Internet & Websites - Page 5

Now that Elon Musk has purchased Twitter, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has begun revealing some of his stances on changes that may come to the platform.

Musk hasn't been shy about saying that Twitter needs changes, as it was one of his main reasons for purchasing the world's second-largest social media to take it private as he believes that under his guidance and changes, he will "unlock it". Since the purchasing has gone through, Musk has dropped hints on his beliefs for Twitter to "deserve public trust,"; what Twitter's direct-messaging services needs, and now account authentication.

In reply to a post by Mike Huckabee that directly asks Musk to change Twitter's account requirements to have people's real names attached to them so people cannot hide behind anonymity. Huckabee calls upon people to "be man enough or woman enough to stand by what you say!". In response to this Tweet, Musk says that "Authentication is important, but so is anonymity for many. A balance must be struck."

Despite having restrictions on his tweets, Elon Musk has taken center stage once again to reveal his stance on direct messaging (DMs) on Twitter.

The SpaceX and Tesla CEO took to his personal Twitter account to reveal that he supports end-to-end encryption-style DMs and then referenced the messaging platform Signal. Musk went on to write that he believes Twitter should have this messaging service "so no one can spy on or hack your messages".

At the moment, administrators at Twitter with the appropriate level of system access can view a message sent between two individuals, and by proposing end-to-end encryption, Musk is saying that Twitter shouldn't be allowed to read the messages users are sending. Essentially, when a message is sent from the user's phone, it arrives on the Twitter server encrypted and is then transferred to the receiver's phone, where its deciphered.

Meta's latest financials reveal how many people use Facebook every day, and the answer is surprising.

Facebook is absolutely huge and is easily the largest social media platform on the market. A quarter of the world's population, or 25% of people on planet Earth, log into and use Facebook every day.

The numbers show that more people are using Facebook than ever before. A record-breaking 1.96 billion people used Facebook on a daily basis through January and March 2022. That's a substantial yearly increase of 4.4% in users, or 82 million people

Facebook is under pressure from several regulators worldwide to change how it handles users' data.

A leaked internal document written in 2021 obtained from Facebook by Motherboard shows that Facebook was "surprised" by a "tsunami of inbound regulations," and privacy engineers on its Ad and Business Product team are sounding alarm bells within the company to institute change to prevent trouble with regulators. The document uses the acronyms 3PD, 1PD, and SCD to refer to third-party data, first-party data, and sensitive categories data, respectively.

Since Elon Musk's official purchase of Twitter, many individuals have been asking the SpaceX CEO questions about what he will do to the platform when the deal has closed and what he should investigate internally once he has taken the reins.

Dave Rubin, a conservative political commentator who hosts "The Rubin Report," took to Twitter to ask Musk to investigate The New York Times, Forbes, and other media outlets for buying "their Twitter followers to fake influence." Rubin then pointed out that The New York Times Twitter account has 53 million followers but only gets about 50 retweets per post, indicating a severe lack of user engagement despite the extremely high follower count.

The very same principle applies to Forbes' Twitter account, which has 17.8 million followers but only receives about fifteen retweets per post and about ten comments. Notably, Rubin didn't provide evidence of these media outlets directly purchasing followers but has pointed out an interesting metric nonetheless. Furthermore, Musk has responded to the call for an investigation to be launched by replying, "Yeah, I noticed that too. Pretty weird."

Since his purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk has been launching off several tweets about what he believes Twitter needs to be in the future, revealing some of the ethos he will be bringing to the company.

Earlier this week, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $46.5 billion, citing that free speech is the "bedrock of a functioning democracy" and that "Twitter is the digital town square". When the deal was struck, Musk said that he wanted to "unlock it" by implementing changes such as making the social media platform open source and making it "politically neutral".

The now Twitter owner seeks to make Twitter a publicly trusted platform, and recently revealed how he intends to do that. Musk to his personal account on April 28 to write that "For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally". Jokingly, Musk said that his next big company purchase will be Coca-Cola as he desires to put the cocaine back in the drink. More on that story below.

Following Elon Musk's official purchase of Twitter and the long process of closing a multi-billion dollar deal, Musk has found himself in the middle of some controversy.

Musk only recently purchased Twitter, and as a part of the 95-page-long agreement, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO agreed to put restrictions on any future tweets until the deal was closed. The restrictions that Musk signed on for was that any future tweets wouldn't "disparage" Twitter or any of its representatives.

