Year: 2019

Here’s a concerning story from India, where the upcoming election is putting the use of social media in the spotlight.

While the Indian government is putting Facebook, Google and other companies under pressure to prevent their digital platforms from being used for election manipulation, a journalist has demonstrated just how easy it is to control the social media messages that published by government ministers.

Pon Radhakrishnan, India’s minister of state for finance and shipping, published a series of puzzling tweets today after Pratik Sinha, a co-founder of fact-checking website Alt News, accessed a Google document of prepared statements and tinkered with the content.

Among the statements tweeted out, Radhakrishnan said Prime Minister Modi’s government had failed the middle classes and not made development on improving the country’s general welfare. Sinha’s edits also led to the official BJP Assam Pradesh account proclaiming that the Prime Minister had destroyed all villages and made women slaves to cooking.

These are the opposite of the partisan messages that the accounts intended to send.

The messages were held in an unlocked Google document that contained a range of tweets compiled for the Twitter accounts. Sinha managed to access the document and doctor the messages into improbable statements — which he has done before — in order to show the shocking lack of security and processes behind the social media content.

Sinha said he made the edits “to demonstrate how dangerous this is from the security standpoint for this country.”

“I had fun but it could have disastrous consequences,” he told TechCrunch in a phone interview. “This is a massive security issue from the point of view of a democracy.”

Sinha said he was able to access the document — which was not restricted or locked to prevent changes — through a WhatsApp group that is run by members of the party. Declining to give specifics, he said he had managed to infiltrate the group and thus gain access to a flow of party and government information and, even more surprisingly, get right into the documents and edit them.

What’s equally as stunning is that, even with the message twisted 180 degrees, their content didn’t raise an alarm. The tweets were still loaded and published without any realization. It was only after Sinha went public with the results that Radhakrishnan and BJP Assam Pradesh account begin to delete them.

The Indian government is rightly grilling Facebook and Google to prevent its platform being abused around the election, as evidence suggested happened in the U.S. Presidential election and the U.K’s Brexit vote, but members of the government themselves should reflect on the security of their own systems, too. It would be too easy for these poor systems to be exploited.

Last time I checked London was awash with co-working spaces, shared office spaces, spaces of every shape, size and color. If there’s one sector that always makes money during a boom, it’s the sector that makes the spades and pick-axes for the gold-rush. And that’s exactly what’s happened to London’s tech scene: a property boom.
In the last year at least we’ve seen WeWork expand to 31 locations in London alone. Meanwhile, it’s well-funded native US challenger from New York, Knotel (which has a polar opposite approach to WeWork in the way it brands its spaces) is expanding rapidly across the city.

Now the Canadian are coming!

Toronto’s OneEleven thinks it has a new take on helping London’s fast-growth businesses with space. They call it “scale as a service”. Yes, this also sounds like marketing hype to me, but, the company insists, there’s more to it than that.
What this boils down to is giving its tenants access to turn-key services such as HR, brand and marketing support, sales tools and the like. The idea being that founders and their teams get freed-up to focus on their business. That’s aside from the usual selection of office spaces and meeting rooms etc etc.
In its native Toronto, OneEleven claims to have seen 70 member companies raise more than $500 million at a collective valuation of more than $2 billion since 2013 by applying this methodology to its customer base.
Dean Hopkins, CEO of OneEleven, says the company is addressing a real need: “London offers incredible support for early-stage businesses as they start out, and once they reach Series A funding – but there simply isn’t enough of an infrastructure out there at the moment to help companies at that crucial in-between stage. Many companies will go through accelerator or incubator programmes that provide them a valuable kickstart, but when the fixed term is up they are too often left to fend for themselves with little support in maintaining that momentum.”

He’s engaged UK managing director Rob McPherson who wants to “create a truly bespoke version of the OneEleven experience that is best suited to the London ecosystem.”

So far so good.

But wait a second, do the startups pay for these services?

A spokesperson told me that the services are provided “a-la-carte as individual subscriptions – our members can buy only what they need for only as long as they need.” So in other words, although OneEleven doesn’t take equity in its members’ companies, these extra services don’t come free for businesses in the building.

That’s not the approach of other competitors in the London ‘tech spaces’ space.

Natasha Guerra of Runway East tells me: “Runway East provides free investment support for its startups, running monthly VC office hours as well as updating leading London VC’s on a monthly basis with details on which members are raising… We provide this service for free as part of our commitment to supporting our members.”

