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| May 8 · Issue #132 · View online |
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Among large technology companies, very few have a leadership team as stable as Facebook’s. Every time Twitter changes its head of product — once a year or so for the past half-decade — I’m reminded that Facebook has had a single person in that role the entire time: Chris Cox. The rest of the leadership team, from COO Sheryl Sandberg to CTO Mike Schroepfer, has been similarly static. Without offering any public explanation, today Mark Zuckerberg threw some dynamite at the org chart. Kurt Wagner, my colleague at Recode, broke the news in a piece that everyone should read. Here are the five most important changes, to my mind, in descending order: 1. David Marcus and Kevin Weil to create a new blockchain division. Marcus is leaving Messenger, where he oversaw tremendous growth in both number of users and features that nobody uses. It’s hard to assess Marcus’ legacy without knowing Messenger’s financials, but as a user I’m less enthusiastic about Messenger than I was when he started. What began as a fun, lightweight utility gradually transformed into a junk drawer full of games, payments, bots, stories, and stickers. Now Marcus, whose previous job was CEO of PayPal, can get back to his first love: abstruse payment architectures. Weil was Instagram’s head of product and, from this user’s perspective, an excellent one. He oversaw not just the successful implementation of stories but its rapid iteration, as it became the first to launch features such as story highlights in the profile. He leaves as the team is testing a standalone messaging app, called Direct, and continuing to invest in new live video features. His move to the mystery blockchain division is a curveball, though given how bad most blockchain products have been to date, he’ll be a welcome addition to the team. 2. Adam Mosseri to become head of product at Instagram. Mosseri’s previous job was running the News Feed, where he was overseeing efforts to restore its integrity after the bruising events of the past year and a half. I like Mosseri a lot — he takes more than his share of abuse on Twitter, gamely responding to tweets from hostile users in his spare time. It would be a mistake to assume he’ll take the same approach to Instagram’s feed as Facebook took to the News Feed — but I’ll be watching the company’s next big moves closely to see where there’s overlap. (Also notable here: Mosseri is leaving the News Feed with many initiatives to improve it under way, but long before it can truly said to be fixed. His successor, John Hegeman, will be under a lot of pressure.) 3. Jay Parikh to lead a new group focused on privacy initiatives. This could turn out to be one of those hard jobs where the people who make money at the company are trying to undermine you at every turn, so I’ll be fascinated to see what emerges from what are likely to be some bruising internal battles. The last time I talked to Parikh it was about Facebook’s internet plane, Aquila. People who work at Facebook get to work on a wide range of issues! 4. Chris Daniels is taking over WhatsApp. I don’t know anything at all about Chris Daniels. (If you do, email me!) I can say that with Brian Acton and Jan Koum now out of the way, WhatsApp is about to undergo a total Facebookization. Daniels, a longtime Facebook executive who previously worked on Internet.org, would seem well positioned to make that happen. 5. Chris Cox is a mega-executive now. Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook’s flagship app, and Messenger (now run by legendary growth hacker Stan Chudnovsky) all report up to him. In a way, this was already true — that’s what it means to be the head of product at Facebook. But the move further establishes Cox as Zuckerberg’s tippy-top deputy for all things product, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him become Facebook CEO someday. Some storylines to watch in the weeks ahead:
- What prompted these changes? Is there a grand design here, or was it a series of disconnected moves that the company decided to announce all at once? (It would be helpful if someone leaked the email to employees.)
- Will the reshuffling affect any of the more urgent initiatives around improving News Feed integrity, data privacy, or protecting users from malicious actors?
- Will the increasingly centralized nature of product development at Facebook undermine the individual apps?
- What the hell is Facebook going to do on the blockchain?
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Facebook quietly rolls out issue ads policy
Facebook is going to require extra information from advertisers who want to run ads about political issues. So what’s a political issue? The company laid out its policies today: Facebook’s initial list of what it considers an “issue ad”: Abortion, budget, civil rights, crime, economy, education, energy, environment, foreign policy, government reform, guns, health, immigration, infrastructure, military, poverty, social security, taxes, terrorism, and values.
