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In a meeting on Spaces, Twitter’s live audio feature, Elon Musk has discussed his plans for the platform, saying it would make money from content creators and delve deeper into the short-form video business that TikTok has mastered. He talked about a proposal for Twitter to process payments, complete with connected debit cards and bank accounts, and that he ultimately hopes to transform Twitter into an “everything app” modeled after WeChat, a Chinese social media platform that is used by more than a billion people for services including food orders. “The rate of evolution of Twitter will be an immense step change compared to what it has been in the past,” he said. “You know, if nothing else, I am a technologist and I can make technology go fast. And that’s what you’ll see happen at Twitter.”

Writing for Unleash, Gerard Murnaghan says social media experts have the right skills to be future CEOs. He writes that they are currently being overlooked, which is curious because they “have spent their entire careers at the cutting edge of consumer trends and digital transformation . . . Not only do they have first-hand experience of the merits of proactively embracing emerging technologies, but they equally have the technical nous needed to implement and utilize them successfully. From a data perspective, it’s worth remembering that successful social media campaigns are driven by analytics.”

The FT’s world of work reporter Sarah O’Connor tweets a “striking” chart in a new research paper from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation non-profit on the links between economic insecurity and mental health. She notes that it highlights big differences in the respective experiences of homeowners and renters in the UK:
Sarah adds: “It would be very interesting to know if there are similar patterns, or not, in countries like Germany where renting is more secure & predictable [than in the UK].”

LinkedIn has announced a new educational partnership with GitHub that will provide more training resources for software developers within the LinkedIn Learning platform. “Now, you can learn and practice in real-world environments at any stage in your software development career - from beginner to advanced - in the most popular programming languages on LinkedIn Learning. So whether you’re learning SQL or advancing your Python coding skills, a developer can get straight from learning to writing code,” LinkedIn said.

A teacher in Zimbabwe has been accused in court of sending a false and annoying message on WhatsApp. Edith Mupondi, who works at Epworth High School in Harare, was arrested for using the social media platform to complain about low teacher salaries paid by the government. Prosecutors say her message caused anxiety to other people. Mupondi was charged under section 88(b) of the Postal and Telecommunications Act, which prohibits “sending by telephone any message that she knew to be false for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to any person.” The Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights said her arrest showed that “government surveillance on social media is growing.”  In 2021, Zimbabwe’s government said it had set up special monitoring teams to observe what people send and receive on social media. The Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) condemned the move at the time, saying: “MISA Zimbabwe is concerned that the government could increasingly be gravitating towards mass surveillance. Indiscriminate mass surveillance is not justifiable in an open and democratic society.”