These are some of the findings from Discovery Bank’s annual survey of its customers’ spending habits for the past year, done with Visa.

Conversely, for Cape Town to Joburg flights, the cheapest time is Wednesday at 9PM (the same goes for Durban to Joburg) and the priciest time is at midday on Sundays. From Durban to Joburg the most expensive is at 4PM on Sunday afternoon. Joburg to Durban is at its cheapest at 6AM on Sunday – good luck with that – while at its costliest at 1PM on Friday.

The data was compiled not just from Discovery Bank’s customers, but from 60-million global credit cards which made 13-billion transactions through Visa’s “vast global repository,” said the bank’s CEO Hylton Kallner. This gives a snapshot of how global economies in 2023 had to navigate a “post-pandemic revival, framed by persistent inflation and high interest rates”.

These macro-economic challenges “pushed up the cost of living” and demonstrated South Africa’s “economic resilience” through “more stable spending patterns,” he said of the SpendTrend24 report’s findings.

Apart from Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, data was analysed from 11 other global cities: five from emerging markets (Accra, Lagos, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam) and six in developed countries (Barcelona, Lisbon, London, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sydney).

While the study shows a “growth in online and digital transformation,” says Visa South Africa country Manager Lineshree Moodley, “South Africa stands out as a leader in the global shift towards digital wallets, online purchases and contactless payments”. Indeed, most Stuff readers will not be surprised to learn that we tech-savvy Saffas are using our smartphone wallets to pay instead of physical cards in actual wallets at the same adoption rates – or even “surpassing” them – as international cities.

Online shopping also grew five times faster in 2023 than shopping in-store. “South Africans are increasingly shopping online, surpassing other emerging market cities and keeping pace with developed ones,” the report found.

But what are actually we buying?

According to TrendSpend24, groceries, retail, travel and fuel make up nearly two-thirds of what we South Africans spend our money on. In emerging markets – that’s us in the Global South – most of our budget goes to essentials like groceries and petrol, with less spent on the non-essentials like travel.

The average grocery spend in South Africa in 2023 grew by 8%, double the 16% increase the year before. This was caused by last year’s bogey – inflation – with high food inflation rates of 12% and 11% for the last two years respectively. Grocery spending did not grow in the mass market, meaning most people spent less on food and more of their “disposable income being used to repay debts, due to higher interest rates”.

Our favourite shopping apps – used mostly on a Monday – are Checkers Sixty60, Pick n Pay’s asap! and Woolies Dash – which are exactly the same as our favourite stores to visit (preferably on a Saturday).

Takeaways and eating out only grew by 8% last year, down from the post-pandemic bounce of 28% in 2022. Interestingly, our favourite online takeaways are from Mr D, Nandos and Uber Easts, while our favourite places to eat or pick up food are at KFC, McDonalds and Spur. Our favourite day for takeouts is Friday, while most eating-out dining occurs on Saturdays.

Read More: Go green with us, says Discovery as it unveils new renewable power offerings

Globally, travel has returned to where it was before the pandemic but, not surprisingly, at a “higher cost”. You can’t blame Discovery Bank for pointing out its customers saved themselves R670-million through its discounted rates on flights, car hire and accommodation; nor that its clients earned R300-million back in Discovery Miles for eating healthily.

You will also not be surprised that its patriotic cardholders increased their international travel to France last year – by 6% in terms of all travel and by 3% from the year before – for that small sporting event called the Rugby World Cup.

One of the key findings – pleasingly – is how the “benefits and increased security” of digital payments – both through digital wallets and online purchases – have been driving rapid adoption around the world. “South Africa benchmarks well against global counterparts, with an impressive nine percentage point increase in digital wallet usage over the last year.”

Old Mutual scores an own goal

Dear @OldMutualSA please advise why you are refusing to release my mother’s money even though a court order has been provided. You are in contempt of court and I am about to lose my cool right now

— Seba (@Seba_S_M) March 5, 2024

Whoever responded from the Old Mutual X / Twitter account posted an A4-formatted PDF trying to explain what the problem was. It was an own goal in so many ways, and the wise heads at a financial institution like Old Mutual must be kicking themselves.

Seemingly, a junior staffer – with no awareness of the brand’s promises and lack of oversight – wrote a poorly worded response, which also misspelt the name of the complainant. The same uninformed responder seems to have replied out of their own frustration – which is hardly the right approach to dealing with a social platform characterised by outrage.

Regarding the tweet from Seba_S_M pic.twitter.com/mix7ynPbXE

— Old Mutual SA (@OldMutualSA) March 8, 2024

The offending PDF, which has over 9-million views, reveals that Old Mutual doesn’t understand that most of us mostly use our mobiles. This is certainly true for Twitter and just about all the other social networks, which I have long deleted from my phone to avoid the pointlessness of doom scrolling.

Old Mutual, like so many big businesses, especially financial institutions, clearly don’t use their own products. If they did, they would notice that the PDF was created on a larger screen and is designed to be read on that 14-inch/35cm screen.

An A4-sized document is very difficult to read on a 6-inch/15cm smartphone screen. This may be a first-world problem, which I readily admit it is, but it is deeply revealing about how out of touch big business is with the actual people who use their services.

