Archives for May 2021

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Two years after a white supremacist in New Zealand livestreamed the slaughter of 51 Muslim worshippers on Facebook, French President Emmanuel Macron says the internet continues to be be used by terrorists as a weapon to propagate hate.

Macron and other leaders from tech giants and governments around the world — including the U.S. for the first time — gathered virtually on Saturday to find better ways to stop extremist violence from spreading online, while also respecting freedom of expression.

It was part of a global effort started by Macron and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern after deadly attacks in their countries were streamed or shared on social networks.

The U.S. government and four other countries joined the effort, known as the Christchurch Call, for the first time this year. It involves some 50 nations plus tech companies including Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon, and is named for the New Zealand city where the slaughter at the two mosques took place.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in a prerecorded video that authorities in his country alone had taken down more than 300,000 pieces of terrorist material from the internet over the past decade, which he described as a tsunami of hate.

“Terrorist content is like a metastasizing tumor within the internet, or series of tumors,” Johnson said. “If we fail to excise it, it will inevitably spread into homes and high streets the world over.”

Since its launch, governments and tech companies have cooperated in some cases in identifying violent extremist content online. Ardern, however, said more tangible progress is needed to stop it from proliferating.

The meeting was aimed at revitalizing coordination efforts, notably since President Joe Biden entered office, and getting more tech companies involved. Macron and Ardern welcomed the U.S. decision as a potential catalyst for stronger action.

Macron said the internet had continued to be used as a tool in recent attacks in the U.S., Vienna, Germany and elsewhere. He said it cannot happen again, and that new European regulations against extremist content would help.

Ardern said that two years after the Christchurch Call was launched, momentum was strong. But she acknowledged the challenge in essentially playing whac-a-mole with different countries, internet platforms and algorithms that can foster extremist content.

“The existence of algorithms themselves is not necessarily the problem, it’s whether or not they are being ethically used,” Ardern said. “And so that is probably the biggest focus for the Call community over the next year.”

She said part of the solution also came in better equipping a younger generation of internet users to have the skills to deal with radical content or disinformation when they encounter it online.

Although the U.S. only officially joined the Christchurch Call this year, it had been consistently contributing to the effort, Ardern said.

“Countering the use of the internet by terrorists and violent extremists to radicalize and recruit is a significant priority for the United States,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement. She also stressed the importance of protecting freedom of expression and “reasonable expectations of privacy.”

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From sourdough to feta pasta, much of the last year at home has been food-focused. And one driver of these delectable fads is the social media platform TikTok.

Many people have embraced cooking during the pandemic, when they’ve been home, bored, looking to try something new. TikTok was ready to fill the gap as a foodie paradise, and has seen more than 15 billion food posts.

“It’s my bedtime routine,” Lori Jackson, 54, of Lynn, Massachusetts, said of watching TikTok cooking videos. “I’ve taken ideas I’ve seen on there and made them.”

One of the burgeoning TikTok celebrity chefs is Harry Heal, a 26-year-old who lives in Dubai.

Heal has a distinct baritone, an English accent, and has garnered about a million followers in the six months he’s been posting cooking videos. He isn’t a chef by trade, though he learned some cooking skills when working in the French Alps as a teen.

“From then on, I have been a huge cooking enthusiast and loved being in the kitchen,” Heal said.

His most viral video – 13.3 million views — is a Valentine’s Day dish with seared chicken breast, roasted garlic, sliced mushrooms and cream. Like most TikTok videos, it’s set to music and has the feel of something professionally crafted.

Tri Phan of Arlington, Virginia, has amassed 1.5 million followers since he began posting workout and healthy cooking videos in November. The 23-year-old, who is working on his master’s degree in data and business analytics at American University, often does two versions of his content, one in English and one in Vietnamese; about 60 percent of his followers are Vietnamese, he says.

“When I first started, it was me wanting to share with the world Vietnamese cuisine, Vietnamese food,” he said. “Now I want to take this TikTok further to really help people learn to cook healthy meals that they could eat and they could eat for the rest of their lives.”

Phan’s love of cooking came despite being told by his traditional mother to stay out of the kitchen. “My mom never wanted the only boy in the family to be in the kitchen,” he said.

“And because of that, I always wanted to cook.”

Now that he’s TikTok famous, he says his mother doesn’t quite grasp what that means. “She’s like, ‘Oh, good job, son. Very good. But your finance major, how’s that going?’”

About one year ago – somewhere near the “Tiger King” phase of the pandemic – a whipped coffee drink made the rounds on the internet, starting its viral journey on TikTok. The drink originated in South Korea, where it’s called a dalgona coffee. All it required was instant coffee, sugar and hot water to construct a luscious-looking beverage resembling a soft-serve ice cream cone. The hashtag #whippedcoffee has amassed more than 2.3 billion views.

There’s a lot of variety on “food TikTok.” You can learn to perfect a hamburger or ferment kimchee, make old-fashioned Japanese candy or fry frog legs.

The video-only platform lends itself to cooking demonstrations, said Crystal King, a social media professor at Boston-based marketing software firm Hubspot. Other social media platforms have multiple features – lots of text or static photos – that can divide a user’s attention. TikTok, however, “sucks people in really easily,” she said. “The format is simple, easily understood and it connects people into a global understanding of food really quickly.”

The vast array of content is a leading attraction of food TikTok, fans say. Many people, like Julie Vick, a 44-year-old writer and college instructor in the Denver area, look there for new ideas.

“The videos are a little mesmerizing at times,” Vick said. “I’ve liked watching the tortilla ones, where people put four different ingredients in different sections of a tortilla and then fold it up and cook it in a skillet.”

Although they’re generally not hands-on, TikTok’s short videos do create interest in cooking skills, says Geeti Gangle, co-owner of Create a Cook culinary school in Newton, Massachusetts.