Meanwhile, over at TechHub, CEO and co-founder Elizabeth Varley says: “At TechHub our entire support programme is included in the membership price and we run at least one VC event a week for our members. No fee, no percentage, no equity.”

So this approach of offering paid-for support services to companies which sign up to office space is clearly a fairly new one for London’s tech scene. The question is will it fly? With Brexit storm clouds on the horizon, it’s frankly impossible to predict anything these days.

Around 37 percent of Americans were subjected to severe hate and harassment online in 2018, according to a new study by the Anti-Defamation League, up from about 18 percent in 2017. And over half of all Americans experienced some form of harassment according to the ADL study.

Facebook users bore the brunt of online harassment on social networking sites according to the ADL study, with around 56 percent of survey respondents indicating that at least some of their harassment occurred on the platform. — unsurprising given Facebook’s status as the dominant social media platform in the U.S.

Around 19 percent of people said they experienced severe harassment on Twitter (only 19 percent? That seems low); while 17 percent reported harassment on YouTube; 16 percent on Instagram; and 13 percent on WhatsApp .

Chart courtesy of the Anti-Defamation League

In all, the blue ribbon standards for odiousness went to Twitch, Reddit, Facebook and Discord, when the ADL confined their surveys to daily active users. nearly half of all daily users on Twitch have experienced harassment, the report indicated. Around 38% of Reddit users, 37% of daily Facebook users, and 36% of daily Discord users reported being harassed.

“It’s deeply disturbing to see how prevalent online hate is, and how it affects so many Americans,” said ADL chief executive Jonathan A. Greenblatt. “Cyberhate is not limited to what’s solely behind a screen; it can have grave effects on the quality of everyday lives – both online and offline. People are experiencing hate and harassment online every day and some are even changing their habits to avoid contact with their harassers.”

And the survey respondents seem to think that online hate makes people more susceptible to committing hate crimes, according to the ADL.

The ADL also found that most Americans want policymakers to strengthen laws and improve resources for police around cyberbullying and cyberhate. Roughly 80 percent said they wanted to see more action from lawmakers.

Even more Americans, or around 84 percent, think that the technology platforms themselves need to do more work to curb the harassment, hate, and hazing they see on social applications and websites.

As for the populations that were most at risk to harassment and hate online, members of the LGBTQ community were targeted most frequently, according to the study. Some 63 percent of people identifying as LGBTQ+ said they were targeted for online harassment because of their identity.

“More must be done in our society to lessen the prevalence of cyberhate,” said Greenblatt. “There are key actions every sector can take to help ensure more Americans are not subjected to this kind of behavior. The only way we can combat online hate is by working together, and that’s what ADL is dedicated to doing every day.”

The report also revealed that cyberbullying had real consequences on user behavior. Of the survey respondents 38 percent stopped, reduced or changed online activities, and 15 percent took steps to reduce risks to their physical safety.

Interviews for the survey were conducted between Dec. 17 to Dec. 27, 2018 by the public opinion and data analysis company YouGov, and was conducted by the ADL’s Center for Technology and Society. The non-profit admitted that it oversampled for respondents who identified as Jewish, Muslim, African American, Asian AMerican or LGBTQ+ to “understand the experiences of individuals who may be especially targeted because of their group identity.”

The survey had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points, according to a statement from the ADL.

Around 37 percent of Americans were subjected to severe hate and harassment online in 2018, according to a new study by the Anti-Defamation League, up from about 18 percent in 2017. And over half of all Americans experienced some form of harassment according to the ADL study.

Facebook users bore the brunt of online harassment on social networking sites according to the ADL study, with around 56 percent of survey respondents indicating that at least some of their harassment occurred on the platform. — unsurprising given Facebook’s status as the dominant social media platform in the U.S.

Around 19 percent of people said they experienced severe harassment on Twitter (only 19 percent? That seems low); while 17 percent reported harassment on YouTube; 16 percent on Instagram; and 13 percent on WhatsApp .

Chart courtesy of the Anti-Defamation League

In all, the blue ribbon standards for odiousness went to Twitch, Reddit, Facebook and Discord, when the ADL confined their surveys to daily active users. nearly half of all daily users on Twitch have experienced harassment, the report indicated. Around 38% of Reddit users, 37% of daily Facebook users, and 36% of daily Discord users reported being harassed.

