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Russia will block Twitter within a month if it fails to delete banned content, authoritiestoldstate media Tuesday.

Vadim Subbotin, the deputy chief of Russias state communications watchdog Roskomnadzor, issued the warning a week after the country began slowing down the social media platforms speed over the dispute. The agency acted amid tensions with western social media platforms over what Moscow calls censorship against its state-affiliated accounts.

Weve taken a month to watch Twitters reaction on the issue of removing prohibited information. Appropriate decisions will be made depending on the social network administrations actions, the state-run TASS news agency quoted Subbotin as saying.

If Twitter doesnt comply with Roskomnadzor and Russian legislations requirements, then we will consider the issue of completely blocking the service in Russia, he warned.

The watchdog says the banned content at the center of the conflict involves more than 3,000 posts containing information about suicide, child pornography and drugs that apparently remained online since 2017. Polls say a mere 3% of Russians use Twitter.

Experts interviewed by The Moscow Times called Russias announcement that it would disrupt Twitter access unprecedented but noted that it was unclear how it would be carried out.

The Kremlin has said it supports Roskomnadzors efforts to force foreign platforms to comply with Russian law.

President Vladimir Putin last month raised fines for social media giants accused of discriminating against Russian media. On New Years Eve, he granted Roskomnadzor the power to block social media platforms if they are found to discriminate against Russian media.

Putinaccusedsocial media giants in January of controlling society and restricting the right to freely express viewpoints.

Russia previously banned the social networking website LinkedIn for failing to store users data on Russian servers and, more recently, reversed a decision to ban the Telegram messaging app after a two-year attempt to block it.

This article first appeared inThe Moscow Timesand is republished in a sharing partnership with the Barents Observer.

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Russia threatens to block Twitter within 30 days | The Independent Barents Observer - The Independent Barents Observer

MyPillow founder and staunch Trump ally Mike Lindell plans to launch a social network of his own in the next few weeks, creating a haven for the kind of pro-Trump conspiracy theories that have been banned on more prominent social-media sites. On Lindells Vocl social media platform, users will be free to claim that a supercomputer stole the election from Donald Trump, or that vaccines are a tool of the devil.

Any new social media network faces serious challenges. But Vocl must grapple with a daunting problem before it even launches: a website called Vocal, spelled with an A, already exists.

On Thursday, lawyers for Vocals publicly traded parent company, Creatd, Inc., warned Lindell, in a letter reviewed by The Daily Beast, to change his social media networks name and surrender ownership of the Vocl.com domain name. If Lindell refuses to change the name, he could face a lawsuit.

Lindell claims Vocl is also an acronym. Ours stands for the Victory of Christ's Love, Lindell added.

While Lindell has promised to turn Vocl into a cross between Twitter and YouTube, Vocal is a publishing platform similar to Medium where writers can post and monetize articles.

It is clear that you are acting with bad faith and with intent to profit from Creatds mark, the letter reads, claiming Lindells Vocl would tarnish the Vocal brand.

Its not like anything youve ever seen, Lindell previously told Insider, describing his similarly named social network. Its all about being able to be vocal again and not to be walking on eggshells.

Creatd owns the trademark for using Vocal in a number of ways related to social networking, including creating virtual communities and online networking services. Along with surrendering ownership of the Vocl.com domain name, Creatd wants Lindell to destroy any products with Vocl branding and never use the name again.

Creatd is prepared to take all steps necessary to protect Creatds valuable intellectual property rights, without further notice to you, the letter reads.

When asked on Friday morning about the new legal warning, the embattled MyPillow CEO and Trump friend replied, It has nothing to do with their trademark. I haven't even launched yet. But it has nothing to do with us.

Lindell claims Vocl is also an acronym.

Ours stands for the Victory of Christ's Love, Lindell added.

Early Friday afternoon, he called back to say, We looked into it, and we believe it would be confusing, so we are going to announce a different name and URL by Monday.

Lindell is already facing one major lawsuit. In February, voting-tech company Voting Systems sued Lindell and MyPillow over his baseless allegations that Dominion was involved in a scandalous election theft. Concurrently, Lindell, with the help of Trump attorney and Gawker-slayer Charles Harder, has also recently sued the Daily Mail tabloid, over the publications January article that the Trump pal had a secret romance with 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt star Jane Krakowski, a story that both parties have flatly denied.

