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  • How Elon Musk upended Twitter and his own reputation in 6 months as CEO | CNN Business

    How Elon Musk upended Twitter and his own reputation in 6 months as CEO | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    When Elon Musk first agreed to buy Twitter, he promised to make the company “better than ever,” with greater transparency, fewer bots, a stronger business and more of what he called “free speech.”

    But six months after Musk took control of Twitter, the future of the company and the platform have never been less certain.

    After acquiring the social media platform for $44 billion in late October, Musk reportedly now values Twitter at around $20 billion — and some who track the company believe even that estimate is likely high. Musk repeatedly warned that Twitter could be at risk of filing for bankruptcy only to claim he had brought it back from the brink thanks to his slashing costs, both by laying off 80% of Twitter’s staff and allegedly by failing to pay some of its bills, according to multiple lawsuits. But it’s not clear just how and when Musk might return Twitter to growth.

    He has antagonized journalists and news outlets that have long been central to the platform’s success, overseen policy changes that threaten to make Twitter less safe or reliable, made the platform less transparent to researchers and scared away many top advertisers. Musk’s primary plan to grow Twitter’s business through an overhauled subscription strategy has resulted in much chaos but only a limited number of actual subscriptions.

    In the process, Musk has also upended his own reputation. Once known by much of the public primarily for his innovative efforts to launch rockets and build electric cars, Musk has instead spent much of the past six months in the headlines for controversial policy and feature changes at Twitter, draconian cuts to staff resulting in frequent service disruptions, and briefly banning several prominent journalists. He’s also tweeted a long list of eccentric remarks from his personal Twitter account, including sharing conspiracy theories and publicly mocking a Twitter worker with a disability who was unsure whether he’d been laid off.

    “If he had done nothing except cut costs, then Twitter would have been okay,” said Leslie Miley, a former Twitter engineering manager who started its product safety and security team and left the company in 2015. He has since held roles at Google, Microsoft and the Obama Foundation. “If you had just let everyone go, treated them with respect, and just let the service run for two years, you probably would be okay.”

    Now, though, Miley said he expects Twitter will “eventually go down the road of MySpace.”

    “It’s going to take a little bit longer … [but] I think Twitter is on its way to irrelevance,” he said, “there is no strategy to acquire or retain users because you are offering them no value.”

    Twitter, which has slashed much of its public relations team under Musk, responded to CNN’s request for comment on this story with the auto-reply from its press email that it has used for weeks: a poop emoji.

    For years, what differentiated Twitter from other social platforms was that it served as a central hub for real-time news. It was a place for ordinary people to read and even engage in conversation with celebrities, business leaders and other newsmakers.

    Many of Musk’s recent moves at the platform threaten to undermine that purpose, not to mention the larger information ecosystem — and it’s not clear the efforts will improve the company’s business.

    “Twitter has never been perfect, it had a lot of problems but it was critical global infrastructure for information that Elon Musk is now systematically, frankly, vandalizing,” former Twitter chair of global news Vivian Schiller told CNN in a recent interview.

    Most recently, Musk removed the legacy blue check marks that verified the identities of prominent users, saying he would instead make the checks available only to those who pay $8 per month for Twitter Blue in the interest of “treating everyone equally.”

    “There shouldn’t be a different standard for celebrities,” Musk said in a tweet earlier this month.

    But the move may make it easier for bad actors to impersonate high-profile people and harder for users to trust the veracity and authenticity of information on the platform. What’s more, Musk then decided to sponsor the blue checks for certain celebrities, including Stephen King and LeBron James, in effect creating exactly the “different standard” for famous users he’d professed to want to avoid.

    Now, Musk says content from verified users will be promoted on the platform, potentially making it harder for users who can’t afford a subscription, or simply don’t want to pay Musk for one, to find an audience on the platform. And the new paid verification system won’t necessarily rid the platform of bots, an issue Musk spent months railing on while trying to get out of the acquisition deal last year, according to Filippo Menczer, a computer science professor at Indiana University and director of the Observatory on Social Media.

    “You can create fake accounts and pay $8 [for a blue check] … so if you are a well-funded bad actor, you can do more damage now than you could before,” Menczer said. “And if you are a reliable source and you’re not well-funded, your information will not be as visible as before.”

    Menczer added that the result could be “less free speech, because you’re drowning out the speech of regular people [with speech] by people who either have the technical skills or the money to manipulate the system.”

    Twitter’s move to charge users of its API will also make it harder for researchers to identify and warn the platform about inauthentic activity, Menczer said, and could disrupt other positive uses of the platform that contributed to its reputation as a news hub. Weather agencies, for example, have warned that the change could make it harder for them to release automated emergency weather alerts.

    Any social network lives or dies based on its ability to retain and attract users — and there’s real reason for Twitter to be worried.

    A number of users, celebrities and media organizations have said they plan to leave Twitter over Musk’s recent policy changes — which often appear to be made on a whim without any real principles.

    NPR, BBC and CBC left Twitter after opposing a controversial new “government-funded media” label that they say was misleading. CenterLink, a global nonprofit that represents hundreds of centers providing services to LGBTQ communities, said it would no longer use Twitter after the platform removed protections for transgender users from its hateful conduct policy. And some high-profile users, such as bullying activist Monica Lewinsky, have threatened to exit the platform over the blue check change, now that they may be at greater risk of impersonation on Twitter.

    There remain few alternatives that offer similar features and scale to Twitter, but a growing list of upstart competitors has emerged since Musk’s takeover. At least one large rival, Facebook-parent Meta, has also confirmed it’s working on a service that sounds a lot like Twitter.

    “Almost everything he said he was going to do, he has screwed up in any number of ways,” Miley said. “If it weren’t so damaging to people and organizations who have depended upon the platform, it would be funny. But it’s not actually funny because it has degraded people’s ability to communicate effectively.”

    All of the chaos has made it difficult to convince advertisers, which previously made up 90% of Twitter’s revenue, to rejoin the platform, after many halted spending in the wake of Musk’s takeover over concerns about increased hate speech, as well as confusion about layoffs and the platform’s future direction.

    Just 43% of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers as of September — the month before Musk’s takeover — were still advertising on the platform in April, according to data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

    Musk, for his part, has said that Twitter’s usage has increased since his takeover and that advertisers are steadily returning to the platform. But because he took the company private, he is not obligated to make financial disclosures and followers of the company are left to take him at his word.

    Musk built his reputation by overhauling Tesla, helping to launch a widespread shift away from gas cars to electric vehicles and growing SpaceX into a space transport juggernaut. Now, he appears to be attempting a similar overhaul at Twitter — upending the tried-and-true digital advertising business in favor of a subscription model that no other social media platform has yet been able to find large scale success with.

    “I give him some credit for trying a different business model, I think the business model based on user data is quite abusive,” said Luigi Zingales, professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, although Musk has also attempted to improve Twitter’s targeted advertising business.

    Some other tech companies have followed his lead in some places. Facebook-parent Meta copied Twitter by launching a paid verification option. And Meta, along with a number of other tech companies, have undergone multiple rounds of cost-cutting since last fall. Twitter appears to have given cover for some of these ideas, and other firms’ somewhat more principled approaches made them look better by comparison.

    For Twitter and Musk, the stakes for success are high: Musk’s relationships with banks and investors for future endeavors could hinge in part on his performance at the social media firm, which he took on billions of dollars in debt to purchase. Banks “will sit down and say, what kind of cred does this guy have? Will we find him making these shoot-from-the-lip sort of dictates that, in fact, throw our money down a hole?” said Columbia Business School management professor William Klepper.

    Any change to Musk’s reputation from his time leading Twitter could also ultimately have ripple effects for his broader business empire, causing potential investors, recruits and customers to think twice about betting on one of his companies. Tesla

    (TSLA)     shareholders recently complained to the company’s board that Musk appears “overcommitted.”

    “His reputation has been diminished significantly with Twitter … and once you lose it, it’s very difficult to recover,” Klepper said. “It would be a good opportunity for [Musk] to rethink whether or not … he’s really leadership material.”

    Musk in December pledged to step down as Twitter CEO after millions of users voted in favor of his exit in a poll he posted to the platform. But for now, he remains “Chief Twit.”

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  • Elon Musk says he’s found a new CEO for Twitter | CNN Business

    Elon Musk says he’s found a new CEO for Twitter | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Elon Musk on Thursday said he’s found a new CEO to take over Twitter, months after he first promised to step back from the role.

    The new CEO will assume the role at Twitter Inc., which recently changed its name to X Corp., in the coming weeks, Musk said. He did not provide a name.

    “Excited to announce that I’ve a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!” Musk said in a tweet.

    Musk, who has had a chaotic reign as “Chief Twit” since buying the company in October, said he will become Twitter’s executive chair and chief technology officer, overseeing product, software and system operations.

    In December, Musk ran a poll on the platform asking users whether he should step back as Twitter’s CEO, which ended with the majority of users voting in the affirmative. Musk said he would abide by the results of the poll but later backtracked, saying he would hand over the role “as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” In February, he reiterated that he planned to find a replacement by the end of the year.

    Musk has faced criticism for a series of policy changes at Twitter, which often came without clear justification and raised concerns about the impact on Twitter’s users.

    He has also been attempting to convince advertisers to rejoin the platform, after many fled over concerns about hateful conduct on the platform, Twitter’s mass layoffs or questions about the company’s future. At the same time, he has been trying to sell users on a new paid subscription platform that includes the ability to pay for a blue verification check mark, but appears to have limited traction so far.

    Musk — who runs or is involved in numerous other companies, including Tesla

    (TSLA)     — has also faced criticism from Tesla

    (TSLA)     shareholders concerned that he is distracted by Twitter.

    Musk recently said that Twitter is now “trending to breakeven,” after previously saying it was at risk of bankruptcy. Now, the company’s new CEO will be tasked with trying to help turn around the struggling company and help Musk recoup some of the $44 billion spent acquiring the platform.

