Elon Musk confirms that Twitter will be reinstating most banned accounts in the coming weeks

A couple of days ago, Elon Musk asked his followers via a Twitter poll if the social media platform should give amnesty to people who were banned from the platform and reinstate their banned accounts.

Because most of his followers voted ‘Yes’ overwhelmingly, the Twitter and Tesla CEO has now announced that Twitter will be reinstating most of the banned accounts starting next week. Most of the accounts that have been banned, and which did not break local laws will be restored over the next few weeks.

About 72.4 per cent of all respondents who took part in the pool voted “yes” toward unbanning accounts, from a pool of slightly more than 3 million votes. Although it is difficult to know who voted and in which direction, the poll was conducted among Musk’s followers, so it wouldn’t be wise to say that the vote reflects the true conscience of the users on the platform.

The people have spoken.

Amnesty begins next week.

Vox Populi, Vox Dei.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 24, 2022

Elon Musk reinstating these banned accounts is the second major moderation decision he’s made since taking over after unbanning former President Donald Trump; both decisions were made after Musk ran an informal poll from his personal Twitter account.

The decision to reverse years of moderation work at Twitter effectively trashes Musk’s original promise: to create a diverse council that would help adjudicate serious moderation decisions. Musk backed away from that idea by later blaming “political/social activist groups” for breaking an alleged “deal.” There has been no vetting or verification of Musk’s claims on this. Moreover, advertisers and brands have all been clear about why they have suspended their ad spends on the platform.

It’s still not clear which accounts will be allowed back. Musk said accounts that have “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam” would not be granted “amnesty,” but without a functional moderation policy or content moderation team for that matter, it will be difficult for Twitter to determine who all are eligible to have their accounts reinstated as per Musk’s new dictum.

Even Musk has expressed some bare-minimum standards beyond breaking the law. Musk has stated that he would not want people like notable conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to be back on the platform for “engaging in egregious spam” and propagating a false and harmful lie.

 For those who are unaware, Alex Jones has often claimed that several mass shootings in the US were staged and performed by actors. The controversial right-wing political commentator has also claimed that people and families who claim to be victims of mass shootings are paid actors employed by left-leaning political activists.

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Vivo is the first smartphone maker to the market with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 device, the Vivo X90 Pro+

The world’s first smartphone with the all-new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC will be the Vivo X90 Pro+. While the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC will power most flagship Android phones that will be launched in 2023, Vivo is beating everyone to the punch and releasing before the new year, when they launch the smartphone in China in early December this year.

Looking at the specifications that are available from online sources, we see that the Vivo X90 Pro+ gets a 6.78-inch, 3200×1440, OLED display with support for a refresh rate of 120HZ, The device will get up to 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage, and a 4700 mAh battery with support for 80 W fast charger, and a rare signing of Qualcomm’s super-sized 3D Sonic Max in-display fingerprint sensor. We also get 50W wireless charging.

The cameras are also really big, with Sony’s 1-inch IMX989 sensor leading the way, along with a 50MP portrait camera, a 48MP ultrawide, and a 64MP 3.5x telephoto. The cameras have been co-developed with Zeiss and appear to be pretty solid. In fact, so confident is Vivo with cameras on this smartphone, especially about that 1-inch Sony sensor, that Vivo is calling it the “King of One Inch sensors.” While the Vivo X90 Pro+ isn’t the first to come out with Sony IMX989 sensor, Vivo did equip it with several enhancements that make it special.

Vivo’s suite of software features like horizon correction, lens flare portrait mode, astrophotography mode, and 100x hybrid zoom further complement the camera setup. The phone can also record 8K videos at 30fps, with Dolby Vision and LOG10 support. The company has equipped the phone with its V2 ISP for image processing. It features 45MB of SRAM and provides 16TOPS per watt of performance. 

As for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and what it enables, users will get UFS 4.0 storage, a new, faster flash storage standard that can hit read speeds of 4,200MBps and write speeds of 2,800MBps. We can also expect to see Wi-Fi 7 support. However, we don’t know for sure if the Vivo X90 Pro+ gets all the latest bells and whistles of the new SoC

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More than a third of Twitter’s top 100 clients have not advertised on the platform in the past two weeks

One of the biggest worries that Elon Musk had when he took over Twitter was that advertisers and brands would leave the platform and stop spending on ads. It turns out, Musk’s fears were well-founded. A recent report from The Washington Post suggests that over a third of Twitter’s top 100 ad clients have not advertised on the platform over the last two weeks.

