Platforms

The promotion of diverse viewpoints has been the cornerstone of United States media policy over the last 100 years. In Nov 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published an article that delineated the algorithm that Facebook will use to disincentivize hate speech. Although Zuckerberg’s proposal is a laudable step for content moderation, it may be neglecting the value of exposing people to diverse views and competing sources of news.

WordPress is excited to announce funding for a new platform, Newspack by WordPress.com, aimed at small- and medium-sized news organizations. Google, through the Google News Initiative, is taking the lead in backing the project and has committed $1.2 million. Other funders include The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, which is contributing $400,000; ConsenSys, the venture studio backing Civil Media, which is contributing $350,000; and The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which is contributing $250,000.

The world’s biggest social-media companies, under fire for failing to police content on their sites, have invited an array of outside groups to help them figure out who should be banned and what’s considered unacceptable. That solution is creating a new set of problems—public fights, complaints and legal battles. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have made a concerted push to seek out input from hundreds of groups, a growing number of which lean to the right. The companies have become receptive to behind-the-scenes lobbying as well.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg pledged to hold public discussions in 2019 “about the future of technology in society,” a reflection of mounting apprehensions — among regulators and web users alike — with the social-networking giant and its peers in Silicon Valley. In a note posted to his personal Facebook page, Zuckerberg said he plans to convene experts and others every few weeks, with the goal of exploring “the opportunities, the challenges, the hopes, and the anxieties” posed by the tech industry.

Facebook said it is investigating whether an organization backed by Internet billionaire and Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman violated the social media giant’s policies when it set up several misleading news pages in a bid to target US voters with left-leaning political messages. The probe focuses on News for Democracy, whose Facebook ads and affiliated pages about sports, religion, the American flag and other topics were viewed millions of times during the 2018 midterm elections, according to an analysis of the company ad archive conducted by New York University.

Tech giants are facing a barrage of tough, negative coverage, with some of the same dynamics that drive saturation coverage of President Donald Trump. Many major news organizations — including The Washington Post, The Atlantic and CNN — are staffing up for greatly expanded tech coverage because: 1) Tech is the new politics. 2) This is partly in reaction to the techlash and partly in preparation for a post-Trump world, when websites can't count on politics to drive massive year-round traffic.

In a glass conference room at its California headquarters, Facebook is taking on the bonfires of hate and misinformation it has helped fuel across the world, one post at a time. The social network has drawn criticism for undermining democracy and for provoking bloodshed in societies small and large. But for Facebook, it’s also a business problem. The company, which makes about $5 billion in profit per quarter, has to show that it is serious about removing dangerous content.

After more than a year of research and discussion, Facebook late in the summer of  2018 shelved a project called “Common Ground” that tried to encourage users with different political beliefs to interact in less-hostile ways. One reason: fears the proposed fix could trigger claims of bias against conservatives, apparently.  The objections were raised by Joel Kaplan, a former White House aide to George W.

How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.” 

That Facebook can’t stay out of the headlines is not just a crisis for Facebook. It’s also a crisis for the Federal Trade Commission—indeed, it’s a “credibility-check moment.” Every day that passes in which the consent order is not enforced against Facebook adds to speculation that something is deeply broken at the agency. Moreover, the tech firms want the FTC to be named as their sole regulator, pre-empting stronger action by states and their attorneys general to protect privacy.