Category: Tech

• One-fifth of workers polled by ZipRecruiter said they ghosted an employer in their latest job hunt.
• Workers in the 18-to-34 age bracket were the biggest culprits.
• One ghoster told us: “I’m the classic younger millennial, and I’m very deliberate with what I like.”

Most job seekers have a disappointing story about suddenly losing touch with a promising company. But ghosting — the practice of cutting off all communication without warning or explanation — goes both ways in the professional sphere.

Once a rare phenomenon, candidates in a tight labor market are increasingly abandoning employers after attending interviews — and sometimes even after accepting a formal job offer.

In an October survey by ZipRecruiter, 21.6% of respondents said they’d “ghosted” a prospective employer during their latest job hunt. The employment marketplace polled 2,550 US residents who’d started a new job within the previous six months. 

Younger workers are the biggest culprits. In ZipRecruiter’s survey, those in the 18-to-34 age bracket were three times as likely as workers over 55 to have left an employer in the lurch.

What’s led to the rise in ‘professional ghosting’? 

Companies — especially smaller businesses — are feeling the pinch. One-third of small businesses polled in Canada recently said they’d hired people who never showed up or stopped coming in work shortly after starting. Some simply cut off all communication midway through the application process, according to research by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.

CFIB’s president, Dan Kelly, said this rise in “professional ghosting” might be a lasting symptom of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many companies fired and rehired staff amid successive lockdowns, and “employees understandably felt an erosion of confidence that their employer was providing them with stable work,” he said.

Kelly added that he thought labor shortages in both the US and Canada were empowering workers to cut off communication. The US unemployment rate has been consistently low since the end of pandemic-induced restrictions — remaining below 4% throughout 2022.

“Employers are desperate for workers, and employees know that there are plenty of jobs out there. As a result, they’re perhaps less concerned about potential damage to their reputation.”

Young workers want employers that align with their values

Nicole Gray, a 27-year-old marketer in London, described herself as a “serial ghoster.”

“I’m the classic younger millennial, and I’m very deliberate with what I like and what I don’t like,” she said.

Gray told Insider her recently diagnosed ADHD may have played into her recurrent pattern of ghosting but that she’s proud of how mindful she was about whether a company aligned with her values.

Before accepting a job, Gray always checks out company reviews on sites like Glassdoor and examines the social-media profiles of the senior-leadership team.

This has sometimes prompted her to withdraw, or even abandon, applications. Gray once ghosted a prospective employer after an initial interview. She said she had noticed that the company’s director had liked “a weird and disrespectful comment about women” on LinkedIn.

She’s also ghosted companies after negative interview experiences. On one occasion, Gray said, the interviewers “were critiquing somebody else’s CV in front of me and making fun of all the spelling mistakes.”

Gray didn’t respond to the hiring team after the interview. She said: “Deleted, blocked — that’s not for me.”

Another interviewer kept her waiting for about 40 minutes, she said, and didn’t offer any apology or explanation.

Gray said: “That’s just not the kind of company I want to work for.”

She told Insider she’s trying to become a “reformed ghoster” and make a conscious effort to offer specific feedback if she felt a prospective employer wasn’t the right fit. Nevertheless, she doesn’t feel too guilty about her past actions.

Gray said: “I felt like I’d be ghosted in return. Companies are really crappy at getting back to you.”

• Artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT stunned users with its ability to write like a human.
• Some fear college students will use it to cheat, but these professors say they’re not too worried.
• One even thinks it might make education fairer — especially for non-native speakers of English.

An updated version of artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT was launched by OpenAI on November 30. Its ability to write in an intelligent and human-like manner left users impressed — and also a little bit frightened.

People have used ChatGPT to write entire blocks of code, television scripts, and even complete academic essays — sparking fears that students might use the bot to cheat their way to an easy A. 

“We’re witnessing the death of the college essay in realtime,” said one user on Twitter. 

But some college professors aren’t that concerned.

“I’m not a huge fan of the gloom and doom,” said Professor Stuart Selber, who teaches English at Pennsylvania State University. “Every year or two, there’s something that’s ostensibly going to take down higher education as we know it. So far, that hasn’t happened.”

