Category: Uncategorized

Google parent Alphabet’s annual shareholder meetings are a very civilized affair, with chairman Eric Schmidt playing host, sharing a vision of the better world the company is creating, followed by polite questions and proposals from shareholders.

Those shareholder proposals, however, are largely a false front—window dressing, if you will. Because as everyone at the meeting probably knows, there are only two shareholders who really matter at an Alphabet annual meeting, and their names are Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

That’s because Google founders Page and Brin control 51% of the votes, despite owning just 11% of the overall equity. Their voting control comes through their large ownership stake in Class B shares, which carry 10 votes each (Schmidt’s stake gives him 5% of the overall votes).

One by one, shareholder representatives stood up at the meeting in Mountain View, Calif. on Wednesday morning, including several from large investors such as Northstar Asset Management, which owns 7.2 million shares. They presented a range of proposals designed to try and force Alphabet to take action on a variety of issues.

A proposal from Arjuna Capital, for example, would have required that the company produce numbers related to the pay gap between male and female staff, an issue that is currently the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor.

The department has alleged that there are “systemic compensation disparities against women” at Alphabet, but the company maintains that this is not the case. In the shareholder proxy document filed with regulators, it argued that shareholders should vote against the Arjuna proposal because it is “not in the best interests of the company and its stockholders.”

Another motion, also backed by Arjuna and several other institutional shareholders, proposed that the company be required to produce a report describing what kind of action it is taking to prevent the spread of “fake news” and misinformation through its networks.

Arjuna director Natasha Lamb told the meeting that such misinformation “has affected elections in the U.K, France and the U.S., and the confusion cuts across political lines—a study from Pew shows that 64% of Americans trust news on the Internet less than a year ago.” Steps the company has announced to take action, she said “are too little and too late.”

The investment fund presented an identical motion at Facebook’s recent annual meeting, and just like the proposal at Alphabet’s meeting, it was voted down—and for the same reason, since Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg controls a majority of the votes in the company.

The motion from NorthStar was perhaps the most quixotic of them all: It proposed that Alphabet restructure its shares in order to give every shareholder a single vote.

A representative for the fund said that it’s easy to ignore voting-rights inequities when profits are up, but it “poses significant risk” to the company’s future performance. “It’s impossible for shareholders to have any meaningful input,” the NorthStar spokesman said. “We are very concerned about the governance risks of relying on two or three people.”

Just like all the other shareholder proposals, the Northstar motion was voted down.

Most of the users watching Apple’s WWDC conference on Monday were probably interested in what the company’s new products can do, but at least some of the interest in Apple’s latest version of its Safari web browser was based on what it doesn’t do.

In a nutshell, the version of Safari that is rolling out with Mac’s new High Sierra operating system won’t display auto-playing videos on websites, something many web users hate. And it won’t allow websites to track users as they move across the web either.

https://twitter.com/JackMarshall/status/871782144993091585

These new features may put Apple on users’ good side, since both autoplaying videos and user-tracking are seen as annoying and intrusive. But publishers and media companies aren’t likely to greet these new additions with open arms, and neither are advertisers.

Apple’s Craig Federighi said the upcoming version of Safari will block autoplay videos and will feature what he called “intelligent tracking prevention,” which will prevent websites from tracking your browsing data. “Now your browser history is your own,” he said.

Apple’s moves come on the heels of an announcement from Google that the next version of its Chrome web browser—which has about 60% of the market—will block certain ad types by default, including autoplaying video ads. In some cases, websites that have a lot of low-quality ads will have all their ads blocked, not just the ones that breach Google’s rules.

In Google’s case, the fact that the company is one of the world’s largest advertising entities and Chrome is the leading browser by market share makes some publishers and advertisers nervous.

Although the search giant points out that the definition of which ads are acceptable comes from an independent industry group called the Coalition for Better Ads, some believe that the default blocking of certain ads puts too much power in Google’s hands.

Apple doesn’t have a huge digital advertising business the way Google does, and its browser is the third or fourth player in the market based on recent estimates. So it would be harder to make the case that Apple’s choice to not show autoplaying videos is anti-competitive.

That said, however, Apple has a large and powerful user base of loyal fans, and the fact that it is using that power to remove certain forms of advertising—and tools that advertisers and publishers use, such as user tracking—is bound to set off alarm bells for some in the industry.

https://twitter.com/readDanwrite/status/871781907889106944

Although it is a small player in relative terms, Apple sparked much of the current outcry about ad-blocking software when it enabled support for third-party ad blockers in iOS 9 in 2015.

Ad-blocking in general, on both the desktop and mobile web, has been growing rapidly over the past couple of years, according to industry surveys. Users on mobile devices in particular are not happy with the time-consuming and intrusive ads that many sites rely on.

Publishers, meanwhile, argue that they have no choice but to use these annoying features, because Google and Facebook have taken over so much of the digital-advertising market.

According to one industry analyst, the two companies combined have about 75% of the $70-billion U.S. digital advertising market, and between the two of them, they accounted for virtually all of the growth in the industry last year.

Twitter users block other users on the platform all the time, in some cases because they are abusive and sometimes because they are just irritating. But is it different if the user doing the blocking happens to be the president of the United States?

The Knight First Amendment Institute says it is different, or at least that it should be. The Institute, a non-profit group associated with Columbia University, has sent a letter to the White House arguing that Trump is breaching the First Amendment rights of those he blocks.

It might seem laughable at first, and there are some First Amendment experts and supporters who appear to find it so, but the Institute believes it has a valid case.

According to the letter, written by Institute director Jameel Jaffer, the president’s Twitter account fits the legal definition of a “designated public forum,” and as such it can’t be closed to public access under the First Amendment.

In effect, the Institute argues that the law requires Trump make his account available to everyone regardless of whether they criticize him. It has said it is considering pursuing a case against the president on behalf of two users who were blocked by him.

