keyword: Facebook

facebook-is-removing-any-posts-celebrating-the-atlanta-attack-or-the-suspected-shooter

Facebook is removing any posts celebrating the Atlanta attack or the suspected shooter

Facebook says it will remove any posts that celebrate the recent shooting in Atlanta or support the suspected shooter. Eight people were killed in the attack. Seven of the victims of the shooting were women and six were of Asian descent.

The social network has designated the shooting to be a “violating event,” a classification that it’s previously used for the US Capitol riots in January this year and the killing of two people during Black Lives Matter protests in Kenosha in August 2020.

This classification is part of Facebook’s expanded policies on Dangerous Individuals and Organizations. The social network noted last August that it wanted to address movements “that, while not directly organizing violence, have celebrated violent acts.” That means removing content related to movements that “have demonstrated significant risks to public safety but do not meet the rigorous criteria to be designated as a dangerous organization and banned from having any presence on our platform.”

As is common with Facebook moderation, it’s not clear exactly what criteria the company is applying. A Facebook spokesperson told The Verge it would remove content that praises, supports, or represents the shooting or the suspect, but did not offer further details.

Facebook also said that it had found and removed an Instagram account it believes was linked to the alleged shooter, but noted that this account had been inactive for some time. The company has also confirmed that a widely-circulated image, purporting to be a Facebook post from the shooter, is a fake.

The social network said it would temporarily stop new accounts being registered on Facebook and Instagram using the same name as the suspected shooter, presumably to limit the creation of new hoaxes or misinformation. Facebook says it’s working with law enforcement to help their investigations into the shooting.

why-facebook-is-getting-in-the-newsletter-game

Why Facebook is getting in the newsletter game

Today let’s talk about platforms’ growing interest in building newsletter tools — and whether Facebook, against all conventional wisdom, might have an opportunity there.

I.

Newsletters made headlines today after Facebook announced a plan laying out some of its intentions in the space. In a blog post entitled “Supporting independent writers,” the company explained its point of view and sketched out the products it is now building. Campbell Brown, the company’s vice president for global news partnerships, and Anthea Watson Strong, a product manager for news, laid it out:

  • A free, self-publishing tool with robust styling options to create individual websites and an email newsletter
  • An integration with Facebook Pages to enable publishing across various multimedia formats including photos, live videos, and stories
  • The ability to create Facebook groups and nurture a community of readers

In addition, Facebook plans to offer features to help writers find audiences and sell subscriptions, as well as analytics tools and an accelerator program “to help creators come together and learn best practices.”

Before I go any further, let me acknowledge my conflicts here. As noted in my ethics statement, I receive a health care subsidy and legal support from Substack, the company with which Facebook is most prominently competing here. At the same time, it’s in my interest to see lots of newsletter services thriving. As in most things, the more big companies that are competing for writers, the better off most writers will be.

That said, I still find Facebook’s move into newsletters a bit surreal, if only because I started a newsletter in 2017 as an end run around Facebook. Or rather, as an end run around the idea of algorithmic feeds in general. After the better part of a decade chasing audiences from platform to platform, I set out to build a strong, direct connection to an audience that wants to hear from me, and that I can reliably reach no matter how many likes, upvotes, or retweets any individual post happens to get.

I won’t rehearse Facebook’s long history with the news business here, but suffice to say it has been rocky and mostly unsatisfying for just about everyone involved. At the same time, since the clear-eyed and opinionated-in-a-good-way Brown joined the company in 2017, Facebook’s news efforts have gradually bent toward realism. If the Facebook of old promised publishers the moon, the Facebook of today is more likely to promise as little as possible.

But as the platform’s dominance has grown, so has the threat of onerous regulation. As their digital advertising revenues have shrunk, publishers around the world have gotten better at convincing lawmakers that Facebook (and Google) owe them a cut of that revenue. (Australia is the most recent example of this, and it will not be the last.) Facebook has grudgingly paid up, to no real material benefit to society — as I like to say in this space roughly once per day, the United States lost 16,000 journalism jobs last year. Platform subsidies have not been enough to stop the bleeding in the past, and I have no reason to believe they will do so in the future.

Still, demands for those subsidies will only increase over the next year. For platforms, the natural response to those demands is to try to change the laws. Facebook will certainly continue to lobby around the world, but with newsletters it’s attempting a secondary strategy: it’s trying to change the publishers.