I had the same issue with my bank, which sends an email every time there is a credit card payment or transaction on my account.

The only problem for that bank is that nobody has updated its IT policy for over a decade. Back in the 2000s, it became popular for businesses to automatically include a banner advert at the bottom of emails. Probably designed on a 27-inch/68cm iMac, these ads force the text in the email to resize when the banner is loaded. The end result is an impossible-to-read message because the marketing department hasn’t updated its methodology for over 10 years and still thinks such banners are useful.

In fact, all it shows is that the big firm is stuck in old and unworkable methodologies – and clearly doesn’t use its own services. It’s a subtle, perhaps sub-minimal, aspect of this avoidable own goal. But if you don’t know what size screen your customers are using, how much else are you getting wrong about life in the 21st century?

• This column first appeared in the Financial Mail 

Rather than typing up notes on my laptop during an interview, I can have a conversation with someone and record it. In the past, I seldom used the recordings I routinely made during interviews because it took so long to transcribe them.

For a few years, I used a transcription service (which wasn’t cheap) but then came AI transcription websites. Take your recorded .mp3 and upload it. Within 15 minutes, you have a pretty good transcript of that conversation. These days there are numerous such offerings, but I have been team Otter.ai for a good while now. The entry-level price of $10 – or R186 – a month seems steep, I know, but I often subscribe for a month or two and then unsubscribe until I need it again.

It also means I get two different work products, a podcast and an article, with minimum effort. I call this lazy journalism. But then again, I am a high-functioning lazy person.

For the last few years, I have used a dedicated recorder – made by a Japanese firm called Zoom, which predates the Covid-era software of the same name. I also schlepped a pair of Sennheiser microphones (and XLR cables) with me. I have flown to New York and Nairobi with these and was always aggrieved at the extra weight that made my backpack that much heavier.

But technology moves on, and often very swiftly.

Read More: 6 podcasts for your business brain

I was showing a friend yesterday (let’s call him Lyal) how I no longer carry an extra 2kg of audio gear for podcasts. Instead, I use lapel mics, known in the audio industry as lavalier mics, that connect to a USB-C or Lightning port. I’ve been using an excellent Sennheiser lapel mic with a Lightning adaptor and recently bought another with USB-C that I use with my iPad or MacBook. They weigh less than 100 grams together.

I can still record podcasts with ease – as I did with Workday’s Sayan Chakraborty in November – but I save myself from schlepping that extra gear.

As I was telling my friend, a friend of his (let’s call her Za) asked which mics to use.

There’s a brand called Boya, which makes the BY-M3 clip-on USB-C lavalier mic, and a Lightning connector BY-M2 model. They’re both on Takealot.com.

I use the Motiv Audio app from Shure for recording. It’s good and connects to Dropbox, which I use to upload and send to Stuff’s genius director of audio, Hans Baumgarten, for editing. Motiv is available on both Apple and Android.

This is the view of Ishmet Davidson, the chief executive officer of Media24, South Africa’s largest digital news publisher, which is owned by internet firm Naspers. He was testifying at the country’s Competition Commission inquiry into Google’s dominance in search and digital advertising.

Davidson has “played an active role in resisting any potential threat by government to interfere in or to curtail press freedom” in his 30-year career in publishing. But the biggest “threat to press freedom in our country is not from government, it’s from one of the wealthiest and most dominant companies in the world, Google.”

The Fourth Estate plays “a vital role in our democracy” which is “enshrined in our constitution,” he told the Media And Digital Platform Marketing Inquiry. “Yet today we find ourselves not just facing challenges relating to freedom of the press but challenges relating to the very existence of the press.”

The South African digital advertising revenue market grew from R3.5-billion in 2015 to R14.5-billion in 2022, Davidson said. But based on the latest statistics from the country’s IAB advertising body, with PwC, Google and Meta are “absolutely dominant with 97% market share, leaving publishers with the crumbs.”

“What’s particularly concerning is that in 2015, publishers had an 8% market share, which by 2022 had declined to 3%. On the other hand, during this time, Google’s dominance grew from 67% to 78% of the digital advertising market (with close to 100% of the search market).”

He added: “Even more shocking is Google’s advertising revenue growing to over R11-billion, at an average annual growth rate of 25%.”

In effect, Google’s dominance in digital advertising has done what South Africa’s apartheid government was never able to do and shut down critical voices, while weakening democracy. The National Party, which introduced Apartheid, spent decades trying to silence the mostly English-language newspapers, including independent media outlets like The Weekly Mail and Vrye Weekblad. It was voted out of power in South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994, which saw Nelson Mandela elected as president.

Moneyweb editor Ryk van Niekerk told the hearing that the mainstream media has played a “critical role during the past decade in exposing state capture” and has “contributed significantly to protecting our constitutional democracy”.

State capture is the phrase used to describe government corruption under the current ruling ANC party, which has crippled the provision of electricity (with as much as 12 hours a day without power due to rolling blackouts), as well as infrastructure and logistics. As much as $34 billion (ZAR500 billion) was looted during the “nine wasted years” of former South African president Jacob Zuma, said his successor, President Cyril Ramaphosa.

