Tag: Elon

Elon Musk reopened Twitter for political ad business. But is it too late?

[ad_1]

The platform’s new ad verification process and disclosure mechanisms are rudimentary so far, relying on both potential advertisers and members of the public to fill out a form hosted by Google, unusual for a tech company that would typically be expected to build most of its own web features.
Both Republican and Democratic digital operatives said they expect Twitter advertising will eventually pick up as campaigns seek to meet voters wherever they are, including on the Musk-owned platform. But the same concerns about Twitter’s “brand safety” driving the platform’s overall advertising decline remain. Twitter’s rollout of the new ad policy, including the use of Google Forms, is not exactly inspiring confidence.
“It’s been several years since political advertisers have used Twitter, so it’s not just in our muscle memory or our toolbox in the way that some other things would be,” said Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist and director of the Center for Campaign Innovation, which studies campaign practices. “And then there is a lot of uncertainty about Twitter and who is using it.”
Twitter stopped accepting political advertising in 2019, with then-CEO Jack Dorsey saying political message reach should be “earned, not bought.” Political ads accounted for only a small share of the company’s revenue prior to the ban, Twitter said at the time.
The slow start to political advertising could partially reflect the timing. Overall political advertising is relatively low across all digital platforms in February of an off election year. Campaigns typically pick up spending on digital advertising ahead of competitive elections beginning in the fall ahead of the election year.
But campaigns also have to consider some of the “brand safety” issues that have caused other advertisers to leave or reconsider their presence on the platform, said Mark Jablonowski, president of DSPolitical, a digital advertising firm that works with Democratic candidates and causes.
The issue is not necessarily about Musk’s professed political beliefs, Jablonowski said, but reflects campaigns needing the ability to get their message across in an environment where content policies do not “amplify misinformation.”
Twitter’s policies define political advertising as ads that advocate for or against a candidate or party, appeal for votes or financial support related to an election or are paid for by registered political groups. For now, the platform is also allowing only certain kinds of political ads — sponsored posts, for example, but not sponsored hashtags. The policies also say ads cannot include false or misleading content, although it’s not clear how that policy will be enforced. Since Musk bought Twitter, he has expanded the use of community notes, which allow users to comment on others tweets intending to correct misinformation, but has also eliminated the platform’s policy of misinformation related to Covid-19 and has faced criticism for allowing back users previously suspended for spreading misinformation.

Advertisers can request verification to run political ads by submitting information via a Google Form. The company follows up with those who have submitted, with the process expected to take between two and four weeks, according to Twitter’s website. It is not clear how many campaigns have attempted to be verified so they can run ads.
There is similarly a Google Form where users can request information on political ads running on Twitter. By contrast, Meta has a verification process within its website and a public ad library on its website, where all political ads are searchable.
After POLITICO requested data on ad disclosures so far, Twitter responded on Feb. 27 saying “there are no existing political ads to disclose at this time.” The company did not respond to follow-up questions about whether campaigns or groups were going through its verification process to run ads.
“It’s apparent that there’s a resource crunch at Twitter if they’re using a Google form for the verification process,” Jablonowski said. “It seems like they want the revenue from political advertising but don’t have the infrastructure to support it.”
Polling from the Pew Research Center in 2021 found that less than 1 in 4 U.S. adults use Twitter, while nearly 70 percent use Facebook.
Still, the minority of adults who use Twitter are highly interested in politics. Campaigns and groups are likely to try out the platform eventually, particularly as digital advertising remains generally cheap and other methods of running ads will become more saturated as elections approach.
“Campaign advertising follows voters’ eyeballs,” Wilson said.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misspelled the name of Mark Jablonowski, president of DSPolitical.
[ad_2]
#Elon #Musk #reopened #Twitter #political #business #late
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 3, 2023
Elon Musk takes next Tesla Gigafactory to Mexico

[ad_1]
San Francisco: Elon Musk has chosen Mexico for the next Tesla Gigafactory and will reveal more about it during the company’s investor day.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said that Tesla agreed to use recycled water at the plant in Monterrey throughout the manufacturing process.
“He (Musk) was very responsive, understanding our concerns and accepting our proposals,” said the President.
Musk is expected to present the long-awaited and often teased ‘Master Plan 3’ during the investor day on March 1 (US time) at the company’s Gigafactory Texas located near Austin, Texas, reports TechCrunch.
Tesla has several factories in the US, including in Fremont, California.
The electric carmaker also has factories near Berlin and Shanghai.
US automakers Ford and GM, German automaker Volkswagen and Japanese companies Honda, Nissan and Toyota have vehicle assembly plants in Mexico.
GM, Kia and Stellantis have factories in Monterrey.

