Tech

Elon Musk Begins Purging Twitter of Up to 3500 Employees

Published

2 years ago

2022-11-05

X 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.

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Tech

NVIDIA’s Earnings: The Leader in AI Chips Demonstrates Relentless Growth.

Published

2 days ago

2024-11-21

Salman Ahmad

(VOR News) – Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company and a catalyst of the artificial intelligence revolution, announced another quarterly report on Wednesday, much to the delight of investors.

The company’s value has risen by $2.2 trillion this year to reach $3.6 trillion, attributed to a near doubling of chip sales. It reported revenue of $35.08 billion, which fell short of the anticipated $33.15 billion. Year on year, its profits more than doubled. Revenue rose 94% compared to the same quarter of the prior year.

Nvidia predicted 70% growth.

Nvidia reported earnings of $0.81 per share, exceeding analysts’ predictions by $0.81. After the announcement, Nvidia’s stock plummeted over 5% in extended trading but immediately recovered to stay at a comparable level; it had previously closed at $145.89 in New York.

In a press statement last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang projected that the computational power facilitating generative AI development will increase by “a millionfold” over the next decade.

During an earnings call, Huang asserted that the extensive adoption of Nvidia technology is instigating a platform transition from coding to machine learning, prompting the reconfiguration of traditional data centers to facilitate artificial intelligence development.

A novel industrial revolution poised to create an artificial intelligence sector valued in the multi-trillion dollar range. Generative artificial intelligence is a new industry with artificial intelligence factories manufacturing digital intelligence, not merely a new tool capacity,” he stated.

“AI is revolutionizing every industry, organization, and country,” stated Huang. “Constructing an artificially generated data omniverse… the epoch of robotics has commenced.”

The robust demand for NVIDIA’s Blackwell GPU chips appears to have mitigated concerns regarding a potential decline in the company’s demand, as major digital corporations invest billions in data centers and artificial intelligence processing.

August low

After the election, the semiconductor stock has attained unprecedented peaks, increasing almost 200% this year and exceeding 1,100% over the past two years.

Nevertheless, as they struggle to compete with Nvidia’s supremacy in AI, other chip manufacturers have become a net detriment to the industry.

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives anticipated another “drop-the-mic performance” from Nvidia before the results were announced, asserting that the business was “the sole contender with over $1 trillion in AI capital expenditure forthcoming over the next few years, with Nvidia’s GPUs representing the new oil and gold in this domain.”

IT companies spent billions.

Many perceive Nvidia as a barometer for the technology sector and the desire for artificial intelligence, which has driven Wall Street to numerous all-time highs this year.

Markets are anxious due to the escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the likelihood that the Federal Reserve will not reduce US interest rates, and the potential for global tariff increases under Donald Trump’s forthcoming administration.

Multiple analysts corroborated Ives’ assertion that Nvidia’s forthcoming Blackwell processor might propel the company’s revenues and market capitalization to historic levels. Indicators of “extraordinary demand” for the new chip, including forecasts of unprecedented sales and accounts of depleted inventories for the forthcoming year, are significant indicators of Nvidia’s continued exceptional growth, as Saxo chief investment analyst Charu Chanana stated.

Nevertheless, due to its inflated valuation, Chanana warned that “any indications of production delays or insufficient demand could exert pressure on the stock.”

This week, a source reported that the chipmaker is seeing server overheating issues with its latest graphics processors, the B200 and GB200 NVL72, named after renowned American statistician and mathematician David Harold Blackwell.

Nvidia’s spokesperson remarked that “the engineering iterations are standard and anticipated,” without explicitly dismissing the report.

“Minor details can disrupt significant investments consistently,” stated computer magnate Michael Dell.

Tech

How to Boost Your Instagram Live Videos

Published

2 days ago

2024-11-21

PR News

Video marketing on Instagram is booming. Today, developers offer influencers and entrepreneurs many tools to make their pages popular and improve their online credibility and visibility.

Streams are one of the most effective ways to communicate with the audience, expand reach and improve engagement. However, as with everything else, you should clearly understand what results you expect from this type of PR and what tools will help you achieve them.

Of course, the competition here is high and intense, so you should know the best ways to promote your live sessions and improve their visibility to stay ahead of the competition and make your streams better and viewed every day. You need to know several secrets to achieve the desired result here, and today, we’ll tell you about them. Keep reading!

Use paid Instagram service.

So, your goal is to get as many views as possible and attract more loyal fans. How can you do this? Generally speaking, there are many ways, but they all require a lot of effort, time and resources from you. Most of them are created for long-term PR; you’ll get the result from free methods only after a few weeks or months.

The best thing is that you can greatly simplify your growth and instantly get as many interactions as you want. The secret is simple. Today, professional advertising companies offer various boosts for rapid growth, including the opportunity to buy Instagram live video views.

You can check out Viplikes: https://viplikes.net/buy-instagram-live-video-views. In other words, real people will come to your stream and stay here for a while. Such a purchase will inevitably attract more new target subs – your live session will occupy a leading position in their feed. So, if you don’t have time to promote live videos in freeways or want to support your content, use a paid boost and combine it with other secrets of success, which we’ll share below.

Notify your followers and post teasers.

