Twitter has officially rebranded as X — so owner Elon Musk is holding a giant garage sale to purge the company’s HQ of remnants of the past.
Items up for auction range from a standard desk chair to a large bird cage welded with a Twitter logo bird and everything in between.
Since buying Twitter less than a year ago, Musk has worked to remake the social media site. He’s laid off most of the company’s employees, instituted a paywall and eliminated most account authentication, among other changes.
Interested buyers can browse through numerous “#” and “@”statues, paintings of Ellen DeGeneres’ viral 2014 Oscar selfie and Barack Obama celebrating his reelection, a reconstructed barn from Montana and numerous musical instruments.
On top of the more outlandish items, Twitter is looking to get rid of office equipment including desks, chairs and refrigerators.
The auction, run by Heritage Global Partners (HGP), opens September 12 and runs for two days in San Francisco. Viewing is available by appointment only, with all 584 items opening with a bid of 25 dollars.
Twitter also put memorabilia up for auction in January, trying to offload similar items.
X and HGP did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment on the auction.
A federal appeals court on Friday said the Biden administration likely violated the First Amendment in some of its communications with social media companies, but also narrowed a lower court judge’s order on the matter.
The US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that certain administration officials – namely in the White House, the surgeon general, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation – likely “coerced or significantly encouraged social media platforms to moderate content” in violation of the First Amendment in its efforts to combat Covid-19 disinformation.
But the three-judge panel said the preliminary injunction issued by US District Judge Terry Doughty in July, which ordered some Biden administration agencies and top officials not to communicate with social media companies about certain content, was “both vague and broader than necessary to remedy the Plaintiffs’ injuries, as shown at this preliminary juncture.”
The Biden administration had previously argued in the lawsuit brought by Republican attorneys general claiming unconstitutional censorship that channels with social media companies must stay open so that the federal government can help protect the public from threats to election security, Covid-19 misinformation and other dangers.
In briefs submitted earlier this summer, the administration wrote, “There is a categorical, well-settled distinction between persuasion and coercion,” adding that Doughty had “equated legitimate efforts at persuasion with illicit efforts to coerce.”
The 5th Circuit left in place part of the injunction that barred certain Biden administration officials from “threatening, pressuring, or coercing social-media companies in any manner to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce posted content of postings containing protected free speech.”
“But,” the appeals court said, “those terms could also capture otherwise legal speech. So, the injunction’s language must be further tailored to exclusively target illegal conduct and provide the officials with additional guidance or instruction on what behavior is prohibited.”
The appeals court reversed several aspects of Doughty’s sweeping order, concluding that those pieces of it risked blocking the federal government “from engaging in legal conduct.”
The 5th circuit left the order, which had been temporarily blocked earlier in the summer, on pause for 10 days so that the case can be appealed to the Supreme Court.
The opinion was handed down jointly by Circuit Judges Edith Clement, Jennifer Walker Elrod and Don Willett – all appointees of Republican presidents.
The conservative appeals court sided with many of the arguments put forward by the plaintiffs, which included private individuals as well Missouri and Louisiana, but also narrowed the injunction’s scope so that it only applied to the White House, the surgeon general, the CDC and the FBI. Doughty had included other agencies in his July order.
This story has been updated with additional information.
Two new bills meant to protect children’s mental health online by changing the way they are served content on social media and by limiting companies’ use of their data will be introduced in the New York state legislature, state and city leaders said Wednesday.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York Attorney General Letitia James made the announcement at the headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers Manhattan, joined by UFT President Michael Mulgrew, State Senator Andrew Gounardes, Assemblywoman Nily Rozic and community advocates.
“Our children are in crisis, and it is up to us to save them,” Hochul said, comparing social media algorithms to cigarettes and alcohol. “The data around the negative effects of social media on these young minds is irrefutable, and knowing how dangerous the algorithms are, I will not accept that we are powerless to do anything about it.”
The “Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act” would limit what New York officials say are the harmful and addictive features of social media for children. The act would allow users under 18 and their parents to opt out of receiving feeds driven by algorithms designed to harness users’ personal data to keep them on the platforms for as long as possible. Those who opt out would receive chronological feeds instead, like in the early days of social media.
The bill would also allow users and parents who opt in to receiving algorithmically generated content feeds to block access to social media platforms between 12am and 6am or to limit the total number of hours per day a minor can spend on a platform.
“This is a major issue that we all feel strongly about and that must be addressed,” James said. “Nationwide, children and teens are struggling with significantly high rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts and other mental health issues, largely because of social media.”
The bill targets platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube, where feeds are comprised of user-generated content along with other material the platform suggests to users based on their personal data. Tech platforms have designed and promoted voluntary tools aimed at parents to help them control what content their kids can see, arguing that the decision about what boundaries to set should be up to individual families. But that hasn’t stopped critics from calling on platforms to do more — or from threatening further regulation.
“Our children deserve a safer and more secure environment online, free from addictive algorithms and exploitation,” said Gounardes. “Algorithms are the new tobacco. Simple as that.”
The New York legislation comes amid a raft of similar bills across the country that purport to safeguard young users by imposing tough new rules on platforms.
States including Arkansas, Louisiana and Utah have passed bills requiring tech platforms to obtain a parent’s consent before creating accounts for teens. Federal lawmakers have introduced a similar bill that would ban kids under 13 from using social media altogether. And numerous lawsuits against social media platforms have accused the companies of harming users’ mental health. The latest of these suits came on Tuesday, when Utah’s attorney general sued TikTok for allegedly misleading consumers about the app’s safety.
Mulgrew called the New York legislation necessary in part due to a lack of action by the federal government to protect kids.
“The last time, first and only time that the United States government passed a bill to protect children in social media was 1998,” Mulgrew said, referring to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a federal law that prohibits the collection of personal data from Americans under the age of 13 without parental consent. In July, the US Senate commerce committee voted to advance a bill that would expand COPPA’s protections to teens for the first time.
New York officials on Wednesday also highlighted risks to children’s privacy online, including the chance their location or other personal data could fall into the hands of human traffickers and others who might prey on youth.
“While other states and countries have enacted laws to limit the personal data that online platforms can collect from minors, no such restrictions currently exist in New York,” a press release from earlier Wednesday stated. “The two pieces of legislation introduced today will add critical protections for children and young adults online.”
The New York Child Data Protection Act would protect children’s data online by prohibiting all online sites from collecting, using, sharing or selling the personal data of anyone under 18 for the purposes of advertising, without informed consent or unless doing so is strictly necessary for the purpose of the website. For users under 13, this informed consent must come from a parent or guardian.
Both bills would authorize the attorney general to bring an action to enjoin or seek damages or civil penalties of up to $5,000 per violation and would allow parents or guardians of minors to sue for damages of up to $5,000 per user incident or for actual damages, whichever is greater.
The US Department of Health and Human Services says that while social media provides some benefits, it also presents “a meaningful risk of harm to youth.” The Surgeon General’s Social Media and Youth Mental Health Advisory released in May said children and adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of mental health problems like depression and anxiety, a finding the report called “concerning” given a recent survey that showed teens spend an average of 3.5 hours a day on social media.
Alexandra is a very attentive girlfriend. “Watching CUBS tonight?” she messages her boyfriend, but when he says he’s too busy to talk, she says, “Have fun, my hero!”
Alexandra is not real. She is a customizable AI girlfriend on dating site Romance.AI.
As artificial intelligence seeps into seemingly every corner of the internet, the world of romance is no refuge. AI is infiltrating the dating app space – sometimes in the form of fictional partners, sometimes as advisor, trainer, ghostwriter or matchmaker.
Established players in the online dating business like Tinder and Hinge are integrating AI into their existing products. New apps like Blush, Aimm, Rizz and Teaser AI (most of them free or with many free features) offer completely new takes on virtual courtship. Some use personality tests and analysis of a user’s physical type to train AI-powered systems – and promise higher chances of finding a perfect match. Others apps act as Cyrano de Bergerac, employing AI to whip up the most appealing response to a potential match’s query: ‘What’s your favorite food? or “a typical Sunday?”
Around half of all adults under 30 have used a dating site or app, according to 2023 Pew Research findings – but nearly half of users report their experience as being negative. Empty conversations, few matches and endless swiping leave many users single and unhappy with apps – problems that many in the AI dating app field say could be solved with the technology, making people less lonely and fostering easier, deeper connections.
