promises – Techdirt (original) (raw)

In YOLO Ruling, Ninth Circuit Cracks Open Pandora’s Box For Section 230

from the you-only-destroy-the-internet-once dept

The Ninth Circuit appeals court seems to have figured out the best way to “reform” Section 230: by pretending it doesn’t apply to some stuff that the judges there just randomly decide it doesn’t apply to anymore. At least that’s my reading of the recent ruling against YOLO Technologies.

Now, let’s start by making something clear: YOLO Technologies appears to be a horrible company, making a horrible service, run by horrible people. We’ll get more into the details of that below. I completely understand the instinctual desire that YOLO should lose. That said, there are elements of this ruling that could lead to dangerous results for other services that aren’t horrible. And that’s what always worries me.

First, a quick history lesson: over fifteen years ago, we wrote about the Ninth Circuit’s ruling in Barnes v. Yahoo. At the time, and in the years since Barnes, that ruling seemed potentially problematic. The case revolved around another horrible situation, where an ex-boyfriend posted fake profiles. Barnes contacted Yahoo and reached a Director of Communications who promised to “take care of” the fake profiles.

However, the profiles remained up. Barnes sued, and Yahoo used 230 to try to get out of it. Much of the Barnes decision is very good. It’s an early decision that makes it clear Section 230 protects websites for their publishing activity of third-party content. It clearly debunks the completely backwards notion that you are “either a platform or a publisher” and only “platforms” get 230 protections. In Barnes, the court is quite clear that what Yahoo is doing is publishing activity, but since it is an interactive computer service and the underlying content is from a third party, it cannot be held liable as the publisher for that publishing activity under Section 230.

And yet, the court still sided with Barnes, noting that the direct promise from the employee at Yahoo to take care of the content went outside of traditional publishing activity and created a promise, and therefore a duty to live up to that promise.

In the fifteen years since that ruling, there have been various attempts to use Barnes to get around Section 230, but most have failed, as they didn’t have that clear promise like Barnes had. However, in the last couple of months, it seems the Ninth Circuit has decided that the “promise” part of Barnes can be used more broadly, and that could create a mess.

In YOLO, the company makes an add-on to Snapchat that lets users post questions and polls on the app. Other users could respond anonymously (they also had the option to reveal who they were). The app was very popular, but it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that some users used to harass and abuse others.

However YOLO claimed publicly, and in how it represented the service to users who signed up, that one way it would deal with harassment and abuse would be to reveal those users. As the Ninth Circuit explains:

As a hedge against these potential problems, YOLO added two “statements” to its application: a notification to new users promising that they would be “banned for any inappropriate usage,” and another promising to unmask the identity of any user who “sen[t] harassing messages” to others.

But it appears that YOLO never actually intended to live up to this, or it just became overwhelmed, because it appears not to have done it.

Now, this is always a bit tricky, because what some users consider abuse and harassment, a service (or other users!) might not consider to be abuse and harassment. But, in this case, it seems pretty clear that whatever trust & safety practices YOLO had were not living up to the notification it gave to users:

All four were inundated with harassing, obscene, and bullying messages including “physical threats, obscene sexual messages and propositions, and other humiliating comments.” Users messaged A.C. suggesting that she kill herself, just as her brother had done. A.O. was sent a sexual message, and her friend was told she was a “whore” and “boy-obsessed.” A.K. received death threats, was falsely accused of drug use, mocked for donating her hair to a cancer charity, and exhorted to “go kill [her]self,” which she seriously considered. She suffered for years thereafter. Carson Bride was subjected to constant humiliating messages, many sexually explicit and highly disturbing.

These users, and their families, sought to unmask the abusers. Considering that YOLO told users that’s how abuse and harassment would be dealt with, it wasn’t crazy for them to think that might work. But it did not. At all.

A.K. attempted to utilize YOLO’s promised unmasking feature but received no response. Carson searched the internet diligently for ways to unmask the individuals sending him harassing messages, with no success. Carson’s parents continued his efforts after his death, first using YOLO’s “Contact Us” form on its Customer Support page approximately two weeks after his death. There was no answer. Approximately three months later, his mother Kristin Bride sent another message, this time to YOLO’s law enforcement email, detailing what happened to Carson and the messages he received in the days before his death. The email message bounced back as undeliverable because the email address was invalid. She sent the same to the customer service email and received an automated response promising an answer that never came. Approximately three months later, Kristin reached out to a professional friend who contacted YOLO’s CEO on LinkedIn, a professional networking site, with no success. She also reached out again to YOLO’s law enforcement email, with the same result as before.

So, uh, yeah. Not great! Pretty terrible. And so there’s every reason to want YOLO to be in trouble here. The court determines that YOLO’s statements about unmasking harassers meant that it had made a promise, a la Barnes, and therefore had effectively violated an obligation which was separate from its publishing activities that were protected by Section 230.

Turning first to Plaintiffs’ misrepresentation claims, we find that Barnes controls. YOLO’s representation to its users that it would unmask and ban abusive users is sufficiently analogous to Yahoo’s promise to remove an offensive profile. Plaintiffs seek to hold YOLO accountable for a promise or representation, and not for failure to take certain moderation actions. Specifically, Plaintiffs allege that YOLO represented to anyone who downloaded its app that it would not tolerate “objectionable content or abusive users” and would reveal the identities of anyone violating these terms. They further allege that all Plaintiffs relied on this statement when they elected to use YOLO’s app, but that YOLO never took any action, even when directly requested to by A.K. In fact, considering YOLO’s staff size compared to its user body, it is doubtful that YOLO ever intended to act on its own representation.

