For a brief moment in a five-hour House hearing on Thursday, TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew let his frustration show. Asked if TikTok was prepared to split off from its Chinese parent company if ordered to do so by the U.S. government, to safeguard Americans’ online data, Chew went on offense.
Layoffs Alone Won’t Solve Tech’s Problems: Parmy Olson
The world’s largest tech companies are promising across the board to spend less, new territory for an industry that thrives on perks. Already last year, Facebook parent Meta Platforms shut down its laundry service for staff, and in January of this year, Alphabet’s Google included more than 30 massage therapists in its first big round of layoffs.
Tech giants are tightening up on fringe benefits and showing their talent the door. But there is still more to do.
Hiring freezes and cutting perks are the easy part. Now, having grown fat on old business models and morphed into sprawling bureaucracies, Silicon Valley’s biggest firms must become innovative again. That means spearheading a shift in culture away from protecting mini-fiefdoms and more toward getting ideas in motion and product features out the door. That’s an entirely new challenge for big tech’s stable, mostly technocrat leaders. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google parent Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai have overseen years of continued growth largely by keeping things ticking along.
When the pandemic came, their steady growth went into overdrive. Collective profits at Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft grew by 55 percent in 2021 from an already eye-popping baseline. Their combined $1.4 trillion (roughly Rs. 1,15,83,670 crore) in sales would have made them the world’s 13th largest economy, overtaking Australia.
Now with shares and growth under pressure, Zuckerberg is talking about flattening his leadership structure and trimming middle management. Pichai wants to “re-engineer the company’s cost base in a durable way.” That will mean more layoffs because even the latest, painful cuts haven’t brought staffing levels anywhere close to pre-pandemic levels.
Facebook hired about 30,000 new staffers during the pandemic while Alphabet went on an even bigger hiring spree, swelling its ranks by 68,000 to 187,000. But Meta and Google have announced 11,000 and 12,000 job cuts, respectively, so far. Microsoft, which hired 58,000 people in the two years following the start of the pandemic, said last month that it was cutting 10,000 positions. The painful truth is that for these companies to earn the market’s trust in their pledges for efficiency, cuts will need to continue through 2023.
They also will have to continue to get the most out of their top talent, who might be less inclined to stay loyal to their employers now that they know that their bosses could cut them loose at any time.
An equally difficult task will be changing tech’s management culture. Already last year, months before the layoffs began, Zuckerberg and Pichai were telling staff they needed to work harder, with “greater urgency,” in the words of the Alphabet chief executive, and to come to the office more frequently.
Google especially needs to get better at executing on new product features. For all the attention that the company receives about its exciting moonshot projects, Google is notoriously conservative in its release of new products and services, because it doesn’t want to tinker too much with its $150 billion (roughly Rs. 12,41,000 crore) search business or its lucrative ad-tech operation. But the search business has come under threat from ChatGPT and other AI tools that generate conversational answers to any query.
Under pressure to respond, Google on Monday said it would soon release a ChatGPT competitor called Bard to the public. The service will be powered by LaMDA, Google’s highly sophisticated large language model. Google has rarely moved so quickly to develop a product, marking a risky new era for the company while it’s simultaneously trying to cut back on spending.
Doing more with less is much harder than it sounds for companies in Silicon Valley, who are used to throwing money at problems to make them go away. At least they know that needs to change. Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew “Boz” Bosworth said in an email to the company’s 18,000 Reality Labs employees, who are driving its metaverse efforts, that “we have solved too many problems by adding headcount.” Now Meta needs to learn to solve problems by innovating and executing.
Zuckerberg used the word “efficient” or “efficiency” approximately 40 times in his earnings call with analysts last week. (By comparison, he mentioned “metaverse” just seven times.) Investors liked that direction of travel so much that they sent Meta’s shares up by more than 20 percent after earnings day, despite a miss on profit estimates.
A looming question is how much all this talk of efficiency from Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft, the world’s biggest internet and software companies, will lead to real improvements. And if it doesn’t, will investors care? Meta’s rally last week could be a sign that investors are looking for any excuse to resume their love affair with some of the most profitable companies in history. Who wants to agitate for efficiencies from companies (barring Amazon) that have regular quarterly net margins of around 30 percent? Compare that with two other popular stocks, Walmart, and Walt Disney, that have margins of 6 percent and 5 percent, respectively, according to Bloomberg data.
Still, high margins weren’t enough to stop big tech stocks from getting bruised over the last year in the markets. Wall Street wants to see these companies become leaner and meaner. Big Tech’s investor-friendly, technocratic operators will almost certainly comply.
