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March 30 · Issue #109 · View online |
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Yesterday afternoon, BuzzFeed published a post from June 2016 in which Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, a member of Mark Zuckerberg’s inner circle who is now the company’s vice president in charge of hardware, talked about “the ugly” side side of Facebook’s growth hacking. The post stirred a wave of discussion online, but it also became a lightning rod for controversy inside Facebook. Dozens of employees criticized the unknown leakers at the company. “Leakers, please resign instead of sabotaging the company,” one wrote in a comment under Bosworth’s post. Wrote another: “How fucking terrible that some irresponsible jerk decided he or she had some god complex that jeopardizes our inner culture and something that makes Facebook great?” Several employees suggested Facebook attempt to screen employees for a high degree of “integrity” during the hiring process. “Although we all subconsciously look for signal on integrity in interviews, should we consider whether this needs to be formalized in the interview process?” one wrote. Wrote another: “This is so disappointing, wonder if there is a way to hire for integrity. We are probably focusing on the intelligence part and getting smart people here who lack a moral compass and loyalty.” There’s a lot more in here: employees debating the original blog post; speculating that the company has been infiltrated by spies; arguing that the company should show more empathy for its users. It’s a valuable discussion to read, in part because it cuts against a common strain of Facebook criticism: that the company’s “move fast and break things” ethos has led to a culture in which Facebook makes decision without ever considering the consequences. In fact, even before the 2016 election, the company was reckoning with the consequences of its growth-at-all-costs mind set. In a previously unpublished response to an employee yesterday, Boz laid out the context for his memo “The Ugly”: The context of 2016 was a large number of tactical discussions about practices relating to growth so I decided to put a stake in the ground that I felt would invite all the conversation to one place. I was reasonably successful at that, I think, but didn’t anticipate the post being reinterpreted in a public context with none of the history or community. Based on the comments I read, a huge number of Facebook employees found value in reading and debating Boz’s post. It came from a long tradition of open and honest debate at Facebook. But as the company has grown — it now has 25,000 employees — the risks of that open culture have been thrown into stark relief. Even employees have begun to question their access to sensitive company debates. In another previously unpublished comment, a contractor questions the logic of the company’s transparency: “I was quite blown away by how open Facebook is, even with contractors (like me). I feel that I have been given a lot of privileges (for e.g. unfettered access on Workplace) but I have continued to wonder if I have enough context to have so much access and whether I have even earned the right to have so much access. The employee added, regarding the leak: "I am sorry to hear what happened.” As a reporter, of course, I fall on the side of those asking Facebook to share more about its internal workings, not less. And I’m not sure that Boz’s memo made Facebook look bad in the way that some other journalists seem to: here you had a senior executive, and confidante of the CEO, reckoning with the moral dimensions of the company’s work in a serious and apparently productive way. If he had to do it again, I imagine Boz wouldn’t write so casually about terrorism. On the other hand, Facebook has to reckon with the use of its platform by terrorists somewhere. A private internal forum for discussing product development does not seem, at first blush, to be a terrible place to do that. Still, the comment that struck me the hardest last night was one from an employee who noted the connection between the leak and Facebook’s product itself: It’s interesting to note that this discussion is about leaks pushing us to be more cognizant of our sharing decisions. The result is that we are incentivized toward stricter audience management and awareness of how our past internal posts may look when re-surfaced today. We blame a few ill-intentioned employees for this change. The non-employee Facebook user base is also experiencing a similar shift: the move toward ephemeral and direct sharing results from realizing that social media posts that were shared broadly and are searchable forever can become a huge liability today. A key difference between the outside discussion and the internal discussion is that the outside blames the Facebook product for nudging people to make those broad sharing decisions years ago, whereas internally the focus is entirely on employees. Typically here we cover the reckoning over social media in the broader culture. With these comments, we see clearly how that reckoning has arrived Facebook itself.
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Facebook aim to fight election manipulation misses a big problem, critics say
Jessica Guynn talks to election experts who say Facebook’s focus on candidate ads in the midterm could distract from the more difficult, and perhaps more important, work of guarding against divisive, issue-based organic posts: Tackling this insidious form of election interference should be a top priority for Facebook, election experts say. “The 2016 elections did not feature a problem with candidate ads. The problems were coming from foreign interference in American elections,” UC Irvine law professor and election expert Rick Hasen said. “To say they are not going to target that now indicates they are far from coming up with solutions to the main problem.”
