Tag Archives: X

Elon Musk Says X Is Moving To Monthly Subscription Fees

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Elon Musk discussed his plans for Twitter, now called X, on Monday during a live-streamed conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Among other things, Musk said the social network is “moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system” in order to combat “vast armies of bots”, CNBC reported.

According to CNBC, Musk did not say how much a new plan would cost users of the social network, or what other features would or would not be included with payment at the lowest tier.

Variety reported Elon Musk may flip the switch to make X – the social network formerly known as twitter – an entirely subscription-based platform.

According to Variety, Musk has previously mulled the idea of putting Twitter entirely behind a paywall in internal conversations, according to industry news site Platformer. Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has said X/Twitter’s ad sales have plunged 50% since he bought the company. “We’re still negative cash flow, due to ~50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load,” Musk posted on July 15.

Currently, X’s subscription program – formerly Twitter Blue, now called X Blue, under Musk’s rebranding effort – is priced starting at $8 per month, Variety reported. One of the chief perks of X Blue is getting verified check-mark status, although this summer the company added the ability for subscribers to hide the check-mark from public view.

TechCrunch reported that X owner Elon Musk floated the idea that the social network formerly known as Twitter may no longer be a free site. Musk said the company was “moving to a small monthly payment” for the use of the X system. He suggested that such a change would be necessary to deal with the problem of bots on the platform.

“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” explained Musk. “Because a bot costs a fraction of a penny – call it a tenth of a penny – but even if it has to pay…a few dollars or something, the effective cost of bots is very high,” he said. Plus, every time a bot creator wanted to make another bot they would need another new payment method.

According to TechCrunch, Musk didn’t say what the new subscription payment would cost, but described it as a “small amount of money.”

Musk did not expand on his plan to charge for X or when such a change would come about. But since Musk took over the platform last year, the company has been pushing users to subscribe to its paid subscription product, X Premium (previously Twitter Blue). This $8 per month or $84 dollars per year subscription service offers a variety of features like the ability to edit posts, half the ad load, prioritized rankings in search and conversations, the ability to write longer posts, and more.

Personally, I think it is time for me to leave X/Twitter. Plenty of people have already left the platform, after letting their friends know what other social media sites they moved to. There is absolutely no way I am going to trust Elon Musk with my credit card numbers.

FTC Says Elon Musk May Have Jeopardized Data Privacy And Security

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Court filings have revealed new details about the FTC’s investigation into Elon Musk over his handling of privacy and security issues at X. In newly public court documents, the Department of Justice says Musk fostered a “chaotic environment” at Twitter, now known as X, that prevented officials from complying with their obligations to the FTC, Engadget reported.

According to Engadget, the FTC investigation stems from a 2022 settlement between FTC and Twitter over the company’s use of deceptive ad targeting under the leadership of Jack Dorsey. Prior to Musk’s takeover, the company paid a $150 million fine and signed on to an agreement to implement specific privacy and security measures. It was this additional data protection measures that apparently fell by the wayside once Musk took control, triggering new scrutiny from the regulator.

In March, the FTC began investigating the rushed rollout of Twitter Blue, which reportedly launched without the privacy and security review required under the FTC order, as well as Musk’s handling of the so-called “Twitter Files.”

CNN reported that Elon Musk should be forced to testify in an expansive US government probe of X, the company formerly known as Twitter, the US government said.

The government said mass layoffs and other decisions Musk made raised questions about X’s ability to comply with the law and to protect users’ privacy.

According to CNN, the US government’s attempt to compel Musk’s testimony is the latest turn in an investigation that predates Musk’s acquisition of X that has intensified due to Musk’s own actions, according to a court filing by the Justice Department on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission.

The court filing dated Monday cites depositions with multiple former X executives, including its former chief information security officer and former chief privacy officer, who testified that a barrage of layoffs and resignations following Musk’s $44 billion takeover may have hindered X from meeting its security obligations under a 2011 FTC consent agreement.

The Guardian reported that the US Department of Justice alleged in a legal filing on Tuesday that depositions from former employees at Twitter, now rebranded X, raised “serious questions” about whether the company was complying with an order imposed by the consumer and competition watchdog, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

“The information obtained revealed a chaotic environment at the company that raised serious questions about whether and how Musk and other leaders were ensuring X Corp’s compliance with the 2022 administrative order,” the filing said.