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Biden White House urged Meta to crack down on ‘vaccine-skeptical’ content on WhatsApp private chat platform
Newly-released communications between the Biden administration and Meta show an effort to crack down on so-called “vaccine-skeptical” content shared on the private communications platform WhatsApp.
Independent journalist David Zweig reported on Friday that the White House went beyond Twitter to curb COVID-related posts. Emails obtained through discovery from the ongoing Missouri v Biden legal battle show email exchanges from the White House to the tech giant began just days after President Biden took office.
Zweig stressed that unlike Facebook and Instagram, both of which are owned by Meta, WhatsApp is an encrypted direct messaging platform, Citing Meta, “90% of WhatsApp messages are from one person to another. And groups typically have fewer than 10 people.”
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In an email from March 2021, Rob Flaherty, the White House director of digital strategy, pressed Meta executives how they were “measuring reduction of harm” on WhatsApp, insisting they must have a “good mousetrap” to observe what encrypted content was being shared on the platform.
The Biden White House pressured Meta to moderate COVID vaccine content on its private communications platform WhatsApp. (Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Flaherty also offered then-White House COVID senior adviser Andrew Slavitt, telling Meta he’d be “willing to get on the phone” a “couple of times per week if [it’s] necessary.”
“Because of WhatsApp’s structure, targeted suppression or censorship of certain information did not appear possible. Instead, much of the aim of the content moderation on WhatsApp, therefore, was to ‘push’ information to users,” Zweig wrote. “The service partnered with the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and more than 100 governments and health ministries to send Covid-19 updates and vaccine-related messages to users. The company created initiatives such as a WhatsApp chatbot in Spanish to aid in making local vaccination appointments.”
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Days after the previous email, Flaherty continued pressing Meta about moderating content on WhatsApp. He was told that Meta’s only moderation option would be “content-agnostic product interventions” which typically monitoring messages “that didn’t originate from a close contact” which it deemed “were more likely to contain misinformation” and reduce its “forwards” as a result.
WhatsApp one of Meta’s prominent apps including Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Flaherty asked Meta how it “measured success,” to which an employee replied by pointing to the “reduction of forwards” and that it bans accounts “that engage in mass marketing or scam behaviors – including those who seek to exploit COVID-19 misinformation.” The employee also noted that “3 billion” COVID-related messages were sent by “governments, nonprofits and international organizations” to citizens via WhatsApp chatbots “and over 300 million messages have been sent over COVID-19 vaccine helplines” during the first quarter of 2021.
“In one of the follow up exchanges, Flaherty seemed dissatisfied with the response, and again pressed Meta to take action on vaccine hesitancy,” Zweig reported. ‘I care mostly about what actions and changes you’re making to ensure you’re not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse,’ he wrote. ‘I still don’t have a good, empirical answer on how effective you’ve been at reducing the spread of vaccine-skeptical content and misinformation to vaccine fence sitters.’”
In the email, Flaherty dinged Facebook for not having implemented an “algorithmic shift” in election-related content to prevent the Jan. 6 “insurrection” from being plotted on the platform, suggesting he doesn’t want such laid-back content moderation to occur on WhatsApp.
The Biden White House has repeatedly urged Big Tech companies to moderate COVID-related content. (DANIEL SLIM/AFP via Getty Images)
“Flaherty wanted empirical data about the effectiveness of reducing ‘vaccine-skeptical content’ on a platform composed of non-public messages. He wanted supposed misinformation on a private messaging app to be ‘under control.’ What, exactly, was he hoping to get Meta to do?” Zweig wrote. “It was obvious from the start that WhatsApp’s interface didn’t allow for the granular control Flaherty appeared to desire. And his smiley face response suggests he well understood this. Yet he kept badgering the Meta executives anyway.”
Zweig continued, “The exchanges about WhatsApp are arresting not because of what Meta ultimately did or did not do on the platform—since the company’s options for intervention appear to be limited—but because efforts to moderate content on a private messaging service was a continued interest for a White House official at all… Fortunately, targeted censorship on a private messaging app is still out of government reach.”
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Fox News Digital asked the White House whether it had any concerns that such interactions with Meta have any First Amendment implications. The White House did not immediately respond.
Zweig, author of the “Silent Lunch” Substack newsletter, went viral in December with his contribution to the Twitter Files series, exposing how the White House under both President Biden and President Trump leaned on Twitter to moderate COVID-related content.
Mark Zuckerberg, wife Priscilla Chan welcome third baby girl
From Facebook to family of five!
Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Priscilla Chan announced on Friday that their third baby girl arrived.
“Welcome to the world, Aurelia Chan Zuckerberg!” the couple wrote via Instagram. “You’re such a little blessing.”