    Even as Musk prepares to step back from the CEO role, he will likely maintain significant control over the future direction of the company. After taking over the company in October, Musk cleared out the C-Suite, dissolved the board and became both the CEO and sole director of the platform.

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  • First on CNN: Pornhub asks users and Big Tech for help as states adopt age verification laws | CNN Business

    First on CNN: Pornhub asks users and Big Tech for help as states adopt age verification laws | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    In the two-minute video, adult performer Cherie Deville stares into the camera and intones soberly to viewers, for the second time in a month, that policymakers are coming for their porn.

    “Click the button below to contact your representatives before it is too late,” Deville pleads.

    The call-to-action video, launching Wednesday in multiple states, comes from Pornhub, which last month withdrew from Utah over a new law that requires adult sites to verify their users’ ages and holds them liable for serving their content to minors. Now, as similar legislation is set to take effect next month in Arkansas, Mississippi and Virginia, Pornhub is making a last-ditch effort to galvanize users there in opposition.

    It’s unclear how much Pornhub expects to achieve, as the laws have already been passed and signed. A company spokesperson told CNN it’s “certainly not our goal” to shut down the site in the three states as it did in Utah but hinted at the possibility, saying that “if necessary, we will share next steps in the coming weeks.”

    But the video campaign is only part of a broader unfolding strategy by one of the internet’s highest-profile distributors of adult material.

    The video’s release coincides with a previously unreported effort by Pornhub — and its private equity owners, Ethical Capital Partners (ECP) — to convince the world’s largest tech companies to intervene in the wider debate over age restrictions for digital porn and social media.

    In recent weeks, ECP has lobbied Apple, Google and Microsoft to jointly develop a technological standard that might turn a user’s electronic device into the proof of age necessary to access restricted online content, according to Solomon Friedman, a partner at ECP.

    One possible version of the idea, Friedman told CNN, would be for the tech companies to securely store a person’s age information on a device and for the operating system to provide websites requesting age verification with a yes-or-no answer on the owner’s behalf — allowing sites to block underage users without ever handling anyone’s personal information.

    “We are willing to commit whatever resources are required to work proactively with those companies, with other technical service providers and as well with government,” Friedman said.

    Pornhub’s simultaneous appeals to users and to Big Tech highlight the challenging position the company now finds itself in amid a wave of state legislation. Under many of these laws, adult sites are required to implement “reasonable age verification methods” that could include users submitting pictures of their photo ID, facial scans or other information, either to third-party companies or to the sites themselves.

    Minimum age requirements have emerged as a favored policy tool in statehouses across the country as lawmakers have increasingly become attuned to the potential mental health harms of unregulated social media use. But Pornhub, along with civil liberties and digital rights groups, have broadly warned of the potential pitfalls of age-verification rules.

    Those risks can include the infringement of Americans’ rights to access legal speech under the First Amendment; the leakage of personal information belonging to underage as well as overage internet users; or the loss of online anonymity that safety experts say is crucial for shielding vulnerable individuals.

    Pornhub’s outreach to Big Tech is intended to convince the companies whose operating systems power the world’s smartphones, tablets and computers that their technology is central to the future of online identity management and to draw their political might into a global policy battle that could reshape the internet for millions.

    But it is far from clear the effort is succeeding. Friedman declined to say how, or even if, the companies have responded to Pornhub’s communications. Microsoft declined to comment for this story; Apple and Google didn’t respond to requests for comment.

    Friedman characterized the discussions as being in “early stages,” though his other remarks implied the talks may be largely one-sided.

    “We are willing and ready to work with them proactively to determine best solutions and to lend any technical expertise that we possibly can, whether it be implementation or pilot projects or assistance in any way,” Friedman told CNN. “We are hoping that this dialogue bears fruit and age verification will be addressed once and for all.”

    The adult industry has famously led the charge on technological innovation before. Porn played a decisive role in the battle between the VHS and Betamax videotape platforms, facilitated the rise of online credit card transactions and helped promote streaming video technology writ large.

    Now, Pornhub’s fight could prove to be a bellwether for the growing push to enforce age verification for social media. As with the battle over adult material, debates over how to keep children and teens away from social media have raised substantial questions about user privacy and how effective age restrictions may be when determined kids inevitably try to circumvent the rules.

    The tech industry, for its part, has been making its own strides in digital identity services. In 2021, for example, Apple announced support for adding driver’s licenses from eight states to Apple Wallet. In December, Google announced it was beta testing a similar feature for Android.

    Those services, however, are designed for in-person ID checks such as at travel checkpoints or liquor stores, technology experts said, and are not set up to perform age or identity verification remotely or virtually.

    Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a consumer advocacy group focused on children’s technology use, described calls for device-based age verification as an “intriguing idea” that might ease burdens on websites and internet users. But, he argued, there are less invasive ways of determining a website visitor’s age.

    “It is our position that rather than requiring new, stringent forms of age verification, that we should start by having the platforms use the data they’re already collecting to do age estimation,” Golin said, pointing to how TikTok, for example, reportedly uses behavioral cues and activity algorithms to guess whether a user may be underage.

    Any device-based approach to age verification would immediately run into issues in most households with children, where no device is ever solely used by one person or exclusively by adults, said India McKinney, director of federal affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization.

    “You would have to assume that children and teens weren’t borrowing their parents’ phones,” McKinney said. “And that’s sharing on purpose. You don’t have to be too sophisticated to think about teens stealing their parent’s device to get around the age-gating.”

    Meanwhile, entrusting large tech companies to be the custodians of even more personal information, and enabling them to be the effective arbiters of what internet users can see online, brings its own challenges, said Udbhav Tiwari, head of global product policy at Mozilla, maker of the popular Firefox web browser.

    Device-based age verification, Tiwari said, could have “very serious privacy connotations, because you now have the largest tech companies in the world having your government ID and all the information present in them linked to individual devices. We’ve seen Twitter use phone numbers they collected for account security for targeting ads in the past, which led to them being subjected to FTC fines.”

    Last year, Twitter agreed to pay $150 million to resolve those Federal Trade Commission allegations.

    But Pornhub argues that the alternative is a world that’s even less safe, where users seeking age-restricted content may simply go to sites without age-gates or other checks.

    “Giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution,” Deville says in Wednesday’s video. “In fact, it will put children and your privacy at risk.”

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  • A lawsuit by TikTok users challenging Montana’s ban is being funded by the social media company itself | CNN Business

    A lawsuit by TikTok users challenging Montana’s ban is being funded by the social media company itself | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    A high-profile lawsuit brought by TikTok users and creators last month challenging Montana’s statewide ban against the short-form video app is being funded by the social media giant itself, the company told CNN on Wednesday.

    TikTok has been covering legal fees for the group of five TikTok creators, said Jodi Seth, a TikTok spokesperson, separately from the company’s own lawsuit to block the state’s new law targeting the app over national security concerns.

    “We support our creators through various programs and have an ongoing dialogue about their presence on TikTok,” Seth said in a statement. “Throughout this process, many creators have expressed major concerns both privately and publicly about the potential impact of the Montana law on their livelihoods. We will support our creators in fighting for their constitutional rights.”

    TikTok’s involvement in the creators’ suit was first reported this week by The New York Times, weeks after the initial court case was filed. The company’s role in the litigation had not been previously known.

    The suit by the TikTok creators was the first to challenge Montana’s law banning TikTok from being offered within state lines and establishing penalties for the company and for app stores that violate the law. Legal experts have said the legislation, which is not set to take effect until January, raises constitutional issues and may well be practically unenforceable even if the law is upheld.

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  • Meta could become even more dominant in social media with Threads | CNN Business

    Meta could become even more dominant in social media with Threads | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    In less than 48 hours, Meta’s Twitter rival Threads has surpassed 70 million sign-ups, upended the social media landscape and appears to have rattled Twitter enough that it is now threatening legal action against Meta.

    But even as users signed up for Threads in droves, with some clearly eager to flee the chaos of Elon Musk’s Twitter, the sudden success of Meta’s app could raise a new set of concerns.

    Meta has long been criticized for its market dominance, and for allegedly trying to choke off competition by copying and killing rival applications. Now, some competition experts and even some Threads users worry that if the new app’s traction continues, it may simply lead to the accumulation of even more power and dominance for Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

    “The prospect of total monopoly by Meta, yikes,” wrote one user. “It’s a real problem for society when a few dozen people and companies own every single thing so that no alternative paradigms can exist that they don’t co-opt from the cradle,” replied another.

    Twitter had always been much smaller than Meta’s platforms, but it had an outsized influence in tech, media and politics. As Twitter faltered under Musk, though, a cottage industry emerged of smaller apps trying to capture some of its magic. Now more than any of them, Meta seems best positioned to claim the crown.

    Threads’ blockbuster launch this week highlights the uncomfortable reality of the modern digital economy: To potentially beat some of the biggest players in the industry, you might have to be a giant yourself.

    The overnight success of Threads is a testament both to the dissatisfaction with Musk’s ownership of Twitter and to the unique power and reach of one of Meta’s most important properties: Instagram.

    Instagram has more than two billion users, far more than the 238 million users Twitter reported having in the months before Musk took over. When new users sign up for Threads, which they do using an Instagram account, the app prompts them to follow all of their existing Instagram contacts with a single tap. It’s optional, but is easy to accept, and it takes a conscious decision to decline.

    By promoting Threads through Instagram, and by sharing Instagram user data with Threads to let people instantly recreate their social networks, Meta has significantly greased the onboarding process. That frictionless experience has allowed Threads to leapfrog what’s known in the industry as the “cold start” problem, in which a new platform struggles to gain new users because there are no other users there to attract them.

    Thanks to the Instagram integration, “that biggest problem, the chicken-egg problem, has been solved from the jump,” Reddit co-founder and venture investor Alexis Ohanian said in a video Thursday (posted, naturally, on Threads).

    That Threads appeared to clear that hurdle easily, Ohanian said, makes him “bullish” on the new app.