Selber told Insider he’s “no more worried” about ChatGPT than any other development in the history of literary technologies. “You can go back a couple decades and find similar alarm over Word, Wikipedia, and the Internet in general,” said Selber.

While ChatGPT’s writing might seem “quite good in an abstract way”, Selber thinks it struggles to address precise or local issues, generate an original argument, or interrogate other arguments rather than just citing them. These are all key aspects of effective essay-writing in his opinion.

That’s why Selber ultimately doesn’t think essays written entirely by ChatGPT have any hope of scoring high grades.

He’s not alone in this assessment. Dr Jacqueline Antonovich, an Assistant Professor at Muhlenberg College, wrote on Twitter that she put a question from her midterm essays into ChatGPT and the paper it produced “would earn an F. Probably an F- if that’s possible.”

ChatGPT won’t replace original writing, said Selber, but it might help college students refine their work. Indeed, he thinks it might offer a shortcut for some of the more arduous tasks of essay-writing, like preparing a literature review — a summary of the existing research in a student’s topic area.

Dr Leah Henrickson, a lecturer at the University of Leeds, thinks that artificial intelligence, if used carefully, might even make education fairer.

Henrickson told Insider: “I think there’s a lot of potential for helping people express themselves in ways that they hadn’t necessarily thought about. This could be particularly useful for students who speak English as a second language, or for students who aren’t used to the academic writing style.”

Artificial intelligence tools like Grammarly, which analyzes and improves written sentences, are already widely used by college students. In Henrickson’s view, ChatGPT is just the next step — and these tools aren’t going away.

“Our students know that these tools exist,” she said. “Our job is to help them use them critically.”

According to Henrickson, the University of Leeds is already looking at modifying its assessments in reaction to the rise in artificial intelligence. It hopes to focus more on critical analysis and judgement — a human skill — rather than straightforward information retention, which a chatbot like ChatGPT can easily replicate.

Henrickson told Insider: “I’m optimistic. I think these tools, when used mindfully, can really help our students see the world in new ways.”

Three wiener dogs dressed up as hot dogs stood outside the UK Parliament.

That could be the start of a bad joke, but to the man who took the dachshunds there, it was utterly serious.

Morten Toft Bech, the founder of a startup that makes plant-based meat alternatives, brought the animals in protest.

It was 2020, and the European Parliament was voting on a ban against the use of meat-related words — like sausage, bacon, burger, chicken, and steak — in the names of plant-based food.

If the ban had passed, “plant-based sausages” would have needed a different name, perhaps “plant-based tubes.” Vegetable burgers might have to be renamed “discs,” and plant-based bacon “veggie strips.”

It was a serious threat to companies like Toft Bech’s UK company Meatless Farm, which makes mince, burgers, and “chicken” out of pea, soya, and rice proteins.

Matt Alexander/PA

Toft Bech put miniature placards next to the dogs saying “What will you call us?” and “I’m not a tube dog,” pointing out that dachshunds, known in the UK as sausage dogs, get to use the meat-evoking word “sausage” in their name — so why couldn’t plant-based meat substitutes do the same?

The ban was rejected, but two years later the debate is far from over.

“If you look up bacon in the dictionary, it says bacon is cured meat from the back or sides of a pig,” said Sarah Morrell, a policy officer at Ulster Farmers’ Union, which is seeking to ban plant-based-food companies in Northern Ireland from using “meaty” terms for their products.

Unions like hers are on one side of a heated international battle pitting meat-alternative startups — companies often only a few years old, whose backers include wealthy NBA stars and actors — and the millennia-old farming and agriculture industry.

Startups are increasingly finding themselves in court as meat lobbies — made up of farming unions, agriculture bodies, and other organizations representing meat producers — try to stop them from using meaty words to describe their products.

And they are ready for the fight. “We are not going to get anywhere by sitting and smiling,” said Toft Bech.

It’s not clear which side is winning: Texas lawmakers are considering a ban, while Louisiana struck down a law limiting the use of certain “meat” terms in March. South Africa outlawed the use of meaty names, and its government even planned to seize some artificial meat from store shelves, until a last-minute court order paused the law from being implemented.

