Arvind's Newsletter

1.India’s government has granted itself special social media powers
It’ll ‘fact check’ and delete posts it disagrees with. Journalists, opposition parties, and advocacy groups are worried what this “absolute power” means for press freedom in India.

The Indian government on April 6 announced a state-run fact-checking unit that will have sweeping powers to label any piece of information related to the government as “fake, false or misleading” and have it removed from social media. The country has tweaked its tech rules that now require platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to take down content flagged by the fact-checking body. Internet service providers are also expected to block URLs to such content. Failure to comply could result in the platforms losing safe harbor protection that safeguards them from legal action against any content posted by their users, said India’s minister of information technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar.

2.China’s yuan is increasingly being used as an alternative to the U.S. dollar, thanks in part to Western sanctions imposed on Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine. The yuan replaced the dollar as the most-traded foreign currency in Russia in February and March, Bloomberg reported. And its share of global trade finance more than doubled in the year after the invasion, according to the Financial Times — though the yuan’s share remains a small fraction of the dollar’s. Analysts say the shift is part of a strategic push by China to increase use of the yuan, in part to help protect Beijing against the power of the U.S. financial system

Trade finance data of Swift shows that the renminbi’s share by value of market has risen from less than 2% to 4.5% a year later, t86.8hough still lower than euro which is at 6%. But are still a tiny fraction of the dollar at 84.3% down from 86.8%.

However, renminbi’s recent rise in trade finance is not matched by greater use in international payments made on Swift which have plateaued at 2%.

Also in light of tight capital controls maintained by China’s Central Bank, few experts expect renminbi to quickly rocket up the ranks of of global payment currencies.

3.Ghana became the first country to approve a new malaria vaccine. The Oxford University-developed vaccine, called R21, showed 80% protection in early trials: Ghana’s regulators have seen data from a bigger study which apparently shows similar results, the BBC reported. Malaria kills 600,000 people a year, the vast majority of them African children. African countries fell behind on COVID-19 vaccination as rich countries monopolized supply, but R21 should be cheap — a couple of dollars a dose — and widely available: The Serum Institute of India is building a factory in Ghana’s capital Accra which will make 100 to 200 million doses a year.

4.Twitter's inching towards Musk's "everything app" vision, but getting there could be challenging opines Finimize.

When Elon Musk bagged Twitter for $44 billion last year, his ultimate ambition was to turn the platform into an "everything app" named X, inspired by China's WeChat. With over a billion users relying on Tencent’s WeChat for everything from payments to booking event tickets, Musk spied an opening to replicate its success globally. And now he seems to be taking a significant step in that direction – ending Twitter’s life as an independent firm and merging it with a shell company named X.

Musk's cost-cutting strategies have helped Twitter reach a break-even point – but the crash diet he put the firm on has shrunk Twitter's workforce from around 8,000 to a mere 1,500. That probably played a role in the six major outages that have struck the platform since the year began. And those wrinkles have got people questioning the feasibility of any potential plans to add e-commerce and payment features, especially when tech titans with much more manpower – like Alphabet and Meta – are struggling with similar goals.

If Twitter wants to outpace those behemoths, it’ll need to get its own house in order first. After all, one of Musk’s main goals was to make the platform more trustworthy – and while he’s claimed that his crusade against bots and automated accounts has helped clamp down on misinformation, studies suggest otherwise. In fact, engagement with misinformation spreaders actually seems to have spiked post-takeover.

The expected decline in Twitter’s ad revenue this year compared to 2022, according to the market research firm Insider Intelligence is projected at 28%. The biggest obstacle that the social media company faces in its ad business is the personal brand Elon Musk has intertwined with Twitter, one that, as Quartz’s Scott Nover explains, exudes chaos, not trust.

5 A new study details how octopuses are able to taste with their arms; receptors on the animals' suckers allow them to sense chemicals on surfaces they touch independently from sensing chemicals in the water