The entire story of Twitter / X under Elon Musk

X uses your data to train its Grok AI assistant, but if you’d like to opt out of that, you can do that right from your settings menu. It is accessible on the web right here, or you can find it yourself if you click the three dots menu, then “Settings and privacy,” then “Privacy and safety,” and then “Grok.”

X’s @Safety account wrote in a post on Friday that the setting is available to all users on the web now and “will soon be rolled out on mobile.”

Years after Twitter replaced the pistol emoji with a green and orange water gun, X has decided to change it back to a regular handgun. An X employee announced the change in a post last week.

The company hasn’t explained the change, but it feels on brand for Elon Musk’s social network. Twitter originally switched its emoji to display a water gun in 2018, following others like Google and Facebook. (Apple made the switch in 2016; Microsoft was a brief holdout.)

A “Trump2024” banner labeled “Promoted by Team Trump” sat atop the What’s Happening summary on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, during the fourth and final night of the Republican National Convention on Thursday.

While the #Trump2024 hashtag temporarily showed the American flag, and clicking it caused an animated “hashfetti” effect with flags raining down, it was the icon attached to the number one trending #MAGA topic that caught our eyes.

Elon Musk says he plans to move X and SpaceX’s headquarters from California to Texas. “Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas,” Musk wrote in a tweet, referencing California’s SAFETY Act (AB1955).

Signed on Monday by California Governor Gavin Newsom, it prevents schools from imposing rules requiring teachers to disclose changes to a student’s gender identity without their permission and prohibits retaliation against teachers who refuse to out a student, reports the Los Angeles Times.

During an internal all-hands meeting led by X CEO Linda Yaccarino on Wednesday, concerned employees tuned in to hear if she would address the pressing issue on their minds: performance reviews.

Sources inside the company confirm that a promotions process was recently delayed without explanation and that X’s sales team doesn’t expect to meet its revenue targets for the quarter. Given how the company formerly called Twitter has continued to struggle under Elon Musk’s ownership, employees have been bracing for more layoffs.

X is rolling out private likes as soon as today, according to a source at the company. That means what users like on the platform will be hidden by default, which is already an option for X’s Premium subscribers. Following the publication of this story, X owner Elon Musk reshared a screenshot of it, saying it’s “important to allow people to like posts without getting attacked for doing so!”

A few weeks ago, X’s director of engineering, Haofei Wang, said the upcoming change is meant to protect users’ public image — because “many people feel discouraged” to like “edgy” content. The Likes tab on user profiles will be gone. Users will still be able to see who liked their posts and the like count for all posts, but they will not see the people who liked someone else’s post, according to X senior software engineer Enrique Barragan. (He also hinted at the launch today in a post.)

As spotted by TechCrunch, X updated its guidelines to let users “share consensually produced and distributed adult nudity or sexual behavior” as long as it’s labeled and not in a prominent location, such as a profile picture or banner.

After this article was published, the @Safety account tweeted saying, “We have launched Adult Content and Violent Content policies to bring more clarity of our Rules and transparency into enforcement of these areas. These policies replace our former Sensitive Media and Violent Speech policies - but what we enforce against hasn’t changed.”

Elon Musk has agreed to testify in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s investigation into his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. A legal document filed on Thursday shows that Musk waived his right to appeal a court order that requires him to testify.

This means Musk will have to appear at one of the SEC’s offices for an up to five-hour interview. The document says Musk and the SEC have already agreed to a date, but it’s not disclosed “for confidentiality purposes.”

In yet another major shift, X, the social platform previously known as Twitter, is taking away the ability to see what posts other users have liked. It’s a change the company’s director of engineering, Haofei Wang, says is meant to protect users’ public image — because “many people feel discouraged” to like “edgy” content. MacRumors first reported that the change is coming after a flag was discovered in the iOS app that removes the Likes tab on all user profiles.

“Soon you’ll be able to like without worrying who might see it,” Wang says. It wasn’t initially clear if this would affect seeing who liked your own posts, but X senior software engineer Enrique Barragan chimed in to clarify:

The social network formerly known as Twitter has officially adopted X.com for all its core systems. That means typing twitter.com in your browser will now redirect to Elon Musk’s favored domain, or should. At the time of publication, we’re seeing a mix of results depending upon browser choice and whether you’re logged in or not.

A message also now appears at the bottom of the X login page that reads, “We are letting you know that we are changing our URL, but your privacy and data protection settings remain the same.”

Just as Elon Musk said, X is doling out free Premium and Premium Plus memberships to accounts with a high number of verified followers.

Multiple X users on Wednesday reported seeing the familiar blue “Verified” checkmark next to their handles despite not paying for either paid X subscription tier. Musk last week announced that X accounts with over 2,500 “verified subscriber followers” would receive a free Premium membership; while accounts with over 5,000 would receive a free Premium Plus membership.

Elon Musk’s controversial behavior in recent years is “very likely” to be a contributing factor in Tesla’s declining sales, according to corporate reputation tracking firm Caliber.

Survey data reported by Reuters found that Tesla’s “consideration score” — a metric used by Caliber to track consumer interest in brands, based on how they respond to the prompt “I would buy, or continue buying, products and services from Tesla, if given the chance” — has fallen to 31 percent from its 70 percent high in November 2021, tumbling by 8 percent alone this January. Caliber’s consideration scores for rival EV-producing manufacturers Audi, BMW, and Mercedes, meanwhile, increased slightly during the same period, reaching between 44–47 percent.

In a decision filed Monday, federal Judge Charles Breyer dismissed a lawsuit from Elon Musk’s X against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), saying the company’s case is “about punishing the Defendants [CCDH] for their speech.”

Judge Breyer writes that X’s “motivation in bringing this case is evident,” stating that the company’s goal is to “punish CCDH for CCDH publications that criticized X Corp. — and perhaps in order to dissuade others” from criticizing X in the future. “If CCDH’s publications were defamatory, that would be one thing, but X Corp. has carefully avoided saying that they are,” the filing reads.

Don Lemon has published the “tense” interview with Elon Musk that got his show canceled on X. During the interview, Lemon touches on various topics related to hate speech on X and Musk’s own views on right-wing conspiracy theories, with the billionaire becoming noticeably irritated by the interview’s end.

Things start to take a turn about halfway into the interview. Lemon asks Musk about his comments on illegal immigration and the far-right “great replacement” theory and then turns to the topic of content moderation. Lemon asks whether better content moderation on X would let Musk avoid some of the criticism of his posts about the “great replacement” theory.