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Who Needs Trust And Safety?
Big Tech companies are eliminating thousands of positions.
Layoffs have largely impacted trust and safety and AI ethics teams, CNBC reports.
Meta announced plans to cut 21,000 jobs in 2023, a culling CEO Mark Zuckerberg described as the “Year of Efficiency.” As part of those cuts, it disbanded a team that was building a tool for third-party fact-checkers to add comments flagging misleading articles shared on the platform. The project has been discontinued.
Meta also laid off 200 content moderators, 16 members of Instagram’s well-being group and more than 100 employees working on platform integrity.
Meanwhile, Google cut a third of its department tasked with fighting misinformation, radicalization and censorship.
Twitter slashed its ethical AI team from 17 to just one member and laid off 15% of its trust and safety department.
Amazon also downsized its ethical AI team and cut 50 positions dedicated to identifying abusive and illegal behavior on its streaming platform Twitch.
Microsoft cut all 30 members of its ethics and society team.
Yikes.
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Daily Roundup
These cuts will do little to allay advertiser concerns about misinformation spreading online as generative AI and deepfakes become mainstream.
Trendsetters
Did Netflix really think this anti-password-sharing thing through?
The streamer expects its crackdown to build revenue in the long term, despite an initial churn reaction. But Netflix isn’t accounting for subscribers who will choose to downgrade their plans instead of canceling them, The Verge reports.
Netflix’s premium and standard plans allow more user devices to stream content simultaneously. Subscribers who don’t want to pay extra to share their accounts with people outside their households might downgrade their plans because they no longer need as many concurrent streams.
Specifically, these subscribers might downgrade to the ad-free basic plan, which would ultimately lower Netflix’s average revenue per user (ARPU), an essential metric for streaming services looking to prove profitability.
The industry is keeping close tabs on Netflix since its decision to disallow password sharing could create “an industry norm,” says analyst and consultant Paul Erickson. If Netflix is monetizing account sharing, why shouldn’t everyone else?
But to keep ARPU up, anti-account sharing would need to funnel subscribers into ad-supported tiers (which is what Netflix is trying to do).
Ring, Ring
Dish Network is in talks to sell plans for its wireless mobile service through Amazon, WSJ reports.
The satellite TV company has been working on building 5G technology and cell towers to create a wireless network. Dish also got a leg up by buying divested customer accounts from T-Mobile after it acquired Sprint.
Right now, Dish Wireless has roughly 8 million accounts, which pales in comparison with T-Mobile’s 100 million accounts and Verizon’s 140 million. A distribution agreement with Amazon is a marketing opportunity that could actually help Dish become a competitive player in the space.
Amazon wants a stronger foothold in the mobile space, too. The ecommerce giant launched a smartphone called the Fire Phone in 2014 with AT&T’s network, but it quickly scrapped the product due to weak sales. Which goes to show how difficult it really is to take on incumbents in the mobile sphere.
Dish and Amazon inking a deal isn’t guaranteed, though. Dish has to both ensure its 5G tech works on Apple iPhones and meet a government-mandated milestone of network coverage by June before this partnership has a chance.
But Wait, There’s More!
Telly, the startup giving away free TVs, announces a distribution deal with DirecTV. [Insider]
Outfront brings programmatic ads to the NYC subway. [Adweek]
Netflix is taking a necessary risk in tackling its 100 million freeloaders. [Financial Times]
YouTube is shuttering YouTube Stories. [The Verge]
Publishers large and small are funneling their resources into first-party data. [Digiday]
You’re Hired!
Fetch hires Robin Wheeler as chief revenue officer and Jeff Lau as SVP of partnerships and go-to-market operations. [release]