‘Fundamentally misunderstand’

Google and Meta have made written submissions and will testify later this month. X, formerly known as Twitter and owned by South African-born Elon Musk, has refused to participate.

Google claims in its written submission that it does not make much revenue from news. “While we appreciate that both publishers and search engines have an ads-funded business model, there is no competitive interaction between Google Search and a news publisher in relation to searches with news intent,” said the Google submission.

Meta’s submission claimed the competition investigation “fundamentally misunderstand the relationship between publishers and the Meta platforms, and materially exaggerate the degree to which publishers’ content drives users to access Feeds and, by corollary, advertising content on Meta’s platforms.”

Referring to its global Google News initiative, the search giant said it gave publications funding and training.

But Davidson said this $300-million it has given to the world’s media in the past six years represents just 0,03% of its global advertising, totalling $1,07-trillion, according to figures from the Securities and Exchange Commission and Google for the years 2018 to 2023.

This “is just altruism disguising greed” much “like tossing crumbs to appease the peasants,” he told the commission, adding it “is designed to increase their stranglehold over the media industry”.

“We don’t want their charity. What we do want is to be fairly compensated for our content.”

‘40% of Google Search from news’

A Swiss media study last year found that Google makes as much as 40% of its revenue from media content, or “$176-million per year in Switzerland alone,” while news content “accounts for the majority of Google’s $280-billion annual revenue,” wrote Courtney Radsch, the director of the Centre for Journalism & Liberty and a fellow at the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law & Policy.

The study, conducted by FehrAdvice & Partners, concluded that Google searches using media content bring in an estimated revenue of around $440-million a year.

US publishers are owed between $11-billion and $14-billion a year by Google and Meta, according to research published last year by academics from Columbia University and the University of Houston.

Davidson’s views were echoed by Van Niekerk, who is also Moneyweb’s commercial manager. He said his digital publication “is trapped in Google’s ecosystem” with 43% of its traffic directed to it by the search giant.

Publishers are also at the mercy of Google’s own agendas. “Unfortunately, Google changes the algorithm often without informing publishers, which, in Moneyweb’s case, has led to a sudden drop in traffic. It is a big problem for us,” he told the hearing. “If Moneyweb is not part of this [Google] ecosystem, we will close our doors.”

Google reaps the rewards

Google reaps the major economic rewards from the work the media does. “Moneyweb invests heavily in editorial content, and it seems that Google and other digital platforms benefit financially from the content,” Van Niekerk said.

“Journalism is in danger,” Caxton chairman Paul Jenkins told me. “Digital advertising follows eyeballs and does not discriminate between clickbait, fake news and cutting-edge journalism.” Moneyweb is part of the Caxton stable.

Despite generating 2.36-billion search page impressions in 2023, News24, part of Media24 which is South Africa’s largest digital news publisher, received only 4% of click-throughs. The balance was “monetized by Google,” CEO Davidson told the hearing.

News24’s total number of Google impressions – from its search, News and Discover offerings – totalled 5,2 billion, with a 5% click-through rate. Some 5 billion – or 95% – of the impressions were “for Google’s benefit.”

But, said Davidson, that 5% clickthrough, represents 44% of News24’s referral traffic.

“So, without Google, we’d lose almost half of our referral traffic and would be in even deeper trouble.”

“As Google likes to pretend, news may well be ‘insignificant’ in the global Google universe, but it’s hardly insignificant when we take the contribution in impressions.”

Sbu Ngalwa, the chairperson of the South African National Editors’ Forum, told the hearing the day before that “the entire industry is in trouble.”

“Fair compensation to us should be based on the value that the platforms derive from the content. The reality is that we don’t know what that value is because the tech companies do not provide that information,” he said.

Khadija Patel, from the International Fund for Public Interest Media, and a former editor of South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper, warned that “what we are mourning is not the death of newspapers. What instead we are really afraid of is a future without access to news at a low price point. When I say news, I mean high-quality independent news. That’s what newspapers ultimately represented.”

Adriaan Basson, News24’s editor-in-chief, summed up the dilemma for the media industry, which actually creates the content, in that Google, “without a newsroom” and without generating its own content, makes the most money from that content.

This article first appeared on Forbes, where Toby Shapshak is a senior contributor.

The most famous intersection between east and west Berlin, and the site of the famous “you are now leaving the American sector” sign. You can now buy T-shirts emblazoned with the sign, which makes for great gifts.

Berlin’s cultural and militaristic equivalent of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, the Brandenburg Gate similarly has longstanding militaristic and patriotic associations.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe | Cora-Berliner-Straße 1, 10117 Berlin 

When I first read about this, I was irrationally irritated that such a prime spot in Berlin would be the site of such a memorial. I thought it was just so, well… “obvious” and trite. Especially with a name like that.

Cookies Cream | Behrenstraße 55, 10117 Berlin

This quirkily little area is part market, part touristy haven. There are food stalls and other trinkets on sale during the day in the open square; and a good assortment of restaurants around the sides. German food is in abundance. The currywurst is a Berlin staple, as are the platters of sausage with potato salad.

