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The new Twitter, under Musk

I'm missing why it isn't legal? is he not offering severance in lieu of the required notice for a mass layoff?

They are required by law to give a notice 60 days prior. They do offer a severance package, if you accept you will need to sign a paper saying that you won't sue, but you don't have to accept the severance, you can reject it and exercise your rights. That is what some of them are doing I hear. My knowledge on this is limited so I may be wrong.
 
They are required by law to give a notice 60 days prior. They do offer a severance package, if you accept you will need to sign a paper saying that you won't sue, but you don't have to accept the severance, you can reject it and exercise your rights. That is what some of them are doing I hear. My knowledge on this is limited so I may be wrong.

Yes, either 60 days notice, or a severance package when there is a mass layoff by a sizeable company. Which is why I was wondering if they were in fact offering the severance, since it seems they aren't giving 60 days notice. What I didn't know is that you could reject the severance in lieu of the notice. I thought they just had to do one or the other.
 
Yes, either 60 days notice, or a severance package when there is a mass layoff by a sizeable company. Which is why I was wondering if they were in fact offering the severance, since it seems they aren't giving 60 days notice. What I didn't know is that you could reject the severance in lieu of the notice. I thought they just had to do one or the other.

Yep, you are not required to take the severance. Severance is given as an appeasement to the laid off employees and usually comes with a catch when you choose to take it, like signing a contract. The conditions of the severance varies (don't sue, don't work in a similar position, etc), and there can be a lot of traps on there.
 
Why would you pay $44 Billion for a company then proceed to burn it all down?

I have no idea why I’m so intrigued with what is happening with Twitter.

Idiocy? Bravado? I'm sure we're all just too "simple" to comprehend his "grand plan". :roll2: I deactivated my account, so I've got no skin in the game. Just gonna sit over here in my lawn chair and enjoy my bucket of popcorn.
 
The rumor is he's lost 75% of the workforce after his latest stupid ultimatum. Twitter may be done.
He's going to be remembered as a conman and fraud. He talks big, convinces some and never delivers. He repackages existing technology and runs it into the ground. He is the ultimate failson.
To be fair, he can do one thing extremely well and that is his PR cult of personality.
 
Why would you pay $44 Billion for a company then proceed to burn it all down?

I have no idea why I’m so intrigued with what is happening with Twitter.

Maybe he didn't foresee the mass exodus of Twitter users and then the issue with all those phony accounts. And he probably thought the employees would just do whatever he wanted and not leave. I haven't read all the stories on the downfall of Twitter, but it sure seems like he lacks management skills!
 
It will interesting to see if Twitter survives and if not what takes it’s place.

I was reading a lot last night @ItsMainelyYou. I wasn't getting the impression that this man is a genius. A “stable genius” I can see but certainly not a genius. Without going into deal I hope you know what I’m trying to say. I don’t want to get banned. Musk reminds me of someone.
 
He can’t afford the overheads. As the economy dipped, the value of Twitter was cut in half before the purchase was complete, but of course the sale had no contingencies (at his insistence) and he aggressively tried to back out and failed to given his own idiocy.

Twitter had a notoriously bloated staff and was running at a multi million dollar deficit on a monthly basis. He had to act, and do it fast.

Do I think he handled any of it well? Absolutely not. He’s essentially setting what’s left if the business on fire from multiple angles…my point is, it was an ailing business for years before he showed up as the white knight. he impacted a lot of employees lives and led a highly unethical layoff
 
Credit: today's NYT.
A very interesting piece peek behind the curtain at Twitter today.
From Twitter's, recently-resigned head of trust and safety at Twitter, IOW from the horse's mouth.

OPINION
GUEST ESSAY

I Was the Head of Trust and Safety at Twitter. This Is What Could Become of It.​

Nov. 18, 2022

By Yoel Roth
Mr. Roth is a former head of trust and safety at Twitter.

This month, I chose to leave my position leading trust and safety at Elon Musk’s Twitter.

My teams were responsible for drafting Twitter’s rules and figuring out how to apply them consistently to hundreds of millions of tweets per day. In my more than seven years at the company, we exposed government-backed troll farms meddling in elections, introduced tools for contextualizing dangerous misinformation and, yes, banned President Donald Trump from the service. The Cornell professor Tarleton Gillespie called teams like mine the “custodians of the internet.” The work of online sanitation is unrelenting and contentious.

Enter Mr. Musk.

