Coronavirus-enforced lockdowns across the globe have brought bricks and mortar retail to its knees, with more customers shopping online. Ensuring your digital offering is user friendly, accessible, and welcoming is more important than ever, according to Ben Harris, cofounder and CEO of digital experience startup Decibel. 

The startup, which helps businesses better understand customers' digital experiences through a combination of AI and data science, has raised a $40 million funding round from Perwyn and Draper Esprit, as well as existing investors Eight Roads Ventures and former General Catalyst partner John Simon, via his Ventureforgood investment entity. 

This Series B round includes an initial $17 million investment from Draper Esprit in late 2019 and takes the company's total funding to date to $54 million.

Decibel, founded in 2013, works with companies like Lego, Adidas, and Sony to optimize their understanding of customer experience. "Our tech is the most advanced in the space," Harris told Business Insider in an interview. "Once companies get over the initial shock [of coronavirus] and release their budgets they need to see improvements in how they get lifetime value from customers."

The company is based in the UK but has significant operations in the US and will continue to expand its offering there in what the startup estimates to be a $5 to $10 billion market. Digital marketing spend in the US is set to reach $122 billion next year, according to research from Forrester. Decibel's platform crunches billions of pieces of data a month for large companies to better understand potential pain points or missed opportunities for customers. 

"We're looking at data that simply wasn't there before," Harris said. "People have struggled for a long time to know how to improve websites and apps because if a customer has a good experience they are more likely to come back. It's a no brainer and the upside is enormous."

The funding round closed in February, prior to the worst of the coronavirus in Europe and North America. Harris said the funds would be used to continue growing in the US and continue hiring in senior and strategic roles as the startup expands. 

Check out Decibel's (redacted) pitch deck below:

Greyparrot uses computer vision to improve waste management

Another Amazon employee has come out accusing the company of retaliating against dissent and union organizing.

On Wednesday, California warehouse worker John Hopkins published a blog post saying he'd been suspended from his job at Amazon.

"The officially given reason for my suspension is that I 'knowingly and repeatedly refused to follow social distancing protocol despite repeated directives from your managers,'" Hopkins wrote.

He continued: "My perspective is that the real reason for my suspension is that my managers did not want to acknowledge and commit to providing a response to my email of April 26, which pointed out that non-Amazon flyers for external Delivery Service Providers were being allowed on the bulletin board while my union flyers were being removed."

Hopkins previously told The Guardian about the pamphlets going missing. "No matter where I put them in the building they turn up missing shortly thereafter," he told The Guardian in early May.

According to Hopkins the flyers he was bringing in kept routinely vanishing from his locker, and at one point the warehouse swapped lockers where workers brought their own locks to ones with keypads.

On May 1 Hopkins joined a mass strike of Amazon and other retail workers. He clocked out and went to the lunch room to hand out his flyers.

"I was there talking to a co-worker, just as lunch was about to end when the manager first came in to talk to me about the 'social distancing protocol,'" he writes. Hopkins was suspended the next day. He wrote that HR took a month to investigate him, during which he said Amazon routinely refused to put anything in writing.

Business Insider has approached Amazon for comment.

Hopkins isn't the only worker to claim Amazon used social distancing policy as an excuse to fire him.

Amazon also said the dismissal of union organizer Chris Smalls, who was fired after he led a protest over coronavirus safety at his New York warehouse, was because he violated social distancing rules.

"Amazon would rather fire workers than face up to its total failure to do what it should to keep us, our families, and our communities safe. I am outraged and disappointed, but I'm not shocked," Smalls said at the time.

Hopkins said his experience fits with a public critique of the company that was posted at the beginning of May by senior engineer Tim Bray, who resigned from the company for what he viewed as retaliation against whistleblowers.

Bray's criticisms were met with resistance by Amazon VP Brad Porter, who called Bray's blogpost "deeply offensive to the core."

Hopkins said the purpose of his blog was to "show how Brad's response to Tim's critique of Amazon missed the point in a manner that spoke volumes." Hopkins believes that Porter's response focused on worker safety rather than retaliation against whistleblowers, which was Bray's main contention.

"Based on my experience, my perspective is that Tim's analysis is exactly correct — although, I do feel compelled to make one criticism of it: he didn't take it far enough!"

Bray tweeted a link to Hopkins' blog saying Hopkins "goes places I wouldn't," but adds that he enjoyed reading it.

 

Microsoft founder and world's second-richest person Bill Gates has been turning to TV and film to get away from the coronavirus pandemic. 

"Most of my conversations and meetings these days are about COVID-19 and how we can stem the tide. But I'm also often asked about what I am reading and watching — either because people want to learn more about pandemics, or because they are looking for a distraction," Gates wrote in a blog post.

In his blog post Gates outlined his summer 2020 book recommendations and threw in six TV shows and a film for good measure.

