Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 05/29 – The Best Summary of the Executive Order I Can Muster (Replacement)

Episode Date: May 29, 2020

I do my best to breakdown the who Twitter/executive order situation, at least at the time of this recording. Hall of Fame fundraiser drops mic and rides off into the sunset. TikTok has an interesting new rival. And, of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: DoubleUp.agency Tovala.com/ride Links: Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media platforms (Axios) ‘Rammed it through’: Trump's Twitter order riles staffers and tech reformers (Protocol) Trump’s Order on Social Media Could Harm One Person in Particular: Donald Trump (NYTimes) The Two Things To Understand About Trump's Executive Order On Social Media: (1) It's A Distraction (2) It's Legally Meaningless (TechDirt) Trump Executive Order Misreads Key Law Promoting Free Expression Online and Violates the First Amendment (The EFF) Scheduled tweets and tweet drafts are now available on Twitter's website (Neowin) Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz is stepping down (VentureBeat) The Rise of New Short-Form Video App Zynn Could Spell Trouble for TikTok (Social Media Today) Weekend Longreads Suggestions Amazon’s Big Breakdown (NYTimes) Remember the MOOCs? After Near-Death, They’re Booming (NYTimes) Who Will Own the Cars That Drive Themselves? (NYTimes) The rise of React (Increment) 'We had no idea how to do it': YouTube's founders, investors, and first employees tell the chaotic inside story of how it rose from failed dating site to $1.65 billion video behemoth (Business Insider) Poolside.fm is the chillest place you should be hanging out right now (The Verge) Podcast Survey: https://www.ridehome.info/survey/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme ride home for Friday, May 29th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, I do my very best to break down the whole Twitter slash executive order situation, at least at the time of this recording. Hall of Fame fundraiser drops Mike and rides off into the sunset. TikTok has an interesting new rival, and of course the weekend long-read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So here's the latest on what I guess we can call a whole different sort of Twitter storm at this point. Yes, President Trump yesterday signed an executive order designed to limit, Section 230 protections currently afforded to social media platforms,

and directing the Commerce Department to pressure the FCC to roll back portions of said Section 230. So what does this all mean? Kind of nothing at the moment, but I don't know. I'll explain. Quoting Axios, despite this executive order, the president does not have unilateral power to regulate tech companies and social media platforms. This week, a federal appeals court ruling in a case brought by conservative activists against social media companies affirmed that private websites are not public spaces and social media companies don't have First Amendment obligations. Any truly strong limits to Section 230 would almost certainly require action by Congress.

Senator Josh Howley, Republican of Missouri, said in a series of tweets Wednesday that he would introduce legislation to strip platforms of their protections if they offer what he described as editorializing, end quote. Well, several things about that. First, even though Section 230 does have critics on both the left and the right for various reasons, I'm not sure any legislation rolling back 230 has a chance of passing either Chamber of Congress at this point, since, well, for one thing, there are people on both the left and the right who tend to not like passing laws that seek to hamstring specific industries or attack the free speech of private companies and the like. Also, for all of the IR being directed at Twitter in particular, note that this executive order broadly targets the entire social media industry. Indeed, quoting protocol, the executive order was rushed through using an old draft that had been circulated last year, but which had been criticized by agencies and reformers that wanted to target Section 230 changes in the first place. These agencies and reformers felt like this executive order that has been. been rushed through was muddying the waters, quoting from protocol. The direction from on high was

do something, a White House official with direct knowledge of the situation told protocol. They picked this order off the shelf and essentially rammed it through, said the official who requested anonymity because the White House had not authorized the interview. Referring to a draft that leaked late Wednesday, the official said, quote, it reads like a rough draft in a lot of ways it is, end quote. Ironically, the hasty move also angered many lawyers and academics who have been fighting for Section 230 reform for years and believe the administration's actions undermine their cause. Quote, lots of people are upset with the tech industry for a lot of reasons, many legitimate and many illegitimate, said Marianne Franks, a professor at the University of Miami School of Law and president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, which fights against online revenge porn. For someone to deliberately exploit that ambiguity makes it harder for us to have real principled, tech reform, end quote. Indeed, the overall analysis from about half a dozen places that I've read