And, again, given all the details, this feels understandable. But I still worry about where the boundaries are here. We’ve seen plenty of other cases. For example, six years ago, when the white supremacist Jared Taylor sued Twitter for banning him, he argued that it could not ban users because Twitter had said that it “believe[s] in free expression and believe[s] every voice has the power to impact the world.”

So it seems like there needs to be some clear line. In Barnes, there was a direct communication between the person and the company where an executive at the company directly made a promise to Barnes. That’s not the case in the YOLO ruling.

And when we combine the YOLO ruling with the Ninth Circuit’s ruling in the Calise case back in June, things get a little more worrisome. I didn’t get a chance to cover that ruling when it came out, but Eric Goldman did a deep dive on it and why it’s scary. That case also uses Barnes’ idea of a “promise” by the company to mean a “duty” to act that is outside of Section 230.

In that case, it was regarding scammy ads from Chinese advertisers. The court held that Meta had a “duty” based on public comments to somehow police advertisements, that was outside of its Section 230 protections. That ruling also contained a separate concurrence (oddly written by the same Judge who wrote the opinion, but which apparently he couldn’t get others to agree to) that just out and out trashed Section 230 and basically made it clear he hated it.

And thus, as Eric Goldman eloquently puts it, you have the Ninth Circuit “swiss-cheesing” Section 230 by punching all kinds of holes in it, enabling more questionable lawsuits to be brought, arguing that this or that statement by a company or a company employee represented some form of a promise under Barnes, and therefore a “duty” outside of Section 230.

In summary, Barnes is on all fours with Plaintiffs’ misrepresentation claims here. YOLO repeatedly informed users that it would unmask and ban users who violated the terms of service. Yet it never did so, and may have never intended to. Plaintiffs seek to enforce that promise—made multiple times to them and upon which they relied—to unmask their tormentors. While yes, online content is involved in these facts, and content moderation is one possible solution for YOLO to fulfill its promise, the underlying duty being invoked by the Plaintiffs, according to Calise, is the promise itself. See Barnes, 570 F.3d at 1106–09. Therefore, the misrepresentation claims survive.

And maybe that feels right in this case, where YOLO’s behavior is so egregious. But, it’s unclear where this theory ends, and that leaves it wide open for abuse. For example, how would this case have turned out if the messages sent to the kids weren’t actually “abusive” or “harassing”? I’m not saying that happened here, as it seems pretty clear that they were. But imagine a hypothetical where many people did not feel that the behavior was actually abusive, but the user argued that it was. Perhaps they even said this to be abusive back.

Under this ruling, would YOLO still need to reveal who the anonymous user was to avoid liability?

That seems… problematic?

However, the real lesson here is that anyone who runs a website now needs to be way more careful about what they say regarding how they moderate or do anything. Because anything they say could be used in court as an argument for why Section 230 doesn’t apply. Indeed, I could see how this could even conflict with other laws requiring websites to be more transparent about their moderation practices, but where doing so could remove 230 protections.

And I really worry about how this plays out in situations where a platform changes trust & safety policies mid-stream. I have no idea how that works out. What if when you signed up, the platform had a policy that said it would remove certain kinds of content, but later on decided to change that policy as it was ineffective. Would someone who signed up under the old policy regime now claim that the new policy regime violates the original promise that got them to sign up?

On top of that, I fear that this will lead companies to be way less transparent about their moderation policies and practices. Because now, being transparent about moderation policies means that anyone who thinks you didn’t enforce them properly might be able to sue and get around Section 230 by arguing you didn’t fulfill the duty you promised.

All that said, there is some other good language in this decision. The plaintiffs also tried a “product liability” claim, which has become a hipster legal strategy for many plaintiffs’ lawyers to try to get around Section 230. It has worked in some cases, but it fails here.

At root, all Plaintiffs’ product liability theories attempt to hold YOLO responsible for users’ speech or YOLO’s decision to publish it. For example, the negligent design claim faults YOLO for creating an app with an “unreasonable risk of harm.” What is that harm but the harassing and bullying posts of others? Similarly, the failure to warn claim faults YOLO for not mitigating, in some way, the harmful effects of the harassing and bullying content. This is essentially faulting YOLO for not moderating content in some way, whether through deletion, change, or suppression.

They also make clear, contrary to the claims we keep hearing, that an app having anonymous messaging as a feature isn’t an obvious liability. We’ve seen people claim this in many cases, but the court clearly rejects that idea:

Here, Plaintiffs allege that anonymity itself creates an unreasonable risk of harm. But we refuse to endorse a theory that would classify anonymity as a per se inherently unreasonable risk to sustain a theory of product liability. First, unlike in Lemmon, where the dangerous activity the alleged defective design incentivized was the dangerous behavior of speeding, here, the activity encouraged is the sharing of messages between users. See id. Second, anonymity is not only a cornerstone of much internet speech, but it is also easily achieved. After all, verification of a user’s information through government-issued ID is rare on the internet. Thus we cannot say that this feature was uniquely or unreasonably dangerous.

So, this decision is not the worst in the world, and it does seem targeted at a truly awful company. But poking a hole like this in Section 230 so frequently leads to others piling through that hole and widening it.

And one legitimate fear of a ruling like this is that it will actually harm efforts to get transparency in moderation practices, because the more companies say, the more liability they may face.

