Much like other eyebrow-raising choices made by Elon Musk’s X, is raising more than a few skeptical eyebrows. It’s like watching a potential train wreck in slow motion.

Let’s not forget, Kanye West, or should we say Ye now, got himself into some serious trouble on Twitter back in December. He was suspended for sharing a string of tweets that were not only controversial but downright offensive.

We’re talking about tweets that included antisemitic content and even featured a disturbing image that combined a Nazi swastika with the Star of David. Yea, the usual classic behaviour you would expect to see from him.

Elon Musk, never one to shy away from making a statement, later explained that West’s suspension was due to his incitement to violence. Well, that’s not exactly the kind of behavior you want from someone with such a massive following.

Fast forward seven long months, and lo and behold, the owner of X has apparently had a change of heart. Kanye West’s Twitter account, with its whopping 31.6 million followers and that coveted gold verification badge, has been brought back from the dead. It’s, folks, and ready to stir up some controversy once again

According to The Wall Street Journal, Kanye West’s Twitter account will not feature any advertisements. Additionally, he will not be able to earn money through Elon Musk’s new revenue-sharing program.

It seems that his account was reinstated with the condition that he refrains from posting any hateful or antisemitic content. As of now, Kanye West has not made any new posts on Twitter.

After assuming control of Twitter, Elon Musk wasted no time in lifting bans on numerous accounts, many of which were affiliated with right-wing individuals.

Recently, X temporarily banned the account of a prominent right-wing influencer due to allegations of sharing inappropriate content involving minors. However, the account was eventually reinstated later on the same day.

Have any thoughts on this? Drop us a line below in the comments, or carry the discussion to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• What is Elon Musk’s net worth?
• Who owns TikTok?
• Elon Musk teases a new Twitter CEO, what is he hiding?
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The post Elon Musk’s new regime reinstates Kanye West’s Twitter account appeared first on KnowTechie.

Tech mogul Elon Musk’s $25 billion investment in Twitter is almost entirely gone as the social media website has struggled to gain financial footing in the months since he acquired it in a private sale, according to a new report.

This week, investment firm Fidelity said Twitter is valued at around $15 billion, about one-third of the $44 billion Musk and his co-investors paid to acquire the social media platform in late October.

Of that $44 billion, Musk himself put up $25 billion in debt financing to acquire the platform. Financial news outlet Bloomberg said that investment is now worth around $8.8 billion.

Musk owns 79 percent of Twitter and is the platform’s chief executive officer, a role he intends to abdicate soon after hiring NBC advertising chief Linda Yaccarino to serve as the company’s new CEO.

Since acquiring Twitter, Musk has made several business decisions that have drawn criticism and scrutiny from every corner of the financial and legislative world.

Immediately after closing the deal, Musk dissolved Twitter’s board of directors and fired several top executives, some of whom are now suing the company over unpaid legal bills.

Musk also laid off hundreds of engineers who served in critical support roles that kept the platform running. Since the layoffs, Twitter has been prone to glitches and outages that have frustrated users and raised questions over Musk’s ability to operate the service on his own.

Recently, a bug caused once-private Twitter postings to be publicly accessible; the posts were made through a feature called Twitter Circles, which was intended to give users the ability to limit posts to a specific audience.

Once favored by local and national journalists for its ability to deliver real-time updates to millions of users, Twitter has become aggressively combative toward members of the press in the months since Musk acquired the platform.

Musk banned several reporters who tweeted information about an account that followed his private jet and modified an email account used by journalists to communicate with the company so it automatically responded to any messages with a poop emoji.

Today, around 1,500 workers are still employed at Twitter — far fewer than the 7,500-strong workforce Musk inherited last year.

Those who remain have accused Twitter of failing to pay them on time. The landlords that own Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters have made similar complaints. 

Last month, Musk told the BBC that running Twitter was “quite painful,” but claimed the site was “breaking even” amid an uptick in advertising.

“We could be profitable, or to be more precise, cash flow positive this quarter if things keep going well,” Musk said.

Have any thoughts on this? Drop us a line below in the comments, or carry the discussion to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• Twitter’s encrypted DM feature is a mess, and you shouldn’t trust it
• Elon Musk teases a new Twitter CEO, what is he hiding?
• What is Bluesky? And does it have the potential to be a Twitter killer?
• Elon Musk & Twitter: a definitive timeline

The post Elon Musk’s investment in Twitter is almost entirely gone appeared first on KnowTechie.

