The debate over anonymity extends to every corner of the internet, but may matter most on social networks.
Although the First Amendment does not prohibit platforms from deciding whether to limit anonymity or pseudonymity, these choices impact the culture of anonymity empowerment.
The following is an excerpt from “The United States of Anonymous,” by Jeff Kosseff. The book is available now.
Listen to our conversation with the author on the Source Code Podcast.
Many ground rules for Internet anonymity are set not by courts or legislators, but by the private platforms that are the gateways to the Internet. Social media sites, online discussion forums, and other platforms are private companies that are not restricted by the First Amendment. They are free to decide the level of anonymity or pseudonymity that their users receive. And some platforms have decided to require all or most of their users to identify themselves by their real names.
Although the First Amendment does not prohibit platforms from deciding whether to limit anonymity or pseudonymity, these choices impact the culture of anonymity empowerment. Regardless of the protections that the First Amendment might provide for anonymity, a private company’s decision to ban anonymity could make it more difficult for users to separate their identities from their speech.
The nation’s largest social media provider, Facebook, has long had a fairly stringent real-name policy. In an interview in 2009, founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told David Kirkpatrick that he always differed with those who said that Facebook should allow people to open separate profiles for their professional and social lives. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg told Kirkpatrick that maintaining dual identities “is an example of a lack of integrity,” and “the level of transparency the world has now won’t support having two identities for a person.” He said that transparency enables people to be more accountable for their behavior. “To get people to this point where there’s more openness—that’s a big challenge,” Zuckerberg said. “But I think we’ll do it. I just think it will take time. The concept that the world will be better if you share more is something that’s pretty foreign to a lot of people and it runs into all these privacy concerns.” Although Zuckerberg’s comments did not explicitly criticize anonymity, a single-identity policy makes it difficult to engage in the anonymous and pseudonymous speech that has defined so much online discourse.
Soon after Zuckerberg’s remarks were published, Michael Zimmer aptly noted that people routinely control what information they communicate depending on whether they are at work or socializing. “It is not that you pretend to be someone that you are not; rather, you turn the volume up on some aspects of your identity, and tone down others, all based on the particular context you find yourself,” Zimmer wrote.
Facebook’s focus on a single identity stemmed from its commitment to “radical transparency.” As Kirkpatrick described it, the philosophy goes like this: “Since the world is likely to become more and more open anyway, people might as well get used to it. . . . Everything is going to be seen.”
But as danah boyd pointed out in an essay responding to Zuckerberg’s comments, Facebook had failed to be radically transparent in its own operations. Users, boyd noted, were often unaware of how their data were collected, used, and shared. “Users have no sense of how their data is being used and Facebook is not radically transparent about what that data is used for,” boyd wrote in 2010. “Quite the opposite. Convolution works. It keeps the press out.”
Over the years, Facebook has enforced its real-name policy by locking accounts of some users who allegedly violated its rules. In 2011, the company reportedly closed the account of Chinese commentator Michael Anti, who was born with the name Zhao Jing. Although he had presented Facebook with a Harvard University certificate identifying him as Michael Anti, Facebook told him that he needed to present a government ID card containing the name. A Facebook spokesperson told the Guardian newspaper that its policy was designed to promote trust and safety: “We fundamentally believe this leads to greater accountability and a safer and more trusted environment for people who use the service. This viewpoint has been developed by our own research and in consultation with a number of safety and child protection experts.”
While real-name requirements may be intended to promote safety, they also could threaten safety. In 2015, British journalist Laurie Penny’s Facebook account was locked because she had been using a pseudonym. “Thanks to @facebook forcing me to use my real name, I am now at more risk of rape and death threats,” Penny wrote on Twitter at the time. “But enjoy flogging that data, guys.”
Facebook has changed its real-name practices a bit over the years to accommodate some concerns. In 2014, San Francisco drag queens, including Sister Roma and Lil Miss Hot Mess, were suspended from Facebook due to its real-name policy. They met with Facebook representatives and argued that the real-name policy could hurt not only them, but many other groups, such as undocumented immigrants. Facebook executive Chris Cox later released a statement explaining the company’s reasoning for its real-name policy, but agreed there is “lots of room for improvement” in its procedures. “With this input, we’re already underway building better tools for authenticating the Sister Romas of the world while not opening up Facebook to bad actors,” Cox said. “And we’re taking measures to provide much more deliberate customer service to those accounts that get flagged so that we can manage these in a less abrupt and more thoughtful way.”
In an online Q&A in June 2015, Zuckerberg clarified that Facebook’s real-name policy did not necessarily require users to provide legal names. “Your real name is whatever you go by and what your friends call you,” Zuckerberg said. “If your friends all call you by a nickname and you want to use that name on Facebook, you should be able to do that. In this way, we should be able to support everyone using their own real names, including everyone in the transgender community.”
