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Twitter - X

Twitter was never the largest social network, but it remained one of the most influential as a home to celebrities, journalists, and influencers of all sorts and the go-to network for breaking news. Since Elon Musk purchased it, Twitter’s employee count has dropped by more than half, advertisers have tightened budgets, and it’s charging money for access to verified checkmarks and Tweetdeck. Oh, and now it’s called X instead of Twitter.

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Grok goes open-source.

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has open-sourced the “base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1,” the model that underpins the Grok chatbot on X. xAI’s blog says Grok-1 is a 314 billion parameter pre-training model that’s “not fine-tuned for any particular task.”

VentureBeat notes that while the model’s Apache license 2.0 means it can be freely used (with some minor conditions), it won’t have live access to X content by default.


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The NYPD tried to use a warrantless subpoena for a watchdog’s X account.

According to Hellgate the organization sent the subpoena to X in an effort to gather as much information about the X user and his account as possible and asked the company not to tell the guy about the subpoena.

X told him anyways and also suggested he get a lawyer, which he promptly did. Now the NYPD has withdrawn the administrative subpoena rather than try and justify it in a court. It’s unclear how frequently the NYPD has gone after watchdogs and reporters using these subpoenas but this is at least the second time in four years.

Yikes.


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Twitter’s former head of trust and safety will now lead Match Group’s trust unit.

Match runs Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, and many other popular dating platforms. Yoel Roth eventually left Twitter in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover — and received death threats after Musk tweeted about him — and tells Wired in an interview that he’ll work on improving spam detection, removing underage users, and protecting users in marginalized groups in dating apps.


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X adds “Articles.” They’re blog posts, but only for the most Premium posters.

If you pay for the platform formerly known as Twitter, then you can post Articles on X. Better known as blog posts, they can feature stylized text, embedded images, and videos.

They’ll show up on the timeline with other tweets, but to publish one, you must belong to a Verified Organization or pay $16 monthly for the Premium Plus package. $8 Premium or $3 Basic subscribers will have to live without it, post regular tweets, or use Tumblr.


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Seven banks who have Elon Musk-related debt are trying to negotiate with Musk.

They are discussing options that may make the debt less risky to hold. After the events of 2022, when Musk bought Twitter, it was difficult for these banks to offload the debt; they’ve agreed — for now anyway — to coordinate a sale together when X is “on firmer financial footing.”


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X’s lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate sounds like it’s on the rocks.

The parties held a conference call to argue about whether the nonprofit’s anti-hate speech researchers illegally scraped data from Elon Musk’s social network, and a judge seems dubious.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer was skeptical that when the nonprofit entered the standard user contract governing all Twitter and X users, it could have foreseen that Musk would buy Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and welcome back users it had banned for posting hateful content. [...] “I am trying to figure out, in my mind, how that’s possibly true, because I don’t think it is.”

Judge Breyer didn’t indicate when we might get a ruling, Reuters says.


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Passkeys on X are now available to all US users on iOS.

The platform started rolling out passkey support on its iOS app last month, but now it’s available to all iPhone users in the US. That means you can use Face ID, Touch ID, or your device’s passcode to log in to your account instead of entering a password. You can learn how to enable passkeys on X from this support page.


X is starting to roll out search filters.

Premium users on iOS will see the feature first, according to X designer Andrea Conway. The feature will let you sort through posts based on the date, language, location, and more.


Image: Andrea Conway via X
Threads and X are looking slightly more alike.

Two changes spotted by app researchers show how the platforms are testing tweaks — X with carousel-style image galleries instead of grids, and Threads with buttons spaced apart.

Nima Owji shared the change on X and Alessandro Paluzzi pointed out the Threads update. Meta insisted that Threads isn’t an X clone — but at least in terms of look and feel, the two are getting closer and closer.


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X has another AI porn problem.

This time it involves not Taylor Swift, but comedian Bobbi Althoff, who’s become a target for users chasing clout with nonconsensual faked nudes under X’s anemic moderation:

One of the most popular posts directing viewers to the video remained online after more than 30 hours. Another post, which promised to “send full Bobbi Althoff leaks to everyone who like and comment,” was online for 20 hours — X removed it after The Washington Post sought comment on the fakes. By the time it was removed, the video post had been viewed more than 5 million times.