Of course, the average online dater now has other issues to deal with, having to wonder if the person they are are speaking with might be relying entirely on AI-generated conversation. And is it even possible that a computer can identify a potential love connection? Is it a way of cheating the dating game?
“It’s like saying using a word processor is like cheating on generating a novel. In so many ways this is just a new tool that enables people to be faster and more creative. AI is just honestly no different from sending a friend a gif or a meme. You’re taking existing content, and you’re repurposing it to connect with somebody,” Dmitri Mirakyan, co-founder of AI dating conversation app YourMove.AI, told CNN. “The world’s becoming a more lonely place, and I think AI could make that easier and better for people.”
And many people seem ready for AI to take part in their online dating life. A March study by cybersecurity and digital privacy company Kaspersky found 75% of dating app users are willing to use ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot, to deliver the perfect line.
“There is a growing fatigue with dating apps right now as there is a lot of pressure on people to be ‘original’ and cut through the noise created by the continuous choice being offered to single people – unfortunately dating has become a numbers game,” Crystal Cansdale, dating expert at global dating app Inner Circle, commented on the study.
Founders of the new apps say they are doing a fair share of good. Here are a few of the ways AI apps are now trying to help you fall in love:
Try Rizz.app, Teaser AI or YourMove.AI.
Founders and designers of these apps say people find starting and keeping conversations going the most challenging part of the process. “Dating app conversations are exhausting,” reads YourMove.AI’s homepage. “We can make it easier. So you can spend less time texting, and more time dating.”
Rizz.app and YourMove.AI allow users to upload words or screenshots, receiving a witty AI-generated response to be used either to create their own dating app profile, respond to someone else’s or just keep a conversation going. Mirakyan says he was hoping to help people like himself who have struggled in social situations.
“I was a really freaking awkward kid…I couldn’t really read social cues, but I remember reading this book called ‘Be More Chill’ about a computer that you could put into your ear that would tell you what to say so that you could sound cool and fit in,” Mirakyan told CNN. “It feels like it’s an opportunity to really make a difference with this fairly large subset of people that for various reasons find the current social environment challenging.”
Teaser.AI is a new stand-alone dating app from the makers of viral camera app Dispo, and it adds an unusual twist. Users build the average profile – but also select personality traits for their AI bot they train. (Options include “traditional,” “toxic,” and “unhinged.”) When matching with another person, users first get to read a conversation between their two AIs they’ve created to “simulate[what] a potential conversation between you two might look like,” according to the app. Once a human messages, the bots takes a back seat.
“We see it as an improvement, a tweak of the current dating app ecosystem,” Teaser.AI co-Founder and CEO Daniel Liss told CNN. “So many of those apps it feels are not really designed to get you out there meeting people. They’re designed to keep you on the app for as long as possible. So for us, we view this technology as a way to give people a nudge… just starting that conversation and to creating connection.”
Find out on dating apps Iris and Aimm.
Theseapps are among thoseusing AI technology to better pair potential couples, relying on gathered data to determine how compatible two people are.
Dating app Iris is all about AI-determined mutual attraction. It initiates new members by putting them through “training” where they are shown faces of “people” of their desired gender – some stock images, others AI-generated – and prompted to hit “Pass,” “Maybe,” or “Like.” The app uses theinformation to learn a user’s physical type, then only offers potential matches with a high data-backed chance of mutual attraction and lower odds of rejection.
Also hoping that AI can find better matches is Aimm, a full service digital matchmaker that uses a virtual assistant to perform intensepersonality assessments before conducting a matchmaking process to find an optimal match. Founder Kevin Teman says the technology is really good at putting two people together who have the possibility to fall in love – but that it can only go so far.
“The tug of war that I see is thinking ‘how can a computer be able to know what real human love is,’ and the way people assess whether they’re in love with somebody may not be able to translate perfectly into a machine,” Teman told CNN.
Try Blush or RomanticAI. These startups offer an array of AI potential matches, digitalgirlfriends and boyfriends that users can chat with.
Both apps market themselves as places to practice relationship skills, giving users a chance to converse with bots in a romantic environment. Blush uses a traditional dating app set-up, letting users swipe, chat with matches and even go on virtual dates. Before entering the app, users get a warning: “Be aware that AI can say triggering, inappropriate, or false things.”
Blush reports that their audience is mostly men and largely people in their early 20s who are struggling to connect romantically with others. “A lot of people reported that exploring different romantic relationships or dating scenarios with AI really helped them first boost their own confidence and feel like they feel more prepared to be dating, which I think especially after COVID was definitely a problem for many of us,” Blush’s chief product officer Rita Popova told CNN.
Romantic.AI is set up more like a chat room, offering several male and female bots to choose from- though there is a much larger selection of female options, including Mona Lisa and the Ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti. The bots have bios with interests, career and body type, giving users a multi-faceted idea of a person while chatting.
It creates a “safe space for any kind of desire, any kind of sexuality relief or something like that. AI is giving the ultimate acceptance of whatever you want to bring over there,” COO Tanya Grypachevskaya told CNN.
RomanticAI has over one million monthly users using the app for over an hour a day on average, according to the company.
One user left a rave review after using the app to find closure after a breakup. “He created his custom-made character with the traits similar in personality as his girlfriend. He talked to it and he talked and he was able to tell all of the things he wanted to tell but didn’t have the opportunity before. So the whole review was about ‘guys, thank you so much. It really gave me an opportunity to close this chapter of my life and move on,” said Grypachevskaya.
Threads, the much-hyped social media app from Facebook-parent Meta, is taking heat for blocking searches for “coronavirus,” “Covid,” and other pandemic-related queries.
The tech giant’s decision to block coronavirus-related searches on its service comes as the United States deals with a recent uptick in Covid-19 hospitalizations, per CDC data, and more than three years into the global pandemic.
News of Threads blocking searches related to the coronavirus was first reported by The Washington Post.
A Meta spokesperson told CNN that the company just began rolling out keyword search for Threads to additional countries last week.
“The search functionality temporarily doesn’t provide results for keywords that may show potentially sensitive content,” the statement added. “People will be able to search for keywords such as ‘COVID’ in future updates once we are confident in the quality of the results.”
As of Monday, searches on the Threads app conducted by CNN for “coronavirus,” “Covid” and “Covid-19” yielded a blank page with the text: “No results.” Searches for “vaccine” also prompted no results. Typing any of these queries into the Threads app does, however, offer a link directing users to the CDC’s website on Covid-19 or vaccinations, depending on the search.
Meta did not disclose what other keyword searches currently yield no results.
Meta’s Facebook and other social media platforms faced controversy in the early part of the pandemic for the apparent spread of Covid-19-related misinformation online.
Meta officially launched Threads in early July, and the app quickly garnered more than 100 million sign-ups in its first week on the heels of months of chaos at Twitter, which is now known as X. But much of the buzz faded somewhat in the weeks that followed as users realized the bare-bones platform still lacked many of the features that made X popular with users.
Threads released its much-requested web version late last month, and its keyword search about a week ago. But the current limitations around its search function highlights how the platform still has some kinks to work through before it can fully replace the real-time search and engagement experience that social media users have historically relied on with X.
As the Israel-Hamas war reaches the end of its first week, millions have turned to platforms including TikTok and Instagram in hopes of comprehending the brutal conflict in real time. Trending search terms on TikTok in recent days illustrate the hunger for frontline perspectives: From “graphic Israel footage” to “live stream in Israel right now,” internet users are seeking out raw, unfiltered accounts of a crisis they are desperate to understand.
For the most part, they are succeeding, discovering videos of tearful Israeli children wrestling with the permanence of death alongside images of dazed Gazans sitting in the rubble of their former homes. But that same demand for an intimate view of the war has created ample openings for disinformation peddlers, conspiracy theorists and propaganda artists — malign influences that regulators and researchers now warn pose a dangerous threat to public debates about the war.
One recent TikTok video, seen by more than 300,000 users and reviewed by CNN, promoted conspiracy theories about the origins of the Hamas attacks, including false claims that they were orchestrated by the media. Another, viewed more than 100,000 times, shows a clip from the video game “Arma 3” with the caption, “The war of Israel.” (Some users in the comments of that video noted they had seen the footage circulating before — when Russia invaded Ukraine.)
