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Today, three shorter articles to take us on weekends.
AFacebook has hired a new global policy and communications officer to replace Elliot Schrage. Nick Clegg, the former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Clegg is a former trade negotiator with the European Commission, where he played a role in cracking down on anti-competitive behavior by companies in the tech sector, including Google, which has been fined $ 5 billion. for problems involving Android. While Facebook is currently the focus of European regulators on a wide range of topics, Clegg brings a perspective and influence that was previously lacking in society.
The British have a proud tradition of hating their elected officials, and they enthusiastically exchanged zingers on Clegg on Friday morning, many of which are only fun if you have a solid understanding of British politics. (It is useful to know that Clegg has lost the support of his party, the Liberal Democrats, and has given up his commitment to oppose increasing tuition fees for students. guardian has a useful mini-profile embedded in his editorial about taking the new job.)
Clegg is a former journalist, a centrist and unlike Schrage, has a big Twitter next. Is it what Facebook needs for the role? A global policy and communications officer must be very good at two things: knowing people and arguing. By this measure, Clegg would seem to match the bill. In any case, he deserves a chance. Here's what he said in the guardian:
I remain an obstinate optimist about the potential for technological innovation of the company. It can transform the way we work, play and create relationships. It can help protect our environment and keep our streets safe. This will fundamentally change the way we teach our children in school and at home. It transforms health care and transportation. If the technology sector can work wisely with governments, regulators, parliaments and civil society around the world, I think we can increase the benefits of technology while reducing the often unintended inconvenience.
Of course, managing these unwanted inconveniences will probably be most of Clegg's time on Facebook. He will have some work to do.
Two, the new WhatsApp manager made his first public comments on an issue of importance. Chris Daniels, who took over the messaging app at the big organizational chart reorganization of Facebook in May, posted on the company's blog Thursday to explain how Facebook is trying to prevent misuse of WhatsApp in Brazil. (This was also the subject of my column yesterday, Daniels' note was not posted by the time press).
Anyone who hopes to better understand Daniels' product philosophy will be disappointed by his unattractive and particularly defensive blog post, which includes the full set of Facebook discussion points from October 2018: misinformation did not begin with us; most people do not use WhatsApp to spread misinformation; a global platform will inevitably welcome the good and the bad. It also adopts the unfortunate trend of Facebook to speak as a percentage of global issues.
Today, more than 90% of the messages sent on WhatsApp in Brazil are individual, face-to-face conversations. The majority of groups only comprises about six people – a conversation so private and personal that it would suit your living room.
(You can prevent more than 90% of asteroids from crashing onto your planet while maintaining a major problem.)
Nowhere in his message does Daniels recognize some of the unique ways in which its popular application, with its powerful combination of encryption and viral sharing mechanisms, has created new and extremely challenging issues for Brazil. (An anti-democratic skeptic of the far right on climate change is about to win, after his supporters have funded a campaign of false information about WhatsApp.) Instead, Daniels lists six measures taken by the company to reduce its damage, before saying we will all take "to solve the problem.
In the meantime, it is not clear that Daniels even understands the problem. is. He appears as a colonial governor telling an anxious public that the Crown is addressing their concerns. very seriously. Brazil deserves better. Just like WhatsApp.
Threethe media had been arguing all week to find out if Facebook had deliberately misled them, pushing publishers to fire their editors into a ultimately fruitless "video pivot" that was impoverishing journalists and journalism. The spark was a lawsuit that I mentioned here earlier in the week, in which advertisers said that a metric error – which had been recognized by Facebook in 2016 – was well known within the company for a year.
The problem is how Facebook reported video views. Here is Suzanna Vranica with a concise explanation:
For two years, Facebook had only counted video views of more than three seconds in the calculation of its metric "average video viewing time." Video views of less than three seconds were not taken into account, which inflated the average duration of a view.
Facebook has replaced the metric with "average reading time," which reflects video views of all lengths.
The metric may have been overestimated. But as the pivot of a theory that publishers have turned video under false pretense, it's rather fragile. As Laura Hazard Owen points out, the way Facebook has talked Mark Zuckerberg himself predicts that video will soon become the dominant form of communication on the platform.
Much of the conversation concluded that people did not want to watch news videos. This conversation tends to omit the existence of YouTube, on which people watch a lot of news videos. (Can I recommend the Vox channel, with 1.1 billion views and a successful show on Netflix, or Edge Science, which has reached more than half a million subscribers in less than a year.)
In 2016, traditional publishers still struggled to crack YouTube. But they were ready to take a flyer on Facebook because more than a billion people were watching it every day and Facebook had fully pushed the buttons on the video. Importantly, some publishers seemed to succeed with a video strategy:
In September, Tasty's Facebook main page was the third-largest video account on Facebook with nearly 1.7 billion views, according to Tubular Labs. The number of viewers per video is also staggering: over the last three months, Tasty videos on Facebook have been viewed on average with 22.8 million views in the first 30 days. This is better than BuzzFeed's main Facebook page and the separate BuzzFeed Food account, which averaged 4.7 million views and 1.1 million views per video over the same period.
