Tag: Twitter

Categories
Mobile Syrup

Spotify CEO joins Elon Musk in slamming Apple’s App Store policies

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has expressed support for Twitter chief Elon Musk in his ongoing dispute with Apple.

Earlier this week, Musk asked on Twitter if Apple “hate[s] free speech in America” after claiming that the company has “mostly stopped advertising on Twitter.” He also accused Apple of threatening to withhold Twitter from its App Store while criticizing the company for the 30 percent revenue cut it takes from developers. Musk has reportedly paused the relaunch of his $8 Twitter Blue subscription as he attempts to avoid Apple’s 30 percent cut.

Now, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has retweeted multiple anti-Apple tweets from Musk and launched his own lengthy Twitter thread to blast the company.

After referencing Spotify’s 2019 complaint against Apple’s “anticompetitive practices,” Ek said “over and over again, Apple gives itself every advantage while at the same time stifling innovation and hurting customers.” He went on to say Apple “acts in self interest but also doesn’t seem to care about the law or courts” or about “consumer choice,” accusing it of being “shameless in [its] bullying.”

“This bad behaviour is far-reaching and as Elon Musk recently pointed out, not widely understood,” he added.

“So how much longer will we look away from this threat to the future of the internet? How many more consumers will be denied choice? There’s been a lot of talk. Talk is helpful but we need action,” he concluded while tagging the U.S. Commerce Department, European Commission and European Commission VP Margrethe Vestager.

Ek’s comments also come just one month after Spotify published a blog post titled “Apple’s Anti-Competitive Behavior Hurts Everyone.” The blog cited a story from The New York Times reporting that Apple rejected its in-app audiobook purchasing system three times due to it violating its App Store rules. Spotify eventually conceded, but not without criticizing Apple extensively:

“The Audiobooks purchase flow that Apple’s rules force us to provide consumers today is far too complicated and confusing — confusing because they change the rules arbitrarily, making them impossible to interpret. Bottom line, we’re forced to make users work even harder to listen to an audiobook. This harms not only consumers, but, this time, also authors and publishers who now find themselves under Apple’s thumb.”

Outside of Spotify, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney also recently backed Musk.

Sharing a Daily Mail article about Apple’s handling of personal data in China, Sweeney called the iPhone maker “a menace to freedom worldwide” that “maintain[s] an illegal monopoly on app distribution.” He’s also been retweeting several tweets that have been critical of Apple.

Sweeney has long been at war with Apple, most notably through a major antitrust lawsuit filed in August 2020. As part of the dispute, Epic’s Fortnite game featured a 1984-inspired ad to rally players against Apple and Sweeney even said “it’s everybody’s duty to fight,” controversially likening the conflict to the civil rights movement. A September 2021 court ruling largely favoured Apple, which Epic is currently appealing.

Apple has yet to publicly comment on Musk’s comments.

Categories
Mobile Syrup

Twitter un-bans 62,000 accounts as CSAM removal team decimated by layoffs

In today’s Twitter news, the platform has begun restoring some 62,000 accounts following new owner Elon Musk’s “general amnesty” poll. Meanwhile, reports indicate Twitter has stopped enforcing its COVID-19 misinformation policy and has slashed its CSAM to just one person despite Musk promising that removing CSAM would be Twitter’s “priority #1.”

Starting with the account restorations, Casey Newton reported via his Platformer newsletter that Twitter began the process of reinstating about 62,000 accounts with over 10,000 followers, including one account with over 5 million followers and 75 accounts with 1 million or more followers. The move, which Twitter employees have started calling “the Big Bang,” comes after Musk polled Twitter users asking if the company should grant a “general amnesty” to suspended accounts.

Platformer notes that the move could cause increased instability at Twitter as the company loses valuable engineering talent. Moreover, the Twitter team is arguably stretched across various Musk projects, such as his goal of bringing back the refreshed Twitter Blue subscription later this week with a manual verification process.

The influx of formerly suspended accounts could have other impacts on Twitter. For example, CNN reported that Twitter added a note to its COVID-19 misinformation page that it no longer enforces the policy. Between January 2020 and September 2022, Twitter suspended over 11,000 accounts for breaking COVID misinformation rules, per statistics published by Twitter. It also removed more than 100,000 pieces of content that violated the rules.

