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After Elon Musk's $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in November, a swath of celebrity influencers and casual users alike vowed to abandon the platform in protest of the new owner's content moderation policies and massive layoffs across the company that particularly gutted teams responsible for user trust and safety.
That exodus, which included daily users with hundreds of thousands of followers, led somewhere: to existing and brand new startup social media apps, some of which were unprepared for the influx of new activity when so-called Twitter refugees began looking for a new social media platform to keep pinned to their home screen.
Here's a look at the alternative social media platforms looking to become the next legacy app.
Insider
Launched: May 2015
Number of users: 150 million monthly active users, Discord's internal statistics indicate.
Number of staff: 2,834, according to the company's LinkedIn page.
Funding: $995.4M raised across 16 rounds of funding, with an anticipated IPO later this year, per MLQ, an AI-based investment platform.
What people are saying: Discord was originally toted as a platform for gamers to connect, but has since grown to include a wide array of servers — essentially chat rooms based on user interests — its most popular being meme channels and for players of Grand Theft Auto.
The chat-based platform, instead of offering a large "public square" feeling where users can come across a wide variety of topics like Twitter does, instead segments users into servers based on their interests where they can speak to each other directly or use text-based features.
CEO and co-founder Jason Citron told The New York Times in 2021 that Discord's rapid expansion over the years, after beginning with just a handful of users, has been "surprising and wonderful and humbling."
Euronews wrote that the app's main appeal is allowing users to communicate in real-time using text, video, and audio. TechCrunch called Discord one of the best social media apps around, though the platform's highlighting of live conversations isn't for everyone.
Representatives for Discord declined Insider's request for comment.
Insider
Launched: March 2016
Number of users: About 1.3 million monthly active users, according to Mastodon's internal statistics — a jump up from 300,000 between October and November, following Musk's takeover of Twitter.
Number of staff: 8, per the company's LinkedIn
Funding: Raised $57,000 in 2021, The Washington Post reported. The site's CEO has turned down several six-figure investment offers from venture capital firms to preserve its ad-free, nonprofit status, according to PC Mag.
What people are saying: Founder and CEO Eugen Rochko was, after years as an avid user, dissatisfied with the state and direction of Twitter when he decided to launch Mastodon.
The open-source, decentralized social network platform functions similarly to Twitter, in that it allows users to post messages up to 1500 characters that are visible by the site's users in a collection of related chatrooms.
However, "getting started with Mastodon is the hardest part because it's not always clear where to start," according to PC Mag.
Despite the sometimes unintuitive platform design, more than 130,000 people were joining Mastodon each day in November, as Musk's takeover of Twitter sent users seeking alternative sites, The Guardian reported — though that activity has dropped off, according to the outlet, suggesting users aren't sticking around.
Representatives for Mastodon did not respond to Insider's request for comment.
Since its launch, Mastodon's open-source code has been used to create additional alternative social sites, including Truth Social, Vice reported. TechCrunch noted it's among the most talked-about Twitter alternatives, while Euronews called it confusing.
Insider
Launched: October 2019
Number of users: 556,000 daily active users, CEO Raluca "Kassandra" Pop told Insider.
Number of staff: Five — and expanding, Pop said.
Funding: $290,104 raised through WeFunder, a crowdsourcing investment app.
What people are saying: Hive Social seeks to put the fun back in posting online, Pop told Insider.
The 24-year-old self-taught programmer — who maintains handwritten notes for the business in a notebook kept near her bedside — has created a space where users can redecorate their profiles with custom colors, and share video, or text-based posts with their followers, attempting to roll the best parts of multiple social platforms into one.
Notably, Pop said, the platform takes a stricter stance on content moderation than Twitter does, to maintain a platform free from harassment and hate speech — which has surged on Twitter since Musk's takeover.
"A lot of the feedback that we get is that Hive is really welcoming and relaxing and it's really inclusive, so we're just continuing to maintain that," Pop told Insider. "We've taken a really harsh stance against hateful speech, transphobia, homophobia, white supremacy, I mean, all of those things we don't tolerate that on the app are very explicit with what we allow and what we don't allow."
In the wake of Musk's takeover of Twitter, Hive Social gained a large wave of users, mostly Gen Z and younger millennials. While the platform had the advantage of being established for several years and was able to keep afloat, Hive briefly struggled with the influx of new activity as it skyrocketed server costs and staffing needs.
The growing pains, Pop told Insider, have been worth it — and her sights are aimed even higher: "We definitely want to grow and become one of those next big four apps," she said.
The Verge described Hive as "a cleaner, better version of Twitter, with an attractive app featuring a familiar interface." Mashable declared the platform Twitter's "latest rival."
Insider
Launched: May 2021
Number of users: 3.5 million active users, according to the industry news site, Business of Apps.
Number of staff: 213, per the company's LinkedIn
Funding: The pre-revenue app has raised $110 million in two funding rounds, according to Business of Apps.
