Lukman Shobowale

Last week, ahead of WWDC, there was a ripple of news when Axios  discovered  that Bozoma Saint John — one of the more noticeable execs at the company for being a woman of color, who led an Apple Music demo at the previous year’s WWDC to some acclaim — was leaving Apple. Now TechCrunch has learned where she’s landing: she’s going to Uber. We received the news via a tip, and have confirmed the appointment through multiple sources at Uber. The company, we understand, views the appointment as important in helping “turn the tide on recent issues.” As for what role she will be taking, that’s something we’re still trying to figure out. We understand that Uber will be making more details public later. Saint John’s  track record is in marketing  — most recently at Apple but also with a long stint at Pepsi, among other places. The appointment is a key move for Uber that could help shore up confidence in the company both internally and externally as it fights to justify its $70 billion

Uber has fired more than 20 people involved in a harassment probe, TechCrunch has confirmed. The ride share company began investigating at least 215 employees after the company was hit with sexual harassment claims earlier this year and has so far found at least 20 employees to be at fault in a wide array of discriminatory, bullying and other harassing actions. First reported in  Bloomberg  and confirmed with Uber, about 100 employees have so far been dismissed from those claims but another 57 employees are still under investigating, 31 are in some type of counseling or training for their actions and seven have received a written warning. Uber held an all-hands meeting to discuss the findings from the  Perkins Coie LLP  investigation with its 12,000 employees to discuss some of the details of this investigation, which, although it centers on harassment of any kind, started after former Uber engineer Susan Fowler  penned a scathing letter  accusing the company of sexual harassme

The problem is this: Facebook has become a feedback loop which can and does, despite its best intentions, become a vicious spiral. At Facebook’s scale, behavioral targeting doesn’t just  reflect  our behavior, it actually  influences  it. Over time, a service which was supposed to connect humanity is actually partitioning us into fractal disconnected bubbles. The way Facebook’s News Feed works  is that the more you “engage” with posts from a particular user, the more often their posts are shown to you. The more you engage with a particular kind of post, the more you will see its ilk. So far so good! It’s just showing you what you’ve demonstrated you’re interested in. What’s wrong with that? The answer is twofold. First, this eventually constructs a small “in-group” cluster of Facebook friends and topics that dominate your feed; and as you grow accustomed to interacting with them, this cases your behavior tochange, and you interact with them even more, reinforcing their in-group s