Mark Zuckerberg actually calls for regulation of content, elections, privacy

It’s been a busy day for Facebook exec op-eds. Earlier this morning, Sheryl Sandberg broke the site’s silence around the Christchurch massacre, and now Mark Zuckerberg is calling on governments and other bodies to increase regulation around the sorts of data Facebook traffics in. He’s hoping to get out in front of heavy-handed regulation and get a seat at the table shaping it.

The founder published a letter simultaneously on his own page and The Washington Post, the latter of which is an ideal way to get your sentiments on every desk inside the beltway. In the wake a couple of years that have come with black eyes and growing pains, Zuckerberg notes that if he had it to do over again, he’d ask for increased external scrutiny in four key areas:

• Harmful content – He wants overarching rules and benchmarks social apps can be measured by
• Election integrity – He wants clear government definitions of what constitutes a political or issue ad
• Privacy – He wants GDPR-style regulations globally that can impose sanctions on violators
• Data portability – He wants users to be able to bring their info from one app to another

The story of why the letter breaks down each doubles as kind of recent history of the social network. Struggles and missteps have defined much of Facebook’s last few years, with several controversies often swirling around the social network at once. Not every CEO gets asked to testify in front of Congress. Facebook houses and controls an incredible collection of data, playing a key role in everything from ad targeting and interpersonal relationships to news cycles and elections.

I’ve spent most of the past two years focusing on issues like harmful content, elections integrity and privacy. I think…

Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Saturday, March 30, 2019

“Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree,” Zuckerberg writes, three days after issuing a blanket ban on “white nationalism” and “white separatism.” He goes on to describe the company’s work with various governments, along with its development of independent oversight committee, before anyone can accuse the company of completely passing the buck.

“One idea is for third-party bodies to set standards governing the distribution of harmful content and to measure companies against those standards,” Zuckerberg writes, “Regulation could set baselines for what’s prohibited and require companies to build systems for keeping harmful content to a bare minimum.”

Zuckerberg goes on to encourage increased legislation around election tampering and political advertisements. Notably, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development hit Facebook earlier this week with charges that its targeted ads violate the Fair Housing Act.

The op-ed rings somewhat hollow, though, because there’s plenty that Facebook could do to improve in these four areas without help from the government.

Facebook’s harmful content policies have long been confusing, inconsistent, and isolated. For example, Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was removed from Facebook but not from Instagram. Meanwhile, bad actors can just hop between social networks to spread problematic posts. Facebook should apply enforcement of its policies across its whole family of apps, publicly work through its logic for why it does or doesn’t remove things instead of having those discussions leak, and cooperate better with fellow social networks to coordinate blanket takedowns of the worst offenders.

As for election integrity, Facebook made a big advance this week by placing all active and old inactive political ad campaigns into keyword-searchable Ad Library. But after pressure from news publishers who didn’t want their ads promoting politicized articles to be included beside traditional campaign ads, Facebook exempted them. Those ads can still influence the electorate, and while they should be classified separately, they should still be archived for research.

On privacy, well, there’s a ton to be done. One major area where it could improve is allowing people to more completely opt out of search, including by their phone number, to avoid stalkers. And better controls should be available for how Facebook uses your contact info when uploaded in the address books of other users.

Facebook shouldn’t block you from finding friends on competitors

Finally, with data portability, Facebook has been dragging its feet. A year ago, we published a deep dive into how Facebook only lets you export your social graph as a list of friends’ names which can’t be easily used to find them on other social networks. Facebook must make its social graph truely interoperable so users don’t lose their community if they switch apps. That would coerce Facebook to treat users better since leaving would actually be a viable option.

Taking these steps would show regulators that Zuckerberg isn’t just paying lip service in hopes of getting a more lenient sentence. It would demonstrate he’s ready to make change that serves society.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2CWfaRp Mark Zuckerberg actually calls for regulation of content, elections, privacy Brian Heater https://ift.tt/2I0IsBy
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Ride-hailing, bike and scooter companies probably raised less money than you thought

Jason Rowley Contributor

Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News.

More posts by this contributor

• To get big faster, younger unicorns start buying startups sooner
• Small VC funds continue to raise, despite pressure from above

After years of fierce competition as private companies, Uber and Lyft are going public on U.S. markets. Scooter service providers, the transportation trend du jour, raised hundreds of millions of dollars to scatter scooters on city sidewalks (to the chagrin of residents and regulators alike) throughout 2017 and 2018. On the other side of the Pacific, Grab and Go-Jek are raising gobs of cash as they continue to scale upward and outward.

Of all the seed, early and late-stage venture funding raised over the past couple of years, how much of the total went to companies in the ride-hailing, food delivery and last-mile transportation categories (which encompasses bikes and scooters)? Probably not as much as you’d think.

Taken together, companies in these sectors raised less than 10 percent of the total venture dollar volume reported for each of the past five full calendar years.

We’ve charted it out based on yearly totals. Take a peek:

To be sure, we’re still talking about a lot of money here. Companies in these three categories raised more than $22 billion in venture funding rounds (not including private equity) in 2017 and more than $18 billion in 2018.

Ventures in the transportation space loom large in the media, and how could they not? It’s a forbiddingly capital-intensive market to play in, requiring companies to raise massive sums, which make for good headlines.

In its early years, competition between on-demand, point-to-point transportation marketplace companies rewarded brashness and speed with early scale and the long-term structural advantages conferred to first the firms which grew the fastest.

But those advantages may not have been as stiff as first expected. Lyft beat Uber to the public markets, raised its valuation during its IPO roadshow, priced at the top of its extended range and then popped 21 percent when it started trading.

That success means that the red chunks of our above chart weren’t all fool’s bets. Instead, a good chunk of the equity represented is now liquid. Of course, there’s a lot more work to do for literally every other ride-hailing, ridesharing, scooter-renting and other wheels-providing unicorns in the world: They still have to go public.

https://ift.tt/2HPfOnI Ride-hailing, bike and scooter companies probably raised less money than you thought https://ift.tt/2FMlE77

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Startups Weekly: Why Lyft’s $2.2B IPO wasn’t “crazy land” or “nuts”

Lyft completed its long-awaited IPO this week, trading 21 percent higher Friday than its initial offering price of $72 per share. It closed its first day of trading at about $78 per share, up roughly 9 percent.

I spoke to IPO guru Brian Hamilton, the CEO of banking software company Sageworks, about Lyft’s offering to get a sense of how Wall Street views the buzzworthy tech unicorn. As I wrote earlier this week, Wall Street doesn’t seem to care about profitability, prioritizing growth instead. Lyft is definitely growing, quickly, and working hard to shrink its losses. Hamilton said the price per share was reasonable, and, given Lyft’s positive cash flows, he seemed confident the company will fare well on the Nasdaq this year.