What people are saying: The audio-focused app functions like live, public podcasting, with listeners and speakers joining together in topic-based rooms and either broadcasting or chatting together.
Representatives for Clubhouse did not respond to Insider's detailed request for comment.
The pandemic-era app has shifted largely to business-related chats, according to Euronews. CEO Paul Davison said the company is working toward shifting to more intimate chatrooms over the current broadcast-forward configuration, Bloomberg reported.
PC Mag said Clubhouse is "on its way out," as the app saw a nearly 60% decline in downloads over the last six months.
Insider
Launched: February 2022
Number of users: 130,000 users total. Of those, about 20,000 active users, Jae Kaplan, Cohost co-founder told Insider.
Number of staff: Four full-time, with contracted support staff, Kaplan said.
Funding: The app had under $59,000 in the bank at the end of 2022, according to a Cohost financial update, posted quarterly to the site in the interest of transparency, Kaplan said. The only revenue stream the platform relies on are optional subscription fees paid by users.
What people are saying: Cohost has a "different vision" for social media, according to The Verge. Kaplan agrees.
"I prefer the terminology of 'Twitter alternative' because we are very much trying to do something different," Kaplan told Insider. "And not something that is just 'Twitter without bad parts.'"
Posts on cohost are entirely customizable using HTML or CSS coding — to the point where screenshots shared of the site may have entirely different layouts depending on which user made the post. Especially creative users have used the platform to develop their coding skills and build simple games.
"You know, we have the benefit of over 20 years of social media existing," Kaplan told Insider. "And I think personally, that taking all of that time, all of those lessons that we've learned, all of that knowledge, and then essentially just building a straight clone of something else is kind of lazy."
TechCrunch described Cohost as "fairly new and a bit rocky," but "could be appealing to people who want a simple alternative that actually looks like Twitter in some ways."
Insider
Launched: February 2022
Number of users: 2.85 million monthly visitors as of October 2022, according to right-wing media watchdog group, TheRighting — the outlet also reported Truth Social's traffic has seen a significant drop in users over the past two months.
Number of staff: 40 full-time employees, Variety reported
Funding: An SEC filing indicated the site, owned by Trump Media & Technology Group, had $27,203 in assets as of March 2022. "TMTG may never generate any operating revenues or ever achieve profitable operations," the filing read.
What people are saying: The Trump-owned social media site skyrocketed in popularity after the former president launched the site, marketing his app as a refuge safe from censorship.
Truth Social was briefly beating Twitter in app store downloads when it launched, Newsweek reported, but the "free speech" social media platform has faced dwindling audiences, huge financial losses, and a trademark denial in the last year.
Pew Research Center noted in an analysis of the platform that, though Truth Social totes itself as a nonpartisan platform, nearly half of the site's top 200 most popular accounts "have a reference to being right-leaning or pro-Trump in their profile – higher than any other alternative social media site studied."
The most popular topics on the site, Pew found, include guns, the Capitol riot, and vaccines.
Representatives for Truth Social did not respond to Insider's request for comment.
Mastodon's open-source code was used to create Truth Social's codebase, down to copying the earlier platform's error notices, Vice reported.
Insider
Launch expected: Q1 2023
Number of staff: Fewer than 10, co-founded by Alphonzo "Phonz" Terrell and DeVaris Brown — both former Twitter employees.
Funding: The app has raised a $2.75 million pre-seed round, Spill announced last month.
What people are saying: Designed as an alternative to the bird app by two former Tweeps, Spill is catering to "culture drivers."
While everyone will be welcomed to come spill their tea when the app officially launches, co-founder and CEO Phonz imagined the app with "Black creators, Queer creators, and a variety of influential voices outside the US" in mind.
"Our goal was to just highlight the best of what was happening on Twitter, which really is about culture, you know," Phonz told Insider. "And so that really set the table for the moment that we're having now."
Spill will aim to help creators monetize their viral posts and incentivize influencers to innovate on the platform, Phonz said — as Black Twitter has been known to do. Popular cultural movements and memes like #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, as well as the Kermit the Frog drinking tea meme (among many others) either originated or were popularized by the unofficial online network.
Following the announcement of the app's planned launch, Terrell tweeted that Spill had received 20,000 reservations for handles within 12 hours.
Insider
Launch expected: 2023, TBD
Number of staff: 9 full-time and contracted staff. Gabor Cselle, co-founder & CEO is a former Group Product Manager at Twitter. Sarah Oh, Co-Founder, previously was a Human Rights Advisor at Twitter.
Funding: T2 has raised $1.1 million from angel investors, Cselle told Insider.
What people are saying: Cselle, a former product manager at Twitter, had been imagining an alternative to the bird app for a while when, on November 4, there was a massive swath of layoffs at Twitter, including co-founder Sarah Oh.
