The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 62 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Rogers: Previous administration pressured Twitter and Meta to censor posts
“Under the prior administration included things like global engagement center censorship efforts that were the subject of the Murphy Supreme Court litigation, where the State Department Along with other organs of the executive branch would contact Twitter or Me…”
Srinivasan: Twitter elected Trump in 2016, and X elected him in 2024
“Twitter elected Trump, and then Twitter deplatformed Trump, and then ex-elected Trump.”
VandeHei: Twitter ruined mainstream journalism by exposing reporter political bias
“In my personal view on Twitter, in terms of its effect on journalism, is it, ah, I think it ruined a lot of mainstream journalism because a lot of the habits that people thought And suspected about reporters in terms of their bias and their ideology, they were…”
Kalanick: Musk buying Twitter enabled tech founders to speak their minds
“Elon buying Twitter is like the beginning of us being able to speak our minds and for disagreeing to not be illegal.”
Boyle: Elon Musk buying Twitter was most consequential free speech event
“I would argue that it's the most consequential moment in terms of Elon buying Twitter, kind of, you know, displacing the trust and safety team there and kind of, you know, changing, I would say, the kind of nature of free speech for a lot of the country with t…”
Rogers: Twitter moderation once banned calling a male sex offender male
“Like, we have seen tech workers make decisions, for example, that you should, it should not be permissible on Twitter to call a convicted sex offender, a male, which he is.”
Acharya: Current AI code generation tools cannot produce production-ready software
“Almost all of these products today, they sort of, they're good at prototyping, they're trying to push into refinement. They're not really usable as things that you can actually deploy to production at all. In fact, most of the cool demos you see on Twitter don…”
VandeHei: Axios bans opinion pages and reporter political posts
“We don't have an opinion page. We ask our reporters to stay off of Twitter and social media platforms expressing their personal opinions.”
Balaji Srinivasan: Consumer tech startups scale by exploiting the seven deadly sins
“Tinder is lust. Twitter is wrath. Instagram is pride and so on and so forth, right? Uber eats is like gluttony, right? And many things, productivity apps are arguably sloth or whatever, right? Because that it is hard to build a company and you do want to align…”
Balaji Srinivasan: On the internet, words speak louder than actions
“You're selecting for politicians that are liars because, you know, there's that saying like, actions speak louder than words. They actually don't online. Words speak louder than actions. You know why? You see the Twitter feed of, I don't know, AOC or like, you…”
Dixon: VCs will not fund third-party tools for closed platforms
“You will not see any VC. We have not funded. No one will fund an anti-spam solution for Twitter or Facebook.”
Dixon: Centralized platforms inevitably capture all value from third-party developers
“You would never build on top of, you know, a centralized protocol, because people have now learned, after 2030 years of this, that when you do that, that the platform changes the rules, and you ask everyone who built on top of, you know, Twitter, all these dev…”
Wilson: Web2 users deserve financial equity for building platform value
“It's just not right, particularly for a lot of these businesses where the user is the product. Right? Facebook users made Facebook. Twitter users made Twitter. You know, YouTube users made YouTube, right? It's just not right that the people who make the produc…”
Wilson: Twitter could have stayed open using a token business model
“If Bitcoin and tokens had existed in 2005 instead of 2009, I think it's very possible that Twitter could have adopted a token-based business model Left the protocol open.”
Carlson-Wee: P2P protocols will eventually compete with Web 2.0 giants like Uber and Twitter
“Many of the major Web two point O companies that have seen a substantial growth in the last 15 years, this is Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy, eBay, Uber, every single one of these companies could someday see competition from a peer peer-to-peer protocol.”
Benet: Twitter as a protocol token could have sustained third-party developers
“If you instead thought of Twitter as a protocol token, Twitter, the company, or like the group developing the protocol could totally continue to exist just fine with as many developers on top as you can think of.”
Cockcroft: Open source from Big Tech makes proprietary software startups harder
“So what you're seeing now is Twitter and Facebook and Netflix and Google and LinkedIn producing the stuff you actually want to use, which has already been tested at volume. And then it's actually much harder to build a proprietary software company because you'…”
Evans: Linking Facebook to personal identity is a Western assumption
“So the idea that this is about identity is kind of a Western assumption, that actually those people in Burma are using Facebook like Twitter, with no connection to their identity at all.”
Andreessen: Twitter generates $3B revenue with 300M active users
“It's a sign of the times that we have a company in the valley that's 10 years old that's doing three billion dollars in revenue, and has three hundred million active users, and everybody's like, wow, they suck.”
Andreessen: A near-future US presidential election will pivot entirely on social networks
“I think there is going to be an election in which the entire thing is going to pivot on social networks, and it's going to turn out that the candidate that most effectively used Facebook and Pinterest and Twitter and all these things is, is, is the one who win…”
Masad: X Has Irreplaceable Staying Power Despite Rebranding and Risk
“The platform has so much staying power. Like it's really hard to replace. Like you can change the name. You can destroy the brand and you, and the platform will still be very valuable.”
Tornberg: Twitter ran as well or better after 70% headcount cuts
“Twitter proved it, right? Cutting 70%, and then it's running better or as good as it was before.”
Andreessen: Early investments Twitter and LinkedIn became the censorship machine
“You know, I was, you know, I was an angel investor in Twitter angel investor in LinkedIn, you know, they both, you know, became kind of key parts of the censorship machine at certain points.”
