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rat king 🐀
@MikeIsaac
NYT tech reporter. tell me stuff at Mike.Isaac@nytimes.com or mjisaac@protonmail.com / Call or text with tips at 510-228-4646
JournalistOaklandlinktr.ee/MikeIsaacJoined January 2009

rat king 🐀’s posts

would love to know which galaxy brain exec thought that murdering the free, unlimited user-generated marketing campaign would be a good idea
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Disney has started to remove Baby Yoda GIFs across the internet due to fear of copyright issues. bit.ly/33lzPIZ
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There is an enormous demonstration going on at Hospital right now carried out by staff, who are protesting the decision by higher ups to give vaccines to some administrators and physicians who are at home and not in contact with patients INSTEAD of frontline workers.
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me at 23 on two hours of sleep: “whew the ol internship is going to suck today!” me at 36 on 2 hrs sleep: “i need to go to the hospital”
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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."
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so Elon spent six months in court saying Twitter was riddled with bots, was forced to buy the company, said he was going to create a moderation council for all content decisions, and has thrown all that out of the window for a "vox populi" poll that could be easily gamed
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if i have one consumer electronics recommendation it is to never buy a new tv again new TVs serve you ads and require software updates and talk at you my 2009 flatscreen had two ports and no internet and never broke and it ruled
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someone taught me the “put a wooden spoon over boiling pot and pasta wont boil over” trick and it is the most life changing kitchen hack ive ever learned
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they whooped peoples asses on bl**sky yesterday so hard that the team was compelled to ship a blocking feature in like a day
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weird how this isn’t getting the same amount of traction among the “SF is lawless” crowd as the previous stories
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EXCLUSIVE: Defense attorneys for the man accused of attacking former SF Fire Commissioner Don Carmignani say the person shown in this video bear spraying a homeless person in the face appears to be Carmignani. The video, taken in November 2021, is part of a trove of new evidence… Show more
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so my understanding is at twitter HQ, the folks running things in the “war room” are Musk, David Sacks, Jason Calacanis (VCs/Elon pals) Sriram Krishnan (exTwitter/current a16z), Elon’s legal and finance head guys (Spiro, Birchall) and a fleet of Tesla/BoringCo engineers
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this is a complete mistranslation of what’s occurring inside right now, warped to fit a brazenly careerist and self-serving narrative.
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The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same. (Thread.)
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all the blu*ch*ck replies at the top of any viral tweet are guaranteed to be detached from reality or deeply unfunny it’s as if low quality tweets that were previously algorithmically hidden are now being used to repel me personally
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thirty six years on this earth and it was only today i realized that the “Sherlock” in Sherlock Holmes is a name, not his title
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tom cotton spending the rest of his career trying to imprison an infected bat
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Sen. Tom Cotton release this morning: "We will emerge stronger from this challenge, we will hold accountable those who inflicted it on the world." What does that mean?
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BREAKING: Facebook blocking the President from posting for 24 hours. FB spokesman: “We've assessed two policy violations against President Trump's Page which will result in a 24-hour feature block, meaning he will lose the ability to post on the platform during that time.”
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what does it say about a platform that it must take down long-running features to make it less immediately harmful? and conversely, when the election is over, why is it okay to turn the harmful feature back on?
