Is This An Ad? Nick Jonas & Lyft Edition

As a human who exists on the internet, you’re probably familiar with what it looks like when a celebrity posts something to their social media that is obviously an ad. Like when some C-list reality star poses on Instagram with a bag of diet tea or a UV-light teeth whitener. These kinds of celebrity ads usually have some telltale sign in the form of a hashtag, like #sponsored, #ad, or even just #sp.

But it’s not always obvious, at all. And sometimes its positively confusing. So welcome to a new recurring feature here at BuzzFeed Tech we're calling “Is This An Ad?”

A few years ago, the FTC laid out a set of guidelines for bloggers about disclosing ads or free gifts from brands. Blogs were a radical shift in publishing, and in their early-ish days, many bloggers were making money or getting freebies from brands in exchange for recommending products, with no disclosure. The FTC responded with a set of rules meant to help readers know whether or not posts were, well, ads. Knowing a fashion blogger got that dress she’s wearing in her photo for free makes the motivation to write about it more transparent for the readers. Good!

But these FTC rules are incredibly hard to understand – even the plain English FAQs on its site have a lot of grey. They also pre-date the true rise of social media. (Does anyone actually blog anymore?) Also, these rules aren't really aimed at celebrities – for example, they address issues like getting a free entry to a sweepstakes for blogging about a product. Come on, Beyoncé isn't posting anything in exchange for a freaking sweepstakes entry.

In general, the FTC isn't combing through blogs and social media looking to crack down on individuals. There's only been a handful of actual lawsuits that they brought on, and those were brought against companies, not individuals. The most recent example is Warner Bros., which paid video game vloggers to review a new title. The FTC only went after Warner Bros, not the vloggers personally.

Which is to say that there is not a lot of accountability around surreptitiously advertising a product on Instagram or Snapchat or Snapagram, or whatever. And yet, people are also clearly in love with certain products, and do post about them out of genuine affection — Kim Kardashian's Blackberry comes to mind. So it can be hard to know! Which is why we're trying to regularly answer this a basic question: is this an ad? Welcome to our first installment.

The Case:

Our first case features the talented and handsome pop star Nick Jonas, and the ride-hailing app Lyft. Jonas is formerly of the mid-aughts Disney act The Jonas Brothers, and more recently of the surprisingly swole and sexy set. He's now an actual mainstream pop star with hits like “Jealous”, does some acting, and is on tour with Demi Lovato this summer.

On July 19, Jonas posted an Instagram where he’s holding a cigar and a cocktail glass poolside at a Hamptons mansion (according to TMZ, this is an Airbnb rental house). The caption reads, "there are days without shows, there are never days off. Thanks for getting me to the Hamptons, @lyft!"

"There are days without shows, there are never days off. Thanks for getting me to the Hamptons, @lyft!"

Instagram: @nickjonas

The Evidence:

Now, Nick Jonas doesn’t usually post sponsored ads on his Instagram, which makes it feel less likely that it’s an ad. And it doesn’t say “sponsored” or anything like that. But on the other hand, who shouts out Lyft randomly to thank them? Not us normal folks. And even the premise of it is strange… NYC to the Hamptons is about a 3 hour drive, which isn't really the type of ride Lyft is usually used for.

What if it's just a freebie? Celebrities get free stuff all the time. But that's not even THAT much of a free gift... Lyft's app wouldn't give me a price estimate from NYC to East Hampton, but Uber estimates it's about $220. Is a brand shoutout from Nick Jonas to his 8 million Instagram followers worth a mere $220? Not a bad deal.

It’s really confusing what’s going on here. A paid ad? An organic shoutout? A comped ride?

The Verdict:

We asked Lyft what was going on here. Their answer: "Lyft has a relationship with Nick's team and provided him with complimentary services out to the Hamptons."

So: Nick got a free ride (approximate value: $220). And sometimes he gets free rides other times as well.

We asked the FTC for comment on the case of Nick and his free ride, but they told us that they do no comment on specific examples like this. However, a source familiar with its rules did tell us that it would be a violation because Jonas should have disclosed that it was a free gift.

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Smartphones Are Key To Banking In The Developing World

A man holds up his mobile phone showing a M-Pesa mobile money transaction page in Nairobi, Kenya.

Noor Khamis / Reuters

Those of us in the developed world take our access to banks, credit cards, and venmo so much for granted that many of us don't even bother to check our account statements once a month. But people in the developing world aren't so lucky.

