The UN rights chief decried Wednesday an online “trolling campaign” against a leading anti-defamation group, urging online platforms like X, formerly Twitter, to do more to battle hate speech.
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk demanded that social media platforms “do far more to stop the circulation of hate speech and disinformation”.
“Those that do not take action need to be held to account,” he said, insisting “there is no excuse for purveying the voice of hatred”.
Speaking at an event on anti-Semitism on the sidelines of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Turk deplored in particular “the current trolling campaign of one online platform against the anti-Defamation League, after it called for action to limit its volume of hate speech”.
Turk did not mention names, but appeared to be referring to a barrage of abuse recently launched by X owner Elon Musk’s against the US-based Jewish organisation.
Musk has accused the ADL of making unfounded accusations of anti-Semitism that have scared away advertisers and hurt his company’s revenue, and has threatened to sue for billions of dollars.
Musk, who bought Twitter last year and rebranded it as X, has come under fire for liking posts on the platform with the hashtag “BanTheADL”.
The hateful campaign started after the ADL participated in a civil rights march marking the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, according to the group.
The ADL has for years accused the social media site of amplifying anti-Semitic hate speech, and has charged that problematic and racist speech has risen sharply on X after Musk completed his $44 billion takeover in October.
The organisation recently met with X top executives to discuss the problem.
Turk decried Wednesday that “new technologies and online media mean that racist caricatures and conspiracy theories can circulate now at a much greater speed and without regard to distance, making them a grave threat to our social fabric.
“Social media platforms have played a terrible role in metastasising of hatred from limited backwaters into multi-current mainstream trends,” he said.
X, Elon Musk’s social media platform formerly known as Twitter, appears to be attempting to limit its users’ access to The New York Times.
Since late July, engagement on X posts linking to the New York Times has dropped dramatically. The drop in shares and other engagement on tweets with Times links is abrupt, and is not reflected in links to similar news organizations including CNN, the Washington Post, and the BBC, according to NewsWhip’s data on 300,000 influential users of X.
The drop in engagement in Times posts seems isolated to X: NewsWhip data showed that engagement with Times links shared on Facebook remained consistent relative to other outlets.
“There was a drop off in engagement for NYT compared to the other sites in late July/early August,” NewsWhip spokesperson Benedict Nicholson told Semafor.
Times employees had already taken note of the pattern, as high-profile attempts to share Times articles failed to travel on the platform. For instance, earlier this week, former President Barack Obama shared multiple New York Times articles on X about healthcare costs, which the service said reached fewer than 900,000 and 800,000 users respectively. The number was far lower than any other post shared by the former president since X began sharing that data publicly earlier this year — for comparison, a Politico link shared by the president got nearly 13 million views.
Elon Musk’s latest tweak to Twitter, the former name of what he now calls X: Users will no longer be able to block other accounts — as Musk claims the feature “makes no sense.”
“Block is going to be deleted as a ‘feature’, except for DMs,” the tech mogul posted on X Friday. “Makes no sense.”
X/Twitter describes block as “a feature that helps you control how you interact with other accounts on Twitter. This feature helps people in restricting specific accounts from contacting them, seeing their Tweets, and following them.” Blocking other accounts is useful if someone is harassing, threatening or stalking you on the platform.
Instead of using the “block,” Musk suggested that X users can use the mute feature instead. Currently, however, the social network’s mute button simply removes an account’s posts from your timeline without unfollowing or blocking that account — whereas blocking an account prevents that account from viewing your public posts on X. When you “mute” X/Twitter accounts, they are still able to reply to your public posts (you just don’t get notifications, and replies are hidden from your view by default).
Musk has previously disparaged Twitter’s block function. In June, he posted, “Blocking public posts makes no sense. It needs to be deprecated in favor of a stronger form of mute,” although he didn’t elaborate on what a “stronger form of mute” might entail.
Elon Musk’s new ‘X’ logo raises some legal questions.
Now that Elon Musk has officially replaced Twitter’s logo with an X, many of us are wondering: can he actually use it?
The drastic rebranding doesn’t come as much of a surprise to Musk-watchers. Musk has long touted his idea of X as an “everything” app that offers audio, video, messaging, and support for digital payments. He has also founded a company called X.com before it merged with PayPal in the year 2000. While that name never resurfaced, that didn’t stop Musk from incorporating the letter X into all his other brands, including SpaceX, xAI, X Corp., and now Twitter.
