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Facebook unveiled a new experiment: a conversational AI named BlenderBot 3, which the company says can “can search the internet to talk about nearly any topic.” So Josh Benton at the Nieman Journalism Lab decided to ask BlenderBot who is to blame for the death of the news business:

From a great piece by Dave Karpf on the problem with Facebook:

“The trouble with Facebook is, more broadly, the trouble with the entirety of Silicon Valley and its particular version of techno-capitalism. You could imagine a profitable company that does what Facebook is actually good for. Create a free social network with a newsfeed optimized for personal life updates and conversations within your extended social graph. Pare things back, revert it to the place where people keep in touch and organize dinner parties. Sell advertisements against the page views. There’s money in such a company.

But it’s not a trillion-dollar company. Its founder doesn’t buy a mansion and then buy all the houses on adjacent lots to ensure privacy. Its early investors don’t carve out entire career paths on the basis of having been an early-investor-in-Facebook. It’s ultimately a small-money company. And Silicon Valley doesn’t do small-money companies.”

Okay, we live in a world. That world contains us and all the things we see. Of what are these things comprised? Matter! physicists say. Fantastic! And what is matter made of? Atoms, physicists say, but not as enthusiastic because they sense where this is heading. And what are atoms and their sub-atomic particles made of? the world asks. The actual stuff of life?

Here physicists are silent. Not because they don’t know—not exactly—but because the answer is too weird to be believed. At the sub-atomic level, particles become waves of energy and those waves of energy can sense when they’re trying to be measured. It’s true. Physicists talk about how the reading comes back all strange and mangled and just at spot of their attempted measurement.

Also: sub-atomic particles exist in two places at once. This is even weirder. This one particle is here, and also there, and at the same time. How can one thing be in two places at once? And what is the implication of that? Especially when that one thing is the literal building block of all life?

Paul Kix’s intro to this piece by Adam Frank, a physicist, in Aeon magazine

In her 20 years as a librarian, Sharon McKellar has unearthed all kinds of left-behind personal items — from doodles to recipes to old photographs — nestled between the pages of returned library books. She carefully removes them and reads them, then she scans and uploads them to the library’s website after scrubbing any personal identifying information.

“Part of the magic is that they sort of just appear,” McKellar said. “Sometimes, they may have been in a book for a really long time before we notice them there.” McKellar — a librarian at the Oakland Public Library — marvels at each memento, no matter how mundane. She chronicles them all.

Susan and Theodore Crane surprised their brother-in-law Samuel L. Clemens with this study in 1874. It was placed about 100 yards from the main house at Quarry Farm on a knoll overlooking the Chemung River Valley. In this octagonal building, Mark Twain wrote major portions of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Prince and the Pauper, A Tramp Abroad, and many short pieces.

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Two weeks ago, Mercy Ndegwa—a director of public policy at Meta, the parent company of Facebook—described in a blog post the various steps the company was taking in order to “help ensure a safe and secure general election in Kenya” (The election is scheduled for August 9, and Kenya has a long history of violence and unrest around national elections.) Ndegwa wrote that Meta had been preparing for the vote for the past year, and had been working hard to “reduce the spread of misinformation, detect and remove hate speech, improve digital literacy and help make political advertising more transparent”, among other things. In the six months leading up to April 30, 2022, Ndegwa said, Facebook “took action on more than 37,000 pieces of content for violating our hate speech policies on Facebook and Instagram in Kenya”, and blocked or removed more than 42,000 items that contravened Meta’s policies against inciting violence.

Ndegwa noted that Facebook was going to be paying particular attention to abuse involving female public figures, and that it was working with a team of people with experience in Kenya to understand and remove gender-based slurs in a number of local languages. She also added that Facebook had a strict policy of requiring advertisers who wanted to run political ads in Kenya to “undergo a verification process to verify their identity and that they live in the country”, as well as other checks to ensure that their ads complied with Facebook’s policies. In the six months leading up to April 30, Ndegwa wrote that about 36,000 ad submissions targeted to Kenya were rejected before they ran for not completing the authorization process or not including a disclaimer. Ndegwa’s post gave the impression Facebook was prepared for any eventuality, and had all the bases covered in terms of hate speech and calls for violence.

