The Twitter v. Elon Musk trial is now on hold as the two sides work to hammer out a deal for Musk to complete his buyout of the social media company. On Thursday, Judge Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick, Chancellor of Delaware’s Chancery Court, stayed the trial until October 28th, following a motion from Musk's lawyers to call off the trial.

However, if the two sides aren’t able to close by the end of the month, a trial could be back on. “If the transaction does not close by 5 p.m. on October 28, 2022, the parties are instructed to contact me by email that evening to obtain November 2022 trial dates,” McCormick wrote.

The stay comes less than two weeks before the five-day trial was scheduled to begin, and on the same day that Musk was scheduled to be deposed in the case. It’s the latest sign that Musk and Twitter are moving closer to a deal. Earlier in the week, Musk said he would agree to a deal at the original price of $54.20 a share, provided he finalized his financing and that the trial was adjourned. Twitter also confirmed it wanted to close the deal on its original terms.

But since then the two sides have still been arguing over the particulars of the arrangement. Bloombergreported Musk wanted a provision that would still allow him to sue Twitter over the number of bots on the platform, while The New York Times reported Twitter didn’t want to call off the trial until its shareholders had been paid.

Musk’s lawyers alluded to the disagreements in their filing, writing that “Twitter will not take yes for an answer,” claiming the company was endangering the deal. McCormick didn’t weigh in on the disagreement, though she noted that Twitter has opposed Musk’s motion to stay the trial.

Lawyers for Elon Musk have officially asked to cancel the upcoming trial with Twitter, as the two sides attempt to negotiate a deal. In a new court filing, Musk’s lawyers asked the judge to call off the trial, which is currently scheduled to begin October 17th.

Earlier this week, Musk’s camp had proposed proceeding with the original deal, to buy Twitter at $54.20 a share, contingent on Musk’s financing going through and the adjournment of the trial. Twitter responded that it was also intent on closing the deal.

While that certainly seemed to put the two sides a lot closer to an agreement, it wasn’t an immediate end to the litigation. The New York Times has since reported that Twitter does not want to call off the trial until a deal is finalized and the company’s shareholders have been paid. There are likely other sticking points, too. Bloomberg reported Tuesday that “Musk is also seeking to reserve his rights to file a fraud suit over his claims the platform’s executives misled him and other investors about the number of spam and robot accounts.”

In their latest filing, Musk’s lawyers confirm the disagreement over the trial, writing that Twitter is now endangering the deal. “Twitter will not take yes for an answer,” Musk’s lawyers write. “Astonishingly, they have insisted on proceeding with this litigation, recklessly putting the deal at risk and gambling with their stockholders’ interests. Instead of allowing the parties to turn their focus to securing the Debt Financing necessary to consummate the transaction and preparing for a transition of the business, the parties will instead remain distracted by completing discovery and an unnecessary trial.”

Notably, the filing comes on the same day Musk was scheduled to be deposed in the case. The deposition was delayed — for the second time. Musk's lawyers say they expect the deal could close "on or around October 28."

At this point, we’re all pretty used to seeing Instagram copy TikTok. Now, in a new twist, TikTok is copying Instagram with a new feature called “Photo Mode.” The update allows TikTok users to share multiple still photos in a post, along with captions of up to 2,200 characters.

The new photo posts, which can also feature music, will appear in users’ For You page alongside videos. In a blog post, TikTok says it hopes Photo Mode, combined the recently-extended character count, will allow creators to “express themselves and more deeply connect with others.”

But Photo Mode is also making the For You Page more like Instagram in ways that may not be as creative. According to Mashable, the feature is already being used by creators to share recycled text memes and other content that’s often popular on... Instagram.

But TikTok now copying Instagram’s original premise is especially noteworthy given that Instagram has reportedly been struggling with engagement with its TikTok clone, Reels. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that TikTok is still vastly outpacing Instagram Reels in daily watch time.

It’s also the latest bout of every social media platform shamelessly copying each other until they all look kind of the same. In the last six weeks alone: Instagram,TikTok and Snapchat have come up with their own take on French upstart BeReal (Instagram’s hasn’t formally launched yet). Twitter introduced a TikTok-style feed for full-screen videos. While YouTube Shorts, itself a TikTok clone, added TikTok-style voice overs.

A lot more people will soon be able to do what was once unthinkable: edit tweets. Twitter has begun to roll out its new tweet-editing feature to Twitter Blue subscribers in the United States. The expansion follows a launch in Canada, New Zealand and Australia earlier this week.

The feature gives users a 30-minute window to make changes to their tweets. A version history is also available, so others — regardless of whether they subscribe to Twitter Blue — can see a record of all the changes that have been made.

For now, the feature is part of Twitter’s $4.99/month subscription service, which also provides access to NFT profile photos and other specialized features. The company hasn’t confirmed if the edit button will ever be available outside of Twitter Blue, though the feature is categorized as part of “Twitter Blue Labs,” and Twitter has previously said some “Labs” features will eventually be available more widely.

