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Twitter Sued by Women Alleging Discriminatory Layoffs After Elon Musk Takeover
Two women who lost their jobs at Twitter when billionaire Elon Musk took over are suing the company in federal court, claiming that last month’s abrupt mass layoffs disproportionately affected female employees.
The discrimination lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal challenges over Musk’s decimation of Twitter’s workforce through mass layoffs and firings.
Days after the world’s richest man bought the social media platform for $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3,37,465 crore), the company told about half of employees on November 4 that they no longer had a job but would get three months severance. The lawsuit filed in a San Francisco federal court this week alleges that 57 percent of female employees were laid off, compared to fewer than half of men, despite Twitter employing more men overall before the layoffs.
The cutbacks continued throughout November as Musk fired engineers who questioned or criticized him and gave all remaining employees the choice to resign with severance or sign a form pledging “extremely hardcore” work, long hours and dedication to Twitter’s new direction. Scores more lost their jobs after declining to make the pledge.
The lawsuit alleges that also disproportionately harmed women, “who are more often caregivers for children and other family members, and thus not able to comply with such demands.”
San Francisco-based Twitter started the year with about 7,500 employees worldwide, according to a filing with securities regulators. Now a private company, it hasn’t disclosed how many are left. Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
The lawsuit filed late Wednesday for former employees Carolina Bernal Strifling and Willow Wren Turkal on behalf of similarly-situated female workers makes the claim that 57 percent of female employees were laid off on November 4, compared to 47 percent of male employees, citing a spreadsheet. The plaintiffs are scheduled to speak about the lawsuit on Thursday.
The gap is even greater for women in engineering-related roles — 63 percent were laid off, compared to 48 percent of men with engineering roles, according to the lawsuit filed by prominent Boston workers’ rights attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who ran an unsuccessful Democratic primary campaign for Massachusetts attorney general earlier this year.
“The mass termination of employees at Twitter has impacted female employees to a much greater extent than male employees – and to a highly statistically significant degree,” Liss-Riordan wrote. “Moreover, Elon Musk has made a number of publicly discriminatory remarks about women, further confirming that the mass termination’s greater impact on female employees resulted from discrimination.”
Speaking outside the courthouse before a hearing, Liss-Riordan said she wanted to show that “the richest man in the world is not above the law.”
“Musk and Twitter think they’re never going to be held accountable in court. We are arguing that the arbitration agreements (signed by Twitter staff) are not enforceable. But if we have to go through arbirtration one by one, we are ready to do that,” Liss-Riordan said.
“Of all the issues facing Elon Musk, this is the easiest to address: treat the workers with respect, pay them what they deserve under the law,” she added.
The lawsuit adds to a number of examples of discharged Twitter employees in the US and elsewhere fighting back. One group of employees is filing individual arbitration claims in California because the documents they signed when joining the company waived their rights to a class action lawsuit and jury trial.
“As of today, we’ve filed five,” said their attorney Lisa Bloom in an email Thursday. “The number will continue to rise daily.”
In Ireland, a senior executive is fighting the company in court to get her job back after she didn’t respond to Musk’s email demanding that employees pledge to “extremely hardcore” work or resign with severance pay.
Sinead McSweeney, Twitter’s global vice president for public policy, won a temporary injunction last week preventing Twitter from terminating her employment, according to Irish news reports. The company told the Irish High Court its human resources department intended to enter into talks with McSweeney to resolve the dispute, the reports said.
In a sworn statement to the court, McSweeney said many staffers in Twitter’s European headquarters in Dublin “expressed concerns and confusion” about Musk’s email.
McSweeney said she was forced to make a “completely artificial decision” that “placed me in an impossible and and extraordinarily unfair and unjust position” between accepting a “unilateral change” in her terms of employment or being fired through a “sham resignation.”
After her lawyers received assurances from Twitter that her employment was still valid, she tried to return to the Dublin office, but found her access pass didn’t work. Security said they’d need to check with human resources to verify she was still an employee.
“I felt utterly humiliated, deeply confused and was reduced to tears in a public place,” she said.
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YouTube will roll out a slew of artificial-intelligence-powered features for creators, the latest effort from parent company Alphabet to incorporate generative AI — technology that can create and synthesize text, images, music and other media given simple prompts — into its most important products and services.
Among the new products YouTube announced Thursday is a tool called Dream Screen that uses generative AI to add video or image backgrounds to short-form videos, which the company calls Shorts. It also announced new AI-enabled production tools to help with editing both short- and long-form videos on its platform.
“We’re unveiling a suite of products and features that will enable people to push the bounds of creative expression,” Toni Reid, YouTube’s vice president for community products, said in a blog post timed to the announcement Thursday. The Google-owned video platform first announced that it was developing the tools in March.
