July 3 (Reuters) – Elon Musk’s move to temporarily cap how many posts Twitter users can read on the social media site could undermine efforts by new CEO Linda Yaccarino to attract advertisers, marketing industry professionals said.
Musk announced Saturday that Twitter would limit how many tweets per day various accounts can read, to discourage “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation.
Users posted screenshots in reply, showing they were unable to see any tweets, including tweets on the pages of corporate advertisers, after hitting the limit.
Ad industry veterans said the move creates an obstacle for Yaccarino, the former NBCUniversal advertising chief who started last month as Twitter’s CEO.
Yaccarino has sought to repair relationships with advertisers who pulled away from the site after Musk bought it last year, the Financial Times reported last week.
The limits are “remarkably bad” for users and advertisers already shaken by the “chaos” Musk has brought to the platform, Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, said on Sunday.
“The advertiser trust deficit that Linda Yaccarino needs to reverse just got even bigger. And it cannot be reversed based on her industry credibility alone,” he said.
Lou Paskalis, the founder of advertising consultancy AJL Advisory and former marketing boss at Bank of America, said Yaccarino is Musk’s “last best hope” to salvage ad revenue and the company’s value.
“This move signals to the marketplace that he’s not capable of empowering her to save him from himself,” he said.
Under the new cap, unverified accounts were initially limited to 600 posts a day with new unverified accounts limited to 300. Verified accounts could read 6,000 posts a day, Musk said in a post on the site.
Twitter logo and a photo of Elon Musk are displayed through magnifier in this illustration taken October 27, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
Hours later, he said the cap was raised to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 per day for unverified and 500 posts per day for new unverified users.
A Twitter spokesperson did not reply to requests for comment and inquiries about how long the restrictions will last on Sunday.
Capping how much users can view could be “catastrophic” for the platform’s ad business, said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence.
“This certainly isn’t going to make it any easier to convince advertisers to return. It’s a hard sell already to bring advertisers back,” she said.
Olivia Wedderburn, an executive at creative agency TMW Unlimited, said she was advising her clients to “stop investing in Twitter immediately,” because the platform was turning away heavily engaged users, which she said is the “sole reason” to advertise on Twitter.
The limit came soon after Twitter began requiring users to log into an account on the social media platform to view tweets, which Musk called a “temporary emergency measure” to combat data scraping.
Musk had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.
Platforms including Reddit and major news media organizations have complained about AI companies using their information to train AI models as some have sought fees.
Kai-Cheng Yang, researcher at Indiana University in Bloomington, said that the limits appeared to be effective in blocking third parties, including search engines, from scraping Twitter data like before.
“It might still be possible, but the methods would be much more sophisticated and much less efficient,” he said.
Reporting by Jody Godoy in New York, Sheila Dang in Dallas, Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Martin Coulter in London; editing by Burton Frierson, Nick Zieminski and Marguerita Choy
WASHINGTON, June 13 (Reuters) – A vast majority of Republicans believe federal criminal charges against Donald Trump are politically motivated, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Monday that also showed him far ahead of his nearest rival in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
The polling, which began on Friday, a day after Trump was indicted, found that 81% of self-identified Republicans said politics was driving the case, reflecting the deep polarization of the U.S. electorate. President Joe Biden, a Democrat, has repeatedly said he has no involvement in the case brought by the Department of Justice.
The number of Republicans who believe the former president is being unfairly targeted vastly exceeds the 30-35% of Trump supporters who are estimated by political analysts to make up his core base.
Some 62% of respondents in the Reuters/Ipsos poll, including 91% of Democrats and 35% of Republicans, said it was believable that Trump illegally stored classified documents at his home in Florida as alleged by prosecutors.
The indictment did not appear to dent Trump’s standing in the Republican nominating contest for the 2024 presidential election. The specific charges, including obstruction of justice, became public on Friday afternoon when the indictment was unsealed.