The coronavirus outbreak has changed the world beyond compare, but perhaps one of the more positive things to come out of the global pandemic is the opportunity for businesses and entrepreneurs to innovate and create in response to the situation. According to a report by startups.co.uk, there's been a 60% increase in businesses launching online, compared to this time last year. Furthermore, according to a recent GoDaddy poll, one in 5 of the public are planning to set up a new business during lockdown and 9% already have. From healthcare to food deliveries, there are a number of ventures which have launched out of the pandemic — here's our top 10 to watch:

Meniga helps incumbent banks keep fintech fear at bay

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

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.

You can also subscribe to this newsletter here — just tick "10 Things in Tech You Need to Know."

A new poll published Wednesday revealed that about one in five people would refuse the COVID-19 vaccine as scientists race to create one.

The poll, conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, also found that only about half of Americans would get the vaccine when it becomes available, and 31% are not yet sure if they would get one.

The poll surveyed 1,056 adults and was conducted from May 14 to May 18. The results were released as the US reached a grim milestone of 100,000 deaths from the coronavirus Wednesday, which causes the respiratory illness known as COVID-19.

"There's still a large amount of uncertainty around taking the vaccine," Caitlin Oppenheimer, senior vice president of Public Health at NORC, told AP. "There is a lot of opportunity to communicate with Americans about the value and the safety of a vaccine."

Melanie Dries, 56, from Colorado, told AP that she is not an anti-vaxxer but is concerned about getting a COVID-19 vaccine in the near feature, saying it "causes me to fear that it won't be widely tested as to side effects."

Dr. Francis Collins Director of the National Institutes of Health, told AP in a previous interview that he "would not want people to think that we're cutting corners because that would be a big mistake."

"I think this is an effort to try to achieve efficiencies, but not to sacrifice rigor," he said, adding that "definitely the worst thing that could happen is if we rush through a vaccine that turns out to have significant side effects."

The Trump administration announced a vaccine distribution program, dubbed "Operation Warp Speed," aimed at having 300 million doses in stock by January. The Department of Health and Human Services also promised earlier this week to provide "up to $1.2 billion" in funds to a laboratory at Oxford University working to develop a vaccine, The New York Times reported.

"It's always better to under-promise and over-deliver," Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told The Associated Press. "The unexpected looms large and that's why I think for any of these vaccines, we're going to need a large safety database to provide the reassurance."

The AP-NORC poll showed that 20% of Americans believed that the timeline of "Operation Warp Speed" would be attainable, with a majority of respondents thinking that it is more likely a vaccine will be available next year.

About seven in 10 people of those who said they would get the coronavirus vaccine said they believed life would not return to normal without one, with top reasons for getting vaccinated including protecting themselves, their families, and the community.

"I'm definitely going to get it," Brandon Grimes, 35, from Austin, Texas, told AP. "As a father who takes care of his family, I think ... it's important for me to get vaccinated as soon as it's available to better protect my family."

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey responded on Wednesday to mounting criticism from President Donald Trump and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg after Twitter added fact-checking labels to the president's tweets about mail-in ballots.

Dorsey tweeted Wednesday night saying that he is "ultimately accountable" for Twitter's actions regarding the fact-check links on the president's tweets, and implored the public to "leave our employees out of this."

"We'll continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally," Dorsey wrote. "And we will admit to and own any mistakes we make."

Trump went on a tweetstorm in light of the fact-check links, accusing the company of "interfering" in the 2020 election and for "stifling FREE SPEECH," he wrote Tuesday.

Twitter Safety added context behind the decision to put fact-checking links on Trump's tweets about mail-in ballots because it "could confuse voters about what they need to do to receive a ballot and participate in the election process," according to the tweet.

 

Zuckerberg told Fox News on Wednesday that he thinks Facebook has a "different policy" than Twitter when it comes to fact-checking.

"I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online," the Facebook CEO told Fox News. "Private companies probably shouldn't be, especially these platform companies, shouldn't be in the position of doing that."

Dorsey also responded to Zuckerberg's comments, saying that it wasn't the goal of the company to be an "arbiter of truth."

"Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves," Dorsey tweeted. "More transparency from us is critical so folks can clearly see the why behind our actions."

In light of the Twitter feud, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on Wednesday that the president plans to sign an executive order "pertaining to social media," according to reporters aboard Air Force One. It is not immediately clear what the executive order will pertain to, but PBS Newshour White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor reported that it will be signed on Thursday.

Google is facing another legal challenge accusing it of illegally collecting users' data, this time from Arizona, whose attorney general filed a lawsuit against the company on Wednesday.

The lawsuit claims that Google violated Arizona's consumer fraud laws by continuing to collect smartphone location information even after users explicitly opted out of location tracking, "which Google then exploits to power its lucrative advertising business."

"While Google users are led to believe they can opt-out of location tracking, the company exploits other avenues to invade personal privacy," Attorney General Mark Brnovich said in a press release.

"It's nearly impossible to stop Google from tracking your movements without your knowledge or consent," he said, adding that "even the most innovative companies must operate within the law."

