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Most giant platforms have an easy pitch for developers. Apple developers create apps for iOS and Mac and then sell them for cash. Google developers create Android apps and ChromeOS hardware and then sell them for cash. Amazon developers launch businesses on AWS or Amazon's storefront and then sell goods and services for cash.
Today, Facebook's annual F8 developer conference is opening in San Jose, and it's worth noting how complicated its developer talk has become. There was a time when things were relatively simple: developers like Zynga used to print money by selling virtual cows on Facebook's popular gaming platform.
But this part of Facebook has almost disappeared and, in the meantime, developers have become one of the biggest problems in society. Cambridge Analytica is basically a story of developers – a story that Facebook has, by necessity, responded by closing large parts of the platform to prevent such events from happening again.
So, what should we expect from the F8 this year? AT wired, Brian Barrett does a full-horizon tour, providing for announcements regarding privacy, encryption, AI, Oculus and Augmented Reality, Facebook encounters and Facebook Watch, among other topics .
A glance at this year's calendar shows that the story of Facebook's developers is now a story that focuses on growth marketing and customer service. Sessions planned after the introductory conference will focus on the use of Messenger as a professional tool, on creating better ads using the story format and on the value of virtual reality for l & # 39; business. "
(Incidentally, the latter domain is an area in which the story of Facebook developers looks like a normal software company: Oculus developers can sell software for money.)
Facebook could have big surprises in store. But considering what we know so far, it seems that 2019 is a year in which the company announces more progressive developments. This could be perfect – the products advertised at the F8 often fail to be shipped.
But what if you hope for a deeper discussion of the relationship between social networks and modern society? CEO Mark Zuckerberg published one of these on Friday: a discussion with historian Yuval Noah Harari, whose book sapiens has been a compulsory reading in Silicon Valley for a few years.
Harari is smart, and he does an admirable job of dealing with some key issues. 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?
Each of these questions could serve as a basis for a book length thesis. And it's easy to see how anyone working on these issues might be baffled by a question when it's put on the spot. Nevertheless, I was troubled by the weakness of Zuckerberg's answers. Confronted with the toughest questions he has encountered in his year of stimulating conversations, he refrains from simply believing in Facebook's power and democracy.
Here is a representative sample:
Harari: The Soviet model simply did not work well because of the difficulty of dealing with so much information quickly and with the technology of the 1950s. And that is one of the main reasons why the Soviet Union lost the cold war for the benefit of the United States. But with the new technology, it could suddenly become and it is not certain, but one of my fears is that new technology suddenly makes the central processing of information much more efficient than ever and distributed data processing . Because the more data you have in one place, the better your algorithms, and so on. And this kind of tilt balances totalitarianism and democracy in favor of totalitarianism. And I wonder what your opinion is on this question.
Zuckerberg: Well, I'm more optimistic about –
Harari: Yes, I guess so.
Zuckerberg: About democracy in this area.
Harari: Mm-hmm.
Mark Zuckerberg: I think the democratic process has to work in such a way that people start talking about these problems and even if it seems that the process is starting slowly, as far as people who care about data and the data are concerned, technological policy, because it is much more difficult to get everyone to worry about just a few decision makers. So, I think that in the history of democracy compared to more totalitarian systems, it always seems that totalitarian systems are more efficient and democracies are left behind, but you know, smart people, you know , people start by discussing these issues and taking care of them, and I think we're seeing that people now care a lot more about their own privacy with respect to the data, the technology industry.
"Smart people care about these issues and discuss them" is an argument for a positive future rooted in hope rather than empirical facts. I want to believe that the virtues of democracy are self-evident and are able to withstand rampant authoritarianism all over the world – but when a historian of Harari's stature begins to ask questions like these, I've what to worry about.
One of the reasons why Zuckerberg's arguments seem so lean here is that they usually lack a personal point of view. Zuckerberg would almost always prefer to describe the world as it is rather than to decide on how he thinks it should be. His case for Facebook suffers from it: optimism is an attitude, not a world view.
I'm glad Zuckerberg offered a Harari a great platform to ask questions about. And while I'm not expecting answers at a developer conference, I'd like to see Facebook at least recognize the issues. In recent years, F8 has described with joy the world that was meeting. In 2019, this is more like a world at stake.
Democracy
As the shooting in the synagogue unfolded, the extremists gathered on the Facebook page linked to the shooter
Another shot of someone who has apparently been radicalized online has taken place near San Diego this weekend. Ben Collins is watching the Facebook connection. (Separately, here is a good thread from Alex Stamos who examines the similarities and differences between the fight against the Islamic State and white nationalist terrorism on social networks.)
