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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked recently about his commitment to quality journalism on the platform, and the social network made some changes earlier this year that were supposed to promote higher-quality content in the News Feed. But some recent data on the best-performing news brands on the site seems to show that, if anything, some high-quality new sources are getting less engagement on Facebook and lower quality sites are getting a lot more, which seems like the opposite of how things should be working.

NewsWhip, a social-media metrics company, tracks what it calls the “most engaged” sites on the network as measured by likes, comments, reactions and shares. In its latest ranking for the month of April, Fox News climbed from third place to first with more than 30 million engagements, while the previous leader—CNN—dropped to second with 24 million. The Daily Mail rose to fourth place from seventh and a site called Daily Wire, which specializes in alt-right news stories, climbed to eighth place with about 14 million engagements.

https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/993502674233577479

NewsWhip notes that in March, one of the main losers in Facebook traffic were sites that tended to focus on viral entertainment, such as LadBible and Unilad, as well as political sites like Daily Wire. At the time, this downturn was seen as evidence that Facebook’s tweaking of the algorithm was having an effect, and reducing the visibility of clickbait and other cheap content. But last month those sites all showed a bit of a recovery or at least held their ground.

Does this mean Facebook’s algorithm changes aren’t having the desired effect? Not necessarily. With any ecosystem as gigantic as Facebook’s, changes from one month to the next could be caused by any number of things. Or it could be that enough people said they trusted Fox News and the Daily Mail, and therefore those sources are getting ranked higher, since Facebook is using surveys to see who the most-trusted news outlets are.

As Facebook’s head of news, Campbell Brown, admitted in a recent interview with CJR, measuring trust is a difficult thing to do when it comes to the news, since plenty of people are more than happy to say they trust sources simply because they align with their existing views. No matter what Facebook does, Brown agreed it would be accused of picking winners and losers—which is exactly what’s happening with the NewsWhip numbers.

As if we needed another lesson in the downsides of the media shackling their business models to third-party platforms, Snap Inc.—the company behind the popular Snapchat messaging app—is reportedly changing the terms of how it compensates publishers who use its Discover feature, a kind of newsstand where media companies can post short videos. According to Digiday, those who use the feature will no longer get an up-front licensing fee for their videos, but instead will get a share of advertising revenue generated by them.

“There were a lot of people who didn’t take the licensing deals, and I think some people who didn’t were bummed because the audience and ad revenue growth slowed down,” said a Snapchat Discover publishing exec. “If you were able get a high enough of a license fee based on Snap’s belief that the platform would keep growing, you were able to shield yourself.”

This feels a little like another Facebook-style “bait and switch” tactic, where publishers get hooked on a source of revenue only to have the rug pulled out from under them (as Facebook has done multiple times now, especially with video). But it’s a little more complicated than that. This is actually the second switch that Snap has made on publisher compensation, and it amounts to a 180-degree pivot back to the way things were originally.

When Discover first launched in 2015, the ability to share in advertising revenues was one of the main incentives for publishers to take part, and it was a significant draw in part because Snapchat was seen as a rocket-fueled growth story. Then in 2016, the company told media partners that it was changing tactics, and it would no longer be sharing ad revenue—instead, it would pay up front licensing fees and keep all the ad revenue.

So what are we to learn from this reversal? It seems obvious the licensing fee model didn’t really serve the company’s needs, and that could have something to do with Snap’s current financial situation. The share price has come under pressure of late because of slower-than-expected growth in the app’s user base.

In that context, it’s possible that paying out a share of future revenue looks more financially appealing to Snap than paying an up-front fee that may or may not be recouped. And that’s particularly the case if, as some publishers have said, the performance of Discover has not been stellar. Unfortunately, the new/old model leaves publishers to bear more of that potential burden than they would have under the licensing model (although Snap did say that it is testing e-commerce features, which could soften the blow).

Perhaps the only lesson that media companies could learn from all of this is that gambling on third-party platforms for growth and revenue can be a tricky business, especially when that platform is as young and untested as Snap.

Matt McAlister has been working in digital publishing for a long time now, including a stint at The Guardian as director of digital strategy, so he has a long memory when it comes to the relationship between publishers and platforms like Google and Facebook. McAlister now runs a media research company called Kaleida, which just came out with a new report looking at the health of the publisher-platform ecosystem—a report that was funded by Google, although McAlister says the web giant had no influence over the findings. As he put it in the preface:

The inspiration for this research came from the growing tensions we’ve observed between news publishers and the big Internet platforms. Many publishers believe platforms are using content unfairly to grow, while the platforms believe publishers are getting a lot of benefit from traffic directed toward news. Clearly, it’s more complicated than that.

The study used data supplied by 18 news publishers from across Europe who provided details of their traffic, combined with research from comScore, as well as consumer insights from YouGov on news-reading behavior in the UK, France and Germany. Perhaps the most eye-opening detail in the report is that a single visit to a news website from a platform like Facebook is worth on average $0.008 or just eight-tenths of a cent. In other words, you could be getting millions of referrals and still not be making more than pocket change.