In a news release announcing his agreement to acquire the company, Mr. Musk laid out a simple thesis: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” He said he planned to revitalize Twitter by eliminating spam and drastically altering its policies to remove only illegal speech.

Since the deal closed on Oct‌. 27‌‌, many of the changes made by Mr. Musk and his team have been sudden and alarming for employees and users alike, including rapid-fire layoffs and an ill-fated foray into reinventing Twitter’s verification system. A wave of employee resignations caused the hashtag #RIPTwitter to trend on the site on Thursday — not for the first time — alongside questions about whether a skeleton crew of remaining staff members can keep the service, now 16 years old, afloat.

And yet when it comes to content moderation, much has stayed the same since Mr. Musk’s acquisition. Twitter’s rules continue to ban a wide range of lawful but awful speech. Mr. Musk has insistedpublicly that the company’s practices and policies are unchanged. Are we just in the early days — or has the self-declared free speech absolutist had a change of heart?

The truth is that even Elon Musk’s brand of radical transformation has unavoidable limits.

Advertisers have played the most direct role thus far in moderating Mr. Musk’s free speech ambitions. As long as 90 percent of the company’s revenue comes from ads (as was the case when Mr. Musk bought the company), Twitter has little choice but to operate in a way that won’t imperil the revenue streams that keep the lights on. This has already proved to be challenging.

Almost immediately upon the acquisition’s close, a wave of racist and antisemitic trolling emerged on Twitter. Wary marketers, including those at General Mills, Audi and Pfizer, slowed down or paused ad spending on the platform, kicking off a crisis within the company to protect precious ad revenue.

In response, Mr. Musk empowered my team to move more aggressively to remove hate speech across the platform — censoring more content, not less. Our actions worked: Before my departure, I shared data about Twitter’s enforcement of hateful conduct, showing that by some measures, Twitter was actually safer under Mr. Musk than it was before.

Marketers have not shied away from using the power of the purse: In the days following Mr. Musk’s acquisition, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a key ad industry trade group, published an open call to Twitter to adhere to existing commitments to “brand safety.” It’s perhaps for this reason that Mr. Musk has said he wants to move away from ads as Twitter’s primary revenue source: His ability to make decisions unilaterally about the site’s future is constrained by a marketing industry he neither controls nor has managed to win over.

But even if Mr. Musk is able to free Twitter from the influence of powerful advertisers, his path to unfettered speech is still not clear. Twitter remains bound by the laws and regulations of the countries in which it operates. Amid the spike in racial slurs on Twitter in the days after the acquisition, the European Union’s chief platform regulator posted on the site to remind Mr. Musk that in Europe, an unmoderated free-for-all won’t fly. In the United States, members of Congress and the Federal Trade Commission have raised concerns about the company’s recent actions. And outside the United States and the European Union, the situation becomes even more complex: Mr. Musk’s principle of keying Twitter’s policies on local laws could push the company to censor speech it was loath to restrict in the past, including political dissent.

Regulators have significant tools at their disposal to enforce their will on Twitter and on Mr. Musk. Penalties for noncompliance with Europe’s Digital Services Act could total as much as 6 percent of the company’s annual revenue. In the United States, the F.T.C. has shown an increasing willingness to exact significant fines for noncompliance with its orders (like a blockbuster $5 billion fineimposed on Facebook in 2019). In other key markets for Twitter, such as India, in-country staff members work with the looming threat of personal intimidation and arrest if their employers fail to comply with local directives. Even a Musk-led Twitter will struggle to shrug off these constraints.

There is one more source of power on the web — one that most people don’t think much about but may be the most significant check on unrestrained speech on the mainstream internet: the app stores operated by Google and Apple.

While Twitter has been publicly tight-lipped about how many people use the company’s mobile apps (rather than visit Twitter on a web browser), its 2021 annual report didn’t mince words: The company’s release of new products “is dependent upon and can be impacted by digital storefront operators” that decide the guidelines and enforce them, it reads. “Such review processes can be difficult to predict, and certain decisions may harm our business.”

“May harm our business” is an understatement. Failure to adhere to Apple’s and Google’s guidelines would be catastrophic, risking Twitter’s expulsion from their app stores and making it more difficult for billions of potential users to get Twitter’s services. This gives Apple and Google enormous power to shape the decisions Twitter makes.

Apple’s guidelines for developers are reasonable and plainly stated: They emphasize creating “a safe experience for users” and stress the importance of protecting children. The guidelines quote Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” quip, saying the company will ban apps that are “over the line.”

