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New Restriction in response to Facebook scandal

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New Restriction in response to Facebook scandal

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New data privacy laws could be on the way

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A new bill from Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Ed Markey (D-MA) would place significant new constraints on data collection by Facebook and other online services. Dubbed the CONSENT Act (short for Customer Online Notification for Stopping Edge-provider Network Transgressions), the bill requires explicit opt-in consent from users to use, share, or sell any personal information, as well as clear notification any time data is collected, shared, or used. The bill would also add new security and breach reporting requirements.

Crucially, the CONSENT Act relies on the Federal Trade Commission to enforce any violations of those new rules. If the bill passes, the result would be a significant expansion of the commission's power and role in online advertising more broadly. The commission is already expected to take action against Facebook in response to a 2011 consent decree, which many believe the Cambridge Analytica data collection may have violated.

Sen. Blumenthal confronted Mark Zuckerberg over the apparent violation of the consent decree during the CEO's testimony before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees earlier today.

"Doesn't that [thisisyourdigitallife] term of service conflict with the FTC order that Facebook was under at that very time?" Blumenthal asked Zuckerberg, after presenting language from the app ultimately used to collect data for Cambridge Analytica. "Isn't there a conflict there?"

"It certainly appears that we should have been aware that this app developer submitted a term that was in conflict with the rules of the platform," Zuckerberg replied.

"What happened here was, in effect, willful blindness," Blumenthal continued. "It was heedless and reckless, which in fact amounted to a violation of the FTC consent decree. Do you agree?"

"No, Senator. My understanding is not that this was a violation of the consent decree," Zuckerberg said. "But as I've said a number of times today, I think we need to take a broader view of our responsibility around privacy than just what is mandated in the current laws."

Later in the hearing, Sen. Markey pressed Facebook on whether it would support the bill and the principles of opt-in consent more generally. "Would you support that legislation to make it a national standard," Markey asked Zuckerberg, "not just for Facebook but for all the other companies out there, some of which are bad actors?"

Zuckerberg demurred: "In general, I think that principle is exactly right and we should have a discussion..."

Markey continued to press Zuckerberg on his support for the bill, framing it as a US response to the impending GDPR requirements mandated by the European Union. "But would you support legislation and make that the American standard?" Markey asked. "Europeans have already passed that as a law, and Facebook's going to live with that law beginning on May 25th. Would you support that as the law in the United States?"

"As a principle, I would," Zuckerberg said. "I think the details matter a lot."

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After Facebook hearing, senators roll out new bill restraining online data use

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A new bill from Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Ed Markey (D-MA) would place significant new constraints on data collection by Facebook and other online services. Dubbed the CONSENT Act (short for Customer Online Notification for Stopping Edge-provider Network Transgressions), the bill requires explicit opt-in consent from users to use, share, or sell any personal information, as well as clear notification any time data is collected, shared, or used.

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Age of unregulated issue needs to be looked at

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Real estate developer Alastair Mactaggart became alarmed about the internet's threat to personal privacy while chatting with a Google engineer at a cocktail party.

"I asked, 'What's this deal with all the privacy stuff? Is it anything to be worried about?'" Mactaggart recalls. "I expected him to say, 'No, it's not a big deal.'

"I was taken aback," the developer says. "That got me interested."

People have become a lot more aware of it this week, however, as two congressional committees grilled Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg. The lawmakers particularly wanted to know why Facebook failed to protect the data of 87 million users that fell into the hands of Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm working for President Trump's election campaign.

It's not just the marketing of political candidates that personal data is used for, of course. It's also employed to market shoes, TV sets, cars, you name it. Companies glean information about your hobbies, age, children, residence, religion, gender and sexual orientation. And they use it to target ads at specific groups.

The internet is no longer the infant that needed freedom to innovate and grow unregulated, if it ever was. It has grown into a monster and now needs to be restricted - like the railroads at the turn of the last century and financial institutions during the Great Depression.

