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A new watchdog report uncovers Facebook groups quietly fueling a black market for operational Uber and DoorDash accounts, posing serious safety concerns for riders and customers. The Tech Transparency Project (TTP), a research initiative run by the nonprofit the Campaign for Accountability, found more than 80 black market groups through searches for terms such as uber account for rent. Sporting a combined membership of more than 800,000 users and named things like Uber Delivery Drivers Account For Rent or UBER ACCOUNT FOR RENT WORLDWIDE, these groups make no secret of their intent. Through these online groups, users can acquire delivery or rideshare accounts without going through the required screening process, allowing those without licenses or insurance to drive for these companies. By bypassing the screening procedure, buyers can also skip the required background checks for drivers. For women or people who may be vulnerable, if the person making a delivery or picking somebody up via Uber has a criminal history, there is an increased risk to those users, TTP Director Katie Paul says. Paul says that this concern is only the latest content moderation issue in a broader pattern with Facebook and Meta. Past TTP reports have documented a thriving black market for Facebook business accounts, revealing how the platformwhich has over three billion active users worldwide, according to recent financial filingsis being exploited for scams and potential election interference. This latest TTP report comes as Meta already faces fresh criticism for scaling back third-party fact-checking in January and shifting more responsibility to users to flag harmful content. That decision coincided with Metas launch of the Community Notes feature, which essentially relies on Facebook users to moderate content and flag posts that violate community guidelines. The move was met with widespread backlash, particularly given that it was announced mere weeks before President Donald Trumps inauguration. According to Paul, though, the change in moderation guidelines made little difference when it came to scams that are at the center of the latest TTP report. Paul says this recurring issue is especially prevalent on Facebook, largely because of its Group functionality. The platform relies on community moderators and administrators to police contentbut that system breaks down when the groups themselves are designed to enable scams and fraud. These have essentially become insulated communities for all kinds of nefarious activity, Paul says. Theyre not just groups where people are trying to keep their plants alive. In October 2024prior to Metas content moderation policy shiftTTP published a report on a pro-Trump scam ad network, uncovering more than 100 Facebook groups dedicated to selling business manager accounts capable of running multiple pages and ad campaigns. A similar trend was noted in a 2019 report by Talos, Ciscos cybersecurity research division, which found Facebook groups selling cyber fraud services. Some of these groups had been active for nearly eight years, their reach amplified by Facebooks content algorithm. A Meta spokesperson says the company is reviewing the report and removing content that violates guidelines. The spokesperson adds that Meta does not allow content that offers to buy, sell, or trade any personal identifiable information. The TTP report arrives as Meta stands trial for allegedly violating antitrust laws, with the Federal Trade Commission accusing the company of using a buy-or-bury strategy to eliminate competition. The case marks a major push to redefine how antitrust rules apply to tech giants, with the FTC targeting Metas high-profile acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsAppeach now boasting nearly two billion monthly active users. Meta is facing an FTC trial today about whether the platform has monopolized because its gotten so big, Paul says. If the company is not able to control its product because of its scale, it raises a lot of other questions that policymakers really should be looking into.
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E-Commerce
Becoming a manager for the first time can feel exciting, gratifying, nerve-wracking, and even overwhelming. But being a good boss is not about following a checklist of what makes a perfect manager, as theres no such thing, argues Sabina Nawaz in her book Youre the Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need). A former HR leader at Microsoft and executive coach for Fortune 500 decision-makers, Nawaz offers actionable frameworks in her book on how to become a better manager, backed by lessons from her clients and personal career wins and losses. Here are some top takeaways from the book on how new managers can best make the transition. Being a good manager is a journey Its a common misconception that there are bad bosses and good ones, but according to Nawaz, we all have the capacity to teeter between good and bad boss behaviors. Just as no person is all good or all bad, the measure of a boss is neither binary nor fixed,” writes Nawaz. “‘Bad’ bosses are rarely bad people. In fact, most of them are good people with the best of intentions who unwittingly cross a tenuous dividing line between good intentions and bad behaviors. Acknowledging this can help you realize its an active practice to deliver skilled managementand quite common for negative habits to emerge if left unchecked. This mental shift of making continual progress towards productive behaviors and minimizing the emergence of lackluster ones often starts with reframing how you attain success. Your path to becoming a manager was likely the result of being an ambitious professional delivering beyond expectations, but thats no longer the case. Showcasing your output may be what got you where you