    But that same innovation that made signing up so many users so quickly may raise competition concerns, particularly in Europe where new antitrust rules for digital platforms are set to go into effect in a matter of months.

    “From a competition perspective this can be problematic because Meta can use it to leverage its market power and raise barriers to entry, as other rivals would not have the customer base Meta has via Instagram,” said Agustin Reyna, director of legal and economic affairs at the Brussels-based consumer advocacy organization BEUC.

    Under the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), “digital gatekeepers” — a term that’s expected to cover Meta and/or its subsidiaries — will be prohibited from combining a user’s data from multiple platforms without consent, Reyna said. Another restriction forbids requiring users to sign up for one platform as a condition of using another.

    Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri appeared to acknowledge those issues this week in an interview with The Verge. Threads won’t be launching in the EU for now, he said, because of “complexities with complying with some of the laws coming into effect next year” — a statement The Verge suggested was a reference to the DMA.

    The DMA was passed specifically to deal with the antitrust concerns raised by large tech platforms. That Threads apparently cannot (yet) comply with rules designed to protect competition underscores uncertainty about the app’s potential competitive impact.

    Meta’s approach to Threads could also revive longstanding criticisms about the company’s alleged practice of copying and killing rivals, particularly as Twitter has warned Meta it may sue over claims of trade secret theft (an allegation Meta denies).

    The issue isn’t limited to the realm of social media. As the world races to develop artificial intelligence, Threads represents a huge new opportunity for Meta to gather training data for its own AI technology, in a way that could help it catch up to industry leaders such as OpenAI and Google. That could complicate any attempt at a comprehensive analysis of what Threads means for competition in tech.

    Part of what makes the debate so complicated is Threads’ seemingly very real threat to Twitter.

    If Threads puts pressure on Twitter to improve its service, that is a form of competition between apps, said Geoffrey Manne, founder of the Portland, Oregon-based International Center for Law and Economics.

    But, he added, if it leads to a concentration of power in the social media industry more broadly, it could mean a reduction in competition overall. It all depends on how you define the market.

    “I’m inclined to say it does both simultaneously, and the ultimate consequences aren’t so clear,” Manne said.

    Rather than viewing it through the lens of a social media market, one helpful way to look at the issue is from the perspective of the advertising market, he said. It’s possible that once Threads introduces advertising — which Zuckerberg has said won’t happen until the app has increased to significant scale — Threads simply reinforces Meta’s advertising market power, Manne said. That could lead to further antitrust scrutiny for Meta even if the question about competition in social media is ambiguous.

    Jeff Blattner, a former DOJ antitrust official, said it can only benefit consumers to have Threads as a rival to Twitter.

    “Two platforms run by maniac billionaires are better than one,” he wrote on Threads — though if Threads is so successful as to effectively knock out Twitter altogether, then in some ways the original question about Meta’s dominance will still stand.

    Threads has one thing going for it that may nip any competition concerns in the bud: A commitment to integrate with the same open protocols used by other distributed social media alternatives, such as Mastodon.

    That would give users the option to migrate their accounts, along with all their follower data intact, to a rival like Mastodon that isn’t controlled by Meta.

    While that interoperability isn’t available yet, Mosseri has repeatedly highlighted it as a priority on his to-do list.

    When and if it happens, that could be a significant step. What may appear now as an audience grab by Meta could someday wind up being how millions of people were onboarded to a massive, decentralized social networking infrastructure that is not controlled by any single company, individual or organization.

    “This is why we think interoperability requirements are so important,” said Charlotte Slaiman, a competition expert at the Washington-based consumer group Public Knowledge. If users could port their entire social graph from one rival to another whenever they wanted, she said, “we could have more fair competition based on the quality of the product, not just incumbency advantage.”

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  • RFK Jr. hearing encapsulates a political era when truth is upside down | CNN Politics

    RFK Jr. hearing encapsulates a political era when truth is upside down | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    In a Donald Trump-influenced era of through-the-looking-glass politics, everything seems upside down, traditional loyalties are scrambled, history can be rewritten and truth is just what anyone wants it to be.

    A Republican-run House hearing Thursday encapsulated the current political circus ahead of another tense election. In a head-spinning spectacle, a Kennedy family scion and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination was greeted as a hero by Republicans. But he was slammed by Democrats, including by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries as “a living, breathing, false flag operation.”

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was given a platform by pro-Trump Republicans because his conspiracies about vaccine and Covid-19, and claims that the government has tried to censor him gel with their efforts to shield Trump by claiming that the political weaponization of government is a Democratic and not a GOP transgression.

    The marriage of convenience in a fiery hearing underscored how populism and the bending of truth pioneered on the right by Trump also has significant currency on the left. It illustrated how the character of mainstream American politics is under siege from fringe voices and extremist positions that once struggled to be heard but in recent years found a footing on social media, the campaign trail and even in Congress and the White House.

    As an example of his creation of alternative realities – a tactic frequently used by Trump – Kennedy forcibly denied that he had ever been anti-vaccine, racist or antisemitic. Yet CNN fact checks show he has repeatedly shared unfounded conspiracy theories with a false link between autism and childhood vaccines. He has also claimed that man-made chemicals could be making children gay or transgender. And just last week, he was hit by new claims of conspiracy mongering, racism and antisemitism over remarks at a dinner in New York City in which he claimed that “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

    Despite this controversy, Kennedy brazenly appeared to be inventing new truths even during the hearing. He said, for instance, “In my entire life, and while I’m under oath I have never uttered a phrase that was either racist or antisemitic.” At another moment he said: “I’ve never been anti-vaccine,” then added: “But everybody in this room probably believes that I have been because that’s the prevailing narrative.”

    Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of President John F. Kennedy, criticized his relative in a social media video Friday, calling his candidacy an “embarrassment.”

    “I’ve listened to him. I know him. I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president. What I do know is, his candidacy is an embarrassment. Let’s not be distracted, again, by somebody’s vanity project.” Schlossberg said.

    In an odd flipping of the normal political order, Democrats in the hearing effectively sought to undermine the candidacy of the son and nephew of assassinated party heroes, former Attorney General Robert Kennedy and President John F. Kennedy. The top Democrat on the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Virgin Islands Delegate Stacey Plaskett, for instance, condemned committee chair Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan for letting Kennedy air what Democrats regard as extreme views. “It’s a free country. You absolutely have a right to say what you believe,” she said, adding: “But you don’t have the right to a platform, public or private.”

    Plaskett’s comments did raise serious questions about whether there are limits – if any – on a prominent personality’s right to free speech even if they are saying things that are not true, as well as the extent to which misinformation has swamped politics and elections. But most of the hearing stayed away from such topics and was dominated by Republican attempts to score points and shield Trump and Democratic attacks on Kennedy.

    One of the ex-President’s top allies, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the fourth ranking House Republican, revived conservative claims that the Democratic-leaning officials in the federal government suppressed a story about a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden before the last election, a move she argued had been instrumental in his father beating Trump for the presidency. She cited this theory when asking Kennedy whether he believed there was censorship amounting to government interference in the 2020 election.

    Former Twitter executives admitted under oath this year that the social media network temporarily suppressed a story about the laptop but said there was no government interference in the decision. CNN has previously reported that allegations the FBI told Twitter to suppress the story are unsupported, and a half-dozen tech executives and senior staff, along with multiple federal officials familiar with the matter, denied any such directive was given.

    But the specific truth in this case isn’t necessarily important to Republicans who were using Kennedy to further create the impression of government interference to prevent Trump retaining the White House. The more public confusion there is the better it is for the ex-president politically. Of course, claims that Democrats are the ones really guilty of election interference are a direct attempt to whitewash Trump’s own behavior – since he used the tools of his office to try to subvert the 2020 election and to stay in power.

    Thursday’s hearing is not the first time political reality has seemed mixed up or traditional loyalties subverted. Just last week for instance, Republicans subjected FBI Director Christopher Wray to a fearsome grilling in a hearing while Democrats unusually defended the bureau – long regarded as one of the most conservative organs of the US government. The GOP storm was whipped up by allies of Trump who want to discredit investigations into his effort to overturn the 2020 election and his hoarding of classified documents in his Florida resort. Trump has already been indicted in the latter case and there are growing signs he will be charged in the former. He denies any wrongdoing and claims the investigations are politically motivated.

    It’s not that Republicans don’t have genuine ground for oversight. Independent government watchdog reports and internal investigations for instance have found deficiencies and mistakes in some investigations involving Trump. In the Russia probe, there were mistakes in the use of a dossier complied by a former British spy and in applications for surveillance warrants. More recently, an agreement with the Justice Department under which Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to two tax misdemeanors and struck a deal to resolve a felony gun charge is within the right of Congress to investigate. But neither case so far supports the wild claims that a corrupt liberal deep state is conducting schemes designed to suppress conservatives that are often made by Trump and his fellow Republicans.

    There is plentiful evidence that the ex-president is the one who weaponized government to go after his political enemies and to evade accountability. For instance he sacked former FBI chief James Comey and told NBC News it was because of the Russia investigation. He used his position as president and the prospect of military aid to seek to coerce Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into opening an investigation into Joe Biden and his son in a phone call that later led to his first impeachment. And Trump, by pressuring multiple officials in key swing states and by lambasting poll workers and making claims of widespread voter fraud, apparently used executive power to try to defy the will of voters in 2020.

    Voters also risked being misled by Washington’s hall of mirrors on another occasion this week. In a more frivolous, but still misleading example of the way it’s often hard to work out what is true, the Biden campaign debuted a campaign video that appeared to show one of Trump’s most fervent allies, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene praising Biden as fulfilling the historic mission of great Democratic presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. The words were those of Greene but they were selectively edited from a speech in a video that disguised her true intent, which was to condemn historic government spending by Democrats on education, health care, and social safety net programs that Republicans claim are akin to socialism.

    This example of things being not quite what they seem was more of a cheeky case of campaign trolling than the wholesale refashioning of truth evident Thursday. The hearing at one point degenerated into both Republicans and Democrats accusing each other of trying to censor their questions and witnesses.

