By Agence France-Presse | Updated: 25 October 2021

Facebook was well aware that hate speech was spreading on its site in India which could exacerbate ethnic violence, and did not deploy resources to curb the phenomenon, US media reported, citing internal documents.

The so-called Facebook Papers, leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen, have already revealed the impact of Facebook — as well as of WhatsApp and Instagram, both of which it owns — on the deep polarisation of politics in the United States and on the mental health of some teenagers.

But there have long been concerns over the social network’s impact in spreading hate speech fuelling violence in the developing world, such as the massacre targeting the Rohingya minority in Myanmar.

This weekend the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, among others, focused on Facebook’s presence in India, the biggest market for the US-based company and its messaging service WhatsApp in terms of users.

A report by the company’s own researchers from July 2020 showed that the share of inflammatory content skyrocketed starting in December 2019.

“Rumours and calls to violence spread particularly on Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging service in late February 2020,” when clashes between the Hindu majority and Muslim minority left dozens dead, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Facebook had also as early as February 2019 created a fictitious account, that of a 21-year-old woman in northern India, to better understand the user experience, the Washington Post reported, citing an internal memo.

The account followed posts, videos, and accounts recommended by Facebook, but a company researcher found it promoted a torrent of fake and inflammatory content.

“I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life,” media quoted the staffer as saying in a 46-page report among the documents released by Haugen.

“Soon, without any direction from the user, the Facebook account was flooded with pro-Modi propaganda and anti-Muslim hate speech,” the Washington Post reported. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist, was campaigning for re-election at the time.

The test also coincided with India launching an air strike on Pakistan over a militant suicide bombing in the disputed Kashmir region.

The unnamed researcher called that experience an “integrity nightmare.”

The content made jingoistic claims about India’s air strikes and included graphic pictures.

These included one image of a man holding a severed head and using language slamming Pakistanis and Muslims as “dogs” and “pigs,” reports said.

Bad actors, authoritarian regimes

“Facebook has meticulously studied its approach abroad — and was well aware that weaker moderation in non-English-speaking countries leaves the platform vulnerable to abuse by bad actors and authoritarian regimes,” the Post continued, citing the internal documents.

The documents showed that the vast majority of the company’s budget dedicated to the fight against misinformation is intended for the United States — even though users there represent less than 10 percent of Facebook’s users worldwide.

“We’ve invested significantly in technology to find hate speech in various languages, including Hindi and Bengali,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.

“As a result, we’ve reduced the amount of hate speech that people see by half this year. Today, it’s down to 0.05 percent.” The figure is a percentage of content in all countries.

The company said it was “expanding” its operations into new languages. It has “hate speech classifiers” working in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and Urdu.

More than 40 civil rights groups warned last year that Facebook had failed to address dangerous content in India.

One Facebook India executive resigned in 2020 after being accused of refusing to apply hate speech policies to the Hindu nationalist ruling party and also sharing an anti-Muslim post.

“Hate speech against marginalised groups, including Muslims, is on the rise globally. So we are improving enforcement,” the spokesperson said.

By Reuters | Updated: 23 October 2021

Fortnite creator Epic Games on Friday opposed Apple’s efforts to put on hold orders handed down in an antitrust trial as a potentially lengthy appeals process plays out.

US district Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in September struck down some of the iPhone maker’s App Store rules, including a prohibition on developers directing their users to other payment options beside Apple’s in-app payment system, in a partial win for Epic and other app makers.

Apple has until December 9 to comply with the injunction, but earlier this month the company said it will appeal the ruling and asked Gonzalez Rogers to put her order on hold as the appeals process, which could take more than a year, unfolds.

Epic on Friday argued in a court filing that Apple has not met the legal standard for that pause, which requires Apple show that it will be irreparably harmed by even temporarily complying with the order if the injunction is later reversed on appeal.

Epic said that Apple’s positive comments about the ruling shortly after it landed, and its delay in asking for a pause, showed that it would not be harmed by enacting the orders.

“The public interest favours denying (Apple’s request); an injunction is the only path to effective relief,” Epic wrote. “History shows … that in the absence of an injunction, Apple will not make any changes.”

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A hearing on Apple’s request is set for November 9.

© Thomson Reuters 2021

By Agence France-Presse | Updated: 23 October 2021

Apple has updated its App Store rules to allow developers to contact users directly about payments, a concession in a legal settlement with companies challenging its tightly controlled marketplace.

According to the App Store rules updated Friday, developers can now contact consumers directly about alternative payment methods, bypassing Apple’s commission of 15 or 30 percent.

