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"content": "\u003cp>In 2018, before Elon Musk was making headlines for his role in running Twitter, he was making headlines for another Twitter-related controversy: allegedly using the platform to commit fraud.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back then, a series of tweets about a possible $72-billion Tesla buyout that never materialized got Musk, the electric vehicle maker's CEO, in trouble with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. \u003ca href=\"https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-226\">The SEC said the billionaire knew a deal wasn't on the horizon. \u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, a civil trial stemming from those tweets is being watched as a window into Musk's behavior, past and present, which means the trial could produce new controversies of its own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The trial starts Tuesday in San Francisco with jury selection. Here's what else you need to know.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>First, a quick refresher on what happened with the buyout tweets\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>On August 7, 2018, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1026872652290379776\">Musk tweeted that he had secured the funding\u003c/a> needed to pay for a potential buyout of Tesla at $420 per share. He \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1026914941004001280?s=20&t=Le2qlAEifbYrHqt8OFXqxQ\">tweeted again on the same day\u003c/a>, implying that the move was imminent: The \"only reason\" why the move was not certain is because it's contingent upon a shareholder vote, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the buyout never happened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After a week-long roller coaster in Tesla's stock price, \u003ca href=\"https://www.vox.com/2018/8/13/17683316/elon-musk-tesla-private-saudi-arabia-funding-secured-sec\">the company said it didn't have the funding secured after all.\u003c/a> Musk said it was feedback from shareholders that made him change his mind about the deal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An investigation by the SEC commission \u003ca href=\"https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-226\">led to a settlement with the company\u003c/a>, which included a $40 million fine, split evenly between Tesla and Musk, and Musk's relinquishment of his chairman role for at least three years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The SEC also said then that Musk wasn't even close to locking up the billions needed to pull off the buyout he teased on Twitter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdZZpaB2kDM\">Musk has since said \u003c/a>that he really believed he had the funding and that he entered into the SEC agreement under duress.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What's the deal with this trial?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The trial stems from a class-action lawsuit brought by investors who owned Tesla stock during a 10-day period (Aug. 7-17) that began the same day as Musk's tweets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>District Judge Edward Chen has already ruled that Musk's initial tweets were \u003ca href=\"https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/judge-rules-musks-tweets-over-taking-tesla-private-were-false-investors-say-2022-04-16/\">knowingly false and misleading\u003c/a>. A jury will now decide whether Musk acted recklessly by posting them, as well as whether he caused financial harm to Tesla shareholders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tesla's stock prices swung by roughly $14 billion during the 10-day period covered in the lawsuit, the shareholders say.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What's happened to Tesla stock since the 2018 drama?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The August 2018 shareholder loss wasn't sustained for long: When adjusting for two stock splits, Tesla's shares are now worth roughly six times more than their 2018 values.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, recent investors have also lost a lot more than the $14 billion at the heart of the case. After a meteoric rise, Tesla shares started to plummet last year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It lost 65% of its value in 2022 alone, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2023/01/06/1146941980/tesla-shares-elon-musk-twitter-electric-cars\">a dip partly due\u003c/a> to a tough year for the overall automobile industry and partly because of widespread disapproval of Musk's Twitter takeover.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk himself has broken the record for the most amount of money lost by one person in the shortest amount of time, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2023/01/12/1148634966/elon-musk-guinness-world-records\">according to Guinness World Records.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His fortune went from an estimated $320 billion in 2021 to its current level of roughly $147 billion, though he's still one of the richest people in the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What's at stake for Musk?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The CEO could lose another chunk of change after this trial, depending on its outcome. The shareholders say Musk should pay damages for the financial risk he put them in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And while Tesla's stock price isn't directly on the line in this case, it could be swayed by another factor at stake: Musk's reputation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At a time when shareholders are losing faith in Musk, we're likely to learn a thing or two about his management style from a witness lineup that includes top Tesla executives and Silicon Valley stars such as Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-technology-san-francisco-business-f6f0e8de56e2ac55a7a0d4ab9d6f1758\">according to The Associated Press\u003cem>. \u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The trial has already turned into a bit of a referendum on Musk's likeability.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last week, Judge Chen rejected the billionaire's bid to transfer the trial to Texas, which has been the site of Tesla headquarters since 2021.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk's lawyers said that he wouldn't get a fair trial in San Francisco due to the jury pool's probable biases against Musk related to his Twitter takeover, which included \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/17/1137413251/twitter-employees-quit-elon-musk\">laying off over 3,750 employees.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-technology-texas-san-francisco-business-6ac6780b84fa446c43821e1fffeaf930\">The judge sided with the shareholders' lawyers\u003c/a>, who said Musk had only himself to blame for any negative perceptions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Here%27s+what%27s+at+stake+in+Elon+Musk%27s+Tesla+tweet+trial&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>In 2018, before Elon Musk was making headlines for his role in running Twitter, he was making headlines for another Twitter-related controversy: allegedly using the platform to commit fraud.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back then, a series of tweets about a possible $72-billion Tesla buyout that never materialized got Musk, the electric vehicle maker's CEO, in trouble with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. \u003ca href=\"https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-226\">The SEC said the billionaire knew a deal wasn't on the horizon. \u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, a civil trial stemming from those tweets is being watched as a window into Musk's behavior, past and present, which means the trial could produce new controversies of its own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The trial starts Tuesday in San Francisco with jury selection. Here's what else you need to know.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>First, a quick refresher on what happened with the buyout tweets\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>On August 7, 2018, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1026872652290379776\">Musk tweeted that he had secured the funding\u003c/a> needed to pay for a potential buyout of Tesla at $420 per share. He \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1026914941004001280?s=20&t=Le2qlAEifbYrHqt8OFXqxQ\">tweeted again on the same day\u003c/a>, implying that the move was imminent: The \"only reason\" why the move was not certain is because it's contingent upon a shareholder vote, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the buyout never happened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After a week-long roller coaster in Tesla's stock price, \u003ca href=\"https://www.vox.com/2018/8/13/17683316/elon-musk-tesla-private-saudi-arabia-funding-secured-sec\">the company said it didn't have the funding secured after all.\u003c/a> Musk said it was feedback from shareholders that made him change his mind about the deal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An investigation by the SEC commission \u003ca href=\"https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-226\">led to a settlement with the company\u003c/a>, which included a $40 million fine, split evenly between Tesla and Musk, and Musk's relinquishment of his chairman role for at least three years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The SEC also said then that Musk wasn't even close to locking up the billions needed to pull off the buyout he teased on Twitter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdZZpaB2kDM\">Musk has since said \u003c/a>that he really believed he had the funding and that he entered into the SEC agreement under duress.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What's the deal with this trial?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The trial stems from a class-action lawsuit brought by investors who owned Tesla stock during a 10-day period (Aug. 7-17) that began the same day as Musk's tweets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>District Judge Edward Chen has already ruled that Musk's initial tweets were \u003ca href=\"https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/judge-rules-musks-tweets-over-taking-tesla-private-were-false-investors-say-2022-04-16/\">knowingly false and misleading\u003c/a>. A jury will now decide whether Musk acted recklessly by posting them, as well as whether he caused financial harm to Tesla shareholders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tesla's stock prices swung by roughly $14 billion during the 10-day period covered in the lawsuit, the shareholders say.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What's happened to Tesla stock since the 2018 drama?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The August 2018 shareholder loss wasn't sustained for long: When adjusting for two stock splits, Tesla's shares are now worth roughly six times more than their 2018 values.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, recent investors have also lost a lot more than the $14 billion at the heart of the case. After a meteoric rise, Tesla shares started to plummet last year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It lost 65% of its value in 2022 alone, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2023/01/06/1146941980/tesla-shares-elon-musk-twitter-electric-cars\">a dip partly due\u003c/a> to a tough year for the overall automobile industry and partly because of widespread disapproval of Musk's Twitter takeover.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk himself has broken the record for the most amount of money lost by one person in the shortest amount of time, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2023/01/12/1148634966/elon-musk-guinness-world-records\">according to Guinness World Records.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His fortune went from an estimated $320 billion in 2021 to its current level of roughly $147 billion, though he's still one of the richest people in the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What's at stake for Musk?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The CEO could lose another chunk of change after this trial, depending on its outcome. The shareholders say Musk should pay damages for the financial risk he put them in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And while Tesla's stock price isn't directly on the line in this case, it could be swayed by another factor at stake: Musk's reputation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At a time when shareholders are losing faith in Musk, we're likely to learn a thing or two about his management style from a witness lineup that includes top Tesla executives and Silicon Valley stars such as Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-technology-san-francisco-business-f6f0e8de56e2ac55a7a0d4ab9d6f1758\">according to The Associated Press\u003cem>. \u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The trial has already turned into a bit of a referendum on Musk's likeability.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last week, Judge Chen rejected the billionaire's bid to transfer the trial to Texas, which has been the site of Tesla headquarters since 2021.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk's lawyers said that he wouldn't get a fair trial in San Francisco due to the jury pool's probable biases against Musk related to his Twitter takeover, which included \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/17/1137413251/twitter-employees-quit-elon-musk\">laying off over 3,750 employees.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-technology-texas-san-francisco-business-6ac6780b84fa446c43821e1fffeaf930\">The judge sided with the shareholders' lawyers\u003c/a>, who said Musk had only himself to blame for any negative perceptions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Here%27s+what%27s+at+stake+in+Elon+Musk%27s+Tesla+tweet+trial&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Billionaire Elon Musk says he will step down as chief executive of Twitter as soon as he finds someone “foolish enough” to succeed him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1605372724800393216\">tweet\u003c/a> on Tuesday, Musk confirmed that he is searching for his replacement, but he gave no timeline for the process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk’s tweet comes two days after he launched a poll on the social network. The majority of respondents voted for his ouster.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even when Musk finds a new person to head Twitter, he will still be the owner and ultimate decision-maker at the company.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk indicated as much in his tweet, saying he would “just run the software & servers teams.” Last month, he \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/16/1137105935/twitter-elon-musk-ultimatum\">told Twitter employees\u003c/a> that Twitter would become “a software and servers company” under his ownership.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After Musk \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/12/15/1143291081/twitter-suspends-journalists-elon-musk-jet\">received broad blowback\u003c/a> for suspending the Twitter accounts of several journalists, the billionaire took to his platform Sunday to pose a question: “Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some 17 million voted in the unscientific poll, and nearly 58% of participants supported Musk stepping down as CEO.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As the saying goes, be careful what you wish, as you might get it,” Musk tweeted after launching the poll.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk has previously said it was never his intention to stay CEO of Twitter for the long term, but his tweet on Tuesday comes amid renewed scrutiny of his ability to lead the social media company.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside label=\"related coverage\" tag=\"twitter\"]Since Musk took over Twitter in late October, there has been a constant barrage of erratic decisions and turmoil at the company. From laying off more than half of the staff to reinstating the account of former President Trump, Musk has ruled Twitter based on what seem to be his ever-changing whims, with few checks on his decisions. Nearly all of Twitter’s top executives have either been fired or quit since Musk took the reins.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Amid the chaos, major advertisers have fled the platform, just as Musk has repeatedly suggested Twitter could be on the verge of bankruptcy. But longtime analysts of the site doubt that, and suggest Musk could be floating the idea of bankruptcy as cover for his cost-cutting measures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The confusion and disarray at Twitter had some Tesla investors fretting that Musk was too distracted to lead both companies. The electric car company accounts for most of Musk’s wealth, but Twitter has been eating up Musk’s schedule. Tesla shares have fallen 56% this year, with some investors suggesting Musk needed to stop trying to juggle leading both operations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last week, Tesla investor Ross Gerber \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/GerberKawasaki/status/1602685634044477442\">told\u003c/a> Tesla’s board of directors to “wake up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gerber\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/GerberKawasaki/status/1602685634044477442\"> added\u003c/a> in the tweet: “Who is running tesla and when is Elon coming back?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gerber \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/21/1138064606/elon-musk-twitter-investors-fans\">told NPR\u003c/a> in November that he thought Musk had made a number of mistakes since buying Twitter, but that he continued to support him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m never betting against this guy,” Gerber said at the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A brief policy shift leads to broad outcry\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Twitter announced a new policy on Sunday that took many users aback: It said tweets including links to other social media sites would no longer be allowed, calling such posts “free promotion.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The policy was quickly reversed, but not before upsetting some of Musk’s most ardent supporters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who previously voiced support for Musk’s takeover of the platform, questioned the policy, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/jack/status/1604554444544393216\">saying on Twitter\u003c/a> that it “doesn’t make sense.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Others who had backed Musk’s bid for Twitter appeared frustrated at the decision. Venture capitalist Paul Graham wrote of the policy, “This is the last straw. I give up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168\">tweet\u003c/a>, also explaining how people could find Graham on rival social media site Mastodon, triggered a brief suspension of his Twitter account.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk offered a rare apology in response to the outcry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won’t happen again,” Musk \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">tweeted\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Three minutes later, Musk launched the poll asking whether it was time for him to step down as head of Twitter, and promising to abide by the poll results.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Elon+Musk+says+he+will+resign+as+Twitter+CEO+once+he+finds+a+replacement&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Billionaire Elon Musk says he will step down as chief executive of Twitter as soon as he finds someone “foolish enough” to succeed him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1605372724800393216\">tweet\u003c/a> on Tuesday, Musk confirmed that he is searching for his replacement, but he gave no timeline for the process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk’s tweet comes two days after he launched a poll on the social network. The majority of respondents voted for his ouster.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even when Musk finds a new person to head Twitter, he will still be the owner and ultimate decision-maker at the company.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk indicated as much in his tweet, saying he would “just run the software & servers teams.” Last month, he \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/16/1137105935/twitter-elon-musk-ultimatum\">told Twitter employees\u003c/a> that Twitter would become “a software and servers company” under his ownership.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After Musk \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/12/15/1143291081/twitter-suspends-journalists-elon-musk-jet\">received broad blowback\u003c/a> for suspending the Twitter accounts of several journalists, the billionaire took to his platform Sunday to pose a question: “Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some 17 million voted in the unscientific poll, and nearly 58% of participants supported Musk stepping down as CEO.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As the saying goes, be careful what you wish, as you might get it,” Musk tweeted after launching the poll.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk has previously said it was never his intention to stay CEO of Twitter for the long term, but his tweet on Tuesday comes amid renewed scrutiny of his ability to lead the social media company.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Since Musk took over Twitter in late October, there has been a constant barrage of erratic decisions and turmoil at the company. From laying off more than half of the staff to reinstating the account of former President Trump, Musk has ruled Twitter based on what seem to be his ever-changing whims, with few checks on his decisions. Nearly all of Twitter’s top executives have either been fired or quit since Musk took the reins.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Amid the chaos, major advertisers have fled the platform, just as Musk has repeatedly suggested Twitter could be on the verge of bankruptcy. But longtime analysts of the site doubt that, and suggest Musk could be floating the idea of bankruptcy as cover for his cost-cutting measures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The confusion and disarray at Twitter had some Tesla investors fretting that Musk was too distracted to lead both companies. The electric car company accounts for most of Musk’s wealth, but Twitter has been eating up Musk’s schedule. Tesla shares have fallen 56% this year, with some investors suggesting Musk needed to stop trying to juggle leading both operations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last week, Tesla investor Ross Gerber \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/GerberKawasaki/status/1602685634044477442\">told\u003c/a> Tesla’s board of directors to “wake up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gerber\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/GerberKawasaki/status/1602685634044477442\"> added\u003c/a> in the tweet: “Who is running tesla and when is Elon coming back?