Tag: Covid-19

Twitter Stops Enforcing COVID-19 Misinformation Policy, Experts Express Concerns Over False Claims

Twitter will no longer enforce its policy against COVID-19 misinformation, raising concerns among public health experts and social media researchers that the change could have serious consequences if it discourages vaccination and other efforts to combat the still-spreading virus.

Eagle-eyed users spotted the change Monday night, noting that a one-sentence update had been made to Twitter’s online rules: “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy.”

By Tuesday, some Twitter accounts were testing the new boundaries and celebrating the platform’s hands-off approach, which comes after Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk.

“This policy was used to silence people across the world who questioned the media narrative surrounding the virus and treatment options,” tweeted Dr. Simone Gold, a physician and leading purveyor of COVID-19 misinformation. “A win for free speech and medical freedom!”

Twitter’s decision to no longer remove false claims about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines disappointed public health officials, however, who said it could lead to more false claims about the virus, or the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.

“Bad news,” tweeted epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding, who urged people not to flee Twitter but to keep up the fight against bad information about the virus. “Stay folks — do NOT cede the town square to them!”

While Twitter’s efforts to stop false claims about COVID weren’t perfect, the company’s decision to reverse course is an abdication of its duty to its users, said Paul Russo, a social media researcher and dean of the Katz School of Science and Health at Yeshiva University in New York.

Russo added that it’s the latest of several recent moves by Twitter that could ultimately scare away some users and even advertisers. Some big names in business have already paused their ads on Twitter over questions about its direction under Musk.

“It is 100% the responsibility of the platform to protect its users from harmful content,” Russo said. “This is absolutely unacceptable.”

The virus, meanwhile, continues to spread. Nationally, new COVID cases averaged nearly 38,800 a day as of Monday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University — far lower than last winter but a vast undercount because of reduced testing and reporting. About 28,100 people with COVID were hospitalized daily and about 313 died, according to the most recent federal daily averages.

Cases and deaths were up from two weeks earlier. Yet a fifth of the U.S. population hasn’t been vaccinated, most Americans haven’t gotten the latest boosters, and many have stopped wearing masks.

Musk, who has himself spread COVID misinformation on Twitter, has signalled an interest in rolling back many of the platform’s previous rules meant to combat misinformation.

Last week, Musk said he would grant “amnesty” to account holders who had been kicked off Twitter. He’s also reinstated the accounts for several people who spread COVID misinformation, including that of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose personal account was suspended this year for repeatedly violating Twitter’s COVID rules.

Greene’s most recent tweets include ones questioning the effectiveness of masks and making baseless claims about the safety of COVID vaccines.

Since the pandemic began, platforms like Twitter and Facebook have struggled to respond to a torrent of misinformation about the virus, its origins and the response to it.

Under the policy enacted in January 2020, Twitter prohibited false claims about COVID-19 that the platform determined could lead to real-world harms. More than 11,000 accounts were suspended for violating the rules, and nearly 100,000 pieces of content were removed from the platform, according to Twitter’s latest numbers.

Despite its rules prohibiting COVID misinformation, Twitter has struggled with enforcement. Posts making bogus claims about home remedies or vaccines could still be found, and it was difficult on Tuesday to identify exactly how the platform’s rules may have changed.

Messages left with San Francisco-based Twitter seeking more information about its policy on COVID-19 misinformation were not immediately returned Tuesday.

A search for common terms associated with COVID misinformation on Tuesday yielded lots of misleading content, but also automatic links to helpful resources about the virus as well as authoritative sources like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19 coordinator, said Tuesday that the problem of COVID-19 misinformation is far larger than one platform, and that policies prohibiting COVID misinformation weren’t the best solution anyway.

Speaking at a Knight Foundation forum Tuesday, Jha said misinformation about the virus spread for a number of reasons, including legitimate uncertainty about a deadly illness. Simply prohibiting certain kinds of content isn’t going to help people find good information, or make them feel more confident about what they’re hearing from their medical providers, he said.

“I think we all have a collective responsibility,” Jha said of combating misinformation about COVID. “The consequences of not getting this right — of spreading that misinformation — is literally tens of thousands of people dying unnecessarily.”