"I was like, 'maybe now's the time,'" Cselle told Insider, who reached out and partnered with Oh on their new build. "And the idea T2 is to build initially with a small community from the ground up with a familiar format that has constraints — I think constraints fuel creativity. It's short, just like the Tick Tock style video stuff is looking at."
What will differentiate the beta-testing T2 from Twitter when it officially launches is a focus on community safety that has been built into the app from its foundation, the co-founders told Insider, instead of relying on reactionary policies.
"Usually the safety has come after something bad happens," Oh told Insider. "Usually you're kind of getting what resources you can to do the most protective, safety-first thing and so when Gabor called me up, and he had been envisioning something like what we all enjoy about Twitter with trust and safety built in, it was kind of it was the easiest decision to make."
The T2 website name will change so as not to evoke Terminator associations, Cselle told Insider. The app has a waitlist over five digits long, though the co-founder did not specify how many users are waiting for their handle to be approved to start posting.
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I know I should buy heads of romaine and iceberg and wash it and cut it fresh. I’m sure some of us can relate, we just don’t have the time to separate the leaves and wash and dry them individually, which makes bag lettuce enticing.
It’s just… you can see just by looking that some of the leaves are already spoiling. How can these bags have an expiration date of more than another day or two?
Win McNamee/Getty Images
Liberal US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor brushed aside conservative arguments against President Joe Biden's student-loan forgiveness plan on Tuesday, urging the justices to think about the tens of millions of affected students.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard over four hours of oral arguments related to two consequential cases challenging the Biden administration's program to cancel up to $20,000 in debt for federal borrowers.
Justices heard a case brought by Republican-led states who argued the debt relief would hurt their states' tax revenues, and later picked apart a case brought by two student-loan borrowers who sued because they did not qualify for the full $20,000 amount of debt relief.
Conservative justices appeared skeptical of the legality of Biden's plan in their lines of questioning, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch bringing up the issue of fairness when it comes to giving student debt relief to some, but not all.
"I think it appropriate to consider some of the fairness arguments," Roberts said, with Gorsuch also asking what the "cost" of the plan is "in terms of fairness" to people who have paid their loans, who haven't taken out loans, or who are ineligible for loans in the first place.
But Sotomayor challenged that argument. When questioning Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, on behalf of Biden, about the scope of the debt relief plan, Sotomayor asked: "I take your bottom-line answer to be, everybody suffered in the pandemic, but different people got different benefits because they qualified under different programs, correct?"
"There's inherent unfairness in society because we're not a society of unlimited resources. Every law has people who encompass it or people outside it," Sotomayor said, adding that "that's not an issue of fairness. It's an issue of what the law protects or doesn't."
Ahead of the arguments, Republican lawmakers also made their voices heard on the issue of fairness. GOP Sen. Rick Scott wrote on Twitter: I think it's unfair to make YOU pay off the debts of a small percentage of Americans who chose to take out student loans. Don't you?"
It's unclear which way the conservative-majority court will lean. Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the liberal justices in challenging the standing of both of the cases, but it would require the vote of an additional conservative justice to uphold Biden's debt relief plan.
Still, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona expressed confidence the plan will prevail following the arguments.
"The Department of Justice argued against the lawsuits aimed at denying relief to borrowers, made clear that challengers to the program lack standing to even bring their cases to court, and explained the Department of Education's decades-old authority used by multiple administrations to protect borrowers from the effects of national emergencies," Cardona said in a statement.
Reinhard Dirscherl/ullstein bild/Getty Images
The coast of Southern California is well known for its popular beaches, which are visited by millions of people each year and where swimmers and surfers — and now shark nurseries — abound.
The area in recent years has become a hot spot for great white sharks, which can frequently be captured with drones gliding along below the surface just 50 feet from shore, sometimes as many as 40 at a time.
Researchers with the Cal State Long Beach Shark Lab, led by Chris Lowe, have been monitoring the sharks, which are predominantly juvenile, and their new gathering spots.
"The first time I saw white shark near a beach, a baby white shark near a beach, I just couldn't believe it," Lowe told local outlet KABC, adding: "Then it went from one to five, and to 20 and to 40, and when you see all the sharks in one area, and you go, 'Those are white sharks at one of the most busiest beaches in the world. You're like, 'How did this happen?'"
Most of the juvenile sharks, aged around three or four years old, are 6 to 8 feet long. Adult white sharks can reach 12-20 feet, but they rarely come close to the shoreline. Instead, the gathering spots along the coast serve as white shark nurseries, where the juveniles stay temporarily before moving on to other places.
The shark lab is studying the behavior of the sharks, as well as how their behavior changes in the presence of people. The lab has frequently documented drone footage of the white sharks, swimming by a group of surfers or just off the shore where sunbathers, swimmers, and boogie boarders are present.
They are also studying what makes a good hot spot for the sharks and how long they typically stay.
