The IT Nerd

Elon Musk has been obsessed with rebranding Twitter to X. But if you went to various parts of the site, you would find references to Twitter. But that appears to be no longer the case based on this Tweet from Elon himself:

Let’s start with the fact that this X logo looks nothing like the X logo that Elon has been using for a while now. What’s up with that? And how much does this move to X.com break things for people on the Internet? That’s a good question.

Regardless of what Elon thinks. This site will still be Twitter to me and many other people. And there’s nothing that Elon can do about it.

Elon Musk does a lot of things that make me say WTF. But this one takes the prize for dumbest idea ever. A Twitter account called X Daily News noticed this:

Elon himself responded to this with the following:

It’s always about the bots with him. Bots are the problem that he claimed he could solve, but so far hasn’t been able to solve that problem. Because it’s not about the bots. It’s about the fact that he tanked Twitter by buying it and making a lot of dumb decisions that has cratered the user count along with the value of the platform and he needs something to cover up the fact that he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.. The fact is that this is another of those dumb decisions and the only thing it will do is drive actual humans away from Twitter which will make his problems with the platform worse than they already are.

Great move Elon. Keep doing what you’re doing and Twitter will be dead soon enough under your watch.

I haven’t written about the train wreck next to a dumpster fire that Twitter is in a while. But this Sky News article caught my interest. Let’s start with the desperation that is strong with Elon by him making this move:

Elon Musk has announced further changes to social media platform X that will see certain accounts get premium features for free.

The tech billionaire, writing on the platform formerly known as Twitter, said all accounts with more than 2,500 verified subscriber followers would be able to access features that usually cost $8 (£6.30) a month.

Premium features include the ability to edit and write longer posts, as well as reducing the number of adverts seen by the user. It also gives the account holder a blue tick next to their display name.

So this is interesting. I seem to recall that Elon argued that he had to charge $8 a month for certain features to allow Twitter to make money. But now he’s making said features free to a subset of users. Which means he’s not making as much money. I wonder why he’s doing that? Perhaps this is the reason:

It comes after the company denied reports that the number of people logging in to X has plummeted since Musk took over.

Worldwide daily users of X’s mobile app fell to 174 million in February, down 15% from a year earlier, according to research by data firm Sensor Tower.

X’s own figures also suggest a decline since November 2022, Sky’s US partner NBC News reported.

The company said earlier this month it had 250 million active daily users – which is down from the 258 million claimed by Musk at around the time when he took over the firm.

Other social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, have in contrast experienced “modest” increases in users over the past year, researchers said.

“This decline in X mobile app active users may have been driven by user frustration over flagrant content, general platform technical issues, and the growing threat of short-form video platforms,” Sensor Tower senior analyst Abe Yousef said.

A spokesperson for X described the research figures as “inaccurate” and added: “Both our own data and self-reported data from other platforms tells a different story.”

In short, my thinking is that Elon is making this move to try and stop users from leaving. And then if he can stop the bleeding, he’s going to go back to figuring out how to make a buck off of those users. It’s a strategy I suppose. But it highlights the fact that Twitter is a mess since Elon took over and Elon doesn’t know how to fix the damage that he has caused. Thus highlighting the fact that he’s not as smart as everyone thinks he is.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again. Sucks to be you Elon.

Right now Elon Musk is fighting an insane number of lawsuits related to his purchase of Twitter. You can now add one more to that as a bunch of ex-execs from Twitter are suing him over unpaid severance:

Former Twitter executives including CEO Parag Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, head of legal Vijaya Gadde and General Counsel Sean Edgett filed a new lawsuit against Elon Musk and X Corp. in federal court arguing that they are owed $128 million in unpaid severance.

In their complaint, lawyers for the ex-Twitter executives say that after Musk backed himself into a deal to buy Twitter, now X Corp., for $44 billion, he took revenge against these executives personally, and tried to recover some of his expenses by “repeatedly refusing to honor other clear contractual commitments.”

Musk and X Corp. have been “stiffing employees, landlords, vendors, and others” since they took over Twitter, the lawyers allege, an allusion to more than 25 vendor nonpayment lawsuits filed against the social media business by companies including software and service providers and a landlord.

