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indexindexauthorShakeel HashimNoneNeed to dive deep into the financial movements that matter to tech? Get Shakeel Hashim's newsletter every Friday.f11fbe35a3
December 8, 2020
The company filed for the sale on Tuesday, with the company seemingly trying to take advantage of its soaring stock price, which is up 650% so far this year. Its stock dropped on the news though, down around 2% as of 9.45 a.m. ET.
Shakeel Hashim
Shakeel Hashim ( @shakeelhashim) is a growth manager at Protocol, based in London. He was previously an analyst at Finimize covering business and economics, and a digital journalist at News UK. His writing has appeared in The Economist and its book, Uncommon Knowledge.
Power
Yes, GameStop is a content moderation issue for Reddit
The same tools that can be used to build mass movements can be used by bad actors to manipulate the masses later on. Consider Reddit warned.
WallStreetBets' behavior may not be illegal. But that doesn't mean it's not a problem for Reddit.
Image: Omar Marques/Getty Images
January 27, 2021
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
January 27, 2021
The Redditors who are driving up the cost of GameStop stock just to pwn the hedge funds that bet on its demise may not be breaking the law. But this show of force by the subreddit r/WallStreetBets still represents a new and uncharted front in the evolution of content moderation on social media platforms.
In a statement to Protocol, a Reddit spokesperson said the company's site-wide policies "prohibit posting illegal content or soliciting or facilitating illegal transactions. We will review and cooperate with valid law enforcement investigations or actions as needed."
<p>It's still unclear whether any such investigations will result from this, and White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is "monitoring" the situation. But the fact is, Reddit writes lots of site-wide rules that have nothing to do with whether certain behavior is illegal. Reddit is <a href="https://www.protocol.com/reddit-powermods-war" target="_blank">unique among platforms</a> in that it leaves much of its content decisions to the moderators of different subreddits. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Still, the company does have rules. It <a href="https://www.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043071072" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">prohibits</a>, for example, "directing unwanted invective at someone" or "following them from subreddit to subreddit," classifying that as harassing, bullying behavior. Redditors aren't allowed to send "large amounts of private messages to users who are not expecting them" or repeatedly post "unrelated/off-topic/link-farmed content," because, under Reddit's <a href="https://www.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043504051" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">rules</a>, that's spam.</p><p>That means if Reddit decides that what r/WallStreetBets is doing is dangerous or disruptive, it could very well take action. That would be tricky for Reddit. Given the range of offensive stuff that regularly appears on the platform, it could be tough to justify outlawing stock trade tips. So far, that hasn't happened, and the Reddit spokesperson was unable to comment on whether any content policies related to the GameStop issue might be implemented in the future. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, for one, seemed unconcerned in a Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/1354407436732387335?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">thread</a> Wednesday. "It's a perfect storm at a time when lots of people are hurting, interest rates are so low, inescapable student loan debts loom, and every major institution has caught Ls during a /global pandemic/ over the last year," Ohanian wrote. "This is something to believe in."</p><p>That may be true for now. But experts on social media manipulation argue the model WallStreetBets has created could morph into a bigger long-term problem for Reddit. "The WallStreetBets manipulation of [GameStop] is now the best template for how one could monetize an influence operation," <a href="https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1354499573209653251?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweeted</a> Stanford researcher Alex Stamos who, as Facebook's former chief security officer, worked on detecting and rooting out foreign influence operations after the 2016 election. "I don't know if any laws were broken this time, but Reddit now has a problem: it is the home for a community of hundreds of thousands of people who have demonstrated the ability to move billions of dollars based upon the urging of, at most, a couple dozen anonymous accounts."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Facebook's current chief security officer, Nathaniel Gleicher, agreed with Stamos, <a href="https://twitter.com/ngleicher/status/1354517057673392129?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweeting</a>: "Good reminder that while political [information operations are] a serious threat, there are many harmful cases of these tactics driving financial gain."</p><p>Gleicher added: "[Money] is a driver across security threats, from hacking to phishing to good old bank fraud, & [information operations are] no exception. Getting ahead of how these tactics enable fraud is essential to disincentivize bad actors."</p><p>To be clear: There's no evidence that the GameStop mob has any ties to a malicious influence operation, and aside from some hedge funds that tried to short GameStop in the first place, it's not immediately obvious who WallStreetBets is hurting. What are hedge funds anyway if not an institutionally sanctioned pool of people betting on the success or failure of businesses for profit? For now, it's easy to root for the underdogs banding together to stick it to the man. </p><p>But one thing that seems obvious from the last decade or more on the internet is that the same tools that can be used to build mass movements — be they political or financial — can be used by bad actors to manipulate the masses later on. If and when that happens, Reddit will have few excuses for not being prepared. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
Protocol | China
More women are joining China's tech elite, but 'Wolf Culture' isn't going away
It turns out getting rid of misogyny in Chinese tech isn't just a numbers game.
