The new generation of consoles is both a hard and an easy sell. With a big bump to specs and broad backwards compatibility, both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are certainly the consoles anyone should buy going forward. But with nearly no launch content or must-have features they also fail to make a compelling case for themselves beyond “the same, but better.” What we’re left with is something more like a new iPhone: You’ll have to upgrade eventually, and it’ll be fine. Just don’t believe the hype for the new consoles… yet.
Disclosure: TechCrunch was provided consoles from both Microsoft and Sony ahead of release, as well as a handful of titles from first- and third-party publishers.
In accordance with an elaborate (and ongoing!) series of embargoes for different features and games, impressions have been trickling out about the new platforms for a month now. For a launch that’s already lacking impact, this may have further blunted excitement: Few gamers will get excited when all anyone can write about is the exterior of the console itself, or the first level of the pack-in game. Some features wouldn’t even be available before launch, or are prohibited from coverage until long afterwards, leaving reviewers wondering whether day-one changes would make any impressions they had obsolete. (I’ll update this review when new information comes to light, or link to future coverage.)
But whatever the case, the shackles are finally removed and now we can talk about most (but not all) the new consoles have to offer. Unfortunately it’s… not that much. Despite the companies’ attempts to hype the next generation as a huge leap, there’s simply no evidence of that at launch and probably won’t be for many months.
That doesn’t mean the new platforms are a flop — or even that they aren’t great. But the new generation is a lot like the old one, and compatibility with it is actually the biggest thing the PS5 and Series X have going for them for the opening stretch. Here’s what I can tell you honestly about my time with the PS5.
As you can see, the PS5 is CONSIDERABLY larger than the PS4 Slim.
The PS5 is a strange-looking beast, but I’ll give it this: no one is going to mistake it for any other gaming console. Though they may think it’s an air purifier.
The large, curvy device likely won’t fit with anyone’s decor, so it may be best to just bite the bullet and display it prominently (fortunately it sits comfortably vertically or on a stand horizontally). I look forward to getting custom shields for the side to make this thing a little less prominent.
The console is fairly quiet while playing games, but you’ll probably want it at least a few feet away from you, especially if you’re going to play with a disc, which is much louder than normal operation.
As for performance, it’s really impossible to say. The only “next-gen” (really cross-gen) game I got to play much of was Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and while it looked great (more impressions below), it’s incredibly hard to make any substantive comment on the machine’s computing and rendering chops.
Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch
The prospect of gaming in 4K and HDR, and of advanced techniques like ray tracing changing how games look, is an exciting one. But in the first place you need a TV setup that’s capable of taking advantage of these features, and in the second — to be perfectly honest, they’re not all they’re cracked up to be. A high-quality 1080p TV from the last couple years will look very nearly as good despite not supporting Dolby Vision or what have you. (I know because I got a new TV during the review period. They both looked great.)
Load times — a factor of the much-lauded custom SSD in this thing — are similarly hard to evaluate, though certainly going from menu to game in Miles Morales was fast, fast-traveling faster, and the previous game was faster to load than on my regular PS4. This benefit will of course vary from game to game, however — some developers are announcing their performance gains publicly, while others with less impressive ones may just let sleeping dogs lie. Without more titles to get a feel for the console’s performance improvements, right now you’ll have to take Sony’s word on things.
Image Credits: Devin Coldewey/TechCrunch
One place where Sony is attempting to advance the ball is in the new DualSense controller.
Not in the shape and color and slick, transparent buttons — those are not so hot. It feels like a DualShock that’s let itself go a bit, and I’m definitely not a fan of the “PS” shaped PlayStation button. This thing feels like a grime magnet.
And not in the built-in speaker and microphone, either; I struggle to think of any application for these that wouldn’t be better served by a headset or avoided altogether.
What’s actually a clear and impressive upgrade is the triggers, which feature incredibly precise mechanical resistance that serves all kinds of gameplay functions and sets the imagination running.
Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch
The new triggers are connected to a set of gears that impart actual pressure against your fingers, from a very light tap to, presumably (though I haven’t experienced it), actually pushing your fingers back.
The range is wide and it can impart the pressure anywhere along the trigger’s range, giving interesting effects like (the obvious one in violent games) resistance while you pull a gun’s trigger, which then clicks and releases when it fires. In Miles Morales, the triggers act as a very sensitive rumble, but also give you tactile feedback when you’re swinging, telling you when you’ve made contact and so on.
Honestly, I love it. I want to play games that use it well. I don’t want to play games that don’t have it! Hopefully developers will embrace the variable-resistance triggers, because it genuinely adds something to the experience and if I’m not mistaken even has the potential to make games more accessible.
The PS4’s interface had the illusion of simplicity, and the PS5 continues that with two steps forward and one step back.
For one thing, separating out the “games” and “media” portions of the machine is a smart move. As OTT apps and streaming services proliferate they take up more and more space and it makes perfect sense to isolate them.
As for the games side, it’s similar to the PS4 in that it’s a horizontal line that you click through, and when a game is highlighted it “takes over” the screen with a background, the latest news, achievements, and so on. As before it works perfectly well.
