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Elon Musk Defends Pay Model for Twitter Amid End to Free Verified Blue Ticks
Elon Musk on Friday defended his controversial pay model for Twitter, claiming that any social media platform that didn’t follow suit would fail because they would be swarmed by bots.
Musk made his prediction on the eve of Twitter’s April 1 ultimatum that verified accounts with the cherished blue tick that had not forked over cash would lose it.
“The fundamental challenge here is that it’s (easy) to create literally 10,000 or 100,000 fake Twitter accounts using just one computer at home and with modern AI (artificial intelligence),” Musk told a question and answer session on Twitter.
“That’s the reason for really pressing hard on verified where the verified requires a number from a reputable phone carrier and a credit card,” Musk said.
“My prediction is that any so-called social media network that doesn’t do this will fail,” Musk added.
The change in system puts pressure on companies, journalists and celebrities who used Twitter as their main channel of communication and relied on the blue tick for credibility.
And it also raises the spectre of imposters and jokesters paying for an officially verified, but totally fake account.
In the US, the subscription plan, known as Twitter Blue, costs $8 (roughly Rs. 700) a month or $84 (roughly Rs. 6,900) a year, or $11 (roughly Rs. 900) a month if bought through Apple‘s app store.
Since its creation in 2009, the blue tick or checkmark became a signature element that helped the platform become a trusted forum for news makers and campaigners.
But Musk and his fans said the blue check was decided by fiat in a secretive procedure and called it a symbol of an unfair class system.
Opening the blue tick to paying subscribers was among the first decisions made by Musk when he took ownership of Twitter last year, but his overhaul backfired.
Within hours, Twitter was flooded by fake yet verified accounts impersonating celebrities, major companies and even Musk himself.
Musk swiftly backtracked, but many advertisers fled the site, denying Twitter a major source of income that the CEO is struggling to replace.
For now, blue checks of celebrities — including Justin Bieber and his 113 million followers or footballer Cristiano Ronaldo and his 108 million — are tagged on the site as “legacy” accounts.
‘Will be awful’
The verified account conundrum also involves officials, charities and news media companies.
Already the White House, which will keep a special designation as a government entity, told employees it would not pay to have its staff’s official Twitter profiles keep the blue tick, Axios reported.
News media companies, firms and charities already lost their blue tick and were tagged as verified business accounts under Musk’s new system.
According to Twitter’s website, these cost a hefty fee of $1,000 (roughly Rs. 82,200) a month in the United States, and $50 (roughly Rs. 4,100) for each additional affiliated account.
“This will be awful for those who can’t afford the new fees,” said Andrew Stroehlein, European Media Director of Human Rights Watch, who said his group would not pay for the privilege.
“It will damage the effectiveness of local activists, including human rights activists, who have long used Twitter for grassroots organizing,” he added in a blog post.
The New York Times said it will not pay for a verified business account and that it would only subscribe for a blue tick for journalists when essential for reporting needs.
The “pay to play” verification model is also being tested by Twitter rival Facebook in Australia and New Zealand, which has also drawn major criticism.
Much is riding on Musk’s ability to find a business model for Twitter.
Last week Musk put the current value of Twitter at $20 billion (roughly Rs. 1,64,600 crore), less than half the $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3,62,100 crore) he paid for the social media platform just five months ago.
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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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