Enlarge (credit: Anadolu Agency / Contributor | Anadolu Agency )

Last month, X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, sued a group of hate speech researchers in the United Kingdom, claiming that they had instigated advertiser boycotts that allegedly lost the platform "tens of millions" of dollars. Now, X owner Elon Musk has threatened to sue another group advocating against hate speech, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which Musk claimed did even more damage—allegedly causing X to lose billions in ad revenue.

Musk spent the long weekend posting on X about his concerns with the ADL. He claimed that the ADL "has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it and me of being anti-Semitic," saying that "based on what we’ve heard from advertisers, the ADL seems to be responsible for most" of X's revenue loss.

"Our US advertising revenue is still down 60 percent, primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL (that’s what advertisers tell us), so they almost succeeded in killing X/Twitter!" Musk posted on X.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto )

Today, an unsealed court document revealed that, earlier this year, a federal judge held Twitter (now called X) in contempt of court. The judge imposed $350,000 in sanctions.

Sanctions were applied after the social media platform delayed compliance with a federal search warrant that required Twitter to hand over Donald Trump's Twitter data without telling the former president about the warrant for 180 days.

At first, Twitter resisted producing Trump's data and argued that the government's nondisclosure order violated the First Amendment and the Stored Communications Act. However, US circuit judge Florence Pan wrote that the court was largely unpersuaded by Twitter's arguments, mostly because the government's interest in Trump's data as part of its ongoing January 6 investigation was "unquestionably compelling."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Chris Delmas)

Elon Musk's decision to rebrand Twitter as "X" wouldn't be complete without a change to the company's official Twitter account. The @X handle was already taken by a user who registered it over 16 years ago, but that wasn't much of an obstacle—Twitter simply took over the username and offered its longtime owner some merchandise but no monetary compensation.

San Francisco-based photographer Gene X Hwang was @X on Twitter from March 2007 until yesterday. "They just took it essentially—kinda what I thought might happen," Hwang told The Telegraph . "They did send an email saying it is the property of 'x' essentially."

Hwang confirmed to Ars today that "there was no financial compensation" offered to him. The company offered "to switch the @x account and its history/followers etc to a new handle once I select one that is available," Hwang told us. "They also offered some merch and to meet with the management team as well."

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 .

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Christopher Furlong )

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: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto )

Data shows that a sudden spike in interest in Meta's Threads—which surpassed 100 million signups in five days, Mark Zuckerberg boasted yesterday—has likely already put a tiny dent in Twitter's traffic, The Wall Street Journal reported .

The news comes after a tweet from Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince went viral. In it, Prince shared a Cloudflare chart showing that since January, Twitter traffic—compared to other popular websites—has been "tanking."

During Threads' first two days online, Twitter traffic dropped by 5 percent compared to the same two days in the prior week, web analytics firm SimilarWeb reported. When measuring year over year, Twitter's traffic dropped by 11 percent.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Duncan Hull / Getty)

Elon Musk's X Corp. this week sued a law firm that Twitter hired last year after Musk tried to break their $44 billion merger agreement. Musk's lawsuit in San Francisco County Superior Court alleges that Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz overcharged Twitter when it collected $90 million—including $84.3 million on the same day Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter.

"This action for equitable relief arises out of an effort by Wachtell to fundamentally alter its fee arrangement as litigation counsel in the twilight of its representation of Twitter to obtain an improper bonus payment in violation of its fiduciary and ethical obligations to its client," claimed the lawsuit filed by X Corp., the successor company to Twitter. "Wachtell exploited a corporate client left unprotected by lame duck fiduciaries who had lost their motivation to act in Twitter's best interest pending its imminent sale to Elon Musk and his entities, X Holdings I, Inc. and X Holdings II, Inc."

When Musk tried to pull out of his commitment to buy Twitter, the company hired Wachtell in July 2022 to handle the lawsuit that eventually forced Musk to complete the merger. Musk finally honored the merger contract in October when it became clear that he would likely lose in court.

Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. (credit: Getty Images | AFP)

The proposed cage match between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg might never happen, but the tech titans may soon battle in a more civil arena. Musk's X Corp., the successor company to Twitter, yesterday threatened to sue Meta over alleged intellectual property violations in Meta's new Threads social network .

Musk's lawyer Alex Spiro wrote a letter on behalf of X Corp. to Meta CEO Zuckerberg. "Based on recent reports regarding your recently launched 'Threads' app, Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms has engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property."

The letter was revealed today in a Semafor article . "Competition is fine, cheating is not," Musk tweeted about the letter.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket )

In what might be another blow to the stability of Twitter's trust and safety efforts, the company has allegedly stopped paying for Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS), which host tools that support the platform's safety measures, Platformer reported this weekend.

According to Platformer, Twitter relies on Google Cloud to host services "related to fighting spam, removing child sexual abuse material, and protecting accounts, among other things." That contract is up for renewal at the end of this month after being negotiated and signed prior to Elon Musk's takeover. Since "at least" March, Twitter has been pushing to renegotiate the contract ahead of renewal—unsurprisingly seeking to lower costs, Platformer reported.

But now it's unclear if the companies will find agreeable new terms on time or if Musk already intends to cancel the contract. Platformer reported that Twitter is rushing to transition services off the Google Cloud Platform and seemingly plans to drop the contract amid failed negotiations.