Ideaforge

Doing more with less: This is what marketers get asked for when they join an early-stage startup. British consultant Lucy Heskins knows firsthand how overwhelming that can be, which is why her services can both replace and complement early in-house marketing staff. Either way, it often involves educating the founders about the job to be done.

“Too many people fail to realize that marketing is the process of understanding your customers, building appropriate channels to reach them and ultimately meeting their needs (profitability),” she wrote on her site, Oh, blimey.

TechCrunch is asking founders who have worked with growth marketers to share a recommendation in this survey. We’ll use your answers to find more experts to interview.

Having earned “scars and stripes” at various startups, Heskins recently joined “tech for good” company Big Lemon as a part-time head of growth, but still offers her services to other teams as a SaaS and early-stage startup marketing consultant. If you are a marketer yourself or thinking of hiring one, read on: She shared some compelling insights with TechCrunch.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

How do you collaborate with the startups you work with as a consultant?

Typically I will work with startups in two ways. The first will be project-based. So for example, when they want to explore a potential new customer market or introduce a freemium strategy.

The other way is as a mentor or extension to their marketer. Often I will work with marketers who’ve never worked in a startup and they can bounce ideas or strategies off me. It helps speed up their learning and time to deliver results.

How do your roles as an employee and as a consultant nourish each other?

I’ve experienced the very real pains/challenges/opportunities a startup presents, especially as an early-stage employee. I’ve come in, helped change business models, explored things like freemium and repositioned brands. It’s tough. So as a consultant, I can pass on my learnings (and mistakes). And I get to work with some great startups who are open to trying new things. Plus, having worked in four startups now, I get the pressure they’re facing and can adjust my approach accordingly. There’s a lot of plates spinning, and I get that.

What do early-stage startups typically misunderstand and need to know about startup marketers like you?

In my experience, there are a few mistakes startups often make.

The first is hiring a marketer too soon. I’ve come into startups, thinking I was coming in to set up their in-house function. However, very quickly you realize that they’ve jumped the gun and think they’ve got product-market fit when they are nowhere near it. This can cause conflict because the startup’s expecting one thing (say, revenue) but the marketer is missing a few basics to be effective (value proposition, an idea of how “painful” the problem is that they are solving, lack of involvement in areas like pricing).

The next mistake is not trusting their marketer. All too often I hear of marketers who’ve gone into a startup only to learn that their ideas are put on the back burner because the founder(s) — and this is typically first-time founders — don’t quite understand marketing and will push them to deliver short-term results (leads).

Lastly and probably the biggest mistake is applying what worked at a previous business. When joining a startup, you’re starting from scratch — new customers, new markets, go-to-market strategy. There’s a bias for wanting to use what worked previously, but people forget … your customers and markets are totally different. You can’t just replicate.

What should be the main focus of a startup’s first in-house marketer?

Of course, it depends really on the stage of the startup; however, whatever stage you’re at, it needs to be customer research/development. I’d be very wary of a marketer who doesn’t suggest this as one of their first activities.

You need to unlock why customers buy or subscribe to the startup’s product. This will determine your traction channels, your proposition, your pricing model — everything.

Why should startups consider hiring a freelancer or agency to help with their marketing instead of doing everything in-house?

I think it’s a great idea to outsource until the startup understands (1) if there’s an actual problem that needs solving and (2) whether there’s a market big enough to actually turn it into a business.

Whilst you’re in this period, you can’t afford to learn new skills — even though it may seem attractive/”cheap” to do it in-house, it really isn’t. It can actually set you back. Outsource the specifics and focus on what you do best. Once you’ve got a better idea of validation, then you can start to see which skills to bring in-house.

Have you worked with a talented individual or agency who helped you find and keep more users?

Respond to our survey and help us find the best startup growth marketers!

Why have you decided to focus on SaaS startups? What makes them different when it comes to marketing?