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Cambridge Analytica’s work in the Caribbean was pretty shady.
April Glaser digs into Cambridge Analytica’s political work in the Caribbean: Before SCL had dealings in St. Kitts and Nevis, in 2009 the company worked on a major referendum campaign on the Caribbean islands of St. Vincent and the Grenadines to defeat an attempt to establish a new constitution to replace the one that had been enacted when the country became independent from British rule in 1979. Had the new referendum passed, it would have installed a number of new (often odious) provisions, including rules that opened elections to dual citizens and that legal marriage could only exist between a man and a woman. The referendum also would have ended Queen Elizabeth II’s symbolic reign over the Caribbean country, but the measure failed to get the two-thirds majority it needed—thanks, at least in part, to help from SCL Group, according to accusations at the time from Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves, who in 2010 said the campaign to defeat the referendum had hired SCL to run a smear campaign against him. Gonsalves further claimed that his rival James Mitchell—the founder of the country’s National Democratic Party and a former prime minister—held an advisory role on SCL’s board, an allegation Mitchell didn’t deny when asked by a reporter from the Guyana Chronicle. Mitchell is also listed as a member of SCL’s advisory board in a Bloomberg profile. Later in 2011, in presentation materials seen by the Times of London, SCL admitted it worked against Gonsalves with a “targeted digital attack,” meaning that “within three weeks every single reference to him on the first two pages of Google … referred to the candidate’s horrific track record of corruption, coercion, rape allegations and victimisation,” the presentation read.
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Facebook was informed privacy breach app might sell user data
The FT finds a document sent by Aleksandr Kogan to Facebook related to his now infamous app, thisisyourdigitallife, in which he told them he reserved the right to give away any data he collected. But the process for submitting the form was automated, the FT reports, and it’s unclear that it was ever reviewed by Facebook employees. In the document, Global Science Research, Mr Kogan’s company, outlined terms and conditions that asked users for permission to collect information, including their likes and status updates as well as similar data from their Facebook friends. The terms stated the company would have the right to “edit, copy, disseminate, publish, transfer, append or merge with other databases, sell, license . . . and archive your contribution and data”.
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Facebook tries to prove it cares with ‘Fighting Abuse @ Scale’ conference
Facebook is hosting a conference about online harassment. I have not yet been invited, which I consider a form of online harassment.
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Facebook, longtime friend of data brokers, becomes their stiffest competition
Drew Harwell talks to folks who wonder whether Facebook’s breakup with data brokers will mean much in practical terms: But some critics questioned what effect the move would have in a site that counts selling access to its users’ information as its biggest moneymaker. Facebook, privacy experts said, nets a vast range of real-time information — friendships, photos, work histories, interests and consumer tastes, as well as mobile, location and facial-recognition data — that advertisers view as more current and accurate than the broker information inferred from old receipts and government logs. What, they ask, would advertisers need to pay data brokers for? “We don’t know enough about Facebook’s data trove to know whether their abandonment of Partner Categories helps users avoid privacy invasions,” said Frank Pasquale, a University of Maryland professor who specializes in algorithms and privacy. “Even if we did have that knowledge, we have little reason to trust Facebook to actually follow through on it. It may well change course once media attention has gone elsewhere.”
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The Cambridge Analytica Data Apocalypse Was Predicted in 2007
Good headline on an unpersuasive story about some social scientists who, upon using cellphones, theorized that they came with privacy risks. Prescient!
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New Urbanist Memes For Transit-Oriented Teens Will Save the City
CityLab profiles one of the most wholesome and delightful groups on Facebook: New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens, whose 62,000 members advocate for better transit and urban planning. (Insufferable hipster disclosure: I became a member after two cool teens recommended it to me earlier this year.) “There’s something so striking about a meme that says, ‘bae come over,’ and it’s a photo of a train,” said Marty, now a junior and one of the group’s lead administrators alongside Eldred and Orenstein. “It’s this weird juxtaposition of the nerdy world of subway models and zoning laws, plus that internet humor.”
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Why is Fortnite Battle Royale so wildly popular?