Some 43% of self-identified Republicans said Trump was their preferred candidate, compared to 22% who picked Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest rival.
In early May, Trump led DeSantis 49% to 19%, but that was before DeSantis formally entered the race.
The rest of the Republican field, which includes former Vice President Mike Pence who declared his candidacy last week, had low single-digit levels of support.
Trump flew to Miami on Monday to face federal charges of unlawfully keeping U.S. national security documents and lying to officials who tried to recover them. Trump, who will appear in court on Tuesday, has proclaimed his innocence and vowed to continue his campaign to regain the presidency in the November 2024 general election.
Many Republican contenders in the 2024 race have accused the U.S. Justice Department of political bias and say it is being “weaponized” against Biden’s biggest Republican challenger. The department says all investigative decisions are made without regard to partisan politics.
Trump also faces charges in New York in a state criminal case related to alleged hush money payments to a pornographic film star. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in March found that Republicans also saw that investigation as politically motivated.
Biden’s approval rating stood at 41% last week, close to the lowest level of his presidency. Trump had a 40% approval rating at this point in his 2017-2021 presidency.
The latest poll included responses from 1,005 adults nationwide and had a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of 4 percentage points for all voting-age Americans and between 6 and 7 percentage points for Republicans.
Reporting by Jason Lange; Editing by Andy Sullivan, Ross Colvin and Howard Goller
LONDON/WASHINGTON, Nov 14 (Reuters) – Thousands of smartphone applications in Apple (AAPL.O) and Google’s (GOOGL.O) online stores contain computer code developed by a technology company, Pushwoosh, that presents itself as based in the United States, but is actually Russian, Reuters has found.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the United States’ main agency for fighting major health threats, said it had been deceived into believing Pushwoosh was based in the U.S. capital. After learning about its Russian roots from Reuters, it removed Pushwoosh software from seven public-facing apps, citing security concerns.
The U.S. Army said it had removed an app containing Pushwoosh code in March because of the same concerns. That app was used by soldiers at one of the country’s main combat training bases.
According to company documents publicly filed in Russia and reviewed by Reuters, Pushwoosh is headquartered in the Siberian town of Novosibirsk, where it is registered as a software company that also carries out data processing. It employs around 40 people and reported revenue of 143,270,000 rubles ($2.4 mln) last year. Pushwoosh is registered with the Russian government to pay taxes in Russia.
On social media and in U.S. regulatory filings, however, it presents itself as a U.S. company, based at various times in California, Maryland and Washington, D.C., Reuters found.
Pushwoosh provides code and data processing support for software developers, enabling them to profile the online activity of smartphone app users and send tailor-made push notifications from Pushwoosh servers.
On its website, Pushwoosh says it does not collect sensitive information, and Reuters found no evidence Pushwoosh mishandled user data. Russian authorities, however, have compelled local companies to hand over user data to domestic security agencies.
Pushwoosh’s founder, Max Konev, told Reuters in a September email that the company had not tried to mask its Russian origins. “I am proud to be Russian and I would never hide this.”
Pushwoosh published a blog post after the Reuters article was issued, which said: “Pushwoosh Inc. is a privately held C-Corp company incorporated under the state laws of Delaware, USA. Pushwoosh Inc. was never owned by any company registered in the Russian Federation.”
The company also said in the post, “Pushwoosh Inc. used to outsource development parts of the product to the Russian company in Novosibirsk, mentioned in the article. However, in February 2022, Pushwoosh Inc. terminated the contract.”
After Pushwoosh published its post, Reuters asked Pushwoosh to provide evidence for its assertions, but the news agency’s requests went unanswered.
Konev said the company “has no connection with the Russian government of any kind” and stores its data in the United States and Germany.
Cybersecurity experts said storing data overseas would not prevent Russian intelligence agencies from compelling a Russian firm to cede access to that data, however.
