As YouTube struggles with controversy, TikTok is surging in popularity. The VidCon digital video conference has always been focused on YouTube creators and their fans, but last week’s 10th annual gathering reflected changes — and threats — for the video-sharing site. YouTube has been criticized for mishandling content on its platform related to a range of sensitive topics, including anti-vax misinformation, online harassment, white nationalism, and conspiracy theories. Many conversations at the event this year centered on the health of the YouTube platform and creators’ experiences with harassment and exploitation, with one popular YouTuber asking onstage, “how do we protect ourselves from our audience?” according to BuzzFeed News’s report from VidCon.
[Ryan Broderick / BuzzFeed News]
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The FTC fined Facebook $5 billion, and Wall Street didn’t even blink. Facebook will pay a $5 billion settlement to the Federal Trade Commission related to charges that it violated users’ privacy during the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But after news of the settlement broke on Friday, Wall Street pushed the value of Facebook shares up slightly, to nearly $205. Why? Because $5 billion is a “very doable number for Facebook” — and investors were well-prepared because the company said it expected a fine in that price range back in March.
Speaking of Facebook and privacy violations ... Congress still hasn’t moved forward on a bill to protect consumer privacy. With only a few weeks to go until Congress takes its recess in August, legislators are running out of time to act on creating federal online privacy legislation. According to Politico, Sen. John Kennedy said at a hearing last week, “We’ve been talking for what, two years about a privacy bill? Haven’t seen one, don’t know if we’ll ever see one.” Congress’s failure to act seems especially troubling in light of the FTC’s Facebook penalty announcement last week.
Seven million students’ names, emails, ages, and other personal information were exposed by a misconfigured online education platform called K12.com that’s used by more than 1,000 school districts around the US. As Engadget reports, the information was available online for more than a week before it was fixed, though it’s uncertain if any bad actors were aware of the breach and accessed the information.
Listen up: Today on Recode Decode, Kara Swisher talks to Democratic 2020 presidential candidate Mayor Pete Buttigieg. In the interview, Buttigieg told Kara Swisher that he supports a national “right to be forgotten” from the internet. “Some of these things are fierce technical — as well as legal, as well as constitutional — problems,” Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said. “But at the end of the day, we need to have some level of relationship to the value that is created in our name.”
Other topics of conversation between the two included his new “Douglass Plan” to help Black Americans, and, of course, Donald Trump. Want to watch it for yourself? A video of the full interview can be found here.
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Recode and Vox have joined forces to uncover and explain how our digital world is changing — and changing us. Subscribe to Recode podcasts to hear Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka lead the tough conversations the technology industry needs today.