UPDATE 5/12/2023: Musk Tweeted to confirm that Linda Yaccarino will be the new CEO.

Elon Musk sent reporters scrambling yesterday by simply Tweeting, “Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~ six weeks! 

My role will transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.” 

Charitably, Musk has an antagonistic relationship with the press. He seemingly avoids positive media coverage regardless of the costs. But he knows how to claim headlines. 

With 33 words, at just 184 characters with little information, Musk garnered reports from at least 50 media outlets within hours.

Musk may revel in negative headlines, but he also uses them as a distraction

When the Twitter logo changed to an image of a Shiba Inu dog, Musk was in federal court for a $258 billion class-action lawsuit related to dogecoin.

He was accused of engaging in a pyramid scheme by promoting the cryptocurrency. Win, lose, or draw, Musk wanted a distraction, and he created one.

As Elon Musk Tweeted the words “Funding secured” in August of 2018, he and his companies faced several pending lawsuits.

In June 2018, Carlos Ramirez, a former high-level Tesla safety official, sued the company for failing to treat injured workers and misclassifying worker injuries to avoid reporting them to authorities.

Also, in June 2018, a Tesla stockholder filed an action against Musk and the members of Tesla’s board of directors, alleging a breach of their fiduciary duties in approving Musk’s unusually high stock-based compensation.

Oh yeah, also in June 2018, Martin Tripp, a Tesla employee, leaked information damaging to Tesla.

Tesla filed a civil lawsuit against the ex-employee, who, in turn, filed a lawsuit claiming Tesla’s Security team gave police a false tip that he was planning a mass shooting at the Nevada factory.

Behind the smoke and mirrors: unraveling Musk’s hidden agendas

The outcome of these cases is irrelevant to the fact that when Musk wants a distraction, he creates one. 

Musk is PR savvy by only one vector, distracting people from anything he really wants to keep hidden. If the story seems a little too easy to talk about, dig deeper.

Wednesday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg criticized Tesla’s use of the word “autopilot.”

Yesterday a federal court reviewed Musk’s agreement with the SEC regarding the Funding secured Tweet from August 2018.

I don’t know what story Musk is specifically trying to distract the world from. However, the energy on the part of reporters, pundits, and the public speculating who will be Twitter’s new CEO is distracting from something.

For all we know, at this point, Elon will announce that he has two identities, one of them trans and that his trans identity is the CEO. That theory adds as much value to the discourse as any floated by the Wall Street Journal. Stop speculating.

Have any thoughts on this? Drop us a line below in the comments, or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• Elon Musk & Twitter: a definitive timeline
• What is Elon Musk’s net worth?
• Elon Musk says Twitter’s For You page is now pay-to-play
• How to mute Elon Musk on Twitter and remove him from your timeline

The post Elon Musk teases a new Twitter CEO, what is he hiding? appeared first on KnowTechie.

Twitter was an online customer support hub for many years. The social network offered low-friction access to a large user base and inbuilt brand identity confirmation.

When Twitter changed the blue checks from identity verification into a paid product, one of those factors was lost. We’ve seen real problems from Twitter brand impersonation already.

In November 2022, a blue check-clad account impersonating insulin maker Eli Lilly, Tweeted, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.” That was a joke, not someone trying to defraud customers.

Risk to customers and reputation is not the only reason airlines are shying away from answering support requests on Twitter.

At the direction of Elon Musk, Twitter now charges incredibly high fees for access to its API (application programming interface), allowing third-party developers to build tools to interact with Twitter. 

Twitter’s API is necessary for customer support tools with industry-standard tracking to interface with the social network.

Twitter’s new enterprise API access now starts at $42,000 a month. The cost climbed so high that Microsoft dropped Twitter from its advertising platform due to the API rate hike.

Customers can obviously still contact customer service for each of these airlines. Twitter is a publishing ecosystem with creators, advertisers, and consumers.

Brands were no one’s favorite part of Twitter, but the ability to access customer support was a value add for users. 

The party most hurt by Twitter’s decisions is Twitter. I’ve never seen a business strategy more accurately embody “tripping over hundred dollar bills to pick up pennies.”