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gerber \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/21/1138064606/elon-musk-twitter-investors-fans\">told NPR\u003c/a> in November that he thought Musk had made a number of mistakes since buying Twitter, but that he continued to support him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m never betting against this guy,” Gerber said at the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A brief policy shift leads to broad outcry\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Twitter announced a new policy on Sunday that took many users aback: It said tweets including links to other social media sites would no longer be allowed, calling such posts “free promotion.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The policy was quickly reversed, but not before upsetting some of Musk’s most ardent supporters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who previously voiced support for Musk’s takeover of the platform, questioned the policy, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/jack/status/1604554444544393216\">saying on Twitter\u003c/a> that it “doesn’t make sense.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Others who had backed Musk’s bid for Twitter appeared frustrated at the decision. Venture capitalist Paul Graham wrote of the policy, “This is the last straw. I give up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168\">tweet\u003c/a>, also explaining how people could find Graham on rival social media site Mastodon, triggered a brief suspension of his Twitter account.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk offered a rare apology in response to the outcry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won’t happen again,” Musk \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">tweeted\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Three minutes later, Musk launched the poll asking whether it was time for him to step down as head of Twitter, and promising to abide by the poll results.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Elon+Musk+says+he+will+resign+as+Twitter+CEO+once+he+finds+a+replacement&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The criticism was immediate, and has only intensified, since Elon Musk suspended several high-profile journalists from Twitter on Thursday, Dec. 15. The suspensions came a day after Twitter changed its policy on sharing live location information and banned an account known as ElonJet, which tracked the movement of Musk’s private jet using public flight data. Most of the banned journalists appear to have been reporting about these developments and to have written critically of Musk’s chaotic management of Twitter.[pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"David Loy, legal director, First Amendment Coalition\"]‘Elon Musk has called himself a free speech advocate. But by banning journalists from Twitter and impairing their ability to report the news and gather the news, he is violating the very principles that he purports to uphold.’[/pullquote]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The suspensions caused an intense backlash and accusations of violating press freedom, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/12/17/1143796992/twitter-lifts-suspensions-on-several-journalists-amid-rift-between-the-site-and-\">leading to Musk reinstating all but one of the suspended accounts \u003c/a>by Saturday, Dec. 17.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KQED’s Tara Siler spoke with one of the suspended journalists, Micah Lee, who is director of information security at The Intercept, and with David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tara Siler: Can you tell us what you’d been writing about before your account was suspended, and did you receive any explanation as to why it was suspended?\u003c/strong>[aside postID=\"news_11935737,news_11935529,news_11934602\" label=\"Related Posts\"]\u003cstrong>Micah Lee:\u003c/strong> Nope, no communication at all. My account was just suddenly banned and so I’m not even completely sure that this is the reason why. It just seems very likely because it was very shortly after I posted a tweet about ElonJet, and about\u003cb> \u003c/b>20 or 30 minutes later my account got permanently suspended. [But] I’ve spent the last month writing a bunch of articles that are pretty critical of Elon Musk and of the direction Twitter is going in. One of the stories that I reported on was how Elon Musk was basically directly asking right-wing extremists on Twitter who should get kicked off the site. And then in response to that, they kicked off a bunch of very high-profile left-wing accounts that have never broken any rules.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And it was directly at the request of specific right-wing influencers on Twitter. This includes some prominent anti-fascist accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers: CrimethInc., an anarchist collective that’s been publishing books since the ’90s, and just yesterday an anarchist news website called It’s Going Down. So that’s one of the stories that I did.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’ve also reported about a Twitter ban of Distributed Denial of Secrets. This is a group that actually was banned in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests. And they publish “how can we” documents. And so they published some documents that showed a lot of police misconduct, including police spying on activists. And they’ve been banned ever since then. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he started unbanning former President Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene and stuff, but he refuses to unban accounts that aren’t basically on the far right.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>It would seem most of these journalists were reporting about the recent policy changes at Twitter in the suspension of this particular account known as ElonJet. Musk is claiming these reporters were doxxing him by endangering him and his family. I mean, how does that square with your understanding of doxxing?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Loy:\u003c/strong> Reporting on publicly available data is not, in my view, a form of doxxing. Doxxing, as I understand it, is revealing that which is truly private — someone’s Social Security number, someone’s home address. Truly personal, private information. Flight data is publicly available from the FAA or otherwise. There’s any number of websites which track flight data in real time for both commercial and private jets. This is not in any way truly private information that, as I understand it, falls within the ordinary term or ordinary understanding of the term “doxxing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Musk has long touted himself as this so-called free speech absolutist. I’m wondering what you think that even means on today’s Twitter platform or in the context of social media in general.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lee: \u003c/b>Free-speech absolutism is an extreme position to take because it means that Nazi content and child pornography are just fair game. Typically, being a free-speech absolutist means that you think there shouldn’t be any content moderation. And that’s clearly not what he believes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He believes in a lot of content moderation. I think what he means by free-speech absolutism is free speech for the far right, a lot of whom were getting suspended and suppressed in various ways in the old days of Twitter. So he’s undoing that. But I think it also means censorship of the left. I think that’s his version of free-speech absolutism. He is in charge, so he gets to make the rules according to his whims now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Twitter is a private company, so I’m just wondering if you can tell us, is there anything illegal about these suspensions?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Loy: \u003c/b>It does not violate the First Amendment for a private company to decide who it will or will not host on its platform. So this may not be illegal in that sense, but that doesn’t make it a good thing, right? Whether or not Twitter is allowed to ban journalists at will or at whim, I do not believe it should do so. Banning journalists is antithetical to freedom of speech. Elon Musk has called himself a free speech advocate. But by banning journalists from Twitter and impairing their ability to report the news and gather the news, he is violating the very principles that he purports to uphold.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twitter’s a vital news-gathering tool that many journalists rely upon to do their jobs, and the public — now more than ever — depends on journalists to gather, produce, provide and distribute information and facts to promote transparency and accountability and fight disinformation. When Twitter or Facebook or any other platform holds itself out as a common space or a town square, if you will, and engages and invites the public and journalists in particular to participate, then I think it has held itself to a higher obligation than the mere minimum of what the First Amendment requires or allows and should be devoted to freedom of speech, press freedom, and reporting and critiquing the actions of the powerful and the wealthy, and to hold them accountable to the principles that they hold.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>I know some members of Congress are criticizing these suspensions, and I’m just wondering what, if anything, lawmakers can do, given that, again, this is a private company.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Loy: \u003c/b>Certainly it would be beyond the pale for the government to tell Twitter or any other platform who it must host or not, who it must platform or not — just like the government cannot tell a newspaper what content to print or whose articles to print, or whose editorials or letters to print, or whose op-ed to print or not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The First Amendment does guarantee editorial discretion to owners of platforms and publishers. [But] it is certainly within the authority of lawmakers or anyone else to discuss the issue, to express critiques of the particular decision, to say, “Well, Mr. Musk, you have held yourself out as a free speech advocate, and yet you are acting in ways that seem to violate your own principles.” And that’s certainly a fair topic for debate and discussion. But certainly the government should not be in the business of telling or commanding publishers or platforms what they must publish or who they must publish.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Looking forward, should journalists be looking for ways to reduce our dependance on social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook? Is that even possible today?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lee: \u003c/b>Absolutely journalists should be reducing their dependance on any single social media platform. I think that’s a real problem that a lot of journalists have right now, [because they’re] so addicted to Twitter specifically. Like me. I have this big following on Twitter and I don’t really have a big following on all of these other platforms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And this means that Elon Musk can just, at his whim, kick off journalists, kick off whole newsrooms, and then they lose their whole audience. So I think that it will be very wise for journalists to start expanding beyond Twitter and also beyond Facebook and just use multiple platforms, try and build an audience in multiple places so that there’s not a single point of failure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Micah Lee:\u003c/strong> Nope, no communication at all. My account was just suddenly banned and so I’m not even completely sure that this is the reason why. It just seems very likely because it was very shortly after I posted a tweet about ElonJet, and about\u003cb> \u003c/b>20 or 30 minutes later my account got permanently suspended. [But] I’ve spent the last month writing a bunch of articles that are pretty critical of Elon Musk and of the direction Twitter is going in. One of the stories that I reported on was how Elon Musk was basically directly asking right-wing extremists on Twitter who should get kicked off the site. And then in response to that, they kicked off a bunch of very high-profile left-wing accounts that have never broken any rules.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And it was directly at the request of specific right-wing influencers on Twitter. This includes some prominent anti-fascist accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers: CrimethInc., an anarchist collective that’s been publishing books since the ’90s, and just yesterday an anarchist news website called It’s Going Down. So that’s one of the stories that I did.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’ve also reported about a Twitter ban of Distributed Denial of Secrets. This is a group that actually was banned in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests. And they publish “how can we” documents. And so they published some documents that showed a lot of police misconduct, including police spying on activists. And they’ve been banned ever since then. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he started unbanning former President Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene and stuff, but he refuses to unban accounts that aren’t basically on the far right.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>It would seem most of these journalists were reporting about the recent policy changes at Twitter in the suspension of this particular account known as ElonJet. Musk is claiming these reporters were doxxing him by endangering him and his family. I mean, how does that square with your understanding of doxxing?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Loy:\u003c/strong> Reporting on publicly available data is not, in my view, a form of doxxing. Doxxing, as I understand it, is revealing that which is truly private — someone’s Social Security number, someone’s home address. Truly personal, private information. Flight data is publicly available from the FAA or otherwise. There’s any number of websites which track flight data in real time for both commercial and private jets. This is not in any way truly private information that, as I understand it, falls within the ordinary term or ordinary understanding of the term “doxxing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Musk has long touted himself as this so-called free speech absolutist. I’m wondering what you think that even means on today’s Twitter platform or in the context of social media in general.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lee: \u003c/b>Free-speech absolutism is an extreme position to take because it means that Nazi content and child pornography are just fair game. Typically, being a free-speech absolutist means that you think there shouldn’t be any content moderation. And that’s clearly not what he believes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He believes in a lot of content moderation. I think what he means by free-speech absolutism is free speech for the far right, a lot of whom were getting suspended and suppressed in various ways in the old days of Twitter. So he’s undoing that. But I think it also means censorship of the left. I think that’s his version of free-speech absolutism. He is in charge, so he gets to make the rules according to his whims now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Twitter is a private company, so I’m just wondering if you can tell us, is there anything illegal about these suspensions?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Loy: \u003c/b>It does not violate the First Amendment for a private company to decide who it will or will not host on its platform. So this may not be illegal in that sense, but that doesn’t make it a good thing, right? Whether or not Twitter is allowed to ban journalists at will or at whim, I do not believe it should do so. Banning journalists is antithetical to freedom of speech. Elon Musk has called himself a free speech advocate. But by banning journalists from Twitter and impairing their ability to report the news and gather the news, he is violating the very principles that he purports to uphold.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twitter’s a vital news-gathering tool that many journalists rely upon to do their jobs, and the public — now more than ever — depends on journalists to gather, produce, provide and distribute information and facts to promote transparency and accountability and fight disinformation. When Twitter or Facebook or any other platform holds itself out as a common space or a town square, if you will, and engages and invites the public and journalists in particular to participate, then I think it has held itself to a higher obligation than the mere minimum of what the First Amendment requires or allows and should be devoted to freedom of speech, press freedom, and reporting and critiquing the actions of the powerful and the wealthy, and to hold them accountable to the principles that they hold.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>I know some members of Congress are criticizing these suspensions, and I’m just wondering what, if anything, lawmakers can do, given that, again, this is a private company.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Loy: \u003c/b>Certainly it would be beyond the pale for the government to tell Twitter or any other platform who it must host or not, who it must platform or not — just like the government cannot tell a newspaper what content to print or whose articles to print, or whose editorials or letters to print, or whose op-ed to print or not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The First Amendment does guarantee editorial discretion to owners of platforms and publishers. [But] it is certainly within the authority of lawmakers or anyone else to discuss the issue, to express critiques of the particular decision, to say, “Well, Mr. Musk, you have held yourself out as a free speech advocate, and yet you are acting in ways that seem to violate your own principles.” And that’s certainly a fair topic for debate and discussion. But certainly the government should not be in the business of telling or commanding publishers or platforms what they must publish or who they must publish.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Looking forward, should journalists be looking for ways to reduce our dependance on social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook? Is that even possible today?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Lee: \u003c/b>Absolutely journalists should be reducing their dependance on any single social media platform. I think that’s a real problem that a lot of journalists have right now, [because they’re] so addicted to Twitter specifically. Like me. I have this big following on Twitter and I don’t really have a big following on all of these other platforms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And this means that Elon Musk can just, at his whim, kick off journalists, kick off whole newsrooms, and then they lose their whole audience. So I think that it will be very wise for journalists to start expanding beyond Twitter and also beyond Facebook and just use multiple platforms, try and build an audience in multiple places so that there’s not a single point of failure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Amid intense backlash and accusations of violating press freedom, Twitter has reinstated the accounts of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/12/15/1143291081/twitter-suspends-journalists-elon-musk-jet\">several journalists who were suspended\u003c/a> earlier this week, though at least one remains suspended.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Thursday night, the social media platform suspended several reporters who had tweeted or written about Elon Musk’s ownership of the company.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The accounts that went dark included Donie O’Sullivan of CNN; Ryan Mac of \u003cem>The New York Times\u003c/em>; Drew Harwell of \u003cem>The Washington Post\u003c/em>; Micah Lee of The Intercept; and journalist Aaron Rupar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Friday evening, Musk put the decision of whether to reinstate suspended accounts up for a public vote. He \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603600001057185792\">tweeted\u003c/a> an informal poll which asked Twitter users to choose when to “unsuspend accounts who doxxed my exact location in real-time.”[pullquote align=\"right\" size=\"medium\" citation=\"Linette Lopez, reporter, Business Insider\"]‘It’s funny that Elon suddenly has a problem with doxxing and harassing people because he has a history of doing that before people were paying such close attention to him.’[/pullquote]According to the poll, 58.7% of voters favored lifting the suspensions immediately over 41.3% of respondents who said Musk should wait seven more days.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rupar, whose account was reinstated on Friday, said the suspensions signaled Twitter’s instability.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a clear illustration that it is no longer a rules-based company,” Rupar told NPR. “It’s basically a company based on Elon Musk’s whims and the terms of service depend on his mood each day.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Joan Donovan, the research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, thinks this week’s spree of suspensions is only the beginning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The way Musk is targeting particular mainstream journalists, I think we’re going to see more of these shenanigans, and not less, over the next couple of months,” she told NPR’s Michel Martin on \u003cem>All Things Considered.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Linette Lopez, a Business Insider reporter who previously covered Musk, said her account was suspended on Friday after she tweeted court documents that revealed Musk had hacked and doxxed people in the past.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s funny that Elon suddenly has a problem with doxxing and harassing people because he has a history of doing that before people were paying such close attention to him,” she told NPR.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lopez’s account remains suspended. As of Saturday afternoon, Lopez said she still has not heard from Twitter as to why.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NPR has reached out to Twitter and Musk but has not gotten a response.