Category: Fortune

While it has taken steps to clamp down on the spread of “fake news,” Facebook continues to resist attempts to portray the company as a media entity. But the reality is that many people use it as a news outlet and have come to think of it that way, according to a recent study.

A report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center looked at the ways that more than 2,000 U.S. adults find and consume news during an average week. It asked them twice a day for a week about where they got their news, and asked them to describe the experience.

About 10% of the users surveyed said the source of the news they came across was Facebook. In other words, they couldn’t remember which specific news outlet produced the news that they saw, just that it came via Facebook. More people cited the social network as a frequent news source than cited the New York Times, Washington Post or CBS.

In fact, almost 50% of those surveyed by the Pew Center researchers couldn’t remember the original source of the news they came across, even just a few hours after they had read it. For media companies relying on brand awareness, that’s a somewhat disturbing statistic.

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

The term “fake news” seems to have come out of nowhere over the last six months, dominating much of the discussion around Donald Trump and his election as president, and has triggered what some believe to be a full-fledged moral panic about the “post truth” era we live in.

While there are new aspects to the problem, however — including how easy it is to create realistic-looking websites, and the power of social networks to spread fake news farther and faster — experts point out that it is not a new problem. Not only that, but we arguably have much better tools to fight it than we have ever had before.

Even the idea that fake news about a candidate might affect the election of the president of the United States isn’t all that new. Robert Parkinson, a professor at Binghampton University, pointed out in a piece for the Washington Post that the creation and spread of fake-news stories played a role in the birth of the United States.

John Quincy Adams, Parkinson notes, wrote in his diary in 1769 about creating fake and exaggerated stories that would be published in various early newspapers of the time, stories designed to undermine the King’s authority in Massachusetts.

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

The promise of so-called “sharing economy” platforms like Airbnb, Uber, Lyft and TaskRabbit was that by using social media tools and digital technology, markets for goods and services such as taxis, hotel rooms and cheap labor could be made more efficient. But this golden vision of the future has started to look a little tarnished of late.

Airbnb, for example, grew at a torrid pace over the past eight years by allowing house and apartment owners to rent their dwellings to any traveller quickly and easily. Millions of people have taken advantage of these services, and Airbnb now has a market value estimated at $30 billion, roughly the same size as the Marriott International hotel chain.

Some regulators, however, are less enthusiastic. A number of cities and regions from Berlin to San Francisco have implemented restrictions on Airbnb rentals, arguing that they are in violation of zoning and other regulations, and the company is currently trying to negotiate a cease-fire by offering to share tax revenue and make other concessions.

The problem for Airbnb is that these concessions and restrictions are likely to significantly decrease its potential revenue generation and earning power, and thus remove some of the benefits and efficiencies that were supposed to flow from the sharing economy. And Airbnb isn’t the only peer-to-peer service provider facing that problem.

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

If TV networks like CNN and CBS are happy with the higher ratings and advertising revenue that Donald Trump has brought them, they aren’t the only ones benefiting from his ascent to power. The New York Times has also seen a dramatic increase in paying subscribers since the election, and that is helping keep the company afloat as print continues to decline.

According to CEO Mark Thompson, the newspaper added more digital subscribers to its paywall plan in the last three months of 2016 than it did in all of 2013 and 2014 put together. That’s 276,000 new sign-ups, to be exact, and those additions pushed the paper’s digital subscribers to over 1.8 million.

Unfortunately for the Times, while digital subscriptions are growing, print advertising— which still generates the lion’s share of the company’s revenue, although a smaller proportion than in the past— is still in free fall.

In the most recent quarter, revenue from print ads fell by a whopping 20%, and the paper has seen similar double-digit declines every quarter for the past year or more. In 2016 as a whole, print ad revenue dropped by 16%. This is what Thompson described in a comment to his own paper as the “significant headwinds” the Times is facing.

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

When you get to be as large as Facebook—something very few companies ever manage to do—it becomes more and more difficult to keep growing at the same rate you did when you were smaller. This is often referred to as the “law of large numbers.” But Facebook shows few signs of hitting any kind of growth limit just yet.

Many of the Wall Street analysts who follow the giant social network have been warning about a slowdown for some time now, and even Facebook itself has spoken about how it expects to see a slowdown in the growth rate of its advertising revenue. Those fears helped push the stock price down after the company posted its results in November.

On Wednesday, however, investors appeared to be all smiles, after Facebook beat earnings and revenue estimates for its most recent quarter, and dramatically increased its user base. The shares were up in after-hours trading.

Instead of the $1.31 per share in profit that Wall Street was expecting, Facebook made $1.41, and its total revenue—the vast majority of which is advertising-related—came in at $8.8 billion for the quarter, compared with consensus estimates of $8.5 billion. That represented growth of more than 50% over the same quarter of last year.

