Category: Uncategorized

The news came by way of a softball pitch of a story from the New York Times: The News Media Alliance — a group formerly known as the Newspaper Association of America — says it plans to ask Congress for a special exemption from antitrust regulations. Why? So that its members can work together to negotiate with Google and Facebook for better terms.

According to the story in the Times (which is a member of the Alliance and supports the lobbying effort) the group’s plan isn’t just about the fight for digital territory, it’s about the endurance of “quality journalism,” which the paper says is “expensive to produce, and under economic pressure as never before” from fake news that gets promoted by Facebook.

If you feel a twinge of something when you read that, you’re not alone. The first thing I thought was “So quality journalism only comes from the members of the News Media Alliance?” That’s some excessive hubris you’ve got there, folks.

This sense of entitlement is at the core of what the NMA is proposing. In effect, it is suggesting that mainstream newspaper companies are the only entities capable of producing quality journalism, and therefore they deserve a get-out-of-jail-free card so they can engage in what amounts to collusion. And they are hoping Congress will see Google and Facebook as the enemy.

Here’s a thought: What if these newspaper companies had spent a little more time trying to compete over the past decade or so, instead of relying on their historic market control to keep their profits rolling in? What if more had tried to improve their websites and their mobile versions, so that users wouldn’t install ad blockers, or turn to other solutions like Facebook Instant Articles?

Every single competitive threat the newspaper industry has faced, from Craigslist to Facebook, has been visible long before it decimated the industry’s profits, and most of the newspapers in the NMA did little or nothing to deal with them until it was too late.

https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/884459996355768320

Would Facebook and Google have become just as dominant in the advertising business if that had happened? Probably. But only because they can offer demographic targeting that no newspaper has even tried to produce, let alone succeeded at producing. And in Google’s case, it controls much of the “programmatic” or automated ad bidding market, which has driven prices down.

As Ben Thompson noted in an essay on the topic for his subscription newsletter Stratechery (which I encourage you to subscribe to), the case made by the NMA’s David Chavern is based on a myth: The group argues that it needs help negotiating with Google and Facebook so that it can repair the damage done to its quality journalism business. But quality journalism has never actually been a business.

“The truth is that newspapers made money in the past not by providing societal value, but by having quasi-monopolistic control of print advertising in their geographic area; the societal value was a bonus. Thus, when Chavern complains that “today’s internet distribution systems distort the flow of economic value derived from good reporting”, he is in fact conflating societal value with economic value; the latter does not exist and has never existed.

And yet, this is the classic argument from the industry — that they need to be protected because they are are only ones capable of producing that socially valuable journalism. The Alliance’s counsel, Jonathan Kanter, said that “we’re not just talking about widgets, we’re talking about news, and news is crucial for a democratic society.”

https://twitter.com/pt/status/884248484634701824

Okay, so let’s assume the group’s journalism is crucial for democracy. And what are the newspapers asking for? They want better terms from Google and Facebook, i.e. more ad revenue — but they also want support for subscriptions. In other words, paywalls. So this product that is crucial for democracy is only delivered to people who can afford to pay, and all of the revenue from that flows to a private company’s bottom line.

This is the kind of thing that drives Thompson to refer (correctly, I think) to what he calls the “suffocating sense of entitlement and delusion” that flows throughout the NMA’s proposal, which “expects someone — anyone! — to give journalists money simply because they are important.”

Realistically speaking, there’s approximately zero chance that Congress is going to exempt the NMA from antitrust rules (although the group may also be hoping that bringing up the subject gets regulators interested in looking at Google and Facebook and their advertising duopoly). But even if it did, it’s unlikely that collective bargaining would help the news industry where it counts.

The only collective bargaining that'd work for publishers is asking FB/Google to shut down on weekends. Otherwise consumers have spoken.

— Rafat Ali, Media Operator & Dad (@rafat) July 9, 2017

The reality is that even if newspapers have a monopoly on quality journalism — which is a stretch — they no longer have the monopoly their business was based on, which is the control over advertising. And that’s because they don’t control the distribution of their content, and never will.