He was especially clear about one thing: Lyft’s offering is nothing like Snap’s. “The camera company,” if you remember, had posted only $404.5 million in revenue ahead of its IPO, which valued it at $23.8 billion: “It’s not crazy land; it’s not nuts; it’s not Twitter, it’s not Snap; it’s reasonable actually, I’m surprised,” Hamilton told TechCrunch. “I’ve seen some of these tech companies go for much higher valuations [and] those companies commanded much higher sales multiples.”

Ultimately, Lyft commanded an 11x revenue multiple, on par with what we expect from Uber next month. Lyft could have priced higher given demand, though my Equity co-host Alex Wilhelm argued against that prospect on this special episode, where we discuss Lyft’s first day of trading.

Hamilton, like Alex and I, also emphasized the benefit of beating Uber to the public markets and debuting on the stock exchange at peak bull market: “The markets are hot, people want to put their money somewhere,” he said. “Even the people that have been on the fence want [Lyft stock].”

Here’s what else happened this week.

Uber is buying…

…Careem, its Middle Eastern counterpart. Uber will pay a whopping $3.1 billion to acquire the seven-year-old company. The deal had been rumored for months and is expected to close in Q1 2020, pending applicable regulatory approvals.

Airbnb’s road to IPO

Airbnb announced this week that it has checked in half-a-billion guests to its 6 million global participating properties. Damn. It’s also closing in on some of the larger hospitality industry incumbents like Hilton and Marriott. This paints a nice picture for a company that is more than ready to IPO and is surely preparing its pitch to public market investors. No word yet on when Airbnb will file, but it’s looking like it’s still several months out.

Deal of the week

I promised myself I wouldn’t write Casper and unicorn in the same sentence, but it seems inevitable at this point. The mattress startup raised a $100 million Series D this week at a valuation of $1.1 billion and became the newest entry to the unicorn club. Target — which once tried to acquire Casper — NEA, IVP and Norwest Venture Partners participated in the round. Casper has previously raised $240 million in equity funding from celebrity investors Leonardo DiCaprio and 50 Cent, as well as institutional investors, including Lerer Hippeau.

Startup capital

Restaurant manager Toast raises $250M at $2.7B valuation
Airwallex raises $100M at a valuation north of $1B
Vlocity nabs $60M Series C on $1B valuation
Lola.com raises $37M to take on SAP 
Boundless gets $7.8M to help immigrants navigate the green card process

Venture $$$

Jon Sakoda, a former partner at the esteemed venture capital firm NEA, has taken the wraps off his new, Cisco-backed fund, called Decibel. Sakoda can’t disclose the precise size of the fund yet, but he told TechCrunch he’s working very collaboratively with Cisco, including its corporate venture arm, Cisco Investments. Plus, 500 Startups has raised $33 million for its Middle Eastern-focused fund, 500 Falcons.

Extra Crunch

This week’s recommended read for our Extra Crunch subscribers: What’s the cost of buying users from Facebook and 13 other ad networks? Subscribe to EC here.

Podcast M&A

Spotify is making good on its promise to spend millions on podcast M&A, following its purchases of Gimlet and Anchor for $340 million. This week, the music streaming giant announced that it had acquired a small podcasting studio called Parcast, known best for true-crime and other factual serials in genres like mystery, science fiction and history.

Meet Evan Spiegel’s sister, Caroline

She spoke to TechCrunch about her first big project. Called Quinn, Caroline plans to launch a website dedicated to sexy text and audio on April 13th. She describes Quinn as “a much less gross, more fun Pornhub for women.” Read TechCrunch’s Josh Constine’s full interview with Caroline here.

#Equitypod

If you enjoy this newsletter, be sure to check out TechCrunch’s venture-focused podcast, Equity. In this week’s episode, available here, TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos, Crunchbase News’ Alex Wilhelm and I chat about Wall Street’s appetite for unicorns, Casper’s big round and more. Then, in a special Equity Shot, we discuss Lyft’s first day trading on the Nasdaq.

Want more TechCrunch newsletters? Sign up here.

https://ift.tt/2HX1BnY Startups Weekly: Why Lyft’s $2.2B IPO wasn’t “crazy land” or “nuts” https://ift.tt/2uy3fo4

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Toast, the restaurant management platform, has raised $250M at a $2.7B valuation

Restaurant sales hit $825 billion last year in the U.S., but with margins averaging at only three to five percent per business, they’re always looking for an edge on efficiency and just generally running things in a smarter way. A startup called Toast, which has built a popular platform for restaurant management, has closed a hefty round of funding to double down on that opportunity to do that.

The company has raised $250 million on a valuation of $2.7 billion, money that it will use to invest in building technology to help restaurants with marketing, recruitment and operational efficiency, as well as start to think about expanding to more territories outside the U.S.

The basics of the funding were flagged earlier today by Prime Unicorn Index and we reached out to the company to confirm. It is being led by TCV and Tiger Global Management, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners and T. Rowe Price Associates funds and other existing investors.

This Series E is a big bump up for the company: in its previous round in July 2018, the company was valued at $1.4 billion — partly the result of strong growth at the company. While it’s not disclosing revenue numbers or whether it is yet profitable, Toast currently serves tens of thousands of businesses — covering a range of sizes from independent venues to smaller chains — and in the last year tallied up transactions in the tens of billions of dollars, seeing growth of some 148 percent in its revenues, according to CFO Tim Barash.

The restaurant business represents a big opportunity for e-commerce companies, but there have been some notable stumbles where ambitions have not been met with success. Groupon, which spent several years acquiring and organically building a point of sale and restaurant management business, first drastically cut down and then finally called it quits and sold off its efforts, called Breadcrumb, in 2016. Amazon also pulled out of point of sale services (aimed at more than restaurants) and has in certain regions also pulled back on other restaurant efforts like its order management and delivery platform.

Barash said in an interview that he thinks the key to why Toast has steadily grown its business through all that is because a large proportion of its own employees — some 70 percent — have worked in the food service industry themselves.

“I was first a busboy, and then I worked in pizza delivery for years,” he said. “Seventy percent of our employees have worked at restaurants, including those in our product leadership, and that helps us understand the problem.”

Restaurants, as Barash points out, are complicated. “They are essentially manufacturers and retailers at the same time, all in one small physical footprint,” and so the key to building products for them is to understand that and the challenges they face in building and running those businesses.

And that’s before you consider the many other factors that can make restaurants a dicey game, from changing cuisine tastes, to changing eating habits — many get food delivered today — to the precariousness of the commercial real estate market and so much more.

