Special counsel Jack Smith was granted a search warrant for former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account as part of his investigation into the events of January 6th, 2020. The warrant was first reported by Politico after court documents detailing the warrant surfaced.

Smith obtained the warrant in January, but had trouble getting the records from Twitter. First, his investigators apparently encountered an “inoperative” website typically used for law enforcement to make legal requests. After they were able to serve the warrant, Twitter was slow to respond, according to court records.

The issue, according to newly unsealed court documents, was a nondisclosure agreement that barred Twitter from disclosing the existence of the warrant, including to Trump. The company argued it had a First Amendment right to notify Trump about the warrant, which resulted in months of legal wrangling between Twitter and the special counsel’s office.

The court sided with the government and Twitter was required to hand over the data. During the litigation, the government amended the nondisclosure order to allow Twitter “to notify the former President of the existence and contents of the warrant” provided they withheld the identity of the case agent.

But the company missed a court-ordered deadline for turning over all its records, and was fined $350,000 after being held in contempt. “Although Twitter ultimately complied with the warrant, the company did not fully produce the requested information until three days after a court-ordered deadline,” the filing states.

The legal wrangling underscores the role Trump’s Twitter account played in the events of January 6th. The company suspended the @realdonaldtrump account the evening of the riot after he tweeted support for the violent mob. Trump’s account was reinstated after Elon Musk acquired the company last year, but the former president has yet to return to the platform.

The company, now known as X, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

X is giving advertisers new ways to have some control over what type of content can appear near their ads. The company formerly known as Twitter introduced new “sensitivity settings” that allow advertisers to choose between different types of content filtering for their ads.

The new controls arrive as X is increasingly desperate to win back advertisers. The company’s ad revenue has dropped 50 percent since Elon Musk took over as brands cut spending on the platform amid concerns about the rise of hate speech and other unsavory content. Since then, watchdog groups have reported several instances of ads from major brands being placed near neo-Nazi accounts, Holocaust deniers and other previously suspended users.

With the new tool, X says it “will use machine learning to reduce adjacency to varying levels of content according to a brand’s sensitivity threshold in an upcoming campaign.” For now, the two settings available to advertisers include “conservative” and “standard.” The company notes that all rule-breaking content is meant to be excluded from ads regardless of what advertisers have opted into.

X

Under the most restrictive “conservative” setting, ads would be excluded from appearing near “targeted hate speech, sexual content, gratuitous gore, excessive profanity, obscenity, spam and drugs” in the “for You” timeline. The “standard” option would avoid the same topics, but allow spam and drug-related content, according to an example shared by X. The company also plans to add a “relaxed” setting for advertisers who want to “maximize reach” of their ads with the fewest limits on what can appear nearby.

The update isn’t the first time X has introduced tools to promote brand safety. The company previously added other keyword-based “adjacency controls” that were also meant to limit ad-buyers’ exposure to problematic content. But those changes, introduced in December, seem to have had little effect on X’s ad business. 

Though the company has repeatedly claimed that it has successfully limited the reach of hate speech on its site, researchers have said otherwise. Last month, Bloombergreported that researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) indicating hate speech has surged, both in terms of sheer volume and in engagement, since Musk’s takeover of the company. X disputed the findings and is now suing CCDH, alleging the group “illegally” scraped data.

While the jury is still out on whether Meta’s new Threads will be a Twitter killer, the app could still upend how we think of social networks. Not because of how many users it has, but because of Meta’s promise to integrate ActivityPub, the decentralized protocol that powers Mastodon and other fediverse apps, into Threads.

Though that functionality hasn’t been built yet, there are hints about it sprinkled throughout the service. For now, the most prominent clue is the “threads.net” URL at the top of each user’s profile. It currently links to a brief message that hints at what’s coming. “Soon, you’ll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, like Mastodon,” it reads.

