Welcome back for this week’s Twitter roundup. Here’s the main highlights of the past week!
MONETIZATION BY CONTENT CREATORS IS A MAJOR PRIORITY
Elon Musk cares about content creators on Twitter and has now shared that a major priority is to allow content creators to monetize their work on Twitter in order to make a living and prosper. On March 6 he tweeted,
“It is a major priority to enable monetization by content creators! People need to make a living and prosper from their work. We need to make it possible to upload the content in the first place. That’s getting there.” Elon Musk
COMMUNITY NOTES. CONTEXT ON TWEETS, BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE
When a journalist acknowledged that his tweet was dishonest but refused to fix it, Community Notes did it for him. To understand the Community Note concept, Twitter released a video on March 9 explaining it and several days later invited people to sign up to join.
Here’s a breakdown of the video explaining Community Notes, Context on Tweets, by the people, for the people:
“How does Community Notes avoid one-sided bias? Pile-ins? Brigading? Manipulation? abuse? Community Notes are rated by contributors of multiple perspectives, and only notes that are widely found helpful are shown on Tweets. So one group alone can’t determine what notes get shown. And pile-ons aren’t effective. This helps ensure that notes are effective to a wide range of people. To make it clear how all of this works, Community Notes’ algorithm is open-source and all data is public.”
Twitter warmly invited everyone to sign up to become a Community Notes contributor
Community Notes can serve to add context to advertising, even increasing financial literacy, as in this note for an ad by QuickenCompare.
When the ad stated “Don’t borrow from the bank. Borrow from yourself,” Community Notes stepped in to add context, “Home Equity Lines of Credit do not allow someone to borrow from ‘themselves’ rather than a bank. The money is loaned from a bank, with home equity as collateral for a loan.”
TWITTER BLUE GOING GLOBAL
Twitter Blue is now available in at least 50 countries, making people happy in the United States, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Brazil, Indonesia, India, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Netherlands, Poland, Ireland, Belgium, Sweden, Romania, Czech Republic, Finland, Denmark, Greece, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Slovakia, Latvia, Slovenia, Estonia, Croatia, Luxembourg, Malta, Cyprus, Turkey, Pakistan, Mexico, Thailand, Philippines, South Africa, Argentina, South Korea, Egypt, Nigeria and Malaysia.
TWITTER FILES EXPOSED THE CENSORSHIP INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
One Twitter user, Jim Hall, commented on the Twitter files when Matt Taibbi or Michael Shellenberger (who helped release the files) appeared before congress, saying “I don’t know about you all but I’m glad Matthew Taibbi and Elon Musk took up the challenge of sharing this data. Those who stick their heads in the ground and say the Twitter Files are a nothing burger are oblivious and seem to wish to stay that way. The New York Times has not written one word about the Matt Taibbi or Michael Shellenberger hearing at which Democrat members of congress impugned their integrity and tried to intimidate Taibbi into revealing his sources.”
Matthew Taibbi made an opening statement on the Twitter Files to members of congress about the censorship industrial complex: “Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation requests from every corner of government, from the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps twenty quasi-private entities doing the same thing.”
COST TO ACCESS TWITTER’S API
On March 10, Twitter’s Developer Platform began to offer Enterprise Packages in small, medium and large. Shown is the benefits of a small package, costing only $42,000 a month. For the other packages, click here.
Image courtesy Twitter, Inc. RealTime PowerTrack API Small Package Twitter
TWITTER MAY BECOME THE BIGGEST FINANCIAL INSTITUTION IN THE WORLD
Elon Musk also spoke at the Morgan Stanley TMT 2023 conference in San Francisco on March 7, about Twitter becoming a financial institution, and one day it could be a viable alternative to banks, Venmo, Paypal, etc. You may read the entire talk here, “Elon Musk’s Talk at Morgan Stanley TMT 2023 on Twitter, X.com, Tesla and Starship.”
“You want to be able to send money easily on Twitter to another account with one click, & also earn interest on the money. I think it’s possible for Twitter to become the biggest financial institution in the world” Elon Musk
CONCLUSION
Twitter and its initiatives are truly inspiring. With Community Notes, we are given the opportunity to add context and shift the course of discussion or contribute to tweets in a way that is thoughtful and respectful. It’s great that Twitter Blue is extending its reach internationally making it available in 50 countries and soon plans to promote monetization for content creators. At the end of the day it’s our responsibility to help ensure safe and civil participation regardless if it’s on or offline. Let’s do this by being informed users of this platform and making sure we create an inclusive space that encourages honest contribution without fear of personal attack or manipulation. Use Twitter more often. Use Community Notes. Work collectively so we can all benefit from it!
Do you love reading about the history of Twitter? See more here…
Gail Alfar, author. Exclusive to What’s Up Twitter – March 14, 2023. All Rights Reserved. My goal as an author is to support Twitter 2.0 and Elon Musk in both making lives better on earth for humans and becoming a space-fairing civilization.
Twitter was the big topic at Morgan Stanley’s TMT Conference this last week and Elon Musk talked for about 45 minutes. This article captures his insanely inspiring and at times humorous talk. My favorite part of his talk was about Twitter advertising and how he plans to make it a resounding success! Don’t miss this amazing talk!
Highlights:
Mission of Twitter
News happens in real-time on Twitter
Should Twitter have a public relations department?
GOOD INFO! Why advertising on Twitter has incredible potential
Community Notes: combatting misinformation across a broad spectrum and the rigorous pursuit of truth
Proactively reducing child exploitation on Twitter
Advertisers on Twitter enjoy brand safety
A healthy national dialogue on Twitter
Freedom of speech: hearing what you don’t want to hear
Twitter won’t always be a fractal rube goldberg machine
Twitter’s cash flow
MUST READ! The incredible value of advertising on Twitter and how Elon Musk will make sure it happens
The everything app is going to be x.com
Image Courtesy Twitter, Inc.
MISSION OF TWITTER IN THE WORDS OF ELON MUSK
Morgan Stanley: How would you describe the mission of Twitter 2.0 under your ownership?
Elon Musk: The goal is to have Twitter be the best source of truth, the most timely and accurate source of truth, even if the truth is something we don’t want to hear or unpleasant or whatever but have it be timely and accurate and really where you can understand what’s going on.
And not just, ‘is something true or not?’ but what is the narrative?
The thing that I think most people probably don’t appreciate is that the media controls the narrative. So there are many things that could be talked about in the world but only a few things can fit on the front page.
But Twitter doesn’t have a limitation like that, so the public can control the narrative and the public can inform themselves as to what the narrative should be. That’s really a big deal. It’s a forum for citizen journalism or a forum for the public to get together and communicate in a way that was never possible before, so you can really know what’s going on.
I think that it’s really going to be essential for a functioning democracy. What is the bedrock of a functioning democracy? It has to be free speech and a level playing field.
That’s why it’s the First Amendment. It was the first thing they did, it was like, ‘we’ve got to make sure freedom of speech’ and why did they do that? It’s because where they came from there wasn’t freedom of speech, and once you lose freedom of speech you don’t get it back.
That’s why we must protect it at all costs.
MS: (paraphrased) Where are you on the core principles of Twitter: Authentic, informative, entertaining, accurate, brand safe and democratic?
Elon Musk: I think some of these are a little at odds, but brand safe I think really means like ‘where advertising is displayed’ or the advertiser gets to choose what material is near that advertising.
If its some sort of… like a train accident or a war scene, then probably a family-friendly brand is not going to want to advertise right next to that.
Or it can’t be like, ‘here’s a bleak war scene, would you like to buy a hamburger?’ it would be like, awkward, you know? So that’s understandable you want to put advertising next to content where it makes sense. But the content in general needs to be authentic and informative even if it is controversial or jarring. I think people need to be able to choose, to some degree, what content they want to see.
Of course on Twitter you can. But really we want it to be the fundamental place you go to, to learn what’s going on and get the real story. The truth, the whole truth and it’s going to be more than, hahaha, I’d like to say nothing but the truth but that’s hard, (laughter) there’s going to be a lot of BS there too. There are going to be lies, for sure, but you want to have the truth and you want to bubble up the truth and be able to sort of sort out… you really want truth with the least amount of error.
TWITTER IS WHERE THE NEWS HAPPENS
MS: How can the media catch up? If they’re on Twitter they can be seeing these tweets and posting them. If they’re not on Twitter is there no way to catch up? Like how does the traditional media and citizen journalism and 50,000 tweets on an important subject, how do those intersect and how does the media catch up.
Elon Musk: Well, I’m sure many of you use Twitter.
Everything on Twitter is happening in real-time.
So if you contrast that to what’s happening in a newspaper, they have to learn the information, propose an article to their editor, get it approved, write the article, get it edited, figure out which day it’s going to get published on, and so the thing that happened is being reported on 3-4 days, sometimes a week late. And if it happens on a weekend then it’s at least 3 days.
You know ChatGPT was huge news for several days on Twitter before there were any news articles about it in major publications.
So when thinking about investing in things, you want to have information that is as timely and accurate as possible, there’s no better source than Twitter for that.
SHOULD TWITTER HAVE A PR DEPT?
MS: Paul Graham has said how important accuracy is on Twitter he said you should be ‘default skeptical’ of any news story about Twitter and assume its default wrong because not only some journalists have an agenda but the source has an agenda and it’s so easy to go through the chain of inaccuracy or outright falsehood. Is he right about this and how can accuracy about Twitter and about you be conducted by the traditional media if at all? Would a PR department help, which you famously don’t have?
Elon Musk: No, PR departments… no the right name for PR is propaganda. Maybe we should have a VP of propaganda, I think that’s more honest, and also a VP of witchcraft. (laughter) Those would be two great ones.
If you pick up any given newspaper and read the whole thing and say, ‘how many of those stories are positive about anything at all?’ Almost none.
So if something is newsworthy it is going to have a negative slant, whether it is positive or not. There’s like something in journalism that, they’ve been trained to basically never write a positive story about anything. Once and a while you see a puff piece but it’s rare.
So anything that’s newsworthy will get written about, anything that’s written about will go through a negativity lense and so you therefore have a bizarrely negative view of the world if you draw your information from newspapers. This is simply a fact.
THE SMARTEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD USE TWITTER, POTENTIAL FOR AD REVENUE IS HUGE
Elon Musk: So on Twitter, you can get a much more balanced positive-negative situation, it doesn’t have that bias quite as much. There’s probably still a little bit of negativity bias but much less so. I’m not sure what the legacy media does, I mean at this point, really.
Twitter is, by the way, the #1 news app in the world. So in terms of what people download for news, it’s #1. There are 500M active users. 250M daily users of which I’d say there are probably 180M significant daily users, where it’s a meaningful amount of time.
The average amount of time people spend on Twitter of that 250M is about 1/2 an hour or so. The thing I think that is most interesting is about 120M to 130M hours of human attention per day on Twitter, every single day on average. I think it comes to an interesting point which is, it’s startling how poorly monetized that is because you have to say, how valuable is that attention? 130M hours of human attention per day, of people that read.