Previously, when you pressed the PlayStation button, you’d return to the main menu and pause whatever you were playing. If you held down the button, it opened an in-game side menu where you could invite friends, turn off the console, and other common tasks.
The PS5 reverses that: the long press now returns you to the home screen, while a short press brings up the in-game menu (now a row of tiny icons on the bottom of the screen — not a fan of this change).
The in-game menu now sports an in-depth “card” system that, while cool in theory, seems like one of those things that will not actually be used to great effect. The giant cards show recent screenshots and achievements, friend activity, and if the developer has enabled it, info about your current mission or game progress.
For instance, in Miles Morales, hitting pause told me I was 22% of the way through a side mission to rescue a bodega cat named Spider-Man, with an image of the bodega where I accepted it. Nice, but it’s redundant with the info presented in-game if I pause in the ordinary way. There’s more to it, though — the cards can also be used as “deep links” to game features like multiplayer, quests in progress, quick travel locations, even hints.
Sony showed these advanced possibilities off in a video of Sackboy: The Big Adventure, but since that game isn’t yet available I can’t yet speak to how well it works. More importantly, I can’t make any promises on behalf of developers, who may or may not integrate the system well. At the very least it could be nice, but I’m afraid it will be relegated to first-party games (of which Sony promises many) and be optional at that.
It’s hard to call the new UI an improvement over the old one — it’s different, in some ways more busy and in some ways streamlined. Where it may improve things is in reducing friction in things like organizing voice chat and joining friends’ games. But that capability wasn’t ready for launch.
A couple nice things I want to note: Setting up the PS5 to your own preferences is super easy. I downloaded my cloud saves in a minute or two, and there’s a great new settings page for things people often change in games: difficulty, language, inverting the camera, and some other things. There are also accessibility options built-in: a screen reader, chat transcription, and other goodies I wasn’t able to test but am glad to see.
The chief reason for buying a new console is to play the new games on it. When the Switch came out, half the reason anyone bought it was to play the fabulous new Zelda. Sadly, the selection at this launch is laughably thin for both Sony and Microsoft fanboys.
As I noted above, the only game I was provided in time to get any real impressions (that I’m permitted to write about) was Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Having recently completed its predecessor on PS4, I can say that the new game looks and plays better, with shorter load times, improved lighting, more detailed buildings, and so on. But the 2018 Spider-Man still looks and plays very well — this is the difference you’d expect in a sequel, not from one generation to the next.
As far as a review goes, I’ll just say that if you liked the first, you’ll like the second, and if you didn’t play the original, play it first because it’s great. I also want to hand it to the new game for its commitment to diversity.
But that will also be coming out on the PS4… and Xbox One and Series X… In fact, almost all the big games of the next year will be.
They will, of course, play and look better on the PS5 than the PS4. But it’s a hard sell to tell someone to pay $500 so they can play the next Assassin’s Creed or Horizon: Zero Dawn in 4K HDR rather than 1080p.
Meanwhile, the few games you can only play on PS5 are niche players. Sackboy looks to be a fun platformer but hardly a blockbuster; Demon’s Souls is my most anticipated title of the season, but a remake of a legendary but little-played and controller-bitingly difficult PS3 game isn’t going to break sales records; Destruction All-Stars, an online-only racing battle royale game, got delayed until February, which suggests it’s not playing well.
Adding them all up there really isn’t much reason in terms of exclusives to pick the PS5 over the Xbox Series X or, at least for 2021, a PS4 Pro.
The good news is that the PS5 is now without a question the best way to play the huge catalog of amazing PS4 games out there. Nearly all of them will look better, play better, and load faster. Sony as much as admitted this when they bundled a dozen of the best games from the last generation with the PS5. Honestly, I’m looking forward to finally playing God of War (I know… don’t hassle me!) on this thing than I am to Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.
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Unfortunately I can’t speak to whether these PS4 games have much to speak of in terms of real improvements yet. As mentioned above, a lot of that depends on support from the developers. But as a simple test, loading the Central Yharnam area in Bloodborne took about 33 seconds on the PS4, and 16 on the PS5 (as you can see in the shots above, the game looks identical). I didn’t time them, but anecdotally other games showed improvements as well.
Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch
No, that isn’t a typo. The PS5 (and I am joined in this opinion by our review of its rival, the Xbox Series X) simply isn’t a console anyone should rush out and purchase for any reason. Not least of which because it will be near-impossible to get one in the next month or so, making the possibility of unwrapping a PS5 a remote one for eager youths.
The power of the next generation is not much on display in any of the titles I have been able to play, and while a handful of upcoming games may show off its advantages, those games will likely play just as well on the other platforms they’re being released on.
Nor are there any compelling new features that make the PS5 feel truly next gen, with the possible exception of the variable resistance triggers (the Series X has multi-game suspension at least, and I’d jealous if there were any games to switch between). For the next 6-8 months, the PS5 will merely be the best way to play the same games everyone else is playing, or has been playing for years, but in 4K. That’s it!
