WeWork has long faced questions about whether it’s been overvalued. Now, it could end up being priced at less than half of what it is currently “worth” when it goes public. Reports from the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg suggest that WeWork, which was most recently valued by venture capitalists at $47 billion, is currently considering selling shares at a price that lowers its value to $20 billion. This isn’t a nip and a tuck. That’s a dramatic slash in value that speaks to a more fundamental concern about what this company even is.

• The problem: Many observers and investors see WeWork as a real estate company. Despite using the word “tech” 123 times in its IPO filing, WeWork’s fundamental business model isn’t any different from IWG, its biggest rival. IWG is generally considered a real estate company. So it’s possible that public-market investors aren’t buying what WeWork is selling.
  [Theodore Schleifer / Recode]

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The second-least-sexy social media app (after LinkedIn) has officially entered the dating game. Facebook Dating is here. Facebook announced its plans to launch a dating platform last year, rolling out first in Colombia in September 2018. Since then, the company has tried to convince users that it could still be trusted with their personal data. Now Facebook wants users to trust it with their romantic relationships, too — a tough sell. Today, Facebook has made Dating as separate as possible from its regular app. First and foremost, users must opt in to the service, then create an entirely distinct profile. Facebook Dating also launched with an integration with Instagram.

• Should you trust Facebook with your love life? There’s a reason why Facebook Dating is free and doesn’t show ads: Facebook isn’t making money on it — yet. Facebook Dating will gather even more information from Facebook users, information that will presumably be more intimate, up to date, and relevant to what people actually like and think. But that is also the sales pitch to potential Facebook Dating users: Facebook has more data on you, so they’ll pair you up with a better match.
  [Rebecca Jennings / Vox]

The SoulCycle boycott worked. Last month, SoulCycle’s liberal user base was outraged by news that one of SoulCycle’s major investors was hosting a reelection fundraiser for President Trump. Devotees pledged to boycott SoulCycle and its parent company Equinox. A month later, the boycott appears to have had an impact, according to new data from Earnest Research, a company that analyzed publicly available website data. Following the boycott calls, SoulCycle attendance declined about 1 percent compared with the same week a year earlier. That has been followed with consistent declines of 6 percent to 7.5 percent in subsequent weeks.

• Do boycotts really work? Generally, boycotts aren’t that effective, but as the Washington Post pointed out, lifestyle brands like SoulCycle, which are built on marketing their values, are more susceptible to such actions.
  [Rani Molla / Recode]

When it comes to facial recognition, more than half of Americans trust law enforcement to use it responsibly. According to Pew Research Center’s data, 56 percent of US adults “trust law enforcement agencies to use these technologies responsibly.” But it’s a different story when it comes to companies or advertisers. Pew found that “around one-third of US adults trust technology companies to use facial recognition technology responsibly, and just 18% trust advertisers with these technologies.”

• Not everyone is on board: Attitudes toward law enforcement change depending on demographic. Pew found that only 42 percent of young people “think it is acceptable for law enforcement to use facial recognition.” And it found that “smaller shares of black and Hispanic adults than whites think the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement is acceptable.”
  [Aaron Smith / Pew Research Center]

This is Cool

Walgreens, CVS, Walmart, and Kroger ask shoppers not to carry guns in their stores.

YouTube will pay $170 million to settle charges it violated kids’ privacy and a 1998 law. That’s a pittance. Google’s YouTube has agreed to pay the fines to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it illegally harvested children’s personal data, which it used to serve them personalized ads. The $170 million is a record for companies accused of violating the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. It’s also basically a rounding error in terms of profits for Google and YouTube. (Google’s parent company Alphabet may generate $161 billion in revenue this year; one analyst estimates that YouTube will generate $20 billion of that.)

• The bigger issue is whether YouTube is fundamentally going to change the way it does business. YouTube says it is going to overhaul how it interacts with kids who watch videos on its massive platform, but critics doubt the platform’s commitment to that pledge.
  [Peter Kafka / Recode]

More trouble for Google: More than half of the nation’s state attorneys general are preparing to investigate Google for potential antitrust violations. The Washington Post broke news of the investigation ahead of its planned announcement next week. According to the Post, the investigation follows growing skepticism toward the tech giant as states such as Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas “have sharply criticized Google for its handling of users’ personal information and its algorithms for surfacing search results.”

