Programming note: I'm going on summer vacation! See you back here on July 8th. In the meantime, I'll
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June 22 · Issue #159 · View online |
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In January, I wrote that “Time Well Spent” was likely to dominate the discussion in tech this year. The movement led by Tristan Harris, Joe Edelman, and a small cadre of former tech employees had vaulted into the mainstream that month when, after Harris had been particularly critical of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg himself adopted Harris’ language to describe his goals for the company. “By focusing on bringing people closer together — whether it’s with family and friends, or around important moments in the world — we can help make sure that Facebook is time well spent,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post.
As new research came out supporting the idea that social media can make people feel bad about themselves, Facebook was an early target of the Time Well Spent movement. Harris argued that human beings were ill equipped to manage the time they spent on digital devices, given the army of PhDs at Facebook and other companies working to hold their attention. But as the chief makers and enablers of those devices, Google and Apple also found themselves under pressure. (Harris had begun his work while still working at Google.) And they reacted with shocking speed. Last month, Google announced Android P, which will offer you a dashboard that gives you usage statistics for every app on your phone. It also allows you to place limits on each app, and enable a “wind down” mode that turns the phone grayscale before bedtime. This month, Apple followed suit with a dashboard, app limits, and additional parental controls. The message was clear: these are now default features of any smartphone operating system. Buried in Facebook’s Android app is an unreleased “Your Time on Facebook” feature. It shows the tally of how much time you spent on the Facebook app on your phone on each of the last seven days, and your average time spent per day. It lets you set a daily reminder that alerts you when you’ve reached your self-imposed limit, plus a shortcut to change your Facebook notification settings. Facebook confirmed the feature development to TechCrunch, with a spokesperson telling us, “We’re always working on new ways to help make sure people’s time on Facebook is time well spent.” When I wrote that Time Well Spent was shaping up to be the next big debate in tech, I never imagine that the debate would be settled by June — or that Harris and his colleagues would have won the debate so decisively. But win they did, and now the question about all these Time Well Spent features is whether people use them — and what happens if they do.
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Over 100 Amazon employees sign letter asking Jeff Bezos to stop selling facial recognition software to police
The next next big debate in tech is “should we be selling our software to the government?” Here’s the Amazon version, from Greg Sandoval: Those who signed the letter want the company to cease “providing infrastructure to Palantir (the company that builds preditive policing tools) and any other Amazon partners who enable (Immigration and Customs Enforcement),” according to documents reviewed by Business Insider. They also ask that Amazon “implement strong transparency and accountability measures” that identify which law enforcement agencies are already using the company’s technology.
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Facebook Hired A Team Of Ex-Intel Officers, Researchers, And Media Buyers To Pressure Test Its Systems
One of the most common criticisms about Facebook over the past year is that it too rarely asks itself how its systems could be misused. Alex Kantrowitz that the company has now formed a dedicated “how might this be misused?” team. Here’s hoping it makes regular public reports: Facebook calls this group the “Investigative Operations Team” and has directed its members to find the worst possible things that can be done using Facebook, and to help the company prevent them. The group, whose existence is being revealed for the first time in this story, is testing Facebook’s advertising systems, pages, Instagram, Messenger, and more. Facebook told BuzzFeed News the team is searching for troubling behavior in countries like Myanmar, examining keywords and other signals that could be used to promote violence. And it’s investigating Facebook’s merchant tools, attempting to spot problematic product sales.
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Instagram Removed a ProPublica Post Outing White Supremacists Because Facebook Keeps Blocking the Wrong Things
Here’s another false positive from Facebook’s community moderation efforts: Lucas Waldron, a social visuals and graphics producer at ProPublica, noted on Twitter Thursday afternoon that Instagram removed a video uploaded by the publication on October 2017. The video showed footage of violent protests and identified members of white supremacists groups. […] Late Thursday evening, Waldron said a spokesperson from Instagram contacted him and said the takedown of the video was an accident. “We removed [the videos] by mistake and they have been restored,” the spokesperson said in an email to Waldron. “We have also taken steps to prevent this from happening again.” Instagram didn’t detail how the mistake happened or what guardrails it put in place to prevent it from happening again in the future.
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Cambridge Analytica's Final Spinoff Spent A Year Trying To Get "Government Work"
The sequel to Cambridge Analytica was going to have the much catchier name of Anaxi, but it died, Kevin Collier and Ryan Mac report from bankruptcy court: Anaxi, which, according to court filings, was founded in April 2017 to provide “data analytics and communication services to government departments,” never saw much success. It was still in the early stages of marketing its services to potential clients when it was seized in bankruptcy proceedings. Starting such a company requires creating a “pipeline of opportunity,” Wheatland said Thursday, noting that it would have taken about 18 months of relationship-building before it would have started to get contracts. It wasn’t clear exactly what kind of government work Anaxi was hoping to perform. An attorney representing Wheatland declined BuzzFeed News’ request for comment.
