U.S. stocks closed higher Tuesday, but off the session’s best levels, after more data suggested inflation may be slowing and mega-retailer Walmart offered a rosier annual forecast.
The Dow turned negative earlier in the session after the Associated Press reported that Russian missiles crossed into Poland and killed two people, ratcheting up geopolitical tension given Poland is a NATO country.
How stocks traded
S&P 500 index SPX, +0.87%
rose 34.48 points, or 0.9%, to close at 3,991.73.
Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.17%
climbed 56.22 points, or 0.2%, ending at 33,592.92, after touching a nearly three-month high of 33,987.06 earlier.
Nasdaq Composite COMP, +1.45%
climbed 162.19 points, or 1.5%, closing at 11,358.41.
On Monday, U.S. stocks finished near session lows after early gains evaporated. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 211 points, or 0.6%, while the S&P 500 declined 36 points, or 0.9% and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 226 points, or 2%.
What drove markets
U.S. stocks closed higher Tuesday, after another batch of inflation data showed that whole prices rises were slowing in October for the second straight month.
The Dow’s brief negative turn came after reports that Russian military bombarded Ukraine Tuesday. In the attack, missiles reportedly crossed into Poland, a member of NATO, the Associated Press said, citing a senior U.S. intelligence official.
“Geopolitical concerns obviously are never positive for the market,” said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Spartan Capital Securities.
On Tuesday, oil futures settled higher. West Texas Intermediate crude for December delivery rose to $1.05, or 1.2%, reaching $86.92 a barrel.
While markets had started to price in the toll of Russian’s nearly nine-month invasion of Ukraine, it had not priced in an potential escalation of the war, said Kent Engelke, chief economic strategist at Capitol Securities Management.
“Talk about geopolitical angst returning,” Engelke said, later adding, “If there were really missiles shot to Poland and that was really not an accident, wow, that is really increasing the scope of the war.”
A U.S. National Security Council spokesperson said the agency was aware of the news reports out of Poland, but that it cannot confirm the reports or any details at this time.
While international worries clouded the session, there was also encouraging domestic news.
The U.S. producer-price index climbed 8% over the 12 months through October, the Labor Department said Tuesday, easing from September’s revised 8.4% increase. Last week, stocks surged after the October consumer-price index rose more slowly than expected.
Tuesday’s PPI report helped support the notion that inflation has peaked, at least for now.
“Today, it’s really about the PPI and the market reaction to it,” Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers IBKR, +3.45%,
said in a Tuesday morning interview before the reports of missiles crossing into Poland.
Markets ripped higher last Thursday after October’s consumer-price index showed signs of easing. The same dynamic was playing out Tuesday, but the response now has been “a bit more muted” because it’s an iteration on inflation data that investors already had been starting to see, Sosnick said.
So, is the economy really at peak inflation? It’s too early to say for sure, according to Sosnick. Still, the PPI numbers, paired with last week’s CPI reading “does add evidence to that narrative,” he added.
Walmart’s third quarter earnings also were buoying markets, Sosnick said. The massive retailer’s beat on earnings offers a glimpse at the minds and wallets of many American consumers. For anyone who worries about consumers “getting highly defensive” and not spending, Walmart’s numbers are “counter evidence.”
In other news, the first face-to-face meeting between President Joe Biden and President Xi Jinping helped support stocks listed in China and Hong Kong, as some of the tensions between the world’s two largest economies were seen to be easing.
Analysts increasingly expect stocks to enjoy a positive end to the year. “The near-term picture still looks positive for U.S. benchmark indices and while momentum has reached intra-day overbought levels, this doesn’t imply a selloff has to happen right away,” said Mark Newton, head of technical strategy at Fundstrat.
Philadelphia Federal Reserve President Patrick Harker said Tuesday that he favored a 50 basis-point hike to the Fed’s benchmark rate in December. Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic said more rate hikes will be needed, even through there have been “glimmers of hope” on inflation.
Fed Vice Chairman for Supervision Michael Barr said Tuesday that the U.S. economy is likely to slow in coming months, and more workers will lose their jobs, in Senate testimony. The Fed is working with regulators to assess risks tied to cryptocurrency markets, following the collapse of FTX and its associated companies.
In other U.S. economic data, the New York Empire State manufacturing index for November showed a gauge of manufacturing activity in the state rose 13.6 points to 4.5 this month.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury note TMUBMUSD10Y, 3.774%
was down 6.7 basis points at 3.798%. Bond yields move inversely to prices.
Companies in focus
Walmart WMT, +6.54%
shares jumped after the giant retailer swung to a net third-quarter loss, due to $3.3 billion in charges related to opioid legal settlements, but reported adjusted profit, revenue and same-store sales that were well above expectations and a full-year outlook that was above forecasts. Walmart shares opened Tuesday at $145.61 and closed at $147.48, or 6.57% higher.
Home Depot HD, +1.63%
rose after the home improvement retailer reported fiscal third-quarter earnings that beat expectations, citing strength in project-related categories, but kept its full-year outlook intact. Home Depot shares opened Tuesday at $304.06 and closed at $311.99.
Chinese-listed technology traded sharply higher on Tuesday, including U.S.-traded ADRs for Alibaba Group Holding BABA, +11.17%, Baidu Inc. BIDU, +9.02%
and JD.com Inc. JD, +7.14%
The KraneShares CSI China Internet exchange-traded fund KWEB, +9.56%
also traded substantially higher.
—Jamie Chisholm contributed reporting to this article
BALI, Indonesia — Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday called on G20 leaders not to offer his country any peace deal that would compromise its independence from Russia, amid recently renewed contact between Washington and Moscow over the future of the war.
Zelenskyy appeared at the Bali summit via videolink at the invitation of the Indonesian hosts, just days after Ukraine liberated Kherson from invading Russian forces — a feat he compared to the D-Day landing of allied troops in Normandy, a key turning point of World War II.
“For Ukraine, this liberation operation of our defense forces is reminiscent of many battles of the past, which became turning points in the wars of the past,” Zelenskyy said in his speech to world leaders, among them U.S. President Joe Biden — and, according to a Western diplomat, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. “It is like, for example, D-Day — the landing of the allies in Normandy.”
Pointedly addressing his comments to the “dear G19” — the leaders of the Group of 20, with a snub to Russia — Zelenskyy warned against making Ukraine weaker than it was before Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion in February.
“I want this aggressive Russian war to end justly and on the basis of the U.N. Charter and international law,” Zelenskyy said in his speech, the content of which was leaked to POLITICO. “Ukraine should not be offered to conclude compromises with its conscience, sovereignty, territory and independence. We respect the rules and we are people of our word.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin was invited to the summit in Bali but last week decided not to attend, sending Lavrov instead.
In his speech on Tuesday, Zelenskyy rejected any negotiations like those Kyiv held with Moscow in previous years, after Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014, before seizing, via proxies, territory in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
“Apparently, one cannot trust Russia’s words, and there will be no Minsk 3, which Russia would violate immediately after signing,” Zelenskyy said, referring to the Minsk 1 and 2 agreements, signed in 2014 and 2015 and mediated by the leaders of France and Germany in the so-called Normandy Format, which were intended to bring an end to the war at that time.
Zelenskyy’s speech to the G20 came on the same day Chinese President Xi Jinping asked his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron to work toward negotiated peace for Ukraine.
According to the Chinese state media Xinhua, Xi “emphasized that China’s position on the Ukrainian crisis is clear and consistent, advocating ceasefire, cessation of war and peace talks. The international community should create conditions for this, and China will continue to play a constructive role in its own way.”
Nevertheless, Zelenskyy thanked countries including China for rejecting Russia’s threats to use nuclear weapons.
Slamming the “crazy threats of nuclear weapons,” the Ukrainian president added: “There are and cannot be any excuses for nuclear blackmail. And I thank you, dear G19, for making this clear.”
Bill Burns, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, met his Russian counterpart Sergei Naryshkin in Turkey on Monday and warned Moscow against using nuclear weapons, according to the White House.
BUDAPEST — On an early morning drive from his residence to the U.S. Embassy, David Pressman kept a close eye on his surroundings.
Look, the new U.S. ambassador to Hungary said, pointing out the government-funded billboards dotting Budapest’s streets.
“The Brussels sanctions are ruining us!” they declared, the word “sanctions” emblazoned across a flying bomb.
One by one, the posters whizzed by, blaring the same ominous warning.
These types of signs have been a feature of the Budapest landscape for years, spinning up a conspiratorial gallery of foreign enemies Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has used to instill fear and anger in the Hungarian population as he vies to keep his grip on power.
But historically, the U.S. — like many of its Western partners — has stayed relatively quiet in public about these targeted messaging campaigns and the rise of anti-Western government rhetoric, which often reflected the country’s democratic backsliding and the local influence of Russian propaganda.
With Pressman, that has changed. Pressman’s presence alone is an implicit rebuke of Orbán’s strongman, culture wars agenda. Pressman is a human rights lawyer, has a male partner and has worked closely with George Clooney, a totem of the Fox News-caricatured “Hollywood liberal elite.”
And in just two months on the job, the new American ambassador has become a household name in Budapest for his willingness to call out — and even troll — the Orbán government’s overtly propagandistic and conspiratorial bombast.
There is, Pressman said in his first interview since taking his post, a “need to be both respectful and more candid about what we’re seeing.”
Recently, the U.S. embassy posted a once-unthinkable video quiz challenging people to guess whether quotes came from Hungarian public figures or Russian President Vladimir Putin. The answer, of course, was never Putin.
“I’m concerned when I see missiles flying from Moscow into children’s playgrounds in Kyiv — and see the foreign minister of Hungary flying into Moscow to do Facebook Live conferences from Gazprom headquarters,” the ambassador told POLITICO.
For this approach, Pressman has become the latest foreign enemy in Budapest.
In a country that recently banned the portrayal of LGBTQ+ content to minors, Pressman has put his personal life on display | Janka Szitas/U.S. Embassy Budapest
The newspapers cover him regularly — “Clown diplomacy,” one declared. State-owned and Orbán-friendly TV channels are similarly obsessed, portraying the American ambassador as a secretive colonial overlord sent to meddle in Hungary’s internal affairs.
