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The Twitter app is seen on a smartphone in this illustration taken July 13, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/IllustrationRegister now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comMay 3 (Reuters) - Elon Musk said on Tuesday Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) will always be free for casual users but may charge a slight fee for commercial and government users, as the billionaire entrepreneur tries to boost the social media platform's reach from "niche" to most Americans."Twitter will always be free for casual users, but maybe a slight cost for commercial/government users," Musk said in a tweet.Twitter declined to comment when contacted by Reuters.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comTesla (TSLA.O) chief Musk has been suggesting a raft of changes to Twitter since last month. After adding the company to his cart recently, Musk said he wanted to enhance the platform with new features, make the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeat spam bots, and authenticate all humans.Last month, even before reaching a deal with Twitter, Musk had suggested few changes to the Twitter Blue premium subscription service, including slashing its price. read more Earlier this week at the annual Met Gala in New York on Monday, Musk also said he would make Twitter transparent…

Twitter will always remain free for ‘casual users’, Elon Musk tweeted as he floated the idea of a ‘maybe a slight cost’ for government and commercial users.  Does Elon Musk want to make Twitter a subscription-based platform? (AFP) Elon Musk has dropped a major hint of what Twitter will be like under him as he revealed his plans of making Twitter something like a paywall social media platform. However, he clarified that for "casual users", Twitter will always be free, but a slight cost may be imposed on commercial and government users. "Ultimately, the downfall of the Freemasons was giving away their stonecutting services for nothing," Musk tweeted making premises for introducing a fee for Twitter. Twitter will always be free for casual users, but maybe a slight cost for commercial/government users— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 3, 2022 Twitter will not be absolutely new to the idea of fee-based subscription and Twitter Blue is a similar concept, which gives Twitter's most loyal customers exclusive access to premium features and app customisation for a small monthly subscription fee. Twitter Blue is available on Twitter for iOS, Android and the web in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.While Twitter Blue offers exclusive…

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who was permanently suspended from Twitter last year after repeatedly making the baseless claim that former President Trump won the 2020 election, created a new account on the social media platform Sunday but was banned again just hours later.  "Hello everybody, I'M BACK ON TWITTER. My only account is @MikeJLindell! Please RT and FOLLOW to SPREAD THE WORD," Lindell tweeted shortly before noon.A Twitter spokesperson told Fox Business around 5:00 p.m. that Lindell's new account had been "permanently suspended for violating the Twitter Rules on ban evasion." Michael Lindell, CEO of My Pillow reacts as U.S. President Donald Trump attends a Made in America roundtable meeting in the East Room of the White House in Washington, U.S. July 19, 2017.  (REUTERS/Carlos Barria / Reuters) Lindell had included a video in which he explained that other fake accounts were imitating him and @MikeJLindell was his only real profile. "Please share it with everybody you know… so that we can get the word out over here at Twitter in case they do take it down," Lindell said in the video, before it was deleted with his account.  TEXAS LAWMAKER SAYS STATE WILL 'ROLL OUT THE RED CARPET' IF ELON MUSK…

In theory, social media networks provide every human being with an equal opportunity to share thoughts and images with everyone else. In practice, they reflect the many fragmentations of politics and society and, in doing so, grant ever greater power to those who have power, through their office, their wealth or their celebrity. The most fundamental questions regarding social media are the same as those which apply to “traditional” news media: Who owns them? And why? After this, we need to ask how society – through governments and international agreements – regulates the media, to prevent them causing harm. This leads to questions about criteria and mechanisms for curbs on freedom of expression. When one person makes a bid to become sole owner of an established global forum, these questions need to be answered. Let’s indulge in a thought experiment. What would have happened if Twitter and Facebook had been around when Hitler was on the rise, if, instead of writing his “Struggle” between 1924 and 1926, he had vomited his anti-Semitic hatred and grandiose schemes into Twitter “threads” or Facebook posts? Would this have got him banned from the platforms (if their owners did not support unregulated “free speech”)?…

In an emergency meeting on Friday, Twitter employees lashed out over Elon Musk's deal to acquire the company for $44 billion, accusing the world's richest man of bigotry and fretting over potential job cuts once the deal closes.Staffers at the 'impromptu' all-hands meeting fired angry questions at executives including CEO Parag Agrawal, who was described as looking tired and at times annoyed, according to Insider. Reached by DailyMail.com on Saturday morning, a Twitter spokeswoman declined to comment. One employee at the meeting described Musk as anti-gay and anti-transgender, expressing fear that his ownership would hurt efforts to recruit new employees.'What should we tell the LGTBQ community at recruiting conferences we're lined up to attend when they ask us why they should come work at Twitter when we just sold ourselves to an open homophobe and transphobe?' the staffer asked Dalana Brand, Twitter's chief people and diversity officer.Brand diplomatically avoided agreeing with that assessment of Musk, responding: 'I cannot speak to Elon's personal feelings on these things. I can't speak to what he's done in his other companies, in terms of people's experiences.' 'Perhaps in the future we'll be able to have a conversation. That may be telling,' she added. At an all-hands meeting on Friday,…

