|
|
July 12 · Issue #163 · View online |
|
But what if Facebook banned purveyors of misinformation from the platform instead? That was the question asked yesterday of John Hegeman, who recently replaced Adam Mosseri as the head of News Feed, at a small gathering of reporters in New York. How can Facebook claim to be serious about fighting misinformation, CNN’s Oliver Darcy asked Hegeman, while also offering notorious conspiracy site Infowars a platform for its 1 million followers? Hegeman replied that Facebook’s policy is not to remove false news. “I guess just for being false that doesn’t violate the community standards,” Hegeman said, explaining that InfoWars has “not violated something that would result in them being taken down.” Hegeman added, “I think part of the fundamental thing here is that we created Facebook to be a place where different people can have a voice. And different publishers have very different points of view.” A spokeswoman followed up afterward with some additional context: “While sharing fake news doesn’t violate our Community Standards set of policies, we do have strategies in place to deal with actors who repeatedly share false news. If content from a Page or domain is repeatedly given a ‘false’ rating from our third-party fact-checkers … we remove their monetization and advertising privileges to cut off financial incentives, and dramatically reduce the distribution of all of their Page-level or domain-level content on Facebook.” By focusing only on egregious examples of false news, Facebook allows its biggest purveyors of disingenuous conspiracies and polarizing content to operate with impunity while growing their audiences and expanding the footprint of low-quality information on the platform. All they need to know is how to game the system. Despite investing considerable money into national ad campaigns and expensive mini documentaries, Facebook is not yet up to the challenge of vanquishing misinformation from its platform. As its videos and reporter Q&As take pains to note, Facebook knows the truth is messy and hard, but it’s still not clear if the company is ready to make the difficult choices to protect it. Vox.com’s David Roberts, sounding a similar note, says Facebook’s policies disproportionately advantage conservatives, who expertly manipulate platforms into promoting misinformation and outright lies. “Conservatives have forced the same choice on institution after institution, person after person,” he writes in a Twitter thread. “Pursue accuracy, and live with relentless charges of bias & partisanship, or buy some protection by pursuing ‘balance.’ One after another, they’ve made the wrong choice. And here we are.” Then as now, Infowars was at the center of the debate. But in issuing a strike, YouTube showed a willingness to ban the company’s channel. (A third strike results in account termination.) Facebook won’t go that far. The anonymous holder of Facebook’s Twitter account, gently sparring with reporters today, said so: “We understand you strongly disagree with our position,” Facebook tweeted at the Times’ Kevin Roose. “We just don’t think banning Pages for sharing conspiracy theories or false news is the right way to go.”
The question I’m left with about these policies is: who or what do they serve to protect? Is it the principle of free speech? Is it Alex Jones and other bottom-feeding page administrators? Is it Facebook itself? It seems inarguable to me that Facebook’s policies around misinformation offer more protection to publishers than they do to the users those publishers seek to exploit. As a statement about policy, “we just don’t think banning Pages for sharing conspiracy theories or false news is the right way to go” offers little comfort to the victims of hate crimes fueled by WhatsApp. Or to the rural poor in Brazil being told, falsely, that the vaccine that will save their lives will actually end it. These are difficult questions, but they’re questions Facebook invited by growing itself to 2 billion users. What’s striking in the end is how far Facebook will go to protect the publishers who use its platform most maliciously — and how poorly its policies serve those publishers’ victims.
|
|
|
SEC Probes Why Facebook Didn’t Warn Sooner on Privacy Lapse
Here are some new details on the SEC investigation into Cambridge Analytica from Dave Michaels and Georgia Wells: The SEC has requested information from Facebook seeking to understand how much the company knew about Cambridge Analytica’s use of the data, these people said. The agency also wants to know how the company analyzed the risk it faced from developers sharing data with others in violation of Facebook’s policies, they added. The SEC enforces securities laws that govern what must be disclosed to shareholders so they can make informed investment decisions. It is one of several government agencies investigating Facebook and its handling of user data.
