The entire story of Twitter / X under Elon Musk

Twitter has announced that its recently released Community Notes feature will now require all contributors to rate a sufficient number of notes before they can unlock the ability to write notes themselves.

Rating notes on the platform will increase a user’s “Rating Impact,” a ranking system that reflects how often a contributor’s ratings have helped notes to be identified as “Helpful” or “Not Helpful” by the Twitter community. The ability to write Community Notes will be unlocked when a contributor has achieved a Rating Impact of at least five. Notes in need of ratings can be found under the “Needs your help” section of Community Notes in order to boost your Rating Impact.

Elon Musk said Tuesday that he’ll still be in charge of Twitter’s software and server teams after he resigns his CEO seat to “someone foolish enough to take” it. He broke the news in a response to a poll he ran earlier this week, where around 58 percent of respondents said that he should step down as CEO.

Given that the social networking site is mainly made up of software and servers (especially after the massive layoffs), it’s clear Musk will still have direct control over the company, even if he doesn’t have the explicit CEO title. That’s not necessarily a surprise; Musk has de-facto control over product at most of his companies, and he’s still Twitter’s owner at the end of the day. But the announcement likely means disappointment for anyone hoping that him stepping down as CEO would bring an end to Twitter’s wild rollercoaster ride.

George Hotz, known for being the first person to carrier-unlock an iPhone and jailbreaking the PS3, both under his hacker alias “geohot,” has resigned from his Twitter internship, he announced Tuesday evening on Twitter.

“Appreciate the opportunity, but didn’t think there was any real impact I could make there,” he wrote. He also said it was “sad” to see his GitHub “withering.”

That poll that Elon Musk posted to Twitter Sunday evening? Asking whether he should stay on as CEO of Twitter or appoint someone else? The one where he said he would “abide by the results” no matter how it turned out? The one where nearly 58 percent of participants said, yes, please step down already?

It was probably mostly meaningless. According to CNBC’s David Faber, whose reporting is pretty reliable on this kind of stuff, Musk has been actively searching for a replacement even before posting the poll. In fact, that search has been “ongoing,” Faber writes. How ongoing? Faber doesn’t say, but Musk hasn’t been exactly shy about describing his tenure at Twitter as only temporary.

Mastodon, a decentralized social media platform that many are turning to as a Twitter alternative, saw its userbase skyrocket from about 300,000 monthly active users to 2.5 million between October and November, Mastodon’s CEO, founder, and lead developer Eugen Rochko said in a new blog post. Elon Musk officially took over Twitter in late October, meaning Mastodon’s huge jump in users almost directly followed Musk’s new ownership.

Rochko’s post also addressed Twitter’s now-reversed bans on sharing links to Mastodon, many journalists, and the @joinmastodon account itself following the still-in-place ban on @ElonJet. “This is a stark reminder that centralized platforms can impose arbitrary and unfair limits on what you can and can’t say while holding your social graph hostage,” Rochko said. “At Mastodon, we believe that there doesn’t have to be a middleman between you and your audience and that journalists and government institutions especially should not have to rely on a private platform to reach the public.”

Twitter has officially announced Blue for Business, a subscription geared toward companies that want to “verify and distinguish themselves on Twitter,” as its press release says. The service will let companies link their main accounts with those of their employees to make it easier to show that someone actually does work for them.

The company is testing the service with “a select group of businesses,” including its own employees. Esther Crawford, director of product management at Twitter, has a little bird badge next to her blue checkmark that verifies her as an employee at the company, as you can see in this tweet of her announcing Blue for Business. Craft Ventures, a venture capital firm, also appears to have some employees marked as affiliates, using a badge with its logo.

Update December 19th, 5:46PM ET: The changes detailed in this article are related to the launch of Twitter Blue for Business, which the company revealed Monday evening. You can read our story about that here. Our original story follows.

Twitter is adding to its increasingly complex ways of differentiating accounts with new square profile pictures with rounded corners for brands. The new type of profile pic started rolling out on the platform on Monday, and you might already be able to see them on brand profiles and in your feed.

Elon Musk may be close to ending his run as Twitter CEO.

After haphazardly establishing a ban on links to certain social platforms that put his site at odds with both The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz and his own supporters, like Silicon Valley venture capitalist Paul Graham, Musk’s doxxing, banning, and moderation outburst ended — predictably — with an apology and a promise it “won’t happen again.”

Update December 19th, 2:45AM ET: Twitter has deleted @TwitterSafety’s tweets and a webpage detailing its new policy after Elon Musk apologized and said major policy changes would be put to a vote. The story that follows reflects the policy as of Sunday evening.

Twitter will no longer allow users to promote their presence on certain social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr, and Post. In a post outlining these changes, Twitter says it will take action against users that violate this policy “at both the Tweet level and the account level.”

Elon Musk has started to lift the suspensions of some journalists on Twitter after re-running a poll asking if he should “Unsuspend accounts who doxxed my exact location in real-time.” (The journalists did not reveal his real-time location.) Out of the two poll options, “now” won with 58.7 percent of the responses, beating “in 7 days.” There were almost 3.7 million responses to the poll.

Journalists from a variety of outlets, including The New York Times, CNN, NBC, The Intercept, and more, had their accounts suspended on Thursday, most of them after tweeting about @ElonJet, a Twitter account that tracked the SpaceX-owned private jet Elon Musk uses, based on publicly available FAA flight tracking data. The ElonJet account was suspended from Twitter prior to the strike against the other accounts but survives on other platforms (which is potentially the reason you can’t tweet a link to many instances of Mastodon, a decentralized Twitter alternative).

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about that time when Elon Musk bought a McLaren F1 for $1 million and then immediately drove it into a ditch while trying to show off to Peter Thiel. “You know, I had read all those stories about people who made money and bought sports cars and crashed them,” Musk said to Thiel, according to Max Chafkin’s The Contrarian. “But I knew it could never happen to me, so I didn’t get any insurance.”

Anyway, according to Semafor, Musk is trying to get more investors for Twitter at the original $54.20 per share price he bought the company at before he frightened away advertisers and banned a bunch of journalists.

Update December 16th, 5:20PM ET: Twitter Spaces have returned, according to CEO Elon Musk, and a Verge staffer was able to start and end one on iOS. We have updated the headline to reflect that the feature is back. Our original story follows.

Last night, Elon Musk popped into a Spaces chat discussing his move to ban a bunch of journalists’ accounts from the platform. Confronted by Buzzfeed News’ Katie Notopoulos and The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell (who was one of the banned reporters) on how he can claim to support free speech while also ejecting journalists who report information about him that he does not like, Musk stuck to his refrain of “you dox, you get suspended.” (The banned users had not, in fact, doxxed him.) He dipped out when pressed further. 

A few weeks ago, I deleted Twitter from my phone and tablet. This was a long time coming, and the reasons I chose to do it are obvious, so I’m not here to write an essay about why I did. Instead, I’m here to provide some tips if you, like me, used to rely on Twitter for staying on top of news and events and don’t want to use Twitter to do so anymore.

I used a lot of the tools here before I deleted Twitter, but they’ve become more useful and prominent in my screen time calculations without Twitter around. (And no, deleting Twitter did not reduce my screen time, sadly.) Some of them may be obvious and some of them may be new to you, but here’s what I’m doing to keep up with both general news and topics I’m interested in specifically.