Business/Markets/Stocks/Economics Random, Random

[skatingfan]

And, I am sorry, it is not the fault of the rich.

Accept that the current situation is not an accident, or a coincidence. It is a plan that was put into place starting with Reagan in the '80's, and it's working exactly as intended.

[ponchi101]

It is the sickening idea of "trickle down" economics, I agree with that. But that is the rich having your senators in their pocket.
Jimmy Carter (whom I detest even more than Reagan) said it: the USA is NOT a democracy. It is a plutocracy.
But if the people keep voting for those that are minions of the rich, I say that it is not the fault of the rich.

[ti-amie]

Bloomberg News Bot
@bloombergnews@mstdnnewsbots.org
Two senior Republican lawmakers are asking the US Securities and Exchange Commission to justify including private funds in a proposal that would require high-frequency trading firms to register as securities dealers. https://t.co/4Q9ANVOY8H

[ponchi101]

Bloomberg News Bot
@bloombergnews@mstdnnewsbots.org
Two senior Republican lawmakers WHO MOST LIKELY HAVE LARGE STAKES IN PRIVATE FUNDS are asking the US Securities and Exchange Commission to justify including private funds in a proposal that would require high-frequency trading firms to register as securities dealers AND PUBLISH PUBLICLY OPEN STATEMENTS. https://t.co/4Q9ANVOY8H

As we used to say, fixed that for you

[ti-amie]

How it started



How it's going

[Ainsley]

Twitter is a company that I would get as far away from as I could. Esther Crawford being out is probably the best thing that has happened to her in quite some time.

[ti-amie]

In case it wasn't clear she was laid off.

Twitter Blue head Esther Crawford is out at Twitter

Esther Crawford led Twitter Blue and the company’s payments project. Now she and much of her team have been let go.

By EMMA ROTH

Updated Feb 26, 2023, 3:55 PM EST|

Twitter product manager Esther Crawford no longer has a job at the company following yet another wave of layoffs, as first reported by Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer. Crawford headed up various projects at Twitter, including the company’s Blue with verification subscription as well as Twitter’s forthcoming payments platform.

Alex Heath of The Verge confirmed Crawford and most of the remaining product team were laid off this weekend, leading to speculation that Twitter’s owner Elon Musk may be about to install a new regime at the company.

In a recent interview, Musk said, “I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financially healthy place in that the product roadmap is clearly laid out” before guessing that “before the end of the year” would be a good time to find a replacement for himself as Twitter CEO.



During her time at Twitter, Crawford emerged as one of Twitter’s most prominent product managers under Elon Musk’s leadership, and notably tweeted a picture of herself on the floor of Twitter’s office in a sleeping bag and eye mask. “When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork,” the tweet reads.

This latest round of layoffs is at least the fourth one since Musk assumed ownership of Twitter last November. According to Schiffer, the layoffs affected “well above 50” people and were spread throughout multiple departments. They also included Martijn de Kuijper, the founder of the now-shuttered Revue newsletter platform that Twitter acquired in 2021.

Crawford “began angling for a bigger role” shortly after Musk’s takeover, as documented in this inside look at Twitter from Schiffer, Casey Newton, and Alex Heath. She also commented on Musk’s massive layoffs that halved the company’s workforce last year, and at the time wrote on Slack that “drastic cuts were going to be required to survive, no matter who owned the company.”

Update 3:53PM ET: Added additional information on this weekend’s layoffs.


https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/26/2361 ... rd-layoffs

[Ainsley]

In case it wasn't clear she was laid off.

Twitter Blue head Esther Crawford is out at Twitter

Esther Crawford led Twitter Blue and the company’s payments project. Now she and much of her team have been let go.

By EMMA ROTH

Updated Feb 26, 2023, 3:55 PM EST|

Twitter product manager Esther Crawford no longer has a job at the company following yet another wave of layoffs, as first reported by Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer. Crawford headed up various projects at Twitter, including the company’s Blue with verification subscription as well as Twitter’s forthcoming payments platform.

Alex Heath of The Verge confirmed Crawford and most of the remaining product team were laid off this weekend, leading to speculation that Twitter’s owner Elon Musk may be about to install a new regime at the company.

In a recent interview, Musk said, “I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financially healthy place in that the product roadmap is clearly laid out” before guessing that “before the end of the year” would be a good time to find a replacement for himself as Twitter CEO.