are, but now you need to rewire who gets showcased and what ‘output’ means, writes Nawaz. Recalibrating to focus on driving your teams success is the critical distinction between being a standout employee and a standout boss. Its a continual effort as a manager to reorient how you were incentivized to perform before, and do your best to avoid the slow slip into bad boss behaviors, writes Nawaz. Communicate with greater precision Now that youre a manager, the power dynamics have shifted when it comes to how youre perceived by your colleagues. What you say, write, and do can carry more weight. Poor communication is the second most common perceived weakness of managers, according to Nawazs research. One of the most common mistakes is when managers give imprecise feedback or advice, resulting in a lack of clarity on appropriate next steps. This can lead to an overreaction like a colleague redesigning the entire pitch deck, when only one slide needed a revamp. Or too restrained of a response altogether. When youre a manager, the team often pays close attention to your every word, so Nawaz suggests using what she dubs the scaling tool to offset this pitfall and communicate with the intended level of impact and urgency. She suggests saying something like: On a scale of one to 10, Id rate the importance of this task at a . . . Or, in terms of a rough sketch vs. polished, this can be a . . . Or, On a scale of one to 10, how confident do you feel about your ability to deliver in the timeline given? Any professional could benefit from being a more calculated communicator by using the scaling tool, but it matters more when your team puts more weight to your message. Another common mistake among managers is giving uneven feedback or only offering corrective feedback about whats wrong and needs to be improved upon. Solely delivering negative feedback is demoralizing and harmful to a team members productivity when theyre not getting motivating insights into what is working. As human beings, we are wired to listen for the dangers, for the negatives, and dont take in the positive until its repeated endlessly like this weeks top song, writes Nawaz. She recommends managers offset this by offering five positive comments for every piece of corrective feedback, keeping the positive stuff more feedback than praise, and making the delivery of positive feedback a frequent habit. This is important: A Gallup survey found that employees rank the most meaningful and memorable recognition comes from their managers. Delegate effectively Now that youre a manager, you cant continue to do everything yourself like you did when you were an individual contributor. You have to delegate. Whats not obvious about delegating is how to do it successfully. You cant simply pass off tasks with a set of instructions and hope for results. According to Nawaz, delegation starts with identifying your direct reports level of knowledge on a given subject or task. The next step is adjusting your coaching so employees are given the right level of support and independence. Depending on how much support is needed, you could approach that in a number of ways. For instance, you could do the task and have them observe you, teach them the step-by-step process, ask what they need from you as they complete the task without your instruction, or make it clear youre a resource as they finalize the task on their own. These actions go in order of providing more coaching from you and less self-sufficiency initially to eventually scaling back your involvement and increasing their own autonomy to complete the task. Delegation is critical for not only empowering your team to grow and contribute to the organizations goals, but it also provides you with more blank space on your schedule for other tasks. Recognize your triggers that lead to bad boss behavior Youll be exposed to different sources of stress and pressure as a manager. Some is avoidable, but a lot of it is not. The buildup of these forces is typically what leads a well-intentioned manager to delegate poorly, communicate haphazardly, or come across as cold. To do your best to prevent a downward shift toward the bad boss lane, aim to control how you react to these strains by spotting the triggers that set you off. Nawaz refers to these as your pressure pitfalls, and the ability to identify them as theyre emerging can help you deescalate and change how you react in the moment. She suggests managers ask themselves these types of questions and keep note of the scenarios when these moments bubble up. What types of people tend to put me on high alert? What tends to get under my skin the most? What days of the week or cyclical or seasonal times are particularly pressure-filled for me? What do I experience physically when I get triggered? When are the moments I am not at my best? (When youre sleep-deprived? Hungry? In the mornings before youve had your coffee or late afternoons when your energy dips?) The answers you come up with can help you map your pressure-induced triggers and begin to adjust how you react through following a series of groundig exercises. Once a trigger is activated, Nawaz recommends doing complex math or thinking through a familiar memory to help direct the brain out of a flight or fight moment and back to executive functioning. To put this into practiceor any of these suggestionsNawaz advocates for creating a micro habit where you practice the skill daily and keep it small, so theyre tiny enough to sneak past our defense systems and start to inoculate us against change resistance. By small, she suggests so tiny that this habit takes two minutes or less a day, and may even feel absurdly minuscule on the surface, which means youre off to a strong start. Keep these management frameworks and recommendations in mind as you begin your journey of working to become a better boss for your team.
