Month: April 2017

Facebook’s marketing campaign for its Facebook Live video-streaming feature focuses on the potential for sharing intimate moments from its users’ lives — weddings, birthdays, etc. But its video platform is also a popular way to share much darker moments as well.

While many families were enjoying an Easter or Passover meal together on Sunday, a man in ** was busy uploading video of himself shooting and killing a ** grandfather of **. After he was done, the killer logged on to the social network to boast about his actions.

The killing of ** is the latest in a series of incidents that have cast a shadow over Facebook’s video offering. Although the murder was not actually live-streamed (contrary to some initial news reports), it still raises significant questions about Facebook’s responsibilities in such cases, since the video remained available for several hours after the shooting.

The social network released a statement to CNN late Sunday saying **. But for many, the damage had already been done. And the fact that the killer spent time after the murder live-chatting about the incident seemed to add insult to injury.

Since Facebook introduced its live-streaming video service in **, there have been several cases where deaths and other violent acts have been broadcast to the network’s billions of users. In some cases, the company has taken swift action to remove the videos, but in others it has chosen to leave them up with a warning about the content being disturbing.

Last year, for example, Antonio Perkins of Chicago was shot and killed in a drive-by attack while he was live-streaming himself drinking with friends on the sidewalk in a residential neighborhood. The video was watched hundreds of thousands of times within a matter of hours.

Despite the violence of the attack, and the fact that Perkins died as a result, Facebook told CNN at the time that the clip was left up because it didn’t violate the company’s community standards.

In **, Philando Castile of Minneapolis was shot by police during a routine roadside stop, and his death was filmed and live-streamed by his girlfriend Lavish Reynolds, while her young daughter sat in the back seat. In that case, the footage — which Facebook didn’t remove — helped galvanize protests about police violence against blacks in the U.S.

There have also been several cases that were equally disturbing, even if they didn’t involve death. In January, a 12-year-old girl uploaded a live-stream of her own suicide to Facebook, in a clip that showed her tying a rope around a tree and hanging herself. Facebook was criticized for leaving the video clip up for more than two weeks after the incident.

Also in January, a group of four men and women in Chicago live-streamed an attack on a young developmentally-delayed man who was bound, gagged, and cut with a knife (he later escaped, and the four were eventually arrested by police).

At one point, the video stream had more than 16,000 simultaneous viewers, and several Facebook users interacted with the attackers while they were abusing the boy. According to a number of reports, they posted comments that the attackers then responded to on camera.

Just last month, several teenage boys in Chicago live-streamed the sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl using the Facebook feature. According to police, at one point more than 40 people were watching the attack, but no one called 911 or contacted the authorities.

Facebook isn’t the only one that has to deal with this kind of violent content — similar clips also get uploaded to YouTube, including the ones of the 12-year-old’s suicide and the latest shooting. But Facebook has spent so much time and energy promoting its live feature that it has become a lightning rod for criticism in such cases.

And whatever the social network may think of the ethics of live-streaming deaths or leaving clips up for weeks, having newspaper and TV headlines using the term “Facebook murder” or “Facebook killing” probably isn’t something the company wants to deal with. But the genie is out of the bottle, and there’s no putting it back in again.

When Facebook launched its “Instant Articles” feature in 2015, it sounded like a great deal for media companies. All they had to do was hand over the content from their stories, and Facebook’s engineers would magically make those stories look better and load faster on mobile devices.

Not only that, but Facebook promised to help publishers make money from the content they distributed through Instant Articles — they could keep 100% of the advertising revenue for any ads they sold, or take 70% of whatever Facebook sold for them.

Some observers were skeptical of the offer, since Facebook seemed poised to gain far more from the deal than media companies ever would. Others recalled how similar efforts aimed at encouraging publishers to distribute their content through the social network — including the “social reader” Facebook apps that were popular in 2012 — ultimately fizzled.

At the same time, however, many publishers were desperate to find new ways of reaching readers, and Facebook offered a cheap and easy way to reach more than a billion. Some, including the Washington Post, started publishing 100% of their content through Instant Articles.

Despite multiple iterations of the product, however, Instant Articles has never really delivered on its initial promise, and many of Facebook’s initial partners — including the New York Times and Hearst — have dropped out of the program. Many say they have never been able to generate much revenue from the format, and Facebook hasn’t really helped much.

There’s a big clue to why this happened in a recent piece by The Verge about Instant Articles and its lack of success. According to a former staffer who worked on the project, the idea that media companies would need to make money from the feature was never really factored in to its development in any significant way.

