Twitter pledged to support a proposed Senate bill that would require technology platforms that sell advertising space to disclose the source of and amount of money paid for political ads. Called the Honest Ads Act, the bipartisan bill was first introduced back in October by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

And as I mentioned last time, our investigation did not find any election-related advertisements of the nature found on other platforms, through either our self-serve or managed advertisements. I also want to be very clear that none of the 944 users placed any ads on Reddit. We also did not detect any effective use of these accounts to engage in vote manipulation.

Ethnic Uighurs in China’s west say they are being forced to download an app that scans cell phones for audio and video files and dispatches their information to an outside server.

According to new research by a team supported by the Open Technology Fund under Radio Free Asia, the app Jingwang Weishi — which translates to “web cleansing” — records a phone’s identifying information, including its IMEI number, model, phone number, and manufacturer.

It also searches through the phone for unique, fingerprintlike identifiers associated with files, particularly photos, audio recordings, and videos, researchers found.

“We’ve noticed a troubling increase in the number of activist Facebook pages taken down and content removed. We have evidence that government-sponsored trolls are behind the ‘abuse’ reports that led to the content takedown,” Duy Hoang, an organizer with the pro-democracy group Viet Tan, told BuzzFeed News. “Unfortunately, when activists contacted Facebook, they only received vague responses from the company.”

“We are concerned that Facebook is unwittingly helping the Hanoi authorities to censor free expression,” Hoang added.

A Facebook spokeswoman declined to comment on his choice of suit for Congress. Mr. Rosenfeld said he had no idea of the maker or whether Mr. Zuckerberg was getting outside advice. A quick survey of my colleagues who work in Silicon Valley elicited only puzzlement. But over the years Mr. Zuckerberg’s suits have gotten skinnier, the ties narrower, the aesthetic less uncomfortable-kid-in-Dad’s-borrowed-suit.

A VR platform like Oculus offers lots of data points that could be turned into a detailed user profile. Facebook already records a “heatmap” of viewer data for 360-degree videos, for instance, flagging which parts of a video people find most interesting. If it decided to track VR users at a more detailed level, it could do something like track overall movement patterns with hand controllers, then guess whether someone is sick or tired on a particular day. Oculus imagines people using its headsets the way they use phones and computers today, which would let it track all kinds of private communications.

The Oculus privacy policy has a blanket clause that lets it share and receive information from Facebook and Facebook-owned services. So far, the company claims that it exercises this option in very limited ways, and none of them involve giving data to Facebook advertisers. “Oculus does not share people’s data with Facebook for third-party advertising,” a spokesperson tells The Verge.

All the while, Facebook’s access to our personal data increases and little changes about the way Zuckerberg handles it. So as Zuckerberg prepares to apologize for the first time in front of Congress, the question that lingers is: What will be different this time?

Privacy advocates have been raising concerns about how much information we share with tech companies for the last dozen years, if not longer. But we kept at it, mainly because there wasn’t any clearly viable alternative, and to most there wasn’t any obvious harm.

Even as data breaches piled up and identity theft became consumers’ number one concern over the years, the harm still wasn’t measurable enough to stop the sharing. And even in the wake of major data breaches like Yahoo, Target, the GAO, and Equifax, federal officials enacted zero new regulations to dictate how personal information is collected and stored, or how consumers should be notified when there’s a breach. One expert told me bluntly, “there’s no blood.” 

Krieger and Systrom refused to build look-alike functionality until Zuckerberg personally requested it, according to a person familiar with discussions. Zuckerberg worried that if Instagram didn’t do something to change its product, such as copy Snapchat, it risked missing out on an entire generation of users. A spokeswoman says Instagram “initiated and drove the creation of Stories internally and was not pressured.” Systrom acknowledges there was “tension” over the direction of Instagram, which he’s grateful for. Instagram Stories was introduced in August 2016. By the following spring, it was already more popular than Snapchat.

Today the charges against Mark and Facebook are graver still. Did Russian ads and posts of false news sway the 2016 election (If you believe this, I REALLY want to talk to you)? Why was Cambridge Analytica permitted to make off with so much user data? Does Facebook tilt us towards polarization and political intransigence? There’s much more. Slowly and patiently, Mark, Sheryl and their team will make Facebook much better. Should they have acted sooner? Of course. Do they understand how angry many of their users are? I would bet a lot that the answer is yes. Watch the changes they will make.

