Rolling out some new Blogs 

TikTok USA.

The House of Representatives has passed a bill that would force a sale or ban of the hugely popular social media app.

On December 22, 2022, the world’s understanding of TikTok changed. The social media giant admitted that a China-based team of employees at its parent company, ByteDance, had tracked the location of journalists, including this reporter, just three months after Forbes reported on its plans to surveil American citizens.

It was concrete evidence of something that American lawmakers have feared for years — that TikTok could be used to spy on Americans. The U.S. Government has long worried that the Chinese government could require ByteDance to either use TikTok to surveil Americans or try to influence our civic discourse. Today, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would require ByteDance to divest from TikTok, or, if it refuses, ban the app in the United States, and President Biden has said he will sign the bill if he has the opportunity to do so. Whether that will happen is now in the hands of the Senate, where lawmakers are debating behind the scenes about whether they should introduce and pass an equivalent measure or not.

Making Remote, Work.

In the wake of a global shift toward remote work, businesses and employees alike have encountered a transformative opportunity to redefine productivity and job satisfaction. This flexible, efficient and employee-centric approach has challenged the conventional 9-to-5 office model, characterized by long commutes and fixed-location workspaces.

This article explores the inherent problems with traditional work settings, proposes solutions for a remote work future and highlights the benefits of embracing this model.

The Challenges With The Traditional Work Model

In the years after the Industrial Revolution, the world of work saw a seismic shift from 16- to eight-hour work days, primarily due to work-life balance. In addition to the market benefits, Henry Ford remarked that shorter hours increased productivity and reduced absenteeism.

Yet, with all of the technological advances in our society, we have only re-evaluated the work model once the pandemic forced us to.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, employees often spent upwards of eight hours at the office, yet not all of this time was productive. Businesses were paying for eight hours of physical presence rather than production. The distinction between motivated and less engaged employees becomes blurred in a setting that values physical presence over actual output.

Post-Covid, many businesses have adhered to outdated processes and have suffered financially due to underutilized office spaces and loss of motivated employees. The insistence on a physical workplace overlooks technological advancements that enable effective remote collaboration.

Moreover, the traditional billing of 40 hours per week emphasizes time spent over the quality and quantity of work accomplished, which is an arbitrary practice.

How To Succeed With Remote Work

Transitioning to remote work, however, necessitates comprehensively reimagining how we approach communication, motivation and organizational structures to maintain and enhance productivity.

With communication, for example, it is vital to implement a joint status board accessible to all stakeholders—including clients, developers, testers and customer support—to provide a granular view of project statuses. This board should be linked to a roadmap dynamically tied to issues, ensuring that the roadmap communicates each project’s real-time, at-a-glance status.

Regarding motivation, we can draw inspiration from self-motivated fitness apps, which can be beneficial, where progress and achievements are continuously acknowledged, creating a positive feedback loop. Additionally, allowing peers to vote for top performers can foster a competitive yet supportive environment, encouraging everyone to contribute.

The organizational structure should support these initiatives. Project managers (PMs) are crucial in prioritizing the board for the most significant impact, creating issues, managing resource availability and overseeing the budget. Developers, on the other hand, can be tasked with creating detailed “steps” for each issue and performing daily status updates by checking off completed steps. The system must be intelligent enough to raise red flags for issues at risk of falling behind schedule, suggest pairing developers on challenging tasks and assign issues based on priority, ensuring the workflow remains smooth and efficient.

Successful remote work environments are also built on clear expectations and robust team structures. Key strategies include:

• Establishing core meeting hours.

• Meetings that are small and focused on specific problems.

• Promoting video engagement during calls to foster connection.

• Automating collective and individual status reports.

• Sharing road maps across levels, updating in real time and conveying status at a glance.

Moreover, teams should encompass core functions such as product support, strategy, development, communication and customer support to ensure comprehensive coverage of business needs. With this in mind, oversight in a remote setting can be democratized by allowing team members to provide feedback on each other’s performance, fostering a culture of accountability and transparency.

Encouraging self-competition and establishing a feedback loop where consistency and exceeding personal bests are rewarded can enhance productivity and job satisfaction.

Conclusion

The shift to remote work offers numerous advantages for businesses, employees and society. Reduced overhead costs for businesses, the emergence of new industries and the distribution of capital across more diverse geographical areas are just a few of the economic benefits. Employees gain invaluable time, improving their work-life balance and overall well-being.

Remote work also democratizes opportunity, allowing companies to source the best talent regardless of location and enabling individuals to live and work where they choose, not just in major urban centers. This geographical flexibility can lead to more diverse and innovative teams and contribute to decentralizing economic activity from traditional urban hubs.

The future of work is unequivocally remote. This model addresses the inefficiencies and limitations of the traditional office and offers a framework for a more balanced, productive and satisfied workforce. By embracing remote work, businesses can thrive in a digital landscape, harnessing the benefits of technological advancements to create a more equitable, efficient and flexible work environment.

The transition requires a reevaluation of long-held norms and an openness to restructuring how we work, communicate and collaborate. The rewards, however, promise a revolution in how work is perceived and executed, heralding a new era of productivity and job satisfaction.

_{March 2024, CICO writer – Staff Reporter Jacob Cheriathundam}

TikTok Owner ByteDance Quietly Launched 4 Generative AI Apps Powered By OpenAI’s GPT.

The websites and policies for new apps Cici AI, ChitChop, Coze, and BagelBell don’t mention that they were made by ByteDance.

TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, has quietly launched four new generative AI apps for users outside of China, Forbes has learned. Dubbed Cici AI, Coze, ChitChop, and BagelBell, the apps were all launched in the past three months and collectively have millions of downloads.

Cici AI, ChitChop, and Coze are bot creation platforms that let users make and share their own chatbots. BagelBell generates the plot and text of fictional stories that change based on readers’ choices. But ByteDance did not build the underlying large language models that power them. Instead, the apps rely on OpenAI’s GPT technology, accessed through a Microsoft Azure license, according to ByteDance spokesperson Jodi Seth.

_{February 2024, CICO writer – Staff Reporter Emily Baker-White}

Why Is TikTok Parent ByteDance Moving Into Biology, Chemistry And Drug Discovery?

TikTok’s Chinese parent is beginning to recruit across the U.S. for experts in science and healthcare disciplines far afield from social media. Its motives are unclear.

ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, appears to be ramping up work in fields well beyond the bounds of social media: Biology, chemistry, natural sciences and pharmaceuticals.

The Beijing-based tech giant is recruiting American talent in computational biology, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics and physics for its “AI for Drug Design” and “AI for Science” teams, according to LinkedIn posts reviewed by Forbes. ByteDance appears to be hiring for at least 17 of these positions across New York, California and Washington state—taking a swing at local rivals like Meta, Google and Amazon, where similar work is already underway. (Others leading these efforts at ByteDance appear to be based in Chicago, Boston and Beijing, according to LinkedIn.)

The AI for Drug Design team aims to “revolutionize drug discovery,” says one job listingrecruiting PhD students to Silicon Valley. “We are dedicated to pushing the boundaries of AI-driven drug design, tackling complex challenges in protein structure prediction, molecular conformation analysis, and computational protein design. By combining our passion for scientific excellence with the transformative power of AI, we aim to accelerate drug discovery and make a meaningful impact on global healthcare.”

ByteDance’s AI for Science group, meanwhile, “has been focusing on tackling challenges in natural sciences, including biology, physics, and materials,” say listings for research scientists in computational biology and quantum chemistry in Seattle. And those interning in molecular dynamics in New York will be responsible for pursuing “novel strategies for computer-aided drug discovery” and advancing “free energy methodologies.”

What, exactly, that future is to be isn’t clear. It is also unclear how drug discovery or development, and other science-focused efforts, fit into ByteDance’s sprawling repertoire of social media sensations like TikTok and its Chinese counterpart Douyin. ByteDance declined to comment on what its objectives are, how large the AI for Drug Design and Science teams are today and who it may have already hired. But a head of AI for drug design and science started at the company this past summer, per LinkedIn—an expert who is also running UCLA’s General Artificial Intelligence Lab—and the team has already released research on protein design and drug design, and an open-source toolcombining structural biology with AI.

TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.

How TikTok could help.

Forbes found no indication that these ByteDance initiatives are related to TikTok, and TikTok did not respond to a request for comment about whether they are in any way linked.

But experts said data from TikTok and other platforms owned by ByteDance could be highly valuable for these science initiatives. (And though TikTok has emphasized that it operates largely separately from its Chinese parent, Forbes reporting has repeatedly revealed the extent to which the businesses are entangled and data from one company is often accessible by both.)

“They could be doing large-scale hypothesis generation with all this data, and then they could be feeding that data into Chinese pharmaceutical companies or Chinese weapons manufacturers.”

In the development of new drugs or medical treatments, experts and pharmaceutical companies typically work around what’s called a “target product profile,” a rubric that helps them distill what their optimal drug would look like, the conditions or key problems they’d address with it and who their ideal patients, candidates or markets are. Experts said TikTok—where many people are drawn to health and wellness content, talk openly about medical issues, and regularly seek information on what has (or hasn’t) worked for others—could serve as an invaluable feedback loop and marketing tool for drug developers. Spending data collected from TikTok Shop and in-app purchases could also be useful.

“Based on the kinds of videos that [young TikTok users] watch or the content that they consume, it might provide insights as to conditions that they’re facing,” said Douglas Schmidt, associate provost for research and co-director of the Data Science Institute at Vanderbilt University, who noted that many young Americans are medicated for ADHD, anxiety and other mental health conditions. “If you could find a way to sell products that would be appealing to them, you can certainly imagine [building] up a robust pharmaceuticals industry or a competitive product, then advertising it on TikTok.”

Eric Perakslis, a former chief scientist for the FDA who previously helped lead pharmaceuticals R&D for Johnson & Johnson, called this “surveillance capitalism basics: everything that you can extract from those things, they do.”

“Given that they’re a social media company, and given that they don’t have life science divisions that are consenting patients, taking samples or running mice and rat studies and stuff like that—their own data—I think it’s a fair assumption that somehow they’re accessing data” from elsewhere, said Perakslis.

This growing arm of ByteDance could be a “very big, large antenna,” he added—a way of pulling in a “big noisy mess of data,” filtering it through experts and then figuring out how to monetize it.

“They could be doing large-scale hypothesis generation with all this data, and then they could be feeding that data into Chinese pharmaceutical companies or Chinese weapons manufacturers or Chinese whatever,” Perakslis said. (ByteDance’s head of research appears to be based in Beijing, per LinkedIn.) Beyond drug discovery or repurposing, he noted the language used in these roles could also portend work in food science, agrochemical, petroleum, fuels science or even bioweapons. “The same technologies that allow us to develop new medicines can be used for bioweapons,” Perakslis said. “It’s a very similar set of capabilities.” Finally, experts said the roles signal that TikTok’s owner is looking to channel its AI prowess—embodied best by the unmatched TikTok algorithm that steers its ultra-personalized “For You” feed—into other revenue streams. That hypothesis jibes with the job descriptions: Those joining ByteDance’s “multidisciplinary drug discovery team” will be tasked with “applying inventive algorithms” to its work and developing algorithms for antibody design. Other hires will build “cutting-edge machine learning technologies in scientific areas like biology, physics and materials.”

State of play.

This is not the first time that ByteDance—which established the ByteDance AI Lab in 2016—has ventured into industries that seemingly have little to do with TikTok, Douyin and social media more broadly.