Filed Under: 9th circuit, anonymity, duty, duty of care, promises, promissory estoppel, section 230, terms of service
Companies: yolo

Kroger, Albertsons Grocery Merger Again Highlights How The U.S. Business Press Is A Bunch Of Mindless Parrots When It Comes To Consolidation

from the merge-ALL-the-things! dept

Thu, Aug 22nd 2024 05:27am - Karl Bode

I spent decades as a telecom beat reporter watching the mainstream press cover the telecom industry. I had a front row seat to the endless promises big telecoms like AT&T and Comcast made before a merger, and the way the U.S. business press repeatedly parroted pre-merger claims entirely unskeptically, without pointing out the harms of consolidation, layoffs, or that pre-merger promises are broadly meaningless.

Big companies promoting terrible mergers that cause untold layoffs and consumer and market harms — while promising none of that will actually happen — is a proud, fifty-plus year American tradition. And it requires a symbiosis with lazy, (not-coincidentally also highly consolidated) major media empires.

Case in point: grocery giants Kroger and Albertsons are floating a $24.6 billion merger that regulators have been justifiably skeptical about. Experts who study grocery consolidation for a living all indicate that, just like most major mergers, the deal will likely harm consumers and workers alike. States and the FTC have sued Kroger, and Kroger countersued the FTC, claiming antitrust enforcement is “unconstitutional.”

Kroger (and tell me if you’ve heard this one before) is pinky swearing that increased consolidation in the already consolidated grocery space will increase jobs, boost competition, and lower prices for consumers. On that last point, the company this week told the press that if the merger is approved, they’ll dole out $1 billion in immediate savings to consumers.

The promise is baseless. As you see in tech and telecom, pre-merger promises are utterly valueless. U.S. regulatory enforcement of merger promises is completely feckless, and getting weaker in the wake of major Supreme Court rulings. Antitrust academics insist there’s nothing in the promise that’s worth anything. And yet Bloomberg, Reuters, and CNBC all parroted the claim mindlessly:

Not a single one of the news reports took the time to speak to a single antitrust academic or expert, who’d be quick to point out the promise isn’t real. There are people, surprisingly enough, who’ve spent their entire lives studying consolidation in grocery markets, but they’re rarely quoted by major business journalism outlets whose job, purportedly, is to convey the truth to the U.S. public.

One local Boise outlet, BoiseDev, actually crunched the numbers, and found that even if Kroger followed through on the promised price cuts (which again they wouldn’t, because that’s not how consolidation works), they’d amount to about four cents per store visit per consumer.

Several Senators and State AGs have expressed concerned that the one-two punch of consolidation (read: less competition), fused with new dynamic store-shelf display tag pricing tech, could make it easier than ever to screw consumers. Combine that with a Supreme Court regulatory assault on regulatory oversight of, well, everything, and the potential harms to Americans become rather clear.

I don’t mean to wander outside of our beat into grocery news, but the treatment of the merger by major outlets is a perfect demonstration of the U.S. press’ complete failure to fully, accurately report on corporate behavior and its real-world impact. Most U.S. business journalism isn’t journalism, so much as a weird fan fiction that tells investors, executives, and media owners precisely what they want to hear.

It’s a world where history doesn’t exist, academic antitrust expertise doesn’t exist, real-world consumer and labor harms are downplayed or ignored, and executive statements are almost always taken at face value, even if the executive has a long-history of lies. The coverage broadly reflects the anti-regulation, anti-consumer, anti-labor, shot-term profit seeking interests of center-right billionaire ownership. The same ownership, that, again, not coincidentally owns what’s left of mainstream U.S. journalism.

And it’s more broadly reflective of any serious interest in antitrust reform. When the GOP was looking to bully tech giants away from moderating racist political propaganda, the press also mindlessly bought their claim they were “suddenly very serious about antitrust reform,” despite the fact, with their other hand, they were stocking the courts with folks utterly dedicated to making such reform impossible.

Filed Under: competition, consolidation, ftc, grocery, journalism, media, mergers, monopoly, prices, promises, reform
Companies: albertsons, kroger

Fool Me Thrice: ExTwitter’s Empty Brand Safety Promises

from the go-fuck-yourselves dept

The famous line is “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” But what do you call it when Elon Musk fools advertisers over and over again into believing that ExTwitter will protect their brand safety, despite making it clear that he has no interest in doing so?

At this point, no advertiser can seriously believe that Elon Musk’s ExTwitter will protect the brand safety of its advertisers. I mean, this is literally the guy who told advertisers to “go fuck themselves” after some pulled their advertisements following one of Elon’s many ridiculous comments (as well as evidence of ads appearing next to neo-Nazi content).

But, at the recent Cannes Lion advertising festival, Elon and Linda Yaccarino tried to play nice with advertisers. They announced that ExTwitter was rejoining the World Federation of Advertisers’ (WFA) Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM).

After drifting from the World Federation of Advertisers’ (WFA) Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) when Elon Musk took over Twitter, the social platform now known as X has decided to rejoin the coalition of online providers and brand partners, working to uphold the group’s brand-safety requirements and potentially win back advertisers.

“We’re excited to announce that X has reinstated our relationship with the @wfamarketers Global Alliance for Responsible Media,” the social media company posted on its platform Monday, adding that “X is committed to the safety of our global town square and proud to be part of the GARM community.”

