Datree Smart Policy Editor. Screenshot: Datree

A group of 14 human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and PEN International, have written an open letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai demanding he reverse plans to launch a censored search engine in China.

News broke in early August that Google was planning to re-enter China after an eight-year hiatus. The Intercept obtained leaked documents showing that firm is working on a new search service, codenamed "Dragonfly," and that Pichai met with a Chinese government official in December 2017.

In their letter, the human rights groups said the plan would be an "an alarming capitulation by Google on human rights," as it would mean accommodating "one of the world's most repressive internet censorship and surveillance regimes."

The letter demands three things:

Google announced it was leaving the Chinese market in 2010 after it detected a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack," the primary goal of which was to infiltrate the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

"If Google's position has indeed changed, then this must be stated publicly, together with a clear explanation of how Google considers it can square such a decision with its responsibilities under international human rights standards and its own corporate values," the letter said.

It added that protections for whistleblowers are essential, pointing out that Google staff were instrumental in raising concerns about its involvement in military drone programme "Project Maven." The company has since set out ethical guidelines on the use of AI and plans to withdraw from the Pentagon project in 2019.

The letter concludes: "As it stands, Google risks becoming complicit in the Chinese government's repression of freedom of speech and other human rights in China. Google should heed the concerns raised by human rights groups and its own employees and refrain from offering censored search services in China."

Business Insider has contacted Google for comment.

Dear Mr Pichai

(cc: Ben Gomes, Vice President of Search; Kent Walker, Senior Vice President of Global Affairs)

Like many of Google's own employees, we are extremely concerned by reports that Google is developing a new censored search engine app for the Chinese market. The project, codenamed "Dragonfly", would represent an alarming capitulation by Google on human rights. The Chinese government extensively violates the rights to freedom of expression and privacy; by accommodating the Chinese authorities' repression of dissent, Google would be actively participating in those violations for millions of internet users in China.

We support the brave efforts of Google employees who have alerted the public to the existence of Dragonfly, and voiced their concerns about the project and Google's transparency and oversight processes.

In contrast, company leadership has failed to respond publicly to concerns over Project Dragonfly, stating that it does not comment on "speculation about future plans". Executives have also refused to answer basic questions about how the company will safeguard the rights of users in China as it seeks to expand its business in the country.

Since Google publicly exited the search market in China in 2010, citing restrictions to freedom of expression online, the Chinese government has strengthened its controls over the internet and intensified its crackdown on freedom of expression. We are therefore calling on Google to:

Our concerns about Dragonfly are set out in detail below.

Freedom of expression and privacy in China and Google's human rights commitments

It is difficult to see how Google would currently be able to relaunch a search engine service in China in a way that would be compatible with the company's human rights responsibilities under international standards, or its own commitments. Were it to do so, in other words, there is a high risk that the company would be directly contributing to, or complicit in, human rights violations.

The Chinese government runs one of the world's most repressive internet censorship and surveillance regimes. Human rights defenders and journalists are routinely arrested and imprisoned solely for expressing their views online. Under the Cybersecurity Law,[1] internet companies operating in China are obliged to censor users' content in a way that runs counter to international obligations to safeguard the rights of access to information, freedom of expression and privacy. Thousands of websites and social media services in the country remain blocked, and many phrases deemed to be politically sensitive are censored.[2] Chinese law also requires companies to store Chinese users' data within the country and facilitate surveillance by abusive security agencies.

According to confidential Google documents obtained by The Intercept, the new search app being developed under Project Dragonfly would comply with China's draconian rules by automatically identifying and filtering websites blocked in China, and "blacklisting sensitive queries". Offering services through mobile phone apps, including Google's existing Chinese apps, raises additional concerns because apps enable access to extraordinarily sensitive data. Given the Cybersecurity Law's data localization and other requirements, it is likely that the company would be enlisted in surveillance abuses and their users' data would be much more vulnerable to government access.

Google has a responsibility to respect human rights that exists independently of a state's ability or willingness to fulfil its own human rights obligations.[3] The company's own Code of Conduct promises to advance users' rights to privacy and freedom of expression globally. In Google's AI Principles, published in June, the company pledged not to build "technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights". The company also commits, through the Global Network Initiative, to conduct human rights due diligence when entering markets or developing new services. Project Dragonfly raises significant, unanswered questions about whether Google is meeting these commitments.

Transparency and human rights due diligence

Google's refusal to respond substantively to concerns over its reported plans for a Chinese search service falls short of the company's commitment to accountability and transparency.[4]

In 2010, the human rights community welcomed Google's announcement that it had "decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn", citing cyber-attacks against the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists and attempts by the Chinese government to "further limit free speech on the web".

