The Interface By Casey Newton An evening newsletter about Facebook, social networks, and democracy. 5653 subscribers 245 issues Subscribe to my list This thingy has to be empti pwieshh
#242 Nov 7, 2018 How Democrats' victory helps Facebook – The Democrats have retaken the House of Representatives. If you're a social media company concerned b
#241 Nov 6, 2018 America holds its breath – A little over a year ago, I found myself growingly concerned with the unintended consequences of our
#240 Nov 2, 2018 One way Twitter's political ads improve on Facebook's – Programming note: Have you ever been to a Monday wedding before? Me either! But The Interface will be
#239 Nov 1, 2018 The brilliance of the Google walkout – Companies are not democracies. But companies born in democracies sometimes display their values, as w
#238 Oct 31, 2018 On Halloween, Facebook is haunted by a form field – A little form field is giving Facebook a lot of trouble.We've talked in recent weeks about the new "d
#237 Oct 30, 2018 Hate speech finds a home on Instagram – The aftermath of a national emergency follows a now-familiar pattern. Various bad actors race to fill
#236 Oct 29, 2018 A free-speech social network disappears from the internet – It was an awful weekend of hate-fueled violence, ugly rhetoric, and worrisome retreats from our democ
#235 Oct 26, 2018 The mail bombing suspect was Extremely Online – I had a great time yesterday at the content moderation conference COMO III, where I got to meet many
#234 Oct 24, 2018 Tim Cook talks privacy — but gets a pass on China – Programming note: The Interface will be off Thursday and Friday so I can attend the COMO content mode
#233 Oct 23, 2018 America slides into Russia's DMs – One of Facebook's key talking points over the past year, as it faces more pressure to act in the face
#232 Oct 22, 2018 Twitter finds an enemy within – One reason I write this newsletter about social networks is to cover the new and exotic methods that
#231 Oct 19, 2018 The British are coming to run Facebook comms – Programming note: I'll be in New York City for work next week, and so the newsletter may arrive irreg
#230 Oct 18, 2018 The war Facebook can't see from its war room – About a month ago, the New York Times revealed the existence of a conference room inside of Facebook
#229 Oct 17, 2018 The new dark money behind Facebook's political ads – I was on a reporting assignment today and had less time to read than usual. If something obvious seem
#228 Oct 16, 2018 Facebook's privacy case for Portal falls apart – A week ago, when Facebook announced Portal, I noted that its launch had been stymied by trust issues.
#227 Oct 15, 2018 Kevin Systrom very nearly tells the truth – The greatest mystery in all of social media is why Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger left Instagram. I u
#226 Oct 12, 2018 Facebook has good news and bad news about its data breach – The good news about the Facebook data breach is that it affected fewer people than previously believe
#225 Oct 11, 2018 Facebook discovers new enemies, foreign and domestic – Earlier this week, The Daily Beast published a story with a counterintuitive finding. As best as rese
#224 Oct 10, 2018 Google wrestles with being a "good censor" – On Wednesday, an 85-page document leaked to Breitbart News. Titled "The Good Censor," it's a presenta
#223 Oct 9, 2018 The first bug to kill a social network – A year ago today, I sent out the first edition of this newsletter. Two hundred and twenty-three issue
#222 Oct 8, 2018 Facebook launches Portal, haunted by trust issues – Facebook is a powerful phone book, but it long ago opted against building a phone. There were good re
#221 Oct 5, 2018 How Facebook polarized us during the Kavanaugh hearings – The polarization of the American electorate predated Facebook's arrival on the scene. But a nagging q
#220 Oct 4, 2018 A Facebook VP stands by Kavanaugh, and employees revolt – On September 27th, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh appeared before Congress to answer allegatio
#219 Oct 3, 2018 The crack at the heart of Facebook's advertising business – The recent focus on security breaches and departed Instagram founders around here has prevented us fr
#218 Oct 2, 2018 How Lady Gaga fans bend reality to their will using Twitter – One of our core concerns around here is the way social networks are vulnerable to coordinated influen
#217 Oct 1, 2018 What we still don’t know about the Facebook breach – It's been three days since Facebook reported that hackers obtained access tokens for 50 million user
#216 Sep 28, 2018 Hackers access 50 million Facebook profiles – On Friday morning of Facebook's most tumultuous week in recent memory, the notorious bug-bounty hunte
#215 Sep 27, 2018 Facebook pushes out the troublemakers – Yesterday I wrote about how differently Brian Acton and David Marcus saw the WhatsApp acquisition, an
#214 Sep 26, 2018 Why WhatsApp's Brian Acton told us all to delete Facebook – On September 17th of last year, WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton quit the company to start a nonprofit
