Sources told my colleague Erin Griffith that Airbnb has long overlooked the problem to avoid turning away business. Uhhh … there were 700 people at an Airbnb party during a pandemic?! Airbnb has forever struggled with “party houses” - rented homes where people throw ragers that sometimes spark violence or annoy the neighbors. (Nick Corasaniti of our politics team has more here.)
Email us at and put VOTE in the subject line.īogus information hyped by powerful people has a big impact: In the latest episode of the “Stressed Election” video series from The New York Times, my colleagues trace how partisans in Kentucky capitalized on a made-up tweet about voter fraud to spread doubts about the outcome of the 2019 governor’s race. It’s your turn: What do you want to know about how tech companies are handling election-related information and results? My Times colleagues and I will try to tackle a selection of your questions in the coming days.
There’s no easy fix, but the researchers are telling us that wallowing in credible information and focusing on what’s going right can arm our brains against the toxicity. Look, the next few days and weeks around Election Day are going to be noisy and confusing, and we’re going to be bombarded with misleading information. Focusing on isolated problems in elections can be used as false evidence to support bogus claims of voter fraud, the researchers said. In its guide to the public and journalists, the coalition recommended highlighting positive experiences people have in voting and emphasizing that the vast majority of ballot casting and counting will go smoothly. (Twitter also continues to apply warning labels to the president’s misleading information about voting, including as recently as Monday night.) My colleague Mike Isaac wrote that among the communications are messages stating that voting results may not come immediately on Election Day, and that voting by mail is safe and reliable. That’s why Twitter on Monday said it would start putting messages in a prominent spot at the top of Americans’ feeds to highlight credible information that can head off commonly circulated misleading information about the election. But repeated good information can be powerful and stick in our minds, too. Misinformation has a way of getting ingrained in people’s brains - particularly if we see it often enough or it comes from people we trust. There’s constant drama about what Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other big internet properties are doing about the spread of conspiracy theories and misleading information about the coronavirus and possible voter fraud, including from President Trump. The fights we’re watching unfold at the big internet companies have mostly focused on the first. There are two ways to counter bad information: Tackle the misinformation, or blare the correct information so people don’t encounter or believe the bogus stuff. If you don’t already get this newsletter in your inbox, please sign up here. Yes, for everything: my rent, phone bills, food, gym classes, train tickets, rides on Didi - the Chinese equivalent of Uber. When you lived in China, did you use payment apps? No typing a 16-digit credit card number into a tiny field on your computer. But the Chinese apps have the edge for online payments. I think Apple Pay is much easier to use, for in-person checkout at least. Maybe in India.Īlipay and WeChat are hardly perfect. I’m not convinced similar QR-code-based digital payment systems will catch on elsewhere. Is China a preview of digital payments taking hold in the rest of the world?Īlipay and WeChat developed for China’s specific needs. (Our newsletter cousins at DealBook have more information on the initial public stock offering of Ant Group.) Several government-owned funds and institutions are investors in Ant Group, Alipay’s owner. But in response to the government’s scrutiny, Alipay and WeChat deliberately now say they are partners to banks, not competitors. These apps initially portrayed themselves as alternatives to the conventional, government-backed banking system.