What you're looking at is a concept car, but it's also so much more. This is the car that could change everything you've come to expect about acceptable range from an electric car, not to mention raise the bar for visual style and aggression along the way. This is the Mercedes-Benz Concept CLA Class.
The Concept CLA inherits a lot of learnings from the extremely slippery Vision EQXX, but it's a car that’s a lot more ready for production, and should be a lot more affordable. The current CLA is one of the most affordable Mercedes-Benz cars you can buy in the US, and with any luck this future one won’t break the bank, either.
That’s despite a range that should surpass 400 miles on a charge, plus a wholly new software architecture ready to deliver level-three advanced, hands-off driver assistance. It’s an exciting combination of form and technology, and hopefully close to something we’ll see in dealerships soon. Watch the video below for the full story.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-mercedes-benz-concept-cla-class-mixes-big-range-and-big-style-130222801.html?src=rss
Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. is setting the record straight. After Variety reported earlier this week that an AI-generated track echoing the voices of Drake and The Weeknd could be considered for a Grammy Award in songwriting categories, Mason is insisting that’s not the case.
In an interview with The New York Times only last week, Mason suggested the track would be “absolutely eligible” as the lyrics a human made the lyrics. On Instagram, the Recording Academy CEO has now clarified that the song will not be eligible.
“Even though it was written by a human creator, the vocals were not legally obtained, the vocals were not cleared by the label or the artists and the song is not commercially available and because of that, it’s not eligible,” he said. Sorry robots.
– Mat Smith
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Affordable Windows notebooks are great for people who only use a computer to check email, shop online or post on Facebook. They’re also good for kids who have no business putting their sticky little hands on a $2,000 gaming rig. And, depending on what you need them for, these devices can be decent daily drivers, too. Here’s what to look for in a cheap Windows laptop – and some of our recommendations.
Google desperately would love for you to remember that it will announce its own devices after Apple has its turn. Rather than just... holding its own event before Apple’s, Google has instead teased its upcoming devices with short videos. After dripfeeding details about the Pixel 8 lineup, now Google is teasing a new Pixel Watch that will feature IP68 dust and water resistance.
Apple has its fingers in many pies, and now it’s getting into the monster business with an upcoming TV show. The company has released the first trailer for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters and while the title might not make it super clear, this is a Godzilla affair. Get lost, Mothra.
You may be able to ask an Uber provider to help you mount a TV.
According to Bloomberg, Uber is exploring offering a new TaskRabbit-like service. Developer Steve Moser found code hidden in Uber’s iPhone app for an offering reportedly codenamed Chore. Based on its current iteration, Chore will let you hire “taskers” and specify in the app what you need help with, how long you think it would take and what time you want the tasker to arrive. It’s all pretty similar to TaskRabbit. Like any other unconfirmed feature still in development, Chore may not even make it to public release. If it does, it’ll be a huge new undertaking for Uber.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-ai-generated-drake-and-the-weeknd-track-wont-be-winning-a-grammy-111545613.html?src=rss
Sony has launched the "Aibo Foster Parent" program for its $2,900 robot dogs, allowing owners whose basic plans have been canceled to donate them. The company will then refurbish the Aibos as necessary and donate them to medical facilities, foster homes and other organizations. The aim is to "make Aibo more sustainable," the company said, by giving the units a second home where they can provide emotional support and more.
The Aibo robot dogs in question are the newer 2019 ERS-1000 units still being sold, which are a reboot of its "entertainment" robotic dogs from the late 1990s. It's not exactly a fully charitable project, as Sony will charge "foster parents" an unnamed fee for service. It also notes that depending on condition, some donated units may serve strictly as parts for other Aibo robots.
As we discussed in our review back in 2019, Aibo can do a number of tricks like standing on its hind legs and greeting its owner at the door, and has been engineered to "mature" over time like a real dog. It also offers a web-based interface that lets you program custom actions. The units have a suite of sensors and respond to voice and touch, and can even recognize specific people, so they're ideal as emotional support devices. That means they can sub in at facilities that don't allow real animals, so the program seems like a good use of older units — while also reducing e-waste.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/sony-will-repair-aging-aibo-robot-dogs-to-help-them-find-their-forever-homes-103303488.html?src=rss
The latest WhatsApp beta contains a new screen called Third-party chats that may allow it to work with other messaging apps, WaBetaInfo has reported. While the page is blank, its presence could signal that WhatsApp is getting such a feature ready in order to comply with the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA).
