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Ever since “fake news” first started to get traction during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, it has been seen by many as primarily a Facebook problem, since so many hoax and fake-news creators use the giant social network as a distribution system. But Google also plays a role in the promotion and dissemination of false information, and in some ways it’s a more disturbing one than Facebook.

While Google was once just a search box followed by a page of blue links, the search giant has been trying hard to become a one-stop provider of answers to common questions. Some of these consist of what it calls “featured snippets” from webpages that deal with those topics, which are highlighted in a box at the top of the search page.

In most cases, these answers — which Google selects from the billions of pages it scans and indexes every day, based on how many people have shared them — are uncontroversial, like the answer to “When is Mother’s Day?” or “What time is the Super Bowl?” Other one-box solutions point to cheap flights to your chosen destination, or supply the answer to a math question.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Google’s fake news problem could actually be worse than Facebook’s”

When it comes to finding fans of the newspaper business, financier Warren Buffett is a bit of an odd choice. After all, he is a billionaire known primarily for his interest in making money, not journalism. But he is also a folksy, avuncular old man, and so media companies have clung to his faith in newspapers like a life preserver.

They might want to reconsider that stance, however, given what the “Oracle of Omaha” had to say recently about the newspaper business. In an interview with CNBC on Monday, Buffett said he believes the only papers that are “assured” of a long life are probably the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and possibly the Washington Post.

“If you look, there are 1,300 daily newspapers left,” Buffett said. “There were 1,700 or 1,800 not too long ago. Now, you’ve got the internet. Aside from the ones I mentioned, [most of them] haven’t figured out a way to make the digital model complement the print model.”

This comment is interesting for reasons other than just that Buffett is one of the world’s richest men. Through his holding company Berkshire Hathaway, he is also a large investor in newspapers, particularly small weeklies, as well as some larger titles like the Buffalo News.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Warren Buffett says local newspapers, including his own, are doomed”

Twitter has been criticized in the past for focusing more on freedom of speech and anonymity than on curbing those who use the service to abuse and harass. Recently, however, the company has been trying to show that it is listening to such complaints, and on Wednesday it rolled out a new suite of features designed to help do that. The most far-reaching — and probably also the most difficult — of these efforts involves trying to identify abusive behavior before it has been reported by a user.

Over time, Twitter has improved the way that it handles abuse and harassment reports, by removing hurdles and speeding up its response time (although some users argue it is still too difficult). But now, the company says it is focusing on identifying abuse while it is actually occurring, instead of waiting until a user flags it.

According to a blog post by Ed Ho, Twitter’s VP of Engineering, if the service’s algorithm detects that abuse is happening, it will take one of a number of potential steps to reduce the potential harm, including “limiting certain account functionality for a set amount of time.”

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Twitter is now trying to detect and curb abuse in real time”

Ever since he first declared his candidacy for president, Donald Trump and Twitter have been joined at the hip. Throughout the campaign, the social network provided a window into Trump’s thoughts, and it has continued to do so now that he is the commander-in-chief. It’s an unprecedented real-time look at what he is thinking.

As anyone who has followed the coverage of the Trump administration knows, what the president is thinking often falls into the category of knee-jerk criticism of the “failing media” or of specific Democratic viewpoints, or of those who have a problem with his policies.

There’s also a whole separate category of tweets that involve factual inaccuracies, unproven statements and boasts of various kinds, the kind that often trigger a massive response by traditional media outlets, even if the facts being alleged are of minor importance.

Is this part of a clever strategy of distraction, as some suggest? Or is it simply Trump speaking his mind after watching a TV program or reading something in the news, while he sits alone in the White House residence? There’s plenty of evidence for the latter view, including meticulously documented examples of Trump tweets that appear to have been triggered by specific segments on Fox News and other conservative TV shows.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Twitter is a window into Trump’s brain, which is both a good and a bad thing”

As media outlets struggle to replace the rapidly disappearing revenue they used to get from traditional advertising, they see Google and Facebook taking the lion’s share of what has come along to replace it. And now some argue that those technology giants should repay some of what they have taken. But would doing so really solve anything?

In a recent opinion piece published in the New York Times, entitled “What Facebook Owes to Journalism,” Steven Waldman — a former senior adviser to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and former visiting scholar at Columbia University — argues that the founders of Facebook, Google and Apple need to donate billions to save journalism.

Waldman notes that Facebook has talked about its role in the media ecosystem, and recently started a Journalism Project aimed at helping local news outlets make use of the platform. Google has a similar venture called Google News Lab. But these are not enough, Waldman says.

“While training, technology and innovation are critical, what journalism needs most now is money, and lots of it — to fund full-time local journalists. What these companies have donated so far is too little given how wealthy they are, how much harm they’re (inadvertently) doing — and how much good they could do.”

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Is tech funding for journalism a solution, or a Hail Mary pass?”

