Even Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal doesn’t know what Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company means for the service or its employees. That’s the biggest takeaway from accounts of the company’s first all-hands meeting following news of the $44 billion deal.

Will Musk unban Donald Trump? Will there be layoffs? What about employees’ stock grants? For now, all those questions seem to be up in the air. Agrawal reportedly told employees there were no layoffs planned “at this time,” but acknowledged that he was also uncertain about the future. “Once the deal closes, we don’t know what direction this company will go in,” he said according toThe New York Times.

Meanwhile, Twitter chairman Bret Taylor confirmed that the board will dissolve once the acquisition is finalized. The whole process could take another six months, Bloombergreported. The deal has left many Twitter employees unsettled, and the company has reportedly “locked down changes to its platform through Friday,” in an effort to guard against “rogue” employees.

In announcing the deal, Musk outlined a number of changes he wanted to make, including ridding Twitter of spam bots and “authenticating all humans.” One person who hasn’t publicly weighed in yet is Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who has previously endorsed Musk’s involvement with the company. In its statement, Twitter’s board of directors confirmed that its decision to accept Musk’s offer was unanimous, meaning Dorsey had also approved the deal.

Meta will open its first physical retail store next month, in a sign of the increasing importance of its hardware business as the company pivots to the metaverse. The “Meta Store” opens May 9th in Burlingame, California, close to the headquarters for Meta’s Reality Labs division. The store will showcase the company’s VR headsets, Ray-Ban Stories glasses and Portal devices; and will offer interactive demos for shoppers.

For Meta, physical retail stores are meant to help the company not just sell more hardware, but expose more people to its VR and AR technology. In-store virtual reality demos will play on a massive “wall-to-wall” LED display that broadcasts content from participants' headsets. Mark Zuckerberg teased the display in a recent post on his Facebook page.

In a post Monday, Zuckerberg said the new store would help people “get a sense of what's coming as we build towards the metaverse.” In addition to its existing products, Meta is also working on augmented reality glasses, a high-end VR headset and possibly a smartwatch.

Meta

Though the initial store will be somewhat modest — about 1,500 square feet near a company office — Meta’s retail footprint could eventually be much bigger. The New York Timesreported last fall that the company was considering opening stores all over the world. However a significant expansion of its physical stores would likely depend on Meta selling a lot more devices than it currently is. The company’s metaverse division lost $10 billion in 2021.

Twitter is turning to outside developers for help in preventing harassment on its platform. Under a new experiment, the company will recommend third-party moderation apps as an additional measure users can take on top of the app’s built-in tools,

With the update, which was first reported by TechCrunch, Twitter will surface recommendations for a series of third-party apps when a user blocks or mutes another person. For now, the apps include Block Party, a tool that allows people to automatically block accounts likely to be the source of harassment; Bodyguard, which can automatically moderate replies; and Moderate, which helps users manage their mentions.

These tools have already been available, but Twitter users previously had to seek out these services to get them set up. Now, the company will recommend them in its app and website alongside its own blocking and muting tools.

Twitter

As TechCrunch notes, the change is also the latest sign that Twitter is, once again, making inroads among third-party developers with whom it has sometimes had a tumultuous relationship. The moderation apps are just a handful of a broader set of third-party services Twitter is promoting as part of its revamped developer platform. Eventually, Twitter could recommend other specialized apps in various parts of its service, the company told TechCrunch, though it didn’t offer details.

Meta is reportedly investigating whether Sheryl Sandberg broke company rules in her dealings with a publication that was reporting on Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, who she was dating at the time. According to a new report in The Wall Street Journal, the Meta COO used company resources to help kill negative reporting about Kotick. Meta is now reportedly conducting a "review" of her actions and “whether she violated the company’s rules.”

According to the report, the British tabloid MailOnline was pursuing a story based on allegations made by a former girlfriend of Kotick’s, and a temporary restraining order she had received against him. But Sandberg and Kotick worked together on two separate occasions, in 2016 and in 2019, to strategize on how to “persuade the Daily Mail not to report on the restraining order.”

The report states that Facebook and Activision staff were both directly involved in the effort, and that there was concern internally at Facebook that the story would “reflect negatively on her reputation as an advocate for women.”