“Though the architects of the Constitution surely didn’t contemplate presidential Twitter accounts, they understood that the President must not be allowed to banish views from public discourse simply because he finds them objectionable,” Jaffer said in a statement. “Having opened this forum to all comers, the President can’t exclude people from it merely because he dislikes what they’re saying.”

Not everyone is buying this argument, however. Ken White, a former assistant U.S. Attorney who writes legal commentary at Popehat and is a First Amendment expert, said that he found the idea of the Institute’s case “ridiculous.”

https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/872160527153340416

Ken Paulson, president of the First Amendment Center, told the Wall Street Journal that the Institute had a “novel and ambitious argument” that was clearly in the public interest. But he also described it as a “tough sell.”

Is the president’s Twitter account “a public forum where interactive free expression is expected or more like a newsletter, where the communication is all one way?” Paulson asked. Municipalities that establish Facebook pages and invite citizen input may be creating public forums, “but I’m not sure that Donald Trump’s brief bursts of opinion are the same thing.”

https://twitter.com/andy_sellars/status/872160254229917696

There a number of problems with determining whether Trump’s Twitter account is a public forum or not, and one of them stems from the fact that the law is far from settled on the question of what exactly constitutes a truly public forum.

The laws relating to free public access to government property were designed to protect the ability of demonstrators, protesters, etc. to speak their mind in public parks and other areas. The extension of this right to any “public forum” didn’t occur until a Supreme Court decision in 1972, and from that point things just got more and more complicated.

As University of Florida law professor Lyrissa Lydsky put it in a legal paper on the First Amendment and online forums that was published in 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court’s public forum and government speech doctrines are “lacking in coherence — to put it mildly.”

In a nutshell, there are several definitions for public forums, based in part on what the government’s intentions were in setting them up in the first place. A fully public forum, designed for what is described as “expressive activity,” can’t be censored. But a “limited public forum,” which has a specific purpose, can be restricted in a variety of ways.

To further complicate things, the government and its representatives are protected from First Amendment rules on such matters if what they are doing is defined by the court as “government speech.” If so, then feedback or input or access theoretically can be restricted.

So should Donald Trump’s Twitter account be considered a public forum, a limited public forum, or a form of protected government speech?

Comments from press secretary Sean Spicer on Tuesday could be pertinent to such a case, because he said that Trump’s tweets are considered to be “official statements by the president.” That could support the argument that Trump is engaging in government speech, and therefore opposing viewpoints can be restricted without breaching the First Amendment.

Early Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump said he would continue to use Twitter even though “the fake MSM” doesn’t like it, saying the social network allows him to broadcast what he called “the honest and unfiltered message” about his government to Americans.

The FAKE MSM is working so hard trying to get me not to use Social Media. They hate that I can get the honest and unfiltered message out.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

The President went on to criticize the “fake news” of media outlets such as CNN, NBC and the New York Times, saying if he had relied on those organizations, he would have had “zero chance of winning” the presidential election.

Sorry folks, but if I would have relied on the Fake News of CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, washpost or nytimes, I would have had ZERO chance winning WH

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

It’s not the first time Trump has talked about how using social media allows him to get his message out to Americans directly. During an interview in January, he said he liked using the social network because he was “covered so dishonestly by the press.”

At the same time, however, that direct and unfiltered message has also caused problems for the president and his administration on a number of occasions.

To take just one example, courts in both Washington state and Hawaii used tweets that Trump posted about his proposed immigration ban to strike down the legislation, on the basis that his comments suggested the ban was targeted specifically at banning Muslims, which is unconstitutional.

Some legal experts have warned that his recent comments about the travel ban could cause similar complications as the case heads to the Supreme Court.

In a response to his Tuesday morning rant, the American Civil Liberties Union — one of the groups that has been fighting the immigration ban — suggested that it may use Trump’s tweets on the topic to help in that ongoing battle.

Yes, we may incorporate @realDonaldTrump's tweets about the ban into our Supreme Court argument.

— ACLU (@ACLU) June 5, 2017

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

— ACLU (@ACLU) June 6, 2017

There have been reports recently from a number of news outlets that members of Trump’s administration would very much like to filter his tweets by having his legal team look at them before they are sent out. But Trump apparently isn’t in favor of that kind of strategy.

Direct access to his Twitter account was reportedly taken away from the president for a brief period during the election campaign, because of concerns about the impact that his unfiltered tweets might have. During that time his tweets were edited by spokesman Hope Hicks.

According to a number of White House insiders, some of the tweets that appear on Trump’s personal account come from him, via his personal Android phone, while others are written by members of his staff and are posted from an iPhone.

Trump’s defense of his Twitter use comes just a day after one of his advisers, Kellyanne Conway, criticized the media’s focus on his individual tweets, referring to what she called its “obsession with covering everything [he] says on Twitter.”

A number of media observers have pointed out, however, that the tweets from Trump are essentially official communications from the president of the United States, just as press conferences or news releases are, and therefore they deserve to be covered.

CNN media analyst Brian Stelter said the president’s tweets are an important part of the public record of his administration, since they provide a glimpse into his emotional state and give his unfiltered perspective on the events going on around him.

What I said on @NewDay about Trump's impulsive tweets:

The emotional state of the president IS part of this story… https://t.co/fG7eUUu28S

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) June 6, 2017

As more than one journalist noted in response to Trump’s Tuesday morning rant, most of the media would probably love for him to continue tweeting, because it provides them with a real-time glimpse into his thought process and endless fodder for articles. Any pressure to stop doing so seems more likely to come from members of his own administration.

Fact Check: MSM eat up his tweets like Skittles. It's WH advisers, lawyers and Trump supporters who want him to stop tweeting. https://t.co/r6ZvJlTa8O

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) June 6, 2017

Google has confirmed that it intends to add a new feature to its Chrome web browser that will block certain types of ads from being seen by users, and in some cases could block all advertising on websites that don’t meet certain standards.