Chinese tech companies that claim to value female empowerment may act differently behind closed doors.
Photo: Qilai Shen/Getty Images
January 27, 2021
Shen Lu is a Reporter with Protocol | China. She has spent six years covering China from inside and outside its borders. Previously, she was a fellow at Asia Society's ChinaFile and a Beijing-based producer for CNN. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, The New York Times and POLITICO, among other publications. Shen Lu is a founding member of Chinese Storytellers, a community serving and elevating Chinese professionals in the global media industry.
January 27, 2021
A woman we'll call Fan had heard about the men of Alibaba before she joined its high-profile affiliate about three years ago. Some of them were "greasy," she said, to use a Chinese term often describing middle-aged men with poor boundaries. Fan tells Protocol that lewd conversations were omnipresent at team meetings and private events, and even women would feel compelled to crack off-color jokes in front of the men. Some male supervisors treated younger female colleagues like personal assistants.
Within six months, despite the cachet the lucrative job carried, Fan wanted to quit.
A woman we'll call Zhang had a similar experience at her former employer, Baidu. She told Protocol that senior colleagues joked that Zhang and her younger female coworkers were hired to "please their eyes."
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Alibaba and Baidu look and act like they value female empowerment. Alibaba, the ecommerce giant, hosts a <a href="https://www.alizila.com/speakers-talk-womens-empowerment-at-alibaba-conference/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Global Conference on Women and Entrepreneurship</a> every year. Its founder, Jack Ma, has <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUuEryO0ogg" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">positioned</a> himself as a champion for women and has repeatedly said that Alibaba <a href="https://www.qianzhan.com/people/detail/271/140925-908063c9.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">owes its success to its female workers</a>. Ma has touted the company's <a href="https://ishare.ifeng.com/c/s/7pVlMyNV25i" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">relatively hefty share</a> of women in top management — currently, <a href="https://www.alibabagroup.com/cn/about/leadership" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">six out of 14</a> of the most senior roles are staffed by women. Search engine behemoth Baidu, too, likes to<a href="http://d.youth.cn/newtech/202012/t20201230_12640898.htm" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> tout</a> its relatively high ratio — <a href="http://esg.baidu.com/Uploads/File/2020/06/18/u5eeb598d72472.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">46%</a> — of women in management.
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"Workplace equality is a core value of Baidu. Female employees account for 43% of Baidu's workforce and 46% of management. Women play significant roles as top executives of the company driving technology innovation and strategy," Baidu said in an email reply. Alibaba did not respond to Protocol's requests for comment.
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So why do women like Fan and Zhang have such a rough go of it?
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This is the terrible paradox at the heart of Chinese tech, one that will threaten its capacity to innovate in the future. A wave of Chinese women are joining elite tech companies and their boardrooms, often in numbers that compare favorably to tech industries abroad, but it turns out that getting rid of sexism is far more than a numbers game. Women in Chinese tech are marginalized, demoralized and exhausted. When they get home, they're still expected to shoulder most of the childcare and household chores.
