Instagram is testing pinned posts for profiles

For a while now, Instagram has allowed you to pin your favorite Stories to the top of your profile as a way to save them beyond their expiry date. And the company may soon allow you to do the same with posts to ensure they stand out in their own way.As…

How messy might Twitter get under Musk?

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk added Twitter to his stable of companies on Monday, purchasing the social media platform for $44 billion dollars. Whether he made this purchase to finally realize his aspirations as a “free speech absolutist” or just did it to put an end to his nemesis, @ElonJet, once and for all remains to be seen, but changes are abound for the internet’s third-favorite hellsite. Engadget’s reporters have some thoughts on what those might be.

There are only two predictions I feel confident making: Twitter will get an edit button, and employees are going to head for the door. Even under the best of circumstances, big acquisitions tend to result in a fair amount of employee turnover and executive shakeup. And for many tweeps, Musk taking over is very far from the best of circumstances. Musk rankled the Twitter rank and file before the deal was even official, with tweets about whether Twitter was “dying” and whether the company’s HQ should be converted into a homeless shelter.

But now they have much more to worry about than his usual trolling. Musk’s bid has already negatively impacted recruiting efforts, according toThe New York Times. And current employees still don’t have clear answers on how Musk’s acquisition will affect their stock packages, a significant portion of their total compensation. There are also real, existential questions about how Musk’s questionable views on content moderation will affect the company and the direction of the service. As CEO Parag Agrawal reportedly told employees following the news, “once the deal closes, we don’t know what direction the platform will go.”

– Karissa Bell, Senior Reporter

It can’t get much worse, right?

While I’m sure Twitter’s moderation policy will get watered down, it’s hard to imagine the doomsday scenarios where it turns into some kind of 4Chan/Stormfront cesspool.

Twitter is an international company, with international advertisers and international users. It’s broadly bound to ensure its content is in line with the laws of the countries in which it operates, which severely limits the ability to create the “free speech” oasis of Musk’s dreams, at least if he also would like it to be a functional, broadly breakeven company at the same time. The company’s moderation of its platform is already terrible, and people either make do by going private/blocking people, or (hi) give up on the whole tweeting thing altogether. So I’m expecting more of the same, which is to say, I’m expecting it to be mostly awful.

– Aaron Souppouris, Executive Editor

I’ve covered Elon Musk in his roles as both head of Tesla and SpaceX for a few years now, witnessing his sneering contempt for journalism, transparency, basic ethics and accountability up close and in person. I’ve sat through his easily-disproved boasts, his myriad empty promises and publicity stunts. This is a man who belittles society’s most vulnerable members to gain the panting adoration of 4Chan trolls, who demonizes the helpers to boost his own fragile ego, a man who would declare himself God-Emperor of Mars before paying his income taxes. Is this your king?

I dread the effects this sale will have, not just for Twitter itself, but the internet writ large. The destabilizing effects social media amplification has on societal and democratic norms have been well studied since the 2016 elections. What is not yet fully understood is what happens when we hand control over that mechanism to the world’s wealthiest contrarian. As such, my advice to you are the same wise words Samuel L Jackson had for us in Jurassic Park: Hold onto your butts.

– Andrew Tarantola, Senior Reporter

I think the biggest challenge about trying to predict an Elon Musk-led Twitter is separating the guy’s online persona from his business practices. Musk catches a lot of flak (often deservedly) for dumb or insensitive tweets, something most other CEOs know or have been trained to avoid. But at the same time, Elon is a rather shrewd businessman, separately helming what has become the world’s biggest EV carmaker alongside the most successful private space aerospace company.

With Tesla and SpaceX there’s a clear pattern of high-risk, high-reward behavior, which, due to a combination of luck and smarts, has worked out so far. Musk gives the impression of being a move fast and break stuff type, and his latest disruption looks to be bringing free speech (or his version of it) to Twitter, regardless of how that might impact others. This potentially greenlights every tweet that’s not explicitly inciting violence or distributing sensitive info (like the plans for a nuclear bomb or whatever).

In the short term, Must will look to help boost Twitter’s bottom line, which the company desperately needs after losing more than $200 million in 2021. Engagement (both good and bad) sells, and turning Twitter into an even bigger battleground would almost certainly result in a quick spike in users. Musk might even do something silly like raise the limit on tweets to 420 characters. Down the line, Musk’s plan to authenticate all humans sounds a lot like a different flavor of Sam Altman’s troubled Worldcoin endeavor, and I‘d bet there’s way more crypto integration coming to the platform in general.

The big concern is that some of Twitter’s issues regarding harassment and abuse will continue to go unaddressed. Though that actually might be a feature. Moderation costs money, and by pushing Twitter down the free speech path, Elon conveniently might be able to absolve the company of having to protect its users while simultaneously reducing operating costs. Sure, there’s a chance that eliminating anonymity and linking every tweet to a specific person could stop people from spouting nonsense they wouldn’t dare say in real life. But I wouldn’t count on it. So unless better safeguards are coming too, Twitter could devolve into the most chaotic social media platform around.