#213 Sep 25, 2018 The end of Instagram – Some time on Monday, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger appear to have snapped.Tensions between the Insta
#212 Sep 24, 2018 The case that Russia is winning the cyberwar – Kathleen Hall Jamieson is a prominent political scientist and professor of communications at the Univ
#211 Sep 21, 2018 How Twitter reset its Twitter account – On Friday morning, Twitter posted a single word to its Twitter account: "The." Average users began re
#210 Sep 20, 2018 Facebook has a Europe problem – Věra Jourová is the European Commissioner for justice, consumers and gender equality. Once upon a tim
#209 Sep 19, 2018 Facebook takes us inside its election war room – Note: I included the wrong link for yesterday's lead story about YouTube radicalization. The correct
#208 Sep 18, 2018 How white supremacists are thriving on YouTube – What role do major institutions play in the promotion of extremism? Two days into this week, we've al
#207 Sep 17, 2018 danah boyd's lesson for the press — and the platforms – On a rare slow news day, I found myself reading and re-reading this talk given by danah boyd at the O
#206 Sep 14, 2018 How Facebook beat Twitter at fighting fake news, in two charts – Reality has had a tough year. When the president of the United States is denying that thousands of Am
#205 Sep 13, 2018 Zuckerberg delivers a progress report on election security – Since the aftermath of the 2016 election, Facebook has invested millions of dollars in an effort to s
#204 Sep 12, 2018 The leaked Google video that's riling conservatives – It's an unhappy time at Google.Ever since the James Damore controversy last year, Google has faced re
#203 Sep 11, 2018 The fight against Facebook's conservative fact-checker – In December of last year, conservative publisher The Weekly Standard became an approved fact-checker
#202 Sep 10, 2018 The trouble with Mark Zuckerberg profiles – Can Mark Zuckerberg fix Facebook before it breaks democracy? That's the headline on Evan Osnos' 14,00
#201 Sep 5, 2018 Jack and Sheryl go to Washington – Programming note: As I mentioned last week, I'm heading to Portland for XOXO Festival tomorrow. I hea
#200 Sep 4, 2018 The countries who use Facebook against their own citizens – Last month, Facebook discovered evidence of a coordinated influence campaign on its platform led by g
#199 Aug 31, 2018 How Facebook rewards polarizing political ads – Programming note: The Interface is off Monday for Labor Day. I'll also be off Thursday and Friday to
#198 Aug 30, 2018 Donald Trump, Jr. floats a Facebook for conservatives – In the days after the 2016 election, Gizmodo published a much-discussed story that predicted our curr
#197 Aug 29, 2018 Trump escalates his attacks on social media – It was a vexing day.Conversations about social media continued to dominate the capital. "Conversation
#196 Aug 28, 2018 Instagram's surprisingly simple answer to verification – Who deserves a "verified" badge? On Twitter, the issue has been surprisingly contentious. Last Novemb
#195 Aug 27, 2018 United Nations calls Facebook a "useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate” – The United Nations issued a report today alleging that the military in Myanmar had "genocidal intent"
#194 Aug 24, 2018 Who's really being silenced on Twitter – "Social Media Giants are silencing millions of people," the president mentioned today on his Social M
#193 Aug 23, 2018 "What they’re trying to do is to resolve human nature fundamentally" – It's been a big week for tales of content moderation. On Friday, Radiolab posted a fascinating episod
#192 Aug 22, 2018 Critics question the link between Facebook and refugee violence – On Tuesday, The New York Times' investigation of a study into how Facebook promoted anti-refugee viol
#191 Aug 21, 2018 Facebook is the leading cause of attacks on refugees in Germany – The open rate for yesterday's newsletter was about half the usual rate. If you didn't get it, please
#190 Aug 20, 2018 Why Facebook needs a Supreme Court for content moderation – What belongs on Facebook? It's a central question in our current reckoning over social media, and giv
#189 Aug 17, 2018 The tweets that stopped Google in its tracks – On Thursday afternoon, a critical meeting at Google was derailed by a handful of tweets. Employees wh
#188 Aug 16, 2018 The real reason Twitter keeps tripping over itself – Thanks to my hero-friends Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher for the kind tweets on Tuesday, which sent m
#187 Aug 15, 2018 Twitter users protest Alex Jones with a viral block list – Last week, we talked about why Facebook banned Alex Jones — and Twitter didn't. Facebook saw that Jon
#186 Aug 14, 2018 How a wily Californian beat Google and Facebook's influence operation – Amid a national reckoning over the perils of social media, a looming question has been whether — and