• What we don’t know: It is unknown if the same attorneys general plan to open more probes into other tech giants, like Amazon and Facebook, which are also being scrutinized for monopolistic practices on a federal level. It’s also unclear if the DOJ, which is doing its own review of big tech and their antitrust concerns, will join the states in their investigations.
  [Tony Romm / The Washington Post]

Amazon is testing a payment method at Whole Foods that involves scanning human hands. Right now, Amazon employees in New York City are testing the biometric technology “at a handful of vending machines to buy such items as sodas, chips, granola bars and phone chargers,” according to the New York Post. The system, which is codenamed “Orville,” allows Amazon Prime customers to scan their hands at a Whole Foods store and link them to their credit or debit card for payment. Sources told the New York Post that Amazon wants to start rolling the system out to stores in early 2020.

• But why? The technology Amazon is developing could encourage Amazon consumers to spend more money when they shop at Whole Foods. Amazon has already reduced the human interactions that Prime members have at checkout at its “Amazon Go” convenience stores, where customers don’t even have to scan their items to pay for them.
  [Nicolas Vega / The New York Post]

WeWork is adding a woman to its board … finally. Just in time for its impending IPO, WeWork says it will add Frances Frei, a professor of technology and operations management at Harvard Business School, to its board, according to Reuters. The We Company, the parent company of WeWork, said it will seek to add another director to its board within a year of the IPO, “with a commitment to increasing the board’s gender and ethnic diversity,” in an amended filing.

• In other news: We Company CEO Adam Neumann will return the $5.9 million the company paid him for the use of the trademarked word “We” ahead of the IPO. “The deal to pay Neumann for use of the ‘We’ trademark came after the decision to rebrand WeWork as the We Company earlier this year,” Reuters writes.
  [Joshua Franklin / Reuters]

Top Stories from Recode

How Amazon’s Ring is creating a surveillance network with video doorbells. Here’s everything we know about Amazon’s video doorbell and the controversies surrounding it.
[Rani Molla]

Was Etsy too good to be true? The people who built Etsy dreamed of remaking commerce with their bare hands. Fifteen years later, its sellers are being asked to compete with Amazon.
[Kaitlyn Tiffany]

Facebook will finally ask permission before using facial recognition on you. You’re being asked to opt in — years after the technology became part of your social media experience.
[Sigal Samuel]

This is Cool

Fall is right around the corner. Start better habits in three steps.

Amazon next-day delivery’s real cost. Yes, Amazon uses UPS and the US Postal Service to make deliveries. And it has grand plans for futuristic drone delivery, which does not exist yet. But to maintain its gigantic delivery network’s amazing next-day and same-day targets, it relies on a home-grown network of hundreds of small companies. A new BuzzFeed News report details how drivers employed by these small companies work under “relentless demands to deliver hundreds of packages each shift — for a flat rate of around $160 a day — at the direction of dispatchers who often compel them to skip meals, bathroom breaks, and any other form of rest, discouraging them from going home until the very last box is delivered,” according to BuzzFeed.

• The real cost: Amazon’s local system cuts costs and shields the company from liability. These standalone companies take packages directly from Amazon facilities to the consumer — “covering what’s known in the industry as ‘the last mile.’” When things go wrong for employees of these small companies — as they often do under the pressure to meet Amazon’s punishing targets — the system allows Amazon to avoid any responsibility.
  [Caroline O’Donovan and Ken Bensinger / BuzzFeed News]

Facebook will join Instagram in hiding “Like” counts. Facebook may soon stop showing “Like” counts on posts in your News Feed in an attempt to “protect users from envy and dissuade them from self-censorship,” according to TechCrunch. Instagram has been testing the same change in seven countries. Removing the “Like” counts on both Instagram and Facebook “could put less pressure on users and encourage them to share more freely and frequently,” TechCrunch writes, especially on Facebook, which has become a platform for sharing major life events rather than day-to-day updates.

