Susan Wojcicki apologizes, sort of

The four companies spent a combined $55 million on lobbying last year, doubling their combined spending of $27.4 million in 2016, and some are spending at a higher rate so far this year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks lobbying and political contributions. That puts them on a par with long-established lobbying powerhouses like the defense, automobile and banking industries.

Amazon’s doorbell camera company Ring is featuring its customers’ home security footage in Facebook advertisements, encouraging people to identify and report suspected criminals to the police. The company is able to do this thanks to a broad terms of service agreement that grants it the perpetual right to use footage shared with it for “any purpose” it chooses.

Customers who already have Huawei phones will still be able to use its apps and receive updates, Facebook told Reuters. But new Huawei phones will no longer be able to have Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram apps pre-installed.

Smartphone vendors often enter business deals to pre-install popular apps such as Facebook. Apps including Twitter and Booking.com also come pre-installed on Huawei phones in many markets. Twitter Inc declined to comment and Booking Holdings did not respond to a request.

Wicks has opposed industry-backed legislation and introduced her own bill to make the CCPA more restrictive. Separately, she promoted new rules to govern Amazon.com Inc.’s relationship with companies that sell their products on its platform. “I think we can push the envelope here in California, regardless of what happens in D.C.,” she says. But Wicks’s experience has also served as a reminder of how formidable the industry can be as a political opponent.

While WeChat has become an arena for Australian conversations, players need to follow Beijing’s rules. SBS Radio’s WeChat is an international account, and it explicitly pitches its stories toward Mandarin-speaking WeChat users in Australia.

This would, generally speaking, put the account at relatively low risk of facing censorship on WeChat. Moderators are more concerned about news that could stir up trouble in China.

However the ABC understands that SBS Radio has had some stories removed from its WeChat account due to keyword restrictions, a form of censorship that filters out news stories deemed potentially damaging to Beijing.

Starting last year, a new cadre of negative YouTube gaming commentators came to prominence. Almost in unison, they each enjoyed spikes in audience and view counts, attracting hundreds of thousands of subscribers. That translated into millions of views a week as they dissected the video game industry’s missteps, misadventures and controversies. The views get rewarded by YouTube in ad dollars.

Their negativity comes in many forms. Some YouTubers produce a stream of videos criticizing every imaginable fault a game could have. Visual bugs. Awkward controls. Stupid storylines. Others obsess over game developers’ attempts to fix glitches. There are commentators who rail against efforts to upsell players, who typically shell out $60 for a game. These microtransactions, as they’re known, can include different character designs, new looks for weapons and additional stories, and are a source of constant irritation for vocal commentators, who see them as a rip-off. Others veer into criticism of outspoken game company executives. Some attacks get personal, criticizing members of the gaming community for their looks or perceived political beliefs.

In recent months, the social network has courted dozens of financial institutions and other tech companies to join an independent foundation that will contribute capital and help govern the digital currency, according to people briefed on the plan. The digital token, which Facebook is expected to unveil later this month, is designed to function as a borderless currency without transaction fees and will be aggressively marketed in developing nations where government-backed currencies are more volatile, the people said.

Some keywords did suggest bias — in both directions. Just as PJMedia charged, the New York Times was over-represented on searches for “Trump”. However, searches for “crime” leaned right: Fox News got far more links than expected.

This implies that Google’s main form of favouritism is to boost viral articles. The most incendiary stories about Mr Trump come from leftist sources. Gory crime coverage is more prevalent on right-leaning sites. Readers will keep clicking on both

Claire Stapleton, a longtime marketing manager at Google and its subsidiary YouTube, said she decided to leave the company after 12 years when it became clear that her trajectory at the company was “effectively over”.

“I made the choice after the heads of my department branded me with a kind of scarlet letter that makes it difficult to do my job or find another one,” she wrote in an email to co-workers announcing her departure on 31 May. “If I stayed, I didn’t just worry that there’d be more public flogging, shunning, and stress, I expected it.”

Much like word processing, the editor could easily add new words, delete unwanted ones or completely rearrange the pieces by dragging and dropping them as needed to assemble a finished video that looks almost flawless to the untrained eye.

A team of researchers from Stanford University, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Princeton University and Adobe Research created such an algorithm for editing talking-head videos – videos showing speakers from the shoulders up.

The idea is that teams are a point of leverage for their fans’ behavior, not that they are fully responsible for their fans’ actions. Hooliganism is about identity, about fighting for one’s team against its opponents. But it becomes harder to frame fan violence that way when it hurts the team those fans are supposedly fighting for. And it also incentivizes the teams themselves, who are better able than outsiders to set the tone of their own fan culture, to demand an acceptable standard of behavior.

Could punishing influencers for their followers’ mob attacks have a similar effect? There are clear parallels between sports fan culture and the followers of online personalities like Mr. Crowder. Communities bound together by shared fandom that has become a shared identity. An influential team or figure that everyone pays attention to, whose interests they want to defend.

Sarah: YouTube is entitled to shoot entirely from the hip, but it leans on a process and a system of written rules instead. They mimic the law. The problem is, they don’t mimic it very well. What drives me nuts is that more or less all of the platforms have lawyers crafting these policies and processes. They all took the same law school classes I did. They know legal theory.

According to the Anti-Merger Act of 1950, federal agencies are supposed to block any merger whose effect “may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly.” Yet of the more than 350 mergers completed by Facebook or Google, none threatened a reduction of competition sufficient to block it, at least according to the federal agencies. As with a basketball referee who never calls a foul, the question is whether the players have really been faultless — or whether the referee is missing something.

To the extent that data is leaking out through the sign-in process, this plugs the biggest leak.

Still, it’s not clear how much data was actually leaking out that way. If you’re concerned about Google and Facebook knowing what apps you use, the technical situation hasn’t changed much. Apple will still know which apps you’re logging into and when. (It has to in order to operate the system.) The company has promised to stovepipe the information internally, but all you’ve really done is transfer your trust from Google to Apple, like switching from Gmail to iCloud.

Examining distribution more closely allows for a balance of free expression and a healthier information ecosystem. It’s debatable whether Facebook was right to leave up the Pelosi video, though it’s becoming clearer that, much like in past examples, the creator coordinated distribution across several sites he managed. The video likely should never have gone viral in the first place. Once it did, it should have been clearly and unambiguously been labeled an edited video, in-platform—not with an interstitial telling people they can go read an article for more information. In a Lawfare essay, the authors put it eloquently: “It may be best to embrace a more-aggressive combination of demotion and flagging that allows the content to stay posted, yet sends a much louder message than the example set by Facebook.”