Since Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter on October 28, the social network has been in constant news due to its owner's difficult-to-understand maneuvers.
In the last week alone, Elon Musk has changed the bird logo for a dog meme, Doge, has changed his mind about how to remove the blue
check
from verified to millions of accounts, has shown the network code to see how its algorithm works and has certified the end of free access via API (a tool used by other apps to automate access to tweets through code) to content on the network.
đ€âđ¶ Why does a dog appear on Twitter?
It is Shiba Inu, symbol of Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency.
Elon Musk traded the Twitter bird for the dog, and Doge was up 20%.
Musk is suing for $258 billion over an alleged Dogecoin-linked pyramid scheme.
#DOGE pic.twitter.com/ioRh0Pjdfk
â The Doomer (@El_Doomer) April 4, 2023
Each of these news, which occurred in just five days, has different details and complicated consequences.
April 1st is April Fool's Day in the US It's hard to tell if any of these decisions have anything to do with a global hoax.
Musk seems to run Twitter by meme, but the company still needs billions of dollars in revenue to survive.
The reasonable doubt is if Musk knows what he is doing and is clear about success at the end of the road or if he is just turning around to keep attention alive on the network while waiting for subscribers to arrive, advertisers to return or the economic outlook to improve.
The figures that arrive for now are bad.
Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter and last week valued it at $20,000 in an internal report.
The most recent number of subscribers is less than half a million, half of which would have less than a thousand followers.
Twitter has 237 million daily users, so the subscription rate is ridiculous.
The decision to close the free API is beginning to have an impact on how tweets will be seen in other apps, as the head of Flipboard, an aggregator that had automated the inclusion of tweets in its summaries, says here.
After 13 years, #Twitter has made certain you won't be able to see a tweet on #Flipboard ever again.
Today Twitter turned off their API integration without regard for Twitter users who enjoyed seeing tweets on their Flipboard.
âMike McCue (@mmccue) April 3, 2023
Other network management tools, such as Echobox, have also apparently stopped working this week due to the API collapse.
This disinformation research center at Indiana University explains in this tweet, for its part, that it will no longer be able to use the API to collect thousands of tweets to analyze:
.@twitterdev finally announced the new Twitter API access tiers.
Sadly, it's no longer feasible to build tools and perform research using the API.
This change will affect all our research projects and tools, including @botometer, Hoaxy, and Fakey.#NoResearchWithoutAPI
đ§”1/ pic.twitter.com/tDiijMmeCZ
â OSoMe (@OSoMe_IU) April 3, 2023
The odyssey of the blue verified
On April 1, the old blue verification
checks
used by Twitter before Musk were to disappear: they were a sign of
prestige
that the social network gave to whoever it wanted, in an opaque process.
Musk's idea was to leave the blue
check
only to those who pay.
But since April 1, all that has changed is the message that appears when you click on a
blue
check : "This account is verified because it is subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a verified traditional account."
I mean, it doesn't clarify anything.
The new subscribers celebrated because their signal was now worth as much as before.
Verified elders lamented that they could now be thought to pay, a sign of declining status.
hahahahahaha checkmate pic.twitter.com/vSTX6OG0iR
âMike Solana (@micsolana) April 2, 2023
It is difficult to know Musk's intention.
The
Washington Post
reported from old Twitter sources that removing all previous verifications in one fell swoop is not easy.
They are in a system that can be broken if done with a stroke of the pen.
Musk has removed some, like the one from the
New York Times,
which he accused of publishing "diarrhea" and "propaganda."
The newspaper had announced that he was not going to pay the subscription for organizations, which costs 950 euros per month, much more than the 8 euros via the web or 11 on mobile phones for individuals.
Variations of the verification between the main account of the NYTimes (which it does not have) and the rest.
The gold sign is for "organizations."
The proof that it is one more gesture from Musk is that many other newspaper accounts continue to be verified, including some with the golden sign, typical of organizations.
The same
New York Times
reported that Musk was considering "giving away" these
checks
to the main advertisers and the accounts with the most followers.
Nothing, however, is clear.
In another bizarre announcement, Musk said that only tweets from Twitter Blue accounts (subscribers) would appear in the main tab of the app (âfor youâ).
The next day he said that he had âforgottenâ to mention that there would be others as well.
Why Doge the dog
While all this debate is happening live on Twitter, and Musk laments being treated badly by the media, the Twitter logo became the meme dog Doge, which is also the image of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency.
Musk has a trial in New York where he is accused of having created a financial pyramid in support of this currency.
That same day his lawyers asked the judge to reject the complaint.
Meanwhile, with Twitter's decision, the cryptocurrency rose 30% in value.
Musk recalled that he had promised to do so in a nonsensical Twitter conversation.
As promised pic.twitter.com/Jc1TnAqxAV
â Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2023
In a different decision.
Twitter decided to release its code so that programmers could unravel how its algorithm decides which tweets to promote.
The release happened after an alleged former employee did the same to a piece of that code.
There have been dozens of threads that have tried to unravel the keys: a
like
has more weight than a retweet (and both much more than a response), it is better to add photos and videos and much worse to put a link, subscribing to Twitter Blue will promotes and if they block or
mutate
you punish you.
press@twitter.com now auto responds with đ©
â Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 19, 2023
Among the punished tweets are those labeled as disinformation, violence and hate, there are also messages about Ukraine.
Musk has not given a reason.
Nor is it clear how much or how.
When Twitter made the code public, Musk tweeted: "People will find out a lot of dumb stuff, but we'll patch it as soon as it's found."
The media that have written to the usual email account press@twitter.com have received a poop emoji in response.
It is an automatic response that Musk also announced.
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