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E-Commerce
The world’s first commercial direct air capture plant opened in Iceland in 2021, with the capacity to remove around 4,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year and turn it into stone deep underground. Four years later, a new DAC plant planned in Louisiana, called Project Cypress, is designed to be 250 times largercapturing 1 million tons of CO2 a year. But supporters are now scrambling to save the project, and up to $550 million in Department of Energy funding on which its future relies. Under the Biden administration, the DOE planned to create four large new American DAC hubs, with two selected so far. In Louisiana, the project was designed to scale up two different technologies: one from Climeworks, the company behind the first plant in Iceland, and the other from Heirloom, a Silicon Valley startup that operates a plant in Californias Central Valley. Another DAC hub, in Texas, secured up to $500 million in funding from the agency. The government sent the first tranche of $50 million to both last year. Now theres a chance that neither project will happen. Last month, a leaked DOE memo suggested that the planned DAC hubs in Louisiana and Texas would lose their funding. If that happens, it will be a major challenge for either project to survive. “The whole point of the [DOE funding] is to step in when it’s too risky for the private sector to do so,” says Jessie Stolark, executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, a nonpartisan group of companies, unions, and environmental organizations that advocates for so-called carbon management tech. “Youve got to wonder who’s going to take that risk on. Stolark sees a very real risk that the U.S. is ceding its leadership in the energy space. She says that it’s a story that’s been played out so many times in tech advancement: The U.S. spends the money on the research and development for a technology, and then we don’t end up manufacturing or deploying the technology. It’s deployed elsewhere. Climeworks’ ‘Orca’ large-scale plant in Iceland, the world’s first. [Photo: Arnaldur Halldorsson/Bloomberg/Getty Images] Experts say DAC technology could be a meaningful part of the fight against climate change, though its still at an early stage of development. It will only ever supplement the main solution: radically curtailing greenhouse emissions across every sector of the economy, from transportation to manufacturing to housing. But the science suggests that to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we must also remove at least some of the billions of tons of CO2 that weve pumped into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Congress has recognized the potential for DAC technology, and earmarked $3.5 billion in 2021s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to fund the DOEs hubs program, which is administered by the departments Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. The new office launched in order to run the program and support other early-stage climate tech in the private sector. Yet on his first day in office, Trump halted the payout of funds granted under both the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. (He later clarified that the 90-day pause applied only to projects that are part of what the president derisively calls the “Green New Scam.”) He also tasked agencies with reviewing federal grants to assess whether they were “consistent” with his administration’s policy prioritieseven though the government already had signed legally binding contracts to disburse the funds. The planned locations for Project Cypress’s DAC facilities [Image: Project Cypress] Compounding the issue, these policy U-turns have put other sources of money at risk. Corporations that had planned to buy carbon removal credits from the DAC plants to help meet their own climate goals, including Microsoft, Amazon, and AT&T, now don’t know when or even if those credits will become available. Investors have to worry that a make-or-break chunk of funding will disappear. Banks financing the projects could get cold feet. “The uncertainty itself is damaging,” says Noah Deich, cofounder of the nonprofit Carbon180, who served as deputy assistant secretary for carbon management at the Department of Energy under Biden. “Everyone just needs clarity as quickly as possible.” Climeworks and Heirloom both declined to comment for this story. Batelle, which is overseeing the implementation of the project, didn’t respond to a request for an interview. A rendering of Heirlooms DAC Hub in Louisiana [Image: Heriloom/Project Cypress] It’s not yet a foregone conclusion that the projects are dead. After the meo leaked, a coalition of Louisiana business associations sent a letter to their D.C. representatives urging support for policies that boost carbon management. Signees included groups not known for their support of environmentalism or progressive ideals, such as the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association and the Louisiana Chemical Association. (Such support has made DAC tech controversial in some climate circles, since some industries appear to view DAC credits as an excuse to keep polluting. But help from the oil sector could also be the technologys fastest means of scaling up.) Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Susan Bourgeois sent another letter to Congress specifically advocating for Project Cypress. “Beyond the direct economic benefitsthousands of jobs and billions of dollars added to the states GDPthe project will have immense downstream impacts,” she wrote. Investing in DAC will generate demand for American-made steel, concrete, and advanced equipment, revitalizing U.S. manufacturing and ensuring that innovation and jobs remain here at home.” The project is estimated to bring around 2,300 jobs and a total investment of up to $1.7 billion to Louisiana. A report from the Rhodium Group estimates that the DAC industry as a whole has the potential to employ 55,000 people in the state, creating jobs that often appeal to people transitioning out of oil and gas. (In Texas, the planned DAC hub would bring 2,000 jobs, and the industry could attract more than 200,000 jobs.) Climeworks’ concept rendering for Project Cypress Southwest [Image: Climeworks] “What we’re seeing is that all of these projects are in really conservative districts,” says Deich. “These are the exact types of industrial and manufacturing jobs that so many of these communities have been asking for and are being delivered.” At the same time, “We’ve already seen this administration say very clearly that they don’t think climate change is a problem. And if you don’t think climate change is a problem, efforts to clean up carbon pollution from the atmosphere are not useful. That’s what’s so concerning to me.” Following lobbying efforts, a revised version of the memo leaked again. Project Cypress was no longer marked as “terminate,” sources say, but the list noted that DOE wanted more time to evaluate the project. (Funding for the Texas project was still slated for termination.) A final decision might come in the next couple of weeks, when Trump’s 90-day pause on funding disbursements expires. But even if the money survives, the projects will still face challengesincluding the fact that swaths of DOE staff have lost their jobs or accepted buyout offers, and it’s not clear who will be left at the agency to do the work. Meanwhile, some DAC projects that dont rely on massive federal grants are still moving forward, including a different large facility in Texas that’s slated to open later this year and will capture half a million tons annually. But it’s critical to launch more large projects, says Deich. The industry is aiming for a cost of $100 per ton of CO2 captured. “Everyone knows that you won’t get to that price point until you start building it at scale,” he says. “That creates the type of deployment-led innovations that you’ve seen from solar and windplaces where breakthroughs happened in the lab, initially, but then 90% of the cost reduction happened because the people who manufactured stuff figured out how to do it better.” If large projects are delayed, that means it will take longer to get down the cost curveand could make it harder to get more investments from the policy side in the future. Deich worries now that if the new hubs aren’t built now, people will think the projects didn’t move forward because the tech doesn’t work. That’s not the case. “It’s the political decisions that [could cause] the projects to fail at this point,” he says. “Not something inherent to the projects.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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