China, the EU, and Facebook's GlobalCoin

The video of Pelosi’s onstage speech Wednesday at a Center for American Progress event, in which she said President Trump’s refusal to cooperate with congressional investigations was tantamount to a “coverup,“ was subtly edited to make her voice sound garbled and warped. It was then circulated widely across Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

One version, posted by the conservative Facebook page Politics WatchDog, had been viewed more than 2 million times by Thursday night, been shared more than 45,000 times, and garnered 23,000 comments with users calling her “drunk” and “a babbling mess.”

The suspensions are a major loss for the Krassensteins, who had used their massive Twitter followers and ability to quickly respond to tweets from Donald Trump to make themselves internet celebrities. Ed Krassenstein had roughly 925,000 followers before he was banned, while Brian Krassenstein had more than 697,000.

The brothers appeared to be unusually good at getting attention on Twitter. While the Twitter statement doesn’t explain what the Krassensteins allegedly did to illicitly promote their accounts, “fake interactions” could engage buying bots to retweet their posts, or buying fake followers to inflate their profiles on the site.

Since the region’s standards came into force a year ago, few companies have yet to have their wings clipped by the new regulation — and some of the world’s largest tech companies have used their significant in-house regulatory and financial muscle to turn Europe’s privacy push to their advantage.

So far, almost 100,000 privacy complaints have been filed with national privacy regulators, though only a few have led to meaningful penalties, according to the International Association of Privacy Professionals, an industry trade body. Total fines have now reached roughly €56 million, although almost all of that came from a one-off €50 million levy against Google by French officials (the search giant is appealing that decision).

Facebook’s new approach to political ad sales is designed to eliminate incentives for employees to push a more-is-better strategy with campaigns. The ad-buying portal for campaigns is now largely self-serve, with Facebook staffers available to help campaigns register to buy ads, assist if certain ads are stuck in review and provide other basic customer service. Sales employees are no longer paid based on reaching or exceeding goals related to ads purchased promoting either a candidate or politically tinged messages in the U.S. and abroad, said Katie Harbath, Facebook’s global elections public policy director. […]

Ms. Harbath said the company views its political-ad business as a civic responsibility rather than a revenue driver. The company declined to comment on whether that business is profitable on its own.

Facebook left a gaping loophole in this system: If a user shares a political ad, the disclaimer disappears for anyone who sees the shared ad, as does the ability to click through it to the ad library. Civil rights and election security experts have warned Facebook that this loophole is ripe for abuse. Several experts on campaign finance expressed surprise when Mother Jones asked them about it, and concern that this loophole could lead to viral, misleading content paid for by undisclosed political actors.

“The public has a right to know who is trying to influence their vote,” says Brendan Fischer, an expert on campaign finance and ethics issues at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “For political actors that want to influence the public without detection, creating posts that are designed to go viral would be an obvious way to do so, and perhaps to do so legally.”

Google, Facebook and Twitter will send representatives to testify at an upcoming hearing on election security, the House Oversight and Reform Committee announced Monday.

The officials will likely field questions about their companies’ efforts to stave off disinformation and manipulation ahead of the 2020 presidential election after facing enormous scrutiny for allowing bad actors to take advantage of their platforms in 2016.

However, Enel has a problem: Google won’t let it integrate Enel X Recharge into the Android Auto system, meaning people can’t use it to search for charging stations while driving—which is kind of when you’d want to do that. What can Android phone owners use to search for charging stations while driving? Google Maps.

Some workers say Google’s promise to remain unconventional is in question. Interviews with 32 current and former employees revealed a demarcation between what several called “Old Google” and “New Google.” Whether there’s a clear-cut line between these eras—the company got its start in a Menlo Park, Calif., garage in 1998, when Page and Brin were still Ph.D. students at Stanford—depends on whom you ask. But there is a pattern in how they describe the change: At Old Google, employees say they had a voice in how the company was run. At New Google, the communication and trust between the rank and file and executives is in decline. Decision-making power, some say, is now concentrated at the very top of a company run by executives who are increasingly driven by conventional business metrics.