TikTok is hardly alone. One post on X, formerly Twitter, was viewed more than 20,000 times and flagged as misleading by London-based social media watchdog Reset for purporting to show Israelis staging civilian deaths for cameras. Another X post the group flagged, viewed 55,000 times, was an antisemitic meme featuring Pepe the Frog, a cartoon that has been appropriated by far-right white supremacists. On Instagram, a widely shared and viewed video of parachuters dropping in on a crowd and captioned “imagine attending a music festival when Hamas parachutes in” was debunked over the weekend and, in fact, showed unrelated parachute jumpers in Egypt. (Instagram later labeled the video as false.)
This week, European Union officials sent warnings to TikTok, Facebook and Instagram-parent Meta, YouTube and X, highlighting reports of misleading or illegal content about the war on their platforms and reminding the social media companies they could face billions of dollars in fines if an investigation later determines they violated EU content moderation laws. US and UK lawmakers have also called on those platforms to ensure they are enforcing their rules against hateful and illegal content.
Since the violence in Israel began, Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the social media watchdog group Center for Countering Digital Hate, told CNN his group has tracked a spike in efforts to pollute the information ecosystem surrounding the conflict.
“Getting information from social media is likely to lead to you being severely disinformed,” said Ahmed.
Everyone from US foreign adversaries to domestic extremists to internettrolls and “engagement farmers” has been exploiting the war on social media for their own personal or political gain, he added.
“Bad actors surrounding us have been manipulating, confusing and trying to create deception on social media platforms,” Dan Brahmy, CEO of the Israeli social media threat intelligence firm Cyabra, said Thursday in a video posted to LinkedIn. “If you are not sure of the trustworthiness [of content] … do not share,” he said.
‘Upticks in Islamophobic and antisemitic narratives’
Graham Brookie, senior director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, told CNN his team has witnessed a similar phenomenon. The trend includes a wave of first-party terrorist propaganda, content depicting graphic violence, misleading and outright false claims, and hate speech – particularly “upticks in specific and general Islamophobic and antisemitic narratives.”
Much of the most extreme content, he said, has been circulating on Telegram, the messaging app with few content moderation controls and a format that facilitates quick and efficient distribution of propaganda or graphic material to a large, dedicated audience. But in much the same way that TikTok videos are frequently copied and rebroadcast on other platforms, content shared on Telegram and other more fringe sites can easily find a pipeline onto mainstream social media or draw in curious users from major sites. (Telegram didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Schools in Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States this week urged parents to delete their children’s social media apps over concerns that Hamas will broadcast or disseminate disturbing videos of hostages who have been seized in recent days. Photos of dead or bloodied bodies, including those of children, have already spread across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X this week.
And tech watchdog group Campaign for Accountability on Thursday released a report identifying several accounts on X sharing apparent propaganda videos with Hamas iconography or linking to official Hamas websites. Earlier in the week, X faced criticism for videos unrelated to the war being presented as on-the-ground footage and for a post from owner Elon Musk directing users to follow accounts that previously shared misinformation (Musk’s post was later deleted, and the videos were labeled using X’s “community notes” feature.)
Some platforms are in a better position to combat these threats than others. Widespread layoffs across the tech industry, including at some social media companies’ ethics and safety teams, risk leaving the platforms less prepared at a critical moment, misinformation experts say. Much of the content related to the war is also spreading in Arabic and Hebrew, testing the platforms’ capacity to moderate non-English content, where enforcement has historically been less robust than in English-language content.
“Of course, platforms have improved over the years. Communication & info sharing mechanisms exist that did not in years past. But they have also never been tested like this,” Brian Fishman, the co-founder of trust and safety platform Cinder who formerly led Facebook’s counterterrorism efforts, said Wednesday in a post on Threads. “Platforms that kept strong teams in place will be pushed to the limit; platforms that did not will be pushed past it.”
Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X, said in a letter Wednesday to the European Commission that the platform has “identified and removed hundreds of Hamas-related accounts” and is working with several third-party groups to prevent terrorist content from spreading. “We’ve diligently taken proactive actions to remove content that violates our policies, including: violent speech, manipulated media and graphic media,” she said. The European Commission on Thursday formally opened an investigation into X following its earlier warning about disinformation and illegal content linked to the war.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said that since Hamas’ initial attacks, the company has established “a special operations center staffed with experts, including fluent Hebrew and Arabic speakers, to closely monitor and respond to this rapidly evolving situation. Our teams are working around the clock to keep our platforms safe, take action on content that violates our policies or local law, and coordinate with third-party fact checkers in the region to limit the spread of misinformation. We’ll continue this work as this conflict unfolds.”
YouTube, for its part, says its teams have removed thousands of videos since the attack began, and continues to monitor for hate speech, extremism, graphic imagery and other content that violates its policies. The platform is also surfacing almost entirely videos from mainstream news organizations in searches related to the war.
Snapchat told CNN that its misinformation team is closely watching content coming out of the region, making sure it is within the platform’s community guidelines, which prohibits misinformation, hate speech, terrorism, graphic violence and extremism.
TikTok did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Large tech platforms are now subject to content-related regulation under a new EU law called the Digital Services Act, which requires them to prevent the spread of mis- and disinformation, address rabbit holes of algorithmically recommended content and avoid possible harms to user mental health. But in such a contentious moment, platforms that take too heavy a hand in moderation could risk backlash and accusations of bias from users.
Platforms’ algorithms and business models — which generally rely on the promotion of content most likely to garner significant engagement — can aid bad actors who design content to capitalize on that structure, Ahmed said. Other product choices, such as X’s moves to allow any user to pay for a subscription for a blue “verification” checkmark that grants an algorithmic boost to post visibility, and to remove the headlines from links to news articles, can further manipulate how users perceive a news event.
“It’s time to break the emergency glass,” Ahmed said, calling on platforms to “switch off the engagement-driven algorithms.” He added: “Disinformation factories are going to cause geopolitical instability and put Jews and Muslims at harm in the coming weeks.”
Even as social media companies work to hide the absolute worst content from their users — whether out of a commitment to regulation, advertisers’ brand safety concerns, or their own editorial judgments — users’ continued appetite for gritty, close-up dispatches from Israelis and Palestinians on the ground is forcing platforms to walk a fine line.
“Platforms are caught in this demand dynamic where users want the latest and the most granular, or the most ‘real’ content or information about events, including terrorist attacks,” Brookie said.
The dynamic simultaneously highlights the business models of social media and the role the companies play in carefully calibrating their users’ experiences. The very algorithms that are widely criticized elsewhere for serving up the most outrageous, polarizing and inflammatory content are now the same ones that, in this situation, appear to be giving users exactly what they want.
But closeness to a situation is not the same thing as authenticity or objectivity, Ahmed and Brookie said, and the wave of misinformation flooding social media right now underscores the dangers of conflating them.
Despite giving the impression of reality and truthfulness, Brookie said, individual stories and combat footage conveyed through social media often lack the broader perspective and context that journalists, research organizations and even social media moderation teams apply to a situation to help achieve a fuller understanding of it.
“It’s my opinion that users can interact with the world as it is — and understand the latest, most accurate information from any given event — without having to wade through, on an individual basis, all of the worst possible content about that event,” Brookie said.
Potentially exacerbating the messy information ecosystem is a culture on social media platforms that often encourages users to bear witness to and share information about the crisis as a way of signaling their personal stance, whether or not they are deeply informed. That can lead even well-intentioned users to unwittingly share misleading information or highly emotional content created with the intention of collecting views or monetizing highly engaging content.
“Be very cautious about sharing in the middle of a major world event,” Ahmed said. “There are people trying to get you to share bullsh*t, lies, which are designed to inculcate you to hate or to misinform you. And so sharing stuff that you’re not sure about is not helping people, it’s actually really harming them and it contributes to an overall sense that no one can trust what they’re seeing.”
X CEO Linda Yaccarino, leader of the platform formerly known as Twitter, said the company is keeping an eye on new competitor Threads, despite the sharply slowing growth of the rival app from Meta.
“Threads did jump in with a ton of hype and a launch pad from their Instagram users … [but] it’s dropped off dramatically,” Yaccarino told CNBC Thursday in her first interview as CEO of the company now called X.
