Twitter is (or was) down

February 8, 2023 5:48 PM

Twitter experiencing international outages; most users can’t tweet or DM. Seems like its the 2nd or 3rd time in the last couple of months.
posted by buffy12 (230 comments total)

I've admired how Twitter has mostly stayed online as Elon Musk has decimated the staff and forced rapid changes with no forethought or planning. Going full chaos monkey and unplugging random racks in Sacramento on Christmas Eve was a particular treat. Twitter's former engineers did good work building a system resilient enough to survive that kind of abuse.

But it's gotta come to an end at some point. There's only so many holes you can punch in the walls before the building falls down.
posted by Nelson at 5:55 PM on February 8, 2023 [54 favorites]

BTW, Elon is trying to do crisis management. "Um stop making all those changes I demanded, we have a Super Bowl to survive."
posted by Nelson at 5:56 PM on February 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

It also won't let [at least some] users follow people anymore. Just hilarious.
posted by Pink Frost at 6:08 PM on February 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Tweetdeck was the only thing making Twitter bearable, and it won't load for me at all. Probably a good thing!
posted by HeroZero at 6:12 PM on February 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's like that bit in Titanic when the lights flicker and go out. Boat's not fully down but headed that way.
posted by emjaybee at 6:13 PM on February 8, 2023 [19 favorites]

so this is what Nelson Muntz feels

it feels .... good.
posted by Sauce Trough at 6:15 PM on February 8, 2023 [50 favorites]

I really like Twitter, ownership questions aside. I enjoy being on there. But if Tweetdeck goes down I may have to put it in the "too difficult to use" basket given the desktop interface keeps getting worse.
posted by solarion at 6:16 PM on February 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Did they not pay rent on their datacentre or something?
posted by Dysk at 6:27 PM on February 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

Twitter has no communications department to follow up to confirm if the apparent outage is due to a bug or recent product update, both possible causes

See, guys, The Clown CEO was actually planning ahead for once
posted by armoir from antproof case at 6:29 PM on February 8, 2023 [12 favorites]

Rumor in the tech circles I travel in is that they didn't realize the API they turned off was also used for regular old posting.
posted by potrzebie at 6:31 PM on February 8, 2023 [56 favorites]

“I TOLD you it was a piece of crap! I said it wouldn’t even make it to the Superbowl! But nooooooo you said i had to buy it anyway! Hah! Well now look what you made me do! Er, um, wait a sec,..”

- Melon Husk
posted by armoir from antproof case at 6:34 PM on February 8, 2023

Twitter's engineering headcount is what, 10% of what it was six months ago? Possibly less? Anybody left at this point must be one of the True Believers, but how many times can you pull all-nighters trying to trace back someone else's idiosyncratic undocumented Katamari of a build configuration, all while the klaxons are sounding and the completely unhinged narcissist in charge is pitching a fit and threatening your job? The company itself is radioactive in the tech community, so it's not like there are reinforcements coming. Attrition isn't going to stop. At some point, there's going to be an outage that they can't recover from (or that takes weeks to recover from, which in this business is basically the same thing), and when that happens, I hope the cameras are rolling and all pointed directly at Elon's face.
posted by Mayor West at 6:35 PM on February 8, 2023 [41 favorites]

They just announced a week "extension" of the current free API access, so I'm guessing they pushed a update that shit the bed and need a week for the skeleton crew to leave voicemails with all the engineers they recently fired.
posted by credulous at 6:36 PM on February 8, 2023 [11 favorites]

Anybody left at this point must be one of the True Believers

(Or dependent on their job at Twitter for immigration rights! Can't be much fun...)
posted by Dysk at 6:37 PM on February 8, 2023 [81 favorites]

Well if you like your social media with cool third party clients…

Ivory for Mastodon Review: Tapbots Reborn
posted by Artw at 6:46 PM on February 8, 2023 [13 favorites]

yes, for as much as I am loling at that dope for throwing away all his expertise, I feel for the poor H1B hostages stuck there, their living situations all hanging off a mercurial goofball. six months ago there were lots of escape opportunities but today not so much. hang on friends.
posted by Sauce Trough at 6:57 PM on February 8, 2023 [27 favorites]

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
posted by not_on_display at 6:59 PM on February 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

what took it down was:

@infinite_scream: well, if this bot is ending, let's go out in style. what's up, @infinite_bees

posted by scruss at 7:11 PM on February 8, 2023 [47 favorites]

Apparently people affected by the earthquake in Turkey have been using twitter to find one another, and it being down is causing a lot of problems for them.
posted by Zumbador at 7:36 PM on February 8, 2023 [19 favorites]

It....I just have to laugh. He announces the free API goes away, and what do ya know tomorrow's the deadline and oof, oh hmmm crap.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 7:45 PM on February 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Apparently people affected by the earthquake in Turkey have been using twitter to find one another, and it being down is causing a lot of problems for them.

Twitter Chaos Endangers Public Safety, Emergency Managers Warn
posted by Artw at 7:47 PM on February 8, 2023 [21 favorites]

Ivory for iOS is awesome and I'm starting to see interesting stuff on my server these days. I'm enjoying all of this immensely.
posted by JoeZydeco at 7:51 PM on February 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

so this is what Nelson Muntz feels

it feels .... good.

Good, good. Let the ha-ha flow through you! Your schadenfreude has made you powerful.
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:58 PM on February 8, 2023 [27 favorites]

🐤m̷̛̛̳̣͔̲͚̼͍̹̳̙̲̯̖̫͙̯͇̝̭̤̹̀͗͑̈́͊̍̄͒̇͂̏̾̋̉́̄̈́̈́͆̋̅̈́̑͗̀̑͐͐̍̒͊̊͆͊͑̈́̃̅͂̉̔̇̅͊̈̐̓͆̍̓̌̀̓̽͆͋͐̅́͆̄́̏͒͐͋̽̎̌͗́́͗̏͌̌̓̎̓͛̓̇̎̏̃̀̄̇͘͘͘̕̕̚͘͘͜͜͝͝͝͝
posted by clavdivs at 8:00 PM on February 8, 2023 [12 favorites]

This is the point at which even Lone Skum has to admit that the game of Jenga that he was playing was not involving simple wooden blocks.

Or maybe he won't. Look, everyone, a "truck" that looks like an unused Battlezone asset!
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:21 PM on February 8, 2023 [8 favorites]

a "truck" that looks like an unused Battlezone asset

It was inspired by old sci-fi movies where they had to design props that would be practical to make out of cardboard.
posted by aubilenon at 8:25 PM on February 8, 2023 [14 favorites]

One report (@[e-mail]) is that they shut down (or rate-limited) the API without taking into consideration that other elements of Twitter also used the API.

Which seems like the kind of thing that would take firing an awful lot of employees to lose track of.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:29 PM on February 8, 2023 [22 favorites]

The last paragraph is hilarious.
posted by brundlefly at 9:40 PM on February 8, 2023

It's failing, and becoming infected with trolls, bad-faith and Gopaganda; every thread on climate change, public-health, and Left politics is instantly swamped to the point where not worth writing - wishing destruction of Musk and his empire, what a terrible useless person he is.
posted by unearthed at 10:27 PM on February 8, 2023 [26 favorites]

Over the last couple of weeks, a very substantial percent of the people I follow have finally left twitter. It's hit a tipping point where I'm primarily getting content from just a handful of the frequent posters I used to follow, most of whom are cross-posting elsewhere. With very minor exception, the people who are still posting substantially on twitter are pretty much the posters of unremitting bad news, either by temperament or because they are, like, Unicorn Riot and covering bad news is their remit. Almost all my history/regional follows are gone, my cat content follows are obviously moving elsewhere, I'm getting pretty much nothing but queer and trans character-of-the-day stuff, my big SF follows have mostly moved. I'm sure that this latest round of changes is going to push the last of the people I follow away from twitter. It's such a shame, I had such a nice list there before Martian Landlord bought it.

I think that this is it for me - life has been busy and I haven't done more than preliminary export/finder stuff about moving to Mastodon and probably making a tumblr, but the death spiral has really become apparent since mid-January and I think I'm done.
posted by Frowner at 10:29 PM on February 8, 2023 [24 favorites]

How long any migration/backup tools will last is highly questionable, with anything relying on the API getting killed off and Twitters own stability highly questionable. If you’re intending using any of those probably worth doing sooner rather than later.
posted by Artw at 10:52 PM on February 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

Twitter Chaos Endangers Public Safety, Emergency Managers Warn

Twitter sucks. Elon Musk sucks. But public safety is not the responsibility of a social media network. It's the responsibility of government. And if government fails in its responsibilities, then the blame lies with government, not Twitter. As much as Twitter and its owner are terrible for humanity. People use a similar argument for defending Facebook, and they are just as wrong, and we can all see the consequences.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:40 PM on February 8, 2023 [57 favorites]

Apparently people affected by the earthquake in Turkey have been using twitter to find one another

Probably more pertinent to the Turkey earthquake thread, but initially Twitter was intentionally blocked by the Turkish government, separately from any technical problems.
posted by meowzilla at 11:51 PM on February 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

Or… nationalize it.
posted by Artw at 11:52 PM on February 8, 2023 [15 favorites]

But public safety is not the responsibility of a social media network. It's the responsibility of government.