MUJI Berlin | Hackescher Markt 1, 10178 Berlin

Meta is the epitome of surveillance capitalism, exploiting our personal data – and young girls – for money. Shame on anyone who still believes they are reaching their audiences when all your marketing money is doing is propping up a “vast paedophile network,” according to an investigation last year by The Wall Street Journal with researchers from Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Every day, 100,000 children experience sexual harassment on Instagram and Facebook, according to Meta’s own documents, as revealed in a New Mexico attorney-general lawsuit last year.

“Meta’s Instagram helped connect and promote a network of paedophiles,” said Senator Dick Durbin, the head of a Senate judiciary committee, which grilled Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg last month, as well as the CEOs of X/Twitter, Snap Discord and TikTok.

Nvidia, meanwhile, actually does something useful for society – and the stock markets are clearly excited about the potential of its processors needed to power artificial intelligence (AI). Nvidia has quietly grown its expertise and market share for making graphical processing units (GPUs), which have been used by the gaming industry for decades. Rendering the complex videos of games requires processors to perform multiple processes at the same time, which turns out to be the same requirement for AI applications.

Never has one industry — AI — owed so much to another — gaming. Parents of gaming-obsessed teenagers can take some solace that their kids’ infatuation with first-person-shooter (FPS) games has helped advance humanity – albeit tangentially.

The Nvidia numbers are extraordinary. The 16.4% increase pushed Nvidia’s valuation to $1.94-trillion, putting it in third place behind tech giants Microsoft and Apple. Its $272-billion increase is about that of the combined value of Goldman Sachs Group and Boeing; while much more than car makers Ford, General Motors and Stellantis put together ($176-billion), according to data from TradingView.

Read More: Nvidia’s secret “TrueHDR” tool uses AI for real-time HDR-gaming conversion

Nvidia’s market cap is – amazingly – bigger than the GDP of all but 11 nations in 2022, including Brazil’s $1.92-trillion and Australia’s $1.69-trillion, according to Investopedia.

“Despite concerns over its high valuation, Nvidia’s unparalleled AI-related intellectual property, rooted in decades of visionary investment, sets it apart in a league of its own,” says Rosenblatt Securities analyst Hans Mosesmann. Indeed it does. Like OpenAI, whose ChatGPT took the world by storm in November 2022, Nvidia is central to the AI industry.

And the good news will keep on coming, says Nvidia’s co-founder and chief executive, Jensen Huang. “Accelerated computing and generative AI have hit the tipping point. Demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries and nations,” he said in a press release.

“We are one year into generative AI,” Huang told the New York Times. “My guess is we are literally into the first year of a 10-year cycle of spreading this technology into every single industry.”

• This column first appeared in the Financial Mail

“The tech giants have argued that news is not essential and that publishers are lucky to have their platforms driving traffic to their sites, which can then convert that traffic into subscriptions,” writes Haaris Mateen, an assistant professor at the University of Houston, and Anya Schiffrin, a senior lecturer in Discipline of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

But their study finds that “news is important to Big Tech platforms” even if value is created for both sides.

Big tech companies have “resisted paying traditional licensing and copyright fees” and are not forthcoming about providing audience traffic and impression numbers. What payments they make are “meagre” and often through small grants or private arrangements with major outlets, the academics found.

“Unsurprisingly, by keeping the cost of goods sold (news) down, Google and Meta have grown rich off the advertising revenue they reap from attracting the world’s eyeballs to their sites.”

“Meanwhile, news deserts have become a global problem as outlets struggle with the loss of revenue, although some – like The New York Times and The Guardian – have been able to offset the losses with subscriptions and other income.”

In South Africa, publisher Caxton with the Centre for Free Expression has asked Google to “provide transparent answers to a list of well-considered questions,” Caxton chairman Paul Jenkins tells the FM. These are the “very questions which media around the world seek answers to and yet we as the media face the byzantine maze of confidentiality protection that secretive organisations such as Google hide behind”.

This aims at “redressing of the disproportionate power of digital advertising platforms over the news industry”.

Caxton, like other media organisations in South Africa, has been wrestling with the digital revolution for nearly 25 years, he adds, and in that time the “behemoths of the digital world” have come to dominate the industry. The average American now spends seven hours a day on a screen, he says.

“Our ability as news organisations to hold government to account and report on society has never been more under threat. Journalism is in danger – and digital advertising follows eyeballs and does not discriminate between clickbait, fake news and cutting-edge journalism.”

“It is not melodramatic to say news as a public good and freedom of expression is at a tipping point, not unlike the climate crisis. But the blame game and finger-pointing are unhelpful,” Jenkins adds.

“News publishers all over the world have tried to estimate what Google and Meta owe them for the news they distribute to audiences. This is a difficult task due to a lack of publicly available data about audience behaviour and because a lack of competition makes the price tech companies pay for news artificially low,” Mateen and Schiffrin concur.

The academics have created a methodology they say is “transparent and replicable,” having used insights from over 50 years of research in the economics of bargaining to find the “fair” payment for news.

The “methodology offers the flexibility to change underlying assumptions based on the market and geography being analysed”.

It’s also important that publishers stick together as they negotiate, they say, as “more value is created when bargaining is collective”.

Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, which was enacted in 2021, is a good template, they argue, and has forced Google and Meta to strike deals with Australian media organisations, resulting in payments of A$200-million a year.

