Three days after his Twitter thread about the Mueller indictment, Rob Goldman apologized. Goldman, wh
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February 20 · Issue #87 · View online |
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“I wanted to apologize for having tweeted my own view about Russian interference without having it reviewed by anyone internally. The tweets were my own personal view and not Facebook’s. I conveyed my view poorly. The Special Counsel has far more information about what happened [than] I do—so seeming to contradict his statements was a serious mistake on my part. To those of you who have reached out this weekend to offer your support, thank you. It means more than you know. And to all of you who have worked so hard over the last six months to demonstrate that we understand our responsibility to prevent abuse on Facebook—and are working hard to do better in the future—my deepest apologies.“ Goldman, the Facebook V.P., has seen more of the Russian ads and posts than most Americans, and his imagination clearly strains to accommodate the push to take them seriously. It’s hard to square words like “sophisticated” (frequently used by the Times to describe the Russian campaign) with posts like one from an apparently fake L.G.B.T. group promoting something called “Buff Bernie: A Coloring Book for Berniacs” with catchy English-language copy: “The coloring is something that suits for all people.” More broadly, Gessen argues for restraint in processing last week’s revelations about Russia’s information war, which she describes as more of a "cacophony” than a conspiracy. Americans’ apparent need to imagine a Russian adversary as cunning, masterly, and strategic is matched only by the Russians’ own belief in a solid, stable, unshakable American society. Stability is what Vladimir Putin has been promising Russians for eighteen years and still hasn’t delivered, making Russians all the more resentful of what they imagine as a predictable, safe American society. Americans, on the other hand, increasingly imagine American society as unstable and deeply at risk. While most people believe themselves to have a solid grip on reality, they imagine their compatriots to be gullible and chronically misinformed. This, in turn, means that we no longer have a sense of shared reality, a common imagination that underlies political life. In a society with a strong sense of shared reality, a bunch of sub-literate tweets and ridiculous ads would be nothing but a curiosity. Framing the election meddling as strictly a matter of outside interference will only encourage the conspiracy-mongering that already makes it hard to form a democratic consensus. “By exaggerating the actual consequences of foreign influence operations, American elites are further undermining the confidence and shared knowledge that American democracy needs to function,” Farrell argued. “They are tacitly encouraging Americans on the liberal left to build their own private universe of facts, in which Russian influence has pervasive political consequences.” Ultimately, my beef with Goldman’s tweets was how they aligned with President Donald Trump’s permanent war against the press. Goldman suggested that “ the main media narrative” about Russia ignored the fact that the (slight) majority of its illegal ad spending on Facebook occurred after the election, when in fact it had been widely covered in mainstream outlets. Facebook’s relationship with publishers is fraught enough without its vice president of ads painting them one of its chief antagonists. I suspect Goldman realizes that now. But set those tweets aside and consider the larger question: is our hyperventilating about Russia’s cyber-warfare making a mountain out a molehill? At the very least, I suspect it may be distracting us from some of the underlying fault lines in our democracy. Which isn’t to say social networks ought to be let off the hook — but I am taking it as a reminder to approach new revelations with as much calm as I can muster.
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After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced
The Times examine how Russian bot networks on Twitter spring into action following major news events in an effort to polarize the body politic. Twitter seemingly has no response whatsoever to this kind of thing: The bots’ behavior follows a pattern, said Mr. Morgan, one of the researchers who worked with the German Marshall Fund to create Hamilton 68, the website that monitors Russian bot and fake Twitter activity. The bots target a contentious issue like race relations or guns. They stir the pot, often animating both sides and creating public doubt in institutions like the police or media. Any issue associated with extremist views is a ripe target.
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Long Before U.S. Election, Russian Trolls Were Spreading Disinformation
NBC News did something similar first. But now here’s the Journal with a comprehensive analysis of the Russian tweets shared with Congress: Taken together, the activity—much of which has now been wiped from the internet—presents a rare perspective on an external effort to manipulate American minds. Those behind the efforts took advantage of an array of social-media platforms, broadcasters, fake-news websites, Wikipedia and in one case, a federal regulator. Many of the users who took part in the early campaigns went on to participate in the U.S. presidential-election attack, mostly supporting Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders while disparaging Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, as early as the middle of 2015.
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How to Inoculate the Public Against Fake News
Cambridge researchers had people play a game where they created fake news. They were subsequently much less likely to fall for fake news. Another data point that makes the case for new media literacy classes in America: Did the game successfully inoculate players against fake news? The researchers had 57 people play the game, adopting different personas and using different tactics associated with misinformation and persuasion. As compared to a control group, the players were much more skeptical of fake news articles they were subsequently shown. And this remained true no matter what the player’s political leanings.
