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MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who was permanently suspended from Twitter last year after repeatedly making the baseless claim that former President Trump won the 2020 election, created a new account on the social media platform Sunday but was banned again just hours later.  "Hello everybody, I'M BACK ON TWITTER. My only account is @MikeJLindell! Please RT and FOLLOW to SPREAD THE WORD," Lindell tweeted shortly before noon.A Twitter spokesperson told Fox Business around 5:00 p.m. that Lindell's new account had been "permanently suspended for violating the Twitter Rules on ban evasion." Michael Lindell, CEO of My Pillow reacts as U.S. President Donald Trump attends a Made in America roundtable meeting in the East Room of the White House in Washington, U.S. July 19, 2017.  (REUTERS/Carlos Barria / Reuters) Lindell had included a video in which he explained that other fake accounts were imitating him and @MikeJLindell was his only real profile. "Please share it with everybody you know… so that we can get the word out over here at Twitter in case they do take it down," Lindell said in the video, before it was deleted with his account.  TEXAS LAWMAKER SAYS STATE WILL 'ROLL OUT THE RED CARPET' IF ELON MUSK…

In theory, social media networks provide every human being with an equal opportunity to share thoughts and images with everyone else. In practice, they reflect the many fragmentations of politics and society and, in doing so, grant ever greater power to those who have power, through their office, their wealth or their celebrity. The most fundamental questions regarding social media are the same as those which apply to “traditional” news media: Who owns them? And why? After this, we need to ask how society – through governments and international agreements – regulates the media, to prevent them causing harm. This leads to questions about criteria and mechanisms for curbs on freedom of expression. When one person makes a bid to become sole owner of an established global forum, these questions need to be answered. Let’s indulge in a thought experiment. What would have happened if Twitter and Facebook had been around when Hitler was on the rise, if, instead of writing his “Struggle” between 1924 and 1926, he had vomited his anti-Semitic hatred and grandiose schemes into Twitter “threads” or Facebook posts? Would this have got him banned from the platforms (if their owners did not support unregulated “free speech”)?…

In an emergency meeting on Friday, Twitter employees lashed out over Elon Musk's deal to acquire the company for $44 billion, accusing the world's richest man of bigotry and fretting over potential job cuts once the deal closes.Staffers at the 'impromptu' all-hands meeting fired angry questions at executives including CEO Parag Agrawal, who was described as looking tired and at times annoyed, according to Insider. Reached by DailyMail.com on Saturday morning, a Twitter spokeswoman declined to comment. One employee at the meeting described Musk as anti-gay and anti-transgender, expressing fear that his ownership would hurt efforts to recruit new employees.'What should we tell the LGTBQ community at recruiting conferences we're lined up to attend when they ask us why they should come work at Twitter when we just sold ourselves to an open homophobe and transphobe?' the staffer asked Dalana Brand, Twitter's chief people and diversity officer.Brand diplomatically avoided agreeing with that assessment of Musk, responding: 'I cannot speak to Elon's personal feelings on these things. I can't speak to what he's done in his other companies, in terms of people's experiences.' 'Perhaps in the future we'll be able to have a conversation. That may be telling,' she added. At an all-hands meeting on Friday,…

Contained within 95 pages of dense legal jargon, the warning from Twitter to Elon Musk was clear: don’t use your considerable power on the social media platform to attack the company.The world’s richest man and owner-in-waiting of Twitter signed an agreement for the planned $44bn (£35bn) takeover last week confirming that he could tweet about the deal so long as “such tweets do not disparage the company or any of its representatives”.Yet hours later the self-described “free speech absolutist” was engaging with tweets criticising senior Twitter staff, including an interaction with a political podcast host who had labelled the company’s legal head, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s “top censorship advocate”. Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s legal head, was the victim of a pile-on sparked by a Musk tweet. Photograph: Mike Blake/ReutersThe inevitable consequence for Gadde was one of the grimmer phenomena of social media: a pile-on. Comments included calls for her to lose her job and, in a typical example of unpleasant digital hyperbole, statements that Gadde would “go down in history as an appalling person”.Announcing the deal to buy Twitter last week, Musk said: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital…

Twitter’s chief executive, Parag Agrawal, sought to quell employee anger on Friday during a company-wide meeting where employees demanded answers to how managers planned to handle an anticipated mass exodus prompted by Elon Musk.The meeting comes after Musk, the Tesla chief executive who sealed a $44bn deal to buy the social media company, repeatedly criticized Twitter’s content moderation practices and a top executive responsible for setting speech and safety policies.At the internal town hall meeting, executives said the company would monitor staff attrition daily, but it was too soon to tell how the buyout deal with Musk would affect staff retention.Musk has pitched lenders on slashing board and executive salaries but exact cost cuts remain unclear, according to sources familiar with the matter. One source said Musk would not make decisions on job cuts until he assumed ownership of Twitter.“I’m tired of hearing about shareholder value and fiduciary duty. What are your honest thoughts about the very high likelihood that many employees will not have jobs after the deal closes?” one Twitter employee asked Agrawal, in a question read aloud during the meeting.Agrawal answered that Twitter had always cared about its employees and would continue to do so.“I believe the…