Twenty-four hours after the agreement was signed, Musk posted two tweets; one was a reply to podcast host Saagar Enjeti flagging, who posted an article that claimed Twitter's legal head, Vijaya Gadde, was "emotional" and cried during a meeting where the deal was being discussed. Enjeti described Gadde as Twitter's "top censorship advocate", which was a call back to the role Gadde played in Twitter's decision to stop the New York Post from publishing a story about President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden.

A YouTuber that goes by the Trevor Jacob filmed himself crashing his own plane over California's Los Padres national forest and has now lost his pilot license.

Jacob filmed himself flying over California's Los Padres national forest in a small plane that was equipped with several camera angles. In the video, Jacob can be heard saying, "I'm over the mountains and I ... have an engine out," and then he can be seen abandoning his plane, jumping out, and filming himself parachuting towards the ground. The video was uploaded on December 24, 2021, and sparked an investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on April 11, 2022.

The investigation has concluded that the crash of Jacob's 1940 Taylorcraft BL-65 was intentional and that Jacob "demonstrated a lack of care, judgment, and responsibility by choosing to jump out of an aircraft solely so you could record the footage of the crash."

President Trump won't be returning to Twitter any time soon, while SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk has just secured Twitter for $44 billion... and ex-CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, is singing Musk's praises.

In a series of new tweets, Jack said that doesn't believe "anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness".

Jack continued: "Elon's goal of creating a platform that is "maximally trusted and broadly inclusive" is the right one. This is also Parag's goal, and why I chose him. Thank you both for getting the company out of an impossible situation. This is the right path...I believe it with all my heart".

YouTube launched on December 15, 2005, and since then, it has become an internet sensation and a standard, to the point where younger generations can't even imagine an internet without it.

With YouTube getting thousands upon thousands of hours uploaded to its every day in 2022, in 2005, there was nothing on the platform, that was until YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, an American software engineer, uploaded the very first YouTube video titled "Me at the zoo" on April 24, 2005. The 17-year anniversary of the video's upload and the beginning of YouTube's journey was just yesterday.

In April 2005, YouTube launched a public beta and around the same time, Karim, one of YouTube's co-founders, left the project to study for a master's degree in computing science at Stanford University. Karim left with a substantial number of shares in the company, which was later purchased by Google for $1.65 billion in 2006, sending YouTube's share value skywards.

Elon Musk has secured the required $46.5 billion in funding for his acquisition of Twitter, according to a filing with US regulators on Thursday.

The SpaceX and Tesla CEO will be ponying up $33.5 billion on his own, which includes $21 billion in equity and $12.5 billion in margin loans. The richest man on the planet still requires regular banks, with financial firms like Morgan Stanley agreeing to cough up $13 billion in debt against Twitter, according to the filing.

Twitter has been tripping over itself to not let this happen, going as far as introducing a "poison pill" so that someone like Musk couldn't buy the social networking giant. Well, spoiler alert... I think it's about done. The second-largest shareholder of Twitter has just secured $46.5 billion in funding to do what you should do when you're obscenely rich -- whatever the hell you want to.

The full collection of The Facebook Papers contains thousands of pages of internal company documents from Meta.

The collection was shared last year with seventeen United States news outlets by Frances Haugen, a whistleblower, and former Facebook product manager. Haugen also shared the documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission and a consortium of European news organizations.

The Facebook Papers have yet to make their way into the wider public domain for public access and scrutiny. Gizmodo was one of the outlets that had the documents shared with them and announced in November 2021 that it would publicize the documents after partnering with independent experts who would review them to redact private individuals' sensitive information.

Hours after putting down an offer of $43 billion for the world's second-largest social networking company, Elon Musk appeared on the TED stage to explain why.

In early April, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk purchased a 9.2% state in Twitter valued at $2.9 billion. This purchase by Musk caused the social media's share price to skyrocket by 25% and led people to believe that Musk was going to join Twitter's board of directors and attempt to implement a bunch of new changes. Now, the SpaceX CEO has changed his plans by putting down $43 billion for 100% of the company's shares at $54.20 a share, according to an SEC filing.

Twitter is finally... finally... FINALLY adding an edit button that millions have wanted for years now. The social networking giant -- now 9.2% owned by SpaceX and Tesla owner Elon Musk -- has announced people can edit their tweets after they've posted them. Hooray!

Twitter will be testing the edit feature with its Twitter Blue subscribers in "the coming months", but the social networking giant tweeted -- without an edit -- that it had been "working on an edit feature since last year". The edit feature comes within 24 hours of Musk being added to the board of directors at Twitter, and barely a few more hours more in the aftermath that Musk had purchased billions of dollars in Twitter shares.

