Author: Mathew Ingram

It’s showtime for Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook co-founder and CEO appears before Congress on Wednesday, testifying before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce about the recent data leak involving the personal information of more than 87 million Facebook users, whose data was used by Cambridge Analytica to target them with advertising and misinformation during the 2016 election.

Of course, we already know what Zuckerberg plans to say, not just because Congress released the text of his prepared statement on Monday, but because (as more than one person has pointed out) we have been down this road with the Facebook CEO so many times that it’s easy to lose track of the exact number. In some ways, Facebook’s entire history is a series of privacy-related mishaps and screwups, followed by a sincere and heartfelt apology from Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives.

Wasn’t that the same text he used in the last eight apologies?

— Timo Grün (@Khoji) April 9, 2018

In a recent piece for Wired magazine, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci calls it “Zuckerberg’s 14-year apology tour.” She lists the highlights of the company’s on-again, off-again interest in users’ privacy, starting with the 2006 controversy over the introduction of the News Feed, which many saw as a privacy disaster. Then in 2007 it was “Beacon,” which tracked people’s purchases and in many cases made them public without their consent. And so on. Zuckerberg’s prepared remarks for Wednesday are in the same vein:

It’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here.

The only real difference this time around is that Zuckerberg isn’t just apologizing to Facebook users in a blog post, he is testifying before Congress. And what he’s apologizing for isn’t just a few loose information policies or the fact that other users can see your purchases; he’s admitting that Facebook wasn’t prepared for the idea that its users’ data might be used to target election ads, or that Russian trolls would hijack the platform to try and swing the results of the presidential election. Does a “my bad” really cut it here?

What’s more than a little frustrating is that Zuckerberg’s apology statement suggests the company was just too darn naive, and too focused on all the good that Facebook can do in people’s lives. This might seem admirable, if it wasn’t for the fact that literally dozens of researchers like Tufecki and others have been pointing out the potential dangers for years, complete with tangible examples. Not to mention that there is a long history of negative outcomes associated with other platforms that Facebook could have learned from.

Congress may ask some hard questions on Wednesday (or members might just use the occasion for some personal grandstanding, as many did in the previous sessions in November) and Mark Zuckerberg may even convince both them and us that he is sincerely repentant. But how many times can we watch the same show without figuring out that little is going to change, because to change would require a completely different business model? Fool me once, shame on you — fool me 15 times, and maybe shame isn’t even the right word to be using at this point.

I find it endlessly fascinating how much amazingly cheap real estate there is if you look outside the major centres in North America. I would have assumed by now that the Internet would have enabled enough people to live anywhere and that house prices would have evened out, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Look at some of the prices for these amazing homes on Old House Dreams:

• A 1910 home in Winfield, Kansas — four bedrooms and 2,700 square feet. Cost? $35,000. Does it need a little work? Sure. But still, you can’t even buy a half-decent car for $35,000

• A six-bedroom Queen Anne-style home with over 4,000 square feet of space, in beautiful shape, in Altmar, New York. Cost? Just $107,000.

• A five-bedroom, four-bathroom Civil War-era house with over 2,500 square feet of space on a four-acre piece of land in York, Pennsylvania. Cost? Only $195,000

• Five bedrooms and almost 3,800 square feet of space in this extensively renovated 1903 Victorian beauty in Boykins, VA. Cost? Just $179,000

The list goes on and on. It’s sad to see people paying massive sums to live in tiny little houses in major cities when they could have a beautiful home like this on a huge piece of land out in the country. Admittedly, not everyone likes living in small towns, but how bad could it be? There are lots of health and personal benefits to living outside of major cities that would probably be worth the tradeoff. Obviously not everyone can work from anywhere, but with more and more jobs being done on the Internet, it’s probably getting more common.

I love a good Internet rabbit hole as much as the next person (probably more), and I came across a great one recently while searching for information on the island of Capri in Italy. Since some friends and I were planning a trip there, I was looking up some of the sights to see, including the Villa San Michele, which was built by the Swedish doctor (at one time physician to Queen Victoria) and author Axel Munthe in the early 1900s.

The Wikipedia entry mentioned in passing that when he ran short of money, Munthe had to rent the villa “unwillingly” to the Marchesa Luisa Casati. Why unwillingly? So I looked up the Marchesa, who was described as “a muse and patron of the arts” and a legendary figure. According to her entry in Wikipedia, the Marchesa was known for “eccentricities that delighted European society for three decades” including her penchant for parading around with two cheetahs on a leash and “wearing live snakes as jewellery.”

From there, a Google search found an excerpt from a book that mentions her dispute with Axel Munthe over the villa. He apparently decided not to rent to her after learning about her behavior, but she came anyway and stayed for several months and drove him mad with her requests. Munthe designed the villa to be as open to the air as possible, but the Marchesa — who “was dressing herself entirely in black that summer” — ordered black curtains for every window. Guests often arrived to find her reclining naked on a black rug.

