YouTube was under fire again in early March, when a video blogger named Matt Watson detailed how pedophiles can enter a “wormhole” of YouTube videos to see “footage of children in sexually suggestive positions” according to CNET.com. They can then jump from video to video, helped by YouTube’s recommendation engine, and fill them with lewd comments. Oh yeah, there's an old NetLingo word for that: flame bait.
In response, brands such as Disney, AT&T, and Epic Games pulled their ads from YouTube, and the company responded by banning more than 400 accounts. Unfortunately, it’s not the first time that Google-owned YouTube has had this kind of child-safety flare-up. In 2017 alone, disturbing knockoffs appeared on the YouTube Kids platform that depicted Disney and Marvel characters in troubling ways; then sexually explicit comments appeared under videos of kids’ gymnastics. “In response to those scandals, CEO Susan Wojcicki overhauled YouTube’s safety guidelines.” Yet two years later, the same problems keep cropping up.
It’s not just the comments that are problematic for YouTube, said The New York Times. The platform has been reckoning with the vast troves of disinformation and extreme content it harbors, such as conspiracy videos and hoaxes that are popular with millions of viewers. Here, again, the recommendation engine is part of the problem: It sends viewers of misinformation to similar videos with more misinformation.
Conspiracy theories and viral hoaxes top the list” of recommendations for viewers of many popular channels. Young people repeatedly battered by these recommendations often start to reject mainstream sources. To fix this, YouTube needs to recognize how deep these problems run and realize that any successful effort may look less like a simple algorithm tweak, and more like deprogramming a generation.
YouTube's Porn & Conspiracy Problems: Fix Your Recommendation Engine
Big Tech Scruples: Why Did Facebook Executives have to be so Ruthless?
Facebook has weathered its share of scandals lately but this item didn't get much coverage and it really got my goat. At the end of 2018, some 250 pages of internal Facebook emails were released by British lawmakers revealing that executives were "ruthless and unsparing" in their ambition to collect more data from users according to The New York Times. The emails, which spanned 2012 to 2015, a time of tremendous expansion for Facebook, show executives including Mark Zuckerberg, discussing ways to undermine their competitors, obscure their collection of user data, and above all, ensure that their products kept growing.
Most of that sounds well and good (not the obscuring of data part) as our current definition of what a business should do, there's even a NetLingo word for it: moneytizing eyeballs.
Until you get to the part that Facebook engineered a way to collect Android users' data without having to alert them, and Zuckerberg personally approved cutting off a video-sharing app's access to Facebook because it was a competitor to Instagram (which they own). The app, called Vine and loved by many, was eventually forced to shut down. C'mon executives of Big Tech, speak out! Especially you spiritual ones... there's more than enough to go around.
Hey Amazon :( If Coastal Elite Turn On You, Go Where You're Needed
Amazon walked away from New York City due to the public outcry over the $2 billion tax incentives. Amazon, with the rest of Big Tech, is facing unprecedented scrutiny from the newly emboldened Left, according to Axios.com. Progressive Democrats have hammered Amazon over its market power and treatment of warehouse and delivery workers.
In fact, the company has become a potent symbol of American inequality but they are moving fast to head off attacks, and sometimes by co-opting the liberal agenda, like by raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour.
But Amazon is popular in Virginia and that doesn't surprise the people in Roanoke, VA according to the Times. Polling shows that more than 90 percent of people in southern Virginia support the company. Why? For the idea of the jobs! Guess what, the red states lost a lot of work due to Big Tech. There's even a NetLingo word for it: You've been Amazonned.
Southern Virginians get why Amazon didn’t locate there: They don’t have 25,000 highly skilled people ready to go to work immediately, but they do have 75,000 college students they'd rather not watch leave. So, Amazon if the coastal elite think you and the other Big Tech companies are wrecking their cities, set up shop in places that will benefit America! I agree with their sentiment, it's tiring to watch politicians in New York City and Seattle gripe about tech companies overrunning their cities, it's like watching two rich people argue.