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Fake videos are on the rise. As they become more realistic, seeing shouldn't always be believing
The LA Times catches up to deepfakes: “This goes far beyond ‘fake news’ because you are dealing with a medium, video, that we traditionally put a tremendous amount of weight on and trust in,” said David Ryan Polgar, a writer and self-described tech ethicist. “If you look back at what can now be considered the first viral video, it was the witnessing of Rodney King being assaulted that dramatically impacted public opinion. A video is visceral. It is also a medium that seems objective.” To stop the spread of fake videos, Facebook, Google and Twitter would need to show they can make good on recent promises to police their platforms.
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Lawmakers worry about rise of fake video technology
Speaking of deepfakes, one lawmaker wants DARPA to solve the issue by inventing a protocol that authenticates all content: It’s still difficult to easily produce video and audio together that can actually fool people, but at least one lawmaker believes that there is concrete action the government can take. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who represents Silicon Valley, called for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create some way to authenticate genuine audio and video. “I think we should task DARPA with figuring out how to create a secure internet protocol that requires authentication,” Khanna told The Hill.
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The far-right smear campaign against students who survived the Parkland massacre
Sadly, I suspect this will get worse before it gets better: Students who survived the gun massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have emerged as powerful advocates of gun control and fierce critics of the NRA. Now they are being targeted by a right-wing smear campaign.
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Banning Bots, Punishing Troll Farmers, and Hardening Voting Machines: Here’s How to Stop Russia From Wrecking Election 2018
Clint Watts has lots of good ideas for how the US government can protect itself from election hacking. Some involve regulating social media companies, but many don’t: Above all, all voting systems should immediately institute paper ballot backups that provide a verifiable audit trail to confirm results. Despite the Kremlin’s targeting of American electoral processes, five states—Delaware, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, and New Jersey—still rely on digital voting without paper backups. Meanwhile, Congress can step up quickly, by immediately passing the Honest Ads Act requiring public disclosures of all political and social issue advertising in social media consistent with print, radio, and television standards.
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Did 'Bots' Force Al Franken to Resign?
Here’s another case where journalists relying on the Hamilton68 dashboard got caught with their pants down: It is true that far-right Internet trolls tried to exploit to #MeToo movement to take out political opponents, with varying degrees of success, but this was not an unfounded character assassination; Tweeden had a photograph showing Franken smiling and appearing to grope her chest over a flak jacket as she slept. Rawstory.com has pulled the article pending further research, while Newsweek has updated theirs to reflect the removal of references to the Hamilton68 dashboard and to clarify when Democrats began calling on Franken to resign.
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Lesser-known YouTubers band together on ‘Demonetization Day’
Just realized I forgot to get my significant other anything for Demonetization Day! (I’m just kidding — I don’t have a significant other.) Despite the numerous people tweeting about Demonetization Day, a statement from YouTube claims that 99 percent of affected channels were making less than $100 in the past year, and 90 percent earning less than $2.50 in the last month. The statement noted that “after thoughtful consideration, we believe these are necessary compromises to protect our community.” YouTube’s statement did nothing to quell the anger and hurt that came from the community, and the company released a subsequent notice trying to rationalize its decision to change the rules.
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Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes wants $500 per month in basic income
Chris Hughes out here giving away other people’s money: Chris Hughes, who made a fortune as a co-founder of Facebook, told CNBC on Tuesday American workers who make less than $50,000 per year should get a government stipend of $500 per month — paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy 1 percent. Such a plan is necessary because of the growing digital economy, said Hughes, author of “Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn” and an advocate for a basic income. “I don’t have a crystal ball on exactly where technology is headed. But I do think that it’s going to continue to destroy work.”
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“Just an Ass-Backward Tech Company”: How Twitter Lost the Internet War
Maya Kosoff comes for Del Harvey, Twitter’s longtime head of trust and safety. (For context, Kosoff previously told Hillary Clinton to take up knitting.) Elements of this piece feel unfair to me; it’s an unusually personal attack against a midlevel employee, and given the anonymity of the quotes here, Harvey couldn’t face her accusers even if she wanted to. Still, while Harvey’s job isn’t to set Twitter policy — ultimately, that’s Jack Dorsey’s call — it is her job to enforce it. And Twitter’s enforcement of its own abuse rules is legendarily erratic. One positive step Harvey could take? Tweet more! Her feed consists mostly of retweets of faceless corporate accounts; I’d love to hear more of her perspective. If the buck stops at the top, the blame lies with Dorsey. Yet the question remains: If Harvey can’t solve the problem on her own, shouldn’t someone else take the wheel? “[Harvey] is over-titled and overpaid,” the former employee told me. “She joined this company early and got to ride the wave. I know why she would never quit. It’s a little bit like asking Ringo Starr why he never left the Beatles: it was the best job he ever had.” There are two main components to Harvey’s job, this person told me: to formulate a clear set of rules for what constitutes abusive speech, and to be consistent in enforcing them. “And I hate to say it, but she clearly was in so far over her head on both of those. It was a disaster. I’m sure she’s a nice person personally, but in this job, she was utterly incompetent.”
