Music

Twitter, Once a Threat to Titans, Now Belongs to One

But by the early 2010s, it had grown into a global water cooler where millions of people went to make sense of the world around them. Its rapid-fire, 140-character bursts made it a valuable tool for those wanting to steer a conversation, attract attention to a cause or simply peer into the kaleidoscope of human thought.

On any given day, Twitter was the place to: talk about the news, complain about airline food, flirt with strangers, announce an earthquake, yell at your senator, cheer for your sports teams, post nudes, make dumb jokes, ruin your own reputation, ruin somebody else’s reputation, document police brutality, argue about anime, fall for a cryptocurrency scam, start a music career, procrastinate, follow the stock market, issue a public apology, share scientific papers, discuss “Game of Thrones,” find skillet chicken recipes.

And while it was never the biggest social media platform, or the most profitable, Twitter did seem to level the playing field in a way other apps didn’t.

But as Twitter and other social networks grew, powerful people found that these apps could help them extend their power in new ways. Authoritarians discovered they could use them to crack down on dissent. Extremists learned they could stir up hateful mobs to drive women and people of color offline. Celebrities and influencers realized that the crazier you acted, the more attention you got, and dialed up their behavior accordingly. A foundational belief of social media’s pioneers — that simply giving people the tools to express themselves would create a fairer and more connected society — began to look hopelessly naïve.

And when Donald J. Trump rode a wave of retweets to the White House in 2016, and used his Twitter account as president to spread conspiracy theories, wage culture wars, undermine public health and threaten nuclear war, the idea that the app was a gift to the downtrodden became even harder to argue.

Since 2016, Twitter has tried to clean up its mess, putting into effect new rules on misinformation and hate speech and barring some high-profile trolls. Those changes made the platform safer and less chaotic, but they also alienated users who were uncomfortable with how powerful Twitter itself had become.

These users chafed at the company’s content moderation decisions, like the one made to permanently suspend Mr. Trump’s account after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. They accused the platform’s leaders of bowing to a censorious mob. And some users grew nostalgic for the messier, more freewheeling Twitter they’d loved.

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Adidas ends Ye deal over hate speech, costing rapper his billionaire status

Summary
Companies

Adidas ends partnership immediately
To take about $250 mln hit to 2022 net income
Gap, Balenciaga have also cut ties with Ye

Oct 25 (Reuters) – Adidas AG (ADSGn.DE) terminated its partnership with rapper and fashion designer Ye on Tuesday after he made a series of antisemitic remarks, a move that knocked the musician off the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires.

Adidas put the tie-up, which has produced several hot-selling Yeezy branded sneakers, under review this month.

“Adidas does not tolerate antisemitism and any other sort of hate speech,” the German company said on Tuesday.

“Ye’s recent comments and actions have been unacceptable, hateful and dangerous, and they violate the company’s values of diversity and inclusion, mutual respect and fairness,” it said.

Forbes magazine said the end of the deal meant Ye’s net worth shrank to $400 million. The magazine had valued his share of the Adidas partnership at $1.5 billion.

The remainder of Ye’s wealth comes from real estate, cash, his music catalogue and a 5% stake in ex-wife Kim Kardashian’s shapewear firm, Skims, Forbes said.

Representatives for Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

For Adidas, ending the partnership and the production of Yeezy branded products, as well as stopping all payments to Ye and his companies, will have a “short-term negative impact” of up to 250 million euros ($248.90 million) on net income this year, the company said.

Ye has courted controversy in recent months by publicly ending major corporate tie-ups and making outbursts on social media against other celebrities. His Twitter and Instagram accounts were restricted, with the social media platforms removing some of his online posts that users condemned as antisemitic.

In now-deleted Instagram posts earlier this year, the multiple Grammy award-winning artist accused Adidas and U.S. apparel retailer Gap Inc (GPS.N) of failing to build contractually promised permanent stores for products from his Yeezy fashion line.

[1/3] Singer Kanye West walks past models after presenting his Fall/Winter 2015 partnership line with Adidas at New York Fashion Week February 12, 2015. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson/File Photo

He also accused Adidas of stealing his designs for its own products.

On Tuesday, Gap, which had ended its partnership with Ye in September, said it was taking immediate steps to remove Yeezy Gap products from its stores and that it had shut down YeezyGap.com.

“Antisemitism, racism and hate in any form are inexcusable and not tolerated in accordance with our values,” Gap said in a statement.

European fashion house Balenciaga has also cut ties with Ye, according to media reports.