And in a country that recently banned the portrayal of LGBTQ+ content to minors, Pressman has put his personal life on display, posting photos of his partner and their two kids as they arrived to present his diplomatic credentials.
“I think it speaks for itself,” Pressman said. “Sometimes the power of example,” he added, “is the most powerful way we can communicate about shared values and concerns.”
In many ways, Pressman’s story is emblematic of the evolution of the broader relationship between the U.S. and Hungary. For years, an ambassador posting in Budapest was primarily considered a symbolic role, reserved for wealthy political donors with no foreign policy expertise.
Hungary, the thinking went, was a reliable European Union and NATO member that required little extra attention in Washington. But the erosion of democratic norms — combined with Moscow’s influence in Budapest and Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine — has changed the calculus.
“The stakes right now are huge,” the ambassador said. “The politicization and partisanization of the relationship,” he added, “is not sustainable.”
A pragmatic idealist
Pressman, unlike many of his predecessors, is no novice to U.S. foreign policy.
As a young lawyer, he teamed up with Clooney on a campaign to get those in power to pay attention to atrocities in Darfur — later earning the nickname “Cuz” from Clooney. He also made stops as an aide to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, as a Homeland Security Department official and a White House staffer during the Obama years. In 2014, he landed in New York as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for special political affairs.
Those experiences — and his resulting relationships across government — have given Pressman the backing to make significant changes to how the U.S. approaches Orbán’s government.
Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author-turned-diplomat, was the one who brought the then-32-year-old Pressman to the White House before working closely together in New York when she became U.N. ambassador. Pressman, she said, was her go-to person for tough assignments.
Once, she recalled, her staff needed to convince China to join sanctions against North Korea after a nuclear test.
“David,” she told POLITICO, “is a person that I entrusted in the day-to-day to work with the Chinese ambassador to extract as robust a set of sanctions as possible.”
“When we see insane Kremlin stories being re-propagated in the Hungarian media, we’re gonna call that out, because we have to”, David Pressman said | Attila Kisbenedek/AFP via Getty images
Pressman, Power recounted, was so well-prepared that it was as if he “got a PhD in iron ore trafficking.” His prep work also paid off. “No one had invested more in advance of the nuclear tests in a relationship with his Chinese counterpart that he could then call upon when it mattered for the United States,” she added.
Now, Hungary matters for the United States. In the last 12 years, Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party has taken control of much of the media landscape, placed allies at the helm of independent state institutions, channeled government resources into political campaigning and nurtured ties to Moscow and Beijing. The development has strained the bedrock of the global democratic order.
On a recent fall day, the ambassador invited POLITICO to visit his home at 7:30 in the morning, as his sons were getting ready to leave for school. He then spent the day racing between meetings with anti-corruption experts, a founding member of Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party, Hungarian students and a fellow ambassador.
At the discussion with anti-corruption campaigners, Pressman placed a large notebook on the table and began scribbling as he tossed out a flurry of questions: Who is involved? How does this work? How do you know that?
Later, Pressman popped into a graffiti-decorated pub and took his seat among a cluster of high school and university students. Again, the questions came quickly: How do your peers see the U.S.? Is there anyone in the government you trust? What comes to mind on Russia?
Pressman is known as an idealist. As the White House National Security Council’s director for war crimes and atrocities, he decorated his office — no bigger than two large filing cabinets — with photos of indicted war criminals the U.S. was trying to apprehend, Power recalled.
But he still professes a pragmatic approach. His goal, he insists, is to build relationships with the Hungarian government — even as he needles it over anti-democratic behavior. The two sides can work together, he noted.
“When we see insane Kremlin stories being re-propagated in the Hungarian media, we’re gonna call that out, because we have to,” he said.
But, Pressman added, “all of that is with the intent to pull us closer together — not to push us apart.”
A troubled relationship
Even before the ambassador’s arrival, anti-American rhetoric had been on the rise in Hungary.
In the government-controlled press, the U.S. is both the boogeyman behind the invasion of Ukraine and the puppet master of Hungary’s opposition parties. Fidesz-linked outlets even spread paranoid conspiracy theories about a U.S. diplomat who died in a traffic accident.
But in recent weeks, the vitriol — and the personal attacks on Pressman — has reached a fever pitch.
As Orbán’s allies have tightened their judicial system vice grip, the EU and others have made strengthening the council a priority | John Thys/AFP via Getty images
One sharp escalation occurred after Pressman posted a photo of himself meeting with two judges from the National Judicial Council.
The group’s bureaucratic name belies its heated symbolic and political importance in Hungary.
The council is meant to help oversee Hungary’s judiciary. So as Orbán’s allies have tightened their judicial system vice grip, the EU and others have made strengthening the council a priority.
Pressman’s decision, just weeks into his job, to sit down with the council’s representatives sparked dozens of articles attacking him and breathless TV coverage.
“Unprecedented serious interference in the judiciary,” blared a headline in the government-linked Origo news portal. “Today what comes to mind is that if we have such friends, then we don’t need enemies,” the Orbán-adjacent Magyar Nemzet newspaper pronounced.
Even in private, Hungarian officials stewed. “His meeting with two infamous judges,” said one senior Hungarian official, ”was a pretty unfortunate beginning.” A spokesperson for the Hungarian government did not respond to questions about Pressman.
Judge Csaba Vasvári — the council’s spokesperson and one of the figures who met with the ambassador — told POLITICO the public pillorying is fueling a “strong chilling effect” within the judiciary.
Instead of letting it pass, Pressman pushed back — in his own style.
The U.S. embassy posted a host of photos of politicians and senior diplomats meeting with judges — including, cheekily, a smiling younger Orbán standing beside former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.
“What is inconsistent with normal diplomatic practice between allies,” the embassy said in a public statement, “is the recent coordinated media attack on the spokesperson and international liaison of the National Judicial Council in what appears to be an effort to instill fear in those who wish to engage with representatives of the United States.”
A politicized alliance
Orbán and his government have made no secret of their disdain for Democrats.
Democrats, they say, want to impose their liberal ideology on Hungary. They are the ones who ruined the relationship with Hungary. They lack family values. They are not a Christian government.
“Always great to hear from our good friend @realDonaldTrump. Let’s make US-HU relations great again!” Orbán tweeted recently at the Twitter-banished ex-president | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty images
Republicans are the exact opposite, in the government’s narrative. Orbán himself has personally courted MAGA-ites at their own super bowl — CPAC. He hosted Tucker Carlson in Budapest. He pines on Twitter for Donald Trump’s return.
“Always great to hear from our good friend @realDonaldTrump. Let’s make US-HU relations great again!” Orbán tweeted recently at the Twitter-banished ex-president.
It’s these types of tossed-off comments that no longer pass without a response.
“With Hungary facing economic challenges and Vladimir Putin’s war on its doorstep, the time for a great US-HU relationship? Right now,” Pressman quipped back.
It wasn’t the pair’s first sarcastic Twitter repartee, either. When the Hungarian leader first joined the platform in October and rhetorically asked where Trump was, Pressman also jumped in.
“While you look around for your friend, perhaps another friend to follow: the President of the United States,” he shot back, before offering a sly nod to his critics: “But as the Hungarian media might say: no pressure.”
Such cutting Twitter missives are not to everyone’s liking. Some even insist they are having a boomerang effect, cheapening diplomacy and further deteriorating the U.S.-Hungarian relationship.
Two former Trump-era intelligence officials recently blasted Pressman’s approach in the Wall Street Journal, calling the playful video quiz a “cringe-worthy example of the State Department’s woke virtue signaling.”
“When the U.S. has issues with foreign leaders, it should deal with them through adult diplomacy,” they added. “Instead, our diplomatic efforts under President Biden, a self-styled foreign-policy expert, could be summed up as ‘anyone I don’t like is Putin.’”
The Biden administration batted away any concerns.
When POLITICO asked for comment on the ambassador’s work, the State Department was quick to both express the administration’s “full confidence” in Pressman and to pass along a bipartisan endorsement from Cindy McCain, the widow of Republican stalwart and foreign policy maven John McCain.
McCain, now in Rome as a U.S. diplomat, talked of knowing Pressman for “nearly two decades,” and said he had “earned the deep respect of national security and foreign policy leaders in both the Republican and Democratic parties.”
If there is any overarching goal, it is to call out Russian propaganda, while still paying attention to how Hungary’s government treats minorities at home | Yuri Kadobnov/AFP via Getty images
For his part, Pressman insisted the embassy has no partisan goals and simply wants a better relationship with the Hungarian authorities.
“Our work is not about liberal policies. It’s not about conservative policies,” he said. “But it’s fundamentally about shared core values that are premised upon small ‘d’ democracy, and ensuring that we are able to collaborate together.”
If there is any overarching goal, it is to call out Russian propaganda — while still paying attention to how Hungary’s government treats minorities at home.
“The United States will always engage on behalf of communities that are vulnerable or marginalized, and that are under pressure — and here in Hungary, there are a few of those,” the ambassador said, noting that groups have Washington’s support as “they seek to engage in their own democratic process.”
Principled stances aside, the situation is undeniably strange: A diplomat from an allied country becoming public enemy No. 1 — and the top news story. On a recent Sunday evening, the Fidesz-linked HírTV station spent nearly half an hour on Pressman.
Pressman insisted he doesn’t take it personally. But “do we take it seriously? Absolutely,” he said.
“I’m the representative of the United States of America,” he added. “It’s unusual to find yourself,” he observed with understatement, in “an environment quite like this.”
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Hosting the World Cup marks a pinnacle in Qatar’s efforts to rise out of the shadow of its larger neighbors in the wider Middle East, where its politics and its upstart ambitions have brought both international attention and regional ire.
The road to the tournament — and Qatar’s increased prominence on the global stage — has been fueled by the country becoming one of the top exporters of natural gas. That newfound wealth built the stadiums that fans will fill for the tournament, created the Arab world’s most recognized news network, Al Jazeera, and enabled Doha’s diplomatic outreach to the wider world.