"We're taking on the richest, most powerful industry that the world has ever seen," says Mactaggart, 51, of Piedmont in Alameda County. "Standard Oil was powerful, but they didn't know everything about you."

Mactaggart's initiative would affect companies that earn at least $50 million a year and derive half their annual revenue by peddling personal information.

Consumers would have the right to learn what info is collected. They'd need to be told whether it was disseminated and to whom. They could tell the companies to stop selling or sharing it. They couldn't be charged more for internet service if they opted out. And they could sue if they were ignored.

Mactaggart must collect 365,880 voter signatures by June 18 to qualify the initiative for the November ballot. He's the sole financer so far, putting up $2 million-plus.

Tech companies are expected to spend tens of millions fighting the measure if it qualifies. So far they've put up $1 million - $200,000 each from Facebook, Google, AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.

After its hammering by the congressional committees, however, Facebook announced Wednesday that it wouldn't contribute more money to the opposition campaign. The company said it wants to focus "on supporting reasonable privacy measures in California."

That sounds like it might be looking for a legislative compromise - something the rest of the tech industry has shown no interest in.

"We've got all our resources focused on the ballot measure," says Robert Callahan, vice president of government affairs for the Internet Assn. "This is very much a 'gotcha' initiative. It's unworkable. It would strangle the ability of companies to innovate."

Tech firms especially fear giving opportunistic internet users the ability to sue, he says.

Callahan also contends "it's dishonest to link" the initiative with the Facebook turmoil. But good luck convincing voters of that.

Opposition campaign spokesman Steve Maviglio says, "This is a national issue. It's more appropriately settled in Washington. Clearly that's the way to do it, not state by state."

But if California had waited for Washington to act, Southern Californians would be choking on smog. And who knows how many beaches would have been fouled by oil spills.

Under a relatively new reform, an initiative proponent can negotiate a legislative compromise and drop the ballot measure. A potential compromise vehicle is a bill by Assemblyman Ed Chau (D-Arcadia).

Chau's measure would restore federal regulations rolled back by President Trump that required internet providers to obtain users' permission before sharing data.

"It's our own data," Chau says, "so we should be the ones able to say what's collected and how it's used."

He dropped the bill last year under stiff opposition from the tech lobby. But it's still there waiting for a compromise.

Some regulation is needed. The Wild West days of an uncontrolled internet should be history.

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The internet is no longer an infant that needs freedom to innovate - it's grown into a monster and needs to be restricted

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Real estate developer Alastair Mactaggart became alarmed about the internet's threat to personal privacy while chatting with a Google engineer at a cocktail party. "I asked, 'What's this deal with all the privacy stuff? Is it anything to be worried about?'" Mactaggart recalls. "I expected him to say, 'No, it's not a big deal.'

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How russians interfered with US social media

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How russians interfered with US social media

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Russian interaction with US citizens in social media to polarize voters

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Here's what the Russian trolls did, according to the Mueller indictment (which is in line with everything that's been publicly reported). They built medium-sized social-media pages, primarily on Facebook and Instagram. They posted to these pages regularly, usually targeting Hillary Clinton, with a mix of content.

"Defendants and their coconspirators issued or received guidance on: ratios of text, graphics, and video to use in posts; the number of accounts to operate; and the role of each account (for example, differentiating a main account from which to post information and auxiliary accounts to promote a main account through links and reposts)," the indictment reads. None of this is magic. Many media companies from HuffPost to Blavity would be familiar with trying to optimize the type of posts going out on a page or set of pages. In a quick scan, HuffPost maintains more than 50 Facebook pages, the main one and dozens of auxiliary ones in different languages and on specific topics. And they coordinate action across them.

The Russians tracked how well what they were posting was connecting with people. "In order to gauge the performance of various groups on social-media sites, the ORGANIZATION tracked certain metrics like the group's size, the frequency of content placed by the group, and the level of audience engagement with that content, such as the average number of comments or responses to a post," the indictment reads. And in another spot: "Defendants and their coconspirators received and maintained metrics reports on certain group pages and individualized posts."