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Also, Ace NYT reporter Kevin Roose announced today he’s COMING FOR MY BEAT, but I like him and frankly this is a journalistic all-hands-on-deck situation and I look forward to his additional contributions to this newsletter. Please be helpful to Kevin, although no more helpful to him than you would be to me:
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Hello! For the next few months, I'll be covering a big and (I think) critical story: social media and the 2018 midterms.
Get in touch (email in bio, DM for Signal) if you:
— work on a campaign digital team — research social disinformation — see something sketchy on your feeds
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Facebook mistakenly leaked developer analytics reports to testers
Here’s a Friday whoopsie from Facebook. Josh Constine: The social network now confirms to TechCrunch that 3 percent of apps using Facebook Analytics had their weekly summary reports sent to their app’s testers, instead of only the app’s developers, admins and analysts. Testers are often people outside of a developer’s company. If the leaked info got to an app’s competitors, it could provide them an advantage. At least they weren’t allowed to click through to view more extensive historical analytics data on Facebook’s site. Facebook tells us it has fixed the problem and no personally identifiable information or contact info was improperly disclosed. It plans to notify all impacted developers about the leak today and has already begun.
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Facebook says it has "no plans" to listen in on users' conversations to target them with ads.
“No plans,” is, of course, but a prelude to “our plans have changed.” So maybe not the language you I would want to use if I were trying to debunk a conspiracy theory that, in fairness to Facebook I guess, everyone will always believe no matter what they do or say. Anyway, here’s the full quote they gave to Will Oremus: To be crystal clear on this point: Facebook does not use users’ phone’s microphone or any other method to extract audio to inform ads or to determine what they see in their News Feed. Facebook only accesses users’ microphone if the user has given our app permission and if they are actively using a specific feature that requires audio (like voice messaging features). We have no plans to change this.
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Facebook moves into print with UK quarterly title aimed at business leaders but claims it is not a ‘magazine’
Facebook has a print edition now! For marketers, anyway. And now reporters have their excuse to continue yelling “Facebook is a media company” for the next year: “We know that business leaders have limited time for long reads at work, so we’ve also created a physical version with journeys in mind,” Facebook’s micro-site for Grow said. The magazine is run by Facebook’s northern Europe marketing team. It has no cover price and does not run advertising. Leila Woodington, Facebook’s head of business marketing in northern Europe, said in a statement: “Grow by Facebook is a business marketing program that shares thought leadership content directly with our clients through an annual event as well as print and online marketing channels.
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Teens at VidCon sound off on YouTube, Facebook Watch, Snapchat’s redesign and IGTV
Digiday has reports from anonymous teens about a smorgasboard of video apps. They appear to be cool on Facebook Watch: “I come across a lot of videos on Facebook. But once you find those videos on Facebook, you can actually search up those types of videos on YouTube, and they provide even more content because Facebook usually is limited to one video in one group or something like that, one genre, and you can connect that to YouTube and find even more videos of that genre and you can enjoy it more.”
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Twitter ‘smytes’ customers
Normally when a big company acquires a small company, the big company gives customers of a small company a grace period to transition off the service. Especially when it makes mission-critical software that, once the APIs turned off, cause everything to crash and burn. Anyway, when Twitter bought Smyte yesterday, some customers got 30 MINUTES notice before Smyte shut down. Total amateur hour: According to reports from those affected, Smyte disabled access to its API with very little warning to clients, and without giving them time to prepare. Customers got a phone call, and then – boom – the service was gone. Clients had multi-year contracts in some cases. And again, to reiterate, Smyte is a provider of anti-abuse and anti-fraud protections – not something any business would shut off overnight. In npm’s case, it even led to a production outage.
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Study: male D.C. reporters retweet male colleagues three times more
Here’s a great little study about Politics Twitter, which found that male journalists were much more likely to amplify the work of their male colleagues. I hope someone does the same for Tech Twitter, which I imagine suffers from a similar dynamic. In which I have no doubt played a part. And benefited! The study also identified the 25 political reporters who male political reporters retweet the most. Of the 25, just three are women. “We found that male journalists, indeed, were more likely to retweet other male journalists— in fact, when male journalists retweet, they retweet men almost three times more often than they retweet women.”
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Spectacles’ latest update finally optimizes videos for sharing outside Snapchat
Here’s a bit of belated pride-swallowing from Snap, which will now let you export your Spectacles videos in more Instagram-friendly formats.
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The Glamorous Grandmas of Instagram
I am extremely here for these grandmothers who are dominating the Instagram charts: Married or single, working or not, and most often grandmothers, they are asserting their presence on Instagram, intent, in the process, on subverting shopworn notions of what “old” looks and feels like. They are, to hear some tell it, “100 percent slaying.” “These women are ambassadors of age,” said Ari Seth Cohen, the creator of Advanced Style, a popular street style blog, two books and a film documenting, in his words, the “fashion and wisdom of the senior set.” His subjects, he noted, are simultaneously reflecting and contributing to a gradual shift in the common perception of aging. Exactly what I needed to read on my birthday week. See y'all next month!
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Questions? Comments? Favorite things to do in Munich? casey@theverge.com
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