Monday 30 September 2019

Twitter launches its anti-abuse filter for Direct Messages

Twitter is rolling out its spam and abuse filter for Direct Messages, a month and a half after the company announced it had started testing the feature. The filter will be available on Twitter’s iOS, Android and Web apps.

The filter adds a new view to the Additional Messages inbox, where DMs from people you don’t follow go. If you click on it, messages that potentially contain offensive content also have their previews hidden, with an option to delete the message without opening it first.

The new DM filter is useful for people who want to keep their Twitter messages open, but (like most people) don’t want to see abusive content. The feature, however, feels long overdue considering that offensive messages are so common for users with open inboxes that third-party developers have launched their own filtering tools, including a recently-released plugin that detects and deletes dick pics.

Earlier this month, Twitter also released its Hide Replies feature in the U.S. and Canada after testing it in Canada. It gives users the option of picking replies to a tweet to hide, but does not delete them. Instead, they are still visible in a separate view that is linked to a button in the original tweet.



source https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/30/twitter-launches-its-anti-abuse-filter-for-direct-messages/

Daily Crunch: Facebook faces VR challenges

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Not all is predictable on Facebook’s social Horizon

Last week, Facebook unveiled Horizon, a massively multiplayer VR world that’s scheduled to launch in 2020. This might seem to play to Facebook’s software strengths, but Lucas Matney argues that the social networking giant may not actually have much of an advantage against smaller game studios.

For example, the team at Against Gravity has already built a network inside VR called Rec Room that’s been maturing over the past few years, with rich environments and toolsets for multiplayer interactions. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

2. Spotify now lets you add podcasts to playlists

Users can create their own custom playlists of their favorite podcasts, or even those that combine music and audio — similar to Spotify’s newly launched playlist “Your Daily Drive.”

3. Kickstarter darling EcoFlow Delta battery generator is not what it seems

The EcoFlow Delta is a new battery generator available on Kickstarter with incredible features claimed. Most are true, some are not.

4. YouTube TV is now available on Fire TV devices

Earlier this year, Google and Amazon reached an agreement to bring their streaming video apps to each other’s platforms. The YouTube app launched on Fire TV in July, and now Google is adding its live TV streaming service.

5. Amboss, the knowledge platform for medical professionals, scores €30M Series B

Launched in 2014 as a study platform for medical students, Amboss has since evolved to offer what it claims is the “most comprehensive and technologically-advanced” knowledge platform for medical professionals.

6. Learn everything you can about mobility at Disrupt SF

We’re bringing some of the industry’s leaders onstage at Disrupt SF — including Bird founder and CEO Travis VanderZanden, Kitty Hawk CEO Sebastian Thrun and Zoox CEO Aicha Evans.

7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

The latest episode of Equity kicks off with the reemergence of the much-criticized startup Bodega, which is now known as Stockwell and has raised a total of $45 million in funding. Meanwhile, Original Content reviews “Between Two Ferns: The Movie” on Netflix.



source https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/30/daily-crunch-facebook-faces-vr-challenges/

Instagram launches a ‘creators’ account to encourage more… creation

Instagram deployed a new tool today that should help it continue to build a more viable alternative to YouTube for individual creators looking to try a different platform. It’s a dedicated account called @creators, which will deliver tips and tricks for people hoping to become more active on the platform.

Based on the pinned FAQ story that Instagram has posted to the account, and a brief explainer with some testimonials from actual creators using the platform. Some of the questions that Instagram answers include how to get Verified, which must be asked so incredibly frequently by this particular set of folks.

The grid posts of @creators include some helpful tips like pointing out that 60% of people listen to stories on the platform with the sound on. Clearly, the account is geared towards pushing video creation tips and tools, which makes sense given that’s an area of growth for the company, and a way for it to win over disaffected YouTubers and younger creators who are looking for their new home on the web.

This could be a huge potential opportunity for Instagram, in fact, and this account, while a small part of an overall approach to wooing creators, is a good one.



source https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/30/instagram-launches-a-creators-account-to-encourage-more-creation/

SmartNews’ head of product on how the news discovery app wants to free readers from filter bubbles

Since launching in the United States five years ago, SmartNews, the news aggregation app that recently hit unicorn status, has quietly built a reputation for presenting reliable information from a wide range of publishers. The company straddles two very different markets: the U.S. and its home country of Japan, where it is one of the leading news apps.

SmartNews wants readers to see it as a way to break out of their filter bubbles, says Jeannie Yang, its senior vice president of product, especially as the American presidential election heats up. For example, it recently launched a feature, called “News From All Sides,” that lets people see how media outlets from across the political spectrum are covering a specific topic.

The app is driven by machine-learning algorithms, but it also has an editorial team led by Rich Jaroslovsky, the first managing editor of WSJ.com and founder of the Online News Association. One of SmartNews’ goal is to surface news that its users might not seek out on their own, but it must balance that with audience retention in a market that is crowded with many ways to consume content online, including competing news aggregation apps, Facebook and Google Search.

In a wide-ranging interview with Extra Crunch, Yang talked about SmartNews’ place in the media ecosystem, creating recommendation algorithms that don’t reinforce biases, the difference between its Japanese and American users and the challenges of presenting political news in a highly polarized environment.

Catherine Shu: One of the reasons why SmartNews is interesting is because there are a lot of news aggregation apps in America, but there hasn’t been one huge breakout app like SmartNews is in Japan or Toutiao in China. But at the same time, there are obviously a lot of issues in the publishing and news industry in the United States that a good dominant news app might be able to help, ranging from monetization to fake news.