A New Yorker article says: “She blackened her eyes with kohl, powdered her skin a fungal white, and dyed her hair to resemble a corona of flames; her mouth was a lurid gash. Her totem animal was the snake. Her contemporaries couldn’t decide if she was a vampire, a bird of paradise, an androgyne, a goddess, an enigma, or a common lunatic. Her clothes were esoteric and memorable––i.e., the suit of armor pierced with hundreds of electric arrows; the iridescent necklace of live snakes; the headdress of peacock tail feathers accessorized with chicken’s blood.”

She also invited a wide range of guests to the villa, including some of the gay and lesbian artists who hung out on Capri at that time, and people like the Baron Jacques d’Adelsward-Fersen, described as a “self-styled diabolist” who liked to smoke opium with the Marchesa. A separate entry from the book describes her later setting up residence in Paris with her cheetah Anaxagoras and a pet cobra named Agamemnon, and mentions that after Anaxagoras passed away she had him replaced with a stuffed black panther that had a clockwork mechanism inside that made its eyes flash and the tail swing back and forth.

Not a happy ending to this story, unfortunately — Wikipedia says the Marchesa built up debts of more than $20 million (equal to $200 million today) and had to sell her possessions. She moved to one-bedroom flat in London and later died there of a heart attack in 1957, at the age of 76. The New Yorker says “spent her last days in a cheap bed-sit, casting spells on her enemies and compiling three volumes of a strange journal… Poor, and increasingly addled by gin and drugs.” According to Wikipedia, she was buried “wearing her black and leopard skin finery and a pair of false eyelashes,” along with one of her stuffed Pekingese dogs.

One thing about Facebook is it’s very difficult to get rid of things once they are on the social network. Even if you delete your profile, it is only hidden for several days in case you change your mind, and even after that your data remains on Facebook’s servers for up to three months. In the past, Facebook has even kept status updates that users typed into the post box but never actually posted.

Until recently, however, if you happened to be a senior executive at the company, you had access to a special feature—one that allowed you to not only automatically delete your past instant messages, but to also remove them from the inboxes of anyone who received them. And for many, that seems like a double standard when it comes to who gets to delete their personal behavior on the site and when.

TechCrunch first reported on this phenomenon on Thursday, April 5, with a story that described how several people who got access to their message history through Facebook’s “Download Your Information” tool noticed that their messages to CEO Mark Zuckerberg were in the archive, but his replies had disappeared—and not just recent ones, but replies going all the way back to 2010. According to TechCrunch, when asked about the deletion, a Facebook spokesperson gave the following explanation:

After Sony Pictures’ emails were hacked in 2014 we made a number of changes to protect our executives’ communications. These included limiting the retention period for Mark’s messages in Messenger. We did so in full compliance with our legal obligations.

The company apparently never told the users who had these discussions that those messages would be removed from their inboxes, however. And while Facebook introduced a feature in 2016 that allows users of a special encrypted version of Messenger to set a timer and have their instant messages auto-deleted after a certain period, they can’t remove those messages from the inboxes of the people who received them, and that feature also doesn’t remove messages dating back as far as 2010.

After questioning from TechCrunch and a number of other outlets about the feature, Facebook said that it would stop allowing executives to delete messages from other people’s inboxes while it works on the roll-out of a similar deletion feature for all users. A spokesman told BuzzFeed:

People using our secret message feature in the encrypted version of Messenger have the ability to set a timer and have their messages automatically deleted. We will now be making a broader delete message feature available. This may take some time. And until this feature is ready, we will no longer be deleting executives’ messages. We should have done this sooner — and we’re sorry that we did not.

While it might be a small feature that was designed to limit the potential liability of Facebook executives if their messages were hacked somehow, for many it seems like a case of Facebook allowing its senior staff to do something that normal users aren’t allowed to do. And it seems especially egregious that they did this to give Zuckerberg and others the power to remove personal information, while at the same time distributing massive quantities of personal data to entities like Cambridge Analytica.

As Mark Zuckerberg continues his 2018 apology tour by admitting that Cambridge Analytica may have illicitly acquired personal data on as many as 87 million Facebook users, instead of the previous estimate of 50 million, the chorus of voices saying we need to reject the social network (the #DeleteFacebook movement) grows louder. In a New York Times opinion piece published on Wednesday, however, Columbia law professor and author Tim Wu recommends a different course—that we build an alternative to Facebook, or possibly multiple alternatives. Fixing it isn’t an option, he says:

Every business has its founding DNA. Real corporate change is rare, especially when the same leaders remain in charge. In Facebook’s case, we are not speaking of a few missteps here and there, the misbehavior of a few aberrant employees. The problems are central and structural, the predicted consequences of its business model. From the day it first sought revenue, Facebook prioritized growth over any other possible goal.

The solution, Wu says, is to figure out how to replace the giant social network with other models that aren’t predicated on massive ad-driven surveillance of users. And what would that look like? Wu says it could be a network that provides the same social connection and media sharing functions as Facebook, but users would pay a small fee instead of having their data harvested for advertising. Or, he suggests that it might be possible to create a non-profit that could do something similar, an entity that wouldn’t be driven by the need to sell its targeting abilities to brands.