Contained within 95 pages of dense legal jargon, the warning from Twitter to Elon Musk was clear: don’t use your considerable power on the social media platform to attack the company.The world’s richest man and owner-in-waiting of Twitter signed an agreement for the planned $44bn (£35bn) takeover last week confirming that he could tweet about the deal so long as “such tweets do not disparage the company or any of its representatives”.Yet hours later the self-described “free speech absolutist” was engaging with tweets criticising senior Twitter staff, including an interaction with a political podcast host who had labelled the company’s legal head, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s “top censorship advocate”. Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s legal head, was the victim of a pile-on sparked by a Musk tweet. Photograph: Mike Blake/ReutersThe inevitable consequence for Gadde was one of the grimmer phenomena of social media: a pile-on. Comments included calls for her to lose her job and, in a typical example of unpleasant digital hyperbole, statements that Gadde would “go down in history as an appalling person”.Announcing the deal to buy Twitter last week, Musk said: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital…

Twitter’s chief executive, Parag Agrawal, sought to quell employee anger on Friday during a company-wide meeting where employees demanded answers to how managers planned to handle an anticipated mass exodus prompted by Elon Musk.The meeting comes after Musk, the Tesla chief executive who sealed a $44bn deal to buy the social media company, repeatedly criticized Twitter’s content moderation practices and a top executive responsible for setting speech and safety policies.At the internal town hall meeting, executives said the company would monitor staff attrition daily, but it was too soon to tell how the buyout deal with Musk would affect staff retention.Musk has pitched lenders on slashing board and executive salaries but exact cost cuts remain unclear, according to sources familiar with the matter. One source said Musk would not make decisions on job cuts until he assumed ownership of Twitter.“I’m tired of hearing about shareholder value and fiduciary duty. What are your honest thoughts about the very high likelihood that many employees will not have jobs after the deal closes?” one Twitter employee asked Agrawal, in a question read aloud during the meeting.Agrawal answered that Twitter had always cared about its employees and would continue to do so.“I believe the…

A life-size cat backpack made of faux fur is making waves on Twitter in Japan. The bags are hand-sewn by Miho Katsumi, a Japanese housewife based in Fukui prefecture. The backpacks sell for $1,000 a piece. Loading Something is loading. In Japan, people on Twitter have been going nuts over a series of plush backpacks that look just like real-life cats. Crafted by Japanese housewife Miho Katsumi, who is based in Fukui prefecture, the hand-sewn bags feature cats with pink paw pads, huge gleaming eyes, and furry tails. Katsumi has made true-to-life replicas of Persian, Munchkin, and British Shorthair cats. The bags are usually made of faux fur, which Katsumi dyes herself, per her official website. Making the bags is no easy feat. Katsumi told Insider it takes her one week to design each bag and one to three months to make it."It may take more time to achieve a satisfactory result," Katsumi added. The cats are sewn piece by piece. A small pattern usually requires 22 hand-stitched pieces of fabric, while a larger model, such as the backpack, is made up of about 80 different pieces, Katsumi said. A post shared by 猫制作pico (@nekoseisaku_pico) On April 15, Katsumi posted four photos…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk hasn’t yet assumed ownership of Twitter — and the attorneys noted they’re representing Twitter’s position as a public company. | Susan Walsh/AP Photo SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter tried to fend off a free-speech lawsuit on Thursday even as a federal judge asked if Elon Musk’s takeover might make the whole case moot. “Your company has been taken over by a new owner, and your new owner may disagree with your position,” U.S. District Judge William Alsup told Twitter’s lawyers on Thursday. “And I don’t want to have to spin my wheels and do a lot of work for nothing. So when is your new owner going to decide whether to continue with this lawsuit?” Independent journalist Alex Berenson, a vocal critic of the government’s pandemic response, sued Twitter after the company kicked him off the site for describing Covid vaccines as an advance therapeutic with risky side effects. The complaint, which got its first preliminary hearing in a San Francisco federal court on Thursday, could be a test case for how the social media company will handle content moderation under the ownership of Tesla’s headline-driving CEO. It’s also a Venn diagram for the online debate that’s…

Twitter has been overstating its number of active users for nearly three years. The company admitted this in its quarterly earnings report for the first quarter of 2022. "In March of 2019, we launched a feature that allowed people to link multiple separate accounts together in order to conveniently switch between accounts. An error was made at that time, such that actions taken via the primary account resulted in all linked accounts being counted as mDAU. This resulted in an overstatement of mDAU from Q1’19 through Q4’21," the report says. The difference in users counted ranges from 1.4 million to 1.9 million daily users, with the largest difference found in the last quarter of 2021, the company announced. The error doesn't dramatically impact Twitter's results, given that the company currently has 229 million active users (with hope that the number is accurate this time). It is, however, telling that Twitter has already made a similar mistake once before, having counted its monthly active users inaccurately back in 2017. Other than this tiny error, Twitter's earnings report isn't bad, with the company reporting Q1 revenue of $1.2 billion, a 16 percent year-over-year increase, and a massive net income increase from $68…