Do people want an app specifically for discovering events and messaging as a group? That’s the bet behind IRL, a young social network that has been quietly growing over the past year and just attracted an eye-popping amount of money to take on Facebook.
The two-year-old startup is betting that a post-pandemic world will fuel its mission to help people “do more together,” usually by meeting up in real life — you know,IRL. The idea has attracted the deep pockets of the Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank, which is the biggest investor in a new $170 million round of funding that values IRL at roughly $1 billion.
That’s a remarkable amount of money for an app with roughly 12 million monthly users and no revenue. Even still, IRL is finding early traction primarily with people under the age of 18 in the United States, and the app has already facilitated more than 1 billion messages in barely a year. A handful of universities have now let students enter their school emails to gain access to virtual events and group chats.
What a paid IRL group looks like.Image: IRL
“We’re building Facebook groups and events for the generation that doesn’t use Facebook,” IRL CEO and co-founder Abraham Shafi told The Verge. “There just happens to be no other product really focused on this space for the next generation.”
It’s true that Facebook’s users are getting older — look no further than Instagram preparing an app for kids as a sign that the company is desperate to attract young people. And Shafi is right to identify groups as a critical area in social networking, as people are increasingly moving away from communicating primarily in public feeds to private chats.
IRL is also starting to experiment with allowing groups to charge for access to for things like tutoring or music lessons, though it hasn’t rolled the feature out broadly. Eventually, it also plans to let brands promote events on its main discovery page.
According to Shafi, the goal is to become “a super messaging social network” over time. “We have the opportunity to build WeChat for the rest of the world,” he said in reference to the messaging app that over 1 billion people use in China to do everything from pay bills to hail taxis. “The combination of messaging and events creates the conditions for a platform,” said the venture capitalist Mike Maples, an IRL board member and investor who was also an early backer of Twitter.
For now, the vast majority of IRL’s users are teenagers that live in middle America, but Shafi plans to use SoftBank’s money to help grow in other countries. Besides paying some creators on TikTok to promote their IRL chats early on, the startup hasn’t spent money on marketing. Instead, it’s finding new users in apps where young people are already spending time, like Snapchat, Roblox, and TikTok — the latter of which is also working on a product integration with IRL. (SoftBank’s only other known investment in the social media industry is ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company.)
As part of this fundraiser, IRL is setting up a creator fund that will pay people to organize events in major cities using its app, like an outdoor movie night or a block party. Up to $100,000 in grant money will be earmarked for each city in the application program, which will start in the US this year and move to other countries sometime in 2022. The initiative is application only and IRL hasn’t specified the list of cities yet.
IRL CEO and co-founder Abraham Shafi.
Giving its young audience exposure to group chats with strangers opens up the potential for problems, and IRL will have to contend with moderating its growing network. The startup has already had to battle spam, and it’s just now starting to ramp up hiring for its trust and safety team. It plans to give group moderators adjustable tools for proactively weeding out bad messages through Hive, an automated content moderation platform that Reddit also uses. Group chats that aren’t invite-only will be reviewed by IRL staff before they are promoted on the app’s explore page.
Even with all the money it has raised, IRL faces tough odds against tech giant incumbents. Aside from the audio social app Clubhouse, which has already seen its growth stall as people emerge from pandemic lockdowns, only a small handful of social networks have managed to reach hundreds of millions of people since Snapchat debuted almost a decade ago. Unlike Clubhouse, IRL has yet to crack the top of the App Store’s free downloads chart, according to the research firm Apptopia.
Thanks to its new fundraiser, IRL doesn’t need to make money in the near term, but it certainly needs to prove it can keep growing, according to Shafi. “The pressure is to become a global phenomena as quickly as possible.”
In March 2020, two months after The New York Times exposed that Clearview AI had scraped billions of images from the internet to create a facial recognition database, Thomas Smith received a dossier encompassing most of his digital life.
Using the recently enacted California Consumer Privacy Act, Smith asked Clearview for what they had on him. The company sent him pictures that spanned moments throughout his adult life: a photo from when he got married and started a blog with his wife, another when he was profiled by his college’s alumni magazine, even a profile photo from a Python coding meetup he had attended a few years ago.
“That’s what really threw me: All the things that I had posted to Facebook and figured, ‘Nobody’s going to ever look for that,’ and here it is all laid out in a database,” Smith told The Verge.
Clearview’s massive surveillance apparatus claims to hold 3 billion photos, accessible to any law enforcement agency with a subscription, and it’s likely you or people you know have been scooped up in the company’s dragnet. It’s known to have scraped sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram, and is able to use profile names and associated images to build a trove of identified and scannable facial images.
Little is known about the accuracy of Clearview’s software, but it appears to be powered by a massive trove of scraped and identified images, drawn from social media profiles and other personal photos on the public internet. That scraping is only possible because social media platforms like Facebook have consolidated immense amounts of personal data on their platforms, and then largely ignored the risks of large-scale data analysis projects like Clearview. It took Facebook until 2018 and the Cambridge Analytica scandal to lock down developer tools that could be used to exploit its users’ data. Even after the extent of Clearview’s scraping came to light, Facebook and other tech platforms’ reactions came largely in the form of strongly worded letters asking Clearview to stop scraping their sites.
But with large platforms unable or unwilling to go further, the average person on the internet is left with a difficult choice. Any new pictures that feature you, whether a simple Instagram shot or a photo tagged on a friend’s Facebook page, are potentially grist for the mill of a globe-spanning facial recognition system. But for many people, hiding our faces from the internet doesn’t feel like an option. These platforms are too deeply embedded in public life, and our faces are too central to who we are. The challenge is finding a way to share photos without submitting to the broader scanning systems — and it’s a challenge with no clear answers.
In some ways, this problem is much older than Clearview AI. The internet was built to facilitate the posting of public information, and social media platforms entrenched this idea; Facebook recruited a billion users between 2009 and 2014, when posting publicly on the internet was its default setting. Others like YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn encourage public posting as a way for users to gain influence, contribute to global conversations, and find work.