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New rules challenge Google and Facebook to change the way they moderate
My colleague Russell Brandom introduces us to the Santa Clara Principles, an ambitious set of guidelines that backers hope will improve content moderation around the web: Today, a coalition of nonprofit groups tried to address that gap with a list of basic moderation standards called the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation, designed as a set of minimum standards for how to treat user content online. The final product draws on work from the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Center for Democracy & Technology, and New America’s Open Technology Institute, as well as a number of independent experts. Together, they call for more thorough notice when a post is taken down, a stronger appeals process, and new transparency reporting around the total number of posts and accounts suspended. They’re simple measures, but they give users far more information and recourse than they currently get on Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms. The result is a new road map for platform moderation — and an open challenge to any company moderating content online.
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White House will host Amazon, Facebook, Ford and other major companies for summit on AI
Having a hard time not being cynical about this so not going to say anything at all: The White House on Thursday plans to convene executives from Amazon, Facebook, Google, Intel and 34 other major U.S. companies as it seeks to supercharge the deployment of powerful robots, algorithms and the broader field of artificial intelligence. The Trump administration intends to ask academics, government officials and AI developers about ways to adapt regulations to advance AI in such fields as agriculture, health care and transportation, according to a draft schedule of the event. And they’re set to discuss the U.S. government’s power to fund cutting-edge research into such technologies as machine learning.
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Facebook Introduces Tools to Curb Foreign Meddling in Irish Abortion Vote
Facebook’s new ad transparency tools, which are already live in Canada, are now being tested in Ireland: With a contentious May 25 referendum on Ireland’s abortion ban approaching, Facebook said on Tuesday that it would block political advertising from groups based outside the country. The company also recently introduced a tool so users can see all the ads a group is posting on the social network, in a bid to increase transparency of political campaigning on its platform. Facebook has said similar tools will eventually be rolled out in other countries, with analysts and observers focused in particular on the 2018 midterm elections in the United States.
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European regulators: We're not ready for new privacy law
European regulators: they’re just like us! (On the subject of GDPR.) The pan-EU law comes into effect this month and will cover companies that collect large amounts of customer data including Facebook (FB.O) and Google (GOOGL.O). It won’t be overseen by a single authority but instead by a patchwork of national and regional watchdogs across the 28-nation bloc. Seventeen of 24 authorities who responded to a Reuters survey said they did not yet have the necessary funding, or would initially lack the powers, to fulfill their GDPR duties.
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Facebook added Jeff Zients, the former director of the National Economic Council, to its board of directors
Facebook has added the CEO of Cranemere Group Limited to its board. Barring a major scandal, this will most likely be the last we hear about him until he leaves the board.
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Match Isn’t Worried About Facebook Dating App Competition
I’m basically with Match Group on this, even if people absolutely mix Facebook and their dating lives. A quarter of people log into Tinder with Facebook, and even more connect their Instagram accounts to it. I often think of Tinder as a messaging infrastructure for Instagram: Last year, Tinder started letting users verify that they were real people by receiving a text message. That method quickly became much more popular than logging into Tinder through Facebook and now is used by about 75 percent of customers, she said. Tinder’s matching algorithms also don’t tap into Facebook or other third-party data providers, according to a company presentation. “People don’t want to mix Facebook and their dating lives,” Ginsberg said.
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These academics are on the frontlines of fake news research
Daniel Funke has some fun capsule profiles of top researchers on the subject of misinformation. I enjoyed learning about Matthias Nießner — pronounced “Nießner” — who helped develop deepfake-style technology and is now working to ensure fakes can be easily identified: Detecting deepfake videos online remains a challenge for fact-checkers. With that in mind, Nießner’s team is working on methods like FaceForensics, a system that pulls from a dataset of about half a million edited images from more than 1,000 videos to detect patterns in manipulated videos.