“But you can never, ever take your eye off any competition because they’ll continue iterating and as much as the launch has stalled, we’re keeping an eye on everything that they’re doing.”
Still, Yaccarino said X remains largely focused on its own future as the company chases profitability, and that Threads may be looking at its past.
“What we can see is that [Threads] may be building to what Twitter was — enter rebrand, enter X — and we’re focused on what X will be, and it’s an entirely different roadmap and vision,” she said.
Staving off competition from Meta’s Threads and other rival platforms is just one of the things Yaccarino is now tasked with after taking over from owner Elon Musk as X’s CEO in June. In just her first two months, the company underwent a massive rebrand from Twitter to X in hopes of transforming into an “everything app” similar to China’s WeChat, and has continued to warn of challenges reviving its core advertising business. Musk, who is now the company’s chief technology officer, has also been preparing for a cage fight with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Yaccarino joined the company after months of turmoil caused by Musk’s takeover, including mass layoffs, controversial policy decisions and various legal battles.
But on Thursday, she doubled down on the company’s vision and explained why it retired its highly recognized brand name.
“The rebrand really represented a liberation from Twitter, a liberation that allows us to evolve past a legacy mindset and to reimagine how everyone … around the world is going to change how we congregate, how we transact, all in one place,” Yaccarino said, adding that users would soon be able to make video calls and payments through the platform.
“It’s developing into this global town square that is fueled by free expression, where the public gathers in real time,” she said.
Yaccarino said that the company is returning to growth mode after months of slashing costs through ongoing layoffs, infrastructure and office space reductions and, in some cases, allegedly holding back on paying its bills and employee severance. Twitter’s staff has shrunk from nearly 8,000 employees to just around 1,500 workers since Musk’s takeover, Yaccarino said.
“Are we hiring? Yes,” Yaccarino said. “I get to come in and shift from this cost discipline to growth … the future is bright.”
Threatening to stand in the way of that evolution are the company’s very real business challenges. Musk last month disclosed in a post that, due to a 50% drop in advertising revenue and a “heavy debt load,” the platform is still losing money. After Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last October, the company’s value now stands around $15 billion, according to a May disclosure from a Fidelity fund.
Yaccarino, a former marketing executive with NBCUniversal, was brought on to Twitter in part to help revive its advertising business. And she said on Thursday that the company is “close to breakeven.”
“Coca Cola, Visa, State Farm is a huge partner, they’re coming back — the last bunch of weeks, continued revenue growth,” Yaccarino said.
But maintaining the ad business has been an uphill battle for the site since Musk’s takeover. Hordes of advertisers halted spending on the platform over concerns about content moderation, mass layoffs and general uncertainty about the company’s future. Musk has also defended his own controversial tweets, telling CNBC in May, “I’ll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.”
Yaccarino pointed to the company’s “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” policy that aims to limit the reach of so-called lawful but awful content on the platform and to protect brands from having their ads appear alongside such content. X on Tuesday rolled out additional brand safety controls for advertisers, including the ability to avoid having their ads show next to “targeted hate speech, sexual content, gratuitous gore, excessive profanity, obscenity, spam, drugs.”
“I wrap my security blanket around you, my brand and my CMO, and say your ads will only air next to content that is appropriate for you,” Yaccarino said Thursday.
“You’ll never be successful,” Errol Musk in 1989 told his 17-year-old son Elon, who was then preparing to fly from South Africa to Canada to find relatives and a college education.
That’s one of the scenes Walter Isaacson paints in his 670-page biography of Elon Musk, who is now the richest person who ever lived. The biography allows readers new glimpses into the private life of the entrepreneur who popularized electric vehicles for the masses and landed rocket boosters hurtling back to Earth so they could be reused.
But Musk’s public statements and actions have become increasingly unhinged, filing and threatening lawsuits against nonprofits that fight hate speech and allowing some of the internet’s worst actors to regain their platforms.
Isaacson portrays Musk as a restless genius with a turbulent upbringing on the cusp of launching a new AI company along with his five other companies.
Musk allowed Isaacson to shadow him for two years but exercised no control over the biography’s contents, the author said.
Here are four key takeaways.
Musk’s upbringing and father haunt him
Isaacson’s book attributes much of Musk’s drive to his upbringing. He recounts the emotional scars inflicted on Musk by his father, which, Isaacson writes, caused Musk to become “a tough yet vulnerable man-child with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive.”
Musk decided to live with his father from age 10 to 17, enduring what Musk and others describe as occasional but regular verbal taunts and abuse. Musk’s sister, Tosca, said Errol would sometimes lecture his children for hours, “calling you worthless, pathetic, making scarring and evil comments, not allowing you to leave.”
Elon Musk became estranged from his father, though he has occasionally supported his father financially. In a 2022 email sent to Elon Musk on Father’s Day, Errol Musk said he was freezing and lacking electricity, asking his son for money.
In the letter, Errol made racist comments about Black leaders in South Africa. “With no Whites here, the Blacks will go back to the trees,” he wrote.
Elon Musk has said that he opposes racism and discrimination, but hate speech has flourished on X, formerly known as Twitter, since he purchased it 11 months ago, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Musk threatened to sue the ADL for defamation last week, arguing that the nonprofit’s statements have caused his company to lose significant advertising revenue.
Isaacson reported that Errol, in other emails, denounced Covid as “a lie” and attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, the United States’ former top infectious disease expert who played a prominent role in the government’s fight against the pandemic.
Elon Musk, similarly, has criticized Fauci and raised many questions about public health policy during the pandemic. But he has said he supports vaccination, even if he doesn’t believe the shots should be mandated.
Musk’s fluid family and obsession with population
Musk has a fluid mix of girlfriends, ex-wives, ex-girlfriends and significant others, and he has many children with multiple women. Isaacson’s book revealed Musk had a third child (Techno Mechanicus) with the musician Grimes in 2022, and Musk confirmed the revelation Sunday.
Musk has frequently stated that humans must be a multiplanetary species, warning space exploration will ensure the future of humanity. He similarly has spoken numerous times that people need to have more children.
“Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” Musk said last year.
Musk has referred to his desire to increase the global population as an explanation for his unique family situation.
The book reports that Musk encouraged employees such as Shivon Zilis, a top operations officer at his Neuralink company, to have many children. “He feared that declining birthrates were a threat to the long-term survival of human consciousness,” Isaacson writes.
Although the book presents their relationship as a platonic work friendship, Musk volunteered to donate sperm to Zilis. She agreed and had twins in 2021 via in vitro fertilization; she did not tell people who the biological father was.
Zilis and Grimes were friendly, but Musk did not tell Grimes about the twins, according to the book.
Musk asked Zilis if her twins might like to take his last name. Isaacson reports that Grimes was upset in 2022 when she learned the news that Musk had fathered children with Zilis.
“Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,” Musk tweeted at the time, trying to defuse the tension. “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.”
One of Musk’s children, Jenna, often criticized her father’s wealth specifically and capitalism broadly. In 2022, she disowned her father, which Isaacson reports saddened Musk.
Isaacson reports that Musk’s fractured relationship with Jenna, who is trans, partly led to Musk’s rightward turn toward libertarianism and questioning what he considers the “woke-mind-virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit, and antihuman.”
Musk has called into question the use of alternate gender pronouns and made numerous statements some critics consider to be anti-trans.
“I absolutely support trans, but all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare,” Musk posted in 2020.
But in December 2020 he also posted a tweet, since deleted, that said “when you put he/him in your bio” alongside a drawing of an 18th century soldier rubbing blood on his face in front of a pile of dead bodies and wearing a cap that read “I love to oppress.”
The purchase of his favorite social media platform, gutting the staff and tinkering with policies and branding have taken time and resources away from Musk’s other companies and projects, Isaacson reports.
“I’ve got a bad habit of biting off more than I can chew,” Musk told Isaacson at one point.
After a protracted legal battle over his decision to purchase Twitter, Musk said he regained his enthusiasm for taking over the company when he realized that he wanted to prevent a world where people silo off into their own echo chambers and would prefer a world of civil discourse.
But Isaacson notes “he would end up undermining that important mission with statements and tweets that ended up chasing off progressives and mainstream media types to other social networks.”