And we run up against the hypercapitalist idea that government needs to step out of the way when there is the chance for private profits. It is supposedly just more "natural" or "efficient" this way, or something?

Sadly I do not have much faith that there is any government in the world ready to step up in the Internet sphere to establish the information infrastructure that is very clearly needed in the modern world...
posted by Meatbomb at 12:03 AM on February 9, 2023 [11 favorites]

Or… nationalize it.

I think that is evil socialism or something like that, right? When was the last time a (not evil enemy socialist) government has done this?
posted by Meatbomb at 12:05 AM on February 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Or… nationalize it.

I don’t think Turkey has that option.
posted by aubilenon at 12:08 AM on February 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

How sure are you that any government could do a good job of running a major social media platform? Has it been done anywhere?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 12:13 AM on February 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

The idea of governments running social media platforms that have any chance of gaining (and maintaining!) traction via the network effect is... "extremely infeasible", to be polite. I wouldn't trust any government in the world right now to not spend billions and still just absolutely botch it.

Simpler to just post all important information across multiple popular platforms simultaneously to prevent overreliance on individual companies.
posted by jklaiho at 12:57 AM on February 9, 2023 [19 favorites]

Your periodic reminder that there is an unofficial Mefi Mastodon instance. There's a link there to get an invite.
posted by zompist at 1:22 AM on February 9, 2023 [20 favorites]

It seems like quite a leap from "people need help finding each other after a disaster" to "nationalize Twitter".
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:48 AM on February 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

For a mefi.social invite, mefimail me or mefi dot social!
posted by Pronoiac at 1:51 AM on February 9, 2023 [13 favorites]

But public safety is not the responsibility of a social media network.

Public safety is everyone's responsibility. Purporting to provide a reliable way to communicate with friends and family and then yanking the rug out when people need it most is anti-social behavior at best.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 2:01 AM on February 9, 2023 [17 favorites]

There's a country where the government manages social media, and it's China. Do not try to be like the Chinese Internet, please. Just think of what would happen to BLM or LGBTQ+ activists or women giving each other abortion counsel in a GOP-controlled twitter because it's already bad enough as it is.
posted by sukeban at 2:31 AM on February 9, 2023 [27 favorites]

Or… nationalize it.
This assumes successive governments of the nation in question will each preserve its independence and fund it adequately.
An assumption that hasn't proved to be true for the US postal service or the UK National Health Service, to name but two.
posted by faceplantingcheetah at 2:34 AM on February 9, 2023 [11 favorites]

The right answer, the correct answer, is a network of independently operated, redundant servers connected by a fault-tolerant mesh network; funded directly by its users yet available to everyone regardless of ability to pay, and having no single point of failure or control.
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:54 AM on February 9, 2023 [27 favorites]

It is not necessary for the communication ststem to be run by governments (though that can work see for example numerous provincal, state, federal or city owned phone systems past and present) merely that they maintain their own system that inter connects with other systems. If some US department stands up a Mastodon instance they will get all the distribution reach of Twitter while not being beholden to some manbaby's whims. In exactly the same way the Whitehouse can send an email whithout paying for every mail server on the planet.
posted by Mitheral at 5:36 AM on February 9, 2023 [9 favorites]

I heard on Countdown [Cued to the story at 20:30] this morning that it wasn't just Twitter. K.O. reports, “There were outages at or about the same time at Instagram, Facebook, Fox News, Tweet Deck, Runescape — Runescape? For Roone Arledge fans? — Facebook Messenger, Google, AWS, the McDonalds app, YouTube, and Pokemon Go.”

“YouTube says homepage back up after brief outage,” Akanksha Khushi, Reuters, 08 February 2023
posted by ob1quixote at 5:57 AM on February 9, 2023

If you are an iOS user and want a great, free, Mastodon app check out Ice Cubes.

Yes, and join mefi.social
posted by terrapin at 5:59 AM on February 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

“Nationalize Twitter, it’s in the public interest to keep it alive” might be a way Musk could get out of this and keep control at his other companies. It’s also extremely unlikely to happen.
posted by aspersioncast at 6:07 AM on February 9, 2023

Someone posted on Mastodon that their Twitter account that they had cleaned out was showing old tweets again. I looked at my account and, sure enough, a bunch of old tweets I had purged using a third party tool have reappeared. The ghost of my account has been reanimated. Twitter must have restored part of the data store from backup.
posted by Surely This at 6:11 AM on February 9, 2023 [16 favorites]

Surely This, that is very alarming. Are you able to share a link to tweets that were deleted and now are appearing again? Either your own or someone else's?

Twitter data safety has been a huge concern of mine. My particular worry is DMs. Those were supposed to always be private but between mistakes and Musk's general contempt for privacy if he doesn't like someone, I fear DMs will end up getting exposed. And there's no way to delete DMs from the system (by design).
posted by Nelson at 6:28 AM on February 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

My side of twitter actually hasn't been affected. Right now I'm wondering (for the first time) if this is a side benefit of living in the same country as Elon's fascist bestie.
posted by cendawanita at 6:29 AM on February 9, 2023

a bunch of old tweets I had purged using a third party tool have reappeared ... The ghost of my account has been reanimated. Twitter must have restored part of the data store from backup.

Somewhere in Europe, a GDPR auditor's ears prick up.
posted by Static Vagabond at 6:30 AM on February 9, 2023 [33 favorites]

The public launch of Spoutible is also happening today at 8pm Eastern, apropos of nothing.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 6:31 AM on February 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

One of the few occasions in which Jeremy Clarkson can speak for me.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:33 AM on February 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Elon's fascist bestie

Which one?
posted by curious nu at 6:46 AM on February 9, 2023 [14 favorites]

It seems like quite a leap from "people need help finding each other after a disaster" to "nationalize Twitter".

If something actually counts as vital infrastructure and you leave it in oligarch hands they will fuck it up at your cost and to their benefit. In Elons case maybe just the “fuck it up at your cost” bit because he is an idiot.

The soft alternative would be building up alternative sources of information via open protocols such as activePub.
posted by Artw at 7:26 AM on February 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

The right answer, the correct answer, is a network of independently operated, redundant servers connected by a fault-tolerant mesh network; funded directly by its users yet available to everyone regardless of ability to pay, and having no single point of failure or control.

That’s a great idea. I’m not certain that it’s sarcastic. I’m going to propose a new law. Every three lisp reinvention generations someone reinvents the internet. There’s absolutely no reason for social media to be centralized except that the people running the companies want you to to stay inside the garden walls and people are too lazy to demand decentralization.
posted by rdr at 7:34 AM on February 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

A law requiring open APIs, with appropriate controls, for all social media sites, seems like it might work better than nationalization. Link it to their right to not be sued for content.

Yes, it would be hard to write and impossible to pass. But also, so would nationalization.
posted by SunSnork at 7:50 AM on February 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

There has been some work towards legally requiring data access: in Europe the Art. 20 GDPR Right to data portability and in California the right to access information. These requirements are part of why sites like Twitter allow you to request a data archive export. And those are genuinely useful! But few services have taken the obvious step of writing imports for competing services' data. (TheStoryGraph and GoodReads is an exception).

But these data dumps wouldn't be useful for real time alerting of events. Honestly this is a service the government should be building and operating itself. Only no one (including myself) believes that would work very well in the US. The government alert systems we do have work sort of OK for true emergencies but it's only suitable for once-a-year type events. Twitter was good for daily notifications of lower level concerns.
posted by Nelson at 7:57 AM on February 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

When Elon bought the place I did one of those Delete Tweets things. it never seemed to have gotten everything.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 8:17 AM on February 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Or… nationalize it.

Nationalize or not, but maybe don't rely upon it as a single point of failure for communication. Or regulate the hell out of it if it is used for that purpose, as is done in other countries, say, with cellular phone service and emergency communications (911, Amber alerts, Hawaiian nuclear launch warnings, etc.). The point is that governments do not need to abdicate their responsibilities to private companies that are not accountable to the public.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:18 AM on February 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

I did Delete Tweets as well, and it all seems to be gone. However when I go to the Media tab it's full of my pictures, and if I click on any of those pictures it shows the picture plus the original tweet that came with it.

So it looks like I have more to do, or find another tool that can nuke those photos. But the fact that those "deleted" tweets are still in there somewhere is bothersome.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:26 AM on February 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

Extremist influencers are generating millions for Twitter, report says
posted by Artw at 8:38 AM on February 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

The city of Amsterdam has set up its own mastodon server, so now I can get official toots from local government: https://social.amsterdam.nl/@gemeenteamsterdam

I don’t think governments need to develop whole social media platforms when they can just set up a server using a freely available and open protocol to get their messages out.

