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May 27, 2020
Yoel Roth is not a top executive at Twitter. He is the company's "head of site integrity," making him one member of the company's broad team dedicated to enforcing Twitter's rules. He works under Del Harvey, Twitter's vice president of trust and safety. He's best-known for dealing with issues around bots and spam.
But over the past 24 hours, Roth has become the poster child of everything that Republicans say is wrong with Silicon Valley — tying Roth's past tweets criticizing the GOP and President Donald Trump to Twitter's decision this week to add a fact-check link to the president's tweets about mail-in ballots.
On "Fox & Friends" on Wednesday morning, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway read Roth's Twitter handle aloud and said: "Somebody in San Francisco go wake him up. Tell him he's about to get more followers."
Roth has received more than 3,000 new followers over the past day, according to an analysis of his Twitter account. He hasn't tweeted since Monday, but harassing messages are appearing every minute under his latest posts, and right-wing accounts with millions of followers, including the president's son and the Trump campaign's official account, have been tweeting out his name and personal information every hour since mid-Tuesday.
A Twitter spokesperson told Protocol the company is standing behind Roth and does not have any plans to fire or suspend him.
"No one person at Twitter is responsible for our policies or enforcement actions," a Twitter spokesperson said, "and it's unfortunate to see individual employees targeted for company decisions."
A person familiar with the matter said Roth has faced an explosion of death threats.
The storm began on Tuesday, when Twitter flagged a tweet from Trump as false, prompting conservatives and then Trump himself to lash out over allegations that Twitter was exhibiting bias against the president. It's a familiar battle, and one that came only days after The Wall Street Journal reported that the president was considering convening panels devoted to unearthing "anti-conservative" bias, a culture war known to fire up the GOP's base during election seasons.
"Twitter has now shown that everything we have been saying about them (and their other compatriots) is correct," Trump tweeted on Wednesday morning. "Big action to follow!"
Twitter confirmed that Roth was one of many voices within the company that helped make the decision to fact-check Trump. But it was not his call alone, Twitter said — it was made by the broader "trust and safety" team.
It was the first time Twitter has appended its "misinformation" label to a tweet from Trump after years of pressure to do so, and it underscored the impossible question that companies like Twitter have found themselves facing in the Trump era: Should social media sites fact-check the president when he uses his enormous platform to spread falsehoods?
Roth, who has been at Twitter for more than four years and comes from an academic background, was almost immediately thrust into the center of that debate. Jon Levine, a reporter with the New York Post who is popular among conservatives, on Tuesday tweeted screenshots of Roth's tweets about Republicans from 2017.
In one tweet, Roth called Mitch McConnell "a personality-free bag of farts." In another, he wrote there were "actual Nazis in the White House."
The tweets took on a life of their own, bolstered by an article published on Fox News, promotions from the Trump-friendly One America News Network, and Conway's attack on "Fox & Friends." By Wednesday afternoon, Donald Trump Jr. had retweeted the post to his 5 million followers, writing, "This joker is in charge of 'Site Integrity?' Could you possibly find someone more biased?"
The Trump 2020 campaign's official account responded to a tweet from the president, likely in a bid to get more eyeballs on their message: "Yoel Roth is the Twitter employee in charge of 'developing and enforcing Twitter's rules' and he has a history of tweeting terrible and vile things that show he has a very bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS)!"
Twitter said Roth is continuing to work despite the barrage of death threats and harassment he is facing. The company declined to comment on whether it has assigned a security detail to his home.
But the episode highlights the toxicity around the political debate around how social media companies should treat speech from world leaders, especially Trump, and how quickly that fight can devolve into personal attacks from those who think there are political points to be won.
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Emily Birnbaum
Emily Birnbaum ( @birnbaum_e) is a tech policy reporter with Protocol. Her coverage focuses on the U.S. government's attempts to regulate one of the most powerful industries in the world, with a focus on antitrust, privacy and politics. Previously, she worked as a tech policy reporter with The Hill after spending several months as a breaking news reporter. She is a Bethesda, Maryland native and proud Kenyon College alumna.
Protocol | Fintech
Plaid’s COO is riding fintech’s choppy waves
He's a striking presence on the beach. If he navigates Plaid's data challenges, Eric Sager will loom large in the financial world as well.
Plaid COO Eric Sager is an avid surfer.
Photo: Plaid
March 4, 2021
Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Signal at (510)731-8429.
March 4, 2021
Eric Sager is an avid surfer. It's a fitting passion for the No. 2 executive at Plaid, a startup that's riding fintech's rough waters — including a rogue wave on the horizon that could cause a wipeout.
As Plaid's chief operating officer, Sager has been helping the startup navigate that choppiness, from an abandoned merger with Visa to a harsh critique by the CEO of a top Wall Street bank.