Here are some of the other insights from the report:

Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference is supposed to be a showcase for all the cool new features that the giant social network is either working on or busy rolling out to its two billion users — filters that turn your Instagram selfie into a picture of a dog, and so on. But not surprisingly, given all the furore over the Cambridge Analytica data leak and Mark Zuckerberg’s recent testimony before a Congress subcommittee, the latest iteration of the Facebook love-fest started on a somewhat different note.

In an attempt to lighten the mood, Zuckerberg tried to crack a joke when introducing a new feature that would allow users to follow along with and chat about a movie or TV show.  “Let’s say your friend is testifying before Congress and you want to watch,” the Facebook CEO joked, with a somewhat awkward-looking smile. On a more serious note, however, he suggested that he has learned a few things about how the social network can be used for evil as well as good. “I’ve learned this year that we need to take a broader view of our responsibility,” he said. “It’s not enough to just build powerful tools. We need to make sure that they are used for good.”

The Facebook CEO also announced a new feature that the company said would enable users to block Facebook from tracking their behavior on the web and through apps with Facebook access.The new feature is called “Clear History,” and operates much like a feature in most web browsers of the same name: When clicked, it removes all of the data related to that user that is normally stored — data used by Facebook to help its algorithms figure out what you might be interested in, and what ads to show you (Zuckerberg pointed out that if you do enable this feature “Facebook won’t be as good” until it gets to know you again).

Please stop making this sound like a ‘feature’ they are now offering when it’s actually just a legal requirement as part of GDPR. This would be like reporting that Ford will now add seatbelts to their cars. It’s not news that they do this. But it would be news if they didn’t. https://t.co/CadeBIwZlA

— Thomas Baekdal (@baekdal) May 1, 2018

This and other new privacy-related features the social network is rolling out aren’t coming about solely because Facebook was raked over the coals in front of Congress, nor even because it is embarrassed by the data leak involving Cambridge Analytica. One of the main driving forces behind the latest changes is the need to comply with the European General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR, which is coming into effect later this month. These new rules require platforms like Google and Facebook to give users a lot more control over who has their data and what they can do with it, or face significant financial penalties.

In his testimony before Congress, the Facebook CEO was asked whether he planned to extend GDPR-like protections to even non-European users of the social network, and he hedged his answer, saying some of the details were still to be worked out. The “Clear History” feature appears to be part of his attempt to introduce enough privacy protections to satisfy regulators without actually impacting Facebook’s business in any significant way — in other words, to eat his cake and have it too.

Here are some more links related to Facebook’s ongoing struggles with privacy:

• In a blog post published just before the F8 conference, Zuckerberg talked about the new “Clear History” feature and how it works. “When you clear your cookies in your browser, it can make parts of your experience worse,” he noted. “You may have to sign back in to every website, and you may have to reconfigure things. The same will be true here. Your Facebook won’t be as good.”
• Wired described in a recent piece how some critics believe both Google and Facebook are trying to implement the GDPR rules in a way that allows them to “game the system,” leaving users no better off than they were before. The supervisor of the EU’s data protection authority called the online platforms  “digital sweat factories” whose approach to privacy is unsustainable, and said that their proposals for meeting the new rules violate the spirit of the new regulations.
• Some believe the new GDPR rules and other privacy-related regulations that emerge following the Cambridge Analytica leak could actually reinforce the power that Facebook and Google have, since it will make it more difficult for other companies to acquire data or use it to build new services. That would effectively build a wall around the data that Google and Facebook already have, argues tech analyst Ben Thompson in his subscription newsletter Stratechery.
• Facebook also appears to be restructuring itself behind the scenes in order to reduce its legal liability under the GDPR: It is moving the responsibility for data involving all non-EU users — who represent about 70 percent of the total, or about 1.5 billion — to its US subsidiary from its Irish subsidiary, meaning they will be governed by US laws on data, not the GDPR.

Other notable stories:

• A group called the Student Press Coalition did a survey of student journalists at 49 Christian colleges and universities and found that more than 75 percent  had faced pressure from university personnel to change, edit, or remove an article after it had been published in print or online. About 70 percent said their faculty advisors could stop a story from being printed.
• According to a memo obtained by Variety, staffers at NBC were told by management that if they reported the sexual harassment accusations against veteran broadcaster Tom Brokaw, they had to also mention the letter of support for the former anchor that was signed by more than 60 employees of the network — some of whom suggested that they felt pressure to sign.
• The fallout from the White House Correspondents Association dinner continues: The Hill, a site that focuses on stories about Washington politics, said it is pulling out of the event because it “casts our profession in a poor light,” and The New York Times says CBS News also considered pulling out, but changed its mind after being assured that event organizers planned to change the format.
• Speaking of the WHCA dinner, CJR’s Karen Ho dug into the finances of the event, and found that last year, the organization raised a total of almost $900,000 from ticket sales and donations for the event. About $550,000 of that went to pay for the venue and the entertainer, and only about $100,000 went towards the scholarships that the WHCA says are the main reason it does the dinner in the first place.
• Politico writes about the growing number of  news websites catering to a right-wing audience, which it calls “baby Breitbarts,” including sites with names like the Tennessee Star, the Arizona Monitor and the Maine Examiner — sites that sound like reputable newspapers but which in most cases are online-only publications that exist primarily to promote a right-wing agenda.