Many of Twitter’s top advertisers, including 14 of the top 50 advertisers, have stopped their ad spends in the few weeks since Musk’s acquisition. Ads for brands including Jeep and Mars chocolates, whose corporate parents were among the top 100 US advertisers on the platform in the six months before Musk’s purchase, haven’t since November 7, just weeks after Musk assumed ownership of the platform on October 27.

Pharmaceutical company Merck, cereal maker Kellogg, Verizon and Samuel Adams brewer Boston Beer also have stopped their advertising in recent weeks, the report said.

Twitter is still heavily reliant on advertising. Last year, nearly 90 per cent of the company’s $5 billion in revenue came from advertising, while the rest was derived from data licensing and other services.

One of the biggest reasons why advertisers have pulled out of Twitter has to do with the attrition of employees at Twitter. More than the number of people who have been terminated or who have resigned, it is the departure of certain key personnel which has scared advertisers and brands. Although Twitter has many policies in place to counter hate speech, advertisers feared that the departure of many key enforces and content moderators would mean that such policies would mean nothing.

There is also the fact that the usage of racial slurs went up exponentially after Musk took control of Twitter. The fact that Musk and his team have been able to curtail it and bring hate speech down on Twitter to an all-time low, should give advertisers some confidence.

Then there was the surge in impersonation or fake verified accounts which took place because of Musk’s idea of paid verification or buying a verified badge for $8. The plan backfired so badly, that Musk had to suspend it just days after rolling it out. Musk has since gone on to say that they will not be relaunching the paid verification or Twitter Blue for $8 programme until they have a way of dealing with the impersonation of organisations and key individuals.

Apart from Twitter’s internal turmoil that stemmed from the terminations and resignation of a people, and the paid verification, there is also the fact that the world is on the brink of a recession. Even before Musk took over, marketers were pulling back on their digital advertising as worries about the economy proliferated.

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Hate speech on Twitter is at its lowest level, down even from pre-spike levels says Elon Musk

Twitter has always been a cesspool of vitriolic and hateful speech. However, when Elon Musk took the social media platform and declared himself as the CEO, hate speech and the use of racial slurs went up exponentially. As per a report by The Washington Post, the use of certain derogatory epithets for African-Americans, Jews, and East Asians increased by up to 500 per cent on the platform.

Elon Musk recently took to Twitter to announce that because of his team at Twitter, not only has there been a significant drop in the use of racial slurs and hate speech over the weeks that he took over, it is in fact down by a third from the pre-spike levels. That means, hate speech is at an all-time low on Twitter.

Musk took to Twitter to share an infographic which showed that hate speech on Twitter was significantly down. The graph that Musk showed a little spike after the drop, but that was to be expected.

The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a research group based out of Princeton, that analyzes social media content to predict emerging threats, had said that the use of the N-word on Twitter increased by nearly 500 per cent in the 12 hours immediately after Musk’s deal was finalized.

Yoel Roth, who was Twitter’s head of safety and integrity when Musk took over, said “a small number of accounts post a ton of tweets that include slurs and other derogatory terms.” He said that more than 50,000 tweets repeatedly using the derogatory term for an African-American came from just 300 accounts, most of which were “inauthentic.” Twitter also maintained that the spike in racial slurs was a part of a campaign to malign Musk.

After Musk posted that the use of hate speech was down on the platform, he also put out a Tweet that suggests that all of the chaos was caused by just 1500 accounts. This, seems a little hard to believe. Musk also said that he thought of reprimanding those accounts and taking some action against them, but then ultimately decided not to.

Musk also revealed that during the exercise, Musk saw a list of the most offensive terms that were being used on the platform, and with what frequency. It should be noted that Musk’s claims have not been verified by an independent source or organisation as of yet. 

Having said that, his followers believe that hate speech has been down on Twitter, mainly because left-leaning users have left the platform in large droves, or have stopped engaging on the platform because of Musk and his policies.

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Twitter amnesty: Elon Musk proposes letting nearly everyone back on the platform whom Twitter had banned

Before Elon Musk had reinstated Donald Trump’s Twitter account, he had put up a poll for his followers, asking should the former US President’s ban from the platform be reversed. Now, Musk has put up a similar poll asking if nearly all accounts and profiles that have been banned on the platform in the past, should be given general amnesty and allowed back on the platform.

This means that figures like Kangana Ranaut and Kamaal R Khan may finally get their Twitter accounts back.