If Google's position has indeed changed, then this must be stated publicly, together with a clear explanation of how Google considers it can square such a decision with its responsibilities under international human rights standards and its own corporate values. Without these clarifications, it is difficult not to conclude that Google is now willing to compromise its principles to gain access to the Chinese market.

There also appears to be a broader lack of transparency around due diligence processes at Google. In order to "know and show" that they respect human rights, companies are required under international standards to take steps to identify, prevent and mitigate against adverse impacts linked to their products - and communicate these efforts to key stakeholders and the public.[5] The letter from Google employees published on 16 August 2018 demonstrates that some employees do not feel Google's processes for implementing its AI Principles and ethical commitments are sufficiently meaningful and transparent.[6]

Protection of whistle-blowers

Google has stated that it cannot respond to questions about Project Dragonfly because reports about the project are based on "leaks".[7] However, the fact that the information has been publicly disclosed by employees does not lessen its relevance and rights impact.

In relation both to Project Dragonfly and to Google's involvement in the US government's drone programme, Project Maven, whistle-blowers have been crucial in bringing ethical concerns over Google's operations to public attention. The protection of whistle-blowers who disclose information that is clearly in the public interest is grounded in the rights to freedom of expression and access to information.[8] The OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises recommend that companies put in place "safeguards to protect bona fide whistle-blowing activities".[9]

We are calling on Google to publicly commit to protect whistle-blowers in the company and to take immediate steps to address the concerns employees have raised about Project Dragonfly.

As it stands, Google risks becoming complicit in the Chinese government's repression of freedom of speech and other human rights in China. Google should heed the concerns raised by human rights groups and its own employees and refrain from offering censored search services in China.

Signed, the following organizations:

Access Now Amnesty International Article 19 Center for Democracy and Technology Committee to Protect Journalists Electronic Frontier Foundation Human Rights in China Human Rights Watch Independent Chinese PEN Centre International Service for Human Rights (ISHR) PEN International Privacy International Reporters Without Borders (RSF) WITNESS

Signed in individual capacity (affiliations for identification purposes only):

Ronald Deibert Professor of Political Science and Director of the Citizen Lab University of Toronto

Rebecca MacKinnon Director, Ranking Digital Rights

Xiao Qiang Research Scientist Founder and Director of the Counter-Power Lab School of Information, University of California at Berkeley

Lokman Tsui Assistant Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication The Chinese University of Hong Kong

It's no secret that Snapchat has been leaning into augmented reality in recent years, arming marketers with a suite of products that enable them to test the technology in their ads.

But it turns out, some brands have it better than others.

Select marketers, including Adidas, Anheuser-Busch and McDonald's are part of of an exclusive group that gets early access to Snapchat's latest proprietary AR tools and ad formats — before they become widely available.

They are part of what Snapchat is calling "AR Partnership Program," a pilot initiative where 10 of its partners get early access to new formats and buying methods in the form of alpha and beta tests, as well as visibility into Snapchat's AR product roadmap.

The program, which was rolled out in January, is led by Snapchat's AR product marketing and management team. It is geared at strategic partners who are "leaning in," that is, have been identified as having increased their investment over time.

The idea, according to the company, is to work with brands to gauge not just how AR can prompt user engagement, but also real business results.

"We want to learn exactly how AR can drive every type of marketing objective, and we want to make it even easier to develop and easier to buy," Carolina Arguelles, Snap's head of augmented reality (AR) Monetization and Product Strategy, told Business Insider. "We want to have these brands really inform the things that we're developing, and test with us early."

'Bud Light Man' broke new ground in AR ads

Anheuser-Busch, for example, was one of the first companies to dabble in augmented reality last year, when it created a dancing 3D "Bud Light Man" using Snapchat's 3D World Lenses. Since then, the company has continued to work with Snapchat to iterate on new ideas.

The company, for example, brought Budweiser's iconic "Dilly Dilly" campaign to life in the US through "Sponsored Snappables," Snapchat's gamified AR lenses. If consumers swiped left on the Snapchat carousel, they were able to use Snappables to play an interactive game with their friends. If they swiped right, they could use a dual-lens that they could share with their friends.

"AR allows consumers to engage with our brands in a deeper and more meaningful way while bringing the personalities of our brands to life," said Spencer Gordon, senior director of digital at Anheuser-Busch. "By participating in the program we've been able to tap into the Snapchat team's consumer insights, which has allowed us to produce impactful, relevant creative that's tailored to the right consumer."