They will be able to ask users for basic information, such as names and e-mail addresses, “as long as this request remains optional”, said the iPhone maker.

Apple proposed the changes in August in a legal settlement with small app developers.

But the concession is unlikely to satisfy firms like Fortnite developer Epic Games, with which the tech giant has been grappling in a drawn-out dispute over its payments policy.

Epic launched a case aiming to break Apple’s grip on the App Store, accusing the iPhone maker of operating a monopoly in its shop for digital goods or services.

In September, a judge ordered Apple to loosen control of its App Store payment options, but said Epic had failed to prove that antitrust violations had taken place.

For Epic and others, the ability to redirect users to an out-of-app payment method is not enough: it wants players to be able to pay directly without leaving the game.

Both sides have appealed.

Apple is also facing investigations from US and European authorities that accuse it of abusing its dominant position.

By Reuters | Updated: 22 October 2021

Tencent’s WeChat has fixed a glitch that allowed some of its content to be searchable by external search engines, the owner of China’s most popular messaging app said on Friday, raising questions over regulators’ latest attempt to crackdown on the internet sector.

Some of WeChat’s content, including articles on its public accounts page, was briefly searchable in the last few days on Alphabet-owned Google and Microsoft’s Bing, but not on China’s dominant search engine Baidu, Reuters checks showed.

The change had prompted speculation that Tencent was heeding a call by Chinese authorities for its tech giants to tear down “walled gardens” in the country’s cyberspace which has come amid a wide ranging crackdown on the sector.

“Due to recent technological upgrades, the official accounts’ robots protocol had loopholes, which caused the external crawlers to scrape part of the official accounts’ content,” Tencent said in a statement in Chinese.

“The loopholes have since been fixed.”

Google, Microsoft, and Baidu did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Google is not available in China.

The ability to find WeChat content on Google and Bing was initially raised by users on developer forums. China’s internet sector has been long dominated by a handful of technology giants who have historically blocked rivals’ links as well as their search crawlers, a practice is often referred to as ‘walled gardens’.

In recent months, this practice has been targeted by Chinese authorities as part of a sweeping regulatory crackdown.

Last month, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) ordered companies to stop blocking links, which they said has affected users’ experience and damaged consumer rights.

The MIIT has also been studying plans and conducting research to make WeChat content available on external search engines, according to a person with direct knowledge.

MIIT did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Some users on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform expressed dismay over Tencent’s comments.

“This should be an important attempt of creating an open internet space, how can you call it a bug,” said one user.

© Thomson Reuters 2021

By Reuters | Updated: 22 October 2021

Shares of Snap plummeted 25 percent on Thursday after the owner of photo messaging app Snapchat said privacy changes implemented by Apple Inc on iOS devices hurt the company’s ability to target and measure its digital advertising.

The Santa Monica, California-based company, which earns the vast majority of its revenue from selling digital advertising on the app, said the issue was compounded by global supply chain disruptions and labor shortages and caused brands to pull back on their advertising spending.

The results for Snap, which is the first of the major social media companies to report earnings, cast a shadow over Facebook and Twitter, which release third quarter results next week..

Snap’s results also knocked Facebook shares down 6 percent, Twitter down 7 percent and Alphabet fell 3 percent on Thursday.

The Apple privacy updates were rolled out broadly in June and prevent digital advertisers from tracking iPhone users without their consent.

A new ad measurement tool provided by Apple hampered the ability for companies to measure the performance of their ads, upending many of the ways advertisers have been accustomed to doing business for decades, said Snap Chief Executive Evan Spiegel during a conference call with analysts.

“This has definitely been a frustrating setback for us,” he said.

Snap added it expects the Apple privacy changes and global supply chain disruptions to linger through the fourth quarter, which is typically the highest-earning period for social media companies when brands ramp up marketing for the holiday season.

Many of the advertisers who place ads on Snapchat are in the beauty, fashion and consumer goods industries.

Snap said the supply chain disruptions affected a wide variety of advertisers across industries and regions.

Revenue for the third quarter ended September 30 was $1.07 billion, missing consensus estimates of $1.1 billion (roughly Rs. 8,000 crore), according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

Daily active users, a metric watched closely by advertisers and investors, rose 23 percent year-over-year to 306 million, beating analyst estimates of 301.9 million.

Snapchat has worked to attract and retain users by building new features like the ability to discover restaurants and stores through a map feature, or play virtual games with friends.

The net loss during the quarter was $72 million (roughly Rs. 540 crore), or 5 cents (roughly Rs. 4) per share, narrowing from $199.9 million (roughly Rs. 1,495 crore), or 14 cents (roughly Rs. 10) per share, in the year-ago quarter.

