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Twitter is digging one of its most important new features out of its settings and putting it within easy reach. Twitter is now testing with a small number of iOS users a homescreen button that lets you instantly switch from its algorithmic timeline that shows the best tweets first but out of order to the old reverse chronological feed that only shows people you follow — no tweets liked by friends or other randomness.
Twitter had previously buried this option in its settings. In mid-September, it fixed the setting so it would only show a raw reverse chronological feed of tweets by people you follow with nothing extra added, and promised a more easily accessible design for the feature in the future. Now we have our first look at it. A little Twitter sparkle icon in the top opens a menu where you can switch between Top Tweets and Latest Tweets, plus a link to your content settings. It would be even nicer if that was a one-tap toggle.
Twitter’s VP of Product Kayvon Beykpour tweeted that “We want to make it easier to toggle between seeing the latest tweets the top tweets. So we’re experimenting with making this a top-level switch rather than buried in the settings. Feedback welcome.. what do you think?”
Given the backlash back in 2016 when Twitter started shifting to an algorithmically sorted timeline based on what you engaged with, many users will probably think this is great. Whether you’re trying to follow a sports game, a political debate, breaking news, or are just glued to Twitter and want the ordering to make more sense, there are plenty of reasons you might want to switch to reverse chronological.
Still, Twitter’s apprehension to make the setting too accessible makes sense. Hardcore users might prefer reverse chronological, but for most people who only open Twitter a few times per day or week, that’d mean they’d likely miss the tweets from their closest friends that could be drown out by the noise of everyone else. Twitter’s user growth rate perked up after the shift to algorithmic.
We’ve asked whether the setting reverts to the Top Tweets default when you close the app. That might be frustrating to some expert users, but could prevent novice users from accidentally getting stuck in reverse chronological and not knowing how to switch back. The company tells TechCrunch that it’s trying out several different duration options for the setting based on user inactivity to see what works best. For example, one version will revert the setting to the Top Tweets default if they’re gone for a day. That method would make sure people who’ve been inactive long enough to forget changing their timeline setting will get the default back and not end up stuck in a chronological abyss.
If Twitter gets the reversion to default situation figured out, the new button could make the service much more flexible, thereby boosting usage. You could start algorithmic in the morning or after a weekend away to see what you missed, then quickly toggle to reverse chronological if something big happens or you’ll be on it non-stop all day to get the real-time pulse of the world.
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Influcencer marketing could get a lot more accountable if Snapchat’s PR firm wins this lawsuit. Snapchat hoped that social media stars promoting v2 of its Spectacles camera sunglasses on its biggest competitor could boost interest after it only sold 220,000 of v1 and had to take a $40 million write-off. Instead Snap comes off looking a little desperate to make Spectacles seem cool.
Snap Inc comissioned its public relations firm PR Consulting (real imaginative) to buy its an influencer marketing campaign on Instagram. The firm struck a deal with Grown-ish actor Luka Sabbat after he was seen cavorting with Kourtney Kardashian. Sabbat got paid $45,000 up front with the promise of another $15,000 to post himself donning Spectacles on Instagram.
He was contracted to make one Instagram feed post and three Stories posts with him wearing Specs, plus be photographed wearing them in public at Paris and Milan Fashion Weeks. He was supposed to add swipe-up-to-buy links to two of those Story posts, get all the posts pre-approved with PRC, and send it analytics metrics about their performance.
But Sabbat skipped out on two of the Stories, one of the swipe-ups, the photo shoots, the pre-approvals, and the analytics. So as Variety’s Gene Maddaus first reported, PRC is suing Sabbat to recoup the $45,000 it already paid plus another $45,000 in damages.
TechCrunch has attained a copy of the lawsuit filing, embedded below, that states “Sabbat has been unjustly enriched and PRC is entitled to damages.” Snap confirms to us that it hired PRC to run the campaign, and that it also contracted a campaign with fashion blog Man Repeller founder Leandra Medine Cohen. And as a courtesy, I Photoshopped some Spectacles onto Sabbat above.
But interestingly, Snap says it was not involved in the decision to sue Sabbat. The debacle brings unwanted attention to the pay-for-promotion deal that brands typically tried to avoid when commissioning influencer marketing. The whole thing is supposed to feel subtle and natural. Instead, PRC’s suit probably cost Snapchat more than $90,000 in reputation.
