 Coming up on DTNS, we cover the big Twitter news, scheduling tweets, but also the stuff with the president. We know, but we have to. And to balance it out, Sarah Lane has done a deep dive on TikTok cults, and we're all joining stepchickens. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, May 29, 2020. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. Also in Los Angeles, I'm Lamar Wilson. Drawn from Studio Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We just had a very long conversation about Sarah's very short rolls of toilet paper. I knew you were going there. I knew it. So if you want that conversation and more, we're going to talk groceries. Get good day internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Twitter announced that scheduled tweets are now available on the Twitter website to all users. A calendar icon in the compose window will now let users schedule tweets up to 18 months in advance. And list of all scheduled tweets is now available in the scheduling interface. This is Insider Attain, the memo from Magic Leap co-founder and CEO Tony Apovitz, hope I said that right, to employees saying that he will step down and the company is actively recruiting candidates to replace them as CEO. The memo also mentions a new round of funding previously reported. Ah, that's I guess not surprising. Facebook's R&D group NPE team launched an app called Venue that acts as a second screen for live events. Starting with NASCAR's Food City presents the supermarket heroes 500 race on Sunday, May 31st. Venue sends out notifications when there's a new moment available in the app. Commentators for a given event hosted in Venue will include journalists, current or former athletes, or aspiring analysts. And hosts may also open up limited chats around specific moments during the event. So kind of a locked down Twitter. Man, that watch party thing, it is really catching on. The Financial Times reports that tracking app maker Tyle has sent a letter to Europe's competition commissioner asking for an investigation into Apple. Tyle complains that Apple made tracking default off for tracking apps, but leaves it on for its own My Find My App. That Tyle also complained about the app store placement and Apple stopping selling at Tyle tags in Apple stores. Apple denies allegations of uncompetitive behavior. Tyle has filed similar complaints in the US. All I heard there was wham. Alright, IDC reports that wearable shipments in quarter one increased 29.7 to 29% percent, which amounts to 72.6 million units. That was driven by strong growth in the hearables category, aka wireless earbuds, which increased 68.3% on the year to account for almost 55% of the overall market. Smartwatches and fitness tracker shipments grew 16.2% on the year, with IDC noting that COVID-19 impacted the available component supply chain for the category. Among the top five wearable companies of Apple, Xiaomi, Samsung, Huawei, and Fitbit, only Fitbit saw a year on year decrease in shipments. Why didn't my voice go up like I was a teenager? Sorry. Because you're so excited about hearables and wearables. Engineers from Microsoft and Google are working on the Chromium project together these days and have integrated the Windows spell check feature into current builds of the Chrome and Edge browsers. This replaces the Hun spell open source implementation and features better support for URLs, acronyms, email addresses, and improved shared custom dictionary. The spell check will be enabled when the browsers are updated or you can enable it through flag pages in the browsers right now. Qualcomm announced the first two chip lines with support for Wi-Fi 6E designed to take advantage of the 6 GHz wireless spectrum. One chip is designed for routers with a theoretical top speed of 5.4 Gbps, on the low end to 16 streams, and 10.8 Gbps on the high end. The second chip line is designed for phones with a top theoretical speed of 3 Gbps and 3.6 Gbps on the higher end. These chips will be available in the second half of 2020. Time to buy a new router. Oh yeah. Uber has added hourly booking in 12 US cities to let you hire a driver for $50 an hour for up to 7 hours. Now hourly bookings cannot be used for airport trips or outside the city service area. Hourly booking was already available from Uber in Australia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. I like this. Yeah. You want to do that? I think it should be $25. $50 is a little much. Bring it down. Bring it down. Sony officially announced it will show off games for the PlayStation 5 as we expected, but it will be on June 4th at 4 p.m. Eastern. The stream will run on Twitch and YouTube, and they say it should be just a little more than an hour. Yay. All right. Let's talk about Twitter and the president of the United States. Thursday, the president signed an executive order related to social networks. It happened right around showtime, so we told you about it yesterday. Now we've had a chance to read through it. We got ahold of the text. It orders the attorney general to