Likely, some of the accounts suspended over the misinformation policy will be among the ones Musk allows back on Twitter.

Twitter CSAM removal team down to one person

Finally, Wired reported that Twitter’s child sex abuse material (CSAM) removal team was decimated by the company’s recent layoffs, leaving just one staff member for the entire Asia Pacific region. Wired notes that it’s not clear how many people were on the CSAM removal team prior to the layoffs, but the Asia Pacific region is home to around 4.3 billion people (roughly 60 percent of the world’s population) and some of Twitter’s busiest markets. For example, there are 59 million Twitter users in Japan, second only to the number of users in the U.S.

Twiter’s CSAM removal teams work with various organizations that collect data about CSAM content. That data is used in Twitter systems that remove CSAM content, and Twitter’s internal dashboards are considered critical for analyzing metadata to help people writing code to identify CSAM networks and remove them before content is shared.

Twitter has a long-running issue with tackling CSAM, with an internal report from April 2022 saying the company “cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and nonconsensual nudity at scale.” The company’s CSAM struggle is made more complicated by it allowing the sharing of consensual pornography since tools that scan for CSAM struggle to differentiate between a consenting adult and an unconsenting child.

Additionally, the CSAM problem has helped push brands off Twitter — notably, Dyson and Forbes suspended Twitter advertising campaigns in September after ads appeared next to CSAM.

Needless to say, human staff are integral to the process of finding and removing CSAM material. Musk, however, has publicly asked Twitter users to “reply in comments” if they see any CSAM issues on Twitter. Experts told Wired that Musk should be having that discussion with his CSAM removal staff instead of asking Twitter users to help in the comments.

You can keep up with the ongoing saga of Twitter under Musk here.

Source: Platformer, CNN, Wired

Categories
Mobile Syrup

Musk accuses Apple of hating ‘free speech’ in Twitter tirade sent from iPhone

Elon Musk did a live speed run of learning about Apple’s stringent App Store policies on Monday.

In a series of totally normal, not-at-all-unhinged tweets, Musk claimed Apple “mostly” stopped advertising on Twitter, accused the company of hating “free speech in America” and censorship, then said Apple “threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store,” and wrapped things up by tweeting about Apple’s 30 percent App Store cut and posting a meme about going to war with Apple (I’ve included screenshots below in case Musk deletes any of the tweets).

Humorously, Musk tweeted everything from an iPhone.

Musk’s new beef with Apple should hardly come as a surprise. Over the last few weeks, Musk has laid off a significant amount of Twitter staff and upended the company’s content moderation policies, causing brands and advertisers to ditch the platform (contrary to Musk’s claims, it has nothing to do with activists).

At the same time, Musk forged ahead with a refreshed Twitter Blue subscription that gives subscribers an identical blue checkmark to verified accounts, despite warnings that it wouldn’t go well. Within days of Blue going live, Twitter had to suspend the subscription while it scrambled to come up with ways to stop rampant impersonations on the platform, which so far has boiled down to Musk begrudgingly admitting Twitter will manually verify Blue subscribers after all.

Blue subscription puts Twitter at odds with Apple, Google

The Twitter Blue subscription fiasco is a relatively important piece to the Musk v. Apple puzzle. As advertisers pull out of Twitter, Musk is hunting for other ways to squeeze profit out of the company as bankruptcy looms. Getting people to pay for Twitter might help (although the math of Musk’s Blue subscription doesn’t quite add up). The new Twitter Blue was only available on iOS for the brief period it was available at all and will likely be available on iOS when it returns later this week. It’s unclear if or when Musk will expand Blue to Android.

Blue’s iOS availability is the crux of the issue. As has been pointed out before, Twitter’s shift to subscriptions means Apple and Google take a cut of the money — Apple takes a 30 percent cut that drops to 15 percent after the first year per subscriber, while Google takes 15 percent from the start. That could be a problem for Musk, who — as described above — is trying to squeeze as much profit from Twitter as possible.