“I want to thank Elon Musk, who was very respectful and understood the importance of addressing the problem of water scarcity,” the Mexican President was quoted as saying in reports.
Musk was reportedly touring three Mexican states in December 2022. It was reported locally that the automaker plans an initial investment of $800 million to $1 billion.
[ad_2]
#Elon #Musk #takes #Tesla #Gigafactory #Mexico
( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

March 1, 2023
Male activists in Bangalore organise special ‘puja’ for Elon Musk

[ad_1]
Bengaluru: A group of male activists from the Save Indian Family Federation (SIFF) NGO, which fights for men’s rights, organised a special ‘puja’ here for Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk and thanked him for purchasing the micro-blogging platform “allowing men to express their views against the oppression of authorities”.
The video of the incident that took place in the city’s Freedom Park has gone viral on social media.
In a Twitter post on Monday, the NGO said that “men’s Activists of SIFF used to be often shadow banned from Twitter by previous woke admins of the company”.
“After Elon Musk fired them, the MRAs have got back their right to free speech.”
The “special worshipping” was done on the sidelines of a protest against PILs on marital rape in the Supreme Court.
The post by the activists stated “SIFF members are worshipping guru Elon Musk in Bengaluru, India for purchasing Twitter and allowing men to express their views against the oppression of authorities”.
The activists were seen in the video with banners that read “mens lives matters” and “men have a right to peaceful existence”
The members lit incense sticks before a portrait of the tech billionaire and chanted “Elan Muskaya Namaha”, “Elon Musk ki Jaia, “Elon Musk se kuch seekho Adani, Ambani”.

SIFF members maintained that laws on rape, domestic violence and dowry are biased against men which are leading to lodging of false cases against them.
“The law is twisted to create fear among men rather than delivering justice to the victims. The members clarified that at the same time they are not against the laws relating to sexual violence in marriage or relationship, they are concerned with the abuse of laws,” they added.
[ad_2]
#Male #activists #Bangalore #organise #special #puja #Elon #Musk
( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

February 28, 2023
Gavin Newsom and Elon Musk recharge bromance at Tesla announcement

[ad_1]

The appearance was meant to promote California’s commitment to electric vehicle initiatives and its robust economy, but it also highlighted Newsom’s long-standing relationship with the polarizing billionaire, which appears to be alive and well despite Tesla relocating some of its operations to Texas, ignoring the state’s pandemic orders, and Musk nearly running another Silicon Valley giant, Twitter, into the ground.
Newsom says his relationship with Musk goes back “decades,” but the two have engaged in some light public sparring in recent years. Musk in 2021 derided California as “the land of sort of overregulation, overlitigation, overtaxation.” The governor in September suggested Tesla wouldn’t even exist without California’s incentives.
But none of that was brought up on Wednesday. Musk cheerfully noted that Newsom was “one of the first to buy a Tesla Roadster back in the day” — noting he would have had to put down $100,000 to reserve one in 2007. That also means Newsom would have been one of the first Californians to buy an electric vehicle. According to data from the state’s energy commission, only 112 zero-emission vehicles had been sold by 2010.
“That was a healthy deposit you had to make,” Newsom said, joking he made the purchase “back when I had money.”
“That was a lot of money in 2007,” Musk said.
“It’s still a lot of money,” Newsom replied. “Trust me, brother, you haven’t looked at my salary … We had about the same net worth back then, 20 years ago.”
The governor, who receives a state salary of $224,020, reported at least $1.6 million in income, assets and investments for 2021. Newsom founded a lucrative wine and hospitality business in 1992, but moved the Plumpjack Group assets to a blind trust upon taking office in 2018.
His office didn’t respond to a question about how many Tesla vehicles he owns, but a 2018 profile in The New Yorker makes mention of three Teslas in his driveway.

