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Thieves of Experience: How Google and Facebook Corrupted Capitalism

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Thieves of Experience: How Google and Facebook Corrupted Capitalism

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Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting

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WE SOMETIMES FORGET that, at the turn of the century, Silicon Valley was in a funk, economic and psychic. The great dot-com bubble of the 1990s had imploded, destroying vast amounts of investment capital along with the savings of many Americans. Trophy startups like Pets.com, Webvan, and Excite@Home, avatars of the so-called New Economy, were punch lines. Disillusioned programmers and entrepreneurs were abandoning their Bay Area bedsits and decamping. Venture funding had dried up. As a business proposition, the information superhighway was looking like a cul-de-sac.

Today, less than 20 years on, everything has changed. The top American internet companies are among the most profitable and highly capitalized businesses in history. Not only do they dominate the technology industry but they have much of the world economy in their grip. Their founders and early backers sit atop Rockefeller-sized fortunes. Cities and states court them with billions of dollars in tax breaks and other subsidies. Bright young graduates covet their jobs. Along with their financial clout, the internet giants hold immense social and cultural sway, influencing how all of us think, act, and converse.

Silicon Valley's Phoenix-like resurrection is a story of ingenuity and initiative. It is also a story of callousness, predation, and deceit. Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley's wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise - what she calls "surveillance capitalism." Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we're shopping or socializing, working or voting.

Zuboff's fierce indictment of the big internet firms goes beyond the usual condemnations of privacy violations and monopolistic practices. To her, such criticisms are sideshows, distractions that blind us to a graver danger: By reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, Google and Facebook are perverting capitalism in a way that undermines personal freedom and corrodes democracy.

Capitalism has always been a fraught system. Capable of both tempering and magnifying human flaws, particularly the lust for power, it can expand human possibility or constrain it, liberate people or oppress them. (The same can be said of technology.) Under the Fordist model of mass production and consumption that prevailed for much of the 20th century, industrial capitalism achieved a relatively benign balance among the contending interests of business owners, workers, and consumers. Enlightened executives understood that good pay and decent working conditions would ensure a prosperous middle class eager to buy the goods and services their companies produced. It was the product itself - made by workers, sold by companies, bought by consumers - that tied the interests of capitalism's participants together. Economic and social equilibrium was negotiated through the product.

By removing the tangible product from the center of commerce, surveillance capitalism upsets the equilibrium. Whenever we use free apps and online services, it's often said, we become the products, our attention harvested and sold to advertisers. But, as Zuboff makes clear, this truism gets it wrong. Surveillance capitalism's real products, vaporous but immensely valuable, are predictions about our future behavior - what we'll look at, where we'll go, what we'll buy, what opinions we'll hold - that internet companies derive from our personal data and sell to businesses, political operatives, and other bidders. Unlike financial derivatives, which they in some ways resemble, these new data derivatives draw their value, parasite-like, from human experience.

To the Googles and Facebooks of the world, we are neither the customer nor the product. We are the source of what Silicon Valley technologists call "data exhaust" - the informational by-products of online activity that become the inputs to prediction algorithms. In contrast to the businesses of the industrial era, whose interests were by necessity entangled with those of the public, internet companies operate in what Zuboff terms "extreme structural independence from people." When databases displace goods as the engine of the economy, our own interests, as consumers but also as citizens, cease to be part of the negotiation. We are no longer one of the forces guiding the market's invisible hand. We are the objects of surveillance and control.
II. The Map
It all began innocently. In the 1990s, before they founded Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were computer science students who shared a fascination with the arcane field of network theory and its application to the internet. They saw that by scanning web pages and tracing the links between them, they would be able to create a map of the net with both theoretical and practical value. The map would allow them to measure the importance of every page, based on the number of other pages that linked to it, and that data would, in turn, provide the foundation for a powerful search engine. Because the map could also be used to record the routes and choices of people as they traveled through the network, it would provide a finely detailed account of human behavior.

In Google's early days, Page and Brin were wary of exploiting the data they collected for monetary gain, fearing it would corrupt their project. They limited themselves to using the information to improve search results, for the benefit of users. That changed after the dot-com bust. Google's once-patient investors grew restive, demanding that the founders figure out a way to make money, preferably lots of it. Under pressure, Page and Brin authorized the launch of an auction system for selling advertisements tied to search queries. The system was designed so that the company would get paid by an advertiser only when a user clicked on an ad. This feature gave Google a huge financial incentive to make accurate predictions about how users would respond to ads and other online content. Even tiny increases in click rates would bring big gains in income. And so the company began deploying its stores of behavioral data not for the benefit of users but to aid advertisers - and to juice its own profits. Surveillance capitalism had arrived.

Google's business now hinged on what Zuboff calls "the extraction imperative." To improve its predictions, it had to mine as much information as possible from web users. It aggressively expanded its online services to widen the scope of its surveillance. Through Gmail, it secured access to the contents of people's emails and address books. Through Google Maps, it gained a bead on people's whereabouts and movements. Through Google Calendar, it learned what people were doing at different moments during the day and whom they were doing it with. Through Google News, it got a readout of people's interests and political leanings. Through Google Shopping, it opened a window onto people's wish lists, brand preferences, and other material desires. The company gave all these services away for free to ensure they'd be used by as many people as possible. It knew the money lay in the data.

Once it embraced surveillance as the core of its business, Google changed. Its innocence curdled, and its idealism became a means of obfuscation.

Even as its army of PR agents and lobbyists continued to promote a cuddly Nerds-in-Toyland image for the firm, the organization grew insular and secretive. Seeking to keep the true nature of its work from the public, it adopted what its CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, called a "hiding strategy" - a kind of corporate omerta backed up by stringent nondisclosure agreements. Page and Brin further shielded themselves from outside oversight by establishing a stock structure that guaranteed their power could never be challenged, neither by investors nor by directors. As one Google executive quoted by Zuboff put it, "Larry [Page] opposed any path that would reveal our technological secrets or stir the privacy pot and endanger our ability to gather data."

As networked computers came to mediate more and more of people's everyday lives, the map of the online world created by Page and Brin became far more lucrative than they could have anticipated. Zuboff reminds us that, throughout history, the charting of a new territory has always granted the mapmaker an imperial power. Quoting the historian John B. Harley, she writes that maps "are essential for the effective 'pacification, civilization, and exploitation' of territories imagined or claimed but not yet seized in practice. Places and people must be known in order to be controlled." An early map of the United States bore the motto "Order upon the Land." Should Google ever need a new slogan to replace its original, now-discarded "Don't be evil," it would be hard-pressed to find a better one than that.
III. The Heist
Zuboff opens her book with a look back at a prescient project from the year 2000 on the future of home automation by a group of Georgia Tech computer scientists. Anticipating the arrival of "smart homes," the scholars described how a mesh of environmental and wearable sensors, linked wirelessly to computers, would allow all sorts of domestic routines, from the dimming of bedroom lights to the dispensing of medications to the entertaining of children, to be programmed to suit a house's occupants.

Essential to the effort would be the processing of intimate data on people's habits, predilections, and health. Taking it for granted that such information should remain private, the researchers envisaged a leak-proof "closed loop" system that would keep the data within the home, under the purview and control of the homeowner. The project, Zuboff explains, reveals the assumptions about "datafication" that prevailed at the time: "(1) that it must be the individual alone who decides what experience is rendered as data, (2) that the purpose of the data is to enrich the individual's life, and (3) that the individual is the sole arbiter of how the data are put to use."

What's most remarkable about the birth of surveillance capitalism is the speed and audacity with which Google overturned social conventions and norms about data and privacy. Without permission, without compensation, and with little in the way of resistance, the company seized and declared ownership over everyone's information. It turned the details of the lives of millions and then billions of people into its own property. The companies that followed Google presumed that they too had an unfettered right to collect, parse, and sell personal data in pretty much any way they pleased. In the smart homes being built today, it's understood that any and all data will be beamed up to corporate clouds.

Google conducted its great data heist under the cover of novelty. The web was an exciting frontier - something new in the world - and few people understood or cared about what they were revealing as they searched and surfed. In those innocent days, data was there for the taking, and Google took it. The public's naïveté and apathy were only part of the story, however. Google also benefited from decisions made by lawmakers, regulators, and judges - decisions that granted internet companies free use of a vast taxpayer-funded communication infrastructure, relieved them of legal and ethical responsibility for the information and messages they distributed, and gave them carte blanche to collect and exploit user data.

Consider the terms-of-service agreements that govern the division of rights and the delegation of ownership online. Non-negotiable, subject to emendation and extension at the company's whim, and requiring only a casual click to bind the user, TOS agreements are parodies of contracts, yet they have been granted legal legitimacy by the courts. Law professors, writes Zuboff, "call these 'contracts of adhesion' because they impose take-it-or-leave-it conditions on users that stick to them whether they like it or not." Fundamentally undemocratic, the ubiquitous agreements helped Google and other firms commandeer personal data as if by fiat.

The bullying style of TOS agreements also characterizes the practice, common to Google and other technology companies, of threatening users with a loss of "functionality" should they try to opt out of data sharing protocols or otherwise attempt to escape surveillance. Anyone who tries to remove a pre-installed Google app from an Android phone, for instance, will likely be confronted by a vague but menacing warning: "If you disable this app, other apps may no longer function as intended." This is a coy, high-tech form of blackmail: "Give us your data, or the phone dies."

In pulling off its data grab, Google also benefited from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As much as the dot-com crash, the horrors of 9/11 set the stage for the rise of surveillance capitalism. Zuboff notes that, in 2000, members of the Federal Trade Commission, frustrated by internet companies' lack of progress in adopting privacy protections, began formulating legislation to secure people's control over their online information and severely restrict the companies' ability to collect and store it. It seemed obvious to the regulators that ownership of personal data should by default lie in the hands of private citizens, not corporations. The 9/11 attacks changed the calculus. The centralized collection and analysis of online data, on a vast scale, came to be seen as essential to national security. "The privacy provisions debated just months earlier vanished from the conversation more or less overnight," Zuboff writes.

Google and other Silicon Valley companies benefited directly from the government's new stress on digital surveillance. They earned millions through contracts to share their data collection and analysis techniques with the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency. But they also benefited indirectly. Online surveillance came to be viewed as normal and even necessary by politicians, government bureaucrats, and the general public. One of the unintended consequences of this uniquely distressing moment in American history, Zuboff observes, was that "the fledgling practices of surveillance capitalism were allowed to root and grow with little regulatory or legislative challenge." Other possible ways of organizing online markets, such as through paid subscriptions for apps and services, never even got a chance to be tested.

What we lose under this regime is something more fundamental than privacy. It's the right to make our own decisions about privacy - to draw our own lines between those aspects of our lives we are comfortable sharing and those we are not. "Privacy involves the choice of the individual to disclose or to reveal what he believes, what he thinks, what he possesses," explained Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas in a 1967 decision.

Those who wrote the Bill of Rights believed that every individual needs both to communicate with others and to keep his affairs to himself. That dual aspect of privacy means that the individual should have the freedom to select for himself the time and circumstances when he will share his secrets with others and decide the extent of that sharing.

Google and other internet firms usurp this essential freedom. "The typical complaint is that privacy is eroded, but that is misleading," Zuboff writes. "In the larger societal pattern, privacy is not eroded but redistributed. [...] Instead of people having the rights to decide how and what they will disclose, these rights are concentrated within the domain of surveillance capitalism." The transfer of decision rights is also a transfer of autonomy and agency, from the citizen to the corporation.
IV. The Script
Fearing Google's expansion and coveting its profits, other internet, media, and communications companies rushed into the prediction market, and competition for personal data intensified. It was no longer enough to monitor people online; making better predictions required that surveillance be extended into homes, stores, schools, workplaces, and the public squares of cities and towns. Much of the recent innovation in the tech industry has entailed the creation of products and services designed to vacuum up data from every corner of our lives. There are the chatbots like Alexa and Cortana, the digital assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home, the wearable computers like Fitbit and Apple Watch. There are the navigation, banking, and health apps installed on smartphones and the new wave of automotive media and telematics systems like CarPlay, Android Auto, and Progressive's Snapshot. And there are the myriad sensors and transceivers of smart homes, smart cities, and the so-called internet of things. Big Brother would be impressed.

But spying on the populace is not the endgame. The real prize lies in figuring out ways to use the data to shape how people think and act. "The best way to predict the future is to invent it," the computer scientist Alan Kay once observed. And the best way to predict behavior is to script it.

Google realized early on that the internet allowed market research to be conducted on a massive scale and at virtually no cost. Every click could become part of an experiment. The company used its research findings to fine-tune its sites and services. It meticulously designed every element of the online experience, from the color of links to the placement of ads, to provoke the desired responses from users. But it was Facebook, with its incredibly detailed data on people's social lives, that grasped digital media's full potential for behavior modification. By using what it called its "social graph" to map the intentions, desires, and interactions of literally billions of individuals, it saw that it could turn its network into a worldwide Skinner box, employing psychological triggers and rewards to program not only what people see but how they react. The company rolled out its now ubiquitous "Like" button, for example, after early experiments showed it to be a perfect operant-conditioning device, reliably pushing users to spend more time on the site, and share more information.

Zuboff describes a revealing and in retrospect ominous Facebook study that was conducted during the 2010 US congressional election and published in 2012 in Nature under the title "A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization." The researchers, a group of data scientists from Facebook and the University of California at San Diego, manipulated voting-related messages displayed in Facebook users' news feeds on election day (without the users' knowledge). One set of users received a message encouraging them to vote, a link to information on poll locations, and an "I Voted" button. A second set saw the same information along with photos of friends who had clicked the button.

The researchers found that seeing the pictures of friends increased the likelihood that people would seek information on polling places and end up clicking the "I Voted" button themselves. "The results show," they reported, "that [Facebook] messages directly influenced political self-expression, information seeking and real-world voting behaviour of millions of people." Through a subsequent examination of actual voter records, the researchers estimated that, as a result of the study and its "social contagion" effect, at least 340,000 additional votes were cast in the election.

Nudging people to vote may seem praiseworthy, even if done surreptitiously. What the study revealed, though, is how even very simple social media messages, if carefully designed, can mold people's opinions and decisions, including those of a political nature. As the researchers put it, "online political mobilization works." Although few heeded it at the time, the study provided an early warning of how foreign agents and domestic political operatives would come to use Facebook and other social networks in clandestine efforts to shape people's views and votes. Combining rich information on individuals' behavioral triggers with the ability to deliver precisely tailored and timed messages turns out to be a recipe for behavior modification on an unprecedented scale.

To Zuboff, the experiment and its aftermath carry an even broader lesson, and a grim warning. All of Facebook's information wrangling and algorithmic fine-tuning, she writes, "is aimed at solving one problem: how and when to intervene in the state of play that is your daily life in order to modify your behavior and thus sharply increase the predictability of your actions now, soon, and later." This goal, she suggests, is not limited to Facebook. It is coming to guide much of the economy, as financial and social power shifts to the surveillance capitalists. "The goal of everything we do is to change people's actual behavior at scale," a top Silicon Valley data scientist told her in an interview. "We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us."

Behavior modification is the thread that ties today's search engines, social networks, and smartphone trackers to tomorrow's facial-recognition systems, emotion-detection sensors, and artificial-intelligence bots. What the industries of the future will seek to manufacture is the self.
V. The Bargain
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a long, sprawling book, but there's a piece missing. While Zuboff's assessment of the costs that people incur under surveillance capitalism is exhaustive, she largely ignores the benefits people receive in return - convenience, customization, savings, entertainment, social connection, and so on. The benefits can't be dismissed as illusory, and the public can no longer claim ignorance about what's sacrificed in exchange for them. Over the last two years, the press has uncovered one scandal after another involving malfeasance by big internet firms, Facebook in particular. We know who we're dealing with.

This is not to suggest that our lives are best evaluated with spreadsheets. Nor is it to downplay the abuses inherent in a system that places control over knowledge and discourse in the hands of a few companies that have both incentive and means to manipulate what we see and do. It is to point out that a full examination of surveillance capitalism requires as rigorous and honest an accounting of its boons as of its banes.

In the choices we make as consumers and private citizens, we have always traded some of our autonomy to gain other rewards. Many people, it seems clear, experience surveillance capitalism less as a prison, where their agency is restricted in a noxious way, than as an all-inclusive resort, where their agency is restricted in a pleasing way. Zuboff makes a convincing case that this is a short-sighted and dangerous view - that the bargain we've struck with the internet giants is a Faustian one - but her case would have been stronger still had she more fully addressed the benefits side of the ledger.

The book has other, more cosmetic flaws. Zuboff is prone to wordiness and hackneyed phrasing, and she at times delivers her criticism in overwrought prose that blunts its effect. A less tendentious, more dispassionate tone would make her argument harder for Silicon Valley insiders and sympathizers to dismiss. The book is also overstuffed. Zuboff feels compelled to make the same point in a dozen different ways when a half dozen would have been more than sufficient. Here, too, stronger editorial discipline would have sharpened the message.

Whatever its imperfections, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is an original and often brilliant work, and it arrives at a crucial moment, when the public and its elected representatives are at last grappling with the extraordinary power of digital media and the companies that control it. Like another recent masterwork of economic analysis, Thomas Piketty's 2013 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the book challenges assumptions, raises uncomfortable questions about the present and future, and stakes out ground for a necessary and overdue debate. Shoshana Zuboff has aimed an unsparing light onto the shadowy new landscape of our lives. The picture is not pretty.

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Nicholas Carr has written several books on technology, economics, and culture, including The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains and The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. He is the Richmond Visiting Professor at Williams College.

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Thieves of Experience: How Google and Facebook Corrupted Capitalism - Los Angeles Review of Books

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WE SOMETIMES FORGET that, at the turn of the century, Silicon Valley was in a funk, economic and psychic. The great dot-com bubble of the 1990s had imploded, destroying vast amounts of investment capital along with the savings of many Americans. Trophy startups like Pets.com, Webvan, and Excite@Home, avatars of the so-called New Economy, were punch lines.

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Enter your demographic and see what Russian trolls served you on FB

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Enter your demographic and see what Russian trolls served you on FB

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See Which Facebook Ads Russians Targeted to People Like You

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Congress last week released more than 3,000 Facebook ads linked to Russia around the 2016 presidential election, the most comprehensive look at the misinformation campaign mounted on the social network.

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Collection of Russian FB ads and their US targets

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Collection of Russian FB ads and their US targets

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Russian accounts bought thousands of social media ads on hot-button U.S. issues ranging from Black Lives Matter to illegal immigration, according to members of the House intelligence panel.

In November, lawmakers released a batch of those ads. On Thursday, they published all of the ads identified by Facebook as being connected to the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency.

Story Continued Below

Here is a sampling of ads purchased by Russian-linked accounts and aimed at U.S. Facebook and Instagram users:

Benghazi

According to the ad, the mother of one of the people killed in the attack on U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, said in a television interview that there was a "special place in Hell" for people like Hillary Clinton. Pat Smith made the comments in a 2016 interview on Fox Business. The ad shows an image of Clinton on Capitol Hill.

Posted on: Facebook
Created: March 2016
Targeted: People ages 18 to 65+ who like the group "Being Patriotic" or have friends connected to the group
Results: 4,668 impressions, 783 clicks
Ad spend: 511.53 rubles ($8.27)

Talk to a Muslim

"We really need to stop Islamophobia and the fear of Muslims," the ad reads.

Posted on: Facebook
Created: March 2016
Targeted: People ages 18 to 65+ who like the group "Muslims of America" or have friends connected to the group
Results: 1,640 impressions, 213 clicks
Ad spend: 500 rubles ($8.09)

Border security

"No invaders allowed" reads a yellow sign in this ad, which plays off Republican calls during the 2016 campaign for enhanced border security measures.

Native Americans

This ad, targeted to people interested in the American Indian Movement and other similar topics, says the Oglala Lakota had "good relationships" with the U.S. government but were moved onto a reservation.

Posted on: Facebook
Created: January 2017
Targeted: People ages 18 to 65+ whose interests match "American Indian Movement," "Native American Indian Wisdom," "Cherokee language" or "Cherokee Nation"
Results: 1,210 impressions, 203 clicks
Ad spend: 3,200 rubles ($3.23)

Black Lives Matter

This ad features images of three African-Americans whose deaths - either from police shootings or while in police custody - inspired protests and called attention to the "Black Lives Matter" movement: Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.; Tamir Rice in Cleveland; and Freddie Gray in Baltimore.

Blue Lives Matter

An image of police saluting a fallen comrade and a flag-draped casket blames a "Black Lives Matter" activist for "another gruesome attack on police." The fine print, however, describes a Boston "gun battle" in which officers were shot and critically injured - making it unclear whose funeral is being depicted. In any case, the ad warns that Hillary Clinton is "the main hardliner against cops" and says that "among all the candidates Donald Trump is the one and only who can defend the police from terrorists."