“It’s no surprise other governments are looking at Australia’s law to find ways to get payments for their news too,” say Mateen and Schiffrin.

Read More: What’s wrong with programmatic advertising – and why you should never trust Google or Facebook again

Other countries considering similar laws are Indonesia, New Zealand, South Africa and Switzerland, they add. Japan has done its own study and “warned tech platforms [that] low payments to publishers could violate antimonopoly laws”.

Caxton and the Centre for Free Expression want to “use our generous South African constitution to protect our rights to freedom of expression and information, and to provide us with access to the data we need to protect these rights,” Jenkins tells the FM.

“We don’t accept that the trope of commercial confidentiality is an excuse for secrecy”.

• This feature originally appeared in the Financial Mail

In short: Google and Facebook lied. They promised a range of never-seen-before, easy-to-communicate nonsense about how to market to individual consumers.

But they have never actually delivered on this promise and 25 years later, their hyperbole has become fact. After over two decades of this, the marketing industry is convinced that programmatic advertising actually works.

Just like first-time voters in the 2024 election will have never known anything but load shitting, a generation of marketers has grown up thinking programmatic advertising works – when all evidence proves it doesn’t. Research shows that 70% of such adverts are just ignored, while fraud is so rife it accounts for $20- to $50-billion a year.

Worse, it has sucked all the oxygen out of the media. For instance, the cost-per-impression (CPI) for programmatic adverts is 8c – of which Stuff only receives 1c. That’s just 12,5% for the actual media publisher – which has built up the exact following advertisers are looking for. Google gets 87% of the revenue for providing the mechanism.

Additionally, Meta is the “largest marketplace for predators and paedophiles globally” according to New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez.

Here is a selection of the articles and columns I have written for the Financial Mail and Daily Maverick. (As a quick aside, here’s how to beef up your cybersecurity.)

Why Facebook and Google can’t be trusted

I wrote this cover story for the FM in 2022, detailing all of the scandalous lies told by programmatic advertisers and pointing out how surveillance capitalism only makes Facebook and Google richer – and society poorer. The headline says it all.

Google’s “dominance” succeeded where Apartheid couldn’t – forcing South Africa’s Fourth Estate onto “its knees”

South Africa’s Fourth Estate “is on its knees” as Google and Meta’s dominance has captured 97% of all digital advertising in the country, creating an “extinction crisis” for the media.

Programmatic advertising is killing local media

The media plays a vital role in democracy, but, globally and in South Africa, the media is dying. This is caused in no small part by the growth of programmatic advertising that has drained the media of its financial lifeblood.

Google lied: it’s making a fortune from news media

Google makes as much as 40% of its revenue from media content for its search business in Switzerland, according to new research. “The value of news is far higher than policymakers or publishers think it is, at least on Google Search, which accounts for the majority of Google’s $280-billion annual revenue.”

Show us the money, SA media tells Google 

Google and Facebook owe United States news publishers between $11bn and $14bn a year, according to new research, which proves that “news is important to Big Tech platforms”. In South Africa, news publishers Caxton and News24, with the Centre for Free Expression, have served an access-to-information request on Google to “provide transparent answers” about how its data is used. “Journalism is in danger,” warns Caxton chairman Paul Jenkins.

Why Google and Meta owe news publishers much more than you think – and billions more than they’d like to admit

New research by Columbia University and the University of Houston found that Google and Meta owe news publishers between $11- and $14-billion a year in the US alone.

Google’s ads like selling “cigarettes or drugs”

Only “illicit businesses (cigarettes or drugs) that could rival these economics” said Google Vice President for Finance Michael Roszak in a note that the search giant fought to keep from being made public. It is an apt comparison which has hooked the world on a habit it can’t kick.

“Search advertising is one of the world’s greatest business models ever created,” Roszak started the July 2017 note, adding, “We are fortunate to have an amazing business”.

Not a happy 25th birthday for “monopolist” Google

It wasn’t a happy 25th birthday for Google, which went on trial in September 2023 for monopolising the online search industry.

“Everybody talks about the open web — but there is really the Google web”

Google’s dominance is being challenged out by the US government in court – having bought or squashed any competition for the last two decades. “There is really the Google web” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told the blockbuster antitrust court case against the search giant.

Facebook is no better – it enables child sexual exploitation for profit

Zuckerberg has “blood on his hands”

Every day 100,000 children experience sexual harassment on Instagram and Facebook, according to a lawsuit by the New Mexico attorney general. Every day. Your marketing money is propping up a business used by criminals “to buy and sell children for sex”.

Facebook is a “product that’s killing people”

Facebook Messenger is being used “to coordinate trafficking activities,” according to Meta’s own internal documents. “Every human exploitation stage (recruitment, coordination, exploitation) is represented on our platform,” one document says. Facebook decided not to scan Messenger for harmful content as it would put the company at “a competitive disadvantage vs other apps who might offer more privacy,” according to a 2017 email.

Instagram’s child porn problem

The social network’s algorithms promote accounts used by a “vast paedophile network,” investigations reveal.

Facebook’s teen mental health Waterloo

“Meta has harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens,” according to a 233-page lawsuit by attorneys general of 42 States that have sued Instagram owner Meta. “Its motive is profit.”