The company changed its real-name procedures later that year, after criticism from advocates for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community as well as domestic violence victims’ advocates. It began requiring people who flag false names to provide “additional context” for the review, seeking to reduce the amount of verification requests that it sends to users. Second, it developed a tool that it said would allow the users of flagged accounts to “let us know they have a special circumstance, and then give us more information about their unique situation.”
Facebook did not eliminate its real-name policy; it only promised two more procedural changes. And even those proved to be controversial. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which has criticized real-name policies, said that the new tool that allows users to justify a “special circumstance” would effectively force “those who are most vulnerable to reveal even more information about their intimate, personal lives.” Pressuring them to disclose more personal information results “in a remedy that is useless and risks putting them in a more dangerous situation should Facebook share those personal details,” Eva Galperin and Wafa Ben Hassine of EFF wrote.
Safety is a primary justification for Facebook’s real-name policy. The company said it concluded that anonymity and pseudonymity can allow people to more easily harass, abuse, and intimidate others. In response to concerns that its real-name policies endangered some of its more vulnerable users, Facebook tried to mitigate these risks by offering the new tool to allow people to explain their unique situations that prevent them from complying with the policy. Yet even that solution raised safety concerns.
Facebook and other platforms have valid reasons for attempting to better identify the sources of user content. For instance, Brian Friedberg and Joan Donovan documented many cases of “pseudonymous influence operations,” in which “politically motivated actors impersonate marginalized, underrepresented, and vulnerable groups to either malign, disrupt, or exaggerate their causes.” Among the case studies that they document is Facebook’s 2018 removal of fake accounts created by Russia’s Internet Research Agency that purported to be run by Black and LGBT activists. Such pseudonymous operations, Friedberg and Donovan wrote, “intentionally or unintentionally reproduce social harm by degrading trust in the authenticity of marginalized people.” Pseudonymous speech is not the same as deceptive or false speech, and even platforms that allow pseudonymous accounts generally prohibit impersonation. But a policy that allows pseudonymity also may be more likely to pave the way for misleading accounts. The debate over real-name policies shows how the Safety Motivation for anonymity cuts both ways: while anonymity or pseudonymity would protect Facebook users from many types of threats, the company is just as concerned about the harmful potential uses of anonymity. Facebook is concerned about anonymity’s use as a sword, while its critics argue that anonymity is a vital shield.
Despite the pushback that Facebook received and its procedural changes, as of early 2021, Facebook continued to have a real-name policy. “Facebook is a community where everyone uses the name they go by in everyday life,” the company wrote in its online Help Center. The company requires profile names to appear on an ID document such as, among other things, a government ID, bank statement, library card, utility bill, or car insurance card. Although this policy is a bit less restrictive than one that permits only legal names, it curtails the full range of pseudonymous and anonymous speech. Merely having a real-name policy does not prevent every user from having fake names. During the first quarter of 2021, Facebook estimates, about 5 percent of its worldwide monthly active users were fake accounts, and the company took action on 1.3 billion fake accounts.
The survival of Facebook’s real-name policy despite persistent criticism reveals the power that companies wield in determining the level of anonymity that people may employ online. The First Amendment provides a baseline level of anonymity that the government may not restrict, but people may be unable to fully exercise those anonymity rights if the companies that serve as gateways to much of the Internet prohibit them from doing so.
Facebook is not the only platform to require real names. Websites of all sizes have experimented with various levels of anonymity and pseudonymity, and many concluded that the costs of anonymous comments outweigh the benefits. In 2013, the Patriot-Ledger newspaper in Quincy, Massachusetts, began requiring commenters to comment via their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles. “For some time, we’ve received complaints that the anonymous commenting system we’ve hosted on our online stories does little to enhance the conversation within our community,” the newspaper wrote in an editorial announcing the change. “The criticism has been that some of the comments are hateful and sometimes, downright objectionable. We heard you and we agree.” Also that year, the Huffington Post began requiring commenters to post under their real names. “Freedom of expression is given to people who stand up for what they’re saying and who are not hiding behind anonymity,” Ariana Huffington, then the site’s editor-in-chief, said. “Maintaining a civil environment for real conversation and community has always been key to the Huffington Post.”
Other platforms have taken a more anonymity-friendly approach. Reddit, a massive collection of online bulletin boards run by volunteer moderators, requires users to create usernames, but those need not be connected to their real names. As Reddit states in its content policy: “You don’t have to use your real name to use Reddit, but don’t impersonate an individual or an entity in a misleading or deceptive manner.” And many Reddit moderators have gone a step further, removing posts that “dox,” or reveal the true identities of other posters. “When people detach from their real-world identities, they can be more authentic, more true to themselves,” Reddit chief executive Steve Huffman said in 2018.
