Tech
Elon Musk Begins Purging Twitter of Up to 3500 Employees
Billionaire Elon Musk began purging Twitter of its abundance of managers and woke employees on Friday.
Elon Musk’s overhaul of Twitter has sparked condemnation from leftist progressives and Democrats who say they are worried over the platform’s ability to combat disinformation just days before the US midterm elections.
Musk’s purge of Twitter has led to legal action from the left. At least one lawsuit was filed in San Francisco on Thursday, saying that Twitter violated federal law by failing to provide needed notice to sacked employees.
Musk informed employees through email that they would find out if they had been laid off on Friday.
His email did not specify how many approximately 7,500 employees would be let go.
Musk did neither confirm nor correct investor Ron Baron, who asked how much money he would save if he “fired half of Twitter” at a conference in New York on Friday.
Musk responded by discussing Twitter’s cost and income issues, blaming activists within Twitter who persuaded large corporations to stop advertising on the platform.
Musk hasn’t said anything about the Twitter layoffs.
Activist groups, including employees, have been successful in causing a decline in Twitter advertising revenue. We’ve done everything we can to please them, but nothing has worked,” Musk said.
He went on to say that the decline in advertising was expected as many of the advertisers were aligned with EGS, Environmental, social, and corporate governance.
When activist employees lost access to their work accounts hours earlier, they realized they would soon be fired.
These employees and others took to the platform using the hashtag #OneTeam to send messages of solidarity.
The memo to employees stated that job cuts were “essential to ensure the company’s success moving forward.”
No other social media network comes close to Twitter in terms of keeping people informed by public agencies and other key service providers – electoral boards, police departments, utilities, schools, and news sources.
Before Musk’s takeover of Twitter, conservatives accused the social media site of being biased against conservative viewpoints. They were excited by the idea of fair moderation under Musk, who has previously criticized Twitter’s leftist moderation.
Republican, Senator Marsha Blackburn, stated on Friday, “I am hopeful that Elon Musk will assist in reining in Big Tech’s history of silencing users who have a different viewpoint than the left.”
The purge of Spam Bots
Musk has stated that Twitter’s mechanism for ranking tweets should be made public, and he has highlighted user-friendly changes to the service, such as the addition of an edit button and the defeat of “spam bots” that send massive numbers of undesired tweets.
“Free expression is the foundation of a functional democracy,” he stated Monday. “I hope that even my harshest detractors remain on Twitter since that is what free expression entails,” he added.
However, many on the left fear Musk’s layoffs will devastate the social media platform and worry about the possible rise of abuse on the platform. Despite Musk’s saying Twitter would not become a “free-for-all hellscape” under his leadership.
Several employees who tweeted about their job losses claimed that Twitter also eliminated their entire teams, including one devoted to human rights and global conflicts.
Another group for testing Twitter’s algorithms for bias in how tweets are amplified and an engineering team dedicated to making the social platform more accessible to people with disabilities.
Eddie Perez, a former Twitter civic integrity team manager who resigned in September, expressed concern that the layoffs close to the midterm elections could allow disinformation to “spread like wildfire” during the post-election vote-counting phase in particular.
“I have a hard time believing that doesn’t have a meaningful influence on their capacity to handle the quantity of disinformation out there,” he said, adding that there may not be enough personnel to combat it.
Progressive Attack Musk and Twitter
According to Perez, a board member of the nonpartisan election integrity NGO OSET Institute, the post-election period is especially dangerous because “some candidates may refuse to concede and some may cite election anomalies, which is likely to start a fresh cycle of falsehoods.”
However, a Twitter insider says Perez’s concerns are somewhat overinflated, and his comments are stereotypical of the progressive activism that permeated the social media platform.
Since Musk took over as CEO, Twitter staff have been anticipating layoffs. On his first day as owner, he sacked key executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, and removed the company’s board of directors.
As the emails went out, many Twitter employees rushed to the site to voice their support for one another, typically just tweeting blue heart emojis to represent the company’s blue bird logo and salute emojis in answer to one another.
Meanwhile, a coalition of progressive civil rights organizations say the broad layoffs will threaten content moderation standards, and they have increased their requests for corporations to suspend advertising purchases on the site.
This claim has, however, been disputed by Musk supporters saying the progressive left is more worried about their voices being moderated as the platform is being purged of cancel culture activists.
Cancel Culture Activism Surges
The cancel culture activists have said Musk’s layoffs are especially perilous in the run-up to the elections, as well as for transgender people and other groups facing violence spurred by hate speech that circulates online.
Free Press and Color of Change leaders claimed they spoke with Musk on Tuesday, and he committed to keeping and implementing existing election integrity procedures. According to Jessica González, co-CEO of Free Press, the enormous layoffs suggest otherwise.
González disputed Musk’s claim that content moderation procedures had not changed since his takeover, claiming that the organization was already “dangerously under-resourced.”
“When you purportedly lay off 50% of your workforce — including teams in charge of tracking, monitoring, and enforcing content moderation and guidelines — it essentially suggests that content moderation has changed,” González explained.
Media Bias Fact Check rates Free Press.Org as Far-Left biased based on editorial positions that align with the progressive left.
