TheNewsGuru

Tag: Jack Dorsey

  • Twitter CEO lends support for #EndSARS

    Twitter CEO lends support for #EndSARS

    Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Twitter, Jack Dorsey has thrown his weight behind the demand to end police brutality in Nigeria.

    TheNewsGuru.com (TNG) reports Jack Dorsey tweeted the hashtag of the protest at 9:40pm Nigerian time on Wednesday, officially joining in the #EndSARS campaign that is going on across the country.

    The philanthropist also tweeted a link on #EndSARS and #EndPoliceBrutality before going ahead to retweet a crowdfunding project that the Nigerian government had been accused of attempting to suppress.

    Jack Dorsey also tweeted a Washington Post article chronicling why the #EndSARS campaign in Nigeria, the largest black nation on earth, matters for America too.

    His display of solidarity comes 24 hours after music superstar, Kanye West, added his voice to the protests.

    Kanye told the government to listen to the cry of the citizens.

    “I stand with my Nigerian brothers and sisters to end police brutality, the government must answer to the peoples cries #EndPoliceBrutalityinNigeria”, the fashion mogul tweeted.

  • Facebook, Twitter, Google CEOs avoid subpoena, agree to testify before U.S. Senate committee

    Facebook, Twitter, Google CEOs avoid subpoena, agree to testify before U.S. Senate committee

    The chief executives of Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet-owned Google have agreed to voluntarily testify at a hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee on October 28 about a key law protecting internet companies.

    Facebook and Twitter confirmed on Friday that their CEOs, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, respectively, will appear, while a source said that Google’s Sundar Pichai will appear.

    That came a day after the committee unanimously voted to approve a plan to subpoena the three CEOs to appear before the panel.

    Twitter’s Dorsey tweeted on Friday that the hearing “must be constructive & focused on what matters most to the American people: how we work together to protect elections.”

    The CEOs are to appear virtually.

    In addition to discussions on reforming the law called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects internet companies from liability over content posted by users, the hearing will bring up issues about consumer privacy and media consolidation.

    Republican President Donald Trump has made holding tech companies accountable for allegedly stifling conservative voices a theme of his administration.

    As a result, calls for a reform of Section 230 have been intensifying ahead of the Nov. 3 elections, but there is little chance of approval by Congress this year.

    Last week Trump met with nine Republican state attorneys general to discuss the fate of Section 230 after the Justice Department unveiled a legislative proposal aimed at reforming the law.

    The chief executives of Google, Facebook, Apple Inc and Amazon.com Inc recently testified before the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel.

    The panel, which is investigating how the companies’ practices hurt rivals, is expected to release its report as early as next Monday.

  • Jack Dorsey wants Twitter users to be able to edit tweets

    Twitter chief executive officer (CEO), Jack Dorsey has said his micro-blogging platform is considering an option for users to be able to edit tweets.

    TheNewsGuru (TNG) reports the Twitter CEO stated this in a podcast interview on Saturday.

    However, the original version of the tweet would still be viewable.

    “Maybe we introduce a 5-30 seconds delay in the sending of tweet and within that window, you can edit because the issue with going longer than that is it takes that real-time nature of the conversational flow out of it,” 9To5Mac quoted the Twitter CEO to have said.

    On why the micro-blogging site lacks the feature, Dorsey said the platform was built on the SMS format of text messaging

    “Once you send a text, you can’t take it back. When you send a tweet, it goes to the world instantaneously. You can’t take it back,” Dorsey said.

    Dorsey first addressed the possibility of adding the edit feature for tweets in December 2016, based on suggestions.

     

  • 2019: Who is the Nigerian billionaire behind the 2015 general elections?

    As events unfold for 2019 general elections to hold in Nigeria, it becomes imperative to consider certain dealings that came to play in events leading up to the 2015 general elections in the country.

    In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, confessional statements emerged of how a Nigerian billionaire supported ex-President Goodluck Jonathan to execute a smear campaign against Muhammadu Buhari in the 2015 general elections.

    However, given over 8 months and counting, after the Cambridge Analytica revelations came to the fore, neither has the so called Nigerian billionaire been named nor anything further heard of the ‘ghost’.