<p>But things have been breaking nicely for Plaid during the COVID-19 crisis, which has let the company really charge. </p><p>Plaid, which is based in San Francisco and has more than 600 employees, charges financial apps for a service that helps consumers verify and connect their bank accounts, a key step for moving and managing their money. It also, controversially, pulls transaction data from those newly connected accounts and sells insights based on that information.</p><h3>Surfer-in-chief</h3><p>Plaid's surfer-in-chief describes the customer base as a series of waves.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>"The first wave is the core fintech companies — the Robinhoods, the Venmos, the Squares, the Chimes," he said, noting how these "early fintechs are getting more and more successful."</p><p>"The second wave [composed of] banks and financial institutions are rapidly moving to digitize. … The third wave are the Googles, the Apples, the Lyfts, the Teslas. Everybody is moving towards building digital financial services."</p><p>"We're riding all three of those," he added. "If anything keeps me up at night it's making sure that we continue to kind of scale the business."</p><p>Sager admits that, as a surfer bro, he can be an intimidating presence at the beach.</p><p><br></p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<a href="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTcxMzc4NC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1ODQ1Mjc4NX0.2-3V-Md9VtATd0QhCvcc6VFQNXuu7_reFyIPjdEVuAA/img.jpg?width=980" target="_blank"><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTcxMzc4NC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1ODQ1Mjc4NX0.2-3V-Md9VtATd0QhCvcc6VFQNXuu7_reFyIPjdEVuAA/img.jpg?width=980" id="3c170" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4978fb31443a663192df9fc1643a9eb4" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image"></a>
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Sager with wife Melissa Miao.</small>
<small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">Photo: Plaid</small>
</p><p><br></p><p>"I'm 6'8", I have a 10-foot-board and my family has a history of skin cancer, so I go out there with a hat," he told Protocol. "So all the little kids that are surfing always make fun of me. But once I'm on the wave, all the short boarders get out of the way."</p><p>Plaid's latest charge is toward payroll data. On Thursday, the company unveiled a new product that would make it easier to verify employee income for different financing needs, including securing a loan, applying for a mortgage or leasing a car. </p><p>Plaid is supporting real-time payroll authentication for more than 250,000 of the largest employers in the U.S., which the company estimates makes up to 60% of the total working population. </p><p>"It was something we heard a lot from customers who were being asked to verify income and so forth," Sager said. "Every single lending customer we have would love to have this information for the exact same reason that it makes the onboarding flow easier."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Melody Brue, analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, said the new offering could "open up so many possibilities for employers, lenders, neobanks — pretty much everyone in the fintech ecosystem." </p><p>"Access to payroll data can change the way lenders look at underwriting and servicing loans and significantly cut costs and time spent on verification," she told Protocol. </p><h3>'A blessing in disguise'</h3><p>It's Plaid's first major product rollout since the collapse of merger talks with Visa. Brue called <a href="https://www.protocol.com/plaid-visa-deal" target="_self">the scuttling of the deal</a> "a blessing in disguise" after Plaid saw stronger demand for its infrastructure in the COVID-19 crisis. The company, which has raised $310 million in funding from investors that include Goldman Sachs, Citi Ventures and Visa, was last valued at $5.3 billion. That has <a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/plaid-shareholders-field-offers-at-15-billion-after-merger-collapse" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reportedly jumped to $15 billion</a> following the collapse of the Visa deal.</p><p>But Plaid's latest product offering, she said, will also likely make it more of a target: "This will likely be seen as a threat to financial institutions, as they already fear security issues from open banking and now may fear losing customers."</p><p>Plaid emerged as a powerhouse by providing banks and financial startups real-time access to consumer financial data, such as bank and investment accounts. Plaid, whose services integrate with 11,000 financial institutions, has more than 4,000 customers, including Square, PayPal, Robinhood, SoFi and Affirm.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>But Plaid has taken fire for the way it manages financial data. "Plaid has irritated a lot of the banks," Logan Allin, managing general partner and founder of Fin Venture Capital, told Protocol. "You heard Jamie Dimon saying Plaid's playing dirty, right?"</p><p>He was referring to the <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/15/jamie-dimon-says-jpmorgan-chase-should-absolutely-be-scared-s-less-about-fintech-threat.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">JPMorgan Chase CEO's remark</a> on a call with analysts calling out "people who improperly use data that's been given to them, like Plaid." Dimon's remarks came despite a 2018 agreement the companies signed that they said would "protect customer data."</p><p>Plaid also faces a class action lawsuit filed by a consumer, accusing the company of using deceptive and misleading data practices.</p><p>"Imagine there is a company that knows every dollar you deposit or withdraw, every dollar you charge or pay to your credit card and every dollar you put away for retirement, within hours after you make the transaction," <a href="https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.361471/gov.uscourts.cand.361471.1.0.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the lawsuit filed on behalf of California resident</a> Logan Mitchell began. "Imagine that, as far as you know, you never provided your username and password to this company or otherwise authorized it to access your online accounts."</p><p>The lawsuit argued that Plaid "acquired its mountain of consumer data by deceiving consumers into giving Plaid the key to their financial lives: their bank usernames and passwords." It accused the startup of committing "fraud by erecting a sophisticated edifice of deceit to trick users into thinking that they are logging into their financial institutions, when in fact they are turning over their credentials to Plaid."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>Sager declined to comment on the lawsuit or Dimon's remarks. But he said Plaid has built features meant to give consumers control over their data. "If you're a consumer, you can log on to a dashboard, you can see every single connection you've ever made, you can permission and un-permission that information."</p><h3>Debate over data access</h3><p>However, critics, including some fintechs, argue that Plaid does not offer enough clear and convenient opportunities for consumers to opt out of having their data accessed. Yves-Gabriel Leboeuf, CEO and cofounder of Flinks, a Plaid rival based in Montreal — it's been called the "Canadian Plaid" — would not comment directly about Plaid, but he said consumer consent in fintech data aggregation is a serious issue. </p><p>"The bad data practices that we've seen in the market are practices where there will be an ongoing aggregation of the data on a daily basis, without having expressly giving the consent to do so," he told Protocol. "Our thesis is that that's not Flinks' data, that's the consumers' data. And we have no right to use that data, unless it's clear that they are giving us that right."</p><p>Steve Smith, CEO of Finicity, another Plaid rival which was recently acquired by Mastercard, also emphasized the need for "full transparency" in the way consumer financial data is accessed. He stressed the importance of "bringing down the walled garden of data, but doing it in a very responsible way."