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg likes to write open letters during times of great import. He wrote one when the company went public, he wrote one to his infant daughter when he became a father, and he has written a new one that was published on Thursday.

So why is now a time that requires an almost 6,000-word essay that touches on world affairs, U.S. politics, the value of high-quality journalism and the crumbling social fabric of America? Because it seems that Zuckerberg has become “woke,” as the kids like to say.

In other words, the Facebook co-founder seems to have awakened to some of the unintended consequences of the mega-platform that he has built.

In the case of the media, for example, Zuckerberg has undergone a significant evolution from his original position just after the election, when he scoffed at the idea that “fake news” distributed on the social network was a problem, and reiterated his position that Facebook is not a media company and therefore is more or less blameless when it comes to such things.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Mark Zuckerberg Starts to Take Some Responsibility for Facebook’s Influence”

Roger Ailes hasn’t been chairman of Fox News since last July, but the company continues to deal with issues raised during his tenure at the top of the Murdoch-owned conservative broadcaster, including multiple sexual-harassment claims that helped lead to his departure.

According to new information that emerged on Wednesday, federal investigators may be looking into payments that Fox News made in order to settle some of Ailes’ harassment cases, and whether those payments were disclosed properly.

This revelation came to light during a hearing in New York’s Supreme Court, in an ongoing lawsuit filed by former Fox News host Andrea Tantaros alleging harassment by Ailes. A lawyer for Tantaros said that one of his clients had been served with a subpoena by federal prosecutors investigating the sexual-harassment claims against the former Fox chairman.

Attorney Judd Burstein said he got the subpoena from federal investigators at the Department of Justice’s New York Southern District, and that it requested testimony from his client before a grand jury. Burstein said that he believes the investigation centers around whether Fox News violated securities laws by not reporting harassment settlements.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Fox News said to be facing investigation over Ailes harassment cases”

When the term “fake news” burst onto the scene during the presidential election, most of the examples the media referred to came from right-wing sites and networks, alleging all kinds of horrible things done by Hillary Clinton and/or the left — murders, child sex-abuse rings operating underneath pizza parlors, etc.

If Donald Trump was mentioned in these fake stories, it was usually in a complimentary way, like the one about Pope Francis endorsing his campaign, or one that said he sent his private plane to pick up 200 starving Marines.

But liberal sites and networks are no strangers to fabricated news, for the simple reason that the desire to believe something which caters to our existing prejudices isn’t restricted by political ideology. And according to an editor who works for the fact-checking site Snopes, liberal versions of fake news are growing in popularity.

In the latest example, former ** and senior Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal wrote an essay in the highly-regarded London Review of Books, in which he described how Donald Trump’s father Fred had commissioned a couple of racist TV ads during his run for mayor of New York in **.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Liberals are just as guilty of falling for fake news as Conservatives”

While it has taken steps to clamp down on the spread of “fake news,” Facebook continues to resist attempts to portray the company as a media entity. But the reality is that many people use it as a news outlet and have come to think of it that way, according to a recent study.

A report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center looked at the ways that more than 2,000 U.S. adults find and consume news during an average week. It asked them twice a day for a week about where they got their news, and asked them to describe the experience.

About 10% of the users surveyed said the source of the news they came across was Facebook. In other words, they couldn’t remember which specific news outlet produced the news that they saw, just that it came via Facebook. More people cited the social network as a frequent news source than cited the New York Times, Washington Post or CBS.

In fact, almost 50% of those surveyed by the Pew Center researchers couldn’t remember the original source of the news they came across, even just a few hours after they had read it. For media companies relying on brand awareness, that’s a somewhat disturbing statistic.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Facebook says it’s not a media outlet, but plenty of users disagree”

The term “fake news” seems to have come out of nowhere over the last six months, dominating much of the discussion around Donald Trump and his election as president, and has triggered what some believe to be a full-fledged moral panic about the “post truth” era we live in.

While there are new aspects to the problem, however — including how easy it is to create realistic-looking websites, and the power of social networks to spread fake news farther and faster — experts point out that it is not a new problem. Not only that, but we arguably have much better tools to fight it than we have ever had before.

Even the idea that fake news about a candidate might affect the election of the president of the United States isn’t all that new. Robert Parkinson, a professor at Binghampton University, pointed out in a piece for the Washington Post that the creation and spread of fake-news stories played a role in the birth of the United States.

John Quincy Adams, Parkinson notes, wrote in his diary in 1769 about creating fake and exaggerated stories that would be published in various early newspapers of the time, stories designed to undermine the King’s authority in Massachusetts.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Fake news isn’t a new problem, and we’re better equipped to fight it”

The promise of so-called “sharing economy” platforms like Airbnb, Uber, Lyft and TaskRabbit was that by using social media tools and digital technology, markets for goods and services such as taxis, hotel rooms and cheap labor could be made more efficient. But this golden vision of the future has started to look a little tarnished of late.

