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Elon Musk ends Trump’s Twitter ban • ZebethMedia

Former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account has been reinstated following a permanent ban in January 2021. On Friday, new Twitter owner Elon Musk posted a poll asking if Trump should be allowed back on the platform. Just over 15 million people voted, with 51.8% voting in favor of reinstating Trump on Twitter. When the poll ended on Saturday, Trump’s account was unbanned. “The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated,” Musk tweeted. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei.” Trump’s controversial ban took place days after the January 6 riots on the U.S. Capitol, in which insurrectionists violently attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” Twitter wrote in a January 2021 blog post. Still, it is unclear whether the former president will actually return to Twitter. After he was deplatformed from mainstream social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, Trump created his own social platform called Truth Social. Image Credits: Donald Trump on Truth Social “Vote now with positivity, but don’t worry, we aren’t going anywhere. Truth Social is special!” the former president posted on Truth Social this evening. Since taking over Twitter mere weeks ago, Elon Musk has already reversed suspensions on two high-profile accounts that were deplatformed for maliciously misgendering trans people: conservative satire publication The Babylon Bee and Jordan Peterson. He also reversed the ban on Kathy Griffin, a comedian who had impersonated Musk on Twitter. This story is developing…  

Amazon layoffs begin, Ticketmaster can’t handle Taylor Swift, and much of Twitter HQ quits • ZebethMedia

Hello again! Time for another edition of Week in Review, the newsletter where we recap the week’s most read ZebethMedia stories in one quick and easy-to-skim blast. Get it in your inbox every Saturday AM by signing up here. (There won’t be a newsletter next Saturday because I’ll be off being thankful/eating leftovers/being thankful for leftovers, but we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming the weekend after.) If you read last week’s edition, you’ll notice some echoes here: more layoffs, more FTX drama, and more absurdity at Elon’s Twitter. Let’s dive in! —Greg most read Mass resignations at Twitter: After laying off thousands of Twitter employees over the past few weeks, Elon presented something of an ultimatum to those remaining: commit to being “extremely hardcore” as “part of the new Twitter” or leave with three months severance…and, well, a lot of people took door number 2. It’s unclear at this point (even to Twitter, it seems) how many declined the ultimatum, but all indications are that it was hundreds/thousands. SBF DMs: For some reason the founder of FTX — the once massive crypto exchange that imploded last week — decided to have an impromptu interview with a Vox reporter by way of DM. Seemingly without any agreement that any of it was off the record, said DMs were, of course, quickly published. His biggest regret in all this? Weirdly, filing for bankruptcy. Evernote gets bought: Evernote was once something of an App Store darling — an early go-to example of design, quality, and company leadership. Then after a series of pricing/privacy/design changes pissed off the user base, it just sort of…faded away. This week the company was acquired by Italian app developer Bending Spoons, in what Kyle Wiggers calls “the end of an era.” Amazon layoffs: Rumors suggested layoffs were on the way at Amazon, with some estimates suggesting upward of 10,000 would be let go. This week the layoffs began, with CEO Andy Jassy writing in a memo that the layoffs will continue into next year. Ticketmaster face-plants: Tickets for Taylor Swift’s first tour in years went on presale this week, and Ticketmaster, the website that no one on earth is happy to use, couldn’t keep up with the Swifties. Things went so awry with the gated presale that the scheduled public sale was outright canceled. You know your site outage is bad when it relights the political fire to break up your company’s overwhelming dominance. audio roundup Podcasts! We’ve got them! People seem to like them! Or a lot of people are just downloading/subscribing for the sake of inflating our collective ego. That’s okay too. Here’s what’s up in TC podcasts lately: Live from our ZebethMedia Sessions: Crypto event during one of crypto’s wildest weeks in ages, the Chain Reaction crew “tore up the script” and talked all about Sam Bankman-Fried’s “surreal, absurd” DM conversation with Vox. What does a corporate comms team do? The Equity team sat down with a pair of deeply experienced comms people to learn how all that behind-the-scenes machinery works. ZebethMedia+ Two states received 80% of venture funds raised: “Through the third quarter of 2022, U.S. venture firms raised $150.9 billion across 593 funds,” writes Rebecca Szkutak. Where did it all go? Rebecca breaks down the stats. A look at Sateliot’s Series A deck: 90% of the planet has no cell connectivity. What if you need an IoT device to phone home from, say, the middle of the ocean? That’s the idea behind Sateliot, which raised an $11.4 million Series A earlier this year. The company shared the pitch deck it used to raise with our resident pitch expert Haje Jan Kamps, who explored “the good and the bad of this high-flying space deck.”

