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Today, Elon Musk's X Corp. sued to block California's content moderation law, AB 587. In its complaint, filed a US district court in California, X Corp. is seeking a preliminary and permanent injunction stopping California Attorney General Robert Bonta from enforcing the law.

AB 587 passed in September 2022, requiring social media platforms to submit a "terms of service report" semi-annually to California's attorney general, providing "a detailed description of content moderation practices used" and "information about whether, and if so how, the social media company defines and moderates" hate speech or racism, extremism or radicalization, disinformation or misinformation, harassment, and foreign political interference. Under the law, social media platforms must also provide information and statistics on any content moderation actions taken in those categories.

In X's complaint, the company accused California of trying to dictate X's terms of service and compel "controversial disclosures about how X Corp. moderates content on its platform."

Enlarge (credit: Manuel Augusto Moreno | Moment )

Just two weeks after Elon Musk took over Twitter in fall 2022, he told employees that his big plan to save the social media platform from bankruptcy was to turn it into a bank . Since then, he has rebranded the platform as X, and banking regulators in eight US states have approved his applications for money-transmitting licenses.

Now, as X continues filing for money-transmitting licenses— in pursuit of turning X into an "everything app," a one-stop destination where users bank, shop, communicate, and basically spend all their time online—US banking regulators are being urged to reconsider approving X's applications to provide financial services, The Guardian reported . And Ars confirmed that states that already granted licenses are being pressured to revoke them.

In an open letter reviewed by Ars, lawyers at Walden Macht & Haran LLP—who are representing a Saudi family suing Twitter/X —warned both “attorneys general and banking commissioners across 50 states” that Musk's company should be considered "unfit" to hold banking licenses. They alleged that X is unfit for banking due to its alleged treatment of users’ personal data and "intentional complicity" in human rights violations. These grievances, The Guardian reported, also call into question whether X "can be trusted to abide by federal and state laws protecting consumer data and records."

Enlarge / Twitter's new X logo. (credit: Twitter )

Twitter has replaced its longtime bird logo with an X in order to fit owner Elon Musk's preferred aesthetic. Musk is famously a fan of the letter X, applying it to everything from his companies to his children's names.

The branding change comes about three months after Musk officially replaced Twitter the company with a successor firm called X Corp. Over the weekend, Musk wrote that "soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds," and invited users to come up with a new logo. He also wrote that a tweet will now be called an "X," and noted that his X.com domain now redirects to Twitter.

Musk chose a logo offered by a Twitter user but wrote that it will probably be changed later and "certainly will be refined." The X logo was suggested yesterday by Sawyer Merritt, who initially said it had been used for a now-discontinued podcast about Musk .

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Elon Musk's X Corp. is suing four unidentified data scrapers accused of "severely tax[ing]" Twitter's servers and degrading the social network's user experience. The defendants, known only by their IP addresses so far, allegedly "engaged in widespread unlawful scraping of data from Twitter" by "flooding Twitter's sign-up page with automated requests."

"The volume of these requests far exceeded what any single individual could send to a server in a given period and clearly indicated that these automated requests were aimed at scraping data from Twitter. These requests have severely taxed X Corp.'s servers and impaired the user experience for millions of X Corp.'s customers," the lawsuit alleged.

The lawsuit , which seeks damages of at least $1 million, was filed last week in Dallas County District Court and reported yesterday by the Dallas-based station WFAA. The defendants are four John Does. Twitter hopes to learn their true identities during discovery.

Enlarge (credit: Clive Mason - Formula 1 / Contributor | Formula 1 )

The new features on Twitter keep coming, as CEO Elon Musk has announced that today the platform will release an early version of encrypted direct messages that will "grow in sophistication rapidly." The move seemingly signaled Musk's intention to entice users to spend more time on the platform by maximizing the privacy of personal communications.

"The acid test is that I could not see your DMs even if there was a gun to my head," Musk tweeted.

In the same tweet, Musk said that voice and video chat from Twitter handles would be "coming soon," and he confirmed that any users with the latest version of the app "can DM reply to any message in the thread (not just most recent) and use any emoji reaction."