In his piece, Wu says the problem with Facebook is that it suffers from the same problem that journalist Walter Lippmann complained about in 1959 with respect to television, namely that it was ultimately “the creature, the servant and indeed the prostitute of merchandizing.”  Those kinds of sentiments led to the creation of the American public broadcasting system. Would it be possible to build the equivalent for the Facebook era? It’s an intriguing idea. Could public funding, donations and other mechanisms be used to support something like PBS but for social networking?

https://twitter.com/superwuster/status/979828300565622784

The biggest hurdle, as Wu notes, are the network effects that Facebook now enjoys by having two billion people attached to its platform every day. If you want to remain connected to friends and family members, you almost have to be on it, because everyone else is. Would an alternative be as attractive, even if it didn’t harvest your data, especially if it required you to pay a monthly fee? For some, perhaps. But for enough people to make it practical? It seems unlikely. But then, public broadcasting probably seemed like a moonshot in its day too, and somehow that happened.

One crucial step required for that future to work would be regulations requiring some form of data portability or federation between Facebook and these alternative networks, to lower the barrier to people moving from one to the other. Ironically, data-protection regulations implemented in the wake of Facebook’s data leak could actually make doing this harder rather than easier. Which would be a shame. As Wu puts it: “If today’s privacy scandals lead us merely to install Facebook as a regulated monopolist, insulated from competition, we will have failed completely.”

Facebook announced on Tuesday it is expanding a recent test that showed users more information about the articles in their News Feed and the media entities that publish them, in the hope that doing so will make it easier for people to determine who is trustworthy and who isn’t. The test started in October in a number of US markets, and the company says it is now rolling the feature out to everyone in the US, as well as adding more sources of information. The idea, according to Facebook, is to “provide more context for people so they can decide for themselves what to read, trust and share.”

The new features are a small part of what the tech giant has been doing to try and fix what is widely viewed as a “fake news” problem, one that exploded into public view after Russian trolls were shown to have manipulated the network to try and influence the 2016 election. The company has said it wants to cut down on news in the feed, as well as ensuring that what news there is remains “high quality.” But will these kinds of tweaks have any impact on Facebook’s role in spreading misinformation? That seems unlikely. Trust is a very slippery concept when it comes to news, as multiple studies have shown—people tend to believe and share the news that confirms their existing preconceptions.

Which nobody will understand nor care about as they mash share on the next fake article that confirms their previously held beliefs. https://t.co/AQtgsJrrmg

— Jeremy C. Owens (@jowens510) April 3, 2018

Facebook maintains that its research, as well that of unnamed “academic and industry partners,” shows certain types of information help users evaluate credibility, and determine whether to trust a source. So it is adding contextual links when an article is shared, including links to related articles on the same topic and stats on how often the article has been shared and where. It will also include a link to the publisher’s Wikipedia page if there is one (and indicate if there isn’t), which is something YouTube also recently said it is doing to add context to videos about conspiracy theories.

In addition to those elements, Facebook says it also plans to add two new features, one that shows other recent stories published by the same outlet, and a module that shows whether a user’s friends have shared the article in question. The company is also starting a test to see whether users find it easier to gauge an article’s credibility if they get more information about the author: When they see an article in Facebook’s mobile-friendly Instant Articles format, some users will be able to click the author’s name and get additional info, including a description from Wikipedia if there is one. Whether any of these new features actually reduce the amount of questionable news shared on Facebook remains to be seen.

Here’s more on Facebook and its news and trust problems:

• Today in irony: While the social network says it wants to increase the trust people have in what they see in their News Feed, it is facing a trust crisis of its own, thanks to the news that personal information on 50 million users was acquired by a data firm with ties to the Trump campaign. Facebook recently updated its privacy settings in an attempt to show that it cares about the issue, and has taken pains to point out that the source of the data leak was plugged several years ago.
• An ultimatum: Indonesia has said it is prepared to shut down access to Facebook if there is any evidence the privacy of Indonesian users has been compromised. “If I have to shut them down, then I will do it,” Communications Minister Rudiantara told Bloomberg in an interview on Friday in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, after pointing out the country had earlier blocked access to the messaging app, Telegram. “I did it. I have no hesitation to do it again.”
• Power move: As part of its attempts to atone for the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, Facebook recently said it is shutting off the ability of third-party data brokers to target users on the platform directly through what are called Partner Categories. But long-time digital ad exec and publisher John Battelle argues that this is really consolidating Facebook’s power over that kind of targeting.
• Fake news to blame? A study by researchers at Ohio State appears to show that belief in “fake news” may have affected the 2016 election, something that has been the subject of much debate. According to a Washington Post article on the research, about 4 percent of Democratic voters who supported Barack Obama in 2012 were persuaded not to vote for Hillary Clinton by hoax news stories, including reports she was ill, and that she approved weapon sales to ISIS.
• Probe launched: The attorney general of Missouri has announced that he is launching a probe into Facebook’s use of personal data following the Cambridge Analytica leak. Josh Hawley said he is asking the social network to disclose every time it has shared user information with a political campaign, as well as how much those campaigns paid Facebook for the data, and whether users were notified.