I love working in SaaS, especially B2B SaaS. What makes it different, for me, is that the role becomes part marketing, part product, part commercial. You get to look at the entire customer experience, and because many SaaS products are trial/subscription-based, your focus needs to be on retention. You’re only as good as your last month, so it forces you to work and think harder.

Plus, B2B SaaS is actually very, very cool now. Just because you work in B2B marketing doesn’t mean you need to be boring!

What are some key takeaways from your Early-Stage Startup Marketing Playbook?

I created the playbook because I sat in a board meeting and, when an investor was asking about the go-to-market strategy, I realized that there wasn’t a clear toolkit for helping early-stage startups to map out the market, nor think about the steps leading up to launching a product.

There are many takeaways, but I think the main one and the most valuable is providing clarity as to what specific steps go into a go-to-market strategy and how it all works together.

I talk you through how to speak to the customers who’ll actually buy from you — not those who tell you they love your product but run a mile when it’s time to pay — and how to determine which market channel is best to reach them.

What is customer-led growth? And how can it help startups adapt post-COVID?

Customer-led growth is a strategy that combines product, marketing and sales. It views your product through the lens of a customer with the aim of working out how value is delivered to them “whenever, wherever and however they need it.” It’s something I learned and studied from the co-founders of Forget the Funnel.

The idea is that you look at the entire customer journey, from the struggle stage right through to when they’re a customer, and you break each section down to where there’s an opportunity for growth. It’s really helpful for startups — especially post-COVID because chances are, your customers’ needs have changed.

How your customers derive value from your product changes all the time. This framework gives you a starting point.

How is content marketing best used?

I often say to startups, stop creating content for the sake of it. A lot of content that’s created doesn’t allow for where your customer may be in the buying process. It doesn’t consider what’s motivating them to solve their problem.

As a result, the results you get are skewed. Things take much longer than they should. Customers get confused about what it is your business actually is/does. Everyone starts to lose respect for marketing.

Again, you need to take it back to the customer and their journey and identify what content they need to overcome that particular problem that’s getting in the way of signing up/using your product.

Why is alignment with sales important, and what does it involve?

I’ve worked in startups that have been sales-led (so, complex products, long lead time) and it’s important to understand what sales needs to uncover to help move a customer to the next stage. Likewise, marketing can help sales to really dig into the proposition and understand what channels are best to convert leads.

I think when you work in a startup as a marketer, you have to roll up your sleeves and get involved in sales. It’ll help improve the content, strategy and revenue in the end.

So if you are working with a salesperson whose ultimate aim is to secure a call with a prospect, you can’t just go in and expect a prospect to say yes, immediately. There are a series of steps you and the salesperson need to go through in order to nurture and open up this relationship. It’s all about proving a set of hypotheses about your customer. Do they really hang out on LinkedIn? Are they bombarded with companies offering the same? Which proposition is working enough to get someone to agree to a call? Is that calendar link putting off prospects altogether?

I truly believe people do love to help, but it’s about working out what’s in it for them and how your product will make their life just that little bit easier.

Source: Tech Crunch

From the outside looking in, the construction industry appears ripe for tech innovation. The industry represents 6.3% of the U.S. GDP. There are close to 1 million general contractors (GCs) in the country, and anywhere between 3 million and 5 million workers on job sites every day.

Meanwhile, there’s a common (if somewhat justified) belief that construction firms are slow to adopt technology and are behind the digital curve.

But not every construction company is a technology laggard. While GCs are historically slower to adopt new technologies, this doesn’t necessarily make them behind the times. About 60% of construction companies have R&D departments for new technology, and the largest construction firms have substantial R&D budgets. Yet 35.9% of employees are hesitant to try new technology, according to JB Knowledge.

One way to interpret this is that there is a strong interest and need to take advantage of newer construction-centric technologies, but only if they’re easy to use, easy to deploy or access while on a job site, and improve productivity almost immediately.

These factors have made construction tech appealing to investors, who have poured at least $3 billion into the sector. Is construction tech the “it” place right now? Is it ripe for disruption, the way VC investors find attractive? If that’s true, what went wrong at Katerra? Is Procore justified in losing $1 for every $4 in revenue? And why does so little investment go into improving productivity at the job site where GC money is made — or lost — compared to back-office operations?

