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One consequence of the intersection of social media and democracy is that sometimes you end up having to discuss very stupid things. The somewhat infuriating controversy over "the shady ban" of some of Twitter's prominent conservatives – which she absolutely does not – is part of it. And yet, how Twitter reacts to the criticism that accompanies it could determine if the company has a hold on the abuse for which its platform is so well known.
Yesterday I mentioned a misleading story in Vice whose title was falsely saying that "The shadow has banished" prominent Republicans like the RNC chairman and Trump spokesman Jr. "(It has since been changed.) This story was taken from a Sunday article by Gizmodo that describes how some" controversial "accounts are" downgraded. "Search results."
The first thing to Note about this story is that it starts and ends with which accounts are suggested when one starts typing a name in the Twitter search box. That's all. The worst thing that we can blame Twitter is, in some cases, to spell out the full names of some people if you wanted to read their tweets.
As I said: very silly
] This story starts last year, when Twitter started late to remove the tweets of poor quality and harbading search results. Twitter has continued to refine search results based on many different signals, most of which do not have and will never share with us. One effect of this was that the company sometimes would not automatically suggest certain accounts, based on the behavior of this account and the accounts that interacted with it.
The operating theory here is that you can say a lot about a Twitter account of his friends, and if he hangs out with dirt, he might not deserve a place in your custom autocomplete results. Twitter, of course, has been under tremendous pressure to make changes like these after a decade of struggling to control abuse.
Wired's Issie Lapowsky talked to Twitter about what might have happened to demote a handful of conservatives in the search results:
Twitter was far from transparent in defining this bad behavior, but some examples that it gives publicly include accounts that have not confirmed their email addresses or who have signed multiple accounts at once. Twitter does not ban these accounts nor the tweets that they publish. It reduces their visibility in user responses and also in search. The company's algorithms also badyze who these accounts are connected to, and whether the accounts in these networks also behave similarly to trolls. But Twitter insists that algorithms have no way of knowing if the people behind these tweets are Republicans or Democrats.
"If you send a tweet and 45 accounts we think they're really trolley a hundred times, and you retweet a hundred of them, we do not look at that and we say," C & # 39; is a political point of view. "We are watching the behavior surrounding the tweet," said the spokesman.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump was rage-tweeting about the history of vice. "Twitter's SHADOW BANNING's prominent Republicans," he said. "Not good.We will consider this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints." (For the record, it is not illegal to oblige someone to spell the full name of 39, a person to find his account.)
A negative consequence of the news cycle is to remove the word "shadowban" from its meaning – another platform jargon formerly useful, as the "false news", which almost does not think of an idea.As Brian Feldman tells New York a shadowban – which allows a user to continue posting on a forum, without informing them that their posts are visible only to them – "is useful rather than someone immediately being locked and possibly retaliating, for example, by creating a new account, the user disappears gradually because of the lack of # Interaction of other users. "
Thanks to this week's events, however," shadowban "seems fatal This means" having less distribution than I personally think. "That's the idea that motivated this disastrous Diamond audience and Silk at this year's Congress, and Twitter's search hiccup could bring in another.The argument that Twitter has consistently biased conservative voices can only be done in bad faith. The argument that Facebook systematically disadvantages conservative voices can only be done in bad faith.
This is not because it was done in bad faith that it can not be effective. 39; is one of the lessons of the last two years of Facebook, in which a story Gizmodo arguing that Facebook "suppressed the conservative news" led the company to eliminate human editors of his p This paved the way for the spread of misinformation on the platform that continues today.
And that's why a very silly story about search results on Twitter is more consequential than it might appear at first. Platforms that find themselves at odds with the President of the United States will be very prone to overreact – in a way that aggravates the platform. The work that Twitter has undertaken to reduce abuse has been welcome. And if it involves typing a few more characters into a search box, I say it either.
Democracy
Twitter is not the shadow of Republicans. Here's Why
The full explanation of Feldman on the history of shadowbanning here is helpful, and I suggest reading the whole thing.
News Using Social Media Platforms 2017
Here are some new statistics from Pew on how Americans news them on social platforms:
Since 2013, at least half of Twitter users have reported having news on the site, but in 2017, with a president who frequently makes announcements on the platform, this share rose to three quarters (74%), up 15 percentage points from the previous year. last year. On YouTube, about a third of users now have access (32%), up from 21% in 2016. The use of information among Snapchat users has increased by 12 points to 29% in August 2017 , against 17% in early 2016.