The rush by Sony and Microsoft to get these consoles out by the holidays this year simply didn’t have the support of the publishers and developers that make the games that make consoles worth having. That will change late next year as the actual next-gen titles and meaningful exclusives start to appear. And a year from now the PS5 and Series X will truly be must-haves, because there will be things that are only available for them.
I’m not saying buy your kid a PS4 Pro for Christmas. And I’m not saying the PS5 isn’t a great way to play games. I’m just saying that outside some slight differences that many gamers don’t even have the setup to notice, there’s no reason to run out and buy a PS5 right now. Relax and enjoy the latest, greatest games on your old PS4 in confidence, knowing that you’ll save $50 when a Cyberpunk 2077 bundle goes on sale in the summer.
So don’t feel bad if you can’t lay your hands on a PS5 to keep you entertained this winter — a PS4 will do you just fine for the present while the next generation makes its lazy way towards the consoles it will eventually grace.
Amazon will invest about $2.8 billion in Telangana to set up a new AWS Cloud region in the southern state of India, a top Indian politician announced on Friday.
The investment will allow Amazon to launch an AWS Cloud region in Hyderabad city by mid-2022, said K. T. Rama Rao, Minister for Information Technology, Electronics & Communications, Municipal Administration and Urban Development and Industries & Commerce Departments, Government of Telangana.
The new AWS Asia Region will be Amazon’s second infrastructure region in India, Amazon said in a press release. It did not disclose the size of the investment.
“The new AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will enable even more developers, startups, and enterprises as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations to run their applications and serve end users from data centers located in India,” the e-commerce giant said.
“Businesses in India are embracing cloud computing to reduce costs, increase agility, and enable rapid innovation to meet the needs of billions of customers in India and abroad,” said Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, Amazon Web Services, in a statement. “Together with our AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region, we’re providing customers with more flexibility and choice, while allowing them to architect their infrastructure for even greater fault tolerance, resiliency, and availability across geographic locations.”
The investment illustrates the opportunities Amazon, which has poured over $6.5 billion in its India operations to date and leads the cloud market in the nation, sees in the world’s second largest internet market.
“This is a big win for the state government of Telangana for attracting this level of investment,” said Jayanth Kolla, chief analyst at consultancy firm Convergence Catalyst. He told TechCrunch that the move will also help Amazon better comply with India’s data localization policy. “We could see states launch their own similar laws in the future.”
AWS has courted several high-profile businesses as customers in recent years. Some of these include automobile giant Ashok Leyland, life insurance firm Aditya Birla Capital, edtech giant Byju’s, Axis Bank, Bajaj Capital, ClearTax, Dream11, Druva, Edelweiss, Edunext, Extramarks, Freshworks, HDFC Life, Mahindra Electric, Ola, Oyo, Policybazaar, Quantela, RBL Bank, redBus, Sharda University, Swiggy, Tata Sky, and Zerodha.
More to follow…
PUBG Mobile, the sleeper hit title that was banned in India two months ago over cybersecurity concerns, is plotting to make a return in the world’s second largest internet market, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
The South Korean firm has engaged with global cloud service providers in recent weeks to store Indian users’ data within the country to allay New Delhi’s concerns about user data residency and security, one of the sources said.
The gaming giant has privately informed some high-profile streamers in the country that it expects to resume the service in India before the end of this year, the other source said. Both the sources requested anonymity as they are not authorized to speak to the press. PUBG Corporation did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.
The company could make an announcement about its future plans for India as soon as this week. It also plans to run a marketing campaign in the country during the festival of Diwali next week, one of the sources said.
In recent weeks, PUBG has also engaged with a number of local firms including SoftBank-backed Paytm and telecom giant Airtel to explore whether they would be interested in publishing the popular mobile game in the country, an industry executive said. A Paytm spokesperson declined to comment.
Chinese giant Tencent initially published PUBG Mobile apps in India. After New Delhi banned PUBG Mobile, the gaming firm cut publishing ties with Tencent in the country.
Late last month, two months after the ban order, PUBG Mobile terminated its service for Indian users. “Protecting user data has always been a top priority and we have always complied with applicable data protection laws and regulations in India. All users’ gameplay information is processed in a transparent manner as disclosed in our privacy policy,” it said at the time.
With more than 50 million monthly active users in India, PUBG Mobile was by far the most popular mobile game in the country before it was banned. It helped establish an entire ecosystem of esports organisations to teams and even a cottage industry of streamers that made the most of its spectator sport-friendly gameplay, said Rishi Alwani, a long-time analyst of Indian gaming market and publisher of news outlet The Mako Reactor.
PUBG Mobile’s return, however, could complicate matters for several industry players, including some that are currently building similar games to cash in on its absence and their conversations with venture capital firms over ongoing financing rounds.
It would also suggest that more than 200 other Chinese apps that India has banned in recent months could hope to allay New Delhi’s concerns by making some changes to where they store their users data. (That was also the understanding between TikTok and Reliance when they engaged in investment opportunities earlier this year.)
