Internet & Websites News - Page 7

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.

"I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy. However, since making my investment, I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company. Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it," Musk wrote.

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".