Twitter Blue subscriptions to relaunch Monday after disastrous debut

Twitter will relaunch its Twitter Blue subscription service on Monday, it said Saturday, providing some details about how the service will work after a disastrous debut last month.

Twitter Blue got off to a rough start and had to be suspended last month after trolls used the service to impersonate celebrities and companies, including Eli Lilly, Nintendo, and Lockheed Martin. In the case of Eli Lilly, pranksters impersonating the drugmaker declared, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now,” forcing the company into an awkward apology for something it didn’t do.  

Elon Musk has pushed for more subscription revenue at Twitter since taking it over in late October, saying the company cannot survive on advertising alone. 

Twitter Blue returns—with changes

“We’re relaunching  @TwitterBlue on Monday – subscribe on web for $8/month or on iOS for $11/month to get access to subscriber-only features, including the blue checkmark,” the company tweeted

Former Twitter janitor said someone from Elon Musk’s team told him that robots would replace cleaners

Elon Musks’ Twitter takeover has been characterized by a particularly high number of layoffs. 

The Tesla billionaire cut nearly 50% of workers last month, and followed that up with a middle-of-the-night email asking the remaining employees whether they wanted to leave the company, or commit to an “extremely hardcore” work culture. 

This week, janitors who were contracted to work at Twitter headquarters through a company called Flagship joined a picket line in front of the building, saying their contract with the company was not renegotiated. 

Julio Alvarado, a janitor who said he was fired on Monday after working at Twitter offices for 10 years, told the BBC that someone from Musk’s team told him that eventually his job would no longer exist because robots would replace human cleaners. 

Twitter did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. 

The idea of robots as cleaners isn’t necessarily new—just look at

Amazon starts ‘Alexa, thank my driver’ program amid Alexa, driver woes

Amazon is giving customers a new way to thank the drivers who deliver their packages, just in time for the holidays. Specifically, its “Alexa, thank my driver” program asks them to do so via its voice assistant Alexa.

Unfortunately for Amazon, the timing of the program’s launch yesterday is awkward in a few ways. First, it follows news that Amazon is planning big layoffs, with a focus on the teams working on Alexa and the devices used to access it. Second, it comes the same week as a lawsuit alleging the company used deceptive methods to lead consumers to believe that tip money went directly to drivers as extra pay, when it really was used to subsidize their base wages. 

Alexa is part of an Amazon division that has posted major losses in recent years. The unit is also the focal point of large job cuts planned at Amazon, as

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott says AI language models can improve access to education, assist entrepreneurship

If you’ve been on the internet this week, you’ve likely seen the buzz about ChatGPT, AI firm Open AI’s advanced, human-sounding chatbot that was released for public use last week. As users marveled at the chatbot’s ability to answer complex questions and even make jokes, many are hypothesizing what the implications will be for higher education as well as the future of work. At Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco, CTO of Microsoft Kevin Scott explained what the potential is for powerful AI language models to make information more accessible.

Scott emphasized that one important aspect of AI models is its ability to help individuals and businesses create complex code without necessarily having to get a degree in computer science. Microsoft has its own AI platform, GitHub, which is a coding assistant the company built with OpenAI. “You don’t need to have a PhD in computer science anymore

Meta had a system to treat celebrity Facebook and Instagram accounts with less scrutiny and misled the public about it new report finds

Facebook and Instagram have a list of the most high-profile and commercially useful users on their services, and even their own parent company is saying it’s unethical.

Over the past year, Meta’s oversight board has been investigating Facebook and Instagram’s little-known “cross-check” program, in the wake of a damning 2021 Wall Street Journal report detailing how the platforms protected millions of celebrity users from the company’s enforcement and content policing protocols.

Meta tasked the oversight board, which is funded by the company but operates largely independently, with investigating the program in October of last year. The board finally released its findings on Tuesday in a publicly available policy advisory to Meta. The opinion is that a big overhaul is needed for the cross-check program, which covers famous public figures including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, and former President Donald Trump.

