A prime reason fake news stories gain wide traction these days is that there are fewer gatekeepers to
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January 10 · Issue #60 · View online |
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A prime reason fake news stories gain wide traction these days is that there are fewer gatekeepers to keep them away from us. They show up in our News Feeds, tell us what we want to hear, and we happily share them with friends and family, often without ever having clicked the link. Facebook was built to let anyone share almost anything, and we do. Unlike the newspapers of the past, Facebook insists it does not want to be “ an arbiter of truth.” As a result, it can be harder than ever to separate fact from fiction. Of course, newspapers and plenty of other big publishers are still happy to count fact-finding as part of their mission. The trouble is that in a world of infinite content supply, newspapers have had a difficult time reaching their audiences on Facebook. And so news today that Facebook is testing a separate section for local news and events caught my eye. Here’s my colleague from Recode, Kurt Wagner, with the details: The social network is testing a new section inside its app called “Today In,” a feed made up entirely of local news, events and announcements. The test is running in just six cities for now: New Orleans, La.; Little Rock, Ark.; Billings, Mont.; Peoria, Ill.; Olympia, Wash.; and Binghamton, N.Y. Facebook users who self-identify as living in those areas will be able to visit the new section to see local information, like stories from local publishers or emergency updates from local authorities. Facebook is using a mix of humans and machine learning software to surface content in this new section. Local news publishers who appear there will all be approved and vetted by the company’s News Partnerships team, which is overseen by former NBC news anchor Campbell Brown, according to a company spokesperson. Up until now, Facebook’s efforts to rein in bad actors on the platform have largely involved placing them on a blacklist. With “Today In,” Facebook is effectively testing a whitelist: using humans to select high-quality local journalism outlets, and allowing them — and only them — to share news within the section. The quality of local journalism varies widely from town to town. But by limiting publishers to vetted outlets, Facebook can both promote the local journalists whose businesses have been crushed by the rise of platforms and improve the quality of the journalism shared with its own users. The move likely won’t drive enormous traffic to publishers, especially while it’s in a test phase and limited to the purgatory of the hamburger button. But over time, it could drive both interest in, and subscriptions to, local publications. I don’t mean to get too excited over a test. Even if Today In succeeds beyond Facebook’s wildest expectations, I don’t imagine that Facebook will bring this approach to the core News Feed. If anything, it’s another experiment that separates news from the News Feed — a test we talked about in October, and one that seems to have had negative consequences for the publishers affected. Still, at this earliest of stages, Today In feels like a win-win. Sometimes a little gatekeeping can go a long way.
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Fake News Risks Plaguing Brazil Elections, Top Fact-Checkers Say
Ahead of its presidential election, Brazil is considering the same ban on fake news — however it chooses to define it — suggested recently by French President Emmanuel Macron. Brazil’s electoral authorities are moving to tackle the problem. Luiz Fux, incoming president of the country’s electoral tribunal, will create a task force comprised of various authorities to combat the proliferation of fake news and draft a bill to curb the practice, local media reported. A law Congress approved last year also aims to fine internet users who publish content aimed at influencing the election under a false identity.
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The Digital Activism Gap: How Class and Costs Shape Online Collective Action
Here’s a useful academic paper from researcher Jen Schradie that finds a digital divide among activists. You’d think free tools like Facebook and Twitter would empower groups with fewer financial resources, but Schradie’s study finds that isn’t the case. From the abstract: In-depth interviews and ethnographic observations reveal that the mechanisms of this digital activism gap are organizational resources, along with individual disparities in access, skills, empowerment and time. These factors create high costs of online participation for working-class groups. Rather than reduced costs equalizing online participation, substantial costs contribute to digital activism inequality.