establish a working group to look into whether social networks have violated individual state laws against unfair and deceptive practices, as well as help states develop those kinds of laws. It reviews federal ad spending on social networks in light of their moderation practices regarding government communication. It doesn't actually order them to stop. It just says, tell us what you've been spending on and what those free speech practices are, and then send them to us for review. It orders the Department of Commerce to petition the FCC, because the president can't order the FCC to do anything, but it orders the Department of Commerce to petition the FCC to clarify rules regarding the application of CDA Section 230, the Safe Harbor legislation that protects companies from liability for content removal. And it asks the Federal Trade Commission, again, the president can't make the FTC do anything, but it asked the FTC to investigate social networks for unfair or deceptive practices regarding their moderation rules compared to how moderation is conducted. The FCC and FTC are independent agencies. They're not under the direction of the president, so they can implement those requests how they see fit, which means they can ignore them or they can pursue them. The executive order itself does nothing to change CDA Section 230. That is the law that protects the right of the internet companies to moderate content without risking liability. What the executive order says a lot about is a second clause of CDA 230 that says you can't be punished for removing objectionable content, content that you as a platform find objectionable as long as you're acting in good faith. So that's what they're going after is saying, hey, FCC, look and make sure it's that they're acting in good faith, that they're doing what they say, that the terms of service match their moderation policies. That's what they're asking the FTC and the FCC to do. Now, that order came in response to Twitter adding fact-checking links to two of the president's personal tweets regarding mail-in ballots. We talked about that on Wednesday. Thursday evening, Twitter added a more restrictive warning to one of the president's personal tweets regarding the protests in Minneapolis. The president had posted a tweet that used the phrase, quote, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. That is a December 1967 quote of Miami Police Chief Walter Headley, who targeted black communities. The president later tweeted that he intended a different meaning for that quote, but it is exactly what Headley said, and that is usually attributed as the origin of that quote. Twitter cited that historical context in its decision that the tweet violated its policy against glorifying violence and so put a label up that obscures the post when you first go to it with a message. This tweet violated the Twitter rules on glorifying violence. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public's interest for the tweet to remain accessible. There's then a link to learn more about that policy and a link to click through and view the original post. Users cannot reply or retweet the post. However, they can retweet with comment, so you can't just retweet it. But if you want to retweet with comment, you can pass it along that way, and it still has the label on it. Twitter's policy says you can't glorify, celebrate, praise or condone violent crimes, violent events where people were targeted because of their membership in a protected group. That's why they're picking on that Headley quote. They're saying that's exactly what that police chief was doing in 1967, so quoting him is doing that. The policy also says exceptions may be made for violent acts by state actors where violence was not primarily targeting protected groups. So there's wiggle room there, which may be why they didn't remove the tweet. But there's no clear consequence for violating the policy if you are a world leader. Consequences for violating the policy are to remove the tweet and have the account temporarily locked. World leaders, which we talked about on Wednesday have a particular definition, are exempt from that, but there's nothing about labeling their tweets. They didn't take the action of removing the president's tweet or his personal account. They picked a middle ground. Facebook has not removed the post by the president with the same language. Facebook's policy calls for removal of a post when, quote, there is a genuine risk of physical harm or direct threats to public safety. It's worded slightly different. I bring up the text of the posts and the text of the policies because the executive order is specifically saying are the actions of the platforms matching what they say they will do. And so there you go. Now you have the information to make your judgment. Lamar, how do you feel about not only Twitter's policy, but what's happening here? Well, listen, I mean, it's been a tough last day dealing with this. Obviously just, you know, being in a minority group and listen to my opinion is that the