It certainly won’t be easy, but there are ways for newspaper companies to compete in this environment, and they don’t involve illegal collusion in an attempt to extort more ad revenue from Google and Facebook. That’s a Hail Mary pass that has little or no hope of succeeding, and likely wouldn’t help the industry much even if it did succeed.

The news came by way of a softball pitch of a story from the New York Times: The News Media Alliance — a group formerly known as the Newspaper Association of America — says it plans to ask Congress for a special exemption from antitrust regulations. Why? So that its members can work together to negotiate with Google and Facebook for better terms.

According to the story in the Times (which is a member of the Alliance and supports the lobbying effort) the group’s plan isn’t just about the fight for digital territory, “it’s about the endurance of quality journalism,” which the paper says is “expensive to produce, and under economic pressure as never before” from fake news that gets promoted by Facebook.

If you feel a twinge of something when you read that, you’re not alone. The first thing I thought was “So quality journalism only comes from the members of the News Media Alliance?” That’s some excessive hubris you’ve got there, folks.

This sense of entitlement is at the core of what the NMA is proposing. In effect, it is suggesting that mainstream newspaper companies are the only entities capable of producing quality journalism, and therefore they deserve a get-out-of-jail-free card so they can engage in what amounts to collusion. And they are hoping Congress will see Google and Facebook as the enemy.

Here’s a thought: What if these newspaper companies had spent a little more time trying to compete over the past decade or so, instead of relying on their historic market control to keep their profits rolling in? What if more had tried to improve their websites and their mobile versions, so that users wouldn’t install ad blockers, or turn to other solutions like Facebook Instant Articles?

Every single competitive threat the newspaper industry has faced, from Craigslist to Facebook, has been visible long before it decimated the industry’s profits, and most of the newspapers in the NMA did little or nothing to deal with them until it was too late.

Would Facebook and Google have become just as dominant in the advertising business if that had happened? Probably. But only because they can offer demographic targeting that no newspaper has even tried to produce, let alone succeeded at producing. And in Google’s case, it controls much of the “programmatic” or automated ad bidding market, which has driven prices down.

As Ben Thompson noted in an essay on the topic for his subscription newsletter Stratechery (which I encourage you to subscribe to), the case made by the NMA is based on a myth: The group argues that it needs help negotiating with Google and Facebook so that it can repair the damage done to its quality journalism business. But quality journalism has never actually been a business

If there’s one thing the coverage of Donald Trump has shown time and again, it’s that the mainstream media is more than happy to construct elaborate stories about him, based on nothing more than a tweet or a short GIF — even if the impression they give of events is distorted as a result.

The latest example was a mini-storm of coverage focused on the idea that Trump was ignored by Agata Kornhauser-Duda, the wife of the Polish prime minister, during a recent visit during the G20 summit. A video clip that made the rounds appeared to show Kornhauser-Duda avoiding a handshake with Trump in favor of one with his wife, Melania.

Awkward! The Polish First Lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda inadvertently snubs Donald J. Trump's handshake pic.twitter.com/gFwOYtDA2E

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) July 7, 2017

Headlines said things like “Watch Donald Trump Handshake Rejected by Polish First Lady in Hilariously Awkward Exchange” (Newsweek) and “Polish first lady passes over Trump’s handshake” (Washington Post). But is the video clip a fair representation of what actually happened? Not really.

If you look at longer video clips and those shot from a different angle, it’s obvious that the Polish first lady was heading for Melania Trump from the beginning, and didn’t pass over Trump, who was busy saying hello to her husband. And after she shook Melania’s hand, she turned and shook the president’s hand as well. Nothing very awkward at all.

So why did so many outlets — and plenty of Twitter accounts — choose to make so much out of the alleged rejection? Because it was funny, presumably, to think of the president of the United States being embarrassed or humiliated by someone refusing his handshake.