• On the other hand: Removing the “Like” counts from Facebook could be a way to disguise Facebook’s “potential decline in popularity as users switch to other apps,” TechCrunch writes.
  [Josh Constine / TechCrunch]

Uber and Lyft lost another battle in California. On Friday, California state senators on the appropriations committee voted in favor of AB 5, a bill that would require companies to classify workers as employees, not independent contractors (with a few exceptions). Despite Uber and Lyft’s aggressive lobbying campaigns, the two ride-hail companies were not exempted. Lawmakers voted 5-2 to send the bill to the Senate floor for a final vote. That means Uber drivers in California are one step closer to becoming Uber employees.

• The big deal: If AB 5 becomes law, it would disrupt the gig economy business model championed and cherished by Silicon Valley. Uber, Lyft, and other app-based gig companies rely on hundreds of thousands of independent contractors to give rides, deliver food, and complete other tasks. With AB 5, these contract workers would get the labor protections and benefits of full-time employees, and most importantly, they would be able to unionize.
  [Alexia Fernández Campbell / Vox]

Hong Kong protesters are stumped by Twitter. Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong who are protesting proposed amendments to Hong Kong’s extradition law are turning to Twitter in an attempt to drum up international support or intervention for their cause. But these new Twitter users are finding the platform hard to understand. Quartz reports that one woman found “some functions of Twitter confusing, for example the difference between retweeting and retweeting with a comment.” Users on Twitter have jumped in to help the newcomers, with some setting up Google Docs with tips and others tweeting to explain common English internet terms that aren’t clear to the new users.

• The more they learn, the more organized they are: These new Twitter users are collaborating on Telegram to poll each other on issues they want the rest of the world to see them unifying around on Twitter, Quartz reports.
  [Isabella Steger / Quartz]

Top Stories from Recode

Jack Dorsey’s hack encapsulates Twitter’s struggle with problematic content. Dorsey himself has tried to be something of a model Twitter user.
[Theodore Schleifer]

🎧 In your podcast feed:

Social media is the perfect petri dish for bias. The solution is for tech companies to slow us down. Stanford psychology professor Jennifer Eberhardt, the author of Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, tells Kara Swisher that Nextdoor reduced racial profiling by 75 percent by introducing a tiny bit of friction for users. Listen to the latest Recode Decode here.

This is Cool

Sleep tracking is coming for your Apple Watch. 😴

Note: Recode Daily will take a break for the Labor Day holiday. We’ll return to our regularly scheduled tech roundup on Wednesday, September 4.

Billionaires are out of favor in Democratic politics. But here’s how one billionaire spent $400 million on Democratic politics anyway. Tom Steyer, the San Francisco billionaire and 2020 Democratic candidate, released 10 years of tax returns this week. Steyer is offering us that rare glimpse into the complex business, political, and philanthropic ties of the country’s 1 percent. Steyer, who made his fortune at his hedge fund, has a net worth of $1.6 billion and is perhaps the wealthiest person ever to run for president.

• Where’s the money going? In 2010, when their net worth was about $1.3 billion, Steyer and his wife were among the first billionaires to sign the Giving Pledge, a public declaration that they would give at least half of their money to charity either during their lifetime or in their will. The records Steyer released on Thursday show he and his wife donated $190 million to charitable causes between 2009 and 2017. Steyer also spent about $365 million on political activities between 2009 and 2017, the returns show. And he has pledged to spend $100 million on his presidential campaign, a sum that could almost certainly impact the race at the margins.
  [Theodore Schleifer / Recode]

Infowars returns to YouTube, then is deleted again. Only a day after YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki wrote a letter to YouTube’s creators about the importance of keeping the platform open to content that some find offensive, the Infowars War Room reopened its YouTube channel, according to Vice. The same day, after being contacted by Vice about the channel, YouTube deleted it again. A YouTube spokesperson told Vice: “We’re committed to preserving openness and balancing it with our responsibility to protect our community. This means taking action against channels that continue to violate our policies.”

• YouTube says it knows the line between staying open and keeping order: Wojcicki says YouTube is okay with the idea that some people will be upset with some things they find on YouTube, which could include “content that is outside the mainstream, controversial, or even offensive,” Recode’s Peter Kafka reported earlier this week. But she draws a line when it comes to content that violates YouTube’s policies, which she argues is both rare and damaging.
  [Matthew Gault / Vice]

Uber’s half-billion dollar marketing campaign to rebuild its image last year didn’t pay off. In the wake of the #DeleteUber campaign in 2017, Uber launched an aggressive national branding campaign to repair its reputation with drivers and riders alike. It hasn’t worked. According to the Washington Post, Uber’s metrics, which rely on a mixture of internal tracking tools and external polling firms, place its brand sentiment near the same lows measured in the depths of its crisis.