#185 Aug 13, 2018 Twitter finally draws a line on extremism – On Friday I wrote about Twitter's seeming paralysis when it came to enforcing its platform rules. Wha
#184 Aug 10, 2018 Why Facebook banned Alex Jones, and Twitter didn't – On one hand, we spent maybe too much time this week on the question of whether one person should lose
#183 Aug 9, 2018 Twitter's case for keeping Alex Jones falls apart – On Tuesday, weighing in on the public pressure to ban Alex Jones and Infowars from Twitter, CEO Jack
#182 Aug 8, 2018 Jack Dorsey makes everyone mad — except Sean Hannity – Last night, amid growing pressure to address Alex Jones' presence on Twitter, CEO Jack Dorsey tried t
#181 Aug 7, 2018 Apple crushed Alex Jones — then tossed him a lifeline – Alex Jones' fate was decided over the weekend, when Apple CEO Tim Cook and his vice president of soft
#180 Aug 6, 2018 Alex Jones loses the info war – On Monday, the bottom dropped out for Alex Jones. After a series of tepid disciplinary actions, which
#179 Aug 3, 2018 The 8-year-olds hacking our voting machines – It's been a rather grim week in the social-media-and-democracy cinematic universe, so let's end on a
#178 Aug 2, 2018 Fake events have arrived — and they're worse than fake news – Some days, it seems like any number of topics might lead The Interface. Other days, nearly every majo
#177 Aug 1, 2018 Senate to tech companies: "time is running out" – "Time is running out." That was the message from Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) today at a meeting of the Sena
#176 Jul 31, 2018 Facebook discovers a conspiracy to amplify the left – We are 97 days away from the midterm elections, there's an active campaign to undermine our democracy
#175 Jul 30, 2018 Democrats propose a comprehensive Facebook regulation – As Congress has paid increasing attention to social networks over the past year, a recurring theme in
#174 Jul 27, 2018 How Infowars keeps escaping Facebook's ban hammer – Two weeks ago, CNN's Oliver Darcy put a question to Facebook executives during an event in New York:
#173 Jul 26, 2018 Trump blasts Twitter over nonexistent "shadow bans" – A consequence of covering the intersection of social media and democracy is that sometimes you wind u
#172 Jul 25, 2018 Facebook's stock price collapses along with user growth – Today, for the first time in three years, Facebook failed to meet Wall Street's expectations for reve
#171 Jul 24, 2018 3 unanswered questions about Facebook hoaxes and threats – Another day, another high-profile outrage spreading virally on Facebook. This time around it's our fr
#170 Jul 23, 2018 What YouTube could teach Facebook about conspiracies – Months before critics revisited Facebook's embrace of Holocaust deniers and other conspiracy peddlers
#169 Jul 20, 2018 Facebook says it limits the spread of hoaxes. But does it? – During the briefing with reporters that kicked off Facebook's latest round of soul searching over fak
#168 Jul 19, 2018 "It feels like Facebook is waiting for someone to die" – Thanks to everyone who wrote in yesterday with their thoughts on Facebook and Holocaust denial. I got
#167 Jul 18, 2018 Zuckerberg gets tripped up by the Holocaust – Today we had a very long and vexing debate about free speech. It started when Mark Zuckerberg sat for
#166 Jul 17, 2018 Congress beats up Facebook over Infowars – Yesterday I told you today's tech hearing promised to be another high-profile waste of time. Reader:
#165 Jul 16, 2018 Conservative pages outperform everything on Facebook – Tomorrow the House Judiciary Committee will once again bring together representatives from Facebook,
#164 Jul 13, 2018 A brief history of Infowars promoting violence on Facebook – As Facebook worked to quell unrest around its decision to offer Infowars a platform for its toxic con
#163 Jul 12, 2018 How Facebook's policies protect its worst users – Misinformation on Facebook kills. Hoaxes warning of child traffickers and organ harvesting on WhatsAp
#162 Jul 11, 2018 Facebook gives more away data, but this time it's good – One reason the world was caught unawares by the rise of misinformation on Facebook is that no one cou
#161 Jul 10, 2018 Regulators fine Facebook over Cambridge Analytica – During our long springtime discussion of the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, a key question
#160 Jul 9, 2018 YouTube finally fights back against conspiracy theories – Each time a new national calamity occurs — which is to say, every few days for the past couple years
#159 Jun 22, 2018 The Time Well Spent debate is over. (Time Well Spent won) – Programming note: I'm going on summer vacation! See you back here on July 8th. In the meantime, I'll
#158 Jun 21, 2018 The smartest thing about IGTV – It's been a day now since Instagram introduced IGTV, its new home for watching longform vertical vide
#157 Jun 20, 2018 Twitter blocks the doxxers – Today Splinter News, a remnant of Gawker that is now part of the Gizmodo Media Group, published Steph