Other notable stories:

• During a shooting incident at YouTube’s headquarters in Palo Alto, the Twitter account of a YouTube product manager was apparently hijacked and used to tweet fake news reports about the event, according to a story written by The Verge. After the hack was pointed out by a number of journalists, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said he was looking into it, and the fake tweets quickly disappeared.
• The Environmental Protection Agency tried to limit press access to a briefing by EPA head Scott Pruitt, but the move backfired thanks to journalists at Fox News. The agency reportedly told a TV crew from Fox about the briefing but didn’t tell the other major networks, at which point Fox let its competitors know and agreed to share reporting on the event.
• The Wall Street Journal reports that 94-year-old billionaire media mogul Sumner Redstone, founder and chairman of Viacom and CBS, won’t have much of a say in the proposed merger of the two companies because his voting power has been reduced. He also now reportedly communicates using an iPad with pre-programmed responses such as “Yes,” “No,” and “F*** you.”
• Joe Pompeo writes at Vanity Fair about what some see as a culture war taking place in the New York Times newsroom, thanks in part to growing numbers of young employees. “I’ve been feeling a lot lately like the newsroom is split into roughly the old-guard category, and the young and ‘woke’ category, and it’s easy to feel that the former group doesn’t take into account how much the future of the paper is predicated on the talent contained in the latter one,” one staffer told the magazine.
• The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has released a report that looks at incidents in the US in the past year that threatened press freedom, based on the first annual assessment of data from the Press Freedom Tracker, an index that records attacks on journalists and the media. Out of 122 incidents logged by the tracker, almost half occurred at protests.

 

Whenever Mark Zuckerberg talks about something that has gone wrong at Facebook—which happens rather frequently—he almost always comes off as sincerely concerned and apologetic, and his latest interview with Ezra Klein of Vox Media is no exception to this rule. But anyone who has been following Facebook for any length of time probably feels an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, because it all sounds very familiar: We screwed up, we’re sorry, we didn’t know, we will fix it. And please keep using Facebook.

We’re in the middle of a lot of issues, and I certainly think we could’ve done a better job so far. I’m optimistic that we’re going to address a lot of those challenges, and that we’ll get through this, and that when you look back five years from now, 10 years from now, people will look at the net effect of being able to connect online and have a voice and share what matters to them as just a massively positive thing in the world.

To be fair, no one has ever run a globe-spanning social network that has over two billion daily users before, so perhaps we should forgive Mark for not being that good at it. But still, it seems disingenuous to have spent 14 years building a company that now has $40 billion in revenue, but at the same time to claim that it never occurred to anyone such a giant social network—especially one powered by surveillance of its users—could become a tool for deception or evil of various kinds. Which is effectively what Mark wants us to believe.

I think the basic point that you’re getting at is that we’re really idealistic. When we started, we thought about how good it would be if people could connect, if everyone had a voice. Frankly, we didn’t spend enough time investing in, or thinking through, some of the downside uses of the tools. So for the first 10 years of the company, everyone was just focused on the positive. I think now people are appropriately focused on some of the risks and downsides as well.

What this means in practice is that Facebook has been doing its best to ignore the repeated warnings from researchers such as Danah Boyd and Zeynep Tufekci of the dangers inherent in Facebook’s structure and business model. And why wouldn’t it? Some of those concerns go straight to the heart of how the company makes the billions of dollars a year investors have come to rely on.

Facebook's repeated insistence that they mean well but just constantly blindsided–despite giant warning signs and a chorus of people trying to warn them–isn't an apology, it is an admission that they are not equipped to handle this kind of power. https://t.co/F5OdZrHPmI

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) April 2, 2018

Tellingly enough, one of the points during the interview where Zuckerberg seems to become genuinely peeved is when Klein mentions Apple CEO Tim Cook’s criticisms of the company’s advertising-based model. The Facebook CEO rejects the idea that “if you’re not paying that somehow we can’t care about you,” calling it “extremely glib” and “not at all aligned with the truth.” And he suggests that consumers should question comments made by companies that he says “work hard to charge you more” for their services, as opposed to someone like him, who is trying to provide something for free to as many people as possible.

There are other interesting moments, such as when Zuckerberg says Facebook is considering a court-style model for deciding what speech should be allowed. “You can imagine some sort of structure, almost like a Supreme Court, that is made up of independent folks who don’t work for Facebook, who ultimately make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech,” he says. A sensible idea, or a frightening glimpse of a potential future in which Facebook is a global censor? As usual with Facebook, it’s a little bit of both.

Earlier this year, Facebook announced a change to its News Feed algorithm, one designed to reduce the visibility of news — apart from those outlets deemed to be high quality or trusted sources — in favor of posts by people and pages that encouraged what the social network called “meaningful interaction.” And what effect has this had on the flow of fake and/or real news? According to a recent study from media-monitoring firm Newswhip, real news is still being shared a lot, but so are obvious misinformation and clickbait.

In the report, entitled “Navigating the Facebook Algorithm Change,” the firm looked at the most widely-shared articles and found that more than half of the top 100 were hard news stories or reporting on current events, including the death of famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. But clearly falsified stories also show up fairly high in the rankings: Number 26 on the most-shared list is a report from a fake news site called Your Newswire that says the flu shot is causing a “disastrous flu outbreak.” That got more than 850,000 engagements.