Short GIFS and clickbait headlines about Trump being rejected also likely drove a certain amount of low-quality, high-churn traffic to those news sites, something outlets like Newsweek are increasingly desperate for. But what is the long-term cost of these strategies?

https://twitter.com/TEN_GOP/status/883076138112872449

The problem with posting a funny GIF of Trump is that, even though it might seem like a harmless laugh, to the extent that it distorts the reality of what actually happened, it plays right into the allegations of “fake news” coming from conservatives in the U.S. There are plenty of real things worth criticising Trump for — we don’t need to invent them.

It was a pretty big scoop, at least as far as Twitter and Reddit were concerned: CNN’s “K-File” investigative unit, run by former BuzzFeed reporter Andrew Kaczynski, found the guy who created the GIF that Donald Trump used for a recent anti-CNN tweet. And then a single poorly-worded line in the story shifted the focus away from the GIF creator and onto CNN itself.

In the story, CNN said it had decided not to identify the Reddit user who originally created the GIF, someone who goes by the name HanAssholeSolo. But then it added a coda to that promise that created a controversy about its motives that continues to expand.

CNN is not publishing “HanA**holeSolo’s” name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same. CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.

As soon as I read that last line, I thought to myself “That’s odd. It sounds like CNN is threatening to identify this guy if he steps out of line in the future.” That’s a pretty unusual thing for a mainstream news outlet to do. So I tweeted about it:

The threat is the part where you say you'll renege on the deal and reveal his identity if he doesn't behave https://t.co/OBY8EssJLO

— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) July 5, 2017

Kaczynski responded to me (and to others) that we were misinterpreting the phrase, and that it was intended only to make it clear that CNN had not made any kind of agreement with the Reddit user to keep his identity anonymous. But I was hardly the only one who saw it as an implied threat.

https://twitter.com/popehat/status/882422961814163456

Unfortunately for CNN, this line was seized upon by pro-Trump forces (my tweet was retweeted over two thousand times, which is an unusually large amount) and used to accuse the media outlet of blackmailing their target. This in turn fed into the ongoing “CNN is fake news” campaign that gave rise to the original Trump GIF of him taking down a person with the CNN logo for a head.

I don’t think CNN deliberately wanted to threaten the Reddit user with that phrase, but I find it hard to believe that no one else could see that this is the way it would be interpreted. According to BuzzFeed, the line was added later by an editor. “All we intended to make clear is that there was no agreement about revealing or not revealing his identity,” a CNN executive said.

That may have been the intention, but the way it was handled has made CNN’s problems worse instead of better. If you have a target on your back the way CNN does, you should try reading everything you write in the most suspicious way possible, just in case.

A large number of people, many of them in the mainstream media, spent a large part of Sunday up in arms about a tweet from Donald Trump in which he bashed CNN as “fraud news” (he’s apparently trying to get away from the term “fake news,” probably because it has been debased by him and his followers). The tweet included a GIF from a wrestling event in which he took someone down, but their face is obscured by a CNN logo.

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

Obviously, this is far from the only time Trump has attacked CNN on Twitter, and it’s not even close to being the worst thing he has said about them in speeches or at rallies. So why did it cause so much fuss? Mostly because some saw it as encouraging violence against members of the media, which they said crossed the line of acceptable behavior — and some argued that it should be seen as a breach of Twitter’s terms of service, which forbids harassment or threats of violence.

There’s a lot going on here, of course, which makes it more complicated than just some dumb tweet. First of all, it’s from the president of the United States. And it’s yet another in a long line of attacks on the mainstream media and threats against the press, and even threats against the First Amendment. Trump has deliberately made the traditional media the enemy, and this apparently plays extremely well with his base, who see the press as left-wing liars.

Please RETWEET THIS if you want Twitter to suspend Trump's account for repeated crimes, civil offenses, and violations of terms of service. pic.twitter.com/qHlwsJ1XaG

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) July 2, 2017

Needless to say, this troubles many people in the media, including me. It’s a pernicious and dangerous attempt to destabilize the free press and to empower news outlets that are more friendly to Trump, such as Breitbart News, InfoWars and NewsMax.