Women are particularly disadvantaged. Only 50% of women in the developing world — countries like Afghanistan, India, and Nigeria — have a bank account with a financial institution or a mobile money service, compared to 59% of men. Despite an uptick in access, with 500 million new people getting bank accounts from 2011 to 2014, the gender gap (like many other gender divides) in financial access has remained constant. Women and other marginalized groups like the poor and refugees still risk being left "unbanked," without access to lines of credit, savings accounts, and secure ways to transfer money.

In a new study to be published Thursday by the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, researchers found that smartphones are one of the key tools for giving women access to banking in Asia, Africa, and Latin America — but much of the world is still a long way from widespread financial inclusion. The researchers behind the study are calling for renewed efforts to achieve gender parity in banking, and they think mobile technology and non-traditional financial services are the best way to make it happen.

“There are still roughly two billion people in the world that are excluded from financial participation," John Villasenor, one of the study's authors, told BuzzFeed News. "And almost everybody recognizes that financial inclusion is a critical part of improving the economic prosperity and growth of a country."

At the most basic level, having access to a bank helps reduce the risk of being robbed, Villasenor explained. Banks offer a way to store cash more securely, and digital banking can save people in underserved communities from long treks and bus rides where they can be targeted by thieves. Without access to banks, people can exchange and save their cash, but less reliably. Other important services like interest-bearing savings accounts, international money transfers, and credit lines are generally only offered by formal institutions.

The study, now in its second year, measured how nations provide financial tools to their underserved populations. The Brookings researchers ranked 26 countries across four categories, including the commitment of governments to increase access to financial services, and a country’s adoption of banking tools.

"There is a clear business case for serving women, who tend to save more relative to their total income than men, repay loans at a higher rate, buy more products per capita, and be more loyal to their bank."

As it did last year, Kenya claimed the top spot, touting one of the most mature markets for mobile money services in the world. Kenya's largest mobile-network operator, Safaricom, allows customers to transfer money through their phones on its mobile money system called M-PESA. M-PESA's massive adoption in the country has helped boost bank account ownership; 75% of Kenyan adults and 71% of Kenyan women have bank accounts, which is well above the global average, according to the study.

(According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, about 92% of American households have access to a bank account, but of these households, about 20% are underserved, meaning that they have accounts but also use services outside of the traditional banking system.)

Mobile money has taken off in other African nations too, with Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania among the highest ranking nations in mobile money adoption. It will likely get better: By 2020, the number of smartphones connections is expected to increase from about 4 billion to 6 billion. More mobile phones means more people will have access to digital financial services, like mobile money.

“One of the great trends we are going to see in the next couple of years is this conceptual migration of hundreds of millions of people into the digital world.” Villasenor said, which will help provide access to financial services more efficiently and for less money.

While the cost of smartphones remains a barrier for many women, the study cites a number of initiatives to make phones more affordable. One private industry-backed program in Vietnam offers low-interest loans to workers to purchase appliances and smartphones. Bangladesh has payment plans for phones, and mobile operators in Indonesia, Rwanda, and Turkey have also pledged to increase the proportion of women on their networks by 2020.

"Increasing access to financial services among women enables them to invest in themselves, in their families, and in their communities," the report says. Gender parity in banking has another perk, too: "There is a clear business case for serving women, who tend to save more relative to their total income than men, repay loans at a higher rate, buy more products per capita, and be more loyal to their bank."

To pinpoint which programs and national strategies will best close the gender gap in banking, the researchers said they hoped to gather more gender-specific data in the future. But perhaps even more urgent is the need for information on marginalized migrant workers and refugees, which the researchers said is especially limited. “There’s a huge number of issues that forcibly displaced persons face, and one of them is access to financial transactions," Villasenor said. Without access to banking tools, and facing both language and legal barriers, refugees must often rely on informal channels for transferring money that are costly, unreliable, and dangerous.

According to the United Nations, about 12.4 million people were forced to leave their home countries because of conflict or persecution last year. More than half of these refugees came from just three countries: Syria, Afghanistan, and Somolia. So armed with more data next year, the Brookings researchers will try to figure out which banking policies will help displaced individuals the most.

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Apple’s Diversity Is Slowly Improving — But It’s Got A Long Way To Go

Apple released a new report on employee diversity Wednesday, touting a year in which more than half of the company's new employees are minorities.

“Our new hires are more diverse than our current employees,” states the report.

Since last year, Apple's overall percentage of minority employees has increased, slightly.

Black employees now make up 9% of the company’s workforce, up from 8% in 2015; the number of Asians has increased from 18% to 19%; and Hispanics are up from 11% to 12%.

But the company remains 68% male and 56% white.

