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Twitter Is Changing Fast. Here's What Could Happen Next
This week, we discuss possible consequences of Elon Musk's shakeup at the social media platform he now owns.
If you've been on Twitter in the past week, you may have noticed that the platform has been emanating some slightly different vibes. Mostly because everybody on there is talking about how Elon Musk just bought the place. There's no doubt Twitter—as a company and as a community—is in flux. So far Musk has already fired top executives, flirted with adding additional paid tiers of service, tasked employees with finding ways to make the company more money, and spread his own share of misinformation.
This week on Gadget Lab, we talk with WIRED platforms and power reporter Vittoria Elliot about the changes coming to Twitter and how they may affect the future of the social network.
Vittoria covered the news of the takeover deal closing. Users are flocking to other platforms because of Elon's ownership of Twitter. Read more about the potential privacy risks that could arise from Elon cleaning house. Read Twitter users' reactions to the power shift. Read all of our stories tagged with "Elon Musk."
Tori wants you to encourage your male-presenting friends interested in fathering children to watch House of the Dragon on HBO. Mike recommends the new album from Natalia Lafourcade, De Todas las Flores. Lauren recommends reevaluating your relationship with Twitter, and social media in general.
Vittoria Elliott can be found on Twitter @telliotter. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Lauren Goode: Mike.
Michael Calore: Lauren.
Lauren Goode: Mike, would you pay up to $20 a month to keep your blue check on Twitter?
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Michael Calore: Absolutely not.
Lauren Goode: Are you reconsidering your relationship on Twitter at all?
Michael Calore: Yes, absolutely. What about you?
Lauren Goode: Yeah, I definitely am. I have been for months actually.
Michael Calore: Do you have any sense of what's going to happen to Twitter over the next couple of weeks, months, year?
Lauren Goode: I have no idea what's going to happen to Twitter over the next couple of hours as we're taping this podcast, but we should probably get to it.
Michael Calore: Let's do it.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]
Lauren Goode: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.
Michael Calore: And I'm Michael Calore. I'm a senior editor at WIRED.
Lauren Goode: And we're also joined this week by WIRED reporter Vittoria Elliot, who's joining us from New York. Thanks for being on the show, Vittoria.
Vittoria Elliot: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Hi guys.
Michael Calore: Hi.
Lauren Goode: It's great to have you on. And I should also note that I am remote this week, so if I sound a little bit different, it's because I'm not in our San Francisco studio with Mike. Vittoria, you cover power and platforms for WIRED, which is why we've asked you to come on the show because we want to talk about what else? Twitter. As you've surely all heard by now, Elon Musk has officially bought Twitter for $44 billion, or $54.20 per share, and he is moving pretty fast. So far he has already fired top executives, dissolved the board of directors, and well, he has spread some misinformation. Now, since this is a fast-moving story, I wasn't joking earlier when I said I didn't know what was going to happen in the next couple of hours. It's moving as we are recording this, and we should note that we're recording this on Tuesday, November 1st, which is a couple of days before you will hear the show. So please forgive us if Elon decides to turn Twitter into a dating app between now and then, or do something even more consequential, like let Donald Trump back onto Twitter just before the midterm elections. But we're here today to talk about the long future of Twitter and how it's going to be monetized. Vittoria, first tell us about paid verification and what we know about it and how it might change Twitter.
