On Thursday evening, after a full day of chaos on the timelines, Musk halted new sign ups for his $8-a-month Blue subscription offering. Offering anyone the chance to impersonate government officials, corporations, and celebrities had led to widespread impersonation. Advertiser pullouts and a general sense that the platform had descended into chaos were caused by the resulting chaos.
Musk said that satirical accounts must now include "parody" in their name and bio. Musk and his team can't say they weren't warned if any of the backlash came as a surprise.
A seven-page list of recommendations was prepared by the company's trust and safety team days before the launch of Blue. A document obtained by Platformer predicts some of the events that will happen.
The first recommendation of the document was to use increased amplification to achieve their ends where their upside exceeds the cost.
The team found that impersonation of world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials, and other high profile individuals was a P0 risk. The loss of legacy verification is likely to lead to an increase in the number of high-profile accounts being impersonated.
Privileges and exemptions from legacy verified accounts could cause confusion.
On November 1st, when the document was circulating internally, Musk was considering a yearly subscription for Blue, but after an exchange online with Stephen King, did he lower the price? As the desire to make fun of brands and government officials became an impulse buy, the risk of scam increased.
The team noted that removing the verified badge and related privileges from high-profile users if they didn't pay would drive them away from the site. They wrote that removing privileges and exemptions from legacy verified accounts could cause confusion. To manage against false- positive actions on high-profile users, we use the health-related protections. We run the risk of false positives if that signal is no longer valid.
The team has yet to find any solutions for the other risks. The company doesn't have an automated way to remove verified badges. There will be a large amount of legacy verified users on the platform, and if they decide not to pay for Blue, we will need to debadge a lot of them.
This was before the company laid off most of its contractors.
Retaining verification for high-profile accounts using the official badges was one of the solutions the company won support for.
Most of the features that are on the wish list have not been approved.
Esther Crawford, a director of product management at the company who has risen to become one of Musk's top lieutenants, received the gift. Sources said that Musk was briefed as well. Crawford was sympathetic to many of the concerns in the document, but she did not want to delay the launch of Blue. rawford did not reply to the request for comment.
The launch went ahead despite the warnings. With the predictions of the trust and safety team largely realized, Musk halted the roll out.
Platformer was the first to report that a second wave of cuts had hit the company after the initial round of layoffs. The cuts were directed at the contract workers of the company. 80% of the team had lost their jobs by the next day, and on a percentage basis, these losses were even worse.
Content moderation, recruiting, ad sales, marketing, and real estate were some of the functions affected. It's not clear how the loss of thousands of moderators will affect the service. It's clear that there are fewer people available to police the site.
Contractors received nothing, unlike full-time employees, who at least received an email telling them that layoffs were coming a night before. Managers of the company discovered over the weekend that people they had been counting on to perform critical tasks had disappeared from the company's systems.
One of the company's managers noted in the company's channels that one of their contractors was no longer with the company. In the past, we've reported on how difficult it is for the platform to adequately police child sexual exploitation material.
Over the course of the day, similar messages trickled in on Blind, an app for coworkers to anonymous discuss their workplace, and on external slacks that employees have established to have more candid discussions.
Several workers said they found out about their employment status after they tried to log in to the two services, but they couldn't.
One person who worked on content moderation told us that it was found out through your social media posts. It was a nice Saturday night.
I wouldn't have known if I didn't see your message right now.
Employees said that they had been bracing for cuts since the layoffs earlier this month. As Platformer first reported, vendors told former contractors via email that their medical benefits would end on their final day of work.
There was a story on the company's channels over the weekend about employees finding a new home.
One employee asked when people would realize the value of the people that worked here.
The most welcoming and healthy workplace I have ever known has gone from being the most hostile and degrading to being the most hostile and degrading I have ever seen.
Employees are showing a lot of support. Those who have been carrying out Musk's orders are referred to as "the goons" by the coterie of volunteer venture capitalists.
An emergency meeting was held on Monday morning. Musk had just ordered a freeze on all production changes on the social network.