“The idea that these products could meaningfully impact the revenue of the news industry just didn’t really come up,” the former employee told The Verge’s Casey Newton. “I don’t know that anyone [at Facebook] took that piece all that seriously.”

Senior Facebook executives dispute this in the Verge piece, but it seems clear from the outcome that even if they did consider monetization to be important, the social network didn’t spend nearly enough time on that piece of the puzzle. Why? Because the bottom line was to get media companies to hand over their content, not to make money for them.

Facebook has one over-riding mandate, and that is to buy, borrow or create content that will generate more engagement and time spent on its platform. And that takes precedence over just about anything, especially the desires of traditional media outlets.

The giant social network also routinely changes its mind in the process of trying to maximize those goals, and media companies often get caught in the cross-fire. That’s what happened with the “social reader” apps, and it arguably happened with Instant Articles as well. The goal posts changed, and therefore so did Facebook’s behavior.

In the case of the social-reader apps, Facebook changed the algorithm to focus more on personal sharing, and that caused the apps launched by the Washington Post and The Guardian to suddenly crater in terms of audience. In the case of Instant Articles, they were seen as important right up until Facebook decided to go all in on video, and then they became an afterthought.

As tech analyst Ben Thompson pointed out in a recent edition of his Stratechery newsletter, Facebook was trying to create a three-sided market with Instant Articles, by serving consumers on one side and media companies on the other. But while it created a great product for users, it “completely dropped the ball” when it came to making it a good deal for publishers.

According to The Verge, many publishers have found Google’s competing Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP project to be much more effective for their purposes.

Although some have criticized Google for trying to take too much control over media companies’ content with AMP, it has the benefit of being an open-source project that anyone can participate in. And it also supports subscription and paywall options, something Facebook has been slow to incorporate.

Twitter is often criticized—and rightfully so—for some of the decisions it has made in the past, including the fact that it moved too slowly to try and stop abuse of the service by trolls and bots. But there is one thing the company routinely does right, and that is to fight back against government attempts to force it to reveal user information.

It did so again on Thursday, by filing a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security in San Francisco. In the suit, Twitter has asked a judge to block the government’s order to divulge the personal details of the user behind a so-called “rogue” account, which claims to be run by employees of the Citizenship and Immigration Services department.

According to the company’s filing, the @ALT_uscis account “has often criticized immigration policies” introduced by Trump, including the travel ban imposed on a number of Muslim countries. The account, which was created right after the first Executive Order that introduced the ban, is one of a number of accounts that purport to be run by either current or former government employees.

“Defendants may not compel Twitter to disclose information regarding the real identities of these users without first demonstrating that some criminal or civil offence has been committed,” Twitter argues in its complaint. “Defendants have not come close to making any of these showings.”

We're glad Twitter is pushing back. We'll be going to court to defend this user's right to anonymous speech. https://t.co/tqj5XrNvgn

— ACLU (@ACLU) April 6, 2017

This is not the first time Twitter has used the courts to fight such demands by the U.S. government. One of the first was in 2011, when the Justice Department ordered it to produce information about several of the people associated with the WikiLeaks account, including founder Julian Assange, hacker activist Jacob Appelbaum and Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir.

As it has in the current case, Twitter rejected the order and also defied the government’s demand that it not inform the individuals in question about the agency’s request for information.

Ultimately, Twitter lost that case, which was supported by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But it at least tried to resist the government’s demands, and it tried to force the incident out into the public eye as much as possible. Many other tech companies—including Facebook—comply with such requests but say very little about them.

Twitter fought a government order in 2012 that tried to get it to reveal information about an account associated with the Occupy Wall Street protests. And it has also fought in court to block demands by other governments, including those from the Turkish authorities, that have tried to force it to shut down accounts critical of those in power.

It appears from the evidence introduced by Twitter in the current case that the government has been trying to identify the users behind the rogue account since early March, when the Customs and Border Protection agency sent the company a court order demanding the personal information of whoever created it. The order also forbid Twitter from informing those users of the government’s request.

Instead of complying, however, Twitter told the users behind the @ALT_uscis account about the agency’s demands, and filed suit to try and have the order struck down.

In its legal argument, the company makes the case that the CBP order goes beyond the scope of what is normally permitted by subpoenas of that kind, and it also argues that submitting to the agency’s demand would have a chilling effect on the users’ freedom of speech and therefore is in contravention of the First Amendment’s protections for such speech.

“The CBP Summons is unlawful and unenforceable because it violates the First Amendment rights of both Twitter and its users by seeking to unmask the identity of one or more anonymous Twitter users voicing criticism of the government on matters of public concern,” the filing states.