“The saga of Ye … underlines the importance of vetting celebrities thoroughly and avoiding those who are overly controversial or unstable,” said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData.

Adidas poached Ye from rival Nike Inc (NKE.N) in 2013 and agreed to a new long-term partnership in 2016 in what the company then called “the most significant partnership created between a non-athlete and a sports brand.”

The tie-up helped the German brand close the gap with Nike in the U.S. market.

Yeezy sneakers, which cost between $200 and $700, generate about 1.5 billion euros ($1.47 billion) in annual sales for Adidas, making up a little over 7% of its total revenue, according to estimates from Telsey Advisory Group.

Shares in Adidas, which cut its full-year forecast last week, closed down 3.2%. The group said it would provide more information as part of its upcoming Q3 earnings announcement on Nov. 9.

($1 = 1.0044 euros)

Reporting by Mrinmay Dey, Uday Sampath and Aishwarya Venugopal in Bengaluru and Lisa Richwine in Los Angeles; Editing by Tomasz Janowski, Sriraj Kalluvila, Bernadette Baum, Anil D’Silva and Cynthia Osterman

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Who Gets the Last Word on Steve Jobs? He Might.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis meticulously curated the memory of her husband after he was assassinated, reimagining President John F. Kennedy as a fallen King Arthur in a modern-day Camelot.

Now some historians wonder if Laurene Powell Jobs is also trying to frame the legacy of her late husband, Steve Jobs, a complicated and transformational figure who was shadowed by his flaws as a father and belligerence as a boss.

Last month, Ms. Powell Jobs introduced the Steve Jobs Archive. It aspires to reinvent the personal archive much as Mr. Jobs, in his years running Apple, remade music with the iPod and communication with the iPhone.

Rather than offering up a repository of personal correspondence, notes and items for public research and inquiry, as other influential figures have done, Ms. Powell Jobs, who did not respond to requests for comments, said at a conference last month that the Steve Jobs Archive would be devoted to “ideas.” Those ideas are primarily Mr. Jobs’s philosophies about life and work.

Harvard Business School’s 25 greatest business leaders of the 20th century left behind personal archives that are open to the public in libraries or museums, including Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Asa Candler, who built Coca-Cola.

Other iconic business founders such as Walt Disney, Sam Walton and Ray Kroc entrusted their papers to the companies they built, allowing those collections to become the cornerstone of corporate archives.

Walt Disney Company, make personal correspondence, notes, speeches and other items available to authors for research.

“We don’t censor,” said Becky Cline, director of the Walt Disney archives. “We just vet.”

The new Jobs archive debuted with a minimalist website containing eight pieces of video, audio and writing that express what the archive calls Mr. Jobs’s “driving motivations in his own words.” The items, three-quarters of which were already public, can be accessed by clicking through maxims made famous by Mr. Jobs, including “make something wonderful and put it out there” and “pursue different paths.”

The next steps for the archive are shrouded in the kind of mystery associated with the way Mr. Jobs ran Apple. About all that’s been publicly disclosed is that Ms. Powell Jobs hired a documentary filmmaker to gather hundreds of oral histories about Mr. Jobs from former colleagues. Where that material will be stored and who will have access to it has not been revealed.

She married Mr. Jobs in 1991, two years after meeting him as a graduate student at Stanford. Since his death, she has used her estimated $16 billion fortune to fund the Emerson Collective, a philanthropic and commercial operation that owns The Atlantic magazine and funds an organization trying to reduce gun violence in Chicago.

During his life, Mr. Jobs admired and encouraged historians to preserve the history of his Silicon Valley predecessors such as Robert Noyce, who co-founded the chip maker Intel. But he put little value on his own history, and Apple has seldom commemorated product anniversaries, saying it focuses on the future, not the past.

A very small group of just several hundred Americans is trying an at-home medical treatment involving electrical stimulation of part of the brain.

It looks a little “weird science.”

But the headpiece that Susan Meiklejohn dons daily is giving her head peace— peace and relief from the deep, debilitating depression from which she has suffered most of her life.

SUSAN MEIKLEJOHN: I had a very, very stressful — overwhelmingly stressful — childhood. I had a violent father. And at 11, was the first time I had suicidal ideation.

NEWSY’S JASON BELLINI: How old are you now?

MEIKLEJOHN: 68. So, I’ve never gotten past the ideation phase. I’ve never attempted suicide. But I certainly have been enmeshed in that ideation.

