SpaceX, Uber Reach New Heights In Lobbying Spending

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With Martian ambitions but earthly pragmatism, SpaceX spent nearly $2 million on lobbying in 2016, a new high for the gravity defying upstart. The company met with Congress, the Defense Department, and NASA among other federal agencies to discuss issues central to its business like commercial space transportation and NASA funding.

SpaceX Founder Elon Musk was recently tapped by President Trump to serve as an economic advisor, along with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Musk met with Trump on Monday along with a cadre of industry chieftains that included Dell CEO Michael Dell and the head of Ford, Mark Fields. During the two-hour meeting, Trump asked the business leaders for ideas to grow the US economy and to list the obstacles preventing them from hiring more workers and expanding their operations, according to White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

In 2016, Uber spent nearly $1.4 million lobbying Congress, traffic safety regulators, and US trade officials, nearly tripling its expenditures from the year before, according to federal lobbying disclosures due Monday. The company dwarfed what it spent in 2015, which totaled $470,000.

Not only did Uber cross the $1 million mark for the first time, but it continues to tower over ride-hail rival Lyft, as far as lobbying money is concerned. Lyft spent $250,000 on federal lobbying last year, a significant increase from its 2015 total, at $30,000, but still a way's off from Uber.

AT&T, whose proposed merger with Time Warner was quickly denounced by Trump on the campaign trail, has also spent big in 2016. The media and communications titan racked up $16.4 in lobbying last year, topping its 2015 total by $1.5 million. In the months after the $85.4 billion mega-deal was announced, AT&T spent $3.7 million lobbying the House and the Senate on a wide range of issues including surveillance, arbitration in consumer contracts, and cybersecurity.

While the AT&T-Time Warner deal undergoes a lengthy Justice Department review, the merger may ultimately serve as a major test of Trump&039;s campaign promises. In October, Trump condemned the merger, describing the deal as an undue concentration of media power. Since then, antitrust and media experts have been left pondering whether Trump&039;s initial statements would lead to a White House skeptical of mergers and inclined to shield consumer, or if Trump would simply revert to the traditionally Republican stance of de-regulation.

Earlier this month, Trump appeared to soften his position on the merger, even as he admitted to a lack of knowledge of the deal. “I have been on the record in the past of saying it&039;s too big and we have to keep competition,” he told Axios. “So, but other than that, I haven&039;t, you know, I haven&039;t seen any of the facts, yet. I&039;m sure that will be presented to me and to the people within government.”

With or without Trump&039;s blessing, AT&T must win the approval of the Justice Department to proceed, but it is unclear who will lead the agency&039;s antitrust division. Whoever is chosen to fill that role, like the attorney general, requires senate confirmation. Trump&039;s pick for the nation&039;s chief lawyer and law enforcement officer, Sen. Jeff Sessions, has not yet been approved by the Senate.

In the last quarter of 2016, only four corporations in the US spent more money lobbying than AT&T.

Google once again led the tech industry in beltway cash, spending over $3.5 million in the final months of the Obama era. Google was the 6th biggest spender of any corporation, behind only AT&T and a handful of industry giants that included Boeing and Comcast. In 2016 Google spent $15.4 million lobbying on issues like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (nixed by Trump on Monday), immigration, email privacy, and encryption.

Amazon and Microsoft came next. With lobbying expenditures of more than $2.6 million, Amazon ranked 13th overall and second only to Google in tech. The Treasury Department and the Federal Aviation Administration were among the agencies that Amazon lobbied in the fourth quarter of 2016. Amazon&039;s issues included corporate taxation, drone privacy, and #cloud computing. Microsoft ranked third in the tech industry and 16th overall, forking over $2.4 million.

Oracle followed, spending $2 million and ranking 27th overall. Hewlett Packard was close behind at $1.8 million and in the 31st position.

