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Premier League, EFL and Women’s Super League now monitoring all players’ social media handles

The Premier League, EFL and Women’s Super League are monitoring the social media accounts of all their players in a bid to protect footballers from the rising tide of online hate. The leagues have painstakingly gathered the handles of players and staff in order to keep tabs on the abuse that is routinely meted out at all levels of the game. The move is seen as a ‘safety net’ by football officials, who believe the primary responsibility for protecting users on social media rests with the platforms themselves. Hector Bellerin (left) was abused after promoting a LGBT campaign before north London derby The monitoring will also be used to gather data on the scale of the abuse crisis and the results will be used to put further pressure on the big tech companies, like Facebook and Twitter, to take action. There is a long list of players and officials who have been horribly abused, and in some cases the hate has not been picked up or dealt with by the platforms. Sportsmail highlighted racist and homophobic abuse directed at the Arsenal duo Granit Xhaka and Hector Bellerin recently and some of those Twitter posts had remained online for months. The scale of the abuse can be overwhelming. The FA highlighted an unnamed player this week who received so much online hate that the social media company’s reporting system would not let him report any more. Chelsea’s Antonio Rudiger received 900 abusive messages on Twitter and more than 2,000 on Instagram after fans accused him of undermining former boss, Frank Lampard – an allegation Rudiger has steadfastly denied. Burnley defender Erik Pieters was subjected to online abuse after a 1-1 Premier League home draw with Arsenal in which the Dutchman was sent off before getting a reprieve from the Video Assistant Referee (VAR). And Axel Tuanzebe, Anthony Martial, Southampton’s Alex Jankewitz, West Brom’s Romaine Sawyers and Chelsea’s Reece James are among those to have been targeted. THREE-PRONGED APPROACH TO ABUSE The development of AI technology available to football clubs enables a three-pronged approach to curb social media abuse of footballers. Firstly, big tech firms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are under pressure to do more to tackle the problem by improving their own use of technology to highlight posts and act. Secondly, Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden is developing an Online Harms Bill, which is expected to pass into law later this year. It will bring huge fines for tech giants that don’t do enough to protect users. And now finally, clubs and the Premier League have access to technology that allows them to protect their players, identify the abuse and some of the perpetrators. The creation of a centrally or club-based system was a recommendation of a PFA report last year into online abuse. The Premier League has pioneered the monitoring approach, using an external company to keep tabs on the trolls. The initiative has now been extended to the EFL and WSL, where it has already identified abusers in the first week of operation. Sportsmail understands these were individuals missed by the social media firms. The monitoring is part of a three-pronged approach to take on big tech and encourage those companies to do more to identify and remove abuse before it can be seen and gather views; work with government to develop the Online Harms Bill, which is expected to come into law by the end of this year, and to spot cases of abuse missed by the platforms. ‘Collectively the football authorities have challenged social media companies to use their platforms to effect change,’ said an EFL spokesman. ‘At the same time, we have urged government to do all it can with its Online Safety Bill to create conditions that will help ensure that there are real life consequences for online hate. ‘However, these are not quick fixes and football is committed to work collaboratively to combat online abuse – ultimately we want to do all we can to make sure that all those connected to the game can participate with confidence, not in fear of abuse and discrimination. ‘ Football authorities combined to call out the big tech companies last month. Eight of the game’s leading figures, including Richard Masters chief executive of the Premier League, Mark Bullingham, chief executive of the FA, Trevor Birch, who holds the same position at the EFL, Kelly Simmons, director of the women’s professional game and Sanjay Bhandari from Kick It Out, all signed a hard-hitting letter to Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg, accusing them of allowing their platforms to become ‘havens of abuse’. As reported by Sportsmail this week, the signatories have been underwhelmed by the response, which came from a mid-ranking staffer. The FA’s director of corporate affairs, Edleen John, said that social media remained like the ‘wild west’ for footballers and accused the firms of peddling ‘platitudes’. John’s frustration stems from the belief that much more could be done to protect not only footballers, but others abused on social media. The technology exists to identify abusive posts and in some cases track the perpetrators. John wants social media firms to use it more effecitivly and require some users to register with identification so they are unable to operate in the shadows. Monitoring and gathering evidence can result effective action, which is a deterrent to tothers. This week, a 22-year-old man from Fife was arrested following a racist message sent to Middlesbrough player Yannick Bolasie, who is on loan from Chelsea. And earlier this month, Brighton banned a season ticket holder for two seasons for posting an offensive tweet aimed at another club. A spokesman for Facebook told Sportsmail this week: ‘We’re continuing this work and are committed to fighting hate and racism on our platform. We also know these problems are bigger than us and we look forward to meeting with The FA and wider industry soon to collectively tackle this issue.’ And in a statement on the issue, published last month, Twitter said: ‘We believe everyone >>Read more