The problem with this announcement, though, is that basically every time ExTwitter is desperate for advertisers to buy some ads, it touts GARM compliance, but then Elon goes on some antisemitic rant, or yet another study comes out showing what a terrible job ExTwitter does in protecting brand safety, and the promises of GARM compliance are forgotten.

Why is this time any different?

Some history: soon after Elon completed the purchase of Twitter, GARM had issued an open letter to Elon about making sure he was committed to brand safety.

At the time, Elon insisted the company’s “commitment to brand safety” was unchanged. He met with GARM folks, and promised to uphold the guidelines.

A few months later, the company announced a new brand safety effort, compliant with GARM.

But, largely due to Elon’s own nonsense (and misunderstanding of free speech), he keeps going back on those promises and personally driving advertisers away.

And each time the company gets desperate for new advertisers, it tries to claim it’s supportive of the GARM approach to “brand safety” for advertisers.

Indeed, at last year’s Cannes Lion, the company also talked about its GARM compliance. That was just months before Elon told advertisers to go fuck themselves, and multiple reports showed that big brand advertisers were showing up next to some pretty horrific content.

So it’s not even clear what is meant by ExTwitter “rejoining” GARM. The company keeps touting GARM as its standard anyway over the last few years, and then totally failing to live up to those promises, mostly due to their own owner’s behavior and desire to appease the worst people in society.

Any advertiser who thinks this newly constituted relationship with GARM means literally anything for brand safety is too gullible to be left alone with an advertisement. It’s all for show. Sooner or later (probably sooner) Elon will do something horrible and/or another study will come out showing how badly the company protects the brand safety of its advertisers.

It’s happened before. It’ll happen again. And rebuilding a relationship with GARM is just window dressing.

Filed Under: advertisers, brand safety, elon musk, garm, promises
Companies: garm, twitter, wfa, x

FTC: Um, Those Microsoft Layoffs Contradict What It Told The Courts In Activision Blizzard Acquisition

from the liar-liar dept

Late last year, we discussed how the FTC had appealed the court’s decision to allow Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard to move forward. I said at the time that I don’t think this appeal is going anywhere, and I still don’t thanks to the general toothless nature of regulators in America, but the FTC has decided to poke at the courts over the recent layoffs Microsoft announced, which include staff from Activision Blizzard. I will embed the entire two page letter to the court below, but here’s some relevant information as a manner of throat-clearing.

When Microsoft was battling it out with the FTC, and specifically to the question over how much control Microsoft would exert on these studios, it represented to the court that Activision Blizzard would operate with limited integration into Microsoft as a whole. In other words, the studio would operate with more independence than seen in typical acquisitions. This was a particularly important claim for two reasons.

First, because Microsoft was arguing against the injunction the FTC was seeking by stating that this was a “vertical” acquisition, rather than a “horizontal” one, meaning that the public interest wasn’t well-served by such an injunction.

Microsoft claimed that the public equity favoring an injunction “is more acutely implicated in horizontal mergers, where competing entities integrate their operations and, in the process, often eliminate redundancies.”

Secondly, Microsoft argued that the end result of the merger was such that Microsoft could, if ordered to by the court in the future, divest itself of these studios. This again relates directly to the limited hand Microsoft claimed it would have if the acquisition was allowed to proceed without the injunction the FTC sought.

Microsoft represented to this Court that “the post-merger company will be structured and operated in a way that would readily enable Microsoft to divest any or all of the Activision businesses as robust market participants in the unlikely event that such a divestiture is ordered.”

Got that? Microsoft said its merger was structured such that an injunction was not necessary because it was a vertical deal, which would avoid eliminating “redundancies” in staff and that it would be able to divest itself smoothly from the studios if so ordered, suggesting limited control over studio operations.

All of which is directly contradicted by Microsoft’s recent announcement of layoffs that include staff from Activision Blizzard.

Microsoft’s recently-reported plan to eliminate 1,900 jobs in its video game division, including in its newly-acquired Activision unit, contradicts the foregoing representations it made to this Court. Specifically, Microsoft reportedly has stated that the layoffs were part of an “execution plan” that would reduce “areas of overlap” between Microsoft and Activision which is inconsistent with Microsoft’s suggestion to this Court that the two companies will operate independently post-merger. Moreover, the reported elimination of thousands of jobs undermines the FTC’s ability to order effective relief should the pending administrative proceeding result in a determination that Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision violated Section 7 of the Clayton Act. The reported layoffs thus underscore the FTC’s need for injunctive relief pending completion of the administrative proceeding.

I mean…no lies detected? The announcement from Microsoft on these layoffs is pretty cut and dried. As was what it told the court during the FTC hearings.

I still don’t expect this to amount to much, because regulation in this country is broken beyond repair, but it probably should.

Filed Under: ftc, layoffs, promises, synergies, video games
Companies: activision blizzard, microsoft

T-Mobile, Dish Continue Petty Squabbles As Sprint Merger 'Solution' Looks Shaky

from the dysfunction-junction dept

Thu, Oct 28th 2021 06:29am - Karl Bode

To gain regulatory approval for its $26 billion merger with Sprint, T-Mobile made numerous promises. One was that the deal would immediately create jobs (there’ve been 5,000 layoffs so far). Another was that the company would work closely with Dish Network to help them build a fourth wireless network that would replace Sprint, theoretically “fixing” the reduction in competition the deal created. As predicted, that plan isn’t working out so well.