Jay Sullivan, the company's VP of consumer product explained last week: "the most requested Twitter feature for many years" had been an edit feature. He continued: "Without things like time limits, controls, and transparency about what has been edited, Edit could be misused to alter the record of the public conversation. Protecting the integrity of that public conversation is our top priority when we approach this work".

A report from VICE claims that a group of TikTok influencers is being paid to push out content that is pro-Kremlin narratives.

According to the report, VICE has uncovered what is described as a "coordinated campaign to pay Russian TikTok influencers" to create and post content that fits certain guidelines and narratives. VICE reports that it discussed a Telegram channel that included prominent Russian TikTok influencers. This Telegram channel was run by an anonymous user who told VICE he was a journalist. He also explained that his job was to tell influencers the date and time the video needs to be posted and how to get around TikTok's banning of new uploads from within Russia.

The anonymous administrator posted a campaign to gather TikTok users to push content that called for national unity and used an "audio track featuring Putin calling for all ethnic groups in Russia to unite at this time of conflict," per VICE. Additionally, the administrator would instruct influencers on what text to add to the videos, what audio tracks, and even what emojis are to be used.

YouTube has announced it will be targeting a selection of channels on its platform and remove them while also purging specific content.

The announcement was made via Twitter and states that YouTube is now blocking access to channels that are funded by the Russian government, which includes state-run media outlets such as RT and Sputnik. YouTube explains that it will also be blocking access to channels associated with Russian state-funded media globally.

Additionally, YouTube writes that its community guidelines prohibits "content denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events" and that it will be removing content that violates this policy. The video platform wrote that these changes will be "effective immediately" and then followed up with a series of tweets explaining that it has removed more than 1,000 channels and more than 15,000 videos that violated policies for hate speech, misinformation, and graphic content.

The Russian government has announced it will soon be ending Instagram throughout Russia in a move that bans the social media service of all Russians.

Russia's communications agency Roskomnadzor claimed in its announcement that Instagram moderators have allowed for content that encourages violence towards Russian soldiers depending on where they originated from. The announcement from the Russian government comes only a week after it announced Facebook was banned, citing "discrimination against Russian media".

Adam Mosseri, a former executive at Facebook and current head of Instagram, tweeted out about the announcement, writing that 80 million Russians won't be able to communicate with each other once the ban has taken place, going on to describe the decision as "wrong". According to a report from Russian state-owned media Novosti, the ban will take effect on March 14 and won't apply with Meta's encrypted messaging app "What's App".

Facebook pressed the big red button inside of Mark Zuckerberg's offices a few weeks ago, right in front of Zuck's duct-tape-covered front-facing webcam (screw your privacy, not his) when it rebranded itself amid non-stop chaos to Meta.

The rebranding to Meta saw the Facebook-owned Instagram blocking the account of the user with the handle @metaverse, out of nowhere and with no explanation. The owner of the @metaverse handle on Instagram is Australian artist Thea-Mai Baumann, who had her Instagram account banned once Meta stepped into the world.

Baumann told The New York Times after her @metaverse account on Instagram was snuffed: "This account is a decade of my life and work. I didn't want my contribution to the metaverse to be wiped from the internet. That happens to women in tech, to women of color in tech, all the time".

President Donald Trump has announced that he is launching a new social media network, which will be a direct competitor to Facebook -- at least we can call it Facebook for now, which has stepped in multiple big piles of sh*t over the last few months (years) and will be rebranded next week -- and Twitter: TRUTH Social.

TRUTH Social will be competing with whatever Facebook rebrands itself in emergency meetings next week, with President Trump announcing Trump Media & Technology Group and Digital World Acquisition Corp. have entered into a definitive merger agreement that makes TMTG into a publicly listed company, subject to regulatory and stockholder approval.

The new social network "TRUTH Social" will be rolling out nationwide in Q1 2022, with President Donald J. Trump, Chairman of TMTG explaining: "I created TRUTH Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech. We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced. This is unacceptable. I am excited to send out my first TRUTH on TRUTH Social very soon".

Facebook is preparing for a huge rebranding with a change to the company name to be announced next week, according to the very latest rumors.

The company will change its name and talk about its focus on building the metaverse, "according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter" reports The Verge. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will talk at the company's annual Connect conference on October 28, but we could hear about the rebrand sooner than that.

The new name for Facebook isn't known widely within the company according to The Verge, which says that the new name is a "closely-guarded secret within its walls and not known widely, even among its full senior leadership". One of the names being thrown around is "Horizon".