Former Presidential advisor and right-wing pundit Steve Bannon had his show suspended from Twitter and an episode removed by YouTube after calling for violence against FBI director Christopher Wray and the government’s leading pandemic expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Bannon, speaking with co-host Jack Maxey, was discussing what Trump should do in a hypothetical second term. He suggested firing Wray and Fauci, but then went further, saying “I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I’d put the heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats.”
This may strike one at first as mere hyperbole – one may say “we want his head on a platter” and not really be suggesting they actually behead anyone. But the conversation continued and seemed to be more in earnest than it first appeared:
Maxey: Just yesterday there was the anniversary of the hanging of two Tories in Philadelphia. These were Quaker businessmen who had cohabitated, if you wil,l with the British while they were occupying Philadelphia. These people were hung. This is what we used to do to traitors.
Bannon: That’s how you won the revolution. No one wants to talk about it. The revolution wasn’t some sort of garden party, right? It was a civil war. It was a civil war.
Whether one considers this only nostalgia for the good old days of mob justice or an actual call to bring those days back, the exchange seems to have been enough for moderators at YouTube and Twitter to come down hard on the pair’s makeshift broadcast.
Twitter confirmed that it has “permanently suspended” (i.e. it can be appealed but won’t be restored automatically) the account for violating the rule against glorifying violence.
YouTube removed the episode from “Steve Bannon’s War Room” channel Wednesday afternoon after it was brought to their attention. A representative for the platform said “We’ve removed this video for violating our policy against inciting violence. We will continue to be vigilant as we enforce our policies in the post-election period.”
Online platforms have struggled with finding the line between under- and over-moderation. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tiktok, Instagram and others have all taken different measures, from preemptively turning off features to silently banning hashtags. Facebook today took down a group with more than 300,000 members that was acting as an amplifier for misinformation about the election.
While the platforms have been vigorous in at least some ways in the labeling and isolation of misinformation, it’s more difficult for video platforms. Just minutes ago Trump took to YouTube to detail a variety of unfounded conspiracy theories about mail-in voting, but the platform can’t exactly do a live fact-check of the President and shut down his channel. More than with text-based networks, video tends to spread before it is caught and flagged due to the time it takes to review it.
Facebook has taken down a group that had amassed more than 300,000 members and was sharing misinformation and organizing around false allegations of impropriety during the 2020 elections.
The group, called “Stop the Steal 2020,” was organizing protests targeting the election officials currently counting ballots cast in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Phoenix and Las Vegas.
“In line with the exceptional measures that we are taking during this period of heightened tension, we have removed the Group ‘Stop the Steal,’ which was creating real-world events,” said a Facebook spokesperson in a statement emailed to TechCrunch. “The group was organized around the delegitimization of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group.”
Facebook’s action was first noticed by Ryan Mac of BuzzFeed, who reported the move in a tweet.
Facebook statement: “In line with the exceptional measures that we are taking during this period of heightened tension, we have removed the Group 'Stop the Steal,' which was creating real-world events…
— Ryan Mac
(@RMac18) November 5, 2020
Protestors advocating for votes to be counted and for vote counting to cease are cropping up across the country as Republican Party organizers and campaign officials try to derail the count of mail-in ballots and absentee votes cast in the 2020 race and Democratic supporters organize counter-protests.
While the organizers may be tapping supporters of President Trump across the country, their messaging is different depending on the state.
In Phoenix, protestors are calling for all votes to be counted, as presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden hangs on to a slim lead in Arizona.
Meanwhile, the messaging is the opposite in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada, where President Donald Trump is trying to preserve the slim margins that have him ahead or reverse the counts that had put him behind in the polls. In Detroit, for instance, Trump supporters held up signs that said “stop the steal” and “stop the cheat” according to news reports.
Conservative advocates across the Twittersphere have had their tweets amended by the company to indicate that they were sharing election misinformation.
Facebook has also added “labels” to election posts that break the rules, though they are designed to mostly point users to contextual, factual information rather than to offer explicit warnings about false claims.
In fact, as a direct response to Trump’s premature claims of victory, Facebook also rolled out an eye-catching set of messages across Facebook and Instagram reminding users that votes were still being counted.
Facebook has also instituted changes to its policies about groups that organize real-world events in the wake of 2016’s election disinformation campaign carried out by Russian agents and the recent shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin in which two men were killed after a local self-declared militia group organized a response to protests against the shooting of Kenosha resident, Jacob Blake.
ByteDance, the company behind the social media sensation TikTok, is in talks to raise another $2 billion before the initial public offering of a large chunk of its international businesses on the Hong Kong StockExchange, according to a Bloomberg report.
The new financing would give the Chinese tech powerhouse a valuation of $180 billion, according to people cited by Bloomberg.
Investors, including ByteDance’s existing backers like Sequoia, are in the running to finance the new investment, the Bloomberg report said.
Sequoia had emerged as one of the drivers behind a now-stalled deal touted by the Trump administration to have Oracle take some sort of control over the American operations of ByteDance’s most valuable international asset — TikTok.
