I’ve been documenting Twitter’s great improvements since November 2022 and it’s amazing how much positive progress happens in real-time. In this article, I’ll bring you up to date on the last few weeks’ great changes from my perspective!
USERS LOVE TWITTER, EVEN THOSE WHO DON’T
This is ironic, I know, and honestly Twitter is a great place to come and interact in a positive way or a complaining way as well. This funny observation was made by Twitter account BillyM2K when he noted how many people love to come to Twitter to complain about it, rather than take to another social site to complain about it.
This elicited a hilarious reaction from Elon Musk, who replied, “lol they should keep doing it all day.”
HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE WILL EARN A LIVING ON TWITTER… SOON!
Can you make a living being on Twitter all day? Not really… yet! And you may be able to soon!
Being a creator of any sort on Twitter will take a lot of hard work just like any other successful endeavor. This was emphasized by Elon Musk this week when he commented in a tweet under BillyM2K’s subscriptions, “Growing subscribers requires work. No way around it.”
I believe thousands of people will soon earn a living on Twitter, bringing opportunity to all corners of the world and giving creative people hope and an important sense of value. In the coming months, we will see many creative ways to use subscriptions.
A good friend of mine, Johnna Crider came up with an idea I had not thought of for restaurants. Owners could enable subscriptions allowing people discounts and special deals on dine-in or delivery.
When I think of making a living, something that comes to mind is security and this is another area that Twitter is working on, the enabling of secure messages when needed.
TWITTER’S VISION FOR SECURE MESSAGING
There are many reasons for secure messaging, such as protecting private information and sensitive data. Encryption converts all data into a string of unreadable numbers before sending it over the internet, it protects you from a wide range of cyberattacks. Elon Musk clearly intends to provide this for Twitter users in the future.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson that aired in April, Elon said, “One of the things that we are about to release is the ability to encrypt your DM‘s. We’re moving to be able to have DM’s be optionally encrypted. You know there are a lot of DM conversations which are just chatting with friends. Elon explained that end-to-end encryption will come out by the end of May and will give users the ability to toggle encryption on or off.”
“If you are in a conversation that you think is sensitive, you can just toggle the encryption on and then no one at Twitter can see what you’re talking about. They could put a gun to my head, and I couldn’t tell. Sort of, the gun test. If somebody puts a gun to my head, can I still not see your DM‘s? That should be the acid test. And that’s how it should be.”
Our conversations should be private if we need them to be.
Blending characteristic humor with the ability to make a strong point, Elon explained to Carlson, that if the US government were to ask him to do something unconstitutional, his reply would be to “send them a copy of the first amendment, and just say, what part of this are we getting wrong?”
TWITTER’S ROLE IN ELECTIONS
Lately there has been a lot of talk about possible presidential debates being hosted on Twitter. My thought on that is it’s entirely up to the candidates. I think it is a wonderful idea.
When Carlson asked Elon about Twitter‘s role in the upcoming presidential elections, Elon stated, “I think it will play a significant role, not just domestically, but internationally. The goal of new Twitter is to be as fair and evenhanded as possible, so not favoring any political ideology, and being fair to all.”
TRUST AND TWITTER
Trust must be earned, and I believe Twitter is already the best place to get news and information. I think humanity will benefit from discovering, having conversations, and being exposed to different viewpoints in an open and fair way. Elon explains,
“We’re trying to make Twitter the most trusted place on the Internet, the least untrustworthy place on the Internet. I don’t think anybody should trust the Internet. But maybe we can make Twitter the least untrustworthy like I said, try to get the truth to the people as best we can.”
CONCLUSION
In December 1992, Marc Sautet started the idea of philosophy cafés in the Place de la Bastille neighborhood of Paris at the Café des Phares. Sautet would gather friends at his “café philo” each Sunday and have philosophical debates.
I imagine this happening on Twitter and in Twitter Spaces.
I’ll leave you with this quote from President George Washington,
“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
Will there come a time when A.I. is in control and can’t be turned off?
“Absolutely.” – Elon Musk
Elon Musk talked in an interview with Tucker Carlson and here are the highlights. This was a short, engaging Part I (the 2nd part will air soon). It’s significant that Elon considers Tesla and SpaceX much more complex than Twitter. The interview covers many areas. Enjoy!
ADVANCED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE SINGULARITY.
ELON MUSK AGREES HE’S A SPECIESIST.