Jeannie Yang: I think that’s definitely a challenge for everybody in the U.S. With SmartNews, we really want to see how we can help create a healthier media ecosystem and actually have publishers thrive as well. SmartNews has such respect for the publishers and the industry and we want to be good partners, but also really understand the challenges of the business model, as well as the challenges for users and thinking of how we can create a healthier ecosystem.



source https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/30/smartnews-head-of-product-on-how-the-news-discovery-app-wants-to-free-readers-from-filter-bubbles/

Saturday 28 September 2019

This Week in Apps: AltStore, acquisitions and Google Play Pass

The app industry shows no signs of slowing down, with 194 billion downloads in 2018 and over $100 billion in consumer spending. People spend 90% of their mobile time in apps and more time using their mobile devices than watching TV. In other words, apps aren’t just a way to spend idle hours — they’re a big business. And one that often seems to change overnight. In this new Extra Crunch series, we’ll help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps — including everything from the OS’s to the apps that run upon them, as well as the money that flows through it all.

This week, alternatives to the traditional app store is a big theme. Not only has a new, jailbreak-free iOS marketplace called AltStore just popped up, we’ve also got both Apple and Google ramping up their own subscription-based collections of premium apps and games.

Meanwhile, the way brands and publishers want to track their apps’ success is changing, too. And App Annie — the company that was the first to start selling pickaxes for the App Store gold rush — is responding with an acquisition that will help app publishers better understand the return on investment for their app businesses.

Headlines

AltStore is an alternative App Store that doesn’t need a jailbreak

An interesting alternative app marketplace has appeared on the scene, allowing a way for developers to distribute iOS apps outside the official App Store, reports Engadget — without jailbreaking, which can be difficult and has various security implications. Instead, the new store works by tricking your device into thinking you’re a developer sideloading apps. And it uses a companion app on your Mac or PC to re-sign the apps every 7 days via iTunes WiFi syncing protocol. Already, it’s offering a Nintendo emulator and other games, says The Verge. And Apple is probably already working on a way to shut this down. For now, it’s live at Altstore.io.

Friday 27 September 2019

Not all is predictable on Facebook’s social Horizon

Most of the people I spoke with at Facebook’s Oculus Connect see the proliferation of virtual reality as a foregone conclusion, one that’s just a matter of timing at this point. For Facebook, the conference’s “The Time is Now” catchphrase showcased that they feel their hardware is ready for everyone.

But despite the success, they feel like they’ve tapped into when it comes to hardware iterations, the company’s bread and butter social networking prowess feels like it’s barely improved in-headset in the past several years of VR experimentations.

“On the social side, looking back, it’s kind of embarrassing all of the stages we’ve gone through at Oculus,” Oculus CTO and veteran programmer John Carmack conceded onstage during his signature rambling annual keynote, noting that his own social APK was followed by Oculus Rooms, Oculus Venues, Facebook Spaces and now the company’s latest shiny pearl Facebook Horizon.

Horizon’s debut this year included a flashy trailer for what quickly seemed to be the company’s biggest gamble and first potential social hit, a massive multi-player online world. In introducing the software, Zuckerberg talked about people-centric software as Facebook’s “bread-and-butter,” noting, “We build a lot of the best social experiences for phones and computers, and we want to do this for virtual reality as well.”

But Facebook does not actually appear to hold that much of an advantage over much smaller game studios in terms of understanding how to make social virtual reality experience take off.



source https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/27/not-all-is-predictable-on-facebooks-social-horizon/

Daily Crunch: Facebook hides Like counts

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Facebook tries hiding Like counts to fight envy

It looks like Facebook wants to end the terrible game of chasing Likes, and then the equally terrible feeling of failing.

The experiment starts today in Australia. A post’s author can still see the count, but everyone else will only be able to see who Liked a post, not how many Likes total it received.

2. DoorDash confirms data breach affected 4.9 million customers, workers and merchants

The breach happened on May 4, the company said, but added that customers who joined after April 5, 2018 are not affected. It’s not clear why it took almost five months for DoorDash to detect the breach.

3. My Galaxy Fold display is damaged after a day

Samsung’s new rebooted Galaxy arrives this week with one job: it just needs to not break. And yet …

4. 25+ launches from Uber’s big event

The company unveiled a slew of changes across all its products, designed to promote Eats and micromobility, make life easier for drivers, keep riders safe and make transportation more accessible. The big highlight? Two new visions for the future of Uber’s home screen.

5. ‘We are seeing volume and interest in Peloton explode,’ says company president on listing day

Despite dropping more than 10% in its first day of trading, the IPO was a bona fide success. Peloton, once denied (over and over again) by VC skeptics, now has hundreds of millions of dollars to take its business into a new era. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Director Ang Lee explains why he built a digital Will Smith in ‘Gemini Man’

Lee made things even harder for himself by shooting the movie in 3D, at 120 frames per second. In that format, everything looks more clear and detailed than in traditional film, so an unconvincing effect would be even more obvious.

7. Tesla V10.0 car software update adds Smart Summon, Netflix/YouTube, Spotify, karaoke and more

The new “Smart Summon” feature will allow cars equipped with the optional full self-driving package to automatically drive themselves from a parking spot and collect you in a parking lot.



source https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/27/daily-crunch-facebook-hides-like-counts/

Thursday 26 September 2019

Facebook tries hiding Like counts to fight envy

If their post has lots of Likes, you feel jealous. If your post doesn’t get enough Likes, you feel embarrassed. And when you just chase Likes, you distort your life seeking moments that score them, or censor it fearing you won’t look popular without them.

That’s why Facebook is officially starting to hide Like counts on posts, first in Australia starting tomorrow, September 27th. A post’s author can still see the count, but it’s hidden from everyone else who will only be able to see who but now how many people gave a thumbs-up or other reaction.