During her time at Twitter, Crawford emerged as one of Twitter’s most prominent product managers under Elon Musk’s leadership, and notably tweeted a picture of herself on the floor of Twitter’s office in a sleeping bag and eye mask. “When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork,” the tweet reads.

This latest round of layoffs is at least the fourth one since Musk assumed ownership of Twitter last November. According to Schiffer, the layoffs affected “well above 50” people and were spread throughout multiple departments. They also included Martijn de Kuijper, the founder of the now-shuttered Revue newsletter platform that Twitter acquired in 2021.

Crawford “began angling for a bigger role” shortly after Musk’s takeover, as documented in this inside look at Twitter from Schiffer, Casey Newton, and Alex Heath. She also commented on Musk’s massive layoffs that halved the company’s workforce last year, and at the time wrote on Slack that “drastic cuts were going to be required to survive, no matter who owned the company.”

Update 3:53PM ET: Added additional information on this weekend’s layoffs.


https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/26/2361 ... rd-layoffs

Yeah, she should use this time being laid off to search for another job.

[Owendonovan]

^Sucker.

[ti-amie]

^Sucker.

It's not funny but...

[ti-amie]

[ti-amie]

Twitter insiders: We can't protect users from trolling under Musk

By Marianna Spring
BBC Disinformation and social media correspondent

Twitter insiders have told the BBC that the company is no longer able to protect users from trolling, state-co-ordinated disinformation and child sexual exploitation, following lay-offs and changes under owner Elon Musk.

Exclusive academic data plus testimony from Twitter users backs up their allegations, suggesting hate is thriving under Mr Musk's leadership, with trolls emboldened, harassment intensifying and a spike in accounts following misogynistic and abusive profiles.

Current and former employees of the company tell BBC Panorama that features intended to protect Twitter users from trolling and harassment are proving difficult to maintain, amid what they describe as a chaotic working environment in which Mr Musk is shadowed by bodyguards at all times. I've spoken to dozens, with several going on the record for the first time.

The former head of content design says everyone on her team - which created safety measures such as nudge buttons - has been sacked. She later resigned. Internal research by Twitter suggests those safety measures reduced trolling by 60%. An engineer working for Twitter told me "nobody's taking care" of this type of work now, likening the platform to a building that seems fine from the outside, but inside is "on fire".

Twitter has not replied to the BBC's request for comment.

My investigation also reveals:

Concerns that child sexual exploitation is on the rise on Twitter and not being sufficiently raised with law enforcement
Targeted harassment campaigns aimed at curbing freedom of expression, and foreign influence operations - once removed daily from Twitter - are going "undetected", according to a recent employee.
Exclusive data showing how misogynistic online hate targeting me is on the rise since the takeover, and that there has been a 69% increase in new accounts following misogynistic and abusive profiles.
Rape survivors have been targeted by accounts that have become more active since the takeover, with indications they've been reinstated or newly created.
Short presentational grey line
Abuse on Twitter is nothing new for me - I'm a reporter who shares my coverage of disinformation, conspiracies and hate there. But throughout most of last year I noticed it steadily lessening across all of the social media sites. And then in November I realised it had got worse on Twitter again.

It turns out, I was right. A team from the International Center for Journalists and the University of Sheffield have been tracking the hate I receive, and their data revealed the abuse targeted at me on Twitter had more than tripled since Mr Musk took over, compared with the same period in the year before.

All of the social media sites have been under pressure to tackle online hate and harmful content - but they say they're taking measures to deal with it. Measures that no longer seem to be top of the agenda at Twitter.

In San Francisco, the home of Twitter's headquarters, I set out to look for answers. What better place to get them than from an engineer - responsible for the computer code that makes Twitter work. Because he's still working there, he's asked us to conceal his identity, so we're calling him Sam.

"For someone on the inside, it's like a building where all the pieces are on fire," he revealed.

"When you look at it from the outside the façade looks fine, but I can see that nothing is working. All the plumbing is broken, all the faucets, everything."

He says the chaos has been created by the huge disruption in staffing. At least half of Twitter's workforce have been sacked or chosen to leave since Musk bought it. Now people from other teams are having to shift their focus, he says.

"A totally new person, without the expertise, is doing what used to be done by more than 20 people," says Sam. "That leaves room for much more risk, many more possibilities of things that can go wrong."

He says previous features still exist but those who designed and maintained them have left - he thinks they are now left unmanned.

"There are so many things broken and there's nobody taking care of it, that you see this inconsistent behaviour," he tells me.