The company’s submission to the court goes on to point out that a “time-honored tradition of pseudonymous free speech on matters of public moment runs deep in the political life of America,” and that these First Amendment rights are “at their zenith when, as here, the speech at issue touches on matters of public political life.” The Supreme Court has written about the necessity for anonymity to allow for criticism of the government, the filing says.

Whether Twitter is ultimately successful or not in its latest attempt to resist the government’s attacks on the free-speech rights of its users, it deserves a lot of credit for at least trying to do so. That’s more than many companies do.

It may have come as a surprise to many last year when Twitter struck a deal with the NFL to live-stream Thursday night games. But it wasn’t much of a surprise when the league chose to sign a similar deal with Amazon on Tuesday instead of renewing its arrangement with Twitter.

Why? Because there are two things that leagues like the NFL are usually looking for when it comes to signing those kinds of streaming contracts: One is money, and the other is reach. And as much as it might like to, Twitter [fortune-stock symbol=”TWTR] can’t really compete with giants like Amazon or Facebook when it comes to either one of those factors, nor will it be able to any time soon.

The deal that the NFL signed last year with Twitter, for example, was worth $10 million. The deal that the league signed with Amazon on Tuesday—which was virtually identical in almost every way—was worth $50 million, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

Twitter might have been able to justify spending $10 million on the digital-streaming rights to football games that are already available on traditional television (where NBC and CBS own the rights). But it would be hard for it to justify spending five times that much, especially since it is currently under a lot of financial pressure after missing its revenue targets.

Amazon [fortune-stock symbol=”AMZN], however, has oceans of cash available to spend—not just because it has over $20 billion in cash on its books, but because its AWS hosted-computing platform spins off huge amounts of money. And the company has made it clear that it wants to expand in the area of streaming not just sports but other kinds of traditional TV content as well.

On top of that, the online retailing giant also has a much stronger strategic case to make for bidding on rights like the NFL, and that makes it easier to justify paying a higher price. That’s because the streaming will be offered through its Amazon Prime subscription service, where it will be able to promote the rest of its retailing interests to a captive audience.

Twitter likely hoped that offering Thursday night football games through its platform would generate significant amounts of new sign-ups or boost engagement, or produce a bump in advertising revenue. But it doesn’t seem to have accomplished any of those things to any great extent.

There haven’t been any signs of a real increase in new users as a result of having the broadcasts available. Twitter’s user growth in the U.S. remains stuck at zero, which is part of what has investors concerned. And the fact that the company missed its revenue estimates last quarter suggests the video deal didn’t really help the bottom line much either.

When it comes to reach, Twitter said the NFL games got about 300,000 simultaneous viewers per minute. That’s by comparison to more than 15 million who watched the games on traditional television, which means that for the NFL, the Twitter deal was more or less a rounding error.

The Amazon streaming deal is only available to Prime members, and that is a smaller number than the 300 million that Twitter claims to have. But those viewers are theoretically much more inclined to buy things (since they have already shown a willingness to pay for Amazon’s service) and that makes them a much more desirable audience than random Twitter users.

If Amazon wins over Twitter in this kind of contest, then Facebook [fortune-stock symbol=”FB] is even more likely to come out on top, because the ocean of cash it has to draw on is even more massive, and so is its reach. And it too has shown an interest in expanding its offerings of TV-style content.

Twitter has said that it wants to do more NFL-style deals—and it points out that it aired more than 800 hours of live-streaming content in the first quarter of this year, including sports, news and entertainment. But that doesn’t change the fact that in any bid that forces it to go up against Amazon or Facebook, the odds are stacked against it.

Thanks to the current super-charged political climate, discussion of political issues seems to pop up almost everywhere, even during coverage of football games. In recognition of that, ESPN has issued new guidelines for how and when its staff are supposed to mix sports and politics.

In a blog post about the new rules, ESPN public editor Jim Brady acknowledged that coming out with these kinds of guidelines is something that typically happens before an election, not after. But “we are living in unique political times,” he said, and so the Disney-owned network decided it was necessary to clarify the rules.

Patrick Stiegman, ESPN’s head of global digital content and the chairman of the company’s internal Editorial Board, said that “given the intense interest in the most recent presidential election and the fact subsequent political and social discussions often intersected with the sports world, we found it to be an appropriate time to review our guidelines.”

The network’s managing editor of newsgathering, Craig Bengtson, said both the tense political climate in the U.S. and the changing media environment made it necessary for the network to revisit the topic.

“We have the convergence of a politically charged environment and all these new technologies coming together,” Bengtson said. “We wanted the policy to reflect the reality of the world today. There are people talking about politics in ways we have not seen before, and we’re not immune from that.”