Historically, one person’s contribution to this unfathomable amount of graduation pics, vacation group shots, and selfies would have meant safety in numbers. You might see a security camera in a convenience store, but it’s unlikely anyone is actually watching the footage. But this kind of thinking is what Clearview thrives on, as automated facial recognition can now pick through this digital glut on the scale of the entire public internet.
“Even when the world involved a lot of surveillance cameras, there wasn’t a great way to analyze the data,” said Catherine Crump, professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Law. “Facial recognition technology and analytics generally have been so revolutionary because they’ve put an end to privacy by obscurity, or it seems they may soon do that.”
This means that you can’t rely on blending in with the crowd. The only way to stop Clearview from gathering your data is by not allowing it on the public internet in the first place. Facebook makes certain information public, without the option to make it private, like your profile picture and cover photo. Private accounts on Instagram also cannot hide profile pictures. If you’re worried about information being scraped from your Facebook or Instagram account, these are the first images to change. LinkedIn, on the other hand, allows you to limit the visibility of your profile picture to only people you’ve connected with.
Outside of Clearview, facial recognition search engines like PimEyes have become popular tools accessible to anyone on the internet, and other enterprise facial recognition apps like FindFace work with oppressive governments across the world.
Another key component to ensuring the privacy of those around you is to make sure you’re not posting pictures of others without consent. Smith, who requested his data from Clearview, was surprised at how many others had been scooped up in the database by just appearing in photos with him, like his friends and his college adviser.
But since some images on the internet, like those on Facebook and Instagram, simply cannot be hidden, some AI researchers are exploring ways to “cloak” images to evade Clearview’s technology, as well as any other facial recognition technology trawling the open web.
In August 2020, a project called Fawkes released by the University of Chicago’s SAND Lab pitched itself as a potential antidote to Clearview’s pervasive scraping. The software works by subtly altering the parts of an image that facial recognition uses to discern one person from another, while trying to preserve how the image looks to humans. This exploit on an AI system is called an “adversarial attack.”
Fawkes highlights the difficulty of designing technology that tries to hide images or limit the accuracy of facial recognition. Clearview draws on hundreds of millions of identities, so while individual users might be able to get some benefit from using the Windows and Mac app developed by the Fawkes team, the database won’t meaningfully suffer from a few hundred thousand fewer profiles.
Ben Zhao, the University of Chicago professor who oversees the Fawkes project, says that Fawkes works only if people are diligent about cloaking all of their images. It’s a big ask, since users would have to juggle multiple versions of every photo they share.
On the other hand, a social media platform like Facebook could tackle the scale of Clearview by integrating a feature like Fawkes into its photo uploading process, though that would simply shift which company has access to your unadulterated images. Users would then have to trust Facebook to not use that access to now-proprietary data for their own ad targeting or other tracking.
Zhao and other privacy experts agree that adversarial tricks like Fawkes aren’t a silver bullet that will be used to defeat coordinated scraping campaigns, even those for facial recognition databases. Evading Clearview will take more than just one technical fix or privacy checkup nudge on Facebook. Instead, platforms will need to rethink how data is uploaded and maintained online, and which data can be publicly accessed at all. This would mean fewer public photos and fewer opportunities for Clearview to add new identities to its database.
Jennifer King, privacy and data policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, says one approach is for data to be automatically deleted after a certain amount of time. Part of what makes services like Snapchat more private (when set up properly) than Facebook or Instagram is its dedication to short-lived media posted mainly to small, trusted groups of people.
Laws in some states and countries are also starting to catch up with privacy threats online. These laws circumvent platforms like Facebook and instead demand accountability from the companies actually scraping the data. The California Consumer Privacy Act allows residents to ask for a copy of the data that companies like Clearview have on them, and similar provisions exist in the European Union. Some laws mandate that the data must be deleted at the user’s request.
But King notes that just because the data is deleted once doesn’t mean the company can’t simply grab it again.
“It’s not a permanent opt-out,” she said. “I’m concerned that you execute that ‘delete my data’ request on May 31st, and on June 1st, they can go back to collecting your data.”
So if you’re going to lock down your online presence, make sure to change your privacy settings and remove as many images as possible before asking companies to delete your data.
But ultimately, to prevent bad actors like Clearview from obtaining data in the first place, users are at the mercy of social media platforms’ policies. After all, it’s the current state of privacy settings that has allowed a company like Clearview to exist at all.
“There’s a lot you can do to safeguard your data or claw it back, but ultimately, for there to be change here, it needs to happen collectively, through legislation, through litigation, and through people coming together and deciding what privacy should look like,” Smith said. “Even people coming together and saying to Facebook, ‘I need you to protect my data more.’”
Twitter has officially announced Twitter Blue, a paid subscription service that offers access to new features like undoing tweets and viewing threads in an easier to digest “Reader Mode.” Starting Thursday, it will roll out first in Canada and Australia, where the subscription will cost $3.49 CAD or $4.49 AUD per month, respectively. We already had a good idea of what features to expect from Twitter Blue thanks to sleuthing from app researcher Jane Manchun Wong, but now Twitter has detailed everything the service includes.
A new undo send feature gives you the option of retracting your tweets before they actually go live, and you can set a timer for undoing your tweets that can last up to 30 seconds. A Bookmark Folders feature lets you group saved tweets to make them easier to find later. “Reader Mode” lets you keep up with threads by “turning them into easy-to-read text” and mashing together tweets into one page. Other Twitter Blue features are purely aesthetic: it adds new color theme options as well as the ability to change the color of Twitter’s app icon.
Twitter Blue subscribers will also get access to “dedicated subscription customer support,” the company says. This means that Twitter Blue users will get an expedited timeframe for resolving issues, Twitter tells The Verge. The expedited timeframe applies to any type of support ticket that you might file, which means you’ll get faster support both for account-related problems as well as if you’re reporting someone for harassment. Abuse and harassment continue to be an issue for Twitter, and paid prioritization for support could cause some controversy.