Last year, it was 69% male and 54% white. Diversity among Apple's leadership remained essentially the same as last year, too, at 72% male and 28% female.

Like many of its peers in Silicon Valley, Apple has faced public pressure in recent years to make its work environment more diverse. Though many tech companies cite innovation as one of their core values, they maintain glaring racial, ethnic, and gender disparities in their workforces.

Apple is making some progress: Under CEO Tim Cook, women and minorities at Apple have been promoted and appointed to key leadership positions. They include Denise Young Smith, who leads global human resources; Lisa Jackson, the vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives; as well as Susan Wagner and James Bell, who sit on the board of directors. The percentage of female and black leaders within the company remained the same as last year, however, at 28% and 3% respectively. (Hispanic leadership saw a one percent increase, to 7%.)

Apple’s diversity statistics are similar to other tech industry giants, although Apple does a little better when it comes to its percentage of black and Hispanic employees — minority groups that have been historically underrepresented in tech. Facebook's workforce is 52% white and 38% Asian, but only 4% of its employees are Hispanic, and 2% are black. Google's workforce is 3% Hispanic and 2% black.

Apple's Young Smith told BuzzFeed News that the new report reflects the company's standing commitment to a more inclusive workplace and a richer, more diverse tech culture. "We believe that there are talent pools out there, and we have to create access to them," she said. That contrasts with Facebook's diversity report in July, which appeared to blame the company's diversity problem on a lack of available talent.

One way Apple is trying to attract more diverse employees is with its Thurgood Marshall College Fund partnership that it announced last year, pledging over $40 million to a new multi-year diversity initiative. The first program of the initiative offered a $25,000 scholarship to 33 students from historically black colleges and universities, as well as a summer internship and mentorship program with the company. The inaugural class of students are currently halfway through their internships. So far, eight of them have been offered full-time jobs at Apple, Young Smith said.

"We are absolutely accountable to making sure that we are as richly represented as we can be," she said. "That's not just for the future. That's for now."

Rev. Jesse Jackson, who successfully pressured tech companies in 2014 to begin disclosing their diversity hiring data, told BuzzFeed News in a statement that he is pleased with Apple’s progress. “Apple is showing that a large tech company with 80,000 US employees can move the diversity and inclusion needle,” he said. “That stands in stark contrast to Facebook and other tech companies whose data shows that [they] have made little, if any, progress.”

“Stagnation is already unacceptable,” US Representative Barbara Lee told BuzzFeed News. Rep. Lee led a congressional delegation to Silicon Valley last year, pushing tech firms to develop and publish diversity plans with clear benchmarks. “For too long, diversity and inclusion in the tech sector has been an afterthought. This increase shows Apple’s real commitment to addressing this issue. While much work remains, by working together, I am confident we can achieve parity.”

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Here's How To Create A New Snapchat-Style "Story" On Instagram

~new feature who dis~

This morning, you may have noticed a new Instagram feature called "Stories."

An Instagram Story is a series of temporary photos and videos that last 24 hours. (Sound familiar? 😏 )

Instagram

First, launch the Stories camera using the new (+) button in the top left corner.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed

You can also use the shortcut: just swipe right from the main Instagram feed.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed

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View Entire List ›

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Former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich Says The Gig Economy Can Be A “Nightmare"

Reich testifying on income inequality before the Joint Economic Committee in 2014.

Win Mcnamee / Getty Images

Former United States Labor Secretary Robert Reich always suspected Uber driver pay was low — but he didn't know how low until recently, when he read a BuzzFeed News report that found that Uber drivers in three cities made less than $14 an hour on average.

“It was about where I thought they'd be,” he told BuzzFeed News on a recent sunny afternoon in Berkeley, California. “But I was surprised the payment was so low after costs.” He also called Uber’s price cuts, which tend to infuriate drivers despite Uber’s claim that they increase demand for rides, a “blunder.”

“Tech is affecting the entire workforce very dramatically.”

Reich has spent about half of the nineteen years since he left the Clinton administration and the Department of Labor working at the University of California, Berkeley, where he’s a professor of public policy. Between writing bestsellers, stumping for Bernie and maintaining an active Facebook presence, he has also been observing the impact of the tech industry on the American workforce.

“Tech is affecting the entire workforce very dramatically,” Reich said. “A lot of people don't know how much they're being affected. It's not just Uber and Airbnb, it's really the whole employment relationship.”

Here’s what he told BuzzFeed News about why the gig economy — a group he said makes up 30% of the American workforce — is bad for workers, how it’s making labor worse, and what we can do to fix it.