“If we engage younger people in learning to cook, they will start making food for themselves one day,” Gangle said. “And they might become interested in learning the skills later on.”

The link between good nutrition and knowing how to cook has been well established. But until the pandemic, cooking skills were on the decline for young people and not frequently taught in school.

Camden Allard, a 21-year-old student in Seattle, has made several recipes from TikTok: bread recipes, the feta tomato pasta that recently broke the internet, trifles, cinnamon rolls and the quarter quesadilla.

“TikTok videos are great to watch because I am able to get the overall information about a recipe – like what it makes, the ingredients, how you cook it – in about a minute,” he said. “I can quickly determine if it’s something that I would be interested in doing.”

Allard, who has been cooking for about eight years, said he enjoys making meals with his girlfriend and family, and TikTok has made it easy for them to expand their repertoire.

“Quarantine has made life bland and repetitive with us staying at home, and having new meals to try out has added some excitement,” he said. “That has made making dinners less of a chore and more an exciting thing.”

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Amanda Lee Myers in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Many of us were taught to share as kids. Now streaming services ranging from Netflix to Amazon to Disney+ want us to stop.

That’s the new edict from the giants of streaming media, who are hoping to discourage the common practice of sharing account passwords without alienating subscribers who’ve grown accustomed to the hack.

Password sharing is estimated to cost streaming services several billion dollars a year in lost revenue. That’s a small problem now for an industry that earns about $120 billion annually, but something it needs to address as spending on distinctive new programing skyrockets. Amazon’s upcoming “Lord of the Rings” series will reportedly cost $450 million for its first season alone – more than four times the cost of a season of HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”

“Frankly the industry has been gravitating toward that. It’s a question of when, not if,” said CFRA analyst Tuna Amobi. “The landscape seems to be pretty set in terms of these new entrants, so it seems like a good time to get a much better handle on subscribers.”

It’s a tricky balance. The video companies have long offered legitimate ways for multiple people to use a service, by creating profiles or by offering tiers of service with different levels of screen sharing allowed. Stricter password sharing rules might spur more people to bite the bullet and pay full price for their own subscription. But a too-tough clampdown could also alienate users and drive them away.

In March some Netflix users began to get popups asking them to verify their account by entering a code sent via email or text, but also gave them the choice of verifying “later.” Netflix did not say how many people were part of the test or if it was only in the U.S. or elsewhere.

“They’ll be taking a very cautious approach to it,” Amobi said. “Handled the wrong way, there’s always a downside to a move like this.”

The test comes at a crucial time for Netflix. Last year’s pandemic-fueled subscriber growth is slowing. It remains the streaming service to beat with more than 200 million subscribers globally. But a bevy of new competitors have emerged, including Disney+, which is cheaper and has quickly snapped up 100 million subscribers in less than two years.

When Disney+ launched in 2019, then CEO Bob Iger said the service was modeled on sharing.

“We’re setting up a service that is very family-friendly, we expect families to be able to consume it – four live streams at a time, for instance,” he said in a CNBC interview. “We’ll watch it carefully with various tools, technology tools, that we have available to us to monitor it. But it’s obviously something we have to watch.”

Roughly two in five online adults have shared passwords to online accounts with friends or family members, according to the Pew Center for Internet and Technology. Among millennials it’s even higher: 56% of online adults ages 18- to 29 have shared passwords.

“With the cost of all the streaming platforms bought together equaling a cable bill — which it was supposed to eliminate — I think it’s a great thing to be able to share your login to help family and friends save a few bucks,” said Ryan Saffell, 39, an IT director from Las Vegas.

Another study found more than a quarter of all video streaming services are used by multiple households. That includes a family or friend sharing the account they pay for outside of the household, or, less commonly, several households splitting the cost. And 16% of all households have at least one service that is fully paid for by someone else according to the study by Leichtman Research Group. That increases to 26% for 18- to 34-year-olds.

Sharing or stealing streaming service passwords cost an estimated $2.5 billion in revenue in 2019 according to the most recent data from research firm Park Associates, and that’s expected to rise to nearly $3.5 billion by 2024.

That may be a small fraction of the $119.69 billion eMarketer predicts people will spend on U.S. video subscriptions this year. But subscriber growth is slowing, and costs are increasing.

Companies are investing dizzying sums to produce own original movies and shows and stand out from competitors. Disney+ said it’ll spend up to $16 billion a year on new content for Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ by fiscal 2024. Netflix is expected to spend $19 billion on originals this year, research firm Bankr estimates.

“Programming spend is doubling, or in some cases tripling and quadrupling, so you have to fund it somewhere.” CFRA’s Amobi said. “Most services are looking at losses for the next few years before they break even. So they can use every subscription that they can get.”

Another way to finance all this new programing is to raise prices. Netflix hiked the price of its most popular plan by $1 last October, to $14 a month. Disney+ followed in March with its own $1 a month increase, to $8.

Josh Galassi, a 30-year-old Seattle resident who works in public relations, says everyone he knows shares passwords. If companies start to crack down, he said he would subscribe to the services he uses, but only if the shows he likes are on the service, like “The Good Fight” on Paramount+. He does that with Starz’ “Outlander,” subscribing only when the show is on and then canceling.

“One rule I have is I only share passwords with close friends or family members,” Galassi said. “Or somebody I know that has a service I don’t want to pay for, I’ll ask them if they’re willing to share in exchange for something that I pay for.”

Netflix played down its March user verification test, telling investors it was a continuing effort and nothing new. Company co-founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings promised not to spring any changes on customers too abruptly.

“We would never roll something out that feels like ‘turning the screws,’” Hastings said in an April call with analysts. “It’s got to feel like it makes sense to consumers that they understand.”

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