My experience to date says that construction is different from other sectors because of the significant variation among projects that originates in the way projects are financed, how risks are managed and the factors that drive variation among projects. Construction’s differences are not easily mitigated via data processing, as compared to fintech, for example, where all money is data-amenable to software processing. Addressing project variations will be key to succeeding in construction tech beyond the back office. Here are the critical factors to consider.

Project financing makes capital investment more difficult. While the Commerce Department reported that construction spending in the U.S. reached a record high of $1.459 trillion in November 2020, this doesn’t mean there are unlimited opportunities for construction tech. The reality is that GCs make few capital investments because they must fund investments in technology out of operating cash flow.

Construction projects are typically funded incrementally in phases as the project demonstrates progress. Delays or accidents can have a huge effect on cash flow. Overhead and G&A cost burdens are hated. Asking a GC to license technology as a capital purchase doesn’t always make sense.

GC ownership and business structure also make large capital investment more difficult. Most GC firms were founded by tradespeople and either started as, or remain, family-owned firms. Borrowing what’s considered the “family’s money” is a much more risk-averse decision compared to the way larger corporations evaluate productivity investments and put assets at risk.

Source: Tech Crunch

The Artemis Fund is a Houston-based firm built by three women with the goal of encouraging more women-led startups. The company launched in 2019 and has raised a $15 million initial fund, which closed earlier this year.

Diana Murakhovskaya, who launched the firm with Stephanie Campbell and Leslie Goldman, says that the three women met over a mutual interest in investing in startups, one that didn’t just write a check and walk away, but that was really involved in helping these companies grow and thrive.

“We launched the fund in 2019, and we were looking to raise a micro VC to invest in about 15 companies, and keep a concentrated portfolio where we can really help these companies,” she said. The LPs in the fund are split 50/50 between men and women with an equal capital share among them, she said.

The women recognized that female founders faced an up-hill battle when it came to getting funding. In fact, in 2019 Crunchbase research found that just 13% percent of VC money went to startups with at least one female founder with all female founding teams accounting for just 3% of that.

At the same time, as the women came together in the Houston investing scene, they couldn’t help but notice that it was mostly dominated by older white men. Murakhovskaya, whose background is engineering, connected with Campbell, who has an MBA and they wanted to know why more women weren’t getting involved.

“I said, ‘Where are all the women?’ [ … ] And so we started doing these dinners to bring together women and asking them why they’re not investing, what they’re doing and, and these were all corporate women [who had the money to invest].”

What they found was that either women had never been invited to invest, or like them they were looking to do it, but found angel investing less than satisfying. About this time, they met Goldman, who was a lawyer, and was on the board at the Houston Angel Network. “She’s an active angel in about 50 companies and 11 funds and similarly had this thesis of shifting all of her investing to female founders at the time,” Murakhovskaya said.

The three women with distinctly different professional backgrounds decided to come together and the idea for The Artemis Fund began to take shape. “We thought it was the perfect [mix] — kind of what happens when an engineer, an MBA and a lawyer get together. So, we find that our backgrounds are unique, and that helps a lot of our portfolio companies in a lot of different ways,” she said.

That meant they wanted to be involved with the founders and help them grow the businesses. “And so that was one thing we wanted to make sure that differentiates us from the other female-focused VCs. We would invest nationally, we would lead or co-lead most of our rounds and really help the companies along the capital stack. And that meant running a much more concentrated portfolio.”

The fund focuses on startups with female founders, who are in large potential markets, but ones that conventional male-dominated VCs might not see the potential in. Among the portfolio companies is UNest, a company that helps families take advantage of tax-exempt college savings accounts to save money for their kids’ college education and Upgrade, a maker of custom wigs and extensions. These businesses checked each of these boxes of being run by a woman in a large market that had been mostly ignored by the traditional investment community.