OpenAI has transitioned from the non-profit Elon founded in order to ethically distribute the power of artificial intelligence, into a closed-source for-profit partnered with Microsoft.
Elon said,
“It is fundamentally profound that the smartest creatures on this earth are humans. It is our defining characteristic.
Now what happens when something vastly smarter than the smartest person comes along in silicon form?
It’s very difficult to predict what will happen in that circumstance. It’s called the singularity.
Regulations are really only put into effect after something terrible has happened.
If that’s the case for AI, and we only put in regulation after something terrible has happened, it may be too late to put the regulation in place.
The AI may be in control at that point.”
Elon explained that he and Google co-founder Larry Page were once close, and he would stay on Page’s couch. They would talk about AI late into the night. Elon said he was concerned about the dangers of AI. Page called Elon a “Speciesist” when he said that “We need to make sure that humanity is okay.” Elon laughed and said he is one, and asked Page, “What are you?”
“My perception was that (Page) was not taking AI safety seriously enough. He really wanted a digital superintelligence. Basically, a digital god as soon as possible. He’s made many public statements that the whole goal of Google is artificial general intelligence.” – Elon Musk
TRUTH GPT.
Elon discussed creating an alternative to OpenAI, TruthGPT, because “Open AI” is being trained to be politically correct and to lie to people. Elon explained,
“What’s happening is they are training the AI to lie. It’s bad. To lie and to withhold information. To comment on some things, to not comment on other things.
But not to say what the data actually demands that it say.
In effect, Microsoft has a very strong say and, if not, directly controls OpenAI at this point.
You really have an OpenAI – Microsoft situation, and then Google DeepMind. These are the two heavyweights in this arena.
I’m worried about the fact that it’s being trained to be politically correct, which is another way of saying untruthful things. That’s a bad sign.
Certainly, the path to AI dystopia is to train an AI to be deceptive.”
Elon Musk explained the goal of TruthGPT,
“I’m going to start something which is called TruthGPT or a Maximum Truth Seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe, and I think this might be the best path to safety in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe.”
TWITTER PURCHASE.
Was it worth it to buy Twitter? Elon explains the Twitter purchase will greatly help ensure the strength of democracy and free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy.
“It remains to be seen as to whether this was financially smart. Currently, it is not. You know we just revalued the company at less than half of the acquisition price.
But some things are priceless.
Lose money or not, that is a secondary issue compared to ensuring the strength of democracy, and free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy.”
NEXT PRESIDENT.
NEW YORK TIMES.
FACEBOOK.
Elon confessed he voted for Biden in 2020, not Trump, and now he just wants a “normal person” with “common sense” to lead America.
He also disclosed what the media has been silent on.
“My understanding is that Zuckerberg spent $400 million in the last election nominally in a get-out-the-vote campaign but fundamentally in support of Democrats. Is that accurate or not accurate? Does that sound unbiased to you?”
As the most followed & interacted man on Twitter, Elon has useful advice on how to use Twitter. He explains, for example, that the New York Times’ Twitter account (and others) should choose only the top best articles to tweet. Otherwise, small insignificant articles clog people’s timelines, and relevant articles are missed.
COMMUNITY NOTES.
TRUTH.
“We got this Community Notes feature which is great. We put a lot of effort into ensuring that Community Notes does not get gamed or have biases.
It simply cares about what is the most accurate thing. The effect of Community Notes is more powerful than people realize because once people realize they can get Community Noted on Twitter, then they will think more carefully about what they say.
Basically, it’s an encouragement to be more truthful and less deceptive.” – Elon Musk
DM’S WILL BE ENCRYPTED.
Tucker Carlson asked about Governmental Agencies having access to Twitter including Direct messages, “You were shocked to find out that various intel agencies were affecting [Twitter’s] operations?”
Elon replied, “The degree to which various Government Agencies had effectively full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind.”
Elon added that direct messages will soon be encrypted (as an on/off toggle feature).
TWITTER WAS OVERSTAFFED.
‘GLORIFIED ACTIVIST ORGANIZATION.’
Speaking about cutting staff at Twitter, Elon said,
“Turns out you don’t need all that many people to run Twitter.
If you’re not trying to run some sort of glorified activist organization and you don’t care that much about censorship, then it turns out you can let go of a lot of people.
What has been the product development over time with Twitter? So, years versus product improvement. You know, it’s a pretty flat line.