On Sunday, Musk declared that Twitter will be rebranded as X and turned to the site’s community to commission a new logo. “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make [it] go live worldwide tomorrow,” Musk wrote. That night, Twitter user Sawyer Merritt offered up an X logo he no longer needed, which Musk scooped right up. But while its design seems somewhat unique at first glance, the notion of one chunky, angular line crossing over a thin one wasn’t created from scratch.
Correction to my previous reply: @ajtourville designed the thicker X logo below for our (now discontinued) @OfficialXPod. The thicker logo was inspired by a font he found online (bottom right). I created the video above using the font logo, adding a glow and little lines in the… pic.twitter.com/GF0l2KM2Vt
Merritt says the designer he worked with was merely “inspired by a font he found online,” but that designer seems to contradict that with a post of his own, stating he based it on a Unicode character. And that designer’s statement doesn’t necessarily clear things up, either: while Twitter’s new logo does look like it could have been inspired by a Unicode character, it looks almost exactly like one from Monotype. Either way, online sleuths have traced the design back to both potential sources.
Monotype is the typeface company that has created some of the world’s most recognizable fonts, including Times New Roman and Arial. If you look at the letter “X” in Monotype’s Special Alphabets 4, you’ll notice that it closely resembles Twitter’s new logo design. (Twitter’s first stab at the X looks like the lowercase X, while a thicker one that Musk briefly tried looks like the capital X from Monotype.)
Here’s what the “X” glyph looks like in the upper-case and lower-case versions of Special Alphabets 4. Screenshot: Sean Hollister / The Verge
While Ars Technica got confirmation from Monotype that the logo isn’t the same as the capital X in Special Alphabets 4, it still hasn’t heard back about the lowercase X, which the logo looks even more like. “We can confirm that whilst it is similar, this is not the capital X glyph from Monotype’s ‘Special Alphabets 4,” Monotype spokesperson Phil Garnham tells Ars Technica.
We reached out to Monotype to see if it could confirm whether the logo matches the lowercase character and didn’t immediately hear back. If Twitter’s logo does, indeed, match up with Monotype’s font, it would need to purchase a license in order to use it.
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Photo: Getty Images
X.com now redirects to Twitter.com, following a tweet from Twitter owner Elon Musk today, and an “interim X logo” will replace the Twitter bird logo later today. Leading up to the change, Musk spent a lot of time tweeting about it.
Around 12AM ET last night, he started tweeting — and did so for hours — about the Twitter rebrand to X, the one-letter name he’s used repeatedly in company and product names forever. It started with a tweet saying “soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” followed by a second tweet adding that “if a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow.”
Musk then, over the next several hours, gestured at the change in between other posts and replies, tweeting things like “Deus X,” or replying to other users talking about it. At one point, he joined a Twitter Spaces session called “No one talk until we summon Elon Musk,” and sat silently for almost an hour before unmuting and confirming he would be changing Twitter’s logo tomorrow, adding “we’re cutting the Twitter logo from the building with blowtorches.”
Musk also reportedly sent an email last night to Twitter employees telling them the company would become X, and that it was the last time he would email from a Twitter address, according a Threads post from Platformer managing editor Zoe Schiffer. She added that she assumes he was talking about the logo, since Twitter’s business was already renamed X corp.
As for what the new logo will look like, Musk didn’t comment specifically, but pin a gif that was posted by Sawyer Merritt, a Twitter user who offered the logo, which he said was used for his discontinued podcast.
Despite threats of legal action from the richest man in the world, the guy behind an account giving live updates on the location of Elon Musk has simply hopped over to new kid on the block, Threads
Jack Sweeney is taking the fight to a new frontier (Image: CNN)
The bloke who tracked Elon Musk’s private jet and got banned from Twitter, is setting up again on the new competitor Threads.
Jack Sweeney posted on the new rival platform from Mark Zuckerberg: “ElonJet has arrived to Threads!”
Going by the name @ElonMusksJet, he picked up 15,000 followers in the first 24 hours alone.
Some 30million people are thought to have joined the platform since it was opened on July 6.