Mainstream media now reacts at the end of social news cycles
“They used to set the tone, and now they're at the very end. At the very end of all the stuff that's been said on Twitter, or Reddit, or, it eventually spills out, and then media is like, oh, what is this thing? But like, it's at the very end, right? And that, …”
Sriram Krishnan Assisted Elon Musk During the Twitter Acquisition Transition
“I was briefly helping Elon at Twitter. I was there on the let it sink in day”
Costolo: Twitter partnered with Google to bypass Egypt's Arab Spring shutdown
“Egypt, you know, during the Arab Spring, we sort of started in Tunisia with people organizing protests on Twitter, and they were able to organize protests on Twitter because they were writing under pseudonyms and not, you know, their actual names, so people we…”
Sarandos notes Amazon paid 10x Twitter's price for non-exclusive NFL rights
“The cost of that Amazon NFL deal for basically games that are on two other networks at the same time, so completely non-exclusive programming, went up 10 times from Twitter to Amazon.”
Cowen: Social media political activism is mostly ineffective protest theater
“If you compare today to previous historical eras, I think we're going through a kind of protest theater in many ways. People do things on Facebook, Twitter, they think that's effective. I suspect it's not.”
Early social media use forces young athletes to brand themselves prematurely
“It's good and bad for the game, because I'm seeing high school kids, and I'm seeing elementary kids with Twitters and Instagrams, and it's like they're branding themselves already, and it's like, you're not quite there yet, you know. So it's putting a little b…”
Evans: Twitter's watch notifications for trending terms are completely worthless
“Here are five new trending terms in Twitter, which is the thing that the Twitter app is sending me, which is completely worthless.”
Margit Wennmachers: The top-down PR strategy embodied by Steve Jobs is over
“This very sort of top down, you know, one channel out going to the masses that Steve Jobs embodied, I think to a large degree is over because we just have too many channels, too many constituents, and you know, there's Twitter, there's, you know, that is just …”
Peretti: Pinterest drives twice as much BuzzFeed traffic as Twitter
“Pinterest sends double the traffic to BuzzFeed as Twitter.”
Madrigal: Facebook drives an order of magnitude more traffic than Twitter
“Oh, an order of magnitude.”
Masad: Twitter reaches tech elites while YouTube and Meta reach early majority
“Twitter's influence is amazing, but it tends to be elite kind of inside group influence. I think Instagram, Facebook still, YouTube, Is where you get to the early majority.”
Kevin Rose: Twitter Investment Thesis Centered on Open Broadcasting Over Friending
“I did the investment in Twitter way back in the day. And the thesis for me was, it was very simple for me to see because we'd had bi-directional relationships for the longest time. And what I mean by that is the, my spaces and all the social platforms that had…”
Horowitz: Twitter is sole major tech company enforcing strict return-to-office mandate
“We haven't seen a lot of companies, you know, other than Elon at Twitter go like, you have to come back or you're gone. Like that, that's the one kind of big case, but most of them have been okay with it.”
Dixon: VCs stopped funding social platform apps in 2013 due to risk
“I would say around 2013, 12, 13, probably people like us, all the VCs stopped because of platform risk, right?”
Hung Lee: Elon Musk reduced Twitter's headcount down to 20%
“Now what he managed to do was to obviously wipe out more than 70% of the company, I believe, Pre-Musk. Twitter was significantly bigger than it was now. They're down to 20%, I believe, in terms of headcount.”
Casado: Jack Dorsey's Twitter Account Takeover Was Executed via SIM Port
“Jack Dorsey, if you know, his Twitter account was taken over. This was done via Simport.”
Andreessen: Successful tech platforms rely on emergent user behavior
“The really successful platforms let the users surface the behaviors, right, that the creators of the platform could have never thought of, and, you know, Twitter's had all kinds of issues over the years, but, like, it always has been amazing. Most of the compe…”
Zuegel: OAuth is centralized, janky, and limited by tech monopolies
“OAuth as a tool that people can use as you're building a little side project. You don't want to have to build a whole complicated login system. You plug in OAuth. This is a huge step forward, but it is not really sufficient for everything. It's Centralized. It…”
Costolo: Leaders must correct mistakes quickly rather than try preventing them
“It's not your job as a leader to prevent mistakes from happening. It's your job as leader to correct mistakes as quickly as you can when they happen. If you try to lead by preventing mistakes from happening, nobody's going to friggin' take any chances, and the…”
Carlson-Wee: A decentralized Twitter requires Filecoin's storage infrastructure
“Until you have IPFS and an incentive system using something like Filecoin, on top of that, you can't really have reliable peer-to-peer file storage. So you can't really build Twitter the protocol until Filecoin is deployed and robust and easy to use.”
Wennmachers: Audiences easily detect fake or over-curated social media content
“And then Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat and whatever else there is that they just demand authenticity because it's so easily detectable if it's someone else doing the writing or if these photos are too curated.”
Beshara: True social commerce requires participatory collective purchasing, not just social graphs
“I think it will be much more nuanced, but much more powerful than just, oh, add your social graph to your credit card transaction. It's much more participatory of collectively, socially.”
Costolo: CEOs can operate in wartime and peacetime simultaneously across departments
“Yeah, sometimes you're both at the same time inside the company, right? With, I remember there were times at Twitter where, with the sales team, I could focus on All right, this is really good. This engine's really working. It's going well. Let's focus on, you…”
Chan: Chinese Tech Companies Are Distinct Products, Not Clones
“You will see companies that look like the Facebook of China, look like the Google of China, look like the YouTube of China, but they're different. And that's why it's not just Chinese Twitter.”
Daneshwar: Iranians routinely use VPNs to access blocked social media platforms
“Facebook advertisement is closed for Iranians, like Google AdWords as well, but the fact that people here are having the full access to Twitter, to Facebook, and Facebook is blocked by the government as well, but we are going through the VPNs, so everybody is …”