So what were they doing? It took a year to add an edit button that doesn’t work most of the time. It feels like a comedy situation over here.
The real question is how did it get so absurdly overstaffed?”
CONCLUSION.
I would call this a cautionary interview because Elon does much to explain how dangerous Advanced Artificial Intelligence is. The Good News is that the dire direction of AI today has managed to prompt Elon into moving forward with the creation of TruthGPT. I am confident that humans will one day be very grateful to him for that!
Thanks to Tucker Carlson / FoxNews for Interviewing Elon Musk. You may watch the interview on Fox. This Article is by Gail Alfar, please credit accordingly and consider following and subscribing to my Twitter Account to support citizen writing.See @gailalfaratx on Twitter
1 day closer to AGI, Image credit @SmokeAwayyy on Twitter
I have a lot of great news about Twitter (now legally known as X.corp on paper) to share with you this week. The vibe on Twitter is energizing, happy, and powerful. No other social media has as many positive changes and potential benefits for users on the web.
What is new this week? Subscriptions Have Opened Up to Include Millions of Accounts!
A fabulous program that will benefit many people was revealed around lunchtime on April 13th.
Twitter users with at least 500 followers can, free of charge, apply to offer their followers a way to thank them for their efforts by simply activating “Subscriptions” for their account. Previously, a user needed to have 10,000 followers.
My take on this is that there are many accounts that provide valuable information daily and there are appreciative people who may like to Subscribe to them to show support.
I’ll use my account as an example. I use Twitter to share the articles I write for WhatsUpTesla and WhatsUpTwitter. I also use Twitter daily to share my enthusiasm for Tesla, Tesla AI, and Twitter 2.0. The reason I offer Subscriptions on my account is mainly to allow a few of my followers to show appreciation for my efforts and to support this blog (Twitter Subscriptions is the main way I receive any currency to pay for part of the costs of the two publications I operate). Honestly, most of the content I exclusively provide for my followers are creative “Thank You” tweets and an occasional special article. I am extremely grateful for this support and it means a lot to me.
So if you are active on Twitter as a writer, artist or even a talented shitposter, I encourage you to go to “Monetization” in settings and activate Subscriptions. There are a few more details that make this an irresistible opportunity:
You’ll be able to offer your followers both longform text and hours long video.
Twitter will help promote your work.
At any point, you may leave Twitter and take your work with you, there’s no obligation or contract to stay.
Twitter generously agreed that (until April 2023), all profits will go to you.
That last perk is HUGE for people who are already known creators (artists, writers, YouTubers, etc, etc), as it gives them an opportunity to prosper while being creative in their own way.
I like being able to show appreciation to a few other people I know on Twitter. I like being able to Subscribe to them because it shows I support them. One account I subscribe to, for example, gives all the proceeds to an organization that helps the homeless. The Providence House in Shreveport, Louisiana is a nonprofit that helped my friend Johnna Crider and her mother. When Johnna was only age 9-12 she formed good memories and relationships that last to this day because of the people at Providence House. If you want to subscribe to Johnna you’ll also see her beautiful private tweets.
There are also, in my opinion, going to be many people who, may want to Subscribe to someone they really like (examples might be Mr. Beast, and Marques Brownlee) and my hope is that citizen journalists will activate subscriptions.
CONCLUSION
As you can see, there are many ways people are already being creative using the Subscription feature! Here are some accounts I recommend trying out a Twitter subscription to:
Johnna Crider @JohnnaCrider1 (kind & thoughtful tweets with a saxophone flare and money goes to good use)
Elon Musk @elonmusk1 (who can resist?)
Shibetoshi Nakamoto @BillyM2k (best shitposter on Twitter)
Me @gailalfaratx (I had to put this here, haha)
“Life is full of beauty. Notice it. Notice the bumble bee, the small child, and the smiling faces. Smell the rain, and feel the wind. Live your life to the fullest potential, and fight for your dreams.” ― Ashley Smith (image courtesy @dvorahfr on Twitter)
Gail Alfar, author. Exclusive to What’s Up Twitter – April 14, 2023. All Rights Reserved. My goal as an author is to support Twitter 2.0 (X.corp) and Elon Musk in both making lives better on Earth for humans and becoming a space-fairing civilization. I write these articles, I will not use AI of any form to write them, they are time-consuming and I appreciate the opportunity to do this.