Working at Google is Not The Dream It’s Supposed To Be
Google has a two-tier workforce, with half of the 170,000 people who work for Google classified as temporary or contract workers, and permanent employees are instructed to treat them differently in a variety of ways. According The Guardian, there's a written company guide that says Google staff are not to reward certain workers with perks like T-shirts, invite them to all-hands meetings, or allow them to engage in professional development training. Ugh! I experienced that same bullying at ADT which was shocking. There's a NetLingo word for it: NQOCD.
The contract workers also don’t get benefits at Google, they can’t list on LinkedIn that they work for Google, and they are still subject to forced arbitration for sexual harassment claims, a policy that changed for full-time workers after a global walkout by Google employees (see below!). According to one employee, Google’s contract worker policy basically amounts to this: We are legally in the clear to treat people like garbage. Coming from one of the most successful companies in history, it only makes Google look like garbage.
As for their employees, Google has also been quietly urging the U.S. government to overturn an Obama-era protection that lets employees use their work email to organize online, according to Bloomberg.com. Google made an argument to the National Labor Relations Board last November, three weeks after 20,000 of its employees walked out to protest the company’s handling of sexual harassment cases. The filing was revealed last week through a Freedom of Information Act request. Busted.
Because Google’s workers are spread around the globe and don’t have most co-workers’ personal emails, its employee email system played a pivotal role in the organizing for that protest. Google’s push to remove the protection was considered surprising because the company publicly expressed support for the goals of the protest. Busted again. This is yet another instance of Big Tech saying one thing and doing something else, when what they need to do is be more transparent... but not to the degree as Netflix (see previous blog)!
Still Like Netflix Knowing Their Employees Work in Constant Fear?
Who wants to work at a place where the culture can be ruthless and demoralizing? How about brutal honesty, ritual humiliation, insider lingo, and constant fear? Sure you always dream about how cool it would be to work at Netflix for example, but the reality of working in Big Tech and many other corporations these days is very different.
You don't care you say, you want the salary, the prestige, the experience. Well apparently ruthless and demoralizing and working in constant fear is the Netflix way. What gives? According to The Wall Street Journal at Netflix, they count "radical candor and transparency" among their highest corporate values. OK... So that means when almost every employee can access sensitive information such as viewer numbers for Netflix’s shows, and when 500+ executives can see the salaries of every staffer, they want to demand the same transparency to evaluating performance? The problem with that is you don't treat humans the way you treat data.
Netflix actually encourages team dinners where everyone goes around and gives feedback and criticism about others at the table, and managers are encouraged to apply a "keeper test" to their staff... asking themselves whether they would fight to keep a given employee and firing those for whom the answer is no. In fact, Netflix infamous CEO Reed Hastings uses the keeper test himself, and last year fired one of the company’s first employees, a close friend for decades. One former Netflixer says she saw a fired colleague crying as she packed her boxes while other employees looked away, fearing that helping her would put a target on their back.
It's kill or be killed according to Gizmodo.com. This is the kind of the place where the Chief Human Resources Officer created a 120-slide PowerPoint deck back in 2004 explaining Netflix’s culture of “freedom and responsibility.” She pushed them to keep only highly effective people and devised the keeper test. You can guess how the story ends: Hastings used the keeper test on her in 2011 and fired her. Don't worry, there's a NetLingo word for what she'll do next: ladder bypass.
For those of us who have endured this kind of corporate hell, it's disheartening to see that Big Tech and other corporations still don't care about bullying people to get rid of dead weight. What's even more challenging is that many employees join companies like this with their eyes open and they don't care either! Otherwise Netflix wouldn't have an 87 percent approval rating on Glassdoor. Netflix also took the No. 1 spot on a survey in which knowledge workers were asked which company they most wanted to join.