Healthcare is just one of many. Last year, ByteDance bought Chinese hospital chain Amcare for $1.5 billion—a push to establish a foothold in the space after ByteDance had acquired online medical encyclopedia Baikemy in 2020 and subsequently launched a suite of healthcare apps under the name Xiaohe. Experts at the time told Forbes those moves reflected the Chinese government’s mandate for the country to be a global leader in health by the end of this decade.

What’s different now, though, is that ByteDance appears to be expanding those efforts beyond China into the United States—hiring scientists and PhDs in at least three major U.S. cities. And in doing so, it’s planting a flag in a market where some of its biggest American competitors have their own science, research or health-focused initiatives underway and edging into their AI research talent pool.

“They’ve attracted a lot of negative publicity about TikTok. … Maybe they’re trying to diversify into fields that are viewed more positively by governments and regulators.”

Like ByteDance, these U.S. rivals are tech behemoths that are trying to win in industries well outside their bread-and-butter businesses. Google parent Alphabet is pursuing breakthroughs in tech and science through its Moonshot Factory (previously called Google X). Google DeepMind, the search giant’s innovation lab for AI and neuroscience, recently released a model that can mimic human reasoning. Meta AI, a research hub from the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is transforming medicine by deploying AI to improve and expand access to MRIs and help doctors read and make predictions off X-rays. And Amazon has had its own foray into healthcare, acquiring OneMedical in 2022. (TikTok Shop, which the platform launched in the U.S. in September, is also a growing threat for Amazon.)

“They’re undoubtedly trying to find a way to leapfrog or get access to people with skills in those areas,” said Schmidt, the professor from Vanderbilt.

But ByteDance’s segue into the sciences could also simply be a way for the Chinese company to improve its goodwill in the U.S. as talks of a TikTok ban loom and the app faces heavy scrutiny for its effect on the American public and discourse, he added.

“They’ve attracted a lot of negative publicity about TikTok and its corruption on the youth of America,” Schmidt said. “But when we start thinking about healthcare and science, that comes across as more corporately responsible and trying to help for the good of humanity. … Maybe they’re trying to diversify into fields that are viewed more positively by governments and regulators.”

After all, as ByteDance says itself: “Our goal is to create breakthroughs in natural science with new methodology and help the world.”

_{January 2024, CICO writer – Staff Reporter Alexandra S. Levine}

A Secretive $10 Billion Firm Backed By WhatsApp Billionaire Jan Koum Is Quietly Building A Startup Portfolio.

Led by former Sequoia partner Michael Abramson, two-year-old Newlands already holds billions in equities like Alphabet, Amazon and Meta alongside a smattering of early-stage startup bets — and then there’s crypto flameout FTX. No one involved wants to talk.

n the early months of the pandemic, Michael Abramson returned home to Texas to plot his next career move. A former partner at storied venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, he’d kept a low public profile despite investments in flashy startups like beauty retailer Glossier and delivery app Rappi. Hoping to maintain that quiet approach in his next endeavor, he pinged a friend with a similar penchant for privacy, and billions of dollars to invest: WhatsApp billionaire Jan Koum.

Today, with Koum’s support, Abramson quietly leads Newlands, a firm that has rapidly grown into one of the largest new funds in tech. Abramson and Koum haven’t spoken publicly about Newlands, and the firm does not appear in recent funding announcements. Its corporate website is little more than a shell. But regulatory filings reveal a firm that holds nearly $10 billion in public equities, mostly tech stocks, and is beginning to make investments in the early-stage startup ecosystem.

Some peers consider Dallas-based Newlands to be effectively Koum’s family office, deploying some of a fortune that Forbes values at about $15 billion, and filings link Koum to Newlands. But Newlands also doesn’t look like a typical family office, experts who reviewed its public filings on behalf of Forbes said.

The extent of Newlands’ size beyond its public holdings isn’t easily assessed; Abramson and Koum didn’t respond to requests for comment, nor did three other investors known to work at the firm. But conversations with a dozen peers and former or current collaborators — all of whom asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak or feared retaliation — reveal a fund that has built an eye-popping portfolio of some of tech’s buzziest public companies and is meeting and backing a number of other startups to grow it further.

“They have a great network, and they’re bought into a lot of stuff,” said one investor familiar with the firm. “They want to support people in the broader ecosystem — and also preserve and grow their wealth.”

When Sequoia doubled down on its early-stage investment in WhatsApp in 2013, Abramson was a key member of the team that worked closely with Koum, an immigrant from Ukraine whose messaging app had reached 200 million users. The two connected, in part over a shared aversion to the limelight. In a rare interview for a 2014 Forbes cover story, Koum recounted not sharing his employees’ enthusiasm when WhatsApp reached the top 20 apps on Apple’s App Store. “Marketing and press kicks up dust,” he told them. “It gets in your eye, and then you’re not focusing on the product.”

“Newlands is Jan and the partners’ money — and their money is a drop in the bucket.”

Fake Profiles And Anonymous Posts: How Social Media Is Upending College Life During The Israel-Gaza War.

From his early days at Sequoia, the Texas native Abramson had also become known for a similar disdain for public attention. A Harvard and Stanford Business School graduate, he’d originally joined a public/private crossover fund affiliated with Sequoia, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, then ended up on the growth team of Sequoia Capital, the venture firm. Investor peers knew him as “a good guy” who had the ear of Michael Moritz, the legendary Google and Stripe investor who previously led the firm’s global operations, and who was named co-lead of its growth team alongside partner Pat Grady in 2017. But Abramson was also on “the extreme side of introverted,” several sources said. “He’s an investor, not a hunter who would get out in front,” added one. “He has a pretty tight network.”

Working with Rappi, the Latin American on-demand app that Abramson backed in a Series B funding round in 2016, Abramson “knew the numbers cold,” a fellow Rappi investor said, but stood out as seemingly ill-suited to play the company politics beneficial at a large, hard-charging VC firm, a fellow Rappi investor said. “He was more low profile, but super responsive over email,” another said. Abramson gave a statementfor Glossier’s press release when he backed the beauty retailer in 2019, but didn’t become known for the deal like other backers. Behind the scenes, “he made a strong impression as being super sharp and inquisitive or engaged,” a fellow Glossier investor said. The founders of Rappi and Glossier didn’t respond to requests for comment.

But Abramson was holding only one board seat for Sequoia by 2020, weight-loss unicorn Noom (lead partners at growth funds will often hold eight or more). He’d given another statement for its 2019 funding press release, too, alongside Koum, who personally invested. His signature bets — Rappi, previously valued at $5 billion, Glossier, previously valued at $1.8 billion, have yet to go public or be acquired, while Noom, once valued at $3.7 billion, has battled controversies and conducted multiple rounds of layoffs. When Abramson departed Sequoia in the fall of 2020, with the U.S. still under Covid-19 shutdowns, he did so without fanfare. The firm wrote privately to its limited partners that Abramson had left the firm in order to move closer to family.

As he tinkered with different ideas, Abramson gravitated toward a reunion with Koum. The two had developed a close friendship following WhatsApp’s $22 billion sale to Facebook in 2014, even vacationing together, according to a source. Hiring two other SCGE alumni, Andy Shah and Dominik Pasalic, they launched Newlands in 2021 with the intention of running a $1 billion fund, the source added, before quickly expanding its scope. But they kept quiet. A filing from Massachusetts, where the firm hired a general counsel and chief compliance officer, is the only public document that directly connected Newlands to Koum. On LinkedIn, where Koum keeps a spartan presence under the name Jan K., he lists himself as a Newlands employee with the wry role of “QA testing,” or quality assurance. (Abramson’s LinkedIn page is even more sparse, without a photo. He, like others at the firm, calls himself simply an “investor.”)

“Newlands is Jan and the partners’ money — and their money is a drop in the bucket,” one investor who knows the firm said.

“Michael was a great partner in the building of our U.S. growth business,” Grady wrote in a statement. “He remains a close friend of Sequoia and we wish him continued success.”

So far, Newlands appears to have mostly invested in public tech stocks. Firm employees have told others that they expect to deploy about half its capital to such equities, with another 30% for startups and 20% earmarked for cryptocurrencies and investments in other funds, according to one source. But the public side has accounted for more than 80% of its activity so far, another source said.

A November filing by Newlands reported its public portfolio as holding $9.4 billion in assets to close the third quarter, flat from the previous quarter. The fund’s biggest positions: nearly $3 billion in shares of Meta, Koum’s former employer; a nearly $1 billion stake in Elon Musk’s Tesla; $800 million-plus positions in Alphabet and Amazon, and a $500 million-plus position in DoorDash. Newlands also holds $100 million-plus positions in Zoom, Shopify, Microsoft, Workday, Bill.com, JD.com, Netflix, Robinhood, Snowflake, DocuSign and Salesforce. Smaller positions include Alibaba, Datadog, Gitlab, PayPal, Coinbase, Moderna and Sprinklr.

Compared to its previous quarterly filings, Newlands’ holdings have grown considerably since it reported a public portfolio value of $5.6 billion to close Q1 2023, and $3.8 billion for the quarter before, the first period for which it filed. (Investment managers that “exercise investment discretion” over $100 million or more of securities must report such holdings quarterly to the SEC.) It typically only held or increased its positions, with some especially large purchases of Alphabet, Amazon, DoorDash, Bill.com, JD.com and Robinhood. Most recently it took positions in Chinese online retailer Pinduoduo and financial services giant Charles Schwab Corporation, sold its stake in Kraft Heinz and made modest investments in software businesses: Braze in customer engagement, and Procore in construction management.

“Michael is very risk-reward focused, and the public stuff is more attractive for risk-reward right now, so that’s where they spend their time,” said one investor peer.

Still, Newlands has begun to make startup investments, too, even as it works to keep them quiet. Startup funding tracker PitchBook lists no entry for the firm or recent deals by Abramson or Koum, and they’ve stayed out of any recent press releases. Crunchbase lists Newlands as having participated in Series A funding rounds for two data infrastructure startups this year, Kloudfuse and Lightup. Neither responded to a comment request.

Forbes also contacted three other startup CEOs named by sources as having taken Newland investment. One said they were familiar with Newlands but denied meeting the firm or taking its money. A second told Forbes that Newlands had asked it not to comment. A third didn’t respond.

One investment Newlands couldn’t keep quiet: a reported position in FTX, the bankrupt crypto exchange formerly led by former billionaire and convicted felon Sam Bankman-Fried. Newlands invested alongside Abramson’s previous firms, Sequoia Capital and SCGE, according to a report by The Information. And both Abramson and Koum were named on behalf of Newlands on a list published by Newcomer of advisors for FTX’s final fundraising push before its collapse in late 2022, alongside Sequoia’s Alfred Lin and former Sequoia partner Matt Huang of Paradigm, another FTX investor.

While the firm has made a number of relatively small, under $1 million early-stage bets, according to a source, Newlands hasn’t formalized a startup investment strategy or hired an investor to execute it full-time. But the firm has approached other funds about co-investing in deals they led, another source said.

The overall size and scale of Newlands’ operations remain a mystery, as does the total percentage of Koum’s $15 billion fortune now managed by the firm. The firm’s multi-billion-dollar Meta position could be shares it manages on behalf of the billionaire or two family trusts, each of which has received millions of such shares from Koum in the past, per filings. If the trusts were grantor trusts, Koum could have also swapped in other assets, such as cash, to transfer shares to Newlands without tax implications, said trusts expert Beth Shapiro Kaufman, a partner at Lowenstein Sandler and chair of its national private client services group.

“I think they’re redefining what it means to be a family office.”

Venture capital peers have referred to Newlands colloquially as Koum’s family office. But experts who reviewed its filings said Newlands looked more like a hedge fund or special purpose vehicle. Newlands refers to itself as a “global investment partnership” on LinkedIn, where several of the 11 employees listed include finance, tax and accounting specialists with previous roles at EY and Maverick Capital, a prominent Dallas hedge fund.

