Enlarge (credit: FT montage/Getty Images/Bloomberg)

From a secretive “war room” at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters last month, Elon Musk’s trusted lieutenants pored over a list of employees, showing how much they cost the social media company.

The billionaire owner’s “transition team,” headed by Steve Davis, who leads the Musk-owned Boring Company, then began to phone staffers. Some were asked to justify their role; others to recommend which colleagues to retain.

Those deliberations informed Musk’s latest layoffs at Twitter, as part of his efforts to bring the lossmaking company to financial health while also battling an advertiser exodus and unwieldy debt servicing bill.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg )

After a tweet exchange where Twitter CEO Elon Musk questioned a fired former Twitter executive’s disabilities and work performance, Musk has issued a rare apology and offered to rehire former Senior Director of Product Design Haraldur “Halli” Thorleifsson.

Thorleifsson joined Twitter in 2021, saying on the podcast Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast that he decided to let his successful design agency Ueno get acquired by Twitter because he really believed that, much like Musk, Twitter had “never lived up to its potential.” Until his exit from Twitter, Thorleifsson led an innovation team at Twitter, but Musk apparently was not familiar with the meaningful contributions Thorleifsson made to the company until after he let Thorleifsson go. Now Musk apparently regrets dismissing Thorleifsson.

“I would like to apologize to Halli for my misunderstanding of his situation,” Musk tweeted. “It was based on things I was told that were untrue or, in some cases, true, but not meaningful.”

Enlarge (credit: Anadolu Agency via Getty Images )

Elon Musk and the EU are in a dispute over the Twitter owner’s plan to use more volunteers and artificial intelligence to help moderate the social media platform, as the company responds to strict new rules designed to police online content.

According to four people familiar with talks between Musk, Twitter executives, and regulators in Brussels, the billionaire has been told to hire more human moderators and fact-checkers to review posts.

The demand complicates Musk’s efforts to reorganize the lossmaking business he acquired for $44 billion in October. The new owner has slashed more than half of Twitter’s 7,500 staff, including the entire trust and safety teams in some offices, while seeking cheaper methods to monitor tweets.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto )

Yesterday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk declared that Twitter will now be temporarily suspending any accounts found to be “engaging in repeated, egregious weaponization” of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Musk’s tweet came at the same time that an intense copyright dispute was unfolding that resulted in the suspension of a rightsholder’s Twitter account. The suspension came after a professional photographer and Twitter user, @NightLights_AM, submitted a takedown notice to a hobbyist Twitter user, @Rainmaker1973, who posted one of the photographer’s videos without permission.

It’s difficult to track down the full story here because the suspended account’s tweets are unavailable, and some of the hobbyist account’s tweets have been deleted. And it’s unclear if Musk was aware of this particular dispute or the subsequent account suspension of the rightsholder. But TorrentFreak documented the DMCA Twitter saga in great detail, gathering archived and cached tweets to piece together what happened.

According to TorrentFreak, @NightLights_AM is run by Norway-based nature and astrophotographer Adrien Mauduit, whose Twitter feed was full of colorful videos and photos that he took as an “Aurora chasing specialist.” In early March, Mauduit uploaded a video of a geomagnetic storm that was then embedded in a tweet sent by @Rainmaker1973, which is run by an Italy-based Twitter user named Massimo.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Thomas Trutschel )

When Elon Musk blamed Twitter's outage yesterday on code that "is extremely brittle for no good reason," he ignored the effect his massive layoffs had on Twitter's ability to keep the site running.

Twitter said the outage, which broke links and other functionality for about an hour, was caused by "an internal change that had some unintended consequences." That change, according to a Platformer article , "was part of a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API."

"The company has been building a new, paid API for developers to work with," Platformer wrote, continuing:

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Twitter's revenue and adjusted earnings reportedly fell about 40 percent year over year in December 2022 amid an advertiser exodus following Elon Musk's takeover.

Twitter no longer reports earnings publicly since Musk bought the company and took it private in late October. But Twitter reported the December 2022 revenue and earnings declines in an update to investors, according to "people familiar with the matter" cited in a Wall Street Journal report on Friday.

Many big companies cut advertising spending on Twitter shortly after Musk's acquisition, largely over concerns about content moderation. Twitter offered special deals to advertisers throughout December 2022, but it wasn't enough to prevent the 40 percent revenue and earnings declines.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

Twitter suffered an embarrassing technology failure today that temporarily broke links to outside websites and even to Twitter's own webpages. The problem lasted for about 45 minutes or so.

In our tests, clicking any link brought up this error message:

{"errors":[{"message":"Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint, please see https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api for more information","code":467}]}

Clicking that developer link didn't clear anything up while the problem was still happening because it brought up the same API error message. In addition to news articles and other outbound links, the error message appeared when we tried to click Twitter's terms of service, privacy policy, cookie policy, and other similar pages. Some images embedded in tweets were broken, and there were reports of TweetDeck being broken too.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Stable Diffusion)

“Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” Twitter CEO Elon Musk said last October, just weeks before assuming control of the platform.

In tweets, Musk mused that he “could be wrong,” but he expected that his purchase of Twitter would provide the infrastructure to launch his own super app within the next three to five years. Whether Twitter would become an arm of X or vice versa, Musk planned to leverage Twitter’s millions of daily active US users to launch an irresistibly convenient platform where Americans could go to text, call, pay, shop, bank, and post online.

To some experts, what Musk suggested sounds too ambitious—or even impossible. United States regulators have begun more carefully scrutinizing both antitrust concerns at tech companies and rapid tech developments in the financial industry. More oversight in these sectors has made it increasingly difficult for Big Tech companies to attempt to launch their own super apps as they chase the success of China’s widely used WeChat. But as Musk told an audience at the Baron Investment Conference last year, he has been dreaming about creating an app that reimagines the digital payments industry since 2000—more than a decade before WeChat launched—and he said that buying Twitter was his first step toward rapidly realizing that dream.

Bye bye Facebook, bye bye Twitter, the federated platforms are ready to take over!

The whole Fediverse is booming, Mastodon looks like a really promising replacement for the little blue bird and Peertube to replace Youtube. Many other platforms are currently being developed around the ActivityPub ecosystem like explained in this article The Fediverse is so much bigger than Mastodon.

We think that Movim also fit perfectly in there by being a perfect blogging and chatting platform. Fully built on the widely used Internet standard XMPP it is packed with plenty of exciting features in a nice and friendly user interface.

The Libervia project is actually working on a bridge between ActivityPub (the Fediverse core protocol) and XMPP which would allow us to connect all those exciting platforms with Movim!

Feel free to share the word to help us!

We are just at the beginning of this exciting journey :)

edhelas

#movim #xmpp #activitypub #fediverse #mastodon #libervia #twitter #facebook