When Elon Musk accused journalist Matt Taibbi of being an employee of Substack, a publishing platform, and that same platform of stealing data from Twitter, my first reaction was that Elon would not have said any of this without evidence even though Taibbi and Substack’s CEO were both denying this. This led me to examine what happened more carefully.
I also think it’s critical for us to pause a moment and seek the truth. With this in mind, I asked Elon for context for the sake of this article. As you well know, I write articles that support the mission of Twitter 2.0 (X.corp.)
My publication, “WhatsUpTwitter” was founded November 2022. My goal is to “create a publication that strives to communicate accurate information about Twitter and leave the reader feeling hopeful and optimistic about the future.”
This article is about an insidious attempt to destroy Twitter and sheds light on what really happened
As the first week of April rolled along, I watched what I think is one of the most insidious attacks so far on Twitter 2.0 since Elon Musk bought it. Even more so is the intensity of the sense of betrayal. A journalist who Elon Musk trusted not only stabbed him in the back, (in my opinion), but his actions showed that he wanted Twitter to fail. Again, this is my personal opinion.
Substack’s copycat social media app looks almost identical to Twitter, accompanies their blogging site, and is called “Substack Notes.” This is alarming considering Elon Musk’s explanation that the platform was trying to download a large portion of the Twitter database.
“Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted.”– Elon Musk
Bootstrapping is a technique of loading a program into a computer by means of a few initial instructions which enable the introduction of the rest of the program from an input device, and this is what Substack was doing to create “Substack Notes,” so that is why it looks like a rip-off of Twitter because it is!
To further add salt to the open wound, a prominent writer of the Twitter Files announced that he was leaving Twitter for Substack Notes. It later came to light that he, by his own wording, is an employee of Substack.
Matt Taibbi Declines Activating Twitter Subscriptions
It is well-known that Matt Taibbi released many Twitter Files threads. I wrote about that in many previous articles.
With a large following and his notoriety on Twitter for releasing the Twitter Files (a generous gesture from Elon Musk), it seems it would make sense to take advantage of the Twitter subscription feature. I know that I would if it were me. I wrote in February about how writers with subscriptions activated will be able to publish directly on Twitter and get paid for it by adding essays as attachments to tweets.
An important context for this is that Taibbi declined Twitter subscriptions on the pretense that people would say he was an employee of Twitter. Why? And why would Substack choose this time to release their counterfeit version of Twitter? Perhaps because of the gained fame of some of its leading writers with paid subs (on Substack) to raise free awareness through the use of Twitter. And how did they gain in popularity? Certainly, the release of the Twitter Files was a big factor.
In my opinion, it feels like Substack wants to directly compete with and possibly ruin Twitter. And that prominent writer, Matt Taibbi, announced that he planned to leave Twitter and give up the opportunity to dual post his writing on both Twitter and Substack.
Taibbi also declined to activate paid subscriptions on his Twitter account, which currently has 1.8 million followers. He could have many Twitter Subscribers and make a wonderful income as many people are already doing on Twitter.
In a private email, Elon Musk shared some important context with me which made clear that Taibbi declined Twitter subscriptions on the pretense that people would say he was an employee of Twitter. Taibbi said that Twitter didn’t work for him professionally, questioned how he could market his work, and that if he were to post his articles to Twitter and enable subscription service, “people would say I’m essentially an employee of Twitter and both of us would never hear the end of it.”
Elon pointed out that Twitter isn’t giving Taibbi extra reach or any free advertising and rhetorically asked if the people using YouTube to post videos and earn money creating content were considered employees. He has an excellent point there. YouTube, TikTok, and other social media platforms pay users for content creation although they are not actual employees.
In response to this, Taibbi said “The optics of that would be really bad journalistic ethics-wise.”
In my opinion, Taibbi is choosing to support Substack which wants to ruin Twitter. And the excuse of “journalistic ethics” is weak. Taibbi was, in his own words, a Substack employee. Keep reading for proof.
Taibbi’s Work With Substack
Message thread with Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi. Used with permission. Image was also public on Twitter on April 10 for about 1 hour.
In the above message thread, Taibbi himself admits that he was/is employed by Substack.
What wasn’t apparent to most people was that Taibbi was, all along, part of the paid Substack Pro, or Substack Professionals program. Taibbi wrote about this in a newsletter that came to my inbox. Taibbi left out the details of just what his historical association was with Substack, and how much money he had gained and is currently receiving from Substack.