This is one of those cases where mastodon is like email. Governments run email servers under their own domains that government officials can send email from, why not also run an activity pub server?
posted by antinomia at 8:46 AM on February 9, 2023 [17 favorites]

I think part of the attraction of Twitter was that it was *outside* of the system. You didn't have to file a 27B/6 with Booz Allen and wait two weeks for the IBM WebSphere team to create an XML email avatar or something.
posted by credulous at 9:10 AM on February 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

Why is anyone still on that site?
posted by senor biggles at 10:02 AM on February 9, 2023 [14 favorites]

Well, to the original article, a lot of US government services send information out on Twitter because it's worked so well as a way to notify people. I think Musk has ruined that but the word isn't fully out yet.
posted by Nelson at 10:21 AM on February 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Why is anyone still on that site?

There are still people worth following and that still works.
posted by mazola at 10:25 AM on February 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

My particular worry is DMs. Those were supposed to always be private

There's no way to prove it either way, but I'd be extremely surprised if Musk was not personally going through the DMs of his ex-wives.
posted by AlSweigart at 10:29 AM on February 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

Went back into my account to delete the remaining pictures from the Media tab...they're gone. Hit refresh a dozen times and they're back. I'd make a shocked face here but I'll shrug instead. They're fucked.
posted by JoeZydeco at 10:46 AM on February 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

Annnnd now I see that most of these "delete my tweets" sites only do a small amount for free and want money to do the rest. Argh.

Is there some Python script I can grab somewhere that will do all of this (and probably runs the rest of these sites)?
posted by JoeZydeco at 11:02 AM on February 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

@jessehawken:

Why would anyone pay good money to invest in a platform run by a man who asks “what does this button do?” after pressing it

posted by mhum at 11:07 AM on February 9, 2023 [10 favorites]

We know that internal tools are being used to pursue grievances and personal agendas, ie “the Twitter Files”, and that the current head of “Safety” is complicit in this - All DMs should absolutely be considered potentially compromised.
posted by Artw at 11:21 AM on February 9, 2023 [10 favorites]

JoeZydecco - most of those require you to get an archive then use the API to specifically delete the tweets by ID, which is the most effective way, but even then I am not entirely sure it wiped all of mine out when I did it, and this was pre takeover.

Availability of the API is of course an open question.
posted by Artw at 11:24 AM on February 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I'm seeing the same thing ArtW. Thanks. I did grab my archive back before the takeover, and I found one tool that claims to do it...and it wants money too. Ugh. I'll keep looking.

We know that internal tools are being used to pursue grievances and personal agendas, ie “the Twitter Files”, and that the current head of “Safety” is complicit in this -

Kudos to Gerry Connolly (D VA-11) for taking a hearing about Hunter Biden tweet suppression and using it to get Twitter's previous "head of Safety" to admit that Trump asked Twitter to pull down a tweet calling him a "pussy ass bitch." And now that's in the Congressional Record.
posted by JoeZydeco at 11:34 AM on February 9, 2023 [11 favorites]

Availability of the API is of course an open question.

Even when the API access was completely free you had to get a higher level than the easy-to-get basic developer account (by default you don't get the ability to delete), can't recall if it was a paid level, but guessing that in the time it would take to get it the free version will be gone. So while there are Python scripts around to do the deleting, they are likely to be a lot more hassle and expense than paying for it.

https://tweetdeleter.com/pricing was the one that I found works out cheapest if you just get it for one month and delete everything then cancel.

Probably worth doing now if doing at all as there's no guarantee that the availability and cost of these services aren't going to change at any moment with further Twitter chaos.
posted by Buntix at 11:38 AM on February 9, 2023

If you are in California or in Europe, in theory you have the right to delete your Twitter account entirely and Twitter is supposed to facilitate that. In practice that may not be so easy. Twitter's FAQ makes it sound like they think "delete tweets one by one" is adequate. There's third party sites like this one that will submit GDPR and CCPA deletion requests for you, but I can't vouch for them. Also Twitter is apparently ignoring GDPR deletion requests these days, another law that Elon Musk feels like he can just ignore.

I keep hammering on this deletion point because it seems very serious to me. For years we treated Twitter DMs as private as text messages. That may or may not be reasonable, but the new owner is now actively hostile to user privacy and is pursuing a political agenda. (See also Artw's comment).

Yesterday Marjorie Taylor Greene accused a gay former Twitter execuitive of supporting pedophilia during a congressional hearing. This is the methodology of stochastic terrorism; the purpose is to incite attacks against him. That executive had to sell his house trying to escape the death threats he's been getting. All since Elon Musk personally attacked him in December. This shit is way beyond "lol the site is a little broken".
posted by Nelson at 12:08 PM on February 9, 2023 [26 favorites]

Musk already signaled they're going to kill the original blue checks.

Now there's reporting that there will be activity limits for accounts without Blue.

Twitter is leveraging everyone's dependence on it as an aggregator to move to a pay-to-say model, away from advertising as its main revenue stream.

And the commentariat will find a way to conduct an about-face on Twitter Blue once their checks are yanked because no one wants to go back to life without a centralized content hub.

Elon's going to get the last laugh on the buyout and it angers me already.
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:14 PM on February 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

I still hold out hope that he’s overestimated peoples willingness to pay for the privilege of provide free content to a dwindling audience of Nazis.
posted by Artw at 12:21 PM on February 9, 2023 [13 favorites]

There's an amazing new article on Platformer:

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?

“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
[...]
Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

Musk did not take the news well.

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer.

posted by Superilla at 12:23 PM on February 9, 2023 [30 favorites]

I still hold out hope that he’s overestimated peoples willingness to pay for the privilege of provide free content to a dwindling audience of Nazis.

The Establishment (of all flavors) couldn't tweet or DM for a few hours and they totally lost their shit. viz., this thread.

I'm not confident the people presently responsible know how to produce the nightly news without Twitter. Or the front page of the newspaper (whichever you read).
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:27 PM on February 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

God I am glad I never did the Twitter thing. What a total shitshow.

Elon has made me embarrassed to own a Tesla. When we bought it, we didn't know what an asshole he was. I SWEAR!!!
posted by Windopaene at 12:32 PM on February 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

(Aside from whatever they reprint from the wires, who still employ journalists, anyway.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:32 PM on February 9, 2023

The Establishment (of all flavors) couldn't tweet or DM for a few hours and they totally lost their shit. viz., this thread.

On the other hand I heard about that because they were complaining about it on mastodon, so… *shrug*
posted by Artw at 12:35 PM on February 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

(A slightly grimmer milestone: I’m getting pretty much the same level and depth of news updates on the Turkey earthquake via mastodon that I previously would have via Twitter. Six months ago that would very much not have been the case)
posted by Artw at 12:37 PM on February 9, 2023 [10 favorites]

Twitter Blue Bug Seems to Let Users Keep Their Checkmark Without Paying
posted by Artw at 12:41 PM on February 9, 2023

I still hold out hope that he’s overestimated peoples willingness to pay for the privilege of provide free content to a dwindling audience of Nazis.

Looks like we're at 0.2% of the user base at this point for Twitter Blue.
posted by JoeZydeco at 12:47 PM on February 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

That Platformer article is just full of details of how bad the culture is inside Twitter now. And then there's this:

"There’s times he’s just awake late at night and says all sorts of things that don’t make sense,” one employee said.

I guess they have to be careful what he says in an article but this sure screams "drug problem". Which is not a new concern.
posted by Nelson at 12:52 PM on February 9, 2023 [12 favorites]

How I Use RSS To “Rewild” My Attention

I stick by my hypothesis that the end of Google Reader was the root cause of the end of the internet golden age and consequent crumbling of society.
posted by Artw at 12:53 PM on February 9, 2023 [42 favorites]

I waiting for Musk to go full Howard Hughes.
posted by terrapin at 12:55 PM on February 9, 2023 [8 favorites]

Looks like we're at 0.2% of the user base at this point for Twitter Blue.

Meaningless until they follow through on the threat (with teeth).

Who here really thinks everyone who depends on their 'impressions' to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year won't pony up $8/mo?

What will Twitter/Elon rake in when you can pay $8 to be on equal footing w/ @whoever?

I am a BBS kid and Mastodon tickles me, but let's be real.
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:05 PM on February 9, 2023

Twitter is leveraging everyone's dependence on it as an aggregator to move to a pay-to-say model, away from advertising as its main revenue stream. ... And the commentariat will find a way to conduct an about-face on Twitter Blue once their checks are yanked because no one wants to go back to life without a centralized content hub.

Elon's going to get the last laugh on the buyout and it angers me already.

how do those numbers pencil out? Say Musk converts all 400K verified accounts to twitter blue. That's 3.2MM gross a month, ~$38M gross a year.

That feels like an insignificant amount of revenue for a company that costs a cool billion annually in debt servicing.
posted by Sauce Trough at 1:09 PM on February 9, 2023 [10 favorites]

I hope that math can kill it. My gut says otherwise.
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:11 PM on February 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

From the Platformer article.