Facebook’s oft-repeated mission is to “give people a voice,” and yet for the first decade-plus of its existence, its media partnerships have largely been with big companies like CNN and News Corp. A more Facebook-like approach to media partnerships would be to start at the level of the individual and help people start building their businesses that way.

After a long period of inattention to creators, Facebook has been developing new ways for individuals to make money from their large followings on Instagram. It is doing the same in its Twitch rival, Facebook Gaming — which, incidentally, saw its watch time grow 79 percent last year. Viewed in this light, turning individual writers into successful tiny media companies feels like a logical next step.

Not to say that Facebook’s newsletter ambitions have been received particularly warmly. “Facebook Has Found a New Way to Ruin Media,” a headline in The New Republic announced today. Jacob Silverman’s piece doesn’t really say anything specific about how Facebook newsletters would “ruin the media”; instead, it recounts how difficult the media business is for the people who work in it, and it casts doubt on the idea that solo entrepreneurs and small groups of collaborators can do much to change that. (My humble retort is that, uh, maybe we could try it first?)

Certainly there are questions that any would-be media mogul should ask before throwing in with Facebook, and I asked the company a couple. For starters, will these “individual websites” be hosted on domains controlled by Facebook or the author? (If the author, yay; if Facebook, run.) Facebook told me it was “too soon to discuss those details.”

Second, will Facebook take a cut of subscription revenue? No answer there either, but a spokeswoman pointed out that Facebook currently takes no cut from revenue generated by subscriptions initiated through its Instant Articles product, and it has said it will not take a cut of any video creator revenue through at least August. If those are hints that Facebook will take a zero percent commission on newsletter subscription revenue — well, that will get the attention of at least a few creators who are currently giving up 5 or 10 percent.

The third question, and the most important one, I didn’t bother asking: how committed will Facebook be to these creators over the long term? Much of journalists’ enmity toward the company stems from the fact that what the platform amplifies changes all the time, making it shaky ground on which to build a business. But even assuming that Facebook’s enthusiasm for newsletters wanes over time, it might not be as catastrophic to the individual as the pivot to video was for big publishers. As long as creators can export their mailing lists and customer relationships when the time comes, they may find that the hassle was worth it.

II.

Those are all questions about what’s in it for creators, though. Perhaps just as interesting is what’s in it for Facebook.

On the surface, it may not seem obvious why the company would take an interest in helping people build businesses off the platform. But that view is rooted in the company’s old view of the News Feed, as a place that blended posts from your friends with links to articles from publishers on the open web.

Two years ago, though, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would gradually shift its product development to focus on private messaging and groups. And groups are the real opportunity for Facebook when it comes to newsletters.

The historian Heather Cox Richardson is the most successful individual authors on Substack, on track to earn more than $1 million in subscription revenue this year. Many of her subscribers come from her Facebook page, which has 1.4 million followers. For most of us on Substack, newsletters offer a way to monetize our Twitter followings. But if you’re a Facebook executive, you look at Richardson and wonder whether you couldn’t help more people monetize their Facebook pages.

If Facebook could do that, and create a thousand Richardsons around the world, it would prove that the company can support a different kind of publishing, giving it a shiny new talking point as it wrestles with lawmakers around the world. And it would help to realize the company’s visions for groups as the starting point for many, or even most, of the discussions that the average person has on the platform.

That looks like a win-win for Facebook and ought to give prospective participants in this new experiment at least some confidence that the company’s commitment is real. (It’s also notable to me that Facebook announced these tools months before they are publicly available — a sign that the company wants them to be on the mind of anyone considering making a move in the short term, particularly those who have large Facebook followings and might otherwise consider Substack or the newly Twitter-owned Revue.)

Anyway, I don’t know if any of this will work for Facebook. But it seems clear to me why the company would want to try.

III.

Another reason why Facebook might have an opportunity is that Substack seems intent on giving them one.

Some writers on the platform have been unhappy since Substack published a blog post last week announcing its “Pros” program, in which it offers some writers big advances to lure them to the platform. The list of writers to whom advances have been offered is not public, and I believe it to be more diverse than the public conversation over the past week has made it out to be. But among the Pros who have been open about their involvement, most of them are white and male like me. (I was offered an advance last year but turned it down, though I accepted other benefits, as disclosed above. If Substack considers me part of the “Pro” program, I am not aware of it.)