“It’s deeply disturbing to see how prevalent online hate is, and how it affects so many Americans,” said ADL chief executive Jonathan A. Greenblatt. “Cyberhate is not limited to what’s solely behind a screen; it can have grave effects on the quality of everyday lives – both online and offline. People are experiencing hate and harassment online every day and some are even changing their habits to avoid contact with their harassers.”

And the survey respondents seem to think that online hate makes people more susceptible to committing hate crimes, according to the ADL.

The ADL also found that most Americans want policymakers to strengthen laws and improve resources for police around cyberbullying and cyberhate. Roughly 80 percent said they wanted to see more action from lawmakers.

Even more Americans, or around 84 percent, think that the technology platforms themselves need to do more work to curb the harassment, hate, and hazing they see on social applications and websites.

As for the populations that were most at risk to harassment and hate online, members of the LGBTQ community were targeted most frequently, according to the study. Some 63 percent of people identifying as LGBTQ+ said they were targeted for online harassment because of their identity.

“More must be done in our society to lessen the prevalence of cyberhate,” said Greenblatt. “There are key actions every sector can take to help ensure more Americans are not subjected to this kind of behavior. The only way we can combat online hate is by working together, and that’s what ADL is dedicated to doing every day.”

The report also revealed that cyberbullying had real consequences on user behavior. Of the survey respondents 38 percent stopped, reduced or changed online activities, and 15 percent took steps to reduce risks to their physical safety.

Interviews for the survey were conducted between Dec. 17 to Dec. 27, 2018 by the public opinion and data analysis company YouGov, and was conducted by the ADL’s Center for Technology and Society. The non-profit admitted that it oversampled for respondents who identified as Jewish, Muslim, African American, Asian AMerican or LGBTQ+ to “understand the experiences of individuals who may be especially targeted because of their group identity.”

The survey had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points, according to a statement from the ADL.

Another autonomous vehicle unicorn has joined the herd.

TuSimple, a self-driving truck startup running daily routes for customers in Arizona, has raised $95 million in a Series D funding round led by Sina Corp. as the company prepares to scale up its commercial autonomous fleet to more than 50 trucks by June.

The startup, which launched in 2015 and has operations in San Diego and Tucson, Arizona, has a post-money of $1.095 billion (aka unicorn status). TuSimple has raised $178 million to date in rounds that have included backers such as Nvidia and ZP Capital. Sina, operator of China’s biggest microblogging site Weibo, is one of TuSimple’s earliest investors. Composite Capital, a Hong Kong-based investment firm and previous investor, also participated in this latest round.

TuSimple launched when the burgeoning AV ecosystem of investors, academics turned entrepreneurs, and early self-driving tech pioneers, were focused more on the development of autonomous passenger vehicles, namely robotaxis.

Autonomous trucking existed in relative obscurity until high-profile engineers from Google launched Otto, a self-driving truck startup that was quickly acquired by Uber in August 2016. Then came the reveal of the Tesla Semi and the founding of several autonomous trucking startups including Starsky Robotics and Embark.

Suddenly, it seemed people had woken up to the economic opportunity that could be achieved — just maybe — with trucks.

Meanwhile, TuSimple quietly scaled. In late 2017, TuSimple raised $55 million with plans to use those funds to scale up testing to two full truck fleets in China and the U.S. By 2018, TuSimple started testing on public roads, beginning with a 120-mile highway stretch between Tucson and Phoenix in Arizona and another segment in Shanghai.

“Autonomous driving is one of the most complex AI systems humans have ever built. After three years of intense focus to reach our technical goals, we have moved beyond research into the serious work of building a commercial solution,” TuSimple founder, president and CTO Xiaodi Hou said.

Today, TuSimple is taking three to five fully autonomous trips per day for customers on three different routes in Arizona. All of these trips have two safety engineers, one who is behind the wheel, and another monitoring the data pouring in during each trip. TuSimple says these daily trips allow it to earn revenue while it validates its Level 4 autonomous system, a designation by SAE that means the vehicle takes over all of the driving in certain conditions. TuSimple has 12 contracted customers.