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 class=\"edTag\">It all started with a jet-tracking Twitter account\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Prior to suspending the accounts of the journalists, Musk took issue with several accounts that tracked the movement of private planes used by billionaires, government officials and others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk was particularly concerned with the jet-tracking account, @ElonJet, run by a 20-year-old University of Central Florida student, which Musk alleges was used by a “\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603190155107794944\">crazy stalker\u003c/a>” in Los Angeles to follow one of Musk’s children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Journalists who tweeted or wrote about Musk’s rift with the account found themselves later suspended.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk, a self-professed “free speech absolutist,” has denied accusations that the suspensions were in retaliation for critical coverage. Instead, he argued that the accounts are a “physical safety violation” and can lead to “doxxing,” or sharing of personal information to encourage harassers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” Musk \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603575877538680832\">tweeted\u003c/a> Thursday night.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 class=\"edTag\">Musk’s crackdown was condemned by the UN and EU\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>A number of organizations around the globe have criticized Musk’s apparent silencing of high-profile journalists on Twitter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Melissa Fleming, the United Nations undersecretary-general for global communications, said she was “deeply disturbed” by the suspensions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Media freedom is not a toy. A free press is the cornerstone of democratic societies and a key tool in the fight against harmful disinformation,” Fleming \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MelissaFleming/status/1603763517642907655\">tweeted\u003c/a> on Friday.[aside postID=news_11935529 hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/GettyImages-1240652428-1020x763.jpg']Věra Jourová, the European Commission vice president, warned Twitter of potentially violating the European Union’s Digital Services Act and Media Freedom Act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There are red lines. And sanctions, soon,” Jourová \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/VeraJourova/status/1603689440710369281?s=20&t=dUR9L5132TApMsXHmrkMQQ\">tweeted\u003c/a> Friday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The suspensions have also drawn outrage from several news organizations that are demanding explanations for why their reporters were temporarily banned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Twitter’s increasing instability and volatility should be of incredible concern for everyone who uses the platform,” CNN said in a \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/CNNPR/status/1603579612612665344\">statement \u003c/a>on Thursday. “We will reevaluate our relationship based on that response.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Rupar, though he was initially worried about how the Twitter ban would negatively impact his career, the opposite turned out to be true.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The consequences for me were pretty positive overall,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the hours following his suspension, Rupar said he received an onslaught of support and a mass of followers on his newly created \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/10/1135243276/mastodon-twitter-elon-musk\">Mastodon\u003c/a> account — which he plans to use more frequently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Even though I’m back on Twitter, in light of this experience, it seems like a good time to spend more energy developing a following elsewhere,” Rupar said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>According to the poll, 58.7% of voters favored lifting the suspensions immediately over 41.3% of respondents who said Musk should wait seven more days.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rupar, whose account was reinstated on Friday, said the suspensions signaled Twitter’s instability.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a clear illustration that it is no longer a rules-based company,” Rupar told NPR. “It’s basically a company based on Elon Musk’s whims and the terms of service depend on his mood each day.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Joan Donovan, the research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, thinks this week’s spree of suspensions is only the beginning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The way Musk is targeting particular mainstream journalists, I think we’re going to see more of these shenanigans, and not less, over the next couple of months,” she told NPR’s Michel Martin on \u003cem>All Things Considered.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Linette Lopez, a Business Insider reporter who previously covered Musk, said her account was suspended on Friday after she tweeted court documents that revealed Musk had hacked and doxxed people in the past.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s funny that Elon suddenly has a problem with doxxing and harassing people because he has a history of doing that before people were paying such close attention to him,” she told NPR.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lopez’s account remains suspended. As of Saturday afternoon, Lopez said she still has not heard from Twitter as to why.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NPR has reached out to Twitter and Musk but has not gotten a response.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 class=\"edTag\">It all started with a jet-tracking Twitter account\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Prior to suspending the accounts of the journalists, Musk took issue with several accounts that tracked the movement of private planes used by billionaires, government officials and others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk was particularly concerned with the jet-tracking account, @ElonJet, run by a 20-year-old University of Central Florida student, which Musk alleges was used by a “\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603190155107794944\">crazy stalker\u003c/a>” in Los Angeles to follow one of Musk’s children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Journalists who tweeted or wrote about Musk’s rift with the account found themselves later suspended.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk, a self-professed “free speech absolutist,” has denied accusations that the suspensions were in retaliation for critical coverage. Instead, he argued that the accounts are a “physical safety violation” and can lead to “doxxing,” or sharing of personal information to encourage harassers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” Musk \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603575877538680832\">tweeted\u003c/a> Thursday night.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 class=\"edTag\">Musk’s crackdown was condemned by the UN and EU\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>A number of organizations around the globe have criticized Musk’s apparent silencing of high-profile journalists on Twitter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Melissa Fleming, the United Nations undersecretary-general for global communications, said she was “deeply disturbed” by the suspensions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Media freedom is not a toy. A free press is the cornerstone of democratic societies and a key tool in the fight against harmful disinformation,” Fleming \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MelissaFleming/status/1603763517642907655\">tweeted\u003c/a> on Friday.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Věra Jourová, the European Commission vice president, warned Twitter of potentially violating the European Union’s Digital Services Act and Media Freedom Act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There are red lines. And sanctions, soon,” Jourová \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/VeraJourova/status/1603689440710369281?s=20&t=dUR9L5132TApMsXHmrkMQQ\">tweeted\u003c/a> Friday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The suspensions have also drawn outrage from several news organizations that are demanding explanations for why their reporters were temporarily banned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Twitter’s increasing instability and volatility should be of incredible concern for everyone who uses the platform,” CNN said in a \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/CNNPR/status/1603579612612665344\">statement \u003c/a>on Thursday. “We will reevaluate our relationship based on that response.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Rupar, though he was initially worried about how the Twitter ban would negatively impact his career, the opposite turned out to be true.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The consequences for me were pretty positive overall,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the hours following his suspension, Rupar said he received an onslaught of support and a mass of followers on his newly created \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/10/1135243276/mastodon-twitter-elon-musk\">Mastodon\u003c/a> account — which he plans to use more frequently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Even though I’m back on Twitter, in light of this experience, it seems like a good time to spend more energy developing a following elsewhere,” Rupar said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>News organizations were left scrambling and journalists were reacting with alarm this week following Elon Musk’s abrupt suspension of several reporters who cover Twitter, the latest sign of a growing rift between the social media site and media organizations that have used the platform to build audiences.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Accounts of reporters with The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Voice of America and other publications went dark Thursday. The suspension of journalists continued Friday with the account of a Business Insider columnist who published a series of articles between 2018 and 2021 highlighting what she called dangerous Tesla manufacturing shortcomings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There was an exodus of advertisers shortly after the billionaire’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in October over content moderation and Musk now risks a rupture with media organizations, among the most active on the platform.[aside label=\"Related Stories\" postID=\"news_11935113,forum_2010101891137,news_11934602\"]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The company hasn’t explained to the journalists why it took down the accounts and made their profiles and past tweets disappear. But Musk took to Twitter on Thursday night to accuse journalists of sharing private information about his whereabouts that he described as “basically assassination coordinates.” He provided no evidence for that claim.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Business Insider’s Linette Lopez told The Associated Press that she was given no explanation for the suspension. Shortly before being suspended, she said, she had posted court-related documents to Twitter that included a 2018 Musk email address. That address is not current, said Lopez, because “he changes his email every few weeks. If he wants to call that doxxing, fine.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Tuesday, she posted a 2019 story about Tesla troubles, commenting, “Now, just like then, most of @elonmusk’s wounds are self inflicted.” The same day, she called reports of Musk reneging on severance for laid-off Twitter employees, threatening workers who talk to the press and refusing rent payments “classic Elon-going-for-broke behavior.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alarm over the suspensions extended beyond media circles, however.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“From our standpoint, the move sets a dangerous precedent at a time when journalists all over the world are facing censorship, physical threats and even worse, and we are remaining in touch with officials,” said U.N. spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The sudden suspension of news reporters followed Musk’s decision Wednesday to permanently ban \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-technology-business-social-media-13119e8cc9bbc15a886369263b29087a\">an account that automatically tracked the flights of his private jet\u003c/a> using publicly available data. That also led Twitter to change its rules for all users to prohibit the sharing of another person’s current location without their consent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Several of the reporters suspended Thursday night had been writing about the new policy and Musk’s rationale for imposing it, which involved his allegations about a stalking incident he said affected his family on Tuesday night in Los Angeles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote align=\"right\" size=\"medium\" citation=\"Statement from the Committee to Protect Journalists\"]‘If confirmed as retaliation for their work, this would be a serious violation of journalists’ right to report the news without fear of reprisal.’[/pullquote]The official account for Mastodon, a decentralized social network billed as an alternative to Twitter, was also banned. The reason was unclear, though it had tweeted about the jet-tracking account.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Same doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else,” Musk tweeted Thursday. He later added: “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Doxxing” refers to disclosing online someone’s identity, address or other personal details.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Washington Post’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, called for technology reporter Drew Harwell’s Twitter account to be reinstated immediately. The suspension “directly undermines Elon Musk’s claim that he intends to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech,” Buzbee wrote. “Harwell was banished without warning, process or explanation, following the publication of his accurate reporting about Musk.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CNN said in a statement that “the impulsive and unjustified suspension of a number of reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is concerning but not surprising.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Twitter’s increasing instability and volatility should be of incredible concern for everyone who uses Twitter,” CNN’s statement added. “We have asked Twitter for an explanation, and we will reevaluate our relationship based on that response.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The U.N. is also reconsidering its involvement with Twitter, according to Dujarric.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another suspended journalist, Matt Binder of the technology news outlet Mashable, said he was banned Thursday night immediately after sharing a screenshot that O’Sullivan had posted before his own suspension.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The screenshot showed a statement from the Los Angeles Police Department sent earlier Thursday to multiple media outlets, including The Associated Press, about how it was in touch with Musk’s representatives about the alleged stalking incident.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I did not share any location data, as per Twitter’s new terms. Nor did I share any links to ElonJet or other location tracking accounts,” Binder said in an email. “I have been highly critical of Musk but never broke any of Twitter’s listed policies.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11931830\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/11/005_KQED_Twitter_11072022.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11931830 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/11/005_KQED_Twitter_11072022-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"A partial view from below of a seemingly limestone-brick building, with four floors of windows visible, and a white, vertical, two-story sign, with @twitter in gray, capped by the blue bird Twitter symbol. The photo is framed by shadowy, blurred leaves on the left, and perhaps a roof, a dark, triangle, in the bottom right.\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/11/005_KQED_Twitter_11072022-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/11/005_KQED_Twitter_11072022-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/11/005_KQED_Twitter_11072022-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/11/005_KQED_Twitter_11072022-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/11/005_KQED_Twitter_11072022.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Twitter building in San Francisco. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Late Thursday, Musk briefly joined a Twitter Spaces chat hosted by journalist Katie Notopoulos of BuzzFeed. Musk stood by the suspensions, saying, “You dox, you get suspended, end of story.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He abruptly left the conversation, and, a short time later, all of Twitter Spaces went offline.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some of the journalists who had been suspended, and the creator of the ElonJet Twitter account, were on the Spaces chat with Musk despite the suspension of their Twitter accounts due to what appears to be a technical quirk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk later tweeted, “We’re fixing a Legacy Bug,” and said that the service should be up and running again Friday. It remained dormant Friday afternoon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The suspensions come as Musk makes major changes to content moderation on Twitter. He has tried, through the release of selected company documents dubbed “The Twitter Files,” to claim that the platform suppressed right-wing voices under its previous leaders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He has promised to let free speech reign and has reinstated high-profile accounts that previously broke Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct or harmful misinformation, but also has said he would suppress negativity and hate by depriving some accounts of “freedom of reach.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists, which defends journalists around the world, voiced concern.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If confirmed as retaliation for their work, this would be a serious violation of journalists’ right to report the news without fear of reprisal,” the group said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If suspensions lead to the exodus of media organizations that are highly active on Twitter, the platform would be changed at the fundamental level, said Lou Paskalis, longtime marketing and media executive and former Bank of America head of global media.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CBS briefly shut down its activity on Twitter in November due to “uncertainty” about new management, but media organizations have largely remained on the platform.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We all know news breaks on Twitter — it has been stock and trade since I’ve been using Twitter — and to now go after journalists really saws at the main foundational tentpole of Twitter,” Paskalis said. “Driving journalists off Twitter is the biggest self-inflicted wound I can think of.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The suspensions may be the biggest red flag yet for advertisers, Paskalis said, some of which had already cut their spending on Twitter over uncertainty about the direction Musk is taking the platform.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It is an overt demonstration of what advertisers fear the most,” Paskalis said. “Retribution for an action that Elon doesn’t agree with. That would be the No. 1 reason to pause advertising on Twitter if I haven’t done so already.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Advertisers are also monitoring the potential loss of Twitter users. Twitter is projected to lose 32 million of its users over the next two years, according to a forecast by Insider Intelligence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They’re projecting a nearly 4% drop in 2023 and another 5% drop in 2024, as technical issues and the return of accounts banned for offensive posts return under new Twitter rules.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Associated Press writers Kelvin Chan in London, Frank Jordans in Berlin, Frank Bajak in Boston and Hillel Italie and Edith Lederer in New York, contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Twitter suspended the accounts of several journalists who cover the social media platform in the latest battle over what can and cannot be said on the site since billionaire Elon Musk took control of it.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>News organizations were left scrambling and journalists were reacting with alarm this week following Elon Musk’s abrupt suspension of several reporters who cover Twitter, the latest sign of a growing rift between the social media site and media organizations that have used the platform to build audiences.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Accounts of reporters with The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Voice of America and other publications went dark Thursday. The suspension of journalists continued Friday with the account of a Business Insider columnist who published a series of articles between 2018 and 2021 highlighting what she called dangerous Tesla manufacturing shortcomings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There was an exodus of advertisers shortly after the billionaire’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in October over content moderation and Musk now risks a rupture with media organizations, among the most active on the platform.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The company hasn’t explained to the journalists why it took down the accounts and made their profiles and past tweets disappear. But Musk took to Twitter on Thursday night to accuse journalists of sharing private information about his whereabouts that he described as “basically assassination coordinates.” He provided no evidence for that claim.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Business Insider’s Linette Lopez told The Associated Press that she was given no explanation for the suspension. Shortly before being suspended, she said, she had posted court-related documents to Twitter that included a 2018 Musk email address. That address is not current, said Lopez, because “he changes his email every few weeks. If he wants to call that doxxing, fine.