Hate speech continues to flourish on the messaging service formerly known as Twitter, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
The CCDH said Wednesday that X fails to remove posts that contain hate speech despite being notified that the content violates the company’s current hateful conduct guidelines.
The CCDH’s report comes a little after one month after X sued the nonprofit over allegations that some of the group’s previous research was derived from unscrupulous methods, including the use of illegally scraped Twitter data.
CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed declined to comment about the specifics of the lawsuit, but said the CCDH did not use data-scraping tools to conduct its latest research and instead “simply went in and had a look.”
For this report, the CCDH collected 300 posts spread from 100 accounts that contained hateful content, such as posts urging people to “stop race mixing” and messages stating that Black people are intrinsically violent. About 140 of those 300 posts contained antisemitic content, including images of Nazi swastikas, messages supporting Holocaust denial and notes promoting conspiracy theories related to Jews.
The CCDH said it reported the posts to X via the company’s user-reporting tools on Aug. 30 and 31. When the researchers followed up a week later, they found that X had only taken down 41 posts, meaning that 259 posts containing hateful content were still active, including one that that referred to Adolf Hitler as “A hero who will help secure a future for white children!” Additionally, 90 of the 100 accounts that were responsible for sending the posts were still active.
Major companies like Apple and Disney ran online ads on X that appeared next to the hateful content, the CCDH report said. One ad from Walt Disney World ran below a post that insulted Black Americans while an Apple ad was displayed above a post insinuating Holocaust denial. Another ad from the corporate server company Supermicro was sandwiched between two pro-Nazi posts that contained images of a swastika.
“What this shows is that it takes out any excuses of this being about capacity to detect problematic content,” CCDH’s Ahmed told CNBC. “We’ve done the detection for you, and here’s how you responded, or here’s how we can see that you responded.”
Ahmed added, “Leaving up content like this is a choice, and that invites the question: Are you proud of the choices you’re making?”
While X’s process for users to report hateful content is “straightforward,” Ahmed said, “the problem is that people on the other end of the alarm bell either aren’t listening, they’ve got earplugs in and they’re ignoring everything, or they are being incredibly selective in what they choose to respond to.”
X did not respond to a request for comment, and instead pointed to a post saying that “based on the limited information we’ve seen, the CCDH is asserting two false claims – that X did not take action on violative posts and that violative posts reached a lot of people on our platform.”
“We either remove content that violates our policies or label and restrict the reach of certain posts,” the company said in the X post, adding that it would review the report when it is released and “take action as needed.”
While he didn’t comment on the specifics, Ahmed told CNBC that he believes X’s lawsuit was intended to place a financial burden on the CCDH, and that he estimates it will cost the nonprofit “half a million just to defend it.”
X attorneys have previously said that the CCDH’s prior research was an attempt to “to drive advertisers off Twitter by smearing the company and its owner.”
Last week, Elon Musk said that he was considering filing a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League, which he claimed was “trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic.” Musk attributed a 60% decline in X’s U.S. advertising revenue to a pressure campaign from the ADL.
ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt soon responded by saying that Musk was merely issuing a “threat of a frivolous lawsuit” and said that the billionaire’s behavior was “flat out dangerous and deeply irresponsible,” referring to Musk engaging with “a highly toxic, antisemitic campaign” that helped foster the #BanTheADL campaign to trend on the messaging service.
Last Friday evening, X CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote a post on X saying that “X opposes antisemitism in all its forms” and that “Antisemitism is evil and X will always work to fight it on our platform.” Yaccarino’s post also pointed to a corporate blog post detailing the ways X is addressing antisemitic content on its platform, including improving automatic enforcement and providing training support for its “frontline moderators.”
Okta on Tuesday topped Wall Street’s third-quarter estimates and issued an upbeat outlook, but shares fell as the company did not provide guidance for fiscal 2027.
Shares of the identity management provider fell more than 3% in after-hours trading on Tuesday.