As with people, the SoCal shoreline is highly appealing to juvenile sharks. The coast provides warmer waters, food sources like stingrays, fish, and squid, and safety from predators that are unlikely to travel into the shallower waters, including larger sharks or orcas.
Chase Dekker Wild-Life Images/Getty Images
Marissa Wu, the aquarium programs and operations director for the Roundhouse Aquarium, said the return of the sharks correlated with conservation efforts. The Roundhouse Aquarium, located on the Manhattan Beach pier, focuses on native species in the local Southern California waters, including sharks.
"There has been shark overfishing," Wu said, adding that there have been concerted efforts to enforce laws related to fishing practices. "Because those have been more regulated recently to help conserve populations of sharks in our local waters, we're starting to see that benefit. We're starting to see the populations come back, and those sharks are starting to appear more and more off our shores."
California banned actively targeting white sharks in 1994, as well as certain fishing nets that often entrapped the sharks. Populations of the sharks' preferred food sources, including marine mammals like whales, seals, and sea lions, have also rebounded, providing an additional boon to white sharks.
Wu said the sharks are incredibly important to the local ecosystem. They help maintain fish and stingray populations, as well as other shark and even marine mammal populations. Stingrays in particular are important to manage, as a beachgoer in Southern California is much more likely to be stung by one than to be attacked by a shark.
California remains low in terms of the number of shark attacks, especially compared to Florida. The discrepancy may be due to Florida's warmer water, and thus more swimmers, as well as the types of sharks that are present, such as bull sharks, which are more aggressive than white sharks.
Still, getting attacked by a shark is extremely rare, anywhere.
There were 57 unprovoked shark attacks on humans worldwide in 2022, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History's International Shark Attack File. The US leads the world in shark attacks, with 41 recorded last year, one of which was fatal. There were 16 attacks in Florida, making up 39% of the US total, while California had four.
Researchers at the shark lab and Wu have emphasized that sharks and humans can coexist. Most of the time when a juvenile white shark encounters a person off the California coast, it may check out the swimmer or surfer but just swim right on by.
"We can exist with these creatures just fine. We're aware of them, they're aware of us, and we all get home safely," Wu said.
Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images
There are a few things to keep in mind to stay extra safe if you're concerned about sharks when at the beach. Be aware of your surroundings and pay attention to any signs posted by lifeguards, which will often say if a shark has recently been spotted in the water. Sharks tend to avoid busy beaches, so it's generally safer to swim at crowded beaches or in groups.
If you do spot a shark in the water, keep your eyes on it. "That lets them know you see them, and they're less likely to interpret you as prey," Wu said. Most of the time, the shark is checking you out and will likely just move on along. But it's important to keep watching it and look out for aggressive behavior, such as if it starts moving rapidly toward or away from you. While watching the shark, you should swim calmly back to the beach.
If a shark does bite you, you should hit it in the eye or nose, or stick your hand in its gills. In most cases, the shark will release and not come back. Then you can call for help and return to the beach as quickly as possible.
Researchers emphasized it is still safe to swim along the Southern California coast, which sharks have historically inhabited longer than us.
"They've been here for longer than we have," Wu said. "It's just learning to exist in this shared home with them, safely."
Hello all! I am attempting my first ever chicken broth and I did everything this recipe asked me to do and i’m finally in the simmering stage. My question although is, how come I don’t see any fat or “foam” rising to the top? I see colored circles within the broth but I wanted to see if that was either just the stock or that’s the fat every recipe is referring too.
Just wondering if this pan is no longer safe to use even if i clean off the burnt stuff? Picture for reference
This is the brand/make of pan i am referring to: https://www.amazon.com/Farberware-17501-Purecook-Nonstick-Cookware/dp/B01IVPUN0M/ref=asc_df_B01IVPUN0M/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=198087151093&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=17199596740480478041&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9061285&hvtargid=pla-381317124470&psc=1
Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Rupert Murdoch, the media magnate behind the sprawling Fox News media empire, was eager to keep the election-denying MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell's advertisements on-air because of how much ad revenue he provided to the network, per a new court filing from Dominion Voting Systems.
"The man is on every night. Pays us a lot of money," read a snippet from Murdoch's January deposition in a court filing released on Monday. "At first you think it's comic, and then you get bored."
Murdoch went on to admit in his deposition that he could have pulled Lindell's MyPillow advertisements — but did not. This was even after the pillow CEO made wild, unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud on Fox News' programs, per Dominion's court filing.
"It is not red or blue, it is green," Murdoch said of Lindell during his deposition — presumably a reference to money.
Dominion's filing on Monday also alleges that Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott sent Lindell gifts and urged various Fox shows to book Lindell to "get ratings." But Lindell told Insider in mid-February that the idea that Fox might have bought him a gift is a "Dominion lie" and that Fox "never sent anything."
Dominion Voting Systems is suing Fox News in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit, which alleges the network pushed a conspiracy theory that their systems helped to rig the 2020 election. Lindell is also facing a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion. The company has accused him of hurting their business by spreading baseless conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud.
