Content creators often go uncredited on Instagram. That's about to change. – Protocol
A new feature will help creators get credit for their work.
Instagram is rolling out more features to attract creators.
Instagram announced a new feature Tuesday which will allow creators to tag their specific contributions to a project. Now, when a creator is tagged, the post’s author can designate whether they are a “stylist,” “photographer” or “model,” for example.
The new feature “gives us an opportunity to be seen easier,” Los Angeles-based creator Jordan Rock told Protocol.
The new feature comes as several social media companies have made additional concessions to creators, who drive engagement to their respective platforms. Instagram also recently launched overlay ads for Reels and began testing out paid creator subscriptions, while Twitch is also trying to get creators paid on a more consistent basis. And sure, YouTube isn’t desperate, but it’s offering as many opportunities to monetize content as it possibly can to keep in viral stars’ good graces.
Instagram’s new tag ostensibly solves a growing problem that occurs when several content creators contribute to a single post. In a blog post explaining the feature, Instagram says it was designed to elevate Black creators, who have called out the platform for the way it popularized trends they are responsible for without proper credit.
That’s certainly a real problem — social media platforms are where trends or slang first popularized by Black communities tend to become mainstream (remember “Bye, Felicia?”). But Rock told Protocol that it’s rare he’s tagged in a post, and it’s unclear what he contributed.
“There isn’t much click-through in general,” he said.
The feature will more likely come in handy for high-profile photographers, stylists and producers, who often find themselves one of a handful of handles tagged on a post. Excerpts from celebrity photoshoots, movie posters and brand launches often have several contributors tagged, for example, with little information as to who was responsible for which task.
As of Tuesday morning, the new feature is already live for most creators. After tagging, click “show profile category” to add the label.
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Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol, covering breaking news. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.
The Army Corps of Engineers has closed its review of SpaceX’s planned expansion in Boca Chica, Texas, because the company failed to provide environmental documentation about how the Starbase site growth could affect the surrounding ecology and wildlife.
Bloomberg first reported the Army Corps’ letter to SpaceX detailing the missing documentation, which should have included information on how the planned expansion in South Texas would affect the complex and rare combination of coastal flats and wetlands that surround the planned growth area. The Army Corps cannot approve the company’s planned growth until it submits those documents.
The local residents of Cameron County, Texas, have been sharply divided over the SpaceX facility’s growth and Elon Musk’s plans to build and launch the Starship spacecraft to Mars from that location eventually, in part because of the way the facility could threaten the environment and beaches. Musk’s facility has grown rapidly over the last five years, and Musk reportedly spends about half of his time living in the surrounding area.
SpaceX rocket launches and booster tests have sometimes exploded over the wetlands and coastal mudflats, and environmental researchers in the area told Protocol last year that they are especially concerned about the effects on some rare bird species in the Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge, adjacent to the Starbase facility. Locals also told Protocol last year that they feel that Musk’s wealth and power have made it impossible for people to challenge the company’s decisions to close roads to the beaches; though the company has an agreement that gives them a right to a certain number of road closures per year, the roads have been closed for far more hours each year than previously agreed upon.
The Federal Aviation Administration is also preparing a final environmental impact report for the planned Starship and Super Heavy rocket and booster launches and has pushed backed the report’s planned release date several times over the last year. The current planned release date is April 29, and that report will determine whether or not SpaceX must take additional steps to mitigate the potential environmental consequences of the Starship launches.
SpaceX did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Berkshire Hathaway just bought a huge stake in HP. Warren Buffett’s investment firm took a roughly 11% stake in the company, which is worth about $4.2 billion based on the stock’s closing price at market close on Wednesday.
Berkshire’s stake makes it the largest shareholder in the personal computing and printing company. Shares of HP jumped more than 15% in premarket trading Thursday morning, according to CNBC.
“Berkshire Hathaway is one of the world’s most respected investors and we welcome them as an investor in HP Inc,” an HP spokesperson told Yahoo Finance.
Berkshire’s latest grab is its third large investment since late February. In mid-March, the firm bought a large stake — about 14.6% — in Occidental Petroleum. The firm also bought insurance company Alleghany Corp for $11.6 billion late last month. Prior to Alleghany, Buffett hadn’t followed through with a large acquisition in about six years, Reuters pointed out.
Berkshire has taken a fairly conservative approach to investing in tech in the past, with the notable exception being its stake in Apple. Evercore ISI tech analyst Amit Daryanani said Berkshire’s investment shows that HP is still a valuable company. “We view Berkshire buying HPQ shares as a positive that validates HPQ’s strategy/deep value,” Daryanani wrote in a note.
HP sees the future of work as hybrid. The company announced plans to buy office headset-maker Poly in late March, and it purchased remote computing software firm Teradici last year.
NASA isn’t just staring off into space. It’s also looking down on Earth and tracking how it’s changing.
The agency announced two new climate research projects on Tuesday, one looking at the Earth’s forest biomass and the carbon it stores, and another monitoring groundwater loss. Together, they’ll help us get a handle on how climate change is reshaping the planet — and how the world’s natural resources could help in our effort to stave off the worst impacts.
The project tracking biomass, part of the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation, will allow researchers to discover how Earth’s forests are changing, what role forests play in fighting climate change and the impacts of deforestation both regionally and globally. To do that, NASA is using technology aboard the International Space Station known as lidar, which uses lasers to capture the trees, plants and shrubs in stunning 3D detail. (Yes, from space.) The lidar data along with advanced modeling will be among the most granular estimates of biomass ever created.
Knowing how much carbon is stored in forests will allow scientists to predict how much will be released by deforestation and wildfires. Extremey large and destructive wildfires have become increasingly common in the western U.S. due to rising temperatures and increasing drought while fire is commonly used to clear land in the tropics. Climate change has also exacted a toll in other ways on forests, including drying out the Amazon. That could be turning one of the world’s largest carbon sinks into a net emitter, speeding up the climate crisis even further.
In short, as the forests go, so goes the planet. Getting a grip on how they’re doing and what areas are huge stores of carbon could help policymakers better target areas for protection.