Overall, Tasty now accounts for 37% of BuzzFeed video views, according to Tubular. This is all the more remarkable as BuzzFeed was launched in July 2015.
There were three problems with the Facebook video. First, Facebook has never found an effective way for publishers to make money with them. Publishers have assumed that a kind of advertising before, mid-term or post-roll would offer a return on investment, but this has never been the case. Second, Facebook had a product problem. The news feed is designed for fast scrolling and almost unreflected; the video is designed for intentional viewing. A handful of formats, including those from Tasty, have flourished in the news. But most of them are dead – that is why Facebook is now transferring the video to its Watch tab, and even then nothing has really exploded.
Finally, in the aftermath of the 2016 elections, Facebook has reduced the amount of publisher content in the feed, in the hope that seeing more friends and family members would discourage us from sharing viral memes and to destroy democracy. The video will continue to play a major role in Facebook's future, but it will probably be more similar to the video you see in Instagram stories and less so to those square videos with text captions posted on B-roll.
There is a valid review of Facebook somewhere. But much of the anger seems to me misplaced. The journalists would have benefited if Facebook had done better to predict the future. But publishers could also have better predicted the future.
Democracy
Ministry of justice accuses Russians of interfering in mid-term elections
This is our first tangible proof that Russia is actively involved in the mid-term elections we are holding here in the United States. Adam Goldman reports:
Russians working for a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin embarked on an elaborate campaign of "information warfare" to interfere in mid-term elections, prosecutors said Friday. federal by unveiling a criminal complaint against one of them.
The woman, Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, 44, of St. Petersburg, was involved in an effort "to sow distrust of candidates for US political positions and political system," the prosecutor said.
McCain is a "geezer" and Ryan is an "absolute person": the manual of Russia to sound American in Facebook propaganda
Craig Timberg, Tony Romm and Brian Fung examine the propaganda of Russia's mid-term Russian election campaign, which follows from the unsealed criminal complaint presented above.
The late Senator John McCain was "an old asshole". The Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, is "an absolute and absolute." And the investigation into a possible collusion between President Trump's campaign and Russia is a "witch hunt" led by "a puppet. "
Name the subject, and Russian disinformation agents had a manual on how to pretend to be politically active Americans while they secretly sought to manipulate US voters online – right and left – with incendiary phrases, flippant reproaches and appeals to existing political prejudices. And the same tactics perfected in the 2016 presidential election have been postponed in the run-up to the mid-term vote of the 2018 Congress.
Disinformation spreads on WhatsApp before the Brazilian election
Mike Isaac and Kevin Roose examine the state of misinformation in Brazil before the elections:
"People have entered this election with a sense of hyperpolarization," said Roberta Braga, associate director of the Adrienne Latin America Center Adrienne Arsht of the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank on foreign policy. "There is a lot of mistrust of politics and politicians and political institutions in general."
"People have entered this election with a sense of hyperpolarization," said Roberta Braga, associate director of the Adrienne Latin America Center Adrienne Arsht of the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank on foreign policy. "There is a lot of mistrust of politics and politicians and political institutions in general."
"Chris Corrupt" and "Tammy Two Face": the candidates are trying their best trump impressions
Trumpian appointments are now a feature of many regional and local elections, reports Kevin Roose.
New research shows Facebook is making good progress against false news
Tessa Lyons quotes a new study showing that the volume of fake news shared on Facebook has decreased by more than 50%:
Alcott, Gentzkow and Yu first published a study on misinformation on Facebook and Twitter (PDF). The researchers began by compiling a list of 570 sites identified as sources of false information in previous studies and online listings. They then measured the volume of Facebook engagements (sharing, comments and feedback) and Twitter sharing for all the news from these 570 sites published between January 2015 and July 2018. The researchers found that on Facebook, the interactions with these fake news sites had declined by more than half after the 2016 elections, suggesting that "Facebook's efforts after the 2016 elections to limit the spread of misinformation could have had a significant impact."
Last week, a University of Michigan misinformation study (PDF) came to similar conclusions about the effectiveness of our work. The Michigan team has compiled a list of sites generally sharing incorrect information by reviewing the judgments of two external organizations, Media Bias / Fact Check and Open Sources.
Exclusive: Twitter lowers the bot network that pushed pro-Saudi arguments about the missing journalist
Twitter on Thursday suspended a network of alleged Twitter bugs that had prompted Saudi Arabia to speak on the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi last week.
