The Wall Street Journal - 16.03.2020

B4| Monday, March 16, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

TECHNOLOGY WSJ.com/Tech

a while.

WhileFacebookInc. recom-

mended employees stay home

when feasible, it required large

blocks of staffers to remain at

the office to press on with cer-

tain work—such as the policing

of videos or images related to

child abuse or pornography—

deemed too sensitive to per-

form remotely.

“There are certain sensitive

content review areas that can’t

be done off-site,” a Facebook

spokesman said. In recent days

the company has started experi-

menting with allowing some

contractors handling less

charged issues to work from

home, he said.

The company employs more

than 15,000 contractors to help

Offices Move to

Kitchen Tables as

Routines Upended

The coronavirus outbreak

has forced West Coast compa-

nies to adopt blanket work-

from-home policies that could

span months and is changing

the way of life for many.

Todd McKinnon, chief execu-

tive of software companyOkta

Inc., said his company’s new re-

mote work plan was less than a

month old when it was trig-

gered March 5 by coronavirus

cases within 50 miles of the

company’s Bay Area offices. He

told his 2,250 employees to go

home immediately.

Mr. McKinnon is conducting

important company business, in-

cluding the weekly all-hands

meeting attended by all Okta

staff, from his laptop at the

kitchen table, having been

beaten out by his wife and son

for the home office. “I’m think-

ing of doing ‘Cribs,’ ” Mr. McKin-

non said, referring to the MTV

home-tour series. “If the mo-

ment strikes me, I might make

sure everyone is dressed in the

house and just walk around.”

Most Silicon Valley compa-

nies are already putting guard-

rails around hiring. Google, Ama-

zon and Microsoft this month

eliminated in-person candidate

interviews.

At Microsoft Corp., the shift

has made it difficult to evaluate

potential hires’ problem-solving

skills, typically tested by drilling

through engineering problems in-

person, a current employee said.

Some Amazon managers

have advised their employees

on health, and not just the cor-

onavirus.

One Bay Area Amazon em-

ployee said his boss reminded

him to go outside for some fresh

air. Another Amazon executive

said he was hunting for the ex-

act brand of string cheese, Frigo,

now cleared out of the com-

pany’s Palo Alto offices.

Michelle Roque, a full-time

Google contract worker in Moun-

tain View, Calif., said she missed

her desk plant.

This isn’t the first go-round

for remote work. International

Business Machines Corp. helped

pioneer the practice decades ago

before calling all employees back

to offices in 2017, when it cited

the need to increase collabora-

tion. Corporate leaders have long

been divided on the practice, dis-

agreeing on whether it lifts pro-

ductivity or impairs innovation.

Science Center. “It’s disappoint-

ing.” Ms. Simon-Thomas is a

member of Twitter’s more than

40-person Trust and Safety

Council, set up in 2016 as a fo-

rum for experts to advise on how

to prevent abuse on the platform.

While recent investor criti-

cism of Mr. Dorsey largely cen-

tered on his being a part-time

CEO at Twitter—sharing his time

with financial-services company

Square Inc.—industry officials

have for years said improving

conversation would make the

platform more appealing to users

and advertisers.

The company’s financial per-

formance is increasingly in focus

after Twitter last week said it

would seek to grow the number

of users it can show ads by 20%

or more this year and beyond. It

made the commitment as it an-

nounced a truce with activist

hedge fund Elliott Management

Corp. that pushed for better fi-

nancial performance and made

replacing Mr. Dorsey a key part

of its campaign.

“For Twitter to increase its

user rate quickly while also de-

creasing harmful content, Twitter

would have to learn how to get

users to post less harmful con-

tent,” said Susan Benesch of Har-

vard’ Universitys Berkman Klein

Center who has studied online

speech and is a member of the

company’s council. The problem,

she said, is “Twitter’s leadership

has talked plenty about wanting

to improve civility or ‘health’ as

they call it, but they’ve failed to

do or even allow others to do the

actual work.”

it police the platform, handling

everything from spam posts to

terrorist propaganda.