Snap is trying to create a new ad medium hand-in-hand with big marketers

To be sure, platforms having special groups of marketers and advertisers dedicated to improve their products and help them better cater to the industry's needs is nothing new. Facebook, for example has a client council as well as a creative and small business council.

But Snap's AR Partnership Program is different in that it is tailored according to each client's individual needs, said Arguelles. There is a core program strategy team, and other teams, including engineering and creative, are looped in when required. The program also includes access to senior leaders and experts on its engineering and creative teams, such as Steven M. Horowitz, Snap's VP of Technology and Jeff Miller, its global head of creative strategy.

"The team rotates and the cadence depends on each advertiser's individual needs," she said. "It's a hub-and-spoke model rather than one large roundtable...[with a] team of experts that works with each client individually to drive impact."

When Budweiser launched its biggest-ever commercial campaign during the soccer World Cup this summer spanning more than 50 countries, for example, it tapped into program to push the envelope further. Anheuser-Busch reached out to to its Snapchat reps, asking them whether it could merge sound and AR technology to create a sound-activated lens.

Once the brand's account and creative strategy leads confirmed that such tech was possible and was indeed on the roadmap, Anheuser-Busch was brought on board as an exclusive launch partner with a June launch. A Snapchat team built then built the AR Lens, which was able to recognize volume level around the phone to make matching animations — in this case encouraging users to cheer into the camera for their favorite soccer teams.

Anheuser-Busch

The brands themselves are plugged in as well. All of Anheuser-Busch's digital brand managers, for example, meet with the Snapchat team on a regular basis to ensure that they are up to speed on the latest products and services. The company also has two digital content specialists who help it cascade the learning, best practices and results across the entire portfolio.

The hope is that AR ads can eventually work for all sorts of Snap advertisers

While Adidas, Anheuser-Busch and McDonald's are big-name first movers, Snapchat has been increasingly making a bigger play for direct-response brands and their budgets. This is also reflected in its AR Partnership Program, which counts King Games, the UK-based company behind the mobile game Candy Crush, as a member.

King was a launch partner for Shoppable AR, becoming the first brand to drive app downloads directly from an AR Lens.

"Most marketers haven't realized that AR can drive results," said Shane Horneij, senior director of performance marketing at King. "Snapchat has millions of people using AR every day, and in a mindset to play — a perfect opportunity to drive engagement for our games at scale."

Ultimately, Snapchat hopes that it'll be able to use learnings from the program to relay the value of AR brands of all stripes. And that the members will start to share best-practices among themselves.

"Until now, we've gathered learnings at each individual level," said Arguelles. "The next step is how do we bring everything together to cross-pollinate these learnings."

Natural Cycles, the app which claims to be an effective method of contraception, has had a Facebook ad banned after it was deemed to be misleading by the Advertising Standards Association (ASA).

Natural Cycles, which has just been greenlit by the Food and Drug Administration to launch in the US, claims it can provide by protection-free birth control by tracking a woman's menstrual cycle through her body temperature.

Using an algorithm developed by the company, the app then shows the user whether she is either on a fertile day or a non-fertile day, in which case it claims it is safe to have unprotected sex. The app costs £39.99 ($51.50) a year or £5.99 ($7.71) a month, and comes with a thermometer.

The ASA investigated a paid-for Natural Cycles ad on Facebook in July 2017, which claimed: "Natural Cycles is a highly accurate, certified, contraceptive app that adapts to every woman's unique menstrual cycle. Sign up to get to know your body and prevent pregnancies naturally."

The ASA found that Natural Cycles had exaggerated the app's "typical-use" failure rate — i.e. how often it fails when someone doesn't use it 100% correctly, as is often the case with contraceptives.

Natural Cycles told the ASA that clinical trials showed it was 93% effective with typical use, but the ASA's investigation found that this figure was exaggerated, and a more realistic figure was 91.7%. It also found that Natural Cycles requires far more input from the user than other contraception methods, and that only 9.6% of inputted cycles in the app could be considered "perfect-use."

Natural Cycles' co-founder and CTO Elina Berglund Scherwitzl.Courtesy of Natural Cycles

"We considered that in isolation, the claim 'clinically tested alternative to birth control methods' was unlikely to mislead. However, when presented alongside the accompanying claim 'Highly accurate contraceptive app', it further contributed to the impression that the app was a precise and reliable method of preventing pregnancies which could be used in place of other established birth control methods," the ruling concluded.

"Because the evidence did not demonstrate that in typical-use it was 'highly accurate' and because it was significantly less effective than the most reliable birth control methods, we considered that in the context of the ad the claim was likely to mislead."