In July, the EU announced that seven tech giant "gatekeepers" with over $7.5 billion in turnover — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, TikTok owner ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft and Samsung — must comply with all of the EU's new digital market rules. A key tenet of the DMA is that gatekeepers are prohibited from favoring their own services and must allow interoperability with third parties. Last week, the EU Commission designated key apps subject to the rules, including Meta's messaging apps, WhatsApp and Messenger.
📝 WhatsApp beta for Android 2.23.19.8: what's new?
WhatsApp is working on complying with new EU regulations by developing support for chat interoperability, and it will be available in a future update of the app!https://t.co/XI6zMoOD5Ppic.twitter.com/Jpd9Leh2Ki
That means Meta must make WhatsApp work with other third-party messaging apps like Signal and Telegram starting in March 2024. That will allow users of those apps to contact people on WhatsApp, even if they don't have a WhatsApp account — though WhatsApp users will supposedly be able to opt out. There's no news yet about what kind of features will be available with cross-messaging, though end-to-end encryption will supposedly be preserved, according to WaBetaInfo.
Apple's iMessage app isn't (yet) one of 22 key services mentioned under the DMA, so Google's dream of having Apple support RCS messaging may not happen soon. However, the App Store will be impacted. Apple is reportedly set to allow third-party app stores and sideloading in iOS 17, and both Microsoft and Epic Games are preparing their own stores for iOS mobile apps. We're likely to learn more about that tomorrow evening (September 12th) at Apple's iPhone 15 event, when it will take the wraps off of iOS 17.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/whatsapp-tests-feature-that-could-open-it-up-to-other-messaging-apps-085433722.html?src=rss
Amazon’s iRobot just released a pair of budget-friendly robo-vacs to suit modest cleaning tasks, but it’s been a while since the flagship J7+ vacuum got a refresh. Well, the wait is over. The company announced presales for the forthcoming J9+ line of vacuums, and these high-end appliances boast plenty of nifty features for those who absolutely hate manually pushing a vacuum or mop around.
The J9+ is available in two versions, which is normally the case with modern Roomba devices. There’s the traditional vacuum-only J9+ and the Roomba Combo J9+ that mops in addition to sucking up dirt. The latter ships with a redesigned fill dock that automatically empties debris and replenishes the robot with mopping liquid, removing yet another manual cleaning step so you can get back to the important work of clearing out that Netflix queue.
These robots are more powerful than ever before, with an amped-up motor designed to “tackle dirt, pet fur and debris with unmatched precision.” The four-stage cleaning system provides multiple passthroughs and the newly-added dual rubber brushes take the suction power up a notch, in addition to allowing for pressurized scrubbing when necessary. The Combo J9+ features a motor that automatically lifts the mop pads when vacuuming carpets and rugs to avoid moisture leakage.
The hardware updates are well and good, and certainly useful, but it’s the software that provides the lion’s share of new features. These Roombas ship with OS 7, which looks to take automation and efficiency to the next level. The software boasts a tool called Dirt Detective that uses a proprietary algorithm to keep track of previous cleaning tasks to assess the dirtiest parts of the home, prioritizing those locations accordingly. In other words, it’ll start with the dirtiest rooms and move on from there.
The Combo J9+ goes a step further, and Dirt Detective will force the vacuum and mop to clean the bathroom last, no matter how dirty it is. This means that the vacuum won’t be tracking gross bathroom stuff throughout the rest of the home. If you want a more hands-on approach, you can use the app to manually select the navigation route through your house.
Other software improvements include the SmartScrub feature that ensures the Combo J9+ makes multiple passes through certain parts of the home, like the kitchen, when mopping. It’ll even boost the scrubbing power in these locations to eliminate dirt and stains. This also works in the other direction, so the vacuum will scrub less in cleaner areas to protect hardwood flooring and the like.
