Twitter’s CEO fires top product exec as company cuts costs

There’s a new shakeup happening at the top of Twitter. CEO Parag Agrawal has fired the company’s general manager of consumer products Kayvon Beykpour in order to “take the team in a different direction.” Bruce Falck, the company’s general manager for revenue, is also leaving, the company confirmed. Beykpour, who had been with the company for seven years, was on paternity leave at the time. 

The shakeup comes alongside a companywide pause on hiring as Twitter tries to cut costs. A spokesperson said the company is “pausing most hiring” and “pulling back on non-labor costs.” It will likely fuel more uncertainty at Twitter, which has been reeling since the company accepted Elon Musk’s offer to buy the company. Agrawal has reportedly told employees the company’s current execs don’t know what direction Musk will take the platform. Musk has said he has no confidence in Twitter’s current management, and that he has a new CEO in mind for when the deal closes.

Despite all that, Agrawal is making big changes of his own. Most notably, by firing Beykpour, a longtime product executive who is well-liked in and outside of Twitter. “The truth is that this isn’t how and when I imagined leaving Twitter, and this wasn’t my decision,” he wrote in a thread about his departure. “Parag asked me to leave after letting me know that he wants to take the team in a different direction.”

In a memo, Agrawal cited the company’s failure to hit goals for revenue and user growth, The New York Timesreported. Musk has made clear he has even more aggressive goals for the platform. He recently stated that he intends to grow Twitter’s user base to nearly a billion users by 2028.

Twitter isn’t the only major platform looking to cut costs. Meta has also said it intends to pull back on its hiring plans, and has ended some projects in its Reality Labs division. 

Google expands emergency SOS and earthquake warning features

Google is expanding two of its personal safety features: the “SOS” alerts and its earthquake warning system. The company announced the updates during its I/O 2022 developer conference.Google’s emergency SOS features have already been available for Pixe…

Google open-sources skin tone research to improve inclusivity

Google has been working with researchers to make its products and services more inclusive for people with darker skin tones. Now, the company is open sourcing a major part of that work. The company is making its skin tone research widely available as part of its effort at creating more ”responsible AI.” The research has so far resulted in the Monk Skin Tone Scale (MST), a scale “designed to be easy-to-use for development and evaluation of technology while representing a broader range of skin tones.”

The scale is meant to more accurately reflect the diversity of different skin tones, Google says, and was developed with Harvard professor Dr. Ellis Monk. The work will help AI more accurately “see” a wider range of skin tones, especially darker ones.

This research will be most apparent to users in Search results and in Google’s Photos app to start. For Search, Google is using the MST scale to surface results that are more inclusive of darker skin tones. For example, makeup-related searches will come with a filter for adjusting for different skin tones so users can find results that are most relevant for them.

Google is making Search results more inclusive to different skin tones.
Google

In Photos, Google is also using the MST scale to power a new set of “Real Tone filters.” According to Google, these filters are “designed to work well across skin tones” and “a wider assortment of looks.” 

Eventually, Google says it will incorporate the MST scale into more of its products and services. It’s also working to make it easier for brands, creators and publishers to label content to adapt to the scale so Search will be better able to surface results for different hair textures and colors too.

Google isn’t the first company to undertake this type of work. Pinterest has launched features to better detect diverse skin tones and different hair textures. Snapchat has also conducted research into making its camera more inclusive to darker skin tones. But with Google making its work open source, these kinds of advancements could become much more common.

Follow all of the news from Google I/O 2022 right here!

Elon Musk says he would ‘reverse’ Donald Trump’s Twitter ban

Elon Musk has finally confirmed what many have long suspected: that he would allow Donald Trump back on Twitter.

In an interview with The Financial Times, Musk said that he would reinstate Trump when his deal to acquire Twitter closes. “I guess the answer is that I would reverse the perma ban,” Musk said in response to a question about whether he would allow the former president back on the platform. “Obviously, I don’t own Twitter yet. So this is not a thing that will definitely happen because what if I don’t own Twitter.”