In a call with Insider on Monday, Lindell complained that Fox News has not had him on-air for a while.
"Ever since Smartmatic sued Fox News, no one in this country can go on any conservative stations and talk about the election," Lindell told Insider.
When asked about how Fox News stood by him and refused to pull his ads, Lindell said that he commends the network for "not punishing MyPillow" and standing up to Dominion.
"I mean, I'm glad that Fox News doesn't boycott because it has nothing to do with MyPillow and my 2,000 employees if I'm standing up for my country and trying to try to raise the flag of these machine companies that were hacked," Lindell told Insider, once again pushing an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that voting machines were rigged during the 2020 election.
Lindell in 2021 was was one of Fox's biggest advertisers, The Washington Post reported. It is unclear how much Lindell gives Fox News now to air his ads, or if he is as prominent of an advertiser as he was during the Capitol riot.
But Lindell and Fox News have had their share of disagreements — the network in September 2021 refused to run an ad where Lindell promoted a voter-fraud symposium. This move from Fox News resulted in Lindell pulling his ads from the network temporarily.
A Fox News spokesperson told Insider that Dominion is trying to "publicly smear Fox." The spokesperson also accused Dominion of "mischaracterizing the facts" and trying to "generate headlines" about its defamation lawsuit against Fox.
A Dominion Voting Systems spokesperson told Insider: "Dominion is a strong believer in the First Amendment and its protections. As long-settled law makes clear, the First Amendment does not shield broadcasters that knowingly or recklessly spread lies."
Meanwhile, Lindell has not stopped claiming that the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. In February, Lindell told late-night host Jimmy Kimmel that he has spent more than $40 million pushing Trump's baseless claims of voter fraud.
This total sum is up from the $25 million estimate Lindell gave Insider in December 2021. The figure amounts to four-fifths of Lindell's estimated $50 million net worth.
Al Bello/Getty Images
Rupert Murdoch admitted that individual Fox News hosts endorsed the falsehood that the 2020 election was "stolen" from Donald Trump, according to deposition excerpts included in a new court filing from Dominion Voting Systems.
In the Monday filing, it shows that Murdoch, the chairman of Fox Corporation, was asked whether hosts Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs, and Sean Hannity endorsed "this false notion of a stolen election." Murdoch answered in the affirmative.
"Oh, a lot," Murdoch responded when asked about Dobbs endorsing false election claims.
At the same time, Murdoch denied that Fox Corporation itself endorsed these false claims.
The distinction is an important one in the lawsuit. Dominion sued Fox News Network along with its parent company, Fox Corporation, in March 2021, also including Bartiromo, Pirro, and Dobbs as defendants.
Dominion alleged they collectively owed the election technology company $1.6 billion in damages for hosting Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, two conspiracy theorist lawyers who had represented Trump, on Fox News's shows, and endorsed their false claims that Dominion secretly flipped the 2020 election results.
In a filing last week, Dominion included numerous messages and deposition excerpts they argued show Fox News knew the claims about the election were false, and then hosted Powell and Giuliani anyway.
Fox News Network has defended itself by saying it was simply reporting the news. Fox Corporation, in legal filings, says Dominion's claims are out-of-step with defamation law and that it's too far removed from the editorial decision-making process at Fox News to be held liable in the case.
"Dominion is left arguing that Fox Corporation should be on the hook because Rupert or Lachlan Murdoch might have had the power to step in and prevent the challenged statements from airing," lawyers for Fox Corporation wrote in their own new filing Monday. "That argument has no basis in defamation law, would obliterate the distinction between corporate parents and subsidiaries, and finds no support in the evidence."
And in response to the new filing from Dominion, Fox News said in a statement: "Dominion's lawsuit has always been more about what will generate headlines than what can withstand legal and factual scrutiny, as illustrated by them now being forced to slash their fanciful damages demand by more than half a billion dollars after their own expert debunked its implausible claims.
"Their summary judgment motion took an extreme, unsupported view of defamation law that would prevent journalists from basic reporting and their efforts to publicly smear FOX for covering and commenting on allegations by a sitting President of the United States should be recognized for what it is: a blatant violation of the First Amendment."
Dominion's new filing, however, does provide some evidence that Rupert Murdoch and his son, Lachlan Murdoch, the CEO of Fox Corporation, weighed in on editorial decisions at Fox News. According to the filing, Rupert Murdoch said in his deposition he took care to strike a tone that wouldn't antagonize Trump.
"He had a very large following, and they were probably mostly viewers of Fox, so it would have been stupid," Rupert Murdoch said in the deposition.
Murdoch tried to thread the needle, Dominion argues, by helping Republicans win two US Senate seats that had gone to a runoff election in Georgia. Murdoch believed Trump would eventually concede, and Fox News's programming would be better focused on the January 5, 2021, runoff.
