by tyler | Feb 5, 2024 | Pulse
A misleading seven second clip of President Biden could reshape Facebook’s misinformation policies ahead of the 2024 election, but the platform — and the American electorate — are running out of time.
The Oversight Board , the external advisory group that Meta created to review its moderation decisions on Facebook and Instagram, issued a decision on Monday concerning a doctored video of Biden that made the rounds on social media last year.
The original video showed the president accompanying his granddaughter Natalie Biden to cast her ballot during early voting in the 2022 midterm elections. In the video, President Biden pins an “I Voted” sticker on his granddaughter and kisses her on the cheek.
A short, edited version of the video removes visual evidence of the sticker, setting the clip to a song with sexual lyrics and looping it to depict Biden inappropriately touching the young woman. The seven second clip was uploaded to Facebook in May 2023 with a caption describing Biden as a “sick pedophile.”
Meta’s Oversight Board announced that it would take on the case last October after a Facebook user reported the video and ultimately escalated the case when the platform declined to remove it.
In its decision, issued Monday, the Oversight Board states that Meta’s choice to leave the video online was consistent with the platform’s rules, but calls the relevant policy “incoherent.”
“As it stands, the policy makes little sense,” Oversight Board Co-Chair Michael McConnell said. “It bans altered videos that show people saying things they do not say, but does not prohibit posts depicting an individual doing something they did not do. It only applies to video created through AI, but lets other fake content off the hook.”
McConnell also pointed to the policy’s failure to address manipulated audio, calling it “one of the most potent forms of electoral disinformation.”
The Oversight Board’s decision argues that instead of focusing on how a particular piece of content was created, Meta’s rules should be guided by the harms they are designed to prevent. Any changes should be implemented “urgently” in light of global elections, according to the decision.
Beyond expanding its manipulated media policy , the Oversight Board suggested that Meta add labels to altered videos flagging them as such instead of relying on content takedowns initiated by fact-checkers, a process the group criticizes as “asymmetric depending on language and market .”
By labeling more content rather than taking it down, the Oversight Board believes that Meta can maximize freedom of expression, mitigate potential harm and provide more context and information for users.
In a statement to TechCrunch, a Meta spokesperson confirmed that the company is “reviewing the Oversight Board’s guidance” and will issue a public response within 60 days.
The altered video continues to circulate on X, formerly Twitter. Last month, a verified X account with 267,000 followers shared the clip with the caption “The media just pretend this isn’t happening.” The video has more than 611,000 views.
The Biden video isn’t the first time that the Oversight Board has ultimately told Meta to go back to the drawing board for its policies. When the group weighed in on Facebook’s decision to ban former President Trump, it decried the “vague, standardless” nature of the indefinite punishment while agreeing with the choice to suspend his account. The Oversight Board has generally urged Meta to provide more detail and transparency in its policies, across cases.
As the Oversight Board noted when it accepted the Biden “cheap fake” case, Meta stood by its decision to leave the altered video online because its policy on manipulated media — misleadingly altered photos and videos — only applies when AI is used or when the subject of a video is portrayed saying something they didn’t say.
The manipulated media policy, designed with deepfakes in mind, applies only to “videos that have been edited or synthesized… in ways that are not apparent to an average person, and would likely mislead an average person to believe.”
Critics of Meta’s content moderation process have dismissed Meta’s self-designed review board as too little, far too late .
Meta may have a standardized content moderation review system in place now, but misinformation and other dangerous content move more quickly than that appeals process — and much more quickly than the world could have imagined just two general election cycles ago.
Researchers and watchdog groups are bracing for an onslaught of misleading claims and AI-generated fakes as the 2024 presidential race ramps up. But even as new technologies enable dangerous falsehoods to scale , social media companies have quietly slashed their investments in trust and safety and turned away from what once appeared to be a concerted effort to stamp out misinformation.
“The volume of misleading content is rising, and the quality of tools to create it is rapidly increasing,” McConnell said.
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by tyler | Jan 17, 2024 | Pulse
General Motors is recalling around 66 electric delivery vans made by its BrightDrop subsidiary after the front drive units in at least two of them caught fire late last year.
The automaker says it’s still investigating the root cause of the fires, but believes a manufacturing defect may have caused the drive pinion to pierce the drive unit casing, creating an oil leak that could catch fire during heavy use. GM says in paperwork filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that it believes the defect was limited to its larger EV600 vehicles built between November 24, 2021 and May 24, 2022.
