Dehumanizing Zoom. Court hearings moving to zoom could lead to harsher outcomes. Studies have shown that people are more likely to be deported in immigration hearings if they appear on video than in person, and people applying for asylum are less likely to be granted it over video too. Read more.

Outsourced Moderators. New York University released a report with 8 key recommendations for Social Media companies to improve content moderation. The big one is to stop outsourcing the work. These workers have to watch the worst of what the internet has to offer and then decide if it breaks to rules. The report’s recommendations are intended both to improve the wellbeing of the workers and to make the moderation outcomes better. Better outcomes are particularly important in volatile regions like Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Ethiopia, where it social media content has sparked violence and resulted in deaths. Read more.

Many of these outsourced jobs are based in Dublin, paying about €12 per hour. Jennifer O’Connell did a great piece in The Irish Times on the work involved last year. Read more.

“Deepfakes” are the product of a new video editing technique, essentially photoshopping someone’s face into a video. Many people are worried about their use in politics. “What if someone fake’s a video of Trump declaring war?” But Deepfakes were originally invented by Reddit users to put women’s faces into porn videos and unfortunately, that’s what most of it is used for now. A study found that over 90% of deep-fake videos online involve non-consensually photoshopping a woman into porn. Often celebrities or women they know personally. Vox produced a great video on this emerging vector of harassment online. Link.

End-to-End Encryption involves trade-offs between privacy and safety, so it’s interesting to see how Zoom are planning to strike the balance. If you get a paid account, they’ll make your video calls E2E encrypted, meaning no Zoom employee could listen in – for the company or on behalf of law enforcement. But they won’t be encrypting calls for free accounts. Zoom’s explanation is that most nefarious action happens with free accounts, with people unwilling to enter their billing details, which I guess makes sense. It’s an interesting place to draw the line between privacy and safety, which isn’t an option available to most messaging services like WhatsApp or FB Messenger, which typically have no paid users. Read more.

Shared Micromobility, a term which encompasses bike share schemes like Dublin Bikes and electric scooters like Lime, is set to benefit from Covid. In particular as cities return to work, but commuters look for alternatives to busy public transport. Read more. 

Moby, the second private Micromobility company set to launch its electric bike-sharing scheme in Dublin, is profiled in The Currency. Link.

But e-scooters still aren’t legal in Ireland. They’re classed as Mechanically Propelled Vehicles, so must be taxed and insured, but according to the Gardaí “As it is currently not possible to tax or insure eScooters etc., they are not considered suitable for use in a public place.” Read More.

Here’s a beautiful flowchart of where all of our energy comes from. Link.

German restaurant seatings (on the OpenTable app) are now back to pre-lockdown levels. Link.

Is Remote Working the new Tourism? If we understand the benefit of spending money to attract tourists to our towns for a week or two, surely the same Return-on-Investment calculations can be done on attracting remote workers out of Dublin for several years? Interesting idea gleaned from a Twitter conversation between people working in tourism, remote working and on Clare County council. Read more.

Podcast recommendation. A few years ago Reply All did an episode about a computer system to record crime stats and the effect it had on the NYPD. It’s a great example of Goodhart’s law – “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” As pressure mounted to increase stops, searches and arrests, a system to measure crime ends up creating it. Worth a listen amid the current conversation around the future of policing in the US. Link.

The Parliamentary Budget Office have produced a digital, visual flowchart of how tax receipts and government spending have been impacted by Covid. More of this please. Link.

RTE’s posts will get start getting tagged on Facebook soon, as will the posts of all other state-owned or state-backed content producers. Youtube has been already doing this for quite a while. In Ireland, the tags will only appear on the page itself or in the Ads Library (where nobody but nerds like us look), but in the US posts in the newsfeed will be individually tagged, so hopefully that happens here too shortly. Read more.

Challenger Banks are making a significant impact in Ireland. N26 now has 100,000 customers here and Revolut has a million. It has the same number of customers as bank of Ireland, but 6% of the staff (1.5k vs 24k). As this ecosystem evolves I think we’ll start thinking about our Pillar Banks (BOI, AIB, PTSB) as the core banking infrastructure layer, similar to how we think about Eir’s broadband network or ESB networks – with consumer facing apps built on top of them. But which parts of banking, like mortgages, deposit insurance or transfers, sit in which layer is still to be discovered. 

