The Chompsky Weekly #76

In which inflation hits billionaires.

Nov 13, 2022

Hello.

As the meltdown of Twitter continues, Meta makes billions in losses and fires 13% of its workforce, and several other top-5 companies see stock prices crumbling, The Atlantic reckons The Age of Social Media is Ending.

I sort of hope they’re right, though I will miss Sterling Newton.

The launch of paid-for-verification on Twitter launched a “free-for-all of impersonation and misinformation” this week, as employees were fired or resigned, advertisers continued to pull out or pause their campaigns, and Elon announced that he was ending the company’s ‘work from home forever’ policy.

This culminated in a stock drop for Big Pharma’s Eli Lilly, when an impersonator who bought a blue check mark for the fake ‘Eli Lilly and Co’ account announced that insulin was ‘free now’.

Drew Harwell @drewharwell

Spokesperson for pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly says they're in communication with Twitter to address the fake-but-verified Eli Lilly tweet that has been up for three hours and has 1,500 retweets and 10,000 likes wapo.st/3UrrHSs

While Elon harps on about “doing it for the lulz” (really), not everyone believes that it’s simply the cashgrab shit-show it appears to be.

Journalist Dave Troy makes an interesting case for a grand plan by Musk and Jack Dorsey, who has supported Musk’s takeover, for ‘Twitter as a public good’:

No, Elon and Jack are not “competitors”. They’re collaborating.

It’s Sunday 13 November, 2022

Media News

Matt Hancock has decided to compete in the television game show I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! instead of doing the job taxpayers are paying him to do, and has been subsequently suspended as an MP before being slimed and feathered. So far, viewers have had to endure his asking fellow contestants for forgiveness for his conduct as Health Secretary during the pandemic, and bothering bugs and reptiles just trying to get on with their lives. (BBC/The Guardian)
Amazon has become the first public company ever to lose $1 trillion in market value. The company’s market capitalisation fell to $879 billion from $1.88 trillion, while Microsoft was “close behind with $889 billion in value lost”. Inflation and monetary policies have triggered an industry-wide hit in growth felt by many of the US’ largest companies. (Bloomberg)
Meta is firing 11,000 staff, a whopping 13% of its workforce. As it “invests heavily” in building mass-VR space ‘the Metaverse’, losses are expected to “grow significantly year-over-year” says CNBC; problems arose after “lukewarm guidance” for investors around last quarter’s losses, resulting in a massive stock drop. (CNBC)
Disney has announced a hiring freeze and job cuts from its workforce of 190,000 after “disappointing” quarterly earnings, apparently a direct result of Disney+ suffering as part of this year’s industry-wide streaming subscriber drop-off. (CNBC)
Three journalists were arrested covering a Just Stop Oil protest despite showing press cards. Law reform organisation Justice has warned this “might become commonplace” if the Public Order Bill passes into law. (Press Gazette)
Oliver Darcy of CNN claims that ‘Murdoch favours DeSantis over Trump’ as the next Republican presidential nominee, after three top Murdoch-owned outlets (Fox News, Wall Street Journal, New York Post) all published favourable coverage of DeSantis. Murdoch papers have “significant sway “ over Republican voters, Darcy notes. (CNN)
At 34, an “unprecedented number of women journalists are now detained in Iran”, says Reporters Without Borders. 42 journalists have been arrested during recent protests in the country over ‘morality police’ brutality. (RSF)
Staff at HarperCollins, owned by Murdoch’s NewsCorp and one of the ‘Big Five’ publishing companies, have gone on strike until they reach an agreement on a new contract. (NYT)

Campaigns + Content

Anxiety, Ambivalence and Ambition: the three A’s, according to Project Inside Out, a set of clarifying tools for people struggling with how to take action on climate change.

Visit Project Inside Out if you’re interested in clarifying your own thoughts, feelings and direction on climate action.

“A generation of children has paid the price of an unregulated online world”, says childrens’ commissioner Rachel de Souza, in an opinion piece for the Observer, as it’s reported that Tories are considering ditching parts of the Online Safety Bill that address “legal but harmful” online speech, in the name of free speech. The controversial bill has been in development hell for a while now, and stands to be redeveloped yet again under new culture secretary Michelle Donelan:

UK government criticised for failing to protect children from online harm