T-Mobile was supposed to closely shepherd Dish’s own network build over a period of 7 years, but the two companies have proven largely incapable of getting along. Recently, Dish accused T-Mobile of shutting down its 3G (CDMA) network (which Dish is currently using as it builds a 5G network) prematurely. T-Mobile in turn accused Dish of being too cheap to pay for 4G and 5G upgraded phones for its fairly tiny userbase. This week T-Mobile balked, issuing a hilariously passive aggressive press release saying T-Mobile would be leaving its 3G network on for a little bit longer because Dish was, effectively, incompetent:

“Recently it?s become increasingly clear that some of those partners haven?t followed through on their responsibility to help their customers through this shift. So, we?re stepping up on their behalf. We have made the decision to extend our deadline for the CDMA sunset by three months to March 31, 2022.”

Salty! T-Mobile goes on to accuse Dish of being generally terrible, and throws in a few references to the “digital divide” for good measure:

“There should be no more room for excuses. We have provided even more time and those partners can follow suit with the effort that is needed to ensure no one is left on the wrong side of the digital divide.”

Recall that it’s T-Mobile that spent millions of dollars lobbying the Trump administration (including spending more money at Trump’s hotel) to approve a $29 billion merger with Sprint that experts warned would reduce competition, ultimately raise consumer prices, and result in thousands of lost jobs. And recall that the Trump DOJ and FCC approved T-Mobile’s demands before even seeing the full impact analysis of the deal.

Then, to provide cover for the approval of a deal most folks didn’t think should have been approved due to competitive harm, Trumpland and T-Mobile came up with the idea of creating an entirely new wireless carrier out of Dish Network (a company with a long history of empty promises in wireless) and some twine. The deal was crafted by folks who like to wax poetic about how government shouldn’t meddle in business, yet now expect the U.S. government to mommy Dish and T-Mobile’s attempts to create an entirely new competitor. A plan you wouldn’t need if government had just blocked the deal and forced Sprint to find outside investment (Amazon, Google, Comcast, whoever).

But T-Mobile and Dish can’t even get along long enough to make it out of the first several years of the plan. And Dish continues to delay the launch of any meaningful wireless network. I still tend to think this ends with Dish stringing the FCC along for a few years on network build obligations until it can cash out of its vast spectrum holdings and head for the exits. Then, over time, investors will pressure the remaining three wireless providers (AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon) to progressively exploit the dwindling competition and stop competing so intensely on price.

In most countries (Ireland, Canada, many European countries) the reduction of overall wireless competitors from four to three via merger and consolidation always ends badly. I tend to think Trumpland regulators and T-Mobile knew this from the outset, and this entire deal was crafted to help them pretend that wasn’t going to happen this time.

Filed Under: competition, doj, fcc, mobile service, mvno, promises, spectrum
Companies: dish, sprint, t-mobile

AT&T Quickly Ditches Pledge Not To Fund Congressional Insurrectionists

from the see-no-evil dept

Thu, Sep 23rd 2021 06:33am - Karl Bode

Much like the company’s dedication to women, AT&T’s dedication to not funding people eager to overthrow democracy appears to be somewhere between inconsistent and nonexistent. Shortly after January 6 a number of companies, including telecom giants like AT&T, publicly crowed about how they’d be ceasing all funding to politicians that supported the attack on the Capitol and the overturning of, you know, fucking democracy. Of course that promise was never worth all that much, given the the umbrella lobbying orgs companies like AT&T used never really stopped financing terrible people.

Initially, AT&T made a big stink about how it had suspended funding to all 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election. But not only did AT&T not actually suspend funding via its numerous policy and lobbying tendrils, it didn’t even really ever stop funding insurrectionists directly:

“In February, however, AT&T donated $5,000 to the House Conservatives Fund. The chair of the House Conservatives Fund is Jim Banks (R-IN), who objected to the certification of the Electoral College in January. Banks also signed an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court supporting Texas’ efforts to throw out the election results in several states.”

Back in March, when news outlets like the Dallas News pressed AT&T on why it was still funding insurrectionists, the company offered up some convoluted gibberish about how it was more ethically policing its PAC spending:

“We have been assured that none of the employee PAC?s contributions will go toward the reelection of any of those members of Congress,? Balmoris said. ?Any future contributions to multi-candidate PACs will require such consistency with the policy suspending individual contributions.”

Six months later, when a reporter tries to press AT&T on the fact it continues to fund insurrectionists, it just goes radio silent:

“Six months later, AT&T is charting a very different path. In August, new FEC disclosures reveal, AT&T donated $15,000 each to the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) and National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC). These donations will support the reelection of every Republican objector running for reelection. Popular Information contacted AT&T and asked whether, as it had pledged in March, it had secured a commitment that none of the funds it donated to the NRCC or NRSC would support Republican objectors. This time, the company did not respond.”

In short, AT&T funded a bunch of politicians who filled the public’s head with propaganda and bullshit, resulting in a violent if clumsy attempt to steal an election. Now AT&T doesn’t want to talk about it, and hopes that if it stays quiet about it, the storm will pass. And they’re probably right, given the broader press’ ongoing tendency to normalize what happened earlier this year (largely because they don’t want to offend leak sources and advertisers). Which, of course, all but guarantees that, sooner or later, the same bullshit is going to play out all over again, potentially with more calamitous results.

