something really fucked up going on with twitter’s AI i am not joking, other people are replicating this weird thing all over twitter.

weird that Grok really cares about this one very specific issue for some reason right now!

good morning! day two of FTC vs meta — i am in the DC blogging cave today, colleague @ceciliakang and i will be in and out of court

mute me if you do not love court tweets talking about antitrust theory and zuckerberg testimonies an enjoyable percentage of this trial so far is Zuckerberg sort of explaining what Facebook and Valley insider terms mean to the judge and the court and me feeling smug b/c i already knew them

"surface"
"native code"
etc

the twitter takeover loans were such a bad deal for investment banks that some bankers are getting their annual comp cut by nearly half because they cant offload them from their books without gigantic losses "worst deal since the financial crisis"

i am not an M&A banker but that sounds bad

wsj.com/tech/elon-musk…

hooooly shit⁩ nytimes.com/2022/11/20/bus… honestly risky for iger’s own legacymaking — he was already cemented as goated CEO with some of the best acquisitions ever

now you gotta wade back into the muck….

currently an emergency twitter all-hands going on with Elon Musk answering employee Q's

Elon was asked: "How are you going to deal with the expected attrition and align everyone on a shared vision?"

Elon Answer: "I don't know....we all need to be more hardcore." updates to come in today's story w/ @kateconger and @RMac18

nytimes.com/2022/11/10/tec…

six outcomes in musk land:

1. Elon changes his mind (again) and the deal closes

2. Twitter sues Elon, they go to court in Delaware, Elon is ordered to pay $1b breakup fee

3. Twitter sues Elon, court orders “specific performance” and he has to pay debt financing amount ($33b~) 4. Twitter sues Elon, court orders in elons favor, he walks away

5. Twitter sues Elon, they settle for undisclosed amount

(@matt_levine’s emergency newsletter today has a real good section on what may bring that about and how)

and here’s Elon officially trying to back out of the deal

sec.gov/Archives/edgar… key word: “trying”

good morning!

Elon Musk is addressing Twitter employees for the first time today. Follow me and my NYT colleagues for updates as we get them.

nytimes.com/live/2022/06/1… we're still on question one: "Why do you love twitter," and elon's answer was pretty long and rambling, but one thing he said was that he appreciated "Freedom of speech, and Freedom of Reach."

the “yaaaaas qweeen-ification” of meme-on-meme cyberwarfare between nation states is giving me a brain bleed

https://twitter.com/samramani2/status/1500164010662060033

like i genuinely feel like im too old to register this and ive been on twtr for wayyyy too long

Russian govt appears to be blocking Facebook entirely across the region, according to its government communications bureau, after a week of throttling the service

They're claiming it's in response to "discrimination" against russian media

rkn.gov.ru/news/rsoc/news… Facebook's stance has been to continue providing service inside of Russia, saying they wish to support Russians who are against the war and use the services for communications during a chaotic time

Also pertinent: FB just rolled out encryption on Instagram last week

Meta earnings out: Company lost $10 billion investing in Reality Labs (oculus wing) over 2021.

Even still, the company is massively profitable making nearly $40 billion in net income over the past year. that doesnt seem to be enough for wall street: stock is down like 16 percent in after hours

probably because the huge spending FB is doing on Metaverse stuff is dragging down their profit growth, which is down 8 percent year over year

Facebook apps experiencing outages again for the second time in a week.

https://twitter.com/Facebook/status/1446556732977778695

Facebook spox says that today's issues are not related to Monday's outage and that teams were working to resolve the issue.

i think its fair to look hard at the methodology and findings of the research being publicized, as this article says, and treat it with the appropriate amount of skepticism rather than immediately divine it is widely applicable

npr.org/2021/10/06/104… it is extremely hard to judge the findings of the past few weeks without the source material and methodology being laid out

if all of this leads to even more transparency — full published papers and research in daylight on platform effects — that benefits both "sides"

hello it is facebook whistleblower day in congress

follow the scrum of nyt reporters covering it below

nytimes.com/2021/10/05/tec… Facebook updates its engineering blog post on the outage Monday, saying it wasn't a malicious attack — just a screw up

engineering.fb.com/2021/10/04/net…

hello

we’ve traveled back in time to 2010 and Facebook is down

nytimes.com/2021/10/04/tec… snow day for FB employees

the Facebook whistleblower is Frances Haugen, per 60 minutes former google, yelp and pinterest employee, and has been a product manager at Facebook for the past two and a half years working on civic integrity, according to her linkedin

lol

the oversight board kicks the Facebook Trump Ban decision back to Facebook

nytimes.com/2021/05/05/tec… facebook grumbles "thank you" while going back to drawing board for six months to make another decision

about.fb.com/news/2021/05/f…

Big news: Hours after Google cut a deal with News Corp, Facebook pulls the trigger and restricts publishers and people from sharing news links in Australia

about.fb.com/news/2021/02/c… first quick thing

I am fascinated to see what sort of information — misinformation? — fills the void in countries that will no longer allow news publisher link sharing

nytimes.com/live/2021/02/1…

Monday News: Facebook expands its policies to take down all posts with vaccine-related misinformation, going beyond just COVID issues or previous positions

*that will include taking down posts that vaccines cause Autism*

nytimes.com/2021/02/08/tec… the caveat (and there's always a caveat) is that they have come up with a list of claims determined by the WHO that will qualify in takedowns. all of that and more here:

facebook.com/help/230764881…

just found out the hard way that baking powder can actually go bad my last banana bread came out like an oily compacted turd and i thought i just didn’t mix it well enough

then this morning my cheddar bacon biscuits didn’t rise

look at these ruined beauties

the uber saga never ends

on his way out of office, trump pardons Anthony Levandowski, who pleaded guilty for theft of trade secrets from google when he was a self driving car engineer there years ago

whitehouse.gov/briefings-stat… (Levandowski later sold his self driving truck startup to UBER for millions, only to have the whole deal unwind in disaster after Google discovered the theft)

this story NEVER ENDS....