Technology

Ahead of 2018 U.S. midterm elections, Twitter is taking a visible step to combat the spread of misinformation on its famously chaotic platform. In a blog post this week, the company explained how it would be adding &election labels& to the profiles of candidates running for political office.

&Twitter has become the first place voters go to seek accurate information, resources, and breaking news from journalists, political candidates, and elected officials,& the company wrote in its announcement. &We understand the significance of this responsibility and our teams are building new ways for people who use Twitter to identify original sources and authentic information.&

These labels feature a small government building icon and text identifying the position a candidate is running for and the state or district where the race is taking place. The label information included in the profile will also appear elsewhere on Twitter, even when tweets are embedded off-site.

The labels will start popping up after May 30 and will apply to candidates in state governor races as well as those campaigning for a seat in the Senate or the House of Representatives.

Twitter will partner with nonpartisan political nonprofit Ballotpedia to create the candidate labels. In a statement announcing its partnership, Ballotpedia explains how that process will work:

Ballotpedia covers all candidates in every upcoming election occurring within the 100 most-populated cities in the U.S., plus all federal and statewide elections, including ballot measures. After each state primary, Ballotpedia will provide Twitter with information on gubernatorial and Congressional candidates who will appear on the November ballot. After receiving consent from each candidate, Twitter will apply the labels to each candidate profile.

The decision to create a dedicated process to verify political profiles is a step in the right direction for Twitter. With major social platforms still in upheaval over revelations around foreign misinformation campaigns during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Twitter and Facebook need to take decisive action now if they intend to inoculate their users against a repeat threat in 2018.

U.S. President Donald Trump has claimed that Chinese telecom firm ZTE will pay a $1.3 billion fine and undergo a significant overhaul of its management team in order to remain operational in North America.

ZTE looked to be in dire straits when it ceased its business in the U.S. earlier this month after a Department of Commerce orderbanned U.S. partners from selling components to the company in response to it flouting trade bans in Iran and North Korea.

The company has since been reprised — a strategy move within the U.S.-China trade stand-off — but Trump said today that its new life comes at a cost. Thatapparently a $1.3 billion fine, a new management team and board, and &high-level security guarantees.&

Trump previously took to Twitter to break news of ZTEreprieve and today, while aiming to score political points, he gave insight into why ZTE is being given another chance.

ZTE has over 70,000 employees, it grossed more than $17 billion in annual revenue and it maintains close ties to the Chinese government. As I wrote earlier this month, a company of its global scale brings significant revenue to U.S. businesses which, beyond more obvious consumer-facing companies, includes component-level partners like Qualcomm, who would be impacted if ZTE were to disappear tomorrow.

Trumpclaim that ZTE &must purchase U.S. parts,& while as yet unconfirmed, suggests the deal is important for ZTEU.S. business partners as well as being a key card in working out his administrationcomplicated relationship with China.

Still, despite these apparent conditions, the decision to allow ZTE to continue is hugely controversial. Most companies don&t get a second chance for the kind of activities that the Chinese firm has carried out.

The company flouted trade bans to Iran and North Korea, then it lied about them and tried to cover its tracks before finally admitting its guilt. Speaking in April, TrumpownCommerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, said:

&ZTE made false statements to the U.S. Government when they were originally caught and put on the Entity List, made false statements during the reprieve it was given, and made false statements again during its probation. ZTE misled the Department of Commerce. Instead of reprimanding ZTE staff and senior management, ZTE rewarded them. This egregious behavior cannot be ignored.&

Beyond that, the firmclose links to the Chinese government have long troubled U.S. security agencies concerned that ZTE equipment was being used by American telecom firms and security agencies.

HerewhatFBI Director Chris Wray told the Senate Intelligence Committeein February:

&We&re deeply concerned about the risks of allowing a company or entity that is beholden to foreign governments that don&t share our values to gain positions of power inside our telecommunications networks.&

Five years ago, Alexia Bonatsos, née Tsotsis, was co-editor of TechCrunch, a job that made her renowned in startup circles and familiar with a wide number of startups and their founders. What she really longed to do, in fact, was invest in some of them.

