Sources: on December 11, Twitter briefly blocked traffic from ~30 mobile carriers, mainly in the Asia-Pacific region, in an attempt to rid Twitter of spam (Platformer)

Morgan Meaker / Wired:
A look at the fake online traffic business, as some ad exchanges look the other way and advertisers are embarrassed to admit they purchased fraudulent inventory  —  Botmasters have created a Kafkaesque system where companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots.  And everyone is fine with this.

Casey Newton / Platformer:
Sources: Twitter’s newsletter platform Revue, acquired in early 2021, is scheduled to close by the end of the year, and its Notes product has been paused  —  A new Vine camera is in.  Notes and Revue are out  —  With massive layoffs expected to hit Twitter tomorrow, on Thursday employees once again endured …

Casey Newton / Platformer:
A look at a doc from Twitter’s trust and safety team on Nov. 1 that detailed how the new Blue subscription could be abused, largely ignored in a rush to launch  —  Employees and advertisers keep warning him about the risks of changes he’s making to Twitter — but he’s not listening

Casey Newton / Platformer:
Sources: Twitter engineers were told on Friday to print out their last 30 to 60 days of code for Elon Musk to review, before being told to shred those printouts  —  Twitter has a new CEO.  And he’d like to see your code, please  —  Elon Musk took over Twitter on Thursday like a military general …

Casey Newton / Platformer:
A Twitter HQ seating chart shows Elon Musk’s top five special projects: Blue verified, Blue for business, encrypted DMs, tips on tweets, and longform notes  —  After demanding the remaining Twitter employees pledge their loyalty, Musk’s product priorities are coming into focus  —  I. Extremely hardcore

Casey Newton / Platformer:
Sources: Twitter has begun reinstating ~62K accounts with more than 10K followers after Musk’s poll on general amnesty; one of those accounts has 5M+ followers  —  They’re skeptical of their workers, too.  PLUS: New details on Musk’s ‘general amnesty’ for banned Twitter users  —  and Zoë Schiffer