Now, it’s ready to ramp up further, in terms of its fleet size and partnerships. TuSimple plans to expand its daily “fully-autonomous” commercial deliveries to Texas. The company also plans to use this influx of capital to fund what it describes as “critical joint production programs” with OEM, Tier 1 suppliers and sensors partners. Truck manufacturing suppliers are working with TuSimple on the integration of autonomous software with powertrain, braking and steering systems. The company says this is “an essential step for the commercial production and operation of self-driving trucks.”

TuSimple isn’t disclosing its customers or even suppliers yet. Although, TuSimple did reveal last month at CES that it’s working with Tier 1 supplier Cummins Inc. to enable powertrain integration with its autonomous technologies.

TuSimple’s focus on cameras

Other AV companies, namely low-speed autonomous passenger vehicles have focused on LiDAR (light detection and ranging lasers) to improve the perception of the vehicle, arguably one of the most difficult tasks of automated driving. But for TuSimple, “laser isn’t the sauce.”

Instead, TuSimple has developed a camera-centric perception solution. The company does use LiDAR for its mapping and some data collection. However, LiDAR has its limitations in the high-speed world of trucking, Hou explained to TechCrunch in a previous interview.

Even its name, which is an interlingual pun that essentially means “simple image” or simple image analysis, affirms TuSimple’s approach.

It appears that has paid off. LiDAR can detect objects like cars to about 250 meters, although the optimal quality falters past 150 meters. TuSimple says its camera-based system has a vision range of 1,000 meters.

As a reluctant participant in AV demos, this TechCrunch reporter headed to TuSimple’s Tucson operations recently armed with lots of curiosity and a healthy dose of skepticism.

The TuSimple truck, two safety engineers in the front, and Hou and myself in the back of the cab, entered into autonomous mode in the company parking lot as it approached a surface road. From here, the truck drove the route in autonomous mode for the entire 65-mile or so trip. This route began with a left turn onto a surface road, then onto an unprotected left at a traffic light, a railroad crossing, and finally an entrance onto the highway. The truck continued for 30 miles before exiting the interstate, then maneuvering back onto the highway from the trip back.

A display in the cab allowed us to see what the truck was seeing, or more specifically what the camera-based system sees. TuSimple’s camera combined with software algorithms allows the system to track distance, relative speed and vehicle type of the various objects spotted while on the road and has an intention prediction feature that allows the vehicle to understand what those objects might do.

The end result, at least for this demo, was a ride along in an autonomous truck that was able to accomplish a number of complicated tasks, including anticipating congestion ahead and making a lane change in a smooth, uninterrupted movement — no disc braking necessary.

Another autonomous vehicle unicorn has joined the herd.

TuSimple, a self-driving truck startup running daily routes for customers in Arizona, has raised $95 million in a Series D funding round led by Sina Corp. as the company prepares to scale up its commercial autonomous fleet to more than 50 trucks by June.

The startup, which launched in 2015 and has operations in San Diego and Tucson, Arizona, has a post-money of $1.095 billion (aka unicorn status). TuSimple has raised $178 million to date in rounds that have included backers such as Nvidia and ZP Capital. Sina, operator of China’s biggest microblogging site Weibo, is one of TuSimple’s earliest investors. Composite Capital, a Hong Kong-based investment firm and previous investor, also participated in this latest round.

TuSimple launched when the burgeoning AV ecosystem of investors, academics turned entrepreneurs, and early self-driving tech pioneers, were focused more on the development of autonomous passenger vehicles, namely robotaxis.

Autonomous trucking existed in relative obscurity until high-profile engineers from Google launched Otto, a self-driving truck startup that was quickly acquired by Uber in August 2016. Then came the reveal of the Tesla Semi and the founding of several autonomous trucking startups including Starsky Robotics and Embark.

Suddenly, it seemed people had woken up to the economic opportunity that could be achieved — just maybe — with trucks.

Meanwhile, TuSimple quietly scaled. In late 2017, TuSimple raised $55 million with plans to use those funds to scale up testing to two full truck fleets in China and the U.S. By 2018, TuSimple started testing on public roads, beginning with a 120-mile highway stretch between Tucson and Phoenix in Arizona and another segment in Shanghai.

“Autonomous driving is one of the most complex AI systems humans have ever built. After three years of intense focus to reach our technical goals, we have moved beyond research into the serious work of building a commercial solution,” TuSimple founder, president and CTO Xiaodi Hou said.