For years, the pillow mogul has been a personal friend of former President Donald Trump, and a diehard MAGA supporter and campaigner. During the 2020 presidential election, Lindell served as Trump 2020s Minnesota co-chair, and following Trumps loss in the Electoral College and general election to Democrat Joe Biden, the MyPillow CEO became one of the loudest voices in the country supporting the broader Trump effort to nullify the outcome of the presidential race. (Trumps anti-democratic crusade on this, of course, climaxed with his instigation of the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., an event that led to the ex-presidents second impeachment in the House.)

During the tumultuous presidential transition period, Lindell was a major behind-the-scenes funder of several efforts to challenge the 2020 results, and near the very end of Trumps term even visited the then-president at the White House to brief him on discredited documents alleging that China and other foreign nations helped hack the election and throw it to Biden. Ever since the start of the Biden era, Lindell has not given up aggressively promoting the fiction that Trump actually won, even as it has resulted in his banishment from certain social media platforms, his business getting shunned by other companies, and ballooning legal risk.

Alternative social media networks aimed at conservatives have been challenged by hacks and other technical issues, but Lindell claims Vocl wont face those problems. Hackers recently hit far-right social network Gab, while social media platform Parler went offline for a month after the U.S. Capitol riot when Amazon Web Services pulled support for its hosting. In contrast, Lindell told Insider that Vocl will have its own servers, with space-age stuff to prevent hacking.

Lindell told Insider that Vocl has a staff of roughly 10 people, but declined to describe them or where theyre working for their safety.

Vocl users will be free to promote conspiracy theories about election fraud and vaccines, according to a speech Lindell gave Wednesday at a rally in Arizona.

Every word out of their mouths is going to say Dominion, Smartmatic fraud, vaccine fraud, Lindell told the cheering crowd, describing the content on Vocl.

Read more from the original source:
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell Is Trying To Launch a Social Media Site, and It's Already Resulted in a Legal Threat - The Daily Beast

In 2020, the Race, Prosperity, and Inclusion Initiative completed two research projects on the role of social networks in economic mobility, one project based in Charlotte, NC and the other based in three cities (Racine, WI; San Francisco, CA; and Washington, DC). The purpose of this research was to better understand how the social networks of groups of diverse individuals are related to economic outcomes and opportunities such as jobs, stable housing, and education.

In this research, social networks refers to the set of personal relationships which individuals rely on for resources, information, advice, and help. These four locations were selected due to their diverse economic mobility profiles. We hypothesized that social networks of individuals vary in terms of their size, composition, function, and formation based on an individuals own characteristics, including their race, gender, and income. We also hypothesized that social networks are linked to outcomes in employment, housing, and education by providing social capital in the form of resources, advice, information, or help that may tie to economic mobility.

We were motivated by previous research which showed that local dynamics appear to drive economic mobility. While we now understand more about the dynamics of economic mobility, we were not able to identify data that could explain how social networks function for low SES populations or for communities of color in the domains important to economic mobility. We also did not have data on the conditions under which these social networks might confer opportunities for economic mobility.Our projects were focused on filling this vacuum. Over the course of 6 months, which coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, we analyzed over 30,000 interpersonal network connections drawing on data from 431 interview participants across all four cities to understand how social networks are linked with economic outcomes. Our main findings were:

1. Race is the most important and consistent differentiator of social networks. For example, In Washington DC, 97% of people in white mens job networks were also white. The graphic below depicts the racial homogeneity of social networks in Charlotte, NC.

2. Across all four cities, Black males tended to have the least robust networks for jobs, education, and housing. In Charlotte, Black men typically relied on just one person on average for support. Similarly, Latinos had relatively thin and small networks mostly reliant on family members with Latinas (Hispanic women) being the least networked within this racial group.

3. Outside of family, jobs, education, and housing, networks were primarily formed through work and education settings (college or K-12 schooling). Community activities were also mentioned as a means through which social networks are formed, specifically in San Francisco.

4. Low-income participants in Charlotte and San Francisco had small social networks. Higher-income groups also had fewer people in their networks, but those contracts were very reliable for information, advice, networking, and providing references.

Policy Opportunities

One of our principal goals in conducting the research was to ensure that local communities contributed to and were aware of the findings of the projects. We intentionally partnered with local leaders and local non-profits to share the intentions of the study, to solicit suggestions about what to include in the interview questions and to share the final results as broadly as possible. We did this in the hope that the local communities would attain a sense of ownership of the results and be empowered to lead on solutions.

From a policy perspective, the results suggest that there are numerous ways of addressing racialized and economic status-based social networks. What can be done? While we do not offer a blueprint for building social capital, we do suggest some potential paths forward to achieve equitable social networks in these cities.