</p><p>"I can't speak to Plaid's specific data governance policy or Yodlee's specific data governance policy," Smith told Protocol, referring to another major data aggregator which has <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/dataprivacy-envestnet-yodlee/envestnet-yodlee-seek-dismissal-of-privacy-lawsuit-over-financial-data-collection-idUSL1N2HR39K" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">also been sued for its data collection practices</a>. "Clearly, I think you'll find differences between the three organizations and the way they view data or the way they approach this conversation."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>Sager stressed that making all that data accessible to banks and fintechs has been a game changer for many consumers. "A lot of the innovation fintech is helping address is suddenly people are getting products that they previously weren't able to get," he said.</p><p>His views were shaped by an unusual career. Born and raised in Germany, he moved to the U.S. as a high school exchange student. He had hoped to go to California or Hawaii, for the surfing spots, but the program sent him instead to Mississippi where he also went to college.</p><p>His first job after graduation was with Capital One. He was part of a team at the credit-card issuer that ran tests to evaluate the effectiveness of direct mail campaigns. "What's the difference in response rate if the letter is blue versus pink versus white?" he said. "What's the difference in response rate if the font on the APR is 10 points versus 12 points? There's just nothing we didn't test."</p><p>That included the unorthodox, and legally dubious idea, of putting a dollar bill inside promotional mailers. That didn't sit well with Capital One's management, who promptly told them to shut it down.</p><p>"Well, I didn't put it in there myself," Sager said of the dollar bill scheme, laughing. "The results were good, but it's obviously not the kind of thing you want to be doing at scale so we shut that down. It was my first job. I was 22 and it was probably not the best judgment call."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>He subsequently got an MBA from Harvard before working at Bain. He then plunged into the fintech world, first as head of sales at Square, then as chief revenue officer at BlueVine, a small business-financing startup. <em>[Disclosure: This reporter worked with Sager at BlueVine.]</em></p><p>When he joined Plaid as COO in 2019, it was a challenging transition. Plaid was six years old, and still growing quickly. He was the new guy, and he didn't want to screw things up.</p><p>For the first time in his executive career, Sager said, he was leading a team that he didn't help build from the ground up. He was used to being one of the most experienced people in the room.</p><p>"I was used to saying, 'Hey, I built this. I actually was there when we built it from zero to one or from one to two,'" he said. "Suddenly, you're in a world where it's already at 10. It was already a big, successful company. Suddenly, you're in a situation where you're going literally all day long talking to somebody else and they know way more, but they're still looking to you as if you should have some unique insight. It will make you feel dumb very quickly."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>Charley Ma, who was a growth manager at Plaid when Sager joined the startup and is now a general manager at Alloy, remembered him as an effective leader. "He's very German, very direct, which I like," he told Protocol. </p><h3>Democratizing finance</h3><p>Brue of Moor Insights & Strategy said Sager has become instrumental in "driving the company" in the direction of "actually democratizing finance. The company is giving people access to financial services they've previously been excluded from."</p><p>That approach was influenced by Sager's early years in the U.S.. His first credit card after moving to the U.S. from Germany had an APR of roughly 30%, he said. "I just didn't have a good credit score because I just had never been part of the U.S. system," he said. "Don't get me wrong. Nobody should feel sorry for me. I had a good job and I could find other ways of doing it."</p><p>"But think about how many people in the U.S. aren't in that position — they don't have the history, they can't get loans or they have to get really really expensive loans. You're in a bad cycle. You're trying to take care of your family. You're forced to take high-interest loans. Now you have to work to pay off the high-interest loans and before you know it, you end up in a very negative spiral."</p><p>Fintech is helping fix this, he said. Broader data access is making it possible to offer better financing to more consumers, including those who may not have what's traditionally considered stellar credit. "At the end of the day right, better data means better underwriting," Sager said.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>In fact, having more data could have improved the work he did at Capital One, he said: "If we just had some of the data that we now have, we would have been able to make much better decisions. We would have been able to offer people much lower rates."</p><p>"It's not impossible" for a consumer to provide more data then or now, he said. "The other version 10 years ago would have been you asked for all the bank statements, I go print them out, I put them in the mail or I go go to the office and drop them off and you work through all that. It's not like it couldn't be done, but it's about removing the friction."</p><p>Sager acknowledged that data access has become a "flashpoint" in financial services. Banks and other traditional financial institutions have been <a href="https://www.protocol.com/fintech/cfpb-banks-financial-data" target="_self">resisting calls to make consumer data</a> they collect and hold more accessible to new financial players. </p><p>Leboeuf, the Flinks CEO, said it's a debate in which his company and others are aligned with Plaid: "I do think that the best approach is driven by Plaid and Flinks because ultimately we are working for the best interests of the applications and the consumers."</p><p>Sager echoed that view, saying: "At the end of the day, it's the consumer's data. Whoever you've been banking with, it's your data and you should have the same rights to that data digitally as you would if you were to print out your bank statement, if you wanted to use that to get a car loan, if you wanted to use that to input that information manually into an Excel spreadsheet so you could do your budgeting — whatever it is, it's the consumers' data."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="9">
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</div></p><p>It's the view Sager hopes will prevail as Plaid gears up for that swell on the horizon. Will Sager get a clean ride — or will Plaid find itself locked in?</p>
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Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Signal at (510)731-8429.
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The future of computing at the edge: an interview with Intel’s Tom Lantzsch
An interview with Tom Lantzsch, SVP and GM, Internet of Things Group at Intel
February 28, 2021
Saul Hudson has a deep knowledge of creating brand voice identity, especially in understanding and targeting messages in cutting-edge technologies. He enjoys commissioning, editing, writing, and business development, in helping companies to build passionate audiences and accelerate their growth. Hudson has reported from more than 30 countries, from war zones to boardrooms to presidential palaces. He has led multinational, multi-lingual teams and managed operations for hundreds of journalists. Hudson is a Managing Partner at Angle42, a strategic communications consultancy.
February 27, 2021
An interview with Tom Lantzsch
Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Internet of Things Group (IoT) at Intel Corporation
Edge computing had been on the rise in the last 18 months – and accelerated amid the need for new applications to solve challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic. Tom Lantzsch, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Internet of Things Group (IoT) at Intel Corp., thinks there are more innovations to come – and wants technology leaders to think equally about data and the algorithms as critical differentiators.
