On Wednesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill that targets Amazon's surveillance of warehouse employees. Earlier this month, another bill appeared on his desk, this one allowing restaurants to provide customers an itemized breakdown of the fees charged by delivery apps.
Both bills aim to take on Big Tech. And both were authored by Lorena Gonzalez.
The Democrat and assemblywoman from San Diego has emerged as one of the California legislature's fiercest critics of Silicon Valley's giants.
In 2019 she drafted Assembly Bill 5, which codified a state Supreme Court ruling reclassifying gig workers as employees. It also raised her profile. While Prop 22 overturned Assembly Bill 5, labor chalked up a victory last month after a California Superior Court judge ruled the ballot initiative unconstitutional.
All three bills threaten not only to change how these tech giants do business, but cut into their bottom line.
Gonzalez knows that tech companies feel victimized by her office. AB 286, her bill providing the itemized fee breakdown, is her latest salvo against them. The legislation would ensure delivery services pay the entire gratuity to their drivers, following a lawsuit alleging that DoorDash had stolen drivers' tips.
"We've been asked a lot, 'Why are you picking on us?'" she said. "But I just want people to remember that transparency in transactions is always good. We don't allow people to sell you something and not point out the taxes on it. We don't allow you to buy a car without knowing the add-in. So it's normal for us to look at transactions that have been kept secret, that keep the consumer from making educated decisions, we tackled that and that's what we're trying to do here."
Although a permanent cap on delivery fees failed to make it into the final version of AB 286, the bill still provides enforcement mechanisms to ensure workers receive their tips. It also allows the attorney general, city attorneys or district attorneys to pursue a civil court case, while another complementary bill says an employer can go to jail for stealing tips, Gonzalez told dot.LA.
"It's putting it in the penal code but it's also ensuring that adding into the discussion of what is a wage, it includes tips for independent contractors," she said. "So I think those bills together will make people think twice."
The bill Newsom just signed would require Amazon and other companies to reveal details of the quota systems they use to ramp up productivity in their warehouses.
At Amazon warehouses, workers have blamed the pressure to meet demands on unsafe working conditions and high injury rates. And a 2019 investigation by The Verge showed that Amazon had fired hundreds of workers at a single fulfillment center in one year for failing to meet productivity quotas.
For Gonzalez, a former labor leader who has turned her enemies' anti-union smears into badges of honor, her battle for gig workers' benefits follows over two decades of organizing. She unionized workers at Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside, where her mother once worked long hours, and was banned from all Wal-Mart stores following a demonstration demanding higher pay.
Her latest fight temporarily sidelined her from the Capitol: she was diagnosed with breast cancer in early August and underwent a bilateral mastectomy weeks later, announcing on September 13 that she was cancer-free.
Her work as an assemblywoman has earned her both a national reputation as a progressive darling—and detractors within her state's business community, including Rachel Michelin, head of the California Retailers Association.
"She's been very vocal about who she's targeting, similar to what she did with AB 5," Michelin said. "She goes after a few companies but sets out this large net and it has unintended consequences."
Michelin who called the bill "overly broad": also took umbrage at Gonzalez's political style, noting that the assemblywoman prefers to take to social media—where she once tweeted "F*ck Elon Musk"—rather than come to the table with the state's business interests groups.
"She responded to some of our comments online through our digital campaign, but not directly to me or any of our coalition partners," Michelin said.
California Assemblyman Alex Lee, who represents the Silicon Valley area, co-authored the bill aimed at delivery fees with Gonzalez. The young politician has known her since his time as a legislative staffer in Sacramento and decided to team up with Gonzalez after he heard similar complaints from his restaurateur constituents about delivery apps.
A self-described "Gen Z-er," Lee not only takes little offense when Gonzalez pops off on Twitter, he applauds it.
"She's an absolute fierce champion for the working class," he said. "There are other politicians who see themselves as great dealmakers, Lorena's more like, 'How do I get the most for working people?'"
As a former gig worker himself, Lee said he knows how AB 5 revolutionized the tech industry for those who labor in what he describes as "new serfdom."
At the same time, he points to the impact the legislation made on his peers from college, many of whom worked in contracted positions at Google, Facebook and Apple. While their white-collar jobs offered a lucrative salary, the companies didn't offer full-time benefits.
"For our generation, organized labor is like a foreign concept now. Just getting money in the bank is so important that you'll forgo dental and health insurance," Lee said.
"That's why big things like AB 5 and what Lorena does are so important. We are in this race to the bottom and it's not just the stereotypical person who works in the factory, it's people who have white collar jobs in offices, they're all in the same boat and that's why her work is so profound."
Even as Social Sites Crack Down, Inauguration Posts Are Full of Misinformation, Report Finds
Despite a crackdown on social media content that calls for violence, posts about conspiracy theories continue to proliferate on both fringe alt-right sites and mainstream platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
A report from the non-partisan nonprofit Advance Democracy found that four of the five most popular tweets about the inauguration between January 15 and 18 promoted conspiracies about COVID-19 and/or the election. The organization conducts public-interest research and investigations.
"As these false claims spread unchecked, it provides the fuel for other potential violence across the nation," said Advance Democracy President Daniel J. Jones.
