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| April 2 · Issue #110 · View online |
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If there’s a single theme that dominates Ezra Klein’s fascinating interview with Mark Zuckerberg today, it’s accountability. In the 18 months since the 2016 election, the world has belatedly come to grips with the unintended consequences of social media. And yet it’s only beginning to ask who should be held accountable — and how they should be held accountable — when the worst happens. As Klein points out, Facebook’s failures have consequences on par with government failures. The integrity of elections is threatened; violence is incited; key communication channels are jammed by bad actors. In America and many other countries, much of this activity goes unregulated by the government. And so what recourse does the average person have? As Klein puts it: There’s no quadrennial election for CEO of Facebook. And that’s a normal way that democratic governments ensure accountability. Do you think that governance structure makes you, in some cases, less accountable? My goal here is to create a governance structure around the content and the community that reflects more what people in the community want than what short-term-oriented shareholders might want. And if we do that well, then I think that could really break ground on governance for an internet community. But if we don’t do it well, then I think we’ll fail to handle a lot of the issues that are coming up. Here are a few of the principles. One is transparency. Right now, I don’t think we are transparent enough around the prevalence of different issues on the platform. We haven’t done a good job of publishing and being transparent about the prevalence of those kinds of issues, and the work that we’re doing and the trends of how we’re driving those things down over time. A second is some sort of independent appeal process. Right now, if you post something on Facebook and someone reports it and our community operations and review team looks at it and decides that it needs to get taken down, there’s not really a way to appeal that. I think in any kind of good-functioning democratic system, there needs to be a way to appeal. And I think we can build that internally as a first step. But over the long term, what I’d really like to get to is an independent appeal. So maybe folks at Facebook make the first decision based on the community standards that are outlined, and then people can get a second opinion. You can imagine some sort of structure, almost like a Supreme Court, that is made up of independent folks who don’t work for Facebook, who ultimately make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech in a community that reflects the social norms and values of people all around the world. To some, an independent Facebook Supreme Court could represent a welcome check on the company’s total control over what is shared on the platform. To others, it might look like a strategic retreat from responsibility. And no matter what you think, given Facebook’s sheer size, some kind of enhanced oversight seems all but inevitable. For now, details about how Facebook Supreme Court would be composed, or would operate, are very much theoretical. What’s more important is that Zuckerberg, who owns the majority of Facebook voting stock and has sought to cement that control permanently, has endorsed its existence. It’s consistent with something he said during last month’s spate of Cambridge Analytica interviews. It’s from his interview with Kara Swisher and Kurt Wagner in Recode: Zuckerberg said something else we haven’t heard before, which is that even though making these kinds of policy decisions make him uncomfortable, he may no longer have a choice. “Things like, ‘Where’s the line on hate speech?’ I mean, who chose me to be the person that did that?” Zuckerberg continued. “I guess I have to, because we’re here now, but I’d rather not.” With great power, it seems, has come a fervent wish to maybe not quite have so much power. Or maybe to retain the more appealing aspects of that power while offloading the trickier responsibilities of policing political speech to stakeholders. Of course, it’s one thing to signal your long-term goals, and another to put those ideas into practice. Facebook has never lacked for good intentions, but it can ultimately only be judged on its results. Fortunately, Zuckerberg himself told Klein the standard to which he hopes the company will be held: Over the long term, I think that’s the big question. Have we enabled people to come together in new ways — whether that’s creating new jobs, creating new businesses, spreading new ideas, promoting a more open discourse, allowing good ideas to spread through society more quickly than they might have otherwise? And on the other side, did we do a good job of preventing the abuse? Of making it so that governments aren’t interfering in each other’s civic elections and processes? Are we eliminating, or at least dramatically reducing, things like hate speech? The company may yet achieve those goals, but in the meantime we have to live in the present day. The midterm elections are seven months away, and Russian bots still pervade social media. “I’m optimistic that we’re going to address a lot of those challenges,” Zuckerberg told Klein, “and that we’ll get through this, and that when you look back five years from now, 10 years from now, people will look at the net effect of being able to connect online and have a voice and share what matters to them as just a massively positive thing in the world.” All of that could be true — and yet you don’t have to be a pessimist to worry about what all might happen in the meantime. |
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14 Million Visitors to U.S. Face Social Media Screening
Here’s an extremely spooky plan from the Trump administration to demand the social media handles of would-be visitors to America. Sewell Chan reports: Nearly all applicants for a visa to enter the United States — an estimated 14.7 million people a year — will be asked to submit their social media user names for the past five years, under proposed rules that the State Department issued on Friday. Last September, the Trump administration announced that applicants for immigrant visas would be asked for social media data, a plan that would affect 710,000 people or so a year. The new proposal would vastly expand that order to cover some 14 million people each year who apply for nonimmigrant visas. The proposal covers 20 social media platforms. Most of them are based in the United States: Facebook, Flickr, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Myspace, Pinterest, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, Vine and YouTube. But several are based overseas: the Chinese sites Douban, QQ, Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo and Youku; the Russian social network VK; Twoo, which was created in Belgium; and Ask.fm, a question-and-answer platform based in Latvia.