And as for the secrecy and traceability of the effort, the foreign-affairs analyst Vladimir Frolov described it to The Times as " very ad hoc, very amateurish."

I'd take the audience-development teams at BuzzFeed, Arby's, or JetBlue over the Internet Research Agency any day of the week. It is not hard to imagine a far better campaign to have actually tried to throw the election. For example, the Russians could have targeted electorally crucial areas within certain battleground states. Instead, as we learned at a Senate hearing in November, "the total amount spent targeting Wisconsin was a mere $1,979; all but $54 was spent prior to the completion of the primary, and none of the ads even mentioned Trump. The spending in Michigan and Pennsylvania was even smaller."

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Mueller's indictment even suggests that the Russian operatives were not familiar with the term "purple state" until they talked with somebody in Texas in June of 2016. "After that exchange," the indictment says, "Defendants and their coconspirators commonly referred to targeting 'purple states' in directing their efforts."

This analysis, of course, is based on extant evidence. Worse things could be found.

And none of this is to say that Mueller won't discover something in the Russian scheme that will end up implicating one or more members of the Trump campaign or even the President himself. Recall that Watergate revolved around a silly, bungled, and unnecessary wiretapping misadventure that occurred during an election in which Richard Nixon won 60.7 percent of the popular vote and 520 of 537 electoral votes.

A medium-sized hustle to mess with the American presidential election on behalf of the Russian oligarchy could lead anywhere. But from the looks of things, it was Americans who put Donald Trump in the White House.

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Russia's Troll Operation Was Not That Sophisticated

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Here's what the Russian trolls did, according to the Mueller indictment (which is in line with everything that's been publicly reported). They built medium-sized social-media pages, primarily on Facebook and Instagram. They posted to these pages regularly, usually targeting Hillary Clinton, with a mix of content.

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Evidence of interference of US election by Russian leads criminal charges towards 13 russians

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Thirteen Russians have been criminally charged for interfering in the 2016 US election to help Donald Trump, the office of Robert Mueller, the special counsel, announced on Friday.

Mueller's office said 13 Russians and three Russian entities, including the notorious state-backed "troll farm" the Internet Research Agency, had been indicted by a federal grand jury in Washington DC.

A 37-page indictment alleged that the Russians' operations "included supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J Trump ... and disparaging Hillary Clinton," his Democratic opponent.

Mueller alleged that Russian operatives "communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump campaign", but the indictment did not address the question of whether anyone else in Trump's team had knowingly colluded.

Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, said at a press conference in Washington: "There is no allegation in this indictment that any American had any knowledge." Rosenstein added that the charges did not mean the Russian activity had an effect on the outcome of the election.

Trump and the White House seized on Rosenstein's remarks to falsely claim that the indictment proved there had been no collusion and that the election result had definitely not been impacted.

In a statement on Friday, Trump suggested that what he called "outlandish partisan attacks, wild and false allegations, and far-fetched theories" relating to possible collusion were serving to further the Russian agenda.

The Russians allegedly posed as Americans to operate bogus social media accounts, buy advertisements and stage political rallies. They stole the identities of real people in the US to post online and built computer systems in the US to hide the Russian origin of their activity, according prosecutors.

"This indictment serves as a reminder that people are not always who they appear to be on the internet," said Rosenstein. He alleged that the Russians had "worked to promote discord in the United States and undermine public confidence in democracy," adding: "We must not allow them to succeed."

The charges state that from as far back as 2014, the defendants conspired together to defraud the US by "impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of government" through interference with the American political and electoral processes.

One defendant, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, is accused of using companies he controlled - including Concord Management and Consulting, and Concord Catering - to finance the operations against the US. The operation at one stage had a monthly budget of $1.25m,according to Mueller, which paid for operatives' salaries and bonuses.

Events were organised by Russians posing as Trump supporters and as groups opposed to Trump such as Black Lives Matter, according to prosecutors. One advertisement shortly before the election promoted the Green party candidate Jill Stein, who is blamed by some Clinton backers for splitting the anti-Trump vote.