Murakhovskaya says so far the firm has invested in 11 companies with plans to invest in 4-5 more and then raise the next fund. She says while it’s about helping nurture and build these companies, it’s also about finding companies that continue to grow into their Series A, B and beyond, while delivering a good return for the company’s partners.

“This is not a charity or philanthropy. We really believe that women and diverse teams in particular will outperform, on top of bringing together a different set of companies and products and services that are just not being met for the consumers that they’re trying to serve.”

Source: Tech Crunch

The Gang spends a lot of time these days on the streaming wars, so it seems appropriate that Congress wants to get into it. With Netflix’s success at overturning the structure of Hollywood’s broadcast television production and advertising processes, consumers are taking advantage of a Golden Age of choices. Senator Elizabeth Warren is resuscitating her plan to tax the billionaire class as a way to fund the progressive part of the infrastructure bill through the Democrat-only reconciliation process. As bait, she is using Amazon’s MGM acquisition as the carrot, suggesting the deal would be anti-competitive and dilutive of consumer choice. Coming as streaming passes broadcast as a percentage of the entire television market, it’s not clear just what consumers are going to lose with a smorgasbord of captivating programming choices.

The streaming heavyweights are in the throes of a transition from building audience to locking in paying customers. Netflix has jumped way out in front with an enormous audience fueling an equally gigantic investment in original programming. Apple TV+ has blinked earliest, moving their free trial of a year with a new Apple device purchase to 3 months, barely long enough to get halfway through the second season of their hit The Morning Show. Similar Disney+ deals with Verizon Wireless unlimited broadband upgrades are starting to time out as Disney tries to survive the pandemic’s impact on theme park revenue and steep costs of moving newly acquired properties from theaters to streaming, And then there are the rest of the old studio and network players, trying to build enough scale to compete with the leaders. Comcast consumed NBC and Universal Studios, CBS and Viacom merged to knit together broadcast, cable networks, and Paramount studios, now renamed Paramount +. And reality TV giant Discovery absorbed the remnants of WarnerMedia’s scripted studio and cable operation as AT&T backed away from content to pay for investment in 5G.

Ironically, ad-supported networks may turn out to be where the real action is. Although streaming subscribers are running up against a budget cap as they opt out of cable bundles, their antipathy for advertising is finessed by some midtier networks like Hulu and Paramount + mixing some ads with subscriptions at a reduced monthly charge. Comcast is already managing that transition with HBO Max, bundling the new streaming network with basic cable packages that include the HBO premium service. Combining HBO’s pre-pandemic windowed, or delayed from theatrical release feature films with original series programming is one thing: adding a monthly new feature simultaneously with theatrical release for all of 2021 has proven a powerful way of attracting new HBO Max subscribers in the battle for streaming. While the strategy will moderate in 2022 as theaters reopen, movie-goers are learning to appreciate the marriage of smaller titles with the convenience of subscription television.

Although big budget films like F9 are enjoying considerable success theatrically, smaller films like Parasite and other streaming releases are winning Oscars and other awards. Films have been eligible for Oscars and Golden Globes without the requirement of theatrical runs during the pandemic, and will continue for at least one more year. The HBO Max theater/digital gambit angered producers and talent with its bold move made easier during 2020’s lockdown, but WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar was apparently the loser in AT&T’s Discovery/WarnerMedia deal as Discovery’s CEO David Zaslav was picked to run the combined company. But audiences may find more affinity with popcorn at home than the distributors expect as vaccinations take root. Kilar may have bootstrapped a look at what success will mean in the New Normal similar to what companies are saving in travel and facilities costs as we incorporate the strengths of work/play-from-anywhere and the mobile transformation.

