Year: 2018

A new study by Amnesty International and Element AI puts number to a problem many women already know about: that Twitter is a cesspool of harassment and abuse. Conducted with the help of 6,500 volunteers, the study, billed by Amnesty International as “the largest ever” into online abuse against women, used machine-learning software from Element AI to analyze tweets sent to a sample of 778 women politicians and journalists during 2017. It found that 7.1%, or 1.1 million, of those tweets were either “problematic” or “abusive,” which Amnesty International said amounts to one abusive tweet sent every 30 seconds.

On an interactive website breaking down the study’s methodology and results, Amnesty International said many women either censor what they post, limit their interactions on Twitter, or just quit the platform altogether. “At a watershed moment when women around the world are using their collective power to amplify their voices through social media platforms, Twitter’s failure to consistently and transparently enforce its own community standards to tackle violence and abuse means that women are being pushed backwards towards a culture of silence,” stated the human rights advocacy organization.

Amnesty International, which has been researching abuse against women on Twitter for the past two years, signed up 6,500 volunteers for what it refers to as the “Troll Patrol” after releasing another study in March 2018 that described Twitter as a “toxic” place for women. The Troll Patrol’s volunteers, who come from 150 countries and range in age from 18 to 70 years old, received training about constitutes a problematic or abusive tweet. Then they were shown anonymized tweets mentioning one of the 778 women and asked whether or not the tweets were problematic or abusive. Each tweet was shown to several volunteers. In addition, Amnesty International said “three experts on violence and abuse against women” also categorized a sample of 1,000 tweets to “ensure we were able to assess the quality of the tweets labelled by our digital volunteers.”

The study defined “problematic” as tweets “that contain hurtful or hostile content, especially if repeated to an individual on multiple occasions, but do not necessarily meet the threshold of abuse,” while “abusive” meant tweets “that violate Twitter’s own rules and include content that promote violence against or threats of people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”

In total, the volunteers analyzed 288,000 tweets sent between January to December 2017 to the 778 women studied, who included politicians and journalists across the political spectrum from the United Kingdom and United States. Politicians included members of the U.K. Parliament and the U.S. Congress, while journalists represented a diverse group of publications including The Daily Mail, The New York Times, Guardian, The Sun, gal-dem, Pink News, and Breitbart.

Then a subset of the labelled tweets was processed using Element AI’s machine-learning software to extrapolate the analysis to the total of 14.5 million tweets that mentioned the 778 women during 2017. (Since tweets weren’t collected for the study until March 2018, Amnesty International notes that the scale of abuse was likely even higher because some abusive tweets may have been deleted or made by accounts that were suspended or disabled). Element AI’s extrapolation produced the finding that 7.1% of tweets sent to the women were problematic or abusive, amounting to 1.1 million tweets 2017.

Black, Asian, Latinx, and mixed race women were 34% more likely to be mentioned in problematic or abusive tweets than white women. Black women in particular were especially vulnerable: they were 84% more likely than white women to be mentioned in problematic or abusive tweets. One in 10 tweets mentioning black women in the study sample was problematic or abusive, compared to one in 15 for white women.

“We found that, although abuse is targeted at women across the political spectrum, women of color were much more likely to be impacted, and black women are disproportionately targeted. Twitter’s failure to crack down on this problem means it is contributing to the silencing of already marginalized voices,” said Milena Marin, Amnesty International’s senior advisor for tactical research, in the statement.

Breaking down the results by profession, the study found that 7% of tweets that mentioned the 454 journalists in the study were either problematic or abusive. The 324 politicians surveyed were targeted at a similar rate, with 7.12% of tweets that mentioned them problematic or abusive.

Of course, findings from a sample of 778 journalists and politicians in the U.K. and U.S. is difficult to extrapolate to other professions, countries, or the general population. The study’s findings are important, however, because many politicians and journalists need to use social media in order to do their jobs effectively. Women, and especially women of color, are underrepresented in both professions, and many stay on Twitter simply to make a statement about visibility, even though it means dealing with constant harassment and abuse. Furthermore, Twitter’s API changes means many third-party anti-bullying tools no longer work, as technology journalist Sarah Jeong noted on her own Twitter profile, and the platform has yet to come up with tools that replicate their functionality.

For a long time I used blocktogether to automatically block accounts younger than 7 days and accounts with fewer than 15 followers. After Twitter’s API changes, that option is no longer available to me.

