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This week: The fire Zuck started is spreading, and Twitter, Apple, and Sand Hill road are all in its path
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It's been a difficult and emotional week as Americans react to the killing of George Floyd and the longstanding institutional racism that it represents.
The protests in the streets have been the most visible manifestation of anger, but the unrest is also playing out inside tech companies, many of which control the platforms where toxic content has proliferated. A couple of important developments are worth paying attention to:
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is floating on a cloud of goodwill right now because the company's actions are better than Facebook's, which is to say, better than nothing. But the reality is that Twitter's "labels" are still weak medicine, and Twitter's past role enabling the unfettered spread of hate and misogyny online may come back to haunt it.
You have to appreciate the irony in seeing tech's masters of the universe succumb to the same divisiveness and backbiting that their products have induced in their customers.
But the real takeaway here is the palpable sense that, for the first time in a generation, the parameters we've accepted with social media and smartphones are being decisively challenged. All the prior privacy scandals, screentime concerns, and security screw-ups may have chipped away at the industry's reputation, but they lacked the force to bring the industry to a tipping point. This feels different.
And the dramatic real-world events unfolding over the past few months have added to the sense of alarm. As former Facebook communications director Barry Schnitt wrote in a powerful open letter to Facebook employees: "We are in the midst of a global pandemic. Nearly 400,000 people are dead. Many more are likely to die and that risk is being made worse by content you host. Every. Single. Day."
He asks Facebook employees to consider what might happen in the event of a war. "Ask yourself where a concerted and systematic undermining of science and truth and rampant divisiveness ends if it is left unchecked?"
It's a question the tech industry is finally realizing it can't ignore.
Sound bite of the week:
"My clients are often middle-class Russian and Ukrainian boys with good knowledge of computer science. They have difficulty finding a job, so they prefer to break the law — knowingly or unknowingly."
Face masks are the center of the heated "health versus economy" debate. And as BI's Katie Canales writes, it's not the first time we've done this. Back in 1918 and 1919, when the Spanish flu pandemic was raging, masks were a hot-button issue. There was even an Anti-Mask League of 1919 devoted to repealing mask laws — although its members' fashion game was much stronger than today's mask opponents.
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