If the Russian-bought election interference ads hadn’t been bought by fraudulent accounts, “Most of them would be allowed to run” Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said this morning. “The responsibility of an open platform is to allow people to express themselves” she said during the first of an Axios interview series with Facebook execs.
“The thing about free expression is when you allow free expression you allow free expression,” Sandberg said, noting that “we don’t check what people post” and that she doesn’t think people should want Facebook to.
The linchpin quote of the interview was when Sandberg said “The question is should divisive, political, or issue ads run … our answer is yes, because when you cut off speech for one person, then you cut off speech for all people.”
The perspective maintains Facebook’s neutrality across the political spectrum and absolves it from being the truth police. But it also means that it’s knowingly creating a platform where people can misinform each other.
That raises the question of how free speech scales to user-generated content sharing networks that lack the curation and editorial oversight of traditional news distribution systems. Sandberg dodged Axios editor Mike Allen’s question about whether Facebook is a media company, and wasn’t pressed about how it accepts money for ads like other media companies.
Facebook plans to hire 1,000 more human moderators to protect election integrity, make all ads transparent to everyone rather than visible just to those targeted, and increase scrutiny on political ad buys. But can the fake news issue ever be solved if Facebook actually permits fake news under the banner of free speech?
Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
During her talk, Sandberg also confirmed that Facebook will support the plan of congressional investigators probing election interference to release the Russian-bought ads to the public. She said she met with Congress yesterday, Facebook is fully cooperating, and that it will provide Congress any content investigators want. That includes non-ads. “A lot of them, if they were run by legitimate people, we would let them run,” Sandberg explained.
She also said targeting information about the ads will be released to the public, as well. “We have a responsibility to do everything we can do to prevent this kind of abuse,” said Sandberg. “We’re hoping to set a new standard in transparency in advertising.” Though at the same time, she blatantly dodged a question about whether the Russian-bought ads and Donald Trump’s campaign ads had matching targeting.
As for the accusation that Facebook causes filter bubbles by surrounding us with information shared by our social graph instead of a more impartial news source, Sandberg said Facebook actually broadens our perspective through exposure to our weak ties and acquaintances. She cited studies showing we see a wider view of the news through the lens of Facebook than traditional sources.
You can watch the full talk with Sandberg below:
Sandberg’s comments come alongside newly exposed information about the effectiveness of Facebook’s fight against fake news. In an email obtained by BuzzFeed, Facebook’s manager of news partnerships Jason White wrote to one of the company’s third-party fact checkers:
“Once we receive a false rating from one of our fact checking partners, we are able to reduce future impressions on Facebook by 80 percent . . . we are working to surface these hoaxes sooner. It commonly takes over 3 days, and we know most of the impressions typically happen in that initial time period.”
But while Facebook is willing to demote the News Feed prominence of a news story that’s unequivocally established as false by third parties, it still allows this content on its platform.
A Slippery Slope Worth Navigating
This all boils down to the fact that Facebook’s News Feed is sorted by engagement. Normally, low quality content simply receives too few Likes or comments to be seen by many people. But fake news is so tantalizing in how it stokes our biases and political leanings that it breaks this system. People will click-through, Like, and share this content because they agree with or are entertained by it, not because it’s high quality.
This, in turn, incentivizes publishers of false news hoaxes. Facebook demotes hoaxes when identified, and is blocking monetization and ad buys from these publishers. But these mechanics also incentivize publishing of highly polarized opinion, exaggeration, and sensationalism. And when advertisers pay to boost the reach of fake news, its click-baitness attains these ads a level of engagement that wins them a lower price in Facebook’s auction system.
That’s how Facebook profits from fake news and polarization, even as it vows to work harder to protect us from it. While Facebook might want to offer an open platform where it’s not the opinion police or even the truth police, it’s simultaneously earning money from some of the most malicious uses of free expression.
It’s all a slippery slope. One person’s fake news busting is another’s censorship. But at the same time, Facebook is not legally obligated to maintain a free speech platform. Its rules prohibiting nudity, hate speech, and graphic imagery for the sake of ‘safety’ already show it’s willing to make judgement calls about when free speech crosses the line. But fake news is unsafe too.