#156 Jun 19, 2018 The Cambridge Analytica story keeps getting weirder – Enough time has passed since this spring's Cambridge Analytica scandal that you may find yourself str
#155 Jun 18, 2018 The Onion tees off on Facebook – After a week away in Los Angeles playing video games for work, I arrived today eager to catch up on a
#154 Jun 8, 2018 Facebook contemplates whether it's too big – Programming note: The Interface will be off next week covering E3 for The Verge. When democracy is in
#153 Jun 7, 2018 Facebook sets the Days Without A Scandal counter back to 0 – Facebook's business works because people are generally willing to give up a healthy amount of their p
#152 Jun 6, 2018 Facebook makes two big moves into video – Until now, 2018 has been the year Facebook ran away from the news. Burned by the Trending Topics scan
#151 Jun 5, 2018 Why the WhatsApp founders really quit – The Interface is a messy newsletter that lives for drama, and so naturally I was excited to read Kirs
#150 Jun 4, 2018 Apple slaps Facebook at WWDC – On Thursday, Facebook was riding high, with its stock near an all-time peak and a group of angry shar
#149 Jun 1, 2018 Facebook puts the end into Trending – In February, a Wired piece on the origins of our reckoning over social media put laid the blame on Fa
#148 May 31, 2018 Facebook's shareholders get their say,twice – Facebook's annual shareholder meeting was held today, and it made for a better spectacle than most su
#147 May 30, 2018 Evan Spiegel turns the tables on Facebook – Last night Code Conference attendees got to see top executives from Snap and Facebook speak back to b
#146 May 29, 2018 Papua New Guinea threatens to block Facebook for a month – Programming note: I'm here at the Code Conference in Southern California, where Snap's Evan Spiegel a
#145 May 25, 2018 Facebook's political ad rules could upend the June 5th primaries – Programming note: The Interface will be taking the Memorial Day holiday off on Monday, and we'll be b
#144 May 24, 2018 Facebook opens up its political advertising archive – Today was a big day for people who like digging through thousands of political ads.Facebook’s new rul
#143 May 23, 2018 Trump's Twitter blocking ruled unconstitutional (plus, our new podcast) – Some of the most interesting entrepreneurs I get to talk to are the ones who scare Facebook. One of t
#142 May 22, 2018 Europe takes a swing at Facebook, and misses – Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before European Parliament today was designed to give members a chance t
#141 May 21, 2018 The campaign to break up Facebook – Programming note: the premiere episode of my new podcast, Converge, arrives on Wednesday. Find it on
#140 May 18, 2018 Facebook gets squeezed by the Vietnamese – Authoritarian governments love the way the internet grows their economies. But they hate the way diss
#139 May 17, 2018 How Facebook lost the battle for internet.org — and won anyway – Facebook spent the better part of the past half-decade promoting internet.org, its ambitious effort t
#138 May 16, 2018 Why fake Facebook accounts can be real scary – Yesterday, with the release of the Community Standards Enforcement Report, Facebook gave us two numbe
#137 May 15, 2018 Facebook puts its money where its moderation is – Last month I attended a meeting with Monica Bickert, who runs global policy management at Facebook. T
#136 May 14, 2018 Facebook announces 200 more Cambridge Analyticas – On March 21, in response to the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, Facebook said it would inve
#135 May 11, 2018 Snapchat hits the reset button – Snapchat began life as a novel new messaging app. The addition of stories, which allowed you to broad
#134 May 10, 2018 How Google got religion about smartphone addiction – Watching this week's keynote at Google I/O, with its surprise focus on features inspired by the Time
#133 May 9, 2018 Your worst ideas for putting Facebook on the blockchain – Yesterday, we learned of Facebook's surprise decision to create a blockchain division. I asked you fo
#132 May 8, 2018 Facebook blows up its org chart – Among large technology companies, very few have a leadership team as stable as Facebook's. Every time
#131 May 7, 2018 Google I/O is here — and has big implications for social media – In January, I told you that "time well spent" was shaping up to be tech's next big debate. As concern
#130 May 4, 2018 Facebook might ask us to like and subscribe – Programming note: For all but 11 percent of you, yesterday's Interface went to your spam filter. The
#129 May 3, 2018 Twitter makes everyone change their password – After spending the past two months in the angry-media spotlight, Facebook finally caught a breather o
#128 May 2, 2018 Cambridge Analytica is dead. Good riddance – Cambridge Analytica was nothing if not consistent. After nearly two months of scandal, the Trump camp
#127 May 1, 2018 Everything that happened at F8 today (and one thing that didn't) – As expected, the first day of the F8 developer conference had a more muted tone than previous years.