Arizona alleges that Google misleads users by making it "impractical if not impossible" to actually opt out of its data collection practices by confusing them with a labyrinth of settings, continually changing how location-sharing permissions work, and deceiving them about when it deletes their information.

"The Attorney General and the contingency fee lawyers filing this lawsuit appear to have mischaracterized our services," a spokesperson from Google said in a statement to Business Insider. "We have always built privacy features into our products and provided robust controls for location data. We look forward to setting the record straight."

Arizona is seeking to force Google to forfeit any profits it made as a result of the alleged surreptitious data collection, pay back consumers, and pay the state up to $10,000 in fines per violation.

The lawsuit is the result of a two-year-long investigation that Arizona began in 2018 following a report from the Associated Press that found Google tracked smartphone users' locations through a variety of apps and services even if they had enabled a privacy setting that ostensibly prevented Google from doing so.

This is not the first time Google has faced legal scrutiny over how it collects and uses data.

Last December, the European Union opened a new antitrust investigation into how Google leverages data months after slapping the company with its third multibillion-dollar fine in just three years.

Regulators in the US have also been looking into whether Google's data practices unfairly give it an edge in its online ads and search businesses. A group of state attorneys general and the US Justice Department both have ongoing investigations that are expected to wrap up in the coming months and could result in additional lawsuits.

President Donald Trump had a vitriolic reaction Wednesday morning to Twitter's decision to add fact-checking labels to some of his tweets for the first time, accusing Twitter and other tech companies of anti-conservative bias.

Now Trump allies and advisers have found a new target for their ire: Twitter's head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, who has tweeted harsh criticism of Trump in the past.

Roth's old tweets from 2016 and 2017 were resurfaced and shared widely on Wednesday, including a tweet calling Trump a "racist tangerine," a tweet decrying "ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE," and a tweet describing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as "a personality-free bag of farts."

A Twitter spokesperson told Business Insider that Roth is part of the team overseen by VP for trust and safety Del Harvey that recommends whether to label tweets that contain misinformation, but added that the decision to label tweets is ultimately made by "leadership" following recommendations from the trust and safety team.

On Wednesday night, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stood by the decision to correct Trump's false claims about voting.

"Fact check: there is someone ultimately accountable for our actions as a company, and that's me," Dorsey posted. "Please leave our employees out of this. We'll continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally."

"Per our Civic Integrity policy (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/election-integrity-policy), the tweets yesterday may mislead people into thinking they don't need to register to get a ballot (only registered voters receive ballots)," Dorsey continued. "We're updating the link on @realDonaldTrump's tweet to make this more clear."

Trump advisers are presenting Roth's tweets as evidence of alleged anti-conservative bias across Twitter and other tech companies. Donald Trump Jr. slammed Roth on Twitter after Breitbart reported on his past tweets. On Fox News Wednesday morning, senior adviser Kellyanne Conway called Roth "horrible" and read his Twitter handle out loud on air.

"Somebody in San Francisco go wake him up and tell him he's about to get a lot more followers," Conway said on "Fox & Friends" on Wednesday.

The jabs at Roth are part of the Trump world's broader backlash to Twitter's decision to add fact-checking labels to Trump's tweets that claimed without evidence that vote by mail is being used by Democrats to commit voter fraud. The tweets now include a disclaimer reading "get the facts" with a link to independent fact-checkers who debunk Trump's claim.

This is the first time Twitter has taken action to mediate Trump's false or misleading statements on the platform. Twitter has been upbraided by Trump critics over the years who say the platform enables Trump to spread falsehoods despite its policies against misinformation.

Trump lashed out at Twitter in response to the labels early Wednesday, threatening to shut down or "strongly regulate" social-media platforms that he claims are unfair to conservatives.

Charles Davis contributed to this report.

President Donald Trump is preparing to issue an executive order targeting social media companies — plunging them into a political and legal quagmire they have desperately tried to avoid.

On Wednesday, the White House press secretary  Kayleigh McEnany said the president will issue an executive order "pertaining to social media" on Thursday, without providing specifics. The announcement came after a day of extremely aggressive rhetoric from Trump against social media companies, prompted by Twitter applying warning labels to two inaccurate tweets the 73-year-old politician posted about the purported dangers of mail-in ballots on Tuesday.

Trump responded in fury, threatening to shut down social media companies altogether, and the US President's allies were quick to jump in — repeating popular but unproven allegations that social media companies are deliberately discriminating against conservatives. "Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016," Trump tweeted.

In fact, companies like Twitter and Facebook have gone to great lengths to avoid alienating conservatives — creating carve-outs to protect Trump from being banned for what would otherwise be violations of their rules, and nixing certain changes to their platforms over fears they might offend the right. 

The warning label Twitter applied to Trump's tweets was also a notably mild one, not even directly pointing out the falsehoods in his messages unless a user clicks through to a second page.  The label on Trump's tweets read simply "Get the facts about mail-in ballots."