The blog post characterized the decision to offer advances as “business decisions, not editorial ones,” which came across as wishful thinking. Meanwhile, some of the people who have taken advances have written various offensive things, both on and off Substack, and now some other writers are wondering whether remaining on the platform makes them complicit. (The logic is that their paid subscriptions are generating revenue that will then be used to fund further advances for people who attack journalists, or stoke fears about transgender people, and so on.)

Amid all this, Substack CEO Chris Best tweeted, without any other context, “Defund the thought police,” seeming to side with the platform’s most lucrative edgelords over its more centrist and liberal creators. I’ve since received a few inquiries from writers asking whether being associated with Substack will damage their reputations over the long term.

If I were Substack, I would take pains to demonstrate that the platform offers financial support to creators across the political spectrum and draws hard lines around targeted harassment and bigotry. I would hire a really good head of communications and give her the passwords to the founders’ Twitter accounts. I would lean all the way away from the culture war — and toward building products and services that generate more revenue, for more people, than anyone else does.

Because if Substack doesn’t, someone else will.

And it might just be Mark Zuckerberg.

This column was co-published with Platformer, a daily newsletter about Big Tech and democracy.

facebook-introduces-a-corporate-human-rights-policy-it-will-‘strive-to-respect’

Facebook introduces a corporate human rights policy it will ‘strive to respect’

Facebook is addressing the criticism it’s faced for its role in human rights abuses by putting its values on paper in a new “corporate human rights policy” collecting “the human rights standards [it] will strive to respect.” Under the policy, Facebook is committing to providing an annual report on its impact on human rights and a fund for human rights defenders.

The company plans on reporting its “most critical human rights issues, like risks to freedom of expression” to its board of directors. The fund for defenders is concentrated on offline support for activists and journalists, but Facebook’s director of human rights Miranda Sissons says it will continue to support digital security efforts like “thwarting unauthorized access” to activists’ accounts, as well.

While the policy is new, Facebook’s not making any changes to its current community standards, privacy policies, or code of conduct, according to Bloomberg. The “corporate human rights policy” is more of a framework for how it plans to handle issues in the future, and potentially, another way to hold the company accountable if it fails.

Many large, multinational corporations have some kind of human rights policy (here’s Coca-Cola’s), usually designed around guidelines set by the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). Facebook is just finally collecting all its disparate standards, policies, and guidelines in one place (or PDF), without really streamlining anything.

Facebook’s announcement comes at yet another interesting time for its social media platforms. The company has banned accounts from the military junta that led the coup in Myanmar, a more active approach than how it handled the previous outburst of genocidal violence against the nation’s Rohingya population in the past. At the same time, its Oversight Board, the independent body created to provide guidance on Facebook’s thorniest issues, has delivered its first rulings, including a decision on anti-Muslim hate speech.

tiktok-will-no-longer-let-people-opt-out-of-personalized-ads

TikTok will no longer let people opt out of personalized ads

TikTok will soon make personalized ads mandatory, meaning you’ll start getting ads in the app based on the kind of content you engage with, whether you want them or not.

TikTok’s notice about ad changes.
Image: TikTok

The app currently has a setting that allows users to choose whether they’ll be served ads based on their activity within the app. “Starting April 15,” reads a notice shown when opening the app, “your settings will change and the ads you’ll see may start to be based on what you do on TikTok.”

People will still be able to control whether TikTok personalizes ads based on data pulled from other apps and websites. The change in TikTok’s privacy settings reflects the way ads already operate on many social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Users can opt out of advertising that’s personalized based on tracking across different sites, but not the personalization based on activity within the sites themselves.

The change is likely related to Apple’s upcoming rollout of iOS 14, which will require developers to get users’ permission to track their data across apps for targeted advertising. Any apps that don’t request permission will risk suspension or removal from the App Store. Making personalized ads mandatory allows TikTok to target advertising to some extent as more people opt out of cross-app tracking.

facebook-says-it’ll-start-punishing-group-members-who-break-its-rules

Facebook says it’ll start punishing group members who break its rules

Facebook is trying to clean up its Groups experience and limit the reach of potentially problematic users and communities. The company announced multiple changes to groups today, including plans to put users who break rules on probation, further limit the reach of civic and political groups, and require more moderation in groups that have violated Facebook’s rules.