Companies including FedEx and Walmart have taken delivery of the EV600. The recall doesn’t affect BrightDrop’s smaller EV400 vans. GM shipped 497 BrightDrop vans in total in 2023.
The recall comes just a few months after GM re-absorbed BrightDrop in an attempt to streamline its electric commercial vehicle efforts . BrightDrop initially launched in 2021 when GM spun it out of its Global Innovation organization.
“The safety of our products is the highest priority for the entire GM team, and we’re working to quickly remedy this matter for our customers,” the company said in a statement to TechCrunch.
GM received a report of a fire in the front drive unit of a BrightDrop EV600 on December 7, and another one on December 13, according to the paperwork filed with NHTSA. The company opened an investigation into the fires on December 22 and decided to conduct a recall on January 4. Both affected vehicles were owned by an undisclosed GM fleet customer.
This is the third recall for BrightDrop vehicles. The EV600 was previously recalled in late 2022 after the company discovered a problem with the water seal on the van’s high-voltage battery pack. It faced another recall in October when GM discovered an issue with one of the van’s airbags.
by tyler | Jan 17, 2024 | Pulse, Tech
Swedish battery startup Northvolt secured a $5 billion debt deal earlier this week, paving the way for the expansion of its first gigafactory as Europe seeks to solidify its home-grown battery manufacturing base .
Northvolt is hoping to become a rare success story in the industry: a battery manufacturing startup that survives. If the company manages to deliver on its plans, it’ll catapult itself and the continent into the top ranks of battery producers.
It’s not an easy path. Outside of China, none of the major battery producers are startups; they’re either spinoffs or subsidiaries of existing industrial juggernauts. Even China’s leading battery companies, CATL and BYD, are related to existing manufacturers, and all of them have benefited from generous state subsidies and industrial policies.
Northvolt’s $5 billion loan won’t be enough to guarantee success, but it should be enough to help ramp up its production to a targeted 60 gigawatt hours, enough for over 1 million Volkswagen ID.3s, Europe’s best-selling, non-Tesla EV. The company said it has offtake contracts totaling over $55 billion with automakers, including BMW, Volkswagen, Volvo and Scania.
Over 300 gigafactories will make tomorrow’s EVs. We mapped them all
The new loan includes the refinancing of an existing $1.6 billion debt facility from 2020. Northvolt said the debt package was provided by the European Investment Bank and the Nordic Investment Bank. JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and BNP Paribas also provided a portion of the financing, the Wall Street Journal reported .
Northvolt is also building factories in Germany and Montreal, the latter of which is meant to attract production tax credits in the U.S., offered by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
by tyler | Dec 18, 2023 | Pulse, Tech
I think most people would agree that 2023 was a challenging time to be a startup. There were lots of layoffs as companies struggled to make the transition from growth to profitability . Meanwhile, sales cycles were longer and many startups struggled to grow at a decent pace.
As we start to see the economic signals improve a bit with inflation letting up , the cost of money dropping, and most currency headwinds decreasing, you would think that 2024 might be shaping up to be a better year.
Not necessarily.
We are in a new era, one where money won’t flow so freely, and according to the experts we spoke to, we won’t see a bounce-back again anytime soon. This means that startups that aren’t well capitalized right now could continue to struggle in 2024, and the flipping of the calendar isn’t going to change that.
What does it all mean for startups entering 2024? It means they have to prove their worth more than ever. It means they need enough cash to ride out long sales cycles. It means they have to fight for their piece of enterprise budgets, and that, possibly, 2024 could look a lot like 2023.
A good starting point for budget discussions is what the proposed budget looks like. Analyst firms like IDC and Gartner predict IT spending each year, although they generally adjust throughout the year as the reality becomes clear.
IDC is predicting 6.8% growth, which is up from 5% last year. This number looks at hardware, software and services but excludes any telecom spending. Meanwhile, Gartner is predicting a bit higher at 8.2%.
The overall upward trend has to be good news for startups, which are looking to enterprise buyers to lift their businesses. But John-David Lovelock, a Gartner analyst who looks at IT budgets, says while 2023 was a year of getting more efficient, that doesn’t mean that just ends with the new year.
by tyler | Nov 21, 2023 | Pulse, Tech
It’s been an eventful week for crypto exchanges and the U.S. government.
Changpeng Zhao, also known as “CZ,” the founder and CEO of Binance, is stepping down and has pleaded guilty to a number of violations brought on through the Department of Justice and other U.S. agencies. He’s expected to appear in a Seattle federal court on Tuesday afternoon to enter his plea.
Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, has also agreed to pay about $4.3 billion to resolve the DOJ’s investigations, the agency said in a press release on Tuesday.
As a part of Binance’s guilty plea, it has also reached agreements with the Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and will credit about $1.8 billion toward those resolutions.
The crypto exchange “admits it engaged in anti-money laundering, unlicensed money transmitting and sanctions violations,” the DOJ release stated, calling it the “largest corporate resolution” that included criminal charges for an executive. Zhao pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an anti-money laundering program.
“The message here should be clear: using new technology to break the law does not make you a disruptor, it makes you a criminal,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
Binance, Zhao and other related parties “knowingly failed to register as a money services business” and violated the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to implement an anti-money laundering program, a filing on the charges stated. It added that the respective parties allegedly violated U.S. economic sanctions “in a deliberate and calculated effort to profit from the U.S. market,” without following U.S. laws.
The crypto exchange collected about $1.35 billion in trading fees from U.S. customers, according to Chairman Rostin Behnam of the CFTC. According to court documents, Zhao told Binance employees it was “better to ask for forgiveness than permission” and prioritized the exchange’s growth there over complying with U.S. law.
“Any institution, wherever located, that wants to reap the benefits of the U.S. financial system must also play by the rules that keep us all safe from terrorists, foreign adversaries, and crime or face the consequences,” Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen said in the release.
Under Zhao’s plea agreement, he will agree to the recommendation that the court impose a $50 million fine to the CFTC and won’t make any statements “contradicting his acceptance of responsibility,” according to a separate filing from Monday.
As for Binance’s plea agreement, the company will accept the resignation of Zhao and prohibit him “from any present or future involvement in operating” the business from the beginning of the plea acceptance and “ends three years from the date a monitor is appointed,” the Monday filing stated. The company will also “maintain and enhance” its compliance program and appoint an independent compliance monitor during that three year period.
The crypto exchange did not respond to multiple requests for comment from TechCrunch on the charges.
Binance launched in June 2017 and within 180 days became the largest crypto exchange in the world. It had over $12.65 billion in trading volume during the past 24-hours, 532% higher than $2 billion in trading volume from the second largest crypto exchange, Coinbase, according to CoinMarketCap data .
This comes less than a day after the SEC charged Kraken , the third largest crypto exchange by trading volume, with allegedly operating as an “unregistered securities exchange, broker, dealer and clearing agency.”
Separately, in February, Kraken agreed to end crypto staking services for U.S. clients and settled a past suit with the SEC after agreeing to pay $30 million in charges for “disgorgement, prejudgment interest and civil penalties.”
The DOJ charges against Binance come over five months after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accused the exchange and Zhao of lying to regulators about its operations, filing 13 charges against the defendants in the federal case . Zhao and Binance were allegedly “intimately involved” in directing the trading entity’s business operations and providing crypto-related services to the Binance.US platform, which claims it’s an independent exchange in the SEC filing.
In late March the U.S. CFTC also filed a suit against Binance, Zhao and its Chief Compliance Officer Samuel Lim for allegedly breaking trading and derivatives rules.
Binance has made headlines this past year for a range of reasons, including Zhao’s comments contributing to the collapse of FTX , which was once one of its top competitors. In April, Binance.US, its American sister company, broke off its $1.3 billion deal to buy crypto broker Voyager Digital’s assets due to a “hostile and uncertain regulatory climate.”
In August, Checkout.com cut ties with Binance over concerns about the crypto firm’s alleged issues with anti-money laundering, sanctions and compliance controls. At the time, Binance’s spokesperson said it does not agree with “Checkout’s purported basis for termination and are considering our options for legal action.”
The article has been updated to reflect the latest developments on charges against Binance and Zhao.
by tyler | Nov 20, 2023 | Pulse, Tech
Even before major brands like Apple, Disney, and IBM paused their ad spending on X in the wake of Elon Musk’s endorsement of an antisemitic post, the company formerly known as Twitter had seen its revenues severely impacted by brand safety concerns. According to an October forecast from Insider Intelligence, X ad’s business was on track for a 54.4% year-over-year decline in worldwide ad spending, from 2022 to 2023. With the additional advertiser pull-outs, that decline may be even more significant, analysts now believe.
