Threads, AI & Bad PR
5 in 5 - Brave & Heart HeartBeat #162 ❤️
This week, we ask, were Meta able to launch Threads because of Elon Musk (spoiler alert, yes, absolutely) and speaking of him, why is Mr M actually hiding tweets?
Plus, some interesting musings on the “global water cooler”, Shein’s disastrous PR trip to sweatshops, I mean factories, in China, and can AI help us learn languages?
Let’s get into it.
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#1 - Threads Is OUT
In the juiciest news this year, Meta’s blatant rip off of Twitter has launched, and is the fastest online platform to ever reach 1 million users. For some context, it took Twitter two 2 years, Instagram 2.5 years, and Threads did it in 1.5 hours… The count stands at around 70 million at the time of writing, and is going to keep going up.
There’s really no need for us to explain the app and how it works to you, because, well, it’s Twitter. Mark Zuckerberg really had the audacity to break his eleven year silence on Twitter when Threads launched, posting the popular meme of two identical spiderman figures pointing at each other. That may be the funniest thing he’s ever done.
But what is not funny, to Elon Musk at least, is plagiarism. In the US, ideas are not protected by patent law, so successful legal action would have to prove that intellectual property such as programming code was stolen by Meta. In addition, Meta have had a patent for a “news feed” since 2012.
Twitter have sent a cease-and-desist letter to Meta, threatening to sue them over “systematic, wilful and unlawful misappropriation” of Twitter’s trade secrets and IP, and scraping their data.
Musk seems to think Twitter employees went over to the Zuck side, and while we have no proof of this, it is an absolutely logical ending to the aggressive management tactics put in place by Musk during his takeover, in which 80% off staff were lost. Some quit, some were made redundant, some were simply logged out of their work accounts and trolled by the boss himself.
Work non-stop for exactly what I want you to, even though I wasn’t your boss yesterday, or you’re sacked. What, you have no loyalty to my company and you’ve helped my literal nemesis to create a copy of my app? I did not see this coming.
#2 - Why Is Twitter Limiting The Amount Of Tweets We Can See?
Elon Musk just rolled out a surprising new Twitter feature, and, as with most of what Elon Musk has been up to since he decided he wanted to buy Twitter 75 years ago, we are asking ourselves, what on earth.
The newest thing in Twitter news, apart from the literal copy of Twitter that just launched and stole all their subscribers, is a tweet viewing limit, put in place seemingly without warning this past Tuesday. It was of course met with indignation, as people began sharing screenshots of the message notifying them that they’d exceeded their limit. There was uproar, memes were born, the usual.
Now, surely this goes completely against not only the very idea of social media, but the way that Twitter itself makes money. Ad revenue is what pays the bills at Twitter. Users go on the platform and are shown ads, logically, the more time they spend there the more ads they see, the more bills Musk can pay.
And yet, we know that Musk is famously anti advertising. Tesla doesn’t do ads, and Musk has been very put out by the battle with ad execs which in his opinion stifles free speech. They can, and have, pulled ads away from the platform in response to what Musk sees as his efforts to free speech completely (by removing all common decency, by the by, but we digress).
What else is Musk currently fighting, apart from Mark Zuckerberg in a cage? Artificial Intelligence. While he hasn’t confirmed the reason behind his cap on tweet views, which is unusual for Elon Musk as he usually spews out every detail of his strategy like a bond villain in the final stand off, James Clayton, the reporter who famously got a same day BBC interview with Musk, posits that he may be trying to sell Twitter’s data.
As we know, LLM’s are trained on data, and the conversations on social media hold valuable information on how to respond to questions in a human way. Musk has accused Microsoft of “ripping off” the Twitter database to scrape data to power AI, and Reddit boss Steve Huffman recently said AI companies shouldn’t be getting access to invaluable data contained in Reddit threads for free.
Whether it’s to protect, or monetise, data held on the platform, introduce a paywall further down the line, or just because he felt like it, we’re sure he’ll tell us all soon enough.
#3 - The End Of A Social Era
With the changes at Twitter fresh in our minds and more disastrous than ever this week, this opinion piece in The Verge gives words to a feeling that we couldn’t quite explain.