Some critics take a cynical approach, saying Facebook cracks down harder on that stuff because it scares away advertisers, while fake news actually brings in dollars. It’s certainly true that it’s easier to detect those banned content types at scale with algorithms searching for nipples, racial slurs, and blood. Yet even if Facebook could reliably spot not just unabashedly false news but sensationalized content, its current policy is to allow it as long as it doesn’t preach violence or pure hate.
Something has to change. Sandberg said the public deserves “Not just an apology, but determination” to fix the problem. Now it’s time to see that determination in action. In my opinion, either:
Facebook must evolve its policy to more broadly and forcefully define and delete fake news, whether that means taking the political heat of vetting content in-house and being accused of bias or massively funding third-party fact-checkers to staff up so they can handle the volume of moderation Facebook requires.
Or
Facebook must continue to technically allow fake news, but add overt “Report as fake news” buttons, strictly and swiftly demoting links that are reported so they’re hardly visible. This would require protection against abuse of the Report button, and again either in-house policing or funding for third-party fact checking at Facebook’s scale.
Or at least
Facebook should set a much higher bar for legitimacy of advertisers that buy ads promoting news articles. That might mean restricting ad buys from anyone who isn’t the original news publisher or that hasn’t been verified by Facebook. Or limiting ad buys promoting any content that’s been flagged as fake.
All of these enforcement options could potentially ensnare legitimate news, be misused by trolls, or prevent innocent ad buys. But if Facebook commits to minimizing these false positives, the result could better protection for democracy and civil society compared to the alternative of knowingly allowing false news to proliferate in the name of free speech.
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The misleading video was intercepted by Meta fairly quickly, but is apparently circulating widely on Facebook’s Russian counterpart VKontakte, according to the Atlantic Council\u2019s Digital Forensic Research Lab. DFRLab also observed that a pro-Russia Telegram channel published a deepfake Wednesday depicting Zelensky calling on the country to surrender.\n
National TV network Ukraine 24 also reported that its news ticker was hacked on Wednesday to similar ends. The ticker showed a message purportedly from Zelensky calling on the people of Ukraine to end their resistance against Russian invading forces.\n
\u2757\ufe0f Russian hybrid warfare in action. Ukraine 24 TV channel was hacked: the news ticker started displaying President Zelenskyy’s fake “capitulation” address. @ZelenskyyUa has already refuted the fake, stating the only people he can offer to lay down arms is the Russian troops. pic.twitter.com\/MaZjk2hGzA
— Stratcom Centre UA (@StratcomCentre) March 16, 2022\n
\n
Ukraine’s president was quick to counteract the disinformation with his own messaging on Telegram, shot in the same selfie video style that’s characterized Zelensky’s communications since the beginning of the invasion.\n
In early March, Ukraine’s Centre for Strategic Communications cautioned that Russia might deploy altered videos to distort public perception of its invasion. The center, part of the Ukrainian government’s Ministry of Culture and Information Policy, focuses on “[countering] external threats, in particular information attacks of the Russian Federation.”\n
“Imagine seeing Vladimir Zelensky on TV making a surrender statement,” the center wrote on its Facebook page on March 2. “You see it, you hear it – so it\u2019s true. But this is not the truth… Be aware – this is a fake!”\n
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Ukrainian hackers say HackerOne is blocking their bug bounty payouts\n
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Meta removed an altered video falsely depicting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ordering troops to surrender Wednesday. The video is the latest alarming milestone in the parallel information war accompanying Russia’s brutal invasion of neighboring Ukraine, but it was a moment that Ukraine’s government and social media companies appear to have been prepared for. 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For a company named after a slow reptile, Silicon Valley startup Tortoise has made some quick pivots into new business models over the past year.\n
Co-founded in 2019 by ex-Uber executive Dmitry Shevelenko, the company began with a mission of being the operating system for micromobility vehicles, one that uses remote operators to reposition shared electric scooters to locations where prospective riders are or send them back to the warehouse for a charge.\n
In January 2021, Tortoise began working with shared micromobility operator Spin to test three-wheeled scooters embedded with Tortoise’s repositioning software.\n
