The IT Nerd

Since starting to cover this story, I’ve been saying on a daily basis that it cannot possibly get any worse. Except that it keeps getting worse and at some point, things will break for Twitter and it will be game over for the platform and it’s rather unstable leader Elon Musk. Here’s what’s happened overnight. And it’s a lot so buckle up:

First up, banned accounts are returning today. And according to Platformer around 62,000 banned or suspended accounts with 10k+ followers have so far been reinstated:

In fact, since Musk’s poll, Twitter has begun the process of reinstating roughly 62,000 accounts with more than 10,000 followers, Platformer has learned, including one account that has over 5 million followers, and 75 accounts with over 1 million followers. (The identities of the accounts could not be learned before press time.) Internally, employees have referred to this event as “the Big Bang.”

The project could cause more instability at Twitter at a time when the company is hemorrhaging engineering talent, according to current employees. Each reinstatement requires Twitter to rebuild a social graph, activating data on who the account follows and who follows the account. For large accounts like Trump’s, with 88 million followers, that’s millions of lists that Twitter has to update and maintain. 

Also, the same Platformer article shows that Musk has apparently come up with his own “reality distortion field” when it comes to Twitter Blue:

The move also comes the same week that Musk plans to relaunch Twitter Blue, allowing anyone to buy a verified badge for $8 a month. An internal document about the launch, designed for employees in sales, says that impersonations have been “extremely rare,” despite all evidence to the contrary. 

“We anticipated early efforts like this from bad actors, and we are adapting dynamically to prevent and detect them,” the document reads. What about “large scale coordinated misinformation attacks funded by wealthy organizations or governments?” the document asks. “Large-scale bad actors would also require a huge supply of unique credit card numbers and mobile phones,” the document says. “As we detect and suspend these, the logistical hurdles to re-offend at scale become insurmountable.”

Uh… No. We saw what happened the last time. It was a mess. And this re-launch has the potential to be the same for Twitter.

Now over to Donald Trump. You know, the first guy to be let back onto Twitter by Musk. Except that he’s still suing Twitter:

Donald Trump is not backing down from his ongoing legal fight against Twitter despite his ban from the site being lifted by Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk.

Trump’s attorney, John Coale, said the former US president has no plans to withdraw his appeal against a May ruling that dismissed his lawsuit against Twitter, per Bloomberg.

Earlier this month, Trump asked an appeals court to revive his legal challenge against Twitter for suspending his account after the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol.

Trump separately sued Meta’s Facebook and Google’s YouTube over similar bans they imposed on him after the riot.

Lawyers for Trump argue that the Twitter ban was “contrary to First Amendment principles,” and amounted to “overtly partisan censorship,” according to court documents.

However, legal experts have said it will be challenging for them to prove that the ban amounted to censorship, per Bloomberg.

Despite Trump’s Twitter account being reinstated, Coale said the former president had no intention to drop the case without reaching an agreement on terms to end the dispute, per Bloomberg.

“There’s more to it than just letting him back in so we want to talk to see if we can figure something out,” Coale said. “You don’t just do things on your own, you should talk to the other side or wait.”

Trump seems to want back onto Twitter. But on his terms. And despite having his own social media platform which he claims that he wants to stick to. That’s curious. We’ll have to keep an eye on this one.

Next up, is Wired reporting that cuts to Twitter CSAM monitors have been drastic. How drastic you ask? Well…:

REMOVING CHILD EXPLOITATION is “priority #1”, Twitter’s new owner and CEO Elon Musk declared last week. But, at the same time, following widespread layoffs and resignations, just one staff member remains on a key team dedicated to removing child sexual abuse content from the site, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who both requested to remain anonymous. 

It’s unclear how many people were on the team before Musk’s takeover. On LinkedIn, WIRED identified four Singapore-based employees who specialize in child safety who said publicly they left Twitter in November. 

With only one person on that time, I am not sure how Musk squares that circle. Because clearly with that staffing level, it’s not “priority #1” for musk.

Finally is CNN reporting that alongside the account restorations, Twitter has abandoned its ban on harmful COVID-19 misinformation:

Twitter did not appear to formally announce the rule change. Instead, some Twitter users Monday night spotted a note added to the page on Twitter’s website that outlines its Covid policy.

“Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy,” the note read.

Free speech is one thing. But allowing misinformation about a communicable disease that kills people is another thing entirely. And when you tie this into the sort of people Twitter is letting back onto the platform, it seems to me that Twitter is becoming a cesspool under Musk’s leadership. And he is fine with that quite clearly.

No wonder advertisers are leaving the platform in droves as they clearly don’t want to be associated with this sort of toxic mess.