Twitter first announced that it was working on the long-requested edit button back in April, following a poll from Elon Musk, who had recently become the company’s largest shareholder. The company said its work on an edit button predated Musk’s involvement with Twitter, which newly released text messages from Musk seemed to confirm. Interestingly, Musk’s messages also revealed that he was not a fan (to put it mildly) of Twitter Blue, at least in its original form. No word yet on if he has the edit button. 

Twitter has agreed — once again — to Elon Musk’s proposal to buy the company for $54.20 a share. In a statement, Twitter confirmed it had received Musk’s letter that “the intention of the Company is to close the transaction at $54.20 per share.”

The agreement follows months of legal drama after Musk tried to back out of his original agreement to buy the company for $44 billion this spring. The two sides were set to go to trial later this month as Twitter attempted to force Musk to keep up his end of the agreement. Musk had claimed Twitter had misled him about the number of bots on the platform, and had raised concerns about issues disclosed by the company’s former head of security who filed a whistleblower complaint against the company.

But Musk, once again, abruptly reversed course on Tuesday, telling Twitter that he would be willing to proceed with the original terms of the deal. In the letter filed with the SEC, Musk's lawyers say they will go ahead with the original agreement struck in April if Delaware Chancery Court will "adjourn the trial and all other proceedings related" to the ongoing lawsuit.

Developing...

Elon Musk wants to own Twitter after all. The Tesla CEO has decided he wants to go ahead with the deal he originally struck to buy the social media company for $54.20 a share, Bloomberg reports.

News of the proposal comes less than weeks before the two sides were set to go to trial in Delaware’s Court of Chancery over Musk’s attempt to get out of that deal. He has cited concerns about the number of spam and bot accounts on Twitter, and later added allegations from the company’s former head of security turned whistleblower to his suit.

Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But CNBC reported that trading of Twitter's shares was halted following the report. 

Developing…

A tranche of Elon Musk’s private messages have been made public as part of his ongoing lawsuit with Twitter. The messages, revealed in a court filing Thursday, shed new light on Musk’s behind-the-scenes negotiations with Twitter’s leadership, as well discussions with former CEO Jack Dorsey, and how Musk’s talks with CEO Parag Agrawal quickly soured.

The messages include the moment Musk tells Agrawal he wants to acquire Twitter and take it private, rather than join the board. Agrawal confronts Musk about an April 9th tweet questioning if “Twitter is dying.”

Agrawal writes to Musk:

You are free to tweet "is Twitter dying?" or anything else about Twitter - but it’s my responsibility to tell you that it’s not helping me make Twitter better in the current context. Next time we speak, I’d like to you provide you [sic] perspective on the level of the internal distraction right now and how it [sic] hurting our ability to do work. I hope the AMA will help people get to know you, to understand why you believe in Twitter, and to trust you - and I’d like the company to get to a place where we are more resilient and don’t get distracted but we aren't there right now.

Musk responded less than a minute later. “What did you get done this week? I’m not joining the board. This is a waste of time. Will make an offer to take Twitter private.”

Twitter board chair Bret Taylor followed up with Musk a few minutes later asking to talk. “Fixing Twitter by chatting with Parag won’t work,” Musk tells Taylor. “Drastic action is needed. This is hard to do as a public company, as purging fake users will make the numbers look terrible, so restructuring should be done as a private company. This is Jack’s opinion too.”

The messages also provide a glimpse into the relationship between Dorsey and Musk. Dorsey has publicly said that “Elon is the singular solution I trust,” but hasn’t publicly commented since Musk sued in an attempt to renege on the acquisition.

But in the newly released messages, it’s clear Dorsey has wanted Musk to take on an active role at Twitter for some time. Dorsey tells Musk that he wanted him to join Twitter’s board of directors long before Musk acquired a large stake in the company.

“Back when we had the activist come in, I tried my hardest to get you on our board and our board said no. That’s about the time I decided I needed to work to leave, as hard as it was for me,” Dorsey says. “I think the main reason is the board is just super risk averse and saw adding you as more risk, which I though was completely stupid and backwards, but I only had one vote, and 3% of company, and no dual class shares. Hard set up. We can discuss more.”

Dorsey seemed to be referring to Elliott Management, the activist investor that attempted to oust Dorsey in early 2020.

Notably, this conversation occurred in late March, after Musk had acquired a multibillion-dollar stake in Twitter, but before his stake had been made public. He and Dorsey also discussed the Twitter cofounder’s belief that Twitter “can’t be a company.”

Dorsey writes to Musk:

I believe it must be an open source protocol, funded by a foundation of sorts that doesn’t own the protocol, only advances it. A bit like what Signal has done. It can’t have an advertising model. Otherwise you have surface area that governments and advertisers will try to influence and control. If it has a centralized entity behind it, it will be attacked. This isn’t complicated work, it just has to be done right so it’s resilient to what has happened to twitter.