Twitter says it’s launching Twitter Blue first in Australia and Canada “to gain a deeper understanding of what will make your Twitter experience more customized, more expressive, and generally speaking more [fire emoji].” The company didn’t have a timeline to share for when Twitter Blue might expand to other regions.
Offering a paid subscription service is a significant change to Twitter’s business model that the company has been considering for some time. Previously, the company has relied mainly on advertising for its revenue, but intense competition from Facebook and Snapchat’s ad businesses, and pressure from activist investors has pushed it to explore new sources of revenue.
In early May, Twitter began testing a Tip Jar service that lets users send one-off payments to their favorite accounts. A Super Follows feature, announced in February, will eventually let users charge subscriptions for things like bonus tweets, community groups, or newsletters. (Newsletters were made possible after Twitter acquired newsletter service Revue at the beginning of the year.) Twitter has not yet announced when its Super Follows feature will launch.
The Verge is deeply invested in doing service journalism; we report on companies’ misdeeds, we review expensive products to tell you whether they’re worth your hard-earned money, and speak to industry leaders to get their insights on the issues affecting their companies and their customers.
It is in that vein that we brainstormed some ideas for social media theme parks in Florida.
See, the Sunshine State passed a law this week that blocks social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter from “knowingly” deplatforming politicians and even algorithmically ranking content, with fine ranging from $25,000 to $250,000 per day (The law, which is a mish-mash of broad speech regulations, has already been challenged in court by the tech companies’ trade organizations, which called it “a frontal assault on the First Amendment.”)
But there’s an easier way. The law has a hilariously corrupt exemption for any company that owns or operates a theme park or large entertainment complex in the state of Florida. Republican state Rep. Blaise Ingoglia said that exemption was included so that the Disney Plus streaming service “isn’t caught up in this.” The Disney World park in Orlando brings in significant tax revenue for Florida, of course, a state which relies heavily on tourism dollars.
So all Twitter, Facebook, TikTok et al have to do to comply with the law and avoid the knotty First Amendment issue of government speech regulations is build their own Floridian theme parks.
Here are our suggestions for the parks including some ideas for appropriately themed rides that the venues might offer:
Twitterland
Has a secret nightclub called Slides
Sells drinks called Canoes
The Ratio is a dunk tank where you get dropped into water for your bad takes
Whac-A-Mole is instead Block-A-Troll
A water-themed ride where you’re sailing along and random guys try to pull you into the water: Reply Guys, the ride
Rollercoaster goes sideways
The only problem with Twitterland is that it keeps opening amazing rides and then letting them completely fall apart.
Facebook World
All the rides suddenly pivot to video without warning
A haunted house attraction called Facebook Moderation
Instagram and WhatsApp once had separate parks, but they have been annexed into the main Facebook park and turned into shopping malls
The water park has a slide into radicalism
If you get detained by security, they put you in the Racist Uncle Time Out Room
An Instagram hall of mirrors that features mirrors that give you an Insta-ready body with lighting made for photos and then leaves you feeling terrible when you come to the last mirror, which has heavy shadows for lighting and no body editing whatsoever
TikTokLand
A hall of mirrors that shunts you through random rides with absolutely no information or warning, gradually tuning your experience using the sophisticated biometric monitor in your admission wristband
Alternately, the whole park is just the set from the Weeknd’s Super Bowl halftime show where a Backyardigans song plays on a loop
Pinterest Park
It’s just a bunch of themed photo booths that produce those little photo strips, but you have to wait in line and read 200 words before you can ride the Recipe Rollercoaster.
The GooglePlusPlex
A giant haunted house which closed eight years ago but high school kids still break into at night
The entire park littered with discontinued Google products
Clubhouse Clubhouse
It’s just one big infinity room where you enter and hear men talking at you and over each other about Bitcoin.
Reddit Faire
A Renaissance fair that ended up sharing its property lease with a prison, thanks to an awkward misunderstanding in the C-suite. Many guests are incredibly devoted cosplayers in delightful historically accurate costumes. Many are petty criminals. A few are serial killers. Try to guess which ones!
YouTubeLand
Has a ride where you appear to climb higher and higher forever, but then perilously fall to Earth after a botched apology
To enter the park you have to smash the like button
The Thumbnail Ride promises nonstop conflict but is really just a pretty chill afternoon
Every ride is at least 10 minutes long so it can include a midroll break
If you make a wrong turn at the bathrooms, you’ll occasionally run into an off-brand superhero ride that ends in a spike pit. No one knows who paid for or designed these rides, but children find them inexplicably compelling
You can’t leave unless you ring a bell, and then you will be sent notifications reminding you to return to YouTubeLand for the rest of your life
Really big and expensive and in many ways the gold standard for all the other parks, but no one appears to be in charge at all?
Snapchat Studios
Rides disappear after you go on them once
All the vending machines sell Spectacles, but no one buys them
Unfortunately the park’s been kind of struggling because all its best rides get cloned by Facebook World within six months
Temporarily closed because it accidentally opened another racist ride
Amnesty International is teaming up with 38 other human rights groups and individuals to call for a halt to Google’s plans to set up an enterprise cloud business in Saudi Arabia because of concerns over the country’s human rights track record.
The joint statement — signed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Media Matters for Democracy, among others — calls for Google to end its plans in Saudi Arabia until the company conducts a public human rights assessment and makes it clear what kinds of government requests for data it won’t honor. Even more important, the letter writers state, is conducting that investigation in the open, actually consulting with the people Google could inadvertently help Saudi Arabia to hurt, and speaking to groups in the country who can better understand the issues there.
The organizations cite several human rights violations that they argue should give Google pause. Saudi Arabia has a documented history of seeking to spy on and violate its citizen’s privacy, including allegedly recruiting Twitter employees to spy on the company from within. It’s also taken extreme and violent measures to silence dissent from people in positions to criticize, most recently with the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
Google initially announced it was making Saudi Arabia one of its new “Cloud Regions” in 2020, with plans to build cloud infrastructure and partner with Saudi Aramco, the Saudi Arabian Oil Company, to resell enterprise cloud services. The announcement sparked a response from activists groups like Access Now and the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, particularly because Google’s original blog post included a quote from Snap, the creators of Snapchat, promoting the business, Protocol reports. The quote has since been removed.
