Chinese vacation rental service Tujia has raised $300 million in new funding led by Ctrip and All-Stars Investment, valuing the company at $1.5 billion.
Why it matters: Airbnb has been doubling its China investment and quadrupling its engineering team, but the country had proven nearly impossible for U.S. consumer tech companies to crack, especially when facing local rivals like Truja (e.g., Uber and Didi Chuxing).
Russia ran a disinformation campaign that was intentionally hard to track. As new evidence emerges of the Russians' paid and organic digital media tactics, we're starting to see that Russian operatives intentionally used many small, segregated campaigns across many automated platforms that often aren't monitored by people, making it harder to get caught in the moment, if at all.
Why it matters: It will take a whole lot of investigative reporting to understand the extent of the Russian disinformation campaign that was used to meddle in the election and cause division, but we now have a good amount of context that can help us understand smart places to look.