|
Russian Influence Campaign Sought To Exploit Americans' Trust In Local News
Russian agents created a bunch of fake local-news account during their 2016 information operation, Tim Mak reports: NPR has reviewed information connected with the investigation and found 48 such accounts. They have names such as @ElPasoTopNews, @MilwaukeeVoice, @CamdenCityNews and @Seattle_Post. “A not-insignificant amount of those had some sort of variation on what appeared to be a homegrown local news site,” said Bret Schafer, a social media analyst for the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which tracks Russian influence operations and first noticed this trend.
|
Facebook 'closed' groups weren't as confidential as some thought
We regret to inform you that the Days Without a Facebook Data Privacy Scandal counter must once again be set back to zero. Kate Fazzini and Chrissy Farr: Facebook recently closed a privacy loophole that allowed third parties to discover the names of people in private, “closed” Facebook groups. A Chrome extension that was made specifically for marketers to harvest this information en masse was also shut down prior to Facebook’s move, after the social media network issued a cease-and-desist letter to the application’s makers earlier this year, according to a spokesperson. Facebook’s decision came after members of a private group for women with a gene mutation associated with a higher risk breast cancer complained, concerned that their names might be exposed and open them to discrimination from insurers or other privacy violations. A spokesperson for Facebook said shutting down the ability to view members of closed groups was a recent decision based on “several factors,” but was not related to this group’s outreach.
|
|
Facebook Watch Is Struggling to Win Fans
Here’s a good report from Tom Dotan and Jessica Toonkel answering a question I’ve had: how is Facebook Watch doing? (It’s not doing very well.) An executive at one digital media company who said that its Facebook Watch show brought in tens of thousands of dollars of ad revenue said it could have made $1.5 million if the show had appeared on its own site.
|
Facebook's diversity efforts are failing black and Hispanic women
Facebook’s latest diversity report shows slow progress, Jessica Guynn reports: You can almost count on one hand the number of black women – six – who work as senior managers or executives at Facebook in the U.S., accounting for less than 1 percent of those 769 jobs. The next layer of managers at Facebook isn’t more diverse: 34 out of a total of 2,816, or 1.2 percent. The number of Hispanic women who are senior managers or executives can be counted on two hands – 10 – for about 1.3 percent of those jobs, according to the most recent documents Facebook filed with the federal government. Hispanic women hold 46 of the next layer of management positions at Facebook, or 1.6 percent.
|
Is Instagram changing the way we design the world?
Yes it is! The spectacular regeneration of King’s Cross in London in recent years has gone further. Glittering glass buildings have shot up alongside plant-covered walls, colour-changing fountains and kitsch billboards. Every part of the area now features something that looks like a prop - from steps covered in fake grass where people eat lunch to a giant neon swing that cries out to be photographed. Then, at King’s Cross station, there is the fictional platform 9¾ that featured in the Harry Potter books, where fans queue to “crash” through the barrier. There is even a professional photographer to mark your moment. Kate Beavis, an expert in vintage interiors, thinks this kind of pop-up urbanism is becoming the norm. “The things you see on Instagram, such as pastel-coloured houses and walls, seem to be becoming more visible in cities and suburbs. Instagram selfie-wall opportunities are cropping up everywhere, even at events. This is now the norm, so it makes sense for architects to plan them in. What will happen is that all our communal areas will take on a new look and feel to match the Insta need, but, in reality, this is what a trend is: something popular that works into our spaces and life. In 10 years, it will be something else.”
|
Why Some of Instagram's Biggest Memers Are Locking Their Accounts
Taylor Lorenz has a great story answering a question I have had for years: why do so many Instagrammers lock their accounts? Improbably, it’s a growth strategy: Going private on Instagram means only people who follow you can see and share your content. If a friend drops a link to a funny meme from a private page into a group chat, only those who already follow the page will be able to see it. So, the thinking goes, anyone who wants to see it and can’t will smash the follow button. “People go private because they get more followers when a follower sends a post to their friends and that person has to follow the account in order to see. It’s that simple,” says Jack Wagner, a Los Angeles–based director who has run several meme accounts. “It’s just a weird technique somebody noticed one day and now lots of people do it.”