Google has been under pressure to show results and practical applications for its generative AI products. Some critics have been wary the company, which has long been seen as a leader in artificial intelligence, was falling behind upstarts like OpenAI or rival Microsoft, and that the products Google was rolling out weren’t yet ready for public consumption. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and a new Bing chatbot from Microsoft — which has invested $13 billion (nearly Rs. 1,08,100 crore) in OpenAI since 2019 — have been wildly popular and gained mainstream favour.
Over the past few months, Google launched its own ChatGPT competitor, Bard, and released a steady flow of updates to the product. It’s also incorporated experimental generative AI features into its most important services, including its flagship search engine, in what the company calls its experimental “search generative experience.” The product generates detailed summaries based on information it’s ingested from the internet and other digital sources in response to search queries.
The announcement of the new features also comes as YouTube is locked in fierce competition with ByteDance‘s TikTok and Meta Platforms‘s Instagram Reels to gain more share of the vertical, short-form video market. YouTube said it now sees more than 70 billion daily views on Shorts, and the new generative AI tools appear to be aimed at attracting even more users and creators and gaining a competitive edge over its rivals.
The company also announced YouTube Create, a mobile app aimed at helping the platform’s creators make video production work easier. The app includes AI-enabled features like editing and trimming, automatic captioning, voiceover capabilities and access to a library of filters and royalty-free music. The app is currently in beta on Android in “select markets,” the company said, and will be free of charge.
Beyond creation, YouTube said it would also provide creators with more tools to get AI-powered insights, help with automatic dubbing of videos and assist with finding music and soundtracks for videos.
© 2023 Bloomberg LP
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WhatsApp has begun rolling out support for a new feature that will allow you to log in to your account using the biometric authentication mechanism on your smartphone. The messaging service will soon allow you to create a passkey — a kind of login credential that eliminates the need to use or remember a password — on your device and use it to securely log in to apps and services using the facial recognition or fingerprint scanner on your device.
Feature tracker WABetaInfo spotted the new passkey feature on WhatsApp beta for Android 2.23.20.4 on Tuesday, that is rolling out to beta users. However, not all users who have updated to the latest beta release will have access to the feature, which is reportedly rolling out to a “limited number of beta testers”. Gadgets 360 was unable to access the feature on two different Android smartphones that are both enrolled in the beta program.
The new Passkeys feature on WhatsApp
Photo Credit: WABetaInfo
The new passkey feature is described as a “simple way to sign in safely” to WhatsApp in a screenshot shared by the feature tracker. This suggests that it could be used to help sign in to other devices via secure authentication on your primary device.
Authenticating using passkeys isn’t a novel concept and the technology is slowly gaining traction online— Google already allows you to log in to a new device by using fingerprint-based biometric authentication for passkeys in place of a password. These passkeys are securely stored on your device and used when biometric authentication is provided.
The screenshot posted by WABetaInfo also states that WhatsApp will store the passkey in the device’s password manager — for most users, that would be the device’s default password store that is handled by Google with autofill support. The feature is also expected to make its way to iOS, where it is likely to be stored in the iOS Keychain.
It is currently unclear whether WhatsApp will also support storing passkeys in third-party apps like Bitwarden, 1Password, or Dashlane. We can expect to learn more about how the feature works when it is rolled out to more users in the beta program and the feature is expected to arrive on all smartphones on the stable channel in the future.
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Britain urged Meta not to roll out end-to-end encryption on Instagram and Facebook Messenger without safety measures to protect children from sexual abuse after the Online Safety Bill was passed by parliament.
Meta, which already encrypts messages on WhatsApp, plans to implement end-to-end encryption across Messenger and Instagram direct messages, saying the technology re-enforced safety and security.
Britain’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman said she supported strong encryption for online users but it could not come at the expense of children’s safety.
“Meta has failed to provide assurances that they will keep their platforms safe from sickening abusers,” she said. “They must develop appropriate safeguards to sit alongside their plans for end-to-end encryption.”
A Meta spokesperson said: “The overwhelming majority of Brits already rely on apps that use encryption to keep them safe from hackers, fraudsters and criminals.
“We don’t think people want us reading their private messages so have spent the last five years developing robust safety measures to prevent, detect and combat abuse while maintaining online security.”
It said it would update on Wednesday on the measures it was taking, such as restricting people over 19 from messaging teens who do not follow them and using technology to identify and take action against malicious behaviour.
“As we roll out end-to-end encryption, we expect to continue providing more reports to law enforcement than our peers due to our industry leading work on keeping people safe,” the spokesperson said.
Social media platforms will face tougher requirements to protect children from accessing harmful content when the Online Safety Bill passed by Parliament on Tuesday becomes law.
End-to-end encryption is a bone of contention between companies and the government in the new law.
Messaging platforms led by WhatsApp oppose a provision that they say could force them to break end-to-end encryption.
The government, however, has said the bill does not ban the technology, but instead, it requires companies to take action to stop child abuse and as a last resort develop technology to scan encrypted messages.
Tech companies have said scanning messages and end-to-end encryption are fundamentally incompatible.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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