April 23, 2022

USA: Fauci’s Daughter Is A Software Engineer At Twitter, A Company Which Suspends People For Disagreeing With Her Father. Elon Musk Secures Financing To Complete Twitter Cash Purchase.

The National Post
written by Staff Wednesday
March 3, 3021

While Dr. Anthony Fauci is spearheading the nation’s COVID-19 response, his daughter is working for the social media platform Twitter.

In addition to readily censoring conservatives, the social media platform has also cracked down on users sharing COVID-19 “misinformation.”

Amidst the heavy-handed censorship, Alison Fauci has been working at the company since graduating in 2014, The National Pulse can reveal.

“She works as a software engineer and, according to her LinkedIn profile, was focused on developing “ad formats for the Twitter for Android app.” (Her LinkedIn profile has since been made private or deleted),” Heavy magazine summarizes.

Alison Fauci maintains a profile on Twitter’s official blog, with one entry from November 2017 entitled “Introducing Serial: improved data serialization on Android.”

“Smooth timeline scrolling on the Twitter for Android app is important for the user experience, and we’re always looking for ways to improve it. With some profiling, we discovered that serializing and deserializing data to and from the database using standard Android Externalizable classes was taking around 15% of the UI thread time,” the blog post begins.

The position at the social media company, however, appears to represent a conflict of interest given the platform’s decision to censor COVID-19 information that goes against the diktats of her father – who notoriously insisted there was “no reason” to wear a mask.

In early March, Twitter decided to broadly ban any tweet that “could place people at a higher risk of transmitting COVID-19.”

Primarily, the platform vowed to crack down on tweets that represent a “denial of expert guidance.”

“Encouragement to use fake or ineffective treatments, preventions, and diagnostic techniques” and “misleading content purporting to be from experts or authorities” were other categories targeted by the social media platform.

And the platform has used its powers to censor users who defy the recommendations of Alison Fauci’s father.

A high-profile example of this censorship is the platform’s decision to ban Donald Trump’s son from the platform for “posting misinformation about hydroxychloroquine” – a potential treatment for COVID-19.

Twitter ordered Donald Trump Jr. to delete the misleading tweet, adding that it would “limit some account functionality for 12 hours.”

The platform also removed videos of doctors holding a press conference on Capitol Hill to defend the potential treatment which had not yet garnered support from Fauci.
The Blaze
written by Carlos Garcia
Thursday March 4, 2021

Alison Christine Fauci has worked at Twitter for 7 years.

The daughter of the coronavirus task force director Dr. Anthony Fauci works for the social media platform Twitter and some are calling it a conflict of interest.

Alison Christine Fauci, 28, has worked for the microblogging platform as a software engineer since 2014 after she graduated from Stanford University, majoring in computer science.

The connection between the controversial epidemiologist and Twitter had been reported at Heavy.com since at least March 2020 but it resurfaced as many questioned censorship of lockdown-skeptical voices on the platform.

She said on her LinkedIn profile that she focused on developing "ad formats for the Twitter for Android app." That profile has since been deleted or made private.

Twitter has been among the Big Tech companies who have shut down the spread of those arguing against the efficacy of masks and lockdowns to fight the spread of the coronavirus. In one instance from August 2020, the service suspended the Trump campaign account over a video containing information the company deemed misleading about the pandemic.

Some saw the employment of Fauci's daughter at Twitter circumspect given how the service has enforced the guidance handed down from Fauci and other health officials by shutting down dissent.

"Imagine that. No wonder they are screening / blocking all 'Covid' posts. Only Power hungry Dictators on the left think this way," said one critic on Twitter.

"Fraud Fauci's daughter works for Twit. Twit acts like jack booted thugs to anyone who questions corrupt Dr or his vac-cine," said another user.

Dr. Fauci had previously mentioned his daughter in connection to his work fighting the coronavirus pandemic. In December 2020 during an interview at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, he said that his family had been personally affected by the pandemic.

"My youngest daughter's boyfriend's brother is a 32-year-old young man, athletic, healthy, who got COVID-19 and had one of the unusual complications of cardiomyopathy with an arrhythmia and died," said Fauci.