Snap, Twitter, Facebook and other sites took down President Donald Trump's accounts in the days after a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol. Twitter alone shut down 70,000 QAnon-related profiles on Jan. 11 and companies including TikTok and YouTube introduced new restrictions on content. Parler, the social network where many Trump backers gathered, was removed from the Apple App Store, the Google Play Store and Amazon Web Services, where the site was hosted. It has partially returned reportedly with the help of a Russian-backed internet service provider.
But conspiracies related to QAnon are still building across mainstream platforms, several of which say that President Trump will begin a second term this week following a string of arrests. And many of these conversations are also going on in fringe platforms like GreatAwakening.win, TheDonald.win and 8kun.
"Trump isn't going anywhere," states a top post on GreatAwakening.win, a sister site of TheDonald dedicated to QAnon.
Jones wants legislatures and platforms to do more to stem the spread of disinformation. But the attack at the Capitol has highlighted the difficulty officials will have drawing a line between speech that incites violence and muzzling political expression. While social media sites have been more aggressive, it's not something they can easily stamp out.
Far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec's Twitter account saw the most engagement among users posting about Wednesday's inauguration, Advance Democracy said.
"They are instituting thought vetting for the troops guarding inauguration to make sure they aren't conservative," a tweet on Jan. 17 read. "This isn't about national security. Understand where it's all going."
Advance Democracy's report finds that Posobiec's posts about the inauguration "are consistently conspiratorial in nature."
Skeptics of the content moderation crackdowns following Jan. 6 said the statements and company policies came too late. Conspiracy theorists have been gathering online for years, culminating in a siege that reflected planning on platforms that did little to moderate them. It also speaks to looming problems for these sites about the growth of misinformation and their role in allowing it.
Karen North, a USC Annenberg professor of digital and social media, said that private companies maintain a legal right to make their own decisions over censoring and content moderation through Section 230. They might make decisions because of political pressure or to maintain "the kind of community they want to foster and cultivate."
Talking or posting about conspiracy theories is not illegal, North said. But it's important to watch these conversations online.
"Social media often has the opportunity for the authorities at least to keep an eye on the discussion and make sure that it doesn't go astray," she said.
Meanwhile, social media platforms are preparing to take down content on Inauguration Day. Snap has created a committee to conduct "regular proactive sweeps" of its platform and TikTok has updated community regulations around Biden's swearing-in.
- Snapchat Locks Trump's Account After Riot at Capitol - dot.LA ›
- Lawmakers Take Aim at Algorithms 'at Odds with Democracy' - dot.LA ›
- Facebook Fails to Stop Spanish-Language Misinformation - dot.LA ›
The popular podcast mobile app Breaker will get a second life in Los Angeles.
Three-year-old Maple Media will use Breaker - the 10th most-downloaded podcast app on iOS in 2020 - to help amplify its podcasting presence.
Breaker is a podcasting platform that hosts over 700,000 shows. It competes with the likes of Apple Podcasts, and aims to help users discover podcasts based on what their friends like.
Earlier this month, Breaker appeared to be shutting down when Twitter absorbed its employees. But, the company formerly based in San Francisco was resuscitated over the weekend after a 72-hour negotiation session. In the end, Breaker agreed to sell its website, technology and social media handles to Maple Media for an undisclosed amount.
Backed by private equity firm Shamrock Capital, Maple Media owns a portfolio of more than 150 mobile applications that reach over 40 million users monthly, according to the company.
When Breaker's CEO Erik Berlin and CTO Leah Culver "decided to join Twitter to help build out a new product for them, it was a natural fit for Erik to turn to us. What was most important to him, his team and investors was to see Breaker thrive," said Maple Media CEO Michael Ritter.
The deal came together over the weekend, Ritter said.
With podcasts growing ever more crowded, Maple believes it can help solve "the discovery challenge in podcasting: creators want to find an audience, and audiences are seeking out new shows." To do so, in the coming weeks it will launch a program to allow creators and brands to promote podcasts across its podcast apps Breaker, Player FM, Podkicker and its social media platform We Heart It.
The podcast industry brought in about $1.3 billion in 2020, according to research firm Omdia. Although that figure is less than what one blockbuster film can make, the space has attracted significant investment of late, driven largely by expectations of growth. Omdia forecasts industry ad revenue could triple by 2025 and that listenership could grow to two billion, up from about 800 million listeners in 2019.
Spotify, Apple and Amazon have all been ramping up their podcasting footprint. In December, Amazon acquired L.A.-based podcast studio Wondery for a reported sum of over $300 million.
Launched in 2017, Maple Media's business model is to acquire apps with a loyal following, then grow that user base and improve the app's monetization, said Ritter.
Operating them collectively is cheaper and allows the company to cross-promote their apps.
For instance, Maple plans to add podcasts onto We Heart It, which it says "many popular podcaster creators" use to promote their shows.
The company's portfolio includes two other podcasting apps, Player FM and Podkicker, which combined reach millions of monthly users, Ritter said. Player FM is the sixth most-downloaded podcasting app worldwide, he added.
Outside of podcasting, some of its popular apps include SwiftScan, WeekCal, Pic Stitch and Weather Hi-Def Radar.