In his role at Intel, Lantzsch leads the worldwide group of solutions architects across IoT market segments, including retail, banking, hospitality, education, industrial, transportation, smart cities and healthcare. And he's seen first-hand how artificial intelligence run at the edge can have a big impact on customers' success.
Protocol sat down with Lantzsch to talk about the challenges faced by companies seeking to move from the cloud to the edge; some of the surprising ways that Intel has found to help customers and the next big breakthrough in this space.
What are the biggest trends you are seeing with edge computing and IoT?
A few years ago, there was a notion that the edge was going to be a simplistic model, where we were going to have everything connected up into the cloud and all the compute was going to happen in the cloud. At Intel, we had a bit of a contrarian view. We thought much of the interesting compute was going to happen closer to where data was created. And we believed, at that time, that camera technology was going to be the driving force – that just the sheer amount of content that was created would be overwhelming to ship to the cloud – so we'd have to do compute at the edge. A few years later – that hypothesis is in action and we're seeing edge compute happen in a big way.
<p>The last 18 months have been a wild time to be in technology. We've seen edge compute come to life to help businesses adapt during the pandemic. At the same time, we are also seeing how 5G is going to drive up interest, especially from a networking perspective, rather than a use-case perspective. We also see lot of people that are focused on their data, but the <em>algorithms</em> that companies train with the data are going to be their critical assets. It doesn't matter what company or what industry; <em>this</em> will really become the differentiator for many companies.</p><p>And particularly amid the backdrop of the pandemic, we've seen how companies are using technology to either bring workers back in safely or <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/covid-19-response-sensormatic-article.html" target="_blank">serve their customers in new ways</a>, <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/customer-spotlight/stories/brentwood-academy-customer-spotlight.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">educate children in new ways</a> -- all things that have accelerated the digital transformation that had been underway. I recently read a <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">McKinsey survey</a> that reported on the "speedup in creating digital or digitally enhanced offerings. Across regions, the results suggest a seven-year increase, on average, in the rate at which companies are developing these products and services."</p><p>And based on what we're seeing at Intel, those are lifesaving and industry saving investments happening today – completely re-designing the way that <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/covid-19-response-mic-article.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">patients are treated</a>, and businesses operate.</p><h4>What are you particularly expecting to see this year?</h4><p>What I find most interesting is the work that combines IoT with networking capabilities – and I think this is going to be a year of expansive exploration and working with our customers to put these two things together to solve real business challenges.</p><p>When we first started the integration of networking technology and operational technology capabilities and layered that across the industry verticals, we could count the amount of interested customers and opportunities on one hand. Last year, it was five times that many and this year we see that number increasing significantly already. So, we're excited to see the industry continue to build excitement to scale those types of deployments.</p><h4>What role does AI play at the edge and in what way is Intel involved?</h4><p>An AI use case recently grabbed my attention: employees in a restaurant being screened by a device that checks temperature while the employees are washing their hands – and provides a determination on whether they'd done it adequately before they report to work. I have seen other applications using similar technology in the <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/offering/a5b3b000000TiMSAA0/using-ai-to-make-construction-site-safer?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">construction industry</a>, where an AI algorithm scans to see if employees have their helmet, goggles, vest and other safety equipment on properly to determine if they are ready to work. And the best part is – that the employer can see aggregate data on these interactions to determine if more training on handwashing or helmet wearing is needed.</p><p>At Intel, in addition to providing the fundamental base technology to enable these applications, we work with a lot of third-party developers to create these applications. And we help the developers scale them across multiple industries with our salesforce. So, we may not make the scan technology that determines if you have the right gear on, but we orchestrate that coordination across our ecosystem with all of our partners to effectively put it into a <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">catalog</a> so that if customers are interested in that sort of application, we can provide them with different parties to make that happen.</p><h4>Is there a problem with fragmentation in the market and how can that be solved?</h4><p>It's very fragmented. I gave just two examples of totally different workers coming to work in different industries and I can give you five more that are different again. Although the base technology that Intel creates to enable this type of innovation is very horizontal in nature, the reality is that bringing those to life must be very "vertically-centered" and very "use-case centered" – and must take into account, geography. The two employee use cases I cited look very different if you are talking about employees in North America, India or Germany. So, all in all, this is a holistic ecosystem challenge – and an ecosystem solution.</p><p>At Intel, we're in a unique situation to orchestrate these solutions. </p><p><cite class="pull-quote">People tend to think of Intel as providing the technical footprint that enables edge computing – but we also have the developer reach – and we can use our ecosystem and scale to help our end customers get access to the best solutions.</cite></p><h4>What sort of challenges do customers face when they're attempting to adopt edge computing?</h4><p>There are two common challenges. One is the technical question of 'Who can I work with?' A customer may have a chip focus but actually, it's a more complex question than a chip. We like that complexity, because we can be an adviser to them and <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/partners-by-industry?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">bring to the table partners</a> that they can work with to solve that complexity leveraging our technical knowledge and ecosystem network. </p><p>The second thing that companies struggle with is the challenge of how to fund getting into this space – even if the business case warrants the investment. The world has changed. Companies don't want to write a big capital check for these types of investments – they want a pay-as-you-go model, like you see with the cloud. We've been working with customers to find a way to make that happen – and I think that is going to be a bigger part of the conversation moving forward.</p><p>You can see it across almost every aspect of technology now. We rent compute more than we buy compute. Evidenced by the success of AWS, companies can rent compute from Amazon instead of building their own data center – and there are many benefits to that approach. In the old world, even for this video conference that we're having today we would have installed capital to do this. Now it's just a service. And I think that edge as a service is right around the corner.</p><h4>Do you have an example of that?</h4><p>A customer in Mexico wanted to deploy outdoor WiFi and add security features into it. So, it was an edge-based computing issue that was part connectivity. But there was actually way more to it than just installing it. We not only helped to solved the technological challenge creatively and coordinated the <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/partners-by-industry?