The ESPN executives said that no specific incidents that led to the changes, but the issue of politics and the sports network has been the subject of much conversation of late. Some conservative websites and news outlets have criticized what they say is a a left-leaning agenda at ESPN.

It’s not just external critics of the network that have raised the issue. As Brady noted in a blog post in November: “There’s a feeling among many staffers—both liberal and conservative—that the company’s perceived move leftward has had a stifling effect on discourse inside the company and has affected its public-facing products.”

Brady quoted one conservative staffer at the time as saying “If you’re a Republican or conservative, you feel the need to talk in whispers. There’s even a fear of putting Fox News on a TV.”

The network’s updated political guidelines state that “our reputation and credibility with viewers, readers and listeners are paramount. Related to political and social issues, our audiences should be confident our original reporting of news is not influenced by political pressures or personal agendas.”

Despite this statement of intent, however, it could be difficult—if not impossible—for the network to convince its critics that it is not being influenced by political beliefs or agendas. In fact, even the fact that it has issued updated rules is being used by some sites as evidence that the network wants to become more political rather than less.

WHY @ESPN HAS LOST MILLIONS OF VIEWERS: New guidelines encourage Nitwit Hacks to connect sports with politics https://t.co/z8jI6D3ptn *

— ConserValidity (@ConserValidity) April 4, 2017

The new guidelines state that anchors and other journalists at the network are free to discuss political issues, but that they should be connected directly to a sports-related topic. And those who are in commentary roles are free to discuss politics if it’s relevant, the network says.

The Daily Wire said that the new statement of objectivity “isn’t going to help much: CNN believes the same, and their reporting is slanted heavily to the left.” The site added that the sports network engages in “selection bias” by choosing to cover stories with a political agenda, such as Caitlyn Jenner’s gender change.

The new rules boil down to “talk politics, so long as it’s leftist,” the Daily Wire said, arguing that former coach Mike Ditka “lost his job for speaking up in favor of Donald Trump and against Barack Obama on NFL Countdown” and other on-air personalities such as Curt Schilling and Chris Broussard have also been penalized for stating conservative views.

Commentator Sage Steele was also replaced on the network’s NBA Countdown show, something critics portrayed as payback for making statements that were seen as controversial politically, including a comment about Trump’s immigration bam

So while ESPN may have wanted to clarify what is expected of its staff when it comes to political discussion, in the process it appears to have just given its critics even more ammunition with which to attack the network for its alleged political leanings.

Fox News is facing what appears to be a growing advertiser boycott of its top-rated show, “The O’Reilly Factor,” after news broke that host Bill O’Reilly was the subject of five sexual-harassment cases launched by former staff.

Mercedes-Benz pulled its ads from the Fox News show on Monday as a result of the allegations, and two other major automotive brands announced similar moves on Tuesday.

A spokesperson for Mercedes said Monday that because of the “disturbing allegations” against the Fox News host, the luxury car maker had decided that The O’Reilly Factor was not “a good environment in which to advertise our products right now.”

Hyundai told CNN that while it didn’t currently have ads running on the show, it had taken steps to ensure that future ads wouldn’t appear there. And on Tuesday, BMW announced it would also be removing its ads from the program.

Hyundai: We had upcoming advertising spots on The O'Reilly Factor but are reallocating them due to the recent and disturbing allegations

— Emily Steel (@emilysteel) April 4, 2017

A New York Times report published on the weekend found that Fox News’ parent company 21st Century Fox and Bill O’Reilly paid out a total of $13 million to settle harassment cases launched by five women since 2002.

The money was paid “in exchange for agreeing to not pursue litigation or speak about their accusations” against O’Reilly, the Times report said. The Fox News host has said that the accusations are untrue, but neither he nor 21st Century Fox have denied making the payments.

“We had advertising running on The O’Reilly Factor, and it has been reassigned,” Mercedes-Benz spokesperson Donna Boland told CNN. “Given the importance of women in every aspect of our business, we don’t feel this is a good environment.”

Hyundai said it would not run ads that were planned for the show because of the “recent and disturbing allegations,” and that it would continue to “monitor and evaluate the situation” as it planned future advertising decisions.

Another car maker, Lexus, told CNN: “We take our duties as a responsible advertiser seriously, and seek to partner with organizations who share our company culture and philosophy of respect for all people. We will continue to monitor the situation and will take any appropriate action.”

Unless it grows significantly, however, the advertiser boycott is unlikely to make a dent in the show’s profitability. According to recent estimates, The O’Reilly Factor generated almost half a billion dollars in ad revenue between 2014 and 2016.