This hasn't stopped the right from making allegations of bias and censorship for years, having found that companies im liberal Silicon Valley make an easy bogeyman to cast as coastal elites interfering in ordinary voters' lives.

It remains unclear what exactly Trump's executive order will target — as well as whether it will have any firm legal backing. Legal experts say Trump's previous threat to shut down social media firms has "absolutely no legal authority," Business Insider previously reported.

One possibility is that Trump might attempt to alter social media companies' legal liability for content on their platforms unless they comply with his demands. Currently, platform companies generally can't be sued or prosecuted for illegal content that appears on their services (so long as they remove it when they become aware of it); this is why Facebook doesn't get hit with charges when it's used to share terrorist material, for example. (In the US, this is governed by Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which basically says that the companies won't be treated as publishers of the offending material.)

On Tuesday, Republican Senator Marco Rubio suggested that Twitter, by applying the warning label to Trump's tweets, was acting like a publisher and should no longer be protected. "If they have now decided to exercise an editorial role like a publisher then they should no longer be shielded from liability & treated as publishers under the law," he tweeted. (In fact, social media companies have moderated their platforms in this way since their inception, albeit not on such a politically fraught arena.) Trump's executive order might take a similar line of reasoning.

Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law who specializes in digital law, told Business Insider that Trump did not have legal authority to revoke or alter Section 230. That's because the rule has already been passed by Congress and a President can't veto a law after it's been passed.

What's more, said Goldman, any attempt by a president to control what social media companies publish or how they publish it would be a flagrant restriction on freedom of speech.

"It's not a close call at all," Goldman said, though he added that "it doesn't mean they won't try."

If Trump does take aim at Section 230, it would force tech companies into a fight: While they have been loathe to offend Trump, if the executive order targets Section 230, they will need to fight vigorously to defend it. If the likes of Facebook and Twitter were held legally liable for the content that anyone posts on their platform, it would be ruinous; social media in its present form would effectively cease to exist, sunk beneath a sudden tide of lawsuits. Industry experts believe the businesses would do near-anything to defend it.

The Trump White House is also no stranger to having executive orders and initiatives struck down by the courts as having no legal basis, losing 65 cases in the first two years of the administration. But even if it ultimately fails, the executive order may have to energize Trump's base, and perpetuate an us-versus-then narrative that demonizes the tech industry as out to attack the president — giving him the fight he wants.

Editor's note: This story was updated with more details on WeWork's board composition.

A fight over new WeWork board members culminated in a Wednesday court hearing that showed the battle between WeWork investors and SoftBank is far from over.

On behalf of WeWork, board members Bruce Dunlevie and Lew Frankfort asked a judge to prevent WeWork's board from bringing on two temporary board directors. Dunlevie and Frankfort are suing SoftBank in the Delaware Court of Chancery for backing out of a $3 billion stock purchase agreement in April. 

The judge, Andre Bouchard, ruled on Wednesday against Dunlevie and Frankfort's motion to stop the board additions, so WeWork will vote on the directors on Friday. The proposed directors would form an independent committee to decide if Dunlevie and Frankfort have the authority to sue SoftBank. 

Dunlevie and Frankfort formed a special committee in October 2019 to evaluate rescue packages for WeWork, including SoftBank's bailout that included the stock buyback agreement. The pair were chosen because they lacked ties to SoftBank, unlike most other board members.

"The uncertainty created by this process will cause harm to the Company and its minority stockholders," Frankfort wrote in a court filing. 

The new directors, Alex Dimitrief and Frederick Arnold, have deep corporate, legal, and board experience. The two names were detailed at the hearing on Wednesday, sources who attended the hearing virtually told Business Insider.

Dimitrief held a number of executive roles at GE, including general counsel and then CEO of the company's global growth organization, and is now a partner at law-focused consultancy Zeughauser Group. Arnold served on the board of Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy estate and is currently a director at FS KKR, a business development corporation.  

WeWork's board is chaired by SoftBank chief operating officer Marcelo Claure. The board includes three other SoftBank and SoftBank Vision Fund executives, as well as SoftBank's financial adviser on the stock purchase agreement, WeWork's CEO, and Hony Capital's John Zhao. 

"WeWork is pursuing best practices of corporate governance to determine what role if any WeWork should have in this contractual dispute among its shareholders. The court's decision today allows that process to go forward," a SoftBank spokesperson said in a statement. 

Spokespeople for WeWork and the special committee declined to comment. 

Read more: Leaked data shows the WeWork stakes that 10 big investors are stuck with — and how JPMorgan wanted to cash out $356 million from the struggling coworking giant

The row was sparked by an April 17 letter that SoftBank sent to WeWork's board questioning if the special committee even had the authority to file lawsuits on behalf of the company. In response, the company's external lawyers recommended hiring executive recruiting firm Heidrick & Struggles to find independent directors, per Wednesday's court filings.