Yes, it’s normal if you start a stream without any notifications for your subscribers, but in this case, you should keep in mind that there will be much fewer interactions than you would like. That’s why SMM specialists and famous content makers recommend notifying fans in advance and writing the live session’s time, date and topic. Agree this is logical; if people know about the upcoming live video, they are more likely to visit it. So, if you aim to build up a large viewing base, keep this rule in mind and notify subscribers using Stories, Reels, posts or something else.

It’s the same with teasers: spread as much information as possible about the upcoming stream. Promise something unique and interesting that will be available only to live spectators. This is another secret of a successful session!

Collaborations

If you’ve never started streaming with another influencer, it’s time to do so! This is one of the best ways to quickly attract new spectators and improve live video statistics—a double benefit.

But you need to understand that not all bloggers agree to such activities, so it’s better to choose those with whom you’re already familiar or who have the same statistical indicators. Then, the effectiveness of the live sessions will be excellent, and the collaboration will go smoothly. Good luck!

Turkey Instagram Ban Update!! Nationwide Blackout

Turkey Instagram Ban Update!! Nationwide Blackout

Tech

The Impact of Tier Regions on Digital Advertising ROI

Published

3 days ago

2024-11-20

Geoff Brown

In today’s complex digital advertising world, knowing Tier regions is key. It is vital for getting the best ROI. Tier regions, also known as Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3, refer to separate markets that may have different levels of economic development and different purchasing and media consumption patterns.

All markets raise prospects and issues that can affect ad success. This article reviews Tier regions and their impact on digital ad ROI, aiming to help marketers refine their strategies.

Understanding Tier Regions

Tier 1 countries are generally developed economies with higher disposable income, such as the United States, Canada, and some Western European countries. These markets are usually characterized by high levels of advertisement clutter, that is, high competition, yet the population is accustomed to advertisements.
Tier 2 regions are emerging markets like Brazil, India, and parts of Eastern Europe. These areas have relatively higher rates of economic growth and growing Internet usage, hence becoming the right place for advertisers. Yet they can also have disadvantages, including fluctuations in consumer behavior and less overall buying power compared to Tier 1 markets.
Tier 3 regions generally encompass developing countries with slower economic growth, and digital infrastructure may still be in its infancy. Although these markets present long-term growth, the short-term effectiveness may be low owing to consumer purchasing capability and frequency of exposure to online advertisements.

Consumer Behaviour Concerning Organizational Setting

The behavior of the consumers in the different Tier regions is quite divergent. So, which Tier to choose? Tier 1 markets are usually more selective. They demand high quality and relevancy of the offered content.

They also prefer to interact with companies that have values that they hold dear, such as environmental conservation and corporate social responsibility values. This means that in these regions, the advertising companies may be forced to spend more time developing appealing messages to the target market.

In contrast, Tier 2 and Tier 3 consumers will likely follow the low involvement model, where the communication strategy consists of simple messages that focus on value and utility.

Advertisers targeting these regions should not concentrate on sales conversion but on branding to foster consumer trust. Marketing people who understand these differences in behaviors can help them adapt to them and gain much better ROI than they would expect.

Cost Considerations

The cost of advertisement is greatly influenced by the Tier regions, as illustrated in the figure below. Because of high competition, in Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets, there will be higher cost per click (CPC) and cost per impression (CPM).

This may, therefore, translate into higher initial costs, but it usually has the potential to give higher returns if the campaigns are managed appropriately.

Tier 2 and Tier 3 locations have lower GDP per capita, so advertising costs less there. This will attract brands with limited budgets.

However, marketers need to be wary; the latter is not necessarily always true, meaning that it is not rare to see lower costs entail lower ROI. The success of these campaigns can depend on audience activity and brand familiarity in different regions.

Measuring Success

Therefore, it is important to set success metrics, especially when comparing the ROI of Tier regions. Traditional measures, such as conversion rates and customer acquisition costs, may work better in Tier 1 markets.

In Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, the end action value may better define success. Depending on the segmentation and targeting strategies, metrics like brand awareness or engagement might work, too.

For instance, tracking such factors as interactions on social networks or website attendance can significantly determine how successfully the campaign reflects the interests of the target audience in these regions.

The Tier region analysis of the current success metrics can be seen through the following perspective: marketers need to set up detailed success metrics depending on the attributes of every Tier region, which can provide a closer look at the campaign results.

Future Trends

Knowing new trends in digital ads in Tier regions will be key to getting high returns in the future. For example, mobile-first ads suit Tier 2 and 3 markets. These markets have the most active online users of mobile devices. Mobile campaign companies could reach many consumers and boost engagement.

Further, improved data analysis methods and artificial intelligence are helping advertisers better decide where to spend their money across Tier regions. These technologies allow marketers to fine-tune their campaigns over the traffic flow to maximize every strategy implemented for the best returns on investment.

Conclusion

The importance of Tier areas for digital advertising ROI cannot be underscored. Marketers may create more successful tactics for their target audiences by knowing the distinct features of each Tier, such as customer behavior, cost considerations, and success indicators.

As we approach 2024 and beyond, staying on top of area trends will be critical for optimizing advertising results. Those who adapt will succeed in today’s international digital marketplace.