The Wall Street Journal report also questions whether Sandberg inappropriately wielded her influence as Facebook COO in her dealings with the MailOnline management. One of the paper’s unnamed sources states that Kotick “told people that Ms. Sandberg threatened the Mail in 2016 by saying that such an article, if published, could damage the news organization’s business relationship with Facebook.”

In a statement, a Meta spokesperson denied Sandberg had “threatened” MailOnline. “Sheryl Sandberg never threatened the MailOnline’s business relationship with Facebook in order to influence an editorial decision,” the spokesperson said. “This story attempts to make connections that don’t exist.” Kotick told The Journal he “never said anything like that.”

Developing...

Another day, another change to Instagram’s algorithm. The app is tweaking the way it ranks content in order to “value original content more,” according to Instagram Head Adam Mosseri.

Mosseri called out the update in a video on Twitter, saying the change was aligned with Meta’s broader goal of empowering creators. “If you create something from scratch, you should get more credit than if you are reshaping something that you found from someone else,” he said. “We're going to do more to try and value original content more particularly compared to reposted content.”

In follow-up comments, he added that Instagram already tries to prioritize original content, but that “it’s becoming increasingly important that [we] don’t overvalue aggregators.” It’s not clear how effective this change will be or what its impact will be. Mosseri said that the company does its best to “predict” whether a given photo or video is original, but they “can’t know for sure.”

The move comes as Instagram has taken other steps to incentivize creators to post original content on its platform first, rather than re-sharing clips from TikTok and other apps. But the latest change also seems to be geared toward discouraging accounts that simply aggregate and distribute popular memes and other re-posted content.

It also reflects just how much Instagram’s feed has changed over the last year. The company has been steadily inserting more and more recommendations from accounts users don’t already follow into their feeds.At the same time, the company has been forced to reckon with the fact that many creators have long been suspicious of how the app ranks content. Instagram’s in-app recommendations have also come under fire from lawmakers who have raised concerns of teen mental health and other safety issues. 

But those who dislike Instagram’s ranked feed do finally have an alternative: the company recently brought back its chronological feed, though it’s not enabled by default.

Elon Musk, who until the last week or so, was known on Twitter mainly for trolling and incurring the wrath of the SEC, has now set his sights on taking over the platform. Speaking at a TED conference on Thursday, the Tesla CEO positioned his $43 billion hostile takeover bid not as something he wants to do, but as something he feels is “important to the function of democracy.”

“It's important to the function of the United States as a free country and many other countries,” he said. “Civilizational risk is decreased, the more we can increase the trust of Twitter as a public platform.”

That may sound like a lofty goal — and it’s not that different from how Jack Dorsey and other Twitter leaders have talked about the platform — but Musk’s actual ideas for making Twitter more “trustworthy” are bizarre and sometimes contradictory. It suggests he has little understanding of how Twitter works, much less how to run the company.

During the interview, Musk repeatedly stated he believed speech on Twitter should only be constrained by what’s legal. Twitter, he said, should “err on the side of, if in doubt, let the speech exist.” He said that permanent bans should be used sparingly. “A good sign as to whether there's free speech is, [if] someone you don't like is allowed to say something you don't like, and if that is the case, then we have free speech.”

Besides being a somewhat narrow view of free speech, Musk’s own track record would appear to be at odds with this statement. While he has zero experience running a social media company, his actions as Tesla’s CEO suggest there are many scenarios in which he is notably less committed to absolute free speech.

As Quartzpoints out, Musk has reportedly fired numerous Tesla workers who disagree with him. Recently, one employee was shown the door for posting videos to his personal YouTube channel that depicted flaws in Tesla’s self-driving software running on his own vehicle. Musk also reportedly tried to force a law firm, hired by Tesla and SpaceX, to fire an associate who had previously worked for his arch-nemesis the SEC, in an apparent retaliation for the lawyer’s involvement with the agency’s investigation of Musk. Incidentally, Tesla has faced allegations of discrimination and is currently contending with a lawsuit from the state of California over its treatment of Black employees.

Trust and safety experts were also quick to point out that a lack of content moderation actually has a chilling effect on free speech. “Effective moderation is not inherently in conflict with free speech,” Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s former head of civic integrity tweeted. “It is required for people to feel free to speak.”

This is more than just theoretical. Just ask former CEO Dick Costolo who famously presided over one of the most toxic eras in Twitter history thanks to a hands-off approach to content moderation. It was under his tenure as CEO that Gamergate and other targeted harassment campaigns were able to drive scores of users off the platform. Costolo later admitted that his failure to deal with trolls was a huge mistake.