'Buff Bernie' coloring book

This ad promoted a coloring book called "Buff Bernie," filled with "very attractive doodles of Bernie Sanders in muscle poses." It added that "I've recently heard some hateful comments from the Hillary supporters about Bernie Sanders and his supporters" - language aimed at stirring up the kinds of intra-party divisions that would later flare after the first release of Russian-hacked Democratic Party documents during the summer of 2016.

Trump is 'Not My President'

Created the day after the election, this ad proclaimed that "racism won, ignorance won, sexual assault won" and invited people to a rally in New York City's Union Square where they could "march against Trump." The ad may not have been necessary - Trump's critics turned out en masse for rallies much like this during that weekend.

Bernie Sanders: Clinton Foundation is a 'Problem'

This ad, from around the time when Hillary Clinton secured the Democratic nomination, cites Sanders' criticism of donations given to the Clinton Foundation - but it also goes beyond Sanders' rhetoric by calling the foundation "an 'organized crime at it's finest [sic]." It also accuses Clinton of disregarding the rights of women, gays and lesbians in foreign countries. It finishes: "So, why are so many people going to vote for her?"

Teaching children about guns

This image of an adult and a child wielding guns included the text that "this is the way our children have to be raised," adding: "Follow us if this video makes you proud!"

Satan: 'If I Win Clinton Wins!' Jesus: 'Not If I Can Help It!'

This ad by the "Army of Jesus" invited people to elect "a president with godly moral principles," calling Hillary Clinton "a Satan." While Donald Trump "isn't a saint by any means, he's at least an honest man and he cares deeply for his country," it says.

Texas: Get Ready to Secede!

This ad promoted an event on the Saturday before the November election urging "fellow Texans" to "say a strong NO to the establishment robbers" and "the crimes committed by Killary Rotten Clinton." It adds: "Let's remind them what Texas is made of and show that we're ready to secede!"

Flag-draped casket

The ad, featuring a woman sobbing over a flag-draped casket, tells readers that "Killary Clinton will never understand what it feels like to lose the person you love for the sake of your country." The headline, "What Difference Does It Make?", is taken from a controversial section of Clinton's testimony during one of the congressional Benghazi hearings.

This article tagged under:

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The social media ads Russia wanted Americans to see

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Russian accounts bought thousands of social media ads on hot-button U.S. issues ranging from Black Lives Matter to illegal immigration, according to members of the House intelligence panel. In November, lawmakers released a batch of those ads. On Thursday, they published all of the ads identified by Facebook as being connected to the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency.

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What FB knows about you - from ProPublica

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What FB knows about you - from ProPublica

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Breaking the Black Box: What Facebook Knows About You - ProPublica

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We live in an era of increasing automation. But as machines make more decisions for us, it is increasingly important to understand the algorithms that produce their judgments.

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Here’s what FB and Google knows about you. 

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Here’s what FB and Google knows about you. 

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ant to freak yourself out? I'm going to show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it.

Google knows where you've been

Google stores your location (if you have location tracking turned on) every time you turn on your phone. You can see a timeline of where you've been from the very first day you started using Google on your phone.

Click on this link to see your own data: google.com/maps/timeline?...

Here is every place I have been in the last 12 months in Ireland. You can see the time of day that I was in the location and how long it took me to get to that location from my previous one.

Google knows everything you've ever searched - and deleted

Google stores search history across all your devices. That can mean that, even if you delete your search history and phone history on one device, it may still have data saved from other devices.

Click on this link to see your own data: myactivity.google.com/myactivity

Related: Why have we given up our privacy to Facebook and other sites so willingly?

Google has an advertisement profile of you

Google creates an advertisement profile based on your information, including your location, gender, age, hobbies, career, interests, relationship status, possible weight (need to lose 10lb in one day?) and income.

Click on this link to see your own data: google.com/settings/ads/

Google knows all the apps you use

Google stores information on every app and extension you use. They know how often you use them, where you use them, and who you use them to interact with. That means they know who you talk to on Facebook, what countries are you speaking with, what time you go to sleep.

Click on this link to see your own data: security.google.com/settings/secur...

Google has all of your YouTube history

Google stores all of your YouTube history, so they probably know whether you're going to be a parent soon, if you're a conservative, if you're a progressive, if you're Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, if you're feeling depressed or suicidal, if you're anorexic ...

Click on this link to see your own data: youtube.com/feed/history/s...

The data Google has on you can fill millions of Word documents

Google offers an option to download all of the data it stores about you. I've requested to download it and the file is 5.5GB big, which is roughly 3m Word documents.

Manage to gain access to someone's Google account? Perfect, you have a diary of everything that person has done

This link includes your bookmarks, emails, contacts, your Google Drive files, all of the above information, your YouTube videos, the photos you've taken on your phone, the businesses you've bought from, the products you've bought through Google ...

They also have data from your calendar, your Google hangout sessions, your location history, the music you listen to, the Google books you've purchased, the Google groups you're in, the websites you've created, the phones you've owned, the pages you've shared, how many steps you walk in a day ...

Click on this link to see your own data: google.com/takeout

Facebook has reams and reams of data on you, too

Facebook offers a similar option to download all your information. Mine was roughly 600MB, which is roughly 400,000 Word documents.

This includes every message you've ever sent or been sent, every file you've ever sent or been sent, all the contacts in your phone, and all the audio messages you've ever sent or been sent.

Click here to see your data: https://www.facebook.com/help/131112897028467

Facebook stores everything from your stickers to your login location

Facebook also stores what it thinks you might be interested in based off the things you've liked and what you and your friends talk about (I apparently like the topic "girl").

Somewhat pointlessly, they also store all the stickers you've ever sent on Facebook (I have no idea why they do this. It's just a joke at this stage).

They also store every time you log in to Facebook, where you logged in from, what time, and from what device.

And they store all the applications you've ever had connected to your Facebook account, so they can guess I'm interested in politics and web and graphic design, that I was single between X and Y period with the installation of Tinder, and I got a HTC phone in November.

(Side note, if you have Windows 10 installed, this is a picture of just the privacy options with 16 different sub-menus, which have all of the options enabled by default when you install Windows 10)

They can access your webcam and microphone

The data they collect includes tracking where you are, what applications you have installed, when you use them, what you use them for, access to your webcam and microphone at any time, your contacts, your emails, your calendar, your call history, the messages you send and receive, the files you download, the games you play, your photos and videos, your music, your search history, your browsing history, even what radio stations you listen to.

Related: Facebook told me it would act swiftly on data misuse - in 2015 | Harry Davies

Here are some of the different ways Google gets your data

I got the Google Takeout document with all my information, and this is a breakdown of all the different ways they get your information.

Here's the search history document, which has 90,000 different entries, even showing the images I downloaded and the websites I accessed (I showed the Pirate Bay section to show how much damage this information can do).

Google knows which events you attended, and when

Here's my Google Calendar broken down, showing all the events I've ever added, whether I actually attended them, and what time I attended them at (this part is when I went for an interview for a marketing job, and what time I arrived).

And Google has information you deleted

This is my Google Drive, which includes files I explicitly deleted including my résumé, my monthly budget, and all the code, files and websites I've ever made, and even my PGP private key, which I deleted, that I use to encrypt emails.

Google can know your workout routine

This is my Google Fit, which shows all of the steps I've ever taken, any time I walked anywhere, and all the times I've recorded any meditation/yoga/workouts I've done (I deleted this information and revoked Google Fit's permissions).

And they have years' worth of photos

This is all the photos ever taken with my phone, broken down by year, and includes metadata of when and where I took the photos

Google has every email you ever sent

Every email I've ever sent, that's been sent to me, including the ones I deleted or were categorised as spam.

And there is more

I'll just do a short summary of what's in the thousands of files I received under my Google Activity.

First, every Google Ad I've ever viewed or clicked on, every app I've ever launched or used and when I did it, every website I've ever visited and what time I did it at, and every app I've ever installed or searched for.

They also have every image I've ever searched for and saved, every location I've ever searched for or clicked on, every news article I've ever searched for or read, and every single Google search I've made since 2009. And then finally, every YouTube video I've ever searched for or viewed, since 2008.

This information has millions of nefarious uses. You say you're not a terrorist. Then how come you were googling Isis? Work at Google and you're suspicious of your wife? Perfect, just look up her location and search history for the last 10 years. Manage to gain access to someone's Google account? Perfect, you have a chronological diary of everything that person has done for the last 10 years.

This is one of the craziest things about the modern age. We would never let the government or a corporation put cameras/microphones in our homes or location trackers on us. But we just went ahead and did it ourselves because - to hell with it! - I want to watch cute dog videos.

* A caption was corrected on 28 March 2018 to replace "privacy options in Facebook" with "privacy options in Windows 10".

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Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you | Dylan Curran

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ant to freak yourself out? I'm going to show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it. Google stores your location (if you have location tracking turned on) every time you turn on your phone.

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Great Twitter thread: "Info FB & Google have about you"

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Great Twitter thread: "Info FB & Google have about you"

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And you don't even know it.

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Want to freak yourself out? I'm gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it

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Want to freak yourself out? I'm gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it

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Want to freak yourself out? I'm gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it

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Want to freak yourself out? I'm gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it

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Want to freak yourself out? I'm gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it

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"Using users' data for profit is Facebook’s business model..." 

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"Using users' data for profit is Facebook’s business model..." 

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The data scientist who Facebook branded a liar after he collected information on tens of millions of Americans for a company that would later go on to work for the 2016 Trump campaign says Facebook is making him a scapegoat to distract from bigger problems facing the company.

"Using users' data for profit is their business model," Aleksandr Kogan said of Facebook in interviews with CNN on Tuesday, his first time talking publicly about his work with the data firm Cambridge Analytica since Friday night when Facebook announced it had suspended him and Cambridge Analytica from its platform for breaking its rule s.

Kogan said that he suspects thousands of other developers and data scientists had used similar methods to gather information on Facebook users.

Related: What you need to know about Facebook's data debacle

Kogan, 32, said he gathered information on 30 million Americans through his Facebook personality test app in 2014 - data he then passed to Cambridge Analytica. When Facebook learned in 2015 that Kogan had shared the data with the company it demanded the data be deleted, saying that transferring or selling data was against its company guidelines.

Kogan says he doesn't believe he broke Facebook policy. He claims that Christopher Wylie, then a Cambridge Analytica staffer, assured him he was doing everything in accordance with Facebook policy. Wylie's revelations about his former company, reported by The New York Times and The Observer, sparked the current crisis facing Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

A Facebook spokesperson told CNN that Kogan had breached Facebook's policies in several ways, including by transferring data to a third-party for commercial purposes.

Kogan, who has worked for Cambridge University since 2012, said he doesn't recall whether or not he read all of Facebook's terms and conditions in 2014, but that he relied on Wylie's assurances.

A spokesperson for Wylie said their client had been open about his role in working with Kogan and Cambridge Analytica and that he has been working with British authorities for several months. The spokesperson would not comment on specific claims Kogan made about Wylie to CNN.

Facebook did not respond to Kogan's claims.

Kogan told CNN on Tuesday that when he began his work looking into what can be predicted about any given person based on what that person "likes" on Facebook, he was relying upon research that had been done by others, but after he began looking into it himself, he said, he found the model was not effective.

"What we found ourselves was that the data isn't very accurate at the individual level at all," he said.

As a result, he said he believes that Cambridge Analytica was selling a "myth" to political campaigns by suggesting they could offer a more sophisticated method of targeting voters by determining their personality types through social media.

Kogan said he would be happy to testify before Congress on his work for Cambridge Analytica and to speak to authorities should they wish to talk with him.

He also said he hopes that there may be a "silver lining" to the current controversy, a discussion about how social media companies like Facebook use personal information to sell ads.

"The broader question is the elephant in the room," he said, adding that in exchange for free services like Facebook, users become the product that is sold to advertisers. "Are we concerned with being the product?" he asked.

CNNMoney (New York) First published March 20, 2018: 9:58 PM ET

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Exclusive: Scientist at center of data controversy says Facebook is making him a scapegoat

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"Using users' data for profit is their business model," Aleksandr Kogan said of Facebook in interviews with CNN on Tuesday, his first time talking publicly about his work with the data firm Cambridge Analytica since Friday night when Facebook announced it had suspended him and Cambridge Analytica from its platform for breaking its rule s.

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Primer on your personal info taken by Facebook

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Primer on your personal info taken by Facebook

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And how to fix it

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Noah Berger / AP

FILE - In this Tuesday, April 18, 2017, file photo, a conference worker passes a demo booth at Facebook's annual F8 developer conference, in San Jose, Calif. Facebook Inc. reports earnings Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2018. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)

Facebook has come under fire after Cambridge Analytica, a voter profiling company that worked on President Trump's campaign, allegedly improperly collected and misused the data of up to 50 million users. It has prompted a big investigation in the UK and lots of scrutiny in the US.

Initially, people voluntarily handed over their personal information and friends data - they thought they were participating in a survey conducted by a Russian-American academic. What they unwittingly did was give their data to Cambridge Analytica.

But that's the point - people give away a lot of very personal information to Facebook. Then they just as quickly give it away to third parties without really knowing what in heaven's name they're doing with the information.

Here are the three basic ways we're handing over very personal information - our birthday, our "likes," our preferences, who we're friends with online - and how quickly it can be taken from us.

It's that simple. Some people think Facebook doesn't have all that much information on them because they rarely use it. You may be a lurker. How much data can Facebook really have on you?

A lot! If you're curious about what kind of data Facebook has about you, you can follow these steps to download your personal Facebook history. In these archives you'll find fun things you probably never thought were stored on a server somewhere about you.

The archive contains a list of IP addresses that you've used to logged into your Facebook account, ads that you clicked on, and cell phone numbers associated with your account.

Facebook also tracks this type of data you entered onto the platform:

2. The even simpler act of using Facebook

Facebook keeps detailed data of all your preferences and every one of your "likes" - and it leverages that information for super-precise ad targeting. By reacting to Facebook posts, it's kind of like you're participating in an ongoing consumer survey exclusively for Facebook.

Your activity log can give you a pretty good idea of your Facebook behavior over time. It's a record of all your activities from today all the way back to the day you signed up for your account. Here, you'll find every like, :haha:, :wow:, :angry:, :love:, and :sad: reaction you've ever made to a Facebook post; every video, song, and photo you've looked at, listened to, posted, and been tagged in. It also keeps every change to your profile you've ever made.

Oh, and don't forget your search history - including every ex you've ever looked up.

Facebook also stores:

Every status update you've ever posted

Every Facebook Messenger chat

Every place you've checked in

Friends you hid from your News Feed

Stuff you've searched for

It's all very personal and it's all right there!

3. Signing in to third-party apps through Facebook

Here's where it really gets hairy.

You know that convenient option of logging into a third-party app with your Facebook credentials? Once you click "continue," you're allowing this app - it could be Spotify, Farmville, or, say, a survey being conducted by a Russian-American academic connected to Cambridge Analytica - to access a ton of the precious personal data that Facebook has on you.

For example, if you use Tinder via Facebook, you have to hand over at least some basic information about your public profile, which includes your name, your gender, and anything else you posted publicly about yourself.

By default, the app also asks for access to a complete list of your friends, what genders you are interested in, your birthday, your work and educational history, any photo you've ever uploaded or are tagged in, any pages and groups you like, and your email address.

Unless you edit the default settings upon your first Tinder login - and you probably don't - you automatically give the dating app all this data.

These are only a few of the data points that apps may ask for. Here's a complete list.

Back in 2014 - when the academic linked to Cambridge Analytica, Aleksandr Kogan, used his app to collect data - Facebook users were also able to give third-party apps permission to gather not just personal information but also the information of their friends. At the time, this data included things like the check-ins, locations, and interests of a user's friend.

"The news about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica should serve as a reminder of the inevitable privacy risks in a world where a near-endless stream of personal information is collected indefinitely stored, analyzed, and re-used by marketers, identity thieves, and professional government snoops," Corynne McSherry, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told BuzzFeed News through a spokesperson.

If you're looking to update your app settings, here are some helpful tips.

Lam Thuy Vo is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

Contact Lam Thuy Vo at lam.vo@buzzfeed.com.

Got a confidential tip? Submit it here.

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3 Simple Ways We Give Up A Ton Of Very Personal Information To Facebook And Random Apps

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Facebook has come under fire after Cambridge Analytica, a voter profiling company that worked on President Trump's campaign, allegedly improperly collected and misused the data of up to 50 million users. It has prompted a big investigation in the UK and lots of scrutiny in the US.

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Cambridge Analytica Series from The Guardian

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Cambridge Analytica Series from The Guardian

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The Cambridge Analytica Files | The Guardian

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Latest The Cambridge Analytica Files news, comment and analysis from the Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice

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YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century

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YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century

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It seems as if you are never "hard core" enough for YouTube's recommendation algorithm. It promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes. Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.

This is not because a cabal of YouTube engineers is plotting to drive the world off a cliff. A more likely explanation has to do with the nexus of artificial intelligence and Google's business model. (YouTube is owned by Google.) For all its lofty rhetoric, Google is an advertising broker, selling our attention to companies that will pay for it. The longer people stay on YouTube, the more money Google makes.

What keeps people glued to YouTube? Its algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with - or to incendiary content in general.

Is this suspicion correct? Good data is hard to come by; Google is loath to share information with independent researchers. But we now have the first inklings of confirmation, thanks in part to a former Google engineer named Guillaume Chaslot.

Mr. Chaslot worked on the recommender algorithm while at YouTube. He grew alarmed at the tactics used to increase the time people spent on the site. Google fired him in 2013, citing his job performance. He maintains the real reason was that he pushed too hard for changes in how the company handles such issues.

The Wall Street Journal conducted an investigation of YouTube content with the help of Mr. Chaslot. It found that YouTube often "fed far-right or far-left videos to users who watched relatively mainstream news sources," and that such extremist tendencies were evident with a wide variety of material. If you searched for information on the flu vaccine, you were recommended anti-vaccination conspiracy videos.

It is also possible that YouTube's recommender algorithm has a bias toward inflammatory content. In the run-up to the 2016 election, Mr. Chaslot created a program to keep track of YouTube's most recommended videos as well as its patterns of recommendations. He discovered that whether you started with a pro-Clinton or pro-Trump video on YouTube, you were many times more likely to end up with a pro-Trump video recommended.

Combine this finding with other research showing that during the 2016 campaign, fake news, which tends toward the outrageous, included much more pro-Trump than pro-Clinton content, and YouTube's tendency toward the incendiary seems evident.

YouTube has recently come under fire for recommending videos promoting the conspiracy theory that the outspoken survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., are "crisis actors" masquerading as victims. Jonathan Albright, a researcher at Columbia, recently "seeded" a YouTube account with a search for "crisis actor" and found that following the "up next" recommendations led to a network of some 9,000 videos promoting that and related conspiracy theories, including the claim that the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Conn., was a hoax.

What we are witnessing is the computational exploitation of a natural human desire: to look "behind the curtain," to dig deeper into something that engages us. As we click and click, we are carried along by the exciting sensation of uncovering more secrets and deeper truths. YouTube leads viewers down a rabbit hole of extremism, while Google racks up the ad sales.

Human beings have many natural tendencies that need to be vigilantly monitored in the context of modern life. For example, our craving for fat, salt and sugar, which served us well when food was scarce, can lead us astray in an environment in which fat, salt and sugar are all too plentiful and heavily marketed to us. So too our natural curiosity about the unknown can lead us astray on a website that leads us too much in the direction of lies, hoaxes and misinformation.

In effect, YouTube has created a restaurant that serves us increasingly sugary, fatty foods, loading up our plates as soon as we are finished with the last meal. Over time, our tastes adjust, and we seek even more sugary, fatty foods, which the restaurant dutifully provides. When confronted about this by the health department and concerned citizens, the restaurant managers reply that they are merely serving us what we want.

This situation is especially dangerous given how many people - especially young people - turn to YouTube for information. Google's cheap and sturdy Chromebook laptops, which now make up more than 50 percent of the pre-college laptop education market in the United States, typically come loaded with ready access to YouTube.

This state of affairs is unacceptable but not inevitable. There is no reason to let a company make so much money while potentially helping to radicalize billions of people, reaping the financial benefits while asking society to bear so many of the costs.

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video recordings  downloads and streaming

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Opinion | YouTube, the Great Radicalizer

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It seems as if you are never "hard core" enough for YouTube's recommendation algorithm. It promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes. Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.

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I have spent most days since then getting the news mainly from print, though my self-imposed asceticism allowed for podcasts, email newsletters and long-form nonfiction (books and magazine articles). Basically, I was trying to slow-jam the news - I still wanted to be informed, but was looking to formats that prized depth and accuracy over speed.

It has been life changing. Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in my pocket was like unshackling myself from a monster who had me on speed dial, always ready to break into my day with half-baked bulletins.

Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed (though there are some blind spots). And I'm embarrassed about how much free time I have - in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father.