The ASA banned the ad from appearing on Facebook and warned Natural Cycles not to say that the app was a highly accurate method of contraception, or to exaggerate its efficacy in preventing pregnancies.

Business Insider has contacted Natural Cycles for comment. A spokesperson told the Guardian: ;"We respect the outcome of the investigation by the ASA into one Facebook advertisement, which ran for approximately four weeks in mid-2017. The investigation was initiated nearly 12 months ago and the advertisement was removed as soon as we were notified of the complaint."

This is not the only time an investigation has called the efficacy of Natural Cycles as a contraceptive into question. The company is under investigation in Sweden after a hospital reported that 37 of 668 female patients who sought an abortion between September and December 2017 had been using the app.

Riot Games, maker of League of Legends, has been accused of fostering a hostile work environment. Riot Games

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Wednesday.

1. US president Donald Trump attacked Google several times on Tuesday, claiming its search results were rigged against conservative news outlets. Trump claimed Google was "really taking advantage of a lot of people" and warned Silicon Valley firms needed to be "careful."

2. Conservative Facebook employees are reportedly organizing to attack the liberal company's 'intolerant' culture. More than 100 politically conservative Facebook employees have formed a new internal group to complain that the famously liberal company is "intolerant" of opposing political thought, according to a report from The New York Times on Tuesday.

3. Some Google employees allegedly threw a party in 2015 with 'controlled substances' after a successful self-driving car demo. The so-called "Cocaine Cowboys" were reportedly fired.

4. YouTubers KSI and Logan Paul probably generated up to $11 million with their boxing match last week. Meda reports suggested that around 20,000 fans attended the match, while 773,000 paid to watch a livestream on YouTube.

5. Riot Games, one of the world's biggest game studios, has been hit with multiple allegations of fostering a hostile, sexist work environment. A former manager, Barry Hawkins, detailed numerous incidents in a devastating blog post this week.

6. Instagram says users can now evaluate the authenticity of accounts. The company is introducing a new feature to let users find out more information about the ads that various accounts on the service pay for.

7. The CEO of the company that makes 'Fortnite' spent days attacking Google for scoring 'cheap PR points' by exposing a flaw in the game's security. Tim Sweeney said the firm revealing the flaw so quickly just gave hackers the chance to exploit the bug.

8. YouTube has expanded its 'digital wellbeing' tools to include a new metric telling users how much time they spend watching videos. The new feature will track how much time the user has spent watching videos over the previous 7 days.

9. Amazon is preparing to roll out a new, free video streaming service for Fire TV users. The ad-supported service, tentatively called Free Dive, would be available free to users of the Amazon Fire TV device.

10. Oath — the Verizon business that includes Yahoo and AOL — reportedly scans user emails for ad targeting. The practice isn't new, but Oath has recently been pitching advertisers a service that scans more than 200 million inboxes for buying habits.

Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.

Ketamine's unique ability to staunch the symptoms of depression has earned it a new reputation in recent months. No longer seen solely as an illicit party drug, the compound is the focus of research into a novel class of antidepressants that could yield the first new depression drug in more than 30 years.

But the science of how ketamine stonewalls depression symptoms has remained murky. For years, researchers believed it worked by acting on a network of brain receptors called the glutamate system, which other popular antidepressants ignore. But a new study suggests that ketamine also influences the brain's opioid network — the same one engaged by opioid painkillers.

That could have implications for plans to turn the drug into a pharmaceutical. Drug companies including Allergan, Johnson & Johnson, and a San Francisco-based drug maker called VistaGen have all been looking to ketamine as inspiration for the next blockbuster antidepressant.

"When we say this is a new generation of drugs, we mean it. This drug is fundamentally different from all the other antidepressants that have been approved so far," Shawn Singh, VistaGen's CEO, told Business Insider in May.

The new paper, published Tuesday night in the American Journal of Psychiatry and funded by the National Institutes of Health, is the first to illuminate how ketamine exerts its effects in the brain.

Alan Schatzberg, a co-author on the paper and a professor of psychiatry at Stanford, told Business Insider that he hopes drug makers can use his team's discovery to streamline their efforts and avoid the pitfalls of antidepressant drug candidates that have failed.

"Before we did the study, I had some doubts about ketamine's use for treating depression," Schatzberg said. "Now I've seen the drug work, but I've also seen it doesn't work the way people originally thought."

How ketamine is distinct from existing depression drugs

Shutterstock

Most existing antidepressants, from Abilify to Zoloft, work by plugging up the places where our brain takes up serotonin, a chemical messenger that plays a key role in mood. The result is more free-floating serotonin and, in some people, relief from a dark curtain of depressive symptoms.