One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach:

I am a principal software engineer. I work for a tech-adjacent startup company building highly specialized tools that empower our highly niche product. I am super understaffed, I have 10x more work than I can accomplish.

My department -- just my department of about 50ish SDEs -- has two principal software engineers, me and another one.

I can't imagine what the poor duo at Twitter is dealing with right now.

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer.

Correction, I can't imagine what that poor solo at Twitter is dealing with right now.
posted by Sauce Trough at 1:17 PM on February 9, 2023 [16 favorites]

Yeah, I too raised an eyebrow at that casually-dropped "one of two remaining PEs."

Who here really thinks everyone who depends on their impressions to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year won't pony up $8/mo?

And how many such people are there really, though? Not enough, I reckon.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 1:27 PM on February 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Seems they want to also fleece businesses and governments with "Twitter Verification for Organizations" (pricing not yet announced). Through sheer laziness and inertia they should be able to make money on this.
posted by credulous at 1:43 PM on February 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

the threat (with teeth).

The 'teeth' tweet got deleted (very recently, afaik).

It reported a leak that without Twitter Blue, tweets, retweets, etc. would be throttled to ~20/day (combined).
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:49 PM on February 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

So, literally 'put up or shut up' for the platform, if true.
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:18 PM on February 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

How I Use RSS To “Rewild” My Attention

I've gone back to reading via RSS feeds. Not quite as much as in the google reader days, but it's helping me find more interesting stuff outside of the facebook et al walled gardens.

My favorite tip these days is that you can get an RSS feed from any substack by just adding /feed/ to the end of the substack URL. Works like a charm, though I'd guess the person you're following doesn't get the addition to their subscription numbers and I have no idea how it works with paid substacks.
posted by msbrauer at 2:21 PM on February 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

The day Musk closed the deal I left one last “see ya” post on Twitter and logged out. Not logging back in, moved to Mastodon. Made the mistake of picking a local instance, but the admin flaked out about 2 weeks ago and we lost everything. Moved to a different instance and only noticed MeFi.social after doing so. Oops.

My posts are useless noise and no one should care about my meandering thoughts, but the one throwaway commend and photo of my cat got a lot of hits. Go figure, people on the internet like cats! Who knew?
posted by caution live frogs at 3:14 PM on February 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

From the article Superilla linked:

... users being told, inexplicably, “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.” It turns out that an employee had inadvertently deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter. The team that worked on that service left the company in November.

Inadertently. Sure.
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:03 PM on February 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

That's a chill way of saying test code went live, right?
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:08 PM on February 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Inadertently.

It's clear I've "inadertently" let my caffeine level drop too low...
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:10 PM on February 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

It reported a leak that without Twitter Blue, tweets, retweets, etc. would be throttled to ~20/day (combined).

Can't find the tweet (from either @TwitterDev or @TwitterAPI) but think those were going to be API limits for the free post-only accounts.

Given that Twitter is basically fuelled by a very small percentage of terminally online people for whom posting is pretty much a compulsion (and mostly entirely sans profit) then doing something that would almost certainly drive that core elsewhere would be social media suicide. This admittedly does make it seem more likely they were planning on rolling it out to everyone without a paid checkmark...

Seems they want to also fleece businesses and governments with "Twitter Verification for Organizations" (pricing not yet announced)

Musk was suggesting $1000 a month + $50 extra for each related company dept/employee account [Variety]. Though guessing that was quite possibly just thrown out there in a late-night zolpidem haze.

-----
RE: Tweet deletion.
Had a look around my Twitter developer login, and all the levels required to access the v.2 of the API needed to delete tweets are priced at 'TBD', so guessing a homebrew Python (or other) approach probably isn't an option.

That said it occurred to me that it could be done by bypassing the API and doing it via something like a chrome extension using the regular account login and web interface. Or to be fancy perhaps even a headless chrome bot, there's even a Selenium based Twitter bot that could probably be adapted.
posted by Buntix at 4:14 PM on February 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

I looked at the Twitter Verification for Organizations thing and to me it looks like it's only of use to organizations who want to verify (like old-style blue check marks before Musk) their employees, e.g. maybe journalists. I don't see what good it would be to the vast majority of industries.
posted by joannemerriam at 4:39 PM on February 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

I looked at the Twitter Verification for Organizations thing and to me it looks like it's only of use to organizations who want to verify (like old-style blue check marks before Musk) their employees

Which explains why he's getting rid of all the 'legacy' blue checks that were based on actual identity verification rather than eight bucks a month.

Could this potentially be the biggest ‘Who’s Who’ con in history?
posted by Buntix at 4:54 PM on February 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

Elongineering - Attempting to build by loudly proclaiming that every problem is easy and that the people who did it before are incompetent; slowly coming to understand why things were done the way they were for reasons that you didn't actually understand; and finally, returning to loud proclaiming instead of admitting you were wrong and learning from your mistakes.
posted by Artw at 5:28 PM on February 9, 2023 [8 favorites]

> The 'teeth' tweet got deleted (very recently, afaik).

There's only one "teeth" tweet in my heart
posted by Pronoiac at 7:16 PM on February 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

Ok, invite requests are sorted out, so far. And I followed a "chill out on the silly shitposting for a minute" with an updog reference, so I'm happy.
posted by Pronoiac at 7:48 PM on February 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

Someone posted on Mastodon that their Twitter account that they had cleaned out was showing old tweets again. I looked at my account and, sure enough, a bunch of old tweets I had purged using a third party tool have reappeared.

I have used Tweetdelete to delete all my tweets at lest three times now to have some large number of them reappear some weeks or months later. I just logged in and everything from 2018 back is up again. It feels Sisyphean at this point. I don’t want to delete my entire account because I don’t want bad actors swiping my username, but this is getting ridiculous.
posted by Devils Rancher at 8:47 PM on February 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

Musk did not take the news well.

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” ....

In his heart he was proclaiming, "Off with his head!"
posted by BlueHorse at 8:53 PM on February 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

Musk is doing just what Putin wanted him to do.
I was booted the day of the insurrection. Pretty much said that in any real country the Capitol steps would have been knee deep in their blood. I was on Twitter and live tweeting my reactions. I considered going back on, then Musk bought it. In my opinion the ONLY moral reason to be on Twitter is as a member of NAFO.
Otherwise aside from certain accounts I interacted with, I don’t greatly miss it. As for Musk, so tired of rich toddlers.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 10:28 PM on February 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

Who here really thinks everyone who depends on their 'impressions' to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year won't pony up $8/mo?

I imagine they are going to adopt the same model as Google ads and Facebook impressions, where the price of that blue check is “dynamic“ and gets very steep for anyone who’s tied their livelihood to the platform
posted by Jon_Evil at 1:15 AM on February 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

I don’t want to delete my entire account because I don’t want bad actors swiping my username, but this is getting ridiculous.

Is it possible to swipe your own username by deleting your account and then opening a new blank one in your old name?
posted by trig at 5:59 AM on February 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

there’s a 30 day period where the data is retained (to allow for reactivation) then it’s up for grabs. Unfortunately this means anyone else can grab it too, so abandoning an account might be a better choice than deleting it if you’re worried about any fuckery ensuing from that.
posted by Artw at 6:42 AM on February 10, 2023

Are there sites still using the "Log in with Twitter" API? Because that's a huge hole if someone gets your old account.
posted by JoeZydeco at 7:19 AM on February 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

A sane implementation would have a token associated with the account that would be used for those purposes and would change if the username was recreated after being deleted.
posted by Mitheral at 7:40 AM on February 10, 2023

Nobody can get your old account. People are worried that somebody registers a new account after 30 days with the same handle they had.
posted by Pendragon at 7:41 AM on February 10, 2023

The primary security risk there being someone making you look like an asshole.
posted by Artw at 7:56 AM on February 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Not a problem for me, I already do that myself!
posted by Meatbomb at 8:04 AM on February 10, 2023 [9 favorites]

Why is anyone still on that site?

I open up a tab, talk to my friends on the platform, do a little shitposting and maybe take a few minutes to laugh at the CEO showing his ass (yet again). My experience has barely changed, it's just funnier on a daily basis.
posted by Dark Messiah at 11:49 AM on February 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

And I followed a "chill out on the silly shitposting for a minute" with an updog reference, so I'm happy.

What’s updog?
posted by Horace Rumpole at 3:14 PM on February 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

$20, same as in town.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:14 PM on February 10, 2023 [14 favorites]

Nobody can get your old account. People are worried that somebody registers a new account after 30 days with the same handle they had.

Not true. I was rickscully on twitter. A month after I closed that account someone else took that handle.
posted by terrapin at 3:39 PM on February 10, 2023

Not true. I was rickscully on twitter. A month after I closed that account someone else took that handle.


The distinction is between your account and your handle. It's a different account and doesn't start out with all your followers, tweets, DMs, etc. Though if the new rickscully were trying to impersonate you for some reason it would probably be easy to fool some people.
posted by aubilenon at 3:58 PM on February 10, 2023

A month after I closed that account someone else took that handle.

