The Marketplace of Ideas

Amazon, 5G, Facebook, and Elon Musk.

Amazon

I’ve written about the shady shit that goes on in the Amazon marketplace, the “third party” portion of the website, which allows independent sellers to hawk their wares. For years, it has been rife with counterfeit goods and seller fraud, and Amazon has taken a series of half-measures to police it. But what about Amazon’s own marketplace? Well, it turns out there is shady shit going on there too, and you’ll never guess the culprit:

Amazon.com Inc. employees have used data about independent sellers on the company’s platform to develop competing products, a practice at odds with the company’s stated policies.

Ahh, yes. Of course they did. Amazon employees and executives regularly used sales and consumer data from their third party marketplace to research and decide on which products to copy and sell under their own labels. I was not aware of how many brands Amazon has developed over the years:

Amazon’s private-label business encompasses more than 45 brands with some 243,000 products, from AmazonBasics batteries to Stone & Beam furniture.

Furniture? Huh. The problem with Amazon using this data to create and market its own products is that it can list them above competitor products in the search results, stealing sales from competitors. This is why they have claimed for years that they don’t do it, because it’s blatant anti-competitive behavior.

Amazon claims it’s not doing anything wrong, and even if it was their brands only account for a small fraction of the overall sales. But, well, that’s not what their goals were:

Former executives said they were told frequently by management that Amazon brands should make up more than 10% of retail sales by 2022. Managers of different private-label product categories have been told to create $1 billion businesses for their segments, they said.

What was the strategy here? At some point, if your own brands are 10% of retail sales and you’ve pushed third party sellers off the platform or out of business, someone might notice? Did they have a long term lobbying plan to put enough ex-Obama dipshits on the payroll to convince Congress to rip up all anti-monopoly laws? Do they simply not care, because they can’t see past the next quarter’s financial statements? Who knows. None of this seems to have worked, and now they are facing investigations in the US and Europe, though I am not sure what sort of fines or regulations would give them pause, at this point.

5G

New coronavirus conspiracy theories crop up faster than journalists and scientists can debunk them. Many stay contained to the fever swamps of private Facebook groups, but some have spilled out into the world, creating havoc at the worst possible time.

A few weeks ago, some people who believe that 5G technology is making us more vulnerable to coronavirus set fire to cel towers in the UK:

Across Britain, more than 30 acts of arson and vandalism have taken place against wireless towers and other telecom gear this month, according to police reports and a telecom trade group. In roughly 80 other incidents in the country, telecom technicians have been harassed on the job.

The attacks were fueled by the same cause, government officials said: an internet conspiracy theory that links the spread of the coronavirus to an ultrafast wireless technology known as 5G.

While it is something of a relief to know that our country doesn’t have the monopoly on insane COVID conspiracy theories, it also shines a light on how, once again, companies like Google and Facebook allow these dangerous lies to fester on their platforms.

Oh, also! Scammers are using 5G and fears about coronavirus to rip people off with fake products:

A network of British conspiracy theorists are promoting — and profiting from — a hoax that 5G cellular technology is spreading COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

Of course they are. I assume they’re using the best technology to combat the evil 5G scourge:

One of the other speakers at the event, pharmacist Jacques Bauer, sells a $350 USB stick he calls the “5GBioShield,” which he falsely claims protects people from 5G radiation by converting it into beneficial radiation.

Nice! Apparently USB sticks are the preferred tool among 5G conspiracy theorists:

[John] Kitson sells a different $350 USB stick, called the “5G Rezotone Shield,” which he falsely claims protects people from the coronavirus and 5G radiation, and saves people 30% on their vehicle fuel bills when carried in the car. He also promotes silica water — produced by a company that has been accused of preying on the fears of families of autistic children to hawk a fake therapy — and products that falsely claim to block electromagnetic radiation.

Uhh, wow. Lot to unpack there. The thing is, people like this wouldn’t be able to sell their ridiculous USB sticks or recruit followers without the power of YouTube and Facebook. It seems like every week a new story comes out about this sort of thing, and the tech companies promise to take action, and maybe they remove a page or ban a couple users, but it does nothing to stem the tide.

In fact, until the pandemic hit, they were content to let these groups flourish:

Up until the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-5G content had been allowed to flourish on Facebook. One of the largest Facebook groups for the movement, Stop 5G U.K., has over 50,000 members. The most-shared video on Facebook about 5G was published in June 2019 and has 3.8 million views on YouTube and 270,000 shares on Facebook, according to social metrics site BuzzSumo.

I mean, if tech platforms want to use coronavirus as a reason to get rid of this sort of thing, I’m all for it. But, if their track record indicates anything, they’ll go right back to ignoring dangerous conspiracy theories when we’re allowed back out of our houses.

Facebook

Speaking of Facebook, last week Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post pledging to combat coronavirus misinformation on Facebook. How’s that going?

[…] at the very same time, The Markup found, Facebook was allowing advertisers to profit from ads targeting people that the company believes are interested in “pseudoscience.” According to Facebook’s ad portal, the pseudoscience interest category contained more than 78 million people.

