Category: Fuck Twitter

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Holy Hell, Trump Did Use Twitter Direct Messages, There Were "Many" of Them, and the Special Counsel Now Has Them

From Daring Fireball:

Katelyn Polantz, reporting for CNN:

The special counsel's investigation into Donald Trump and the aftermath of the 2020 election sought the former president's Twitter direct messages, of which there were many, federal prosecutors and lawyers for Twitter revealed in newly unsealed transcripts from February court hearings about the search warrant. […]

A lawyer representing Twitter, now called "X," similarly confirmed in court that Trump's account had several private messages between users on the platform. "X" was able to find both the sent direct messages and deleted messages for prosecutors, according to the transcripts.

"We were able to determine that there was some volume in that for this account. There are confidential communications," a lawyer for Twitter said about @realDonaldTrump's direct messages.

Alan Feuer and Maggie Haberman, reporting for The New York Times:

While it remained unclear what sorts of information the messages contained and who exactly may have written them, it was a revelation that there were private messages associated with the Twitter account of Mr. Trump, who has famously been cautious about using written forms of communications in his dealings with aides and allies.

The papers included transcripts of hearings in Federal District Court in Washington in February during which Judge Beryl A. Howell asserted that Mr. Smith's office had sought Mr. Trump's direct messages — or DMs — from Twitter as part of a search warrant it executed on the account in January.

In one of the transcripts, a lawyer for Twitter, answering questions from Judge Howell, confirmed that the company had turned over to the special counsel's office "all direct messages, the DMs" from Mr. Trump's Twitter account, including those sent, received and "stored in draft form."

The lawyer for Twitter told Judge Howell that the company had found both "deleted" and "nondeleted" direct messages associated with Mr. Trump's account.

I am not at all surprised that "deleted" DMs are not in fact deleted, but rather hidden. I am slightly surprised that Trump — famously averse not just to using email and text messages, but even to his own lawyers taking written notes in meetings, so as not to leave a chain of evidence for his lifelong criminal activity — would use, of all things, the infamously unencrypted direct messaging feature on Twitter. To be clear, this is a pleasant surprise.

Kyle Cheney, reporting for Politico, "Special Counsel Obtained Trump DMs Despite 'Momentous' Bid by Twitter to Delay, Unsealed Filings Show":

Among the data the search warrant commanded Twitter to produce:

    • Accounts associated with @realdonaldtrump that the former president might have used in the same device.
    • Devices used to log into the @realdonaldtrump account.
    • IP addresses used to log into the account between October 2020 and January 2021.
    • Privacy settings and history.
    • All tweets "created, drafted, favorited/liked, or retweeted" by @realdonaldtrump, including any subsequently deleted.
    • All direct messages "sent from, received by, stored in draft form in, or otherwise associated with" @realdonaldtrump.
    • All records of searches from October 2020 to January 2021.
    • Location information for the user of @realdonaldtrump from October 2020 to January 2021.

As I speculated last week, nothing you do on Twitter is private. Not your DMs, not your "deleted" DMs, not your searches, not your location (if you're foolish enough to grant Twitter/X access to it), not your draft posts.

Elon Musk comes out of this looking like he'd happily fellate Trump:

Ultimately, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell held Twitter in contempt of court in February, fining the company $350,000 for missing a court-ordered deadline to comply with Smith's search warrant. But the newly unsealed transcripts of the proceedings in her courtroom show that the fine was the least of the punishment. Howell lit into Twitter for taking "extraordinary" and apparently unprecedented steps to give Trump advance notice about the search warrant — despite prosecutors' warnings, backed by unspecified evidence, that notifying Trump could cause grave damage to their investigation.

"Is this to make Donald Trump feel like he is a particularly welcomed new renewed user of Twitter?" Howell asked.

"Twitter has no interest other than litigation its constitutional rights," replied attorney George Varghese of WilmerHale, the firm Twitter deploys for much of its litigation.

But Howell returned to the theme repeatedly during the proceedings, wondering why the company was taking "momentous" steps to protect Trump that it had never taken for other uses. In the hearing on Feb. 7, 2023, Howell referenced Musk, asking: "Is it because the new CEO wants to cozy up with the former president?"

The unsealed court filing (PDF) is here, for your reading enjoyment. Hope you stocked up on popcorn, like I did, for indictment season.

