Twitter - X

It’s seemingly easy to make the chatbot’s new image generator spit out the few things it supposedly can’t generate — including gore and even “child pornography if given the proper prompts,” says X user Christian Montessori.

While all AI models have loopholes, Elon Musk seems unfazed by the abuse, calling it a “step for people to have some fun.”

The social media platform says it’s seen a 60 percent surge in signups in the United Kingdom, telling Reuters that the region had “the most Bluesky signups of any country” for the majority of last week.

The spike comes as X users, including Labour MPs, claim to be jumping to alternative platforms following Elon Musk’s controversial comments about nationwide riots in the UK.

This time, it’s not House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) calling for a probe of platform censorship. His ranking member, Jerry Nadler (D-NY), is the one calling on Jordan to probe Elon Musk’s X for political censorship of Democrats on the platform. Jordan is typically the one raving about conservative censorship by Meta and others. I guess two can play that game.

Ireland’s Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) handed down the ~$600,000 fine in favor of Gary Rooney, who was fired from Twitter in 2022 after failing to click “yes” in an email asking employees to accept Elon Musk’s “extremely hardcore” work culture or leave.

As reported by RTE, the WRC found Rooney’s choice to not click “yes” was “not capable of constituting an act of resignation.”

Grok, X’s AI assistant, summed up how X users have evaluated Musk’s skills as an interviewer: not good.

He’s both not engaged enough and constantly butting in, trying to flex his knowledge on topics he knows little about. At one point he asked for a job!

Good thing he told us this would be a conversation, not an interview.

Users are lighting up X with posts about the Elon / Trump space, and an AI-generated trending topic aggregated user posts about Trump’s “unusual speech pattern,” which some are attributing to ill-fitting dentures (there’s no proof whether Trump has dentures or not).

X’s automated trending topics have a history of getting things disastrously wrong.

Update: X has since taken down this AI-generated trending topic.

Elon is sticking with the DDOS excuse, which multiple sources at X tell The Verge is almost certainly untrue.

Fort Worth, Texas Judge Reed O’Connor, who is presiding over Elon Musk-owned X’s antitrust lawsuit against advertisers and one against Media Matters, has invested as much as $50,000 in Tesla stock, NPR reports.

O’Connor is known for conservative-friendly rulings, such as one calling Obamacare unconstitutional (later overturned because he didn’t have jurisdiction).

EU Commissioner Thierry Breton says the EU will watch for “spillovers” that violate the Digital Services Act, such as “content that may incite violence, hate and racism in conjunction with major political - or societal - events around the world, including debates and interviews in the context of elections.”

The “conversation” starts at 8PM ET on the former president’s X account on the service formerly known as Twitter which Musk previously said “must be politically neutral” to deserve our trust. 

Musk says he’s doing some “system scaling tests,” hoping to avoid another system meltdown like we saw when he tried to launch Ron DeSantis’ 2024 presidential campaign on Spaces.

At the moment, if you type “from:realdonaldtrump” followed by a specific term in X’s search bar, you’ll get the same set of results, seemingly no matter what you type, according to a Mediaite story spotted by Engadget.

I experienced the same thing when I tried it, but could still search other accounts this way. X responded with an auto-reply when reached for comment.

Omid Kordestani’s lawsuit, which was reported on by The New York Times, follows a lawsuit from the company’s former CEO, CFO, chief legal officer, and former general counsel over more than $128 million in unpaid severance.

Randal Cooper imagines a response to a user trying to quit the platform formerly known as Twitter:

These actions constitute an illegal one-person boycott that infringes on our client’s constitutional right to free speech, as well as his right to monetize that speech in several ways, and has caused him irreparable harm.

In an all-hands at X, CEO Linda Yaccarino attempted to rally the troops after filing a lawsuit against a coalition of major advertisers, claiming they had coordinated an “illegal boycott” and cost the company billions of dollars.

Yaccarino urged employees to “review the evidence,” a source at X told me. She also hyped up X payments and shopping on the platform, but didn’t announce a launch date, and emphasized X’s “pivot to video.”

X is moving out from the building Elon Musk famously walked into while carrying a kitchen sink, per an internal memo I’ve seen.

In the email to employees, X CEO Linda Yaccarino says the company will “transition to our new primary locations in the Bay Area,” including an office in San Jose and a “shared space” with Musk’s xAI in Palo Alto.

Mark Kalman, X’s engineering lead of media, and his second-in-command, Melissa Merencillo, resigned today. They announced their departures in a company Slack channel on the day stocks vest at X; Merencillo told The Verge that the timing had no bearing on their decision.

This is a big loss for X, a source tells me. Kalman is the main source of knowledge for all things X media infrastructure, and more important than that, he’s good at “handling” Elon Musk.

Update: added comment from Merencillo.

There’s no official confirmation, but the app — which has been abandoned before — has been delisted from the Mac App Store. It’s still functional, although it’s been increasingly buggy since the transition to X. It remains one of the last vestiges of Twitter iconography and terminology which I’ll memorialize in the grab below.

Update:  The Mac app now prompts users to “upgrade” to the iPad version of X, which is a worse experience.

Based on the screenshot below from app researcher Nima Owji, the new checkmark would be in the same menu as other per-post options that let you limit replies. X employee Christopher Stanley confirmed the feature, Engadget spotted.

I nodded a lot at this Max Read piece about how we perceive the world now, particularly the current “vibe shift” in politics but also just... everything. I feel like we’ve been debating “is Twitter really the world?” for 15 years now, but the answer feels more slippery than ever.

One way of thinking about every American election since 2015 is as a referendum on whether or not Twitter is real. Did the “prevailing vibes” on Twitter reflect the electoral choices of millions of Americans?

The platform is promoting trending topics including “staged” and “#falseflag” — the kinds of conspiracy theories that other major social networks might moderate away.

That’s a whole lot easier than scrolling through several years worth of bookmarks just to find a particular post. The feature is only available on the web and iOS for now.

As reported by The Financial Times:

In previously unreleased figures, X said its number of global daily active users in the second quarter of this year was 251mn, a rise of 1.6 per cent from the same period the year before.

The stalled growth and general turmoil at X, ever since Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, created an opening for Zuckerberg’s Threads to attract 175 million monthly users in its first year.