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Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer.

Elon Musk’s bid to acquire Twitter for $44 billion is only a month old, but it has already had more high-speed twists and turns than any Coney Island rollercoaster. After Musk filed notice of his offer with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 13, Twitter’s board of directors implemented a “poison pill” defense, which would have flooded the market with cheap stock if Musk went ahead with his bid. Only a few days later, Twitter accepted his offer, in part because it was well above the stock’s recent trading price. This triggered a wave of speculation about what Musk planned to do with the service; among other things, he said that he would make the service’s recommendation algorithm public, and confirmed last week that he would reverse the permanent ban on Donald Trump’s Twitter account.

Then late last week (on Friday the 13th, no less) came a series of tweets in which Musk declared that his offer for Twitter was “on hold,” until he could verify the company’s recent statement that spam bots and other fake accounts make up less than five percent of Twitter’s total user base. At a technology conference in Miami on Monday, Musk expanded on this concern, saying he believed that the true number of spam or fake accounts could be 20 percent of Twitter’s total user base or higher, although he didn’t provide any evidence to support his estimate. Musk also said a deal for Twitter at a lower price “wouldn’t be out of the question” (Twitter’s share price is currently in the $36 range, more than 30 percent below where it was after Musk filed his offer.) The company responded that it plans to “enforce the merger agreement.”

Some observers believe Musk’s concern about the percentage of fake accounts is a ruse to either back out of the takeover deal, or at least negotiate a lower price. Matt Levine, an opinion columnist for Bloomberg, wrote recently that he doesn’t believe Musk really cares about spam bots. “I think it is important to be clear here that Musk is lying,” he said. Musk “has produced no evidence at all that Twitter’s estimates are wrong, and certainly not that they are materially wrong or made in bad faith,” Levine wrote. He added that the only way Musk could get out of the deal would be to prove that such a mistake would have a “material adverse effect” on the business, which he called “vanishingly unlikely” (although Musk did question whether advertisers are getting what they paid for, which he said was “fundamental to the financial health of Twitter”.)

Continue reading “Elon Musk, Twitter, and the spam bot problem”

I often bring my kayak with me when we go to different places, because there’s almost always a lake or river or creek worth paddling around, and it’s a great way to see different aspects of the places we visit. Last year when we came in the spring, I paddled around a huge wetland called Cootes’ Paradise and saw a ton of turtles and hawks and other wildlife. So this past weekend, when we went to our daughter and son-in-law’s place in Ancaster, Ontario — which is just outside Hamilton — I looked for a different place nearby where I could take the kayak and see some wildlife and natural scenery.

Hamilton has historically been a pretty industrial city, with a number of giant steel mills that belch smoke as you drive by. But they have tried to make things a little nicer in different ways, and one of those ways is Bayfront Park, which is a lovely park right by the bay (obviously). So I checked out a few sites and one talked about paddling from Bayfront across the bay to a creek called Grindstone Creek, which winds its way past the Botanical Gardens and through a wetland area.

Continue reading “A kayak trip up Grindstone Creek”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer.

On April 14, Elon Musk filed a notice with the Securities and Exchange Commission saying he intended to acquire Twitter for $43 billion, and since then, average Twitter users and media analysts alike have speculated about his motivation for the acquisition, and his plans for the company. For the most part, Musk has talked in general terms about his desire to own Twitter, describing it as being like a town square, and expressing concern about how it handles free speech. He has also said that he will be happy if both the far right and the far left are equally upset by the way he runs the company, but some note that he has responded more favorably to conservative and even right-wing commentators like Mike Cernovich, who helped promote the Pizzagate conspiracy. In a recent resonse to Cernovich, Musk said Twitter “has a strong left-wing bias” (although social-media researchers say this is not accurate.)

On Tuesday, Musk provided one of the first concrete examples of what he plans to do if he acquires the company, and—whether by design or by accident—it seemed to cater to conservative users. When Musk first indicated he was interested in buying Twitter, right-wing commentators were excited by the possibility he might reverse the company’s ban on Donald Trump, whose account was permanently banned following the January 6 attack on the Capitol because his tweets promoted violence. At a Financial Times conference on Tuesday, Musk said he plans to restore Trump’s account if he acquires Twitter. He called the ban “a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice,” the New York Times reported. Musk added that the ban was “morally wrong and flat-out stupid” and that “permanent bans just fundamentally undermine trust in Twitter.”