More than that, Apple and Google have both taken stances against apps that don’t handle content moderation properly. For example, back in January 2021, Apple and Google banned Parler from their respective app stores over its lax moderation policies in the wake of the January 6th insurrection. Musk claimed Apple hasn’t said why it allegedly withheld Twitter from the App Store, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the moderation changes had some part in it (assuming the allegation is true). That said, Apple has a history of blocking app updates if it thinks the app in question tries to skirt its revenue cut, among other reasons, so it really could be anything.

Regardless, now that Musk owns a business that is directly impacted by Apple’s and Google’s app store policies, he seems much more concerned about them. There are certainly arguments to be made that app store policies, rules, and regulations are anti-competitive in many respects — it will be interesting to see if Musk manages to spur any action on the issue or if he chooses to offer Blue through the web instead as a way of avoiding giving Apple and Google a cut.

Of course, Musk might just make his own smartphone (judging by the tweets already surfacing from Musk stans who are ready to toss their iPhone if Apple bans Twitter from the App Store, he’d have some customers). Hopefully, the Musk phone doesn’t catch fire as often as Tesla vehicles.

Read more about the ongoing Musk x Twitter saga here.

Categories
Mobile Syrup

Twitter inundated with spam obscuring posts about protests in China

Twitter struggled with a wave of spam tweets promoting gambling, escort services and porn that’s filling search results for major Chinese cities on Sunday amid protests.

As reported by The Washington Post (via The Verge), searches for the Chinese names of cities like Beijing and Shanghai were filled with spam tweets, which outnumbered tweets about the protests.

According to an initial analysis highlighted by Stanford Internet Observatory’s Alex Stamos estimated that over 95 percent of tweets under the Beijing search term were from spam accounts, the vast majority of which only recently started tweeting in high volumes. Some accounts were years old but only started tweeting in the last few hours — one highlighted account was created in 2015, but the over 2,000 tweets it posted were sent over the last day or so.

Protesters have been using VPNs to access Western services like Twitter and Telegram to coordinate efforts and work around Chinese government censorship. The spam, however, is reportedly coming from government-linked accounts. Along with the impact on the protests, it’s disrupting people’s ability to get on-the-ground information about events.

The protests are against China’s zero-COVID strategy, which is responsible for rolling lockdowns attempting to control the spread of COVID-19. The policy has been in place for a while, but protests erupted after an apartment fire killed 10 people and injured nine more — one resident told BBC News that the COVID restrictions prevented people from being able to leave the apartment easily.

An ex-Twitter employee told The Washington Post that it’s not the first time alleged government-linked accounts used these kinds of spam techniques. In the past, Twitter dealt with it through a combination of manual effort and automation, but with Elon Musk gutting the company’s staff in recent weeks, Twitter is having a tough time. The ex-employee said that “the China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned, leaving a large hole to fill.

However, the Post also reported that a current employee told an external researcher that Twitter was aware of the problem and working to resolve it.

Source: The Washington Post Via: The Verge

Categories
Mobile Syrup

Twitter working on encrypted DMs with Signal protocol

Last week, Twitter owner Elon Musk talked about plans to add encrypted direct messages (DMs) to Twitter as part of his ‘Twitter 2.0’ vision. Additionally, Musk mentioned the creator of the encrypted chat app Signal might be on board to help. Now, code spotted in the Twitter iOS app includes references to the Signal protocol.

Spotted by Jane Manchun Wong, who has a track record for finding in-development features in social media apps, the code strongly suggests Twitter will use the Signal protocol for encrypted DMs. As an aside, it appears Wong’s Twitter account was removed or deleted after posting these details — it’s not clear why.

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a fairly common feature of messaging platforms. For those unfamiliar with it, E2EE means that only participants in a given chat have the encryption key and can view the messages. Currently, Twitter DMs use a weaker form of encryption, which means Twitter holds the keys, and technically anyone at the company with access could read DMs.

Should Twitter adopt E2EE, it will make DMs significantly more secure. Moreover, using the Signal protocol will add some trust to encrypted Twitter DMs, given the protocol is the basis for E2EE in both the Signal app and WhatsApp. Of course, it’s likely still early days for the development of the feature, and it’s not clear how long it’ll take to roll out.