But right before the company scored its Spin pilot, it started realizing the potential behind remote positioning and all the cameras and sensors the company had placed on scooters. With COVID-19 causing the burgeoning shared micromobility industry to take a nose dive at the same time as people, huddled indoors, began to demand quick delivery services, Shevelenko realized it “would be malpractice” not to pursue the robotic sidewalk delivery.\n
Tortoise started delivering with smaller local clients first, and then with big names like grocery story chain\u00a0Albertson’s, nationwide logistics company AxelHire,\u00a0and convenience store chain KRS. All signs were pointing to sidewalk delivery being a success.\n
But then\u2026\n
Shevelenko, who served as Uber’s director of business development and was behind its acquisition of Jump bikes, says these pivots are just the beauty of a startup that’s responsive to market changes. The founder has advised or been on the board of a number of mobility and tech companies, including Skip, Superpedestrian, Codi, Payfare, Skyryse, SpotHero and Cargo Systems.\n
While Tortoise is his first time starting a company, Shevelenko is well versed in the factors that can cause a startup to win and lose.\n
We sat down with Shevelenko to talk about everything from Tier’s acquisition of Spin and the future of micromobility, how to own changing business directions, the difficulties in sidewalk robot delivery and the agility of startups.\n
The following interview, part of an ongoing series with founders who are building transportation companies, has been edited for length and clarity.\n
TC: At Uber, you were behind a lot of new mobility segments and the acquisition of Jump bikes. What do you think is the value of companies having multiple pillars, instead of just doing one thing really well?\n
Dmitry Shevelenko: For Uber, as a consumer-centric company, it’s ultimately a strategy of capturing all your transportation spend. The ultimate end state here \u2014 and this is why I think they\u2019re putting so much money behind this Uber One subscription \u2014 is transportation-as-a-subscription product.\n
\t
It’s not really effective for Uber and Lyft to try to win your business one trip at a time by offering you special incentives. If people are constantly switching back and forth between Uber and Lyft, they both lose. So the way to win is not by competing on a per-trip basis, but almost on an annual basis. How can you lock somebody in to be yours for a year? I think the essential nature of that consumer lock-in means you need to have more than just rideshare, right?\n
I think in rideshare, bundling is essential, because rideshare will have ups and downs. But the demand for transportation is constant. So if you have multiple modes, you’re always going to be doing well.\n
Tortoise’s original idea of repositioning scooters didn’t pan out in part because of the pandemic, but do you think it’s still a good idea?\n
Oh, absolutely. It’s just purely a function of sequencing and relative prioritization. The only reason delivery got so good, and there’s so much demand for it is because of COVID, too, right? It’s not only shared scooters that became bad.\n
We spoke to Tortoise founder Dmitry Shevelenko about the future of micromobility, how to own changing business directions, difficulties in sidewalk robot delivery, and the agility of startups.\n”,”protected”:false},”author”:133574434,”featured_media”:2285248,”comment_status”:”open”,”ping_status”:”closed”,”sticky”:false,”template”:””,”format”:”standard”,”meta”:{“outcome”:””,”status”:””,”crunchbase_tag”:0,”amp_status”:””,”relegenceEntities”:[],”relegenceSubjects”:[],”carmot_uuid”:”503dc226-1a0e-3b4a-bc21-76cc982d3468″},”categories”:[424613844,449223024,449546991,20429,17396,2401],”tags”:[576706120,2621719,576856615,576860890,576638690,576966970,576721630,53259,53304683,576777962,11701,34926503,217609],”crunchbase_tag”:[],”tc_stories_tax”:[],”tc_ec_category”:[576796354],”tc_event”:[],”jetpack_featured_media_url”:”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/shevelenko.jpg”,”parsely”:{“version”:”1.0.0″,”meta”:{“@context”:”http:\/\/schema.org”,”@type”:”WebPage”,”headline”:”iPad rumors abound! 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CTO on electrification and supply chain issues”},”content”:{“rendered”:”
As BMW gets ready to debut the next generation of its 7 Series luxury sedan in April — and with that, the new all-electric i7 — the company today turned the spotlight on its overall portfolio of electric cars, including the upcoming iX1, an electrified version of its popular small crossover SUV.\n
These will join the company’s technology flagship iX and the sporty i4, which it announced last year. This, of course, is all happening against the backdrop of the global chip shortage and overall supply chain crisis, as well as now the war in Ukraine.\n
In a press briefing earlier today, BMW CTO Frank Weber noted that production of the i4 will start in the middle of the year, but for now, that’s really all we know. As for the i7, the company showed a few teasers at its annual conference this morning, mostly highlighting the car’s new (and large) kidney grille, which will surely get the BMW fans talking. For the i7, BMW promises up to 305 miles of EPA electric range, which is in line with everybody’s expectations. But as its flagship sedan, the 7 Series and especially the i7 are also where the company will debut a lot of new tech.
