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Moderation Madness

Good morning! This Tuesday, Reddit bans The_Donald, YouTube bans white supremacists, and Twitch bans President Trump himself.
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Doug Hirsch, one of Facebook's earliest product chiefs, said he's selling his stock in the company — not out of anger, but self-reflection:
Microsoft is joining the social media ad boycott, CMO Chris Capossela said:
What if the future of meetings didn't involve real-time conversations? That's what Prezi CEO Peter Arvai imagines:
You shouldn't be able to click a button and sign your privacy rights away, Sen. Sherrod Brown said:
All at once, June 29, 2020, became something like Moderation Day.
Why did this happen all at once, and why yesterday? In part, it seems, because the increasing ad boycott against Facebook is spilling over onto these other platforms, and they're eager to avoid the full brunt of the attack.
Huffman's note about Reddit's move stuck out to me, because it's a remarkably human look at the situation. Huffman didn't hide behind Reddit's policies or say "we mostly do good." He said Reddit hadn't done enough, and changed the policies.
Reddit's also thinking through product changes, Huffman said. It's starting with how easy it is for banned people to create a new account. "We aim to address this in the long term by making the reputation of an account more valuable," he said, "and by requiring an account to have good reputation to do such things, so that banning an account actually hurts (and is therefore more effective)."
These changes make all the companies more advertiser-friendly. But they also show that tech companies are clearly feeling more free to enforce their rules, especially after Twitter and Snap started doing so. And they're more willing than ever to change the rules, too.
Protocol's Shakeel Hashim writes: The Indian government made waves on Monday when it announced that it would ban 59 Chinese apps, including WeChat and TikTok, and claimed they pose a threat to the "sovereignty and integrity of India." It's a marked escalation in India-China hostilities, and signals tech as a major battleground in the countries' dispute.
This could pose a major problem to TikTok, which has over 80 million monthly active users in India. In April of last year, the app was removed from Indian app stores for eight days after the government said it posed a risk to children.
This isn't the only way tech's been caught in the India-China crossfire: Last week, Reuters reported that tech shipments from China had been held up at Indian ports, including Apple and Dell products.
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Google: great at search. Amazon: great at products. Amazon: also winning at product search. Which Google would like to rectify. And it's starting by making it free for retailers to list on Google Shopping, and have those listings appear in normal search results.
Google's clearly trying to establish Google Shopping as a real ecommerce player, as Walmart and Shopify and eBay and so many others all try to push back at Amazon's online dominance. Paired with its Google Lens product search and Google Assistant shopping lists, it could be a pretty powerful ecosystem — except everyone currently just searches "Nintendo Switch Amazon" and goes from there.
I'm absolutely fascinated by the ongoing battle between these platforms, all vying to be the place you shop. It's like every department store moved into town, opened up across the street from each other, and started having huge sales to drive the others out. It's good news for buyers, as long as it lasts.
Katerra laid off more than 400 employees, The Information reported, about 7% of staff. It's another in the growing line of companies that took huge investment from SoftBank and then had to cut costs.
Sophia Dominguez is Snap's new head of camera platform partnerships. She comes from Svrf, a company she founded to work on AR and 3D search and discovery.
Leading an investigation into Pinterest's workplace culture: Danielle Conley, a lawyer at WilmerHale in DC. Pinterest has been in the news after former employees said they were discriminated against while working there.
Mark Porter is MongoDB's new CTO, after having the same gig at ride-sharing company Grab. He's been on MongoDB's board since February.
First Disney did hand-drawn animation. Then it did animation via computer. Up next: deepfake cartoons? The company's research studio put out a (terrifying, unnerving, probably best not to watch) video yesterday featuring a new algorithm for "neural face swapping in images and videos" at high resolution. (Not movie-theater high, yet, but getting there.) Gizmodo has a good story on how it works. At this rate, by the time they get to "Toy Story 8," you're going to be able to stick your own face onto Woody's.
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Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce, with help from 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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