A week later, researchers at Global Witness, a human-rights group, and Foxglove Legal, a British nonprofit, released a report describing their attempts to buy ads that included hate speech related to Kenya, comparing certain tribal groups to animals, as well as calls for violence—including outright genocide, as well as rape, slaughter and beheadings—in both English and Swahili. All of the ads were eventually approved to run. “This follows a similar pattern we uncovered in Myanmar and Ethiopia”, the researchers wrote, “but for the first time also raises serious questions about Facebook’s content moderation capabilities in English”. Global Witness noted that Facebook has in the past praised the “super-efficient AI models” the company uses to detect hate speech, but said the group’s findings are “a stark reminder of the risk of hate and incitement to violence on their platform”. Nanjala Nyabola, a Kenyan technology researcher, told the Washington Post: “It is a deliberate choice to maximize labor and profit extraction, because they view the societies in the Global South primarily as markets, not as societies”.

Global Witness said when it contacted Meta to inform the company of the problem, it was told that “there will be instances where they miss things and take down content in error, as both machines and people make mistakes”. According to Global Witness, Ndegwa’s blog post was actually written in response to the group’s research, although it was published before the report was made public. Despite the detailed lists of precautions Ndegwa described, Global Witness says that even after her post was published, the group was able to submit more ads calling for violence, which were also approved. Following the release of the report, Danvas Makori, head of Kenya’s National Cohesion and Integration Commission, told a press conference that Facebook “is in violation of the laws of our country. They have allowed themselves to be a vector of hate speech and incitement, misinformation, and disinformation”. Makori said Meta would have a week to comply with speech laws or the service would be blocked from operating in Kenya.

The day after Makori made this pronouncement, however, Joseph Mucheru, a cabinet secretary in the Kenyan government responsible for internet and communications technologies posted a message on Twitter that seemed to contradict Makori’s warning. “Media, including social media, will continue to enjoy PRESS FREEDOM in Kenya”, he wrote. “Not clear what legal framework NCIC plans to use to suspend Facebook. Govt is on record. We are NOT shutting down the Internet”. Other government ministers made similar statements. Bridget Andere, African policy analyst at Access Now, a nonprofit human rights group, told Wired magazine that “there’s currently no legal framework that would allow NCIC to order Facebook’s suspension”. While those who want to fight hate might wish for an extra-legal method for stopping Facebook, some are concerned this will play into the hands of authoritarian governments looking to shut down social media for their own purposes, as India’s Modi government seems to be.

“Platforms like Meta have failed completely in their handling of misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech in Tigray and Myanmar”, Andere told Wired. “The danger is that governments will use that as an excuse for internet shutdowns and app blocking, when it should instead spur companies toward greater investment in human content moderation”. Global Witness, meanwhile, said its research “points to a broken system. For one of the world’s wealthiest companies, with staggering reach and a responsibility not to facilitate division and harm, Facebook can and should do better”. The group added that in 2020, following pressure from advertisers to stop profiting from hate speech, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, said that the company was going to do more to tackle the problem. However, Global Witness noted that “our repeated findings — in Myanmar, Ethiopia and now Kenya — raise serious questions about whether these commitments were followed through, particularly in all parts of the world”.

Here’s more on Facebook and hate speech:

Failure to remove: Documents leaked last year by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistleblower, showed that staffers at the social media network repeatedly sounded the alarm on the company’s failure to remove or down-rank posts inciting violence in countries like Ethiopia, CNN reported. The documents show workers warned managers about how Facebook was being used by “problematic actors,” including states and foreign organizations, to spread hate speech and incite violence. CNN said the documents “also indicate that the company has, in many cases, failed to adequately scale up staff or add local language resources to protect people in these places”.