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Grindr Is Sharing The HIV Status Of Its Users With Other Companies
Here’s a concerning story about how Grindr, a popular gay hookup app, has shared data about users’ HIV status with two app optimization companies. On one hand, users chose to share their status on their profiles. And it’s important that we not stigmatize the disease. On the other, it seems likely that many o those users would not want their HIV status shared with other companies without their express consent. It’s Cambridge Analytica all over again. (By the end of the day, the company begrudgingly decided to do the right thing and stop sharing this information, but not before complaining that they had been “ unfairly singled out”.) “To then have that data shared with third parties that you weren’t explicitly notified about, and having that possibly threaten your health or safety — that is an extremely, extremely egregious breach of basic standards that we wouldn’t expect from a company that likes to brand itself as a supporter of the queer community.“
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Missouri Attorney General Opens Probe of Facebook Data Usage
Missouri’s Republican attorney general is making some hay out of the Cambridge Analytica story: In a civil investigative demand dated Monday, Missouri’s Josh Hawley is asking Facebook to disclose every time it’s shared user information with a political campaign or political action committee, how much those campaigns paid Facebook for such data, and whether users were notified.
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Has Facebook’s algorithm change hurt hyperpartisan sites? According to this data, nope
Data that analytics provider NewsWhip provided to Nieman Lab suggests that hyperpartisan publishers are doing just fine after this year’s big algorithm change. The whole thing is worth reading — lots of charts! — but also wanted to note this, since we had included the story referenced here in a previous edition of The Interface: The NewsWhip data appears to contradict a report published by The Outline that used BuzzSumo (a NewsWhip competitor) data to suggest that conservative sites had seen a particularly big decrease following the Facebook algorithm changes. The Outline said that Fox News experienced a “serious dip” in January, for instance, but NewsWhip’s data shows the opposite.
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Let Us Break Down The Bizarre Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory Roseanne Barr Has Tweeted About
Roseanne Barr’s reboot of her 90s ABC sitcom is a massive hit — and her Twitter account shares a bunch of awful conspiracy theories. It’s hard to see this ending well: So what exactly is “QAnon” and “The Storm”? They’re part of a pro-Trump mega–conspiracy theory that claims, among other things, that top Democrats are secret Satan worshippers running a global child sex trafficking ring and Trump is going to take them down. A spokesperson for Barr did not immediately return a request for comment.
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Can "Extreme Transparency" Fight Fake News and Create More Trust With Readers?
Nieman looks at how publishers are trying to build more trust with readers by describing their reporting processes in elaborate detail: In many ways, the new push for transparency is a response to the current media environment of “fake news”—both the dissemination of actual false stories online and through social media, and the cries from the current administration that stories it doesn’t like are “fake.” As more and more Americans get their news through social media, content gets divorced from context that allows readers to decide whether a story is trustworthy. “People are getting their news through every possible medium and on every possible device,” says Melody Kramer, senior audience development manager at the Wikimedia Foundation and columnist for the Poynter Institute. “It’s a challenge to figure out the veracity of the information, where it came from, what the point of view is, or how it was put together.” That creates more of an imperative for news organizations to pull back the curtain to explain to readers how they report and write stories. “It becomes incumbent upon organizations—that are trying to improve our lower-d democracy—to open up a window into how they do the work they do.”
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Mark Zuckerberg calls Tim Cook’s comments on Facebook “extremely glib”
Elsewhere in the Klein interview, Zuckerberg spoke up for an ad-based business model: Instead, Zuckerberg argued that it’s tech companies like Apple that charged premiums that might care less. “To the contrary, I think it’s important that we don’t all get Stockholm syndrome and let the companies that work hard to charge you more convince you that they actually care more about you. Because that sounds ridiculous to me,” he said.
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They Tried to Boycott Facebook, Apple and Google. They Failed.