• The Currency have an interview with N26’s Head of Europe. Link.
• A great overview of the difference between opening an account with a traditional vs. challenger bank. Link

Ask the experts. “When 511 Epidemiologists Expect to Fly, Hug and Do 18 Other Everyday Activities Again.” Link. 

Trump’s Tweets. It’s been a long week, but near the start of it (last Wednesday to be exact), US President Trump sent a Tweet containing the phrase “when the looting starts the shooting stars.” Twitter didn’t remove it, but they did hide the contents so that users would have to click into it to view, on the basis that it promotes or glorifies violence. The same post was shared on Facebook, but the company has left it unchanged.

Twitter seems to be viewing this as a choice between two evils – either promoting a message that glorifies violence, or hiding from the public the fact that the president holds these views, which might be important for people to know. This is how they arrive at the half-way solution of leaving it accessible, but adding a warning.

It’s unclear how effective this strategy is. Studies in the past showed that marking only some posts as “disputed” made people more likely to believe all of the others that were not. The little exclamation marks or warning symbols also drew more attention to the content. That happened here too – the fact that Twitter did this made headlines and the Tweet itself was read out on the RTE 9 O’Clock news.

Trump then threatened legislative changes in retaliation. Many speculate that his retaliation is really aimed at Facebook. He’s seeking to intimidate them into inaction as his campaign plans to use the platform for voter suppression to secure re-election in November. 

“We see the executive order as very clear retaliation that’s designed to deter social media companies from fighting misinformation and voter suppression,” said Alexandra Givens, the leader of Center for Democracy and Technology.

Mark Zuckerberg continues to stand over the decision not to moderate any of Trump’s actions, which a lot of Facebook employees are unhappy about.

These are difficult decisions. You probably have your own opinion on whether or not these posts should be left alone, removed, or tagged in some way. Whatever your opinion, it’s useful to understand the decision making process within these companies, as they will continue to impact the spread of political speech throughout the world.

Testing the limits. Someone set up a Twitter account that tweets Trump’s tweets word-for-word, which Twitter then suspended for 12 hours for glorifying violence. Link.

Fake pics. Twitter are also adding “manipulated media” tags to posts. For example, this one of a photoshopped photo of Hitler to make it look like he and Trump held the bible in the same way. Link.

Profiling the Police. There are many stories of police using big data and algorithms to try predict bad behaviour in the public, but what if we turned the tech around and used it to predict bad behaviour from the police? This study in 2019 did just that, with two very interesting (but probably unsurprising) findings. 1. “You are the average of the company you keep” applies to police too, with bad behaviour in one acting as a strong predictor of bad behaviour in their partner. 2. “The presence of female officers in the group reduced the chances of anyone receiving complaints of excessive force in the future.” Read More.

Grow Remote, a group trying to revive rural Irish towns with remote working, are hiring a General Manager. Link.

Local Digital in the UK have a good repository of online resources to help local councils in their response to Covid-19, including frequent webinars that anyone can join. Read more.

Ireland’s Competitiveness Scorecard 2020 was published. I’ve never read one before, so I was surprised by how holistic the focus is – on environmentally sustainable growth, quality of life, civic engagement and, of course, the main economic indicators. The full PDF is worth a skim, but the key out-take is that we perform well in many areas, but quite poorly on “the environment, broadband coverage, digital skills, and the productivity of the SME sector. Dealing with these competitiveness weaknesses will be paramount to achieving a sustainable and balanced recovery in a period of heightened global uncertainty.” Read more.

Data Protection and Contact Tracing. The ICCL, Digital Rights Ireland and other experts have published a set of guidelines for any new technology the HSE may wish to use to help fight Covid. The framework seems sensible, aiming for a good balance that allows for enough data gathered to be useful, but no more than necessary, and urging careful consideration of where that line is drawn. Read more.

Keelvar, a spin-out from University College Cork (UCC) that uses AI to help supply chain departments operate more efficiently, has secured $18m in Series A funding. Read More.

5km. Apparently 2 million of us used the 2kmfromhome website David Bolger built in his spare time, to see how far we could roam during lockdown. Read more.

