Technology
TikTok Lite: EU closes addictive design case after TikTok pledges not to reinstate rewards mechanism
The European Commission has closed its investigation into the TikTok Lite rewards feature under the Digital Services Act (DSA), accepting the social media giant’s commitment to permanently withdraw the feature within the EU.
TikTok Lite’s “tasks and rewards” mechanism, launched in France and Spain earlier this 12 months, lets users earn points for completing actions within the app, resembling watching and liking videos. These points might be redeemed for Amazon vouchers. TikTok Lite is an alternate, lower-bandwidth version of the TikTok app that the corporate offers in some markets.
TikTok also agreed not to attempt to circumvent its commitment, for instance by launching the identical feature under a distinct name or implementing a version that serves as an equivalent alternative, according to the Commission. While the settlement covers the TikTok Lite rewards mechanism that the EU was investigating, it’s not a blanket ban on TikTok launching any rewards features in the longer term.
When the EU launched an investigation into the rewards feature in April, the Commission raised concerns that the design of the mechanism could negatively impact the mental health of young users since it “stimulates addictive behaviour”.
TikTok temporarily suspended its rewards mechanism within the EU shortly after the Commission opened an investigation. The EU threatened to use temporary powers to disable the feature while it investigated concerns that it encouraged people to spend excessive amounts of time on the app.
Briefing journalists on the situation, a senior Commission official said the enforcement body was pleased with the final result because it had managed to quickly deliver the intended results, ensuring that EU residents, including minors, were protected.
The settlement means the EC has not formally found that TikTok has breached the DSA, so there isn’t a penalty. However, if TikTok fails to honour its commitments, the Commission has stressed that the corporate might be immediately penalised under the DSA, which allows for penalties of up to 6% of world annual turnover without the necessity for a brand new investigation. So TikTok has a reasonably large incentive to comply here.
The Commission said it might monitor TikTok’s compliance with its obligations using existing procedures and powers under the DSA, including through Member State authorities that oversee compliance with the overall principles of the Regulation.
Commenting in an announcement, Thierry Breton, EU Commissioner for Internal Market, said: “The available brain time of young Europeans is not the currency of social media – and never will be. We have achieved the permanent withdrawal of the TikTok Lite Rewards programme, which could have had highly addictive consequences. The DSA is in full swing.”
TikTok spokesperson Elliott Burton sent TechCrunch an announcement concerning the settlement: “We always strive to work constructively with the European Commission and other regulators. TikTok is pleased to have reached an amicable resolution and to have withdrawn the TikTok Lite rewards program, which was launched in France and Spain in April and which we had already voluntarily suspended.”
While the TikTok DSA case has now been closed, one other, broader investigation that was announced in February remains to be ongoing.
The case involves TikTok’s core algorithm, amongst other things. The commission said it was concerned that the design of the tracking-based suggestion engine could lead on to “rabbit hole effects,” where users who watch one video on a subject might be advisable more extreme videos, potentially amplifying harmful content, resembling videos promoting eating disorders.
The EU can be concerned that TikTok does not apply sufficiently robust age-based measures to protect children from accessing inappropriate content. TikTok’s compliance with the DSA’s transparency requirements can be under scrutiny.
For more information on how the DSA and its related regulation, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), will impact Big Tech platforms, see our previous reports.
Technology
Entrepreneur Marc Lore on ‘founder mode’, bad hiring and why avoiding risk is deadly
Entrepreneur Marc Lore has already sold a complete of two corporations for billions of dollars. Now he plans to start out delivering takeaway food Wonder made public in a couple of years, at an ambitious valuation of $40 billion.
We recently spoke in person with Lore in New York about Wonder and its ultimate goal of constructing meal planning easier, but we also touched on Lore’s management philosophy. Below is a part of what he said on the topic, flippantly edited for length and clarity.
Lore on the so-called founder modewhere founders and CEOs actively engage not only with their direct reports, but in addition with “skip level” employees to make sure that small challenges don’t grow to be big ones (Brian Chesky works this fashion, as does Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, amongst others):
Yes, I didn’t just like the founding mode because I operate in a different way. I focus very much on the concepts of vision, capital and people. We meet weekly with the leadership team and spend two hours every week on the core elements of vision, strategy, organizational structure, capital plan, our performance management systems, compensation systems, behaviors and values - akin to: things you’re thinking that are already set.
You think, “Oh, yeah, we’ve done certain behaviors before. We have already established the values. We dealt with performance management. We have our strategy.” But as you grow and develop quickly, it’s amazing how much it evolves over time, and you must sustain with it… and just speak about it and speak about it.