Source: @wongmjane Via: 9to5Mac

Categories
Mobile Syrup

Musk aims to relaunch Blue on December 2 with manual verification

Twitter owner Elon Musk plans to “tentatively” relaunch Twitter Blue on December 2nd with new, colour-coded checkmarks. Previously, Musk planned to relaunch Blue on November 29th but later said Twitter would hold off until it could deal with the impersonation issue.

In a tweet, Musk said that companies would get gold checkmarks, governments would get grey checkmarks, and individuals would get blue checkmarks, “celebrity or not.” Moreover, Musk said that “all verified accounts will be manually authenticated before [the] check activates,” a move he described as “painful, but necessary.”

In another tweet, Musk said, “All verified individual humans will have [the] same blue check, as [the] boundary of what constitutes “notable” is otherwise too subjective.” Moreover, he said individuals can get a secondary logo showing they belong to an organization if verified by that institution. Musk promised a longer explanation would come next week.

These changes come after Musk rolled out a new version of the Twitter Blue subscription that gave subscribers a blue checkmark that matched the verified badge previously given to notable accounts. The new subscription costs $9.99/mo in Canada. However, Musk suspended the new Blue within days after Twitter was flooded with paid ‘verified’ accounts that impersonated brands, celebrities, and politicians. Blue caused chaos and even led to significant stock drops for some companies.

Moreover, Twitter employees warned Musk and leadership of the potential problems — including impersonation risks — ahead of the Blue launch. Musk ignored them.

While the changes to Blue and Musk’s promise to actually verify Twitter users seem promising, it remains to be seen how it plays out on December 2nd (or whenever the changes go live). Moreover, questions remain about how Musk plans to manually verify all the users who sign up, given he decimated Twitter’s staff and contract workers and continued firing people even after saying he would start hiring new staff.

You can follow the ongoing Musk and Twitter saga here.

Source: Elon Musk Via: The Verge

Categories
Mobile Syrup

The joy of Black Friday and Elon Musk burning Twitter down [SyrupCast 269]

On this week’s SyrupCast, Patrick O’Rourke, Brad Bennett and Jon Lamont talk about this year’s carrier and retailer Black Friday deals and whether they are worthwhile, then delve into the current state of Twitter under Elon Musk’s regime.

Subscribe on Spotify

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts

Direct download link

Categories
Mobile Syrup

Musk asks Twitter if he should grant ‘general amnesty’ to suspended accounts

Twitter owner Elon Musk is back with another poll to make another significant moderation decision, something he previously promised would happen after forming a “widely diverse” content moderation council.

This time around, Musk’s Twitter poll asks if Twitter should offer a “general amnesty” to suspended accounts. If Twitter users vote in favour of it, it seems Musk plans to let the accounts return to Twitter “provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.” At the time of writing, there were three hours left on the poll, and the results were 72.3 percent yes and 27.7 percent no, with a little over 3 million votes.

Musk has already made several significant decisions after promising not to do so until after forming a moderation council. However, Musk reinstated several accounts over the weekend, including comedian Kathy Griffin (who was banned for impersonating Musk), right-wing parody outlet The Babylon Bee, and author Jordan Peterson (both of which had accounts locked for misgendering trans people). Musk also reinstated former U.S. President Donald Trump’s Twitter account after Twitter users narrowly voted in favour of it in a poll from Musk, although Trump declined to return to Twitter.

Like many things Musk does with Twitter, it feels like there’s little regard for the potential consequences of allowing suspended accounts back on the platform. Those accounts were suspended for a reason, and while some likely weren’t justified, plenty of suspensions were. Giving people a second chance is good, but this move will likely flood Twitter with less savoury accounts. That will likely spiral into more content that advertisers don’t like and more harassment of journalists, politicians, and other users, ultimately driving more people off the platform.

Whatever damage this move does to Twitter, Musk will likely just blame it on activists before tweeting another plan with little regard for consequences.

Read more about Musk’s tumultuous time at Twitter here.