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Elon Musk denies sexual misconduct allegations

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has denied claims that he groped and exposed himself to an employee at his SpaceX rocket company six years ago. A report in the Business Insider news outlet on Thursday alleged SpaceX paid the ex-flight attendant $250,000 (£200,000) to settle the claim. “Those wild accusations are utterly untrue,” he wrote on Twitter. Mr. Musk told Business Insider its article was a “politically motivated hit piece”. The SpaceX founder suggested the piece was intended to interfere with his stalled $44bn (£35bn) acquisition of Twitter and malign the recent shift in his politics. He had used the social media site to announce he “can no longer support” the Democratic Party on Wednesday, saying he plans to vote for Republicans in future elections. Shares in his electric car company, Tesla, dropped on Friday. According to Business Insider, SpaceX paid the unnamed woman a severance agreement that was settled out of court and, as part of the deal, she was not allowed to sue the company or talk about the alleged incident. The magazine quotes an anonymous friend of the flight attendant, who it claimed had provided a signed declaration as part of the settlement process. The friend said Mr. Musk had exposed himself to the former employee – a cabin crew member on contract for SpaceX’s corporate jet fleet – in 2016 while receiving a massage from her aboard his private jet. He is said to have exposed his genitals to her, touched her leg without consent, and offered to buy her a gift if she would “do more” – referring to the performance of sex acts. The BBC has not been able to confirm these reports independently. In a series of tweets late on Thursday night, he alleged the friend quoted in the report was “a far-left activist/actress in [Los Angeles] with a major political ax to grind” – and challenged her to verify the claims by describing his intimate body parts. Nicholas Carlson, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, defended his outlet’s work, writing on Twitter: “We stand by our story, which is based on documents and interviews and speaks for itself.” Read more at bbc.com
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How Much Money Do You Need to Live Off Investments?

Living off investments defines financial independence, but getting there can be challenging. How much money do you need to live off investments? Here’s the formula: Divide the desired annual income by the expected yield. If you want $10,000 monthly investment income, and expect a 5% yield, divide $120,000 by 5% for the amount of money you’ll need to live off investment income, or $2,400,000 in this example. This is the simple formula to show how much money it will take for you to live off investment income only since yield is a measure of the income an investment generates. In other words, you want to live off the income your investments generate, without spending your investment capital. This is the ideal way to live off investments, so you don’t have to deplete your investment capital. After we stumbled into early retirement in late midlife, we pondered how much money we needed to live off our investments. Knowing we didn’t want to begin depleting our savings, we began creating diversified income streams and did so over the next 15 years. I’ll share what I’ve learned about estimating how much money you need to live off investments, and what all you’ll want to consider before attempting to live off your money. There’s some super important risk related factors you don’t want to miss so be sure to read this entire post. Beyond Investment Income We all love simple formulas. However, there are several more factors you’ll want to keep in mind as you use the formula above to estimate how much money you need to live off investments. First, the reality is that traditional investment income alone doesn’t generate enough money for most people to live comfortably in retirement. You can see that for someone with $2,400,000, making $10,000 a year is achievable since a 5% annual yield is doable for proactive investors. Yet studies show that most people don’t have anywhere near $1,000,000 put aside for retirement, let alone over $2 million. Additionally, most people aren’t getting a 5% yield on their investments, particularly given the popularity of index funds, which usually have very low yields. Second, the norm in retirement planning is to withdraw and live on a set percent of your investment accounts. These withdrawals typically have to dip into more than just investment income for almost everyone, unless investors have chosen to invest in higher yielding investments, or they have a lot of investment capital earning income. As a result, capital gains and maybe even invested capital (aka, your hard earned savings) are needed to live in retirement for most people, in addition to only investment income. In order to make sense of all of this, let’s explore the layers of your nice, prosperous investment account, which I’ll equate to a chocolate layer cake. Investment Income, Capital Gains and Savings Investment income, capital gains, and invested capital can be thought