Twitter’s inability to pay its rent is more urgent than building ‘Twitter 2.0’

First up is new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, who on Monday tweeted an email she’d just sent out to the company’s employees. It started off as an unsurprisingly Elon Musk–ish mission statement about how Twitter was going to “drive civilization forward through the unfiltered exchange of information and open dialogue about the things that matter most to us.” Then it got weird.

“Twitter is on a mission to become the world’s most accurate real-time information source and a global town square for communication. That’s not an empty promise. That’s OUR reality,” Yaccarino wrote. “When you start by wrapping your arms around this powerful vision, literally everything is possible. You have to genuinely believe—and work hard for that belief.”

Even if that powerful vision is Yaccarino and Musk’s reality, is it, y’know, reality reality? It’s important to know where you want to end up, but right now Twitter faces serious problems with hate speech and disinformation and polarization and instability—all of which will seriously hinder any attempt to become “the world’s most accurate real-time information source”—and above all with revenue.

With advertisers being largely scared off by the aforementioned issues, Twitter is so strapped for cash that its Boulder office is being evicted over unpaid rent. It’s being sued in San Francisco and London (where, fun fact, the property in question is owned by King Charles III) over the same. According to a lawsuit launched last month by six former Twitter workers who say they haven’t been paid the severance they’re owed, Musk said Twitter would pay rent “over his dead body.”

Twitter’s ever-helpful owner also appears to have steered the company into a $250 million lawsuit filed yesterday by the U.S. National Music Publishers’ Association, over Twitter users uploading and sharing copyright-protected songs. Social media platforms normally just strike licensing deals with the labels, but the New York Times reported in March that Musk thought licensing would be too expensive, so talks stalled.

Before Yaccarino can make good on her promises of delivering “Twitter 2.0,” she really needs to save Twitter as it exists. Her cultish letter did not mention anything about doing that, and she has not tweeted since.

Then we have Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, who seems unable to end his platform’s user revolt. 

The protest (which is mostly about Reddit threatening its ecosystem with hefty new data-access fees) was meant to be a two-day affair, with only a handful of subreddits threatening to “go dark” indefinitely. Then Huffman emailed his staff to say that although this was “the noisiest” protest the site had seen, there was no “significant revenue impact so far” and “like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well.” 

This was like a red flag to the bull that is Reddit’s moderator community. Many major subreddits are now staying dark indefinitely, and some are mooting a switch to Discord or a fediverse-compatible Reddit rival like Lemmy. Moderators hold the real power at Reddit, owing to its decentralized nature, so they really can bring much of the site to a grinding halt. Huffman cofounded Reddit nearly two decades ago. How could he not know this would happen?

This feels extremely obvious to say, but effective leadership requires leveling with people, including yourself. Very few people can successfully weave reality-distortion fields—and those who can’t will court disaster by trying.

More news below.

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David Meyer

Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman.

NEWSWORTHY

Google delays Bard chatbot in the EU. Alphabet-owned Google planned to launch its conversational chatbot in European Union nations this week. But Europeans will have to keep waiting to access Bard after Google failed to provide a briefing on privacy concerns to its regulator, the Irish Data Protection Commission. The Register reports that Google considers the delay a routine matter, telling the tech news website that it’s still committed to providing expanded access to Bard in a responsible manner after engaging with experts, regulators, and policymakers. This comes as EU lawmakers voted yesterday to approve rules for safe and transparent A.I.

Amazon’s HQ2’s grand opening day. E-commerce giant Amazon is formally opening the first major part of its East Coast headquarters in Northern Virginia today, and residents are bracing for change. The Washington Post reports that local elected officials have thanked Amazon for its donations toward nonprofits and efforts to create affordable housing. But some local activists have shared worries that the influx of highly paid workers Amazon has hired to move to Arlington will drive up housing costs all while Amazon receives up to $750 million in taxpayer subsidies from Virginia. Danny Cendejas, of the activist group For Us Not Amazon, told the paper that the company is “fueling gentrification and displacement.”

EU plans to ban Chinese vendors. The European Commission will ban equipment from Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corp. for its own internal telecommunications networks. Bloomberg spoke to unnamed sources who shared the news before an upcoming review of the European Union’s guidance on fifth-generation mobile networks that’s expected to pressure bloc members to phase out equipment from the companies. The publication reports that the EU has faced increased pressure from Washington to take a harder line on China and that it will be the first time the two vendors are named in the EU’s guidance on its 5G “toolbox.”

ON OUR FEED

“It’s a competitive moment, but I’ve built the company to be A.I. native for a long time. I feel better positioned for this than we were for the shift to mobile.”

—Google CEO Sundar Pichai in an interview with Bloomberg. Pichai went on to say that Google is moving cautiously as it incorporates A.I. into its products since people need correct answers to things like medication dosage, though A.I. has a tendency to make mistakes.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Almost half of CEOs fear A.I. could destroy humanity 5 to 10 years from now—but one ‘A.I. godfather’ says an existential threat is ‘preposterously ridiculous,’ by Chloe Taylor

A popular Google search hack doesn’t work because of the Reddit protests, by Stephen Pastis

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink blamed remote work for falling productivity and rising inflation. He now thinks A.I. can solve both those problems, by Nicholas Gordon

In stark contrast to U.S., Brazil offers clarity on crypto by naming central bank as regulator, by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez

Sam Bankman-Fried scores a victory as prosecutors agree to withdraw 5 charges, including bribery, until next year, by Leo Schwartz

BEFORE YOU GO

IBM quantum computer won a match against a supercomputer. A major issue with quantum systems is their tendency to be “noisy,” and produce a significant number of errors caused by the fragile nature of quantum bits (also known as qubits) and disturbances from their environment. Still, IBM set out on an experiment to see if a noisy quantum computer could churn out more accurate calculations than a standard machine. In its experiment, IBM challenged its Eagle quantum computer against a supercomputer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. The two were assigned to calculate the most likely behavior of a collection of particles, and as the quantum computer provided accurate results when error mitigation techniques were used, the classical computing methods eventually failed. 

In a release, director of IBM research Darío Gil shared excitement over the Eagle’s win: “To us, this milestone is a significant step in proving that today’s quantum computers are capable scientific tools that can be used to model problems that are extremely difficult—and perhaps impossible—for classical systems, signaling that we are now entering a new era of utility for quantum computing.”