#126 Apr 30, 2018 Facebook sets low expectations for F8 – F8 takes place tomorrow and Wednesday in San Jose. I'll be there both days. Say hi if you see me, and
#125 Apr 27, 2018 The Diamond and Silk disaster in Congress – There were plenty of reasons to criticize lawmakers after this month's Facebook hearings: too many of
#124 Apr 20, 2018 Facebook gets invited back to Congress. (It shouldn't go.) – Programming note: The Interface will go dark from Monday through Thursday of next week. I'm traveling
#123 Apr 19, 2018 Facebook's terms of service switcheroo – The day's most important social media-and-democracy story is also extremely weedsy, and its consequen
#122 Apr 18, 2018 Facebook shows off its GDPR designs (and doesn't invite us) – In the weeks leading up to its implementation, Facebook has made many appreciative noises about Europ
#121 Apr 17, 2018 Facebook won't launch military cyberattacks. Will Google? – As our collective faith in government institutions has declined, we've put more pressure on corporati
#120 Apr 16, 2018 The real hard questions about shadow profiles – In January, we wrote about Facebook's Hard Questions blog, in which the company seeks to address some
#119 Apr 13, 2018 How AI fails Facebook — and YouTube and Pinterest – After a long week of hearings, I went on The Vergecast this week to talk at length about Mark Zuckerb
#118 Apr 12, 2018 The data Facebook collects without permission – On Wednesday afternoon, midway through his grilling at the hands of the House of Representatives, Mar
#117 Apr 11, 2018 The House strikes back at Facebook – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made his second of two appearances before Congress on Wednesday, endurin
#116 Apr 10, 2018 Mark Zuckerberg confuses the Senate – Mark Zuckerberg made his highly anticipated debut before Congress today during a marathon five-hour h
#115 Apr 9, 2018 Mark Zuckerberg arrives in the capital – After an intensive crash course in testifying before Congress, Mark Zuckerberg (and squad) have lande
#114 Apr 6, 2018 Mark Zuckerberg deletes his Facebook messages – At some point in 2015, Facebook executives began noticing a peculiar phenomenon in their Messenger in
#113 Apr 5, 2018 A wild Sheryl Sandberg appears – Yesterday Mark Zuckerberg took an hour's worth of questions from reporters on topics including data p
#112 Apr 4, 2018 Mark Zuckerberg takes our question – Today, YouTube grieved in the aftermath of a shooting that left four injured but — mercifully — no on
#111 Apr 3, 2018 Four shot, suspect dead at YouTube – It was a busy day on the social media and democracy beat, and yet all of the day's developments pale
#110 Apr 2, 2018 Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook needs a Supreme Court – If there's a single theme that dominates Ezra Klein's fascinating interview with Mark Zuckerberg toda
#109 Mar 30, 2018 Return to Boz – Yesterday afternoon, BuzzFeed published a post from June 2016 in which Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, a membe
#108 Mar 29, 2018 Facebook breaks up with the data brokers – Last week, the central story about Facebook and the data privacy scandal was the company's silence. T
#107 Mar 28, 2018 Justin Rosenstein and Chris Cox on fixing Facebook – Last year, when a series of former Facebook executives came forward to reveal misgivings about the wo
#106 Mar 27, 2018 Zuckerberg (probably) agrees to testify – Last week the big question was, will Mark Zuckerberg address the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal?
#105 Mar 26, 2018 Facebook's data privacy scandal is spiraling – After a week in which it was battered over its handling of user data, Facebook sought to reset the de
#104 Mar 23, 2018 Elon Musk deletes Facebook – This week we saw just how much billionaires enjoy kicking their fellow billionaires in the face. On W
#103 Mar 22, 2018 Mark Zuckerberg asks: "Who chose me?" – Until 9PM ET last night, the world thought we would be getting one interview with Mark Zuckerberg. An
#102 Mar 21, 2018 Zuckerberg breaks his silence – The crisis PR handbook, says Scott Galloway, has three essential steps: The person in charge responds
#101 Mar 20, 2018 Why Mark Zuckerberg isn't talking – After nearly four days of silence from top executives on the unfolding controversy around Cambridge A
#100 Mar 19, 2018 Cambridge Apocalyptica – The longer you consider Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, the stranger it seems. The basic deta
#99 Mar 8, 2018 On Twitter, lies outrun the truth – Programming note: Standing on the very precipice of ISSUE ONE HUNDRED, The Interface is going on Spri
#98 Mar 7, 2018 The Italian job – A blustery populist takes a hard line on immigration, masters the use of Facebook, and leads his part
#97 Mar 6, 2018 The conservative playbook against Facebook – Today we learned about two ways conservatives hope to put Facebook on the perpetual defensive. After
#96 Mar 5, 2018 Fixing Facebook with a labelmaker – Is misinformation a problem we can label our way out of? Two initiatives announced today promise to m
#95 Mar 2, 2018 Q&A with Cortico, the nonprofit trying to improve Twitter – This week, Twitter asked for help as it tries to promote healthier conversations on the platform. Yes
#94 Mar 1, 2018 Twitter asks for help – The battle over "time well spent," which we first wrote about in January, has arrived at Twitter. It