In practice, the enforcement of these rules is fraught.

In my time at Twitter, representatives of the app stores regularly raised concerns about content available on our platform. On one occasion, a member of an app review team contacted Twitter, saying with consternation that he had searched for “#boobs” in the Twitter app and was presented with … exactly what you’d expect. Another time, on the eve of a major feature release, a reviewer sent screenshots of several days-old tweets containing an English-language racial slur, asking Twitter representatives whether they should be permitted to appear on the service.

Reviewers hint that app approval could be delayed or perhaps even withheld entirely if issues are not resolved to their satisfaction — although the standards for resolution are often implied. Even as they appear to be driven largely by manual checks and anecdotes, these review procedures have the power to derail company plans and trigger all-hands-on-deck crises for weeks or months at a time.

Whose values are these companies defending when they enforce their policies? While the wide array of often conflicting global laws no doubt plays a part, the most direct explanation is that platform policies are shaped by the preferences of a small group of predominantly American tech executives. Steve Jobs didn’t believe **** should be allowed in the App Store, and so it isn’t allowed. Stripped bare, the decisions have a dismaying lack of legitimacy.

It’s this very lack of legitimacy that Mr. Musk, correctly, points to when he calls for greater free speech and for the establishment of a “content moderation council” to guide the company’s policies — an idea Google and Apple would be right to borrow for the governance of their app stores. But even as he criticizes the capriciousness of platform policies, he perpetuates the same lack of legitimacy through his impulsive changes and tweet-length pronouncements about Twitter’s rules. In appointing himself “chief twit,” Mr. Musk has made clear that at the end of the day, he’ll be the one calling the shots.

It was for this reason that I chose to leave the company: A Twitter whose policies are defined by edict has little need for a trust and safety function dedicated to its principled development.

So where will Twitter go from here? Some of the company’s decisions in the weeks and months to come, like the near certainty of allowing Mr. Trump’s account back on the service, will have an immediate, perceptible impact. But to truly understand the shape of Twitter going forward, I’d encourage looking not just at the choices the company makes but also at how Mr. Musk makes them. Should the moderation council materialize, will it represent more than just the loudest, predominantly American voices complaining about censorship — including, critically, the approximately 80 percent of Twitter users who reside outside the United States? Will the company continue to invest in features like Community Notes, which brings Twitter users into the work of platform governance? Will Mr. Musk’s tweets announcing policy changes become less frequent and abrupt?

In the longer term, the moderating influences of advertisers, regulators and, most critically of all, app stores may be welcome for those of us hoping to avoid an escalation in the volume of dangerous speech online. Twitter will have to balance its new owner’s goals against the practical realities of life on Apple’s and Google’s internet — no easy task for the employees who have chosen to remain. And as I departed the company, the calls from the app review teams had already begun.
 
Thank you for posting this opinion essay @kenny.
 
De nada. :wavey:
 
I just hope the moron doesn't take Tesla down with him....I love my car.....

He has alienated his core clientele for Tesla. Years ago, when he was more modest or at least lower-profile, their cars were unique and had cachet. Now they are sold mostly for cachet.

It's like the Rolex model -- fine product and far from unique -- except that Rolex does not rely upon west-coast-based environmentally-conscious early adopters.

EDIT: I kinda hope he does drag Tesla down with him -- although it would cost all of us a lot of money. Would help clear the playing field for the competition. Years ago, I thought he would be competitive for the Nobel Peace Prize for catalyzing (and based on performance and not feel economy!) the end of petroleum reliance.
 
I can’t speak for others…. But we got the Model Y because it is a fantastic vehicle. One drive and we were sold.
And the way the company is organized was also innovative.
If I have a question about the car, I call any dealer and speak to a salesperson.
Invariably they are completely well versed on the car and happy to answer questions.
In fact today I had a question about the car and called the Manhattan dealership. As normal, the gentleman I spoke to was gracious and knowledgeable.
It occurred to me that he might very well feel at risk. I would if Musk was my employer. I didn’t ask.
Given the genius that Tesla is, how could this guy be so clueless as to throw away $45bil. Scary
 
I would imagine a large percentage of his employees feel at risk. It’s been unsettling to watch.
 