According to Access Now, Google told concerned groups that it had conducted an independent human rights assessment of its future cloud region and taken steps to address issues it had identified. But the company didn’t share what those issues were or what it did, motivating in part the groups and individuals calling out the company today.
Snap’s new Spectacles glasses are its most ambitious yet. But there’s a big catch: you can’t buy them.
On Thursday, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel unveiled the company’s first true augmented reality glasses, technology that he and rivals like Facebook think will one day be as ubiquitous as mobile phones. A demo showed virtual butterflies fluttering over colorful plants and landing in Spiegel’s extended hand.
The new Spectacles have dual waveguide displays capable of superimposing AR effects made with Snapchat’s software tools. The frame features four built-in microphones, two stereo speakers, and a built-in touchpad. Front-facing cameras help the glasses detect objects and surfaces you’re looking at so that graphics more naturally interact with the world around you.
These Spectacles, however, aren’t ready for the mass market. Unlike past models, Snap isn’t selling them. Instead, it’s giving them directly to an undisclosed number of AR effects creators through an application program online. (Another indication they aren’t ready for everyday use: the battery only lasts 30 minutes.)
The idea is to encourage a small portion of the 200,000 people who already make AR effects in Snapchat to experiment with creating experiences for the new Spectacles, according to Spiegel. Like the bright yellow vending machines Snap used to sell the first version of Spectacles several years ago, the approach could end up being a clever way to build buzz for the glasses ahead of their wide release. Spiegel has said that AR glasses will take roughly a decade to reach mainstream adoption.
“I don’t believe the phone is going away,” he told The Verge in an interview this week. “I just think that the next generation of Spectacles can help unlock a new way to use AR hands-free, and the ability to really roam around with your eyes looking up at the horizon, out at the world.”
The first two generations of Spectacles, released in 2016 and 2018, looked like sunglasses with a single camera in the corner of the frame. They let you snap videos (and later photos) in a unique, spherical format that could then be transferred to your phone and posted to Snapchat or another social network.
Above: Snap’s new fourth-generation Spectacles. Lower: the Spectacles in their case, and a side-view showing their touch panel. Images: Snap
Snap, which calls itself a camera company, started moving more toward AR in 2019 with the launch of its third-generation Spectacles. That model added a second camera to detect depth in videos, allowing for more advanced effects to be applied afterward. But they lacked displays. You had to shoot a video, import it to Snapchat, and then apply AR effects — which Snap calls Lenses — later.
The new fourth generation of Spectacles come from a secretive hardware division of the company called Snap Lab, which is also working on a camera drone. They weigh 134 grams, more than double the weight of the previous version but far less than Microsoft’s Hololens AR headset. They’re designed to be worn indoors or outdoors with up to 2,000 nits of display brightness, a tradeoff the company clearly made to favor display richness at the expense of battery life.
Two front-facing cameras use the software Snap built for its mobile phone Lenses to automatically detect physical surfaces and place effects in a way that doesn’t obstruct the real world. Two stereo speakers capture audio and allow for the wearer to control them by voice. A touchpad on the side of the frame operates an interface in the displays that Snap calls the Lens Carousel, allowing the wearer to switch AR effects they’re seeing.
Above: two images show AR effects as seen through the new glasses. Lower: the lens carousel interface lets you select different AR effects. Images: Snap
The new Spectacles were announced Thursday at Snap’s virtual Partner Summit for developers, where the company previewed a number of new augmented reality features for Snapchat. Its AR clothing try-on tech can now handle watches and glasses, and businesses will be able to more easily add AR versions of their online catalogs for Snapchat’s 500 million monthly users to try and purchase.
A new feature, called Connected Lenses, allows multiple people to see and interact with the same scene in AR. Snap is also launching an AR “innovation lab” called Ghost and is committing $3.5 million to support creators making effects, with another $1 million in funding with Verizon to fund AR experiences used over 5G.
While Snap is known primarily for the Snapchat app now, these Spectacles indicate how the company’s ambition is to be a major player in the race to build AR glasses. Facebook, Apple, and other tech giants are currently working on their competing devices. Facebook plans to debut its own pair of smart glasses in partnership with RayBan later this year, though they won’t feature AR displays.
According to Spiegel, head-worn devices like these new Spectacles will create a big shift in how we interact with computers. While Snap is betting that millions of people will eventually want to wear Spectacles, the company is content for now to build in public alongside its creators.
“You have to invent a whole new way of interacting with computing when it’s volumetric and integrated with the space around you,” Spiegel said. “So I don’t see Snapchat transitioning to wearables that directly, but one of the things that’s really fun is to think about what the new interaction paradigms can look like.”
Snapchat is introducing a new type of augmented reality lens, called “Connected Lenses,” which allows Snapchat users to connect and enjoy an AR experience or game together — even if they’re not in the same physical space.
The company is partnering with Lego for its first Connected Lens, which allows users to build a Lego model in augmented reality together, whether that’s in the same room or through the internet from around the world.
In the demo video that Snap showed off, both users see the same floating Lego model on a table in their respective homes and can add parts, effects, and animations to the model, which are reflected for both users in real time.
The move marks Snap’s latest expansion of augmented reality lenses, which include the popular photo filter lenses, the company’s “Landmarker” lenses for interacting with famous landmarks in AR, and the community-sourced Lens Explorer.
Creators will also be able to build new Connected Lenses using Snap’s Lens Studio. The new multiperson Lego Lens should be available soon on Lego’s Snapchat profile.
YouTube plans to pay $100 million to creators who use YouTube Shorts, its TikTok competitor, throughout the next year. The goal is to encourage creators to pick up and continually post to its new service, which doesn’t otherwise give creators a built-in way to make money.