Here’s how the company did versus LSEG estimates:
Earnings per share: 82 cents adjusted vs. 76 cents expected
Revenue: $742 million vs. $730 million expected
Compared to previous third-quarter reports, Okta refrained from offering preliminary guidance for the upcoming fiscal year. Finance chief Brett Tighe cited seasonality in the fourth quarter, and said providing guidance would require “some conservatism.”
Okta released a capability that allows businesses to build AI agents and automate tasks during the third quarter.
CEO Todd McKinnon told CNBC that upside from AI agents haven’t been fully baked into results and could exceed Okta’s core total addressable market over the next five years.
“It’s not in the results yet, but we’re investing, and we’re capitalizing on the opportunity like it will be a big part of the future,” he said in a Tuesday interview.
Revenues increased almost 12% from $665 million in the year-ago period. Net income increased 169% to $43 million, or 24 cents per share, from $16 million, or breakeven, a year ago. Subscription revenues grew 11% to $724 million, ahead of a $715 million estimate.
For the current quarter, the cybersecurity company expects revenues between $748 million and $750 million and adjusted earnings of 84 cents to 85 cents per share. Analysts forecast $738 million in revenues and EPS of 84 cents for the fourth quarter.
Returning performance obligations, or the company’s subscription backlog, rose 17% from a year ago to $4.29 billion and surpassed a $4.17 billion estimate from StreetAccount.
This year has been a blockbuster period for cybersecurity companies, with major acquisition deals from the likes of Palo Alto Networks and Google and a raft of new initial public offerings from the sector.
Marvell Technology Group Ltd. headquarters in Santa Clara, California, on Sept. 6, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Semiconductor company Marvell on Tuesday announced that it will acquire Celestial AI for at least $3.25 billion in cash and stock.
The purchase price could increase to $5.5 billion if Celestial hits revenue milestones, Marvell said.
Marvell shares rose 13% in extended trading Tuesday as the company reported third-quarter earnings that beat expectations and said on the earnings call that it expected data center revenue to rise 25% next year.
The deal is an aggressive move for Marvell to acquire complimentary technology to its semiconductor networking business. The addition of Celestial could enable Marvell to sell more chips and parts to companies that are currently committing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure for AI.
Marvell stock is down 18% so far in 2025 even as semiconductor rivals like Broadcom have seen big valuation increases driven by excitement around artificial intelligence.
Celestial is a startup focused on developing optical interconnect hardware, which it calls a “photonic fabric,” to connect high-performance computers. Celestial was reportedly valued at $2.5 billion in March in a funding round, and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan joined the startup’s board in January.
Optical connections are becoming increasingly important because the most advanced AI systems need those parts tie together dozens or hundreds of chips so they can work as one to train and run the biggest large-language models.
Currently, many AI chip connections are done using copper wires, but newer systems are increasingly using optical connections because they can transfer more data faster and enable physically longer cables. Optical connections also cost more.
“This builds on our technology leadership, broadens our addressable market in scale-up connectivity, and accelerates our roadmap to deliver the industry’s most complete connectivity platform for AI and cloud customers,” Marvell CEO Matt Murphy said in a statement.
Marvell said that the first application of Celestial technology would be to connect a system based on “large XPUs,” which are custom AI chips usually made by the companies investing billions in AI infrastructure.
On Tuesday, the company said that it could even integrate Celestial’s optical technology into custom chips, and based on customer traction, the startup’s technology would soon be integrated into custom AI chips and related parts called switches.
Amazon Web Services Vice President Dave Brown said in a statement that Marvell’s acquisition of Celestial will “help further accelerate optical scale-up innovation for next-generation AI deployments.”
The maximum payout for the deal will be triggered if Celestial can record $2 billion in cumulative revenue by the end of fiscal 2029. The deal is expected to close early next year.
In its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday, Marvell earnings of 76 cents per share on $2.08 billion in sales, versus LSEG expectations of 73 cents on $2.07 billion in sales. Marvell said that it expects fourth-quarter revenue to be $2.2 billion, slightly higher than LSEG’s forecast of $2.18 billion.
