We talked about the past year of Twitter chaos and what a wild ride it has been. You can listen below or add the show to your podcast player of choice at this link.
After New York’s MTA announced it was leaving Twitter yesterday, The Verge contacted Bay Area Rapid Transit — which like the MTA was knocked offline earlier this month by Twitter’s API changes — to see if it would follow suit. “We are continuing to use Twitter while closely monitoring the situation,” media relations manager James Allison tells us.
but not enough to aggressively fight back. Rest of World reports that government requests for Twitter to censor posts or provide data more than doubled under Musk, and Musk’s team has been doing little to combat them.
In the year before Musk’s acquisition, the [requests that Twitter complies with in full] had hovered around 50 percent, in line with the compliance rate reported in the company’s final transparency report. After Musk’s takeover, the number jumps to 83 percent (808 requests out of a total of 971).
The latest example is analytics firm Parse.ly, which said today it will no longer offer detailed info about how sites receive traffic from Twitter. It blamed the company for “dramatically” changing the terms of access for its API “on short notice.” Twitter is already a small traffic driver, but if publishers can’t see what it’s delivering, they’ll care even less, too.
We sometimes forget that, for all its faults, Twitter is still an important platform for sharing information online. Yes, it’s funny to see the $8-club complain about low engagement on their bad tweets, but impersonation and fake accounts can potentially have serious, real-world consequences, as Vox reports.
Are there any bombshell revelations in Elon Musk’s accidentally revealed alt Twitter account? Not really. Is its existence funnier than the former FBI director having a secret Twitter account? Probably not. Am I impressed at how quickly it was discovered after Musk hinted at its existence? Yes.
In a segment for This American Life, Roth, who resigned shortly after Elon Musk officially took over Twitter, talks about what brought him to eventually leave the company.
[This American Life]
Ryan Broderick has some thoughts on the ongoing verification demolition derby, which has somehow gone even worse than I thought it would. Sure, someone could probably give Elon Musk useful advice, but this is way funnier! Webbed site.
[www.garbageday.email]