of as different layers of your investment accounts. It’s very important to understand these layers in determining how much money you need if you’re planning to live off investments at any time in the future. That’s because steps can be taken to increase income from investments or elsewhere freeing you from the need to continuously dip into the capital gains and savings layers for large amounts. In this post, I’ll explain the difference between those three potential layers for living off investments so you can see what your options are and how you might go about being able to live off investments at the age you choose. Like you may do, I equate living off investments to financial independence and/or retirement without financial struggle or worry. Living Off Stocks and Bonds Only In this post, first I’ll focus mostly on living off investments in stocks and bonds since these are the most common investments. The reality is, however, there are a lot of ways you can live off investments when you consider real estate and small business investments in addition to stocks, bonds, and slightly alternative investments such as MLPs and REITs. I’ll disregard other potential income sources, such as social security in this post, especially since you may be younger than the common retirement age of 63 like we were when we began living off investments and alternative income streams. Potential Income From Living Off Investments Money Available Yield Investment Potential Assets $2,400,000 5% $120,000 High Yield Assets $1,000,000 3% $30,000 Devident Stocks $500,000 3% $15,000 Devident Stocks $1,000,000 7% $70,000 Alternative Investment $1,000,000 10% $100,000 Covered Call Strategoies Using Account Size and Yield to Determine How Much Money You Need When you’re considering how to live off investments, first, you’re faced with the decision of whether to live off income from investments only, as in the example above, or spending your savings (investment capital) to live. Whether or not this is really an option depends on how much money you have, and how much yield you’ll earn on investments, so let’s start there. For example, if you have $1,000,000 earning 3% from dividend stocks, this will generate $30,000 income a year (before considering taxes or wealth management fees). If you have $500,000 earning 3% in dividends, the income generated will be $15,000 a year. A 3% income yield from traditional stock and bond portfolios is realistic if not overly optimistic these days. The yield can be improved, however, as I’ll explain more later in this post. This simple math is very telling. This is because, in this example, we’re focusing on investment income only vs capital gains from your investments. Capital gains are the increase in value your investments have had, not the income they generate. Most people who live off investments, however, don’t just rely on investment income for several reasons, as I’ll explain next in more detail. If you’re confused about this, click here to read my post How to Understand Your Investments. First, however, let’s dig into exactly what those layers of investment income, capital gains, and savings (or initial deposits) >>Read more
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7 Essential Insights For SEO Client Reports

What goes into making the perfect SEO reports for your clients? If you’re managing SEO for clients, then you know how important it is to deliver accurate and insightful reports. You’ve done the work, now you have to show it. Your clients rely on you to give them the relevant information they need to make informed decisions about their marketing efforts going forward. The SEO report is their (and your) roadmap. Getting it right every time is a matter of creating a system you can consistently mimic for each client. So, what goes into making perfect SEO reports? These are the seven essential elements you need to consider 1. Traffic: Sources Is increasing organic traffic to their website your client’s main goal? Start your SEO reports with traffic. If using Google Analytics, you’ll also want to utilize the Source/Medium section of the traffic report for this part of the report. It will provide you with more information on where your visitors are coming from, helping your client determine where they should spend their time and money. Ensure that mobile sources are also included in this part of the report since mobile phones made up about 63% of organic search engine visits in 2021. To get there quickly, go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. 2. Conversion Rate & Progress On Goals Massive flows of site traffic are great, but if you don’t know what your visitors want or how they want to be engaged with your content, then even all the traffic in the world won’t help you get very far. In other words, if you can’t convert your visitors into customers, no amount of traffic will help you. Conversion rate is probably one of the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) to your clients, so tuck this near the front of your report for easy access. Once you’ve discovered the conversion rate, you’ll be more equipped to explain what comes next in the report and describe why they’re seeing certain insights and data points. To demonstrate conversion rate to a customer, select certain goals that you want to track as “conversions.” In this example, one non-profit client used landings on their “Thanks for the donation!” page to track completed donations. Google Analytics will count each landing as a donation, helping to complete the goals on the Goal Completion portion. To get to Goal Completion, go to Conversions > Goals > Overview. 