president knew exactly what he was doing. He knows history. He knows what that quote came from. And it was entirely inappropriate and tie entirely what Twitter thought it was, in my opinion, a stoking violence in some way. And then even threatening later to send it, which he actually did send a national guard over all of that to say this. Twitter double down and they could have backed off after, you know, the executive order, you know, Dorsey and company double down and I applaud them for that. However, as I mentioned to you earlier, it's one of those things like if, if I wouldn't do this, or you were to do this, or, or anyone else, you know, what what what I still have an account on Twitter, right. You know, and so I understand it's a world leader. I understand you want to tip toe carefully with that. But the double standard is getting old is getting old with me is getting old with a lot of people. And I, there's just a helpless feeling. I can just say from a personal experience, I do not enjoy Twitter anymore. I, I think I told you this earlier I probably would be taking a leaf of absence for it. And it's just, it's too much to deal with right now. And it shouldn't be that way for for social service. So I applaud what Twitter did. I hope they continue it and don't get bullied by him or anyone else that decides to bully. I don't condone the violence. I was I don't condone the the the the riots or anything. Of course not. You know, but he's a leader and the leaders need to be corrected when they're wrong. Simple as that. Yeah. The snobo s podcast calls it social network distancing, where you just kind of put the social network at arm arms length for a while. We're talking about just kind of, you know, getting off of it for a while. Sarah, do you have any more thoughts on this? I, I, I find the whole, I find the whole thing with Twitter, because I see a lot of, and perhaps it's because on Twitter, I've a lot of people who are in media space, saying what they should have done this, they should have done that or the opposite. And to me, the company. It does not. I don't think Twitter is doing anything wrong. I think they might be pussy footing around some stuff a little bit to the point where there are going to be certain people were saying you should have taken a, you know, a bigger stance or there should be accounts that are canceled or something. But as far as introducing new layers to what a tweet means, where it came from, how you might get more context, it's not being rolled out in a very elegant way. I will, I will, I will agree with a lot of people who have, have given them grief for that. I'm not quite sure what Twitter does differently at this point. If they do nothing, it's wrong. If they, you know, take down a bunch of accounts. That's not going to go over well either. So this seems like the appropriate middle ground, but it's not going to make a lot of people happy. So there you go, folks, we've got the facts of the situation. You got a couple of opinions. This is not going away as Justin and Sarah talked about yesterday. In fact, US Senator Ted Cruz sent a letter to the Justice and Treasury departments calling for a criminal investigation into Twitter. He alleges they're violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act by allowing Iranian officials to hold Twitter accounts. Twitter says that it believes it has an exemption from sanction requirements. But that is probably going to be another aspect of this fight as well. All right, let's switch gears a little bit here, Lamar, and talk a little bit about a new function coming to YouTube. Hi, I'm back. Yeah, but YouTube wrote out a new feature. I think that's of today or yesterday, but yeah, they wrote up video chapter markers to all users across desktop phones and tablets. Now on desktop, the playback timeline will feature small breaks to show chapter start points. Mousing over the markers will show the title of the chapter. The mobile app will give haptic feedback when you advance to a new chapter. I think it's cool. And on tablets, videos will snap play to the start of a chapter of user selects. Creators must manually enter in time codes for the start of each chapter, and videos must have at least three time steps and last longer than 10 seconds to use the chapters. So I looked a little bit in depth to this. I didn't actually see this on a couple videos. I think Phil DeFranco was one person who had it, and a few others who were testing it. I think it's a great feature. People who are in news, podcasts, this show, you know, you'll talk about that in a second, could benefit from this type of thing where you talk about different type of stories and have the time codes. It is on the creator of course to do that. So that's the first challenge. I also think how to channels, I think the verge mentioned is to where like how to make a burrito, how to how to use a blender, how to how to sew this. It has multiple steps. And sometimes if the video is 20 minutes long, you like, can I just find out this one part? I already know