Month: December 2022

Password manager LassPass said it’s investigating a security incident after its systems were compromised for the second time this year.

LastPass chief executive Karim Toubba said in a blog post that an “unauthorized party” recently gained access to some customers’ information stored in a third-party cloud service shared by LastPass and its parent company, GoTo. Toubba said the unauthorized party used information stolen from LastPass’ systems in August, which the company disclosed at the time.

Toubba did not say what specific customer information was taken, but said it was working to “understand the scope of the incident and identify what specific information has been accessed.”

GoTo, formerly LogMeIn, which acquired LastPass in 2015, said in a similarly vague statement that it was investigating the incident. It’s not yet clear if both LogMeIn and GoTo customers are affected by the breach.

LastPass said in August that an unauthorized party “gained access to portions of the LastPass development environment through a single compromised developer account and took portions of source code and some proprietary LastPass technical information.” LastPass said that its system design and controls “prevented the threat actor from accessing any customer data or encrypted password vaults.”

Toubba added in the blog post Wednesday that “customers’ passwords remain safely encrypted.”

GoTo spokesperson Elizabeth Bassler declined to comment beyond LastPass’ blog post.

LastPass says it was breached — again by Zack Whittaker originally published on TechCrunch

DeHaat, a startup that offers a wide-range of agricultural services to farmers in India, has raised $60 million in a new funding round as it looks to deepen its penetration in the country and reach break-even profitability within two years.

Sofina Ventures and Temasek co-led the Patna and Gurgaon-headquartered startup’s Series E funding, it said, at a valuation between $700 million and $800 million, according to a person familiar with the matter. Existing backers RTP Global Partners, Prosus Ventures and Lightrock India also participated in the new round.

Farming is a $350 billion industry in India, but farmers face a myriad of challenges in the country that were largely unaddressed until upstarts such as DeHaat arrived on the scene. Farmers struggle with securing agri-inputs, finding buyers for their produce and in maintaining enough runway.

Giants such as Reliance and Adani Group offer some services to farmers, but their involvement in the agriculture sector remains largely limited. A fast-growing population and climate change mean Indian farmers need to adopt technology quickly to improve – and maintain – their yields.

DeHaat uses artificial intelligence to help 1.5 million farmers across 11 states, 110,000 villages and over 150 zip codes in India source raw materials, find advisory and credit services, and sell crops.

The startup has onboarded over 2,000 agricultural institutions including input manufacturers, food and consumer goods giants, banks, insurance firms. It works with over 10,000 micro-entrepreneurs who help the startup run a maze of last-mile supply chains.

In the past two years, DeHaat has aggressively expanded across several key Indian states, and co-founder and chief executive Shashank Kumar told TechCrunch in an interview that the startup will focus on deepening its presence across the zip codes where it’s already operational in the immediate future and reaching break-even profitability in 12 months.

The new funding provides DeHaat with up to 40 months of runway, during which time Kumar said the startup will be profitable. “At least for the next three to five months, we are not adding any new geographies. We will continue to serve more farmers and broaden our network of centers in the states where we are operational,” he said. DeHaat is currently doesn’t have presence in the Southern Indian states. Kumar said the startup is hopeful to start expanding to those states after about a year.

Kumar acknowledged that raising funds in the current market scenario isn’t a walk in the park. Funding inflows to local startups has shrunk by more than 80% as investors grow cautious following a sharp reversal in the global market conditions.

“The lens is different – everyone is looking for assets that have a clear path to profitability,” said Kumar. “In that way, DeHaat had its own advantage – our unit economics are very strong, whatever burn we have is for adding geographies. We raised the round to be ready for all the future opportunities,” he said, adding that DeHaat still has about two-thirds of the funds left from the previous $115 million funding round.

He said the startup, whose name means village in Hindi, has acquired half a dozen firms in the recent quarters and sees more m&a potential on the horizon and is ready to execute when it finds the right partners.