True selves are not always socially desirable. Some user-created boards, or “subreddits,” have enabled some users to anonymously traffic in racist content, celebrity nude photos, and violence. A 2019 study of six million Reddit posts created between 2011 and 2018 found “increasing patterns on misogynistic content and users as well as violent attitudes.” Yet Reddit’s relative anonymity has fostered some of the communities that believed they were disenfranchised by Facebook’s real-name policy. Emily VanDerWerff wrote of the welcoming communities for trans people that were created by anonymity on Reddit and Twitter. “The big reason to use an anonymous Twitter or Reddit account is to protect one’s identity in the hope of exploring a new one,” VanDerWerff wrote. “This is perhaps why anonymous social media accounts that people gradually start to use more than their ‘real’ accounts so frequently belong to trans women.”
Like Reddit, Twitter has taken a different approach from Facebook to anonymity and pseudonymity, reflecting the very real impact that corporate choices can have on identity disclosures. Twitter has had a longstanding policy against requiring users to publicly disclose their real names, though it does prohibit “accounts that pose as another person, brand, or organization in a confusing or deceptive manner.” At a 2011 town hall, Chief Executive Dick Costolo said that the lack of a real-name policy stemmed not from idealism, but from a desire to better serve consumer demand. “We’re not wedded to pseudonyms,” he said. “We’re wedded to people being able to use the service as they see fit.” As Mathew Ingram wrote about Costolo’s remarks, “Twitter realizes it can provide plenty of value for users (and thus for advertisers) without having to know your real name.”
Many Twitter users have long relied on the lack of a real-name policy. In an analysis of 2010 data from Twitter, New York University researchers found that 26 percent of Twitter accounts were either fully or partly anonymous (i.e., only providing part of a name). The researchers found that more than 20 percent of the followers of accounts in “sensitive” categories such as Islamophobia, gay/lesbian, and marijuana were anonymous, while fewer than 10 percent of the followers of “nonsensitive” categories were anonymous.
The anonymity-permissive nature of Twitter has not been free of problems and criticism. In 2018, Twitter told the Senate Judiciary Committee that fifty thousand automated Russian accounts—or bots—were behind more than 4 percent of the retweets of Donald Trump’s account from September 1 to November 15, 2016. Fake Twitter accounts also enabled people to boost their numbers of followers. A 2018 New York Times article documented an underground industry of fake Twitter accounts, and estimated that up to 15 percent of Twitter’s active users “are automated accounts designed to simulate real people, though the company claims that number is far lower.”
Billionaire Mark Cuban tweeted then that if the company “were to eliminate bots and accounts individuals won’t put their real names behind, your revenues and user base and usage would skyrocket as a result of users and advertisers feeling safer on the platform.” But such a change would lead to some of the problems that Facebook has confronted with its real-name policy. “Think about closeted LGBT individuals who may not be in a position to be open about their identities,” Matthew Hughes observed. “The anonymity Twitter offers means they have an avenue for personal expression, while remaining anonymous.”
Moreover, even companies that impose aggressive real-name policies may be susceptible to abuse by bad actors. For example, despite Facebook’s real-name policy for individual users, Russian propagandists managed to reach 126 million Facebook users during the 2016 presidential campaign. As Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2018 indictment of thirteen Russian propagandists outlined, Russians distributed the Facebook propaganda using fictitious groups such as “United Muslims of America” and “Being Patriotic,” and they even managed to create a fictitious individual, “Matt Skiber,” to organize an event for Trump. It is impossible to quantify how much more Russian misinformation would have spread on Facebook had it not had a real-name policy, but the Mueller indictment shows that its policies were not a bulletproof method of preventing impersonation on its services.
The question that online services must address is whether the benefits of real-name policies outweigh the benefits of anonymity and pseudonymity. At least part of the answer comes from the free market. Consumer demand will ultimately determine whether a platform should have a realname policy and any exceptions to that rule. If a platform’s stringent real name policy prevents its users from engaging in candid conversations, the platform may lose customers. But if a platform is overrun by anonymous trolls, it is unlikely to attract a broad user base, although there is a history of niche anonymous and pseudonymous sites such as AutoAdmit that can cause substantial damage despite having relatively small numbers of users.
But it is questionable whether requiring real names improves the level of discourse on social media. A 2016 analysis of a German online petition website reviewed more than half a million comments on more than 1,600 petitions. The researchers hypothesized that the commenters who used their real names would be more aggressive. “Aggressive commentors have nothing to hide: they stand up for higher-order moral ideals and principles,” they wrote. And the research confirmed that hypothesis; they found that “more online aggression is obtained by non-anonymous commenters and not by anonymous commenters.”