Silicon Valley offers a model

for where the rest of the nation

appears to be headed. Face-

book,Amazon.com Inc. and

Google were among the tech-

nology firms to recommend

working from home to their

employees in Seattle—site of an

early coronavirus outbreak that

included a worker at Amazon’s

offices there—as early as March

4. They quickly expanded the
   orders to the Bay Area, New
   York and, by late this week,
   around the globe.
   The companies declined to
   comment further.
   Big tech companies have
   built-in advantages over other
   industries now shifting to re-
   mote work. Its companies built
   the cloud-based systems, such
   as Google Docs and Dropbox Pa-
   per, that enable remote collabo-
   ration. They also developed the
   tools that power people in vari-
   ous lines of work, like messag-
   ing services, video calls and dis-
   aggregated software storage.
   The technology systems have
   helped the companies maintain
   operations and extend support
   to others. Google is developing
   a tool to help people navigate
   coronavirus testing, and cloud-
   software providerBoxInc. is
   offering unlimited capacity for a
   month to customers that need
   expanded storage.
   Still, the forced transition
   hasn’t been smooth, and that
   raises questions about what lies
   ahead for other industries less
   accustomed to life outside the
   office.
   YelpInc. in recent weeks
   spent millions of dollars on
   work-from-home equipment, in-
   cluding buying a laptop for ev-
   ery employee who didn’t al-
   ready have one, according to
   people familiar with the matter.
   “You’ll start seeing the
   breaking points,” said Aaron
   Levie, chief executive of Box,
   whose 2,000 employees have
   been home for a week. “A lot of
   organizations don’t have the
   technologies or culture to work
   this way.”
   Though Apple has encour-
   aged staff to stay away from the
   office for health reasons, many
   engineers say they continue to
   come into headquarters, heed-
   ing company policy that forbids
   unreleased products from being
   removed from campus. The
   company has loosened some se-
   curity restrictions but main-
   tains them on any software that
   might reveal the nature of off-
   limits projects, staffers say.

SAN FRANCISCO—Silicon
Valley’s tech giants are a week
ahead of the rest of the country
in conducting a nearly million-
person, real-time experiment
into whether it is possible to
operate a fully remote work-
force in the age of the corona-
virus.
It’s early days. And it has
been messy.
At many firms, foremostAp-
pleInc., the shift is especially
tricky because of its tight rules
around what work can be done
remotely due to the secrecy
around its products.
In recent days, software de-
velopers sent home by Apple
Chief Executive Tim Cook have
complained of slow download
speeds and mounting confusion
over still-evolving new internal
rules about what work they are
allowed to perform, staffers
say. Some workers can’t access
crucial internal systems from
home due to strict security pol-
icies meant to fend off outsid-
ers—which now includes off-
site employees.
AlphabetInc.’s Google was
overrun with requests after it
told its 119,000 employees to
put in for “work from home”
kits of monitors, cables and
other technological must-haves,
employees say. Facing a back-
log and no certain date of de-
livery, many San Francisco em-
ployees came in over the
weekend, despite requests from
Google to avoid doing so, and
hauled home desktop equip-
ment and personal effects like
family photos back with them.
The result is an eerie feeling
in Google’s offices, employees
say, akin to visiting the site of a
robbery. The snack bars, bereft
of candy and almond milk, are
bare. Even some dry-erase
boards have been wiped clean, a
nod to the possibility that the
offices could be abandoned for

BYROBCOPELAND
ANDTRIPPMICKLE

Work-at-Home Plans Hit Glitches

Confusion and security

requirements pose

hurdles to big Silicon

Valley firms’ shift

A Google employee sat outside the rapidly emptying headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.., last week.

GLENN CHAPMAN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

BEIJING—Popular short-

video app TikTok said it would

halt using China-based moder-

ators to monitor overseas con-

tent and shift that work to

those outside of China.

The decision will result in

the transfer of more than 100

China-based moderators to

other positions within the

company, according to people

familiar with the matter.