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X restores Yulia Navalnaya’s account after briefly suspending it.

Yulia accused Vladimir Putin of killing her husband, opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and vowed to continue her husband’s fight against Putin’s “crazy regime.” Then, on Tuesday morning, her X account was abruptly suspended for a short time.

A message from the @Support account followed up saying, “Our platform’s defense mechanism against manipulation and spam mistakenly flagged @yulia_navalnaya as violating our rules. We unsuspended the account as soon as we became aware of the error, and will be updating the defense.”


Is “Adrian Dittmann” actually Elon Musk?

Dittmann has found media attention before due to sounding almost identical to the Tesla CEO, but after appearing on Alex Jones’s Infowars podcast, people now suspect that he may actually be Musk masquerading under a false name.

It's an uncanny vocal likeness, and it’s not like Musk doesn’t have a history of allegedly using burner accounts.


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One of the last ways to access Twitter without an account is dead.

Nitter, the open-source, tracker-free Twitter front end, joins the other great third-party apps in the API afterlife.

Activist IT collective NoLog, which ran one of the largest Nitter instances, has shut it down, three weeks after Nitter’s developer said the project was dead.


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X will allow advertisers to only run ads on selected profiles.

Elon Musk’s revamped X ad business has included a “revenue sharing” program that requires payment to have the potential of getting paid and shown ads alongside white nationalist profiles.

X, as it attempts to become a YouTube alternative, says it has over 80,000 creators monetizing their posts and is trying to address brand safety issues with Creator Targeting:

This means giving advertisers more control to be able to use the self-serve X Ads Manager to run pre-roll video ads against the video content of their chosen creator(s) in both the home timeline and profile.

Soon we’ll add the ability to serve ads only on an individual creator’s profile – completely eliminating the unlikely event of unwanted adjacencies while aligning your brand to creators you love most. 

It didn’t say how big of a cut creators will get if their profile is targeted or if they can choose which advertisers are shown.


As the Super Bowl rolls into Las Vegas, X cuts a deal to advertise gambling odds.

Besides its arrangement for weekly 5-minute WWE matches, X is partnering with BetMGM to slap gambling odds at the top of event pages for sporting events, starting with the Super Bowl.

The platform formerly known as Twitter is far from the only one suddenly flooded with odds and gambling promos (see ESPN Bet). A recent 60 Minutes report dug into how the services use data to target when someone’s most likely to place a bet.


A screenshot of the X event page for the Super Bowl that prominently displays gambling infor linked to BetMGM.
The Super Bowl event page inside the X app with betting odds above tweets.
Image: Screenshot by Richard Lawler
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WWE Speed will stream 5-minute wrestling matches on X this spring.

In addition to the WWE’s 2025 switch to Netflix, it will also broadcast timed matches via the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Like Tucker Carlson’s two-hour interview with Vladimir Putin, these will be produced live to tape exclusively for the platform, but they’ll only be five minutes long and will feature “your favorite WWE Superstars.” THR notes their agreement is for two years of weekly episodes.


Toward a unified taxonomy of text-based social media use

Or how Threads’ Adam Mosseri needs to stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.

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Twitter alternative Post just got some major upgrades.

Post launched in 2022 as a way to read ad-free news articles and paywalled content with a points-based system. But now, it’s rolling out a number of improvements, including native comments you can leave on feeds, repost, and tag people in.

There’s also an update to make navigating between posts and comment threads smoother, along with a new real-time notification system that will keep you “up to date with accurate comment counts, activity stream updates, and much more.” Post is also working on building achievements, status badges, and rewards for users.


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Microsoft closed the loophole in its AI image generator that could create explicit images of celebrities like Taylor Swift.

After graphic AI-generated images of Taylor Swift became a trending topic on X, 404 Media reported on people creating and trading similar pictures created using Microsoft’s Designer AI image generator. By altering prompts, they were able to get around simple name blocks.

After CEO Satya Nadella said last week that guardrails are “our responsibility,” 404 Media reports the loopholes have been closed. Sarah Bird, a Responsible AI Engineering Lead at Microsoft confirmed the changes, saying:

We are committed to providing a safe and respectful experience for everyone. We are continuing to investigate these images and have strengthened our existing safety systems to further prevent our services from being misused to help generate images like them.