Facebook lied: it knew teens were in danger

“Meta has profited from children’s pain by intentionally designing its platforms with manipulative features that make children addicted to their platforms while lowering their self-esteem,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James, part of a lawsuit by 33 attorneys general filed in California in October.

It’s personal: Facebook’s execs named in lawsuits

“Facebook, now Meta, has failed to protect young people on its platforms and instead chose to ignore or, in some cases, double down on known manipulations that pose a real threat to physical and mental health – exploiting children in the interest of profit,” said Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey. They allege that Facebook knowingly “put the public at risk” by, as Haugen so famously said, “prioritising growth over safety”.

Other investigations

A marketplace of girl influencers managed by moms and stalked by men – New York Times

Seeking social media stardom for their underage daughters, mothers post images of them on Instagram. The accounts draw men sexually attracted to children, and they sometimes pay to see more.

How Facebook and Instagram became marketplaces for child sex trafficking – The Guardian

A two-year Guardian investigation found that the messaging service was used by criminals “to buy and sell children for sex” – which Meta is struggling to prevent.

Meta is the world’s ‘single largest marketplace for paedophiles’, says New Mexico attorney general – The Guardian

Raúl Torrez is taking the company to court and expects further details to emerge about its knowledge of child sexual exploitation on its platforms.

‘Not letting me on Snapchat was the best thing my mum ever did for me’ – The Guardian

When her 14-year-old child asked for social media, Guardian advice columnist Annalisa Barbieri held firm. Thank goodness, says her daughter, now all grown up.

Meanwhile, programmatic advertising is actually useless – and misinformation is rife

Why Google gets it wrong about me

Google replies on snooping through your search activity primarily to target you with advertising. The only problem – for Google – is that I stopped using it six years ago, and most of the things I searched for (tech product prices) were for Stuff, and not me personally. Also, who wears such fugly shoes?

Google scored “billions” for video ads nobody watched

For the last three years, Google’s video partner ads missed the firm’s own targets by 80% and such ads often appeared as muted ads in hard-to-see places on no-name websites.

How websites trick you into accepting cookies

You may have heard of dark patterns – which are the unethical ways that websites force users into accepting cookies.

Chatbots spew fake info via clickbait websites

Generative AI has a dark side, already, as scammers use it for “proliferating” misinformation websites, powered by programmatic advertising.

What’s wrong with so-called influencers

Anybody can be famous. But famous for what?

South Africa’s competition authorities have finally woken up to the economic damage of these advertising monopolies

SA’s Competition Commission disrupts Google’s unrepentant advertising monopoly

A blockbuster announcement in August 2022 means Google needs to highlight better which results are paid for, potentially disrupting how the search engine giant shows its advertising. It also focused on Google’s monopoly as the default search engine for Android smartphones. The only surprising thing about this is why it took so long.

Google tracks phones even when people opt-out

The search giant has been accused — again — of snooping on its users and invading their privacy to obtain their location data.

Google is coming for your privacy in new and scary ways

Only Google would have the chutzpah to call an invasive new way to track people online “Privacy Sandbox”. The ironically named feature will track you so it can monetise you by serving ads. It’s not about privacy.

Google finally faces the antitrust music

There has been a massive turnaround in the last few years, with the US Department of Justice launching its biggest antitrust lawsuit in two decades against Google in 2023. Brought forward by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and several States’ attorneys-general, they argue Google stifled innovation and therefore cost consumers more. There are two major issues they are being sued over.

The first is that Google broke antitrust laws by locking browser makers into using its services. The second important aspect the lawsuit raised is how Google pressurises smartphone manufacturers to preload its apps, as well as its Play Store and Gmail services.

Think Google is too big? So does the US government.

The Department of Justice launched its second lawsuit accusing the ‘behemoth’ of illegally building a monopoly — this time in online advertising.

Google “distorts platform competition” in the country – Competition Commission

The Competition Commission’s two-year process found similar monopolistic behaviour as international inquiries.

“Google influences platform competition because it is where most online journeys start,” says commission chair James Hodge. “The inquiry finds that Google search’s dominance and business model distort platform competition, as small and new platforms struggle for visibility and customer acquisition.” And: “Google search is a critical gateway to consumers for all platform categories, and its business model of paid search alongside free results favours large established platforms.”

Is Google, Facebook and adtech anti-competitive? SA’s watchdog is investigating

The Competition Commission will investigate the impact of adtech through its Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry (MDPMI). The inquiry is based on the “commission’s view that there may exist market features in digital platforms that distribute news media content, and associated Adtech markets, that impede, distort, or restrict competition and which may have adverse implications for the news media sector of South Africa”.

How the EU is saving the internet

The European Union is doing what American lawmakers have been unable to do – rein in the dominant and unmitigated powers of big tech and social platforms.

A quick glossary:

• GDPR – General Data Protection Regulation privacy legislation.
• DSA – Digital Services Act
• DMA – Digital Services Act

Big tech meets big EU

New European legislation aims to rein in the surveillance capitalism of social media and tech giants. They made billions of dollars in profit before anyone realised they were, er, overstating their abilities — except, arguably, for overturning democracies (see Brexit and the 2016 US presidential election).