That said, however, this is also just a dumb tweet that includes a joke video clip from a clearly staged wrestling match, with a poorly Photoshopped logo added to it — in other words, it seems to be an obvious parody. In any case, it is hardly a call to violence against the press. And since that is the case, if Twitter was to remove it, it would provide Trump’s base with even more ammo to argue that their guy is being treated unfairly by liberal media snowflakes.

https://twitter.com/joshgreenman/status/881584963061243904

On top of all that, I personally don’t want Twitter to be pushing the censorship line even further down the slippery slope it is already on. Should hate and outright violence be removed? Yes. But if we are going to take down every tweet or account that engages in parody or satire, that’s going to lead to some dark places. As Charlie Warzel points out, Twitter didn’t even take down Kathy Griffin’s severed-head parody tweet, and that was much closer to advocating actual violence.

Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci also makes a good point, which is that CNN is hardly a blameless actor in this whole scenario. The network has deliberately and crassly played to Trump’s supporters in a variety of ways, and arguably gave the candidate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free advertising during the campaign. As she put it, if you turn the election into a wrestling match, someone who comes from that background will turn it against you.

During the election, CNN hired hacks just to shout on screen. You turn politics into pro wrestling, and a pro will wrestle it away from you.

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) July 2, 2017

I realize that just because CNN has given Trump lots of coverage, that doesn’t justify him attacking them. That’s called blaming the victim. And I also know that as soon as a journalist is thrown to the floor by a Republican (as Ben Jacobs was not long ago by then Congressional candidate Greg Gianforte) or is otherwise harmed by a Trump supporter, someone will say that this GIF made them do it. I happen to think that’s unlikely, but I could be wrong.

In any case, I think Twitter was right not to remove the tweet, because that’s a slippery slope that I don’t think we want to go down. Feel free to argue the point with me in the comments below.

Under the terms of a new German law, social networks like Facebook face fines of up to $57 million if they don’t delete illegal, racist or slanderous content within 24 hours. But free-speech advocates, including the Commission for Human Rights, say the law gives too much power to Facebook and other platforms to decide what constitutes hate speech.

“I am concerned with the lack of judicial oversight with respect to the responsibility placed upon private social networks to remove and delete content,” said David Kaye of the High Commission for Human Rights. “A prohibition on the dissemination of information based on vague and ambiguous criteria, such as ‘insult’ or ‘defamation,’ is incompatible” with the International Covenant on Civil Rights.”

The European Digital Rights group, made up of civil and human rights organizations, also protested the new law, saying “there is no indication of how a decision is to be made on what ‘violating content’ might be.” The group added that it is “easy to see how the fear of high fines will bring platforms to delete and block any content that appears to generate a risk of being punished under this new law.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists, meanwhile, said that the law is ostensibly aimed at combatting disinformation and hate speech, but the way it is going to be implemented “raises concerns about restrictions on free expression and the privatization of censorship.”

This is a disturbing decision by the Supreme Court of Canada, as explained by my former colleague (and fellow Canadian) Jeff Roberts at Fortune. It follows some equally troubling decisions in Europe that have ordered Google to delete results worldwide because of the so-called “right to be forgotten.”

In a 7-2 decision, the court agreed a British Columbia judge had the power to issue an injunction forcing Google to scrub search results about pirated products not just in Canada, but everywhere else in the world too.Those siding with Google, including civil liberties groups, had warned that allowing the injunction would harm free speech, setting a precedent to let any judge anywhere order a global ban on what appears on search engines. The Canadian Supreme Court, however, downplayed this objection and called Google’s fears “theoretical.”

Source: Google Loses Supreme Court of Canada Case Over Search Results

Update: Daphne Keller published a smart piece on this issue at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society (which I found via Eugene Volokh). Here’s some of what she said:

Canada’s endorsement of cross-border content removal orders is deeply troubling. It speeds the day when we will see the same kinds of orders from countries with problematic human rights records and oppressive speech laws. And it increases any individual speaker’s vulnerability to laws and state actors elsewhere in the world. Content hosting and distribution are increasingly centralized in the hands of a few multinational companies – Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft with their web hosting services, etc. Those companies have local presence and vulnerability to formal jurisdiction and real world threats of arrest or asset seizure in scores of countries.