Russia, whose ties with the West have deteriorated since its takeover of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and its invasion of Ukraine this year, is a global leader in hacking and cyber-espionage, spying on foreign governments and industries to seek competitive advantage, according to Western officials.
Reuters Graphics
HUGE DATABASE
Pushwoosh code was installed in the apps of a wide array of international companies, influential non-profits and government agencies from global consumer goods company Unilever Plc (ULVR.L) and the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) to the politically powerful U.S. gun lobby, the National Rifle Association (NRA), and Britain’s Labour Party.
Pushwoosh’s business with U.S. government agencies and private companies could violate contracting and U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) laws or trigger sanctions, 10 legal experts told Reuters. The FBI, U.S. Treasury and the FTC declined to comment.
Jessica Rich, former director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said “this type of case falls right within the authority of the FTC,” which cracks down on unfair or deceptive practices affecting U.S. consumers.
Washington could choose to impose sanctions on Pushwoosh and has broad authority to do so, sanctions experts said, including possibly through a 2021 executive order that gives the United States the ability to target Russia’s technology sector over malicious cyber activity.
Pushwoosh code has been embedded into almost 8,000 apps in the Google and Apple app stores, according to Appfigures, an app intelligence website. Pushwoosh’s website says it has more than 2.3 billion devices listed in its database.
“Pushwoosh collects user data including precise geolocation, on sensitive and governmental apps, which could allow for invasive tracking at scale,” said Jerome Dangu, co-founder of Confiant, a firm that tracks misuse of data collected in online advertising supply chains.
“We haven’t found any clear sign of deceptive or malicious intent in Pushwoosh’s activity, which certainly doesn’t diminish the risk of having app data leaking to Russia,” he added.
Google said privacy was a “huge focus” for the company but did not respond to requests for comment about Pushwoosh. Apple said it takes user trust and safety seriously but similarly declined to answer questions.
Keir Giles, a Russia expert at London think tank Chatham House, said despite international sanctions on Russia, a “substantial number” of Russian companies were still trading abroad and collecting people’s personal data.
Given Russia’s domestic security laws, “it shouldn’t be a surprise that with or without direct links to Russian state espionage campaigns, firms that handle data will be keen to play down their Russian roots,” he said.
‘SECURITY ISSUES’
After Reuters raised Pushwoosh’s Russian links with the CDC, the health agency removed the code from its apps because “the company presents a potential security concern,” spokesperson Kristen Nordlund said.
“CDC believed Pushwoosh was a company based in the Washington, D.C. area,” Nordlund said in a statement. The belief was based on “representations” made by the company, she said, without elaborating.
The CDC apps that contained Pushwoosh code included the agency’s main app and others set up to share information on a wide range of health concerns. One was for doctors treating sexually transmitted diseases. While the CDC also used the company’s notifications for health matters such as COVID, the agency said it “did not share user data with Pushwoosh.”
The Army told Reuters it removed an app containing Pushwoosh in March, citing “security issues.” It did not say how widely the app, which was an information portal for use at its National Training Center (NTC) in California, had been used by troops.
The NTC is a major battle training center in the Mojave Desert for pre-deployment soldiers, meaning a data breach there could reveal upcoming overseas troop movements.
U.S. Army spokesperson Bryce Dubee said the Army had suffered no “operational loss of data,” adding that the app did not connect to the Army network.
Some large companies and organizations including UEFA and Unilever said third parties set up the apps for them, or they thought they were hiring a U.S. company.
“We don’t have a direct relationship with Pushwoosh,” Unilever said in a statement, adding that Pushwoosh was removed from one of its apps “some time ago.”
UEFA said its contract with Pushwoosh was “with a U.S. company.” UEFA declined to say if it knew of Pushwoosh’s Russian ties but said it was reviewing its relationship with the company after being contacted by Reuters.
The NRA said its contract with the company ended last year, and it was “not aware of any issues.”
Britain’s Labour Party did not respond to requests for comment.
