Elon Musk says Twitter’s HQ in San Francisco creates “strong left bias” on platform

The billionaire Tesla CEO, Elon Musk is hinting at relocating Twitter’s headquarters outside the Bay Area if his offer to buy the company goes through. Musk spoke Tuesday about Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters creating left-leaning bias on the platform, during a live interview at an auto conference hosted in London by the Financial Times. KTVU’s Emma Goss reports.

SAN FRANCISCO – The billionaire Tesla CEO, Elon Musk is hinting at relocating Twitter’s headquarters outside the Bay Area if his offer to buy the company goes through.

Musk spoke Tuesday about Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters creating left-leaning bias on the platform, during a live interview at an auto conference hosted in London by the Financial Times.

“I think Twitter needs to be much more even-handed. It currently has a strong left bias, because it’s based in San Francisco,” Musk said, appearing virtually at the Future of the Car Conference.

“I don’t think people out there necessarily intend, or at least perhaps some of them don’t intend to have a left bias, just from their perspective it seems moderate, they’re just coming at it from an environment that is very far left,” Musk continued. “So, this fails to build trust in the rest of the United States and perhaps other parts of the world.”

“It’s conceivable that he [Musk] might move Twitter to Texas, as he did with the headquarters of Tesla,” Larry Magid, president and CEO of ConnectSafely.org, a nonprofit internet safety, privacy, and security organization, said in response to Musk’s comment. Magid is also on Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, involved in the council’s Online Safety and Harassment Prevention group.

“The fact is, wherever it’s going to be, it’s going to be staffed by people. Probably educated people.” Magid said. “At the end of the day, it’s how they implement their policies that matters, not how they might think or vote.”

Musk also told the Financial Times’ Peter Campbell at the Tuesday conference that he would allow former president Donald Trump back on Twitter if he became the social media company’s owner.

“It was not correct to ban Donald Trump. I think that was a mistake,” Musk said, “because it alienated a large part of our country, and it did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice.”

The mistake, Musk said, was implementing a permanent ban, rather than a temporary suspension, following the January 6th insurrection at the United States Capitol.

“Permanent bans should be extremely rare and really reserved for accounts that are bots, or scam, spam accounts,” Musk said.

Musk’s offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion was unanimously approved by Twitter’s board. Still, the deal is subject to shareholder and regulatory approval before closing.

Trump told Fox News last month that if given the option, he wouldn’t return to Twitter. Instead, he’s focused on growing his new online platform, Truth Social, where some on the political far-right are going too. Musk said Tuesday that this division in online platforms creates a situation that is “frankly worse than having a single forum where everyone can debate.”

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July 14 (Reuters) – An independent report on San Francisco’s Equal Opportunity Employment Practices reveals the pervasive problems of discrimination in the workplace, even in a city considered one of the most progressive places in the country.

According to the July 9 report, black and Hispanic city workers in San Francisco are more disciplined and laid off than white and Asian workers, and these differences persist even when factors such as income levels or union membership are controlled. Black workers accounted for more than half of all disciplinary cases indicted in the city’s transportation department in 2020, though they account for 32% of that workforce, according to data from the city’s transportation authority in the new report. A little over 12% of the city’s total workforce in 2019 were black, but according to city data, they were the subject of more than 20% of corrective and disciplinary actions that year.

The results reveal a fundamentally broken internal process of combating workplace discrimination within the San Francisco city government. More importantly, however, the analysis of the city’s complaints handling processes and some of the report’s innovative recommendations are an unusual step in tackling systemic biases in public employment and mark the beginning of a blueprint for other cities to follow.

Mawuli Tugbenyoh, head of politics in the city’s human resources department, told me the officials “are that we are the first jurisdiction to do this type of review, and we certainly hope others will follow suit given the history of structural racism “. throughout the country.

The review was commissioned by Mayor London Breed after public outcry over a former human resources manager’s admission that she had forged a settlement on a discrimination case against a black city worker in September 2020, according to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle The manager admitted the employee Lied about the city’s financial settlement, prompting the worker to dismiss a pending lawsuit she filed. Officials said in a statement last Friday that they will review the 57 reform recommendations and publish an implementation plan “this fall”.

William Gould IV, an expert on workplace discrimination at Stanford Law School who led the review, told me he believed Breed would be receptive to the recommendations.

“It takes courage and self-confidence from the mayor and other heads of government, because nobody wants to be held accountable for existing deficiencies,” said Gould. “The proof, of course, is in the pudding, so we’ll have to see what happens in the coming weeks and months. But I think that by grabbing the chance, this mayor paved the way for California and the nation to address systemic biases in public employment.

Black workers in particular are concentrated in low-paying jobs in the San Francisco city government and, according to the analysis, have no opportunities for advancement.

