Swedish 'Future minister' doesn't do social media Social media is something you would think your "future minister" is active on. Not so in Sweden. As part of the Prime Minister's office, the minister for "Strategy, Future Issues and Nordic cooperation" is a significant and powerful voice. Kristina Persson's voice does not extend to the internet however. Criticizing his new …
Very few in the current government has any academic credentials, no experience outside of political work and their version of leveling the playing field is to point at the neighbor and demand raised taxes for him because he appears to be better of then you are.
Complete waste of oxygen....
What sort of person thinks there is any necessary connection between social media use and taking the future seriously? The premise of this idiotic meme seems to be
(a) social media is where I waste most of my time
(b) I am young, not too bright, and have a future (probably)
(c) therefore social media = future.
If I was paying the taxes that support this minister's wages, I'd want a refund for every hour she wasted on Twitter when she is supposed to be doing useful work.
I am wondering too "those that are not there (Facebook, Twitter) are the ones who are weird.". I totally disagree. And what about this "Kristina Persson's voice does not extend to the internet however." Is the internet really now Facebook and Twitter.
Nothing against Carl Bildt who "ran a not inconsiderable part of Swedish foreign policy through his personal Twitter account" and built up a stockpile of over 100,000 tweets"
It's just that it is/sounds so damned stupid that it makes me totally speachless. It would, however, make me happy if the pope built up a stockpile of over 100,000 tweets regarding condoms.
Oh dear, haa haa and haa haa.
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Ah, no it doesn't.
There are still a gazillion messages an hour flowing around the airline industry whose format was originally designed to be carried on store and forward teletype networks (not telex - that's a circuit switched network) but they are more or less universally carried on IP networks nowadays. Just like everything else.
Totally unscientific poll, but I spent a day being bored to death at cybersafety/digital citizenship presentations for the school (@1100 students) on cybersafety. There were 6 presentations each with a slightly different viewpoint & examples, 1 for each year (secondary ie teens).
When the presenters asked who was on twitter , very very few hands went up, on facebook, about 1/3rd of each group (and tellingly of that 3rd 90% were female), instagram - close to a 3rd again (big overlap between the groups and similar MF ratio). I was surprised and thought that the number would be higher. Speaking with presenters at the end of the day they said that this was typical of what they have been seeing in schools this year - last year the facebook was @50% and in the years before that as high as 90%.
I was looking for a method other than email to alert my year 12 software design & development to things that might of interest, reminders for homework etc expecting to have to create a facebook or twitter account but 0/24 used any form of social media. I have changed to my plan to increase the number of texts I send
Your recent competition for some Samsung SSD's required a loging to a well know Social Media site.
Whilst a good proportion of your readers are on 'Social Media' for one reason or another there are some who totally eschew the Likes of Facebook, Twitter, WHatsAp etc etc because we have better things to do with our lives (on a good day that includes reading this site)
Addiction to FB etc is already a problem* and by promoting its use, is a retrograde step IMHO.
* Don't think this is a problem?
Take any journet on Public transport and watch how many people are constantly checking FB or Twitter etc. Can't they go more than 10,20 or 30 minutes without checking to see what others are saying about them?
'Social media is something you would think your "future minister" is active on.'
First, I never heard of such a thing as a "future minister". I'd have taken it to mean "member of a shadow cabinet." Second, does social media comprise such a large part of the future? Facebook seems to be fine for keeping up with old friends. Twitter seems to serve variously as a modern game of "telephone", transmitting headlines with some degree of garbling, and as a tool for the many to demonstrate how few have the gift of a delivering short, pithy sayings.
The title "Minister for Strategy, Future Issues, and Nordic Cooperation" does not suggest to me that there is any real job. Strategy concerning what? Future issues of bonds? I don't think that Ms. Persson's abstention from social media deprives the public of vital information.
"A social media presence should be as natural for a politician to have a computer or cell phone"
Maybe that can be the case for a politician who needs to drum up voter support.
My opinion is that a person in office should spend his time doing his job, and Twitter is NOT part of the job description.