Jack Dorsey, a co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, appears to agree with Musk, saying on Tuesday that permanent suspensions of individual users “are a failure” of the company and “don’t work” (Trump, for his part, has said that he won’t rejoin Twitter even if his account is reinstated). Dorsey, who was running the company when Trump was banned, said last year that the decision, while difficult, was ultimately the right one, but on Tuesday he said that “it was a business decision [and] I still believe that permanent bans of individuals are directionally wrong.” Musk and Dorsey aren’t the only ones who feel this way: Gilad Edelman, writing in Wired, argued that they both have a point. “It’s probably not a good idea for important platforms to be in the business of frequently banning users for life,” he said, especially one like Twitter, which Edelman says “occupies a unique place in American political life.”

Continue reading “Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and the future of Twitter”

Laura Young was browsing through a Goodwill store in Austin, Texas, in 2018 when she found a bust for sale. It was resting on the floor, under a table, and had a yellow price tag slapped on its cheek: $34.99. She bought it.Turns out, it wasn’t just another heavy stone curio suitable for plunking in the garden. It was an actual Roman bust from the late 1st century B.C. or early 1st century A.D., which had been part of a Bavarian king’s art collection from the 19th century until it was looted during World War II.

Turns out, it wasn’t just another heavy stone curio suitable for plunking in the garden. It was an actual Roman bust from the late 1st century B.C. or early 1st century A.D., which had been part of a Bavarian king’s art collection from the 19th century until it was looted during World War II.

How it got to Texas remains a mystery. But the most likely path suggests it was taken by an American soldier after the Bavarian king’s villa in Germany was bombed by Allied forces.

via the New York Times

An amusing story about how Stefan Banach, a Polish mathematician and the founder of functional analysis got his PhD:

“He was being forced to write a Ph.D. paper and take the examinations, as he very quickly obtained many important results, but he kept saying that he was not ready and perhaps he would invent something more interesting. At last the university authorities became nervous. Somebody wrote down Banach’s remarks on some problems, and this was accepted as an excellent Ph.D. dissertation.

But an exam was also required. One day Banach was accosted in the corridor and asked to go to a Dean’s room, as “some people have come and they want to know some mathematical details, and you will certainly be able to answer their questions”. Banach willingly answered the questions, not realising that he was just being examined by a special commission that had come to Lvov for this purpose.”

via Math Overflow

“A bachelor tax existed in Argentina around 1900. Men who could prove that they had asked a woman to marry them and had been rebuffed were exempt from the tax. In 1900, this gave rise to the phenomenon of “professional lady rejectors”, women who for a fee would swear to the authorities that a man had proposed to them and they had refused.”

This reminds me of a recent conversation with an Italian friend when we were traveling around Puglia, in southern Italy. She said it used to be commonplace for landowners to burn down forests or olive groves so they could build or expand their existing property. So the government passed a law saying landowners couldn’t build anything for 10 years anywhere there had been a fire. Then people started to set fires on their neighbour’s land, to prevent them from building or expanding their real estate. The law of unintended consequences at work 😀

“Wondering why so many Russian and Ukrainian cities have Greek names (eg Sebastopol)? Catherine the Great had a secret plan to resurrect Byzantium and install her appropriately-named grandson Constantine as New Roman Emperor. Step 1 was to found a lot of new cities with Greek names. Step 2 was to ally with the Austrian Empire. Then the Austrians got distracted with other things and they never reached Step 3.”

via Astral Codex Ten

“I felt a little stupid, to be honest, and when you look that dumb you have to go quickly,” said skier Jack Kuenzle, who set a new record for ascending and then descending Mount Hood, wearing nothing but a tiny pair of shorts that looked like underwear. Why? “My body just puts out an enormous amount of heat during these climbs—so that’s why I do it,” he said. “But yeah, when I went past people, it was hard to tell whether they were cheering or laughing at me.”

I really liked this poem, “Some Kind of Magic,” by Ken Giesbrecht

I dreamt of you last night
as I have so often this past year.
It is the same dream
It always is.
In it we are witches
living secluded on some coast,
Although where I could not tell you.