The Alphabet subsidiary says it wants to work with publishers to help them understand what kinds of ads will no longer be acceptable, and the standards being built into the browser come from an industry group rather than Google itself.

But that hasn’t stopped some from criticizing the idea, since Google controls a significant share of the digital ad market.

Word of the new feature first emerged in April, when the Wall Street Journal reported that Google had approached some publishing partners about its plans.

At the time, Cornell Law professor James Grimmelmann said that the idea of an ad blocker controlled by one of the world’s largest digital-advertising companies was almost certain to raise anti-competitive concerns in some circles.

If Google uses its 50%+ browser share to ship a product that blocks rivals’ ads but not Google’s own, my antitrust eyebrows go up.

— James Grimmelmann (@grimmelm) April 20, 2017

In a nutshell, Chrome will now include ad-blocking features that are turned on by default (although Google prefers to call it “filtering” rather than blocking). Ads that meet certain annoying criteria will not be shown, and if a website crosses a certain threshold of substandard ads, users won’t see any advertising at all.

Some of the ad types that will be blocked include pop-ups, videos that auto-play, and so-called “pre-stitial” ads that force readers to sit through a count down before they can see the page’s contents. Many leading publishers rely on some or all of these strategies to boost ad revenue.

To try and soften the blow somewhat, Google is also offering something called Funding Choices, which allows publishers to show users a note when their ads are blocked by third-party software. The note will give readers the option of either disabling their blocker or buying an ad-free pass or subscription of some kind for that site.

Google reportedly pays Eyeo, the German company that owns AdBlock—the leading ad-blocking software—to have its ads automatically whitelisted, so they are not blocked.

The company notes that the standards for what will be considered acceptable advertising under its new Chrome system have been developed by the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group that includes advertisers and industry groups, media companies such as News Corp., as well as Google and Facebook.

The appeal of such a feature for users and publishers is obvious. The web has become a sea of popups, pop-unders, interstitials, auto-playing videos and other annoying behavior, and growing numbers of users have responded by installing ad-blocking software like AdBlock. Publishers lose revenue as a result, and no one is happy.

However, some media companies argue that they have no choice but to rely on such methods, because the bulk of the advertising business has been sucked up by Google and Facebook.

According to a recent estimate by Pivotal Research, not only do the two digital giants control over 75% of the $70-billion U.S. digital ad industry, last year they accounted for almost all of the growth that the industry saw compared to 2015.

Not only that, but Google’s Chrome browser has an estimated 58% share of the browser market, which makes it the leading player by far.

So in effect, what the company is rolling out is a system that will block ads by default for a majority of web users, based on standards that it and Facebook—two companies that control the bulk of the online advertising business—have a huge amount of control over.

Will it improve the web for users? Probably. But at the same time, it raises some significant questions about the extent of Google’s power over the advertising we see, and its increasing dominance when it comes to the ways in which publishers and media companies can make money.

Media companies and politicians aren’t the only ones who think Facebook needs to stop fake news from proliferating on the social network. Two institutional investors are also pressuring the company to do something to fix the problem.

Arjuna Capital and Baldwin Brothers are jointly presenting a proposal at Facebook’s annual shareholder meeting Thursday in ** that asks the company to take decisive action to inhibit fake news, and would require Facebook to be transparent about how it is doing so. The two investors plan to present a similar proposal at Google’s annual meeting next week.

“Fake news is not about spin or confirmation bias – It’s about fabrication,” Arjuna managing director Natasha Lamb said in a statement. “And when fabrication is disseminated so easily at scale, the way we have seen through social media, it represents a threat to our democracy.”

The resolution would require Facebook to “provide detailed information regarding the impact of current fake news flows and management systems on the democratic process, free speech, and a cohesive society.” It would also require the company to quantify the “reputational and operational risks from potential public policy developments” related to fake news.

Arjuna Capital is an investment firm focused on sustainable and impact investing. It and Baldwin hold a small number of Facebook shares, but are hoping to influence larger shareholders to put pressure on the company. The two have made similar efforts related to pay equity at several of the major technology companies, including Google and Facebook.

The chances of the proposal getting enough votes to pass at Facebook’s annual meeting are extremely small, since CEO Mark Zuckerberg controls a majority of the votes by virtue of owning multiple-voting shares. But the firms are hoping the company will take action anyway if enough individual shareholders raise the issue and make it clear they think it’s important.

“If Facebook maintains a platform of confusion and distortion it will lose the trust of its users, in which case they will simply move on to the next thing, and that’s what concerns long-term investors,” said Lamb. “Right now, we think the issue is being fumbled.”

Michael Frerichs, the treasurer for the state of Illinois–which is an investor in Facebook–is also supporting the Arjuna and Baldwin proposal.

“We need internet platforms to step up and acknowledge their corporate responsibilities,” Frerichs said in a statement. “With more and more citizens being subjected to systematic deception and manipulation online, the proliferation of fake news represents a major threat to our democratic institutions.”

Facebook’s role in distributing fake news, hoaxes and misinformation has been criticized by media analysts as well as political entities like the European Union, who have pressured the company to do more to solve the problem. On Wednesday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blamed Facebook for the role that fake news played in her failed presidential campaign.

Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg initially dismissed the idea that fake news was a significant problem, or that Facebook had any responsibility to eradicate it, but more recently the company has taken steps to try and halt the spread of hoaxes and misinformation.

Facebook has partnered with a number of third-party fact-checking organizations to flag fake news on the network, and has also tried to remove some of the financial incentives for publishing such content by banning certain sites from using its ad services. The company has advised shareholders to vote against the Arjuna and Baldwin Brothers proposal.