In addition, the city’s internal process for handling complaints about discrimination in the workplace among its approximately 35,000 employees is fundamentally flawed.

The EEO division of the city’s human resources department currently has only 15 investigators, which is around 2,000 employees per investigator, according to the report. The ministry’s guidelines require EEO investigations to be completed within 180 days, but around 78% of the 130 racial harassment complaints that were open as of December 2020 were open for more than 180 days – including some that started in 2015 on Discrimination based on ethnicity, skin color, descent and national origin.

The city’s EEO investigators act as neutral fact finders when someone files a complaint against a colleague. Sometimes, however, they also represent the city’s best interests when workers submit their complaints to outside agencies such as the state equal opportunities commission. And they are essentially arguing against a complainant who, according to the report, appeals the EEO division’s original decision in the dispute.

All of this understandably creates trust problems for workers “who could now reasonably question whether the investigator was genuinely neutral from the start,” the report concludes. Gould told me that these types of structural conflicts of interest “are likely to exist in other government agencies as well.”

Another major problem is that cases often depend on an investigator’s determination of whether a complainant or defendant is credible, and many city workers believe these determinations “are not impartial,” the report said. Sometimes people who complain about a discriminatory suspension, for example, are found to be implausible because they have a “motive to lie”, because they want to avoid discipline – an argument the report notes can be used around a person discredit who alleges that an adverse work activity was itself discriminatory.

“Ultimately, the inefficiencies of the EEO complaints process have led many employees to feel that it is an ineffective tool for identifying discriminatory behavior.

Tugbenyoh told me that the city’s mayor has already funded seven other EEO investigators.

The report also recommends that the city follow up if necessary and take action if managers are disproportionately disciplined. And it proposes policy revisions that will keep EEO investigators from responding to EEOC complaints or defending HR decisions on appeal.

That might sound like a sensible move for any equality bureau. But if these kinds of fundamental problems exist in the San Francisco city government, it’s not difficult to assume that they exist in other US cities to some extent. These communities would do well to review their own policies for similar shortcomings.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

The opinions expressed are those of the author. They do not reflect the views of Reuters News, which are committed to trust principles of integrity, independence and bias.

Hassan Canoe |

Hassan Kanu writes about access to justice, race and equality. Born in Sierra Leone and raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, Kanu worked in the public interest after graduating from Duke University School of Law. He then spent five years reporting mainly on labor law. He lives in Washington, DC. Reach canoe at hassan.kanu@thomsonreuters.com

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By T. Watts

Lissette Feliciano’s debut feature film “Women Is Losers” shares the title with an obscure Janis Joplin song that evokes visions of sexist oppression. Feliciano comes from San Francisco, where the film is set in the late 1960s, when many of us awakened our politically opiate consciousness.

The 16-year-old protagonist Celina Guerrera (Lorenza Izzo) has a hard time at home. Your father is a controlling misogynist who gives courage through beer. When Celina asks to attend a welcome party for her boyfriend, father (Steven Bauer) doesn’t accuse his daughter of throwing a whore around, which means she’s taking care of her mother. It’s a typical paternal chatter in the Guerrera house. The following argument causes Celina to flee to her room. She puts on a dress, ducks out of the bedroom window, and still sneaks to the party.

There she meets up with her BF Marty (Chrissie Fit) and they both have romantic interludes with their friends. Both become pregnant and agree to have an abortion after finding the soul. They go together to the “abortion clinic” in the back room of a dental practice. Marty goes in first and the results are disastrous. When she wakes up in the hospital, Celina is there. They briefly discuss their teenage boy in adult dreams, but Marty dies and coughs convulsively. A tender tear caresses Marty’s cheek as Celina kisses her forehead in goodbye. The camera captures the arch of tears beautifully as Marty dies.

The story navigates through all the obstacles that teenage mother Celina now faces: getting stuck in an entry-level job, a dysfunctional domestic situation until she moves out, a mentoring boss who helps her even if he hits her until she does Mateo marries (Bryan Craig), the father of their child. With a drunk father and a drunk husband, things look bad for Celina, especially if she’s fired from her job.

Feliciano describes herself as a creator with multiple hyphens.

“It really is, she says. I write, I manage, I produce and I act. It’s about being able to create stories. The way this story came about was through a conversation with my mother. I spoke to her about the struggles I had in the industry, ”she says.

