Social media platform Twitter suspended a bot account tracking its owner Elon Musk’s private jet, the account’s operator Jack Sweeney said on Wednesday.
The account tracked movements of Musk‘s private jet using data in the public domain and puts out alerts.
Musk said in a tweet in November that his commitment to free speech “extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk”.
Sweeney, a 20-year-old University of Central Florida student, tweeted On Saturday that Ella Irwin, Twitter’s Vice President of trust and safety, requested the account be filtered and less visible to users.
Twitter and Sweeney did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
In media interviews, Sweeney has said that he turned down a $5,000 offer from the Tesla chief executive officer in 2021 to shut down his bot account.
Meanwhile, Twitter has undergone several changes ever since the billionaire took over the charge of the social media platform. This week, Musk disbanded a key advisory group, the Trust and Safety Council, made up of dozens of independent civil, human rights and other organisations. The company formed the council in 2016 to address hate speech, harassment, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform.
On the other hand, Musk has been trying to prove through giving selected journalists access to some of the company’s internal communications dubbed “The Twitter Files” that officials from the previous leadership team allegedly suppressed right-wing voices.
Twitter is offering advertisers incentives to increase their spending on the platform, according to an email sent on Thursday to advertising agencies, an effort to jump-start its business after Elon Musk’s takeover prompted many companies to pull back.
Details of the incentive offer were first reported by newsletter Marketing Brew.
Twitter billed the offer as the “biggest advertiser incentive ever on Twitter,” according to the email reviewed by Reuters. US advertisers who book $500,000 (roughly Rs. 4 crore) in incremental spending will qualify to have their spending matched with a “100 percent value add,” up to a $1 million cap, the email said.
Musk’s first month as Twitter’s owner has included a slashing of staff including employees who work on content moderation and incidents of spammers impersonating major public companies, which has spooked the advertising industry.
Many companies from General Mills Inc to luxury automaker Audi of America stopped or paused advertising on Twitter since the acquisition, and Musk said in November that the company had seen a “massive” drop in revenue.
Musk previously stated that Twitter was experiencing a “massive drop in revenue” from the advertiser retreat, blaming a coalition of civil rights groups that has been pressing the platform’s top advertisers to take action if he did not protect content moderation.
Ad sales account for about 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Advertisers in Britain and Japan who book $250,000 (roughly Rs. 2 crore) in incremental spending would receive a 100 percent match, while brands in all other regions that spend $50,000 (roughly Rs. 40,57,100) would receive the match, according to the email.
Earlier in October, Musk said he wanted Twitter to be “the most respected advertising platform” and not a “free-for-all hellscape”, in a bid to gain the trust of ad buyers ahead of the close of his deal.
If you witness a drop in your follower count on Twitter, then fret not. Twitter’s new boss Elon Musk is working on “purging a lot” of spam/scam accounts. On Thursday, Musk took to his Twitter account and shared the particular update with everyone.
He tweeted, “Twitter is purging a lot of spam/scam accounts right now, so you may see your follower count drop.”
Twitter is purging a lot of spam/scam accounts right now, so you may see your follower count drop
Musk is also planning to up Twitter’s character limit from 280 to 1000.
A few days ago, a social media user tagged Musk and tweeted, ” Idea on expanding character limit to 1000.”
In response, Musk wrote, “It’s on the to-do list.”
The character limit has been one of the prime differences between Twitter and other social media services. Musk has shown interest in the idea of increasing the character limit on a number of occasions since his takeover of the platform, as per a report by Mashable. On November 27, a Twitter user suggested to Musk to increase the platform’s word limit from 280 to 420.
“Good idea” Musk wrote in response. Prior to that, another user had suggested: “get rid of character limits.”
“Absolutely”, the multi-billionaire responded.
Now, we have to wait and see when Musk finally makes the changes regarding the character limit.
Another change announced by Tesla CEO Musk for the microblogging site is the inclusion of a multi-coloured verification system. As per Musk’s plans, Twitter will introduce a new three-coloured verification checkmark system which will replace the previous ‘Twitter Blue’ service. The new Twitter Blue verification service will tentatively be relaunched on December 2, according to Musk.
Last month, Musk stated that the new user signups to the social media platform have reached an “all-time high”, while the billionaire struggles with a mass exodus of advertisers and users fleeing to other platforms. Musk, in his tweet, mentioned that the signups on the microblogging site have reached an average of over two million per day as of November 16.