Meanwhile, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced a new method of tracking groundwater loss, an increasingly precious resource. The research team, which includes scientists at JPL and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, studied California’s Tulare Basin using satellite data from NASA and the European Space Agency. There, they explored at changes in ground height as well as small changes in gravity itself, which can shift locally due to groundwater withdrawals.
The researchers created a monthly look at groundwater and ground-level changes, showing that certain types of aquifers are more impacted by water withdrawal than others. The team chronicled the results in a study in Scientific Reports published last month. While the findings are specific to the Tulare Basin, they serve as a proof of concept for using the same techniques in other regions where groundwater used for agriculture and other purposes.
Stretching the results across all of California’s Central Valley — where the Tulare Basin is located — could be a huge boon. The region produced more than $49 billion in agricultural products in 2020, largely by relying on groundwater to keep thirsty crops like almonds in rotation. Managing groundwater more intelligently there and in other places that lean on it for irrigation could help save money and conserve natural resources. The need is particularly acute given that climate change is sapping surface water resources; California and other parts of the groundwater-dependent Southwest are in their worst drought in at least 1,200 years.
Pinterest is taking a stand against climate change misinformation, as it did with COVID-19 vaccine myths. And while Pinterest isn’t really the first platform anyone thinks of when it comes to the spread of fake climate news, its stance could push other social media companies to be more aggressive.
The platform announced Wednesday that it’s taking down false and misleading information related to climate change and conspiracy theories in both content and ads. That includes content that rejects the existence of climate change, the human influence on global warming and information that contradicts scientific consensus on the matter. Pinterest will also remove “harmful, false or misleading” content about public safety crises like extreme weather events.
Sarah Bromma, Pinterest’s head of Policy, said the new policy expands on its current rules against public health misinformation, which were set in 2017.
“The expanded climate misinformation policy is yet another step in Pinterest’s journey to combat misinformation and create a safe space online,” Bromma said in a statement announcing the change.
Pinterest is the first big tech platform to take such a stance on climate change misinformation. The platform said the new policy comes as more people search for ways to lead a greener life, like “zero waste tips” and “recycling clothes ideas.” If searches to lead a greener life are escalating on Pinterest, they are surely rising elsewhere, too. Google reported that the world collectively increased its searches on the impact of climate change last year, if that’s any indication of how big the issue has become.
Other platforms haven’t taken as strong of a stance against the spread of climate change misinformation. Meta-owned Facebook pledged to place labels on posts about climate change, but a recent report found that the platform fell short of its goals. The company has also praised its Climate Science Center to connect people with credible information about climate change, but few even know about it. Google stopped showing ads on YouTube that include false claims about climate change, but it hasn’t explicitly banned content containing climate change misinformation. And even that effort hasn’t stopped people from running ads questioning climate change.
Unlike other platforms, Pinterest’s policy addresses both ads and content. The company is also working with the Climate Disinformation Coalition and the Conscious Advertising Network to help detect misinformation on various platforms, Pinterest said.
Twitter giveth, and Twitter taketh away. The company is testing an edit button, but it’s also wiping out embedded tweets if they’ve been deleted. The clear answer: Screenshot everything.
Now, if a third-party website embeds a tweet that ends up getting deleted after it’s shared, users will see a blank box with grey lines and a button that says “explore what’s happening on Twitter.” Before today, the original unformatted text would show up.
The change was first detailed by Twitter user Kevin Marks last week, and Twitter Senior Product Manager Eleanor Harding later responded that the change was to “better respect when people have chosen to delete their tweets.” The tweets of users who have had their accounts suspended also no longer show up when embedded.
Harding said that Twitter will soon release “better messaging that explains why the content is no longer available.” Twitter did not immediately respond to request for comment from Protocol. The change creates a problem for websites, including news outlets, that rely on embedded tweets to provide context for stories. It also makes it possible for public figures to erase newsworthy statements as if they never happened.
The change follows a week of wild news from Twitter. After joking that it was working on a long-awaited edit button on April Fools’ Day, the company announced Tuesday that it actually had plans for an edit button in the works. “People want to be able to fix (sometimes embarrassing) mistakes, typos and hot takes in the moment,” tweeted Jay Sullivan, Twitter’s head of Consumer Product. Twitter also welcomed Elon Musk to its board of directors this week, following his purchase of more than 9% of the company — a decision which may signal big upcoming changes to the way the platform works. Musk is a self-described “free speech absolutist” who wants Twitter to open-source its algorithm.
Google has booted dozens of Android apps from the Google Play store after finding the apps included a line of code that was discreetly harvesting user data.
According to the Wall Street Journal, some of the now-banned apps were Muslim prayer apps downloaded more than 10 million times. A popular highway speed trap detection app and a QR-code-reading app were also found to include the data-scraping code. Researchers reportedly linked the Panamanian company responsible for the code to a Virginia-based company that works with U.S. national security agencies.
The line of code, part of an SDK developed by Measurement Systems S. De R.L., was found to be collecting rich data including precise location information, email and phone numbers, nearby devices and passwords when users used a “cut and paste” feature. It could also scan for WhatsApp downloads, according to researchers. The company did not encrypt or otherwise obfuscate personal identifiers, which may violate data privacy laws.
Google banned the apps on March 25, spokesperson Scott Westover told the Wall Street Journal, and is allowing apps to return to the Google Play store once they’ve deleted the code. Several are already back online and available for purchase.
Two researchers, Serge Egelman from the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley and Joel Reardon of the University of Calgary, first discovered the SDK and published their findings in a report Wednesday. The report was shared in advance of publication with the Wall Street Journal, Alphabet and the Federal Trade Commission.
The researchers also found that Measurement Systems is tied to Virginia-based Vostrom Holdings Inc., whose Packet Forensics LLC subsidiary works with the federal government on cyberintelligence.