For close watchers of the fediverse — the collection of decentralized services that run on ActivityPub — those 15 words could be the start of one of the most consequential moments for the technology. While interest in the fediverse has been growing over the last year, it’s still not widely understood, even by some who are active on places like Mastodon. But Meta’s entry into the space could expose a lot more people to the power, and perils, of decentralized social networks.

What even is decentralized social media?

For enthusiasts, the rise of decentralized platforms represents an opportunity for a more open web — a chance to tear down some of the walled gardens that have become the norm on mainstream social media platforms. “It reminds me of the early, heady days of the Internet, when the web was happening,” Mike McCue, a former Netscape executive and current CEO of Flipboard said. “I believe that this is where the entire social media space will go.”

Because they are open source and not controlled by a single entity, ActivityPub and other protocols allow users to interact with each other’s content, regardless of where it originated. The concept is often compared to email, which also relies on foundational protocols that most people don’t think much about.

“I can email somebody with a random .com address from my .edu address and it just works, the servers talk to each other and the email is delivered,” explains Ross Schulman, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s decentralization fellow. Decentralized social media promises a similar experience, he says. “Instead of exchanging little short messages that we call emails, they exchange little short messages that we call social media, or images or likes, or replies.”

Right now, this kind of experience is limited to Mastodon and other, more niche services that make up the current fediverse. That’s not starting to change as larger and more mainstream platforms begin to experiment with ActivityPub.

Tumblr has said it plans to support ActivityPub. Blogging platform Medium started its own Mastodon instance last year, and now offers membership as a premium "perk" to paying subscribers. Mozilla has also started its own Mastodon instance, calling it a “long-term investment” in the future of social media. The BBC recently announced the start of a six-month experiment with Mastodon. News aggregator Flipboard is even more invested. The company has started its own Mastodon instance, promised to adopt ActivityPub and added integrations with Bluesky, another decentralized platform that uses its own protocol.

Why now?

Despite the recent surge in interest, the idea of the fediverse and decentralized, protocol-based social media is far from new. The ActivityPub protocol was officially established in 2018, but the idea of federated platforms is even older.

“ActivityPub is another instantiation of the basic idea of the internet … every node should be able to talk with any other node at the simplest level,” says Sorin Matei, communications professor and associate dean at Purdue University.

Though Mastodon gained some notoriety in 2017, much of the fediverse remained relatively obscure — until Elon Musk announced his plan to take over Twitter. The acquisition represented a “tectonic shift” for decentralized social media, Matei tells Engadget. New users began to flood Mastodon in the days immediately after his bid was announced, and there have been regular surges that coincide with controversial decisions he’s made since. The service currently has just over 2 million active users, according to founder Eugen Rochko.

Bluesky, another decentralized platform, has also notched early success. The service, which began as an offshoot of Twitter but severed all ties with the company last year, has racked up hundreds of thousands of users in its closed beta. Unlike Mastodon, the team behind Bluesky is developing its own federated protocol, the AT Protocol. For now, the only instance of Bluesky is the closed beta, but the company has said it plans to start testing federation.

And while the AT Protocol and ActivityPub are separate standards, the visions behind them are similar. Already, there are projects to “bridge” the two, and some fediverse enthusiasts suspect the distinction between the two will matter less as both Mastodon and Bluesky mature. “The most important thing is the first principles built around both these protocols are identical,” McCue told Engadget. “The most important thing is there's an open protocol — actually two — to build the federated social web.”

For now, the number of people using the federated social web, though, is still small compared with more established platforms. Yet smaller and mid-size companies are investing in the protocols and the platforms they power because they see the surging interest as an opportunity to bolster their own communities. “They think it will actually create a better experience for their users,” Schulman told Engadget. “Whether that’s the promise of an even larger reader pool or access to more people to follow.”