    TheNewsGuru (TNG) reports parent company of now defunct Cambridge Analytica, SCL Elections, confirmed it was hired in the wake of December 2014 to support Jonathan’s campaign on a massive scale.

    Brittany Kaiser, a senior director at Cambridge Analytica, who would go on to play a public role at the launch of Nigel Farage’s Leave.eu campaign, and a senior strategist on the Donald Trump campaign, was fingered, with the Nigerian billionaire not named.

    Regarded by colleagues as a prolific networker, in 2014, Kaiser was introduced to the ghost Nigerian oil billionaire who wanted to fund a covert campaign to support Jonathan, according to the report that stated the billionaire wanted total discretion.

    “We can confirm that SCL Elections was hired in December 2014 to provide advertising and marketing services in support of the Goodluck Jonathan campaign,” the firm stated.

    However, several confessional statements made by employees of the firm, seven of them, with close knowledge of the campaign, showed that Cambridge Analytica did more than just providing advertising and marketing services in support of the Jonathan campaign.

    Employees of the defunct Cambridge Analytica, according to the report, actually worked effortlessly and ruthlessly to sway the 2015 general election votes in favour of Jonathan.

    This came to the fore after Cambridge University professor Aleksandr Kogan harvested valuable information on the data of about 50 million Facebook users in the US to sway votes in favour of Donald Trump.

    Describing how Cambridge Analytica worked with people they believed were Israeli computer hackers, they said the hackers offered Cambridge Analytica access to Buhari’s financial and medical records, and that they had accessed the private emails of two politicians who are now heads of state.

    Also, Cambridge Analytica was reported to have used an astonishing and disturbing video content, especially on social media, Facebook and Twitter inclusive, to push the campaign, a malicious one, against Buhari.

    Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey have largely remained silent on how Cambridge Analytica manipulated Facebook and Twitter to push the malicious content to sway the election in the country, especially given that as Nigeria heads into the 2019 general elections, malicious contents of various kinds and varying degrees are yet being peddled on the platforms.

    “Coming to Nigeria on February 15th, 2015. Dark. Scary. And very uncertain. Sharia for all. What would Nigeria look like if Sharia were imposed by Buhari?,” a Guardian UK report quotes the voiceover on the malicious campaign video, spread on Facebook and Twitter, against Buhari in 2015.

    “Its answer to that question is certainly dark. And scary. It’s also graphically, brutally, violent. One minute and 19 seconds of archive news footage from Nigeria’s troubled past set to a horror movie soundtrack. There are scenes of people being macheted to death. Their legs hacked off. Their skulls caved in,” the report stated of the campaign video.

    According to one of the employees, now a former contractor of the defunct data analytics firm, “It was voter suppression of the most crude and basic kind. It was targeted at Buhari voters in Buhari regions to basically scare the shit out of them and stop them from voting”.

    According to the Guardian UK, the employees confessed Cambridge Analytica was paid an estimate of N1 billion by the Nigeria billionaire barely six weeks to the elections to sway the votes, and that there is no suggestion Jonathan knew of the covert operation.

    While there is yet to be seen any ‘dark and scary’ malicious content like the one peddled in 2015 on the social media, various malicious contents of varying degrees are being peddled on, especially Facebook and Twittter, and it is absurd that execs at Facebook and Twitter have been silent on the matter.

    While, SCL Elections denied the confessional statements made by its employees, stressing that, they, through the instrument of Cambridge Analytica, only provided advertising and marketing services in support of the campaign, the firm went further to say “Members of the SCL Elections team that worked on the Nigeria campaign remained in country throughout the original campaigning period” and that “Although the election was rescheduled, SCL was not retained for the entirety of the extended campaign period. Team members left in accordance with the company’s campaign plan.

    “During an election campaign, it is normal for SCL Elections to meet with vendors seeking to provide services as a subcontractor. SCL Elections did not take possession of or use any personal information from such individuals for any purposes. SCL Elections does not use ‘hacked’ or ‘stolen’ data”.

    It is more appalling that the President Buhari government did nothing about the matter, except for a political press statement by Garba Shehu, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity.

