Twitter - X

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.

The company announced “early access to the X Hiring Beta” that’s available to Verified Organizations (aka gold checks that pay X / Twitter at least $1,000 per month for the privilege). Organizations that use it can feature job listings on their X profiles — you can see how it works on Vercel’s profile.

The post seems to be part of Musk’s latest campaign to encourage writers and journalists to post more on the platform. News organizations may not be as interested if X actually goes through with removing headlines from links to news articles, though.

Matt Binder of Mashable offers an analysis of data collected on basic account information from all the X accounts that follow Musk. Here are some stats from the article:

In the approximately ten months since Elon Musk took over Twitter, there’s hardly been a week when the social network (or its owner) wasn’t in upheaval. So while some people are staying put, others are moving on. If you’re one of the latter, it’s probably a good idea to delete all your previous tweets first. Here’s how.

The rebranding of Tweetdeck has finally been announced. Tweetdeck users began noticing a paywall and the new name of the popular Twitter app on Tuesday, but there was no official communication from X, the company formerly known as Twitter, until today.

If you really want to extra verify yourself, I guess that’s coming. Let’s hope it’s not a system that’s only available to X Premium subscribers, but since you already have to pay to be verified, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the case.

Those are words a US District Court Judge said to Twitter’s attorney, Ari Holtzblatt, during a February hearing about Donald Trump’s Twitter data. Holtzblatt had no idea:

Friend of The Verge Cameron Faulkner showed me today that retweets are now called “reposts,” and as my colleague Alex Cranz wrote about recently, the old tweet button now says “post.”

The platform formerly known as Twitter is discontinuing its “Follower Objective” ads, Axios reports, which are the ones that include a prominent “Follow” button in the promoted post. The implication is that X wants to nudge advertisers towards more multimedia rich ad styles, even if that means giving up a format estimated to be worth over $100 million to the company annually.