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Everybody’s (still) mad at Big Tech

Good morning! This Tuesday, it's time for yet another congressional hearing, why tech's biggest CEOs don't know what's happening in their own company and what's inside Airbnb's S-1.
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Brew some extra coffee, take a preventive Advil and get comfy: It's Internet Bias Hearing Day!
Today's Senate Judiciary hearing — titled "Breaking the news: Censorship, suppression, and the 2020 election" and featuring Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg — is all but guaranteed to consist mostly of partisan bickering and bipartisan certainty that the social platforms keep failing to handle things correctly.
Protocol's Issie Lapowsky wrote a good preview of the hearing. There will be a lot of talk about the Hunter Biden New York Post story, but I suspect most of the hearing will focus on the claims of election fraud that are rampant on the two platforms. Here are a few things I'll be looking for in particular:
The last time we did this, which was only about three weeks ago, it turned into a lot of grandstanding as a number of senators (particularly Ted Cruz) seemed to be looking for a viral clip rather than a substantive answer. I don't expect today to be any different. But we can hope! These are important conversations to be had, and I hope we have real versions of them soon.
Your hearing drinking game for the day: Drink (booze, coffee, Soylent, whatever) every time somebody compares social media moderation to Chinese censorship. Just don't drink too much — there's gonna be a lot of that.
Anna Kramer writes: You know what's definitely going to get talked about today? Jack Dorsey apologizing for Twitter's decision to prevent users from sharing that infamous New York Post article. It prompted the reemergence of a longstanding question facing the light-handed CEO: Can one person run two companies well? While Dorsey remains leader of both Twitter and Square, he spent the last six months fending off threats from activist investors who want a more involved Twitter chief.
But it's not just Jack; Big Tech's CEOs are not omniscient. They don't like to admit it, and you might not want to believe it, but these men run corporations so large that it's impossible for them to know all that goes on inside. That doesn't excuse their lack of accountability, but I'm just here to remind you that they are, after all, people, and not the larger-than-life demigods they sometimes play in our conversations.
Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have faced similar problems. After years of keeping his hands off the wheel, Bezos only stepped back into the everyday management in March, after the pandemic hit. And Zuckerberg's story is one we know all too well: Until recently, he was really Facebook's product guy, content to let Sheryl Sandberg keep tabs on some of the company's most critical decisions. His increased involvement was induced reluctantly, in response to enormous political and social pressure.
All the Congressional theater in the world may not move the needle much more than it already has. If Congress wants actual answers to its questions, the people who can do that best might not be the CEOs it keeps calling on.
It's been a fall full of big-money tech IPOs, but Airbnb's has probably been the most hotly anticipated. The company's been around for more than a decade, its valuation has been all over the map, it's had a brutal year that included laying off 1,900 people and there are a lot of investors and employees who would very much like to get rich.
Now they're one step closer. Airbnb's S-1 has been published, which means it's time to dig into some of the company's Risk Factors. All the startup classics apply: the company's losing money, it's hard to keep employees, branding is everything. But Airbnb's an unusual company in a lot of ways.
Airbnb thinks its total addressable market is $3.4 trillion, with almost half of that coming from experiences. (Against all odds, Airbnb continues to believe in that part of its platform.) The company had a tough 2020, but believes it's the biggest name and best brand at the beginning of a massive change in how people live and move. I suspect investors are going to agree.
Welcome to the age of synthetic media
Content generated or manipulated by AI through machine or deep learning is changing how we create, distribute, consume, and democratize media. What does synthetic media have the power to change next?
Barack Obama wants tech companies to be more proactive in their decision-making, and said democracy depends on it:
California is "pulling the emergency brake" on COVID-related reopenings, Gov. Newsom said:
The Substack backlash is right on schedule, according to Paul Graham:
GitHub restored youtube-dl, and wants to help lead the fight to change copyright law:
Wendy Nice Barnes is GitLab's new chief people officer. She joins from Palo Alto Networks. Merline Saintil is also joining the company's board of directors.
Jeff Bezos announced the first climate grants from his $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund. He's giving $791 million in total, to 16 separate groups, and said there's more to come soon.
Some of the old Essential team is back together, working on a company called OSOM. Jason Keats is the company's founder and "chief hooligan," and it's working on privacy-focused hardware and software. Notably not on the corporate roster: Andy Rubin.
Peiter Zatko is Twitter's new head of security. Better known in internet circles as Mudge, he comes from a similar role at Stripe.
The YouTube channel Unus Annus was always supposed to last for one year and no longer. Never mind that it had more than 4.5 million followers by day 365, never mind that more than 1.5 million people were watching live at the moment Unus Annus' creators shut it down and deleted the channel. I'd say you should go back and watch, but, uh, you can't. The fun post-mortem will have to do.
Welcome to the age of synthetic media
Content generated or manipulated by AI through machine or deep learning is changing how we create, distribute, consume, and democratize media. What does synthetic media have the power to change next?
Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce, with help from Anna Kramer and Shakeel Hashim. Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day; see you tomorrow.
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