part I knew step one to three. I don't know four and five. Can I get to that part? It's so funny you brought up burrito because that that is a use case for me. I'm always fold the burrito. I just need the tortilla part. I don't need any of the rest of your recipe. That is exactly why I mentioned it because I really the other week I was just like, I don't know how to fold this. How did they do it at Chipotle? How did they do this? So I found a video that showed exactly how to do a step by step. It was really cool. So it's a good feature. I wish there was some consistency across, but I understand why mobile needs to be haptic. I get that, you know, but you know, but tablet having to have a little different thing. But yeah, I hope more creators use it so that the users will kind of encourage the ones who aren't using it to do that. Will it hurt people who have ads and things? Yeah, probably if you get to skip an ad or so. But you know, I still think in the I think this is better than not having it. It's just labor intensive. I mean, they've had a similar feature for podcasts for audio podcasts for a long time. And because we want to get news out fast. We don't take the time to put in those chapter markers because it takes a long time. So I think you're right. I think it's a great feature. I just you got to figure out that balance between how how labor intensive it is to go in and mark all that stuff versus how many people are going to take advantage of it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if it's like you said Lamar, like if it's a 20 minute video that's about very specific things and really all I care about is what's between minute six and nine, then that actually makes a lot of sense just depends on the kind of video. It does. Hey folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines dot com. Thankfully, Sarah Lane has done great work in digging into the implications of a story from the New York Times called step chickens and the rise of tick tock cults. Sarah, what have you found? Oh, man, Tom, I'm glad you asked. So we were talking about social media distancing a couple of minutes ago and I have distanced myself from tick tock on purpose. I understand what it is. We talk about it on the show quite a bit. It's fast rising, you know, a lot of money being made for bite dance, etc, etc. But I stayed away from it because I knew it was going to be a time suck. I mean, I can barely manage my dog's Instagram accounts. You know what I'm saying? All right, so here's the deal with step chickens. And as you mentioned, there was a New York Times article that just it was sort of like tick tock cults. And I was like, All right, let's dig in. Let's see what this whole thing is. So I will attempt to condense this as much as possible because it's kind of a crazy story. A woman named Melissa Ong was working at Google, which actually has really nothing to do with the story, but that's where she was working and wore a chicken suit to a like a Halloween company costume contest, right? So she had this chicken suit. And she was like, Oh, tick tock, I should get on tick tock and, you know, the chicken suit that I have in my house, I'd be all like, maybe I'll put it to good use and do some funny videos on tick tock and maybe I'll get a little bit of a following. I made a bunch of videos wearing the chicken suit. She says, in actually a YouTube video, hilariously, she was like, Yeah, I didn't really get any traction, but I was committed. I felt like eventually it would be funny to somebody. Eventually, on a video that she was doing and she was doing all sorts of kind of off color stuff. Somebody wrote in a comment, quote, step chicken, what are you doing? And she she Melissa says, it was just funny, like what I don't really know what they meant. I don't think they know what I meant I was doing. It was just funny. And it kind of stuck. You know, fast forward a little bit. She had gotten more followers from various tick tock comedy stuff that she was doing. She was definitely trying to, you know, try to make a name for herself. And she started experimenting with just like, crazy stuff where she was like, I then just asked my followers. Hey, everyone just like, type the comment e. And she was like, and I woke up the next morning and they were like, 100,000 people who did it. And I realized, I might be on to something here. There's something going on here. It's not about what I'm asking them to do. It's the fact that we're all kind of in this together. So there was a little bit of a quote, cult that emerged. Now, Melissa had a random photo that she sent to a friend way back in the day. This is, you know, previous to tick tock even existing. And, you know, it's sort of a unflattering photo of her that was sort of funny between two folks and she had suggested this as the step chicken logo, and everyone was like, yep, we're doing it. And to the point where so many people who are on tick tock and, you know, we're talking millions of people were like, who is this woman in all of your profile pictures