Others pointed out that less moderation would quickly result in Twitter being overrun with spam and other shady — yet entirely legal — content. Even Musk seemed to contradict himself on this point, saying that a “top priority” would be to rid Twitter of the “spam and scam bots and bot armies” that frequently impersonate him.

Away from the culture war battles over "free speech," Twitter is facing significant challenges of its own. The company is still in the middle of a big shift, changing many of its core features in an effort to find new sources of revenue. It still has aggressive growth targets for users and revenue that would prove challenging even for seasoned Twitter insiders — which Musk is not.

And Musk doesn’t even seem to know what he actually wants. He acknowledged that he was unsure of if he would be able to pull off actually buying Twitter (other shareholders seem to agree on that point) and claimed to be unconcerned with making money from his investment. He claimed to have a “plan B,” but didn’t share details. He also admitted that his tweets are little more than a “stream of consciousness” he sometimes composes while on the toilet.

As with so much else he does, it’s impossible to tell if he really wants to fully control Twitter or if all this is yet another elaborate troll. It could be both.

“I do think this will be somewhat painful,” he mused. On that, at least, he’s spot on.

If Elon Musk is indeed able to buy Twitter, the platform could look a lot different. In his first public, non-tweeted comments since the saga began, Musk addressed why he wants to buy the company, and changes he would want to bring about.

“Twitter has become kind of the de-facto town square,” he said. “It's just really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they're able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.”

In terms of specific changes, Musk said Twitter should open-source its algorithms and minimize the interventions it takes in policing content. “Any changes to people's tweets — if they're emphasized or de-emphasized — that action should be made apparent,” he said. “So anyone can see that that action has been taken so there's no sort of behind-the-scenes manipulation, either algorithmically or manually.”

He added that the underlying code behind the algorithm should be available on GitHub, so that users could inspect it themselves.

Musk also spoke about his philosophy on content moderation, namely that there should be very little of it. “I think we would want to err on the side of, if in doubt, let the speech exist,” he said. “I'm not saying that I have all the answers here.” He repeated several times that his preference would be to allow all speech that is legal, and that he dislikes measures like permanent bans. “I do think that we want to be just very reluctant to delete things and be very cautious with permanent bans,” he said. “You know, timeouts I think are better than sort of permanent bans.”

Those comments are not likely to be well-received among Twitter employees, some of whom were reportedly extremely worried by the prospect of him joining the board.

Musk’s appearance at TED comes just hours after the Tesla CEO made a $43 billion offer to buy Twitter. That offer was the culmination of a chaotic few days for Musk and Twitter, during which he revealed that he had become Twitter’s largest shareholder, was offered a seat on the company’s board of directors, declined to join and was subsequently sued by Twitter shareholders over his delay in reporting his investment to the SEC.

Whether Musk will actually succeed in taking over the company is unclear. Twitter’s board has so far only said that it will “review” the offer. “I'm not sure that I will actually be able to acquire it,” he said. When asked if he had a "plan B," if Twitter's board were to decline his offer, he said that he did but declined to elaborate. 

As for his own Twitter feed, Musk confirmed what many may have long suspected. “I'm tweeting more or less stream of consciousness,” he said. “It's not like, ‘let me think about some grand plan about my Twitter’ or whatever. I'm like, literally, on the toilet like, ‘oh, this is funny,’ and then tweet that out, you know?”

WhatsApp will start experimenting with Communities, an update that represents a “major evolution” for the messaging app, according to Mark Zuckerberg. An unreleased version of the feature was first spotted last year, but the company hadn’t confirmed its existence until now.

Communities will allow people to combine separate group chats “under one umbrella with a structure that works for them,” WhatsApp wrote in a blog post. “That way people can receive updates sent to the entire Community and easily organize smaller discussion groups on what matters to them.”

The company hasn’t shared details around exactly how these groups will be formed, but a spokesperson said the idea is to give “close-knit groups” more ways to communicate beyond the chat features currently offered by WhatsApp. The company will start testing the feature later this year in “select countries,” but will eventually make it available globally.

In a post on Facebook, Zuckerberg said that Communities would be a major shift for WhatsApp and Meta, one that emphasizes “feeds” and traditional social networking features less than “community messaging.”