I can’t speak for others…. But we got the Model Y because it is a fantastic vehicle. One drive and we were sold.
And the way the company is organized was also innovative.
If I have a question about the car, I call any dealer and speak to a salesperson.
Invariably they are completely well versed on the car and happy to answer questions.
In fact today I had a question about the car and called the Manhattan dealership. As normal, the gentleman I spoke to was gracious and knowledgeable.
It occurred to me that he might very well feel at risk. I would if Musk was my employer. I didn’t ask.
Given the genius that Tesla is, how could this guy be so clueless as to throw away $45bil. Scary

 
Leaving behind the more sinister overtones, and the fact that real people are losing their jobs and communities they've built, I liked this description I read (on Twitter, no doubt):

"It's like watching a midlife crisis from the perspective of the sports car."
 
If you notice- I said the genius of Tesla. Not Musk per se.
The company is really well run, from the perspective of a customer. I guess I assume Musk created the structure that allows Tesla to have done what it's done.
It is truly remarkable how well designed the whole Tesla system is. For example, someone knew exactly where to put superchargers. I could go on and on.
Anyway, I now fear that the collateral damage could hurt Tesla.
And how it's possible that a person could steer the ship that is Tesla, and do what this moron did with twitter.....inconceivable
 
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For example, someone knew exactly where to put superchargers.

well they know where to put gas stations, too -- just simple optimization using the data they already have. They know the zip codes and markets the cars were sold in and it's easy to deduce driving patterns when you can track drivers' every move! (I realize you said that is just one example, and I agree.)

I agree there is (was) a lot of brilliance there. The amazing thing is to start a successful new car company (electric or ICE). For the big ones to get in on it after the fact -- that's just a little evolution.

EDIT: I also suspect it is the first "nice" car (being a little performance-oriented) that many first-time Tesla buyers have ever driven. So a lot of what feels revolutionary is just being in a quick, responsive car. There are many ICE cars like that out there -- but they are never cross-shopped by the Prius and Camry set whereas a Tesla feels like a logical next step. That is the brilliance.
 
warning- I do love talking about Tesla...
well they know where to put gas stations, too
Yes, but there are likely 100+ Gas Stations for every supercharger. Which sprung up rather haphazardly.
This was a plan and a super perceptive one.
Drive up the Taconic Parkway, a scenic, no trucks allowed - and common route to get to Vermont and other destinations North. Halfway from NYC to the Mass pike- there's your supercharger. I mean, of course, they have them on the Thruway and Mass Pike...but someone figured out all the alternate routes and placed them strategically. I've never NOT found a convenient supercharger and I've driven a lot.

EDIT: I also suspect it is the first "nice" car (being a little performance-oriented) that many first-time Tesla buyers have ever driven. So a lot of what feels revolutionary is just being in a quick, responsive car.

Uumm...Coming from owning Porsche 911's, BMW M4's, Mercedes AMG...I've been a car lover my whole life.
This is the fastest car I've ever owned.
And the most responsive. You really have to drive one to get that part.
The interior is kind of plain jane for me- but the seats are really comfortable.
It's just an entirely different experience than an ICE.
But the guy is still a moron.
 
Uumm...Coming from owning Porsche 911's, BMW M4's, Mercedes AMG...I've been a car lover my whole life.

That's fair. You know what you're talking about (more than I do). That's a pretty good endorsement!

Around here, my spouse calls them "the new Prius" based on the driving style (meaning: you never want to be behind one, especially as it approaches a subtle bend in the road :lol-2:).
 
I listen to a show called Marketplace on NPR- according to that show, Musk has lost over $100 billion dollars of late.
Billion, with a B.
More than 100 of them.
Inconceivable ( yes, Princess Bride comes to mind)
 
I'm amazed how people are rooting for his "demise" just because he decided to defend free speech. I mean he gave a lot to the world and is still giving.
Unlike others who seek to place monopolies and sell your food and water back to you.
 
I'm amazed how people are rooting for his "demise" just because he decided to defend free speech.

If he were interested in defending free speech with balance and humility, and with the same logical and methodical approach that he applies to purely technical challenges (tunnel-boring, space travel, battery design), we would continue to celebrate him.

When, instead, he rebrands "freedom from consequences" as "freedom of speech," applies it asymmetrically to the worst among us (don't forget that the left got Kathy Griffin back -- that threat to humanity), and does so under the phony cover of Twitter polls, he shows what a true a$$hole he is. Some would call this "being canceled." It's really just people learning how awful and transactional he is. He is "self-canceling" before our very eyes. Same as Ye and Kyrie Irving.

I was his biggest fan years ago -- and way before I learned what kind of person he is.

Of course we still celebrate Henry Ford so maybe there is hope for another awful-human-as-auto-magnate.
 
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