NASA's InSight lander has taken its first selfie on Mars.

The selfie, released on Tuesday and shown above, is made up of 11 images that were stitched together. The resulting photo shows InSight's solar panels and deck, along with the scientific instruments on top of the deck and the lander's weather sensor.

InSight landed on Mars on November 26 after a nearly seven-month journey from Earth. Since then, scientists have gotten their first look at InSight's "workspace": a 14-by-7-foot area in front of the lander. The image scientists have of that workspace is also a mosaic, created out of 52 separate images.

The $830 million InSight mission to Mars is the first since the nuclear-powered Curiosity rover reached the red planet more than six years ago. But InSight is not made to roam around. Instead, NASA scientists are hoping to use the lander's tools to study Mars' internal structure and the history of the planet's formation.

InSight is equipped with a seismometer that will listen for seismic movements on the red planet, which are known as Mars quakes. And a heat probe will dig down 16 feet to measure Mars' temperature and help scientists better understand the planet's geology.

Over the next few weeks, scientists and engineers at NASA will determine where those instruments should go within the lander's workspace. Then, the lander's robotic arm will grab the heat probe and seismometer and carefully place them on the Martian surface.

Another view from NASA's InSight lander on the surface of Mars.NASA/JPL-Caltech

InSight was launched to Mars along with two briefcase-sized satellites collectively called Mars Cube One, which helped record and relay crucial landing data to NASA mission control.

NASA chose to land InSight in a region of Mars called Elysium Planitia because the area is relatively free of boulders and craters.

"The near-absence of rocks, hills and holes means it'll be extremely safe for our instruments," Bruce Banerdt, InSight's principal investigator, said in a press release. "This might seem like a pretty plain piece of ground if it weren't on Mars, but we're glad to see that."

Elysium Planitia is located just north of the Martian equator, where the sun's rays remain strong throughout the year. That solar power is expected to allow InSight to operate on Mars for two Earth years using its solar panels.

Back to the Future fans will swoon over this "DeLorean" hovercraft.

It's a custom-designed sculpture of a DeLorean.

Have you ever seen a DeLorean do THIS before?

Matt Riese: "Hi I'm Matt Riese. This is my crazy creation. A hand-made, amphibious, hovering time-traveling Delorean. Come on, I'll show you how it works"

It's made out of styrofoam and wrapped in fiberglass.

It consists of some real DeLorean parts.

It can cruise on the water, reaching speeds up to 81 mph.

Matt Riese: "You can see this is the lift engine. This is how it works. You turn on this motor and the big fan in there will push a bunch of air down. Some of that air gets diverted into this vinyl skirt here. Which forms basically an inner tube around the perimeter of the whole and that traps the pocket of high-pressure air underneath the rest of the whole and that lifts the whole about six to eight inches off the ground, water, snow, dirt, sand... Whatever you are over"

The hovercraft runs on a 23-horsepower thrust engine pushed by a 36-inch fan.

Rudders help the driver steer.

The steering wheel can be moved to different positions.

Matt Riese: Check out this switch panel here. We got headlights. We got navigation lamps for the Coast Guard. We got cockpit lights. Flux capacitor, that's the colored lights around the perimeter. And then anti-gravity, which is the pulse engines embedded in the tires which you can see flashing.

There are some real DeLorean parts. The side marker lights. These grill pieces. The logo here and the grill emblem. And the doors are created with molds of the real Delorean doors. You can see the armrests. I got the leather texture and everything. That's fiberglass but that's from a real DeLorean."

The hovercraft took a total of four-and-a-half years to build.

Matt Riese: So piloting this basically feels like driving a car that's constantly sliding around on ice. You got your foot pedal and you got your steering wheel and it feels like you're in a car, but you're just sliding around every which way with no friction.

A startup plans to pay you for opening a credit card with a lower rate. Or moving your money into a higher-yielding savings account. Or using a coupon at your favorite retailer.

The service is the brainchild of Status Money, a relatively new player in an industry led by larger firms like Mint or CreditKarma that recommend credit card offers, high-yield savings accounts or online personal loans within free personal finance software. In return for sharing their data, consumers get access to offers. The tech companies receive what is effectively a referral fee.