Now Google finds itself in the awkward position of trying to temper the radical culture that it spent the past 20 years stoking. Boasting more than 100,000 employees between Google and its parent company, Alphabet, executives acknowledge that the company is struggling to balance its size with maintenance of the principles, like employee voice, that were so foundational. “You can’t go through that kind of growth without the culture needing to evolve,” says Jen Fitzpatrick, a Google SVP and a member of CEO Sundar Pichai’s leadership team. 

The policy debate in the Democratic 2020 primary has so far lacked a conversation on what exactly candidates would do to address the rising threat of white nationalism. BuzzFeed News reached out to the campaigns of each of the 23 candidates running for the Democratic nomination to ask about their views on growing white nationalist sentiment in the country; if they believe the Department of Justice and social media companies have done enough to combat it; and if the candidates would support regulating the social platforms to curb its spread.

“It’s clear that none of our institutions are doing enough to combat the spread of white nationalism,” a spokesperson for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign told BuzzFeed News, a sentiment common among the 14 other campaigns that responded.

”You’ve now hit the sweet spot that brings progressives and conservatives together,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) told panelists. The chairman of the committee, civil rights leader Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), responded by saying, “That’s music to my ears.”

Federal agencies like the FBI and Department of Homeland Security are not currently required to obtain a warrant prior to using facial data to identify potential criminal suspects. It’s unclear how the committee plans to draft legislation to combat potential violations, but members on both sides of the aisle voiced concern that facial scans on United States citizens may be violating constitutional rights.

Hawley’s Do Not Track Act would, if approved, allow people using an online service to opt out of any data tracking that isn’t necessary for that particular service to properly work. It would create a national list that would provide people with an option to block any secondary data tracking and penalize companies that continued to collect unnecessary data.

“Big tech companies collect incredible amounts of deeply personal, private data from people without giving them the option to meaningfully consent,” Hawley said. “They have gotten incredibly rich by employing creepy surveillance tactics on their users, but too often the extent of this data extraction is only known after a tech company irresponsibly handles the data and leaks it all over the internet.”

The powerful American Law Institute (ALI) hoped to solve this problem with something called the Restatement of the Law of Consumer Contracts. The proposal has been in the works for years, and the group hoped to pass it at a meeting yesterday. But the proposed restatement galvanized consumer rights advocates into opposition, caused a brief drama when the ALI issued copyright takedown notices to a critic who posted the draft online, and drew fire from two dozen state attorneys general and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who called the proposal “dangerous.”

One of the former employees said that data access abuse occurred “a few times” at Snap. That source and another former employee specified the abuse was carried out by multiple individuals. A Snapchat email obtained by Motherboard also shows employees broadly discussing the issue of insider threats and access to data, and how they need to be combatted.

Motherboard was unable to verify exactly how the data abuse occurred, or what specific system or process the employees leveraged to access Snapchat user data.

I understand Mohan’s argument that letting the Sophs of the world post what they like — and taking their worst stuff down if it crosses particular lines — is fundamental to YouTube.

But the fact that YouTube’s policies, software, and army of evaluators didn’t flag a popular video creator making death threats against the company’s CEO until a reporter pointed it out suggests that YouTube has a structural problem. And it’s not one it can solve with tools, rules, and people.

Mr. Schroepfer, 44, is in a position he never wanted to be in. For years, his job was to help the social network build a top-flight A.I. lab, where the brightest minds could tackle technological challenges like using machines to pick out people’s faces in photos. He and Mr. Zuckerberg wanted an A.I. operation to rival Google’s, which was widely seen as having the deepest stable of A.I. researchers. He recruited Ph.D.s from New York University, the University of London and the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris.

But along the way, his role evolved into one of threat removal and toxic content eliminator. Now he and his recruits spend much of their time applying A.I. to spotting and deleting death threats, videos of suicides, misinformation and outright lies.

