In issue 11 of this newsletter, I told you about Facebook's move to imagine a News Feed free of news.
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November 15 · Issue #28 · View online |
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A new system being trialled in six countries including Slovakia, Serbia and Sri Lanka sees almost all non-promoted posts shifted over to a secondary feed, leaving the main feed focused entirely on original content from friends, and adverts. Today a Serbian journalist named Stevan Dojcinovic (it’s pronounced just the way it’s spelled) told us how that is going, in the New York Times:
My country, Serbia, has become an unwilling laboratory for Facebook’s experiments on user behavior — and the independent, nonprofit investigative journalism organization where I am the editor in chief is one of the unfortunate lab rats. Last month, I noticed that our stories had stopped appearing on Facebook as usual. I was stunned. Our largest single source of traffic, accounting for more than half of our monthly page views, had been crippled. As Dojcinovic notes, “Even one extra click can make a world of difference.” This is an existential threat, not only to my organization and others like it but also to the ability of citizens in all of the countries subject to Facebook’s experimentation to discover the truth about their societies and their leaders. On one hand, there’s no way to test a news-free News Feed without removing the news from it. On the other hand, it’s not clear how Facebook users in Serbia benefit from an experiment like this one, which has the effect of downplaying disturbing developments in their country at the possible cost of their democracy. I understand how some users could read Dojcinovic’s post and see typical media whingeing. But as he notes, Serbia’s democracy is very young, not totally formed, and under threat from the current ruling party. If Facebook is determined to run experiments like this one, it might have at least considered a better laboratory.
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Twitter will remove verification badges from accounts that break rules
I wrote about Twitter’s most recent — and most confounding — effort to get rid of bad actors on the platform: Promising to remove verification badges from accounts that violate Twitter’s rules will likely create a thicket of tricky editorial decisions for a company that has historically prided itself on free speech. It remains to be seen how Twitter navigates the verification battles to come — and whether de-verifying accounts has any effect on reducing harassment and abuse on the platform.
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Russia used hundreds of fake accounts to tweet about Brexit, data shows
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh identified 419 accounts operating from the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) attempting to influence UK politics out of 2,752 accounts suspended by Twitter in the US. One of the accounts run from the Kremlin-linked operation attempted to stir anti-Islamic sentiment during the Westminster Bridge terror attack in March in a bogus post claiming a Muslim woman ignored victims – a claim that was highlighted by mainstream media outlets including Mail Online and the Sun.
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Google Critic Thiel Gave Money to Official Probing Search Giant
Bloomberg: Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who backed Donald Trump’s presidential run, gave $300,000 to a political campaign of Josh Hawley, the Missouri attorney general who opened an antitrust investigation into Google this week. What makes this interesting, of course, is that Thiel is also a Facebook board member. And a Facebook board member supporting candidates who go on to make trouble for one of Facebook’s chief rivals is notable.
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Facebook full of illegal opioid marketing
CNBC: Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was surprised at the extent of the opioid crisis. But Facebook is filled with illegal opioid ads.
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YouTube videos of children are plagued by sexual comments
An upsetting story about how YouTube’s failure to understand what is being posted on its own platform has repercussions beyond politics: It’s trivially easy to find sexual comments on videos of children exercising, going for a day at the beach, or trying the ice bucket challenge. Often these videos are uploaded by the children themselves. Google requires that YouTube users are either 18 years old, or at least 13, with a parent or guardian’s permission. In practice, those age restrictions are not always enforced. Most concerning are the instances where commenters reach out for direct contact. One, posted on another gymnastics video of a young girl, offered a phone number to text. The comment was posted about 10 months ago. Below the video were other predatory comments. Others chimed in to denounce those commenters, and cited the work of a YouTube personality who had made some of the original claims about predatory commenters on the platform. The video had almost 1.5 million views, and it’s not difficult to find other, similar videos with hundreds of thousands of views, in several languages
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Facebook teen-in-residence defects to Google and launches “Lies”
Is Lies an evil take on tbh or just a dumb side project that Michael Sayman worked on for 10 minutes between his job at Facebook and his job at Google? Hard to say: In Lies, you first upload your contacts, and then take a Tinder-style profile quiz where you swipe yes or no about questions about yourself. Then you’re given tbh-style four-choice questions about friends with the goal of correctly guessing which tribia tidbit about them is true. The statements range from “I’ve gone skinny dipping” to “I’m afraid of crowds” to “I’ve kissed someone on the first date”. When friends answer questions about you, you get notified. “This game ends friendships” it declares, as you might learn who doesn’t really know you or thinks the worst about you. I’ll end my own friendships, thanks.
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Snapchat’s New Test: Grow Like Facebook, Without the Baggage - The New York Times
Kevin Roose: Snap’s pivot is more than a necessary business move. It’s an indictment of our current tech landscape, and a warning sign for other start-ups hoping to take on the largest internet companies on their own terms. If a wildly creative company with an app used by 178 million people every day can still be crushed by Facebook, how is anyone supposed to succeed?
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Do we even know what "premium content" is?
Tim Carmody has a new newsletter, which I recommend subscribing to, and a new Patreon, which you should also check out. He takes a look at Frederic Filloux’s new News Quality Scoring Initiative. The plan: creating “an algorithm to separate ‘commodity’ news from 'value-added news’ in an attempt to connect high quality content with advertisers who want better exposure.” Tim is skeptical: “Eventually, when you’re filtered out all of what Filloux calls biases, you’ve filtered out all of the tools readers and publications already use to determine the quality of a news story. You’ve undone all the institutional work. To me, this suggests something that might be unsettling: we don’t actually know what premium content is.” I mean, this newsletter is premium content. But everything else is up for debate!
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George Takei's Facebook empire strains under sexual assault allegations
A month ago, George Takei was generally regarded as an impossibly charming late-career celebrity who used his large platform to promote LGBT equality and other progressive causes. Then came an accusation of sexual assault, and now there’s this: his Facebook accounts consists primarily of undisclosed deals with big publishers to share their content in exchange for money — a lot of money! The Social Edge founder and COO Jay Kuo wrote in a Medium post in May that one publisher working with Takei generally yields more than 2 million views per post. Mic saw an average of 1 million page views for posts shared on Takei’s Facebook page, and paid 1 cent per page view, Tase said. That could be $10,000 for a single post, though Tase later said the amount was hypothetical. In any case, the gravy train is off the rails: As of Tuesday, Slate, Upworthy, GOOD, Futurism, Refinery29 and Mic have made arrangements to no longer have their articles and videos shared on Takei’s Facebook page, the companies confirmed.
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Questions? Story ideas? Requests for a verified badge? casey@theverge.com
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