C'mon gang, we'll never get rid of this corporate culture of fear until people stop accepting it. The answer lies with you, with us... not with Reed Hastings and his cronies who are clearly acting out of fear themselves. Don't "want to work" there just because you spend so much of your valuable free time consuming their product. Better yet, boycott the product... they may not care in their hearts but they will when they feel it in their wallets. Our workplace environment should at least maintain common decency empower professionals to be their best possible versions.
Knowledge Workers: It's Time to Embrace Working Remotely
Employees actually hate open offices, everyone knows that. But's it now been scientifically proven that open offices are doing the opposite of what they were intended and causing us more stress. An article in Fast Company points out that they are too symbolically powerful for companies to abandon. What? It’s not just that open offices are cheap—though they are. OK. Open offices signal that people are collaborating and ideas will spark. Not true!
Open offices have become popular at startups and established companies alike, and Facebook even put all 2,800 employees in one 10-acre building! Ugh. The article goes on to point out that these layouts actually lower the percentage of in-person interactions by 70 percent, while emailing and other electronic messaging rises by 50 percent.
Open offices have also been shown to create stress, especially for women who fell like they are on display all of the time. Check that. While sixty-five percent of creative people have said we need quiet or absolute silence to do our best work. Sure enough, open offices changed everything and there's a NetLingo word for it: disruptive technology.
Even CBS News said yep, the latest research shows that most open office plans fail, and that we didn’t need science to prove how much open offices suck the life out of our workday. I can't believe that seventy percent of Americans now work in open offices! That's a lot of people when, they need to have a real conversation or pitch an important client, they have to find a storage closet.
According to the Financial Times, at the trending WeWork co-working offices, the shared desks seem fairly empty, while the private meeting rooms were full. The ultimate sign that the open office is due for some serious rethinking? Companies are now spending $3,500 for portable soundproof pods to let their employees get away from their colleagues and actually do their work. Gang, if you need to get out from under the fluorescent light, check out job sites like Remote.com.
Dear corporations and businesses alike, the time has come. If you have a productive employee who is capable of performing his or her job offsite, and is equipped with all the office technology and collaboration software as needed, and expresses an interest and desire to do so, then c'mon Big Tech, allow your employees the opportunity to work from home, work remotely, work virtually, telecommute... whatever you want to call it. If not, at least bring back the cube farms.
Why the Gig Economy can be an Online Hell for Workers
The “click-worker” jobs on these platforms can include “filling out questionnaires for academic researchers, transcribing audio, even moderating content for social networks.” These jobs are demanding and require education, yet the people who do them earn an average of only $4.43 an hour, according to a survey of 3,500 workers from 75 countries. That number falls to $3.31 an hour when you factor in unpaid time spent looking for orders, researching clients, and taking qualification tests.
It’s not just workers in poor countries who are paid these wages. Two-thirds of U.S. “Turkers” made less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. These are “hellish” jobs without even “basic worker protections.” Should a modern society tolerate jobs that come with no worker rights and no possibility of dignified survival? “And even if such jobs are allowed, should they be offered by huge tech companies that provide outsize returns to shareholders?” Shouldn’t gig workers get to live in a world that feels like 2018, not Marx’s 1848?
Congress Doesn't Get Big Tech and Senators Don’t Use E-mail. This Bothers Me.
From Senator Chuck Schumer to Senator Lindsey Graham, many of our elected officials continue to brag about not using email. That's concerning. Even more startling is the fact that Congress doesn't get Big Tech. The Facebook hearing last year made it clear that very few U.S. Senators understand Facebook's business. Most of the questions came from tech-challenged Senators who seemed clueless about how Facebook makes its money and even how the Internet works.
"If a version of Facebook will always be free, how do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service?" Senator Orrin Hatch, the 84-year-old Republican from Utah (who also famously doesn't use email), asked early on in the five-hour hearing. Mark Zuckerberg paused a moment before saying, "Senator, we run ads." He, and his staff sitting behind him, then grinned directly at him. There's a NetLingo word for that Senator Hatch: noob.