X is facing a potential loss of sizable ad spend, as a number of advertisers have paused or stopped their ad campaigns on X after owner Elon Musk amplified antisemitic conspiracy theories on the platform. Among the brands who have since stopped advertising on X are Apple, Comcast/NBCU, Disney, Warner Bros., IBM, Paramount, Lionsgate, and the European Commission.
Though X has still proven itself as the hub for fast-breaking news — as this weekend’s OpenAI drama proved — the nature of its business is still dependent on advertising, which makes up the majority of its revenue. As Twitter, ads accounted for roughly 90% of company revenue, with API licensing fees and subscriptions also contributing to the company’s bottom line. But Musk’s plan to beef up X’s subscription plan with a new set of features, including paid verification, has not been proven successful enough to weather a large advertiser departure in the long run. That doesn’t necessarily mean X will shut down — it’s owned and operated by a billionaire, after all — it just means it will need new sources of funding at some point.
Warns Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg, the latest advertiser departures could now prompt a further exodus.
“The damage to X’s ad business will be severe,” she predicts. “A big-name advertiser exodus will inspire other advertisers to follow suit, and there is already likely a long tail of less vocal advertisers that have pulled spending.”
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While brands generally understand the risk of running ads against user-generated content, they don’t typically find themselves in a situation quite like this, she also points out.
“Advertisers are accustomed to dealing with brand safety concerns on social media, particularly during periods of political and social tension or war. But they’re not accustomed to a platform’s owner amplifying misinformation and hate speech, and emboldening conspiracy theorists,” Enberg notes. “The impact of Musk’s words poses a major societal danger. Twitter’s influence has always been larger than its user base and ad revenues, and while the platform’s cultural relevance has declined, Musk and X are still very much a major part of public conversation,” she adds.
The complaints against Musk arrive alongside a report from Media Matters , which showed how ads were appearing alongside posts praising Nazi ideology. An executive at X, Joe Benarroch, pushed back at Media Matters’ reporting, however.
Benarroch, who joined X from NBCU shortly after CEO Linda Yaccariono has, at times, acted as a company spokesperson as Musk’s earlier layoffs wiped out the company’s comms department. He claimed in a post on X that Media Matters used 3 accounts and then constantly refreshed the timeline of posts to see 13x the number of ads served, compared with the median. In other words, he’s saying that a typical user wouldn’t have the same experience with regard to ad placement.
Media Matters created 3 accounts and followed 30 accounts similar to the ones in the article. They then constantly refreshed the timeline of posts (13X the number of ads served to this user as opposed to the median.) 50 impressions served agains the the content in the article,…
— Joe Benarroch (@benarroch_joe) November 18, 2023
Still, X was on a downward path even before these recent debacles. Ahead of this, X’s ad revenues were already forecast to decline by 54.4% from 2022 to 2023 — a sizable drop for the platform that Musk has now run for roughly one year so far. And Musk himself said in September that U.S. ad revenues were then down by 60%, citing pressure from the Anti-Defamation League which accused the owner of antisemitism. (Musk, in turn, threatened to sue the ADL ).
Insider Intelligence’s figures are in that same ballpark — its forecast predicts that X’s U.S. advertising revenues were expected to be down by nearly 55% year-over-year, and 54.4% worldwide. And this, we should note, was calculated before these latest advertiser departures.
The analysts also estimated that X’s monthly active users will have dropped by 4.1% to 348.6 million by year-end 2024, down from 363.7 million in 2023, and a high of 373.6 million in 2022. (Musk took over Twitter in late October 2022. ) U.S. users are forecast to decline as well, the firm predicts — down to 51.6 million by 2024, a decline of 8.1% from 56.1 million in 2023, and a high of 58.9 million in 2022.
Enberg additionally suggests that Yaccarino’s efforts to assure advertisers of X’s brand safety efforts will not work, given she’s being undermined by Elon Musk himself. Forbes recently reported that top advertising executives have been pressuring Yaccarino to resign, suggesting her own reputation is now at risk as a result of Musk’s actions. So far, those requests have fallen on deaf ears, it seems, as Yaccarino has been posting on X in support of free speech and the company’s vision.
“What we’re doing at X matters and has everyone’s attention. I believe deeply in our vision, our team, and our community,” she wrote in a post on X on Monday morning. “I’m also deeply committed to the truth and there is no other team on earth working as hard as the teams at X. When you’re this consequential, there will be detractors and fabricated distractions, but we’re unwavering in our mission,” the post read.
Insider Intelligence has not yet calculated the impact of the recent advertiser departures into its forecast, but says it will do so in its next update.