Facebook Hides Likes

The launch of the hidden Like counts test makes available what we reported Facebook was privately prototyping earlier this month, as spotted in its Android code by reverse engineering master Jane Manchun Wong. The test will run in parallel to Instagram’s own hidden Like count test we also scooped that first tested in Canada in April before expanding to six more countries in July.

“We are running a limited test where like, reaction, and video view counts are made private across Facebook” a Facebook spokesperson tells me. “We will gather feedback to understand whether this change will improve people’s experiences.” If the test improves people’s sense of well-being without tanking user engagement, it could expand to more countries or even roll out to everyone, but no further tests are currently scheduled.

Facebook’s goal here is to make people comfortable expressing themselves. It wants users to focus on the quality of what they share and how it connects them with people they care about, not just the number of people who hit the thumbs-up. The tests are being conducted by the News Feed team that falls under VP Fidji Simo’s jurisdiction over the main Facebook app.

Facebook Like Counts

As you can see, the Like button itself remains visible to everyone. Comment counts will still be displayed, as will the most common types of reactions left on a post plus the faces and names of some people who Liked it.

But without a big number on friends’ posts that could make users feel insignificant, or a low number on their own posts announcing their poor reception, users might feel more carefree on Facebook. The removal could also reduce herd mentality, encouraging users to decide for themselves if they enjoyed a post rather than just blindly clicking to concur with everyone else.

As I wrote about 2 years ago, a collection of studies identify the harm Facebook can do. They found that while chatting with friends and comment threads on Facebook made people feel better, passively scrolling and Liking could lead to envy spiraling and declines in perception of well-being. Users would compare their seemingly boring life to the well-Liked glamorous moments shared by friends or celebrities and conclude they were lesser.

screen shot 2017 12 14 at 12 16 21 pm 2

For example, Krasanova et al discovered that 20% of the envy-inducing moments users experienced in life were on Facebook, and that “intensity of passive following is likely to reduce users’ life satisfaction in the long-run, as it triggers upward social comparison and invidious emotions.”

One concern is that Facebook Pages that have large followings and often get more Likes than individual users’ posts could miss out on extra engagement and reach without that herd mentality. Some Canadian influencers have complained about reduced reach since the hidden Likes test launched their on Instagram, but there’s been no conclusive data to prove that and Facebook will still use the number of Likes as part of its ranking algorithm.

If Facebook wants to build a social network people continue using for another 15 years, it has to put their well-being first — above brands, above engagement, and above ad dollars. It also needs better controls for notifications and warnings when you’ve been passively scrolling for too long. But if the Like hiding works and eventually becomes standard, it could help Facebook get back to the off-the-cuff sharing that made it a hit at colleges so long ago. No one wants to be in a life-long popularity contest.



source https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/26/facebook-hides-likes/

Europe shows the way in online privacy

After passively watching for many years as tech giants developed dominant market positions that threaten consumer privacy and stifle competition, American antitrust regulators seem to have finally grasped what’s happening and decided to take action. 

This increasing scrutiny, which tacitly acknowledges that Europe’s more proactive regulators were perhaps right all along, is helping unleash a wave of tech startups at the expense of big tech. By holding industry titans accountable over the privacy and use of our data, regulators are encouraging long overdue disruption of everything from back-end infrastructure to consumer services.

Over the past decade, Facebook, Google, Amazon and others have tightened their grip on their respective domains by buying up hundreds of smaller rivals, with little U.S. government opposition. But as their dominance has grown, and as egregious privacy violations and mishaps proliferate, regulators can no longer look the other way.

In recent months, American regulators have announced a flurry of new antitrust investigations into big technology companies. The Federal Trade Commission has voted to fine Facebook $5 billion for misusing consumer data, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee is probing the tech industry for antitrust violations and 50 attorneys general announced an antitrust probe into Google. U.S. officials are even considering establishing a digital watchdog agency.

It’s hard to understand why it took so long, though perhaps U.S. officials were loath to target domestic companies that were driving huge economic growth and creating millions of new jobs. In contrast, their counterparts across the pond have been on an antitrust tear under the watch of European Union antitrust commissioner (and now also EVP of digital affairs) Margrethe Vestager.

Now that regulators from both Europe and the United States are pursuing antitrust probes, they have exposed areas where startups can innovate. 

Startups take on big tech



source https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/26/europe-shows-the-way-in-online-privacy/

Voter manipulation on social media now a global problem, report finds

New research by the Oxford Internet Institute has found that social media manipulation is getting worse, with rising numbers of governments and political parties making cynical use of social media algorithms, automation and big data to manipulate public opinion at scale — with hugely worrying implications for democracy.

The report found that computational propaganda and social media manipulation have proliferated massively in recently years — now prevalent in more than double the number of countries (70) vs two years ago (28). An increase of 150%.

The research suggests that the spreading of fake news and toxic narratives has become the dysfunctional new ‘normal’ for political actors across the globe, thanks to social media’s global reach.

“Although propaganda has always been a part of political discourse, the deep and wide-ranging scope of these campaigns raise critical public interest concerns,” the report warns.

The researchers go on to dub the global uptake of computational propaganda tools and techniques a “critical threat” to democracies.

“The use of computational propaganda to shape public attitudes via social media has become mainstream, extending far beyond the actions of a few bad actors,” they add. “In an information environment characterized by high volumes of information and limited levels of user attention and trust, the tools and techniques of computational propaganda are becoming a common – and arguably essential – part of digital campaigning and public diplomacy.”

Techniques the researchers found being deployed by governments and political parties to spread political propaganda include the use of bots to amplify hate speech or other forms of manipulated content; the illegal harvesting of data or micro-targeting; and the use of armies of ‘trolls’ to bully or harass political dissidents or journalists online.

The researchers looked at computational propaganda activity in 70 countries around the world — including the US, the UK, Germany, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil and Australia (see the end of this article for the full list) — finding organized social media manipulation in all of them.