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Tuesday, she posted a 2019 story about Tesla troubles, commenting, “Now, just like then, most of @elonmusk’s wounds are self inflicted.” The same day, she called reports of Musk reneging on severance for laid-off Twitter employees, threatening workers who talk to the press and refusing rent payments “classic Elon-going-for-broke behavior.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Alarm over the suspensions extended beyond media circles, however.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“From our standpoint, the move sets a dangerous precedent at a time when journalists all over the world are facing censorship, physical threats and even worse, and we are remaining in touch with officials,” said U.N. spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The sudden suspension of news reporters followed Musk’s decision Wednesday to permanently ban \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-technology-business-social-media-13119e8cc9bbc15a886369263b29087a\">an account that automatically tracked the flights of his private jet\u003c/a> using publicly available data. That also led Twitter to change its rules for all users to prohibit the sharing of another person’s current location without their consent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Several of the reporters suspended Thursday night had been writing about the new policy and Musk’s rationale for imposing it, which involved his allegations about a stalking incident he said affected his family on Tuesday night in Los Angeles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The official account for Mastodon, a decentralized social network billed as an alternative to Twitter, was also banned. The reason was unclear, though it had tweeted about the jet-tracking account.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Same doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else,” Musk tweeted Thursday. He later added: “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Doxxing” refers to disclosing online someone’s identity, address or other personal details.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Washington Post’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, called for technology reporter Drew Harwell’s Twitter account to be reinstated immediately. The suspension “directly undermines Elon Musk’s claim that he intends to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech,” Buzbee wrote. “Harwell was banished without warning, process or explanation, following the publication of his accurate reporting about Musk.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CNN said in a statement that “the impulsive and unjustified suspension of a number of reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is concerning but not surprising.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Twitter’s increasing instability and volatility should be of incredible concern for everyone who uses Twitter,” CNN’s statement added. “We have asked Twitter for an explanation, and we will reevaluate our relationship based on that response.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The U.N. is also reconsidering its involvement with Twitter, according to Dujarric.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another suspended journalist, Matt Binder of the technology news outlet Mashable, said he was banned Thursday night immediately after sharing a screenshot that O’Sullivan had posted before his own suspension.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The screenshot showed a statement from the Los Angeles Police Department sent earlier Thursday to multiple media outlets, including The Associated Press, about how it was in touch with Musk’s representatives about the alleged stalking incident.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I did not share any location data, as per Twitter’s new terms. Nor did I share any links to ElonJet or other location tracking accounts,” Binder said in an email. “I have been highly critical of Musk but never broke any of Twitter’s listed policies.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11931830\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/11/005_KQED_Twitter_11072022.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11931830 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/11/005_KQED_Twitter_11072022-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"A partial view from below of a seemingly limestone-brick building, with four floors of windows visible, and a white, vertical, two-story sign, with @twitter in gray, capped by the blue bird Twitter symbol. The photo is framed by shadowy, blurred leaves on the left, and perhaps a roof, a dark, triangle, in the bottom right.\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/11/005_KQED_Twitter_11072022-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/11/005_KQED_Twitter_11072022-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/11/005_KQED_Twitter_11072022-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/11/005_KQED_Twitter_11072022-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/11/005_KQED_Twitter_11072022.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Twitter building in San Francisco. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Late Thursday, Musk briefly joined a Twitter Spaces chat hosted by journalist Katie Notopoulos of BuzzFeed. Musk stood by the suspensions, saying, “You dox, you get suspended, end of story.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He abruptly left the conversation, and, a short time later, all of Twitter Spaces went offline.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some of the journalists who had been suspended, and the creator of the ElonJet Twitter account, were on the Spaces chat with Musk despite the suspension of their Twitter accounts due to what appears to be a technical quirk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk later tweeted, “We’re fixing a Legacy Bug,” and said that the service should be up and running again Friday. It remained dormant Friday afternoon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The suspensions come as Musk makes major changes to content moderation on Twitter. He has tried, through the release of selected company documents dubbed “The Twitter Files,” to claim that the platform suppressed right-wing voices under its previous leaders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He has promised to let free speech reign and has reinstated high-profile accounts that previously broke Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct or harmful misinformation, but also has said he would suppress negativity and hate by depriving some accounts of “freedom of reach.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists, which defends journalists around the world, voiced concern.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If confirmed as retaliation for their work, this would be a serious violation of journalists’ right to report the news without fear of reprisal,” the group said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If suspensions lead to the exodus of media organizations that are highly active on Twitter, the platform would be changed at the fundamental level, said Lou Paskalis, longtime marketing and media executive and former Bank of America head of global media.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CBS briefly shut down its activity on Twitter in November due to “uncertainty” about new management, but media organizations have largely remained on the platform.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We all know news breaks on Twitter — it has been stock and trade since I’ve been using Twitter — and to now go after journalists really saws at the main foundational tentpole of Twitter,” Paskalis said. “Driving journalists off Twitter is the biggest self-inflicted wound I can think of.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The suspensions may be the biggest red flag yet for advertisers, Paskalis said, some of which had already cut their spending on Twitter over uncertainty about the direction Musk is taking the platform.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It is an overt demonstration of what advertisers fear the most,” Paskalis said. “Retribution for an action that Elon doesn’t agree with. That would be the No. 1 reason to pause advertising on Twitter if I haven’t done so already.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Advertisers are also monitoring the potential loss of Twitter users. Twitter is projected to lose 32 million of its users over the next two years, according to a forecast by Insider Intelligence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They’re projecting a nearly 4% drop in 2023 and another 5% drop in 2024, as technical issues and the return of accounts banned for offensive posts return under new Twitter rules.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Associated Press writers Kelvin Chan in London, Frank Jordans in Berlin, Frank Bajak in Boston and Hillel Italie and Edith Lederer in New York, contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Mayor London Breed called on Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk on Thursday to rehire the 48 janitors recently fired from their jobs cleaning the company’s headquarters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The janitors — mostly immigrants and women of color — lost their jobs without severance or much notification after Twitter cut its contract with Flagship, the janitorial company that employed them.[pullquote align=\"right\" size=\"medium\" citation=\"SF Mayor London Breed\"]'They deserve more than being put out in the way that they were.'[/pullquote]Breed said the city gave Twitter tax breaks when it set up shop in mid-Market in hopes of revitalizing the neighborhood, and she wants Musk to “respect the people who helped make your company what it is.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She urged him to “be compassionate, to be understanding and to work with this community that has showed up for this company day in and day out … because they deserve more than being put out in the way that they were.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Breed was joined by union leaders and local and state elected officials at a rally outside City Hall. The janitors then marched to Twitter’s office, where they placed plungers and mops marked with the hashtag #justiceforjanitors in front of the building.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The lawyer representing the janitors' union, SEIU Local 87, said she filed unfair labor practice charges against Twitter and the new, nonunion contractor that replaced Flagship earlier this week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11935455\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-11935455\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_2739-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Men place plungers and mops outside a building in downtown San Francisco.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1920\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_2739-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_2739-800x600.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_2739-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_2739-160x120.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_2739-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_2739-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_2739-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The janitors placed plungers and mops marked with the hashtag #justiceforjanitors in front of the building. \u003ccite>(Daisy Nguyen/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Attorney EmilyRose Johns vowed to file lawsuits next week against the two companies, alleging they violated city and state laws that are meant to protect displaced workers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twitter and the new contractor, Cabalen MB Food Group, have not returned requests for comment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The janitors say they’re left in limbo as the holidays approach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“With less than two weeks before Christmas, we’re trying to figure out what’s the outlook for us as far as being able to put food on the table and what our Christmas is going to look like in comparison to his Christmas,” Carolina Ayala said about the billionaire entrepreneur.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sui Bing Liao, 56, who has worked overnight cleaning Twitter’s office for the last 10 years, said she wasn’t sure how she was going to cover her December bills. Liao says she earns less than $14 per hour, which isn’t enough to live on in an expensive city like San Francisco, but the hours allow her to work a day job caring for older people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When Elon Musk took over and began letting people go, we were scared. My friends told me to start looking for another job but this all happened so fast I wasn’t prepared,” Liao said in Cantonese.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reality hit her, she said, when she showed up to work one night and was turned away at the door.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Breed said the city gave Twitter tax breaks when it set up shop in mid-Market in hopes of revitalizing the neighborhood, and she wants Musk to “respect the people who helped make your company what it is.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She urged him to “be compassionate, to be understanding and to work with this community that has showed up for this company day in and day out … because they deserve more than being put out in the way that they were.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Breed was joined by union leaders and local and state elected officials at a rally outside City Hall. The janitors then marched to Twitter’s office, where they placed plungers and mops marked with the hashtag #justiceforjanitors in front of the building.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The lawyer representing the janitors' union, SEIU Local 87, said she filed unfair labor practice charges against Twitter and the new, nonunion contractor that replaced Flagship earlier this week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11935455\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-11935455\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_2739-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Men place plungers and mops outside a building in downtown San Francisco.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1920\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_2739-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_2739-800x600.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_2739-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_2739-160x120.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_2739-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_2739-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_2739-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The janitors placed plungers and mops marked with the hashtag #justiceforjanitors in front of the building. \u003ccite>(Daisy Nguyen/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Attorney EmilyRose Johns vowed to file lawsuits next week against the two companies, alleging they violated city and state laws that are meant to protect displaced workers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twitter and the new contractor, Cabalen MB Food Group, have not returned requests for comment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The janitors say they’re left in limbo as the holidays approach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“With less than two weeks before Christmas, we’re trying to figure out what’s the outlook for us as far as being able to put food on the table and what our Christmas is going to look like in comparison to his Christmas,” Carolina Ayala said about the billionaire entrepreneur.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sui Bing Liao, 56, who has worked overnight cleaning Twitter’s office for the last 10 years, said she wasn’t sure how she was going to cover her December bills. Liao says she earns less than $14 per hour, which isn’t enough to live on in an expensive city like San Francisco, but the hours allow her to work a day job caring for older people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When Elon Musk took over and began letting people go, we were scared. My friends told me to start looking for another job but this all happened so fast I wasn’t prepared,” Liao said in Cantonese.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reality hit her, she said, when she showed up to work one night and was turned away at the door.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Two women who lost their jobs at Twitter when billionaire Elon Musk took over are suing the company in federal court, claiming that last month’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11931134/twitter-begins-mass-layoffs-one-week-after-musk-takeover\">abrupt mass layoffs of thousands of workers\u003c/a> disproportionately affected female employees.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The discrimination lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal challenges over Musk’s rapid decimation of Twitter’s workforce.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Days after the world’s richest man bought the social media platform for $44 billion, the company on Nov. 4 told about half of its employees that they no longer had a job but would get three months’ severance. The lawsuit filed in a San Francisco federal court this week alleges that 57% of Twitter’s female employees were laid off, compared to fewer than half of its male workers, despite Twitter employing more men overall before the layoffs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The cutbacks continued throughout November as Musk fired engineers who questioned or criticized him and gave all remaining employees the choice to resign with severance or sign a form pledging “extremely hardcore” work, long hours and dedication to Twitter’s new direction. Scores more lost their jobs after declining to make the pledge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside label=\"related coverage\" tag=\"twitter\"]The lawsuit additionally contends that the required pledge also disproportionately harmed women, “who are more often caregivers for children and other family members, and thus not able to comply with such demands.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Francisco-based Twitter started the year with about 7,500 employees worldwide, according to a filing with securities regulators. Now a private company under Musk, it hasn’t disclosed how many employees remain. Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The lawsuit was filed late Wednesday for former employees Carolina Bernal Strifling and Willow Wren Turkal on behalf of similarly situated female workers. The plaintiffs, who are scheduled to speak about the lawsuit on Thursday, are represented by prominent Boston workers’ rights attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who ran an unsuccessful \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/boston-massachusetts-whole-foods-market-inc-edward-markey-workers-rights-52d1e6f83ee060d5ffc328cf20ac59b5\">Democratic primary campaign\u003c/a> for Massachusetts attorney general earlier this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The suit also alleges that the disparity between laid-off male and female employees in engineering-related roles is even greater than the overall gap, with 63% of women in those roles laid off, compared to 48% of men in similar jobs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The mass termination of employees at Twitter has impacted female employees to a much greater extent than male employees – and to a highly statistically significant degree,” Liss-Riordan wrote in the lawsuit. “Moreover, Elon Musk has made a number of publicly discriminatory remarks about women, further confirming that the mass termination’s greater impact on female employees resulted from discrimination.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Speaking outside the courthouse before a hearing, Liss-Riordan said she wanted to show that “the richest man in the world is not above the law.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Musk and Twitter think they’re never going to be held accountable in court. We are arguing that the arbitration agreements (signed by Twitter staff) are not enforceable. But if we have to go through arbirtration one by one, we are ready to do that,” Liss-Riordan said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Of all the issues facing Elon Musk, this is the easiest to address: treat the workers with respect, pay them what they deserve under the law,” she added.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The lawsuit adds to a number of examples of discharged Twitter employees in the U.S. and elsewhere fighting back. One group of employees is filing individual arbitration claims in California because the documents employees signed when joining the company waived their rights to a class-action lawsuit and jury trial.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As of today, we’ve filed five,” said their attorney Lisa Bloom in an email Thursday. “The number will continue to rise daily.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Ireland, a senior executive is fighting the company in court to get her job back after she didn’t respond to Musk’s email demanding employees make his pledge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sinead McSweeney, Twitter’s global vice president for public policy, won a temporary injunction last week preventing Twitter from terminating her employment, according to Irish news reports. The company told the Irish High Court that its human resources department intended to enter into talks with McSweeney to resolve the dispute, the reports said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a sworn statement to the court, McSweeney said many staffers in Twitter’s European headquarters in Dublin “expressed concerns and confusion” about Musk’s email.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McSweeney said she was forced to make a “completely artificial decision” that “placed me in an impossible and extraordinarily unfair and unjust position” between accepting a “unilateral change” in her terms of employment or being fired through a “sham resignation.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After her lawyers received assurances from Twitter that her employment was still valid, she tried to return to the Dublin office, but found her access pass didn’t work. Security officials said they’d need to check with human resources to verify she was still an employee.