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iPhone Factory Workers’ Protest: Over 20,000 New Hires Said to Leave Foxconn’s Zhengzhou Plant

More than 20,000 employees, most of them were new hires not yet working on the production line, have left Apple supplier Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant in China, a Foxconn source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday. The person said the departures would complicate the company’s previous target of resuming full production by the end of November, following worker unrest that rocked production at the world’s largest iPhone factory.

Foxconn declined to comment. The worker departures come after the Taiwanese firm offered on Thursday CNY 10,000 (roughly Rs. 1,14,000) to employees who wanted to resign and leave the chaos-hit plant.

It had apologised for committing a pay-related “technical error” when hiring new recruits, which workers say was a factor that led to protests involving clashes with security personnel.

Videos posted on Chinese social media on Friday showed crowds and long lines of luggage-laden workers queuing for buses. “It’s time to go home,” said one of the posters.

The labour unrest at the Zhengzhou plant that began on Wednesday marked rare scenes of open dissent in China which workers say was fuelled claims of overdue pay and frustration over severe COVID-19 restrictions.

A second Foxconn source familiar with the matter said some new hires had left the campus but did not elaborate on how many. The person said the departures had no impact on current production, as the new staff still needed to take training courses before working online.

The unrest comes at a time when China is logging record numbers of COVID-19 infections and grappling with more and more lockdowns that have fuelled frustration among citizens across the country. But it has also exposed communication problems and a mistrust of Foxconn management among some staff.

Foxconn launched a hiring drive earlier this month promising bonuses and higher salaries after it had to enact measures to curb the spread of COVID-19 in October. The curbs forced the company to isolate many employees and the plant’s conditions prompted several to flee.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

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iPhone November Shipments Said to See 30 Percent Slash Due to COVID-19 Woes in Foxconn China Plant

Apple supplier Foxconn’s COVID-19 woes at its vast iPhone manufacturing facility in China’s Zhengzhou city could slash the site’s November iPhone shipments by up to 30 percent, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said.

The source, who declined to be identified as the information was private, said Foxconn is working to boost iPhone production at its factory in the southern city of Shenzhen.

Foxconn referred Reuters to a statement it released late on Sunday, in which the company said that the situation was gradually being brought under control and that Foxconn would coordinate back-up production capacity with its other plants to reduce any potential impact.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request from Reuters for comment. Shares of Foxconn, formally called Hon Hai Precision Industry Company Limited, dropped 1.9 percent on Monday morning, compared to a 1.1 percent rise in the broader market.

Foxconn’s factory in Zhengzhou assembles the majority of the company’s global iPhone output, though Apple also produces the product in southern China as well as in India.

The plant, which employs about 200,000 workers, has in recent days been rocked by worker discontent over stringent measures to curb COVID-19 within the site.

Several migrant workers fled the plant over the weekend for their hometowns, driving cities to hastily draw up plans to accommodate them.

The impact on production comes amid the traditionally busy time for electronics makers and ahead of the year-end holiday season, which is also a prime time for vendors such as Apple.

Under China’s ultra-strict zero-COVID policies, localities are mandated to act swiftly to quell any outbreaks, with measures that could include full-scale lockdowns. On October 19, Foxconn banned all dining-in at canteens and required workers to take their meals in their dormitories, but said that production was normal.

Photographs and videos circulating widely on Chinese social media since Saturday showed Foxconn workers trekking across fields in the day and along roads at night. Reuters could not immediately verify the authenticity of the posts.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

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Hacker Offers to Sell Data of 48.5 Million Users of Shanghai’s COVID App

A hacker claims to have obtained the personal information of 48.5 million users of a COVID health mobile app run by the city of Shanghai, the second claim of a breach of the Chinese financial hub’s data in just over a month.

The hacker with the username “XJP” posted an offer to sell the data for $4,000 (roughly Rs. 3,20,000) on the hacker forum Breach Forums on Wednesday.

The person provided a sample of the data including the phone numbers, names, Chinese identification numbers, and health code status of 47 people.

Eleven of the 47 reached by Reuters confirmed they were listed in the sample, though two said their identification numbers were wrong. Reuters was unable to further verify the authenticity of the hacker’s claim.