First Tiki-Torches, now Hawaiian shirts. A bizarre but interesting thread on why, based on memes about the 1980s movie “Breaking 2: Electric Boogaloo”, racist young men in America now wear Hawaiian shirts to signify the coming of a second civil war. Link.

Print Newspaper’s ad revenues fell by 70% in the UK. Link.

Health Tracking. The Chinese city of Hangzhou has announced plans to extend it’s health-tracking QR code for monitoring people’s health status at all times — regardless of whether there is a public health emergency. It’s already meeting intense backlash online in China as a privacy overreach. Read More.

Encryptions vs Safety. Most popular messaging services, like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, are moving towards end-to-end encryption. This means that if I send you a text through Facebook Messenger, no Facebook employee will be able to read the contents of our message. This is good if we’re planning to protest our government, or if we’re building a Facebook competitor, or for any host of other privacy reasons. But it’s bad if the messages are hateful, or predatory or criminal. 

So how do you police bad behaviour in messages when you can’t read them? Many governments approach this by asking “how can law enforcement have a key, but nobody else?” Which is tricky. Tech companies instead are phrasing the question as “assuming a scenario where no-one but the sender and recipient can read the message, what other things could we do to improve safety?”

In that spirit, Facebook have announced plans to build safety alerts based on the metadata about the encrypted messages. For example, if an older person is sending messages to many young people they aren’t friends with, that might flag as potentially predatory. In that instance, Facebook would alert the recipients and encourage them to report it.

WhatsApp already do metadata analysis like this. If a text message (or a meme or a link) has been forwarded 5 times in a row, they limit people’s ability to share it further. This helps reduce the spread of disinformation, and it can be done without knowing the content of the message.

This broadly feels like the right approach, encrypting securely and layering safety on top. Read More.

Maximum Media, owners of Joe.ie and Her.ie, is set to enter examinership. Aaron Rogan has a good overview of the rise and fall in the Business Post. While some of the details involve bad behaviour – like artificially inflating viewership figures for advertisers – most of the financial troubles are fairly run-of-the-mill. Paying large, fixed costs for high profile sports stars and broadcasters and getting low-margin, variable revenue from digital advertising, especially since Covid-19. Whatever happens to the business, it unfortunate to see the end of one of the few media properties aimed at young men which talks frequently about mental health, wellbeing and sexual consent. Read More.

RTE tried to invest in Maximum. The most interesting nugget in all of this, for me, was the emergence of the fact that RTE had bid for a minority ownership stake in the business back in 2018. I don’t have any strong opinion on the specifics of the deal but I do find the strategy quite interesting and generally positive. We often refer to RTE as our “national broadcaster”, but these days it seems more apt to think about their two key functions separately – the “national content producer” and “national content distributor”. Investing in teams that produce popular, Irish, digital content probably makes sense. Link.

How Facebook Moderates Content. Richard Allen, formerly of Facebook, shared a framework for how social media platforms think about a controversial content and decide whether or not it should be removed.

He describes a weighing scales. On one side is both “Harm” and “Falsity”. If something is very harmful, but not false, they’ll probably remove it. If something is very false but not particularly harmful (“the moon is made of cheese!”) they’ll leave it.

On the other side of the scale is “resilience” and “partisanship”, which increase the likelihood the content will be left up. Resilience refers to the notion that a population may already be well educated against a claim, and therefore naturally recognise its falsity, so it may not need to be removed. Partisanship is a measure on whether removing it would disproportionately impact one political side, party or candidate.

Covid-19, for example, has been mostly non-partisan. All sides of the political debate are generally agreed, so removing disinformation doesn’t favour one side/party/candidate over the other. But saying “this government is doing a bad job handling Covid-19”

This framework why Mark Zuckerberg said they wouldn’t remove political ads containing lies about opponents, but that they would remove political ads with incorrect information on election dates or polling centre locations, for example.

It’s a good framework for understanding the inner workings of their arbitration policies, but one would worry the “partisanship” measure just further incentivise bad actors to make partisan issues out of conspiracy theories. Read More.

Eir sold it’s tower infrastructure to Phoenix Tower International for €300m. This is the concrete and the metal part of their mobile network. Always interesting to see how different the economics of mobile data are to wired, where competition can happen much easier with spectrum than with fibre. I guess that’s why privatisation of our rural-fibre causes ministerial resignations, but this proceeds without much notice Link. 