Gig workers are the new blue collar workers.

Not only are wages for gig workers low, but the work is also unpredictable, according to Reich — ”not just in how much you earn, but when you will be needed.” For example, it used to be that it was an employer’s job to predict demand; if customers didn’t come into a store, the people staffing the cash registers still had to get paid. Nowadays, it’s the Uber drivers of the world who take a hit if demand is slow. Said Reich: “If you have a lot of fixed costs that you have to bear as a person with a family and a home and utilities and auto costs and so on, that unpredictability can really cause havoc.” The result of this instability and frustration, he continued, is that gig workers are becoming part of the “angry working class.”

“The new blue collar workers are gig economy workers. If you define gig economy broadly to include part-timers, the self-employed, independent contractors, freelancers and temps, they’re on a downward escalator.”

The gig economy is both a product and a cause of income inequality.

"We are actually reducing the quality of life for millions of people.”

Airbnb and Uber say they’re helping middle-class Americans get by, and Uber justifies paying drivers at a rate, that is in Reich’s words, “not all that far removed from minimum wage” by saying it’s only supposed to be additional income on top of another job. But 35 years ago, Reich said, employed Americans didn’t need supplemental income just to pay the bills. If people still had good wages and labor protections, they wouldn’t need to turn to these platforms for extra cash. And ironically, Reich said, it’s companies like Uber, which popularized the idea of a digital on-demand labor marketplace, that are driving down the value of work, causing people to need extra jobs.

“I think the digital platforms are making it easier for companies to move in this direction,” he said. “And it's happening in all sorts of ways. I'm not blaming tech companies. They are doing what the economy wants them to do. There's all sorts of money to be made in making it easier for everyone else to move from fixed costs to variable costs. The problem is, if you believe, as I do, that the heart of the economy is a good job, with predictable wages and benefits, we are actually reducing the quality of life for millions of people.”

The solution is more and better benefits.

Thanks to Obamacare, many gig workers now have health insurance. But Reich thinks we need income insurance, too. Here’s how it would work: “If you, next month, are earning half as much as you earned this month, the wage insurance or income insurance would give you, say, half the difference between the two,” he said. “It smooths out your income stream over time.”

Reich also think we need portable benefits — in which tax advantages normally given to employers are instead attached to individuals. (On Thursday, the Department of Labor announced $100,000 to fund portable benefits research. Many tech companies already support the idea.)

But the easiest way to make sure workers get the benefits they need is to help them retain employee status. To that end, Reich wants to make it harder for companies to classify workers as contractors — even Uber. Said Reich: “I think Uber made a terrible strategic blunder. A few years ago, a lot of drivers really liked the company. They felt they were getting a fair deal. These price changes coming at them with little or no warning has made them far less generous with regards to the company. They feel that they are being treated badly, and the fiction that they are not employees becomes even more obvious.”

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Twitter Will Let You Temporarily Follow Olympics Tweets For 17 Straight Days

Twitter is about to embark on a 17 day-long test where it will insert curated Olympics-related tweets into people’s timelines, if they opt in.

The experiment is a more ambitious iteration of Twitter’s temporary follow function in Moments, a tab that highlights the platform’s most compelling content and offers a temporary follow option for certain topics and events from time to time. Twitter clearly likes what it’s seeing from the feature, which proved valuable during big news events like Brexit and last month’s political conventions, and is investing more energy into it.

"We want to see how things perform at the Olympics but we’re very excited about the idea of the longer [temporary] follow and want to look for other opportunities to experiment,” Andrew Fitzgerald, Twitter’s Director of Curation told BuzzFeed News.

The temporary feature is beneficial because it inserts high-value tweets — from journalists, newsmakers, people at the scene, etc. — in real time, allowing you to follow live and unfolding events without having to do the work of figuring out who to follow. One major issue with the feature is that it is deeply buried within Twitter’s user interface, but long sessions like the one during the Olympics could help it build momentum and increase its visibility.

Twitter will make the temporary follow available in nine different markets; the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, Australia, Japan, Mexico, Canada, France and Germany. The inserted tweets will be tailored to each market, so people in Japan will see tweets about Japan’s Olympic squad in Japanese, and people in France will see tweets about the French team in French. Twitter is bringing on additional people to support the effort. It will also offer shorter temporary follow options for specific events, like swimming.

Though the temporary follow was included in Moments’ initial launch, Twitter appears to be putting additional emphasis on it of late. Its rise has coincided with the departures of the product executives at the helm of the Moments when it debuted— head of product Kevin Weil and product manager Madhu Muthukumar — thought it’s unclear if the departures have any connection.