Whoops! Any time one of these stories comes out, I think about how the meetings at Facebook went, as they were developing these categories for advertisers to use. Tech companies can blame a lot of things on machine learning, but these sorts of decisions mean that a significant number of people looked at a category labeled “pseudoscience” in their advertising software and said yeah, this seems good. Ship it!

An audience size of 78 million people is very large, so whatever criteria the Facebook software developers decided to use to create it must be quite broad. There is, arguably, a community of people who are interested in pseudoscience because they realize it is fake, or are researchers, or something like that. The Markup journalist who broke the story actually found the category because he was targeted for ads by a company selling hats to protect him from cellphone radiation:

The “Why You’re Seeing This Ad” tab on the ad showed it was displayed because “Lambs is trying to reach people Facebook thinks are interested in Pseudoscience.”

Lambs CEO Art Menard de Calenge told The Markup that the company didn’t select the pseudoscience category. That targeting, he noted, was done by Facebook independently. “This is Facebook thinking that this particular ad set would be interesting for this demographic, not our doing,” Menard de Calenge wrote in an email.

And this, in a nutshell, is why allowing a room full of 20-something white dudes in Mountain View to decide how ad targeting should work is a pretty bad idea! When Facebook’s own targeting levers decide that people “interested” in pseudoscience are likely to click on Faraday hats, we’re way off script.

Tiger Ki…Just Kidding, it’s Elon Musk

I cannot say how much easier it makes my job - let’s just say blogging is a job, okay - when journalists track down and put all the dumb things people say and do in one place. Sometimes, when I am writing a piece, I will have to read, like, four or five other articles! It sucks! So, a big thank you to Jemima Kelly from Alphaville, who has done most of my work for me:

After playing down the virus since January, our Elon suddenly last week seemed like maybe he had taken a Trump-style turn, and had decided that maybe Covid-19 was something that needed to be taken seriously after all. Though he earlier said he would produce ventilators but only “if there’s a shortage” (as if there weren’t already one), he then announced on March 24 that he’d bought over 1,255 “FDA-approved ventilators” from China and had delivered them to Los Angeles.

Yes, those are big red Tesla logos slapped on machines that another company made, and Elon Musk purchased to ship to the state of New York. Oh, and there’s one other slight problem:

You might also be surprised to see there, on top of the boxes, not a ventilator, but a BPAP (Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure, also called a “BiPAP” machine), which is used to treat sleep apnoea by maintaining a consistent breathing pattern at night (it’s very similar to a CPAP machine, but it has two pressure settings rather than just one). 

Now BPAP and CPAP machines are sometimes called “non-invasive ventilators”, but these are not the ventilators that can be used in intensive care units, which are invasive ventilators that deliver oxygen to the lungs and are used as part of life support.

Come ON, man. While Musk was taking a victory lap, actual doctors were saying that, actually, it may not be a great idea to use these not-really-ventilators on COVID patients:

And there have even been warnings that CPAP or BPAP machines could make things worse. The American Society of Anesthesiologists on February 23 issued guidance warning that CPAP and BPAP machines “may increase the risk of infectious transmission”. 

To give you an idea of quite how different a BPAP machine is from an ICU-grade ventilator, one of these bad boys will set you back around $800. That’s if you can still buy them — the machines that Musk and Tesla appear to have delivered to New York are the ResMed S9 Elite, which have now been discontinued. A ventilator, meanwhile, can cost as much as $50,000. So over 60 times more, in other words.

During the pandemic, for reasons I cannot fully explain but just google the stonks meme, Elon Musk’s net worth has increased by one billion dollars. And he’s out here buying $800 sleep apnea machines to send to New York hospitals? Thanks, dude.

At least he actually delivered those machines, however. Because he also promised California some ventilators, and, well:

So, millions of Californians heard the governor announce Musk’s heroic donation of “ventilators.” Yet not one unit has been delivered – and Musk likely never had the real ventilators our hospitals need.

There are a lot of far more important things and people to worry about during a global crisis, but Elon Musk using Twitter and his status as a billionaire to promise lifesaving medical equipment he can’t or won’t deliver is kind of a problem! Meanwhile, his car company’s stock price is up 64% in the last three weeks.

Short Cons

Daily Mail - “a DailyMail.com investigation has uncovered serious questions over One America News (OAN) White House Correspondent Chanel Rion's background, finances, and how she obtained security clearance to be in the White House.”

NPR - “Carpenito said the Justice Department has more than 100 open investigations into price gouging. It has hundreds more, he said, into other crimes tied to the pandemic, including fake treatments and cures.”

Justice Dot Gov - “Dr. Jennings Ryan Staley, a licensed physician and the operator of Skinny Beach Med Spa in San Diego, was charged today with mail fraud in connection with the sale of what he described as a “100%” cure for COVID-19 that he said would render customers immune to the virus for at least six weeks.”

Bank Info Security - “The U.S. State Department is offering a $5 million reward for information about North Korean-sponsored hacking campaigns.”

SDX Central - “Ransomware attacks skyrocketed 148% in March, compared to baseline levels in February, as corporations shift to remote work because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to VMware Carbon Black threat researchers.”

Tips, comments, and CPAP machines to scammerdarkly@gmail.com