Speaking to Insider, Sweeney said: “I would like to post on Threads just as I do on Instagram.”
Meta hasn’t yet created an auto-publication feature, but Sweeney hoped he would be able to take advantage of this one day as he will have to work manually until then.
Elon Musk’s jet has been tracked since 2020 (Image: elonmusksjet)
He first started tacking the private jet of the Twitter owner in 2020 with his @ElonJet account racking up some half a million subscribers.
He’s also managed to track celebrities like former US President Donald Trump, Taylor Swift and Kim Kardashian – and he even did one on Zuckerberg himself.
Musk weighed in on the conversation at the time, saying: “Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation.
The Facebook company’s new social platform is like Twitter, but for celebrities, brands, and annoying people.
NURPHOTO / GETTY IMAGES
It’s no secret that Twitter has been imploding ever since being taken over by billionaire cringeposter Elon Musk. So it should be no surprise that Facebook parent company Meta is now launching its own Twitter clone, Threads, which promises to suck in slightly different ways than the blue bird site.
The myriad problems with Twitter have been well documented, and the launch of Threads is proof that Meta smells blood in the water. The app is a direct response to the mass-exodus of advertisers under Musk, whose increasingly blatant transphobia and racist conspiracy-peddling has left many users of the dying platform pining for a social app that is not overrun with Nazis and QAnon conspiracists.
Meta’s sales pitch for Threads seems to be simply that it’s not Twitter. It’s a text-based social network that is not actively falling apart, created by a monopolistic tech company known for privacy abuses and run by the second worst guy on earth. Even by these extremely low standards, it is not good.
To understand Threads, just imagine all the worst parts of Instagram and Twitter. The interface looks and feels like Instagram’s comments section, and there is no way to view posts chronologically on the timeline—or even to limit your feed to posts from accounts you follow. Instead, users see text posts based on what an invisible algorithm determines is most likely to make them engage and stay on the app, so they will see more ads.
[1/2]Meta’s Threads app and Twitter logos are seen in this illustration taken July 4, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File PhotoTwitter’s claim that Meta Platforms (META.O) stole trade secrets to build its new microblogging site may be the first volley in a legal battle between the social media giants, but experts say Twitter would have to clear a high hurdle if it sues.
In a letter sent on Wednesday, Twitter alleged that Meta used its trade secrets to develop its new social media platform, Threads, and demanded that it stop using the information. Twitter said that Meta had hired dozens of former Twitter employees, many of whom “improperly retained” devices and documents from the company, and said Meta “deliberately” assigned them to work on Threads.
It was unclear whether any lawsuit would be filed.
A spokesperson for Twitter did not immediately reply to a request for comment. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a Threads post on Thursday that no one on the site’s engineering team is a former Twitter employee.
Legal experts said that while many companies have accused competitors that hired former employees and have a similar product of stealing trade secrets, the cases are difficult to prove.
To win, a company needs to show its competitor took information that was economically valuable and which the company had taken “reasonable efforts” to keep secret, said Polk Wagner, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
But the question of what constitutes a “reasonable effort” can be tricky, he said.
“The courts are pretty clear that you can’t just wave your hands and say something is a trade secret. On the other hand, you don’t have to lock everything down so much that nobody can use the information,” Wagner said.
DESIGNATING ‘SECRETS’
Meta launched Threads on Wednesday in what could be the first real threat to Twitter, which has alienated many users and advertisers since billionaire Elon Musk bought the microblogging site last year.
Threads shares some resemblance to Twitter, as do the numerous other social media sites that have cropped up in the last several months.
One element courts look at is whether a company made clear to employees that the specific information at issue was a trade secret.
Sharon Sandeen, a professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, said that companies have lost trade- secret cases when they claimed that employees were bound by broad agreements designating all the company’s information as confidential.
Courts have said that employees have no way of knowing from such sweeping language what is and is not confidential, she said.
Companies often bring trade-secret cases only to find their claims are not as strong as they thought, experts said.
Elon Musk said these measures were taken to discourage ”extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation.
Jack Dorsey agreed with Elon Musk and said that the new curbs are in favour of the social media site
Hours after Elon Musk announced that Twitter will be limiting the visibility of tweets with a daily limit on various accounts, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey reacted to the new curbs and rules.