"So there you have a 32-year-old young man, otherwise healthy actually, quite athletic and strong, who died," he added.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ)
written by Cara Lombardo and Liz Hoffman
Thursday April 21, 2022

Elon Musk said he has lined up $46.5 billion to fund his bid for Twitter Inc., TWTR 3.93% ▲ answering the biggest question that had loomed over his takeover offer for the social-media platform.

In a regulatory filing, Mr. Musk also said he was considering taking his offer straight to Twitter shareholders, bypassing a board that appears dug in. Twitter said Thursday it was reviewing the newly detailed proposal.

The financing commitments—about half in bank debt and half in cash promised by Mr. Musk himself—lend credibility to an offer that lacked the details that usually accompany a bona fide takeover play. When he lobbed in his bid last week, Mr. Musk didn’t say how he planned to pay for the deal, which is expensive even for the world’s richest person.

Now he says he has lined up more than $25 billion in debt from a group of banks led by Morgan Stanley MS -4.69% ▼, Bank of America Corp. BAC -3.47% ▼ and Barclays BCS -2.43% ▼ PLC. He would personally commit $21 billion in equity, the deal-making equivalent of a down payment on a home.

While Mr. Musk surprised doubters by actually coming up with the money—in contrast to his infamous “funding secured” tweet in 2018 that hinted at an ultimately nonexistent bid to take Tesla Inc. private—he is risking a considerable part of his fortune doing so.

Under the plan disclosed Thursday, he will hock $62.5 billion of Tesla stock, one-third of his stake in the world’s most-valuable car company, as collateral for bank loans. He’ll need to come up with $21 billion more in cash, which would likely mean selling Tesla stock or whittling his stakes in his privately held ventures, SpaceX and Boring Co.

And it leaves little margin for error at Twitter, which would be saddled with a heavy debt load under a new owner who has said he doesn’t care whether the company makes money.

People familiar with the matter said Mr. Musk is still considering bringing in potential equity partners and has had conversations with some, which would lighten his own financial burden. He is also in line to receive billions of dollars in Tesla stock options after the electric-vehicle maker reported record quarterly earnings this week.

Twitter shares were little changed Thursday, closing at $47.08 They have been trading well below Mr. Musk’s offer of $54.20 a share, a sign that investors are skeptical.

Twitter is still likely to reject his bid, which he described as “best and final,” in the coming days, people familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Musk said Thursday he is considering launching a so-called tender offer, a direct offer to shareholders that sidesteps the board. In a series of not-so-cryptic tweets—“_____ Is the Night” and “Love Me Tender _____”—he has hinted as much in recent days.

That effort would be complicated by a defensive move that Twitter’s board made last week. It adopted a so-called poison pill, a legal maneuver that prevents Mr. Musk from amassing more than 15% of the company by offering every other investor cheap shares that would dilute his stake.

Mr. Musk is a Twitter power user, with over 82 million followers and a long history of espousing his views on everything from space travel to cryptocurrencies. In January, he began buying Twitter stock, becoming the single-largest individual investor with a more than 9% stake by April.

Since then he has been using his Twitter account to criticize the company, especially its approach to content moderation, which he believes impedes free speech. Twitter and other social-media platforms banned then-President Donald Trump, for example, shortly after Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters—echoing many of his false claims about election fraud—stormed the U.S. Capitol, seeking to overturn his election loss.

Still unknown is whether other suitors might emerge for Twitter. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that private-equity firms including Apollo Global Management Inc. APO -3.97% ▼ and Thoma Bravo LP are kicking the tires, and corporate suitors including Walt Disney Co. and Salesforce Inc. have made bids in the past.

But the fact that nearly every global blue-chip investment bank is participating in Mr. Musk’s bid—except for the two, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase JPM -2.87% ▼ & Co., advising Twitter in its response—suggests there isn’t a rival bidder waiting to surface.

UPDATE 4/24/22 at 11:06am: Added info below.

Posted by Princess Mononoke at 4:03 PM

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