“The 7 Series is not just a product for us. The 7 Series is a collection of our capabilities. It is what we are really able to do. The i7 is not only the most powerful electric vehicle we will do, it has a cinema experience in the second row, the doors will open automatically and close automatically — and it has a long, long list of things. It has art mode, so it has real digital art inside,” Weber said — and he himself had to laugh a bit about the extravagance of it all.\n
Image Credits: BMW\nHow BMW is managing the chip shortage\n
But these vehicles, of course, are increasingly complex in terms of the tech inside them and, as such, BMW (and everybody else in the business) has been affected by the chip supply crisis. That meant the company had to pause putting touchscreens into some of its cars for a while last year, for example. Weber noted that the chip crisis hasn’t changed the company’s overall EV expansion plans.\n
“It takes us a lot of energy to cope with the challenges of the chip crisis,” he said in today’s meeting. “We are really proud of — as a team — when you see how we deal with a chip crisis, our production systems and our supply chain systems are really flexible and we can react very quickly. This gave us a competitive edge last year. We believe this will also give us a competitive edge this year, but we expect that this will continue for the whole year.” He noted that the company initially thought the supply chain would recover by the second half of 2022, but BMW now believes this will continue throughout the year. “Like we dealt with it last year, we will deal with it this year. We have not changed any introduction dates, we have not changed any volume assumptions, assumptions on the birth or rollout because of a chip shortage,” Weber said.
Likewise, he does not expect the war in Ukraine to affect BMW in the long run. But Weber also noted that the company gets its wiring harnesses from Ukraine, just as a number of its competitors, mostly for the engine and transmission. Weber noted that this industry employs around 20,000 people in Ukraine, mostly in the western part of the country. “We don’t just want to take away the work there. We have duplicated machines in order to help us now to build up those wiring harnesses,” he said, and added that, while there are only a few BMW engines that completely rely on wiring harnesses currently built in Ukraine, by next week, the company will be able to resume normal production again.\nQualcomm partnership\n
Weber also highlighted the company’s recent partnership with Qualcomm and Arriver, the company’s software arm for the mobility space. This partnership is less about the chip shortage, but it does give BMW more say in the tech stack for its autonomous driving systems and its infotainment offerings. Weber also noted that this partnership is an example of his company thinking about its supply chain in a more global fashion these days.\n
“This is a global economy, whether we like it or not. Regional solutions and not leveraging what’s available globally would be such a setback for how we are used to doing exceptional products, I can almost not imagine going back there. We are connected. And actually, I can only hope that we can go back to some of this and not that, after this has been resolved, everybody thinks we have to solve problems within each region. It will simply not work.”\n
As for the overall move to electric vehicles, Weber was clear that BMW is not setting an end date for combustion engines. Before even contemplating that, he argued, the charging infrastructure has to be in place, together with the green electricity infrastructure to charge these cars and a robust flow of raw materials to build batteries. BMW wants to ramp down combustion engine technology and ramp up battery electric vehicles.\n
“The last thing we want is — maybe because it seems to be politically appropriate — just to cut off things will not work. You have to make sure that this ramp down and ramp up go hand-in-hand and go smoothly. Those are bigger industrial processes and this is not just about single vehicles,” Weber said. He also seemed somewhat bullish about hydrogen, but for heavy trucks more so than for personal vehicles, mostly because of the weight it would take to put batteries into a truck with enough range.\n
BMW shows off a color-changing car\n
\n
BMW wants to turn your car into a rolling cinema\n
\n”,”protected”:false},”excerpt”:{“rendered”:”