According to The Guardian, Twitter’s former director of security engineering, Andrew Sayler, testified that he had “ongoing questions about Elon’s commitment to the overall security and privacy of the organization” because he thought “the manner in which Elon was requesting us to grant access to third parties that had not undergone our regular vetting process … [had] some degree of disregard for the overall sensitivity and security at that level of access”.

In a further example from the filing, another employee said the Tesla CEO “insisted on launching the new Twitter Blue user verification services on an accelerated basis, despite staffing limitations.” Musk, according to the testimony, insisted that the service had to launch “right now” even though Twitter’s staffing was reduced so drastically that remaining employees were “struggling to keep up.”

Personally, I think that Elon Musk should have slowed down the changes he made on (then) Twitter (and later) X. I think this lawsuit could have been avoided if Elon Musk didn’t try to do a speed-run of scattered policies shortly after he purchased Twitter.

X Is Suing California Over Social Media Content Moderation Law

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X, the social media company previously known as Twitter, is suing the state of California over a law that requires companies to disclose details about their content moderation practices, Engadget reported.

The law, known as AB 587, requires social media companies to publish information about their handling of hate speech, extremism, misinformation and other issues, as well as details about internal moderation processes.

According to Engadget, lawyers for X argue that the law is unconstitutional and will lead to censorship. It “has both the purpose and likely effect of pressuring companies such as X Corp. to remove, demonetize, or deprioritize constitutionally-protected speech,” the company wrote in the lawsuit. “The true intent of AB 587 is to pressure social media platforms to ‘eliminate’ certain constitutionally-protected content viewed by the State as problematic.”

ArsTechnica reported that Elon Musk’s X Corp. sued to block California’s content moderation law, AB 587. In its complaint, filed by a US district court in California, X Corp. is seeking a preliminary and permanent injunction stopping California Attorney Robert Bonta from enforcing the law.

According to ArsTechnica, AB 587 passed in September 2022, requiring social media platforms to submit a “terms of service report” semi-annually to California’s attorney general, providing “a detailed description of content moderation practices used” and “information about whether, and if so how, the social media company defines and moderates” hate speech or racism, extremism or radicalization, disinformation or misinformation, harassment, and foreign political interference.” Under the law, social media platforms must also provide information and statistics on any content moderation actions taken in those categories.

The law stipulated that all platforms were required to start collecting data for their first terms of service report covering content moderation during the third quarter of 2023 and submit those reports to California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta by January 1, 2024.

Platforms could be found violating the law for failing to post terms of service about content moderation, missing a deadline to submit a terms of service report, or materially omitting or misrepresenting information about content moderation. Any platform violating the law risks fines – which X described as “draconian financial penalties” – up to $15,000 per violation per day.

TechCrunch reported that AB 587 was signed into law a year ago. At the time, California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote: “Californian’s deserve to know how these platforms are impacting our public discourse, and this action brings much-needed transparency and accountability to the policies that shape the social media content we consume every day.”

According to TechCrunch, California has definitely placed itself at the heavier end of the government involvement spectrum, partly because of the states’ inherently progressive character and partly because, as the cradle and playground for many of these companies, it enjoys a particular attainment to and influence on their affairs. California’s privacy bill, for instance, is widely seen as a precursor to a national law similarly attempting to protect consumers from the depredations of tech companies.

The tendency is at odds with the philosophy of Elon Musk, owner of X/Twitter and self-described “free speech absolutist.” After more or less eliminating the teams and efforts at the company dedicated to defining and responding to matters like hate speech and disinformation, he may find it difficult to comply with AB 587 even if he did not find doing so objectionable.

In my opinion, proclaiming yourself to be a “free speech absolutist” is not going to cause California to suddenly drop AB 587. It appears that this specific California law could potentially be accepted by various other like-minded states. If so, then that would put more pressure on X to follow that law.

Elon Musk Strips Headlines Off News Links On Twitter In Overhaul

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X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter, is planning a major change in how news articles appear on the service, stripping out the headline and other text so that tweets with links display only an article’s lead image, according to material viewed by Fortune.

Roughly four hours after the publication of this article, Elon Musk confirmed these plans, posting that “this is coming from me directly,” and it “will greatly improve the esthetics.”

The change means that anyone sharing a link on X – from individual users to publishers – would need to manually add their own text alongside the links they share on the service; otherwise the tweet will display only an image with no context other than an overlay of the URL. While clicking on the image will still lead to the full article on the publisher’s website, the change could have major implications for publisher who rely on social media to drive traffic to their sites as well as for advertisers, Fortune reported.