When everyone is fully aligned and you have got really good people, you simply allow them to do it; I do not have to get entangled in any respect. So I won’t go into the small print of what people do, so long as they know the nuances of the strategy and vision. When you connect that together with your team and they achieve that with their very own team, everyone is moving in the correct direction.
What Lore thinks about hiring the correct people:
I actually, really care about hiring rock stars. That is, one and all (I hire). I used to think you could possibly interview someone and inside an hour resolve whether or not they were a rock star. I actually thought so, and I believe other people think so too.
It’s not possible. I’ve employed hundreds of individuals. You cannot tell in an hour-long interview whether someone is a rock star, and it’s normal to get honeyed. Someone talks about a great game, sounds good, says the correct things, has the correct experience, and then it doesn’t work out and you wonder why.
I began going back to resumes and attempting to draw correlations, and I discovered that there was a definite pattern that superstar resumes had that distinguished them from non-superstar resumes. This doesn’t suggest that somebody who doesn’t have a superstar resume cannot be a superstar. I miss these people, it’s okay. But after I see someone with a superstar resume, they’re almost all the time a superstar. When I interview them, I already know that I would like to rent them, and it’s more about ensuring that I’m not missing anything from a behavioral, cultural, or values standpoint – we would like it to be compatible.
However, your resume must show a demonstrable level of success in each position you have got worked in. This means multiple promotions. This means staying with the corporate long enough to advance, and leaving and moving from one company to a different is a giant step. Superstars don’t move sideways. They don’t move from a great company to a bad one because bad corporations must pay more to draw people, so sometimes they shake loose individuals who should not that good, who just need to go for the cash.
But you discover someone who’s (at the highest) 5% and you take a look at their CV and it’s like: boom, boom, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, and then a giant jump… promotion, promotion, big jump . When I get a resume that shows a visual level of success, I take it and pay them what they need. It’s very essential for me to get this superstar there. And you are constructing an organization of superstars.
You have to have a correct performance management system in place in order that they know exactly what they should do to get to the following level. Because superstars are very motivated. They need to know what they should do to get to the following level, especially Generation Z. They need to know and get promoted every six months.
Finally, Lore talks about his belief that taking more risks is the solution to secure a startup’s future, even when this approach could seem counterintuitive to many:
People all the time underestimate the risk of the establishment and overestimate the risk of introducing change. I see it over and all over again.
If you have got a life-threatening disease and the doctor says, “You have six months to live,” at that time you may go on a trial drug or anything, even when it’s extremely dangerous (it should look good). Basically, you are trying to take a risk to avoid inevitable death.
If you are super healthy and every thing’s going great and someone says, “Take this experimental drug; it can make you live longer” (many individuals will say), “You know what? It’s too dangerous. I’m really healthy. I don’t desire to die from this drug.”
However, startups are very different from large corporations. When you’re employed at a big company like Walmart (whose US e-commerce business Lore tracked selling is certainly one of his corporations), it’s about incremental improvement. There is no incentive to take risks.
As a startup founder, you’ll likely die. Every day that you just live and do that startup, there is a risk that you’re going to die. The probability is 80% and only a 20% likelihood it should actually work. So you have got to take this into consideration when making decisions. You must search for opportunities to take risks to cut back your risk of death. The establishment is the worst thing you may do. Doing nothing is the most important risk you may take.
Technology
Australian government withdraws disinformation law
The Australian government has withdrawn a bill that might have imposed penalties on online platforms as much as 5 percent their global income in the event that they fail to stop the spread of disinformation.
The bill, backed by the Labor government, would enable the Australian Communications and Media Authority to create enforceable rules on disinformation on digital platforms.
IN statementCommunications Minister Michelle Rowland said the bill would “provide an unprecedented level of transparency, holding big tech accountable for its systems and processes to prevent and prevent the spread of harmful misinformation and disinformation online.”
However, she said that “based on public statements and conversations with senators, it is clear that there is no way this proposal could be passed through the Senate.”
When a revised version of the bill was introduced in September, Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter), criticized it in a one-word post: “Fascists.”
Shadow communications minister David Coleman was a vocal opponent of the bill, arguing it could encourage platforms to suppress free speech to avoid penalties. Because the bill seems dead now, Coleman sent that it was a “shocking attack on free speech that betrayed our democracy” and called on the Prime Minister to “rule out any future version of this legislation”.
Meanwhile, Rowland in his statement called on Parliament to support “other proposals to strengthen democratic institutions and keep Australians safe online”, including laws to combat deepfakes, enforcement of “truth in political advertising during elections” and regulation of artificial intelligence .