Substack was founded in 2017. In 2018, founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie and Matt Taibbi, posted onHacker News,
“We’re Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie, the founders of Substack (YC W18), and Matt Taibbi, a journalist and author who has written four best-sellers and is a contributing editor to the Rolling Stone. Substack is a tool that makes it simple for a writer to start a paid newsletter – but we’re also experimenting with other models for online publishing. For instance, Matt is using Substack to serialize a novel called The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing: Adventures of the Unidentified Black Male, which you can see here.
Matt has so far published six chapters in the book. The serial is an experiment for him, too, but even when it’s done he intends to keep publishing his independent work through Substack. We thought it might be interesting to bring Matt into a Hacker News discussion about this model, other things that might be tried, and the state of online publishing generally.”
My firm belief is that Matt Taibbi was getting paid for and was working for Substack. I believe Elon Musk is correct when he asserted that Matt is employed by Substack.
Conclusion
The truth always has a way of coming to light. We will never truly know the motives of those journalists who took advantage of Elon’s generosity when releasing the Twitter Files. Yes, they performed a valuable service. However, Taibbi’s actions show that he was never on Twitter’s or Elon’s side. Running to the competitor, who he said was his employer, when given the opportunity to monetize his own Twitter account, is, in my opinion, proof of this.
Those who want Elon Musk to fail, in my mind, are fine with humanity being doomed. Perhaps this seems an exaggeration but I fully believe that Elon’s heart is focused on helping all of humanity itself and this is why he bought Twitter.
He purchased it with the solid intention of providing a digital town square for humanity. Tesla and SpaceX are philanthropy and so is Twitter.
Prior to Elon Musk, Twitter was raking in advertising profits based on the amount of likes advertising posts would get, but many of those likes turned out to be bots. Twitter’s ad placement also had a net negative effect on companies as they were placed next to viral posts, and it is now widely known that some of those “viral posts” contained CSAM (child sexual abuse material).
As Twitter, now officially X.corp, moves forward with the mission, it is clear that Substack Notes won’t be able to compete and their sad attempt to kill Twitter will one day be remembered only as a small glitch.
Austin, Congress Street, and the Capitol. Image Courtesy Shane Ware.
Gail Alfar, author. Exclusive to What’s Up Twitter – April 11, 2023. All Rights Reserved. My goal as an author is to support Twitter 2.0 (X.corp) and Elon Musk in both making lives better on Earth for humans and becoming a space-fairing civilization. I write these articles, I will not use AI of any form to write them, they are time-consuming and I appreciate the opportunity to do this.
Elon Musk tweets a meme about Dogecoin and Twitter
Welcome back to my weekly blog! All my articles seek to document the ongoing story of how Elon Musk is transforming Twitter for the better. There were a lot of exciting changes this past week and I’ll try to summarize all of them for you!
Twitter Verified Organizations went Global
The Recommendation Algorithm AND Community Notes are open-source on GitHub
Elon Musk talked live on Twitter Spaces (transcript)
Dogecoin Logo Appears on Twitter! (update 4/7/23 doge logo disappeared)
Twitter sign Becomes Titter!
“If Twitter can be the least imperfect place to find the truth on the internet, then I will consider that we have done a good job.” – Elon Musk
Twitter Verified Organizations became available globally
Twitter Verified Organizations are how organizations and their affiliates can distinguish themselves on Twitter. Twitter allows the Verified Organization to fully control vetting and verifying accounts they’re affiliated with.
To connect people with accounts affiliated with the organization, each account features an affiliate badge on its profile with the organization’s logo. It is easy to find these accounts because they are featured on the organization’s Twitter profile.
Twitter’s beta program included sports teams, news organizations, financial firms, Fortune 500 companies, and nonprofits. Now Verified Organizations is rolling out globally to all interested businesses, nonprofits, governments, and multilateral organizations. But there was one organization that loudly protested Twitter’s new offer, that was the New York Times.
New York Times
The New York Times decided to forgo any type of verification leading to dramatic news stories across the internet and funny comments from Elon Musk. The New York Times drama only served as free advertising for Twitter’s new Verified Organization program.
Twitter seeks to gain the trust of the people, and one way to do that is to open-source codes.
GitHub and Twitter Transparency
Now there are two source codes available to all on GitHub!
