The IT Nerd

If Elon Musk thought the weekend would bring some respite from the feeling of doom that is around Twitter these days. Especially with his Donald Trump is back on Twitter stunt from last night, I am going to put it out there that he is wrong. First up is the fact that CBS News has suspending posting on Twitter:

“In light of the uncertainty around Twitter and out of an abundance of caution, CBS News is pausing its activity on the social media site as it continues to monitor the platform,” Jonathan Vigliotti, CBS News national correspondent, said in a report about the latest chaos at the company on the “CBS Evening News” Friday.

A statement with nearly identical wording was shared Friday by the Twitter account of KPIX, the CBS-owned station in San Francisco.

Currently, the most recent post on @CBSNews is a retweet of a segment shared at 3:38 p.m. ET about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of a special counsel to oversee investigations into Donald Trump. On @CBSEveningNews, the most recent tweet is story about a dog that “turned herself in to police after getting lost during a walk,” which was posted at 5 p.m. ET; @CBSMornings last posted at 3:30 p.m. ET, linking to an article about users speculating about “whether Twitter will live or die.”

I’m calling it now, this will spur other news agencies to do the same thing. That in turn will make Twitter less valuable to people who visit Twitter to get news form CBS, NBC, ABC, Reuters, and others. That in turn make Twitter less valuable to advertisers and take money out of Elon’s pockets. But that’s not the worst news for him. This is:

Twitter stands a 50% chance of a major outage that could take the site offline during the World Cup, according to a recently departed employee with knowledge of how the company responds to large-scale events.

The former employee, who was granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of what was discussed, has knowledge of the workings of Twitter Command Centre, the platform’s team of troubleshooters who monitor the site for issues such as traffic spikes and data centre outages.

“Between the lack of preparations and the lack of staffing, I think it’s going to be a rough World Cup for Twitter,” said the former employee.

He suggested that an incident of some kind – such as a service responding slowly or incorrectly – is almost a certainty during the 29-day competition in Qatar, estimating a 90% possibility of something going wrong that users would see.

The likelihood of Twitter staying online during the competition, which kicks off on Sunday, is no better than even, according to the former employee.

Twitter is “likely to struggle with traffic at kickoff, and may crash,” he said. “If we’re lucky, it will recover with minimal disruption.”

If anything happens to Twitter that users can see, it will be a terminal event for Elon. He’ll burn through any credibility that he has left, and it will send any advertisers that are left on the platform running for the nearest exit. At that point, he’d be screwed with no way back. Seeing as the World Cup starts today, we won’t have long to wait. And I will be watching.

Maybe Elon should refocus his priorities? Just a thought.

Elon Musk is going to have a major problem. It appears that users are now uploading entire movies is roughly two minute and thirty second chunks to Twitter. Here’s an example:

If you look through the entire thread, the entire movie is there. And by the way, Hackers was a really good movie. But besides that, here’s the real problem. Sharing full movies is a violation of Twitter’s copyright policy which you can read here. But it’s still being allowed. And I can find other movies without trying to hard. My guess is the people who police this sort of behaviour are gone, or the systems that flag this sort of content aren’t working. Or perhaps both.

So why is this a problem? The MPAA or Motion Picture Association of America is going to get wind of this and they are going to knock on Twitter’s door asking “WTF”. Twitter will have to try and prove that they tried to stop these movies from being uploaded. But when they can’t the MPAA is going to not only want money, but they will take Twitter to court to get it. This will add to Elon’s problems as advertisers, who are the bulk of Twitter’s revenue will look at this and say “I don’t want to be associated with that gong show” and pull their ads. Oh, wait, that’s already happening.

And I thought the Donald Trump sideshow was the worst thing that Elon could do to the platform. Clearly I was incorrect.

UPDATE: The Tweet that I linked to above was deleted by Twitter. Over 12 hours after it was posted. But I continue to find other movies on Twitter without much effort. That’s a #fail Elon.