The aim of Toast is to build tools to apply data science and orderly IT processes to address whichever of those variables that can be controlled by the restaurant.

Today, Toast’s products include point of sale services as well as reporting and analytics; display systems for kitchens; online ordering and delivery interfaces; and loyalty programs. It also builds its own hardware, which includes handheld order pads, payment and ordering terminals, self-service kiosks and displays for guests. It also offers links through to a network of some 100 partners, such as Grubhub for takeout food, when a restaurant does not cover those services or functions directly, to help stitch together services to work on its platform.

Tomorrow, the plan is to use the funding to enhance all of those with more advanced features that speak to some of the bigger issues and concerns Barash said its customers are voicing today.

That will include better and more services aimed at guest engagement and retention; better ways to recruit and keep people in an industry that has a high turnover of employees; and of course more tools to address how efficiently a business is operating to make it more profitable. The company has committed some $1 billion in the next five years to R&D to build more hardware and software.

Having access to this kind of tech and platform is a big deal, especially for independently owned places that hope to compete against bigger chains without having to compromise on their core competency: making unique and delicious food.

In the meantime, Barash said that while Toast itself is no stranger to approaches from larger players itself — he declined to say who but said many who have ambitions to do more business with the restaurant industry had approached it over the years — the company’s long-term vision is to grow bigger and remain its own boss.

It’s an ambition that has hit the spot with investors that have an appetite for high-growth businesses.

“At TCV, we invest in companies that have the potential to reshape entire industries. By providing restaurants of all sizes with access to innovative technology, Toast is leveling the playing field and leading the industry’s transition to the cloud,” said David Yuan, general partner at TCV, in a statement, who is joining the board with this round. “Our investment will enable Toast to extend their platform beyond point-of-sale and guest-facing technology, and in doing so, create a powerful SaaS platform with a superlative business model. We’re excited to partner with Toast as they accelerate the growth of the community they serve.”

https://ift.tt/2HNecL6 Toast, the restaurant management platform, has raised $250M at a $2.7B valuation https://ift.tt/2WA4AXA

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Equity Shot: Lyft is public — what does that mean for other IPO-ready unicorns?

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Sure, we just aired a new episode, but things keep happening, and after talking about this crop of IPOs for so long, we can’t help ourselves. (You can follow us on Twitter, here and here, by the way, if Equity isn’t enough for you.)

Lyft, as you know, started trading today, closing the loop on a long saga that brought the smaller of the two domestic ride-hailing unicorns to the public markets.

After so much speculation about which of the two would get out the door first, Lyft did, and now we get to see what sort of pricing shenanigans happen next. Does Uber drop rates and punish Lyft? Or does Uber work to cut its losses, lowering its expenses and providing a clearer path toward profitability before its April IPO roadshow kicks off? (Not a path to profitability, mind; Uber and Lyft need to show a path to the direction of profitability first.)

We hit all the bases, going over the company’s pricing path, its varying share figures, final raise metrics and more. If you want the hard stuff, we’ve got a shot for you.

Now that the Lyft IPO has wrapped, we’ll be shifting our focus to Pinterest, Zoom and, of course, Uber. Stay tuned.

OK, now we’re done. Until next Friday. Unless something else happens.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Equity Shot: Lyft is public — what does that mean for other IPO-ready unicorns? https://ift.tt/2Wx6Gr5

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Remote workers and nomads represent the next tech hub

Amid calls for a dozen different global cities to replace Silicon Valley — Austin, Beijing, London, New York — nobody has yet nominated “nowhere.” But it’s now a possibility.

There are two trends to unpack here. The first is startups that are fully, or almost fully, remote, with employees distributed around the world. There’s a growing list of significant companies in this category: Automattic, Buffer, GitLab, Invision, Toptal and Zapier all have from 100 to nearly 1,000 remote employees.

The second trend is nomadic founders with no fixed location. For a generation of founders, moving to Silicon Valley was de rigueur. Later, the emergence of accelerators and investors worldwide allowed a wider range of potential home bases. But now there’s a third wave: a culture of traveling with its own, growing support networks and best practices.

You don’t have to look far to find startup gurus and VCs who strongly advise against being remote, much less a nomad. The basic reasoning is simple: Not having a location doesn’t add anything, so why do it? Startups are fragile, so it’s best to avoid any work practice that could disrupt delicate growth cycles.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Remote workers and nomads represent the next tech hub https://ift.tt/2I5V3TQ

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Lyft closes up 10% on first day of trading

Pink confetti fell from the ceiling Friday as Lyft co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer celebrated their company’s IPO. The stock offering was a bonafide success, with shares selling for $87.24 apiece Friday morning — 21 percent higher than Lyft’s initial $72 share price — and closing at about $79 per share.

Lyft raised roughly $2.3 billion Thursday evening, hours before ringing the opening bell of the Nasdaq on Friday around noon Pacific. The IPO gave Lyft an initial market cap of about $24 billion, representing an 11x revenue multiple and a 1.6x step-up from its most recent private valuation of $15.1 billion. 

On Bloomberg TV, Lyft’s co-founders discussed the company’s long-term prospects, including international growth, autonomous vehicle plans, the future of car ownership and insurance.

“We are confident that the business will be very profitable,” Green told Emily Chang. “We are making tremendous progress going after this once-in-a-generation shift where this entire industry, a $1.2 trillion market, could flip from an ownership model to a service model and we are leading the way there.”

The pair opted to host their IPO in Los Angeles, Lyft’s largest market.

“We want to make a point that you can both invest in communities and build a great business,” Zimmer said. “It was fun to ring the bell with several members of our driver community and have many of them participate in our IPO because we gave them a bonus to do so.”

Lyft pops 21% on its first day of trading on Nasdaq, after raising $2.2B in its IPO at a $24B valuation

https://ift.tt/2uyPN3h Lyft closes up 10% on first day of trading https://ift.tt/2U5JcMP

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1stdibs, the high-end online marketplace, just nabbed $76 million in Series D funding

1stdibs began pushing the antiques business into the 21st century long ago. Apparently, investors think it can push further and faster with $76 million in new funding. That’s how much the now-18-year-old, New York-based company says it just closed on for its Series D round, led by T. Rowe Price Associates, with participation from earlier backers Index Ventures, Benchmark and Spark Capital.

The company now boasts a valuation of well over $500 million, it tells the WSJ.

1stdibs has always been an interesting startup, one that’s both loved by the antiques dealers who use it, and, apparently, feared. When, in 2016, 1stdibs became heavier-handed about enforcing the commissions from each sale on its platform — and on which it relies for revenue — more than 30 dealers reportedly met at a design store in lower Manhattan to grouse about the development, complaining that the company had begun prizing revenue growth over its relationships.