The ad streamers bring more to the party than just subscriber discounts. While Netflix has made hay with binge viewing (dumping an entire season of shows at one time) ad streamers are using a hybrid of binge production and broadcast-style staged release as a way of updating the feel of appointment television with Peak TV dynamics. Using the weekly series model a la This Is Us and Gray’s Anatomy, shows like Paramount +‘s The Good Fight are released on a weekly basis with the release night staggered across the key nights of the week. Instead of browsing the TV Guide, you get a notification that the new episode has “dropped.” In effect, the linear tv schedule so beloved by advertisers and marketers is creating a new prime time schedule across the variety of streaming networks. With constant mergers and realignment of studios, cable assets, and streaming models, we already don’t have a clue what network is screening our new shows let alone what the network is called this week, so mobile messaging becomes the point of sale for sharing digital experiences. With cable giants like Comcast deriving more and more broadband customers as cable cutting persists, and set top boxes like AppleTV and Roku smart tvs capturing more scale and competing for a combination of ad-supported and original programming, the built in microphone on their remotes leapfrogs the vanished TV guides with audio commands that require only the name of the show or even the name of the favorite star.

The creator economy is experiencing a surge of services across the social networks. Newsletters, conversational audio sites, and new notification services from Apple are promoting media to support these AI-driven user rankings of the new Hollywood streaming winners. Apple’s notification summary screens in iOS 15 effectively present a way to organize a personalized digest of show notifications, freeing you from interrupting work to track the weekly dropping of favorite shows. It won’t be long before Twitter and other newsletter tools let you broadcast those alerts to special groups you define for watercooler-like conversations about the latest spoilers. Clubhouse and other social audio rooms will invite media analysts, showrunners, and stars to interact with these newly empowered fans, and some of the more proficient will graduate to subscription newsletter recaps and transcribed interviews. Advertisers will sponsor these streams, expanding the impact of the intersection of subscription and ad-supported hybrid services.

from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, June 18, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

Source: Tech Crunch

Peter Boyce II has left General Catalyst to start his own firm, a little over a year after the venture capital firm promoted him to partner. His new firm is called Stellation Capital, and filings indicate that he is looking to raise up to $40 million for the debut investment vehicle. Sources say that most, if perhaps not all, of that total has been closed since the initial SEC filing in April.

Boyce declined to comment for this story. It’s been a quiet transition for the investor; his LinkedIn and Twitter have not been updated to indicate his new job title, but his personal website indicates the new gig. For an investor to leave a prominent venture capital firm after an eight-year tenure to raise dozens of millions of his own — and somehow do so quietly and with minimal coverage — might be a result of the funding frenzy and consequential numbness to yet another filing.

Boyce joined GC in 2013 and led investments in Ro, Macro, towerIQ and Atom. He’s also supported portfolio companies such as Giphy, Jet.com and Circle. Beyond GC, Boyce has experience co-founding and running Rough Draft Ventures, a program that helps incubate startups founded by students and recent graduates, as well as promote entrepreneurship on campuses.

Stellation Capital will leverage his work and name into early-stage investments. The name of the firm, per its website, is derived from the Latin root of stella, which means star. The name also describes “the process of extending a polygon in new dimensions to form a new shape … just like we’re extending the potential of a founder into new possibilities.”

It’s unclear what the firm’s check size and cadence will be, but it did say it wants to back successful companies at “their earliest stages” on the website.

Source: Tech Crunch

Instacart has appointed Facebook executive Fidji Simo as its new CEO, just seven months after she joined the grocery delivery company’s board of directors. Simo, formerly the vice president and head of the Facebook app, will replace Instacart founder and current CEO Apoorva Mehta on August 2. Mehta will transition to executive chairman of the board, per a statement from Instacart.

Instacart declined on behalf of Simo for request to provide further comment.

Women of color chief executives at the forefront of billion-dollar businesses are still an unfortunately rare occurrence. Simo is the co-founder of Women in Product, a nonprofit organization that works to empower women in product management, as well as advance and advocate for women’s careers in tech. The transition marks that Facebook has lost one of its few female leaders, and Instacart has a new energy as it plans to increase its head count by 50% in 2021.

The departure of Mehta from his role so close to an expected IPO is as notable as it is rare. Mehta founded Instacart 10 years ago, incubating it through Y Combinator’s 2012 summer batch to its most recent valuation of $39 billion.