Facebook&039;s lobbying spend was down for both the fourth quarter (compared to 2015) and for the entire year of 2016. Facebook spent $1.7 in the last quarter of 2016 compared to $2.1 in 2015. And the social network tallied $8.7 million for all of 2016, while it spent just under $10 million in 2015. Facebook lobbied the White House, Congress, and federal agencies on high-tech worker visas , terrorism, and government surveillance, in addition to other concerns.

Apple&039;s spending for the quarter and the year roughly tracks its 2015 figures: about $1.4 million for the fourth quarter and $4.7 for the year. Apple&039;s disclosures listed energy efficiency standards, encryption, and the regulation of mobile medical apps as issues the company lobbied. The iPhone maker held meetings with the office of the President, Congress, Homeland Security, and the Commerce Department, among other federal agencies.

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Twitter Is Already Playing A Big Role In The Trump Administration

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Within his first minute at the podium Monday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer let the assembled press know he&#039;d been checking his Twitter mentions over the weekend.

“As I get started, I know that [Obama press secretary] Josh Earnest was voted the most popular press secretary by the press corps,” Spicer said. “After checking my Twitter feed, I shot Josh an email last night letting him know that he can rest easy, that his title is secure for at least the next few days.”

The Trump administration is only four days old, but it&039;s already evident that Twitter is playing a significant role inside it — not just as a publishing tool, but as a feedback channel. Spicer and other members of the administration are clearly watching the platform closely, monitoring the activity on it and acting based on what they see there. Trump used the platform vigorously and effectively during his campaign; now, it seems, little has changed.

In fact, in each of his two visits to the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, Spicer has led with Twitter. On Saturday, much of his statement focused on tweets the administration didn&039;t like.

“For all the talk about the proper use of Twitter, two instances yesterday stand out,” Spicer said at the start of his Saturday remarks. After criticizing a report that falsely claimed Trump had removed the bust of Dr. Martin Luther King from the Oval Office, Spicer then criticized news organizations&039; (accurate) tweets on the size of Trump&039;s inauguration crowd size. “Photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall,” Spicer said.

The Trump administration&039;s focus on Twitter has already extended beyond news organizations. After the National Park Service retweeted tweets pointing out Trump&039;s smaller crowd size, administration officials ordered it to temporarily stop tweeting, reportedly out of concern it was hacked.

The Park Service apologized Saturday, calling the retweets mistaken.

And, of course, President Trump is keeping his “big, beautiful Twitter account” active, having tweeted more from @realDonaldTrump than @POTUS since his swearing-in. Trump regularly takes to the service to go around traditional media and its filters. His tweets often move markets and have already broken with behavior expected of a President.

As BuzzFeed News has reported, the discussion of Trump on Twitter far outpaces anything else on the platform. Trump is discussed more than ten times as often as all of the Kardashians combined.

Spicer, for his part, has suggested replacing traditional press conferences with social-media question-and-answer sessions.

Quelle: <a href="Twitter Is Already Playing A Big Role In The Trump Administration“>BuzzFeed

Snapchat Will Start Cracking Down On Fake News

Snap Inc (formerly Snapchat) is getting more strict about what shows up in its app&#039;s Discover section. On Monday, the New York Times reported, the company introduced guidelines requiring publishers to start fact-checking Discover content, both linked and within the app. The rules also prohibit misleading and unnecessarily shocking headline images in Discover. The move comes as Snap heads to a likely IPO.

The updated guidelines on headlines and Discover Tiles prohibit profanity, overly sexualized content, and violent content. There are, however, exceptions for news, according to Snap, if the content comes with appropriate warnings. Publishers will also have the ability to filter content for Snapchatters younger than 18 starting in February.

Snap told BuzzFeed News, “It’s been two years since we first launched Discover. During that time, our partners’ editorial content has continued to evolve in look and feel, and we felt our guidelines should be updated to thoroughly reflect these changes.”