Of course, with venture-capital funding — and the company has now collected $170 million altogether — comes expectations. And despite pushback from dealers, they’ve apparently stuck with the platform. 1stdibs says an average of 50 items sell for more than $5,000 on its platform daily, and that 15 of these are items that sell for more than $10,000. (A quick scan suggests a very wide range of prices, with many vintage items priced at $5,000 or less, but plenty with far richer tags, like a three-carat ruby and diamond ring available right now on the site for a cool $200,000, and a chandelier dating back to roughly 1870 and selling, someone is hoping, for more than $300,000.)

With venture funding comes competition, too. Though 1stdibs may be the doyen of the online antiques market, other, newer companies eyeing its traction have since emerged on the scene, many of which have also since raised venture funding and are also growing fast, including The RealReal, which was founded in 2011 and is reportedly weighing a public offering; and Chairish, founded in 2013, which sells vintage and used decor.

Chairish has raised just $16.7 million from investors to date. The RealReal has raised $288 million.

In fact, a fight for brand recognition in what’s become an increasingly crowded playing field as the U.S. population ages (and more antiques are dispersed into the world) may ultimately lead 1stdibs to follow a growing number of formerly online-only marketplaces now extending their reach into the offline world.

Though the company already has a New York location, in a block-long, late-19th-century warehouse called the Terminal Stores building, CEO David Rosenblatt tells the WSJ that using its new funding, more brick-and-mortar showrooms may be in its future.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J 1stdibs, the high-end online marketplace, just nabbed $76 million in Series D funding https://ift.tt/2U4KwQb

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Focaldata thinks it has some answers for campaigners in the age of Trump and Brexit

Political parties, campaigns and brands can’t get an accurate and cost-effective understanding of opinion in small geographic areas, like the constituencies of lawmakers. This is a big problem in political campaigning. And all political campaigning now has a huge online element, as we know. We also know political turbulence is one of the defining themes of our age.

But one thing is clear: All the players want faster, cheaper, more accurate and a more granular understanding of consumers and voters. In the age of AI, survey predictions are influenced as much as so many other machine-learning technology products.

Focaldata is a U.K. startup that thinks it has some of the answers to these quandaries. Their integrated consumer analytics and survey workflow application claims to give customers a more accurate and granular picture of consumers than traditional polling using machine learning. At the same time, they say their workflow software cuts down on the cost and time that market research takes.

The idea is that they employ a new machine learning-based technique (MRP) to generate survey “results.” This new methodology can use more information (such as old survey data or public statistics) than conventional methods, which lets them get accurate predictions in small geographic areas from the same sample sizes.

Founder Justin Ibbett had done MRP manually on his laptop a few times for some existing market research firms and realized how fiddly it was. “I felt a dedicated software application would reduce the complexity whilst making the results more accessible and useful — our early incarnations just delivered a spreadsheet!” he told me.

Much of Focaldata’s business has been in politics. They have worked with the pro-Remain group Best for Britain and the anti-Racism charity Hope not Hate on combating Far Right sentiment. However, most demand is now from large brand owners, such as ABInBev, a recent client.

They now have more than 10 paying clients, including big brands like M&C Saatchi.

Competitors include YouGov, Survation, Dalia Research (a Balderton-backed company) and standard market research agencies like Kantar and Ipsos Mori.

But against traditional agencies, Ibbett says their ML-based data processing engine sets them apart, allowing them to go very granular and get more accurate over time.

The market research market is £5 billion in the U.K. alone (PwC report, 2016) and global market research is a $40 billion market.

The startup has raised a £1.1 million seed round from notable U.K. angels, including Alex Chesterman, founder of Zoopla and Martin Bolland, founder of Alchemy Partners. Previously they raised a small pre-seed round from three other angels, including Xen Lategan (backer of Magic Pony and ex-Google, former CTO of News International).

CTO and co-founder Calvin Dudek was at Google for five years as a product manager, and ran Data Science Innovation at the DWP. Chief Data Scientist Takao Noguchi is a cognitive scientist.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Focaldata thinks it has some answers for campaigners in the age of Trump and Brexit https://ift.tt/2FJROQw

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Built Robotics’ massive construction excavator drives itself

I’ve never had a meeting quite like the one I had with Built Robotics.

Within about 10 minutes of meeting Built’s co-founder Noah Ready-Campbell, we’re steering an 80,000-pound construction excavator around what is basically his company’s back yard.

He wants me to see what it’s like to drive one; how much skill and finesse it takes to safely and efficiently move mountains of dirt around with this massive machine. The answer? Lots.

That’s why his company wants these machines to drive themselves.

Built is taking the concepts and technology that others are using to build self-driving cars and adapting them for a whole different vertical: construction.

They’ve built a kit that retrofits existing construction equipment with hardware like lidar, GPS and Wi-Fi, giving it the ability to autonomously map and navigate its surroundings. Rather than trying to build its own dozers and excavators and fight its way into an already dominated market, Built is aiming to make a kit that works across the popular equipment already out on job sites. They sell and rent the kits to companies, then charge a usage fee whenever the machine is working in its autonomous mode.

They showed this tech at a smaller scale for the first time in 2017, implementing it into the compact track loader pictured above. Now it’s expanding into bigger equipment, including dozers (pictured below) and excavators (pictured up top). See those black boxes on top of each vehicle? That’s where all of Built’s tech lives.

Back in their office, we look out at the machines in their lot. Noah and the Built team switch the excavator into automated mode, bringing up a map of what’s just outside the window. A red border tells the machine where it’s allowed to go; if it for any reason edges past those borders, the whole machine shuts down.

Cameras on and around the vehicles are constantly checking for anyone who might stray too close. If something goes wrong and the machine starts to tip too much, or if on-board sensors detect that something is in the way underground? Power gets cut. And there’s a big red emergency stop button on the back of each machine (and a wireless button meant to stay on the operator’s desk) for good measure.

They fire up the excavator, and it starts digging away at its task. Every move the machine makes is represented on the screen. A blinking sea of dots surround the on-screen vehicle, indicating the terrain it’s sensing around itself. It’s an absolute trip, watching these machines roll around and push and dig with no humans in their cabs. It reminds me of StarCraft for some reason.

Won’t these machines take jobs from people who want them? The construction industry is in the middle of a severe labor shortage, Noah tells me. The industry seems to agree, with The Associated General Contractors of America having just this month asked Congress to support a temporary work visa program to bring more potential workers in.