– Sam Rutherford, Senior Reporter

Yes, Musk is divisive, a puerile troll that at age 50 seems to have finished his emotional growth decades prior; a loudmouth who is almost constantly spouting off easily disprovable nonsense. His ideas on a “free speech” haven are an echo of the wrong-headed thinking that was a north star for social media founders a decade or more ago, and which they have spent the time since regretfully paddling away from. Musk is also, by accounts, a capricious and vindictive boss whose alleged love of free speech is forever subservient to his hatred of dissent.

And all of this is, more than some outward-facing exodus of users, likely to lead Twitter employees to rethink if it’s all worth the agita. Who wants to develop for product categories (moderation in particular) that have effectively been marked for death? Who wants to go to a job that feels more like the What Did My Boss Fuck Up Today sitcom?

But that this sale went through at all is indication enough that, whether led by Musk or literally anyone else, Twitter probably is headed for the great dustbin of history. The people whose job it is to do nothing but turn money into more money ran the numbers and determined no one was or would ever bring a better offer, nor was the company — which almost always posts a loss— was ever going to stabilize into a recurring source of profit.

Musk, the PT Barnum of techno-magic bullshit solutions, would probably gleefully categorize himself as an accelerationist: Accelerating the accumulation of space junk; the eventual drowning of pedestrians in underground tunnels; the mass adoption of combusting non-combustion cars. And in this instance my sense is he will accelerate the demise of Twitter by a few degrees too, but don’t give him too much credit, it was headed that way anyhow.

– Bryan Menegus, Senior News Editor

Reality often sits in between our greatest hopes and worst fears, and I’d expect the same for Twitter under Elon Musk. It’s easy to see his laissez-faire content moderation leading to the revival of some hate speech and harassment that Twitter previously removed. At the same time, I don’t think a Musk-era Twitter will be a full-fledged calamity. Not everyone who was banned will be eager to come back, and Musk may have to rethink his stance if there are any truly toxic elements that resurface.

I say there’s a one-in-three chance that Twitter goes sideways within two years of the deal closing — that is, the content moderation and the company’s overall direction lead to serious trouble. Those are very distinct possibilities, but they aren’t guaranteed and may take years to unfold. They may hinge as much on users’ desires as they do on Musk’s decisions. I’d expect many of Twitter’s anti-toxicity tools to survive, such as downvoting replies.

With that said, I’m fully prepared to be wrong. Musk is legendary for heading in unexpected directions. This is the man who launched a tunnel company after complaining about LA traffic, after all. I just don’t see Twitter facing imminent disaster, and it won’t be surprising if the company reins in some of Musk’s impulses.

– Jon Fingas, Reporter

Twitter is experimenting with a status update feature

Twitter might soon take a page from Instagram’s defunct Threads app — not to mention other messaging apps you used in the past two decades. As The Vergereports, code sleuth Jane Manchun Wong has discovered that Twitter is developing a “Vibe” feature that would let you set status updates akin to Threads and the many, many IM clients at the turn of the century. You could set status at the profile level, but you could also attach them to specific tweets to indicate what you were doing at a specific moment.

Wong’s examples only showed generic presets like eating, listening to music and shopping. It’s not clear if you have the option of writing your own updates, or if third-party apps could hook into the feature (say, for music and videos).

The concept of a Twitter status update isn’t completely new, either. The social network was testing another form of status update back in 2018, although it didn’t work the same way and never reached everyday users.

We’ve asked Twitter for comment. There are no guarantees Vibe will reach the broader public or even enter testing. We wouldn’t be surprised if it does, however. Twitter has long had messaging features that could benefit from status updates (such as letting others know you’re busy), and it’s increasingly relying on live features like Spaces audio sessions where you might want to share what you’re doing.

Elon Musk’s Twitter bid is as well thought out as his tweets

Elon Musk, who until the last week or so, was known on Twitter mainly for trolling and incurring the wrath of the SEC, has now set his sights on taking over the platform. Speaking at a TED conference on Thursday, the Tesla CEO positioned his $43 billion hostile takeover bid not as something he wants to do, but as something he feels is “important to the function of democracy.”

“It’s important to the function of the United States as a free country and many other countries,” he said. “Civilizational risk is decreased, the more we can increase the trust of Twitter as a public platform.”

That may sound like a lofty goal — and it’s not that different from how Jack Dorsey and other Twitter leaders have talked about the platform — but Musk’s actual ideas for making Twitter more “trustworthy” are bizarre and sometimes contradictory. It suggests he has little understanding of how Twitter works, much less how to run the company.

During the interview, Musk repeatedly stated he believed speech on Twitter should only be constrained by what’s legal. Twitter, he said, should “err on the side of, if in doubt, let the speech exist.” He said that permanent bans should be used sparingly. “A good sign as to whether there’s free speech is, [if] someone you don’t like is allowed to say something you don’t like, and if that is the case, then we have free speech.”