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese can be moving forward with a plan to ban children under 16 from using social media.
Technology
Department of Justice tells Google to sell Chrome
Welcome back to the week in review. This week, we take a look at how the Department of Justice ordered Google to sell Chrome to break its monopoly, whether OpenAI by chance deleted potential evidence in a copyright lawsuit filed by The New York Times, and the way artificial intelligence corporations are exploiting TikTok for research purposes. Let’s do it.
The U.S. Department of Justice argued that Google should get rid of its Chrome browser to help break the corporate’s illegal monopoly on online search. U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled in August that Google is an illegal monopoly for abusing its power within the search industry, and the Department of Justice’s latest filing says Google’s ownership of Android and Chrome poses a “significant challenge” to pursuing countermeasures aimed toward establishing a competitive search engine market.
Anthropic raised a further $4 billion from Amazon and agreed to make Amazon Web Services the first training site for its flagship generative artificial intelligence models. Anthropic can be working with Annapurna Labs, AWS’s chip manufacturing division, to develop future generations of Trainium accelerators, custom AWS chips for training artificial intelligence models. Amazon’s recent money injection brings the tech giant’s total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion.
OpenAI by chance deleted potential evidence in The New York Times and Daily News’ copyright lawsuit, say the publisher’s lawyers. As part of the lawsuit, OpenAI agreed to provide two virtual machines so the lawyer could seek for copyrighted content in its AI training kits. However, within the letter, lawyers for the publishers claim that OpenAI engineers deleted all publisher search data stored on one of the virtual machines.
News
Kim Kardashian meets Optimus: The fashion mogul had hands-on experience with Tesla’s bipedal humanoid robot. In videos posted to X, Kardashian encourages Optimus to make a heart out of his hand, dance like he’s at a luau and play rock, paper, scissors. Read more
Oura’s valuation exceeds $5 billion: The smart ring maker has received a $75 million investment from glucose device maker Dexcom. The investment, which constitutes Oura’s Series D financing round, raises the corporate’s valuation to over $5 billion. Read more
Let’s organize a celebration for Partiful: The customizable event planning app challenges legacy solutions like Evite, Eventbrite, and Facebook Events, is a favourite amongst Gen Z users, and was just named a top app of 2024 by Google. Read more
Talk to me in your language: Microsoft will soon allow Teams users to clone their voices so that they can talk to others in up to nine languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. Read more
Hackers attack Andrew Tate: According to The Daily Dot, hackers breached a web-based course founded by an influencer and self-confessed misogynist, exposing data on nearly 800,000 users. Tate is currently under house arrest awaiting trial on sex trafficking and rape charges. Read more
What makes a bank a bank? The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has ruled that each one digital services that handle significant volumes of transactions needs to be subject to bank-style supervision, which could impact Apple Pay, Cash App, Google Pay, PayPal and Venmo. Read more
A more conversational Siri: According to sources cited by Bloomberg, Apple is developing a new edition of Siri based on advanced multilingual models in an attempt to meet up with more natural-sounding competitors comparable to Google Gemini Live. Read more
Making Money With TikTok Brains: Several AI-powered research tools are taking advantage of the “PDF to Brainrot” trend, during which the text of an uploaded document is read in a monotone voice against a backdrop of “weirdly satisfying” vertical videos like Subway Surfers gameplay. Read more
Threads attacks Bluesky: As Bluesky’s user base surpasses 20 million, Instagram Threads has begun rolling out a brand new feature called custom feeds to capitalize on user demand for more personalization. Read more
ChatGPT within the classroom: OpenAI has released a free online course to help elementary and middle school teachers find out how to introduce ChatGPT into their classrooms. However, some educators are concerned about this technology and its potential for error. Read more
Do we want one other day by day word game? Normally I’m an evangelist for word games and crosswords, but I feel like we’re quickly approaching market saturation. Netflix has launched a brand new day by day word puzzle game in partnership with TED called TED Tumblewords. Read more
Analysis
Please don’t send X-ray images to the chatbot: People often turn to generative AI chatbots to ask questions on their health concerns and higher understand their health. Since October, X users have been encouraged to upload their X-rays, MRIs and PET scans to the AI-powered chatbot, Grok, to help interpret the outcomes. Medical data is a special category subject to federal protections that, usually, only you may circumvent. But simply because you may does not imply you need to. As Zack Whittaker writes, it’s price remembering that what goes on the Internet never leaves it. Read more
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