The true size and nature of these kinds of data hacks is sometimes overstated by the seller in an attempt to make a quick profit.

“This DB (database) contains everyone who lives in or visited Shanghai since Suishenma’s adoption,” XJP said in the post, which originally asked for $4,850 (roughly Rs. 4,00,000) before lowering the price later the same day.

Suishenma is the Chinese name for Shanghai’s health code system, which the city of 25 million people established in early 2020 to combat the spread of COVID-19. All residents and visitors have to use it.

The app collects travel data to give users a red, yellow or green rating indicating the likelihood of having the virus. The code has to be shown to enter public venues.

The data is managed by the city government and users can access Suishenma either by downloading the app or opening it using the Alipay app, owned by fintech giant and Alibaba affiliate Ant Group, and Tencent‘s WeChat app.

The Shanghai government, Ant and Tencent did not immediately respond to requests for comment. XJP declined to comment when reached on Breach Forums.

“I’m not ready to answer questions yet as I have a lot more to drop,” XJP said.

The purported Suishenma breach comes after a hacker last month claimed to have procured 23TB of personal information belonging to one billion Chinese citizens from the Shanghai police.

That hacker also offered to sell the data on Breach Forums.

The first hacker was able to steal data from the police as a dashboard for managing a police database that had been left open on the public internet without password protection for more than a year, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing cyber security researchers.

The newspaper said data was hosted on Alibaba’s cloud platform and Shanghai authorities had summoned company executives over the matter.

Neither the Shanghai government nor the police nor Alibaba have commented on the police database matter.

Chinese regulatory bodies have in the past two years announced a barrage of new rules strengthening oversight over the private sector’s management of user data, after years of complaints by residents about how their personal data could be easily stolen or sold.

A screenshot of XJP’s offer on Breach Forums went viral on Chinese social media on Friday, prompting several Weibo users to weigh in on this latest leak and its broader implications, as well as question what sort of action would be taken.

“Data leaks in China are really no longer uncommon news,” said one.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

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Tesla’s Run of Record Deliveries May Take a Hit This Year Due to COVID-Related Shutdown, Predict Analysts

Tesla is expected to end its nearly two-year-long run of record quarterly deliveries as a prolonged COVID-related shutdown in Shanghai hit its production and supply chain, highlighting the risks of its reliance on China.

While Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk has been pursuing the acquisition of social media platform Twitter, his crown jewel, Tesla, has grappled with production glitches in China and slow output growth at new factories in Texas and Berlin.

Analysts expect Tesla to report deliveries of 295,078 vehicles for the second quarter as early as Friday, according to Refinitiv data. Several analysts have slashed their estimates further to about 260,000 due to China’s prolonged lockdown.

This would be down from its record deliveries of 310,048 the preceding quarter, marking Tesla’s first quarter-on-quarter decline in deliveries since the first quarter of 2020.

The world’s most valuable automaker has posted record deliveries every quarter since the third quarter of 2020, weathering pandemic and supply-chain disruptions better than most automakers.

China has been instrumental in Tesla’s rapid increase of vehicle production and Musk has praised workers there for “burning the 3 am oil.”

But China’s prolonged zero-COVID lockdown — Wedbush analyst Dan Ives called it Tesla’s “albatross” this quarter — caused deeper disruptions to output than Musk predicted. Tesla’s low-cost, lucrative Shanghai factory produced roughly half of the company’s total cars delivered last year, and Ives estimated the shutdown wiped out about 70,000 units in the quarter.

Musk said in April that Tesla’s overall vehicle production in the second quarter would be “roughly on par” with the first quarter, driven by a China rebound. But he recently said Tesla had a “very tough quarter,” citing production and supply-chain challenges in China.

Musk also said Tesla’s new factories in Texas and Berlin are “gigantic money furnaces” losing billions of dollars as they struggle to increase production quickly. He said the carmaker’s supply-chain problems are not over and keeping the factories running remains a concern.

“The key question is the magnitude of the (China production) decline and whether the Fremont (California) factory was able to help support volumes,” CFRA Research analyst Garrett Nelson said.

He expects volumes to rebound strongly in the second half of the year, as Tesla boosts production at the Shanghai factory with the easing of a COVID-19 lockdown.