Meta, which already operates some of the most dominant social networks, may have different motivations. While Zuckerberg has championed “interoperability” in the past, Meta hasn’t historically been welcoming to potential competing networks. Yet the company has talked glowingly about the promise of the fediverse. “Our vision is that people using compatible apps will be able to follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads account, and vice versa, ushering in a new era of diverse and interconnected networks,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing Threads.

Schulman notes that Meta may have more self-serving motivations. “They're trying to portray themselves as not anti-competitive,” Schulman said, pointing to recent regulatory scrutiny.

It’s still unclear how long it will take Meta to actually add ActivitySupport for Threads. Instagram’s top exec has cautioned it will take time. In addition to technical complications involved, there are also serious moderation issues associated with the fediverse, where communities are responsible for setting their own rules and norms. Researchers have recently flagged the prevalence of CSAM on some servers. Bluesky, which does currently have centralized moderation, has also dealt with some controversies surrounding its handling of trust and safety. Meta will need to ensure that Threads, which has the same content policies as Instagram, is interoperable with the fediverse while keeping out content that doesn’t align with its rules.

The stricter approach may also explain why some fediverse backers were not excited about the prospect of Meta joining their ranks, even tangentially. Some Mastodon servers have pledged to block Threads in order to wall off their users from the Facebook owner. Mastodon’s Rochko alluded to the discontent in a blog post after Threads’ launch, assuring users that Meta won’t be able to serve ads or access the data of Mastodon users. But he made clear he was broadly supportive of Meta’s efforts.

“We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years,” he wrote shortly. “The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.”

Elon Musk says he plans to ask Tim Cook to adjust the App Store fees X pays on subscriptions as part of a plan to boost creators earnings on the platform that was, until recently, known as Twitter. The remarks are the latest example of Musk calling out the “App Store tax” Apple takes from in-app purchases.

Musk framed the ask as part of a broader effort to help creators get paid more for paying subscribers. “While we had previously said that 𝕏 would keep nothing for the [first] 12 months, then 10%, we are amending that policy to 𝕏 keeps nothing forever, until payout exceeds $100k, then 10%,” he tweeted. “Apple does take 30%, but I will speak with @tim_cook and see if that can be adjusted to be just 30% of what 𝕏 keeps in order to maximize what creators receive.”

It’s unclear if Musk’s request has any chance of success. Cook seems unlikely to make such a concession, as he’s long ducked criticism from numerous other developers about the App Store’s fees and the policies surrounding them. Apple and X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

However, it’s not the first time Musk has publicly called out Apple’s App Store policies. He previously complained about Apple’s “secret 30% tax” on in-app purchases, and reportedly delayed the launch of Twitter Blue to avoid the fees. He’s also accused the iPhone maker of threatening “to withhold” Twitter’s from the App Store, though he later said that was a “misunderstanding” after a private meeting with Cook.

Regardless, Musk and X would greatly benefit from a boost in paying subscribers, which seems to be the motivation for Musk again calling attention to the issue. The company’s ad revenue is down more than 50 percent as many advertisers have yet to return to spending at the same level as before he took over Twitter. Generating more subscribers— via creators and Twitter Blue — could help the company become less reliant on ad revenue, though the company would need tens of millions of subscribers, if not more, to make up the deficit.

Meta’s consumer-facing generative AI tools based on its new Llama 2 model may not be far off. The company appears to be working on several new generative AI features for Instagram, including labels that allow creators to identify images “generated by Meta AI.”

That’s according to screenshots shared by reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi who often teases unreleased features from Meta’s apps. Paluzzi recently posted a screenshot that shows an in-app message detailing how posts created with generative AI tools may soon be labeled within Instagram. “The creator or Meta said that this content was created or edited with AI,” the message explains. Additional labels indicate it was “generated by Meta AI” and that “content created with AI is typically labeled so that it can be easily detected.”

Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but the screenshot suggests that the company, like Google and others in the AI space, is interested in helping users discern when AI was used to create content. As generative AI tools have become more widely used, researchers and policymakers have raised concerns about how the technology could be used to aid the spread of misinformation or otherwise mislead people. Earlier this month, seven AI companies — including Meta — pledged to adopt a series of AI safety measures, like watermarks for AI-generated content.