Most of all, I realized my personal role as a consumer of news in our broken digital news environment.

We have spent much of the past few years discovering that the digitization of news is ruining how we collectively process information. Technology allows us to burrow into echo chambers, exacerbating misinformation and polarization and softening up society for propaganda. With artificial intelligence making audio and video as easy to fake as text, we're entering a hall-of-mirrors dystopia, what some are calling an "information apocalypse." And we're all looking to the government and to Facebook for a fix.

But don't you and I also have a part to play? Getting news only from print newspapers may be extreme and probably not for everyone. But the experiment taught me several lessons about the pitfalls of digital news and how to avoid them.

I distilled those lessons into three short instructions, the way the writer Michael Pollan once boiled down nutrition advice: Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social.

Get news.

I know what you're thinking: Listening to a Times writer extol the virtues of print is like taking breakfast suggestions from Count Chocula. You may also wonder if I am preaching to the choir; doesn't everyone reading this story already appreciate print?

Probably not. The Times has about 3.6 million paying subscribers, but about three-quarters of them pay for just the digital version. During the 2016 election, fewer than 3 percent of Americans cited print as their most important source of campaign news; for people under 30, print was their least important source.

I'm nearly 40, but I'm no different. Though I have closely followed the news since I was a kid, I always liked my news on a screen, available at the touch of a button. Even with this experiment, I found much to hate about print. The pages are too big, the type too small, the ink too messy, and compared with a smartphone, a newspaper is more of a hassle to consult on the go.

Print also presents a narrower mix of ideas than you find online. You can't get BuzzFeed or Complex or Slate in print. In California, you can't even get The Washington Post in print. And print is expensive. Outside New York, after introductory discounts, seven-day home delivery of The Times will set you back $81 a month. In a year, that's about the price of Apple's best iPhone.

What do you get for all that dough? News. That sounds obvious until you try it - and you realize how much of what you get online isn't quite news, and more like a never-ending stream of commentary, one that does more to distort your understanding of the world than illuminate it.

I noticed this first with the deal Democrats made to end the government shutdown late in January. On the Jan. 23 front pages, the deal was presented straight: "Shutdown Ends, Setting Up Clash Over 'Dreamers,'" ran The Times's headline on the news story, which appeared alongside an analysis piece that presented the political calculations surrounding the deal.

Many of the opinions in that analysis could be found on Twitter and Facebook. What was different was the emphasis. Online, commentary preceded facts. If you were following the shutdown on social networks, you most likely would have seen lots of politicians and pundits taking stock of the deal before seeing details of the actual news.

I want to see the government re-open as much as anyone, but this bill fails to fix the moral issue we must solve. That's why I voted against it.
- Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) Jan. 22, 2018

This is common online. On social networks, every news story comes to you predigested. People don't just post stories - they post their takes on stories, often quoting key parts of a story to underscore how it proves them right, so readers are never required to delve into the story to come up with their own view.

There's nothing wrong with getting lots of shades of opinion. And reading just the paper can be a lonely experience; there were many times I felt in the dark about what the online hordes thought about the news.

Still, the prominence of commentary over news online and on cable news feels backward, and dangerously so. It is exactly our fealty to the crowd - to what other people are saying about the news, rather than the news itself - that makes us susceptible to misinformation.

Not too quickly.

It's been clear that breaking news has been broken since at least 2013, when a wild week of conspiracy theories followed the Boston Marathon bombing. As I argued then, technology had caused the break.

Real life is slow; it takes professionals time to figure out what happened, and how it fits into context. Technology is fast. Smartphones and social networks are giving us facts about the news much faster than we can make sense of them, letting speculation and misinformation fill the gap.

It has only gotten worse. As news organizations evolved to a digital landscape dominated by apps and social platforms, they felt more pressure to push news out faster. Now, after something breaks, we're all buzzed with the alert, often before most of the facts are in. So you're driven online not just to find out what happened, but really to figure it out.

This was the surprise blessing of the newspaper. I was getting news a day old, but in the delay between when the news happened and when it showed up on my front door, hundreds of experienced professionals had done the hard work for me.

Now I was left with the simple, disconnected and ritualistic experience of reading the news, mostly free from the cognitive load of wondering whether the thing I was reading was possibly a blatant lie.

Another surprise was a sensation of time slowing down. One weird aspect of the past few years is how a "tornado of news-making has scrambled Americans' grasp of time and memory," as my colleague Matt Flegenheimer put it last year. By providing a daily digest of the news, the newspaper alleviates this sense. Sure, there's still a lot of news - but when you read it once a day, the world feels contained and comprehensible rather than a blur of headlines lost on a phone's lock screen.

You don't need to read a print newspaper to get this; you can create your own news ritual by looking at a news app once a day, or reading morning newsletters like those from Axios, or listening to a daily news podcast. What's important is choosing a medium that highlights deep stories over quickly breaking ones.

And, more important, you can turn off news notifications. They distract and feed into a constant sense of fragmentary paranoia about the world. They are also unnecessary. If something really big happens, you will find out.

Avoid social.

This is the most important rule of all. After reading newspapers for a few weeks, I began to see it wasn't newspapers that were so great, but social media that was so bad.

Just about every problem we battle in understanding the news today - and every one we will battle tomorrow - is exacerbated by plugging into the social-media herd. The built-in incentives on Twitter and Facebook reward speed over depth, hot takes over facts and seasoned propagandists over well-meaning analyzers of news.

You don't have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news. But, for goodness' sake, please stop getting your news mainly from Twitter and Facebook. In the long run, you and everyone else will be better off.

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For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here's What I Learned.

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I have spent most days since then getting the news mainly from print, though my self-imposed asceticism allowed for podcasts, email newsletters and long-form nonfiction (books and magazine articles). Basically, I was trying to slow-jam the news - I still wanted to be informed, but was looking to formats that prized depth and accuracy over speed.

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You may disagree, but still a good visualization.

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TL;DR: What's new in this chart is:

I edited the categories on the vertical axis to more accurately describe the contents of the news sources ranked therein (long discussion below).

I stuffed as many sources (from both version 1.0 and 2.0, plus some new ones) on here as I could, in response to all the "what about ______ source" questions I got. Now the logos are pretty tiny. If you have a request for a ranking of a particular source, let me know in the comments.

I changed the subheading under "Hyper-Partisan" from "questionable journalistic value" to "expressly promotes views." This is because "hyper-partisan" does not always mean that the facts reported in the stories are necessarily "questionable." Some analysis sources in these columns do good fact-finding in support of their expressly partisan stances. I didn't want anyone to think those sources were necessarily "bad" just because they hyper-partisan (though they could be "bad" for other reasons.

I added a key that indicates what the circles and ellipses mean. They mean that a source within a particular circle or ellipse can often have stories that fall within that circle/ellipse's range. This is, of course, not true for all sources

Green/Yellow/Orange/Red Key. Within each square: Green is news, yellow is fair interpretations of the news, orange is unfair interpretations of the news, and red is nonsense damaging to public discourse.

Just read this one more thing: It's best to think of the position of a source as a weighted average position of the stories within each source. That is, I rank some sources in a particular spot because most of its stories fall in that spot. However, I weight the ranking downward is if it has a significant number of stories (even if they are a minority) that fall in the orange or red areas. For example, if Daily Kos has 75% of its stories fall under yellow (e.g., "analysis," and "opinion, fair"), but 25% fall under orange (selective, unfair, hyper-partisan), it is rated overall in the orange. I rank them like this is because, in my view, the orange and red-type content is damaging to the overall media landscape, and if a significant enough number of stories fall in that category, readers should rely on it less. This is a subjective judgment on my part, but I think it is defensible.
OK, you can go now unless you just really love reading about this media analysis stuff. News nerds, proceed for more discussion about ranking the news.
As I discussed in my post entitled " The Chart, Second Edition: What Makes a News Source Good?" the most accurate and helpful way to analyze a news source is to analyze its individual stories, and the most accurate way to analyze an individual story is to analyze its individual sentences. I recently started a blog series where I rank individual stories on this chart and provide a written analysis that scores the article itself on a sentence-by-sentence basis, and separately scores the title, graphics, lede, and other visual elements. See a couple of examples here. Categorizing and ranking the news is hard to do because there are so very many factors. But I'm convinced that the most accurate way to analyze and categorize news is to look as closely at it as possible, and measure everything about it that is measurable. I think we can improve our media landscape by doing this and coming up with novel and accurate ways to rank and score the news, and then teaching others how to do the same. If you like how I analyze articles in my blog series, and have a request for a particular article, let me know in the comments. I'm interested in talking about individual articles, and what makes them good and bad, with you.

As I've been analyzing articles on an element-by element, sentence-by-sentence basis, it became apparent to me that individual elements and sentences can be ranked or categorized in several ways, and that my chart needed some revisions for accuracy.

So far I have settled on at least three different dimensions, or metric, upon which an individual sentence can be ranked. These are 1) the Veracity metric, 2) the Expression metric, and 3) the Fairness metric

The primary way statements are currently evaluated in the news are on the basis of truthfulness, which is arguably the most important ranking metric. Several existing fact-checking sites, such as Politifact and Washington Post Fact Checker, use a scale to rate the veracity of statements; Politifact has six levels and Washington Post Fact Checker has four, reflecting that many statements are not entirely either true or false. I score each sentence on a similar "Veracity" metric, as follows:

True and Complete

Mostly True/ True but Incomplete

Mixed True and False

Mostly False or Misleading

False

Since there are many reputable organizations that do this type of fact-checking work, according to well-established industry standards, (see, e.g., Poynter International Fact Checking Network), I do not replicate this work myself but rather rely on these sources for fact checking.

It is valid and important to rate articles and statements for truthfulness. But it is apparent that sentences can vary in quality in other ways. One way, which I discussed in my previous post ( The Chart, Second Edition: What makes a News Source 'Good') is on what I call an "Expression" scale of fact-to-opinion. The Expression scale I use goes like this:

(Presented as) Fact

(Presented as) Fact/Analysis (or persuasively-worded fact)

(Presented as) Analysis (well-supported by fact, reasonable)

(Presented as) Analysis/Opinion (somewhat supported by fact)

(Presented as) Opinion (unsupported by facts or by highly disputed facts)

In ranking stories and sentences, I believe it is important to distinguish between fact, analysis, and opinion, and to value fact-reporting as more essential to news than either analysis or opinion. Opinion isn't necessarily bad, but it's important to distinguish that it is not news, which is why I rank it lower on the chart than analysis or fact reporting.

Note that the ranking here includes whether something is "presented as" fact, analysis, etc. This Expression scale focuses on the syntax and intent of the sentence, but not necessarily the absolute veracity. For example, a sentence could be presented as a fact but may be completely false or completely true. It wouldn't be accurate to characterize a false statement, presented as fact, as an "opinion." A sentence presented as opinion is one that provides a strong conclusion, but can't truly be verified or debunked, because it is a conclusion based on too many individual things. I'll write more on this metric separately, but for now, I submit that it is an important one because it is a second dimension of ranking that can be applied consistently to any sentence. Also, I submit that a false or misleading statement that is presented as a fact is more damaging to a sentence's credibility than a false or misleading statement presented as mere opinion.

The need for another metric became apparent when asking the question "what is this sentence for?" of each and every sentence. Sometimes, a sentence that is completely true and presented as fact can strike a reader as biased for some reason. There are several ways in which a sentence can be "biased," even if true. For example, sentences that are not relevant to the current story, or not timely, or that provide a quote out of context, can strike a reader as unfair because they appear to be inserted merely for the purpose of persuasion. It is true that readers can be persuaded by any kind of fact or opinion, but it seems "fair" to use certain facts and opinions to persuade while unfair to use other kinds.

I submit that the following characteristics of sentences can make them seem unfair:

-Not relevant to present story

-Not timely

-Ad hominem (personal) attacks

-Name-calling

-Other character attacks

-Quotes inserted to prove the truth of what the speaker is saying

-Sentences including persuasive facts but which omit facts that would tend to prove the opposite point

-Emotionally-charged adjectives

-Any fact, analysis, or opinion statement that is based on false, misleading, or highly disputed premises

This is not an exhaustive list of what makes a sentence unfair, and I suspect that the more articles I analyze, the more accurate and comprehensive I can make this list over time. I welcome feedback on what other characteristics make a sentence unfair, and I'll write more on this metric in the future. Admittedly, many of these factors have a subjective component. Some of the standards I used to make a call on whether a sentence was "fair" or unfair" are the same ones in the Federal Rules of Evidence (i.e., the ones that judges use to rule on objections in court). These rules define complex concepts such as relevance and permissible character evidence, and determine what is fair for a jury to consider in court. I have a sense that a similar set of comprehensive rules for legal evidence could be developed for journalism fairness. For now, these initial identifiers of fairness metric helped me distinguish the presence of unfair sentences in articles. I now use a "Fairness" metric in addition to the Veracity scale and the Expression scale. This metric only has two measures, and therefore requires a call to be made between:

By identifying a percentage of sentences that were unfair, I was able to gain an additional perspective on what an overall article was doing, which helped me create some more accurate descriptions of types of articles on the vertical quality axis. In my previous chart (second edition), the fact-to-opinion metric was the primary basis for the vertical ranking descriptions, so it looked like this:

In using all three metrics, 1) the Veracity scale, 2), the fact-to-opinion Expression scale, and 3) the Fairness scale, I came up with what I believe are more accurate descriptions of article types, which looks like this:

As shown, the top three categories are the same, but the lower ranked categories are more specifically described than in the previous version. The new categories are "Opinion; Fair Persuasion," "Selective or Incomplete Story; Unfair Persuasion," "Propaganda/Contains Misleading Facts," and "Contains Inaccurate/ Fabricated Info." If you look at the news sources that fall into these categories, I think you'll find that these descriptions more accurately describe many of the stories within the sources.

Thanks for reading about my media categorizing endeavors. I believe it is possible (though difficult) to categorize the news, and that doing so accurately is a worthy endeavor. In future posts and chart editions I'll dive into other metrics I've been using and refining, such as those pertaining to partisanship, topic focus (e.g., story selection bias), and news source ownership.

If you would like a blank version for education purposes, here you go:
Third Edition Blank
And here is a lower-resolution version for download on mobile devices:

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The Chart, Version 3.0: What, Exactly, Are We Reading? - All Generalizations are False

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TL;DR: What's new in this chart is: I edited the categories on the vertical axis to more accurately describe the contents of the news sources ranked therein (long discussion below). I stuffed as many sources (from both version 1.0 and 2.0, plus some new ones) on here as I could, in response to all ...

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Gaming Facebook’s New Algorithm

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Last Saturday - 12 days ago now - I shared a cringeworthy video on Facebook: a six-minute clip of a twentysomething white woman showing off her small, blandly decorated Brooklyn apartment. Sort of the pumpkin spice latte version of MTV Cribs - innocuous, but annoying. Ever since, this video has been waging a reign of terror over my friends and family, showing up at the top of their feeds every single day, over and over and over. They are complaining to me on Facebook. They are complaining to me in real life. They are tweeting me about it and emailing me. Begging me to remove this cursed video that greets them each time they open Facebook.

And of course, they commented on my post. And then people commented on the comments. The more people commented, the more the video showed up on other people's feeds. As the rage around this post intensified, so did the comments. Coworkers I sit next to commented. College friends commented. Someone I went to preschool with commented. A vicious, algorithmically delicious cycle.

After a few days, the comments shifted from "I hate this woman's apartment" to "why is this video constantly at the top of Facebook?" or "please, I beg you, delete this video," and eventually, my boss commenting "please write about this."

At the start of 2018, Facebook announced it would focus more on meaningful engagement. The company's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has written numerous times that the company is now focusing on "time well spent" on the platform (even though few inside Facebook seem to know how to define that metric). Since then, people who rely on Facebook for eyeballs (like journalists) have been nervously trying to figure out what this change means - is "meaningful engagement" just shorthand for comments? Well, they should just ask me, because I've figured it all out. And I'm using this to torture my friends.

Presumably because of this latest algorithm shift, my post stayed at the top of people's feeds - even though part of the new change was supposed to lead people away from passively consuming content (aka watching videos and scrolling through memes), and what I shared was exactly an example of the kind of passive content Facebook wants you to consume less of. My post still broke through, thanks to its ability to goad my friends into angrily commenting. Facebook is rewarding me for pissing my friends off, and its new thirst for comments seems to have driven itself into a loop that won't let my friends free from the grasp of a piece of content that they actually hate.

It's in the moments where the cracks start show - when the same awful video is at the top of your Facebook page for 12 days straight - that we remember how fucked up it is having our friendships ruled by an algorithm.

We've come to accept nonchronological feeds in our social media. Even on Instagram, where people do still seem to complain the most about it, we understand the rules of the new feed. It's in the moments where the cracks start show - when the same awful video is at the top of your Facebook page for 12 days straight - that we remember how fucked up it is having our friendships ruled by an algorithm. It's like in a sci-fi movie where a sexy android peels off her mask and you remember she's made of steel, or the Wizard of Oz furiously cranking his noise machine behind the curtain. This algorithm doesn't understand friendship. It can fake it, but when we see Valentine's Day posts on Instagram four days later, or when the machines mistake a tornado of angry comments for "engagement," it's a reminder that the machines still don't really get the basics of humanity.

I've been down this path before. In fact, I've written about this problem before. In the summer of 2016, Facebook did another recalibration of its News Feed that prioritized posts from friends and family over publishers, ending what seemed to many like a three-year tyranny of BuzzFeed quizzes and cooking videos. Soon after, I noticed a post from a coworker, asking if anyone had ever tried making overnight oats, had "stuck" to the top of my Facebook feed for five days straight, even though I had never commented or liked the post. I dubbed this phenomenon the overnight oats problem.

At the time, I saw this shift toward posts from friends and family a little uncanny. Back then, people had been so used to communicating purely through shared content from publishers that people had forgotten to ever actually do a simple text post. This meant that text posts were rare, and when someone actually wrote one - like asking about oatmeal recipes - Facebook's algorithm got a massive boner for it. In general, it felt like Facebook was an alien who came down to Earth and thought "friendship" meant caring about Minions memes from someone you sort of knew in middle school.

Facebook was an alien who came down to Earth and thought "friendship" meant caring about Minions memes from someone you sort of knew in middle school.

But this has all changed since summer 2016. We've gotten more used to posting text posts again, in large part due to the popularity of those colorful text blocks, which started out annoying, but now you're just used to them. That recommendation widget thing is even kind of useful now, and you maybe even forgot that it was weird when you first started seeing it.

A lot more has changed with Facebook since summer 2016 - between fake news and having to answer to Congress about Russian election meddling on the platform, it's been a rough year and a half for the company. This latest algorithm change toward "meaningful engagement" seems like an obvious response to the crisis it found itself in by the end of 2017.

So here we are, at a new phase in Facebook's history, when comments are king. But this has led to a new version of the overnight oats problem: People are being served the same stale content from a friend for 12 days straight, just because it happens to have a lot of comments. No one wanted to see my post several times a day, but the algorithm had, once again, misjudged what people wanted. In fact, people really hated this video - they wanted it to go away. Facebook took their pleas for it to stop as a sign that they should be shown it more and more. It's enough to almost make you nostalgic for those Russian chaos agents.

You can try this yourself; it's easy to game the system by posting something that drives comments. Try asking a question, or for advice: "Does anyone have a shampoo they love?" or "What was the most embarrassing thing that happened to you in middle school?"

Trust me, you will get lots of replies. And it will stick to the top of your friends' feeds for days.

And if they are like my friends, they will hate you for it. Good luck.

Katie Notopoulos is a senior editor for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York. Notopoulos writes about tech and internet culture is cohost of the Internet Explorer podcast.

Contact Katie Notopoulos at katie@buzzfeed.com.

Got a confidential tip? Submit it here.

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How I Cracked Facebook's New Algorithm And Tortured My Friends

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Last Saturday - 12 days ago now - I shared a cringeworthy video on Facebook: a six-minute clip of a twentysomething white woman showing off her small, blandly decorated Brooklyn apartment. Sort of the pumpkin spice latte version of MTV Cribs - innocuous, but annoying.

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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Facebook and YouTube dominate the social media landscape. But younger Americans, especially those ages 18 to 24, stand out in using a variety of platforms like Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter.

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We live in a world of dense information pollution

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We live in a world of dense information pollution

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Two incidents hit The Miami Herald in recent days that underscore new tactics by those seeking to discredit mainstream media, and they augur what experts said are dark days in the battle between credible news and misinformation.

Both incidents came in the wake of the shooting in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14 when a teenage gunman killed 17 students and adults at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

In the first incident, a perpetrator used a software tool to create two fake tweets that looked like they came from the account of Alex Harris, a Herald reporter preparing tributes to the slain students. One fake tweet asked for photos of dead bodies at the school and another asked if the shooter was white.

The reporter almost immediately began getting angry messages.

