Thanks for indulging my week spent away reporting. It has been a productive trip, and I'll have much
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May 24 · Issue #332 · View online |
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Thanks for indulging my week spent away reporting. It has been a productive trip, and I’ll have much more to share with you from it soon. In the meantime, I spent my plane ride catching up on the week’s news. I’ll see you again on Tuesday after our Memorial Holiday. The big news from this week in social networking fell broadly into three categories: China, the European Union, and money. Let’s consider them in turn.
I. In recent days, we’ve seen tech companies attempt to use the Trump Administration’s fears over China to their own advantage. Nitasha Tiku sums it up nicely in Wired: Over the past week, both Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt made the same appeal to American nationalism, with differing degrees of subtlety: Breaking up Big Tech will only help China. It’s a politically expedient plea as calls for regulating tech intensify amid growing concern about China’s tech prowess and an escalating US-China trade war. But the argument rests on the idea that what’s good for Facebook and Google is good for America. It also ignores how Silicon Valley is simultaneously seeking growth through partnerships with some of those same Chinese competitors, such as Google’s investment in JD.com and reported talks with Tencent to bring Google Cloud to China. There’s no doubt that big American companies project America’s influence and values around the world — a kind of soft power whose value is hard to measure. That power scales proportionally along with the companies’ size — and so, as Tiku notes, makes for an expedient argument at a time when many voices are calling for these companies to be broken up. I don’t know whether this argument will carry the day — but I do expect that we’ll be hearing it a lot more. Related question: given this backdrop, how should we expect TikTok parent ByteDance to fare? The Chinese company has almost never granted an interview to the American press, but it’s shipping new products at an impressive pace. It just released a new chat app America called Flipchat, and it’s reportedly planning a new music service. Meanwhile, David Carroll — one of the key figures in the Cambridge Analytica drama — warns that TikTok could one day lead to a data privacy scandal on a similar scale. And Ryan Broderick, who calls TikTok “China’s most important export right now,” wonders about the consequences of American teens embracing an app that is also effectively an arm of the Chinese government: How TikTok handles other facets of privacy and data are also unclear. Last year, its owner ByteDance cooperated with China’s state censors, adding thousands of human moderators to remove “vulgar” content from one of its other apps that is a newsfeed. And Douyin now sends out official push notifications and emergency alerts for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s administration, essentially making it a channel of communication for the government. Are fears of a rising TikTok xenophobic or justified? I welcome your thoughts on the subject.
II. China doesn’t hold free and fair elections, but the European Union does. EU Parliamentary elections took place this week, and the results will be announced Sunday. How well did Facebook protect itself against attacks? On one hand, misinformation networks amassed tens of millions of followers and generated lots of engagement. Natasha Lomas reports: Following the independent investigation, Facebook has taken down a total of 77 pages and 230 accounts from Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain and Poland — which had been followed by an estimated 32 million people and generated 67 million ‘interactions’ (i.e. comments, likes, shares) in the last three months alone. The bogus mainly far-right disinformation networks were not identified by Facebook — but had been reported to it by campaign group Avaaz — which says the fake pages had more Facebook followers and interactions than all the main EU far right and anti-EU parties combined. Meanwhile, an Oxford University study found that individual pieces of fake news on Facebook can receive four times as much engagement as news stories produced by non-lying professionals. (It also found that professional news sites receive much more engagement overall, as Lomas notes here in a separate story.) But for the most part, observers seem skeptical that fake news will have played a major role in this election. Researchers Alex Krasodomski and Josh Smith write in Wired UK that the majority of political speech online is primarily emotional rather than factual — and while false facts can whip up hysteria, the power of individual pieces of fake news to do that is likely small. Fact-checking, then, is not enough to defend us from manipulation or harassment. Indeed, of the cases we reviewed, nearly half did not even make factual statements. The same is true for doxxing, online abuse, spam, algorithmic manipulation and poisoning of communication channels. Information operations are rarely about changing the things people believe, but changing the way they feel. Anger and fear are not things we can correct with better facts. (Counterpoint: if a viral WhatsApp thread falsely tells you that there’s a stranger in town stealing babies, you can absolutely address the anger and fear with better facts.) In any case, Facebook (and Twitter, and YouTube) seemed to have weathered the EU Parliamentary elections without any major unforced errors. III. Finally: money. Facebook’s forthcoming cryptocurrency has generated a steady stream of stories about its development. This week we learned first that Facebook has incorporated a new company to house its payment efforts. Brenna Hughes Neghaiwi reports: Facebook has set up a new financial technology company in Switzerland focusing on blockchain and payments as well as data analytics and investing, Geneva’s commercial register shows. Libra Networks, with Facebook Global Holdings as stakeholder, was registered in Geneva on May 2 to provide financial and technology services and develop related hardware and software, plans submitted on the Swiss register reveal. Next, we learned that the cryptocurrency has a codename — the appropriately grandiose “GlobalCoin” — and that it could launch next year. Szu Ping Chan reports: Facebook is expected to outline plans in more detail this summer, and has already spoken to Bank of England governor Mark Carney. Founder Mark Zuckerberg met Mr Carney last month to discuss the opportunities and risks involved in launching a crypto-currency. Facebook has also sought advice on operational and regulatory issues from officials at the US Treasury. The firm is also in talks with money transfer firms including Western Union as it looks for cheaper and faster ways for people without a bank account to send and receive money. If the company wants to eliminate credit card fees, that doesn’t leave much room to impose its own fees. In fact, I don’t think that Facebook wants to impose any fees at all: thinks about it — what could possibly be more valuable to an advertising-based business than knowing exactly what customers are spending their money on? I suspect Facebook is content with knowing about the flow of its’ users money; that is a very attractive replacement for, say, the inane contents of user-to-user messaging. We’ll know soon enough.
