The entire story of Twitter / X under Elon Musk

If you want to join X, the service formerly known as Twitter, via its website in New Zealand and the Philippines, be prepared to fork over $1 a year for the privilege.

The subscription, part of a so-called “Not A Bot” program, is beginning in those two countries and is designed to “bolster our already significant efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity,” X said Tuesday in an unsigned post on its help center. In addition, new web users in New Zealand and the Philippines will have to verify their account with a phone number, the post says. Fortune first reported that Musk was going to charge new users $1 a year shortly before X’s announcement went live.

CNBC reports that the National Labor Relations Board alleged, in a complaint filed Friday, that X violated labor law when it fired an employee who criticized the company. Elon Musk bought the company, then known as Twitter, in October and threatened to fire workers who didn’t return to in-person office work. After Yao Yue encouraged others in the company’s Slack to let the company fire them instead of quitting, she was fired for breaking an unspecified company policy.

CNBC writes that in the complaint, the NLRB accuses X of keeping workers at the company from exercising their legal labor rights. Yue alleges the company laid her off “in retaliation for her attempt to organize her co-workers not to resign, so they would have better legal footing” on which to challenge the company later.

Now that X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, has managed to repeatedly send out its ad revenue sharing payments on time without any last-minute delays, engineer Eric Farraro is answering questions from users who still aren’t getting the payments they expect. Reasons include: 1) X users only earn ad revenue from other paying X users, 2) advertisers aren’t paying much to reach the demographic that the creator attracts, 3) the posts didn’t get a lot of replies, or 4) their content is not suitable for ads.

That first reason is one that X hasn’t exactly hidden. Here’s how Farraro puts it in his new explanation:

The latest turn in the Elon Musk-directed platform X, previously known as Twitter, is that users can now block unverified accounts from replying to their posts.

This change arrives about 11 months after Musk launched paid verification for Twitter Blue, apportioning blue checkmark labels to people willing to part with $7.99 per month. It also means it could be harder for those who don’t pay for the service (with the exception of accounts forced into verified status) to refute misinformation, which researchers report has continued to increase.

Mashable reports that users on X, formerly known as Twitter, have seen unlabeled ads in their feeds while scrolling through the company’s mobile apps. When users tap them, they’re taken to other websites, with no way to block or report them.

Unlike normal ads that are just posts from company X accounts and have an “Ad” label, these new ones have no account associated with them. Here, this post shows what they look like:

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is suing Elon Musk over his refusal to testify in an investigation into Musk’s purchase of Twitter stock in 2022.

According to the SEC’s complaint, Musk was scheduled to appear for testimony on September 15th after receiving a subpoena. However, “two days before his scheduled testimony, Musk abruptly notified the SEC staff that he would not appear” and apparently raised “several spurious objections, including an objection to San Francisco as an appropriate testimony location,” the SEC said. The lawsuit was first reported by Bloomberg.

X, formerly Twitter, is no longer showing headlines on articles shared on the platform. Instead, X is only showing the article’s lead image and the domain it will link you to.

You can see the differences between the new version of link previews in the X iOS app and the old version on the web in this comparison image I stitched together:

A judge has ruled that X, the platform previously known as Twitter, must pay $1.1 million in legal fees associated with the investigations of the platform that unfolded during Elon Musk’s buyout of the platform last year, according to a report from Bloomberg.

As noted by Bloomberg, Delaware Chancery Court Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick ruled in favor of former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, former lead policy officer Vijaya Gadde, and other executives, as Twitter “violated its duties to cover legal expenses generated by their work for the company.”

It was bound to happen eventually: a company has filed a lawsuit in federal court against Elon Musk’s X Corp. over its renaming of Twitter (via Reuters). The company in question is X Social Media LLC, an ad agency from Florida that alleges X Corp. is guilty of violating Florida common law because of “unfair competition and trademark and service mark infringement,” as well as the state’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.

X Social Media (hereafter referred to as XSM to make this article easier to write) writes in the complaint that it has used its registered trademark, “X SOCIALMEDIA,” continuously since 2016. XSM claims it has “already suffered loss in revenue that correlates with X Corp.’s rebrand and use of the mark ‘X.’”

X, the company formerly known as Twitter, has made a special revenue sharing deal with Paris Hilton and her media company, 11:11. It even includes a custom hashtag for a word that Hilton has been trying to popularize since at least 2019: “sliving.”