Both Sequoia and Oracle have significant ties to President Trump through Republican mega-donors Doug Leone, a managing partner at Sequoia, and Safra Catz and Larry Ellison, Oracle’s top leadership and founder.
ByteDance has long planned a public offering for some of its largest Asian assets Douyin and Toutiao, which are huge drivers for the company’s revenues.
TechCrunch previously reported that ByteDance last year generated 120 billion yuan ($17.2 billion) in revenue, citing an investor with knowledge of the company’s finances. Around 67% of that revenue was derived from ads sold on its domestic apps Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese version, and popular news aggregator Toutiao. Live streaming targeted at users of Douyin and another app in the family made up about 17%. Nascent businesses, including games, e-commerce and TikTok, accounted for 20 billion yuan, or roughly another 17%.
The company projected its 2020 revenue at 200 billion yuan ($28.7 billion), with TikTok and other emerging businesses contributing 30 billion yuan, or 15%, according to the investor. Previous reports by Reuters and Bloomberg cited similar revenue figures.
ByteDance is already the most valuable privately held, venture-backed technology company in the world, but at least some of that value is tied up in the revenue-generating potential of the company’s TikTok assets. And it appears that any new investment (at the valuations being reported) would be an indication that investors are shrugging off previous concerns about how a TikTok spin-off might affect the company.
Much of what happens next will hinge on the presidential elections in the U.S. and various court battles that remain underway. A Biden administration could scuttle the planned deal between TikTok, Oracle and Walmart — and a timeline for a separate TikTok public offering within the U.S.
There’s also internal confusion among the TikTok deal’s participants over who will own what when the dust finally settles and a deal moves forward.
As we reported in September:
… our assumption, that Oracle is taking 12.5% in TikTok Global, and Walmart will take 7.5%. The deal terms would value TikTok at about $60 billion by some estimates.
That’s a simple story, but apparently not the full one, because now there is another wrinkle happening here.
In a new statement attributed to its executive vice president Ken Glueck, Oracle said that “Upon creation of TikTok Global, Oracle/Walmart will make their investment and the TikTok Global shares will be distributed to their owners, Americans will be the majority and ByteDance will have no ownership in TikTok Global.”
President Donald Trump has spoken out about the deal himself in places like CNBC, arguing that TikTok must be completely controlled by Americans.
The U.S. government’s trouble with TikTok stems from a few different sources. For one, users on the platform managed to troll a deeply vindictive president and turn one of his planned marquee campaign events into a farce. And more importantly to the nation, but apparently less so to the administration, the company’s ties to China could expose U.S. citizens’ data to the CCP and its users to the potential for manipulation through TikTok’s decisions on what to post or not post on the app.
Sequoia and ByteDance had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.
The various iterations of the new iPhone were announced 800 million years ago. Actually, wait, I just double checked — it was only about two or so weeks ago, but it turns out that time has no meaning anymore. Another cursory glance at my calendar tells me that, while the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro were released in late-October, not long after being announced, the iPhone 12 Pro Max and iPhone Mini, meanwhile, won’t be available for sale for another week or so.
You can check out Matthew’s substantial review of those middle of the line devices here. And while we wait for the low and high end of the line to arrive, I spent a little time with the devices and snapped a couple of photos with the products, which you can check out below.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
Again, we can talk more in-depth write-ups at some point in the future, likely, but for now a smattering of thoughts and images. Consider this a kind of make up for the sorts of hands-ons with products we used to do at Apple’s in-person events, back in the before times, when Apple had in-person events.
All of the four sizes were present and accounted for. As someone who’s been testing a fair number of large Android devices in recent months, the 6.7-inch Pro Max doesn’t appear exceptionally large. As you can see in that top photo, however, the difference between it and the Mini is pretty pronounced.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
It’s amazing how quickly our perceptions of screen sizes have shifted over the years, that a handset sporting a screen two inches larger than the original iPhone is now considered “mini” by a fairly considerable margin. Heck, even the 6-inch Pixel 5 I’ve been using off and on feels pretty small by today’s standards.
The standard iPhone 12 and 12 Pro’s 6.1-inch display seem like a pretty good sweet spot for many or most users. Many of the key specs are surprisingly consistent, given the $400 price difference between the high and low end. All sport 5G connectivity, the new magnetic MagSafe connector, OLED displays and an A14 chip.
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Beyond size, storage and battery capacity, the big differentiator are the cameras. No huge surprise there, as that continues to be where most smartphone manufacturers are making their biggest strides. Here’s a chart we made to break down those distinctions:
The iPhone 12 Pro Max and iPhone 12 Mini hit retail November 13.
As social media platforms struggle to get U.S. election misinformation under control with varying degrees of success, TikTok has taken new actions to stop people from searching and browsing select hashtags associated with misinformation and conspiracies related to the U.S. election results.
The video app has redirected some hashtags — including #RiggedElection, #SharpieGate and others — where users have been publishing election misinformation. And it has taken down various videos making claims of “election fraud.”