Elon Musk said on Wednesday a wireless device developed by his brain chip company Neuralink is expected to begin human clinical trials in six months.
The company is developing brain chip interfaces that it says could enable disabled patients to move and communicate again. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Austin, Texas, Neuralink has in recent years been conducting tests on animals as it seeks US regulatory approval to begin clinical trials in people.
“We want to be extremely careful and certain that it will work well before putting a device into a human but we’ve submitted I think most of our paperwork to the FDA and probably in about six months we should be able to upload Neuralink in a human,” Musk said during a much-awaited public update on the device.
The event was originally planned for October 31 but Musk postponed it just days before without giving a reason.
Neuralink’s last public presentation, more than a year ago, involved a monkey with a brain chip that played a computer game by thinking alone.
Musk is known for lofty goals such as colonizing Mars and saving humanity. His ambitions for Neuralink, which he launched in 2016, are of the same grand scale. He wants to develop a chip that would allow the brain to control complex electronic devices and eventually allow people with paralysis to regain motor function and treat brain diseases such as Parkinson’s, dementia and Alzheimer’s. He also talks about melding the brain with artificial intelligence.
Neuralink, however, is running behind schedule. Musk said in a 2019 presentation he was aiming to receive regulatory approval by the end of 2020. He then said at a conference in late 2021 that he hoped to start human trials this year.
Neuralink has repeatedly missed internal deadlines to gain US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval to start human trials, current and former employees have said. Musk approached competitor Synchron earlier this year about a potential investment after he expressed frustration to Neuralink employees about their slow progress, Reuters reported in August.
Synchron crossed a major milestone in July by implanting its device in a patient in the United States for the first time. It received US regulatory clearance for human trials in 2021 and has completed studies in four people in Australia.
Twitter could expand its character limit from 280, according to a tweet by new owner Elon Musk. The world’s richest man and Twitter’s new CEO responded to a user on the microblogging platform requesting the higher character limit, stating that it was part of the company’s plan. Twitter is also working on adding encrypted direct messages (DMs), and payment services, according a set of slides recently shared by Musk on Twitter. However, it is currently unclear whether the increased character limit will be the same as the longform tweet feature teased by the company’s CEO.
On Monday, Musk responded to a Twitter user asking him to expand the 280-character limit for on tweets on Twitter to 1,000 characters. Musk responded, stating :It’s on the todo list.”
Twitter, which is referred to as a “microblogging service”, originally had a 140-character limit for tweets, which was expanded to 280 characters in 2017. At the time, the company’s blog stated that “many people Tweeted the full 280 limit because it was new and novel, but soon after behaviour normalised…We saw when people needed to use more than 140 characters, they Tweeted more easily and more often.”
The platform is one of the few services that limits users’ posts to a few hundred characters. Rival Facebook allow users to upload posts with thousands of characters.
Musk has shown interest in the idea of increasing the character limit on a number of occasions since his takeover of the platform, as per a report by Mashable.
On November 27, a Twitter user suggested to Musk to increase the platform’s word limit from 280 to 420. “Good idea” Musk wrote in response.
Prior to that, another user had suggested “get rid of character limits,” to which Musk responded: “Absolutely”.
Musk recently announced another major change for the platform with its multi-coloured verification system. A new three-coloured verification check mark system would replace the previous ‘Twitter Blue’ service which had to be pulled off within days of its release due to rising number of accounts impersonating well-known brands and personalities while carrying the ‘verified’ check. The new Twitter Blue verification service will tentatively be relaunched on December 2, according to Musk.
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Over 21,000 cryptocurrencies are known to be in existence currently, with new ones made every day. One such fresh project, dedicated to Elon Musk recently made it to the headlines. The creators behind the ‘Elon Goat Token (EGT)’, who claim to be Musk’s ‘superfans’, delivered a rather unique statue to Tesla’s Austin office that has Musk’s head attached to the body of a goat, while riding a rocket. The EGT creators were aiming at gaining some promotion for their project with Musk’s acknowledgement — but that did not happen.
Musk, who is otherwise famous for being active and responsive on Twitter, has not yet reacted to this special parcel from the makers of the EGT.
As per a CoinTelegraph report, the statue is about 30-feet tall, weighs 12,000 pound (roughly 5,443 kg), and costs $600,000 (roughly Rs. 4 crore).