Musk said that verified accounts will have a temporary limitation of 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts will be limited to 600 posts per day. Additionally, new unverified accounts will have a daily limit of 300 posts.
The temporary reading limitation was later increased to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified and 500 posts per day for new unverified users, Musk said in a separate post without providing further details.
He said these measures were taken to discourage ”extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation.
Musk tweeted that it is a “temporary emergency measure,” to ward off people scraping the site for tweet data. “We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 300/day
Following this, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey tweeted: “Running Twitter is hard. I don’t wish that stress upon anyone”. Dorsey agreed that the new curbs are in favour of the social media site and added, “It’s easy to critique the decisions from afar…which I’m guilty of…but I know the goal is to see Twitter thrive. It will”.
He added: “And I do hope they consider building on truly censorship-resistant open protocols like Bitcoin and nostr to help ease that burden. Good for all, and critical to preserving the open internet.”
Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of Twitter, gestures as he attends the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre in Paris, France, June 16, 2023. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes/File Photo
Twitter is limiting how many tweets per day various accounts can read, to discourage “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation, Executive Chair Elon Musk said in a post on the social media platform on Saturday.
Verified accounts were initially limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, Musk said, adding that unverified accounts will be limited to 600 posts a day with new unverified accounts limited to 300.
The temporary reading limitation was later increased to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified and 500 posts per day for new unverified users, Musk said in a separate post without providing further details.
Previously, Twitter had announced it will require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move that Musk on Friday called a “temporary emergency measure.”
Musk had said that hundreds of organizations or more were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively”, impacting user experience.
Musk had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.
Twitter was down for thousands of users on Saturday morning, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
After saddling the company with $13 billion of debt, Musk’s erratic decision making and challenges with content moderation led advertising revenue to decline by 50%
Twitter is now worth just one-third of what Elon Musk paid for the social-media platform, according to Fidelity, which recently marked down the value of its equity stake in the company.
Musk has acknowledged he overpaid for Twitter, which he bought for $44 billion, including $33.5 billion in equity. More recently, he said Twitter is worth less than half what he paid for it. It’s unclear how Fidelity arrived at its new, lower valuation or whether it receives any non-public information from the company.
Fidelity first reduced the value of its Twitter stake in November, to 44 per cent of the purchase price. That was followed by further markdowns in December and February.
Twitter has struggled financially since Musk took over. After saddling the company with $13 billion of debt, Musk’s erratic decision making and challenges with content moderation led advertising revenue to decline by 50 per cent, Musk said in March. An attempt to recoup that revenue by selling Twitter Blue subscriptions has so far failed to take off. At the end of March, less than 1 per cent of Twitter’s monthly users had signed up.
The buzzy new social media app of the moment looks so much like Twitter it’s almost hard to distinguish the two. The profiles, timelines and colors are nearly identical. Even the creator is the same.
But under the hood, Bluesky, developed by Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, is vastly different.
The app, which launched in a closed beta on iOS in February and on Android this month, runs on a decentralized network which provides users with more control over how the service is run, data is stored, and content is moderated.
In recent days, it’s gained traction among journalists, politicians and celebrities, from Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to model Chrissy Teigan and the 90s band Eve 6.
Here’s what you should know:
What is Bluesky?
Bluesky calls itself “a new social network for microblogging.” With the app, users can post and follow short updates on a timeline, just as they would on Twitter, though with some differences. There are currently no hashtags – a central feature on Twitter – and no direct messages.
The Bluesky social media app logo is seen on a mobile device in April 2023. Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
Bluesky was formed independently of Twitter while Dorsey was serving as CEO but it was funded by the company until it became an independent organization in February 2022. In a tweet introducing the idea in 2019, Dorsey said it also plans to “build an open community around it, inclusive of companies & organizations, researchers, civil society leaders,” but warned “this isn’t going to happen overnight.”
In a tweet last year, Dorsey said the “biggest issue and my biggest regret is that [Twitter] became a company.” He later clarified that if a service was a protocol it “can’t be owned by a state, or company.”
If the idea of a decentralized social network sounds familiar, it’s likely because of Mastodon, another Twitter alternative that also gained attention late last year.
Why are people joining it?
