In 1998, as the internet began to spread across the country, Congress passed the Children's Online Pr
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December 4 · Issue #39 · View online |
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In 1998, as the internet began to spread across the country, Congress passed the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA. Among the act’s most consequential provisions was a rule that children under the age of 13 could not give out their personal information with a parent’s permission. Because of the cost of complying with that law, most internet companies have simply forbidden anyone younger than 13 from signing up. But in practice, a healthy number of children under 13 wind up using online services anyway. And if you work at a big, rich social network whose existence is regularly threatened by the emergence of new networks popular with such humans, all those under-13s may begin to look like an attack vector. If you don’t grab the 6-year-old eyeballs, someone else will. And so here’s Messenger Kids, a new chat app for 6- to 12-year-olds that will soon arrive in the iOS App Store: Messenger Kids is primarily designed to offer video and text chat along with the types of playful masks and filters, originally popularized by Snapchat, that are now prevalent across Facebook’s many messaging products. Facebook says there is a “library of kid-appropriate and specially chosen GIFs, frames, stickers, masks and drawing tools lets them decorate content and express their personalities.” The app also gives parents the ability to control a child’s contact list, while a more spartan home screen shows pre-approved friends that are online and preexisting one-on-one chats and group threads. Kids told us that the primary reason they want to use social media and messaging platforms is to have fun, which means that an environment that emphasizes safety at the expense of joy and laughter will fail the customer satisfaction test — and potentially leave kids vulnerable to less controlled and more risky social environments. We believe that it’s possible to give kids a fun experience that provides more peace of mind for parents, too. What are these risky social environments? On Twitter, I asked what messaging services young children used most often. Common answers included services from Apple (iMessage, FaceTime) and Google (Hangouts). Many parents told me their children were indeed using messaging apps from the age of 6. It is easy to see how Facebook would look at the competitive landscape and conclude that a large market for kids’ messaging apps already exists, and that it would be unwise not to participate. And yet Messenger Kids gives me pause. Not once in the blog posts it wrote or the interviews it granted did Facebook executives describe the business purpose of Messenger Kids. It did not say how it would monetize the app. It did not describe whether parents would have access to any of the data being gathered about their families, or how that data might be used. A child can use an iMessage account and share very little data about herself with Apple. The same holds true for Hangouts. In many cases, children are using their parents’ accounts, obscuring the data further. On Messenger Kids, a parent creates an account for a child, establishes a familial relationship within the app, and then begins building their child’s social graph. Facebook says it has no plans to turn these mini-profiles into full-fledged Facebook profiles. And yet should it amass hundreds of millions of underage users, the company will have every incentive to offer one-click exporting of these shadow profiles to real ones on the day the child turns 13. Apple and Google profit off children in their own ways, of course, largely through the sale of hardware to their schools. And yet that feels, to me at least, like a fairer trade. Those companies make tools that help children learn. Facebook’s pitch, on the other hand, relies first upon scaring parents — your kids are going to text anyway, they tell us, and there might might be a child predator on the other end of the line: We also heard some scary things, like a mom who found the online chat her 7 year-old had while playing a video game with an adult male stranger. It began with seemingly friendly questions about her son’s favorite sports teams but slowly led to questions about what he looked like, before finally pushing the boy to send a photo of himself. She was terrified. Facebook argues that it has uniquely good intentions here, and that its app was built only after thousands of conversations with parents and a blue-ribbon panel of child development experts. In its pitch to kids to use the app, it reminds me of the mother in Mean Girls: “If you’re gonna drink, I’d rather you do it at the house.”
A core idea in this newsletter is that social media often has unintended consequences, and that those consequences often turn out to be negative. Facebook scarcely has a handle on the way its users are employing private messaging tools to spread misinformation here and abroad — and now it is turning over those tools, dressed up in primary colors, to children. Facebook’s success has long derived from its willingness to find the limits of our comfort around sharing, and then push right past them. Viewed in that light, building a pipeline of 6-year-old users in the name of protecting them from child predators is part of a long tradition. And yet at a time when I’m still struggling to understand how social media is altering my own mind, I’m hesitant to recommend it to children. The benefits of Messenger Kids to Facebook are too obvious, and too little acknowledged by its creators. And the benefits to children all but elude me.
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Facebook has a team of around 100 employees building products for teens and kids
Facebook’s “youth team” is building for the internet’s youngest users.