Vittoria Elliot: I mean, I think the first important thing to note is that it's fundamentally different than how a lot of other platforms treat their creators, right? If you're a creator on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram, you are not necessarily paying for the blue check, or you're not paying for the sort of recognition that you're an official creator. And I think what that does is create a different sort of relationship between the platform and creators. And obviously anyone with a blue check is a super user or a power user, generally. And in Twitter's case, because it has been so tied with civil society and journalism more than, I think you could argue, some of these other platforms, it's been a real way to identify who's spreading misinformation, who is a valid source of information to follow. And one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about, and I'm sure that Elon and many other people have been thinking about is how do you get this platform that in many ways has sort of seen itself as having a social mission to be a place where people can have conversations and get information. That was a fundamental place for organizing protests like the Arab Spring over a decade ago. How do you monetize that? And in the case of this, monetize it ethically, if you're thinking about that. And I will say that I don't think charging people for the blue check really sort of puts Twitter in the position to monetize off creators and creation of content on their platform, especially when they're trying to incentivize more people to use it. I think if anything, that probably is going to make it more of a pay-to-play model, and not everyone is following the ups and downs of the Twitter drama. So if you are just a regular human using Twitter, you are not necessarily thinking about what the meaning of that blue check is going to signify this month versus next month. And I could see that causing a lot of confusion, especially because Twitter has been so tied with current events and news.
Lauren Goode: And we don't actually know the details of this yet or when or how it will launch. We know that Elon initially said he was considering charging users $20 per month for their blue check and that he had given his product team a hard deadline by which they needed to launch this early November. And then just today as we were about to take this podcast, we saw that Elon was tweeting with the author Stephen King and said $8 a month. So he just changed it. So we don't know what this is actually going to be yet or when it's going to roll out, but I am very intrigued by what you say about these power users being the ones that ultimately are going to be charged. Because when you think about Twitter in the big picture, it is still much, much smaller than other social networks or even social messaging apps that have some of the characteristics of social media. And I wonder if it's worth it to potentially disrupt that very small percentage, maybe 10 percent of power users on Twitter who are really very active and very concerned about the blue check mark when the network is just so small to begin with.
Vittoria Elliot: Yeah, I mean, I think also Twitter has, and I think this is true of other platforms too, has created this sort of lurker culture a little bit, where people are using it to get information. Just because you're not a super active creator doesn't mean you're not using it pretty regularly to see what's happening in the world or just check in on things. So I mean, I think it also fundamentally ... Again, it kind of misunderstands the point of people that on other platforms we would call influencers, which is like you want them on your platform, you want them creating stuff on your platform. That's what draws more people in. And there's a reason that when you're a creator on Instagram or TikTok, they're trying to build as many features as possible to make it easy for you to use the platform, to make it easier for you to engage with the people that follow you to figure out how to monetize off of ads. Not that I'm saying that I want every creator on Twitter, every blue check on Twitter, to have the ability to monetize off of ads or something like that. But a lot of these platforms engage their power users and buy incentives and try to figure out how they want to use the platform and how they want to engage with the people that follow them. And this is almost using the opposite methodology. And again, I wonder if part of that is because so much of the civil society in different parts of the world and news media use it as the sort of news-gathering tool and also for their own ... We all use it for our own kind of self-promotion. And so I wonder if he believes that perhaps the incentive structure could be a little bit different on Twitter, but I don't know that the people who are using that ... I mean, anyone who's trying to make money off of media in general tends to struggle a little bit. And so I also wonder if even the cohort of people who are those blue-check people on Twitter is fundamentally different than who might be a blue-check person on Instagram.
Michael Calore: I think one thing that we should also talk about is the fact that when you go to a paid verification model, it changes the perception of who the person is who has the blue check mark. Right now it's a signal. So it's a very clear signal that this person is who they say they are, and when they're talking, they represent who they say they represent. It could be a public official, it could be a journalist. So if I can pay to get that check mark, and we don't know yet whether or not there is going to be any sort of additional verification about your identity in order to get the check mark, but how you represent yourself on Twitter will be as a person of authority if you have a blue check mark. So basically if you can buy the authority, then it really changes the dynamic about whether or not I can trust you and whether or not what you're saying is self-serving or for the public good, et cetera.
Vittoria Elliot: And I think that's also a very dicey area to enter into when we already know that misinformation and disinformation, and particularly taking advantage of people's blind spots, is something that people can do maliciously when we already know those are such big issues on these platforms.