However, based on our scans of the app and other election-related hashtags today, it’s clear that it’s still an uphill battle for TikTok in terms of getting a handle on violating content.
Because of TikTok’s size and scale, even smaller videos from unknown publishers can rack up thousands of views before they disappear.
Media Matters, for example, reported yesterday it was able to identify 11 examples of election misinformation spreading across TikTok, with more than 200,000 combined views. The videos shared conspiracies that ranged from unfounded “magic ballot” narratives to the completely untrue allegations that Arizona poll workers handed out markers to Trump voters so their votes wouldn’t count.
Image Credits: TikTok screenshot via Media Matters
TikTok says all the videos Media Matters reported have since been removed except one where a user made a premature declaration of victory. That one was shadowbanned — meaning its discoverability on the platform was reduced. It also has a banner pointing to authoritative information about the election results.
These individual takedowns are a drop in the bucket compared to the number of videos that are still out there making claims of election fraud. And, so far, TikTok has only removed a small number of hashtags on this subject.
Image Credits: TikTok screenshot via TechCrunch
TikTok confirmed it has removed content and redirected searches for the hashtag #RiggedElection as of yesterday. Now, when you try to find videos flagged with this term in the app, you’ll get to a blank page with a notification that says the search term “may be associated with behavior or content that violates our guidelines.” The page also provides a link to TikTok’s Community Guidelines.
“Promoting a safe and positive experience is TikTok’s top priority,” the message reads.
This is the same playbook that TikTok recently used to address the spread of QAnon-related content on its platform. By redirecting searches and hashtags, it makes misinformation harder to find.
While TikTok declined to share an exhaustive list of hashtags it has taken action on during the elections, we found a few hashtags that returned either no results — like #RiggedElection and #SharpieGate — as well as those that returned only a small handful videos, or what TikTok considers “counter speech.”
The TikTok community will often create videos with counter speech or other content related to a misinformation-related hashtag. In these videos, they’ll provide factual information or will dispute the claims being made in another video. TikTok says this sort of counter speech doesn’t violate its policies. That’s why you may see videos listed under hashtags that would otherwise be associated with misinformation, as opposed to seeing the hashtag entirely silenced.
We also found some lesser-used hashtags like #RepealtheSteal and #VeritasArmy, which have been seen on Twitter, were not showing on TikTok at all. (However, upon reaching out to TikTok, the company chose to redirect these hashtags, too.)
A popular misinfo hashtag, #StoptheSteal, was also not available, but its variation, #StoptheStealing, had seven videos.
Many other hashtags were being used, too, as of the time of writing, including #VoterFraud (and its misspelling #VoterFruad), #DemsCheat, #CorruptElection, #ElectionCorruption, #StoptheStealing, #ElectionFraud (and misspelling #ElectionFruad), #CrookedJoeBiden, #CrookedDems, #Fraud (and its misspelling #Fruad), #Rigged, #Rigged2020, #MailinBallots, #CoupdEtat, #ElectionMeddling, #DemocratsAreDestroyingAmerica and #BallotHarvesting, to name a few.
While some hashtags had little content, many were filled with videos that weren’t just expressing their political views — they were making claims of election fraud. Combined, these hashtags have tens of millions of views, or even more.
Image Credits: TikTok screenshot, video republished previously removed content; screenshot via TechCrunch
For example, when we searched for the hashtag #VoterFraud (20.9 million views), we first encountered videos posted in the months leading up to Election Day that were responding to the Republican-driven claims of voter fraud associated with mail-in ballots.
But many videos under this hashtag have been published by Trump supporters this week, and are videos where the supporters are directly disputing the election results.
Among the videos we found were those reposting videos TikTok had already taken down. These included videos featuring Trump supporters’ protests against or for the counting of ballots in various states, calling them proof of election fraud.
In other videos, users opine about how Trump’s lawsuits will prove fraud took place and win him re-election. They sometimes use screenshots of website vote tallies as their “proof.”
Image Credits: TikTok app screenshot via TechCrunch
We also saw videos using text labels overtop their video footage. The text was used to make their claims of election fraud, while the video itself may have them talking in more measured terms about their disappointment with the election results. (It’s unclear if this is a viable workaround to avoiding rule enforcement, however.)
TikTok says its list of blocked hashtags continually grows as new terms and phrases emerge and it’s able to determine how the terms are being used on its platform. It also said it block more election misinformation hashtags in the hours, days and weeks to come.
To be clear, TikTok’s decision to keep this sort of content online doesn’t make it much different from other social networks.
During election season, Facebook and Twitter have taken to labeling election misinformation from high-profile accounts (like Trump’s). Facebook even ran in-app notifications to inform users that votes are still being counted. But both platforms today still easily allow users to click through on a wide range of hashtags that promote this idea of election fraud or rigged results.
TikTok may not much be doing much better, overall, in addressing the sizable amount of content promoting election misinformation on its video network. But TikTok’s ban of top election misinformation hashtags works differently from hashtag bans on other social networks.