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I felt utterly humiliated, deeply confused and was reduced to tears in a public place,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Two women who lost their jobs at Twitter when billionaire Elon Musk took over are suing the company in federal court, claiming that last month’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11931134/twitter-begins-mass-layoffs-one-week-after-musk-takeover\">abrupt mass layoffs of thousands of workers\u003c/a> disproportionately affected female employees.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The discrimination lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal challenges over Musk’s rapid decimation of Twitter’s workforce.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Days after the world’s richest man bought the social media platform for $44 billion, the company on Nov. 4 told about half of its employees that they no longer had a job but would get three months’ severance. The lawsuit filed in a San Francisco federal court this week alleges that 57% of Twitter’s female employees were laid off, compared to fewer than half of its male workers, despite Twitter employing more men overall before the layoffs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The cutbacks continued throughout November as Musk fired engineers who questioned or criticized him and gave all remaining employees the choice to resign with severance or sign a form pledging “extremely hardcore” work, long hours and dedication to Twitter’s new direction. Scores more lost their jobs after declining to make the pledge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The lawsuit additionally contends that the required pledge also disproportionately harmed women, “who are more often caregivers for children and other family members, and thus not able to comply with such demands.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Francisco-based Twitter started the year with about 7,500 employees worldwide, according to a filing with securities regulators. Now a private company under Musk, it hasn’t disclosed how many employees remain. Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The lawsuit was filed late Wednesday for former employees Carolina Bernal Strifling and Willow Wren Turkal on behalf of similarly situated female workers. The plaintiffs, who are scheduled to speak about the lawsuit on Thursday, are represented by prominent Boston workers’ rights attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who ran an unsuccessful \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/boston-massachusetts-whole-foods-market-inc-edward-markey-workers-rights-52d1e6f83ee060d5ffc328cf20ac59b5\">Democratic primary campaign\u003c/a> for Massachusetts attorney general earlier this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The suit also alleges that the disparity between laid-off male and female employees in engineering-related roles is even greater than the overall gap, with 63% of women in those roles laid off, compared to 48% of men in similar jobs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The mass termination of employees at Twitter has impacted female employees to a much greater extent than male employees – and to a highly statistically significant degree,” Liss-Riordan wrote in the lawsuit. “Moreover, Elon Musk has made a number of publicly discriminatory remarks about women, further confirming that the mass termination’s greater impact on female employees resulted from discrimination.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Speaking outside the courthouse before a hearing, Liss-Riordan said she wanted to show that “the richest man in the world is not above the law.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Musk and Twitter think they’re never going to be held accountable in court. We are arguing that the arbitration agreements (signed by Twitter staff) are not enforceable. But if we have to go through arbirtration one by one, we are ready to do that,” Liss-Riordan said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Of all the issues facing Elon Musk, this is the easiest to address: treat the workers with respect, pay them what they deserve under the law,” she added.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The lawsuit adds to a number of examples of discharged Twitter employees in the U.S. and elsewhere fighting back. One group of employees is filing individual arbitration claims in California because the documents employees signed when joining the company waived their rights to a class-action lawsuit and jury trial.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As of today, we’ve filed five,” said their attorney Lisa Bloom in an email Thursday. “The number will continue to rise daily.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Ireland, a senior executive is fighting the company in court to get her job back after she didn’t respond to Musk’s email demanding employees make his pledge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sinead McSweeney, Twitter’s global vice president for public policy, won a temporary injunction last week preventing Twitter from terminating her employment, according to Irish news reports. The company told the Irish High Court that its human resources department intended to enter into talks with McSweeney to resolve the dispute, the reports said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a sworn statement to the court, McSweeney said many staffers in Twitter’s European headquarters in Dublin “expressed concerns and confusion” about Musk’s email.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McSweeney said she was forced to make a “completely artificial decision” that “placed me in an impossible and extraordinarily unfair and unjust position” between accepting a “unilateral change” in her terms of employment or being fired through a “sham resignation.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After her lawyers received assurances from Twitter that her employment was still valid, she tried to return to the Dublin office, but found her access pass didn’t work. Security officials said they’d need to check with human resources to verify she was still an employee.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I felt utterly humiliated, deeply confused and was reduced to tears in a public place,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Twitter's Former Safety Chief Warns Musk Is Moving Fast and 'Breaking Things'",
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"content": "\u003cp>Elon Musk's rapid changes at Twitter are risking the safety of its most vulnerable users around the world, including human rights activists, free speech advocates and marginalized people in autocratic countries, according to the social network's former head of trust and safety. [aside postID=news_11930570 hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/10/GettyImages-1244262469-1-1020x578.jpg']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"People need to very thoughtfully and carefully weigh the costs and benefits of using Twitter, given their personal security situation,\" Yoel Roth, who resigned from his position as Twitter's Head of Trust & Safety, told \u003cem>All Things Considered\u003c/em> host Ari Shapiro. \"And that's a terrifying prospect to have to come to terms with, especially for many people who have spent the better part of a decade building a platform and an audience and a community on Twitter.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter in late October, the billionaire has upended the company and the platform, sowing chaos and confusion for employees, users and the advertisers it depends on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk has rapidly transformed Twitter's previous approach to what is and isn't allowed. He reinstated accounts that had been barred for violating Twitter's rules, including that of former President Donald Trump, who was banned after the Jan. 6th, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last week, Musk announced a \"general amnesty\" for many suspended accounts (\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/12/01/1140166140/kanye-west-ye-parler\">although he also suspended Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, on Thursday after Ye posted an image of a swastika inside a Star of David\u003c/a>). This week, Twitter quietly updated its online rulebook to say \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/29/1139822833/twitter-covid-misinformation-policy-not-enforced\">it was no longer enforcing policies against misleading claims about COVID-19\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/17/1137413251/twitter-employees-quit-elon-musk\">Meanwhile Musk laid off half the company's staff and issued an ultimatum asking remaining employees to commit to a new \"hardcore\" Twitter or resign\u003c/a>. \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/30/1139924914/twitters-chaos-could-make-political-violence-worse-outside-of-the-u-s\">That's dramatically shrunk the number of people working to keep Twitter users safe\u003c/a>. The cuts include contract content moderators, the company's human rights team and investigators working to curb political manipulation and child sexual abuse material.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"That's the real risk. You can't do this work with a skeleton crew,\" Roth said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twitter, which no longer has a communications staff, did not respond to a request for comment. \u003ca href=\"https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2022/twitter-2-0-our-continued-commitment-to-the-public-conversation\">In a blog post this week signed by \"The Twitter Team,\"\u003c/a> the company said its policies have not changed and that it \"continues its diligent work to keep the platform safe from hateful conduct, abusive behavior, and any violation of Twitter's rules.\" It said the trust and safety team \"remains strong and well-resourced.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Roth said Twitter had been justifiably criticized for being too slow to change. But Musk's rapid transformation of the small, but highly influential, social network alarms him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"In place of that perhaps overly slow culture, Mr. Musk is introducing a culture of moving quickly and, unfortunately, breaking things as a result,\" Roth said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the nearly eight years Roth spent at Twitter, he saw the company through a cascade of crises, from Russian interference in the 2016 election to the company's unprecedented decision to ban Trump.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After Musk took control, Roth was one of the few high-level executives remaining at the company as the new owner fired top management.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Musk on Twitter versus Musk in private\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Roth described a gap between Musk's public persona as a brash and capricious autocrat – Musk changed his bio to \"Chief Twit\" after closing the deal – and the seasoned executive whom Roth interacted with.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Those caricatures weren't true to my experience with him,\" Roth said. \"A lot of the times in the weeks that we worked together, when a situation would come up and I would explain the rules, I would explain the factors influencing the situation, and I would suggest a course of action that was aligned with our policies, he would listen to and, oftentimes, accept that approach.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, one of Musk's first priorities was to bring back some controversial accounts, including the Babylon Bee, a conservative satirical site that was suspended for misgendering a Biden administration official.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Roth and Musk discussed whether reinstating the account would entail a broader change to Twitter's rules against misgendering or be a singular exception.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"[Musk] was convinced ultimately that taking that kind of one-off action would undermine Twitter's rules and would create gaps in consistency of enforcement that would make Twitter a less trustworthy place,\" Roth said. (Musk would go on to reinstate the Babylon Bee's account along with others after Roth resigned).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But as the days went on, Roth found that wasn't always the case. When Musk took over, Roth wrote down \"red lines\" he was unwilling to cross, including breaking the law and lying publicly. An important one: he would only stay as long as decisions were made based on Twitter's policies and principles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"What matters to me, ultimately, is not the decision, but how the decision is made,\" he said. \"I wouldn't want to be a part of undermining [Twitter's approach to governing the platform] with capricious decision-making. And unfortunately, that's what happened.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Roth resigned from Twitter on Nov. 10th, a day after Twitter's botched rollout of an $8 a month subscription plan giving users blue checkmarks. The checks previously indicated the company had verified the identity of high-profile users, but under the new program, Twitter wasn't making any effort to confirm subscribers were who they claimed to be.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That unleashed a flood of accounts impersonating politicians, celebrities and big brands, further inflaming relations with advertisers, who were already wary of the platform's direction under Musk. Roth's team had prepared a lengthy document warning how the feature could be abused in exactly this way, and proposing guardrails to mitigate those risks, but was largely ignored.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just the day before he quit, Roth had appeared with Musk in a public Twitter audio chat where they attempted to reassure advertisers that the platform was still a safe place for their brands.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Advertisers flee, hate speech increases\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Less than a month after Musk took over, half of Twitter's top 100 advertisers appeared to have halted spending on the platform, according to data compiled by the liberal nonprofit \u003ca href=\"https://www.mediamatters.org/elon-musk/less-month-elon-musk-has-driven-away-half-twitters-top-100-advertisers\">Media Matters for America\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Civil rights groups have documented a rise in hate speech on Twitter since Musk took over. The company had said a trolling campaign originating on far-right message boards drove a surge in racist, homophobic and antisemitic slurs right after the deal closed, but that it had stepped up enforcement and banned many of the accounts responsible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Friday, Musk tweeted a graph showing \"impressions\" of hate speech – meaning how many times people saw such tweets – are lower than the level before he took control.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But a new report from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate found the daily number of tweets containing hateful terms was \"substantially higher\" in late November, compared to the baseline before he bought Twitter. The number of tweets with the n-word tripled in that time, for example.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598755659499044879\">Musk disputed CCDH's report as \"utterly false\"\u003c/a> and said \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598758363650719756\">hate speech impressions are less than 0.1% of what's seen on Twitter\u003c/a>. He pledged to publish the rate of hate speech impressions weekly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Roth said he and former colleagues are \"heartbroken\" to see what's happening to their efforts to keep Twitter users safe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"What happens on Twitter can move markets, can change elections, and it can impact the safety of millions of people around the world,\" he said. \"More than anything else, people [who have left the company] are worried about what will happen, given Twitter's importance in the world, if there isn't a team left to do that type of work.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org.\">npr.org\u003c/a>.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Twitter%27s+former+safety+chief+warns+Musk+is+moving+fast+and+%22breaking+things%22&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"People need to very thoughtfully and carefully weigh the costs and benefits of using Twitter, given their personal security situation,\" Yoel Roth, who resigned from his position as Twitter's Head of Trust & Safety, told \u003cem>All Things Considered\u003c/em> host Ari Shapiro. \"And that's a terrifying prospect to have to come to terms with, especially for many people who have spent the better part of a decade building a platform and an audience and a community on Twitter.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter in late October, the billionaire has upended the company and the platform, sowing chaos and confusion for employees, users and the advertisers it depends on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk has rapidly transformed Twitter's previous approach to what is and isn't allowed. He reinstated accounts that had been barred for violating Twitter's rules, including that of former President Donald Trump, who was banned after the Jan. 6th, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last week, Musk announced a \"general amnesty\" for many suspended accounts (\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/12/01/1140166140/kanye-west-ye-parler\">although he also suspended Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, on Thursday after Ye posted an image of a swastika inside a Star of David\u003c/a>). This week, Twitter quietly updated its online rulebook to say \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/29/1139822833/twitter-covid-misinformation-policy-not-enforced\">it was no longer enforcing policies against misleading claims about COVID-19\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/17/1137413251/twitter-employees-quit-elon-musk\">Meanwhile Musk laid off half the company's staff and issued an ultimatum asking remaining employees to commit to a new \"hardcore\" Twitter or resign\u003c/a>. \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/30/1139924914/twitters-chaos-could-make-political-violence-worse-outside-of-the-u-s\">That's dramatically shrunk the number of people working to keep Twitter users safe\u003c/a>. The cuts include contract content moderators, the company's human rights team and investigators working to curb political manipulation and child sexual abuse material.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"That's the real risk. You can't do this work with a skeleton crew,\" Roth said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twitter, which no longer has a communications staff, did not respond to a request for comment. \u003ca href=\"https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2022/twitter-2-0-our-continued-commitment-to-the-public-conversation\">In a blog post this week signed by \"The Twitter Team,\"\u003c/a> the company said its policies have not changed and that it \"continues its diligent work to keep the platform safe from hateful conduct, abusive behavior, and any violation of Twitter's rules.\" It said the trust and safety team \"remains strong and well-resourced.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Roth said Twitter had been justifiably criticized for being too slow to change. But Musk's rapid transformation of the small, but highly influential, social network alarms him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"In place of that perhaps overly slow culture, Mr. Musk is introducing a culture of moving quickly and, unfortunately, breaking things as a result,\" Roth said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the nearly eight years Roth spent at Twitter, he saw the company through a cascade of crises, from Russian interference in the 2016 election to the company's unprecedented decision to ban Trump.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After Musk took control, Roth was one of the few high-level executives remaining at the company as the new owner fired top management.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Musk on Twitter versus Musk in private\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Roth described a gap between Musk's public persona as a brash and capricious autocrat – Musk changed his bio to \"Chief Twit\" after closing the deal – and the seasoned executive whom Roth interacted with.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Those caricatures weren't true to my experience with him,\" Roth said. \"A lot of the times in the weeks that we worked together, when a situation would come up and I would explain the rules, I would explain the factors influencing the situation, and I would suggest a course of action that was aligned with our policies, he would listen to and, oftentimes, accept that approach.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, one of Musk's first priorities was to bring back some controversial accounts, including the Babylon Bee, a conservative satirical site that was suspended for misgendering a Biden administration official.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Roth and Musk discussed whether reinstating the account would entail a broader change to Twitter's rules against misgendering or be a singular exception.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"[Musk] was convinced ultimately that taking that kind of one-off action would undermine Twitter's rules and would create gaps in consistency of enforcement that would make Twitter a less trustworthy place,\" Roth said. (Musk would go on to reinstate the Babylon Bee's account along with others after Roth resigned).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But as the days went on, Roth found that wasn't always the case. When Musk took over, Roth wrote down \"red lines\" he was unwilling to cross, including breaking the law and lying publicly. An important one: he would only stay as long as decisions were made based on Twitter's policies and principles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"What matters to me, ultimately, is not the decision, but how the decision is made,\" he said. \"I wouldn't want to be a part of undermining [Twitter's approach to governing the platform] with capricious decision-making. And unfortunately, that's what happened.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Roth resigned from Twitter on Nov. 10th, a day after Twitter's botched rollout of an $8 a month subscription plan giving users blue checkmarks. The checks previously indicated the company had verified the identity of high-profile users, but under the new program, Twitter wasn't making any effort to confirm subscribers were who they claimed to be.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That unleashed a flood of accounts impersonating politicians, celebrities and big brands, further inflaming relations with advertisers, who were already wary of the platform's direction under Musk. Roth's team had prepared a lengthy document warning how the feature could be abused in exactly this way, and proposing guardrails to mitigate those risks, but was largely ignored.