By the end of 2022, a total of about 1.4 million ZEVs had been sold in the state, including 346,000 sold last year for nearly 19 percent of the new vehicle market. California has a goal of propelling electric vehicle sales to 100 percent of the new car market by 2035.
Jeremy B. White contributed to this report.
[ad_2]
#Gavin #Newsom #Elon #Musk #recharge #bromance #Tesla #announcement
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 23, 2023
Elon Musk reportedly forced Twitter algorithm to boost his tweets after Super Bowl flop

[ad_1]
Twitter chief executive Elon Musk rallied a team of roughly 80 engineers to reconfigure the platform’s algorithm so his tweets would be more widely viewed, tech news site Platformer has reported.
A disgruntled Musk called for an emergency effort after a tweet he sent during Sunday’s Super Bowl game failed to achieve as much engagement as a tweet from Joe Biden, interviews and internal documents reviewed by Platformer have revealed.
The effort was sparked when a tweet from the president, who has 37m followers, generated nearly 29m impressions while a similar tweet from Musk – who has 128m followers – generated little more than 9.1m impressions.
A Twitter employee and cousin of Elon Musk, James Musk, posted urgently in the company Slack at 2.30am the following Monday morning, asking all employees who can code to participate. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem,” he wrote. “This is high urgency.”
Engineers then deployed a new algorithm that artificially inflated Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000, ensuring that more than 90% of Musk’s 128.9m followers see them. Many who do not follow Musk are also being served his tweets in their feed through the “For you” tab of the app’s home page, which curates tweets from a number of accounts, including those a user is not following.
Elon Musk checks his phone during Super Bowl LVII in Glendale, Arizona. Photograph: Caitlin O’Hara/Reuters
Musk seemed to publicly confirm the move, in his own way, posting a meme about forcing followers to read his tweets. He also told followers to “stay tuned” while Twitter makes adjustments to the algorithm.
The decision to devote internal resources to promoting his own tweets comes amid ongoing reports about Musk’s obsession with his own impressions on the platform. Last week, a report from Platformer also revealed Musk had fired a principal engineer at Twitter who told him views on his tweets had decreased organically, with interest in the erratic CEO waning. Users have complained since Twitter made its “For you” page the default feed on the platform in January that Musk’s tweets were appearing more frequently.
Musk, who purchased Twitter in October 2022 for $44bn, has made a number of additional changes to the platform in the intervening months, allowing the return of previously banned accounts like that of Donald Trump, changing the process for Twitter verification, and revoking free access to the platform’s API, or application programming interface.

Amid ongoing criticisms of his decisions as chief executive, Musk has promised to step down and find a replacement as soon as later this year. Current employees have described a harrowing environment at the company, which laid off nearly half its workforce in November 2022. At the time, Musk defended the cuts and other cost-cutting measures, stating the company was losing $4m per day.

[ad_2]
#Elon #Musk #reportedly #forced #Twitter #algorithm #boost #tweets #Super #Bowl #flop
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

February 16, 2023
Elon Musk spends long day at Twitter HQ, fixes 2 key problems

[ad_1]
New Delhi: Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Sunday said that engineers resolved two significant problems on the platform during a “long day at Twitter HQ” with him.
He said that the ‘Fanout service for Following feed’ was getting overloaded when “I tweeted, resulting in up to 95 per cent of my tweets not getting delivered at all”.
“Following is now pulling from search (aka Earlybird). When Fanout crashed, it would also destroy anyone else’s tweets in queue,” Musk added.
He also said that the recommendation algorithm was using absolute block count, rather than percentile block count, “causing accounts with many followers to be dumped, even if blocks were only 0.1 per cent of followers”.
“Also, it’s trivial to bot spam accounts with blocks,” the Twitter CEO said.
Musk also said that oversized fonts and undersized paragraph spacing will be fixed this week.
“Advertising also needs to be semantic keyword-based, so it’s contextually relevant. Amazingly, ads shown when doing twitter searches don’t consider the search words! We’re changing that as fast as possible,” Musk informed.
When a user said that Blocks are quite powerful and “seems like for accounts with a lot of reach, they’ll probably get blocked a lot”, Musk replied that the giant block lists are problematic.

“They mess up the recommendation system & create a DDoS vector,” he added.
[ad_2]
#Elon #Musk #spends #long #day #Twitter #fixes #key #problems
( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

February 13, 2023
Elon Musk goes to war with researchers

[ad_1]

Press play to listen to this article
Voiced by artificial intelligence.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he promised an era of openness for the social media platform. Yet that transparency will soon come at a price.
On Thursday, the social-networking giant will shut down free and unfettered access to reams of data on the company’s millions of users. As part of that overhaul, researchers worldwide who track misinformation and hate speech will also have their access shut down — unless they stump up the cash to keep the data tap on.
The move is part of Musk’s efforts to make Twitter profitable amid declining advertising revenue, sluggish user growth and cut-throat competition from the likes of TikTok and Instagram.