• Uber knows it still has a problem: Uber’s reputation struggles have taken a toll on revenue growth. Uber laid off 400 employees in July, most of whom were responsible for helping improve the company’s external image. And before its IPO in May, Uber mentioned the need to maintain and enhance its brand and reputation as critical to the company’s future success in its filing.
  [Faiz Siddiqui / Washington Post]

The US is way behind on mobile payment use. About 81 percent of Americans own a smartphone, up from 35 percent just eight years ago, according to CNBC. But most Americans don’t use their phones to make payments: The adoption rate for major mobile payments apps is less than 10 percent. Compare that to China, where mobile payments made up more than 80 percent of all purchases in the country last year.

• Why? One reason is that for countries like China and India, cash was the only payment option before mobile payment apps arrived. In the US, paying for stuff with credit and debit cards is a well-established system.
  [Kate Rooney / CNBC]

Beach reads for the long weekend:

Mary Meeker’s most important trends on the internet [Rani Molla / Recode]

Female scientists are up against a lot of unconscious bias. Here’s how to fight it [Sigal Samuel / Vox]

Which 2020 candidates would you swipe right on? [Eve Peyser / The New York Times]

Leaked emails show how white nationalists have infiltrated conservative media [Hannah Gais / Splinter]

Top Stories from Recode

 In your podcast feed:

What happened to the formerly fearsome right-wing media troll? Milo Yiannopoulos and his right-wing peers seemed state of the art in 2016. CNN’s Oliver Darcy talks to Peter Kafka about what changed since then on the latest Recode Media. Listen here.

Scooters may be a better business than Uber or Lyft, says Lime president Joe Kraus. On the latest episode of Recode Decode, Kraus says the rocky debuts of the ride-hailing giants on Wall Street have not scared Lime away from an eventual IPO. LIsten here.

This is Cool

“Siri, tie my shoes” 

Facebook wants even more information about who’s paying for political ads. Facebook said this week that it will tighten some of its rules on political ads and will require more information about these ads’ funding, as well as verification of the ad purchaser’s identity. Users will need to give “their tax-identification number, or campaigns can share their own registration data from the Federal Election Commission, and Facebook will label them as a ‘confirmed organization’ in its archive,” according to the Washington Post. The new rules are meant to address recent political ads on Facebook that featured misleading or inaccurate disclaimers.

• Facebook can only go so far, it says: According to the Post, advocacy organizations buying political ads on Facebook won’t be required to share additional information about their donors. This means that if Facebook users want to look into an unfamiliar-sounding group, they will have to explore government campaign finance databases.
  [Tony Romm / Washington Post]

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Pinterest is getting serious about fighting health misinformation. Users who search for health information on its platform will now only see results from major public health organizations, like the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Vaccine Safety Net. The platform will allow results for 200 preselected terms related to vaccines, and it will not allow ads, recommendations, or comments on those pages.

• Pinterest has had a vaccine problem: In 2018, Pinterest cracked down on misinformation about cancer and vaccines on its platform by breaking its search function so that users would only see a blank page with a prompt that said: “If you’re looking for medical advice, please contact a healthcare provider.”
  [Julia Carrie Wong / Guardian]

Apple is going to stop listening to your Siri requests. Apple is changing the way its Siri audio review, or “grading,” works on all its devices. In an upcoming software update, Apple will make audio review, a process the company uses to improve Siri from the audio samples of users’ requests, an explicitly opt-in process. Going forward, contractors will not be able to review customers’ audio clips, and only Apple employees will be able to do so. And Apple will no longer retain audio recordings of Siri interactions. It wants its customers to know that the company “respects their data and has strong privacy controls in place.”