Have any thoughts on this? Drop us a line below in the comments, or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• Musk’s Twitter hits new low as NPR publicly quits the platform
• Elon Musk & Twitter: a definitive timeline
• Elon Musk says Twitter’s For You page is now pay-to-play
• Twitter pushes back paid API feature ‘a few more days’

The post Airlines abandon Twitter customer service amid high API fees appeared first on KnowTechie.

And, him being a chill, normal guy and not a carrier of near-radioactive levels of divorced man energy, has been using this alt account for totally cool and normal things.

Chiefly, impersonating his own infant son and tweeting about porn.

This seemingly accidental unveiling came, as it often does with Machiavellian types, as the result of unchecked arrogant dipshittery wherein Musk took to Twitter, the platform he purchased for just a smidge over its value, to brag about how much he is making in subscriptions from his sad boi army.

But how weird of stuff can he be posting, you ask? Pretty weird stuff (allegedly), I answer!

Here’s him responding to a tweet from his regular account (classic normal guy stuff).

Here’s him talking about how he wishes he was old enough to go to nightclubs. (It’s worth mentioning that Musk, despite having the humor and overall intelligence of a 13 year, is, in fact, 51 years old).

Here’s him posting totally normal things for a 50-year-old man cosplaying as his 3-year-old son to post.

Interesting. Looking into it!

Of course, Musk, being the generation-defining genius that we all know he is (while still being a normal chill dude, no less), is almost certainly doing all this as a ploy to drum up interest in the website he purchased for 10x its value in order to make himself the main character of it for the lulz.

Because, while he has successfully driven away most of the platform’s major advertisers, which was undoubtedly his master plan to target the real money held by Solitaire-based mobile games – and piss off even his most devoted followers with the clusterfuck that the Twitter Blue rollout has been, it’s only a matter of time before his magnum opus that doesn’t even work half the time because he fired everyone who maintained it starts rolling in the dough.

Masterful gambit, sir.

Have any thoughts on this? Drop us a line below in the comments, or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• Musk’s Twitter hits new low as NPR publicly quits the platform
• Twitter is blocking Substack links – here’s how to get around it
• Elon Musk wants to lead Twitter until the end of 2023
• Elon Musk says tweet view counts will soon be optional

The post Totally normal and cool Twitter CEO pretending to be son tweets about porn appeared first on KnowTechie.

On April 5, 2023, National Public Radio (NPR)’s Twitter accounts were labeled “US state-affiliated media.”

This ominous-looking tag was introduced by Twitter’s erstwhile leadership prior to the 2020 election so users would “have context on [an account’s] national affiliation and [be] better informed about who they represent.”

On April 12, 2023, a week after receiving the label, NPR announced that they will be leaving Twitter entirely, saying the social media platform is “taking actions that undermine our credibility.”

Is NPR “state-affiliated media”?

The short answer is no, NPR is not “state-affiliated media,” at least not by Twitter’s own guidelines.

State-affiliated media is 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. Accounts belonging to state-affiliated media entities, their editors-in-chief, and/or their prominent staff may be labeled. – Twitter Rules & Policies

To cover their tracks, Twitter even removed specific language from their policy site that stated “media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy.”

NPR’s leadership insists that “NPR is a private, nonprofit company with editorial independence. It receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”

According to InfluenceWatch.org, “NPR receives funding for less than 1% of its budget directly from the federal government, but receives almost 10% of its budget from federal, state, and local governments indirectly.”

Despite “Head Twit” Elon Musk Tweeting that the tag “seems accurate” his $44b social media platform eventually amended NPR’s tag to read “Government-funded Media.“

What does this all mean?

NPR feels that the “Government-funded Media” tag is still “inaccurate and misleading,” and as a result will not be publishing new content on any of their 52 Twitter accounts.

The news org posted a thread describing the different, non-Twitter, ways that readers can find NPR’s reporting.

Paired with Twitter’s April 2nd removal of the New York Times’ verification, this represents the Musk-owned platform’s most straightforward clash with American news organizations.

It’s hard to see how any of these actions support the billionaire’s claims of “Free Speech” on Twitter.

It’s even more difficult to imagine how quarreling with generally trusted media companies is going to convince brands to start advertising on Twitter again.

