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As we have done the past several years, we did a big backcountry camping trip in September, right around my birthday, with our neighbours and friends Marc and Kris. This year it was a little harder to find a campsite than it has been in previous years, because COVID restrictions loosened up and everyone wanted to be out in the woods apparently. But we found a great site on a little lake called McEwen, just northwest of Carnarvon, and we picked a great weekend to do it because the weather was fantastic for camping — a big rainstorm went by just as we were getting ready to put in, but we didn’t even get wet, and it was essentially warm and sunny the whole time we were there. It did get a little cool at night — like around 9 degrees Celsius — but we were fine.

We put into Margaret Lake, which is long and thin, but we crossed it sideways and then had a fairly long and rocky portage (about 300 metres or so) uphill to the next put-in. Unfortunately, it had rained not that long before we got there, so the trail was quite muddy, but we made it without any mishaps. We paddled out of a swamp and into Dan Lake, and stopped partway up for a lunch break at one of the campsites. We were thinking we would have another portage to get into McEwen, but as it turned out the water was still high enough that we just poled the canoes through a narrow swampy section and we were in McEwen. After that, it was only a 20-minute or so paddle and we made it to our campsite.

Continue reading “Backcountry camping trip to McEwen Lake”

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

Over the long weekend, one of the trending topics on a number of social-media platforms was a news item from Oklahoma with some terrifying information: it said that so many people were in hospital due to overdoses of ivermectin—a drug originally designed for horses, which some anti-vaccine sources have been promoting (incorrectly) as a defense against COVID—that there was no room in the intensive-care units for other patients, including those with gunshot wounds. The story, from a local news outlet called KFOR, contained quotes from an interview with Dr. Jason McElyea, a local physician, and the article quickly got picked up by a number of national outlets, including Rolling Stone magazine, the Guardian in the UK, Newsweek magazine, and Business Insider. A producer for MSNBC repeated the claim on Twitter (although she later deleted it), and so did the Rachel Maddow show.

Not long afterward, the story started to spring some major holes. As detailed on Twitter by Drew Holden—a public-affairs consultant in Washington, DC and former assistant to a Republican congressman—and by Scott Alexander on his popular blog, Astral Codex Ten, the first sign that all was not right came with a statement from a large Oklahoma hospital, which said that there was no bed shortage due to ivermectin overdoses, and that the doctor quoted in the KFOR report didn’t work there. Others pointed out that in his original interview with the Oklahoma news outlet, McElyea hadn’t said anything about ivermectin cases crowding out other patients. He mentioned that there had been some ivermectin overdoses, and he said that beds were scarce, but the connection between the two seemed to be a leap that the news outlet and subsequent reports had added.

This was all it took for the story to catch fire with right-wing Twitter trolls and other conservative groups, as yet another example of the mainstream media‘s tendency to make up news stories to either make citizens of rural areas look stupid, or to overstate the risk of non-mainstream COVID treatments. Many latched on to the tweet from the Maddow account, and used it as evidence that no one fact-checks their statements any more, especially when they serve the purpose of making right-wing anti-vaxers and COVID denialists look bad. Others used the Rolling Stone story as an excuse to revisit the magazine’s infamous investigative story from 2014 on an alleged rape at the University of Virginia, which collapsed after the single source it was based on retracted some of her statements.

Continue reading “How a story about ivermectin and hospital beds went wrong”

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

In February, Facebook announced an experiment designed to test how much political news users wanted in their News Feeds, a test that would remove that kind of content for a small group of users in the US, Canada, Brazil, and Indonesia, and then survey those users for their reactions to the removal. According to an update published on Tuesday, the company saw what it called “positive results” from the experiment, and as a result is now expanding the test to cover users in Ireland, Sweden, Spain, and Costa Rica. In addition, Facebook said it is tweaking the way it measures user behavior when interacting with political content: “We’ve learned that some engagement signals can better indicate what posts people find more valuable than others,” the company said. Instead of looking only at whether someone is likely to comment on or share a political post, Facebook said it will now put more emphasis on newer signals, such as how likely a person is to provide negative feedback about a political post or topic that happens to show up in their News Feed.

Facebook’s announcement is just the latest in a long series of algorithm changes aimed at de-emphasizing not just political news but professional news sources in general. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said in 2018 the social network would be changing the News Feed to prioritize content shared by a user’s friends and family, rather than content from professional publishers and brands. “I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions,” he said. Some hoped the changes might spur some media companies to stop relying on Facebook for their traffic, but it’s unclear whether that has happened to any significant extent. Meanwhile, some disinformation researchers have pointed out that Facebook’s prioritization of content from friends and family—including a focus on promoting the use of private groups—may actually have made the problem worse.

Whenever Facebook tweaks its news algorithm, media outlets and publishers around the world tend to hold their breath, because even a small change in such a large and influential platform can impact a publisher’s traffic significantly. When the company made a similar tweak to its algorithms designed to down-rank professional news content in favor of personal posts, some publishers saw traffic declines as high as 30 percent. According to Facebook’s note, the latest changes “will affect public affairs content more broadly [and] publishers may see an impact on their traffic.” The company didn’t say how big an impact they might see, but did add it is planning a “gradual and methodical rollout” for its experiment, and expects to announce further expansions in the coming months.

Continue reading “Facebook plans to show users even less political news”

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

Last week, Facebook released a report detailing some of the most popular content shared on the site in the second quarter of this year. The report is a first for the social network, and part of what the company has said is an attempt to be more transparent about its operations: Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, described the content review as part of “a long journey” to be “by far the most transparent platform on the internet.” If that is the case, however, the story behind the creation of the report shows the company still has a long way to go to reach that goal.