Gene Munster, managing partner at venture capital firm Loup Ventures, was cautious about the outlook, saying the third quarter will be difficult for Tesla and other tech firms, citing a risk of recession.

Tesla has been laying off hundreds of employees in the United States, after Musk early this month told executives that he had a “super bad feeling” about the economy and needed to cut about 10 percent of staff at the electric car maker.

Nevertheless, Musk has said demand for Tesla vehicles remains strong.

Tesla shares have fallen 37 percent since early April, hurt by Musk’s Twitter deal and the China lockdown.

Musk, a prolific Twitter user who this week passed the 100 million follower mark, has not been tweeting for over a week.

Cowen analyst Jeffrey Osborne said in a report, “investors are growing fatigued with Elon’s rants” on the Twitter saga, politics and other topics.

“Many we speak to are questioning if we have reached ‘peak Elon’.”

© Thomson Reuters 2022

 

 

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Disney+ Grows to Nearly 138 Million Subscribers, Even as Profit Slips Despite Return to Parks

Disney on Wednesday said its profit slipped in the recently ended quarter but its theme parks and streaming service Disney+ were booming.

The entertainment giant reported net income of $470 million (about Rs. 3,645 crore), just over half of the $912 million (about Rs. 7,075 crore) profit it made in the same period a year earlier.

But park attendance that had fallen due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic rebounded and Disney+ gained 7.9 million subscribers to hit 137.7 million.

When adding in subscriptions to Disney’s streaming services Hulu and ESPN+, the overall number tops 205 million.

“Our strong results in the second quarter, including fantastic performance at our domestic parks and continued growth of our streaming services once again proved that we are in a league of our own,” said Walt Disney CEO Bob Chapek.

Chapek told analysts Disney is open to raising its streaming service subscription price in the future, but has no specific plans. Disney+ is pursuing a version of the service that would be supported by advertising, set to launch later in 2022.

Disney+ gained more subscribers than analysts had expected, in stark contrast to a dive in subscriber numbers reported by rival Netflix in the first quarter of this year.

A drop of just 200,000 users — less than 0.1 percent of the total Netflix customer base — caused shares in the Silicon Valley firm to plunge and prompted a shareholder to file a lawsuit accusing the streaming television titan of not making it clear that subscriber numbers were in peril.

“Disney+ has been taking Netflix out at the knees [in the US],” tech analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group told AFP.

“Kids have always chased their content, and for parents it has been a no-brainer to get their service.”

About half of Disney+ subscribers are families with children, executives said on the earnings call.

Disney stopped licensing its coveted content to Netflix to make it exclusive to its own streaming service, and said it planned to stick with the tactic when it comes to rivals in the market.

Parks and politics

Disney said that as its streaming television service continues to grow strongly, its resorts and parks are generally operating without any of the significant COVID-19 related restrictions on capacity that were in place last year.

The pandemic does continue to vex film and television show production, Disney said, but it has been able to release films in theatres so far this year.

“Our slate for the remainder of this year is incredibly strong,” Chapek told analysts while discussing the company’s line-up of shows for streaming and theatres.

Chapek acknowledged challenges getting Disney films released in China, saying the situation there is “very complicated” from political and business standpoints.

He said he was encouraged by the fact that a freshly released Doctor Strange film based on a Marvel comics character took in more than $500 million (about Rs. 3,877 crore) in its first week, even without being shown in China.

Disney has run into political turbulence closer to home, with the Florida governor recently signing a law that eliminates a statute that has for decades allowed the entertainment giant to act as a local government in Orlando, where it has a theme park.

The move was the latest episode in a dispute between the state’s Republican administration and Disney, after the company criticised the passage in March of a law banning school lessons on sexual orientation.

“From a financial standpoint, Disney will come out ahead with the plug pulled,” analyst Enderle said.

“It’s almost like Florida gave them a monetary favour; Disney was covering all the costs of the municipality they are in.”

The Reedy Creek Improvement District was an area created by Florida’s congress in 1967 to facilitate the construction of Disney World in Orlando.

Under that agreement, Disney runs the district as if the entertainment juggernaut were a local government, including collecting taxes and guaranteeing essential public services such as garbage collection and water treatment.