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ecosystem of providers</a> to solve this, but we also found a way so that the customer could get into this market with a service-based model without needing to outlay a lot of capital.</p><p>Other semiconductor companies would have a difficult time partnering on both sides of that challenge, but Intel can do it because we have the scale.</p><h4>How do businesses identify which functions they do want to perform at the edge versus in the cloud?</h4><p>It really comes down to a question of what you're trying to do and how you do it at the lowest cost, highest quality and standard in computability.</p><p>If you have an application and it can perform what you need it to do in the cloud, you'll probably run it there. The cloud is a great thing - there's infinite compute and lots of choice in a well-understood developer environment.</p><p>But there are many things you can't or shouldn't do in the cloud for certain reasons. Take the camera example from earlier. Say you have eight high-density cameras, and you want an action on them immediately. You may not be able to afford the latency that comes with going up into the cloud. Or it may be a financial challenge – that its actually more expensive to send that data to the cloud over and over again, and it makes sense to invest in compute at the edge. There are nuances in the decision-making. It really comes down to what you want the application to do, how quickly and how much it should cost.</p><h4>How does Intel help developers to learn, to build and then test their solutions at the edge?</h4><p>To enable what we know to be interesting and challenging use cases at the edge, required us to change our focus on who these developers are and what they care about. We learned that they <em>really</em> don't care about what hardware they're running on. The modern developers are fairly well extracted from the hardware – they just assume the compute is going to be available for them to do their work.</p><p>To make sure we can deliver on that, we typically target developers by specific capability. The most advanced case that we've been studying on the edge recently is focused video and specifically, video inferencing and AI inferencing. We created a tool called <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a>, which was developed in a way that developers didn't have to care about the hardware it runs on. It's a model optimization technology that enables them to easily scale out to different hardware platforms. That's proven to be an interesting value proposition to these developers.</p><p>Our goal with <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a> is democratize AI activity and inference at the edge. We want to make it simple -- to put these tools in the hands of non-data scientists and make it work. As a part of that process, we're also creating an environment where they can develop anyplace, anytime, anywhere they want to be. We're so proud of our <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a> community and are constantly working to grow the community and release new features and capabilities to edge developers.</p><h4>What's the possible next breakthrough that you see for Intel in edge computing and the IoT space?</h4><p>I'm looking forward to the big breakthrough when we show integrated 5G, Virtual Private Network and the edge workloads all in one unit. More to come.</p>
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Saul Hudson has a deep knowledge of creating brand voice identity, especially in understanding and targeting messages in cutting-edge technologies. He enjoys commissioning, editing, writing, and business development, in helping companies to build passionate audiences and accelerate their growth. Hudson has reported from more than 30 countries, from war zones to boardrooms to presidential palaces. He has led multinational, multi-lingual teams and managed operations for hundreds of journalists. Hudson is a Managing Partner at Angle42, a strategic communications consultancy.
Twitter’s future is newsletters and podcasts, not tweets
With Revue and a slew of other new products, Twitter is trying hard to move past texting.
We started with 140 characters. What now?
Image: Liv Iko/Protocol
January 26, 2021
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
January 26, 2021
Twitter was once a home for 140-character missives about your lunch. Now, it's something like the real-time nerve center of the internet. But as for what Twitter wants to be going forward? It's slightly more complicated.
In just the last few months, Twitter has rolled out Fleets, a Stories-like feature; started testing an audio-only experience called Spaces; and acquired the podcast app Breaker and the video chat app Squad. And on Tuesday, Twitter announced it was acquiring Revue, a newsletter platform. The whole 140-characters thing (which is now 280 characters, by the way) is certainly not Twitter's organizing principle anymore. So what is?
<p>Twitter was always just about speed. The initial 140-character limit that became associated with the platform was a technical limitation — required to fit everything into a text message, then the quickest way to reach people — not a statement about brevity being the soul of anything. Many of the moves Twitter has made over the years have been in service of making Twitter even faster: faster to show users good stuff with algorithms, faster to publish with Fleets, faster to spread information with RTs and quote tweets. Even when Twitter decides not to do something, the reasons usually come back to speed. Take the much-desired edit button: One reason Jack Dorsey has given <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/jack-dorsey-wont-get-edit-tweet-button/" target="_blank">for not including one</a> is that it "means we'd have to delay sending that tweet out … we'll probably never do it."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Rather than think of Twitter as a social network or a 140-character writing tool, it's helpful to think of Twitter the way Dorsey does. "At its core Twitter is public messaging," he <a href="https://twitter.com/jack/status/684496529621557248" target="_blank">said in 2016</a>. "A simple way to say something, to anyone, that everyone in the world can see instantly." </p><p>That tweet came in part in response to <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/1/5/11588480/twitter-considering-10000-character-limit-for-tweets" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">a Recode story</a> that claimed Twitter was considering expanding its text limit to 10,000 characters. Dorsey didn't quite acknowledge the plan, but he didn't shoot the report down, either. He also explained why longer-form text might be a powerful part of Twitter. "We've spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on Twitter, and we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it," he tweeted (in a Notes app screenshot, of course). "Instead, what if that text … was actually text? Text that could be searched. Text that could be highlighted. That's more utility and power." </p><p>Increasingly, Twitter is also thinking about what Twitter looks like outside of its own apps. With Project Bluesky, the company is investigating turning Twitter into a protocol rather than a platform, so the Twitter that users know today would be just one way to tap into the social graph and content flowing through it. And with Revue, Twitter is heading into users' email inboxes. Revue appears to be a good fit at Twitter, actually: Its platform has always focused on curation, making it easy for newsletter writers to grab a bunch of links, add commentary and send it to subscribers. Which sounds an awful lot like Twitter — only longer.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>The Revue acquisition, and some of Twitter's other recent moves, also make clear where the company is headed as a business. It's leaning into working with creators, trying to help people build audiences and make money on the platform so that they'll keep spending time there. Twitter is way behind on this front. Twitter is, for most creators, a marketing vehicle, a public way to send fans to the Instagram/Twitch/TikTok/Substacks that make them actual money. </p><p>By acquiring a newsletter provider, Twitter brings at least one part of that in-house. "Revue will accelerate our work to help people stay informed about their interests while giving all types of writers a way to monetize their audience," Twitter's Kayvon Beykpour and Mike Park wrote in <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/making-twitter-a-better-home-for-writers.