Watch this and tell me Congress, do you really want to be laughed at by Big Tech?
Meanwhile Trump is begging Big Tech for free labor to avoid federal hirings, and because of the government shutdown, 45% of employees in the Department of Homeland Security’s newly created Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have been furloughed, in addition to 85% of workers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
This all bothers me so I try to reach out and voice my concern but apparently you need to call, and not email, your legislators. I'm told even if you don’t speak directly to the lawmaker, staff members will often pass the message along in one form or another. Really? With a can and a line of string?
Congress, you cannot afford to be stuck in 1995. As Catherine Rampell from the Washington Post reminds us, the digital revolution is now decades old, affecting virtually every industry and public policy. Senators help make federal laws regulating technology, privacy, cybersecurity, and the digital economy, and for you, ignoring how everyone else in the nation communicates is a form of political malpractice. If you know little or nothing about technology in a technological age, you shouldn't be in the Senate, but if you are, then please hire a consultant like me.
Google, Facebook, and Amazon: A Second Gilded Age of New Monopolies
- Google dominates search, video, and online ads and has an 885 market share in search advertising in the U.S.
- Facebook and its major subsidiaries—Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger—account for 77% of mobile social media traffic.
- Almost $1 of every $2 in online retail sales goes through Amazon.
Flush with revenues of tens of billions of dollars, each company has heavily expanded into other industries:
- Google dominates video (through YouTube), mapping, and personal email;
- Facebook is building consumer drones and virtual reality sets;
- Amazon recently bought the upscale grocery chain Whole Foods for $13.4 billion.
So, what’s wrong with monopolies you may ask? When companies control a market, they tend to use their power to eliminate competition—often to the detriment of consumers. They can force suppliers to lower their prices, cutting their profits, and can bankrupt their rivals by undercutting them—or simply buy them out. Massive companies can also use economies of scale to eliminate jobs—particularly in the digital era, when much work can be automated. All this can result in reduced consumer choice, depressed wages, and a concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer people in fewer locations.
And is that actually occurring? Yes...
- Amazon accounts for 52% of all U.S. book sales, 43 percent of all online commerce, and 45 percent of the fast-growing cloud-computing market. The Seattle-based company has put most brick-and-mortar bookstores out of business, and last year had online sales six times higher than those of Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Nordstrom, Home Depot, Macy’s, Kohl’s, and Costco combined! The self-proclaimed “Everything Store” has absorbed many of its competitors, buying the largest online shoe retailer (Zappos), the most popular live-streaming video platform (Twitch), and the market leader in baby products (Diapers.com). When the latter initially refused to sell, Amazon simply slashed its prices for its own baby products until Diapers.com capitulated.
- Facebook boasts 2 billion active users—more than a quarter of the human race. When CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw a social media threat from Instagram and WhatsApp, he spent $20 billion to buy them. A third social media competitor, Snapchat, rejected an offer of $3 billion, so Facebook launched a feature on Instagram essentially replicating Snapchat’s self-deleting videos and photos. Within a year, Instagram Stories has already attracted more daily users than its rival.
- Google’s parent company, Alphabet, acquires an average of one company a week. More than 1 billion people worldwide use Gmail. For Google, Amazon, and Facebook’s stockholders and executives, this staggering level of success has created enormous wealth, and the companies’ customers benefit from the unprecedented convenience their various services provide.
- The newspaper industry is one example. Facebook and Google control more than 70% of the $73 billion digital advertising market in the U.S. Many of those dollars used to go to media companies: Between 2006 and 2016, U.S. newspaper advertising revenue plummeted from $50 billion to $18 billion, and the number of jobs in the industry has been cut by more than half, from 411,000 in 2001 to 174,000 in 2016. Journalism websites, too, are struggling to survive, because Facebook and Google eat up most of the online ad dollars.
