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The Real-World Impact of Our Reporting [Bari Weiss, The Free Press]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Free Press]
February 15, 2023
636 views
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• The House Oversight Committee summoned four former Twitter executives to answer questions about The Free Press’ Twitter Files reporting.
• Jamie Reed, a whistleblower from inside an American pediatric gender clinic, spoke out publicly about her experience in an article published by The Free Press.
• The story generated a major reaction among law enforcement and policy makers, including Senator Josh Hawley’s office and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey.
• The Free Press is launching a new audio documentary, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, hosted by Megan Phelps-Roper and premiering on February 21.
• Jennifer Sey, who wrote about leaving a top job at Levi Strauss & Co. in order to speak her mind, is hosting an FP Forum tonight.
• The Free Press is driving the political and cultural conversation in the U.S. and beyond, and readers can join the community with a 25% discount for their first year.

Published February 15, 2023
Visit The Free Press to read Bari Weiss’s original post The Real-World Impact of Our Reporting

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

By Spencer Chen
In [Platformer]
February 15, 2023
1,009 views
Y

• Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s, prompting Musk to fly back to the Bay Area to demand answers from his team.
• Engineers worked through the night to investigate why Musk’s tweets weren’t performing as well as they should.
• They discovered that Musk had been blocked and muted by many people, and that Twitter’s system had been promoting other users’ tweets over his.
• To fix the issue, they deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, boosting them by a factor of 1,000 and bypassing Twitter’s filters.
• This caused an uproar, and Musk acknowledged it with a meme. The artificial boosts remain in place, although the factor is now lower than 1,000.
• The incident highlights the tension between why some posts are more popular than others, and the difficulty of understanding why people see certain things and not others.
• Google previewed Privacy Sandbox, its answer to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency.
• Instagram will shut down its live shopping feature in March.
• Meta updated the “Why am I seeing this ad?” feature on Facebook to include information about how the company uses machine learning to analyze users’ behavior.
• Andy Jassy says Amazon is doubling down on the company’s grocery store business despite slow growth.
• Spotify removed a clause that let Apple use human voices from Findaway Voices to train Apple’s machine-learning systems.
• Twitter and other big companies are cutting Slack and Salesforce contracts.
• The NFT market been inching back up, with sales on the ethereum blockchain jumping from $546.9 million in December to $780.2 million in January.
• BuzzFeed launched “infinity quizzes,” letting users build personalized narratives using technology from OpenAI.

Published February 15, 2023
Visit Platformer to read Zoë Schiffer’s original post Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first

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Elon Musk fires a top Twitter engineer over his declining view count [Zoë Schiffer, Platformer]

By Spencer Chen
In [Platformer]
February 9, 2023
568 views
E

• Elon Musk has been preoccupied with worries about how many people are seeing his tweets, and recently took his Twitter account private for a day to test whether that might boost the size of his audience.
• Engineers showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart, which indicated that his popularity had dropped from a score of 100 to a score of nine.
• Twitter usage in the US has declined almost 9 percent since Musk’s takeover, and the view count feature may be contributing to the decline in engagement.
• Twitter’s increasingly glitchy product has baffled users, and the company suffered one of its first major outages since Musk took over.
• Employees are torn between giving the right answer and the safe answer when Musk or the goons ask questions.
• The perks that made Twitter an attractive place to work pre-Musk have been eradicated, and Slack has gone dormant.
• The FTC plans to audit the company this quarter, and employees have doubts that Twitter has the necessary documentation in place to pass inspection.

Published February 9, 2023
Visit Platformer to read Zoë Schiffer’s original post Elon Musk fires a top Twitter engineer over his declining view count

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Twitter can’t handle the truth [Judd Legum, Popular Information]

By Spencer Chen
In [Popular Information]
January 24, 2023
626 views
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• Popular Information reported that the Manatee County School District instructed teachers to make their classroom libraries inaccessible to students, or risk felony prosecution.
• The directive was issued as part of an effort to comply with new laws and regulations championed by Governor Ron DeSantis (R).
• After the report was posted on Twitter, a “Community Note” was appended stating that “all books are not being removed from classroom libraries”, which is inaccurate.
• Teachers in Manatee County have been told to remove all books from their classroom libraries.
• The Community Note feature has been championed by Elon Musk, the billionaire who purchased Twitter for $44 billion in the fall.
• Musk has argued that Community Notes will be a corrective and cannot be biased towards the right, but since taking over Twitter, he has repeatedly catered to the far-right.

Published January 24, 2023
Visit Popular Information to read Judd Legum’s original post Twitter can’t handle the truth

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Twitter Timelines, Azure and OpenAI, Apple and China [Ben Thompson, Stratechery]

By Spencer Chen
In Ben Thompson [Stratechery]
January 18, 2023
629 views
T

• Twitter is enforcing its long-standing API rules, resulting in the shutdown of 3rd-party apps.
• Twitter revenue is reportedly down 40% year-over-year, and the company’s first interest payment is due at the end of the month.
• Microsoft is adding OpenAI’s viral AI bot ChatGPT to its Azure service, as part of its existing agreement with OpenAI.
• The Financial Times has a two-part series about Apple and China, discussing how Apple has been sending its top product designers and manufacturing design engineers to China, and how Apple is attempting to diversify its supply chain internationally while forging closer ties with mainland Chinese companies.
• India is not yet a viable alternative to China for Apple’s supply chain, as most operations are Final Assembly, Test and Pack (FATP) with components largely flown in from China.
• Taiwanese companies such as Pegatron and Foxconn are moving to India to assemble Apple products, but their suppliers are not.
• There is no existing supply chain in India, so they must import components from China.
• Some Chinese companies have been cleared to operate in India for Apple’s sake, potentially playing the same role as Taiwanese suppliers in China.