Besides being a somewhat narrow view of free speech, Musk’s own track record would appear to be at odds with this statement. While he has zero experience running a social media company, his actions as Tesla’s CEO suggest there are many scenarios in which he is notably less committed to absolute free speech.

As Quartzpoints out, Musk has reportedly fired numerous Tesla workers who disagree with him. Recently, one employee was shown the door for posting videos to his personal YouTube channel that depicted flaws in Tesla’s self-driving software running on his own vehicle. Musk also reportedly tried to force a law firm, hired by Tesla and SpaceX, to fire an associate who had previously worked for his arch-nemesis the SEC, in an apparent retaliation for the lawyer’s involvement with the agency’s investigation of Musk. Incidentally, Tesla has faced allegations of discrimination and is currently contending with a lawsuit from the state of California over its treatment of Black employees.

Trust and safety experts were also quick to point out that a lack of content moderation actually has a chilling effect on free speech. “Effective moderation is not inherently in conflict with free speech,” Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s former head of civic integrity tweeted. “It is required for people to feel free to speak.”

This is more than just theoretical. Just ask former CEO Dick Costolo who famously presided over one of the most toxic eras in Twitter history thanks to a hands-off approach to content moderation. It was under his tenure as CEO that Gamergate and other targeted harassment campaigns were able to drive scores of users off the platform. Costolo later admitted that his failure to deal with trolls was a huge mistake.

Others pointed out that less moderation would quickly result in Twitter being overrun with spam and other shady — yet entirely legal — content. Even Musk seemed to contradict himself on this point, saying that a “top priority” would be to rid Twitter of the “spam and scam bots and bot armies” that frequently impersonate him.

Away from the culture war battles over “free speech,” Twitter is facing significant challenges of its own. The company is still in the middle of a big shift, changing many of its core features in an effort to find new sources of revenue. It still has aggressive growth targets for users and revenue that would prove challenging even for seasoned Twitter insiders — which Musk is not.

And Musk doesn’t even seem to know what he actually wants. He acknowledged that he was unsure of if he would be able to pull off actually buying Twitter (other shareholders seem to agree on that point) and claimed to be unconcerned with making money from his investment. He claimed to have a “plan B,” but didn’t share details. He also admitted that his tweets are little more than a “stream of consciousness” he sometimes composes while on the toilet.

As with so much else he does, it’s impossible to tell if he really wants to fully control Twitter or if all this is yet another elaborate troll. It could be both.

“I do think this will be somewhat painful,” he mused. On that, at least, he’s spot on.

Elon Musk says that Twitter’s algorithm should be open source

If Elon Musk is indeed able to buy Twitter, the platform could look a lot different. In his first public, non-tweeted comments since the saga began, Musk addressed why he wants to buy the company, and changes he would want to bring about.

“Twitter has become kind of the de-facto town square,” he said. “It’s just really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they’re able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.”

In terms of specific changes, Musk said Twitter should open-source its algorithms and minimize the interventions it takes in policing content. “Any changes to people’s tweets — if they’re emphasized or de-emphasized — that action should be made apparent,” he said. “So anyone can see that that action has been taken so there’s no sort of behind-the-scenes manipulation, either algorithmically or manually.”

He added that the underlying code behind the algorithm should be available on GitHub, so that users could inspect it themselves.

Musk also spoke about his philosophy on content moderation, namely that there should be very little of it. “I think we would want to err on the side of, if in doubt, let the speech exist,” he said. “I’m not saying that I have all the answers here.” He repeated several times that his preference would be to allow all speech that is legal, and that he dislikes measures like permanent bans. “I do think that we want to be just very reluctant to delete things and be very cautious with permanent bans,” he said. “You know, timeouts I think are better than sort of permanent bans.”

Those comments are not likely to be well-received among Twitter employees, some of whom were reportedly extremely worried by the prospect of him joining the board.

Musk’s appearance at TED comes just hours after the Tesla CEO made a $43 billion offer to buy Twitter. That offer was the culmination of a chaotic few days for Musk and Twitter, during which he revealed that he had become Twitter’s largest shareholder, was offered a seat on the company’s board of directors, declined to join and was subsequently sued by Twitter shareholders over his delay in reporting his investment to the SEC.

Whether Musk will actually succeed in taking over the company is unclear. Twitter’s board has so far only said that it will “review” the offer. “I’m not sure that I will actually be able to acquire it,” he said. When asked if he had a “plan B,” if Twitter’s board were to decline his offer, he said that he did but declined to elaborate. 

As for his own Twitter feed, Musk confirmed what many may have long suspected. “I’m tweeting more or less stream of consciousness,” he said. “It’s not like, ‘let me think about some grand plan about my Twitter’ or whatever. I’m like, literally, on the toilet like, ‘oh, this is funny,’ and then tweet that out, you know?”