Like Mastodon, Bluesky appeals to a number of Twitter users who are frustrated with the direction of the platform under owner Elon Musk. In the six months since Musk took over Twitter, he has made a number of controversial changes to its features and policies, including the removal of blue check marks from prominent users.
Some of the same high-profile users now testing out Bluesky have also been openly critical of Musk’s moves at Twitter.
According to data.ai, the company formerly known as App Annie, Bluesky has been downloaded more than 375,000 times from the Apple App Store and the waitlist continues to be flooded with signup requests. On the Google Play Store, Bluesky is described as having been downloaded more than 100,000 times. (By comparison, Twitter reported having more than 200 million monetizable daily active users last year before Musk completed his acquisition.)
Bluesky did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It’s unclear if Bluesky has staying power or will lose steam as Mastodon did. But Mark Bartholomew, a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law who writes about online privacy, said the early shift toward Bluesky is a positive one, as it gives social media users more choice over where they spend their time.
Across Twitter on Saturday, some of the platform’s biggest names expressed surprise when their fickle checkmarks suddenly reappeared.
Aly Song/Reuters
After approximately two days of purging “legacy checkmarks,” Twitter CEO Elon Musk appears to be waving the white flag.
Across Twitter on Saturday, some of the platform’s biggest names, from Stephen King to Chrissy Teigen, expressed surprise when their fickle checkmarks suddenly reappeared.
“Friends told me my blue verified check was restored. Dont know why. I’ve paid nothing. I gave no number,” tweeted Seinfeld star Jason Alexander.
It appeared that Musk had only restored the blue checks to users with the highest follower counts, seemingly caving on an issue that has deviled the platform since he made the decision to introduce his $8-a-month Twitter Blue verification system.
Musk’s decision on Thursday to finally make good on his promise to only verify those who paid the fee threw the platform into chaos, with the mass de-verification opening the door for a host of celebrity imposter accounts.
Yet in classic Musk fashion, the Chief Twit initially attempted to cast his capitulation as an epic troll.
“I will pay for your blue check – my gift to you,” Musk tweeted in response to a thread in which former Labor Secretary Robert Reich rejected his blue check and denounced the “oligarchs who have too much power over the Internet.”
NEWS: Twitter trolls the “Block The Blue” movement by giving their biggest proponents Twitter Blue. pic.twitter.com/lpgeTE3giN
However, the move appeared to be much more far-reaching than a mere prank on those who had criticized the verification system.
From Pope Francis to former President Donald Trump, numerous notables who had not waded into the blue check debacle also saw their verifications restored after briefly losing them.
As the checks flooded back in, many celebs who were vocal about their decision not to pay the $8 made sure to let their followers know that the restoration was not their doing.
“Good lord, I’ve been LeBroned, Shatnered, Kinged without my consent. No means no, boys,” tweeted tech journalist Kara Swisher.
Transgender activists and their allies are expressing outrage after restrictions on “dead-naming” and misgendering were deleted from Twitter’s Terms of Service.
The policy was enacted in 2018 before tech billionaire Elon Musk bought the popular platform for $44 billion. On Sunday, Musk opined that declarations of preferred pronouns were “virtue-signaling” that could be used as a shield by bad people.
Two days later, the policy against misgendering was changed.
Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and CEO of GLAAD, told the Associated Press that the change in policy would lead to violence against transgender people.
“Twitter’s decision to covertly roll back its longtime policy is the latest example of just how unsafe the company is for users and advertisers alike,” said Ellis.
“This decision to roll back LGBTQ safety pulls Twitter even more out of step with TikTok, Pinterest, and Meta, which all maintain similar policies to protect their transgender users at a time when anti-transgender rhetoric online is leading to real-world discrimination and violence,” she added.
Others attacked Twitter with their tweets.
“Twitter lifts it’s policy on targeted misgendering and deadnaming and the freaks are out gleefully misgendering and deadnaming every prominent trans person as an achievement. It’s not about speech, it’s about bullies wanting to harass people because of who they are,” said activist Alejandra Caraballo.
BBC labelled government-funded media: The label links through to a page on Twitter’s help website which says “state-affiliated media accounts” are defined as “outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution”.