On Wednesday, he asked: “Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?” He gave his followers 24 hours to vote, and so far, people have overwhelmingly voted “yes.”

Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 23, 2022

Donald Trump isn’t the only one who got their bans overturned. Rapper Ye, and Professor Jordan Peterson, two highly controversial figures have also had their bans or suspensions lifted.

Shortly after taking ownership of Twitter, Musk said that Twitter would set up a council to make decisions on who should be allowed back onto the platform. That idea has since been binned, and it seems that Musk is now willing to make sweeping changes based largely on his own opinion.

In the poll that Musk out up or any of the subsequent tweets, he doesn’t share the details on when this change will happen, if his followers vote yes. And although several brands and users may be concerned about having certain “bad actors” back on the platform, it theoretically shouldn’t matter, at least as per Musk’s vision for the platform, 

Musk has said before that he wants negative and hate tweets to basically be invisible unless a user specifically tries to seek them out. To achieve this, Twitter will still need a bunch of content moderators and robust moderation system, that will enable them to report those accounts. However, Twitter’s content moderation has been hit hard by the firing of both, moderators who were on Twitter’s payroll, and those who were contracted agents.

There’s a silver lining in all of this though. Even though people may fear that Twitter will be filled with very controversial figures who would spew nothing but venom on the platform, Musk has an idea of where he would draw the line. For example, he would never let anyone like Alex Jones, a controversial conspiracy theorist who has accused the victims of mass shootings in the US to be paid actors, to be reinstated for mongering clearly false rumours.

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First to hack into iPhone, tech prodigy who trolled Tesla, joins Elon Musk at Twitter

It seems that Elon Musk recognises game when he sees it. While Musk may come across as a brash troll at times, the Tesla and Twitter CEO surely respects tech skills and people who demonstrate their technical prowess and know what they are doing.

Elon Musk has hired George Hotz, a notable engineer who made a name for himself for being one of the very first people to hack into an iPhone. Hotz is a notable security hacker who, in the past, turned down a job at Tesla working on its driver-assistance technology.

One of the issues that Musk had spotted with Twitter was how jarring the search options on the platform operated. This is a sentiment that was shared by a lot of programmers, including Hotz. Hotz, then suggested what he would do to remedy this and solve the search issue that users face with Twitter.

Hotz even offered to join Twitter as an intern under Musk, which Musk accepted.

Sure, let’s talk.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 16, 2022

The internship came about after Hotz expressed support for Musk’s “extremely hardcore” ultimatum to Twitter’s employees, which demanded that they work “long hours at high intensity” or else depart the company. Hotz said that “this is the attitude that builds incredible things” and that he’d be willing to do an internship at the company. “Sure, let’s talk,” was Musk’s response.

Apart from hacking into an iPhone and the consequent battles with Apple, Hotz gained notoriety for founding Comma.ai, an advanced driver assistance company that creates autonomous driving solutions that can be retrofitted into older cars as well. Back then, Tesla said of Hotz’ ideas about autonomous driving as “extremely unlikely that a single person or even a small company that lacks extensive engineering validation capability will be able to produce an autonomous driving system that can be deployed to production vehicles.”

Evidently, Tesla had earlier offered to hire Hotz before he founded Comma.ai, to work on Tesla autonomous driving. However, he rejected the offer because Musk, as per Hotz, kept changing the deal. Hotz, when rejecting Tesla’s final offer, famously told Musk, “I appreciate the offer, but like I’ve said, I’m not looking for a job. I’ll ping you when I crush Mobileye.” At the time, Mobileye was the company supplying some of the technology Tesla used in its Autopilot system.

How do you feel the quality of Twitter search is? What would get you to use Twitter search instead of Google?

BTW, there’s some nice advanced search stuff here: https://t.co/CYMzuWD1HT

— George Hotz 🐀 (@realGeorgeHotz) November 21, 2022

In exchange for fixing Twitter’s search function, Hotz is only seeking that his living expenses in San Francisco are covered. Hotz’s internship comes at a time when Musk is desperately looking for engineers who can write software or code. 

Musk is also looking for engineers with expertise in other avenues as well as salespeople for the ad-sales team.

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Elon Musk slashes employee benefits at Twitter, gets rid of several perks in a bid to increase profits

In a bid to turn Twitter profitable, Elon Musk has decided to several employee benefits and get rid of several perks that employees at Twitter had come to enjoy. It should be noted that since its inception, Twitter has never been profitable.

