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F8 is a conference where Facebook leaders talk about the future – and on Facebook, the future is flexible. In 2015, the future was the video. The following year, the future was bots. The following year, the future was an augmented reality – and also a project to make you hear with your skin. All of these technologies have finally found their way into Facebook's products, in one form or another – well, all but cutaneous hearing. But no one has really moved the company away from its main product: an infinite flow of updates, interrupted by a very targeted advertising.
This year, the company has sought to break with this tradition. Almost everyone in today's F8 speech, starting with Mark Zuckerberg, has repeated a version of "the future is private." Since Zuckerberg announced Facebook's pivot to private messaging last month, I argued that this decision represented a fundamental transformation of the company. On Tuesday, Zuckerberg sought to convince the world – and skeptics within his own company – that he was serious.
He has notably managed to launch products. Zuckerberg's vision for a new Facebook is perhaps best represented by an upcoming redesign of the flagship app and office site that will focus on events and groups, to the detriment of the Fil de D & # 39; # 39; news. Together, the design changes will push people into small group conversations and real-world encounters – and away from public positions. Zuckerberg's new vision also appears in the large number of email-related ads: a desktop version of Messenger; a redesigned mobile app designed for speed; and a version of WhatsApp for the main Facebook portal speaker.
Equally important is the way he talked about all these launches: as the foundation of what he repeatedly called the "next chapter" of Facebook. "Over time, I think that a private social platform will be even more important in our lives than our digital cityplaces," he said. speech. "Today we are going to talk about what this product might look like, which means that the center of your social experience is more private, [and] how we need to change the way we manage this business to build it. "
One thing that Zuckerberg did do not On Tuesday, he discussed in detail the considerations that led him to move away from the public broadcasting model of social networks. But he gave Mike Isaac the outline in the New York Times:
"The three fastest growing areas of online communication are private messaging, groups and stories," said Zuckerberg. "By 2019, we expect the number of shared stories to exceed the number of shared feeds."
One way to look at Facebook right now is like an unstoppable monster who bends reality to his will, no matter the consequences. (This is what many journalists tend to see.) Another way of looking at society is to consider its fundamental weakness: to be the slave of ever-changing consumer behavior. (This is so that employees are more likely to watch it.)
In the short term, Facebook's strength is undeniable. The company is making record profits, the use of its products is at an all time high and continues to find new users around the world. But in his interview with the TimeZuckerberg admits that the writing is on the wall. If the company wants to remain dominant, it must refocus.
Last week, before addressing issues closely related to the company, Mr. Zuckerberg met with historian Yuval Noah Harari to discuss the effect of social networks on the society in general. Yesterday, in this space, I wrote about some of the questions asked by the historian to the director general:
Does Facebook want to "connect" people for a particular purpose or just let them watch a screen? How do you build a social network that enhances cohesion among people around the world, rather than eroding it? How do you build artificial intelligence systems that do not serve as monitoring and control tools? Is the economy of the Internet undermining the human agency and democracy?
These are exhilarating topics, and any discussion about them would not fit perfectly with the cheerful choreography of a developer conference talk. But they lingered in my mind as I watched Zuckerberg gather his audience. The company has new orders that, according to the CEO, will require Facebook to reorganize. It will remove the old technical infrastructure and replace it with new code bases. He will abandon his old gospel of public sharing and begin preaching privacy.
While he is undertaking this very difficult work, the issues raised by Harari and others will remain unresolved. But while Zuckerberg is working to fortify Facebook against future competitors, it's hard for me to imagine giving less than anything. And as Facebook transforms itself, how much attention will society have to cope with all the social changes that come with it?
More than F8
What happened on the first day of Facebook's developer conference? Facebook asked the live viewers that they thought the company cared about them. Facebook Dating arrives in 14 other countries and adds a "crush secret" feature. You can now ship items via Marketplace. The company's Spark AR platform is in full swing.
The Oculus Quest and the Oculus Rift S have received mixed reviews and you can now pre-order them. Portal arrives in a larger number of countries and receives WhatsApp encrypted threads.
Instagram rearranges its camera, adds a donation sticker and allows influencers to sell content via tags that can be purchased. (We also test a version that hides the number of mentions of a post, as well as some anti-bullying features.) WhatsApp tests payments in India and adds catalogs to companies.
Finally, I want to shout on the Facebook Band, an incredibly talented band of musicians who work as Facebook employees in his London office. You will never play in front of a colder crowd than a group of developers and journalists at 8:30 am in a convention hall in San Jose, and yet the Facebook group group saw my row of reporters bouncing off our chairs during an hour before the opening speech. . One of George George's two "Freedom '90s" with Rihanna's "We Found Love" was a particularly inspired combination, I thought. If you have the chance to see the Facebook group playing live, I highly recommend it.
Democracy
Tech lobbyists mobilize to defend Defang's historic law in California
Issie Lapowsky said that, as expected, lobbyists from large technology companies wanted to relax California's privacy law:
The California Consumer Privacy Act, or CCPA, allows residents of California to request, among other things, the data collected by companies, to delete them, and to refuse the sale of such data to third parties. But last week, the California Assembly's Consumer and Consumer Protection Commission introduced a series of bills that would amend the CAAA or provide for exemptions for certain categories of businesses. These bills have received wide support from corporate groups, including the California Chamber of Commerce, as well as large technology lobbying companies representing groups such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. However, privacy groups have almost unanimously opposed it, raising fears that state legislators may be about to kill the country's most flesh-and-blood law.