But the shift has riled academics, infuriated lawmakers and potentially put Twitter at odds with new content-moderation rules in the European Union that require such data access to independent researchers.
“Shutting down or requiring paid access to the researcher API will be devastating,” said Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, who has spent years relying on Twitter’s API to track potentially harmful material online.
“There are inequities in resources for researchers around the world. Scholars at Ivy League institutions in the United States could probably afford to pay,” she added. “But there are scholars all around the world who simply will not have the resources to pay anything for access to this.”
The change would cut free access to Twitter’s so-called application program interface (API), which allowed outsiders to track what happened on the platform on a large scale. The API essentially gave outsiders direct access to the company’s data streams and was kept open to allow researchers to monitor users, including to spot harmful, fake or misleading content.
A team at New York University, for instance, published a report last month on how far wide-reaching Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election had been by directly tapping into Twitter’s API system. Without that access, the level of Kremlin meddling would have been lost to history, according to Joshua Tucker, co-director at New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics.
Twitter did not respond to repeated requests to comment on whether this week’s change would affect academics and other independent researchers. The move still may not happen at all, depending on how Twitter tweaks its policies. The company’s development team said via a post on the social network last week it was committed to allowing others to access the platform via some form of API.
“We’ll be back with more details on what you can expect next week,” they said.
Yet the lack of details about who will be affected — and how much the data access will cost from February 9 — has left academics and other researchers scrambling for any details. Meanwhile, many of Twitter’s employees working on trust and safety issues have either been fired or have left the company since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October.
In Europe’s crosshairs
The timing of the change comes as the European Commission on Thursday will publish its first reports from social media companies, including Twitter, about how they are complying with the EU’s so-called code of practice on disinformation, a voluntary agreement between EU legislators and Big Tech firms in which these companies agree to uphold a set of principles to clamp down on such material. The code of practice includes pledges to “empower researchers” by improving their ability to access companies’ data to track online content.
Thierry Breton, Europe’s internal market commissioner, talked to Musk last week to remind him about his obligations regarding the bloc’s content rules, though neither discussed the upcoming shutdown of free data access to the social network.
“We cannot rely only on the assessment of the platforms themselves. If the access to researchers is getting worse, most likely that would go against the spirit of that commitment,” Věra Jourová, the European Commission’s vice president for values and transparency, told POLITICO.
“It’s worrying to see a reversal of the trend on Twitter,” she added in reference to the likely cutback in outsiders’ access to the company’s data.
While the bloc’s disinformation standards are not mandatory, separate content rules from Brussels, known as the Digital Services Act, also directly require social media companies to provide data access to so-called vetted researchers. By complying with the code of practice on disinformation, tech giants can ease some of their compliance obligations under those separate content-moderation rules and avoid fines of up to 6 percent of their revenues if they fall afoul of the standards.
Yet even Twitter’s inclusion in the voluntary standards on disinformation is on shaky ground.
The company submitted its initial report that will be published Wednesday and Musk said he was committed to complying with the rules. But Camino Rojo — who served as head of public policy for Spain and was the main person at Twitter involved in the daily work on the code since November’s mass layoffs — is no longer working at the tech giant as of last week, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions within Twitter. Rojo did not respond to a request for comment.
American lawmakers are also trying to pass legislation that would improve researcher access to social media companies following a series of scandals. The companies’ role in fostering the January 6 Capitol Hill riots has triggered calls for tougher scrutiny, as did the so-called Facebook Files revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugen, which highlighted how difficult it remains for outsiders to understand what is happening on these platforms.
“Twitter should be making it easier to study what’s happening on its platform, not harder,” U.S. Representative Lori Trahan, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement in reference to the upcoming change to data access. “This is the latest in a series of bad moves from Twitter under Elon Musk’s leadership.”
Rebecca Kern contributed reporting from Washington.
This article has been updated to reflect a change in when the European Commission is expected to publish reports under the code of practice on disinformation.

[ad_2]
#Elon #Musk #war #researchers
( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