The news is “incredibly important to society and democracy,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters at an invitation-only event following his address to developers at the company’s F8 conference on Tuesday. But apparently that doesn’t mean the giant social network has any plans to actually pay for it directly, the way media insiders like BuzzFeed publisher Jonah Peretti believe that he should. “I’m not sure that makes sense,” Zuckerberg said when the idea was raised. Instead, he says the company wants to help media companies sell more subscriptions and generate more revenue from readers. The Atlantic writes:

At one point, Zuckerberg hinted at the need for government subsidy of American journalism—alluding to the public-television licensing model that supports the BBC. Couldn’t Facebook pay publishers directly by licensing their stories or programming? “Yeah,” Zuckerberg said, “I’m not sure that makes sense.” “I think news is incredibly important to society and democracy,” he added. “It’s just that it’s a pretty small minority” of what people are reading on Facebook.

The Facebook CEO also announced that the social network has already started elevating certain preferred news sources in the News Feed based on whether users rank them as trustworthy, a controversial approach that Zuckerberg announced earlier this year. The controversy stems from the fact that trust is an incredibly slippery concept when it comes to news — for example, surveys show that a many conservative voters don’t trust mainstream media sources like CNN, but do trust Breitbart and Fox News.

At some point, selecting “high quality” sources of news means Facebook is going to be deciding who is worthy of showing in the News Feed and who isn’t, which could have a significant impact on the traffic and revenue generated by those who are chosen and those who aren’t. Already, some publishers like Mic have seen their Facebook engagement decline by more than 90 percent, and the ranking process has only just begun. But Zuckerberg said the platform’s responsibility to news only goes so far:

“People come to Facebook primarily not to consume news but to communicate with people,” Zuckerberg said. “The way we can help out the most with that is by helping out with a business model that is profitable and sustainable for news organizations.”

Given the fact that Facebook is going to be selecting winners and losers in the media sphere, it’s interesting that Zuckerberg’s comments were made to a specific group of publications, including CNN, The New York Times, BuzzFeed, Recode and the Economist. The choice of who to include wasn’t made by Facebook, however — the group is part of an annual event called Off The Record, organized by The Information founder Jessica Lessin, BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith and Quartz editor Kevin Delaney.

Considering the sensitivity around what Zuckerberg was discussing, it was probably smart of him to go on the record with his comments, since there are already enough people out there suspicious of what Facebook is doing to the media industry behind the scenes. The bottom line seems to be that he cares about journalism, but apart from some tweaks to the News Feed and some help with subscriptions, he’s not prepared to do a whole lot about it. And perhaps that’s ultimately a good thing.

In interviews following the F8 developer conference in San Jose on Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that journalism is “incredibly important to society and democracy,” but at the same time noted it is a tiny fraction of what happens on the giant social network. That tension runs through all the ways in which Facebook handles news and information on the platform, including its attempt to rank sources based on how trusted they are, which Zuckerberg said Facebook has already started doing.

How are these changes going to affect media companies who currently rely on Facebook for their traffic and revenue? And how will the company decide which news sources are considered trusted or high quality and which aren’t, if users disagree? I talked with Facebook’s head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, about those and other thorny questions, and about some of the new features the social network is working on related to news and journalism. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

 

I’ve heard that Facebook wants to pay news organizations to create programming for Facebook’s Watch video feature. Can you talk a bit about that? 

“This is an experiment, but we are bringing together a group of about 10 to 12 publishers and we are going to pay them directly to produce news programming for Watch. My hope is that Watch will become a destination for news on Facebook that people know is reliable, and they will find diversity of sources and different points of view. And during breaking news it would become a place to go to find whatever the most important stories of the day are. It’s a big step for us, and we’re just starting to figure this out with a handful of publishers who are going to be the early testers. I think there is real potential for us to create a destination for video news.”

Some media companies seem rather antagonistic about Facebook and how it has disrupted the media ecosystem. How do you respond to that?

“It’s not my role to lobby publishers to be on Facebook if they don’t feel like that’s the right way to reach their audience, I want to be 100 percent clear about that. But I do think for the ones who are on Facebook and who see the potential for distribution on Facebook. I want to help them make money. I want to help them find a business model that works so they keep doing what they do best which is journalism.”

 

Facebook’s changes to the algorithm are going to have a fairly significant impact on the traffic and revenue of some publishers, if they haven’t already. What would you tell them?

“What we’ve done is to down-rank clickbait and down-rank sensationalism, and we’ve given a boost to broadly trusted news sources, or what we define as informative news sources. So publishers who built a business on clickbait are not going to find success on Facebook. We are optimizing for quality journalism going forward, we’ve been very clear about that, and I think it’s the right thing to do. I’m excited that Mark and Facebook have made that commitment and I think most publishers are too. But it does mean a period of transition while a lot of publishers adjust to this new environment.”