The EU’s Digital Services Act will make the internet a safer place

The European Union’s wide-ranging Digital Services Act came into effect on 25 August 2023 to provide much-needed oversight for “very large online platforms” which the EU defines as having over 45 million users. They now “must apply the new law,” tweeted European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. “We’re bringing our European values into the digital world.”

The new DSA laws have far-reaching consequences for the 40 Big Tech firms if they fail to stop abuse, misinformation, propaganda, child porn, vaccine denialism, and the selling of fake and counterfeit goods.

EU watchdog ruling threatens Facebook’s ad revenue

Because Facebook – and all the other Big Tech firms – have their European headquarters in tax-friendly Ireland, that country’s Data Protection Commission is the lead EU regulator. It fined Facebook €390-million (R7.3-billion) in February 2023.

This effectively undermines Facebook’s business model for selling advertising in a market of 450-million people in 27 countries. This is 5% to 7% of the social giant’s advertising revenue, says Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives. “This could be a major gut punch,” he said. Facebook made a whopping $118-billion in revenue in 2021.

How much is your privacy worth?

Apple’s ad-tracking costs social media $10-billion

After it introduced controversial privacy settings in early 2021, which reduced the ability for advertisers to track iPhone users and their app activity, it cost Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as much as $10-billion (R156-billion) that year, according to an investigation by The Financial Times.

Apple gets 36% cut of Google’s search deal

Google pays Apple a whopping 36% of the advertising revenue it generates from its deal as the exclusive search engine for Safari. This gobsmacking revelation was made in the US government’s anti-monopoly court case against Google – which both Apple and Google have tried to keep from going public.

Misinformation is rife on social media

How social media became the new frontiers of propaganda

Social media has allowed conspiracy theories, disinformation and anti-vaxxers to spread because it brings more eyeballs, and therefore more advertising, as I wrote in 2022.

Chatbots spew fake info via clickbait websites

Generative AI has a dark side, already, as scammers use it for “proliferating” misinformation websites, powered by programmatic advertising.

None of the other social giants are any better – especially TikTok

TikTok data privacy comes to the EU

Europe’s war against privacy issues keeps on rolling, with TikTok being the latest social media platform to be fined. This fine – amounting to €345-million or R6.8-billion – was for how it dealt with children’s accounts under the EU’s very strict GDPR privacy legislation.

The Titanic never sank on TikTok

Misinformation’s newest frontier is the short-form video app, where conspiracy theories regularly run rampant.

Advertising is not the only industry Google throws its weight around

Sonos beats Google in first of three patent lawsuits

Google’s voice-activated speakers are amazing but the technology was invented by Sonos, the maker of the gold standard in music streaming speakers. “Google has been blatantly and knowingly copying our patented technology,” Sonos CEO Patrick Spence said in August 2021 of the lawsuit, where the courts ruled Google had stolen the patented technology.

“Why are you typing on a smartphone?” I replied. It doesn’t have the screen for 10-finger typing, and it’s not the most efficient way to input data.

I have been using two more appropriate options for years. I use a swiping keyboard – either Apple’s own or my preferred option, Microsoft’s Swiftkey. I dictate a lot, too, using Swiftkey, which is superior to all the other options I have tried.

The dictation secret is to verbalise punctuation when you want a “comma” or a “full stop”. You also need to clean up the dictation because it’s often slightly incorrect. For instance, whenever I say “Ramaphosa”, it comes out as Rama Poser. Make of that what you will.

The second friend is a doctor who makes rounds every day in a large hospital and wants to upgrade his five-year-old hospital-issued iPad. Let’s call him Evan.

Appropriate options

They have very different needs – or use cases if you want the industry jargon – and they are both already in the Apple ecosystem. I always advise people to stick with what they know and have – especially if it’s one ecosystem because of how well it all works together.

Paul wants to view plans and PDFs that require a large screen. The obvious choice for him is a 12.9-inch iPad Pro. The current 6th-generation model comes with an extremely speedy M2 processor.

Evan needs to look at patient records and interact with Google Drive, which is helpful for having access to an entire set of records and other data. I suggested he pick up the 10th-generation iPad, which is light and, well, cheap(ish).

It still uses an older A14 Bionic processor, and not the new M-range of Apple silicon, but I am rigorous in only advising people to buy what they need – or can afford.

I suggest that people don’t go with the cellular option because you can very easily use your phone’s hotspot. The extra expense and secondary SIM card are another level of complication. I ended up with a cellular version of the iPad Pro 11, because there wasn’t stock of the WiFi-only option, but I have an extra data SIM as part of my Vodacom Red contract. (Yes, I’m still on contract.) But I very seldom use it.

Storage

When I was upgrading my iPhone and my wife’s iPad Pro a few years ago, I calculated the best storage option for a smartphone or tablet is 256GB. The entry-level 64GB or 128GB are too small for our cloud-based way of working or streaming. The same goes for the opposite end of the spectrum. Those larger storage options are unnecessarily expensive. You really don’t need to download that many Netflix or Showmax series at the same time.

Do you need a pencil?

I thought the idea of an Apple Pencil was wonderful, but I found I rarely used it. The difference is that I don’t mark up documents like a lawyer does, nor annotate plans like Paul will. The second-generation pencil is the one you’d want as it magnetically clips to the side of the tablet and charges that way too.