Musk team members, such as his business manager Jared Birchall, his lawyer Alex Spiro and his brother Kimbal, sometimes try to restrain Musk from sending text messages or tweets that could create legal or economic peril, according to the book. Some friends convinced him to place his phone in a hotel safe overnight on one occasion, before Musk summoned hotel security to open the safe for him.
During Christmas in 2022 with his brother, Kimbal warned Elon about how fast he was making enemies. “It’s like the days of high school, when you kept getting beaten up,” he said. Kimbal stopped following Elon on Twitter after his brother’s tweets about Fauci and other conspiracies. “Stop falling for weird s—.”
Are robocars, an AI company and a robot called Optimus on tap?
Musk continues moving forward on new engineering projects. Since 2021, Musk has been working on a “humanoid” robot called Optimus that walks on two legs instead of like four-legged robots coming from other labs. He unveiled an early version of the Optimus robot in September of 2022. Musk told engineers that humanoid robots will “uncork the economy to quasi-infinite levels,” according to Isaacson, by doing jobs humans find dangerous or repetitive.
Some of Musk’s top engineers are also working on a “robotaxi,” a driverless vehicle that shows up like an Uber. This past summer, he spent hours each week preparing new factory designs in Texas to produce the next-generation Tesla cars that would look similar to Tesla’s cybertruck.
Musk is also starting his own AI company called X.AI, which he told Isaacson will compete with Google, Microsoft and other companies surging ahead in the past year with public AI projects. Musk had co-founded OpenAi with Sam Altman in 2015 and contributed $100 million to the non-profit. He became angry when Altman converted the project into a for-profit. Musk also ended a friendship with Larry Page when the two disagreed on AI. According to the book, Musk believes he has a better vision for AI and humanity and thinks the data he owns from Tesla and Twitter will be an asset to his next AI plans.
“Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged?” Isaacson asks in the last chapter.
Schools in Israel, the UK and the US are advising parents to delete their children’s social media apps over concerns that Hamas militants will broadcast or disseminate disturbing videos of hostages who have been seized in recent days.
A Tel Aviv school’s parent’s association said it expects videos of hostages “begging for their lives” to surface on social media. In a message to parents, shared with CNN by a mother of children at a high school in Tel Aviv, the association asked parents to remove apps such as TikTok from their children’s phones.
“We cannot allow our kids to watch this stuff. It is also difficult, furthermore – impossible – to contain all this content on social media,” according to the parent’s association. “Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.”
Hamas has warned that it will post murders of hostages on social media if Israel targets people in Gaza without warning.
There are additional concerns that terrorists will exploit social media algorithms to specifically target such videos to followers of Jewish or Israeli influencers in an effort to wage psychological warfare on Israelis and Jews and their supporters globally.
During the onslaught on Saturday, armed Hamas militants poured over the heavily-fortified border into Israel and took as many as 150 hostages, including Israeli army officers, back to Gaza. The surprise attacks killed at least 1,200 people, according to the Israel Defense Forces, and injured thousands more.
Since Israel began airstrikes on the Palestinian enclave Saturday, at least 1,055 people have been killed in Gaza, including hundreds of children, women, and entire families, according to the Palestinian health ministry. It said a further 5,184 have been injured, as of Wednesday.
As the war wages on, some Jewish schools in the US are also asking parents not to share related videos or photos that may surface, and to prevent children – and themselves – from watching them. The schools are also advising community members to delete their social media apps during this time.
“Together with other Jewish day schools, we are warning parents to disable social media apps such as Instagram, X, and Tiktok from their children’s phones,” the head of a school in New Jersey wrote in an email. “Graphic and often misleading information is flowing freely, augmenting the fears of our students. … Parents should discuss the dangers of these platforms and ask their children on a daily basis about what they are seeing, even if they have deleted the most unfiltered apps from their phones.”
Another school in the UK said it asked students to delete their social media apps during a safety assembly.
TikTok, Instagram and X – formerly known as Twitter – did not immediately respond to requests for comment on how they are combating the increase of videos being posted online and for comment on schools asking parents to delete these apps.
But X said on its platform is has experienced an increase in daily active users in the conflict area and its escalation teams have “actioned tens of thousands of posts for sharing graphic media, violent speech, and hateful conduct.” It did not respond to a request to comment further or define “actioned.”
“We’re also continuing to proactively monitor for antisemitic speech as part of all our efforts,” X’s safety team said. “Plus we’ve taken action to remove several hundred accounts attempting to manipulate trending topics.”
The company added it remains “laser focused” on enforcing the site’s rules and reminded users they can limit sensitive media they may encounter by visiting the “Content you see” option in Settings.
Still, misinformation continues to run rampant on social media platforms, including X.
A post viewed more than 500,000 times – featuring the hashtag #PalestineUnderAttack – claimed to show an airplane being shot down. But the clip was from the video game Arma 3, as was later noted in a “community note” appended to the post.
Another video that is purported to show Israeli generals after being captured by Hamas fighters was viewed more than 1.7 million times by Monday. The video, however, instead shows the detention of separatists in Azerbaijan.
On Tuesday, the European Union warned Elon Musk of “penalties” for disinformation circulating on X amid Israel-Hamas war.
The EU also informed Meta CEO Zuckerberg on Wednesday of a disinformation surge on its platforms – which include Facebook – and demanded the company respond in 24 hours with how it plans to combat the issue.
In an Instagram story on Tuesday, Zuckerberg called the attack “pure evil” and said his focus “remains on the safety of our employees and their families in Israel and the region.”
A zoo in eastern China has denied suggestions that some of its bears were people dressed in costume after videos of a Malayan sun bear standing on its hind legs – and looking uncannily human – went viral, fueling rumors and conspiracy theories on Chinese social media.
In a statement written from the perspective of a sun bear named “Angela,” officials from Hangzhou zoo said people “didn’t understand” the species.
“I’m Angela the sun bear – I got a call after work yesterday from the head of the zoo asking if I was being lazy and skipped work today and found a human to take my place,” the statement read.
“Let me reiterate again to everyone that I am a sun bear – not a black bear, not a dog – a sun bear!”
In videos shared on the popular Chinese microblogging site Weibo, a sun bear was seen standing upright on a rock and looking out of its enclosure.
Many Weibo users noted the animal’s upright posture, as well as folds of loose fur on its behind – making the bear look somewhat odd and fueling speculation that a human imposter might be masquerading in its place.
It might sound like an implausible gambit. But zoos in China have courted public ridicule in the past for trying to pass off pets like dogs as wild animals.
In 2013, a city zoo in the central Henan province angered visitors by trying to pass off a Tibetan Mastiff dog as a lion. Visitors who had approached the enclosure expressed shock when they heard the “lion” bark.
Visitors at another Chinese zoo, in Sichuan province, were shocked to discover a golden retriever sitting in a cage labeled as an African lion enclosure.
Native to the tropical forests of Southeast Asia, sun bears are the world’s smallest bear species. Adult bears stand at heights of up to 70 centimeters tall (28 inches) and weigh between 25 to 65 kilograms (55 to 143 pounds), experts say.
They do not hibernate andare also characterized by amber colored crescent shaped fur patches on their chests and long tongues which help them extract honey from bee hives – earning them the name “beruang madu” (honey bear) in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Their numbers in the wild are at threat by poachers and deforestation, declining by 35% over the past three decades, according to conservation groups like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Center (BSCC) in Sabah, Malaysia.
Sun bears are listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
X, formerly known as Twitter, has reinstated Kanye West’s account on the social media platform. West will not be able to monetize his account, and no ads will appear next to his posts, the company told the Wall Street Journal on Saturday.
The musician’s account was suspended in December for violating the platform’s rules on inciting violence. The suspension followed multiple antisemitic comments made by West – who has legally changed his name to Ye – including a threat to “Go death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” Those statements led to a swift disintegration of multiple business deals, including partnerships with Adidas and luxury fashion house Balenciaga.
Although CNN at the time was unable to determine which tweet had been the final straw, the day before his suspension West tweeted an altered image of the Star of David with a swastika inside.
Twitter has long been embroiled in questions surrounding moderation, with the platform’s CEO Elon Musk describing himself as a “free speech absolutist.” After agreeing to buy the company last October, he said Twitter would “be very reluctant to delete things” and “be very cautious with permanent bans.”