• Apple is sorry for listening to Siri conversations: Earlier this month, Apple stopped its Siri review program after the Guardian reported that “some of the workers who were reviewing Siri requests heard personal medical details, drug deals, and more.”
  [Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch]

Amazon is pushing customers to buy its brands over competitors. A new Amazon feature pitches the e-commerce giant’s private-label brand “right before customers add rival products to their shopping carts,” according to the Washington Post. An investigation from the Post found that when purchasing products like Glad trash bags, Dr. Scholl’s gel insoles, Energizer batteries, and Nicorette gum, Amazon would offer a “similar item to consider” prompt with a link to an Amazon product with a lower price right before the option to add a product to the shopping cart. Amazon told the Post that the promotion feature isn’t different from the ways other stores promote their own private-label products. Amazon also would not say if it is testing the feature or if it’s permanent.

• Amazon is already under the microscope: Amazon is drawing scrutiny from European regulators, which are specifically investigating “whether the company is misusing its dual role as both a marketplace for independent sellers and a retailer of its own products.” In the US, the FTC and the House Judiciary Committee are also investigating Amazon’s competitive tactics.
• On this week’s Land of the Giants, Recode’s Jason Del Rey asks big and small retailers and sellers if they think Amazon is too big. Small businesses and major brands alike rely on Amazon, but they are increasingly ambivalent about selling on the platform’s marketplace because of the fierce competition and declining profit margins. From a societal standpoint, is this a good thing? Listen here.
  [Jay Greene / Washington Post]

Top Stories from Recode

The world’s biggest women’s tech conference just dropped Palantir as a sponsor. It’s the third time in recent months that an outside group has severed ties with Palantir over its controversial work for ICE.
[Shirin Ghaffary]

In your podcast feed:

Every telecom company can be hacked and “everybody should be suspect,” Huawei USA’s chief security officer says. Andy Purdy talks with Kara Swisher on the Recode Decode podcast about the pending ban on US companies doing business with Huawei. Listen here.

This is Cool

SpaceX did its highest and longest test yet. 

Instagram is taking another bite out of Snapchat. The Verge’s Casey Newton has learned that “Facebook is developing a new messaging app called Threads that is meant to promote constant, intimate sharing between users and their closest friends” and will be a companion app to Instagram. The app is designed to allow users to interact with their “Closest Friends” list that currently exists as an option on Instagram, and it will let them share more detailed information like location, speed, and battery life. The idea is to have an app focused on someone’s closest circle of friends — which, as Newton points out, is what Snapchat already is. The average Snapchat user spends more time on the Snap app than the average Instagram user spends on Instagram, and Facebook has “long coveted Snapchat’s strong engagement among younger users.”

• Some background: Facebook stopped development on a separate messaging app called Direct in May. Beta testers at the time said it was too frustrating to “switch between Instagram and a second app whenever they wanted to send a message.” Threads now appears to be the latest project to make good on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s stated mission earlier this year to make private messaging the future of the company.
• Friends of Recode know this well: Recode Decode host Kara Swisher considers Evan Spiegel to be the chief product officer of Facebook, due to the number of times Facebook has “borrowed” Snapchat’s ideas. Watch this 2018 interview with the Snapchat CEO at Code.
  [Casey Newton / The Verge]

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WeWork has an HR problem. For a company that prides itself on sharing its hip work culture with the startups that lease its office space, it is ironic that WeWork can’t maintain its own human resources staff. According to the Information, almost a dozen HR employees are leaving the company. The Information found that most of the employees have left voluntarily, with some expressing “frustrations with the company’s leadership.” One executive claims to have left over alleged sexual harassment and gender discrimination that “HR leaders failed to investigate.”

• This is unusual for a “tech” company: The Information points out that other tech firms typically pride themselves on their strong HR and “durable” culture. Netflix’s HR head worked there 14 years; the department leaders at Amazon and Google held their roles for more than a decade each.
  [Cory Weinberg / The Information]

YouTube thinks it’s “more important than ever” to let people upload anything they want. In a letter addressed to creators on YouTube, CEO Susan Wojcicki says the platform is committed to remaining open because she thinks the upside of that approach very much outweighs the downside. As she and other Google executives have previously argued, Wojcicki says she is okay that some people will be upset with some things they find on YouTube, which could include “content that is outside the mainstream, controversial, or even offensive.”