But we’re not the only country facing a construction labor shortage, and it’s not one that’s likely to end soon. As BuildZoom chief economist Issi Romem makes clear in this post, there aren’t enough young people entering the field to keep up.

What if instead of one vehicle per operator, each operator could oversee an automated fleet of two, or three, or five? They could give the machines a map of what they needed dug, fire them up and only step in the cab when there’s something the machines can’t do. It won’t solve the shortage, but it might help fill the gaps.

It’s still early days for Built. It’s built a research fleet of seven vehicles, and they’re coming up on their tenth completed construction project; all in all, their fleet has about 6,000 hours of operating time. But they should be good to keep rolling for a whole lot longer, with the company having $100 million dollars in contracts now signed.

This is Noah’s second startup. He sold his first startup, a clothing resale site called Twice, to eBay in 2015.

https://ift.tt/2U3cagp Built Robotics’ massive construction excavator drives itself https://ift.tt/2FA8dpA

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Nativo acquires content analytics company SimpleReach

Nativo has acquired SimpleReach, a move that Nativo CEO Justin Choi said will pair his company’s distribution system for native ads with SimpleReach’s measurement tools.

“If you can’t measure the impact of something, it’s difficult to scale spend in that area,” Choi told me. “When we say measurement we’re actually talking about connecting content to outcomes.”

To be clear, Nativo already offers measurement tools of its own, but apparently they’re limited to content that the brand or marketer is publishing on their own sites. SimpleReach, on the other hand, can measure sponsored content programs published elsewhere on the web, so Choi said it provides a “complementary measurement technology.”

Both Nativo and SimpleReach are long-standing players (and partners) in the native advertising and content marketing industry. Choi said Nativo has succeeded by “focusing on content,” and on the “mid-funnel” of the customer purchase journey.

“Almost all our relationships involve … the actual brands themselves, because we do solve a unique problem for them,” Choi said. “That middle part of: How you get someone to consider something? How do you create intent?”

The companies aren’t disclosing the financial terms of the acquisition. SimpleReach has raised a total of $24 million from investors including MK Capital, Atlas Ventures, Village Ventures, High Peak Venture Partners and Spring Mountain Capital.

Choi said the company will continue to support SimpleReach as a separate product while also working to integrate its data into Nativo. Apparently “all the core team members” (less than 10 people) are joining Nativo, as are an off-site engineering team.

He added that the remaining team members have already been hired elsewhere, so “everyone that wanted a home ended up with a home.”

Native Ad Startup Nativo Raises $3.5M Round Led By Greycroft

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Nativo acquires content analytics company SimpleReach https://ift.tt/2HLzoRQ

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Snap CEO’s sister Caroline Spiegel starts a no-visuals porn site

If you took the photos and videos out of pornography, could it appeal to a new audience? Caroline Spiegel’s first startup Quinn aims to bring some imagination to adult entertainment. Her older brother, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, spent years trying to convince people his app wasn’t just for sexy texting. Now Caroline is building a website dedicated to sexy text and audio. The 22-year-old college senior tells TechCrunch that on April 13th she’ll launch Quinn, which she describes as “a much less gross, more fun Pornhub for women”.

TechCrunch checked out Quinn’s private beta site, which is pretty bare bones right now. Caroline tells us she’s already raised under a million dollars for the project. But given her brother’s success spotting the next generation’s behavior patterns and turning them into beloved products, Caroline might find investors are eager to throw cash at Quinn. That’s especially true given she’s taking a contrarian approach. There will be no imagery on Quinn.

Caroline explains that “There’s no visual content on the site– just audio and written stories. And the whole thing is open source, so people can submit content and fantasies, etc. Everything is vetted by us before it goes on the site.” Caroline is building Quinn with a three-woman team of her best friends she met while at college at Stanford including Greta Meyer, though they plan to relocate to LA after graduation.

“His dream girl was named ‘Quinn'”

The idea for Quinn sprung from a deeply personal need. “I came up with it because I had to leave Stanford my junior year because i was struggling with anorexia and sexual dysfunction that came along with that” Caroline tells me. “I started to do a lot of research into sexual dysfunction cures. There are about 30 FDA-approved drugs for sexual dysfunction for men but zero for women and that’s a big bummer.”

She believes there’s still a stigma around women pleasuring themselves, leading to a lack of products offering assistance. Sure, there are plenty of porn sites but few are explicitly designed for women, and fewer stray outside of visual content. Caroline says photos and videos can create body image pressure, but with text and audio, anyone can imagine themselves in a scene. “Most visual media perpetuates the male gaze . . . all mainstream porn tells one story . . . You don’t have to fit one idea of what a woman should look like.”

That concept fits with the startup’s name “Quinn”, which Caroline says one of her best guy friends thought up. “He said this girl he met — his dream girl — was named ‘Quinn.'”

Caroline took to Reddit and Tumblr to find Quinn’s first creators. Reddit stuck to text and links for much of its history, fostering the kinky literature and audio communities. And when Tumblr banned porn in December, it left a legion of adult content makers looking for a new home. “Our audio ranges from guided masturbation to overheard sex, and there’s also married stories. It’s literally everything. Different strokes for different for folks, know what I mean?” Caroline says with a cheeky laugh.

To establish its brand, Quinn is running social media influencer campaigns where “The basic idea is to make people feel like it’s okay to experience pleasure. It’s hard to make something like masturbation cool, so that’s a little bit of a lofty goal. We’re just trying to make it feel okay, and even more okay than it is for men.”

As for the business model, Caroline’s research found younger women were embarrassed to pay for porn. Instead Quinn plans to run ads, though there could be commerce opportunities too. And since the site doesn’t bombard users with nude photos or hardcore videos, it might be able to attract sponsors that most porn sites can’t.

Evan is “very supportive”

Until monetization spins up, Quinn has the sub-$1 million in funding that Caroline won’t reveal the source of, though she confirms it’s not from her brother. “I wouldn’t say that he’s particularly involved other than he’s one of the most important people in my life and I talk to him all the time. He gives me the best advice I can imagine” the younger sibling says. “He doesn’t have any qualms, He’s very supportive.”

Quinn will need all the morale it can get, as Caroline bluntly admits “we have a lot of competitors”. There’s the traditional stuff like Pornhub, user generated content sites like Make Love Not Porn, and spontaneous communities like on Reddit. She calls $5 million-funded audio porn startup Dipsea “an exciting competitor” though she notes that “we sway a little more erotic than they do, but we’re so supportive of their mission.” How friendly.