Like myself it seems the minister has in the past taken a look at T and F as evidenced by the existence of old and barely used accounts and had made the right decision, just as I did with Myspace, Geocities and other failed platforms. And why just mention T&F what about the hundreds of others some of which may indeed turn out to have a future? Is the minister in fact an avid user of LinkedIn, G+, runs a blog or prefers some other communication channel?
The problem here is those T&F users too lazy to grasp the concept that there may be other valid communications channels. If the minister caves in to them THEN Persson loses my respect. (And I suspect that like many other celeb/politicos the T&F accounts will be serviced by assistants anyway).
-The name of the political science professor is Ulf Bjereld.
-The translation of @framtidsminist would be "future minist", misspelled on purpose I suspect.
-The ending qoute is incorrect; "Det är inte konstigt eller ovanligt att finnas i sociala medier. Det är det omvända, att inte finnas där, som börjar bli konstigt" becomes " It is not strange or unusual to be in social media. It is the opposite, not being there, which is becoming strange."
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...in that all the major parties actually hire youngsters to tweet on behalf of their senior politicos?
That way the tweets look authentic (because the youngsters know what a tweet is) and they are always on-message (because the youngsters are paid to be on-message) ... but it is all a pack of lies.
Elon Musk is prepared to terminate his takeover of Twitter, reiterating his claim that the social media biz is covering up the number of spam and fake bot accounts on the site, lawyers representing the Tesla CEO said on Monday.
Musk offered to acquire Twitter for $54.20 per share in an all-cash deal worth over $44 billion in April. Twitter's board members resisted his attempt to take the company private but eventually accepted the deal. Musk then sold $8.4 billion worth of his Tesla shares, secured another $7.14 billion from investors to try and collect the $21 billion he promised to front himself. Tesla's stock price has been falling since this saga began while Twitter shares gained and then tailed downward.
Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, and others promised to loan the remaining $25.5 billion from via debt financing. The takeover appeared imminent as rumors swirled over how Musk wanted to make Twitter profitable and take it public again in a future IPO. But the tech billionaire got cold feet and started backing away from the deal last month, claiming it couldn't go forward unless Twitter proved fake accounts make up less than five per cent of all users – a stat Twitter claimed and Musk believes is higher.
Twitter has reportedly thrown its $44 billion buyout by Elon Musk to a shareholder vote, which could take place around late July or early August.
Execs told employees of the plans on Wednesday, according to outlets including CNBC and the Financial Times.
The move follows reiterations by Musk's camp that he is prepared to walk away from the deal if the social media network fails to provide accurate information on the number of fake accounts.
America's financial watchdog is investigating whether Elon Musk adequately disclosed his purchase of Twitter shares last month, just as his bid to take over the social media company hangs in the balance.
A letter [PDF] from the SEC addressed to the tech billionaire said he "[did] not appear" to have filed the proper form detailing his 9.2 percent stake in Twitter "required 10 days from the date of acquisition," and asked him to provide more information. Musk's shares made him one of Twitter's largest shareholders. The letter is dated April 4, and was shared this week by the regulator.
Musk quickly moved to try and buy the whole company outright in a deal initially worth over $44 billion. Musk sold a chunk of his shares in Tesla worth $8.4 billion and bagged another $7.14 billion from investors to help finance the $21 billion he promised to put forward for the deal. The remaining $25.5 billion bill was secured via debt financing by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, and others. But the takeover is not going smoothly.
GPUs are a powerful tool for machine-learning workloads, though they’re not necessarily the right tool for every AI job, according to Michael Bronstein, Twitter’s head of graph learning research.
His team recently showed Graphcore’s AI hardware offered an “order of magnitude speedup when comparing a single IPU processor to an Nvidia A100 GPU,” in temporal graph network (TGN) models.
“The choice of hardware for implementing Graph ML models is a crucial, yet often overlooked problem,” reads a joint article penned by Bronstein with Emanuele Rossi, an ML researcher at Twitter, and Daniel Justus, a researcher at Graphcore.