Published January 18, 2023
Visit Stratechery to read Ben Thompson’s original post Twitter Timelines, Azure and OpenAI, Apple and China

 

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Extremely Hardcore: Our New York magazine cover story [Casey Newton, Platformer]

By Spencer Chen
In [Platformer]
January 17, 2023
874 views
E

• Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has been chaotic, with employees chewed up and spat out along the way. A new cover story at New York magazine attempts to capture the chaos and the fallout that could take big chunks of Musk’s empire down with it.
• Government agencies rely on Twitter to share time-sensitive communications, but their dependence on the platform is becoming more tenuous under Musk’s ownership.
• The UK’s Online Safety Bill is expected to reduce user numbers for the big social platforms, impacting advertising revenue on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
• Microsoft is likely to receive an antitrust warning from the European Union about its bid for Activision Blizzard.
• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company will move quickly to commercialize tools like ChatGPT and incorporate them into the company’s products.
• Apple announced the next-generation 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models, with faster M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, up to 96GB of RAM, an upgraded HDMI 2.1 port with support for an 8K external display, and faster Wi-Fi 6E.
• Bitcoin’s price has risen 26 percent in January, breaking $20,000 again and putting it in on course for its best month since October 2021.
• Scammers are gaming Amazon’s review system to sell fake 16 terabyte portable SSD drives for $100 or less.
• Discord acquired Gas, the app that allows teens to share compliments with each other anonymously.

Published January 18, 2023

Visit Platformer to read Casey Newton’s original post Extremely Hardcore: Our New York magazine cover story

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Twitter Kills Third-Party Clients, Twitter’s Tortured History With 3rd-Party Apps, The Twitter Files Business Model [Ben Thompson, Stratechery]

By Spencer Chen
In Ben Thompson [Stratechery]
January 16, 2023
571 views
T

• Twitter’s decision to kick-off third party clients is classic Musk, signaling the company’s focus on its business model going forward.
• The outage was intentional, and speculation suggests it was to drive ad revenue.
• Twitter’s history with 3rd-party apps has been tumultuous, with the company needing to control the user experience to monetize via advertising.
• Bill Gross attempted to build a competing network of clients to monetize independently, leading to Twitter kicking off several of his clients.
• The 2012 decision to kill the 3rd party API made sense for Twitter to pursue its advertising business model.
• Twitter leadership has been historically weak and averse to conflict, leading to a situation where 3rd-party Twitter clients were allowed to exist and add up to 100,000 new users.
• Elon Musk’s decision to cut off 3rd-party clients was a business decision that should have been made a decade ago, but was executed in the worst way possible.
• The move may be a signal that Twitter Blue has already been deemed a failure.
• The Twitter Files reveal that Twitter was very much enmeshed with the federal government in terms of controlling speech on Twitter.
• Matt Taibbi was given access to the Twitter Files, but had to agree to certain conditions, such as publishing on Twitter and attributing the sources as “Sources at Twitter”.
• The decision to publish the Twitter Files on Twitter blunted their impact substantially, as Twitter’s power is in its orchestration of consent.
• The move may be an attempt to capture the value of content directly on Twitter, as the more essential Twitter is, the more advertisers will have no choice but to be on Twitter.

Published January 16, 2023. Visit Stratechery to read Ben Thompson’s original post [Twitter Kills Third-Party Clients, Twitter’s Tortured History With 3rd-Party Apps, The Twitter Files Business Model]

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How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate [David Zweig, The Free Press]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Free Press]
December 26, 2022
604 views
H
  • Twitter suppressed true information from doctors and public-health experts that was at odds with U.S. government policy.
  • The Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s content according to their wishes.
  • Twitter acted as a kind of FBI subsidiary, re-writing the platform’s policies on the fly to accommodate political bias and pressure.
  • Twitter suppressed views and even scientific evidence that ran to the contrary.
  • Bots and contractors were used to moderate content, leading to a significant error rate.
  • Higher level employees at Twitter chose the inputs for the bots and decision trees, and determined suspensions.
  • Content that was contrarian but true, and the people who conveyed that content, were still subject to getting flagged and suppressed.
  • Twitter propped up the official government line that prioritizing mitigation over other concerns was the best approach to the pandemic.
  • If Twitter had allowed the kind of open forum for debate that it claimed to believe in, could any of this have turned out differently?

Click HERE for original. Published December 26, 2022

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Twitter’s Link Ban [Ben Thompson, Stratechery]

By Spencer Chen
In Ben Thompson [Stratechery]
December 19, 2022
557 views
T

• Twitter’s link ban to other social networks was met with widespread condemnation, including from prominent members of the tech industry.

• Network portability is the single most important thing to spurring competition, but government regulation is going in the opposite direction.

• China is ramping up production of decade-old chip technology, setting off alarm bells in the US and prompting some lawmakers to try to stop them.

• The US has a massive strategic weakness when it comes to trailing edge chips, and the CHIPS Act should have been focused on building trailing edge capacity.

Published December 19, 2022

Visit Stratechery to read Ben Thompson’s original post

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The Twitter dumpster fire, explained [Judd Legum, Popular Information]

By Spencer Chen
In [Popular Information], Politics
December 19, 2022
570 views
T
  • Twitter chaos since Musk took over has made it difficult for news consumers to discern accurate accounts
  • Twitter is integral for new media organizations to reach new audiences
  • Musk’s selective release of internal communications has caused users to worry about their data
  • Data portability and interoperability could potentially make social media better
  • Subscribing to reliable sources is important, but there are too many to pay for them all

Click HERE for original. Published December 19, 2022

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