These perks include several of the benefits that are not only common in tech companies across the world, but also some key benefits that were introduced in the middle of the pandemic to facilitate Twitter employees in the completion of their duties.

Of the perks that have been slashed, some of the biggest ones include perks like, training and development, finishing school, daycare facilities for children of staff and quarterly team activities. Other perks such as all allowances and activities related to employee wellness and productivity, the provision of home internet etc.

While getting rid of facilities like home internet makes sense given that Twitter is putting a stop to the practice of working from home, getting rid of training and development, especially for managers is a little bizarre according to industry insiders.

“Allowances will be reevaluated over time and may be added back when the company’s financial situation improves,” read an internal memo that was circulated among the remaining staff.

Musk had previously claimed that it cost Twitter about $4 million a day to feed its 7400-7500 employees. However, that claim was challenged by a number of people working at the company, including the team that was responsible for the meals served to staffers at Twitter offices. 

Since Musk took control of Twitter he has managed to fire about half of the 7500 people, directly employed at the social media platform. In addition to this, he also terminated about 4000 or so contractual content moderators working for Twitter.

In addition to all this, the attrition at Twitter also includes another 1200-1500 people who resigned after Musk sent an ultimatum, warning employees that the culture at Twitter would have to undergo a massive overhaul and that employees willing to be a part of the new direction that Twitter would take, also called Twitter 2.0, should prepare themselves for longer working hours, and a more fast-paced, hardcore environment.

Elon Musk has since announced that he is done with terminating Twitter employees and is ready to hire engineers and salespeople for the ad sales team. He has also encouraged employees to refer people who fit the role.

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Amazon’s Alexa team set to lose $10 billion this year, was the main driving force behind mass layoff

Amazon is currently in the middle of one of the biggest mass layoffs in its history. The e-commerce giant plans to terminate about 10,000 people by 2023, and also plans to refocus finances and efforts away from the hardware division. The Alexa team at Amazon, responsible for not only the voice assistant, but the devices as well, is one of the hardest hit divisions, with more than half of all employees in the vertical, either being reassigned or terminated.

Amazon will be losing about $10 billion just this year because of Alexa. Alexa, which was a pet project of Jeff Bezos, was one of the best voice assistant when it was launched almost a decade ago. However, Amazon, like Google, hasn’t been able to monetise their voice assistant services in any meaningful way.

Moreover, the smart assistant takes up a lot of space and compute power in Amazon’s server. With each passing year, it was becoming difficult for Amazon to justify the space that that programme takes up on its servers and the amount of computing power it occupies. 

This happened, despite the fact that Amazon was able to place Alexa in a number of devices and hardware that were not the Echo speakers. Also, Alexa’s Echo line is among the “best-selling items on Amazon.” However, most of the devices are sold at cost.” The plan with Alexa was for Amazon to want to make money when people use the devices, not when they buy bought them. This has colossally backfired on the e-commerce giant.

According to a report by Business Insider, the Alexa division, along with Prime Video lost about $3 billion in just the first quarter of 2022, with a vast majority of the losses coming from the Alexa division. The hardware team, as we said is said to lose about $10 billion this year. 

The Alexa division has been trying to turn around monetisation of the assistance services for years now. An all-hands crisis meeting took place in 2019 to try to turn the monetization problem around, but that was futile. 

As a result, Amazon stopped hiring people for the Alexa division by late 2019. Bezos too started to lose interest in his pet project around 2020. Bezos’ successor as Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy is also not interested in protecting Alexa.

Jassy has claimed that the company still has “conviction in pursuing” Alexa, but that’s after making huge cuts to the Alexa team. However, the Alexa division believes that there is no clear directive for devices in the future, and that since the hardware isn’t profitable, there’s no clear incentive to stay on that direction.

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Elon Musk starts recruiting engineers for ‘Twitter 2.0,’ wants anyone who can code to join his team

When Elon Musk took control of Twitter, the social media platform had over 7,400 employees on its payroll. However, in the weeks to follow, Musk would go on to gut the workforce, firing nearly half of all Twitter employees, and thousands of contractual content moderators, and forcing thousands of other on-roll employees to resign. All in all, as of 8:30 AM Monday (Indian Standard Time), Twitter has just a little over 2,700 employees on the payroll.

Elon Musk, in a recent all-hands meeting with the remaining Twitter employees, announced that he is done with the terminations and is now actively looking to hire people. Musk and his team of recruiters have already started recruiting engineers and salespeople for the ad-sales team. Some sales employees who opted to stay after Musk’s Twitter 2.0 ultimatum were reportedly laid off shortly after.

