Category: Social Media

If you want to know just how bad things are inside Twitter, this piece has it all. The graph on the left side of the page is particularly good.

Twitter Support:

Twitter is where the public conversation is happening, and where people from all over the globe come to promote their businesses, art, ideas, and more. We know that many of our users may be active on other social media platforms; however, going forward, Twitter will no longer allow free promotion of specific social media platforms on Twitter.

At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL.

Offenders include:

• Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr
• 3rd-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee, lnk.bio

Seems about right.

Update: And a day later, the rule is gone, after Twitter Safety ran a poll on the issue. What a joke.

John Carmack is leaving Meta.

Casey Newton, in an excellent edition of Platformer:

From the start, my strategy on Twitter has been to tell jokes about tech, use the engagement on those posts to grow a following, and then promote my work to that following. (Some people who read my tweets also became friends and sources; Twitter was great for that, too.)

Now, awaiting Musk’s latest tweets, I find myself anxious that one of his former employees could be physically assaulted or worse over what the CEO is posting. I don’t know how, in that environment, to make little jokes about Google’s latest failed messaging app, or bad PR pitches, or any of the other bits I have been doing on Twitter forever. I don’t know how to pretend that what is happening is not actually happening. I don’t want to provide, even in the smallest of ways, a respectable backdrop against which hate speech against my fellow LGBTQ people, or Black or Jewish or any other people, can flourish.

This part really resonated with me:

No company has influenced the media more in my career than Twitter has. For more than a decade it has shaped what news gets covered, how, and by whom. It is also the largest platform I have, at least by number of followers, and has been the primary way Platformer has found new customers since I launched the newsletter in 2020.

At the same time, when I started writing an email newsletter in 2017, I did so out of anxiety that I would find myself at a crossroads like this: with a malignant landlord standing in between me and the audience I had cultivated. I feel fortunate that the Platformer audience — now just shy of 100,000 readers — can make a divorce like this seem possible.

I owe a ton of my success to the early days of Twitter and the relationships that bloomed there, but those days are gone, and so am I.

…but as you can probably imagine, that verified badge cost someone a mere $8. Jordan Liles has more:

On Nov. 10, 2022, a Twitter account with a “verified” checkmark badge and a display name of “Eli Lilly and Company” tweeted, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.” The account’s handle was @EliLiIlyandCo. However, this was nothing more than a parody account, as its bio clearly said.

The message was engaged with tens of thousands of times. At last check, it was nearing 20,000 combined reweets, quote tweets, and likes.

Don’t get me wrong, companies like Eli Lilly charge a criminal amount for insulin and other medications, but this is exactly the sort of thing that was bound to happen under Twitter’s new pay-to-be-verified scheme.

Maybe a lawsuit or two will help that sink in over at Twitter HQ. At least the new system has been paused for now.

Adi Robertson has more experience reviewing AR and VR products than just about anyone else, and wow does she have some words for Meta’s new $1,499 Quest Pro:

The problem is, the Quest Pro isn’t very good. It’s a device seemingly launched without plan or purpose, highlighting VR’s persistent drawbacks without making good use of its strengths — and topped off with some irredeemably bad software. We might be seeing a roadmap for where Meta is going, but right now, it’s not a particularly fun place to be. And if Meta lingers there much longer, its metaverse is in trouble.

In the upheaval surrounding Twitter’s changes to its verification system, many were left wondering how accounts posing as politicians, journalists, musicians, athletes and others could be noted as official. As it turns out, the checkmark was the way to go after all.

Jay Peters at The Verge has more:

Twitter is rolling out another type of checkmark to help distinguish accounts that users actually need to know are real. Although you can pay for a blue checkmark with the new version of Twitter Blue, select accounts for governments, companies, or public figures will get a gray “Official” checkmark, according to a thread from Twitter’s Esther Crawford, who is heading up the new Twitter Blue initiative.

“A lot of folks have asked about how you’ll be able to distinguish between @TwitterBlue subscribers with blue checkmarks and accounts that are verified as official, which is why we’re introducing the ‘Official’ label to select accounts when we launch,” Crawford says.

“Accounts that will receive it include government accounts, commercial companies, business partners, major media outlets, publishers and some public figures.”

Being previously verified doesn’t automatically mean you’ll get the new “Official” label, and you can’t buy the new label, meaning Twitter will be the one making the call on who gets to have it.

It really feels like someone is making this stuff up as he goes along.

Update: A couple hours after this rolled out, it stopped, with Elon tweeting “I just killed it.” ROFFFLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL.

It’s just been a few days since Musk let go roughy half of Twitter’s staff, and the cracks are already beginning to show, as Elizabeth Lopatto has discovered:

I can’t change my screen name on Twitter. I can change my bio. But not my screen name. So although I was helpfully trying to describe myself as “Elizabeth Lopatto (parody)” that simply wasn’t possible.

[…]

I have no idea what’s causing this problem but I’m not the only one experiencing it. My coworker Alex Cranz can’t change hers either. Neither can Jay Peters, Tom Warren, or Sean Hollister. However, our coworker Mitchell Clark can! Cranz, Peters, Warren, Hollister and I are all verified. Clark isn’t.

Hmmmmm.

Update: It’s a little unclear if this was a technical problem or a policy change. Honestly, it’s hard to tell the difference all of a sudden.

Ben Lovejoy:

One of the Twitter Blue perks was ad-free access to more than 300 US publishers through a deal known as Ad-Free Articles.

Twitter would pay publishers an amount roughly equivalent to the ad revenue for a view, and in return subscribers would be able to read pieces on Twitter Blue Publisher sites without ads.

Twitter has cancelled this feature overnight, with just one day’s notice. Publishers were sent an email announcing the change.

Between this and its Pay-to-be-Verified plans, New Twitter is already a lot less friendly with publishers and journalists. What a shock.