The case could solidify the need for influencer marketing contracts to come with prorated payment terms where stars are paid fractions of the total purse after each post rather than getting any upfront, as The Fashion Law writes. PRC’s choice to chase Sabbat even despite the problematic publicity for its client Snap might convince other influencers to abide more closely to the details of their contracts. If social media creators want to keep turning their passion into their profession, they’re going to have to prove they’re accountable. Otherwise brands will slide back to traditional ads.
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Twitter is adding more nuance to its spam reporting tools, the company announced today. Instead of simply flagging a tweet as posting spam, users can now specify what kind of spam you’re seeing by way of a new menu of choices. Among these is the option to report spam you believe to be from a fake Twitter account.
Now, when you tap the “Report Tweet” option and choose “It’s suspicious or spam” from the first menu, you’re presented with a new selection of choices where you can pick what kind of spam the tweet contains.
Here, you can pick from options that specify if the tweet is posting a malicious link of some kind, if it’s from a fake account, if it’s using the Reply function to send spam, or if it’s using unrelated hashtags.
These last two tricks are regularly used by spammers to increase the visibility of their tweets.
Often, high-profile Twitter users will see replies to their tweets promoting the spammers’ content. For example, check any of @elonmusk’s thread for crypto scammers’ tweets – a problem so severe, that when Elon played along one time as a joke, Twitter locked his account.
Using hashtags, meanwhile, allows spammers to get attention from those people searching Twitter’s Trends.
And of course, spammers are often posting prohibited content, like malicious links, links to phishing sites, and other dangerous links.
But Twitter users will probably be most interested in the new option to report fake accounts.
There’s been a lot of name-calling on Twitter today following the emergence of reports of Russian bots and trolls flooding Twitter, in an attempt to influence U.S. politics with disinformation. Often, users in disagreements on the site will call someone “bot” as a way to shut down a conversation.
Twitter itself has been suspending real bots left and right in recent months. It deleted 200,000 Russian troll tweets earlier this year, for example, and suspended more than 70 million fake accounts in May and June, according to reports.
Now users will be able to report those accounts they believe to be bots, as well.
To what extent Twitter will rely on these user-generated reports over its own algorithmic-based bot detection systems, or other factors (like IP addresses or suspicious behavior), is unclear.
It’s also unclear if people can ban together to mass report an account as “fake” in an attempt to remove a real person’s account. But someone will surely soon test that out.
Prior to the change, users were able to report spam but not the type of spam, Twitter’s documentation today still confirms.
Twitter tells us the updated reporting flow will simply allow the company to collect more detail so it can “identify and remove spam more effectively.”
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LinkedIn has created and — with 562 million users — leads the market in social platforms for people who want to network with others in their professions, and look for jobs. Now a startup that hopes to take it on in a specific niche — university students and recent grads, with a focus on diversity and inclusion — has raised a substantial round to grow. Handshake, a platform for both students looking to take their early career steps and employers who want to reach them, has raised $40 million in a Series C round of funding, after hitting 14 million users in the U.S. across 700 universities, and 300,000 employers targeting them.
The company is now valued at $275 million post-money, according to figures from PitchBook, a big leap on its valuation at the Series B stage two years ago, when it was valued at $108 million.
The funding is notable not just for that valuation hike — and the implication that many think it could give Microsoft-owned LinkedIn a run for its money among 20-somethings — but for who is doing the backing.
The round was led by EQT Ventures, the investment arm of European holding company and PE firm EQT, with participation also from several investment organizations that have put a focus on backing interesting startups in the education sphere, including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Omidyar Network, Reach Capital; as well as True Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Spark Capital and KPCB Edge. Several of these are repeat investors and the total raised by Handshake — not to be confused with the B2B e-commerce platform of the same name — to $74 million.
To date, Handshake has only been active in the U.S. The company was founded in 2014 originally named Stryder by three graduates of the University of Michigan — Garrett Lord (currently the CEO), Scott Ringwelski (CTO) and Ben Christensen (a board member). The plan is to use the new funding to expand into more markets like Europe, using EQT’s network of businesses in the region to help it along.
LinkedIn has been making a lot of efforts over the years to court younger users and bring them into the LinkedIn fold earlier.
In 2013, the company lowered its minimum age for users to 13 and launched dedicated pages for universities. In 2014, LinkedIn started to add in more tools for younger users to connect with universities and their university-related networks on the platform. And through various e-learning efforts, LinkedIn has been trying to create a bridge between the kind of learning you might do at university, and what you might do after you leave to further your career.