#93 Feb 28, 2018 Vero and the pop-up restaurant theory of social networks – Every year or so, a promising new social network bubbles up to the surface. You can probably name the
#92 Feb 27, 2018 Why 2020 will be a Facebook election, too – America's longest sustained national conversation about CPMs entered a surprising fifth day on Tuesda
#91 Feb 26, 2018 How Trump gamed Facebook, down to the penny – Did Facebook's ad platform give Donald Trump an unfair advantage in the 2016 election? That's a quest
#90 Feb 23, 2018 From 'leave it up' to 'take it down' – Recently I was talking with someone who works at one of the big platforms we like to talk about in th
#89 Feb 22, 2018 Why Sly Stallone keeps dying on Facebook – In real life, Sylvester Stallone is a healthy 71-year-old. But on Facebook, he keeps dying. If his de
#88 Feb 21, 2018 YouTube tripped up by trending video – Six days ago, in the aftermath of the shooting in Parkland, Fla., we wrote about the information war
#87 Feb 20, 2018 Rob Goldman apologized. Should he have? – Three days after his Twitter thread about the Mueller indictment, Rob Goldman apologized. Goldman, wh
#86 Feb 19, 2018 5 questions for social networks after the Mueller indictment – Over the weekend, the press further digested special counsel Robert Mueller's indictment of 13 Russia
#85 Feb 16, 2018 Mueller indicts a troll farm — and the idea of a 'Facebook community' – A year ago today, Mark Zuckerberg published a lengthy post titled “Building a Global Community.” It o
#84 Feb 15, 2018 A misinformation war in Florida, and on Twitter – The aftermath of any school shooting is terrible, and today was worse than most. After a 19-year-old
#83 Feb 14, 2018 Following the money behind Messenger Kids – Facebook marked Valentine's Day by releasing Messenger for Kids, its controversial app designed for c
#82 Feb 13, 2018 Facebook tells publishers to take it or leave it – Facebook hired Campbell Brown as its head of news partnerships on January 6th, 2017. At the time, Bro
#81 Feb 12, 2018 The real Trending Topics scandal – When did our cultural reckoning over social media begin? In a comprehensive new account of that quest
#80 Feb 9, 2018 My News Feed, revealed – On Monday I'm heading down to Southern California for Code Media, an event where we'll hear from seve
#79 Feb 8, 2018 Mr. Pickles goes to Washington – People tell lies on social media. What, if anything, should social media do about it? Members of the
#78 Feb 7, 2018 The comedian and the social network – The internet created fertile new ground for comedians, just as it had for so many other creative type
#77 Feb 6, 2018 Q&A with Mark Zuckerberg's personal pollster – Tavis McGinn applied for a job at Facebook last year hoping to work in market research. He had previo
#76 Feb 5, 2018 The $50 million ad campaign against Facebook addiction – The loose collection of former social media executives sounding an alarm about its unintended consequ
#75 Feb 2, 2018 An ex-YouTube engineer has a warning for democracy – This summer, I wrote a cheerful piece called How YouTube perfected the feed. In the dark months follo
#74 Feb 1, 2018 How WhatsApp is roiling Indian families — and predicting our future – The release of Facebook earnings yesterday gave us a fresh opportunity to ask: what is a meaningful i
#73 Jan 31, 2018 Facebook shrinks in North America – Facebook reported its fourth quarter earnings today, and they showcased both the enormous strength of
#72 Jan 30, 2018 The backlash against Messenger Kids – In retrospect, the weirdest thing about Messenger Kids was the timing. With trust in the company decl
#71 Jan 29, 2018 How Europe is shaping privacy on Facebook — and what comes next – On May 25th, the 28-member European Union will begin enforcing the General Data Protection Regulation
#70 Jan 26, 2018 Why the News Feed should explain itself – One reason Facebook struggles to earn our trust is because at the individual level, no one at the com
#69 Jan 25, 2018 Facebook's corporate blog looks dangerous, but plays it safe – Hard Questions is a series of blog posts that Facebook began publishing to talk about the thornier qu
#68 Jan 24, 2018 Another former Facebook employee sounds the alarm – Dipayan Ghosh once worked to improve Facebook from the inside. According to his biography at the New
#67 Jan 23, 2018 Facebook asks us who we can trust – On Friday, Facebook announced two key changes to the News Feed: one, it would reduce the amount of ne
#66 Jan 22, 2018 5 ways Facebook hurts democracy — according to Facebook – I started writing The Interface in October. Fallout from the 2016 election had resulted in a daily de
#65 Jan 17, 2018 The battle over Time Well Spent – Programming note: The Interface is taking Thursday and Friday off.In 2016, Tristan Harris, whose job
#64 Jan 16, 2018 Four questions Facebook won't answer – One benefit of writing a newsletter every day is that you get to look at the same set of facts so lon
#63 Jan 15, 2018 The curious case of the missing Instagram likes – Last week, I mentioned in passing this story in Canada's Globe and Mail, a high-level look at smartph
#62 Jan 12, 2018 Facebook moves slow and fixes things – A day after Facebook announced major changes to the News Feed, I found myself thinking about Mark Zuc
#61 Jan 11, 2018 Facebook rips up the News Feed – Today's top story: Facebook is rewriting the rules of the News Feed, and nobody can say for certain h
#60 Jan 10, 2018 How Facebook is fighting fake news with local news – A prime reason fake news stories gain wide traction these days is that there are fewer gatekeepers to