Status' rewards program, months in the making, aims to share some of that fee with users and also persuade them to improve their financial health in other ways that don't necessarily mean revenue for the startup, according to Majd Maksad, one of its founders.

"This is the first program in this space that gives people cash rewards," Maksad said. "These aren't points or some weird currency, this is real money."

Status and other firms are positioning themselves at the nexus of two prevailing global trends: the growing use of technology that's spitting out vast troves of data to mine for valuable insights and the drive to use behavioral economics findings to create policies to help persuade humans to be more healthy. Those suggestions may include nudging them to walk more, signing up for a retirement program at work or, as of Tuesday, paying them to move money into a higher-yielding savings account.

The aim isn't entirely altruistic. Status' rewards are likely to distinguish it from competitors and encourage people to engage more fully with the sales leads on its site. If successful, that would mean more user growth and higher revenue.

Read more: 'If you get to 700, 750, we'll cut your mortgage costs a little bit': JPMorgan is working on ways to reward you for improving your credit score, and it may be the future of consumer finance

The product works like this: an individual receives $5 for opening an account (a badge on the homepage touts the cash value) and another $2 for linking various bank and credit bureau accounts. Users can then earn additional rewards by signing up for other financial products that Status recommends, or engaging in other activity on the site. Like a game, badges identify opportunities and encourage engagement.

That could mean signing up for things like a high yield savings account or refinancing a loan, and even managing a budget. It could mean using a coupon at your favorite retailer, delivering rewards on top of the savings. And the firm is even in talks with a daily deals site to offer additional rewards to nudge consumers into using that coupon for a restaurant or sightseeing cruise that they bought months ago.

Once $10 or more has been collected, Status allows user to withdraw the funds and drop them into a linked bank account. Some products may deliver $20 or more in rewards; there's no cap on the amount of rewards that can be earned and they don't expire.

The idea is to turn a traditional technology model on its head. Rather than simply monetizing the data it collects through bank accounts and credit files and offering a free service in exchange Status aims to return some of that value to consumers. And adds transparency around how it's being used. The firm doesn't sell data or share it with third parties.

"If I'm the consumer giving you data and information, why don't I get a share of that?" Maksad said in an interview. "What we're trying to do is create a more of a shared business model."

Read more:People aren't paying their credit cards and more accounts are being shut down, and it could be a sign that 'economic clouds are darkening'

Maksad, the former head of decision management for Citigroup's digital payments group, founded Status with Korash Hernandez, a colleague from Citi who had left to become one of the first employees at Goldman Sachs's online lender, Marcus. They joined up in May 2016, raising $4 million in a seed round from AltPoint Ventures. The website was unveiled in September 2017 and there's now a mobile app for the more than 200,000 users.

From the beginning, the two data scientists aimed to separate themselves from the larger competitors by using machine learning to make smarter recommendations — delivering better leads to its partners — and to return real value to consumers.

The initial product was a dashboard comparing an individual's financial situation to peers based on factors such as address, age, or credit score. It delivers information about how they stack up to peers and, hopefully, persuades them to take action to save more or spend less, Maksad said.

"The equation between consumers and their tech companies is going to have to change," Maksad said. "There is no doubt in our minds that open data and financial transparency is coming. We want to be one of the ones to lead that change."

JPMorgan — the largest bank in the country - is also considering ways it can reward people for improving their financial health, CEO Jamie Dimon said in a July interview with Business Insider. The firm would provide incentives, like reducing loan costs, for lifting a credit score to a certain threshold, Dimon said. The bank is thinking about beta testing several tools around that idea, though it's unclear whether those would be tied to improving credit scores, financial education, or other things.

Adrian Aoun, the founder and CEO of healthcare startup Forward, spoke about the importance of preventative care at the annual IGNITION conference, hosted by Business Insider, in New York on Dec. 3.

Aoun, a former Google executive, started Forward just two years ago, and has since opened futuristic-looking doctors offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City. Memberships work like that of a gym: you pay a monthly fee, starting at $150, and doctors work alongside patients to monitor health risks with advanced AI technology.

