The road to Twitter 2.0 is paved with potholes as Elon Musk outlines his roadmap for the platform. Ban rhymes with Iran as it calls for the US to be removed from the World Cup. And someone please cover Santa’s ears because Balenciaga did a bad thing.
December 11, 2023
Studio
Musk outlines plans for Twitter 2.0
Elon Musk has graciously outlined his current strategic plan for Twitter 2.0 in a newly published slide deck. (Emphasis on ‘current’ because ‘Elon’.)
The slides list features and goals that Musk has for the platform, including:
The company will also embark on a hiring push after firing / losing more than half of its workforce because Musk is crazy for cuckoo pops.
Graphs shared by Musk also showed that new account sign-ups and user active minutes are at an all time high, with the average Twitter user spending 31.5 minutes per day in the app. (Really, the data shows that Twitter is back at its previous usage levels, after experiencing a significant decline in recent times). There’s also some questionable charts that show a decline in hate speech and a spike, then fall, in reported impersonation following pay-per-tick-gate. However, he provided very little context so be generous with your salt shaker.
And hopefully this is the last Monday for a while that we pepper you with Musk news.
Iran calls for the US to be banned from World Cup
US-GO-AWAY.
That’s what the country of Iran is demanding, after the US temporarily showed Iran’s national flag on social media without the emblem of the Islamic Republic.
The Iranian soccer federation said the US had “disrespected” its flag and called on America to withdraw from the World Cup.
The United States Soccer Federation has now deleted the graphic, which was posted across its official Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts - to which Iran has said “Not. 👏Good. 👏 Enough 👏”.
In a statement from the USSF, they said the word ‘Allah’ had been removed on the soccer federation’s posts in a show of solidarity with the “women in Iran fighting for basic human rights” following the death of 22--year-old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini in the custody of morality police.
The country’s football teams are due to face each other in their final group-stage match on Monday, but Iran is insisting America be expelled from the tournament.
Dramaaaaaa.
Balenciaga, Balenciaga, Balenciaga. 🤦
Global brand Balenciaga is under fire after it got children to hold teddy bears wearing bondage gear in its new Christmas campaign.
Quick repeat: Teddy bears wearing bondage gear. Can this year be over already?
The Spanish fashion house has since apologised for the ad, which has been labelled as totally inappropriate by almost everyone with eyes, issuing the following statement on Instagram:
“We sincerely apologise for any offence our holiday campaign may have caused. Our plush bear bags should not have been featured with children in this campaign. We have immediately removed the campaign from all platforms.”
It gets worse.
As well as the teddy bears, in a separate campaign to promote its collab with Adidas, it features a stack of documents referring to the Supreme Court case Ashcroft v Free Speech Coalition, which dealt with virtual child pornography, because why not make this even more ludicrous.
In another damage control statement about the documents, Balenciaga said “We apologise for displaying unsettling documents in our campaign. We take this matter very seriously and are taking legal action against the parties responsible.”
Just… just don’t do it??