Khashoggi's misinformation sheds light on growing number of fake fact checkers
A few days after the alleged murder of Jamal Khashoggi, misinformation is omnipresent, report Daniel Funke and Alexios Mantzarlis:
The Saudi media reported a conspiracy theory that Khashoggi's fiancée is false in an apparent effort to discredit the Turkish and US intelligence services. Reuters fell for a fake report on the dismissal of a Saudi consul general. Some accounts promote an absurd video of a guy wearing a colander on his head. And the Saudi government itself has threatened anyone who broadcasts "fake news" online with heavy jail sentences and heavy fines.
Somewhere else
Facebook's stormy debate on "political diversity"
Issie Lapowsky speaks with Brian Amerige, a recent Facebook engineer, who accused the company of "intolerant political monocultures of divergent views". But he fears becoming a spokesman for Republicans who complain of "bias".
"I am convinced that they take these issues very seriously, and they have treated me with great respect," Amerige said. "They are pretty intimately involved."
Last week, Amerige left Facebook after disagreements over the company's platform-wide hate speech policy, which it describes as "dangerous and impractical" for a platform that promotes transparency. But he had spent the previous two months working closely with Facebook's human resources team on ways to promote what he calls "political diversity." One initiative that Amerige talked about was an updated employee speech policy that would distinguish between attacking people's ideas (which would be allowed) and attacking their character (which would be banned). He does not know if Facebook plans to implement the ideas.
Google engineer refuses to code censored product for China
Speaking of employees who have left, PRI's The World talks with former Googler Vijay Boyapati, who resigned in 2007 as a result of the company's decision to enter the Chinese market.
When I was there, I thought it was a moral injury for two reasons: the first was that there was no internal debate about it about Google News – the product on which I had worked. And so I wanted to talk about it because I thought it was not the right move for Google. If a reporter has the courage to write about a controversial topic, Google has been asked to censor it. And as a person who has worked on the product, you will know that a person's voice has been silenced by something you have built. And that puts me deeply uncomfortable.
The hunt for false news
Facebook is launching a new series of blog posts in which they describe how they found false information and determined that they were fake. In the first episode, find out if a Saudi man really spits in a woman's face.
I've cracked for Facebook's fake news. This is why millions of you have done it too.
Speaking of fake news, Geoffrey Fowler is caught by a video that showed a commercial plane pretending to roll over during the landing:
The photorealism of the Tsirbas clip played a big role in spreading the false story. This is typical: the wrong information containing manipulated photos and videos are among the most likely to become viral, Lyons told Facebook. Sometimes, as in this case, it uses elements taken from real reports to give the impression that it seems just credible enough. "Really crazy things tend to be less distributed than things that are in the right place where they could be credible," Lyons said.
Even after decades of Photoshop and CG movies, most of us still can not challenge the authenticity of the images – or distinguish the real from the fake. This includes myself: during an online test of the Autodesk software manufacturer called Fake or Foto, I correctly identified the authenticity of only 22% of their images. (You can test yourself here.)
launches
YouTube introduces mini-player for desktop browsers
YouTube has finally deployed mini-drives for browser users. The mobile application has been using it for some time. This will allow users to continue watching a video while searching for something new at the same time.
YouTube refines its video to include an easy channel subscription button
Great day for small YouTube updates! In addition to the one above, and from this one, which is exactly what is written on tin, you can also buy concert tickets on Eventbrite from music video pages.
Take
David Simon speaks to Godwin's creator of law about his suspensions on Twitter.
The creator of Thread Speak to the creator of the law that, as online preservation continues, there is a good chance that it will eventually include a comparison with Hitler. everything he wants:
The last thing that Twitter should do is control the decorum, or try to lower the hostility of the platform. Why? Because the appropriate response to racism, anti-Semitism, defamation and organized disinformation campaigns is not to reason politely with such long lines of sharing facts. This only gives a fundamental credibility to the worst type of speech – which, unfortunately, seems to be the paradigm that Twitter currently prefers. It is a paradigm that proposes two fundamental choices: Ignore the deplorati, which allows dishonesty or cruelty to make itself known to the public and thereby gain the credibility of credibility. Or worse, engage in serious discussion with all kinds of outlaws, which also gives Trash the veneer of credibility.
In 1935, the answer to Streicher or Goebbels citing Protocols of the elders of Sion and claim that Jews drink the blood of Christian baptized babies should not begin to claim that "no, Jews do not drink Christian baby blood" and provide a long explanation of Protocols as false tsarist in chapter and verse. The correct answer is to call Julius Streicher a piece of submaronic shit, marking it as such for the rest of the sensible, and to move on to a more meaningful exchange of ideas. So it's with Twitter.
And finally …
COMO III: Moderation of Content and Future of Online Speech
I will be in New York Thursday to speak at this conference on moderation of content on major platforms. If you see me, please say hello!
Talk to me
Send me tips, questions, comments and fun ideas about what I should do in New York next week: [email protected].
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