    President Buhari failed to act on the matter first because the outcome of the 2015 elections favoured him, and secondly most probably because Buhari himself was also fingered in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

    His team was alleged to have hired AKPD, the firm of former Barack Obama strategist David Axelrod, to push slick-social-media-heavy, Obama-esque message of hope in favour of Buhari.

    There are multiple wider political questions about what went on in the Nigerian election of 2015 and the role western powers, and the social media, played. There are even more questions to be answered as the country nears the 2019 general elections.

     

  • 2019 elections: Twitter taking multiple steps to curb fake news

    2019 elections: Twitter taking multiple steps to curb fake news

    Twitter co-founder and chief executive officer Jack Dorsey said the micro-blogging platform is taking multi-variable steps to curb the spread of misleading information ahead of 2019 elections.

    TheNewsGuru (TNG) reports Dorsey stated this on Monday while addressing a town hall-style meeting at the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi (IIT-D).

    He stated that the multi-variable steps being taken include the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

    “Fake news is a way too big category. The real problem is not misinformation per se as jokes can also be categorized as misinformation.

    “But misinformation that is spread with the intent to mislead people is a real problem,” he said.

    Dorsey likened solving the problem of misleading information to that of addressing a security issue or building a lock.

    “No one can build a perfect lock, but we need to stay ahead of our attackers. AI could probably help,” Dorsey said.

     

  • Jack Dorsey to testify before House Panel

    Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive will on September 5th testify before a US House of Representatives committee.

    TheNewsGuru (TNG) reports the panel made this known in a statement on Friday, after some Republicans raised concerns of social media companies removing content from conservatives.

    The House Energy and Commerce Committee “intends to ask tough questions about how Twitter monitors and polices content,” Republican Representative Greg Walden, the panel’s chairman, said in a statement.

    “We look forward to Mr Dorsey being forthright and transparent regarding the complex processes behind the company’s algorithms and content judgment calls,” Walden said.

    On Friday, President Donald Trump accused social media companies of silencing “millions of people” in an act of censorship, but without offering evidence to support the claim.

    “Social Media Giants are silencing millions of people. Can’t do this even if it means we must continue to hear Fake News like CNN, whose ratings have suffered gravely. People have to figure out what is real, and what is not, without censorship!” Trump wrote on Twitter, not mentioning any specific companies.

    Trump also criticized social media outlets last week, saying without providing proof that unidentified companies were “totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices.”

    Those tweets followed actions taken by Apple, Facebook, and Alphabet’s YouTube to remove some content posted by Infowars, a website run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

    Jones’ Twitter account was temporarily suspended on Aug. 15.

     

  • Twitter CEO rejects salary payments 3rd year in a row

    Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey in 2017 declined to receive his salary payments for running the micro-blogging for the third straight year.

    “As a testament to his commitment to and belief in Twitter’s long-term value creation potential, our CEO, Jack Dorsey, declined all compensation for 2017,” a proxy statement Twitter filed with the US Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) noted.

    However, Dorsey has shares which value went up 20 per cent since the beginning of 2018.

    “As of April 2, Dorsey owned 18 million shares of Twitter, currently worth $529 million. His holdings represent 2.39 per cent of all outstanding shares,” reports stated on Thursday.

    According to the Twitter filing with the US SEC, Twitter CFO, Ned Segal had a total compensation package worth $14.3 million for 2017.

    Twitter has 330 million monthly active users globally. The company is currently undergoing major overhauling steps under Dorsey to revive the company’s fortune.

    In 2016, Dorsey received personal and residential security costs totalling $68,506.

    Dorsey, also the CEO of payments company, Square, owns 65.5 million shares in the company which currently is worth $3.1 billion.

     

  • Twitter’s CEO battles President Trump over YouTube HQ shooting

    Twitter’s CEO battles President Trump over YouTube HQ shooting

    After shooting at YouTube headquarters left a man and two women injured with gunshot wounds, Twitter’s founder and chief executive officer Jack Dorsey has called out on President Donald Trump to other than praying, evolve policies to address incessant shootings in the United States.

    Chaos erupted at the Google-owned video sharing platform offices in California on Tuesday when Nasim Aghdam, 39, opened fire on the unsuspecting victims, and killing herself in the process.