If you'd like to watch his presentation, it starts at 2:23:14 here.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

Amazon: retailer, cloud-computing powerhouse, and voice-computing pioneer. And now, toymaker.

Amazon released on its website four new products related to toys:

The new products were first spotted by TJI Research, which keeps tabs on new products Amazon that puts on its website. Since TJI spotted the new products on Monday, Amazon took all four of them off the site as of Tuesday evening, and they now return error pages. They were released under Amazon's AmazonBasics line, according to TJI.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the record about why the listings were taken down.

It marks the first time Amazon has released anything that resembles a toy for children under a private label. The items collectively are probably not what an average consumer thinks of when they hear the term "toy." It's mostly large, plush blocks, like ones you might find in a daycare or preschool.

That would make sense if the new items were similar to AmazonBasics' other items that are intended more for businesses than for personal use. Other AmazonBasics items include office chairs, standing desks, and bedding.

Still, the number of categories and items Amazon is developing and selling has exploded in recent months. Most recently, Amazon decided to make its own mattresses under both the AmazonBasics brand as well as its furniture brand, Rivet.

Read more: Amazon is now selling its own mattresses, and it shows why the industry is worried about the e-commerce giant's growth

Amazon's private brands have come under fire lately, as some critics have pointed to the problems inherent with the company's overall strategy to be both a retailer of goods and a marketplace platform for other sellers.

Critics including the European Union's competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, and US Sen. Elizabeth Warren have said that Amazon limits competition, as it can use its sales data to help launch its own brands and products like the new mattress. The EU has opened a preliminary investigation into whether Amazon has violated antitrust rules by using third-party data to launch its own products, and German officials have launched their own investigation.

Emotional support peacocks. Emotional support snakes. Emotional support hamsters.

People have brought all sorts of "support animals" into public places recently, arguing the creatures should be allowed to fly on planes or come into offices because they serve a mental-health purpose.

But the trend has led to a spike in in-flight problems for airlines. Animals have peed, defecated, bit, and in one case mauled people on Delta planes. So the company announced Monday that emotional support pets will no longer be allowed on any Delta flights longer than eight hours.

When it comes to the science behind the concept of a support pet, "the research is quite inconsistent on whether the animals really do anything at all," Forensic psychologist Jeffrey Younggren from the University of Missouri told Business Insider.

By law, a peacock cannot be a service animal. Thomson Reuters

Younggren has spent years studying the trend of patients asking their therapists to sign letters certifying that they need an emotional support animal.

Overall, he said, scientists don't know if such pets do anything "other than make somebody happy."

But despite that lack of evidence, many therapists sign "ESP" letters for their patients, sometimes without even seeing the animals in action.

"How can you say the animal does something if you've never seen them with a patient?" Younggren said.

New rules for Delta flights

As such signed letters get more common, some pet owners are using the designation as a way to let their pets fly on planes with them for free.

As the holiday travel season approaches, Delta is cracking down, instituting some of the strictest support-animal rules of any US carrier to date. Support pets will no longer be allowed on eight-plus-hour flights if the ticket is purchased on or after December 18. The airline is also instituting a ban on "ESP"'s under four months of age. No exceptions will be granted after February 1, 2019.

Delta said there has been an 84% increase in incidents involving unruly animals since 2016.

Earlier this year, the airline started requiring anyone flying with an emotional-support pet to sign a waiver stating that the animal can behave on a flight. The airline has also initiated other restrictions, including requiring proof of vaccination for the animals and only accepting certification letters from a doctor or mental health professional. (In the past, travelers could easy pay for such a letter online.)

United has also made its policies more strict, as ABC News previously reported.

What is an emotional support animal?

There's not much regulation about what constitutes an emotional support pet. People can buy their way into a designation pretty easily online for around $70.

Researchers in California looked at more than a decade of records of registered "assistance" dogs and found that from 1999-2012, there was a huge uptick in the number of smaller dogs, older dogs, and dogs used for psychiatric and medical assistance in the state. Those researchers said the study revealed a growing trend of "misunderstanding" and "misuse" of support dogs.