In the world of crypto-currencies — the most famous of which is Bitcoin — the hottest trend is what’s being called an “initial coin offering,” in which companies offer crypto-currency tokens to their supporters as a way of crowdfunding their efforts.

How hot is it? On Thursday, a startup called Brave launched a coin offering to fund its next-generation web browser and raised the equivalent of $35 million in about 30 seconds, according to CoinDesk, a site that covers crypto-currency news.

Brave is the brainchild of Brendan Eich, the co-founder of the Mozilla Foundation and former CEO of its for-profit arm, Mozilla Corp. The browser is designed so that users can direct micropayments to the web publishers they like using crypto-currency.

“We are pleased with the sale, and we’re looking forward to disrupting digital advertising and building a user-centric platform for supporting the Web,” Eich told CoinDesk.

The Brave browser’s payment system uses what are called Basic Attention Tokens, whose value is based on the crypto-currency known as Ethereum, a popular alternative to Bitcoin. Eich has said his company plans to release the code behind the tokens as open source, so that anyone can build publishing systems or services that use them for payment.

Although the use of crypto-currencies puts a new spin on it, the history of micropayments for content is littered with failures, including a litany of strange-sounding digital would-be payment systems such as Beenz and Flooz.

That said, however, some appear to be extremely interested in Brave’s tokens. The coin offering was so popular that some would-be investors complained they had no chance to even make a bid. A single investor bought almost $5 million worth in a single trade, CoinDesk said.

Only about 130 people were able to buy tokens in the offering, and five buyers got close to half of all the available supply, according to a Bitcoin exchange that analyzed the sale.

Initial coin offerings are seen by some as an alternative to traditional share offerings. Instead of equity, backers get tokens that can be converted into units of a crypto-currency like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Crypto-currencies generate value through a process called “mining,” which involves the computation of complex mathematical formulas.

Regulators have said they are looking into initial coin offerings to see if they should be treated the same as equity offerings, but for now they are largely unregulated.

Investor Balaji Srinivasan said in a recent essay that he believes crypto-currency tokens could eventually generate more money for the technology industry than all of the Internet-related equity offerings that have taken place to date. He called the token economy “a Kickstarter on steroids.”

Kik, a Canadian company that makes a popular messaging app, said recently that it is launching its own crypto-currency called Kin with an initial coin offering. Like the tokens that Brave sold, Kik’s currency will be based on Ethereum.

Twitter has been one of Donald Trump’s key tools ever since he started running for president, so it’s no surprise that his account is closely followed by millions of users, and his every tweet is parsed for intelligence about his intentions.

More recently, however, attention has focused on the fact that Trump’s already large Twitter following appears to have increased substantially, and that many of these new followers seem to be “bots” or automated accounts. This has triggered fears in some circles of a looming “bot war.”

According to a number of tweets, including one that got a lot of traction on the social network, Trump’s following increased by as much as 5 million in a matter of days, and most of the new followers were automated or fake accounts.

https://twitter.com/txmockingjay/status/869389023898370048

A spokesman for Twitter, however, told BuzzFeed this report was not true, and a comparison that the news site did between Trump’s current personal Twitter profile and an archived version of the page shows that it has only increased by about 300,000 in the past few days.

While it may not have grown by several million in just a few days, Trump’s account has added more than 2 million followers this month, according to Mashable. It has added about 7 million since February, the site said, and more than half of them have blank profiles.

A report from a third-party service called Twitter Audit shows that more than half of those following the president’s account are suspected of being fake or automated (although BuzzFeed notes that the site’s methodology for detecting fakes is not foolproof).

Totally normal that Trump's twitter account gained 3 million followers this weekend and almost all created in May w/ no prior tweets, right? pic.twitter.com/UbEWJePf9I

— The Darkest Timeline Numbersmuncher (@NumbersMuncher) May 30, 2017

These large increases, and what appears to be a huge number of automated followers, have sparked a number of theories, including one from Newsweek that suggested the president or his team might have purchased fake followers, something celebrity accounts occasionally do.

But another theory being promoted by some observers is that the bots are part of a deliberate build-up for a forthcoming “bot war” between the Trump administration and its critics, one that might be part of a Russian attempt to influence public opinion related to the president.

Malcolm Nance, a retired U.S. Navy cryptologist and intelligence expert, said he believes that the increase in bots following Trump could show that “Russian cyber warfare support [is] ramping up for @POTUS” and that this kind of behavior is a “key intelligence indicator.”

Concur w/ @th3j35t3r Russian Cyber warfare support ramping up for @POTUS? Key intelligence indicator of impending major political activity. https://t.co/87dpvdw7LB

— Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) May 30, 2017

Intelligence sources working for a number of agencies including the FBI have suggested that agents working for or with the Russian government may have tried to influence the outcome of the U.S. election. And Facebook recently released a report that indicates organized groups tried to influence public opinion via fake accounts sharing hoaxes or misinformation.

Looking back on her failed election campaign, former Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton said she takes responsibility for every political decision she made, but “that’s not why I lost,” she told attendees at the Code conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

In addition to press attention focused on her use of a personal email server—which Clinton called a “nothing-burger” that the New York Times “covered like it was Pearl Harbor”—the former Secretary of State said she was subjected to an unprecedented campaign of fake news and social engineering on Facebook, orchestrated by Russian agents and an army of bots.

Clinton said that while her campaign was using social media to reach out to potential voters and supporters, Republican groups were engaged in the “weaponization of technology” to push a message about her and the risks of electing her president.

Wow, Hillary is laying out a powerful case on #Russian intervention in our election, giving a seminar on weaponized data and propaganda.

— Peter Daou (@peterdaou) May 31, 2017

“Here’s what the other side was doing,” she told interviewers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of Recode. “Through content farms, through an enormous investment in falsehoods, fake news, call it what you will—lies—the other side was using content that was just flat out false, and delivering it both above and below the radar screen.”