A link to the Facebook page had been posted before the shot on the far right 8chan message board by a user claiming to be John T. Earnest, the white supremacist who was charged in the synagogue attack Chabad of Poway. The page promised a direct attack and an "open letter" filled with anti-Semitic tropes.
Many messages on the Facebook page celebrated the mbad launchers, and the first messages made it possible to guess how many people he would kill. A user posted an article containing an AR-15 rifle with the words "let's go". Another speaker asked for a video feed of the attack, saying that he "needs blood for Santa Muerte," the saint of death. Both accounts remain active.
New data will help better understand Facebook's influence on elections
Today, Facebook has announced its first round of grants for independent research on the effects of social networks on democracy. Makena Kelly guides them:
The projects will give more than 60 academics access to "protected Facebook data", to conduct research on a range of topics, including the impact of IRA lagging behind in the 2017 German elections and the spread of false information during the Chilean elections in the country. same year.
Facebook will provide researchers with data from the platform APIs for CrowdTangle, its ad library, and possibly an anonymized URL dataset. Researchers from around the world have competed for grants, even though Facebook has not been involved in determining approved projects. The company is also committed to not interfere in future research.
Q & A on our preparations for the European elections
Facebook held a call with journalists Friday to discuss preparations for the European elections; the transcription of the call is here.
FBI. Warns of Russia's interference in the 2020 race and strengthens counterintelligence operations
Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman report that working groups of intelligence agencies set up to protect the electoral integrity in the midterm elections have been made permanent:
"We are aware that our opponents will continue to adapt and improve their game," said Christopher A. Wray, F.B.I. The director, said Friday in a Washington speech, citing the presence of Russian intelligence officers in the United States and the Kremlin's antecedents in his nefarious influence operations.
"So we really think that 2018 is a sort of dress rehearsal for the grand spectacle of 2020," he said in his speech to the Council on Foreign Relations.
How Fox News Dominates Facebook in the Trump Era
David Uberti explains how Fox News has continued to generate more engagement than any other Facebook publisher, despite its tendency to focus on rewarding conversations with friends:
Fox News could also benefit from Facebook's efforts to bring order to its business. Shortly after the 2016 elections, as fears of misinformation reached a climax, Facebook began by turning his dials to filter the so-called false news and plots. In some cases, Facebook downgraded or banned hyperpartisan pages, many of them are smaller or more conspirators than the famous Hook truth site, Sandy Hook, InfoWars.
This clean-up effort could unintentionally spur Fox, said Robert Faris, who is studying digital communication as director of research at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. By narrowing the scope of a constellation of marginal sites essentially right, Facebook may have actually redirected the attention of some users on Fox News.
Facebook admits to having broadcast hundreds of Trump campaign ads breaking the rules of Facebook.
Judd Legum reports that the Trump campaign aired hundreds of commercials breaking his rules … including the phrase "Attention Ladies".
The campaign seems to rely on Melania to reinforce Trump's low support for women. Focusing on Texas, which some Democrats see as the next pivotal state, is also an interesting choice.
But these ads also explicitly violate Facebook's advertising guidelines because they include "forbidden content". Facebook's rules prohibit advertisements that refer to the "personal attributes" of the targeted people.
"Advertisements must not contain content that baderts or implies personal attributes," indicate Facebook's rules, including "direct or indirect badertions or implications regarding a person's gender identity." The phrase "Attention, ladies" at the beginning of each of these advertisements violates the instructions. .
Somewhere else
Facebook pursues Instagram bot vendors in New Zealand
Adi Robertson reports that Facebook is trying to prevent companies selling followers and other false promises
Facebook sued a New Zealand company that was selling fake junkies, shares and followers on Instagram, claiming that "we would act to protect the integrity of our platform." It is alleged that Social Media Series Limited – a company run by Arend Nollen, Leon Hedges and David Pasanen – have spent years mocking Facebook's requests to stop selling automated fiction via sites with names such as Likesocial. co and IGFamous.net. The lawsuit asks a US court to stop the company's behavior and award damages for manipulating the Instagram platform.
Facebook's Chris Cox was more than just the most powerful product CEO in the world.
Roger Parloff has a nice profile of Chris Cox, with the first interview since he left Facebook:
He goes away because of what he calls, with a mean joke, "artistic differences" with CEO Mark Zuckerberg, he says. "But I respect and care about Mark so much," he says, "that I would never really go into more detail.