— sarah jeong (@sarahjeong) December 18, 2018

A friend coded up a way for me to automatically mute people who tweeted certain trigger words for me. (Like, say, “gook.”) This is also no longer available to me because of API changes.

— sarah jeong (@sarahjeong) December 18, 2018

Amnesty International’s other research about abusive behavior towards women on Twitter includes a 2017 online poll of women in 8 countries, and an analysis of abuse faced by female members of Parliament before the UK’s 2017 snap election. The organization said the Troll Patrol isn’t about “policing Twitter or forcing it to remove content.” Instead, the organization wants the platform to be more transparent, especially about how the machine-learning algorithms it uses to detect abuse.

Because the largest social media platforms now rely on machine learning to scale their anti-abuse monitoring, Element AI also used the study’s data to develop a machine-learning model that automatically detects abusive tweets. For the next three weeks, the model will be available to test on Amnesty International’s website in order to “demonstrate the potential and current limitations of AI technology.” These limitations mean social media platforms need to fine-tune their algorithms very carefully in order to detect abusive content without also flagging legitimate speech.

“These trade-offs are value-based judgements with serious implications for freedom of expression and other human rights online,” the organization said, adding that “as it stands, automation may have a useful role to play in assessing trends or flagging content for human review, but it should, at best, be used to assist trained moderators, and certainly should not replace them.”

TechCrunch has contacted Twitter for comment.

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s vision of an “entirely new system of transport,” which he unveiled Wednesday night at a splashy event in Hawthorne, California, wasn’t a reusable rocket like the ones he’s building at his nearby SpaceX headquarters. Nor is it an electric vehicle, like the Teslas he is producing at a factory in Fremont, California.

Tonight, Musk showed off a 1.14-mile test tunnel — that snakes its way underneath 120th Street in the city of Hawthorne — that his other business, the Boring Company, dug for about $10 million using a modified boring machine called Godot. (That $10 million figures includes the cost of building the tunnel, all internal infrastructure, lighting, 
communication and video, safety systems, ventilation, and track, according to the company.) For Musk, this is merely a demonstration of what could be: a network of low-cost tunnels used for transportation, utilities or water and built for millions of dollars, or even billions less than those constructed for subways or trains.

These tunnels, which at about 12-feet in diameter are smaller than a subway, are cheaper to build thanks to the company’s boring machines, Musk and Boring Company president Steve Davis contend.

The tunnels could be stacked — Musk calls it a 3D network — and operate like a giant underground highway with vehicles entering and exiting at strategic points along the way via ramp, spiral or elevator depending on available space. The main tunnel would allow vehicles, which are stabilized via a retractable tracking wheels, to travel up to 150 miles per hour. Once a vehicle leaves the main artery, speeds would be reduced. (The retractable tracking wheels are important, new development; Musk said they originally were going to place the vehicles on a skate, which would travel at high speeds, but ditched the idea because it was too “complex.”

These entry points could take as little room as two parking spaces for an elevator, Musk said, which TechCrunch was able to attest to, at least with the demonstration tunnel.

“You can weave these stations throughout the fabric of the city without changing the character of the city, Musk said during a press briefing.

There are some important caveats to this system. This is a concept; it currently doesn’t exist at the scale Musk envisions, although there are numerous cities and utilities interested. (Davis noted they get between 5 and 20 requests or inquires a day from municipalities and utilities).

And only autonomous, electric vehicles would be allowed in the Loop, as The Boring Company is calling the concept. A Tesla Model X was used in the demo Wednesday night, although Musk insisted during a press briefing that “this is not some walled garden or something only for Teslas.” He also said, several times, that this is meant to be a complement to other forms of transport, not to the exclusion of other things.

The Loop would also have dedicated vehicles for pedestrians and bicyclists that Musk speculated could cost about $1 a ride, if shared. The vehicles designated for public transport would run in a loop and get priority.

The public transport piece is notable because, if the Loop existed today, there would be few vehicles that could qualify as autonomous and electric, except Tesla. While the Tesla Model X was used in the demo rides Wednesday night, Musk said he believes smaller electric vehicles like the Model 3, or the yet to be seen Model Y, would be better use cases. And yes, there would be bike racks.

The demo ride

TechCrunch’s ride through the Hawthorne test tunnel began near 120th street and Prairie Avenue, next to a nondescript building — “The Brick Store” stenciled discreetly on one side — that only stood out because of all the security surrounding it. The Model X had been outfitted with the  retractable wheels, which Musk said would be an aftermarket product that might cost between $200 and $300.