Zuckerberg and his former Harvard University classmate previously welcomed daughters Max, 7, and August, 5, in 2015 and 2017, respectively.
The entrepreneur, 38, mentioned the little ones in his September 2022 Instagram post announcing his 38-year-old wife’s pregnancy.
“Lots of love,” Zuckerberg captioned a smiling selfie with his hand on Chan’s budding belly.
“Happy to share that Max and August are getting a new baby sister next year!”
The couple met in 2003 at a frat party while in line for the bathroom.
“He was this nerdy guy who was just a little bit out there,” Chan told the New Yorker in 2010, joking that Zuckerberg had a “nerdy, computer-science appeal.”
On their first date, the Meta CEO told Chan that he would rather go out with her than “finish his take-home midterm.”
The sentiment “appalled” the “the type-A first child,” the pediatrician told “Today” show co-hosts in 2014.
The couple got married in 2012, and Zuckerberg called Chan the “most important” part of his life in a commencement speech at their alma mater five years later.
While trying to start a family, the doctor struggled to conceive and suffered three miscarriages.
Zuckerberg called the pregnancy losses “a lonely experience” in a 2015 Facebook post.
As the CZI co-founder and co-CEOs’ family began growing, Zuckerberg told North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University students that he had been changed in a “pretty dramatic way” by parenthood.
“The thing that I’m most proud of and the thing that brings me the most happiness is my family,” he gushed in 2017.
TikTok hearing obscures wider issue of Americans’ online privacy
“I don’t think ownership is the issue here. With a lot of respect: American social companies don’t have a great record with privacy and data security. I mean, look at Facebook and Cambridge Analytica,” Chew said, referring to the 2018 scandal in which Facebook users’ data was found to have been secretly harvested years earlier by a British political consulting firm.
He’s not wrong. At a hearing in which TikTok was often portrayed as a singular, untenable threat to Americans’ online privacy, it would have been easy to forget that the country’s online privacy problems run far deeper than any single app. And the people most responsible for failing to safeguard Americans’ data, arguably, are American lawmakers.
The bipartisan uproar over TikTok’s Chinese ownership stems from the concern that China’s laws could allow its authoritarian government to demand or clandestinely gain access to sensitive user data, or tweak its algorithms to distort the information its young users see. The concerns are genuine. And yet the United States has failed to bequeath Americans most of the rights it now accuses TikTok of threatening.
While the European Union has far-reaching privacy laws, Congress has not agreed on national privacy legislation, leaving Americans’ online data rights up to a patchwork of state and federal laws. In the meantime, reams of data on Americans’ shopping habits, browsing history and real-time location, collected by websites and mobile apps, is bought and sold on the open market in a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry. If the Chinese Communist Party wanted that data, it could get huge volumes of it without ever tapping TikTok. (In fact, TikTok says it has stopped tracking U.S. users’ precise location, putting it ahead of many American apps on at least one important privacy front.)
That point was not entirely lost on the members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which convened Thursday’s hearing. Last year, their committee became the first to advance a comprehensive data privacy bill, hashing out a hard-won compromise. But it stalled amid qualms from House and Senate leaders.
Likewise, worries about TikTok’s addictive algorithms, its effects on teens’ mental health, and its hosting of propaganda and extreme content are common to its American rivals, including Google’s YouTube and Meta’s Instagram. Congress has not meaningfully addressed those, either.
And if Chinese ownership is the issue, TikTok has plenty of company there, as well: A glance at Apple’s iOS App Store rankings earlier this week showed that four of the top five apps were Chinese-owned: TikTok, its ByteDance sibling CapCut, and the online shopping apps Shein and Temu.
The enthusiasm for cracking down on TikTok in particular is understandable. It’s huge, it’s fast-growing, and railing against it allows lawmakers to position themselves simultaneously as champions of American children and tough on China. Banning it would seem to offer a quick fix to the problems lawmakers spent five hours on Thursday lamenting.
And yet, without an overhaul of online privacy laws, it ignores that those problems exist on all the other apps that haven’t been banned.
“In most ways, they’re like most of the Big Tech companies,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said of TikTok after the hearing. “They can use Americans’ data any way they want.” She and several other committee members said they’d prefer to address TikTok as part a broader privacy bill, rather than a one-off ban.
But the compromises required to pass big legislation can be politically costly, while railing against TikTok costs nothing. If Chew can take any consolation from Thursday’s hearing, it’s that congressional browbeating of tech companies are far more common than congressional action against them.
For an example, he has only to look at the one he raised in that moment of frustration: For all the hearings, all the grilling of Mark Zuckerberg over Cambridge Analytica, Russian election interference and more, Facebook is still here — and now Congress has moved on to a new scapegoat.
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