Your handle is not your account.
posted by Pendragon at 4:08 PM on February 10, 2023

Shows how much/little I used the site before abandoning it! Thanks for the correction. I still don't really understand the distinction though. If someone goes to that address expecting to see me and doesn't what does it matter if it is a handle or an account?
posted by terrapin at 4:46 AM on February 11, 2023

Right. So there’s a danger of being spoofed that way, but whoever dies it doesn’t have access to the prior account at that positions DMs, follows, etc…
posted by Artw at 5:30 AM on February 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

Moved to a different instance and only noticed MeFi.social after doing so. Oops.

You can move your account from one server to another! You can even bring your followers that way, which seems like it must have been a difficult technical challenge since it involves your old server telling all of the servers of your followers to change where they point at. But I can vouch that it works!
posted by JHarris at 3:02 PM on February 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Is anyone still on Twitter seeing Oxboy pushed into your feed? Especially if you don't actually follow him?

One report.

Oxboy really did think of Twitter as his own personal megaphone, didn't he.
posted by humbug at 7:39 AM on February 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Probably a follow up to this nonsense.
posted by Artw at 8:07 AM on February 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I check in on twitter every once and a while because I get DMs from a couple people who haven't cottoned that I'm absent, and every time I do there's some straggling notifications about my actual tweet history mixed in with a couple recommended tweets, and 75% of those recommendations are Elon. Twitter decided that I was interested in Automobiles when he was apparnetly; tweeting to gloat about winning one of his Tesla court cases; it decided I was interested in Space or whatever category when there was a launch or a deal or something for SpaceX. It's been going on for a while, definitely prior to the most recent tantrum.
posted by cortex at 8:27 AM on February 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

March 15 has been declared “Leave Twitter Day”. Spread the word.

Alex Wild
@[e-mail]
March 15 is the day people leave Twitter.

The abandonment of Twitter in the Musk era has, for now, been inconsistent and chaotic, with people leaving at different times and for different reasons.

An organized effort to promote a "Leave Twitter" day, when everyone still reluctantly there logs off for the last time, with enough advance to line up alternate sites, should help get people out.

Thus, March 15. The Ides of Musk. Spread the word.

#Twitter #IdesOfMusk #LeaveTwitterDay
Feb 13, 2023 at 07:37
posted by umber vowel at 8:54 AM on February 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

I check in on twitter every once and a while because I get DMs from a couple people who haven't cottoned that I'm absent

Theoretically it should be emailing me notifications, but in actuality it just doesn’t, so I do this thing, but I’ve been doing it less and less over time as the experience is just increasingly unpleasant. Are people you stay just used to the random shit UI glitches and constant promotion of awful shit now?
posted by Artw at 9:27 AM on February 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

75% of those recommendations are Elon.

As well as that I was seeing him as part of the recommended 'People' section on pretty much every hashtag search result, even for things like hurricanes, etc. That does seem to have stopped now, though.
posted by Buntix at 9:54 AM on February 13, 2023

Twitter is just showing everyone all of Elon’s tweets now
posted by Artw at 3:39 PM on February 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ides of Musk! I love it! I hope this goes....exit-ly.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:37 PM on February 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

The flip side of "social media is vital during emergencies"
posted by trig at 12:22 AM on February 14, 2023

Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first [platformer]

At 2:36 on Monday morning, James Musk sent an urgent message to Twitter engineers.

“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” wrote Musk, a cousin of the Twitter CEO, tagging “@here” in Slack to ensure that anyone online would see it. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”

When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.

posted by Buntix at 9:31 PM on February 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

This story is just jaw dropping, every paragraph. The final kludge:

By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his tweets will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed.

Cheers to the Twitter engineer who made this "fix" as a form of malicious compliance. They did what Elon and his cousin demanded and it makes Elon look like an absolute fucking clown. According to the story all this was done under threat of being fired if they didn't find a way to boost Elon's numbers immediately.

I alternate between laughing and crying at seeing this. Twitter used to be precious and important to me.
posted by Nelson at 8:22 AM on February 15, 2023 [10 favorites]

It's good to be the king.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:03 AM on February 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

I wonder if he's got an actual piss boy to follow him around with a bucket. God, it would not surprise me in the least.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:14 AM on February 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

The bit that got me (emp. mine)

That explains why people opening the app Monday found that Musk dominated the feed, with a dozen or more Musk tweets and replies visible to anyone who followed him and millions more who did not. Over 90 percent of Musk’s followers now see his tweets, according to one internal estimate.

So now, even after all the feed manipulation, 10% of Musk's followers don't see his tweets? Isn't being fed their tweets the point of following someone? Or are they just not scrolling far enough?
posted by achrise at 9:37 AM on February 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Their own 'for you' algo — which feed they default you to unless you set it to 'following' — decided that Elon's posts suck.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:54 AM on February 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Why stop there? Why not go beyond MySpace Tom and re-rig it so that every single account is always following Musk and his drivel always shows up unblockable at the top of every account's timeline?
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 9:56 AM on February 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Step away from the lathe.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:58 AM on February 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

90% sounds frankly made up - nobody’s account has 90% active followers who log in every day, especially not a big celebrity follow like Musk.
posted by Artw at 10:00 AM on February 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

I bet bot farms log in everyday.
posted by Mitheral at 10:39 AM on February 15, 2023

I can't think this will be good for Twitter's actual-non-Musk-quisling-human-being numbers. Human beings who are not Musk quislings seem unlikely to enjoy getting force-fed his tweets.
posted by humbug at 11:19 AM on February 15, 2023

I wonder if he's got an actual piss boy to follow him around with a bucket.

I think Elon would rather pee in a sink, let that sink in, but my brain went around the corner on this one. I would expect him to bring back the Groom of the Stool position....
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:22 AM on February 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

@[e-mail]:
John Mastodon would never put his toots at the top of our timeline.
#JohnMastodon
posted by Artw at 12:07 PM on February 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it.

Musk never read the second sentence, did he?
posted by cheshyre at 6:40 PM on February 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

I was pretty certain adding view counts to tweets would drive a certain kind of clout chaser absolutely insane, I just hadn’t expected the biggest victim to be Elon for some reason.
posted by Artw at 7:56 PM on February 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

90% sounds frankly made up

To stop the Fail Whale, Twitter has a counterintuitive architecture where when a new tweet is sent, copies of it are delivered to the figurative inboxes of that user's followers - plus presumably these days to anyone the algorithm thinks might be interested - and in my brief experimentation the "views" count seems to be related to the number of copies sent, not the number received or looked at or engaged with.

So this sounds much more like juicing the number of flyers stuffed into mailboxes, with no accounting for how many people ever saw them, or how many were dumped straight in the trash.
posted by grahamparks at 12:50 AM on February 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

So… all of the numbers are completely fake more so than previously thought?

That’s hilarious.
posted by Artw at 6:53 AM on February 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

I guess it is a useful metric purely and only of use to the kind of freaks and weirdos that get upset about “shadow banning” because their right wing conspiracy nonsense doesn’t get the engagement they’d hoped for… so VERY relevant to Elon.
posted by Artw at 6:55 AM on February 16, 2023

Probably not even useful to them...

@TaylorLorenz tweet with screenshots:

In case you need proof that view counts on Twitter aren’t accurate:

I have a locked, private account with ZERO followers for reporting purposes. I just posted these two tweets. Check the view counts. One tweet I posted on my private acct less than 1 min ago already has 59 views
12:57 PM · Feb 9, 2023
posted by umber vowel at 7:15 AM on February 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

I've noticed even weirder - I have a fairly small account where I posted a tweet that displays 2 views... and 5 likes from 5 different people.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 12:57 PM on February 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

@ZoeSchiffer:

NEW: Twitter is planning to unveil a new policy as soon as this afternoon that only Blue subscribers will be able to use SMS-based two-factor authentication, according to company sources.
---
It's not clear how existing users of 2FA will be affected, or who will get access to other methods of 2FA, such as authenticator apps.

Fully expect this to be rolled out in the worst way possible, resulting in mass lockouts. Also long-term probably a lot more accounts being hijacked as people just forgo 2FA altogether rather than deal with learning how to use an authenticator app or YubiKey (looks like it requires a minimum of a version 5 key, so around a $60 outlay at least).

For anyone still using the site now is probably the time to set up an alternative to SMS, anyway.

