https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/28/musk-twitter-racist-posts/



An emboldened cast of anonymous trolls spewed racist slurs and Nazi memes onto Twitter in the hours after billionaire industrialist Elon Musk took over the social network, raising fears that his pledge of unrestricted free speech could fuel a new wave of online hate.

The flood of racist posts was among the most prominent signs of how Twitter had changed in the first hours of Musk’s ownership. But those who were expecting even bigger changes, such as the restoration of former president Donald Trump’s account and the layoff of hundreds if not thousands of Twitter employees, will have to wait longer.

Musk on Friday tweeted that he would make “no major content decisions or account reinstatements” until the convening of a new “moderation council.” He promised that the council would have “widely diverse viewpoints” but offered no other information about who would be on it, how its members would be selected, what authority it would have or whether its views would be binding on the company.

Musk’s social media rival Mark Zuckerberg, chief of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, also turned to an outside group — known as the Oversight Board — to pass judgment on Facebook’s social media moderation actions after years of public criticism of its decisions. But whether Musk has a similar arrangement in mind was unknown.

Paul M. Barrett, the deputy director of New York University’s Center for Business and Human Rights, said such a council under Musk would face even more skepticism because of Musk’s “notoriously erratic and imperious personality.”

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/23/business/diwali-products-marketing-us-mainstream-cec/index.html



Diwali seems to be everywhere this year.

More and more major brands are recognizing the festival of lights, running ad campaigns and stocking products related to the holiday in the US. South Asian Americans who celebrate Diwali can now pick up fireworks from Costco, greeting cards from Hallmark and party decorations from Target.

Diwali, also known as Deepavali, is one of the most important festivals in Hinduism. The holiday also has significance for Sikhs and Jains, and is celebrated not just in India, but in Nepal, Malaysia, Singapore and other countries with South Asian diasporas.

The growing acknowledgment of the holiday in the US is a marked shift for many first- and second-generation South Asian Americans who grew up celebrating the festival at home but rarely saw it acknowledged outside of their communities, says Soni Satpathy-Singh, who runs the meal delivery review website Meal Matchmaker.

Eight years ago, Satpathy-Singh wrote a piece for Brown Girl Magazine lamenting that Diwali hadn’t caught the attention of mass market retailers, despite the Indian American population’s growing numbers and high incomes. Today, the landscape looks much different.

“It’s interesting to see how much has developed over the last eight years just in terms of things you can buy to celebrate Diwali,” she told CNN. “Growing up, we would buy diyas from India or [use] things that my parents already had at home. There was no venturing out to buy stuff for a party, partly because it wasn’t even available.”