“Normally, a family office is grossly under-capitalized, where people play games to convert expenses into deductible ones,” Kauffman said. “Their employees produce financial statements, do tax returns, hire the nanny and handle buying a new car. They run these peoples’ lives for them in whatever respect the client wants.”

Newlands, by comparison, looks more like a hedge fund manager, said Brian Buehler, a managing partner of Triton Pacific Capital Partners, a Los Angeles-based private equity firm. But ultra-high net worth individuals have been known to hire investors with venture capital or hedge fund backgrounds to manage their portfolios, sometimes taking aggressive public-equities strategies. And sometimes a fund looking like Newlands may draw its capital from a separate legal entity representing a person or family, he added. “There’s no ‘normal’ in family offices,” Buehler said. “But this seems more than a decade ago, Koum’s former boss Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire Facebook cofounder, parked some of his wealth with a new-look investment advisory firm, Iconiq Capital, that quietly grew an outsized profile by taking on more funds from wealthy tech founders and pouring much of it back into the next generation of startups. Abramson and Koum could aspire for a similar evolution for Newlands someday. Or maybe it will look more like Maverick, which ‘Tiger Cub investor’ Lee Ainslie launched 30 years ago with the backing of another billionaire, Sam Wyly, who later went bankrupt. For now, such talk is just speculation. What is known: Newlands is out in the market, it’s backing a new wave of tech entrepreneurs, and the buck stops with Koum. “I think they’re redefining what it means to be a family office, reframing it a bit away from a pejorative,” said a source with knowledge of Newlands’ thinking. “They’re happy to have the freedom to invest how they want.”

December 2023, CICO writer – Staff Reporter Alex Konrad 

Mainstream platforms, and popular websites built for students, are at the heart of Gen Z discourse about Israel and Gaza. But with anonymity the norm and fake social media users becoming more prevalent, some forums are inflaming tensions at universities.

Kathleen Margaret Connelly has inflammatory thoughts about the Israel-Gaza war. She’d been sharing them regularly with her more than 2,000 Facebook “friends” since Hamas violently massacred 1,400 people in Israel, and kidnapped hundreds more, on October 7, prompting Israel to launch a deadly offensive aimed at decimating Hamas in Gaza. As an apparent employee at the University of Pennsylvania—with a PhD from Penn, a master’s from Georgetown and a bachelor’s degree from Fordham, according to her Facebook—Kathleen’s voice, and anti-Israel diatribes, held weight. But Kathleen Margaret Connelly isn’t real. There is no record of her ever attending, graduating from or working at any of these schools, they all confirmed to Forbes. And the striking green-eyed, red-haired woman who appeared in Kathleen’s Facebook profile picture is, in fact, a young actress in Dublin who told Forbes she was not aware the account had been using photos of her face for well over a year. As the Israel-Gaza war crosses the one-month mark, college campuses across the United States are facing an ideological reckoning and have become ground zero for protests, counter protests and debates over hate speech and freedom of expression. But mainstream social media platforms, as well as those geared toward college students, are increasingly becoming vehicles to spread threats, stir up fear and sow division at American universities, including by agitators who may not even be part of the school community. Anonymous emails are similarly being weaponized. In an email obtained by Forbes, the director of the Penn Museum—where Kathleen purported to be employed as a “cultural anthropologist”—wrote to the Museum Board and other leaders about the fake account. He described its “disturbing social media posts… that contain hate-filled messages and antisemitic content” and said the school believed it to be “an AI-created fake account designed to sow discord.”

① For well over a year, the fake account had been using personal photos lifted from a stranger halfway across the world without that person knowing. We’ve omitted the profile picture to protect her privacy.

② Kathleen’s account claimed she’d earned a PhD from Penn in 2020, and that for the last six years, she’s been employed by the Penn Museum. She also claimed she’d earned an MA from Georgetown in 2014 and a BA from Fordham in 2012.

③ A number of Kathleen’s “friends” appeared to be sharing or reposting the same divisive content around the same time. But Meta said that “for now” it has not seen evidence of the account being part of a larger, coordinated network.

④ All three schools whose credentials were touted by the fake account confirmed that a person named Kathleen Margaret Connelly never attended, graduated from or worked at any of them. It is unclear who is behind the account.

Penn did not respond to multiple requests for comment about whether it has identified other fake social media accounts like Kathleen’s—impersonating students, staffers or alums—posting content seemingly intended to inflame student conversations about the war. But this week, Penn president Liz Magill said the FBI and Penn Police were investigating a potential hate crime on campus after an unknown sender emailed threats against the school’s Jewish community, and specific buildings, to several Penn staffers. The Daily Pennsylvanian reported that “undisclosed individuals” have also used social media and email to threaten people at Penn who’ve voiced support for Palestinians. And last week, following an FBI investigation into anonymous threats that targeted Jewish students at Cornell, a 21-year-old student was arrested on a federal criminal complaint and charged with “posting threats to kill or injure another using interstate communications.” (Disclosure: I graduated from Penn over a decade ago.)

The Cornell threats were shared on top college-focused site Greekrank—where users can post anonymously about life on campus without needing school credentials—and similar problems are playing out on rivals like Sidechat and Yik Yak. (Those two require a school email to sign up, but Forbes was able to register and post using a .edu address that is more than a decade old. Neither responded to a request for comment.) Across a range of platforms, the easy masking of individuals’ identities is intensifying discord and outrage between Gen Z supporters and critics in all corners of the conflict.

“Social media is only escalating an already emotionally charged and tragic conflict,” said Penn junior Allison Santa-Cruz, who recently penned an op-ed in the student newspaper about the effect of tech platforms on the Penn community.

“It is extremely dangerous for fake social media accounts to pose as students, faculty, or administrators and post inflammatory, divisive material and misinformation online,” she added. “Especially now when people are routinely punished for what they say online and in the era of cancel culture, these poser [social] accounts are more dangerous than ever.”

An old problem in a new frontier.

It’s not unusual to see suspicious, potentially dangerous social media activity aimed at shifting public opinion or inflaming discourse during high stakes national and global events. In recent years, for example, Meta—the parent company of Facebook and Instagram—has uncovered so-called influence operations and taken down networks of accounts and pages working in tandem to mislead or deceive people using its platforms. (A number of these have originated from China, Russia and Iran, and some targeted the U.S. during recent presidential and midterm elections.) But now, in the midst of a war with no end in sight, some experts fear that American colleges are an easy target for individuals and groups, inside or outside the student body, looking to stoke discord and wreak havoc.

“[These] accounts don’t necessarily try to change anyone’s mind; they try to heighten polarization by encouraging Americans to go for each other’s jugular.”

“Why university campuses? Because they are hotspots in the debate about the Palestinians, Hamas and Israel,” said misinformation researcher Paul Barrett, who is deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. “College and grad students are already passionately divided over who is to blame for the strife in the Middle East,” and fake or anonymous social media accounts “[appear] to be egging them on, trying to get both sides more riled up.”

Adversaries have long “specialized in trying to exacerbate division within U.S. society,” Barrett added, citing Russia as a key example. “Russian accounts don’t necessarily try to change anyone’s mind; they try to heighten polarization by encouraging Americans to go for each other’s jugular.”

The Facebook account purporting to be Ivy League grad and current Penn Museum employee Kathleen Margaret Connelly wasn’t new, either. Before the Israel-Gaza war began, the account was fomenting anger around the Ukraine-Russia war—promoting Russia, attacking Ukraine and going so far as to suggest that Ukrainians are Nazis. Other posts championed China and cast doubt on vaccines.

But Kathleen shifted her focus at the start of the war in the Middle East to attack Israel. She called for “the end for Israel,” accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and spread misinformation about the conflict—including false claims about the now well-documented horrors at the music festival where Hamas brutally murdered at least 260 people, and kidnapped others, on October 7. “No one was killed at the concert; witnesses say Hamas treated people with kindness,” Kathleen shared in a photo on October 14. The U.S. government has designated Hamas as a terrorist organization and several of its members as terrorists.

“On a college campus… individuals are retreating to dangerous ideology and doing the dirty work of terrorist regimes.”

“Each person who spreads information [through social media] has the responsibility to make sure it is not misinformation, promotes violence, or signals a message that is not aligned with morality,” said Penn senior Eyal Yakoby, who is focused on political science and modern Middle East studies. “On a college campus, where you would think these principles are being upheld and emphasized most, individuals are retreating to dangerous ideology and doing the dirty work of terrorist regimes.”

It remains unclear who is behind Kathleen’s account.

“The account strikes me as a very generic ‘American woman’ which could just signal that it was made to boost engagement, or was an anonymous account of someone who didn’t want to be known for their political beliefs,” said disinformation expert Joan Donovan, author of Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America. “Both are terms of service violations.”

When Forbes inquired about the account, Meta removed it for violating its policies. And though Meta did not say who was responsible for Kathleen’s persona, where it originated from or what their motives may have been, Barrett said “most telling is that the account began salting in anti-Ukraine content and then switched over to the Gaza/Israel conflict.” A number of Kathleen’s “friends” sometimes appeared to be sharing or reposting the same divisive content around the same time. But Meta said that “for now” it has not seen evidence of her account being part of a larger, coordinated network.

Online chaos spills on campus.

College students across the U.S. have been vocal about what’s unfolding in Israel and Gaza.

At Harvard, shortly after the conflict began, a letter from a coalition of student groups blaming Israel for the Hamas atrocities prompted backlash from some of the school’s most prominent alums, who’ve pledged not to hire people who signed onto the missive. At Penn, where Jewish students have been assaulted, buildings have been vandalized and large anti-Israel protests have taken place, megadonors from Apollo CEO Mark Rowan to former U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman have pledged to close their wallets to the university; many more have called for its leaders to resign over their handling of antisemitism on campus. Similar tensions are playing out at Stanford, UC Berkeley, NYU and beyond as students and locals protest the actions of the Israeli government and military, the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the rising civilian death toll there. The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry says some 10,500 Palestinians have been killed since Israeli air strikes began in October.

But some of the organizing across higher education has boiled over into antisemitic and islamophobic hate speech and incitement to violence against Jews and Muslims on campus. The Anti-Defamation League and the Council on American Islamic Relationshave reported surges in hate crimes, threats or harassment against both groups. FBI Director Christopher Wray had a similar message in Senate testimony last week, warning lawmakers about domestic violent extremism targeting Jewish and Muslim communities across the country.

For example, anonymous antisemitic and islamophobic posts that surfaced recently on a Cornell discussion forum on Greekrank (which is not affiliated with the university) threw the campus into chaos. The viral posts included violent hate speech and racism against Jewish and Muslim students, as well as threats to kill or commit other illegal acts against them.

Some took to Greekrank to complain that anonymous commenters were “fueling hatred on our campus” and criticized the website for allowing anyone, including people who may not be associated with Cornell, to broadcast harmful messages. “Any idiot can post whatever they want here … Greekrank needs to add user verification, like, yesterday,” one person said. Another noted that “this site is toxic and the anonymity makes everything worse.” When someone else lamented that “there are no safeguards to prevent threats or hate speech” in this wide-open, easily accessible forum, they were met with more hate speech and a reply declaring: “Free speech is free speech. Go suk ur moms c0ck.”

Greekrank said in a statement that “we unequivocally condemn any form of hate speech and have taken swift action to remove the offensive content as soon as we were made aware of it.” It also emphasized that “we have been working closely with law enforcement to provide any information that can aid in their investigation.” It added that Greekrank is taking steps to “review and strengthen our platform’s moderation processes” and that it is “dedicated to preventing the recurrence of such unacceptable incidents.”