Today, TuSimple is taking three to five fully autonomous trips per day for customers on three different routes in Arizona. All of these trips have two safety engineers, one who is behind the wheel, and another monitoring the data pouring in during each trip. TuSimple says these daily trips allow it to earn revenue while it validates its Level 4 autonomous system, a designation by SAE that means the vehicle takes over all of the driving in certain conditions. TuSimple has 12 contracted customers.

Now, it’s ready to ramp up further, in terms of its fleet size and partnerships. TuSimple plans to expand its daily “fully-autonomous” commercial deliveries to Texas. The company also plans to use this influx of capital to fund what it describes as “critical joint production programs” with OEM, Tier 1 suppliers and sensors partners. Truck manufacturing suppliers are working with TuSimple on the integration of autonomous software with powertrain, braking and steering systems. The company says this is “an essential step for the commercial production and operation of self-driving trucks.”

TuSimple isn’t disclosing its customers or even suppliers yet. Although, TuSimple did reveal last month at CES that it’s working with Tier 1 supplier Cummins Inc. to enable powertrain integration with its autonomous technologies.

TuSimple’s focus on cameras

Other AV companies, namely low-speed autonomous passenger vehicles have focused on LiDAR (light detection and ranging lasers) to improve the perception of the vehicle, arguably one of the most difficult tasks of automated driving. But for TuSimple, “laser isn’t the sauce.”

Instead, TuSimple has developed a camera-centric perception solution. The company does use LiDAR for its mapping and some data collection. However, LiDAR has its limitations in the high-speed world of trucking, Hou explained to TechCrunch in a previous interview.

Even its name, which is an interlingual pun that essentially means “simple image” or simple image analysis, affirms TuSimple’s approach.

It appears that has paid off. LiDAR can detect objects like cars to about 250 meters, although the optimal quality falters past 150 meters. TuSimple says its camera-based system has a vision range of 1,000 meters.

As a reluctant participant in AV demos, this TechCrunch reporter headed to TuSimple’s Tucson operations recently armed with lots of curiosity and a healthy dose of skepticism.

The TuSimple truck, two safety engineers in the front, and Hou and myself in the back of the cab, entered into autonomous mode in the company parking lot as it approached a surface road. From here, the truck drove the route in autonomous mode for the entire 65-mile or so trip. This route began with a left turn onto a surface road, then onto an unprotected left at a traffic light, a railroad crossing, and finally an entrance onto the highway. The truck continued for 30 miles before exiting the interstate, then maneuvering back onto the highway from the trip back.

A display in the cab allowed us to see what the truck was seeing, or more specifically what the camera-based system sees. TuSimple’s camera combined with software algorithms allows the system to track distance, relative speed and vehicle type of the various objects spotted while on the road and has an intention prediction feature that allows the vehicle to understand what those objects might do.

The end result, at least for this demo, was a ride along in an autonomous truck that was able to accomplish a number of complicated tasks, including anticipating congestion ahead and making a lane change in a smooth, uninterrupted movement — no disc braking necessary.

Shortly after BuzzFeed News employees revealed that they had voted to unionize, its editor-in-chief said the company wants to meet with them to discuss voluntarily recognition. Employees announced today that they are organizing as BuzzFeed News Union under the NewsGuild of New York.

“Our staff has been organizing for several months, and we have legitimate grievances about unfair pay disparities, mismanaged pivots and layoffs, weak benefits, skyrocketing health insurance costs, diversity, and more,” says a mission statement posted to BuzzFeed News Union’s site. It adds that employees have been meeting for years and ramped up its efforts last fall when BuzzFeed laid off video staffers and its podcast team. Organizing efforts gained more urgency two weeks ago, when BuzzFeed cut 15 percent of its workforce, or about 250 jobs.

BuzzFeed News’ deputy news director Jason Wells reports that the publication’s editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, told employees “we look forward to meeting with the organizers to discuss a way toward voluntarily recognizing their union.”

Just a few hours after we went public with our unionizing effort, @buzzfeedben has responded to our demand for voluntary recognition @bfnewsunion pic.twitter.com/rgXitJyBcF

— Davey Alba (@daveyalba) February 13, 2019

Wells’ notes that BuzzFeed News is “on track to be one of the last major newsrooms to unionize in the wake of industry pressures that have shrunk many media outlets.” Other outlets with new employee unions include HuffPost and the Los Angeles Times. The NewsGuild of New York also represents the New York Times, Reuters, the Daily Beast and the Los Angeles Times.