"It was hampering our ability to cover this terrible tragedy in our own backyard because we're having to deal with the backlash," said Aminda Marques, executive editor of The Herald.

In a second incident, someone again used a software tool to create a phony Miami Herald story - in the high tension following the Parkland shooting - saying that a Miami-Dade middle school faced threats of "potentially catastrophic events" on upcoming dates, indicating that a new mass shooting was in the offing.

Screenshots of that fake story were passed along on Twitter and Snapchat, two social media platforms, said Monique O. Madan, a Herald reporter whose byline appeared on the fake story.

It looks super real. They use the same font that we use. It has our masthead.

Monique O. Madan, Miami Herald reporter

"It looks super real. They use the same font that we use. It has our masthead. It has my byline. If I weren't a journalist, I wouldn't think twice about it," Madan said.

Worried parents and teachers grew alarmed, thinking it was a real Herald story. Dozens called or messaged Madan. "My phone just would not stop ringing," she said.

The motive behind the hoaxes was not clear, but someone sought to create alarm.

"It seems to be consistent with a pattern of people trying to disparage or discredit the news media," said Edward Wasserman, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Wasserman is a former executive business editor at The Herald and columnist on the media for McClatchy.

Your information flows are being contaminated in ways that are very difficult to discern.

Edward Wasserman, dean of UC Berkeley Graduate Journalism School

"Obviously this has broad civic consequence if you have a citizenry that doesn't know where to turn to get truthful information," Wasserman said. "Your information flows are being contaminated in ways that are very difficult to discern and very difficult to disentangle."

In the case of the Herald, the incidents came at a time of widespread anxiety.

"The primary thing that it did was create fear among a population that was already terrified. It was just on the heels of this mass shooting," Marques said.

"I think it's part of this larger evolving system of misinformation," said Aviv Ovadya, chief technologist at the Center for Social Media Responsibility at the University of Michigan's School of Information. "This is sort of the very, very beginning of something that could be much darker."

The future will bring hoaxes that far surpass fake tweets and screenshots of fake stories, Ovadya said, noting that "fake video is just about here," with tools that will make it easy even for amateurs to create images that are totally false but look real.

"There's less of even an opportunity to think about, 'Is this real or not?' when something looks real," he said.

Key to the hoax perpetrated on The Herald, owned by McClatchy, was that the instigators hijacked the brand of the news organization and the name of respected reporters.

"What they are doing is trafficking in the brand's integrity to lend credence to a false claim," said Nicco Mele, director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School.

We live in a world of dense information pollution.

Nicco Mele, Shorenstein Center at Harvard's Kennedy School

"We live in a world of dense information pollution," he added. "The long-term fallout is really dramatic corruption of our democratic sphere."

Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook and other social media platforms have all said they are struggling to police their sites against fake news. A Snap Inc. spokesperson, declining to speak for attribution, said the Bay Area company believes in content that is credible and authoritative.

Twitter was criticized last week over a torrent of tweets suggesting that two of the student survivors of the shooting were paid actors, and it responded with a tweet.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted, in response to the Herald hoax and other challenges related to falsehoods being spread on its platform, the company is looking for a "scalable and objective" solution to prevent this type of abuse.

"We are actively working on reports of targeted abuse and harassment of a number of survivors of the tragic mass shooting in #Parkland. Such behavior goes against everything we stand for at Twitter," a tweet from the company added.

Both Mele and Wasserman said social media companies could do more to battle the use of their platforms for the propagation of misinformation.

"Algorithms should be able to find an order of magnitude more than they do now," Mele said, adding that more employees would also be needed at the social media giants.

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Hoax attempts against Miami Herald augur brewing war over fake, real news

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Two incidents hit The Miami Herald in recent days that underscore new tactics by those seeking to discredit mainstream media, and they augur what experts said are dark days in the battle between credible news and misinformation. Both incidents came in the wake of the shooting in Parkland, Florida, on Feb.

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Twitter:  We should not be the arbiter of truth. 

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Twitter:  We should not be the arbiter of truth. 

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In the wake of the Florida high school shooting on Wednesday, Twitter users began spreading doctored tweets targeting Miami Herald reporter Alex Harris.

The shooting on Wednesday left at least 17 dead. After the gunman entered the school and began the attack, some students posted on Snapchat and Twitter about what was happening. Harris was one of the first reporters to reach out to the students to help explain the situation.

As the tweet went viral, Harris began getting harassment.

It took less than an hour for someone to create fake screenshots of tweets she sent.

The first tweet faked Harris asking for "pictures or video of dead bodies." The second doctored tweet went further, making it look like she was asking whether the shooter was white.

"That one went nuts, that one picked up tremendous steam," Harris told BuzzFeed News. It got posted to Reddit and a white nationalist forum. She began reporting the tweets almost immediately, but Twitter didn't take them down despite gaining steam on social media.

Harris said people spreading the fakes were relentless. One person followed her every move on Twitter.

"He would follow my tweets and every time I tweeted at someone, he would reply 'Don't talk to her, she's been harassing students,'" she said. Someone offered a victim $30 to talk to the competition and asked for people to send them money so they could offer more. "People kept saying, 'Don't talk to her, she's racist,' and it just kept getting worse."

It's difficult to tell how it impacted the reporting she was able to do, but she thinks it probably had an effect. "I think it genuinely might have made a difference to some of the people I reached out to," she said.

Harris has covered shootings before, including at the Pulse nightclub and Fort Lauderdale. This is the worst online abuse she's ever recieved.

"I had literally thousands of messages and they just filled up my mentions and DMs with terrible, racist, sexist, horrific, graphic death threats," she said. "I got Facebook messages sent directly to my private account that had the same content too. I've never experienced anything like it before."

When asked about the impersonating tweets, a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the company's team reviews reports against their rules and if those rules are broken, a number of actions can be taken.

Twitter also pointed BuzzFeed to a blog post from last June titled, Our Approach to Bots & Misinformation. The spokesperson highlighted a paragraph that dealt with hoaxes:

"Twitter's open and real-time nature is a powerful antidote to the spreading of all types of false information. This is important because we cannot distinguish whether every single Tweet from every person is truthful or not. We, as a company, should not be the arbiter of truth. Journalists, experts and engaged citizens Tweet side-by-side correcting and challenging public discourse in seconds. These vital interactions happen on Twitter every day, and we're working to ensure we are surfacing the highest quality and most relevant content and context first."

For Harris, Twitter's response is inadequate. She estimates she sent dozens of reports to the company and thought this was an open-and-shut case.

"The text accompanying the screenshot said 'kill yourself' and 'die' and 'how dare you say that you racist'," Harris said. "I don't see how you can read that and think it's not targeted abuse."

Twitter has long been criticized for how it deals with abuse on its platform. A BuzzFeed News report from last July showed clear-cut harassment cases were getting through the cracks, despite the social media network making abuse its focus for the year. Twitter was also suspended and then reinstated white supremacist David Duke in March, and last August it faced criticism for allowing a tweet about the location of the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville to remain on its network.

People routinely use Twitter to spread misinformation, including around breaking news situations like the Florida shooting. Hoax screenshots of media outlets or shooters are nothing new, but the doctored tweets are a new type of fake. Throughout her reporting, Harris has never come across anything like this before.

"It definitely created more attention over something that didn't need to be paid attention to when you're talking about 17 dead kids," she said.

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Twitter Says Impersonating A Journalist During A Mass Shooting Doesn't Violate Its Rules

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In the wake of the Florida high school shooting on Wednesday, Twitter users began spreading doctored tweets targeting Miami Herald reporter Alex Harris. The shooting on Wednesday left at least 17 dead. After the gunman entered the school and began the attack, some students posted on Snapchat and Twitter about what was happening.

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Facebook to End News Feed Experiment That Magnified Fake News

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Facebook to End News Feed Experiment That Magnified Fake News

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Focusing on "friend's posts" created more misinformation.

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SAN FRANCISCO - Facebook said it will end an experiment it ran in six countries in which it had separated news and other publishers from its main site, after independent news publishers said the changes had led to a rise in misinformation.

Adam Mosseri, who heads Facebook's News Feed, said the social network was stopping the experiment - which was known as Explore - after receiving negative feedback from people in the countries where the program was taking place. The countries included Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Bolivia, Guatemala and Serbia.

"In surveys, people told us they were less satisfied with the posts they were seeing, and having two separate feeds didn't actually help them connect more with friends and family," said Mr. Mosseri. "We also received feedback that we made it harder for people in the test countries to access important information, and that we didn't communicate the test clearly."

Facebook's decision to terminate Explore is an acknowledgment of a misstep, one of several that the company appears to have made recently. The social network has also been grappling with how it may have been a central tech vehicle for misinformation propagated by Russians ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Facebook released Explore in the six countries in October 2017. It was quickly criticized by independent news sites and nongovernmental organizations for the changes; those groups said the shifts had made it harder for trusted sources of information to reach local populations. They also said that the experiment had led to an increase in false, and salacious news being shared within those countries.

Facebook has announced a series of changes to News Feed - the scrolling screen of content that greets people when they log into the social network - this year. The company has said that it is working to increase "meaningful interaction" on its site by drawing attention to content from family and friends while de-emphasizing content from brands and publishers.

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Facebook to End News Feed Experiment in 6 Countries That Magnified Fake News

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SAN FRANCISCO - Facebook said it will end an experiment it ran in six countries in which it had separated news and other publishers from its main site, after independent news publishers said the changes had led to a rise in misinformation.

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Facebook struggles to control Troll posts

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Facebook struggles to control Troll posts

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The resilience of misinformation, despite efforts by the tech behemoths to eliminate it, has become a real-time case study of how the companies are constantly a step behind in stamping out the content. At every turn, trolls, conspiracy theorists and others have proved to be more adept at taking advantage of exactly what the sites were created to do - encourage people to post almost anything they want - than the companies are at catching them.

"They're not able to police their platforms when the type of content that they're promising to prohibit changes on a too-frequent basis," Jonathon Morgan, founder of New Knowledge, a company that tracks disinformation online, said of Facebook and YouTube.

The difficulty of dealing with inappropriate online content stands out with the Parkland shooting because the tech companies have effectively committed to removing any accusations that the Parkland survivors were actors, a step they did not take after other recent mass shootings, such as last October's massacre in Las Vegas. In the past, the companies typically addressed specific types of content only when it was illegal - posts from terrorist organizations, for example - Mr. Morgan said.

Facebook and YouTube's promises follow a stream of criticism in recent months over how their sites can be gamed to spread Russian propaganda, among other abuses. The companies have said they are betting big on artificial intelligence systems to help identify and take down inappropriate content, though that technology is still being developed.

The companies have in the meantime hired or said they plan to hire more people to comb through what is posted to their sites. Facebook said it was hiring 1,000 new moderators to review content and was making changes to what type of news publishers would be favored on the social network. YouTube has said that it plans to have 10,000 moderators by year's end and that it is altering its search algorithms to return more videos from reliable news sources.

Mary deBree, head of content policy at Facebook, said the company had not been perfect at staving off certain content and most likely would not be in the future.

"False information is like any other challenge where humans are involved: It evolves, much like a rumor or urban legend would. It also masks itself as legitimate speech," she said. "Our job is to do better at keeping this bad content off Facebook without undermining the reason people come here - to see things happening in the world around them and have a conversation about them."

A YouTube spokeswoman said in a statement that the site updated its harassment policy last year "to include hoax videos that target the victims of these tragedies. Any video flagged to us that violates this policy is reviewed and then removed."

For many people, getting around Facebook and YouTube's hunt to remove noxious content is straightforward. The sites have automated detection systems that often search for specific terms or images that have previously been deemed unacceptable. So to evade those systems, people sometimes can alter images or switch to different terminology.

Sam Woolley, an internet researcher at the nonprofit Institute for the Future, said far-right groups had started using internet brands to describe minorities - like "Skype" to indicate Jewish people - to trick software and human reviewers.

Those who post conspiracy theories also tend to quickly repost or engage with similar posts from other accounts, creating a sort of viral effect that can cause the sites' algorithms to promote the content as a trending topic or a recommended video, said David Carroll, a professor at the New School who studies tech platforms.

That duplication and repackaging of misinformation "make the game of snuffing it out Whac-a-Mole to the extreme," he said.

That game played out across the web in the past few days, after a video suggesting that one of the most vocal Parkland survivors, David Hogg, was an actor became the No. 1 trending video on YouTube. After a public outcry, YouTube removed the video and said it would take down other "crisis actor" videos because they violated its ban on bullying. YouTube has since scrubbed its site of many such videos.

Yet some of the videos remained, possibly because they used slightly different terminology. One clip that had drawn more than 77,000 views by Friday described the shooting survivors as "disaster performers" instead of "crisis actors."

Other videos that were not about the Parkland survivors but that called the entire shooting into question also stayed online. A video posted last week by Alex Jones, the founder of the conspiracy theory site Infowars, titled "Red Alert! Evidence Mounts Florida Attacks Is a Giant False Flag" had attracted more than 300,000 views by Friday.

On Facebook, some of the posts the social network had vowed to ban were still gaining traction. One lengthy post had been shared more than 3,800 times by early Friday. The post included a photo of Mr. Hogg and his classmate Emma Gonzalez with the text "Globalist Deep State Crisis Actors."

After The New York Times contacted the author of the post, a self-described political analyst named John Miranda, the post disappeared. It is unclear if Facebook removed it. Mr. Miranda did not respond to a request for comment.

The tech companies' increasing efforts to remove misinformation have a side effect: angering some of their most active users.

Moe Othman, a comedian and commentator on YouTube who has about 60,000 subscribers, said that within 10 minutes of posting a video on Wednesday that suggested some Parkland students were actors, YouTube removed it and placed a strike on his account. YouTube terminates accounts after three strikes.

Mr. Othman said in a private message on Twitter: "I'm not surprised. We live in a world where information is one of the most important tools." He added, "In this case, I see YouTube as a censoring machine."

Would he stop using YouTube? No, he said, "mainly because I'm still a comedian who simply wants to make people laugh."

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marjory stoneman douglas high school (parkland  fla)

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Facebook and Google Struggle to Squelch 'Crisis Actor' Posts

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The resilience of misinformation, despite efforts by the tech behemoths to eliminate it, has become a real-time case study of how the companies are constantly a step behind in stamping out the content.

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Trump's campaign manager Tweets how FB's model benefitted them

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Trump's campaign manager Tweets how FB's model benefitted them

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Read follow up Tweets for more insights

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@nxthompson I bet we were 100x to 200x her. We had CPMs that were pennies in some cases. This is why @realDonaldTrump was a perfect candidate for FaceBook.

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@nxthompson I bet we were 100x to 200x her. We had CPMs that were pennies in some cases. This is why @realDonaldTrump was a perfect candidate for FaceBook.

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@nxthompson I bet we were 100x to 200x her. We had CPMs that were pennies in some cases. This is why @realDonaldTrump was a perfect candidate for FaceBook.

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@nxthompson I bet we were 100x to 200x her. We had CPMs that were pennies in some cases. This is why @realDonaldTrump was a perfect candidate for FaceBook.

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@nxthompson I bet we were 100x to 200x her. We had CPMs that were pennies in some cases. This is why @realDonaldTrump was a perfect candidate for FaceBook.

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Find Out How many of your followers are real?

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Find Out How many of your followers are real?

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TwitterAudit | Audit your Twitter followers.

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Audit your Twitter followers. How many of your followers are real?

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Assessments for Evaluating Online Information 

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Assessments for Evaluating Online Information 

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From the Stanford History Education Group

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Free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.

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What happens when video and audio can be easily faked?

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What happens when video and audio can be easily faked?

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In mid-2016, Aviv Ovadya realized there was something fundamentally wrong with the internet - so wrong that he abandoned his work and sounded an alarm. A few weeks before the 2016 election, he presented his concerns to technologists in San Francisco's Bay Area and warned of an impending crisis of misinformation in a presentation he titled "Infocalypse."

The web and the information ecosystem that had developed around it was wildly unhealthy, Ovadya argued. The incentives that governed its biggest platforms were calibrated to reward information that was often misleading and polarizing, or both. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google prioritized clicks, shares, ads, and money over quality of information, and Ovadya couldn't shake the feeling that it was all building toward something bad - a kind of critical threshold of addictive and toxic misinformation. The presentation was largely ignored by employees from the Big Tech platforms - including a few from Facebook who would later go on to drive the company's NewsFeed integrity effort.

"At the time, it felt like we were in a car careening out of control and it wasn't just that everyone was saying, 'we'll be fine' - it's that they didn't even see the car," he said.

Ovadya saw early what many - including lawmakers, journalists, and Big Tech CEOs - wouldn't grasp until months later: Our platformed and algorithmically optimized world is vulnerable - to propaganda, to misinformation, to dark targeted advertising from foreign governments - so much so that it threatens to undermine a cornerstone of human discourse: the credibility of fact.

But it's what he sees coming next that will really scare the shit out of you.

"Alarmism can be good - you should be alarmist about this stuff," Ovadya said one January afternoon before calmly outlining a deeply unsettling projection about the next two decades of fake news, artificial intelligence-assisted misinformation campaigns, and propaganda. "We are so screwed it's beyond what most of us can imagine," he said. "We were utterly screwed a year and a half ago and we're even more screwed now. And depending how far you look into the future it just gets worse."

That future, according to Ovadya, will arrive with a slew of slick, easy-to-use, and eventually seamless technological tools for manipulating perception and falsifying reality, for which terms have already been coined - "reality apathy," "automated laser phishing," and "human puppets."

Which is why Ovadya, an MIT grad with engineering stints at tech companies like Quora, dropped everything in early 2016 to try to prevent what he saw as a Big Tech-enabled information crisis. "One day something just clicked," he said of his awakening. It became clear to him that, if somebody were to exploit our attention economy and use the platforms that undergird it to distort the truth, there were no real checks and balances to stop it. "I realized if these systems were going to go out of control, there'd be nothing to reign them in and it was going to get bad, and quick," he said.

Today Ovadya and a cohort of loosely affiliated researchers and academics are anxiously looking ahead - toward a future that is alarmingly dystopian. They're running war game-style disaster scenarios based on technologies that have begun to pop up and the outcomes are typically disheartening.

For Ovadya - now the chief technologist for the University of Michigan's Center for Social Media Responsibility and a Knight News innovation fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia - the shock and ongoing anxiety over Russian Facebook ads and Twitter bots pales in comparison to the greater threat: Technologies that can be used to enhance and distort what is real are evolving faster than our ability to understand and control or mitigate it. The stakes are high and the possible consequences more disastrous than foreign meddling in an election - an undermining or upending of core civilizational institutions, an "infocalypse." And Ovadya says that this one is just as plausible as the last one - and worse.

Worse because of our ever-expanding computational prowess; worse because of ongoing advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning that can blur the lines between fact and fiction; worse because those things could usher in a future where, as Ovadya observes, anyone could make it "appear as if anything has happened, regardless of whether or not it did."

And much in the way that foreign-sponsored, targeted misinformation campaigns didn't feel like a plausible near-term threat until we realized that it was already happening, Ovadya cautions that fast-developing tools powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and augmented reality tech could be hijacked and used by bad actors to imitate humans and wage an information war.

And we're closer than one might think to a potential "Infocalypse." Already available tools for audio and video manipulation have begun to look like a potential fake news Manhattan Project. In the murky corners of the internet, people have begun using machine learning algorithms and open-source software to easily create pornographic videos that realistically superimpose the faces of celebrities - or anyone for that matter - on the adult actors' bodies. At institutions like Stanford, technologists have built programs that that combine and mix recorded video footage with real-time face tracking to manipulate video. Similarly, at the University of Washington computer scientists successfully built a program capable of " turning audio clips into a realistic, lip-synced video of the person speaking those words." As proof of concept, both the teams manipulated broadcast video to make world leaders appear to say things they never actually said.

As these tools become democratized and widespread, Ovadya notes that the worst case scenarios could be extremely destabilizing.

There's "diplomacy manipulation," in which a malicious actor uses advanced technology to "create the belief that an event has occurred" to influence geopolitics. Imagine, for example, a machine-learning algorithm (which analyzes gobs of data in order to teach itself to perform a particular function) fed on hundreds of hours of footage of Donald Trump or North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, which could then spit out a near-perfect - and virtually impossible to distinguish from reality - audio or video clip of the leader declaring nuclear or biological war. "It doesn't have to be perfect - just good enough to make the enemy think something happened that it provokes a knee-jerk and reckless response of retaliation."

Another scenario, which Ovadya dubs "polity simulation," is a dystopian combination of political botnets and astroturfing, where political movements are manipulated by fake grassroots campaigns. In Ovadya's envisioning, increasingly believable AI-powered bots will be able to effectively compete with real humans for legislator and regulator attention because it will be too difficult to tell the difference. Building upon previous iterations, where public discourse is manipulated, it may soon be possible to directly jam congressional switchboards with heartfelt, believable algorithmically-generated pleas. Similarly, Senators' inboxes could be flooded with messages from constituents that were cobbled together by machine-learning programs working off stitched-together content culled from text, audio, and social media profiles.