    One veteran Democrat, Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, summed up how the session had in itself warped reality. “I never thought we’d descend to this level of Orwellian dystopia. Suddenly, the tools of the trade are not to get at the truth but to distract, distort, to deflect and dissemble,” Connolly said.

    Oddly, several members on the Republican side of the committee nodded their heads in agreement – apparently convinced the Orwellian behavior in question was on the part of what they see as a tyrannical, censoring government rather than in the obvious truths turned upside down.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Pentagon investigating alleged classified documents circulating on social media of US and NATO intelligence on Ukraine | CNN Politics

    Pentagon investigating alleged classified documents circulating on social media of US and NATO intelligence on Ukraine | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The Pentagon is investigating what appear to be screenshots of classified US and NATO military information about Ukraine circulating on social media, a Pentagon official told CNN.

    CNN has reviewed some of the images circulating on Twitter and Telegram but is unable to verify if they are authentic or have been doctored. US officials say the documents are real slides, part of a larger daily intelligence deck produced by the Pentagon about the war, but it appears the documents have been edited in some places.

    Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh would not weigh in on the documents’ legitimacy but said in a statement that the Defense Department is “aware of the reports of social media posts, and the Department is reviewing the matter.”

    Mykhailo Podolyak, the adviser to the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, said on his Telegram channel he believes the Russians are behind the purported leak. Podolyak said the documents that were disseminated are inauthentic, have “nothing to do with Ukraine’s real plans” and are based on “a large amount of fictitious information.”

    The emergence of the documents, whether genuine or not, has heightened focus on when the planned Ukrainian counteroffensive will begin and what, if anything, either side knows about the other’s preparations for it.

    One image that has been circulating on Russian Telegram channels and was reviewed by CNN is a photo of a hard copy of a document titled “US, Allied & Partner UAF Combat Power Build.” The document, which is from February and marked as secret, lists the amounts of certain Western weapons systems that Ukraine currently has on hand, estimated delivery of additional systems and the training Ukraine has or is expected to complete on the systems.

    Another is titled “Russia/Ukraine Joint Staff J3/4/5 Daily Update (D+370)” and is listed as secret. J3 refers to the operations directorate of the US military’s joint staff, J4 deals with logistics and engineering, and J5 proposes strategies, plans and policy recommendations. “D+370” refers to the date the document was produced: 370 days after the first day of the Russian invasion.

    A third document is a map, listed as top secret, that shows the status of the conflict as of March 1. The map shows Russian and Ukrainian battalion locations and sizes, as well as total assessed losses on both sides. The casualty numbers on this document are what officials believe was doctored – the Russian losses are actually far higher than the “16,000-17,500 killed in action” listed on the document, officials said.

    The document also says that 61,000-71,500 Ukrainians have been killed in action, a number that officials said also appeared edited to be higher than actual Pentagon estimates.

    A fourth document is a weather projection from February, listed as Secret, that assesses where the ground may freeze in Ukraine in a way that would be favorable for vehicle maneuver.

    The New York Times, which first disclosed the Pentagon investigation, reported that some of the images circulating online describe intelligence that could be useful to Russia, such as how quickly the Ukrainians are expending munitions used in US-provided rocket-systems.

    Podolyak called the documents “a bluff, dust in your eyes” and said that “if Russia really did receive real scenario preparations, it would hardly make them public.”

    “Russia is looking for any way to seize the information initiative, to try to influence the scenario plans for Ukraine’s counteroffensive,” he said. “To raise doubts, compromise previous ideas and frighten with their ‘awareness.’ But these are just standard elements of the Russian intelligence’s operational game and nothing more. It has nothing to do with Ukraine’s real plans.”

    Podolyak added that Russian troops “will get acquainted” with Ukraine’s real counteroffensive plans “very soon.”

    Asked about the images circulating on Twitter and Telegram, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told CNN in a statement that “we don’t have the slightest doubt about direct or indirect involvement of the United States and NATO in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.”

    “This level of involvement is rising, is rising gradually,” he said. “We keep our eye on this process. Well, of course, it makes the whole story more complicated, but it cannot influence the final outcome of the special operation.”

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Jack Dorsey no longer thinks Elon Musk is the right person to run Twitter | CNN Business

    Jack Dorsey no longer thinks Elon Musk is the right person to run Twitter | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey backtracked Saturday on his earlier endorsement of Elon Musk as the right choice to lead the company, speaking out against the billionaire who, for the past six months, has led Twitter through a series of largely self-inflicted crises.

    Asked on Bluesky, Dorsey’s new Twitter-like social media venture, whether he believed Musk has been the best possible steward of Twitter, Dorsey said flatly: “No.”

    Dorsey added that Musk “should have walked away” from acquiring Twitter for $44 billion, and faulted Twitter’s board in hindsight for trying to compel Musk to follow through with the deal despite Musk’s attempts to back out of the purchase last year.

    “It all went south,” Dorsey said. “But it happened and all we can do now is build something to avoid that ever happening again.”

    Twitter, which has cut much of its public relations team under Musk, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Under Musk, Twitter has slashed most of its staff, suffered frequent service disruptions and made a number of controversial changes to its policies and features, including a recent decision to remove blue checks from VIP users who don’t pay to be verified.

    Dorsey’s reflections, outlined in Bluesky posts reviewed by CNN, highlight the Twitter founder’s growing disillusionment with Musk. They also come after numerous exchanges in recent months where Dorsey has publicly questioned some of Musk’s decision-making.

    A year ago, Dorsey was quick to heap praise on Musk. When Musk’s deal to purchase Twitter was first announced, Dorsey said that so long as Twitter had to be owned by a single person or company, “Elon is the singular solution I trust.”

    “I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness,” Dorsey proclaimed at the time.

    Dorsey also rolled over his more than 18 million shares in Twitter (a roughly 2.4% stake) into the new Musk-owned company as an equity investor, rather than receiving a cash payout, according to a securities filing after the deal was completed.

    Now, though, Dorsey appears to believe Musk was an imperfect choice. Confronted by criticism from other Bluesky users that Twitter could have gone in a different direction, Dorsey argued that there was nothing stopping someone else from outbidding Musk.

    “If Elon or anyone wanted to buy the company, all they had to do was name a price that the board felt was better than what the company could do independently,” he said. “This is true for every public company.”

    Asked whether he felt any responsibility for the role he played in the transaction, Dorsey, who served on Twitter’s board at the time, said he was not the only person who authorized the deal and that Twitter’s “only alternative” to Musk was an acquisition by “hedge funds and Wall Street activists.”

    “The company would have never survived as a public company,” Dorsey claimed, adding: “I wish it were different,” but that some of Twitter’s revenue initiatives prior to Musk’s takeover “would not have mattered given market turn.”

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  • Anita Dunn, Biden’s brawler-in-chief, looks to 2024 | CNN Politics

    Anita Dunn, Biden’s brawler-in-chief, looks to 2024 | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Anita Dunn saw an opportunity with “Dark Brandon.”

    The liberal meme, created by Joe Biden’s most online fans as a play on the right-wing “Let’s Go Brandon” code bashing the president, depicts a grinning Biden with red lasers shooting out of his eyes. After Dunn, Biden’s top messaging and communications adviser, became aware of the meme, she brought it to the president – and they jumped on an opportunity to go on the offensive in the never-ending social media meme wars.

    He’s nodded to Dark Brandon in official speeches, aides have shared the image on social media, and his 2024 campaign is selling $32 T-shirts emblazoned with his online alter-ego. While it’s a minor part of his repertoire, it shows how Dunn – a longtime Democratic operative and Biden confidante – has used her influence to engage in the kind of street brawling needed to combat perceptions of the aging president and the challenge ahead as he seeks a second term.

    “It fits well with who she is, which is a f**k-sh*t-up-brawler. It’s not a coincidence that the stuff that came behind Dark Brandon was very much in line with Anita’s way of seeing the world,” Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital strategy, told CNN.

    CNN spoke to more than a dozen current and former White House and administration officials, lawmakers and Democratic strategists – many of whom requested anonymity to speak freely – who paint a picture of Dunn as a deeply loyal aide with a big-picture view of Biden’s strategy – with a hand in nearly all aspects of his political life.

    Her instincts for brawling are now directly intertwined with the president’s political fortunes, as she bolsters an already expansive role as a presidential adviser with steering 2024 messaging from the White House. For a president who relies on a very tight circle of trusted advisers, sources say Dunn has emerged as a powerful chief political communicator, a key strategist and someone who will fight on his behalf. She takes these responsibilities on with a combination of deep experience and Biden’s trust.

    While sources both inside and outside the White House say no communicator is better prepared for the moment than Dunn, her messaging task ahead is massive: A high-profile candidate of Biden’s age has never run before, and the president is facing low approval ratings after two years in the White House, which could be a drag on his reelection campaign. With Biden widely expected to face a familiar, but powerful, foe in former President Donald Trump, the mission facing Biden’s advisers is to find a message that can resonate enough with voters to beat Trump again.

    Just a third of Americans (33%) say that Biden winning in 2024 would be a step forward or a triumph for the country, per a May CNN poll conducted by SSRS. Voters also have serious questions about Biden’s age – he’s 80 now, and would be 86 at the end of a potential second term. Recent Washington Post/ABC News polling indicates that nearly two-thirds of respondents feel that Biden lacks the mental sharpness (63%) or is not in good enough physical health (62%) to serve effectively as president.

    Those poll numbers mean that Dunn’s most important task ahead is to help the president communicate to an unconvinced American public why he deserves a second term. And that has given her a White House portfolio that is virtually unparalleled.

    “The circle is small and isn’t exactly expanding anytime soon. That makes voices like Anita’s carry a significant amount of weight,” a Biden adviser said.

    Ostensibly, Dunn’s White House role centers around messaging, political strategy, oversight and crisis communication on the key issues facing the White House.