"Trump will concede eventually and we should concentrate on Georgia, helping any way we can. We don't want to antagonize Trump further, but Giuliani taken with a large grain of salt," Murdoch wrote. "Everything at stake here."
Paul Ryan, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been a Fox Corporation board member since 2019, repeatedly pushed Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch to "dispel conspiracy theories if and when they pop up" and said Fox News was "uniquely positioned to state the message that the election was not stolen," according to messages obtained by Dominion.
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
On January 5, 2021, Rupert Murdoch and Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott discussed whether Fox News opinion hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham should "say some version of 'The election is over and Joe Biden won,'" believing the words "would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election stolen."
"Scott told Rupert that 'privately they are all there' but 'we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers,'" Dominion wrote in the filing. "So nobody made a statement."
After January 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob rioted at the Capitol and sought to force Congress to overturn the election results, Murdoch took a different position. When a former Murdoch company executive said Fox News needed a "course correction," Murdoch said the media organization was "very busy pivoting" away from Trump.
"We want to make Trump a non-person," Murdoch said in an email.
In an email to a Fox Corporation board member a few days later, Murdoch recounted a conversation she had with Scott about changing the direction of the network's coverage.
"Just talked at length with Suzanne Scott. Everything changed last Wednesday [January 6]. She thinks everyone is now disgusted and previous supporters broken hearted," Murdoch wrote in an email.
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
The communications obtained by Dominion include other evidence that Fox News producers and executives were anxious about their hosts making false election fraud claims.
Meade Cooper and David Clark, two executives at the network, canceled Pirro's show one weekend because they were "very doubtful that [she'll] behave responsibly" and meaningfully push back against lies from guests, Dominion's lawyers wrote in the filing.
Fox Business Network executive Gary Schreier said in a message to a colleague that he was concerned about Bartiromo, too.
"The problem is that she [Maria] has gop conspiracy theorists in her ear and they use her for their message sometimes," he wrote. "I wish she had that awareness."
When Murdoch was asked in his deposition whether he could have told Scott, or the hosts, to "Stop putting Rudy Giuliani on the air," Murdoch responded: "I could have. But I didn't."
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Can I put it directly over it or does it need to elevated onto something? Please explain
Feels like a harder dried apricot. Very faint taste of garlic. Looked totally normal from the outside.
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Sen. Joe Manchin dodged a question on Sunday about whether he still thinks of himself as a member of the Democratic Party.
Manchin was interviewed on the talk show "Sunday Morning Futures," where Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo repeatedly pressed him to say whether he still considers himself a Democrat.
"I identify as an American," Manchin told Bartiromo. "I'm an American through and through."
During the same interview, Manchin called for unity between the two political parties.
"My main concern is how do we bring this country together?" Manchin said. "How do we make it work? How do we make Democrats and Republicans become Americans again, and not just party affiliates?"
"This is what's happening right now. We're pushing people further apart, making people take a side, and then we're rewarding for bad behavior," Manchin added. "The country has to be about America and coming together."
—Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 26, 2023
Manchin — who hails from West Virginia, a solidly red state — is known to be a moderate Democrat with conservative leanings. He was for two years one of the most powerful voices in the Senate: Because of the Democratic Party's slim majority, Manchin had the power to make or break bills.
For instance, Manchin wielded his influence when he torpedoed President Joe Biden's "Build Back Better" legislation in December 2021, vowing not to back the spending bill. But he also did his fair share of making legislation happen for the Democratic Party when he pushed for the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022.
After Sen. Raphael Warnock won the Georgia runoff election in December, Senate Democrats now have more breathing room. They hold a 51-seat majority in the Senate, making it possible to pass legislation even if Manchin remains a holdout.
But Manchin still holds a crucial seat for the Democratic Party in the 2024 election cycle. If he switches over to the GOP, he will put the Democratic Party's majority in jeopardy.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said that "it would be a great idea" if Manchin were to switch parties.
"It would not surprise you to know that I've suggested for years it would be a great idea, representing a deep red state like West Virginia, for him to come over to our side," McConnell said in December 2021.
Manchin has not made any formal moves to officially switch parties, but he has also not ruled it out in his public statements on the matter.
In December, Manchin dodged a question about whether he intends to switch over to the GOP. Manchin told CBS he doesn't see "much validity in the identity of being a Republican or Democrat." He added that he would tell people "later" what he decides to do with his party affiliation.
In January, Manchin remained noncommittal about whether he intends to run for president — and when pressed, did not say if he would run as a Democrat.
"I haven't made a decision about what I'm going to do in 2024. I've got two years ahead of me now to do the best I can for the state and for my country," Manchin told NBC's Chuck Todd. "Everything's on the table."
Representatives for Manchin did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
I’m following a recipe:
LOADED BAKED POTATO SOUP,
Disneyland's Carnation Cafe Yield: 6 servings.