But that rise has not been without intrigue. A palace coup in 1995 installed a more assertive ruler in the country, who used Qatar’s wealth to back the Islamists who emerged stronger amid the 2011 Arab Spring protests — the same figures his fellow Gulf Arab leaders viewed as threats to their rule. A yearslong boycott of Qatar by four Arab nations that began in 2017 nearly sparked a war.
And while the overt tensions have eased in the region, Qatar likely hopes the World Cup will serve to boost its standing as it balances its relations abroad to hedge against any danger to the country in the future.
“They know there are these potential threats; they know they are very vulnerable,” said Gerd Nonneman, a professor of international relations and Gulf Arab studies at Georgetown University in Qatar. “Anything they can do to have an international network of if not allies, at least a sympathetic element, they will.”
Qatar, a little larger than Jamaica or just smaller than the U.S. state of Connecticut, is a peninsular nation that sticks out into the Persian Gulf like a thumb. It shares just a 60-kilometers (37-mile) border with Saudi Arabia, a nation 185 times larger, and sits just across the Gulf from Iran.
Through its sovereign wealth fund, Qatar owns London’s famed Harrods department store, Paris Saint-Germain soccer club and billions of dollars in real estate in New York City. That wealth comes from its sales of liquified natural gas through an offshore field it shares with Iran, most of it going to Asian nations such as China, India, Japan and South Korea.
That spigot of wealth began flowing in 1997, just after two major events that shook Qatar. The first, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the subsequent 1991 Gulf War, saw Doha and other Gulf Arab nations realize the need for long-term American military presence as a hedge, said Kristian Ulrichsen, a research fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute.
Qatar built its massive Al-Udeid Air Base, which is home to some 8,000 American troops and the forward headquarters of the U.S. military’s Central Command today.
The second event that shook Qatar took place in 1995, when Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani seized power in a bloodless coup from his father who was in Switzerland. Sheikh Hamad later put down a 1996 coup attempt by his cousin.
Under Sheikh Hamad and flush with cash, Qatar created Al Jazeera, the satellite news channel that became known worldwide for airing statements from al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. The U.S. railed against the channel after the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, though it provided the Arab world something beyond tepid state-controlled television for the first time.
In December 2010, Qatar won its bid to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Just two weeks later, a Tunisian fruit seller set himself on fire in protest and ultimately died of his burns — lighting the fuse for what became the 2011 Arab Spring.
For Qatar, it marked a crucial moment. The country double-downed on its support of Islamists across the region, including Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood who would be elected president in Egypt after the fall of the longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak. Doha poured money into Syrian groups opposing the rule of Bashar Assad — with some funding going to those that America later described as extremists, like the Islamic State group.
Qatar long has denied funding extremists, though it does maintain relations with the Palestinian militant group Hamas that rules the Gaza Strip, working as an interlocutor with Israel. But analysts say there was a recognition that things may have moved too fast.
“They realize they stuck out their necks too far too soon … and they began to re-calibrate that,” Nonneman said.
The Arab Spring soon chilled into a winter. A counterrevolution in Egypt supported by other Gulf Arab states saw the installation of military general turned President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in July 2013.
A little over a week earlier, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Sheikh Hamad’s son, took over as ruler in Qatar in the ruling family’s own acknowledgment that a generational change was needed.
Gulf Arab countries, however, remained angry. A 2014 dispute over Qatar’s support of Islamists saw Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates withdraw their ambassadors — only to bring them back eight months later.
But in 2017 after then-President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia, those three nations and Egypt began a yearslong boycott of Qatar, closing off air traffic and severing economic ties even as construction on the stadiums continued.
Things grew so tense that Kuwait’s late ruler, Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Sabah, who at the time mediated the dispute, suggested that “military action” at one point was a possibility, without elaborating.
The dispute ended as President Joe Biden stood poised to take office, though regional tensions remain. Still, Qatar has found itself hosting negotiations between American officials and the Taliban, as well as assisting the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Russia’s war on Ukraine has seen European leaders come to Doha, hopeful for additional natural gas.
“They are at the center of attention again,” Ulrichsen said. “It gives them a seat at the table when there’s decisions being taken.”
———
Follow Jon Gambrell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jongambrellAP.
Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk is further gutting the teams that battle misinformation on the social media platform as outsourced moderators learned over the weekend they were out of a job.
Twitter and other big social media firms have relied heavily on contractors to track hate and enforce rules against harmful content.
But many of those content watchdogs have now headed out the door, first when Twitter fired much of its full-time workforce by email on Nov. 4 and now as it moves to eliminate an untold number of contract jobs.
Melissa Ingle, who worked at Twitter as a contractor for more than a year, was one of a number of contractors who said they were terminated Saturday. She said she’s concerned that there’s going to be an increase in abuse on Twitter with the number of workers leaving.
“I love the platform and I really enjoyed working at the company and trying to make it better. And I’m just really fearful of what’s going to slip through the cracks,” she said Sunday.
Ingle, a data scientist, said she worked on the data and monitoring arm of Twitter’s civic integrity team. Her job involved writing algorithms to find political misinformation on the platform in countries such as the U.S., Brazil, Japan, Argentina and elsewhere.
Ingle said she was “pretty sure I was done for” when she couldn’t access her work email Saturday. The notification from the contracting company she’d been hired by came two hours later.
“I’ll just be putting my resumes out there and talking to people,” she said. “I have two children. And I’m worried about being able to give them a nice Christmas, you know, and just mundane things like that, that are important. I just think it’s particularly heartless to do this at this time.”
Content-moderation expert Sarah Roberts, an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who worked as a staff researcher at Twitter earlier this year, said she believes at least 3,000 contract workers were fired Saturday night.
Twitter hasn’t said how many contract workers it cut. The company hasn’t responded to media requests for information since Musk took over.
At Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters and other offices, contract workers wore green badges while full-time workers wore blue badges. Contractors did a number of jobs to help keep Twitter running, including engineering and marketing, Roberts said. But it was the huge force of contracted moderators that was “mission critical” to the platform, said Roberts.
Cutting them will have a “tangible impact on the experience of the platform,” she said.
Musk promised to loosen speech restrictions when he took over Twitter. But in the early days after Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October and dismissed its board of directors and top executives, the billionaire Tesla CEO sought to assure civil rights groups and advertisers that the platform could continue tamping down hate and hate-fueled violence.
That message was reiterated by Twitter’s then-head of content moderation, Yoel Roth, who tweeted that the Nov. 4 layoffs only affected “15% of our Trust & Safety organization (as opposed to approximately 50% cuts company-wide), with our front-line moderation staff experiencing the least impact.”
Roth has since resigned from the company, joining an exodus of high-level leaders who were tasked with privacy protection, cybersecurity and complying with regulations.
Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk is further gutting the teams that battle misinformation on the social media platform as outsourced moderators learned over the weekend they were out of a job.
Twitter and other big social media firms have relied heavily on contractors to track hate and other harmful content.
But many of those content watchdogs have now headed out the door, first when Twitter fired much of its full-time workforce by email on Nov. 4 and now as it moves to eliminate an untold number of contract jobs.
Melissa Ingle, who worked at Twitter as a contractor for more than a year, was one of a number of contractors who said they were terminated without notification on Saturday. She said she’s concerned that there’s going to be an increase in abuse on Twitter with the number of workers leaving.
“I love the platform and I really enjoyed working at the company and trying to make it better. And I’m just really fearful of what’s going to slip through the cracks,” she said Sunday.
Ingle, a data scientist, said she worked on the data and monitoring arm of Twitter’s civic integrity team. Her job involved writing algorithms to find political misinformation on the platform in countries such as the U.S., Brazil, Japan, Argentina and elsewhere.
Ingle said she was “pretty sure I was done for” when she couldn’t access her work email Saturday. The notification from the contracting company she’d been hired by came two hours later.
“I’ll just be putting my resumes out there and talking to people,” she said. “I have two children. And I’m worried about being able to give them a nice Christmas, you know, and just mundane things like that, that are important. I just think it’s particularly heartless to do this at this time.”
Content-moderation expert Sarah Roberts, an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, tweeted Sunday that around “3,000+ contractor employees of Twitter were canned last night.”
Twitter hasn’t said how many contract workers it cut. The company gutted its communications department and hasn’t responded to media requests for information since Musk took over.
Contractors also do other jobs to help keep Twitter running,
“All contractors are not content moderation agents,” Roberts said. “Contractors fulfill many key roles inside the company. But almost all moderation agents are contractors.”
In the early days after Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October and dismissed its board of directors and top executives, the billionaire Tesla CEO sought to assure civil rights groups and advertisers that the platform could continue tamping down hate.
That message was reiterated by Twitter’s then-head of content moderation, Yoel Roth, who tweeted that the Nov. 4 layoffs only affected “15% of our Trust & Safety organization (as opposed to approximately 50% cuts company-wide), with our front-line moderation staff experiencing the least impact.”
Roth has since resigned from the company, joining an exodus of high-level leaders who were tasked with privacy protection, cybersecurity and complying with regulations.
Back in September at a music conference in Singapore, Sir Lucian Grainge, the CEO of Universal Music Group, stated that 100,000 new songs were being uploaded to streaming music platforms every day. That figure was confirmed at the same conference by Steve Cooper, the departing CEO of Warner Music Group.
The audience was shocked. Numbers like 25,000 or even 60,000 have been tossed around. But 100,000?
To be fair, neither man was talking about 100,000 unique and different songs. This number includes all the remixes, edits, alternate versions, live performances, special mixes (Dolby ATMOS/high-res/Spatial Audio, etc.), and the odd duplicate. But it’s still a lot. Apple Music, Amazon Prime Music, and YouTube Music all say they have at least 100 million tracks available. Spotify could be at that level, too, but the most recent official number I’ve seen for their library is 82 million.
To put that into perspective, even the biggest record store back in the olden days (i.e. pre-Internet) stocked 100,000 titles at most. If we assume that each album has an average of 12 tracks, that’s a mere 1.2 million songs.
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We’ve long passed the point of Too Much Music. Our choices are endless, practically infinite. And this isn’t a good thing. Let me count the ways.