In their mission statement, BuzzFeed News Union’s organizers said they want an agreement that “requires due process for termination, a diverse newsroom, reasonable severance amid layoffs, a competitive 401(k), rights to our creative works, and affordable health insurance.”

It also calls on BuzzFeed News’ management to address pay gaps and give employees on contract, or “permalancers, who are paid through a third party but are functionally members of our team,” the same treatment as other staff.

BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said during a 2015 company meeting that he didn’t think “a union is right for BuzzFeed,” though his recent response to employees demanding that the company compensate their laid-off colleagues for unused paid time off make signal a more conciliatory approach. After the meeting, BuzzFeed News paid out all unused vacation and comp days to laid-off staff even in states they are not legally required to do so.

China celebrated Lunar New Year last week as hundreds of millions of people travelled to their hometowns. While many had longed to see their separated loved ones, others dreaded the weeklong holiday as relatives awkwardly caught up with them with questions like: “Why are you not married? How much do you earn?”

Luckily, there are ways to survive the festive time in this digital age. Smartphone usage during this period has historically surged. Short video app TikTok’s China version Douyin noticeably took off by acquiring 42 million new users over the first week of last year’s holiday, a report from data analytics firm QuestMobile shows. Tencent’s mobile game blockbuster Honor of Kings similarly gained 76 percent DAUs during that time, according to another QuestMobile report.

People also hid away by immersing themselves in the cinema during the Lunar New Year, a movie-going period akin to the American holiday season. This year, China wrapped up the first six days of the New Year with a record-breaking 5.8 billion ($860 million) yuan box office, according to data collected by Maoyan, Alibaba’s movie ticketing service slated for an initial public offering.

The new benchmark, however, did not reflect an expanding viewership. Rather, it came from price hikes in movie tickets, market research firm EntGroup suggests. On the first day of Year of the Pig, tickets were sold at an average of 45 yuan ($6.65), up from 39 yuan last year. That certainly put some price-sensitive audience off — though not by a huge margin as there wasn’t much to do otherwise. (Shops were closed. Fireworks and firecrackers, which are traditionally set off during the New Year to drive bad spirits away, are also banned in most Chinese cities for safety concerns.) Cinemas across China sold 31.69 million tickets on the first day, a slight decline from last year’s 32.63 million.

Dawn of Chinese sci-fi

Image source: The Wandering Earth via Weibo

Many Chinese companies don’t return to work until this Thursday, so the box office results are still being announced. Investment bank Nomura put the estimated total at 6.2 billion yuan. What’s also noticeable about this year’s film-inspired holiday peak is the fervor that sci-fi The Wandering Earth whipped up.

American audiences may find in the Chinese film elements of Interstellar’s space adventures, but The Wandering Earth will likely resonate better with the Chinese audience. Adapted from the novel of Hugo Award-winning Chinese author Liu Cixin, the film tells the story of the human race seeking a new home as the aging sun is about to devour the earth. A group of Chinese astronauts, scientists and soldiers eventually work out a plan to postpone the apocalypse — a plot deemed to have stoke Chinese viewers’ sense of pride, though the rescue also involves participation from other nations.

The film, featuring convincing special effects, is also widely heralded as the dawn of Chinese-made sci-fi films. The sensation gave rise to a wave of patriotic online reviews like “If you are Chinese, go watch The Wandering Earth” though it’s unclear whether the discourse was genuine or have been manipulated.

Alibaba’s movie powerhouse

This record-smashing holiday has also been a big win for Alibaba, the Chinese internet outfit best known for ecommerce and increasingly cloud computing. Its content production segment Alibaba Pictures has backed five of the movies screened during the holiday, one of which being the blockbuster The Wandering Earth that also counts Tencent as an investor.

Tech giants with online streaming services are on course to upend China’s film and entertainment industry, a sector traditionally controlled by old-school production houses. In its most recent quarter, Alibaba increased its stake to take majority control in Alibaba Pictures, the film production business it acquired in 2014. Tencent and Baidu have also spent big bucks on content creation. While Tencent zooms in on video games and anime, Baidu’s Netflix-style video site iQiyi has received wide acclaim for house-produced dramas like Yanxi Palace, a smash hit drama about backstabbing concubines that was streamed over 15 billion times.