Once the vehicle descended, the test driver slowly accelerated to about 44 mph through the tunnel, back towards Crenshaw and 120th Street. The tunnel, hazy with dust from the construction, and lit by neon-like lighting, delivered a bumpy-ish ride on occasion. Musk later explained that this was because they had some trouble with the paving. A system for the public would be much smoother, he said.

The entry point, near the Brick Store, provides an important link to the Boring Company story and vision. Earlier this year, TechCrunch reported that Musk has started a company called The Brick Store LLC to produce and sell bricks, according to public documents. The new company, which was founded in July, will be managed by Davis, the ex-SpaceX engineer who is also running The Boring Company (TBC).

The plan, is for the Boring Company to use the dirt extracted during the boring process to produce bricks, which will cost $0.10 a brick, Musk said.

The next step for the Boring Company is to develop its next generation boring machine, the Line Storm (reference to a Robert Frost poem) and eventually Prufrock, which will deliver a 15-fold cost savings to current technologies, Musk said.

And that’s just the beginning.

“The Loop is just a stepping stone to the hyperloop, Musk said, in reference to the high-speed futuristic mode of transport he first floated in a white paper several years ago. “the Loop will be transport within cities and the hyperloop will be transport between them.”

By any measure Facebook hasn’t had the best of years in 2018.

But while toxic problems keep piling up and, well, raining acidly down on the social networking giant — from election interference, to fake accounts, faulty metrics, security flaws, ethics failures, privacy outrages and much more besides — the silver lining of having a core business now widely perceived as hostile to democratic processes and civilized sentiment, and the tool of choice for shitposters agitating for hate and societal division, well, everywhere in the world, is that Facebook has frankly far more important things to worry about than the latest anti-tech-industry salvo from President Trump.

In an early morning tweet today, Trump (again) attacked what he dubbed anti-conservative “bias” in the digital social sphere — hitting out at not just Facebook but tech’s holy trinity of social giants, with a claim that “Facebook, Twitter and Google are so biased towards the Dems it is ridiculous!”

Time was when Facebook was so sensitive to accusations of internal anti-conservative bias that it fired a bunch of journalists it had contracted and replaced them with algorithms — which almost immediately pumped up a bunch of fake news. RIP irony.

Not today, though.

When asked if it had a response to Trump’s accusation of bias a Facebook spokesperson told us: “We don’t have anything to add here.”

The brevity and alacrity of the response suggested the spokesperson had a really cheerful expression on their face when they typed it.

The relief of Facebook not having to give a shit this time was kinda palpable, even in pixel form.

It was also a far cry from the screeds the company routinely dispenses these days to try to muffle journalistic — and indeed political — enquiry.

Trump evidently doesn’t factor ‘bigly’ on Facebook’s oversubscribed risk-list.

Even though Facebook was the first name on the president’s (non-alphabetical) tech giant hit-list.

Still, Twitter appeared to have irked Trump more, as his tweet singled out the short-form platform — with an accusation that Twitter has made it “much more difficult for people to join [sic] @realDonaldTrump”. (We think by “join” he means follow. But we’re speculating wildly.)

This is perhaps why Twitter felt moved to provide a response to the claim of bias, albeit also without wasting a lot of words.

Here’s its statement:

Our focus is on the health of the service, and that includes work to remove fake accounts to prevent malicious behavior. Many prominent accounts have seen follower counts drop, but the result is higher confidence that the followers they have are real, engaged people.

Presumably the president failed to read our report, from July, when we trailed Twitter’s forthcoming spam purge, warning it would result in users with lots of followers taking a noticeable hit in the coming days. In a word: Sad.

Of course we also asked Google for a response to Trump’s bias claim. But just got radio silence.

In similar “bias” tweets from August the company got a bigger Trump-lashing. And in a response statement then it told us: “We never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has also just had to sit through some three hours of questions from Republicans in Congress on this very theme.

So the company probably feels it’s exhausted the political bias canard.

Even while, as the claims drone on and on, it might truly come to understand what it feels like to be stuck inside a filter bubble.

In any case there are far more pressing things to accuse Google’s algorithms of than being ‘anti-Trump’.

So it’s just as well it didn’t waste time on another presidential sideshow intended to distract from problems of Trump’s own making.