The number of engineers who have exited Twitter is so huge, that Musk has one simple criterion for his hiring team to follow – hire anyone who actually knows how to write software, irrespective of their qualifications and work experience.

Musk has also asked the existing employees at Twitter for referrals, and that under his ownership and management, Twitter will be “much more engineering-driven.” Design and product management will still be very important and report to me, but those writing great code will constitute the majority of the team and “have the greatest sway.”

The Twitter careers page wasn’t listing any open jobs as of writing this article. There were more than 100 job openings before Musk took over.

Musk may have to hire engineers quickly to keep Twitter systems running properly. A Washington Post report quoted a former employee as saying layoffs and other departures “have left multiple critical systems down to two, one or even zero engineers.” Gutted departments include “Twitter’s traffic and front-end teams that route engineering requests to the correct backend services,” a Verge report said.

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Google’s parent company Alphabet to layoff 6 per cent or about 10,000 “low performing” employees

Google became the latest tech company to announce the truncation of its workforce. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, recently announced that they will be laying off about 10,000 or 6 per cent of its workforce, after identifying the “weak performers” across various teams and verticals.

A report by The Information has claimed that managers across various verticals in Google have been asked to analyse and rank the ‘poor performing’ employees on their teams. Google will use a ranking system to analyse their performance, and the lowest-ranked employees are expected to be fired from the company.

Google witnessed a major spike in hirings in the past quarter. Experts have been warning Google about its inflated workforce as well as salaries. Billionaire activist investor, Christopher Hohn, has claimed that Google employees are paid a lot more, in comparison to the rest of the industry. He claimed that the hiring has outpaced the actual need of the company.  

Google had earlier announced that it will be slowing down the hiring process in the fourth quarter of the year. However, the economy seems to have pushed the otherwise ’employee-friendly’ company to a wave of layoffs that is almost thrice the size of what is usually expected from Google.

Currently, Alphabet employs around 1,87,000 employees, making it one of the biggest employers in the tech industry. A US SEC filing revealed that the median annual salary of a Google employee is around $295,884 or roughly Rs 2.41 crore.   

Google has been witnessing a consistent drop in profits. The company reported a net profit of $13.9 billion in the last quarter which was 27 per cent lower compared to last year. This drop was despite an overall 6 per cent increase in revenue to $69.1 billion. 

Meta, Twitter, Amazon, and many prominent, US-based tech companies are on a mission to downsize. Most of the companies have registered their biggest layoffs ever in just the past month. Meta laid off over 11,000 employees, Twitter is left with less than a third of its entire workforce, and Amazon is also expected to continue layoffs well into 2023.

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Want to make UPI payments without internet connection? This trick can help you

The introduction of digital payment methods has made life easier for people. Nowadays, Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is becoming a more popular choice than cash purchases because almost everyone accepts it, from retailers in luxurious malls to small florists on the street. However, a bad internet connection can sometimes give headaches to individuals while making UPI payments. But this issue can also be resolved by using a USSD code to access UPI.

The USSD method makes online transactions accessible and concise for everyone, regardless of whether you have a smartphone or not. It was initially made available by NPCI in November 2012 with only two limited telecom partners—BSNL and MTNL. But, now it is currently functional on all major cellular networks. According to NPCI, the *99# service can be used in 13 different languages, including Hindi and English. A total of 83 leading banks are offering the service.

Set up your UPI for the USSD method:

You need to set up your UPI before making online payments without an internet connection. Follow these below-mentioned steps to complete the set-up process:

• On your smartphone or feature phone, open the call dialer, and enter *99#.
• Pick your preferred language and enter the first four letters of the IFSC code or the bank’s name.
• Now, you can choose the bank account you want to use from a list of accounts that are connected to the particular phone number and shown on the screen.
• Next, you have to enter the last six digits of your debit card and its accurate expiry date.
• After completing this entire process, you will be able to make UPI payments without internet access.

Steps to follow to make UPI payments without the internet:

• To send money using the USSD method, go to your call dialer and enter 1.
• Decide whatever option you like, then type in the phone number, bank account number, or UPI ID.
• Then, enter the amount you want to send along with the UPI PIN.

Although, charges for using the *99# service might reach Rs 0.50 for each transaction. Additionally, the transaction limit for this service is now capped at Rs 5,000.

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