Meat lobbies argue that plant-based products have stolen the concept of meat without matching its taste and nutrition standards, tarnishing the integrity and cultural importance of meat.

On the other hand, companies argue their plant-based products are intuitively called the veggie version of whatever meat they are imitating, and it’s only in using terms like sausage that they can signal to consumers which product they’re positioning themselves against, and how to cook and eat it.

The cost of these legal battles could be the “kiss of death” for startups with limited resources, according to Ivan Farneti, an investor at the venture-capital firm Five Seasons Venture, which has backed the plant-based food company This.

An ‘insanely large’ legal bill

Investment in alternative proteins — a catch-all term for nonanimal proteins — has blown up, as concern builds about the environmental and animal welfare impacts of the meat industry.

In 2021, European startups lured over $1.1 billion from venture capitalists backing plant-based, fermented, and cultivated protein, as well as edible insects, according to data from PitchBook, which tracks the venture-capital industry. The figure is up from $697 million the previous year. 

 

But legal battles over naming are sucking time and money out of startups that could be focusing on scaling.

Meatless Farm’s Toft Bech told Insider his company had spent about 5% of its £89 million in venture-capital funding on lawyers looking after its trademarks, as part of a legal bill he describes as “insanely large for the size of company we are”. It’s defending challenges to its trademark over its use of the word “farm” in its name.

What could that money have done “if it dropped down to our bottom line?” he asked.

Heura

Every minute spent on legal cases is less time spent on changing the food system, according to Bernat Añaños, who cofounded Heura, a Spanish startup that makes plant-based meat substitutes and is backed by the NBA star Ricky Rubio. It has raised 36 million euros from Rubio and other backers including the venture firm Unovis Asset Management.

Heura took to Instagram to share satirical redesigns of its products if it could no longer use meaty words: Meatballs became pingpong balls, and burgers were renamed “rabbit food you can throw on the barbeque.”

‘It’s an intimidation strategy’

“Bacon and lardons without mr piggy” is how the French startup La Vie describes its foods. They may look like meat but are made of rehydrated soya protein.

La Vie is backed by the actor Natalie Portman and is known for its playful advertising.

In July it was among a group of companies — including Nestlé — that succeeded in pausing a French ban on plant-based foods using meat-related names. The ban was the first of its kind to pass in Europe, and was introduced by the former French politician Jean-Baptiste Moreau, a cattle farmer.

“We were nervous, obviously,” said Nicolas Schweitzer, the CEO and cofounder of La Vie. Losing the case would mean rethinking the company’s branding, advertising, and packaging — letting products already packaged go to waste — and losing the meat-based names that customers have gotten to know over the years. La Vie was planning to move its manufacturing to Belgium if the ban went ahead.

He expects to be back in court at some point next year to challenge the ban again and hopes to have it thrown out.

Schweitzer told Insider the meat lobby was “just trying to slow us down.”

“It’s an intimidation strategy,” he continued, “and it’s not going to work.”

La Vie has decided to wear its legal battles as a badge of honor. It has hired an in-house lawyer and publishes details of its court cases on its website as part of its marketing.

In June, it won a case against France’s pork lobby, the French Interprofessional Pork Council, which complained that its advertising was misleading.

In a provocative ad in response, La Vie teasingly said, “Thanks for the compliment,” adding: “We think your pork lardons are indistinguishable from our veggie lardons. Would you mind changing your recipe?”

La Vie

It was a typical move from 35-year-old Schweitzer, who sees himself as a crusader against meat consumption, with humor as a key weapon.

“I don’t see myself as a militant but as an activist, which is slightly different,” he said, explaining that he tried to call for change to the food system “in a quirky and positive way.”

Adding the “plant-based” qualifier to a name should be enough to make it clear that a product isn’t meat, Schweitzer argued. When consumers look at his product, they intuitively call it plant-based bacon, he added.

“The fact that it’s only economic interest,” he said, that might prevent his company from referring to its products in the most explicit way, “is just not right.”

Common sense

The meat industry sees things differently.

It tends to argue that plant-based meat alternatives shouldn’t be allowed to use meaty terms at all because, put simply, they aren’t meat. They don’t match it in terms of taste, texture, or nutrition, people in the meat and agriculture industries told Insider.