In 2020, Motherboard reported that the U.S. government had purchased precise location data collected through several apps, including Muslim Pro. The ACLU later filed for three years of data purchased by the U.S. government, calling its data collection efforts “a serious threat to privacy and religious freedom.” Lingering fears that Muslims are targeted for data collection still remain, particularly in light of documented surveillance of Muslims by the U.S. government following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The U.S. Defense Department declined to discuss specifics to the Journal, though it has reportedly admitted previously that it purchases publicly available data for the purposes of national security.
Correction: This story was updated to correct the spelling of Vostrom Holdings Inc. This story was updated April 6, 2022.
Big banks are considering bringing Zelle to retail, positioning them for a big brawl with Visa and Mastercard.
Some of the banks that own Zelle operator Early Warning want to make it a payment option at retailers, competing directly with Visa and Mastercard, according to the Wall Street Journal. But others don’t want to make that move and instead want to keep Early Warning focused on fraud prevention.
Al Ko, the CEO of Early Warning, told Protocol in February that Zelle doesn’t compete with other payment methods or apps at present. The money transfer and payment service saw strong growth during the pandemic to 1.8 billion payments in 2021, up 49% from 2020. But that pales against the more than 300 billion transactions Visa and Mastercard did, and while Zelle has made some progress in getting people to use it for business payments, it’s still mostly used for person-to-person money transfers.
One complication is that while Visa and Mastercard get a cut of transactions they process, those fees, known as interchange, are split with the banks that issue cards and the banks that help merchants receive payments.
Interchange fees have been a valuable source of income for many fintech companies, prompting many to issue Visa or Mastercard debit cards to their customers to spend balances held in spending, payment or brokerage accounts.
The success of Alipay and WeChat Pay in China have led many financial institutions to revisit the idea of direct bank-account payments. Zelle recently introduced QR code payments, a key feature that helped Chinese payment apps gain popularity, but the Zelle feature is still being rolled out across its bank and credit union customer base.
Among the many strange things about Elon Musk’s revelation of his large stake in Twitter, there was the particular form he used to reveal it. Buckle up: We’re about to dive deep into the wonderful world of SEC filings.
Musk disclosed his stake in a Schedule 13G filing Monday, used by investors who are taking a passive stake in a company, which means he didn’t plan to seek control of the company or influence its policies. That was promptly contradicted by Twitter’s announcement that it planned to name Musk to the board, as well as his barrage of tweets in March where he, well, sought to influence Twitter’s policies.
The SEC website, like Twitter at present, lacks an edit button, so Musk filed a new, different form, a Schedule 13D. Since Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal admitted Twitter and Musk had been having conversations about him joining the board for weeks, it’s likely he should have filed that form in the first place.
He also should have filed on March 24, his new filing shows. That’s 10 days after the date at which his holdings exceeded the 5% threshold that requires disclosure, as SEC rules require.
Musk’s new filing also gives us an idea of how much Twitter investors lost by selling to Musk without knowing of his intentions. Traders sent shares soaring Monday, suggesting investors view a Twitter partially owned by Musk as more valuable. Musk paid $2.6 billion for his shares, which are now worth $3.8 billion. A quick calculation shows that investors who sold him shares between $38.20 and $40.30 between March 24 and April 1 missed out on $165 million, assuming shares would have jumped similarly in price had Musk made his filing on time.
Musk would have still profited massively from his acquisition had he made the disclosure on time.
By March 24, Musk had acquired a 7.5% stake in Twitter. He increased his stake to 9.1% by the time of his late filing. He also agreed not to buy more than 14.9% of the company’s shares, according to the filing, in exchange for taking a board seat. “Any future acquisitions of Common Stock will be subject to the Company’s policies, including its insider trading policy, as applicable,” the filing stated.
Musk has expressed contempt for the Securities and Exchange Commission, which he has tangled with before. His filing about the Twitter stake discloses, as required, that he reached a settlement with the SEC about earlier charges of securities fraud which revolved around — wouldn’t you know it? — a tweet.
Eight days ago, over $625 million worth of ether and USDC was stolen in an exploit of the Ronin sidechain used for the popular play-to-earn game Axie Infinity. Now the game’s studio, Sky Mavis, is trying to pay its users back.
Sky Mavis announced Wednesday that it has raised over $150 million in funding, which will be added on to the company’s existing balance sheet to reimburse users for the entire $625 million lost. Binance led the fundraising, its first investment in Sky Mavis. Existing backers a16z, Animoca Brands, Paradigm and Accel also invested in the round.
“All users affected by the Ronin Validator Hack will be reimbursed,” the company said. “While racing for mainstream adoption, we made some trade-offs that ended up leaving us vulnerable to this sort of attack. It’s a lesson we’ve learned the hard way.”
The hackers were able to siphon funds from the Ethereum sidechain when a person was able to compromise a majority of a small number of Sky Mavis’ Ronin validator nodes and Axie DAO validator nodes, Sky Mavis said. The company considered the hack “socially engineered” and is continuing to investigate. The company also said it was working with law enforcement to recover funds.
In the meantime, the gaming studio will increase the number of validators from five to 21 over the next quarter. Binance will also provide Ronin users liquidity so that they can withdraw and deposit ether.
Axie Infinity has about 2.2 million monthly active players. Many of the most committed players rely on the game for significant income and may have been severely impacted by the hack. The game is particularly popular in the Philippines, where users account for about 35% of global traffic. Many there have turned playing the game into a full-time job, and speculators have long feared that a hack could be economically destabilizing to millions of people.
But Sky Mavis still sees play-to-earn as a net good. “We believe that Axie will go down in history as the first game to imbue players with true digital property rights and recent events have only strengthened this conviction,” the company said.
Binance.US, the American arm of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, just raised a whopping $200 million seed round.
It is now valued at $4.5 billion, the company said in a statement. The funding round was led by RRE Ventures, Foundation Capital, Original Capital, VanEck and Circle Ventures.
The funding round quickly sparked speculation that Binance could be gearing up to take the American entity public. The company, which says it’s able to process 1.4 million orders per second, plans to use the funds to boost spot trading and roll out new products and services. It will also be used for marketing and “consumer education initiatives.” In February, the Binance parent company announced a $200 million “strategic investment” in Forbes.