Once TikTok has made the decision to ban a term like “SharpieGate,” for example, the content won’t be surfaced whether you use the hashtag symbol (#) itself or not. Facebook, on the other hand, may ban the hashtag specifically, but not the term entirely. That means you can still find content about SharpieGate on its platform — even if it’s largely posts and videos from news organizations.
#SharpieGate was also among the hashtags Facebook began blocking today related to election misinformation. It also blocked #StoptheSteal and a related group.
Facebook today began to block select hashtags which were being used to share misinformation related to the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Now, searches for the hashtags #SharpieGate is being blocked on the social network. Another election conspiracy hashtag #stopthesteal is also blocked on Facebook, with a note saying some of its content goes against the platform’s community standards. The #stopthesteal hashtag has been promoted by Donald Trump Jr. and other Trump campaign associates on Twitter.
Instead of taking users to search results for the hashtag in question, Facebook presents a page where it explains that posts with the hashtag are being “temporarily hidden.” This message also explains that “some content in those posts goes against our Community Standards,” and offers to direct users to its guidelines under a “Learn More” link.
Image Credits: Facebook screenshot via TechCrunch
Though TechCrunch found select election misinformation hashtags had been banned, there were still many others that would direct users to content that pushed conspiracies disputing the election results or outright calling them fraudulent.
For example, hashtags like #RiggedElection, #Rigged, #ElectionFraud, #ElectionMeddling and others still worked, and even directed users to content associated with QAnon conspiracies, at times — despite Facebook’s earlier ban on QAnon content, which extended to many associated hashtags.
Given that Facebook allowed QAnon content to spread for years, it’s notable that the company moved to block election misinformation hashtags in a matter of days. That indicates Facebook is capable of addressing viral misinformation somewhat quickly — it just has historically chosen not to do so.
As for the hashtags themselves, Sharpiegate had already been thoroughly debunked, both by news outlets and election officials. In a letter posted to Twitter, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors debunked the claims that the use of sharpies would invalidate ballots. Because the ballots are printed with offset columns, the use of sharpies is allowed and would not cause bleed-through or other issues.
The claim was first made Tuesday in a video posted to Facebook in which a woman claims poll workers were encouraging some voters to use sharpies in order to invalidate their ballots. That video is now flagged on Facebook with a “false information” label and requires users to click through to watch it.
In addition to its hashtag bans, Facebook today also removed a group, “Stop the Steal,” that had been organized to delegitimize the election process, the company told BuzzFeed reporter Ryan Mac.
Facebook statement: “In line with the exceptional measures that we are taking during this period of heightened tension, we have removed the Group 'Stop the Steal,' which was creating real-world events…
— Ryan Mac
President Trump is leaning heavily into a false narrative that suspicious polling place behavior and late-arriving ballots are part of a Democratic plot to thwart his reelection chances. In a speech from the White House early Wednesday morning, Trump declared premature victory, raising baseless concerns that mail-in ballots, which were expected to lean heavily Democratic, were somehow improper as they erased some of his early gains. “We were getting ready to win this election,” Trump said. “Frankly, we did win this election.”
On Twitter, many of Trump’s recent tweets promoting unfounded election conspiracies have been hidden from view and placed behind a misinformation warning. Those hidden tweets also have likes, retweets and comments restricted in order to limit their ability to spread in a viral way. On Facebook, the president’s posts alleging fraud at voting sites are not called out directly as misinformation. Instead, Facebook pairs them with informational labels reminding users that vote-by-mail ballots are trustworthy or noting that election officials follow “strict rules” around processing and counting ballots.
Facebook so far has not responded to a request for comment about its new hashtag bans, but they’re observable within the Facebook app on both the desktop and mobile app as of the time of writing.
A lot of the past decade in smart home gadgets has been figuring out just how smart we actually want our appliances to be. In a lot of cases when it comes to cooking, the old ways are best, and smart features tend to just complicate things. The new Revolution Cooking R180 High-Speed Smart Toaster ($299.95) strikes the right balance, delivering genuinely useful tech-enabled goodies, without any of the things you don’t need in a toaster – like an internet connection.
Revolution Cooking’s R180’s most immediately apparent feature is its large, prominent touchscreen display. The screen replaces your typical hardware controls, including buttons and switches, and gives you visual feedback about the toasting process when it’s underway. This is definitely part of the ‘smart’ of the R180’s Smart Toaster designation, but the company’s ‘InstaGlo’ heating technology might be better described as its primary differentiator.
In terms of basic specs, this is a two-slice toaster with slots that are wide enough to accommodate bagels and burger buns pretty easily. It has selectable modes for bagels, sliced bread, English muffins, waffles and toaster pastries (like pop-tarts). You can choose between three different heating modes, including ‘fresh,’ ‘frozen’ and ‘reheat’, and there are seven different darkness levels for browning.
There’s a standby clock display option for when the toaster isn’t in use, and the toaster can provide reminders occasionally to nudge you to remove and empty the crumb tray.