It’s confusing and misleading to customers, they said, especially as meat alternatives are increasingly stocked next to animal meat in grocery stores.

Bruno Menne, a senior policy advisor at Europe’s meat body COPA COGECA, said plant-based foods were “hijacking” the positive marketing that meat had built up over decades. 

Meat bodies want startups to come up with new terms for plant-based food that imitates meat. “It is a matter of common sense and consistency,” José Manuel Alvarez, a representative of Carne y Salud, a group representing Spanish meat organizations.

Nutrition is a concern too. Some plant-based products have been criticized for being highly processed.

Through that lens, Menne accused his plant-based competitors of hiding behind meaty names that obscure how they’re made. “By using that, you manage to avoid actually telling the consumer what is really in your product,” he said.

A meat-free burger might be high in protein, but “you don’t have the same amino acids, the same vitamins, zinc, and phosphorus and so on,” he added. 

Both meat organizations and plant-based companies told Insider they encouraged a healthy, balanced diet.

Trading down

The battle over meaty names comes at a precarious time for meat-alternative companies.

Despite the boom in investment, meat alternatives are seeing disappointing sales growth and are feeling the pressure of market volatility and inflation, which the PitchBook analyst Alex Frederick said was leading consumers “to trade down” to cheaper proteins like animal meat.

Volume sales of meat alternatives in the US are down 12.1% from last year, according to IRI data as of November 6. Europe-wide data isn’t readily available.

Bans on meat-based names could slow sales further, weakening the case for more investment — investment that is essential to keep developing plant-based products that might rival meat in terms of taste, texture and nutritional value.

Farneti of Five Seasons Ventures told Insider that naming restrictions would be a blow to the already difficult job of running these startups. “Founders of startups are swimming in deep water, right?” he said. “Changing these rules makes them swim in mud.”

‘We don’t want to destroy our everyday culture’

Heura’s products include soy-based chicken and chorizo substitutes as well as meatballs made with pea protein. It has been sued for using the word “carne” — Spanish for meat — in advertisements.

Añaños, the Heura cofounder, accepts that the legal battles come with the territory. “If we were liked by everyone, we would not be transformative,” he said, adding: “These cases will happen because we are shaking up a whole industry, a big part of the economy.”

Heura Foods

But he thinks the idea that startups like his are threatening all the things people enjoy about meat is a misunderstanding. “We don’t want to destroy our everyday culture,” he said. “I love barbecues with my friends. I love my grandma’s Christmas dinners. I love everything that is connected to meat, but I hate the consequences of it.”

He says the state has a role to play in helping meat producers transition toward a “plant-based age,” such as by helping farmers swap meat rearing for growing legumes and beans.

Despite the animosity, he feels meat producers and plant-based companies will ultimately have to work together: “The climate crisis and the animal crisis is also a challenge of humanity, and either we go together or we will fail — there is no other answer.”

“It is a shame,” Toft Bech said. “I would prefer that we could just get some support, maybe a bit of a regulatory environment that’s more supportive of the new rather than just the old status quo.”

Meatless Farm

He can imagine a future in which animal-based meat dominates the luxury market and plant-based alternatives replace cheaper, everyday meats. He wants Meatless Farm’s products to replace middle-market cuts that are mass-produced in industrial farms — not quality, hand-reared meat.

Despite the cost and time, startups told Insider the court battles were worth it. “We are fully committed to our vision, so we don’t mind the backlash,” Schweitzer said. 

Most companies like his have been launched recently and, unlike the animal-meat industry, don’t have millions of lifelong customers or a long cultural history to protect. 

All they have to defend is their products — and their names. “We have nothing to lose,” Schweitzer said.

• Elon Musk and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got into another tiff on Twitter on Thursday night.
• She told Musk to “lay off the proto-fascism” and try putting down his phone.
• In response, Musk tweeted: “You first lol.” 

Elon Musk and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are in another Twitter spat.

On Thursday evening, Musk suspended the accounts of at least half a dozen journalists and tweeted an explanation for the move. He claimed the suspended journalists had doxxed him, a violation of Twitter’s updated privacy policy that was put in place on Wednesday.

