The platform era is ending. Rather than build new Twitters and Facebooks, we can create a stuff-posting system that works better for everybody.
Tesla Owners Silicon Valley posted a video of an apparently bullet-pocked Cybertruck driving on a highway at night.
Musk replied to a repost of it, claiming that the dents were from “the entire drum magazine of a Tommy gun” and “no bullets penetrated into the passenger compartment.”
I’m going back to sleep.
The DOJ was granted (PDF) a stay of an injunction barring DHS, CISA, FBI, and other federal officials from contact with social media platforms about content moderation. The judge who wrote the injunction this summer claimed their requests about posts containing covid misinformation amounted to a violation of the First Amendment.
An appeals court limited the terms of the ban last month but paused the process to see if the Supreme Court would weigh in. Now it will hear the DOJ’s appeal, over dissent from three justices (Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch).
Bloomberg had the story a few weeks ago after listening in on a call between X CEO Linda Yaccarino and Twitter debt holders. Premium plans currently start at $8/mth ($84/yr) and show about 50 percent fewer ads. X is also testing charging every new user $1/year just to post because you gotta make up for a plummet in ad revenue somehow.
X is now filled with contextless links to articles after Elon Musk removed headlines from link preview cards earlier this month. But some Substack links now include the headline right in the image (spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra).
I was able to replicate it below with a newsletter I follow — it’s a good idea! So far it seems limited to Substack blogs with a custom domain, and the headline doesn’t appear in the image on other platforms like Facebook.
The money to protect Europeans from the spread of harmful content comes from the 19 companies identified as very large online platforms, divvied up based upon the number of users they have but not more than 0.05 percent of profits.
This methodology results in X, formerly known as Twitter, and Amazon not contributing a penny, while Alphabet Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. together would pay about €31 million — almost three-quarters of the total.
Or so say Bloomberg sources. Official numbers will be announced in November.
It’s been almost a year since Elon Musk took over Twitter and, well, a lot of things have happened since then. Now, after previously diving into the backstories of dating apps, Meta, and Tesla, the Vox Media podcast Land of the Giants launches a new season about Twitter, its richest user, and “why Twitter’s cultural and political influence far exceeds its size,” hosted by Peter Kafka.
New episodes will arrive weekly starting on October 25th, and you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or other podcast apps.
The New York Times reported today that Australia’s government is charging Elon Musk’s platform $610,500 AUD (about $384,000 USD) for not answering all of its questions about how it handles child abuse imagery.
The regulator reportedly didn’t get enough detail from Google either, but while it only got a warning, “X’s lack of a response was more extensive.”