Complicity: In 2018, the United Nations categorized the beating, displacement, and killing of tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar as a genocide. In a separate report, the agency concluded that Facebook “played a determining role” in the violence, by allowing members of the army and other anti-Rohingya elements to spread messages of hate and calls for violence. A group of six civil-society organizations in Myanmar wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, saying the social network’s behavior relied too much on third parties, failed to engage with local human-rights workers on important issues, and exhibited “a lack of transparency”.

Blame game: Global Witness pointed out in its report on Kenya that the acceptance of ads with hate speech and calls for violence “is not the fault of the individual content moderators, who all too often are asked to undertake deeply traumatising work – including in Kenya – with scant regard for their mental health and decent working conditions”. The group also noted that earlier this year, a former moderator at Facebook filed a lawsuit in Kenya against Meta and its local partner, Sama, alleging moderators suffer from poor working conditions including “irregular pay, inadequate mental health support, union-busting, and violations of their privacy and dignity”.

Other notable stories:

Semafor, the online news startup from Ben Smith, former New York Times media writer, and Justin Smith, former head of Bloomberg Media, has hired a number of journalists in both the US and other countries, the Financial Times reported. “Liz Hoffman, a Wall Street Journal reporter known for landing finance scoops, has joined alongside politics and technology journalists from BuzzFeed and the Washington Post, respectively”, the FT wrote. “In addition to assembling a team of reporters in the US, Semafor plans to open local bureaux, starting with Africa [and] has hired Yinka Adegoke, a Nigeria-educated journalist and former Africa editor of Quartz, to lead the team”.

The lawyer representing parents of Sandy Hook victims—who are suing suing Alex Jones, the Infowars podcast host, for defamation—said in court that Jones’ attorney “messed up” and sent a digital copy of Jones’ cell phone, including all its email and text message records, to the prosecution. Insider reported that the copy of Jones’ phone “revealed a text about the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012 that Jones claimed did not exist, as well as financial information for Jones’ InfoWars”. Messages taken from the phone appear to show that InfoWars made as much as $800,000 per day in 2018.

The New York Times announced Wednesday that it added about 180,000 digital-only subscribers in the second quarter of the year, but generated less digital advertising revenue than it did in the same period a year earlier. The company had total revenue of $556 million, up 11.5 percent from a year earlier—and digital subscriptions contributed almost half that amount—but its operating profit fell by 18 percent to $76 million. The lower profit was a result of losses at The Athletic, which the Times bought in February.

Triller, a video app that competes with TikTok, said last year that it was giving 300 Black content creators contracts totaling $14 million, which it called “the largest ever one-time commitment of capital to Black creators”. But Taylor Lorenz reports for the Washington Post that some creators have not seen any of the money they were promised. “Nearly a year after Triller began recruiting Black talent, its payments to many creators have been erratic — and, in some cases, nonexistent, according to interviews with more than two dozen creators, talent managers and former company staff”, Lorenz wrote.

Andy Bird, the CEO of Pearson, one of the world’s largest publishers of school textbooks, hopes that the company can use non-fungible tokens and the blockchain to get reimbursed for secondary sales of its books, Bloomberg reported. Bird told reporters following the company’s financial results that “in the analogue world, a Pearson textbook was resold up to seven times, and we would only participate in the first sale. Technology like blockchain and NFTs allows us to participate in every sale of that particular item”.

Kathryn Foxhall writes for CJR about “a growing culture of censorship by public information officers”. In the past, she writes, journalists were able to call and talk to scientists working in the public service without approval from higher-ups, but that has changed in recent years. “Glenn Nowak, a former head of media relations at the CDC who held various communication positions at the agency starting in the early nineties, says each subsequent administration has become more restrictive on journalists’ talking to scientists and experts without oversight from authorities”.

Some podcast guests are paying as much as $50,000 to appear on popular podcasts, Bloomberg reported. “Guests with a product to sell often see podcasting as a golden ticket—an unfiltered medium through which to reach listeners for extended periods of time”, the news service wrote. Some marketing companies are brokering these kinds of deals, as is a new startup called Guestio, but not everyone is in favor. “It’s a gray area, but it’s payola”, said Jon Bier, CEO and founder of public-relations firm Jack Taylor.

