Twitter is Falling Apart at the Seams

Brand impersonations... more executives leaving... and now regulators are watching closely: Is this the beginning of the end for Twitter?

November 10, 2022

NOTE: Everyone is getting today’s newsletter because tomorrow is a stat holiday in Canada, so there’ll be no newsletter or podcast episode tomorrow.

Also, my wife and I are going on holidays tomorrow, so there won’t be any newsletter issues next week… HOWEVER… we will be posting a week-long series of deep-dive interviews on the podcast:

  • Monday — a look into the fake review business, and how it affects online merchants and social media managers.

  • Tuesday — an in-depth look into TikTok's discovery algorithm, and the SEO secrets to getting your brand's content to be more visible there

  • Wednesday — Google Ads in review... Jyll Saskin Gales recaps the last 12 months of changes, and walks us through what she thinks next year will hold

  • Thursday — How to use humour when replying to negative comments on social media... I'll be speaking with a marketing scientist who just did a huge study on that

  • Friday — Andrew Hutchinson from SocialMediaToday.com will give us his predictions of what 2023 will hold for digital marketers, e-commerce merchants, social media managers, and the rest of us.

Again, that content will only be on the podcast next week, so be sure to subscribe in your podcast app, if you haven’t already.

Twitter News Roundup

Brand Impersonation Running Wild

Honestly, you have to wonder what Nintendo was thinking.

Yesterday, with no context or reference to a forthcoming game or anything, Nintendo's social media team tweeted an image of their Mario character with his middle finger up.

They left it up for hours. It got more than 2,300 retweets. 

Except it wasn't Nintendo that tweeted it, of course, it was Nintendo.

You can tell because it was their verified account.

Confused? Welcome to the new Twitter — where anybody can now pay $8 to impersonate any brand they want.

If you'll recall our coverage yesterday, Twitter's plan to combat brand impersonation was to offer a second verified badge — a grey one, labelled "Official." But within hours of its rollout, Elon Musk cancelled the entire plan. A manager scrambled to try to explain it, saying the plan was actually to start with government accounts, but even that, by the end of the day, appeared to be off.

This left major government organizations, like safety groups, pleading to their followers on Twitter yesterday to be absolutely sure that tornado warning they tweeted... the active shooter alert they tweeted... that North Korea missile alert they tweeted... actually came from their real account. An account, of course, now almost completely indistinguishable from any imposter that comes along.

  • LeBron James said he wanted to be traded

  • Rudy Giuliani tweeted about taking a crap

  • OJ Simpson admitted he was the killer all along

  • George W. Bush tweeted "I miss killing Iraquis,"

  • to which former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair replied "Same, tbh."

Except none of those people actually tweeted that, only the verified accounts with their names on it did.

Near the end of the day, Twitter seemed to confirm that it had shelved the "Official" badge entirely, tweeting:

At least I think they did. 

Because Twitter also promoted a new program where you could even get Twitter Blue for free — and a free NFT — if you just connect your crypto wallet up to twitter-blue.com.

At least I think they did. 

Both those accounts were named Twitter, both had the same logo, and both were verified.

The latter, of course, was a scammer. But it had 26,000 followers. How many of those people do you think understood the distinction?

You might say, well the username is going to be obviously different. Someone can't create the username AppleTVPlus if Apple already owns that.

Except they can, and someone did. Here's how. They used a capital "I" instead of the lower case "L" in Plus. The two are completely indistinguishable from each other.

See for yourself — can you tell which is real and which is fake, below?

What's Elon's take on all this? 

James Felton, a British author, asked Twitter's new owner what he thought of all the fake accounts; Musk replied with a pair of laughing emojis. 

So far, the only action Twitter seems to have taken is to temporarily prevent new accounts — those created from yesterday onward — from buying the blue checkmark. 

Senior Privacy Executives Bail Out

And then, it got worse.

Overnight, we learned that Twitter’s most senior cybersecurity director had resigned. Then, the company's chief compliance officer quit. Then its chief privacy officer.

Techcrunch this morning noted:

It’s not immediately clear who is responsible for Twitter’s day-to-day security operations following [these] departure[s]. A spokesperson for Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Of course they didn't. There are almost no communications people left.

Speculation is the departures are related to a decade-old agreement with the American trade regulator, which had accused Twitter of letting cybercriminals access internal systems and user data.

Again, quoting Techcrunch:

The decree mandates that Twitter “establish and maintain a comprehensive information security program” to be audited every decade. It’s not clear how Twitter maintains that compliance with the FTC without a company security lead in place. One employee said in a company Slack that it was for Twitter engineers to “self-certify” compliance with the FTC.