According to three people well-versed in his thinking, he disagreed with Zuckerberg on his decision to integrate the "application family" of Facebook (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp), as well as with the Zuckerberg's most surprising and spectacular pivot, announced on March 6, create more end-to-end encrypted spaces on the platform for individual and small-group communications.
Apple's attack on apps that fight against iPhone addiction
Apple has started banning screen management apps after introducing its own tools, reports Jack Nicas. (Apple responded that apps did not use mobile device management features for professional use only.)
Over the last year, Apple has removed or restricted at least 11 of the 17 most-frequently-downloaded parental control and screen time apps, according to an badysis by The New York Times and Sensor Tower, a company specializing in the application data. Apple has also cracked down on a number of lesser known apps.
In some cases, Apple has forced companies to remove features that allow parents to control their kids' devices, or block children's access to certain apps and content that is only available to adults. In other cases, he simply extracted the apps from his App Store.
Google Workers tell "systemic" retaliation stories – Bloomberg
Mark Bergen and Josh Eidelson report that Google may be cracking down on internal dissidents:
Hundreds of Google staffers met on Friday and discussed what activists see as a frequent consequence of corporate criticism: retaliation. Two leaders of recent corporate protests said they have been mistreated by managers and have collected similar testimony from other workers at the world's largest Internet company.
The retaliation claims are the latest in a series of internal upheavals on topics ranging from the use of artificial intelligence for military purposes to the fault of a senior executive and to the rights contractors.
PewDiePie calls for the end of the same 'Subscribe to PewDiePie' after the filming of New Zealand
A few weeks later, YouTube's biggest individual creator said that terrorists kept telling people to subscribe to his channel:
Kjellberg is asking his subscribers to completely stop the meme and remedy the unpleasant consequences of the attack in New Zealand.
"To badociate my name with something so vile, has affected me more than what I've left showing," says Kjellberg in the video. "I just did not want to answer it right now and I did not want to pay more attention to the terrorist. I did not want to talk about it because I did not think it had anything to do with me. To put it plainly, I did not want to hate winning.
"But it's clear to me now that the" Subscribe to PewDiePie "movement should have ended at that time."
Chase Bank removes tweet from "Monday Motivation" after provoking social media outrage
Chase Bank broke the cardinal rule of Twitter (never tweet) and had his bad broken thereafter. Elizabeth Warren's dunk was my favorite. Michael Cappetta reports:
Chase Bank's efforts to provide some "Monday Motivation" after a tweet urging people to be financially responsible have been widely criticized as "a poor shame".
Chase, which has 365,000 subscribers on Twitter, quickly removed the message.
Facebook almost missed the mobile revolution. He can not afford to miss the next big thing.
Kurt Wagner's story about Facebook's pivot to mobile includes this interesting note about the Oxygen project, the company's effort to ensure that its application could be distributed in the event that Apple or Google attempted to block it. (PS, this is Kurt's first day at Bloomberg Congratulations Kurt!)
According to four sources close to the project, Oxygen wants to be a defense against a bigger long-term problem that Google has created for Facebook: as the owner of the Android operating system – and therefore the Google Play store, where billions of people the world can download Facebook products – Google has a virtual throttle on the Facebook distribution. Oxygen is the "safety glbad in case of an emergency" that Facebook has put in place in case Google decides to suck up all the oxygen in the room.
The plan was created around 2013, according to some sources, at a time when Facebook was still moving to mobile and worried about the influence of Google. According to our former employees, it is unclear how much Oxygen is needed today, but the plan included allowing users to access the Facebook app on Android phones outside the Google Play Store. This includes strategies such as side loading, which would allow people to download an Android application from a mobile web browser instead of the Play Store, for example.
The dead could be more numerous than those living on Facebook 50 years from now
My favorite story of the day for the goths of social media. Valar morghulis all of you!
According to their forecasts, in 2018, the number of Facebook users who died on the social media platform would reach at least 1.4 billion, or even 4.9 billion by the end of the century.
In the most extreme scenario, in which Facebook never wins new users, the death toll is higher than that of the living in 50 years.
launches
Mark Zuckerberg unveils an invention that he created to help his wife Priscilla Chan sleep better: "Being a mother is difficult."
Mark Zuckerberg has built a nice box to help his wife sleep better and he posted about it on Instagram:
Zuckerberg, who shares two daughters, Maxima, on August 3 and 1, with Chan, said the dilemma had led her to create a small wooden box placed at the top of Priscilla's nightstand and emitting a feeble light between 6 and 7 o'clock in the morning.
