Twitter - X

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.”

We’d already learned the company now known as X handed over some Trump information as part of a probe into his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, but newly unsealed documents provide a little more detail about what that included:

In July, a federal judge decided Biden administration officials violated the First Amendment while contacting social media companies about removing posts with covid misinformation.

A new Justice Department filing says that Elon Musk’s actions at X (formerly Twitter) might have violated a privacy order from the FTC, according to The Washington Post.

Semafor has a story saying that could be the case.

A panel of judges ruled that government officials crossed a line while pressuring social media companies to curb covid misinformation, writing that they aren’t “permitted to advance these interests to the extent that it engages in viewpoint suppression.”

There aren’t a lot of surprises here, but there’s a lot more color on the events we all saw: Musk’s capriciousness about the deal, the attempt to recreate the dot-com boom company X, and Musk’s dialogue with Sam Bankman-Fried.

In the middle of the NBA playoffs, Eric Lewis was suspended for allegedly responding to criticism of himself and other refs on a “burner” account, despite a policy barring referees from discussing officiating without approval. The 19-year vet had just refereed game one of the Western Conference finals, and even LeBron James took note.

First, it was by the cool kids at a Dave Chapelle show, then Captain Hardcore got booed again over the weekend by a bunch of nerds while attending the world championship final of Valorant in Los Angeles with his son. Welcome to hell.