Can you talk a bit more about that transition and how Facebook is approaching it?

“I think we are shifting how we think about news on Facebook. We used to think about it as optimizing for engagement, but now we’re optimizing for quality. So a lot of the journalism that might have been successful in the past because it got a lot of engagement — viral videos and sensationalist kind of content that everybody wanted to click on — isn’t going to do very well given what we’re optimizing for now. Now there were plenty of people who were doing good journalism regardless of what Facebook was optimized for. And I don’t think that’s changed. I just think they’re going to be much happier with how they do on the platform. And it does mean that if you are in the business of doing a lot of sensationalism and clickbait and you had a really successful business on Facebook, you are going to be impacted in a negative way by these changes.”

I think a lot of media companies feel as though Facebook often pulls a bait-and-switch tactic on them, where they are promised certain things and then the algorithm changes and all bets are off.

“I think that’s true. And some of that has to do with the different cultures of a technology company and a media company. For technology companies, the culture is to experiment and change and to modify and to iterate and to be in a constant state of change. Whereas if you’re building a media business, you’re looking for stability and consistency. And so those two dynamics aren’t always gonna mesh very well. I think what we can do to make things better is transparency and communication about what’s coming — like we may go to a publisher and say we want to test this new product, but what we also have to say is that it might not work and if it doesn’t work we’re going to change it. So don’t come test with us if you’re not ready for that ride.”

Ranking news sources on trust is a difficult problem, since a lot of people disagree on who they trust and who they don’t. Lots of people trust Breitbart News, for example.

“I think that is what makes this so hard, that we’re trying to find ways to define quality. We’re trying to find ways that are fair that can account for the different kinds of journalism out there. It’s really hard to get this right. One of the measures we’re using is to look at broadly trusted news organizations, but if you try to define widely trusted you end up with mostly big brand-name publishers versus someone small like Axios, more niche publishers who aren’t going to have the same brand recognition. So what are the quality measures you look at to ensure that we capture those publishers? And how do you get people to agree on quality measures? This is really tricky, and it’s one of the things we’re going to be devoting a lot of time to in the coming months because I don’t think that we can unilaterally make these decisions and get it right.”

It seems inevitable that Facebook is going to be accused of rigging the game or choosing the sources that it likes for whatever reason.

It’s not going to be perfect. I’m not going to lie, we don’t have all the answers yet. We’re going to do this in conjunction with publishers, we’re going to do it in partnership with academia. I want to have a broad cross-section of people in the ecosystem and engaged in conversation. I’d love to work with the other platforms on this. But even then even, let’s say we get the most broad selection of people across the ecosystem to agree on 10 to 15 quality signals that we all agree  the platforms should use to boost quality content. We’re still going to be picking winners and of not getting it right, it’s inevitable. But the alternative is not one that I think any of us can live with. We do have have to agree on a shared set of facts. And we have to do the  best we can to ensure that the information that is getting a boost is factual. I don’t have the answers yet for how we do it, which is why we’re taking baby steps in this direction, because it’s going to be really really difficult.”

 

In interviews following the F8 developer conference in San Jose on Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that journalism is “incredibly important to society and democracy,” but at the same time noted it is a tiny fraction of what happens on the giant social network. That tension runs through all the ways in which Facebook handles news and information on the platform, including its attempt to rank sources based on how trusted they are, which Zuckerberg said Facebook has already started doing.

How are these changes going to affect media companies who currently rely on Facebook for their traffic and revenue? And how will the company decide which news sources are considered trusted or high quality and which aren’t, if users disagree? I talked with Facebook’s head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, about those and other thorny questions, and about some of the new features the social network is working on related to news and journalism. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

 

I’ve heard that Facebook wants to pay news organizations to create programming for Facebook’s Watch video feature. Can you talk a bit about that? 

“This is an experiment, but we are bringing together a group of about 10 to 12 publishers and we are going to pay them directly to produce news programming for Watch. My hope is that Watch will become a destination for news on Facebook that people know is reliable, and they will find diversity of sources and different points of view. And during breaking news it would become a place to go to find whatever the most important stories of the day are. It’s a big step for us, and we’re just starting to figure this out with a handful of publishers who are going to be the early testers. I think there is real potential for us to create a destination for video news.”

Some media companies seem rather antagonistic about Facebook and how it has disrupted the media ecosystem. How do you respond to that?

“It’s not my role to lobby publishers to be on Facebook if they don’t feel like that’s the right way to reach their audience, I want to be 100 percent clear about that. But I do think for the ones who are on Facebook and who see the potential for distribution on Facebook. I want to help them make money. I want to help them find a business model that works so they keep doing what they do best which is journalism.”

 

Facebook’s changes to the algorithm are going to have a fairly significant impact on the traffic and revenue of some publishers, if they haven’t already. What would you tell them?