According to a source with knowledge of the matter, the change is indeed being pushed directly by X owner Elon Musk. The primary objective appears to be to reduce the height of tweets, thus allowing more posts to fit within the portion of the timeline that appears on the screen. Musk also believes the change will help curb clickbait, the source said.

TechCrunch reported that currently, a Twitter card for a news article or a blog post shows the headline and summary text (just on the web) along with the header image of the preview card of a post. However, if the proposed change comes through, X will only show the image with a link in a post. That means if a publication or a blog doesn’t post any accompanying text with the link, users will only see the link and the image for that article.

According to TechCrunch, Musk also recently said that journalists vying for more freedom and higher income should directly publish on X. Elon Musk tweeted: “If you’re a journalist who wants more freedom to write and a higher income, then publish directly on this platform!”

The Guardian reported the move may be an attempt to drive people to sign up for X’s premium service. With the shortened links, users could be inclined to include more text along with their posts. The premium service allows a single post of up to 25,000 characters.

It is not immediately clear how it will impact advertisers on the platform, which Musk claimed in July had 540 million monthly users.

With the changes, Musk is pitching X as a more relevant platform for content creators. Premium subscribers can now post longer videos, their posts are shown higher up and they also receive a cut of ad sales.

According to The Guardian, Musk has made a number of abrupt changes to Twitter since he took over as owner in October 2022, many of which have negatively impacted the news media that make up a large portion of its user base. The billionaire has suspended journalists from the platform, removed verification from many media figures, and attempted to launch his own journalistic endeavors with a project called the Twitter Files, in which he had reporters publish “investigations” directly on the platform.

It seems to me that Elon Musk doesn’t really want to support Twitter very much at all. He appears to be doing his best to push people away from using Twitter by making bad decisions that will likely cause harm to many marginalized users.

A Glitch Temporarily Wiped Out X Images And Links

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Since Friday, users of X, formerly Twitter, started noticing that many images posted on the platform between 2011 and 2014 were no longer accessible, according to various media reports, Insider reported.

The glitch resulted in some of the most viral moments in internet history becoming inaccessible. It also seemed to affect links posted in the same three-year period – some of which have become shortened links.

The most famous casualty was Ellen’s star-studded selfie at the Oscars, posted in 2014. The post racked up over 2.8 million reshares and 2 million likes since being posted in March 2014.

According to Insider, on Saturday, users posted about losing access to other pieces of internet history, from pictures about the Arab Spring to posts by the K-Pop group BTS.

At the time of writing, access to images and links from 2011 to 2014 – including Ellen’s selfie – continued to be inconsistently available, per Insider’s review.

Insider also reported that X first introduced image-sharing to its platform in June 2011. It remains unclear why the glitch occurred, and neither Musk nor X acknowledged the glitch since the outages began.

However, these outages come amid increasing instability on the platform. Widespread outages have been on the rise since Musk made massive job cuts to the company in October last year, Insider reported in March.

One of the most high-profile outages occurred in February when the platform became inaccessible because an employee accidentally deleted data on a key function. The team responsible for it had already left the company.

The Verge reported that the @Support account at X, the company formerly known as Twitter until Elon Musk rebranded it, says, “Over the weekend we had a bug that prevented us from displaying images from before 2014. No images or data were lost. We fixed the bug, and the issue will be fully resolved in the coming days.”

There are no details mentioned in the post about what the bug was, when it started happening, or why it will take an unspecified amount of time to resolve. In looking up the problem, we learned that changes by Twitter in 2016 used metadata on tweets posted from December 2014 going forward to fill in additional data from linked webpages and allow attachments that didn’t eat up a tweet’s character count, and it was only earlier posts that were hit by the bug.

To me, it seems like X is having unexpected (and strange) problems nearly every day. I suppose this is what happens when the person in charge of a major social media company decides that the first move is to fire the vast majority of its workers. Things typically do not run smoothly after that.

Twitter Deletes All User Photos And Links From 2011 – 2014

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Twitter, the social media company officially known as X, appears to have deleted all images from the website that were posted between 2011 and 2014. Links that used Twitter’s native shortening service are also broken, Forbes reported.

According to Forbes, its not immediately clear if this was an intentional act or an error, but whatever’s happening is causing concern among users who’ve been on the site for over a decade.

It appears that Twitter’s link-shortening domain – the new URL that Twitter generates so it can track user activity – is the likely culprit behind why images no longer display and links no longer work.