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Ingush Head hates Instagram but wants to keep abreast of times
The head of Ingushetia, a Russian state, is a weary user of social media in a way that I personally found highly relatable! He has 168,000 followers and has posted more than 4,500 pictures: Yunus-bek Yevkurov, the Head of the Russian Republic of Ingushetia said in an interview with RIA Novosti that he does “not like Instagram in the slightest”, but this “must be done nevertheless”. He is reportedly the one making all the posts on social networks. Yevkurov said he used social media to tell everyone about the republic’s achievements and traditions, to convey the national flavor and to ensure that more people know about the republic. The Ingush head also said he might create accounts in other networks as well, since it is important to “keep abreast of the times”. At present, “80 percent of people around the world read news and get information via social networks,” he added.
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Where Is Twitter's Promised Ad Transparency Center?
Like most people, you probably spend a lot of time wondering where Twitter’s promised ad transparency center is. Well, would you be surprised to learn that it is not ready yet? In October 2017, as Congress probed Russia’s suspected manipulation of Twitter’s platform, the company pledged to within weeks establish an “industry-leading transparency center” that would provide visibility into political and issues-based ads. More than two months later, the center is nowhere to be found. Twitter announced the center as it was preparing to testify before Congress following revelations that Kremlin-linked trolls used its platform in an attempt to sow discord in American politics. The initiative would offer important visibility into what ads run on Twitter, and when, regardless of the ads’ intended targets. Twitter told BuzzFeed News that the creation of the transparency center is still in progress. But a spokesperson declined to comment on when it might debut and why it’s been delayed.
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WhatsApp Encryption Security Flaws Could Allow Snoops to Slide Into Group Chats
Wired on some new findings from German researchers: But while the Signal and Threema flaws they found were relatively harmless, the researchers unearthed far more significant gaps in WhatsApp’s security: They say that anyone who controls WhatsApp’s servers could effortlessly insert new people into an otherwise private group, even without the permission of the administrator who ostensibly controls access to that conversation. “The confidentiality of the group is broken as soon as the uninvited member can obtain all the new messages and read them,” says Paul Rösler, one of the Ruhr University researchers who co-authored a paper on the group messaging vulnerabilities. “If I hear there’s end-to-end encryption for both groups and two-party communications, that means adding of new members should be protected against. And if not, the value of encryption is very little.”
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Here’s Facebook security chief Alex Stamos with a thread pushing back on the piece:
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Read the Wired article today about WhatsApp – scary headline! But there is no a secret way into WhatsApp groups chats. The article makes a few key points. https://t.co/XCvlcolFiA
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11:05 AM - 10 Jan 2018
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YouTube removes Logan Paul from top-tier Google ad platform, YouTube Red projects on hold - Polygon
More suicide forest fallout: The company announced today that it will not move forward with a planned YouTube Red movie that Paul was supposed to star in. The Thinning: New World Order was supposed to be the sequel to Paul’s 2016 YouTube Red movie, The Thinning. A YouTube representative also confirmed to Polygon he is removed from Google’s top tier preferred ad program. “In light of recent events, we have decided to remove Logan Paul’s channels from Google Preferred,” a YouTube representative said. Additionally, we will not feature Logan in season 4 of ‘Foursome’ and his new Originals are on hold.
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The Strange Brands in Your Instagram Feed
Alexis Madrigal takes a deep dive into the world of Instagram e-commerce, occasioned by his purchase of a bad coat. It does not inspire a lot of confidence about shopping on Instagram — particularly for items with too-good-to-be-true prices: The products don’t matter to the system, nor do they matter to Ganon. The whole idea of retail gets inverted in his videos. What he actually sells in his stores is secondary to how he does it. It’s as if he squirts hot dogs on his ketchup and mustard. What Ganon does is pick suppliers he’ll never know to ship products he’ll never touch. All his effort goes into creating ads to capture prospective customers, and then optimizing a digital environment that encourages them to buy whatever piece of crap he’s put in front of them. And he is not alone.
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HQ Trivia, Troll Edition: Scott Rogowsky Answers Chatters
Set the “days without a Quiz Daddy profile” back to zero! For this unit of content, New York pivoted to video: In this special HQ Troll Edition, hear Rogowsky ask no questions and instead answer his trolls and fans’ most pressing questions, like whether he’s their daddy.