So these are generally the smartest people in the world, the most influential people in the world, and you have 130M hours of their time per day, that’s a lot! Currently, Twitter makes about 5 or 6 cents per hour of that time. I think this is poorly monetized (laughter).
MS: Paul Graham’s 1/2 hour of attention is worth more than that, haha!
Elon Musk: Like, if I’m spending 2 hours a day on Twitter, whatever ads are coming through are getting my, or yours or everyone in the room’s attention, your time is incredibly valuable.
The thing is, we need to actually serve ads that are relevant and useful and I think as we do that we can probably at least get it like 15 cents an hour or 20 cents an hour, a quarter? I think the actual potential here for Twitter revenue is gigantic.
And it’s going to be a win-win situation which is if you are served advertising that you find timely and relevant with products and services that are useful to you, that’s good for you and good for the advertiser. Advertising in the limit of relevance is content.
COMMUNITY NOTES: COMBATTING MISINFORMATION ACROSS A BROAD SPECTRUM
Morgan Stanley shared how Community Notes, a fact-checking by the power of the people on Twitter can be used to combat misinformation in 6 examples:
Correcting government misstatements
Correcting candidate misstatements
Adding context
Debunking conspiracy theories
Correcting misstatements about companies
COMMUNITY NOTES AND THE RIGOROUS PURSUIT OF TRUTH
Morgan Stanley asked how Community Notes can be used without being hijacked by either side of an issue or political spectrum.
Elon Musk: There’s a White Paper on Community Notes that I recommend reading, in fact, I’ll tweet it out so that people can have easy access to it because it’s really quite a clever idea. Think of it like page rank for pages as applied to people, which is that as people build credibility in how they review notes, they build up enough credibility to actually write notes.
Those notes are then rated by others, and depending upon the credibility of the people rating your notes, your credibility score gets affected. In order to be a notes contributor, you have to be a verified person. And it takes a while to get there; when you just start out, you will start off with no credibility score.
We actively look at any attempts to game the system and shut them down. If they’re determined to be not real people or if they seem to be brigading because there are deliberate attempts to manipulate Community Notes. We also make the Community Notes source code open and available, so you can basically see everything.
You can see exactly how Community Notes is calculating things, and what changes are made to Community Notes and we’ll keep iterating and the goal is to have truth with the least amount of error.
There’s always like, ‘What is truth?’ Does someone really aspire to the truth? If they really aspire to the truth they must acknowledge that there is some probability that what they think is untrue.
If somebody thinks that what they say is true with 100% probability, there’s a 100% probability they are lying. Truth must acknowledge error, where you aim to minimize the error over time, that’s what Community Notes is. I think also, once someone gets Community Noted, they think twice about being dissected in the future. You start getting noted a few times, and you think ‘Uh, oh!’
The important thing is that anyone can be noted, including me, and in fact, I wanted to make a note of being noted. The point is that if I can be noted, anyone can be noted, including advertisers. We’ve had a few cases where the advertising wasn’t accurate and it got noted.
This, I think will be very helpful in truth in advertising. The goal is rigorous pursuit of the truth, aspirationally the whole truth, and the least amount of untruth.
TWITTER IS DOWN > 50% LESS HATE SPEECH THAN PRE-ACQUISITION
PROACTIVELY REDUCING CSE ON TWITTER
Elon Musk: Yeah, I’ve repeatedly said to the trust and safety team at Twitter that the #1 priority, which will always be the #1 priority no matter what, is ensuring that children are safe on Twitter, that there’s no child exploitation. So that is #1 priority always and forever.
The #1 priority, which will always be the #1 priority no matter what, is ensuring that children are safe on Twitter, that there’s no child exploitation. So that is #1 priority always and forever. Elon Musk
Elon Musk: What I’ve been told is that we’ve done more to eliminate [CSE material] on Twitter in the last four months than what has been done in the last ten years. It will continue to be our number one priority. A 100-fold reduction in CSE search patterns is pretty gigantic to say the least. It’s the absolute number one priority.
HOW ELON MUSK WILL MAKE ADVERTISING ON TWITTER A SUCCESS
Elon Musk: With respect to brand safety, it really depends a lot on the brand.
By the way, Disney is a major advertiser on Twitter worldwide. Apple is one of our biggest advertisers. But Disney of course does not want to have one of their ads next to things that aren’t appropriate for a family audience.
But there are other products that are kind of more R-rated if you will, so they’re more comfortable with advertising being in the equivalent of like a R-rated movie or something like that. So brand safety depends on what brand you’re talking about. Is it a family brand or a less family brand?
Advertisers can actually adjust what content they are comfortable having their advertising appear next to. The same is true on TV. The advertising that you’ll see at 7 pm is different than the advertising that you’ll see at midnight. We have the same functionality on Twitter, so it’s truly up to the advertiser where they want to put their content.
But I think by far the most important thing is if the advertising is effective. That it is relevant and that it moves the needle for a company. Advertising relevance is the most gigantic thing. This is going to sound totally bizarre but Twitter did not consider relevance in advertising until 3 months ago. In fact if you use Twitter for a long time, you should ask ‘how many products have you bought off Twitter?’ Probably zero! (laughter) Judging by the laughter, probably zero. And your time is incredibly valuable.
MS: Flamethrower, no one bought a flamethrower?
Elon Musk: Haha, its possible that they might have bought things from content-based tweets because the content that’s recommended is reasonably relevant but the advertising has not been.
So as we shift towards advertising being relevant and timely, as I said, advertising that is relevant and timely is content. The time of 130M person-hours of the smartest people on earth is insanely valuable. Historically, with advertising being mostly irrelevant, we’ve been wasting peoples’ time and that’s not good. Going forward, Twitter will have very relevant and useful advertising.
There will be a massive increase in revenue because it is now useful. So I’m very optimistic about the future. It’s been a very difficult 4 months, but I’m optimistic about the future.
TWITTER AS A DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM FOR ALL
Elon Musk: I think the objective reality for anyone looking at Twitter for a long time was that Twitter had a massive thumb on the scale on the left side. Twitter would ban and suspend accounts on the right 10 times more than on the left.
This is naturally what you would expect, frankly, because we are in San Francisco, which is deep deep blue. So, Twitter was controlled by the far left.
So the natural thing that would happen then was the suppression of moderates, not just suppression of the right but even suppression of moderate voices.
But that’s not conducive to a healthy national dialogue. In order to have a healthy national dialogue, you have to represent the whole country, and you have to represent everyone in other countries too. That’s the only way to have a Town Square.
FREEDOM OF SPEECH IS WHEN YOU HEAR WHAT YOU DON’T WANT TO HEAR
Elon Musk: Yeah, there were disproportionately more accounts unsuspended and un-shadowbanned on the right because Twitter had a huge thumb on the scale in favor of the left.
But if you say, ‘Have we been suspending accounts on the left? Have we been shadowbanning accounts on the left? No, no we haven’t.’ No, because exactly what I said we were doing which is to make it an even playing field and you know something is Freedom of Speech when you’re hearing speech from someone you don’t like and you don’t like what they’re saying. Otherwise its not free speech.
And if you don’t have that ability, then sooner or later that suppression of speech is going to be turned on you. It is a good sign if you’re seeing people you don’t like say things you don’t like.
That is a good sign, not a bad sign… provided you can say your piece too! I think this is fundamental. The reason I did the Twitter acquisition was not because I thought this would be some lucrative goldmine, and in fact, it has been arduous and difficult with being dumped on [by mainstream media] every day.
That’s not the most fun thing in the world. But if we do not have a strong foundation of free speech, I fear for the future of our civilization. We must have this. That’s why I did it.
“if we do not have a strong foundation of free speech, I fear for the future of our civilization. We must have this. That’s why I did it.” Elon Musk
FIXING THE FRACTAL RUBE GOLDBERG MACHINE
Elon Musk: The codebase is like a Rube Goldberg Machine and when you zoom in on one part of the Rube Goldberg Machine there’s another Rube Goldberg Machine and then there’s another one!
That’s what I mean by the fractal. As you zoom in there’s another fractal and another fractal and a fractal Rube Goldberg Machine. It’s quite difficult to keep this thing running and then also difficult to advance the product because it is really overly complex. We’ll make what appears to be a small change somewhere that then causes massive disruption. For example, yesterday we made what we thought was a small change, we want to be in full disclosure including gruesome details.
There was what was supposed to be a small change to 1% of the Twitter user base ended up being a catastrophic event to 100% of the Twitter user base. We don’t have enough time to go into the details but there was a Boolean flag in the Twitter front end that should not have been there.
I’ll give you an example. At one point there was a problem with Twitter Spaces where suspended users were able to join conversations even though they were suspended and so we temporarily turned off access to Twitter Spaces which then made anyone who is using the Twitter Android App unable to like a tweet.
Now how those things are connected is not clear, haha. So if you had an iOS app you could like tweets, if you’re on the Web app you could like tweets but not if you had an Android app because of Spaces. So there’s a lot of work behind the scenes and simplifying the code base, getting rid of extraneous features and enabling Twitter to evolve more rapidly in the future but it requires a lot of cleanup.
MS: You’ve grown users despite this lean engineering team and you cut out a data center.
Elon Musk: Yeah, I think on balance we’re doing okay. Just to give you a sense of where things were at the close of acquisition on October 29th, Twitter was tracking to a negative 3 Billion dollar a year burn rate and had 1 Billion in the bank. That’s a pretty dire situation.
If 2023 had been a normal year, Twitter would have done something on the order of 4.5 Billion in revenue and 4.5 Billion in cost, roughly break even, but when you add 1.5 Billion of debt servicing to that and a massive decline in advertising, some of it cyclic, some of it political, but call it at roughly a 50% decline in revenue, you’ve got over 3 Billion dollars negative.
Twitter has some revenue that’s not advertising-based, data subscriptions and what-not, but in the absence of action, Twitter would have had 6 Billion in costs and 3 Billion in revenue so minus 3 Billion and there was 1 Billion in the bank, so it would have gone bankrupt in 4 months.
Immediate and drastic action had to be taken, which was. We actually have now cut the non-interest burn to roughly 1.5 Billion. So we’ve got 1.5 Billion of debt servicing and 1.5 Billion of expenditures. We went from 3 data centers to 2, and reduced our cloud expenditures significantly, while at the same time having the fastest product evolution in Twitter’s history. So overall, not bad.
There have been a few bumps along the road obviously but this is to be expected. And now I think we have the opportunity to grow it into something quite spectacular. We had the highest total user minutes in Twitter history. The real number to care about is actually not the MDAU (Monetized daily active user) but its user time. How many total user hours per day do you have? That’s the real figure of merit because one could for example go to 300 Million daily active users but if they spent less time on the system cumulatively that would actually be a downgrade. How much human attention are you worth?