Uber has been granted permission by the state of Pennsylvania to reinstate tests of its autonomous vehicles, as first reported by Reuters.

A spokesperson for Uber confirmed to TechCrunch that the ride-hailing giant received a letter of authorization from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and clarified that the company has not yet resumed self-driving operations.

Uber halted testing of its self-driving cars following a fatal accident in Tempe, Arizona this March that left a pedestrian dead. An autonomous Uber SUV accompanied by a safety driver was driving northbound when it struck a woman, who was taken to the hospital where she later died as a result of her injuries.

Investigators later determined the driver, Rafaela Vasquez, had looked down at a phone 204 times during a 43-minute test drive, according to a 318-page police report released by the Tempe Police Department.

In the aftermath of the accident, Uber paused all of its AV testing operations in Pittsburgh, Toronto, San Francisco and Phoenix.

Moving forward, Uber will test its self-driving cars more cautiously, per a recently released Uber safety report. The company will require that two employees are in the front seat of its cars at all times, that an automatic braking system is enabled and that its safety employees are more strictly monitored.

Uber, which first began developing its autonomous vehicle fleet in 2015 and initiated tests the following year, confidentially filed for an initial public offering two weeks ago. The company, currently valued at $72 billion, is expected to debut at a valuation as high as $120 billion early next year.

Smart security camera maker Lighthouse AI is calling it a day. The news, first reported by The Information, has since been confirmed by CEO Alex Teichman.

“I am incredibly proud of the groundbreaking work the Lighthouse team accomplished – delivering useful and accessible intelligence for our homes via advanced AI and 3D sensing,” the executive writes on the company’s homepage. “Unfortunately, we did not achieve the commercial success we were looking for and will be shutting down operations in the near future.”

Teichman also promises the company will provide refund details to those customers who have already bought into the product.

Lighthouse’s offering certainly showed promise. Andy Rubin’s Playground Global was among those companies throwing their support behind the device, helping the startup raise ~$17 million, by Crunchbase’s count.

I was given a demo at Playground’s offices earlier this year and was impressed by its implementation of 3D sensing and artificial intelligence to get a much more focused picture of what the device is recording. From Greg’s initial writeup:

One aspect of Lighthouse that’s particularly unique is in how you’re meant to peruse your footage; it’s aiming to be less of a security camera and more of an assistant. Rather than scrubbing a timeline, you ask the in-app natural language processing system (think Google Assistant or Alexa, but it only cares about what’s going on in your house) for what you want. You ask it things like “Did the dog walker come on Wednesday?”, or “When did the kids get home yesterday?” and it responds with relevant footage.

Of course, some things just can’t be overcome. An overcrowded market is one. The space is flooded with products, while being mostly dominated by Netgear spin-off, Arlo. And then there was the $300 price tag. That’s well out of the range of much of the competition.

Teichman ends the write-up on a hopeful note, however, “We remain strong believers in a future with AI at your service, and look forward to inventing that future with you.” Perhaps we’ll see the company’s impressive technology implemented on another smart camera in the future?

We’ve reached out to Playground for additional comment.

Tinder has fired its vice president of marketing and communications Rosette Pambakian, as well as other employees who sued Tinder’s parent company Match Group and its controlling shareholder IAC earlier this year.

The Verge first broke the news of the firings. A Match Group spokesperson confirmed that a number of Tinder employees have been terminated, though they did not identify them or say how many were involved.

The lawsuit was filed by Tinder co-founders Sean Rad, Justin Mateen and Jonathan Badeen and other executives. Some, like Rad, had already left Tinder, while others like Pambakian and Badeen, were still employed at the time.

In the suit, the group alleged that IAC and Match Group had manipulated financial data in order to lower the company’s valuation.They also alleged that Greg Blatt, who served as CEO of Match and Tinder, groped and sexually harassed Pambakian at the company’s 2016 holiday party. (Match and IAC said the allegations were “meritless.”)

In an email sent to Match Group’s current CEO Mandy Ginsberg, Pambakian said that after being placed on leave when the lawsuit was filed, she was subjected to “ongoing intimidation and retaliation clearly designed to pressure me into resigning.” Pambakian also said that after she declined to sign a non-disparagement agreement, “Match snuck an arbitration clause into its employees’ most recent compliance acknowledgements, causing me, Jonathan, James and Josh to have to withdraw from the lawsuit.”