Filed Under: congress, insurrection, political funding, politics, promises
Companies: at&t

Employees Are Feeling Burned Over Broken Work-From-Home Promises As Employers Try To Bring Them Back To The Office

from the working-form-home dept

As vaccinations and relaxed health guidelines make returning to the office a reality for more companies, there seems to be a disconnect between managers and their workers over remote work.

A good example of this is a recent op-ed written by the CEO of a Washington, D.C. magazine that suggested workers could lose benefits like health care if they insist on continuing to work remotely as the COVID-19 pandemic recedes. The staff reacted by refusing to publish for a day.

While the CEO later apologized, she isn?t alone in appearing to bungle the transition back to the office after over a year in which tens of millions of employees were forced to work from home. A recent survey of full-time corporate or government employees found that two-thirds say their employers either have not communicated a post-pandemic office strategy or have only vaguely done so.

As workforce scholars, we are interested in teasing out how workers are dealing with this situation. Our recent research found that this failure to communicate clearly is hurting morale, culture and retention.

Workers relocating

We first began investigating workers? pandemic experiences in July 2020 as shelter-in-place orders shuttered offices and remote work was widespread. At the time, we wanted to know how workers were using their newfound freedom to potentially work virtually from anywhere.

We analyzed a dataset that a business and technology newsletter attained from surveying its 585,000 active readers. It asked them whether they planned to relocate during the next six months and to share their story about why and where from and to.

After a review, we had just under 3,000 responses, including 1,361 people who were planning to relocate or had recently done so. We systematically coded these responses to understand their motives and, based on distances moved, the degree of ongoing remote-work policy they would likely need.

We found that a segment of these employees would require a full remote-work arrangement based on the distance moved from their office, and another portion would face a longer commute. Woven throughout this was the explicit or implicit expectation of some degree of ongoing remote work among many of the workers who moved during the pandemic.

In other words, many of these workers were moving on the assumption ? or promise ? that they?d be able to keep working remotely at least some of the time after the pandemic ended. Or they seemed willing to quit if their employer didn?t oblige.

One of authors explains the research.

We wanted to see how these expectations were being met as the pandemic started to wind down in March 2021. So we searched online communities in Reddit to see what workers were saying. One forum proved particularly useful. A member asked, ?Has your employer made remote work permanent yet or is it still in the air?? and went on to share his own experience. This post generated 101 responses with a good amount of detail on what their respective individual companies were doing.

While this qualitative data is only a small sample that is not necessarily representative of the U.S. population at large, these posts allowed us to delve into a richer understanding of how workers feel, which a simple stat can?t provide.

We found a disconnect between workers and management that starts with but goes beyond the issue of the remote-work policy itself. Broadly speaking, we found three recurring themes in these anonymous posts.

1. Broken remote-work promises

Others have also found that people are taking advantage of pandemic-related remote work to relocate to a city at a distance large enough that it would require partial or full-time remote work after people return to the office.

A recent survey by consulting firm PwC found that almost a quarter of workers were considering or planning to move more than 50 miles from one of their employer?s main offices. The survey also found 12% have already made such a move during the pandemic without getting a new job.

Our early findings suggested some workers would quit their current job rather than give up their new location if required by their employer, and we saw this actually start to occur in March.

One worker planned a move from Phoenix to Tulsa with her fianc? to get a bigger place with cheaper rent after her company went remote. She later had to leave her job for the move, even though ?they told me they would allow me to work from home, then said never mind about it.?

Another worker indicated the promise to work remotely was only implicit, but he still had his hopes up when leaders ?gassed us up for months saying we?d likely be able to keep working from home and come in occasionally? and then changed their minds and demanded employees return to the office once vaccinated.

2. Confused remote-work policies

Another constant refrain we read in the worker comments was disappointment in their company?s remote-work policy ? or lack thereof.

Whether workers said they were staying remote for now, returning to the office or still unsure, we found that nearly a quarter of the people in our sample said their leaders were not giving them meaningful explanations of what was driving the policy. Even worse, the explanations sometimes felt confusing or insulting.

One worker complained that the manager ?wanted butts in seats because we couldn?t be trusted to [work from home] even though we?d been doing it since last March,? adding: ?I?m giving my notice on Monday.?

Another, whose company issued a two-week timeline for all to return to the office, griped: ?Our leadership felt people weren?t as productive at home. While as a company we?ve hit most of our goals for the year. ? Makes no sense.?

After a long period of office shutterings, it stands to reason workers would need time to readjust to office life, a point expressed in recent survey results. Employers that quickly flip the switch in calling workers back and do so with poor clarifying rationale risk appearing tone-deaf.

It suggests a lack of trust in productivity at a time when many workers report putting in more effort than ever and being strained by the increased digital intensity of their job ? that is, the growing number of online meetings and chats.

And even when companies said they wouldn?t require a return to the office, workers still faulted them for their motives, which many employees described as financially motivated.

?We are going hybrid,? one worker wrote. ?I personally don?t think the company is doing it for us. ? I think they realized how efficient and how much money they are saving.?

Only a small minority of workers in our sample said their company asked for input on what employees actually want from a future remote work policy. Given that leaders are rightly concerned about company culture, we believe they are missing a key opportunity to engage with workers on the issue and show their policy rationales aren?t only about dollars and cents.

3. Corporate culture ?BS?

Management gurus such as Peter Drucker and other scholars have found that corporate culture is very important to binding together workers in an organization, especially in times of stress.

A company?s culture is essentially its values and beliefs shared among its members. That?s harder to foster when everyone is working remotely.