In August 2016, Russian operatives communicated with Trump campaign staff in Florida through their "@donaldtrump.com" email addresses to coordinate a series of pro-Trump rallies in the state, according to Mueller, and then bought advertisements on social media to promote the events.

At one rally in West Palm Beach, a Russian operative is even alleged to have paid Americans to build a cage on a flatbed truck and to have an actor posing as Clinton in a prison uniform stand inside.

One defendant, Irina Kaverzina, is accused of admitting her involvement in the operation and a subsequent coverup in an email to a relative in September last year, after Mueller's inquiry had begun. "We had a slight crisis here at work: the FBI busted our activity," Kaverzina allegedly wrote, "so I got preoccupied with covering tracks together with the colleagues."

The Russians are also accused of working to suppress turnout among ethnic minority voters. They allegedly created an Instagram account posing as "Woke Blacks" and railed against the notion that African Americans should choose Clinton as "the lesser of two devils" against Trump.

In early November 2016, according to the indictment, the Russian operatives used bogus "United Muslims of America" social media accounts to claim that "American Muslims [are] boycotting elections today."

Following Trump's victory, the Russian operation promoted allegations of voter fraud by the Democratic party, according to Mueller's team. Around that time, Trump repeatedly claimed without evidence that he would have won the popular vote if not for large-scale voter fraud.

The individuals charged are Mikhail Ivanovich Bystrov, Mikhail Leonidovich Burchik, Aleksandra Yuryevna Krylova, Anna Vladislavovna Bogacheva, Sergey Pavlovich Polozov, Maria Anatolyevna Bovda, Robert Sergeyevich Bovda, Dzheykhun Nasimi Ogly Aslanov, Vadim Vladimirovich Podkopaev, Gleb Igorevitch Vasilchenko, Irina Viktorovna Kaverzina, Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhinand Vladimir Venkov.

All were charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States. Three defendants were charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and five defendants were charged with aggravated identity theft.

Separately, Mueller's office announced that Richard Pinedo, of Santa Paula, California, had pleaded guilty to identity fraud. Pinedo, 28, admitted to running a website that offered stolen identities to help customers get around the security measures of major online payment sites. It was not made clear whether his service had been used by the Russian operatives.

Rosenstein said no contact had been made with Russian authorities regarding the charges so far, but that US officials intended to seek extradition of the defendants.

US intelligence agencies previouslyconcluded that Russians mounted an attack on the US election system aimed at electing Donald Trump to the presidency.

Mueller is conducting a criminal inquiry into interference by Russians and possible collusion by Trump's campaign. Two Trump campaign advisers have pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Two others have been charged with federal crimes.

US investigators have long signalled their belief that Prigozhin, a 56-year-old billionaire businessman, is behind Russia's internet troll factories.

Nicknamed the "Kremlin's chef", Prigozhin once ran Putin's favourite restaurant in St Petersburg, after which he was awarded multi-billion pound state catering contracts.

He provided catering for Dmitry Medvedev's presidential inauguration in 2008, and also has lucrative contracts to feed Russia's army and Moscow's schoolchildren.

Prigozhin, who has also been linked to the Wagner Group, a shadowy Kremlin-linked private military contractor believed to be operating in Syria, was included on a US sanctions list in July.

Speaking to the RIA Novosti state news agency on Friday, Prigozhin said: "The Americans are really impressionable people, they see what they want to see. I have great respect for them. If they want to see the devil - let them see him."

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the allegations "absurd".

"Thirteen people carried out interference in the US elections? Thirteen people against special services with a budgets of billions?" she wrote in a Facebook post.

Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian media he had not yet had a chance to study the indictments.

Topics

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Mueller charges 13 Russians with interfering in US election to help Trump

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Thirteen Russians have been criminally charged for interfering in the 2016 US election to help Donald Trump, the office of Robert Mueller, the special counsel, announced on Friday. Mueller's office said 13 Russians and three Russian entities, including the notorious state-backed "troll farm" the Internet Research Agency, had been indicted by a federal grand jury in Washington DC.