because all of these people had moved her picture to their pictures and, you know, it was is a very sort of ha ha inside baseball type thing. Now, because it's tick tock and because we're in the world that we're living in now, there are now the rival gangs of sorts that have cropped up so that now that step chickens, as they're known, they're the step chickens step chickens rise up. They're now battling other tick tock gangs. And it's all very, it's, it's, it's very friendly. It's not mean spirit and stuff at all. It's just silly. But it's like, it's a, it's an identity thing that is really fascinating to me. And I, you know, just learned about this over the last few days, they're definitely going to be people listening to the show saying, well, what about the purple versus green alien gangs, you know, in, in, in Grand Theft Auto like that preceded this, which it did. Don't happen to play that game myself. So I was not privy to this whole thing. But the idea that, and, and, and before I, you know, open it up to the group, the New York Times article weighed very heavily on, well, you got a lot of board teenagers right now because no one can go outside. And so that's what this is all about. And I think that there's some truth in that. But I also think that there's some, just some like, just the fun aspect of how silly this is and how nonsensical it is. And Melissa on really didn't have some sort of a goal besides being like, I don't know, just trying to see what stuck. And this eventually stuck. And now a lot of people are really into it. This reminds me of BB Live show, NSFW show, Night Attack, the Diamond Club. If people aren't aware, those are sister podcasts of DTNS hosted by Justin Robert Young and Brian Brushwood, where you just found a bunch of like minded people. You got them and like, Oh, we're all on the internet. Let's play pranks. They did, they did pranks where they just responded, Oh, or E in the the step chickens to someone's account just to see if they could get everyone to do it. And so then they're like, what else can we do if we tell people to do stuff? They'll do it as long as it's good nature. And that was the Diamond Club. That's exactly it. And Diamond Club joked around like not a cult, just a loose affiliation. This is all in the pattern. I was watching Melissa Ong's video describing all this. I'm like, Oh, yes. No, you've you've done all the same steps. It's just you've reached higher heights because you surfed in on the random TikTok wave. Yeah. And what was interesting, this is a YouTube video that she she laid out being like, okay, if you're very confused, here's how here's how this whole thing happened from front to back. And, you know, it's it's it's well produced. And she's very well spoken. And it's like, she's not sitting there being like, I don't know. I don't know how this happened. She's like, No, I know how this happened. And here's how it happened. She doesn't know why, but she knows how. She doesn't know why caught on to the point that it did. But she understands that she was going for something and it eventually worked. And next up YouTube and Instagram. That's why this video is on YouTube because she says, like, though that's my target. Yeah, they're coming. Oh, yeah, I better watch out. Or join this or join. Yeah, you used the word gang, which I thought was was was very accurate because people who joined gangs usually it's just it's a sense of belonging wanting to be part of something. And then that's what the New York Times article mentioned to, you know, these kids, you know, even some adults just, yeah, they're bored. But a lot of people, even when you're not bored, just want to be part of something that's cool. Step chickens is cool. And it's cool to be associated with that it's cool to change your, your profile picture to make memes out of it. And so that's all it's about it's harmless is not it's not some, you know, some crazy business idea. It may fade out in a few months, but it's just a great moment. Like, why not? It's just, it's a nice diversion. I love it. I did too. And it's, it's, I mean, not to, I mean, I don't want to, I mean, under emphasize how big a deal it actually is, even though I didn't know about it because, hey, man, I can't follow every meme on the internet. But I mean, there were like sports teams who were changing their official Tik Tok logos to the step chickens logo, which is a picture of her face. Like the Houston Rockets, the NBA team. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Isn't sort of like, oh, like somebody's like, you know, little cousin, you know, thought it was funny. It's like, no, this was quite a movement. And what like, what were we all going for? What was the, what was the mantra of the movement? No, there wasn't, there isn't one. But it is fun. I would, I would say, like, especially in this day and age, there is something to that whole idea of, you know, we all need a little something fun going on. This is fun. Well, social media, just like I mentioned earlier about Twitter, I don't, I don't consider Twitter fun anymore. Twitter used to be fun. And it's just not enjoyable. So just, it's nice to have a place or hear about a movement of people just kind of just having fun on social media again. It's nice. Yeah, the New York Times tried to make the point, and I think it's a fine point that you don't need even a thousand true fans anymore. Like we can have all these cults of a few hundred people. At the same time, Melissa Ong's got millions of people following her on TikTok. So I don't know that she is the example of the point they were trying to make. But instead, sort of like, you know, the the idea that like we we on the on the Internet, we think like, oh, the gatekeepers have arrived. Maybe maybe not, you know, there's still chances for these random explosions to happen. Yeah, right on. Well, speaking of random explosions, sometimes there are very heated debates going on in our discord. But for the most part, we're all just won't just step chickens just hanging out and having a great time. And you can join by linking to a patron account at patreon.com. And have fun with us. Also, shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Ruchan Brantley, Paulo Jacob and Martin James. Yes, all step chickens welcome in the DTNS cult. Please join us. Let's check in with Len Peralta, who has been drawing during the show. Oh my gosh, Len, this is my new profile picture. You know, the thing about the chickens, I only found out about them today. And it was very, very interesting to hear just her process, everything else that went on. And, you know, one thing I took away from it is you only know if you know. So I wanted to be a little bit more coy with this image. In case you didn't know what step chickens were, you should go check it out. This is today it's the it's called you only know if you know I don't mention step chickens in this. So it but but it's alluded to. But it's here is perfection. It's a great it's a great image of her. And it was a lot of fun to draw. And, and yeah, it you only you only know if you know that's all I'll say about this one. And if you're interested in seeing it or or actually getting it is you sent my Patreon right now on Patreon.com forward slash Len or at my online store at Len Brawl store.com. What if they use this as their picture? Oh, that'd be I'd be flattered. Oh, yeah, your life will change overnight, man. I mean, you know, it's it's you know, talk to the gang. Thanks to Lamar Wilson. You know, you are our number one step chicken always. And we haven't seen you in a few. And I don't and I don't even know what I was doing when I was saying it. We haven't seen you in a few weeks though so let everybody know what you've been up to. Yeah, you know, just, you know, just dealing with the whole pandemic thing and all that working from home. But my latest video on YouTube is, I think it'll be interesting to this audience I kind of go. The first night, like literally after HBO Max dropped. I did a walkthrough through it. So if you haven't seen anyone do that yet. I talk about HBO Max because I'm, I'm very passionate about it. I'm, I'm even more so about the Flintstones and things but you know, we can ignore that for now but yeah just check out YouTube.com slash Lamar Wilson. And oh yeah, you'll you'll learn some stuff about HBO Max because I love it. And I keep on to keep saying that because you're paying me every time I say I love it. And I'm kidding. Not paying. Not paying. Now you have to double disclose. Great. Yeah, right. Hey, yesterday I put, yesterday I was not on the show because I was working on an upcoming series called Know a Little More where I'm going to deep dive into individual topics. One of the topics I had planned to work on anyway, serendipitously, was Safe Harbor. So if you noticed yesterday, there was an episode where I dig in for 15, 20 minutes about Safe Harbor and CDA 203. If you really want to understand what that law actually says and what it doesn't, why it was created, what it's meant to do, go listen to that episode. James C. Smith from Irvine said, the Safe Harbor explainer show was fantastic. I thought I understood that already, but I learned so much more when Tom went into great detail that was easy to follow. I also like the way Tom and team covered the story of the U.S. President's Twitter posting getting labeled and the full history of how Twitter's policy has evolved over time. You guys are the best. Thank you, James. That's exactly why we do it. So I appreciate the feedback and I hope everyone else gets the benefit from that as well. You can keep us going by supporting us at DailyTechNewShow.com slash Patreon. And if you've got burning questions or comments, our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Keep them coming. We love to read your stuff. We're also live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC. And you can find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. You only know if you know. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. Well, I hope you have enjoyed this program.