So next time Facebook puts out another press release detailing a bit of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” it claims to have found and removed from its platform, it’s important to put it in context of the bigger picture. And the picture painted by this report suggests that such small-scale, selective discloses of propaganda-quashing successes sum to misleading Facebook PR vs the sheer scale of the problem.

The problem is massive, global and largely taking place through Facebook’s funnel, per the report.

Facebook remains the platform of choice for social media manipulation — with researchers finding evidence of formally organised political disops campaigns on its platform taking place in 56 countries.

We reached out to Facebook for a response to the report and the company sent us a laundry list of steps it says it’s been taking to combat election interference and coordinated inauthentic activity — including in areas such as voter suppression, political ad transparency and industry-civil society partnerships.

But it did not offer any explanation why all this apparent effort (just its summary of what it’s been doing exceeds 1,600 words) has so spectacularly failed to stem the rising tide of political fakes being amplified via Facebook.

Instead it sent us this statement: “Helping show people accurate information and protecting against harm is a major priority for us. We’ve developed smarter tools, greater transparency, and stronger partnerships to better identify emerging threats, stop bad actors, and reduce the spread of misinformation on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. We also know that this work is never finished and we can’t do this alone. That’s why we are working with policymakers, academics, and outside experts to make sure we continue to improve.”

We followed up to ask why all its efforts have so far failed to reduce fake activity on its platform and will update this report with any response.

Returning to the report, the researchers say China has entered the global disinformation fray in a big way — using social media platforms to target international audiences with disinformation, something the country has long directed at its domestic population of course.

The report describes China as “a major player in the global disinformation order”.

It also warns that the use of computational propaganda techniques combined with tech-enabled surveillance is providing authoritarian regimes around the world with the means to extend their control of citizens’ lives.

“The co-option of social media technologies provides authoritarian regimes with a powerful tool to shape public discussions and spread propaganda online, while simultaneously surveilling, censoring, and restricting digital public spaces,” the researchers write.

Other key findings from the report include that both democracies and authoritarian states are making (il)liberal use of computational propaganda tools and techniques.

Per the report:

  • In 45 democracies, politicians and political parties “have used computational propaganda tools by amassing fake followers or spreading manipulated media to garner voter support”
  • In 26 authoritarian states, government entities “have used computational propaganda as a tool of information control to suppress public opinion and press freedom, discredit criticism and oppositional voices, and drown out political dissent”

The report also identifies seven “sophisticated state actors” — China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela — using what it calls “cyber troops” (aka dedicated online workers whose job is to use computational propaganda tools to manipulate public opinion) to run foreign influence campaigns.

Foreign influence operations — which includes election interference — were found by the researchers to primarily be taking place on Facebook and Twitter.

We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment and will update this article with any response.

A year ago, when Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was questioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee, he said it was considering labelling bot accounts on its platform — agreeing that “more context” around tweets and accounts would be a good thing, while also arguing that identifying automation that’s scripted to look like a human is difficult.

Instead of adding a ‘bot or not’ label, Twitter has just launched a ‘hide replies’ feature — which lets users screen individual replies to their tweets (requiring an affirmative action from viewers to unhide and be able to view any hidden replies). Twitter says this is intended at increasing civility on the platform. But there have been concerns the feature could be abused to help propaganda spreaders — i.e. by allowing them to suppress replies that debunk their junk.

The Oxford Internet Institute researchers found bot accounts are very widely used to spread political propaganda (80% of countries studied used them). However the use of human agents was even more prevalent (87% of countries).

Bot-human blended accounts, which combine automation with human curation in an attempt to fly under the BS detector radar, were much rarer: Identified in 11% of countries.

While hacked or stolen accounts were found being used in just 7% of countries.

In another key finding from the report, the researchers identified 25 countries working with private companies or strategic communications firms offering a computational propaganda as a service, noting that: “In some cases, like in Azerbaijan, Israel, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, student or youth groups are hired by government agencies to use computational propaganda.”

Commenting on the report in a statement, professor Philip Howard, director of the Oxford Internet Institute, said: “The manipulation of public opinion over social media remains a critical threat to democracy, as computational propaganda becomes a pervasive part of everyday life. Government agencies and political parties around the world are using social media to spread disinformation and other forms of manipulated media. Although propaganda has always been a part of politics, the wide-ranging scope of these campaigns raises critical concerns for modern democracy.”

Samantha Bradshaw, researcher and lead author of the report, added: “The affordances of social networking technologies — algorithms, automation and big data — vastly changes the scale, scope, and precision of how information is transmitted in the digital age. Although social media was once heralded as a force for freedom and democracy, it has increasingly come under scrutiny for its role in amplifying disinformation, inciting violence, and lowering trust in the media and democratic institutions.”

Other findings from the report include that:

  • 52 countries used “disinformation and media manipulation” to mislead users
  • 47 countries used state sponsored trolls to attack political opponents or activists, up from 27 last year

Which backs up the widespread sense in some Western democracies that political discourse has been getting less truthful and more toxic for a number of years — given tactics that amplify disinformation and target harassment at political opponents are indeed thriving on social media, per the report.

Despite finding an alarming rise in the number of government actors across the globe who are misappropriating powerful social media platforms and other tech tools to influence public attitudes and try to disrupt elections, Howard said the researchers remain optimistic that social media can be “a force for good” — by “creating a space for public deliberation and democracy to flourish”.

“A strong democracy requires access to high quality information and an ability for citizens to come together to debate, discuss, deliberate, empathise and make concessions,” he said.

Clearly, though, there’s a stark risk of high quality information being drowned out by the tsunami of BS that’s being paid for by self-interested political actors. It’s also of course much cheaper to produce BS political propaganda than carry out investigative journalism.