Support pets are not the same as service animals. According to the Americans with Disabilities Act, a service animal must be trained to perform tasks for a person with a disability, be it physical or psychiatric. Disabilities can include being blind or deaf, using a wheelchair, relying on a dog to remind you to take meds, or having a dog around in case of an anxiety attack.

Under federal law, only dogs and miniature horses weighing less than 100 pounds qualify for the "service animal" designation.

These trained animals are on the job and allowed to accompany their humans anywhere that members of the general public can go (including businesses, hospitals, and just about anywhere that's not a sterile operating room).

But the law is clear: "Service animals are working animals, not pets." The ADA even spells out that "dogs whose sole function is to provide comfort or emotional support do not qualify as service animals under the ADA."

The Fair Housing Act, however, is a bit more lenient: It says that US tenants have a right to keep "assistance animals," including emotional support pets, in their homes even if a leaser has a strict no-pets policy.

Therapy dogs are a third category of animal, and they're trained to help calm patients down during therapy sessions, usually in clinical settings.

Animals can help people feel better, but they have to be trained

People who train and certify dogs to work with patients are worried about the growing number of untrained pets flying on planes.

Budimir Jevtic/Shutterstock

Alice Smith, a client services coordinator at the PAWS dog training center in Florida, told Business Insider that untrained pets are giving real service dogs a bad name.

"There are people who just wanna be able to take their dogs with them everywhere, and they go online and buy a vest," Smith said. She added that if owners don't put in the six months to a year required to train an animal, the dog can end up barking and acting out in public.

However, Smith believes dogs can help for people dealing with anxiety and depression. As a pet owner herself, she said she has benefitted from having dogs around when she's upset.

"My dogs have just known it," she said. "They would come over to me, and get close to me, and as soon as I would pet them, I would calm down."

Smith said there are likely many other people who'd benefit from having a furry, well-behaved friend nearby. She said she even fielded calls from students in Florida who were scared about getting on the bus after the school shooting in Parkland and thought a support dog might help. Other kids call the training center because they're getting bullied and want an emotional support dog to help them get through the day safely. Dogs can also help guide their owners to exits in a panic, or just lean into a person to calm them down in a crowd.

"They can feel that dog's pressure, and know the dog's there," Smith said.

But Younggren pointed out that some people are afraid of dogs or allergic to them. For those individuals, a flight alongside an emotional support pet could be an anxiety- or illness-provoking experience.

It boils down to a simple, well-known problem, he said: "People who love dogs think everybody loves dogs."

Sundar Pichai's 3 1/2 hour testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday was noticeably lacking in enlightening answers.

The Google CEO was there as a witness to talk about transparency and accountability at the Californian technology giant, and it was a rare opportunity for serious scrutiny of Google's — and the broader tech industry's — data-collection policies and social impact.

Instead, Republican lawmakers fixated on the notion that tech companies like Google are deliberately biased against conservatives, trying to censor them from social networks and search results. They cited random anecdotes and disputed studies.

Republican Rep. Steve Chabot of Ohio complained about the negative news stories that appeared when he searched for the Republican attempts to repeal Obamacare. Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas ranted about Wikipedia undoing one of his staffer's edits, without ever actually asking a question. Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa, a congressman repeatedly accused of racism, nonsensically asked why an unflattering message about him flashed up on an iPhone being used by one of his grandchildren. Pichai carefully responded, "Congressman, iPhone is made by a different company."

(Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu quipped, "To some of my colleagues across the aisle, if you're getting bad press articles and bad search results, don't blame Google or Facebook or Twitter — consider blaming yourself.")

Fox News/YouTube On the relatively few occasions Pichai was pushed more substantially on issues, his reticence and obtuseness was telling.

Asked repeatedly about "Dragonfly," Google's efforts to build a censored search engine for China, Pichai clearly avoided answering questions, giving only the mealy-mouthed answer that Google wasn't planning to launch it "right now." When pushed, he said more than 100 employees were working on the project at one point — far less than the 300 reported by The Intercept, which initially broke the news of Dragonfly's existence.

In another exchange, asked about whether Google was tracking a congressman's cellphone, Pichai said he'd need to check the settings, which may have been technically correct but sidestepped the obvious point that Google is tracking (at least) hundreds of millions of people's devices, and not necessarily with their informed consent.