February 8, 2023
US Prez Joe Biden turns 80, Elon Musk restores Trump’s twitter

[ad_1]
The US President, Joe Biden, is 80 today, which is one thing. On the other hand, Elon Musk restored access to Donald Trump’s account on Twitter on Saturday, lifting a ban that had prevented the former president from using the social media platform ever since a pro Trump mob attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, as Congress prepared to certify Joe Biden’s election victory.
Following a vote asking Twitter users if Trump’s account should be reinstated, Musk made the announcement in the evening. With a majority of 51.8%, “yes” was chosen. Before deciding whether to reinstate suspended accounts, Musk had previously stated that Twitter would set up new rules and a “content moderation council.”
“The people have had their say. Trump will get his job back. Musk used the Latin term “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” which translates to “the voice of the people, the voice of God,” in his tweet.
Shortly later, Trump’s account, which had earlier looked to be suspended, returned on the platform with all of his prior tweets—more than 59,000 in all. At least initially, his supporters had vanished, but he quickly started getting them back. But as of late Saturday, there have been no new tweets from the account.
Less than a month after Tesla CEO Elon Musk took over Twitter and four days after Trump declared his campaign for the 2024 presidential election, Musk restored the account.
Trump may or may not truly come back to Twitter. Trump, who was an unstoppable tweeter prior to his suspension, has previously claimed that he would not return even if his account was reactivated. He has been relying on Truth Social, a far more modest social media platform that he started after being banned from Twitter.
Additionally, on Saturday, Trump mentioned Musk’s poll in a video address to a gathering of Republican Jews in Las Vegas, but added that he thought Twitter had “a lot of problems.”
“I hear we’re receiving a lot of support to also return to Twitter. I don’t see it because I can’t think of a good explanation for it, said Trump. He said, seemingly alluding to the recent internal turmoil at Twitter, “It may make it, it may not make it.”

Trump’s potential return to the platform comes in the wake of Musk’s purchase of Twitter last month, which sparked widespread worries that the site’s billionaire owner would enable the propagation of lies and misinformation. Musk has often stated his opinion that Twitter has become too censorship-heavy for free speech.
His attempts to redesign the area have been both quick and disorganised. Many of the 7,500 full-time employees and incalculable numbers of contractors who are in charge of content moderation and other critical duties have been fired by Musk. A large number of employees, including hundreds of software engineers, resigned as a result of his demand that the remaining staff promise to work “very hardcore.”
Following the mass layoffs and staff migration, users have noted more spam and frauds on their feeds and in their direct messages, among other issues. Twitter may soon deteriorate to the point where it could actually crash, according to some programmers who were fired or resigned this week.
More than 15 million people participated in Musk’s online survey, which was published on his personal Twitter account.
Musk acknowledged that the findings lacked much rigour. He tweeted early on Saturday that “Bot & troll armies might be running out of steam shortly.” “Some intriguing insights to improve polling in the future.”
He has employed Twitter polling before to help him make business decisions. Following a poll of his supporters, he decided to sell millions of shares of Tesla stock last year.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, tweeted a video of the uprising on January 6 in response to Musk’s poll on Trump. On Friday, she wrote that Trump’s last tweets “were used to fuel an insurrection, many people died, the US Vice President was almost assassinated, and hundreds were injured but I guess that’s not enough for you to answer the question.” It’s a poll on Twitter.
Two days after Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol and shortly after the former president urged them to “fight like hell,” he was denied access to Twitter. After Trump sent out two tweets that Twitter claimed raised concerns about the integrity of the election and threatened the inauguration of Vice President Biden, the website shut off his account.
Trump was also banned from Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram, all of which are owned by Meta Platforms, after the incident on January 6. Additionally suspended was his capacity to upload videos to his YouTube page. In January, Facebook plans to review its decision to suspend Trump.
Trump’s use of social media throughout his time as president presented a significant challenge to major social media platforms that aimed to strike a balance between the public’s desire to hear from public officials and concerns about false information, bigotry, harassment, and incitement to violence.
However, Musk claimed that Twitter’s move to block Trump was “morally awful” and “very idiotic” in a speech at an auto convention in May.
Musk announced earlier this month that the firm would not permit anyone who had been banned from the site to rejoin until Twitter had developed policies for doing so, including creating a “content moderation committee.” Musk completed the $44 billion buyout of Twitter in late October.
Musk tweeted on Friday that the comedian Kathy Griffin, the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, and the conservative Christian news satire website Babylon Bee have had their suspended Twitter accounts returned. He emphasised that a choice had not yet been made regarding Trump. On Twitter, he also replied “no” to a request to revive conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ account.
The Tesla CEO referred to the new content policy as “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach” in a tweet on Friday.
He said that although a tweet that was regarded to be “negative” or to include “hate” would be permitted on the website, only users who explicitly looked for it would be able to view it. According to Musk, such tweets would also be “demonetized, so no adverts or other money to Twitter.”
(With inputs from various media organisations)

(We don’t allow anyone to copy content. For Copyright or Use of Content related questions, visit here.)
To support our Independent Journalism

[ad_2]
#Prez #Joe #Biden #turns #Elon #Musk #restores #Trumps #twitter

November 20, 2022