Snap forecast fourth quarter revenue between $1.16 billion (roughly Rs. 8,670 crore) to $1.2 billion (roughly Rs. 8,970 crore), and daily active users between 316 million to 318 million.

© Thomson Reuters 2021

By Reuters | Updated: 22 October 2021

PayPal has offered to buy Pinterest for $45 billion (roughly Rs. 3,36,770 crore), people familiar with the matter said, a combination that could herald more financial technology and social media tie-ups in e-ecommerce.

It would be the biggest acquisition of a social media company, surpassing Microsoft’s $26.2 billion (roughly Rs. 1,95,990 crore) purchase of LinkedIn in 2016.

The deal talks come as internet shoppers increasingly buy items they see on social media, often following “influencers” on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. Acquiring Pinterest would allow PayPal to capture more of that e-commerce growth and diversify its income though advertising revenue.

PayPal has offered $70 (roughly Rs. 5,200) per share, mostly in stock, for Pinterest, one of the sources said. The online payments provider hopes to successfully negotiate and announce a deal by the time it reports quarterly earnings on November 8, the source added.

The sources cautioned that no deal was certain and terms could change. They asked not to be identified because the matter is confidential.

PayPal and Pinterest did not respond to requests for comment. Bloomberg News first reported on the companies’ talks on Wednesday.

PayPal shares fell 4.9 percent to close at $258.36 (roughly Rs. 19,330), while Pinterest shares jumped 12.8 percent to $62.68 (roughly Rs. 4,690).

“(The) combination would be a significant positive for PayPal’s ongoing monetisation initiatives on both sides of its merchant and consumer platforms, especially if Pinterest’s social commerce platform gets integrated with Honey’s AI into PayPal’s destination app,” Wedbush analysts wrote in a note.

The payments behemoth was among the big winners of the COVID-19 pandemic, as more people used its services to shop online and pay bills to avoid stepping out. Its shares have risen about 36 percent in the last 12 months, giving it a market capitalisation of nearly $320 billion (roughly Rs. 23,94,100 crore).

Pinterest was valued at about $13 billion (roughly Rs. 97,275 crore) when it went public in 2019. It also saw a huge spike in users looking for crafts and DIY project ideas, as lockdown curbs kept people at home.

As lockdowns eased, Pinterest has warned about slowing user growth, especially in the United States, its largest market. It has said it expects revenue growth mainly through deeper engagement with existing users rather than signing up new ones.

The market has valued Pinterest shares more cheaply than those of some younger social media platforms such as Snap but higher than more mature companies such as Twitter, according to Refinitiv Eikon valuation metrics.

PayPal’s offer represents a 26 percent premium to Pinterest’s closing price of $55.58 (roughly Rs. 4,160) on Tuesday and it is equivalent to 62 times the social media company’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation over the last 12 months, according to Eikon.

By that metric, Microsoft paid 79 times LinkedIn’s earnings when it acquired it in all-cash deal. Pinterest, however, would be giving its shareholders some of PayPal’s stock, in a bet that this currency would appreciate over time over time as the combined company reaps revenue and cost synergies.

Pinterest is at a crossroads after co-founder Evan Sharp announced last week he would step down as chief creative officer to join LoveFrom, a firm led by Jony Ive, the designer of many Apple products.

Sharp founded the online scrapbook and photo-sharing platform in 2010 with Ben Silbermann, who is the San Francisco, California-based company’s chief executive officer, and Paul Sciarra, who left in 2012.

PayPal had been looking to boost its e-commerce offerings in recent years through acquisitions. It bought online coupon finder Honey Science in 2019 for $4 billion (roughly Rs. 29,920 crore) and Japanese buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) firm Paidy for $2.7 billion (20,195 crore) earlier this year. It acquired return-service provider Happy Returns in May.

Social media-driven commerce

Social media platforms that have not pursued mergers with fintech firms have been working on ways to allow consumers to buy directly from their platforms.

TikTok, for example, is testing a way for users to buy products directly on its short video app. It has partnered with ecommerce giant Shopify and in August began allowing retail brands to link their product catalogs to the app.

Analysts said the PayPal-Pinterest deal talks highlight the potential for other social media and fintech companies to join forces to capture swaths of the e-commerce market.

“Social/interactive commerce is growing in the United States and no one has won it yet. So rather than going against Amazon, PayPal is making a bet on a different kind of shopping model,” said Marketplace Pulse e-commerce analyst Joe Kaziukėnas.

© Thomson Reuters 2021