seems to be, this does nothing but, as I said, muddy the waters. Here's the analysis from the New York Times, quote, the executive order that Mr. Trump signed on Thursday seeks to strip liability protection in certain cases for companies like Twitter, Google, and Facebook for the content on their sites, meaning they could face legal jeopardy if they allowed false and defamatory posts. Without a liability shield, they presumably, have to be more aggressive about policing messages that press the boundaries, like the presidents. That, of course, is not the outcome Mr. Trump wants. What he wants is the freedom to post anything he likes without the companies applying any judgment to his messages, as Twitter did this week

when it began appending get-the-fax warnings to some of his false posts on voter fraud. Quote, ironically, Donald Trump is a big beneficiary of Section 230, said Kate Rune, a senior legislative council for the American Civil Liberties Union, which instantly objected to the proposed order, end quote. Let me stress again, this is analysis. I'm not a legal expert, and also I'm not inserting any personal political opinions on this here. I'm just giving you what the analysis seems to be. TechDirt, for example, says the executive order has limited power anyway, as content created by any platform, like the labels that Twitter has applied in this case, and again, this is worth pointing out, Twitter did not actually take down the president's tweet, merely added a label to them. That sort of

action is not even covered by Section 230. Quote, the order that all departments and agencies should apply this, and these are their words, nonsense interpretation of 230 is meaningless. Federal agencies don't interpret or enforce Section 230. The courts do that. So what will this actually do or change? Literally nothing. From there, the president tries to get agencies to, quote, do something that they cannot do and which would be meaningless even if they wanted to do something anyway, end quote. Finally, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose job it is to analyze legal implications of things like this, and which has had, shall we say, a conflicted opinion of Section 230 itself in the past? The EFF says, the executive order essentially misreviewed

section 230 completely by conflating two independent subsections of the section and then ask the FCC to link the two provisions together which previous judicial rulings have said can't be done. Quote, even though neither the statute nor court opinions that interpret it mush these two section 230 provisions together, the order asked the federal communications commission to start a rulemaking and consider linking the two provisions liability shields. The order asked the FCC to consider whether a finding that a platform failed to act in good faith under subsection C2 also disqualifies the platform from claiming immunity under Section C1. In short, the order tasks government agencies with defining good faith and eventually deciding whether any platform's

decision to edit, remove, or otherwise moderate user-generated content meets it upon pain of losing access to all of Section 230's protections. Should the order result in FCC rules interpreting 230 that way, a platform's single act of editing user content that the government doesn't like could result in losing both kinds of protections under 230. This essentially will work as a trigger to remove Section 230's protections entirely from a host of anything that someone disagrees with. But the impact of that trigger would be much broader than simply being liable for the moderation activities purportedly done in bad faith. Once a platform was deemed not in good faith, it would lose C1 immunity for all user-generated content, not just the triggering content. This could result in platforms being subjected to a torrent of private litigation for thousands of completely unrelated publication decisions, end quote.

So, like I said, a mess. And things just spiraled overnight. Twitter added a rule violation notice to a tweet from the president overnight that seemed to threaten Minneapolis protesters. Twitter said that the tweet glorified violence. You can still read the tweet in question, but you have to click through to actually read it. Just checked the president's Twitter thread this morning, and he has tweeted that Section 230 should be revoked by Congress and retweeted calls to repeal Section 230, and he just now tweeted a one-word tweet that was China, exclamation point. Don't know what that's referring to, but there you go. That's where things stand at the moment. In the background of all of this,