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The result: Those who manage to ascend have to learn to play — and win — a man's game. This paradox is going to sharpen as more women enter tech and become aware of gender inequality.
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Women are increasingly populating Chinese tech offices. Data shows that some of China's biggest internet companies, including <a href="https://pic2.zhimg.com/80/v2-64ca7bcc8aa012b59dbd90cdb6c7b809_1440w.jpg" target="_blank">ByteDance</a>, <a href="http://esg.baidu.com/Uploads/File/2020/06/18/u5eeb598d72472.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Baidu</a> and ride-hailing giant <a href="https://www.yicai.com/news/5260027.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Didi Chuxing</a>, each employ at least 40% female staff. By way of comparison, <a href="https://www.statista.com/chart/4467/female-employees-at-tech-companies/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">statistics show</a> that female employees fill between 28% and 42% of roles at America's five largest tech companies. In India, women make up <a href="https://go.451research.com/women-in-tech-india-employment-trends.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">34%</a> of the tech workforce; in the U.K., the figure is <a href="https://technation.io/insights/diversity-and-inclusion-in-uk-tech-companies/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">19%</a>.
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Women have also made it into Chinese tech leadership. <a href="https://www.svb.com/trends-insights/reports/women-in-technology-2019" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Seventy percent</a> of Chinese startups have at least one female executive, a higher proportion than companies in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, according to a 2019 survey conducted by Silicon Valley Bank. And more than 1,000 women have<a href="https://xw.qq.com/cmsid/20200308A0L9J400" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> made it into the boardrooms</a> of China's public tech companies, according to a study conducted by Tianyancha, a data technology service company.
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Yet Alibaba and Baidu are not the only "greasy" companies. Leading Chinese tech firms, including Tencent, have posted job ads depicting their female employees as "pretty" or "goddesses" to attract male candidates, according to a <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/04/23/only-men-need-apply/gender-discrimination-job-advertisements-china#_ftn99" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">2018 Human Rights Watch report</a>. In 2017, WeChat's parent company Tencent apologized after <a href="https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1815/video-of-women-on-their-knees-deals-blow-to-tencent-image" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">footage emerged</a> of a corporate event where female employees were kneeling while using their teeth to open water bottles placed between men's legs. A <a href="https://www.digitaling.com/articles/16221.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">2012 job ad</a> for food-delivery group Meituan declared that "finding a job equals finding a woman," featuring a suggestive image of a thong hanging between a woman's legs. "Do what you most want to do," the ad concluded, using a verb for "do" that colloquially means "fuck." In the years since, Meituan has repeatedly depicted young women in its promotional ads as <a href="https://www.yunyingpai.com/extend/518996.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">food on the plate</a> for delivery.
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In gender studies, the <a href="https://tidsskrift.dk/scandinavian_political_studies/article/download/32616/30682" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">theory of critical mass</a> hypothesizes that deliberative bodies must be made up of at least <a href="https://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/egm/eql-men/index.html#:~:text=Women%20have%20gained%20the%20right,States%20of%20the%20United%20Nations.&text=The%20figure%20of%2030%20percent,content%20of%20political%20decision%2Dmaking." rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">30%</a> women to impact policymaking. But at least when it comes to tech, it's clear that neither a high percentage of female execs nor a workforce approaching gender parity equate to workplace equality. Julie Yujie Chen, who teaches at the University of Toronto and has researched the experience of Chinese women in tech, doesn't believe the presence of more women executives in a Chinese tech company will work in favor of female employees. "Women in tech is not a representation issue," she told Protocol. "It is about challenging the norms."
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Lin Zhang, an assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire who has interviewed dozens of female entrepreneurs in China's tech companies, said many of the women who thrive in this ultra-competitive, male-dominated industry not only have become resigned to workplace masculinity and sexism, but have internalized it. "Because of the generally hostile gender culture in China, there's not much solidarity among women," Zhang said. "Now that they're up there, they feel like, 'I have paid my dues. It's your turn.'"