Elsewhere
Facebook's stock market downturn is the largest decline in US history
The collapse of Facebook yesterday afternoon has continued Thursday, to record the effect:
After a surprisingly weak growth forecast The earnings report this week, Facebook's share price fell 19 percent today. The decline, which wiped out about $ 120 billion in market value, is the biggest single-day drop in the history of the US stock market
The conference call that rocked investors' faith on Facebook
minute by minute through the conference call resulting in Facebook's record plunge. Here is something that has not been paid enough attention yet. (He goes though though.)
He partly blamed the "headwinds" and new privacy options for users, but also revealed that newer ad formats such as Instagram Stories do not have the same effect. did not result in the same amount of money. Facebook and Instagram feeds.
This revelation on Stories surprised many badysts and investors. Facebook executives said users are adopting the Stories feature, which allows users to post photo and video mounts after 24 hours, and that activity would eclipse time spent scrolling through the year. next. Advertisements displayed in feeds are those where Facebook generates the bulk of its revenue. Now, Facebook's leaders said people spent more time using a less lucrative product
Facebook just learned the true cost of solving its problems
Here's a good nugget from Fred Vogelstein on the earnings of Facebook:
Facebook will be much less profitable? During the last quarter of 2017, the ratio of operating income to income – an important measure of profitability – was 57%. It was 44 percent in the second quarter of 2018. And it is expected to fall in the 30 percent range by the end of this year, said David Wehner, Facebook's chief financial officer.
Facebook has acquired Redkix to improve messaging features in its competitor Slack
Facebook seeks to strengthen Workplace with some commonplace collaboration tools. Redkix is "an email startup that combines email, messaging and calendar features into one application," reports Kurt Wagner.
Slack buys Hipchat with plans to shut him down and migrate users to his competing chat service – Hipchat, which preceded him, and that Slack has completely routed him to the point that Atbadian paid his rival (in the form of an investment) to get rid of it.
Adolescents discuss big problems on Instagram Flop Accounts
"Flop Accounts" on Instagram are those where teenagers discuss real-world events, because they no longer trust traditional media, Taylor Lorenz reports:
Accounts publish photos, videos, or screenshots. people have considered a "flop", or, essentially, a failure. A flop could be a famous YouTuber who says something racist, someone rude or ugly in person, a homophobic comment, or whatever the teenager who postulates him or her bad or unacceptable. Sometimes, the teenagers who run a given account know each other in real life; it is more likely that they will meet online.
"Flop accounts draw attention to the bad things or bad people that people should be aware of.We also publish credible content for entertainment purposes," said Alma, a director of 13 years on account flop @nonstopflops
When a stranger decides to destroy your life
Here is a surprisingly disturbing story of Kashmir Hill about a woman who was defamed by a troubled addict after making an online comment about the right of a teenager to take a selfie in Auschwitz (?????).
Lance
voicemail on LinkedIn: give you more ways I have conversations
I'm sorry but that's the funniest thing I've ever read.Never changes, LinkedIn.Except if you add a voicemail in 2018, in which case do just that.
Did you you already typed a long and thoughtful message How much faster and easier would it be to say it out loud? To give you more ways to have conversations, we have now added the ability to record and send voice messages up to a minute in LinkedIn Messaging.
Snapchat "Storytellers" finally creators with advertisers
The IGTV carousel intones Instagram feed traffic to embedded videos
Do you completely ignore IGTV? No worries, it will now be inserted into your Instagram feed as an incentive to click.
Takes
Facebook has had an incredibly bad day
Matt Levine is wonderfully funny about the decline of Facebook's record stock:
There is a popular, somewhat ironic notion in the industry Financial, according to which losing a billion dollars of money is a mark of honor, something of which one can be proud, a good thing to have on his CV. This shows that you can recover from adversity, etc., but most importantly, it shows that customers trusted you to a billion dollars and that you had the confidence to take risks. Losing $ 150 billion of shareholder money shows, at a minimum, that Facebook had shareholders who believed it to be close to $ 630 billion (at the close of yesterday); you can not lose $ 150 billion in market capitalization without first having a market capitalization of $ 150 billion. I claim that losing $ 150 billion in market capitalization per day is a more impressive financial achievement than anything almost any other company has done in the history of stock markets.
And finally …
How the aerial tramway was saved from being the least popular Twitter emoji
The hottest trend among teens is Twitter spamming with the least used emoji so that it is … not the least used emoji. My colleague Shoshana Wodinsky reports:
During the last part of these eleven weeks, the streetcar became a hero among many public transport advocates. The campaign to save the tramway emoji from its ignominious destiny really took off when the 100,000 members of New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens – a Facebook group dedicated to transport mayors – took the wind of the situation. Dozens of NUMTOTs, as members call themselves, have spammed Twitter with strings of the lonely gondola to try to elevate it from its place to the last place.
God bless NUMTOTS and thank you for everything you do. to me
Any questions? Comments? Shadowbans? [email protected]
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