Ocasio-Cortez tweeted a response to Musk’s explanation.

“You’re a public figure. An extremely controversial and powerful one. I get feeling unsafe, but descending into abuse of power + erratically banning journalists only increases the intensity around you,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.

“Take a beat and lay off the proto-fascism. Maybe try putting down your phone,” she added.

The congresswoman added that she understands where Musk is coming from, saying that she, too, has been “subject to real + dangerous plots.”

“I didn’t have security and have experienced many scary incidents,” she tweeted. “In fact, many of the right-wing outlets you now elevate published photos of my home, car, etc. At a certain point you gotta disconnect.” 

Some 20 minutes later, Musk tweeted his response: “You first lol.”

Musk also alleged on Thursday that the suspended journalists had posted his real-time location online, calling them “basically assassination coordinates.” Insider was unable to independently verify if the journalists had posted the coordinates on their accounts.

Among the individuals whose accounts were suspended are CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, as well as independent journalists Aaron Rupar, Keith Olbermann, and Tony Webster.

Musk and Ocasio-Cortez have had several tense exchanges on Twitter. In April, Ocasio-Cortez called Musk a “billionaire with an ego problem” who only bought Twitter “because Tucker Carlson or Peter Thiel took him to dinner and made him feel special.” In response, Musk tweeted: “Stop hitting on me, I’m really shy.”

In November, Ocasio-Cortez hit out at Musk for “trying to sell people on the idea that ‘free speech’ is actually a $8/mo subscription plan,” referring to the billionaire’s plan to charge Twitter subscribers a premium for verification.

Musk replied to the congresswoman’s tweet, saying: “Your feedback is appreciated, now pay $8.”

Also in November, Ocasio-Cortez reacted to Musk’s public poll on whether former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account should be reinstated. 

“Idk man, last time he was here this platform was used to incite an insurrection, multiple people died, the Vice President of the United States was nearly assassinated, and hundreds were injured but I guess that’s not enough for you to answer the question. Twitter poll it is,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a tweeted response to Musk.

Ocasio-Cortez and Musk did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.

• Russia’s revenue from oil exports fell by $700 million in November, according to the IEA. 
• Deep discounts and falling crude prices drove down revenue despite a jump in exports, it said. 
• A G7 price cap on Russian crude will slash output and pressure global prices upward next year, the agency added. 

Russia’s revenue from oil sales took a dive last month even as its crude exports jumped, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). 

Deep discounts and lower global crude prices drove Moscow’s export revenue down by $700 million in November to $15.8 billion, the IEA said in its monthly report. That’s despite an increase in daily shipments of 270,000 barrels to 8.1 million barrels, the highest level since April. 

Since its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has been selling its crude at steep discounts to Asia, in particular to China and India, as it hunts for alternative buyers to replace its key European market. Now, China and India account for about two-thirds of all Russian seaborne crude exports. 

As major customers, the two Asian countries are demanding even bigger discounts, and that’s delivering a hit on the Kremlin’s war chest. According to Bloomberg estimates, Russia is losing about $4 billion a month in energy revenues. 

This comes alongside the impact of recent declines in global oil prices amid fears of a recession. China’s imposition of strict zero-Covid rules have also weighed on energy markets, reducing the demand for crude from the world’s second-biggest economy. 

Brent crude futures, the international benchmark, have fallen more than 8% since October even after the OPEC+ decided to slash output in a bid to support prices. The drop comes after months of high prices, with the level surging past $100 a barrel in March. At last check Thursday, Brent crude traded at $82.04. 

“While lower oil prices come as a welcome relief to consumers faced by surging inflation, the full impact of embargoes on Russian crude and product supplies remains to be seen,” the IEA said.

G7 countries set a price cap of $60-per-barrel on Russian crude earlier in December in an effort to crimp the country’s revenues, while still allowing for the flow of its oil cargoes around the world. 

The cap however means Russian output will fall by 1.4 million barrels per day, according to Reuters, which cites the IEA. That could squeeze global supply and put upward pressure on prices again. 

“As we move through the winter months and towards a tighter oil balance in 2Q23, another price rally cannot be ruled out,” the IEA said.