    TheNewsGuru reports Police have since opened investigations into the motive behind the incident with several reports indicating Aghdam was angered her videos were not getting expected number of views due to YouTube’s filters.

    After the White House confirmed monitoring the situation, President Trump took to his Twitter handle to express his “thoughts and prayers are with everybody involved”.

    “Was just briefed on the shooting at YouTube’s HQ in San Bruno, California. Our thoughts and prayers are with everybody involved. Thank you to our phenomenal Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders that are currently on the scene,” he tweeted.

    Not before long, Jack responded to the tweet, retweeting it and saying: “We can’t keep being reactive to this, thinking and praying it won’t happen again at our schools, jobs, or our community spots. It’s beyond time to evolve our policies. This is a simple and reasonable approach, and it won’t solve all, but it’s a good start:” while adding a url to March for Our Lives.

    The Police in San Bruno, California, say there is no evidence yet that the attacker knew the victims, a 36-year-old man said to be in a critical condition, and two women aged 32 and 27.

    The suspect: Nasim Aghdam

    Nasim Aghdam lived in San Diego in southern California.

    Police have revealed few details about her but US media said she ran a number of channels and a website, posting videos on a variety of subjects including those highlighting animal cruelty. The channels have now been deleted.

    Aghdam has been variously described as a vegan bodybuilder, artist and rapper.

    In January 2017 she posted a video complaining that YouTube was filtering her content, leading to fewer views.

    On her website she also ranted against YouTube, saying: “Videos of targeted users are filtered and merely relegated, so that people can hardly see their videos.”

    She also quotes Adolf Hitler, saying: “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”

    She also wrote: “There is no equal growth opportunity on YouTube or any other video sharing site. Your channel will grow if they want [it] to!”

    Aghdam’s father, Ismail, told local US media she was angry because YouTube had stopped paying her for videos.

    Video posters can receive money from linked advertisements but the company can “de-monetise” channels for various reasons, taking adverts off. It is unclear if this happened with Aghdam’s material.

    Her father said Aghdam had been reported missing on Monday after not answering calls for two days. Police later found her sleeping in her car in Mountain View, 25km (15 miles) south of the YouTube offices in San Bruno and reported this to her family, but they did not detain her.

    Her father told police she might go to YouTube as she “hated the company”, local media said.

    YouTube terminated her account following the shooting. Her Instagram and Facebook accounts have also been removed.

    However, many Twitter users posted her Facebook video rant against YouTube:

    What happened in the attack

    The suspect is reported to have approached an outdoor patio and dining area at the offices in San Bruno, near San Francisco, at about lunchtime on Tuesday and opened fire with a handgun.

    San Bruno Police Chief Ed Barberini said officers arrived at the offices at 12:48 (19:48 GMT) local time to find a “chaotic scene”, with numerous people fleeing.

    Images broadcast on local TV stations showed employees leaving with their hands raised. Other footage showed evacuees forming a queue before being individually frisked by police.

    Police said officers had “encountered one victim with an apparent gunshot wound at the site and two additional gunshot victims that had fled to a neighbouring business”.

    Inside the complex, officers then found a woman dead from a gunshot wound that was believed to be self-inflicted.

    An employee at a nearby fast food restaurant told Fox station KTVU he had treated a young woman who suffered a bullet wound to the leg.

    He said he had fashioned a makeshift tourniquet from a bungee cord as they waited for first responders.

    Several YouTube employees tweeted about the attack as it was taking place.

    Product manager Todd Sherman said people fled the building in panic as the shooting unfolded.

    https://twitter.com/tdd/status/981262640830754817

    Another employee, Vadim Lavrusik, tweeted he was barricaded in a room with other staff. He later said he had been evacuated.

    The three wounded were taken to Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Officials said the 32-year-old woman’s condition was serious and the 27-year-old’s condition was fair.

    A fourth person was also taken to hospital with an ankle injury sustained while trying to escape, Mr Barberini said.

    Some 1,700 people work at the YouTube HQ. The company is owned by Google and is the area’s biggest employer.

    There had been earlier media reports that the man shot was Aghdam’s boyfriend, but police later said; “At this time there is no evidence that the shooter knew the victims of this shooting or that individuals were specifically targeted.”

    Such “active shooter” incidents are overwhelmingly carried out by men – an FBI report found that out of 160 incidents between 2000-2013, only six of the people who opened fire were women.

     

  • Cryptocurrency scam on Twitter: “We are on it” – Jack Dorsey

    As the issue of copying verified Twitter accounts to trick cryptocurrency users is becoming increasingly prevalent, the microblogging company has said that it is working to curb the rise of these copycat handles.

    Company CEO Jack Dorsey on Tuesday replied to a tweet that complained about the ongoing cryptocurrency scam on Twitter in which several users have been tricked and their digital assets stolen.

    “We are on it,” Dorsey replied to a user who questioned the CEO if the company was taking note of it, Coindesk.com reported.

    On February 26, Dorsey had said that his company was aware of the issue and they “are fixing” the problem.

    Several users have been complaining about being duped on Twitter by fraudulent offers that promise huge amount of Ether cryptocurrency in return of small initial deposits.

    These offers are being made by accounts that mimic well-known industry members and have a “blue tick” (verified account).

    As a preventive measure, Twitter had banned several accounts, including the support team for cryptocurrency exchange Kraken despite them trying to warn others about the scam. On Tuesday, the ban on Kraken’s customer support handle was lifted.

    “Good news, guys! @krakensupport is back! Strange that our initial appeal was also apparently handled by an automated system. Thank you all for your public outrage. Stay vigilant,” it announced.

    According to the report, the scam began after an influencer posted a tweet regarding a fraudulent offer which was followed by similarly designed accounts.

    In order to make the posts seem more legitimate, the spam accounts posted supportive messages, claiming that they have received the returns.

    On seeing that the threads were posted by “verified accounts”, people fell in the trap and lost digital assets.

     

  • Twitter CEO calls for RFP to fix ‘broken’ platform

    Twitter CEO calls for RFP to fix ‘broken’ platform

    Twitter Inc. has launched a request for proposal (RFP) process soliciting for help to cast the widest net possible for great ideas and implementations to fix the ‘brokenness’ of the microblogging platform.

    Twitter Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jack Dorsey in a statement made this known on Thursday while acknowledging that the platform has witnessed abuse; harassment; troll armies; manipulation through bots and human-coordination; misinformation campaigns; and increasingly divisive echo chambers.

    “We’re committing Twitter to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress.

    “Why? We love instant, public, global messaging and conversation. It’s what Twitter is and it’s why we‘re here. But we didn’t fully predict or understand the real-world negative consequences. We acknowledge that now, and are determined to find holistic and fair solutions.

    “We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns, and increasingly divisive echo chambers. We aren’t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough,” the Twitter CEO said.

    He went further to say that while experts at the platform are working to fix the many challenges, Twitter Inc. has been accused of apathy, censorship, political bias, and optimizing for her business and share price instead of the concerns of society.

    “This is not who we are, or who we ever want to be,” Jack said, adding “We’ve focused most of our efforts on removing content against our terms, instead of building a systemic framework to help encourage more healthy debate, conversations, and critical thinking. This is the approach we now need”.

    He further stated: “Recently we were asked a simple question: could we measure the “health” of conversation on Twitter? This felt immediately tangible as it spoke to understanding a holistic system rather than just the problematic parts.

    “If you want to improve something, you have to be able to measure it. The human body has a number of indicators of overall health, some very simple, like internal temperature. We know how to measure it, and we know some methods to bring it back in balance”.

    Jack revealed experts Cortico and Laboratory for Social Machines introduced his company to the concept of measuring conversational health.

    “They came up with four indicators: shared attention, shared reality, variety of opinion, and receptivity. We don’t yet know if those are the right indicators of conversation health for Twitter. And we don’t yet know how best to measure them, or the best ways to help people increase individual, community, and ultimately, global public health.

    “What we know is we must commit to a rigorous and independently vetted set of metrics to measure the health of public conversation on Twitter. And we must commit to sharing our results publicly to benefit all who serve the public conversation.

    “We simply can’t and don’t want to do this alone. So we’re seeking help by opening up an RFP process to cast the widest net possible for great ideas and implementations. This will take time, and we’re committed to providing all the necessary resources,” he said.