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Music streaming service Spotify announced Monday that it is slashing hundreds of jobs in the latest round of layoffs in the tech sector. Spotify said it would cut 6 percent of its staff, or about 600 workers, based on its last earnings report. “Like many other leaders, I hoped to sustain the strong tailwinds from the pandemic and believed that our broad global business and lower risk to the impact of a slowdown in ads would insulate us. In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth,” CEO Daniel Ek wrote in a statement. Ek announced...

HERMAN, WI (AP) — A company that operates a southern Wisconsin wind farm is investigating what caused part of a wind turbine and its blades to plummet to the ground, leaving debris strewn across a field. No one was injured Wednesday night when the blades and top portion of a wind turbine collapsed in Dodge County, near the town of Herman. The turbine, which is part of the Butler Ridge wind farm, stands about 400 feet above the ground, according to the National Weather Service. Mark Dietrich, whose father owns the property where the collapse occurred, told WISN-TV that a...

The Centers for Disease Control are looking for new ways to determine the effectiveness of vaccines against seasonal respiratory diseases like COVID-19, and think the answer could be found in leveraging electronic health record data. The agency issued its Fiscal Year 2023 Broad Agency Announcement on Wednesday, calling for vendors to provide white papers outlining solutions that address 37 research topics posed by the CDC. “This effort will address knowledge gaps regarding the preventive benefit of currently available vaccines; aid in identification of populations who can benefit from enhanced vaccine strategies; and improve our ability to respond to seasonal respiratory...

...In the U.S., which relied on a hodge-podge of state and local quarantine orders to ensure compliance with COVID rules, the federal government took the opportunity to build out its surveillance toolkit, including two contracts in 2020 worth $24.9 million to the data mining and surveillance company Palantir Technologies Inc. to support the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ pandemic response. Documents obtained by the immigrant rights group Just Futures Law under the Freedom of Information Act and shared with AP showed that federal officials contemplated how to share data that went far beyond COVID-19. The possibilities included integrating...

It took $44 billion of Elon Musk’s money to uncover how national-security agencies like the FBI and Homeland Security — as well as Adam Schiff — conducted censorship on Twitter. Those revelations are still continuing, even while not much else seems to be changing on that platform. But what about Facebook? Who’s got $100 billion or so to buy out Mark Zuckerberg and get a peek under Meta’s hood? Reason Magazine certainly doesn’t, but it turns out that all Robby Soave needed was a lawsuit and a court order or two. Internal documents show that Facebook essentially allowed the CDC...

EXCLUSIVE: Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday told Fox News Digital that Facebook "needs us more than we need them," but confirmed that his campaign is working to set up a meeting to discuss his reinstatement to the platform with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg ahead of the 2024 election cycle. Trump, who announced his 2024 presidential campaign in November, told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview that Facebook has "lost $700 billion since I was de-platformed." "It has been considered a major business mistake for them, Twitter, and others," he said. "If they took us back, it would help...

2010 DHS Contract to General Dynamics Information Systems for Domestic “Media Monitoring and Social Media Networking”December 30, 2022 | Sundance | 110 CommentsDuring my trip to DC in the summer of 2020 there were a myriad of disconcerting datapoints assembled; revelations that made sense of the madness and disappointments found everywhere. However, one of the key notations for future reference was to watch the political evolution of Dept of Homeland Security (DHS) and spot the jump where the ideological outlook turns into specific government action.With that in mind, this recent discovery of a 2010 to 2015 DHS contract to a...

Has Barack Obama gone from ex-president to Democrat party crime boss? It sure looks like it, based on a new report about his treatment of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Investigative reporter Lee Smith has got a stunning report that ran this week in Tablet, comparable in impact to that report by Molly Ball at Time who wrote about how elites conspired to "fortify democracy" by rigging the election against President Trump in 2020 and afterwards thought it was a smart thing to crow about.

The liberal Columbia Journalism Review may now want to consider retracting its 2019 screed dismissing Big Tech bias against conservatives as a “myth” that “refuses to die.” CJR’s August 2019 propaganda was plastered with a blaring headline: “The myth of social media anti-conservative bias refuses to die.” CJR Chief Digital Writer Mathew Ingram decried how “DESPITE AN ALMOST TOTAL LACK of evidence to support the theory, alt-right groups and mainstream conservatives alike—including the ones that currently occupy the [Trump] White House—continue to promote the idea that Facebook, Twitter and Google are somehow biased against them.” Oops! That statement aged like...

Salesforce and Amazon announced major layoffs on Wednesday, beginning 2023 with significant cuts during what has already been a brutal period for the tech sector. Amazon announced that its layoffs will impact more than 18,000 employees - the highest number so far at a major tech company. Salesforce will lay off 10 percent of its workforce - or about 8,000 workers - after a period of over-hiring, according to its Co-CEO Marc Benioff, who said he took 'full responsibility' for the decision. As the tech sector, and the economy as a whole, suffers, rumors have begun to circulate that original...