“I never imagined that I’d be pushed out of my company for standing up for what is right,” she wrote. “But if that is the cost of being on the right side of history, I’ll pay it. As a woman CEO, I truly hope that you reconsider the safety of your remaining female workforce and allow Tinder and other Match owned companies to follow in the footsteps of Uber, Facebook and Google in eliminating forced arbitration for sexual misconduct claims. We deserve better.”

In response, Ginsberg denied that Pambakian was fired for complaining about sexual harassment: “You couldn’t have been, as you never reported Greg for sexual harassment.”

“As explained in the letter we sent you, you were terminated because it was not possible for you to fulfill the duties and responsibilities of your role as Tinder’s spokesperson for a number of reasons, including your public position against the company over a valuation process,” Ginsberg continued. “We also recently asked you to come to the office for a meeting with the HR department to discuss work-related activities and policies and were told that we can only contact you through your attorneys. Unfortunately, it’s impossible for you to do your work at Tinder if all communications related to your job have to go through your lawyers.”

I’ve included the full text of both emails (originally published by The Verge, but subsequently shared by sources with TechCrunch as well) below.

Email from Rosette Pambakian to Mandy Ginsberg

Dear Mandy,

Six years ago I wrote the very first press release for Tinder. Since then, I’ve poured my heart and soul into this company and helped grow it into a global phenomenon and top-grossing app. I was the youngest and longest-standing female executive at the company. I love Tinder. And I love my colleagues. But you have now fired me from a company I was so proud to build in blatant retaliation for joining a group of colleagues and Tinder’s original founding members in a lawsuit against Match and IAC, standing up for our rights, calling out the company’s CEO Greg for sexual misconduct, and confronting the company about covering up what happened to me.

While I truly hoped that decency and professionalism would prevail and that you would let me return to work, I knew that was probably unlikely when I was placed on leave the very day the lawsuit was filed and you continued to defend the actions of the executive that I spoke out against. Rather than acknowledge the truth and condemn his actions, you chalked it up it to “bad judgment.” To make matters worse, you told the world that a sham investigation (in which I was never even interviewed) determined the assault was some sort of “consensual cuddling”—as if there could by anything consensual about a CEO groping his subordinate in front of other employees after making sexually explicit comments throughout the evening of a company holiday party. No company that has faced allegations like this has gone to such lengths to protect one of its own – it’s truly despicable.

Since being placed on leave, I’ve been subjected to ongoing intimidation and retaliation clearly designed to pressure me into resigning—from immediately removing my name from my office and converting it into a conference room, to trying to coerce me into turning over my private and personal data on my phone. Though I can think of no other company that has actually fired the woman who made sexual assault allegations against an executive—the company’s actions here, including firing me just one day before my remaining options vest, are totally consistent with the way you have circled the wagons around him from day one.

Was the board aware that the company would publicly blame the victim?

When I refused to sign a non-disparagement agreement presented to me by HR, which would have prevented me from speaking publicly about my experience in exchange for compensation, Match snuck an arbitration clause into its employees’ most recent compliance acknowledgements, causing me, Jonathan, James and Josh to have to withdraw from the lawsuit. Know that my former Tinder colleagues and I still vigorously support that lawsuit — IAC and Match cheated us out of what we were promised and rightfully earned in exchange for building Tinder into Barry Diller’s most valuable business. As the lawsuit progresses the evidence will emerge and the world will see how IAC and Match plotted against their employees and rewarded misconduct.

I never imagined that I’d be pushed out of my company for standing up for what is right. But if that is the cost of being on the right side of history, I’ll pay it. As a woman CEO, I truly hope that you reconsider the safety of your remaining female workforce and allow Tinder and other Match owned companies to follow in the footsteps of Uber, Facebook and Google in eliminating forced arbitration for sexual misconduct claims. We deserve better.

Email from Mandy Ginsberg to Rosette Pambakian

Dear Rosette,

I’m glad you reached out to me directly and I would like to take this opportunity to clarify a few points, because there seems to be a very real disconnect here that I truly want to fix.

You were not terminated because you reported Greg for sexual harassment. You couldn’t have been, as you never reported Greg for sexual harassment. When Sean Rad brought the subject up nearly five months later, right after the valuation process commenced, it was immediately and thoroughly investigated by the Board, independently without any involvement from Greg, which concluded that no sexual harassment occurred. I was not the CEO at the time, but I know that you were interviewed on at least two separate occasions and you never alleged sexual harassment.