3. Top Performing Pages You probably know where your visitors are coming from, but it’s vital to learn where they’re heading on your site. If someone arrives at your site organically via Google, that’s awesome; however, if you know they clicked on your most recent blog post, that is way more valuable. You always want to include top-performing pages so your client knows what’s working and what isn’t. There are usually lessons they can learn from pages that are doing well and apply them to pages that could use help to attract (and keep!) traffic. One way to pull data from Google Analytics to illustrate this is via the Landing Pages section. To get there, first, go to Behavior, then Site Content, and Landing Pages. You’ll see which URLs are hot and which ones aren’t quite. 4. Page Speed Insights Take a quick break from Google Analytics for this part and head over to a tool called PageSpeed Insights from Google. It’s a completely free tool that will show your clients how fast their pages are loading and any performance issues they may be able to fix to improve their results. Sometimes, it’s something as small as a video with a file size that’s too large. This simple quick fix can get your pages up quickly. Page speed hasn’t always been a high priority, but as user expectations are becoming more and more demanding with their online experiences, getting your pages to load quickly is paramount to keeping visitors on your site. Google even tells us that the probability of someone bouncing off a website increases by 32% if load time goes from a one-second load to a three-second load. 5. Bounce Rate And Dwell Time Knowing that visitors have come to your site, clicked on certain pages, and in some cases, converted is incredibly helpful. But to complete the full picture, your client needs to know how long people are staying on their site and how many of them are clicking away after the first landing page. Dwell time is the time someone spends on a website page when they come from an organic search. Are they exploring other pages from there, or looking for a quick answer? A high bounce rate isn’t always a bad thing, though. If their landing page was one chock full of internal links to other pages on your site and they bounced quickly, it probably means they’ve moved on to exploring these outbound links. In this section, focus on bounce rate for core site pages with rich content like videos. They should be staying for a while to consume the content. 6. Rankings And Backlinks Backlinks can be powerful tools for websites struggling to make progress in their SEO rankings. You can find many tools to track links you have, which is helpful because it can identify potential SEO opportunities. If you’ve helped your client get backlinks as part of your SEO strategy, this section of the report is where you’ll show their impact. As for rankings, you should include where the site ranks for keywords that you’ve determined are most valuable to the client. Just keep in mind that rankings are no longer the end-all and be-all of SEO – we now know that countless factors, such as history, user geographic location, and personalization can all impact rankings. 7. Recommendations And Next Steps Recommendations may not be the first thing that springs to mind when underneath a mountain of data, but recommendations and next steps are ultimately what the client is looking for at the end of this >>Read more
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Michael Douglas reunites with Kathleen Turner for the final season of Kominsky Method

Michael Douglas, 76, reunites with his Romancing the Stone co-star Kathleen Turner, 66, after 32 years… for the final season of The Kominsky Method. The dup have reunited for the third and final season of Netflix’s hit series The Kominsky Method. Douglas, 76, and Turner, 66, starred alongside each other in a string of hit movies in the 1980s. Previously, the pair co-starred in Romancing the Stone in 1984 and its 1985 sequel, The Jewel of the Nile. The last time the pair worked together was on the dark comedy War of the Roses, 32 years ago in 1989. Michael Douglas reunited with his longtime costar Kathleen Turner for the third and final season of Netflix’s hit series The Kominsky Method. The 66-year-old actress, who previously made a guest appearance on the series as Douglas’ ex-wife last year, will be taking on a full-time role on the critically-acclaimed as the mother to his daughter Mindy (Sarah Baker). In the first picture of Sandy Kominsky (Douglas) and Roz together, they can be seen sitting together and look in deep conversation. Previously, the pair co-starred in Romancing the Stone in 1984 and its 1985 sequel, The Jewel of the Nile as well as War of the Roses in 1989. The six-episode final season will include Sarah Baker, Paul Reiser, Lisa Edelstein, Emily Osment, Graham Rogers and Haley Joel Osment. Speaking about the decision to play his former spouse on the half-hour comedy-drama about getting older, Turner told People it was a ‘no-brainer.’ ‘Michael and I have always been friends but it was fun just to fall back in the rhythm again of our working together,’ she told the outlet in November 2019. Over the summer, new broke that the series would conclude after three seasons. ‘The Kominsky Method has been a true passion project for me, and it’s been an incredible experience to see the warm response from both audiences and critics,’ the show’s creator and executive producer Chuck Lorre in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter in July. He continued: ‘I’m excited to wrap up the story with this final chapter.’ The Golden Globe Award-winning series first premiered in November 2018. Season 3 will premiere on May 28 on Netflix. Source: DailyMail.co.uk
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