Have any thoughts on this? Drop us a line below in the comments, or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• Twitter is blocking Substack links – here’s how to get around it
• Is Substack Notes the new Twitter?
• Twitter replaces its logo with Doge
• Elon Musk says Twitter’s For You page is now pay-to-play

The post Musk’s Twitter hits new low as NPR publicly quits the platform appeared first on KnowTechie.

UPDATE 3/9/2023: Twitter CEO, Elon Musk, denied any wrongdoing and claimed that Twitter was not blocking links to Substack. In a sudden reversal, the company is now allowing users to like and share Substack links. However, when searching for “Substack,” the results still only display “newsletter” as the search term.

On the morning of April 7, 2023 – Rohit Krishnan, author of the Strange Loop Canon newsletter, noticed something was amiss with his most recent Substack link.

“In other news, any link with substack in its name is now blocked on Twitter. You can post it, but you cannot like it or comment on it or retweet it,” wrote Krishnan in his tweet.

“Things that happen when your equity value is zero,” referring to Substack’s recent financials.

Krishnan, and many other Twitter users, pointed out that the timing seems suspicious, given that Substack recently announced its own short-form micro-blogging timeline, Substack Notes.

Initially, this was only happening on desktop – but users quickly reported having engagements limited on mobile, as well.

Twitter is now making it impossible to respond to new posts that link to a Substack pic.twitter.com/RFLxaR41vg

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) April 7, 2023

What happens when you post a Substack link on Twitter?

Like many “features” that have been rolled out by Twitter’s zombie skeleton crew, this change seems to have come with no warning or explanation.

“Elon Musk has blocked all Substack links on Twitter from being RTed or liked. This gives huge advantage to the MSM he claims is bad, but ok, writes scientest and author, Erik Hoel in a tweet.

Users are reporting that they cannot “Pin” Substack links to their account or reply to/Quote Tweet some posts with Substack links.

Additionally, as of April 6, 2023, Twitter is apparently blocking Tweets from being embedded in Substack newsletters – possibly related to Twitter’s sunsetting free API access.

Didn’t Twitter do something similar a few months ago?

Back during “Head Twit” Elon Musk’s first month on the job, Twitter announced that the company would limit links to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and other social media platforms.

In a now-deleted thread, @TwitterSupport claimed that the move was because the (supposedly) $44b tech giant’s new policy to “no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter.”

As of writing, Twitter had not made an official statement – but we did get a reply to our request for comment:

How to get around Twitter’s Substack link ban

First suggested by Ed Zitron, CEO of media relations firm EZPR, there is a workaround to skirt the Substack link ban. Here’s how:

• Use a link shortner
• Use a bespoke URL/redirect

If you use a link shortener or bespoke URL/redirect, you should still be able to link to Substack’s site, as long as you don’t say the other website’s name in the tweet.

I confirmed this in my own testing and the workaround seems to be legit. Now, how long this will last is another story.

In a new post, which Substack emailed to all its writers, the company addressed the latest Twitter episode and noted “The Substack model is thriving. The proof is that the imitations are failing and the incumbents are resisting.”

Despite this, the company expressed its concern that users are unable to share links to Substack and hoped that the issue was temporary.

“However, even if this change is not temporary,” the post continued, “it is a reminder of why cracks are starting to show in the internet’s legacy business models.” The statement went on to suggest that writers and creators should own their relationships with their audiences, regardless of the platform they use.

Have any thoughts on this? Drop us a line below in the comments, or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

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The post Twitter is blocking Substack links – here’s how to get around it appeared first on KnowTechie.

In the most substantial user-experience update since launching in 2017, Substack is introducing “Notes” – although they’re not quite calling it a “Twitter Clone.”

What is “Substack Notes”?

According to their announcement,

Notes will give [writers] the ability to recommend almost anything—including posts, quotes, comments, images, and links. Our goal is to foster conversations that inspire, enlighten, and entertain, while giving writers a powerful growth channel as these interactions find new audiences. 

The main point of differentiation between this new micro-blogging product is that your timeline will be populated solely with writers you subscribe to, including free subscriptions.

By contrast, the lifeblood of a subscription network is the money paid to people who are doing worthy work within it. Here, people get rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences. The ultimate goal on this platform is to convert casual readers into paying subscribers. In this system, the vast majority of the financial rewards go to the creators of the content.

This means that contributors will have more of a stake in producing meaningful content for their subscribers.

