News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Fidelity: Value of Elon Musk’s Twitter Plummets
to Just One-Third of Purchase Price

Fidelity holds a stake in Twitter after backing Musk’s takeover.

Bloomberg reports that Twitter is now only worth a third of the $44 billion that tech tycoon Elon Musk paid for the social media giant according to Fidelity Investments. “Twitter’s value has seen a significant decline since Musk’s takeover,” a Fidelity spokesperson said. “Our recent evaluation of our equity stake in the company reflects this downturn.”

Elon Musk, who paid $44 billion for Twitter, including $33.5 billion in equity, has openly acknowledged that he overpaid for the service. “Twitter is worth less than half what I paid for it,” Musk confessed in a recent statement.
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Under Musk’s management, the company has a $13 billion debt load. As Musk revealed in March, his erratic decision-making and difficulties with content moderation have caused a 50 percent decline in advertising revenue. Selling Twitter Blue subscriptions in an effort to make up for lost income has so far not been successful. Less than one percent of Twitter’s monthly users had signed up as of the end of March.

In April, Musk openly admitted that legal pressure was the driving force behind his purchase of the social media firm. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the most recent markdown subtracts about $850 million from Musk’s $187 billion fortune. Musk’s wealth has increased by more than $48 billion this year, largely as a result of a 63 percent increase in the share price of Tesla.

Ministry of Truth: Nikon and Leica Are Adding
Adobe-NYT ‘Misinformation’ Tech to Cameras

The software works by embedding information about a picture’s origin from the moment the picture is captured.

The Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), which was launched by Adobe in collaboration with Twitter and the New York Times last year announced a partnership with Nikon and Leica to bring image marking technology to the Nikon Z9 and Leica M11 cameras.

The technology, at least according to CAI, will increase trust in photographers’ digital work by securing provenance information at the point of capture, including location, time, and how the image was taken.

Provenance is the facts of a piece of digital content like origin. CAI, launched in 2019, aims to restore trust in images people see online by embedding provenance information from the time an image is first captured.

The CAI also joined forces with Project Origin, a similar effort started by Microsoft and the BBC, also focused on tracing the history of digital images, to create the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA).

C2PA describes itself as “an open technical standard providing publishers, creators, and consumers the ability to trace the origin of different types of media,” with the goal of “address[ing] the prevalence of misleading information online through the development of technical standards for certifying the source and history (or provenance) of media content.”

Promoted by the media, deep state, and left-wing NGOs, “misinformation” in the Trump years became synonymous with censoring conservative voices on social media platforms.

Twitter Engineering Chief Resigns
Day After DeSantis Campaign Launch Glitches

Foad Dabiri, whose LinkedIn profile says he is Twitter’s engineering lead for growth, announced his resignation but did not mention what prompted the move. He later noted that his decision and timing were “independent of any recent events.”

In his resignation statement, Dabiri reflected on his time at Twitter, which he divided into two distinct eras: pre- and post-acquisition by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk last year.

“After almost four incredible years at Twitter, I decided to leave the nest yesterday,” Dabiri wrote in a heartfelt message offering gratitude to colleagues.

Both eras, he said, “came with their fair share of challenges, but they also shared a grand mission and a team of extraordinary individuals,” he said.

During the “Twitter 2.0” phase under Musk’s leadership, the company underwent significant changes aimed at achieving profitability, resulting in a substantial reduction in the workforce within the initial months.
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In response to a request for comment, Dabiri directed The Epoch Times to a new post: “And since some have asked, my decision and the timing of it are independent of any recent events,” the post reads.
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Hosted on Twitter Spaces by Musk and tech entrepreneur David Sacks, the event encountered intermittent sound issues during its initial moments.

With over 500,000 Twitter users joining the event, it was eventually paused and then restarted, causing a delay of nearly half an hour before DeSantis could deliver his announcement.

Facebook Owner Meta Slashes Business Operations Staff
in Final Round of Mass Layoffs

Meta Platforms Inc., owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, slashed jobs across its business and operations units on Wednesday as part of a plan announced last fall to eliminate 10,000 jobs in the course of a broader restructuring program.

Dozens of Meta employees from enterprise engineering, marketing, corporate communications, site security, program management, and content strategy took to LinkedIn to announce that they had been laid off.

According to the LinkedIn posts, the social media giant also cut staff working on its privacy and integrity teams.

This is the third round of layoffs at Meta since last November, when CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a blog post that he would let go of more than 11,000 employees—some 13 percent of Meta personnel—after overestimating the e-commerce growth trend in the wake of some 18 years of seemingly unstoppable expansion.
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According to Zuckerberg, some 4,000 people were let go in April. These layoffs primarily hit tech teams—mostly staff from content design and user-experience research, while programmers were retained.

This month’s layoffs should be the last round of redundancies at Meta, following Zuckerberg’s pledge to restructure business teams “substantially” and return to a “more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles.”

The company’s shares gained ground slightly this week in a broadly weaker market.

Trespassing TikTok Prankster Mizzy Charged Again
2 Days After Receiving Court Order

A teenage TikTok prankster was arrested and charged with breaching a court order two days after he was given the order for entering a private home without permission.

Bacari-Bronze O’Garro, 18, known on social media platforms as Mizzy, appeared at Thames Magistrates’ Court on Saturday morning, three days after he had appeared at the same court.

O’Garro pleaded not guilty to three counts of breaching a Criminal Behaviour Order. He was remanded into custody until the next hearing, which is scheduled for Tuesday.

During Saturday’s hearing, Rose Edwin, prosecuting, said O’Garro had posted two videos on social media without the consent of the people featured and one video of him visiting Westfield Centre in Stratford—activities he had been banned from doing.

The teenager from Hackney gained notoriety recently after videos of him pranking people went viral on TikTok.

In one of the videos taken on May 15 for a TikTok trend of walking into random houses, he entered a private home, where a family with children live.

Appearing in court on Wednesday, O’Garro admitted to one count of breaching a community protection notice (CPN) issued on May 11, 2022.

He really wants the  judge to send him straight to jail for several years if deemed necessary.