Binance.US CEO Brian Shroder said the company has become profitable after only three years. The company looks to continue growing in the U.S. “from this position of strength, and with an eye toward continuing our rapid ascent alongside the ascent of the crypto industry at large,” he said in a statement.
Binance’s foray into the U.S. market has been controversial. The company is reportedly under investigation by the Justice Department and the IRS over allegations that the exchange has been used for illicit activity. Binance.US is not allowed to operate in five states: Hawaii, Idaho, New York, Texas and Vermont.
Binance.US also has grappled with leadership issues. Shroder was named CEO in September after the abrupt departures of two previous heads.
Brian Brooks quit suddenly in August, citing “differences over strategic direction.”
Predecessor Catherine Coley left in June. Her departure turned into a crypto-world mystery: A well-known figure in industry circles, Coley has not been heard from since she left the company.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Original Capital’s name. This story was updated on April 6, 2022.
A few years ago, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said he wants Uber to be the “Amazon of transportation.” Over the years, that played out with Uber Eats, an Explore page, scooters and more in an effort to get people on the Uber app as often as possible. Now, the company is going a step further with long-distance transportation options.
Uber announced Wednesday that it’s adding trains, buses, planes and car rentals to its U.K. app. The company isn’t offering these services itself; instead, it’ll partner with companies that provide them and build the software integrations needed for people to purchase tickets in its app. If all goes well in the U.K., Uber said it’ll expand to other countries down the line. The announcement comes just after Uber was granted a license to continue operating in London for two and a half years.
The plan builds on Uber’s push to be a super app that offers both short- and long-distance travel options, or as Uber’s U.K. head Jamie Heywood puts it: “a one-stop-shop for all your travel needs.” Heywood said adding trains and other forms of mass transportation is a “natural progression” given that users can already book rides, bikes, boat services and scooters on the app. The company will also let people buy tickets for the Eurostar train, which offers travel from London to other European cities, through the app.
Heywood added that flight integrations will come later this year. After that, Uber is looking into hotel bookings on the app as well.
Currently, Uber focuses on offering local services: rides, scooters, food delivery, airport ride reservations and more. The U.K. pilot will test if users continue to use Uber on a wider scale for longer travel.
You’ve asked for it. I’ve asked for it. Your physical therapist who loves to tweet about Lebron James being washed up has asked for it. And now we’re getting it.
My friends, we’re talking about a Twitter edit button. The social media giant announced (via tweet, of course) on Tuesday that it was going to start testing an edit button with Twitter Blue users soon. But while everyone, including Twitter’s newest board member, has pushed for the ability to edit tweets, we’re about to get a heck of a lot more than we bargained for. The edit button could very well kick Twitter’s worst traits — harassment, hate speech and misinformation — into overdrive.
The innocuous benefits of an edit button are clear. Who doesn’t hate going viral only to discover a dumb typo in their tweet? A nightmare, really. It could also allow journalists and government officials to correct erroneous information in tweets rather than having to issue a threaded correction or deleting what could be — at least in the case of official government accounts — a public record. Good, great.
But the ideal internet is one thing. The internet we actually have is another beast entirely. Twitter has certainly made some efforts to clean up the platform’s biggest sources of misinformation and purveyors of hate speech, booting a number of white nationalists and even former President Donald Trump after he incited a violent attempted coup last January. But the platform has still struggled to contain misinformation during Russia’s war against Ukraine while at the same time temporarily banning accounts helping track Russian actions that could help Ukrainians stay safe. (Twitter said it was a human error.)
Introducing an edit button is a recipe for more chaos to ensue. It’s easy to imagine troll farms working to crank out random viral tweets, only to change the text to propaganda when one actually hits. White nationalists, climate deniers, state actors or just any user looking to mess with people could do the same.
Details are in short supply with how Twitter will implement its edit button. One mitigating factor could be a time limit for editing tweets. It’s also totally possible — likely even — that users will be able to see if a tweet has been edited. But how many will click to see the original text is a totally different story. And even if people do click to see the pre-edit tweet text, they’ll still be exposed to propaganda, hate speech or whatever else someone has decided to change. (Facebook has this option and it’s not like the platform is a paragon of propriety.)
There are also questions about how Twitter’s algorithm will handle edited tweets. Will it make it so they appear in people’s timelines less often post-editing or will it just keep serving it up? Will edited tweets end up in curated moments? Will they appear at the top of trending topics based on the retweets they garnered before being edited? All these questions raise major concerns. Throttling updates to an initially erroneous tweet will slow the spread of good information. But not throttling a tweet changed to include misinformation — say, a climate denial group turning a tweet about cats into one about how sunspots are causing the planet to overheat (they’re not) — will give bad information normally trapped in a small echo chamber a much wider reach.
This matters to users of the platform. The online world is already rife with lies, and adding more to the pile will make our daily existence that much more exhausting trying to discern fact from fiction and be yet another blow to democracy and shared reality. But it could also create a business headache for Twitter. If the edit button brings a new wave of misinformation, it’s an open question of how brands will feel with their tweets — promoted or otherwise — next to a viral tweet about a gas pump with nearly 55,000 retweets that’s been turned into one about, say, anti-vaccine talking points or targeted harassment.
None of this is to say an edit button will be misused, of course. But if the past is any indication…
Jay Sullivan, Twitter’s head of consumer product, said an editing tool has been the most requested Twitter feature for years. “People want to be able to fix (sometimes embarrassing) mistakes, typos and hot takes in the moment,” Sullivan tweeted, adding that people usually delete their tweet and try again if there’s an error. Relatable!
The company tweeted from its official Twitter account on Friday — April Fool’s Day — that it was toying with the long-requested tool. But it seemed too good to be true, and Twitter just couldn’t stop joking about it, so how were we supposed to believe it? When Reuters asked Twitter to clarify whether it was a joke, the company responded: “We cannot confirm or deny but we may edit our statement later.” The bit continued on Monday, when Elon Musk polled his followers about whether Twitter should add an edit button, and Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal weighed in too.