&I was among the first people to write about Pinterest and Wish — when it was known as ContextLogic — and Uber and Instagram and WhatsApp,& says Bonatsos. &I started to wonder if I was in the right place at the right time — so, luck — or if I&m in the right information flows. I was curious: What if I&d been writing checks&

She talked occasionally with venture firms, but the right job didn&t materialize. So she set to work on creating her own dream job. Her first move was tostep down from her post at TechCrunch in 2015 to enter into an accelerated, one-year masterdegree program at Stanford Universitybusiness school. (&I wanted to be able to communicate in the same language& as other VCs, she says with a shrug.) All the while, and in the year afterward, she was talking with founders about how to tell their story and shape their editorial and convince people with large followings that they are worth tracking — skills Bonatsos had herself honed as a reporter.

She wasn&t building out her network merely to stay connected; she was also slowly piecing together checks from individual investors for a debut venture fund. Toward that end, last December, she registered her San Francisco-based firm, Dream Machine, with the SEC, listing the target amount at $25 million.

If she has reached or is nearing that number, she won&t say out of an abundance of caution around securities regulations. (This is what happens when business journalists become VCs.) Still, when we caught up with her recently, she disclosed that she has already made seven investments, including as part of one token sale. She also shared a bit about what they have in common, which seemingly centers on two things: they involve the ever-growing sharing economy, and they take advantage of an overarching trend toward decentralization.

One of those bets, for example, is TruStory, which we&d written about earlier this week. Founded recently by an alumna of both Coinbase and Andreessen Horowitz, TruStory is creating aplatform for users to research and validate claims that people make online, whether in a blog post, whitepaper, website or social media post. Itcreating a &real system of information hierarchy with the blockchain,& says Bonatsos, whose co-investors in the company include True Ventures and Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, among others.

Another of Dream Machinechecks has gone to Omni, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based on-demand storage company thatmaking every possession in onehome rentable— giving members an opportunity to make money from their underused items in the process. By way of example, Bonatsos recently rented a dress that a fellow investor had worn once and stored away. Omni photographs each item and allows users to designate friends who can rent them. Users can also rent their belongings to strangers if they choose.

A third investment, in Fable Studios, perhaps best underscores Bonatsosambition to invest in &founders who turn science fiction into non-fiction.& The startup — created by former members of the Oculus Story Studio team — took the wraps off what is essentially a studio for augmented and virtual reality content this year at Sundance, where it premiered one of its first projects: an animated three-part series called &Wolves in the Walls.& (You can check out the trailer here.)

The company hasn&t disclosed how much it has raised to date, but others of its investors include Shasta Ventures and founder-investor Joe Lonsdale.

Asked how shedrumming up deal flow, Bonatsos suggests she isn&t shy about networking like a maniac. (We spied her at an industry event last night, in fact.)

She also points to the small but growing number of people who are similarly raising and managing funds as solo general partners, and who are forming collaborations and sharing lessons in the process.

Some of these include Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover, who is currently managing Weekend Fund, a $3 million fund that has backed roughly 10 startups since last year; Niv Dror, an early Product Hunt employee who is now investing $3 million through a vehicle called Shrug Capital; and Boom Capital, which is a pre-seed fund for &deeply technical, under-networked founders& founded by Cee CeeSchnugg, who previously spent 4.5 years with Eric SchmidtInnovation Endeavors fund.

Yet a fourth new, seed-stage fund is22nd Street Ventures, launched earlier this year by Katey Nilan, who&d spent the previous six years in a variety of marketing and public relations roles.

Whether all of these seed-stage funds, including Dream Machine, can survive, let alone thrive, remains an open question, of course. As a VC at a well-regarded seed-stage fund told us just yesterday, seed-stage funding is &insanity& right now, with so much capital in the ecosystem — between established seed funds, accelerator programs and so many burgeoning funds — that itgrowing harder by the day to obtain a meaningful stake in a promising new startup.

Bonatsos, who expects most of her initial checks to average around $300,000 and is willing to invest in both first-time and serial founders, doesn&t sound concerned.

She has her intuition, a vast network of founder contacts and support from fellow seed investors. She also argues that sheprepared to invest much earlier than many others.

&I can suspend disbelief and get on board with a wild vision,& she says. As she knows, having been immersed in the startup universe for many years, &Non-obvious deals are where you make returns.&