Let’s look at it from the perspective of the artist. Making your songs available for worldwide distribution has never been easier. But when you upload a track, it has to fight for attention with the other 99,999 tracks that were uploaded that day, not to mention the other 100 million already sitting in the library. Your brand new unknown track has to compete with practically every other song written in history.
No wonder it’s estimated that around 20 per cent of the songs in Spotify’s library haven’t been streamed even once. If we accept Spotify’s estimate of 82 million songs in its library, that means there are 16,400,000 tracks that remain unheard of by anyone, ever.
We’re starting to hear about fan fatigue, too. This once-wonderous all-you-can-eat buffet is beginning to make people queasy. All this choice has people flicking through song after song after song, looking for something perfect for the moment. This has become a grind as music is being used as a tool for our day-to-day activities rather than something that we can sink into and experience. We’re not listening; we’re merely soundtracking.
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So much choice has led to confusion. Sure, this song is good, but there’s gotta be something even better out there. What’s everyone else listening to? What am I missing? I’m falling behind! Some even throw up their hands in despair: “I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT I LIKE ANYMORE!”
For many, selecting something to listen to has become an interminable chore. Discovering new music has paradoxically become more difficult.
Our attention spans have shrunk. If we don’t like something immediately — usually within five to 10 seconds — we hit the skip button. The algorithms then remove that song from what it recommends to us and we never have the opportunity to learn to like something that requires repeated listening.
New music is increasingly dismissed, especially something different or experimental that has the potential to be groundbreaking and/or transformative if just given the time. The more choice we have, the more disposable songs become.
Find a song. Make a judgment after 10-15 seconds. Skip. Next song. Skip. Repeat over and over and over again.
What’s the solution? Some people are weaning themselves from constant streaming, opting instead to stick with a smaller, manageable selection of playlists that they’ve created themselves. Others have returned to physical media like CDs, vinyl, and even cassettes. An actual physical object that contains music invites far more investigation, which can lead to greater engagement.
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Some of those folks have cancelled their streaming music accounts, concerned about how little they hear artists are making from streaming. Others are even discovering the pleasures of old-fashioned radio where they don’t have to worry about choice.
Meanwhile, the streamers have problems of their own. Ingesting thousands and thousands of new songs every day requires server space. Servers cost money. It takes electricity to run those servers. More customers mean more bandwidth is required to distribute all these digital files. That costs money and consumes energy.
While record labels, especially the majors, are making billions from streaming, a figure that’s growing every quarter, they’re concerned that the market share for new music is shrinking as people opt to listen to more and more familiar music from years gone by. The gold rush that is “catalogue music” (material more than two years old) comes at the expense of new songs, which are supposed to be the catalogue music of the future.
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Something has to change. The tsunami of new music is unsustainable in so many ways. Do streamers cap the number of songs they ingest? Do they restrict the size of their accessible libraries to their customers? Do they cull the songs that aren’t getting any attention from their libraries? Will we see streamers start to discourage musicians from uploading music by limiting royalties for songs that stream more than, say, a thousand times?
Think about Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. If someone doesn’t do something, we risk drowning in music that we will never hear.
Spotify grapples with artist backlash over COVID-19 misinformation on platform
LAS VEGAS — Retired Las Vegas correspondent Robert Macy, who wrote thousands of stories about entertainment, crime and sports in Sin City over the course of two decades for The Associated Press, has died. He was 85.
Macy died early Friday in hospice in Las Vegas following a brief illness, his family said.
After graduating from the University of Kansas with a degree in journalism in 1959, Macy spent the next decade working in television, in public relations and for newspapers.
He began his almost 30-year career with the AP in 1971 when he was hired by the news cooperative as a writer in Kansas City, Missouri. Macy gained attention there early on for his coverage of a hotel pedestrian walkway collapse that killed more than 100 people.
A decade later Macy was in Las Vegas, where throughout the ’80s and ’90s he wrote about a virtual who’s who of entertainers, then staples of The Strip.
In 1988 he reported on the fatal police shooting of a man who took a 74-year-old employee hostage while trying to steal $1 million in jewelry from the Liberace Museum. Macy was there when singer Wayne Newton, known as “Mr. Las Vegas,” performed his 25,000th show in 1996.
He interviewed more than 200 celebrities, including comedians George Burns and Red Skelton and singers from Phyllis McGuire to Paul Anka to the Osmond Brothers. He also developed friendships with more than a few.
Macy knew entertainers Siegfried & Roy so well that when trainer and performer Roy Horn was attacked in 2003 by one of their white tigers, the AP story carried his byline even though he was already retired.
Macy retired from the AP in 2000 and the following year was inducted into the Nevada Newspaper Hall of Fame.
He is survived by his wife, Melinda, of Las Vegas: son Brent and daughter-in-law Martha, of Las Vegas; and son Scott, granddaughters Kara and Savannah and great-granddaughter Azlynn, all of Leesburg, Florida.
A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:
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Arizona officials correct false claims about ballot issues
CLAIM: When ballots were rejected by tabulators at some voting locations across Maricopa County on Election Day, an alternate solution for voters to drop ballots in a secure drop box onsite resulted in the ballots getting shredded, thrown in the trash, or marked for Democrats.
THE FACTS: Ballots submitted in this way were counted just as absentee ballots or mail-in ballots are, according to county officials. They weren’t discarded or altered. When a printing problem caused tabulators to reject ballots in at least 70 of 223 polling sites in Arizona’s largest county on Tuesday, county officials offered a few alternate solutions. Voters could wait and try another machine, cancel their vote and go to another vote center, or drop their ballot in a secure drop box referred to as “door 3” or “box 3.” Some social media user falsely claimed that using this drop box would allow county officials to rig those votes by manually changing them or discarding them. However, county elections department spokesperson Megan Gilbertson explained that ballots placed in these drop boxes were machine-counted at the central tabulation center in downtown Phoenix, just as all mail-in and absentee ballots are. At the end of the voting day, a bipartisan team collected all the voted ballots from voting centers, sealed them and transported them by truck to the tabulation center for counting. This is the same process used for early voting and is the same methodology used on Election Day by most counties, including Pima County and Yavapai County, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said in a statement Tuesday.
— Associated Press writers Josh Kelety in Phoenix and Ali Swenson in New York contributed this report.
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Clip shows poll worker in Wisconsin, not ‘cheating’ in Philadelphia
CLAIM: Video shows masked man at polling site “cheating” in front of cameras in Philadelphia.
THE FACTS: The video shows a poll worker in Madison, Wisconsin, on Tuesday. He was initialing ballots to be handed out to voters, a standard procedure mandated by state law, according to the county clerk. Social media users on Election Day distorted a clip of the Madison poll worker doing his job to falsely claim it showed election fraud in Philadelphia. The video, which aired on Fox News on Tuesday, shows a man wearing a cloth face mask flipping through ballots and writing on them. “Masked man cheating in front of the cameras on the mainstream media,” read a widely shared tweet with the video. But the original footage shows the video was filmed in Madison, not Pennsylvania. Immediately before Fox News showed the clip in Madison, the network showed the exterior of Philadelphia’s East Passyunk Community Center with a graphic labeling that location. The broadcast then showed the clip of the poll worker and changed the location in the label to Madison. Social media versions of the video cropped out the location. A reverse-image search of the building’s interior revealed that the clip was filmed at Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, which served as a polling location for Tuesday’s election. Scott McDonell, the Dane County clerk, said the man is a poll worker, and the video shows him initialing ballots before they were handed out to voters. He was also circling the ward in which the ballots were issued. It’s part of the process of preparing the ballots for voters, McDonell said. Another poll worker also initialed the ballots before they were handed to voters. “You need to have those signatures to show that two people saw the blank ballot and handed it to the voter,” McDonell said. “This is a standard operating procedure. It’s done in public so that anyone can watch it. It’s mandated by state law. It’s a check and balance on the system.” Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and the director of the Elections Research Project, agreed that the video showed standard procedures for poll workers in Madison. Wisconsin election law explains that at polling places with paper ballots, two inspectors “shall write their initials on the back of each ballot and deliver to each elector as he or she enters the voting booth.” Philadelphia’s city commissioner on Twitter debunked the false claims that the video showed a polling site in his city. Nick Custodio, deputy commissioner with Philadelphia’s elections board, told the AP that Philadelphia does not use paper voting booths such as those shown in the video, and that the “I voted” stickers in the video also do not match those used in Philadelphia.
— Associated Press writers Arijeta Lajka and Ali Swenson in New York contributed this report with additional reporting from Amy Forliti in Minneapolis and Claudia Lauer in Philadelphia.
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No voters turned away over Detroit absentee ballot glitch
CLAIM: Voters in Detroit were prevented from casting ballots on Election Day after officials mistakenly said they’d already voted by absentee ballot.
THE FACTS: No eligible voters were prevented from casting a ballot at Detroit polling locations that experienced the data glitch on Tuesday morning, state and city officials confirmed. As voters nationwide went to the polls, there was heightened focus on voting problems and irregularities. One of the places election watchers sounded the alarm early on was the battleground state of Michigan. “People are showing up to vote in Detroit only to be told that they already voted via absentee ballots and are being turned away,” wrote one Twitter user. “Citizens are being told they voted already absentee,” wrote Kristina Karamo, a Republican candidate for Michigan secretary of state, in widely shared posts on Twitter and Facebook. Former President Donald Trump also amplified the claims on Truth Social. But state and city officials said the issue stemmed from an election software problem and was quickly resolved without anyone being disenfranchised. Corwin Smidt, a political science professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing, said the situation demonstrated the voting system worked properly. “It certainly slowed down voting there, but the reasons for the slowdown were that the system caught an error, and that error was then fixed,” he wrote in an email. Liette Gidlow, a history professor at Wayne State University in Detroit who focuses on U.S. politics and voting rights, agreed. “Minor technical glitches are not unusual in any precinct because administering elections is a complex business,” she wrote in an email. Detroit’s elections department said the problem was caused by computer software used by election workers to check in voters as they entered the polling location. The agency said the program wrongly flagged some residents as having requested an absentee ballot, which would make them ineligible to cast a ballot in-person. Matthew Friedman, a department spokesperson, said the issue was resolved within an hour and all eligible residents were able to vote. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, whose office assisted the city in addressing the issue, also stressed that no voters were disenfranchised. “In all circumstances, eligible voters were able to vote,” the office said in a statement. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, which observed the voting process, said it spoke with multiple city election officials and was satisfied with the response. Spokespersons for Trump and Karamo did not respond to messages seeking comment.
