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Musings From Abroad

Elon Musk goes tough on revenue drive, says government, businesses to pay for using Twitter

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Billionaire owner of electric car manufacturer, Tesla, Elon Musk, on Tuesday, said government and commercial businesses using Twitter will have to pay for it in a bid to drive revenue and make the social media company he acquired last week become profitable.

In a tweet, Musk wrote that the company will consider charging a “slight” fee for commercial and government users for using the platform.

According to Musk, the fee which will not be very significant, will be part of his push to reposition the company and grow its revenue which has made it lag behind major social media rivals like Facebook and Google.

“Twitter will always be free for casual users, but maybe a slight cost for commercial/government users.

“Some revenue is better than none!” Musk wrote on Twitter while announcing the measure.

This will not be the first time the world’s richest man would be mulling on measures that would place the platform as a profitable business model.

Last week, a few days after completing the take over of Twitter, Musk said he would develop new ways to monetise tweets and crack down on executive pay to slash costs at the social media platform company.

He added that he planned to develop features to grow business revenue, including new ways to make money out of tweets that contain important information or go viral.

On Monday, at the annual Met Gala held in New York, Musk said the reach of Twitter was currently only “niche” without equal revenue to go with it and that he would want a much bigger percentage of the United States to be on the platform.

He said he wanted to make Twitter less ‘niche’ and more revenue driven as much as possible just as he has been able to Tesla a very profitable company.

After completing the deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion, Musk had said he wanted to enhance the platform with new features, make the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeat spam bots, and authenticate all humans.

Musings From Abroad

French army begins Chad pullout

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Just two weeks after local authorities said they were terminating their defence collaboration, the French army announced that jets deployed in the capital N’Djamena had returned home on Tuesday, marking the beginning of France’s military departure from Chad.

The government of Chad, a crucial Western partner in the war against Islamic jihadists in the area, unexpectedly terminated its defence cooperation treaty with France on November 28, a decision that caught French authorities off guard.

It is still unclear how the evacuation will be executed and if any French forces will remain in the central African country at all, even after the first Mirage aircraft returned to their base in eastern France on Tuesday.

“It marks the beginning of the return of French equipment stationed in N’Djamena,” Army spokesperson Colonel Guillaume Vernet said.

Due to anti-French sentiment and military takeovers in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, France has already withdrawn its troops from those West African nations.

Decades of French military participation in the Sahel area came to an end with the departure from Chad, and more recently, French military operations against Islamist extremists in the region were discontinued.

There are still around 1,000 French soldiers in Chad. Vernet stated that it would still take several weeks for the two nations to establish a schedule for reducing its activities.

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Musings From Abroad

Court documents show Meta contractor overlooked Ethiopia rebel threats to moderators

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New evidence cited by Reuters suggests that a contractor employed by Facebook’s parent company, Meta, overlooked threats against content moderators by Ethiopian rebels during a case contesting the removal of dozens of moderators in Kenya.

Last year, 185 content moderators sued Meta and two contractors for losing their positions with Sama, a Kenyan business that moderated Facebook material, for seeking to form a union.

After Facebook switched contractors, they were barred from applying for the same jobs at Majorel.

Foxglove, a British non-profit helping Ethiopian moderators, submitted court filings on Dec. 4 alleging that Sama ignored their accusations that OLA rebels had targeted them for deleting their videos.

In the petition obtained by Reuters, the moderators said Sama accused them “of creating a false account and manufacturing” the threatening messages before agreeing to a probe and transferring one of the rebels’ officially named moderators to a safe house.

In his statement, Moderator Abdikadir Alio Guyo said that OLA had threatened “content moderators who were constantly pulling down their graphic Facebook Posts.”

“They told us to stop removing their content from Facebook or else we would face dire consequences,” he said, adding that his supervisor dismissed his concerns.
In his declaration, another moderator, Hamza Diba Tubi, stated that OLA sent him a message with the names and addresses of both himself and his coworkers.

“Since I received that threatening message, I have lived in so much fear of even visiting my family members in Ethiopia,” he said.

After peace negotiations in Tanzania in 2023 failed to end a decades-old conflict, the government of Oromiya, Ethiopia’s biggest province, accused OLA rebels of killing “many civilians” in assaults.

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