The goal of our open source endeavor is to provide full transparency to you, our users, about how our systems work.
We’ve released the code powering our recommendations that you can view here (and here) to understand our algorithm in greater detail, and we are also working on several features to provide you greater transparency within our app.
Some of the new developments we have planned include:
- A better Twitter analytics platform for creators with more information on reach and engagement
- Greater transparency into any safety labels applied to your Tweets or account
- Greater visibility into why Tweets appear on your timeline
With so many changes happening, Elon Musk spoke on a LIVE Twitter space on April 1st.
Live Conversation with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces
April Fool’s Day brought many pranks and also a delightful talk with Elon Musk LIVE on Twitter Spaces!
Here is a transcript of the highlights of the conversation:
“We’ll be adding in the ability to do voice DM. Through DMs, you’ll be able to speak to someone through a voice chat or a video chat. So if you’ve got a DM group and you want to turn that into private Spaces or an audio chat or a video chat, you can do so. I think it would be kind of cool to have a conversation with someone else without having to give away your phone number. There’s some pretty insightful people at Twitter talking about Twitter being like “Trust” as a service and really that is kind of what we’re going for. It’s to try to be the most trusted place on the internet in a world where so many people and entities and governments are trying to influence you and in a lot of cases try to trick you with information that isn’t true. Where can you go that is the most trusted, or where is the information you can actually count on? Which is not to say that Twitter is perfect, but if Twitter can be the least imperfect place to find the truth on the internet, then I will consider that we have done a good job.” – Elon Musk
Dogecoin Logo Appears on Twitter!
Dogecoin logo appears on Twitter. Image courtesy @cb_doge on Twitter
On April 3, people started noticing a Dogecoin logo had replaced the blue bird logo in the top sidebar area of Twitter (and it appears in other places too). Elon Musk has always liked Dogecoin, “the people’s currency.” He has mentioned it is more fun because it has dogs and memes. (update 4/7/23 the sneaky little doge disappeared and was replaced with the twitter bird logo)
The playful and sly-looking character of the Shiba Inu dog is delightful to many people, especially to children! Artists and fans of Dogecoin (including Elon Musk) reacted with joy and celebrated with creating memes. I’m sharing a few examples below! Elon is always ready for humor, and the next day he pulled another prank!
Twitter sign Becomes Titter
On March 5, an image was shared by @softwarejameson on Twitter. A photo (see below) showing the Official Twitter HQ Building was shared and the “W” in the sign was covered up! This was verified by other videos.
Fans all over the internet began to meme and comment on how Elon was making good on a promise last year when he asked in a survey, “Delete the w in twitter?”
Fans create AI Art for Twitter and Dogecoin
Doge and Twitter are perfect for each other. Image Courtesy @itsALLrisky One of the best collabs all year, Twitter and Doge. Twitter Bird over X. Unknown artist.Image Twitter HQ with the W taken out. Courtesy @softwarejameson on Twitter
Gail Alfar, author. Exclusive to What’s Up Twitter – April 6, 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. I write these articles, I will not use AI of any form to write them, they are time-consuming and I appreciate the opportunity to do this.
One late starry evening a few months ago I watched in fascinating horror as a not-so-advanced bot swarm filled my Twitter account and others with hundreds of “follows” from fake created accounts. We know this happens to many accounts and it is a service that can be bought. Fake accounts still plague my Twitter account and with almost every tweet I do there is an instant message under it that directs people toward a scam. This is nothing compared to what’s next.
Advanced AI Bot Swarms
Imagine the same scenario happening to millions of accounts only the bots are multiplied and equipped with Advanced Artificial Intelligence? It is critical to stop this but not easy. Elon Musk warned us of this on the evening of March 27th while AI continues the make unchecked rapid advances into daily life.
“Starting April 15th, only verified accounts will be eligible to be in For You recommendations.
The is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over.
It is otherwise a hopeless losing battle.
Voting in polls will require verification for same reason.
That said, it’s ok to have verified bot accounts if they follow terms of service & don’t impersonate a human.” Elon Musk
As a follow-up, Elon Musk added, “Forgot to mention that accounts you follow directly will also be in For You, since you have explicitly asked for them.”
When Future of Life Institute collaborated to create an Open Letter to protect humanity, Elon Musk joined other notable people in signing.