Travel website AirHelp ranks the world’s best airlines on three metrics: on-time performance, customer opinion, and claims processing.

Contributor/Getty Images

Launched in 2015 by German claims-management company AirHelp, AirHelp Score is an annual ranking of the world’s top airlines.

These airlines are evaluated based on three criteria — on-time performance, customer opinion, and claim processing — and are scored on a 10-point scale. Each criterion makes up a third of the final score. 

‘On-time performance’ measures the percentage of an airline’s flights that arrive within 15 minutes of their published arrival time. 

‘Customer opinion’ assesses what passengers think of the airline’s quality of service based on five factors: cabin crew, aircraft comfort, aircraft cleanliness, food offering, and onboard entertainment. Passengers provided a score of between one and five for each factor. 

‘Claim processing’ refers to how efficiently an airline handles claims and settles payouts. AirHelp cited its own data for this criterion. 

“AirHelp has found that combining these three categories provides a well-rounded view of airlines’ performances throughout the year,” Tomasz Pawliszyn, the company’s CEO, told Insider in an email.

AirHelp explained in its methodology brief that it took into account a total of 805 airlines around the world, but only included 64 of the largest airports in terms of passenger numbers and “popularity.” AirHelp also said that it excluded airlines for which it was unable to procure data. For 2022’s ranking, the company collected data between January 1 and October 31. 

Take a look at the 10 airlines that were ranked the best in the world this year by AirHelp. Entrants are arranged in ascending order according to their final scores.

• Bahamian authorities arrested FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried on Monday.
• Just hours before, SBF said in an interview he didn’t believe he would be detained on US shores.
• He made the comments while explaining why he was planning to call-in to testify before the Congress on Tuesday.

A multitasking Sam Bankman-Fried — who was playing a video game and responding to questions during an interview — said he didn’t think he would be detained if he returned to the US, mere hours before he was arrested in the Bahamas.

“I don’t believe I would be, but I haven’t done a deep dive into that. That’s something I have to think harder about,” Bankman-Fried said in a Monday interview on Twitter Spaces with options flow platform Unusual Whales, per a transcript.

Unusual Whales has called Bankman-Fried’s interview “the last thing he did as a free man.”

Bankman-Fried was responding to a question about potential detainment if he entered the US — as he was scheduled to testify before Congress on Tuesday. The former FTX CEO had said he wasn’t going to be there in person because he was “quite overbooked,” per the transcript.

He also said it was difficult for him “to move right now and travel because the paparazzi effect is quite large.”

—unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) December 12, 2022

During the interview — and amid a constant clicking sound in the background — Bankman-Fried was asked if he was playing video games, to which he responded: “Yes I am.”

He said he was playing “Storybook Brawl,” a game FTX acquired in March 2022. Bankman-Fried had told the New York Times in November the game clears his mind.

Though he was arrested in the Bahamas, Bankman-Fried could face extradition to the US, experts told Insider’s Sindhu Sundar and Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert on Tuesday. 

The US Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC, said after Bankman-Fried’s arrest it will file charges against him on Tuesday, relating to violations of securities law.

Rep. Maxine Waters, who chairs the US House Financial Services Committee, said in a statement she was “surprised” at Bankman-Fried’s arrest as that means he wouldn’t be testifying as scheduled.

“Although Mr. Bankman-Fried must be held accountable, the American public deserves to hear directly from Mr. Bankman-Fried about the actions that’ve harmed over one million people, and wiped out the hard-earned life savings of so many,” Waters said. 

Bankman-Fried resigned as the CEO of FTX on November 11, the same day the exchange filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, as it failed to secure a rescue following an intense week-long liquidity squeeze. 

The curly-haired 30-year has been on a media apology tour since FTX’s collapse but told the New York Times in late November that he didn’t think he’s legally accountable.

The SEC did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment sent outside regular business hours.

Insider was not immediately able to reach Bankman-Fried’s representatives for comment, but a representative declined comment to the New York Times upon his arrest.

• Sir James Dyson has slammed the UK’s plans to extend employees’ rights to work from home.
• Writing in The Times, the billionaire said the policy shift is “economically illiterate and staggeringly self-defeating.”
• Without control over where employees work, companies like Dyson will hesitate to invest in the UK, he said.