Though Musk has long made it clear he disagrees with Twitter’s decision to ban Trump, it’s the first time he has explicitly said he would “reverse” it. “I think bans just fundamentally undermine trust in Twitter as a town square where everyone can voice their opinion,” Musk said. He added that permanent bans should be reserved for “accounts that are bots or spam scam accounts.”

Whether Musk would bring back Trump has been a major question and the company’s own executives have told employees they don’t know what direction Musk will take the company. Employees have been concerned that Musk could reverse many of the company’s policies around trust and safety and reverse progress they have made in combatting online abuse and misinformation.

Musk said that accounts that are “destructive to the world” could still be punished with temporary suspensions or having individual tweets deleted. But he said that he and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey believe that permanent bans “should be extremely rare.”

Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The company banned Trump in the wake of the January 6th insurrection, saying that the president had broken its rules around incitement of violence. Then-CEO Dorsey said at the time he believed permanent bans could set a “dangerous” precedent, but that the company had made the right decision in the face of “extraordinary and untenable circumstance.” On Tuesday, following Musk’s comments, Dorsey called Trump’s ban a “business decision.” “We should always revisit our decisions and evolve as necessary,” Dorsey said. 

Musk was more explicit. He called the ban a “morally bad decision,” and cited the Trump-backed Truth Social as proof Twitter’s ban did not have the intended effect. The former president has stated that he would not rejoin Twitter even if his ban is lifted. 

“He is now going to be on Truth Social, as will a large part of the right in the in the United States,” Musk said. “Banning Trump from Twitter didn’t end Trump’s voice. It will amplify it among the right and that is why it is morally wrong and flat out stupid.”

Updated with comments from Jack Dorsey.

Nextdoor will remind users to keep conversations ‘constructive’ and ’empathetic’

Neighborhood social network Nextdoor is trying out a new way to keep conversations respectful. The company is introducing a new feature that will remind users to keep conversations “constructive” when the app detects that a particular thread may be likely to turn negative or overly contentious.

With the change, which will be rolling out over the next few weeks, users will see a big pop-up reminding them “you can set the tone,” before they are able to add to a discussion. “Show your neighbors what it looks like to have empathetic conversations,” it reads.

It’s an approach the company has tried before. Nextdoor introduced “kindness reminders” in 2019, which surface pop-ups when the app detects someone may be about to post a heated comment. Last year, it debuted a similar reminder to promote anti-racist language among its users.

What sets these latest notifications apart is that they appear proactively, before a user has typed out a comment. The feature uses machine learning to detect when a conversation between neighbors may be close to becoming problematic, looking at factors like the rate of comments coming in as well as whether the people active in a thread have been reported in the past.

Nextdoor will push reminders to users about how to have
Nextdoor

The goal, according to the company’s Chief Product Officer Kiran Prasad, is to catch people before they get involved in a discussion that could be veering off course. Once you’ve already started typing out a response, he says,”you’re kind of committed to a certain level because you’ve already written a bunch of stuff.” If people can see the reminders before they start writing, the hope is they’ll be more likely to respond thoughtfully, or even not jump in at all.

For a service that has often been in the spotlight for enabling people’s more base instincts (there’s a reason why the app has had to actively remind users to not be racist) predicting when a conversation is likely to turn negative could have a sizable impact.

“It’ll start to kind of set the tone that these are the types of conversations that are appropriate or not appropriate on the platform,” Prasad said.

Nextdoor isn’t the only platform to try out these kinds of reminders in an effort to make people be nicer to each other online. Twitter has prompted users to rethink mean tweets, and has said the prompts have led to a decrease in harmful replies. TikTok adopted a similar measure, prompting users to “reconsider” before posting offensive comments. Instagram also has anti-bullying “nudges.”

Prasad says that early tests of Nextdoor’s “constructive conversations” reminders have already been positive, though it has led to some decrease in overall engagement on the platform. “We think that it’s still the right thing to do.”