Dunlevie and Frankfort said they were not part of the original discussions with the recruiting firm, and the pair voted against hiring the firm and forming the temporary committee. Later, they learned WeWork agreed to pay the recruiting firm $450,000 for successfully finding the new directors or $225,000 if the firm did not find them.

In a court filing, attorneys for WeWork's special committee called SoftBank's attempt to form a new committee an "unprecedented betrayal" and a "tainted process." 

SoftBank, meanwhile, said in filings that the proposed independent directors would not "rubberstamp" the Japanese investor's claim that the special committee can't act on behalf of WeWork.

"The Special Committee seeks to entrench itself, securing a blank check drawn from WeWork's treasury to fund litigation benefiting its members and other tendering stockholders," SoftBank's attorneys said in a filing on Wednesday.

The investor's lawyers also said that Dunlevie and Frankfort have ties to WeWork via investments, Dunlevie via his venture capital firm Benchmark Capital and Frankfort via two investment entities. The recruiting firm was engaged to bring on independent board members – someone who doesn't have any relationship to or interest in the company. 

Dunlevie and Frankfort said they're representing 850 current and former WeWork employees who were set to participate in the tender offer. WeWork founder Adam Neumann is also suing SoftBank over the same issue; his lawsuit was consolidated with the special committee's suit and will be heard in January. 

The groups are due back in court in late July for the next phase of the tender offer litigation.

SoftBank's tender offer came as part of a larger rescue package for WeWork in the fall after the office company shelved its initial public offering. After Neumann was ousted, SoftBank agreed to bail out the company through a multibillion-dollar debt and equity agreement and to buy stock from early employees and investors. 

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 (646) 768-1627 using a non-work phone, email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., or Twitter DM at @MeghanEMorris. (PR pitches by email only, please.) You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

LastPass is a locally encrypted way to store all your passwords and other essential data securely in one place. Despite all its security features, for some, LastPass's master password system isn't enough protection for their most sensitive information and data. 

That's where Google Authenticator, the alphabet company's software-based mobile freeware that implements two-step verification services, can help. The Authenticator lets you add another layer of protection for your bank accounts and passwords you've uploaded to your LastPass Vault by generating one-time-use, time-sensitive codes that will confirm you are the account holder.

Coupling LastPass's native security system with Google Authenticator can offer another layer of protection for your cyber identity and the data in your Vault. To link them, you'll need access to an internet browser, mobile device, and your master password on hand. You will also need to download and install Google Authenticator on your mobile device if you haven't already. 

Here's how the security savvy can connect their LastPass account to Google Authenticator. 

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

iPhone 11 (From $699.99 at Apple)

Samsung Galaxy S10 (From $699.99 at Walmart)

Apple Macbook Pro (From $1,299.00 at Apple)

Lenovo IdeaPad 130 (From $469.99 at Walmart)

How to add LastPass to Google Authenticator 

1. Login to your LastPass account at LastPass.com using your username and master password. 

2. Select "Account Settings" — represented by a gear or cog icon — from your Vault's left-side menu. 

3. Choose "Multifactor Options" from the top "Account Settings" menu bar. 

4. Locate the Google Authenticator option and click the pencil icon to the far right in the "Action" column. 

5. Enable Google Authenticator in LastPass by selecting "Yes" in the "Enable" dropdown. Then press "Update." 

6. To the right of the "Private Key" row, click "View." 

7. When prompted, enter your master password. 

8. Write down the 16-digit Private Key that's generated. 

9. In the same window, next to the "Barcode" tab, click "View." 

10. Enter your master password to summon the Google Authenticator QR code. 

11. Open the Google Authenticator app on your mobile device. 

12. Tap "Begin Setup" when you launch the Google Authenticator app. 

13. Select "Scan barcode." 

14. Hold your device to the QR code on your computer screen. 

15. Go back to your computer and select "Update" in the LastPass pop-up window. Then enter your master password. 

16. Using the current visible Authenticator 6-digit code on your mobile device, enter it into the dialog box on your LastPass browser screen. 

17. Click "OK" on your browser screen.

18. Select "Update" again to save and close.

 

President Donald Trump is planning to issue an executive order Thursday "pertaining to social media," according to several White House reporters who were briefed aboard Air Force One on Wednesday evening.

The White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, offered no details about what the directive might include, but The Washington Post reported that it could empower various federal agencies to penalize social-media companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google for their content-moderation practices.

Two officials familiar with the order told the paper the directive would task the US Commerce Department with asking the Federal Communications Commission to look at narrowing the scope of Section 230, a provision of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that shields internet companies from legal liability for content published on their sites and gives them broad power to moderate that content.

The sources also told The Post that the order could funnel complaints about political bias to the Federal Trade Commission, which could then investigate social-media companies' content-moderation practices and require federal agencies to conduct a review of their social-media advertising spending.

Kate Klonick, a law professor at St. John's University who is a fellow at Yale University' Information Society Project, tweeted late Wednesday that she had obtained a draft of the order. She said the order might argue that fact-checking falls under "editorial conduct" and therefore isn't protected under Section 230.