The Roomba J9+ and the Combo J9+ are available for preorder today from iRobot and tomorrow from third-party retailers, with shipments going out sometime during the fall. The vacuum-only J9+ costs $900 and the Combo J9+ costs $1,400. As for OS 7, it’s coming to other Roomba models beyond the J9+, but the company hasn’t said which ones.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/irobots-new-flagship-roombas-ship-with-an-updated-os-to-make-cleaning-simpler-040142701.html?src=rss
You didn't actually believe all those founder's myths about tech billionaires like Bezos, Jobs and Musk pulling themselves up by their bootstraps from some suburban American garage, did you? In reality, our corporate kings have been running the same playbook since the 18th century when Lancashire's own Richard Arkwright wrote it. Arkwright is credited with developing a means of forming cotton fully into thread — technically he didn't actually invent or design the machine, but developed the overarching system in which it could be run at scale — and spinning that success into financial fortune. Never mind the fact that his 24-hour production lines were operated by boys as young as seven pulling 13-hour shifts.
In Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech— one of the best books I've read this year — LA Times tech reporter Brian Merchant lays bare the inhumane cost of capitalism wrought by the industrial revolution and celebrates the workers who stood against those first tides of automation: the Luddites.
The first tech titans were not building global information networks or commercial space rockets. They were making yarn and cloth.
A lot of yarn, and a lot of cloth. Like our modern-day titans, they started out as entrepreneurs. But until the nineteenth century, entrepreneurship was not a cultural phenomenon. Businessmen took risks, of course, and undertook novel efforts to increase their profits. Yet there was not a popular conception of the heroic entrepreneur, of the adventuring businessman, until long after the birth of industrial capitalism. The term itself was popularized by Jean-Baptiste Say, in his 1803 work A Treatise on Political Economy. An admirer of Adam Smith’s, Say thought that The Wealth of Nations was missing an account of the individuals who bore the risk of starting new business; he called this figure the entrepreneur, translating it from the French as “adventurer” or “undertaker.”
For a worker, aspiring to entrepreneurship was different than merely seeking upward mobility. The standard path an ambitious, skilled weaver might pursue was to graduate from apprentice to journeyman weaver, who rented a loom or worked in a shop, to owning his own loom, to becoming a master weaver and running a small shop of his own that employed other journeymen. This was customary.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as now in the twenty-first century, entrepreneurs saw the opportunity to use technology to disrupt longstanding customs in order to increase efficiencies, output, and personal profit. There were few opportunities for entrepreneurship without some form of automation; control of technologies of production grants its owner a chance to gain advantage or take pay or market share from others. In the past, like now, owners started small businesses at some personal financial risk, whether by taking out a loan to purchase used handlooms and rent a small factory space, or by using inherited capital to procure a steam engine and a host of power looms.
The most ambitious entrepreneurs tapped untested technologies and novel working arrangements, and the most successful irrevocably changed the structure and nature of our daily lives, setting standards that still exist today. The least successful would go bankrupt, then as now.
In the first century of the Industrial Revolution, one entrepreneur looms above the others, and has a strong claim on the mantle of the first of what we’d call a tech titan today. Richard Arkwright was born to a middle-class tailor’s family and originally apprenticed as a barber and wigmaker. He opened a shop in the Lancashire city of Bolton in the 1760s. There, he invented a waterproof dye for the wigs that were in fashion at the time, and traveled the country collecting hair to make them. In his travels across the Midlands, he met spinners and weavers, and became familiar with the machinery they used to make cotton garments. Bolton was right in the middle of the Industrial Revolution’s cotton hub hotspot.
Arkwright took the money he made from the wigs, plus the dowry from his second marriage, and invested it in upgraded spinning machinery. “The improvement of spinning was much in the air, and many men up and down Lancashire were working at it,” Arkwright’s biographer notes. James Hargreaves had invented the spinning jenny, a machine that automated the process of spinning cotton into a weft— halfway into yarn, basically— in 1767. Working with one of his employees, John Kay, Arkwright tweaked the designs to spin cotton entirely into yarn, using water or steam power. Without crediting Kay, Arkwright patented his water frame in 1769 and a carding engine in 1775, and attracted investment from wealthy hosiers in Nottingham to build out his operation. He built his famous water-powered factory in Cromford in 1771.