Likewise, some research has found that pseudonymous online discussions tend to be of higher quality. Disqus, which provides online comment platforms for websites, reported in 2012 that commenters using pseudonyms commented nearly five times as often as those who were required to use their real names via Facebook logins and concluded that “pseudonyms are the most valuable contributors to communities because they contribute the highest quantity and quality of comments.”
A platform’s determination that real-name policies are in its business interests does not necessarily mean that they are in the best interests of society. While companies such as Facebook have presented reasonable explanations for their real-name requirements, many harms that the policies seek to prevent will still occur, as the worst actors will be able to circumvent the real-name policies. Yet real-name policies can harm the transgender community, domestic violence victims, and others who might face serious consequences from the use of their real names. Because of the serious consequences for some of the most vulnerable groups, real-name policies often are not in the best interests of society.
Reprinted from “The United States of Anonymous: How the First Amendment Shaped Online Speech,” by Jeff Kosseff. Copyright (c) 2022 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.
How tech is tackling climate change — and reckoning with its own impact on the planet.
Your information will be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy
Thank you for signing up. Please check your inbox to verify your email.
Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again.
A login link has been emailed to you – please check your inbox.
The company set out new programs for partners that entice them to sell services across six distinct cloud products and service areas.
The Microsoft Cloud Partner Program will be focused on six areas: Azure data and artificial intelligence, Azure infrastructure, Azure digital and app innovation, business applications, “modern work” and security.
Microsoft is revamping its partner program and setting new recertification requirements for the 400,000-plus companies that sell and support its enterprise products and services and build their own solutions and devices around them.
The changes reflect Microsoft’s investments in the cloud as a strategic growth area and the need to align partners with the evolving requirements and buying patterns of customers, according to Rodney Clark, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Channel Sales and channel chief.
“While we’ve delivered on this promise of customer value in the past, the reality is that this has shifted, especially in the last two to three years,” Clark said in a press conference Wednesday. “It’s no longer us — Microsoft and our [partners] — leading our customers on this tech-intensity journey of innovation and ongoing development. It’s very much our customers that are directing us based on their emerging needs.”
On Oct. 3, the current 15-year-old Microsoft Partner Network will become the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program, which will be focused on six areas: Azure data and artificial intelligence, Azure infrastructure, Azure digital and app innovation, business applications, “modern work” and security.
The new two-level program will continue to be open to Microsoft’s current partners — resellers, systems integrators, managed services providers, device partners and independent software vendors — but Microsoft is changing the way it categorizes them to signal their cloud expertise and experience to customers. Those partners are a critical part of Microsoft’s success: The company previously has credited them with having a hand in 95% of its commercial revenue.
“The scale of our success that we see through our partners drives these incredible results — $28 billion in partner co-sell value in the past four years — and we continue to refine and enhance the sales motion with partners as [evidenced] by the 37% revenue growth,” said Nick Parker, corporate vice president of Global Partner Solutions.
Microsoft is retiring its Silver and Gold competencies that partners could earn to help differentiate their businesses to customers beyond a baseline partner network membership status.
The first new partner qualifying level — a “solutions partner” designation — will validate Microsoft partners that meet specific requirements for each of the six new areas. A new partner capability score will rank partners’ technical skills and performance based on their certifications, new customers added, successful deployments and overall growth. That score will be a telemetry-based calculation based on reporting in Microsoft’s Partner Center portal, and partners must earn at least 70 points out of 100 points to earn the designation. Partners now can access the portal to see their current progress toward that goal.
“From there, we provide technical skilling if there’s a gap that we need to close to help them get to 70 points,” Clark said. “There’s proactive support to help partners navigate exactly where they need to go and how they need to invest in order to get there.”
The three Azure-related solutions partner designations — infrastructure, data and artificial intelligence, and digital and app innovation — also will be prerequisites for the Azure Expert MSP program beginning Oct. 3.
Microsoft’s second new partner qualifying level will include specializations — renamed from the current advanced specializations — and expert programs. They will recognize partners’ deep technical expertise and experience in specific technical scenarios under each solution area. The solution partner designation will be a prerequisite for earning specializations.
Microsoft stressed that there will be no immediate changes to partners’ business or program statuses, including anniversary dates, prior to October. Partners’ incentive eligibility will not change in the program year that runs from October 2022 to September 2023.
“It’s important to know that as part of this evolution, we’re not removing any benefits that partners receive today,” Clark said. “In fact, we’re increasing investment in our program by more than 25%.”
In addition to renewing benefits they’re already using, partners will be able to access new customized benefits packages, according to Microsoft. They’ll also continue to receive internal use rights licenses — which will be called “product benefits” — including on-premises licenses, cloud service subscriptions and Azure credits.
Microsoft’s partner program overhaul follows controversial changes associated with its New Commerce Experience platform that included adding a premium on monthly Microsoft 365 subscriptions purchased through partners in its Cloud Solution Provider program.