Klonick also said the order could also prohibit federal agencies from advertising on platforms that violate the editorial conduct provision of Section 230.

Earlier this week, Twitter for the first time applied a fact-checking label to some of Trump's tweets.

Twitter added a link with the text "Get the facts about mail-in ballots" below two tweets in which Trump falsely claimed vote-by-mail ballots were linked to fraud. The link took users to a page where fact-checkers had debunked Trump's claims.

Trump ranted against Twitter's decision in a series of tweets, accusing the company of "interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election" and "completely stifling FREE SPEECH."

Following reports of Trump's planned executive order, Twitter responded by saying Trump had violated its policy against "manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes," which "includes posting or sharing content that may suppress participation or mislead people about when, where, or how to participate in a civic process."

"We added a label to two @realDonaldTrump Tweets about California's vote-by-mail plans as part of our efforts to enforce our civic integrity policy. We believe those Tweets could confuse voters about what they need to do to receive a ballot and participate in the election process," the company said in a tweet Wednesday evening.

It's not the first time the Trump administration has threatened legal action against social-media companies that make decisions the president disagrees with.

Last year, the White House drafted a proposal aimed at penalizing platforms accused of bias against conservatives — conservatives have frequently raised such accusations but have yet to provide evidence to support them. Earlier Wednesday, a federal judge tossed a lawsuit that claimed Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and Google conspired to suppress conservative views online, Bloomberg reported.

It's also likely that Trump doesn't have the legal grounds to issue such regulations, according to multiple experts who told Insider the First Amendment, Section 230, and other legal protections gave private companies broad rights around regulating content on their platforms.

Trump's order, however, could still drag social-media companies into a fight over Section 230 that they've been desperately trying to avoid. The legal shield it provides, which was instrumental in the development of the modern internet, has become a hotly debated issue in recent years from both sides of the aisle.

Twitter is not a public utility, despite the push in recent years to have certain tech companies declared part of the public commons. 

While the social media giant remains a private entity that makes its own rules, some of the content it hosts falls squarely in the public interest. This would include elected officials' Twitter accounts.

The power and influence wielded by elected officials entitles the public to as much transparency as possible into the thought processes of their representatives in government. 

That includes Donald Trump's deranged tweets spreading despicable fake conspiracy theories about a woman's tragic death nearly two decades ago.

We're better off knowing this is how the president thinks than trying to whack-a-mole his worst thoughts down the memory hole.  

Trump is providing transparency on his unfitness for the presidency

The leader of the free world, governing a country on the brink of a depression and suffering through a pandemic, is practically begging Twitter to ban him from its platform. 

With all that should be occupying his time and energy, he has instead chosen to continue his public war of words with his former friend Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC "Morning Joe" co-host and former Republican congressman from Florida.

Though Trump has a long history of promoting conspiracy theories, he's now relentlessly using his Twitter feed to accuse Scarborough of murdering a former staffer, Lori Klausutis, who died in 2001. 

Klausutis had an undiagnosed heart condition, and died of trauma after collapsing and hitting her head on a desk. 

Despite widely-available facts and a plea from Klausutis' widower to leave his late wife's memory out of his unhinged attacks, Trump doubled-down on the fake conspiracy theory to reporters Tuesday.

The often Trump-friendly Wall Street Journal editorial board slammed Trump's conspiracy tweets as "debasing his office, and he's hurting the country in doing so." In a comparison that must sting Trump, the board said Trump is "trafficking in the same sort of trash" as "the lies spread about him in the Steele dossier."

The right-leaning but sometimes Trump-critical Washington Examiner editorial board said "observers might even someday look back at this incident as the instant when things began to unravel."

And the staunchly conservative New York Post editorial board warned Trump that "You might be making your enemies angry, but you're making allies tune out."

Trump is demonstrating his unfitness for office, and Twitter is the platform where he's making conservatives and stout allies cringe, because his actions are indefensible. 

If one agrees that Trump is unfit and wants the world to see him at his worst, taking away his microphone is the least advisable course of action.

Lawmakers' tweets are public record

America offers far too much pomp and circumstance to our elected officials (is there really any reason a one-term member of Congress should be addressed with the honorific for the rest of their life?).  

We elevate lawmakers as "leaders" when they are in fact, public servants. We give those jobs their legitimacy, and the people in those jobs in turn make decisions that affect our lives. That's why they can't shut out the public, however much they'd like to.

Both Trump and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York learned through the courts over the past year that they could not block critics on Twitter without violating the First Amendment. The reason is because as public officials, their Twitter accounts are public forums. Denying the public access to that forum is unconstitutional.

Elected officials' social media accounts offer a window into their thinking. And say what you want about Twitter, it shows us where Trump's head is at. That's a good thing. 

Would the public rather not know that he's taking some of his policy cues from Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens? Is it in the public interest to hide his ignorance and gullibility? More information is always better than less with public officials, especially when they're metaphorically showing their rear ends. 