“In the same way that social feeds took the basic technology behind the internet and made it so anyone could find people and content online, I think community messaging will take the basic protocols behind one-to-one messaging and extend them so you can communicate more easily with groups of people to get things done together,” he wrote. He added that Meta was working on similar features for Messenger, WhatsApp and Facebook as well.

It’s also a playbook Meta has used in the past. In 2017, Zuckerberg tried to reorient Facebook around Groups and “meaningful communities.” The company started building new feature for Groups and encouraging users to join as part of its new mission to "bring the world closer together.” Zuckerberg seems to be following the same strategy now with WhatsApp, which is far more popular than Facebook in much of the world. 

Making WhatsApp more like Groups on Facebook also comes with some risks, though.Facebook’s earlier pivot to Groups may have resulted in increased polarization on the platform, and Groups have also been pegged as major sources of misinformation on the platform. And WhatsApp, which due to its encryption lacks many of the moderation tools available to Facebook, has already struggled with misinformation and other problematic content. Making it even easier to connect disparate group threads into one place could potentially exacerbate these issues.

A spokesperson said the company is “building a number of updates” focused on safety, and pointed to new controls that allow admins to delete messages and existing limits on message forwarding.

TikTok is testing a way for users to “dislike” comments in an effort to help people “feel more in control” over what they are seeing. The company revealed the experiment in a blog post about its most recent community guidelines enforcement report, which tracks how TikTok is enforcing its safety policies.

For now, TikTok hasn’t provided many details about exactly how the feature will work or what it looks like. Some users who appear to be part of the test have shared screenshots on Twitter of a thumbs down button appearing next to the heart in videos’ comment sections. The company did specify that individual users will have no way of knowing if their comment has been disliked, so it seems that dislike counts will not be viewable in the same way that likes are. (The screenshots show no numbers next to the thumbs down.)

“We've started testing a way to let individuals identify comments they believe to be irrelevant or inappropriate,” the company explained. “This community feedback will add to the range of factors we already use to help keep the comment section consistently relevant and a place for genuine engagement. To avoid creating ill-feeling between community members or demoralize creators, only the person who registered a dislike on a comment will be able to see that they have done so.”

The subject of “dislikes” on social media has been somewhat of a controversial topic. YouTube, which had public dislikes for years, recently made dislike counts private saying that the feature was contributing to targeted harassment on the platform. Though some creators welcomed the move, it’s proved so controversial that even one of YouTube’s co-founders has protested the change.

In TikTok’s case, it sounds like dislikes will be much more limited than how YouTube has used them, at least for now. The company has so far suggested the feature is meant to help inform how it ranks comments and give creators a way to control which ones are most visible.

Elon Musk has only been Twitter’s largest shareholder for a few weeks, but he’s already facing a class action lawsuit over his handling of the investment. A Twitter shareholder has filed a class action lawsuit against Musk over his 11-day delay in officially disclosing his investment in Twitter to the SEC.

Under securities law, Musk was required to file paperwork with the SEC by March 24th — 10 days after his stake in Twitter grew to 5 percent — but he didn’t do so until April 4th. That delay might not sound particularly significant, but it may have netted him as much as $156 million. According to the lawsuit, those gains came at the expense of other shareholders, who were not able to similarly profit.

“Investors who sold shares of Twitter stock between March 24, 2022, when Musk was required to have disclosed his Twitter ownership, and before the actual April 4, 2022 disclosure, missed the resulting share price increase as the market reacted to Musk’s purchases and were damaged thereby,” the lawsuit states.

According to the shareholder who brought the suit, he and other investors sold shares at “artificially deflated” prices as a result of Musk’s actions. The suit also alleges that Musk made “materially false and misleading statements and omissions by failing to disclose to investors that he had acquired a 5% ownership stake in Twitter as required.”

The lawsuit comes after a chaotic few days for Twitter and Musk. The Tesla CEO and noted Twitter troll had initially agreed to join Twitter’s board of directors, much to the dismay of some employees. But the decision was abruptly reversed following several days of characteristically bizarre tweets from Musk, who polled his Twitter followers whether the company should change its name, and speculated on whether the service was “dying.”

In an email to employees, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal noted that as a board member Musk would have been a "fiduciary of the company, where he, like all board members has to act in the best interest of the company and all our shareholders.” He added that he believed it was “for the best” that Musk ultimately wouldn’t take the position.