Snapchat may have trouble vetting the accuracy of all its publishers&039; content, though. On the same day as the update, the British tabloid The Daily Mail published a series of unverified Snapchat posts: “The Bigfeet Family,” “Did aliens &039;unlock&039; Uri?” and a story about one of Madonna&039;s Instagram posts, which the publication said was a response to a unverified secret service investigation.

The Daily Mail/Snapchat

The Daily Mail/Snapchat

The Daily Mail/Snapchat

The story about Madonna relies on an unconfirmed report from the Gateway Pundit, a pro-Trump site that publishes stories with headlines like “Organizer For DC Women’s March Against Trump Pictured Flashing the ISIS Sign” and “Trump And Mattis Take The Fight To ISIS, Bomb ISIS 31 Times On Day 1 (VIDEO)”. The Secret Service did not verify the alleged investigation to the Daily Mail, instead declining to comment.

Snap told BuzzFeed News that publishers maintain editorial independence once they are accepted as a partner, so the company doesn&039;t see content before it is published. But it said it follows up with publishers if users raise questions about their sourcing, accuracy, or other factors.

Snapchat&039;s move against dubious and exaggerated content comes at a time when Facebook and Twitter have faced sharp criticism over their unwillingness to fight the scams and fake news that proliferate on their platforms. Snap has managed to largely sidestep those debates, in part because of the tight control it&039;s always exercised over the Discover section. (BuzzFeed has partnered with Snapchat Discover for content distribution.)

Snapchat still faced a lawsuit in July 2016 alleging that, via Discover, it was “currently engaged in an insidious pattern and practice of intentionally exposing minors to harmful, offensive, prurient, and sexually offensive content, without warning minors or their parents” and that it “placed profit from monetizing Snapchat Discover over the safety of children.” The lawsuit was settled out of court, according to the Times.

Even before the new guidelines, the company already required that images and headlines in Discover be appropriate for users as young as 13. More than 100 million people view content in the Discover channels each month, according to the New York Times.

Facebook and Twitter have defended themselves against criticisms over fake news, harassment, and scams by claiming that they are content-agnostic tech platforms. Snap has taken an opposite tack, describing itself as “a publishing platform, built on values of providing Snapchatters with content that informs and entertains, from authoritative and credible media partners.” Those partners, Snap said, earn the community&039;s trust through “substantial, sourced and rewarding content.”

“We take the responsibility of being a source of news, entertainment and information for our community,” the company told BuzzFeed News.

Quelle: <a href="Snapchat Will Start Cracking Down On Fake News“>BuzzFeed

The Breathalyzer Device On "Shark Tank" Allegedly Ran False Ads

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On the fifth season of ABC&#039;s hit show Shark Tank, entrepreneur Charles Michael Yim handed the sharks champagne as he pitched them on an irresistible invention: a smartphone-attached breathalyzer. Blow into the device and the app would calculate your alcohol levels, Yim explained, so you would know if it were safe to drive home. So charmed were all five investors that they offered to put $1 million in his startup, Breathometer, for a 30% stake.

But the Federal Trade Commission took a more sober view of the startup’s promises. On Monday, more than three years after the Shark Tank episode, the FTC said that Breathometer had settled allegations that “they lacked scientific evidence to back up their advertising claims.”

Under the settlement, Yim and Breathometer are prohibited from making accuracy claims about a consumer breathalyzer product unless backed by “rigorous testing,” according to the FTC. They must also notify consumers of the devices&039; inaccuracy and refund them.

“People relied on the defendant’s products to decide whether it was safe to get behind the wheel,” Jessica Rich, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. “Overstating the accuracy of the devices was deceptive — and dangerous.”

The company acknowledged the settlement on its website, writing, “We feel it is important to clarify that this settlement does not undermine our achievements in creating quality consumer health devices.” It said that it had stopped making both Breathometer products in 2015, before the FTC’s inquiry.

As part of the settlement, Breathometer did not admit or deny the FTC’s allegations.