Trump is a performative victim and a free speech tourist, posing a staunch First Amendment defender who in fact has a long history of supporting censorship and intimidating the free press that continues into his presidency. 

Depriving him of his favorite toy would only allow him to falsely claim free speech martyrdom. 

Twitter is a private company free to impose any policies of conduct it wishes (whether it's healthy for society to have tech corporations as the arbiters of free expression is a conversation for another time), but his removal from the site would not violate the constitution.

But there's another small matter that demonstrates the pointlessness of banning him: he's the president. 

Reporters will continue to tweet and print his words. He'll still appear on TV. He'll still represent the country on the global stage. 

The knowledge of how unstable, willfully ignorant, and vindictive our president is chilling. But a muzzled, secretive, mysteriously quiet Trump would be a much more frightening prospect.

A white man in a Minneapolis gym threatened to call the police on a group of black men, accusing them of not being tenants of the building, just days after an unarmed black man died after being kneeled on by a police officer in the same city.

"I'm a tenant here. Are you?" the man said in a video of the incident recorded by the group. They posted the video on Instagram on Tuesday on the account for their business, Top Figure.  

The group responds that they have an office in the building, but the man, who identified himself in the video as Tom Austin, continues: "What office? What office are you in?" 

"As you guys can see we're dealing with racism here," says one of the black men. The men did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

The men declined to tell Austin which office they had in the building, MoZaic East, in Minneapolis' Uptown neighborhood. The men rent an office in the WeWork in the building, according to their Instagram post. 

"I'm calling 911 then," Austin said. He then appears to call someone, saying "there's a whole bunch of people who don't appear to be..." before the audio becomes unclear.

Austin said in a phone interview with Business Insider on Wednesday that in the video he is calling the building manager, not the police. The Minneapolis Police Department said there is no record of a request for police for this incident.

Austin said that he asked the men whether they were tenants because the property's building manager, Nicole LaVere, had previously sent an email to tenants about concerns that non-tenants were using the gym and that the gym could be shut if the problem persists. Business Insider has asked Austin for a copy of the email, but have yet to independently confirm its existence.

LaVere's email, Austin said, had asked tenants to each use their own FOBs to enter the gym. A FOB is required to enter and exit the gym, and the men were sharing one FOB among the group, Austin said.

He said when he asked if they had received the email about the matter, the men asked him who Nicole was and were unaware of the email. (It's possible that as WeWork tenants, the men did not receive an email directly from the building nor would they be aware of the building manager.)

LaVere was not immediately available for comment.

"We all pay rent here and this man demanded that we show him our key cards or he will call the cops on us," the men said on Instagram. "We are sick and tired of tolerating this type of behavior on a day to day basis and we feel that we had to bring light onto this situation." 

Austin told Business Insider that he is sorry for his actions and that he overreacted. "I thought I was being helpful" to the building manager by reporting the men, Austin said. 

He also said he and the men continued to exercise in the gym together for 45 minutes following the incident shown in the video.

Austin told Business Insider that when he left the gym, he asked the men "if we're good" and that the group fist-bumped and moved on. When he went home that night, he thought the issue had been resolved, Austin said.

"I thought everything was fine," Austin said. "I was shocked to see that video." 

Austin also provided a written statement.

Yes, I f----d up. Should have handled it differently.  Not my job to have done anything. Building management had been complaining that tenants were allowing their friends to trespassing and use a private gym that was authorized only for building tenants. Said hello to everyone when I walked in. But after working out for 10 minutes, I noticed that one of the tenants seemed to have brought 4 friends and I complained to them that this isn't right. One guy was letting his other 4 friends in and out of the building with his pass card FOB. Four guys didn't have a FOB. When I said something, they got in my face accusing me of racial profiling. I said it wasn't racial profiling and it was all about suspicious activity/behavior. Because they were in my face and didn't have pass cards, I took photos and called the property manager. I only called the building property manager!  Never called 911.  I told them I'd have done the same thing if they were white, or even a bunch of girls who were trespassing. What surprises me is that we worked out in gym together for another 45 minutes. I had already apologized to them for making them feel it was a race issue and I listened to all their grievances about "being black." When I left the gym, at the end of the night I said "Have a great night, hope we're good." and did a fist bump with each of them! There is way more to the story. Fake news!

According to the Star Tribune, Austin, a venture capitalist, had his office lease terminated in the building where the incident took place. 

The incident comes days after an unarmed black man, 46-year-old George Floyd, died after being kneeled on by a Minneapolis Police officer. The FBI is investigating the matter, and the death sparked protests in the city on Tuesday, where police deployed tear gas. 

The incident also occurred the same day a white woman was shown in a video calling the police on a black man who had asked her to put her dog on a leash in an area where park rules require dogs to be leashed. The woman told police that "there's an African American man threatening my life." She was fired from her job as an executive at investment firm Franklin Templeton after the company reviewed the matter. 