Substack hopes that this subscription-based model will create a deeper relationship between content creators and their audience.

“Substack Notes may look like familiar social media feeds. But the biggest difference is one you can’t see. It’s based on subscriptions instead of ads. It’s social media with a heart transplant. It’s a subscription network, tweets McKenzie. “While attention is the lifeblood of ad-based social media, a subscription network’s lifeblood is the money that gets paid to writers and creators.”

Will Substack Notes become the new Twitter? Who knows, but we’re certainly going to give it a try. Hopefully it won’t be the new “Ello.”

Which Substacks do you read? Drop us a line below in the comments, or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• Twitter shutting down Substack-like Revue platform
• Substack Chat is a Twitter alternative for newsletter people
• Substack’s new RSS feed reader is now on web and mobile
• Substacks’ new tools will make it easier to listen to newsletters

The post Is Substack Notes the new Twitter? appeared first on KnowTechie.

Musk says the change goes into effect on April 15 and says only verified accounts will be eligible to be in For You recommendations. What’s his reasoning behind this?

“The is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over. It is otherwise a hopeless losing battle.”

And oh, one more thing: “Voting in polls will require verification for same reason,” Musk tweeted.

Coincidence? I think not.

RIP Legacy accounts

What about Legacy accounts? Better cough up the cash for Twitter Blue or kiss that precious blue checkmark goodbye. Now everyone and their dog will be sporting that checkmark.

Honestly, it’s like he’s on a mission to drag the core product down. Who needs a sense of exclusivity when you can turn verification into a pay-to-play club?

Unverified is the new verified

Maybe the unverified folks will become the true Twitter elite. So, what do we have to look forward to on the For You feed? They are a bunch of card-carrying dweebs who shell out real money to use the site. Great.

But hey, maybe there’s a silver lining here. This decision could actually strengthen the bonds of those who’ve built tight-knit communities on the platform.

While the wannabe influencers and hustle scammers flood the For You page, the real Twitterverse can carry on, unbothered by the blue checkmark brigade—so long, and good riddance.

I’ll close with this: Elon Musk, a man with a legacy of ambitious feats like self-driving cars and landing rockets back on Earth, could have been remembered as a visionary.

But nope, looks like he’s setting himself up to be remembered as a colossal dweeb and a $7 bill-collecting puppet, dancing to the tune of China.

Who knew the same guy revolutionizing transportation and space exploration would be best known for turning Twitter into a glorified country club for verified try-hards?

I picked up a little life hack some time back: just hit mute on Musk. Trust me, dorks like him can’t stand it, and they’re forced to throw around their cash to win people over.

Never forget:

Have any thoughts on this? Drop us a line below in the comments, or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• Someone leaked Twitter’s source code and no one knows who did it
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The post Elon Musk says Twitter’s For You page is now pay-to-play appeared first on KnowTechie.

According to a legal filing, per the New York Times, the leaker posted on GitHub, a developer collaboration platform, letting it sit there in the open, publicly available for several months. Yikes.

Twitter took swift action to remove the code, sending a copyright infringement notice to GitHub, which complied and took the code down on the same day. But the damage is done.

Twitter is a mess

Hackers could’ve potentially used the code to identify vulnerabilities in the platform, which could put users’ data at risk or even take the whole damn thing down.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Twitter’s already struggling to reduce technical issues and improve its business fortunes under the ownership of Elon Musk.

So who’s behind the leak? Honestly, the list is long. At this point, it’s unclear, and Twitter is getting the courts involved in hopes it gets Github to reveal the actors behind it.

But if I were a betting man, the code was likely uploaded by one of the many engineers Musk laid off in a cost-cutting move after purchasing the company.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. A former Twitter security chief alleged in a whistleblower complaint that many employees have access to the social media platform’s code and user data.

Probably doesn’t take a law degree to figure this out, but as NYT tech reporter Ryan Mac notes in a tweet, “The user who Twitter says posted the source code had the username “FreeSpeechEnthusiast” an apparent allusion to Elon Musk.”

Have any thoughts on this? Drop us a line below in the comments, or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• Twitter may soon let Blue subscribers hide in plain sight
• Did Twitter disable its SMS-based two-factor authentication?
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The post Someone leaked Twitter’s source code and no one knows who did it appeared first on KnowTechie.