But those effects don't occur in everyone who tries the drugs. In fact, up to 80% of the people who try existing antidepressants fail to see results. Plus, the drugs take four to six weeks to work. As a result, depression remains one of the world's leading causes of death.

Ketamine, on the other hand, affects key switches in the brain called NMDA receptors. Collectively, these switches are part of a larger network in the brain called the glutamate system. Like serotonin receptors, those for NMDA play an important role in our mood and help keep our emotions in check. But NMDA receptors also keep our brain's synapses — the delicate branches that serve as the ecosystem for our thoughts — flexible and resilient.

Depression appears to cause those synaptic branches to shrivel up and in some cases even die. Scientists think existing antidepressant drugs send help to those branches indirectly over time by way of serotonin. Ketamine, by contrast, delivers its aid directly by plugging up NMDA receptors like a cork and nipping depressive symptoms within hours.

This mechanism of action spurred some scientists to call ketamine "the most important discovery in half a century" in 2012.

The new study suggests that in addition to affecting the glutamate system, ketamine also impacts the same switches that are targeted by opioid painkillers.

For their work, the Stanford researchers gave 12 adults whose depression failed to respond to multiple treatments two infusions of ketamine. Before the first infusion, the participants took a drug that blocks the brain's opioid receptors. Before the second infusion, the participants got a placebo. (The participants and researchers were never told whether they were getting the drug or the placebo — a double-blind setup designed to minimize the chance that observed results were merely psychological.)

In more than half the cases in which the participants got the placebo, the ketamine appeared to reduce depressive symptoms by roughly 90%; the effects lasted about three days. Conversely, when the patients got the opioid-blocker before the ketamine, the ketamine had virtually no antidepressant effects.

This finding led the researchers to hypothesize that ketamine's activity takes place in different phases. In the first, the drug activates the brain's opioid receptors, quickly smothering depressive symptoms, one of the researchers suggested in the paper. In the second phase — which is thought to be key for ketamine's lasting antidepressant qualities — the drug appears to engage the brain's glutamate system.

What the next blockbuster antidepressant needs

Several drug companies have tried and failed to create a new depression drug that targets the NMDA receptors in the glutamate system. Pharmaceutical giant Roche pulled the plug on a drug called basimglurant in 2016 after it failed to show results in a Phase II study; AstraZeneca discontinued its work on a heavily-promoted candidate called lanicemine in 2013.

Yet ketamine's rapid-fire ability to stymie depressive symptoms has continued to baffle and inspire researchers looking for an alternative to current treatments.

Allergan, Johnson & Johnson, and VistaGen are all currently working to develop new ketamine-inspired drugs. In fact, two of the authors on the latest paper previously consulted for these companies: Schatzberg received a grant from Janssen, Johnson & Johnson's neuroscience partner, and study author Carolyn Rodriguez has consulted for Allergan.

None of the three drug candidates target the brain's opioid system, however.

Mark Smith, VistaGen's chief medical officer, said that although the results of the study are "intriguing," they would not directly impact the company's work on its new drug.

Similarly, a representative from Janssen, whose work with Johnson & Johnson has focused on a nasal-spray version of esketamine (the chemical mirror image of ketamine), told Business Insider in a statement that the Stanford study would not impact the direction of their work. They added that there were several issues with the study, including the fact that it was small and did not include "relevant control conditions."

But overall, the new study sheds light on important questions about why — and how — ketamine works to fight depression in the brain.

"I think this paper points us in the direction that the [opioid system] is an area for potential interest," Schatzberg said. "The question is, can we have a rational discussion about this in an era when there's an opioid crisis?"

More than 100 politically conservative Facebook employees have formed a new internal group to complain that the famously liberal company is "intolerant" of opposing political thought, according to a report from The New York Times on Tuesday.

The new group, "FB'ers for Political Diversity," was reportedly created in the last week, and came after senior Facebook engineer Brian Amerige wrote in an internal post viewable only by company employees that "we are a political monoculture that's intolerant of different views ... we claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology."

Amerige and Facebook did not immediately respond to Business Insider's requests for comment.

Silicon Valley, the heart of the American tech industry, is largely liberal, and has been fraught with allegations of bias in Trump's America.

In July 2017, Google found itself at the centre of a political firestorm after engineer James Damore wrote an internal post decrying what he characterised as "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber," in which he attacked the company's diversity efforts. Some conservatives also allege, without proof, that social media firms are deliberately silencing and censoring non-liberal voices on their platforms.

On Tuesday, President Trump accused Google, without providing evidence, of "silencing" conservative news publications in its search results.