Sir James Dyson thinks the UK’s plans to allow employees to continue working from home are “staggeringly self-defeating.”

“The government talks loftily of the UK being a ‘science and technology superpower’ while doing everything it can to achieve the exact opposite,” the founder and chief engineer of multinational technology company Dyson wrote in a December 8 commentary piece for The Times.

Under new legislation, workers in the UK will have the right to request flexible working arrangements even on their first day of work, per a December 5 press release from the UK government. This policy shift falls under the government’s plans to make flexible working the default.

However, such a move — which comes during a global recession — is a “misguided approach” that will “generate friction between employers and employees,” Dyson wrote.

Without control over where their employees can work, “high-growth, ambitious companies” like Dyson — which has 3,500 employees in Britain — will hesitate to invest in the UK, the businessman added.

“We have seen from our own experience at Dyson during periods of government-enforced working from home how deeply inefficient it is,” Dyson wrote. “It prevents the collaboration and in-person training that we need to develop new technology and maintain competitiveness against global rivals.”

The billionaire also took a swipe at the legislators who were in favor of the reform, writing that the policy was “aided by the many civil servants who enjoyed working from home, despite the shockingly bad public service they often provide and their terrible track record of delivery.”

Dyson, who’s currently worth an estimated $15.4 billion, is not the first business leader to rally against flexible work arrangements for employees.

In August, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon pushed back against remote work, saying that it “slows down honesty and decision making.”

In November, just two weeks after taking over the company, Elon Musk sent a 2:30 a.m. email to Twitter staff, requesting them to return to the office for “a minimum of 40 hours per week.” 

Dyson did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

• Elon Musk has been weighing in more and more on political issues since buying Twitter.
• Once positioning himself as neutral, he now shares anti-Democratic conspiracies and endorses the GOP.
• “Any argument that he’s trying to empower the center is patently bullshit,” a researcher on extremism told Insider.

Though he has long touted himself as “somewhere in the middle” on politics, Elon Musk has been sharing increasingly more conservative political views on Twitter since he first showed interest in purchasing the platform, and is now regularly amplifying anti-Democratic conspiracy theories while endorsing Republican candidates across the country.

“In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party,” Musk wrote in a tweet this May. He then bashed the Democratic Party, adding: “But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.” 

In November, he called on “independent-minded voters” to vote Republican to curb a Democratic majority. While such an endorsement may seem commonplace in today’s political landscape, critics warn Musk’s widespread influence and increasingly conspiratorial posts appear to be favoring far-right extremism.

“I think he’s intentionally empowering right-wing extremists,” J.M. Berger, a researcher on extremism on social media like Twitter, told Insider. “Any argument that he’s trying to empower the center is patently bullshit and should be treated as such.”

Far-right conspiracy theories

Berger — who has written several books about extremist movements and is a fellow with VOX-Pol, a research network focused on violent online political extremism — told Insider it has become more difficult to talk about extremism without discussing mainstream politics, as views shared by Republican candidates have “increasingly overlapped with kind of extremist points of view,” such as a Florida GOP candidate who was banned from social media after he said he would legalize shooting federal agents on sight and another who said federal agents would leave his home “in a body bag” if they attempted to execute a search warrant, as they did at Mar-a-Lago.  

“So if we’re talking about empowering centrist voices…if you look at polling and you look at people’s attitudes, a centrist platform would not empower anti-LGBTQ+ activism and violence, because most people support equal rights for LGBTQ+ people,” Berger said. 

Musk recently amplified a debunked rumor that Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, was attacked by a lover in a sexual tryst gone wrong, sharing a link to an article that claimed Pelosi and his attacker met at a gay bar, and saying there “might be more to this story than meets the eye.”

The 82-year-old husband of the Speaker of the House was beaten with a hammer in a “politically motivated” attack, according to the San Francisco District Attorney. 

“What we’ve seen since he did this takeover is that he started off positioning himself as super neutral and he’s sort of explicitly saying he’s politically neutral,” Berger said. “And then there are two things that we’ve seen since then: First is in his interactions on Twitter, he is increasingly palling around with, and apparently paying heed to some of the worst people on the far right.”