That?s likely why corporate human resource executives rank maintaining organizational culture as their top workforce priority for 2021.

But many of the forum posts we reviewed suggested that employer efforts to do that during the pandemic by orchestrating team outings and other get-togethers were actually pushing workers away, and that this type of ?culture building? was not welcome.

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One worker?s company ?had everyone come into the office for an outdoor luncheon a week ago,? according to a post, adding: ?Idiots.?

Surveys have found that what workers want most from management, on the issue of corporate culture, are more remote-work resources, updated policies on flexibility and more communication from leadership.

As another worker put it, ?I can tell you, most people really don?t give 2 flips about ?company culture? and think it?s BS.?

Kimberly Merriman, Professor of Management, Manning School of Business, University of Massachusetts Lowell; David Greenway, Doctoral Candidate in Leadership/Organization Studies, University of Massachusetts Lowell, and Tamara Montag-Smit, Assistant Professor of Business, University of Massachusetts Lowell

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Filed Under: covid, employers, promises, remote working, work from home

5,000 T-Mobile Employees Lost Their Jobs Post-Merger While Ex-CEO John Legere Saw A $137 Million Golden Parachute

from the uncarrier-no-more dept

Mon, Apr 26th 2021 09:31am - Karl Bode

To be clear, former T-Mobile CEO John Legere did some amazing things with T-Mobile. After regulators blocked AT&T from acquiring T-Mobile in 2011 (which wound up being a very good thing), he took the $3 billion break up fee and turned an also-ran into a major thorn in the side of AT&T and Verizon. Legere accomplished this by (gasp) generally treating consumers well, eliminating annoyances like long-term contracts, sneaky fees, and many other telecom industry mainstays. He also did it by embracing an entertaining, wise ass persona in an industry not known for having a sense of humor.

But then, T-Mobile owners Deutsche Telekom decided it would be a good idea to throw all of this away by pursuing a $26 billion merger with Sprint. That suddenly forced Legere into a position where he had to behave exactly like the companies he’d just spent a decade making fun of. That included lying a lot about the benefits of the deal as the company tried to sell the Trump administration on the competition and job-eroding megadeal (that wound up not being particularly difficult, since the industry-allied Trump FCC and DOJ didn’t care about hard data).

Technically, Legere only worked for three months in 2020, but nabbed a $137 million exit package according to new data:

“Legere’s 2020 compensation was revealed yesterday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (see pages 49 and 50). Legere was previously paid 27.8millioninthefullyearof2019and27.8 million in the full year of 2019 and 27.8millioninthefullyearof2019and66.5 million in 2018, mostly in the form of stock awards. His 2020 compensation of 137.2milliondidnotincludeanystockawards?instead,itconsistedofa137.2 million did not include any stock awards?instead, it consisted of a 137.2milliondidnotincludeanystockawards?instead,itconsistedofa136.55 million severance payment, 600,000insalary,and600,000 in salary, and 600,000insalary,and50,000 in reimbursement for legal fees.”

Legere certainly had a comfy exit, also offloading his $17.5 million Central Park West apartment to Giorgio Armani on his way out of town.

Of course, you’re supposed to ignore (and most of the US press certainly will) the fact that Legere repeatedly promised in print that the Sprint merger would result in a massive surge in new jobs. That never happens in the wake of telecom consolidation, and soon enough, the company was busy laying off 5,000 employees. Unions and Wall Street analysts predict the layoffs could get as high as 15-30,000 as redundant positions are inevitably eliminated over the next few years.

Of course, there was always ample evidence that Legere’s brash, pink high-top wearing trash talking persona was more caricature than reality. After all, Legere supported the FCC’s decision to lobotomize its consumer protection authority, opposed net neutrality, and mocked the EFF when they pointed out the company was lying. But the mask really slipped during the merger sales pitch, which not only involved lying constantly about the benefits of the deal, but hiring Trump ally Corey Lewandowski, and throwing cash at Trump’s DC hotel to improve merger approval chances.

Given the Sprint merger reduced US wireless sector competition by 25%, and the FCC currently has its hands tied behind its back due to the net neutrality repeal, which T-Mobile supported (which again neutered most FCC authority, not just net neutrality rules), it’s inevitable that investors now pressure T-Mobile to behave more and more like AT&T and Verizon over the next few years. That means more empty promises, more efforts to nickel-and-dime subscribers, and a steadily eroding effort to seriously compete on price. All the stuff Legere repeatedly insisted he was opposed to. That’s not speculation or opinion, it’s what happens every time a country decides to give a middle finger to competition by allowing mindless consolidation in telecom. There are 40 years of indisputable evidence.

Again, Legere deserves all the praise in the world for turning T-Mobile into a heavyweight champion in wireless. But at the same time, he also deserves ample criticism for the ease in which he was willing to throw all of that in the toilet, and the grotesque amount of falsehoods and Trump ass kissing that accompanied the effort along the way.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, jobs, john legere, lies, mergers, promises, wireless
Companies: sprint, t-mobile

Another Report Shows US Consumers Don't Get The Broadband Speeds They Pay For

from the false-advertising dept

Thu, Feb 25th 2021 01:35pm - Karl Bode

Yet another report has shown that US consumers aren’t getting the broadband speeds they’re paying for.

Researchers from broadband deal portal AllConnect dug through FCC data on broadband speeds and found that about 45 million Americans aren’t getting the speeds that broadband providers are advertising. Fiber and cable broadband providers appeared to have the toughest time providing the speeds they advertise, with those subscribers getting around 55% of the speeds they were promised. Satellite and DSL providers generally offer crappy speeds, but at least, the report found, those speeds were delivered more consistently.