Last week, following an FBI investigation, the Cornell junior charged with posting some of the threats made his first appearance before a federal court in upstate New York. Shortly after, he’d already become the subject of several new threads on Greekrank. One was quick to recognize that while the 21-year-old student had allegedly posted some of the threats, others targeting Cornell had come from individuals who are still unknown.

“Yeah, he posted at least some of them,” one Greekrank post said. “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I can’t believe someone is grinding a Cornell engineering degree just to ruin it over being an insufferable troll.”

November 2023, CICO writer – Staff Reporter Alexandra S.Levine                    

European regulators dealt a blow to TikTok over its handling of children’s data, the largest fine the company has faced to date.

TikTok’s lead regulator in the European Union is slapping the company with a €345 million fine for violating Europe’s landmark privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation.

The nearly $370 million penalty announced today by the Irish Data Protection Commission is related to TikTok’s handling of sensitive data from children, ages 13 to 17, who’ve used the app—as well as from kids under 13 whose personal data TikTok has processed as part of determining whether they were old enough to be on the platform. (Users must be at least 13 to be on TikTok). The privacy watchdog, which opened the investigation in 2021, looked in particular at TikTok’s public-by-default settings and “Family Pairing” tool, as well as its age verification process for individuals signing up for an account. It also scrutinized whether TikTok had been adequately transparent with young users about their privacy settings. The body found that TikTok violated several parts of GDPR in 2020, including articles pertaining to the processing of young users’ data and to so-called “dark patterns,” design decisions that deceive or manipulate users into taking certain actions in an app. In addition to the hefty fines in the hundreds of millions, the commission is requiring TikTok to make its data processing compliant by the end of the year.

This all but concludes one of two major investigations that the regulator in Ireland, home to TikTok’s European headquarters, has launched into the company and whether it has complied with GDPR. The other probe is examining whether TikTok—owned by Beijing-based parent ByteDance—has unlawfully transferred European users’ personal data from the EU to China, and whether it was sufficiently transparent with users about how it was handling their information. (The Commission recently told Forbes it expects a public update on that inquiry around now).

This is TikTok’s largest ding from regulators to date, but it’s not the first time the social media giant has been punished for children’s privacy and safety missteps; earlier this year, Britain’s data watchdog issued TikTok a €12.7 million fine (almost $16 million) for breaking British data protection laws in its processing of kids’ information. In 2021, Dutch authorities issued a €750,000 fine (almost $1 million) for similar violations. And back in 2019, the Federal Trade Commission reached a $5.7 million settlement with TikTok (then Musical.ly) along the same lines. (Still, ByteDance posted $80 billion in revenue in 2022).

“TikTok is a platform for users aged 13 and over,” a spokesperson said in response to the recent U.K.-issued fine, which the company disagreed with. “We invest heavily to help keep under-13s off the platform and our 40,000-strong safety team works around the clock to help keep the platform safe for our community.” Weeks before that fine was handed down, TikTok also launched Project Clover—a counterpart to Project Texas in the U.S.—in an effort to better protect European TikTok users and their data and address concerns about access to that information in China.

In the first quarter of 2023, TikTok removed nearly 17 million accounts thought to be younger than 13, and 91 million videos that broke its rules, according to its most recent enforcement report. More than a quarter of those posts were pulled down for policy violations related to minor safety.

TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

September 2023, CICO writer – Staff Reporter Alexandra S. Levine

Innovation and sustainability: coral reefs.

Vriko Yu launched a startup on the back of her Ph.D. studies in biological sciences. Now she’s the CEO of Archireef, a climate tech venture that’s working to restore fragile marine ecosystems by using 3D printing technology and some good old-fashioned terracotta.

Coral reefs, the delicate breeding grounds for marine life, take years to fully form. That’s why Vriko Yu was deeply alarmed when, in 2014, she saw a coral reef community in Hong Kong die in just two months. “That was shocking,” says Yu, a 30-year-old doctoral student in biological sciences at the University of Hong Kong. “I’ve always known about climate change, but I did not know that it is happening at a pace where I can witness [the death of coral reefs] in such a short period of time.” Working alongside David Baker, a marine biology professor, and other researchers at the University of Hong Kong, they tried a variety of different ways to restore the fragile marine ecosystem, such as planting coral fragments onto metal grids and concrete blocks. Yet, they found the baby corals would often become detached and die. As frustrations mounted, the team finally came up with a solution: tiles made out of terracotta using 3D printers with carefully crafted designs that incorporate folds and crevices, enabling coral fragments to become attached to the seabed so that they can survive and grow. Yu says the coral seeded to their terracotta tiles have been able to achieve a survival rate of up to 98%.

With their prototypes in hand and driven by the urgent need for funding to scale up their operation, Yu and Baker decided to spin off a startup from the University of Hong Kong. The pair cofounded Archireef in 2020 as a climate solutions provider. With Yu serving as the startup’s chief executive, Archireef, which made the Forbes Asia 100 to Watch list last year, is working to rebuild the marine ecosystems degraded by climate change to achieve carbon neutrality. “When it comes to climate tech, most people are focusing on reducing carbon emission,” says Yu in an interview from Archireef’s office in Hong Kong Science Park. “However, I would also like to emphasize that while tackling the root cause is critical and essential, it is also as important to do active restoration because nature recovery by itself is very slow and it’s not going to catch up with climate change.”

Coral reefs only cover 0.2% of the seafloor, but provide outsized benefits to the environment. About a quarter of the ocean’s fish depend on coral reefs for their food and shelter at some point in their life cycles, helping to provide a food source and livelihood for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. It’s estimated that coral reefs support $2.7 trillion a year in goods and services, including $36 billion in tourism.

However, coral reefs are extremely sensitive to warming waters. Corals can lose the algae that provides them with food when sea temperatures are abnormally high—a process known as bleaching because it’s the algae that gives them their bright colors. According to a report released by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network last year, the world had already lost 14% of its coral reefs between 2009 and 2018. Another report published in 2018 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global scientific authority on climate change, shows that “virtually all” (more than 99%) of the world’s coral reefs would be lost if temperatures rise by 2 degrees Celsius.

Archireef operates on a subscription model, where corporate clients and government agencies pay regular fees to cover the maintenance and monitoring costs of its coral restoration projects for at least three years. In return, Archireef provides them with a report detailing the ecological impact of their investment that they can use for their ESG reports and marketing materials.

It’s estimated that coral reefs support $2.7 trillion a year in goods and services, including $36 billion in tourism.

Yu says Archireef is already profitable and its clients include Hong Kong companies like jewelry chain Chow Sang Sang and real estate company Sino Group, which is run by Singapore billionaire Robert Ng.

“We are very sustainability-minded,” says Melanie Kwok, assistant general manager of sustainability at Sino Group, in an interview at the company’s The Fullerton Ocean Park Hotel Hong Kong. “We have played a role to actually protect the ocean.”

The Fullerton Ocean Park Hotel is one of the six hotel properties owned by Sino Land, the group’s property company listed in Hong Kong. Opened in July 2022, all of its 425 rooms and suites have sea views. “As you can see, all our rooms are facing the ocean,” says Kwok. “That’s why we have a role to play. We have a role to educate our customers and stakeholders of the importance of preserving the ocean so that we can all see and view this beautiful ocean together.”

Archireef’s terracotta tiles have so far been scattered across roughly 100 square meters of Hong Kong’s waters. After laying the foundations for growth in the city, Yu now has her sights on overseas expansion—and she’s starting with Abu Dhabi, the oil-rich capital of the United Arab Emirates, which has been trying to diversify its economy before the fossil-fuel era ends.

The startup said it’s working with sovereign wealth fund ADQ to restore an area of 40 square meters of waters near the United Arab Emirates capital, which will become the nurturing ground of around 1,200 coral fragments. Last year, Archireef also established a 400 square-meter facility in Abu Dhabi, after receiving an undisclosed amount of funding from ADQ. The facility will certainly boost the company’s international expansion by allowing it to mass produce its reef tiles.

The Abu Dhabi government announced in 2021 that the United Arab Emirates aims to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, making the emirate the first in the region to set such a target. It was Abu Dhabi’s commitment to sustainability that convinced Yu to set up Archireef’s first overseas operations in the United Arab Emirates, which is hosting this year’s COP28 climate summit.

“When we were thinking about our expansion outside of Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates really came up to be one of the strongest markets, not only because of the financial performance, but also the push for sustainability,” she says.

Archireef’s ambition doesn’t limit to just restoring coral reefs. The startup is busy expanding its product line so that it can also help regrow species that create the natural habitats for other organisms. These species include mangroves and oysters, says Yu.

Meanwhile, Yu is in a hurry to expand Archireef and deploy its reef tiles around the world, including in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans. She’s racing against the clock to safeguard coral reefs. “We have already lost 50% of the world’s coral reefs since 1950. And if nothing changes, we will lose up to 90% by 2050,” she says. “So if I can deliver one message here today, it’s: Please take the time to grab our last opportunity to reverse climate damage.”

July 2023, CICO writer – Staff Reporter Zinnia Lee

Social Media Update.

TikTok has stored the most sensitive financial data of its biggest stars — including those in its “Creator Fund” — on servers in China. Earlier this year, CEO Shou Chew told Congress “American data has always been stored in Virginia and Singapore.”

ver the past several years, thousands of TikTok creators and businesses around the world have given the company sensitive financial information—including their social security numbers and tax IDs—so that they can be paid by the platform.

But unbeknownst to many of them, TikTok has stored that personal financial information on servers in China that are accessible by employees there, Forbes has learned.

TikTok uses various internal tools and databases from its Beijing-based parent ByteDance to manage payments to creators who earn money through the app, including many of its biggest stars in the United States and Europe. The same tools are used to pay outside vendors and small businesses working with TikTok. But a trove of records obtained by Forbes from multiple sources across different parts of the company reveals that highly sensitive financial and personal information about those prized users and third parties has been stored in China. The discovery also raises questions about whether employees who are not authorized to access that data have been able to. It draws on internal communications, audio recordings, videos, screenshots, documents marked “Privileged and Confidential,” and several people familiar with the matter.

In testimony before Congress earlier this year, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew claimed U.S. user data has been stored on physical servers outside China. “American data has always been stored in Virginia and Singapore in the past, and access of this is on an as-required basis by our engineers globally,” he said under oath at a House hearing in March.

TikTok spokesperson Alex Haurek said in a statement that “we remain confident in the accuracy of Shou’s testimony.” ByteDance did not respond to a detailed request for comment. At publication time, neither company had answered basic questions about whether sensitive tax information of U.S. citizens is stored and accessible in China.

Over the last year, TikTok has been touting its plans to cordon off Americans’ data from China in a $1.5 billion undertaking called Project Texas. That initiative has been central to negotiations with the Biden administration on a deal that would allow the wildly popular app to continue operating in the U.S., despite longstanding national security concerns about its Chinese ownership and the potential for the platform to be used to surveil or influence the 150 million Americans using it. But since those talks hit a snag late last year, with both FBI Director Christopher Wray and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen speaking out about national security issues with the app, the Biden administration (through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S.) has demanded that TikTok split from its Chinese parent company or face a possible ban.

“There’s ongoing litigation over TikTok that is not yet resolved,” Yellen, whose department leads CFIUS, said at a hearing in March. And many in Congress have cast doubt on Project Texas altogether: “I don’t believe that it is technically possible to accomplish what TikTok says it will accomplish through Project Texas,” California Republican Jay Obernolte told the TikTok CEO at the March hearing. “There are too many backdoors.”

“Even if TikTok was not a subsidiary of a Chinese company, this would be pretty alarming IT security malpractice.”