Colin Campbell has a good look at the social mechanics that have turned Fortnite into a phenomenon. Imagine if, say, Facebook offered “a blank slate for vivid personal stories.” First and foremost, Battle Royale designed to be a blank slate for vivid personal stories. Once inside the game, it’s easy to be swept up in the travails and adventures of your avatar. Every time that bus cruises over the island, a hundred narratives unfold. Some of them are as forgettable as “I opened the door to a house and someone blew me apart with a shotgun.” Others are more textured. When I achieved my first Victory Royale, I couldn’t stop myself from recounting the whole story to my entire family.
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Finally, an Instagram client for the terminal!
You love Instagram. The only problem is that, until now, you have been unable to render an ASCII Instagram feed in your terminal. Well merry Christmas, y'all: It has all that chaos and randomness of the regular Instagram news feed algorithm, except now it’s difficult to tell what the images are of because they’re in ASCII. Win, win!
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Could Facebook Be Safer If Built Today?
Jessica Lessin proposes a new architecture for Facebook that bakes privacy into the code: While there may be a policy solution, there could also be various technical ones. In particular, Facebook could design its systems so it didn’t manage all our data by default. Instead, user data could be stored inaccessible to Facebook until users gave the service explicit permission to tap into it. Users could still see ads, keeping Facebook’s business model intact. When Facebook was founded, “there was only one data model that worked: Facebook knew everything you did,” Bill Raduchel, a well-known Silicon Valley investor and adviser, told me this week. “Nothing else was possible. However, we are now 15 years later, and computer science has moved on both in hardware and software. You can now recreate all the functionality of Facebook where the social network has zero knowledge of your activities, but it can still have most of its business model.”
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How the Internet Ate Movies
Has the internet stifled imaginations in Hollywood? Sean Fennessey notes that Hollywood’s upcoming slate of movies feels extremely online, and rife with social-media anxieties: Just last week, Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane depicted a woman pushed to the brink of madness, into an asylum, desperate for just a few moments on her cellphone, to return to the tranquility of her lonely life of dating-app sadness and banal texting. 2016’s Nerve turned social media stunting into a life-and-death game show. This summer’s forthcoming Eighth Grade spotlights a socially awkward teenage girl’s dual life as an aspirant motivational YouTube star and Instagram tourist. The sequel to 2015’s slick, unnerving horror movie Unfriended will travel to the Dark Web, where the most ghoulish, Bitcoin-backed corners of the internet spring to life, and, eventually, bring death. Last year’s ill-conceived The Circle was at least premonitory in its vision of a future tracked and targeted by a cheery, globe-conquering technology company and all of its extensions into our daily lives. The Emoji Movie was, literally, shit. But it was also a corporately synergized movie spun directly from your phone. This fall, Disney’s Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2 will be a kid’s play on Ready Player One, in which the titular character escapes a video game and heads straight into the depths of internet culture writ large. Maybe he’ll come out the other side as a blogger.
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How a tweet about a chicken and a hair dryer got its own news cycle
A sentence I think about all the time is this one, from my former colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany, in her piece about Tide Pods: “The inclination (now shared between the blogsophere and traditional media) to turn every single joke or online event into a topic of conversation for days or months at a time, cannonballing head-first from a 30-foot diving board into a four-inch-deep puddle of substance, is making me want to die.” I thought of this sentence while reading about what happened when the great food writer Helen Rosner mentioned casually that she likes to dry out her chickens with a hair dryer before roasting: The tweet gained about 1,600 likes in its first week, with 100-plus responses, including one from the official Dyson Twitter account. (Is any brand capable of passing up an opportunity for self-promotion?) It’s now been covered by outlets like Fox News, The Today Show, the New York Post, Lifehacker, Allure, USA Today, Bustle, and The Kitchn. The Root declared it “the Whitest Thing on the Internet” in 2018, three months into the year. Rosner’s own New Yorker article about the hack was turned into a YouTube video by the content farm EnterTV, which interspersed Rosner’s writing with stock images of chicken and set it all to a Latin soundtrack. In a week that has been dominated by Facebook, let’s not lose sight of the ancients who instructed us: never tweet.
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Questions? Comments? Internal Facebook posts? casey@theverge.com
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