That’s why I think the really profound thing is what Twitter has is roughly 130 Million hours of the smartest most influential people on earth, every single day. There’s nothing else that has that. I mean there are social networks that have more users but they do not have the smart, influential people, they don’t have you!
MS: After doing the math, Twitter is EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) profitable today and then you’re looking for break even after debt services. when do you get to cash flow break even?
Elon Musk: Well its EBITDA profitable but the “D” is quite big! (laughter)
MS: When do you get to cash flow break even after that “D”?
Elon Musk: This is where we need to focus on the “E” part. (laughter) Yeah, I hope we pay taxes. So like I said, we’re getting to the point where we’re close to having the total expenditures for the company excluding debt roughly equal to the debt. I think we’ll be there in Q2.
I defintely don’t want to count chickens before they’re hatched or jinx it or anything but I think we’ve got a shot at being cash flow positive next quarter.
THE INCREDIBLE VALUE OF ADVERTISING ON TWITTER AND HOW ELON MUSK WILL MAKE SURE IT HAPPENS
MS: Twitter has great advertiser value with 147 Billion global impressions of the World Cup 2022 conversation.
Elon Musk: What I say to advertisers and brands is ‘use Twitter yourself and believe what you see on Twitter, not what you read in the newspapers.’ Because what you see on Twitter is the real thing, and what you read in newspapers is not.
And I’d like to thank Mark Read and WPP for their support and publicists and others that have stuck with us like Disney and Apple.
MS: When do you introduce performance-based advertising and scale it?
Elon Musk: Performance-based advertising is really just advertising that is relevant, in fact we should realistically have zero nonperformance-based advertising.
We want advertising that matters, people’s attention is precious. We should not serve them ads that are annoying or irrelevant or strident or ugly.
It was interesting you should mention White Lotus, I was talking today with David Zaslav, it was great, and he was like, ‘Why can’t we put a White Lotus trailer every time someone mentions White Lotus on Twitter?’ I’m like, ‘Absolutely!’
So one of the super-obvious but profound things that we’re doing is enabling keyword advertising so that can the keywords, like ‘White Lotus’ and if somebody mentions White Lotus, you put the White Lotus trailer there. I mean, that sounds very obvious.
We don’t need advanced AI for this one (laughter). It’s sort of just google Adwords that apply to tweets and the home timeline and replies and everywhere else because you often have sort of long, deep conversations with people going on talking about movies, TV, products and whatnot and that’s the perfect opportunity for advertisers to provide their message.
You know, if I think about something, for example, like Starlink, which does advertise in various media you want to advertise to users in a region that are not already saturated. So Starlink tends to be saturated in urban areas but it is not saturated in rural areas. So what Starlink would like to do is say, ‘Please show the ad to rural users with a slow connection. And the simple message is, ‘Do you want faster internet for less money? Click. Probably you do. Twitter needs to be able to do a simple thing like that. And it will. It is already able to do that, we just haven’t fully rolled it out. So I think we’re around 20%-ish but by the end of this year, almost all advertising should be reasonably relevant.
I think there’s also an opportunity here to really improve the relevance of advertising using AI based on the tweets, views, and likes.
You can actually populate a parameter space and then you can take an ad, and even if you say nothing about that ad, after its dropped in the Twitter system and it has 10,000 views, you populate the parameter space of the ad and then you correlate the user parameter space and the ad parameter space and then you don’t need to do any demographic targeting because you could be like, say its a gardening ad or you could be 20, 30, 40, 70 years old, any sex, whatever, it doesn’t matter.
What matters is you like gardening and that’s the ad that should be shown. I think we can get away from the ad targeting by age range and sex in favor or targeting by interest. A lot of this demographic targeting was done coming from a TV or newspaper era where you don’t have interaction with the user, you just have to kind of guess because it’s a one-way street in TV. But on Twitter it’s not a one-way street, there’s continuous interaction. I think we can have a profoundly more useful advertising experience.
THE EVERYTHING APP: X.COM
MS: Tell us about your vision for X, the everything app.
Elon Musk: I think it’s possible to create a very powerful finance experience basically. Paypal is kind of like a halfway version of what I think could be done in payments and finance. You want to be able to send money easily from one account on X / Twitter to another account effortlessly with one click. You want to be able to earn interest on the money, you want to be able to have debt so your interest can grow negative. Basically, I think it’s possible to become the biggest financial institution in the world just by providing people with convenience and payment options. We don’t have time to go into detail here except if we just make the app more and more useful, people will use it more and it will be great. I mean, you’ll see!
MS: The Tesla team is nice and built out, the Twitter executive team is perhaps a bit leaner. Maybe there’s a meme that’s accurate.
Elon Musk: He does have a black turtleneck, haha! Do you need anything more? I don’t think so. (see header image of this article for picture of Elon’s pet dog as the CEO of Twitter)
MS: So when does that Twitter management team have that bench like you showcased at the Gigafactory?
Elon Musk: Well I think it takes a lot of time to build a strong management team. We built the Tesla management team over 20 years. I think Twitter is an easier problem than Tesla by a long shot. But it will take some time to build the team, probably a few years.
X / Twitter HQ enjoys a lovely afternoon as a San Francisco Cable car passes by. Image Courtesy Roxanne Productions, Inc.
Gail Alfar, author. Exclusive to What’s Up Twitter – March 10, 2023. All Rights Reserved. My goal as an author is to support X / Twitter 2.0 and Elon Musk in both making lives better on earth for humans and becoming a space-fairing civilization.
Credit to cb_doge for the creation of the header image.
Contribute to Gail’s coffee fund, and buy her a hot coffee!
Welcome back to What’s Up Twitter! This past week’s Twitter updates exemplify how much care and concern the company has for people all over the world under the new direction of Elon Musk. Highlights from this week include:
Twitter officially launches their violent speech policy
Community Notes expands to Brazil and other improvements
Future plans: video, suppressed tweets, feedback for BasedAi
“The ability of Twitter advertising to reach the most influential people in the world is often not fully appreciated.
While a few other social networks are technically bigger, Twitter is where the writers & leaders spend their time” – Elon Musk
I think one reason writers & leaders spend their time on Twitter is that no other social network gives the ability for people to reach out to others so easily. The person you want to communicate with can choose to read your input. The opportunity is there and it is unlike anything else.
TWITTER COMMUNITY NOTES FOR BRAZIL
Community Notes expands to Brazil. Image courtesy Twitter, Inc.
As of March 2, Briazilians can apply to contribute to Community Notes. Twitter announced,
“Hello Brazil! Starting today, we will accept contributors from Brazil to Notas da Comunidade. Want to help? Subscribe now! Vacancies will be opened gradually so we can keep an eye on the quality of the experience. We look forward to learning from you!
Help keep people on Twitter in the loop.
Community Notes is now available in your country. Participate to add useful context to potentially misleading Tweets. Subscribe to Community Notes.” – Twitter
I am thrilled to see Twitter open up Notas da Comunidade for Brazil! This was specifically mentioned by Elon Musk at the World Government Summit on February 15. The purpose of Community Notes was explained by Elon Musk,
“I think there’s something that we’re putting a lot of efforts into called Community Notes. It’s currently just in English, but we will be expanding it to all languages.
That is I think quite a good way to assess the truth of things where it’s the community itself basically the people of Earth who are basically, not exactly voting but competing to provide the most accurate information.
So it’s sort of a competition for truth. I think it’s a very powerful concept to have a competition for truth, because you also said, like what is truth, it’s because what may be true to self, may not be viewed as true to others, but you want to have the closest approximation of that so I think the Community Notes thing is very powerful.” – Elon Musk
TWITTER OFFICIALLY LAUNCHES THEIR VIOLENT SPEECH POLICY
Here’s the Twitter thread on February 28th which summarizes the policy:
“We’ve made a few changes to our policies around violent content and similar language.
Today, we’ve officially launched our Violent Speech policy, which prohibits violent threats, wishes of harm, glorification of violence, and incitement of violence.
Twitter has a zero-tolerance approach towards Violent Speech, and in most cases, we will suspend any account violating this policy.
For less severe violations, we may require you to delete the content before you can access your account again.
If you believe a tweet violates this policy, please report it to us right away.
As always, if you think we made a mistake, you can file an appeal by following the process here: Appeal a locked or suspended account."
Twitter’s straightforward policy on violent threats (taken from their official website) states,
“You may not threaten to inflict physical harm on others, which includes (but is not limited to) threatening to kill, torture, sexually assault, or otherwise hurt someone. This also includes threatening to damage civilian homes and shelters, or infrastructure that is essential to daily, civic, or business activities.”
Twitter explains Wishes of Harm “You may not wish, hope, or express desire for harm. This includes (but is not limited to) hoping for others to die, suffer illnesses, tragic incidents, or experience other physically harmful consequences.”
For Incitement of Violence, Twitter states, “You may not incite, promote, or encourage others to commit acts of violence or harm, which includes (but is not limited to) encouraging others to hurt themselves or inciting others to commit atrocity crimes including crimes against humanity, war crimes or genocide. This also includes using coded language (often referred to as “dog whistles”) to indirectly incite violence.”
Lastly, Twitter details Glorification of Violence, “You may not glorify, praise, or celebrate acts of violence where harm occurred, which includes (but is not limited to) expressing gratitude that someone experienced physical harm or praising Violent entities and Perpetrators of Violent Attacks. This also includes glorifying animal abuse or cruelty.”
Twitter’s easy-to-understand Violent Speech Policy also includes short explanations of “What is not a violation of this policy?” and “What happens if you violate this policy?”
This is Twitter’s overview, which you may find valuable,
“Twitter is a place where people can express themselves, learn about what’s happening, and debate global issues.
However, healthy conversations can’t thrive when violent speech is used to deliver a message.
As a result, we have a zero tolerance policy towards violent speech in order to ensure the safety of our users and prevent the normalization of violent actions.” Twitter
COMMUNITY NOTES: MORE IMPROVEMENTS
I’ve written about Community Notes often, and Twitter is continuously improving in this area.
This week an update was shared, stating, “Major under-the-hood update: Community Notes can now run multiple note ranking models in parallel, facilitating both expansion to new countries and experimentation with improved ranking approaches. As always, the code and data is open source: GitHub Ranking Notes.”
Twitter explains, “We’re now running three models: our existing core model, an experimental variant of the core model that could potentially increase note coverage, and a model that will help assess and improve quality as Community Notes expands to new countries and languages in the coming weeks.”
If you’re not familiar with Community Notes, you can read more here.
FUTURE PLANS: VIDEO, SUPRESSED TWEETS, FEEDBACK FOR BasedAI
Elon Musk is known for thoughtfully taking user’s suggestions into consideration.
On February 28, Elon liked this suggestion from Steven Mark Ryan, Tesla YouTube personality, “Twitter desperately needs 1.5x, 2x etc video playback speed. I have taken to downloading videos from twitter via a third party app to watch them at 2x on my computer. Would also be cool to have an AI trim out silences automatically & give us a button to toggle that mode on/off.”
