Twitter - X

Reuters reports that X (fka Twitter), YouTube, and Telegram were sent notices by India’s federal Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) requesting prompt and permanent removal of any child sexual abuse material.

KTLA has had a look around Meta’s X/Twitter competitor and points out that several major brands, including the BBC, CBS, and the NFL, have quietly stopped posting on Threads from their main accounts. Those that have continued are seeing limited engagement, which makes sense given how overall user numbers have dipped (Meta, obviously, is reportedly working hard on changing this).

We haven’t updated this timeline of ill-fated celebrity “creative directors” for tech companies in several years, but something about today’s calorie-free Paris Hilton / X announcement really cements my belief that we’re just reliving 2015 on the internet in every way.

Inspired by X CEO Linda Yaccarino flashing her home screen during her Code Conference interview, many of my colleagues at The Verge have been sharing their own home screens on Threads.

Interesting.

During her bizarre interview at the Code Conference yesterday, Yaccarino held up her iPhone to the audience while seemingly indicating that it was supposed to represent X. I was sitting near the front of the stage and squinting to try and see what was on it.

Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, was a late add to the agenda, and that meant two of the last sessions of the event were a kind of meta conversation about Twitter’s past and X’s future.

She mostly talked about the value of spirited debate, but did say this: “All I’m saying is that the the idea of the inability to have a debate or feedback, I haven’t experienced or I’ll say I haven’t experienced it yet.”

An actual question Linda Yaccarino has posed to the audience. Not me!

She’s completely dodged Julia Boorstin’s question about if everyone will be charged to use X.

From an “operating cash flow perspective,” the company is “just about break even.” In early 2024, “we’ll be turning a profit.”

“There is no analog for the book that is being written right now,” she said onstage at Code. That sounds like a ridiculously lofty claim to me! She says that there have been over 100 products shipped since the acquisition.

Yoel Roth said he said that to Elon Musk when he left the company. He’s rooting for CEO Linda Yaccarino, the current CEO of X — who will be speaking at Code in just a bit.

I asked him if there would ever be a platform that’s as culturally relevant as Twitter, now X. “I do hope somebody can capture that,” he said. “I hope they can do it better than Twitter.”

At Code 2023, he noted that of all the VLOPs, TikTok hasn’t laid off members of its trust and safety team and that it continues to invest heavily in identifying inauthentic behavior. Not the answer I was expecting!

That’s how Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, characterized the decision immediately after Elon Musk took over the company to change the logged out experience to the explore page.

There’s another Twitter spat going on, this time between market-makers DWF Labs, GSR and Wintermute. Worth keeping an eye on, because at least once when there was this kind of Twitter trash-talking — between FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried and Binance’s Changpeng “CZ” Zhao — FTX melted down.

During a livestreamed meeting between Musk and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Musk hinted at requiring users to pay a “small monthly payment” to use X to combat “vast armies of bots.”