The Times talks to one of my favorite types of person — the person who dramatically quit Facebook to use Instagram instead: Hundreds of people deleted their accounts after revelations that the political-data firm Cambridge Analytica had improperly harvested the information of 50 million Facebook users. Yet many of those same people promptly instructed their friends to find them on Instagram, which is owned by — you guessed it — Facebook. “It’s exactly the same company. I realize it’s ridiculous,” said Sachi Cunningham, a documentary filmmaker in San Francisco who deactivated her Facebook last week and shifted her attention to Instagram, where, she said, the conversation is less toxic. Ms. Cunningham, who has freelanced for The New York Times, added that she had immediately begun missing Facebook as a research tool for her documentaries. “I don’t know if I can get out of the ecosystem,” she said.
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Facebook lets advertisers target users on the basis of their interest in illegal firearms.
Mark Joseph Stern reports: The loophole could provide a workaround to Facebook’s ban on gun sales.
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Marketers shrug amid Facebook-Cambridge Analytica fallout
Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal began to unfold, one question has reigned above all: how will the Clorox family of brands react? Today we can tell you that Clorox — which makes bleach, charcoal briquets, and salad dressing, presumably from different ingredients — stands with Facebook: “We at Clorox stand by Facebook as an essential partner in building our brands,” Clorox Co. Chief Marketing Officer Eric Reynolds said in a statement. “We feel good about the steps Facebook is taking to protect people’s privacy and security and are confident it will continue to be aggressive in honoring its commitments to the Facebook community of advertisers and users above all else.”
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Facebook to Delete Videos That Users Never Posted
Facebook retained a bunch of videos captured through its in-app camera even if they were never posted. It’s deleting them now, saying it was bug.
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Instagram is limiting how much data some developers can collect from its API — and cutting off others altogether
Fallout from the Cambridge Analytica story has come to Instagram.
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Instagram effect? Number of Seattle-area hikers has doubled in less than 10 years, data show
Here’s a fun little story that attributes the increase in the popularity of hiking to people needing inspirational backdrops for their Instagram photos. (Another contributing factor is that nearly every single person in America says that they enjoy hiking in their dating profile, as if by force of law.)
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As Facebook Struggles, Rivals’ Leaders Stay (Mostly) Mum
Here’s a curious story from The New York Times which says that apart from Tim Cook, Marc Benioff, Ginni Rometty, the CEO of Redfin, and Elon Musk, tech CEOs are not criticizing Facebook. (Another one I’d add: WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton, now running the foundation behind Signal.)
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Silicon Valley Rivals Take Shots at Facebook
And here’s a story from the Wall Street Journal that takes the same set of facts the Times did and puts what I would consider to be the correct headline on it.
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At 12, His Science Video Went Viral. At 14, He Fears He Was Too Rude.
Adrianne Jeffries looks at how the formerly chill category of science explainer videos has devolved into attention-grabbing viral clickbait: Science communication is the art of making science accessible, and thanks to the internet, science is more accessible than ever. More research and original data is being posted publicly online, and a new generation of science ambassadors — in the tradition of Mythbusters or Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan — has found a large audience on social media. But they face a conundrum: the platforms that help get their message out sometimes favor a style that inflames as much as it informs. Science enthusiasts have built enormous audiences online not only because they appeal to human curiosity, but also because they have a flair for entertainment.
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YouTube channel pages have been down all afternoon
YouTube channel pages were down most of the day.
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Jake Paul is getting his own talk show on YouTube Red
This follows YouTube’s current playbook of trying to build its subscription business around stars who are native to the platform. But given some of this Paul’s antics, it feels like something YouTube may come to regret. |
Logan Paul Cited by Park Rangers for Being a D-Bag in Yosemite Park
What’s the other Paul brother up to? I’m so glad you asked: An official for the U.S. National Parks Service in Yosemite tells The Blast Paul was cited over the weekend after one of their Rangers allegedly witnessed the YouTube star and his friends riding around the park on top of a school bus while sitting inside tents that were fastened to the roof.
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Snap Stock Gets Hammered
Bad day for Snap stock, reports Tom Dotan: Two negative analyst reports sent Snap’s stocks tumbling. One from MoffatNathanson said that a survey of young users showed that sentiment toward Snapchat had soured. Another from Pivotal Research reiterated its broader bearish outlook across social media, though it lowered Snap’s price target by a dollar. Right now Snap is down 7% amid a bad day overall in tech stocks.
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Facebook updated its VR avatars to look more ‘lifelike’
Maybe this will stop snarky newsletter writers from using Facebook executives’ avatars for their header images once and for all.
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Facebook plans crackdown on ad targeting by email without consent
Josh Constine on a forthcoming post-Cambridge Analytica data privacy protection: TechCrunch has learned Facebook will launch a certification tool that demands that marketers guarantee email addresses used for ad targeting were rightfully attained. This new Custom Audiences certification tool was described by Facebook representatives to their marketing clients, according to two sources. Facebook will also prevent the sharing of Custom Audience data across Business accounts.