Partners have until Sept. 30 to decide whether to join the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program or renew their legacy Microsoft Partner Network benefit status for another year.
“We are engaging with our ecosystem and giving plenty of time for our partners to understand where and how they should be investing,” Clark said. “We want to make sure that our ecosystem, who contributes so much to our commercial success, is set up for success — that we don’t allow competitors to come in and basically, through their set of offerings or their capability, impact the value that we deliver to customers.”
Clari’s leaders and partners addressing the biggest questions in tech
Clari’s Revenue Operations Platform improves efficiency, predictability, and
growth across the entire revenue process. Clari gives revenue teams total
visibility into their business, to drive process rigor, spot risk and
opportunity in the pipeline, increase forecast accuracy, and drive overall
efficiency. Thousands of sales, marketing, and customer success teams at
leading companies, including Okta, Adobe, Workday, Zoom, and Finastra, use
Clari’s execution insights to make their revenue process more connected,
efficient, and predictable. Visit us at clari.com and follow us @clari on
LinkedIn.
Pilar Schenk is the Chief Operating Officer of
Cisco Collaboration responsible for growing
the organization at a global level.
“To win more revenue for your sales teams, start with the customer. Understand what your customers need, and make sure that those needs are aligned to clearly defined internal success criteria. Build trust across the teams that what you sold the customer is what is being delivered.”
Watch the full episode here.
Madalina Paul is the Regional Vice President of Major Accounts at Docusign.
“Finding transformational talent is not easy; and by extension, you should be purposeful in your strategy to retain exceptional individuals. Giving everyone the right environment to develop, grow, and learn will continuously increase revenue performance across the whole team and maximize the impact that your talent has on the organization.”
Watch the full episode here.
Michael Megerian is the Chief Revenue Officer of Yello, with over 21 years of experience building and managing SaaS revenue organizations, at Oracle, Taleo, and Ariba.
“Trying to make every deal as big as possible often adds complexity and extends sales cycles. To accelerate growth, sellers should focus on landing faster, and then expanding, and expanding again. Getting customers into your solution sooner helps you solve their initial problems, then later, you can grow together.”
Watch the full episode here.
Dan O’Connell serves as the Chief Strategy Officer and is also a member of the Board of Directors at Dialpad.
“Make it easy for prospects to go through the buying process. At every step of the journey from lead to customer, make sure they are getting as much sales assistance as they need. Focusing on the conversion rates from lead to opportunity to customer lets you spot friction and accelerate deals faster.”
Watch the full episode here.
Bhaskar Roy is the Chief Marketing Officer of Workato. He brings more than 20 years of experience in building and bringing software products to market.
“Bring sales into the marketing planning sessions. The goal of marketing is to help drive pipeline to sellers that turn into revenue. Cross-functional input from sales, marketing, customer success, channels, and anyone else involved in the process drives full alignment.”
Watch the full episode here.
Mark Ebert is the Senior Vice President of Sales at 6Sense, where he leads all sales, revenue operations, and enablement teams.
“If you want to improve your sellers’ performance, protect their time. Make it clear what high-value activities actually matter and manage against only those. Don’t waste energy reporting on activities for the sake of reporting activities.”
Watch the full episode here.
Andrew Casey is the Chief Financial Officer of WalkMe. He brings over 20 years of financial experience with companies like ServiceNow, HP, and Symantec to managing financial operations.
“When heading toward IPO, align rep metrics with company growth metrics. Knowing the activities that drive predictable revenue at the rep level means you can promote and reproduce those behaviors across your entire organization.”
Watch the full episode here.
Clari’s Revenue Operations Platform improves efficiency, predictability, and
growth across the entire revenue process. Clari gives revenue teams total
visibility into their business, to drive process rigor, spot risk and
opportunity in the pipeline, increase forecast accuracy, and drive overall
efficiency. Thousands of sales, marketing, and customer success teams at
leading companies, including Okta, Adobe, Workday, Zoom, and Finastra, use
Clari’s execution insights to make their revenue process more connected,
efficient, and predictable. Visit us at clari.com and follow us @clari on
LinkedIn.
They’re also concerned about how global warming could impact the industry, from the supply chain to innovation.
Two-thirds of poll respondents were concerned that the tech industry is a major contributor to climate change.
Nat Rubio-Licht is a Los Angeles-based news writer at Protocol. They graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in newspaper and online journalism in May 2020. Prior to joining the team, they worked at the Los Angeles Business Journal as a technology and aerospace reporter.
Two-thirds of U.S. adults are concerned about the tech industry’s impact on the climate, and 73% believe that tech companies have an obligation to address the crisis, according to an exclusive survey conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of Protocol.