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just the day before he quit, Roth had appeared with Musk in a public Twitter audio chat where they attempted to reassure advertisers that the platform was still a safe place for their brands.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Advertisers flee, hate speech increases\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Less than a month after Musk took over, half of Twitter's top 100 advertisers appeared to have halted spending on the platform, according to data compiled by the liberal nonprofit \u003ca href=\"https://www.mediamatters.org/elon-musk/less-month-elon-musk-has-driven-away-half-twitters-top-100-advertisers\">Media Matters for America\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Civil rights groups have documented a rise in hate speech on Twitter since Musk took over. The company had said a trolling campaign originating on far-right message boards drove a surge in racist, homophobic and antisemitic slurs right after the deal closed, but that it had stepped up enforcement and banned many of the accounts responsible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Friday, Musk tweeted a graph showing \"impressions\" of hate speech – meaning how many times people saw such tweets – are lower than the level before he took control.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But a new report from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate found the daily number of tweets containing hateful terms was \"substantially higher\" in late November, compared to the baseline before he bought Twitter. The number of tweets with the n-word tripled in that time, for example.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598755659499044879\">Musk disputed CCDH's report as \"utterly false\"\u003c/a> and said \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598758363650719756\">hate speech impressions are less than 0.1% of what's seen on Twitter\u003c/a>. He pledged to publish the rate of hate speech impressions weekly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Roth said he and former colleagues are \"heartbroken\" to see what's happening to their efforts to keep Twitter users safe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"What happens on Twitter can move markets, can change elections, and it can impact the safety of millions of people around the world,\" he said. \"More than anything else, people [who have left the company] are worried about what will happen, given Twitter's importance in the world, if there isn't a team left to do that type of work.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org.\">npr.org\u003c/a>.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Twitter%27s+former+safety+chief+warns+Musk+is+moving+fast+and+%22breaking+things%22&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Impersonators paying for \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/25/1139218045/twitter-verification-subscription-relaunch-elon-musk\">blue “verified” checkmarks\u003c/a>. A \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/17/1137413251/twitter-employees-quit-elon-musk\">decimated team of workers\u003c/a> enforcing rules against hate speech and other violating posts. A \u003ca href=\"https://www.dailydot.com/debug/antifa-twitter-accounts-list-telegram/\">mass reporting campaign\u003c/a> by right-wing activists targeting political opponents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under the chaotic changes unleashed by Elon Musk, Twitter users in the U.S. are confronting problems that have long plagued the social network in other parts of the world – and which are at risk of getting even worse under its new billionaire owner, according to human rights and freedom of expression advocates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It is not clear to me at all that Musk knows the kinds of liability he’s creating with these sort of antics,” said Thenmozhi Soundararajan, executive director of Equality Labs, which advocates for the rights of Dalits, the community at the bottom of India’s caste hierarchy. “I think Musk lacks the cultural competency, he’s not getting proper legal advice around this issue, and so he’s endangering millions of people’s lives just for his whims,” she said.[aside label=\"related coverage\" tag=\"twitter\"]While Musk hasn’t publicly spoken about the implications of his vision for Twitter outside the U.S., activists and advocates point to a wealth of examples of how social media has enabled and exacerbated political, ethnic and religious conflicts, from \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/12/14/1064011279/facebook-is-being-sued-by-rohingya-refugees-over-myanmar-violence\">genocide in Myanmar\u003c/a> to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/07/18/629731693/fake-news-turns-deadly-in-india\">mob killings in India\u003c/a> to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/10/15/1046106922/social-media-misinformation-stokes-a-worsening-civil-war-in-ethiopia\">civil war in Ethiopia\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The majority world, the global south, is an expert in all of these issues,” said Mishi Choudhary, a lawyer and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, an Indian digital rights organization. “I generally say that we have been watching the same reality TV show,” she added, and “India is two or three seasons ahead” of the West.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Layoffs decimate internationally-focused teams \u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Musk’s recent announcement that he will grant many suspended Twitter accounts \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/25/1139197362/elon-musk-says-he-will-grant-amnesty-to-suspended-twitter-accounts\">“amnesty,”\u003c/a> following an unscientific poll of Twitter users, is escalating alarm about how the platform could be abused. The company has already begun to reinstate some 62,000 accounts with more than 10,000 followers, according to the tech newsletter \u003ca href=\"https://www.platformer.news/p/why-some-tech-ceos-are-rooting-for\">Platformer\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Twitter and every other platform have always struggled to effectively enforce content moderation guidelines and other policies outside of the U.S. and especially in non-Western countries,” said Shannon McGregor, a communications professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “They don’t have enough people who understand the language and the culture and the politics to be involved in these things.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And that was before Musk laid off more than half of Twitter’s staff, with \u003ca href=\"https://restofworld.org/2022/global-twitter-employees-layoffs/\">teams outside the U.S.\u003c/a> hit especially hard, and eliminated thousands of contractors, many of whom do the difficult daily work of monitoring millions of tweets. Hundreds more employees have resigned rather than commit to the CEO’s call for a new \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/16/1137105935/twitter-elon-musk-ultimatum\">“hardcore” Twitter\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twitter’s \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/ShannonRSingh/status/1588591603622772736\">human rights team\u003c/a> is gone. So is a group of investigators tracking state-backed domestic manipulation efforts in high-risk countries including Honduras, Ethiopia and India, according to a former employee. Its team fighting propaganda has been “radically reduced,” the \u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/27/twitter-china-spam-protests/\">\u003cem>Washington Post \u003c/em>reported\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twitter, which has laid off its communications staff, didn’t respond to NPR’s questions for this story. In a \u003ca href=\"https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2022/twitter-2-0-our-continued-commitment-to-the-public-conversation\">blog post\u003c/a> published Thursday, the company said its policies had not changed and it remained “committed to providing a safe, inclusive, entertaining, and informative experience for everyone.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our Trust & Safety team continues its diligent work to keep the platform safe from hateful conduct, abusive behavior, and any violation of Twitter’s rules,” the post, signed by “The Twitter Team,” said. “The team remains strong and well-resourced, and automated detection plays an increasingly important role in eliminating abuse.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But automation is not perfect: this week, Twitter’s software failed to detect newly posted videos of the 2019 attack on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The company only removed the clips after it was alerted by the New Zealand government, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/28/twitter-failed-to-detect-upload-of-christchurch-mosque-terror-attack-videos\">\u003cem>The Guardian\u003c/em>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Automated systems also require human input to reflect the cultural and linguistic challenges of a company that operates around the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Before Musk acquired Twitter, it was understood within the company that markets in South Asia, including India, were countries in which mass atrocity was agreed to be occurring. … One tweet could set off a pogrom,” Soundararajan said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As part of Twitter’s trust and safety council – an outside group of advisers – Soundararajan’s group worked with the company, giving feedback on potential risks of various features and developing lists of racist, casteist and sexist slurs used to help police the platform.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since Musk took control, the trust and safety council group hasn’t met with or heard from the new owner – despite his claim he wanted to set up an outside \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/10/31/1132906782/elon-musk-twitter-pelosi-conspiracy\">“content moderation council.”\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve gotten an email early in November that basically acknowledged the staffing changes and let us know that they were going to reach back out in December,” Soundararajan said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, the Twitter staffers Soundararajan typically communicates with have disappeared. “Our emails bounce back,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Potential for blue checkmark abuse\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Against that backdrop, Musk’s plans to relaunch a subscription offering that would give accounts checkmark badges – previously used to indicate Twitter had verified the identity of high-profile accounts – are a source of additional concern.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The initial rollout of the feature allowed anyone to buy an $8 monthly subscription and receive a blue checkmark with no identity verification. Immediately, accounts popped up impersonating celebrities, companies and politicians, forcing Twitter to halt signups.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk has said the feature will return, with different colored checkmarks for different kinds of accounts, and that going forward, all verified accounts will be “manually authenticated.” It’s not clear how Twitter will authenticate accounts or if it has sufficient staff to do so.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Former employees and experts warn the risk of abuse is high, especially by those seeking to use the feature to influence public conversation, given that subscribers are being promised greater amplification on Twitter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The possibility for different kinds of media manipulation and disinformation campaigns to proliferate is enormous,” said Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Long before Musk actually put the checkmarks up for sale, Twitter has struggled with bad actors illicitly selling verified accounts in places like the Middle East, Turkey and Africa.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Nigeria, for example, verified accounts have traded hands for at least $5,000 in the past, according to Rosemary Ajayi, lead researcher at the Digital Africa Research Lab. One account impersonating Nigeria’s ruling party managed to retain a verified check from 2015 to 2019, accumulating a million followers along the way, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s expensive, but people are doing it, in a country where there is a high level of poverty. So then how [many] more would buy it at the rate of $8 a month?” she asked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The risk will only grow amid a slew of upcoming elections, from Nigeria, Turkey and Thailand in 2023, to India, Mexico, Taiwan, European Parliament and, of course, the U.S. presidential race in 2024.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Free speech outside of the U.S.\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Even as they worry about how Musk’s changes could make Twitter more dangerous, freedom of expression advocates are also left wondering what his avowed commitment to free speech will mean outside America.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twitter is \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/05/business/twitter-india-lawsuit.html\">suing the Indian government\u003c/a> over orders to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/02/17/968641246/twitter-in-standoff-with-indias-government-over-free-speech-and-local-law\">censor critics\u003c/a> of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and has resisted some of Modi’s efforts to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/06/10/1004387255/india-and-tech-companies-clash-over-censorship-privacy-and-digital-colonialism\">clamp down on social media\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“His free speech concerns seem to have only been about the people he thinks should be on this platform, who are U.S.-centric people with a certain kind of politics,” said Choudhary, the Indian digital-rights lawyer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even though only a small proportion of India’s 1.4 billion people use Twitter, it’s influential among politicians, the media and activists. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She said it’s unclear what Musk’s relationship with the Indian government will be like – especially considering he has other business interests in the country with his role as CEO of electric-car maker Tesla.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I rely on the fact that Twitter does not cave in to the pressure of my government and continues to allow me to speak, no matter what I’m speaking against them,” Choudhary said. “I don’t think that he has shown any indication that he’s going to be able to do that, or [that] he’s going to continue, whether it’s the lawsuit or any resistance against the government.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Twitter%27s+chaos+could+make+political+violence+worse+outside+of+the+U.S.&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Impersonators paying for \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/25/1139218045/twitter-verification-subscription-relaunch-elon-musk\">blue “verified” checkmarks\u003c/a>. A \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/17/1137413251/twitter-employees-quit-elon-musk\">decimated team of workers\u003c/a> enforcing rules against hate speech and other violating posts. A \u003ca href=\"https://www.dailydot.com/debug/antifa-twitter-accounts-list-telegram/\">mass reporting campaign\u003c/a> by right-wing activists targeting political opponents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under the chaotic changes unleashed by Elon Musk, Twitter users in the U.S. are confronting problems that have long plagued the social network in other parts of the world – and which are at risk of getting even worse under its new billionaire owner, according to human rights and freedom of expression advocates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It is not clear to me at all that Musk knows the kinds of liability he’s creating with these sort of antics,” said Thenmozhi Soundararajan, executive director of Equality Labs, which advocates for the rights of Dalits, the community at the bottom of India’s caste hierarchy. “I think Musk lacks the cultural competency, he’s not getting proper legal advice around this issue, and so he’s endangering millions of people’s lives just for his whims,” she said.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>While Musk hasn’t publicly spoken about the implications of his vision for Twitter outside the U.S., activists and advocates point to a wealth of examples of how social media has enabled and exacerbated political, ethnic and religious conflicts, from \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/12/14/1064011279/facebook-is-being-sued-by-rohingya-refugees-over-myanmar-violence\">genocide in Myanmar\u003c/a> to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/07/18/629731693/fake-news-turns-deadly-in-india\">mob killings in India\u003c/a> to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/10/15/1046106922/social-media-misinformation-stokes-a-worsening-civil-war-in-ethiopia\">civil war in Ethiopia\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The majority world, the global south, is an expert in all of these issues,” said Mishi Choudhary, a lawyer and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, an Indian digital rights organization. “I generally say that we have been watching the same reality TV show,” she added, and “India is two or three seasons ahead” of the West.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Layoffs decimate internationally-focused teams \u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Musk’s recent announcement that he will grant many suspended Twitter accounts \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/25/1139197362/elon-musk-says-he-will-grant-amnesty-to-suspended-twitter-accounts\">“amnesty,”\u003c/a> following an unscientific poll of Twitter users, is escalating alarm about how the platform could be abused. The company has already begun to reinstate some 62,000 accounts with more than 10,000 followers, according to the tech newsletter \u003ca href=\"https://www.platformer.news/p/why-some-tech-ceos-are-rooting-for\">Platformer\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Twitter and every other platform have always struggled to effectively enforce content moderation guidelines and other policies outside of the U.S. and especially in non-Western countries,” said Shannon McGregor, a communications professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “They don’t have enough people who understand the language and the culture and the politics to be involved in these things.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And that was before Musk laid off more than half of Twitter’s staff, with \u003ca href=\"https://restofworld.org/2022/global-twitter-employees-layoffs/\">teams outside the U.S.\u003c/a> hit especially hard, and eliminated thousands of contractors, many of whom do the difficult daily work of monitoring millions of tweets. Hundreds more employees have resigned rather than commit to the CEO’s call for a new \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/11/16/1137105935/twitter-elon-musk-ultimatum\">“hardcore” Twitter\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twitter’s \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/ShannonRSingh/status/1588591603622772736\">human rights team\u003c/a> is gone. So is a group of investigators tracking state-backed domestic manipulation efforts in high-risk countries including Honduras, Ethiopia and India, according to a former employee. Its team fighting propaganda has been “radically reduced,” the \u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/27/twitter-china-spam-protests/\">\u003cem>Washington Post \u003c/em>reported\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twitter, which has laid off its communications staff, didn’t respond to NPR’s questions for this story. In a \u003ca href=\"https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2022/twitter-2-0-our-continued-commitment-to-the-public-conversation\">blog post\u003c/a> published Thursday, the company said its policies had not changed and it remained “committed to providing a safe, inclusive, entertaining, and informative experience for everyone.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our Trust & Safety team continues its diligent work to keep the platform safe from hateful conduct, abusive behavior, and any violation of Twitter’s rules,” the post, signed by “The Twitter Team,” said. “The team remains strong and well-resourced, and automated detection plays an increasingly important role in eliminating abuse.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But automation is not perfect: this week, Twitter’s software failed to detect newly posted videos of the 2019 attack on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The company only removed the clips after it was alerted by the New Zealand government, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/28/twitter-failed-to-detect-upload-of-christchurch-mosque-terror-attack-videos\">\u003cem>The Guardian\u003c/em>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Automated systems also require human input to reflect the cultural and linguistic challenges of a company that operates around the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Before Musk acquired Twitter, it was understood within the company that markets in South Asia, including India, were countries in which mass atrocity was agreed to be occurring. … One tweet could set off a pogrom,” Soundararajan said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As part of Twitter’s trust and safety council – an outside group of advisers – Soundararajan’s group worked with the company, giving feedback on potential risks of various features and developing lists of racist, casteist and sexist slurs used to help police the platform.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since Musk took control, the trust and safety council group hasn’t met with or heard from the new owner – despite his claim he wanted to set up an outside \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/10/31/1132906782/elon-musk-twitter-pelosi-conspiracy\">“content moderation council.”\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve gotten an email early in November that basically acknowledged the staffing changes and let us know that they were going to reach back out in December,” Soundararajan said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, the Twitter staffers Soundararajan typically communicates with have disappeared. “Our emails bounce back,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Potential for blue checkmark abuse\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Against that backdrop, Musk’s plans to relaunch a subscription offering that would give accounts checkmark badges – previously used to indicate Twitter had verified the identity of high-profile accounts – are a source of additional concern.