The IT Nerd

The title sounds weird. But hang with me. It will make sense in the end. There have been protests in a variety of Chinese cities over China’s strict COVID lockdown protocols. And this seems to have made the government nervous enough to use a novel tactic to make sure that news about these protests don’t get out. Via TechCrunch:

Search any major Chinese city on Twitter, and you will see a cascade of spam tweets showing porn, escort services, and gambling content that are published every few seconds, making it impossible to get any legitimate results.

There has been a “significant uptick” in these tweets over the last three days, according to a China-focused data analyst. The surge in such bot content coincides with an unprecedented wave of protests that have swept across major Chinese cities and universities over the weekend.

The demonstrations are largely a result of China’s zero-tolerance approach toward COVID-19, a rare show of defiance amongst the people. The country’s stringent COVID restrictions have led to prolonged lockdowns across the country, obstructing life, business, and manufacturing activities.

I have to admit that I did not have “China uses porn to cover up protests” on my BINGO card. That is very novel. Now according to the article Twitter is aware of this. And as this morning I was not able to reproduce this while last night I was. Thus there’s apparently someone left at Twitter who can take care of an issue like this. But now that China has done something like this, you can expect others to try the same thing. And then we’ll see how serious Elon Musk is about fighting bots on Twitter.

It seems that Elon Musk is hit two new lows when it comes to his behaviour. Let’s start with the fact that advertisers are running from advertising on Twitter in huge numbers. And according to this article, this has really ticked Elon off;

Elon Musk called up the chief executives of companies that pulled advertising spending from Twitter to complain, the Financial Times reported. 

A number of leading media buyers and advertising agencies say that almost all the major brands they act for have stopped ad spending on Twitter, the report said. 

Musk took it upon himself to personally call CEOs to chastise them, one industry figure told the FT, but his actions have backfired, the newspaper reported. 

Of course his actions have backfired. Calling up CEO’s to whine about them pulling adds is not an effective business development strategy. And this is another reason why you’re seeing less ads on Twitter:

Four industry figures told the Financial Times that in recent weeks agencies have not little communication with Twitter’s ads business team because so few staff were left following mass layoffs. 

Twitter’s ad systems have become bug-ridden, according to some media buyers, making it nearly impossible to launch campaigns. 

“It is quite unique. The turmoil, the damage, nothing of this magnitude has happened before. Never,” a big four advertising agency executive told the FT.

I have been using this phrase since the Twitter gong shows with Elon Musk being the ringmaster began. He’s turned Twitter into a train wreck next to a dumpster fire via his actions and his behaviour. Speaking of his behaviour, a reader pointed me towards an article in The Jerusalem Post that shows that Elon is playing the anti-semitic card when confronted with criticism. You be the judge:

Elon Musk called Jewish American retired US Army officer Lt.-Col. Alexander Vindman both a “puppet & puppeteer” on Monday in response to Vindman sharing a copypasta (copied and pasted text shared on the Internet) suggesting that Musk is “erratic” and too powerful now that he owns Twitter.

“Vindman is both puppet & puppeteer. Question is who pulls his strings … ?” Musk tweeted.

Musk’s tweet was in response to another one by Tablet magazine Chief Technology Officer Noah Blum mocking the copypasta, which said that it’s “Kinda weird that @elonmusk gets to decide how like a half-billion people communicate. Way too much power for one erratic individual to wield, don’t you think?”

Here’s the problem with that Tweet by Elon:

Musk’s tweet – deliberately or not – evoked an antisemitic trope that Jews are puppeteers who secretly wield power over various institutions or that they are puppets of the Israeli government.

An anti-semitic Tweet like this is massively problematic for Elon. It reinforces that he’s a racist, which is something that I said in this article from a week ago when he mocked Black Twitter. And I am pretty sure this will put Elon on a collision course with Apple and Google as it is becoming clear that Elon not only can’t or won’t moderate hate speech on Twitter, but his own behaviour is amplifying said hate speech. Which means that Apple and Google will have to make a choice as to if the Twitter app should be on their respective app stores. That’s on top of the fact that this is likely to send more advertisers to the exits because nobody wants to do business with a racist.