“The data Pushwoosh collects is similar to data that could be collected by Facebook, Google or Amazon, but the difference is that all the Pushwoosh data in the U.S. is sent to servers controlled by a company (Pushwoosh) in Russia,” said Zach Edwards, a security researcher, who first spotted the prevalence of Pushwoosh code while working for Internet Safety Labs, a nonprofit organization.
Roskomnadzor, Russia’s state communications regulator, did not respond to a request from Reuters for comment.
FAKE ADDRESS, FAKE PROFILES
In U.S. regulatory filings and on social media, Pushwoosh never mentions its Russian links. The company lists “Washington, D.C.” as its location on Twitter and claims its office address as a house in the suburb of Kensington, Maryland, according to its latest U.S. corporation filings submitted to Delaware’s secretary of state. It also lists the Maryland address on its Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.
The Kensington house is the home of a Russian friend of Konev’s who spoke to a Reuters journalist on condition of anonymity. He said he had nothing to do with Pushwoosh and had only agreed to allow Konev to use his address to receive mail.
Konev said Pushwoosh had begun using the Maryland address to “receive business correspondence” during the coronavirus pandemic.
He said he now operates Pushwoosh from Thailand but provided no evidence that it is registered there. Reuters could not find a company by that name in the Thai company registry.
Pushwoosh never mentioned it was Russian-based in eight annual filings in the U.S. state of Delaware, where it is registered, an omission which could violate state law.
Instead, Pushwoosh listed an address in Union City, California as its principal place of business from 2014 to 2016. That address does not exist, according to Union City officials.
Pushwoosh used LinkedIn accounts purportedly belonging to two Washington, D.C.-based executives named Mary Brown and Noah O’Shea to solicit sales. But neither Brown nor O’Shea are real people, Reuters found.
The one belonging to Brown was actually of an Austria-based dance teacher, taken by a photographer in Moscow, who told Reuters she had no idea how it ended up on the site.
Konev acknowledged the accounts were not genuine. He said Pushwoosh hired a marketing agency in 2018 to create them in an attempt to use social media to sell Pushwoosh, not to mask the company’s Russian origins.
LinkedIn said it had removed the accounts after being alerted by Reuters.
Reporting by James Pearson in London and Marisa Taylor in Washington
Additional reporting by Chris Bing in Washington, editing by Chris Sanders and Ross Colvin
Nov 4 (Reuters) – Twitter Inc laid off half its workforce on Friday but said cuts were smaller in the team responsible for preventing the spread of misinformation, as advertisers pulled spending amid concerns about content moderation.
Tweets by staff of the social media company said teams responsible for communications, content curation, human rights and machine learning ethics were among those gutted, as were some product and engineering teams.
The move caps a week of chaos and uncertainty about the company’s future under new owner Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, who tweeted on Friday that the service was experiencing a “massive drop in revenue” from the advertiser retreat.
Musk blamed the losses on a coalition of civil rights groups that has been pressing Twitter’s top advertisers to take action if he did not protect content moderation – concerns heightened ahead of potential pivotal congressional elections on Tuesday.
After the layoffs, the groups said they were escalating their pressure and demanding brands pull their Twitter ads globally.
“Unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day,” Musk tweeted of the layoffs, adding that everyone affected was offered three months of severance pay.
The company was silent about the depth of the cuts until late in the day, when head of safety and integrity Yoel Roth tweeted confirmation of internal plans, seen by Reuters earlier in the week, projecting the layoffs would affect about 3,700 people, or 50% of the staff.
Among those let go were 784 employees from the company’s San Francisco headquarters and 199 in San Jose and Los Angeles, according to filings to California’s employment authority.
Roth said the reductions hit about 15% of his team, which is responsible for preventing the spread of misinformation and other harmful content, and that the company’s “core moderation capabilities” remained in place.