Group members who break Facebook’s rules will suffer various new consequences. Initially, people with repeat violations will be prevented from posting or commenting in any group for a certain period of time. A spokesperson tells The Verge this time could be either seven or 30 days, depending on the number of violations and the severity of them. They also won’t be able to invite other people to any groups or create new groups.

One of the biggest changes is around members who break rules. Groups that have numerous violations will soon come with a warning label, too. Whenever a user tries to join one of these groups, they’ll receive a disclaimer that the group has violated community standards, which might dissuade them from joining. Facebook will also limit invite notifications for these groups. For existing members, the company will reduce the distribution of the group’s content, meaning it’ll be shown lower in the News Feed. (It first piloted this functionality around the 2020 US presidential election, but it’s now making it a regular feature.)

Finally, these violating groups’ admins and moderators will have to temporarily approve all posts whenever the group has a substantial number of members who have violated policies or were part of other groups that were removed for breaking the rules. If these admins or moderators just approve everything, even content that breaks the rules, the entire group will be taken down.

As a broader update, Facebook started removing civic and political groups earlier this year, as well as newly created groups, from recommendations in the US. It’s now making that the standard worldwide.

Facebook has received much criticism for allowing extremist political groups, as well as groups that spread conspiracy theories or anti-vax rhetoric, to thrive on its platform. As one example, members of the group that plotted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer used Facebook groups to organize, according to an FBI affidavit. And in the past, even its attempts to limit the reach of political groups have failed, according to The Markup, which found that political recommendations still showed up for users. (A Facebook spokesperson says this error has now been corrected.)

The company continues to be in a game of whack-a-mole, where it attempts to squash the bad groups and members, only to see others sprout up. These new rules might dissuade some people from behaving badly or limit their time on the platform, but there’s always a chance that they just create a new account or skirt around the rules without breaking them.

apple-maps-now-shows-covid-19-vaccination-locations

Apple Maps now shows COVID-19 vaccination locations

Apple announced today that Apple Maps has been updated with vaccine locations from VaccineFinder, a site run by Boston Children’s Hospital that provides information on vaccine eligibility and availability. People can search for nearby vaccination sites in Apple Maps or ask Siri, “Where can I get a COVID vaccination?” Over 20,000 locations are now listed, with more to be added in the coming weeks.

Vaccination sites in Apple Maps
Image: Apple

Each vaccine site listing in Apple Maps includes the operating hours and contact information for the site, with a link to the provider’s website to find vaccine availability and make an appointment.

With the new feature, Apple joins a number of other tech companies offering more ways for people to check their eligibility, locate vaccination sites, and get vaccine appointments.

Facebook announced yesterday that it will be adding VaccineFinder information to its COVID Information Center, showing people when and where they can get vaccinated and providing links to make appointments. The COVID Information Center will also be expanding to Instagram, and the company is working on expanding government and health authority WhatsApp chatbots to help people register for vaccines.

Google is also offering more ways to find information about vaccination. The company announced today that people can use Business Messages in Google Maps and Google search to contact local pharmacies owned by Albertsons Companies — including Safeway, Jewel-Osco, Vons, Albertsons, Acme, Shaw’s, and Tom Thumb — with questions about vaccine eligibility, availability, and appointment booking.

The US federal government is set to launch its own vaccine-finding website by May 1st and has said that all adults in the US will be eligible for a vaccine at that time. So far, about 28 percent of adults in the US have received their first vaccine dose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

wikimedia-will-launch-a-paid-service-for-big-tech-companies

Wikimedia will launch a paid service for big tech companies

The Wikimedia Foundation is creating a new paid service for companies that draw on Wikipedia data. The foundation announced the news today via an article in Wired, and it’s planning to launch later in 2021. Wikimedia Enterprise, as it’s called, won’t change how current Wikipedia services work. Instead, it will offer new options for companies that use its content, a category including giants like Google and Facebook.

Wikimedia is still finalizing how Wikimedia Enterprise will operate. But broadly, it’s like a premium version of Wikipedia’s API — the tool that lets anybody scrape and re-host Wikipedia articles. Enterprise customers could get data delivered faster or formatted to meet their needs, for instance, or get new options for sorting and posting it. As Wikimedia Foundation senior director Lane Becker explains to Wired, companies may already be paying employees to clean up Wikipedia data, and Enterprise will do that kind of cleanup at the source. Or if they want, companies can keep using the existing API for free.