The pandemic spotlighted Instacart’s purpose, as millions of people around the world faced quarantines and limited in-person interactions, including trips to the grocery store. The increased consumer spending on for-delivery services led Instacart to hire hundreds of thousands of workers, as well as launch same-day delivery on a variety of products beyond avocados — including electronics, sports equipment and prescription medicine

The growth hasn’t come without controversy. Instacart joined Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Postmates as major backers for Proposition 22, a measure that would classify gig workers as independent contractors, limiting the types of benefits that they could receive. Prop 22 eventually passed, which could be seen as beneficial to Instacart executives and detrimental to the shoppers who make the deliveries. The event happened after years of protests, class-action lawsuits over wages and tipping debacles in which Instacart was scrutinized for unfair policies toward its shoppers.

Simo obviously has experience working at controversial companies, thanks to her decade at Facebook. Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg replied to Simo’s announcement in a comment on the platform.

“Fidji — I’m immensely grateful for the impact you’ve had on Facebook over the last 10 years,” Sandberg wrote. “You’ve worn so many hats leading the Facebook App — all while advocating for gender equality in the tech community. I’m so proud to see where you’re headed. Cheering you on!”

Instacart describes Simo as a “core driver of Facebook’s mobile monetization strategy” and the leader behind the architecture of Facebook’s advertising business. The executive helped scale Facebook as it grew from 1,000 to 100,000 employees, and through its transition to the public markets — experience that may mesh well with Instacart’s ambitions to eventually go public.

Her rise to chief executive comes as the pandemic winds down and parts of the world begin to reopen, which will likely signal a new chapter about how Instacart conducts business and faces new challenges on how the business stays relevant.

Source: Tech Crunch

Understanding what you will change is most important to achieve a long-lasting and successful robotic process automation transformation. There are three pillars that will be most impacted by the change: people, process and digital workers (also referred to as robots). The interaction of these three pillars executes workflows and tasks, and if integrated cohesively, determines the success of an enterprisewide digital transformation.

Robots are not coming to replace us, they are coming to take over the repetitive, mundane and monotonous tasks that we’ve never been fond of. They are here to transform the work we do by allowing us to focus on innovation and impactful work. RPA ties decisions and actions together. It is the skeletal structure of a digital process that carries information from point A to point B. However, the decision-making capability to understand and decide what comes next will be fueled by RPA’s integration with AI.

We are seeing software vendors adopt vertical technology capabilities and offer a wide range of capabilities to address the three pillars mentioned above. These include powerhouses like UiPath, which recently went public, Microsoft’s Softomotive acquisition, and Celonis, which recently became a unicorn with a $1 billion Series D round. RPA firms call it “intelligent automation,” whereas Celonis targets the execution management system. Both are aiming to be a one-stop shop for all things related to process.

We have seen investments in various product categories for each stage in the intelligent automation journey. Process and task mining for process discovery, centralized business process repositories for CoEs, executives to manage the pipeline and measure cost versus benefit, and artificial intelligence solutions for intelligent document processing.

For your transformation journey to be successful, you need to develop a deep understanding of your goals, people and the process.

Define goals and measurements of success

From a strategic standpoint, success measures for automating, optimizing and redesigning work should not be solely centered around metrics like decreasing fully loaded costs or FTE reduction, but should put the people at the center. To measure improved customer and employee experiences, give special attention to metrics like decreases in throughput time or rework rate, identify vendors that deliver late, and find missed invoice payments or determine loan requests from individuals that are more likely to be paid back late. These provide more targeted success measures for specific business units.

The returns realized with an automation program are not limited to metrics like time or cost savings. The overall performance of an automation program can be more thoroughly measured with the sum of successes of the improved CX/EX metrics in different business units. For each business process you will be redesigning, optimizing or automating, set a definitive problem statement and try to find the right solution to solve it. Do not try to fit predetermined solutions into the problems. Start with the problem and goal first.