Although the algorithm change has resulted in a decline in traffic to some sites (including apparently conservative sites, which are complaining that they have been deliberately targeted), Newswhip’s analysis shows that some news outlets have actually seen an increase in traffic since the change, including NBC and Fox News. January was the strongest month for Fox since October of 2017, the company says, but NBC actually eclipsed it and took the top spot for the first time since January of last year. More niche sites have suffered:

Some Pages that our data showed a more serious decline in average engagements were UNILAD, Student Problems, 9Gag, Cosmopolitan, and Architecture & Design, though some of these are starting to show some recovery. For these publishers, it might be time to look at what role their content actually serves their followers — is it connecting them to one another, teaching them something new, making them pause… or is it just adding to a landscape of digital waste?

Newswhip also found that Facebook is true to its word, and has been favoring posts that get more engagement, including comments. Over the past couple of years, the number of comments as a proportion of the overall engagement on the top 100 posts has averaged about 5 percent but since the algorithm change comments make up more than 11 percent of total engagement on the top 100 most-shared posts. Most of the ones that got a large number of comments were funny clickbait-style videos.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been having a bad week, and it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better, as the company continues to take fire from all sides because of the way it allowed personal data on more than 50 million users to be misused by a firm called Cambridge Analytica. Facebook has shut down the specific method used in that case — an app that hoovered up not just the data of those who signed up for it, but also personal information shared by any of their friends — but the incident has touched off a debate over the social network’s privacy protections that has reached as far as Washington, DC and the European Union.

On Wednesday, Facebook tried to show that it is listening to its critics by updating its privacy settings to make it easier for users to find out what they are sharing and with whom, and then change those settings if necessary. Of course, as more than one long-time Facebook watcher pointed out, the company has done this on multiple occasions in the past whenever it has run afoul of privacy rules, and not much seems to change. Tim Wu, a law professor and former staffer at the Federal Trade Commission, has also noted that in the consent decree Facebook signed with the regulator in 2011, the company agreed to take better care of its users’ data.

Great. Also Facebook has made 100,000 previous changes to its privacy settings to make them "better" for users. https://t.co/IYZLdm3w4c

— Shira Ovide (@ShiraOvide) March 28, 2018

Congress has asked Zuckerberg to appear before a hearing into the incident, and according to reports by CNN and others, the Facebook co-founder plans to show up — unlike the last hearings Facebook was called to attend, when the Senate and House intelligence committees questioned Facebook, Google and Twitter about whether Russian trolls used their platforms to try and influence the 2016 election. Zuckerberg didn’t appear at those hearings; instead he sent his legal counsel, as did both Google and Twitter. This time, Congress has made it clear that they want to hear from the man himself, not one of his deputies.

The United Kingdom may have to make do with a stand in, however. Legislators in Britain have also asked Zuckerberg to appear before them to answer questions about Cambridge Analytica’s usage of Facebook data, but sources close to the company told Reuters that the co-founder and CEO won’t be attending. Meanwhile, the turmoil caused by the Cambridge revelations continues for Facebook: It announced on Tuesday that it has delayed plans to launch a “smart assistant” style device similar to the Google Home or Amazon Echo, concerned that people might not react well to a Facebook-branded always-on listening device.

• In addition to strong questions from Washington and the UK, Facebook is also getting grilled by legislators in India, according to a report by BuzzFeed. They want to know whether companies like Cambridge Analytica have used Facebook data to try and influence elections in India, and they’ve issued the social network an official notice asking how it plans to keep its platform from being exploited in that way. India has several state elections happening this year and national elections next year.
• Although hashtags like #DeleteFacebook have been trending on some social networks since the Cambridge data leak news broke, it’s not clear how much of a backlash there is at the user level. Some corporations, however, have deleted their pages, including Tesla and SpaceX, both owned by maverick billionaire Elon Musk. And on Wednesday, Playboy magazine said that it was removing itself from Facebook because of the data leak, but also because the social network’s policies are “sexually repressive.”
• While there may not have been a mass exodus of Facebook users so far, the same is not true for investors. Some shareholders of the company appear to be worried that the backlash could impact Facebook financially, especially if there are more regulations coming that will restrict what it can and can’t do with its users’ data (as there are in Europe). Facebook’s share price has fallen by more than $32 in the past five days, which has shrunk the company’s market cap by almost $100 billion.
• The Trump campaign wasn’t the only outfit that used Cambridge Analytica’s data and expertise. Both The Economist and the Financial Times were reportedly also clients of the data-analysis firm, which has been accused of meddling in the Brexit vote in the UK as well as the 2016 US election. A Financial Times source told BuzzFeed UK that the paper only did some market-size research with Cambridge Analytica. It wasn’t clear whether any illicit Facebook data was part of the deal or not.