Sullivan said Twitter’s work on the edit button is anything but a joke, and the platform is weighing rules like time limits and controls to ensure an edit button wouldn’t “alter the record of the public conversation.” Adding an edit tool has also been a controversial topic among Twitter employees, and former CEO Jack Dorsey has in the past said “we’ll probably never do it.”
Right now, the closest thing to an edit button is the undo feature, but it’s limited to Twitter Blue subscribers, who pay for extra Twitter perks. Twitter is testing the edit button for Twitter Blue subscribers as well, but it’s unclear if a widely rolled out editing tool would be available to only those subscribers or to everyone. Sullivan said an edit button is one feature Twitter is looking into to give users “more choice and control” on the platform.
A former employee gained access to Block’s Cash App Investing customer data, the company said Tuesday.
The former employee downloaded reports from the Block investing product on Dec. 10, 2021, Block reported to the SEC.
“While this employee had regular access to these reports as part of their past job responsibilities, in this instance these reports were accessed without permission after their employment ended,” Block said in the filing.
Block said the former employee, who was not named, obtained reports that included the names and brokerage account numbers of Cash App Investing customers.
Information on the brokerage portfolio value, holdings and stock trading activity for some customers were also compromised, the company said. The former employee did not gain access to other critical data, such as usernames, passwords, Social Security numbers, birthdates or payment card information.
Block said it is reaching out to roughly 8.2 million current and former customers to let them know of the breach. The company has also informed regulators and law enforcement authorities.
Shares of Block fell more than 6% Tuesday reportedly on news of the breach.
On the short list of Twitter troublemakers, Elon Musk has got to rank somewhere near the very top. Trump may have had him beat for a bit, but he’s already banned for life, so the title by default now goes to Musk, a grown man and billionaire whose tweets have at times been so reckless, they have their own federally mandated “Twitter sitter.”
So what happens when a tech company’s biggest shit-stirrer becomes its biggest shareholder — and a member of the board? We’re about to find out.
In some ways, the news Tuesday that Twitter had appointed Musk to the board could have been ripped from any corporate playbook. CEO Parag Agrawal discussed the “great value” Musk would bring to the company, while co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey noted Agrawal and Musk would “be an incredible team.” In an uncharacteristically formal response to Agrawal, Musk said he was “looking forward to working with Parag & Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months!”
But the announcement was also instantly politicized, with Republican lawmakers and pundits alike cheering their favorite shitposter’s ascension to the top of the big bad company that unapologetically axed Trump. “Elon Musk being named to Twitter’s Board of Directors is just the start,” tweeted Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, who was temporarily suspended from Twitter last year. “2022 is the year that we take back our country.”
Fox’s Tucker Carlson called it “a good day in America” when the news of Musk’s 9% stake was announced. Meanwhile, calls poured in from the right urging Musk to restore Trump’s account.
This response is no accident. Less than two weeks before his stake in Twitter went public — but well after he actually accumulated the shares — Musk teased that he was “giving serious thought” to building his own social network, in light of what he described as Twitter’s failure “to adhere to free speech principles.”
At the time, the tweet read like any of Musk’s other half-baked ideas — including, most recently, his attempt to challenge Vladimir Putin to hand-to-hand combat. In retrospect, it reads like a warning.
For all of the excitement from the right, rank-and-file tweeps were decidedly less enthused about — and even openly critical of — Musk’s new role. And who can blame them? Musk’s apparent interest in pushing Twitter to prioritize free expression seems at total odds with the company’s ongoing efforts to create what it refers to as a “healthy” environment on the platform. What happens to all that work when it runs up against the views of the new most powerful person at Twitter?
It’s too soon to tell. For now, Musk is taking to his newfound power like some kind of Silicon Valley Santa Claus, polling his followers on wish list items, like whether they want an edit button.
But it’s also important to remember that Musk can be serious when he wants to be. You don’t make hundreds of billions of dollars building electric cars and rockets by doing everything for the lulz. For all his bluster and promises, Musk has made lots of wild wishes actually come true. The question now is whether he’ll take Twitter seriously too, or treat it like a plaything to shape to the liking of his many devoted fanboys.
Agrawal for one shared Musk’s poll about the edit button with a good-natured jab parroting one of Musk’s own self-serious tweets from late last month. But as Twitter faces down the potential impact of its new troll king, it’s hard not to see the truth in it too. “The consequences of this poll will be important,” Agrawal wrote. “Please vote carefully.”
The House Oversight and Reform Committee took on one of the major thorns in the side of the Biden administration’s climate goals in a hearing on Tuesday: the Postal Service’s refusal to completely electrify its fleet.
Despite members of Congress’ arguably most powerful committee asking tough questions, the USPS is doubling down on its investment in a new fleet of primarily gas-powered vehicles. This is despite ongoing pressure from the Environmental Protection Agency, and now lawmakers in the House. The White House has set a goal of electrifying all federal civilian vehicles by 2035, and mail trucks make up a major chunk of that fleet. The federal commitment to EVs could pay dividends by helping bring down costs for everyone. Yet the Post Office is weirdly not on board.
Late last month, the independent agency placed an order for 50,000 “next-generation delivery vehicles,” of which just more than 10,000 will be EVs. This is just the start of its up to $11.3 billion planned investment with Oshkosh Defense to replace the Postal Service’s old (10 mpg!) fleet.
According to Victoria Stephen, executive director of USPS’ Next Generation Delivery Vehicles department, the agency faces “organizational and financial constraints” that prevent it from electrifying its fleet at a quicker pace. Though it is set up to be financially self-sufficient, the agency is doubling down on its central thesis when it comes to electrification: We’ll electrify if the funds to do so don’t come out of our own pockets.
“Fleet electrification is a near-term opportunity, but not a mission-critical one,” Stephen said at the hearing, adding that the agency “remains in a crisis condition.”
