DealBook Conference: Kim Kardashian West Supports Instagram Removing ‘Likes’, Hacker News

Kim Kardashian West and her mother, Kris Jenner, discussed the rise of their multimedia empire and the consequences of social media at the DealBook Conference on Wednesday afternoon.

Ms. Kardashian West, who has 151 million Instagram followers, said she supported the platform’s proposal to remove “Likes” from posts as a mental health move.

“It would be really beneficial,” she said. “I know the Instagram team has been having lots of inner conversations with a bunch of people to get everyone’s take on that and is taking it really seriously, and that makes me happy.”

What about those paid Instagram posts? Ms. Ms. Kardashian West said she decides on whether to accept offers from brands by taking into account her personal expenses and if it is “on-brand.”

“If I have a paid post that comes in, I think I can fund this amount of people behind bars that can help free them with simple legal fees that they just can’t afford then that would be worth it to me, even if the brand is off brand for me, ”she said. “I really weigh out things differently now than I used to.”

Ms. Kardashian West, who is studying to be a lawyer, has been active on prison reform and said she plans to start a law firm to help people who have been incarcerated.

– Sophia June

Facebook executive defends Libra as an “innovation.”

David Marcus said he knew there would be an enormous amount of backlash to Libra, Facebook’s cryptocurrency announced earlier this year.

Mr. Marcus, the Facebook executive in charge of Libra, admitted he would have done things differently in announcing the initiative. He said he would have stayed away from any intimation that Libra was a “new currency.”Instead he would have underlined the idea that creating new financial infrastructure would help people, especially those in developing countries.

“The way I think about it is as a responsibility, we have to innovate ”on behalf of those underserved communities, Mr. Marcus said.

The Libra project, which was secretly incubated it inside the company for over a year before being unveiled in June, has faced a torrent of criticism from regulators and central bankers, who cautioned against the idea of ​​a new, unregulated method of transferring money across borders.

And the questions surrounding Libra come at a particularly inopportune time. Facebook has grappled with larger issues around privacy, antitrust and disinformation in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election. Facebook initially had 27 partners that it hoped would help give the cryptocurrency legitimacy and spread it. Only 20 remain.

Marcus said he was confident that the partners who had dropped out – including big names in financial services industry like PayPal, Mastercard, and Stripe – would ultimately want to be “part of the innovation” that Libra will bring.

–Davey Alba

Why the government shouldn’t block Big Tech’s acquisitions of start-ups.

Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of Instagram, said that he believed breaking up big tech companies prescribed a “general medicine” to “very specific strains” of problems.

“If big companies weren’t allowed to buy little companies, you would get a bunch of innovation that wouldn’t end up taking off, ”said Mr. Systrom, who founded the company with Mike Krieger.

The pair sold it to Facebook for $ 1 billion in 2012. Mr. Systrom left the company six years later, reportedly over disagreements about how Facebook asserted more control over the photo-sharing app.

The model of allowing bigger companies to give small ones the runway to figure out how “to grow and thrive” is a model Systrom said he agreed with, and he warned against judging companies for their decisions in retrospect.

“When someone comes to you and offers $ 1 billion for 11 people, what do you say? ” Systrom asked Mr. Sorkin.

– Davey Alba

Airbnb unveils plans to verify every listing.

Airbnb plans to conduct a comprehensive review of every property listed on its platform, aspart of a series of initiativesto give customers “peace of mind,” said Brian Chesky, the company’s chief executive.

By the end of next year,Airbnb will have checked the accuracy of the photographs and addresses on each posting, as well as verified that listings meet safety standards and that the hosts are who they say, Mr. Chesky said.

“We’re going to make sure we can stand behind every single listing, every single host,” he said. “We want to give peace of mind to our guests.”

In addition, the company will guarantee refunds to guests who check in to an Airbnb that does not match the listing on the website, and establish a hotline to address concerns from neighbors.

– David Yaffe-Bellany

Khosrowshahi: Uber is on a strong path.

“Thank God we went public when we did,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive of Uber, at the DealBook conference on Wednesday morning.

Uber, the most prominent tech company to go public in 2019, has gone through a dramatic transition in the past two years, from the founder’s ousting to its rocky initial public offering in May.

In recent months, Mr. Khosrowshahi has launched intoa belt- tightening operationto cater to company investors’ appetite for a clearer path to profitability. Uber laid off more than 1, 000 workers in three rounds of job cuts, removed top executives and saw board members leave. Mr. Khosrowshahi said the company was on a “strong path” to achieve its goals.

“Fundamentally, the ride-sharing business is upscale, is global, is an attractive business, and is only going to get better in a competitive market, ”he said.

Wednesday represented a milestone in the arc of Uber’s story, as the company’s post-initial public offering lockup expired – meaning that shares held by early investors became eligible to trade on the market.

Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to President Obama and the board chair of We All Vote, a nonpartisan organization started by Michelle Obama, said she doesn’t see the current Democratic Party as a rebuke of the Obama administration.