    “Like the rest of the senior staff, Anita works to act on the strategies and agenda President Biden assigns for her portfolio,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said.

    She’s in close touch with Cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, outside groups and prospective candidates. A former Hill aide, Dunn is keenly aware of congressional dynamics, but her work inside the Obama White House has shaped her views on how to approach the daily challenges confronting the president.

    “She has this perch where she spans the overall strategic plan for (Biden) and for the White House, and also communicates outward with the political apparatus of the (Democratic National Committee) and the campaign and tries to keep the entire Joe Biden enterprise swimming in the same direction,” a White House aide said.

    She’s also playing an active role in Biden’s reelection campaign strategy, with multiple sources familiar with the dynamic indicating she is spearheading 2024 political messaging from the White House and coordinating with senior campaign staff.

    A former White House senior adviser put it more bluntly: When it comes to 2024, “she’s running everything.”

    Pressed in an interview with CBS News on how she will balance those two roles, Dunn declined to comment, citing the Hatch Act.

    “I’m going to be here at the White House serving the people,” she said. “I’m a White House employee, and I have a government job, and I will continue to do my government job.”

    For an incumbent president running for reelection, there is no commodity more valuable than time, especially time spent in front of the cameras, with an audience of critics looking for signs of fatigue. And with Biden officially jumping into the 2024 race, it’s expected that his current pace of activity will continue for the foreseeable future – using the bully pulpit to highlight key policies at the White House, visiting battleground states to showcase his accomplishments and traveling abroad to meet world leaders. That makes everything he says – and how and where he says it – part of an implicit reelection campaign.

    Dunn – in concert with a tight circle of aides, including White House chief of staff Jeff Zients, deputy chiefs of staff Jen O’Malley Dillon and Bruce Reed, senior adviser Mike Donilon, and counselor to the president Steve Ricchetti – is key to making those decisions and how to communicate them.

    For instance, Dunn was central to a recent decision to frame the president’s age as a sign of wisdom and experience.

    “It’s a legitimate thing to raise the question of age,” Biden told donors at a recent campaign fundraiser. “I hope what I’ve been able to bring to this job, and will continue to bring, is a little bit of wisdom.”

    His explicit use of that framing had Dunn’s fingerprints all over it – part of Bidenworld’s effort to mitigate a weakness by tying it to legislative accomplishments that supporters believe have little precedent over the past several decades.

    Multiple sources told CNN that Dunn has been a decision-maker for campaign issues such as staffing, announcement timing, headquarters location and selecting campaign leadership.

    She’s also recently been involved in strategically elevating the profile of Vice President Kamala Harris, making it clear internally that the West Wing needs to do a better job at bolstering Harris heading into the campaign, a source familiar with the dynamic said.

    Dunn is expected to remain in her White House role but continue to advise Biden on 2024 matters, multiple sources said, with campaign manager and former White House staffer Julie Chavez Rodriguez leading the charge from the campaign side.

    It’s a similar model to how former President Barack Obama’s top advisers coordinated between the West Wing and the campaign, and not unusual.

    “You want a strategist like Anita at the White House. Reelects are about organizing, ground game, targeting digital and ads and messages to particular audiences. It is a game of execution,” said Jennifer Palmieri, a longtime Democratic strategist who served as communications director during the Obama administration after Dunn.

    “The most important messaging that people will judge the president on is the job he is doing at the White House,” Palmieri said.

    Dunn’s deep loyalty and instinct to fight has also raised eyebrows outside the White House. TJ Ducklo, a 2020 Biden campaign aide who resigned from his White House role after privately threatening a reporter weeks into the administration, is expected to play a role in the 2024 campaign, a decision that has been publicly defended in a rare on-the-record statement from Dunn. (That reporter later called for Ducklo’s redemption.)

    “TJ made a mistake, took responsibility for it, and paid a price,” Dunn said in her statement – in her personal capacity – to Politico’s “West Wing Playbook” last month.

    One former senior White House adviser, however, called that an “unforced error” by Dunn. The former adviser asked for anonymity to speak freely without retribution.

    Her allegiance to Ducklo, the adviser said, “leaves the president vulnerable and exposed to unnecessary criticism and charges of hypocrisy.”

    “It’s in direct contradiction to the president’s own values and integrity and the standards that he himself demanded of everybody in the White House,” the former adviser said.

    A current White House aide fired back.

    “The president has values. Taking responsibility when you have done wrong means a lot. So does forgiveness,” that aide said.

    Dunn, 65, is one-half of a Washington power couple at the epicenter of Bidenworld – husband Bob Bauer is the president’s personal attorney and the lead attorney handling the special counsel investigation into classified documents found at Biden’s private office and residence. Yet she has risen from roles in the Jimmy Carter White House to the Senate to building public affairs powerhouse SKDK to the 2008 Obama campaign entirely on her own, sparked by her intense preparation.

    “She made preparation her friend,” said veteran Democratic operative Minyon Moore, who has known Dunn for decades.

    “Every time she walks in a room, she’s probably more prepared than most of her counterparts. And I think that’s how she was able to tackle the business very early, because they knew she had done her homework. They knew she could think through many layers. She was smart as heck. And so, you want a person like Anita in the room,” Moore said.

    Dunn operates largely behind the scenes – actively eschewing Washington’s social scene, social media and most television appearances.

    Her loyalty to Biden was cemented when she was among a small group of advisers working toward a potential 2016 presidential run, Biden wrote in his 2017 memoir, “Promise Me, Dad.” Though he ultimately decided against running, Dunn’s encouragement solidified a strong level of trust, multiple people close to her say.

    Dunn joined Biden’s 2020 campaign as a senior adviser and is widely credited for helping turn the tide of Biden’s political fortunes in that campaign’s Democratic primary after she was tapped to lead the operation following a fourth-place showing in the Iowa caucuses.

    She encouraged a sharper messaging posture from her desk in the center of the campaign “bullpen” workspace.

    When Biden arrived in the White House, Dunn briefly joined the administration as a senior adviser before returning to SKDK in August 2021, the temporary nature of her service allowing her to skirt disclosure of a cadre of investments and high-profile clients.

    She continued to advise Biden informally and rejoined the White House in May 2022 in a permanent capacity, a move requiring multimillion-dollar financial disclosures.

    Dunn’s omnipresence in Biden’s orbit has been just as clear in the period when she was out of the White House as when she’s been in. She was a constant presence on conference calls or in visits to the White House.

    “The president trusts her counsel – and there’s good evidence as to why,” one adviser said, pointing to her central role in his path to the presidency, loyalty during Biden’s 2016 deliberations and her work inside the West Wing.

    Over her career, Dunn has developed a reputation as an aggressive messaging tactician with strict discipline.

    She’s led White House messaging efforts on legislative accomplishments, seeking to highlight the legislation’s tangible impacts on real Americans, though some Democrats argue the White House has not done enough to sell those measures to the public.

    “What she tries to do is find the connective tissue,” said a senior administration official, who talks to Dunn regularly. “There’s nobody in government that has a better big picture perspective of what’s going on.”

    Multiple colleagues suggested Dunn can inspire a certain level of anxiety in her subordinates – demanding a high level of results and keeping the receipts – while also being seen as a supportive mentor. At the White House, Dunn is known for leading a weekly meeting known as “Fridays at 5,” a 5 p.m. in-person convening that is met with both eye-rolling (given its timing) and appreciation. It includes the entire communications staff, from interns to press assistants to the highest levels. Dunn will lead shout-outs at the beginning of each meeting, identifying achievements and often spotlighting junior staff.

    “It’s really emblematic of Anita,” the White House aide said. “The fact that she took it upon herself to establish this very expansive view of who’s on the communications team across the entire White House and set a weekly meeting where those people get direct exposure to her, as the senior adviser to the president, is really neat.”

    Dunn’s counsel isn’t only valued inside the White House walls – Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who ran against Biden for president in 2020, regularly seeks her advice.

    “She’s someone that you feel like you can trust and she’s going to have your back. And I think that’s why she’s been such a trusted adviser to President Biden,” the Minnesota senator told CNN, saying that Dunn has been a key messaging coordinator for her Senate colleagues in advancing Biden’s policies.

    That intense loyalty to the president is ultimately why Dunn has been given such a powerful role inside Biden’s political operation.

    “The people that were there and believed in him when he was counted out hold a unique bond and trust with the president. That relationship, with her obvious expertise, means she’s empowered to do what she needs to do,” a former colleague said.

    “Few people have the experience and discipline to keep their eye on the ball like she does. She’s not distracted, and she knows what messages are going to land, even if the pundits disagree,” the former colleague added.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Snapchat+ gains 4 million paying subscribers in its first year | CNN Business

    Snapchat+ gains 4 million paying subscribers in its first year | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Snap said Thursday that it has garnered more than 4 million paying customers for its subscription service Snapchat+.

    The news comes on the one-year anniversary of Snap launching the service on its flagship platform, Snapchat, and shows how it is finding some early success in getting users to shell out cash for access to premium features. The service costs $3.99 a month.

    The tally of paying subscribers disclosed by Snap on Thursday still represents a small fraction of the 750 million monthly active users that the platform boasted about hitting at its Investor Day event earlier this year.

    Snapchat+ offers access to “exclusive, experimental and pre-release features,” according to a blog post from Snap Thursday. As of Thursday, subscribers have access to more than 20 features, “including custom app themes, unique app icons, and the ability to pin your #1 BFF,” the company added.

    The announcement comes as a handful of other social media platforms are similarly trying to find new ways to get users to pay for services.

    Under the new ownership of Elon Musk, Twitter unveiled an $8-per-month subscription service that offered users the once-coveted blue check mark on the platform, as well as additional features such as seeing fewer ads and having their tweets prioritized in replies, mentions and search. The service, dubbed Twitter Blue, had an estimated 550,000 paying subscribers as of late April. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, similarly began rolling out a paid service for users called Meta Verified earlier this year with a price tag of $11.99 per month.