“Musk doesn’t pay his bills, believes the rules don’t apply to him, and uses his wealth and power to run roughshod over anyone who disagrees with him,” the complaint says.

The complaint also alludes to comments Musk made to his official biographer, Walter Isaacson, that “he would ‘hunt every single one of’ Twitter’s executives and directors ‘till the day they die.’”

The ex-Twitter executives’ lawyers argue, “These statements were not the mere rantings of a self-centered billionaire surrounded by enablers unwilling to confront him with the legal consequences of his own choices. Musk bragged to Isaacson specifically how he planned to cheat Twitter’s executives out of their severance benefits in order to save himself $200 million.”

The suit, Agrawal et al v. Musk et al, was filed in California’s Northern District and follows news that settlement talks between X Corp. and ex-Twitter managers broke down in a related case in Delaware, Woodfield v. Twitter Inc., where $500 million in unpaid severance to former Twitter managers and engineers is in dispute.

Well, that’s likely to enrage Elon. While I am not a lawyer, I don’t see how Elon can simply continue to do this and expect to come out on the winning side. Perhaps it might be in his interest to settle these lawsuits. But Elon rarely does things that are in his interest.

Elon Musk has been very vocal about bots on Twitter and wanting to get rid of them. But the fact is that bots are everywhere on Twitter and anyone who still uses the platform will tell you that. As proof of that, there’s this report from Mashable that says the following:

This week, Super Bowl 2024 shattered records, with the NFL championship broadcast on CBS becoming the most-watched televised event in U.S. history.

Also riding high from the big game? Elon Musk’s X. The company formerly known as Twitter published its own press release, lauding Super Bowl LVIII as one of the biggest events ever on the social media platform with more than 10 billion impressions and over 1 billion video views.

However, it appears that a significant portion of that traffic on X could be fake, according to data provided to Mashable by CHEQ, a leading cybersecurity firm that tracks bots and fake users.

According to CHEQ, a whopping 75.85 percent of traffic from X to its advertising clients’ websites during the weekend of the Super Bowl was fake.

“I’ve never seen anything even remotely close to 50 percent, not to mention 76 percent,” CHEQ founder and CEO Guy Tytunovich told Mashable regarding X’s fake traffic data. “I’m amazed…I’ve never, ever, ever, ever seen anything even remotely close.”

So it seems that this battle against bots that Elon is waging is a losing one. Assuming that he’s truly waging a war against bots and not just lying about waging a war against bots. This really hurts the credibility of the platform when it comes to advertising on the platform. And I suspect that this report may send some more advertisers heading to the exits. It will be interesting to see how Elon reacts to this report as this really looks bad.

Business Insider has the story of a Twitter engineer who was, according to him, fired by Elon Musk after being accused of leaking company information to the press:

Randall Lin was reportedly told that he had violated the employee handbook and was let go from Twitter in February 2023, several months into Elon Musk’s takeover.

Speaking to Zoë Schiffer in her newly released book, “Extremely Hardcore,” Lin said that someone lied about him leaking information to the press. Schiffer is a managing editor of the tech newsletter, Platformer.

And:

On 24 February 2023, Lin was called to meet with the corporate security team.

He says they claimed to have proof that he was the source behind two Platformer articles, written by Schiffer and a colleague — a report about the firing of an engineer who had been critical of Musk and a story about Musk’s tweets being boosted after the Super Bowl.

“I’ve never talked to Zoë [Schiffer] in my life,” he told the security team.

Schiffer corroborates this in the book, saying that she had never spoken to Lin at that point in time — and assumed that as he was so close to Musk’s inner circle, he wouldn’t talk to her.

But Lin’s laptop was taken and the following day he was fired.

As he left, Lin claims a colleague told him that James Musk, one of Elon Musk’s cousins, was telling people that Lin had admitted to leaking dozens of articles.

Fearing that he was going to be sued as well, he reached out to Schiffer for more information. She couldn’t tell him anything but passed on the names of two attorneys representing Twitter employees.

Troy Batterberry, CEO and Co-founder, EchoMark had this to say:

“People who leak or steal information harm the organization’s brand, employee morale, ongoing information flow, and customer trust. Collectively, this also damages leadership effectiveness. People who leak information are also typically sabotaging other aspects of the organization. To add insult to injury … organizations are literally paying these saboteurs to remain employed within their organization. Insiders leaking or stealing information is on the rise, too – growing nearly 50% annually.