Source: Ominous: Canadian Court Orders Google to Remove Search Results Globally

It should be noted that Keller is associate general counsel at Google, and as such was involved in this particular case at the Court of Appeals stage. But her warning is still worth listening to. Another smart post on the topic comes from my friend Michael Geist, a Canadian law professor.

What happens if a Chinese court orders it to remove Taiwanese sites from the index? Or if an Iranian court orders it to remove gay and lesbian sites from the index? Since local content laws differ from country to country, there is a great likelihood of conflicts. That leaves two possible problematic outcomes: local courts deciding what others can access online or companies such as Google selectively deciding which rules they wish to follow.

Source: Global Internet Takedown Orders Come to Canada: Supreme Court Upholds International Removal of Google Search Results

Smart post from Eugene Wei about how information gets distributed now, and things that were commonly known in specific circles (like a certain VC’s reputation for sexual harassment) become more widely known.

We live in the age of distributed truth, and it’s an environment in which fake news can spread like mold when in viral form. But the same applies to the truth, and if there’s one lesson on how to do your part in an age of distributed truth, it’s to speak the truth and to support those who do. It may be exhausting work—is it really necessary to point out the emperor is buck naked?—but it’s the best we can do for now.

Source: The age of distributed truth — Remains of the Day

Copy editors at the New York Times have written an open letter to executive editor Dean Baquet and managing editor Joe Kahn, protesting the downsizing of editing functions at the paper. The Times is planning to get rid of its central copy desk, and aims to reduce the number of editors by about 50%.

“Dear Dean and Joe,” the letter begins. “We have begun the humiliating process of justifying our continued presence at The New York Times. We take some solace in the fact that we have been assured repeatedly that copy editors are highly respected here. If that is true, we have a simple request. Cutting us down to 50 to 55 editors from more than 100, and expecting the same level of quality in the report, is dumbfoundingly unrealistic. Work with us on a new number.”

Source: New York Times copy desk to top editors: ‘You have turned your backs on us’ – Poynter

I have a huge amount of respect for copy editors, and editors of all types — the good ones are invaluable, and have saved me from more stupid errors than I care to enumerate. But the harsh fact is that the kind of structure newspapers used to have, in which four or five different editors touched every story, simply doesn’t make any sense any more.

When I worked at Fortune, one editor was responsible for assigning, copy editing and publishing. Obviously we still made mistakes, but not that much more than any other publication I don’t think. As touching and heartfelt as the New York Times editor’s letter is, there is no way to turn back the hands of time and make the newspaper business what it used to be.

This seems like an interesting — and also ambitious — project aimed at developing a kind of crowdsourced journalism infrastructure based on the crypto-currency Ethereum. Instead of a traditional advertising-based model, the group is proposing to monetize the project (known as Civil) using Ethereum “tokens” or virtual currency that could be exchanged in a variety of ways.

We propose a solution called Civil, an Ethereum-based decentralized platform that can be used to create “newsrooms” and “stations”?—?blockchain-based marketplaces where citizens and journalists form communities around a shared purpose and set of standards, financially support factual reporting and investigative work, and substantially limit misinformation through effective collaborative-editing methods. The net result is a self-sustaining global marketplace for journalism that is free from ads, fake news, a

Source: Civil: Self-Sustaining Journalism — Medium

Facebook has reportedly been working on building support for paywalls and subscription models into its mobile-first Instant Articles platform. And as with so much of what the social network offers to publishers, it will be a giant double-edged sword.

The company is hoping to roll out support for third-party subscriptions by the end of this year, according to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal.

The proposed feature is still in the development stages, so it’s unclear whether Facebook is planning to take a percentage of the revenue from subscriptions that are activated through Instant Articles (as Apple does through Apple News) or allow publishers to keep all the money.

As far as the structure of the feature goes, Facebook reportedly prefers a metered approach where users would get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay. This is the kind of paywall the New York Times offers.

Imposing such a feature could rankle some other publishers who have harder paywalls, however, such as the Journal itself, or the Financial Times.

There’s no question that support for subscriptions, in whatever way Facebook chooses to implement it, could be hugely beneficial to many media companies. As the social network and Google have increased their dominance in the advertising industry, many publishers have turned to subscriptions as a way of boosting their declining revenues.

According to a recent estimate by industry analyst Brian Wieser, the two digital giants now control more than 75% of the digital advertising business, and last year they accounted for almost 100% of the growth in that industry in the U.S.

Subscriptions have also become more appealing because outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post have been having so much success with them, thanks to what appears to be a backlash against President Donald Trump’s attacks on the media.

The risk in Facebook’s new feature, however, is the same as it is with almost every other Facebook offering: Namely, that it will pull media companies even further into the giant social network’s orbit, and thereby give it even more control over their fate.

Instant Articles itself, which formats news articles so they load faster on mobile devices, is exactly this kind of Faustian bargain. It solves a huge problem for many media companies, many of which can’t afford to come up with their own mobile solution, and it offers the potential of reaching Facebook’s massive 1.8-billion user base.

At the same time, however, it gives Facebook an enormous amount of control over the content that publishers produce and how they make money from it. And over the long term, it risks turning media companies into commodity suppliers of news to the social network.

Surveys show that large numbers of people who get their news from Facebook—including the millennial audiences that many media companies are so concerned about reaching—can’t remember the original source of the news they read on the site. The only source that matters is Facebook. What effect does that have on a media company’s brand?

The social network also has a history of changing its mind when it comes to features it offers to publishers. A number of years ago, many bet their future on so-called “social reader apps,” which lived on Facebook and for a time brought in millions of new readers.

That worked until Facebook decided to de-emphasize those apps in the news-feed algorithm, however, and all of a sudden huge numbers of users never saw those apps or the articles within them.

Reaching the billions of users Facebook has is a huge lure for publishers, and understandably so. But building your business—or at least a significant part of it—on someone else’s land can have very real consequences. Facebook may genuinely want to help media companies. But it also wants to help itself. How long until the latter clashes with the former?

As a number of legal experts warned they might, Donald Trump’s tweets about his “travel ban” helped convince an appeals court to block the controversial order. It’s the second time his own comments have helped the courts knock down the proposed legislation.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision on Monday, ruling that the Trump’s attempt to block immigration from six predominantly Muslim countries “exceeded the scope of the authority delegated to him by Congress.”

In their ruling, the judges cited a tweet from the president that was posted after the recent terrorist attack in London, in which Trump argued that the U.S. needed a travel ban “for certain dangerous countries.”

President Trump’s tweets continue to be cited in court decisions. This from the 9th circuit just now: pic.twitter.com/4qN3thefAq

— Matt Viser (@mviser) June 12, 2017

The Trump tweet was cited in a footnote in the decision, at a point where the court was questioning the justification for the ban.

“The Order seeks to ban people from specific countries, but it does not provide any link between an individual’s nationality and their propensity to commit terrorism or their inherent dangerousness,” the judges said. “In short, the Order does not provide a rationale explaining why permitting entry of nationals from the six designated countries… would be detrimental.”

The court also noted that press secretary Sean Spicer recently confirmed that Trump sees his tweets as official statements from the president of the United States, and therefore they should have the same effect as a statement from the Oval Office.

Immediately after the president posted his thoughts on the travel ban in the wake of the London attacks, a number of people were quick to respond that this was probably unwise, given the fact that the immigration order was still before the courts.

The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, warned in a tweet that it was planning to use Trump’s tweets as evidence in its ongoing fight against the order.