It’s true that USPS has been in fairly dire financial straits in recent years owing to a byzantine set of circumstances put in place by a 2006 law. But Tammy Whitcomb, inspector general for the agency, caveated this reluctance in her testimony, citing recent research that found that EVs “are well-suited for most postal routes.”
EVs are also generally more cost-effective over time because they require less maintenance and have lower operating costs. However, the potential long-term benefits have come up against upfront costs in the form of both the higher per-vehicle price of EVs and the cost of installing the necessary charging infrastructure.
But Democratic lawmaker after Democratic lawmaker pressed Stephen on the Postal Service’s rationale while imploring the agency to reconsider. It seems we have a stalemate on our hands: If we want an electrified fleet, either Congress ponies up more funds ($6.9 billion, per a USPS analysis) or the public starts seeing substantial increases in the price of postage. Rep. Carolyn Maloney made it clear during today’s hearing that Congressional Democrats would be open to offering more funding; after all, the dead-for-now Build Back Better Act included roughly $6 billion for these upgrades.
Whitcomb’s office plans to release two more reports later this year, including an audit of how the Postal Service acquires vehicles and its compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act, as well as an analysis of whether the agency’s vehicle maintenance facilities are up to snuff as it introduces new vehicles, both conventional and electric.
Some Disney+ subscribers noticed something was off when the streaming service announced that a price increase would take effect on April 19, 2022. iPhone users are typically prompted with two options when a developer increases prices: to accept the price increase, or to manage their subscription. But when the price increase notification popped up on the iPhones of Disney+ subscribers in Europe last month, they didn’t have so many options. The only button they could tap said “OK.” Beneath that was some fine print telling them they could review their subscription.
Apple confirmed to TechCrunch that the new language on the alerts was not a fluke. The company is piloting a program with Disney and other companies “across various app categories” to change the way in-app purchases operate. An Apple spokesperson acknowledged that the new prompt for Disney+ subscribers would be out of compliance with Apple’s current documentation, were it not part of the pilot program.
The company did not offer any additional details, however, and also did not respond to Protocol’s request for comment.
The pilot raises a lot of questions. For one, it’s unclear whether there are limits on how high developers can raise subscription prices automatically. Raising a subscription by $1, after all, would be less of a financial hit for users than a bad actor automatically raising subscriptions by large sums. It’s also unclear how much notice app developers would need to give users, if any notice at all.
Apple has been in hot water for how it brokers payments through the App Store for years. The company takes up to 30% commission of in-app payments and does not allow developers to link to third-party billing options. Regulators in the EU and South Korea have targeted Apple for these policies, which they see as monopolizing the market. Companies like Epic have also tried to fight the so-called “app store tax” in court.
But by creating a feature to increase subscription prices automatically, Apple may be trying to win back developers’ favor — and take a cut of those subscriptions as a bonus.
Online payments service Fast announced Tuesday that it is closing its doors, a sudden, stunning end to a seemingly fast-growing ecommerce venture once considered a pandemic darling.
The one-click-checkout software maker will discontinue service of its Fast Checkout on Friday, CEO and co-founder Domm Holland said in a statement. “Sometimes trailblazers don’t make it all the way to the mountaintop,” he said.
Fast ran out of funds after failing to secure additional investment fast enough in what had become a tough fundraising environment, a Fast employee told Protocol.
“We waited too long and we ran out of money,” said the employee, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the situation. Fast “misjudged significantly” the mood in the VC community, he added: “What was acceptable revenue and burn and prospects for growth in the summer of 2021 looks looks very different in April of 2022.”
But Fast’s pending demise has also created an expansion opportunity for another fintech. Affirm is hiring roughly 130 Fast engineers, the employee said. “With Fast winding down its operations and discontinuing its brand and products, we saw another opportunity to invite a great technology team to join us,” an Affirm spokesperson said. The “buy now, pay later” company does not plan to offer a one-click-checkout product like Fast’s.
Fast’s decision to shut down was first reported by The Information.
The pandemic greatly accelerated innovation in online shopping, and several other companies created their own one-click-checkout systems, including Shopify and Bold Commerce. PayPal was always considered a direct competitor to Fast, while Amazon invented one-click online checkout so long ago that its patent has expired. Apple auto-fills payment information on Macs and iPhones, as does Google’s Chrome browser.
But Fast bet that it had a more modern, easier-to-use solution than the competition. Stripe invested $20 million in the company’s series A round in 2020. The company had raised a total of $120 million, with other major investors including Index Ventures and Lee Fixel’s Addition.
The startup had big dreams of being not just a one-click-checkout company, but a one-click identity service. In a 2020 interview with Protocol, Holland said that the service was meant to become an “identity API,” storing critical information about users so they could shop around the internet seamlessly without repeatedly filling out forms with their address and contact information.
Though that meant the company would in theory assemble a valuable database of customer information along the way, Holland told Protocol that the company would never sell it. “Absolutely not, it’s just not our model,” he said.
Electric cars are a convenient way to reduce individual carbon emissions. They’re also pricey upfront.
But GM and Honda say they’re ready to make EVs accessible to everyone. The automaking duo announced an expanded partnership to co-develop “a series of affordable electric vehicles” on Tuesday. The vehicles will use GM’s new modular platform and “Ultium” battery pack, combined with Honda’s interior and exterior design.
The new EVs will be available in North America by 2027 and include an array of cars and crossovers. According to the press release, the two companies will also “discuss future EV battery technology collaboration opportunities, to further drive down the cost of electrification, improve performance and drive sustainability for future vehicles.”
When the companies first announced their partnership in 2020, GM said vehicles would be made at GM’s North American plants and would go on sale in 2024. Things may have changed in terms of manufacturing, and now it’s unclear whether the new EVs will be made in North America. GM spokesperson James Cain told Protocol that “we overwhelmingly build where we sell,” including markets in North America, South America and China. “We’re just not ready to announce our manufacturing strategy yet,” he said.