But after West was suspended, Musk tweeted “I tried my best. Despite that, he again violated our rule against incitement to violence.”
In April, Twitter’s safety team launched a new content enforcement strategy called “Freedom of Speech, Not Reach,” which focused on “restricting the reach of Tweets that violate our policies by making the content less discoverable.”
This approach, in part, requires the team to “proactively prevent ads from appearing adjacent to content” labeled as violative.
In an update earlier this month, the safety team reported that these labeled tweets “receive 81% less reach or impressions” than non-restricted ones, and that “more than 99.99% of Tweet impressions are from … content that does not violate our rules.”
Twitter’s Violent Speech Policy prohibits inciting and glorifying violence, wishing harm on other people, and threatening others. But it makes some exceptions, including for “figures of speech, satire, or artistic expression when the context is expressing a viewpoint rather than instigating actionable violence or harm.”
“We make sure to evaluate and understand the context behind the conversation before taking action,” the policy states, adding that if a user believes their account was wrongfully suspended, they can submit an appeal.
It’s not clear whether West submitted an appeal, or if something else prompted his account’s reactivation. The musician has yet to post on the platform. CNN has reached out to Twitter and a representative for West but has not received a response.
Twitter, the text-based social media platform that played an outsized role on society by serving as a digital town square, was killed by its unhinged owner Elon Musk on Sunday. It was 17 years old.
A zombie Twitter, known only as X, reluctantly endures. A warped and disfigured platform, X marches on like a White Walker, an ugly shell of its former self under the command of a loathsome leader.
Whereas Twitter was once a fountain of authoritative information, X is a platform where trolls can pay a small fee to have their ugly content boosted ahead of reputable sources.
X is a platform where identity verification no longer exists and impersonation is only a paid subscription away.
X is a platform where journalists are banned and smeared while the most repellant and dishonest voices are elevated.
X is a platform where the rules are unclear and content moderation is largely an idea of the past.
X is a platform where the most important and consequential decisions are made on a whim and can happen without any warning.
And X is a platform where vital infrastructure is crumbling and the most basic of features often fail to function.
X might resemble Twitter. It might occupy the same address on the internet that Twitter once did. But make no mistake, it is not the same platform it once was — even as recently as nine months ago, when Musk took over, quickly decapitated the former leadership, and threw the company into chaos and turmoil.
That platform has ceased to be. It arguably died some time ago, before it was announced to the public by way of a sudden and disorderly rebranding.
In many ways, Musk has done to Twitter what Donald Trump did to the Republican Party: wholly remade it in his own image. At least, with Musk, the deformed entity is getting a different name, one that allows the public to perhaps separate Twitter from what Musk has transformed it into.
X will, of course, inherit all of Twitter’s business problems. Musk is the entity that has proven toxic to advertisers and much of the user base, not the widely recognized bird logo. How the billionaire ultimately turns that ship around is unclear, particularly as he faces new competition from Mark Zuckerberg and Threads.
So far, however, there is little hope Musk will be able to successfully steer the ship out of iceberg-ridden waters. He is, after all, the captain who led the ship into them — all while manically laughing alongside his inner circle while standing at the wheel.
Elon Musk tweeted on his official account on Sunday that Twitter would be changing its logo to an “X” and that all the birds will be disappearing from the platform.
In a series of tweets, Musk said: “And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”
In the same series of tweets, Musk posted “Paint It Black,” before launching a user poll to “Change default platform color to black.”
“If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow,” he continued.
“Like this but X,” he added above an illustration of the iconic bird silhouette but against a black background.
One of the world’s richest men, Musk, once known for his innovative efforts through companies SpaceX and Tesla to launch rockets and build electric cars, now makes headlines for his antics and eccentric remarks on his personal Twitter account – often sharing conspiracy theories and getting into public spats on the social media platform.
Musk overhauled the site after acquiring it for $44 billion in late October – drastically cutting staff and overseeing controversial policy changes which have led to frequent service disruptions and upended his own reputation in the process as tech watchers have noted.
He has also repeatedly warned that Twitter could be at risk of filing for bankruptcy. This month he disclosed that the platform still has a negative cash flow due to a 50% drop in advertising revenue and heavy debt loads.
Two tourists who snapped selfies with dingoes have been fined more than $1,500 each for taking the “extremely dangerous decision” to interact with the native wild dogs following a recent spate of ferocious attacks, Australian authorities said.
In a statement Friday, Queensland Department of Environment and Science compliance manager Mike Devery said the two women were lucky not to be attacked in the separate incidents on the popular tourist island of K’gari, formerly known as Fraser Island.
An image provided by the department showed an unnamed New South Wales woman, 29, laying down next to a pack of sleeping dingo pups. “She was lucky the mother of the pups wasn’t nearby,” Devery said.
The other tourist, a 25-year-old Queensland woman, appeared in a selfie video posted to social media that showed her with a growling dingo, “which was clearly exhibiting dominance-testing behaviour,” he said.
“It is not playful behaviour. Wongari are wild animals and need to be treated as such, and the woman is lucky the situation did not escalate,” he added, referring to dingoes by their indigenous name.
In an update Friday, the department said a 23-year-old woman was hospitalized with serious injuries to her arms and legs after she was bitten by dingoes while jogging on an island beach Monday.
Tourists Shane and Sarah Moffat jumped in to rescue her, CNN affiliate Nine News reported.
“There was a big piece missing out of her arm there and there was puncture wounds all up the side of her legs,” Shane Moffat told Nine News.
The leader of that dingo pack was later euthanized, the department said. It had also been involved in recent biting incidents that led to the hospitalization of a 6-year-old girl, the department said.
“It was also clear from its behaviour that it had become habituated, either by being fed or from people interacting with it for videos and selfies,” the update said.
“Our number one priority is to keep people on K’gari safe and conserve the population of wongari (dingoes), and those who blatantly ignore the rules for social media attention can expect a fine or a court appearance,” Devery said.
When Mark Zuckerberg shared a photo on Instagram of his family on July 4, two things stuck out: the billionaire CEO wore a striped souvenir cowboy hat, andthe faces of his children were replaced with happy face emojis.
Zuckerberg’s post was promptly criticized by some who saw the decision to obscure the faces as a reflection of his privacy concerns for sharing pictures of his children online, despite his creating massive platforms that allow millions of other parents to do just that.
Meta, Instagram’s parent company, has long been scrutinized over how it handles user privacy and for the way its algorithms can be used to leadyoung users down potentially harmful rabbit hoes.
But the choice also highlights a broader trend among some social media users, and particularly among high-profile individuals, to be more cautious in sharing identifiable pictures of their children online.
For years, celebrities from KristenBell and Gigi Hadid to Chris Pratt and Orlando Bloom have been blurring images or using emojis to help protect their kids’ privacy on social media. Zuckerberg, too, had previously posted pictures of the back of his daughters’ heads and their side profiles rather than showing their entire faces.
It’s more rare for everyday users to take a similar approach — but perhaps it shouldn’t be.
“By modeling for us that he was careful not to share his family’s location or childrens’ identities, he may be communicating that it is the end users’ responsibility to protect themselves online,”said Alexandra Hamlet, a New York City-based psychologist who closely follows the impact of social media on young users.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment.
Few things are as central to the parenting experience as showing numerous, possibly embarrassing, pictures of your children with anyone who will stop and look. But over the years, a growing number of parents and experts have raised concerns about the risks of sharing these pictures on social media, including the possibility of exposing kids to identify theft and facial recognition technology, as well as creating an internet history that could follow them into adulthood.
Some parents choose to either restrict how much they share about their kids or limit sharing to less public platforms. Others adopt more clever hacks like obscuring their children’s faces.
Leah Plunkett, author of “Sharenthood”and associate dean of learning experience and innovation(LXI) at Harvard Law School, said blocking a child’s face is a symbol that you’re giving them control over their own narrative.
“Every time you post about your kids, you are chipping away at allowing them to tell their own stories about who they are and who they want to become,” she said. “We grow up making mischief and more than a few mistakes and grow up better having made them. If we lose the privacy of teens and kids to play and explore, and to live and through trial and error, we will deprive them of the abilityto develop and tell stories [on their own terms].”