Engineers can commit code but not deploy it during a code freeze. Since Musk took over, it's been under one for most of the time. The goal of the freezes is to reduce the chance of a bug disrupting the system.
According to an internal email obtained by platformer, engineers were told they couldn't write any code until further notice. There will be exceptions if there is an urgent change that is needed to resolve an issue with a production service, including any changes reflecting hard promised deadlines for clients, according to an email.
Engineers who attended the late night meeting were confused. The engineer asked if there was a ticket he could reference. I don't see what's happening. A colleague said that they don't have much context at the moment. This is coming from the other side of the fence.
Engineers are waiting for the freeze to end so they can write code on their laptops.
Over the last day, Musk made a number of public statements about the quality of the service and the code.
We were told by another engineer that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
I would like to apologize for the slowness of the site. The app is doing a lot of poorly batchesed RPCs. Musk referred to remote procedures on Sunday. The number of micro-processors that are employed by the company is thought to prevent the entire site from going down at the same time.
An engineer pushed back on Musk's criticism and offered a detailed thread about why some websites load faster than others. He was fired by Musk by the end of the day, along with a second engineer who commented on the affair.
An engineer explained it this way.
The fact that he’s focusing on performance being worse in certain countries kind of shows that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
If it was an issue with the microservices talking to each other inside of a data center, everyone in the world would have the same crappy experience.
Instead, the experience is not great in India, for example. That’s because the payload gets delivered from further away (laws of physics come into effect) and that back-and-forth data transfer between the phone and the data center starts compounding.
Not to mention that places like India have a higher concentration of low power phones that tend to perform worse in general — as opposed to all of our overpowered iPhones and such.
The code is frozen. Some people think that Musk is paranoid that disgruntled engineers may sabotage the site on their way out.
Eli Lilly stopped its ad campaigns on social media after the Blue debacle. According to the Washington Post, the move could cost the company millions of dollars. It took six hours for the fake account to be taken down.
A number of large companies have pulled their ad dollars from the micro-blogging site in the last few days. Volkswagen and Pfizer are two companies that have paused their campaigns and are being advised by large advertising firms to do so as well.
According to conversations with current employees, the news has left the ad teams in a state of confusion.
Many of your markets and clients are seeing declines in the fourth quarter. Please add any commentary, questions, issues, and I will try to raise as many as I can.
T-Mobile asked to stop the campaigns due to brand safety concerns, according to one employee. Three days later, John Legere asked Musk to let him run Twitter, to which Musk responded "no"
General GM had asked to stop campaigns, according to another employee. The team requested to meet next week to help them make a case to global on why they shouldn't. The same employee said that there would be a pause on GM until the end of the year. Brand safety is the reason right now.
GroupM told its clients that it was a high-risk media buy, according to an email obtained by Platformer. GroupM have updated their brand safety guidance to high risk due to the recent senior departures. They understand that our policies are in place, but feel that the ability to scale and manage infraction at speed is uncertain at the moment.
GroupM will consider lowering the risk grade when the below requirements have been met, which we are working through with leadership:
–Return to baseline levels of NSFW / toxic conversation on the platform
–Re-population of IT Security, Privacy, Trust & Safety senior staff
–Establishment of internal checks & balances
–Full transparency on future development plans of community guidelines / content moderation / anything affecting user security or brand safety
–Demonstrated commitment of effective content moderation, enforcing current Twitter Rules (e.g. account impersonation, violative content removal timing, intolerance of hate speech and misinformation)
Advertisers seem to have a better understanding of what a company needs than Musk does. Massive cuts to the content moderation team, a paralyzing code freeze, and open hostility between the goons and the pre-Musk Tweeps have created a company that continues to court a bigger crisis.
After Musk announced that he would be cutting off up to 80 percent of the service, some users said two-factorAuthentication stopped working. Some people reported that their archives were difficult to download.
There are people who know how to fix those things, but they are either no longer employed by the company or not allowed to ship new code. The question haunting engineers at the end of the day was not if there would be new cracks in the service, but how many.
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