    After taking a battering last year, shares of Snap have climbed roughly 30% in 2023. Still, the stock is down about 86% from its all-time high in late 2021.

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  • Twitter threatens to sue Meta after rival app Threads gains traction | CNN Business

    Twitter threatens to sue Meta after rival app Threads gains traction | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Twitter is threatening Meta with a lawsuit after the blockbuster launch of Meta’s new Twitter rival, Threads — in perhaps the clearest sign yet that Twitter views the app as a competitive threat.

    On Wednesday, an attorney representing Twitter sent Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter that accused the company of trade secret theft through the hiring of former Twitter employees.

    The letter was first reported by Semafor. A person familiar with the matter confirmed the letter’s authenticity to CNN.

    The letter by Alex Spiro, an outside lawyer for Twitter owner Elon Musk, alleged that Meta had engaged in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”

    In response to reports on the letter, Musk tweeted: “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”

    The letter goes on to say that Meta hired former Twitter employees who “have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices” and that Meta “deliberately” involved these employees in developing Threads.

    “Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights,” Spiro continued, “and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information.”

    Meta spokesperson Andy Stone flatly dismissed the letter. “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” he said on Threads.

    In the months since Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion, the social network has been challenged by a growing number of smaller microblogging platforms, such as the decentralized social network Mastodon and Bluesky, an alternative backed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. But Twitter has not threatened either with litigation.

    Unlike some Twitter rivals, Threads has experienced rapid growth, with Zuckerberg reporting 30 million user sign-ups in the app’s first day. As of Thursday afternoon, Threads was the number-one free app on the iOS App Store.

    The legal threat may not necessarily lead to litigation but it could be part of a strategy to slow down Meta, said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.

    “Sometimes lawyers, they threaten but don’t follow through. Or they see how far they can go. That may be the case, but I don’t know that for sure,” Tobias told CNN. He added: “There may be some value to tying it up in litigation and complicating life for Meta.”

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  • DeSantis and his team unleash on Rep. Donalds for questioning Florida’s new Black history standards | CNN Politics

    DeSantis and his team unleash on Rep. Donalds for questioning Florida’s new Black history standards | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday accused Rep. Byron Donalds – the only Black Republican in Florida’s congressional delegation – of aligning himself with Vice President Kamala Harris by critiquing the state’s new standards for teaching Black history.

    Donalds tweeted Wednesday that the new standards are “good, robust, & accurate.” But the two-term congressman added that a new requirement for middle school students to be taught that slaves learned skills they later benefited from “is wrong & needs to be adjusted.” He added that he has “faith that (Florida Department of Education) will correct this.”

    In the face of that seemingly gentle criticism, DeSantis’ administration and online allies unloaded on Donalds, who has backed former President Donald Trump over his home state governor for the 2024 nomination. Jeremy Redfern, the spokesman for the governor’s office, called Donalds a “supposed conservative.” Christina Pushaw, the campaign’s rapid response director, replied to Donalds’ tweet: “Did Kamala Harris write this tweet?” DeSantis’ Education Commissioner Manny Diaz tweeted that Florida would “not back down … at the behest of a supposedly conservative congressman.”

    DeSantis joined the pile on during his Iowa bus tour, telling Donalds to “stand up for your state.”

    “You got to choose: Are you going to side with Kamala Harris and liberal media outlets or are you doing to side with the state of Florida?” he said.

    Responding to the blowback to his remarks, Donalds on Twitter called the online attacks aimed at him “disingenuous” and said DeSantis supporters were “desperately attempting to score political points,” adding that that is why he is “proud to have endorsed” Trump.

    “What’s crazy to me is I expressed support for the vast majority of the new African American history standards and happened to oppose one sentence that seemed to dignify the skills gained by slaves as a result of their enslavement,” he wrote on Twitter.

    This week’s clash with Donalds is the latest example of how the DeSantis campaign’s failure to win support from key members of his state’s GOP has come back to bite him as he runs against Trump. Last week, Rep. Greg Steube, who has also endorsed Trump, put DeSantis on blast over property insurance rates in the state continuing to soar.

    “The result of the state’s top elected official failing to focus on (and be present in) Florida,” Steube said, tweeting out a headline that linked the sharp rise in premiums to DeSantis’ time in office.

    The war of words between two Florida Republicans this week is all the more remarkable because of how closely aligned Donalds and DeSantis once appeared.

    Donalds introduced DeSantis and his family at the governor’s election night victory party last year, heaping praise on the man he called “America’s governor.” He played DeSantis’ 2018 election opponent, Democrat Andrew Gillum, during debate preparation. DeSantis had also formed a close alliance with Donalds’ wife, a school choice advocate who received a plum appointment to the Florida Gulf Coast University board of trustees.

    But there was a notable break in their relationship in April when Donalds endorsed Trump over DeSantis. Donalds had previously stated publicly he would wait on an announcement until the field was set. The decision stunned DeSantis’ political operation, which had clearly underestimated the governor’s failures to build a rapport with fellow Republicans. Ultimately most Florida Republicans in the House lined up behind Trump.

    The back and forth with Donalds stems from the new standards for how Black history should be taught in the state’s public schools, which were approved earlier this month by the Florida Board of Education. While education and civil rights advocates have decried many elements of the new standards as whitewashing America’s dark history, much of the national attention has focused on one passage that clarifies middle school students should learn “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

    Amid intense objections to the language, Harris responded by holding a press conference in Jacksonville where she accused Florida’s leaders of “creating these unnecessary debates.”

    “This is unnecessary to debate whether enslaved people benefited from slavery,” she said. “Are you kidding me? Are we supposed to debate that?”

    DeSantis and state education officials have fiercely defended the new standards in recent days. Redfern and others have pointed to similar language that appeared in the course framework for a new Advanced Placement African American Studies course piloted by the College Board. Florida was widely criticized by Democrats for blocking the course from being taught in state public schools.

    According to one document, the AP course intended to teach students: “In addition to agricultural work, enslaved people learned specialized trades and worked as painters, carpenters, tailors, musicians, and healers in the North and South. Once free, American Americans used these skills to provide for themselves and others.”

    The College Board said Thursday it “resolutely” disagrees with the notion that enslavement was beneficial for African Americans after some compared the content of its course to Florida’s recently approved curriculum.

    On Thursday, DeSantis said the state standards are “very clear about the injustices of slavery in vivid detail.”

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  • Meta begins blocking news access on its platforms in Canada | CNN Business

    Meta begins blocking news access on its platforms in Canada | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Meta has begun to remove news content from Facebook and Instagram in Canada, the social media giant said Tuesday, in response to recently passed legislation in the country that requires tech companies to negotiate payments to news organizations for hosting their content.

    As a result of the move — which Meta had previously said would occur before the law takes effect — Meta’s Canadian users will no longer be able to click on links to news articles posted to Facebook and Instagram.

    The changes began Tuesday and will roll out gradually over the coming weeks, said Meta spokesperson Andy Stone.

    The decision comes amid a global debate over the relationship between news organizations and social media companies about the value of news content, and who gets to benefit from it.

    Google has also announced that it plans to remove news content from its platforms in Canada when the law takes effect, which could happen by December.

    The Canadian legislation, known as Bill C-18, was given final approval in June. It aims to support the sustainability of news organizations by regulating “digital news intermediaries with a view to enhancing fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace.”

    It comes after the passage of a 2021 Australian law that the tech platforms initially opposed by warning it would similarly force them to remove news content. Since then, the platforms have reached voluntary agreements with a range of news outlets in that country.

    Like-minded proposals have been introduced around the world amid allegations that the tech industry has decimated local journalism by sucking away billions in online advertising revenues.

    In May, Meta also threatened to remove news content from California if the state moved ahead with a revenue-sharing bill. The legislation was put on hold last month.

    And at the federal level, the US Senate in June advanced a bill that would grant news organizations the ability to jointly negotiate for a greater share of advertising revenues against online platforms, thanks to a proposed antitrust exemption for publishers and broadcasters.

    In a blog post Tuesday, Meta said the Canadian legislation “misrepresents the value news outlets receive when choosing to use our platforms.”

    “The legislation is based on the incorrect premise that Meta benefits unfairly from news content shared on our platforms, when the reverse is true,” the blog post said. “News outlets voluntarily share content on Facebook and Instagram to expand their audiences and help their bottom line.”

    Canadian users of Meta’s platforms will still be able to access news content online by visiting news outlets’ websites directly or by signing up for their subscriptions and apps.

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  • Despite TikTok ban threat, influencers are flocking to a new app from its parent company | CNN Business

    Despite TikTok ban threat, influencers are flocking to a new app from its parent company | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    In the days after TikTok’s CEO was grilled by Congress for the first time, many TikTok users began posting about an alternative platform called Lemon8, sometimes with eerily similar language.

    Multiple creators described the app as being like “if Pinterest and Instagram had a baby, with TikTok’s algorithm.” Some compared it to TikTok circa 2020 and encouraged other influencers to join the app before it grows. They also asked followers to share their Lemon8 usernames in the comments.

    As it turned out, the app wasn’t just a random alternative to TikTok. Lemon8 is a social media platform launched in the United States earlier this year by TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance amid federal and state efforts to ban or restrict TikTok in the country over national security concerns.

    The similarities in the videos comparing the new service to Instagram and Pinterest, which were posted by both English and Spanish-speaking creators, raised questions about whether people were being paid to promote the new app on TikTok. But despite that speculation — and the mounting scrutiny on TikTok and ByteDance — a growing number of US users and influencers are now eagerly touting Lemon8, with its focus on photos and highly curated, informational or “aspirational” content.

    “We have to talk about TikTok’s new sister app,” a creator said in one such video.

    “I’ve seen a lot of bigger content creators that I love on it and promoting it on their Instagram stories, so I thought, ‘okay, it’s my time to hop on this bandwagon,’” said Melanie Cruz, who got her start creating content as a YouTube vlogger in high school around 2018. “I like that it’s something simple, it’s nothing too in your face … it’s not overwhelming.”

    Lemon8 has been downloaded just over one million times in the United States since it became available on US app stores in February, and had around half a million daily active US users last month, according to intelligence platform Apptopia.

    The early traction for Lemon8 hints at the whack-a-mole challenge lawmakers could face in reining in TikTok and other social media platforms. It also carries some hints of TikTok’s own rise, which was reportedly fueled in part by ByteDance spending heavily to advertise the service on rival platforms Facebook and Snapchat. This time, however, the best place to promote the next TikTok may be on TikTok itself.

    The New York Times reported last month that ByteDance had begun early marketing efforts for Lemon8 that included working with influencers. Now, some creators featured on Lemon8’s “for you” feed appear to be disclosing their work with the company using the hashtag #Lemon8Partner in their captions.

    A ByteDance company source said that Lemon8 is still in its early days and testing how to work with creators. They said ByteDance has not launched any formal marketing efforts for Lemon8, but in some cases has made deals to pay creators to post on the platform. However, they denied rumors that ByteDance had paid creators to promote the new app on TikTok.

    ByteDance has also recently listed open jobs for Lemon8 creator partnerships roles, according to postings viewed by CNN. “Lemon8 is a social media platform committed to building a diverse and inclusive community where people can discover new content and creators every day,” the job postings read.

    Lemon8’s photo-heavy focus marks a stark shift away from most of the major social apps that, following TikTok’s lead, have gone all-in on endlessly scrollable short-form videos in recent years.

    Lemon8’s homepage is a “for you” feed where users can scroll through content, similar to TikTok, but instead of videos, the feed is two columns of still images. When you click through to a post, it might be a single photo or a carousel of images. It’s also possible to post videos on the app, but they’re less popular.

    The app is heavily centered on beauty and lifestyle content — the “for you” page can be sorted into six categories including fashion, home and travel. Many of the posts feature lengthy captions, and users can also edit images to include text overlays. On top of similarities to Instagram and Pinterest, Lemon8 looks nearly identical to the Chinese app Xiaohongshu.

    Still, the app lacks some standard social platform features such as messaging and the option to tag other users in posts.

    A recent scroll through Lemon8’s “for you” page showed before-and-after photos of a botox treatment, a “no restrictions” day-long eating plan, book recommendations, black tie wedding attire tips and “10 recent girly Amazon buys I do NOT regret.”

    “It seems like people love it or hate it,” Madison Bravenec, a health coach and content creator, said of the app’s focus on aesthetics. But she added that the app’s targeted focus on certain types of content has made it easier to find a community that’s interested in the wellness content she likes to create, whereas the most popular posts on TikTok often have to appeal to a wider audience.

    Some creators say Lemon8 is filling a hole in the social media ecosystem that was left when Instagram moved to prioritize short-form video content in order to better compete with TikTok, frustrating many creators who joined the app for its original focus on photos.

    “We’re not videographers, we’re not the types of people who would like to change the ways we create content and communicate with others just because a platform is prioritizing one deliverable over the other,” said Can Ahtam, a professional photographer who joined Instagram more than a decade ago. “So all of us did feel the impact of reach being lower with the photos we were sharing [on Instagram].”

    Ahtam added: “If we were to compare them side-by-side right now, Lemon8 would have the upper hand in photos being shared.”

    Lemon8’s userbase remains a far cry from the 150 million users TikTok says it has in the United States.

    Still, in videos reviewing Lemon8, some creators have pondered whether the app could ultimately function as a replacement if TikTok were to get banned in the United States, preserving the content recommendation algorithm that helped make TikTok one of the country’s most popular apps and launched the careers of countless influencers.

    But if TikTok were to go down, Lemon8 would likely go with it, according to James Lewis, director of the strategic technologies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

    “The concern is still the same, which is that ByteDance is a Chinese company subject to Chinese law,” Lewis said. “If it collects [users’ personal] information, then you’ve got the same problem.”

    TikTok, for its part, has said that its app does not pose a risk to US users, and that the Chinese government has never asked for US user data.

    The practical ramifications for creators of a TikTok (and, perhaps by extension, Lemon8) ban — if one were enacted — would still likely be months away, if not more. Lewis said he doesn’t expect any nationwide legislation to be passed before the end of this year, and it would almost certainly face legal challenges that could drag out its implementation if it did.

    By launching a new app even with TikTok in the spotlight, “ByteDance clearly doesn’t feel like they’re at risk,” Lewis said. And many creators say they’re not necessarily worried either.

    Even if TikTok and Lemon8 were banned, Cruz said, “I already have a following on all the other platforms.”

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  • Twitter’s own lawyers refute Elon Musk’s claim that the ‘Twitter Files’ exposed US government censorship | CNN Business

    Twitter’s own lawyers refute Elon Musk’s claim that the ‘Twitter Files’ exposed US government censorship | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    For months, Twitter owner Elon Musk and his allies have amplified baseless claims that the US government illegally coerced Twitter into censoring a 2020 New York Post article about Hunter Biden. The foundation for those claims rests on the so-called “Twitter Files,” a series of reports by a set of handpicked journalists who, at Musk’s discretion, were given selective access to historical company archives.

    Now, though, Twitter’s own lawyers are disputing those claims in a case involving former President Donald Trump — forcefully rejecting any suggestion that the Twitter Files show what Musk and many Republicans assert they contain.

    In a court filing last week, Twitter’s attorneys contested one of the most central allegations to emerge from the Twitter Files: that regular communications between the FBI and Twitter ahead of the 2020 election amounted to government coercion to censor content or, worse, that Twitter had become an actual arm of the US government.

    In tweets last year, Musk alleged that the communications showed a clear breach of the US constitution.

    “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?” he said of a screenshot purportedly showing Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020 asking Twitter to review several tweets it suggested were violations of the company’s terms. Some of the tweets in question included nonconsensual nude images that violated Twitter’s policies.

    In another push to promote misleading allegations of government malfeasance stemming from the Twitter Files, Musk also claimed that the “government paid Twitter millions of dollars to censor info from the public.”

    Legal experts have said the claim of a constitutional violation is weak because the First Amendment binds the government, not political campaigns, and Trump was president at the time, not Biden. The Twitter Files also show the Trump administration made its own requests for removal of Twitter content. And the payments to Twitter have also been identified as routine reimbursements for responding to subpoenas and investigations, not payments for content moderation decisions.

    “Nothing in the new materials shows any governmental actor compelling or even discussing any content-moderation action with respect to Trump” and others participating in the suit, Twitter argued.

    The communications unearthed as part of the Twitter Files do not show coercion, Twitter’s lawyers wrote, “because they do not contain a specific government demand to remove content—let alone one backed by the threat of government sanction.”

    “Instead,” the filing continued, the communications “show that the [FBI] issued general updates about their efforts to combat foreign interference in the 2020 election.”

    The evidence outlined by Twitter’s lawyers is consistent with public statements by former Twitter employees and the FBI, along with prior CNN analysis of the Twitter Files.

    Altogether, the filing by Musk’s own corporate lawyers represents a step-by-step refutation of some of the most explosive claims to come out of the Twitter Files and that in some cases have been promoted by Musk himself.

    Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Even as the filing undercuts Musk’s effort to portray the Twitter Files as a smoking gun, the filing may still work to his benefit because, if successful, it may save Twitter from a costly re-litigation of its handling of Trump’s account and others.

    The communications in question, some of which also came out in a deposition of an FBI agent in a separate case, were invoked last year as part of a bid to revive litigation over Twitter’s banning of Trump following the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol. The lawsuit had been dismissed last summer, after the federal judge overseeing the case said there was no evidence of a First Amendment violation.

    Musk’s release of company files has given lawyers for Trump and other plaintiffs in the case another shot. If the court decides the new evidence is enough to suspend the prior judgment, the lawyers for Trump and others said in May, then they might decide to file a fresh amended complaint.

    But Twitter argued last week that the judge should not allow the case to be reopened because nothing in the Twitter Files supports the already dismissed claim of federal coercion.

    Even the FBI’s flagging of specific problematic tweets were merely suggestions that they might violate Twitter’s terms of service, not a request that they be removed or an implication of retribution if Twitter failed to take the tweets down, Twitter’s lawyers said.

    Citing another case, Twitter wrote: “The FBI’s ‘flags’ cannot amount to coercion because there was ‘no intimation that Twitter would suffer adverse consequences if it refused.’”

    Twitter also objected to the claim, amplified by Musk, that Twitter was paid to censor conservative speech when it sought reimbursement for complying with government requests for user data.

    “The reimbursements were not for responding to requests to remove any accounts or content and thus are wholly irrelevant to Plaintiffs’ joint-action theory,” Twitter wrote.

    It added: “The new materials demonstrate only that Twitter exercised its statutory right—provided to all private actors—to seek reimbursement for time spent processing a government official’s legal requests for information under the Stored Communications Act. The payments therefore do not concern content moderation at all—let alone specific requests to take down content.”

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  • Twitter isn’t letting users view the site without logging in | CNN Business

    Twitter isn’t letting users view the site without logging in | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Twitter appears to be restricting access to its platform for anyone not logged into an account.

    People without a Twitter account or who weren’t logged in used to be able to scroll the platform’s homepage and view public accounts and tweets. But as of this week, when such a user opens the platform they are met with a screen prompting them to sign up or sign in to Twitter.

    Internet users began noticing the change late this week, and on Friday, multiple CNN reporters were unable to access Twitter without logging in.

    It was not immediately clear whether the change was an intentional policy update or a glitch, both of which have been common at Twitter since Musk took over the platform. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

    The change comes as billionaire owner Elon Musk attempts to revamp Twitter’s business following months of challenges since his takeover late last year — now with the help of new CEO Linda Yaccarino.

    Twitter’s leadership is urging advertisers to return to the platform after many fled over concerns about increased hate speech, layoffs and general questions about the company’s direction. Musk has also sought to grow subscription revenue by offering a blue verification checkmark for users who sign up for its Twitter Blue service.

