The U.S. has imposed sanctions on an Iran-based technology firm for its role in facilitating the Iranian government’s censorship of the internet as anti-government protests swept the country

SAG-AFTRA is threatening a walkout by its members working in the video games industry.

Amy Slaton has long been criticized for using beauty filters in her social media photos

Parents of children allegedly given sedatives by staff at a preschool in Taiwan have been protesting the government's slow response to the incident.

In a recent exchange on Twitter, MrBeast and Jacksepticeye have resolved their differences

UPDATE: Aug. 7, 2023, 5:00 a.m. EDT This article has been updated to reflect the

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 14, 2023--

Elon Musk’s Twitter has started sending payments to some of its most most popular and controversial users. The scheme is part of what Twitter says is an ad revenue sharing programme, which will let people keep some of the money generated from showing advertising in the replies to their tweets. It is still not clear exactly how the size of the payments is decided, and some have reported receiving tens of thousands of dollars. Users must be subscribed to Twitter Blue and have at least five million impressions on their posts. The payments have gone to popular Twitter users that include some of the most controversial on the site. Andrew Tate, for instance, shared that he had received a payment of $20,000 from Twitter. Many of those who have received payouts have had their accounts boosted by Elon Musk in recent months. Mr Musk has often replied to some of the site’s users – especially those focused on politics – seemingly in an attempt to draw more attention to those accounts. Some critics of Mr Musk had suggested that he had favoured right-wing accounts in the first payouts. But the nature of the accounts may also be affected by the fact that users must pay for Twitter’s premium Blue membership – which has been embraced by many of Mr Musk’s political allies – and other non-political accounts did post that they had received payments. Mr Musk first announced the ad sharing plan in February, saying that the idea was to allow people to “create an interesting thread and get paid for it”. The payments that are being sent to the first users are based on the impressions their posts have gathered since that plan was first announced, he said in a recent tweet. In a thread, Twitter said that the scheme was intended to allow people to make a living directly on Twitter. Until now, users have had to monetise their following in other ways – usually by sending traffic to other platforms. “We’re expanding our creator monetisation offering to include ads revenue sharing for creators. This means that creators can get a share in ad revenue, starting in the replies to their posts,” the company wrote on its official account. “This is part of our effort to help people earn a living directly on Twitter. We’re rolling out the program more broadly later this month and all eligible creators will be able to apply. Go get yourself something nice!” Twitter said that it will soon launch an application process for ads revenue sharing. It is not clear how those who received early payments were chosen. After some users attempted to calculate how much money accounts were receiving per view, Mr Musk cautioned that the system includes some other controls. He said that the payouts are “not exactly per impression”, and were instead based on how many ads were shown to other verified users, which he said was done to ensure that people were not able to use bots to drive up their impressions. Mr Musk also said that he had given the money generated from his own tweets to the creator payout pool. Twitter’s announcement comes soon after Meta announced its own competitor to the site, in the form of Threads. That app has grown rapidly – and while it is still unclear how much it has affected the user base of Twitter, some away from the company have said that the site’s traffic is “tanking”.

Planet-like objects in the Orion Nebula have been revealed for the first time in images from the James Webb Space Telescope. The Orion Nebula, one of the brightest nebulae in the night sky, has long presented astronomers with an abundance of celestial objects to study. It is identifiable as the sword in the Orion constellation and is located 1,300 light-years from Earth. Astronomers managed to discover unprecedented details by capturing mosaics of the Orion Nebula in short and long wavelengths of light. Whilst searching for low-mass objects, astronomers Samuel G. Pearson - a European Space Agency research fellow at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands - and Mark J. McCaughrean - senior adviser for science and exploration at the European Space Agency - came across something they had never before seen. Their discovery appears to defy some fundamental astronomical theories: pairs of planet-like objects with masses between 0.6 and 13 times the mass of Jupiter. They have been dubbed Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or JuMBOs. "Although some of them are more massive than the planet Jupiter, they will be roughly the same size and only slightly large," said Pearson. The astronomers found 40 pairs of JuMBOs, and although they exist in pairs, the objects are typically about 200 astronomical units apart, or 200 times the distance between Earth and the sun. This means it can take between 20,000 and 80,000 years for the objects to complete an orbit around each other. McCaughrean and Pearson have written two research papers based on their discoveries in the Orion Nebula. The preliminary findings are available on a preprint site called arXiv whilst the studies have been submitted to academic journals for publication. But many questions about JuMBOs remain. "Scientists have been working on theories and models of star and planet formation for decades, but none of them have ever predicted that we would find pairs of super low mass objects floating alone in space - and we're seeing lots of them," Pearson said. "The main that we learn for this is that there is something fundamentally wrong with either our understanding of planet formation, star formation, or both." Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Slack, the workplace chat app, has stopped working for some of it users. Users saw an array of error messages, indicating that “something went wrong”. Slack’s status page showed that the site was up as usual, and that it was not aware of any problems. But a wide array of users reported problems on Twitter, and tracking website Down Detector showed a large outage.

A top European Union official says Twitter has dropped out of the bloc's voluntary agreement to combat online disinformation

DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 12, 2023--