Twitter verification labels are no longer available
On Friday, November 11th, Twitter Blue was not available for subscription.
On Thursday, Musk tweeted that “too many corrupt legacy Blue ‘verification’ checkmarks exist, so no choice but to remove legacy Blue in coming months.”
The $ 8-a-month label allowed users to impersonate other users and brands. Most notable was pharma company Eli Lilly who had an impersonator tweet the company would be offering Insulin for free which led to their share price plummeting and many theorizing that the drug maker’s lawyers will be coming for Twitter.
Nintendo, Lockheed Martin, and Musk’s own companies Tesla and SpaceX were also impersonated.
Racial slurs increased on Twitter
Racial slurs increased on Twitter
On November 10th, Researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that the number of tweets containing racial slurs has risen in the week after Musk bought Twitter.
The researchers looked at nearly 80,000 English-language tweets and retweets from around the world that contained one of the offensive terms they searched for
Twitter board fired
On Monday, October 29th, the Wall Street Journal reported that Twitter had submitted a filing with the SEC that “the nine members of its former board are no longer directors as of the consummation of the $44 billion merger, which closed last Thursday.” The filing said that Musk had always planned to assume the role of sole director since the terms of the acquisition deal were first made public last spring.
Saudi Arabia is the second-largest shareholder
On Friday, October 28th, the Saudi royal tweeted “Dear friend “Chief Twit” @elonmusk Together all the way @Twitter.”
Together Alwaleed and Kingdom Holding now own approximately 4% of Twitter, making them the company’s largest shareholder after Musk.
The robot war
The Associated Press reported on October 28th that Jason Calacanis, a venture capitalist, has been ‘hanging out’ at Twitter to see if he can help said “[they already have] a very comprehensive plan to reduce the number of (and visibility of) bots, spammers, & bad actors on the platform.” One of the issues stopping Musk’s purchase of the platform was that he felt a larger portion of the users were robots.
Musk assures advertisers
On October 27th, Musk realized he might need to make money from this and tweeted a letter to advertisers promising not to let it become a “free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!”
No Trump on Twitter, yet
On October 27th Musk tweeted; ‘Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints. No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.’ This seems to be in contrast to previous pronouncements before the purchase that he would make Twitter a space for free speech and have many wondering if Trump will make a return to the platform.
The kitchen sink
Musk tweeted on October 26th a video of himself walking into the headquarters holding a kitchen sink and asking users to ‘let that sink in?’