“What we’ve done is to down-rank clickbait and down-rank sensationalism, and we’ve given a boost to broadly trusted news sources, or what we define as informative news sources. So publishers who built a business on clickbait are not going to find success on Facebook. We are optimizing for quality journalism going forward, we’ve been very clear about that, and I think it’s the right thing to do. I’m excited that Mark and Facebook have made that commitment and I think most publishers are too. But it does mean a period of transition while a lot of publishers adjust to this new environment.”

Can you talk a bit more about that transition and how Facebook is approaching it?

“I think we are shifting how we think about news on Facebook. We used to think about it as optimizing for engagement, but now we’re optimizing for quality. So a lot of the journalism that might have been successful in the past because it got a lot of engagement — viral videos and sensationalist kind of content that everybody wanted to click on — isn’t going to do very well given what we’re optimizing for now. Now there were plenty of people who were doing good journalism regardless of what Facebook was optimized for. And I don’t think that’s changed. I just think they’re going to be much happier with how they do on the platform. And it does mean that if you are in the business of doing a lot of sensationalism and clickbait and you had a really successful business on Facebook, you are going to be impacted in a negative way by these changes.”

I think a lot of media companies feel as though Facebook often pulls a bait-and-switch tactic on them, where they are promised certain things and then the algorithm changes and all bets are off.

“I think that’s true. And some of that has to do with the different cultures of a technology company and a media company. For technology companies, the culture is to experiment and change and to modify and to iterate and to be in a constant state of change. Whereas if you’re building a media business, you’re looking for stability and consistency. And so those two dynamics aren’t always gonna mesh very well. I think what we can do to make things better is transparency and communication about what’s coming — like we may go to a publisher and say we want to test this new product, but what we also have to say is that it might not work and if it doesn’t work we’re going to change it. So don’t come test with us if you’re not ready for that ride.”

Ranking news sources on trust is a difficult problem, since a lot of people disagree on who they trust and who they don’t. Lots of people trust Breitbart News, for example.

“I think that is what makes this so hard, that we’re trying to find ways to define quality. We’re trying to find ways that are fair that can account for the different kinds of journalism out there. It’s really hard to get this right. One of the measures we’re using is to look at broadly trusted news organizations, but if you try to define widely trusted you end up with mostly big brand-name publishers versus someone small like Axios, more niche publishers who aren’t going to have the same brand recognition. So what are the quality measures you look at to ensure that we capture those publishers? And how do you get people to agree on quality measures? This is really tricky, and it’s one of the things we’re going to be devoting a lot of time to in the coming months because I don’t think that we can unilaterally make these decisions and get it right.”

It seems inevitable that Facebook is going to be accused of rigging the game or choosing the sources that it likes for whatever reason.

It’s not going to be perfect. I’m not going to lie, we don’t have all the answers yet. We’re going to do this in conjunction with publishers, we’re going to do it in partnership with academia. I want to have a broad cross-section of people in the ecosystem and engaged in conversation. I’d love to work with the other platforms on this. But even then even, let’s say we get the most broad selection of people across the ecosystem to agree on 10 to 15 quality signals that we all agree  the platforms should use to boost quality content. We’re still going to be picking winners and of not getting it right, it’s inevitable. But the alternative is not one that I think any of us can live with. We do have have to agree on a shared set of facts. And we have to do the  best we can to ensure that the information that is getting a boost is factual. I don’t have the answers yet for how we do it, which is why we’re taking baby steps in this direction, because it’s going to be really really difficult.”

 

Most of the attention around “fake news” and misinformation so far has tended to focus on Facebook, in part because of its enormous size, and because of the role that Russian trolls and data-driven targeting by organizations like Cambridge Analytica may (or may not) have played in the US election. But YouTube is also a gigantic misinformation machine, as CJR has pointed out a number of times, and yet it seems to be almost incapable of dealing with the fallout from the machinery it has created.

A piece in the latest issue of BusinessWeek is entitled “YouTube’s Plan to Clean Up the Mess That Made It Rich,” but there doesn’t seem to be any real plan per se, or if there is the article doesn’t describe it in any detail. It appears to consist of hiring more moderators to police content, and/or working on artificial intelligence as a way of flagging the worst offenders—in other words, more or less the same solution that Facebook has offered when it gets criticized for similar things.

And just as Facebook did, when CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in an interview that for the first 10 years of its existence it simply didn’t think about the negative aspects of the technology it was creating, YouTube would like us to believe that most of these problems came as a complete surprise. Just the growing pains of a hyperactive and rapidly-expanding toddler, in other words:

In interviews at the San Bruno complex, YouTube executives often resorted to a civic metaphor: YouTube is like a small town that’s grown so large, so fast, that its municipal systems—its zoning laws, courts, and sanitation crews, if you will—have failed to keep pace. “We’ve gone from being a small village to being a city that requires proper infrastructure,” Kyncl says. “That’s what we’ve been building.”

The only problem with that kind of argument, either from Facebook or Google, is that hundreds of thousands of smart people have been building this machinery for more than a decade now. These are not country bumpkins in a small town somewhere. To assume no one ever suggested or thought about the potential negative aspects of these networks defies belief. The only other explanation is that those concerns simply weren’t seen as being important enough, or at least not as important as growth itself.