Identity theft using stolen social security numbers is not uncommon in the U.S., and the Chinese government has been accused of stealing personal financial information from Americans before. One expert told Forbes this is precisely why TikTok’s mishandling of such information is troubling.

“Even if TikTok was not a subsidiary of a Chinese company, this would be pretty alarming IT security malpractice,” Bryan Cunningham, a former national security lawyer for the White House and CIA, told Forbes. He described tax records as some of the most sensitive data there is.

“It could be just bad IT practice, it could be they felt like they had a legitimate business need,” Cunningham said of TikTok. “But whatever the nuance of that turns out to be… if you store information in the PRC, you better assume that the intelligence services can have it if they want it. They may not target you, but boy, on the face of it, it’s highly questionable.” TikTok and ByteDance did not respond to questions about how many people at the companies can access creators’ financial information, where those employees are located and whether there has been unauthorized access to this data. They also did not respond to queries about how long TikTok users and vendors’ payment data had been stored in China and whether it still is today.

Raising regulatory alarms on both sides of the Atlantic.

TikTok or ByteDance employees in China having access to American users and businesses’ sensitive financial records is potentially problematic for geopolitical reasons, particularly against the backdrop of intense regulatory scrutiny in the U.S.

Though there is no national privacy law in the U.S. to protect against the mishandling or misuse of personally identifiable information, one top contender introduced last Congress would require companies to clearly disclose in their privacy policies whether data they collect “is transferred to, processed in, stored in, or otherwise accessible to the People’s Republic of China” and other adversaries. And though a past Federal Trade Commission settlement with TikTok (then Musical.ly) dealt with a markedly separate set of issues—children’s privacy violations—the agency could take that order into consideration when evaluating the company’s conduct today.

Jessica Rich, former director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a case like this, the agency would likely consider whether the company had made false or deceptive statements about how it handles users’ information—in a privacy policy, for example—or if the handling of that information had created a real risk of harm. She would not comment specifically on TikTok and ByteDance.

TikTok’s policies suggest that it takes appropriate steps to protect its users’ data. Creators who join TikTok’s Creator Fund agree to “all” TikTok policies, including privacy terms stating that “certain entities within our corporate group… are given limited remote access to information we collect” if it’s necessary for the platform’s operations. They also emphasize that “we use reasonable measures to help protect information from… unauthorized access.” (It does say TikTok may transmit user data to servers outside the U.S. for storage or processing, and that no data storage or transmission is guaranteed to be secure.) Rich, the former federal regulator, said that if any company claims to be locking down access to information but then making it available to employees around the world who do not need it, the FTC could see that as a deceptive statement and grounds for a potential data security complaint. She also said that the agency generally views financial information and social security numbers as more sensitive than email addresses or phone numbers, and that it may scrutinize those data-sharing cases more aggressively.

“I would like everything to stay in the U.S.—like, I wouldn’t see why it would ever need to be stored on a China database.”

TikTok’s storage of European creators’ bank information in China could also be problematic under Europe’s privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation.

Even as TikTok launched Project Clover—a Project Texas counterpart across the Atlantic—to safeguard the data of its European users, the Irish Data Protection Commission (TikTok’s lead regulator in the European Union) is already conducting two investigations into whether the company has complied with GDPR. One of those probes is looking specifically at whether TikTok has unlawfully transferred European users’ personal data from the EU to China, and whether it was adequately transparent with users about how it was handling their information. Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna, vice president for global privacy at the Future of Privacy Forum, said ByteDance tools storing European creators’ data on servers in China could be problematic for that reason.

“This is the sort of thing that would confirm there are transfers [of personal data] to China happening, so I’m sure they would be interested in knowing this,” she said of Ireland’s privacy watchdog. (Just last week, the body issued a record $1.3 billion fine to Facebook parent Meta, one of TikTok’s biggest rivals, over its own data transfer issues.) GDPR also requires companies to restrict access to sensitive user data on a need-to-know basis, Zanfir-Fortuna added, raising questions about how broad access to these payment tools has been and whether it was necessary.

The Commission would not comment on its ongoing inquiry into TikTok except to say it expects a public update after this summer. TikTok’s policies for Europe say “certain entities in our Corporate Group, located outside your country of residence (see here), are given limited remote access to this information” and that this access is “secure and only granted where necessary under strict security controls.” The link included (“here”) lands on a 404 error page.

June 2023, CICO writer – Staff Reporter Alexandra S. Levine

ChatGPT and freelancers

While some freelancers are losing their gigs to ChatGPT, clients are being spammed with AI-written content on freelancing platforms. The result: increasing mistrust between clients and freelancers and mounting trouble for the platforms themselves.

Melissa Shea hires freelancers to take on most of the basic tasks for her fashion-focused tech startup, paying $22 per hour on average for them to develop websites, transcribe audio and write marketing copy. In January 2023, she welcomed a new member to her team: ChatGPT. At $0 an hour, the chatbot can crank out more content much faster than freelancers and has replaced three content writers she would have otherwise hired through freelancing platform Upwork. “I’m really frankly worried that millions of people are going to be without a job by the end of this year,” says Shea, cofounder of New York-based Fashion Mingle, a networking and marketing platform for fashion professionals. “I’ve never hired a writer better than ChatGPT.”

Shea has not posted a job on Upwork since she discovered ChatGPT (though she still has five freelancers working for her). After it was released in November 2022, ChatGPT amassed more than 100 million users, sparked an AI arms race at companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon and has given rise to a flurry of AI startups. And for small businesses looking to trim costs, the free tool can automate swaths of their operations, providing a cheaper alternative to freelance workers. Built on recent advances in generative AI, ChatGPT and its image-based sibling DALL-E 2 can carry out work that spans most of the freelancing spectrum, from writing articles and compiling research to designing graphics, coding and decrypting financial documents.

Now, freelancers who are less experienced and don’t offer specialized skills stand to lose their gigs, according to five clients Forbes interviewed. But rather than steering clear of the AI tool that could make them obsolete, more and more freelancers are relying on ChatGPT to do some if not all their work for them. Clients on job marketplaces like Upwork and Fiverr are being flooded with nearly identical project proposals written by ChatGPT. A bitter side effect: it’s making clients dubious of the authenticity of work turned in by freelancers and causing transactional disputes and mistrust in the freelancing community.

Upwork, which booked roughly $620 million in revenue in 2022, disclosed in its SEC filings that increased use of AI would be a threat to its business. “Any use of generative artificial intelligence by users of our work marketplace may lead to additional claims of intellectual property infringement,” Upwork’s annual report reads. The company declined to comment on how ChatGPT has affected the rate of transactional disputes or its bottom line during a Forbes interview.

“We want our clients and our talent to be doing all of their diligence to make sure that their work is secure and that things are trusted,” says Margaret Lilani, vice president of talent solutions at Upwork.

Buried in ChatGPT proposals.

In early April, business consultant Sean O’Dowd uploaded two job postings on Upwork and within 24 hours he received close to 300 applications from freelancers explaining why they should be hired. Of the 300 proposals, he suspects more than 200 were done by ChatGPT, he says. Upwork doesn’t have an AI detection tool embedded into the platform and so he used enterprise-focused AI startup Writer’s detection software to evaluate proposals.

O’Dowd, who says that over the past decade he’s hired “close to 100 people who do work that ChatGPT could replace,” says he won’t hire freelancers who pass off ChatGPT’s work as their own because he wouldn’t be able to trust them, and it would indicate a lack of effort. “If I just wanted the basic ChatGPT-level answer, I would have just done that myself. When I’m hiring somebody, I’m looking for more detail, more depth and more thinking than ChatGPT.”

Evan Fisher, who is both a client and a freelancer on Upwork, ran into the same issue: low quality content written by ChatGPT. “The real problem on Upwork is the sheer volume of proposals. We’re talking pre-contracts where a client is just inundated with kind of generic, bland, no-thought-involved proposals,” Fisher, who has hired 80 freelancers on Upwork, tells Forbes.

As a response, clients on Upwork have started including disclaimers from the get-go. One job post begins with, “If you use AI for this job, you will not get paid.” Anotherreads: “I do not want ChatGPT or AI spun content. I will validate and make sure, so anyone who wants to use AI, please do not even apply.” Despite these efforts, some freelancers use AI tools without disclosing it. O’Dowd says he once received work he suspected was done by ChatGPT because the work only included information up till 2021 (ChatGPT’s cut off point) and missed some newer details that would have been easy for a human to find through a simple search. He never hired that freelancer again.

“When I’m hiring somebody, I’m looking for more detail, more depth and more thinking than ChatGPT.”

Georgia Austin, who made $2 million in two years copywriting for brands like Nike on freelancing platform Fiverr, says the overuse and over-dependency on the tool by some freelancers has given “a bad name to all freelancers,” even those who may not secretly use AI. In late February a freelancer posted on Upwork’s community forum that a client was accusing him of using ChatGPT to do the job and was demanding their money back. The contention resulted in a transactional dispute filed with Upwork. Upwork declined to comment on the dispute.

“Our platform is based on trusted relationships between freelancers, our independent talent, and our clients,” Lilani from Upwork says. “AI cannot replace these meaningful and personable connections.”

Freelancers say otherwise.

“Clients are much more wary than before. It creates an advantage for people with big accounts on Upwork as opposed to the newbies because they (newbies) will be suspected of using AI for their work,” says Orezi Mena, a Nigerian graphic design freelancer who uses ChatGPT to help him ideate.

All eyes on Google.

For companies that are using freelancers to create content and increase traffic on their websites, it all comes down to how Google ranks ChatGPT-written content. In February, Google announced that it will prioritize high-quality original content in its search results even if it is written by AI and demote spam content. “Google has many years of experience dealing with automation being used in an attempt to game search results,” a blog post reads.

“If Google is somehow detecting that the AI-written piece is like less valuable and is de-ranking it then it defeats the point of what you’re paying for,” says Adelle Archer, a client on Upwork who hires 20 freelancers for various tasks of her memorial diamond startup Eterneva.

That’s why some freelancers aren’t worried AI could put them out of work.

“At the end of the day, 95% of my buyers who are buying blogs and articles from me, they’re using that for SEO on their website. They’re aware that a ChatGPT generated blog isn’t going to necessarily do them any favors with ranking on Google,” says Alex Fasulo, who has been freelancing for the past nine years on Fiverr and claims to be making a six-figure salary each year. “So they’re still happy to pay me and work with me to get a human generated one.”

“If you use AI for this job, you will not get paid.”

ChatGPT is also creating new jobs, albeit at lower prices. Most people looking to hire freelancers want to get their work done fast and at minimal costs, says Jacobo Lumbreras, a former product manager at Upwork. Some clients are encouraging freelancers to use ChatGPT if that means they are able to be more productive and efficient. Freelancers on Upwork and Fiverr are selling their ability to use ChatGPT to create content and edit it for search engine optimization for as low as $5 an hour. Fasulo, who has 13 different freelancing gigs, just started a new one. “I actually opened up a service called, ‘I will edit and clean up your ChatGPT-generated content,’” she says.

The low price also reflects the quality of output generated by ChatGPT, says freelancer Austin. As the founder of a content marketing agency, she says she’s seen an influx of unhappy clients who have received AI-generated copy that is generic and drab. “In the world of AI specifically, there’s a lot of crappy content that’s coming to the surface.”

The proliferated use of AI is beckoning freelancers to upskill themselves by stepping beyond writing to editing or becoming a domain expert. Upwork offers freelancers coaching on how to find jobs and negotiate with clients and an invitation-based program to help them certify their software development and creative design skills. “Upskilling is going to continue to be the name of the game as tech continues to develop,” Lilani says.

