Microblogging

Photo: kavi designs (Shutterstock)Late Thursday night, Substack journalist Bari Weiss tweeted a batch of screenshots detailing how Twitter limited the visibility of the accounts of several people popular among the online right.Weiss has been given unprecedented access to Twitter’s internal systems by CEO Elon Musk, and aimed to expose the inner workings of the company’s “deamplification/visibility filtering,” as former head of Twitter trust and safety Yoel Roth called it in a tweeted Slack message. Weiss herself dubbed…

The Twitter headquarters in San Fransisco. Photo: Kirby Lee (AP)Janitors are the latest group of workers left in limbo by the ongoing drama happening over at Twitter. The company reportedly terminated the contract that employed the striking janitors, according to the California Labor Federation (CLF). Elizabeth Strater, the communications director at CLF told Gizmodo in an email that at this point, the plan is to maintain “maintain a presence picketing outside Twitter HQ this week.”Twitter did not immediately respond to…

Photo: rarrarorro (Shutterstock)Not long after Elon Musk took over Twitter and started doing a whole lot of crazy stuff to the platform, the microblogging app Hive Social saw a huge spike in users. Apparently fed up with Elon’s shit, a bunch of people had decided to try out alternative social media sites—and Hive was one of them. Launched back in 2019, the platform reportedly saw its user base grow by a million users in the course of several weeks. Normally that kind of bump would have been cause for celebration, but…

Protesters in Beijing gather in protest over China’s repressive covid policy. Screenshot: Tom Mackenzie/TwitterOver the weekend, you might not have seen the shocking footage coming out of several major Chinese cities, with thousands upon thousands of protesters taking to the streets chanting “stand up,” or “down with Xi Jingping.” You may not have seen the rare display of cohesion from the protesters around the same issues of ongoing brutal covid-based lockdowns and government repression. You may also not have paid…

Twitter updated its Community Notes feature (formerly known as Birdwatch) on Friday, according to a set of posts from a company Twitter account. With the update, Community Notes are now, once again, subject to “scoring,” in which site users can vote on whether or not a note is useful. Additionally, an algorithm change will supposedly ensure “more low quality notes get identified,” and restrict users whofrequently contribute “low quality” notes, tweeted the company.So in summary: there is now a crowd-sourced verification…

Image Source : PIXABAY Twitter A lot has taken place since Elon Musk entered the office of Twitter as the new owner and boss of the micro-blogging platform. He mass-fired Twitter employees, and it was reported recently that around 1200 software engineers decided to leave the firm after Musk sent an “ultimatum” email to the staff, asking them to go through and be…

Donald Trump’s Twitter account was permabanned back in 2021 after the Jan. 6 insurrection. The company’s stated reasoning for the ban remains up and active, despite his account being reinstated in recent days.Photo: pcruciatti (Shutterstock)Last month, Gizmodo considered who could be the worst people to get their Twitter accounts back under new CEO Elon Musk’s rule. Well, we guessed right with a few of those accounts already back on while other, completely unexpected accounts have also had their profiles reinstated. On…

Photo: SPPFR (AP)Earlier this month, dozens of civil rights groups advised top brands and marketing agencies to pause advertising on Twitter unless CEO Elon Musk offered serious assurances that he’d protect vulnerable users from a flood of harassment and hate speech. Now, those same groups are renewing their call for companies to cut ties with the platform, saying the site’s billionaire owner has already backtracked on the promises he haddelivered in person just a couple of weeks ago.A coalition of more than 60…

Photo: Scott Olson (Getty Images)The numbers are in and Disruptor in Chief Elon Musk is definitely having an impact on Twitter, but probably not the type he’d hoped for.Newly released brand favorability and trust data from Morning Consult shows a massive backlash, particularly among Democrats, to Twitter in the weeksafter the billionaire officially took over. That steep fall off in favorability and trust are likely driving some users, and advertisers, away from the site, which Musk assures you, isn’t actually a rapidly…

High-level Twitter executives are leaving the company in droves to escape the chaos caused by new owner Elon Musk.Illustration: mundissima (Shutterstock)Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk has essentially set the company on fire—and critical employees are running as fast as they can to escape the flames.The company lost five high-level execs on Thursday, including its chief privacy officer and head of software engineering. Their resignations capped off a day in which Musk told employees that “bankruptcy isn’t out of the…