Facebook has grappled with how to approach dissent by conservative employees before. As Business Insider previously reported in 2017, a group called "Facebook Anon" where employees could chat anonymously morphed into a hub for conservative, Trump-supporting employees during the 2016 election. It was ultimately shut down in December 2016 as the talk "turned ugly and ... alarmed management."

Do you work at Facebook? Do you know more? Contact this reporter via Signal or WhatsApp at +1 (650) 636-6268 using a non-work phone, email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., WeChat at robaeprice, or Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by email only, please.)You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Bumble announces a fund to invest in women-led businesses

In a handful of quick searches, there were zero instances where articles from conservative news sources appeared more often than articles from publications with left-leaning or moderate audiences. But there could be a few key reasons why Google Search showed me stories from sources with more left-leaning audiences.

One reason could be that those are the sources I read on my own time. While I don't often check CNN and it appeared often in my results, I do read stories from The New York Times, Washington Post, and — obviously — Business Insider. I use Google Chrome as my main browser, and it's possible that's the reason those news sources appeared more often for me.

Another reason could be that there just aren't that many center-right publications.According to CJR's analysis, publications like ABC News, Politico, and CNN fall just to the left of center in terms of their readership. But there are very few similar center-right sites. Here's how CJR puts it:

"There are very few center-right sites: sites that draw many Trump followers, but also a substantial number of Clinton followers. Between the moderately conservative Wall Street Journal, which draws Clinton and Trump supporters in equal shares, and the starkly partisan sites that draw Trump supporters by ratios of 4:1 or more, there are only a handful of sites."

Because Google says it's committed to "high-quality content" in response to search queries, it likely steers clear of far-left and far-right media outlets in its results to avoid biased news stories.

In other words, it's possible that Google's search results for Trump news are less biased precisely because of the type of publications that appear in its results.

Serial entrepreneur James Heckman wants to create a healthy alternative outside of Facebook for small publishers — and is making cuts to do so.

In March, Maven announced plans to acquire Say Media. The company also acquired HubPages in January and said that the combination of Maven, Say Media and HubPages "will bring together former competitors to create a dominant platform for professional, independent publishers," according to a press release.

Mave offers publishers a platform that reaches more than 90 million monthly readers and includes 300 channels with 6,000 writers, the company says.

As part of the transition to becoming a single company, Say Media laid off 17 staffers across its creative studio, development, engineering, sales and general and administrative roles two weeks ago. The company's Toronto and London offices have closed and some of the company will operate out of Maven's office in Seattle.

Say Media also has also let got of some employees in its n New York, San Francisco and Portland offices.

"All three companies do the same thing," Heckman told Business Insider. "It would be really irresponsible for us to not finish the merger as planned. It's a shame on a personal basis but obviously it's an exciting move for the company to get to profitability."

Maven says the cuts shave $5 million off of operating costs and the firm is on track to hit its previous revenue goal of $30 million this year. Matt Sanchez, CEO and founder of Say Media, will help in the transition in creating one company but is leaving the company. Heckman expects for the Say Media deal to close in September.

Sanchez founded a video advertising company called VideoEgg in 2005 that was renamed Say Media in 2010 after acquiring ad network Six Apart. Say Media owned media brands like xoJane, ReadWrite and Remodelista for a few years before selling them off in 2014 to focus solely on providing technology for publishers.

According to one source, Say Media team leads to make decisions about "major" staff cuts within 24 to 48 hours.

At the time of the acquisition in March, it seemed like Sanchez would be included in Maven's new leadership, including a 7-minute video that Maven distributed that explained how the coalition would work.

On April 6, Say Media employees received a memo written from Heckman sent via Sanchez's email address detailing how the three companies would work together. The bottom of the email listed bios on 18 of Maven's leadership team — including Sanchez.

"The destruction of an online news and information ecosystem that took two decades to build has created a vacuum, and an opportunity as big as Facebook's forfeiture of the news space," he wrote. "So it makes sense our three founding teams agreed to join hands and align complementary skill sets to restore sustainability by fairly empowering independent, professional content creators — 'mavens.' To ensure success, it's critical we move forward as one, and without hesitation. Success means fair rewards for everyone: advertisers, publishers, consumers, all of you as well as investors."

He went on to explain Maven's mission to provide a unified publishing platform, ad-tech stack and sales operations for independent publishers. The idea is to create an alternative to the duopoly of Facebook and Google that controls how publishers distribute content and sell ads.

"There's an extraordinary, urgent need to solve for independent publisher sustainability," Heckman wrote. "Frankly, we're at ground zero of the biggest cultural and news shift of our era, including the impact of fake news, fake traffic, election fraud, destroyed livelihoods, data theft, broken promises and Silicon Valley executives playing God on lots of levels. We're in position now to help in a meaningful way."