(More to follow)

Indian agritech DeHaat tops $700 million valuation in $60 million funding by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

As new Twitter owner Elon Musk tinkers around with the social network’s feature set, more algorithmic recommendations are apparently on the way.

Twitter’s support account tweeted about the change on Wednesday, noting that the platform was “expanding recommendations to all users.” This is of course under the guide of giving users the “best” content (Instagram likes to use this line too), but in reality splicing more recommendations into a social feed primes users to expect more paid content too.

Twitter provided no other details about the change to recommendations, but links to a previous blog post explaining how they algorithmic content works and where it might show up. According to the post, “recommendations can appear in your Home timeline, certain places within the Explore tab, and elsewhere on Twitter.” As it stands, you can switch between the home feed and “latest tweets” by clicking the sparkle button in the upper right corner of the timeline.

It’s not immediately clear if Twitter plans to stream more recommended tweets into the “home” timeline or if this is something more aggressive, but we’ve tweeted into the void to ask the company for more clarity. Some users have already noticed changes, which seem to be affecting home feeds for now.

Twitter offers two different feeds: “latest tweets” which displays tweets from people you follow in chronological order and “home,” a curated collection of popular tweets from your follows. From our experience, the latter occasionally mixed in some recommendations from beyond our following lists but was mostly a non-chronological collection of tweets from people we did follow.

Given Musk’s habit of quickly rolling out major feature changes (and then rolling them back), we wouldn’t be surprised to see Twitter get heavy-handed with recommendations or even switch the default feed in that direction, so we’ll keep our eyes peeled for anything major.

Pre-Musk, the platform planned to make recommendations more prominent but reversed course after a backlash from users. On Instagram, users have expressed a similar weariness at seeing their feeds cluttered with content from people they don’t follow. For TikTok, serving algorithmically-curated content is in the app’s DNA, but many other social platforms have to tread more carefully.

Because they were originally designed to let users follow people they already know (or know of), apps like Twitter and Instagram have to turn the algorithmic spigot on slowly and hope that users don’t notice any sudden changes. In this case, we’ll have to wait and see.

Twitter is going to show you more tweets from people you don’t follow by Taylor Hatmaker originally published on TechCrunch

“I’ve had a bad month,” Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) said onstage. The crowd instantly broke out in laughter.

The former CEO and founder of disgraced crypto exchange FTX, SBF’s month probably got worse today. In his first public interview since his company imploded, New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin didn’t go easy on him at the DealBook summit.

At one point, Sorkin characterized the apartment SBF shared with Alameda executives as “a bunch of kids who were on Adderall having a sleepover party.” Sorkin also incredulously asked, “What are your lawyers telling you right now?” Of course, his lawyers are very opposed to him speaking so candidly when he’s under investigation by both the SEC and the DOJ.

But maybe SBF is being so open with the press because he simply just loves good ol’ gumshoe journalism!

Yes, a lot happened in SBF’s highly anticipated appearance today. But in what was surely the most important moment of the conversation, SBF affirmed that journalists are good, actually.

Most of these big shot tech guys do not like journalists. We’re annoying! Trust me, I know, I have dated fellow journalists before. But SBF (who, I must emphasize again, is being investigated by both the SEC and DOJ and lost billions of dollars this month) understands us.

SBF’s opinions about journalism came up when Sorkin asked about SBF’s investments in media companies.

“I was looking to support journalists doing great work, because I think what they do is really important,” SBF said. Semafor, a recently launched news outlet, received funding from SBF — a point that Elon Musk has brought up repeatedly when arguing with Semafor co-founder Ben Smith on Twitter.

“I’m certainly seeing, you know…. getting the brunt of a lot of that right now. And frankly, I think it’s healthy for the world that there is real investigative journalism,” SBF said.

Honestly, it’s pretty mature of him! Just two weeks ago, SBF unknowingly gave a damning interview to Vox reporter Kelsey Piper. Piper, a longtime friend of SBF’s, DMed him on Twitter to ask about… how his entire life is falling apart and how his company’s failure is causing actual real people to lose their entire life savings and how everything is a massive disaster that makes Fyre Fest look like a small oopsie.