They also rate them mostly factual in reporting due to one-sided reporting that does not always offer a counter perspective.
Employee Lawsuits and Income Losses
Meanwhile, a California’s Employment Development Department representative stated that Twitter had provided no public notice of the impending layoffs as of Friday.
On Thursday, a complaint was filed in US federal court in San Francisco by one laid-off employee and 3 other employees who were locked out of their work accounts.
The cutbacks come at a difficult time for social media businesses, as advertisers cut back and newcomers — primarily TikTok — threaten established platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
Musk blamed cancel culture activists in a Friday post for a “huge loss in income” since taking over Twitter late last week. He did not specify how much revenue had been lost.
Large corporations that have bought into ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), such as General Motors, REI, General Mills, and Audi, have all paused advertising on Twitter owing to concerns about how it would run under Musk.
Volkswagen Group has advised its brands, Audi, Lamborghini, and Porsche, to halt sponsored operations until Twitter updates its brand safety standards.
Musk did tell advertisers last week that Twitter would not become a “free-for-all hellscape,” but many are anxious about whether content monitoring will remain strict and whether sticking to Twitter will degrade their brands.
Musk stated Friday that “nothing has changed with content control.”
Degrading their brand means corporations fear reprisals from woke social media activists who will target their shareholders like they have targeted Musk and Twitter.
(VOR News) – The most recent version of Meta AI, which was created by Mark Zuckerberg and is accessible on social media platforms that are under the authority of the business, is now capable of accomplishing a great deal more than you might have thought it was able to accomplish in the past.
You might have assumed that it was capable of accomplishing anything, but this is a considerable advance over that perception. It is possible that you did not believe that it would be able to complete this particular duty.
What are your thoughts on this?
TechCrunch reports that Meta’s AI-powered assistant has recently been upgraded with a plethora of improvements, one of which being the introduction of the new “Imagine Yourself” generative AI model.
Meta recently updated its assistant, so we made this update.
All members of the general public have access to this most recent update. This upgrade for the assistant was just recently implemented with the purpose of enhancing the functioning of the helper.
On the other hand, what precisely is the new AI model capable of doing, and how does it operate when it makes use of its capabilities?
“The new generative AI model in Meta AI is the driving force behind a new feature that enables the option to make attractive selfies,” TechCrunch reports.
“This new feature enables users to create selfies that are captivating.” In response to the introduction of the new functionality, this feature was developed. The function was developed, as indicated by the information that is presented here.
It is possible for the Imagine Yourself model to make use of an image of a specific person in order to accomplish the goal of delivering visuals of that person.
The phrase “Imagine me” followed by anything that is not regarded to be “not safe for work” (NSFW) is an example of a prompt that can be used to prompt the model. In addition to that, this prompt can be utilised to prompt the respective model.
Imagine Yourself is currently accessible in beta form; however, Meta has not revealed the data that was used to train this artificial intelligence model.
This is despite the fact that the beta version is currently available. This is in spite of the fact that the model was informed by the data throughout its training.
According to TechCrunch, the terms of service for the company make it abundantly clear that any public posts or images that are affiliated with its platforms are open to scrutiny by the general public. This has been stated in the company’s terms of service.
This Meta information was obtained from this source.
Furthermore, Meta AI is providing new editing tools that simplify the process of adding, removing, amending, or adjusting things by applying easy prompts.
These tools are included in the company’s offerings. The availability of these instruments will not be difficult. Within a short period of time, these tools will be made available for offline download.
Within the following month, a completely new button that will be referred to as “Edit with AI” will be introduced. More options for fine-tuning the editing process will be made available to you when you click this button. Users will have the ability to access this button within the system.
Additionally, Meta has announced that within the next few days, users will have access to new shortcuts that will enable them to contribute images generated by Meta AI to feeds, articles, and comments across all Meta applications.
This initiative is expected to take place within the next few days. By virtue of the fact that Meta AI will be able to produce these photographs, this will be feasible. The abbreviated form of these shortcuts will be available to users for their convenience.
SOURCE: GN
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(VOR News) – During the second quarter of the fiscal year 2024, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) recorded sales of $20.82 billion, which was higher than the estimates provided by analysts.
This is a forty percent improvement over the same time period the previous year. Over the same period of time in the previous year, the Taiwanese chipmaker posted earnings of NT$247.85 billion, which is equivalent to $7.6 billion.
This is a 36% increase. According to FactSet, analysts had expected that the company would take in a net income of NT$236.4 billion, which is equivalent to $7.3 billion, during the second quarter of 2024. This figure exceeded that forecast.
This represents a thirty percent increase when compared to the previous year, when the company declared a profit of eight hundred and eighteen billion NTD. This year, the share price of TSMC has climbed by almost 70 percent.
Apple relies on TSMC as a semiconductor manufacturer, and the company has an exclusive partnership with NVIDIA, a company that manufactures chips for artificial intelligence research and development.
Every consumer wants their electronic devices to be equipped with artificial intelligence capabilities, as stated by C.C. Wei, chief executive officer of TSMC.
The artificial intelligence market is currently dominated by TSMC.
