Twitter was never the largest social network, but it remained one of the most influential as a home to celebrities, journalists, and influencers of all sorts and the go-to network for breaking news. Since Elon Musk purchased it, Twitter’s employee count has dropped by more than half, advertisers have tightened budgets, and it’s charging money for access to verified checkmarks and Tweetdeck. Oh, and now it’s called X instead of Twitter.
After experimenting with its $1-ish annual “Not A Bot” subscriptions in New Zealand and the Philippines, Elon Musk suggests that a broader rollout is coming to the service built upon freely contributed content. Only question is when?
While the fee might curtail bot creation, it will definitely curtail new user signups.
Elon Musk’s lawyers have reportedly undercut his free-speech theatrics related to ye old Twitter’s refusal to block accounts as ordered by the country’s highest court. According to Reuters, X’s lawyers said the following in a letter addressed to Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes on Monday:
“As already communicated to the federal police, X Brasil informs that all orders issued by this Supreme Court and the Superior Electoral Court will continue to be fully complied with by X Corp.”
US District Court Judge Amit Mehta granted a preliminary injunction (PDF) against Texas AG Ken Paxton’s investigation of left-leaning nonprofit Media Matters, writing that there was “evidence of retaliatory intent” in Paxton’s actions.
Media Matters had sued Paxton for his investigation, which launched the same day Elon Musk’s X sued the nonprofit over its report that X displayed ads on pro-Nazi content.
[Media Matters for America]
While the platform’s influence has waned, your dormant Twitter account could still have embarrassing or dire consequences if hijacked. So it’s probably worthwhile to setup a more secure passwordless passkey on your iPhone just in case.
The company said Grok 1.5, the first release since open-sourcing the model, performed significantly better in coding and math-related reasoning than its previous version. xAI’s testing showed Grok 1.5 outdid models like Claude 2, Gemini Pro 1.5, and GPT-4 in some problem-solving benchmarks.
Grok 1.5 will be available to early users of the model on X soon.
Elon’s X Premium package pitches have included forcing them on celebrities, bundling access to an AI bot of uncertain value, and a chance at a slice of ad revenue generated by other paying customers, in addition to an edit button, blog posts, and fewer ads.
Now he’s offering Premium or Premium Plus (normally $8 or $16 per month) as a free sweetener for accounts with at least 2,500 “Verified subscriber” followers (5,000 for Plus) that presumably also pay for access.
The head of Threads and Mastodon competitor Bluesky on why she thinks decentralization is the way forward in a post-Twitter internet.
Earlier this month, a Fortune story reported that one of X’s latest moves since Twitter entered its Musk era involves whipping up a video app for smart TVs, with one source calling it “identical” to YouTube’s own.
Assuming this video posted by app researcher Nima Owji is what Fortune’s source saw... yeah, I’d reckon there’s some resemblance.
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has open-sourced the “base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1,” the model that underpins the Grok chatbot on X. xAI’s blog says Grok-1 is a 314 billion parameter pre-training model that’s “not fine-tuned for any particular task.”
VentureBeat notes that while the model’s Apache license 2.0 means it can be freely used (with some minor conditions), it won’t have live access to X content by default.
[x.ai]
According to Hellgate the organization sent the subpoena to X in an effort to gather as much information about the X user and his account as possible and asked the company not to tell the guy about the subpoena.
X told him anyways and also suggested he get a lawyer, which he promptly did. Now the NYPD has withdrawn the administrative subpoena rather than try and justify it in a court. It’s unclear how frequently the NYPD has gone after watchdogs and reporters using these subpoenas but this is at least the second time in four years.
Yikes.
Match runs Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, and many other popular dating platforms. Yoel Roth eventually left Twitter in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover — and received death threats after Musk tweeted about him — and tells Wired in an interview that he’ll work on improving spam detection, removing underage users, and protecting users in marginalized groups in dating apps.
If you pay for the platform formerly known as Twitter, then you can post Articles on X. Better known as blog posts, they can feature stylized text, embedded images, and videos.
They’ll show up on the timeline with other tweets, but to publish one, you must belong to a Verified Organization or pay $16 monthly for the Premium Plus package. $8 Premium or $3 Basic subscribers will have to live without it, post regular tweets, or use Tumblr.
They are discussing options that may make the debt less risky to hold. After the events of 2022, when Musk bought Twitter, it was difficult for these banks to offload the debt; they’ve agreed — for now anyway — to coordinate a sale together when X is “on firmer financial footing.”
The parties held a conference call to argue about whether the nonprofit’s anti-hate speech researchers illegally scraped data from Elon Musk’s social network, and a judge seems dubious.
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer was skeptical that when the nonprofit entered the standard user contract governing all Twitter and X users, it could have foreseen that Musk would buy Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and welcome back users it had banned for posting hateful content. [...] “I am trying to figure out, in my mind, how that’s possibly true, because I don’t think it is.”
Judge Breyer didn’t indicate when we might get a ruling, Reuters says.
The platform started rolling out passkey support on its iOS app last month, but now it’s available to all iPhone users in the US. That means you can use Face ID, Touch ID, or your device’s passcode to log in to your account instead of entering a password. You can learn how to enable passkeys on X from this support page.
Premium users on iOS will see the feature first, according to X designer Andrea Conway. The feature will let you sort through posts based on the date, language, location, and more.
Two changes spotted by app researchers show how the platforms are testing tweaks — X with carousel-style image galleries instead of grids, and Threads with buttons spaced apart.
Nima Owji shared the change on X and Alessandro Paluzzi pointed out the Threads update. Meta insisted that Threads isn’t an X clone — but at least in terms of look and feel, the two are getting closer and closer.
This time it involves not Taylor Swift, but comedian Bobbi Althoff, who’s become a target for users chasing clout with nonconsensual faked nudes under X’s anemic moderation:
One of the most popular posts directing viewers to the video remained online after more than 30 hours. Another post, which promised to “send full Bobbi Althoff leaks to everyone who like and comment,” was online for 20 hours — X removed it after The Washington Post sought comment on the fakes. By the time it was removed, the video post had been viewed more than 5 million times.
[The Washington Post]
Yulia accused Vladimir Putin of killing her husband, opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and vowed to continue her husband’s fight against Putin’s “crazy regime.” Then, on Tuesday morning, her X account was abruptly suspended for a short time.
A message from the @Support account followed up saying, “Our platform’s defense mechanism against manipulation and spam mistakenly flagged @yulia_navalnaya as violating our rules. We unsuspended the account as soon as we became aware of the error, and will be updating the defense.”
[X]
Dittmann has found media attention before due to sounding almost identical to the Tesla CEO, but after appearing on Alex Jones’s Infowars podcast, people now suspect that he may actually be Musk masquerading under a false name.
It’s an uncanny vocal likeness, and it’s not like Musk doesn’t have a history of allegedly using burner accounts.