“I actually opened up a service called, ‘I will edit and clean up your ChatGPT-generated content.’”

Fiverr, meanwhile, is embracing AI: In January 2023, the platform created a separate vertical dedicated to freelancers offering AI services, such as DALL-E 2 and Midjourney artists and freelancers using AI to make music videos or for content editing. Yoav Hornung, head of verticals and innovation at Fiverr, says the company has seen an increase in searches for AI-based services. While there is no AI detection tool embedded into the system to help clients weed out AI-written content, the Israel-based company offers clients an online logo maker and a voiceover tool for artists. As for ChatGPT-written content, the onus to check and verify work currently falls on the sellers and buyers of services.

“We do communicate to our sellers that they must have, you know, the legal rights to use any elements that they use in their work,” Hornung says.

With freelancers in panic of losing their jobs and clients frustrated with AI-written work, ChatGPT has thrust the freelance world into disarray, and companies like UpWork and Fiverr stand to lose a lot. Fewer job postings for freelance workers could potentially mean less revenue for the platforms as well because they take about 10% to 20% cut from freelancers’ earnings, O’Dowd points out. “If I was them (Upwork or Fiverr), I would be scared shitless right now,” he says.

May 2023, CICO writer – Staff Reporter Rashi Shrivastava

Full-Time Remote Work Is Falling—But Still Five Times Pre-Pandemic Levels, Survey Finds.

Don’t say RIP to the work-from-home era quite yet. A new Pew Research Center analysis, released with a broader report on worker satisfaction, finds that hybrid work schedules are rising, but roughly a third of workers whose jobs can be done remotely say they still work from home full-time.

Amid countless layoffs, calls from corporate chieftains to return to the office and the pendulum of power swinging back to employers, it may feel like the work-from-home era is coming to an end. But while the practice is shrinking, it’s also showing resilience, with about a third of workers in jobs that can be done remotely saying in one new survey they’re still working from home full-time.

A new analysis from Pew Research Center, which was released as a companion to a broader new report on how U.S. workers view their jobs, finds that some 35% of workers with jobs that can be done remotely say they are working from home all of the time. While that’s down from 43% in January 2022 and 55% in October 2020, it still far exceeds the 7% of workers who have told Pew they worked from home full-time before the pandemic.

“It does seem like there has been a shift that could be permanent in how people with telework-able jobs think about where they work,” says Juliana Horowitz, Pew’s associate director of social and demographic trends research. “A third is a sizable share working from home all of the time.”

The decrease in people with jobs that can be done remotely who are working from home full-time came close to matching a corresponding rise in the percentage of them working a hybrid schedule. Those who reported working some or most of their time at home in Pew’s survey, which surveyed 5,775 U.S. adults who work full- or part-time from its American Trends Panel, grew from 35% in January 2022 to 41% in February 2023. Workers with jobs that can be done remotely who said they rarely or never work from home grew only slightly, from 11% to 12% in each group.

“It’s interesting to see the extent to which hybrid work has really stuck with workers,” Horowitz says. Some level of remote or hybrid work “really seems to be becoming more of the norm.”

The survey comes amid headlines that appear conflicting about trends in remote and hybrid work. Researchers that include Stanford University’s Nicholas Bloom, who has been studying trends on remote work since before the pandemic started, found that despite calls for office returns, the number of job postings for remote-work roles is actually growing, Bloomberg reported recently. From 2019 to early 2023, the share of job postings that say employees can work remotely at least some days of the week grew more than three-fold in the U.S., the study found, though trends vary widely by city and region.

Meanwhile, other media outlets reported on a new U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report in which 72.5% of business said employees “teleworked” rarely or not at all last year. Yet that data stems from a question that appears to be problematic, Bloom said in a post on LinkedIn, pointing to one that’s “worded so WFH includes just one employee doing work email once for just 10 minutes at home,” which differs from the way remote work is typically defined.

Whatever the actual figure, what’s clear is that workers’ appetite for work-from-home remains strong, and a smaller but not insignificant group of people appear to be keeping those arrangements, some even on a full-time basis. Pew’s survey found that many hybrid workers would prefer to work from home more than they do. Among those who work from home “some of the time,” for instance, half said they’d like to do so all (18%) or most (32%) of the time.

Pew’s survey also asked workers whether they feel working from home inhibits their career advancement or opportunities, and the majority said they did not think it did. Some 77% of those who work from home at least some of the time said they don’t believe it either helps or hurts their access to important assignments, for example.

More do see an impact when it comes to mentoring, however. While a little more than half said it has no impact, 36% said they perceive working from home hurts their access to mentoring opportunities, while just 10% said it helps.

Pew released the work-from-home survey to accompany a broader, more extensive report that asked about worker satisfaction on a range of issues, from the benefits people receive to the hours they work, the perceived safety of their workplaces and their experiences with discrimination.

The report found that about 51% of U.S. workers are highly satisfied with their job overall, with the lowest share saying they are extremely or very satisfied with how much they are paid (just 34%) and their opportunities for promotion (33%). Older workers and those with higher incomes were most likely to be satisfied with their jobs. The report also showed many are struggling to balance work and personal time. Nearly 30% of workers said they answer work-related messages or emails outside of regular hours often or extremely often—a figure that is higher among those with postgraduate degrees—and nearly half (46%) of workers who have access to paid time off said they don’t take all the time their employer offers.

March 2023, CICO writer – Staff Reporter Jena McGregor

12 Ways CEOs And Companies Fail Chief Diversity Officers.

Chief diversity officers (CDOs) are set up to fail in many companies. These talented DEI professionals often experience tremendous disappointment and depart with really negative feelings. An alarming number of corporate CDOs stay less than two years. Given how essential DEI is to the success of today’s businesses, CEOs really need CDOs to stay and succeed.

I’ve worked extensively with CDOs over the past two decades; many have expressed their frustrations to me. I’ve also been able to make my own determinations about why they weren’t achieving the DEI results their organizations were pursuing. Additionally, over the past 18 months, I’ve learned a lot in forums with corporate CDOs spanning just about every industry—including panels and conversations about their leadership challenges. These leaders worked in public and private sectors, and in organizations of all sizes that are mostly headquartered in the U.S. I also interviewed more than two dozen CDOs specifically for this article. Here are 12 ways CDOs consistently say CEOs and companies fail them:

1. CDOs Are Chiefs And Vice Presidents In Name Only

CDOs rarely have seats at the table with other C-Suite executives. On many dimensions, one of these VPs isn’t like the others. They don’t have the same decision-making authority. Compared to other VPs, CDOs say their budgets and staffs are much smaller. Also, their compensation packages are reportedly much lower than counterparts within the company who have similar titles. Everyday reminders of these inequities are paradoxical and understandably frustrating to the person whose job it is to be the company’s top equity officer.

2. CEOs Rarely Talk To CDOs

In recruitment conversations, CEOs often tell prospective CDOs how much they personally value DEI, yet they don’t get to spend much time with CDOs after they accept the positions. The CDO doesn’t have the same access to the CEO as do other VPs. One told me he’d talked with the CEO a total of 30 minutes over a two-year period; 20 of those were during their one-on-one when he was interviewing for the job.

3. CDOs Don’t Report To The CEO

Despite the position supposedly being responsible for the integration of DEI into every aspect of the business, the CDO’s boss in many places is the chief human resources officer (CHRO). It’s worse in some instances: despite having chief and VP titles themselves, CDOs report to someone who reports to the CHRO. This makes them two layers removed from the CEO. Some were told they’d be reporting dually to the CEO and HR Chief – they say it’s a terrible arrangement because substantive engagement with the CEO is relatively lower, oftentimes nonexistent.

4. CDOs Are Hired Into Haphazardly-Conceived Jobs

In too many businesses, CEOs jumped on the ‘everybody else is doing it bandwagon’ and created CDO positions without being entirely clear about what the role was really supposed to be and do. In the weeks after George Floyd’s murder, lots of businesses abruptly created CDO positions. Many DEI professionals who took those jobs less than three years ago have already left. To be sure, executives were hastily creating these positions long before summer 2020, sometimes under intense pressure from their diverse employees to do something in response to specific internal DEI crises.

5. CDO Roles Are Lopsidedly HR-Focused

Like financial operations, communications, human resources, marketing, and legal affairs, DEI should be a cross-business function. In many places it’s isolated to one area of the company: HR. Some DEI professionals ascend to the CDO job through diversity recruiting roles, but this isn’t the case for all. Regardless of their paths to the CDO position, many understand the job they accepted to be multidimensional, all encompassing. They recognize that their company’s DEI needs, challenges, vulnerabilities, and possibilities, include, but expand far beyond HR-related responsibilities. “They pay people to do HR; I should be partnering with them, not doing the HR team’s diversity work entirely for them,” a former tech industry CDO told me.

6. Execs Attempt To Solve DEI Problems Without CDOs

Weirdly, when there’s a crisis that involves racial or gender discrimination, the CDO is too often left out of the conversation. Instead, legal and communications teams work on making the crisis go away as quickly, quietly, and inexpensively as possible. They too often mishandle these situations in ways that disappoint women and employees of color within the company, as well as invite criticism from diverse customers and others on social media. CDOs say certain missteps could’ve been avoided had their cultural intelligence and expertise on diverse communities been invited to the crisis response table. It isn’t just about being invited – they also want their expertise to be as valued as the expertise colleagues from legal and communications bring.

7. What CDOs Say About Racial Problems Gets Discredited

The CDO tells the CEO the company has a serious racial problem. It’s based on what they’ve experienced firsthand or observed, or it’s credibly informed by what employees of color have reported to them. The CEO ignores this; tells the CDO all the reasons why they’re wrong; lists a few things the company has recently done for people of color (thereby making it incapable of racism); seeks out a handful of other execs (sometimes, but not always people of color) who say there isn’t a problem; and then ultimately rejects the CDO’s advice on what the company should do. Versions of this occur far too often, mostly to CDOs of color and most especially to women of color.

8. DEI Work Isn’t Deeply Connected To The Business Strategy

It’s painfully apparent to many CDOs that the work they lead isn’t nearly as connected as it should be to other parts of the business. With the exception of demographic representation numbers, the CEO and executive leadership team usually don’t have the same expectations for KPIs; the same shared, enterprise-wide accountability standards; and the same strategic concern for DEI as they do other things. Most CDOs strongly believe that good business strategy has DEI deeply, measurably, and sustainably imbedded into its every dimension.

9. What CDOs Do Isn’t Viewed As High Stakes

Many CDOs pursued and accepted their jobs because they care deeply about DEI. They want to help companies enact their espoused values and improve on longstanding failures. The work feels urgent to them, but oftentimes not to other executives at their level and above. CDOs report that something else is almost always seemingly more urgent than DEI, despite the looming threat of one massive discrimination or harassment lawsuit potentially costing the company millions of dollars and tarnishing its brand.

10. CDOs’ Professional Reputations Are Put At Risk

When the company fails to address workplace homophobia, a gay or lesbian CDO can lose credibility with queer colleagues. Similarly, when businesses are in the news for racial discrimination, CDOs of color could be viewed as incompetent, which might disqualify them from future leadership roles elsewhere. “To be fair, this is the occupational hazard that any executive takes on when they accept a position on the executive leadership team,” a CDO in the financial sector told me. “The problem is that we aren’t really executives, we aren’t on those leadership teams where people get paid enough money to assume this level of what can easily become long-term damage to our professional reputations.”