Twitter did another product thing that users have literally been begging them to do since forever. You can now schedule tweets in advance, up to 18 months in advance, in fact. Quoting NeoWin, just as initially reported, the new feature lets you schedule a tweet for any time you'd like, as long as is within the next 18 months. The pop-up window includes the time zone being used so you can more easily understand when the tweet will be published. From here, you can also see a list of scheduled tweets, making it easier to plan out multiple tweets. Another new feature available on the Twitter website today is the ability to save tweet drafts. Recently, the social network made it so that the inline composer at the top of a user's

timeline retains its text as the user navigates to other parts of the website. That didn't apply to tweets written in the pop-up composer, and it only saved the text as long as you stayed on Twitter, but now you can specifically save tweets to resume writing them later, end quote. Remember when I called for him to be put on the Mount Rushmore of fundraisers? Well, fresh after raising the money apparently needed to keep his company alive and pivot to something he's calling spatial computing for enterprises. Magic Leap CEO Ronnie Abovitz is dropping the mic and stepping down as the CEO of Magic Leap. Quoting Venture Beat.

In a statement, Abovitz confirmed rumors that the company had raised a last minute round of funding, but he didn't say where it came from, or share the amount raised. The company is pivoting to focus its spatial computing platform on the enterprise market. A week ago, the information reported that Magic Leap had raised $350 million as a lifeline just after the company announced it was cutting a thousand jobs and exiting the consumer business for its Magic Leap One AR headset, which overlays animated images on the real world, end quote. Quoting friend of the show, Mike Murphy, I mean, if you need a CEO to raise you $3 billion and put out exactly one

underwhelming thing in nearly a decade. He's on the market, end quote. Today I learned about Zen, which is a new TikTok clone. Zen just recently hit the top of the US iOS App Store charts, even though it only debuted earlier this month. What else is interesting about Zen? It was developed by Koyashu, which I'm probably grossly mispronouncing, but which is also a rival to bite dance and bite dance owns TikTok.

Also, how has Zinn gotten so popular so fast? Might have something to do with the fact that Zinn actually pays users to watch videos, quoting social media today. As you can see in the screenshots in the article linked in the show notes, you can earn in-app rewards by watching videos on Zin and inviting friends to the app. Those funds can then be used to purchase items in-app, including a range of gift cards for the app store, Walmart, Amazon, etc. Funds can also be transferred via PayPal, according to Zin's advertising.

Given the amount of people currently out of work due to COVID-19, that could prove to be a major lure. And already there are a heap of YouTube videos in which Zin users claim to have made thousands via the app. The bigger picture is that Zin is seemingly being funded by Kiyashu, which is a key rival for Doyen, the Chinese version of TikTok, as well as TikTok's parent-yush. company bite dance, end quote. And one more interesting winkle, Kiyashu just raised $2 billion from Tencent, which is also a major bite dance rival in China. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First, the New York Times magazine has a huge behind the scenes look at how the COVID-19 pandemic nearly brought Amazon to its knees. Quote, by the end of April, according to earnest research,

total offline sales were down by more than 20% year over year. Online sales were up nearly 20%. While Amazon's competitors saw greater proportional increases in sales, Amazon's increase in sales dwarfed their totals. In other words, April 2020 wasn't far off from where things might be in 2025 or even 2030. When millions of people showed up five or 10 years too soon, Amazon systems weren't ready to accommodate them. The burden of this surge tested Amazon from top to bob bottom, pushing to the breaking point, not just the Amazon most familiar to customers, but also the less visible systems that keep it running. It's warehouses and the employees who operate them, the complex and suddenly confused software

that generates Amazon anew constantly for its customers, and crucially, its vast network of small sellers who, just out of sight and mostly out of mind, carry Amazon on their backs, end quote. Also, from the New York Times, there's another piece on startups that might be winning the COVID moment. Do you remember massive open online courses or MOOCs, the revolution that was supposed to upend higher education, but which until recently had been almost left for dead as an industry? Actually, though, the turnaround in MOOCs happened right before COVID struck.