1. De-segregate communities

On a national scale, residential segregation has declined in the past few decades, but patterns of residential segregation are still prevalent in the cities we studied. The most common measure of segregation, the dissimilarity index (with 0 indicating the lowest level of segregation and 100 being the highest) shows what share of one racial group would have to move to another neighborhood in order to achieve a uniform distribution of races across a city. The table below shows the white-Black dissimilarity index across our cities of study.

White-Black Segregation in Select Cities (Census 2000)

Source: Diversity and Disparities Project, Brown University

The strong racial homogeneity in social networks in the four cities reflects a range of public policy choices made over the last few decades that have essentially maintained spatial segregation. These public policy choices are most evident in housing and educational policies. Since racially homogenous social networks reflect racial segregation, city governments can make a commitment to creating more inclusive communities by undoing racist housing policies, changing restrictive zoning rules, desegregating public housing units, addressing transport inequality, and focusing on transformative placemaking.

2. Focusing on Black boys and men

One of our key findings was that Black men had the least robust social networks. Our results also suggest that most social networks for jobs and education were formed at school or at work. The thin social networks we observed for Black men reflect policy choices that have had the effect of removing Black males from the domains and moments that are critical for forming robust and reliable social networks.

In all our cities of study, Black students were more likely to be suspended compared to their white counterparts as shown in the figure below. Additionally, male students were more likely to be suspended in all four cities.

City governments must set an explicit goal to support the development of Black boys. This should start with an effort to drive down school suspension rates among Black boys. Keeping Black boys in school and building a culture of care in place of a dismissive suspension and punishment culture can go a long way in ensuring that public schools are adequately serving the needs of Black boys. Additionally, some localities are exploring mentorship programs for Black boys to help them navigate academic and non-academic environments. Local governments can also partner with local community organizations and businesses to further support the needs of Black boys. This effort needs to be coordinated across government entities, co-owned by communities who are most negatively affected by the current aggressive disinvestment in Black boys and must be pursued with a sense of urgency.

3. Enhancing paths into the workplace

Our research showed that the workplace is a place where crucial social connections for jobs and education opportunities are formed. A white female interview participant in Racine summarized how social networks formed at work can be helpful for finding other job opportunities:

[My old boss] warned me beforehand [that the company was closing]. Then I told her I was going to look for [another job]. She wrote me recommendation letters. She gave me time off of work for interviews when I didnt actually have time off. So thats how she helped me white female, Racine, WI

The U.S. unemployment rate was 6.2% in February 2021. This is lower than the 14.8% unemployment rate witnessed in April 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it remains higher than the pre-pandemic unemployment rate. Research by our colleague, Stephanie Aaronson, suggests that the unemployment rate significantly understates labor market deterioration. Thus, identifying and executing policies that will improve the chances of getting back to stable and well-paying jobs for minority and low-income workers is important. Robust social connections formed at the workplace can provide resources, advice, information, or help that is linked to chances of economic mobility for these workers and their families in a post-pandemic world. Such policies include improvements in higher education, federal worker training programs, and supporting labor unions.

Policymakers and civic leaders have the opportunity to create what we call a horizon community in their cities, where the possibility of economic mobility is equitably distributed and where the flow of resources and social capital allow all residents to experience expanded horizons and well-being.

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Social networks and economic mobilitywhat the findings reveal - Brookings Institution

A man uses a tablet device in a subway train in Moscow in 2019. Russia's Internet regulatory agency announced it is slowing Twitter because the company has ignored requests to remove content harmful to children. Pavel Golovkin/AP hide caption

A man uses a tablet device in a subway train in Moscow in 2019. Russia's Internet regulatory agency announced it is slowing Twitter because the company has ignored requests to remove content harmful to children.

MOSCOW - The Kremlin is threatening to block Twitter in Russia as President Vladimir Putin seeks to rein in the influence of social media.

In a statement, Russia's Internet regulatory agency, Roskomnadzor, said that for now it will be slowing down Twitter service because the company has allegedly ignored requests to take down material harmful to children.

Social media companies, regardless of country of origin, are coming under increasing scrutiny by the Kremlin, which views them as rivals to the dominant state-run news outlets. In January, Roskomnadzor said social media - including Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Russia's VKontakte - faced fines for inciting minors to take part in unauthorized rallies demanding the release of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Twitter's presence in Russia is relatively small, with just 3% of respondents in a recent poll saying they use the microblog. But the head of Navalny's Moscow office, Oleg Stepanov, tweeted that the Twitter slowdown was just the start of a "large-scale offensive" by authorities to assert control over - and ultimately block - social media.