Lauren Goode: It just feels like this level of verification involves a certain amount of gating for people to join the network. Whereas before … something like Twitter Blue, which admittedly I pay for, there is a feature set that exists within Twitter Blue that some people may find valuable, such as delayed tweets. You send a tweet, it takes several seconds for it to go through, therefore giving you the ability to unsend that tweet. You can edit tweets if you have Twitter Blue. So there are features that are built into the app or the app experience that feel worth it, I guess for a certain level of subscription. But this kind of subscription, it would be like it's attacking some of the features that are fundamental to trust and safety on the platform.
Vittoria Elliot: Yeah, I agree with that. It always makes me think of the joke that people have when things get kind of wild on Twitter where they go, "I can't believe this app is free." I also kind of wonder how much of the sort organicness of it and the joy of it will go away.
Lauren Goode: You mean the joy of just tweeting for free for Elon Musk is going to go away?
Vittoria Elliot: That's my dream.
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Michael Calore: I think a lot of it is going to depend on what you get. Like Lauren already mentioned, some of the things that are available on Twitter Blue, not that this is worth anything more than the pixels it takes up on your screen, but Elon has already tweeted that if you pay for verification, you'll get half the ads, you'll possibly get the ability to read paywalled news sources, you'll be able to post certain types of media that other people can't, like long video and long audio. And I assume it'll also come with those things, like access to the edit button and special moderation controls, delayed tweets, things like that. But for now, I mean, it's a bill of goods that is unknown, and when it becomes known, then I think it'll become very clear whether or not it's worth the money. But is it worth the money on Twitter or is it worth the money on another platform I think are two completely different things.
Lauren Goode: And I think we're going to continue to talk about that in the next half of the show. But I just have to say, I don't have a lot of faith that Elon Musk is the right person to be leading Twitter, that he's the person who's going to make it a decent platform to spend a lot of time on or make it a more solvent business. I mean, he's a person who has a history of building things and selling services, sure. But as Vittoria noted earlier, media is a whole different ball game. Content is a whole different ball game. Content moderation is a really big issue on today's internet, and we're going to talk more about that in the second half of the show.
Lauren Goode: Here in the US, Twitter plays an outsized role as a media echo chamber and a place where politicians go to posture and try to control their narratives. It's also known for its culturally significant communities, like Sports Twitter and Black Twitter. But Twitter also has a long history of influence in markets outside of the US. And while its user numbers have pretty much plateaued here in the US, it still has a lot of potential for growth overseas, which presents a somewhat interesting conundrum for Elon Musk. He has a lot of business interests overseas with Tesla and SpaceX, and now as Chief Twit, as he calls it, he'll also be determining content moderation policies in those markets. Vittoria, paint a picture for us of what Twitter's footprint is outside of the US and how it's used in other markets and what that can tell us about the future of Twitter.
Vittoria Elliot: Yeah, I mean, so Twitter is sort of a small but mighty presence in a lot of other places in the world. So unlike Meta, which really invested in free basics, making their platform as accessible to as many people as possible, like trying to build in payment and chat and all this stuff. If you're looking at Twitter in places like Nigeria or something like that, the average person may not use Twitter, but the average politician, the average journalist, the average person in civil society, activists, people who are really sort of the movers and shakers around policy and stuff in society, those people are on Twitter, and it's an incredibly important space for discourse. And so I think even if we're talking about a platform that may not be used by the average person in a particular place because they might be on WhatsApp, they might be on Facebook, it has an incredibly outsized power in a lot of these places to determine the conversation and for people in power to spread their message. And it's particularly important for dissidents and civil society actors. My former colleague and really, really great friend wrote a piece for Rest of World talking about how dissidents in Saudi Arabia rely on the anonymity on Twitter to be able to speak about what's happening in their country. And [speaking out is] an incredibly dangerous thing. And so even though maybe you don't have everyone in Saudi Arabia using Twitter, you have incredibly important voices on the platform. It's also been a space for a lot of LGBTQ people in countries where that's not necessarily legal or safe to be able to use the platform either to talk about what's happening or just to have community on the platform because of the anonymity it offers and because of the community it offers—and the reach that it offers because of the type of people that are on there. And oftentimes Twitter's own platform policies are more liberal and more sort toward the free speech that Elon Musk seems to prize so much than the countries that it's operating in. A really great example of this is in Turkey. The Turkish court actually ordered tweets to be taken down that referenced a news story that was critical of a supporter of President Recep Erdoğan. And Twitter has refused to take those tweets down. Twitter has protected the free speech of Turkish people in a way that their own government won't. And similarly in India, they're taking the government to court to fight the removal orders of certain tweets and certain accounts. So I think it's really important to note that when we're talking about free speech, especially in ... We have a very US-centric lens on this, and that's really what a lot of these platforms use when they're talking about it as well. And while that may therefore make some people, particularly conservatives who we know have a lot of complaints about free speech on these platforms, feel as though content moderation policies are censoring them in most places in the world, that's far more speech than what people are often getting in other spaces. And Twitter's been a really important actor in protecting that, especially for the types of people that are using it, which are dissidents, civil society, journalists, people who have really benefited from that kind of protection and the people who are most likely to be critical of their governments.