The blog post makes only a brief mention of Actionable Insights’ second, less altruistic purpose: “enabling better business decisions” through “analytics tools.” According to materials reviewed by The Intercept and a source directly familiar with the program, the real boon of Actionable Insights lies not in its ability to fix spotty connections, but to help chosen corporations use your personal data to buy more tightly targeted advertising.

The source, who discussed Actionable Insights on the condition of anonymity because they were not permitted to speak to the press, explained that Facebook has offered the service to carriers and phone makers ostensibly of free charge, with access to Actionable Insights granted as a sweetener for advertising relationships. According to the source, the underlying value of granting such gratis access to Actionable Insights in these cases isn’t simply to help better service cell customers with weak signals, but also to ensure that telecoms and phone makers keep buying more and more carefully targeted Facebook ads. It’s exactly this sort of quasi-transactional data access that’s become a hallmark of Facebook’s business, allowing the company to plausibly deny that it ever sells your data while still leveraging it for revenue.

The research is wide-ranging, and Facebook has shared details about a trio of papers. The first involves getting a six-legged robot to teach itself how to walk through trial and error, the second is about leveraging “curiosity” to help robots learn faster, and the third is about using a sense of touch to help a robot achieve simple tasks like rolling a ball.

None of these papers are breakthroughs, per se, and the topics being researched are also being addressed elsewhere by universities and labs. But it’s notable, still, that Facebook’s AI research lab (known as FAIR) is pursuing this line of work.

I can have a meme war with anybody and destroy them. And I’ve done it! People actually bail at the end and go, “Who is this guy? He’s got like every meme ever produced on the internet! He can knock us out with his memes!” And I do, I have tons of memes, I just keep memeing them to death until they just surrender because they just can’t do it anymore. They don’t have the memes that I have.

Even as it offers a familiar interface, though, everyone posting to Micro.blog does so on his or her own domain hosted on Micro.blog’s server or on their own personal server. Reece’s software acts as an aggregator, facilitating a sense of community and gathering users’ content so that it can be seen on a single screen. Users own what they write and can do whatever they want with it—including post it, simultaneously, to other competing aggregators.

IndieWeb developers argue that this system—which they call posse, for “publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere”—encourages competition and innovation while allowing users to vote with their feet. If Reece were to begin aggressively harvesting user data, or if another service were to start offering richer features, users could shift their attention from one aggregator to another with little effort. They wouldn’t be trapped on a platform that owns everything they’ve written and is doing everything it can to exploit their data and attention.

Instagram is no longer all-in on vertical video. The company announced today that its longform video offshoot, IGTV, will now support landscape video. Up until now, the company only supported vertical video, which was a feature focus during its launch nearly a year ago. Instagram says the change comes because of creator feedback and because some viewers are finding landscape videos on IGTV already but haven’t been able to turn their phones to watch them in fullscreen.

The new offer is called Feiliao, or Flipchat in English, a hybrid of an instant messenger plus interest-based forums, and it’s currently available for both iOS and Android. It arrived only four months after Bytedance unveiled its video-focused chatting app Duoshan at a buzzy press event.

One consequence of Trumpism’s focus on affective, hyperpartisan politics is the protection it offers to even further-right groups and actors. By claiming victim status even as they command the balance of political power in the U.S., and by maintaining that any criticism at all is an unfair liberal attack, Trumpists move the center of American politics to the right, and open up space for America’s many different flavors of racist extremists, who are imputed to be mirror images of left-wing Democrats. As the president put it after anti-racist protestor Heather Heyer was killed during a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, there are “some very fine people on both sides.”

Naughty America had begun to distribute Snapchat lenses to its users earlier this week. The lenses allowed Snapchat users to super-impose porn stars in various states of undress over images of their own living room, and share the results with their friends on the service.

Naughty America CEO Andreas Hronopoulos told Variety this week that he understood these lenses to be in compliance with Snapchat’s policies, arguing that he wasn’t making them publicly available, and likening it to sharing personal photos with friends on Snapchat. “We are just privately sharing these,” he said.