Then there's automated laser phishing, a tactic Ovadya notes security researchers are already whispering about. Essentially, it's using AI to scan things, like our social media presences, and craft false but believable messages from people we know. The game changer, according to Ovadya, is that something like laser phishing would allow bad actors to target anyone and to create a believable imitation of them using publicly available data.

"Previously one would have needed to have a human to mimic a voice or come up with an authentic fake conversation - in this version you could just press a button using open source software," Ovadya said. "That's where it becomes novel - when anyone can do it because it's trivial. Then it's a whole different ball game."

Imagine, he suggests, phishing messages that aren't just a confusing link you might click, but a personalized message with context. "Not just an email, but an email from a friend that you've been anxiously waiting for for a while," he said. "And because it would be so easy to create things that are fake you'd become overwhelmed. If every bit of spam you receive looked identical to emails from real people you knew, each one with its own motivation trying to convince you of something, you'd just end up saying, 'okay, I'm going to ignore my inbox.'"

That can lead to something Ovadya calls "reality apathy": Beset by a torrent of constant misinformation, people simply start to give up. Ovadya is quick to remind us that this is common in areas where information is poor and thus assumed to be incorrect. The big difference, Ovadya notes, is the adoption of apathy to a developed society like ours. The outcome, he fears, is not good. "People stop paying attention to news and that fundamental level of informedness required for functional democracy becomes unstable."

Ovadya (and other researchers) see laser phishing as an inevitability. "It's a threat for sure, but even worse - I don't think there's a solution right now," he said. "There's internet scale infrastructure stuff that needs to be built to stop this if it starts."

Beyond all this, there are other long-range nightmare scenarios that Ovadya describes as "far-fetched," but they're not so far-fetched that he's willing to rule them out. And they are frightening. "Human puppets," for example - a black market version of a social media marketplace with people instead of bots. "It's essentially a mature future cross border market for manipulatable humans," he said.

Ovadya's premonitions are particularly terrifying given the ease with which our democracy has already been manipulated by the most rudimentary, blunt-force misinformation techniques. The scamming, deception, and obfuscation that's coming is nothing new; it's just more sophisticated, much harder to detect, and working in tandem with other technological forces that are not only currently unknown but likely unpredictable.

For those paying close attention to developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning, none of this feels like much of a stretch. Software currently in development at the chip manufacturer Nvidia can already convincingly generate hyperrealistic photos of objects, people, and even some landscapes by scouring tens of thousands of images. Adobe also recently piloted two projects - Voco and Cloak - the first a "Photoshop for audio," the second a tool that can seamlessly remove objects (and people!) from video in a matter of clicks.

In some cases, the technology is so good that it's startled even its creators. Ian Goodfellow, a Google Brain research scientist who helped code the first "generative adversarial network" (GAN), which is a neural network capable of learning without human supervision, cautioned that AI could set news consumption back roughly 100 years. At an MIT Technology Review conference in November last year, he told an audience that GANs have both "imagination and introspection" and "can tell how well the generator is doing without relying on human feedback." And that, while the creative possibilities for the machines is boundless, the innovation, when applied to the way we consume information, would likely "clos[e] some of the doors that our generation has been used to having open."

Tero Karras FI / YouTube / Via youtube.com

Images of fake celebrities created by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs).

In that light, scenarios like Ovadya's polity simulation feel genuinely plausible. This summer, more than one million fake bot accounts flooded the FCC's open comments system to " amplify the call to repeal net neutrality protections." Researchers concluded that automated comments - some using natural language processing to appear real - obscured legitimate comments, undermining the authenticity of the entire open comments system. Ovadya nods to the FCC example as well as the recent bot-amplified #releasethememo campaign as a blunt version of what's to come. "It can just get so much worse," he said.

Arguably, this sort of erosion of authenticity and the integrity of official statements altogether is the most sinister and worrying of these future threats. "Whether it's AI, peculiar Amazon manipulation hacks, or fake political activism - these technological underpinnings [lead] to the increasing erosion of trust," computational propaganda researcher Renee DiResta said of the future threat. "It makes it possible to cast aspersions on whether videos - or advocacy for that matter - are real." DiResta pointed out Donald Trump's recent denial that it was his voice on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, citing experts who told him it's possible it was digitally faked. "You don't need to create the fake video for this tech to have a serious impact. You just point to the fact that the tech exists and you can impugn the integrity of the stuff that's real."

It's why researchers and technologists like DiResta - who spent years of her spare time advising the Obama administration, and now members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, against disinformation campaigns from trolls - and Ovadya (though they work separately) are beginning to talk more about the looming threats. Last week, the NYC Media Lab, which helps the city's companies and academics collaborate, announced a plan to bring together technologists and researchers in June to "explore worst case scenarios" for the future of news and tech. The event, which they've named Fake News Horror Show, is billed as "a science fair of terrifying propaganda tools - some real and some imagined, but all based on plausible technologies."

"In the next two, three, four years we're going to have to plan for hobbyist propagandists who can make a fortune by creating highly realistic, photo realistic simulations," Justin Hendrix, the executive director of NYC Media Lab, told BuzzFeed News. "And should those attempts work, and people come to suspect that there's no underlying reality to media artifacts of any kind, then we're in a really difficult place. It'll only take a couple of big hoaxes to really convince the public that nothing's real."

Given the early dismissals of the efficacy of misinformation - like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's now-infamous statement that it was "crazy" that fake news on his site played a crucial role in the 2016 election - the first step for researchers like Ovadya is a daunting one: Convince the greater public, as well as lawmakers, university technologists, and tech companies, that a reality-distorting information apocalypse is not only plausible, but close at hand.

A senior federal employee explicitly tasked with investigating information warfare told BuzzFeed News that even he's not certain how many government agencies are preparing for scenarios like the ones Ovadya and others describe. "We're less on our back feet than we were a year ago," he said, before noting that that's not nearly good enough. "I think about it from the sense of the enlightenment - which was all about the search for truth," the employee told BuzzFeed News. "I think what you're seeing now is an attack on the enlightenment - and enlightenment documents like the Constitution - by adversaries trying to create a post-truth society. And that's a direct threat to the foundations of our current civilization."

That's a terrifying thought - more so because forecasting this kind of stuff is so tricky. Computational propaganda is far more qualitative than quantitative - a climate scientist can point to explicit data showing rising temperatures, whereas it's virtually impossible to build a trustworthy prediction model mapping the future impact of yet-to-be-perfected technology.

For technologists like the federal employee, the only viable way forward is to urge caution, to weigh the moral and ethical implications of the tools being built and, in so doing, avoid the Frankensteinian moment when the creature turns to you and asks, "Did you ever consider the consequences of your actions?"

"I'm from the free and open source culture - the goal isn't to stop technology but ensure we're in an equilibria that's positive for people. So I'm not just shouting 'this is going to happen,' but instead saying, 'consider it seriously, examine the implications," Ovadya told BuzzFeed News. "The thing I say is, 'trust that this isn't not going to happen.'"

Hardly an encouraging pronouncement. That said, Ovadya does admit to a bit of optimism. There's more interest in the computational propaganda space then ever before, and those who were previously slow to take threats seriously are now more receptive to warnings. "In the beginning it was really bleak - few listened," he said. "But the last few months have been really promising. Some of the checks and balances are beginning to fall into place." Similarly, there are solutions to be found - like cryptographic verification of images and audio, which could help distinguish what's real and what's manipulated.

Still, Ovadya and others warn that the next few years could be rocky. Despite some pledges for reform, he feels the platforms are still governed by the wrong, sensationalist incentives, where clickbait and lower-quality content is rewarded with more attention. "That's a hard nut to crack in general, and when you combine it with a system like Facebook, which is a content accelerator, it becomes very dangerous."

Just how far out we are from that danger remains to be seen. Asked about the warning signs he's keeping an eye out for, Ovadya paused. "I'm not sure, really. Unfortunately, a lot of the warning signs have already happened." ●

Outside Your Bubble is a BuzzFeed News effort to bring you a diversity of thought and opinion from around the internet. If you don't see your viewpoint represented, contact the editor at bubble@buzzfeed.com. Click here to join our Facebook group and discuss stories that have changed how you see the world, or here for more on Outside Your Bubble. And if you want to read more about the future of the internet's information wars, subscribe to Infowarzel, a BuzzFeed News newsletter by the author of this piece, Charlie Warzel.

Charlie Warzel is a senior writer for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York. Warzel reports on and writes about the intersection of tech and culture.

Contact Charlie Warzel at charlie.warzel@buzzfeed.com.

Got a confidential tip? Submit it here.

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He Predicted The 2016 Fake News Crisis. Now He's Worried About An Information Apocalypse.

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In mid-2016, Aviv Ovadya realized there was something fundamentally wrong with the internet - so wrong that he abandoned his work and sounded an alarm. A few weeks before the 2016 election, he presented his concerns to technologists in San Francisco's Bay Area and warned of an impending crisis of misinformation in a presentation he titled "Infocalypse."

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Left and Right websites created by the same company. 

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Left and Right websites created by the same company. 

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"The product they're pitching is outrage"

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The websites Liberal Society and Conservative 101 appear to be total opposites. The former publishes headlines such as "WOW, Sanders Just Brutally EVISCERATED Trump On Live TV. Trump Is Fuming." Its conservative counterpart has stories like "Nancy Pelosi Just Had Mental Breakdown On Stage And Made Craziest Statement Of Her Career."

So it was a surprise last Wednesday when they published stories that were almost exactly the same, save for a few notable word changes.

After CNN reported White House counselor Kellyanne Conway was "sidelined from television appearances," both sites whipped up a post - and outrage - for their respective audiences. The resulting stories read like bizarro-world versions of each other - two articles with nearly identical words and tweets optimized for opposing filter bubbles. The similarity of the articles also provided a key clue BuzzFeed News followed to reveal a more striking truth: These for-the-cause sites that appeal to hardcore partisans are in fact owned by the same Florida company.

Liberal Society and Conservative 101 are among the growing number of so-called hyperpartisan websites and associated Facebook pages that have sprung up in recent years, and that attracted significant traffic during the US election. A previous BuzzFeed News analysis of content published by conservative and liberal hyperpartisan sites found they reap massive engagement on Facebook with aggressively partisan stories and memes that frequently demonize the other side's point of view, often at the expense of facts.

Jonathan Albright, a professor at Elon University, published a detailed analysis of the hyperpartisan and fake news ecosystem. Given the money at stake, he told BuzzFeed News he's not surprised some of the same people operate both liberal and conservative sites as a way to "run up their metrics or advertising revenue."

"One of the problems that is a little overlooked is that it's not one side versus the other - there are people joining in that are really playing certain types of political [views] against each other," Albright said.

And all it takes to turn a liberal partisan story into a conservative one is to literally change a few words.

Liberal Society's story about Conway's alleged TV ban ran with the headline, "White House FINALLY Gives Kellyanne Conway The Boot, Are You Glad?" Things were more grim over at Conservative 101: "White House Just Gave Conway The Boot, Prepare To Be Infuriated."

Both stories talked of her being given "the boot," and both underplayed the fact that her absence from TV was temporary, given she was due to be on Fox News that very night.

The stories unfolded in tandem from there.

"Kellyanne Conway has been a terrible communications director for Donald Trump," were the first words of the story for liberals.

"Kellyanne Conway has been the go-to communications director for Donald Trump," said the one for conservatives.

They embedded the same tweets from Conway and MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski. They used the same quotes from the CNN story. They chose almost the exact same wording to talk about Conway being "banned" from major TV networks. But, critically, the conservative version inserted a reference to the "mainstream liberal media":

"Are you glad to see Conway gone?" asked Liberal Society at the end of its post.

"Will you miss seeing Conway on TV?" asked Conservative 101.

The stories read like they were stamped out of the same content machine because they were. Using domain registration records and Google Analytics and AdSense IDs, BuzzFeed News determined that both sites are owned by American News LLC of Miami.

That company also operates another liberal site, Democratic Review, as well as American News, a conservative site that drew attention after the election when it posted a false article claiming that Denzel Washington endorsed Trump. It also operates GodToday.com, a site that publishes religious clickbait.

This Facebook trending story is 100% made up. Nothing in it is true. This post of it alone has 10k shares in the la... https://t.co/0IYNVmUdPi

Liberal Society, Democratic Review, and God Today all have the same Google Analytics ID in their source code, which means they are connected. Domain registration records show that American News LLC is the owner of God Today. (The other two sites have private ownership records.)

Conservative 101 and American News have the same Google AdSense ID and domain records show that the latter is also registered to American News LLC. Corporate records list John Crane and Tyler Shapiro as officers of the company, and Crane is listed in domain ownership records. They did not respond to three emails and a phone message from BuzzFeed News.

Domain records suggest they began as conservative news publishers. John Crane acquired the AmericanNews.com domain in 2014 and added Conservative101.com in May of 2016. The company moved into liberal partisan news with the registration of DemocraticReview.com in June of last year and LiberalSociety.com a month later. (Their religious clickbait site, GodToday.com, was registered in February of last year.)

They also appear to run several large Facebook pages that play a major role in helping their partisan content generate social engagement and traffic. Content from American News is pushed out via a page with more than 5 million fans, while Liberal Society's stories are promoted on a page with over 2 million fans.

Given the anti-Trump aspect of the Conway story, it's not surprising that the liberal version performed better on Facebook than the conservative one. Liberal Society's story generated over 40,000 shares, reactions, and comments, while the Conservative 101 version earned less than 4,000.

That's not the norm for these sites. An analysis of their top-performing content on Facebook using data from BuzzSumo found that American News is by far the most successful of the sites. It also appears to push the envelope more than the others when it comes to misleading and false headlines. Since the election, it has generated huge engagement for stories that falsely claimed Miley Cyrus and Rosie O'Donnell were moving away from the US "for good" due to Trump's victory. It also scored a hit with a false report that Nicole Kidman was "blackballed" in Hollywood for saying the country should come together to support Trump now that he's the president. Those three stories alone generated more than 2.5 million Facebook engagements.

In contrast, Liberal Society's biggest hit since the election is headlined " Obama Addresses Republicans: 'I Didn't Create Trump, Your Bigotry Toward Me Did' - But He Has A Plan." It generated just over 360,000 Facebook engagements. Even though the headline presents it as a direct quote, Obama did not say those exact words. It appears the headline was largely copied from a March 2016 article on liberal site Occupy Democrats, which reported accurately on comments Obama made at the time. (It also did not use quotation marks in its original headline.)

Grant Stern is a progressive who writes a column for Occupy Democrats and is the executive director of Photography Is Not A Crime. BuzzFeed News sent him American News LLC's liberal and conservative sites and asked him to comment on the fact that they're run by the same company.

"Those websites are marketing websites," he said after looking at the content, "and the product they're pitching is outrage."

It's unclear if the people running American News LLC use the same writers for their conservative and liberal websites, or if they have separate teams. What is clear is at least one of their sites is using fake author photos. The author page for God Today lists two writers, Henry Freeman and John Sullivan. The photos for these writers are taken from stock video footage. Sullivan appears in a Shutterstock video entitled "Mature man playing golf on golf course." Freeman's photo is taken from footage entitled, "Young man writing in notebook in city park." (After this article was published, God Today removed the photos and bios for Sullivan and Freeman from the authors page.)

Liberal Society is the only partisan site owned by the group that lists its writers. It does not have photos but the bios for Travis Davidson and Jacob Richardson are written in an identical style to the ones on God Today. Here's Henry Freeman's from God Today:

Henry Freeman grew up in North Carolina and attended the University of Alabama, where he studied journalism. He has a passion for writing and thoroughly enjoys bringing smiles to the faces of his readers. He hopes to one day become an entrepreneur and give back to his community.

This is Jacob Richardson's on Liberal Society:

Jacob Richardson was raised in New York City. He attended UC Berkeley where he studied Political Science and Journalism. He now lives in California and says he will live there for the rest of his life. He has a passion for staying current with global news, including politics, business, and sports. He plans on getting married in the near future and starting a family.

Now that it has at least two liberal sites and two conservative ones, American News LLC appears to be setting its sights on expanding its presence in the religious clickbait space. On Feb. 17 John Crane registered two new domains: DevoutAmerica.com and EthicalAmerican.com. Neither are active as of now.

Outside Your Bubble is a BuzzFeed News effort to bring you a diversity of thought and opinion from around the internet. If you don't see your viewpoint represented, contact the curator at bubble@buzzfeed.com. Click here for more on Outside Your Bubble.

Got a confidential tip? Submit it here.

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This Is How Your Hyperpartisan Political News Gets Made

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The websites Liberal Society and Conservative 101 appear to be total opposites. The former publishes headlines such as "WOW, Sanders Just Brutally EVISCERATED Trump On Live TV. Trump Is Fuming." Its conservative counterpart has stories like "Nancy Pelosi Just Had Mental Breakdown On Stage And Made Craziest Statement Of Her Career."

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How partisan Twitter users saw and shared different narratives of Charlottesville and the aftermath.

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How partisan Twitter users saw and shared different narratives of Charlottesville and the aftermath.

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After violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 12, media coverage differed on what aspect of the event to cover.

Using analyses from Cortico and the Laboratory for Social Machines at the MIT Media Lab, we looked at what partisan Twitter users shared during and after the events of Charlottesville. We found a clear split in the story as told through partisan sources.

Take, for example, the shared headlines following President Donald Trump's news conference on Aug. 15 in Trump Tower.

On each side, one publication dominated the conversation. The New York Times and Breitbart, represented 32 percent and 26 percent, respectively, of the top links shared by each camp.

Other stories broke through both sides, such as Vice's viral documentary on the events in Charlottesville.

The data targets Twitter users with clear political allegiances - specifically, politically active users that exclusively followed either a Republican or Democratic 2016 presidential candidate. The top stories shared by both camps each day from Saturday, Aug. 12, through Wednesday, Aug. 16, show the political lines drawn between core supporters of Trump and the administration's staunchest detractors.

Outside major media headlines, core Republicans were more likely to share videos, while Democrats were more likely to share petitions.

For example, Republicans widely shared a video conversation between Faith Goldy, reporting for Canadian hard-line conservative outlet, Rebel Media, and nationalist podcaster, Stefan Molyneux. In the video, Goldy describes violence by counter-protesters, "I saw some [Black Lives Matter] folks and just young black men throwing rocks at former veterans." To date, the video has more than 330,000 views.

Democrats shared petitions targeting Steve Bannon and asking the Justice Department to file terrorism charges against the driver of the vehicle that killed Heather Heyer.

Despite the split narratives between Trump's core supporters and Democrats, the effect on the voting base has been less conflicted. The latest POLITICO/Morning Consult poll shows the administration bungled the response in the eyes of many Republican voters, where support for the president fell 8 points last week.

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Our left-right media divide told through Charlottesville

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After violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 12, media coverage differed on what aspect of the event to cover. Using analyses from Cortico and the Laboratory for Social Machines at the MIT Media Lab, we looked at what partisan Twitter users shared during and after the events of Charlottesville.

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Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race

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Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks in San Jose, California, in October 2016. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In February, Facebook said it would step up enforcement of its prohibition against discrimination in advertising for housing, employment or credit.

But our tests showed a significant lapse in the company's monitoring of the rental market.

Last week, ProPublica bought dozens of rental housing ads on Facebook, but asked that they not be shown to certain categories of users, such as African Americans, mothers of high school kids, people interested in wheelchair ramps, Jews, expats from Argentina and Spanish speakers.

All of these groups are protected under the federal Fair Housing Act, which makes it illegal to publish any advertisement "with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin." Violators can face tens of thousands of dollars in fines.

Every single ad was approved within minutes.

The only ad that took longer than three minutes to be approved by Facebook sought to exclude potential renters "interested in Islam, Sunni Islam and Shia Islam." It was approved after 22 minutes.

Under its own policies, Facebook should have flagged these ads, and prevented the posting of some of them. Its failure to do so revives questions about whether the company is in compliance with federal fair housing rules, as well as about its ability and commitment to police discriminatory advertising on the world's largest social network.

Facebook's advertising portal lets users choose their audiences based on specific traits, demographics and behavior profiles. Our ad for an apartment rental excluded African Americans, Asian Americans and Spanish-speaking Hispanic audiences. It was approved in under a minute.

Housing, employment and credit are the three areas in which federal law prohibits discriminatory ads. However, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development - the agency responsible for enforcing fair housing laws - told us that it has closed an inquiry into Facebook's advertising policies, reducing pressure on the company to address the issue. In a 2015 newspaper column, Ben Carson, now HUD secretary, criticized "government-engineered attempts to legislate racial equality" in housing.