Exactly how much creators can earn is still up in the air. YouTube says that it’ll reach out to creators on a monthly basis, looking for people with the most engagement and views. “Thousands” of creators could get paid each month, YouTube says, and basically anyone who posts to Shorts is eligible. The one caveat is that their videos have to be original content, and, of course, abide by YouTube’s community guidelines.
YouTube started launching Shorts in the US in March. The short videos appear in YouTube’s mobile app and, just like TikTok (or Instagram Reels or Snapchat Spotlight), you can swipe from one to the next in an endless full-screen feed.
Other companies have taken the same approach to encouraging creators to stick with their platform. TikTok launched a $200 million creators fund in July 2020, and Snapchat paid out $1 million per day for a period of time after its TikTok competitor, Spotlight, launched in November 2020.
Payments will be available in the US and India — the two regions Shorts has launched — to start, but YouTube plans to expand its availability as it rolls out the service to more regions. There’s no specific date yet for when YouTube will start offering payments. YouTube says the fund will last from its start this year through some point in 2022.
Snap can be sued over a Snapchat speed filter that allegedly encouraged reckless driving, despite the generally broad legal protections for social networks. The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court revived a case that was dismissed in 2020, reversing an earlier ruling that favored Snap. It concluded that even if users were populating the filter with their own high driving speeds, Snap could still be liable for implicitly rewarding that behavior.
Lemmon v. Snap was filed after a 20-year-old Snapchat user crashed his car while using the filter, at one point driving over 120 miles per hour. The 2017 crash killed the driver and two teenage passengers. Two of the victims’ parents sued Snap for wrongful death, saying its combination of an opaque achievement system and speed filter enticed users to drive at unsafe speeds.
The parents claimed many teenagers believed — and that Snap knew they believed — they’d get a secret achievement for hitting speeds of 100 miles per hour. Snap countered that no such achievement existed and that it was just providing a tool for users to post their own content, an action mostly shielded under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
The Ninth Circuit didn’t rule on whether Snap was liable. But it concluded that it wasn’t protected here by Section 230, which prevents sites and apps from being sued over what users post. Instead, it said the lawsuit “presents a clear example of a claim that simply does not rest on third-party content.” The company “indisputably designed” the reward system and speed filter, which allegedly created a defective product. “In short, Snap, Inc. was sued for the predictable consequences of designing Snapchat in such a way that it allegedly encouraged dangerous behavior.”
A lower court reached a different conclusion last year. As legal blogger Eric Goldman explains, it called the filter “essentially a speedometer tool” and noted that Snapchat warned users against driving at high speeds. The lawsuit, it said, was trying to hold Snap liable for a user acting dangerously and posting about it.
Snap’s speed filter has a tortured history in court. An Uber driver sued the company separately in 2016 after he collided with a Snapchat user allegedly trying to hit 100 miles per hour. In that case, a lower court did initially side with the driver, but a Georgia appeals court reversed the decision and said Snapchat’s speed filter wasn’t designed to encourage speeding.
Lemmon v. Snap’s revivalcites a landmark 2008 ruling against Roommates.com, which found that Section 230 didn’t apply when the site specifically guided users to answer potentially discriminatory questions like their racial preferences, even if users were the ones actually supplying the answers. Roommates.com still ended up winning the overall lawsuit, and Snap could prevail in this case, but Lemmon v. Snap would set a precedent for interpreting Section 230 unless the Supreme Court took it up — which it’s declined to do for Section 230-related cases so far.
Some earlier high-profile suits have also basically argued that a social network is defective for facilitating conduct like harassment, only to be defeated on Section 230 grounds. This ruling hints that this court wouldn’t necessarily be sympathetic to those claims, though. It distinguishes the Snap case from what it calls “creative pleading” designed to get around the law, and it applies that label to suits that, “at bottom, depended on a third party’s content.” Even so, it’s one of relatively few major court rulings limiting Section 230’s scope — at a time when the law is increasingly embattled.
Snap’s diversity report reveals that the company has made very little progress in its diversity goals since last year, with 47 percent of its employees being white and 65 percent male. There was a tiny increase in women’s representation across the company (32.9 to 33.1 percent) and a similarly small increase in underrepresented racial groups among leadership (13.1 to 13.6 percent). Meanwhile, Hispanic / Latinx representation decreased from 6.9 to 6.8 percent, and Asian representation in leadership decreased from 16.5 to 14.3 percent.
The company is setting new representation goals, which it aims to meet by the end of 2025: increase underrepresented racial and ethnic groups across the company from 18.7 to 20 percent, increase women in tech roles from 16.5 to 25 percent, and increase women and racial and ethnic groups in leadership an additional 30 percent each, from 13.7 and 17.4 percent, respectively.
Last year’s diversity report was Snap’s first, and it was released in a turnaround from CEO Evan Spiegel’s announcement a month earlier that the company wouldn’t be sharing diversity numbers, saying he was worried “these disclosures normalize the current state of the tech industry.”
Snap also faced criticism last year for its Juneteenth filter, which included a “smile to break the chains” mechanism that was largely received as culturally insensitive and offensive. Oona King, Snap’s head of diversity and inclusion, apologized for the filter, saying that while Black Snap team members were involved in the creation of the filter, they had failed to consider the context of it being used by white people. Other Snapchat filters have been similarly criticized, including a Bob Marley filter and an anime-inspired filter that were both released in 2016.
One of the more concrete goals mentioned in Snap’s report is to develop a more inclusive Snapchat camera. Acknowledging the racist history of photography, the company is consulting with outside experts “to develop technology that counteracts bias.” This includes adjusting the front flash for the selfie camera and adding ways to correct brightness and exposure after a photo is taken, according to Axios. Snap says it is expanding the training of its algorithms with more diverse datasets to better recognize and capture images of non-white faces, as well as removing biased image adjustments like slimming people’s noses.
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If a $100 budget phone is the fast-food dollar menu and a $1,000 flagship is a steakhouse dinner, then the Samsung Galaxy A52 5G sits comfortably halfway between the two: the laid-back all-day cafe with surprisingly tasty food.
