Rishi’s in TikTok trouble as parliament bans across the world push him into the time-old predicament of ‘remain or leave’. The ‘Blue Tick’ saga continues at Meta and Elon Musk pushes his staff to the edge…again

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Remain or Leave; Rishi’s in TikTok Trouble

When thinking of the UK’s House of Commons and various political figureheads around the world, ‘serial scrollers’ or ‘creative content creators’ don’t immediately spring to mind. 

Who knew politicians loved TikTok so much? Not us, that’s for sure.

However only last week a controversial TikTok ban was enforced on politicians and government officials in Europe, mirroring the initial ban from the US last year which prohibited federal employees from using the app on work devices.

The primary concern of the ban is data ownership; fears towards in-app security and privacy risks posed by the Chinese-owned app, which can apparently be accessed by Beijing.

But whilst leaders around the world seem unified in their decision to prioritise the security of their cabinets, the UK’s prime minister is currently resisting pressure to remove parliamentary staff and MPs from TikTok.

A No 10 spokesperson said “It’s for individual departments and ministers to choose which social media platforms they want to use” and that he was “not aware” of any ban on Downing Street staff using the platform.”

Contrary to this, the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, who must surely be a source of reliable security advice, said “he did not have TikTok and that it was important to be “careful” about any social media site”. Hmm.

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Meta Make it Clear;

It feels like there’s been a lot of talk about the ‘blue tick’ feature across all of our social platforms lately and Meta is back again this week, with more to say on the matter of their unveiled feature. Naturally, we thought we’d update you. 

In their most recent statement, Meta has set about to clarify that their paid ‘blue tick’ feature across the platform is *not a symbol of success or status, but that of authenticity only.

‍So remember those paid perks we talked about recently; ‘humanised’ customer support, active impersonation monitoring and the big one, ‘exclusive stickers for your Instagram stories’. They’re officially yours if you’re you and you’ll pay to prove it. 

So to summarise; ‘The meaning of the verified badge has been updated to represent authenticity’. A verified badge is NOT a symbol to show importance, authority, or subject matter expertise. And finally, Meta will not use the verified badge to endorse or recognize public figures/brands".

Here’s to hoping this will be the end of all blue-tick sagas… for now anyway.

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Twitter is Down and Out.

During an internal comms outage at Twitter last week, the implications of losing access to necessary tools Slack and Jira, left employees at their wit's end.

Besides being generally pissed off about the outage, the knock-on effect has reportedly impacted workers’ overall performance and spurred the collective desire to all throw the towel in for good. 

For many who took to Blind, the anonymous workplace chat app, the communication breakdown was nothing short of the final straw for the remaining employees (of which there are now few). 

There, current employees explained how Slack is far more than just a communication tool, but in fact an essential source of information and support for remaining workers who have been left out on a whim after mass-sackings at the company.

Rumour has it, the ‘routine maintenance’ shpiel was a front and suggested Musk was simply looking to trial cutting systems and costs. Coming as no shock to anyone, since Twitter already has a big fat outstanding bill for Slack (and a fair few others) and a comment by a current employee for Slack called bullshit on the CEO’s excuses “There is no such thing as ‘routine maintenance.’ That’s bullshit”. It all looks pretty suss, once again for Mr Musk. 

Whatever his intentions, they’re certainly skewed for his own interest and not that of his own workers or even the platform users. 

Only a few weeks back, Musk identified a glitch when converting accounts on Twitter to private; whereby the soon-to-be private accounts' posts encountered a lag, no longer ranking in the algorithm, meaning less visibility and a huge hit to likes. Or at least, his had. 

Miraculously, Musk’s newly privatised account was fixed in just a few days and his engineers were made to ensure that every user saw his posts in a particularly obnoxious update.

‍Platformer confirmed: “after Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to ensure that Musk — and Musk alone — benefits from the previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.”

So really, do you blame the outage outrage?

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