Source: @elonmusk Via: The Verge

Categories
Mobile Syrup

Musk blames activists for his lie about Twitter’s moderation council

Hey, remember when Elon Musk promised to form a content moderation council with “widely diverse viewpoints” before making any major content decisions or account reinstatements on Twitter, and then not even a month later, let former U.S. President Donald Trump and other controversial figures back onto the platform? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Whether or not Musk remembered, he was reminded of that promise on Twitter last night. His excuse? Activists.

“A large coalition of political/social activist groups agreed not to try to kill Twitter by starving us of advertising revenue if I agreed to this condition,” Musk tweeted. “They broke the deal.”

Musk’s tweet about Twitter activists, preserved as a screenshot in case he deletes it. You can view the tweet here.

Musk previously blamed activists for a “massive drop in revenue,” claiming they pressured advertisers to pull out of Twitter. Musk’s tweet was then fact-checked by Twitter, linking to several publications that reported advertisers were pausing Twitter campaigns over uncertainty around Musk, the platform’s direction, and concerns over content moderation.

Since then, Musk’s failed paid verification scheme sparked rampant impersonation of brands and high-profile accounts, and more advertisers marked Twitter as a “high risk” platform.

So to set things straight, Musk made several rash, controversial decisions that spooked advertisers, advertisers started pulling out of Twitter, Musk made up a story about activists trying to destroy Twitter rather than accept responsibility for his actions, then doubled down on those actions and scared off more advertisers. Then, Musk used that made-up situation as the reason he allowed controversial accounts to return to Twitter.

Musk reinstated several Twitter accounts on November 18th, including comedian Kathy Griffin, right-wing parody outlet The Babylon Bee, and author Jordan Peterson (it’s worth noting the latter two accounts weren’t technically banned, just locked). Musk banned Griffin after she impersonated Musk’s Twitter account to mock him. However, The Babylon Bee and Peterson were both locked for tweets that misgendered trans people.

The following day, Musk ran a Twitter poll asking if Trump’s account should be reinstated. Then, based on the poll results and with no mention of the moderation council, Musk announced Trump would return. Humorously, Trump declined to return.

Oh, and if there was any thought Musk might actually listen to a content moderation council, Musk cleared that up. Per The Verge’s Alex Heath, Musk told Twitter employees at a Q&A about the moderation council that, “This is an advisory council. I will hear what they have to say and I will either agree with it or I won’t.”

You can read MobileSyrup’s ongoing coverage of the turmoil at Twitter here.

Source: @elonmusk Via: The Verge

Categories
Mobile Syrup

Musk talks encrypted DMs, voice and video chat in Twitter meeting

Twitter owner Elon Musk discussed plans to encrypt direct messages (DMs) and add new features like video and voice chat. Moreover, Musk may have the creator of the secure messaging platform Signal on board to help.

The Verge reported the details of a meeting between Musk and Twitter employees on Monday, which the publication obtained a recording of. In the meeting, Musk had presentation slides titled “Twitter 2.0,” which was the same term he used in an email to employees demanding they commit to long hours or quit (spoiler: a bunch quit).

“We want to enable users to be able to communicate without being concerned about their privacy, [or] without being concerned about a data breach at Twitter causing all of their DMs to hit the web, or think that maybe someone at Twitter could be spying on their DMs,” Musk said in the meeting (The Verge notes that Twitter DMs have leaked before).

Encrypted DMs are a top priority for Musk and his Twitter 2.0 vision — during the meeting, he praised Signal and said he spoke with creator Moxie Marlinspike, who was “potentially willing to help out” with encrypting Twitter DMs. Interestingly, Marlinspike previously worked at Twitter and wanted to do encrypted DMs years ago but was denied. He left the company and created Signal.

It’s not clear what Marlinspike’s “help” would look like. If I had to guess, I could see Twitter adopting the Signal Protocol for encrypted DMs, similar to Meta’s WhatsApp, rather than Twitter going its own route. Whatever happens with encrypted DMs will ultimately come down to the current whims of Musk.

To follow along with Musk’s Twitter turmoil, check out all our coverage here.

Source: The Verge