It’s good. More importantly, it’s good where it matters. Sure, you have to order your food at the counter and get your own water refills, but it’s worth it because brunch is fantastic and the prices are reasonable.
The A52 5G is the highest-specced of the budget A-series Galaxy phones we’ll see in the US this year, offering all of the basics for its $499 price tag along with a few good extras. Its 6.5-inch screen comes with a fast 120Hz refresh rate that’s scarce at this price point. Its main camera includes optical image stabilization, something I missed when I used the more expensive OnePlus 9. The A52 5G is rated IP67 waterproof for some extra peace of mind. And hey, there’s still a headphone jack! In this economy!
Still, this isn’t a flagship, and costs had to be cut somewhere. The device’s frame and back panel are plastic, and while I like the matte finish on the back, there’s a certain hollowness when you tap on it that’s not very reassuring. There’s also no telephoto to complement the wide and ultrawide cameras, just digital zoom plus a depth sensor and macro camera of dubious usefulness.
The important stuff is here, though. Samsung has the A52 5G on its list for monthly OS updates currently, and it says it will offer three years of major Android OS updates and at least some security support for four years. That will go a long way toward making the most out of your investment in this phone, and it will help you take advantage of its headline feature: 5G — Sub-6GHz, specifically, with hardware-level support for the C-band frequencies carriers will start using in 2022.
It’s getting more common to see 5G offered in midrange and budget phones, but in this country, it’ll be a couple more years before our 5G networks are truly good. Healthy device support for the next few years makes it more likely that the A52 5G will actually last long enough to make it to that 5G promised land.
The A52 5G offers solid everyday performance with a Snapdragon 750G chipset and 6GB of RAM.
Samsung Galaxy A52 5G performance and screen
The A52 5G uses a Snapdragon 750G processor with 6GB of RAM, and the combination feels like a good fit here. You can certainly push it out of its comfort zone with heavier tasks like webpages with JavaScript, and I noticed it hesitating a moment too long when opening the camera app from the lock screen. But for day-to-day tasks and social media scrolling, it keeps up well.
As in last year’s model, the screen is where the A52 5G (and Samsung generally) really stand out. This is a 6.5-inch 1080p OLED panel that’s rich, bright, and generally lovely to look at. Plus, it offers all of the velvety smoothness that comes with its 120Hz refresh rate. Swiping between home screens, opening apps, scrolling through Twitter — it all just feels nicer with a fast refresh rate.
Even considering the additional power needed for the 120Hz screen, the A52 5G’s 4,500mAh battery consistently lasted well into the next day in my use. I managed to get two full days out of it when I forgot to charge it overnight and decided to embrace chaos and just plow through on the remaining charge. This was with light to moderate use, and I was down to low double-digit battery percentage by the end of day two, but my gamble paid off.
One feature I continue to fight a losing battle with on the A52 5G is the in-display optical fingerprint sensor. I’ve been chastised by the phone many times for not leaving my finger on the sensor long enough, and I almost always need at least two tries to get it to register. That hit rate goes down significantly outside in bright light.
These problems aren’t unique to this device, and you can just opt to use (less secure) facial recognition or a plain old PIN to lock and unlock the phone. But there are nicer in-display fingerprint readers in pricier phones like the OnePlus 9 and Samsung’s own S21, so it’s a trade-off to be aware of.
The Galaxy A52 5G ships with Android 11, which is great. The less good news is, as we saw in the S21 devices earlier this year, Samsung’s latest take on the OS stuffs a lot of unwanted apps, ads, and general clutter into the UI. I see enough ads throughout my day as it is, and I do not appreciate seeing one more when I check the weather on my phone’s own weather app.
If there’s a positive way to look at this situation, it’s that it feels more forgivable on a budget phone than on a $1,000-plus flagship. But I’d rather not have the ads at all. If you buy the similarly priced Pixel 4A 5G, you give up a lot of other features from the A52 5G, but you get an ad-free experience.
Housed in the rear camera bump are a standard wide, ultrawide, macro, and depth sensor.
Samsung Galaxy A52 5G camera
The A52 5G includes three rear cameras, plus a 5-megapixel depth sensor. You get a 64-megapixel standard wide with OIS, 12-megapixel ultrawide, and the seemingly obligatory 5-megapixel macro camera. There’s also a front-facing 32-megapixel selfie camera.
Taken with 2x digital zoom
Taken with ultrawide
Taken with ultrawide
The 64-megapixel main camera produces 16-megapixel images in its standard photo mode that are bright with the very saturated colors you’d expect from a Samsung phone. Sometimes the look is pleasant, but more often than not, it’s a little much for my taste. The good news is that this sensor is capable of capturing lots of fine detail in good lighting, and it even does well in dim to very low-light conditions.
I put its night mode up against the Google Pixel 4A, which is still the low-light champ in the midrange class. There’s more noise visible in the A52 5G’s night mode shot, and details have a watercolory look, but while the 4A hangs on to its title, the A52 5G is quite close behind.
Left: Galaxy A52 night mode. Right: Pixel 4A night mode.“,”image_left”:{“ratio”:”*”,”original_url”:”https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22465175/samsung_night_crop.jpg”,”network”:”verge”,”bgcolor”:”white”,”pinterest_enabled”:false,”caption”:null,”credit”:null,”focal_area”:{“top_left_x”:0,”top_left_y”:0,”bottom_right_x”:2040,”bottom_right_y”:1580},”bounds”:[0,0,2040,1580],”uploaded_size”:{“width”:2040,”height”:1580},”focal_point”:null,”asset_id”:22465175,”asset_credit”:null,”alt_text”:””},”image_right”:{“ratio”:”*”,”original_url”:”https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22465178/pixel_night_crop.jpg”,”network”:”verge”,”bgcolor”:”white”,”pinterest_enabled”:false,”caption”:null,”credit”:null,”focal_area”:{“top_left_x”:0,”top_left_y”:0,”bottom_right_x”:2040,”bottom_right_y”:1580},”bounds”:[0,0,2040,1580],”uploaded_size”:{“width”:2040,”height”:1580},”focal_point”:null,”asset_id”:22465178,”asset_credit”:null,”alt_text”:””},”credit”:null}” data-cid=”apps/imageslider-1619271003_9454_116978″>
Left: Galaxy A52 night mode. Right: Pixel 4A night mode.