The behemoth also started to take baby steps into providing more insights into diversity for those doing hiring, by letting recruiters examine search results by gender; and by providing bigger insights into the wider pool of people on LinkedIn.
Part of the reason for the baby steps, I’m guessing, is that LinkedIn simply lacks the data from its users to do more faster, and so that leaves a lot of room for a rival to step in.
In that vein, it seems Handshake is trying to position itself as a platform that is considering and thinking about how to address diversity from the ground up, as a native part of its platform while it is still small and growing.
One of the ways that Handshake gets more details about its members is through its partnerships with universities, which helps to populate information about their profiles, rather than relying on a person filling out the details manually. (To register for an account, you use your university address, similar to how Facebook worked when it first launched.)
Handshake also has relationships with more than 100 minority-serving institutions, which include Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and Hispanic Serving Institutions in the U.S., to bring them and their students more closely into that fold.
On the side of employers, it includes more search features for recruiters to search using more specific parameters in the effort to make more diverse hiring choices. “Candidates who might not have the right connections or privileged background can get in front of Fortune 500 companies,” the company notes.
“Our Handshake community is tackling the so-called ‘pipeline problem’ head on. Skilled students are on every campus in every corner of the country and we’re proud to help employers discover, recruit and hire up-and-coming talent from all backgrounds,” said Garrett Lord, Handshake Co-Founder and CEO, in a statement. “Students around the world experience the same inequality in the recruiting process, so we’re excited to partner with Alastair Mitchell” — the EQT partner leading the investment — “and EQT Ventures to expand our impact beyond the United States.”
That’s not to say that inclusion and diversity are the only issues that Handshake is tackling.
The company cites a 2018 Strada-Burning Glass Study that says more than 43 percent of graduates are underemployed — either not earning their full potential, or doing a job that doesn’t utilise their skills — in their first job out of college . “Of those who graduate underemployed, 50% remain underemployed 10 years after graduation.” There is, in other words, a big employment gap specifically with recent grads, and while many will land plum positions, many others flail, and the idea is that Handshake will help specifically to address that by improving how well people are matched to positions that are open.
This is, in fact, an interesting counterpoint to the fact that we also have a lot of ageism in certain fields, where older people are often overlooked — perhaps another niche market that is ripe for tackling?
Handshake today makes money much in the same way that LinkedIn does: it offers paid usage tiers for its users to unlock more features. In the startup’s case, a Premium employer tier called the Talent Engagement Suite was recently launched to let organizations search by diversity parameters and other more specific criteria. That appears to be the path that Handshake plans to follow going ahead, doubling its team to 200 with more people in product and engineering roles to build out more analytics and search and recommendations algorithms.
It’s also making some key hires for the next age. Christine Y. Cruzvergara, ex-Associate Provost and Executive Director for Career Education at Wellesley College, is joining as VP of Higher Education and Student Success, to work with institutions precisely on more inclusive initiatives and products.
“CZI is thrilled to support Handshake as it connects talented students to career opportunities that enable them to reach their full potential,” said Vivian Wu, Managing Partner of Ventures at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, in a statement. “Handshake’s approach – expanding access, building student community and support, and showcasing accomplishments beyond college and degree – produces real results, especially for young people from communities that haven’t had access to high quality job and life opportunities.”
Two separate parliamentary committees, in the UK and Canada, have issued an unprecedented international joint summons for Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg to appear before them.
The committees are investigating the impact of online disinformation on democratic processes and want Zuckerberg to answer questions related to the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook user data misuse scandal, which both have been probing this year.
More broadly, they are also seeking greater detail about Facebook’s digital policies and information governance practices — not least, in light of fresh data breaches — as they continue to investigate the democratic impacts and economic incentives related to the spread of online disinformation via social media platforms.
In a letter sent to the Facebook founder today, the chairs of the UK’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) committee and the Canadian Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics (SCAIPE), Damian Collins and Bob Zimmer respectively, write that they intend to hold a “special joint parliamentary hearing at the Westminster Parliament”, on November 27 — to form an “‘international grand committee’ on disinformation and fake news”.
“This will be led by ourselves but a number of other parliaments are likely to be represented,” they continue. “No such joint hearing has ever been held. Given your self-declared objective to “fix” Facebook, and to prevent the platform’s malign use in world affairs and democratic process, we would like to give you the chance to appear at this hearing.”
Both committees say they will be issuing their final reports into online disinformation by the end of December.