For the second year, the National Press Foundation is offering a free online conference in October for journalists who want to cover rare diseases, which it says will consist of “online briefings and question-and-answer sessions from top world experts in rare diseases, diagnostics, targeted testing and drug development”. The foundation is also offering reporting grants of up to $3,000 to 20 journalists to research and write about a rare disease of their choosing.  Selected fellows will be able to attend an additional online session with experts and coaches in narrative journalism.

A friend’s young son was making sand castles on our beach and dug up a carved stone arrowhead. I did a bit of research online and as far as I can tell, this thing is about 4,000 years old or so. I’ve dug on that beach my whole life, and all I’ve ever found are old fishing lures, and the occasional cigarette butt 🙂

Talia Lavin is a journalist who writes a great newsletter called The Sword and the Sandwich that alternates between social and cultural analysis and reviews of famous sandwiches (I know that seems like an odd combination but it works). In a recent issue she looked at the rise of prophetic religious movements and attitudes in the US:

“Looking into the eyes of those struck by a prophet, you can perceive a ravenous hunger for connection: that the touch of the hand or the breath from the mouth of a charismatic preacher can fill you with the wind of God; that you are not alone in the universe; that you and the rest of the flock can shore up an island of sanctuary for yourselves, and watch in comfort as the world drowns. It is the hunger to be among the elect, and to be immortal, to be one with the Divine, and to welcome the end times. It is the hunger to turn Fortune’s Wheel with your own hands to your own ends, to guide its revolutions, to cast down the capricious goddess and lift up the prophet in his certainty and zeal.”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Last week, Meta announced a major change to its Facebook service. Instead of a user’s “news feed” being composed primarily of content from friends and other accounts a user has chosen to follow, the main feed on a user’s Facebook page will be an algorithmically-filtered collection of content from anywhere, and posts from a user’s friends will be moved to a separate page. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, wrote about the proposed changes in May, and now the redesigned feeds are in the process of being rolled out to Facebook’s three billion daily users. As part of these changes, Sara Fischer of Axios also reported that the term “news feed” is being retired as a descriptor for the main feed on a user’s page. Facebook first introduced the news feed in 2006, as a way of making it easy for users to see what all their friends were doing in one place, and while the new feature was not well received by some, it soon became the main interface for the social network, and the driving force behind Facebook’s growth as an advertising vehicle.

According to Axios, one reason why the main feed will no longer be called a “news feed” is that Meta is “de-emphasizing its investment in news content”. The Wall Street Journal reported that Campbell Brown, the head of global media partnerships for Meta, said last week the company is “reallocating resources away from its Facebook News tab, and its Bulletin newsletter platform.” This kind of reallocation—which may be driven in part by the financial pressure the company is under—could mean an end to the payments Meta has been making for the past three years to news publishers who agreed to have their content featured on a separate News tab. Facebook News was launched in 2019, after years of complaints from publishers such as Rupert Murdoch, founder of News Corp., about Facebook stealing content from media companies. The Journal reported that Meta has paid a total of $90 million a year to about 200 news outlets, including more than $15 million a year to the Washington Post, and more than $20 million a year to the New York Times.

Even at the time, many saw the Facebook News launch as primarily a public relations exercise, rather than a sign of any ongoing commitment to the media industry or journalism. Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, wrote that a one-on-one interview between Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp—parent company of Dow Jones and the Journal—and Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta, was “a publicity coup for Facebook,” a sign that it had “tamed the biggest beast in the journalism jungle”. Only a year before the new payments were announced, Zuckerberg seemed skeptical of the idea of paying publishers for their news content, saying “I’m not sure that makes sense”. Since then, Meta has been forced to make payments to news publishers in Australia, after that country passed a law that compelled digital platforms to negotiate licensing deals or have them imposed by the government. (Several countries such as Canada and the UK have proposed similar legislation).