|
Facebook paid $88 million this year to build out its Seattle area Oculus hub
Oculus’ cultural footprint so far feels tiny, but Facebook continues to invest huge resources into it. Taylor Hatmaker reports: A new analysis by real estate resource BuildZoom sheds additional light on the Menlo Park-based company’s efforts to build a satellite virtual reality HQ in and around Seattle. Over the last three years, Facebook has spent $106 million on construction and development permits for Oculus offices in Redmond. In 2018 alone, Facebook spent $88.3 million on Oculus -related permits for as many as eight new offices in the area. BuildZoom’s analysis identifies five properties in particular, all on Willow Road in Redmond, that span more than 90,000 square feet of lab and office space. Those locations are 10545 Willows Rd., 10785 Willows Rd., 9805 Willows Rd., 9845 Willows Rd. and 9461 Willow Road.
|
How 20-Year-Old Kylie Jenner Built A $900 Million Fortune In Less Than 3 Years
The youngest Jenner sister is about to become a billionaire and basically says she owes it all to Instagram. This is wild: Ultimately their fortunes all derive from the same place. “Social media is an amazing platform,” Jenner says. “I have such easy access to my fans and my customers.” That and a large dose of tastemaking are pretty much her entire business, an invention of the Instagram age. Hewlett and Packard immortalized the garage–Jenner has her (or her mom’s) kitchen table. Her near-billion-dollar empire consists of just seven full-time and five part-time employees. Manufacturing and packaging? Outsourced to Seed Beauty, a private-label producer in nearby Oxnard, California. Sales and fulfillment? Outsourced to the online outlet Shopify. Finance and PR? Her shrewd mother, Kris, handles the actual business stuff, in exchange for the 10% management cut she takes from all her children. As ultralight startups go, Jenner’s operation is essentially air. And because of those minuscule overhead and marketing costs, the profits are outsize and go right into Jenner’s pocket.
|
|
The conventional wisdom about not feeding trolls makes online abuse worse
Film Crit Hulk takes on the popular idea that platform trolls will go away if we ignore them: Ask anyone who has dealt with persistent harassment online, especially women: this is not usually what happens. Instead, the harasser keeps pushing and pushing to get the reaction they want with even more tenacity and intensity. It’s the same pattern on display in the litany of abusers and stalkers, both online and off, who escalate to more dangerous and threatening behavior when they feel like they are being ignored. In many cases, ignoring a troll can carry just as dear a price as provocation.
|
Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful? That’s an Easy One
John Herrman argues that tech platforms grow as big as they do only by misleading us about what they’re really up to: The first easy question to ask of the big tech companies: What are they, really? Certainly not what they tell consumers they are. Twitter and Facebook are not merely places to hang out with or meet people, or competitors with the news media, but entirely new forms of discourse built around centralized advertising marketplaces. Uber is not a car company but an attempt to build a new private transit layer over the places in which it operates. Amazon is not a competitor to bookstores or brick-and-mortar retail — or even a store of any kind — but a new logistical model for the exchange and transport of goods, media and services.
|
|
This video of a lemon rolling down a hill has been watched 3 million times
Why do some things go viral where others do not? It is a question as old as Twitter itself. And yet few videos have captured the lottery-like quality of getting famous for no reason than this two-minute clip of a lemon rolling down a hill, which now has more than 4 million views. “I thought it was a tennis ball or something,” Sakasegawa said in an interview Thursday. He’d just passed a guy walking his dogs. He ran to catch up to the rolling object, and it was only as he got closer that he noticed it was actually a piece of fruit.
|
|
Questions? Comments? Favorite Infowars videos? casey@theverge.com
|
Did you enjoy this issue?
|
|
|
|
In order to unsubscribe, click here.
If you were forwarded this newsletter and you like it, you can subscribe here.
|
|
|
|
|
|