Always caring about people and quick to fix problems, Elon Musk confirmed Twitter is looking into concerns by Zuby Music, a well-known rapper with 1M followers and others. They communicated on February 28 that “Many of my followers aren’t seeing my tweets anymore and others are experiencing the same.”
T(w)itter Daily News translated a comment by Guillaume Verdon, a software engineer that Elon replied to. “IMO Elon Musk most likely to use Twitter for data + RLHF & Tesla Dojo supercomputer for training/inference of LLMs at BasedAI. It’s all coming together.” This statement and Elon’s positive response strongly suggest that Twitter data will be included in building a new improved ChatGPT. Let’s break this down.
Elon Musk, noticing that OpenAI’s ChatGPT has recently shown deep problems which do not seem to be improving, is seeking to create a new organization, “BasedAI” which will draw from several areas for success:
Tesla Dojo supercomputer for training/inference of Large Language Models (Learn more about LLMs here)
Twitter image of exchange with Elon Musk and Guillaume Verdon, February 28, 2023
CONCLUSION
Twitter functions as an incredible tool because of its reach to the most influential people in the world. Now, with the launch of their Violent Speech Policy and the expansion of Community Notes to Brazil, they can help create even more meaningful, uplifting conversations and media topics geared towards all communities around the world.
Elon Musk is known for taking users’ suggestions into consideration, so don’t be afraid to post your thoughts and opinions, it might just have some influence on Twitter’s future features. In summary, whether you use Twitter for entertainment or business purposes, remember that Twitter seeks to spread positivity and inclusion to everyone who is part of its community.
I love it when I see people across various communities interacting and engaging in conversations with understanding and respect for one another. Use Twitter more often, try out Community Notes and believe that Elon Musk really cares to hear our thoughts – these are some small steps we can take each day on building a better social media universe.
Gail Alfar, author. Exclusive to What’s Up Twitter – February 23, 2023. All Rights Reserved. My goal as an author is to support Twitter 2.0 and Elon Musk in both making lives better on earth for humans and becoming a space-fairing civilization.
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Elon Musk spoke about Twitter at the world conference on February 14, 2023 and here is a transcript of that conversation. My goal/mission in this blog post is to preserve the important and visionary words of Elon Musk. Enjoy.
Elon explains why he bought Twitter,
“I mean I thought about creating something from scratch but I thought Twitter would perhaps accelerate progress versus creating something from scratch by 3 to 5 years.
I think we are seeing a tremendous technology acceleration that 3 to 5 years is actually worth a lot.
I mean, I was a little worried about the direction that, and the effect of social media on the world and especially Twitter. I thought it was very important for there to be a maximally trusted sort of Digital Public Square where people within countries and internationally can communicate with the least amount of censorship allowed by law, and obviously that varies a lot by jurisdiction.
I think in general, social media companies should adhere to the laws of countries and not try to put a *thumb on the scale beyond the laws of the countries. I think this is something that is probably agreeable to the legislators and to the people of most countries.
So that’s the general idea, it’s just to reflect the values of the people as opposed to imposing the values of essentially San Francisco and Berkeley, which are somewhat of a niche ideology, as compared to the rest of the world.
I think Twitter was doing a little too much to impose a niche 'San Francisco-Berkeley' ideology on the world. You know, I thought it was important for the future of civilization to try to correct that *thumb on the scale if you will and just have Twitter more accurately reflect, like I said, the values of the people of Earth. That's the intention and hopefully we succeed in doing that.”
X.COM
Elon Musk image courtesy cb.doge
Elon talks about his vision for the future of twitter,
“Well I think it would be, you know, have this long-term sort of vision of something called x.com from way back in the day which is sort of like an everything app. where it’s just maximally useful.
It does payments, provides financial services, provides information flow, really anything digital. It also provides secure communications.
You know, I think [the goal of x.com] is be as useful as possible, as entertaining as possible, and a source of truth if you want to find out what’s going on and what’s really going on then you should be able to go on the x app and find out.
So it’s sort of a source of truth and a maximally useful system. And Twitter is essentially an accelerant to that sort of maximally useful everything app.”
Elon Musk explains Twitter’s Community Notes in simple terms
“I think there’s something that we’re putting a lot of efforts into called Community Notes. It’s currently just in English, but we will be expanding it to all languages.
That is I think quite a good way to assess the truth of things where it’s the community itself basically the people of Earth who are basically, not exactly voting but competing to provide the most accurate information.
So it’s sort of a competition for truth. I think it’s a very powerful concept to have a competition for truth, because you also said, like what is truth, it’s because what may be true to self, may not be viewed as true to others, but you want to have the closest approximation of that so I think the Community Notes thing is very powerful.
I think we are trying to have as many organizations and people and institutions verified as being legitimately those people and organizations is important, and to have the organizational affiliation clearly identified so that if you want to find out if somebody’s actually, if an account is actually from a member of parliament or a journalist or if let’s say, a Twitter handle actually belongs to Disney corporation or something like that, you can go on Twitter and it’s sort of an identity layer of the Internet you can confirm that is, in fact, the case.
I think once you’ve got these interlocking, sort of identities, it’s actually very hard to be deceptive in that case, and it’s also, you have a reputation to protect at that point. So I think then people are far more likely to be measured in their response and will be more reasonable, since they have reputational value at that point.
So these are some of the ideas that I have, and you know I'm not saying that for sure it will succeed or that it’s going to be perfect but I am confident that it will over time head in a good direction. and I think that the evidence for that will be, do people find it useful?
As we’re measuring sort of the total user minutes, but not just user minutes, unregretted used minutes which I think that that’s the key figure of merit.
For example, TikTok has a very high usage but I often hear people say well. I spent two hours on TikTok, but I regret those two hours. I’m not trying to knock TikTok, but it’s just we don’t want that to be the case with Twitter.
We want to say like 'ok, you spent half an hour on Twitter, but you found it to be useful and entertaining, and a good thing in your life. and ultimately be a force for good for civilization, that’s the aspiration.”
The most effective way to use Twitter
Elon talked about how governments and organizations can best use Twitter,
"I think, generally, I would recommend really communicating a lot on Twitter. And I think it’s good for people to speak in their voice as opposed to how they think they should speak. Sometimes people think, ‘I should speak in this way that is expected of me,’ but it ends up sounding somewhat at times, stiff and not real.
You know like if you read a press release from a corporation it just sounds like propaganda. I would encourage CEOs and companies and legislators and ministers and so forth to speak authentically. If there's a particular policy to explain it.
I think sometimes there's a sometimes a concern about criticism but I think at the end of the day having some criticism is fine. It's really not that bad. I'm constantly attacked on Twitter, frankly. And I don't mind, you have to be somewhat thick-skinned I suppose at times you know because they really try and twist the knife.
But I think as a forum for communication, its great. I would just encourage more communication and like I said, to sort of speak in an authentic voice. Like sometimes people will have someone else be their sort of Twitter manager or something like that and I think people should just do their own tweets.
And like sometimes you make a mistake or something, its fine. But I think, doing your own tweets, just like you would give a talk here or have a meeting at a summit, that's the way to do it is to actually do the tweets yourself and convey the message that you want directly.”
Single world government as a civilizational risk
“One thing I should say, I know this is called the World Government Summit, but I think we should be a little bit concerned about actually becoming too much of a single world government if I may say that we want to avoid creating a civilizational risk by having, frankly, this may sound a little odd, too much cooperation between governments.
If you look at history and the rise and fall of civilizations where all throughout history civilizations have risen and fallen but it hasn't meant the doom of humanity as a whole because they've been all these separate civilizations that were separated by great distances.
While Rome was falling, Islam was rising so you had, you know, the sort of caliphate doing incredibly well while Rome was doing terribly. That actually ended up being a source of preservation of knowledge and many scientific advancements.
So I think we want to be a little bit cautious about being too much of a single civilization because if we are too much of a single civilization then the whole thing may collapse.
I'm obviously not suggesting war or anything like that but I think we want to be a little bit wary of actually cooperating too much. It sounds a little odd but we want to have some amount of civilizational diversity such that if something does go wrong with some part of civilization that the whole thing doesn't collapse and humanity keeps moving forward.” - Elon Musk
Twitter’s next CEO?
Elon was asked if he has identified a CEO for Twitter and when he would announce who it will be,
"Well, I think I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it's in a financially healthy place and that the product roadmap is clearly laid out, so I'm guessing probably towards the end of this year should be good timing to find someone else to run the company. I think it should be in a stable position around the end of this year."
Twitter is a Startup in Reverse
“Twitter is still somewhat of a startup in reverse and so there’s a lot of work here to get Twitter in sort of a stable position and, like I said, to really build the engine of software engineering at Twitter and really have a great product roadmap and the people in place to implement that product roadmap. And so it is not my intention to work like crazy, I mean I think I still am, I’m comfortable with a mere 80-hour workweek. That would be fine! That is what I would aspire to.”
CONCLUSION
I agree the ‘San Francisco-Berkeley’ ideology is niche. Elon Musk said he thinks its “important for the future of civilization to try to correct that thumb on the scale if you will and just have Twitter more accurately reflect the values of the people of Earth.”
*Thumb on the scale means “An act of bias or a tactic for cheating which creates a situation that unfairly benefits one party involved in an interaction.”
Many people are excited about the future of x.com. Elon’s vision is for it to be as “useful as possible, as entertaining as possible, and a source of truth if you want to find out what’s going on and what’s really going on then you should be able to go on the x app and find out.”
A great way to understand Twitter’s Community Notes is as a competition for truth. In Elon’s words, “I think it’s a very powerful concept to have a competition for truth, because you also said, like what is truth, it’s because what may be true to self, may not be viewed as true to others, but you want to have the closest approximation of that.”
I agree with Elon Musk that the best tweets are genuine tweets and not those curated by a social media manager or a dry press release. Making mistakes in a tweet is okay and happens often to many people so it need not be scary and neither should criticism.
Elon cautioned against “being too much of a single civilization because if we are too much of a single civilization then the whole thing may collapse.” The way he explained it was appropriate for his audience of mostly middle eastern people at the World Government Summit, he said, “While Rome was falling, Islam was rising so you had, you know, the sort of caliphate doing incredibly well while Rome was doing terribly. That actually ended up being a source of preservation of knowledge and many scientific advancements.”
Twitter may have a new CEO near the end of 2023 and first Elon Musk will make certain Twitter is on track for healthy finances and a clearly laid out product roadmap.
Original Twitter HQ in San Francisco. Photo Courtesy Twitter.
Gail Alfar, author. Exclusive to What’s Up Twitter – February 16, 2023. All Rights Reserved. My goal as an author is to support Twitter 2.0 and Elon Musk in both making lives better on earth for humans and becoming a space-fairing civilization.