As someone down-thread noted, this is probably to save money paying Twillo to send the SMSs, suggesting they really are desperate and scraping the barrel to save all costs possible.
posted by Buntix at 2:44 PM on February 17, 2023

What an astoundingly dumb idea. I was trying to figure out what this is really costing Twitter. Twilio pay-as-you-go is $7.90 for 1000 SMS. Say a user needs an SMS every single day, that's $0.24 a month for that user. Probably a lot cheaper in practice, both because Twilio undoubtedly has a cheaper negotiated rate and because most people shouldn't need daily SMS 2FA.
posted by Nelson at 3:18 PM on February 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

$0.24 a month for that user

I think your point is "it's only a quarter per month per user, that's not much" but a quarter a month a user is ridiculously high. They have 350M users, so that's over a billion dollars a year, which is like a quarter of their 2022 yearly revenue. Just for 2FA. Which obviously is not even in the ballpark of what they've ever paid for SMS, even before they stopped letting people get their notifications via SMS in 2020.
posted by aubilenon at 5:04 PM on February 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

My twitter ads have gone absolutely bananas. In the past half hour I got ads for some kind of McDonalds adult happy meal, a poorly edited though enticing tourism ad for Jiangsu Province...and an ad for a femboy Vtuber. I'm not complaining per se, just baffled. I mean, you'd think that I had just recently started following a bunch of femboy Vtubers or Chinese cuisine accounts or something, but I have changed almost nothing in past months since I'm packing up and moving to Mastodon this weekend, I don't watch any kind of Vtubers, know only what general nerd fandom knows about femboys and don't believe I've ever before typed "Jiangsu" on this computer.

I was pretty excited a year or so ago because I'd occasionally get tractor ads - everything else was, like, IBM and the oscars and stuff.
posted by Frowner at 6:09 PM on February 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

The official 2FA SMS statement is out and it's awfully confusing.

While historically a popular form of 2FA, unfortunately we have seen phone-number based 2FA be used - and abused - by bad actors. So starting today, we will no longer allow accounts to enroll in the text message/SMS method of 2FA unless they are Twitter Blue subscribers.

What do they mean by "used - and abused - by bad actors"? Most security folks agree SMS is a less secure form of 2FA because it's relatively easy to hack. But they aren't quite saying that's the problem. Are they implying that Twitter users who have 2FA SMS enrolled are themselves bad actors?

Either way the other half of this is even more confusing. They say SMS 2FA is bad. OK. So why are they exposing their $8/mo paying customers to it?

I assume the real reason is they're trying to cut down on their SMS bill. aubilenon is right, $0.24/mo for a user is kind of high, although they are making a few dollars a month per user. But my $0.24 estimate is unrealistically high for SMS 2FA users and only a small fraction of Twitter users are using SMS 2FA. I can imagine the bill was a few million a year, worst case, but nowhere near $1B.

(I'm making the mistake of assuming rational action with good evidence on the part of Elon Musk. But we've seen time and again his decisions are capricious and based on bad data.)
posted by Nelson at 6:58 PM on February 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

More info on the SMS 2FA removal.

@RachelTobac:

This Twitter 2FA change is nerve-racking because:
1. Only ~2.6% of Twitter users have 2FA on at all (it’s essential for preventing easy account takeover)
Of those 2.6%, 74% use text message based 2FA (https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/account-security.html)
If they don’t pay for Blue they auto lose 2FA on 3/20.

[Quote tweeting the @TwitterSupport link to the blog entry announcement]
--
Coupling essential security features with the requirement to pay, esp for the most used option of SMS 2FA, is not the right move.

Should higher threat model folks use app-based MFA/keys? YES!

Should we require all folks to PAY or lose out on the 2FA they already enrolled in? No
--
For many people, MFA isn’t even in use bc it’s just not yet something folks fully grasp yet. We have so much security education to do before folks understand WHY it’s essential and enrol. Getting that 2.6% of people to enrol in MFA at all is a feat and it’s 74% SMS 2FA at that.

(Thread continues, mostly about the importance of MFA, and SMS being important for those with less digital literacy, even if it's not ideal).

Per the blog post, SMS 2FA enrolment is disabled from today, non-paid subscribers have 30 days to disable SMS 2FA and switch to one of the other forms. At that point it will be disabled automatically.

Factoring the usage details into the potential cost
350 * 0.026 * 0.744 * 0.24 * 12 = $19.5 a year. Although as that's assuming Twitter is paying retail, and everyone who has it uses it every day guessing it's lower.
posted by Buntix at 7:09 PM on February 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Umm $19.5 million, that is.
posted by Buntix at 7:21 PM on February 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

I was pretty excited a year or so ago because I'd occasionally get tractor ads - everything else was, like, IBM and the oscars and stuff.

My favorite pre-Musk advertising streak was when I’d get a lot of sponsored tweaks from Raytheon trying to sell me on anti-missile satellites, which are cool but a bit beyond my price range.
posted by Artw at 10:31 PM on February 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

The official 2FA SMS statement is out

Interesting they managed to find someone to compose a statement; the communications department must not be completely unoccupied.
posted by Mitheral at 3:05 AM on February 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

I’d get a lot of sponsored tweaks from Raytheon

Got those as well. That and the really long future city ones. One thing Musk has actually been more or less right about is that Twitter's ad targeting is mince. Admittedly that's probably because it doesn't really fit organically with the nature of the medium and they'd have been better off renting it out to some third party gathering data from elsewhere. Bit miffed about never getting the tractor ones, it's not like I don't post considerably more tractor content than most, albeit mostly vintage giant-single cylinder German thumpers...

Oddly, can't recall seeing any ads at all recently (weeks), I block them on the browser, but absolutely nada on Twitter's own Android client either. Wondering if it may be region related, in the UK here. I do also tend to block promotor accounts semi-frequently, but that's never had much of an impact before.

This is relatable, @KrangTNelson:

annoying that elon is destroying twitter the way everything gets destroyed now - not in a big explosive exciting meltdown but in a slow, agonizing decline that is almost imperceptible day-to-day but very obvious when viewed broadly

posted by Buntix at 3:37 AM on February 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

A friend suggested another reading on the "SMS bad actors" thing; Musk's theory that Twitter is being defrauded by some mobile carriers who are somehow spamming SMS authentications to bill for the messages. I can imagine some of that is actually happening and in countries where it wouldn't be realistic to take legal action against those carriers. Not clear why Twitter wouldn't block SMS to just them, though.
posted by Nelson at 10:23 AM on February 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

They probably lack the technical know how to institute fine grain controls.
posted by Mitheral at 10:28 AM on February 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Elon Musk has put every lost young man on Twitter in the crosshairs of the far right
posted by Artw at 12:30 PM on February 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

There's a good thread here from @EricAschner who works as part of a team preventing toll fraud for another company.

Some of the main takeaways are that Twitter probably had a team dealing with it before but likely fired when Musk fired everyone he deemed inessential (i.e. anyone not a programmer). Limiting the SMS verification to paid accounts only is unlikely to make a bit of difference in the amount of fraud as for the people doing it the $8 isn't even going to be a rounding error compared to the amount they make. This is especially true if they are laundering stolen credit card info to pay the subscription.
posted by Buntix at 9:09 PM on February 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

From a comment on a vid about the Elon view count thing:

what strikes me the most is the absolute inability for Musk to experience satisfaction, to be satiated. He’s a hungry ghost. He was up in the middle of the night haunted by the absolute deprivation of only 9 million impressions on his worthless superbowl tweet. He’s so taken in by the Skinner box of twitter that he bought it and is making the box-maintainers specifically give him higher numbers. But the whole point is that no matter what number the machine gives him he will feel dissatisfied with it because that feeling is precisely what makes the machine work.

This is the endgame of whale-baiting, right? You make software that’s hostile to brains in the hopes a few rich people get poisoned by it and become willing to exchange money for higher numbers. In twitter’s case, they got eaten by the whale. They get slack notifications at 2am if the whale isn’t getting enough numbers. In a way, the app created its owner. That’s a little fucked up to me, more so than the standard AI domination tropes, that a system without agency ends up in control.

posted by I claim sanctuary at 11:51 PM on February 18, 2023 [17 favorites]

Someone up above said 'lathe', and that triggered a thought that what Musk is doing to Twitter is. . .

Exactly like what the dream researcher Haber did to reality when he stole the power of effective dreaming from hero George Orr of Le Guin'sThe Lathe of Heaven.

Twitter is a kind of collective dream state reality-shaper, and it’s strange to see Musk (lolMusk, I think of him as) replicate Haber's arc, probably right down to crashing into a psychiatric hospital if he doesn’t figure out a way to pull up soon.

Too bad George Orr doesn’t seem to exist in this timeline. Too too too bad Le Guin isn’t still around to tell us what she thinks.
posted by jamjam at 3:31 AM on February 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'd suggest that all the problems stem from the fucking around with the feed they do to game the algorithms, insert unwanted content and ads. I say this because there's actually one way of visiting Twitter that's relatively legacy and un-fucked-with and it doesn't suffer any of these problems, or very few. Pathetically, I'm loathe to say explicitly what it is, as I don't want it to go away just yet (although think of the different options that Twitter offer, or used to offer, try them all and don't go for the most recent implementation if you get a choice), and it will go away as soon as anyone notices it's there and I'll stop using the platform altogether, but the underlying Twitter seems to be fine, technically, it's the interference that's a problem.
posted by Grangousier at 3:41 AM on February 19, 2023

ursulakleguin, on being asked to do sponsored posts for free leggings 114w ago [insta]:

I don't think this will work out the way you hope, Laura.
Oh social media.