Andrei Svintsov, a member of the committee on informational policy in the Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, told a Moscow radio station that Twitter was targeted exactly because it's not widely used in Russia and the slowdown will therefore have a minimal impact.

"Of course it will serve as an example to all the others who don't observe Russian legislation," Svintsov said.

Roskomnadzor claimed that since 2017, Twitter disregarded more than 28,000 requests to delete content that encourages minors to commit suicide, contains child pornography or provides information on drug use. If Twitter fails to comply, the agency said, it could be blocked in Russia.

Later, the agency clarified that the slowdown would affect photo and video content but not text.

In a statement, a Twitter spokesperson said the content which Roskomnadzor claims appears on the platform is not permitted under the company's rules.

"We remain committed to advocating for the Open Internet around the world and deeply concerned by increased attempts to block and throttle online public conversation," the statement said.

The Kremlin has repeatedly used the protection of minors as a pretext to limit free expression. At a meeting with young people last week, Putin said that tech companies had to follow the "moral laws of our society" or Russian society would collapse.

In December, Putin signed a law that would let the Russian government block social media that "censor" Russian news outlets. This week, the speaker of the Duma said new laws were necessary to guarantee the country's "digital sovereignty."

A complete ban on a social media platform would not be unprecedented. In 2016, the authorities blocked LinkedIn, the U.S.-based platform for professional networking, for not storing data on Russian citizens on Russia-based servers, as stipulated by law.

But the Russian government's years-long efforts to block the messaging app Telegram failed because of technical difficulties.

Putin's spokesman told reporters that the authorities had gained valuable experience trying to shut down Telegram.

Not long after the Twitter slowdown was announced, a number of government websites, including the Kremlin's, went down.

Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the Russian Internet with the Center for European Policy Analysis, says that the Twitter slowdown accidentally caused the sites to go down as authorities were testing technology to limit Internet access.

The Ministry of Digital Development blamed the outage on technical issues unrelated to the Twitter slowdown.

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Russia Slows And Threatens To Block Twitter - NPR

When Dan lost his job due to COVID-19, he found an unlikely income stream: selling invites to a new social media platform.

The app is called Clubhouse and looks very different to Instagram or TikTok or Twitter, with their bright feeds of videos and photos and pithy wordplay.

Clubhouse is slower and stranger. It's audio-only; no photos to be seen, except those on user profiles.

Using Clubhouse is like listening to a podcast, but live. Or like being part of a very exclusive conference, one with celebrities.

The conversations cannot be recorded within the app, which seems to loosen people up and encourage them to speak more freely.

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If you aren't in the room to hear them talk, you'll miss out forever.

And to get in the room, you have to get on the app, which is invitation only.

Most members have only been given a handful of invites to share, but Dan was among the first to sign up to the app. He had heaps. Fresh out of work, he saw a chance to make an easy buck.

For the past three months, he's been selling up to 80 invites a day, mostly through Reddit.

"Demand has been massive," he told the ABC via email from the United States.

"I joined Clubhouse very early so I have unlimited invites."

At $US30 a pop, he's made $54,000.

For a measure of the buzz around Clubhouse, Dan's $54,000 is a good place to start.

Launched in April last year, Clubhouse is being spruiked as "the next big thing" in social media.

It's currently riding a wave of media hype, celebrity endorsements, venture capital and chart-topping download figures. The number of active weekly users has increased more than 1,500 per cent to 10 million in the past few months.

But probably the most obvious sign of Clubhouse's success is the fact Instagram and Twitter are launching their own clone versions similar to the way Instagram brought out Reels last year to take on TikTok's popularity in short-form video.

Supplied: Clubhouse

Clubhouse has been described as a cross between a conference call, talkback radio and the video-chat platform Houseparty.

Others call it a hybrid of Twitter and TED Talks.

Once you've logged in, you're brought to the "hallway", a collection of different chat rooms with their topics and list of speakers/listeners on display.

The "conversation rooms" off this "hallway" look much the same as an audio-only conference call. Unlike most calls, however, not everyone gets to speak.

Digital artworks called NFTs are selling for thousands, even millions of dollars. Is this a bubble or a new way for artists to finally get paid for digital art?

Generally, there are many more people listening than have been given access to the mic. Each conversation room can fit up to 5,000.