The end of the Facebook News tab, and the tacit admission that the main user feed no longer qualifies as a “news feed,” are only the most recent signs that Meta and Facebook’s interest in news continues to decline—apart from payments it is forced to make by legislation, and the remains of a few token programs such as the Meta Journalism Project, which hands out grants and training to local news outlets. When the project was first launched in 2017, as a kind of competitor to the Google News Initiative, Facebook’s announcement made promises about how publishers would be able to use the company’s “Instant Articles” format to generate revenue, and how they would be trained to use Crowdtangle, an analytical tool for social platforms that Facebook acquired. Many have since found Instant Articles to be a bust in terms of revenue, and Crowdtangle appears to be in the process of being dismantled, in part because some Meta executives believe it allowed the media too much access to Facebook data.

Facebook’s history in dealing with the news media is filled with a number of similar examples of promises that have led to disappointment. In 2016, as the Nieman Journalism Lab notes, Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives started “pushing the notion that news video on Facebook was publishers’ bright future, a “new golden age”. The metrics Facebook was using to measure engagement with news video later turned out to be overstated, however, and the company paid a group of news publishers—who had committed significant resources to this new pivot-to-video strategy—$40 million to settle a lawsuit over that fact (although Facebook did not admit any wrongdoing). The Wall Street Journal later reported that the shift to more video in the news feed might have actually driven engagement down rather than up, meaning news publishers actually wound up worse off as a result of following the social network’s advice. An attempt to help push traffic to local news publishers also proved to be a bust.

All of these experiences have come on top of the continued down-ranking of professional news publishing content by the Facebook algorithm. In the latest change, in 2018, Facebook said it was de-emphasizing content from news publishers because users told the company that “public content—posts from businesses, brands and media—is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other,” according to a blog post written by Zuckerberg. At the time, Franklin Foer wrote in The Atlantic that Facebook was doing the media a favor. “It has forced media to face the fact that digital advertising and ever-growing web traffic will never sustain the industry,” he wrote, “especially if that traffic comes from monopolies like Facebook.” Now, media companies will get to learn that lesson all over again, as their content is forced to compete in a new algorithm-driven feed run by company that is trying to compete with TikTok.

Here’s more on Facebook:

Disinfo rethink: Meta said it has asked its Oversight Board of independent advisors for advice on how to handle misinformation around COVID-19. Nick Clegg, Meta’s head of global affairs, wrote in a blog post that while the company remains committed to combating COVID-19 misinformation, it is asking the board to consider “whether we should address this misinformation through other means, like labeling or demoting it either directly or through our third-party fact-checking program”.

Virtually blocked: The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday filed for an injunction to block Meta, the parent company of Facebook, from buying a virtual reality company called Within, according to a report in the New York Times. “The antitrust lawsuit is the first to be filed under Lina Khan, the commission’s chair and a leading progressive critic of corporate concentration, against one of the tech giants,” the Times reported. “Khan has argued that regulators must stop violations of competition and consumer protection laws when it comes to the bleeding edge of technology, including virtual and augmented reality, and not just in areas where the companies have already become behemoths.”

Literally anxious: Anxiety has been increasing among Facebook staff as Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, ratchets up the pressure in order to compete with TikTok, some reports say. “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg said on the June 30th call, according to a recording obtained by The Verge. “And part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is okay with me.”

Celebrity critics: Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian, two of the most well-known celebrities on Instagram, with a combined 686 million followers, both posted story updates on their accounts on Monday asking Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) to “stop trying to be TikTok.” The two were reacting to changes the service has made to its feeds, with more algorithmically-recommended content and less content from friends and other accounts a user has chosen to follow. “Make Instagram Instagram again (stop trying to be TikTok. I just want to see cute photos of my friends),” Jenner and Kardashian both wrote.