Democracy needs a free press to function but the press itself is also under assault from online ad giants that have disrupted its business model by being able to spread and monetize any old junk content. If you want a perfect storm hammering democracy this most certainly is it.

It’s therefore imperative for democratic states to arm their citizens with education and awareness to enable them to think critically about the junk being pushed at them online. But as we’ve said before, there are no shortcuts to universal education.

Meanwhile regulation of social media platforms and/or the use of powerful computational tools and techniques for political purposes simply isn’t there. So there’s no hard check on voter manipulation.

Lawmakers have failed to keep up with the tech-fuelled times. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given how many political parties have their own hands in the data and ad-targeting cookie jar, as well as pushing fakes. (Concerned citizens are advised to practise good digital privacy hygiene to fight back against undemocratic attempts to hack public opinion. More privacy tips here.)

The researchers say their 2019 report, which is based on research work carried out between 2018 and 2019, draws upon a four-step methodology to identify evidence of globally organised manipulation campaigns — including a systematic content analysis of news articles on cyber troop activity and a secondary literature review of public archives and scientific reports, generating country specific case studies and expert consultations.

Here’s the full list of countries studied:

Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Brazil, Cambodia, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Honduras, Guatemala, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Moldova, Myanmar, Netherlands, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Qatar, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Syria, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe.



source https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/26/voter-manipulation-on-social-media-now-a-global-problem-report-finds/

Wednesday 25 September 2019

Facebook announces Horizon, a VR massive-multiplayer world

Facebook today announced it’s building its own Ready Player One Oasis. Facebook Horizon is a virtual reality sandbox universe where you can build your own environments and games, play and socialize with friends, or just explore the user generated landscapes. This is Facebook’s take on Second Life.

Launching in early 2020 in closed beta, Facebook Horizon will allow users to design their own diverse avatars and hop between virtual locales through portals called Telepods, watch movies and consume other media with friends, and play multiplayer games together like Wing Strikers. It will also include human guides, known as Horizon Locals, who can give users assistance and protect their safety in the VR world so trolls can’t run rampant.

Users interested in early access can apply for the beta here.

Facebook Wing Strikers

As part of the launch, Facebook will shut down its existing social VR experiences Facebook Spaces and Oculus Rooms on October 25th, leaving a bit of a gap until Horizon launches. Oculus Rooms debuted in 2016 as your decoratable private VR apartment, while Spaces first launched in 2017 to let users chat, watch movies, and take VR selfies with friends. But both felt more like lobby waiting rooms with a few social features that were merely meant as a preamble to full-fledged VR games. In contrast, Horizon is designed to be a destination not a novelty, where users could spend tons of time.

How Facebook Horizon Works

Facebook Horizon will start centralized around a town square. Before people step in, they can choose how they look and what they wear from an expansive and inclusive set of avatar tools. From inside VR, users will be able to use the Horizon World Builder to create gaming arenas, vacation chillspots, and activities to fill them without the need to know how to code.

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Facebook Horizon lets you build objects from scratch

You could design a tropical island, then invite friends to hang out with you on your virtual private beach. A object creator akin to the Oculus Medium sculpting feature lets you make anything, even a custom t-shirt your avatar could wear. Visual scripting tools let more serious developers create interactive and reactive experiences.

Facebook details is Horizon safety features on its “Citizenship” page that explains that “As citizens of Facebook Horizon, it is all of our responsibility to create a culture that’s respectful and comfortable . . . A Horizon citizen is friendly, inclusive, and curious.” Horizon Locals will wander the VR landscapes to answer questions or aid users if they’re having technical or safety issues. They seem poised to be part customer support, part in-world police.

Facebook Horizon Locals

Facebook Horizon will include human Locals who provide safety and technical support

If things get overwhelming, you can tap a shield button to pause and dip into a private space parallel to Horizon. Users can define their personal space boundaries so no one can get in their face or appear to touch them. And traditional tools like muting, blocking, and reporting will all be available. It’s smart that Facebook outlined the community tone and defined these protections.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Horizon today at the Oculus Connect 6 conference in San Jose. He discussed how “Horizon is going to have this property where it just expands and gets better” as Facebook and the community build more experiences for the VR sandbox.

Facebook Horizon World Builder

Facebook lets you build your own islands and other locales in Horizon

Horizon makes perfect sense for a business obsessed with facilitating social interaction while monetized through ad views based on time-spent. It’s easy to imagine Horizon including virtual billboards for brands, Facebook-run shops for buying toys or home furnishings, third-party malls full of branded Nikes or Supreme shirts that score Zuckerberg a revenue cut, or subscriptions to access certain gaming worlds or premium planets to explore.

As Facebook starts to grow stale after 15 years on the market, users are looking for new ways to socialize. Many have already ditched the status updates and smarmy Life Events of Facebook for the pretty pictures of Instagram and silliness of Snapchat. Facebook risked being cast aside if it didn’t build its own VR successor. And by offering a world where users can escape their real lives instead of having to enviously compare them to their friends, Horizon could appeal to those bored or claustrophobic on Facebook.



source https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/25/facebook-horizon/

Why Flexport built a slick Slack SAAS for shipping

“Make their metrics your metrics” is one of Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen’s mantras. Sometimes that means building free software for your clients. It can be frustrating aligning your fates with a fellow business if they operate on email, phone, and fax like much of the freight forwarding industry that gets pallets of good across the world from factories to retailer’s floors. So today the new Flexport Platform launches allowing brand clients, their factories, and their Flexport logistics reps to all team up to get stuff where it belongs on time.

