Mr. Pickles goes to Washington

Twitter left hundreds of Russian propaganda videos, with millions of views, on its video platform Vine for months after it should have known they were posted by a Kremlin-linked troll group.

The discovery raises new questions about the nature of the company’s effort to find and remove content produced by Russians trying to meddle in American politics, and how comprehensive it has been.

“Strong net neutrality rules are necessitated by, among other factors, the lack of competition in the broadband service market,” Michael Beckerman, the group’s CEO, wrote. “More than half of all Americans have no choice in their provider, and 87 percent of rural Americans have no choice.”

A Senate bill that would overturn the FCC’s December decision has nearly enough support to pass the chamber. Every Democrat and one Republican have announced their support for the bill, meaning that it needs just one more GOP senator to put it over the top. Democrats have promised to force a vote.

In at least one plausible interpretation of the survey results, the respondents distinguished the credible outlets from the sketchy ones with near-perfect accuracy. Nineteen of the 20 mainstream news outlets in the sample were trusted more by both Democrats and Republicans than any of the other 40 outlets were trusted by respondents of either party. That includes sites such as the New York Times and CNN, which Donald Trump has famously branded as “fake news,” along with somewhat more partisan mainstream outlets such as Fox News and MSNBC.

If you find this surprising, you’re in good company: Rand, the study’s co-author, told me he too had initially laughed at Facebook’s two-question survey, before deciding to test it out. “What this suggests is that people are actually not nearly as bad at knowing what is a legitimate news outlet and what is not than we might have pessimistically assumed,” he said. 

Facebook and its third-party fact-checking partners met at FB headquarters in Menlo Park on Tuesday after a rocky 14 months of working together. (Daniel Funke had written about the fact-checkers’ concerns.)

My general takeaway is that Facebook is stepping up its commitment to this partnership by investing a lot more internal resources in the third-party fact-checking product. When it comes to transparency, there’s still a ways to go. Data shared in the meeting was under an NDA, but we were reassured that it would soon be shared publicly. Plus, Facebook seems set to address key limitations of the fact-checking tool that have been criticized publicly. We’ll see.

At nearly 12 years old, and after four years as a public company, Twitter has finally had a profitable quarter. The company said today that it made $91 million during the fourth quarter of 2017, whereas it lost $167 million this time in 2016. Twitter advised investors late last year that it was closing in on its first profitable quarter in large part by cutting costs.

Profitability isn’t the only good news for Twitter this quarter: its revenue also started growing again, rising to $732 million, up 2 percent from $717 million this time in 2016. During the rest of 2017, revenues had declined by 4 to 8 percent year over year. It’s not entirely clear what changed to reverse that, but it’s possible that advertisers were wary to spend money on the platform amid major harassment issues that Twitter began to address in a more serious way as the year went on.

“One of the things we were watching for is to see if the if the average tweet size would go up as a result, and it has not,” he said. “People do have the room — we’re seeing less abandonment of tweets. But we’re also seeing a lot more engagement. We’re also seeing more retweets, and we’re seeing a lot more mentions. And we’re also seeing people get more followers and return more often.”

Twitter today posted its first quarterly profit in its 12-year history. It reported $91 million in net income on $732 million in revenue. One quarter of profit, however, barely registers in a long line of losses. Currently, Twitter’s cumulative net loss since going public is $2.2 billion, now slightly less than the $2.3 billion in net loss it had racked up in Q3.

When Twitter first acquired Periscope, it focused on building a devoted community of streamers that would regularly create their own videos and build an audience. But much like the downfall of Twitter’s now-defunct app Vine, a lack of communication with content creators has caused turmoil. Other creator-driven platforms like YouTube and Snapchat have their own problems. But Twitter’s reputation for neglecting its most popular creators has its own community asking, why hasn’t Periscope gone to the app graveyard? 

In a blog post on Twitch’s community board, the company said that if a streamer uses other mediums to send targeted harassment or hate toward another streamer, it will consider those actions a violation of Twitch’s policies — even though the activity didn’t happen directly on the platform. That means that if a streamer were to antagonize another Twitch user on YouTube, Twitter or Discord, Twitch staff will view those messages as inciting hate and use it as evidence when issuing bans. Twitch’s new rules come just a couple of weeks after Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan announced that the game’s moderation team is monitoring off-platform videos and behavior to assess possible player bans.

But when it comes to making money, WeChat is taking it slow. WeChat introduced ads to its Moments section, the equivalent of Facebook’s News Feed, three years ago but strictly limits its ad inventory for fear of alienating its users. In the quarter through September, revenue from targeted ads on Tencent’s social networks—primarily WeChat—stood at just $1.1 billion. (Facebook, in contrast, generated over $10 billion in ad revenue for the same quarter.)

Cryptocurrency scams can often seem opaque from the outside — exploits that rely on odd gaps in the underlying code that governs contracts between users, or back doors in online exchanges that no one is aware of until someone makes away with millions in digital currency. But a hoax discovered by Bleeping Computer is so dead simple, you kinda have to admire whomever decided to go for it: They just created fake celebrity Twitter profiles, then promised to send people a lot of money if they would just send them a little bit to start things off.

Snapchat is rolling out new features today including a new tool to create custom face lenses and new text caption styles for your snaps. Lenses are AR masks that overlay your face with details like puppy ears, flower crowns, and the all important vomiting rainbow. The lenses start from $9.99 and go up depending on the size of the location you’ve chosen (covering anywhere from 20,000 to 5 million square feet), duration of the lens, and other factors.

WhatsApp has been working on digital, peer-to-peer payments for quite some time now, and the Facebook-owned messaging company appears to have just launched the service in beta in India, one of its most important markets. TechCrunch reports that select users in India have noticed the feature popping up in both the iOS and Android version of WhatsApp, with many celebrating the launch on Twitter. Way back in April of 2017, WhatsApp confirmed it was working on a payments service specifically for India after local media reported on the upcoming feature, but it looks like it’s taken nearly a year for it to arrive, even in just a beta form.

After having declared last year that the app would receive no future updates, Facebook is delivering a big update to its VR painting tool Quill.

The update expands on Quill’s initial promise, expanding it from being a platform for designing static scenes to one that can handle dynamic animated ones. The new updates adds the ability for artists to craft and edit frame-by-frame animations inside VR as well as the ability to copy and repose models in a way that enables the beautiful creations of Quill to come to life.

So how much of that 37% revenue growth was attributable to Metamarkets? That would certainly be a good thing to know; unfortunately Metamarkets didn’t come up either in the call or in Snap’s 8-K. I will definitely be scouring the 10-K whenever it is released.