Elon Musk is clearly going all in with this free speech at any cost thing of his. Earlier today he did this:

Yeah, he ran a poll asking the Twitterverse if he should reinstate Donald Trump’s Twitter account as he was suspended from Twitter, along with most other forms of social media because of his behaviour after the January 6th riots. And as you can see, the Twitterverse voted to reinstate his account. To which Musk said this:

By the way, Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a Latin phrase meaning “the voice of the people is the voice of God.” Though the cynic in me says that when this goes off the rails, Musk is looking for plausible deniability by saying something along the lines of “It wasn’t my decision. The people spoke and I gave them what they wanted.”

Here’s why Elon Musk likely made a huge mistake by going down this path. Let’s start with the fact that every time Musk has made a major decision, he sends people to Mastodon. How many people you ask? I can help you with that:

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that we’re about to see another wave of people leave Twitter because of this and that chart is about to get another wave of Mastodon users added to it. As in a significant part of that 48% who voted no in that poll. That will start to affect Twitter’s engagement numbers, which in turn will send whatever remaining advertisers that are still on Twitter to the exits because there’s no point in advertising on a platform that people are leaving. That of course assumes that advertisers will want anything to do with a platform who is run by a guy who would pull this sort of stunt, and leave before even seeing the engagement numbers. And keep in mind, advertising is what keeps the lights on at Twitter. So if they go, Musk will be in deep trouble.

Another reason why Elon really played himself, again, with this stunt is that Trump doesn’t want to go back to Twitter:

“I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on TRUTH,” Trump told Fox News in April, referring to the website Truth Social. “I hope Elon buys Twitter because he’ll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on TRUTH.”

“The bottom line is, no, I am not going back to Twitter,” he added.

On Saturday, before the reinstatement was announced, Trump shared the link to Musk’s poll on Truth Social, saying: “Vote now with positivity, but don’t worry, we aren’t going anywhere. Truth Social is special!”

Now he can always change his mind. But seeing as he’s invested lots of somebody’s money in Truth Social, I don’t see him returning. And again, the cynic in me says that this was a stunt by Elon to get more users onto Twitter. The only problem is that if Trump doesn’t come back to Twitter, it’s highly unlikely any of his followers will. And even if they do, they’ll likely bring all sorts of, shall we say bad behaviour that advertisers will want nothing to do with. Thus Elon will be no further ahead.

The fact is that Elon may think that he’s taken the moral high ground or something by running this poll and reinstating Trump’s Twitter account. But he may well realize that he just played himself for the second time in a week when he doesn’t get the result that he was looking for.

Given the current beyond next level chaos that Elon Musk has created on Twitter in the last 24 hours, I am guessing that he needs a distraction to stop people from focusing on how badly he’s running Twitter. Which I am guessing is why he just dropped this Tweet:

Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but wasn’t Twitter already doing a form of this? It seems to me that was already in place and will not resolve Twitter’s obligation to remove various types of material that they are required by law, to do via a process called “content moderation.” Sound familiar?

The good news, I guess, is that this company’s tech will fail before that given what’s happened in the last 24 hours.

Bottom line: It’s the least destructive thing that Musk has done on Twitter today. Which says a lot.

I have no clue what part of the Twilight Zone I’ve currently stepped into. But every time I turn around, the Twitter story gets more and more surreal. This is the latest example:

So, based on the above and what I wrote in this story, which to be clear was written less than an hour ago, I have to assume that whatever is happening at Twitter right now is so dire, and so world ending that he’s going to more and more desperate means to try and get anyone to help him avert whatever is coming. That’s not good. Which of course is likely the understatement of the year.

I’m going to cancel my weekend plans as I get this feeling that a lot is going to happen over the weekend. And none of it will be good for Elon Musk.

Elon Musk clearly has hit rock bottom after his demand for Twitter workers to sign on to being more “hardcore” backfired. Zoë Schiffer of Platformer has posted this series of Tweets that has me simply saying WTF:

So let’s break this down:

• Twitter either has, or is about to have some sort of issue that requires Elon to reach out to any person who can write code to report to him at 2PM PST (presumably) today.
• In line with how Elon thinks, he needs you to prove your worth to him. Presumably because whatever issue that Twitter has or is going to have is so dire that in his mind, only the best people can alleviate whatever is happening or is about to happen.
• There’s zero context to this email that Elon has sent out. So this could be a big problem, or it could be a catastrophically big problem.
• Twitter employees were locked out of Twitter yesterday. So it isn’t clear how they could get back in.