The results, first shared here, also show the industry’s own workers are even more concerned and ready for tech companies to take action. That reflects a growing movement of tech workers putting pressure on their employers to lay out more ambitious climate plans and stick to them.
Climate change poses a number of challenges to the tech industry. Just last summer, we saw flooding decimate Zhengzhou, an iPhone manufacturing hub, while Amazon warehouse workers suffered through triple-digit heat in the Pacific Northwest. These incontrovertible impacts of the climate crisis are why more Americans than ever are alarmed about climate change, and, as the new results reveal, they’re also a concern when it comes to how people think about the tech industry.
The poll — which was conducted in March and includes roughly 1,000 respondents — shows what people are most worried about when it comes to the impacts the climate crisis could have on the tech industry. Among their concerns are that the tech supply chain, sourcing, manufacturing materials and growth and innovation could be affected. The majority surveyed — around 61% — are also worried that the tech industry’s reputation could be at stake, with 66% concerned that the industry is a major contributor to climate change.
More than half of respondents say tech companies can do something about climate change. Some 59% think tech companies should pursue purchasing renewable energy, 55% believe companies should pursue reducing operation emissions and half see improving supply chain sustainability and investing in new technologies as potential solutions. A number of companies are already taking some of these actions, particularly around buying renewable energy.
But decarbonizing the supply chain has proven to be more challenging as tech companies try to get a handle on Scope 3 emissions. Those carbon emissions are associated both with manufacturing goods and customers’ use of products. Microsoft, for example, saw its Scope 3 emissions rise last year. The same is true for other companies; Amazon saw its emissions increase 19% from 2019 to 2020, the last year with data available.
The public also wants to see venture capital firms get involved by investing in carbon dioxide removal technologies, even if they have yet to be proven. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said it was worth investing in. Most scenarios for stabilizing the climate will require some level of carbon dioxide removal.
Though people think tech companies could be doing more, 63% of respondents trust them to meet their stated climate change goals. An even greater 69% say that tech companies’ commitments to addressing climate change influence their opinions of companies.
Tech workers are even more eager for the industry to do something about climate change. A stunning 94% of tech workers surveyed say that tech companies are highly obligated to address climate change, and 96% say tech companies should make commitments and investments to address it. Some 88% of tech workers say that a tech company’s commitment to climate change influences their opinion of it.
Activism at tech companies has exploded in recent years. High-profile unionization efforts have swept across Amazon, Apple, Google and elsewhere to improve working conditions. Employees at Amazon also organized to press the company to set climate targets, including pushing shareholder resolutions for the company to clean up its act. The company eventually fired two of the leading organizers, and it was forced to cough up back pay following a National Labor Relations Board ruling last year. The new polling shows companies can likely expect more pressure in the coming years.
A total of 60% of tech workers think the company they work at is doing more to address climate issues than others, twice that of all employed adults surveyed. But many also believe that companies can only do so much.
Close to two-thirds of tech worker respondents reported that the pandemic has impacted their employer’s efforts to address climate change. Other limiting factors reported include profit, shareholder considerations and the priorities of a company’s leadership. Despite these limitations, 82% reported wanting to see their company take more steps to address climate change.
Nat Rubio-Licht is a Los Angeles-based news writer at Protocol. They graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in newspaper and online journalism in May 2020. Prior to joining the team, they worked at the Los Angeles Business Journal as a technology and aerospace reporter.
Expanding to multiple blockchains and addressing risks are key parts of its V3 upgrade as its contracts swell to billions of dollars in value.
Founder and CEO Stani Kulechov sees other growth areas for Aave such as fixed-income products and collateralizing NFTs.
Tomio Geron ( @tomiogeron) is a San Francisco-based reporter covering fintech. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, covering venture capital and startups. Before that, he worked as a staff writer at Forbes, covering social media and venture capital, and also edited the Midas List of top tech investors. He has also worked at newspapers covering crime, courts, health and other topics. He can be reached at [email protected] or [email protected].
Aave, an early DeFi protocol, is expanding across a number of new blockchains as it looks to draw in more mainstream users and retool itself for a much larger market opportunity in crypto lending than its creators anticipated.
Backed by a Swiss company of the same name founded in 2017, Aave is an open-source protocol for borrowing and lending crypto. The challenge it faces is not uncommon in crypto: It was built to handle millions of dollars in value, but it now has $18 billion in total value locked or deposited. The new version of Aave’s liquidity protocol, V3, tries to address some of its shortcomings by lowering risk, improving scalability and making Aave a truly cross-chain protocol, Aave founder and CEO Stani Kulechov said.
”When we built the V2 protocol, we were thinking that maybe we’ll have $200 million worth of value locked,” he said. “It has billions now. Now we’re launching the V3 protocol. We’re kind of expecting that some day this protocol could actually have hundreds of billions of value or even a trillion. So we have this kind of scalability in mind.”