Amazon Web Services’ two-track approach to artificial intelligence came into better focus Tuesday as the world’s biggest cloud pushed forward with its own custom chips and got closer to Nvidia . During Amazon ‘s annual AWS Re:Invent 2025 conference in Las Vegas, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman unveiled Trainium3 — the latest version of the company’s in-house custom chip. It has four times more compute performance, energy efficiency, and memory bandwidth than previous generations. AWS said that early results of customers testing Trainium3 are reducing AI training and inference costs by up to 50%. Custom chips, like Trainium, are becoming more and more popular for the big tech companies that can afford to make them. And, their use cases are broadening. For example, Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs), co-designed by Broadcom , have also been getting a lot of attention since last month’s launch of the well-received Gemini 3 artificial intelligence model. It is powered by TPUs. There was even a report that Meta Platforms was considering TPUs in addition to Nvidia ‘s graphics processing units (GPUs), which are the gold standard for all-purpose AI workloads. At the same time, Amazon also announced that it’s deepening its work with Nvidia. In Tuesday’s keynote, Garman introduced AWS Factories, which provides on-premise AI infrastructure for customers to use in their own data centers. The service combines Trainium accelerators and Nvidia graphics processing units, which allows customers to access Nvidia’s accelerated computing platform, full-stack AI software, and GPU-accelerated applications. By offering both options, Amazon aims to keep accelerating AWS cloud capacity and, in turn, revenue growth to stay on top during a time of intense competition from Microsoft ‘s Azure and Alphabet ‘s Google Cloud, the second and third place horses in the AI race, by revenue. Earlier this year, investors were concerned when second-quarter AWS revenue growth did not live up to its closest competitors. In late October’s release of Q3 results, Amazon went a long way to putting those worries to rest. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said at the time , “AWS is growing at a pace we haven’t seen since 2022, re-accelerating to 20.2% YoY.” He added, “We’ve been focused on accelerating capacity — adding more than 3.8 gigawatts (GW) in the past 12 months.” Tuesday’s announcements come at a pivotal time for AWS as it tries to rapidly expand its computing capacity after a year of supply constraints that put a lid on cloud growth. As great as more efficient chips are, they don’t make up for the capacity demand that the company is facing as AI adoption ramps up, which is why adding more gigawatts of capacity is what Wall Street is laser-focused on. Fortunately, Wall Street argues that the capacity headwind should flip to a tailwind. Wells Fargo said Trainium3 is “critical to supplementing Nvidia GPUs and CPUs in this capacity build” to close the gap with rivals. In a note to investors on Monday, the analysts estimate Amazon will add more than 12 gigawatts of compute by year-end 2027, boosting total AWS capacity to support as much as $150 billion in incremental annual AWS revenue if demand remains strong. In a separate note, Oppenheimer said Monday that AWS has already proven its ability to improve capacity, which has already doubled since 2022. Amazon plans to double it again by 2027. The analysts said that such an expansion could translate to 14% upside to 2026 AWS revenue and 22% upside in 2027. Analysts said each incremental gigawatt of compute added in recent quarters translated to roughly $3 billion of annual cloud revenue. Bottom line While new chips are welcome news that helps AWS step deeper into the AI chip race, Amazon’s investment in capacity and when that capacity will be unlocked is what investors are more locked in on because that’s how it will fulfill demand. The issue is not a demand issue; it’s a supply issue. We are confident in AWS’ ability to add the capacity. In fact, there’s no one company in the world that could deal with this kind of logistics problem, at this scale, better than Amazon. Amazon shares surged nearly 14% to $254 each in the two sessions following the cloud and e-commerce giant’s late Oct. 30 earnings print. The stock has since given back those gains and then some. As of Tuesday’s close, shares were up 6.5% year to date, a laggard among its “Magnificent Seven” peers, and underperforming the S & P 500 ‘s roughly 16% advance in 2025. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long AMZN, NVDA. See here for a full list of the stocks.) 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