To take just one example, Facebook’s new content report appears to be, at least in part, a co-ordinated response to critical reporting from Kevin Roose, a Times‘ technology columnist, who has been tracking the posts that get the most engagement on Facebook for some time, using the company’s own CrowdTangle tool, and has consistently found that right-wing pages get the most interaction from users.

This isn’t something Facebook likes to hear, apparently, so the content report tries to do two things to contradict that impression: the first is it tries to argue that engagement, or the number of times someone clicks on a link — which Roose uses as the metric for his Top 10 lists — isn’t the most important way of looking at content, and so it focuses instead on “reach,” or how many people saw a certain post. The second thing it tries to do is show that even the most popular content only amounts to only a tiny fraction of what gets seen on the platform (less than 0.1 percent, according to the report). As Robyn Caplan, a researcher with Data & Society has pointed out, this seems to be an attempt to show that disinformation on the platform isn’t a big deal because so few people see it.

Continue reading “Facebook “transparency report” turns out to be anything but”

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

Earlier this month, Apple announced a series of steps it is taking to help keep children safe online. One of those new additions is a feature for its Alexa line of intelligent assistants that will automatically suggest a help-line number if someone asks for child-exploitation material, and another is a new feature that scans images shared through iMessage, to make sure children aren’t sharing unsafe pictures of themselves in a chat window. Neither of these new features sparked much controversy, since virtually everyone agrees that online sharing of child sexual-abuse material is a significant problem that needs to be solved, and that technology companies need to be part of that solution. The third plank in Apple’s new approach to dealing with this kind of content, however, triggered a huge backlash: rather than simply scanning photos that are uploaded to Apple’s servers in the cloud, the company said it will start scanning the photos that users have on their phones to see whether they match an international database of child-abuse content.

As Alex Stamos, former Facebook security chief, pointed out in an interview with Julia Angwin, founder and editor of The Markup, scanning uploaded photos to see if they include pre-identified examples of child sexual-abuse material has been going on for a decade or more, ever since companies like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook started offering cloud-based image storage. The process relies on a database of photos maintained by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, each of which comes with a unique cryptographic code known as a “hash.” Cloud companies compare the code to the images that are uploaded to their servers, and then flag and report the ones that match. Federal law doesn’t require companies to search for such images — and until now, Apple has not done so — but it does require them to report such content if they find it.

What Apple plans to do is to implement this process on a user’s phone, before anything is uploaded to the cloud. The company says this is a better way of cracking down on this kind of material, but its critics say it is not only a significant breach of privacy, but also opens a door to other potential invasions by the government, and other state actors, that can’t easily be closed. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called the new feature a “backdoor to your private life,” and Mallory Knobel, chief technology officer at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told me in an interview on CJR’s Galley discussion platform that this ability could easily be expanded to other forms of content “by Apple internal policy as well as US government policy, or any government orders around the world.” Although Apple often maintains that it cares more about user privacy than any other technology company, Knobel and other critics note that the company still gave the Chinese government virtually unlimited access to user data for citizens in that country.

Continue reading “Apple’s plan to scan images on users’ phones sparks backlash”

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

Last week, Facebook shut down the personal accounts of several researchers affiliated with New York University, claiming that their work—including a browser extension called Ad Observer, which allows users to share the ads that they are shown in their Facebook news feeds—violated the social network’s privacy policies. The company said that while it wants to help social scientists with their work, it can’t allow user information to be shared with third parties, in part because of the consent decree it signed with the Federal Trade Commission as part of a $5 billion settlement in the Camridge Analytica case in 2018. Researchers, including some of those who were involved in the NYU project, said Facebook’s behavior was not surprising, given the company’s long history of dragging its feet when it comes to sharing information. And not long after Facebook used the FTC consent decree as a justification for the shutdown, the federal agency took the unusual step of making public a letter it sent to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, stating that if the company had contacted the FTC about the research, “we would have pointed out that the consent decree does not bar Facebook from creating exceptions for good-faith research in the public interest.”

To discuss how Facebook responded in this case, its track record when it comes to social-science research, and the way that other platforms such as Twitter treat researchers, CJR brought together a number of experts using our Galley discussion platform. The group included Laura Edelson, a doctoral candidate in computer science at NYU and one of the senior scientists on the Ad Observatory team; Jonathan Mayer, a professor at Princeton and former chief technologist with the Federal Communication Commission; Julia Angwin, founder and editor-in-chief of The Markup, a data-driven investigative reporting startup that has a similar ad research tool called Citizen Browser; Neil Chilson, a fellow at the Charles Koch Institute and former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission; Nathalie Marechal of Ranking Digital Rights; and Rebekah Tromble, a doctoral candidate and director of the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics at George Washington University.

Edelson has said the drastic action Facebook took against her and the rest of the team was the culmination of a series of escalating threats about the group’s research (they are currently lobbying the company to get their accounts reinstated), but that she also has good relationships with some people at the social network. “Facebook’s behavior toward our group has been… complicated,” she said. Since the group studies the safety and efficacy of Facebook’s systems around political ads and misinformation, Edelson said “there is always going to be an inherent tension there,” but that there are several people she has worked with at Facebook who are “smart and dedicated.” One thing that makes the company’s behavior somewhat confusing is that the user information Facebook says it is trying to protect is the names of advertisers in its political ad program, which are publicly available through its own Ad Library. “Those are, technically speaking, Facebook user names,” Edelson says. “We think they are public, and Facebook is saying they are not.”

Continue reading “Facebook’s excuses for shutting down research ring hollow”