11. Nothing (Or Very Little) Is Done To Retain CDOs

As previously noted, too many talented professionals transition in and out of CDO roles within two years. Many say the executives to whom they were reporting did very little (in some instances, nothing) to retain them. Usually, no offer is made to fix the cultural, structural, and systemic issues that compel frustrated CDOs to leave. Some executives convince themselves that the CDO is simply moving on to an opportunity that’s a better fit. “They wouldn’t let a great CFO leave after 18 months without trying to negotiate a different set of arrangements that satisfy that person’s expectations,” one healthcare CDO said in an interview. “But there’s no negotiating with us; they’re unwilling to bend on fixing a structure that we keep telling them is fucked up.”

12. Nothing Changes From One CDO To The Next

A CDO leaves and execs swiftly hire someone else without doing an autopsy of what went wrong. They don’t make significant structural revisions to the role. The new CDO is therefore set up to fail.

A company’s DEI effectiveness depends greatly on its CDO being positioned for success. Having a seat at the table alongside other C-Suite executives is essential. Making them report to someone other than the CEO strongly and offensively conveys to these DEI leaders that they aren’t real executives. Also, CEOs have to pay CDOs like they pay other executives (the same level salaries, bonuses, stock options, and all); empower them with the same level of authority and autonomy; and give them budgets and staffing structures that are appropriate for an enterprise-wide function.

Moreover, CDOs have to be treated like the experts they are. CEOs ought to rely on them heavily for advice, avoid attempting to resolve DEI crises without their significant input, and believe them when they say the company has a serious DEI problem that places it at reputational and financial risk. What the CDO does has to be treated as consequentially as what the chief technology officer does (like if the business was expected to function without email for a month, for example). Situating the CDO’s work entirely or even primarily in HR denies a company the infrastructure that’s required to fully execute a comprehensive, integrated DEI business strategy.

CDOs need CEOs and other C-Suite peers to partner with them on creating and sustaining cultures, structures, and systems that hold every employee (including themselves) accountable for actualizing the company’s DEI commitments. Lastly, CEOs really must stop letting extremely talented CDOs walk out the door without investing considerably more effort into retaining them.

March 2023, CICO writer – Staff Reporter Shaun Harper

How South Africa’s Christo Wiese Sued His Way Back Into The Billionaire Ranks.

An Enron-like accounting scandal at South Africa-based furniture group Steinhoff International wiped out billions of retail tycoon Wiese’s fortune. After a four-year battle, he’s back as one of Africa’s richest, and at peace with the world.

hristoffel “Christo” Wiese exudes an air of calm that betrays no hint of the chaos that turned his world turned upside down for more than four years. In December 2017, the then-76-year-old South African billionaire was informed about serious accounting fraud at retailer Steinhoff International, where he was both chairman and the largest shareholder. Those irregularities turned out to total $7.4 billion in falsified transactions over a span of nine years from 2009 to 2017, a PwC investigation found–making the Steinhoff affair the South African equivalent of the 2001 Enron debacle.

Steinhoff International had acquired Wiese’s discount clothing retailer, Pepkor, in 2015 for $5.7 billion in stock and cash; and he became its chairman a year later in May 2016. Wiese stepped down as chairman in mid-December 2017, soon after the accounting fraud was made public. While it was eventually proven that Weise had no role in the fraud, the 90% drop in the share price of Steinhoff–by far Wiese’s most valuable asset–pummelled his fortune, from an estimated $5.6 billion in March 2017 to $1.1 billion on the 2018 Forbes list of Africa’s billionaires and then off the ranks altogether by the time Forbes’ World Billionaires list came out a few months later that year.

Now, following a multi-year legal battle that ended in a $500 million settlement consisting of cash and stock, Wiese is back on Forbes’ newly released 2023 list of Africa’s billionaires, tied at No. 18 with an estimated net worth of $1.1 billion.

Asked about his ordeal last week, Wiese described his initial reaction–and what he’s grateful for. “It came as a huge shock to discover that this [Steinhoff] fraud was in the core of the business,” Wiese recalled in a Teams video call from his office in Cape Town, South Africa. The other shock? “That the people who were committing the fraud managed to get through all the gatekeepers,” he added, ticking them off: internal auditors, external auditor Deloitte, the South African Reserve Bank, international banks that were lending Steinhoff billions of rand, the South African and Frankfurt, Germany stock exchanges (where the company’s shares trade) and the ratings agencies.

Read More: The Full List Of Africa’s Richest People

What did Wiese know? Nothing, he insists. “People said, ‘But Christo, you were the chairman.’ And I said I chaired four board meetings in the entire time,” Wiese explained. “I am supposed to know what all the other gatekeepers missed?”

Despite his comments, Wiese–and the investment community–had been alerted to concerns about Steinhoff as early as a decade before the furniture seller admitted its problems. In 2007, Sean Holmes, a South Africa-based analyst for JP Morgan, published a critical 56-page report that questioned Steinhoff’s earnings and pointed to poor financial disclosure and a lack of transparency, according to the 2018 book Steinheist: Markus Jooste, Steinhoff & SA’s Biggest Corporate Fraud. The book also recounts a 2009 meeting Wiese had with an analyst at a different firm who shared 40 slides that delved into concerns such as Steinhoff’s inflated assets and its “suspiciously low tax rate.” (That was years before he sold his company to Steinhoff). Then in 2015, right before Steinhoff shifted its primary stock listing to Frankfurt, a German tax authority raised concerns about the company’s accounting. Wiese said a forensic accounting firm the board hired shortly afterward failed to find any issues.

In fact, Wiese had demonstrated supreme confidence in Steinhoff as a business (or took a huge risk, depending on your perspective). In September 2016, he borrowed $1.8 billion from banks to finance the purchase of more shares in Steinhoff, lifting his ownership stake from nearly 20% to 25%. To guarantee the loans, Wiese pledged the vast majority of his Steinhoff shares as collateral. When Steinhoff stock tanked at the end of 2017, the banks took control of his shares. The loan transaction was ring fenced around the Steinhoff shares, so that in case of default, the banks could not go after Wiese’s other assets, a spokesperson for Wiese said.

Markus Jooste, a South African and the former CEO of Steinhoff International–who ran the company during the years of the accounting fraud, will be tried in Germany in April, South African media reported on Friday. In the spring of 2021, German prosecutors were reported to have charged Jooste and three colleagues with balance sheet fraud. Jooste, who has denied the allegations in the past, could not be reached for comment.

Altogether, Wiese claimed he was defrauded out of $5 billion (59 billion Rand) and sued Steinhoff for that amount in 2018. It took until late January 2022 for Steinhoff to get South African and Dutch courts (Steinhoff is headquartered in Amsterdam) to sign off on its settlement for shareholders–Wiese and thousands of others–and creditors.

Wiese’s roughly $500 million (8 billion Rand) settlement came in the form of cash plus a 5% stake in listed retailer Pepkor Holdings (which is now 51% owned by Steinhoff International). Wiese says he accepted far less than he initially sought, partly to put a halt to the negotiations, which kept dragging on. Steinhoff funded the settlement with Pepkor shares and cash raised from selling off assets–though it still owns 50% of U.S. company MattressFirm and a few other holdings.

Wiese was never in danger of losing his fortune entirely. Besides his Steinhoff stake, he owns more than 10% of listed supermarket chain Shoprite Holdings, Africa’s largest retailer–a kind of South African Walmart, with a hard focus on low prices. It had $10.7 billion revenues in the most recent fiscal year, 145,000 employees and nearly 3,000 stores across southern Africa. In the wake of the Steinhoff accounting nightmare, Wiese sold off hundreds of millions of dollars worth of his Shoprite shares, lowering his stake from 18% in 2017.

Other Wiese holdings include industrial investing firm Invicta Holdings, listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, which has investments in China, Singapore, the U.K. and a small business in the U.S. Via another firm, Tradehold Ltd., he owns industrial businesses in South Africa and commercial property in the U.K. And through Luxembourg-listed firm Brait PLC, Wiese owns stakes in Virgin Active health clubs and two South African firms: a fashion label and a consumer goods business.

“Christo has been a massive risk taker his whole life,” Syd Vianello, a retail analyst in Johannesburg, told Forbes for a March 2016 profile of Wiese. “Africa is not a place for sissies.” Wiese, who calls himself an incurable optimist, agrees. “I’ve been in business for 55 years,” he says. “I just accept that the world is always difficult.”

Wiese’s journey to become Africa’s biggest retail tycoon took a meandering path. After attending Stellenbosch University, he started working for his cousin’s husband’s discount firm PEP in 1970. Four years later he decided he wasn’t good at working for someone else, and wanted a job that required less hours so he could start a family. Following a detour that included buying, running and then selling a diamond mine, Wiese went back to his cousin, who’d grown PEP and added Shoprite, a grocery chain, and offered to buy him out. The cousin accepted.

He focused on maintaining low prices and serving poor customers of all races–at a time of apartheid. In 1986, Wiese spun off Shoprite and PEP (now called Pepkor) into separate public companies, maintaining control of both. By 2014, Wiese says he controlled the two largest retail businesses in South Africa, and there was really no way to grow more domestically due to antitrust concerns.

That is when he turned to Steinhoff, which did business in Europe and South Africa. “I came to the conclusion that here was a business with a very strong balance sheet, strong cash flows, experienced management and international operations,” he recalled. It didn’t turn out that way.

Now 81, Wiese said he has no plans to retire. “I nearly died in 2021 with Covid, so I’ve come to realize that I’m not necessarily destined to live forever. But my problem is I don’t play golf or do stuff like that. For me, my business is my pleasure.”

Plus he certainly has no desire for Steinhoff to be his final chapter.

“I was not going to let this almost unbelievable disaster spoil my life,” Weise reflected on the Steinhoff matter. “I have a lot to be grateful for. I love my country, I’ve got a wonderful family, wonderful friends. I just decided to carry on with my life.”

February 2023, CICO writer – Staff Reporter Kerry A. Dolan

TikTok and its Ethics.

Legislators in Washington reacted with outrage to admissions by TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, that they improperly used the video-sharing app to spy on reporters covering the company. Forbes first reported the existence of the surveillance scheme, which targeted three Forbes reporters, in October. At the time, TikTok did not deny the report, but tweetedthat the app had “never been used to ‘target’ any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists.” TikTok and ByteDance now admit that this was false. After the October report, Republican members of Congress James Comer and Cathy McMorris Rodgers requested documentation from TikTok and ByteDance regarding the targets and purpose of the surveillance. On Thursday, McMorris Rodgers tweeted, “TikTok has placed the safety and privacy of Americans in jeopardy. They have gone on record numerous times claiming that they do not share Americans’ data with China. We know that is a lie, and we now know the list has grown to include U.S. journalists. Accountability is coming.” In a statement to Forbes, Senator Ron Wyden (D-WA) endorsed those concerns: “Using customer data to spy on journalists and employees is a scandal that casts doubt on every promise TikTok has made about protecting personal information. Sadly, it’s not the first time a tech company has abused the massive store of information it holds about its customers. As long as corporations have access to detailed data about their users’ movements, personal contacts and interests, companies and governments will be tempted to misuse it.”

This scandal could not have come at a worse time for TikTok, which is currently negotiating a national security contract with the multi-agency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to address national security concerns raised by the app. Although TikTok was reportedly close to a deal with CFIUS this past summer, national security agencies and the DOJ have expressed increasing concern about a deal that would allow ByteDance to continue to own TikTok. Meanwhile, legislators have begun moving forward with their own sanctions of TikTok, including a unanimously passed Senate bill to ban the app on government devices, and a bipartisan, bicameral proposal that would ban the app for all users in the United States. (Disclosure: In a previous life, I held policy positions at Facebook and Spotify.)