Visuals of the statue shared on EGT’s Twitter handle show the rather eccentric, silver coloured effigy, loaded up in an open truck, being pulled into Tesla’s Austin facility.
We’re very proud of our accomplishments and commitment to #EGT
We’ve always had long term vision for $EGT and will continue to build the brand and utility.
We feel our hard work can lead to Elon claiming #ElonGOAT and we will work towards this goal! Maybe have some fun too! pic.twitter.com/Rk2Gdn5PpE
“On launch day, $EGT caught immediate global attention, drawing over 1,750 Telegram users on a live call that helped catapult the native token to a $39 million (roughly Rs. 318 crore) market cap. $EGT’s viral and unique marketing plan that focused on getting Elon Musk’s attention was the central catalyst,” the document said.
Currently, each EGT is trading at $0.0004706 (roughly Rs. 0.038) after recording a 38.57 percent dip in the last 24 hours, as per data tracking website CoinMarketCap.
The creators behind EGT intend to bring more traction to their crypto offering with Musk’s anticipated reaction to the statue.
This is however, not the first time that Musk, who is an avid crypto and blockchain supporter, has had a Web3 project dedicated to him.
In June 2021, Musk had tweeted that he would be naming his pet dog from the Japanese Shiba Inu breed ‘Floki’, and this led to the formation of the ‘Floki Inu’ altcoin.
Back in October last year, an NFT series of 10,000 digital collectibles was launched under the name of ‘Dogs of Elon’.
Musk is famously known for supporting the Dogecoin token over other cryptocurrencies including BTC and ETH.
Musk’s opinions around cryptocurrencies are known to impact the market movement for the coin given the massive following of the SpaceX CEO on various social networking platforms.
Over the past weekend, Dogecoin reportedly saw a price surge of 19.4 percent after Musk tweeted about his plans of revamping Twitter under his leadership.
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News that Elon Musk brought his 2-year-old son — one of 10 children — into key meetings at Twitter headquarters, after taking over the social media company in the fall, might make it less of a mystery to lefties why his “Priority #1” has been to banish child sexual exploitation material.
Not that you need to be a parent to abhor child pornography, but for some reason the vile content effectively was given a free pass at Twitter before Musk arrived, so clearly not everyone in the company respected society’s last taboo.
But, instead of applauding Twitter’s dedication to child safety and attack on degeneracy, leftist media has been decrying Musk’s attempts to restore free speech protections as if they are a threat to civilization.
They are hopping mad that Musk is demolishing the left-wing censorship regime that saw a sitting president de-platformed, satirical site The Babylon Bee banned and the oldest newspaper in the country locked out of its account for two weeks before the 2020 election.
Censorship hypocrisy
Lamenting the explosion of free speech under Musk, Yoel Roth, the former head of “Trust and Safety” who was responsible for censoring The Post, delivered an implied threat to his former employer in an op-ed piece in The New York Times.
Keep the censorship regime in place or Twitter will be thrown off Google and Apple’s app marketplace, he wrote, “making it more difficult for potential billions of users to obtain Twitter services. This gives Apple and Google enormous power to shape the decisions Twitter makes.”
Roth claims he just wants to prevent “hate speech,” but why was it that everyone banned by Twitter was conservative?
Former Twitter executive Yoel Roth claimed Twitter will be removed from Apple and Google’s app stores without censorship.
“Correct,” Musk replied to a tweet observing: “We don’t hear much about Democrats and leftists being let back on Twitter [because] they were never kicked off in the first place . . . Censorship has been deployed as a one-way operation against conservatives.”
Musk already has reinstated Trump, The Babylon Bee, Project Veritas, psychologist Jordan Peterson, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Libs of TikTok account that merely reposts absurd leftist clips from the video-sharing app TikTok.
In response you would think Musk had launched the apocalypse.
No sooner had the multinational fashion brand signaled its virtue, than Balenciaga had to delete its Twitter account after being bombarded with irate messages over its depraved advertising campaign featuring small children holding teddy bears in bondage gear.
Other not-so-subtle pedophilia messages were embedded in the images, such as a sheaf of papers on a table which, on closer inspection, were court documents about child pornography.
How do you explain that? You launch a $25 million lawsuit against the production company and pretend no Balenciaga executive signed off on the images.
