Dorsey himself has gone back and forth on the idea, saying in 2016 that “a form of edit is definitely needed” and spelling out last March how such an option might work. But in a Wired Q&A, he said the door’s shut on the notion, at least for now.

He referenced Twitter’s origins as an SMS-like service as the company’s reason for declining to include an edit option at the outset. “When you send a text, you can’t really take it back,” he pointed out. “We wanted to preserve that vibe, that feeling, in the early days.” That’s not entirely true, since you can of course delete tweets, but alas.

The spread of misinformation is a big enough problem already on platforms like Twitter, but an edit button could make the issue more complex. “You might send a tweet and the someone might retweet that, and then an hour later you completely change the content of that tweet,” Dorsey suggested. “The person that retweeted the original tweet is now retweeting and rebroadcasting something completely different.”

He also cited issues with having a short window to fix typos or broken links. Twitter has mulled a short timeframe of up to a minute where you could make tweaks. “But that also means that we have to delay sending that tweet out, because once it’s out, people see it,” Dorsey noted.

Dorsey tackled several other topics in the Q&A, including how the character limit came about, regulation, decentralization and how many meals he eats per week (seven). It’s a solid watch, especially for his sarcastic responses to questions on a dislike button and how to get verified.

We were blind, and our eyes were opened by zeros and ones. The tech utopia was at hand, and we should just sit back and not ask too many hard questions.

Then things went sideways. Social networks that were the catalyst of the Arab Spring were suddenly being used by nation-states, shit posters and bot armies to destroy democracy and fuel racial violence. Using public roads to beta test software resulted in deaths and of course billions of dollars were essentially wasted. The messiahs thought-leaders innovators disrupters run-of-the-mill ultra-capitalists who promised a better tomorrow crumbled under the slightest scrutiny.

People started asking questions, and the answers weren’t what tech promised.

As the year came to a close, The Verge revealed that Away (which makes suitcases with batteries in them. I guess that means they’re a tech company) CEO Steph Korey was abusing employees via Slack. After the usual mealy-mouthed apology, Korey was fired.

There have been the usual back-and-forth articles and think pieces about whether Korey was targeted and/or if the dismissal was warranted. The reason some people might feel like treating employees badly shouldn’t be a fireable offense is that a long time ago most of us excused the behavior of Steve Jobs. There are far too many stories of Jobs’ cruelty to employees. We allowed it because “OMG, look at that shiny new iPhone” and “Wow, the MacBooks are so great.” Oh also, he saved Apple from complete collapse.

A generation of tech CEOs believed that this is how you manage a company. It’s not, and now their bad behavior is being called out by employees that work long hours in high-stress situations all hoping they’ll make it big via an eventual IPO. Dear CEOs, You’re not Steve Jobs. Stop trying to be Steve Jobs.

By the end of 2019, on the other side of the spectrum was the tech CEO who thought everything was a party. WeWork CEO Adam Neumann burned through billions of Softbank’s (and other investors’) money. The “visionary” offered up shared office space for thousands of startups and a few publications. Subletting space to those in need seems like a good idea. Hotboxing private jets and buying the real estate that your company is leasing, not so much. Ahead of its IPO, investors took a good look at Neumann’s company and realized that it was incinerating cash: $1.9 billion last year to be precise. In the first half of 2019, it lost $904 million. The real estate wunderkind was let go and for all his failures he got a sweet golden parachute of $1.7 billion in shares and loans. Meanwhile WeWork employees have been let go in the wake of his management decisions.

Tossing other people’s money into a pit of snake oil-fueled flames was the basis for the HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, about the rise and fall of Theranos and, more importantly, its CEO Elizabeth Holmes. We all knew the story thanks to the Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou’s investigation of the company way back in 2015. But seeing this unfold on our TVs in 2019 was a reminder that even though things didn’t seem right at the company, Silicon Valley’s sway as the answer to all the world’s ills blinded established companies, reporters and members of the US government.

The blinders that allowed companies like Theranos continuing to bilk people and companies out of money are not just turned outward. Sometimes, the person in charge seems to have no sense of what’s going on. Jack Dorsey wants to be the cuddly “woke” CEO of tech. At the end of 2018 Dorsey tweeted about his silent retreat in Myanmar. The country that has committed genocide and spread hateful propaganda via social media. He issued the usual non-apology apology. Then his account was hacked via an SMS SIM hijack.