On the topic of sexual harassment at Tinder, you know how seriously reports are taken. You yourself reported two other male colleagues, whom Sean Rad hired, and they were very quickly dismissed. Clearly, it was taken very seriously given the company terminated those individuals. More importantly though, Greg is no longer here. I am. And I promise you, we do not retaliate against anyone who reports sexual harassment. Your position was never at risk due to any sexual harassment complaints. I wanted to find a way to keep you employed at Tinder.

As explained in the letter we sent you, you were terminated because it was not possible for you to fulfill the duties and responsibilities of your role as Tinder’s spokesperson for a number of reasons, including your public position against the company over a valuation process. We also recently asked you to come to the office for a meeting with the HR department to discuss work-related activities and policies and were told that we can only contact you through your attorneys. Unfortunately, it’s impossible for you to do your work at Tinder if all communications related to your job have to go through your lawyers. As it relates to your personal information, any suggestion that we have been trying to access it is just not true. Like any company, we’ve asked for you, and all other employees involved, to return company laptops, phones and other devices to us. And unfortunately, we couldn’t retrieve a number of company devices from you and the others since you claimed that they were coincidentally all lost or damaged just before you decided to sue the company.

There are two last points I want to make: on the point about your equity, those options have already been accelerated, and should be exercisable in your account, along with the other equity awards that have vested since August. However, on the arbitration agreements, there is no NDA in them and we never tried to force you to sign a non-disparagement agreement. You’re free to talk about anything publicly that you’d like. You have already done so and that’s your prerogative. But the arbitration agreement is attached again. As you already know from when you signed it, it’s clearly labeled “Agreement to Arbitrate.”

I am a strong female advocate and have said to the women in the organization that as a female CEO in charge, I have zero tolerance for bad behavior and I am very much invested in every single employee’s success. If you’d like to discuss any of the above, or have a productive dialogue, I am here and will make myself available for an in person meeting. Just let me know.

Mandy

A year and a half after giving birth to Oath, Verizon’s officially rebranding its media group as… wait for it… Verizon Media Group. It’s simple, it’s straightforward, it says what it does on the package — and most importantly, it makes a hell of a lot more sense than “Oath.”

Division head Guru Gowrappan confirmed that the changes will go into effect on January 8 — just in time for the kick-off of CES. The exec says the change is aimed at “representing our strong alignment as a core pillar of Verizon’s business.” Contrary to some initial reports spurred on by the (since changed) art accompanying the announcement blog post, Verizon tells me the big, purple Yahoo “Y” will (thankfully) not be the catchall logo for VZM.

A spokesperson for the company confirmed that an official Verizon Media Group logo is launching alongside the official rebranding on January 8. Then we’ll finally see if the company is keeping the infamous Oath colon around.

Again, good.

The less brand confusion the better. “‘Oath’ rhymes with ‘growth,’ and that’s our job, to grow,” then CEO Tim Armstrong told us at the brand’s launch. Clearly, the AOL+Yahoo = Oath equation never really added up for a brand that was initially positioned to be largely internally facing. But even without the rhyming, one assumes growth is still on the docket here.

The rise of the Verizon Media Group is mostly just a rebranding exercise — the portfolio, which includes HuffPost, Engadget, Tumblr and, yes, TechCrunch, should remain largely the same.

A growing cluster of actors, musicians and viral internet stars have Fortnite in their crosshairs. The smash hit third-person shooter is free to play but generates mountains of revenue through in-game microtransactions. Those purchased lure avid Fortnite players to spend real life cash on virtual cosmetic items, like special character skins (today: a winter skiing set!) and, most importantly, dance moves.

Now, Fortnite creator Epic Games faces two new lawsuits over dance moves: one from actor Alfonso Ribeiro who played Carlton on 90’s TV hit Fresh Prince of Bel Air and another from the family of Russell Horning, better known as “Backpack Kid,” who created a viral dance called “the Floss.” Horning’s lawsuit also names 2K Sports, maker of NBA 2K, for that game’s depiction of his dance. Earlier in December, rapper 2 Milly filed a lawsuit against Fortnite maker Epic over the game’s depiction of his dance move, the Milly Rock, which the game calls “Swipe it.”