Lately, Musk’s Twitter mentions and replies include promising users like the infamous right-wing account Libs of TikTok — which is known for promoting anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theories — that Twitter will be “much better” than it was prior to his ownership, accusing The New York Times of going “full woke,” and replying to MAGA activist Charlie Kirk’s musings about Anthony Fauci’s daughter working at Twitter with a quip that it’s a “small world…“

‘Skewed’ content moderation

In addition to Musk’s ongoing interactions with popular alt-right figures, Berger and other experts are concerned that Twitter’s current take on content moderation is encouraging extremism and hate speech on the platform.

“The way that Twitter’s content moderation has changed since he’s taken over has definitely skewed towards favoring the far-right,” Berger said.

Since his acquisition, Musk has reinstated the accounts of Kanye West, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Andrew Tate, and the Babylon Bee — each of which was banned for posting antisemitic, misogynistic, or transphobic content in violation of Twitter’s policies. Musk also reinstated the account of Donald Trump after the former president was banned for inciting violence on January 6. 

Berger, who began tracking some of the English-speaking reinstated accounts that appeared on the site, said that the bulk of accounts were “abusers and harassers and trolls” empowered by the lack of robust content moderation to mobilize harassment against users. In some cases, he said, this could escalate towards violence.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate found, in the week immediately following Musk’s takeover, that use of the N-word tripled the 2022 average, anti-LGBTQ slurs were up between 39% and 53%, and antisemitic slurs rose 22%. The New York Times reported antisemitic posts referring to Jews or Judaism soared more than 61 percent in the first two weeks while accounts supporting ISIS came roaring back.

—𝗝.𝗠. 𝗕𝗘𝗥𝗚𝗘𝗥 #readoptimal (@intelwire) December 4, 2022

“So whatever [Musk’s] beliefs were in the beginning, or whether there has been an evolution or whether it’s something that was there all along, his tenure at Twitter has been marked by a huge increase in both the presence of far-right accounts on the platform and also in how he personally elevates some of these accounts by seeming to take them seriously and engaging with them on questions of policy,” Berger said.

The billionaire owner of Twitter has also recently suggested the now-collapsed crypto exchange FTX was used for laundering billions of dollars to the Democratic party. 

“You can kind of see — when you start looking at the stuff over time — you see some public figures who will sort of start dabbling in far-right stuff and then become increasingly oriented in that direction,” Berger said. “And it’s sort of hard to know whether it’s something they were always into, or whether they [are] making a transition in these attitudes that they have.”

Musk and the ‘mythology of the center’

In 2014, Musk described his political views as “half Democrat, half Republican” in an interview with The Atlantic reporter James Fallows, saying “I’m somewhere in the middle, socially liberal and fiscally conservative.” Though he didn’t regularly weigh in on politics prior to this year, Musk said in May that he voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in recent elections — but “unprovoked attacks” against him “by leading Democrats” have caused him to switch parties.

Musk’s posts on Twitter appeared to shift to be explicitly political in February, when he shared (and then deleted) a meme comparing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Hitler after a COVID-19 vaccine mandate was implemented among truck drivers. Since then, he has more frequently posted tweets amplifying right-wing accounts and viewpoints. 

“So, there’s a ‘mythology of the center’ that the far-right advances and that is the mythological center that Elon Musk is interested in promoting,” Berger said. “The idea is that most Americans, or typical Americans, are right-wing, family-values, red state kind of voters — and that’s evidently not true.”

While Congress is increasingly divided between extreme stances, Insider has found Americans are more united on common issues than the divide would suggest.

Insider’s 2017 analysis of partisanship in the country found 71% of Americans believe climate change is real — including a group of Trump-supporting Texans. 92% of Americans agree the government should be able to negotiate with drug companies and 86% of Americans want more infrastructure spending. Insider has also reported four out of five people support having more LGBT members of Congress.

“But by creating that mythology,” Berger said. “What they succeed in doing is tilting the entire conversation to the right and then making space for further and further kinds of right far-right views that verge into open extremism.”

Musk and representatives for Twitter did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.