She used the metaphor of the Golem in 2017 [No. 124] re: Trumpworld's eclipse of other current affairs in broadcast and social media, at that moment:

The legend of the golem varies according to the teller, but I will follow the version that tells how in a time of persecution a rabbi made a mighty giant out of mud, a golem, and wrote a sacred word on its forehead — “Truth” — that gave it life. With its frightening size and enormous strength, the golem was to defend and safeguard the Jews. But the golem was not rational, not controllable. It was a danger in itself. So the rabbi removed a single letter from the word on its forehead, which then read “Death,” and the life went out of the giant, leaving only mud.

Sometimes it seems lately that most of the emails I get from my friends are about Donald Trump. Some are laments, confessions of despair; many are witty parodies of him, funny imitations of him, scathing cartoons about him. He is the subject, the object, of all of them.

He is also the subject of most lead stories in most newspapers, which is expectable for a new president, and of endless editorials. I gather that he fills the political news on TV even more thoroughly and is exhaustively, continually discussed, attacked, defended, parodied, etc. on the social media, not to mention his own nightly fits of twittering. I don’t know this firsthand because I rarely watch or listen to any media news any more, don’t follow or read social media at all (though occasionally have posted something from my website), and don’t have a smart phone. If this makes you feel that I am disqualified to comment on modern life and politics, I can’t argue.

As a science fiction writer, I will, however, say that sometimes the view of Earth from another planet can give insights otherwise unattainable.

Looking at the New World from the ancient one I inhabit, I am appalled at the constant, obsessive attention paid to Trump.

He appears to be exactly what he wants to be: addictive.

He is a true, great master of the great game of this age, the Celebrity Game. Attention is what he lives on. Celebrity without substance. His “reality” is “virtual” — i.e. non-existent — but he used this almost-reality to disguise a successful bid for real power...It’s no use wishing the media would stop hanging on him and the press would stop reporting every tweet, but it may be worth saying that they’d do less of it if we stopped watching and listening to him — if we weren’t so literally fascinated by him....

I honestly believe the best thing to do is turn whatever it is OFF whenever he’s on it, in any way.

He is entirely a creature of the media. He is a media golem. If you take the camera and mike off him, if you take your attention off him, nothing is left — mud.

posted by snuffleupagus at 9:36 AM on February 19, 2023 [10 favorites]

@alexeheath:

Musk laid off dozens of Twitter employees across sales and engineering last week. It’s his third round of cuts since saying layoffs were done in November.

Meanwhile, he has given those remaining a week to make ad targeting work like Google search ads

It links to an article on The Verge Elon Musk keeps laying off Twitter employees after saying cuts were done.

Can't be long before Twitter actually has a negative number of employees...
posted by Buntix at 12:03 AM on February 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Further dispatches from the clown factory courtesy of Platformer.

New cracks emerge in Elon Musk's Twitter
Jira went down, Slack's gone, and site performance is degraded. What's next?

On Wednesday, Twitter employees had the tech equivalent of a snow day: the company’s Slack instance was down for “routine maintenance,” they were told, and the company was implementing a deployment freeze as a result.

That same day, Jira – a tool Twitter uses to track everything from progress on feature updates to regulatory compliance – also stopped working. With no way to chat and no code to ship, most engineers took the day off.
...
In this as in so many other things, Twitter hasn’t paid its Slack bill. But that’s not why Slack went down: someone at Twitter manually shut off access, we’re told. Platformer was not able to learn the reason prior to publication, though the move suggests Musk may have turned against the communication app — or at least wants to see if Twitter can run without Slack and the expenses associated with it.
...
For Twitter employees, Slack is more than a way to message colleagues: it’s also a store of institutional memory, preserved in documents that workers have had to rely on more and more since Musk purged thousands of employees since taking over.

“After everyone was gone, I had no one to ask questions when stuck,” an employee who stayed on past the first round of layoffs wrote in Blind. “I used to search for the error [messages] on Slack and got help 99 percent of the time.”

Slack remained down at the company on Thursday. While some employees communicated over email, others essentially took a second day off.

More (much more) in the article, including that Musk has announced that they are open-sourcing the tweet ranking algorithm next week and all employees will be required to wear exploding neck collars that are triggered if they push less than 3 commits to main in any given 8 hour period.*

* I may have made up the last bit. For now.
posted by Buntix at 10:14 AM on February 24, 2023 [5 favorites]

I think maybe baby elmo is getting bored with his new toy, and is now just hitting it with a hammer to watch the cogs and springs fly out and bounce around the room.
posted by seanmpuckett at 12:19 PM on February 24, 2023 [5 favorites]

I would not be utterly shocked if an article comes out saying that Elon pooped on the floor and smeared it all over the walls. Literally any damn dumb thing with him.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:43 PM on February 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

If you have had Lone Skum muted or blocked, check the status of that mute/block. I'm seeing reports that Skum is forcibly removing them. Desperate little shitwit.
posted by humbug at 5:56 AM on February 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

I bet it's staff doing it without his knowledge in a desperate effort to bump his numbers without resorting to abject fabrication. Which is probably the next step. On the other hand I can totally see the mental process of a 3 year old going "it's mine, they can't block me!"
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:53 AM on February 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm seeing reports that Skum is forcibly removing them.

Presumably, that and juicing the algorithm to boost him hasn't worked.

@ZoeSchiffer "Hearing that the Twitter layoffs last night were well above 50 and hit multiple departments including engineering. If you know more, get in touch."

Today he mostly seems to be signal-boosting Scott Adams trying to convince people he's not a racist and it's all a conspiracy. That and posting a meme - a person pressing two buttons on a soda fountain pouring into the same cup. Buttons labelled "laughing at WWIII memes" and "kinda being worried about WWIII". Then replying to it with "This meme is a for loop". Which I find unreasonably irritating as it should clearly be a 'while' loop. The guy can't even formulate the most basic pseudocode...
posted by Buntix at 9:03 AM on February 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

In that view, it's not even really a loop; it's a lack of state awareness leading to poor flow control and so a fatal race condition that requires human intervention at the hardware level to prevent the matter from escaping containment.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:26 AM on February 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

“ I've been saying this for a few years now, but it's worth recording here for the record: It's impossible to overstate the degree to which many big tech CEOs and venture capitalists are being radicalized by living within their own cultural and social bubble. Their level of paranoia and contrived self-victimization is off the charts, and is getting worse now that they increasingly only consume media that they have funded, created by their own acolytes.”
posted by Artw at 6:42 AM on February 28, 2023 [10 favorites]

Is it down again for others?

Currently not getting tweets loading on either my desktop or mobile accounts.

And occasionally getting the welcome message inviting me to follow some accounts in order to receive tweets.

Just the 'Following' and 'For You' streams not working by the looks of it, things like tags and viewing profiles are still working.
posted by Buntix at 2:24 AM on March 1, 2023

> Is it down again for others?

Yes. Twitter is down. We're finally free.

It looks like the service that renders home timelines for logged in users finally fell over. You can still look around, here's the #TwitterDown tag
posted by heathkit at 2:41 AM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

You can still look around, here's the #TwitterDown tag

Was reading through it, took the opportunity to peer through the curtains, noted the bright sunshine, thought "hey, I could do some gardening!". Looked back, and...

I regret to inform you that #TwitterDown is now down.
posted by Buntix at 2:52 AM on March 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ah, wait no, it's back again. Wondering if there was some brief manual intervention as the #TwitterDown tag has 4341 tweets, whereas the related Welcome to Twitter search has 242K.

Also while I was typing that the number of tweets on #TwitterDown dropped to 38##, before suddenly showing up as exactly 4341 again.
posted by Buntix at 2:58 AM on March 1, 2023

I can only see the top results for any hashtag. Going to the Latest tab gets me the chicken. Similarly, I can see things in the For You section but I still get the Welcome to Twitter message under Following.
posted by LostInUbe at 3:37 AM on March 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

OK. So I use For You from time to time because when morning hits in Japan it's already the evening (of the previous day) on the East Coast so there's a bunch of stuff I miss. But only using For You is terrible terrible terrible. It is also terrible.
posted by LostInUbe at 3:59 AM on March 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

Seems to be back to more or less normal now. So pretty much exactly 2 hours of being broken, this time.


In other news it looks like there's a fair chance that Steve Davis - CEO of The Boring Company may be replacing Musk as Twitter CEO [Platformer]. He does appear to lack any relevant qualifications (but was willing to sleep over at the Twitter offices along with his partner and new-born), so seems very likely to be true.
posted by Buntix at 4:32 AM on March 1, 2023

From everything I can tell he’s an awful suck up and a grifting moron, has probably never had a real job and probably doesn’t much hang out with anyone who has had a real job, so I suspect this is 100% correct.
posted by Artw at 4:54 AM on March 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Twitter outages are on the rise
posted by Nelson at 5:42 AM on March 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Great timing. Less than a week ago, advertising agency WPP was telling its clients that “Twitter seems to be a lot more stable the last few months than perhaps it was toward the end of last year. I think clients want to start to look about how they can come back onto Twitter.”
posted by mbrubeck at 7:00 AM on March 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

And a week and a half ago there was this from Megan McArdle (I know...): [archive] "How Elon Musk fired Twitter staff and broke nothing: [...] If Twitter can get by for three months on a fraction of its staff, how many of those folks were actually necessary?"