Seeing all the entertainment options on the table, the Chinese government made a pre-emptive move against the private players by introducing a news app designed for propaganda purposes in the weeks leading to the vacation.

“The timing of the publishing of this app might be linked to the upcoming Chinese New Year Festival, which the Chinese Communist Party sees as an opportunity and a necessity to spread their ideology,” Kristin Shi-Kupfer, director of German think tank MERICS, told TechCrunch earlier. “[It] may be hoping that people would use the holiday season to take a closer look, but probably also knowing that most people would rather choose other sources to relax, consume and travel.”

It’s true that DoorDash offsets the amount it pays its drivers with customer tip, according to an FAQ page on its own site.

“For each delivery, you will always receive at least $1 from DoorDash plus 100% of the customer tip,” DoorDash states on a Dasher FAQ page. “Where that sum is less than the guaranteed amount, DoorDash will provide a pay boost to make sure you receive the guaranteed amount. Where that sum is more than the guaranteed amount, you pocket the extra amount.”

To be clear, drivers see the guaranteed amount in the app before deciding to accept or reject the order. That amount is based on the size of the order, whether or not you have to place the order in person, distance away, traffic and other factors.

On another page, DoorDash describes its payment structure as follows: $1 plus customer tip plus pay boost, which varies based on the complexity of order, distance to restaurants and other factors. It’s only when a customer doesn’t tip at all, which DoorDash told Fast Company happens about 15 percent of the time, that DoorDash is on the hook to pay the entire guaranteed amount.

Here’s an example of what Dashers see:

“DoorDash doesn’t show workers what part of the ‘guarantee’ is from tip and what part is from DoorDash,” Sage Wilson of labor organization Working Washington told TechCrunch in an email. “(Instacart’s old policy did show this, which is why it was easier to demonstrate.) So that’s exactly where their “transparency” stops— at the point when it’s clear they’re taking tips.”

And just because DoorDash is upfront about parts of its practice, it doesn’t mean drivers are okay with it. There’s a webpage, Reddit and Subreddits that all describe DoorDash’s practices.

On the website, No Tip Doordash, it states:

While the tip may technically be going to the driver, it is only replacing the normal delivery pay. Your tip saves doordash money, and it is not increasing the drivers pay. Please tip in cash, if available.

In a statement to Bloomberg, DoorDash said it implemented this policy to “ensure that Dashers are more fairly compensated for every delivery.”

This comes shortly after Instacart apologized and announced it would stop engaging in that practice. In a blog post last week, Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta said all shoppers will now have a guaranteed higher base compensation, paid by Instacart. Depending on the region, Instacart says it will pay shoppers between $7 to $10 at a minimum for full-service orders (shopping, picking and delivering) and $5 at a minimum for delivery-only tasks. The company will also stop including tips in its base pay for shoppers.

Amazon also reportedly engages in this practice, according to The Los Angeles Times.

I’ve reached out to DoorDash and will update this story if I hear back.

This story has been updated to reflect comments from Working Washington organizer Sage Wilson.

If you have been experiencing issues with the Like or Retweet count on Twitter and are desperately seeking validation, here it is: yes, it’s Twitter, not you (probably). The company confirmed today that it is working on a fix for a problem with notifications that’s been messing with Like counts.

Some people around the world are experiencing an issue with notifications, Likes, and Retweets. We’re working on resolving this and will follow up soon. We apologize for the inconvenience.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) February 12, 2019

Many users around the world have reported seeing the number of Likes on their tweets fluctuate continuously, making them wonder if accounts were being suspended in mass or if Twitter was deleting them.

Here’s the word thing happening with Twitter right now (they said they’re going to fix it)

Look at the likes and retweets. pic.twitter.com/TAPOXhoziM

— Yashar Ali (@yashar) February 12, 2019

why is twitter deleting so many likes off peoples’ tweets? are accounts getting mass s*spended or… pic.twitter.com/MabHOOxXi0

— bts went to the grammys (@functionbts) February 12, 2019

twitter please stop taking away the likes on my tweets they’re all that I have

— gracie hoos (@cottoncandaddy) February 12, 2019

Oppression thy name is twitter likes! pic.twitter.com/pvB4rBMpg8

— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) February 12, 2019

Twitter did not say when the issue began, but based on a careful study of Twitter search results, and not on my own desperate longing for validation from internet strangers, the issue has been going on for almost a day.