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Twitter reveals us of its site to spread fake news

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Twitter reveals us of its site to spread fake news

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Twitter is going after russian hackers who aimed to spread fake news during the 2016 american election

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Tumblr has revealed that it was used by Russian hackers to disseminate "fake news" in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election.

The blogging site says it only became aware of the situation late last year and reported it to the US Justice Department, collaborating with a subsequent investigation that led to the indictment of 13 individuals linked to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a shadowy organisation accused of trying to interfere in the campaign to the detriment of defeated Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

The exploitation of Facebook and Twitter by bots spreading disinformation and propaganda to boost Republican Donald Trump has been long established but Tumblr's targeting was previously undisclosed.

A Tumblr statement said 84 accounts "were being used as part of a disinformation campaign leading up to the 2016 US election."

"As far as we can tell, the IRA-linked accounts were only focused on spreading disinformation in the US and they only posted organic content. We didn't find any indication that they ran ads," the company said.

Tumblr has pledged to email "anyone who liked, reblogged, replied to, or followed an IRA-linked account with the list of usernames they engaged with" as part of a renewed commitment to transparency.

"We've decided to leave up any reblog chains that might be on your Tumblrs - you can choose to leave them or delete them," it added.

"We're letting you decide because the reblog chains contain posts created by real Tumblr users, often challenging or debunking the false and incendiary claims in the IRA-linked original post."

Special Counsel Robert Mueller's criminal investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin is ongoing.
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Russian hackers targeted Tumblr during the US election

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Tumblr has revealed that it was used by Russian hackers to disseminate "fake news" in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election.

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Opinion of US president based off internet searches

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Opinion of US president based off internet searches

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View of americans view of politics and Trump based off of internet searches

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Democracy is under attack in the United States and around the world. For example, recent elections in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy featured far-right candidates with explicitly nationalist agendas, and many of their parties gained record numbers of seats in their respective parliaments. The Brexit vote in the United Kingdom meanwhile signaled a desire among some voters to elevate domestic interests over global ones. Nations such as Turkey, the Philippines, Poland, and Hungary have eroded basic civil liberties and shifted toward more authoritarian rule.

In the United States, there also are significant challenges facing democracy. Critics complain that President Donald Trump has eroded democracy by violating norms of civility and undermining news organizations by accusing them of being purveyors of "fake news." Yale Law Professor Amy Chua has noted the rise of political tribalism that pits group against group and erodes common bonds. ¹ Brookings scholar William Galston has analyzed populist threats to democracy based on economic anxiety and cultural divisions. ² Harvard Professor Yascha Mounk talks about the dangers that arise when social media divide people and large moneyed interests gain disproportionate influence over the political process. ³ And in the most chilling interpretation, professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have a book describing how democracies can die a slow death through weak institutions and voter mistrust. ⁴

In this paper, we look at views of U.S. democracy using internet search data. We examine public interest in democracy, fake news, money in politics, ethics concerns, the rule of law, and major political institutions in order to gauge how Americans are reacting to recent developments. This report is the second in a series of big data analysis that charts long-term trends in online search activity. Our first report focused on views about Donald Trump in his first year as president. ⁵

The current analysis reveals several important results on views about American democracy:

Searches for democracy fluctuated throughout the Trump administration, but were especially high around the Charlottesville, Va., protests and the chief executive's false equivalence of college protesters and white supremacists.

Trump's accusations that news media are reporting inaccurate stories about him drove many searches for fake news, culminating in a peak around his "Fake News Awards" given out in January 2018.

Money and politics is a recurring concern in American democracy, and our analysis found that interest in billionaires peaked around the release of the "Paradise Papers" documenting the offshore financial holdings of wealthy individuals and high income concentration in the United States.

Ethical concerns drove public interest in emoluments, presidential conflicts of interest, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump conduct.

Searches for rule of law, accountability, and conflict of interest reached high points when Trump flouted norms of presidential behavior, such as in the cases of his firing FBI Director James Comey and pardoning the controversial Arizona sheriff, Joe Arpaio.