- Department stores and malls are another example. Hundreds of major retail stores have shut their doors because of the shift to online shopping, and dozens of malls have gone dark or are half empty. That, in turn, has damaged the vitality of downtowns and surrounding communities. “The communities wither away, and they never come back,” said Howard Davidowitz, an investment banker and consultant to the retail industry.
Facebook, Google, and Amazon argue that they’re not true monopolies, because their much smaller competitors are only a click away—something that wasn’t the case with, say, AT&T before it was broken up. And the Big Tech beasts spend vast sums keeping lawmakers on their side: Facebook alone poured $3.2 million into federal lobbying in one quarter alone. But this is neither true nor fair to the American public.
Ultimately, consumers will have to rebel en masse against these companies before U.S. lawmakers or regulators will take any action—and there’s no sign that will happen, so one of my New Year's resolutions will be to figure out a way to contact elected officials and educate you as to how the Internet actually works and why Big Tech needs regulation.
Brain Hacking – Top Internet Term of 2018: Big Tech Gets Us Addicted
Each year I
identify the Top Internet Jargon of the Year, the Top Internet Acronym of the
Year, the worthy terms that made the Top 10 List, and 5 online trends to look
for in the coming year.
The Internet
term of 2018 is brain hacking, and the Top Internet Acronym of the Year is NSFW
– Not Safe For Work; the rest of the list includes: clap back, co-working,
FIRE, woke, lawnmower parent, QAnon, #TFA and blockchain. Check it out! HOW
MANY HAVE YOU HEARD OF?
Everyone's
talking tech this year, from POTUS to Congress and Millennials to Big Tech.
Here are the Top 10 Internet Terms for 2018. Explanations of the linked terms
are on NetLingo.com:
1. brain hacking - 2018
Jargon of the Year, big
tech is hooking us by making smartphones a habit, even Silicon Valley is
ditching their devices due to Internet addiction,
digital detox and
child tech
addiction. ADULTS: Please take this 8-question quiz, and for your KIDS: please ask them this 12-question quiz. The term "brain hacking" comes from hijacking peoples' minds to form a habit and
it specifically refers to the way Silicon Valley is engineering smartphones, apps and social media to get us hooked, and to
get you and your family to feel the need to check in constantly. You know when
you're on a mobile social media site and you pull
down on the news feed to get it to refresh, and
you see that little circle scrolling clockwise... that's called the pull-down refresh and the guy who
invented it, is sorry he did because people are now addicted. Read the full story here.
2. NSFW - 2018 Acronym of the
Year "Not Safe For Work" from post-#MeToo movements to celebrities
tweeting “NSFW headlines” it inspired the new book “NSFW:
The Little Black Book of Acronyms”
3. clap back - If Oxford’s word
is toxic, then the twitterverse
is clapping back… it’s a noun, it’s a verb, it’s never been used more than NOW
as influencers continue
to perfect the art of the clapback, thx Ja Rule
4. co-working – sharing
workplaces, it’s a millennial
trend with co-living
and co-sharing;
working in the industry and living in urban areas is impacting people’s lives
and creating new business opportunities
5. FIRE – it means
"Financial Independence, Retire Early" bravo to millennial crusaders
who are geeking out
calculating compound interest and blowing up the whole concept of career and
retirement
6. woke – young and old are
becoming aware, like a man who’s a feminist, or a person's awareness of current
affairs, it implies knowledge and empathy as in "You’re woke, so now
things are, you know, real."
7. lawnmower parent
– first tiger,
then elephant, helicopter, dolphin, attachment, free-range,
lawnmowers "mow down" a path for their snowflakes removing all
obstacles that may cause a struggle
8. QAnon – what started as a cryptic post grew into a sprawling
alternative theory about all things fake
9. #TFA – Omarosa said “they'd
just hashtag it ‘TFA’
and move on when Trump did something insane,” it refers to the Twenty Fifth
Amendment, as in the removal of the POTUS in the event of
impairment…
10. blockchain – the muscle
behind bitcoin (which
Scrabble just added) it makes bitcoin transactions secure, reliable, and
anonymous, it fueled a cryptocurrency
craze and helps with ocean plastic too!