Facebook's failure to police discriminatory rental ads flies in the face of its promises in February that it would no longer approve ads for housing, employment or credit that targeted racial categories. For advertising aimed at audiences not selected by race, Facebook said it would require housing, employment and credit advertisers to "self-certify" that their ads were compliant with anti-discrimination laws.

Based on Facebook's announcement, the ads purchased by ProPublica that were aimed at racial categories should have been rejected. The others should have prompted a screen to pop up asking for self-certification. We never encountered a self-certification screen, and none of our ads were rejected by Facebook.

"This was a failure in our enforcement and we're disappointed that we fell short of our commitments," Ami Vora, vice president of product management at Facebook, said in an emailed statement. "The rental housing ads purchased by ProPublica should have but did not trigger the extra review and certifications we put in place due to a technical failure."

Vora added that Facebook's anti-discrimination system had "successfully flagged millions of ads" in the credit, employment and housing categories and that Facebook will now begin requiring self-certification for ads in all categories that choose to exclude an audience segment. "Our systems continue to improve but we can do better," Vora said.

About 37 percent of U.S. households rented in 2016, representing a 50-year high, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. On average, renters earn about half as much as homeowners, and the percentage of families with children that rent rather than buy has increased sharply in the past decade, the study said. Minority renters have long faced pervasive housing discrimination. A 2013 study by HUD found that real estate agents show more units to whites than to African Americans, Asians and Latinos.

Facebook has long been a popular destination for rental listings, on pages hosted by real estate brokers, property owners and building managers. Earlier this month, Facebook announced that it had added two large providers of rental listings to its Facebook Marketplace service. "Marketplace is a popular place for people to look for a home to rent," Facebook product manager Bowen Pan said in a press release.

Facebook warns rental advertisers in its Marketplace section that " listings that discriminate against a protected class can be reported and will be removed from Facebook."

Facebook's anti-discrimination initiative was prompted by an article published last year by ProPublica. For that story, we bought a Facebook ad targeting house hunters. We were able to use Facebook's features to block the ad from being shown to anyone with an "affinity" for African American, Asian American or Hispanic people. Our ability to narrow the audience based on race raised the question of whether such ads violated the Fair Housing Act.

After ProPublica's article appeared in the fall of 2016, HUD, then under the Obama administration, began examining Facebook's practices. Facebook then said it would build an automated system to spot ads that discriminate illegally. "We take these issues seriously," Facebook Vice President Erin Egan wrote in a blog post. "Discriminatory advertising has no place on Facebook."

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Facebook's system allows advertisers to exclude black, Hispanic, and other "ethnic affinities" from seeing ads.

In February, Facebook announced it had built its system and was rolling it out. The press lauded the announcement: " Facebook cracks down on ads that discriminate " was the Washington Post's headline.

Facebook has been under fire for other aspects of its automated ad buying system as well. Two months ago, the company disclosed that it had discovered $100,000 worth of divisive political ads placed by "inauthentic" Russian accounts. And in September, ProPublica reported that Facebook's ad targeting system allowed buyers to reach people who identified themselves as "Jew haters" and other anti-Semitic categories. Facebook pledged to remove the offending categories and to hire thousands more employees to enforce its ad policies.

"We're adding additional layers of review where people use potentially sensitive categories for targeting," Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch said during Senate testimony earlier this month.

After Stretch's public statement, we wondered whether the ability to buy discriminatory housing ads had really been addressed. So we set out to buy an advertisement with the exact same targeting parameters as the ad we bought last year. The ad promoted a fictional apartment for rent and was targeted at people living in New York, ages 18-65, who were house hunting and likely to move. We asked Facebook not to show the ad to people categorized under the "multicultural affinity" of Hispanic, African American or Asian American.

(ProPublica generally forbids impersonation in news gathering. We felt in this instance that the public interest in Facebook's ad system justified the brief posting of a fake ad for non-existent housing. We deleted each ad as soon as it was approved.)

The only changes from last year that we could identify in Facebook's ad buying system was that the category called "Ethnic Affinity" had been renamed "Multicultural Affinity" and was no longer part of "Demographics." It is now designated as part of "Behaviors."

Our ad was approved within minutes.

Left: A screenshot of ad targeting categories ProPublica submitted and Facebook approved in 2016. Right: Categories ProPublica submitted and were approved in 2017, raising questions about what the social network has done to police discriminatory ads.

Then we decided to test whether we could purchase housing ads that discriminated against other protected categories of people under the Fair Housing Act.

We placed ads that sought to exclude members of as many of the protected categories as we could find in Facebook's self-service advertising portal. In addition to those mentioned above, we bought ads that were blocked from being shown to " soccer moms," people interested in American sign language, gay men and Christians.

We also tested whether it was possible to use geography as a way to target racial groups - a practice known as redlining. We bought a housing ad that targeted ZIP codes in Brooklyn whose residents are more than 50 percent non-Hispanic white people, according to the U.S. Census bureau. By definition, that meant the ad was not shown to Facebook users living in Brooklyn neighborhoods where minorities are a majority of the residents.

Facebook drew blue lines around our target neighborhoods and told us our "audience selection is great!" It approved the ad.

Julia Angwin is a senior reporter at ProPublica. From 2000 to 2013, she was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where she led a privacy investigative team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting in 2011 and won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2010.

Ariana is an engagement reporter at ProPublica.

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Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race - ProPublica

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In February, Facebook said it would step up enforcement of its prohibition against discrimination in advertising for housing, employment or credit. But our tests showed a significant lapse in the company's monitoring of the rental market.

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How Facebook’s Political Unit Enables the Dark Art of Digital Propaganda

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How Facebook’s Political Unit Enables the Dark Art of Digital Propaganda

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Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Under fire for Facebook Inc.'s role as a platform for political propaganda, co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has punched back, saying his mission is above partisanship. "We hope to give all people a voice and create a platform for all ideas," Zuckerberg wrote in September after President Donald Trump accused Facebook of bias.

Zuckerberg's social network is a politically agnostic tool for its more than 2 billion users, he has said. But Facebook, it turns out, is no bystander in global politics. What he hasn't said is that his company actively works with political parties and leaders including those who use the platform to stifle opposition-sometimes with the aid of "troll armies" that spread misinformation and extremist ideologies.

The initiative is run by a little-known Facebook global government and politics team that's neutral in that it works with nearly anyone seeking or securing power. The unit is led from Washington by Katie Harbath, a former Republican digital strategist who worked on former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign. Since Facebook hired Harbath three years later, her team has traveled the globe helping political clients use the company's powerful digital tools.

In some of the world's biggest democracies-from India and Brazil to Germany and the U.K.-the unit's employees have become de facto campaign workers. And once a candidate is elected, the company in some instances goes on to train government employees or provide technical assistance for live streams at official state events.

Even before Facebook was forced to explain its role in U.S. election meddling-portrayed by its executives as a largely passive affair involving Russian-funded ads-the company's direct and growing role catering to political campaigns raised concerns inside the social media giant.

"It's not Facebook's job, in my opinion, to be so close to any election campaign," said Elizabeth Linder, who started and ran the Facebook politics unit's Europe, Middle East and Africa efforts until 2016. Linder had originally been excited about the company's potential to be "extraordinarily useful for the world's leaders-but also the global citizenry." She said she decided to leave the company in part because she grew uncomfortable with what she saw as increased emphasis on electioneering and campaigns.

In the U.S., the unit embedded employees in Trump's campaign. (Hillary Clinton's camp declined a similar offer.) In India, the company helped develop the online presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who now has more Facebook followers than any other world leader. In the Philippines, it trained the campaign of Rodrigo Duterte, known for encouraging extrajudicial killings, in how to most effectively use the platform. And in Germany it helped the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party (AfD) win its first Bundestag seats, according to campaign staff.

By all accounts, Facebook has been an indispensable tool of civic engagement, with candidates and elected officials from mayor to prime minister using the platform to communicate directly with their constituents, and with grassroots groups like Black Lives Matter relying on it to organize. The company says it offers the same tools and services to all candidates and governments regardless of political affiliation, and even to civil society groups that may have a lesser voice. Facebook says it provides advice on how best to use its tools, not strategic advice about what to say.

"We're proud to work with the thousands of elected officials around the world who use Facebook as a way to communicate directly with their constituents, interact with voters, and hear about the issues important in their community," Harbath said in an emailed statement.

She said the company is investing in artificial intelligence and other ways to better police hate speech and threats. "We take our responsibility to prevent abuse of our platform extremely seriously," Harbath said. "We know there are ways we can do better, and are constantly working to improve."

Power and social media converge by design at Facebook. The company has long worked to crush its smaller rival, Twitter, in a race to be the platform of choice for the world's so-called influencers, whether politicians, cricket stars or Kardashians. Their posts will, in theory, draw followers to Facebook more frequently, resulting in higher traffic for advertisers and better data about what attracts users.

Politicians running for office can be lucrative ad buyers. For those who spend enough, Facebook offers customized services to help them build effective campaigns, the same way it would Unilever NV or Coca-Cola Co. ahead of a product launch.

While Facebook declined to give the size of its politics unit, one executive said it can expand to include hundreds during the peak of an election, drawing in people from the company's legal, information security and policy teams.

At meetings with political campaigns, members of Harbath's team sit alongside Facebook advertising sales staff who help monetize the often viral attention stirred up by elections and politics. They train politicians and leaders how to set up a campaign page and get it authenticated with a blue verification check mark, how to best use video to engage viewers and how to target ads to critical voting blocs.

Once those candidates are elected, their relationship with Facebook can help extend the company's reach into government in meaningful ways, such as being well positioned to push against regulations.

At the very least, the optics of directly aiding campaigns or those in power may create the impression among users that Facebook is taking sides. Its effort effectively helping the Scottish National Party to victory in 2015 is recounted as a "success story" on Facebook's corporate website that lists business case studies, even though those who favor staying in the U.K. might see it otherwise. In April, Vietnamese officials bragged that Facebook would build a dedicated channel to prioritize takedown requests for content that offended authorities. The company generally routes requests from governments through a separate channel, and takes the content down if it violates community standards. If it violates local law, it'll only be unavailable in the relevant country.

"They're too cozy with power," said Mark Crispin Miller, a media and culture professor at New York University.

That problem is exacerbated when Facebook's engine of democracy is deployed in an undemocratic fashion. A November report by Freedom House, a U.S.-based nonprofit that advocates for political and human rights, found that a growing number of countries are "manipulating social media to undermine democracy." One aspect of that involves "patriotic trolling," or the use of government-backed harassment and propaganda meant to control the narrative, silence dissidents and consolidate power.

Internally, Facebook executives are grappling with how to distinguish between what constitutes trolling harassment and protected political speech. Zuckerberg has long maintained the company doesn't want to play censor, but Facebook has drawn some lines-banning Greece's Golden Dawn, the ultranationalist party, for example. The company also often removes the most extreme content, from white nationalists in the U.S. and from the Islamic State, as well as content it catches violating its "community standards" on hate speech and violence. Not all such content gets caught.

In retrospect, the nexus of power and data at Facebook seems inevitable. In 2007, Facebook opened its first office in Washington. The presidential election the following year saw the rise of the world's first "Facebook President" in Barack Obama, who with the platform's help was able to reach millions of voters in the weeks before the election. The number of Facebook users surged around the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East around 2010 and 2011, demonstrating the broad power of the platform to influence democracy.

By the time Facebook named Harbath, the former Giuliani aide, to lead its global politics and government unit, elections were becoming major social-media attractions. They now rank alongside the Super Bowl and the Olympics in terms of events that draw blockbuster ad dollars and boost engagement.

Facebook began getting involved in electoral hotspots around the world. They went to Argentina in 2015, where now-President Mauricio Macri streamed campaign rallies live on Facebook and, once elected, announced his entire cabinet on the site, complete with emojis. The same year, Poland's nationalist president, Andrzej Duda, became one of the first world leaders to livestream his inauguration on the social network. Even as Duda has overseen a crackdown on press freedom in the country, Facebook's corporate website says the company was "integral" to his electoral success and that his page is "one of his office's main communication channels."

Facebook has embedded itself in some of the globe's most controversial political movements while resisting transparency. Since 2011, it has asked the U.S. Federal Election Commission for blanket exemptions from political advertising disclosure rules that could have helped it avoid the current crisis over Russian ad spending ahead of the 2016 election, Bloomberg reported in October. After a Congressional inquiry into Russian election meddling, Facebook has pledged to be more transparent about ad buyers and said it's open to regulation.

The company's relationship with governments remains complicated. Facebook has come under fire in the European Union, including for the spread of Islamic extremism on its network. The company just issued its annual transparency report explaining that it will only provide user data to governments if that request is legally sufficient, and will push back in court if it's not. Despite Facebook's desire to eventually operate in China and Zuckerberg's flirtation with the country's leaders, it's still unwilling to compromise as much as the government wants it to in order to enter.

India is arguably Facebook's most important market, with the nation recently edging out the U.S. as the company's biggest. The number of users there is growing twice as fast as in the U.S. And that doesn't even count the 200 million people who use the company's WhatsApp messaging service in India, more than anywhere else on the globe.

By the time of India's 2014 elections, Facebook had for months been working with several campaigns. Modi, who belongs to the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, relied heavily on Facebook and WhatsApp to recruit volunteers who in turn spread his message on social media. Since his election, Modi's Facebook followers have risen to 43 million, almost twice Trump's count.

Within weeks of Modi's election, Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg both visited the nation as it was rolling out a critical free internet service that the government later curbed. Harbath and her team have also traveled there, offering a series of workshops and sessions that have trained more than 6,000 government officials.

As Modi's social media reach grew, his followers increasingly turned to Facebook and WhatsApp to target harassment campaigns against his political rivals. India has become a hotbed for fake news, with one hoax story this year that circulated on WhatsApp leading to two separate mob beatings resulting in seven deaths. The nation has also become an increasingly dangerous place for opposition parties and reporters. In the past year, several journalists critical of the ruling party have been killed. Hindu extremists who back Modi's party have used social media to issue death threats against Muslims or critics of the government.

On the night of Sept. 5, a Honda motorcycle pulled in front of the Bengaluru home of Gauri Lankesh, an outspoken critic of Modi who had been targeted by patriotic trolls on Facebook and other social media. As the Indian journalist was unlocking her gate, three bullets struck her in the head and chest, killing her. No arrests have been made.

The final editorial Lankesh had written for her newspaper was titled "In the Age of False News." In it, she lamented how misinformation and propaganda on social media were poisoning the political environment.
- With assistance by Ben Elgin

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The Facebook Team Helping Regimes That Fight Their Opposition

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Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Under fire for Facebook Inc.'s role as a platform for political propaganda, co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has punched back, saying his mission is above partisanship. "We hope to give all people a voice and create a platform for all ideas," Zuckerberg wrote in September after President Donald Trump accused Facebook of bias.

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The addictive power of the technology that dominates every aspect of daily life is getting more and more attention from people who may have enough influence to do something about it.

Why it matters: Criticism of technology's impact on society is not new, but smartphones and social media are becoming even more pervasive, particularly for children and teenagers. Now a larger number of mainstream voices from former execs to investors are raising pointed questions about the impact of iPhones and Facebook on the mental health of the people who use them.

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The addictive power of the technology that dominates every aspect of daily life is getting more and more attention from people who may have enough influence to do something about it. Why it matters: Criticism of technology's impact on society is not new, but smartphones and social media are becoming even more pervasive, particularly for children and teenagers.

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The real Jessica Rychly is a Minnesota teenager with a broad smile and wavy hair. She likes reading and the rapper Post Malone. When she goes on Facebook or Twitter, she sometimes muses about being bored or trades jokes with friends. Occasionally, like many teenagers, she posts a duck-face selfie.

But on Twitter, there is a version of Jessica that none of her friends or family would recognize. While the two Jessicas share a name, photograph and whimsical bio - "I have issues" - the other Jessica promoted accounts hawking Canadian real estate investments, cryptocurrency and a radio station in Ghana. The fake Jessica followed or retweeted accounts using Arabic and Indonesian, languages the real Jessica does not speak. While she was a 17-year-old high school senior, her fake counterpart frequently promoted graphic pornography, retweeting accounts called Squirtamania and Porno Dan.

All these accounts belong to customers of an obscure American company named Devumi that has collected millions of dollars in a shadowy global marketplace for social media fraud. Devumi sells Twitter followers and retweets to celebrities, businesses and anyone who wants to appear more popular or exert influence online. Drawing on an estimated stock of at least 3.5 million automated accounts, each sold many times over, the company has provided customers with more than 200 million Twitter followers, a New York Times investigation found.

The accounts that most resemble real people, like Ms. Rychly, reveal a kind of large-scale social identity theft. At least 55,000 of the accounts use the names, profile pictures, hometowns and other personal details of real Twitter users, including minors, according to a Times data analysis.

"I don't want my picture connected to the account, nor my name," Ms. Rychly, now 19, said. "I can't believe that someone would even pay for it. It is just horrible."

These accounts are counterfeit coins in the booming economy of online influence, reaching into virtually any industry where a mass audience - or the illusion of it - can be monetized. Fake accounts, deployed by governments, criminals and entrepreneurs, now infest social media networks. By some calculations, as many as 48 million of Twitter's reported active users - nearly 15 percent - are automated accounts designed to simulate real people, though the company claims that number is far lower.

In November, Facebook disclosed to investors that it had at least twice as many fake users as it previously estimated, indicating that up to 60 million automated accounts may roam the world's largest social media platform. These fake accounts, known as bots, can help sway advertising audiences and reshape political debates. They can defraud businesses and ruin reputations. Yet their creation and sale fall into a legal gray zone.

"The continued viability of fraudulent accounts and interactions on social media platforms - and the professionalization of these fraudulent services - is an indication that there's still much work to do," said Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has been investigating the spread of fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.

Despite rising criticism of social media companies and growing scrutiny by elected officials, the trade in fake followers has remained largely opaque. While Twitter and other platforms prohibit buying followers, Devumi and dozens of other sites openly sell them. And social media companies, whose market value is closely tied to the number of people using their services, make their own rules about detecting and eliminating fake accounts.

Devumi's founder, German Calas, denied that his company sold fake followers and said he knew nothing about social identities stolen from real users. "The allegations are false, and we do not have knowledge of any such activity," Mr. Calas said in an email exchange in November.

The Times reviewed business and court records showing that Devumi has more than 200,000 customers, including reality television stars, professional athletes, comedians, TED speakers, pastors and models. In most cases, the records show, they purchased their own followers. In others, their employees, agents, public relations companies, family members or friends did the buying. For just pennies each - sometimes even less - Devumi offers Twitter followers, views on YouTube, plays on SoundCloud, the music-hosting site, and endorsements on LinkedIn, the professional-networking site.

The actor John Leguizamo has Devumi followers. So do Michael Dell, the computer billionaire, and Ray Lewis, the football commentator and former Ravens linebacker. Kathy Ireland, the onetime swimsuit model who today presides over a half-billion-dollar licensing empire, has hundreds of thousands of fake Devumi followers, as does Akbar Gbajabiamila, the host of the show "American Ninja Warrior." Even a Twitter board member, Martha Lane Fox, has some.

At a time when Facebook, Twitter and Google are grappling with an epidemic of political manipulation and fake news, Devumi's fake followers also serve as phantom foot soldiers in political battles online. Devumi's customers include both avid supporters and fervent critics of President Trump, and both liberal cable pundits and a reporter at the alt-right bastion Breitbart. Randy Bryce, an ironworker seeking to unseat Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, purchased Devumi followers in 2015, when he was a blogger and labor activist. Louise Linton, the wife of the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, bought followers when she was trying to gain traction as an actress.

Devumi's products serve politicians and governments overseas, too. An editor at China's state-run news agency, Xinhua, paid Devumi for hundreds of thousands of followers and retweets on Twitter, which the country's government has banned but sees as a forum for issuing propaganda abroad. An adviser to Ecuador's president, Lenín Moreno, bought tens of thousands of followers and retweets for Mr. Moreno's campaign accounts during last year's elections.

Kristin Binns, a Twitter spokeswoman, said the company did not typically suspend users suspected of buying bots, in part because it is difficult for the business to know who is responsible for any given purchase. Twitter would not say whether a sample of fake accounts provided by The Times - each based on a real user - violated the company's policies against impersonation.

"We continue to fight hard to tackle any malicious automation on our platform as well as false or spam accounts," Ms. Binns said.

Unlike some social media companies, Twitter does not require accounts to be associated with a real person. It also permits more automated access to its platform than other companies, making it easier to set up and control large numbers of accounts.

"Social media is a virtual world that is filled with half bots, half real people," said Rami Essaid, the founder of Distil Networks, a cybersecurity company that specializes in eradicating bot networks. "You can't take any tweet at face value. And not everything is what it seems."

Including, it turns out, Devumi itself.

Last year, three billion people logged on to social media networks like Facebook, WhatsApp and China's Sina Weibo. The world's collective yearning for connection has not only reshaped the Fortune 500 and upended the advertising industry but also created a new status marker: the number of people who follow, like or "friend" you. For some entertainers and entrepreneurs, this virtual status is a real-world currency. Follower counts on social networks help determine who will hire them, how much they are paid for bookings or endorsements, even how potential customers evaluate their businesses or products.