ZebethMedia staff on what we lose if we lose Twitter • ZebethMedia

I spied a tweet the other day that journalists would suffer if Twitter ever shut down because they would lose a driver of traffic. While there is some truth to that — Twitter does help expose your writing to a larger audience — it’s also true that Twitter has value beyond that for journalists and other users. It’s safe to say that Twitter is in disarray as Elon Musk fecklessly tries to grasp the business, instituting mass layoffs as the remaining essential employees flee the general chaos, spurred on by midnight email ultimatums. That most recent missive, it seems, triggered a mass resignation, according to reports. When you add that to the people who were let go in the layoffs, it’s fair to ask how many people are left to run the site. Even before all this happened, the ZebethMedia team had a conversation on Slack about what we would miss if Twitter went away tomorrow. At the time (three days ago), it felt more like a whimsical game than a real possibility. For all its warts, Twitter has a way of connecting people who otherwise might never connect. It gives us a place to share our passions, our random thoughts, and yes, our shitposts, all while keeping us up on what’s happening in the world in real time. “It’s hard to imagine anything could replace Black Twitter. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that we’ll always find our way.” Dominic-Madori Davis While there are surely many negatives to the platform — it’s way too easy to spread misinformation and hate speech and attack people you disagree with — there are also loads of positives, and many things we would miss if Twitter perishes. It now feels like it very well could. So several ZebethMedia staffers contributed what they would miss most if Twitter went away (while hoping it’ll still be up tomorrow): I’m not even sure where to begin to describe the immense impact Black Twitter has had on, well, the world, really. From when I was a teenager, watching so many Black people mobilize to bring awareness to the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, to that time we all shared experiences and made jokes as to what it was like having Thanksgiving with a Black family. “When it’s time to leave and the plate you hid is missing, *insert Kermit screaming meme here.*” The memes are endless, as is the support — and the heat — we give and place onto people and topics. It was a place to find community in a world so unkind to us. It really does feel like its own universe sometimes. I remember a few years ago going to Clubhouse to hear the talks and then running to Twitter to watch everyone live-tweet the conversations. This thread from a few days ago really brought back memories, in which author Kira J hosted a little “Black Jeopardy.” Famous dates for 500, please. “On December 21st, 2020, what were Black people waiting around to get?” Superpowers. And they’re coming still, don’t worry. They’re just running on CP time. The community always felt quite insular; what happened there rarely burst out of our bubble. When it does hit the mainstream, everything shifts, everything changes. Like someone walking in on you mid-shower. Non-Black people often don’t understand the humor, the sarcasm, the wait, did we all have the same childhood? I’m always reminded of some tweet a while ago asking, How does one get into Black Twitter? It’s not quite the same or as easy as people just giving invites to the cookout (stop just giving those out, please!!!). “I really want a place to post sentence-long shitposts with no punctuation, and I don’t know where I would go if I couldn’t do that on Twitter anymore.” Amanda Silberling I often wonder what it is like to not be in Black Twitter. What do people think when they come across a photo of Chris Evans wearing long neon yellow acrylics with a honey mustard-colored satin bonnet? Where do other people get their news, if not from Philip Lewis? I’ll miss seeing something trending and saying yep, that’s Black Twitter, it has to be. I would miss the solidarity, the camaraderie often not easily made or reciprocated out in the physical world. Yes, I think I would even miss Roc Nation Brunch Twitter, also known as LLC Twitter, also known as the people who tell everyone to start a business and become entrepreneurs. “Would you rather take $500,000 or dinner with Jay-Z?” Seriously, just take the money and run. Last week, Brooklyn White-Grier, the features editor at Essence, asked everyone what we were going to wear to Twitter’s homegoing service. Someone made programs, started planning gospel music performances, and, of course, we started picking out our hats. I tweeted that I was excited to get an extra low vibrational plate at the repast and would probably show up with slicked-back baby edges and in Valentino couture, as Zendaya did to the Emmys. It’s hard to imagine anything could replace Black Twitter. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that we’ll always find our way.

Patreon competitor Fanfix launches ‘SuperLink,’ a link-in-bio platform aimed at Gen Z creators • ZebethMedia

Fanfix, the Patreon-style platform focused on Gen Z, announced today the launch of SuperLink, a standalone monetization-focused link-in-bio platform that displays a creator’s Fanfix page. Fanfix previously partnered with various link-in-bio companies, including Koji, Beacons and Hoo.bee. However, the company says many of its creators requested Fanfix build its own version of the feature. It adds that 90% of its referrals come from link-in-bio links or swipe-ups from Instagram and Snapchat. More creators are looking for a way to connect audiences across all their social media platforms and, of course, promote their paywalled content. SuperLink is free to use, and 46% of ad revenue goes to creators. For comparison, YouTube Shorts reportedly plans to give its creators 45%. “Fanfix has grown to 10 million users so quickly by focusing on monetization and putting creators first. Fanfix has helped thousands of creators monetize their passions and turn content creation into a sustainable career. We are taking these same philosophies to our new products,” said co-founder Harry Gestetner in a statement. “By launching these new features, we will be further shifting the balance of power back to the creator, and subscribers will have even more benefits to joining their favorite creators’ membership clubs. Platforms have taken advantage of creators for so many years, so we are thrilled to launch the most monetization-centric, creator-first link-in-bio on the internet.” Major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are often criticized for dismissing the wants and needs of influencers. Founder and CEO of Patreon, Jack Conte, has been open about his disdain for Facebook and Instagram, Meta-owned platforms that mitigate “the relationship between the creator and the subscriber,” he said. In August, Meta got a lot of flak for making changes to emphasize algorithmic curation on its two platforms. While rival TikTok’s algorithmic approach helps creators gain followers quickly, the money-earning part isn’t so easy. The launch of SuperLink comes as Linktree, a behemoth in the link-in-bio space, announced its “Payment Lock” (currently in beta) feature yesterday, which lets visitors access a purchased document. The company has other monetization solution tools like Linktree Marketplace, a tipping feature, as well as a “Request Link” for visitors to pay for requests like personalized videos. The service currently has 23 million users, but Fanfix tells ZebethMedia,  “We plan to eclipse LinkTree within 12 months.” Fanfix is Gen Z-focused and is for clean content only. It targets audiences around the ages of 13 to 24 years old. Some notable influencers on Fanfix include social media influencers Cameron Dallas, Madi Monroe Brooke Monk, Anna Shumate, and more. It currently has over 9.6 million registered users (including two million monthly active users and 2,000 creators) — impressive growth for a one-year-old company. Founded in 2013, rival Patreon had a total of only 100,000 registered users within a year of launching, which included 50,000 fans (aka patrons) and 15,000 creators. Image Credits: Fanfix Fanfix says that it has processed hundreds of thousands of transactions to date and individual creators are earning millions of dollars on the service. The platform is very selective about which creators it accepts– they must have 10,000 followers across their social media accounts and fit with Fanfix’s “brand image.” Creators won’t get accepted if Fanfix doesn’t think they’ll convert. Creators can charge fans whatever they want for membership, but the minimum monthly subscription cost is $5. One downside is that Fanfix takes a 20% commission fee, letting creators keep 80% of earnings. For comparison, Patreon charges a monthly fee that ranges from 5% to 12%, depending on the subscription plan. The platform launched in August 2021 and was co-founded by Harry Gestetner (22) and Simon Pompan (23). Shortly after the launch, they brought Dallas — a 28-year old creator with millions of followers — on board. Simon Pompan (left) and Harry Gestetner (right) SuperOrdinary, a growth partner and marketing expert, recently acquired Fanfix for eight figures, marking its first investment in the creator space. Fanfix notes that its creators will benefit from SuperOrdinary as the company provides access to a portfolio of over 140 consumer brands, including Farmacy, OLAPLEX, The Honest Company and more. Soon, Fanfix creators will be able to collaborate with SuperOrdinary and sell products in their online storefronts. Fanfix has launched multiple monetization features. In March, Fanfix rolled out a pay-to-message feature, “Tip-to-DM,” letting fans chat with creators by paying anywhere between $3 to $500. According to Fanfix, the top few hundred creators earn thousands of dollars in messages. In general, the feature has generated around seven figures, which accounts for half of the company’s revenue. Plus, Fanfix plans to keep adding new monetization features to the growing platform, such as one-to-one calls and personalized videos, as well as venturing into podcasting and gaming. In December, Fanfix will launch a livestreaming capability for creators to put a paywall on their streams and offer additional perks to followers, like live podcast episodes, Q&As, and more. Fans will be able to watch livestreams of their favorite creators, chat in real-time, and tip creators any amount. Earlier this month, Patreon finally launched a native video feature, however, it has yet to launch livestreaming.

Facebook is removing several information fields from profiles, including religious and political views • ZebethMedia

Facebook is notifying users that it will remove four information fields from profiles starting next month. These fields include religious views, political views, addresses and the “Interested in” field, which indicates a user’s sexual orientation. The change will go into effect on December 1. A spokesperson for the company told ZebethMedia in an email that the reason behind the change is to make the social network easier to use. “As part of our efforts to make Facebook easier to navigate and use, we’re removing a handful of profile fields: Interested In, Religious Views, Political Views, and Address,” the the spokesperson said in a statement. “We’re sending notifications to people who have these fields filled out, letting them know these fields will be removed. This change doesn’t affect anyone’s ability to share this information about themselves elsewhere on Facebook.” The change was first spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra, who tweeted a screenshot of the notice being sent to users who have these fields filled out. The notice indicates that users’ other information will remain on their profiles, along with the rest of their contact and basic information. Facebook’s decision to get rid of these specific profile fields is part of its efforts to streamline its platform, which currently consists of several features that are somewhat outdated. It’s worth noting that the information fields that Facebook is choosing to remove are ones that other major social networks don’t offer. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok have simple bios that let users share a little bit about themselves without going to specific details, such as political or religious views. In the past, people may have been interested in filling out their profiles with additional information, but as privacy infringements have come to light, users may no longer want to share extra details about themselves online. The news comes as Meta laid off 11,000 workers, which is about 13% of its workforce last week. The layoffs came amid a tough time for Meta, which provided lukewarm guidance last month October regarding its upcoming fourth-quarter earnings. The layoffs marked the most significant job cuts in the tech giant’s history.

WhatsApp broadens in-app features to help users browse and find businesses • ZebethMedia

WhatsApp is introducing new Yellow Pages-like features to help users find businesses from within the instant messaging app, part of the Meta-owned platform’s growing attempts to make deeper inroads with e-commerce. The encrypted messaging service, used by over 2 billion users worldwide, said on Thursday that it’s expanding a feature called ‘Directory’ to all users in the key overseas market of Brazil to help them browse and discover local small businesses in their neighborhoods. The nationwide rollout follows WhatsApp testing the directory feature in Sao Paulo last year. WhatsApp is also introducing the ability to find larger businesses from within the app. The feature – rolling out in several markets (Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Mexico and the U.K.), a spokesperson told ZebethMedia – will allow users to browse businesses by category such as banking, food and drink and travel as well as by their names. The feature, called ‘Business Search,’ aims to help individuals avoid having to spend time looking for phone numbers of businesses from their websites and keying in and saving those details to their phone contacts, the company said at a WhatsApp-focused business summit in Brazil. The new features underscore WhatsApp’s growing attempts to turn the behemoth messaging app into a commerce engine, one of its largest bets to generate revenue from the otherwise free service. The company disclosed in the quarterly earnings last month that the click-to-WhatsApp ads business had grown 80% year-over-year and was on track to generate $1.5 billion in annual revenue. “We want to make it easier for people to get more done on WhatsApp,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the summit. “Part of that is building better ways to engage with businesses. And while millions of businesses in Brazil use it for chat, we haven’t made it easy to discover businesses or buy from them, so people end up having to use work-arounds. The ultimate goal here is to make it so you can find, message and buy from a business all in the same WhatsApp chat.” Brazil, the most populous nation in Latin America, is a key region for WhatsApp. The platform, which has amassed over 120 million users in Brazil, has chosen the South American market for testing several new business offerings. WhatsApp last year introduced a payments-to-merchant service in Brazil, in what was briefly a world-first feature for WhatsApp. It rolled back the functionality shortly afterwards following the local central bank stating that adequate risk and regulatory tests were needed to be undertaken first. Brazil’s monetary authority said at the time that its decision would “preserve an adequate competitive environment, that ensures the functioning of a payment system that’s interchangeable, fast, secure, transparent, open and cheap.” The encrypted messaging platform, which received the approval to operate peer-to-peer payments in the nation last year, said it’s still waiting for the regulatory clearance on merchant payments. But that’s not stopping it from continuing some development work. Payments giant Cielo, multinational Fiserv, merchants acquirer Getnet, payments platform Mercado Pago and credit and debit cards player Rede have built the technical integration with WhatsApp and many of them are participating in production testing, Meta-owned unit said. “If you run a business in Brazil, that means people will be able to find you, contact you and purchase from you all in one WhatsApp chat, and we’re working to bring this experience to more countries in the coming months too,” Zuckerberg said. “This is the next step for business messaging and I’m looking forward to hearing about the opportunities this unlocks for all of you.”

OnlyFans partners with Spring to add shopping features • ZebethMedia

Merch is coming to OnlyFans. In a partnership with Spring — the merch company formerly known as TeeSpring that just got acquired by Amaze — OnlyFans creators can sell physical products to their supporters directly on their platform pages. The feature works via an integration. If you go to a creator’s page who has a store enabled, you can see what products are available and be directed to their Spring page to make a purchase. Image Credits: Paige VanZant on OnlyFans “As a creator-first organisation, there are over 3 million creators on OnlyFans, meaning over 3 million small businesses now have access to a new monetisation tool,” said Ami Gan, CEO of OnlyFans, in a press release. OnlyFans isn’t taking a cut from the transaction, but the feature incentivizes creators to integrate their businesses more deeply within the platform. Last year, the company generated $433 million in profit and is on track to earn $2.5 billion in revenue this year — so OnlyFans isn’t exactly hurting for cash. Creators who use this new integration will see the same rates as any other Spring shop. The income a creator makes per item sold varies depending on the cost of production — for example, if it costs $31.95 to print a hoodie, if a creator sells it for $50, they will make $18.05 from the sale. Creators can choose their own price points for their merch, and they can also select what kinds of items they want to sell from over 120 products, including shirts, mugs, pillows, iPhone cases and puzzles (in our opinion, the idea of an adult creator selling a risqué puzzle is extremely funny and someone should definitely do that).

TikTok begins testing an early version of its platform research API • ZebethMedia

Earlier this year, TikTok announced that it’s developing a research API to improve access to public and anonymized data about content and activity on its app. Now, the company says it’s ready to make a beta version of its platform research API available and has asked members of its Content and Safety Advisory Councils to test an early version of the API. “To get started, we’ve asked members of our Content and Safety Advisory Councils with expertise in misinformation, violent extremism, hateful behavior, and emerging technologies to test an early version of our platform research API,” TikTok said in a blog post. “They’ll have access to public data as we gather their feedback on usability and the overall experience. We’re dedicated to hearing and incorporating feedback from testers and creating an API that will meet the needs of the scientific community while respecting the privacy of our community.” At the time of the initial announcement, TikTok said researchers currently don’t have an easy way to assess content or conduct tests on its platform, which is why it saw the need for a research API. In addition to the platform research API, TikTok is developing a content moderation API. The company plans to share more details in the coming months. The moderation system API will give select researchers a way to evaluate TikTok’s content moderation systems and examine existing content on the app. Researchers will also be able to upload their own content to see how different types of content are either permitted, rejected or passed to moderators for further evaluation. TikTok’s update on its research API work comes amid renewed calls from FCC commissioner Brendan Carr to ban the app. This wasn’t the first time Carr voiced this idea. After BuzzFeed News reported data improprieties implied by leaked internal communications, Carr wrote in June to Apple and Google calling the app an “unacceptable national security risk” and asking the companies to remove it from their app stores.

PR software giant Cision acquires Factmata, the fake news startup that pivoted to monitoring all kinds of online narratives • ZebethMedia

Fake news, and the identification and eradication of it, has long been thought of as the purview of social media platforms, where a lot of that tends to be shared. Today, one of the more ambitious tech startups in the field of fighting fake news is getting acquired — not by a social media platform, but by a player in of the other parties that stands to gain and lose a lot from misinformation, or at least bad press: PR. Factmata — founded by AI specialists with the aim of building an engine to detect when fake news and other false information is shared online, but which had more recently turned to using its tech for social analytics — is being acquired by Cision, a provider of media monitoring and distribution services and products for the public relations industry with some 100,000 customers. The financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, both companies tell me. Cision — now privately held after being taken off the public market at a $2.74 billion valuation in 2019 — is one of the bigger companies in the field of public relations services, owning brands like PR Newswire and managing databases provided to PR professionals to better target their pitches (or not, as the case often seems to be). Over time it has expanded beyond engagement and deeper into areas like media monitoring, and it has made a number of acquisitions to bolster that, such as its 2021 acquisition of Brandwatch in the UK for $450 million. It’s very unlikely that this deal was anything close to that. Factmata had raised around $4 million in total, with its investors including a number of high-profile individuals in the world of news, online information and media, including Biz Stone, Craig Newmark and Mark Cuban. The company has a staff of just seven people, and it sounds like will include Factmata’s IP as well as all of of them, including CEO Antony Cousins, who are all joining Cision to build out its existing tools as part of a bigger automation and AI play that Cision is pursuing. The acquisition is notable for a couple of reasons. The first of these is that it gives us a moment to take a pulse check on social media moderation, and how that is being tackled. Fact checking and social media moderation have been hot topics for years. But with layoffs at big platforms like Twitter and Facebook hitting engineers and content moderation teams, a big question has emerged: how effective will these and other companies be at parsing and responding to the waves of content spurred by elections and other big events — especially since their ability to stem the tide of violent, harassing, and misleading posts was never perfect to begin with? For better or worse, that has created an opening — or a responsibility, depending on how you look at it: organizations or individuals who want to understand how the world is talking about them, and to stem the tide of bad conversations, are going out there and finding out for themselves. For its part, Factmata had high hopes when it was first founded by Dhruv Gulati, Sebastian Riedel and Andreas Vlachos (none of whom are working with the company now: Gulati who had been the CEO and then chairman is at Onfido; Riedel — who also founded and sold another news detection startup Bloomsbury AI to Facebook — is at Deepmind, and Vlachos is an academic at Cambridge). It set out to build an engine to find and respond to fake news automatically, with the potential users including not just those social media platforms but also consumers. At one point the company cut a deal with the creators of AdBlock Plus to take investment from them and to take on the operation of their Chrome plug-in Trusted News: the idea was that this would help Factmata develop its go-to-market strategy, by helping it ingest more fake news (and trusted news) data, but also to have a direct line to users. But Cousins tells me that this vision evolved over time. That was in part because it found that targeting a few social media companies was not as scalable as a business model as targeting the wider world of brands and businesses, Cousins said. It was also because Factmata found that there was too much nuance in a lot of content, and ultimately, while an AI system is much better at surfacing clusters of activity and evolving trends, or narratives as the company describes them, a human in the loop, he said, is needed to determine which of these are actionable and which are false flags. “We focused on building tech that could find a narrative but then let users judge for themselves if that narrative is worth watching,” he said, describing it as a “picks and shovels” approach. “It’s scalable and appropriate to have a human making the ultimate decision.” That is what Factmata discovered, and that’s what a lot of others in the field also believe is likely the right route forward. Now, it will be interesting to see how that plays out for companies that are removing content moderation teams now due to cost cutting. Another reason why Factmata’s acquisition is notable is because of the wider startup context. From what we understand, the startup was finding it a challenge to raise money in the current climate, given that it was seeing some growth but not enough, and it was approaching the end of its cash reserves. The company has been working with a number of high-profile companies and their agencies to incorporate its automatic “narrative” detection into their wider monitoring activities, and by April of this year it was “halfway to break even” according to Cousins. “But that was just not enough evidence for VCs,” he continued. “They needed to see evidence of six to nine months of growth. So it wasn’t enough, and we didn’t have the runway for another year.”

Meta appoints new India head amid key departures • ZebethMedia

Meta has appointed Sandhya Devanathan as the new head of its business in India, following several high-profile departures in its key overseas market. The social juggernaut said on Thursday that Devanathan, who joined the firm in 2016 and helped build the company’s Singapore and Vietnam businesses, will report to Dan Neary, Vice President at Meta Asia-Pacific. The new reporting hierarchy is a shift for the firm, which earlier saw India executives directly report to the U.S. leadership. In 2020, Devanathan moved to lead the company’s gaming efforts in the Asia-Pacific region. “India is at the forefront of digital adoption and Meta has launched many of our top products, such as Reels and Business Messaging, in India first. We are proud to have recently launched JioMart on WhatsApp, which is our first end-to-end shopping experience in India,” said Marne Levine, Chief Business Officer of Meta, in a statement. “I’m pleased to welcome Sandhya as our new leader for India. Sandhya has a proven track record of scaling businesses, building exceptional and inclusive teams, driving product innovation and building strong partnerships. We are thrilled to have her lead Meta’s continued growth in India.” The new appointment comes at a time when Meta has seen several key departures in recent weeks. Ajit Mohan, the former head of Meta India, left the firm late last month to join rival Snap as the president of the younger firm’s Asia-Pacific business. WhatsApp India head Abhijit Bose and Meta India’s Public Policy head Rajiv Aggarwal stepped down earlier this week. (More to follow)

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