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How Trolls Locked My Twitter Account For 10 Days, And Welp
Katie Notopoulos turns in a great story about how some ironic old tweets were used against her by members of the alt-right to get her temporarily kicked off of Twitter: Viewed in the context of Twitter culture in 2017, it is very obviously a bad faith campaign by white nationalists and alt-right accounts to target members of the mainstream media for harassment by exploiting Twitter’s policies, which are riddled with loopholes and vague interpretations. In fact, Twitter’s abuse policy is so flaky that the platform couldn’t seem to decide if my tweets broke the rules or not. A few weeks ago, someone filed a report about the very tweet my account was locked over and tweeted out screenshots showing the “kill all white people” tweet wasn’t a violation of Twitter’s rules. This story has a lot of layers, but note how Twitter’s capricious rule-making winds up empowering Nazis at the expense of regular users. The company, as ever, has no explanation for any of this.
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Facebook Is Banning Women for Calling Men ‘Scum’
Taylor Lorenz finds a similar phenomenon playing out on Facebook: In the wake of the #MeToo movement, countless women have taken to Facebook to express their frustration and disappointment with men and have been promptly shut down or silenced, banned from the platform for periods ranging from one to seven days.
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People Are Mass Unfollowing John McCain After He Asked for Help Hitting 3 Million on Twitter
Today in #NeverTweet: Around noon on Monday, McCain tweeted a call to action requesting help from his audience. “We’re only 74 Twitter followers away from 3M — spread the word & help us reach this big milestone,” he tweeted. Doing the math, that means he was sitting pretty with 2,999,926 followers at the time. At the moment, he has 2,993,757 followers and the number is rapidly declining as people see an opportunity to tell McCain what they think of him. At press time tonight, He had 2.98 million followers.
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28 Senators Want the Net Neutrality Vote Postponed Because Bots Flooded the FCC With Comments
Motherboard: The senators have good reason to be worried about fake comments sent to the FCC, especially those opposing net neutrality. In total, the FCC released nearly 22 million comments submitted through its website during a public commenting period from April 27 to August 30 of this year. The FCC received significantly fewer online comments—only around 4 million—the last time it asked the public to weigh in on net neutrality in 2014. Over 80 percent of the comments are believed to have been sent by bots, according to an October analysis conducted by the Gravwell, a data analytics company. Most of the automated comments opposed net neutrality, while around 95 percent of “organic,” or believed to be legitimate comments, favored the current regulations.
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Report: Facebook wants to spend a ‘few billion dollars’ for streaming sports rights
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Facebook opens new London hub, to create 800 UK jobs
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New Study Finds That Most Redditors Don’t Actually Read the Articles They Vote On
A small sample, but still: According to a paper published in IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems by researchers at Notre Dame University, some 73 percent of posts on Reddit are voted on by users that haven’t actually clicked through to view the content being rated. This is according to a newly released dataset consisting of all Reddit activity of 309 site users for a one year period. In the process, the researchers identified signs of “cognitive fatigue” in Reddit users most likely to vote on content. Online aggregation is then somewhat a function of mental exhaustion.
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Who Do You Ship? What Tumblr Tells Us About Fan Culture
Online culture is wishing that two straight characters were gay and making fan art about it until either (a) the ‘ship’ is acknowledged in the show or (b) the discussion devolves into armed conflict. I’m pasting these three grafs here just to upset you: This year’s top ship comes from the animated sci-fi show “Voltron: Legendary Defender,” where fans have latched on to the chemistry between the solemn loner, Keith, and the goofball sharpshooter, Lance. The clip above, from season three, is a nice sampling of their (so-far platonic) relationship. “They’re just adorable with each other,” Ms. Brennan said of the pairing, popularly known as Klance. “On Tumblr specifically, a lot of the content about Klance is really cute fan art.”
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Vidme says goodbye
Vidme, which was like YouTube with Reddit-like upvoting, is dead. And this is why: Few advertisers are willing to negotiate direct deals with platforms that don’t have enormous scale, meaning ad-revenue rates are lower for newer platforms. In turn, there’s less overall revenue to be shared with creators, which means creators are less likely to support newer platforms for a sustained period of time. Although we introduced direct fan patronage as an additional business model, the profit margin was insufficient to cover the high costs of storing and delivering video. I will read literally any post about why a business failed, and this one is better than most. (Though, as an aside, it encourages future startups to issue their crypto coins as a fundraising measure, which advice feels extremely five minutes ago.)
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Ogden man helps Liberian scammer turn his life around
OK, this one charmed me. A man in Liberia reaches out to YouTuber in Utah asking for some help in what seems like a scam. The YouTuber asks him to instead take pictures of his village, in return for a small sum of money. The rest of the story transpired over 16 episodes of a YouTube story, but the gist is that the Liberian man wound up earning hundreds of dollars with his photography, and several hundred dollars more for his village.