But other key subjects, from Google's involvement in military contracts to how the executive team approved huge payouts for employees accused of sexual misconduct, were never mentioned at all.

One big problem was the format itself, something that has caused issues in previous hearings featuring technology executives like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Congresspeople only have five minutes each to ask their questions, which is barely enough time to even get into specifics, especially when Pichai (or any other witness, for that matter) spends half of that time giving boiler-plate answers and filibustering.

Fewer and better-informed questioners, with more time each, could produce vastly more illuminating answers from the Committee's witnesses. If Pichai's hearing taught us anything, it's that this model for hearings is broken.

At a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked some difficult questions. None was more difficult than a question asked by Iowa Rep. Steve King, however, whose question was literally impossible for Pichai to answer.

King said his 7-year-old granddaughter was playing a game on her phone before an election — most likely King's November 2018 reelection bid — and was shown a picture of the congressman that included some not-so-flattering language.

"I'm not going to say into the record what kind of language was used around that picture of her grandfather," he said.

Then, holding up his Apple device, King asked Pichai, "How does that show up on a 7-year-old's iPhone who's playing a kids game?"

The Google CEO answered the question by saying, "Congressman, iPhone is made by a different company."

The Democratic staff table erupted in laughter at Pichai's reply, according to Business Insider's Joe Perticone, who attended Tuesday's hearing.

King backtracked and said, "It might have been an Android. It's just … it was a hand-me-down of some kind."

Later in the hearing, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-California) told the Iowa congressman that if he wanted "positive search results, do positive things." King has repeatedly found himself in hot water over his insensitive racial comments.

Read more: Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu tears intro Republican colleagues during Google hearing: 'If you want positive search results do positive things'

King wasn't alone in holding up his iPhone when addressing Google's CEO on Tuesday.

Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) showed off his Apple device when asking Pichai whether Google tracked users' phones for location data. Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pennsylvania) held his up as well when telling Pichai of the major responsibility he had because "there's a lot of people who believe anything that's put out, by anyone."

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Amazon's contributions to the job market have been underappreciated, Morgan Stanley says. 

Tesla missing its deadlines for Model 3 production targets was not done on purpose, rather it was done out of stupidity, CEO Elon Musk said during an interview with '60 Minutes' on Sunday.

"Well, I mean, punctuality is not my strong suit.... Why would people think that if I've been late on all the other models that I'd suddenly be on time with this one," Musk said.

When it was pointed out to him that his critics would call this lying he countered by explaining it was actually stupidity.

"People should not ascribe to malice that which can easily be explained by stupidity. So it's like, just because I'm like dumb at predicting dates does not mean I am untruthful. I don't know. I've never made a mass-produced car. How am I supposed to know with precision when it's going to get done?"

Tesla did make 5,000 Model 3 vehicles in the last week of June. However, it did not regularly produce that many vehicles per week during the third quarter. Rather, the company averaged 4,300 model 3 cars per week during the quarter. Tesla has still not begun production of the $35,000 Model 3, but Musk said that it should be ready in five to six months.

Ramping up to the target of 5,000 Model 3s per week almost broke the company, Musk said during the interview.

"It was life or death," Musk said. "We were losing $50 million, sometimes $100 million a week, and we were running out of money."

It wasn't until the company created a third assembly line in a tent outside the Fremont factory that the company was able to ramp up production enough to meet its target.

"So those betting against the company were right by all conventional standards that we would fail, but they just did not count on this unconventional situation of creating an assembly line in a parking lot in a tent," Musk said.

Musk said this last-minute push with the tent increased the company's output by 50%.

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The internet has reached a major milestone — half of the world's population is now online.

The digital transformation of economies and society continues apace and promises a range of benefits, from better health to reduced inequality to greater access to information, the World Economic Forum said in a new report issued Sunday night. But as the digital era takes hold, policymakers, businesses and citizens are facing some profound anc difficult-to-solve problems, the forum noted in the report.

Internet adoption is slowing, which threatens to leave billions on the wrong side of the digital divide, possibly even permanently, the report warned. With cyberattacks up and trust in tech companies down, more than half of people around the globe think technology's downsides outweigh its benefits. And both the public and private sectors are struggling to keep up with the pace of digital change and set rules that benefit everyone.