The Breathometer settlement is the latest in a series of incidents in which snazzy-sounding apps and gadgets make health claims that may be too good to be true. Scanadu, which was selling a Star Trek-style “tricorder” that claimed to instantly monitor your vital signs, recently told customers that it would stop making the devices per Food and Drug Administration orders. Last year, the company behind Lumosity, the online brain-training game, paid $2 million to settle FTC allegations that its marketing claims — that playing could stave off cognitive decline — were not scientifically validated.

Breathometer CEO Charles Michael Yim.

Via youtube.com

The Breathometer device was sold online in two versions, Original ($49.99) and Breeze ($99.99), and generated $5.1 million in sales, according to the FTC. The company also raised nearly $140,000 in a successful Indiegogo campaign to make the gadget.

Ads for both products claimed that their accuracy was proven by “government-lab grade testing,” while Breeze was also touted as a “law-enforcement grade product,” according to the FTC. But the agency alleged that neither was properly tested for accuracy, and that the company knew that Breeze “regularly understated” blood alcohol concentration levels.

The startup has since switched gears and started selling a new device, Mint, in September. The $99.99 smartphone-attached device purports to measure your oral health by measuring gases correlated with bad breath and gum disease. “We stand behind our current product, Mint, and its quality and pioneering technology,” the company wrote on its website.

Quelle: <a href="The Breathalyzer Device On "Shark Tank" Allegedly Ran False Ads“>BuzzFeed

A Thriving Chat Startup Braces For The Alt-Right

By most any measure, Discord is a thriving startup. After a $20 million funding round last January led by the august venture capital firm Greylock Partners, the voice-and-text chat app for gamers — lauded as a slick combination of “the best elements of Skype, IRC, and Slack” — has swelled over the past year from 3 to 25 million users.

Now, thanks to that growing community and ease of use, Discord has found favor with an unintended and inflammatory audience: The alt-right, the online movement of hardcore trolls, white nationalists, and neo-Nazis that have dominated discussion of internet life in the Trump era.

It&#039;s a familiar story. From Reddit to Twitter, the internet has produced a series of groundbreaking communication platforms, the very popularity and technological ingenuity of which have led to their adoption by hatemongers, trolls, and harassers. This trend has led the leadership of these services to have to make hard and sometimes ideologically inconsistent choices about free speech, including banning users and entire communities.

Discord didn’t start, like Reddit and Twitter, with any grand ideals about freedom of expression; it was built from the ground up as a tool for facilitating chat between cooperative gamers.

“We’re very focused on making an amazing communication product for gamers,” Discord CEO Jason Citron told BuzzFeed News. “I had a hunch that it would be used outside of gaming, but it wasn’t anything we thought specifically about.”

But a quick look at popular Discord servers shows that discussions on the service have trickled down from purely gaming into gaming-adjacent interests like anime, marijuana, porn, and rare Pepes. And where there are memes, in 2017, there are trolls, and worse.

In a Discord chat server called “/pol/Nation” — named for the controversial 4chan imageboard — more than 3,000 users participate in a rolling multimedia chat extravaganza of Hitler memes, white nationalist revisionist history, and computer game strategy. And in a voice-over-IP chatroom within the server, users keep up a steady chatter about the same subjects. It&039;s like a cutting-edge, venture-backed version of its namesake; 4chan on steroids.

“There&039;s a huge diversity of opinions,” pol/Nation&039;s publisher, who goes by the handle “theBigKK,” told BuzzFeed News over Discord voice chat. “Center-right, alt-right, national socialist.”

A separate server called “Thunderdome” hosts the enthusiastic staff and fans of the Daily Stormer, the neo-Nazi website. “Thunderdome” is published by Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, the white nationalist troll known most recently for printing reams of Nazi propaganda on hundreds of open IP printers around the country.

Discord differs from other communication platforms in one key way: Its chats are entirely opt-in, meaning the potential for unsolicited public harassment is significantly lower. That&039;s why, Citron told BuzzFeed News, the presence of the alt-right on his platform won&039;t work the same way as on Twitter.