Ingredients: 1 pound bacon, roughly chopped 1 medium yellow onion, diced 1 large carrot, peeled and diced 3/4 cup diced celery 4 large Russet potatoes, peeled and diced 4 medium red potatoes, diced 1/4 cup flour 2 cups chicken or vegetable stock Coarse salt, freshly ground pepper, to taste 4 cups heavy whipping cream Optional garnishes: chopped chives, bacon bits, sour cream, shredded cheddar and Monterey Jack cheese Method: 1. In a 6- to 8-quart stockpot over medium heat, fry bacon until crisp. 2. Remove bacon and drain on paper towels, reserving half for garnish. In bacon fat, cook onions, carrots, and celery until the onions are translucent.
(At this step:)Add potatoes and cook for 4 minutes, stirring occasionally.
At the part of the step where I’ve marked the potatoes are put in the pot. Which seems to be a massive amount of potatoes and all the bacon oil has been absorbed by the other vegetables. At this point I’m stirring dry potatoes impossibly cooking anything because it all doesn’t seem to fit. Did I miss something? Was I supposed to keep moving forward by throwing flour in to it?
Multiple engineers and product team members at Twitter, including Director of Product Management Esther Crawford, have been fired, according to multiple media reports.
Crawford spent over two years at Twitter, according to her LinkedIn, working on projects like Twitter Blue and Spaces.
Her layoff was first reported by Platformer's Zoë Schiffer on Saturday. The Verge's Alex Heath confirmed the reporting, along with another round of layoffs that affected multiple teams across the organization, including advertisement and product teams.
The layoffs included at least 50 team members, according to multiple outlets. Insider's Kali Hays first reported in January that 50 people on Twitter's product team were set to be let go.
Crawford made headlines in November last year after the rollout of CEO Elon Musk's hardcore work culture after a photo of her sleeping on the floor of Twitter HQ went viral.
"When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork," Crawford wrote.
—Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) November 2, 2022
According to a November report from Financial Times, the move "bothered" some employees at Twitter. One senior staffer told the outlet she was "bootlicking."
In November, Musk began what became a series of layoffs that slashed the headcount at Twitter from 7,500 employees to around 2,000 today. In November, Musk promised there would no longer be layoffs at the company. Despite this promise, the recent layoffs constitute the fourth round.
Crawford, however, survived the first three rounds of layoffs and became one of the faces touting Twitter's new subscription-based verification system.
Following the first round of layoffs in November, The Verge reported Crawford told employees at Twitter that mass firings were "required" for Twitter to survive, which distanced herself from her colleagues.
"I feel heartbroken that this process has required many good people to leave Twitter, but the business was not profitable and drastic cuts were going to be required to survive, no matter who owned the company," Crawford wrote on Slack, according to The Verge.
The Information reported in November that Crawford, among other employees, appeared to be "rising in prominence" in the company after Musk eliminated multiple executive positions in late October.
Unnamed employees at Twitter acknowledged this prominence in the FT report, saying she and Musk began working closely following the takeover.
"She has become a bit of an interpreter between Elon and the product team," one senior staffer told FT.
Under Crawford, multiple changes to Twitter Blue have been announced including the sunsetting of verified badges for celebrities and public figures, a new $1,000-per-month verification system for businesses, and a limit to who can use two-factor authentication to protect their accounts.
Twitter Blue currently has fewer than 300,000 subscribers. It is unclear if someone will take over Crawford's position.
Crawford and Twitter did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
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For my college dorm, that is. Curious as to what other options I have for searing a steak.
Tyler Le/Insider
Whether it is writing essays or analyzing data, ChatGPT can be used to lighten a person's workload. That goes for cybercriminals too.
Sergey Shykevich, a lead ChatGPT researcher at cybersecurity company Checkpoint security, has already seen cybercriminals harness the AI's power to create code that can be used in a ransomware attack.
Shykevich's team began studying the potential for AI to lend itself to cyber crimes in December 2021. Using the AI's large language model, they created phishing emails and malicious code. As it became clear ChatGPT could be used for illegal purposes, Shykevich told Insider the team wanted to see whether or not their findings were "theoretical" or if they could find "the bad guys using it in the wild."
Because it's hard to tell if a harmful email delivered to someone's inbox was written with ChatGPT, his team turned to the dark web to see how the application was being utilized.
On December 21, they found their first piece of evidence: cybercriminals were using the chatbot to create a python script that could be used in a malware attack. The code had some errors, Shykevich said, but much of it was correct.
"What is interesting is that these guys that posted it had never developed anything before," he said.
Shykevich said that ChatGPT and Codex, an OpenAI service that can write code for developers, will "allow less experienced people to be alleged developers."
Misuse of ChatGPT — which is now powering Bing's new, already troubling chatbot — is worrying cybersecurity experts, who see the potential for chatbots to aid in phishing, malware, and hacking attacks.