This type of hack has been around for a while but it wasn’t until the CEO was compromised that the company put the brakes on the ability of Tweet via SMS. It felt like things were only worth fixing or updating if it affected the boss.

Twitter’s been a headache for another CEO. After some rather weird, unlawful and downright dangerous tweets about his company, reporters and individuals, Musk seems to have tamed his tweets as of late. His company is making a profit, and Tesla is building test vehicles at the new China factory. But, his past Twitter behavior came back to haunt him in the form of a lawsuit brought by the diver he called a “pedo guy.”

The jury found that Musk was not guilty of libel. But being hauled into court for calling someone a child molester via a tweet is never a good look. It’s ridiculous. Also, because of the trial, we found out that Musk hired a private investigator that was a convicted felon to dig up dirt on the diver. Musk’s fans truly believe he will save the world. If that’s his plan, awesome. But maybe concentrate more on climate change and less on hurt feelings and Twitter fights.

Lost money, angry tweets, unsafe medical practices and being blind to the woes of the world should not be something that shows up on the resume of a CEO. But the actual coup d’etat is the destruction of democracy.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared before Congress again in 2019 (the litany of misleading statements he gave in his 2018 appearance concerning election tampering and Cambridge Analytica kept fact-checkers busy) to answer for his company’s Cryptocurrency scheme Libra and paid political ads on his platform. It didn’t go well. But he still insisted that his company would continue to allow politicians to lie in ads on his platform.

Zuckerberg always mumbles something about Facebook not policing free speech, which is a hilarious shield for a company that’s kicked abuse survivors off its platform for using pseudonyms or, worse, changed their names without their consent making them targets. The company has also policed and banned accounts and ads which it deemed has violated its nudity guidelines for ridiculous reasons. Like an ad for a breast cancer nonprofit.

Oh also this year he rewrote the history of Facebook during a college commencement speech laughably citing the first Iraq war as a reason he built his social network. In reality, he built a “Hot or Not” clone for Harvard classmates then decided to expand it for dating.

After years of essentially lying to the press, investors and the government, Mark Zuckerberg and his company continue to make a staggering amount of money on the backs of those lies.

Most of these CEOs are still rich. Golden parachutes, expensive lawyers and great quarterly numbers mean we’ll see these folks again. Some will fail upward. Some might get better. Others won’t.

What’s important is that, maybe once and for all, we’ll see that tech CEOs are not going to save the world. Like CEOs in other industries, they care more about making themselves and their investors rich. 2019 showed us that we’re not better off because of these folks. If anything, things have gotten worse. Technology and billionaires won’t make the world better. It’s up to us.

Debug, another member of the group, also claimed that the suspect was responsible for multiple other hijacks, including one against Santa Clara County’s Deputy District Attorney Erin West. The attack was a response to West convicting Joel Ortiz, a SIM swapper who pleaded guilty to using the swap to steal $5 million in cryptocurrency.

The unnamed individual has so far denied the allegations.

Chuckling Squad has taken credit for compromising other high-profile accounts, including that of actress Chloe Moretz. The campaign led to Twitter temporarily disabling tweeting via SMS until it could find a security measure to prevent similar incidents.

It’s a significant arrest, but Debug suggested that it won’t do much to affect Chuckling Squad’s cohesion. The individual was reportedly booted out of the group in October, and there’s no indication that the others are facing arrest as we write this. The arrest might serve as a deterrent to some potential account hijackers, but it might not do much to dissuade Chuckling Squad itself.

Securing accounts online can be difficult, especially when you’ve got a lot of legacy access points laying around. Today’s example is Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, whose Twitter account has suddenly been hijacked to send random messages and racial slurs. A quick look at the messages (which are quickly being deleted) identifies their source as Cloudhopper, an SMS service Twitter acquired back in 2010.

While newer users may not remember this period, but there was a time when SMS was the main way to use Twitter, and some have noted that Dorsey was still posting using text messages as recently as this year. Twitter announced that it is aware the account has been compromised and is investigating. I confirmed on my own account that texting 40404 from my registered number still works, and identifies the tweet’s source app as Cloudfront. With no option for other protections, tweeting from Dorsey’s account (or anyone else’s) is just as easy as pulling off the increasingly common SIM hijack to steal their phone number.

