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.
Nitter, the open-source, tracker-free Twitter front end, joins the other great third-party apps in the API afterlife.
Activist IT collective NoLog, which ran one of the largest Nitter instances, has shut it down, three weeks after Nitter’s developer said the project was dead.
Elon Musk’s revamped X ad business has included a “revenue sharing” program that requires payment to have the potential of getting paid and shown ads alongside white nationalist profiles.
X, as it attempts to become a YouTube alternative, says it has over 80,000 creators monetizing their posts and is trying to address brand safety issues with Creator Targeting:
This means giving advertisers more control to be able to use the self-serve X Ads Manager to run pre-roll video ads against the video content of their chosen creator(s) in both the home timeline and profile.
Soon we’ll add the ability to serve ads only on an individual creator’s profile – completely eliminating the unlikely event of unwanted adjacencies while aligning your brand to creators you love most.
It didn’t say how big of a cut creators will get if their profile is targeted or if they can choose which advertisers are shown.
Besides its arrangement for weekly 5-minute WWE matches, X is partnering with BetMGM to slap gambling odds at the top of event pages for sporting events, starting with the Super Bowl.
The platform formerly known as Twitter is far from the only one suddenly flooded with odds and gambling promos (see ESPN Bet). A recent 60 Minutes report dug into how the services use data to target when someone’s most likely to place a bet.
In addition to the WWE’s 2025 switch to Netflix, it will also broadcast timed matches via the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Like Tucker Carlson’s two-hour interview with Vladimir Putin, these will be produced live to tape exclusively for the platform, but they’ll only be five minutes long and will feature “your favorite WWE Superstars.” THR notes their agreement is for two years of weekly episodes.
The buzziest new thing in social networking is a big deal. It’s also very confusing. And it’s not actually new. Let’s talk about it.
Post launched in 2022 as a way to read ad-free news articles and paywalled content with a points-based system. But now, it’s rolling out a number of improvements, including native comments you can leave on feeds, repost, and tag people in.
There’s also an update to make navigating between posts and comment threads smoother, along with a new real-time notification system that will keep you “up to date with accurate comment counts, activity stream updates, and much more.” Post is also working on building achievements, status badges, and rewards for users.
[Post News]
After graphic AI-generated images of Taylor Swift became a trending topic on X, 404 Media reported on people creating and trading similar pictures created using Microsoft’s Designer AI image generator. By altering prompts, they were able to get around simple name blocks.
After CEO Satya Nadella said last week that guardrails are “our responsibility,” 404 Media reports the loopholes have been closed. Sarah Bird, a Responsible AI Engineering Lead at Microsoft confirmed the changes, saying:
We are committed to providing a safe and respectful experience for everyone. We are continuing to investigate these images and have strengthened our existing safety systems to further prevent our services from being misused to help generate images like them.
The company, which had been fined $350,000 for the delay, argued that President Donald Trump should have been notified when prosecutors investigating him for election interference issued a search warrant for his account data, according to The Washington Post.
Twitter, now X, can appeal to the Supreme Court, which recently declined to hear the company’s broader legal challenge arguing that it should be able to publicly share government demands for user data.
[The Washington Post]
The giant hashtag statue? Jon Ball, a former Twitter engineering manager, owns that. (“I think I got a pretty decent deal on that,” he said. “My wife doesn’t think so.”) Paintings of famous Twitter moments? People bought those, too. What was the experience of the auction like? “It’d be like if somebody you love went bankrupt and then you’re bidding on the remains.”
There are still some mysteries, though — like where the log cabin went.
After the SEC’s X account was hijacked to post the agency’s premature approval of Bitcoin ETFs, Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) are looking for answers — particularly, whether the SEC had 2FA turned on.
SEC’s failure to follow cybersecurity best practices is inexcusable, particularly given the agency’s new requirements for cybersecurity disclosure... We urge you to investigate the agency’s practices related to the use of MFA, and in particular, phishing-resistant MFA, to identify any remaining security gaps that must be addressed.
“I kind of don’t understand the trade here?” Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine writes of the hack of the SEC’s Twitter account yesterday, in which a fake approval of Bitcoin ETFs was briefly posted.
Linda Yaccarino was at CES yesterday to try to talk more businesses into using Xitter. If I were a troll, using the opportunity of screwing with one of X’s core constituencies and the feds at that precise moment in time would be too good to pass up. The trade is an epic lol, I believe.
[Bloomberg]
X’s news account claimed responsibility for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne having “rescinded its disciplinary action against Juan David Campolargo,” a student who had gotten in trouble for an account that pointed to events on campus that had free food available.
The low-stakes case was the first apparent instance of the site defending a user in trouble for their posts. The Verge has reached out to the university for confirmation.
The Elon Musk-owned platform quietly removed the option for Premium subscribers to use NFTs as their profile pictures, as spotted earlier by TechCrunch. X also scrubbed all mention of NFT profile pictures from its support page.
This comes a little less than one year after Meta ended tests that let users share NFTs on Instagram and Facebook.
X CEO and former award-winning DEI executive Linda Yaccarino is promoting the company’s 2024 plans for AI and Grok, as well as the “video first” experience that included so many unauthorized Super Mario Bros. Movie streams.
Upcoming features mentioned include a “see dissimilar posts” option, as well as payments. The latter is something Elon mentioned when he took over the company, and, as Liz Lopatto explains, has been a pursuit of his for much longer than that.
That sentence may look familiar! Headlines were added back on the web yesterday, but this morning, I noticed they were gone.
X owner Elon Musk said in November that titles would appear over URL cards “in an upcoming release;” hopefully they officially roll out soon.
X (formerly Twitter) now has a “basic” tier for Verified Organizations, which gets you a gold checkmark badge (and a few other benefits) for $200 per month instead of $1,000 per month for “full access.”
While X claims this new tier is “designed for smaller businesses,” the more affordable plan is perhaps an admission that not enough businesses are paying for the more expensive plan.
Fidelity, an investor that put over $300 million into Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, now believes the company is worth 71.5 percent less than the $44 billion paid for it, Axios reports. That implies a total valuation of between $12 and $13 billion and includes a drop of 10.7 percent in the month of November alone when Musk told advertisers to “go fuck” themselves.
Musk keeps asking creators to post their videos to X. Turns out there’s a very obvious reason why they’re not.
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.
He says execs’ promises of a 50 percent payout for those who remained through Q1 of 2023 kept employees around during Elon’s “hardcore” takeover, but now the company argues its oral promise wasn’t enforceable. The judge didn’t buy that, writing that “Twitter’s contrary arguments all fail,” so the case will proceed.
[DocumentCloud]