Twitter Labels BBC As ‘Government-Funded Media’
Twitter has labelled the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which is funded predominantly by British households paying a license fee, as “government-funded media”. While the @BBC account, which has 2.2m followers, has been given the label, much larger accounts associated with the BBC’s news and sport output are not currently being described in the same way.
The label links through to a page on Twitter’s help website which says “state-affiliated media accounts” are defined as “outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution”.
What BBC said
The British national broadcaster objected to the new label and said it is speaking to the social media company about the designation on the @BBC account to “resolve this issue as soon as possible”.
In a statement, it said: “The BBC is, and always has been, independent. We are funded by the British public through the licence fee.”
Notably, the Corporation is mainly funded by British taxpayers, who pay a £159-a-year licence fee. Although the government sets how much the licence fee is, not everyone has to pay it, and households pay directly.
As the UK’s national broadcaster, the BBC operates through a Royal Charter agreed with the government. The BBC Charter states the corporation “must be independent”, particularly over “editorial and creative decisions, the times and manner in which its output and services are supplied, and in the management of its affairs”.
Elon Musk told employees on March 25 that the company is now valued at $20 billion valuation, according to a senior reporter at The Verge.
That’s less than half of the $44 billion he paid for the social networking platform in October 2022.
The Verge’s Zoe Schiffer tweeted on Saturday, “Musk sent Twitter employees an email about the state of Twitter 2.0. He acknowledged the company has been through a period of radical change, but said the changes were necessary… Because Twitter was previously about 4 months away from running out of money.”
Schiffer continued, “Comp increases will be based on X Corp stock. Current grants are based on a $20 billion valuation. Musk says he sees a ‘clear but difficult path’ to $250 billion valuation which would mean current grants could 10x. Like SpaceX, X Corp (aka Twitter) will do periodic liquidity events so people can sell. Musk says Twitter is on the path of an inverse startup.”
With the Musk-mandated return of several formerly banned users, a rise in antisemitic and other hate speech, broken features and a disastrous blue check rollout that cost Eli Lilly millions, the platform has hemorrhaged advertisers. Many who have left the platform for good, although ad revenue was unexpectedly up for 2022’s fourth quarter.
After Elon Musk made fun of an ex-Twitter employee, their verbal battle has continued unabatedly and is receiving way too much attention on social media.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, and Haraldur Thorleifsson, a former employee, have been engaged in a war of words that doesn’t seem to be ending anytime soon. It started when Mr Thorleifsson accused Twitter of ghosting him and not informing him that he had been fired. Mr. Thorleifsson said he first discovered the news of his layoff when he was no longer able to log into his workstation with his Twitter credentials.
Mr Musk made fun of Mr Thorleifsson’s work status in a series of tweets, and questioned if he was of any use to the company, ignoring the fact that the ex-employee has muscular dystrophy. After realising that Mr Musk is ignorant of the fact, he responded by tagging the Twitter CEO in a post in which he said he can’t do certain things because of the condition, but took a jibe at the billionaire, who, despite being physically fit, even has security accompany him to the toilet.
“Oh! I forgot to mention that I read you can’t go to the toilet on your own either, @elonmusk. I’m sorry to hear about that. I know the feeling. The only difference is I can’t do it because of a physical disability, and you’re afraid someone you hurt will attack you while you poop,” he wrote.
Oh! I forgot to mention that I read you can’t go to the toilet on your own either @elonmusk
I’m sorry to hear about that. I know the feeling.
The only difference is I can’t do it because of a physical disability and you’re afraid someone you hurt will attack you while you poop. https://t.co/0XcsMpJW9z
After Musk mocked him on Twitter, the ex-employee explained his health situation.
“I have muscular dystrophy. It has many effects on my body. My legs were the first to go. When I was 25 years old, I started using a wheelchair. It’s been 20 years since that happened. In that time, the rest of my body has been failing me too. I need help to get in and out of bed and use the toilet,” he wrote.
The Twitter conversation has since gone viral, and many people think Mr Musk is being disrespectful and rude.
Twitter insiders have told the BBC that the company is no longer able to protect users from trolling, state-co-ordinated disinformation and child sexual exploitation, following lay-offs and changes under owner Elon Musk.