This isn’t the first time someone’s used a backdoor to send messages from Dorsey’s account, however. In 2016, the group calling itself “OurMine” hijacked a number of high-profile accounts, including @Jack, and alleged that Vine stored passwords insecurely.

Update: Twitter has confirmed that Dorsey’s account is again secure, and without explaining how the exploit worked, said “there is no indication that Twitter’s systems have been compromised.” That would be consistent with someone swapping the CEO’s SIM or somehow spoofing the number, neither of which would require actually compromising Twitter or accessing his account directly.

Update 2 (8:27 PM ET): Twitter explained what happened and it was as I suspected, “The phone number associated with the account was compromised due to a security oversight by the mobile provider. This allowed an unauthorized person to compose and send tweets via text message from the phone number.” Journalist Brian Krebs recommended using a Google Voice phone number to register online accounts, since that can be secured with 2FA and hardware keys, which mobile carriers don’t support.

In the letter, obtained by Wired and published Friday, members of the council express to the company that “There have been no advance heads-up of Twitter’s policy or product changes to the council, leaving many of us to have no prior warning or let alone knowledge when answering press and media inquiries.” The members said the lack of communication is “embarrassing.” While not ever member of the council signed on to the letter, those that did have requested a meeting with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to discuss a vision for the council’s role within the company going forward.

Twitter first formed the Trust and Safety Council in 2016 following years of complaints about abuse taking place on the platform. The plan seemed to work for a time, as Twitter reported targeting and stamping out 10 times as many abusive accounts in 2017 as it had in the year prior. However, it seems as though the company has moved away from relying on its Trust and Safety Council when making decisions on how to change the platform.

With Twttr, the company says it wants to make conversations easier to read, understand and join. And to do that it’s using features like color-coded chat bubbles to help you browse threads more efficiently. For instance, if someone you follow replies to one of your tweets, their response will be highlighted by a light-blue tag, making it easier to spot. This can be particularly helpful if you have a large number of followers, or have a tweet that goes viral and generates a lot of responses. It’s intended to filter out the noise and keep you engaged with people you actually know, as opposed to strangers.

Alternatively, if someone you don’t follow starts a conversation with you, their tweets will have a grey tag, similar to the “Original Tweeter” label Twitter has tried in the past. It’s clear that Twitter wants to make the biggest changes to how you interact with others in your mentions, since the tweaks there go deeper than colored bubbles. In Twttr, there are thread indentations designed to help you keep track of replies that may branch off from the main conversation. Those are complemented by a “show more” button which hides responses that, according to Twitter, may be abusive or spammy.

So far, the experience isn’t drastically different, compared to the main Twitter app. But there are aspects of the beta that I’m starting to like, such as the colored chat bubbles that make it easier to keep up with a conversation. At the same time, though, it’s worth noting that the Twttr app doesn’t support all of Twitter’s mobile features. That includes the revamped camera, which makes it hard for me to use the prototype app as my daily driver.

It’s too early to tell whether these experimental features will manage to successfully filter bots, trolls or spammers completely out of your mentions. But, I have noticed that the color-coded labels and indented tweets let me follow threads more easily. And they help me decide which replies I actually want to read and interact with. Meanwhile, the “show more” can filter out people who may be trolling, although I have come across tweets that aren’t abusive or spammy in some of its hidden replies.

I think what bugs me the most about the “show more” feature is that, if a thread within a thread becomes too long, it just looks odd. Basically, the more you scroll to read the responses, the smaller the tweet boxes get, and that makes it extremely difficult and tedious to read tweets.

#BitcoinTwitter and #CryptoTwitter! Square is hiring 3-4 crypto engineers and 1 designer to work full-time on open source contributions to the bitcoin/crypto ecosystem. Work from anywhere, report directly to me, and we can even pay you in bitcoin! Introducing @SqCrypto. Why?

— jack (@jack) March 20, 2019

There has been no further information beyond Dorsey’s tweets, although it’s notable that the new hires will have the option of being paid in bitcoin, something Dorsey has long championed as the world’s single native currency of the future. Square’s cash app already supports bitcoin purchases and sales, so it will be interesting to see what the team will be working on.

Dorsey added that building upon the current crypto ecosystem is “the most impactful thing” Square can do for the community right now, adding that “Square has taken a lot from the open source community to get us here. We haven’t given enough back. This is a small way to give back, and one that’s aligned with our broader interests: a more accessible global financial system for the internet.”