The move is the latest effort

by TikTok’s ownerBytedance

Inc. to distance itself from

concerns about it being a Chi-

nese-operated company. The

soaring popularity of TikTok

has attracted the attention of

some American lawmakers

worried about its Chinese

roots.

TikTok is Bytedance’s short-

video app for markets outside

of China. While much of Tik-

Tok’s content moderation pro-

cedures have been localized

over the past year or two—in-

cluding in the U.S., where none

of its videos are monitored by

moderators in China, accord-

ing to a TikTok spokesman—

some markets such as Ger-

many still rely on human

moderators in China to review

content.

Bytedance this month told

more than 100 China-based

content moderators that they

will have to find a new posi-

tion within the company, peo-

ple familiar with the matter

said. While it isn’t a layoff,

some could end up leaving the

company as a result of the re-

structuring, these people said.

These human moderators

are a part of the “Trust and

Safety” team of Beijing-based

Bytedance. Their roles include

tagging videos and flagging

problematic content, the peo-

ple said. Many of them speak

foreign languages and are fa-

miliar with specific foreign

cultures, they said.

—Yoko Kubota

and Raffaele Huang

TikTok to

Shift Video

Vetting Out

Of China

combine serving healthy conver-

sation with growth,” said Nick

Pickles, Twitter’s global director

of public-policy strategy.

Two academic teams who ini-

tially set out to work with Twit-

ter abandoned their plans, while

another group is struggling to

get some of the data promised.

Members of Twitter’s advisory

council of researchers, activists

and other experts say they feel

boxed out by Twitter.

Since his tweets on the issue,

Mr. Dorsey has grown less in-

volved with academics and activ-

ists who have volunteered to help

Twitter, according to researchers

and activists involved in those

initiatives.

Twitter declined to make Mr.

Dorsey available for comment.

“We had expectations that

we’d be able to influence the

world with our expertise,” said

Emiliana Simon-Thomas, science

director of the University of Cali-

fornia, Berkeley’s Greater Good

TwitterInc. Chief Executive

Jack Dorsey issued 13 tweets two

years ago emphasizing the need

to make conversations on the

platform less toxic. Mr. Dorsey

said Twitter needed to work with

outside researchers and hold it-

self publicly accountable for its

progress.

Now experts working with the

company say those efforts have

stalled, and some worry Twitter’s

commitment last week to boost

growth—made in response to

pressure from an activist inves-

tor—could further complicate

those attempts.

Twitter said there have been

delays in getting research proj-

ects off the ground, caused in

part by employee turnover and

shifting priorities within the

company, but added it would

continue to build tools to mini-

mize abuse.

“I think you can absolutely

BYDEEPASEETHARAMAN

Push to Stop Abuse

On Twitter Stalls

Troubling Tweets

Unique accounts reported for

perceived harmful content

Source: the company

5

0

1

2

3

4

million accounts

Abuse Hateful

conduct

Violent

threats

Jan.-June 2018July-Dec. 2018Jan.-June 2019

  







 



 

 





   

 



  





 

 















    

         











     

!"#$%#%$&#""

'



()

AUCTIONS

   



    

     

 

     



   

 

  

     

    

 

  !"#$!%#"!!

The Marketplace

ADVERTISEMENT

To advertise: 800-366-3975 or WSJ.com/classifieds

*+,-. /   





    

  



    

 















 







   

 

BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES

COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE







 



 


 
 


PRODUCTS

Ross-Simons Item#877575

To receive this special offer, use offer code:BEST206

1.800.556.7376 or visit ross-simons.com/best

$

99

Plus Free Shipping

8-9mmCulturedFreshwaterPearlHoopEarrings

14kt yellow gold.^3 ⁄ 4 " hanging length. Snap-bar closure.

Also available in black pearl. Item #899623

Shown larger for detail.

The pearl earrings

your collection needs!

OurbestsellerisaRoss-Simons

exclusiveyou'resuretolove.

Two cultured freshwater pearls captured

between 14kt yellow gold hoops add

just the right amount of elegance

toanylook.Afreshtakeonpearl

earrings and a fancy spin on hoops.