Digital Insights - 6 January 2023

Satya Nadella talks inclusivity and “digital imperatives” while in India

• This week, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella posted photos on LinkedIn and Twitter of his meeting with the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi.

• Nadella was in India this week presenting at Microsoft’s Future Ready Technology Summit in Bengaluru.

• In his keynote, Nadella discussed digital imperatives for companies in 2023, and highlighted “reasoning engines” like ChatGPT that will increasingly play a significant role in the future of work.

• Earlier in the week the CEO spoke at an education showcase where he highlighted the importance of inclusivity in the tech industry and advocated for the cause of “technology making a difference in community”.

Meta executives prepare to decide on Trump’s return to Facebook

• Meta executives will soon consider whether to lift Donald Trump's ban from Facebook and Instagram, almost two years after he was banned.

• After facing suspension in 2021 for praising violence at the Capitol on the platform, Policy Chief Nick Clegg will rule whether to remove the ban on the former US president.

• The ban could be lifted in the coming weeks if the company determines the “risk to public safety has receded,” but warns that it could hit Trump with “sanctions” for future policy violations.

LinkedIn CPO unveils ‘big ideas’ for 2023

• Tomer Cohen, Chief Product Officer at LinkedIn, took to his personal LinkedIn to unveil the product updates for 2023 that are likely to impact the way we use the platform.

• Improved accessibility: noting a 33% uptick in conversations on the platform around accessibility, LinkedIn is releasing a number of accessibility improvements including formally announcing auto-captions on videos, standardised job titles related to accessibility and new alt-text functionality to Campaign Manager.

• Personalisation in the job hunt: recognising that many people are simply ‘casually’ on the lookout for jobs that match their values and lifestyle, LinkedIn is unveiling new personalised job collections that don’t require users to manually search for roles.

• Stronger focus on B2B purchases: LinkedIn recently launched product pages for B2B products and plans to improve these with new filters to personalise the process for buyers.

• An improved experience for users who post: as previously announced in 2022, LinkedIn is bringing in scheduled posts for users. Additionally, for users whose profiles are set to Creator Mode, LinkedIn will be providing more robust analytics on audience and post performance.

Twitter - new features for Blue subscribers

• Twitter is introducing “Priority Ranking” for Twitter Blue subscribers, with Elon Musk promising to make Blue subscribers more visible on the site.

• How “Priority Ranking” works is currently unclear, with Twitter saying only: “This feature prioritizes your replies on tweets that you interact with”.

• Blue subscribers will also be able to post videos up to 60 minutes long in order to compete with other video-based social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok.

Areas of focus for Instagram in 2023

• Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has outlined the platform’s ambitions for 2023, in a reel on his personal channel.

• Creativity will be the primary focus for 2023 - it is the “origin” of the platform and “fundamental” to Instagram moving forward, he stated.

• In order to compete with other platforms, Instagram’s other focuses for the year include helping people to discover more interests – something TikTok excels at, and to spark connections with people – in which platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter both lead.

Sam Bankman-Fried pleads not guilty to fraud

• Former FTX CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried has pled not guilty to criminal charges of fraud for “looting billions of dollars” at the now bankrupt crypto exchange.

• Bankman-Fried is has been accused of illegally using FTX customer deposits to fund his hedge fund Alameda Research and buy real estate. He is also alleged to have misled investors on the financial condition of Alameda and defrauded the Federal Election Commission funnelling $70m in illegal contributions to political candidates.

• Colleagues of the disgraced crypto former-billionaire, Caroline Ellison (CEO of Alameda Research) and Gary Wang (FTX’s co-founder) have pled guilty to criminal charges of fraud and conspiracy.

• Between court cases Bankman-Fried has made several public appearances apologising for mistakes made during his running of FTX but denied any criminal liability.

Google develops free terrorism moderation tool for smaller websites

• Following new legislation in the UK and EU forcing internet giants to do more to tackle extremist content, Google has begun to develop a free moderation tool that smaller websites can use to identify and remove terrorist material.

• The software is being developed with Google’s research and development unit Jigsaw and Tech Against Tanrrorism, a UN-backed initiative that helps tech companies police online terrorism.

• It is particularly important as the new regulatory regime has raised concerns about the ability of smaller players in the sector to effectively moderate content and comply with regulations.

• With Jigsaw, Google hopes to tackle the next step of the moderator process concerning helping human moderators make decisions on content flagged as dangerous and illegal. It will begin testing with two unnamed sites at the beginning of this year.

Meta is fined for illegal ad practices by the EU

• Meta has suffered a major defeat after EU regulators found it had illegally forced users to effectively accept personalized ads. The ruling against the social media platform includes a fine of 390 million euros and could have serious consequences for its advertising businesses on Instagram and Facebook.

• Ireland’s data privacy board (Meta’s main EU regulator) determined that the company's privacy agreement was such that users had to accept giving access to their data or lose access to the platforms altogether.

• The authorities concluded that placing legal consent within the terms of service essentially forced users to accept personalized ads, violating GDPR regulations.

• This year the European Court of Justice is also expected to rule on such cases which could lead to more changes to Meta’s data-collection practices.

Microsoft looking to beef up Bing with ChatGPT

• Microsoft plans to update its Bing search engine with AI from OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot to improve search results in March, as it seeks to gain a competitive edge over Google’s dominant search engine.

• Bing was first launched in 2009 and although it didn’t take the market by storm, it did become the second-most widely used search engine. In 2019, Microsoft made a $1 billion investment into OpenAI.

• OpenAI, an artificial intelligence company best known for developing DALL-E, which uses AI to transform text prompts into images, launched ChatGPT toward the end of 2022. Functioning as a chatbot, ChatGPT is a long-form question-answering AI, able to give comprehensive and human-quality responses, with impressive results.

• It is not yet known how ChatGPT will be used by Bing, but its impressive capabilities may give it a strong edge over Google, so much so that some suggest the AI could wholly replace Google on its own.