Other notable stories:

• The New York Times released its diversity report on Wednesday and said that while it has made some progress in employing more women in its newsroom and business operations — with female leadership on both the news side and the business side at 46 percent — it hasn’t been as successful when it comes to people of color. While the number of staff who fall into that category has grown, the percentage of those in leadership roles actually fell last year compared to 2016.
• Most newspaper companies are doing their best to get out of the print business, but in Toronto there’s a brand new paper that is only in print. It’s called the West End Phoenix, and its a neighborhood paper published by veteran rock musician Dave Bidini, who lives in the city’s West End and says he wanted to create something that would tell stories about the neighborhood and its residents.
• Bloomberg spins a fascinating tale about Robert Mercer, who in addition to being a billionaire Trump supporter (who has also helped finance both Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica), happens to be a volunteer police officer for the tiny town of Lake Arthur in New Mexico — which has a population of about 435 — even though he doesn’t live anywhere near the town, and doesn’t really have any personal connection to it. To find out why, you’ll have to read the story.
• Vice Media, the alternative giant with a market cap in the billions, appears to be running into some headwinds in India. Two senior editors have reportedly resigned their positions with the company due to editorial interference, according to a report by The Wire, after a story was killed that involved a gay activist who worked for the youth wing of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party.
• The Tow Center at Columbia has a report in CJR that looks at the problem of disinformation by comparing two very different communities in Philadelphia. In some cases, the authors point out, “a lack of trust in media, issues of perceived relevance, and a sense of relentless negativity have led many readers to vacillate between disengaging from the news for periods of time, and seeking out alternative sources.”
• In a bizarre incident, New York Daily News reporter Ken Lovett was arrested by state police on Wednesday for using his cellphone in the Senate chamber lobby, in breach of the chamber’s rules. After being detained, he was released by none other than Governor Andrew Cuomo, who personally went to the lockup at the state capitol and had him sprung. “I offered my services on a pro-bono basis—it just does my heart good to be able to say I freed Ken Lovett,” Cuomo said after the incident.

Most of the attention focused on Facebook right now is aimed at the Cambridge Analytica leak, where a shadowy Trump-affiliated organization got hold of personal data on 50 million Facebook users and targeted them with ads and fake news during the 2016 election. But this saga is just one example of how Facebook’s targeting features could be mis-used.  As a piece by Bloomberg points out, shady affiliate marketers have been mining the social network for dubious clicks for years, and making millions of dollars by doing so.

The piece goes inside a community of digital grifters and con-men, who use social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to con people out of their money with the offer of untold riches, self-help scams and bogus health remedies. Author Zeke Faux (whose last name seems particularly appropriate in this context) writes about a conference in Berlin last year where Facebook had a large presence. The conference that was supposed to be about traditional marketing, but was filled with shysters and click-farmers:

The Berlin conference was hosted by an online forum called Stack That Money, but a newcomer could be forgiven for wondering if it was somehow sponsored by Facebook Inc. Saleswomen from the company held court onstage, introducing speakers and moderating panel discussions. After the show, Facebook representatives flew to Ibiza on a plane rented by Stack That Money to party with some of the top affiliates… Officially, the Berlin conference was for aboveboard marketing, but the attendees I spoke to dropped that pretense after the mildest questioning. Some even walked around wearing hats that said “farmin’,” promoting a service that sells fake Facebook accounts.

Facebook has taken pains to point out that it doesn’t want this kind of business on the network, and says it has been working hard to get rid of scammers. Rob Leathern, who joined Facebook in 2017 as part of an effort to purge the network of affiliate marketers and similar low-life advertisers, tells Bloomberg that the days when people like Gryn could make millions with dubious clicks are over. “We are working hard to get these people off the platform. They may get away with it for a while, but the party’s not going to last,” he says.

That could be easier said than done, however, given the head start that Facebook gave to the scammers and their supporters. Faux spends part of the piece profiling one of the men at the heart of this affiliate scam network — a Polish entrepreneur named Robert Gryn, who worked his way up through Stack That Money, then developed software that hundreds of affiliate scammers use to leverage Facebook’s ad targeting machine.

Only a few years ago, Gryn was just another user posting on Stack That Money. Now, at 31, he’s one of the wealthiest men in Poland, with a net worth estimated by Forbes at $180 million. On Instagram, he posts pictures of himself flying on private jets, spearfishing, flexing his abs, and thinking deep thoughts. Last year he posed for the cover of Puls Biznesu, a Polish financial newspaper, with his face, neck, and ears painted gold. Gryn’s prominent cheekbones, toned biceps and forearms, perfectly gelled pompadour, and practiced smile lend him a resemblance to his favorite movie character: Patrick Bateman, the murderous investment banker played by Christian Bale in American Psycho.

Tracking down ads that were placed by Russian trolls and aimed at voters during the 2016 election is complicated, but it might actually be easier than rooting out the kind of scams Bloomberg describes. When their accounts are blocked or banned, affiliate link traders simply set up new ones under other plausible-sounding names, and start again. And the same tools that allowed the Russian trolls to target voters give marketers the ability to push their ads to a vast network of gullible users for pennies per click. Read the whole piece here.

Not surprisingly, the issue of “fake news” and the role that the giant web platforms play in spreading misinformation was a big topic of conversation at the Financial Times “Future of News” conference held this week in New York. But things started to get a little heated when Campbell Brown — Facebook’s head of news partnerships — was asked by moderator Matthew Garrahan if the social network might consider “some sort of accreditation system” as part of its attempts to solve the disinformation problem.