"While recognizing that digital developments fuel many opportunities in political, commercial, and social spheres, a key point of this paper is the need to focus on inclusion and addressing digital divides," said Lynn St. Amour, who helped put together the report as the co-chairperson of the forum's Shaping the Future of Digital Economy and Society committee.

The committee brought together people from governments, corporations, and non-profit organizations around the world who worked together for 18 months to produce the report, entitled "Our Shared Digital Future Building an Inclusive, Trustworthy and Sustainable Digital Society." Among the participants in the working group were World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee, former Vice President Al Gore, and Booking.com CEO Gillian Tans.

Read this:'The web had failed instead of served humanity': Tim Berners-Lee was crushed by Russia using Facebook to meddle in the US election

Internet adoption has slowed markedly

Perhaps the biggest problem facing policymakers amid the digital transformation is the slowdown in internet adoption, the report said. Being able to go online is essential to being able to take part in the digital economy and world.

While the number of internet users worldwide grew by 17% in 2007, it's only expected to increase by 5.5% this year, the forum reported, citing data from the International Telecommunications Union. And the 50% adoption rate worldwide masks wide differences in adoption rates around the globe. Only 44% of people in the Asia-Pacific region are online and just 22% in Africa, according to ITU data.

"Digital connectivity is foundational to meaningful social and economic participation of individuals and countries in the 21st century," the forum's working group said in the report. "Unequal access to the internet increasingly means unequal access to opportunities, jobs or ability to deal with unexpected events."

The forum recommended that governments and multilateral organizations invest in widening access to the internet and in removing barriers to adoption.

Trust is waning in the digital economy

Another thing holding back the digital transformation are cyberattacks. Some 74% of businesses will be hacked this year and hacking attacks cost the world economy some $400 billion each year, according to the report.

And the problem is worsening. In just the first half of this year, cyberattacks compromised 4.5 billion records, which was up from 2.7 billion in all of last year.

"Digital connectivity plays a pivotal role in unlocking innovation and prosperity around the world," the working group said in the report. But, it continued: "the increasing number of cyber-risks presents a major obstacle to our continued and collective path to progress."

The forum called on governments and businesses to prioritize cybersecurity and to work together to reduce risks.

Amid all the cyberattacks and other problems, confidence in the digital economy is ebbing, according to the report. Just 45% of people around the world think that the benefits of the digital economy outweigh the drawbacks, the forum group said, citing data from marketing firm Dentsu Aegis.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk slammed the Security and Exchange Commission in an interview with 60 Minutes on Sunday.

"I want to be clear, I do not respect the SEC, I do not respect them," Musk said when asked about the SEC lawsuit brought against the company earlier this year.

The SEC sued Musk in September alleging that he shared "false and misleading statements" about taking Tesla private when he tweeted about doing exactly that.

Musk reached a settlement with the SEC in late September that required him to pay $20 million and step down as Tesla's chairman for a minimum of three years. Tesla was also required to pay $20 million to the SEC as part of the deal.

What's more, the SEC said Tesla must put "additional controls and procedures to oversee Musk's communications," including his tweets.

However, during the interview, Musk said no one has reviewed any of his tweets since the settlement with the SEC. When pressed on the topic, Musk said "I guess we might make some mistakes, who knows. Nobody's perfect."

Musk also spoke candidly about how he felt about stepping down as Tesla's chairman. When asked if the new chairman was put in place to watch over Musk "like a babysitter," Musk said that wasn't the case.

"It's not realistic in the sense that I am the largest shareholder of the company and I can call for a shareholder vote and get anything done that I want," Musk said.

When Musk was asked if he would like to go back to being chairman, he replied, "I prefer no titles at all."

Musk also said he doesn't "really want to try to adhere to some CEO template."

Do you work at Tesla and have a story to share? Contact this editor at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey recently visited Pyin Oo Lwin, Myanmar, for his birthday, to participate in a 10-day Vipassana silent meditation retreat. Since then, he's been posting photos and detailed descriptions of his trip on Twitter, encouraging other people to go there if they can.