“It was not meant to be a public interview, it was a longtime friend of mine who I stupidly forgot was also a reporter,” he said. “I thought I was speaking in a personal capacity.”

The resulting article made him look very bad.

“man all the dumb shit i said. it’s not true, not really,” SBF wrote to Piper. Again, not something you want to say when you are being investigated by both the SEC and the DOJ! To make matters worse, he also said “fuck regulators.” Whoops.

Despite it all, SBF is willing to stand up for the rights of the press, and we respect that! However, we did ask him to make a last-minute appearance at our crypto event a few weeks ago and he didn’t answer, but it’s fine, we got CZ to talk to us instead.

SBF says journalists are good, actually by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Microsoft may have long had OpenAI as its trusty partner (after its sizable investment), but AWS today announced that Stability AI, one of the hottest new upstarts in the generative AI space and the company behind Stable Diffusion, is doubling down on its cloud, making it its “preferred cloud provider to build and scale its AI models for image, language, audio, video, and 3D content generation.”

In addition, Stability AI will also work with AWS to make its open-source tools and model available to more students, researchers, startups and enterprises (which sounds quite a bit like what Microsoft and OpenAI said when they announced their partnership).

Stability AI, which recently announced a $101 million funding round at a valuation of over $1 billion, was already using thousands of Nvidia GPUs in the AWS cloud to train its models. Now, the two companies are formalizing this relationship, with Stability AI planning to use AWS’ SageMaker ML platform, on top of its lower-level infrastructure services with GPUs and AWS’ own Trainium chips.

Typically, these deals also come with preferred pricing and other perks, though neither AWS nor Stability mention those in today’s announcement.

“At Stability AI, our mission is to build the foundation to activate humanity’s potential through AI,” said Emad Mostaque, founder and CEO of Stability AI. “AWS has played an integral role in scaling our open-source foundation models across modalities. We are delighted to run these models on Amazon SageMaker to enable tens of thousands of developers and millions of users to leverage the power of AI with a robust set of tools. We look forward to seeing the amazing things that developers build and customers design and implement using collective intelligence and augmented technology.”

Models like Stable Diffusion, which recently hit version 2.0, are not without controversy, be that for their ability to generate adult content, something Stable Diffusion 2.0 automatically filters out, or because these models are often trained on images from artists who have not explicitly opted in to their works being used to train these models. There can be no doubt, though, that Stability AI is taking over quite a bit of mindshare from OpenAI these days, which has long taken a more cautious approach to how it exposes its models. Stability AI’s open-source approach, at least for the time being, seems to be winning in brining on more developers and — for better or worse — driving innovation in this space.

Stability AI doubles down on AWS by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

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Heeeeeey! Couple of fun things we have in the pipeline at the moment…

Did you know we’re looking for you and your expertise for our TechCrunch founder summit?
Join us for a free, one-hour webinar on Thursday, December 8 and learn about “Building a Compensation Plan for Better Retention,” where we’re talking with two of the top folks at BambooHR, who’ll be offering their expert guidance.

If you’re wondering what our Spotify Wrapped listening personalities are, you are in luck. See below. Happy end of November — onward to the last month of the year! — Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

#SpotifyWrapped: If you were like most of us TechCrunchers today, you were finding out what Spotify had to say about your year-long listening trends. Sarah writes that in addition to the list of your most listened-to songs, Spotify Wrapped 2022 attempted to guess your mood: Christine is “The Maverick” and Haje is “The Time Traveler,” in case you wanted to know.
More layoffs: Food delivery companies continue to have a rough go of it. DoorDash is the latest to announce it will lay off 1,250 employees in efforts to reduce operating expenses, Aisha reports.
It turns out you can have nice things: We enjoyed Mary Ann’s well-done story on ResortPass, a company that gives people a chance to lay out by the pool of a five-star resort without having to stay there. The company’s recent $26 million cash infusion includes celebrity backers, and most likely five-star pool loungers, Jessica Alba and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Startups and VC