In terms of Facebook, Clinton said that the “vast majority” of news items that appeared on the social network about her were fake. This orchestrated campaign was “connected, as we now know, to a thousand Russian agents [and] connected to the bots, which are just out of control,” she said.

Clinton referred to a recently declassified report from the Director of National Intelligence, which said that a number of intelligence agencies agreed there was Russian involvement in the campaign.

“It’s a vast Russian conspiracy. Turns out we were right.” An unusually raw and candid @HillaryClinton on 2016. https://t.co/UmObvbtMYR

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) May 31, 2017

“Read the declassified report that came out in early January,” Clinton said. “Seventeen agencies all in agreement—they concluded with high confidence that the Russians ran an extensive information war campaign against my campaign to influence voters in the election.”

These fake news stories helped convince potential voters not to support her, Clinton said. And the former Secretary of State said she and her campaign were convinced of Russian government involvement in a disinformation campaign and other dirty tricks early on.

“We went and told anyone we could find that the Russians were messing with the election and we were basically shoo’d away,” Clinton said. “We couldn’t get the press to cover it.”

Clinton also referred to Cambridge Analytica, a data-analysis company that specializes in using demographic and psycho-graphic data about online behavior to target political and advertising messages. Some have credited the firm—which is controlled by Robert Mercer, a prominent backer of the Trump campaign—with helping to sway the election.

Hillary says Facebook needs to do much more to stop fake news. "They’ve got to get back trying to curate it more effectively." #codecon

— Miguel Helft (@mhelft) May 31, 2017

The former Senator said that it’s important for people in the technology world and the business world to understand the connections between “domestic fake news operations” and the sophisticated attempts by Russian cyber agents to influence user behavior.

“How did they know what messages to deliver?” Clinton asked, referring to the Russians. “Who told them? Who were they colluding with?” She also called on Facebook to do more about fake news on the network. “They’ve got to curate the news more effectively,” she said. “They’ve got to help prevent fake news from creating a new reality.”

Clinton called her use of a personal email server a “nothing burger,” that got turned into “the biggest scandal since Lord knows when.” New York Times covered it “like it was Pearl Harbor.” She said “I take responsibility for every decision I made, but that’s not why I lost.” Talks about the “weaponization of technology” by various groups, as well as the Russians and Cambridge Analytica. “Here’s what the other side was doing — through content farms, through an enormous investment in falsehoods, fake news, call it what you will — lies — other side using content that was just flat out false, delivering it both above and below the radar screen — look at Facebook, vast majority of the news items were fake — connected as we know now to 1,000 Russian agents, connected to the bots, which are just out of control, see reports now about Trump’s account and all the fake accounts following him…

Clinton noted that she had no control of the Russians, which she said “weaponized” technology against her. She cited the deluge of false articles that circulated on Facebook in the months preceding the election that were “connected to the 1000 Russian agents,” and WikiLeaks, which spent the month before the election releasing a daily trove of emails from her campaign Chairman John Podesta.

Google searches for WikiLeaks, she said, were highest in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, swing states crucial to her victory that she narrowly lost. But, she said, the Russians couldn’t have acted unilaterally; they had to have had support from Americans. “How did they know what messages to deliver?” she asked about the Russians. “Who told them? Who were they colluding with?”

“It’s important for people in tech and business to understand the marriage of the “domestic fake news operations,” the sophisticated Russian cyber units and the Republicans’ more flush data repository, Clinton said.

“Putin wants to bring us down,” Clinton said. “It’s way beyond me. …. I believe that what was happening to me was unprecedented. Over the summer we went and told anyone we could find that the Russians were messing with the election and we were basically shoo’d away. …. We couldn’t get the press to cover it.”

Clinton said platforms like Facebook have got to get better at curating news. But she also said that her supporters put off taking more action on fake news because she was thought to be in the lead. “I don’t know enough about what they could have done in real time,” Clinton said. “I also think I was the victim of the very broad assumption I was going to win. I never believed it, I always thought it would be a close election.”

When sportscaster Bill Simmons left ESPN and subsequently started a new publication called The Ringer, in partnership with the blogging platform Medium, it was seen as a huge loss for Disney-owned ESPN. Now, Simmons is on the move again — this time to Vox Media.

Vox CEO Jim Bankoff told the Wall Street Journal he sees Simmons and The Ringer as a strong brand that will fit well with the company’s portfolio. Vox Media, whose financial backers include NBCUniversal, operates a range of sites including The Verge, Recode and the sports-blog network SB Nation.

Simmons will retain ownership of The Ringer and its various offshoots, which include a successful podcast that he started while at ESPN. Bankoff said Vox and Simmons will share the advertising revenue from those assets, although the exact ratio was not made public.

Before he left in 2015, Simmons was one of the stars of the ESPN universe, thanks to the audience he had built up for Grantland, the standalone sports and culture site he created for the network. His departure was seen by many as a sign that ESPN was losing traction with sports fans, and he made no secret of the fact that the parting was acrimonious.

Don't do it with ESPN. RT @ParrishWalton: What are the lessons @BillSimmons learned from running Grantland from a business perspective?

— Bill Simmons (@BillSimmons) February 17, 2016

Sources at ESPN, meanwhile, said at the time that Grantland was mostly a vanity project for Simmons and didn’t really generate enough traffic or advertising revenue to make it worthwhile for the site to continue, in part because of Simmon’s $3-million salary.

After leaving the sports network, Simmons signed a high-profile deal with HBO to produce and star in an interview show called Any Given Wednesday. But despite his passionate following in the sports world, the program failed to generate much positive buzz, and it was eventually shelved just four months after it launched.