Now, Dorsey is facing backlash against his supposedly ignorant promotion of Myanmar, where social media platforms — including Twitter and Facebook — allegedly helped fuel a mass genocide, SFGate and other outlets reported.

"Myanmar is an absolutely beautiful country. The people are full of joy and the food is amazing," Dorsey wrote in one Tweet. "I woke up at 4 am every day, and we meditated until 9 pm," read another Tweet in the same thread. Another read, "If you're willing to travel a bit, go to Myanmar."

A Reuters investigation published in August 2018 reported that Facebook was hiring more Burmese speakers to review hate speech posted in Myanmar. In March, a United Nations investigator had said Facebook was used to incite violence against the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group, with posts calling the Rohingya things like "non-human kalar dogs." (Kalar is a derogatory word for Muslims.)

Read more: The 18 biggest tech scandals of 2018

Reuters reported that hate speech spread on Twitter as well. In August 2017, Rohingya insurgents attacked police stations, setting off military activity that caused 700,000 people to abandon their homes. New Twitter accounts appeared in Myanmar, and the Tweets portrayed the Rohingya as illegal immigrants. One Tweet Reuters spotted read: "There is no Rohingya in Myanmar they are only illegal immigrant and terrorists."

Twitter has a "Hateful conduct policy," which prohibits "attacking groups of people on the basis of race, ethnicity or national origin." However, in August, Reuters reported that such Tweets were still available on the site.

In response to Dorsey's Tweets about his visit to Myanmar, people are posting critical messages such as, "Leave it to a rich guy to step over bodies while taking pics on his vacation," and calling Dorsey's posts "tone-deaf."

As of yet, Dorsey hasn't posted any follow-ups.

In November, Reuters reported, Facebook said a human rights report it commissioned showed it had not done enough to prevent its social network from fueling violence. On a Slate podcast in March, Adam Mosseri, Facebook's vice president of product management, said he and his team "lose some sleep" over their potential role in the humanitarian crisis.

There are some major differences between those who have money and those who don't.

In a recent YouTube episode with Chelsea Fagan of The Financial Diet, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian was asked what he thinks people with money know that people without money don't know. The episode was sponsored by Empower, a mobile banking app that's backed by Ohanian's venture capital firm, Initialized Capital.

"I thought I'd be handed like a book when [I made money] ...like the book of sh-- only rich people know," he said. "I never got this, and I still am learning things and it's amazing and I know I'm going to be continuing to be learning stuff, and I'm going to be continuing to scratch my head and wonder how is it possible this whole other world exists."

Ohanian said one of the most "frightening" things he's learned since having money is that wealthy people have better access to quality healthcare.

Ohanian explained that he was raised with the assumption that all healthcare and all hospitals are basically the same — that there's not a big difference, and people just go to the hospital near them.

Read more: Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian says he wants to teach his and Serena Williams' daughter to code: 'She already has 3 laptops'

"Only in recent years as I've had to encounter the stuff for loved ones and have I had people who have obscene wealth, relative to my own — very wealthy and old money wealth — have I learned there's a whole other world, from concierge medicine and private medicine to very different tiers of hospitals and quality of care," Ohanian said. "And I literally never even heard of these before, let alone walked into them or seen them and now that I have, it is jarring."

He continued: "I think that's one of those things that if we all as a public understood, really understood the difference, I think folks would be even more upset than they already are about the quality of healthcare in this country, because it is staggering."

Ohanian said this realization "shook" him because it made him rethink the care his loved ones received years ago when they weren't aware of the differences and didn't have access to better healthcare financially. Now, he said, it's a priority to him as a husband and a father to get the very best healthcare.

"My wife and daughter are going to have access to things I never even dreamed of," Ohanian said, speaking of wife Serena Williams. "I didn't think it was that different, but it turns out it is."

But that's not the only difference he sees when it comes to the wealth divide.

"The same way the difference in medicine makes my head spin, the difference in financial products is along the same lines," Ohanian said, referencing a high-net-worth person's relative ease of qualifying for a loan, for instance, compared to the average American.