Twitter launched in 2006 but didn’t support native image uploads until the summer of 2011. Several image-hosting services sprung up to support Twitter, like TwitPic, but that service shut down in 2014 and many images from those early days are lost. But now it seems images that were posted to Twitter directly from 2011 to 2014 could be in danger as well, since they’re no longer loading on the site, Forbes reported.

PCMag reported that Twitter appears to have deleted all of the images that were uploaded to the site between 2011 and 2014. The issues was discovered Saturday by Twitter user Tom Coats.

According to PCMag, along with the loss if images, links that were created during the same time period using Twitter’s link shorter also no longer work. Coats’ tweet about the issue has since had context added to it saying that images have disappeared and links are broken, but the data is still saved on Twitter’s servers.

One of the tweets impacted is Ellen DeGeneres’ famous Oscars selfie, which generated 2.8 million retweets and currently holds the title as the most retweeted post of all time. That particular image was restored on Saturday afternoon along with a tweet of Barack Obama hugging the First Lady after his reelection in 2012.

The Verge reported that X, which was formerly known as Twitter until its recent rebranding, is having a problem displaying old posts that came with images attached or any hyperlinks converged through Twitter’s built-in URL shortener. It’s unclear when the problem started, but it was highlighted on Saturday afternoon in a post by Tom Coats, and a Brazilian vTuber, @DaniloTakagi, had pointed out a couple of days earlier.

As it is, it appears to affect tweets published prior to December 2014. No videos are affected (Twitter only added native image support in 2011 and built-in videos in 2016), but links to YouTube, for example, are now just text with a t.co URL that doesn’t work.

Personally, I think it’s sad that Elon Musk either intentionally, or accidentally, deleted a huge chunk of Twitter’s past content. He needs to be more careful about the decisions he makes, and should think hard before implementing something on a whim.

Musk Says X’s ‘Block’ Feature Is Going Away

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Part of the X roadmap? Off-handed reply? Simple attempt to get a rise out of people? Time will tell, TechCrunch reported. The one thing we can say for sure is that X’s owner responded to a post on the platform (on August 18) foreshadowing the potential removal of the block feature.

“Block is going to be deleted as a ‘feature’, except for DMs,” Elon Musk wrote. “Makes no sense.” The post was a response to a Tesla fan account who asked whether there was any reason to use block instead of mute.

Regarded as a safety feature by many users, the suggestion that block could be going the way of the service’s old verification system was greeted with backlash from concerned users, TechCrunch reported.

“Twitter gives people a variety of tools to control their experience, including blocking,” the company writes on its help page. “Blocking helps people in restricting specific accounts from contacting them, seeing their Tweets, and following them. If you have been blocked by another account on Twitter, you can still block other accounts (including any that have blocked you).”

TechCrunch also reported that while Mute may still remain, the features are not the same. Block restricts fellow users from interacting with, viewing, and following an account. Mute simply hides your posts from their stream. Users are not made aware that they have been muted. Musk adds that the block feature will remain for direct messages.

Blocking has become an essential feature for many users, as they’ve seen an uptick in spam replies on their timeline. Earlier backlash also found some users blocking X Blue/Twitter Premium accounts, as the feature began to prioritize their responses over non-paying users. Many public figures have also relied on the feature as a method of removing harassment from their feed.

CNBC reported the users of X, formerly known as Twitter, will no longer be able to block comments from unwanted followers, according to a post by X owner Elon Musk on Friday, eliminating what’s long been viewed as a key safety feature. Blocking will only be available for direct messages, he said.

CNBC posted a screenshot between @teslaownersSV and @elonmusk, in which Mr. Musk stated that “Block is going to be deleted as a “feature”, except for DMs”.

The response had a “Readers Added Context” added to it: If the ability to block users was to be removed, X would be in violation of the policies of the App Store as well as the Google Play Store. Potentially, this could lead to X being removed from these platforms. There are no such policies for the web-app however.”

According to CNBC, Louis Jones, a longtime media and advertising executive who now works at the Brand Safety Institute, said Musk’s latest plan is very concerning as users could be inundated with spam, threats, and other harmful content.

Musk’s “lax approach to free speech,” is likely to have a “double effect,” making bullying more common on the platform and inhibiting free speech by those users who are targets of bullies and predators, Jones wrote in an email to CNBC. “It’s a downward spiral that cannot be good for the long term success of X.”

Personally, I’ve grown tired of what I see on the X desktop app. It appears that Elon Musk could take away the block feature from the web interface. However, if he tries to do that with the app, it will likely mean his X platform will disappear from the Apple Store and Google Play Store.