The investigation uncovered “several shortcomings” in the

Elon Musk kicked Kanye West of Twitter but the Anti-Defamation League says Musk needs ‘clear policies, not personal intervention’

Twitter’s chief Elon Musk suspended Kanye West’s account last week after the rapper known legally as Ye posted a photo of a swastika inside the Star of David.

The Tesla billionaire previously chose to reinstate West’s account that was suspended for anti-Semitic remarks in October, before Musk took over the social media platform. 

“I tried my best. Despite that, he again violated our rule against incitement to violence,” Musk wrote

But despite his decision to remove West, individual judgments on what qualifies as hateful speech from the richest man in the world do not make a coherent content moderation strategy, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt. 

“We all want to give Elon an opportunity, but he’s got to show some progress,” Greenblatt told CNBC on Monday. “He personally intervened about Kanye and took that account down. He personally intervened [with] another account a few weeks ago that

Coinbase CEO Armstrong: ‘Baffling’ FTX’s Bankman-Fried not in custody

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried should be in custody by now, as far as Brian Armstrong is concerned. The Coinbase CEO said this week it’s “baffling to me why he’s not in custody already.”

“The DOJ or somebody should be able to make—just based on his public statements, I think there’s a very open and shut case for fraud,” Armstrong said at the a16z crypto Founder Summit on Tuesday. He added, “I’m not an expert on this, but the people I talk to seem to agree on that.”

Armstrong also questioned why the media has refrained from calling Bankman-Fried a criminal. 

“I think we were all pretty shocked to see the scope of the fraud that happened at FTX. And let’s call it a fraud. We have to call it what it actually is. It’s been pretty bizarre that mainstream media hasn’t really come out and said, ‘This guy’s a criminal.’

Here’s what happens to your student loan debt when you die

It’s hardly any secret that student loan debt is a major burden for individuals and families across the country. According to the Education Data Initiative, student loan debt in the United States totaled $1.745 trillion as of the third quarter of 2022. About 92.7% of all debt is federal student loans.

The average individual debt balance, when including both federal and private loans, is projected to be about $40,780, according to the same Education Data Initiative report.

So what happens if the worst occurs and the borrower passes away without having fully repaid their student debt? It’s an important question to consider. And the answer varies based on the type of loan in question.

What happens to federal student debt when you die?

The process for dealing with federal student debt in the event of a borrower’s passing is the most straightforward. According to the U.S. Department of Education

‘I did not ever try to commit fraud’: SBF defends his actions and distances himself from Alameda in first live interview since FTX’s collapse

Sam Bankman-Fried, or SBF, defended himself against accusations of fraud on Wednesday in his first live interview since his $32 billion cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, collapsed earlier this month.

“I didn’t ever try to commit fraud,” Bankman-Fried told reporter Andrew Sorkin at the New York Times Dealbook Summit. “I was excited about the prospects of FTX a month ago. I saw it as a thriving, growing business. I was shocked by what happened this month. And, reconstructing it, there are things that I wish I had done differently.”

The former crypto billionaire has watched his fortune—which hit $26 billion at its peak—evaporate in a matter of weeks amid FTX’s bankruptcy, and critics say his crypto empire was nothing more than a “Ponzi scheme.”

One key accusation leveled against SBF is that he used customer funds from his crypto exchange to fund risky bets at his trading firm Alameda Research.

SBF admitted

Justin Bieber, Dua Lipa and Elton John come out on top of Apple’s top songs of 2022

“Stay,” the smash hit by The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber topped Apple Music’s global song chart in 2022 as the giant music streamer released its end-of-year lists and provided listeners with data on their own most listened-to tunes.

“Stay,” which stayed atop the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks this summer, was No. 1 on Apple Music’s top 100 global songs chart, staying on top for 51 days straight. Elton John and Dua Lipa’s “Cold Heart (PNAU Remix)” was No. 1 on the streamer’s Shazam chart and “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” from the movie musical “Encanto” was the song with the most-read lyrics in 2022 on the platform.

Joining “Stay” at the very top of the global songs list were “As It Was” by Harry Styles, “Wait For U” by Future featuring Drake and Tems, “Super Gremlin” by Kodak Black, “Easy on Me” by Adele, and “Heat Wave”