    The restriction on public access to Twitter could be an effort to grow the platform’s user base, which has always been significantly smaller than social media rivals like Facebook and Instagram.

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  • Australian firm sues Twitter for $665,000 for not paying bills | CNN Business

    Australian firm sues Twitter for $665,000 for not paying bills | CNN Business

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    Sydney
    Reuters
     — 

    An Australian project management firm has filed a lawsuit against Twitter in a US court seeking cumulative payments of about A$1 million ($665,000) over alleged non-payment of bills for work done in four countries, court filings showed.

    Sydney-based private company Facilitate Corp on June 29 filed the suit in the United States District Court for the Northern District Of California claiming breach of contract over Twitter’s failure to pay its invoices.

    The Australian firm’s lawsuit is the latest alleging non-payment of bills and rent against Twitter

    (TWTR)     since Elon Musk bought the social media platform for $44 billion last year.

    Facilitate said from 2022 through early 2023, it installed sensors in Twitter’s offices in London and Dublin, completed an office fit-out in Singapore and cleared an office in Sydney.

    For those works, Twitter owed the company about 203,000 pounds ($257,000), S$546,600 ($404,000) and A$61,300 ($40,700), respectively, Facilitate said.

    Twitter, also known as X Corp, no longer has a media relations office. Reuters could not immediately reach Twitter’s Australia office.

    Facilitate said it was seeking compensatory damages in an amount to be determined at trial, legal costs and interest at the maximum legal rate.

    In May, a former public relations firm filed a suit in a New York court saying Twitter had not paid its bills, while early this year, US-based advisory firm Innisfree M&A sued it, seeking about $1.9 million for what it said were unpaid bills after it advised Twitter on its acquisition by Musk.

    Britain’s Crown Estate, an independent commercial business that manages the property portfolio belonging to the monarchy, in January began court proceedings over alleged unpaid rent on Twitter’s London headquarters.

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  • Meta, Microsoft, hundreds more own trademarks to new Twitter name | CNN Business

    Meta, Microsoft, hundreds more own trademarks to new Twitter name | CNN Business

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    Reuters
     — 

    Billionaire Elon Musk’s decision to rebrand Twitter as X could be complicated legally: companies including Meta and Microsoft already have intellectual property rights to the same letter.

    X is so widely used and cited in trademarks that it is a candidate for legal challenges – and the company formerly known as Twitter could face its own issues defending its X brand in the future.

    “There’s a 100% chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody,” said trademark attorney Josh Gerben, who said he counted nearly 900 active U.S. trademark registrations that already cover the letter X in a wide range of industries.

    Musk renamed social media network Twitter as X on Monday and unveiled a new logo for the social media platform, a stylized black-and-white version of the letter.

    Owners of trademarks – which protect things like brand names, logos and slogans that identify sources of goods – can claim infringement if other branding would cause consumer confusion. Remedies range from monetary damages to blocking use.

    Microsoft since 2003 has owned an X trademark related to communications about its Xbox video-game system. Meta Platforms – whose Threads platform is a new Twitter rival – owns a federal trademark registered in 2019 covering a blue-and-white letter “X” for fields including software and social media.

    Meta and Microsoft likely would not sue unless they feel threatened that Twitter’s X encroaches on brand equity they built in the letter, Gerben said.

    The three companies did not respond to requests for comment.

    Meta itself drew intellectual property challenges when it changed its name from Facebook. It faces trademark lawsuits filed last year by investment firm Metacapital and virtual-reality company MetaX, and settled another over its new infinity-symbol logo.

    And if Musk succeeds in changing the name, others still could claim ‘X’ for themselves.

    “Given the difficulty in protecting a single letter, especially one as popular commercially as ‘X’, Twitter’s protection is likely to be confined to very similar graphics to their X logo,” said Douglas Masters, a trademark attorney at law firm Loeb & Loeb.

    “The logo does not have much distinctive about it, so the protection will be very narrow.”

    Insider reported earlier that Meta had an X trademark, and lawyer Ed Timberlake tweeted that Microsoft had one as well.

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  • Twitter sues hate-speech watchdog, following through on its litigation threat | CNN Business

    Twitter sues hate-speech watchdog, following through on its litigation threat | CNN Business

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    Washington, DC
    CNN
     — 

    Twitter has sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit group that has criticized the company’s handling of hate speech, following through on a litigation threat that had been publicly revealed just hours before.

    The lawsuit filed Monday in San Francisco federal court accuses CCDH of deliberately trying to drive advertisers away from Twitter — recently rebranded as “X” — by publishing reports critical of the platform’s response to hateful content.

    It specifically claims CCDH violated Twitter’s terms of service, and federal hacking laws, by scraping data from the company’s platform and by encouraging an unnamed individual to improperly collect information about Twitter that it had provided to a third-party brand monitoring provider.

    The complaint accuses CCDH of engaging in a wide-ranging campaign to silence users of Twitter’s platform by calling attention to the views they post on social media.

    Responding to the complaint’s allegations on Tuesday, CCDH’s CEO Imran Ahmed told CNN that much of the lawsuit, particularly its claim about the unnamed individual, “sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory to me.”

    “The truth is that he’s [Elon Musk] been casting around for a reason to blame us for his own failings as a CEO,” Ahmed said, “because we all know that when he took over, he put up the bat signal to racists and misogynists, to homophobes, to antisemites, saying ‘Twitter is now a free-speech platform.’ … And now he’s surprised when people are able to quantify that there has been a resulting increase in hate and disinformation.”

    “All we do is hold up a mirror to the platform and ask them to consider whether or not they like the reflection they see in it,” Ahmed added. “What Mr. Musk has done is said, ‘I’m going to sue the mirror because I don’t like what I see.’”

    In the past 24 hours, Ahmed said, thousands of people have visited CCDH’s website and many have made donations to the group.

    “That’s what we’re going to need if we’re going to survive this,” he said, adding: “The reason that organizations like CCDH have to rely on methodologies like we do is because there is no transparency on these platforms.”

    The lawsuit comes after CCDH on Monday disclosed Twitter’s original July 20 threat to sue, along with its response to Twitter’s threat calling the company’s claims “ridiculous.”

    “X’s legal threat is a brazen attempt to silence honest criticism and independent research, perhaps in a desperate hope that it can stem the tide of negative stories and rebuild the company’s relationship with advertisers,” Ahmed wrote in an op-ed Monday coinciding with the group’s publication of Twitter’s threat.

    In its own blog post Monday, Twitter said its lawsuit was intended to promote free expression and that it “rejects all claims made by the CCDH.”

    “X is a free public service funded largely by advertisers,” the company said. “Through the CCDH’s scare campaign and its ongoing pressure on brands to prevent the public’s access to free expression, the CCDH is actively working to prevent public dialogue.”

    The July 20 threat indicated Twitter was investigating whether CCDH could be sued for violations of federal laws against false advertising. But Monday’s complaint does not appear to include such an allegation.

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  • Camps to Come Together on #CampTShirtDay, May 7

    Camps to Come Together on #CampTShirtDay, May 7

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    International Wear Your Summer Camp T-Shirt Day to raise spirits, celebrate community, and show how camps are pivoting to deliver camp this summer

    Press Release
    –


    updated: May 6, 2020


    NEW YORK, May 6, 2020 (Newswire.com)
    –
    ​International Camp T-Shirt Day, the globally recognized social media-driven event celebrating the spirit of summer camp fun, is proud to announce a special edition of #CampTShirtDay on May 7. Campers across the globe will wear their favorite camp gear and take to Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter to share their camp pride with the world.

    For 10 years, Camp T-Shirt Day has typically taken place on the second Tuesday in November, but with COVID-19’s impact, the producers decided there is no better time to come together around the virtual campfire than now, with a special edition.  Those interested in participating in #CampTShirtDay for 2020 should wear their favorite camp t-shirt and upload a picture of themselves in it to social media platforms. Participants should include the hashtag #CampTShirtDay and tag their camp.

    The day will wrap up with a special evening activity — a virtual concert at CampTShirtDay.com at 8 p.m. EST from Clyde and Gracie of the band Lawrence, live from their living room in New York City. The duo, typically part of an eight-piece band, represented by UTA and GroundUp Management, have headlined several tours across the USA and also have appeared at Bonnaroo, Outside Lands, SXSW, Electric Forest, Firefly, Okeechobee, and Hangout festivals. Campers and staff from across the country will be tuned in as they continue their countdown to summer at their favorite place.

    While camp directors across the globe are awaiting guidance from the American Camp Association, Center for Disease Control, and local Health Departments, camp directors are doing everything they can to prepare for a number of potential scenarios when it comes to operating camp this summer. In the meantime, #CampTShirtDay will be a wonderful day to celebrate the summer camp community.

    “Camp has never been more essential to our children than it is this summer,” said Camp Echo’s Owner/Director Jeff Grabow. “We remain confident that we can provide a safe and fun summer for our campers and staff. We all realize camp will look a little different this summer, but with testing and medical screenings, the best in-camp medical care, some program modifications, and of course our good ole’ camp creativity — we are confident that we can deliver a memorable camp experience that we all need now more than ever. Camp T-Shirt Day is such a great way to rally our community and share with the world that we will leave no stone unturned to deliver a safe environment for our children and staff.”

    “There is a lot of darkness and uncertainty in our world right now,” says Lauren Nearpass, Co-Founder of Summer 365 and one of the producers of Camp T-Shirt Day. “We are inspired by the resolve of camp directors, the strength of this community, and the importance of summer camp at this moment. We want to share camp spirit, celebrate the amazing work happening across the industry, and spread the message of hope.

    Susie Lupert, Executive Director of the American Camp Association, NY and NJ, said, “Children need camp more than ever this summer, and we are hopeful that camps will be able to operate. #CampTShirtDay will certainly be an uplifting day for all those in the world who are part of the summer camp community.”

    Media Contact:

    Scott Rosenbluth // scott@crazemgmt.com

    Source: Camp T-Shirt Day

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