The software could further stoke Flexport‘s growth by locking in customers to work with the shipping startup that was valued at $3.2 billion after raising $1 billion from SoftBank in February to bring it to $1.3 billion in funding. Flexport’s revenue was up 95% to $441 million in 2018, Forbes’s Alex Konrad reported. Yet there’s plenty of green field to conquer given even Flexport’s largest competitor Kuehne & Nagel only holds 2.5% market share while the whole freight forwarding industry grows 4% per year.

Flexport Search

The Flexport Platform lets 10,000 clients like Bombas socks invite their suppliers to collaborate on managing shipments together. An integrated calendar makes shipping timelines clear. A map gives clients a god-view of their freight criss-crossing the globe. Pre-filled forms speed up compliance. Tagging lets users group shipments and filter or search their dashboards, and flag something for extra care — like a pallet of goods critical for a marketing launch event. Collaborators can also sync up via a Facebook Wall style feature, or direct message the team with threaded conversations much like Slack.

Ryan Petersen Flexport

Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen

“There’s infinite demand for a job well done” Petersen says about his industry. The hard part has always been doing a good job.” Taking the confusion out communication scattered across email chains means clients get shipping documentation filled out 50% faster with 4X more accurate data. Flexport is on the tip of the tongue as software eats the world, with antiquated sectors suddenly leveling up.

Petersen saw the inefficiency first-hand growing up running his own import/export and customs business. He part of a wave of entrepreneurs attacking unsexy businesses that the typical Silicon Valley enterprise exec might never stumble across. But three years after we profiled his scrappy company when it had raised just $26 million in funding and had 700 clients, Petersen tells me “We’re trying to retire the word startup.”

It turns out top global brands like Sonos and Klean Kanteen don’t like the second half of “move fast and break things” when those things are boats and planes full of their products. “They want a company that will help them grow, not the fly-by-night startup” Petersen explains. But with competitors trying to chase it and incumbents trying to adopt similar technologies, Flexport must maintain its agility to be subsumed by the pack.

As his company has grown to 1700 employees, he’s dedicated a ton of his time to keeping its culture in check — especially after a certain other logistics giant startup had some uber-painful troubles with workplace toxicity. “You either have too much bureaucracy or not enough process and no one knows what to do. The English language lacks a positive word for bureaucracy — just the right amount of process so people can move quickly”.

 

Flexport Warehouse

That’s meant a ton of personal growth too. Petersen is still enthusiastic, curious, and charmingly rough around the edges, but he carries it all with more dignity and gravity than a few years back. “The only way I get to stay in this role is if I learn faster than anybody else. Being the CEO of a 1700-person company is not something I knew how to do four to five years ago, or even last year” he tells me. “I’ve changed and become more self aware. It’s been really important to take care of myself — sleeping a lot, I quit drinking alcohol, I lost 30 pounds. I feel great.”

With plenty of cash in the bank, industry talent taking it seriously, and new businesses like Flexport Capital freight financing and its cargo insurance offered in partnership with Marsh, the company might not be a startup for long. It looks like a hot candidate for a coming season of IPOs. And while this company has its own plane (the leading entry for the naming contest is ‘Weird Flex But OK’), it’s actually part of its shipping fleet.



source https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/25/flexport-freight/

Tuesday 24 September 2019

In Latin America, the business of trolling threatens Twitter’s disruptive power

Facebook promises not to stop politicians’ lies & hate

Facebook confirms it won’t fact-check politicians’ speech or block their content if it’s newsworthy even if it violates the site’s hatespeech rules or other policies. This cementing of its policy comes from Facebook’s head of global policy and communication Nick Clegg who gave a speech today about Facebook’s plans to prevent interference in the 2020 presidential election.

But by seeking neutrality, Facebook may become complicit in the misinformation and malevolence some politicians will use it to spread. It leaves users to fend for themselves as they try to discern fact from fiction and opinion from reality. Clegg claims the idea is for users to “judge what politicians say themselves”.

Isn’t that disgorgement of responsibility already what Facebook was doing by merely routing false news links to fact checkers and affixing their verdicts to shares of the content while still leaving it up on the site? To now say politicians can’t be fact-checked directly at all sets a critical and questionable precedent.

Nick Clegg

Facebook’s head of global policy and communications Nick Clegg

“We don’t believe, however, that it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny” writes Clegg, the former deputy Prime Minister of the U.K. “That’s why Facebook exempts politicians from our third-party fact-checking program . . .This means that we will not send organic content or ads from politicians to our third-party fact-checking partners for review.”

Yes, it prevents direct censorship of politicians and leaves critique to the media. Yet it also ignores how Facebook turns any voice into a publication, amplified by engagement-seeking algorithms distributed to billions of people. Users often treat Facebook as the Internet and what they see on the Internet as true.

Facebook doesn’t want false news distorting voters’ decisions ahead of the 2020 elections. However the year-old ‘no fact-checks’ rule and three-year-old ‘protected newsworthy speech’ rule effectively elevate whatever comes out of a politicians mouth as above consequence.

If they share a debunked link, that can be labeled as wrong and demoted, but what they say is free to proliferate and confuse people. Not even a politician’s ads are subject to fact-check, so you can spread whatever lies you want on Facebook as long as you’re rich enough and running for office. Facebook only draws the line at allowing content from politicians that would cause real-world harm, or running politicians’ ads that violate its policies.

This is certainly easier operationally for Facebook. It doesn’t have to be responsible for paying in-house staff or outside fact checkers to assess politicians’ diatribes. And it won’t as often end up in the cross-hairs of elected officials claiming Facebook is biased against them.

Some could see the benefit of these rules being that Facebook could never directly censor a politician unless they directly threatened people. If speaking for themselves from their own accounts, they get what’s close to free speech.

But it ignores how politics has evolved in the post-truth era. Rather than win with facts, it’s easier just to shout lies or insults loud and frequently enough that they’re accepted at face value, rebroadcast, and culturally ingrained. Sensationalism spreads further than what’s level-headed. The fact-check never gets as many shares as the incendiary claim. And those with a bully pulpit can keep an iron grip on their megaphone.

Facebook may not want to be the arbiter of truth or even be considered ‘media’, but it transmits falsity without question, it’s not a platform it’s a pawn.



source https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/24/pawn-not-platform/

Meme editor Kapwing grows 10X, raises $11M

Kapwing is a laymen’s Adobe Creative Suite built for what people actually do on the internet: make memes and remix media. Need to resize a video? Add text or subtitles to a video? Trim or crop or loop or frame or rotate or soundtrack or… Then you need Kapwing. The free web and mobile tool is built for everyone, not just designers. No software download or tutorials to slog through. Just efficient creativity.

Kapwing Video Editor

In a year since coming out of stealth with 100,000 users, Kapwing has grown 10X to over 1 million. Now it going pro, building out its $20/month collaboration tools for social media managers and scrappy teams. But it won’t forget its roots with teens, so it’s dropped its pay-$6-to-remove-watermarks tier while keeping its core features free.

Eager to capitalize on the meme and mobile content business, CRV has just led an $11 million Series A round for Kapwing. It’s joined by follow-on cash from Village Global, Sinai, and Shasta Ventures plus new investors Jane VC, Harry Stebbings, Vector, and the Xoogler Syndicate. CRV partners ‘the venture twins’ Justine and Olivia Moore actually met Kapwing co-founder and CEO Julia Enthoven while they all worked at The Stanford Daily newspaper together in 2012.

“As a team, we love memes. We talk about internet fads almost every day at lunch and pay close attention to digital media trends” says Enthoven, who started the company with fellow Googler Eric Lu. “One of our cultural tenets is to respect the importance of design, art, and culture in the world, and another one is to not take ourselves too seriously.” But it is taking on serious clients.

Kapwing Tools

 

As Kapwing’s toolset has grown, it’s seen paying customers coming from Amazon, Sony, Netflix, and Spotify. Now only 13% of what’s made with it are traditional text-plus-media memes. “Kapwing will always be designed for creators first: the students, artists, influencers, entrepreneurs, etc who define and spread culture” says Enthoven. “But we make money from the creative professionals, marketers, media teams, and office workers who need to create content for work.”

That’s why in addition to plenty of templates for employing the latest trending memes, Kapwing now helps Pro subscribers with permanent hosting, saving throughout the creation process, and re-editing after export. Eventually it plans to sell enterprise licenses to let whole companies use Kapwing.

Kapwing Tools 1

Copycats are trying to chip away at its business, but Kapwing will use its new funding to keep up a breakneck pace of development. Pronounced “Ka-Pwing” like a bullet riccochet, it’s trying to stay ahead of Imgflip, ILoveIMG, Imgur’s on-site tool, and more robust apps like Canva.

If you’ve ever been stuck with a landscape video that won’t fit in an Instagram Story, a bunch of clips you want to stitch together, or the need to subtitle something for accessibility, you’ll know the frustration of lacking a purpose-built tool. And if you’re on mobile, there are even few options. Unlike some software suite you have to install on a desktop, Kapwing works right from a browser.

Trending Memes Kapwing

“‘Memes’ is such a broad category of media nowadays. It could refer to a compilation like the political singalong videos, animations like Shooting Star memes, or a change in music like the AOC Dancing memes” Enthoven explains. “Although they used to be edgy, memes have become more mainstream . . . Memes popularized new types of multimedia formats and made raw, authentic footage more acceptable on social media.”

As communication continues to shift from text to visual media, design can’t only be the domain of designers. Kapwing empowers anyone to storytell and entertain, whether out of whimsy or professional necessity. If big-name creative software from Adobe or Apple don’t simplify and offer easy paths through common use cases, they’ll see themselves usurped by the tools of the people.



source https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/24/kapwing/

Daily Crunch: Facebook acquires a neural monitoring startup

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Facebook buys startup building neural monitoring armband

Facebook has talked a lot about working on a non-invasive brain input device that can make things like text entry possible just by thinking.

So far, most of the company’s progress on that project appears to be taking the form of university research, but with the acquisition of CTRL-labs (which we’ve confirmed was worth between $500 million and $1 billion), Facebook appears to be moving closer to turning this idea into a commercial product.

2. Messaging app Kik shuts down as company focuses on Kin, its cryptocurrency

The company’s team will be reduced to 19 people, a reduction that will affect over 100 employees, as it focuses on converting more Kin users into buyers. Kin still faces a lawsuit from the SEC, claiming the company’s ICO was illegal.

3. Europe’s top court rules that ‘right to be forgotten’ only applies in Europe

Google and other search engines started implementing the right to be forgotten in 2014, allowing European citizens to ask search engines to delist results with sensitive personal information. Now the Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that Google doesn’t have to de-reference those results on a global scale.

Samsung Galaxy Fold

4. Samsung Galaxy Fold, take two

This week, the Fold finally debuts on North American store shelves, about five months later than initially planned.

5. ClimateTech is the new hot space for investors in a warming planet

Whereas CleanTech has traditionally been known in the field of energy generation, such as solar, battery and hydro, ClimateTech could perhaps be defined as data-driven products aimed at addressing the risk and exposure to the effects of climate change. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Honestbee owes almost $1 million in unpaid salary to employees, according to affidavit filed by its CEO

Honestbee, the Singapore-based grocery delivery startup that has been struggling with financial issues, owes 217 employees a total of almost USD $1 million in unpaid salary.

7. Hear about investing in African tech at Disrupt SF with Marième Diop, Wale Ayeni and Sheel Mohnot

We’ll be hosting a Q&A session with Orange Digital Ventures’ Marième Diop, International Finance Organization‘s Wale Ayeni and 500 Startups’ Sheel Mohnot, three Africa-based investors who bring plenty of experience screening startups across its top tech hubs.



source https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/24/daily-crunch-facebook-ctrl-labs/

Meet SoundCloud rival Audius, free & anti-takedowns

“It was SoundCloud’s opportunity to lose and now it’s ours” says Audius CEO Roneil Rumberg. Plenty of musicians and fans are sick of SoundCloud’s expensive hosting costs, haphazard content takedowns, and lagging user experience as the site’s status withers. Audius wants to be the opposite, and offer a new home for artists where they’ll eventually earn 90% of revenue earned and the startup itself can’t remove songs.

Today Audius launches its music streaming and free hosting service backed by DJs like Deadmau5 and Zed’s Dead, plus $5.5 million in A-list venture capital. Music makers can upload their songs at no cost, and users can browse, follow, and get listening recommendations. The catalog is small to start with just a few hundred artists, but Audius has big plans for how to lure artists choosing between other SoundCloud alternatives from Mixcloud to YouTube.

Audius Music Streaming

The secret sauce is that Audius isn’t just a web and mobile site, it’s an open source protocol built on the blockchain, not that users need to be versed in cryptocurrency or do anything special to signup. Audius doesn’t actually host the music, but decentralizes it across independently operated nodes, which it believes will protect it from lawsuits and record label pressure. It’s distributing its own crypto tokens to incentivize artists that join early as well as the node operators with the insinuation that these might rise in value if the service grows popular.

Audius is completely free for listening at high quality 320kbps. For now, artists can’t make money, though many still can’t on SoundCloud. But in early 2020, the startup plans to let artists opt into requiring users to occasionally listen to ads or pay a few dollars per month for an Audius subscription. 90% of revenue will go to the artists and 10% to the node operators, and their are also plans to cut in playlist curators. Audius itself hopes the value of its tokens will rise so it can sell from its stockpile to generate revenue.

Audius Featured Artists 1

“Audius’ dedication to empowering artists through supporting direct relationships with fans, censorship resistance, and fair pay is so important in a time when artists are being mistreated regularly” writes dance music superstar Deadmau5 aka Joel Zimmerman who’s on the startup’s advisory board. Other artists like Zeds Dead, Mr. Carmack, and Rezz have pledged to put some exclusive music on Audius, ranging from finished tracks to rough drafts. They were attracted by the promise of bigger and faster payouts, plus a transparent copyright takedowns process.

The biggest challenge for Audius will be playing catchup recruiting artists and listeners over a decade after SoundCloud launched and when Spotify already has 108 million paying subscribers from is 232 million users. For now there’s not much special about the user experience, where you can listen to a feed of what you follow or library of saved songs, or check out trending artists and playlists At least sign up is easier than most blockchain apps, requiring merely an email address or Twitter sign-in, though crypto kids can use MetaMask. The lack of native mobile apps won’t help, though.

Audius Screenshot

All the artists-first philosophy won’t matter if it never gains traction. But if Audius does grow, it has a savvy approach to preventing unnecessary content takedowns. Rumberg claims an estimated 80% of takedowns on apps like SoundCloud and YouTube are not actually infringing copyright, leading to great content disappearing. “Audius doesn’t have the ability to deplatform you or censor you” says Audius co-founder Forrest Browning.

Audius Founders

Audius co-founders (from left): Forrest Browning, Roneil Rumberg

First, since it doesn’t host the songs itself, it will just pass copyright holder complaints on to the uploaders themselves. Owners can be reassigned the revenue being earned by a song rather than have it taken down. And instead of pulling down a whole DJ set, the rights holder of a 5 minute song in an hour-long mix would get 1/12 of the proceeds. Browning tells me “A lot of artists are completely fine with their content being remixed or mashed up.”

If disputes aren’t resolved, rights holders can approach the operators of nodes hosting the music and file a local equivalent of ta DMCA takedown request, though the music might still live on other nodes beyond the law. In that case, rights holders file a complaint to the Audius arbitration committee made up of users. That group can vote on whether a track legally should be removed or its revenue reattributed, and both plaintiffs and committee members must put up a small financial stake they’ll lose if their claim is frivolous or they make erroneous decisions.

We’ll see if this hands-off approach to censorship actually flies with the law. If so, it could give artists confidence in joining Audius that they lack elsewhere. Many are frustrated after constantly having to rebuild their audience on different platforms from MySpace to iTunes to Spotify to SoundCloud, especially if their tracks are disappearing. One benefit of being open sourced and decentralized is that “Let’s say our company closes up shop in 5 years? Audius and the content will live on forever, as long as folks continue to operate the nodes” Rumberg explains.

To make sure it stays in business as it stretches its venture funding from General Catalyst and Lightspeed, Audius has plans for additional tools that could make it and artists money. From being able to crowdfund future albums to selling merchandise or VIP experiences, Audius could become a gateway to spending on independent music. It could have to compete with itself, though, since Audius’ on-demand streaming site is just one client built on its Open Source protocol. The founders say they hope other people will build Pandora-style radio clients, music discovery apps, and more listening options through its APIs.

Audius Song

Rumberg and Browning met the summer after high school at a camp of Stanford admits. Throughout college, the recent graduates got deeper into dance music subgenres by devouring everything on SoundCloud. But watching their favorite artists get music kicked off that app while their DJ friends struggled to break through the algorithms, Rumberg says they wondered “how can we remove the platform from this equation?”

Music businesses aiming to free art from “the man” so often end up becoming him. But by decentralizing control and funneling money directly to creators, Audius may code its way into music culture.

Audius takedowns



source https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/24/audius-music/