Techmeme
October 31, 2022, 5:20 AM

Top News

Alex Heath / The Verge:
Sources: Twitter plans to make Twitter Blue a $20/month subscription that verifies users; staff have until November 7 to build the feature or face being fired  —  Now that he owns Twitter, Elon Musk has given employees their first ultimatum: Meet his deadline to introduce paid verification on Twitter or pack up and leave.
Casey Newton / Platformer:
Sources: Twitter is strongly considering taking away its verified users' badges if they don't subscribe to Twitter Blue  —  Under pressure to generate revenue quickly, Twitter's new CEO considers ending free verification  —  Twitter is strongly considering making its users pay to remain verified …
Rachel Sharp / The Independent:
In a now-deleted tweet replying to Hillary Clinton, Elon Musk shared a lurid, baseless conspiracy theory about the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul  —  Billionaire peddled the conspiracy theory on Twitter just days after he completed his takeover of the social media platform
Dan Milmo / The Guardian:
Twitter's head of safety and integrity says the service has not changed content policies but was subjected to “an organized effort to make people think we have”  —  Platform says 300 accounts carried out 50,000-plus tweets in ‘organised effort to make users think firm has changed content policy’
Alex Heath / The Verge:
Lauren Hirsch / New York Times:
Twitter faces ~$1B per year in interest expenses after Elon Musk's deal added ~$13B in debt, up from ~$50M in 2021 when operations generated ~$633M in cash flow  —  Mr. Musk faces financial challenges in owning Twitter.  The site frequently loses money and took on $13 billion in debt for the blockbuster deal.
Martin Peers / The Information:
Source: Elon Musk fired four Twitter executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, “for cause”, in an apparent attempt to avoid severance and unvested stock payouts  —  When Elon Musk terminated four top Twitter executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal on Thursday …
Khari Johnson / Wired:
An interview with Gerard de Graaf, the director of a new EU office in San Francisco, on the DMA coming into force on November 1 and its impact on tech companies  —  The Digital Markets Act will force big tech platforms to break open their walled gardens in 2023, says the EU's new ambassador to Silicon Valley.
Selina Cheng / Wall Street Journal:
Inside Foxconn's Zhengzhou iPhone plant as the company grapples with a weekslong COVID-19 outbreak during a critical period, leading to harsh lockdown measures  —  As it adheres to Beijing's strict epidemic controls, Apple's biggest smartphone assembler scrambles to keep production lines moving
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple plans to launch M2-based versions of the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros in early March 2023; the M2 Max will have 12 CPU cores and 38 GPU cores  —  Apple's next group of Macs probably won't launch until early next year, which means it will have fewer new devices to sell in the holiday quarter.
ProPublica:
Analysis: how Google's ad business funnels revenue to prolific purveyors of health, election, and climate disinformation in Europe, Latin America, and Africa  —  Google is funneling revenue to some of the web's most prolific purveyors of false information in Europe, Latin America and Africa, a ProPublica investigation has found.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: US-based self-driving trucking company TuSimple faces US federal probes into whether it improperly financed and transferred tech to a Chinese startup  —  Government authorities are investigating whether the U.S. self-driving trucking company defrauded investors by financing and transferring technology to China-backed Hydron

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Christina Caron / New York Times: