Yesterday, with the release of the Community Standards Enforcement Report, Facebook gave us two numbe
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May 16 · Issue #138 · View online |
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Yesterday, with the release of the Community Standards Enforcement Report, Facebook gave us two numbers related to fake accounts. One was very big — making the problem look very big — and one was very small, making the problem appear trivial. So which is it? The small number was 3-4 percent. That’s Facebook’s fake accounts as a percentage of the company’s monthly active users. Are they saying they see over 6.5 million accounts created and detected every day in addition to the ones they shut down? Is this the normal rate, or has it gone up or down? Did they exist and were undiscovered? If they were not, how did they slip through the cracks? Or are we to assume, that suddenly, in past four months, that number has grown by as much as 450 million fake accounts? Or does that mean that they suddenly discovered and disabled 538 million fake accounts, in addition to the 3-to-4% of monthly active users? Were they looking hard enough? Was Facebook underinvested in finding bad actors? Were they underinvested in fixing the problem? Facebook did a nice job clarifying the discrepancy, in a statement later added to Om’s post: We estimated that fake accounts represented approximately 3% to 4% of monthly active users (MAU) on Facebook. Because we often catch and disable these fake accounts (the 538 million number) within minutes of registration, they never even get counted in our monthly active user number. In Q1 2018, we disabled 583 million fake accounts, down from 694 million in Q4 2017. Our metrics can vary widely for fake accounts acted on, driven by new cyber attacks and the variability of our detection technology’s ability to find and flag them. The decrease in fake accounts disabled between Q4 and Q1 is largely due to this variation. So is it a big problem or a small problem? The answer is both. As a percentage of total users, the number of fake accounts is small. And yet because Facebook itself is so large, even a small percentage of fake users can do an outsized amount of harm. Within 30 minutes I was behind the wheel of Audrey’s page, liking pictures, posting status updates, and warding off creepy messages. There was little to suggest that the page was inauthentic — or that its operator was a 30-year-old journalist in Montana. Across Facebook there are countless others just like Audrey — dummy accounts with partially written backstories, a small posting history, and a photo gallery of real people taking real selfies. They trade hands in a vast web of fake-account marketplaces, where, for a small sum, any interested marketer, scammer, or troll can amass a legion of seemingly human profiles capable of outwitting Facebook’s detection. And though Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Congress this April that “you’re not allowed to have a fake account on Facebook,” the marketplaces continue to thrive in plain sight online. As Charlie notes, this phenomenon isn’t unique to Facebook: “Plenty of Twitter, Instagram, and email accounts are also available for purchase.” He also notes that Facebook is getting better at detecting fake accounts automatically, to the frustration of the people running the marketplaces. For the most part, fake accounts are used by spammers: few people are willing to hawk boner pills under their real name. But as we learned from the Internet Research Agency in 2016, state actors take advantage of fake accounts as well. And as we approach the midterms, Renee DiResta’s words will loom in my mind: Facebook has become more sophisticated at detection because the majority of people who buy fake accounts, traditionally, have been spammers who behave a certain way. But if it’s a state actor buying accounts, they’d have more sophistication and could potentially evade the checks that catch the spammer profile.”
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Zuckerberg Agrees to EU Parliament Grilling Over Data Scandal
A day after saying he would not appear before Parliament under threat of arrest, Mark Zuckerberg has agreed to a closed-door meeting. European Parliament President Antonio Tajani on Wednesday said Zuckerberg had accepted the EU institution’s invitation to travel across the Atlantic and face lawmakers in person as soon as next week. The meeting will take place in private, the assembly’s press service said. “Our citizens deserve a full and detailed explanation,” Tajani said in a statement posted on Twitter. “I welcome Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to appear in person before the representatives of 500 million Europeans. It is a step in the right direction towards restoring confidence.”
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New Privacy Rules Could Make This Woman One of Tech’s Most Important Regulators
Adam Satariano profiles Helen Dixon, Ireland’s data protection commissioner, on the eve of the General Data Protection Regulation being implemented: Ms. Dixon will soon gain vast new authority to investigate and fine Facebook, as well as an array of other technology giants with regional headquarters in Ireland. Amid increased concerns over online privacy, a sweeping new European privacy law could make her one of the world’s most consequential regulators. She is eager to test her newfound power. But the question remains whether her tiny agency is able — or willing — to stand up to tech behemoths of Silicon Valley.
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This Is Ajit Pai, Nemesis of Net Neutrality
Speaking of profiles, here’s Andrew Rice on Ajit Pai for Wired: He jousted with celebrities and nobodies on social media. He staged self-conscious stunts, like appearing in a video entitled “7 Things You Can Still Do on the Internet After Net Neutrality,” in which he posed as a Jedi and danced to “Harlem Shake” with a bunch of young conservatives. But the video just inflamed the internet. On Twitter, Mark Hamill—Luke Skywalker himself—jeered at Pai, calling him “profoundly unworthy” to wield a lightsaber. Someone else quickly identified a young woman dancing next to Pai as a right-wing conspiracy theorist who had helped spread “Pizzagate,” a hoax scandal from the lunatic fringe that linked Hillary Clinton to a child-abuse ring.
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Listen to ‘The Daily’: When Facebook Rumors Incite Real Violence
I enjoyed today’s episode of The Daily, in which Michael Barbaro talks to Max Fisher and Amanda Taub about their recent visit to Sri Lanka to understand the effect of hate speech spread on Facebook. Their interview with a survivor of mob violence is heartbreaking — and there’s a twist at the end that will stick with you.
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San Francisco Nurses Protest the Zuckerberg Hospital’s Name
Here’s some unexpected fallout from Cambridge Analytica: “We are in charge of keeping our most vulnerable people private and protected,” said Heather Ali, who works at the hospital in nursing administration. “Now people wonder, ‘How much is my privacy protected at a hospital with that name on it?’” Megan Brizzolara, a nurse at the hospital, said the Zuckerberg name “scares” patients.
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Construction Tops $1B at Facebook's West Campus
Since it opened the Gehry building, Facebook has filed more than $900 million in construction permits for their Menlo Park campus. Two of the new Gehry-designed buildings have surpassed MPK 20 as having the most expensive permits filed in Menlo Park in recent history, valued at $303M and $300M respectively. Using BuildZoom’s National Building Permit Database, we explored Facebook’s recent westward expansion in terms of costs and square footage, interesting architectural features, and other key details about the burgeoning West Campus and surrounding areas.
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Facebook lets advertisers target users based on sensitive interests
This feels like a moderate amount of ado about nothing, but: Facebook allows advertisers to target users it thinks are interested in subjects such as homosexuality, Islam or liberalism, despite religion, sexuality and political beliefs explicitly being marked out as sensitive information under new data protection laws. The social network gathers information about users based on their actions on Facebook and on the wider web, and uses that data to predict on their interests. These can be mundane – football, Manhattan or dogs, for instance – or more esoteric.
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Twitter is going to make third-party apps worse starting in August
Twitter has done an abysmal job communicating to third-party developers about what upcoming changes will mean for their apps. Jake Kastrenakes attempts to sort it out: The changes, which go into effect August 16th, do two main things: first, they prevent new tweets from streaming into an app in real time; and second, they prevent and delay some push notifications. Neither of these are going to break Twitter apps completely, but they could be very annoying depending on how and where you use it.
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The Pigeon Meme, from the Anime Brave of the Sun FighBird
Brian Feldman walks you through the pigeon meme, which has taken over Twitter over the past several days: It didn’t really take off on Twitter until it began to be used for object labeling — the meme version of editorial cartooning, in which objects become loudly signposted metaphors for other things. (Think about the stock photo of the guy holding hands with his girlfriend, looking over his shoulder to ogle another woman.)
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Facebook adds Voice Posts, Stories archive, and new cloud storage features
Of all these changes, I find voice posts the most interesting. Yanny or Laurel proved, at long last, that audio can go viral! Facebook is also adding an Audio option in the Facebook Camera to share voice messages as Voice Posts. Voice recordings are not only fast and intimate, they also get around the need to install native-language keyboards, and they don’t require written proficiency in a language people can more easily speak.
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Europe’s Data Protection Law Is a Big, Confusing Mess
Alison Cool, a professor of anthropology and information science at the University of Colorado, Boulder, says GDPR is too confusing to be effective. (I don’t find this take particularly persuasive.) Many of the law’s broad principles, though they avoid references to specific technologies, are nevertheless based on already outdated assumptions about technology. “I think it’s very clear that they imagined some company that has your data physically stored somewhere, and you have the right to take it out,” a law professor told me of the G.D.P.R.’s approach to data portability. But in the era of big data and cloud services, data rarely exists in only one place. What the regulation really means is likely to be decided in European courts, which is sure to be a drawn-out and confusing process.
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Goodbye Facebook, Hello Robinhood
Lee Byron spent almost a decade at Facebook in a variety of roles. Among other things, he helped develop React. He just left to work at investment startup Robinhood, and I was interested to read his farewell note: The recent backlash has brought up real issues that deserve focus. And just as they did then in 2010, leaders at Facebook (and especially Mark) have processed this criticism with employees openly and have worked rapidly to put plans in action. I have great respect for and faith in those leaders. This time around, however, with Facebook’s organization around 20 times larger, I felt powerless to help. I stepped back to realize that 2018’s Facebook had become a very different place to work than 2008’s Facebook. The ambition of the new efforts and the level of quality of the products and tools at Facebook today is incredible. That has made it an amazing place to be a deep expert in so many roles. But I thrive more in broader, multidisciplinary roles where I can be scrappy and build brand new things. In an all hands meeting shortly after I joined in 2008, Sheryl Sandberg gave a speech about priorities that I’ll never forget. She said “most people come to work every day and look for the low-hanging fruit, but we come to work and step over all the fruit on the floor to look for the juiciest ones.” Recently, that’s felt less true and I realized how much I really missed 2008’s Facebook.
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The Verge’s new game show, Converge with Casey Newton, launches May 23rd
For a few years now I’ve wanted to do a podcast featuring interviews with the smartest people working in tech. It’s finally (almost) here — and it’s an interview game show. Think Recode Decode meets Billy on the Street. The trailer arrived today, and gives you a sense of the overall vibe. I’d love to know what you think!
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Questions? Comments? Podcast guests? casey@theverge.com
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