Searches for president, Congress, and the Supreme Court dovetailed with Trump's inauguration address and with special elections.

Internet search queries

Digital media platforms represent a lens through which to study contemporary politics. Tools like Google and Bing searches, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, and Instagram sharing reveal important clues about what is happening today. For example, the topics on which people search show what is of interest to them and how that interest changes over time. Facebook likes and sharing behavior help people understand how others engage with important topics and how those reactions change over time. People's reactions to tweets in terms of retweets and likes represent a form of engagement that measure type and intensity of reaction. Instagram sharing behavior reveals what people like and what images engage them.

In this analysis, we use Google search queries and event histories to examine trends in views about American democracy during the first 14 months of the Trump presidency.

The analysis of Google search trends has increased in recent years. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz used Google search trends to investigate how much racial animus cost Barack Obama in terms of votes during the 2008 and 2012 elections. ⁶ Google search trends were especially useful in that study as traditional survey results asking white individuals whether they would vote for a black president may have masked an actual reluctance to do so.

Google search data also have been used to examine the agenda setting effects of television and newspaper coverage. Brian Weeks and Brian Southwell studied news coverage of the rumor that Obama was secretly a Muslim. ⁷ By examining search trends prior to 2007, they demonstrated that the volume of news coverage of this rumor positively predicted aggregate Google searches of that idea.

Event histories

Event histories help to make sense of longitudinal data. Matching events that correspond to spikes in interest enable researchers to add context to the aggregate information. For example, developments such as a terrorist attack or a major legislative action often drive media and public interest in particular topics. The media report on high-profile activities and the public responds by requesting information related to those events. Seeing the ups and downs in search behavior and matching those data points to actual events provides clues regarding the factors driving public interest.

From the standpoint of democratic institutions, the past 14 months were quite eventful. Trump was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2017, followed by a historic women's march the next day that attracted millions of participants around the world. Trump attracted considerable criticism when his travel ban for seven predominantly Muslim countries was temporarily blocked on Feb. 3. FBI Director James Comey was fired on May 9, which generated concern about obstructionist presidential behavior. Social commentators worried about the fabric of American society when a driver drove his vehicle into a group of street protesters in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 17. Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was indicted on federal charges on Oct. 30 and former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn pled guilty to charges on Dec. 3, thereby raising questions about ethical standards within the Trump circle.

In January 2018, Michael Wolff's book "Fire and Fury" detailed turmoil within the White House. The day after the book's publication, Trump declared that "there's been absolutely no collusion" between his staff and Russia. That same month, the president also referred to Haiti and several African nations as "sh-hole countries" during negotiations with senators over immigration. On Jan. 25, The New York Times reported that Donald Trump had wished to fire Robert Mueller in June 2017 and backed away from the idea only after White house Counsel Donald McGahn threatened to resign.

Methods

In this analysis, we use Google search queries and event histories to examine trends in views about American democracy during the first 14 months of the Trump presidency. The data come from Google searches of the U.S. web between Jan. 1, 2017 and March 3, 2018, and we use weekly search data to smooth the data into regular time intervals.

There were a number of major spikes in public interest in democracy based on developments during the first year-plus of the Trump presidency. As an illustration, there were significant shifts in searches about democracy, fake news, money in politics, ethics, the rule of law, and political institutions.

The topics analyzed include interest in democracy, accountability, and rule of law; political institutions like the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court; fake news; ethics topics such as emoluments, Robert Mueller, and conflict of interest; and the role of wealth in American politics. According to Google Trends, interest is defined as "search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. Likewise a score of 0 means the term was less than one percent as popular as the peak." ⁸

We focus on Google search because it includes 88 percent of the searches that take place in the United States, compared to 7 percent for Bing and 4 percent for Yahoo. ⁹ It is important to note that since data are aggregated, it is not possible to break them down by age, gender, race, or other categories of possible interest. According to Google, its search data are normalized in order to facilitate comparability based on subject, time period, and location.