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

After initially denying that “fake news” was a problem on its network, Facebook has spent the past few months trying to come up with ways to stop the spread of hoaxes and false news reports. The latest step is a change to the algorithm that the company says will promote what it calls “authentic” news stories in users’ news feeds.

A post published on Wednesday by two Facebook research scientists and one of the social network’s engineering team said that “authentic communication” is one of the key values of the Facebook news feed. That includes news stories that people “consider genuine, and not misleading, sensational or spammy,” the post added.

Facebook uses a number of signals to determine what to show you in your news feed, the researchers said — including how close you are to the person or page that is posting an update or sharing a piece of content, and how many likes and shares it has.

With the latest update, the company says it will be adding new “universal signals” to the algorithm and its ranking process. To come up with those signals or indicators, engineers looked at various Facebook pages and tried to identify whether they were posting spam, or trying to “game the feed” by asking for likes and shares.

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

In the wake of the Trump administration’s executive order freezing immigration from seven countries, a number of media companies have spoken out either publicly or directly to their employees about the move. Some have treated it mostly as a logistical complication, but others have been more vocal about their support for open immigration.

Rupert Murdoch’s sons Lachlan and James, for example, who run 21st Century Fox — the media and entertainment conglomerate they and their father control — sent a note to their employees pointing out that the company includes immigrants at almost every level, and was founded by one (the elder Murdoch is Australian by birth).

“We deeply value diversity and believe immigration is an essential part of America’s strength,” the note said. “Moreover, as a company that is driven by creativity and innovation, we recognize the unique perspective offered by our many people who came to the U.S. in search of the opportunity for unfettered self-expression.”

A number of Murdoch-watchers pointed out that this critical response to Trump’s move is interesting in part because the family-controlled network Fox News has been fairly positive about the ban, and Trump and Rupert Murdoch are said to be close.

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

A key plank in Donald Trump’s election campaign was his contempt for what he called the “dishonest media,” and that position has not softened with his inauguration as the 45th president of the United States. If anything, he and the rest of his White House team have doubled down on this approach, in an attempt to make the media look even less trustworthy.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer started the process with his first press briefing immediately after the inauguration, in which he lambasted the press for getting the numbers wrong. More recently, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway picked up the torch and used it to set fire to the traditional professional relationship between the media and the president.

In an interview this weekend with Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, Conway — a former lawyer and political pollster who was named a senior counselor to the president after Trump won the election — asked why more journalists haven’t been fired for their attacks on Trump and his administration.

“Who is cleaning house? Which one is going to be the first network to get rid of these people who said things that were just not true? Talk about fake news, talk about alternative facts. Not one network person has been let go. Not one silly political analyst and pundit who talked smack all day long about Donald Trump has been let go.”

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

The Sundance Film Festival in Utah used to be a place where the cult films of tomorrow got their first showing amid small crowds of movie buffs. But increasingly it has become the place where streaming services like Netflix — and its rapidly growing competitor Amazon — shop for potential hit movies they can add to their digital catalogs.

At the most recent version of the festival, both Netflix and Amazon were once again the biggest spenders, snapping up movies that they hope will boost their audience numbers and possibly even increase their chances of winning awards. Amazon’s film Manchester By The Sea was the first movie produced by a streaming service to be nominated for an Oscar.

That movie was one of the big ones that Amazon landed at last year’s festival, paying $10 million for the rights to the movie and beating out several smaller competitors. In some cases these deals don’t even wait for the official festival to begin, but are signed in the days leading up to the event based on the pre-show buzz about a specific property.

This year Amazon also signed one of the largest checks, and this time it wasn’t for a drama but a romantic comedy called The Big Sick, starring Silicon Valley star Kumail Nanjiani, which the online retailer paid $12 million for. Amazon also paid $6 million for a Grateful Dead documentary, $3 million for a movie called Landline, and more than $2 million for a documentary about the terrorist group ISIS called City of Ghosts.

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

If you work in the media, or are even tangentially interested in it, you’ve probably read that Steve Bannon interview in the New York Times, the one where President Trump’s adviser attacks the mainstream press for its cluelessness, and says that they deserve to feel humiliated and irrelevant. And if you haven’t read it, you’ve probably seen plenty of outraged responses.

Some of those who reacted to the interview warned Bannon — and by extension the entire Trump White House — that picking fights with the media is a mistake, citing the example of Richard Nixon and Watergate. The message was clear: Don’t attack us or we will bring you down.

Steve Bannon is many things, including the chairman of the right-wing news site Breitbart News, who some believe has white nationalist (i.e. racist) sympathies. But one thing he almost certainly isn’t is stupid. So why would he go out of his way to try and humiliate the media?