Quote, just a couple of years ago, Udacity's survival was in doubt. When Mr. Thrun returned to oversee operations in 2018, it was a few months from running out of cash. Over the next two years, Mr. Throon laid off about half the workforce, the worst period of my life, he recalled. Today, with 320 employees and 1,300 part-time project reviewers and mentors, Udacity's fortunes have improved. It is tightly focused on its training business for both individual students and for corporations that pay Udacity to upgrade the skills of their employees and to advise them on redeploying workers in digital operations, end quote. Also, the New York Times is re-asking the funding. question of self-driving cars. Re-asking the fundamental question in the time of COVID, which is

when self-driving vehicles arrive, who will actually own them? This has been a question that struck a chord with me because, as I've said on Twitter this week, we're actually in the market to buy a car for our family for the first time in 10 years, and we're not just going with, say, a zip car membership or a car service because we want a vehicle that we know we will be the only ones to ever be inside of. So, like, how long would such thinking last for consumers like us? And could that change the equation for those fleets of shared autonomous vehicles that we all assumed would be the future for autonomy? Increment has a long piece looking at the social, cultural, and technological impact of React, the increasingly ubiquitous front-end framework. This is sort of building off of

another long read that I suggested to you recently, quote, traverse the web today and you'll see a sea of standardized, dare I say, boring websites. Rounded, flattened buttons give way to oceans of white space. Drop-down menus have disappeared replaced by mobile-friendly nav bars. Hamburger buttons proliferate faster than McDonald's billions installed, and everything is modular. We're 30 years in and still trying to figure out what's best for the web, in what circumstances, it said web design consultant and CSS advocate Eric Meyer, author of a number of popular books about CSS. The solution of the moment appears to be modular design enabled by frameworks like React,

an open-source JavaScript library that allows sites to render pages dynamically in response to user input and actions. Modular design is defined by small standalone components that can be plugged into sites where and whenever needed, which can help sites scale quickly. It has been popularized by big platforms like Facebook, which handles countless components and features for billions of users. I wonder sometimes if it's the right answer or if it's one good answer that's being overused, which I think happens a lot in our industry, Mayor says. The latest shiny thing comes out, and then after you use it for a few years, you say, I should use this sometimes, not all the time, end quote. YouTube turns 15 this month, and you know I can't resist oral histories of the early days

of companies. So check out this oral history from Business Insider on YouTube's crazy early days. Quote, what's hard to appreciate is how quickly we had grown beyond our capacity to manage the business. Our global data infrastructure was cracking. Our bank account was dwindling. Angry music company executives demanding hundreds of millions of dollars, partners banging doors down to try to get our attention. We had a company lunch at, I want to say it was a sushi place. almost half of us got food poisoning. Remember, there's no one else to do your job. At that time, it was just so scrappy, and I remember all of us kind of working together around the clock between being sick and still working. I would be like, I've got to go now. Can someone please

take over? It was three days of working an hour here, an hour there, and then sleeping because the whole team got sick, except for the guy that worked overnight, thankfully because he didn't come to the lunch, end quote. And finally, I'm just going to summarize this one real quick. You want to feel like it's summer? You want to specifically feel like it's summer 1997? The last link in the long-read suggestions comes from the verge, suggesting that you check out poolside.fm and get your late 90s vibe on this weekend. That is all for this week. no weekend bonus episodes this weekend, but can I ask you all to do me one more favor this week? Thanks again, by the way, for the YouTube channel subscriptions, which if you haven't done so,

you can do at YouTube forward slash tech meme podcast. But as I said, we're planning a whole bunch of new features this summer and later in the year, so remember how I did an informal Reddit poll about what y'all would like to see in terms of new things on this podcast? Well, We put together an actual formal survey, which you can find at ridehome.comfo, forward slash survey. There's also a link in the show notes. The more responses we get to this actual survey, the more quantifiable data will actually have in terms of what y'all want and don't want, and we can produce some interesting

new stuff that you actually will want from us. So thanks in advance for all of you that go to ridehome.comfo. slash survey to take the survey. It's super, super brief. Talk to you on Monday.