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Pelosi videos, altered to make her seem drunk, are spreading on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook
In what feels like a preview of the 2020 election, distorted videos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are receiving millions of views on social networks, Drew Harwell reports: 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.”
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Twitter Bans #Resistance-Famous Krassenstein Brothers for Allegedly Operating Fake Accounts
But I thought social networks only banned conservatives? Twitter . thirst bots Ed and Brian Krassenstein, who gained a measure of fame by … replying to Trump tweets, I guess? — received a coveted lifetime ban from the service for ‘operating multiple fake accounts and purchasing account interactions.’ Will Sommer reports: 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.
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How Silicon Valley gamed Europe’s privacy rules
The first anniversary of the General Data Protection Regulation is approaching. Mark Scott, Laurens Cerulus, and Steven Overly report that a big fear about GDPR — that it would entrench incumbents — is coming true: 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).
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Facebook Backs Away From the Hard Sell on Political Ads
Emily Glazer and Jeff Horwitz report that Facebook considered halting sales of political ads, but instead decided to take away commissions for its salespeople: 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.
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The Facebook Loophole That Makes Political Ads Look Like Regular Content
Pema Levy asks why political ads lose their paid-for disclosures on Facebook once they are shared by another user: 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.”
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Google, Facebook and Twitter to testify at election security hearing
It’s kind of wild how big tech companies went from basically never testifying before Congress to testifying every few weeks: 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.
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Google Antitrust Complaint Threatens Plan for Auto Dashboard Dominance
Google is facing an interesting antitrust case in Italy over Android Auto, David Meyer reports: 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.
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Inside Google's Civil War
Beth Kowitt finds a generational divide inside of Google that helps explain its current labor issues: 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.
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Democrats Running For President Say Social Media Companies Have A White Nationalist Problem. Some Think Regulation Should Be The Answer.
Ryan C. Brooks surveys the Democratic field on what ought to be done about white nationalism on social networks: 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.
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Republicans and Democrats agree: it’s time to regulate facial recognition tech
There’s emerging bipartisan agreement on the need for restrictions on the use of facial recognition technology, Makena Kelly reports: ”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.
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Senator proposes strict Do Not Track rules in new bill
Sen. Josh Hawley, who has emerged as a leading voice in the Senate against big tech companies, has proposed a tough new law allowing consumers to limit data collection, Makena Kelly reports. 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.”
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A contentious legal debate over user agreements has been delayed after Elizabeth Warren called it ‘dangerous’
One of my favorite hot takes from my boss, Nilay Patel, holds that terms of service agreements should be illegal, because they are too long and numerous and no one reads them. Even supporters of the current law agree with this, and so they’ve proposed a “restatement” of the law. But that proposal is now under attack, Adi Robertson reports: 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.”
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Snapchat Employees Abused Data Access to Spy on Users
Joseph Cox reports that Snap, like all social networks, has a tool to let law enforcement access user data as part of their investigations. But the allegation in the headline — that employees used it to “spy” on users — feels weak given that the story doesn’t include a single example. 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.
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Q&A with Neal Mohan: the man with YouTube’s most impossible job
Peter Kafka interviews YouTube’s head of product. Kafka concludes: 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.
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Facebook’s A.I. Whiz Now Faces the Task of Cleaning It Up. Sometimes That Brings Him to Tears.
Cade Metz and Mike Isaac profile Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technology officer. His job appears to have changed significantly since 2016: 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.
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Thanks to Facebook, Your Cell Phone Company Is Watching You Closer Than Ever
Sam Biddle digs into “Actionable Insights,” a Facebook program that shares user data with telecom companies and other partners: 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.
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Facebook is experimenting with robots to push its AI research forward
Facebook robots! 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.
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My Dad, the Facebook Addict
Jason Kottke links to a new mini-documentary about an extremely online dad named Vincent LeVine. And LeVine is ready to fight: 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.
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Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us?
Cal Newport, who does not use social media, wonders if underfunded independent social networks would mark an improvement over the social networks that he does not use: 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.
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Instagram will now support landscape video on IGTV
With TikTok surging and its own video efforts stalled out, Instagram reversed course and will allow you to post landscape video, Ashley Carman reports. Question: if Kevin Systrom is still CEO, does this move still get a greenlight? 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.
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TikTok owner ByteDance’s long-awaited chat app is here
Regardless of what you think about ByteDance, it seems fair to say that we haven’t seen a company as relentless in the social space since Facebook. Here’s the latest gambit from the TikTok maker, Rita Liao reports: 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.
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The White House’s ‘Tech Bias’ Reporting Form Is a Masterpiece of Trumpism
Max Read says Trump’s insistence that social networks are biased against conservatives “provides cover to far-right extremism.” 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.”
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Snapchat Bans Porn Lenses, Porn Studio Vows to Carry On
Just when Snapchat’s developer community starts to take off, it has to smack down a promising new viral lens. Janko Roettgers reports:
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. Not privately enough, Mr. Hronopoulos. The augmented reality revolution might be upon us, but for now at least, it will not extend to porn.
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Send me tips, comments, questions, and your alternative name suggestions for GlobalCoin: casey@theverge.com.
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