When the show launched, HBO became an investor in Simmons’ holding company, which produced the show and his other ventures. It’s unclear what role the broadcast network will have in the current relationship with Vox, or whether Simmons will continue working with HBO as well.

Several months after he left ESPN, Simmons announced that he was starting a new venture called The Ringer, and that it would be hosted by Medium, the blogging platform founded by Twitter co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams. At the time, the site was busy signing up to host a number of external publishers and content companies.

Earlier this year, however, Medium announced that it was pivoting its business away from advertising revenue to a subscription-based model, which reportedly took a number of its publishing partners by surprise and made them rethink their desire to be hosted there.

Smart move by @Bankoff, opening his platform to others: Bill Simmons Signs Deal to Move Sports Site to Vox Media https://t.co/XMB0JYJYdW

— Paul Greenberg (@paulgreenberg) May 30, 2017

Vox Media, meanwhile, said that if The Ringer experiment works well, the company may consider opening its platform and network up to other publishers or content creators in the same way. “We may do others, but we will be very selective,” Bankoff told the Journal. “We only want to work with the best and with sites that are consistent with our approach.”

Bankoff, a former executive at AOL, joined what became Vox in 2008. At the time, the company consisted primarily of SB Nation, a network of hundreds of individual blogs written by fans of different local sports teams.

In addition to sites like The Verge, Polygon and Vox, the company also owns Recode, which was previously known as All Things Digital and was at one time co-owned by the Wall Street Journal. In 2015, NBCUniversal invested $200 million in Vox, giving it a theoretical valuation of almost $1 billion at the time.

In what appears to be a first, a court in Switzerland has fined a man the equivalent of over $4,000 just for clicking the “like” button on what a judge said were defamatory Facebook comments.

The comments in question suggested that Erwin Kessler, who runs an animal-rights group, holds racist and anti-Semitic views. The defendant (who wasn’t named in the court documents obtained by Agence France Presse) clicked “like” on some of the comments and linked to some of the posts.

Kessler has sued a number of people who participated in those discussions, which began in 2015 during a debate over which animal-rights groups should be allowed to participate in a vegan street festival, according to a Swiss newspaper that covered the story.

Several of the people who made specific comments about Kessler have been found guilty of defamation, but Swiss legal experts said the defendant in the most recent case is the first to have been fined just for “liking” such comments.

According to court documents, the judge in the case ruled that by clicking the “like” button, the defendant “clearly endorsed the unseemly content and made it his own.”

To complicate matters, Kessler was convicted of making racist comments (something that is illegal under Swiss law) in 1998, and briefly served time in prison. But the judge in the recent case said that the defendant had failed to prove that the comments he “liked” were accurate.

Defamation law as it applies to social networks is a grey area in a lot of countries, including the United States, although the U.S. First Amendment provides a lot more protection for an individual’s right to freedom of speech than is found in some other jurisdictions.

Even in the U.S., there have been a number of defamation cases involving social media, including a case in which singer Courtney Love was sued for making derogatory comments about a fashion designer and was forced to pay $350,000 to settle the case.

In Britain, a newspaper columnist was convicted earlier this year of making derogatory comments about a writer on Twitter and was forced to pay damages of $30,000.

The Swiss case, however, appears to be the first in which a man has been found guilty of defamation just for clicking the “like” button on someone else’s comments on Facebook.

In her decision, the Swiss judge argued that by doing so, the man had made the comments “accessible to a large number of people,” since Facebook showed them to all of his friends and followers. Doing this was an “affront to Kessler’s honour,” the judge ruled.

In a Canadian case, a woman was found guilty of making disparaging comments on Facebook about a neighbor, and was held responsible not only for the damage her own comments caused, but also for subsequent comments made by her friends.

Ever since Bitcoin first appeared on the scene several years ago, fans of the crypto-currency have been searching for a way to apply the idea that might capture the public imagination and broaden the use of the technology beyond just geeks and programmers.

Now, some believe that application has appeared with the rise of the “token” economy, in which companies or startup ventures fund their operations by handing out units of crypto-currencies. Some companies have even done what are known as “initial coin offerings” or ICOs, in which they distribute tokens instead of shares to investors.

The crypto-currency market is seen by some as a bubble with hugely inflated prices. Some observers say Bitcoin and other similar ventures are similar to Linux, an open-source alternative to Microsoft’s Windows operating system that has never really achieved mainstream success.

But entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, believes that token-based systems “may eventually create and capture more value than the last generation of Internet companies.”

In an essay published recently on the blogging platform Medium, Srinivasan and his partner Naval Ravikant — co-founder and CEO of a popular online VC community called AngelList — said they believe the token economy has the potential to become “a Kickstarter on steroids.”

The two men, both of whom have been investing in Bitcoin-related technology for several years, argue that using tokens as a financing option has the potential to improve the liquidity options that companies have by several orders of magnitude, as well as increasing the size of the available audience that might want to invest in such ventures.

"token launches occur in any country. coming to the US/Silicon Valley/Wall Street to raise financing will diminish" https://t.co/oHBedEZOC0

— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) May 28, 2017

All of this is possible because of an explosion in the crypto-currency market over the past few years, they argue, in which Bitcoin has survived internal strife but also given birth to alternative currency systems and platforms such as Ethereum.

Initial coin offerings or ICOs are one way of using these new currencies, Srinivasan and Ravikant say. Canadian messaging-app maker Kik recently announced that it is launching its own crypto-currency called Kin, and plans to offer units of it to supporters through a crowdfunding campaign. The currency is based on Ethereum’s blockchain technology.

Kik plans to issue 10 trillion Kin tokens to developers and users via a separate non-profit foundation called the Kin Foundation, which will ultimately hold 60% of all the Kin tokens and be run by a group of independent directors.