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Facebook brings Messenger Kids to Fire tablets
If you are using this app, please tell me how and why!
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Keep Track Of Who Facebook Thinks You Know With This Nifty Tool
Kashmir Hill is obsessed (in the best possible sense of that word) with People You May Know, a Facebook future that is responsible for both explosive growth for the company and some deeply uncomfortable connections, such as when it exposes the real names of sex workers to their clients. This tool lets you track who Facebook thinks you may know, and it’s how Gizmodo has done some of their reporting on the issue. I love it when news organizations make software, and more when they make it publicly available. Great work.
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Also, another of Twitter’s incremental safety updates went live today. More on this below!
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This update is now rolled out to everyone. Here’s an example of the in-app notifications you can expect: https://t.co/q6l7F5050w
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11:12 AM - 10 Jan 2018
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Beware the lessons of growing up Galapagos
Eugene Wei is worth reading on everything: he’s worked at Amazon, Hulu, Flipboard, and most recently Oculus, and I always appreciate his perspective. This is a long, discursive post about why the NFL is likely going the way of the dinosaur, and he slips in some interesting commentary about the crazy prices tech companies have paid the NFL for streaming rights, to no clear effect: This provides the leagues opportunities to swindle the tech companies for a while longer, an example being the rights to stream Thursday Night Football, which a series of tech companies from Yahoo to Twitter to Amazon have (probably) overpaid for the last few seasons. As Patrick Stewart said in L.A. Story, “You think with a statement like this you can have the duck?!” The chef says, “He can have the chicken!” Thursday Night Football is zee chicken of the NFL broadcast portfolio, but the restaurant is still called L'Idiot. This happened for tech companies when they tried to add film and television to their portfolio, too. They routinely paid fortunes for the rights to back seasons of shows that are no longer relevant anymore. When I was at Hulu, I could only shake my head when I heard the asking price for all the back seasons of Seinfeld. Years later, long after I’d left, Hulu paid multiples of that. The cultural decay curve for content in this age of abundance is accelerating by the day, and there is no equivalent of botox to ward it off. Given market feedback, however, such temporary arbitrage never lasts long. The days of the NFL strong-arming its partners to overpay for the most meager of rights are coming to an end. The thing about setting up a moat around your content is that the moment your cultural value crosses its peak, the moat becomes a set of prison bars. The flywheel loop can turn just as furiously counter-clockwise as clockwise.
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What is Snapchat, now that Story sharing has stopped growing?
Snapchat has been incredibly impactful on culture. From impermanent content to vertical video, popularizing augmented reality and bringing on the age of visual communication, Speigel’s ideas have redefined the way we share. Unfortunately, Snapchat hasn’t been able to capture much of the monetary benefits of those inventions as they get cloned elsewhere. The popularity of Snapchat messaging amongst western teenagers means it won’t disappear overnight. But it may be time for it and the world to face the fact that Snapchat could be world-changing product without ever becoming a world-dominating business.
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You, Too, Can Live Like Royalty and Delete All Your Social Media Accounts
The dangerous lunatics at Gizmodo suggest that, like Meghan Markle, you should consider deleting your personal Twitter and Instagram. You first Giz! As first reported by People yesterday, actress Meghan Markle has axed her personal Instagram and Twitter accounts ahead of her planned wedding to Prince Harry later this year. The move puts her in line with the rest of Britain’s royal family, whose social media presence is limited to tidy official group accounts. But here’s a lifehack Big Like doesn’t want you to know: Even filthy commoners like us can quit this shit for good.
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Twitter knows Waluigi is abusive but probably won’t ban him
We all know Twitter is a platform filled with abuse, harassment, and other modern nightmares, but it seems the people at the top are finally listening to our desperate pleas for change. Behold, Twitter posted actual evidence of its commitment to change today as part of a safety rollout: known Mario antagonizer Waluigi has been Dealt With.
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Questions? Comments? What you did during the CES blackout? casey@theverge.com
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