A Twitter employee has appealed to Elon Musk on the platform to ask whether he had been sacked.
In a tweet to the firm's chief executive, Halli Thorleifsson said: "Your head of HR is not able to confirm if I am employed or not".
Let’s time travel back to December, a time when Elon decided he didn’t care for journalists anymore and laid down the ban hammer on a wide swath of the press corp. There were headlines (ironically) about the death of free speech on Twitter and many cried foul from the roof tops as they scrambled to find alternate micro blogging services from which to promote their work. Mastodon became that safe haven for more than just a few reporters, along with others abandoning the bird shop once and for all. It felt like a watershed moment in social media as one of the sacred towers of surveillance capitalism seemed ready to give way to a free and distributed system.
When Twitter quietly updated its developer policies to ban third-party clients from its platform, it abruptly closed an important chapter of Twitter’s history. Unlike most of its counterparts, which tightly control what developers are able to access, Twitter has a long history with independent app makers.
Twitter referral traffic to a dozen major publishers’ websites declined, on average, by 12% in December 2022 compared to November 2022, according to an analysis by Similarweb, a data analytics company that monitors web traffic. Some publishers — such as The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, The New York Times, USA Today, the BBC and Yahoo — each saw referral traffic from Twitter fall between 10% and 18% month over month.
Mastodon, a decentralized microblogging site named after an extinct type of mammoth, recorded 120,000 new users in the four days following billionaire Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, its German founder Eugen Rochko tells TIME. Many of them were Twitter users seeking a new place to call their online home.
Since 2007, Twitterrific helped define the shape of the Twitter experience. It was the first desktop client, the first mobile client, one of the very first apps in the App Store, an Apple Design award winner, and it even helped redefine the word “tweet” in the dictionary. Ollie, Twitterrific’s bluebird mascot, was so popular it even prompted Twitter themselves to later adopt a bluebird logo of their very own. Our little app made a big dent on the world!
On Thursday evening, third-party Twitter clients stopped working in a move that many have come to conclude was intentional. A report now confirms that this was the case.
According to The Information today, a senior Twitter engineer internally communicated this week that the “Third-party app suspensions are intentional.”
Tweetbot, Twiterrific, Echofon, and other third-party #Twitter clients have failed to work for many people since late Thursday night, and the social network has seemingly not notified the apps' developers as to why.
For the past few weeks, I’ve watched a growing number of people I follow on Twitter slowly migrate to Mastodon, a competing social network that looks a lot like Twitter.
Elon Musk insisted that a key reason he took over Twitter was in support of “free speech.” As we noted, it was pretty clear that he never really understood what free speech actually means.
Twitter has considered selling user names to generate new revenue as its owner, Elon Musk, tries to resuscitate the company’s business, two people with knowledge of the plan said.