His real innovation was not the machinery itself; several similar machines had been patented, some before his. His true innovation was creating and successfully implementing the system of modern factory work.
“Arkwright was not the great inventor, nor the technical genius,” as the Oxford economic historian Peter Mathias explains, “but he was the first man to make the new technology of massive machinery and power source work as a system— technical, organizational, commercial— and, as a proof, created the first great personal fortune and received the accolade of a knighthood in the textile industry as an industrialist.” Richard Arkwright Jr., who inherited his business, became the richest commoner in England.
Arkwright père was the first start‑up founder to launch a unicorn company we might say, and the first tech entrepreneur to strike it wildly rich. He did so by marrying the emergent technologies that automated the making of yarn with a relentless new work regime. His legacy is alive today in companies like Amazon, which strive to automate as much of their operations as is financially viable, and to introduce highly surveilled worker-productivity programs.
Often called the grandfather of the factory, Arkwright did not invent the idea of organizing workers into strict shifts to produce goods with maximal efficiency. But he pursued the “manufactory” formation most ruthlessly, and most vividly demonstrated the practice could generate huge profits. Arkwright’s factory system, which was quickly and widely emulated, divided his hundreds of workers into two overlapping thirteen-hour shifts. A bell was rung twice a day, at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. The gates would shut and work would start an hour later. If a worker was late, they sat the day out, forfeiting that day’s pay. (Employers of the era touted this practice as a positive for workers; it was a more flexible schedule, they said, since employees no longer needed to “give notice” if they couldn’t work. This reasoning is reminiscent of that offered by twenty-first-century on‑demand app companies.) For the first twenty-two years of its operation, the factory was worked around the clock, mostly by boys like Robert Blincoe, some as young as seven years old. At its peak, two-thirds of the 1,100-strong workforce were children. Richard Arkwright Jr. admitted in later testimony that they looked “extremely dissipated, and many of them had seldom more than a few hours of sleep,” though he maintained they were well paid.
The industrialist also built on‑site housing, luring whole families from around the country to come work his frames. He gave them one week’s worth of vacation a year, “but on condition that they could not leave the village.” Today, even our most cutting-edge consumer products are still manufactured in similar conditions, in imposing factories with on‑site dormitories and strictly regimented production processes, by workers who have left home for the job. Companies like Foxconn operate factories where the regimen can be so grueling it has led to suicide epidemics among the workforce.
The strict work schedule and a raft of rules instilled a sense of discipline among the laborers; long, miserable shifts inside the factory walls were the new standard. Previously, of course, similar work was done at home or in small shops, where shifts were not so rigid or enforced.
Arkwright’s “main difficulty,” according to the early business theorist Andrew Ure, did not “lie so much in the invention of a proper mechanism for drawing out and twisting cotton into a continuous thread, as in [. . .] training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automation.” This was his legacy. “To devise and administer a successful code of factory discipline, suited to the necessities of factory diligence, was the Herculean enterprise, the noble achievement of Arkwright,” Ure continued. “It required, in fact, a man of a Napoleon nerve and ambition to subdue the refractory tempers of workpeople.”
Ure was hardly exaggerating, as many workers did in fact view Arkwright as akin to an invading enemy. When he opened a factory in Chorley, Lancashire, in 1779, a crowd of stockingers and spinners broke in, smashed the machines, and burned the place to the ground. Arkwright did not try to open another mill in Lancashire.
Arkwright also vigorously defended his patents in the legal system. He collected royalties on his water frame and carding engine until 1785, when the court decided that he had not actually invented the machines but had instead copied their parts from other inventors, and threw the patents out. By then, he was astronomically wealthy. Before he died, he would be worth £500,000, or around $425 million in today’s dollars, and his son would expand and entrench his factory empire.
The success apparently went to his head— he was considered arrogant, even among his admirers. In fact, arrogance was a key ingredient in his success: he had what Ure described as “fortitude in the face of public opposition.” He was unyielding with critics when they pointed out, say, that he was employing hundreds of children in machine-filled rooms for thirteen hours straight. That for all his innovation, the secret sauce in his groundbreaking success was labor exploitation.