By the way, I checked his Twitter feed and the Tweets are still there. Read into that what you will.

Elon really needs to rethink how he acts and behaves as his current behaviour isn’t helping him in the slightest.

Elon Musk sees advertisers as a problem when it comes to him running Twitter. Thus he wants to reduce his reliance on advertisers In fact, this is his ideal revenue split:

Musk has said he wants subscriptions to account for 50% of Twitter’s total revenue, according to a message by a VP on an internal company slack.

The message, which was shared on Twitter by Platformer’s Casey Newton, said Musk thought the subscription aim “could help with conversations” and “pay by credit card could help with bots.

There’s two big problems. The fact that advertisers are fleeing the platform isn’t helping this as it reduces the revenue that he has coming into Twitter’s bank account while he makes this transition. And second, there’s the fact that it is very unlikely that Twitter Blue isn’t likely to catch on:

However, a survey from The Harris Poll, a global market research and consulting firm, found half of frequent US Twitter users said they would ditch the platform if it came with a monthly subscription fee.

The firm polled 2,063 US adults, 1,212 of which were Twitter users, from October 20 to October 28, the week Musk took over the company.

Pinar Yildirim, a professor of marketing and economics at The Wharton School, told Insider introducing a subscription model to Twitter could even drive users away from the platform. Yildirim said many users were waiting to see if Twitter becomes subscription-based.

“Worries about subscription changes have caused some users, either of higher status like some celebrities or ordinary users, to express a desire to potentially explore other platforms,” she said. 

“If in the end, the revenue model becomes such that everyone on Twitter has to pay a price,” she said, “that’s going to result clearly in a movement of users who may find it too expensive to simply be on Twitter.”

Well, that’s a problem. Then there’s the fact that the loans that Musk took require a $1 billion interest payment. But…:

If Musk wants to generate enough revenue to pay the $1 billion in interest owed on Twitter’s debt each year, it would need to add about 10 million more paying customers, according to social media expert Matt Navarra. 

I cannot honestly see how Musk squares this circle. With companies not advertising on Twitter, because they don’t need Twitter and Twitter needs them, there’s zero chance that Twitter Blue will make up the difference, Twitter is screwed and so is Musk. But I will guess that we will see this coming Friday as that is when Twitter Blue launches.

Okay. This whole Twitter thing since Elon Musk took over has been a crazy ride since he took over. But it’s now gotten really crazy. Because one of the potential side effects of giving anti-vaxxers, Neo-nazis, white supremacists, anti-LGBTQ activists, anti-Muslim bigots among other low life scumbags of the universe who don’t deserve a platform, amnesty on Twitter is that it may put him in the crosshairs of Apple and Google who have rules that would require the punting of the Twitter app from their respective app stores. If you want an example of that, look at Parler who was Thanos snapped out of the App Store and Play Store. I am guessing that this is a real possibility that Musk has thought of because he said this on Twitter last night:

Okay……

I have to look at this from both sides. So ignoring the fact that, this could simply be an empty threat, or that the odds are high that Apple and Google would destroy any sort of “Tesla Phone” or “Twitter Phone” in terms of sales, and that the development of this phone could easily become the same sort of train wreck next to a dumpster fire that we’re seeing at Twitter, consider this. If he threw the same people who are responsible for the in car entertainment system at Tesla, and recycle some of the silicon from that system, it isn’t actually that far fetched an idea. In fact this is completely doable from a hardware standpoint. His challenge will be the software. Google isn’t going to hand over a copy of Android to him, and Apple isn’t going to hand over a copy of iOS to him. So he will either have to do what Huawei did which is use the open source version of Android, or make his own OS. That’s a tall order either way. On top of that he needs an app ecosystem to give people a reason to buy this phone. That’s a tall order as well as you’re not going to want to jump to this phone if you can’t use the apps that you already have. And getting developers on board to make those apps will be a challenge.