The DCMS committee has already put out a preliminary report this summer, following a number of hearings with company representatives and data experts, in which it called for urgent action from government to combat online disinformation and defend democracy — including suggesting it look at a levy on social media platforms to fund educational programs in digital literacy.
Although the UK government has so far declined to seize on the bulk of the committee’s recommendations — apparently preferring a ‘wait and gather evidence’ (and/or ‘kick a politically charged issue into the long grass’) approach.
Meanwhile, Canada’s interest in the democratic damage caused by so-called ‘fake news’ has been sharpened by AIQ, the data company linked to Cambridge Analytica, as one of its data handlers and system developers — and described by CA whistleblower Chris Wylie as essentially a division of his former employer — being located on its soil.
The SCAIPE committee has already held multiple, excoriating sessions interrogating executives from AIQ, which have been watched with close interest by at least some lawmakers across the Atlantic…
At the same time the DCMS committee has tried and failed repeatedly to get Facebook’s CEO before it during the course of its multi-month inquiry into online disinformation. Instead Facebook despatched a number of less senior staffers, culminating with its CTO — Mike Schroepfer — who spent around five hours being roasted by visibly irate committee members. And whose answers left it still unsatisfied.
Yet as political concern about election interference has stepped up steeply this year, Zuckerberg has attended sessions in the US Senate and House in April — to face (but not necessarily answer) policymakers’ questions.
He also appeared before a meeting of the EU parliament’s council of presidents — where he was heckled for dodging MEPs’ specific concerns.
But the UK parliament has been consistently snubbed. At the last, the DCMS committee resorted to saying it would issue Zuckerberg with a formal summons the next time he stepped on UK soil (and of course he hasn’t).
They’re now trying a different tack — in the form of a grand coalition of international lawmakers. From two — and possibly more — countries.
While the chairs of the UK and Canadian committees say they understand Zuckerberg cannot make himself available “to all parliaments” they argue Facebook’s users in other countries “need a line of accountability to your organisation — directly, via yourself”, adding: “We would have thought that this responsibility is something that you would want to take up. We both plan to issue final reports on this issue by the end of this December, 2018. The hearing of your evidence is now overdue, and urgent.”
“We call on you to take up this historic opportunity to tell parliamentarians from both sides of the Atlantic and beyond about the measures Facebook is taking to halt the spread of disinformation on your platform, and to protect user data,” they also write.
So far though, where non-domestic lawmakers are concerned, it’s only been elected representatives of the European Union’s 28 Member States who have proved to have enough collective political clout and pulling power to secure a little facetime with Zuckerberg.
So another Facebook snub seems the most likely response to the latest summons.
“We’ve received the committee’s letter and will respond to Mr Collins by his deadline,” a Facebook spokesperson told us when asked whether it would be despatching Zuckerberg this time.
The committee has given Facebook until November 7 to reply.
Perhaps the company will send its new global policy chief, Nick Clegg — who would at least be an all-too familiar face to Westminster lawmakers, having previously served as the UK’s deputy PM.
Even if Collins et al’s latest gambit still doesn’t net them Zuckerberg, the international coalition approach the two committees are now taking is interesting, given the challenges for many governments of regulating global platforms like Facebook whose user bases can scale bigger than some entire nations.
If the committees were to recruit lawmakers from additional countries to their joint hearing — Myanmar, for example, where Facebook’s platform has been accused of accelerating ethnic violence — such an invitation might be rather harder for Zuckerberg to ignore.
After all, Facebook does claim: “We are accountable.” And Zuckerberg is its CEO. (Though it does not state who exactly Facebook/Zuckerberg feels accountable to.)
While forming a joint international committee is a new tactic, UK and Canadian lawmakers and regulatory bodies have been working together for many months now — as part of their respective inquiries and investigations, and as they’ve sought to unpick complex data trails and understand transnational corporate structures.
One thing is increasingly clear when looking at the tangled web where politics and social media collide (with mass opinion manipulation the intended outcome): The interconnected, cross-border nature of the Internet, when meshed with well-funded digital political campaigning — and indeed buckets of personal data, is now placing huge strain on traditional legal structures at the nation-state level.
National election laws reliant on regulating things like campaign spending and joint working, as the UK’s laws are supposed to, simply won’t work unless you can actually follow the money and genuinely map the relationships.
And where use of personal data for online political ad-targeting is concerned, ethics must be front and center — as the UK’s data watchdog has warned.
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