• Why now? Wojcicki’s letter comes after months of criticism about distasteful videos and comments that appeared on the site. (Watch Peter Kafka’s Code interview with Wojcicki about that here.) Critics, regulators, and politicians are also proposing various ways to scale back the protections offered by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a key part of the legal scaffolding used by YouTube and many other giant tech platforms built on users’ submissions.
  [Peter Kafka / Recode]

This gig economy legislation has become a test for 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. A proposed bill in California called AB 5 would make it much harder for companies to classify employees as independent contractors, and so companies like Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and DoorDash (which all depend on gig economy labor) are trying to shut it down. Now, Vox’s Alexia Fernández Campbell reports, AB 5 is offering Democrats running for president a way to take sides in the ongoing debate about the gig economy and its impact on workers. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in an op-ed earlier this month that “all Democrats need to stand up and say, without hedging, that we support AB 5.” Sen. Bernie Sanders and now Sen. Kamala Harris say they support AB 5, too. Out of the top four frontrunners, former Vice President Joe Biden is the only one who has yet to weigh in … but the pressure is on.

• These endorsements are unusual: They show just how far Democratic presidential candidates are willing to go to let voters (and workers) know whose side they are on. More so than any other policy plan they’ve come up with, their endorsement of AB 5 is the clearest signal yet that they are siding with workers and labor unions — not Silicon Valley companies.
  [Alexia Fernández Campbell / Vox]

Top Stories from Recode

The Uber-Waymo dispute returns — this time in criminal court. Waymo executive Anthony Levandowski could face up to 10 years in prison after being indicted for allegedly stealing trade secrets.
[Theodore Schleifer]

Peloton, a bike company, claims it “sells happiness” and is “so much more than a bike.” Behind the easy-to-parody language, the new IPO candidate is a cultural touchstone and a real business.
[Theodore Schleifer]

This is Cool

Gluten-free, kosher, vegetarian, or vegan? Yelp has a setting for that.

YouTube won’t negotiate with the YouTubers Union. The Verge reports that although YouTube agreed to meet with the YouTubers Union, it has no plans to negotiate with them. The union, which is pushing YouTube to address the concerns of smaller creators on the platform, was formed about a year ago. It joined IG Metall, the largest industrial union in Europe, earlier this month, which prompted YouTube to invite its representatives to YouTube headquarters.

• What do they want? The YouTubers Union is seeking monetization for smaller channels. It’s also pushing YouTube to end demonetization and give creators more transparency into moderation decisions.
  [Bijan Stephen / The Verge]

The US and France have reached a deal over a French law that will require US tech companies to pay more in taxes. The law, passed by France’s Senate in July, would put a 3 percent tax on US tech companies and was expected to affect tech giants like Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Google. And a spokesperson for Google said the tax was “a sharp departure from long-established tax rules.” The law caused a stir in Washington, and President Trump hinted that French wine could be subject to a new tariff in retaliation. However, French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday that US tech companies will be able to deduct the tax.

• Who this impacts: The law covers tech companies that make at least €750 million in revenue worldwide (that’s about $844 million) as well as €25 million in digital sales in France.
  [Corinne Reichert / CNET]

Chinese autonomous-driving company Pony.ai and Toyota are teaming up. Bloomberg reports that Toyota, in its attempt to take on rivals such as Alphabet’s Waymo autonomous car operation, will start a pilot program in September “on public roads in Beijing and Shanghai, using Lexus RX vehicles and Pony.ai’s autonomous driving system.” Toyota wants to become “a mobility company firmly rooted in China,” and partnering with the startup is a move in that direction, according to Bloomberg.

• What’s Pony.ai? The company was founded in 2016 and is a frontrunner on China’s self-driving scene, which has gotten a late start compared with the US.
  [Chunying Zhang and Jie Ma / Bloomberg]

Australia is blocking domains that host extremist content during crisis events. The country will even “consider legislation to force digital platforms to improve the safety of their services,” according to Reuters. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said, “We are doing everything we can to deny terrorists the opportunity to glorify their crimes.” Tech giants including Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and Twitter will need to tell Australia’s government by the end of September how they will carry out the recommendations.

• The background: In the wake of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mass shooting in March, Australia and New Zealand have both increased scrutiny of social media platforms.
  [Alison Bevege / Reuters] 

It’s Tuesday, time for a podcast (or two) 🎧

• On the latest episode of Land of the Giants, we ask sellers, ‘Is Amazon too big?” Small businesses and major brands alike rely on Amazon but are increasingly ambivalent about selling on the platform’s Marketplace because of its fierce competition and declining profit margins. From a societal standpoint, is this a good thing? Host Jason Del Rey talks to Samsonite Global Chief E-Commerce Officer Charlie Cole and Birkenstock CEO David Kahan to try to answer this question. Listen here. 
  