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

Alphabet is best known as the holding company that owns Google, but its focus is increasingly on all of the other bets it has made in addition to the search engine — whether it’s a bet on the future of home automation, with products like the Nest thermostat and the Google Home smart assistant, or bets on mobile hardware like its new Pixel line of smartphones.

That doesn’t mean anything is wrong with Google itself. Far from it, in fact. The search engine continues to be a giant cash-spewing machine at the center of the Alphabet universe, providing the never-ending stream of money that has allowed it to branch out in many different directions.

Google’s overall revenue climbed 25% in the most recent quarter to $25.8 billion. Not surprisingly, that made up the vast majority of Alphabet’s revenue, which grew 22% year over year to $26.1 billion.

However, the company’s earnings of $9.36 per share (excluding certain items) were well below the consensus estimate of $9.64, which helped push the stock down (GOOG) by more than 3% in after-hours trading on Thursday.

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

Facebook has been blamed by many for its complicity in the explosion of “fake news” during the recent election campaign, a phenomenon that some say helped Donald Trump take the Oval Office. After initially dismissing the issue, Mark Zuckerberg has talked more recently about taking concrete steps to attack the problem.

One step that Facebook is taking is to alter the way its “Trending Topics” section works, in order to try and keep fake news items from moving up that leaderboard, which sits in the upper right-hand section of every user’s page. The change was announced on Wednesday in a blog post.

Instead of ranking topics based purely on the number of people sharing, liking or commenting on them, Facebook says it will now look at whether those topics or stories are also being covered by a wide range of other publishers and media outlets. The company said it hopes this will reduce the likelihood of having an article from a fake-news website dominating the trending topics.

In addition to some of the fact-checking features that Facebook announced recently — which include integrating with the work being done by organizations like Politifact — this is a good step towards improving the environment for news on the social network.

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

Note: This piece I wrote for Fortune magazine in January of 2017 caused me no end of problems, and looking back I think may have helped lead to my eventual departure from Fortune. The publisher of Fortune, Alan Murray — the man who hired me, along with a group of other Gigaom writers, after Gigaom shut down in 2015 — made it abundantly clear that he did not like this piece at all.

I argued that differences of opinion between columnists and editors are normal, but that if I supported my argument with facts (which I think I did) then it should be allowed to run. He let it be published, but under protest. Not long afterward, he ordered that any piece I wrote that involved Trump had to be approved by him personally before being published. I left Fortune in May.

As expected, Donald Trump’s blatant disregard for accuracy has not moderated itself any now that he has become the 45th president of the United States. In just the last few days, he has made multiple statements that are clearly false, including comments about the size of the crowd at his inauguration and — more importantly — whether millions of people voted illegally.

This behavior has sparked a kind of existential debate within the U.S. news media. How should a news organization respond when the president makes false statements or repeats unsupported claims? Is it ever appropriate to use the word “lie” in such circumstances?

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

Social media, especially Twitter, played a central role in the rise of Donald Trump from celebrity TV host and real-estate magnate to 45th president of the United States. So it seems fitting that Twitter was also the scene of a strange kind of guerrilla uprising on Tuesday against the Trump administration and its practices involving social media.

What seems to have triggered the revolt was the treatment of a National Parks Service account on the weekend. After it re-posted Twitter updates that called into question the size of the crowds at Trump’s inauguration, the account’s activity was frozen. The following day, the tweets in question had been deleted, replaced by an apology for “the mistaken retweets.”

Other government agencies, including the EPA and the USDA’s research arm, have also had their social-media accounts frozen indefinitely as of Tuesday, and staff memos have said that these accounts will likely be more “centrally controlled” in the future.

In the face of all this, the Twitter account for Badlands National Park in South Dakota posted a series of tweets on Tuesday calling attention to the rise of global warming, something President Trump has publicly referred to as a hoax. The posts drew cheers, along with thousands of re-tweets, and the account quickly gained tens of thousands of new followers.

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

Employees at several government departments and agencies, including the Environmental Protection Association and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, have been ordered not to make any statements or provide any documents to the public, whether via social media or by providing comments and/or documents — including press releases — to journalists or media outlets.

It’s not clear how long these gag orders will remain in place, or whether they are simply designed to freeze activity until Trump’s hand-picked staff can issue new regulations on social media or public interaction at those agencies. The EPA has also been ordered to freeze all grants, contracts and other agreements until further notice.

A memo sent to EPA staff said that there should be no press releases sent to “external audiences” and that “no social media will be going out.” The memo also says that a digital strategist will be coming in to oversee the agency’s social-media policies, and that “existing, individually controlled social-media accounts may become more centrally controlled.”

The memo also ordered that no new posts be made to any agency blogs, that staff send a list of any external speaking arrangements, that no new documents be uploaded to any externally-facing website and that “incoming media requests will be carefully screened.”

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