Related to this Twitter rant from Elon Musk earlier today comes this:

Yes

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022

Musk then went on to say this:

Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022

I suspect Elon isn’t telling the complete truth here. My thought is that Apple did tell him why, assuming that this conversation did happen, but since that doesn’t fit with the narrative of being the victim, he’s resorted to this. But we don’t have both sides of this conversation so that’s impossible to prove or disprove.

It would not at all surprise me if Apple made demands to have moderation on the Twitter platform or face being Thanos Snapped off the App Store, just like Parler was after January 6th. This could be a terminal event for Twitter. Doubly so if Google follows suit. Which they did with Parler. So you can see why Elon has become extremely unhinged today. And he’s decided to pick a fight against a trillion dollar company in the process. The problem for Elon is that he will lose. Apple makes the decisions in terms of if and what is on its App Store, and there are rules that Twitter agreed to. Though Twitter has tested the limits of that from time to time. Regardless, Elon should really reconsider his position here because he doesn’t have the cards to play that will lead to a win.

Imagine surviving the Twitter downsizing exercise, and then you make it to payday and find out that you haven’t been paid. That’s what’s happened apparently to Twitter employees:

Twitter staff in the United Kingdom and Germany didn’t receive their salaries as scheduled for November, journalist Chris Stokel-Walker reported. Employees normally get paid on the 28th of every month.

As a result, Stokel-Walker said some Twitter workers were forced to go into overdraft when the money didn’t appear as expected.

“This is a huge issue that has got current and former employees in private groups up in arms,” Stokel-Walker tweeted. “Staff in Ireland and the Netherlands were paid on time. In the last 30 minutes, some of the salaries have been hitting bank accounts… one at a time, suggesting they’re doing it by hand.”

Some irate staff members, including those cut from the company following Elon Musk‘s takeover, tweeted that they still haven’t been paid for November.

This might have something to do with the fact that Twitter has lost most of their payroll team. Because if you don’t have a payroll group, people aren’t going to get paid. And related to that, if you mess with people’s pay, those people will head to the exits because it is suicide for an employee to mess with people’s pay.

Oh yeah. It also affects recruitment efforts, which apparently Twitter is recruiting employees after downsizing employees:

Just a week after taking control of Twitter, new owner Elon Musk laid off around half the company’s staff.

Since then, the tech mogul and Tesla CEO has let further staff go, some through layoffs aimed at downsizing the company and others through more targeted firings.

But after scrambling to get rid of staff, Twitter is still now actually hiring, Musk said in a presentation to the company, slides from which he posted on Twitter.

“We’re recruiting,” the slide simply read.

Twitter’s job-search site, however, doesn’t show any open roles at the company.

Ignoring the fact that this suggests that the downsizings combined with mass resignations have placed Twitter behind the eight ball, I have to ask this question. Seeing as Twitter is literally become a train wreck next to a dumpster fire with Elon Musk at the controls, who would be crazy enough to work for Elon Musk? I would suggest only the truly desperate or those who are taking a risk would. And to those people I would submit the following: Look elsewhere because it isn’t worth it.

Finally, remember when I said that the EU might make Elon’s life more miserable than it already is…. That may be starting to happen:

Twitter has shown a lack of transparency in the fight against misinformation, France’s regulator in charge of digital communications Arcom said on Monday, as the social media platform faced heightened scrutiny following steep job cuts.

In a third yearly report on “the fight against the manipulation of information,” Arcom pointed to Twitter’s “very loose transparency regarding data” on the matter, adding that the company had provided “imprecise” details on how its automated tools worked.

A spokesperson for Twitter in France did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment. The spokesperson has not responded to queries since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last month.

Arcom has no power to sanction online platforms for the spread of false information.

But under a French law adopted in 2018, 12 of these platforms must disclose the processes they have put in place to handle their own definition of misinformation, leading to “naming and shaming” presentations by the authority.

The 12 online platforms include Alphabet’s YouTube, online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, Meta’s Facebook and — for the first time — the fast-growing short-video platform TikTok, owned by China-based firm ByteDance.

French laws also compel large online platforms to provide means to its users to report false information that could alter the potential outcome of an election.

Twitter wasn’t the worst in class, according to Arcom’s report.

“TikTok, Yahoo and, to a lesser extent, Google, stand out particularly by the absence of tangible information allowing Arcom” to analyse the effectiveness of measures aimed at fighting information manipulation, the authority said.

The report comes a week after Twitter France’s head announced his resignation.

While Twitter wasn’t the worst here, this isn’t good news and is likely to get the attention of the EU. Who is likely chomping at the bit to pull him in for a little chat. And that will be very bad for Elon as being willing to be held accountable isn’t one of his strengths as a human being. Which means the EU will really have some “fun” with him as a result.