Justin Fier, director for Cyber Intelligence & Analytics at Darktrace, a cybersecurity company, told Insider when it comes to phishing attacks, the barrier to entry is already low, but ChatGPT could make it uncomplicated for people to efficiently create dozens of targeted scam emails — as long as they craft good prompts.
"For phishing, it is all about volume — imagine 10,000 emails, highly targeted. And now instead of 100 positive clicks, I've got three or 4,000," Fier said, referring to a hypothetical number of people who may click a phishing email, which is used to get users to give up personal information, such as banking passwords. "That's huge, and it's all about that target."
In early February, cybersecurity company Blackberry released a survey from 1,500 information technology experts, 74% of whom said they were worried about ChatGPT aiding in cybercrime.
The survey also found that 71% believed ChatGPT may already be in use by nation-states to attack other countries through hacking and phishing attempts.
"It's been well documented that people with malicious intent are testing the waters but, over the course of this year, we expect to see hackers get a much better handle on how to use ChatGPT successfully for nefarious purposes," Shishir Singh, Chief Technology Officer of Cybersecurity at BlackBerry, wrote in a press release.
Singh told Insider these fears stem from the rapid advancement of AI in the past year. Experts have said that advancements in large language models — which are now more adept at mimicking human speech — have proceeded quicker than expected.
Singh described the rapid innovations as something out of a "science fiction movie."
"Whatever we have seen in the last 9 to 10 months we've only seen in Hollywood," Singh said.
As cybercriminals begin to add things like ChatGPT to their toolkit, experts like former federal prosecutor Edward McAndrew are wondering whether companies would bear some responsibility for these crimes.
For example, McAndrew, who worked with the Department of Justice investigating cybercrime, pointed out that if ChatGPT, or a chatbot like it, counseled someone into committing a cybercrime, it could be a liability for companies facilitating these chatbots.
In dealing with unlawful or criminal content on their sites from third-party users, most tech companies cite Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. The act states that providers of sites that allow people to post content — like Facebook or Twitter — are not responsible for speech on their platforms.
However, because the speech is coming from the chatbot itself, McAndrew said the law may not shield OpenAI from civil suits or prosecution — although open source versions could make it more difficult to tie cyber crimes back to OpenAI.
The scope of legal protections for tech companies under Section 230 is also being challenged this week before the Supreme Court by a family of a woman slain by ISIS terrorists in 2015. The family argues that Google should be held liable for its algorithm promoting extremist videos.
McAndrew also said ChatGPT could also provide a "treasure trove of information" for those tasked with gathering evidence for such crimes if they were able to subpoena companies like OpenAI.
"Those are really interesting questions that are years off," McAndrew said, "but as we see it has been true since the dawn of the internet, criminals are among the earliest of adopters. And we're seeing that again, with a lot of the AI tools."
In the face of these questions, McAndrew said he sees a policy debate on how the US — and the world in general — will set parameters for AI and tech companies.
In the Blackberry survey, 95% of IT respondents said governments should be responsible for creating and implementing regulations.
McAndrew said the task of regulating it can be challenging, as there isn't one agency or level of government exclusively charged with creating mandates for the AI industry, and that the issue of AI tech goes beyond the US borders.
"We're going to have to have international coalitions and international norms around cyber behavior, and I expect that will take decades to develop if we're ever able to develop it."
One thing about ChatGPT that could make cybercrime more difficult is that it is known for being confidently erroneous — which could pose a problem for a cybercriminal trying to draft an email meant to mimic someone else, experts told Insider. In the code that Shykevich and his colleagues discovered on the dark web, the errors needed corrections before it would be able to aid in a scam.
In addition, ChatGPT continues to implement guardrails to deter illegal activity, although these guardrails can often be sidestepped with the right script. Shykevich pointed out some cybercriminals are now leaning into ChatGPT's API models — open-source versions of the application that do not have the same content restrictions as the web user interface.
Shykevich also said that at this point, ChatGPT cannot aid in creating sophisticated malware or creating fake websites that appear, for example, to be a prominent bank's website.
However, this could one day be a reality as the AI arms race created by tech giants could hasten the development of better chatbots, Shykevich told Insider.
"I'm more concerned about the future and it seems now that the future is not in 4-5 years but more in like in a year or two," Shykevich said.
Open AI did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
I have a bread book that uses dry milk in some of the recipes. The book itself and some research says 1/4 cup of dry milk is equal to 1 cup of liquid milk.
Some of the recipes follow that rule when saying how much to substitute, but I noticed others in the book don't. For example, a few recipes call for something like 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons of water and 2 tablespoons of dry milk, but says you can replace all of the water with the same amount of liquid milk instead of using dry milk. Since 2 tablespoons of dry milk is usually equal to 1/2 cup of liquid milk, I'm wondering what the correct amount to use is.
Is this a typo, or just a "close enough" kind of thing? Would the extra milk not make any kind of difference?
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