Many of the concerns raised by lawmakers and government leaders about TikTok have focused specifically on its potential use as a surveillance tool. FBI Director Christopher Wray spoke earlier this month about how the PRC government interrogated the parents of a Chinese student in the U.S. who posted a TikTok critical of the Chinese government, and Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) told Forbes that our October report on surveillance contributed to his decision to co-sponsor a bill to ban the app.

In response to TikTok’s and ByteDance’s admissions yesterday, Krishnamoorthi said, “It’s deeply disturbing to learn that ByteDance weaponized TikTok to track journalists who were investigating the company, confirming some of our fears of how the app could be misused.”

Mike Gallagher (R-WI), Krishnamoorthi’s co-sponsor on the ban bill, issued a statement calling the conduct egregious, saying: “TikTok has repeatedly told Congress and the American public that it does not share U.S. user data with its Chinese owner ByteDance and specifically claimed it has never targeted individual Americans. But reports out just today reveal that this was a lie and that ByteDance employees accessed the location data of U.S. journalists who wrote critical stories about TikTok.”

Both Congressmen called on their colleagues to join across the aisle in an effort to ban the app —calls that were echoed by bipartisan leadership in the senate. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) said, “This new development reinforces serious concerns” about the TikTok. “The DoJ has also been promising for over a year that they are looking into ways to protect U.S. user data from Bytedance and the CCP — it’s time to come forward with that solution or Congress could soon be forced to step in,” he continued.

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn), who was the lead author of a letter to TikTok in June about concerns over the company’s relationship with China, told Forbes TikTok “cannot be trusted.” “It’s clear they are desperate to get their hands on any U.S. user data they can and deposit it directly into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party,” she said in a statement. “The Biden administration has the authority to crack down on this violation of privacy and national security threat – and they must take action immediately.”

Marco Rubio (R-FL), who co-chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee with Warner and is a Senate sponsor of the Gallagher-Krishnamoorthi bill, also spoke up about the spying incident. “No one should be surprised or fooled by ByteDance’s public apology,” he said. “Every day it becomes more clear that we need to ban TikTok.”

January 2023, CICO writer – Staff Reporter Emily Baker-White

The Untold Story Behind Emax, The Cryptocurrency Kim Kardashian Got Busted For Hyping.

In June 2021, at the height of the cryptocurrency craze, Kim Kardashian posted an Instagram story promoting Ethereum Max, a brand-new token. The reality TV star wasn’t giving “financial advice,” but she was eager to share with her 225 million followers “what [her] friends just told her about the Ethereum Max token” – namely that they were reducing supply to give “back to the entire E-Max community.”

Turns out some of those “friends” had paid the professional celebrity $250,000 to promote Ethereum Max, and even though Kardashian had labeled her Instagram post as an “ad” it wasn’t enough to satisfy regulators. Last month the Feds fined her $1.3 million for hyping the cryptocurrency. SEC Chair Gary Gensler described the charges as “a reminder to celebrities” that they must disclose such payments. Kardashian declined to comment.

Kardashian was not the only famous personality to endorse the obscure token, which sported a market cap of nearly $250 million in May 2021 but is currently virtually worthless. Other paid Emax boosters included boxing legend Floyd Mayweather, NBA Hall of Famer Paul Pierce, and NFL wide receiver Antonio Brown. But the token’s famous promoters were merely the outward manifestation of more widespread disease. An exclusive Forbes investigation has uncovered that behind Emax’s rapid rise–and even faster fall–are two guys from the small coastal city of Milford, Connecticut: Russ Davis, a crypto promoter and marketer, and Justin Maher, one of Emax’s cofounders and Davis’ brother-in-law. Over the last 18 months, Davis and Maher have shilled dozens of dubious tokens.

Many of those tokens are so small and obscure that there is little available data, but Forbes was able to find historical prices for 18 of the cryptocurrencies endorsed by Davis and Maher. On average, each token is down more than 90% from its all-time high. That compares to the broader cryptocurrency market which is down 70% since peaking last November, according to CoinMarketCap. At least eight coins promoted by Davis and Maher (with names like Rocket Bunny and Boom Baby) have plunged over 99% from their peaks. Davis and Maher’s role behind Emax has not previously been reported. In an apparent web3 twist on the classic “pump n dump,” Davis and Maher pitched Emax as a long-term investment to Davis’ thousands of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook followers during the token’s launch last May, while simultaneously cashing out their own holdings through secret wallets. According to allegations in a class action lawsuit and individuals who spoke with Forbes, the duo pocketed millions of dollars in profits.

Davis, 41, runs InRussWeTrust, a paid newsletter and private Facebook group of 24,000 crypto enthusiasts. Maher, 37, is a crypto promoter and was a financial advisor at NorthwesternNWE -1.4% Mutual from 2013 until October 2021 when he resigned “while under internal review for allegations that [he] was involved in a cryptocurrency shilling scam,” according to an SEC disclosure. A spokesperson for Northwestern Mutual confirmed that Maher no longer works there “due to not following firm policies and procedures.” Maher has not been charged with a crime.

For his part, Davis denies the lawsuit’s allegations and said he’s never participated in any pump and dump schemes. Davis alleges that Giovanni Perone, one of Emax’s cofounders and a defendant in the class action lawsuit, was the one doing the pumping and dumping: “Gio was the kingpin of the whole Emax scandal, 100%.”

In a series of text messages with Forbes Maher also blamed “Perone and his crew.” Maher insists that most of the lawsuit’s claims are “based on hearsay or conjecture, or just straight up conspiracy theories.”

Perone, 38, was an executive at private equity shop Cerberus Capital Management before cofounding Emax. Perone, like Davis and Maher, offloaded Emax tokens “onto unsuspecting investors” for “substantial profits” during the token’s fist six weeks, according to allegations in the lawsuit. Perone and his lawyers did not respond torepeated requests for comment.

Not everyone is mad at Davis and Maher. Some Emax investors sold early and scored profits. Others made peace with their losses, chalking it up to the realities of the crypto market where fortunes can vanish as quickly as they’re made.

To the less forgiving though, InRussWeTrust sabotaged its own followers.

“A lot of people followed Russ,” says Tony Russo, 34, a Florida-based crypto investor and former InRussWeTrust member. “He gained trust and then started screwing his own people over.”

November 2022, CICO writer – Staff Reporter John Hyatt

Inflation in the eurozone just hit a fresh record high of 9.1%—and economists say ‘the worst is yet to come’

Inflation isn’t just an issue in the U.S.—it’s wreaking havoc on consumers worldwide. And while there are signs domestic price increases may have peaked in June, an ongoing energy crisis is creating a nightmare situation for Europeans.

Inflation in the eurozone surged 9.1% from a year ago last month, the EU’s statistics agency, Eurostat, revealed on Wednesday. The rise marked the ninth straight month of record consumer price increases for the 19-nation currency bloc. And “the worst is yet to come,” Anna Titareva, a UBS economist, warned in a Wednesday research note. A 38.3% year-over-year jump in energy prices was the main driver of European inflation in August. Energy prices have soared in Europe this year as the Ukraine war and subsequent sanctions by the West have lifted natural gas prices four times as high as they were a year ago.

5 ways your website can create an emotional bond with your customer.

Numerous studies have shown that emotions and instinct, rather than rational thought, are more often the driving forces behind consumer behavior and purchasing decisions. When customers feel a deep emotional bond with a brand, it is known as ‘brand intimacy’.

Brand Intimacy agency MBLM’s annual study of US consumers’ emotional connections with the brands that they use confirms that the brands that create the most brand intimacy are also the fastest growing brands. This means that all companies and brands can benefit from marketing that creates emotional bonds with their customers, in turn, ideally, to create a sense of brand intimacy. Here are five strategies companies can draw on to achieve this.

1 – Humanize your brand

It’s much easier to feel an emotional connection with a person than with a concept, so it’s always worth humanizing your brand by showcasing the people behind the brand on your website. This is true for large businesses just as much as for startups (if not more so). The way Apple marketed Steve Jobs as the personality that encapsulated the brand ethos in the years when they first launched their revolutionary iPod, Iphone, and iPad products is a good example of this in a larger company. For smaller companies, showcasing the founder(s) on the website, and potentially the whole team (or the executive team, or those team members who interact with customers, depending on each company) is always going to be helpful in terms of cultivating an emotional bond. Equally important is the information that you provide about your team. Rather than their qualifications, it’s preferable to humanize them by including details about their lives or interests. For example, you can provide a ‘Meet the Team’ page.

2 – Build trust through authenticity

Trust is integral to all emotional relationships, including between consumers and brands. For a customer to trust a brand, it’s important that they feel that it is authentic and trustworthy. There are several ways to help achieve this. Providing real customer reviews (including videos)  is a great way to help new customers to trust a brand. It can also be helpful to provide a glimpse of ‘behind the scenes’, perhaps by creating a ‘meet the team’ video, or a video of a manufacturing process, or a tour of a workshop or company premises, including who does what and a bit about them. Engaging with customers is another way to build trust, such as by providing quick, accurate responses to customer queries. Lastly, making sure that you ‘walk the walk’, by consistently providing what you promise to, is crucial to building brand trust and so meaningful, lasting emotional bonds with your customers.

3 – Develop two-way empathy

Two-way empathy is an important aspect of every emotional relationship, and the onus is on the brand to develop it. Start by gaining a clear and detailed understanding of your customers’ characteristics, needs, and frustrations. With this understanding, you can communicate with them in a way that they can relate to, so using a language and communication style that they’re familiar and comfortable with, and by letting them feel that you understand them, and that you are like them. It can also be helpful to cultivate communities of like-minded people that your customers can join, whether in-person or online. Finally, build and nurture relationships with your customers. Keep records of their communication preferences and purchase history so you can communicate with them appropriately. Depending on your business type, this might include additional meaningful communications that address their needs and interests, or you might go the extra mile and keep records of and reference their family details when you speak to them, or send them a happy birthday message. You should personalize your customer relationships as much as possible, too. As an example, Netflix has created an algorithm that personalizes viewing recommendations rather than using demographic profiles or location.

4 – Employ emotional triggers

Utilizing emotional triggers in your website messaging can be a powerful way to develop an emotional bond and drive sales. Consumer psychologists have identified hundreds of emotional triggers that drive purchasing decisions, depending on the particular brand and product. Some of the most common, compelling emotional triggers are:

– Fear. A good example of this is when marketing insurance. Or, it might be fear of missing out on an offer or opportunity. Be careful before playing on negative emotions though when seeking to develop positive feelings about your brand.

– Guilt. Many people feel guilty about the impact our lifestyles have on the environment, or charities sometimes employ challenging images to invoke guilt to incentivize donations.

– Belonging. The feeling of wanting to belong to a particular movement or social group can be powerful. It might be Mac owners, or a particular car brand drivers, or young or healthy people, for example.

– Aspiration. This often relates to aspiring to a better or type of lifestyle, which buying a certain product or brand can allude to.

– Instant gratification. Chocolate, alcohol, and lottery tickets are among the many products and services that tempt consumer with the allure of instant gratification.

– Liberation, or well-being. These are some of the more positive emotions marketers can appeal to.

The key to employing emotional triggers is to let your understanding of your customers’ buying motivations inform which trigger you use, and then customize your messaging and images (or videos) accordingly and effectively.

5 – Storytelling

Storytelling has facilitated human bonding since time immemorial, and telling stories with an emotional aspect can allow firms or brands to draw consumers in and create an emotional bond. This might mean telling the brand story, or the founder story or team members’ stories, or customer success stories, or creating a video that tells a story that illustrates the lifestyle associated with your brand, for example. Incorporating emotional triggers into brand storytelling can create a particularly compelling purchase motivation and emotional bond.

August 2022, CICO writer – Staff Reporter Hugo Lesser