely just an empty threat to convince employees that canceling Thanksgiving was actually necessary and not just Elon's whim. He's done similar things at Tesla a few times too. "The company will collapse if you don't cancel all your vacations and start sleeping on the factory floor till this project is done" really just seems to be his way of motivating the workforce.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2022 16:20

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

FlamingLiberal posted:

I just don�t understand how he can think the Babylon Bee is funny

Like when he bought Twitter one of the things that particularly upset him about the previous ownership is that they banned the Bee

They're making jokes about his critics instead of making jokes about him. That's all it really takes.

The Onion and Hard Drive both regularly mocked the hell out of him, even before the Twitter purchase. Meanwhile, the Babylon Bee have been giant Musk fanboys for years.

While the Onion was joking about Teslas catching fire, the Babylon Bee was writing fanfiction about Musk sending "bulletproof flamethrower tanks from the future that can go 500 miles on a single charge" to Ukraine just to prove that he could do things way better than any government could. Wasn't actually funny in the slightest, because they were so busy praising him they forgot to tell a joke, but I suspect Musk's happy with it anyway!

https://twitter.com/TheOnion/status/1438939019925151746
https://twitter.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1500154176524881920

# ¿ Dec 20, 2022 18:47

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

haveblue posted:

I'm also a little surprised SpaceX seems to have escaped the meltdown. Guessing that's because they have all-but-guaranteed government funding and a record of real technical achievements

SpaceX isn't a public company. Like Twitter under Elon, it's privately owned and isn't on the stock market.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2022 20:19

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

OgNar posted:

e: thought this was fake at 2nd glance, but at 3rd its real

This was on Dec 24th, dont remember hearing about it til now though.

https://twitter.com/ReutersTech/status/1611138057075318787

It's half right. Twitter users' email addresses and phone numbers were leaked, but it wasn't due to a hack.

You know how every social media phone app has a "tell me if anyone in my contacts list has accounts on this site" button? Turns out that works by just uploading a list of phone numbers and email addresses to Twitter, which returns a list of usernames associated with those phone numbers and/or email addresses. An API call like that is inherently an information disclosure risk, and the devs need to proactively add extra security measures to detect and reject abuse, or else someone can just generate a list of every possible phone number and send it to that API endpoint.

Unfortunately, Twitter's protections against that are fairly rudimentary. And careless practices by Twitter's devs have repeatedly caused various bugs that stripped away even those rudimentary protections and led to the disclosure of millions of username-phone pairs. This is just more of the same.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2023 15:14

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Dull Fork posted:

Why don't the people who own these Twitter HQs.... just change the locks once its been X days since they last got a rent payment? Slumlords do it all the time.

Because that's illegal. Slumlords do that poo poo to people that're too poor to sue, but Twitter isn't small enough or poor enough for landlords to risk blatantly violating the law against them.

Legally evicting a tenant requires filing a lawsuit against them and convincing a judge to issue an eviction order. Though I'd just about guarantee that the landlords would much prefer that this lawsuit just scares Twitter into paying what it owes, since actually evicting and replacing a corporate tenant the size of Twitter is a huge pain in the rear end.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2023 18:19

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 00:25

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Dull Fork posted:

So yeah, I skipped a few steps there, but these are steps that a property owner of such a massive office building should easily be able to do, if they wanted to.

I went and looked up some more info on the issue. Found several articles all saying basically same thing. ( https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/evicting-a-commercial-tenant-in-california-54040 https://bornstein.law/california-commercial-eviction-process/ https://www.rocketlawyer.com/real-estate/landlords/non-residential-or-commercial-property/legal-guide/the-commercial-eviction-process )

It looks like its a relatively straight forward process to evict a commercial tenant, and there are in fact less protections for commercial tenants than residential ones. You're right, you do need to go before a judge, but the steps required don't seem to take long, (one link suggests 40-90 days). Breach of contract includes not paying your rent, simple as. I can't see a judge willing deny that, no matter how many well paid lawyers Twitter might have. So if the owners of the property did want Twitter out, they could do so. It wouldn't be illegal unless they didn't go to a judge. But as others have said, the property owners would vastly prefer Twitter just pays their rent, instead of dealing with a guaranteed lack of income from the empty property and going through the process of tempting some other business moving into the space,

That feels like the far more likely answer than 'Property owner can't evict business who doesn't pay rent, that's illegal!'.

I think you've misunderstood something, because the landlords did go before a judge. That's the entire reason we know for a fact that Twitter hasn't been paying rent: the landlords filed lawsuits against Twitter after it failed to pay rent, and those lawsuits are matters of public record.

However, they can't actually evict Twitter until the judge rules that they can. Like you said, it can take 40-90 days (though I doubt that accounts for the resources of massive companies like Twitter). The landlord of Twitter's San Francisco HQ filed their lawsuit just five days ago, so we can expect at least another month before any ruling in the case. Until then, there isn't going to be any lock-changing.

The reason why it took so long for them to file a lawsuit in the first place appears to be that the landlord had three and a half million bucks worth of security deposit from Twitter, and the lease contract provided that the landlord could take that security deposit and count it toward any unpaid rent. The lease contract also had some mandatory waiting periods in regards to sending demands and such. So the landlords took the security deposit first and sent demands to Twitter to replenish it, and only filed suit when the time limit on those demands expired.

We can expect similar circumstances around Twitter's other properties. The unpaid-rent lawsuits have started flowing in this month, so none of them have yet progressed to the point of a judge ruling on them.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2023 19:33

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Social Media Companies: Tell it to Earth

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