#59 Jan 9, 2018 Snap's internal metrics leak – It feels like a make-or-break year for Snap, Inc., but tracking the company's performance day to day
#58 Jan 8, 2018 "Who the #$@% is Roger McNamee?" – Mark Zuckerberg's nine-point plan to fix Facebook now has an eight-point companion piece from a highl
#57 Jan 5, 2018 Twitter says it won't ban Trump – Today's top story: It took long enough, but Twitter finally has a coherent statement about its stance
#56 Jan 4, 2018 Mark Zuckerberg's New Year's resolution – Every year, Mark Zuckerberg sets a personal challenge. In 2009, to stress Facebook's need to focus on
#55 Jan 3, 2018 The case against banning Trump from Twitter – Last night in San Francisco, protesters turned the Twitter building against itself. A group calling i
#54 Jan 2, 2018 Snap's big night, and everything you missed over the break – Every good new year begins with a party, and so too does our first newsletter of 2018. It seems that
#53 Dec 22, 2017 My 2018 predictions for Facebook, Twitter, and Snap – 2018 predictions. This is the Interface's final edition of 2017, as I spend next week with family and
#52 Dec 21, 2017 Another former Facebook employee speaks out – Today's top story: Another former Facebook employee distances herself from the company — this time, o
#51 Dec 20, 2017 The Interface - Issue #51 – This week my bosses asked me to reflect on Facebook's year. It was a year in which almost too much we
#50 Dec 19, 2017 Twitter's free speech era is officially over – The free speech wing of the free speech party has officially closed. Sinead McSweeney, Twitter's vice
#49 Dec 18, 2017 How Russia learned to regram – In the past year of discussions about how Russia uses social media, Instagram has largely escaped not
#48 Dec 15, 2017 How the News Feed can ruin your day – Today Facebook published what might be the most extraordinary blog post in the history of the company
#47 Dec 14, 2017 An obituary for net neutrality (2015-17) – Net neutrality is dead, and Ajit Pai killed it. In a 3-2 vote — amid a bomb scare, and Republican opp
#46 Dec 13, 2017 Facebook wrestles with Brexit (and also with wrestlers) – We spend a lot of time around here blaming tech platforms for the unintended consequences of the tool
#45 Dec 12, 2017 Facebook confronts its billionaire defector – When you're a fast-growing, world-beating tech giant, it can be easy to dismiss your critics as crank
#44 Dec 11, 2017 Why you can't fix culture with technology – The Interface is, in part, a journal of unintended consequences. Tech platforms build tools that are
#43 Dec 8, 2017 The Burmese monk rallying vigilantes on Facebook – As crises of weaponized misinformation spread to more countries, it often falls to journalists to pla
#42 Dec 7, 2017 What Facebook did to the Philippines – Yesterday we told you about how a single firm created 40,000 fake accounts in Poland to advocate for
#41 Dec 6, 2017 Why 40,000 fake Poles should worry Facebook – Here's a report from the University of Oxford about what the authors call "computational propaganda":
#40 Dec 5, 2017 Evan Spiegel quotes de Tocqueville – Snap is looking to grow in Europe, and so today we find Evan Spiegel sitting for a profile with the G
#39 Dec 4, 2017 Facebook comes for the children – In 1998, as the internet began to spread across the country, Congress passed the Children's Online Pr
#38 Dec 1, 2017 The more Twitter explains, the less we understand – I often compare Twitter to the Bluth Company — that fictional family business from Arrested Developme
#37 Nov 30, 2017 The FCC chairman deletes his Facebook account – On Tuesday, as part of his crusade against net neutrality, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai went on an offensive
#36 Nov 29, 2017 Evan Spiegel tells us what we want to hear – Is Snap our savior from fake news? Snap would like us to think so. Here's Evan Spiegel writing in Axi
#35 Nov 28, 2017 The FCC turns Twitter's argument for net neutrality against it – The Federal Communications Commission is expected to end net neutrality on December 14th, and the deb
#34 Nov 27, 2017 What is political propaganda doing in this Facebook Messenger propaganda? – What does Facebook Messenger mean for the future of political propaganda? That's the somewhat provoca
#33 Nov 22, 2017 Russia sees a turkey in YouTube, and maybe Facebook [The Interface] – Yesterday, we talked about Google's plan to down-rank search results for RT and Sputnik in an effort
#32 Nov 21, 2017 Russians: If you can't beat 'em, rank 'em lower in search – Generally, platforms strive to avoid making decisions that appear editorial in nature. Beyond enforci
#31 Nov 20, 2017 What we mean we talk about community [The Interface] – What does Mark Zuckerberg means when he talks about "community"? The Facebook CEO has used the word i
#30 Nov 17, 2017 The FEC moves to regulate Facebook after all [The Interface] – The total lack of movement on the high-profile Honest Ads Act has made your humble newsletter writer
#29 Nov 16, 2017 Twitter says it's going to start monitoring our offline behavior [The Interface] – When Twitter verified the account of a white supremacist, it triggered a public-relations crisis that
#28 Nov 15, 2017 The Facebook experiment that's rocking Serbia [The Interface] – In issue 11 of this newsletter, I told you about Facebook's move to imagine a News Feed free of news.