Shot of the Poway synagogue: America under the attack of white supremacists acting as the Islamic State group
Kelly Weill examines the link between the 8Chan online hate forum and the recent white nationalist terrorism:
After the shootings in New Zealand, 8 chan users described the alleged killer as "holy" and encouraged each other to kill themselves, including synagogues, to prepare for the "third world war" against Jews or to kill a critical journalist. of the forum.
"As many people have noted in recent days, 8chan is a terrible barrier to violence and hate," said Sam Jackson, assistant professor of online extremism at the University of Albany. "This hatred and encouragement of violence can be a kind of background noise, but someone from time to time somebody who participates in this horror online to offline actions."
Terrorism in Christchurch reaches US shores
The Digital Forensic Research Lab examines the online activity of the alleged gunman before and during the Poway synagogue attack this weekend and notes that it is directly related to the attack on two mosques in Christchurch last month. He also asks why 8Chan deserves a web platform given the frequency with which terrorists use it to recruit followers:
In this declared defender of terrorist attacks, some 8 boards of directors now have content identical to that of the hidden telegram chains used by the militants of the Islamic State. Both demonize their targets, idolize extreme violence, defend and commemorate mass murder.
US Internet companies will no longer tolerate a popular, publicly accessible website dedicated to ISIS recruitment. It is amazing that they tolerate the 8chan today. US Internet service providers would be well advised to follow the example of Australian and New Zealand Internet access providers after the Christchurch bombings, which blocked 8chan and his attorneys. Cloudflare, the US company that protects thousands of websites (including 8chan) from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks as part of its "neutral content" policy, could also reconsider its service commitment.
Facebook frenzy: how the German right dominates social media
Spiegel's reporters analyzed the publications of German political parties on Facebook and found that the far-right party had published more messages – and reached more people on Facebook – than any other:
Political surveys indicate that support for the party is currently between 11 and 15%, but 85% of all shared posts from German political parties come from the AfD. The remaining 15% of these "actions" are split between the center-left Social Democrats (SPDs), the environment-friendly Greens, the Left Party, the pro-business FDP and the conservatives. The major parties of the country – the SPD and the conservative group of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian brother party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) – were only responsible for 2 at 3% of the shares each.
Somewhere else
YouTube CEO Attacks Key Creator Issues, Including Copyright Claims and Trends
In a new blog post, Susan Wojcicki told YouTubers that the service would try to ensure that at least half of the videos in her fashion section were created by native YouTube creators rather than celebrities and celebrities. major publishers. Julia Alexander:
Creators also complained that the YouTube Trends section, an important page for viewer search, often omits their videos. Instead, it features sports events, movie trailers, video clips, and late-night clips. These complaints are not new, but Wojcicki's blog marks the first time a YouTube leader has been responding at length to these frustrations.
To respond to the complaints, Wojcicki said that at least half of all trend videos would now come from YouTubers, "the rest from music and traditional media." That does not mean that an extremely popular video will appear on the list of trends, but it addresses concerns that YouTube is not giving priority to its own creators. Wojcicki says YouTube is already "close" to hitting that representation figure.
YouTube to broadcast live Major League Baseball games
Sure why not:
Google has reached an agreement with Major League Baseball regarding the exclusive rights to broadcast streaming games in the second half of the season, thus continuing the expansion of the sport live on the Internet.
K-pop Army Battle Royale
"The voting process of Billboard Music Awards is manipulated by inauthentic Twitter accounts," according to this analysis by Geoff Goldberg:
More than 20% of accounts that tweeted, retweeted or mentioned in tweets including #FollowAnExoL are accounts created over three days (specifically between April 18 and April 20, 2019).
launches
Twitter is expanding its live video lineup, defining agreements with Viacom, ESPN, Live Nation, Univision, etc.
Todd Spangler reports that Twitter is still doing video business:
In addition to new initiatives with previous partners including the NFL, ESPN, Viacom, Major League Soccer, Live Nation and Activision Blizzard, Twitter has unveiled an agreement with Univision Communications to bring more quality content to sports news and entertainment to the Hispanic American social network community. users. In addition, Twitter adds content from the Wall Street Journal and Time magazine.
Take
How to take control of Facebook
Charlie Warzel explains to a group of people how Facebook could be significantly regulated:
In my column, a former F.T.C. According to one official, the agency may impose restrictions that could "change the way Facebook processes and shares data." What would it look like? Marc Rotenberg, chairman of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, has e-mailed that most people "have no idea what the F.T.C. could actually do it on Facebook, so I asked him.
Rotenberg argued that the F.T.C. The decision is a golden opportunity to break Facebook, especially to hijack WhatsApp. "It's not just philosophical, it's an appropriate and fair sanction," he said.
These ads think they know you
the New York Times got a bunch of ads where they just told people what the ad was thinking about, based on TimeTargeting criteria, and it's very entertaining.
This ad thinks you are a man,
working in the media,
and cut the cord.
Wow, they've got me.
And finally …
Talk to me
Send me tips, comments, questions and edgy memes telling you "the future is private". [email protected]
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