The free speech wing of the free speech party has officially closed. Sinead McSweeney, Twitter's vice
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December 19 · Issue #50 · View online |
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The free speech wing of the free speech party has officially closed. Sinead McSweeney, Twitter’s vice president for public policy and communications in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, said today that it’s “no longer possible to stand up for all speech.” McSweeney spoke before the UK’s Home Affairs committee alongside executives from Google and Facebook, at an event that sounds reminiscent of last month’s congressional hearings. Emboldened by the events of the Arab Spring, Twitter has long been the most sympathetic to arguments that platforms should enable the maximum amount of speech possible. And so it was striking to hear this today from a Twitter executive, as quoted by Business Insider: “I look back over last 5 ½ years, and the answers I would have given to some of these questions five years ago were very different. Twitter was in a place where it believed the most effective antidote to bad speech was good speech. It was very much a John Stuart Mill-style philosophy. We’ve realized the world we live in has changed. We’ve had to go on a journey with it, and we’ve realized it’s no longer possible to stand up for all speech in the hopes society will become a better place because racism will be challenged, or homophobia challenged, or extremism will be challenged. And we do have to take steps to limit the visibility of hateful symbols, to ban people from the platform who affiliate with violent groups — that’s the journey we’re on.” Speaking of which, Charlie Warzel made me extremely jealous by getting his hands on internal Twitter emails showing top executives reckoning with whether to remove the verification badge from noxious white supremacist Milo Yiannopoulos. (He was later banned from the platform entirely.) “I thought that he wasn’t qualified for verification under current guidelines — is that not true?” Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s General Counsel, wrote on the thread. “I want to make sure we are doing the right thing here and not responding to external pressure or attacks from him. We’ve already taken the PR hit, so let’s make sure we are focused on getting this right!” It’s a cringeworthy moment. If the general counsel doesn’t know what verification means, what hope do the rest of us have? On one hand, we should expect — and encourage — platform policies to evolve around the way they are used. But Warzel’s story gives us a rare glimpse into just exactly how confused Twitter’s own employees were about fundamental aspects of their platform, right at the time that some of their worst users were learning how to weaponize it. It’s a chilling moment, and here’s hoping every big platform is taking lessons from it. Not least of all Twitter.
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The Republican net neutrality bill doesn't save net neutrality
There’s a Republican net neutrality bill and it is not great, says my colleague Adi Robertson: Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has introduced a bill in response to the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality rules, but supporters of net neutrality aren’t happy with it. The Open Internet Preservation Act would prevent blocking or degrading the quality of legal web traffic, but would also ban the FCC from making any rules that go beyond those two requirements. It would override any state net neutrality laws, like those recently proposed for California and Washington. And it firmly defines broadband as an “information service,” which would mean it couldn’t be regulated more strictly as a Title II service, as it was under the newly repealed Open Internet Order.
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Facebook and Microsoft disabled slew of North Korean cyber threats
Yikes: If you ask the White House, North Korea’s WannaCry attack was just the tip of the iceberg. Homeland security adviser Tom Bossert reported that Facebook and Microsoft disabled a range of North Korean online threats in the past week. Facebook removed accounts and “stopped the operational execution” of ongoing attacks, while Microsoft patched existing attacks that went beyond WannaCry. Details of just what those attacks were aren’t available. Facebook has confirmed its role. A spokesman told Reuters that it had deleted accounts associated with the Lazarus Group, the hacking team associated with WannaCry and other campaigns, and had notified users who’d had contact with those accounts. It recommended additional security measures in case they might be victims.
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The white nationalist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Muslim accounts Twitter suspended.
April Glaser runs down the list of all the bad people who got purged from Twitter yesterday. For some reason, Richard Spencer isn’t one of them … yet.
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How much news makes it into people’s Facebook feeds? Our experiment suggests not much
Here’s a worthy but flawed Nieman Lab experiment that looked at the first 10 posts in the News Feeds of 402 people to determine how much news they saw: Half the people in our survey saw no news at all in the first 10 posts — even using an extremely generous definition of “news” (from celebrity gossip to sports scores to history-based explainers, across all mediums; our count included any news shared by the publishers themselves, other pages, or individuals, and sponsored publisher content). My methodological critique: most people view more than 10 posts on a single visit to the News Feed, and they visit multiple times per day. So it’s hard to extrapolate much from the data.
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Germany Says Facebook Abuses Market Dominance to Collect Data
Hmm: Germany’s top antitrust enforcer opened a new front against big tech firms on Tuesday, saying the way Facebook Inc. harvests user data constitutes an abuse of market dominance. In what lawyers call a novel use of competition law, Germany’s Federal Cartel Office published preliminary findings that accuse Facebook of using its power as the dominant social network in Germany to strong-arm users into allowing it to collect data about them from third-party sources, such as websites with “like” buttons. While Tuesday’s findings won’t lead to fines, they pave the way for Germany to order changes in the way Facebook does business when it issues a final decision as early as next summer. If upheld in European Union court, this new line of attack could eventually expand the boundaries of competition law within the bloc to encompass questions of online privacy.
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What happens when Facebook doesn’t tell you a friend has died?
Yesterday, interface designer Caryn Vainio wrote about the unexpected death of a friend she kept in touch with through Facebook. Her complaint: Facebook didn’t show her the post indicating he was sick. I personally do not think this was Facebook’s job, and if you’re complaint is that the company is not yet a perfect panopticon, that actually makes me feel relief.
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Mastodon makes the internet feel like home again
I wrote about Mastodon earlier this year when it was hot. The Outline revisits it now that it’s cold: The one common thread that kept popping up in the responses was that people who arrive expecting it to be a replacement for Twitter will be disappointed: Mastodon isn’t conducive to virality or building your personal brand. Yeesh. No thanks!
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The People Who Read Your Airline Tweets
This is the sort of thing that only happens one time, so the company can included it in the list of anecdotes it trots out when it’s being profiled: For example, Meacham said that a young woman had gotten to the airport two hours early only to discover that her flight was three hours delayed. Then she said, “I gotta find some pizza.” So, the JetBlue team contacted the airport and told them the story. “The airport got pizza for the whole flight and delivered it to the area,” Meacham said. “The woman ended up tweeting pictures of the pizza being delivered. That was just great.” Now I’m hungry.
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Facebook’s facial recognition now looks for you in photos you’re not tagged in
File this under “OK, I guess, but do you have to?” Facebook is expanding how it uses facial recognition to find people in photos. From today, the company will notify users when someone uploads a photo with them in it — even if they’re not tagged. The user will then have the option to add their tag to the photo, leave themselves untagged, or report the photo if they think it’s inappropriate. The feature will also work with profile photos, but won’t be available in Canada or the EU, where data laws restrict the use of facial recognition. According to Facebook, the new tool is designed to empower users by helping them control their image online. “We really thought this as a privacy feature for a long time. If someone posts a photo of you, you might not know about it,” Rob Sherman, Facebook’s head of privacy, told The Verge. “Now, the users can access the photo, and they can communicate to the person who posted it. I predict the enterprise version of this is going to be popular with police departments.
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Facebook’s social VR Spaces is now compatible with HTC Vive
No one is going to do this but thanks! Facebook’s VR hangout app Spaces just got cross-platform functionality. Now, in addition to Facebook’s own Oculus Rift headset, you can use the HTC Vive to access all the same features in Spaces, from making Messenger video calls to creating your own avatar and playing games.
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Facebook is introducing new tools to help curb harassment
Useful! Firstly, Facebook is increasing security features that prevent people from creating fake accounts, including now looking at various signals like IP addresses. This should help prevent unwanted contact from people an individual has previously blocked for harassment, so that same person can’t create a new account just to add you again. Facebook is also adding an ignore feature to mute a conversation without the sender knowing. If someone is being harassed, sometimes it is still useful to be able to access messages from the harasser, in order to see if there is any risk of future danger.
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Twitter launches a new enterprise API to power customer service and chatbots
I’m just going to leave this lede here without comment for all of us to enjoy together as friends: Twitter’s big news this week is its announcement that it’s now enforcing its new policies around hateful content and abuse, but today the company is rolling out something new for developers, as well: an enterprise-level API providing access to real-time activities like tweets, retweets, likes and follows.
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Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear
Everybody loves this post from the sci-fi writer Ted Chiang, whose works include the short story that was turned into last year’s stellar Arrival. It’s about the way that popular dread about out-of-control future AI is just sublimated dread about present-day out-of-control corporations: The ethos of startup culture could serve as a blueprint for civilization-destroying AIs. “Move fast and break things” was once Facebook’s motto; they later changed it to “Move fast with stable infrastructure,” but they were talking about preserving what they had built, not what anyone else had. This attitude of treating the rest of the world as eggs to be broken for one’s own omelet could be the prime directive for an AI bringing about the apocalypse. When Uber wanted more drivers with new cars, its solution was to persuade people with bad credit to take out car loans and then deduct payments directly from their earnings. They positioned this as disrupting the auto loan industry, but everyone else recognized it as predatory lending. The whole idea that disruption is something positive instead of negative is a conceit of tech entrepreneurs. If a superintelligent AI were making a funding pitch to an angel investor, converting the surface of the Earth into strawberry fields would be nothing more than a long overdue disruption of global land use policy.
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The Rotten Tomatoes score for "The Last Jedi" may be rigged
One question I am always interested in is, what is an extremely weird way that people are using Facebook? And here is one answer to that question: Rotten Tomatoes uses reCAPTCHA, a free API developed by Google that distinguishes humans from bots with a check of a box, to ensure that new signups are humans. But the site also has an option to sign up with Facebook, which bypasses that system. Once logged in, users can rate the movie by marking it “want to see” or “not interested,” scoring it on a scale of 0.5 to 5 stars, and posting a written review with the score. “Down with Disney” wrote on Facebook that it used Facebook accounts to login into Rotten Tomatoes and manipulate the score: Thanks to friends of mine who taught me a thing or two about Bot Accounts, I used them to create this audience score through Facebook accounts created that subsequently logged into Rotten Tomatoes who rigged this score and still keep it dropping. There was, I am glad to report, a happy ending: While low Rotten Tomatoes scores have contributed to the downfall of other movies this year, like The Mummy and The Dark Tower, The Last Jedi‘s low score had nearly no discernible impact on its box-office performance. It debuted with $220 million in North America, marking the second-largest opening weekend ever, following the The Force Awakens.
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Questions? Comments? Free speech? casey@theverge.com
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