The IT Nerd

Well, if it wasn’t clear that Elon Musk has really gotten in over his head and is only listening to himself when it came to the Twitter Blue fiasco, this Platformer report that a reader pointed me towards has the inside scoop on what happened with that dumpster fire. And make it clear that Elon Musk is basically destroying Twitter:

Days before the Nov. 9 launch, the company’s trust and safety team had prepared a seven-page list of recommendations intended to help Musk avoid the most obvious and damaging consequences of his plans for Blue. The document, which was obtained by Platformer, predicts with eerie accuracy some of the events that follow.

“Motivated scammers/bad actors could be willing to pay … to leverage increased amplification to achieve their ends where their upside exceeds the cost,” reads the document’s first recommendation, which the team labeled “P0” to denote a concern in the highest risk category. 

“Impersonation of world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials, and other high profile individuals” represented another P0 risk, the team found. “Legacy verification provides a critical signal in enforcing impersonation rules, the loss of which is likely to lead to an increase in impersonation of high-profile accounts on Twitter.”  

On November 1, when the document was circulated internally, Musk was considering a $99-a-year annual subscription for Blue; only later, after an exchange online with writer Stephen King, did he lower the cost. The move wound up increasing the risk for scams, as the desire to make fun of brands and government officials became an impulse buy at $8.

The team also noted removing the verified badge and its related privileges from high-profile users unless they paid, coupled with the heightened impersonation risk, would potentially drive them away from Twitter for good. “Removing privileges and exemptions from legacy verified accounts could cause confusion and loss of trust among high profile users,” they wrote. “We use the health-related protections … to manage against the risk of false-positive actions on high-profile users, under the assumption that the accounts have been heavily vetted. If that signal is deprecated, we run the risk of false positives or the loss of privileges such as higher rate limits resulting in escalation and user flight.” 

The team identified several other risks for which Twitter has yet to identify any solutions. For starters, the company lacks any automated way to remove verified badges from user accounts. “Given that we will have a large amount of legacy verified users on the platform (400K Twitter customers), and that we anticipate we’ll need to debadge a large number of legacy verified accounts  if they decide not to pay for Blue, this will require high operational lift without investment.”

(And this was before the company laid off 80 percent of its contractors, but we’ll get to that.)

The company’s trust and safety team did win support for some solutions, including retaining verification for some high-profile accounts using the “official badge.” 

For the most part, though, the document offers a wish list for features that would make the product safer and easier to use, most of which have not been approved.

It was presented to Esther Crawford, a director of product management at the company who in recent weeks has risen to become one of Musk’s top lieutenants. Musk was briefed as well, sources said, as was his attorney Alex Spiro. And while Crawford appeared sympathetic to many of the concerns in the document, sources said, she declined to implement any suggestions that would delay the launch of Blue. (Crawford did not respond to a request for comment.)

Despite the warnings, the launch proceeded as planned. A few hours later, with the predictions of the trust and safety team largely realized, Musk belatedly stopped the rollout.

Well DUH! It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see what was going to happen with Twitter Blue. But strangely, a guy who launches actual rockets into space didn’t see this coming. Or perhaps Musk simply didn’t care because he is too desperate to make a buck from Twitter. Or perhaps he hasn’t got the smarts to run Twitter. No wonder Twitter is a hellscape that no advertiser wants any part of. And users are running to Mastodon as a result (here’s how you can do that if you need some help running from Twitter). And to add to the list of reasons why nobody wants to have any part of Twitter is the fact that Musk breaks stuff and Twitter is at best on shaky ground due to the downsizing of staff. I strongly, and I do mean STRONGLY recommend that you read the entire article from Platformer. It will show you that Elon really can’t manage Twitter, and this platform is likely doomed to extinction because of him.

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, nails have been going into the platform’s metaphorical coffin. And the latest nail is a big one. Advertising giant GroupM, who’s clients include Google, Coca-Cola, and Unilever has named Twitter “high-risk,” and is warning its clients against buying promotions on the site. Digiday has the details:

GroupM, the world’s largest media buying agency, is telling clients that Twitter is now a “high risk” media buy following a barrage of controversies, U-turns and confusion that capped off Elon Musk’s second week as the owner of the social network.

The advice was shared in a document, seen by Digiday, that warns marketers of the risks of advertising on the volatile social network. It reads: “Based on the news yesterday [Nov. 10] of additional senior management resignations from key posts, high profile examples of blue check abuse on corporate accounts, and the potential inability for Twitter to comply with their federal consent decree, GroupM’s Twitter Risk Assessment is increased to a High-Risk rating for all tactics.”

If this stance is to change, Twitter has to resolve several issues, per the document. They are as follows:

• Return to baseline NSFW levels
• Re-population of IT security, privacy, trust & safety senior staff
• Establishment of internal checks & balances
• Full transparency on future development plans of community guidelines/content moderation/ anything affecting user security or brand safety
• Demonstrated commitment to effective content moderation,enforcing current Twitter Rules, e.g., account impersonation, violative content removal timing, intolerance of hate speech & misinformation, etc.

Yeah. None of that is going to happen. Even if he could make any or all of that happen. Which to be clear he can’t. Musk has got zero interest in tap dancing to the tune of the ad industry. Even if he needs their money as Twitter’s main source of income is advertising whether he likes it or not.