As BMW gets ready to debut the next generation of its 7 Series luxury sedan in April — and with that, the new all-electric i7 — the company today turned the spotlight on its overall portfolio of electric cars, including the upcoming iX1, an electrified version of its popular small crossover SUV. 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Apes NFT project gets official ‘ApeCoin’ token”},”content”:{“rendered”:”
Even among the fastest-growing crypto startups, Yuga Labs has had a particularly explosive year.\n
The startup is behind the NFT project Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC), which only launched in April of last year but has quickly grown to become the most valuable NFT project by market cap. The price of admission to purchase the cheapest of the 10,000 images currently sits at around $240,000 worth of the Ethereum cryptocurrency. As the startup reportedly looks to bank funding at a $5 billion valuation (a spokesperson for the company declined to comment on that figure), Yuga Labs is looking toward the future, detailing a new partnership for a play-to-earn gaming title built around a much-hyped token called ApeCoin.\n
Multimillion dollar monkey pictures and monkey money are likely not the future you were expecting to capture the undivided attention of Silicon Valley VCs, but Yuga Labs hopes that the new game and token will inspire a mainstream crypto economy built around their their IP, which further expanded last week to include the highly valued CryptoPunks and Meebits NFT collections after Yuga acquired the assets from Larva Labs.
Building up this economy will require some very particular legal maneuverings to ensure regulatory compliance. The SEC has largely been keeping its distance from NFT projects — though not entirely — but crypto startups selling tokens that act as unregistered securities has been an area where they’ve been more vigilant in cracking down.\n
As a result, Yuga Labs is being very careful to isolate itself publicly from the token’s launch, which will instead be released by an entity called ApeCoin DAO made up of council members that are connected to the NFT project, but none of which are employees or executives at Yuga Labs. An organization called the APE Foundation will also be formed to administer the decisions of the ApeCoin DAO. Furthermore, the DAO will carry official branding of the BAYC project, which Yuga Labs is “gifting” to it by way of a 1\/1 NFT of a blue Bored Apes logo.\n
If this all sounds a little convoluted, welcome to crypto in 2022.\n
ApeCoin DAO’s council members include Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, FTX’s Amy Wu, Sound Ventures’ Maaria Bajwa, Animoca’s Yat Siu and Horizen Labs’ Dean Steinbeck.
Token holders will be able to vote on decisions in the DAO, while the special council “will carry out the decisions of the community,” a spokesperson says. Though Yuga won’t officially be launching the Ethereum-based token, the startup and the BAYC project founders will be the owners of nearly a quarter of the total token supply while owners of Bored Apes and Mutant Apes NFTs will collectively receive 15% of the total token allocation.\n
A spokesperson for Yuga Labs notes that they expect the Ape token to begin trading “soon” on major exchanges including Coinbase, FTX, eToro, Kraken, OKX, Gemini, FTX, Binance and Binance US. The startup did not make any executives available for interview and declined to offer further details on the relationship between the ApeCoin DAO and Yuga Labs.\n
The full breakdown of the token allocation of 1 billion APE coins is as follows:\n\n8% will go to the founders of Bored Apes Yacht Club.\n16% will go to the Yuga Labs team (a portion of which equal to 1% of the total token supply will be donated to the Jane Goodall Foundation Legacy Foundation).\n14% will go to “launch contributors,” which will assumedly be made up of Yuga partners and investors.\n15% will go to owners of the Bored Apes and Mutant Apes collections.\n47% will be released over time as part of the DAO’s “ecosystem fund.”\n\n
Image Credits: BAYC\n
In terms of what the token will actually do, the full scope is currently unclear, but it is apparent that ApeCoin will be used as in-game currency for some titles that Yuga Labs has in the works, including a previously unannounced title being developed with San Francisco-based game studio nWay. The developer has previously published a number of battle games licensing IP from entities including Power Rangers and the WWE.\n
That unnamed title will utilize a crypto gaming mechanic called play-to-earn that enables users to earn tokens based on the amount of time and effort they put into playing the title. The mechanic was partially popularized in the game Axie Infinity, which has done several billion dollars in transactions over the past year and led its parent company Sky Mavis to raise at a $3 billion valuation.\n