Maven's leadership team now consists of Heckman as CEO and member of the board; president and executive chair of the board Josh Jacobs; chief operating officer and former HubPages CEO/founder Paul Edmondson; CMO Michelle Panzer, formerly Say Media's vp of global marketing and brand development; and chief product officer Ben Trout, formerly Say Media's vp of engineering. Maven co-founder and chief technology officer Ben Joldersma will continue in his role as well as becoming chief architect.

As president, Donald Trump has often been right for the wrong reasons.

His broadside Tuesday morning against Google is yet another example.

In a pair of tweets, Trump took the search giant to task for supposedly suppressing news from conservative outlets and positive stories about him. Charging that Google's system is "rigged" against him, he vowed to do something about it — an assertion that was later reinforced by White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow, who said the administration was looking into regulating Google.

"They are controlling what we can & cannot see," Trump said in one of his tweets. "This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!"

On its face, Trump's assertion that Google's news results are biased against him looks spurious, for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is that whether an outlet is considered liberal or conservative is highly subjective, often depending on the political views of individual readers. Indeed, the president's charge that Google is biased against him looks — like much of his attacks against various companies, institutions, and individuals — self-serving. Trump generally doesn't care if something is a problem — like unwarranted surveillance by US spy agencies or the power of federal prosecutors — unless it's a problem for him personally.

Even so, Trump's not wrong to be suspicious of Google. His statement about the company's power is actually spot on — it does very much control the flow of information online. And the truth is that it has used that power in suspect, even illegal ways.

Many rushed to defend Google from Trump's attacks, as if an organization whose corporate parent is the second most valuable company in the world and that has a monopoly on multiple markets, were somehow a maiden in distress. I think we ought to use this moment instead to examine how much power Google has — and do something about it.

Trump's attack seems to have been spurred by a flawed report

As seems to happen regularly, Trump apparently launched his attack on Google in response to something he saw on a conservative TV outlet. Monday night, on his segment for Fox Business News, Lou Dobbs highlighted a report from right-wing website PJ Media that asserted that 96% of the search results for "Trump" on Google News are links to stories from liberal media outlets.

On a segment of his Fox Business show on Monday, Lou Dobbs highlighted a report about Google's supposed bias in its news search results. Fox Business The PJ Media report was flawed at best. Some might even call it "fake news."

As even its author, Paula Bolyard, acknowledged, the 96% figure came not from a scientific study of search results, but from her own noodling around on the site. So even if you accept her other assertions, we shouldn't accept that her conclusion really represents reality.

But there are other reasons to be dubious of Bolyard's conclusion. The 96% figure was derived in part from the classification system she used to place news sites along a liberal-to-conservative continuum. That classification system was put together by another right-leaning media figure, and many people outside of the conservative bubble would likely find it problematic. If you consider CNBC to be a liberal outlet and CNN to be more left-wing than The Intercept, you really don't have a very good sense of media bias, in my book.

Even if we could all agree on her classification system and her findings were in sync with what a scientific study would conclude, that wouldn't necessarily imply that Google is biased against Trump or conservative outlets.

News outlets in general tend to focus on negative news more than positive stories — regardless of who is president. Google's algorithms tend to favor established, frequently cited and what the company says are "high quality" news sources — a preference that doesn't necessarily reflect political bias, but may lead the site to promote stories from CNN or the Washington Post over, say, Infowars.

Regardless of all these factors that complicate or even contradict PJ Media's conclusions, our no-nuance president took the 96% figure and hit Twitter with it, using it as the foundation of his tweet attack on Google. The figure was proof positive that Google was "hiding" positive stories about him and shutting out conservative outlets, possibly illegally, he charged. It's time to do something about it, he said — leaving exactly what kind of "something" that might be completely undefined.

For its part, Google said its search results aren't politically biased.

There are legitimate concerns about Google's power

Here's the thing. As ridiculous and potentially dangerous it is for Trump to make policy based on a single flawed news report he saw on TV — and then likely only because of his own personal grudges — there is a legitimate concern about how Google's search algorithm works.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, which denied the accusations of bias. Stephen Lam/Reuters Google's search engine is basically a black box. Yes, the company does give some guidance on how it ranks results. And, yes, there are plenty of companies that have made it their business to study the algorithm so they can figure out how to get Google to list their partners' websites and advertisements more prominently.

But Google often changes its algorithm without telling anyone. And nobody outside the company has a really detailed understanding of how it works or exactly what it prioritizes and why.

