Imagine paying $10M for mid YouTube agitprop, only to get your propaganda armed banned by Zuck

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• 🚪 Amazon would like fewer workers: Ecommerce, streaming, and cloud compute giant Amazon is demanding that its workers come into the office five days per week. Its CEO wrote that it has been “decided that [Amazon workers are] going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID,” because the “advantages of being together in the office are significant.”

  • Jassy argued that it is “easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture” IRL, and that “collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective” in an office. Amazon being back in its buildings three days per week for more than the last year “strengthened [its] conviction about the benefits,’” the CEO added.

  • Employees are not happy. And some will quit, boosting Amazon’s net margins at least in the short term. (One argued that the new rules are more strict than pre-COVID regs.)

  • More humorously, Amazon is also “asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025,” Jassy also wrote. The goal is to “remove layers and flatten organizations” and “increase [its] teammates’ ability to move fast, clarify and invigorate their sense of ownership [while driving] decision-making closer to the front lines.”

  • Sure. Anyone else getting a whiff of a Five Year Plan in that last set of quotes? Perhaps Amazon is ready to start “deepening consolidation of advancing modernization of the [company’s] governance system and governance capabilities through informatization [because it] must accelerate the building of a digital [corporation], greatly enhance modernization levels of data-based [internal] governance capabilities and transform the structural advantages of [Capitalism] with [Amazon] Characteristics into powerful [corporate] governance abilities….”

Via Natalya Letunova

I shelled out $10M and all I got was deleted YouTube clips

CO did not dig into the Tenet Media/Moscow payola/YouTuber mess because it wasn’t really a technology story — or a business story. It was, I thought, simply another example of people willing to act very dumb for a check.

Today we have get to poke at the saga, because Meta banned RT from its apps — and RT was the bank behind the Tenet Media mess.

So, what happened? Several Russia Today (RT) operatives set up a company — Tenet Media — that paid a half-dozen online commentators huge sums of money to produce videos that hewed to Moscow talking points or simply tried to stir up domestic unrest.

The government put it like this in its suit:

Many of the videos published by U.S. Company-I contain commentary on events and issues in the United States, such as immigration, inflation, and other topics related to domestic and foreign policy. While the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, the subject matter and content of the videos are often consistent with the Government of Russia's interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Government of Russia interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine.

The amount of money in flight was insane:

Between in or about October 2023 and in or about August 2024, the U.S. Company-I Bank Account received approximately 30 wire transfers from foreign entities totaling approximately $9.7 million. U.S. Company-I disbursed most of these funds to its contracted commentators, including approximately $8.7 million to the production companies of Commentator-I, Commentator-2, and Commentator-3 alone.

A fake person named ‘Eduard Grigoriann’ was purportedly behind the scenes with a checkbook. In truth, it was just a Russian operation to try to make the United States more fractious before an election. The saga was not funny overall, but the entire mess — U.S. conservative commentators being paid by Russian government interests — did have its hilarious moments.

Here’s one anecdote that had me rolling:

Imagine having to post clips of Tucker Carlson marveling at a coin-operated grocery cart. Then again, for this amount of money?

The U.S. government notes in its suit that RT turned to the Tenet Media idea after the state mouthpiece suddenly found itself unwelcome around the world. All it took was an illegal invasion and attempted extirpation of a free state:

In the wake of the mess, YouTube yanked Tenet videos, though Wired did run an analysis on their contents if you are curious.

Last Friday, the Biden administration cracked down on RT. Here’s Blinken:

Yeah, Russian intelligence money went to producing videos, and I shit you not, like “Trans Widows Are a Thing and It’s Getting OUT OF HAND” and “Race Is Biological but Gender Isn’t???”, per CJR.

Ok but what’s the tech angle?

Right, right. Today, Meta decided that it too had had enough, releasing a statement that said that after “careful consideration, [it] expanded [its] ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets: Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from [Meta] apps globally for foreign interference activity.”

I can hear you shouting that Meta banning RT is hardly a technology story; it’s a geopolitical story, Alex, get over it. Yes, but technology is geopolitics today. From chips to Internet services to who writes AI code, technology is very much a part of the intra-national rivalries that shape the world today.

And Meta didn’t have to ban RT. Twitter, for example, allows RT on its platform (ironically with the tagline “freedom over censorship”), as does Rumble, including a ‘24/7 RT feed. Tech companies are making choices, and their selections matter.

There is not a politics-free technology story today, because tech companies do so much that they are going to constantly abut governments, both behaving well and not. Meta took a stand today. Let’s see how much company it keeps in the coming weeks.