In Arkwright, we see the DNA of those who would attain tech titanhood in the ensuing decades and centuries. Arkwright’s brashness rhymes with that of bullheaded modern tech executives who see virtue in a willingness to ignore regulations and push their workforces to extremes, or who, like Elon Musk, would gleefully wage war with perceived foes on Twitter rather than engage any criticism of how he runs his businesses. Like Steve Jobs, who famously said, “We’ve always been shameless about stealing great ideas,” Arkwright surveyed the technologies of the day, recognized what worked and could be profitable, lifted the ideas, and then put them into action with an unmatched aggression. Like Jeff Bezos, Arkwright hypercharged a new mode of factory work by finding ways to impose discipline and rigidity on his workers, and adapting them to the rhythms of the machine and the dictates of capital— not the other way around.
We can look back at the Industrial Revolution and lament the working conditions, but popular culture still lionizes entrepreneurs cut in the mold of Arkwright, who made a choice to employ thousands of child laborers and to institute a dehumanizing system of factory work to increase revenue and lower costs. We have acclimated to the idea that such exploitation was somehow inevitable, even natural, while casting aspersions on movements like the Luddites as being technophobic for trying to stop it. We forget that working people vehemently opposed such exploitation from the beginning.
Arkwright’s imprint feels familiar to us, in our own era where entrepreneurs loom large. So might a litany of other first-wave tech titans. Take James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine that powered countless factories in industrial England. Once he was confident in his product, much like a latter-day Bill Gates, Watts sold subscriptions for its use. With his partner, Matthew Boulton, Watts installed the engine and then collected annual payments that were structured around how much the customer would save on fuel costs compared to the previous engine. Then, like Gates, Watts would sue anyone he thought had violated his patent, effectively winning himself a monopoly on the trade. The Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, argues that this had the effect of constraining innovation on the steam engine for thirty years.
Or take William Horsfall or William Cartwright. These were men who were less innovative than relentless in their pursuit of disrupting a previous mode of work as they strove to monopolize a market. (The word innovation, it’s worth noting, carried negative connotations until the mid-twentieth century or so; Edmund Burke famously called the French Revolution “a revolt of innovation.”) They can perhaps be seen as precursors to the likes of Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber, the pugnacious trampler of the taxi industry. Kalanick’s business idea— that it would be convenient to hail a taxi from your smartphone— was not remarkably inventive. But he had intense levels of self-determination and pugnacity, which helped him overrun the taxi cartels and dozens of cities’ regulatory codes. His attitude was reflected in Uber’s treatment of its drivers, who, the company insists, are not employees but independent contractors, and in the endemic culture of harassment and mistreatment of the women on staff.
These are extreme examples, perhaps. But to disrupt long-held norms for the promise of extreme rewards, entrepreneurs often pursue extreme actions. Like the mill bosses who shattered 19th-century standards by automating cloth-making, today’s start‑up founders aim to disrupt one job category after another with gig work platforms or artificial intelligence, and encourage others to follow their lead. There’s a reason Arkwright and his factories were both emulated and feared. Even two centuries later, many tech titans still are.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-blood-in-the-machine-brian-merchant-hachette-book-group-143056410.html?src=rss
In the future, when you need someone's help to get a task done, you might find yourself launching the Uber app on your phone. According to Bloomberg, the company is exploring the possibility of offering a new TaskRabbit-like service. Developer Steve Moser found code hidden within Uber's iPhone app for an offering that's reportedly codenamed "Chore." Based on its current iteration, Chore will let you hire "taskers" and will let you specify in the app what you need help with, how long you think it would take and what time you want the tasker to arrive.
Of course, you'll be able to input the address of where you want the person to go before you submit your request. Uber will then compute a payment that's commensurate with the time required to finish the task, but you will have to pay for a minimum of one hour no matter what it is. Bloomberg says the code Moser unearthed didn't have hints on what types of help you can ask from providers, but the potential service's rival TaskRabbit has a wide range of categories to choose from. These include cleaning, furniture assembly, electrical help, plumbing, TV mounting, packing and moving, snow removal, computer assistance, pet sitting and even senior care.