Former YouTube executive Hunter Walk tells BusinessWeek that resources were gradually taken away from trying to improve the environment on the network. And former YouTube engineer Guillaume Chaslot tells the magazine the same thing he told CJR for a piece on “computational propaganda,” which is that suggestions about ways to keep the recommendation engine from promoting conspiracy theories and fake news were rejected, in favor of a single-minded focus on growth and engagement.

Is this tide turning? Perhaps. But even as YouTube and Facebook say they are committed to solving these problems, their revenue continues to grow at eye-popping rates—analysts estimate YouTube’s revenues are in the $22-billion range, and Facebook’s revenues climbed by almost 50 percent in the latest quarter to $12 billion. In other words, even the high-profile issues Facebook is having with the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica data leak don’t seem to be having much impact on the bottom line. What incentive is there to attack any of these problems when the overall business is going so well?

Britain failed in its attempts to get Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to come and testify before a committee looking into the problem of fake news and user privacy, but it seems the British parliament hasn’t given up quite yet. Damian Collins, the head of the parliamentary committee on digital culture and the media, suggested in a news release following the hearing that Zuckerberg could be compelled to testify in Britain if he enters the UK on his way to hearings being held by the European Union. Collins said:

We believe that, given the large number of outstanding questions for Facebook to answer, Mark Zuckerberg should still appear in front of the Committee. We note, in particular, reports that he intends to travel to Europe in May to give evidence to the European Parliament. As an American citizen living in California, Mr Zuckerberg does not normally come under the jurisdiction of the UK Parliament, but he will the next time he enters the country. We hope that he will respond positively to our request, but if not the Committee will resolve to issue a formal summons for him to appear.

Collins also tried to get a dig in right out of the gate in his questioning of Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer on Thursday, by asking him how much he planned to spend on his next car and the square footage of his house (Schroepfer said he didn’t know the answer to either question).

This was similar to the tactic used by US senator Dick Durbin when Zuckerberg appeared before Congress earlier this month — Durbin asked whether Zuckerberg could tell the committee what hotel he was staying at, and Zuckerberg said he would rather not. The rather obvious implication being, of course, that there are certain kinds of private information that even Facebook execs don’t want to reveal.

Apart from these attempts at theatrics, the British hearing appeared to be almost five hours of Schroepfer avoiding most of the questions that were asked of him about the Cambridge Analytica data leak, and MPs taking the company to task for its cavalier approach to user privacy. According to a statement from British parliament, most of the MPs found Schroepfer’s responses to be “unsatisfactory,” and he failed to answer a number of crucial questions, including:

• Whether Facebook knew about Cambridge Analytica when Facebook gave evidence to the Committee on February 8th
• How much money was made and kept from dark ads, and whether there is any archive or record kept by Facebook of dark ads
• The fact that an individual adapting their privacy settings cannot absolutely block all categories of ads
• How many developers there were at the time before they made these 2014 policy changes between 2011-2014
• Why they moved one and a half billion accounts to Facebook Inc from Facebook Irl a month before GDPR came into force
• Facebook using the data of individuals who are not on Facebook.
• What changes they are about to make ahead of GDPR in terms of becoming fully compliant

This session sums up the whole Facebook problem. UK parliament wants to understand the threat to our entire democratic structure. Facebook sends techie-in-chief who talks about details of automated systems. It’s just another sign that Facebook doesn’t get it.

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) April 26, 2018

In addition to not answering a number of key questions, Schroepfer admitted that Facebook did not read the terms and conditions of the app that provided the personal data on more than 85 million users that Cambridge Analytica wound up using for targeted political advertising during the US election. And he said he regretted that Facebook sent a letter threatening The Guardian before its expose ran, saying he understood that the letter was designed “just to correct the facts.”

Schroepfer did provide at least one positive note for MPs: The Facebook executive promised that the company will make sure that only verified accounts will be allowed to place political ads on its platform, and that all of those ads will be vetted in time for elections in England and Northern Ireland next year. Also, Schroepfer said that users will be able to view all of the promotions paid for by a campaign, not just those targeted at them.

Netflix announced on Wednesday that it is rolling out a new short-form series called “Follow This,” which will profile writers and editors who work at BuzzFeed News and the stories they are working on, in 15-minute segments. As an example, a promo for the series features BuzzFeed reporter Scaachi Koul talking about a story she is working on related to ASMR, a somewhat bizarre Internet subculture of people who create and consume videos consisting solely of soothing noises designed to trigger a feeling of mild euphoria.

It’s a classic kind of BuzzFeed story, and the clip does its best to make the process of reporting interesting to non-journalists, with short cut-scenes of people typing on their laptops, or monitors with interesting-looking things on them. But doo ordinary people really want to watch journalists at work? Obviously most journalists would like to think the answer is yes, but it’s not clear whether that’s actually true or not.

What is the target audience for this kind of thing? Not trying to be a pain, just because I don't get it does not mean this isn't good, I'm just confused.