— Associated Press writer Philip Marcelo in New York contributed this report.
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CLAIM: A Pennsylvania judge ruled that ballots received up until Nov. 14 will count in the 2022 midterm elections.
THE FACTS: Pennsylvania ballots, including mail-in and absentee ballots, must be received by county election offices by 8 p.m. on Election Day, Nov. 8, to be counted, according to the state’s Department of State. As voters went to the polls on Tuesday, misleading information about Pennsylvania’s vote-counting deadlines gained traction. “This just in: Pennsylvania Judge allows ballots to count that are received up until November 14th,” read one post. “This is unconstitutional.” The message, shared in several Instagram posts, is a screenshot of a tweet that was later deleted. The Twitter user who first posted it acknowledged in a follow-up that the information was incorrect. Existing law requires that Pennsylvania voters’ ballots be received by county election workers by Nov. 8, the Department of State explains. Unlike some other states, Pennsylvania allots no extra time for mail-in ballots — what counts is the day the ballot actually made it to election officials, not when the ballot was postmarked. The Twitter user who first made the claim said in a follow-up post that the court case he was referring to was a recent decision by a Pennsylvania Common Pleas Court. However, the case in question has nothing to do with ballot submission deadlines. It concerned the cross-checking procedure that Pennsylvania uses to prevent duplicate votes from being counted, according to Kevin Feeley, spokesperson for the Philadelphia City Commissioners, which oversees elections in the city. The city had sought to delay that process until after the initial ballot count, in an effort to get ballots counted more quickly. He said that no duplicate votes had been found in the last three elections. The court granted the city the right to delay the reconciliation process, but the judge in the case was “highly critical” of the idea, Feeley said. So the City Commission opted Tuesday to revert to doing reconciliation as usual. Feeley confirmed that the case did not mean voting can occur through Nov. 14.
— Associated Press writer Graph Massara in San Francisco contributed this report with additional reporting from Melissa Goldin in New York.
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Large numbers of mailed ballots not evidence of election fraud
CLAIM: A candidate winning an election with a majority of mailed ballots is proof of fraud.
THE FACTS: There is no evidence that mail-in voting has historically caused widespread voter fraud, and fraud related to mail-in voting is exceedingly rare, the AP has reported. Some on social media have posited that if a candidate who receives a significant chunk of their votes through mail-in voting wins, their victory is inherently fraudulent. An Instagram post features results reporting that incumbent Kelly Skidmore, a Democrat, beat Dorcas Hernandez, a Republican, in the race for state representative in Florida’s 92nd House District. It shows Skidmore with 57.51% of the vote, including 31,405 mailed ballots, and Hernandez with 42.9% and 10,297 mailed ballots. “This is what textbook election theft via vote by mail ballot looks like,” the post states. The numbers in the Instagram post are from the state’s unofficial results, as published online by county boards of elections. However, the fact that some candidates are reported as having won after receiving a majority of mailed ballots does not prove election fraud. Claims that mail-in voting has caused widespread voter fraud in the past are unsubstantiated, according to reporting by the AP. After reviewing every potential case of voter fraud in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the AP found far too few to affect the outcome of the 2020 election. Additionally, an AP survey of state election officials across the U.S. found that the expanded use of drop boxes during the 2020 race did not lead to cases of fraud that could have impacted the results. Different states have different ballot verification protocols, but all states vet mailed and absentee ballots. Every state requires voters to sign their ballots. Some have additional precautions, like having bipartisan teams compare the signature on the ballot with one on file, requiring the signature on the ballot to be notarized or requiring a witness to sign the ballot. Other forms of verification can include requiring proof of voter registration, a copy of an ID, a driver’s license number or a Social Security number. Ballot security features and ballot sorting at election offices would help weed out any counterfeits. There are harsh penalties for voter fraud by mailed ballot, such as a fine, prison time or both.
— Associated Press writers Melissa Goldin and Ali Swenson in New York contributed this report.
Conspiracy theories about mail ballots. Anonymous text messages warning voters to stay home. Fringe social media platforms where election misinformation spreads with impunity.
Misinformation about the upcoming midterm elections has been building for months, challenging election officials and tech companies while offering another reminder of how conspiracy theories and distrust are shaping America’s politics.
The claims are fueling the candidacies of election deniers and threatening to further corrode faith in voting and democracy. Many of them can be traced back to 2020, when then-President Donald Trump refused to accept the outcome of the election he lost to Joe Biden and began lying about its results.
“Misinformation is going to be central to this midterm election and central to the 2024 election,” said Bhaskar Chakravorti, who studies technological change and society and is the dean of global business at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. “The single galvanizing narrative is that the 2020 election was stolen.”
A look at key misinformation challenges heading into the 2022 election:
Trump, a Republican, attacked the legitimacy of the election even before he lost. He then refused to concede, spreading lies about the election that inspired the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. His contention was rejected in more than 60 court cases and by his own attorney general, William Barr.
Together, these misleading claims about the nation’s electoral system have led some Republicans to say they’re going to hold onto their mail ballots until Election Day — a move that could slow down the count.
Others vow to monitor the polls to prevent cheating, leading to concerns about intimidation and even the possibility of violence at election sites.
Tech companies say they’ve implemented new policies and programs designed to ferret out misinformation.
“We’ve seen hundreds of elections play out on our platforms in recent years and we’ve been applying lessons from each one to strengthen our preparations,” Facebook and Instagram owner Meta said in a statement.
Yet critics say the volume of false claims spreading now shows there’s more to be done, such as better enforcement of existing rules or government regulations requiring more aggressive policies.
“This is no longer a new problem,” said Jon Lloyd, senior adviser at the nonprofit Global Witness, which last week released a report showing that TikTok failed to remove many advertisements that contain election misinformation. Big social media platforms, he said, “are still simply not doing enough to stop threats to democracy.”
MISTAKES WILL HAPPEN — WHILE CLOCK IS TICKING
Elections involve the combined efforts of tens of thousands of people working under pressure. Mistakes are expected, which is why there’s a robust system of checks and balances to ensure errors are found and corrected.
Taken out of context, stories about glitchy voting machines, mixed-up ballots or even “suspicious” vehicles arriving at election centers can become fodder for the next election fraud myth.
And with so much work to do at such a fast pace, election workers, local officials and even the media can have little time to push back on such claims before they go viral.
In Georgia in 2020, a water leak at a site where ballots were being counted was used to spin a far-fetched tale of ballot rigging. In Arizona, the choice of pens given to voters filling out ballots led to similarly preposterous claims.
To avoid falling for a misleading claim, consult multiple sources including local election offices. Any significant voting irregularity will be covered by multiple news outlets and addressed by election officials. Be skeptical of claims from second-hand sources, said Shaye-Ann McDonald, a behavioral researcher at Duke University who studies ways to improve resistance to misinformation.
The most viral misinformation often elicits anger or fear that motivates readers to repost it before they’ve had time to coolly consider the underlying claim.
“When you read about something that provokes a strong emotion, that should be a warning sign,” McDonald said.
A MULTILINGUAL CHALLENGE
Just before the 2020 election, Spanish-language Facebook ads falsely claimed Biden, a Democrat, was a communist. On other platforms, posts warned Latinos in the U.S. not to vote at all.
Misinformation in non-English languages is a particular concern cited by researchers who say the major platforms — most of them U.S.-based — are focused on content moderation in English. Automated systems written to detect misinformation in English don’t work as well when applied to other languages.
“As bad as they (tech companies) are moderating content in English, they’re even worse when it comes non-English languages,” said Jessica Gonzalez, co-CEO of Free Press, a nonprofit that works on issues of racial justice and technology.
MISINFORMATION BY TEXT?
While misinformation about elections spreads easily on big social media platforms like Facebook, it also has taken root on a long list of less familiar platforms: Gab, Gettr, Parler and Truth Social, Trump’s platform.
Meanwhile, TikTok has emerged as a key network for younger voters — and the politicians who want to reach them. The platform, owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance, has created an election center to connect users with trustworthy information about elections and voting. But nonetheless misinformation persists.
The problem isn’t limited to social media. The number of false claims transmitted by text and email has steadily increased in recent years. Last summer, Democratic voters in Kansas received misleading texts telling them a yes vote on an upcoming referendum would protect abortion rights; the opposite was true.
MUSK AND TWITTER
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter just weeks before the 2022 election upended that platform’s plans for combating misinformation ahead of the midterms.
Musk quickly fired the executive who had overseen content moderation. Over the weekend he posted a tweet advancing a baseless conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, before deleting it.
Musk has called himself a free speech absolutist and had said he disagreed with the decision to boot Trump from the platform for incitement of violence on Jan. 6, 2021.
He has said that a content moderation committee will examine possible revisions to Twitter’s rules but that no changes would be made until after the election.
“We’re staying vigilant against attempts to manipulate conversations about the 2022 US midterms.” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, tweeted Tuesday.
THREATS FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC
Russian efforts to interfere in U.S. elections go back years, and there are indications that China and Iran are stepping up their game.
A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:
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False, unfounded claims distort attack on Paul Pelosi
CLAIM: The attack was a “Domestic Violence Case in a consensual sexual relationship,” and the suspect was found in his underwear when police arrived at the house.