Today, crypto exchange Kraken announced it’s letting go of 1,100 staffers. The announcement came from a company blog post, Alex reports. News that Kraken is cutting staff — and therefore costs — is not a surprise, given a generally gloomy macroeconomic climate and even worse climes in crypto land. Speaking of crypto land, Sarah reports that Jack Dorsey’s Bitcoin project TBD kills its plan to trademark “Web5.” Meanwhile, the creator of Magic: The Gathering spoke with Devin about why he put a paper game on the blockchain.

Apart from the world of crypto, it was a good day for new funds — Christine reports that New Fare Partners is the latest female-led VC to close first fund, and Catherine has a story today about Iterative launching its second fund targeting Southeast Asia–based startups.

“Native Americans are the most impoverished group in the US, a vestige of intergenerational, systematic disenfranchisement. They are also being hit the hardest by inflation right now, as a result,” says Danielle Forward, CEO and co-founder of Natives Rising in an interview with Mike. She is working to change that situation. “While the tech industry is slowing down on hiring, tech jobs remain one of the most economically empowering, in-demand job opportunities of the future, especially for those who desire remote work.”

Okay, fine, there’s a few more:

Cracking the whip on spend management: Kyle reports that spend management platform Teampay expands its partnership with Mastercard and raises $47 million to secure its next cycle of growth.
Security, but simpler: Pangea Cyber wants to simplify security for developers, taking an API approach, Ron reports.
An evolution of startup studios: eFounders morphs into Hexa, a portfolio company of startup studios, Romain writes.
Have a fresh battery: Gogoro to pilot battery swapping and Smartscooters in the Philippines next year, Rebecca writes.
A bucket o’ talent: Sequoia India backs Prismforce, a company that helps IT companies build a better supply chain for talent, Jagmeet writes.

Dear Sophie: How should I prepare for my visa interview?

Dear Sophie,

Our startup was just accepted into the winter batch of a top accelerator!

My co-founder with an H-1B just got laid off from Big Tech, but he’s OK because his immigration lawyer is filing a change of status to B-1 within the 60-day grace period. I’m nervous though, because I’m outside the U.S. and I don’t yet have a B-1/B-2 visitor visa.

How can I ace the visa interview? What type of questions will I be asked? How should I prepare?

— Tenacious in Tobago

Three more from the TC+ team:

Sharpen your swords: Frequent conflict is a new requirement for startup leaders, Natasha M writes.
Venture and slave trade: Erika Brodnock and Johannes Lenhard present an excellent excerpt from the book “Better Venture,” which pieces together “an evidence-based account that traces venture capital back to the transatlantic slave trade.”
From cardboard to warmer houses: Tim explores how transforming old cardboard boxes into insulation netted CleanFiber a $10 million funding round.

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

In Airbnb’s new life, it is playing the role of real estate agent. The vacation home rental giant is now helping renters find an apartment so they can Airbnb it, Ivan writes. Kind of interesting when you consider that Airbnb and its hosts have gotten into trouble in the past for listing properties without permission from landlords, and in some cases the city government.

Speaking of things you’re allowed to do in cities, Brian reports that “San Francisco police can now use robots to kill.” The city’s board of supervisors passed the proposal that will allow robots to be used only “in extreme circumstances to save or prevent further loss of innocent lives,” he writes.

And we have five more for you:

“Road to irrelevance”: Not many things are, mind you, but European Central Bank officials are saying that since Bitcoin is “rarely” used for legal transactions, that is where the cryptocurrency is headed, Manish reports.
Black, white and read all over: Can you believe the Amazon Kindle is 15 years old? Brian takes us on a history tour of the electronic read device and gives a review of the Kindle Scribe.
India likes smartwatches: That’s right, India has surpassed North America in being the biggest smartwatch market, Ivan writes.
It’s electric!: Honda has plans to launch a fuel cell electric vehicle based on its CR-V crossover in 2024. Jaclyn has more.
It’s not Hump Day without a Terraform update: In the latest saga surrounding the collapse of Terraform Labs and its cryptocurrency, Kate writes that South Korean prosecutors now seek arrest warrants for the company’s co-founder, as well as some of its investors and engineers.