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the blog post</a> announcing the acquisition. The same could soon be true for Breaker with podcasts, and Spaces with audio events. If 280-character Twitter can continue to be a powerful marketing engine, but all that marketing can drive toward Twitter's other, higher-fidelity messaging tools, Twitter stands to be a useful home for lots of creators. And, of course, if creators stay, so do users.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>When Dorsey said last year that Twitter was thinking about what <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/23/tech/twitter-subscription-earnings/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">a subscription model for Twitter</a> might look like, these are almost certainly the products he was thinking about. "$9.99 a month for the really good tweets" is a tricky line to walk for an ad-based business, and it's not in line with the way Dorsey has always thought about Twitter. (After all, is there anything slower than a paywall?) But paid newsletters, paid podcasts, ticketed Spaces events and all manner of other similar products could add new revenue streams. Twitter could also be trying to make money from creators themselves, too: It has at least <a href="https://www.searchenginejournal.com/twitter-is-considering-these-premium-features-in-a-subscription-model/376287/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">run surveys</a> asking how users would feel about paying to upload longer videos, get better analytics, or add custom badges to their profile. </p><p>There's no guarantee any of this will work. Twitter's history with integrating new products is spotty, and many creators are still wary of the company after it was so quick to kill Vine. But this is what Twitter wants to be: the internet's universal communication tool, with all the new features that requires.</p>
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David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
Transforming 2021
Blockchain, QR codes and your phone: the race to build vaccine passports
Digital verification systems could give people the freedom to work and travel. Here's how they could actually happen.
One day, you might not need to carry that physical passport around, either.
Photo: CommonPass
February 23, 2021
Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
February 23, 2021
There will come a time, hopefully in the near future, when you'll feel comfortable getting on a plane again. You might even stop at the lounge at the airport, head to the regional office when you land and maybe even see a concert that evening. This seemingly distant reality will depend upon vaccine rollouts continuing on schedule, an open-sourced digital verification system and, amazingly, the blockchain.
Several countries around the world have begun to prepare for what comes after vaccinations. Swaths of the population will be vaccinated before others, but that hasn't stopped industries decimated by the pandemic from pioneering ways to get some people back to work and play. One of the most promising efforts is the idea of a "vaccine passport," which would allow individuals to show proof that they've been vaccinated against COVID-19 in a way that could be verified by businesses to allow them to travel, work or relax in public without a great fear of spreading the virus.
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</div></p><p>But building a system that everyone agrees with — and can access — is no small task. There are several companies working on competing projects to verify vaccinations. But beyond that, there are more than a few hurdles that could prevent vaccine passports from succeeding, from antiquated medical records systems to interoperability issues and privacy concerns. Here's how they could actually succeed. </p><h3>Competing projects, similar standards</h3><p>Pretty much since the first blockchain white paper, people have been looking for perfect examples of where a distributed, immutable ledger could be valuable. There's obviously the push to use it for currencies, and companies have tried to use it for things like tracking <a href="https://www.protocol.com/ibm-blockchain-supply-produce-coffee" target="_self">food production</a> and <a href="https://www.govtech.com/products/Blockchain-Voting-Debate-Heats-Up-After-Historic-Election.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">voting</a>, but there are few use cases that have truly taken off, at least so far. "We've been working on this since 2014; we never thought that health care would be the kind of the use case that we take this mainstream," Jamie Smith, the senior director of business development at Evernym, a company focused on using the blockchain as a basis for verifying identities, told Protocol. </p><p>Smith said Evernym had been discussing its concepts with automakers, retailers, telcos, governments, loyalty companies and banks prior to the pandemic. One of those companies was IAG, the airline group that owns British Airways, which had been interested in the idea of contactless travel based on a single identity credential that follows you from the airport check-in to your gate. With the pandemic, that morphed into thinking about ways to verify that passengers have had negative COVID tests, and eventually, that they've received a vaccine. "From our perspective, it was a really easy lift to see," Smith said. "We're doing contactless travel, and we just added verifiable credentials for test results."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>It's a similar genesis for IBM's Digital Health Pass initiative, which leader Eric Piscini said started about two years ago as a way to store people's entire health records in a safe, accessible platform. It also relies on the blockchain for its immutable record of proof, and both Evernym and IBM are part of an open-standards group called the Good Health Pass Collaborative, which aims to bring private credentialed vaccine records to business and people around the world. Companies are working on their own implementations of the standards, but Evernym's Smith said the data is meant to be portable from one passport to another. </p><p>Most of the companies working on passports say their systems are private by design, especially given that they're mainly working off the same open standards. In most cases, the health information only ever remains on a user's phone, but where it asks to verify that the user's information meets a system's standards — such as whether this person has had two COVID vaccines and should be allowed into an office — that information is recorded on a blockchain. "You can, using blockchain technologies, verify that someone has been tested recently, without having access to the underlying data," Piscini said. "I don't know any other technology where you can do that."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Similarly, the nonprofit Commons Project's CommonPass, backed by the likes of Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce, started out as a project to bring an analog to Apple Health for Android. JP Pollak, a senior researcher at Cornell and founder of the Commons Project, first launched CommonHealth to bring the sort of data and insights that Apple Health offers to iPhone owners to Android users. Last summer, the group started building an app that could take health data and privately share it with others — in that case, it was to help truckers stuck at the borders in <a href="https://www.newtimes.co.rw/opinions/digital-technology-re-opening-africa" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">East African countries</a> who couldn't easily prove they'd taken COVID tests. This morphed into vaccine credentialing, with the group now working to pull together the various data streams needed to get a project like this off the ground. </p><p>"Health care institutions, EMR vendors, retail pharmacies, state vaccine registries, all issuing people a digital verifiable credential of their vaccination record that they could then use in the app of their choice, to be able to get access to various kinds of services," Pollak said. CommonPass is also working with the Mayo Clinic, as well as Epic Systems and Cerner, two of the largest EMR vendors. </p><h3>Something for everyone </h3><p>With so many competing efforts to become the world's digital vaccine passport, it might seem that the country is heading for some sort of VHS versus Betamax format war for proving everyone has had COVID vaccines. But given that so many of the efforts are using the same standards, and in many cases, looking to embed their tech in someone else's app rather than their own, the race might be less about the best tech winning, and more about various approaches working in different situations. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>"The intent is not to be the only company; we don't want to be the proprietary platform that everybody has to use because they have no choice," IBM's Piscini said. "That's not who we are right now: That's the IBM from 30 years ago, not the IBM of today."</p><p>For IBM, though, the selling point is that the company already works with so many other massive companies. Why look elsewhere for a vaccine passport solution if your airline booking system is already powered by IBM? "We believe our network is going to be more valuable than any other because of our scale and our ability to integrate the platform with CRM systems, building systems or stadium systems — we can do that every day," Piscini said.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc3NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMTM1MjYyM30._ykxxCyx3_wDbZrYgCcmK0QT2Ue1tZFdP5pf60kOmPU/img.jpg?width=980" id="c81c9" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="3967636652192acfdaad341861263bc8" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">IATA's digital passport app.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: IATA</small></p><p>For other companies, it's about securing new partnerships with major players in the hopes of finding that scale. Evernym, for example, is working with International Air Transport Association, the airline industry's trade association, on an air travel-specific app called Travel Pass. IATA is working with airlines and local governments to ensure it has the latest requirements to feed the app's rules engine. "It will say, 'Hey, you're flying JFK to Heathrow, you need a PCR test 48 hours in advance before you can land,'" Evernym's Smith said. "And of course, those policy changes are changing every day." Qatar, Emirates and Etihad Airways are all <a href="https://simpleflying.com/qatar-iata-travel-pass-launch/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">expected</a> to start trialing the app in the next few weeks.<br></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>In other instances, the technology will live inside other companies' existing apps; why make someone download yet another app and add another hurdle to compliance? Instead, the experience will be rather like adding a loyalty account or TSA PreCheck number when booking a flight. Airlines and other venues restricting access will require uploading negative test results or vaccine records using one of these services. "You're going to be using the United or the Delta app, and they'll be using our solution or somebody else's, but you will do it via their app," IATA's Travel Pass lead, Alan Murray Hayden, told Protocol.</p><p>The World Health Organization is also working on its own offering, and recently convened the <a href="https://www.who.int/groups/smart-vaccination-certificate-working-group" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group</a>. It's built upon the WHO's nearly century-old notion of the "yellow card" vaccination record, which first was used to document that travelers had been inoculated against diseases such as cholera and yellow fever. Evernym Chief Trust Officer Drummond Reed is part of the working group; he said there should be more to share in the coming months. </p><h3>What could go wrong?</h3><p>It's entirely possible that as more people start to get vaccinated, vaccine passports start to become the norm. You walk to work — still masked, of course — scan a QR code reader in the lobby, and are let in. You go out for lunch, and your loyalty card app has a discount for in-store shoppers verifying they're vaccinated. Your concert ticket is also tied to health pass information that you shared earlier in the day with Ticketmaster. But there are more than a few hurdles ahead of the companies rushing to turn these concepts into realities. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>First off, there's the … reality … of the real world that any digital system has to contend with. For anyone without access to the internet, digital vaccine credentials will prove difficult to acquire, though all the companies Protocol spoke with said they would offer a paper-based QR code for people who don't have smartphones. But there's also the issue of having to corral so many different stakeholders into one system, especially when some health care providers are still reliant on antiquated database systems or <a href="https://www.protocol.com/manuals/health-care-revolution/electronic-health-records-after-coronavirus" target="_self">even paper records</a>. "The amount of inefficiency in the system is tremendous," IBM's Piscini said. </p><p>But in the U.S. at least, all vaccinators are required to report COVID-19 vaccines to their state. Piscini said that even for people who just received a paper copy of their vaccine records, systems like IBM's can likely link up to the state's immunization registry and allow people to import records to a vaccine passport.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc4My9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNzg3MTM2M30.RZtqR7F_FuXK1S24V6jVaqUZ0xOSG-gCwj00xU3fxcM/img.png?width=980" id="b0bd3" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="11d8002d92c0cd6ef39b12fc7b8dccf8" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">How CommonPass's app shows your records. </small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Image: CommonPass</small></p><p>And states are willing to help out, Pollak said, adding that CommonPass has started working with Hawaii to roll out its offering for would-be tourists. "We're seeing a lot of state governments stepping up and doing a really good job with this," Pollak said. "It would be surprising if there wasn't a coordinated federal effort very soon." That being said, while <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/iceland-covid-passports-canada-1.5904828" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">many countries around</a> the world are committing to working on vaccine passports, getting a straight answer out of the U.S. government on what it's doing has proven difficult. The State Department, which maintains America's traditional, analogue passports, referred me to Homeland Security, which referred me to the White House. The acting director and chief of staff of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, Kei Koizumi, told Protocol that "OSTP can't discuss projects we are working on before they are publicly announced."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>But even with systems in place at a federal level, there's still a fair amount of education that needs to happen before people will trust systems like these. "There's a substantial gap in understanding and knowledge of how these systems work, and people's views, in terms of who should get access to which data," Pollak said. </p><p>"We assume there's a Facebook Borg in the sky, monitoring every interaction," Smith said. "The emergence of verifiable credentials breaks down that mental model, where actually it becomes more like decentralized bits of paper that I can carry around, and no one's to know that I've been sharing this information."</p><p>"Our belief is that if you do the right thing, from a platform point of view, protecting your privacy, and giving you control and access to the platform to everybody who wants to use it," Piscini said. "I think those are very basic things that allow the core of the platform that we build to generate adoption by the individuals."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>Even with a system that works, there may still be holdouts to this potential new normal. "Some people are saying, 'I will never get vaccinated,'" Piscini said, "and I don't know if the airlines are going to say, 'Well, maybe you will never fly again.'"</p>
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Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
Protocol | Policy
Facebook’s Oversight Board won’t save it from the Trump ban backlash
The Board's decision on whether to reinstate Trump could set a new precedent for Facebook. But does the average user care what the Board has to say?