“It’s important to be able to accurately identify the culprit and take action to stop the damage. At EchoMark, we have found that the use of stenography can help accurately identify the source of such leaks, and even prevent them from happening in the future.”

The problem is in this case that it doesn’t look like Elon Musk didn’t even try to get the facts right if you believe Mr. Lin’s account. Which is what we’ve come to expect from Elon as he’s not that detail oriented. Hopefully Mr. Lin sues the pants off of Elon to teach him some sort of lesson.

Most of the time when I write about Twitter, I usually talk about what a dumpster fire that this social media platform is. But today, I’m doing something different. I’m going to give it some praise. Twitter has stopped searches for Taylor Swift after deepfake nudes, meaning fake nude pictures, started to flood the site. The BBC has the details:

In a statement to the BBC, X’s head of business operations Joe Benarroch said it was a “temporary action” to prioritise safety.

When searching for Swift on the site, a message appears that says: “Something went wrong. Try reloading.” 

Fake graphic images of the singer appeared on the site earlier this week.

Some went viral and were viewed millions of times, prompting alarm from US officials and fans of the singer.

Posts and accounts sharing the fake images were flagged by her fans, who populated the platform with real images and videos of her, using the words “protect Taylor Swift”. 

The photos prompted X, formerly Twitter, to release a statement on Friday, saying that posting non-consensual nudity on the platform is “strictly prohibited”.

While this is one of the few good moves that Twitter has made lately, one wonders what would have happened if these images were not of Taylor Swift, and were instead a woman who doesn’t have millions of fans to flag images on her behalf so that Twitter could take action. Would Twitter have acted to deal with the issue? I don’t know. But it’s a question worth asking. In any case, this highlights why strict laws need to be enacted everywhere to stop this sort of thing from happening.

Recently Twitter made passkeys available as a login option for US-based users.

This announcement follows recent Twitter account hacks of high-profile organizations, including Hyundai,Netgear and the SEC.

Kevin Vreeland, General Manager of North America, Veridas had this to say:

“The shift towards passwordless authentication is a necessary step for enhanced security. As we’ve seen with the most recent account hacks, passwords, even for high-profile organizations, are not an effective method for keeping credentials safe.  

In today’s predominantly digital landscape, users frequently reuse passwords due to the challenge and frustration of memorizing numerous combinations. This universal practice makes password theft an easy avenue for fraud, identity theft, and in more recent cases, the spread of misinformation. Passkeys, such as face and voice verification, are significantly more difficult to steal, as they are linked to a user’s physical identity. Needless to say, they provide a much more enjoyable login experience for users, as users can be verified in seconds and don’t have to jump through hoops with lengthy dual authentication processes.  

Some vendors are developing their biometric technology on the premise of shifting the paradigm away from the presumption of “what we know” or “what we have,” which is how passwords have worked so far, to “who we are,” people with unique qualities that cannot be duplicated. With Amazon, Google and now X all making passkeys available as a sign-in method, more companies need to be making this shift to keep up with the evolving threat landscape.” 

Paswordless authentication is the future. Full stop. If you or your organization rely on passwords you need to make shift sooner rather than later to avoid getting pwned like the SEC did.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before. But Twitter has banned a bunch of journalists that were critical of Twitter. But then un-banning them quickly:

Elon Musk’s X / Twitter once again purged journalists — among others — who were critical of the billionaire’s politics. But as quickly as they went, they seemingly soon came back. 

This time X barred a handful of journalists, podcasters, and other users. Among the purged: the Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein, the Texas Observer’s Steven Monacelli, podcaster Rob Rousseau, and the account for the leftwing podcast TrueAnon. But just as some of the previous, seemingly arbitrary bans of other journalists didn’t last, this incident was quickly resolved on Tuesday.

For a guy who claims to be all for free speech, Elon Musk loves to ban the Twitter accounts of people that speak freely and criticize him. Talk about having a thin skin. This highlights that journalists are not welcome on Twitter and should find better places to be like Threads or Mastodon where they can do their jobs without the interference of a billionaire who acts like a child.