Daily Crunch: Music fans revisit their year in music with Spotify Wrapped 2022 by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

“I didn’t ever try to commit fraud on anyone, I was shocked by what happened this month,” Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder and former chief executive of the fallen FTX, said at the New York Times’ annual DealBook summit in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin.

One of the biggest questions around this debacle is if there was any misuse of funds between Alameda and FTX. For some context, Alameda began struggling to pay lenders back as crypto prices began falling. As a result, it used FTX customer funds to make lenders whole; a move that both showed Alameda’s lack of assets, and triggered part of the crash when FTX customers began the crypto exchange equivalent of a run on the bank.

When pushed by Sorkin, SBF said that he didn’t “knowingly co-mingle funds” between Alameda and FTX. “Given the size of the position, I think it was not our intention, it was, in effect, tied together substantially more than I would have ever wanted to be,” he said.

“A lot of what we ended up doing and focusing on was a distraction from one unbelievably important area that we completely failed on: that was risk,” SBF said. “That was risk management, customer position risk, and frankly, conflict of interest risk.”

The entrepreneur said that he failed to task anyone specifically with oversight of the Alameda and FTX relationship, a misstep that matches up with the fact that FTX, despite being valued at $32 billion, also never had a board of directors. It was his duty, he explained, to have thought about the financial intertwining more — though he offered as an excuse, somewhat ironically, a fear that in looking too closely at the relationship he might be at risk because of his ownership stake conflict in both entities.

Some see FTX’s collapse, and SBF’s mistakes along with the team that conspired alongside him, as a pivotal moment that impacts general trust in the cryptocurrency space – a world that is already experiencing a winter as Bitcoin and Ethereum prices shake.

SBF, meanwhile, remains a vocal type of vocal, with many surprised that he decided to do the NYT interview in the first place. During the interview, SBF, while sipping (and at least once, spilling) a La Croix in the Bahamas, claimed multiple times that he did not know how certain aspects of the business, from its ties to its eventual bankruptcy, went so wrong. When Sorkin asked what SBF’s lawyers are advising him to do, he said that “they’re very much not” in support of him participating in the interview.

“The classic advice is don’t say anything, recede into a hole,” SBF said, when asked about his lawyer’s perspective on if he should be doing interviews right now. “I don’t see what is accomplished by me sitting locked in a room pretending that the outside world doesn’t exist.”

SBF’s fall from grace is being heavily chronicled, while many wait to see if he will be indicted for the potential crimes in question. The entrepreneur stepped down from his role earlier this month, and has been succeeded by Enron spin-down veteran John J. Ray III. In a filing, Ray said that he never in his career had “seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.”

The entrepreneur also addressed his leaked DMs from a conversation with a Vox reporter, in which he declared filing for bankruptcy as one of his biggest regrets. In the text message exchange, He also made flippant comments, going as far as to say “fuck regulators.”

“It was not meant to be a public interview, it was a longtime friend of mine who I stupidly forgot was also a reporter,” he said. “I thought I was speaking in a personal capacity.”

In that Vox interview, he added that regulators “make everything worse” and that they don’t protect customers at all. ”In FTX s prime, SBF was a frequent visitor to Capitol Hill, where he advised U.S. legislators on regulations around cryptocurrency. In conversation with Sorkin, SBF said that he spent “probably thousands of hours in D.C. ” meeting with regulators.

Speaking of personal, though, SBF did say he talked to his parents, both of whom are lawyers about FTX. There have been allegations that his parents were given a Bahamas vacation home using FTX money; “It was not intended to be their long term property, it was always intended to be the company’s property…and I think that’s where it will end up…I think they may have stayed there.”