Musk endorsed the safety executive last week, citing his “high integrity” after Roth was called out over tweets critical of former President Donald Trump years earlier.
Musk has promised to restore free speech while preventing Twitter from descending into a “hellscape.”
President Joe Biden said on Friday that Musk had purchased a social media platform in Twitter that spews lies across the world.
“And now what are we all worried about: Elon Musk goes out and buys an outfit that sends – that spews lies all across the world… There’s no editors anymore in America. There’s no editors. How do we expect kids to be able to understand what is at stake?”
Major advertisers have expressed apprehension about Musk’s takeover for months.
Brands including General Motors Co (GM.N) and General Mills Inc (GIS.N) have said they stopped advertising on Twitter while awaiting information about the new direction of the platform.
Musk tweeted that his team had made no changes to content moderation and done “everything we could” to appease the groups. Speaking at an investors conference in New York on Friday, Musk called the activist pressure “an attack on the First Amendment.”
[1/9] Owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc. Elon Musk arrives at the 29th Annual Baron Investment Conference in Manhattan in New York City, New York, U.S., November 4, 2022. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
ACCESS TO SYSTEMS CUT
The email notifying staff about layoffs was the first communication Twitter workers received from the company’s leadership after Musk took over last week. It was signed only by “Twitter,” without naming Musk or any other executives.
Dozens of staffers tweeted they had lost access to work email and Slack channels overnight before receiving an official layoff notice on Friday morning, prompting an outpouring of laments by current and former employees on the platform they had built.
They shared blue hearts and salute emojis expressing support for one another, using the hashtags #OneTeam and #LoveWhereYouWorked, a past-tense version of a slogan employees had used for years to celebrate the company’s work culture.
Twitter’s curation team, which was responsible for “highlighting and contextualizing the best events and stories that unfold on Twitter,” had been axed, employees wrote.
Shannon Raj Singh, an attorney who was Twitter’s acting head of human rights, tweeted that the entire human rights team at the company had been sacked.
Another team that focused on research into how Twitter employed machine learning and algorithms, an issue that was a priority for Musk, was also eliminated, according to a tweet from a former senior manager at Twitter.
Senior executives including vice president of engineering Arnaud Weber said their goodbyes on Twitter on Friday: “Twitter still has a lot of unlocked potential but I’m proud of what we accomplished.”
Employees of Twitter Blue, the premium subscription service that Musk is bolstering, were also let go. An employee with the handle “SillyRobin” who had indicated they were laid off, quote-tweeted a previous Musk tweet saying Twitter Blue would include “paywall bypass” for certain publishers.
“Just to be clear, he fired the team working on this,” the employee said.
DOORS LOCKED
Twitter said in its email to staffers that offices would be temporarily closed and badge access suspended “to help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data.”
Offices in London and Dublin appeared deserted on Friday, with no employees in sight. At the London office, any evidence Twitter had once occupied the building was erased.
A receptionist at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters said a few people had trickled in and were working in the floors above despite the notice to stay away.
A class action was filed on Thursday against Twitter by several employees, who argued the company was conducting mass layoffs without providing the required 60-day advance notice, in violation of federal and California law.
The lawsuit asked the San Francisco federal court to issue an order to restrict Twitter from soliciting employees being laid off to sign documents without informing them of the pendency of the case.
Reporting by Sheila Dang in Dallas, Katie Paul in Palo Alto, California, and Paresh Dave in Oakland, California; Additional reporting by Fanny Potkin, Rusharti Mukherjee, Aditya Kalra, Martin Coulter, Hyunjoo Jin, Supantha Mukherjee and Arriana McLymore; Writing by Matt Scuffham and Katie Paul; Editing by Kenneth Li, Jason Neely, Matthew Lewis and William Mallard
San Francisco Bay Area-based tech reporter covering Google and the rest of Alphabet Inc. Joined Reuters in 2017 after four years at the Los Angeles Times focused on the local tech industry.
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