Twitter staff relented to a pressure campaign spearheaded by a Democratic lawmaker in the fall of 2017, changing its advertising policy to allow for a closer relationship with U.S. intelligence agencies, according to internal documents published Tuesday by independent journalist Matt Taibbi. Twitter executives did not believe that there was significant activity by Russian election interference groups on the platform as of Sept. 6, 2017, and had internally decided to direct concerned reporters to Facebook, who they believed to be facing the brunt of congressional scrutiny, according to Taibbi. However, Twitter faced renewed pressure after Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of...

Matt Taibbi shared the ask from Schiff's office sent to Twitter, which said that Schiff's office claimed that there had been "harassment from QAnon conspiracists" against a Schiff staffer. In November 2020, California Congressman Adam Schiff reached out to Twitter to ask them to specifically ban journalist Paul Sperry. Schiff alleged that Sperry, who is an investigative reporter for Real Clear Investigations, had "repeatedly promoted false QAnon conspiracies and harassed [name redacted.]" Matt Taibbi shared the ask that Schiff's office sent to Twitter as part of the latest Twitter Files drop on Tuesday, which said that Schiff's office claimed that...

Twitter users called the Biden HHS official's remarks 'evil' and an example of 'fascism' Conservatives on Twitter blasted a recently surfaced video of the Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine calling on Big Tech companies to censor "misinformation" about "gender-affirming care" for kids on the internet. Levine, a transgender woman, made the statements in May, though the video gained newfound attention on Twitter just after Christmas. Prominent Twitter users expressed horror that a government official was asking tech companies to censor content disputing that gender-affirming care for youth is a thing of "positive value." During a...

Consequences can come at you fast or slow. If you’re a trillion-dollar company, you get to choose which, a bit, but you can never escape completely. Amazon is burning billions on Alexa because voice assistants need massive infrastructure but can't be monetized. Google Cloud is $700 million in the red as of last earnings and heading south to a state of madness like a New Jersey retiree. These are mature products in saturated markets. You don't need an MBA to know what will happen. But even the dean of Harvard Business School can't say when.The big confounding factor is reputation....

The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech. “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement. “As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their...

[SEE ALL THE TWEET LINKS AT SITE....TOO MANY TO POST..............] The Twitter files on the government's coordination with Twitter to silence experts and control the narrative around Covid just dropped and I just have to say, the "conspiracy theorists" are batting 1000. It's not surprising that these things were happening. Anyone who was paying attention KNEW that the government was pressuring Twitter to censor inconvenient facts if they contradicted the official state narrative. David Zweig – a journalist who has written for The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Wired...

The Biden White House pressured Twitter to both “elevate” and “suppress” users based on their stances on COVID-19 — ultimately “censoring info that was true but inconvenient” to policy makers, according to the latest edition of the “Twitter files” revealed Monday. The coercion campaign during the pandemic began with the Trump administration — which asked Twitter to crack down on stories about panic buying and “runs on grocery stores” in the early days of the outbreak — but was stepped up under Biden, whose administration was focused on the removal of “anti-vaxxer accounts,” according to The Free Press reporter David...

Another round of Elon Musk’s Twitter files were released on Saturday. The latest Twitter files were released by journalist Matt Taibbi on Christmas Eve. 1.THREAD: The Twitter Files TWITTER AND “OTHER GOVERNMENT AGENCIES” — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 24, 2022 After weeks of “Twitter Files” reports detailing close coordination between the FBI and Twitter in moderating social media content, the Bureau issued a statement Wednesday. 2. It didn’t refute allegations. Instead, it decried “conspiracy theorists” publishing “misinformation,” whose “sole aim” is to “discredit the agency.” 3. They must think us unambitious, if our “sole aim” is to discredit the FBI....

The FBI may have violated the First Amendment rights of Twitter users when it flagged accounts for the social media platform to review, several legal experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Twitter became an “agent of the government” when it worked with the FBI to silence specific accounts at the agency’s request, Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow, told the DCNF. Ari Cohn, free speech counsel at TechFreedom, told the DCNF that while the findings of the Twitter Files were “interesting,” he doesn’t believe there are “many legal...

There’s bad news and there’s good news for Washington’s anti-monopoly movement. The bad news is that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has done precisely what many long feared he would: While rhetorically supporting two bipartisan antitrust bills targeting Big Tech for months, he effectively killed the effort by never bringing the legislative package for a vote on the Senate floor in the final days of the congressional term.... .....As a consolation, Schumer put an extra $85 million into the nation’s two antitrust enforcement agencies: $50 million to the Federal Trade Commission and $35 million to the Department of Justice’s Antitrust...