Asked whether he had considered the recent occurrences in Minneapolis and New York City, Austin said "it didn't even occur to me." He said his issue with the men was that it appeared they were not all tenants, and he had not considered their race. 

A video of the incident in Minneapolis can be seen on Twitter, where it was widely shared.

 Rosie Perper contributed reporting. 

 

Health concerns aside, people are slowly starting to travel again as states and countries begin to ease stay-at-home orders, and short-term rental sites like Airbnb and VRBO already appear to be benefiting.

Global vacation rental bookings surged 127% between April 5 — when they hit rock bottom — to May 18, nearly reaching pre-pandemic levels, according to a new report from market research firm AirDNA.

As coronavirus lockdowns ground global travel to a halt, bookings plummeted to 916,000 during the week of April 5 — just six weeks later, as governments around the world began easing travel restrictions, they had rebounded to almost 2.1 million, the report said.

While summer bookings are still far behind where they were last year and the broader travel industry is still reeling from the economic fallout of the virus, the report showed some promising signs, saying "guests are actively making reservations for the end-of-year holiday season."

New Zealand, which took aggressive steps early on to contain the virus and halted community transmission by the end of April, has seen the biggest jump in rentals with 465% more bookings, while Germany followed with 367%, the US with 202%, France with 200%, and Australia with 189%, according to AirDNA.

Within the US, the locations that saw the strongest growth were beach towns and other leisure destinations within driving distance of states whose governors were earliest to relax stay-at-home orders, such as Alabama, Georgia, Texas, and the Carolinas.

Major metro areas with more than 2 million people have lagged behind, meanwhile, seeing just 44% growth since April.

With global travel at a near standstill and people staying close to home to vacation during the pandemic, the early rebound in the rental market has been largely fueled by domestic tourism, according to AirDNA.

For 40 top markets in the US and Europe, the average distance traveled is down 74% from last year, while more than half of travelers stayed somewhere within city limits.

Vacation rental bookings are just one sign that the travel may be on the road to recovery, and one that could be derailed by the resurgence of cases that health experts warn is likely if lockdowns are eased prematurely. 

Even if and when travel returns in full force, leaders in the travel industry have predicted that many of the changes prompted by the pandemic — like vacations within driving distance, less frequent business travel, and a shift away from hotels to rental homes with more space — could be here to stay.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended the social network's policies on speech, even if they lead to societal "tension," a day after a report alleged that the company ignored internal reports that its systems were contributing to political polarisation.

On Wednesday, during Facebook's annual shareholder meeting, the 36-year-old billionaire chief executive was asked about allegations of "censorship" on social media. He responded by defending Facebook's stated mission of "giving people a voice" as beneficial to society — even if it contributes to long periods of civil unrest.

"I think there's a lot of history that would suggest that giving more people a voice to say what they think, even if it's impolite in a lot of cases, or can be challenging to people, I think a lot of that also ends up being very productive and important for society, even if it ends up creating more tension in the near term," Zuckerberg said.

"And the near term in the case of history can drag out for years, whole periods. But I do think over the long term, this freedom and giving people a voice is extremely valuable."

On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal published an investigation into how internal research produced by Facebook employees indicated that Facebook's software was helping contribute to "divisiveness" and pushing people apart politically — and that the company ultimately shrugged the findings off.

In this context, Zuckerberg's comments represent an acknowledgement from Facebook's management that it (and other social media services) can indeed drive divisiveness — but that the purported benefits that go along with that outweigh the problems it causes.

For years, Facebook has disputed that its service contributes to "filter bubbles" — a term referring to how people can surround themselves only with people and sources of information that they agree with, reinforcing their beliefs and driving them apart from others who think differently. In 2019, for example, COO Sheryl Sandberg said that Facebook could help widen people's perspectives: "The people who use social media see much more broad points of view."

But The Wall Street Journal found that in 2018, researchers at Facebook warned the company's leadership in a presentation that the social network's algorithms could fuel polarization. They wrote: "Our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness ... If left unchecked," the algorithms would show "more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform."

Similarly, a 2016 presentation reportedly warned that "64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools ... Our recommendation systems grow the problem."

Facebook also published a response to the WSJ's report on its company blog on Wednesday, in which VP of Integrity Guy Rosen wrote: "The piece uses a couple of isolated initiatives we decided against as evidence that we don't care about the underlying issues — and it ignored the significant efforts we did make. The piece disregarded how our research, and research we continue to commission, informed dozens of other changes and new products. It also ignored other measures we've taken to fight polarization. As a result, readers were left with the impression we are ignoring an issue that in fact we have invested heavily in."

Contact Business Insider reporter Rob Price via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1 650-636-6268), encrypted email (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), standard email (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), Telegram/Wickr/WeChat (robaeprice), or Twitter DM (@robaeprice). We can keep sources anonymous. Use a non-work device to reach out. PR pitches by standard email only, please.