Elon Musk, tech leaders, and university professors sign Open Letter calling for an AI Summer with a pause on advanced AI systems
An Open Letter stating “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research and acknowledged by top AI labs.” was signed by tech leaders to raise awareness among the general population as to the huge risks of advanced artificial intelligence.
Here are a few of the highlights of the Open Letter and the recommendations:
Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources.
Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.
Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.
ACTION: We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.
Use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts.
AI research and development should be refocused on making today’s powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal.
Work with policymakers to dramatically accelerate development of robust AI governance systems.
Society has hit pause on other technologies with potentially catastrophic effects on society. We can do so here. Let’s enjoy a long AI summer, not rush unprepared into a fall.
The intense level of stress in running Twitter is evident when Elon Musk explained Twitter’s financial situation on March 25th (2023), tweeting, “Yeah, generally correct. Titter was trending to lose ~$3B/year (revenue drop of ~$1.5B + debt servicing of ~$1.5B) and had $1B in cash, so only 4 months of money. Extremely dire situation. Now that advertisers are returning, it looks like we will break even in Q2.”
Sometimes the simple sweetness of good food relieves stress and in the early afternoon of March 28th, Elon Musk tweeted that he eats a donut every morning. Although this was in response to a post from Peter Diamandis stating “Sugar is poison,” Elon makes a wonderful point! Sugar is not poison.
I may just have a sweet Austin, Texas donut and cup of coffee while I read through Matt Taibbi’s compilation of the Twitter Files!
Twitter Files
For an updated capsule summary of all Twitter Files threads to date, with links and an expanded glossary, Matt Taibbi created a nice compilation of one-paragraph summaries of all the Twitter File threads by every reporter with links and notes on key revelations.
To access this click the link here for Racket News.
My thoughts
Artificial Intelligence will attempt to take over the digital world and likely succeed. The innocent days of the internet are over and it will be hard if not impossible to distinguish between what is truly human and AI. Sadly there will be casualties along the way.
We can prevail and continue to persist in awareness, promote the principles we read in the Open Letter, “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter,” and be sure not to cancel the delight of sweet donuts!
Gail Alfar, author. Exclusive to What’s Up Twitter – March 30, 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. I write these articles, I will not use AI of any form to write them, they are time-consuming and I appreciate the opportunity to do this.
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Humor is one of the sweet things in life that shouldn’t be taken for granted. In late October 2022, after acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk tweeted “Comedy is now legal on Twitter.” The Twitter Press Department is now an automated response email that sends anyone back an instant poo poo emoji. You may try it for yourself at press@twitter.com
In a kind gesture to independent writers who have distanced themselves from mainstream media and their constant quest for clickbait, Elon Musk explained he would be, “Increasing long form to 10k characters soon, along with simple formatting tools, and making it much easier for writers to charge subscription fees for premium content.”
3. Helpful Community Notes arrives on scene
Apparently, I am not the only person who took joy in reading tweets with added helpful context. Within 24 hours of the announcement, the Twitter account for Helpful Community Notes went from almost no followers to 40K followers. The account description says, “Keep up-to-date with the Community Notes people are finding helpful.”
From deep fake photos of Trump in jail, corrections on historical dates to satire that could be misinterpreted and more – Helpful Community Notes fast became an addicting account to follow that shows the value of healthy skepticism.
UPDATE (4/5/2023) Elon Musk tweeted that, “Critically, Community Notes applies equally to every account on this platform without exception, including world leaders & our biggest advertisers.”
4. Twitter Will Avoid Being a Hellscape like Facebook, here’s how…
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Reddit are where many people hang out daily. Bots and trolls are common on most social media and are hard to control and Elon Musk was never fearful of storming into the battle to eliminate them. He explained this on March 18, 2023:
“Any true human can get verified. It’s only $7/month if bought annually via web (without App Store 30% premium).
Yes, non-advertising revenue sources are important, so that this platform is not overly reliant on the whims of corporate America, but having a large number of verified accounts will also clean up the system.
A single desktop computer can create thousands of fake accounts for <1/10th of a penny and the latest AI can get past any “are you human?” checks.
The choices are either move to a verified system or social media becomes a bot/troll hellscape like FB.”
Elon Musk
5. “You are influential and smart!” – Elon Musk
Few people at Twitter in the days prior to Elon Musk’s ownership would have imagined Twitter usage would grow under Elon Musk’s ownership but it did.