Ribeiro’s lawyer provided TechCrunch with the following statement:

It is widely recognized that Mr. Ribeiro’s likeness and intellectual property have been misappropriated by Epic Games in the most popular video game currently in the world, Fortnite. Epic has earned record profits off of downloadable content in the game, including emotes like “Fresh.” Yet Epic has failed to compensate or even ask permission from Mr. Ribeiro for the use of his likeness and iconic intellectual property. Therefore, Mr. Ribeiro is seeking his fair and reasonable share of profits Epic has earned by use of his iconic intellectual property in Fortnite and as a result is requesting through the courts that Epic cease all use of Mr. Ribeiro’s signature dance.

Pierce Bainbridge Beck Price & Hecht LLP is also pursuing similar claims against Take-Two Interactive and Visual Concepts, developer of the NBA 2K series of video games, on behalf of Mr. Ribeiro.

Fortnite’s in-game dance moves are ubiquitous, both in-game and out — and that’s part of the problem. The game lifted its most popular dance moves from various online viral moments across the internet, TV, movies and music. In most cases the in-game dances are so well loved because they copy their source material so precisely. While the game lifts these dances move for move, making them widely recognizable, it doesn’t refer to the source material directly and renames the dances with generic nicknames. In Fortnite, the “Tidy” dance is Snoop Dogg’s “Drop it Like its Hot” dance, “Jubilation” is Elaine’s dance from Seinfeld, “Pure Salt” (not really a dance, some of these are just emotes) is from the Salt Bae meme, Psy’s Gangnam Style dance and so on. In the case of the Carlton dance, Fortnite gives a small nod to the dance’s origins by naming it “Fresh.”

The game draws from a wide pool of source material, but black creators in particular have spoken out about Fortnite’s monetization moves. Black artists have a long history of seeing their work achieve broad mainstream popularity without commercial or credit to accompany it. When Chance the Rapper tweeted about Fortnite’s relationship to black artists in July, BlocBoy JB — creator of the dance the game calls “Hype” — endorsed the idea that artists like himself should be paid if Fortnite is making money from their moves.

Fortnite’s default in-game emote is a dance that actor Donald Faison performs on the show Scrubs, and Faison has also taken notice.

Fortnite’s decision to animate its characters doing popular dance moves in and of itself isn’t new. Overwatch creator and Epic competitor Blizzard includes popular dance emotes in its own multiplayer shooter and before that in multiplayer RPG World of Warcraft. In Blizzard’s case, the depiction of dance moves, some for sale via lootboxes, isn’t quite as on the nose nor does it mine current internet culture as thoroughly.

For example, the Overwatch character Junkrat does a version of the running man dance that looks a lot like a version of the dance by Will Smith’s character on The Fresh Prince. That dance was itself popularized by Janet Jackson in her Rhythm Nation music video.

Other Overwatch dance emotes are drawn from traditional Japanese dance and anime. In Blizzard’s classic game World of Warcraft, the blood elf characters feature dances culled from the movie Napoleon Dynamite and Britney Spears music videos. In World of Warcraft’s case, these moves weren’t for sale in-game — the microtransaction model hadn’t yet really taken off during the game’s heyday.

Epic Games was likely aware that lifting these dance moves and selling them to gamers might cause a stir among some creators, but by that time it was probably already making too much money to care. Notably, the company faced a high profile copycat accusation from the creator of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), a battle royale-style game widely understood to have inspired Fortnite’s gameplay. PUBG dropped the lawsuit in June of this year, likely after a substantial settlement.

Epic also appears to have quietly paid at least one creator to settle a potential legal threat. Dancer Gabby David, who created the Fortnite dance called the “Electro Shuffle,” appears to have settled with Epic Games around a year ago for the game’s depiction of her choreography, according to forum posts and her Twitter account. Epic Games declined to comment to TechCrunch about the details of the settlement.

All three individuals suing Epic Games over Fortnite dances are being represented by intellectual property lawyer David L. Hecht and we’re likely to see more artists and internet stars signing on with Hecht before this is all over. We don’t know Epic’s next move, but as some players have suggested, it would be easy enough for the gamemaker to add some kind of tie-in crediting the creators for their dances. Epic happily partners with entertainment companies and even the NFL for sure to be lucrative in-game promotional crossovers, so it’s tough to say something like this would be out of place in the game.