Twitter has officially entered the post-Dorsey age: its founder and two-time CEO's board term expired Wednesday, marking the first time the social media company hasn't had him around in some capacity.
Jack Dorsey announced his resignation as Twitter chief exec in November 2021, and passed the baton to Parag Agrawal while remaining on the board. Now that board term has ended, and Dorsey has stepped down as expected. Agrawal has taken Dorsey's board seat; Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor has assumed the role of Twitter's board chair.
In his resignation announcement, Dorsey – who co-founded and is CEO of Block (formerly Square) – said having founders leading the companies they created can be severely limiting for an organization and can serve as a single point of failure. "I believe it's critical a company can stand on its own, free of its founder's influence or direction," Dorsey said. He didn't respond to a request for further comment today.
Elon Musk must personally secure $33.5 billion to fund his $44 billion Twitter purchase after allowing a $12.5 billion margin loan against Tesla stock to expire.
Regulatory filings released Wednesday show the Tesla and SpaceX boss agreeing to secure "an additional $6.25 billion in equity financing" on top of the original $27.3 billion.
The Tesla boss's Twitter purchase originally relied on $21bn of equity that he had to provide along with $12.5bn in margin loans secured by his Tesla stock. That margin loan was dropped to $6.25bn on May 5, and this additional financing would eliminate it altogether.
Elon Musk said his bid to acquire and privatize Twitter "cannot move forward" until the social network proves its claim that fake bot accounts make up less than five per cent of all users.
The world's richest meme lord formally launched efforts to take over Twitter last month after buying a 9.2 per cent stake in the biz. He declined an offer to join the board of directors, only to return asking if he could buy the social media platform outright at $54.20 per share. Twitter's board resisted Musk's plans at first, installing a "poison pill" to hamper a hostile takeover before accepting the deal, worth over $44 billion.
But then it appears Musk spotted something in Twitter's latest filing to America's financial watchdog, the SEC. The paperwork asserted that "fewer than five percent" of Twitter's monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) in the first quarter of 2022 were fake or spammer accounts, which Musk objected to: he felt that figure should be a lot higher. He had earlier proclaimed that ridding Twitter of spam bots was a priority for him, post-takeover.
Updated Last week Elon Musk hit pause on his Twitter acquisition over the platform's "less than 5 percent" bot figure.
The Register asked the microblogging website how it made the estimate and was stonewalled, but in ensuing discussions over the weekend, Musk blurted out that the sample size was 100 accounts.
One Musk fan asked how the userbase might help uncover the "real percentage" of fake accounts and was told:
Elon Musk has hit the brakes on his proposed takeover of Twitter in light of the platform's insistence that spam accounts accounted for less than five percent of its daily active users.
The figure was raised in an SEC filing on Monday, the company's latest earning release [PDF], where it said "there are a number of false or spam accounts in existence on our platform."
The company continued in the filing: "We have performed an internal review of a sample of accounts and estimate that the average of false or spam accounts during the first quarter of 2022 represented fewer than 5 percent of our mDAU [monetizable daily active users] during the quarter."
Elon Musk has bagged $7.14 billion in funding from Oracle billionaire co-founder Larry Ellison, cryptocurrency exchange Binance, and Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, as well as top VC firm Sequioa and others, in his quest to acquire Twitter.
The world's richest man may be worth around $250 billion on paper, but he still needs a little more help from investors to secure enough money to take over the bird-themed microblogging site. The Twitter board last month accepted Musk's offer to take the biz private at $54.20 per share, a $44 billion deal in effect. The SpaceX supremo promised to secure $21 billion himself while the remaining $25.5 billion will be footed by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, and others via debt financing.
Musk sold $8.4 billion of his own Tesla shares last week, causing its share price to temporarily dip by 12 percent. Now, he's cobbled together another $7.1 billion from 18 investors, ranging from VC firms and asset managers to private wealth funds and a cryptocurrency exchange, according to an SEC filing Thursday.
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