Exclusive academic data plus testimony from Twitter users backs up their allegations, suggesting hate is thriving under Mr Musk’s leadership, with trolls emboldened, harassment intensifying and a spike in accounts following misogynistic and abusive profiles.
Current and former employees of the company tell BBC Panorama that features intended to protect Twitter users from trolling and harassment are proving difficult to maintain, amid what they describe as a chaotic working environment in which Mr Musk is shadowed by bodyguards at all times. I’ve spoken to dozens, with several going on the record for the first time.
The former head of content design says everyone on her team – which created safety measures such as nudge buttons – has been sacked. She later resigned. Internal research by Twitter suggests those safety measures reduced trolling by 60%. An engineer working for Twitter told me “nobody’s taking care” of this type of work now, likening the platform to a building that seems fine from the outside, but inside is “on fire”.
Twitter has not replied to the BBC’s request for comment.
My investigation also reveals:
Concerns that child sexual exploitation is on the rise on Twitter and not being sufficiently raised with law enforcement
Targeted harassment campaigns aimed at curbing freedom of expression, and foreign influence operations – once removed daily from Twitter – are going “undetected”, according to a recent employee.
Exclusive data showing how misogynistic online hate targeting me is on the rise since the takeover, and that there has been a 69% increase in new accounts following misogynistic and abusive profiles.
Rape survivors have been targeted by accounts that have become more active since the takeover, with indications they’ve been reinstated or newly created.
Abuse on Twitter is nothing new for me – I’m a reporter who shares my coverage of disinformation, conspiracies and hate there. But throughout most of last year I noticed it steadily lessening across all of the social media sites. And then in November I realised it had got worse on Twitter again.
It turns out, I was right. A team from the International Center for Journalists and the University of Sheffield have been tracking the hate I receive, and their data revealed the abuse targeted at me on Twitter had more than tripled since Mr Musk took over, compared with the same period in the year before.
All of the social media sites have been under pressure to tackle online hate and harmful content – but they say they’re taking measures to deal with it. Measures that no longer seem to be top of the agenda at Twitter.
In San Francisco, the home of Twitter’s headquarters, I set out to look for answers. What better place to get them than from an engineer – responsible for the computer code that makes Twitter work. Because he’s still working there, he’s asked us to conceal his identity, so we’re calling him Sam.
“For someone on the inside, it’s like a building where all the pieces are on fire,” he revealed.
“When you look at it from the outside the façade looks fine, but I can see that nothing is working. All the plumbing is broken, all the faucets, everything.”
He says the chaos has been created by the huge disruption in staffing. At least half of Twitter’s workforce have been sacked or chosen to leave since Musk bought it. Now people from other teams are having to shift their focus, he says.
“A totally new person, without the expertise, is doing what used to be done by more than 20 people,” says Sam. “That leaves room for much more risk, many more possibilities of things that can go wrong.”
He says previous features still exist but those who designed and maintained them have left – he thinks they are now left unmanned.
“There are so many things broken and there’s nobody taking care of it, that you see this inconsistent behaviour,” he tells me.
The level of disarray, in his view, is because Mr Musk doesn’t trust Twitter employees. He describes him bringing in engineers from his other company – electric car manufacturer Tesla – and asking them to evaluate engineers’ code over just a few days before deciding who to sack. Code like that would take “months” to understand, he tells me.
He believes this lack of trust is betrayed by the level of security Mr Musk surrounds himself with.
“Wherever he goes in the office, there are at least two bodyguards – very bulky, tall, Hollywood movie-[style] bodyguards. Even when [he goes] to the restroom,” he tells me.
He thinks for Mr Musk it’s about money. He says cleaning and catering staff were all sacked – and that Mr Musk even tried to sell the office plants to employees.
Lisa Jennings Young, former head of content design, says her entire team was cut
Lisa Jennings Young, Twitter’s former head of content design, was one of the people who specialised in introducing features designed to protect users from hate. Twitter was a hotbed for trolling long before Mr Musk took over, but she says her team had made good headway at limiting this. Internal Twitter research, seen by the BBC, appears to back this up.
“It was not at all perfect. But we were trying, and we were making things better all the time,” she says. It is the first time she’s publicly spoken of her experience since she left after Mr Musk’s takeover.