The Pixel 4A is still the better camera in good lighting, too, but the differences are more subjective here. The 4A goes for more subdued color rendering, and the A52 5G’s images lack a little contrast in comparison.
So the A52 5G can’t beat the generation-old imaging tech in the 4A, but that might say more about the Pixel than anything else. Aside from that, the A52 5G turns in good all-around camera performance. Images from the ultrawide sometimes have a little cooler color cast but are generally good. The selfie camera offers two zoom settings: a slightly cropped-in standard wide view and an ever-so-slightly wider angle. The “focal length” difference between the two is almost laughably small.
At its default settings, the selfie camera does a fair amount of face smoothing and brightening. I don’t think it quite crosses the line into hamcam territory, but it certainly has that telltale “maybe it’s AI, maybe it’s Maybelline” smoothed look to it.
If you want to go full hamcam, there’s a new mode just labeled “fun” in the camera app with AR face filters brought to you by Snapchat. There’s a different selection of them every day, and you don’t need a Snapchat account to use or share them.
I’m tempted to dismiss them as “for the youths,” but maybe this is really for the olds like me who would rather not join another social platform if I can possibly avoid it, thank you very much. At last, I can transform my face into a piece of broccoli and share it with the world without logging in to Snapchat — three years after the kids have all moved on to something else. Anyway, it’s there, it works, and you can indeed turn your face into broccoli.
Good hardware and healthy software support make the A52 5G worth spending a little more on.
There’s a lot that the Galaxy A52 5G gets right. Maybe the most important feature is one that sounds much less exciting than cool headline specs: security updates for at least the next few years. At $500, this is the higher end of the budget market, but a few extra hundred dollars is likely easier to swallow if you know you’ll get a couple more years out of your investment.
Samsung has invested in hardware in all the right places: the 120Hz screen makes for an elevated user experience, battery life is good, camera performance is strong, and a healthy processor / chipset combination handles daily tasks well.
What I didn’t love — the cluttered software, fussy fingerprint sensor, a tendency toward oversaturated color in photos — feels more forgivable when the phone gets the nonnegotiable stuff right. The Pixel 4A 5G is probably this device’s closest competition, and it beats the A52 5G on camera quality and a cleaner UI, but it’s a smaller device without a fancy fast refresh rate screen. Depending on how you feel about either of those things, the 4A 5G might be the better pick for you.
In any case, the A52 5G is a good midrange phone today. But just as importantly, it will be a good phone a few years from now. With solid hardware and a software support system to back it up, this is a pricier budget phone that’s worth budgeting a little extra for.
Snap has finally reaped the benefits of building a fully functional Android app. The company announced in its earnings report today that its user base mostly uses Android instead of iOS. That overall user base continues to grow, too. During the first quarter of 2021, Snapchat reached 280 million daily active users, an increase of 22 percent year over year.
CEO Evan Spiegel called the moment Android users overtook iOS users a “critical milestone that reflects the long-term value of the investment we made to rebuild our Android application,” in his prepared remarks today. As a reminder, Snapchat originally launched only on iOS and released its first Android app in 2012. The team later spent over a year rebuilding the app to bring it up to par with its iOS counterpart. As the Android app languished, Snapchat bled Android users. It finally released the final version of that app in 2019, making the app more functional and accessible to global users.
The company says its growth has also fueled it to invest in content abroad. Spiegel highlighted a Snap Original show the company launched in India in March, as well as its efforts to improve language support and feature localization.
Interestingly, new social apps, like Clubhouse in particular, continue to launch on iOS at first, sacrificing the potential Android market locally and abroad. If there’s anything to take away from Snap’s earnings this quarter, it’s not to sleep on Android users.
Facebook, Twitter, and Snap are among the companies that will assist with the Biden administration’s promotional campaign for vaccine eligibility, Axios reported. The White House had set a date of May 1st for states to open coronavirus vaccine eligibility to all adults, but later pushed it to April 19th.
The White House is hoping to reach populations who may have higher rates of vaccine hesitancy with the effort. Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, will do video clips on Snapchat, according to Axios, and Facebook and Twitter will send out push alerts to notify users that they’re eligible to receive the vaccine. Vice President Kamala Harris will also be involved with the social media push.
Half of all US adults have received at least one COVID-19 vaccination, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), But the administration appears concerned that last week’s decision to pause the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine may have made people already hesitant to receive a vaccine even more wary.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and CDC recommended last week that the US pause the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after six people who received the shot experienced unusual blood clots. The agencies wanted time to investigate whether there’s a connection between the clots and the vaccine. Fauci said on Sunday that he believes the pause will be lifted by Friday, perhaps under some kind of restriction or warning.
Facebook, Twitter, Snap, and the White House did not immediately reply to requests for comment on Sunday.
Apple CEO Tim Cook rarely provides details on unannounced products, but he offered some hints about Apple’s thinking on augmented reality and cars in an interview with Kara Swisher for The New York Times this morning.
When it comes to augmented reality, he agreed with Swisher’s framing that the tech is “critically important” to Apple’s future and said it could be used to enhance conversations.
“You and I are having a great conversation right now. Arguably, it could even be better if we were able to augment our discussion with charts or other things to appear,” Cook said. He imagines AR being used in health, education, retail, and gaming. “I’m already seeing AR take off in some of these areas with use of the phone. And I think the promise is even greater in the future.”
Apple has been rumored for years to be working on an augmented reality headset, and the latest leaks suggested a mixed reality device could launch next year. Augmented reality features are already available on the iPhone and iPad, but outside of some fun Snapchat filters, augmented reality hasn’t become all that widely used yet.