Like any other unconfirmed feature still in development, though, Chore may not even make it to public release. If it does, it'll be a huge new undertaking for Uber, which is known for its ride-hailing and restaurant delivery services. Over the past months, Uber rolled out Carshare, which lets users borrow cars from private owner, to more locations as part of its efforts to become a zero-emission platform by 2040. It also started testing a toll-free number — 1-833-USE-UBER (1-833-873-8237) — that you can call to schedule an immediate or a future ride.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/uber-could-launch-a-service-similar-to-taskrabbit-133017852.html?src=rss
This isn’t your parent’s Lotus. The British maker, once famous for ultra-lightweight sportscars that had no room for creature comforts like air conditioning, heated seats, or even doors, is now part of the Geely family, with designs on a big international presence with big sales.
That’s going to require bigger cars, and while the Eletre SUV was something of a first big departure for the company, the Emeya is a quick second-act. The Emeya is a four-door sedan with a swoopy, coupe-like profile, comfortably seating four and, Lotus says, offering somewhere around 300 miles of range from a 102kWh battery pack.
That’s quite good range for a car that will offer up to 905 horsepower and that can sprint from 0 - 60 mph in less than 2.8 seconds. Quick, yes, but as a grand tourer, the idea is comfort and luxury, and that the Emeya has in spades. But will it be good enough to convert the Lotus faithful? That we won’t know until sometime in 2024, when this enters production. Watch the video below for the full story.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-lotus-emeya-brings-electric-supercar-performance-for-four-130035674.html?src=rss
X, the social media company previously known as Twitter, is suing the state of California over a law that requires companies to disclose details about their content moderation practices. The law, known as AB 587, requires social media companies to publish information about their handling of hate speech, extremism, misinformation and other issues, as well as details about internal moderation processes.
Lawyers for X argue that the law is unconstitutional and will lead to censorship. It “has both the purpose and likely effect of pressuring companies such as X Corp. to remove, demonetize, or deprioritize constitutionally-protected speech,” the company wrote in the lawsuit. “The true intent of AB 587 is to pressure social media platforms to ‘eliminate’ certain constitutionally-protected content viewed by the State as problematic.”
X is not alone in its opposition to the law. Though the measure was backed by some activists, a number of industry groups took issue with AB 587. Netchoice, a trade group which represents Meta, Google, TikTok and other tech companies, argued last year that AB 587 would help bad actors evade companies’ security measures, and make it harder for them to enforce their rules.
At the same time, AB 587's backers have said it’s necessary to increase the transparency of major platforms. “If @X has nothing to hide, then they should have no objection to this bill,” Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel, who wrote AB 587, said in response to X’s lawsuit.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/x-is-suing-california-over-social-media-content-moderation-law-233034890.html?src=rss
X, the company formerly known as Twitter, may not be labeling its ads properly, putting it at risk of — once again — running afoul of the FTC. There have been numerous reports over the last several days of ads appearing in users’ timelines without being labeled as such, according toTechCrunch, which was first to report on the stealth ads.
According to their reporting, as well as reports from industry groups, users have identified numerous ads that leave off the typical “Ad” label that identifies the post as paid advertising rather than a native post. It’s apparent that the posts are, in fact, ads when clicking into the “...” menu in the tweet, which indicates the tweet is a paid promotion.
While the unlabeled ads have irked users, who may mistakenly believe the platform is showing posts from accounts they don’t follow in their following timeline, the issue also risks stirring up more regulatory trouble with the FTC. Nandini Jammi, co-founder of watchdog group Check My Ads, has been sharingexamples on her Twitter account over the past couple days. The nonprofit group is tracking the issue and encouraging X users to report any examples they find.
We've gotten some great examples from you all of Twitter ads that aren't marked as ads. Keep those screenshots coming to submit@checkmyads.org, along with how you're using Twitter (iOS/Android app or web). pic.twitter.com/wIXsiLzCj0
It’s unclear if the unlabeled ads are the result of a bug or an intentional change by the company. X, which no longer has a functioning communications department, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
But it’s no secret the company’s advertising business has collapsed over the last year since Elon Musk took over the company. Musk recently said ad revenue is down 60 percent, a drop he has blamed on activists. The company also recently losttwo top executives overseeing brand safety, an issue advertisers have cited as a major concern and reason for pulling back from the platform.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/x-seems-to-be-slipping-unlabeled-ads-into-peoples-feeds-204234161.html?src=rss