Quinn’s biggest rival will likely be outdated but institutionalized site Literotica, which SimilarWeb ranks as the 60th most popular adult website, 631st most visited site overall, showing it gets 53 million hits per month. But the fact that Literotica looks like a web 1.0 forum yet has so much traffic signals a massive opportunity for Quinn. With rules prohibiting Quinn from launching native mobile apps, it will have to put all its effort into making its website stand out if it’s going to survive.

But more than competition, Caroline fears that Quinn will have to convince women to give its style of porn a try. “Basically, there’s this idea that for men, masturbation is an innate drive and for women it’s a ‘could do without it, could do with it’. Quinn is going to have to make a market alongside a product and that terrifies me” Caroline says, her voice building with enthusiasm. “But that’s what excites me the most about it, because what I’m banking on is if you’ve never had chocolate before, you don’t know. But once you have it, you start craving it. A lot of women haven’t experienced raw, visceral pleasure before, [but once we help them find it] we’ll have momentum.”

Most importantly, Quinn wants all women to feel they have rightful access to whatever they fancy. “It’s not about deserving to feel great, You don’t have to do Pilates to use this. You don’t have to always eat right. There’s no deserving with our product. Our mission is for women to be more in touch with themselves and feel fucking great. It’s all about pleasure and good vibes.”

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2V5wbzg Snap CEO’s sister Caroline Spiegel starts a no-visuals porn site Josh Constine https://ift.tt/2CJ7i5z
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Snap CEO’s sister Caroline Spiegel starts a no-visuals porn site

{rss:content:encoded} Snap CEO’s sister Caroline Spiegel starts a no-visuals porn site https://ift.tt/2CJ7i5z https://ift.tt/2V5wbzg March 29, 2019 at 03:15PM

If you took the photos and videos out of pornography, could it appeal to a new audience? Caroline Spiegel’s first startup Quinn aims to bring some imagination to adult entertainment. Her older brother, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, spent years trying to convince people his app wasn’t just for sexy texting. Now Caroline is building a website dedicated to sexy text and audio. The 22-year-old college senior tells TechCrunch that on April 13th she’ll launch Quinn, which she describes as “a much less gross, more fun Pornhub for women”.

TechCrunch checked out Quinn’s private beta site, which is pretty bare bones right now. Caroline tells us she’s already raised under a million dollars for the project. But given her brother’s success spotting the next generation’s behavior patterns and turning them into beloved products, Caroline might find investors are eager to throw cash at Quinn. That’s especially true given she’s taking a contrarian approach. There will be no imagery on Quinn.

Caroline explains that “There’s no visual content on the site– just audio and written stories. And the whole thing is open source, so people can submit content and fantasies, etc. Everything is vetted by us before it goes on the site.” Caroline is building Quinn with a three-woman team of her best friends she met while at college at Stanford including Greta Meyer, though they plan to relocate to LA after graduation.

“His dream girl was named ‘Quinn'”

The idea for Quinn sprung from a deeply personal need. “I came up with it because I had to leave Stanford my junior year because i was struggling with anorexia and sexual dysfunction that came along with that” Caroline tells me. “I started to do a lot of research into sexual dysfunction cures. There are about 30 FDA-approved drugs for sexual dysfunction for men but zero for women and that’s a big bummer.”

She believes there’s still a stigma around women pleasuring themselves, leading to a lack of products offering assistance. Sure, there are plenty of porn sites but few are explicitly designed for women, and fewer stray outside of visual content. Caroline says photos and videos can create body image pressure, but with text and audio, anyone can imagine themselves in a scene. “Most visual media perpetuates the male gaze . . . all mainstream porn tells one story . . . You don’t have to fit one idea of what a woman should look like.”

That concept fits with the startup’s name “Quinn”, which Caroline says one of her best guy friends thought up. “He said this girl he met — his dream girl — was named ‘Quinn.'”

Caroline took to Reddit and Tumblr to find Quinn’s first creators. Reddit stuck to text and links for much of its history, fostering the kinky literature and audio communities. And when Tumblr banned porn in December, it left a legion of adult content makers looking for a new home. “Our audio ranges from guided masturbation to overheard sex, and there’s also married stories. It’s literally everything. Different strokes for different for folks, know what I mean?” Caroline says with a cheeky laugh.

To establish its brand, Quinn is running social media influencer campaigns where “The basic idea is to make people feel like it’s okay to experience pleasure. It’s hard to make something like masturbation cool, so that’s a little bit of a lofty goal. We’re just trying to make it feel okay, and even more okay than it is for men.”

As for the business model, Caroline’s research found younger women were embarrassed to pay for porn. Instead Quinn plans to run ads, though there could be commerce opportunities too. And since the site doesn’t bombard users with nude photos or hardcore videos, it might be able to attract sponsors that most porn sites can’t.

Evan is “very supportive”

Until monetization spins up, Quinn has the sub-$1 million in funding that Caroline won’t reveal the source of, though she confirms it’s not from her brother. “I wouldn’t say that he’s particularly involved other than he’s one of the most important people in my life and I talk to him all the time. He gives me the best advice I can imagine” the younger sibling says. “He doesn’t have any qualms, He’s very supportive.”

Quinn will need all the morale it can get, as Caroline bluntly admits “we have a lot of competitors”. There’s the traditional stuff like Pornhub, user generated content sites like Make Love Not Porn, and spontaneous communities like on Reddit. She calls $5 million-funded audio porn startup Dipsea “an exciting competitor” though she notes that “we sway a little more erotic than they do, but we’re so supportive of their mission.” How friendly.

Quinn’s biggest rival will likely be outdated but institutionalized site Literotica, which SimilarWeb ranks as the 60th most popular adult website, 631st most visited site overall, showing it gets 53 million hits per month. But the fact that Literotica looks like a web 1.0 forum yet has so much traffic signals a massive opportunity for Quinn. With rules prohibiting Quinn from launching native mobile apps, it will have to put all its effort into making its website stand out if it’s going to survive.

But more than competition, Caroline fears that Quinn will have to convince women to give its style of porn a try. “Basically, there’s this idea that for men, masturbation is an innate drive and for women it’s a ‘could do without it, could do with it’. Quinn is going to have to make a market alongside a product and that terrifies me” Caroline says, her voice building with enthusiasm. “But that’s what excites me the most about it, because what I’m banking on is if you’ve never had chocolate before, you don’t know. But once you have it, you start craving it. A lot of women haven’t experienced raw, visceral pleasure before, [but once we help them find it] we’ll have momentum.”

Most importantly, Quinn wants all women to feel they have rightful access to whatever they fancy. “It’s not about deserving to feel great, You don’t have to do Pilates to use this. You don’t have to always eat right. There’s no deserving with our product. Our mission is for women to be more in touch with themselves and feel fucking great. It’s all about pleasure and good vibes.”