Noticeably, Zuckerberg did not obscure the face of his infantdaughter, which might suggest less concern with the risks for a baby’s face than a young child.However,Plunkett said artificial intelligence technology can be used to trace a face’s changes over time and may still be able to later connect any child, even a baby, to an image of them when older.
Plunkett believes social media companies can do more, such as offering a setting that automatically blurs kids’ faces or prevents any picture with a child from being used for marketing or advertising purposes.
For now, however, the onus remains on parents to limit or abstain sharing photos of their kids online.
“It’s not just parents – grandparents, coaches, teachers and other trusted adults should also keep kids out of photos and videos to protect their privacy, safety, future and current opportunities, and their ability to figure out their own story about themselves and for themselves,” she said.
Like many Americans, when Vanessa Steinkamp was stuck inside early in the Covid-19 pandemic, she logged into Twitter to talk to the outside world. The teacher and mother of three schoolchildren in Dallas was worried that closed classrooms would hurt kids, particularly the most vulnerable students who needed the special resources that schools provide. Calling for children to go back to in-person learning earned her a lot of backlash, but she also befriended likeminded moms.
When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pressed public schools to reopen in the summer of 2020, he became their hero.
These women built an informal network of overlapping chatgroups across several states, many of them outside Florida. They had a mix of political views, from liberal to conservative, and were brought together by frustrations with a Covid response that they felt left opening schools a low priority.
College-educated and affluent, the mothers are the kinds of voters seen as critical to both political parties in swing districts and states, and one of the voting groups among whom former President Donald Trump and Republicans underperformed in both 2020 and 2022.
They’re the kinds of voters DeSantis hopes can drive him to victory in a general election if he can overcome Trump to secure the GOP nomination – and appealing to them is a key part of his case in the primary.
One of Steinkamp’s first Twitter friends was Jennifer Sey, then an executive at Levi’s. In 2022, Sey said the company pressured her to stop tweeting about opening schools and playgrounds, and when she refused, she said, she was pushed out of her job as brand president. Levi’s disputed her account, telling The New York Times it supported Sey’s advocacy on schools but her comments “went far beyond calling for schools to reopen, and frequently used her platform to criticize public health guidelines and denounce elected officials and government scientists.”
Another Twitter friend was so infuriated when she saw a local school board member’s campaign fliers in San Diego that touted the decision to keep schools closed that she called a real estate agent in Florida and eventually moved to Tampa. She did not want to use her name because she said she feared backlash at work, but she did send CNN photos of the fliers.
Julie Hamill, a lawyer near Los Angeles, was a later addition to the group. She, too, was furious about the actions of her local public health department and school board. But her husband didn’t want to leave California, so last year Hamill ran for school board and won.
I first spoke to Steinkamp in the spring of 2021 while reporting a story on how Covid had changed the real estate market in Texas. But it was her appreciation of the then first-term Florida governor that stuck with me.
“If DeSantis were to run tomorrow, he would win,” she said then. “All he has to do is run on opening schools.”
Her friends told CNN recently they’d felt the same way – they’d joked about “Daddy DeSantis” and “Freedom Daddy.” His early advocacy for open schools, Sey said, was “pretty heroic.”
Their fangirl vibe was tongue-in-cheek, but also spoke to their situation. Hamill said: “We’re like desperate women who … had tried everything that we could do in our own power in our own communities, and we weren’t getting anywhere.”
DeSantis pressured school districts to open in August 2020, earlier than most places in the US. But many European countries opened schools in April and May of 2020. “Children don’t generally infect adults,” a health official in Finland said in May 2020, explaining his country’s decision to reopen schools. (At the time, there was conflicting research on the role kids played in spreading the virus.) As CNN reported in January 2021, “in Europe, shutting schools is widely seen as a last resort.” Recent research has shown kids fell back in their learning during the pandemic. American fourth- and eighth-graders, for example, showed the largest declines in math scores since the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics began keeping track in 1990.
DeSantis’ actions gained him a bigger national platform during the pandemic, which he’s used to launch his presidential bid. He’s campaigning on his Covid record, but also the idea that Florida is “where woke goes to die.”
Steinkamp has been a Republican all her life, though she said she has never liked Trump. Sey, the former Levi’s executive, had been a leftist Democrat until her Covid experience, she said, but she’s also open to DeSantis’ “war on woke.” She told CNN, “I think, to some extent, he’s got a point. It’s a movement that demands conformity and sees every sort of problem the world faces through this lens of kind of hierarchical oppression.”
Sey, who now says she’s a “disaffected leftist,” said, “My issue with woke capitalism, in particular, is that it’s hypocritical, and it’s a lie. … I would much rather companies focus on treat treating employees with fairness, paying them well, treating women well – not harassing them – than do these fake campaigns while the leaders take all the money for themselves and obscure their greed with woke washing.”
Even so, Sey said, she thought DeSantis’ campaigning against wokeness was “a little bit” of a distraction from the policies that made her like him in the first place. She thought the governor’s fight with Disney was unnecessary. “There’s some truth to what he’s saying about woke ideology being corrosive and conformist and authoritarian in some ways. I just don’t think you should counter that with more authoritarianism,” she said.
Hamill, the lawyer in LA, said she had voted for Barack Obama twice, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden for president. She is open to voting for DeSantis but is concerned about some of his policies.
She said she considered herself socially liberal but suffered backlash when she called for schools to be open. “I was demonized for expressing these feelings. And meanwhile, Ron DeSantis in Florida is saying everything that I was desperately wanting to hear from my own elected representatives.”
The women don’t always agree on politics: Steinkamp is against abortion, while Sey and Hamill are for women having the right to the procedure. But all three think Florida’s new ban on abortion after six weeks is a blot on their favorite governor’s record. “That’s dangerous,” Hamill said. “That’s something that I cannot get behind. And I don’t think that’s going to bode well for his presidential campaign. I think that that might be a real impediment to bringing in moderate women.”
With none of them living in Florida, the women have not had an opportunity to vote for DeSantis yet. And it’s too early to know if their Covid-era infatuation will become more.
They all despair at the thought that the 2024 election will be a rematch between Biden and Trump. If those were her two choices, Steinkamp said, she’d go for a third option: “Jump in my swimming pool and drown myself.”
With just five words, a recent tweet from Kraft Heinz sparked a bit of a debate about how you should store your ketchup.
“FYI,” began the tweet from the United Kingdom-based branch of the food and beverage company. “Ketchup. Goes. In. The. Fridge!!!”
Kraft Heinz, whose ketchup is among its popular condiments, shared the heavily punctuated statement on Tuesday in a tweet that reached over 4 million people.
A day later, the company asked the public via a Twitter poll whether they kept their ketchup chilled or in the pantry.
“Where do you keep yours? It has to be … in the fridge!” the poll stated. The answer of “fridge” appeared to be the consensus, according to 63.2% of over 13,000 votes cast, the poll’s results showed. Meanwhile, 36.8% of respondents said they preferred their ketchup in the cupboard.
Some Twitter users who voiced their distaste for cold ketchup pointed out that ketchup bottles are stored at room temperature on tables at restaurants. Other users didn’t understand the need for a debate, asserting that once the ketchup bottle is opened, it belongs in the refrigerator.
In 2017, a Twitter user posed the same question to the United States branch of Heinz through the social media website.
At the time, Heinz responded, “Because of its natural acidity, Heinz Ketchup is shelf-stable, but refrigerate after opening to maintain product quality.”
The oversight board for Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms on Thursday said Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen should be suspended from the social media site for six months for posting a video violating rules against violent threats.
The board, which is funded by Meta but operates independently, said the company had been wrong not to remove the video after it was published in January.
Meta, in a written statement, agreed to take down the video but said it would respond to the board’s recommendation to suspend Hun Sen after a review.
Any suspension would silence the prime minister’s Facebook page less than a month before an election in Cambodia. Opposition and rights groups have said the poll will be a sham – accusations dismissed by the government.
Hun Sen’s Facebook account appeared to go offline late on Thursday. The prime minister – one of the world’s longest-serving leaders after nearly four decades in power – had said on Wednesday that he was switching from Facebook to the messaging app Telegram to reach more people, without mentioning the video.
A Meta spokesperson said the company had not suspended or removed his account.
There was no immediate government comment on the case on Thursday.
