Was it all a heavily foreshadowed prank? On April 1, I opened Twitter and was dismayed to learn that I still have a blue check. Initially worried that people might think I had paid to retain my “verification” mark—as CEO Elon Musk had demanded—I was somewhat relieved to learn that it wasn’t just me; only a handful of accounts have lost their ticks.
That handful notably includes the main New York Times account, which was de-checked after someone told Musk that the newspaper refused to pay up—Musk claimed the Times was being “incredible hypocritical” because it enforces a paywall, which would be a more coherent argument if the Gray Lady were trying to get readers to pay to write her articles.
This may seem like yet another example of Musk failing to make good on a promise, but it’s not necessarily that. Twitter was clear that it would only begin removing “legacy verified check marks” on Saturday, which may have something to do with the fact—reported by the Washington Post a few days ago—that the process is largely manual and impossible to execute in bulk.
However, if Twitter is following through, it’s doing so in a typically chaotic fashion. Users clicking on blue checks to see what they mean are now told that the badge could mean the user is a legacy check-holder, or that they’ve paid for Twitter Blue—as for which, that’s anyone’s guess. Because Twitter Blue doesn’t involve any real identity verification and the legacy system did, this is a gift for impersonators who can shell out Musk’s $8 safe in the knowledge that even mildly skeptical people might still think they’re the real deal.
Speaking of Musk’s promises, on Friday, Twitter open-sourced much of its recommendation algorithm.
Some have noted that what was released was incomplete. A former Twitter exec told my colleague Kylie Robison that the release was “dishonest” because Twitter recommends tweets based on a user’s data as well as the code it has now made public, so “in order to open-source the algorithm you need to open-source the training set, which is impossible for Twitter to do.” Affirm product manager Aakash Gupta, who authored a viral thread analyzing the code, wrote that a former Twitter engineer told him the company published only around a fifth of the algorithm.
However, as made clear by Gupta and others, we can divine some genuinely interesting information from the release (apart from the fact that Twitter collects metrics segmenting users into the categories of Democrat, Republican, “power user,” and “Elon,” who professed surprise at the existence of that final nano-category). Likes provide a bigger boost than retweets do and way more than replies. Adding links actually hinders the quest for a boost, unless the user gets a lot of engagement. Mutes and unfollows really hurt a user’s engagement score. Posts get heavily penalized for misspellings or made-up words.
This, as they say, is news you can use. As I have previously written, the tech industry will be watching closely to see if Twitter’s partial open-sourcing leads to any kind of abuse by spammers or other ne’er-do-wells. If not, Musk’s transparency move might prove influential.
Separately, congratulations to Meta’s top lobbyist in Brussels, Aura Salla, who is off to become a politician after winning a seat in Finland’s elections over the weekend. That’s not the usual direction of travel, so let’s call this a Reverse Clegg.
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David Meyer
Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman.
NEWSWORTHY
Teslas are sitting in inventory. Despite drawing demand with price cuts, Tesla saw just a 4.3% increase in deliveries over the final three months of December. It’s causing concern that the inventory of unsold vehicles is approaching damaging levels. Tesla says the gap in cars built compared with those delivered is due to an increase of cars “in transit” as it moves away from prioritizing cars slated for export early in the quarter before focusing on domestic demand. But not everyone’s buying it, with Tesla bull Gerber Kawasaki calling delivery numbers of Model X and S troubling: “Even with price cuts, they seem to have lost the high-end customers this quarter.”
ByteDance’s $80 billion in revenue. TikTok’s parent company saw revenue increase more than 30% in 2022, up from around $60 billion in 2021, The Information reports. ByteDance revenue matches that of competitor Tencent, which owns the incredibly popular WeChat super app. The majority of ByteDance’s revenue growth came from its advertising business in mainland China, where the company operates Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.
FTC takes aim at Amazon’s Alexa. The Federal Trade Commission is weighing a case against Amazon over alleged privacy violations for the use of children’s data with the voice assistant Alexa. Citing unnamed sources, Politico reports that the FTC must first refer a complaint to the consumer protection branch at the civil division of the Justice Department before it brings a case. Amazon has previously said it complies with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, and that its product offerings require parental consent.
SIGNIFICANT FIGURES
30 billion
—The number of images Clearview AI, a facial recognition database, scraped from Facebook and handed to police departments across the U.S., the company’s CEO recently admitted in an interview with the BBC.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Celebrities ‘call Elon’s bluff’ as Twitter’s blue check-mark deadline passes with only one subtle change, by Eleanor Pringle
Elon Musk’s open-source Twitter code is ‘completely dishonest’ and akin to misinformation because it lacks vital data to understand it, say critics, by Kylie Robison
Binance, CZ, and NBA star Jimmy Butler and other crypto influencers hit with $1B suit for promoting unregistered securities, by Shawn Tully
‘Car Guy’ Bill Gates just rode in an autonomous vehicle across London and says the sector is reaching a ‘tipping point’ in the next decade, by Prarthana Prakash
Google CEO won’t commit to pausing A.I. development after experts warn about ‘profound risks to society,’ by Steve Mollman
BEFORE YOU GO
Paris says au revoir to e-scooters. Paris residents overwhelmingly voted against allowing shared e-scooters in the city on Sunday. Now, Lime, Dott, and Tier will have to remove their fleets of 15,000 e-scooters by Sept. 1. With 21 polling locations across the city and no electronic voting option, less than 8% of registered Paris voters turned out. “This led to an extremely low turnout, heavily skewed toward older age groups, which has widened the gap between pros and cons,” the companies said in a joint statement.
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