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Snap CEO’s sister Caroline Spiegel starts a no-visuals porn site

If you took the photos and videos out of pornography, could it appeal to a new audience? Caroline Spiegel’s first startup Quinn aims to bring some imagination to adult entertainment. Her older brother, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, spent years trying to convince people his app wasn’t just for sexy texting. Now Caroline is building a website dedicated to sexy text and audio. The 22-year-old college senior tells TechCrunch that on April 13th she’ll launch Quinn, which she describes as “a much less gross, more fun Pornhub for women”.

TechCrunch checked out Quinn’s private beta site, which is pretty bare bones right now. Caroline tells us she’s already raised under a million dollars for the project. But given her brother’s success spotting the next generation’s behavior patterns and turning them into beloved products, Caroline might find investors are eager to throw cash at Quinn. That’s especially true given she’s taking a contrarian approach. There will be no imagery on Quinn.

Caroline explains that “There’s no visual content on the site– just audio and written stories. And the whole thing is open source, so people can submit content and fantasies, etc. Everything is vetted by us before it goes on the site.” Caroline is building Quinn with a three-woman team of her best friends she met while at college at Stanford including Greta Meyer, though they plan to relocate to LA after graduation.

“His dream girl was named ‘Quinn'”

The idea for Quinn sprung from a deeply personal need. “I came up with it because I had to leave Stanford my junior year because i was struggling with anorexia and sexual dysfunction that came along with that” Caroline tells me. “I started to do a lot of research into sexual dysfunction cures. There are about 30 FDA-approved drugs for sexual dysfunction for men but zero for women and that’s a big bummer.”

She believes there’s still a stigma around women pleasuring themselves, leading to a lack of products offering assistance. Sure, there are plenty of porn sites but few are explicitly designed for women, and fewer stray outside of visual content. Caroline says photos and videos can create body image pressure, but with text and audio, anyone can imagine themselves in a scene. “Most visual media perpetuates the male gaze . . . all mainstream porn tells one story . . . You don’t have to fit one idea of what a woman should look like.”

That concept fits with the startup’s name “Quinn”, which Caroline says one of her best guy friends thought up. “He said this girl he met — his dream girl — was named ‘Quinn.'”

Caroline took to Reddit and Tumblr to find Quinn’s first creators. Reddit stuck to text and links for much of its history, fostering the kinky literature and audio communities. And when Tumblr banned porn in December, it left a legion of adult content makers looking for a new home. “Our audio ranges from guided masturbation to overheard sex, and there’s also married stories. It’s literally everything. Different strokes for different for folks, know what I mean?” Caroline says with a cheeky laugh.

To establish its brand, Quinn is running social media influencer campaigns where “The basic idea is to make people feel like it’s okay to experience pleasure. It’s hard to make something like masturbation cool, so that’s a little bit of a lofty goal. We’re just trying to make it feel okay, and even more okay than it is for men.”

As for the business model, Caroline’s research found younger women were embarrassed to pay for porn. Instead Quinn plans to run ads, though there could be commerce opportunities too. And since the site doesn’t bombard users with nude photos or hardcore videos, it might be able to attract sponsors that most porn sites can’t.

Evan is “very supportive”

Until monetization spins up, Quinn has the sub-$1 million in funding that Caroline won’t reveal the source of, though she confirms it’s not from her brother. “I wouldn’t say that he’s particularly involved other than he’s one of the most important people in my life and I talk to him all the time. He gives me the best advice I can imagine” the younger sibling says. “He doesn’t have any qualms, He’s very supportive.”

Quinn will need all the morale it can get, as Caroline bluntly admits “we have a lot of competitors”. There’s the traditional stuff like Pornhub, user generated content sites like Make Love Not Porn, and spontaneous communities like on Reddit. She calls $5 million-funded audio porn startup Dipsea “an exciting competitor” though she notes that “we sway a little more erotic than they do, but we’re so supportive of their mission.” How friendly.

Quinn’s biggest rival will likely be outdated but institutionalized site Literotica, which SimilarWeb ranks as the 60th most popular adult website, 631st most visited site overall, showing it gets 53 million hits per month. But the fact that Literotica looks like a web 1.0 forum yet has so much traffic signals a massive opportunity for Quinn. With rules prohibiting Quinn from launching native mobile apps, it will have to put all its effort into making its website stand out if it’s going to survive.

But more than competition, Caroline fears that Quinn will have to convince women to give its style of porn a try. “Basically, there’s this idea that for men, masturbation is an innate drive and for women it’s a ‘could do without it, could do with it’. Quinn is going to have to make a market alongside a product and that terrifies me” Caroline says, her voice building with enthusiasm. “But that’s what excites me the most about it, because what I’m banking on is if you’ve never had chocolate before, you don’t know. But once you have it, you start craving it. A lot of women haven’t experienced raw, visceral pleasure before, [but once we help them find it] we’ll have momentum.”

Most importantly, Quinn wants all women to feel they have rightful access to whatever they fancy. “It’s not about deserving to feel great, You don’t have to do Pilates to use this. You don’t have to always eat right. There’s no deserving with our product. Our mission is for women to be more in touch with themselves and feel fucking great. It’s all about pleasure and good vibes.”

https://ift.tt/2V5wbzg Snap CEO’s sister Caroline Spiegel starts a no-visuals porn site https://ift.tt/2CJ7i5z

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User Interviews, a platform for product feedback, raises $5 million

It’s not uncommon to hear CEOs and business leaders talk about focusing on the consumer. But the only way to build for the consumer is to hear what they want, which can be a resource-intensive thing to retrieve.

User Interviews, an ERA-backed company out of New York, is looking to lighten that load with a fresh $5 million in seed funding from Accomplice, Las Olas, FJ Labs, and ERA.

User Interviews actually started out as Mobile Suites, an amenities logistics platform for hotels. It was a dud, and the team — Basel Fakhoury, Dennis Meng and Bob Saris — decided to do far more user research before determining the next product.

In the process of talking to customers to understand their pain points, they realized just how difficult collecting user feedback could be.

That’s how User Interviews was born. The platform’s first product, called Recruit, offers a network of non-users that can be matched with companies to provide feedback. In fact, User Interviews’ first sales were made by simply responding to Craigslist ads posted by companies looking for non-users from which they could collect feedback.

But because the majority of user research is based on existing users, the company also built Research Hub, which is essentially a CRM system for user feedback and research. To be clear, User Interviews doesn’t facilitate the actual emails sent to users, but does track the feedback and make sure that no one from the research team is reaching out to a single user too often.

