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"Anthony has such a strong belief in his own intelligence that it's hard for him to learn. He believed himself smarter and better at everyone’s job,” this person said.

Last year, Noto became known inside the company as the man with a growth plan: to go all-in on video.

It cost Twitter a reported $10 million for those rights, a mere $1 million per game, instead of the tens of millions of dollars per game that traditional media outlets pay.

Last spring Twitter announced more than 12 partners who will launch original shows on topics of business, sports and entertainment — the types of things that people already like to Tweet about. And Noto wants Twitter to have enough content to fill 24 hours of live programming, he told BuzzFeed in April.

So far, Bloomberg has signed on to give that a try, and will launch 24x7 streaming in the fall. Plus Twitter plans to launch Stadium in the fall, too, a 24-hour sports network.

Twitter has been stuck at roughly 300 million monthly active users (MAUs) for years.

"Users matter," RBC Capital Market's Mark Mahaney told Business Insider, who rates the stock an "underperform" and dropped his price target for the stock to $14. While he believes Twitter will slowly add more users, "I think the best growth days for Twitter are behind them," he predicts.

"It's like your relative who you love that keeps making a bunch of bad decisions over and over again, that's Twitter," one top exec who left a couple of months ago said.

It faces heavy competition from better-funded companies like Facebook, Google, Netflix and Amazon. Noto will likely also need to pay to develop content, which could become a big new expense, compared to crowdsourced tweets, some analysts point out.

"People are using Twitter for all sorts of different purposes, but they are not going there to watch video," warns eMarketer's Debra Williamson.

Google+ is a data mine. The unified login means Google can start tracking users' interests and behavior around the Web.

What Google Authorship also does is help rank that author in search for original content all over the Interwebz. Can you say guest posting anyone? How about blogging communities? (Just so you know, The SMB Collective is accepting new bloggers; it’s a blogging community I established in 2010 that is ebbing out of dormancy.)

“The providers of social networks are responsible when their platforms are misused to spread hate crime or illegal false news,” German Justice Minister Heiko Maas said in a statement. The proposed law would apply only within German borders. But Maas said Wednesday he would press for similar measures across the European Union. A number of European countries have also sought to counter the fake-news scourge. The Czech Republic recently inaugurated a special unit charged with denouncing false reports. Should the German measure become law, however, experts say it would amount to the boldest step yet by a major Western nation to control social-media content. Depending on how obviously false or illegal a post is, companies would have as little as 24 hours to remove it.

In addition to fake news and hate speech, the draft bill would target posts seen as inciting terrorism or spreading child pornography. Officials have cited a surge of hate speech across the Internet as a major factor behind the rise of far-right violence in Germany, including arson attacks at refugee centers and assaults on police officers.

One of the companies most affected by the bill is Facebook, which has sought to sidestep such laws by taking voluntary measures to curb the spread of fake news. The company echoed concerns that the bill would wrongly foist upon corporations a level of decision-making on the legality of content that should instead reside with German courts.

Rather than setting a new standard, officials also say they are simply forcing social-media outlets to comply with existing laws governing hate speech and incitement in Germany. Incitement and defamation laws here are far broader than in the United States; for instance, laws on the books forbid defaming German leaders and make denial of the Holocaust a crime.