Now how much market share that this phone would get would still be an open question. And more importantly, would it grab enough market share to scare Apple and Google? Personally, I am dubious that Apple and Google would be the least concerned about this Tweet from Elon. Or put another way, I seriously doubt that Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are going to lose a moment’s worth of sleep over this Tweet. But I would suggest that this is something that is at least worth watching if he does get punted from their respective app stores.

Elon Musk wants to wean Twitter off of advertising by brands. That’s why he’s pushing Twitter Blue so hard. The thing is that until Twitter Blue can generate the revenue stream that advertising generates, he needs advertisers. There’s no way around that. So it doesn’t help that Volkswagen who’s brands include, Audi, Porsche, Skoda, Lamborghini, Bentley, and Ducati have paused their advertising on Twitter. What makes this even more interesting is that they are actually speaking about why they did this:

A spokesperson for Volkswagen said all the brands had followed the advice, while Audi had opted to halt organic activities, such as direct posts, and only respond to questions from clients on the website.

WirtschaftsWoche had previously reported that Audi had halted all activities on the social media platform, citing company sources.

“We are monitoring the situation closely and will decide on the next steps depending on developments,” an Audi spokesperson added in an emailed statement to Reuters.

Audi has not tweeted since Nov. 1 after previously tweeting almost every day. Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter in late October.

Well, that’s not good if you are Elon as VW is a global brand which means that their advertising spend on Twitter must have been big. Thus that’s a lot of income that Twitter is not getting. And you have to wonder if VW going public with this will spur other companies to not only pull their ads, but to say why in public. If that happens, one has to wonder how Elon will react to that. Not well I would imagine. But we will have to see.

Remember back in July there was a data breach on Twitter where the information on 5.4 million users was up for sale on the dark web? Well as bad as that was, we now have news that it was actually worse than that. 9to5mac is reporting the following:

We’ve been shown evidence that the same security vulnerability was exploited by multiple bad actors, and the hacked data has been offered for sale on the dark web by several sources.

It had previously been thought that only one hacker gained access to the data, and Twitter’s belated admission reinforced this impression …

And:

There were suggestions on Twitter yesterday that the same personal data had been accessed by multiple bad actors, not just one. 9to5Mac has now seen evidence that this is indeed the case. We were shown a dataset which contained the same information in a different format, with a security researcher stating that it was “definitely a different threat actor.” The source told us that this was just one of a number of files they have seen.

That’s really, really, extremely bad. And reading this report makes one wonder how this is going to get any better under Elon Musk? Because it is pretty clear that Twitter’s security was bad before he took over. So given all that has gone on, how much worse can it be with him in charge? While Twitter doesn’t have a PR department anymore, the company needs to provide some answers on this. And they need to do so now with enough detail to reassure Twitter users that they can have confidence in the company. But I am pretty sure that this is not going to happen.

UPDATE: I have commentary from Brian Johnson, Chief Security Officer at Armorblox:

“Breaches that expose email addresses and phone numbers are almost always followed up by targeted phishing and SMiShing campaigns. Given that Twitter has also been in the news a lot recently, attackers might exploit our cognitive biases like recency bias to send out fake password reset emails or SMSes to Twitter users to steal their credentials. Stolen passwords now allow them to try these passwords out laterally across other sites because many users use the same password across different providers. We recommend that users set up multi-factor authentication on all their personal and work accounts, and more specifically, watch out for suspicious emails that appear to be coming from Twitter. This includes verifying the sender email addresses, and any links that are included in the email to make sure that they are indeed related to Twitter.”

UPDATE #2: Chad McDonald, Chief of Staff and Chief Information Security Officer of Radiant Logic:

“In the latest episode of the Twitter saga, news of the significant data breach resulting in the security expert who reported it being suspended is a huge cause for concern. Security practitioners have often looked to Twitter in the past for updates from colleagues and influencers alike on the latest bugs, vulnerabilities and threat groups. Given the changes that have been brewing at Twitter these last few weeks, it would be incredibly damaging for them to not only be once again responsible for massive amounts of users being breached but that they are also making efforts to cover it up. Twitter must act, quickly, to get a serious handle on how much of their users’ information was leaked and what they plan to remedy the situation.”