While Meta so far hasn’t disclosed many details about its consumer-facing generative AI plans, Mark Zuckerberg has dropped several hints. “We're also building a number of new products ourselves using Llama that will work across our services,” the CEO said in a quarterly earnings call last week. “You can imagine lots of ways AI could help people connect and express themselves in our apps: creative tools that make it easier and more fun to share content, agents that act as assistants, coaches, or that can help you interact with businesses and creators, and more.”

Elsewhere, Paluzzi has spotted signs of other generative AI-powered tools for Instagram, including a “message summary” feature for summarizing long DMs, and new artistic tools for editing Stories.

Nearly three years ago Meta announced it was partnering with more than a dozen independent researchers to study the impact Facebook and Instagram had on the 2020 election. Both Meta and the researchers promised the project, which would rely on troves of internal data, would deliver an independent look at issues like polarization and misinformation.

Now, we have the first results of that research in the form of four peer-reviewed papers published in the journals Science and Nature. The studies offer an intriguing new look at how Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms affected what users saw in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.

The papers are also a notable milestone for Meta. The company has at times had a strained relationship with independent researchers and been accused of "transparency theater" in its efforts to make more data available to those wishing to understand what’s happening on this platform. In a statement, Meta’s policy chief Nick Clegg said that the research suggests Facebook may not be as influential in shaping its users’ political beliefs as many believe. “The experimental studies add to a growing body of research showing there is little evidence that key features of Meta’s platforms alone cause harmful ‘affective’ polarization, or have meaningful effects on key political attitudes, beliefs or behaviors,” he wrote.

The researchers’ initial findings, however, appear to paint a more complex picture.

One study in Nature looked at the effect of so-called “echo chambers,” or when users are exposed to a large amount of “like-minded” sources. While the researchers confirm that most users in the US see a majority of content from “like-minded friends, Pages and groups,” they note all of it isn’t explicitly political or news-related. They also found that decreasing the amount of “like-minded” content reduced engagement, but didn’t measurably change user’s beliefs or attitudes.

While the authors note the results don’t account for the “cumulative effects” years of social media use may have had on their subjects, they do suggest the effects of echo chambers are often mischaracterized.

Another study in Nature looked at the effect of chronological feeds compared with algorithmically-generated ones. That issue gained particular prominence in 2021, thanks to revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has advocated for a return to chronological feeds. Unsurprisingly, the researchers concluded that Facebook and Instagram’s algorithmic feeds “strongly influenced users’ experiences.”

“The Chronological Feed dramatically reduced the amount of time users spent on the platform, reduced how much users engaged with content when they were on the platform, and altered the mix of content they were served,” the authors write. “Users saw more content from ideologically moderate friends and sources with mixed audiences; more political content; more content from untrustworthy sources; and less content classified as uncivil or containing slur words than they would have on the Algorithmic Feed.”

At the same time, the researchers say that a chronological feed “did not cause detectable changes in downstream political attitudes, knowledge, or offline behavior.”

Likewise, another study, also in Science, on the effects of reshared content in the run-up to the 2020 election found that removing reshared content “substantially decreases the amount of political news, including content from untrustworthy sources” but didn’t “significantly affect political polarization or any measure of individual-level political attitudes.’

Finally, researchers analyzed the political news stories that appeared in users’ feeds in the context of whether they were liberal or conservative. They concluded that Facebook is “substantially segregated ideologically” but that “ideological segregation manifests far more in content posted by Pages and Groups than in content posted by friends.” They also found conservative users were far more likely to see content from “untrustworthy” sources, as well as articles rated false by the company’s third-party fact checkers.

The researchers said the results were a “manifestation of how Pages and Groups provide a very powerful curation and dissemination machine that is used especially effectively by sources with predominantly conservative audiences.”

