Month: September 2016

One of the most reliable things about the current election campaign is that on any given day, Republican candidate Donald Trump is almost certain to say something on Twitter that will set off alarm bells or cause some kind of controversy. And Friday morning was no exception to that rule.

Despite the fact that Trump was widely viewed as having lost the recent debate with Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, and that the election itself is just over a month away, the candidate chose to tweet not about the political issues in the campaign but about his dislike of former Miss Universe contestant Alicia Machado.

After the debate, he talked at length on Fox News about how Machado allegedly gained 60 pounds, and how he tried to support her after the pageant wanted to fire her.

Then early Friday morning, Trump chose for some unknown reason to unleash a series of tweets about her allegedly unsavory past, combined with a conspiracy theory about her relationship with Clinton. He called Machado “my worst Miss Universe,” and said Clinton was duped into referring to her in the debate.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Facebook routinely denies that it is a media entity, or that it should be expected to behave like one, and yet the giant social network continues to behave in ways that have a significant and tangible impact on the news that its users see about the world, and the practice of journalism in general.

In the latest example of this behavior, Facebook recently suspended the accounts of several Palestinian journalists without providing any warning or any explanation.

According to Al Jazeera, four editors from the Shehab News Agency — which has more than 6.3 million likes on Facebook — and three executives from the equally popular Quds News Network reported that they were suddenly unable to access their personal accounts.

After the journalists complained to Facebook, their accounts were reinstated, and the company apologized for what it said was a mistake. “Our team processes millions of reports each week, and we sometimes get things wrong,” a spokesman said, suggesting that the accounts were flagged by users.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

The Internet’s fact-checking engines were working overtime during Monday night’s presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Even Clinton’s home page turned into a fact-checking site to debunk the Republican candidate’s statements. But will it matter to his fan base?

As expected, given his performance so far, the Republican candidate repeatedly stretched the truth, denied making certain statements despite ample evidence to the contrary, and twisted the facts until they broke.

According to one estimate, Trump made more than 34 comments that were either lies or mis-statements of fact during the debate. Clinton, by comparison, was tagged with four. According to much of the post-debate analysis, Trump also came off looking like a bully.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

It says a lot about the state of the U.S. election campaign that one of the most hotly debated topics is whether a debate moderator should call out obvious lies by either Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton when they face each other Monday night.

To someone who hasn’t been following the circus sideshow/train wreck that is the Election 2016 campaign, this might seem like a bizarre thing to get hung up on.

After all, isn’t checking facts what journalists are supposed to do—even cable TV journalists? Isn’t that why we have journalists as debate moderators in the first place? As with many things involving Trump, it isn’t quite that simple.

Lester Holt, the NBC news anchor who is moderating the first debate Monday night, hasn’t said whether he plans to call out any untruths, but according to Politico, none of the major networks have committed to doing real-time fact checking of the debates.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

The list of potential Twitter acquirers continues to grow. In addition to recent reports that Salesforce and Google are interested in possibly buying the real-time news service, Disney is now said to be considering an acquisition bid as well.

According to a report from Bloomberg News, anonymous sources familiar with the situation said that the giant news and entertainment conglomerate is “working with a financial adviser to evaluate a possible bid for Twitter.”

In other words, Disney and an investment firm are going over Twitter’s financial data and looking at the potential benefits of combining the two companies, but that process could fall apart or be shelved at any point.

Salesforce and Google are said to be in a similar situation, according to a number of recent reports, which said Twitter is working with Goldman Sachs to consider potential takeover offers for the company.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

According to a new Gallup poll, trust in mass media in the United States is lower than it has ever been since the organization started asking that question in 1972. To put that in some kind of context, Richard Nixon was president in 1972 and the U.S. was bombing Vietnam.

Why would trust in the media be so low? There are a number of reasons, but one of the most obvious ones is that today’s media landscape looks nothing like what U.S. news consumers took for granted in 1972, or 1982 or 1992, or even 2002.

In many ways, the rise of the Internet and the social web has made things a lot better when it comes to being informed about the world, but in other ways–as with so many other things the Internet touches–it has made them much worse. And our trusted relationship with media (to the extent that we ever had one) has taken the brunt of the damage.

Instead of a handful of newspapers, TV channels and trusted journalists, we now have what amounts to the biblical Tower of Babel: Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of news sources, many of which are simply repeating whatever they think might get readers or viewers to click.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Facebook is more than just a site where people share photos of their children or pets. It has become a crucial way in which hundreds of millions of people get information about the world around them. And the tension between those two things is becoming difficult to ignore.

In the latest controversy involving the giant social network’s news judgement, Facebook removed an iconic photo from the Vietnam War: A picture of a young Kim Phuc running naked down a road after her village was hit by napalm.

When a Norwegian newspaper editor—who posted the photo as part of a series on war photography—tried to re-post it, along with a response from Phuc herself, his account was suspended.

The editor-in-chief of the newspaper, Espen Egil Hansen, then wrote an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg criticizing him for doing so, entitled “Dear Mark. I am writing this to inform you that I shall not comply with your requirement to remove this picture.”

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

If there’s one thing that has been driving Twitter’s share price over the past year or so, it’s the repeated rumors that the company is going to be acquired. With every new rumor or speculation, the share price sees a little spike, as weary investors hope for the best.

But is an acquisition likely? And if so, who might buy it, and for how much? Those are the multibillion-dollar questions that crop up every time there is a new report about a bid.

According to a report at Recode, the company is going to consider the possibility of a sale at a board meeting later this week—although as many observers pointed out, such things are often discussed at meetings even when there is no offer on the table. Nevertheless, that report also pushed the stock up.

Unfortunately for long-time Twitter investors, the ones who have been stuck with it ever since it hit $70 in the weeks following its IPO, these rumors and the spikes they create ironically make the problem worse.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

A decade is a long time even in the real world, and on the Internet it is more like a century, especially in the life of a startup. But that’s how long it has been since Facebook launched the real-time news feed that has become the core of the service for more than 1.5 billion people.

It’s hard to even imagine the social network now without this essential feature, as early Facebook staffer Andrew “Boz” Bosworth recalled during a discussion with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and three other members of the original news-feed team on Tuesday (hosted via Facebook’s live-streaming video service, of course).

At that time, the site “was just a page with a big finger pointing at the number of new posts you had,” Boz said. Users had to click on the profiles of each of the people they were friends with, and then try to remember what their last post was, and whether anything had changed.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017