Yuga Labs says that the new title will be released this year.\n
This title will interestingly be in addition to a previously announced play-to-earn gaming title that will be released in partnership with Animoca Brands. The company also notes that ApeCoin will have utility in an existing Animoca title called Benji Bananas.\n
NFTs have had a blockbuster year and are already finding support from major tech companies. Twitter has launched limited support for NFT profile pictures, Facebook has recently indicated plans to integrate NFTs into Instagram and Stripe just launched crypto support for NFTs.\n
NFTs have also inspired a spirited backlash among consumers, particularly gamers, who worry that NFTs won’t actually democratize ownership of games and will instead supercharge micro-transactions. Others have expressed concerns around the environmental effects of minting NFTs on energy-intensive blockchains.\n
Yuga’s foray into gaming is clearly a major element of its growth plans for the BAYC brand, but blockchain gaming is still a decidedly niche affair and one it hopes to open up.\n
“I don’t know how big Bored Ape Yacht Club can be, that’s not to say that I don’t imagine it to be big, but I think — I hope — Yuga will be big and that we will be able to create lots of things that are unique and special and speak to the greater community in different ways,” Yuga CEO Nicole Muniz said in an interview last month with the D3 Network.\n
Bored Apes maker Yuga Labs acquires CryptoPunks NFT collection\n
\n”,”protected”:false},”excerpt”:{“rendered”:”
Even among the fastest-growing crypto startups, Yuga Labs has had a particularly explosive year. The startup is behind the NFT project Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC), which only launched in April of last year but has quickly grown to become the most valuable NFT project by market cap. The price of admission to purchase the 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Lucas Matney is a senior editor at TechCrunch based in San Francisco. He has written thousands of stories on early stage startups and venture capital deals since joining TechCrunch in 2015. Lucas has a degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill school. \r\n\r\n
These days, Lucas is focused on coverage of the crypto\/web3 industry as well as gaming platforms and the AR\/VR space. Since 2016, Lucas has also been writing the Week in Review newsletter, which is sent to hundreds of thousands of subscribers every Saturday morning. \r\n\r\n
He can be reached at lucas (at) techcrunch.com and followed on Twitter at @lucasmtny \r\n\r\n
\r\n\r\n
Disclosures (updated 3\/1\/22): I have investments in exchange-traded funds but do not directly trade any individual stocks myself. I own a small amount of Ethereum and USDC tokens to engage with products in the web3 ecosystem for the purpose of learning more about them. I own an ENS handle. I do not day trade any cryptocurrencies or NFTs for speculative purposes. “,”cbAvatar”:”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Screen-Shot-2021-08-09-at-6.58.13-PM.png”,”twitter”:”lucasmtny”,”_links”:{“self”:[{“href”:”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-json\/tc\/v1\/users\/89192944″}],”collection”:[{“href”:”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-json\/tc\/v1\/users”}]}}],”author”:[{“id”:89192944,”name”:”Lucas Matney”,”url”:””,”description”:””,”link”:”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/author\/lucas-matney\/”,”slug”:”lucas-matney”,”avatar_urls”:{“24″:”https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/ac0471089769c31246f411dc339104f8?s=24&d=identicon&r=g”,”48″:”https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/ac0471089769c31246f411dc339104f8?s=48&d=identicon&r=g”,”96″:”https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/ac0471089769c31246f411dc339104f8?s=96&d=identicon&r=g”},”links”:{“twitter”:”https:\/\/twitter.com\/lucasmtny”,”linkedin”:”https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/lucasmatney\/”,”facebook”:””,”homepage”:””,”crunchbase”:”https:\/\/www.crunchbase.com\/person\/lucas-matney”},”position”:”Senior Editor”,”cbDescription”:”
Lucas Matney is a senior editor at TechCrunch based in San Francisco. He has written thousands of stories on early stage startups and venture capital deals since joining TechCrunch in 2015. Lucas has a degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill school. \r\n\r\n
These days, Lucas is focused on coverage of the crypto\/web3 industry as well as gaming platforms and the AR\/VR space. Since 2016, Lucas has also been writing the Week in Review newsletter, which is sent to hundreds of thousands of subscribers every Saturday morning. \r\n\r\n