One-Time
Monthly
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My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider a donation to support!
My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider a monthly donation to support!
My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider an annual donation to support!
Welcome back to What’s Up Twitter. Thanks for joining me for a moment as we look at how Elon Musk continues to improve Twitter this last week and lead it into a financially healthy place.
Four changes this week involve thoughtful ways for Twitter to generate a revenue stream based on providing value and a good user experience for organizations and individuals.
Major advertisers support Twitter over the Super Bowl
Twitter Blue expands to 6 more countries
Verified Organization plan for Gold checks and Affiliates
Enterprise API
Elon Musk frees the Bird. Art courtesy The Rebel Bear.
Major advertisers show support for Twitter
February 2: Elon Musk takes moment to thank the National Football League (NFL) and major advertisers for their support as we approach Super Bowl Sunday. PepsiCo and Anheuser-Busch are just a few companies that welcome the opportunity to make deals with Twitter.
Super appreciate support of @NFL & major advertisers & congrats to Twitter team!
February 3: Twitter Blue is available in France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Spain. Maren Kahnert creator of Elon Musk Interviews reported that she signed up for Twitter Blue. Deborah in France thanked Elon Musk, saying “France Loves Twitter!”
February 3: Twitter opens early access to its Verified Organization plan. In a tweet from Matt Navarra, some of the details were revealed. A Gold checkmark for organizations ($1000/month) and affiliation badges for its associates ($50/month) will boost Tweets by that organization.
My take is this is a great deal for organizations as it is an inexpensive way to advertise. Imagine advertising for only $1000/month? It should encourage engaging and creative ‘marketing’ tweets.
February 7: As suggested by Twitter user Nima Owji, Twitter created a tab for affiliates. The Official Tesla account has 7 affiliates on their tab.
Enterprise API with Twitter versus “Free API”
February 4: Elon Musk listens to feedback from Twitter users, he states “Responding to feedback, Twitter will enable a light, write-only API for bots providing good content that is free.” *API means Application programming interface and one benign example is the below account for Pepito.
Commenting on a link to a beloved bot account called Pepito the Cat, Elon Musk delighted users by agreeing, “I guess we could give all Verified users access to the API for posts like this.” You can follow this account at https://twitter.com/PepitoTheCat and here’s the French feline!
Pepito The Cat, and account that uses Twitter’s API
February 8: The Twitter dev team shared information about “Enterprise API” in a series of tweets,
“We have been busy with some updates to the Twitter API so you can continue to build and innovate with us.
We’re excited to announce an extension of the current free Twitter API access through February 13. Here’s what we’re shipping then: Paid basic access that offers low level of API usage, and access to Ads API for a $100 monthly fee.
A new form of free access will be introduced as this is extremely important to our ecosystem – limited to Tweet creation of up to 1,500 Tweets per month for a single authenticated user token, including Login with Twitter.
Also on February 13, we will deprecate the Premium API. If you’re subscribed to Premium, you can apply for Enterprise to continue using these endpoints. This is a new chapter for the Twitter API to increase quality, reduce spam, and enable a thriving ecosystem. We appreciate your patience as we implement these changes and we can’t wait to see what you build next! Stay tuned for more information on continued Twitter API access.” - Twitter devs
Avoiding bankruptcy
February 5: Elon Musk expressed appreciation for all who are supporting Twitter. Bankruptcy has been avoided under Elon’s leadership even as he spent countless hours at Tesla and SpaceX. Elon Musk would like to see Twitter become financially healthy soon.
“Last 3 months were extremely tough, as had to save Twitter from bankruptcy, while fulfilling essential Tesla & SpaceX duties. Wouldn’t wish that pain on anyone. Twitter still has challenges, but is now trending to breakeven if we keep at it. Public support is much appreciated!” - Elon Musk
“To be extra clear, Twitter is definitely not financially healthy yet, but is trending to be so. Lots of work still needed to get there.” - Elon Musk
Elon was asked by a Twitter user if it is “Worse than 2008 or production hell?” Elon replied, “Similar.”
February 5: Elon Musk’s team is called to fix an issue reported by many Twitter users. Elon said, “Daily user count & total user minutes are still strong, but engagement on some accounts is weirdly low.” – Elon Musk
Elon Musk is constantly engaged with Twitter users and this is a big reason why Twitter is able to improve so rapidly.
Twitter Files are appreciated by most Americans
February 6: Most Americans approve of the Twitter Files. A poll conducted January 31 – February 2, 2023 by Rasmussen Reports found that 63% of American adults approve of Elon Musk’s decision to authorize the publication of the “Twitter files” and 42% strongly approve.
I think the Twitter Files are Elon Musk’s brilliant way of “disinfecting with sunlight” to clear the decks at Twitter and win the public’s trust.
February 6: T(w)itter Takeover News found an update on the Twitter App designed to give Twitter a seamless and enjoyable experience. The update allows the user app to default to whichever tab so you will not have to switch back to “For you” or “Following.”
BREAKING: Update to the latest version of the Twitter app so that “For you” and “Following” will default to whichever tab you had open last.
February 7: Elon Musk tweets, “Going forward, Twitter will be broadly accepting of different values, rather than trying to impose its own specific values on the world.”
My take is this is essential to preserving humanity and it may even serve to extend the window of opportunity for humans to make it to Mars.
Twitter can be a communication tool that can save lives. It is much more than entertainment.
February 8: In the aftermath of the earthquake in Turkey the Turkish government contacted Twitter to say they are restoring Twitter access in the country. Elon Musk said, “Twitter has been informed by the Turkish government that access will be reenabled shortly.”
Longform Tweets
February 8: Twitter Blue rolled out an amazing feature where people can now tweet up to 4000 characters instead of just 280. Here’s the details:
“need more than 280 characters to express yourself? we know that lots of you do… and while we love a good thread, sometimes you just want to Tweet everything all at once. we get that. so we're introducing longer Tweets! you're gonna want to check this out.
starting today, if you’re subscribed to Twitter Blue in the US you can create longer Tweets. most standard functions of Tweeting still apply, whether you want to post a picture, use a hashtag, or create a poll. but now you can type all the way up to 4,000 characters. for now, longer Tweets on web can't be saved as drafts or scheduled to send later. but don’t worry, Twitter is still Twitter.
we know longer Tweets could mean a lot of scrolling, so they’ll be capped at 280 characters on your timeline and you’ll see a “Show more” prompt to click and read the whole Tweet. while only Blue subscribers can post longer Tweets, anyone and everyone can read them. you can reply to, retweet, and quote Tweet a longer Tweet, no matter if you’re a Twitter Blue subscriber or not.
subscribers will be able to reply and QT with up to 4,000 characters. let us know what you think. we’re excited to see how you use the extra space! if you’ve got more to say, you can subscribe to Twitter Blue by clicking the link in our bio.” - Twitter Blue
CONCLUSION
The tide is turning slowly in society and I am starting to hear some people speak up about how thankful they are that Elon Musk bought Twitter. And for Twitter to be a platform for free speech it must also be financially successful and I believe it is heading in that direction under Elon Musk.
Major advertisers like the NFL are showing support for Twitter
Users in France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Spain can now pay for Twitter Blue
The Verified Organization plan is valuable for both Twitter (revenue) and organizations. It provides the Gold Check and can be used by companies for marketing
Enterprise API from Twitter and other API features may create revenue
Honoring transparency, Elon Musk explained Twitter was being saved from Bankruptcy
In my article “Twitter Just Gets Better with Elon Musk at the Helm,” read about how Twitter is on the path to becoming a one-stop shop for people to keep folders with categorized information, a place to come for news, and a place for content creators to earn an income for their efforts.
Photo San Francisco Courtesy Ethan Chang on Unsplash
Gail Alfar, author. Exclusive to What’s Up Twitter – February 8, 2023. All Rights Reserved. My goal as an author is to support Twitter 2.0 and Elon Musk in both goal as an author is to support Twitter 2.0 and Elon Musk in both making lives better on earth for humans and becoming a space-fairing civilization.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider a monthly donation to support!
My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider a monthly donation to support!
My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider an annual donation to support!
Welcome back to What’s Up Twitter. There are cool developments coming down the pipeline for you as a Twitter user.
Also, do you think Twitter will accept Dogecoin? Share your ideas.
San Francisco, home of Twitter HQ is a gem at sunset. Used with permission from Romain Briaux from Unplash.
Twitter to open Beta version soon to reward creators!
Hundreds of talented citizen writers will soon have a chance to be financially compensated for their work. Elon Musk announced that co-tweets have ended to make way for a feature that will encourage citizen journalism.
Writers with subscriptions activated will be able to publish directly on Twitter and get paid for it by adding essays as attachments to tweets.
Elon Musk announces new features for Twitter.
“You’re welcome. Axed them yesterday to focus on enabling writers to add essays as attachments to tweets. Combined with improvements to creator subscriptions (fka superfollow), you will be able to publish directly on Twitter & get paid for it. Beta version launching next week. We’re also reviewing ad rev share for ads in a creator’s tweet replies – create an interesting thread and get paid for it!” Elon Musk
Are you familiar with Tweet threads? Many writers like Marc Andreessen and Trung Phan are known for their interesting threads. These and others may soon be able to get paid for their threads by sharing ad revenue with Twitter.
I think this is a great idea! Did you know many writers are paid less than $20 per article to write what they are TOLD to write by editors? They need income so they acquiesce and then they are targeted for doing a job to earn a living wage. Imagine if these talented people could write freely and not have to support an agenda they disagree with. I am excited to follow this development on Twitter. This may be part of why Elon Musk purchased Twitter.
Issues with Twitter visibility
Late Tuesday evening on January 31, Elon Musk made his account private. This was to gauge tweet interaction invisibility, which was reported by many users as being limited when accounts were not made private. In one example by Ian Cheong, he had more engagement and visibility when his account was private than when it was public. I will update this article as this situation develops.
Ian Cheong was one of the first to discover visibility issues on Twitter.
The Twitter Files have been ignored by the mainstream media
This was expected and explained well by David Sacks,
“When Elon Musk made necessary business changes at Twitter, the media reacted with hysterical melodrama: he was “starving” employees; the site was facing “imminent collapse.” But when Twitter Files exposed state censorship and Hamilton68 fraud, they react with defeaning silence.”
What are some ideas on Twitter accepting dogecoin?
There is no indication that Twitter has immediate plans to accept Dogecoin and there are clues that Twitter is developing a payment system based on fiat money. The biggest indicator of this is that Elon Musk shared on Twitter on January 31 that creators would soon receive revenue for their content. People already pay money to creators through monthly subscriptions but that money must go through Stripe.
Stripe says, “Millions of companies of all sizes—from startups to Fortune 500s—use Stripe’s software and APIs to accept payments, send payouts, and manage their businesses online.”