“I think we are moving in that direction,” Brown said, at which point she was interrupted by Google’s VP of News, Richard Gingras, who was also part of the panel discussion (along with Emily Bell, director of Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism). Gingras echoed what many journalists were probably thinking when he protested that “from a First Amendment perspective, we don’t want anyone accrediting who a journalist is.”

In tweets sent later to some journalists who made similar criticisms, Brown clarified that what she meant was not accreditation per se, but that in order to stamp out fake news, Facebook might have to verify trusted news organizations “through quality signals or other means.”

to clarify – i do think fake news may be pushing us into a world where we have to verify news orgs through quality signals or other means.

— Campbell Brown (@campbell_brown) March 22, 2018

Giving what seems like approval to the idea of accreditation might be horrifying for some, since it brings up unpleasant images of countries where the government or dictator in power decides who qualifies as a journalist. But at the same time, Brown’s gaffe is somewhat understandable, because Facebook is currently trapped between a rock and a hard place when it comes to taking action on fake news and misinformation.

On the one hand, the company is being pressed by governments both in the US and elsewhere to do more to remove or de-emphasize fake news, not to mention hate speech, harassment and other negative content. But the more it does that, the more it gets accused of infringing on free speech. And every attempt to rank news outlets on vague concepts such as “quality” or “trust” looks a lot like Facebook deciding who is a journalist and who isn’t.

Until the whole Russian troll fiasco broke out into the open, Facebook could plausibly maintain the fiction that it is just a platform, and that it doesn’t play favorites when it comes to sources of news or any other content (which has never really been the case, of course). But now it is having to grapple with the realities of being a media entity and making editorial decisions about what to include and who to highlight, and that is a completely different ball game.

Unless you have a specific interest in sex-trafficking or proposed legislation aimed at reducing it, you might not be familiar with a bill that was has been making its way through Congress, a bill known as the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act or SESTA. The bill has already been approved by the House, and on Wednesday was overwhelmingly approved by the Senate, which means it is on its way to President Trump for approval, and if he signs it — which seems likely, based on his previous comments — SESTA will become law.

Why should you care? Because in the process of trying to combat sex trafficking, Congress could wind up endangering free speech online. As CJR described in a piece on the proposed law last year, when it was still going through the House, SESTA effectively weakens one of the key pillars of online speech: Namely, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of **. That’s the clause that gives platforms like Facebook and Google immunity or “safe harbor” for the user-generated content that appears on their platforms.

While everyone was focused on Facebook, Congress just amended the bedrock law that undergirds the internet https://t.co/nXe0fBETno via @nitashatiku

— Scott Thurm (@ScottThurm) March 22, 2018

In a nutshell, Section 230 is the reason Facebook, Google and Twitter can distribute your tweets or status updates or video clips without being legally liable for everything contained in them. SESTA removes that protection or safe harbor in the case of anything involving sex trafficking — which wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that by removing that protection, it weakens the entire edifice that is Section 230.

This isn’t happening in isolation. Section 230’s safe-harbor provisions were already coming under fire from Congress because of the belief that they insulate platforms like Facebook or YouTube from responsibility for other kinds of speech the government doesn’t like, including Russian troll campaigns, “fake news,” sexual harassment, neo-Nazi sentiments and anything that falls into the large and growing bucket labelled “terrorism.”

And there's more coming. When I asked @MarkWarner yesterday what regulation Facebook should face, he specifically mentioned further changes to Sec. 230 — the law that defines @facebook as a platform instead of as a publisher https://t.co/E3FPNJRbsE

— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) March 22, 2018

The risk is that if Section 230’s protections for speech are weakened — as similar protections are being weakened in Europe to try and stamp out fake news and hate speech — it gives everyone from trolls to governments license to go after all kinds of speech they dislike or disagree with. And while Facebook and Google might have the resources to deal with that, lots of smaller publishers and online services don’t.

As Senator Ron Wyden, one of the authors of Section 230, put it: “”In the absence of Section 230, the internet as we know it would shrivel,” Wyden said on the Senate floor ahead of the vote Wednesday. “Only the platforms run by those with deep pockets, and an even deeper bench of lawyers, would be able to make it.” That would only entrench the dominance that Facebook and Google and other massive platforms have.

It might not have registered for most people trying to keep up with the maelstrom of news this week about the Facebook data leak — the one in which the shadowy, Trump-linked data company Cambridge Analytica got personal details on more than 50 million users — but a number of sharp-eyed New York Times critics noticed that one of the paper’s stories about the topic changed as it was edited.

So what, you might ask? After all, that kind of thing happens on news websites all the time: A short version goes up quickly and then later is replaced by a longer version as more information comes in.

Except in this case, the Times removed a line suggesting that Alex Stamos — a senior Facebook executive in charge of security — wanted to be more open about Russian involvement on the platform, and Chief Operations Officer Sheryl Sandberg shut him down.

Lean On pic.twitter.com/5ldLDjJHAS

— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) March 20, 2018

That sent the media conspiracy machine into overdrive. A site called Law & Crime, run by ABC News legal commentator Dan Abrams, noticed the change and wrote a story suggesting that the Times changed the story because of a complaint from Facebook.

