SOCIAL
Facebook Partners on New Program to Provide Digital Skills Training to Minority Communities


Facebook has announced a new initiative, in conjunction with Goodwill Partners and Coursera, that will provide accredited social media ad digital marketing training to over 6,000 job seekers in the US, free of charge, via a new scholarship program.
The program is designed to help people from minority backgrounds to get back to work, and to capitalize on rising opportunities within the digital marketing space.
As explained by Goodwill:
“This new training program is intended to increase diversity, and eliminate barriers to entry in this rapidly growing field of work. As part of Facebook Elevate’s commitment to diversity, the grant will enable Goodwill to offer holistic support to Black learners, providing eligible participants with services including career planning, résumé building and other supports as needed.”
The program will encompass five digital marketing courses, all designed for learners with no prior industry experience, ultimately awarding each participant that follows through to completion with a Social Media Marketing Professional Certificate.
“This self-paced online program is designed to be completed within 20 weeks and includes 100 hours of hands-on, project-based training. After completing the program, learners will receive an industry-recognized certificate that they can use to apply for entry-level social media marketing roles.”
The initiative aims to address a key element of societal impact, and inequality, as a result of the pandemic.
Facebook’s own State of Small Business research has shown that the COVID-19 mitigation efforts have disproportionately impacted people of color in the US, with businesses in majority-minority neighborhoods suffering poorer business outcomes overall, including significantly higher closure rates.
By providing more support for people of color, who are less likely to have access to such training tools and programs, the initiative aims to be another element in closing the skills gap.
The program will be delivered via Facebook Elevate, its community and learning platform, which it launched back in 2018 with the stated intention of ‘accelerating the economic success and impact of entities of color’. Facebook launched a major update for Elevate last October, in response to the pandemic, while in February, it also showcased a range of businesses that have taken part in Elevate training thus far.
This new expansion will aim to provide a more direct link between job seekers and rising demand for digital skills, which could have a big impact, not just on the participants themselves, but also in expanding those opportunities within impacted communities.
The program will allocate the new digital training scholarships shortly.
SOCIAL
Musk regrets controversial post but won’t bow to advertiser ‘blackmail’

Elon Musk’s comments at the New York Times’ Dealbook conference drew a shocked silence – Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP Slaven Vlasic
Elon Musk apologized Wednesday for endorsing a social media post widely seen as anti-Semitic, but accused advertisers who are turning away from his social media platform X of “blackmail” and said anyone who does so can “go fuck yourself.”
The remark before corporate executives at the New York Times’ Dealbook conference drew a shocked silence.
Earlier, Musk had apologized for what he called “literally the worst and dumbest post that I’ve ever done.”
In a comment on X, formerly Twitter, Musk on November 15 called a post “the actual truth” that said Jewish communities advocated a “dialectical hatred against whites,” which was criticized as echoing longtime conspiracy theory among White supremacists.
The statement prompted a flood of departures from X of major advertisers, including Apple, Disney, Comcast and IBM who criticized Musk for anti-semitism.
“I’m sorry for that tweet or post,” Musk said Wednesday. “It was foolish of me.”
He told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin that his post had been misinterpreted and that he had sought to clarify the remark in subsequent posts to the thread.
But Musk also said he wouldn’t be beholden to pressure from advertisers.
“If somebody’s gonna try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money?” Musk said. “Go fuck yourself.”
But the billionaire acknowledged that there were business implications to the advertiser actions.
“If the company fails… it will fail because of an advertiser boycott” Musk said. “And that will be what will bankrupt the company.”
Musk, who met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a visit to Israel earlier this week, insisted in the interview that he holds no discrimination against Jews, calling himself “philo-Semitic,” or an admirer of Judaism.
During the interview, Musk wore a necklace given to him by a parent of an Israeli hostage taken in the Hamas attack on October 7. The necklace reads, “Bring Them Home.”
Musk told Sorkin that the Israel trip had been planned earlier and was not an “apology tour” related to the controversial tweet.
SOCIAL
TikTok Encourages Creators To Make Longer Videos, With Focus On Ad Revenue 11/30/2023

A new report by The Information shows the company’s recent efforts to convince
creators to put out longer videos in order to provide more room for ad placements.
According to the …
SOCIAL
X Adds Option To Embed Videos in Isolation From Posts

Next time you go to embed an X post, you may notice a new step:
Now, X will enable you to choose whether you want to embed the video element in isolation, or the whole post, as normal.
And if you do choose to embed just the video (or GIF), it’ll look like this:
Which could be a helpful way to present X-originated video on third-party websites, and add context to, say, your blog post, without the clutter of the full X framing.
But it could also reduce brand exposure for X, which is likely why Twitter didn’t enable this before, though it did once provide an “embedded video widget” which essentially served the same purpose.

Twitter gradually seemed to phase that out as the platform evolved, and there’s no specific reason that I can find as to why it removed it as an option. But either way, now, it’s back, so you have more options for using X-originated content, and putting more focus on video elements specifically.
Though I don’t know why they didn’t also take the opportunity to remove the ‘Tweet’ reference. Since the re-brand to X, the platform seems to have gone to little effort to weed out all the tweet and bird terminology, but then again, with 80% fewer staff, that’s probably understandable as well.
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