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The initial rollout of the feature allowed anyone to buy an $8 monthly subscription and receive a blue checkmark with no identity verification. Immediately, accounts popped up impersonating celebrities, companies and politicians, forcing Twitter to halt signups.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk has said the feature will return, with different colored checkmarks for different kinds of accounts, and that going forward, all verified accounts will be “manually authenticated.” It’s not clear how Twitter will authenticate accounts or if it has sufficient staff to do so.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Former employees and experts warn the risk of abuse is high, especially by those seeking to use the feature to influence public conversation, given that subscribers are being promised greater amplification on Twitter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The possibility for different kinds of media manipulation and disinformation campaigns to proliferate is enormous,” said Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Long before Musk actually put the checkmarks up for sale, Twitter has struggled with bad actors illicitly selling verified accounts in places like the Middle East, Turkey and Africa.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Nigeria, for example, verified accounts have traded hands for at least $5,000 in the past, according to Rosemary Ajayi, lead researcher at the Digital Africa Research Lab. One account impersonating Nigeria’s ruling party managed to retain a verified check from 2015 to 2019, accumulating a million followers along the way, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s expensive, but people are doing it, in a country where there is a high level of poverty. So then how [many] more would buy it at the rate of $8 a month?” she asked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The risk will only grow amid a slew of upcoming elections, from Nigeria, Turkey and Thailand in 2023, to India, Mexico, Taiwan, European Parliament and, of course, the U.S. presidential race in 2024.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Free speech outside of the U.S.\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Even as they worry about how Musk’s changes could make Twitter more dangerous, freedom of expression advocates are also left wondering what his avowed commitment to free speech will mean outside America.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twitter is \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/05/business/twitter-india-lawsuit.html\">suing the Indian government\u003c/a> over orders to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/02/17/968641246/twitter-in-standoff-with-indias-government-over-free-speech-and-local-law\">censor critics\u003c/a> of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and has resisted some of Modi’s efforts to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/06/10/1004387255/india-and-tech-companies-clash-over-censorship-privacy-and-digital-colonialism\">clamp down on social media\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“His free speech concerns seem to have only been about the people he thinks should be on this platform, who are U.S.-centric people with a certain kind of politics,” said Choudhary, the Indian digital-rights lawyer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even though only a small proportion of India’s 1.4 billion people use Twitter, it’s influential among politicians, the media and activists. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She said it’s unclear what Musk’s relationship with the Indian government will be like – especially considering he has other business interests in the country with his role as CEO of electric-car maker Tesla.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I rely on the fact that Twitter does not cave in to the pressure of my government and continues to allow me to speak, no matter what I’m speaking against them,” Choudhary said. “I don’t think that he has shown any indication that he’s going to be able to do that, or [that] he’s going to continue, whether it’s the lawsuit or any resistance against the government.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Twitter%27s+chaos+could+make+political+violence+worse+outside+of+the+U.S.&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Twitter will no longer enforce its policy against \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/education/533749/fact-or-fiction-how-to-spot-covid-19-misinformation\">COVID-19 misinformation\u003c/a>, raising concerns among public health experts that the change could have serious consequences if it discourages vaccination and other efforts to combat the still-spreading virus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eagle-eyed users spotted the change Monday night, noting that a one-sentence update had been made to Twitter's online rules: \"Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/twitter-vaccine-misinformation-crackdown-3190793914e7d6aded43c19521954cde\">COVID-19 misleading information policy\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By Tuesday, some Twitter accounts were testing the new boundaries and celebrating the platform's hands-off approach, which comes after Twitter was purchased by billionaire Elon Musk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside label=\"Related Stories\" postID=\"news_11930570,forum_2010101891137,education_533749\"]“This policy was used to silence people across the world who questioned the media narrative surrounding the virus and treatment options,” tweeted \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-misinformation-8407e477767045a428664194aebabbe3\">Dr. Simone Gold\u003c/a>, a physician and leading purveyor of COVID-19 misinformation. “A win for free speech and medical freedom!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Twitter's decision to no longer remove false claims about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines disappointed many public health officials, who said it could lead to more false claims about the virus, or the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Bad news,” tweeted epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding, who urged people not to flee Twitter but to stay and stand up for accurate information about the virus. “Stay folks — do NOT cede the town square to them!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1597567134825345025\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The virus, meanwhile, continues to spread. Nationally, new COVID cases averaged nearly 38,800 a day as of Monday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University — far lower than last winter but a vast undercount because of reduced testing and reporting. About 28,100 people with COVID were hospitalized daily and about 313 died, according to the most recent federal daily averages.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cases and deaths were up from two weeks earlier. Yet a fifth of the U.S. population hasn’t been vaccinated, most Americans haven’t gotten \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11924327/where-can-i-find-a-new-omicron-covid-booster-shot-near-me\">the latest boosters\u003c/a>, and many have stopped wearing masks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk, who has himself spread COVID misinformation on Twitter, has signaled an interest in rolling back many of the platform's previous rules meant to combat misinformation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last week, Musk said he would grant “amnesty” to account holders who had been kicked off Twitter. He's also reinstated the accounts of several people who spread COVID misinformation, \u003ca href=\"https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/elon-musks-twitter-reinstates-rep-marjorie-taylor-greene\">including that of U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene\u003c/a>, whose personal account was suspended this year for repeatedly violating Twitter's COVID rules.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Greene's most recent tweets include ones questioning the effectiveness of masks and making baseless claims about the safety of COVID vaccines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since the pandemic began, platforms like Twitter and Facebook have \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11866331/tech-giants-urged-to-clamp-down-on-misinformation-in-spanish-and-other-languages\">struggled to respond to a torrent of misinformation\u003c/a> about the virus, its origins and the response to it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under the policy enacted in January 2020, Twitter prohibited false claims about COVID-19 that the platform determined could lead to real-world harms. More than 11,000 accounts were suspended for violating the rules, and nearly 100,000 pieces of content were removed from the platform, according to Twitter's latest numbers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite its rules prohibiting COVID misinformation, Twitter has struggled with enforcement. Posts making bogus claims about home remedies or vaccines could still be found, and it was difficult on Tuesday to identify exactly how the platform's rules may have changed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Messages left with San Francisco-based Twitter seeking more information about its policy on COVID-19 misinformation were not immediately returned Tuesday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A search for common terms associated with COVID misinformation yielded lots of misleading content, but also automatic links to helpful resources about the virus as well as authoritative sources like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19 coordinator, said Tuesday that the problem of COVID-19 misinformation is far larger than one platform, and that policies prohibiting COVID misinformation weren't the best solution anyway.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Speaking at a Knight Foundation forum Tuesday, Jha said misinformation about the virus spread for a number of reasons, including legitimate uncertainty about a deadly illness. Simply prohibiting certain kinds of content isn't going to help people find good information, or make them feel more confident about what they're hearing from their medical providers, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think we all have a collective responsibility,” Jha said of combating misinformation about COVID. “The consequences of not getting this right — of spreading that misinformation — is literally tens of thousands of people dying unnecessarily.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Twitter will no longer enforce its policy against \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/education/533749/fact-or-fiction-how-to-spot-covid-19-misinformation\">COVID-19 misinformation\u003c/a>, raising concerns among public health experts that the change could have serious consequences if it discourages vaccination and other efforts to combat the still-spreading virus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eagle-eyed users spotted the change Monday night, noting that a one-sentence update had been made to Twitter's online rules: \"Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/twitter-vaccine-misinformation-crackdown-3190793914e7d6aded43c19521954cde\">COVID-19 misleading information policy\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By Tuesday, some Twitter accounts were testing the new boundaries and celebrating the platform's hands-off approach, which comes after Twitter was purchased by billionaire Elon Musk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“This policy was used to silence people across the world who questioned the media narrative surrounding the virus and treatment options,” tweeted \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-misinformation-8407e477767045a428664194aebabbe3\">Dr. Simone Gold\u003c/a>, a physician and leading purveyor of COVID-19 misinformation. “A win for free speech and medical freedom!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Twitter's decision to no longer remove false claims about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines disappointed many public health officials, who said it could lead to more false claims about the virus, or the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Bad news,” tweeted epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding, who urged people not to flee Twitter but to stay and stand up for accurate information about the virus. “Stay folks — do NOT cede the town square to them!”\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>The virus, meanwhile, continues to spread. Nationally, new COVID cases averaged nearly 38,800 a day as of Monday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University — far lower than last winter but a vast undercount because of reduced testing and reporting. About 28,100 people with COVID were hospitalized daily and about 313 died, according to the most recent federal daily averages.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cases and deaths were up from two weeks earlier. Yet a fifth of the U.S. population hasn’t been vaccinated, most Americans haven’t gotten \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11924327/where-can-i-find-a-new-omicron-covid-booster-shot-near-me\">the latest boosters\u003c/a>, and many have stopped wearing masks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk, who has himself spread COVID misinformation on Twitter, has signaled an interest in rolling back many of the platform's previous rules meant to combat misinformation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last week, Musk said he would grant “amnesty” to account holders who had been kicked off Twitter. He's also reinstated the accounts of several people who spread COVID misinformation, \u003ca href=\"https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/elon-musks-twitter-reinstates-rep-marjorie-taylor-greene\">including that of U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene\u003c/a>, whose personal account was suspended this year for repeatedly violating Twitter's COVID rules.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Greene's most recent tweets include ones questioning the effectiveness of masks and making baseless claims about the safety of COVID vaccines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since the pandemic began, platforms like Twitter and Facebook have \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11866331/tech-giants-urged-to-clamp-down-on-misinformation-in-spanish-and-other-languages\">struggled to respond to a torrent of misinformation\u003c/a> about the virus, its origins and the response to it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under the policy enacted in January 2020, Twitter prohibited false claims about COVID-19 that the platform determined could lead to real-world harms. More than 11,000 accounts were suspended for violating the rules, and nearly 100,000 pieces of content were removed from the platform, according to Twitter's latest numbers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite its rules prohibiting COVID misinformation, Twitter has struggled with enforcement. Posts making bogus claims about home remedies or vaccines could still be found, and it was difficult on Tuesday to identify exactly how the platform's rules may have changed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Messages left with San Francisco-based Twitter seeking more information about its policy on COVID-19 misinformation were not immediately returned Tuesday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A search for common terms associated with COVID misinformation yielded lots of misleading content, but also automatic links to helpful resources about the virus as well as authoritative sources like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19 coordinator, said Tuesday that the problem of COVID-19 misinformation is far larger than one platform, and that policies prohibiting COVID misinformation weren't the best solution anyway.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Speaking at a Knight Foundation forum Tuesday, Jha said misinformation about the virus spread for a number of reasons, including legitimate uncertainty about a deadly illness. Simply prohibiting certain kinds of content isn't going to help people find good information, or make them feel more confident about what they're hearing from their medical providers, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think we all have a collective responsibility,” Jha said of combating misinformation about COVID. “The consequences of not getting this right — of spreading that misinformation — is literally tens of thousands of people dying unnecessarily.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Elon Musk’s managerial bomb-throwing at Twitter has so thinned the ranks of software engineers who keep the world’s de facto public square up and running that industry insiders and programmers who were fired or resigned this week agree: Twitter may soon fray so badly it could actually crash.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk ended a very public argument with nearly two dozen coders critical to the microblogging platform’s stability by ordering them fired this week. Hundreds of engineers and other workers then quit after he demanded they pledge to “extremely hardcore” work by Thursday evening or resign with severance pay.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The newest departures mean the platform is losing workers just as it gears up for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, which opens Sunday. It’s one of Twitter’s busiest events, when tweet surges heavily stress its systems.[aside label='Related Articles' tag='twitter']“It does look like he’s going to blow up Twitter,” said Robert Graham, veteran cybersecurity entrepreneur. “I can’t see how the lights won’t go out at any moment” — although many recent Twitter departures predicted a more gradual death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hundreds of employees signaled they were leaving ahead of Thursday’s deadline, posting farewell messages, a salute emoji or other familiar symbols on the company’s internal Slack messaging board, according to employees who still have access. Dozens also took publicly to Twitter to announce they were signing off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Earlier in the week, some got so angry at Musk’s perceived recklessness that they took to Twitter to insult the Tesla and SpaceX CEO. “Kiss my ass, Elon,” one engineer said, adding lipstick marks. She had been fired.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twitter leadership sent an unsigned email after Thursday’s deadline saying its offices would be closed and employee badge access disabled until Monday. No reason was given, according to two employees who got the email — one who took the severance, one still on payroll. They spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retribution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A trusted phalanx of Tesla coders at his side as he ransacked a formerly convivial workspace, Musk didn’t appear bothered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The best people are staying, so I’m not super worried,” he \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593453455972057090?s=20&t=W4rIKaUhCbn78DrAjD2pFw\">tweeted Thursday night\u003c/a>. But it soon became clear some crucial programming teams had been thoroughly gutted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Indicating how strapped he is for programmers, Musk sent all-hands emails Friday summoning “anyone who actually writes software” to his command perch on Twitter’s 10th floor at 2 p.m. — asking that they fly into San Francisco if not local, said an employee who quit Thursday but who was still receiving company emails.[pullquote align=\"right\" size=\"medium\" citation=\"Blaine Cook, Twitter's founding engineer\"]‘It’s dangerous to drastically reduce a programming workforce to a skeleton crew without first bulletproofing the code … It’s like saying, ‘These firefighters aren’t doing anything. So, we’ll just fire them all.”[/pullquote]After taking over Twitter less than three weeks ago, Musk booted half of the company’s full-time staff of 7,500 and \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-misinformation-social-media-a469130efaebc8ed029a647a149c5049?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=TopNews&utm_campaign=position_09\">an untold number of contractors\u003c/a> responsible for content moderation and other crucial efforts. Then came this week’s ultimatum.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Three engineers who left this week described for The Associated Press why they expect considerable unpleasantness for \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-earnings-b69fa50ddd97accdccde15cf3a4f4607\">Twitter’s more than 230 million users\u003c/a> now that well over two-thirds of Twitter’s pre-Musk core services engineers are apparently gone. While they don’t anticipate near-term collapse, Twitter could get very rough at the edges — especially if Musk makes major changes without much off-platform testing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Signs of fraying were evident before Thursday’s mass exit. People reported seeing more spam and scams on their feeds and in their direct messages. Engineers reported dropped tweets. People got strange error messages.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, nothing critical has broken. Yet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s a betting pool for when that happens,” said one of the engineers, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from Musk that could impact their careers and finances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another said that if Twitter has been shutting servers and “high volume suddenly comes in, it might start crashing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“World Cup is the biggest event for Twitter. That’s the first thing you learn when you onboard at Twitter,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With the earlier layoffs of curation employees, Twitter’s trending pages were already suffering. The engineering fireworks began Tuesday when Musk announced on Twitter that he had begun shutting down “microservices” he considered unnecessary “bloatware.