High follower counts are also critical for so-called influencers, a budding market of amateur tastemakers and YouTube stars where advertisers now lavish billions of dollars a year on sponsorship deals. The more people influencers reach, the more money they make. According to data collected by Captiv8, a company that connects influencers to brands, an influencer with 100,000 followers might earn an average of $2,000 for a promotional tweet, while an influencer with a million followers might earn $20,000.

Genuine fame often translates into genuine social media influence, as fans follow and like their favorite movie stars, celebrity chefs and models. But shortcuts are also available: On sites like Social Envy and DIYLikes.com, it takes little more than a credit-card number to buy a huge following on almost any social media platform. Most of these sites offer what they describe as "active" or "organic" followers, never quite stating whether real people are behind them. Once purchased, the followers can be a powerful tool.

"You see a higher follower count, or a higher retweet count, and you assume this person is important, or this tweet was well received," said Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz, a company that makes search engine optimization software. "As a result, you might be more likely to amplify it, to share it or to follow that person."

Twitter and Facebook can be similarly influenced. "Social platforms are trying to recommend stuff - and they say, 'Is the stuff we are recommending popular?'" said Julian Tempelsman, the co-founder of Smyte, a security firm that helps companies combat online abuse, bots and fraud. "Follower counts are one of the factors social media platforms use."

Search on Google for how to buy more followers, and Devumi often turns up among the first results. Visitors are greeted by a polished website listing a Manhattan address, displaying testimonials from customers and a money-back guarantee. Best of all, Devumi claims, the company's products are blessed by the platform for which they are selling followers. "We only use promotion techniques that are Twitter approved so your account is never at risk of getting suspended or penalized," Devumi's website promises.

To better understand Devumi's business, we became a customer. In April, The Times set up a test account on Twitter and paid Devumi $225 for 25,000 followers, or about a penny each. As advertised, the first 10,000 or so looked like real people. They had pictures and full names, hometowns and often authentic-seeming biographies. One account looked like that of Ms. Rychly, the young Minnesota woman.

But on closer inspection, some of the details seemed off. The account names had extra letters or underscores, or easy-to-miss substitutions, like a lowercase "L" in place of an uppercase "I."

The next 15,000 followers from Devumi were more obviously suspect: no profile pictures, and jumbles of letters, numbers and word fragments instead of names.

In August, a Times reporter emailed Mr. Calas, asking if he would answer questions about Devumi. Mr. Calas did not respond. Twitter forbids selling or buying followers or retweets, and Devumi promises customers absolute discretion. "Your info is always kept confidential," the company's website reads. "Our followers look like any other followers and are always delivered naturally. The only way anyone will know is if you tell them."

But company records reviewed by The Times revealed much of what Devumi and its customers prefer to conceal.

Most of Devumi's best-known buyers are selling products, services or themselves on social media. In interviews, their explanations varied. They bought followers because they were curious about how it worked, or felt pressure to generate high follower counts for themselves or their customers. "Everyone does it," said the actress Deirdre Lovejoy, a Devumi customer.

While some said they believed Devumi was supplying real potential fans or customers, others acknowledged that they knew or suspected they were getting fake accounts. Several said they regretted their purchases.

"It's fraud," said James Cracknell, a British rower and Olympic gold medalist who bought 50,000 followers from Devumi. "People who judge by how many likes or how many followers, it's not a healthy thing."

Ms. Ireland has over a million followers on Twitter, which she often uses to promote companies with whom she has endorsement deals. The Wisconsin-based American Family Insurance, for example, said that the former model was one of its most influential Twitter "brand ambassadors," celebrities who are paid to help promote products.

But in January last year, Ms. Ireland had only about 160,000 followers. The next month, an employee at the branding agency she owns, Sterling/Winters, spent about $2,000 for 300,000 more followers, according to Devumi records. The employee later made more purchases, he acknowledged in an interview. Much of Ms. Ireland's Twitter following appears to consist of bots, a Times analysis found.

A spokeswoman said that the employee had acted without Ms. Ireland's authorization and had been suspended after The Times asked about the purchases. "I'm sure he thought he was fulfilling his duties, but it's not something he should have done," said the spokeswoman, Rona Menashe.

Similarly, Ms. Lane Fox, a British e-commerce pioneer, member of Parliament and Twitter board member, blamed a "rogue employee" for a series of follower purchases spanning more than a year. She declined to name the person.

Several Devumi customers or their representatives contacted by The Times declined to comment, among them Mr. Leguizamo, whose followers were bought by an associate. Many more did not respond to repeated efforts to contact them.

A few denied making Devumi purchases. They include Ashley Knight, Mr. Lewis's personal assistant, whose email address was listed on an order for 250,000 followers, and Eric Kaplan, a friend to Mr. Trump and motivational speaker whose personal email address was associated with eight orders. A Twitter account belonging to Paul Hollywood, the celebrity baker, was deleted after The Times emailed him with questions. Mr. Hollywood then sent a reply: "Account does not exist."

Over two years, the Democratic public relations consultant and CNN contributor Hilary Rosen bought more than a half-million fake followers from Devumi. Ms. Rosen previously spent more than a decade as head of the Recording Industry Association of America. In an interview, she described the purchases as "an experiment I did several years ago to see how it worked." She made more than a dozen purchases of followers from 2015 to 2017, according to company records.

Other buyers said they had faced pressure from employers to generate social media followers. Marcus Holmlund, a young freelance writer, was at first thrilled when Wilhelmina, the international modeling agency, hired him to manage its social media efforts. But when Wilhelmina's Twitter following didn't grow fast enough, Mr. Holmlund said, a supervisor told him to buy followers or find another job. In 2015, despite misgivings, he began making monthly Devumi purchases out of his own pocket.

"I felt stuck with the threat of being fired, or worse, never working in fashion again," said Mr. Holmlund, who left in late 2015. "Since then, I tell anyone and everyone who ever asks that it's a total scam - it won't boost their engagement." (A Wilhelmina spokeswoman declined to comment.)

Several Devumi customers acknowledged that they bought bots because their careers had come to depend, in part, on the appearance of social media influence. "No one will take you seriously if you don't have a noteworthy presence," said Jason Schenker, an economist who specializes in economic forecasting and has purchased at least 260,000 followers.

Not surprisingly, Devumi has sold millions of followers and retweets to entertainers on the lower and middle rungs of Hollywood, such as the actor Ryan Hurst, a star of the television series "Sons of Anarchy." In 2016 and 2017, he bought a total of 750,000 followers, about three-quarters of his current count. It cost less than $4,000, according to company records. Mr. Hurst did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Devumi also sells bots to reality television stars, who can parlay fame into endorsement and appearance fees. Sonja Morgan, a cast member on the Bravo show "The Real Housewives of New York City," uses her Devumi-boosted Twitter feed to promote her fashion line, a shopping app and a website that sells personalized "video shout-outs." One former "American Idol" contestant, Clay Aiken, even paid Devumi to spread a grievance: his customer service complaint against Volvo. Devumi bots retweeted his complaint 5,000 times.

Mr. Aiken and Ms. Morgan did not respond to requests for comment.

More than a hundred self-described influencers - whose market value is even more directly linked to their follower counts on social media - have purchased Twitter followers from Devumi. Justin Blau, a popular Las Vegas-based D.J. who performs as 3LAU, acquired 50,000 followers and thousands of retweets. In an email, Mr. Blau said a former member of his management team bought them without his approval.

At least five Devumi influencer customers are also contractors for HelloSociety, an influencer agency owned by The New York Times Company. (A Times spokeswoman said the company sought to verify that the audience of each contractor was legitimate and would not do business with anyone who violated that standard.) Lucas Peterson, a freelance journalist who writes a travel column for The Times, also bought followers from Devumi.

Influencers need not be well known to rake in endorsement money. According to a recent profile in the British tabloid The Sun, two young siblings, Arabella and Jaadin Daho, earn a combined $100,000 a year as influencers, working with brands such as Amazon, Disney, Louis Vuitton and Nintendo. Arabella, who is 14, tweets under the name Amazing Arabella.

But her Twitter account - and her brother's - are boosted by thousands of retweets purchased by their mother and manager, Shadia Daho, according to Devumi records. Ms. Daho did not respond to repeated attempts to reach her by email and through a public relations firm.

While Devumi sells millions of followers directly to celebrities and influencers, its customers also include marketing and public relations agencies, which buy followers for their own customers. Phil Pallen, a brand strategist based in Los Angeles, offers customers "growth & ad campaigns" on social media. At least a dozen times, company records show, Mr. Pallen has paid Devumi to deliver those results. Beginning in 2014, for example, he purchased tens of thousands of followers for Lori Greiner, the inventor and "Shark Tank" co-host.

Mr. Pallen at first denied buying those followers. After The Times contacted Ms. Greiner, Mr. Pallen said he had "experimented" with the company but "stopped using it long ago." A lawyer for Ms. Greiner said she had asked him to stop after learning of the first purchases.

Still, records show, Mr. Pallen bought Ms. Greiner more Devumi followers in 2016.

Marketing consultants sometimes buy followers for themselves, too, in effect purchasing the evidence of their supposed expertise. In 2015, Jeetendr Sehdev, a former adjunct professor at the University of Southern California who calls himself "the world's leading celebrity branding authority," began buying hundreds of thousands of fake followers from Devumi.

He did not respond to requests for comment. But in his recent best-selling book, "The Kim Kardashian Principle: Why Shameless Sells," he had a different explanation for his rising follower count. "My social media following exploded," Mr. Sehdev claimed, because he had discovered the true secret to celebrity influence: "Authenticity is the key."

Among the followers delivered to Mr. Sehdev was Ms. Rychly - or at least, a copy of her. The fake Rychly account, created in 2014, was included in the purchase orders of hundreds of Devumi customers. It was retweeted by Mr. Schenker, the economist, and Arabella Daho, the teenage influencer. Clive Standen, star of the show "Taken," ended up with Ms. Rychly's stolen social identity. So did the television baker Mr. Hollywood, the French entertainer DJ Snake and Ms. Ireland. (DJ Snake's followers were purchased by a former manager, and Mr. Standen did not respond to requests for comment.)

The fake Ms. Rychly also retweeted at least five accounts linked to a prolific American pornographer named Dan Leal, who is based in Hungary and tweets as @PornoDan. Mr. Leal, who has bought at least 150,000 followers from Devumi in recent years, is one of at least dozens of customers who work in the adult film industry or as escorts, according to a review of Devumi records.

In an email, Mr. Leal said that buying followers for his business generated more than enough new revenue to pay for the expense. He was not worried about being penalized by Twitter, Mr. Leal said. "Countless public figures, companies, music acts, etc. purchase followers," he wrote. "If Twitter was to purge everyone who did so there would be hardly any of them on it."

Devumi has sold at least tens of thousands of similar high-quality bots, a Times analysis found. In some cases, a single real Twitter user was transformed into hundreds of different bots, each a minute variation on the original.

These fake accounts borrowed social identities from Twitter users in every American state and dozens of countries, from adults and minors alike, from highly active users and those who hadn't logged in to their accounts for months or years.

Sam Dodd, a college student and aspiring filmmaker, set up his Twitter account as a high school sophomore in Maryland. Before he even graduated, his Twitter details were copied onto a bot account.

The fake account remained dormant until last year, when it suddenly began retweeting Devumi customers continuously. This summer, the fake Mr. Dodd promoted various pornographic accounts, including Mr. Leal's Immoral Productions, as well as a link to a gambling website.

"I don't know why they'd take my identity - I'm a 20-year-old college student," Mr. Dodd said. "I'm not well known." But even unknown, Mr. Dodd's social identity has value in the influence economy. At prices posted in December, Devumi was selling high-quality followers for under two cents each. Sold to about 2,000 customers - the rough number that many Devumi bot accounts follow - his social identity could bring Devumi around $30.

The stolen social identities of Twitter users like Mr. Dodd are critical to Devumi's brand. The high-quality bots are usually delivered to customers first, followed by millions of cheaper, low-quality bots, like sawdust mixed in with grated Parmesan.

Some of Devumi's high-quality bots, in effect, replace an idle Twitter account - belonging to someone who stopped using the service - with a fake one. Whitney Wolfe, an executive assistant who lives in Florida, opened a Twitter account in 2008, when she was a wedding planner. By the time she stopped using it regularly in 2014, a fake account copying her personal information had been created. In recent months, it has retweeted adult film actresses, several influencers and an escort turned memoirist.

"The content - pictures of women in thongs, pictures of women's chests - it's not anything I want to be represented with my faith, my name, where I live," said Ms. Wolfe, who is active in her local Southern Baptist congregation.

Other victims were still active on Twitter when Devumi-sold bots began impersonating them. Salle Ingle, a 40-year-old engineer who lives in Colorado, said she worried that a potential employer would come across the fake version of her while vetting her social media accounts.

"I've been applying for new jobs, and I'm really grateful that no one saw this account and thought it was me," Ms. Ingle said. Once contacted by The Times, Ms. Ingle reported the account to Twitter, which deactivated it.

After emailing Mr. Calas last year, a Times reporter visited Devumi's Manhattan address, listed on its website. The building has dozens of tenants, including a medical clinic and a labor union. But Devumi and its parent company, Bytion, do not appear to be among them. A spokesman for the building's owner said neither Devumi nor Bytion had ever rented space there.

Like the followers Devumi sold, the office was an illusion.

In real life, Devumi is based in a small office suite above a Mexican restaurant in West Palm Beach, Fla., overlooking an alley crowded with Dumpsters and parked cars. Mr. Calas lives a short commute away, in a penthouse apartment.

On his LinkedIn profile, Mr. Calas is described as a "serial entrepreneur," with a long record in the tech business and an advanced degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But Mr. Calas's persona, too, is a mixture of fact and fantasy.

Mr. Calas, who is 27, grew up in South Florida, where as a teenager he learned web design and built sites for local businesses, according to earlier versions of his personal web page available on the Internet Archive.

Eventually he taught himself techniques for search engine optimization - the art of pushing a web page higher in search results. While in high school, he began taking classes at Palm Beach State College, where he earned an associate degree in 2012, according to a school spokeswoman. Within a few years, Mr. Calas was claiming to have built dozens of online businesses serving 10 million customers, now under the Bytion umbrella.

"I started this company with a thousand dollars in the bank, without investors, and only the burning passion for success," Mr. Calas wrote last year on the job-listing site Glassdoor.

As Mr. Calas's ambitions grew, so did his embroidery. A copy of his résumé posted online in 2014 claimed that he earned a physics degree from Princeton University in 2000, when he would have been about 10 years old, and a Ph.D. in computer science from M.I.T. Representatives for both schools said they had no record of Mr. Calas's attending their institution. His current LinkedIn page says that he has a master's degree in "international business" from M.I.T., a degree it does not offer.

According to former employees interviewed by The Times, turnover was high at Devumi, and Mr. Calas kept his operation tightly compartmentalized. Employees sometimes had little idea what their colleagues were doing, even if they were working on the same project.

The ex-employees asked for anonymity for fear of lawsuits or because they were subject to nondisclosure agreements with Mr. Calas's companies. But their comments are echoed in reviews on Glassdoor, where some former employees said that Mr. Calas was uncommunicative and demanded that they install monitoring software on their personal devices.

Dozens of Devumi's customer service and order fulfillment personnel are based in the Philippines, according to company records. Employing overseas contractors may have helped Mr. Calas hold down costs. But it also appears to have left him vulnerable to a kind of social identity theft himself.

Last August, Mr. Calas sued Ronwaldo Boado, a Filipino contractor who previously worked for Devumi as an assistant customer support manager. After being fired for squabbling with other members of his team, Mr. Boado took control of a Devumi email account listing more than 170,000 customer orders, Mr. Calas alleged in court papers. Then Mr. Boado created a fake Devumi. (Some details of the lawsuit and of Devumi were previously reported by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.)

His copycat company used a similar name - DevumiBoost - and copied the design of Devumi's website, Mr. Calas alleged. The fake Devumi even listed the same phantom Manhattan address. Over a stretch of days last July, Mr. Boado, posing as a Devumi employee, emailed hundreds of Devumi customers to inform them that their orders needed to be reprocessed on DevumiBoost. Then he impersonated the customers, too, emailing Devumi under different aliases to ask that Devumi cancel the original orders. Mr. Boado, according to Mr. Calas, was trying to steal his customers. (Mr. Boado did not respond to emails seeking a response to Mr. Calas's claims.)

Mr. Calas's lawsuit also revealed something else: Devumi doesn't appear to make its own bots. Instead, the company buys them wholesale - from a thriving global market of fake social media accounts.

Scattered around the web is an array of obscure websites where anonymous bot makers around the world connect with retailers like Devumi. While individual customers can buy from some of these bare-boned sites - Peakerr, CheapPanel and YTbot, among others - they are less user-friendly. Some, for example, do not accept credit cards, only cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

But each site sells followers, likes and shares in bulk, for a variety of social media platforms and in different languages. The accounts they sell may change hands repeatedly. The same account may even be available from more than one seller.

Devumi, according to one former employee, sourced bots from different bot makers depending on price, quality and reliability. On Peakerr, for example, 1,000 high-quality, English-language bots with photos costs a little more than a dollar. Devumi charges $17 for the same quantity.

The price difference has allowed Mr. Calas to build a small fortune, according to company records. In just a few years, Devumi sold about 200 million Twitter followers to at least 39,000 customers, accounting for a third of more than $6 million in sales during that period.

Last month, Mr. Calas asked for examples of bots The Times found that copied real users. After receiving the names of 10 accounts, Mr. Calas, who had agreed to an interview, asked for more time to analyze them. Then he stopped responding to emails.

Ms. Binns, the Twitter spokeswoman, said the company did not proactively review accounts to see if they were impersonating other users. Instead, the company's efforts are focused on identifying and suspending accounts that violate Twitter's spam policies. In December, for example, the company identified an average of 6.4 million suspicious accounts each week, she said.

All of the sample accounts provided by The Times violated Twitter's anti-spam policies and were shut down, Ms. Binns said. "We take the action of suspending an account from the platform very seriously," she said. "At the same time, we want to aggressively fight spam on the platform."

The company also suspended Devumi's account on Saturday after the Times article was published online.

Yet Twitter has not imposed seemingly simple safeguards that would help throttle bot manufacturers, such as requiring anyone signing up for a new account to pass an anti-spam test, as many commercial sites do. As a result, Twitter now hosts vast swaths of unused accounts, including what are probably dormant accounts controlled by bot makers.

Former employees said the company's security team for many years was more focused on abuse by real users, including racist and sexist content and orchestrated harassment campaigns. Only recently, they said, after revelations that Russia-aligned hackers had deployed networks of Twitter bots to spread divisive content and junk news, has Twitter turned more attention to weeding out fake accounts.

Leslie Miley, an engineer who worked on security and user safety at Twitter before leaving in late 2015, said, "Twitter as a social network was designed with almost no accountability."

Some critics believe Twitter has a business incentive against weeding out bots too aggressively. Over the past two years, the company has struggled to generate the user growth seen by rivals like Facebook and Snapchat. And outside researchers have disputed the company's estimates for how many of its active users are actually bots.

"We're working with completely unregulated, closed ecosystems that aren't reporting on these things. They have a perverse incentive to let it happen," said Mr. Essaid, the cybersecurity expert. "They want to police it to the extent it doesn't seem obvious, but they make money off it."

In January, after almost two years of promoting hundreds of Devumi customers, the fake Jessica Rychly account was finally flagged by Twitter's security algorithms. It was recently suspended.

But the real Ms. Rychly may soon leave Twitter for good.

"I am probably just going to delete my Twitter account," she said.

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The real Jessica Rychly is a Minnesota teenager with a broad smile and wavy hair. She likes reading and the rapper Post Malone. When she goes on Facebook or Twitter, she sometimes muses about being bored or trades jokes with friends. Occasionally, like many teenagers, she posts a duck-face selfie.

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To make American campaigns more transparent, we've built a tool to display political ads that are rarely seen outside their selected audience of Facebook users.

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Hamilton 68: Tracking Russian Influence on Twitter

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Hamilton 68: Tracking Russian Influence on Twitter

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Hamilton 68: Tracking Putin's Propaganda Push... To America

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Hamilton 68: tracking Russian twitter account to better understand their influence in US politics.

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How bad are you? Get as many followers as you can

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How bad are you? Get as many followers as you can

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Play the fake news game! How bad are you? Become a fake news tycoon and get as many followers as you can.

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How Russian trolls organized a simultaneous protest and a counter-protest in Texas in 2016.

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How Russian trolls organized a simultaneous protest and a counter-protest in Texas in 2016.

