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June 10 · Issue #339 · View online |
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Hello from extremely hot Phoenix, AZ, where each June day offers a hellish preview of our future with climate change. I’m reporting live from the Code Conference, where I’m teaming up with colleagues at Recode and Vox.com to interview key figures in technology on stage. In today’s edition I plan to focus on the continuing drama unfolding at YouTube, which Susan Wojcicki addressed at length today in an interview on stage. Tomorrow I’ll share thoughts on my discussion with Facebook’s Andrew “Boz” Bosworth and Adam Mosseri.
At the end of 2018, as I gathered predictions for the coming year, I predicted that 2019 would be hard on Instagram. “I won’t guess the specifics, but I do think 2019 will see some sort of reckoning over Instagram,” I wrote. “Its charismatic founders are gone, the press is waking up to some long-simmering issues there, and there’s an increasing sense among a certain elite that looking at the app all the time is bad for you.” Six months later, this prediction looks basically totally wrong — unless you swap out “Instagram” for “YouTube,” in which case it’s basically dead on. Since the last edition of The Interface, scrutiny on Google’s giant video platform has continued to intensify. To recap:
- In light of the ongoing controversy over its decision that its existing harassment policies did not cover someone with 3 million subscribers calling someone else a “lispy queer” for two years, YouTube pledged to reconsider the policies. (Vox.com’s Lauren Williams and Joe Posner wrote a powerful open letter to Wojcicki in response.)
- Many LGBTQ Googlers are upset about the company’s decision, but are afraid to speak out.
- The less controversial decision to expand its hate-speech ban to include supremacist content, such as pro-Nazi videos, has led to YouTube executives being doxed and harassed on social networks.
- The ban on supremacist videos has also had some high-profile false positives, including some anti-racism channels. (The Southern Poverty Law Center had a video taken down.) Critics are crying censorship.
- In light of yet another recent scandal, Congress is considering a bill that would ban recommendations on videos that feature minors.
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A Reuters investigation found that “14 Russia-backed YouTube channels spreading disinformation have been generating billions of views and millions of dollars in advertising revenue, according to researchers, and had not been labeled as state-sponsored, contrary to the world’s most popular streaming service’s policy.”
- Kevin Roose profiled Caleb Cain, a college dropout who fell down a never-ending rabbit hole of far-right conspiracy videos. “I was brainwashed,” Cain says.
Taken together, it feels like a full-on reckoning — one that is overdue. In her on-stage remarks Monday, Wojcicki clearly conveyed the gravity of the issues she now faces. She frequently paused before answering questions, and when faced with something particularly tricky — such as Peter Kafka’s question about what would happen if YouTube was split off from Google — she offered a plainspoken “I don’t know.” The news coming out of the session was that she apologized for the company’s treatment of the Maza-Crowder controversy, noting that it had hurt the LGBTQ community, which YouTube takes pride (sorry) in supporting. But it was a strange apology, in my opinion, because Wojcicki stood behind the company’s decision to leave Crowder’s video up. In so doing, the apology became one of those “sorry if you were offended” type things. Ina Fried has the quote: “I know the decision we made was very hurtful to LGBTQ community,” Wojcicki said, speaking at Code Conference. “That was not our intention at all.” But intentions hardly matter in a situation like this. The core question remained — how is it that you have a public policy of disallowing “hurtful” content, and can still decide to host content calling one of your creators a “lispy queer”? I spoke briefly with Wojcicki on Monday afternoon, and she told me that the company plans to address that question when it revists its harassment policies later this year. It seems that the policies we have all been quoting in our articles are not the ones that YouTube itself has been using at it evaluates the videos in question — introducing yet more confusion into what the actual rules of the road at YouTube are at any one time. (On stage, Wojcicki said that YouTube had decided Crowder’s videos were not “malicious” — a word that appears just once in its online bullying policy, as an adjective, and is not further defined.) The more I reflect on YouTube’s current moment, the more I believe that the outrage against it stems from the company’s lack of accountability to the world. Whatever decisions YouTube makes, the world has no real recourse, even as creators like Maza suffer real-world harm in the meantime. We focus on what the policies say, and which of them the company chooses to enforce, but the larger story in my mind is the way that YouTube became a quasi-state without also developing a credible system of justice. The outrage against YouTube will not be quelled through a clearer statement of its rules, or through an adjustment to them. Its size is too big, its decisions too consequential, and its executives too unaccountable to those that they represent. If Google hopes to fix what’s wrong with YouTube in the long term, I would start the discussion there.