“The New York Times apparently offers powerful third parties the ability to edit away—that is, to delete from the internet—unfavorable coverage appearing in the paper of record’s online edition,” the site wrote. The story was picked up by Glenn Greenwald, the occasionally combative journalist who runs The Intercept, who also accused the Times of watering down the story after complaints from Facebook.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/976258670932701184

Soon others joined the fray, including Kurt Walters of Demand Progress, who tweeted: “The original has multiple sources saying advocacy to disclose info about Russian activities on FB caused friction/resistance by Sandberg & other execs. The second does not.”

To their credit, Times reporters involved in the story—including Sheera Frenkel and Nicole Perlroth—responded to these allegations at length on Twitter, describing the changes to the story as nothing more than the usual editing process. They and others pointed out that the final version of the story still suggested Stamos and Sandberg clashed over the former’s desire to be more open about Russian activity, it just didn’t use the same specific sentence or word (“consternation”) as the original.

Glenn, I'm confused why you keep stating as fact that FB called NYT about the article (and that we subsequently weakened the passage). I'll repeat: I was the reporter who spoke to FB that day and this didn't happen.

— Sheera Frenkel (@sheeraf) March 21, 2018

None of this seemed to dissuade Greenwald, however, who continues to maintain that the Times made a significant change, after receiving criticism from Facebook, and is refusing to acknowledge it:

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/976536458461839366

To be fair to Greenwald and other Times critics, some of this is the paper’s fault. It routinely changes news stories—in some cases significantly—and then never discloses or explains the change. In several cases, the changes have became the subject of columns by former Public Editor Margaret Sullivan (the Times no longer has a public editor, after shutting down the position last year).

Web geeks have been recommending for some time that the paper—and other publishers—implement a “diffs” approach, which maintains a record of all the changes in an article over time, the way Wikipedia does with its “talk” pages (WikiTribune, the new journalism venture from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, has a similar system).

There is a site called NewsDiffs that tracks changes to Times stories, which is how the latest changes were discovered. But it would be so much easier if that kind of tracking system was built into the Times website. The chances of that seem astronomical, however. If the Times was interested in talking openly about those kinds of things, it would probably still have a public editor. All we got in this case was a response from Times PR department on Twitter about how the Law & Crime story was false.

As the mushroom cloud continued to spread over the weekend from Friday evening’s nuclear blast—the news that Facebook provided personal data on more than 50 million users to a Trump-linked data company called Cambridge Analytica—one consistent theme amid all the noise and smoke was the increasingly defensive argument from senior Facebook executives that a) What happened wasn’t technically a data “breach,” and b) It happened a long time ago, before they tightened up their data usage policies, so it doesn’t relate to current events like the Trump election campaign, etc.

What’s interesting is that the response to the Cambridge Analytica incident—shock, horror, the pointing of accusatory fingers and threats of regulation—says a lot about the way that attitudes toward Facebook and what it does have shifted over time. The honeymoon isn’t just over at this point; both sides are looking at hiring expensive lawyers and taking each other to divorce court.

Facebook breach: This is a major breach that must be investigated. It’s clear these platforms can’t police themselves. I've called for more transparency & accountability for online political ads. They say “trust us.” Mark Zuckerberg needs to testify before Senate Judiciary.

— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) March 17, 2018

At the risk of appearing like a Facebook apologist, both of the points made by Facebook’s former ad executive Andrew “Boz” Bosworth and Chief Strategy Officer Alex Stamos have a certain amount of truth to them. The data wasn’t obtained as the result of hackers getting access to a database illegally, so it wasn’t technically a breach. Cambridge Analytica got the data because an academic researcher sold it, even though Facebook’s rules say you’re not supposed to do that, and then the firm failed to delete it.

On the second point, Facebook is right that the API access the researcher made use of—which gave him access not just to the friend graph of users who signed up for a quiz, but to their friends’ friends as well—was tightened up in 2014, after a number of privacy researchers and others pointed out it could be misused.

In one of the many responses to the Facebook/Cambridge incident, Benedict Evans, who works for Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, defended the social network by pointing out that in the past, people complained that Facebook was doing too much censoring of the News Feed and was also too stingy with its data, and now that conversation has completely flipped:

https://twitter.com/BenedictEvans/status/975054282771722240

As a VC staffer, Evans is naturally inclined to defend a great Silicon Valley success story like Facebook (which Andreessen Horowitz invested in, and AH co-founder Marc Andreessen once sat on the board of). But that’s not to say he doesn’t have a point.

Not that long ago, Facebook was criticized for removing posts too often and infringing on people’s free-speech rights, but now people seem to want it to do a lot more to remove offensive speech, fake news, and so on. And when it comes to the company’s data, one major complaint was that Facebook’s API was too locked down, not open enough, and that it should make it easier for others (including users) to get their data out. Now the criticism seems to be that it didn’t lock it down soon enough, or tight enough.

As Two-Face said in movie Batman: The Dark Knight, you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself as a villain, and that’s where Facebook is now: All of the things it used to do that many people celebrated as a triumph of social technology—including the ability to target individuals based on their personal data, something the Obama campaign was celebrated for doing—are the fruit of a poisoned tree, in part because we understand what Russian trolls and other governments can do with such data. Our innocence has been lost, and perhaps that’s ultimately a good thing.