• And catch up on Recode Decode: This week Kara Swisher talked to Huawei’s chief security officer in the US, Andy Purdy. Listen here.

Top Stories from Recode

Bernie Sanders takes on Facebook and Google for destroying local media. It’s a unique step for a Democrat who has been particularly outspoken in his criticism of the media.
[Theodore Schleifer]

This is Cool

KFC is here for your Beyond Meat cravings. 🍗

Snapchat and the end of Silicon Beach? The New York Times covers how Venice, California, is readjusting after Snapchat, the biggest IPO in Los Angeles history, left the community for nearby Santa Monica. From 2012 to 2017, Snap dominated Venice’s commercial real estate market, prompting an anti-Snap resistance movement to get the company out. Now that it’s leaving, locals say the changes it brought to Venice are there to stay, and they’re not all happy about it.

• What happens now? Since Snapchat has left, “the local commercial real estate market is holding its breath” waiting to see which other tech companies might fill the commercial space it left empty.
  [Daniel Hernandez / New York Times]

[Want to get the Recode Daily in your inbox? Subscribe here.]

Trump “ordered” US companies out of China. But he can’t do that. President Donald Trump tweeted last week and then defended an “order” for US companies to leave China and to manufacture their products in the US instead. Trump argued that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act legally justifies such an order, but the act only allows a president to regulate commerce during a national emergency. It does not allow a president to order companies to close their factories in foreign countries. Trump’s original “order” came shortly after China announced it planned to react to US tariffs on Chinese goods by imposing new tariffs of 5 percent to 10 percent on $75 billion worth of US goods. China’s new action and Trump’s “order” triggered a strong reaction in the stock market: The Dow dropped more than 600 points on Friday before Trump’s announcement of his latest tariffs.

• Who this could hurt: After Trump’s tweets, the stock of Apple, which is deeply invested in China, went down by more than 4 percent. CEO Tim Cook reportedly told Trump last week that “tariffs would hurt Apple’s ability to compete with Samsung.” The planned tariffs could impact desktop Macs, AirPods, Apple Watch, and more on September 1.
  [Anya van Wagtendonk / Vox]

Book publishers filed a lawsuit against Amazon-owned Audible over a new speech-to-text feature. The Verge reports that the publishing industry claims Amazon’s new “Captions” feature, which uses machine learning to transcribe spoken words into written ones, is a violation of copyright law. The problem? Audiobook recordings have separate licenses from physical books and e-books, and Audible has not secured the licenses needed to reproduce the written versions of the works the feature will offer. Audible defended Captions in a statement to The Verge, saying it is “an educational feature designed to help young kids and improve literacy, and that “it is not and was never intended to be a book.”

• The big deal: This case will “be a determination on the transformative nature of an AI-created audio transcription,” writes The Verge. A copyright attorney told The Verge that “this is one of many lawsuits that will help define the future of intellectual property rights in the digital age.”
  [Nick Statt / The Verge]

Misinformation is raging along with the fires in the Amazon. The photos being shared far and wide on social media of the burning Amazon rainforest are intermixed with images of different places and even years. The Portuguese soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo shared a photo that seemed to show the current fires in the Amazon, but it was in fact taken in 2013. Other photos have surfaced that were taken anywhere from a few years ago to a few decades ago, like this one that musician Jaden Smith and Madonna both shared, which was one of the most-shared photos on social media last week. Leonardo DiCaprio, Ricky Martin, and French President Emmanuel Macron have all also shared misleading photos of the burning rainforest.
[Niraj Chokshi / New York Times]

Coming in September …

Join Recode’s Jason Del Rey and Kara Swisher at Code Commerce in New York on September 9 and 10. They’ll sit down for in-depth conversations with top commerce and tech executives about how innovation is transforming the way today’s consumers choose to spend their money. They’ll dig into emerging trends and what those trends mean for your business, including automation, the reinvention of malls, how direct-to-consumer brands use tech, automated grocery checkouts, and the future of payments. You can get your Code Commerce ticket here.

This is Cool

What is next for Iceland’s tourist economy?