With Recruit, User Interviews charges $30/person that it matches with a company for feedback. Research Hub costs starts at $150/month.

“Right now, our greatest challenge is that our clients are the best product people in the world, and we have a huge pipeline of amazing ideas that are very valuable and no one is doing yet that our clients would love,” said CEO and founder Basel Fakhoury. “But we have to build it fast enough.”

No mention of what those forthcoming products might be, but the current iteration sure seems attractive enough. User Interviews clients include Eventbrite, Glassdoor, AT&T, DirecTV, Lola, LogMeIn, Thumbtack, Casper, ClassPass, Fandango, NNG, Pinterest, Pandora, Colgate, Uber and REI, to name a few.

https://ift.tt/2TJQz7E User Interviews, a platform for product feedback, raises $5 million https://ift.tt/2FL533G

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Lyft’s IPO, Casper the friendly unicorn and WeWork’s staggering losses

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week we had the full gang around, with Connie Loizos in the studio with Kate Clark and our guest Barrett Cohn from Scenic Advisement. Alex was on the line from Providence.

Lucky for us, news of Lyft’s IPO pricing broke right before we hit record. That shook things up a bit, but it was far better to have it break as we were getting our notes together rather than after we kicked off. Let’s start there.

Lyft is going out at $72 per share, the top-end of its boosted range. The firms fully diluted $24 billion valuation (give or take) will be supported by around $2.4 billion in new capital, giving Lyft fresh runway to continue its expensive growth strategy.

Next, we turned to podcast industry stalwart Casper. Fret not podcast fans, the D2C mattress company has $100 million more in the bank, a fresh $1.1 billion valuation and IPO plans on the horizon. That’s a pretty parcel of news, which means it should be a full-charge ahead for the newly minted unicorn.

We also discuss newly leaked Casper financials. The company, like most unicorns, is still losing money but its swelling annual revenues point to a profitable future.

From unicorn to unicorn to unicorn, we moved on to WeWork. WeWork, now known by its stage name The We Company, reported its 2018 financial performance this week and the results were amazing, twice. Amazing first in terms of growth, with revenue spiking from $886 million in 2017 to $1.8 billion in 2018. And amazing again in terms of cost, as WeWork’s net loss shot from $933 million in 2017 to $1.9 billion in 2018.

We had a chat about precisely what the firm is, with our guest arguing that WeWork isn’t a tech company at all, it’s a real estate business. We aren’t sure what the future holds for WeWork but we’re glad to have a front-row seat to the Adam Neaumann show.

Finally, investors are once again in trouble. This time the venture community is taking stripes for landing in the college admissions cheating scandal. As if we still thought this country was a meritocracy.

Regardless, your friends at Equity are glad to see you. And we’ll be back before you miss us!

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Lyft’s IPO, Casper the friendly unicorn and WeWork’s staggering losses https://ift.tt/2UkIASU

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Facebook’s handling of Alex Jones is a microcosm of its content policy problem

A revealing cluster of emails leaked to Business Insider offers a glimpse at how Facebook decides what content is objectionable in high profile cases. In this instance, a group of executives at Facebook went hands on in determining if an Alex Jones Instagram post violated the platform’s terms of service or not.

As Business Insider reports, 20 Facebook and Instagram executives hashed it out over the Jones post, which depicted a mural known as “False Profits” by the artist Mear One. Facebook began debating the post after it was flagged by Business Insider for kicking up anti semitic comments on Wednesday.

The company removed 23 of 500 comments on the post that it interpreted to be in clear violation of Facebook policy. Later in the conversation, some of the UK-based Instagram and Facebook executives on the email provided more context for their US-based peers.

Last year, a controversy over the same painting erupted when British politician Jeremy Corbyn argued in support of the mural’s creator after the art was removed from a wall in East London due what many believed to be antisemitic overtones. Because of that, the image and its context are likely better known in the UK, a fact that came up in Facebook’s discussion over how to handle the Jones post.

“This image is widely acknowledged to be anti-Semitic and is a famous image in the UK due to public controversy around it,” one executive said. “If we go back and say it does not violate we will be in for a lot criticism.”

Ultimately, after some back and forth, the post was removed.

According to the emails, Alex Jones’ Instagram account “does not currently violate [the rules]” as “an IG account has to have at least 30% of content violating at any given time as per our regular guidelines.” That fact might prove puzzling once you know that Alex Jones got his main account booted off Facebook itself in 2018 — and the company did another sweep for Jones-linked pages last month.

Whether you agree with Facebook’s content moderation decisions or not, it’s impossible to argue that they are consistently enforced. In the latest example, the company argued over a single depiction of a controversial image even as the same image is literally for sale by the artist elsewhere on both on Instagram and Facebook. (As any Facebook reporter can attest, these inconsistencies will probably be resolved shortly after this story goes live.)

The artist himself sells its likeness on a t-shirt on both Instagram and Facebook and numerous depictions of the same image appear on various hashtags. And even after the post was taken down, Jones displayed it prominently in his Instagram story, declaring that the image “is just about monopoly men and the class struggle” and decrying Facebook’s “crazy-level censorship.”

It’s clear that even as Facebook attempts to make strides, its approach to content moderation remains reactive, haphazard and probably too deeply preoccupied with public perception. Some cases of controversial content are escalated all the way to the top while others languish, undetected. Where the line is drawn isn’t particularly clear. And even when high profile violations are determined, it’s not apparent that those case studies meaningfully trickle down clarify smaller, everyday decisions by content moderators on Facebook’s lower rungs.

As always, the squeaky wheel gets the grease — but two billion users and reactive rather than proactive policy enforcement means that there’s an endless sea of ungreased wheels drifting around. This problem isn’t unique to Facebook, but given its scope, it does make the biggest case study in what can go wrong when a platform scales wildly with little regard for the consequences.

Unfortunately for Facebook, it’s yet another lose-lose situation of its own making. During its intense, extended growth spurt, Facebook allowed all kinds of potentially controversial and dangerous content to flourish for years. Now, when the company abruptly cracks down on accounts that violate its longstanding policies forbidding hate speech, divisive figures like Alex Jones can cry censorship, roiling hundreds of thousands of followers in the process.

Like other tech companies, Facebook is now paying mightily for the worry-free years it enjoyed before coming under intense scrutiny for the toxic side effects of all that growth. And until Facebook develops a more uniform interpretation of its own community standards — one the company enforces from the bottom up rather than the top down — it’s going to keep taking heat on all sides.

Facebook has removed 4 Infowars pages — but not because of fake news

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2FGarVq Facebook’s handling of Alex Jones is a microcosm of its content policy problem Taylor Hatmaker https://ift.tt/2V3TKZg
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