What I can tell you is that we are content.
That we spend our days with the windows open
Our hearts fluttering,
curtains caught in a gentle breeze.
Our heads bow together in the garden.
You favour the flowers, and I the herbs.

I see you among blossoms
my mind cannot separate your petals from their stem.
You are both soft and strong,
and very beautiful.

Even on the days the mist gathers in
rolling in like deep waves off the sea,
and we must close the shutters
for fear of damaging the stores,
I am not sad.

We sit together,
Yarrow hanging to dry above our heads,
there is comfort in this companionship,
we are Circe and Penelope,
or something like them anyway.

I do not hesitate to reach for your hand.
I know it like my own.
I know it is foolish
dreaming of what will not be,
you are not a witch,
and I am not a gardener,
I know this.

No matter how I try,
I cannot make things grow.
Still, you must have some kind of magic in you,
if even the thought of you,
makes something in me bloom.
Lush and green,
in places where the earth was scorched.

So, you probably like riding a bicycle, and you like camping, and you like paddling around in a tiny boat — so why not a product that puts all of those things into one amazing gizmo? Now you can do this! It’s called the BeTriton, and it just launched, and it is the craziest thing I have seen in a long time. Trying to imagine the bong sessions that not only led to this design, but actually resulted in the creation of a prototype, marketing plan, etc. Absolutely bonkers.

Now and then, I like to remember some of the people and stories I have come across during my 35-year career in journalism, and one of the strangest — and most amazing — of them all was a guy named Chuck Fipke. When I came across him in Edmonton around 1989 or so, Chuck was an oddball loner with an almost impossible story: he claimed that there were diamonds in the Northwest Territories. And not just a few diamonds, but enough for a diamond mine. At this point, Chuck was mostly known for sleeping in his car while prospecting in the far north, and for baking soil samples in his oven at home.

The idea that there might be diamonds in the Northwest Territories might seem pretty straightforward today, since there are not one but three massive diamond mines in the Northwest Territories, which at their peak produced close to $3 billion worth of high-quality diamonds every year. But in 1989, this seemed like a crackpot idea that almost no one in their right mind — other than Chuck — believed was possible. It was like someone saying they’ve invented a time machine or a faster-than-light warp drive. It wouldn’t be overstating it to say Chuck was probably laughed at more than he was listened to.

Continue reading “Chuck Fipke, the man who struck diamonds”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer.

Last week, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, reported its quarterly financial results, and said that while the number of Facebook users increased during that period, the company’s revenues grew at the slowest rate since Facebook first went public a decade ago. This news came on the heels of a similarly gloomy financial report in February, when Meta said that its profit shrank, and also announced that its user base fell for the first time since Facebook went public in 2012. After this report was released, the company’s share price plummeted, reducing Meta’s market value by almost $240 billion, the largest one-day decline in US history. The stock has recovered since then, but is still about 35 percent lower than it was in January.

In his remarks about Meta’s most recent results, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO, tried to reassure investors and analysts that the social network still has a rosy future. He pointed to several things Meta plans to change, including a reduction in costs to help defray the company’s investment in the metaverse, since the unit devoted to those projects lost nearly $4 billion in the most recent quarter. Zuckerberg also talked about how the company plans to change the news feed at both Facebook and Instagram in order to compete with TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing platform that has grown at a rapid pace over the past few years (Facebook has also reportedly hired a PR firm to spread negative news stories about TikTok).

Many industry analysts believe TikTok has become a significant competitive threat to Facebook’s dominance. Meta has been “focused on its far-off vision for virtual existence [and] has been caught unprepared by the growing popularity of short-form video,” Tae Kim wrote at Bloomberg in February, after Meta’s stock fell. Instagram has its own short-form video feature, called Reels, which the company has been pushing as an alternative to TikTok, but while Instagram’s version is growing quickly, it doesn’t seem to have made much of an impact on the Chinese company’s growth. TikTok hit the four-billion-user mark last year, a goal it reached almost twice as fast as Facebook, and its advertising revenue is expected to surpass both Snapchat and Twitter by 2024. Analysts believe that the app’s recommendation algorithm is the key to its success.

Continue reading “Facebook’s news feed: Fewer friends, more AI”