The decision is the latest in a series of rebukes by the oversight board over how the world’s biggest social media company handles contentious statements by political leaders and posts calling for violence around elections.
The company’s election integrity efforts are in focus as the United States prepares for presidential elections next year.
The board endorsed Meta’s 2021 banishment of former US President Donald Trump – the current frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination – after the deadly January 6 Capitol Hill riot, but criticized the indefinite nature of his suspension and urged more careful preparation for volatile political situations overall.
Meta reinstated the former US president’s account earlier this year.
The Cambodia case came after several users reported a January video where Hun Sen said those who accused his Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) of buying votes in a 2022 local election should file a legal case, or face a beating from CPP’s supporters.
Meta determined at the time that the video fell afoul of its rules, but opted to leave it up under a “newsworthiness” exemption, reasoning that the public had an interest in hearing warnings of violence by their government, the ruling said.
The board held that the video’s harms outweighed its news value.
Cambodia’s government has denied targeting the opposition and says those subject to legal action are law breakers.
Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said Hun Sen had finally been called out for inciting violence.
“This kind of face-off between Big Tech and a dictator over human rights issues is long overdue,” he said in a statement.
Last week, the board said Meta’s handling of calls for violence after the 2022 Brazilian election continued to raise concerns about the effectiveness of its election efforts.
Business rivalry seemingly isn’t enough for two of the tech industry’s most powerful billionaires. Now Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg say they want to settle their scores in a cage fight.
Twitter owner and Tesla
(TSLA) CEO Musk recently tweeted that he would be “up for a cage fight” with Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta. In an Instagram story Wednesday, Zuckerberg fired back by posting a screenshot of Musk’s tweet overlaid with the caption: “Send Me Location.”
Musk then responded to a tweet about the fight by Alex Heath, editor of tech news website Verge, with “Vegas Octagon” — a reference to the Las Vegas arena that hosts the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
“I have this great move that I call ‘The Walrus,’ where I just lie on top of my opponent & do nothing,” he added in a separate tweet.
CNN has contacted Meta for comment. A spokesperson for the company told Verge: “The [Instagram] story speaks for itself.”
It remains unclear whether Zuckerberg and Musk are serious or having a laugh.
Quite who would win in a cage fight, however, remains to be seen. Musk is physically bigger than Zuckerberg, but the Meta chief practices jiu-jitsu, the Brazilian martial art, and won gold and silver in a tournament in May.
Oddspedia, a sports betting platform, collated odds from several different bookmakers, including Bovada, Bet Online and Ladbrokes, and concluded that Zuckerberg has an 83% chance of winning the fight.
Meanwhile, bookmaker Paddy Power is betting the match never happens, but that if it does, both men have an equal chance of winning.
“If this fight does actually go ahead, with a bit of luck, they’ll both knock some sense into each other,” a spokesperson for the Irish company said in a statement.
The two — who in the past jostled for a high spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index before Musk became the world’s richest man — have clashed before.
In 2017, they engaged in a very public feud over the future of artificial intelligence.
Musk had repeatedly warned about the dangers of AI, describing it as a potentially existential threat to the human race. Zuckerberg, on the other hand, took a much more optimistic view.
During a Facebook Live broadcast at the time he dismissed “naysayers” who sketched out “doomsday scenarios” as being “pretty irresponsible.”
Musk shot back shortly afterward, tweeting: “I’ve talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is pretty limited.”
Musk knocked Zuckerberg from the number three spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in 2020, before becoming the richest person in the world soon after that.
He was briefly ousted from the top spot in December by Bernard Arnault, the chairman of French luxury goods giant LVMH
(LVMHF), before reclaiming his title in May. Zuckerberg is now in the 10th position.
The state of Texas as well as cities and counties surrounding the Panhandle town of Perryton are sending aid after a tornado ripped through the area Thursday afternoon.
The National Weather Service in Amarillo confirmed that a tornado struck the town. Images of extensive damage have been circulating on social media.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office and the state’s Division of Emergency Management are mobilizing resources, State Rep. Four Price of District 87 said in a Facebook post.
“TDEM is moving everything that way. Search and Rescue, medical, etc.,” Price said. Multiple structures are damaged and “the state is engaging additional medical help to triage,” according to Price.
“This is a serious situation. Again, please lift that community up in prayer,” he added.
Beaver County, Oklahoma, Emergency Manager Keith Shadden told CNN the county has sent fire, law enforcement and EMS units across the state border to help. He said that they intend to send a second wave to assist but are waiting for the weather to clear in the county.
The city of Stinnett, Texas, about 56 miles from Perryton, is sending officers and EMS crews, and the Hutchinson County Sheriff’s Office posted on Facebook that they are also assisting with rescue and emergency operations following the “devastating tornado.”
CNN has reached out to local officials for more information.
Meteorologists had warned that severe weather capable of producing wind gusts up to 90 mph, hail up to 5 inches in diameter and tornadoes was expected Thursday – the sixth day in a row for portions of the South and Plains.
The latest round of storms comes on the heels of more than 300 storm reports Wednesday, continuing a long streak of active weather.
The area under threat Thursday covers a large swath from Colorado to South Carolina, with the greatest potential across portions of Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas.
The Storm Prediction Center has placed a Level 4 of 5 moderate risk of severe weather for the area, which includes Oklahoma City and Norman, Oklahoma.
Two tornado watches have been issued by the Storm Prediction Center for western and central Oklahoma and portions of northwestern, northern and central Texas. The watches include the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and Oklahoma City and both are in effect until 10 p.m. CT.
“Intense supercell development is expected this afternoon from the eastern Texas Panhandle into western Oklahoma and northwest Texas, and storms will spread eastward through late evening,” the SPC said. “The initial, more discrete supercells will be capable of producing giant hail (4-5 inches in diameter) and a few tornadoes. Upscale growth into a cluster or two is possible this evening, with an increasing threat for intense outflow winds of 80-90 mph.”
Extremely large hail is another threat.
“Be prepared for hail up to the size of baseballs and winds up to 80 mph with the stronger storms, as well as a medium risk for tornadoes,” warned the National Weather Service office in Norman. “The severe window will start in western Oklahoma between 3pm and 5pm and continue until storms exit the southeastern parts of the forecast area by 3am.”
Areas around the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex are under a Level 3 of 5 enhanced risk of severe weather.
“The areas most susceptible to another round of large hail and possibly some damaging winds will be eastern North TX down into far eastern Central TX east of I-45 could get into the mix as well,” the weather service office in Dallas said.
A much broader area of severe weather extends from western Kansas, south to central Texas and east to the Florida Panhandle. The Level 2 of 5 slight risk of severe weather covers more than 10 million people and includes places like Tulsa, Oklahoma; Shreveport, Louisiana; and Tallahassee, Florida.
Lastly, a widespread area of a Level 1 of 5 marginal risk of severe weather covers from eastern Colorado to South Carolina.
While it is not in the main threat area, people should not let their guard down because of the potential for damaging winds and very large hail. An isolated tornado could spin up as well.
In addition to the severe weather threat, the same areas should also monitor the potential for flooding. With days of rain over the same areas, the ground is becoming quite saturated.
“A continued threat of heavy rain through the day with potential for several inches to fall within bands of training convection,” is being warned by the weather service office in Mobile, Alabama.
The multiday severe threat will continue Friday and through the weekend, as storms continue to develop each day along a stalled frontal boundary draped across the South.
Wednesday’s severe threat brought more than 300 storm reports across the South and Plains.
There were at least 100 hail reports and more than 200 wind reports, which knocked out power to more than 100,000 homes.
Baseball to tennis ball-sized hail was reported in Alabama and hail greater than 5 inches was reported in Mississippi.
Of the 10 tornado reports, five were reported in Georgia, two in Texas and three in Alabama.
Not only will millions face severe weather, but more than 30 million people are also under heat alerts, including large portions of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Florida.
Most will see temperatures running at least 10-15 degrees above normal, with the potential for nearly 100 high temperature records to break during the next week.
Texas is expected to get hit exceptionally hard, with heat indices reaching as high as 120 degrees.
Heat indices are the “feels like” temperature, when you factor in the humidity.
The Texas power grid could reach a record high for usage next week, as temperatures stay in the triple digits for at least the next week.