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Alibaba's Fan echoes this: "Although women are much present in Alibaba's senior management, they all have transformed themselves to be greasier than the men. That's how they entered that powerful circle."
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Shi is a 30-year-old manager of a content-producing team at Nasdaq-listed video-sharing platform Bilibili. Like Fan and the other female tech workers interviewed for this story, she spoke to Protocol on the condition that she be identified by a pseudonym to avoid retaliation from her employer. Shi said the women in her company leadership "completely subscribe to the 'wolf' mentality. They are just as territorial, aggressive and exploitative as the men."
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One result is tech products that objectify women and reinforce gender stereotypes, at least in the way they are marketed and used. Didi Chuxing is helmed by a woman — company president Jean Liu — and Didi's staff was <a href="https://www.yicai.com/news/5260027.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">40%</a> female in 2017, the most recent year for which statistics are available. However, it encountered scandal with Hitch, a carpooling service launched in 2015 that suggested hookups between drivers and passengers in its 2018 <a href="https://new.qq.com/omn/20180828/20180828A08PZK.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ads</a>. Two female Hitch passengers were <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/26/business/didi-chuxing-murder-rape-women.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimesworld" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">raped and killed</a> that same year. The general manager at Hitch was a woman named Huang Jieli.
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Even relatively "woke" Chinese companies demand a lot of their employees. A major culprit is Chinese tech's infamous 996 work schedule — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days per week — which can wear workers down. I spoke with most interviewees after 10 p.m. in China, after they had finished a long day's work. Message alerts from colleagues often interrupted our conversations.
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This work culture further disadvantages women because of the larger milieu in which they live. Women still shoulder most of the childcare and housework burden in Chinese households. A 2019 National Bureau of Statistics <a href="https://cnlgbtdata.com/files/uploads/2020/01/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E7%A4%BE%E4%BC%9A%E4%B8%AD%E7%9A%84%E5%A5%B3%E4%BA%BA%E5%92%8C%E7%94%B7%E4%BA%BA2019EN-final.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">report</a> showed that women spent more than twice as much time as men on unpaid household work. "The lack of reliable childcare service becomes a structural barrier for women to advance their career," said Chen, "especially in sectors like the tech industry."
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Although a large number of young Chinese women have joined tech, they are more likely to concentrate at the lower end of the skill and productivity spectrum, such as human resources, public relations and business operations. Programming, often the power center, remains a male-dominated division, with female programmers comprising only 10.4% of its ranks in 2020, according to a<a href="https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/109185515" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> report by Chinese digital working platform Proginn</a>. (In the U.S., figures range between <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/1126823/worldwide-developer-gender/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">8%</a> and <a href="https://www.frgconsulting.com/blog/female-developers-workforce/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">11%</a>.)
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Of course, China has its share of relatively egalitarian companies. Take ByteDance. While it spent last year at the center of U.S. controversy over data-sharing with Beijing, it's seen at home as valuing diversity and inclusion. Dong, who works in the ByteDance HR department, told Protocol she chose the company for its relatively egalitarian culture. It was the only prospective employer that did not inquire about her marital status when she was job-hunting in 2018, and the supervisor of the department she was interviewing for was a woman in her late 30s.
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But Dong thinks ByteDance is swimming against the tide. She says several senior female colleagues in her team still had to quit because they couldn't juggle work and childcare demands. It's not a problem unique to China, but female workers there are getting less help than in other countries. "Tech companies in other countries are trying to create a better environment for female workers who face similar social expectations," Dong said. "But in China, they won't specifically create supportive policies for you. The baseline is lower. It's like, 'I'm already doing well by not treating you badly.'"
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Shen Lu is a Reporter with Protocol | China. She has spent six years covering China from inside and outside its borders. Previously, she was a fellow at Asia Society's ChinaFile and a Beijing-based producer for CNN. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, The New York Times and POLITICO, among other publications. Shen Lu is a founding member of Chinese Storytellers, a community serving and elevating Chinese professionals in the global media industry.
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