Because apparently the lesson we all learned from the pandemic is "Who needs slack?" (which Musk's apparently taking literally.)
posted by trig at 7:19 AM on March 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Because apparently the lesson we all learned from the pandemic is "Who needs slack?"

It really does seem like Musk is reducing Twitter's Bus Number to near 0 and believing there will never be a crash.
posted by Clever User Name at 7:32 AM on March 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

In the other hand standards are probably different, as Musk seems to favour what I would call one nines engineering across his organizations, so maybeTwitter being a broken glitchy mess is the new “works as expected” and you can get that, at least temporarily, with far fewer people.
posted by Artw at 7:58 AM on March 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

It really does seem like Musk is reducing Twitter's Bus Number to near 0 and believing there will never be a crash.

With the quartering of staff numbers, and pushing the rest to devote their entire time to new features; I'd imagine that at this point the technical debt in the system must be neck and neck with the financial debt of the company.

It may have had a sound enough infrastructure and codebase that it's not just going to go down in flames, but when it does crunch to a halt the chances are it will be beyond cost-effective repair with all the crud being added.
posted by Buntix at 8:39 AM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

I stand by Twitter 2.0 being a defederated Gab style rebranding of Mastodon as an unlikely but still possible outcome.
posted by Artw at 8:48 AM on March 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

Musk seems to favour what I would call one nines engineering across his organizations,

I was recently reviewing Starlink's SLA and they promised 99% uptime. That sounds impressive until you realize that means 15 minutes a day of internet outages. In practice it's more like 2 to 3 minutes. There are many things ambitious about Starlink but reliability is not one of them.
posted by Nelson at 11:19 AM on March 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'd imagine that at this point the technical debt in the system must be neck and neck with the financial debt of the company.

You've heard of a leveraged buyout? This is a leveraged tryout: if you cantilever enough new code in layers far out enough, the try blocks won't actually trigger the catch blocks until weeks after the data center has melted down.
posted by cortex at 12:21 PM on March 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

15 minutes a day doesn't sound too bad until you realise it won't be nicely distributed and you are likely to get a months worth all in a row meaning 7.5 hours of down time.
posted by Mitheral at 1:13 PM on March 1, 2023

the try blocks won't actually trigger the catch blocks

Guessing at this point all the catch blocks are mostly naked-gun-nothing-to-see-here!.gif : "As you were". If you're trapped in a job where the management is firing everyone on the slightest pretext you're gonna not want to find errors.
posted by Buntix at 6:00 PM on March 1, 2023

More breakage in progress.

@Rebel44CZ:

Looks like idiots running Twitter broke its link shorteners as well as the advanced Twitter search page...

{"errors":[{"message":"Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint, please see https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api for more information","code":467}]}

Also recently added images not showing up.
posted by Buntix at 9:06 AM on March 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

I’m just getting “ Something went wrong. Try reloading” at that address so probably they fixed it and it isn’t an issue anymore.
posted by Artw at 9:11 AM on March 6, 2023

The Elon chaos chased off enough of my favorite posters that Twitter hasn't been sparking joy lately, but the broken image problem means that everyone left on the platform posted their own version of a "MUST SEE" blank image, and it's pretty fun. (I know people talk a lot about how bad the ads have gotten, but I only use Twitter mobile, and I almost never see any. Maybe once a week I will get an ad with a movie trailer in it, and then I will block that account, and then I have an ad-free experience again. It's been a long time since I felt this guiltless about aggressive adblock, but it's probably the only reason I'm still visiting the platform.)
posted by grandiloquiet at 9:43 AM on March 6, 2023

Logged-out Web Twitter -- if you're logged in, open an incognito window -- is showing the "your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint" message also.

@orteil:

i'm so sorry for being that guy but i can't overstate how reminiscent current twitter is of Portal 2 when the entire facility starts to break down because wheatley got so insecure about being called a moron he starts cobbling together abominations that don't work out of spite

posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 9:45 AM on March 6, 2023 [8 favorites]

All getting a bit cyberpunk at Twitter HQ...

@williamlegate

Elon Musk now has bodyguards flank him everywhere inside Twitter HQ — including accompanying him to the bathroom. He is reportedly paranoid that someone in the company may go rogue & stage a coup.

Links to https://www.thedailybeast.com/bodyguards-follow-elon-musk-everywhere-at-twitter-hq-even-to-restroom-says-engineer
posted by Buntix at 10:39 AM on March 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

It's time for Elon to turn over ops to ChatGPT.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 11:16 AM on March 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Musk is quick to the scene with an explanation

A small API change had massive ramifications. The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason.

Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.

This is the kind of thing you say when not only are you entirely ignorant but you've also fired everyone who understood the systems.
posted by Nelson at 12:16 PM on March 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

One of the things Mudge revealed back in Sept. 2022 [CNBC] was that Twitter doesn't have a staging environment, so presumably pushing to prod is when the integrations testing happens.

Not something you can get away with when there's only a skeleton staff left.
posted by Buntix at 12:48 PM on March 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason.

So Musk is the kid who says "It was already broken when I got here, I swear!"?
posted by Epixonti at 5:55 AM on March 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

Musk last night started trolling someone he just fired and later cast doubt on his disability. some details here
posted by Nelson at 6:02 AM on March 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Extensive response.
posted by Artw at 6:06 AM on March 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

The wonderful Australian insult "deadshit" really needs to go global. It's the perfect term for Musk and people like him.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 7:03 AM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oof. Daring Fireball wrote about Halli Thorleifsson:
* he was named Iceland's Person of the Year
* he's one of four people who had been on a "do not fire" list, because paying them out would be so expensive (also, "All four were cut over the weekend")
* Courtney Milan, on Twitter (mirrors: Nitter, Threadreader) wrote that Halli's an acquired founder, he may have gotten a clear and public statement of breach of contract, possibly worth 8-9 figures
> "It’s particularly baffling that Elon made sure to lay out that his grounds for the firing include that Twitter asked Halli to do different work than Halli was hired to do, and that he fired Halli for having a disability that prevented him from doing that different work."
> "I don’t know what the acquisition/employment contract between Twitter and Halli actually said, but if I had to put money on which of Elon or Halli has read it carefully, I know where my money is going."
posted by Pronoiac at 2:41 PM on March 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

Musk doesn't care about lawsuits. He's got more money than almost anyone else on the planet. He can laughingly flaunt his tortious bullshit from now until he dies and it is vastly unlikely that his living circumstances would ever materially change. He gets off on fucking people over, isn't that patently clear by now? It's all "come at me bro" with a smirk and a sneer. An absolute garbage human being in the perfect armour of being a billionaire.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:02 PM on March 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

Eh. Didn't save him from being forced to buy Twitter for the original price, despite all his whining.
posted by tavella at 3:42 PM on March 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

Being forced to buy Twitter: the ONE punishment he'll ever experience in life.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:55 PM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

He always wanted to buy it, he just wanted to scam a discount.
posted by Artw at 4:08 PM on March 7, 2023

No, the point about being Elon Musk is that even if he just set Twitter on fire, he'd still have all the comforts of life he has right now. Even if he lost all the lawsuits he'll fight endlessly. Still everything would be the same for him. None of the life-altering financial consequences that you or I are at risk for every day will ever apply to him.
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:21 PM on March 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

He’ll never be happy unless he has the approval of catturd and a couple of other Nazis though. It’s tragic and pathetic and would be quite funny if everyone else wasn’t also stuck with the consequence of that.
posted by Artw at 4:33 PM on March 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

Latest shitty thing: Jan 6th denialism
posted by Artw at 4:40 PM on March 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

I wonder if he's got an actual piss boy to follow him around with a bucket. God, it would not surprise me in the least.

No, it's clear that he fired all of his, uh, handlers some time ago.
posted by loquacious at 5:09 PM on March 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

No, it's clear that he fired all of his, uh, handlers some time ago.

Seems he may have at least one lawyer left at least:

Musk : "I would like to apologize to Halli for my misunderstanding of his situation. It was based on things I was told that were untrue or, in some cases, true, but not meaningful.

He is considering remaining at Twitter."
posted by Buntix at 5:37 PM on March 7, 2023

I'll be a bit disappointed if this doesn't become a common fill-in-the-blanks image-reply for all of Musk's rightwing bullshit:

"I would like to apologize to _____ for my misunderstanding of _______. It was based on things I was told that were untrue or, in some cases, true, but not meaningful."

posted by nobody at 6:18 PM on March 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

How long does Twitter have left? I give it six months before bankruptcy

This seems plausible, though I would not rule out a zombie existence afterwards or even a bankruptcy that lets them shed all obligations but leaves Elon owning it and running it anyway because god forbid anything ever happen that allows a consequence to land on a billionaire.
posted by Artw at 11:09 AM on March 8, 2023 [5 favorites]