Lots of companies, of course, keep their core business methodology or intellectual property secret (think of Coca-Cola's famously secret recipe). But Google isn't just any company. It dominates web search; depending on how you look at the market, its share is between 70% and 90%. As such, it in a very real way shapes our experience of the internet. If Google doesn't list a site in its first page or two of search results, it may as well not exist.

And the company has become a major force in the news industry. Google passed Facebook last year as the leading source of traffic to news publishers' websites, according to Chartbeat. The search giant now accounts for the majority of the traffic to publishers' websites from mobile devices.

So Google isn't just shaping what we see online, but what we see of the news. If a story isn't promoted on Google, there's a good chance you won't see it or hear about it.

Google has abused its power in the past

That kind of power would be dangerous no matter who held it, regardless of their motivations or political inclinations. But it's especially disturbing that Google in particular has that kind of control.

That's because Google has shown repeatedly that it's not to be trusted, that when it comes to what information gets promoted on its site and services, it is not necessarily a neutral party.

Margrethe Vestager, the European Union's competition commissioner, who has led the bloc's investigations into Google's anti-competitive practices. Reuters Last year, for example, the European Commission found that Google illegally promoted its shopping search results over rival shopping search engines and fined the company $2.7 billion. In June, the EU fined the company another $5 billion after finding that it used the dominance of its Android operating system to promote its own apps. In much the same way as if it had listed something prominently in its search results, the company made sure that its search app and Chrome browser were among the first apps consumers saw on their on Android phones.

What's more, Google and its parent, Alphabet, have taken overt political stands. They've been public about their support for relatively liberal immigration policies. They support gay rights. Like much of Silicon Valley, they backed last year's tax law.

That's not to say that Google's search results are informed by its political leanings. But we shouldn't just assume that they're not — or simply accept the company's denials that they aren't.

It's long past time to rein in Google

Instead, we should demand and require more. Google ought to be required to be more transparent about how its search algorithm works. We ought to know exactly how it ranks news stories and websites. We as citizens deserve to know in detail the judgments Google is making about what is newsworthy and what sources are trustworthy, about what is news.

We deserve to know the judgments Google is making about what is news.

It could well be that Google's judgments are unimpeachable, and lack any kind of political bias. But we won't know until we know.

Of course, Google's argument has always been that it needs to keep the mechanics of its search engine under wraps to prevent "bad actors" — from spammers to individuals with malicious agendas — from gaming the search results.

But that assumes there might not be ways to create a system to vet, or audit, Google's search algorithm by trusted parties without making the engine's blueprint visible to the entire world.

On top of that, regulators ought to be working to promote a more competitive marketplace. No company should have the ability Google has to control what news and information we see. Questions about how its algorithm works wouldn't matter as much if people had legitimate alternatives for internet search.

Unfortunately, its control over search is just one facet of the company's power and dominance over our online lives. Because of that, it's long past time for policymakers to start moving to break up the company.

Donald Trump is almost certainly more worried about how Google may be hurting him that how it's affecting the rest of us. But if his Twitter tirade leads to some real limitations on the search giant's power, he'll have done us all a favor.

Tesla is bringing its upcoming electric semi truck, the Semi, to some of its customers. One of those customers — UPS — recently complimented the vehicle.

The Twitter account for UPS' Illinois branch posted videos of the Semi on Monday and said it offered a "smooth" ride.

Electrek reported on Friday that the Semi had arrived at the Arkansas headquarters of another customer, the trucking company JB Hunt.

The version of the Semi each company saw is likely a prototype, though Tesla declined a request for comment. In addition to UPS and JB Hunt, customers for the Semi include Walmart, Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch, and FedEx.

Production for the Semi will start in 2019, Tesla has said. The company will have to expand the capacity of its assembly plant in Fremont, California, convert its battery-production factory in Nevada to produce vehicles, or use another company's factory to meet that timeline.

During the company's second-quarter earnings call in August, CEO Elon Musk said he was unable to answer questions about where the company will produce future vehicles. Tesla said it would take around two years for production to begin at a factory it will build in China.

Tesla says the Semi will have a range of 500 miles per charge, an innovative cabin design, and the ability to go from 0-60 mph in five seconds without any cargo and in 20 seconds while carrying 80,000 pounds of cargo.

Some in the trucking industry have cast doubt on those numbers. In February, Martin Daum, the head of Daimler's truck and bus division, suggested to Bloomberg that the truck's range would defy the laws of physics.

When asked about Daum's evaluation during Tesla's first-quarter earnings call in May, Musk questioned Daum's knowledge of physics.

"He doesn't know much about physics. I know him. I'd be happy to engage in a physics discussion with him," Musk said.