Image Credits: Darrell Etherington
The industrial design of the Revolution R180 is good, without being wacky or overly futuristic. It’s basically a brushed stainless steel rectangle, with a sloped chrome front face and the large touchscreen display. The toaster unquestionably looks good sitting on a counter, however, and the slant of its front is a nice touch for ensuring prime visibility and touchscreen control access when you’re using it from a standing position. It’s also relatively compact, and won’t take up too much room if you’re concerned at all about counter real estate.
The display is big and bright, and uses capacitive touch so it’s very responsive in terms of input detection. The nice thing about the interface is that even though it’s digital, it keeps things simple – everything you need is on one screen, with a standard cog icon hiding settings that let you do neat but unnecessary things like setting the time and choosing between an analog or digital virtual clock face for the sleep screen.
Using the R180 Smart Toaster is easy – there’s no internet connection to set up or app to install, you just plug it in and it starts up, presenting you with the bread type/browning level/heating mode selection screen. Tap the image associated with what you want to toast, or scroll left and right to reach others, select from the three modes and tap the browning level that corresponds with what color you want the toasted item to mostly closely resemble (the image above updates to reflect this) and hit the ‘Start’ button and you’re off to the races.
Image Credits: Darrell Etherington
And it really is a race: The Revolution toaster is faster than most. I was perhaps expecting even faster given the company’s marketing claims, but there’s no question that it’s speedier than your average toaster. The other big claim that Revolution makes is about toasting quality, as it promises not to dry out your bread, and provide better-tasting end products, even with tricky toasting situations like a combo dethaw and brown.
Here’s the thing: I wasn’t even really aware of these claims the first time I tried out the review unit they sent, and me and my partner both instantly noted about how anything toasted in the R180 seemed not nearly as dried out as in our existing Breville toaster. And yet, the toasted parts were crisp and golden at the same time. Surprising as it might sound, Revolution’s claims bear out – the Smart Toaster really does make better-tasting toast.
A $300 two-slice toaster definitely seems like an extravagance – and to be clear, it is – but premium non-smart toasters already stretch the limits of most home appliance budgets, and Revolution’s main claim to superiority is achieving a crunchy exterior while leaving the inside soft and not dried out, and it does this with aplomb. The touchscreen almost certainly adds to the cost, but it does provide a clear and easy-to-understand interface for setting desired toast goals, and it’s a pretty good-looking countertop clock when not in use. In short, Revolution’s Smart Toaster is just smart enough, and smart where it counts, for a smart appliance – but expensive enough that it’s worth taking a long, hard think about just how much you love toasted things.
When Alibaba entered the cloud infrastructure market in earnest in 2015 it had ambitious goals, and it has been growing steadily. Today, the Chinese ecommerce giant announced quarterly cloud revenue of $2.194 billion. With that number, it has passed IBM’s $1.65 billion revenue result (according to Synergy Research market share numbers), a significant milestone.
But while $2 billion is a large figure, it’s one worth keeping in perspective. For example, Amazon announced $11.6 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue for its most recent quarter, while Microsoft’s Azure came in second place with $5.9 billion.
Google Cloud has held onto third place, as it has for as long as we’ve been covering the cloud infrastructure market. In its most recent numbers, Synergy pegged Google at 9% market share, or approximately $2.9 billion in revenue.
While Alibaba is still a fair bit behind Google, today’s numbers puts the company firmly in fourth place now, well ahead of IBM. It’s doubtful it could catch Google anytime soon, especially as the company has become more focused under CEO Thomas Kurian, but it is still fairly remarkable that it managed to pass IBM, a stalwart of enterprise computing for decades, as a relative newcomer to the space.
The 60% growth represented a slight increase from the previous quarter’s 59%, but basically means it held steady, something that’s not easy to do as a company reaches a certain revenue plateau. In its earnings call today, Daniel Zhang, chairman and CEO at Alibaba Group said that in China, which remains the company’s primary market, digital transformation driven by the pandemic was a primary factor in keeping growth steady.
“Cloud is a fast-growing business. If you look at our revenue breakdown, obviously, cloud is enjoying a very, very fast growth. And what we see is that all the industries are in the process of digital transformation. And moving to the cloud is a very important step for the industries,” Zhang said in the call.
He believes eventually that most business will be done in the cloud, and the growth could continue for the medium term as there are still many companies who haven’t made the switch yet, but will do so over time.
John Dinsdale, an analyst at Synergy Research says that while China remains its primary market, the company does have a presence outside the country too, and can afford to play the long game in terms of the current geopolitical situation with trade tensions between the U.S. and China.
“Alibaba has already made some strides outside of China and Hong Kong. While the scale is rather small compared with its Chinese operations, Alibaba has established a data center and cloud presence in a range of countries, including six more APAC countries, US, UK and UAE. Among these, it is the market leader in both Indonesia and Malaysia,” Dinsdale told TechCrunch.
In its most recent data released a couple of weeks ago prior to today’s numbers, Synergy broke down the market this way: “Amazon 33%, Microsoft 18%, Google 9%, Alibaba 5%, IBM 5%, Salesforce 3%, Tencent 2%, Oracle 2%, NTT 1%, SAP 1% – to the nearest percentage point.”