A life-size cat backpack made of faux fur is making waves on Twitter in Japan. The bags are hand-sewn by Miho Katsumi, a Japanese housewife based in Fukui prefecture. The backpacks sell for $1,000 a piece. Loading Something is loading. In Japan, people on Twitter have been going nuts over a series of plush backpacks that look just like real-life cats. Crafted by Japanese housewife Miho Katsumi, who is based in Fukui prefecture, the hand-sewn bags feature cats with pink paw pads, huge gleaming eyes, and furry tails. Katsumi has made true-to-life replicas of Persian, Munchkin, and British Shorthair cats. The bags are usually made of faux fur, which Katsumi dyes herself, per her official website. Making the bags is no easy feat. Katsumi told Insider it takes her one week to design each bag and one to three months to make it."It may take more time to achieve a satisfactory result," Katsumi added. The cats are sewn piece by piece. A small pattern usually requires 22 hand-stitched pieces of fabric, while a larger model, such as the backpack, is made up of about 80 different pieces, Katsumi said. A post shared by 猫制作pico (@nekoseisaku_pico) On April 15, Katsumi posted four photos…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk hasn’t yet assumed ownership of Twitter — and the attorneys noted they’re representing Twitter’s position as a public company. | Susan Walsh/AP Photo SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter tried to fend off a free-speech lawsuit on Thursday even as a federal judge asked if Elon Musk’s takeover might make the whole case moot. “Your company has been taken over by a new owner, and your new owner may disagree with your position,” U.S. District Judge William Alsup told Twitter’s lawyers on Thursday. “And I don’t want to have to spin my wheels and do a lot of work for nothing. So when is your new owner going to decide whether to continue with this lawsuit?” Independent journalist Alex Berenson, a vocal critic of the government’s pandemic response, sued Twitter after the company kicked him off the site for describing Covid vaccines as an advance therapeutic with risky side effects. The complaint, which got its first preliminary hearing in a San Francisco federal court on Thursday, could be a test case for how the social media company will handle content moderation under the ownership of Tesla’s headline-driving CEO. It’s also a Venn diagram for the online debate that’s…

Twitter has been overstating its number of active users for nearly three years. The company admitted this in its quarterly earnings report for the first quarter of 2022. "In March of 2019, we launched a feature that allowed people to link multiple separate accounts together in order to conveniently switch between accounts. An error was made at that time, such that actions taken via the primary account resulted in all linked accounts being counted as mDAU. This resulted in an overstatement of mDAU from Q1’19 through Q4’21," the report says. The difference in users counted ranges from 1.4 million to 1.9 million daily users, with the largest difference found in the last quarter of 2021, the company announced. The error doesn't dramatically impact Twitter's results, given that the company currently has 229 million active users (with hope that the number is accurate this time). It is, however, telling that Twitter has already made a similar mistake once before, having counted its monthly active users inaccurately back in 2017. Other than this tiny error, Twitter's earnings report isn't bad, with the company reporting Q1 revenue of $1.2 billion, a 16 percent year-over-year increase, and a massive net income increase from $68…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the Tesla Shanghai Gigafactory groundbreaking ceremony in Shanghai, China January 7, 2019. Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comNEW YORK, April 27 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Four years ago, Elon Musk vowed to set up a peanut brittle company to take on Warren Buffett’s iconic U.S. confectioner See’s Candies. Then he changed his mind. It wouldn't be surprising if Musk's $44 billion deal to buy social network Twitter went the same way.Sure, the Tesla boss was clearly serious about acquiring Twitter as of recently. The financing from Morgan Stanley is shored up. The agreement includes a fee of $1 billion that he – or Twitter – would have to pay if they renege on the contract. And Twitter’s lawyers even wedged in a so-called “specific performance” clause, which could theoretically force Musk to buy the company if he threatens to back out, though in practice this could probably be settled by adding to the break fee.There are good reasons for him to get cold feet. The biggest is Tesla. The electric-vehicle maker’s stock has fallen around a fifth since Musk first revealed his stake in Twitter, partly because Musk may sell shares to fund his…

News of the takeover could be shifting the platform’s demographicsWithin hours of the news that Elon Musk, a serial entrepreneur, would add Twitter to his collection, users noticed a peculiar trend: left-leaning accounts were bleeding followers, while right-wing users enjoyed a boom. The Economist studied the pattern by charting the number of followers that America’s members of Congress had on Twitter before and after the deal was announced on April 25th. The results are subtle, yet highly consistent. The average number of followers for all Senate Democrats dropped by around 0.2% between April 25th and April 26th. Accounts linked to Republicans, however, increased by 0.8%. The same was true for the House of Representatives, with Democrats losing and Republicans gaining followers.Vice-President Kamala Harris lost the greatest number of followers, dropping 22,000 in one day. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, two progressive senators, shed more than 19,000 and 14,000 followers, respectively. On average, Democratic senators lost 2,700 followers each. A significant drop in Twitter followers across various accounts usually indicates an operation to clean up “bots”—automated accounts controlled by software. But that the vast majority of Republican senators and representatives actually gained significant numbers of followers suggests that was not the…