But by pooling resources, it appears GM and Honda also believe they can make production more efficient, hopefully reducing EV prices. Neither company, however, has named a target sticker price for the to-be-manufactured vehicles. Instead, they said the partnership will leverage “the two companies’ technology, design and sourcing strategies,” while they “work toward standardizing equipment and processes to achieve world-class quality, higher throughput and greater affordability.”
The partnership is similar to Volkswagen’s with Ford, which was announced in 2019 and expanded earlier this year. Ford plans to build 1.2 million vehicles using VW’s modular electric drive matrix over the course of six years starting in 2023.
The need to bring down the cost of EVs is vital for ensuring we end the use of the internal combustion engine as our main means to get around. According to Kelley Blue Book, EVs currently cost $10,000 more up-front than vehicles in the U.S. overall. They’re cheaper to drive, though, and people have been turning to them in greater numbers.
The first quarter of this year saw a huge spike in EV sales, particularly for Tesla, which continues to outsell the EV competition. But traditional automakers are trying to catch up, from partnerships to Ford’s historic restructuring earlier this year. If those efforts can help drive down EV costs, it could help them chase down Tesla. (It’d also be good for the climate, too, if that’s your type of thing.)
Honda did not respond to a request for comment.
How did Elon Musk accumulate a 9.2% stake in Twitter without the world noticing? The most likely answer — and a running theme in his career — is that he broke the rules.
SEC rules require most individuals who accumulate a stake of 5% or more in a company to disclose it in a Schedule 13G filing within 10 days of the event, meaning the purchase, transfer or other means by which they got their hands on the shares. Given the way trades settle, there’s been some uncertainty over which date to use, but in 2016, the SEC said the clock starts the day after the trade date.
Musk’s filing gives the date of the event as March 14, which would mean he should have filed on March 24. Instead, he filed on April 4, disclosing a stake of more than 73 million shares, well above the 5% filing threshold. What happened in between?
Traders who examined activity in Twitter shares offered the following insights.
Before Monday’s filing, Twitter’s typical trading volume in recent weeks was 17 million shares a day. They estimated that traders working on Musk’s behalf could buy at most 3 million shares a day without noticeably moving the stock. Let’s assume, as our trader sources did, that Musk bought a stake just below 5%, or roughly 40 million shares, before March 24, and crossed the 5% threshold on that date, which his filing suggests. (Notably, there was a big jump in volume on March 18.)
It’s possible that Musk’s traders hadn’t gotten to his target stake by March 24. At that point, Musk may have faced a choice: File on time and see Twitter shares rise dramatically in price, as it did on Monday, or delay the filing and buy more shares at a cheaper price.
If that transpired, Musk’s savings would be substantial, in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And investors who sold shares to him in the last week of March, not knowing he was accumulating a large stake in the company, have corresponding losses.
The fines the SEC has handed out for similar violations are a parking ticket for a man of Musk’s wealth. (The SEC is considering new rules which would require much faster disclosures, by the way.) Securities lawyers might have more luck extracting a payout from selling shareholders.
All of this does raise a question for Twitter, which just announced it would name Musk to its board: You now have a director who has been charged with securities fraud and repeatedly both expressed in words and demonstrated in action his contempt for the Securities and Exchange Commission and its rules. Any qualms about him overseeing your corporate governance?
Max A. Cherney contributed to this report.
Amazon is taking on SpaceX’s internet satellite constellation, Starlink. The company signed a deal with three companies to launch up to 83 of its Project Kuiper internet satellites, marking what Amazon calls the biggest rocket deal in commercial space history.
The company made a deal with United Launch Alliance for 38 launches; signed on with Arianespace for 18 launches; and partnered with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin for 12 launches, with the option for Amazon to add up to 15 more. Notably absent on the launch list is SpaceX, but then that’s to be expected given what’s going into orbit.
Project Kuiper plans to send satellites to low-Earth orbit over the course of five years, and it has two prototypes prepared to launch this year. Those satellites would provide a similar internet service to Starlink, Elon Musk’s low-Earth orbit satellite constellation. That would once again put him in competition with Bezos — who is no longer Amazon’s CEO but remains its executive chairman — for billionaire space supremacy.
Dave Limp, senior vice president at Amazon for Devices and Services, told the Wall Street Journal that the company signed these deals to help meet a deadline set by the Federal Communications Commission. The agency gave Project Kuiper the authorization to deploy 3,236 broadband satellites last year. The terms require at least half of those satellites be operational within six years.
“We still have lots of work ahead, but the team has continued to hit milestone after milestone across every aspect of our satellite system. These launch agreements reflect our incredible commitment and belief in Project Kuiper,” Limp said in a statement.
Limp declined to tell the Journal exactly how much the company is spending on these launches, but he said that it’s in the billions. Amazon said it would “invest more than $10 billion” to build this network of high-speed internet when it came to an agreement with the FCC.
The company is making it clear that there’s room for another big player in the satellite internet game aside from Starlink. But Amazon is playing catch-up to Musk’s satellite internet service, which has roughly 2,000 satellites already in orbit and 250,000 subscribers, according to Elon himself.
But Amazon is clearly putting some serious money into its forthcoming satellite internet service, and Limp told the Journal there can be more than one satellite broadband company to serve more unconnected and underserved people around the world. Of course, doing so will also increase the risk of space junk and mess up astronomers’ view of the heavens, so while the world could well use more satellite internet providers, low-Earth orbit might be a different story.
Elon Musk will (unsurprisingly) join Twitter’s board of directors after becoming the company’s biggest shareholder, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing dated Monday.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal said the company spent weeks talking with Musk about the decision. “It became clear to us that he would bring great value to our Board,” Agrawal tweeted Tuesday morning.
“He’s both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service which is exactly what we need on @Twitter, and in the boardroom, to make us stronger in the long-term,” he added in a Twitter thread.
Agrawal’s observation is correct: Musk is Twitter’s biggest fan and biggest headache. He’s weighed in on everything from whether Twitter should have an edit button (which Agrawal notably responded to) to the platform’s algorithm. Musk went so far as to say he’d seriously consider launching his own social media platform after questioning whether Twitter adheres to principles of “free speech” as he sees them. Now, he has a front row seat to Twitter’s decision-makers, and can just talk to these people instead of shitposting to the world about it.