Under Florida law, if the special district is dissolved, its assets and debts would be transferred to local governments that surround the area.

“Removing district could transfer $2 billion (about Rs. 15,515 crore) debt from Disney to taxpayers,” state Democratic senator Linda Stewart warned after the bill was signed.

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Amazon’s Net Loss Prompts Query: Has It Built Too Many Warehouses?

In recent years, Amazon has spent billions of dollars on new warehouses that cut into profits, explaining to investors that it had no choice but to meet ever-rising consumer demand.

It turns out, Amazon may have built too much, too soon, analysts say.

The world’s largest online retailer on Thursday reported $2 billion (roughly Rs. 15,300 crore) in incremental costs from having excess fulfillment and transportation capacity, a dramatic shift from just two years ago when Amazon had to turn away merchants’ goods because it had room only for vital supplies.

The company is lowering its capital expenditure plans for 2022, its Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said. Amazon will spend less on fulfillment projects this year than last, while transportation investments will be flat to slightly down.

The new reality began to emerge halfway through 2021. Amazon was on track to double its warehouse and delivery network, a feat necessitated by consumers’ embrace of at-home shopping to avoid COVID-19 infections in stores. For the first time, space was not the retailer’s main constraint; it was labour to staff facilities fully. At Amazon’s scale, that meant hiring 270,000 workers in six months.

After the Christmas holiday, consumer demand dwindled, as always. Online sales dipped from a year ago, Amazon’s results showed. Brick-and-mortar stores beckoned shoppers once the Omicron wave subsided, and still, others faced a choice between buying goods and filling their cars with high-priced gas. Amazon says order patterns have remained the same.

Nevertheless, Olsavsky told reporters the company appeared to be “overbuilt for current demand.” He said Amazon had no regrets, later telling analysts: “Many of the build decisions were made 18 to 24 months ago, so there are limitations on what we can adjust mid-year.”

David Glick, a former Amazon vice president who is now chief technology officer of the on-demand fulfillment company Flexe, said extra space was no major challenge.

“Amazon may have gotten a little ahead on fulfillment capacity, but they will grow into that excess capacity over the next year,” he said. A new program for Amazon to store and ship goods that independent merchants directly sell to consumers, known as Buy with Prime, may help, too.

Amazon will eventually need these warehouses, agreed Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities. But Amazon’s disclosure provided little solace.

“Didn’t they see this coming when they built all these fulfillment centres?” Pachter asked, noting how Amazon doubled over two decades of capacity in just 24 months. “Why not do it in 48?”

Operating income fell 59 percent to $3.7 billion (roughly Rs. 28,313 crore) in the first quarter, while a decline in Amazon’s shares in electric vehicle maker Rivian resulted in the company’s first net loss since 2015.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

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Daily COVID cases fall below 1000-mark; Country reports 6 deaths

On Monday, the country recorded less than 1000 new COVID-19 cases, almost after a week. A total of 861 new cases and six deaths were reported in the last 24 hours. According to the Union Ministry of Family and Welfare, the daily positivity rate is at 0.32 percent. The active cases in the country stand at 11,058 which accounts for 0.03 percent of the total cases.

According to the reports, 929 COVID patients recovered in the last 24 hours taking the total number of recoveries in the country since the beginning of the pandemic to 4,25,03,383. The rate of recovery is 98.76 percent. Meanwhile, the death toll in the country rose to 5,21,691. As far as the COVID vaccination drive is concerned, a total of 1,85,74,18,827 so far.

Meanwhile, the Health Ministry had permitted the precautionary dose of COVID vaccine for all adults from April 10. The precautionary dose will be available at the private vaccination centers for all 18+ adults. The announcement was made by the Union health ministry on Friday. “It has been decided that precaution dose of COVID vaccines will be made available to 18+ population group at private vaccination centers,” read the statement. 

To note, the largest countrywide vaccination drive started in January last year with healthcare workers getting inoculated in the first phase. The second phase of the COVID vaccination drive began on March 1 for people above 60 years, while the vaccination drive for all aged more than 45 years was launched on April 1, 2021.

ALSO READ: COVID-19 booster doses permitted for all adults from April 10: Health Ministry



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