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I'm Enjoying the Spectacle

Twitter is now blocking third-party apps. In plain English, what that means is if—for whatever reason—you're still on the platform and have been using an app like Twitterific or Tweetbot instead of the native Twitter app to read tweets, you're now shit out of luck. Because, reasons.

From The Verge:

Twitter confirmed that it's purposefully blocking third-party apps like Tweetbot and Twitterific following days of silence. In a post on Twitter, the company writes that it's "enforcing its long-standing API rules," which "may result in shttps://apps.apple.com/us/app/tweetbot-for-twitter/id1527500834ome apps not working."

While the statement confirms suspicions that Twitter had been purposefully locking users out of third-party Twitter clients, it doesn't even contain a link to the rules that Twitter's referring to and still doesn't tell us anything about what's really going on. This is the first time Twitter's acknowledging the issue since apps started breaking last Thursday.

Twitter's vagueness isn't much of a surprise, given that the company dismantled its communications team as part of CEO Elon Musk's mass layoffs. One senior Twitter engineer reportedly told employees that the third-party outages are "intentional" but never explained why, according to internal messages obtained by The Information.

The situation has left both developers, who make a living off of these apps, and users, who use them to enhance their Twitter experience, frustrated and confused. While one app, Tweetbot, briefly came back online over the weekend, that was only because co-creator Paul Haddad swapped out its API keys. This put the app in a semi-working state and allowed it to temporarily bypass the ban.

Other Twitter clients, like Albatross and the iOS version of Fenix, continue working, and — again — it's entirely unclear what these apps are doing that Tweetbot and Twitterific aren't. It doesn't look like Twitter's communicating with developers, either.

"We have still heard nothing from anyone at Twitter on any level," Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad tells The Verge. "If there's some long-standing rule that we've been unknowingly breaking for the last 10+ years, we'd love to know what it is so that, if possible, we can comply with it."

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Don't Shit in the Swimming Pool

From Greg Fallis:

Okay, here's an analogy. Twitter is a swimming pool. A large pool, an Olympic-sized pool. It's privately owned, but open to the public.

People come. Some just want to splash around, some want to swim laps, some just want to hang out poolside, some want to train for a swim meet, some want to cannonball into the pool and make a big splash, some want to practice diving. It's a big pool, so even if some jackass is playing Nickleback on a bluetooth speaker instead of using headphones, you can move to the other end where it's less annoying. It's far from perfect, but you still come because it's the biggest pool around and all your friends hang out there.

The pool has a few loose rules. You break the rules, you can get your ass booted out of the pool. One of the fundamental rules: Keep Litter Out of the Pool. Nobody wants to swim in a pool that has old candy wrappers and cigarette butts floating around in it.

That's Old Twitter. New Twitter is different.

New Twitter is owned by a rich, arrogant, bone-ignorant narcissist who thought it would be fun to own his own swimming pool. To save money, he's fired the concession stand workers, the maintenance workers, and the lifeguards. He also feels some folks who've been evicted for littering were treated unfairly. He feels they contribute to the swimming pool community, that perhaps the litter makes swimming more challenging and immediately vital.

So he's re-invited them back.

Now, feeling vindicated for littering, they're gleefully shitting in the pool.

And the new owner suggests folks who are reluctant to swim in the pool now aren't really committed to swimming.

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I'm Sure He'll Just Buy the EU

From Appleinsider:

The European Union has warned Elon Musk that it will ban or fine Twitter unless it follows its laws about content moderation that are set to go into effect in 2023.

Thierry Breton, the EU's commissioner in charge of implementing the union's digital rules, made the warning during a video meeting with Musk on Wednesday. The checklist of rules includes aggressively removing disinformation, getting rid of Musk's "arbitrary" approach to reinstating banned users, and more.

Musk has reportedly been told to give clear criteria on which users are at risk of a Twitter ban. Breton also called on Musk to apply strict rules around advertising, such as a ban on targeting kids or using sensitive information to target users with ads, such as religious and political beliefs.

The EU also wants Twitter to agree to an audit by the summer of 2023 and hand over information that includes the number of active users and banned accounts.

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? ? ?

And now the man-baby is threatening to take down Apple because they're cutting back their advertising on the platform and threatening to pull the Twitter app from their App Store.