“We’ve noticed it,” Discord CEO Jason Citron told BuzzFeed News. “We read the news. But the way Discord is designed, it&039;s not a public communication tool. Someone can’t airdrop out of the sky and bother you.”

Still, the private nature of the chats may raise a different issue for Discord. It may not be the place where harassment is carried out, but it may be the place where harassment is planned, or worse. In Thunderdome, Weev posted the code necessary to print Nazi propaganda remotely:

Asked about the potential for such abuses, Citron was philosophical. “Because we have such a large product, I think it&039;s inevitable that you have people who are misbehaving,” he said. “If something is important to us and it’s against the law, we act against it very quickly.”

So, what&039;s important to Discord? In November, TheBigKK contacted Discord customer service over Twitter to ask if /pol/Nation was “in any danger of being removed.” The Discord Twitter account responded, “The only thing that we would ever need to get authorities involved in is illegal speech such as acts of terrorism and the sharing of illegal content such as child pornography.”

Even if a server or a user met this standard, consistent enforcement against infringing users or communities would be nearly impossible. Anyone can create a Discord server with the click of a button, and it&039;s nearly as easy to transfer administrative roles between users. The server /pol/Nation started on October 22, and by election night two weeks later it had grown into a thriving community with more than 1,000 simultaneous users from around the world celebrating Donald Trump&039;s victory. According to TheBigKK, a minimum of 10 users are on /pol/Nation&039;s voice chat at all times.

Indeed, Citron seems resigned to the idea that Discord will be a place where the kinds of users who have made the social internet toxic over the past few years congregate and plan.

“It’s inevitable that there will be actors using the product for things that are not completely wholesome,” he said.

In other words, as Discord continues to grow, don&039;t expect the alt-right to go anywhere — and don’t expect the company to do very much about it.

“It seems natural to me,” TheBigKK said, over Discord&039;s crystal clear voice chat. “It&039;s natural for a place that allows free speech.”

Quelle: <a href="A Thriving Chat Startup Braces For The Alt-Right“>BuzzFeed

This Is Why Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 Phones Caught Fire

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In an effort to rebuild a badly tarnished reputation after numerous Galaxy Note 7 devices caught fire, Samsung offered an explanation Monday after a months long investigation: a battery design flaw, and later, faulty welding in replacement phones that were meant to stem the damage of the recall.

The design of the Note 7 as well as its manufacturing and assembly led to deformations of the phone&#039;s battery, Samsung found. Poor production quality in replacement devices sent to customers after the initial recall was also an issue. Samsung cited uneven welding and missing insulation tape as part of a web of contributing factors that led to Note 7 “failures.”

“For the last several months, together with independent industry expert organizations, we conducted thorough investigation to find cause to the Galaxy Note7 incidents.” DJ Koh, president of Samsung&039;s mobile communications business, said during a press conference Monday. “Today, more than ever, we are committed to earning the trust of our customers through innovation that redefines what is possible in safety, and as a gateway to unlimited possibilities and incredible new experiences.”

By the end of the third quarter last year, Samsung&039;s wide ranging recall led to a loss of $25 billion in market share. But its fourth quarter profits for 2016 grew by 50% compared to 2015, due in part to the growth of its semiconductor division.

Samsung said that the investigation, which attempted to replicate the explosive incidents reported by customers, involved 200,000 devices and more than 30,000 batteries. The company has developed a new quality assurance program and says it has undertaken “extraordinary measures” to improve safety standards.

Samsung first announced a global recall of Note 7 devices in September last year. Soon after, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission formally announced a recall and advised Americans customers to immediately power down their devices. A month later, the Federal Aviation Administration issued an emergency order banning all Samsung Galaxy Note7 devices from air travel in the United States. According to the company, of the more than 3 million Note 7&039;s sold, 96% percent of those devices have been returned.

Samsung

Quelle: <a href="This Is Why Samsung&039;s Galaxy Note 7 Phones Caught Fire“>BuzzFeed