SBF says he is not focusing on criminal liability, although that there will be a “time and place” for him to think about himself and his own future. “I’ve had a bad month…but that’s not what happens here…what matters is all the stakeholders in FTX.”

Asked directly about whether he’s remaining in the Bahamas because of a fear of authority intervention should he return to the U.S., Bankman-Fried claimed not to be motivated to stay where he is due to that fear. He instead said that he “could, to [his] knowledge” return to the U.S. at will.

Toward the end of the interview, SBF said that he has very little money left; including only one working credit card. He believes he has about $100,000 left in a bank account.

“I can’t make any promises about anything, but I would have thought that there would be a chance for a pathway forward here that would bring more value to customers than what would happen if you just sold everything out for scraps,” he said. “It’s not really in my hands to a large extent, but I would think that it would make sense to be exploring that, because I think there’s a chance that customers could end up made a lot more whole, maybe even fully whole if there was a concerted effort.”

As Sorkin referenced at the start of his interview, when he read a letter from a reader who lost millions due to FTX’s collapse, the company’s implosion has vanished some people’s entire life savings. It’s still not clear if those people will see their money again.

“There have been examples of this in crypto history,” SBF said.

He referenced the hack of the crypto exchange Bitfinex, in which 94,000 bitcoins were stolen in 2016. Earlier this year, the DOJ seized the stolen cryptocurrency, and Bitfinex began working with U.S. authorities to help customers get their money back.

In the last month, FTX fell from being the third largest crypto exchange to the 233rd, according to CoinMarketCap data. FTX US division is 243rd. The third largest crypto exchange, behind Coinbase and Binance, is now Kraken – which itself cut 1,100 jobs earlier today.

Darrell Etherington contributed reporting to this piece.

SBF claims massive ignorance on obvious conflicts in FTX downfall by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch

European Union regulators have fired another warning shot at Elon Musk over his erratic piloting of Twitter since his takeover last month — saying he has “huge work” ahead if the social media site is to avoid falling foul of major new governance rules for digital services which entered into force earlier this month.

Reminder: Breaches of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) can attract penalties of up to 6% of global annual turnover.

Since getting his hands on the bird, Musk has fired the top team and made slashing Twitter’s headcount a priority — with reports of 50% cuts early this month, and further sackings since (including of a large number of contractors). He’s also reversed the prior leadership’s ban on former US president Donald Trump’s Twitter account and suggested he’ll implement a general amnesty for accounts previously suspended for violating its policies — all the while engaging in public boosterism with a small group of mostly far right Twitter accounts, which can be seen egging him on to tear down content moderation systems and policies the company had painstakingly built up over years.

The change of ownership at Twitter has also led to the departures of a number of senior compliance, security, privacy and trust & safety staffers in a few short weeks. And there has been a stream of users leaving to other social media platforms — objecting to the direction Musk’s taking the site and a resurgence in toxicity and abuse since he took over which is also leading advertisers to cool on Twitter over brand safety concerns.

So the EU’s assessment that Musk-owned Twitter has its work cut out to comply with the DSA is not exactly rocket science.

Putting out its read on the outcome of a meeting today between Musk and the EU’s internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton — who obtained a ‘thumbs up’ from the billionaire, back in May, verbally affirming the bloc’s plan for Internet regulation that the EU is tenaciously interpreting as a bona fide commitment to DSA compliance — the EU said Breton told Musk that Twitter will have to significantly increase efforts if it’s to pass the grade.

In a statement attributed to Breton after the meeting, the commissioner said (emphasis Breton’s):

“I welcome Elon Musk’s statements of intent to get Twitter 2.0 ready for the DSA. I am pleased to hear that he has read it carefully and considers it as a sensible approach to implement on a worldwide basis. But let’s also be clear that there is still huge work ahead, as Twitter will have to implement transparent user policies, significantly reinforce content moderation and protect freedom of speech, tackle disinformation with resolve, and limit targeted advertising. All of this requires sufficient AI and human resources, both in volumes and skills. I look forward to progress in all these areas and we will come to assess Twitter’s readiness on site.”