Meiklejohn, a retired college professor and amateur artist, is one of nearly three million adults in America with depression that does not respond to medication. Now she’s one of a very small group — just several hundred — trying an at-home medical treatment involving electrical stimulation of part of the brain.

BELLINI: How many medications have you tried?

MEIKLEJOHN: I’d say 10. … I have always been very, very eager to do what it takes to get out of this.

So she tried ketamine—most commonly used in anesthesia—forking over $16,000 out of pocket to see whether the new psychedelic treatment, now being offered in hundreds of U.S. clinics, could provide her with some relief. It did, but not for long.

“It makes you feel great,” Meiklejohn said. “So, that lasted for about three days. And then it’s right back again.”

Back again to suicidal ideation. Then, a few months ago, Meiklejohn heard about a new treatment protocol — one she could try at home.

It’s provided by a team led by Leigh Charvet, who is a neuropsychologist at NYU Langone Health. She’s pioneering research in transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) as a treatment for a wide range of neurological disorders, depression among them.

“I have to say, of all of our experience with tDCS, the response in the depression trial has been absolutely remarkable,” Charvet said.

And the treatment is considered low-risk enough to let Newsy’s Jason Bellinni try it, powered up.

At his lab, at the City College of New York, Marom Bikson develops cutting edge methods of “neuromodulation.”

“Neuromodulation as a field is the use of devices to deliver energy in a controlled way to the nervous system to change the body,” he said. “When you think something, when you feel something, it’s all electricity. We’re adding electricity into that mix. So, it’s sort of, maybe not a surprise that an electrical organ is sensitive to electricity coming in.”

BELLINI: What do you think is most exciting right now when it comes to this field generally?

MAROM BIKSON: One is more and more sophisticated technologies that can deliver energy to the nervous system in a more intentional and targeted way. So, more and more specificity.

To demonstrate, Bikson suited Bellini up for an experiment to see if targeted electrical stimulation can improve one’s concentration while doing a boring, repetitive task.

BELLINI: Is there a sweet spot you’re trying to hit?

“This electrode here is roughly over a part of your brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,” Bikson said.

That’s an area of the brain associated with problem solving, attention switching, memory management and inhibition.

BIKSON: Now, you’re at the full current, can you feel it?

BELLINI: I feel the itchiness, that’s for sure.

Itchiness, where the electrode touched Bellini’s scalp, which he says went away within a few minutes. He had no other sensation beyond that.

As far as the game, as shown to Bellini in an analysis afterward, stimulation appeared to improve his performance a bit. Depression treatments target the same brain area as that experiment.

“We have developed a hypothesis that this energy may not directly affect the neurons of the brain, but actually affect the blood vessels in the brain,” Bikson said.

They headed over to an MRI machine, where they set Bellini up to capture what the stimulation does inside his head.

The areas in red showed an increase in blood flow. But how that may impact people with depression and other neurological diseases remains a medical mystery.

BIKSON: It works, but it also works on the most difficult people, people who have been failed by conventional medicines.

BELLINI: But not everyone?

BIKSON: But not everyone. And then, there’s the opportunity, right? Just like with medications, with neuromodulation, you’re thinking, “How can I make this work better? How can I capture the people who did not respond? And even for the people who did respond, can I do better for them still?”

Today, another approach to stimulation, called “repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation,” or repetitive TMS, is both FDA approved and widely available. But it requires a series of sessions over days or weeks. And larger studies are needed to determine how long improvements last.

“I’m very interested in creating something that is as effective as that. But you can use it at home still under prescription,” Bikson said.

NYU is using a device developed in partnership with Bikson that can be positioned properly remotely.

BELLINI: You haven’t done this long enough to know how long it will last?

LEIGH CHARVET: No. … We know that more is better. We don’t know if you reach a plateau or If you have remission in depression. Do you need to continue or do you need to taper it?

Meiklejohn has been using it daily, while meditating, for more than three months.

BELLINI: When did you start to notice changes?

MEIKLEJOHN: I’d say after about three weeks.

BELLINI: Has the suicide ideation gone away?

MEIKLEJOHN: Not completely, no. You know, when I dip, I dip. … The difference is, I bounce back in a day or two.

Meiklejohn hopes she’ll continue to be a portrait of hope.

Newsy’s mental health initiative “America’s Breakdown: Confronting Our Mental Health Crisis” brings you deeply personal and thoughtfully told stories on the state of mental health care in the U.S. Click here to learn more.

Source: newsy.com

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