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it is truly breathtaking that they’ve managed to incite many of the most famous or highly followed accounts into tweeting anti-endorsements for twitter’s newest revenue stream
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Please note: I have NOT subscribed to Twitter Blue, though for some mysterious reason, my check mark is showing again
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i occasionally wonder if C-suite training in biz school is just learning how to professionally infantilize a workforce
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zoom call from a ceo who cancelled all employee bonuses but took a $6.4 million bonus herself
Readers added context
Andi Owen received $1.29 million in bonuses in 2022 and $1.12 million in 2021. Furthermore, the fiscal year for her company isn’t over yet and bonuses have not been determined or handed out yet, including hers. vice.com/en/article/g5y…
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imagine paying a quarter of a million dollars to get covid
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Trump donors paid up to $250,000 to have a *buffet lunch* with him in the middle of the pandemic. That evening, he disclosed that he had COVID-19. There are conflicting reports regarding whether he knew about the diagnosis at the time of the fundraiser. abcnews.go.com/Politics/day-t
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Facebook employees are staging an internal walkout in protest of Mark zuckerberg’s decision to keep the President’s inflammatory posts up, despite the company’s policies on incitement to violence and voter suppression. w
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this is a big story with excellent internal sources once a company gets to this level of leaking it is in trouble, because it means the executives have lost the confidence of the rank and file
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NEW: We have reporting inside Twitter that explains why Jack hasn't "banned the Nazis:" Treating white supremacy like ISIS would mean autobanning some Republican politicians motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/
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Rep. + his office using video of a disabled activist with ALS who can’t speak, altering it and literally putting different words in his mouth to try and drag Democrats full blown embrace of misinformation from the state just weeks before an election
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.@SteveScalise, These are not my words. I have lost my ability to speak, but not my agency or my thoughts. You and your team have doctored my words for your own political gain. Please remove this video immediately. You owe the entire disability community an apology. twitter.com/SteveScalise/s…
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the problem with antagonizing your biggest advertisers in a series of tweets is that the lions share of ad budgets spent on twitter are minuscule compared to other platforms (GOOG, FB) not a huge deal for them to walk from their smallest ad spend platform to avoid controversy
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Replying to
on the call, Musk was also asked about the company's financial runway and how it was doing in terms of the business Musk mentioned that TWTR had "net negative cash flow of several billion dollars" and that he recently sold a bunch of Tesla stock in order to "save the company"
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NAACP Derrick Johnson calls for total advertising boycott on Twitter after meeting with Elon Musk. Statement below:
NAACP CEO:
"It is immoral, dangerous, and highly destructive to our democracy for any advertiser to fund a platform that fuels hate speech, election denialism, and conspiracy theories. Since Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, racial slurs have spiked, and conspiracy theories have spread. When we met with Elon Musk, he made commitments that gave us cautious optimism, but until actions are taken to make Twitter a safe space, corporations cannot in good conscience put their money behind Twitter. Twitter must earn its advertisers by creating a platform that safeguards our democracy and rids itself of any content or account that spews hate and disinformation. Any account promoting hate, election denialism and any other form of mis- or disinformation cannot be allowed to return to Twitter. As we did in 2020 for Facebook, the NAACP will meet with advertisers privately to discuss their ongoing relationship with Twitter. Unlike Elon Musk's past ventures, this one should not be rocket science."
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kind of weird that a Facebook employee's unencrypted laptop with payroll information and SSN's for 19,000+ workers was stolen and compromised last week and it barely registered as a story
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my dog does this thing now where if i am awake and on the couch past HER bedtime she cries until i make myself get in bed so that she can go to sleep prisoner in my own home
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Twitter securing that rarified "Taliban member endorsement" over meta's threads is the stuff marketing campaigns are made of
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Twitter has two important advantages over other social media platforms. The first privilege is the freedom of speech. The second privilege is the public nature & credibility of Twitter. Twitter doesn't have an intolerant policy like Meta. Other platforms cannot replace it.
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Twitter and Facebook have the same basic policies around voter suppression and incitement to violence, and trump posted the same stuff to both platforms. Some FB employees are beginning to wonder what line must be crossed for the company to act.
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it's this clip. employees are sharing this on the Zuckerberg all-hands Q&A stream in protest. it is not going well
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"If anyone, including a politician, is saying things that can cause, that is calling for violence or could risk imminent physical harm.... we will take that content down." Zuckerberg told @AOC a few months ago. cnn.com/2020/05/29/tec
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work email greetings are so fucked up now “i hope this finds you safe” “May this find you well, considering” it’s like wartime correspondence but with zoom meeting requests
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sf dept of public works has deployed hand washing stations around the city for the homeless (good!) and some mystery man keeps filling one of them in my neighborhood with shrimp
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this is extremely funny because what the hell is Elon going to do with direct access to the firehose
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New: Twitter’s board plans to comply with @elonmusk's demands for internal data by offering access to its full “firehose,” the massive stream of data comprising more than 500 million tweets posted each day, an inside source tells @lizzadwoskin. washingtonpost.com/technology/202
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the only two types of posts in my TL are people screaming the republic is burning and then someone saying like "here is a wombat drinking from a flower petal (sound ON)"
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day three in a fight with a facebook friend i haven’t seen or spoken to in 11 years who decided to play “devils advocate” in my mentions
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a lot of the time im like “hey ill never get old and lame!!!” then i scroll past headlines like this and know that i have already lost
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