Thus the only conclusion that I can come to is that the impending demise of Twitter that I predicted here is happening or is about to happen:

It will be interesting to see if anyone responds to this. Because based on my read of this situation, Elon is in deep trouble and he appears to know it.

#RIPTwitter indeed.

Business Insider is reporting that the latest from last night’s fallout from Elon Musk’s demand that staff sign onto his demand that Twitter employees be “hardcore“. It seems significant parts of Twitter’s financial groups are gone:

Along with the payroll department resigning, Twitter’s US Tax team and its financial reporting team also resigned, two people familiar with the matter said, matching several internal messages seen by Insider. All three segments of the company were part of Twitter’s finance and accounting organization. While accounting was “less impacted” by resignations on Thursday, that part of the organization is smaller now, too, one of the people said.

Employees are set to get paid again next week, one former worker said. While those payments are likely to have been already approved, the next round of payments will not have been, the person said. 

“What happens in another two weeks?” the person asked. “When everyone who can approve something is gone.”

This is not good and is the perfect example of unintended consequences. You have to wonder what Elon is thinking as he’s clearly screwed himself and Twitter along with it. I am not sure what will happen next. But I think it’s safe to say that this will further accelerate Twitter’s downfall. After all, if you can’t pay your taxes, bills, and employees, you’re going to have a problem. Or in Elon’s case, yet another problem.

Elon Musk’s power play to get employees to sign on to being “hardcore” has crashed and burned. Overnight that had the hashtag “#RIPTwitter” trending, people announcing that they were moving to other social media sites, and I noticed this on Down Detector:

Well Twitter is still alive as I type this. But for how much longer? The way I see it, there are a number of scenarios that could play out here given everything that has happened to this point. Four specific scenarios come to mind along with a bonus one:

1. Users leave Twitter taking advertisers with them: Given the events of last night, it would not at all surprise me if user engagement plummets on Twitter. Now that Twitter is a private company, it is highly likely we will never see the truth on what those numbers look like. But if user engagement drops, we’ll see that as other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Mastodon gain users. And more importantly advertisers will see that and direct their money to the places where people are which will leave Twitter out in the cold. And the lack of advertising revenue will ensure that Twitter dies a slow death.
2. Twitter gets hacked: Seeing as the key people behind Twitter’s platform security have left, this now makes Twitter a prime target for hackers. To be honest, it was highly likely that Twitter was repelling attacks long before the Elon Musk gong show. But without the key people manning the defences, it is only a matter of time before someone pwns Twitter and Twitter dies as a result from the bad press.
3. Twitter simply falls apart: From all reports, there’s a lot of people who worked at Twitter who know something that not only nobody else knows, but can’t be replicated. Having that level of institutional knowledge go out the door will be fatal for Twitter. It is probable that Twitter will limp along for weeks or perhaps months. But small things will start to break. Followed by bigger things. And with nobody who knows how any of that stuff works, it is probable that this will kill Twitter.
4. Musk uses the nuclear option: During Elon Musk’s reign as “Chief Twit”, Musk has been exposed as not being as smart as he portrays himself to be given the high profile failures of leadership that we’ve seen since he took over. And the longer that this goes on, the more his fragile ego will be unable to cope with it. So it would not shock me if he wakes up one morning and declares the whole thing bankrupt killing the platform in one go. Then Musk will try and spin it as not being his fault to save his fragile ego. Even though the world would have seen him kill the platform though his actions over the last two or three weeks.

There’s a bonus scenario for the people asking “where’s the option of Twitter surviving?” Musk and his fragile ego give up and sell Twitter to a group who can actually run the company. And that group tries to rebuild. But even if they did get Twitter stable, it won’t be anywhere near the same as it was before Elon Musk the immature billionaire took over as has already caused so much damage that I don’t think anyone can repair it. And I think that’s the point of all these scenarios. Which is Twitter as we know it is done. It is now a question of if it dies quickly, dies slowly, or stays in some sort of comatose like state never to recover.