— MJL716 (@mjlp716) April 25, 2018

Whenever a movie like Spotlight or The Post comes out and gets a good response at the box office, journalists cheer in part because it validates what they do, and even in some cases makes it seem mildly interesting. But it often does this by leaving out all the hard work, and focusing on tropes like the chain-smoking reporter who meets his sources in dark alleys, or the crusty editor with the heart of gold.

It’s easy to see why BuzzFeed would jump at a Netflix series–it could give the site a higher profile, and promote some of its writers. And it’s easy to see why the streaming service would be interested in doing it: Netflix has a desperate need for more and more content, and Follow This is a good way to experiment with the 15-minute format (which both Facebook Watch and YouTube also have in their sights). But is there any real demand for this kind of content, apart from journalists and their friends?

https://twitter.com/desertgardens/status/989144949697347586

It’s true that BuzzFeed has produced some success stories from its own internal short-form video experiments, including former writer Matt Bellassai, who gained a following for his Whine About It series, in which he complained about things while drinking wine in the BuzzFeed newsroom, and later left the site to pursue a career as a comedian. But that seemed more like a happy accident.

Journalist friends have argued the time may be ripe for this kind of behind-the-scenes series, now that the media and journalism itself are under fire from the president, and people are theoretically more interested in protecting it. And perhaps BuzzFeed News can manage to tap into some of that with this series. Or it might join TMZ Live–a behind-the-scenes show about the celebrity news site and its reporting–as something that exists for a very tiny niche market. And maybe that’s as it should be.

Last year, The Guardian published leaked documents it said were internal Facebook rule books on how and when to moderate inappropriate content. The list of permitted terms caused significant controversy because it included threats of violence towards women, children and various ethnic groups, which Facebook said should be allowed to remain as long as they were not too specific. Harassment of white men, however, was not tolerated because they are considered a “protected group.” The guidelines sparked an ongoing debate over the way that Facebook makes decisions about which kinds of speech it will censor and which it won’t.

On Tuesday, the giant social network finally gave in to pressure from critics and published the community standards guidelines it says it uses to make most of its content decisions, with categories ranging from “violence and criminal behavior” to “integrity and authenticity.” The company said in a post introducing the rules that it generally errs on the side of allowing content, even when some find it objectionable “unless removing that content can prevent a specific harm.” Facebook also said that it often allows content that technically violates its standards “if we feel that it is newsworthy, significant, or important to the public interest.”

One of the top questions we’re asked is how do we decide what content is allowed on Facebook. To provide clarity and invite feedback and participation from our community, we are publishing our internal enforcement guidelines for the first time today. https://t.co/CdN2WLstSG

— Meta (@Meta) April 24, 2018

Some of the company’s rules are fairly straightforward, such as not allowing people to sell drugs or firearms. But much of what the social network is trying to do amounts to pinning Jell-O to the wall, especially when it comes to censoring speech around violence. The blog post says that Facebook considers “the language, context and details” in order to determine when content represents a “credible threat to public or personal safety.” But drawing those kinds of sharp lines is incredibly difficult, especially given the billions of posts that Facebook gets every day, which explains why the company gets so much criticism from users.

In an attempt to address some of those complaints, Facebook also announced it is introducing an official appeal process that will allow users to protest the removal of content or blocking of accounts. Until now, anyone who had content removed had to try and reach a support person via email to a general Facebook account, or through posts on social media. But Facebook says it is rolling out an official process that will allow users to request a review of the decision and get a response within 24 hours. Appeals will start being allowed for content involving nudity, hate speech and graphic violence, with other content types added later.

Facebook’s new transparency around such issues is admirable, but it still raises troubling questions about how much power the social network has over the speech and behavior of billions of people. The First Amendment technically only applies to government action, but when an entity of Facebook’s size and influence decides to ban or censor content, it has almost as much impact as if a government did it.

Here are some links to more information on Facebook’s latest moves:

• Facebook has experts: Monika Bickert, Facebook’s VP of Global Policy Management, describes how community standards decisions are made: “We have people in 11 offices around the world, including subject matter experts on issues such as hate speech, child safety and terrorism. Many of us have worked on the issues of expression and safety long before coming to Facebook.” Bickert says as a criminal prosecutor, she worked on everything from child safety to counter terrorism, and other members of the team include a former rape crisis counsellor, a human-rights lawyer and an academic who studies hate speech.
• Not enough: Malkia Cyril, a Black Lives Matter activist and executive director for the Center for Media Justice, was part of a group of civil-rights organizations that pushed Facebook to make its moderation system less racially biased. She tells The Washington Post that the company’s latest moves don’t go far enough in dealing with white supremacy and hate on the social network. “This is just a drop in the bucket,” she says. “What’s needed now is an independent audit to ensure that the basic civil rights of users are protected.”
• Protected but still sensitive: As Wired magazine points out, Facebook doesn’t have to remove any of the offensive or disturbing content on its network if it doesn’t want to, thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects online services such as Google, Twitter and Facebook from any legal consequences for the actions of its users or the content they post. But all of the major platforms have been trying to boost their efforts at removing the worst of the material they host, in part to try and stave off potential regulation.
• The advisory team: As part of Facebook’s attempts to be more transparent about how it makes such decisions, the company allowed a number of journalists to sit in on one of the social network’s weekly community standards meetings, where the team of advisers decides what content meets the guidelines and what doesn’t. HuffPost says the attendees included people “who specialize in public policy, legal matters, product development and communication,” and said there was very little mention of what other large platforms such as Google do when it comes to removing offensive or disturbing content.

