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Salesforce layoffs also appear to be starting. Some directors have been cut, and a mandatory all hands meeting was added to employee calendars for this morning.
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Elon Musk sent an email to Twitter employees telling them to write a one pager on what they accomplished in January, what they plan to accomplish in February, and "any ideas you have for improving Twitter." Twitter has also implemented another change freeze.
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Bay Area friends! Join me, , and Stanford's Janine Zacharia at an event at the Stanford Faculty Club next week where we'll chat about covering Silicon Valley and finding the signal in the noise
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Not typically a new technology booster but I haven’t been this excited about an app in a long time 🤷♀️🤷♀️
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Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are back with a new company. I talked to Systrom about their first app: Artifact, a kind of TikTok for text platformer.news/p/instagrams-c
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For subscribers today:
- Another whistleblower comes for Twitter
- Is the real threat the company's "God Mode" — or its trust and safety team?
- Good tweet about view counts
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Testing policy rolls out Jan 30, sick leave ends in August. Until then, employees get a maximum of 5 days sick leave, if they test positive for Covid.
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Apple is making changes to its Covid-19 policy, and will stop mandating employees test before coming into the office. It's also rolling back its special sick leave policy, which previously allowed for unlimited sick leave for workers experiencing covid symptoms.
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New: When news broke that CNET was publishing AI-written stories, readers had a lot of questions. But CNET staff are in the dark, too.
Red Ventures, which owns CNET, is following a lucrative SEO marketing play. And it's at the expense of the journalism:
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This by and is superb. The real sadness here — Musk is far too complex and loony and obnoxious to feel one ounce of pity for — are the egregious opportunists inside.
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Twitter’s staff spent years trying to protect the platform against impulsive billionaires who wanted to use it for their own ends — then one made himself the CEO. @ZoeSchiffer , @CaseyNewton , and @alexeheath report, in collaboration with @verge trib.al/FezDnWP
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Tiny scoop: We learned today that Twitter’s revenue is down 40 percent year over year (& Musk’s first giant interest payment on the company is due at the end of the month):
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Twitter’s staff spent years trying to protect the platform against impulsive billionaires who wanted to use it for their own ends — then one made himself the CEO. @ZoeSchiffer , @CaseyNewton , and @alexeheath report, in collaboration with @verge trib.al/FezDnWP
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Moments of chaos are often an opportunity. At Twitter, three employees rose the ranks to grab power after Musk became CEO. Their stories hint at where the company is going next.
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We talked to more than two dozen Twitter employees about how Elon Musk’s takeover at the company upended their lives and the culture they knew. This is their story:
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Twitter’s staff spent years trying to protect the platform against impulsive billionaires who wanted to use it for their own ends — then one made himself the CEO. @ZoeSchiffer , @CaseyNewton , and @alexeheath report, in collaboration with @verge trib.al/FezDnWP
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Hearing that he resigned from Tesla and left Twitter as a result.
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Sheen Austin, who joined Twitter from Tesla, is out. He led the infrastructure team after Musk laid off Nelson Abramson. No details yet as to why.
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Musk is instructing employees to focus the meetings on “urgent product decision matters, engineering progress, and legal, finance and HR.”
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NEW: Musk emailed Twitter saying most of his Tesla work was completed this wknd & he’s available to discuss “urgent” product needs. All changes have to be signed off by him personally. “We are going to agonize until we achieve as close to the perfect product as possible”
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Twitter had to send a 2nd email to tell people this wasn't a phishing scam. "This email was an official company communication and is not a phishing attempt," the note says. Twitter blamed "a court order obtained by plaintiffs' attorneys" for the delay in sending the agreements.
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if you were wondering about the current state of twitter, many folks just received their separation agreements in their spam folders, pointing to a URL that was registered this morning from a vendor with a 1 star BBB rating. if still there, I would have reported this as phishing.
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NEW: Twitter is cutting employee benefits starting this quarter. Commuter benefits, family planning, and meal allowances are all out. Coffee and snacks are staying, per an internal email.
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Katie Marcotte, a 10-year Twitter employee and the company's acting head of human resources, just announced that she is leaving the company in a tweet on her private account.
"Rooting for all my people still left," she wrote. "Tonight, the good wine. 🍷💙"
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NEW: Behnam Rezaei, Twitter’s head of product and engineering, and one of the last non-Elon Musk appointed leaders at the company, just resigned.
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Just a minor update: my Twitter timeline is getting weirder and less helpful by the day but Mastodon is almost unusable 🤷♀️
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Twitter is closing its Seattle office and asking employees to work from home, per an email to staff. Looking more like the company is going to just have offices in SF and NY.
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NEW: Twitter is shutting down its data center in Sacramento and downsizing another in Atlanta by early Jan, likely as a cost saving measure. This means a huge amount of traffic will be shifted to its remaining data centers, which could result in increased instability.
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NEW: Luke Simon -- one of Elon Musk's top lieutenants at Twitter -- appears to be out. He's been deactivated on Slack.
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The news comes as Salesforce employees await news of layoffs.
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Benioff continued: “Is this a reflection of our office policy? Are we not building tribal knowledge with new employees without an office culture?…asking for a friend 😇”
The post has close to 300 employee responses.
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Marc Benioff just told Salesforce & Slack employees he’s concerned they’re not being productive enough and asked if it was because of the flexible office policy. “New employees (hired during the pandemic in 2021 & 2022) are especially facing much lower productivity,” he wrote. 1/
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NEW: Twitter is shrinking the size of its ads following a tweet from Elon Musk that said “the ads are also way too big.” Per Slack, the company is enlarging its ad spacing to 6 tweets between ads rather than the previous ML-based ad spacing & cutting the ads height by half.
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SCOOP w/ : Twitter is working on a plan to force users to opt-in to personalized ads & share their location data. It’s considering letting those who pay for Twitter Blue to opt-out of data sharing — a decision that would likely anger Apple:
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As promised, we broke this news last night in Discord, and will continue to publish first in the newsletter and on Sidechannel. We have more coming in today’s edition. Join us:
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Over the weekend, Elon Musk was complaining to Twitter employees about an account impersonating him that Twitter’s systems missed due to Smyte (the content moderation tool) being unstable. 4/
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Twitter doesn’t deploy from GitHub, and most of this is open source, so it’s not life or death. But having hundreds of former employees maintain access when current employees aren’t admins on some projects is…not great, from a security perspective. 3/
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Why? Well, the company fired a bunch of employees who had access. On Slack, one engineer said the TwitterDev org on GitHub has 519 members, most of whom do not work at Twitter anymore. Some still have owner permissions — like the ability to rename or delete an org entirely. 2/
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NEW: Twitter currently does not have admin access to some of its GitHub repos. These repos contain Twitter source code (much of it is open source; some is not). This includes code for companies Twitter acquired, like Smyte. 1/
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Also in this edition: Elon Musk forcing Twitter employees to answer to individual accounts impersonating him.
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NEW: Elon Musk's war on bots took an outrageous turn over the weekend when Twitter abruptly blocked traffic from 30 major telecom companies in the Asia-Pacific region, prompting hundreds of thousands of legit accounts to lose access:
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Hearing that at least some of these were Twitter employees who accepted the severance offer in November but continued to have access to company systems until today.
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The number of Twitter employees in Slack is dropping significantly — looks like more than 100 people were just let go.
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NEW: Elon Musk is threatening to sue Twitter employees who leak confidential information to the press. He's asking staffers to sign a pledge indicating they've understood. Here's the email:
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