Many DeFi protocols initially attracted crypto-native investors as speculators looking for high yields or trading gains in tokens, and have been hit by a big decline in token prices. But Kulechov believes DeFi is just getting started, with a move to broader, more mainstream use in the future.
“We think of these protocols as a new back-end for finance that will be used by everyone who is interacting with finance directly or indirectly — similar to the way we today interact with HTTP or IP protocols,” he said.
Aave has grown quickly, a result of its open system where anyone can contribute to code and build something better, he said. But that means that risk has also increased tremendously for these autonomous systems.
Risk mitigation features in the new version include supply caps, which limit how much of a certain asset can be supplied to Aave; borrowing caps, which limit how much of a certain asset can be borrowed out of Aave; and isolation of assets, which means you can only borrow the same asset as the one you supplied as collateral.
While Aave was on Ethereum, Avalanche and Polygon, with more than $1 billion deposited on each, now with V3 Aave will be live on seven different blockchains, including Fantom, Arbitrum, Optimism and Harmony. This is important as activity on the Ethereum chain moves to Layer 2 protocols or other Layer 1 chains to address speed and cost, and developers and users need to be able to work across multiple chains. Aave’s governance also enables people to vote across different chains.
Aave has built “very successful” DeFi technology for Ethereum, Avalanche and Polygon, said Bill Dishman, investment analyst at CoinFund. “Aave remains one of the most trusted places for borrowing and lending capital throughout DeFi.”
Aave recently launched Aave Arc, a service for large institutions to trade in DeFi only with specific approved parties. This is designed to reduce risk and assuage concerns for large investors. The effort is still new but over $30 million has been put into the service with participants such as SEBA Bank and Fireblocks handling custody, Kulechov said.
Kulechov sees other growth areas for Aave such as fixed-income products and collateralizing NFTs.
Aave, which has a decentralized governance system, collects about $50 million in revenue per year to its treasury through its various activities, which makes it self-sustainable, Kulechov said.
Tomio Geron ( @tomiogeron) is a San Francisco-based reporter covering fintech. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, covering venture capital and startups. Before that, he worked as a staff writer at Forbes, covering social media and venture capital, and also edited the Midas List of top tech investors. He has also worked at newspapers covering crime, courts, health and other topics. He can be reached at [email protected] or [email protected].
LinkTree is “creating a place for people to monetize, grow and curate the ecosystem.”
Linktree co-founder Anthony Zaccaria talks about the state of the creator economy.
Nat Rubio-Licht is a Los Angeles-based news writer at Protocol. They graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in newspaper and online journalism in May 2020. Prior to joining the team, they worked at the Los Angeles Business Journal as a technology and aerospace reporter.
To make a living as a creator, you have to share content to more than one platform. Though creators can make it big on TikTok or Instagram, having multiple sources of income — brand partnerships, merch, subscription platforms — can often be the only way to stay afloat. Linktree knows this better than anyone, said Anthony Zaccaria, its co-founder.
Monetizing content as an independent creator has become a popular career choice, but the market is fragmented. Though creator funds and in-app monetization tools offer ways to make a little cash, brand deals on multiple platforms remain the most profitable way to turn being a creator into a full-time job. Linktree gives creators the opportunity to keep themselves organized, bringing all of the tools they need into one central hub.
“It’s all about creating a place for people to monetize, grow and curate the ecosystem, no matter where they’re building their audience,” Zaccaria said. “That is the key thing.”
The platform, which was founded in 2016 by Zaccaria, his brother Alex and Nick Humphreys, hit 24 million users last year, with major names like Selena Gomez, Shawn Mendes, Bella Poarch and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson joining in. Now it’s attracted a third round of funding, raising $110 million from a host of venture capital firms and bringing its valuation to $1.3 billion, the company announced Wednesday. It’s also bringing on Mike Olson, former SVP of Growth Initiatives at Twitch, as its president, focusing on U.S. market expansion.
Protocol spoke to Zaccaria about the state of the creator economy, how Linktree works for creators, its recent integrations and the future of the platform.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Can you generally speak to the state of the creator economy as it stands, and where Linktree fits into the space?
Obviously creators as a whole have been a thing for a long time. Thinking back to YouTubers and vloggers, and people monetizing content and monetizing their personalities, that has been around for 10 or 15 years. Particularly through the pandemic, people [are] realizing they can do a whole lot more. Tech enabling that has increased.
We’re seeing people really find ways to monetize their passions, their hobbies, their side hustles, whether it’s creating and building something physical or purely just through content. And I think we’re seeing a new economy rise up and a new source of revenue for people, whether people make this a full-time living, whether it’s through platforms like Twitch or YouTube or TikTok being a secondary source of income.