Musk responds that the idea is “super interesting” and that “it’s worth both trying to move Twitter in a better direction and doing something new that’s decentralized.”

The following month, Dorsey also attempted to play mediator between Musk and Agrawal, at one point arranging a call between the three of them. “You and I are in complete agreement,” Musk tells Dorsey. “Parag is just moving far too slowly and trying to please people who will not be happy no matter what he does.”

“At least it became clear that you can’t work together,” Dorsey later responds. “That was clarifying.”

Videos on Twitter will now look a lot more like TikTok. The company announced that it’s switching to a full-screen “immersive” video player for watching clips. It’s also borrowing the now-familiar “swipe up” gesture that will allow people to endlessly scroll through more videos on the platform.

The update will make watching videos on Twitter feel a lot more like browsing TikTok or Instagram’s Reels, at least in terms of the user interface. The changes are limited to Twitter’s iOS app for now, but the company said a similar update for Android could arrive in the "coming weeks."

While Twitter has long promoted video, especially live video, in different parts of its app, the change is one of the company’s most aggressive moves to push video on its users. It could also prove controversial, as some users could find the new full-screen videos disruptive. The company notes that users can navigate back to the original tweet using the back arrow in the top left corner of a clip.

Separately, Twitter is also testing out a change to drive more people to video content across its platform. The company is experimenting with a new section for video recommendations in Twitter’s Explore page. Those suggestions will be “available to people in select countries using Twitter in English on iOS and Android.”

A third-party Instagram app, called “The OG App,” which promised an ad-free feed more like the original Instagram experience, has been pulled from Apple’s App Store just one day after it officially launched. It’s not clear if Apple pulled the app at the request of Meta, but the social network confirmed it had taken “enforcement actions” against the service.

“This app violates our policies and we’re taking all appropriate enforcement actions,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. The spokesperson declined to elaborate on what those actions were, or if it had been in contact with Apple, but pointed to a blog post outlining Meta’s policies barring clone sites.

“A clone site is a third-party site that duplicates, in whole or in part, the content of an existing site,” Meta explains. On Twitter, the developers of The OG App said their entire team had been permanently banned from Facebook and Instagram as a result of their ties to the service.

"Users deserve the right to control what they consume, and OG will continue to defend and fight for that right," Hardik Patil, on of the app's founder's told Engadget. He said he had received no direct communication from Meta.

The OG App had been in the works for more than a year, according toTechCrunch, which reported its initial launch. The app’s founders told the publication they wanted to provide a “cleaner” version of Instagram without advertising. The app featured customizable feeds without Reels, suggested posts and other newer features that have at times been controversial among longtime Instagram users. The Android version of the app is currently still available.

Meta’s policies have long barred third-party Instagram clients, and in recent years the company has filed a number of lawsuits against developers who break its rules, including those barring clone sites. At the same time, the company has also been accused of using those same policies to shut down legitimate researchers’ attempts to study the platform.

However, in this case, it seems the creators of the OG App were clearly breaking Instagram’s policies. The company doesn’t offer a public API for developers to build their own versions of Instagram, and on Twitter, The OG App said they had to “reverse engineer” the Android API. The app also raised privacy concerns about how the developers were protecting users’ account information.

Despite this, the app had already gained a lot of fans due to its more simplified — and ad-free — experience. Instagram has also been dealing with a backlash against its aggressive pushing of Reels and recommended content. The OG App said it had racked up more than 10,000 downloads before its removal from the App Store “because we listened to them and built what they wanted.”

Google is making it easier to find search results from Reddit and other forum sites. The search engine is adding a new module that will surface discussions happening on forums across the web for queries that may benefit from crowd-sourced answers.

The “discussions and forums” module will surface relevant posts from sites like Reddit and Quora alongside more traditional search results. It’s not clear exactly how Google is determining what types of searches are best suited to forum posts. The company says the new “forum” results will “appear when you search for something that might benefit from the diverse personal experiences found in online discussions.”

The feature is already rolling out for mobile searches in the United States. Google didn’t specify when it may be available more widely, but said they will consider updates in the future.

Google is also adding a new feature to news-related searches that will make it easier to browse international headlines that are published in languages other than English. With the change, news-related searches will also turn up relevant local coverage translated by Google.

Google

The company uses the example of the recent earthquake in Mexico. With the update, search results will also show “news from Mexico,” which will highlight coverage from local outlets originally written in Spanish, but translated into English. Of course, Google Chrome and other browsers are already able to translate web pages. But Google says that by elevating stories from international outlets directly in search will help provide “new global perspectives” on important stories.

The feature, which is labeled as being in beta for now, is starting off with the ability to translate headlines and stories from Spanish, French and German into English, though the beta designation means Google is likely to add more languages over time.