The author notes that with the downfall of Twitter and the recent Reddit drama (it’s a long story), Instagram having become more of an entertainment platform than anything else, and Facebook just not really being it, we’re living through the end of an era in real time – the era of the “global water cooler”.
They compare the social boom of the last few years on the internet to answering the question, what if we put everybody in the world in the same room at the same time? And during the social boom, when you could go on Twitter during any Game Of Thrones episode for a play by play of what every person watching was thinking (spoilers) that really was what it felt like – like we were all hanging out together.
While alternatives to the big names do exist, we do seem to be coming to the end of an era. The author puts their finger on that feeling, saying that for a while, there seemed to be a few main platforms where it felt like everybody was together, just hanging out in one place, but not anymore.
They conclude that for all its mess and what it did wrong, the last decade of social did manage to get everyone together, for better or for worse.
However, is Threads about to change that, and bring us all back together?
#4 Shein’s Weird Influencer Trip
Shein have a bad reputation, and their PR and marketing decided that the best way around that was, of course, influencers. And lying, we think.
The brand, and perhaps even more so one of the influencers, received huge backlash from a very ill-advised influencer trip to…. a Shein factory in China. In a weird video reminiscent of a guided tour of North Korea, influencers are ferried around the city and the factory, oohing and aahing at all the nice factory workers doing their nice factory work.
In case you didn’t know, Shein have been accused of a myriad of terrible practises, including violating labour laws, stealing designers work, and including up to 10x the legal amount of harmful chemicals, such as lead, in their baby clothes.
Fashion influencer Dani, who received the most backlash, literally marvelled at the fact that workers were using machines, and “sitting down” – they “weren’t even sweating”! How can it be a sweatshop, if they aren’t sweating?
In comparison to the beginning of influencer marketing, we now know that their opinions are paid for, and are much less likely to trust them. Comments on her video rightly noted that if Shein had nothing to hide, they would invite investigative journalists, not paid influencers.
Are we coming to the end of another era, the era where brands could do whatever they liked in terms of ethics and the environment? In the internet age, and especially with Gen Z, the activist generation, people are asking more questions, and brands are going to have to answer them with something other than staged videos and influencer testimonials.
#5 - Can You Use AI To Learn A Language?
Some students have been turning to AI to help them learn languages. For example, talking to ChatGPT in Spanish and asking it to correct errors and provide regional options for vocabulary and phrases. Others have used chatbots as a way to practise their English.
Chatbots have been described as useful for practising a language in context, which is one of the best most immersive ways to learn, without the anxiety of making mistakes in front of a real person. In addition, talking to a bot allows you to speak a language without the constraints of boring, and sometimes just plain weird, scripted conversations.
Research does suggest that AI chatbots are helpful for developing vocabulary, grammar and other language skills, and especially when they offer corrective feedback.
However, there are limits. As we know, chatbots aren’t coded to tell the truth, or in this case have the right answer, as much as they are coded to be convincing. There have been instances of chatbots literally inventing words, and if you don’t know the language well enough to tell if the bot is right or not, you could be in a sticky situation next time you try and order at the bar.
While it’s unlikely chatbots will replace other language learning methods and apps, it’s a great idea for existing language learning applications to incorporate some AI into their products, notably to answer the “why”.
One of the most frustrating things about many language learning apps is their singular, game-like, goal of getting the single right answer. But language isn’t always a yes or no answer, and corrective feedback is sorely missing, as difficult to give via an app which only has a limited number of functions.
An integrated chatbot that can explain to users why they got the answer wrong, without making up words, could be a great way to use the technology to help us learn.
Brave & Heart over and out.
Bonus
Futurama Is Back
If, like us, you were more Futurama than The Simpsons, prepare to rejoice.
While there will apparently be less episodes than originally planned, and there was some drama when the voice of Bender asked for more money - for the record he says he thinks everyone should get more money, not just him – Season 11 is coming soon.
There will be storylines about Cryptocurrencies, a pandemic and vaccines. We can’t wait.
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