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a lot of the bitter former twitter executives in these articles fucking sucked
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2:24 PM - 20 Feb 2018
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Here’s some Twitter options for Mac users now that the official app is going away
Speaking of Twitter: you probably weren’t using Twitter for Mac, but here are some alternatives if you were.
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The Case Against Google
Charles Duhigg has a lengthy, nuanced account of how two entrepreneurs spurned by Google’s algorithm came to file an antitrust complaint against the company. Embedded here is a fundamental question of the age, which is whether the US regulatory regime will ever start to take competition into account when investigating complaints. The case against Microsoft is often pointed to as an example that antitrust doesn’t really matter, but in fact it worked, argues lawyer Gary Reback:
Surprisingly, some people who worked at Microsoft in the 1990s and early 2000s agree with him. In the days when federal prosecutors were attacking Microsoft day and night, the company might have publicly brushed off the salvos, insiders say. But within the workplace, the attitude was totally different. As the government sued, Microsoft executives became so anxious and gun-shy that they essentially undermined their own monopoly out of terror they might be pilloried again. It wasn’t the consent decrees or court decisions that made the difference, according to multiple current and former Microsoft employees. It was “the constant scrutiny and being in the newspaper all the time,” said Gene Burrus, a former Microsoft lawyer. “People started second-guessing themselves. No one wanted to test the regulators anymore.”
In public, Bill Gates was declaring victory, but inside Microsoft, executives were demanding that lawyers and other compliance officials — the kinds of people who, previously, were routinely ignored — be invited to every meeting. Software engineers began casually dropping by attorneys’ desks and describing new software features, and then asking, in desperate whispers, if anything they’d mentioned might trigger a subpoena. One Microsoft senior executive moved an extra chair into his office so a compliance official could sit alongside him during product reviews. Every time a programmer detailed a new idea, the executive turned to the official, who would point his thumb up or down like a capricious Roman emperor.
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U.S. Attorney General Sessions forms cyber task force to probe election meddling
The task force will deliver a report by June, reports Dustin Volz: The announcement on Tuesday of the new task force came amid renewed concerns about how Russia and foreign adversaries may attempt to use cyber tools to disrupt the 2018 midterm elections, which are less than 10 months away. “The Internet has given us amazing new tools that help us work, communicate, and participate in our economy, but these tools can also be exploited by criminals, terrorists, and enemy governments,” Sessions said in a statement.
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Snapchat now has Giphy integration and will introduce a Tabs function for Stories
This is good, because those transparent animated GIFs are the best thing to happen to Instagram stories possibly forever: Snapchat has launched a new feature that allows you to add Giphy animated stickers to your snaps, similar to the one recently added to Instagram Stories just a few weeks ago. Additionally, Snap will introduce a new feature called Tabs, which will help users organize and see the Stories they want. Tabs, which is rolling out on the Friends and Discover pages, will allow users to sort through friends with active Stories, Group Chats, and Discover subscriptions.
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Instagram Direct one-ups Snapchat with replay privacy controls
Every messaging interaction is now a 14-step social calculation: Messaging is the heart of Snapchat, so after cloning and augmenting Stories, Instagram is hoping to boost intimate usage of Direct with privacy controls not found elsewhere. Now when you send an ephemeral photo or video from the Instagram Direct camera, you can decide whether recipients can only view it once, replay it temporarily or see a permanent thumbnail of it in the chat log.
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Facebook’s plan to unite AR, VR, and News Feed with 3D posts | TechCrunch
Josh Constine has some fun weekend plans for you: For example, you could make a metallic personalized chess piece in a 3D modeling app, share it straight to News Feed, and then bring it into Facebook Spaces where you could play with it as part of the playground’s native chess board.
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The New Snapchat: Less Social, More Fun
David Pierce is here with the controversial take that the Snapchat redesign is good (he’s right): But to me, the infamously inscrutable app is now far easier to understand, especially for new users. It’s no longer “Instagram, only confusing.” Snap is doubling down on being personal, and we need more of that on the internet. It’s exploring how photography, chat and even TV change when we’re all on our phones all the time. I’ve found myself using Snapchat far more since the redesign.
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Kids who dab on Snapchat aren't actually helping cure cancer
The headline is weirdly bitchy, but the phenomenon is just a total A+. What else do you want from the next generation than this? “Now, young Snapchat users are using their dabbing Bitmoji’s to prove they hate cancer.”
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Questions? Comments? Dabs? casey@theverge.com
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