A combination of the words “slaying” and “living,” sliving is supposed to be Hilton’s new “that’s hot,” her catchphrase that was inescapable in the early 2000s. Now the year is 2023, and Linda Yaccarino, fresh from her interview on the Code stage, is posting “#sliving” to a site called X.

The buzz out of the Code Conference this week is, naturally, all about the disastrous performance of X / Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, who closed out the two-day affair in spectacular fashion. Vox’s Peter Kafka, who has been going to the conference since it started in 2008, called it “the weirdest session I’ve ever seen.” If I had to sum up the vibe as everyone trickled off to dinner afterward, it would be stunned disbelief. As for Yaccarino, she immediately fled the premises with her six-person security detail.

Given how her first interview on the job with CNBC went about a month ago, I had low expectations for her ability to field questions from the tough-as-nails Julia Boorstin on the Code stage. But nothing could have prepared me for how woefully unequipped she was to hold her own. There was something poetic about the Financial Times dropping a profile of her that same day with a photo in a literal crucifix pose.

X is planning to shut down Circles, a feature that lets you share posts with a limited group of people instead of all of your followers. The company said in a “PSA” on Thursday that Circles will be disabled by October 31st.

“After this date, you will not be able to create new posts that are limited to your Circle, nor will you be able to add people to your Circle,” X wrote in a post on its help center. “You will, however, be able to remove people from your Circle,” and the company gave instructions on how to do that.

If you add a Community Post to a post on X (formerly Twitter), X will tell you if the person who wrote the post deletes it, the company said on Friday.

“Contributors consistently say their goal is to keep others well-informed,” X wrote on the Community Notes account. “This can happen when a helpful note appears on a post, and also when an erroneous post gets deleted. Starting today, writers will be notified when a post on which they wrote a note gets deleted.”

X really wants you to forget about Twitter — and that includes in its terms of service. Users are starting to see pop-ups about new terms that go into effect on September 29th, and one adjustment is two instances of “retweet” (the only use of “tweet” in the current terms) to “repost,” essentially putting the final stamp in the death of the word tweet.

There are a bunch of other branding changes in the new terms, including a nearly wholesale removal of the word “Twitter” in favor of X. I say nearly wholesale because, hilariously, many of the URLs included in the terms still seemingly have to include the word “twitter,” like in this link to a developer-focused website: https://developer.x.com/en/docs/twitter-for-websites. There have been some hints that X wants to fully switch over to URLs starring X, but it seems Twitter will hang around in some capacity. (It’s worth noting that X.com still redirects to twitter.com.) References to Periscope, Twitter’s live streaming app it shut down in 2021, have been removed as well.

This might finally be the end of the hurricane street shark phenomenon. X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, updated its crowdsourced fact-checking Community Notes feature to tag videos directly and automatically populate those notes onto any matching videos. The same tagging was recently added to images with Community Notes, and last week, the platform added the ability to see the number of matching images that apply to each fact-check. Now, approved Community Notes will automatically show up every time a flagged video is posted or reshared. 

According to a post on the tool’s X account, a select group of Community Notes power users, known as “Top Writers” (if you have to ask what that is, you’re probably not a part of the club), can now submit added context to potentially misleading video content. The platform said this is a “highly-scalable way” to add additional context to AI-generated videos and misleading video edits.

I see Elon Musk has pivoted from pretending he’s going to physically fight Mark Zuckerberg to pretending he is going to sue the Anti-Defamation League. Okay. There are people who still take Musk seriously, and I wish them well on their journey. This blog is for the rest of us.

Obviously, there’s a level of attention-seeking behavior at play. Some of this is financially motivated: Musk is perhaps the most important influencer in the world. His tweets move markets. And he faces the same problem as other influencers. The danger of being too famous is overexposure — people get sick of you.

When Elon Musk livestreamed a drive through Palo Alto, California on Friday afternoon, he was holding his phone — which is plainly and clearly illegal under California law. But the Palo Alto Police Department won’t be issuing a fine, it tells The Verge, because police didn’t witness the crime themselves.

“Had an officer observed the driver with the phone in their hand, they could have issued the driver an infraction ticket for violating California’s handsfree law,” writes Palo Alto PD Captain James Reifschneider.