Elon Musk loves vertically integrating his products on many levels at SpaceX and Tesla. Will he reduce costs by vertically integrating an in-house payment system instead of paying to utilize Stripe’s software?
There has been speculation from the dogecoin community in comments on Reddit about Twitter, Bitcoin and Elon Musk. It is significant that SpaceX, Tesla as well as the Boring Co. have accepted payments in Dogecoin. People bought Boring Co. Burnt Hair fragrance with Dogecoin in October 2022 and rides in the Boring Company Tunnels in Las Vegas appear to be available in Dogecoin by scanning a QR code to buy tickets.
Many people speculate that Twitter will do the same. In comments on Reddit, people know that Dogecoin has benefited from Elon Musk‘s interest. However, Elon Musk is not part of the Dogecoin Foundation and merely supports the coin because it is fun and has memes and makes more financial sense than other coins.
I recently searched for current merch to buy with Dogecoin from Tesla and SpaceX and found none as of February 1, 2023. The Tesla Cyberwhistle costs 1000 Dogecoin and it is out of stock. My take is that Twitter will solidify a financial network in the USA first with traditional fiat money and next year may introduce digital currency in Doge or Bitcoin or both.
The Tesla Cyberwhistle is 1000 DOGE and is OUT OF STOCK
CONCLUSION
The biggest news this week is the prospect of Elon Musk utilizing Twitter to encourage citizen journalism. This takes incentives (money) so writers can earn their own way instead of answering to mainstream media outlets that dictate how they write or edit their work to promote an agenda.
There are technical issues this week with Twitter and decreased tweet visibility. Elon Musk is aware and his team will likely make fixing it a priority.
Mainstream media continues to ignore and even ridicule the seriousness of the Twitter Files. If you would like to research the files, check out www.twitterfiles.co
Rumors are circulating about Twitter payment systems and nothing is verified but we do know that Twitter pays some content creators through Stripe. We shall watch if Stripe continues to be Twitter’s choice as it is not a vertically integrated aspect of Twitter.
What we do know is that all of Elon Musk’s companies (with the exception of Neuralink) have accepted Dogecoin thus far. Many on Twitter would warmly welcome Dogecoin as a payment or integrated tip system on Twitter.
There is more happening at Twitter
In my article “Twitter Just Gets Better with Elon Musk at the Helm,” read about how Twitter is on the path to becoming a one-stop shop for people to keep folders with categorized information, a place to come for news, and a place for content creators to earn an income for their efforts. There are little tweaks and improvements being made almost daily to Twitter’s features. From improving bookmarks to pinned lists, Elon Musk is making sure most people know what Twitter has to offer. He’s even going to make sure cool tweets in other languages (like Japanese) are translated and recommended to people around the globe.
Gail Alfar, author. Exclusive to What’s Up Twitter – February 1, 2023. All Rights Reserved. My goal as an author is to support Twitter 2.0 and Elon Musk in both making lives better on earth for humans and becoming a space-fairing civilization.
One-Time
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My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider a donation to support!
My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider a donation to support!
My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider an annual donation to support!
Elon Musk is driving change at Twitter at a faster pace than most could imagine. If you know much about Elon, you’ll know he lives every day with a sense of urgency. Things tend to get done faster when he’s in charge. Here’s a few of the changes from the past week that “Mr. Tweet” has made,
Elon explains Twitter Lists
Community Notes improvements
Twitter to change how we see ads and will reward creators
Twitter as the source of truth
Twitter will become more international!
Twitter will pick up where you left off
Twitter Blue subscribers and all users get new features
Twitter Lists
There were many people new to Twitter or unaware of Twitter’s List feature. On January 20, Elon explained Lists in simple terms and Elon also said that lists were one of his favorite Twitter features. He added that,
Elon reassured users that community notes will not push any agenda but instead exist to maximize truth. He stated,
“We are going to great lengths to avoid the Wikipedia left wing editorial control problem. By the same token, Community Notes cannot be biased towards the right either. Maximizing for truth is the goal.”
“Coming soon are notifications if you’ve replied, liked or retweeted something subsequently corrected by community.”
The Official Community Notes Twitter account also shared and image (see below)and an explanation of a new development that will affect all of Twitter. Previously a user could quote tweet to avoid Community Notes from being visible. This new development will change that,
“Community Notes are now also shown on Quote Tweets. This change boosts the impact of contributors’ efforts, and helps ensure context is shown everywhere it can be helpful. Live now in the web app, and coming soon to iOS and Android.”
Elon Musk has plans to have Community Notes operate on a wide scale, on January 19 he explained,
Twitter content creators will also be pleased with another new development, which would be a creator fund to incentivize those that put up constant content and bring people on Twitter (suggested by Tyler Todt who is a personal fitness trainer with over 107K followers and produces interesting content on health.
Elon Musk’s Twitter aims to be the source of truth
When a reporter from Rebel News for WEFReports.com ran in to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla at Davos, he asked him some hard questions and then the video was banned on Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube (It has since been spotted on Youtube). The video appears freely on Twitter with Elon Musk’s comment,
In coming months, Twitter will translate & recommend amazing tweets from people in other countries & cultures. There are epic tweets in other countries every day (Japan especially). (Tweets will be translated before being recommended). Interesting & entertaining content from around the world is worth seeing.”
Twitter will pick up where you left off
If you use Twitter, stop, then come back to it hours later, will take you back to where you left off to avoid confusion and allow you a better personal experience. Elon explained this on January 20,
“Next Twitter update will remember whether you were on For You (ie recommended), Following or list you made & stop switching you back to recommended tweets.”
Twitter Blue subscribers and all users get new features
The Official Twitter Blue account explained a new feature on January 20,
“For Twitter Blue subscribers, when you save a new Bookmark, you can still save directly to a folder by holding down the new flag icon. Long press from the Tweet details to access Bookmark folders or individual Tweets after saving a new Bookmark.”
Folders or bookmarks can be accessed on your phone, ipad or laptop. Expect them to undergo a lot of improvements such as the ability to organize them as well as search through them.
Elon Musk encourages Companies to post more content
When Twitter user Mathias Fons shared that, “Tesla started to actively tweet updates & educational content at the start of December. The outcome has been tremendous. I hope that Tesla continues utilizing Twitter like this! Twitter users & companies should take note of this—post interesting content & results will follow.” Elon Musk agreed, saying,
Hopefully, companies will start to post interesting content!
CONCLUSION
Twitter is on the path to becoming a one stop shop for people to keep folders with categorized information, a place to come for news, and a place for content creators to earn an income for their efforts. There are little tweaks and improvements being made almost daily to Twitter’s features. From improving bookmarks to pinned lists, Elon Musk is making sure most people know what Twitter has to offer. He’s even going to make sure cool tweets in other languages (like Japanese) are translated and recommended to people around the globe.
Photo of Austin, Texas by Carlos Alfonso on Unsplash
Gail Alfar, author. Exclusive to What’s Up Twitter – January 24, 2023. All Rights Reserved. My goal as an author is to support Twitter 2.0 and Elon Musk in both making lives better on earth for humans and becoming a space-fairing civilization.
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My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider a one-time donation to support!
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My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider an annual donation to support!
Twitter continues to improve and grow and attract new users as it has quickly become the number one App people choose to download on the Apple app store for news.
This article will sum up some of the improvements to expect in Twitter mentioned so far in January by official Twitter accounts and Elon Musk.
Twitter said ‘Au revoir’ to Revue! Elon Musk asked his followers if they felt Twitter should keep Revue. The great majority of Twitter users replied that they do not use it, many did not even know what it was. Jan 18 marks the last day for this newsletter/email subscription feature that was rarely used
Elon Musk encouraged corporations to use their free Twitter accounts to tweet. Elon said,
“Companies in general are missing the incredible opportunity
that Twitter provides to reach customers.
Just Tweet interesting things!
That’s all it takes.” – Elon Musk
Elon Musk explains Verified Tweets
Elon Musk said in response to a question from Brayden Fox, “Twitter Verified tweets are more likely to be recommended to others, as they are less likely to be bots or troll farms.”
Elon also said, “Trashing accounts that you hate will cause our algorithm to show you more of those accounts, as it is keying off of your interactions. Basically saying if you love trashing *that* account, then you will probably also love trashing *this* account. Not actually wrong.
Twitter’s Algorithms will be open sourced
Transparency is important to gain trust and Elon Musk is making good on his commitment to open source Twitter’s recommendation algorithm. Elon said, “The recommendation algorithm will get much better and it will be open source”
Verification for Organizations to launch soon
Twitter Blue for Business is being renamed. The official Twitter account tweeted: “We will soon launch Verification for Organizations, formerly known as Blue for Business. Today, you can apply for early access via our waitlist here.”
Twitter to add Formatting Features
Elon said, “We will also be adding simple formatting features like bold, underline & font size later this quarter. The goal is to allow people to publish long-form natively on Twitter, rather than forcing them to use another website. Twitter will continue to recommend brevity in tweets.”
Blue users can upload 10 minute video content
Twitter users who enjoy the Blue subscription can upload videos that are 10 minutes long. I was able to upload the first episode of my new Twitter-only podcast, “Gail’s Tesla Podcast.”
Gail’s Tesla Podcast #1 Starting using FSD. How to start FSD and go around corners and other hacks. We’ll go get burgers together! Our first 10 minute video for you! pic.twitter.com/nuJmmtbdIO
Would you like to read the Twitter Files? They are being continuously updated and archived here on The Twitter Files Archive. “This is where you will find the Twitter threads written by independent journalists like Matt Taibbi. These threads are converted into long-form articles for those not on Twitter or who may have a hard time trying to find the threads.”
Gail Alfar, author. Exclusive to What’s Up Twitter – January 18, 2023. All Rights Reserved. My goal as an author is to support Twitter 2.0 and Elon Musk in both making lives better on earth for humans and becoming a space-fairing civilization.
One-Time
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My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider a donation to support!
My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider a donation to support!
My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider an annual donation to support!
Elon Musk shared an image on Twitter showing the titles of 3 books and the words, “YOU ARE HERE” in the middle. Let’s take a look at these 3 books and discuss how the Twitter files relate.
We’ll also look at Elon’s Twitter poll asking “Elon Musk should” a. Stay out of politics or b. Keep shooting his feet. 57.2% were in favor of “Keep shooting his feet.”
Most people approve of Elon Musk staying political on Twitter.
1. Brave New World, 1932
In a society where the “World Controllers” mastered genetic science to “perfect” the human race, humans are nothing more than ‘Alpha-plus mandarins and epsilon-minus semi-morons’ designed to perform menial tasks and educated to be blissfully content with pre-destined roles. Intellectual curiosity, a sense of history and scientific innovation are frowned upon because they threaten the ruling class’s power over the masses.
The purpose of all these distractions is to keep people contented so they don’t question the world around them. Society is designed to reject the consumption of old things—like Shakespeare, which is banned. This is another way to promote continuous consumption, because if people value old, outdated things (like old books and higher-quality, longer-lasting items) they won’t have any reason to buy new things.