He can be reached at lucas (at) techcrunch.com and followed on Twitter at @lucasmtny \r\n\r\n
\r\n\r\n
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away, little sensors! These tiny wireless devices can be scattered by the wind”},”content”:{“rendered”:”
If you want to monitor the temperature, humidity and exposure over 100 square miles of forest, you’re going to spend a lot of time tying tech trees. But what if you could scatter your sensors the same way dandelions and elms scatter their seeds? UW researchers have put together devices light enough to be carried by the wind.\n
The project pushes the boundaries of small-scale and purpose-built computing, and while it’s still very much a prototype, it’s an interesting direction for embedded electronics to take.\n
“Our prototype suggests that you could use a drone to release thousands of these devices in a single drop. They\u2019ll all be carried by the wind a little differently, and basically you can create a 1,000-device network with this one drop,” said Shyam Gollakota, a UW professor and prolific device creator.
It’s made possible primarily by the removal of any sort of battery, which lowers the mass of the electronics considerably. Equipped with only a few tiny sensors, a wireless transceiver and a couple tiny solar cells, the gadget itself weighs less than 30 milligrams.\n
Its wind-catching structure was arrived at after dozens of attempts, ultimately arriving at this bike wheel shape as one that both caused the device to travel far from its starting point but also land with the solar panels facing upward 95% of the time. When scattered by drone, they can travel some 100 meters before settling down.\n
\n
Once they land, they will operate whenever it’s light, using radio-frequency backscatter to bounce their signals off the environment and to each other, forming an ad hoc network that can be collected by a control device.\n
It’s nowhere near the mobility of the miraculously light dandelion seed, which weighs a single milligram and can travel for miles. But nature has had eons to perfect its designs, while the team at UW just started recently. The other challenge is, of course, the fact that real seeds eventually either turn into dandelions or decay into nothing \u2014 while a thousand sensors would remain until picked up or broken to pieces. The team said they’re working on that, though the field of biodegradable electronics is still young.\n
If they can figure out the e-waste angle (and probably the animals eating them angle), this could be very helpful for people trying to keep a close eye on threatened ecosystems.\n
“This is just the first step, which is why it\u2019s so exciting. There are so many other directions we can take now,” said lead author Vikram Iyer. The paper describing their work appeared today in the journal Nature.\n
DroneSeed’s $36M A round makes it a one-stop shop for post-wildfire reforestation\n
\n”,”protected”:false},”excerpt”:{“rendered”:”
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Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He first wrote for TechCrunch in 2007. He has also written for MSNBC.com, NBC News, DPReview, The Economist\/GE’s Look Ahead, and others.\n\n
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Examples of the dandelion seed-like designs tested by the team.\n”},”alt_text”:”Examples of the dandelion seed-like designs tested by the team.”,”media_type”:”image”,”mime_type”:”image\/jpeg”,”media_details”:{“width”:1500,”height”:1000,”file”:”2022\/03\/DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg”,”sizes”:{“thumbnail”:{“file”:”DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg?resize=150,100″,”width”:150,”height”:100,”mime_type”:”image\/jpeg”,”source_url”:”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg?w=150″},”medium”:{“file”:”DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg?resize=300,200″,”width”:300,”height”:200,”mime_type”:”image\/jpeg”,”source_url”:”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg?w=300″},”medium_large”:{“file”:”DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg?resize=768,512″,”width”:768,”height”:512,”mime_type”:”image\/jpeg”,”source_url”:”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg?w=1024″},”large”:{“file”:”DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg?resize=680,453″,”width”:680,”height”:453,”mime_type”:”image\/jpeg”,”source_url”:”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg?w=680″},”guest-author-32″:{“file”:”DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg?resize=32,