Twitter was never the largest social network, but it remained one of the most influential as a home to celebrities, journalists, and influencers of all sorts and the go-to network for breaking news. Since Elon Musk purchased it, Twitter’s employee count has dropped by more than half, advertisers have tightened budgets, and it’s charging money for access to verified checkmarks and Tweetdeck. Oh, and now it’s called X instead of Twitter.
Elon Musk’s company has filed a lawsuit against Operation Bluebird, a new startup hoping to claim the “abandoned” Twitter trademark, but its legal argument is a little unorthodox.
lowmess:
“well technically it isn’t abandoned because we did such a shitty rebrand that people still call our product by its old name”
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Kind of a “no duh” conclusion, but Petter Törnberg, Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science at University of Amsterdam, has the data to back it up. His new study (which has yet to be peer reviewed) is about shifts in social media usage in the last four years, with the biggest shifts being on the platform formerly known as Twitter.
The Financial Times has a good rundown of the extensive executive churn across Elon Musk’s companies in recent months, from Tesla’s robotics team to xAI’s CFO. Musk’s “24/7 campaign-style work ethos” is apparently a little difficult to keep up with.
Former staffers took legal actions against X following Elon Musk’s mass layoffs after he took over the company once known as Twitter.
[The New York Times]
After stepping down from X in July, Yaccarino is taking the CEO job at eMed Population Health, which makes a digital health platform for managing GLP-1 weight loss drugs.
It’s a relatively narrow legal defeat, though. The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court ruled that X — Twitter, at the time of the lawsuit — isn’t protected by Section 230 for failing to report known child sexual abuse material to authorities, nor for designing a bad system to let users flag it. (It hasn’t been held liable for either; that will be argued later.) But the court found Section 230 blocked claims that it “amplified” CSAM by failing to scrub offending hashtags, and it said the controversial FOSTA exception didn’t come into play.
The left-leaning nonprofit watchdog has been a frequent target of Elon Musk and other Republicans for its reporting on the right wing media ecosystem. Its legal battles have left the group with mounting bills, concerns for staff safety, and hesitant donors, The New York Times reports.
“Unlike some major media entities that have recently caved to pressure, we understand that this battle is larger than us,” Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters, said in a statement. “That’s why we continue to carry out our mission and fight in court.”
They say Columbia is just one of five universities they’ve penetrated.
And for Twitter, too, he says in a new podcast with Rabble (aka Evan Henshaw-Plath), who hired Dorsey at Odeo. The specific part starts a little after 28 minutes.
Dorsey has also invested $10 million in a group Rabble is a part of called “and Other Stuff,“ according to TechCrunch. The group is working on “a common vision for the development of Nostr infrastructure and products.”
The Financial Times has this quote from an anonymous source who worked with both Elon Musk and ex-X CEO Linda Yaccarino.
It’s explaining the executive’s departure despite getting some advertisers back on X “with a gun,” and developing the X Money digital wallet and payments project that is reportedly still set for release later this year. A CFO who reported directly to Musk, the return of his focus after leaving the Trump administration, and xAI’s $33 billion acquisition all apparently played a role.
Elon Musk didn’t make her job easy.
According to Similarweb data reported by TechCrunch, the Threads mobile app reached 115.1 million daily active users in June, compared to the 132 million daily actives for X and 4.1 million for Bluesky. But while X’s growth declined by 15.2 percent year-over-year on mobile, Threads has increased by 127.8 percent during the same period.
X only has to take Meta seriously on iOS and Android, however, given it’s still thrashing both Threads and Bluesky for web visits.
Nikita Bier, a co-founder of tbh (acquired by Meta, then Facebook, in 2017) and Gas (acquired by Discord in 2023), will lead product at the social network.
Bier once made a pitch for the role directly to Musk on X in 2022, shortly after Musk revealed his intentions to buy the company (then Twitter).
The Elon Musk-run platform alleges the Stop Hiding Hate Act “impermissibly interferes with the First Amendment-protected editorial judgments” of companies like X to decide how to moderate content. Platforms could face fines unless they disclose what X calls “highly sensitive and controversial speech,” which it says the state may not like. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals already blocked parts of a similar California law on First Amendment grounds, following a separate X challenge.