No wonder Balenciaga protested against a child-porn-free Twitter.
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Which raises the question a a lot of people on Twitter have been asking of Roth, the former head of “Trust and Safety”, after he, too, quit the company in protest.
Why was child porn permitted on Roth’s watch for years and all but eliminated by Musk in a few days? It’s an important question, but the rest of the media is more interested in amplifying his threats against Twitter.
The Associated Press tweeted a story claiming “online safety experts predict [Musk reinstating conservatives] will spur a rise in harassment, hate speech and misinformation”, yet did not quote a single expert and did not carry a byline.
You would think AP might have been more careful about spreading unfounded nonsense after nearly starting World War III the previous week with a false report that Russian missiles had hit Poland.
The Washington Post’s infamous “technology” reporter Taylor Lorenz penned a piece last week claiming that Musk was “opening the gates of hell . . . to the alarm of activists and online trust and safety experts.”
At least she quoted some humans, even though they were far left hysterics and trans activist Alejandra Caraballo, who tweets obsessively as @esqueer to get conservatives kicked off Twitter and demand that the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe should “never know peace again.”
Musk said his goal is to make Twitter a “forum for the peaceful exchange of views.”Baron Capital via AP
Right on cue, Antifa accounts which previously were free to dox conservatives and organize violent riots, called for arson attacks on Tesla locations in response to being banned from Twitter.
All the anti-Twitter “experts” agreed that the ultimate control of Musk will be for Apple and Apple and Google to remove Twitter’s app.
He is no right-winger. A libertarian who says he voted for Joe Biden at the last election, he responded to criticism by tweeting: “As a reminder, I was a significant supporter of the Obama-Biden presidency and (reluctantly) voted for Biden over Trump.
“But freedom of speech is the bedrock of a strong democracy and must take precedence.
“My preference for the 2024 presidency is someone sensible and centrist. I had hoped that would the case for the Biden administration but have been disappointed so far.”
His goal is “a trusted digital town square, where a wide range of views are tolerated, provided people don’t break the law or spam. For example, any incitement to violence will result in account suspension . . .
“Twitter will be a forum for the peaceful exchange of views.”
In fact, since Musk took over and fired half the workforce, including most of the censorship — err, “moderation” — team, he has published stats indicating there are more users and less hate speech.
‘Mistake’ to delete Don
Musk also said banning Trump was a “grave mistake” since there had been “no violation of the law or terms of service. Deplatforming a sitting President undermined public trust in Twitter for half of America.”
He gets it, but is now bracing for the mother of all attacks, because he is removing the censorship that has been a source of the left’s newfound power in recent years.
“They won’t give up controlling the narrative easily,” he tweeted over the weekend.
President Biden hinted at a future investigation into Elon Musk and his “cooperation and/or technical relationships with other countries.”Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
Remember Biden’s triumphal first press conference after the midterms? He issued a pointed warning to Musk that his administration would be investigating him.
“I think that Elon Musk’s cooperation and/or technical relationships with other countries is worthy of being looked at whether or not he is doing anything inappropriate,” Biden said when asked by a useful reporter if the new Twitter owner is a national security threat.
Putting aside the fact that the comment rather lacked self-awareness from someone about to be investigated by Congress over the inappropriateness of millions of dollars given to his son and brother by China and “other countries” which “paid to play” when he was vice president, it was an odd priority for the president’s first pronouncement after losing the House.
Musk in return has promised he will make public all the details around The Post’s censorship by Twitter over the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Twitter will roll out verified gold and grey check marks as it relaunches the coveted blue check service next Friday, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said in a tweet, after holding off the rollout earlier this week.
“Gold check for companies, grey check for governments, blue for individuals (celebrities or not). Painful, but necessary,” Musk said in a tweet.
All verified accounts will be manually authenticated before the check is activated, Musk said.
“Individuals can have a secondary tiny logo to show they belong to an organization if verified as such by that organization,” Musk said in another tweet, adding that he will give a longer explanation next week.
The company had paused its recently announced $8 blue check subscription service as fake accounts mushroomed, and had said the sought-after blue check subscription service will be relaunched on Nov. 29.
Elon Musk announced that all verified accounts will be manually authenticated before the check is activated. SOPA Images/LightRocket via Gett
The blue check mark was previously reserved for verified accounts of politicians, famous personalities, journalists and other public figures.