But I do use a keyboard regularly. There are two main keyboard options, which are called the Magic Keyboard and Smart Keyboard Folio. Each now has a slightly cheaper version. I ended up with the Magic Keyboard, and I’m very happy with the more sophisticated option. It has a clever hinge that holds the screen up and at the right angle. It has a trackpad similar to the MacBook’s and has proved very handy. I use my 11-inch Pro as a substitute laptop for conferences and meetings. But it ain’t cheap. And it ain’t light – which is why I often take my iPad to events where you’ll often find me taking notes or recording podcasts.

Read More: (Admittedly minor) iPad adventures at a conference

I have a USB-C mic that I plug into the iPad and another Sennheiser model that works with my iPhone’s Lightning port. This saves me carrying a much heavier (but only by 300 grams or so) MacBook Pro and a Zoom recorder, plus microphones – which is what I used to use.

Retrospectively, I would have chosen the Smart Keyboard Folio, even though it’s missing a trackpad. It’s what I suggested to both Paul and Evan.

Also in the room, seated behind Zuckerberg, were the parents of children who killed themselves or committed self-harm after being exposed online to unwanted sexual advances. 

The Senate hearing comes on top of a lawsuit brought against Meta by the New Mexico attorney-general in December last year that has revealed e-mails and other internal documents in which Meta executives acknowledge the scale of the abuse.

The documents show that by Meta’s own count, as many as 100,000 children experience sexual harassment on Instagram and Facebook every day. 

The documents indicate company staff were aware that the Facebook Messenger feature was being used “to co-ordinate trafficking activities”. “Every human exploitation stage (recruitment, coordination, exploitation) is represented on our platform,” one document says. 

But company executives resisted scanning Messenger for harmful content — among the Meta documents is a 2017 e-mail that said doing so would put the company at “a competitive disadvantage vs other apps who might offer more privacy”. 

The documents refer to the sexual harassment of the 12-year-old daughter of an Apple executive via Instagram’s direct message feature. “This is the kind of thing that pisses Apple off to the extent of threatening to remove us from the App Store,” a Meta employee said in an e-mail.

The New Mexico lawsuit followed a two-year investigation by The Guardian, published in April last year, which found that Meta messaging services were used by criminals “to buy and sell children for sex”. The exposé quoted a 2020 report by the Human Trafficking Institute that Facebook was the platform most used to groom and recruit children, followed by Instagram and Snapchat.

“We’re seeing more and more people with significant criminal records move into this area,” former Boston Assistant District Attorney Luke Goldworm told the paper. Victims were often as young as 11 or 12, and a pimp could make up to $1,000 a night. In the four years up to October 2022, cases of social media child trafficking handled by his department rose 30% a year. 

Zuckerberg, appearing last month for the eighth time on the Hill, was joined at the Senate hearing by the CEOs of X (Linda Yaccarino), Snap (Evan Spiegel), Discord (Jason Citron) and TikTok (Shou Zi Chew). 

The hearing’s chair, Dick Durbin, said: “Discord has been used to groom, abduct, and abuse children. Meta’s Instagram helped connect and promote a network of paedophiles, Snapchat’s disappearing messages have been co-opted by criminals who financially sextort young victims.”

“Their design choices, their failures to adequately invest in trust and safety, and their constant pursuit of engagement and profit over basic safety have all put our kids and grandkids at risk,” he said.

Durbin showed a video of online child sexual victims relating their horror stories. “I was sexually exploited on Facebook,” one victim said, while another added: “I was sexually exploited on Instagram.”

As Graham said: “These companies must be reined in, or the worst is yet to come.”

Senator Ted Cruz pointed out that Instagram warns users that they might see child sexual abuse material but asks if they would like to “see the results anyway”.

“Mr Zuckerberg, what the hell were you thinking?” Cruz asked him. Zuckerberg replied: “Basic science behind that … [is] it’s often helpful to, rather than just blocking it, to help direct them towards something that could be helpful.”

Read More: Facebook lied: it knew teens were in danger

The Facebook CEO, who has previously argued that Holocaust denialists aren’t “intentionally getting it wrong”, told Cruz he would “personally look into it”.

But Zuckerberg was personally informed about the problem in 2021 by Facebook engineer Arturo Béjar, who also e-mailed Sheryl Sandberg, the then COO; Chris Cox, Facebook’s then chief of product; and Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram. 

Zuckerberg did not respond, Béjar told a Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing last year, adding that his own teenage daughter was sexually harassed on Instagram. “She and her friends began having awful experiences, including repeated unwanted sexual advances, harassment,” Béjar said in November. “She reported these incidents to the company and it did nothing.”

Zuckerberg told last month’s hearing that “the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health”.

However, Instagram head of policy Karina Newton e-mailed in May 2021 that “it’s not ‘regulators’ or ‘critics’ who think Instagram is unhealthy for young teens — it’s everyone from researchers and academic experts to parents. The blueprint of the app is inherently not designed for an age group that don’t have the same cognitive and emotional skills that older teens do.”

As Graham said, echoing what most parents feel: “If you’re waiting on these guys to solve the problem, we’re gonna die waiting.”

This column first appeared in the Financial Mail