Lauren Goode: But do we have a sense when Elon talks about free speech and just totally opening up the platform … do we have a sense that that's who he's catering to? Or is he catering to the fringe right-wing groups that have been saying that Twitter and other social media platforms have been biased against them for a while?
Vittoria Elliot: I think Elon most definitely does seem to have a more US-centric, or at least Western-centric view of free speech and what that means for the platform. He does seem to be very concerned about civil discourse, particularly in America, and particularly about the fact that because conservatives feel censored, they don't feel like they can trust the platforms. And while that's very valid, that's not the majority of Twitter's users at this point. If you add up all the users between the US versus where else Twitter operates, the US is not the majority of users, just like we're not the majority of people in the world—there's only 300 million of us. So I think his concern does seem to be more localized. And he has said that Twitter will abide by the laws in the countries that it operates in. And so that's also a very tricky legal challenge. And he did just get rid of some of the highest-ranking people at the company who may have some legal knowledge about that. But it's very difficult to comply with the speech laws in 90, 100, 120 different countries. But it does seem that his values around free speech would conflict with abiding by local laws. But if your definition of free speech and the kind of speech that's important is really localized to the US—and that may be how they go, where they're looking for really an "everything that's legal gets to stay on the platform" form of free speech for the US and then making more specific moderation choices in other markets.
Michael Calore: I'm curious to hear what both of you think about Elon's plan that he has expressed publicly to turn Twitter into an "everything app." Something that's similar to what WeChat is in China or Grab is across Southeast Asia. These are apps that people use. They spend all day on them. They use them to read the news, they use them to communicate, to hail cars, to send money to each other, to book travel. We haven't really had something like this in this country. Maybe at a time Facebook got close to a status like that for us, but it isn't any longer. And if you look at the Twitter user base now is around a quarter of a billion people. Elon Musk wants to bring it up to a billion people, and he sees the launching of an everything app, which he is for now calling X. The letter X. He sees X as maybe a path toward getting a billion people on it and driving engagement because if you have everything in the app, people spend all day on it. Is this possible?
Vittoria Elliot: I mean, I think the places where it would be most possible to make something an everything app, you have to also think about what those environments are. So obviously WeChat in China, that's a completely different societal setup. It's very closely tied with the government and government policies. So I think there's that level that we just don't have. And then when we're talking about Grab or something like that, Grab isn't a social platform. Grab is great for getting rides and getting food and many other services, but its primary function isn't sort of a space for civic discourse and content publication. I think you're correct that if anything had that chance, it was the Meta products. And actually if Meta were to decide that it wanted to be the everything app in someplace like Indonesia or the Philippines or any of the other countries where it does form ... Or Bangladesh, for instance, where it does form a chat backbone and an ecommerce backbone, where people are using WhatsApp more regularly and pay inside WhatsApp. If you made that argument, I would say, yeah, maybe there is a chance for that, but in the US context, I think it would be more difficult. There's more competitors, and the reality is, again, when we're thinking about what an everything app looks like, you're talking about an app that everybody has to use. And Meta, when it was Facebook, invested a lot in free basics. They made sure that people were on their platform. Twitter was not playing that game. So you have to also look at the population of people that are on the platform. And I don't know that people are going to Twitter to be able to pay for something, to be able to order something. Ecommerce is a big part of the everything app model. And even a private chat function is still not really what Twitter does. It's very public-facing. So I think it would require a lot of changes to the product and pivoting a thoroughly understood brand to compete with companies that frankly are already doing that work, like Uber, like Meta. I think it would be hard to necessarily find the market gap in that.