That regulator, the FTC, said this morning: “We are tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern."

Elon Emails Workers

Then, at about 3 in the morning Eastern time, Elon Musk — for the first time since he bought the company — spoke directly to employees via an email.

It reads, in part:

Sorry that this is my first email to the whole company but there is no way to sugarcoat the message.

Frankly, the economic picture ahead is dire especially for a company like ours that is so dependent on advertising in a challenging economic climate. Moreover, 70% of our advertising is brand, rather than specific performance, which makes us doubly vulnerable! 

That is why the priority over the past ten days has been to develop and launch Twitter Blue Verified subscriptions...

Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn. We need roughly half of our revenue to be subscription....

Starting tomorrow (Thursday), everyone is required to be in the office for a minimum of 40 hours per week. 

A New Twitter in the Wings?

Amidst all the chaos, people are trying to find a Twitter alternative. I mentioned Mastadon earlier in the week.

A different project is being worked on by a guy named Gabor Cselle who sold his advertising startup to Twitter, then became a group product manager there, and later became the director of Google's new products experimentation team.

What's interesting about his early work is he's doing most of the planning in a Google Doc that anybody can view. We created a shortlink for you at https://b.link/newtwitter 

There's no name yet, no anything really, but many people in the industry are watching it closely, if for no other reason than Gabor's track record. 

Today he tweeted:

I had been thinking about a new Twitter for a while. After multiple friends of mine still at the company were laid off last week, I thought to myself, ‘This is the thing I’ve been thinking about for so long! Maybe this is the time.

At least, I think he did.

Pinterest's Invite-Only Collage App

Shockingly, there is other news today, so let's cover that.

Pinterest’s new collage-making app Shuffles has now come out of hiding.

The app become "a thing" when TikTok users started using it to make videos. Even though it was still in limited release, it become the No. 1 Lifestyle app on the U.S. App Store in August.

Quoting Techcrunch:

To use Shuffles, users build collages using Pinterest’s own photo library or by snapping photos of objects they want to include with their iPhone’s camera. Pinterest also built a technology that allows users to cut out objects from their own photos, their Pinterest boards or by searching for new Pins. This works similarly to iOS 16’s image cutout feature, where you can copy and paste an object from a photo into other apps. Shuffles makes this cut-out process a bit easier as it automatically identifies the object in the photos to make them available for pasting into your collages. You can also choose to add effects and motion to your images to make them shake, spin, pulse, swivel and more. These effects can be applied to individual items, as well. For example, you could add an image of a record player, then animate it so it actually spins.

Pinterest says although the app is still in testing, they are releasing it on iOS in U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.

Amazon Cost Cutting

Amazon is cutting back on big projects in light of the economy — and its flagship Alexa business may be swept up in it.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that the company's devices unit had an operating loss of more than $5 billion this year.

Quoting the Journal:

Amazon is currently considering whether it should focus on trying to add new capabilities to Alexa.... Adding capabilities would require greater investment, and many customers use Alexa for only a few functions, some of the people said.

Amazon also has told employees in certain other unprofitable divisions to look for jobs elsewhere in the company because the teams they were working on were being suspended or closed...

In response to media inquiries, the company said you'd expect it would say — they're optimistic, business is as good as it's ever been, yadda yadda.

Amazon’s shares rose by more than 4% today after the Journal's report on the cost-cutting review.

In Brief

  • YouTube has expanded its comment translation tools. Last September, they launched the ability to translate comments within the app, — it's now adding comment translations to their YouTube Studio Mobile app as well. They're also expanding their ‘Smart Replies’ experiment, which is similar to those suggestions you see below some short Gmail messages — things like "Thank you too!" and "More to come!" are now in buttons to click and post.

  • Canva is the latest creative platform to add a text-to-image AI tool. It's a version of the open-source system known as Stable Diffusion, with a few brand safety filters thrown in. Canva says all its users will be able to make 100 images a day with the tool. 

  • And finally, Reddit is rolling out a new “community muting” feature. This is for individual users, not brands. It lets users mute an entire community, so that they will no longer see posts from that subreddit in their notifications, Home feed or Popular feed. You can still participate in communities you've muted.

As mentioned at the top of today’s issue, next week there will be no newsletter issues, so be sure to subscribe to the podcast (it’s free!) to get a full deep-dive episode each day.

I’ll be back the week after.

And, as Elon Musk once tweeted: “Don’t burn the place down when I’m gone.”

At least, I think he did.

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