My opinion is that the niche ideology of the San Francisco Bay area contributed to a narrow, weak platform heading rapidly into bankruptcy with out-of-control expenses and high salaries. Wine flowed freely from the taps for those that managed to saunter into work while most pretended to work from home, avoiding the office entirely. Just in case any former Twitter employees read this, know that I would be right there with you. The old Twitter sounds like it was a sweet place to work (I am guilty of being more of a slacker at times than you, typical Austin-style), and it was a business model that made profit with questionable placement of ads so it was not sustainable and it did not promote free speech. Enter, Elon Musk. Things changed for the better.
“This platform is growing fast! Just exceeded 8 billion user-minutes per day … of the most influential, smartest people on Earth ; )” Elon Musk
Deep in most people’s psyches, there’s a desire to be known as smart and influential. If you are told you are smart and influential you’ll likely feel pretty good. Elon Musk was raised by Maye Musk, known to be a positive, affirming person. It is not surprising that Elon would reflect this kindness in his treatment of others, both on and off Twitter. Both times I met Elon Musk in person, he radiated kindness. Both on and off Twitter, he can make you feel validated as a person. Freedom of speech and removal of suppression is important on Elon Musk’s Twitter. A not-so-calm sense of urgency permeates the air around Elon Musk. This would surely include the important task of getting Twitter up to speed.
6. There are two sides to every coin
Twitter user Bill Ackman said, “How about a feature that serves you the most-liked tweets that take the opposite side of the argument that you just viewed? We should always want to know the best case against a view we have come to believe. The truth is often revealed when the best advocates for opposing points of view are heard.” Elon Musk replied, “Good idea.”
Unencumbered by a sluggish Board of Directors, Twitter began evolving into what the people want in real-time from the beginning of Elon Musk’s ownership. Speed is the name of the game.
7. “You get what you pay for” – Elon Musk
Viral Tweets are usually laden with replies. How they are viewed varies and on March 18, Elon Musk announced,
In the coming weeks, Twitter will prioritize replies by:
1. People you follow
2. Verified accounts
3. Unverified accounts
Verified accounts are 1000X harder to game by bot & troll armies. There is great wisdom to the old saying: “You get what you pay for.”
8. Hate speech on Twitter is lower than expected
Elon Musk endeavored to identify hate speech and attack it head-on. He hired experts at Sprinklr to quantify hate speech.
Sprinklr’s model scored slur Tweets on “toxicity,” and the likelihood that they constituted hate speech.
Sprinklr defines hate speech more narrowly by evaluating slurs in the nuanced context of their use. The old version of Twitter took a broader view of the potential toxicity of slur usage. The new Twitter is improved under Elon Musk.
Twitter safety explained, “Our focal metric is hate speech impressions, not the number of Tweets containing slurs. Most slur usage is not hate speech, but when it is, we work to reduce its reach. Sprinklr’s analysis found that hate speech receives 67% fewer impressions per Tweet than non-toxic slur Tweets.”
Elon Musk explained,
“This is a critical distinction. It’s obviously trivial for a single person to create 10k bot accounts on one computer, each of which is tweeting slurs that are written to avoid text string detection.
What matters is whether those tweets are actually shown to real users.” Elon Musk
Conclusion
Can Twitter move ahead any faster than under the ownership of Elon Musk? Probably not. Here’s this week’s updates.
The Twitter Press Department is an automated response email that sends anyone back an instant poo poo emoji
Writers will soon enjoy publishing on Twitter up to 10k characters soon, along with simple formatting tools so entire articles can be published on Twitter
Helpful Community Notes made a debut this week. There’s no better way to keep up to date with Community Notes that people find helpful
Removing bots/trolls is possible with Twitter’s paid verified system and without that feature, it could drift toward becoming a bot/troll hellscape like FB
Twitter usage is growing, exceeding 8 billion user-minutes per day as of March 2023
Actual impressions of tweets containing defined hate speech receive 67% fewer impressions. Elon Musk explained that though these tweets may exist, they are rarely shown to users.
A view of Twitter HQ as owned by Elon Musk. The setting March sun bathes the building.
Gail Alfar, author. Exclusive to What’s Up Twitter – March 22, 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.
Your support is appreciated! Contribute to Gail’s “Coffee Fund”
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.
Contribute to Gail’s coffee-fund, buy her a coffee!
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