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.
Based on the screenshot below from app researcher Nima Owji, the new checkmark would be in the same menu as other per-post options that let you limit replies. X employee Christopher Stanley confirmed the feature, Engadget spotted.
I nodded a lot at this Max Read piece about how we perceive the world now, particularly the current “vibe shift” in politics but also just... everything. I feel like we’ve been debating “is Twitter really the world?” for 15 years now, but the answer feels more slippery than ever.
One way of thinking about every American election since 2015 is as a referendum on whether or not Twitter is real. Did the “prevailing vibes” on Twitter reflect the electoral choices of millions of Americans?
[maxread.substack.com]
The platform is promoting trending topics including “staged” and “#falseflag” — the kinds of conspiracy theories that other major social networks might moderate away.
That’s a whole lot easier than scrolling through several years worth of bookmarks just to find a particular post. The feature is only available on the web and iOS for now.
As reported by The Financial Times:
In previously unreleased figures, X said its number of global daily active users in the second quarter of this year was 251mn, a rise of 1.6 per cent from the same period the year before.
The stalled growth and general turmoil at X, ever since Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, created an opening for Zuckerberg’s Threads to attract 175 million monthly users in its first year.
Bloomberg has a big report on X’s efforts to let you make payments through the app, including that it has made agreements with payment processors like Stripe.
Bloomberg also found not-great financials from 2023:
[Documents] show that X generated $1.48 billion in revenue in the first six months of 2023, down almost 40% from the same period in 2022, before Musk bought the company.
If you want the TL;DR, read Kurt Wagner’s Threads thread.
Dorsey donated 14 Bitcoins to Nostr’s anonymous founder in 2022. That founder is Giovanni Torres Parra, according to Business Insider. Parra is a devotee of “far-right conspiracy theorist Olavo de Carvalho,” who “claimed that Pepsi-Cola was flavored with stem cells of aborted fetuses.”
Proof once again that it’s easier to make money when you already have it, especially at the peak of the AI hype cycle.
Four months ago Musk posted the following after the Financial Times said xAI was seeking investments up to $6 billion:
xAI is not raising capital and I have had no conversations with anyone in this regard
Update 5:08AM ET: Added Musk quote.
[x.ai]
It’s been five years since “threadnought,” a giant Twitter thread in which lawyers battled trolls who were trying to silence critics of an anime voice actor accused of sexual misconduct.
Now, with a law firm drafted from the thread’s funniest people, lawyer Akiva Cohen represents many former Twitter employees who are suing Elon Musk over how he fired them after buying the company.
The application to extend an injunction for X to remove posts depicting an attack on a church bishop was refused on Monday, for yet undisclosed reasons. A final hearing is expected in mid-June.
X blocked the video for Australian users but refused to remove it globally, despite the Australian eSafety Commission finding that geoblocking wasn’t enough to comply with its online safety laws.
A judge tossed a lawsuit by Elon Musk’s X against web scraper Bright Data that alleged it illegally circumvented X’s anti-scraping technology. It comes after Musk lost a similar suit against an anti-hate group in March.
Just like PlayStation a few months ago and the Xbox platform last spring, Nintendo’s Twitter sharing features are disappearing as the X API lockdown tightens. (The send friend requests to social media from your Switch feature is also going away.)
The X Gaming account claims “Our partnership with Nintendo remains strong,” so we’ll see which integrations end up on the “Switch 2.”
I mean, what could go wrong? A new video conferencing feature in the style of Zoom, Meet and Microsoft Teams is coming soon to X, according to X user/Elon whisperer DogeDesigner and X Daily News.
X Conferences will be hosted on the the platform’s existing live audio platform X Spaces (which added video earlier this year), according to a screenshot of the beta version.
Jason Parham’s 2021 Wired article about Black Twitter detailed quite a bit about what made the community such an enriching space for Black people. But Hulu’s new docuseries based on the piece looks like going to be focused on detailing how Black Twitter became a broader cultural phenomenon. The series premieres on May 9th.
The app now has 150 million monthly users, Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday during Meta’s earnings call. There were almost 100 million monthly Threads users in October.
The metric I’d really like to see, however, is daily users. Meta is juicing the visibility of Threads posts in the Instagram feed, and I’ve heard that a lot of user growth has been coming from that drive-by traffic. If it really wants to kill X, Meta still needs to build a sticky experience that more people come to daily.