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WhatsApp now lets you play Facebook and Instagram videos within the app
With Jan Koum and Brian Acton now out of the way, I expect every story we will see about WhatsApp in the next 12 months is about them integrating more fully with the rest of the Facebook apps. Here’s today’s example: WhatsApp has added support for playing Instagram and Facebook videos within the app. Now when contacts send you Facebook and Instagram videos, you can watch them inside WhatsApp without having to exit your conversation thread and go into other apps. The app already allowed users to play YouTube videos within the conversation.
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‘Facebook Avatars’ is its new clone of Snapchat’s Bitmoji
A Facebook take on Bitmoji is coming, says Josh Constine: Hidden inside the code of Facebook’s Android app is an unreleased feature called Facebook Avatars that lets people build personalized, illustrated versions of themselves for use as stickers in Messenger and comments. It will let users customize their avatar to depict their skin color, hair style and facial features. Facebook Avatars is essentially Facebook’s version of Snapchat’s acquisition, Bitmoji, which has spent years in the top-10 apps chart.
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Facebook United
Here’s Josh Constine’s blockchain speculation: They could explore payments facilitated by the blockchain’s lack of transaction fees. Messenger and Instagram both added native payment systems recently. Cutting out the credit card companies could be a lucrative shot for Facebook. And micropayments could open new ways to tip creators or compensate news outlets. Cloud storage based on blockchains could help Facebook cut its massive server bills. And the decentralized nature of the blockchain might unlock new paradigms for social networking with increased autonomy that might threaten Facebook if invented elsewhere. Perhaps they’ll conclude Facebook doesn’t need the blockchain. That’s fine. The risk would be leaving the space unmined and ripe for someone else’s taking.
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What a Facebook Blockchain Token Might Look Like
Why is Facebook starting a blockchain division? Here’s what Michael J. Casey, chairman of CoinDesk’s advisory board and a senior advisor of blockchain research at MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative, had to say when Zuckerberg first floated the idea. Here’s an admittedly very rudimentary model: Facebook would pre-mine a large pool of tokens, distributing a significant number to shareholders and holding the rest in reserve to distribute to users based on some reliable metric of the traffic their original content generates. Facebook would then mandate that on-platform advertising must be paid for with those tokens. A market would then emerge, into which users could sell, giving them a way to monetize their content creation. The value of the tokens would float against the dollar, based on demand and supply. This, I believe, is how Facebook could best resolve its dilemma, giving both shareholders and users a valuable stake in the future growth of its platform under a more decentralized set of rules.
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Exclusive: Google Assistant could become the most lifelike AI yet
Remember when Facebook poured a lot of time and money into something called M, a hybrid human/AI personal assistant? And remember when they shut it down because they couldn’t figure out how to scale it, because all anyone wanted to use it for was making phone calls on their behalf? Anyway, this was a pretty wild thing for Google to announce on the day that David Marcus, who oversaw the rollout of M, is leaving the Messenger team. And I think it’s fair to say that it felt more ambitious and useful than anything Facebook introduced at F8 last week: That’s because Person 2, the one who sounds like a man, isn’t a person at all. It’s the Google Assistant. And it (or “he”? That’s its own debate) doesn’t sound at all like the semirobotic, disembodied voice you usually hear out of a Google Home smart speaker when it’s giving you updates on the weather or telling you how long it’ll take you to commute to work. This could be the next evolution of the Assistant, Google’s rival to Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana. It sounds remarkably – maybe even eerily – human, pausing before responding to questions and using verbal ticks, like “um” and “uh.” It says “mm hmm” as if it’s nodding in agreement. It elongates certain words as though it’s buying time to think of an answer, even though its responses are instantaneously programmed by algorithms.
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Questions? Comments? Org chart revisions? casey@theverge.com
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