Many huge internet services are powered partly by Wikipedia. Google’s “knowledge boxes” incorporate information from the free encyclopedia, and so do voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. As web platforms attempt to fight misinformation, Wikipedia has also become a go-to fact-checking resource. But while some companies have offered donations in return for using Wikimedia’s free services, others have launched big Wikipedia-powered initiatives without even telling the foundation.

Wikimedia’s frequently asked questions page insists that Enterprise isn’t “forcing Big Tech to pay” for Wikipedia. But it could solve specific, well-known problems for those companies. One potential service would let companies display the most reliably community-vetted edits instead of the newest ones, preventing false or insulting vandalized articles from ending up on their own platforms.

In an essay, the Wikimedia Enterprise team acknowledges that it’s balancing commercial realities with a mission to provide free access to knowledge. “This is about setting up the movement to thrive for decades to come, to weather any storm, and to genuinely stand a chance at achieving the mission first conceived 20 years ago,” the essay says. “We’re going to need more resources, more partners, and more allies if we are going to achieve the goals implicit in our vision statement.” And starting later this year, that could include paid partnerships with the internet’s biggest companies.

instagram-will-no-longer-let-adults-message-teens-who-don’t-follow-them

Instagram will no longer let adults message teens who don’t follow them

Instagram is introducing new policies limiting interactions between teenagers and adults to make its platform safer for young users. The app has banned adults from direct messaging teenagers who don’t follow them and is introducing “safety prompts” that will be shown to teens when they DM adults who have been “exhibiting potentially suspicious behavior.”

Safety prompts will give teenage users the option to report or block adults who are messaging them. The prompts will remind young users not to feel pressured to respond to messages and to “be careful sharing photos, videos, or information with someone you don’t know.”

Notices will appear when Instagram’s moderation systems spot suspicious behavior from adult users. The company is not sharing detail on how these systems operate but says such suspicious behavior could include sending “a large amount of friend or message requests to people under 18.” The Facebook-owned Instagram says this feature will be available in some countries this month (it did not specify which) and available globally “soon.”

New safety prompts will appear when teens DM adults who have exhibited “suspicious behavior.”
Image: Instagram

Instagram also says it’s developing new “artificial intelligence and machine learning technology” to try and detect someone’s age when they sign up for an account. Officially, the app requires that users are aged 13 and above, but it’s easy to lie about one’s age. The company said it wants to do “more to stop this from happening” but did not go into any detail about how new machine learning systems might help with this problem.

New teenage users who sign up to Instagram will also now be encouraged to make their profile private. If they choose to create a public account anyway, Instagram will send them a notification later “highlighting the benefits of a private account and reminding them to check their settings.”

Teen users will be encouraged to make their account private when signing up to Instagram.
Image: Instagram

you-probably-don’t-need-the-msi-liberator-gaming-foot-pedal,-right?

You Probably Don’t Need the MSI Liberator Gaming Foot Pedal, Right?

(Image credit: MSI)

So this is a thing. MSI appears to be crowdfunding a product, the Liberator gaming pedal, with XFastest reporting that the peripheral is expected to debut on March 16. 

Pretty much everything about this needs to be seen to be believed. Take the most recent post on the product’s Facebook page. We’re sure it reads perfectly fine in the original Chinese, but the social network’s automatic translation is just breathtaking:

(Image credit: MSI)

So what is this “unprecedented electrical pedal” exactly? Well, it looks like the kind of pedal racing enthusiasts have used for years, but with far more RGB lighting. It also offers numerous inputs, activated by pressing different parts of its surface.

An earlier Facebook post from the MSI Gaming account said Liberator features an Omron shaft, and the product’s Typeform page revealed that it can be used to input keyboard shortcuts. (A GIF showing Liberator in action is also worth checking out.)

Other details about the product are sparse. It appears to rely on a braided detachable cable, which is a plus for pretty much any peripheral, and it can also be adjusted to accommodate people who know that foot size truly does matter.

Jokes aside for a moment: Liberator could obviously prove useful to people with accessibility concerns, for example, or anyone who wants a discreet way to control their PC. We aren’t mocking the product itself; we’re delighting in the fact that it exists.

XFastest reported that crowdfunders receive an “early bird” discount that brings Liberator’s cost down to approximately $430 (2,790 yuan) and that it will cost about $600 (3,900 yuan) after the official debut on March 16. A ship date was not revealed.