Understand the people first

To accomplish enterprise digital transformation via RPA, executives should put people at the heart of their program. Understanding the skill sets and talents of the workforce within the company can yield better knowledge of how well each employee can contribute to the automation economy within the organization. A workforce that is continuously retrained and upskilled learns how to automate and flexibly complete tasks together with robots and is better equipped to achieve transformation at scale.

Source: Tech Crunch

Trump’s spicy trio of lawsuits against the social media platforms that he believes wrongfully banned him have succeeded in showering the former president with a flurry of media attention, but that’s likely where the story ends.

Like Trump’s quixotic and ultimately empty quest to gut Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act during his presidency, the new lawsuits are all sound and fury with little legal substance to back them up.

The suits allege that Twitter, Facebook and YouTube violated Trump’s First Amendment rights by booting him from their platforms, but the First Amendment is intended to protect citizens from censorship by the government — not private industry. The irony that Trump himself was the uppermost figure in the federal government at the time probably won’t be lost on whoever’s lap this case lands in.

In the lawsuits, which also name Twitter and Facebook chief executives Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg as well as Google CEO Sundar Pichai (Susan Wojcicki escapes notice once again!), Trump accuses the three companies of engaging in “impermissible censorship resulting from threatened legislative action, a misguided reliance upon Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and willful participation in joint activity with federal actors.”

The suit claims that the tech companies colluded with “Democrat lawmakers,” the CDC and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who served in Trump’s own government at the time.

The crux of the argument is that communication between the tech companies, members of Congress and the federal government somehow transforms Facebook, Twitter and YouTube into “state actors” — a leap of epic proportion:

“Defendant Twitter’s status thus rises beyond that of a private company to that of a state actor, and as such, Defendant is constrained by the First Amendment right to free speech in the censorship decisions it makes.”

Trump’s own Supreme Court appointee Brett Kavanaugh issued the court’s opinion on a relevant case two years ago. It examined whether a nonprofit running public access television channels in New York qualified as a “state actor” that would be subject to First Amendment constraints. The court ruled that running the public access channels didn’t transform the nonprofit into a government entity and that it retained a private entity’s rights to make editorial decisions.

“… A private entity… who opens its property for speech by others is not transformed by that fact alone into a state actor,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote in the decision.

It’s not likely that a court would decide that talking to the government or being threatened by the government somehow transform Twitter, YouTube and Facebook into state actors either.

Trump vs. Section 230 (again)

First Amendment aside — and there’s really not much of an argument there — social media platforms are protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a concise snippet of law that shields them from liability not just for the user-generated content they host but for the moderation decisions they make about what content to remove.

In line with Trump’s obsessive disdain for tech’s legal shield, the lawsuits repeatedly rail against Section 230. The suits try to argue that because Congress threatened to revoke tech’s 230 protections, that forced them to ban Trump, which somehow makes social media companies part of the government and subject to First Amendment constraints.

Of course, Republican lawmakers and Trump’s own administration made frequent threats about repealing Section 230, not that it changes anything because this line of argument doesn’t make much sense anyway.

The suit also argues that Congress crafted Section 230 to intentionally censor speech that is otherwise protected by the First Amendment, ignoring that the law was born in 1996, well before ubiquitous social media, and for other purposes altogether.

For the four years of his presidency, Trump’s social media activity — his tweets in particular — informed the events of the day, both nationally and globally. While other world leaders and political figures used social media to communicate or promote their actions, Trump’s Twitter account was usually the action itself.

In the shadow of his social media bans, the former president has failed to re-establish lines of communication to the internet at large. In May, he launched a new blog, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” but the site was taken down just a month later after it failed to attract much interest.

The handful of pro-Trump alternative social platforms are still struggling with app store content moderation requirements at odds with their extreme views on free speech, but that didn’t stop Gettr, the latest, from going ahead with its own rocky launch last week.

Viewed in one light, Trump’s lawsuits are a platform too, his latest method for broadcasting himself to the online world that his transgressions eventually cut him off from. In that sense, they seem to have succeeded, but in all other senses, they won’t.

Source: Tech Crunch