We don’t allow public hangings or bear-baiting in the United States and more. Congressional hearings like this one, with lots of Senators badgering an unpopular CEO, are a substitute. For some Senators—not all—the idea is to ask the nastiest, most hostile questions, thereby earning the prize: time on television. The witness’s replies won’t get much air time.

Those of us in the audience, might take a tip from the still-young man (he’s 33) behind the witness table.

Listen.

During questioning, lawmakers should instead focus on Facebook’s power and influence. Why was Facebook allowed to purchase WhatsApp and Instagram? Are we cool with Instagram kneecapping Snapchat by ripping off Stories? Why is it allowed to silo Americans’ thoughts and opinions using its powerful, black box News Feed algorithm? And why is it allowed to hold businesses hostage by forcing them to pay to reach people who have specifically said they want to see content from their pages in the News Feed?

Anyone who says they know how to fix the mess that Facebook has made is lying, but the path forward is likely to involve fostering a healthier social media and news media ecosystem. Regardless of what Facebook does with consumer data and privacy controls, its centralized nature and sheer size are going to continue to remain problems. If Zuckerberg manages to focus the conversation on how Facebook screwed up and how it can be fixed rather than how it has monopolized the internet, nothing is going to change.

Almost immediately, I cared about the contents of my social media apps again. All of Facebook’s new babies, engagements and political ruminations come from people I actually care about. On Twitter, everything seems more interesting. Having a smaller group of comrades generally makes me want to interact with them more.

The change could start with a small tweak to Facebook’s algorithms. Because positive emotions emerge more slowly than negative emotions, if Facebook’s advertisers received feedback less quickly, they would see engagement data based on a broader mix of emotional reactions, including more positive ones. By simply putting a delay in its feedback loop to advertisers, Facebook can, I suspect, bring about less negativity. That’s one way to make Facebook better that wouldn’t involve repressing Facebook’s customers or censoring its users.

I don’t mean this as a fanciful proposal, but as a practical one for right now, today. Facebook’s executives have made rejecting the idea of changing the company’s core business model a highlight of their current charm offensive, but they are wrong. It is in their interests—and not just everyone else’s—for Facebook to change its business model. The alternative is to become a digital tobacco company.

The whole premise is absurd. Mark is now an adult man with two children and a longtime partner who took his company public and runs what is now one of the most powerful companies in tech. He is one of the richest people on the planet. He has met kings and queens, world leaders and potentates across the globe (as well as a whole lot of livestock on his odd trip across the U.S. in the last year). He has started a massive foundation, he has made a clutch of major acquisitions and he has rewarded his shareholders many times over.

So, my guess — even if he is attacked badly by an attention-seeking politician, as Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang was when he was called a “moral pygmy” in 2007 — is that he can handle it. More to the point, he has to because, and I will try to say this slowly for those who do not get it: It. Is. His. Job. As. CEO. Of. Facebook.

We need to proactively develop systems that can efficiently determine if, for example, a video is real or manipulated and convey this information to the end user. This is especially important for journalists, diplomats, courts and political leaders. Initially, forgery detection may work well enough.

Very soon, however, we may need to build and deploy an enormous amount of new technical infrastructure to proactively validate that a video was captured at a particular time and place. Either way, platforms and even browsers would need to incorporate these authenticity stamps in a way that has real impact for users. They must affect the psychology of belief formation, as merely labeling something as forged is not likely to be sufficient.

As many of you are aware, it was recently brought to our attention that some of our players’ health records have been handled with less sensitivity than we would have liked. Specifically, if you died of dysentery between 1986 and 1993 while playing Oregon Trail, that information was likely shared with your cousins, neighbors, or other persons who were allowed access to the Apple IIe in your family’s basement. Some of those disclosures were repeated through other channels, at times using custom Print Shop banners taped to windows or bedroom doors. In some instances, players logged in under other users’ names so that they could create tombstones claiming that the deceased person was a lame dorkwad. On the earliest versions of the game, which weren’t set up to block obscenities, the publicly available information about users was even more damaging, graphic, and physically impossible.