This helps explain why Fox News recently extended O’Reilly’s contract (which was set to expire this year) despite the multiple allegations against him. According to the New York Times, the Fox host makes about $18 million per year.

Industry insiders say while major brands may pull their ads from specific shows that are caught up in controversy, they usually return once the public furor has died down, especially if those shows have high ratings.

So far, multiple sexual-harassment cases involving the network don’t seem to have put much of a dent in its viewer numbers. In addition to the O’Reilly allegations, Fox has also been dealing with the fallout from harassment allegations involving former chairman Roger Ailes, who left the network last year.

The U.S. Attorneys Office is reportedly investigating whether Fox News properly disclosed the payments it made to settle cases launched against Ailes over the years.

Just last week, numbers from audience-measurement firm Nielsen Research showed that O’Reilly pulled in more viewers than any other cable news program in history. That helped Fox News clinch the top spot for most-watched cable news network for the 61st quarter in a row. The network even beat out non-news programming such as ESPN.

On Monday, Fox News sent a memo to employees telling them to report any inappropriate behavior to the human resources department or network executives. The network’s new head of human resources said he wanted to reiterate this message “in light of some of the accounts published over the last few days.”

The election of Donald Trump as president may be having a questionable effect on the economic and political outlook for the U.S., but it has been a considerable shot in the arm for the TV news business, according to new numbers from Nielsen.

Adults over 18 watched over 27 billion minutes of national cable-TV news programming per week last year. That’s almost 45% more than they watched in 2015, according to Nielsen’s latest Total Audience Report, which looks at consumption patterns for cable as well as smartphones and desktop computers.

While cable TV saw the largest jump, Nielsen said that news consumption across all media — including radio, traditional broadcast TV and smartphones — rose by 18% compared with a year earlier, to 73.5 billion minutes per week.

Adult news consumers spent close to 6.5 hours a week watching national cable TV news last year, the report found. That’s an increase of almost an hour and a half from the previous year, and almost two hours more than they watched during the last presidential election cycle in 2012.

The election campaign boosted news consumption significantly, the firm said, along with other major news events such as the “Brexit” vote in the UK, the war in Syria, the Zika virus and a number of terrorist attacks and news about refugees.

Nielsen also looked at how news consumption is trending in 2017. “Spoiler alert: the year is starting with even more news viewing/listening/reading than the 2016 average,” said Glenn Enoch, senior VP of audience insights at Nielsen.

For the month of January, the average U.S. viewer spent two hours and 11 minutes watching national cable news every week, Nielsen said. That’s an increase of about 20 minutes from the average consumption period for last year.

Last week, Fox News and CNN both reported their highest viewership numbers in over a decade. Fox in particular had the best performance of any 24-hour cable news network ever, and even beat out regular cable networks such as ESPN.

The Nielsen report also notes, however, that cable-TV news is still overwhelmingly dominated by older audiences. For people over 50 years of age, cable TV news makes up more than 11.5% of their TV viewing, but it only accounts for about 2.5% of the TV watching of those between 18 and 35.

And while news consumption got a boost from the election, the Nielsen figures show that cable TV watching as a whole is still in decline. People spent an average of 142 hours and 35 minutes every month watching live TV as well as recorded or time-shifted TV in the fourth quarter of last year, Nielsen said.

That number is about five hours less than the firm’s audience numbers from the previous year. Older audiences between 50 and 64 watched almost 193 hours of TV a month, more than twice the amount watched by those between 18 and 24.

When critics started accusing Facebook of harming journalism by harboring “fake news,” the social network initially balked at admitting any responsibility for the problem. But that attitude has changed dramatically in recent months. Among other things, Facebook started what it calls the Journalism Project, which it says is aimed at helping media outlets figure out how to use the web to improve their content and their business models. And now the company has committed to help fund a separate effort aimed at rebuilding trust in news.

In an announcement released Monday morning, Facebook became part of a $14-million effort called the News Integrity Initiative, a project spearheaded by Craigslist founder and journalism advocate Craig Newmark. The initiative will fund applied research and projects related to improving news literacy and trust in journalism, as well as convening events at which experts will discuss related issues.

In addition to Facebook and Newmark, founding members include the Ford Foundation, the Democracy Fund, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Tow Foundation, Mozilla and New York-based startup incubator Betaworks. The project will be run out of the City University of New York’s journalism school.

CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis, who will be directing the project as part of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, said in a blog post, said that it stemmed from conversations he had with Newmark about the need to fight back against the rise of fake news and misinformation.

Note: This was originally published on Fortune magazine’s website when I was a senior writer there.

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