Lauren Goode: Vittoria, on Monday of this week, Connecticut senator Chris Murphy asked the committee on foreign investments in the US to look into Saudi Arabia's role in Elon's whole Twitter takeover. How big of a deal is this? Is this just more posturing? And also, aren't there several other notable US tech companies—like Uber, like DoorDash—tied up in Saudi money?
Vittoria Elliot: Yeah, I mean, Saudi's complicated in that way, and Tesla also took Saudi money. So it's not the first venture to do this. And Saudi money has been flowing into Silicon Valley for years. And Qatar, which is not exactly friendly with Saudi, also has money in the Twitter deal and also has had money flowing into Silicon Valley. But I think one of the big issues that I've been thinking about with regard to Saudi's involvement, obviously the fact that Saudi Arabia had spies inside of Twitter, that is something that obviously should give us pause because not only now is Saudi money in Twitter, but it's very clear that they have a history of trying to extract information out of the company, trying to identify dissidents, trying to identify people who might be a threat to the regime. And just because Musk has their money doesn't necessarily mean he'll comply. But the reality is, again, as has already been reported, Saudi dissidents use Twitter, LGBTQ people in Saudi use Twitter as a way to protect themselves. And even if it's not coming to Musk and saying, "Oh, give us our money back for this social platform," or "We gave you money, give us this information," he is involved in enough other companies that he may have to raise money for again that he may want access to their markets. And that's a big concern that we really don't know how that's going to play out. And again, especially when most of the people who he's going to want to capture in that billion set of users, they're not going to be American, they may not even be from places that are fully democratic. You're going to have to think about how those governments are going to want you to play ball.
Lauren Goode: Right. I'm kind of wondering how reasonable it is to think that Musk's free speech policies might sway based on his other business interests in these markets.
Vittoria Elliot: Yeah, I think even if he is committed to free speech, it's still a reasonable question, given how many interests he has in other companies and where those markets are. I think it's a question he should feel prepared to answer from the press or from users.
Lauren Goode: Vittoria, thank you for all of these insights. Let's take another quick break and we'll come back with our weekly recommendations.
Lauren Goode: All right, Vittoria, as our guest of honor this week, what is your recommendation?
Vittoria Elliot: This is a very specific one, but I think all men who want to be fathers, as in who want to have children via their partner getting pregnant, should watch House of the Dragon.
Lauren Goode: Oh, so you're saying Elon Musk should watch this because he has lots of children?
Vittoria Elliot: Yes. Yes. That's probably true too.
Lauren Goode: Wait, I have not watched the show. So what does it say about fatherhood?
Vittoria Elliot: Oh, it doesn't say very much about ... I mean, maybe you can argue that it says a lot about fatherhood, but it does show a lot of very graphic pregnancy/birth scenes. And whenever men say to me, "I can't wait to be a dad," it's sort of like when a small child says to me, "I want to be a basketball player," it's like, "That's great, sweetie, I'm so proud of you." Because pregnancy and birth are so graphic and so scary to me in that way. And I don't think a lot of media does a great job of representing that experience. And I think House of the Dragon, even though we are not in a fantasy medieval time where those instruments will come into play, does a really good job of laying out some of the risks. So for all the prospective fathers out there, House of the Dragon.