Cook also talked broadly about Apple’s approach to products during a question about cars. Leaks from Apple have made it unclear if the company is developing self-driving tech that it could license to other companies or if Apple plans to develop an entire car by itself. Cook’s latest comments suggest the latter, assuming the project comes to fruition.
“We love to integrate hardware, software, and services, and find the intersection points of those because we think that’s where the magic occurs,” Cook said. “And so that’s what we love to do. And we love to own the primary technology that’s around that.”
Cook referred to “autonomy” as a “core technology” and said there are “lots of things you can do” with it in connection with robots. But he warned that not every Apple project eventually ships. “We investigate so many things internally. Many of them never see the light of day,” Cook said. “I’m not saying that one will not.”
Swisher also asked Cook about Elon Musk’s comments about a failed attempt to discuss selling Tesla to Apple around 2017. “You know, I’ve never spoken to Elon,” Cook said, “although I have great admiration and respect for the company he’s built.”
Clubhouse had an incredible year in one most of us would rather forget. The live audio app launched during a pandemic; gained more than 10 million downloads for an invite-only, iOS-only app; and succeeded to the point that most every social platform wants to copy it. Congrats to Clubhouse.
The company now faces its biggest challenges yet, however. For one, the pandemic is waning, and people might be more interested in real-life socializing instead of conversations facilitated through their phone. Anyone advertising their backyard as the next great Clubhouse competitor has a point. But for the people who do end up wanting to talk to each other online, they’ll soon have a lot more places to do so. In case you haven’t kept up: Twitter, Facebook (reportedly), LinkedIn, Discord, Spotify, Mark Cuban, and Slack have all launched or are working on their own attempts at social audio — the space is about to get busy.
The great concern for Clubhouse is that, as I postulated in February, social audio could follow the same trajectory as Snapchat’s Stories function: a brilliant social media-altering idea that goes on to live in every app to the detriment of the upstart that pioneered the format. And social audio is shaping up to go that way. With the threat growing, it’s worth looking at where Clubhouse is most likely to run into problems.
But first: what does Clubhouse have going for it? It was the first to social audio, and that’s something. Already, it counts millions of users who come to Clubhouse solely for social audio content, and that includes headline-grabbing names like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and other celebrities. Tech CEOs are even making announcements in Clubhouse, including Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, who announced his company’s own copycat product in the app. The app generates news and discussions — that’s something much trickier for other companies to clone.
People have also built habits around Clubhouse, which is a positive sign for user retention. The team also plans to launch a creators program in the near future that’ll reward its most dedicated users with revenue and resources to beef up their shows.
And critically, the app has staffed up in just the past month. The company recently poached Fadia Kader from Instagram to lead its media partnerships and creators. At Instagram, she worked with musicians to help them optimize their work on the platform. Presumably, she’ll be doing something similar at Clubhouse. Already, I’ve seen her in a room with Justin Bieber talking about his most recent album. Clubhouse also hired Maya Watson from Netflix to become its head of global marketing, meaning it’ll soon dedicate resources to promoting Clubhouse rather than relying primarily on word of mouth. These are all important steps to keeping Clubhouse interesting and thriving.
But the app now faces competition from some of the world’s biggest platforms, which already have years of moderation experience, are available on iOS and Android, and have massive, loyal user bases to whom they can push social audio. Some companies, like Twitter and Discord, already pushed social audio features live to their millions of users with effectively the same interface as Clubhouse. Anyone who didn’t have an invite to Clubhouse, or an iPhone, now can access the magic of social audio with no association to Clubhouse whatsoever.
Maybe the most dangerous possibility for Clubhouse, however, is how easily it could lose the big names on its platform to challengers. Spotify, which announced this week that it acquired Betty Labs, the maker of the sports-centric social audio app Locker Room, plans to bring the app to Android, change its name, and broaden its coverage to music, culture, and sports. It could directly compete with Clubhouse for talent. Joe Rogan, for example, recently joined a Clubhouse chat, and although Spotify’s head of R&D tells me the company won’t restrict its podcasters from using other social audio apps, it’s easy to imagine the company encouraging the use of its own. Musicians, like Bieber, who maybe came to Clubhouse to debut music, might turn to Spotify’s app instead to maintain relationships with the streaming giant. As a point of reference, when Kylie Jenner tweeted that she barely opened Snapchat anymore, the company’s stock lost $1.3 billion. If stars like Tiffany Haddish decide to spend their time elsewhere, Clubhouse will falter, too.
At the same time, a few of these competitors are specifically interested in building native recording into their app, possibly to fuel the podcasting ecosystem and on-demand listening. Clubhouse has yet to do this. Fireside, which was co-founded by Mark Cuban, allows people to input sound effects, like music, and record their shows for distribution across podcasting platforms, as well as later playback on the app itself. Spotify will likely do the same with its app and rely on its Anchor software to handle hosting and distribution. Twitter’s head of consumer product told The Verge that it, too, would let people natively record their Spaces. Clubhouse hasn’t built that functionality, limiting its users to only live conversations, which can be hard to follow if they join them midway through. Context collapse will challenge every platform that focuses on live, but some of Clubhouse’s competitors are already working to solve that.
Stories made Snapchat a success. It pioneered the idea of ephemeral content and brought some semblance of authenticity back to social media. But it didn’t take long for the functionality to come to the same competitors Clubhouse now faces. To make its business work, Snapchat doubled down on its Android app, made the app more approachable to new users through a redesign, and aggressively pursued content partnerships with media and entertainment companies. It now pays users to make content for its TikTok competitor Spotlight and supports a growing ad business, but Instagram ultimately came away with the crown for Stories. Clubhouse hasn’t yet pursued ads or subscriptions, but that’ll be the next step to make it a self-supported platform. (Notably, though, its competitors, like Facebook, already rule ad targeting, possibly making Clubhouse’s job of selling ads or access to the platform itself tougher.)
None of this is to say Clubhouse won’t survive or build a strong business in the coming months and years. It just needs to stay in the conversation.
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