Other notable stories:

GOP politicians are “increasingly shirking sit-down interviews, barring journalists from 2022 events, and skipping debates,” Charlotte Klein wrote for Vanity Fair. At the annual Republican “Sunshine Summit” in Florida, “many local and national mainstream outlets were unable to get press credentials, according to the Tallahassee Democrat,” Klein writes, “including the Miami Herald, Politico, Florida Politics, the New York Times, and the Washington Post“. A Florida wire service, the Wall Street Journal, and Business Insider were among the few mainstream outlets allowed to cover the event. Meanwhile, Paul Farhi profiled Christina Pushaw, the press secretary for Ron DeSantis.

Vox Media is laying off 39 people—about two percent of its current workforce—in an effort to prepare for a potential economic downturn, Sara Fischer reported for Axios. “The company is laying off staffers in a few key areas, including recruiting, some editorial roles and sales,” Fischer wrote. “The cuts are targeted towards certain parts of the company, including some departments within its lifestyle site, Thrillist.” A source told Axios that Vox plans to continue to hire for certain critical roles, but will reduce the pace of hiring.

Sheila Rayam has been named executive editor of The Buffalo News, the first Black journalist and only the second woman to hold that position in the 142-year history of the newspaper, The News announced on Wednesday. “Rayam has been the executive editor of Gannett’s Mohawk Valley news operations, including the Utica Observer-Dispatch, since April 2021,” the paper wrote. “Prior to that, she spent three decades rising through the ranks at the Democrat & Chronicle after graduating from SUNY Buffalo State.”

Vanessa Pappas, the COO of TikTok, announced on Wednesday that the company will soon give researchers access to much of the platform’s data and to its moderation systems, The Verge reported. “Pappas says TikTok will soon provide access to the ‘public and anonymized data’ on the platform so ‘selected researchers’ can “assess content and trends or conducts tests,” The Verge wrote. “Later this year, researchers will have access to TikTok’s moderation tools at its transparency center, a virtual hub where people can learn more about TikTok’s policies and get updates about the changes it’s making.” TikTok has come under fire for the connections that Bytedance, its parent company, has to China.

For CJR, Jem Bartholomew talked with Becca Ricks, a senior researcher at the Mozilla Foundation, whose investigative work highlighted how partisan influencers are evading TikTok’s weak political ad policies. “We zeroed in on conservative organizations like Turning Point USA,” Ricks said. “They’re a nonprofit and they have a dedicated influencer program that’s specifically targeted at funding young conservative content creators on social media. We found a number of influencers who had been flown out to their events or had talked about their relationship with TPUSA.”

Disney on Wednesday confirmed that it will allow political issue ads on the Hulu streaming service, effective immediately, according to Axios. “Hulu has prohibited issue advertising for years, although it has accepted candidate advertising. But now that Disney has majority control over the streamer, it’s moving to integrate Hulu’s policies to match Disney’s,” the site reported. Democratic party groups were upset prior to the change that Hulu was blocking ads related to abortion and gun control.

Grace Abels writes for Politifact about two Facebook pages that say they provide “newsy and up-to-the-minute coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine,” but actually spread dangerous misinformation. “On a given day, their followers might see videos claiming Norwegians raided Russian ships, Vladimir Putin was defeated on ‘all fronts,’ or that a single British ship blocked a Russian fleet,” Abels writes. “None of those headlines are true. But that doesn’t stop the pages from earning clicks, views and a monetizable following.”

Fascinating story here of how we got the avocado — something that was not a given by any means, as Maria Sharapova describes at The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings):

In the last week of April in 1685, English explorer and naturalist William Dampier — the first person to circumnavigate the globe three times — arrived on a small island in the Bay of Panama. Dampier made careful note of local tree species, but none fascinated him more than the tall “Avogato Pear-tree,” with its unusual fruit — “as big as a large Lemon,” green until ripe and then “a little yellowish,” with green flesh “as soft as Butter.” He described how the fruit were eaten — two or three days after picking, with the rind peeled — and their most common local preparation: with a pinch of salt and a roasted plantain, so that “a Man that’s hungry, may make a good meal of it.”

Continue reading “The unlikely survival of the humble avocado”