A person holds a sign during a Free Speech Rally against tech companies, on Jan. 20 in California.
Photo: Valerie Macon/Getty Images
March 4, 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 21, 2021
Two weeks after Facebook suspended former President Donald Trump's account indefinitely, Facebook answered a chorus of calls and referred the case to its newly created Oversight Board for review. Now, the board has 90 days to make a call as to whether Trump stays or goes permanently. The board's decision — and more specifically, how and why it arrives at that decision — could have consequences not only for other global leaders on Facebook, but for the future of the Board itself.
Facebook created its Oversight Board for such a time as this — a time when it would face a controversial content moderation decision and might need a gut check. Or a fall guy. There could be no decision more controversial than the one Facebook made on Jan. 7, when it decided to muzzle one of the most powerful people in the world with weeks remaining in his presidency. It stands to reason, then, that Facebook would tap in its newly anointed refs on the Oversight Board both to earnestly review the call and to put a little distance between Facebook and the decision.
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</div></p><p>It also stands to reason that the Oversight Board would oblige. It was designed to be Facebook's Supreme Court analog, taking up cases that can set new, important precedents for Facebook and issuing decisions on those cases. Like the actual Supreme Court, what matters now is not just what decision the board reaches regarding Trump's account, but how narrowly or broadly it rules. A broad decision that takes into account not just what Trump said on Facebook, but the offline consequences of his words, could mean tougher treatment of all global leaders with a record of <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/daveyalba/facebook-philippines-dutertes-drug-war" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">exploiting Facebook to achieve violent ends</a>. A narrow one could risk creating a global double standard, <a href="https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-01-15/facebook-social-media-bans-trump-capitol-riot" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">affirming fears</a> that Facebook is more concerned with violence on its own home turf than in other countries. </p><p>"I actually think this will be the Oversight Board's Marbury v Madison moment," Stanford Law professor Nate Persily <a href="https://twitter.com/persily/status/1352308920031666177?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">wrote</a> on Twitter. "Meaning, even if they uphold the decision to suspend, the way they handle the case, decide on their jurisdiction, and consider the breadth of the issue presented will be important going forward."</p><p>But a broader question hangs over this entire experiment, and it is very much an experiment: Does the average Facebook user actually care what the Board has to say?</p><p>It's true that the Board's decisions will matter to Facebook, which means they will matter to its billions of users. The decisions it makes will be binding, according to bylaws agreed upon by Facebook, and will likely have domino effects on other content decisions down the line. But if there's a public relations aspect to all of this — that is, if Facebook is hoping to unload the burden of Trump's banishment and redirect some of the public backlash toward a third party — that effort seems doomed to fail. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Unlike the actual Supreme Court, the average American may very well have no idea that the Oversight Board exists. Even if they do, how many of them will take the time to understand the <a href="https://www.protocol.com/facebook-oversight-board-rules-of-the-internet" target="_self">tedious process</a> Facebook underwent to ensure the board is both bipartisan and independent? To the average Trump voter incensed about Facebook's decision to suspend Trump and so many other decisions before that, what is the Oversight Board, really, but an offshoot of the all-powerful tech giant they've believed to be shilling for Democrats all along?</p><p>That's what makes this moment so dicey for the Oversight Board. It's taking on one of its most consequential cases before it's even issued a single other decision. "On the one hand, it divests a huge amount of power from [Facebook] to give the Board authority over this. On the other hand, maybe the Board is too nascent to take on such an enormous question," Kate Klonick, an assistant professor at St. John's Law School, who has studied the Oversight Board extensively, <a href="https://twitter.com/Klonick/status/1352305708423929858?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweeted</a> Thursday. "The Board can establish its seriousness and jurisdiction/power over [Facebook]. That could be good for the Board, but it also means that it's very risky for establishing legitimacy [...] Not sending it also would have also been a damning message — that the Board's authority was limited and that [Facebook] didn't really intend to give it any hard questions."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Now, just months after it came into existence, the Board already <a href="https://twitter.com/hijakamran/status/1352306226923790341?s=20" target="_blank">faces</a> an existential question: to err on the side of public safety or public perception. "Whatever they say will piss off 50-ish percent of Americans. Purely as game theory, I think they're best off reinstating. That shows independence [and] reassures American conservatives, who broadly pose a bigger threat to the Facebook Oversight Board than American liberals," <a href="https://twitter.com/daphnehk/status/1352304994695798784?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweeted</a> Daphne Keller, who directs the program on platform regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center. </p><p>Keller later <a href="https://twitter.com/daphnehk/status/1352306626947022853?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">added</a> that ruling based on those incentives "would be a dereliction of duty, in terms of what they are actually supposed to do."</p><p>But of course, those incentives do exist. The Board may be new, but the choice it's now facing is not. It's a choice between public safety and self-preservation — a choice that will determine the future of dictators and strongmen around the world and, as we've recently seen, have very real implications for the people they govern. It's a choice Facebook has made again and again throughout its history — a choice it's now asking the board to make instead.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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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.
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