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Tech Giants Amass a Lobbying Army for an Epic Washington Battle
Growing calls to break up Big Tech have been very good for the lobbying industry, report Cecelia Kang and Kenneth P. Vogel: 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.
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Amazon’s Doorbell Camera Company Is Using Security Video For Ads. That May Only Be The Beginning.
Davey Alba and Ryan Mac report on fairly dystopian advertising practices from Amazon-owned Ring. I wonder whether Facebook might have something to say about this: 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.
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Facebook suspends app pre-installs on Huawei phones
Here’s another consequence of the escalating trade war with China: 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.
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A California Legislator Battles Big Tech Over New Privacy Laws
Joshua Brustein profiles Buffy Wicks, a California state representative who is pushing for more restrictive privacy legislation: 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.
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'Uncharted territory': WeChat's new role in Australian public life raises difficult questions
Michael Walsh and Bang Xiao report that Aussies’ growing reliance on WeChat as a news source could pose a problem: 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.
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Meet the angry gaming YouTubers who turn outrage into views
Ian Sherr reports on how gamers whipping up outrage against video game developers has become a profitable cottage industry. (It also illustrates what the YouTube algorithm rewards in a very tangible way.) 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 $60 for a game. These microtransactions, as they’re known, can include different character designs, new looks for weapons and additional stories, and are a source of constant irritation for vocal commentators, who see them as a rip-off. Others veer into criticism of outspoken game company executives. Some attacks get personal, criticizing members of the gaming community for their looks or perceived political beliefs.
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Facebook Plans Outside Foundation to Govern Cryptocurrency ($)
Expect lots of news about Facebook and cryptocurrency soon. The company has planned a June 18th event, TechCrunch reported. And here Alex Heath and Jon Victor report that Facebook is planning to create an independent foundation to manage the currency: 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.
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Google rewards reputable reporting, not left-wing politics
The Economist conducted a study which found that that Google News search results do not demonstrate political bias. But: 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
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'I've paid a huge personal cost:' Google walkout organizer resigns over alleged retaliation
One of the Google walkout organizers has quit, Julia Carrie Wong reports: 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.”
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Stanford engineers make editing video as easy as editing text
Today in academic research that will lead to much more realistic deepfakes: 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.
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Snapchat is experimenting with an events feature of its own
Here is a good and obvious idea that I wish had landed two or three years ago. The world needs an alternative to Facebook Events that’s already plugged into your friend network.
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Snapchat Is Releasing Special Landmarkers From LGBTQ Lens Creators for Pride Month
Shout out to Pride Month from Snap.
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Social media has a mob violence problem. Could soccer hooliganism prevention offer a model for solving it?
Max Fisher and Amanda Taub ask whether platforms with unruly users ought to mimic European football: 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.
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YouTube Is a Very Bad Judge and Jury
“Nobody knows how to run YouTube,” writes Sarah Jeong in this exchange with Charlie Warzel. “Especially not YouTube.”
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.
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The Roots of Big Tech Run Disturbingly Deep
Tim Wu and Stuart A. Thompson explore how the US government let Facebook and Google acquire hundreds of companies with almost no scrutiny — paving the way for normal tech to become Big Tech. 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.
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Apple’s new sign-in button is built for a post-Cambridge Analytica world
Russell Brandom throws some cold water on “Sign in with Apple.” 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.
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The Return of Fake News—and Lessons From Spam
Renee DiResta likes the idea of treating posts like the doctored Nancy Pelosi video more like spam: 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.”
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Thanks to Asa Mahat for capturing this image of Boz's shoes!
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Send me tips, comments, and your questions for former deputy US chief technology officer Nicole Wong, former Google head of communications Jessica Powell, and Chaos Monkeys author Antonio García Martínez. I interview them Tuesday at Code! casey@theverge.com.
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