The father of two children noted that the light was "sufficiently visible so that, if she saw it, she knew that the time was right for one of us to go out to pick up the children, but weak enough so that the light does not wake her up if she sleeps again. . "
Take
Mbad shooting has become a nausea
Charlie Warzel is alarmed by the similarities between the online messages of suspects during shootings in a California synagogue and a mosque in New Zealand:
The Poway attack seems to be another horrible entry into a line of hate crimes perpetrated for a captive audience of digital viewers. Even worse, these online communities seem to be encouraging the darkest impulses of their worst users. As with the Christchurch mbadacre, the filming of Poway is not only designed for the Internet, but also standardized to excess. The digital footprints and manifestos of these white nationalist terrorists follow a familiar pattern – a pattern that every shooter fills with his own hideous details. In fact, it seems that deadly hate crimes in the real world have become a sort of electronic bulletin board. And like all memes online, the cycle of creation seems to accelerate, refine and, horribly, multiply. Online, it looks like a game, but its effects turn into real world and spread violence.
Facebook's advertising archive API is inadequate
According to Mozilla researchers, Facebook's archiving API is not enough to allow researchers to understand what's happening on the platform:
The fact is that the API does not provide the necessary data. And it is designed to hinder the important work of researchers, who inform the public and decision-makers of the nature and consequences of misinformation.
Last month, Mozilla and more than sixty researchers released five guidelines that we hoped to see adhered to by the Facebook API. The Facebook API does not meet three of these five guidelines.
TED interview with Jack Dorsey and the end of an era
Anna Wiener comments on Dorsey's appearance at TED:
As Dorsey went from no answer to no answer, it was hard not to wonder if, despite his appearance of media calm, he was not above his head. Since the election of 2016, it has become increasingly clear that allowing young technologists, mostly men, to form exclusive, largely unregulated, international networks could have been a large-scale miscalculation and considerable challenges.
The fact that Dorsey now expects to find a solution to unprecedented and unforeseen problems, on a platform designed thirteen years ago for narrow and relatively innocent use cases, seems at best gloomy comic – an example of refusal to learn from our mistakes. "He is dealing with a scale of problem that is not much precedent in the history of humanity," wrote one of my programmer friends. "It's actually a little scary that it seems to be so little studied. I think "conversational health" is a dodge. Twitter and Jack want to avoid taking a stand on who is hurting. But they do not have that luxury at this point because Twitter is such a megaphone. Change will have to occur at the systemic level, as Dorsey notes. The extent to which this is possible, when the systems work not only as expected, but are rewarded, depends on the willingness of a public company to bet on its own future.
The video chat feature of the Facebook portal is incredibly fun, despite privacy concerns
Katie Notopoulos loves her new Facebook portal so much and regrets that the company's bad reputation for privacy prevents most people from trying it out:
Remember when the Internet was fun? Remember when the idea of a social network – even Facebook – was fun and great? Want to look at photos of your friends online? This bading rule. It's amazing to remember that at one point Facebook was a source of joy.
I am sorry that Facebook has ruined a good thing by bading so much with escapades of constant privacy. I'm furious that it's no longer fun, instead of spending time with friends, it's literally destabilizing democracy and allowing genocide. I am sorry that Facebook suffers from diarrhea so often that all reasonable people hate and be so wary of society that a sensible person would NEVER buy a video chat machine on Facebook, as amazing and good as it is. I am sorry that Twitter has chosen a platform that is the perfect joke boat and that it becomes a place where people do not feel safe. I'm angry Tumblr was left for dead, I'm angry on Flickr, I'm sorry that the promise of an Internet that seemed bursting with possibilities has proved overflowing with horrors. I'm sorry that a million bad little things and bad turns have eroded our trust in the Internet, and now the "Internet" is a shortcut to "a bad place". I am especially pissed off by the constant stream of videos mistakes ruin my ability to have a good time online.
And finally …
Norway discovers a "Russian spy whale" off the Arctic coast
We often write about Russia in the context of its interference in foreign affairs. His last salvo in this effort is apparently a giant whale-spy and I can not imagine ending today's newsletter otherwise:
A Beluga whale discovered off the Norwegian coast wearing a special Russian harness would probably have been trained by the Russian navy, said a Norwegian expert.
Professor Audun Rikardsen, a marine biologist, said the harness had a GoPro camera holder and a tag bringing it back to St. Petersburg. A Norwegian fisherman managed to remove it from the whale.
If Pixar wants to do something that is not a bad result of any of his existing franchises … I think the beluga spy Russian might have legs.
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Send me tips, comments, questions and your predictions F8: [email protected].
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