“Looking forward to working with Parag & Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months!” Musk responded to Agrawal.
News of Musk joining the board came shortly after he revealed his massive stake — more than 9% — in the company. It’s highly likely Twitter was aware of Musk’s accumulation of shares before he made it public. If he didn’t inform the company directly, large institutional shareholders unloading their stakes would likely have tipped the company off.
Tech is among the highest-paid industries in the U.S., according to Glassdoor data. So it’s not at all surprising that interns also report making the most at tech companies — but the amount these companies are handing their interns is wild nonetheless.
Roblox and Uber offer the first and second highest-paying internships in the U.S. for 2022, according to Glassdoor’s top 25 highest-paying internships for 2022. The median monthly pay for Roblox is a whopping $9,667, while the median monthly pay for Uber sits at $8,333. For an internship. Tech companies were the most represented on Glassdoor’s list, with 17 making the cut.
Nine tech companies cracked the top 10 on Glassdoor’s list for highest-paying internships, with Capital One being the only non-tech firm in the top 10. Salesforce notched the No. 4 spot, followed by Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, LinkedIn, HubSpot and Expedia Group, in that order. Of the top 25 companies overall, Google ranked last on the list, paying its interns a median monthly pay of $6,454 (modest, right?). Apple, Oracle, eBay and PayPal are also notable companies on report.
Roblox’s pay this year is $856 more per month than Nvidia offered last year, when it had the highest-paying internship. The median monthly pay for interns at Uber, Salesforce, Amazon and others also rose considerably. Uber, for instance, is paying about $980 more per month than it did last year.
But that doesn’t mean all tech companies are giving their interns more money. The median monthly pay for interns at LinkedIn, Nvidia, Google and others dropped compared to last year, while pay at Meta remained around $8,000 for both summers. Google came in at the bottom of the list, paying its interns about $6,454 per month compared to $7,129 in 2021.
Interns are also way more against remote work than their salaried counterparts. The percentage of interns who spoke negatively about remote work for their summer jobs jumped to 70% last summer, compared to about 58% in the summer of 2020, Glassdoor found. Many interns said it was difficult to communicate and connect with workers in a remote environment.
“Zooming out to look at both review sentiment and frequency of mentions, it’s clear that remote work has become a major — and negative — part of interns’ experience,” Glassdoor wrote in its report.
Elon Musk cares a lot about Twitter. He’s among the platform’s biggest shitposters, critics and now investors. Last night, his deep love for the social network prompted him to act on a particularly touchy subject: the edit button.
“Do you want an edit button?” Musk asked his 80 million followers in a Twitter poll Monday night. The majority have indicated “yes” (although it was humorously misspelled as “yse”) so far.
On a typical day, the poll wouldn’t really be a big deal. Musk has polled his followers before on everything from Twitter’s algorithm to whether he should sell some of his Tesla stock (OK, the latter poll was actually a big deal). But Musk now owns 9% of Twitter, and (perhaps relatedly!) this survey caught the eye of Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. And Agrawal — who is notably not a shitposter — weighed in.
“The consequences of this poll will be important,” Agrawal quote-retweeted, actually quoting a previous Musk tweet in the process. “Please vote carefully.” That was probably a clapback. Right?
Well, making it all the more confusing is the way Twitter announced an edit button plan last week on April 1. Haha, funny! Obviously Twitter never confirmed whether it was definitely an April Fools’ joke, but it told Reuters on Friday that it “may edit our statement later.” Helpful! Then Michael Sayman, a product lead at Twitter, made it all the more confusing by bringing together Musk’s poll and the April 1 plans: “For those asking about the edit button, we have an official statement posted on April 1.”
Still, whatever happens with an edit button on Twitter doesn’t really matter in this situation. The point is that Musk’s thoughts about Twitter matter, and leaders of the platform are learning either to play along with a highly influential shitposter or respond to the whims of a major shareholder.
Musk’s plans to be a passive investor in the company mean he likely wouldn’t seek a takeover. (Probably? Though who knows, really.) But while he may be giving some thought to his own social media company, his recent moves and criticism indicates that he might still want to change the platform that already exists — one tweet at a time.
The electric vehicle future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed. Tesla had a massive first quarter in 2022 and continues to be the leader in EV sales that could climb ever higher due to wild gas prices.
The company reported delivering a total of 310,048 vehicles in the first quarter of 2022, up nearly 68% compared to the same quarter in 2021. Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y made up the majority of its cars delivered for a total of 295,324 units for the quarter.
In its announcement to investors, Tesla said it achieved these numbers “despite ongoing supply chain challenges and factory shutdowns.” The automaker hit record high sales last quarter, but it still announced a price hike of between 5% and 10% across its entire range in mid-March, citing inflation as the reason for the uptick in prices. (It’s hardly alone in the EV maker price hike department.)
Compared to the auto market as a whole, EV sales were high in the first quarter, according to an Autodata report viewed by TechCrunch, as traditional automakers electrify their offerings and EV manufacturers ramp up business. Hyundai has already sold 6,244 units of the Ioniq 5, its latest EV, which hit dealerships in late 2021. Not exactly Tesla sales, but then no company has yet to challenge it for EV supremacy. Last month, Electrek reported that roughly 70% of all EV registrations last year were Teslas. Nissan and Chevrolet — the second and third place automakers for EVs — accounted for just 8.5% and 7% of the market respectively.
Globally, EV sales hit 6.6 million in 2021, according to the International Energy Agency. That represents more than 9% of the total global car market, showing that EVs still have a long ways to go. Monday’s blockbuster United Nations climate report indicates changes could be coming, though. The report shows EV battery prices dropped 85% over the 2010s, which is great news given the need to rapidly end the use of the internal combustion engine.
Prices for some commodities needed to make batteries — notably nickel — have spiked recently following the Russian war against Ukraine. But if the soaring Tesla sales and U.N. report are any combined indications, EVs aren’t going to slow down anytime soon.