Other notable stories:

• After a number of anti-gay posts were found on the blog that she mothballed last year following similar allegations, MSNBC host Joy Reid claims the posts in question were the result of hackers infiltrating the Internet Archive, which is the only place her blog is still available (the Archive is an ongoing attempt to preserve a copy of as many websites as possible). The Archive, however, says that after an investigation of the claims it could find no evidence that the blog was tampered with.
• CJR’s Alexandra Neason writes about a group of high-school students who were frustrated by the limitations of the Freedom of Information Act, and so decided to write their own bill — known as the Cold Case Records Collection Act — to make it easier to get documents related to Civil War-era crimes from the FBI and other agencies, without having them tied up in red tape or redacted to the point where they’re unusable.
• Google is rolling out its new subscription tool, which it calls Subscribe with Google, and its first launch partner is the McClatchy newspaper chain. The search giant says that its new tool allows people to subscribe to newspapers and other online publications with just two clicks, at which point Google highlights results from those publications in search results for those users who sign up. McClatchy plans to implement the tool on all 30 of its local newspaper sites, according to Digiday.
• In a fundraising email sent to his supporters, Donald Trump says that he won’t be attending the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner because he says he doesn’t want to be “stuck in a room with a bunch of fake news liberals who hate me.” Instead, the president said he will be holding a rally in Michigan “to spend my evening with my favorite deplorables who love our movement and love America.”
• In a Rolling Stone magazine feature, Ben Wofford writes about how Sinclair Broadcasting is trying to build what amounts to a national network of hundreds of conservative-leaning, Fox News-style TV stations in small and medium-sized towns across the country, and how the Trump administration is making it easier for the company to do that. “Everything the FCC has done is custom-built for the business plan of one company, and that’s Sinclair,” one FCC commissioner told the magazine.

Like blind men trying to describe an elephant, everyone describing the Zuckerberg 2018 Apology Tour seems to have found whatever they wanted to find. Some members of Congress clearly believe they confronted the arrogant young billionaire and asked him the tough questions, while many observers—especially those in Silicon Valley—saw Congress demonstrating its ignorance about how Facebook works on even a basic level, proving themselves to be completely unprepared to handle the problematic aspects of a giant social network married to a one-of-a-kind surveillance engine.

“Mr. Zuckerberg, a magazine i recently opened came with a floppy disk offering me 30 free hours of something called America On-Line. Is that the same as Facebook?” pic.twitter.com/U7pqpUhEhQ

— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) April 10, 2018

And what did Mark Zuckerberg see? It’s impossible to know for sure, but it’s likely that what he saw was a very clear show of power by Congress. Some of the questions may have been infantile, and some of the grandstanding amounted to a sideshow (as it so often does), but the hearings sent an obvious message: Namely, that Congress thinks Facebook is up to something—even if it’s not too sure what it is exactly—and they’re willing to consider legislation to clean things up.

In other words, if Zuckerberg wants to avoid another packed-house grilling in Washington, he is going to have to get out in front of this whole regulation thing, and that means figuring out how to surf that wave rather than getting smashed into the rocks by it. Regardless of what’s involved, it’s likely to be a lot better than Facebook being broken up, which is the real nightmare scenario.

Front-running the idea of regulation was clearly part of Zuckerberg’s agenda going into the hearings, because he took the surprising step of bringing up the idea himself in interviews, admitting that the giant social network might need to be regulated. That allowed him to be seen as leading the discussion of potential regulation rather than being dragged into it kicking and screaming, and he continued this approach during both the Senate and the House committee meetings.

BREAKING: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tells House panel that regulation of his industry is `inevitable'

— The Associated Press (@AP) April 11, 2018

When it comes to what kind of regulation he is in favor of, however, Zuckerberg was considerably more wishy-washy. He told a Reuters reporter before the hearings that while the company plans to comply with Europe’s GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation, it won’t implement those same rules for users elsewhere. But in subsequent interviews and in Congress,  he said Facebook does plan to extend GDPR-like protection outside Europe, but then hedged his answer on what that would involve.

All of this suggests the Facebook CEO is going to try and game the Congressional regulatory process in much the same way Russian trolls and Trump-connected data brokers gamed Facebook’s rules. All Zuckerberg has to do is give the impression that he is moving ahead on implementing the same things legislators might want—more privacy controls, or even full data portability—while avoiding the things he doesn’t want, like allowing users to block Facebook from tracking them.

Whether the young billionaire in the dark-blue suit can thread that particular needle successfully, however, remains to be seen. Stay tuned!

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.