GroupM joins a number of other ad agencies in recommending against advertising on Twitter. That includes Omnicom, Cossette, and likely others who are running as far away from Twitter as they can get. And the more that happens, the more screwed Elon Musk is.

It’s almost time to give Twitter its last rites.

I don’t get it. I’ll just put that out there right out of the gate. I say that because a reader pointed me towards this Tweet:

With Twitter SMS 2FA turned off, this service will not function. As in you will be locked out of your Twitter account and you will not be able to log back in if you log out. That’s because Musk clearly decided to kill whatever back end service or services send out the code to your phone via SMS.

Now if you use other forms of 2FA for Twitter, for example you use Microsoft Authenticator to generate a code to log into Twitter, you’re fine. But for those who use strictly SMS for 2FA, and that would be a lot of people I suspect, could be in deep trouble unless they immediately do the following via Twitter’s web interface:

• Go to Settings & Support > Settings and privacy and then go to Security and account access.
• Go to the Security section.
• Under Two-factor authentication, click the two-factor authentication link.
• Make sure the Text message toggle is OFF.
• For your security, use one of the other methods which are Authentication App or a Security Key. Or if you feel lucky, don’t use another method of 2FA.

More instructions can be found here. Just ignore anything that refers to SMS or text messaging. Seeing as it’s broken at the moment.

Now to be fair to Musk as I have to look at this from both sides of the fence, SMS based 2FA is weak and exploitable. Thus killing it is a good idea. But to do it with zero warning to users is just plain stupid. That of course assumes that he killed it based on this Tweet.

Now he might not have had a clue what this did, and now by turning whatever back end service supports Twitter SMS 2FA, he’s screwed over a ton of Twitter users in the process.

But the other possibility is that Twitter 2FA broken and there is nobody left who can fix it. Which effectively is the same thing as he turned it off because he laid off half the staff, and those with the knowledge to fix stuff at Twitter are likely not returning his phone calls. Either way, Musk is proving that he’s way out of his league with Twitter. And Twitter users will suffer as a result.

Just another day in Musk run Twitter I guess.

UPDATE: It looks like this service is slowly coming back up. Over the past hour, there have been reports on Twitter that users who were unable to use SMS 2FA can now use it again. But I am not sure that I would trust it as Musk may just break it again.

Over the years on Twitter you might have seen some infamous Twitter fails where someone who’s working for smartphone company not named Apple, or shilling for said smartphone company not named Apple has Tweeted from an iPhone. Take this example caught by YouTuber MKBHD of Huawei doing all sorts of things from iPhones. Stuff like that is funny to see, but those days are apparently over as Elon Musk has put an end to this:

I’m just spitballing here. But maybe he’s doing this to make Twitter a bit more advertiser friendly? As in he’s taken away the ability for smartphone companies to shoot themselves in the foot? Or maybe he’s doing this as a distraction from the world watching him act like an 8 year old by pushing every button in Twitter HQ to see what happens with disastrous results? Who knows? But it is a curious move because given how messed up Twitter is at present, you’d think he’d have bigger issues to deal with.

Speaking of bigger issues. One of those issues is the fact that advertisers have been recommended by ad agencies to pause advertising on the platform. That directly affects Musk’s bottom line as Twitter relies heavily on advertising revenue. This makes this CNBC story curious. Which is that SpaceX has done a massive ad buy for the Starlink Internet service:

The campaign will promote the SpaceX-owned and -operated satellite internet service called Starlink on Twitter in Spain and Australia, according to internal records from the social media business viewed by CNBC.

The ad campaign SpaceX is buying to promote Starlink is called a Twitter “takeover.” When a company buys one of these packages, they typically spend upwards of $250,000 to put their brand on top of the main Twitter timeline for a full day, according to one current and one former Twitter employee who asked to remain unnamed because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the company.

Users should see Starlink brand messaging for the first three times that they open the Twitter app on the day or days of the planned takeover campaign in Australia and in Spain. The campaign, which was purchased in the last week, was slated to run in coming days first in Australia then in Spain.

SpaceX has not typically purchased large advertising packages from Twitter, the current and former employees said.

Hours after this story was first published, Musk wrote in a tweet: “SpaceX Starlink bought a tiny – not large – ad package to test effectiveness of Twitter advertising in Australia & Spain. Did same for FB/Insta/Google.”

According to internal documents viewed by CNBC, SpaceX has spent more than $160,000 on the Twitter ad campaign for Starlink in Australia and Spain so far.

Am I the only one that thinks that this is a little “sus“? The Internet of course found this where Musk says he doesn’t buy adversting:

And based on this Tweet, he has an iPhone. But that’s besides the point. What is relevant to this story is the fact that he now says this when called out for being a hypocrite:

I’m sure if that’s true, he can show proof of his ad purchases on Facebook, Instagram, and Google. But my thinking is that it’s not going to happen as it’s not true. But Musk is free to prove yours truly and the rest of the Internet wrong at any time. My thinking is that he’s doing this as part of a larger plan to entice advertisers back onto the platform. It will be interesting to see if this ad buy, regardless has any effect on that. My thinking is that it won’t as the problem that advertisers have with Twitter is Elon Musk.