THE FACTS: No evidence has been presented to support either assertion, both of which contradict what law enforcement officials have said and what court documents describe. In the days since the alleged assailant, identified as David DePape, 42, broke into the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and attacked her husband with a hammer, internet users amplified these false claims that mock the victim and give credence to insidious conspiracy theories. Baseless and homophobic claims suggesting a personal relationship between Paul Pelosi and DePape have been shared by prominent figures including elected officials, conservative pundits and Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, who later deleted his post. But San Francisco’s district attorney, Brooke Jenkins, told reporters on Sunday that there was “nothing to suggest that these two men knew each other prior to this incident.” She said during a press conference Monday the attack appeared to be politically motivated. Authorities have stated that DePape broke a glass door of the home and entered with a hammer, zip ties and other supplies, intending to kidnap the Democratic lawmaker. Jenkins’ office in a court filing Tuesday detailed the contents of a 911 call Pelosi made early on Oct. 28, during which Pelosi confirmed that he did not know DePape. Overhearing the call, DePape said aloud that his name was David and he was a “friend,” the filing said. Likewise, an FBI agent’s affidavit reports that Pelosi in the 911 call “conveyed that he does not know who the male is” and later told a police officer in the ambulance that he had never seen DePape before. DePape told police officers that he went to the home to take Nancy Pelosi hostage, according to the affidavit, and that he viewed her as a “‘leader of the pack’ of lies told by the Democratic Party.” Separately, the affidavit makes clear that DePape was wearing clothing at the time. “Officers removed a cell phone, cash, clipper cards, and an unidentified card from DEPAPE’s right shorts pocket,” the document reads. A local news outlet reported the baseless claim that DePape was in his underwear, but it later corrected its story. Pelosi, meanwhile, was asleep in his bed on the second floor of the home when DePape entered and woke him up, according to officials. “Mr. Pelosi, who was sleeping, was wearing a loose fitting pajama shirt and boxer shorts,” Jenkins, the district attorney, said Monday. DePape is facing multiple charges including attempted murder.
— Associated Press writers Angelo Fichera in Philadelphia and Ali Swenson in New York contributed this report.
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No, Pennsylvania didn’t send 255K ballots to ‘unverified’ voters
CLAIM: Pennsylvania has sent “255,000 unverified” ballots to voters for the midterm elections.
THE FACTS: The state didn’t send out that many ballots to unverified voters. This claim misrepresents a figure in a state database, which does not mean that the voters failed to provide correct identification information, nor that their identities weren’t ultimately verified. Social media posts and headlines promoted the false claim that Pennsylvania officials had issued around a quarter-million ballots to people whose identities weren’t confirmed. “CRISIS IN PENNSYLVANIA – 255,000 UNVERIFIED NEW VOTERS SENT BALLOTS – CANDIDATES BETTER CONTACT THEIR LAWYERS,” read an Oct. 26 headline from the website The Gateway Pundit. The story claims that this “is how Democrats cheat.” The story cites an Oct. 25 letter from Republican state lawmakers to the Pennsylvania secretary of state, which claimed the state had issued “over 240,000 unverified ballots.” A day earlier, an elections investigation group called Verity Vote issued a report making similar claims, citing a state database as evidence. But officials in Pennsylvania say the claim flagrantly misrepresents the way that the state classifies applications for mail-in and absentee ballots. “There are not 240,000+ ‘unverified ballots,’ as certain lawmakers are claiming,” Pennsylvania Department of State spokeswoman Amy Gulli said in a statement provided to the AP. In Pennsylvania, those applying for mail-in or absentee ballots must provide proof of identification — such as state driver’s license information or the last four digits of their Social Security Number. In some cases, a voter’s identifying information is automatically verified, including by cross-referencing it with Pennsylvania Department of Transportation data. However, in other cases, the voter’s identifying information must be vetted further. When that happens, the application enters the statewide system under a designation labeled “NV,” or “not verified.” Notably, the “not verified” designation doesn’t mean the voter didn’t provide accurate identification information, nor does it mean their ID wasn’t later verified. “The code does not reflect the results of any identification check but is, in fact, an additional mechanism to ensure that counties are properly verifying ID provided by voters,” acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman wrote in an Oct. 28 response letter to the Republican lawmakers. Chapman added that the “NV” status can also be applied to applications of voters who request to permanently receive mail-in ballots so that verification occurs for every election in which the ballot is issued. If a voter’s identification can’t be verified at the time they apply for a ballot, state law does require that the voter still be issued a ballot and be provided an opportunity until the sixth day after the election to provide the proper proof of identification. But counties are not to count the ballot unless the voter provides proof of identification. There are currently about 7,600 ballot applications in Pennsylvania that still require identification verification, according to the Department of State. Election officials use high-tech equipment that sorts out ballots that arrive but are still pending verification, said Al Schmidt, president and CEO of the Committee of Seventy, a nonpartisan group. “That vote won’t be counted unless the voter does what’s required — which is just to verify their ID,” said Schmidt, a former Philadelphia city commissioner. Verity Vote argues all verification should occur before a ballot is issued. “It seems reckless in the modern era, to send a ballot based on an unverified mail ballot application with the intention of verifying later,” the group said in a statement to the AP. The Gateway Pundit on Monday responded to an inquiry by forwarding responses from Verity Vote.
— Angelo Fichera and Ali Swenson
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Pre-filled voter registration forms are not proof of fraud
CLAIM: The campaign of Democrat Beto O’Rourke, who is running for Texas governor, engaged in voter fraud by sending pre-filled voter registration forms to dead people.
THE FACTS: While O’Rourke’s campaign did send out partially filled-out forms to encourage people to register before the Texas deadline, experts and government officials say that sending such forms is permitted under Texas law. Some social media users, however, have falsely claimed that O’Rourke’s campaign was engaging in voter fraud by trying to illegally register dead people to vote. “Beto O’Rourke’s campaign has also been sending pre-filled registration applications to dead voters,” a woman said in a video posted to Twitter that was shared more than 11,000 times. “This is literally right before the November elections and they’re sending this to dead voters. This is voter fraud.” O’Rourke’s campaign did send out application forms with people’s names, birthdays and addresses filled out to remind them to update their voter registration if they’d moved, or needed to register before the Texas deadline on Oct. 11, according to Chris Evans, the campaign’s director of communications. Evans acknowledged that the database the campaign uses for such mailings might contain errors. But he noted that all voter registration applications are reviewed by the state of Texas to make sure people who fill them out are eligible to vote. “An individual who is not eligible would have their application flagged by the state and be unable to successfully register,” he said. Texas election experts and officials concurred that a campaign sending out registration forms with select portions filled out is legally sound, even if a faulty mailing list leads to applications being sent to voters who have died. “Campaigns and third-party organizations that send people blank voter registration applications are allowed to pre-fill certain portions of the application,” Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for the Texas secretary of state’s office, told the AP. Texas election law allows for such pre-filled applications to already include the voter’s name, birthdate and address, Taylor said. He confirmed that all voter registration applications are subject to validation — including a comparison of information to Texas Department of Public Safety and Social Security Administration records. Individuals reported to those agencies as deceased would fail the validation process. D. Theodore Rave, a professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin, also told the AP that it’s not illegal to fill out information such as a name, address and birthday. It would be against state law to fill out other information, such as “statements that the voter is a U.S. citizen, a resident of the county, not incapacitated, and not a felon,” he wrote in an email.
— Associated Press writers Angelo Fichera and Melissa Goldin in New York contributed this report.
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Phillies fans’ cheers did not register on seismograph during Game 3
CLAIM: Cheers by Philadelphia Phillies fans were so loud when Bryce Harper and Alec Bohm hit home runs that they registered on a seismograph at Penn State Brandywine.
THE FACTS: While fans watching Game 3 of the World Series on Tuesday were loud, their cheering was not loud enough to register on the seismograph at Penn State Brandywine, according to geological experts. Fans at Citizens Bank Park were on their feet and roaring after the Phillies hit five home runs against the Houston Astros on Tuesday. Amid the excitement, rumors spread on social media that the fans’ shouts shook the earth hard enough that a seismometer picked them up. “Harper and Bohm homeruns are literally registering on the Penn State University Brandywine seismograph station. The city is physically shaking,” reads one tweet with more than 16,000 likes. The tweet shows a red and blue seismograph readout with two major spikes, one labeled “Harper HR” and the other “Bohm HR.” Another graph shared on Twitter also claimed to show that there was enough noise from the stadium to be measured on the seismometer, with a spike highlighted at 9 p.m. local time. However, these results don’t match the seismic data that the university recorded Tuesday night. Kyle Homman, who is the seismic network manager at Penn State, told the AP that there wasn’t any indication of an increase in seismic activity around the time of Harper’s and Bohm’s home runs. Homman also explained that the two spikes shown in the first chart are only a few minutes apart, which doesn’t match up with those two home runs. The red and blue graph was taken from a seismograph report from Lick Observatory near San Jose, Calif. The graph shows the readout of a magnitude 5.1 earthquake recorded in the San Francisco Bay Area last Tuesday. Both Homman and Laura Guertin, a professor of earth sciences at Penn State Brandywine, confirmed that the second graph was from Penn State. But they noted the timing of the quick spikes did not match the game. For sports events to register, the machines would need to be less than a mile away, Homman said. Citizens Bank Park is about 20 miles away from the Brandywine campus. “We definitely have a Phillies Red Wave going on, but not a seismic wave,” said Guertin. The Phillies’ home runs on Tuesday night tied with a World Series record and gave Philadelphia a 2-1 Series lead. But the lead shifted after the Astros won games on Wednesday and Thursday. Game 6 will be played on Saturday in Houston.
— Associated Press writer Karena Phan in Los Angeles contributed this report.
MYKOLAIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian police officers returned Saturday, along with TV and radio services, to the southern city of Kherson following the withdrawal of Russian troops, part of fast but cautious efforts to make the only regional capital captured by Russia livable after months of occupation. Yet one official still described the city as “a humanitarian catastrophe.”
People across Ukraine awoke from a night of jubilant celebrating after the Kremlin announced its troops had withdrawn to the other side of the Dnieper River from Kherson. The Ukrainian military said it was overseeing “stabilization measures” around the city to make sure it was safe.
The Russian retreat represented a significant setback for the Kremlin some six weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed the Kherson region and three others provinces in southern and eastern Ukraine in breach of international law and declared them Russian territory.
The National Police chief of Ukraine, Ihor Klymenko, said Saturday on Facebook that about 200 officers were at work in the city, setting up checkpoints and documenting evidence of possible war crimes. Police teams also were working to identify and neutralize unexploded ordnance and one sapper was wounded Saturday while demining an administrative building, Klymenko said.