Twitter ran the temporary follow for lengthy sessions during Brexit, The Democratic and Republican National Conventions, and Brazil’s impeachment proceedings, where it was live for three straight days.

"What we saw in the Brazil experiment was [the temporary follow] actually was a really valuable way for users to stay updated on the impeachment process throughout those crucial three days,” Fitzgerald said.

Inside Twitter, there’s long been discussion about allowing users to follow topics, not just specific users. Some might hope that this feature develops into that vision. And in some ways, it already has.

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Instagram Adds Disapearing Stories To Encourage More Casual Posts

Instagram's highly curated feed often feels like a museum full of people's best work. Now, the company is adding a new section that's more akin to a pop-up gallery show: messier, more chaotic, and with a see-it-now-or-miss-it-forever quality to it. This new section, called Stories, will play host to photos and video that don't live in your main feed and, crucially, vanish after 24 hours.

The company is hoping that Stories will encourage people to share more pictures and video by making that media feel less permanent and consequential. The hope is that people will spend more time on its own platform and less on others — like say, Snapchat, with which this update shares more than a little in common. In any case, it's a major change for Instagram, probably it's most substantive feature update since it added support for video, and signals a concerted effort to bring the same kind of raw experiences people are sharing elsewhere without saying goodbye to its precious little boxes.

Here's How Stories Work

Stories appear across the top of your Instagram feed, as a series of circles with the avatars of people and brands you follow.

Instagram

When you tap on a Story, it loads, begins playing, and advances from moment to moment automatically. So if someone has posted a series of updates throughout the day, an Instagram Story will take you through those moments in the same order they were uploaded. When you finish one person's Story, the app automatically advances to the next person or brand, and so on.

Like Instagram's main feed, and Facebook's News Feed, Stories will be ranked algorithmically — so you'll see the most recent updates from people you interact with most frequently getting the most prominent placement. The app only has room for five slots across the top, including your own Story, and Instagram says it is trying to make sure it teases you with whichever Stories are the most relevant at any one time. Once you start viewing Stories, you can see all the updates, from everyone you follow, over the the last 24 hours.

The new feature also has tools to let you see everyone who has viewed your Story, and to prevent people from viewing your Stories if you don't want them to. On the other hand, if you want to share a Story more widely, you can move pictures and video over to the main feed as well.

Creating a Story is also different, with a full-screen camera window oriented for portrait layouts, and tools for adding text, drawings, and emojis to photos.

When you launch the Stories camera, it's full-screen (rather than the square window you see in the normal Instagram camera). You can capture video just by holding down the button that appears on the bottom of the window. Once you've got your shot, or video, it just takes a tap to post it to a Story — but there are ways to add effects, too. A text tool will let you drop words or emojis across the screen. There are also three drawing tools with which you can paint, add highlight colors, or add neon hues to your shots. The experience is fast, casual and, well, very much like Snapchat.

The Snapchat Stories Story

It's hard to view Instagram Stories as anything other than a direct shot at (or, less charitably, blatant rip-off of) Snapchat Stories. While Instagram has added just enough of its own sauce, you could be forgiven for thinking you were, well, in Snapchat Stories.

Instagram has suggested that its inspiration comes from what the company is seeing on its own platform, not others, and that the new feature set is driven by what people are already doing on the platform using workarounds — like importing images with text over them from other apps, or using secondary accounts, so-called finstagrams, to post more casual and realistic content from their day-to-day lives. Instagram says its community wants to share more, but feels reluctant to put too much into the feed, and Stories present a way for people to add a lot more media without bulking up the main feed.

And yet, it's hard to see this update and not wonder if Instagram didn't set out to take what it saw as a huge driver for Snapchat, and simply import it into Instagram.

The company's head of product, Kevin Weil, told BuzzFeed News that's not the case. "It’s not where we came from," says Weil, who formerly ran product at Twitter. "I think that the Stories format is seeing broad adoption and I think will be adopted by a lot of folks. In the same way that Facebook has a feed, and was first to introduce a feed, and now lots and lots of apps have feeds. Twitter was the first to use hashtags; now hashtags are everywhere. If you saw another service launch with hashtags, you wouldn’t think anything of it and you certainly wouldn’t expect them to call it something other than hashtags. I think Stories will be viewed the same way. It’s a new format, it’s a powerful format, it’s one that I think will be adopted across the industry."

Okay! Be that as it may, a lot of people will find this update a bit... familiar when it pushes live, globally, on Tuesday for iOS and Android.

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