The firm noted that consumers just aren’t getting accurate data on what speed is available, or how much speed they’ll get. Something that’s kind of important during a pandemic in which broadband is key to education, employment, health care, human connection, and opportunity:

“Having dependable internet is crucial right now, and with so many options available, it is important to have information like this to help consumers make the right choice for their needs. Being able to compare various aspects of internet service like reliability and speed helps make those decisions a little easier,? Layton adds.”

Granted this has been a problem for the better part of this decade. And it’s another problem (much like patchy availability and high prices) federal regulators haven’t done enough to seriously address. Speed data ISPs provide to the FCC is notoriously unreliable, and the FCC historically doesn’t do enough to verify availability and speed claims. It only takes a few minutes perusing our $350 broadband availability map, which all but hallucinates competition and throughput, to realize there’s a chasm between what the US government and industry claims exists, and what actually exists.

Every year, the FCC is mandated by Congress to release a report detailing the status of the U.S. broadband industry. If broadband isn’t being deployed on a “timely basis,” the agency is supposed to, you know, do something about that. But every year, sometimes regardless of party, the agency, swaddled in dodgy data, pretends this isn’t a problem. Why? Because we’ve fused extremely politically powerful telecom monopolies to our government surveillance apparatus, and holding these companies accountable is bad for political careers.

Of course ISPs aren’t just engaged in false advertising when it comes to speeds. They also routinely use a bevy of misleading fees and surcharges to covertly jack up their advertised rates post sale — to the point where your advertised cable or broadband bill can be as much as 45% higher than advertised. And again, aside from the very occasional suggestion by regulators that ISPs could maybe do better or be more transparent, nobody much does anything about it. After all, who wants to risk losing Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Charter campaign contributions by doing the right thing?

Filed Under: bandwidth, broadband, promises, speeds, study, truth in advertising

Broadband Monopolies Keep Getting Money For Networks Never Fully Deployed

from the round-and-round-we-go dept

Tue, Jan 26th 2021 06:19am - Karl Bode

As we’ve noted a few times, there’s an underlying belief in American tech policy that if we just keep throwing money at entrenched broadband monopolies we can lift US broadband out of the depths of mediocrity. But as we’ve noted more than a few times, heavily subsidizing a bunch of regional monopolies, while not doing anything about the conditions that created and insulate those monopolies, doesn’t result in much changing. It’s especially ineffective when you don’t really punish ISPs for decades of taking taxpayer money in exchange for network upgrades that almost always, like clockwork, wind up unfinished.

The latest case in point: in 2015, regional monopolies CenturyLink and Frontier Communications took nearly $800 million in taxpayer funds to expand broadband to underserved areas they deemed too expensive to wire themselves. And guess what happened:

“The deadline to hit 100 percent of the required deployments passed on December 31, 2020. Both CenturyLink and Frontier informed the FCC that they missed the deadline to finish deployment in numerous states.”

CenturyLink rather coyly acknowledged that it failed to meet deployment milestones in more than 25 states. Frontier failed to meet its deployment targets in around 17 states. Under the law, ISPs have a year from the point they finally inform the FCC that haven’t done what they promised to… actually do what they promised.

And while that same law says the the government can take back taxpayer funding “equal to 1.89 times the average amount of support per location received in the support area,” plus another ten percent of the carrier’s total funding in that area, that often never happens. ISP lawyers routinely tap dance over, under, and around those milestones; and penalties are particularly pathetic when there’s a captured regulator like outgoing FCC boss Ajit Pai at the helm.

A shining example of this lack of accountability is Frontier Communications, which we’ve long held up as a stunning example of monopolization and corruption in states like West Virginia. This is a company that time, and time, and time again has failed to meet its obligations tied to taxpayer subsidies, and in some instances was even caught defrauding the government. The federal response to this? To throw yet more taxpayer and ratepayer money at the company via the recent, scandal-plagued Rural Deployment Opportunity Fund auction:

“CenturyLink and Frontier are both getting more money from the FCC in the new Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, with CenturyLink getting 262.4millionspreadover10yearsandFrontiergetting262.4 million spread over 10 years and Frontier getting 262.4millionspreadover10yearsandFrontiergetting370.9 million over 10 years.

“Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) recently urged the FCC to block Frontier’s new funding, saying that “Frontier has a documented pattern of history demonstrating inability to meet FCC deadlines for completion of Connect America Fund Phase II support in West Virginia.”

Folks in DC (especially the Ajit Pai types) claim they’re focus is “lifting burdensome regulations to boost network investment.” In reality, they’ve effectively ceded all policy decisions to regional monopolies, which they’re utterly incapable of holding accountable for much of anything. When the data then shows that this clearly and obviously only results in less competition, stifled investment, wasted money, and mediocrity, the impulse is almost always to pretend that this data isn’t real… then double down on the same decisions that brought us there. Rinse, wash, repeat.

Now with COVID highlighting broadband’s importance in an entirely new way, there’s a massive new push to solve the problem by throwing more money at it. But until and unless policymakers embrace polices that specifically target the dominance of entrenched monopolies, driving more competition to market, we’re not getting off this ridiculous hamster wheel.

Filed Under: broadband, broken promises, fcc, promises, subsidies, taxpayers
Companies: centurylink, frontier, frontier communications