Ukraine’s communications watchdog said national TV and radio broadcasts had resumed in the city, and an adviser to Kherson’s mayor said humanitarian aid and supplies had begun to arrive from the neighboring Mykolaiv region.
But the adviser, Roman Holovnya, described the situation in Kherson as “a humanitarian catastrophe.” He said the remaining residents lacked water, medicine and food — and key basics like bread went unbaked because a lack of electricity.
“The occupiers and collaborators did everything possible so that those people who remained in the city suffered as much as possible over those days, weeks, months of waiting” for Ukraine’s forces to arrive, Holovnya said. “Water supplies are practically nonexistent.”
The chairman of Khersonoblenergo, the region’s prewar power provider, said electricity was being returned “to every settlement in the Kherson region immediately after the liberation,”
Despite the efforts to restore normal civilian life, Russian forces remain close by. The General Staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said Saturday that the Russians were fortifying their battle lines on the river’s eastern bank after abandoning the capital. About 70% of the Kherson region remains under Russian control.
Ukrainian officials from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on down chave autioned that while special military units had reached the city of Kherson, a full deployment to reinforce the advance troops still was underway. Ukraine’s intelligence agency thought some Russian soldiers may have stayed behind, ditching their uniforms for civilian clothes to avoid detection.
“Even when the city is not yet completely cleansed of the enemy’s presence, the people of Kherson themselves are already removing Russian symbols and any traces of the occupiers’ stay in Kherson from the streets and buildings,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address.
Zelenskyy said the first part of the stabilization work includes de-mining operations. He said the entry of “our defenders” — the soldiers — into Kherson would be followed by police, sappers, rescuers and energy workers, among others.
“Medicine, communications, social services are returning,” he said. “Life is returning.”
Photos on social media Saturday showed Ukrainian activists removing memorial plaques put up by the occupation authorities the Kremlin installed to run the Kherson region. A Telegram post on Yellow Ribbon, a self-described Ukrainian “public resistance” movement, showed two people in a park taking down plaques picturing Soviet-era military figures.
Moscow’s announcement that Russian forces were withdrawing across the Dnieper River, which divides both the Kherson region and Ukraine, followed a stepped-up Ukrainian counteroffensive in the country’s south.
In the last two months, Ukraine’s military claimed to have reclaimed dozens of towns and villages north of the city of Kherson, and the millitary said that’s where stabilization activities were taking place.
Russian state news agency Tass quoted an official in Kherson’s Kremlin-appointed administration on Saturday as saying that Henichesk, a city on the Azov Sea 200 kilometers southeast of Kherson, would serve as the region’s “temporary capital.”
Ukrainian media derided the announcement, with the Ukrainska Pravda newspaper saying Russia “had made up a new capital” for the region.
Across much of Ukraine, moments of jubilation marked the exit of Russian forces, since a retreat from Kherson and other areas on the Dnieper’s west bank would appear to shatter Russian hopes to press an offensive west to Mykolaiv and Odesa to cut off Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea.
In Odesa, the Black Sea port, residents draped themselves in Ukraine’s blue-and-yellow flags, shared Champagne and held up flag-colored cards with the word “Kherson” on them.
But like Zelenskyy, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba sought to temper the excitement.
“We are winning battles on the ground, but the war continues,” he said from Cambodia, where he was attending a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Kuleba brought up the prospect of the Ukrainian army finding evidence of possible Russian war crimes in Kherson, just as it did after previous Russian pullbacks in the Kyiv and Kharkiv regions.
“Every time we liberate a piece of our territory, when we enter a city liberated from Russian army, we find torture rooms and mass graves with civilians tortured and murdered by Russian army in the course of the occupation,” Ukraine’s top diplomat said. “It’s not easy to speak with people like this. But I said that every war ends with diplomacy and Russia has to approach talks in good faith.”
U.S. assessments this week showed Russia’s war in Ukraine may already have killed or wounded tens of thousands of civilians and hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
Elsewhere, Russia continued its grinding offensive in Ukraine’s industrial east, targeting the city of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region, the Ukrainian General Staff said.
Donetsk Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko reported Saturday that two civilians were killed and four wounded over the last day as battles heated up around Bakhmut and Avdiivka, a small city that has remained in Ukrainian hands.
Russia’s continued push for Bakhmut demonstrates the Kremlin’s desire for visible gains following weeks of setbacks. It would also pave the way for a possible push onto other Ukrainian strongholds in the heavily contested Donetsk region.
In the Dnipropetrovsk region west of Donetsk, Russia again shelled communities near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the Ukrainian regional governor said.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
PHOENIX (AP) — Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly won his bid for reelection Friday in the crucial swing state of Arizona, defeating Republican venture capitalist Blake Masters to put his party one victory away from clinching control of the chamber for the next two years of Joe Biden’s presidency.
With Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote, Democrats can retain control of the Senate by winning either the Nevada race, which remains too early to call, or next month’s runoff in Georgia. Republicans now must win both those races to take the majority.
“ Republican Senate nominee Blake Masters earned Donald Trump’s endorsement after claiming ‘Trump won in 2020’ but. under pressure during a debate last month, acknowledged he hadn’t seen evidence that election was rigged. He later resumed adherence to the false claim.”
The Arizona race is one of a handful of contests that Republicans targeted in their bid to take control of the 50-50 Senate. It was a test of the inroads that Kelly and other Democrats have made in a state once reliably dominated by the GOP. Kelly’s victory suggests Democratic success in Arizona was not an aberration during Donald Trump’s presidency.
Other Arizona contests, including the closely watched race for governor between Democrat Katie Hobbs and Republican Kari Lake, were too early to call Friday night.
Kelly, a former NASA astronaut who’s flown in space four times, is married to former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, who inspired the nation with her recovery from a gunshot wound to the head during an assassination attempt in 2011 that killed six people and injured 13. Kelly and Giffords went on to co-found a gun safety advocacy group.
Kelly’s victory in a 2020 special election spurred by the death of Republican Sen. John McCain gave Democrats both of Arizona’s Senate seats for the first time in 70 years. The shift was propelled by the state’s fast-changing demographics and the unpopularity of Trump.
Kelly’s 2022 campaign largely focused on his support for abortion rights, protecting Social Security, lowering drug prices and ensuring a stable water supply in the midst of a drought, which has curtailed Arizona’s cut of Colorado River water.
With President Joe Biden struggling with low approval ratings, Kelly distanced himself from the president, particularly on border security, and played down his Democratic affiliation amid angst about the state of the economy.
He also styled himself as an independent willing to buck his party, in the style of McCain.
Masters, an acolyte of billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, tried to penetrate Kelly’s independent image, aligning him with the Biden administration’s approach to the U.S.-Mexico border and tamp down on rampant inflation.
Masters endeared himself to many GOP primary voters with his penchant for provocation and contrarian thinking. He called for privatizing Social Security, took a hard-line stance against abortion and promoted a racist theory popular with white nationalists that Democrats are seeking to use immigration to replace white people in America.
But after emerging bruised from a contentious primary, Masters struggled to raise money and was put on the defense over his controversial positions.
He earned Trump’s endorsement after claiming “Trump won in 2020,” but under pressure during a debate last month, he acknowledged he hasn’t seen evidence the election was rigged. He later doubled down on the false claim that Trump won.
After the primary, he scrubbed some of his more controversial positions from his website, but it wasn’t enough for the moderate swing voters who decided the election.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Bahrain said Saturday hackers targeted websites in the island kingdom just hours before a planned parliamentary election.
The Interior Ministry did not identify the websites targeted, but the country’s state-run Bahrain News Agency could not be reached online nor could the website for Bahrain’s parliament.
“Websites are being targeted to hinder the elections and circulate negative messages in desperate attempts that won’t affect the determination of citizens who will go to the polling stations,” the Interior Ministry said.
Screenshots taken by internet users showed a picture after the hack claiming it was carried out by a previously unknown account called Al-Toufan, or “The Flood” in Arabic. Social media accounts associated with Al-Toufan said the group targeted the parliament’s website “due to the persecution carried out by the Bahraini authorities, and in implementation of the popular will to boycott the sham elections.”
A banned Shiite opposition group and others have called on voters to boycott the election.
Bahraini officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The attack happened just hours ahead of parliamentary and municipal elections in Bahrain. Voters will pick the 40 members of the lower house of Bahrain’s parliament, the Council of Representatives. The parliament’s upper house, the Consultative Council, is appointed by royal decree by King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa.
Bahrain is in the midst of a decade-long crackdown on all dissent after the 2011 Arab Spring protests, which saw the island’s Shiite majority and others demanding more political freedom.
Since Bahrain put down the protests with the help of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, it has imprisoned Shiite activists, deported others, stripped hundreds of their citizenship and closed down its leading independent newspaper.
Bahrain, about the size of New York City, is home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet.
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Follow Jon Gambrell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jongambrellAP.
Disney plans to institute a targeted hiring freeze as well as some job cuts, according to an internal memo sent to executives.
“We are limiting headcount additions through a targeted hiring freeze,” CEO Bob Chapek said in a memo to division leads sent Friday and obtained by CNBC. “Hiring for the small subset of the most critical, business-driving positions will continue, but all other roles are on hold. Your segment leaders and HR teams have more specific details on how this will apply to your teams.”
He added: “As we work through this evaluation process, we will look at every avenue of operations and labor to find savings, and we do anticipate some staff reductions as part of this review.” Disney has approximately 190,000 employees.
Chapek also told executives business travel should be limited to essential trips only. Meetings should be conducted virtually as much as possible, he wrote in the memo.
Disney is also establishing “a cost structure taskforce” to be made up of Chief Financial Officer Christine McCarthy, General Counsel Horacio Gutierrez and Chapek.
“I am fully aware this will be a difficult process for many of you and your teams,” Chapek wrote. “We are going to have to make tough and uncomfortable decisions. But that is just what leadership requires, and I thank you in advance for stepping up during this important time.”