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Less than 20% are actually needed for Twitter to work!” he tweeted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That drew objections from engineers who told Musk he had no idea what he was taking about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Microservices are how most modern large web services organize their code to allow software engineers to work quickly and efficiently,” said Gergely Orosz, author of The Pragmatic Engineer blog and a former Uber programmer. There are scores of such services and each manages a different feature. Instead of testing the removal of microservices in a simulated real-world environment, Musk’s team has apparently been updating Twitter live on everyone’s computers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And indeed, one microservice briefly broke — the one people use to verify their identity to Twitter via SMS message when they log in. It’s called two-factor authentication.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You have hit the limit for SMS codes. Try again in 24 hours,” Twitter advised when a reporter tried to download their microblogging history archive. Luckily, the email verification alternative worked.[pullquote align=\"right\" size=\"medium\" citation=\"Robert Graham, veteran cybersecurity entrepreneur\"]‘So much of the security infrastructure of a large organization like Twitter is in people’s heads … And when they’re gone, you know, it all goes with them.’[/pullquote]One of the newly separated Twitter engineers, who had worked in core services, told the AP that engineering team clusters were down from about 15 people pre-Musk — not including team leaders, who were all laid off — to three or four before Thursday’s resignations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then more institutional knowledge that can’t be replaced overnight walked out the door.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Everything could break,” the programmer said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It takes six months to train someone to work an on-call rotation for some services, the engineers said. Such rotations require programmers to be available at all hours. But if the person on call is unfamiliar with the code base, failures could cascade as they frantically plow through reference manuals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If I stayed I would have been on-call constantly with little support for an indeterminate amount of time on several additional complex systems I had no experience in,” \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/peterclowes/status/1593458253014265856?s=20&t=kk55pToObSNmCUITISMNiw\">tweeted Peter Clowes\u003c/a>, an engineer who took the severance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Running even relatively boring systems takes people who know where to go when something breaks,” said Blaine Cook, Twitter’s founding engineer, who left in 2008. It’s dangerous to drastically reduce a programming workforce to a skeleton crew without first bulletproofing the code, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s like saying, ‘These firefighters aren’t doing anything. So, we’ll just fire them all,’” Cook said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The engineers also worry Musk will shut down tools involved in content moderation and in removing illicit material that people upload to Twitter — or that there simply wouldn’t be enough people on staff to run them properly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another concern is hackers. When they’ve \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/us-news-ca-state-wire-technology-san-francisco-ap-top-news-860daee9d51ceb588c9bd0feebddc323\">breached the system in the past\u003c/a>, diminishing damage depends on detecting them quickly and kicking them out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not clear how Musk’s housecleaning at Twitter has affected its cybersecurity team, which suffered a major PR black eye in August when the highly respected security chief fired by the company earlier this year, \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/technology-federal-trade-commission-us-securities-and-exchange-f1fe41b0bd7c5c407ecfb83509c671f5\">Peiter Zatko\u003c/a>, filed a whistleblower complaint claiming the platform was a cybersecurity shambles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So much of the security infrastructure of a large organization like Twitter is in people’s heads,” said Graham, the cybersecurity veteran. “And when they’re gone, you know, it all goes with them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beyond technical troubles and even the potential of a crash, critical social and safety concerns loom over Twitter, which has become a fundamental tool in how people and organizations operate and communicate with each other and the public, from academia and journalism to natural disaster information and emergency warnings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Twitter … is really important in our democracy. It’s important for media, and for politics, and for a lot of marginalized communities that rely on it to stay connected and get the word out on important issues,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener in a statement given to KQED, adding that instability at Twitter could hurt public and political discourse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wiener also accused Elon Musk of trying to align Twitter with the “MAGA right-wing world,” and called the fact that wealthy individuals can purchase and destabilize an influential platform like Twitter in mere weeks “one of the biggest flaws in capitalism,” adding that he and other legislators are considering ways to address the company’s treatment of its departing employees.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While organizations like Cal Fire and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services say they have multiple platforms and tools with which to get information out to the public, they acknowledge that Twitter has been an essential tool for sharing information.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[Twitter] allows us to be transparent and reach a broader audience, such as for the heat wave recently when we were encouraging all Californians to conserve energy,” said Brian Ferguson, state director of crisis communications for Cal OES. “[Twitter] was a big part of it. Certainly there’s both good and bad information on Twitter as we’ve experienced in the pandemic and in other things, but it is an important tool to have to reach the public in times of crisis.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Hopefully nothing happens,” said Cal Fire Public Information Officer Robert Foxworthy, referring to Twitter’s ongoing troubles and recent predicament; he indicated that Cal Fire has multiple ways to get information out. But he also made sure to advise, given the extent of the public’s reliance on Twitter for information, that people be prepared for the worst.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We tell folks that where you get your information may not work at any given time, so we ask that you have multiple ways to get that information, whether that be through Twitter or Facebook or your local radio,” said Foxworthy. “We ask the public to go to whatever their local county uses for their alert system, like Reverse 9-1-1 that you have to sign up for, or like Text-to-911, where they can send you emergency alerts, or CodeRED … because at any time the platform you use may not be usable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s Ekene Okobi and Tara Siler contributed to this report. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Elon Musk’s managerial bomb-throwing at Twitter has so thinned the ranks of software engineers who keep the world’s de facto public square up and running that industry insiders and programmers who were fired or resigned this week agree: Twitter may soon fray so badly it could actually crash.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Musk ended a very public argument with nearly two dozen coders critical to the microblogging platform’s stability by ordering them fired this week. Hundreds of engineers and other workers then quit after he demanded they pledge to “extremely hardcore” work by Thursday evening or resign with severance pay.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The newest departures mean the platform is losing workers just as it gears up for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, which opens Sunday. It’s one of Twitter’s busiest events, when tweet surges heavily stress its systems.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“It does look like he’s going to blow up Twitter,” said Robert Graham, veteran cybersecurity entrepreneur. “I can’t see how the lights won’t go out at any moment” — although many recent Twitter departures predicted a more gradual death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hundreds of employees signaled they were leaving ahead of Thursday’s deadline, posting farewell messages, a salute emoji or other familiar symbols on the company’s internal Slack messaging board, according to employees who still have access. Dozens also took publicly to Twitter to announce they were signing off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Earlier in the week, some got so angry at Musk’s perceived recklessness that they took to Twitter to insult the Tesla and SpaceX CEO. “Kiss my ass, Elon,” one engineer said, adding lipstick marks. She had been fired.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twitter leadership sent an unsigned email after Thursday’s deadline saying its offices would be closed and employee badge access disabled until Monday. No reason was given, according to two employees who got the email — one who took the severance, one still on payroll. They spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retribution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A trusted phalanx of Tesla coders at his side as he ransacked a formerly convivial workspace, Musk didn’t appear bothered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The best people are staying, so I’m not super worried,” he \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593453455972057090?s=20&t=W4rIKaUhCbn78DrAjD2pFw\">tweeted Thursday night\u003c/a>. But it soon became clear some crucial programming teams had been thoroughly gutted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Indicating how strapped he is for programmers, Musk sent all-hands emails Friday summoning “anyone who actually writes software” to his command perch on Twitter’s 10th floor at 2 p.m. — asking that they fly into San Francisco if not local, said an employee who quit Thursday but who was still receiving company emails.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>After taking over Twitter less than three weeks ago, Musk booted half of the company’s full-time staff of 7,500 and \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-misinformation-social-media-a469130efaebc8ed029a647a149c5049?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=TopNews&utm_campaign=position_09\">an untold number of contractors\u003c/a> responsible for content moderation and other crucial efforts. Then came this week’s ultimatum.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Three engineers who left this week described for The Associated Press why they expect considerable unpleasantness for \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-earnings-b69fa50ddd97accdccde15cf3a4f4607\">Twitter’s more than 230 million users\u003c/a> now that well over two-thirds of Twitter’s pre-Musk core services engineers are apparently gone. While they don’t anticipate near-term collapse, Twitter could get very rough at the edges — especially if Musk makes major changes without much off-platform testing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Signs of fraying were evident before Thursday’s mass exit. People reported seeing more spam and scams on their feeds and in their direct messages. Engineers reported dropped tweets. People got strange error messages.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, nothing critical has broken. Yet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s a betting pool for when that happens,” said one of the engineers, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from Musk that could impact their careers and finances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another said that if Twitter has been shutting servers and “high volume suddenly comes in, it might start crashing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“World Cup is the biggest event for Twitter. That’s the first thing you learn when you onboard at Twitter,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With the earlier layoffs of curation employees, Twitter’s trending pages were already suffering. The engineering fireworks began Tuesday when Musk announced on Twitter that he had begun shutting down “microservices” he considered unnecessary “bloatware.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Less than 20% are actually needed for Twitter to work!” he tweeted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That drew objections from engineers who told Musk he had no idea what he was taking about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Microservices are how most modern large web services organize their code to allow software engineers to work quickly and efficiently,” said Gergely Orosz, author of The Pragmatic Engineer blog and a former Uber programmer. There are scores of such services and each manages a different feature. Instead of testing the removal of microservices in a simulated real-world environment, Musk’s team has apparently been updating Twitter live on everyone’s computers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And indeed, one microservice briefly broke — the one people use to verify their identity to Twitter via SMS message when they log in. It’s called two-factor authentication.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You have hit the limit for SMS codes. Try again in 24 hours,” Twitter advised when a reporter tried to download their microblogging history archive. Luckily, the email verification alternative worked.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>One of the newly separated Twitter engineers, who had worked in core services, told the AP that engineering team clusters were down from about 15 people pre-Musk — not including team leaders, who were all laid off — to three or four before Thursday’s resignations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then more institutional knowledge that can’t be replaced overnight walked out the door.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Everything could break,” the programmer said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It takes six months to train someone to work an on-call rotation for some services, the engineers said. Such rotations require programmers to be available at all hours. But if the person on call is unfamiliar with the code base, failures could cascade as they frantically plow through reference manuals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If I stayed I would have been on-call constantly with little support for an indeterminate amount of time on several additional complex systems I had no experience in,” \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/peterclowes/status/1593458253014265856?s=20&t=kk55pToObSNmCUITISMNiw\">tweeted Peter Clowes\u003c/a>, an engineer who took the severance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Running even relatively boring systems takes people who know where to go when something breaks,” said Blaine Cook, Twitter’s founding engineer, who left in 2008. It’s dangerous to drastically reduce a programming workforce to a skeleton crew without first bulletproofing the code, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s like saying, ‘These firefighters aren’t doing anything. So, we’ll just fire them all,’” Cook said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The engineers also worry Musk will shut down tools involved in content moderation and in removing illicit material that people upload to Twitter — or that there simply wouldn’t be enough people on staff to run them properly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another concern is hackers. When they’ve \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/us-news-ca-state-wire-technology-san-francisco-ap-top-news-860daee9d51ceb588c9bd0feebddc323\">breached the system in the past\u003c/a>, diminishing damage depends on detecting them quickly and kicking them out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not clear how Musk’s housecleaning at Twitter has affected its cybersecurity team, which suffered a major PR black eye in August when the highly respected security chief fired by the company earlier this year, \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/technology-federal-trade-commission-us-securities-and-exchange-f1fe41b0bd7c5c407ecfb83509c671f5\">Peiter Zatko\u003c/a>, filed a whistleblower complaint claiming the platform was a cybersecurity shambles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So much of the security infrastructure of a large organization like Twitter is in people’s heads,” said Graham, the cybersecurity veteran. “And when they’re gone, you know, it all goes with them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beyond technical troubles and even the potential of a crash, critical social and safety concerns loom over Twitter, which has become a fundamental tool in how people and organizations operate and communicate with each other and the public, from academia and journalism to natural disaster information and emergency warnings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Twitter … is really important in our democracy. It’s important for media, and for politics, and for a lot of marginalized communities that rely on it to stay connected and get the word out on important issues,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener in a statement given to KQED, adding that instability at Twitter could hurt public and political discourse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wiener also accused Elon Musk of trying to align Twitter with the “MAGA right-wing world,” and called the fact that wealthy individuals can purchase and destabilize an influential platform like Twitter in mere weeks “one of the biggest flaws in capitalism,” adding that he and other legislators are considering ways to address the company’s treatment of its departing employees.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While organizations like Cal Fire and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services say they have multiple platforms and tools with which to get information out to the public, they acknowledge that Twitter has been an essential tool for sharing information.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[Twitter] allows us to be transparent and reach a broader audience, such as for the heat wave recently when we were encouraging all Californians to conserve energy,” said Brian Ferguson, state director of crisis communications for Cal OES. “[Twitter] was a big part of it. Certainly there’s both good and bad information on Twitter as we’ve experienced in the pandemic and in other things, but it is an important tool to have to reach the public in times of crisis.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Hopefully nothing happens,” said Cal Fire Public Information Officer Robert Foxworthy, referring to Twitter’s ongoing troubles and recent predicament; he indicated that Cal Fire has multiple ways to get information out. But he also made sure to advise, given the extent of the public’s reliance on Twitter for information, that people be prepared for the worst.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We tell folks that where you get your information may not work at any given time, so we ask that you have multiple ways to get that information, whether that be through Twitter or Facebook or your local radio,” said Foxworthy. “We ask the public to go to whatever their local county uses for their alert system, like Reverse 9-1-1 that you have to sign up for, or like Text-to-911, where they can send you emergency alerts, or CodeRED … because at any time the platform you use may not be usable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s Ekene Okobi and Tara Siler contributed to this report. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"info": "KQED’s statewide radio news program providing daily coverage of issues, trends and public policy decisions.",
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"order": 8
},
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"source": "City Arts & Lectures"
},
"link": "https://www.cityarts.net",
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"order": 1
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"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
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"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
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"link": "/radio/program/commonwealth-club",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 9
},
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"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
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"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
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"id": "fresh-air",
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"hidden-brain": {
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"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "NPR"
},
"link": "/radio/program/hidden-brain",
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"how-i-built-this": {
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"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
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"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
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"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
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"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
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"order": 15
},
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},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
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"order": 18
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},
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"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
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},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
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},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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},
"masters-of-scale": {
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"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
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"source": "WaitWhat"
},
"link": "/radio/program/masters-of-scale",
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"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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"stitcher": "https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/kqed/stories-teachers-share",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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},
"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
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