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Safe Spaces Are an Answer to the Ever-More-Hostile Internet
Christopher Mims rounds up a group of smaller but highly curated social platforms, almost all of which seem completely doomed: A millennial-focused site, Neverthink has “channels” of video content scoured daily from all over the internet and streamed directly from their sources (typically YouTube) by a team of 15 editors. You can’t skip videos. This sounds like a video app you would give to children in prison.
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A simple theory of Moore's Law and social media
Tyler Cowen lays out a series of puckish theses about social media, and it’s great. He begins: 1. Moore’s Law plus the internet makes smart people smarter, and stupid people less smart. And concludes, in part: 11. Parts of social media will peel off into smaller, more private groups. At the end of the day, many will wonder which economies of scale and scope have been lost. And gained. Others will be too manipulated to wonder such things. One of Cowen’s observations here is that when consuming social media, “The socially sensitive, very smart people will become the most despairing, the most manipulated, and the most angry.” Which raises the question: how do I become less socially sensitive??? I am ready to learn!
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The death of the internet | The Outline
My old boss, Joshua Topolsky: I have loved the internet, but Donald Trump and the opportunistic trolls he has created or emboldened have ruined the internet for me. A place that I used to go for joy, for connection, for information, has been perverted, abused, and reduced. I can’t blame Trump alone; Facebook and its ilk have sought to whittle down and define the internet in a manner that has not only diminished its power, but provided thugs and thieves with tools to abuse humanity in ways that have previously only been possible inside of a video game. The Masters of the Cloud, like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, have made the whole of the internet into a violent game. Facebook, Twitter, and social networks in general are powered by a logic of rewards, and any system in which points can be scored can be gamed. And it has been gamed, it has been tightened up and used as a cudgel, and it’s beat down a populace in ways that are both easily describable and frighteningly spectral. What I want everyone to see is that there is no here and there. There is one world, whether it pulses on a screen in front of you, or is flesh right next to you. How we talk to one another, use one another, attack or embrace one another is real life. Emotional and psychological wounds don’t cut less deeply because they have been delivered at a remove. What you do on the internet is what you’re doing in real life.
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Why the government should abandon its plan to vet foreigners on Facebook
Rachel Levinson-Waldman, a lawyer and academic, looks at federal agencies’ monitoring of visitors’ social media handles: The Department of Homeland Security has been capitalizing on the availability of social media data, asking foreign visitors for their social media handles. This summer saw the latest development from one DHS agency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is seeking to mine social media to make sweeping predictions about foreign visitors to the United States — and, by extension, monitoring the Americans in their network. She concludes: Setting aside for a moment whether a program could even do what ICE hopes it will accomplish, it is an enormously dangerous proposition. As a group of more than 50 civil society organizations pointed out to DHS in a letter released in November, it is likely to be custom-built for discrimination. In addition to the fact that the scheme was birthed from the travel ban, a watered-down version of which was found by an appeals court to “drip with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination,” it arises in the context of Trump’s derogatory statements about a range of immigrant groups. It is easy to imagine that a system built in that environment will disadvantage groups targeted by the president, whether intentionally or through the use of ill-conceived tools to measure an individual’s contributions to society. The initiative is also likely to chill speech and association that is protected by the U.S. Constitution and by international human rights frameworks. Any visitor who knows that her online communications will be scrutinized by the U.S. government — not just as a one-time matter, but continuously for the duration of her stay — will choose her words carefully, perhaps choosing not to post messages that are critical of government policies or that discuss views disfavored by the current administration. U.S. citizens might exercise greater caution in speaking, meeting or collaborating with foreign visitors, worried that their speech will attract attention as well. And as a practical matter, it is highly implausible that a program purporting to scrutinize the Internet would pick up only materials that are posted by or related to foreign visitors; rather, it will sweep in vast quantities of content about lawful permanent residents and citizens as well.
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Hide Nazis With This Twitter Setting
Often when we discuss platforms’ responsibility to police the content they host, we lament how difficult it must to be scour every post for inappropriate content. And then we turn around and realize the platforms actually do a pretty great job of this already, so as to be able to operate in countries with more limited speech protections! Here’s Lifehacker with one of the bleakest life hacks I’ve ever seen: tell Twitter that you live in Germany, and Twitter will remove Nazi content from your timeline. It seems like the kind of feature that users around the world would appreciate. Here’s hoping for a global rollout!
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