#27 Nov 14, 2017 In which the core principles of this newsletter are revealed – This newsletter has three core principles:1. I don't understand how social media platforms are changi
#26 Nov 13, 2017 Check your DMs ... for Wikileaks [The Interface] – Democracy: it's going down in the DMs! That's the takeaway in the day's biggest social media-and-gove
#25 Nov 10, 2017 This newsletter was designed to be addictive [The Interface] – Hmm let's see, what other sorts of misinformation are spreading on Facebook? Aha: abortion. Of course
#24 Nov 9, 2017 Twitter finds something new to apologize for [The Interface] – Jason Kessler is a white supremacist who organized the United the Right rally in Charlottesville this
#23 Nov 8, 2017 The bots that crawled into the statehouse [The Interface] – Until now, The Interface has focused on how social media has been an attack surface for bad actors lo
#22 Nov 7, 2017 Snap back to reality — oops, there goes gravity [The Interface] – Let's say you're Facebook, and you have a fake news problem. Something you have observed is that your
#21 Nov 6, 2017 YouTube takes heat over conspiracies, and disturbing videos for kids – One of this newsletter's chief preoccupations is with how information spreads today. Each national ca
#20 Nov 3, 2017 The most insane Twitter story ever? [The Interface] – At press time yesterday, the only thing I knew about Donald Trump's Twitter account was that it had b
#19 Nov 2, 2017 The Trolls Are Coming From Inside the House [The Interface] – Yesterday, at an Intelligence Committee hearing, Sen. Mark Warner decried Facebook's use by Russian t
#18 Nov 1, 2017 Both Sides Against the Meddle [The Interface] – Yesterday, I described tech companies' initial appearance before a Senate subcommittee as political t
#17 Oct 31, 2017 Mr. Face books to Washington [The Interface] – The first big hearing of the week played more as political theater than the first step toward a massi
#16 Oct 30, 2017 Facebook's testimony leaks ahead of time [The Interface] – A big week on the ol' tech-and-democracy beat kicked off with a huge series of leaked announcements f
#15 Oct 27, 2017 Congress is fast approaching. Facebook looks busy [The Interface] – A mercifully slow Friday found Facebook preparing for next week's hearing before the Senate Judiciary
#14 Oct 26, 2017 Twitter gets medieval on RT's ass [The Interface] – Just days ahead of its scheduled hearings before Congress, Twitter said today that it would no longer
#13 Oct 25, 2017 Fake news turns politics upside down from here to Slovakia [The Interface] – I've thought more about Slovakia in the past week than I have in the past 10 years. For one thing, it
#12 Oct 24, 2017 Facebook reassures publishers, as traffic falls off a cliff [The Interface] – On Monday, Facebook said that in six countries it would banish publishers to a separate feed, away fr
#11 Oct 23, 2017 Facebook imagines a News Feed without the news [The Interface] – Over the past 18 months, the news has given Facebook nothing but trouble. The problems began in May 2
#10 Oct 20, 2017 The Interface - Issue #10 – Are political ads the problem — or is the problem Facebook itself? A growing number of commentators t
#9 Oct 19, 2017 The Interface - Issue #9 – Today was a milestone in the story of Facebook and democracy, as a bipartisan group of senators intro
#8 Oct 18, 2017 The Interface - Issue #8 – Here's where growing unease over Facebook's role in democracy starts turning into policy. On Thursday
#7 Oct 17, 2017 The Interface - Issue #7 – One of the chief problems about covering Russia's election meddling, at least for the native English
#6 Oct 16, 2017 The Interface - Issue #6 – All these daily stories — newsletters, even! — about social media's growing, ill-defined, possibly pe
#5 Oct 13, 2017 The Interface - Issue #5 – Yesterday I wrote about Facebook's decision to delete thousands of posts from Russia-linked web pages
#4 Oct 12, 2017 The Interface - Issue #4 – The biggest story in social media today was Sheryl Sandberg's live interview with Mike Allen from Axi
#3 Oct 11, 2017 The Interface - Issue #3 – It was a big news day for Facebook on two fronts. Lawmakers agreed to release the Facebook ads bought
#2 Oct 10, 2017 The Interface - Issue #2 – An unusually slow day on the Facebook front left room for its rivals to grab some news-cycle oxygen.
#1 Oct 9, 2017 The Interface - Issue #1 – Facebook is my beat, and it can be an overwhelming one. That feels particularly true in this moment,