Things from past eras when society functioned differently often contain deeper meaning and would inspire people to think critically, whereas new forms of entertainment encourage people to focus on the present only. Huxley himself gave advice for resisting this brave new world,
“Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them.”
The Twitter Files are Elon Musk’s way of clearing the decks. Elon explained it this way,
“I think it’s important to, like if you know if we’re going to be trusted in the future to kind of clear the decks for stuff that’s happened in the past so to be totally frank, almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true.(laughter from all) Haha, so … is there a conspiracy theory about Twitter that didn’t turn out to be true? So far, they all turned out to be true. And if not more true than people thought.” –Elon Musk, All-In Podcast
Matt Taibbi wrote “Twitter Files: Why Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In” about how once Twitter began rolling over for Congress in 2017, the ending was inevitable: formal surrender to the intelligence community on content moderation. Matt Taibbi shared,
1.THREAD: The Twitter Files How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In
When George Orwell published this book in 1949 it was around the same time as Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, House Un-American Activities Committee accused Alger Hiss of spying for the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union sealed off land routes to Berlin. 1984 immerses the reader in a world where a totalitarian government monitors people even in their private lives. Writing is illegal but main character Winston Smith keeps a diary and desires to beat the system. Everything about Winston’s life is miserable and that includes his job, the food he eats, and the dreary London cityscape he lives in. In his and all people’s daily lives there are hidden cameras and microphones everywhere, even at home TV screens spewing propaganda must never be turned off.
The signs “Big Brother is watching you” in the book have become synonymous in our culture for the dangers of a government that works to police our thoughts.
The Twitter Files show just how far our own United States government organizations were willing to go to control the public narrative on elections in the USA and SARS-CoV-2. Three examples are,
By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy
By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed
By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*
You can read about these in this thread shared by David Zweig, author of Invisibles.
1. THREAD:
THE TWITTER FILES: HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE
– By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy – By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed – By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*
Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an M.D., an economist, and a professor of health policy at Stanford warned about the dangerous impact of lockdowns, especially on children, the working class, and the poor.
In 2020, he and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, then a professor of medicine at Harvard, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, a professor of epidemiology at Oxford wrote an open letter arguing for “focused protection” for the most medically vulnerable and a return to normal life for the rest of society. Twitter put Bhattacharya’s account on the Trends Blacklist, which meant that no matter how many likes or views one of his tweets racked up, it could never “trend”; its visibility to users on the platform would be sharply curtailed. You can read more about that in the article, “Twitter’s Secret Blacklists.”
3. Fahrenheit 451
The sci-fi novel Fahrenheit 451’s title refers to the temperature at which paper burns. The book explores the dangers of a government that tries to control its people through censorship. Reading is illegal and books are burned any time they are discovered.
The main character, Ray, collects books but is betrayed by his own wife. Written in 1953 when people were just starting to buy cathode-ray TV sets. The book features Ray’s wife Mildred, who watches TV on three screens the size of an entire wall. The programs displayed on the walls are shallow, absurd and pointless. Mildred refers to the characters in her favorite program as her “family” and the actors talk over each other the entire time. Eventually Mildred gets tired of Ray and turns him in to the authorities and he is forced to burn his books and his house. 451 ends on a hopeful note when Ray escapes the city before a nuclear war begins and joins a group of intellectuals and academics who live in secrecy and memorize books to preserve them.
Lee Fang released Twitter Files Part 8 and wrote about how Twitter Aided the Pentagon in Its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign in an article in the Intercept. Disturbing revelations are surfacing, as Fang wrote, “This appears to align with a major report published in August by online security researchers affiliated with the Stanford Internet Observatory, which reported on thousands of accounts that they suspected to be part of a state-backed information operation, many of which used photorealistic human faces generated by artificial intelligence, a practice also known as “deep fakes.”
Twitter quietly partnered with the U.S. intelligence community, allowing the IC to select which state-sponsored accounts/advertsting to take down/ban. Incredible screenshot below showing Twitter had a secret policy handing power to FBI/CIA etc. over content decisions. https://t.co/6aXJ5KqLIt
The Twitter Files reveal how the government paid millions of dollars to censor information from the public. Michael Shellenberger shares, “As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — “Bu alumni” — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.” and adds a screenshot of an email.
Michael Shellenberger, Twitter Files
29. As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — "Bu alumni" — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals. pic.twitter.com/prVhPGohOC
Brave New World, 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 are all science fiction novels that serve to warn people of what can happen if we give up our freedoms and allow others to control what we read or see. Our perception of reality will be skewed and humanity as a whole will be at risk.
For this reason, even if Elon Musk has to “shoot himself in the feet,” it is good that he will keep releasing Twitter Files. The Twitter files are very political because they are important in exposing what the government has been doing behind the scenes at Twitter for years.
Read the Twitter Files (free) on the Twitter Files Archive by Johnna Crider here.
Photo of Austin Texas by Spencer Davis on Unsplash
Gail Alfar, author. Exclusive to What’s Up Twitter – January 5 2022. All Rights Reserved. My goal as an author is to support Twitter 2.0 and Elon Musk in both making lives better on earth for humans and becoming a space-fairing civilization.
One-Time
Monthly
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My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider a donation to support!
My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider a donation to support!
My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider a donation to support!
Elon Musk (wearing a Dogecoin t-shirt) talks on Dec 26 episode of All-In Podcast. Image courtesy All-In Podcast.
Changes in Twitter are happening fast and it’s hard to keep track of them. That’s why I’m writing this blog, it is to try to capture the historical significance of Musk‘s purchase of Twitter. I may not go into every single little detail change and I certainly will not write about the daily drama. You already know about The Twitter Files and are most likely very happy they exist. I think Elon‘s recent talk on the all-in podcast had some important information (Davis Sacks, Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David A. Friedberg all asked Elon Musk questions). I’m going to share 12 main points with you in this article.
tweets show view counts
Twitter’s paid verified blue check
Twitter for businesses/organizations
Twitter ‘batting average’
why and how Twitter workforce was reduced
less hate speech, bots and trolls, a new incentive structure emerges
Elon’s business model inspires other tech firms
Twitter will not monetize hate speech: bots versus trolls
Elon Musk personally called Paul Graham to apologize for Twitter suspension
Twitter to unveil new features in January
Chamath asks Elon Musk to share his views on a 2023 recession
Elon Musk’s reason for the Twitter files
TWEETS SHOW VIEW COUNTS
Views are more important than likes for most people. This has been the case on Youtube for years. Now you will see view counts on your tweets. Though a tweet may get 20 “likes,” it could have thousands of views. Elon explains,
Elon: The view thing is huge, that’s why I pushed the views. Actually, it’s a lot harder than you think because of the sheer number of transactions per second. I think it sort of requires systemwide on the order of 3 million transactions a second to actually calculate the view. You know, calculate and display the view count FYI for Twitter global, so it’s like 3 million per second. It’s a lot.
Elon went on to describe what it was like to own Twitter for the first six weeks.
Elon: “Well, it’s been quite a roller coaster which, obviously you’ve witnessed and been on the roller coaster as well (speaking to Jason).
I mean, it’s exciting, but I think it sort of has its highs and lows to say the least but overall, it seems to be going in a good direction and we’ve got the expenses reasonably under control so it’s not like in the fast lane of bankruptcy anymore.
And we’re releasing features faster than Twitter‘s history at the same time as containing the costs and reducing the cost structure by a factor of three maybe four.
Elon: The verified, that’s huge! It’s a revenue stream as well as a means of identifying or like knowing that it’s a real person and not a bot or a troll situation.
TWITTER FOR BUSINESS / ORGANIZATIONS
Elon: “Having the organizational affiliation was an idea of David’s (Sacks).
That was great to have organizational affiliation so that you can know that somebody is an actual professor at Stanford or that this particular handle is actually Disney not someone simply putting “I work at Disney” in their bio.
So I think that’s going to be really helpful, it’s really just having detailed and nuanced verification so of all the things that you say you are, are these things validated by other people and organizations?”
I wrote about Twitter’s organizational verification of Twitter Blue for Business here.
TWITTER BATTING AVERAGE
Elon: I am a big believer in like you want to look at the net output. So it’s sort of like you know “what’s the batting average?” It’s like baseball.
The point is not that you hit the ball, but it’s like how many home runs you get and like what’s your actual slugging percentage? Its like you’ve got to swing for the fences you’re going to strike out a bit more but we’re going to swing for the fences here at Twitter.
And we’re going to do it quickly, so I think generally like my error rate, and sort of being the chief twit will be less over time but you know in the beginning, we’ll make obviously sort of a lot more mistakes because I’m new to the… like, ‘Hey I just got here man!’
So I mean if you look at the actual amount of improvement that’s happened at Twitter in terms of having costs that are not insane and actually shipping product that on balance is good I think that’s great. Like I think we’re actually executing well and getting things done. I think we’ll have fewer pure gaffes in the future.
WHY AND HOW TWITTER WORKFORCE WAS REDUCED
Chamath: How did you get to your intuition on what the efficient frontier of employees needed to be to make the product better?
Elon: Well…
David Sacks: I observed part of this, where you basically ask the question, “who here is critical, and who here is exceptional?”
Elon: Yes, really what the criteria are trying to apply and obviously you’re not gonna be perfect if you’re moving fast and there’s a lot of people you’re talking about here, is anyone who is exceptional with what they do where the role is critical and they have a positive effect on others and they are trusted meaning they put the company’s interests before their own, should stay. And you know also who is up for working hard. That was not Twitter’s prior culture.
Chamath: Were you surprised that the intersection of that circle and the people that left was basically 25%? Were you surprised it was that deep or did you think your intuition was like, ‘It’s probably somewhere in here?’
Elon: Well I think you could just stand back and say, without knowing how many employees Twitter has at all and say ‘how many people are really needed to run Twitter?’
Like let’s say you don’t know what the employee count number is at all. How many people are needed to keep the site operational? Like let’s say if -excluding product evolution- You basically have to keep the servers going and you have to have a customer support function to take down material that is in violation of the law. what’s the minimum number of people? It’s not like a giant number.
David Sacks: Twitter still has like 2000 people right?
Elon: Yeah we still have 2000 people it’s not that nothing and there’s actually on the order of almost 5000 contractors. Almost all the what’s called ‘trust and safety work,’ which is like the support functions for the site are done by contractors.
Elon Musk wearing a Dogecoin Cowboy t-shirt at Twitter HQ with David Sacks. Image courtesy All-In-Podcast.
LESS HATE SPEECH, BOTS AND TROLLS, A NEW INCENTIVE STRUCTURE EMERGES
David Sacks: You’re doing a lot more to take down hate speech than the company previously was doing.
Elon: Yeah, absolutely, hate speech Impressions are down by a third and will get even lower.
