Florida jobless-assistance claims drop to new pandemic low, but state is still fighting fraud
Amid still-rising counts of jobless-assistance claims flagged for fraud detection, Florida tallied its lowest level of new unemployment applications since the outset of the pandemic.
The U.S. Department of Labor reported Thursday that the state saw 16,100 new claims for the week ending Feb. 20, down from 21,564 the week before. It is the lowest new-claims count since March 14, 2020.
The lower count might be the result of fewer claims being officially counted as they are verified as legitimate.
Nationally, new jobless claims fell 111,000, to 730,000. That’s the lowest level since November and well below the 845,000 forecast by economists.
Florida continues to see a stream of jobless claims that it must investigate for fraud. Thursday morning, the Department of Economic Opportunity’s unemployment dashboard showed 48,219 claims that had been flagged as potentially fraudulent, up from 41,524 one week ago. A department spokesman was not immediately available for comments.
If you are aware of any instance of Reemployment Assistance fraud or believe you are a victim of Reemployment Assistance identity theft, visit FloridaJobs.org and navigate to the Reemployment Assistance Service Center, click “claimants” and visit the fraud page.
Twitter is branching out from advertising to find more ways to make money — both for itself and for its most prolific users, whether those are businesses, celebrities or regular people.
In an investor presentation Thursday, the socialmedia company announced a new feature called “Super Follows,” which will let users charge for extra, exclusive material not shown to their regular followers. This can include subscriber-only newsletters, videos, deals and discounts. Users would pay a monthly subscription fee to access the extra content.
Twitter users — and the company’s investors
— have long been asking it to launch a subscriptionbased model. This as a growing number of internet creators and influencers use tools like Patreon, Substack and OnlyFans to make money from their online popularity.
The subscriptions will also allow Twitter to tap into a broader range of revenue sources in a world where online advertising is dominated by a FacebookGoogle duopoly. Twitter did not detail what percentage of the revenue it would share with celebrities and others who sign up paying subscribers.
“Exploring audience funding opportunities like Super Follows will allow creators and publishers to be directly supported by their audience and will incentivize them to continue creating content that their audience loves,” the company said in a statement.
Super Follows is not available yet but Twitter says it will have “more to share“in the coming months. Another coming product, “Revue,” will let people publish paid or free newsletters to their audience. There’s also “Twitter Spaces,” a Clubhouse competitor that lets users participate in audio chats. It is currently in private beta testing, which means it’s not yet available to the general Twitter audience.
The San Francisco-based company also said its revenue goal for 2023 is more than $7.5 billion, more than double its 2020 revenue of $3.7 billion.
THE NEW FEATURE CALLED ‘SUPER FOLLOWS’ CAN INCLUDE SUBSCRIBER-ONLY NEWSLETTERS, VIDEOS, DEALS AND DISCOUNTS.