Twitter - X

In this entry into the list of lawsuits over unpaid Twitter bills, Courthouse News reports Mark Schobinger’s class action lawsuit is over unpaid 2022 annual bonuses. Schobinger, notably, is Twitter’s former senior director of compensation.

X (formerly Twitter) will let you replace the username in a post’s URL with... really, whatever you want, and it will still go to the original post. It’s been that way since at least 2019.

ProPublica and Columbia University identified over 2,200 false or misleading posts from more than 1,300 verified accounts in the month following the Israel-Hamas war’s beginning, garnering half a billion impressions.

It’s about Elon Musk bragging to the banks that backed his Twitter takeover that he never lost money for his investors.

I have spent an alarming amount of time in the last 24 hours reading thousands of the best tweets anyone ever tweeted. We talked about those tweets, our brushes with main-character-ness, and more. Plus, Will Poor resurrects his extremely old Macintosh, and wonders: how can I make this thing last another three decades?

If you missed Sarah Jeong’s piece about the right wing’s coordinated harassment campaign against her (part of our very special Twitter series), you can enjoy it as a TikTok.

Bloomberg cites unnamed sources in this report about how much ad revenue has dropped for the platform formerly known as Twitter as its CTO continues to drive advertisers away, saying it’s on track for $2.5 billion this year despite internal targets for $3 billion.

Even as big advertisers exit, sports Twitter has continued going strong. But now the official Threads account announced that sports/NBA Twitter’s newsbreaker Adrian Wojnarowski “has landed” and is doing a Q&A Friday.

Amicus briefs in the big First Amendment case against the bad Texas and Florida social media laws are getting filed, and Public Knowledge’s submission contains a citation to Welcome to hell, Elon as support for the idea that the real product of any social platform is content moderation. I truly hope Clarence Thomas reads this thing.

According to Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, doing so would open the app up to “spammers and other bad actors” who would “pummel the view with content by simply adding the relevant words or tags.”

After Elon Musk’s endorsement of an antisemitic post led Apple, Disney, IBM, and other major companies to pull advertising from the platform, now an X spokesperson tells the Financial Times it will target smaller businesses instead:

Verge alum Zoë Schiffer just announced her new book, Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter, which will expand on her reporting from Platformer, New York Magazine, and of course, this very website. Here’s what Bloomberg’s Matt Levine has to say about it:

On Wednesday, X owner, executive chair, and chief technical officer Elon Musk used his interview at the DealBook Summit 2023 event to antagonize advertisers (singling out Disney CEO Bob Iger, who was present) that paused doing business with the company, as well as clarifying his previous statements in ways that probably made them worse.

We’re nearing the end of this interview, but Sorkin hasn’t yet asked Musk about X’s lawsuit against Media Matters, which reported that ads were appearing next to Nazi content.

This came right in the middle of a discussion around “free speech” on X. Over the summer, Times links on X took longer to load — Musk didn’t directly answer Sorkin’s question on whether he made a choice to punish the Times.

Sorkin is interjecting and pushing back less, the discussion is meandering, and we’re about 30 minutes over schedule. I’ve lost count of the number of times Sorkin has said, “let me ask you a different question” in order to pivot to something else.

Musk says he hasn’t found anyone who knows why Sam Altman was ousted (and eventually brought back) — but believes a recent AI breakthrough could have caused the power struggle. A recent report suggested that OpenAI may have made progress towards AGI.

The DealBook stage sits in front of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Manhattan. The balloon letters are floating in and out of view behind the background screen outside. It’s unclear who’s behind them.

In a strange turn, we’re now watching Sorkin and Musk talk about the interior “storm” in Musk’s mind.

Here’s Musk responding onstage at DealBook:

That’s Musk’s on-stage message to advertisers who he says are “blackmailing” him — i.e. the companies like Disney, Apple, IBM, and many more that are pulling ads from the platform after his antisemitic posts.

“[The trip to Israel] wasn’t in response to that at all,” Musk says of his post — it wasn’t an “apology tour.”