David Friedberg: Maybe you could speak a little bit to what we discovered in those early weeks, which was the incentive. Previously it was to create as many accounts as possible and there were a lot of quick fixes to lowering all these, you know, what people might call ‘bot accounts.” In some cases it was people opening many millions of accounts, but we discovered this very early how easy it was for the tech team to lower the bot count and all the fake accounts.
Elon: Well, we still have a fair number of bots in the system. The incentive structure, the way Twitter was set up previously was this relentless focus on what they call mDau which is monetizable daily active users, although I would say the monetizable part is dubious.
But at least the things that appeared to be monetized or could be passed off as monetizable daily active users. So this created an incentive to turn a blind eye to fake accounts.
So if the incentive structure is like ‘Maximize the appearance of monetizable daily active users,’ then it’s a strong incentive to pretend that a bot is real, and that’s what happened.
So we’re taking a lot of steps to reduce the bots and troll situation, so many! And I think you’re seeing that in the usage. It’s now relatively rare to have your replies filled with crypto scams.
David Friedberg explained that there are many companies in Silicon Valley that want to copy Elon Musk’s method of fast iteration. David said he talks to a lot of tech companies who have CEOs and investors and boards, and they’re starting to say ‘Look at what Elon did at Twitter, how can we do something as aggressive as swift as deep?’ David asked Elon if he thinks much about his business model.
Elon: I mean, to be frank, I’m not thinking about it that much, I’m just thinking about like how do we get Twitter to be in a financially healthy place and fix the engine of engineering so we can have a rapid evolution of new products. and so I guess I’m in some ways in sort of a fortunate position where I don’t have to answer, because it’s not public, and we don’t have a board really.
So I can take actions that are drastic and obviously if I make a bunch of mistakes then Twitter won’t succeed and that will be pretty embarrassing and sad.
But as long as the batting average is good, and the wins significantly outweigh the mistakes, then it will be a great future and I think I’m very optimistic about where things are headed.
TWITTER WILL NOT MONETIZE HATE SPEECH AND BOTS VS. TROLLS
Jason Calacanis asked Elon about freedom of speech and how he feels about it post Twitter acquisition.
Elon: Well, the general principle is that we should hew close to the law in any given country, so the laws vary quite a lot by country and so I think we should be doing free-speech that’s close to the law and that’s the general principle.
I think there are other things where it’s like for example, if you’re an advertiser you don’t want your Ad -like let’s say- it’s a Family Movie next to some NSFW content, even if that continent is text. There’s more of an allowance for what somebody might call hate speech on the system, but it’s not going to be promoted. Like, we’re not going to be recommending hate speech, haha, just at the risk of stating the obvious. (pause)
And we are not going to monetize hate speech or negative speech. Nor would advertisers want us to. I think it’s going to be a rare product that wants to be near seriously negative stuff.
Elon explains the difference between bots and trolls in relation to Jason’s question about freedom of speech versus freedom of reach.
Jason: I was going to say you referred to it as freedom of speech, but not reach because this is a very nuanced discussion. Should this stuff be able to hit the trends?
Elon: It’s certainly possible that some things that will be regarded as hate speech will hit trends, but I think it’s going to be relatively unusual especially as we are doing a better job of controlling the bots and trolls situation. and I do want to emphasize there’s a difference between the bots and the trolls.
Bots are like fully automated accounts, but a troll farm would be where like you’ve got like 100 people in a warehouse somewhere, each with 100 phones so they’re actually humans and they’re going to pass a capture test and they can reply because actually they’re humans. But it’s 10,000 accounts that are obviously not operating as real people.
So, stuff like that can cause things to trend negatively. That’s why I’m a big proponent of having a low-cost verification capability.
Elon continued, explaining how he applied his way of thinking to Twitter. You might know this famous quote:
“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing you are not innovating.” -Elon Musk
Elon: This is definitely a work in progress. One of the first things I said, after the acquisition closed was, we’re going to make a bunch of mistakes but then will try to recover from them quickly. And that’s what we’ve done. I think we’ve generally succeeded in recovering from them quickly and it’s been going pretty well.
ELON MUSK PERSONALLY CALLED PAUL GRAHAM TO APOLOGIZE FOR TWITTER SUSPENSION
David Friedberg asked if the Paul Graham and journalist suspensions were mistakes. “Have you talked publicly about how that all got resolved at the end?”
Elon: Yes, the Paul Graham suspension was definitely a mistake. I actually called Paul Graham to apologize personally for that one.
On the journalist front, I think the journalist suspensions were not a mistake. For some reason, a bunch of journalists thought they were better than everyone else and that if they engaged in doxxing and breaking the rules in various ways that they’re not subject to suspension even though your average citizen is. I think that’s just messed up.
The same rules should apply to people that call themselves journalists as to anyone else on the system. They shouldn’t be sort of, above the rules. for some reason they thought they should be. so that doesn’t make sense, I don’t think that’s right.
David Friedberg also asked Elon to elaborate on shadow banning and transparency. Jason explained that if there’s going to be a system of shadow banning that the rules should be clear to everybody.
Elon: Yeah, absolutely, so that’s something I’m committed to and we will probably be able to roll that out in January.
By the way, we are not going to be rolling out a ton of new features over Christmas and New Year’s and stuff so…. the next sort of feature set will probably roll out mid to late January.
And hopefully, in that we can include information about why an account gets suspended or what is called in Twitter visibility filtering ha ha a.k.a. shadow banning. There’s a lot of things that just happen accidentally. What are the rules in the system that are meant to detect that someone is a bot or a troll and then an account is sort of innocently caught up in that.
So ha ha there’s some accounts that were just suspended yesterday because — temporary suspended, they got like 12 hours suspensions because — someone in trust and safety thought they had posted a nude photo of Hunter Biden or something but they haven’t actually done that (laughter) I don’t know, it was just basically a mistake. There was some account that got a 12-hour suspension yesterday in error and they weren’t sure why it happened. It was essentially a mistake with Twitter Customer support that was corrected.
Elon Musk wearing a Dogecoin Cowboy t-shirt at Twitter HQ with David Sacks. Image courtesy All-In-Podcast.
CHAMATH ASKS ELON MUSK TO SHARE HIS VIEWS ON A 2023 RECESSION
Elon: Well I think it does seem like we’re headed into a recession here in 2023.
The magnitude of that recession is debatable, but I think it’s at least a light to moderate recession potentially on the order of 2009.
So I think it’s wise to prepare for the worst — hope for the best, prepare for the worst — don’t get too adventurous, watch out for margin debt. Like I would really advise people to not have margin debt in a volatile stock market and from a cash standpoint, keep powder dry.
You can get some pretty extreme things happening in a down market. Like Brett Johnson, who is the CFO at SpaceX, was at Broadcom in 2000 and that’s a good company making good products. And he said from peak to trough, I think in less than 12 months Broadcom went down 97%.
So like even if you had a small margin loan there you got crushed. It subsequently recovered to much higher levels but you know if there’s like mass panic in the stock market then you’ve got to be really careful about margin debt.
But this is just, as we know, the economy is cyclic and its somewhat overdue for a recession. And my best guess is that we have sort of stormy times for a year to a year and a half and then things start to … Dawn breaks roughly in Q2 2024. That’s like my best guess.
Booms don’t last forever but neither do recessions.
ELON MUSK’S REASON FOR THE TWITTER FILES
Elon: I think it’s important to, like if you know if we’re going to be trusted in the future to kind of clear the decks for stuff that’s happened in the past so to be totally frank, almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true.(laughter from all) Haha, so … is there a conspiracy theory about Twitter that didn’t turn out to be true?
So far, they all turned out to be true. And if not more true than people thought.
Chamath asked Elon what he thought was the most shocking thing about the Twitter files so far.
Elon: The FBI stuff was pretty intense!
Elon mentioned to the group that the FBI was flagging content to take down that had nothing to do with terrorism. He said, “they literally flagged satire.”
Elon: Maybe they didn’t get the joke, I don’t know, haha!
It’s a big deal that Twitter shows view counts, this helps people to know that they are seen. It’s more significant than likes. If you pay 8/$11, you can have a verified blue check eventually. I think it’s a great idea for people who can afford it. David Sacks came up with a wonderful idea that was implemented called Twitter for Business/Organizations. It helps to validate people’s claims that they represent an organization.
As far as Twitter‘s batting average, Elon Musk explains how in baseball you look at the big picture and not the individual strikeouts, etc. Basically, Twitter has an excellent batting average.
Elon admits that mistakes are made and explains that on deciding the Twitter workforce, it’s important to look at what’s actually needed. Not ‘how many people you should eliminate.’
Twitter’s incentive structure is changing and will not be based on hate speech magnified by bots and trolls.
I was surprised to hear that other tech firms in Silicon Valley are inspired by Elon Musk’s business model of making swift and drastic changes. The fact is, he is greatly respected and admired, even though the mainstream media would have you believe otherwise.
Again, Elon emphasizes that Twitter will not monetize hate speech. When you watch the video, he has an earnest demeanor when he says this, even pausing between his words. Twitter will not monetize hate speech. This is great news.
As far as Twitter’s suspensions of journalists and of Paul Graham, the Paul Graham suspension was an accident and Elon announced that he personally called Paul to apologize. However, the journalists were not accidentally suspended because they doxxed his family’s private location. This put his family’s life at risk. This is something normal people could not do, and so journalists should be held to the same level of accountability as regular people.
Elon mentioned that new features will be unveiled in January. We’re all looking forward to that. Elon believes we are heading towards a recession and he shares his information in the podcast and you can read about that above if you’re interested. Basically, Elon reminds us that the dawn will break after the stormy times. And he thinks that time will happen roughly in Q2 2024, that’s his best guess.
Lastly, Elon chuckles over the FBI flagging parody accounts in the Twitter files. I agree it is pretty hilarious that a parody account would actually be the reason for the efforts of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The interview ended with Elon giving up his seat to Michael Schellenberger, the writer who released the Twitter files on the FBI.
Fun Sidestory: I had the opportunity to get to know some of the Dogecoin community including Gary Lachance. I met Gary in Austin and I was excited to find out there were T-shirts with the Doge drone show from Cyber Rodeo and Texas Rodeo Doge shirts. Later when I was invited to meet Elon Musk at Giga Texas, I asked Gary if he had any extra shirts. Eventually, I met a friend of Gary’s in Austin who passed me a box of shirts and a ceramic tile. Elon received the Rodeo Doge and Drone Doge t-shirts and was appreciative and grateful for them. It’s cool to see Elon wearing the Rodeo Doge t-shirt.
Gail Alfar, author. Exclusive to What’s Up Twitter – December 29, 2022. All Rights Reserved. My goal as an author is to support Twitter 2.0 and Elon Musk in both making lives better on earth for humans and becoming a space-fairing civilization.
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My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider a donation to support!
My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider a donation to support!
My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider a donation to support!
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