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Image: Sen. Burr

Protests and counter-protests in Texas in May of 2016 were in fact orchestrated by Kremlin trolls some 5,000 miles away from the US border, a US Senator revealed on Wednesday.

Facebook pages controlled by Russian trolls organized both a protest and a counter-protest in 2016 where fewer than 100 people showed up, according to Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC). During a Senate hearing on social media influence in the 2016 elections on Wednesday, Burr revealed that a protest and simultaneous counter-protest in Houston on May 21 of last year were organized by Facebook groups under the control of the infamous Internet Research Agency. This troll farm allegedly works for the Russian government and was responsible for wide-ranging influence operations on social media platforms in the lead-up to the US presidential elections.

Read more: Why Twitter Is the Best Social Media Platform for Disinformation

The first protest, called "Stop The Islamization of Texas," was organized by a Facebook group with more than 250,000 followers called Heart of Texas, as previously reported by CNN and Business Insider. As it turns out, a counter-protest on the same day, at the same time, and at the same location was also organized by Russian trolls, this time using another Facebook group called United Muslims of America, which had more than 300,000 followers.

"What neither side could have known was that Russian trolls were encouraging both sides to battle on the streets and create division between real Americans," Burr said during the hearing.

Burr also quoted a person who attended the event, who said that "Heart of Texas promoted this event but we didn't see ONE of them."

"We now know why. It's hard to attend an event in Houston, Texas when you're trolling from a site in St. Petersburg, Russia," Burr said to the head counsels of the three leading American internet companies, Google, Facebook, and Twitter. "Paying for the ads and causing this disruptive event in Houston cost Russia about $200."

While these two protests gathered only a "handful" of people, as CNN put it, this shows the power of social media in sparking real-life events by exploiting existing tensions.

Got a tip? You can contact this reporter securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, OTR chat at lorenzo@jabber.ccc.de, or email lorenzo@motherboard.tv

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Russian Facebook Trolls Got Two Groups of People to Protest Each Other In Texas

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Image: Sen. Burr Protests and counter-protests in Texas in May of 2016 were in fact orchestrated by Kremlin trolls some 5,000 miles away from the US border, a US Senator revealed on Wednesday. Facebook pages controlled by Russian trolls organized both a protest and a counter-protest in 2016 where fewer than 100 people showed up, according to Sen.

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Most people now get their information from these platforms, which were designed for frivolous interaction

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Most people now get their information from these platforms, which were designed for frivolous interaction

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Russia has been trolling the United States for decades.

It bankrolled American authors who claimed Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy under the direction of the FBI and CIA; it planted articles arguing Martin Luther King Jr. was not radical enough; and it spread a conspiracy theory that the U.S. manufactured the AIDS virus.

The indictments last week by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III against 13 Russians and three Russian companies accused of interfering in the 2016 presidential election laid bare the way America's biggest tech platforms have altered the centuries-old game of spycraft and political warfare.

At the root of the strategy are the algorithms social networks employ to encourage more engagement - the comments, likes and shares that generate advertising revenue for their makers.

The problem, researchers say, is that humans typically gravitate toward things that make us angry online. Outrage generates more stimuli in our brains, increasing the odds we respond to news and posts that tick us off. The algorithms know this and serve up such content accordingly.

"Online platforms have profoundly changed the incentives of information sharing," Yale psychologist M.J. Crockett wrote in a paper for Nature Human Behavior. "Because they compete for our attention to generate advertising revenue, their algorithms promote content that is most likely to be shared, regardless of whether it benefits those who share it - or is even true."

Since the platforms insist they aren't media companies, they're under no legal obligation to verify what's posted. That allows falsehoods to spread faster, not in the least part, because most people don't actually read the links they share, according to a 2016 study by researchers at Columbia University and the French National Institute.

Social media companies argue that they help bring people together. Yet studies suggest anonymity and fake accounts are having a corrosive effect on discourse. People who would never dare shout someone down in public can do so freely from behind the safety of their screens. And the access to information in real-time - highlighted under "trending topics" or amplified with a hashtag - ensures there's never a shortage of issues to shout about.

The result is a feedback loop in which social media algorithms reward the loudest and angriest voices - often on some of the nation's most sensitive topics, be it gun control, abortion or race. Reasoned debate is made even more difficult because users are often siloed with like-minded people.

"It further inflames a topic or debate," said Karen North, a social media expert who teaches at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. "And there's no incentive to compromise."

Nuance, on the other hand, is rarely rewarded. One of Facebook's ideas for expanding the scope of human emotions included adding emojis such as a heart and frowning face next to the obligatory "like" button. For Twitter, it meant doubling the limit of any tweet to 280 characters.

That would have been fine for internet users in the early days of social media more than a decade ago when tech companies had a better excuse to operate under the naive assumption that people would behave online the same way they do in the real world, said Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a company that tracks online disinformation.

"Social media was built around engagement that was very fast and almost like low-fidelity social contact," Morgan said. "What's changed over the years is that most people now get their information from these platforms, which were designed for frivolous interaction. There's a disconnect when people look for substance where it doesn't exist."

It was in this environment that Russian operatives allegedly plied their trade, according to the indictment filed Friday.

"They've been doing this stuff on their own population since the 1990s," said Watts, the former FBI agent.

It wasn't until the Arab Spring, Watts said, that Russia gained a greater appreciation for the power of social media. If these tools could help activists coordinate a revolt, it wouldn't be hard to imagine what they could do in the hands of the state, he said.

The platforms, slow to publicly acknowledge the meddling, have since cooperated with authorities and contacted users who engaged with Russian trolls. They've vowed to disclose backers of political ads to prevent a repeat of the Russian campaign. Twitter has also deleted thousands of automated bots.

But experts expect the likes of Facebook and Twitter to continue to be targeted by Russian operatives as long as Washington refrains from taking punitive action against Moscow for its interference.

"There's really no reason for Russia to stop trying to influence election outcomes through the use of social media," said Kimberly Marten, a professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University. "There is no meaningful response to what Russia is trying to do, beyond attempting to punish the perpetrators."

For now, it appears Russian influence campaigns aren't missing a beat.

Such networks have directed their accounts to pile onto divisive issues like the clamor earlier this year to release a controversial memo by House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, according to the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a project of the nonpartisan German Marshall Fund think tank. More recently, Russian accounts have reportedly perpetuated a conspiracy theory that a Florida school shooting survivor is a paid actor.

In a sign that the tech platforms remain ill-equipped to deal with the onslaught, a YouTube video pushing that conspiracy theory was the top trending video on the platform at one point Wednesday.

Morgan of New Knowledge said the Russian interference campaign will inspire others to exploit social media as long as the platforms remain vulnerable.

"The solution available in the short term is to stop a particular behavior," Morgan said. "But to stop it in a general way will require years of redesigning the platforms. By then, the adversaries will be one step ahead. They've opened a can of worms and we probably have to accept things will never be the same."

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Russia tried and failed to sow discord in America. Then it discovered social media

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Russia has been trolling the United States for decades. It bankrolled American authors who claimed Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy under the direction of the FBI and CIA; it planted articles arguing Martin Luther King Jr. was not radical enough; and it spread a conspiracy theory that the U.S.

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It's not every day that a former work colleague gets retweeted by the president of the United States.

Last Friday, Rob Goldman, a vice president inside Facebook's Ads team, rather ill-advisedly published a series of tweets that seemed to confirm the Trump administration's allegations regarding the recent indictments of 13 Russian nationals by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. To wit, the tweets said that the online advertising campaign led by the shadowy Internet Research Agency was meant to divide the American people, not influence the 2016 election.

Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED. Before turning to writing, he dropped out of a doctoral program in physics to work on Goldman Sachs' credit trading desk, then joined the Silicon Valley startup world, where he founded his own startup (acquired by Twitter in 2011) and finally joined Facebook's early monetization team, where he headed the company's targeting efforts. His 2016 memoir, Chaos Monkeys, was a New York Times best seller and NPR Best Book of the Year, and his writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. He splits his time between a sailboat on the San Francisco Bay and a yurt in Washington's San Juan Islands.

You're probably skeptical of Rob's claim, and I don't blame you. The world looks very different to people outside the belly of Facebook's monetization beast. But when you're on the inside, like Rob is and like I was, and you have access to the revenue dashboards detailing every ring of the cash register, your worldview tends to follow what advertising data can and cannot tell you.

From this worldview, it's still not clear how much influence the IRA had with its Facebook ads (which, as others have pointed out, is just one small part of the huge propaganda campaign that Mueller is currently investigating). But no matter how you look at them, Russia's Facebook ads were almost certainly less consequential than the Trump campaign's mastery of two critical parts of the Facebook advertising infrastructure: The ads auction, and a benign-sounding but actually Orwellian product called Custom Audiences (and its diabolical little brother, Lookalike Audiences). Both of which sound incredibly dull, until you realize that the fate of our 242-year-old experiment in democracy once depended on them, and surely will again.

Like many things at Facebook, the ads auction is a version of something Google built first. As on Google, Facebook has a piece of ad real estate that it's auctioning off, and potential advertisers submit a piece of ad creative, a targeting spec for their ideal user, and a bid for what they're willing to pay to obtain a desired response (such as a click, a like, or a comment). Rather than simply reward that ad position to the highest bidder, though, Facebook uses a complex model that considers both the dollar value of each bid as well as how good a piece of clickbait (or view-bait, or comment-bait) the corresponding ad is. If Facebook's model thinks your ad is 10 times more likely to engage a user than another company's ad, then your effective bid at auction is considered 10 times higher than a company willing to pay the same dollar amount.

A canny marketer with really engaging (or outraging) content can goose their effective purchasing power at the ads auction, piggybacking on Facebook's estimation of their clickbaitiness to win many more auctions (for the same or less money) than an unengaging competitor. That's why, if you've noticed a News Feed ad that's pulling out all the stops (via provocative stock photography or other gimcrackery) to get you to click on it, it's partly because the advertiser is aiming to pump up their engagement levels and increase their exposure, all without paying any more money.

During the run-up to the election, the Trump and Clinton campaigns bid ruthlessly for the same online real estate in front of the same swing-state voters. But because Trump used provocative content to stoke social media buzz, and he was better able to drive likes, comments, and shares than Clinton, his bids received a boost from Facebook's click model, effectively winning him more media for less money. In essence, Clinton was paying Manhattan prices for the square footage on your smartphone's screen, while Trump was paying Detroit prices. Facebook users in swing states who felt Trump had taken over their news feeds may not have been hallucinating.

(Speaking of Manhattan vs. Detroit prices, there are some (very nonmetaphorical) differences in media costs across the country that also impacted Trump's ability to reach voters. Broadly, advertising costs in rural, out-of-the-way areas are considerably less than in hotly contested, dense urban areas. As each campaign tried to mobilize its base, largely rural Trump voters were probably cheaper to reach than Clinton's urban voters. Consider Germantown, Pa. (a Philly suburb Clinton won by a landslide) vs. Belmont County, Ohio (a rural county Trump comfortably won). Actual media costs are closely guarded secrets, but Facebook's own advertiser tools can give us some ballpark estimates. For zip code 43950 (covering the county seat of St. Clairsville, Ohio), Facebook estimates an advertiser can show an ad to about 83 people per dollar. For zip code 19144 in the Philly suburbs, that number sinks to 50 people an ad for every dollar of ad spend. Averaged over lots of time and space, the impacts on media budgets can be sizable. Anyway ...)

The Like button is our new ballot box, and democracy has been transformed into an algorithmic popularity contest.

The above auction analysis is even more true for News Feed, which is only based on engagement, with every user mired in a self-reinforcing loop of engagement, followed by optimized content, followed by more revealing engagement, then more content, ad infinitum. The candidate who can trigger that feedback loop ultimately wins. The Like button is our new ballot box, and democracy has been transformed into an algorithmic popularity contest.

But how to trigger the loop? For that, we need the machinery of targeting. (Full disclosure: I was the original product manager for Custom Audiences, and along with a team of other product managers and engineers, I launched the first versions of Facebook precision targeting in the summer of 2012, in those heady and desperate days of the IPO and sudden investor expectation.)

Despite folklore about "selling your data," most Facebook advertisers couldn't care less about your Likes, your drunk college photos, or your gossipy chats with a boyfriend. What advertisers want to do is find the person who left a product unpurchased in an online shopping cart, just used a loyalty card to buy diapers at Safeway, or registered as a Republican voter in Stark County, Ohio (a swing county in a swing state).

Custom Audiences lets them do that. It's the tunnel beneath the data wall that allows the outside world into Facebook's well-protected garden, and it's like that by design.

Browsed for shoes and then saw them on Facebook? You're in a Custom Audience.

Registered for an email newsletter or used your email as login somewhere? You're in a Custom Audience.

Ordered something to a postal address known to merchants and marketers? You're definitely in a Custom Audience.

Here's how it works in practice:

A campaign manager takes a list of emails or other personal data for people they think will be susceptible to a certain type of messaging (e.g. people in Florida who donated money to Trump For America). They upload that spreadsheet to Facebook via the Ads Manager tool, and Facebook scours its user data, looks for users who match the uploaded spreadsheet, and turns the matches into an "Audience," which is really just a set of Facebook users.

Facebook can also populate an audience by reading a user's cookies-those digital fragments gathered through a user's wanderings around the web. Half the bizarre conspiracy theories around Facebook targeting boil down to you leaving a data trail somewhere inside our consumer economy that was then uploaded via Custom Audiences. In the language of database people, there's now a "join" between the Facebook user ID (that's you) and this outside third-party who knows what you bought, browsed, or who you voted for (probably). That join is permanent, irrevocable, and will follow you to every screen where you've used Facebook.

The above is pretty rudimentary data plumbing. But only when you've built a Custom Audience can you build Lookalike Audiences- the most unknown, poorly understood, and yet powerful weapon in the Facebook ads arsenal.

With a mere mouse click from our hypothetical campaign manager, Facebook now searches the friends of everyone in the Custom Audience, trying to find everyone who (wait for it) "looks like" you. Using a witches' brew of mutual engagement-probably including some mix of shared page Likes, interacting with similar News Feed or Ads content, a score used to measure your social proximity to friends-the Custom Audience is expanded to a bigger set of like-minded people. Lookalikes.

(Another way to picture it: Your social network resembles a nutrient-rich petri dish, just sitting out in the open. Custom Audiences helps mercenary marketers find that dish, and lets them plant the bacterium of a Facebook post inside it. From there, your own interaction with the meme, which is echoed in News Feed, spreads it to your immediate vicinity. Lookalike Audiences finishes the job by pushing it to the edges of your social petri dish, to everyone whose tastes and behaviors resemble yours. The net result is a network overrun by an infectious meme, dutifully placed there by an advertiser, and spread by the ads and News Feed machinery.)

We've all contributed to this political balkanization by self-sorting (or being sorted by Facebook) into online tribes that get morphed into filter bubbles, which are then studiously colonized by commercial memes planted and spread there by a combination of Custom and Lookalike Audiences. One of the ways the Trump campaign leveraged Lookalike Audiences was through its voter suppression campaigns among likely Clinton voters. They seeded the Audiences assembly line with content about Clinton that was engaging but dispiriting. This is one of the ways that Trump won the election, by the very tools that were originally built to help companies like Bed Bath & Beyond sell you towels.

Unsurprisingly, the Russians also apparently made use of Custom Audiences in their ads campaign. The unwary clicker on a Russian ad who then visited their propaganda site suddenly could find yet more planted content in their Feed, which could generate downstream engagement in Feed, and thus the great Facebook wheel turned. The scale of their spend was puny, however, a measly $100,000, which pales in comparison to the millions Trump spent on online advertising.

The above isn't mere informed speculation, the Trump campaign admitted to its wide use of both Custom and Lookalike audiences. There seems to be little public coverage of whether the Clinton campaign used Facebook Ads extensively, but there's no reason to think her campaign did not exploit the same tools.

"I always wonder why people in politics act like this stuff is so mystical," Brad Parscale, the leader of the Trump data effort, told reporters in late 2016. "It's the same shit we use in commercial, just has fancier names."

He's absolutely right. None of this is even novel: It's merely best practice for any smart Facebook advertiser. Custom Audiences was launched almost six (!) years ago, marketed publicly at the time, and only now is becoming a mainstream talking point. The ads auction has been studied by marketers and academics for even longer. The only surprise is how surprising it can still seem to many.

If we're going to reorient our society around Internet echo chambers, with Facebook and Twitter serving as our new Athenian agora, then we as citizens should understand how that forum gets paid for. Rarely will the owners of that now-privatized space deign to explain how they're keeping the lights on. Plotting Russians make for a good story, and external enemies frequently serve an internal purpose, but the trail of blame often leads much closer to home. It's right there, topped by a big, blue bar on our smartphone screens, and could very well be how you arrived at what you're reading right now.

Facebook's Advertising Machine

Rob Goldman, VP of ads at Facebook, published a tweetstorm on Friday appearing to confirm the Trump administration's allegations around the ongoing Muller investigation ... and he did so without clearing his contributions with his employer.

No, Facebook isn't eavesdropping on you through your phone to better target you with ads. It doesn't have to.

To fix its toxic ad problem, Facebook will have to undergo a massive cultural shift.

Photograph by WIRED/Getty Images

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How Trump Conquered Facebook Without Russian Ads

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It's not every day that a former work colleague gets retweeted by the president of the United States. Last Friday, Rob Goldman, a vice president inside Facebook's Ads team, rather ill-advisedly published a series of tweets that seemed to confirm the Trump administration's allegations regarding the recent indictments of 13 Russian nationals by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

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See Liberal and Conservative Facebook, Side by Side

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See Liberal and Conservative Facebook, Side by Side

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Methodology

What is this?

Recent posts from sources where the majority of shared articles aligned "very liberal" (blue, on the left) and "very conservative" (red, on the right) in a large Facebook study.

In 2015, the journal Science published a research paper by Facebook scientists (Bakshy, Eytan; Messing, Solomon; Adamic, Lada, 2015, "Replication Data for: Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook", http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LDJ7MS, Harvard Dataverse, V2) which looked at how a subset of the social network's users reacted to the news appearing in their feeds.

For six months, Facebook tracked and analyzed the content shared by 10.1 million of its users (who were anonymized). These users had identified their political views in their own profiles on Facebook. Analyzing these users' political labels, the researchers categorized each as very liberal, liberal, neutral, conservative or very conservative. The researchers also produced a list of the top 500 sources of content tracked in the study.

For a site appearing in the Journal's red feed, a majority of the articles shared from it were classified in the study as "very conservatively aligned." How did Facebook researchers calculate that? They examined the self-described political leanings of people who shared links on Facebook to calculate a political "alignment score" for each link. Using that score, they grouped the links into five categories, from "very conservative" to "very liberal." So that site's current content appears in the Journal's conservative column because more than half of its links fell into the "very conservative" category during the period of the study (July 7, 2014 through January 7, 2015).

To appear in the Journal's blue and red feeds, posts must have at least 100 shares, and come from sources with at least 100,000 followers.

The Journal removed sources that were no longer active and others, such as Twitter and YouTube, which were simply mechanisms for sharing a wide variety of content. The reason you won't find The Wall Street Journal or any of its biggest competitors in either feed is that their content was shared by Facebook users more broadly across the political spectrum.

Are you saying these sources are conservative and liberal?

No. If a news source appears in the left column, its links were frequently shared by Facebook users whom researchers classified as "very liberal," based on self-described political leanings. In the right column are sources whose content was widely shared by Facebook users identified as "very conservative."

Are you choosing which post to include on each side?

No. The content is being pulled automatically from these sites' public Facebook pages, once an hour using Facebook's software developer tools (specifically, the Graph API).

Are you saying that these views actually simulate what a conservative or liberal sees?

No. It's possible that users have a wide variety of news items appearing in their feeds. These are simply posts from sources that aligned with a majority of users of a particular political view in Facebook's study.

Why did you build this? Aren't you just reinforcing assumptions about the other side's biases?

We built this presentation because it's hard to see these opposing views side by side. Facebook users who are curious about opposing viewpoints may be apprehensive about recording a like for a particular news source-an action which may be seen by other friends. (You can make likes private in Facebook user settings.) This tool gives people anywhere on the political spectrum the ability to see current discussions about newsworthy topics from both very conservative and very liberal viewpoints.

You can download a list of the sources included in this project here.

Source: Bakshy, Eytan; Messing, Solomon; Adamic, Lada, 2015, "Replication Data for: Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook", http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LDJ7MS, Harvard Dataverse, V2

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What is this? Recent posts from sources where the majority of shared articles aligned "very liberal" (blue, on the left) and "very conservative" (red, on the right) in a large Facebook study.

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This guide explores the use of digital methods to study false viral news

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This guide explores the use of digital methods to study false viral news

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A Field Guide to "Fake News" and Other Information Disorders

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A Field Guide to "Fake News" and Other Information Disorders explores the use of digital methods to study viral news, political memes, trolling practices and their social life online. It is a project of the Public Data Lab with support from First Draft.