Another receipt to save for when we see you in court. https://t.co/7WMe0XMkrS

— ACLU (@ACLU) June 6, 2017

Even someone fairly close to Trump — George Conway, a New York lawyer and husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway — suggested that posting such a comment was unwise. “These tweets may make some ppl feel better, but they certainly won’t help OSG get 5 votes in SCOTUS, which is what actually matters. Sad.”

Conway went on to say that he was a big supporter of Trump and of the immigration ban, but added that tweets on legal matters “seriously undermine Admin agenda and POTUS.”

To make matters worse, Trump didn’t stop at one tweet about the ban (which his own administration had argued vociferously was not actually a ban, and shouldn’t be referred to with that term). The president said that he supported his original order, not the “watered down, politically correct version” that his own advisers had convinced him to sign.

That earlier version of the law was struck down by two lower courts because it was targeted at Muslims, and blocking travel based on a person’s religion is unconstitutional.

“I think he shot himself in the legal foot,” Cornell Law School immigration professor Stephen Yale-Loehr said of Trump’s comments about his preference for the original version of the ban.

One would think that the Trump administration or the president himself might be more careful with posts on Twitter about a legal case, since this isn’t the first time that his tweets have been used against him in a court decision blocking his immigration order.

A lower court in Hawaii that blocked the most recent version of the order, in the case that led to the current ruling by the court of appeal, also cited tweets from the president, as did an earlier 9th Circuit decision on the previous version of the ban.

Two of the most difficult problems in the current world of always-on communication are hacking and the spread of “fake news” or misinformation. In some cases, these two very different problems are combining to create one big headache.

In Venezuela, for example, digital-rights group Access Now says it discovered recently that Twitter accounts belonging to a local journalist and a member of parliament and human-rights activist had been hijacked, using a procedure it calls “the Double Switch.”

The hackers then used the accounts to spread fake news, something that has been particularly problematic in Venezuela because of the political unrest there, including a government crackdown that involves online surveillance and censorship.

The journalist and the politician/activist both got in touch with a digital help-line that Access Now operates in a number of countries and asked for help in getting their accounts back.

According to the group, the Double Switch begins when a hacker gets access to the login credentials for an account, whether through a “phishing” attack (which often involves a phony email request pretending to be from the service itself) or through other means.

The hacker then resets the login name and password, as well as the recovery email, so that the original user can’t get access. Then the “double switch” begins.

First, the hacker changes the name on the Twitter account, Access Now says. Then later, they change the name back to the original account-holder’s name or “handle.” They can do this because once a Twitter account is deactivated, the name on the account is freed up for others to use.

By the time the second switch is activated, the hackers have full control, so any attempt by the original account holder to regain access fails, since emails and other messages from Twitter with password-reset information etc. go to the hacker.

Access Now says in its report that the victims worked with Twitter to regain access to their accounts, and were ultimately successful in doing so. But by then, much damage had been done.

In one case, the user’s account was deleted. In the other, some of the account-holder’s original tweets were deleted, and the account was used to spread misinformation about events in Venezuela.

The digital-rights group — which said that similar methods could theoretically be used to hijack an account on Facebook or Instagram as well as Twitter — asked for social-media companies to do more to make it easier for account-holders to get access to a hijacked account.

The group also recommended that Twitter and others have different methods for restricting access to an account, apart from what is called “two-factor authentication.”

Two-factor authentication uses two different methods to verify a user’s identity, such as a password and a special one-time code sent to a mobile phone. Activists in countries like Venezuela, however, might not want to have their phone associated with such an account, Access Now said, because it could open them up to surveillance and harassment.

Google confirmed recently that it is coming out with a new version of its Chrome browser that will have ad-blocking features built in, which the company says will make it easier for users to surf the web without being annoyed by intrusive ads.

The search giant is coming under fire for not blocking another annoying and intrusive aspect of web browsers, however—namely, the fact that they track their users’ behavior.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out on Wednesday, Apple just announced a new version of its Safari browser that will not only block certain types of annoying ads (including auto-playing video ads), but will also disable user tracking.

Google’s update is focused solely on blocking what it says are obtrusive ads such as unwanted videos, ads that have a timer that counts down before the user can see the content, and so on.