Elon Musk said on Thursday that Twitter will provide a “general amnesty” to suspended accounts starting next week after running a poll on whether to do so for users who had not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam. In a poll Musk posted on Twitter on Wednesday, 72.4 percent of the more than 3.16 million users who took part voted in favour of bringing back those who had been suspended by the social media platform.
“The people have spoken,” Musk, who acquired Twitter last month, tweeted on Thursday. “Amnesty begins next week.”
Last week, Musk, the world’s richest person, reinstated some previously suspended accounts, including former US President Donald Trump, satirical website Babylon Bee and comedian Kathy Griffin.
He tweeted in October that Twitter would form a content moderation council “with widely diverse viewpoints.” Musk said no major content decisions or account reinstatements would happen before the council convened.
Change and chaos have marked the billionaire’s first few weeks as Twitter’s owner. He has fired top managers, including former Chief Executive Parag Agarwal, and it was announced that senior officials in charge of security and privacy had quit.
Those resignations drew scrutiny from the US Federal Trade Commission, whose mandate includes protecting consumers and which said it was watching Twitter with “deep concern.”
On Thursday, Musk tweeted that Twitter users might notice small, sometimes major improvements in the platform’s speed, which would be significant in countries far away from the US.
Earlier this week, Reuters reported that a coalition of civil rights activists was urging Twitter’s advertisers to issue statements about pulling their ads off the social media platform after its owner Elon Musk lifted the ban on tweets by former US President Donald Trump.
Last week, Donald Trump said that he had no interest in returning to Twitter even as a slim majority voted in favor of reinstating the former US President, who was banned from the social media service for inciting violence, in a poll organized by new owner Elon Musk.
A coalition of civil rights activists on Monday was urging Twitter’s advertisers to issue statements about pulling their ads off the social media platform after its owner Elon Musk lifted the ban on tweets by former US President Donald Trump.
Trump’s account, which Twitter had suspended after the US Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, citing the risk of further incitement of violence, was reinstated over the weekend. Some 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue comes from selling digital ads.
The groups in the Stop Toxic Twitter coalition complained that Musk had vowed to advertisers that Twitter would take a considered approach to reinstate banned accounts and convene a new content moderation council. No such council has been created as of Monday.
“It was a real breach,” Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, a left-leaning media watchdog that is part of the coalition, said on Monday. He said Musk “was lying from the beginning.”
“In less than three weeks Musk has gone back on every promise he made to civil-rights leaders and advertisers,” said Jessica Gonzalez, co-chief executive of media and democracy group Free Press, which is also part of the Twitter coalition, in a press release.
Twitter, which lost much of its communications team when Musk slashed the staff shortly after taking over, did not immediately respond to the request for comment.
This month, Musk complained that pressure from the activists had already caused a “massive drop in revenue.”
Twitter began reinstating banned or suspended accounts late last week including the comedian Kathy Griffin as well as Trump.
The platform also reinstated the personal Twitter account of US House Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene on Monday.
Of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers by total spending this year, 51 have paused ads according to private conversations with the coalition, public statements or spending data provided by ad measurement firm Pathmatics, Carusone said.
The coalition is asking brands that have not publicized their Twitter pause to issue public statements and help generate pressure on the other 49 advertisers that have taken no action, he said.
“You need to take a stand and draw the line,” Carusone said. “It’s important for big spenders to say they have stopped.”
The coalition will consider naming the companies later this week if they have not issued a public statement about pausing ads, he added.
Musk tweeted Saturday that Twitter would reinstate the former president’s account after a slim majority voted yes on Musk’s poll about the issue.
The names atop the list of Twitter’s top advertisers have shifted from the week before Musk closed his deal to acquire the company. Major brands HBO and Mondelez were Twitter’s top two advertisers in the week before the acquisition, according to data from Pathmatics. But between November 10 and November 16, after Musk laid off half of Twitter’s staff, the top two largest advertisers were FinanceBuzz.io, a personal finance website and Trendytowns, an e-commerce site based in Singapore.
Pathmatics data showed that the top 100 advertisers between November 10 to November 16 spent an estimated $23.6 million (roughly Rs. 193 crore) on Twitter, down from $24.2 (roughly Rs. 198 crore) million spent between October 16 to October 22 before Musk became Twitter’s owner.
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