“My mother raised me all my life. She didn’t complain, she worked very hard, kept her head down and didn’t cry. I learned that from her. She never told me why you had to be better I did all of this. I did well in school. I did the internships, worked all the jobs. I did the damn thing. “

Feliciano adds: “It was a very humble moment when, shortly after my career, I had to come home and say to her, ‘I know you told me to do all these things and I do them, but that is it doesn’t work. ‘ I expected her to tell me to buck up, move on, not cry – all the things she usually told me. But she didn’t. At that point, she opened up to me and told me what she endured as an immigrant who became an entrepreneurial woman of color in the 60s and 70s. It was heartbreaking and informative, but also crazy because everything she told me more or less happened to me 60 years later. My mother said to me, “So what are you going to do now? Will you sit here and cry Or will you keep moving? ‘

“I got angry, frustrated, and sad, which helped me write the film. That’s why I decided to have the film break through the fourth wall as well, I think. The fourth dimension has the conversation with the audience that my mother had with me. Although these characters were walking around in the 60s and 70s, they might as well be walking around in 2021. If they turn around, face the camera and address the audience, they really are 2021 people. It is the connective tissue between my mother’s generation and my generation. “

The film “Women Is Losers” by the writer and director Lissette Feliciano was inspired by her own life. (Courtesy of the moon images)

The soundtrack to Feliciano’s film features expert manipulation of the scene throughout. Donna Summer, Joplin, Tito Puente and Snow Patrol are all there. The leading actress Izzo as Celina kills it especially in the aforementioned “Sneak to the Party” scene. It’s choreographed as the character brings up all of the teenagers’ fear of angrily tossing clothes around the room while seething for her party dress while Sugar Pie DeSanto tosses out the song “Witch For A Night”.

“Women Is Losers” is an important film that repeats and recaptures the premise that women of skin color are still fighting for the promise of democracy. We are all struck by the failures and successes of this promise.

IF YOU LOOK

Women are losers

With: Lorenza Izzo, Chrissie Fit, Bryan Craig and Steven Bauer

Written and directed by: Lissette Feliciano

Not rated

running time: 1 hour, 24 minutes

Note: The film will be shown at festivals in Maryland, Milwaukee and Minneapolis in the near future and is available online.

Movies and television

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – San Francisco police will stop publishing mug shots of arrested persons unless they pose a threat to the public to stop the perpetuation of racist stereotypes, the city police chief said Wednesday.

San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott and outside law enforcement experts said they believe the department would be the first in the nation to do so due to concerns about racial prejudice.

The accounting photos taken by the police when a person is arrested for a crime are often made public, regardless of whether the person is being prosecuted for the alleged crime or not. That can undermine the presumption of innocence and help maintain stereotypes, experts said.

“This is just a small step, but we hope others will consider it too,” said Scott.

Big cities like Los Angeles and New York already have policies against posting posting photos, but make exceptions. For example, the New York City Police Department, the largest in the country, publishes information about arrests but does not issue mug shots unless investigators believe it will cause more witnesses to come forward or to help find a suspect help. Georgia and New York have stopped posting posting photos to restrict websites asking people to remove their pictures and posting information.

Jack Glaser, a public policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies racial stereotypes and whose work has consulted with Scott, said data shows that arrested blacks are more likely to have their cases turned down by prosecutors.

“This is possibly just part of the same problem where the police will stop and search the blacks at a lower suspicion threshold, and therefore their arrests are more likely to be unfounded,” Glaser said.

But the mug shots live on.

Numerous websites will post the mug shots regardless of whether someone has been convicted of a crime, and then charge a fee to those who want their photo removed. The phenomenon prompted the California attorney general to charge one of the largest operators with extortion, money laundering and identity theft.

Scott said this is helping Americans create an unfair association between people of color and criminal. The adoption of the new policy is part of an effort to stop the spread of negative minority stereotypes, which Scott, the black, experienced when he was out of uniform.

“You go into a department store and are followed and the security service looks at you suspiciously. I’ve seen that, ”said Scott.

In San Francisco, the only exceptions will be when a crime suspect poses a threat or when officials need help locating a suspect or person at risk, Scott said. According to the policy, the publication of photos or information about a person who has been arrested must also be approved by the Police Department’s PR team.

Eugene O’Donnell, a former NYPD officer and professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said not every department cracking down on the publication of mug shots gives a reason. The San Francisco Police Department is the first he knows is implementing policies to stop racial prejudice, he said.

He said preventing mug shots of suspects from being published on television shows and elsewhere should be part of a major judicial reform in the country.

“For a democratic society we are very unconcerned about human rights and the presumption of innocence,” said O’Donnell. “We are stealing freedom from people and ruining people’s reputations before anyone has ever made a decision about whether or not the person committed the crime.”

Nina Salarno, president of the Crime Victims United of California advocacy group, praised Scott’s efforts to address racial prejudice but expressed concern about how the department will decide which photos to publish. She said posting posting photos can help crime victims come forward.

“The only concern for the victims side is how they categorize and who decides which ones to release to the public.” Asked Salarno.

Copyright 2020 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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