“At the EFF, we understand that advertising funds much of the media and services online, but we also believe that users have the right to protect themselves against tracking,” researcher Alan Toner wrote in an essay published by the foundation. “Advertising is currently built around a surveillance architecture, and this has to change.”

Google’s decision to block certain types of advertising by default has been criticized by publishers and antitrust experts because of its dominant position in the digital ad market.

According to a recent research report from Pivotal analyst Brian Wieser, Google and Facebook combined control more than 75% of the $70-billion digital advertising market in the U.S., and the two companies alone accounted for almost all the growth in the market last year.

That dominant position is likely also the reason Google doesn’t want to block user tracking, since advertisers rely on those methods to target ads effectively.

Apple has no real advertising business, and therefore it doesn’t mind cutting off tracking in its browser. And the company has made a point in the past of stressing that it doesn’t invade its users privacy the way that companies like Google and Facebook do.

In his essay, the EFF researcher also notes that in addition to blocking ads, Google is offering publishers a new feature called Funding Choices, which will allow them to offer users the ability to turn off third-party ad blocking software and pay the publisher directly for content.

Even if users choose to do this, however, they can still be tracked by advertisers, Toner says. The new feature lets people pay sites to avoid being shown ads “but does not prevent Google, the site, or any other advertisers from continuing to track people who pay.”

Toner says the advertising industry has repeatedly rebuffed efforts to come up with a standard for opting out of tracking, like the Do Not Track program that was initially proposed in 2011.

“The industry’s sole response has been to create a system called AdChoices, which offers users a complicated and inefficient opt-out from targeted ads, but not from the data collection and the behavioral tracking behind the targeting,” the EFF researcher said.

When Snap went public in March, in one of the most eagerly anticipated tech IPOs in recent memory, some analysts expressed concern about a slowdown in the growth of its Snapchat messaging app. Now, a new number suggests those concerns may have been well founded.

In a note to Nomura Instinet’s invesment clients on Wednesday, Snap analyst Anthony DiClemente said that statistics from SensorTower—a company that tracks the popularity of mobile apps—shows that downloads of Snapchat have fallen by 22% in the last two months.

Downloads on Apple’s iOS platform have been even worse, the company found—they declined by more than 40% in the first two months of the second quarter.

By comparison, downloads of Facebook-owned Instagram have shown year-over-year growth, DiClemente pointed out in his note, “suggesting that competitive pressures may be intensifying for Snap, challenging the platform’s ability to attract and retain new users.”

The analyst has a “reduce” rating on the stock and a $14 price target, and said he has lowered both his revenue and profit estimates for this year and next year.

Snap’s stock [fortune-stock symbol=”SNAP”] traded as high as $27 after it went public, giving the company a market value of $18 billion, but it has fallen sharply since. Its share price dropped by another 6% on Thursday to trade in the $18 range, not far from its IPO price of $17.

In its first quarterly report as a public company last month, Snap said that it lost over $2 billion, primarily as a result of equity grants to executives like CEO Evan Spiegel.

Much of the pressure on Snap’s shares stems from concerns that Instagram is eating into the company’s user growth, and taking away advertisers as well.

Instagram added a feature called Stories earlier this year, which allows users to add multiple photos and videos to create a collection with a specific theme. The feature is essentially a carbon copy of a Snapchat feature with the same name.

Instagram said earlier this year that more than 200 million people use its Stories feature, which is more than Snapchat’s entire user base.

Snap and its defenders, however, argue that Snapchat functions differently from Instagram because it is much more focused on sharing among individuals, whereas Instagram has more of a public broadcast model, in which users track how many likes and comments they get.

According to a recent survey by App Annie, another app analytics company, about 35% of Snapchat’s daily users in the U.S. aren’t on Facebook the same day they use the app, and more than 45% can’t be found on Instagram on the same day they use Snapchat.

The risk for Snap, is that while Snapchat’s model may be more appealing to users, Instagram’s model may actually turn out to be more interesting to advertisers.