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YouTube launches a shorter, skippable ad format
I love the idea of a 6-second ad that you cans skip after five seconds, saving yourself one crucial second: YouTube today is introducing a new ad format that will allow viewers to skip even shorter ads. Called “TrueView for reach,” the format arrives around two years after YouTube’s introduction of the six-second bumper, which the company says advertisers have learned how to best use to raise brand awareness, despite having only a few seconds to tell their story. Now, advertisers will have the option to build ads as short as 6 seconds, which can be skipped after 5.
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Music app Genius launches its own take on Stories, aided by YouTube
Snapchat’s popular stories format has now come to a commodity lyrics app.
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What is Snapchat?
Snap launched a new ad to answer the perennial question, what is Snapchat? (Snapchat is an art project that takes the form of a camera.)
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Snapchat is hiding over 1 million eggs across the US and Canada for a Pokémon Go-style egg hunt
Fun little experiment involving AR and Snap Maps over the weekend in Snapchat, and a good use of tools the company has been building over the past couple years.
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Reddit begins rolling out first redesign in a decade
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Can Europe Lead on Privacy?
Former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler says we all will benefit from the GDPR and other privacy-minded regulations from the European Union: Fortunately, the European Union’s law should indirectly help Americans somewhat. In only a few weeks, Facebook, Google and all the other internet companies that collect our private information will have to allow European customers the protections these companies have fought to deny Americans. In an interconnected world where digital code doesn’t respect the geographical or national borders, this will surely have a positive global impact. Internet companies are preparing for a future in which regardless of where a website is based, if it is visited by even a single European Union citizen and if it seeks to collect that person’s data, it must provide that person the protections of the General Data Protection Regulation. Hopefully, this experience will show these companies that protecting privacy is simply the responsible thing to do, not the end of their business.
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The real threat to Facebook is the Kool-Aid turning sour
Josh Constine says a true thing, which is that the primary threat to Facebook from its recent series of crises is that the downturn in morale will hurt recruitment and retention. A source close to several Facebook executives tells us they feel “embarrassed to work there” and are increasingly open to other job opportunities. One current employee told us to assume anything certain execs tell the media is “100% false.”
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Infowarzel 4/2/18
Charlie Warzel has a nice, thick, meaty newsletter this week taking a look at last week’s Facebook leaks and what it says about the disconnect between employees and the world: As a reporter, I’ve interviewed current and former Facebook staffers and continue to see a really meaningful disconnect between the way Facebook employees see the world and the way outsiders do. To be fair, employees on the inside will always have a different view than outsiders, but in Facebook’s case, I think some deeper internal culture issues are at play. Here’s what one senior former Facebook employee told me when I asked them about the Boz post during my reporting last week: “The company has cultivated so much faith in its mission to connect above all that it recruits exclusively those who pride that mission above everyone else. They recruit people who believe in the universal good of connecting the world and recruit those who care about nothing else. And that leads to a real problem of an employee base with incredibly western-centric and tech-centric attitudes. They have a majority of people who only care about the technical dimension of what they’re achieving — not the global impact. That’s where the company runs into cultural and geo-political difficulties.”
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Facebook.gov
Motherboard imagines a world in which the United States government seized Facebook and nationalized it. What happens next? (This is fiction but the site talked to lots of experts about the likely fallout of such a move.) The US government will have unprecedented access to personal data of the world’s citizens—which won’t sit well with global leaders, especially in privacy-obsessed countries like Germany. Many countries on cusp of banning or blocking Facebook, Shahbaz said, will be more likely to take sweeping, outright stances against the platform now that it is run by the US. Amie Stepanovich, US policy manager at ACCESS Now, an internet and open information research and advocacy group, said that countries will race to condemn Facebook.gov but will likely try to cut a deal with the US government to allow the service to continue operating internationally. “I think other countries will first and foremost look for benefit,” she said. “They would publicly discourage users from using it and then privately find some sort of agreement between governments.”
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Snapchat roasts Facebook with Russian bot filter
In one sense, Snap is a tech company like any other. But I find it more useful to think of it as an art project — Evan Spiegel’s art project, which he is gloriously free imbue with his own prejudices. One of those prejudices is an animating hatred of Facebook, and it manifested over the weekend with this highly topical roast. It often sucks to be an underdog — you are defined in the public imagination largely by the degree to which you are losing — but here is an example of how it can be great: you can punch up all you like, and the big dog has to take it.
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Tips? Comments? Questions for Mark Zuckerbeg? casey@theverge.com
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