Ms Jennings Young’s team worked on several new features including safety mode, which can automatically block abusive accounts. They also designed labels applied to misleading tweets, and something called the “harmful reply nudge”. The “nudge” alerts users before they send a tweet in which AI technology has detected trigger words or harmful language.
Twitter’s own research, seen by the BBC, appears to show the “nudge” and other safety tools being effective.
Research shows abuse targeting me on Twitter has more than tripled since Musk took over
“Overall 60% of users deleted or edited their reply when given a chance through the nudge,” she says. “But what was more interesting, is that after we nudged people once, they composed 11% fewer harmful replies in the future.”
These safety features were being implemented around the time my abuse on Twitter seemed to reduce, according to data collated by the University of Sheffield and International Center for Journalists. It’s impossible to directly correlate the two, but given what the evidence tells us about the efficacy of these measures, it’s possible to draw a link.
But after Mr Musk took over the social media company in late October 2022, Lisa’s entire team was laid off, and she herself chose to leave in late November. I asked Ms Jennings Young what happened to features like the harmful reply nudge.
“There’s no-one there to work on that at this time,” she told me. She has no idea what has happened to the projects she was doing.
So we tried an experiment.
She suggested a tweet that she would have expected to trigger a nudge. “Twitter employees are lazy losers, jump off the Golden Gate bridge and die.” I shared it on a private profile in response to one of her tweets, but to Ms Jennings Young’s surprise, no nudge was sent. Another tweet with offensive language we shared was picked up – but Lisa says the nudge should have picked up a message wishing death on a user, not just swear words. As Sam had predicted, it didn’t seem to be working as it was designed to.
During this investigation, I’ve had messages from many people who’ve told me how the hate they receive on Twitter has been increasing since Mr Musk took over – sharing examples of racism, antisemitism and misogyny.
Ellie Wilson, who lives in Glasgow, was raped while at university and began posting about that experience on social media last summer. At the time, she received a supportive response on Twitter.
Twitter on Wednesday unveiled a new policy prohibiting “violent speech” on its platform, though the rules appear very similar to guidelines against violent threats that the company had on its books before Elon Musk took it over.
Among the updates, Twitter expanded its policy to include a ban on “coded language,” which is often referred to as “dog whistles,” used to indirectly incite violence. It also added a rule that prohibits “threatening to damage civilian homes and shelters, or infrastructure that is essential to daily, civic, or business activities.”
The additions come as San Francisco-based Twitter prepares to comply with new European Union rules that go into effect this fall. The new rules, called the Digital Services Act, require tech companies to better police their platforms for material that, for instance, promotes terrorism, child sexual abuse, hate speech and commercial scams.
Twitter’s new violent-speech policy states that “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.”
Elon Musk is expected to become Twitter’s temporary CEO after closing his $44 billion takeover of the social-media firm, a person familiar with the matter said on Thursday, as the billionaire inches closer to securing funds for the deal.
Musk, the world’s richest man, is also the CEO at Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) and heads two other ventures, The Boring Company and SpaceX.
Tesla shares dropped over 8% on Thursday, as investors fretted that Musk’s involvement with Twitter could distract him from running the world’s most valuable electric-car maker.
Twitter shares, on the other hand, extended gains and were up about 4% at $50.89, closer to the deal price of $54.20, as investors bet that the new funding made the completion of the deal more likely.
Parag Agrawal, who was named Twitter’s CEO in November, is expected to remain in his role until the sale of the company to Musk is completed. CNBC first reported on Thursday that Musk plans to become CEO of Twitter on an interim basis.
Earlier on Thursday, Musk listed a group of high-profile investors who are ready to provide funding of $7.14 billion for his Twitter bid, including Oracle’s co-founder Larry Ellison and Sequoia Capital.
Saudi Arabian investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who had said last month that the deal price was not sufficient for him to sell his shares, said Musk would be an “excellent leader” for Twitter and agreed to roll his $1.89 billion stake into the deal.
In a heartbreaking tragedy, five Indian students were killed in a road accident in Canada, said India’s High Commissioner Ajay Bisaria on Monday, adding that two others were injured and were hospitalized.
The accident occurred on Saturday on the Ontario highway and two injured students were rushed to the hospital.
Taking to Twitter, Ajay Bisaria expressed deepest condolences to the families of the victims.