Michael Calore: Wow.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. I mean, childbirth, it's pretty traumatizing. And I don't know if the fact that it's depicted that way in House of the Dragon makes me want to watch it more or less.
Vittoria Elliot: I honestly think more than Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon does a much better job of thinking about how the women characters fit into this medieval patriarchal society and what it means to try and interact in that world in different ways and what your value is. I think they do actually a really good job of interrogating some of those questions. And part of that, especially because you have multiple female characters and lines of succession, is a particular point of interest for the plot. There is a focus on some pregnancy and some birth, and I'm here for it.
Lauren Goode: And presumably they're not getting epidurals and stuff in this show.
Vittoria Elliot: No. No, they're not.
Lauren Goode: Right, right. OK. There's not a lot of modern medicine floating around there?
Vittoria Elliot: No, no, no.
Lauren Goode: Thank you for that recommendation. Or Mike, maybe you should say thank you. You're the guy in the room.
Michael Calore: Yes. Thank you. Thank you for that recommendation.
Lauren Goode: Mike, what's your recommendation?
Michael Calore: I'm going to once again recommend a piece of music. There is a new album in the world by Natalia Lafourcade. It is called De Todas Las Flores. I know I'm going to hear it from our Spanish-speaking listeners, but it translates to "of all the flowers" in English. Natalia Lafourcade is a Mexican singer-songwriter. This is her first album in six or seven years, I think, of new material. She's been doing a lot of folk music and interpretations of folk music and duets over the past few years, but she's also just an amazing original songwriter. And this album in particular is really excellent. It has late-night vibes. It was recorded in a studio in a border town in Texas. It was recorded to analog tape. It has some really great players on it, including Marc Ribot, my favorite guitar player. But it's just a beautiful expression of her joy and her sorrow and love and loss. It's kind of a breakup album. But it's just wonderful. I literally cannot stop listening to it. It came out last week, the Friday before Halloween, and I think I've probably listened to it about 20 times since it came out. It's that addictive. So if you like the late-night vibes and you like songs that are in Spanish that are very deep, if you read lyrics, then I can recommend this to you. Natalia Lafourcade, De Todas Las Flores.
Lauren Goode: Thanks for that. That's great. That's so on-brand for you, Mike.
Michael Calore: I know. Yes, I try. I try really hard. Anyway, Lauren, what is your recommendation?
Lauren Goode: So my recommendation this week is a little less specific, which is that I do think it's time, if you are an active Twitter user, if you are a self-proclaimed Twitter addict as I am, I think it's time to reconsider your relationship with Twitter. I'm going to call this recommendation "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here." I think that it's time to consider other social networks. I don't know what that social network is exactly because I don't think it's Facebook. And there are a lot of other social networks, such as TikTok, that are taking up much of our mindshare these days that are primarily video-focused. And we as media people with blue checks still like to share a lot of text links and text-based stories and things with a lot of context and nuance. I hope that someone is building something or has built something that is going to become the next generation of whatever Twitter has been for us. But historically, we move off social networks onto another. I mean, there's the network effect. The markets change, the internets change, we change, and I think it's time to reconsider how you're using Twitter based on new leadership, based on the changes that are being made, based on the potential threats to democracy in places where democracy still exists. I personally am doing a lot of soul-searching right now about Twitter. And I'm not going to do some big essay on it, all the feels about why, my thoughts on Twitter, no one cares. Right. If the blue check goes away, the blue check goes away. Take it. But yeah, I'm going to be lurking. I'm going to be seeing if it's still valuable from a news perspective. I'm probably going to be retweeting people who I think are smart and trying to get WIRED's work out there into the world. But I don't know … what I'm eating for lunch and all the dad jokes and all the drawing on Twitter, it's all going away.
Michael Calore: Lauren, have you taken the step of setting up a wellness timer on your phone that limits the amount of time you're allowed to spend in the app?
Lauren Goode: Oh, those are bullshit.
Michael Calore: No, they're not. I use them all the time.