We see ourselves playing a big part of that, as a platform-agnostic place for everyone to curate their ecosystem, whether they’re digital talent that lives in the world of YouTube or TikTok, or they live in the physical and digital world where they have they have physical goods and they’re making products a bit selling through Etsy or Amazon, but they’re also using content to promote and build their audiences.
What kinds of creators use Linktree the most?
We have over 23 million users worldwide. For verticals or user groups, there are just over 250 [groups] on the platform that self-identify when they sign up. We’re pretty evenly split across those verticals. There isn’t really one that makes up the majority. We say that we’re platform-agnostic and we have a use case and value prop across the spectrum.
Do people that are bigger on different platforms use Linktree differently? What is Linktree doing to help facilitate all of their needs?
We don’t see different use cases by platform, whether you’re TikTok, Twitter, Instagram. What we see as different is the type of user on that platform. So if you’re a musician that is bigger on Instagram, how you use it might be different to someone who’s producing educational content on TikTok or a realtor who might be showing their listings on TikTok or a gamer on Twitch. Regardless of the platform you’re coming from, Linktree is still this place that unifies your whole ecosystem, everything you care about, what’s important, relevant and recent for you.
For example, as a musician, we see our music users using our music-link functionality, which integrates Songlink/Odesli, which we acquired last year. That allows artists to embed their … Spotify link or any other platform and it will show all the streaming services that the song or album is available on in the country that the user is in. They integrate our Bandsintown link, which we just recently partnered with, to show tour dates, or they might use our Shopify integration to show their merch.
Does Linktree plan to expand from individual and creator uses to enterprise uses?
Absolutely, and we have. Over the last year, we’ve seen the small business vertical itself grow about 327%, and brands — like Red Bulls or Qantas, those kinds of big names — using the product [have grown] over 500%. So we’re sort of seeing brands really use it and drive their audience to the links in profiles to either go to Shopify or sign up to see new content. So we’re seeing that as a big growth area. We already have quite a few users on enterprise plans, which is discounted pricing for bulk accounts. But we’re continuing to build functionality for brands, or even just users that want to manage and control multiple user profiles in one spot … whether it’s integration with payments or marketing tech or whatnot.
Does Linktree plan to get into the crypto/blockchain space? If so, what will that look like?
Web3 as a whole aligns with our vision of empowering creators. We’re not necessarily pivoting to be a Web3 company and changing everything about what we do, but continuing to build on our vision of empowering creators to curate the digital universe. There is some specific functionality and integrations and tools that are coming down the line that we’ll be rolling out over the next couple of months as well that are in a similar space to what we’re doing already. I can’t talk about the specifics on the partnerships and integrations, but they will be coming soon.
We’re building functionality that will help service the NFT community, service Web3, service crypto, while still being true to what Linktree does without necessarily all of a sudden pivoting. We’re already used by a lot of the Web3 community: Bored Ape Yacht Club, for example, use[s] Linktree. So we still have a product that can straddle Web 2.0 and Web3 quite easily.
What does Linktree plan to do with the funding?
It’s obviously super exciting. We’ve got such a big product vision, and the capital is really to execute on that vision. The team really is the first part to help execute on that. We’re at about 240 employees now and will likely be somewhere between 450 and 500 by the end of this year, with a bigger focus on the U.S. as well as some other global markets that are emerging for us. A lot of it is really going into the team, and also reinvesting back into the team to continue to ensure our employee experience is top of class.
Can you expand a little bit more upon how you’re planning on building your product vision? In the near future, what is that going to look like for users?
We’ve done some recent ecommerce functionality, so we’ll continue to build upon that … [with] deeper functionality and partnerships with some other like-minded businesses. We [recently] did a partnership that has been in the works for a while, but we’ve pushed ahead with it because of the situation in Ukraine, with GoFundMe and allowing folks to create a GoFundMe link within their Linktree profiles so they can drive donations for Ukraine. So we’ll continue to build upon that sort of area.
Is an IPO or public debut in Linktree’s future?
To be honest, I think we’re still pretty early. We were bootstrapped up until we took funding at the start of 2020 and profitable to that point. We did that all ourselves, we took on venture to help us grow and scale. We have a big vision and that has been great so far. So whilst the business has been around for five or six years, we still feel we are quite early on in the journey, particularly in the venture journey. So acquisition conversations and IPO conversations aren’t really things we’re talking about.
Nat Rubio-Licht is a Los Angeles-based news writer at Protocol. They graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in newspaper and online journalism in May 2020. Prior to joining the team, they worked at the Los Angeles Business Journal as a technology and aerospace reporter.
To give you the best possible experience, this site uses cookies. If you continue browsing. you accept our use of cookies. You can review our privacy policy to find out more about the cookies we use.