I made this statement while I was having a discussion with analysts. He continued by stating that he anticipated that production will reach capacity by the year 2025 or 2026, but that supply would continue to be difficult to come by beyond then.
“I also attempted to achieve a balance between supply and demand, but I am unable to do so at this time,” he explained to reporters. As a result of the extremely high demand, I had to put in a lot of effort in order to fulfill the requirements of my clients.
The Taiwan-listed shares of the chipmaker experienced a decline of 2.43% by the time trading on Thursday came to a conclusion.
As a result of the demand from its customers, which include Apple and Nvidia, TSMC predicted in April that its revenues for the second quarter may increase by as much as thirty percent, which was a figure that exceeded the expectations.
In order to surpass the initial expectations, it increased its sales projections for the second quarter from $19.1 billion to between $19.6 billion and $20.4 billion between those two numbers.
In addition, TSMC made the announcement that it would continue to adhere to its plans to invest up to 32 billion dollars this year, the majority of which will be allocated to the development of innovative technology.
TSMC announced in June that their net revenue for the month of May increased to seven billion dollars, representing a thirty percent increase between the previous year and the current year.
The income of the company for the months of January through May climbed by 27% compared to the same period in the previous year.
This was despite a 2.7% decline from April for TSMC.
C.C. Wei, chairman and chief executive officer of TSMC, repeated past forecasts that the semiconductor industry, excluding the memory sector, will climb by 10% this year, with artificial intelligence being the primary driver of this growth.
Chip markets around the world, including those of TSMC, experienced a decline in the early hours of Wednesday as a result of comments made by former President Donald Trump that were critical of Taiwan and rumors that the administration of Vice President Joe Biden was purportedly considering imposing more stringent trade restrictions.
By the time the market closed, the shares of TSMC that are listed in Taiwan had experienced a decrease of 2.4%.
It has been claimed that the administration of Vice President Joe Biden is mulling over the idea of imposing an export embargo known as the foreign direct product rule on allies such as Japan and the Netherlands in the event that these countries continue to provide China advanced chipmaking technology.
SOURCE: QZ
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(VOR News) – On Thursday, shares of Nokia, a Finnish telecom business, dropped after the company disclosed a decline in its operational profit for the second quarter that was around 32 percent lower than the previous quarter.
We were able to attribute this reduction to the fact that there was a dearth of demand for the 5G equipment that Nokia was producing.
By the time the market opened at nine o’clock London time, the stock of the business that is listed in Helsinki had already experienced a decline of eight percent.
Today, Nokia reported a comparable operating profit of $462 million.
This value was reported by the company. When compared Nokia to the 619 million euros that were recorded for the same period of time in the previous year, this implies a loss of roughly a third more than what was stated.
Data provided by LSEG indicates that the firm reported a decline in its net sales of 18%, bringing the total to 4.47 billion euros.
This Nokia represents the lowest level of net sales attained since the fourth quarter of 2015. This decline was attributed to “ongoing market weakness” by the corporation at the time of the decline.
“The most significant impact was the challenging comparison period from the previous year, which saw the peak of India’s rapid 5G deployment, with India accounting for three quarters of the decline,” Mr. Pekka Lundmark, CEO of Nokia, remarked in the announcement of the results. “The most significant impact was the challenging comparison period.”
Continuing along the same lines, he emphasized that the landscape in the mobile networks business continues to be “challenging as operators continue to be cautious.”
In spite of this, Nokia forecasts that the business situation will become “stabilizing” and that there will be a “significant acceleration in net sales growth in the second half” of the year. The order intake that was seen in the most recent quarter served as the basis for these forecasts.
According to the company’s CEO, “though the dynamic is showing signs of improvement, the recovery of net sales is occurring somewhat later than we had anticipated, which will have an effect on our business group’s net sales assumptions for the year 2024.”
Despite the fact that this has taken place, we are still well on our approach to fulfilling our full-year target, which is further supported by the early action that we have taken addressing cost.
The business continues to strive for a result that is either near to or slightly below the midpoint of its comparable operating profit prediction for the entire year, which ranges from 2.3 billion to 2.9 billion euros.
Nokia’s founders set this goal for the company.
AT&T, the largest telecommunications company in the United States, made the decision to select Ericsson as the provider for the construction of a telecom network that is completely based on a technology known as ORAN at the end of the previous year.
A severe blow was handed to Nokia by this decision, as the company had previously been awarded a significant contract in the North American market.
Both the Finnish company and its Swedish competitor, Ericsson, have initiated strong cost-cutting initiatives in the midst of an industry-wide fight against a slowing economy and infrastructure expenditure cuts from mobile carriers. Ericsson is a Swedish company that competes with the Finnish company.
The revelation that Nokia will be cutting off as many as 14,000 employees came in October, following the company’s realization that it had experienced a major decline in profitability during the third quarter.
By the year 2026, the company intends to achieve a reduction in its gross expenses of between 800 million and 1.2 billion euros within the time frame.
The business made the announcement on Thursday that it had made “significant progress” on its entire cost reduction program and that it had implemented actions with the goal of cutting expenses by a total of 400 million euros up to this time.
SOURCE: CNBC
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