TechCrunch Newsletters - Week in Review - Fake news Tom Cruise

Saturday, February 27, 2021 • By Lucas Matney

Hello friends, and welcome to Week in Review.

Last week, I talked a little bit about the near-term effects of piecemeal global internet policy. This week, I’m pulling back the scope a bit and talking about a single TikTok account that’s posted three videos so far.

If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox from the newsletter page, and follow my tweets @lucasmtny.

The big thing

Did social platforms actually learn anything from all of the conversations around disinformation during the U.S. presidential election, or did they simply squash the fires that they needed to at the time and punt the hard questions down the road?

I think my thoughts on the matter are pretty clear in the framing of the question, but I thought about that a lot more this week after scrolling through TikTok one night and seeing an odd video of Tom Cruise golfing, only it wasn’t actually Tom Cruise. The account @deeptomcruise features a few very bizarre deepfaked videos of another actor pulling off one hell of an impression of Tom Cruise, complete with his face and a similar voice.

They’re truly fantastic fakes. Most commenters on the videos are simply amazed it isn’t actually him. It’s noteworthy that the tech is this good and yet massive tech platforms like TikTok don’t have a way to detect and label or pull faked content like this. While these videos themselves aren’t designed to lob any scandals on the Mission Impossible actor, the technology is as unsettling as it is cool (side note: I would be very unsurprised if the product ended up being a viral marketing attempt by an AI startup).

As one formerly prolific TechCrunch commenter noted, this clearly involved quite a lot of resources to pull off and thus probably shouldn’t be framed as the beginning of deepfake mayhem so much as an advanced warning of where we’re headed. While Facebook has already toyed with deepfake policy, I think this area we’re headed is largely uncharted waters for tech platforms that avoided the hard questions around taking aggressive steps to delist and algorithmically curb sources of untrustworthy content.

I’d imagine a good deal of the readers of this newsletter feel the media places too much blame on platforms and not enough on users’ individual responsibility when it comes to misinformation issues. And sure, maybe users should know not to trust news from publications they’ve never heard of, or trust random accounts as primary sources, but should the average social media user have the responsibility of inspecting a video for misleading reflections or artifacts in order to determine its trustworthiness? It’s not a huge fiasco when there are only a few viral videos popping up every month that platforms can swat down, but when misinformation scales, these platforms usually don’t have the resources to handle them or make real-time decisions.

Image Credits: TriStar / Getty Images

Unrivaled Technology at Unprecedented Scale

Twitter announces a Patreon killer
For years and years, Twitter has been the tech giant that could’ve been, a company with everything it front of it that still never strived to meet its potential. For the first time in a while, Twitter garnered some excitement, showcasing a new feature called “Super Follow” that aims to bring a paid subscription product to creators on the platform. There are few details on timelines, but check out my story for some screenshots.

Twitter showcases ambitious plan to double revenue by 2023
Twitter wants Wall Street to know it’s serious about growth; during its virtual investor day this week they showcased an ambitious goal — double its revenue to $7.5B+ in 2023 while bringing 315 million “monetizable” daily active users to the platform.

We finally get a peek under Coinbase’s hood
Coinbase is in a pretty ideal spot as the crypto exchange startup readies to enter the public markets, cryptocurrencies are hitting all-time highs and investors seem less bullish on the technology’s staying power. 2019 wasn’t the greatest year for the company, but it capitalized on huge revenue increases in 2020.

Facebook strikes a deal
Facebook reached a deal in its Australian news saga, seemingly succeeding in its quest to strong-arm the government there to amend its recent proposed legislation pushing web platforms to pay news publishers for access. Facebook seems pleased with the deal, with an exec saying the new changes addressed “core concerns about allowing commercial deals that recognize the value our platform provides to publishers relative to the value we receive from them.”

Spotify launches a high-end subscription
Spotify is aiming to put the final nail in Tidal’s coffin, announcing this week that they’re launching a premium digital subscription that gives users “lossless” audio quality. The company was awfully light on details for the new premium subscription, but did say that it will be launching later this year.

Facebook launches a rap battle app
Facebook is trying its best to capture a new trend as it plays catchup to emerging social trends from players like TikTok, Clubhouse, Substack and others. Its new app BARS focuses on freestyle rapping and is being launched under its experimental NPE division.

Extra things

Some of my favorite reads from our Extra Crunch subscription service this week:

Pilot CEO Waseem Daher tears down his company’s $60M Series C pitch deck
“If the Series A was about, ‘Do you have the right ingredients to make this work?’ then the Series B is about, ‘Is this actually working?’ ” Daher tells TechCrunch. “And then the Series C is more, ‘Well, show me that the core business is really working and that you have unlocked real drivers to allow the business to continue growing.” More

Five takeaways from Coinbase’s S-1
“In 2020, Coinbase generated $1.28 billion in revenue off of 2.8 million MTUs, which works out to around $457 apiece during the year. That’s a bit lower, but not terribly so. And given that the company’s transaction margins ranged in the mid-80s percent during much of 2020, each Coinbase active trader was still quite valuable, even at a lower revenue point.“ More

Can solid state batteries power up for the next generation of EVs?
“A new wave of companies and technologies are finally maturing and attracting the funding necessary to feed batteries’ biggest market: transportation. Electric vehicles account for about 60% of all lithium-ion batteries made today, and IDTechEx predicts that solid state batteries will represent a $6 billion industry by 2030.” More