Tag: Facebook

On Facebook

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Why won’t the company let us truly filter our feeds?


Like you, I am on Facebook. In two ways, actually. There’s this public page, which Facebook gives to people who are “public figures.” My story of becoming a Facebook public figure is tortured (years ago, I went Facebook bankrupt after reaching my “friend” limit), but the end result is a place that feels a bit like Twitter, but with more opportunities for me to buy ads that promote my posts (I’ve tried doing that, and while it certainly increases my exposure, I’m not entirely sure why that matters).

Then there’s my “personal” page. Facebook was kind enough to help me fix this up after my “bankruptcy.” On this personal page I try to keep my friends to people I actually know, with mixed success. But the same problems I’ve always had with Facebook are apparent here — some people I’m actually friends with, others I know, but not well enough to call true “friends.” But I don’t want to be an ass…so I click “confirm” and move on.

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How to Detect Fake News in Real-Time

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Fast enough to empower humans to take action

DART Real-time Tsunami Monitoring Systems positioned thousands of miles from shore help forecast tsunamis before they become a threat. (Image: NOAA Center for Tsunami Research)

Last November, a friend told me about his extended family of Filipino-Americans in the Fresno area. In a matter of days they went from feeling conflicted about Trump’s candidacy to voting for him en masse. They are Catholics, and once they heard the Pope had endorsed Trump their minds were made up. Of course, this papal endorsement did not really happen. This is an example of fake news wave that went viral and misled millions.

Here is that same story in a Facebook post, shared by the group North Carolina For Donald Trump. They have 65,000 followers, and you can see how shares by dozens of influential groups could spread this to millions.

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C’mon Facebook. It’s Time For Your Toddler Twin Media Party.

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File Under Humble Suggestions

There’s only one company that can possibly spin media gold on Facebook. And that’s Facebook.


Round and round and round goes the debate — Facebook’s not a media company, Facebook’s not a traditional media company, Facebook’s a new kind of media company. Facebook’s gonna pay media creators to make stuff on Facebook! Wait, no they’re not. Wait, maybe they will make it themselves! Gah.

We’ve seen this debate before — Google refused to call itself a media business for years and years. Now, well…YouTube. And Play. Twitter had similar reluctancies, and now…the NFL (oh, and college softball!). Microsoft tried, but ultimately failed, to be a media company (there’s a reason it’s called MSNBC), and had the sense to retreat from “social media” into “enterprise tools” so as to not beg confusion. Then again, it just bought LinkedIn, so the debate will most certainly flare up (wait, is LinkedIn a media company?!).

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Why Snapchat Won’t Make it Through the Year.

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Or will at least be reduced to a ghost of its former self.

Snapchat’s parent company, Snap Inc, is preparing for its initial public offering (IPO) this week. This will be the largest IPO since Alibaba went public in 2014. Speaking of which, Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant, saw a 10% drop in stock prices after its IPO. Twitter and Facebook, Snapchat’s closest related IPO predecessors, both suffered even steeper declines in stock prices in their early months after going public. Twitter prices sunk 25% in the first 6 months after IPO. Facebook prices dropped 50% in their first 5 months.

In comparison to Facebook and Twitter, Snap Inc is limping to the starting line. Snapchat is witnessing seriously concerning drops in user acquisitions, and their price-to-sales ratio will far exceed historical marks when the stock opens at $14–$16. Putting all that aside, Snapchat has much more deep-seated troubles. The nature of their platform itself puts them in serious risk to follow the paths of Vine and Yik Yak on a much larger and more devastating scale.

Snapchat has no user history.

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Zuckerberg’s New Mission: Save the World

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The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories

Alessio Jacona | Flickr

Honest! When we wrote yesterday about Facebook trying to be all things to all people, we didn’t know that Mark Zuckerberg was about to drop a weighty manifesto illustrating just how true that is.

Zuckerberg’s letter, a revision of the company’s mission statement, commits himself and Facebook to “develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.” It sets new priorities for the company: strengthen and support existing civil institutions, increase voting and democratic participation, help people feel and be safer, improve the quality of information users access, and promote inclusion locally and globally.

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Want to Work at Facebook? Read This First.

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Meet Lori Goler, the woman who runs “People Operations” at the world’s most admired employer.

Fortune Live Media

One simple question drove a sharp pivot in Lori Goler’s already enviable career: “How can I help you?” Of course, when the question is asked of Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, the chances are better such a detour might follow. “What’s your biggest business obstacle,” Goler remembers asking Sandberg in 2007, early in Facebook’s startup days. “How can I help?” Sandberg’s instant reply: “Recruitment.”

A seasoned marketing executive, Goler nevertheless took the challenge, and has since helped Facebook scale from 500 employees to more than 15,000. Along the way she’s implemented industry-leading approaches to parental leave, long-term contracts (Facebook doesn’t do them), and career management (the company encourages ‘individual contributors’ as a career choice, to avoid the trap of management being the only way to advance inside the company).

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We Can Fix This F*cking Mess.

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Let’s discuss the rather sorry state of Internet publishing.

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Here are the caveats for the rant I am about to write.

  1. The fact that I am writing this on Medium will cause many of you to dismiss me for hypocrisy. Don’t. Read to the end.
  2. I will be saying the word “F*CK” a lot. If that bothers you, time to depart for calmer waters.
  3. This post will be subject to dismissal due to charges of high nostalgia — I will be accused of living in the past, failing to get the future, not getting with the times, being the old man yelling “get off my lawn,” etc. These characterizations will be entirely correct. And totally irrelevant.
  4. This post will be compared, most likely unfavorably, to the many, many, many, many wonderful (and better) posts that have already been written on this subject. That’s fine. I just want to add my voice to the conversation.
  5. This post will piss off friends of mine at Facebook, Medium, LinkedIn, and probably Google. Sorry in advance. Kinda.

Ok, now that we’ve got that out of the way, it’s time to say something out loud.

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Facebook Just Made Your News Feed A Battleground

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The NewCo Daily: Top News Stories

Fred Miller | Flickr

Stung by charges that it had become a lie amplifier, Facebook has announced a set of experiments to combat “fake news.” Users will be able to flag stories for review by third-party fact-checkers, and those confirmed as problematic will get tagged with warnings. In Steven Levy’s Backchannel piece on the move, Facebook leaders say their goal is to go after “clear black-and-white hoaxes, the bottom of the barrel, worst of the worst part of the fake news” — like the stories that claim the Pope endorsed Donald Trump or that Hillary Clinton kept sex slaves in a pizzeria.

Good luck to you, Facebook! You’ve just brought an algorithmic knife to a partisan machine-gun fight. You hope you can avoid taking sides, but the conservative part of your customer base is already rejecting the third parties — like Snopes, Politifact, and the AP — to whom you have outsourced the factchecking (Business Insider). And you’ve now incentivized partisan hordes to click “dispute” on all the stories they don’t like, true or false.

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Enough with the “Fake News is Hard” BS

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I swear. If Silicon Valley had to invent a ball point pen, they’d say “it’s just really hard getting the ink to flow smoothly and at a consistent rate out of the pen. You don’t understand how hard it is.” They seem to be under the impression that anything not invented in Silicon Valley does not exist. They also seem to be under the impression that we haven’t been dealing with the nuisance of fake news for hundreds of years.

I am going to say this up front, because I have friends working on these problems: no one is saying the technical challenges to perfectly arbitrating truth and fiction are easy. I am not saying that. And there are good people — at Facebook and elsewhere — who are working very hard on this problem. I believe, however, that management is tying their hands, because they are only looking at a single solution set, and ignoring history. And, I believe, humans don’t expect perfect arbitration. What they expect are openness, context, and labeling, along with the neutering of even the most blatant, clear-cut cases of lying.

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Facebook’s Choice: Mission or Market?

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Konrad Foerstner | Flickr

Facebook has developed software tools to help governments suppress posts they don’t like, Mike Isaac reports in The New York Times. In the past the social network, like other U.S.-based internet services, has removed content in some countries to comply with local laws. But this new approach — aimed at helping Facebook re-enter the huge China market it left seven years ago — would allow third parties to preemptively ban stories and topics from users’ news feeds.

The censorship tools haven’t yet been deployed or offered to China, according to unnamed Facebook employees who confirmed their existence, and they might never be. That depends on how badly the company wants to operate in China, where rivals like Google and Twitter have also been locked out — and how satisfied the Chinese authorities are with Facebook’s ability to stifle dissent. But anyone working at Facebook must be wondering, as the Times story does: How can you square this project with the company’s mission to “make the world more open and connected”? Or does the mission just get tossed out the window in the face of a massive market opportunity?

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