While some of the findings look good for Meta, which has long argued that political content is only a small minority of what most users see, one of the most notable takeaways from the research is that there aren’t obvious solutions for addressing the polarization that does on social media. “The results of these experiments do not show that the platforms are not the problem, but they show that they are not the solution,” University of Konstanz’ David Garcia, who was part of the research team, told Science.

Meta just had its best quarter since 2021, even as it continues to lose massive amounts of money on the metaverse. In fact, the company said it expects to lose even more money on its efforts in the year to come.

Reality Labs, the Meta division overseeing its virtual and augmented reality projects, lost $3.7 billion during the second quarter of 2023 and generated just $276 million in revenue, according to the company’s latest earnings report. And the company, once again, said it expects its metaverse spending to accelerate. CFO Susan Li said that Meta is expecting Reality Labs’ losses to “increase meaningfully” compared with last year, when it lost more than $13 billion on the efforts.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to downplay the significance of the losses. “We remain fully committed to the metaverse vision,” he said during the company's earnings call. When pressed for more details on the company’s metaverse spending, he pointed to the upcoming Quest 3 headset, which he said would launch at Meta’s Connect event in September. “This is going to be the biggest headset that we've released since 2020,” he said. “There are just a lot of expenses related to bring that to market.”

Aside from the metaverse, it was an otherwise a strong quarter for Meta, which reported $32 billion in revenue, an 11 percent increase from last year. Zuckerberg touted Reels, which are now drawing 200 billion views a day across Facebook and Instagram, thanks to the company’s renewed emphasis on AI-driven recommendations. He also highlighted the recent launch of Threads and the company’s Llama 2 large language model.

Though early analytics data has suggested Threads engagement has declined substantially since its launch, Zuckerberg said the company is “seeing more people coming back daily than I'd expected” and that he sees a path for the app to eventually reach “hundreds of millions” of users.

Meta also confirmed that the bulk of its layoffs, which resulted in the company shedding more than 20,000 jobs since last fall, have been “substantially completed.” Zuckerberg previously dubbed 2023 as Meta’s “year of efficiency” as he cut staff and attempted to streamline the company’s management structure. Zuckerberg pointed to Threads’ launch, which he said was overseen by a relatively small team, as proof that “cultural changes” at Meta are working.

Zuckerberg didn’t, however, offer a timeline of when he thought the company’s metaverse spending might start to pay off. “This is a very long term bet,” he said, “You know, on a deep level, I understand the discomfort that a lot of investors have with it. And look, I mean, I can't guarantee you that I'm gonna be right about this bet —I do think that this is the direction that the world is going in.”

Twitter’s rebrand to X is well underway. The name and iconic bird logo have been (mostly) stripped from the company’s San Francisco headquarters, and an “X” has replaced the blue bird atop twitter.com. Elon Musk has said the change is about more than just the name. He wants to turn the service formerly known as Twitter into an “everything app” that also encompasses banking and financial services.

But the rebrand could pose significant legal and financial challenges to the company, which has struggled since an advertiser exodus cut the company’s ad revenue by more than 50 percent. To start, there are hundreds of companies, including Microsoft and Meta, that own trademarks for variations of “X.” That could open the door to lawsuits and other legal headaches for Musk.

Shubha Ghosh, a law professor at Syracuse University, says that lawsuits are “quite common” when major companies rebrand and change their names and logos. “I'm kind of surprised he picked X because it's not that distinctive,” he says. “It's problematic in the sense that it's not something you can just suddenly do without anybody noticing and possibly suing.”

Trademark attorney Josh Gerben told Reuters that he counted almost 900 other companies with trademarks on “X.” And while not all of them will be able to credibly claim that the company formerly known as Twitter is interfering with their brand, it makes X an easy target.