Airbnb, for example, grew at a torrid pace over the past eight years by allowing house and apartment owners to rent their dwellings to any traveller quickly and easily. Millions of people have taken advantage of these services, and Airbnb now has a market value estimated at $30 billion, roughly the same size as the Marriott International hotel chain.

Some regulators, however, are less enthusiastic. A number of cities and regions from Berlin to San Francisco have implemented restrictions on Airbnb rentals, arguing that they are in violation of zoning and other regulations, and the company is currently trying to negotiate a cease-fire by offering to share tax revenue and make other concessions.

The problem for Airbnb is that these concessions and restrictions are likely to significantly decrease its potential revenue generation and earning power, and thus remove some of the benefits and efficiencies that were supposed to flow from the sharing economy. And Airbnb isn’t the only peer-to-peer service provider facing that problem.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Sharing economy giants run head first into regulatory quagmire”

If TV networks like CNN and CBS are happy with the higher ratings and advertising revenue that Donald Trump has brought them, they aren’t the only ones benefiting from his ascent to power. The New York Times has also seen a dramatic increase in paying subscribers since the election, and that is helping keep the company afloat as print continues to decline.

According to CEO Mark Thompson, the newspaper added more digital subscribers to its paywall plan in the last three months of 2016 than it did in all of 2013 and 2014 put together. That’s 276,000 new sign-ups, to be exact, and those additions pushed the paper’s digital subscribers to over 1.8 million.

Unfortunately for the Times, while digital subscriptions are growing, print advertising— which still generates the lion’s share of the company’s revenue, although a smaller proportion than in the past— is still in free fall.

In the most recent quarter, revenue from print ads fell by a whopping 20%, and the paper has seen similar double-digit declines every quarter for the past year or more. In 2016 as a whole, print ad revenue dropped by 16%. This is what Thompson described in a comment to his own paper as the “significant headwinds” the Times is facing.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Donald Trump is helping, but the New York Times is still struggling”

When you get to be as large as Facebook—something very few companies ever manage to do—it becomes more and more difficult to keep growing at the same rate you did when you were smaller. This is often referred to as the “law of large numbers.” But Facebook shows few signs of hitting any kind of growth limit just yet.

Many of the Wall Street analysts who follow the giant social network have been warning about a slowdown for some time now, and even Facebook itself has spoken about how it expects to see a slowdown in the growth rate of its advertising revenue. Those fears helped push the stock price down after the company posted its results in November.

On Wednesday, however, investors appeared to be all smiles, after Facebook beat earnings and revenue estimates for its most recent quarter, and dramatically increased its user base. The shares were up in after-hours trading.

Instead of the $1.31 per share in profit that Wall Street was expecting, Facebook made $1.41, and its total revenue—the vast majority of which is advertising-related—came in at $8.8 billion for the quarter, compared with consensus estimates of $8.5 billion. That represented growth of more than 50% over the same quarter of last year.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Facebook’s growth appears to be unstoppable, at least for now”

After initially denying that “fake news” was a problem on its network, Facebook has spent the past few months trying to come up with ways to stop the spread of hoaxes and false news reports. The latest step is a change to the algorithm that the company says will promote what it calls “authentic” news stories in users’ news feeds.

A post published on Wednesday by two Facebook research scientists and one of the social network’s engineering team said that “authentic communication” is one of the key values of the Facebook news feed. That includes news stories that people “consider genuine, and not misleading, sensational or spammy,” the post added.

Facebook uses a number of signals to determine what to show you in your news feed, the researchers said — including how close you are to the person or page that is posting an update or sharing a piece of content, and how many likes and shares it has.

With the latest update, the company says it will be adding new “universal signals” to the algorithm and its ranking process. To come up with those signals or indicators, engineers looked at various Facebook pages and tried to identify whether they were posting spam, or trying to “game the feed” by asking for likes and shares.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Facebook tries to determine what an authentic news story looks like”

In the wake of the Trump administration’s executive order freezing immigration from seven countries, a number of media companies have spoken out either publicly or directly to their employees about the move. Some have treated it mostly as a logistical complication, but others have been more vocal about their support for open immigration.

Rupert Murdoch’s sons Lachlan and James, for example, who run 21st Century Fox — the media and entertainment conglomerate they and their father control — sent a note to their employees pointing out that the company includes immigrants at almost every level, and was founded by one (the elder Murdoch is Australian by birth).

“We deeply value diversity and believe immigration is an essential part of America’s strength,” the note said. “Moreover, as a company that is driven by creativity and innovation, we recognize the unique perspective offered by our many people who came to the U.S. in search of the opportunity for unfettered self-expression.”

A number of Murdoch-watchers pointed out that this critical response to Trump’s move is interesting in part because the family-controlled network Fox News has been fairly positive about the ban, and Trump and Rupert Murdoch are said to be close.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Here’s what media companies are saying about the immigration ban”