Read more
about the bold terms on NetLingo.com and the Top 5 Online Trends to Watch in
2019:
1. deepfake / facial recognition
/ faceprint – OMG
deepfake wait until you see the photo
2. social credit / social scoring / reputation score
– scary stuff from China, wait it’s from big tech too
3. AI / artificial
intelligence / machine
learning / robotics
– unbelievable developments
4. YIMBY & JOMO - Yes In My Back Yard
& Joy Of Missing Out – new attitude (not NIMBY & FOMO)
5. CBD – yes, as in the
oil, it’s not an actual acronym
because it stands for Cannabidiol
The Top 10
Internet Terms of the Year, compiled by Erin
Jansen, founder of NetLingo.com
Subscribe to
the NetLingo Blog via Email or RSS here
Follow @netlingo on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook
Please copy and distribute! Our purpose is to educate and
entertain :)
DatingNews.com: Get "NSFW" to Decode Flirtatious Slang for Sexty Singles
My friends at DatingNews.com crafted an amazing write-up about the new holiday books, check it out... special thanks to Hayley Matthews! 
NetLingo now boasts the largest list of texting acronyms and sees over 3
million pageviews a year. Erin has embraced the nickname “NetLingo Girl”
and has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, BBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, and “The Martha
Stewart Show” to discuss how technology impacts how we communicate and relate
to one another.
In 2018, Erin released two informative books. “Texting Terms” is a nice list of every acronym and
abbreviation posted on NetLingo. “NSFW” is a naughty list of all the sexy
terms she’s collected in the last 20+ years. “NSFW” is definitely “not suitable
for work.” It includes sexual endearments, crude humor, profanity, and
references to drugs and alcohol. The book doesn’t hold anything back and gives
singles the raw, unfiltered truth. That way, next time someone asks you to tdtm
(talk dirty to me), you’ll know what to do.
“These books can serve as a fun inspiration to keep the
conversation going,” Erin said. “It’s important to understand what
potential dates are texting you, so if you see an acronym you don’t understand,
you can quickly look it up and determine if you should swipe right or left.”
“NSFW” and “Texting Terms” deal with slang in different
ways. You’ll find sections on assicons and sexty smiles on “NSFW,” while
“Texting Terms” deals with more mainstream slang. The raunchy, playful content
in “NSFW” appeals to daters interested in sexting properly, while “Texting
Terms” appeals to parents who want to understand what their kids are saying. Or
singles wondering what a date is saying.
Now, people can turn to their hardcopy of “NSFW” or “Texting
Terms” to find out what a particular slang term or online expression means.
These books have highlighted NetLingo’s most relevant and noteworthy acronyms
to give readers a laugh as well as some good information. Singles can use these
books to help them get to the bottom of what an online crush is saying.Hayley is the Editor-in-Chief of DatingNews, and she handles editorial schedules, interviews, social media, and partnerships, among other things. She's been in the dating industry for more than six years, and her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Bustle, Cosmo, the Huffington Post, AskMen, and Entrepreneur.
Whether They’re Naughty or Nice, NetLingo has Your Holiday Gifts Covered
Sex Sells. Let’s A/B Test that Puppy and See Who Bites
Now that the mid-terms are over let's switch it up and have some fun! I
did one silly little video about “prairie dogging” on YouTube and it
immediately got 36,000 views. Viewers thought it was the “toilet humor” version
(which apparently everyone knows about) but instead it was the “geek humor”
version (which many of you still don’t know about). Didn’t matter… here was
a term that straddled both worlds and in the offline world, it was about
something “dirty” so it generated enough views that Google wanted me to put an
ad on it.WTF? He Told You the Motive on Social Media: No More “Hopes and Prayers”
If I thought Congress was ignorant about internet
technology, you must be idiots regarding guns.
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