The level of disarray, in his view, is because Mr Musk doesn't trust Twitter employees. He describes him bringing in engineers from his other company - electric car manufacturer Tesla - and asking them to evaluate engineers' code over just a few days before deciding who to sack. Code like that would take "months" to understand, he tells me.

He believes this lack of trust is betrayed by the level of security Mr Musk surrounds himself with.

"Wherever he goes in the office, there are at least two bodyguards - very bulky, tall, Hollywood movie-[style] bodyguards. Even when [he goes] to the restroom," he tells me.

He thinks for Mr Musk it's about money. He says cleaning and catering staff were all sacked - and that Mr Musk even tried to sell the office plants to employees.

Lisa Jennings Young, Twitter's former head of content design, was one of the people who specialised in introducing features designed to protect users from hate. Twitter was a hotbed for trolling long before Mr Musk took over, but she says her team had made good headway at limiting this. Internal Twitter research, seen by the BBC, appears to back this up.

"It was not at all perfect. But we were trying, and we were making things better all the time," she says. It is the first time she's publicly spoken of her experience since she left after Mr Musk's takeover.

Ms Jennings Young's team worked on several new features including safety mode, which can automatically block abusive accounts. They also designed labels applied to misleading tweets, and something called the "harmful reply nudge". The "nudge" alerts users before they send a tweet in which AI technology has detected trigger words or harmful language.

Twitter's own research, seen by the BBC, appears to show the "nudge" and other safety tools being effective.

"Overall 60% of users deleted or edited their reply when given a chance through the nudge," she says. "But what was more interesting, is that after we nudged people once, they composed 11% fewer harmful replies in the future."

These safety features were being implemented around the time my abuse on Twitter seemed to reduce, according to data collated by the University of Sheffield and International Center for Journalists. It's impossible to directly correlate the two, but given what the evidence tells us about the efficacy of these measures, it's possible to draw a link.

But after Mr Musk took over the social media company in late October 2022, Lisa's entire team was laid off, and she herself chose to leave in late November. I asked Ms Jennings Young what happened to features like the harmful reply nudge.

"There's no-one there to work on that at this time," she told me. She has no idea what has happened to the projects she was doing.

So we tried an experiment.

She suggested a tweet that she would have expected to trigger a nudge. "Twitter employees are lazy losers, jump off the Golden Gate bridge and die." I shared it on a private profile in response to one of her tweets, but to Ms Jennings Young's surprise, no nudge was sent. Another tweet with offensive language we shared was picked up - but Lisa says the nudge should have picked up a message wishing death on a user, not just swear words. As Sam had predicted, it didn't seem to be working as it was designed to.

During this investigation, I've had messages from many people who've told me how the hate they receive on Twitter has been increasing since Mr Musk took over - sharing examples of racism, antisemitism and misogyny.

Ellie Wilson, who lives in Glasgow, was raped while at university and began posting about that experience on social media last summer. At the time, she received a supportive response on Twitter.

But when she tweeted about her attacker in January after he was sentenced, she was subject to a wave of hateful messages. She received abusive and misogynistic replies - with some even telling her she deserved to be raped.

"[What] I find most difficult [is] the people that say that I wasn't raped or that this didn't happen and that I'm lying. It's sort of like a secondary trauma," Ms Wilson told me.

Her Twitter following was smaller before the takeover, but when I looked into accounts targeting her with hate this time around, I noticed the trolls' profiles had become more active since the takeover, suggesting they'd been suspended previously and recently reinstated.

Some of the accounts had even been set up around the time of Mr Musk's takeover. They appeared to be dedicated to sending out hate, without profile pictures or identifying features. Several follow and interact with content from popular accounts that have been accused of promoting misogyny and hate - reinstated on Twitter after Musk decided to restore thousands of suspended accounts, including that of controversial influencer Andrew Tate.

"By allowing those people a platform, you're empowering them. And you're saying, 'This is OK, you can do that.'"

Several of the accounts also targeted other rape survivors she's in contact with.

Andrew Tate did not respond to the BBC's request for comment.

New research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue - a UK think tank that investigates disinformation and hate - echoes what I've uncovered about the troll accounts targeting Ellie.

It shows that tens of thousands of new accounts have been created since Mr Musk took over, which then immediately followed known abusive and misogynistic profiles - 69% higher than before he was in charge.

The research suggests these abusive networks are now growing - and that Mr Musk's takeover has created a "permissive environment" for the creation and use of these kinds of accounts.


https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64804007

[ti-amie]

Worker asks Elon Musk on Twitter: Have I been fired?