“There is about a 100% probability that Twitter/X will be sued by both opportunistic and legitimate plaintiffs over the new name,” Gerben tweeted. “The company could easily spend tens of millions (if not $100+ million) in legal fees and settlement costs attempting to acquire trademark registrations for ‘X’ and in dealing with the litigation that is likely to result from the rebrand.”

For the same reasons, Twitter’s new X branding could also prove difficult to defend, especially internationally. “The chance that @elonmusk will be able to successfully register a trademark for ‘X’ for all the services he intends to provide, in every country he wants to provide them in, is very low,” Gerben wrote.

Even if Twitter is able to fend off legal challenges, there are serious business risks to doing away with a brand as globally recognizable as Twitter’s. Bloombergreported that some analysts have estimated the name change could wipe out billions of dollars in value from a brand that’s already been damaged by Musk.

Ari Lightman, a professor of digital media marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, says Twitter’s problems go far beyond potential legal headaches brought on by its rebrand. “There's a lot going on that is diminishing the value, the utility, the uniqueness, that Twitter, now X, has in the space,” he says pointing to the rise of Threads and other Twitter competitors. “Tweets are synonymous with this idea of blogging, or microblogging, it's going to be very difficult to resocialize a concept with the global population.”

Twitter’s rebrand to X is officially underway, and CEO Linda Yaccarino has offered some new clues about what it may mean for the company. In a memo reported byCNBC, Yaccarino suggested that payments and banking features could feature prominently in Elon Musk’s new vision.

“Our usage is at an all time high and we’ll continue to delight our entire community with new experiences in audio, video, messaging, payments, banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities,” she wrote.

It’s long been rumored that Musk is keen to bring banking features to Twitter. In January, the Financial Timesreported that he wanted “to offer fintech services such as peer-to-peer transactions, savings accounts and debit cards” to users, as well as additional tipping and shopping features. The paper reported the company had applied for regulatory paperwork necessary to offer such features in the US, but the executive reportedly overseeing the project departed in February.

Yaccarino’s memo suggests those plans have been revived, though it’s light on specifics. Musk has previously talked about his desire to turn Twitter into an “everything app” akin to WeChat in China, where the messaging app is central to users’ daily activities.

Overall, Yaccarino’s memo is notably vague. She said that X would “go even further to transform the global town square” and cited recent updates the company has made around creator monetization and longform content. “Many companies say they want to move fast — but we enjoy moving at the speed of light, and when we do, that’s X,” she wrote. “With X, we serve our entire community of users and customers by working tirelessly to preserve free expression and choice, create limitless interactivity, and create a marketplace that enables the economic success of all its participants.”

Elon Musk’s rebrand of Twitter seems to be underway. In a series of late-night tweets Saturday, Musk shared that the company’s famous bird logo and name would soon be no more. The company, it seems, will simply be known as “X.”

“And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” he tweeted. He later said in a Twitter space that the Twitter logo would be changed Sunday. “It should have been done a long time ago, sorry it took so long,” he said.

Later that night, he reportedly emailed employees about the change. According to Platformer’sZoe Schiffer, Musk emailed staff saying the company would become X and that his note “was the last email he’ll ever send from a Twitter email address.”

Twitter didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

It’s long been known that Musk favors the “X” branding. The banking startup he co-founded in 1999 was called x.com, and his recently-announced Ai venture is called xAI. And Twitter’s holding company was rammed to X Corp in April. Musk has also talked about how X would help Twitter become an “everything app.” Though Musk has offered few specifics on this vision, many believe he’s referencing apps like WeChat, the most popular app in China that people use for a host of everyday activities, like payments and shopping, in addition to social networking.

Still, officially abandoning the Twitter brand could be a risky move for Musk. The company is already facing an advertiser exodus that’s resulted in a loss of more than half the company’s ad revenue. A rebrand could further alienate advertisers. At the same time, Musk may be betting that a new name and identity could help the company shed its ties to its former leadership and the decisions made under them, both of which he has been deeply critical of.