Given the complexity of copyright law and the fact that none of the individuals holds copyright of their respective dances, it’s not clear if any of the latest legal action against Fortnite’s creators will hold water. Still, given its deep pockets — Epic just raised a $1.25 billion round two months ago — settling a handful of small lawsuits over the game’s well-loved dance emotes is a small price to pay for Fortnite’s colossal success.

While proponents swore 2018 would be the year AR moved mainstream, by year’s end it seems the biggest trend has been the movement of early startups to financial collapse.

Blippar, an early augmented reality app that raised more than $130 million in venture funding from investors like Qualcomm and Candy Ventures, announced today that it is “entering into administration” and will be laying off all its employees as administrators appointed by a UK court decides what to do with its assets. The startup just closed a $37 million round in September.

The company, founded in 2011, was on the cusp of a number of trends that took flight in the augmented reality space, but as competition heated up from the tech giants investing in AR, the fast-spending startup couldn’t boost its revenues and was losing money incredibly quickly in search of new customers.

The UK startup claims that its collapse follows some internal shareholder drama, where an emergency influx of $5 million was blocked by Khazanah, a strategic investment fund from the Malaysian government, leading to the startup’s shutdown.

“Blippar’s services are likely to come to halt once the administrators take control of the business and its servers. As part of the administration process, all employees will be let go,” a company blog post read. “This is an incredibly sad, disappointing, and unfortunate outcome.”

Tesla made its ambition for world domination known when it announced its intention to build a factory in China. The move makes sense — China is the world’s largest automotive market. But it might be shortsighted.

By continuing to go after the higher tiers of an established market, Tesla will engage in a zero-sum game for market share instead of forging a new market of unparalleled size. Competition will be fierce as incumbents, like BMW and Audi, which are determined to hold on to their more profitable customers, respond in kind.

Instead, the larger opportunity for any automaker is to grow the overall market by way of disruptive innovation — and not in the Silicon-Valley-hype sense of the term. The architect of disruptive innovation, Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, explains that disruption happens at the low end of the market — not the end adorned with high-tech features and flashy designs.

Disruptive innovations succeed by transforming complicated and expensive products into simple and affordable ones, thereby enabling a much larger population to benefit from the offerings. And since they, by their very nature, expand the market, they constitute a wellspring of new growth.

Rather than take a page out of the disruptive playbook, Tesla is engaging in sustaining innovation. The company plans to use the new factory to build Model 3 and Model Y cars. Assuming that Tesla continues with its current positioning, these cars, like Tesla’s other models, will enter an established market to compete along existing measures of performance, like acceleration, style and luxury.

Sustaining innovations are important in that they advance an industry, but they offer little net growth, as not all consumers are able to access them. And because sustaining innovations target an industry’s more profitable consumers, we can expect leading automakers to fight tooth and nail to retain their core customers. Alternatively, a disruptive strategy offers a much easier way to tap into the Chinese market — and it’s already happening right under the noses of Tesla and other leading automakers.

Chinese manufacturers of low-speed electric vehicles (LSEVs) — small vehicles that typically top out around 45 mph, have a limited driving range, and sell for as little as $2,000 — are creating a market where none existed, by primarily selling cars to people in rural China who have never owned one. We call these customers nonconsumers of cars. The measures of performance that matter most to nonconsumers aren’t speed, style or comfort, but rather affordability, accessibility and simplicity. So, as long as LSEVs meet these criteria, nonconsumers will generally be willing to buy them. After all, having a car that can’t travel very far or very fast is much better than the alternatives: bicycles, motorcycles or farm vehicles.

By targeting nonconsumers, LSEV manufacturers have steered clear of direct competition with incumbent automakers — who have at their disposal far more resources, such as capital, factories and relationships with suppliers — and effectively established a foothold that allows them to steadily move upmarket.

Taking the disruptive route has enabled LSEV manufacturers to unleash a new wave of growth that Tesla and other automakers should covet. During the decade that LSEVs have been available in China, sales have soared. According to the International Energy Agency’s “Global EV Outlook 2017” report, between 1.2 million and 1.5 million units were sold in China in 2016 — overshadowing the number of battery and plug-in hybrid electric cars sold globally that same year. Undoubtedly, further growth potential for LSEVs in China is immense — more than half a billion Chinese lived in rural areas in 2016.

Whether LSEV manufacturers manage to profitably march upmarket into higher-performance tiers of the market remains to be seen. What we can say for sure is that there is enormous untapped potential to be discovered — both in China and in other emerging markets.