Srinivasan and Ravikant warn that some uses of crypto-currency tokens, including some ICOs, may be subject to regulation by governments, if they are seen as equivalent to doing a traditional equity offering or IPO, in which investors receive shares of the company. But they argue other uses of tokens for crowdfunding could essentially be unregulated.

Token supporters say they aren’t really equity but more of a digital IOU, which entitles the holder to redeem their tokens in return for access to a platform like Ethereum’s.

That access has value because it can be used to generate Bitcoin-style coins through a computer-intensive process known as “mining,” and those coins can in turn be exchanged for other more familiar currencies like U.S. dollars. One Bitcoin is currently worth about $2,300 U.S.

People will get fleeced *so hard* if the “token economy” happens. Like railroad bonds in the early 1900’s, but int'l & more theft/extortion https://t.co/omtasvucsM

— Ben Doernberg (@BenDoernberg) May 27, 2017

Some skeptics say token-based fundraising has the potential to turn into a huge boondoggle if it is unregulated, with unwary investors being fleeced of their savings with little to show for it.

Ravikant and Srinivasan, however, argue that tokens will allow companies to raise money much more quickly for new ventures than existing systems do, and will also allow for startups to build valuable services without having to rely on advertising as their only revenue source.

Large technology companies like Google and Facebook offer “have sometimes come under fire for making billions of dollars while early adopters only receive the free service,” their essay says. “After the early kinks are worked out, the token launch model will provide a technically feasible way for tech companies to spread the wealth and align their user base behind their success.”

Tesla’s autonomous or self-driving car technology has helped make the company a **-billion success story. But the system does have flaws, according to a Stanford University robotics researcher, and one of them is a disturbing inability to recognize cyclists.

Heather Knight is an expert in human-robot interfaces who has a PhD from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and is working on her post-doctoral research in social robotics. She published her concerns about Tesla’s self-driving tech in an essay on the blogging platform Medium, entitled “Tesla Autopilot Review: Bikers Will Die.”

Knight described how she and a colleague from Stanford took a Tesla for a drive in order to see how its self-driving technology matched their expectations about human-robot interaction.

Although Knight said the Tesla vehicle’s autopilot worked flawlessly in most situations while the two drove around the streets and highways of southern California, she said she was “concerned that some will ignore its limitations and put biker lives at risk; we found the Autopilot’s agnostic behavior around bicyclists to be frightening.”

In particular, Knight said that the Tesla’s “situation awareness display”—which helps human drivers understand what the car’s self-driving technology can “see” in the environment around it—was fairly accurate with cars, but not even close to accurate with cyclists.

Although she gave the display an A+ rating overall, the Stanford researcher said: “I’d estimate that Autopilot classified ~30% of other cars, and 1% of bicyclists. Not being able to classify objects doesn’t mean the tesla doesn’t see that something is there, but given the lives at stake, we recommend that people NEVER USE TESLA AUTOPILOT AROUND BICYCLISTS!”

There appear to have been no reported incidents where Tesla cars driving on auto-pilot came into contact with cyclists, although there was an accident in Norway in 2016 where authorities said a Tesla failed to properly recognize a motorcycle and injured the rider. In a Wall Street Journal article, one Tesla driver credited the autopilot with preventing an accident with a cyclist.

In a number of responses to readers of her piece, both on Medium and on Twitter, Knight said that she likes Tesla, but was trying to point out that its system is still what she called a “human in the loop” technology because of such inaccuracies in detection.

See feature report card. The basic idea is that it is still a human-in-the-loop system. We were very frightened of its behavior by cyclists.

— Heather Knight (@heatherknight) May 27, 2017

Tesla makes it clear to drivers that its autopilot system is not fully autonomous, and that they should keep their hands on the steering wheel and pay attention to their surroundings at all times. If a driver takes their hands off the wheel for a sustained period of time, the autopilot disengages and can’t be re-enabled unless the car is stopped.

Despite its flaws, Knight said that the Tesla’s Situation Awareness Display was her favorite feature of the car, because “it helps the driver understand shortcomings of the car, i.e., its perception sucks.” Robot-based systems in general, she added, “would benefit from communicating their limitations to people.”

Some of those who criticized Knight’s essay said that it didn’t provide enough evidence of flaws in the detection system, and that the headline on the article was unnecessarily inflammatory about the risks that autonomous driving poses to cyclists.

https://twitter.com/Lee_Ars/status/869183198974152709

Knight said that her concern is that people will see the so-called “autopilot” feature as being fully autonomous at all times, and will fail to pay attention to their surroundings, “as we see in the fatal crashes so far.” Even if detection rates improve, she said, it’s important that human drivers “have the correct mental model of the car, complete with its shortcomings.”

Fortune has asked Tesla for a comment on Knight’s conclusions, and will update this post if and when one is provided.

If there’s one thing you can usually count on with Facebook, it’s that any new feature the giant social network introduces will be designed primarily to benefit Facebook, in most cases by getting users to spend more time inside the company’s walled garden.

That’s why an announcement Facebook made on Thursday is unusual. The company said it is opening up the technology behind its mobile-focused Instant Articles feature so it works with similar services offered by Google and Apple.

With one step, publishers will now be able to use a Facebook software tool to produce articles that fit the Facebook IA standard, and also comply with Google’s competing AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) standard and the Apple News format.

This doesn’t mean Google or Apple will get any more access to Facebook’s platform than they would have before, but it does represent a kind of truce in the mobile news war, and in that sense it is a tacit admission of failure by Facebook.

By supporting Google and Apple’s technologies, the company is essentially admitting that Instant Articles by itself wasn’t enough to entice publishers.

For the past two years or so, ever since it launched Instant Articles as a limited trial with partners like the New York Times (and Time Inc., which owns Fortune), the social network has been trying to get media companies to adopt it.

In a nutshell, the feature takes articles that have been formatted for the web and strips them down to make them load more quickly in Facebook’s mobile browser.