The moves come after Disney reported disappointing quarterly results. Shares of the company fell sharply Wednesday, hitting a new 52-week low, before rebounding later in the week.
McCarthy said during Disney’s earnings call Tuesday that the company was looking for ways to trim costs.
“We are actively evaluating our cost base currently, and we’re looking for meaningful efficiencies,” she said. “Some of those are going to provide some near-term savings, and others are going to drive longer-term structural benefits.”
Disney’s streaming services lost $1.47 billion last quarter, more than double the unit’s loss from a year prior. McCarthy said losses will improve in 2023, and Chapek has promised streaming will become profitable by the end of 2024.
Other large media and entertainment companies, including Warner Bros. Discovery and Netflix, have cut jobs this year as valuations have slumped. Disney hasn’t announced any plans to eliminate jobs.
The full memo can be read here:
Disney Leaders-
As we begin fiscal 2023, I want to communicate with you directly about the cost management efforts Christine McCarthy and I referenced on this week’s earnings call. These efforts will help us to both achieve the important goal of reaching profitability for Disney+ in fiscal 2024 and make us a more efficient and nimble company overall. This work is occurring against a backdrop of economic uncertainty that all companies and our industry are contending with.
While certain macroeconomic factors are out of our control, meeting these goals requires all of us to continue doing our part to manage the things we can control—most notably, our costs. You all will have critical roles to play in this effort, and as senior leaders, I know you will get it done.
To be clear, I am confident in our ability to reach the targets we have set, and in this management team to get us there.
To help guide us on this journey, I have established a cost structure taskforce of executive officers: our CFO, Christine McCarthy and General Counsel, Horacio Gutierrez. Along with me, this team will make the critical big picture decisions necessary to achieve our objectives.
We are not starting this work from scratch and have already set several next steps—which I wanted you to hear about directly from me.
First, we have undertaken a rigorous review of the company’s content and marketing spending working with our content leaders and their teams. While we will not sacrifice quality or the strength of our unrivaled synergy machine, we must ensure our investments are both efficient and come with tangible benefits to both audiences and the company.
Second, we are limiting headcount additions through a targeted hiring freeze. Hiring for the small subset of the most critical, business-driving positions will continue, but all other roles are on hold. Your segment leaders and HR teams have more specific details on how this will apply to your teams.
Third, we are reviewing our SG&A costs and have determined that there is room for improved efficiency—as well as an opportunity to transform the organization to be more nimble. The taskforce will drive this work in partnership with segment teams to achieve both savings and organizational enhancements. As we work through this evaluation process, we will look at every avenue of operations and labor to find savings, and we do anticipate some staff reductions as part of this review. In the immediate term, business travel should now be limited to essential trips only. In-person work sessions or offsites requiring travel will need advance approval and review from a member of your executive team (i.e., direct report of the segment chairman or corporate executive officer). As much as possible, these meetings should be conducted virtually. Attendance at conferences and other external events will also be restricted and require approvals from a member of your executive team.
Our transformation is designed to ensure we thrive not just today, but well into the future—and you will hear more from our taskforce in the weeks and months ahead.
I am fully aware this will be a difficult process for many of you and your teams. We are going to have to make tough and uncomfortable decisions. But that is just what leadership requires, and I thank you in advance for stepping up during this important time. Our company has weathered many challenges during our 100-year history, and I have no doubt we will achieve our goals and create a more nimble company better suited to the environment of tomorrow.
Thank you again for your leadership.
-Bob
WATCH: Disney had to get into streaming, but Meta just did too much hiring
Twitter’s relaunched premium service — which grants blue-check “verification” labels to anyone willing to pay $8 a month — was unavailable Friday after the social media platform was flooded by a wave of imposter accounts it itself had approved.
It’s the latest whiplash-inducing change to the service where uncertainty has become the norm since billionaire Elon Musk took control two weeks ago. Prior to that, the blue check was granted to government entities, corporations, celebrities and journalists verified by the platform — precisely to prevent impersonation. Now, anyone can get one as long as they have a phone, a credit card and $8 a month.
An impostor account posing as pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co. and registered under the revamped Twitter Blue system tweeted that insulin was free, forcing the Indianapolis company to post an apology. Nintendo, Lockheed Martin, Musk’s own companies Tesla and SpaceX were also impersonated, as well as the accounts of various professional sports and political figures.
The impostors can cause big problems, even if they’re taken down quickly.
They have created “overwhelming reputational risk for placing advertising investments on the platform,” said Lou Paskalis, longtime marketing and media executive and former Bank of America head of global media. Adding that with the fake “verified” brand accounts, “a picture emerges of a platform in disarray that no media professional would risk their career by continuing to make advertising investments on, and no governance apparatus or senior executive would condone if they did.”
Adding to the confusion, Twitter now has two categories of “blue checks,” and they look identical. One includes the accounts verified before Musk took helm. It notes that “This account is verified because it’s notable in government, news, entertainment, or another designated category.” The other notes that the account subscribes to Twitter Blue.
But as of midday Friday, Twitter Blue was not available for subscription.
On Thursday, Musk tweeted that “too many corrupt legacy Blue ‘verification’ checkmarks exist, so no choice but to remove legacy Blue in coming months.”
An email sent to Twitter’s press address went unanswered. The company’s communications department was gutted in the layoffs and Twitter has not responded to queries from The Associated Press since Oct. 27 when Musk took the helm.
Thursday night, Twitter also once again began adding gray “official” labels to some prominent accounts. It had rolled out the labels earlier this week, only to kill them a few hours later.
They returned Thursday night, at least for some accounts — including Twitter’s own, as well as big companies like Amazon, Nike and Coca-Cola, before many vanished again.
Celebrities also did not appear to be getting the “official” label.
Twitter is heavily dependent on ads and about 90% of its revenue comes from advertisers. But each change that Musk is rolling out — or rolling back — makes the site less appealing for big brands.
“It has become chaos,” said Richard Levick, CEO of public relations firm Levick. “Who buys into chaos?”
A bigger issue for Musk might be the risk to his reputation as a model tech executive, since the rollout of different types of verifications and other changes have been botched, Levick added.
“It’s another example something not very well thought out, and that’s what happens when you rush,” Levick said. “Musk has been known as a trusted visionary and magician — he can’t lose that moniker and that’s what’s at risk right now,” Levick said.
Twitter is a small part of total ad spending for the biggest companies that advertise on the platform. Google, Amazon and Meta account for about 75% of digital ads globally, with all other platforms combined making up the other 25%. Twitter accounts for about 0.9% of global digital ad spending, according to Insider Intelligence.
“For most marketers on budgets, Twitter has always been that thing that is potentially too big to totally ignore but not quite big enough to care about,” said Mark DiMassimo, creative chief of marketing agency DiGo.
“None of this is a forever moral or ethical stand on the point of advertisers,” he added. “If Musk proves to be a civilizing force in the long run advertisers will come back — if Twitter is still there. It’s a ‘for now’ decision — why be there now?”
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AP Technology Writer Frank Bajak in Boston contributed to this report.
Twitter’s relaunched premium service — which grants blue-check “verification” labels to anyone willing to pay $8 a month — was unavailable Friday after the social media platform was flooded by a wave of imposter accounts approved by Twitter.
Before billionaire Elon Musk took control of the social media platform two weeks ago the blue check was granted to celebrities, journalists and verified by the platform — precisely to prevent impersonation. Now, anyone can get one as long as they have a phone, a credit card and $8 a month.
After an imposter account registered under the revamped Twitter Blue system tweeted that insulin was free, pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co. had to post an apology. Nintendo, Lockheed Martin, Musk’s own Tesla and SpaceX were also impersonated as well as the accounts of various professional sports figures.
There are now two categories of “blue checks,” and they look identical. One includes the accounts verified before Musk took helm. It notes that “This account is verified because it’s notable in government, news, entertainment, or another designated category.” The other notes that the account subscribes to Twitter Blue.
An email sent to Twitter’s press address went unanswered. The company’s communications department was gutted in the layoffs.
On Thursday, Musk tweeted that “too many corrupt legacy Blue ‘verification’ checkmarks exist, so no choice but to remove legacy Blue in coming months.”
Twitter Blue was not available on the platform’s online version, which said signup was only possible on the iPhone version. But the iPhone version did not offer Twitter Blue as an option
Twitter also once again began adding gray “official” labels to some prominent accounts. It had rolled out the labels earlier this week, only to kill them a few hours later.
They returned Thursday night, at least for some accounts — including Twitter’s own, as well as big companies like Amazon, Nike and Coca-Cola, before many vanished again.
Celebrities also did not appear to be getting the “official” label.
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AP Technology Writer Frank Bajak in Boston contributed to this report.
Shares of Chinese travel and consumer companies gained ground in Hong Kong after Beijing eased some Covid-19 restrictions, improving the outlook for sectors directly hit by the pandemic and the broader economic recovery.
In Friday afternoon trade, the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index 160462, +7.98%
advanced 7.6%, while the city’s benchmark Hang Seng Index HSI, +7.51%
jumped 7.1% to 17221.43, recovering to levels last seen a month ago. The benchmark index would mark its largest one-day gain since mid-March if it closes at current levels.
China’s three major airlines, Air China Ltd. 601111, -3.11%,
China Southern Airlines Co. 600029, +0.13%
and China Eastern Airlines Corp. 600115, +1.14%,
added between 2.2% and 5.1%, while travel retailer China Tourism Group Duty Free Corp. 601888, +3.65%
climbed 7.1%.
Broader consumer-related sectors also strengthened, amid hopes that less stringent rules could help revive consumption. E-commerce platforms Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. BABA, +7.60%
9618, +16.22%
jumped 11% and 16%, respectively, while restaurant operator Haidilao International Holding Ltd. 6862, +5.21%
climbed 4.7%.
China said Friday that it will shorten the quarantine period for close contacts of COVID cases and travelers to the country, among other policy tweaks. But the government also said it will stick to its zero-COVID policy.
Friday’s market upturn came on the back of U.S. stocks’ biggest rally in two years, after October inflation data was weaker than expected, lifting expectations of less aggressive interest-rate increases by the Federal Reserve.