32″,”width”:32,”height”:32,”mime_type”:”image\/jpeg”,”source_url”:”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg?w=32&h=32&crop=1″},”guest-author-50″:{“file”:”DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg?resize=50,50″,”width”:50,”height”:50,”mime_type”:”image\/jpeg”,”source_url”:”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg?w=50&h=50&crop=1″},”guest-author-64″:{“file”:”DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg?resize=64,64″,”width”:64,”height”:64,”mime_type”:”image\/jpeg”,”source_url”:”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg?w=64&h=64&crop=1″},”guest-author-96″:{“file”:”DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg?resize=96,96″,”width”:96,”height”:96,”mime_type”:”image\/jpeg”,”source_url”:”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg?w=96&h=96&crop=1″},”guest-author-128″:{“file”:”DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg?resize=128,128″,”width”:128,”height”:128,”mime_type”:”image\/jpeg”,”source_url”:”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg?w=128&h=128&crop=1″},”concierge-thumb”:{“file”:”DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg?resize=50,33″,”width”:50,”height”:33,”mime_type”:”image\/jpeg”,”source_url”:”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg?w=50″},”full”:{“file”:”DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg”,”width”:1024,”height”:683,”mime_type”:”image\/jpeg”,”source_url”:”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/DandelionSensorsWEB003.jpg”}},”image_meta”:{“aperture”:”20″,”credit”:”Mark Stone\/University of Washington”,”camera”:”Canon EOS 5D Mark IV”,”caption”:”Caption: Inspired by how dandelions use the wind to distribute their seeds, a University of Washington team has developed a tiny, battery-free sensor-carrying device that can be blown by the wind as it tumbles toward the ground. 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If the Russian-bought election interference ads hadn’t been bought by fraudulent accounts, “Most of them would be allowed to run” Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said this morning. “The responsibility of an open platform is to allow people to express themselves” she said during the first of an Axios interview series with Facebook execs.\n
“The thing about free expression is when you allow free expression you allow free expression,” Sandberg said, noting that “we\u00a0don’t check what people post” and that she doesn’t think people should want Facebook to.\n
The linchpin quote of the interview was when Sandberg said “The question is should divisive, political, or issue ads run \u2026 our answer is yes, because when you cut off speech for one person, then you cut off speech for all people.”
The perspective maintains Facebook’s neutrality across the political spectrum and absolves it from being the truth police. But it also means that it’s knowingly creating a platform where people can misinform each other.\n
That raises the question of how free speech scales to user-generated content sharing networks that lack the curation and editorial oversight of traditional news distribution systems. Sandberg dodged Axios editor Mike Allen’s question about whether Facebook is a media company, and wasn’t pressed about how it accepts money for ads like other media companies.\n
Image: Bryce Durbin\/TechCrunch\n
During her talk, Sandberg also confirmed that Facebook will support the plan of congressional investigators probing election interference to release the Russian-bought ads to the public. She said she met with Congress yesterday, Facebook is fully cooperating, and that it will provide Congress any content investigators want. That includes non-ads. “A\u00a0lot of them, if they were run by legitimate people, we would let them run,” Sandberg explained.\n
She also said targeting information about the ads will be released to the public, as well. “We have a responsibility to do everything we can do to prevent this kind of abuse,” said Sandberg. “We’re hoping to set a new standard in transparency in advertising.” Though at the same time, she blatantly dodged a question about whether the Russian-bought ads and Donald Trump’s campaign ads had matching targeting.\n
As for the accusation that Facebook causes\u00a0filter bubbles by surrounding us with information shared by our social graph instead of a more impartial news source, Sandberg said Facebook actually broadens our perspective through exposure to our weak ties and acquaintances. She cited studies showing we see a wider view of the news through the lens of Facebook than traditional sources.\n
You can watch the full talk with Sandberg below:\n