The DSA will start to apply from February 17 next year for larger platforms (so called ‘very large online platforms’; or VLOPs) — which also face extra obligations including to assess and mitigate risks on their platforms under the regulation.

This means larger platforms have just a few months to prepare themselves to be able to demonstrate compliance or risk enforcement by the European Commission. For other in-scope services the DSA will start to apply in early 2024 — and enforcement will fall to Member State authorities, rather than the Commission itself.

It’s not yet clear whether Twitter will be designated a VLOP. But as we reported last week, the EU’s executive responded to reports of further layoffs, including the total shuttering of its Brussels office, with alarm — warning that “appropriateness” of resources is one of the factors it will be taking into account as it determines which platforms are designated VLOPs and therefore face an accelerated timeline for compliance, additional requirements and greater regulatory risk.

In apost put out by Twitter today, on its official blog, the company claimed it remains committed to its existing policies — however it said its approach to policy enforcement “will rely more heavily on de-amplification of violative content”, aka “freedom of speech but not freedom of reach”.

Earlier this week it also emerged that the platform has stopped enforcing its policy against misleading information about COVID-19 last week — letting unsubstantiated claims with the potential to endanger public health circulate freely.

The Commission quickly described Twitter’s decision to abandon enforcement against misleading tweets about COVID-19 as regrettable — pointing out the pandemic is not over and warning that measures to tackle disinformation will be an important component of achieving compliance with the DSA.

The episode raises questions about what EU regulators will make of baldly disingenuous claims put out by Musk — such as that ‘no Twitter polices have changed’ — when an unchanged policy that’s no longer being enforced is, de facto, a drastic change of policy.

The question is whether the EU will take an officially dim view, in its role as DSA enforcer, of such obvious contradictions — and find a breach of the regulation. Or blink and let the billionaire get away with giggling as he ignores their rules.

In an interview yesterday at the Knight Foundation conference, covered by Reuters, Twitter’s form head of trust & safety, Yoel Roth, warned the company is not safer under Musk — with far fewer staff to enforce its policies. He said his own decision to leave Twitter, after a few weeks with Musk in charge, came after the company began to stray from an adherence to written and publicly available policies — toward content decisions made unilaterally by the self-appointed ‘Chief Twit’. “One of my limits was if Twitter starts being ruled by dictatorial edict rather than by policy… there’s no longer a need for me in my role, doing what I do,” he said.

The EU will soon have to make its own call about Musk’s approach to policy.

Some might say Musk is already trolling the EU with empty claims of ‘DSA compliance’ at the same time as liquidating the resources required to achieve compliance. At the very least he appears to be testing the ground to see what he can get away with.

The EU’s read out of Breton’s working meeting with Musk does call it “constructive” — but that might just be the EU trolling Musk at this point (actually got a meeting and a date in the diary for another one? winning!) — as it writes that they both “agreed” that the Commission’s services will carry out a stress test at Twitter’s headquarters in early 2023.

Ergo, the the EU is already preparing to test Musk (and stress test his claims of compliance). Which means he’s getting accelerated ‘special attention’ from the Internet’s newly appointed sheriff. (Frankly Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg must be counting his blessings over Musk’s landing in his toxic patch.)

The Commission said this stress test will allow Twitter to “target compliance even ahead of legal deadlines, and to prepare for an extensive independent audit as provided by the DSA”. Translation: Get your house in order fast — because we’ll be back for the receipts.

Whether Musk will keep shrugging off — or finally get serious — about all these increasingly shrill soundings from regulators will be interesting to watch.

If the former, the final bill for Musk owning Twitter could get a lot more expensive.

Musk at Twitter has ‘huge work’ ahead to comply with EU rules, warns bloc by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch