Saturday, September 7

Tag: twitter

A Finance Expert Explains The ‘Poison Pill’ The Anti-Takeover Tool That Twitter Hopes Will Keep Elon Musk At Bay
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BUSINESS, IN OTHER NEWS

A Finance Expert Explains The ‘Poison Pill’ The Anti-Takeover Tool That Twitter Hopes Will Keep Elon Musk At Bay

Takeovers are usually friendly affairs. Corporate executives engage in top-secret talks, with one company or group of investors making a bid for another business. After some negotiating, the companies engaged in the merger or acquisition announce a deal has been struck. But other takeovers are more hostile in nature. Not every company wants to be taken over. This is the case with Elon Musk’s US$43 billion bid to buy Twitter. Companies have various measures in their arsenal to ward off such unwanted advances. One of the most effective anti-takeover measures is the shareholder rights plan, also more aptly known as a “poison pill.” It is designed to block an investor from accumulating a majority stake in a company. Twitter adopted a poison pill plan on April 15, 2022, shortly after Musk un...
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Corporate Governance Scholars Disagree With Elon Musk Argument That Twitter Would Be Better Off In Private Hands Rather Than Public Hands
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BUSINESS

Corporate Governance Scholars Disagree With Elon Musk Argument That Twitter Would Be Better Off In Private Hands Rather Than Public Hands

Billionaire Elon Musk says he wants to take Twitter private by buying 100% of its publicly held shares in a deal worth US$43 billion. In a letter to the board, he said that Twitter can’t serve as a platform for free speech as a public company. “Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company,” he wrote. I’m a scholar in corporate leadership and governance. A big problem with private companies is they lack the safeguards of public corporations – like outside ownership and independent oversight. Public ownership Some years ago, I explored the distinction between public and private companies in detail when the American Bar Association invited me to write about what young corporate lawyers need to understand about how business works. Based on that research, I want to point to an importa...
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US$3 billion Twitter deal – What It Means For Elon Musk And For Social Media
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BUSINESS

US$3 billion Twitter deal – What It Means For Elon Musk And For Social Media

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is now Twitter’s largest shareholder after acquiring a 9.2% stake in the social media platform for just under US$3 billion (£2.3 billion). The announcement drove Twitter’s share price up 27%, and it continued to grow in after-hours trading. You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, here. This investor enthusiasm is not surprising. Social media platforms have been suffering lately thanks to newly developed pressures in their ecosystems. For example, Twitter, and also Meta, have been on the receiving end of Apple’s anti user-tracking system. This is costing them billions of dollars in lost revenues, causing both companies’ stock to languish for the past few months. Musk’s arrival as Twitter’s largest shareholder will ...
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Under New Surveillance Laws Facebook Or Twitter Posts Can Now Be Quietly Modified By The Government
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SOCIAL MEDIA, VIDEO REELS

Under New Surveillance Laws Facebook Or Twitter Posts Can Now Be Quietly Modified By The Government

James Jin Kang, Edith Cowan University and Jumana Abu-Khalaf, Edith Cowan University A new law gives Australian police unprecedented powers for online surveillance, data interception and altering data. These powers, outlined in the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill, raise concerns over potential misuse, privacy and security. The bill updates the Surveillance Devices Act 2004 and Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979. In essence, it allows law-enforcement agencies or authorities (such as the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission) to modify, add, copy or delete data when investigating serious online crimes. The Human Rights Law Centre says the bill has insufficient safeguards for free speech and press fre...
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Twitter’s Trending Function Goes Haywire With Rumors Of Chris Pratt’s Being A ‘MAGA Bro’
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SOCIAL MEDIA

Twitter’s Trending Function Goes Haywire With Rumors Of Chris Pratt’s Being A ‘MAGA Bro’

When actor Chris Pratt found himself trending on Twitter on Oct. 17, it wasn’t because of his new film or the birth of his first child. Instead, Twitter users were clamoring for Pratt to be canceled because of his support of President Donald Trump. There was one problem: Pratt had never said such a thing. As a scholar of communication, I was drawn to the way this saga played out. But whereas a lot of attention has been given to how bots and bad actors fan false information, I see the issue as something more structural, with certain flaws baked into the way Twitter is built – particularly its trending function. Together, they cause what rhetoricians call “logical fallacies” to thrive. The most problematic Chris of them all The controversy began when television writer and producer Amy B...
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Bots Spread Conspiracy Theories And QAnon Talking Points On Twitter
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SOCIAL MEDIA

Bots Spread Conspiracy Theories And QAnon Talking Points On Twitter

Americans who seek political insight and information on Twitter should know how much of what they are seeing is the result of automated propaganda campaigns. Nearly four years after my collaborators and I revealed how automated Twitter accounts were distorting online election discussions in 2016, the situation appears to be no better. That’s despite the efforts of policymakers, technology companies and even the public to root out disinformation campaigns on social media. In our latest study, we collected 240 million election-related tweets mentioning presidential candidates and election-related keywords, posted between June 20 and Sept. 9, 2020. We looked for activity from automated (or bot) accounts, and the spread of distorted or conspiracy theory narratives. We learned that on Twitte...
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Twitter posts show that people are profoundly sad – and are visiting parks to cheer up
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IN OTHER NEWS

Twitter posts show that people are profoundly sad – and are visiting parks to cheer up

The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States is the deepest and longest period of malaise in a dozen years. Our colleagues at the University of Vermont have concluded this by analyzing posts on Twitter. The Vermont Complex Systems Center studies 50 million tweets a day, scoring the “happiness” of people’s words to monitor the national mood. That mood today is at its lowest point since 2008 when they started this project. They call the tweet analysis the Hedonometer. It relies on surveys of thousands of people who rate words indicating happiness. “Laughter” gets an 8.50 while “jail” gets a 1.76. They use these scores to measure the mood of Twitter traffic. The Hedonometer measures happiness through analysis of key words on Twitter, which is now used by one in five Americans. This chart cover...
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Twitter hack exposes broader threat to democracy and society
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SOCIAL MEDIA

Twitter hack exposes broader threat to democracy and society

In case 2020 wasn’t dystopian enough, hackers on July 15 hijacked the Twitter accounts of former President Barack Obama, presidential hopeful Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Kim Kardashian and Apple, among others. Each hijacked account posted a similar fake message. The high-profile individual or company wanted to philanthropically give back to the community during COVID-19 and would double any donations made to a bitcoin wallet, identical messages said. The donations followed. The hack on the surface may appear to be a run-of-the-mill financial scam. But the breach has chilling implications for democracy. Serious political implications As a scholar of internet governance and infrastructure, I see the underlying cybercrimes of this incident, such as hacking accounts and financial fraud,...
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IN OTHER NEWS

Could Donald Trump be banned from Twitter?

Could Donald Trump be banned from Twitter?.Speculation over whether Donald Trump will be impeached has been rife since the US president began his term in January. The controversial head of state has historically low poll ratings and has been embroiled in scandals including a fight with the FBI, domestic and foreign policy turmoil, and a war with journalists. Before impeachment, which requires a two-thirds majority in each house of Congress, Trump could be stripped of access to his second most important platform after the White House: Twitter. Trump is in danger of being blocked from the 140-character social network, his communication method of choice, after posting a video clip that depicts him body slamming and punching a man with a CNN logo on his face. The video, which originated on R...
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