By James Clayton
North America technology reporter

A Twitter employee has appealed to Elon Musk on the platform to ask whether he had been sacked.

In a tweet to the firm's chief executive, Halli Thorleifsson said: "Your head of HR is not able to confirm if I am employed or not".

Mr Musk responded by asking: "What work have you been doing?"

Mr Thorleifsson told the BBC that nine days after being frozen out of Twitter's accounts he did not know whether he had been fired or not.

After a series of follow up questions and answers with Mr Musk, that read like a live interview for his job, Mr Thorleifsson said he received an email confirming that he had been sacked.

Twitter did not immediately respond to the BBC's request for comment.

Mr Thorleifsson, 45, was a senior director in product design for Twitter. He told the BBC the ambiguity around his job was "strange" and "extremely stressful".

"I opened my computer on Sunday morning nine days ago and saw that the screen was grey and locked, indicating that I had been locked out of my Twitter accounts", he said.

"After a few days had passed I started reaching out to people, including Elon and the head of HR to ask about my situation.

"The head of HR has since twice emailed me and has not been able to answer whether or not I am an employee at Twitter."

Frustrated, he tweeted his top boss, Elon Musk.





After several follow up questions Mr Thorleifsson supplied a list of things he had done at the company. The exchange ended with Mr Musk posting two laughing emojis.







Shortly after that exchange Mr Thorleifsson said that Twitter's Human Resources department had contacted him and said that he had been fired.

The exchange was widely shared on Twitter, with Mr Musk wading in with some replies.

He went on to further criticise Mr Thorleifsson saying: "The reality is that this guy (who is independently wealthy) did no actual work, claimed as his excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, yet was simultaneously tweeting up a storm.

"Can't say I have a lot of respect for that."

The Iceland-based entrepreneur had sold his company, Ueno, a creative design agency, to Twitter in early 2021 - after founding the firm in Reykjavik in 2014.

As part of the acquisition he became a full-time employee at Twitter.

"I decided to sell for a few reasons but one of them is that I have muscular dystrophy and my body is slowly but surely failing me," he told the BBC.

"I have a few good work years left in me so this was a way to wrap up my company, and set up myself and my family for years when I won't be able to do as much."

Mr Thorleifsson is worried that Mr Musk will not honour the contract he signed with Twitter when he sold them his company.

"This is extremely stressful. This is my retirement fund, a way to take care of myself and my family as my disease progresses. Having the richest man in the world on the other end of this, potentially refusing to stand by contracts is not easy for me to accept," he said.

Last month, Elon Musk appeared to fire another 200 Twitter employees. It means that Twitter now has just over 2,000 workers - down from approximately 7,500 in October.

"Companies let people go, that's within their rights," Mr Thorleifsson said. "They usually tell people about it but that's seemingly the optional part at Twitter now".

James Clayton is the BBC's North America technology reporter based in San Francisco. Follow him on Twitter @jamesclayton5.



Musk's reply showing his laughing emoji's is embedded in the article. Link is below.

[ti-amie]

Halli Thorleifsson


Halli Thorleifsson with his family

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64871183

William LeGate @williamlegate

Replying to
@iamharaldur
and
@elonmusk
If he doesn’t pay you, you can sue him & would likely be entitled to at least a year in wages — if not more — in damages. you should definitely seek counsel! plenty would take this case for free

[ti-amie]

Twitter Death Cult
@cspam@mastodon.cloud
The guy didn't even insult Elon or slight him at all, and Elon just openly, in front of God, the Meme Community, and everyone viciously (expletive) talked this dude for daring to speak to him.

This is a new nadir, even for Elon. Proper Twilight Zone (expletive) seeing that all play out in public. Of all the things that have happened this in particular has left me reeling, like it’s too surreal to have actually happened in our reality.

Twitter Death Cult
@cspam@mastodon.cloud
This information matches what's been reported in this BBC article:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64871183

I sincerely hope that the dude has a contract like resetera states and it then gets a goddamn country to sue Twitter for breaking contract and drags him over the coals. Dude deserves way better then how's he's being treated


Twitter Death Cult
@cspam@mastodon.cloud
Here's some background on Hali's alleged deal with Twitter, taken from ResetEra's Musk thread:

https://www.resetera.com/threads/elon-m ... -102287260

Sounds like he's owed a rather large amount of money over time as compensation for pre-Musk Twitter acquiring his company, and Musk is trying to stiff him