After the conversation is over, the room is closed. There's no recording through the app (though some users find ways around this).

And that's Clubhouse. The platform is pretty basic, but users appear to like it.

Some go to the platform for a sneak preview of an upcoming musical (The Lion King did this in November), or to hop into a room with a favourite celebrity.

Others are chasing fame and exposure. Many of the rooms are dedicated to making money from tech, including by investing in cryptocurrency schemes or non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Think of it as a vast and sprawling, never-ending conference with no particular focus.

Topics can range from the frivolous to the serious.

Last month the Chinese government banned the app after thousands shared stories of "re-education camps" and the Tiananmen Square massacre.

According to Crystal Abidin, a digital anthropologist at Curtin University, Clubhouse's popularity is a product of the pandemic.

In an age of working from home, where furniture outlets are selling fake bookshelves to make people look good on Zoom calls, audio-only is a relief.

And at a time when social events are easily accessible online, through platforms like Facebook or Eventbrite, talks on Clubhouse are harder to access, and therefore offer the excitement of attending something exclusive.

"Clubhouse came about and said, 'Hey, this is audio only. No need for video we're only going to hear your voice,'" Dr Abidin said.

"It feels like Clubhouse is taking away from all that Zoom fatigue."

The fact the spoken conversations cannot be easily recorded or archived adds to this sense of exclusivity.

"You tune in now or you tune in never," Dr Abidin said.

Clubhouse essentially trades on FOMO the fear of missing out.

"Right now, it's like a gentlemen's club or an insider's club that only people who are very invested in would seek out," Dr Abidin said.

Guilherme, a Portugal-based Clubhouse invite seller on Reddit, said he believed most of his customers (paying about $US15 per invite) were wannabe tech entrepreneurs.

The app can sometimes feel like a version of TV shows like Dragon's Den or Shark Tank, where entrepreneurs make business presentations to a panel of wealthy investors who decide whether to invest in their company.

"It's new and people don't want to miss the hype train," Guilherme said.

"Eighty per cent of rooms are entrepreneurs who tell their stories about how to make money."

If Guilherme is right, there's a strange circularity to the fact that people who lost their jobs due to COVID are making a buck selling invites to wealth seminars.

One of the Reddit sellers told the ABC: "I lost my part-time job as a bartender. I am a college student from middle Europe."

Another said: "I'm not really making much, but money is money."

Of course, staying exclusive while being popular will not be easy.

As downloads soar, the influx of new members could gradually dilute the qualities that made the app popular in the first place, Dr Abidin said.

"Now everyone and their parents are on Clubhouse."

For most of last year, the app kept a relatively low profile a preserve of the Silicon Valley elite.

This changed on January 31, 2021, when Elon Musk interviewed the chief executive officer of Robinhood on Clubhouse at the height of the GameStop saga, grilling him on why his company had stopped some share trades. The 5,000-person conversation room filled up. One user streamed it to YouTube, where the video has been watched millions of times.

Getty Images: Britta Pedersen

Guilherme, the invite seller, noticed the Musk interview coincided with an increase in demand for Clubhouse invites.

"That was the real boom," he said.

Other sellers report selling as many invites as they could supply.

For what it's worth, Dan the invite mogul says demand has slowed in the past week.

He's only sold 20 invites a day, down from 80.

"That could be for a lot of reasons. Like Bitcoin, Clubhouse runs hot and cold," he said.

According to data from the analytics company Sensor Tower, Clubhouse downloads are still going strong. It's the eighth-ranked free social networking app on Apple's app store, down from a peak of third, but still high.

In Australia, Clubhouse is ranked ninth.

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But the app stores are littered with apps that do well at first and then ultimately fail to break into the mainstream.

MeWe, for example, was spruiked in the mid-noughties as an alternative to Facebook. It failed at that, but survived by retaining a core group of users (generally people from the far right who believe in conspiracy theories).

Perhaps once the COVID lockdowns lift in different parts of the world and people are spending less time online, Clubhouse will become more of a niche professional platform something like an audio-only version of LinkedIn.

Another scenario is sex work: audio-only conversations are harder to moderate than text-based ones, which can be more easily ready by machines.

"Deep down, I feel like at some point this is just going to be used for the online exchange of sexual services," Dr Abidin said.

"Sex has been deplatformed from so many apps of late and these groups of workers just need a place to go. This could be a really good space for that to happen.

"We'll see if that ever comes here."

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What is Clubhouse? The invite-only social media platform that people are paying to join - ABC News