Lauren Goode: No, they're totally bullshit. No, no. They've been around for years.
Vittoria Elliot: They're just like alarms that you can just pause them and be like, "I'm going back in. See you."
Lauren Goode: Yeah, they're snooze buttons. They're alarms, and then there's a snooze button. And then you're like, "Yep, that was nice. That was nice that you thought I was going to get up at 6:15. Nope." I mean, that's basically what it is. Yeah, no. And then every week you get the digest of how much time you've been spending on social media and you go, "Oh, wow, that's a lot of time." And then you open Instagram. I mean, the screen time thing was just like a smokescreen. The tech companies were starting to get a lot of heat for how addictive these apps and app platforms have been and how these products have been designed and all of the dark patterns that exist in them. And they were being scrutinized for this since they were like, "Here's a solution, another app." No, does not work. To break addiction takes something much stronger than that.
Michael Calore: I have had good success using the wellness timer around my Android phone. It just shuts off the app after I've spent more than 15 minutes looking at it and won't open it up again until midnight, and I use it. I love it. It works for me.
Lauren Goode: I'm very happy for you.
Michael Calore: Thank you.
Lauren Goode: I mean that genuinely.
Vittoria Elliot: ... part of the paid Twitter features they can, like, lock you out of your account for you?
Michael Calore: Now you're talking.
Vittoria Elliot: Yeah, the Twitter Blue subscription. For now, I'm keeping it. I was just messaging with a friend. He said, "I just unsubscribed to Twitter Blue." I'm like, "No. I actually think the Twitter Blue features are valuable enough for me still at this moment to do it." Yeah, and everything is changing so fast right now with the way Elon Musk is running this company that I think the changes to it are going to become apparent sooner rather than later. Watch this space, folks. That's my recommendation.
Michael Calore: Hopefully not too many changes happen between the time we're recording this right now and the time that the podcast actually publishes to your feed.
Lauren Goode: It would be amazing if I got kicked off of Twitter in that time.
Michael Calore: In the next 48 hours.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. What can I do or tweet to get myself kicked off of Twitter?
Michael Calore: I have some ideas.
Lauren Goode: Vittoria, thank you so much for joining us on Gadget Lab. This was your Gadget Lab debut, and I really hope you join us more in the future.
Vittoria Elliot: Yeah, thank you guys so much for having me.
Lauren Goode: And Mike, thanks as always for being a great cohost.
Michael Calore: Of course. Thank you.
Lauren Goode: And thanks to all of you for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter. Just check the show notes. We're still there for now. Our producer is the excellent Boone Ashworth. Goodbye for now. We'll be back next week.
[Gadget Lab outro theme music plays]
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👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database
🏃🏽‍♀️ Want the best tools to get healthy? Check out our Gear team's picks for the best fitness trackers, running gear (including shoes and socks), and best headphones
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The Best Password Managers to Secure Your Digital Life
Keep your logins locked down with our favorite apps for PC, Mac, Android, iPhone, and web browsers.
The 18 Best Wireless Headphones for Everyone
Whether you need workout earbuds or gaming over-ears, these WIRED-tested picks sound like a million bucks.
Parker Hall
Sitting at a desk for hours? Upgrade your WFH setup and work in style with these WIRED-tested comfy seats.
The 193 Absolute Best Cyber Monday Deals Right Now
These are the top discounts we've found across the web. Whether you want an Away carry-on or AirPods Pro, there's something for everyone.
Don't bolt at the first sight of something that needs repair. You can nail most DIY jobs with the right gear and the right attitude.
Whether you're biking to the office or schlepping a camera to a shoot, a laptop bag is your constant companion. These WIRED-reviewed packs do the job.
Whether you're skiing in the backcountry or trampolining in the backyard, we have an activity tracker for you.
I Spent a Week Using Only TikTok for Search
Younger users are sidestepping Google in favor of the social app's search engine, so I tried it too. You will absolutely believe what happened next.
Lauren Goode
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