He continued: "And it's subtle, these are very subtle things, but they add up a lot, especially when you think of the implications it has in the rest of the country, the rest of world."

Britain's Parliament has just given the world an unprecedented look at the ruthless tactics of Facebook's executive team.

On Wednesday, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee published leaked emails from the Silicon Valley tech giant's leadership team that had been obtained by Six4Three, an app developer that's locked in a legal battle with Facebook after it blocked its bikini photo app.

There are hundreds of pages of documents and emails, mostly dating from between 2012 and 2015, that detail the way Facebook allowed third-party apps to access friend data through its platform.

They provide a unique window into how Facebook's senior leaders privately discussed strategy and competition at a period of intense growth for the company, which has since been bogged down by numerous scandals and flatlining user numbers in key markets.

Do you work at Facebook? Got a tip? Contact this reporter via Signal or WhatsApp at +1 (650) 636-6268 using a non-work phone, email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Telegram or WeChat at robaeprice, or Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by email only, please.) You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

From Facebook's attempts to kneecap "strategic competitors" to CEO Mark Zuckerberg writing that his company's interests don't always match up with what's best for the world, here are some of the key takeaways from the documents.

If you're looking for apps for your iPhone, Apple's year-end awards are a good place to start.

Apple revealed its top apps of the year on Tuesday, including hand-picked suggestions for iPhone app of the year and iPhone game of the year.

Apple also revealed year-end charts for the most downloaded apps on iPhones and iPads. The most downloaded app of 2018 was the Google-owned YouTube. In second place was Facebook's Instagram, and behind it was Snapchat.

Here are the top iPhone and iPad apps of the year:

When Mandy Ginsberg took over as CEO of online dating juggernaut Match Group in mid-2017, she was determined to alter the perception of the industry as a "bro culture" world.

And one step she made was to audit the salaries of her own workforce, which is now 1,500 people, to see if she was paying women and men equally for equal work.

She was shocked to discover that at her company — the largest operator of dating apps with brands like Tinder, Match, Plenty of Fish and dozens of others — her female employees were 100% equally paid, according to the findings by a third-party auditor.

Paying people equally for the work that they do, regardless of their gender, has been required by law since the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963. And yet women still earn 80 cents for every $1 that men earn, and are often underpaid even for equal work.

See Mandy Ginsberg speak at Business Insider's Ignition conference, December 3 & 4 in New York and streaming online.

Ginsberg didn't just want to give lip service to her internal audit. She hired outside auditor, Syndio, to examine the pay rates of her workforce which is 36% female. The firm didn't just look at job title but grouped employees by what their jobs entailed. If it found a difference in pay between genders, it looked at other non-gender factors such as tenure, education, years of experience to determine if that explained the gap.

And often, it doesn't. Salesforce famously audited its workforce, not just once but twice over the past couple of years and issued $6 million in raises to women and agreed to publicly discuss its process, becoming the poster child for equal pay. The second audit and adjustment was done after Salesforce grew its employee base substantially through acquisitions, CEO Marc Benioff previously told Business Insider.

See Salesforce HR chief Cindy Robbins speak about the impacts of paying equally at Business Insider's Ignition conference, December 3 & 4 in New York.

Match has also grown dramatically through acquisitions. So, when the consultants told Ginsberg that their analysis had found no discrepancy, Ginsberg was so surprised she demanded the third-party auditor go back and check the data again. They did and the results stood.

It was a light-bulb moment for Ginsberg. Although she's only been in the top CEO role for a year and a half, she spent the last half dozen years as the executive in charge of a number of Match's biggest businesses, including Match.com, Match Affinity, Plenty of Fish, OKCupid.

And one of her "guiding principals" has been to offer pay and raises based on people's value to their company "whether they ask for it or not," she said in the press release.

In other words, she hasn't turned compensation into a negotiating game, granting raises only when someone asks. She has simply paid people what the company was willing to pay them and rewarded them without asking for a job well done. And now, she's not only published the results but is speaking out and advocating for this method.

"So often and in so many businesses, women don't make compensation demands. And until we raise our daughters to make those demands, we, as leaders, need to be proactive and methodical about how we think about compensation," she said.