Getting Irish Business Online. Two interesting case studies from Enterprise Ireland on Irish businesses who have used some of the Department’s €2m Covid-19 Online Retail Scheme (up to €40k per business). Good to see supports there to push through the transitions while demand is high. Kilkenny Group. Inish Pharmacy.

Remote legislating. The UK Parliament has moved to remote, digital voting during the lock-down. Link

Shane Curran, the 20-year old Irish founder, has just raised $16m for his security startup, Evervault. He’s certainly one to watch. Link.

E-Scooters. The UK Govt are looking at legalising e-scooter rentals. These operate in many European cities already. With our newfound desire not to pack into buses and trains, it may be worth looking at here. Link.

Virgin Media is offering Free TV AD space to Irish SMEs affected by Covid-19. Link.

Uber let go 140 of it’s 500 staff based in Limerick. Link.

The Death of the IFSC?
Last week Twitter, which employs 170 people in Dublin, told all of its employees that they can work from home “forever.” It soon became clear that Twitter was just a first in a series of dominoes. Shopify (employing over 300 in Ireland), Spotify and most significantly Facebook (employing 4,000 here) all followed suit this week. And it’s not just the tech giants. Jes Staley, CEO of Barclays Bank recently commented that “the notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past.”

In many ways what we’re seeing is an acceleration of 5-10 years worth of change over the course of just a few months. Everyone (who could) took the plunge, invested in their home office setup, changed business practices to allow for remote working. James Gorman CEO of Morgan Stanley has said they have “proven we can operate with no footprint. That tells you an enormous amount about where people need to be physically.” The wider fund management industry employs 14,000 in Ireland.

What are the implications for our cities (Silicon Docks and the IFSC in particular) – if this becomes a permanent trend? Or a 5-10 year de-urbanisation trend? I think there are a few important areas work considering:

• The most obvious is transport. What happens when 10,000 fewer people need to move in and out of Dublin each day. Or 50,000? That would be 38% of the total as of the last census.
• Our FDI and broad industrial policy may need rethinking too. Facebook, Google et al have their accounting units based here for tax purposes, but they also have their larger EU offices here for the ability to attract bright young people from across the globe to work in their Dublin office. What happens when those bright young things don’t need to come to Dublin?
• There is possibly a knock on effect for innovation. These companies are a great place for like-minded people to meet, learn and start companies together. In many ways they have acted like University Campuses for Ireland. Is this destined to change?
• The return-on-investment on any sort of broadband infrastructure, including rural broadband, grows more compelling with every passing day.

TikTok Usage in Ireland
It was reported in Jan that 870k Irish people have installed the app, but usage figures were generally unknown. Vodafone recently ran the first ad campaign on TikTok in Ireland. The figures they shared give an interesting glimpse into how popular the app has become here. Over just 24 hours their ad was viewed 1.7 million times. The ad was set to show every time a user opened the app, and TikTok reports that the average user checks their app 5 times per day, which would imply there are now approximately 340k daily active Irish users of TikTok. Link.

Payout for Content Moderators
In an effort to keep Facebook free from abuse, violence and other bad activities, the company employed 30k people globally to review and remove offensive material. Many of these moderators were based in Dublin. Facebook scaled this activity very fast, but it didn’t scale proper supports or procedures for these workers and many have suffered depression, anxiety and PTSD as a result. In the US this week a payout settlement of $52m was reached for the workers there. Content moderators here initiated legal proceedings last September, but not result for them yet.

Contact Tracing. 
A good overview from the BBC on the difference between centralised and de-centralised contact tracing apps that most countries are looking at. Link.

Facebook bought Giphy for $400m
The price tag probably makes more sense expressed as “0.06% of Facebook’s total worth” rather than “almost half a billion dollars”, but it’s still eye watering for a company that does animated gif reactions. There’s probably a wider advertising component to the price tag (the Giphy infrastructure is used in Instagram, Twitter and most other popular social media and messaging apps), but it’s also a reminder of how much we humans need visual queues in communication. Our journey with mobile messaging has been a constant endeavour to enhance the flat written word with facial expressions, from emoticons :- ) to emojis 🙂 to animated reaction gifs. Link.