Initially, this was an appealing idea for many publishers, who either didn’t have the financial resources or the skills to make their stories load faster in mobile browsers. But at the same time, it was a problematic deal in many ways.

Facebook offered anyone who participated in the program 70% of the revenue from ads that Facebook was able to sell, or 100% of the revenue from ads they sold themselves. But this revenue didn’t exactly start pouring in for many of those who signed up.

The company made a number of tweaks to try and improve the situation, but it didn’t really move the needle for many media companies, especially since one of the main ways Facebook sped up the loading of pages was by blocking certain types of ads.

In addition to that, some publishers were leery of giving Facebook even more control over their content. The giant social network already accounts for a huge amount of the traffic that many media outlets get from the web, and uses its algorithm to control who sees their content and when.

Some, like the Washington Post, jumped in with both feet, but others — including Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and ESPN — balked.

Even the New York Times, a launch partner, eventually stopped participating in Instant Articles, and so did The Guardian (which also pulled out of Apple News). In part, that’s because both papers were focusing on their digital subscriptions and membership programs, and Instant Articles wasn’t really helping.

Many publishers seem to be more interested in Google’s AMP standard, which is more open than Facebook’s. Although the search giant is in charge of the technology, it is an open-source project that makes its code public and theoretically allows anyone to take part in developing it.

There are still concerns on the part of some media companies that Google has too much control over AMP, and that it is interested primarily in promoting its own advertising networks and technologies, but AMP still seems to have gotten more uptake than Instant Articles. It also supports subscriptions and paywalls, which Instant Articles doesn’t.

Apple News, meanwhile, got off to a slow start, with many publishers seeing extremely low traffic from articles they formatted for the service. But more recently there is evidence that some sites are seeing improved traffic from their Apple News articles.

Apple also recently hired a managing editor for Apple News, a position that didn’t exist before, which suggests that it might be looking to beef up the service and possibly even expand it.

Facebook may be the world’s largest social-media platform, but there is one significant place where it still falls short, and that is video. YouTube still holds the record in that category, with more than 1 billion hours of video watched every day — 10 times what Facebook generates.

The giant social network didn’t get where it is by settling for second place in any market, however, and that has meant an unprecedented push by CEO Mark Zuckerberg into video in all forms.

The strategy began with a focus on streaming via Facebook Live, which launched in **, a feature that was aimed originally at celebrities and then expanded to include paying for live-streamed content from traditional media entities like the New York Times.

More recently, Facebook has moved aggressively into buying, commissioning and licensing longer-form, more TV-style content.

There have been reports for some time that Ricky Van Veen — the CollegeHumor co-founder Facebook hired last year — was looking to sign deals with a wide range of media companies, TV networks and individual artists for anything video related.

On Wednesday, some details of those arrangements finally came to light, when Reuters reported that the company has committed to distribute both short-form and longer-form video programming from a number of players — including BuzzFeed, Vox Media, ATTN and Group Nine Media, a New York-based outfit that owns short-form video producer NowThis.

Just as it did with its live-streaming efforts, Facebook has shown it is willing to pay up for the video it is getting from its various partners.

According to Reuters’ sources, the company is going to pay between $10,000 and $35,000 for videos that run 5 to 10 minutes long, and as much as $250,000 for any video that is 20 to 30 minutes long. The latter will be owned by Facebook, according to the wire-service report, while the creators of shorter clips will keep all the associated ownership rights.

Judging by the description, the shorter videos Facebook has in mind will be very much like the content that providers like ATTN, NowThis and BuzzFeed — with its popular Tasty cooking clips — already create for the social network.

The longer videos are a different beast, however, and they mark a distinct change in Facebook’s strategy. Instead of just being ad hoc clips of something newsworthy or funny designed to get clicks, the social network appears to have its sights set on what are called “scripted” shows, which is much more like what YouTube and others do.

YouTube has always carried episodic shows and scripted content, but it made a significant push into this as a business with the launch of a subscription service called YouTube Red last year.

As part of that roll-out, the Google subsidiary signed deals with a number of creators, some of whom got their start on the platform — including controversial game reviewer PewDiePie — as well as more mainstream sources such as ** and **.

Since then, the field of TV-style digital video has gotten even more crowded. Snap, which has been trying to justify its $20-billion market cap ever since it went public in March, has also been signing up a variety of players to create shows for its video messaging app. Partners in that effort include late-night TV host James Corden and NBCUniversal.

Mark Zuckerberg has said that he sees longer-form, scripted content as an “anchor” for a new video tab on the site, and that this will be a destination for those looking for video to watch. In other words, exactly the same position that YouTube currently occupies for many younger users of the web.

As with Snapchat, however, the multi-billion-dollar unanswered question is: Do people really want to watch longer-form, TV-style content on Facebook?

In much the same way that Snap is (and Twitter as well), Facebook seems to be moving towards video not because users want it, but because video is the place where it can get the most money from advertisers. Engagement levels are higher with video, meaning people tend to spend more time with them, and therefore they are seen as being more valuable.

As the traditional TV universe continues to fragment and disintegrate due to cord-cutting and other forces, Facebook and others like Snap see the potential shift of billions of dollars in TV ads, and they very much want to be the place where that money lands.

Among the hurdles that remain are a) coming up with content worth watching, and b) proving to advertisers that social views are as valuable as TV views. For the purposes of advertising, Facebook counts as a view anything that lasts longer than three seconds.

The comparison between social media and TV has been a bone of contention for some time in TV land, with a number of traditional networks arguing in their recent “Upfront” presentations to advertisers that television is worth more because it reaches real people. “**,” said NBC’s **.

In Facebook’s case, the issue is complicated by the fact that the social network has repeatedly had to admit errors in its audience-measurement analytics, including one mistake it admitted to last year, in which it over-estimated video views for more than two years.