For a given search term, Google Trends data note that its information represents "an unbiased sample of Google search data. Only a percentage of searches are used to compile Trends data." Our data was collected on March 8, 2018, which means that trend data analyzed at other points in time could yield different results.

Views about US democracy

One of the highest peaks in interest about democracy occurred in the spring of 2017 when Trump launched a missile strike targeting Syrian airfields in retaliation for chemical weapons attacks on civilians. Since the strikes received no prior authorization from Congress, they generated concern about representative government and institutional checks and balances.

In addition, there was concern about societal divisions and freedom of expression in August 2017 when a car plowed through a protest march in Charlottesville, Va., and killed an innocent demonstrator. Trump generated a major backlash and concern about basic rights when he seemingly equated the rights of white supremacists with those protesting against displays of white supremacy. A number of observers felt he was fueling racial hatred by not condemning racial bigotry.

Accusations of "fake news" have been a consistent theme of the Trump administration, and there were several moments that prompted sharp increases in searches for the term. For example, there were spikes when Trump denounced a CNN reporter for spreading "fake news" at a January 2017 press conference. In June of that year, CNN retracted a story about Anthony Scaramucci, which drew further criticism from the White House and led to increased searches about fake news. Finally, Trump's "Fake News Awards," given out to media organizations deemed by the president to report incorrect information about him and his administration, led to a search uptick in January of 2018.

Concern over money in politics has been prevalent for many years. To see how that issue played out in Trump's first year, we examined searches for billionaires. We found that searches for that term peaked at the same time as the release of the "Paradise Papers," a secret trove of documents that detailed the offshore financial holdings of wealthy individuals around the world. The quantity of released documents was second only to the Panama Papers, released in 2016, which covered similar financial data. A study released that same week discovered that the three wealthiest Americans collectively hold as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent.

Ethics concerns have been prevalent throughout Trump's first year in office. Searches for Robert Mueller peaked when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed him as special counsel for the Department of Justice. Searches for "conflicts of interest" reached their highest level after Donald Trump was inaugurated and commentators criticized Trump for not separating his business interests from his political office. Search interest peaked again after congressional Republicans accused Robert Mueller of having a conflict of interest for serving as FBI director when the Obama administration approved the sale of Uranium One to a Russian company in 2010.

Concern about democracy also was expressed following a series of controversial Trump moves. For example, searches for accountability spiked upward when President Trump dismissed FBI Director James Comey and implied he might have conversation tapes, before eventually admitting he had no recordings. The same thing occurred when the #MeToo movement sought to hold men in positions of power accountable for sexual misconduct.

At other times, there were increases in searches about the rule of law. That happened when a federal judge overturned the first version of Trump's travel ban in February, and again when the president pardoned former Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was charged with contempt of court for detaining persons without cause. It came up again as a theme around the time of President Trump's 2018 State of the Union address.

Searches for Congress increased in the lead up to the special election in Alabama to fill the Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions when he joined Trump's cabinet as Attorney General. Searches for the term president reached a peak around inauguration, and then again a year later, around the time when the Michael Wolff book "Fire and Fury" was published and Trump made remarks describing African countries and Haiti as "sh-hole countries." Meanwhile, searches for the Supreme Court reached peaks around the nomination of Justice Neil Gorsuch and at the closing of their term, when the court upheld the president's partial travel ban.

Conclusion

To summarize, there were a number of major spikes in public interest in democracy based on developments during the first year-plus of the Trump presidency. As an illustration, there were significant shifts in searches about democracy, fake news, money in politics, ethics, the rule of law, and political institutions. When President Trump flouted norms of presidential behavior, made provocative statements, or enacted controversial policy proposals, it generated public interest.

The concerns displayed about key principles of American democracy demonstrate it is important to be vigilant about the continuing health of the system. In a number of respects, Americans are worried about societal divisions, political polarization, and widespread public mistrust in the U.S. political system.

The concerns displayed about key principles of American democracy demonstrate it is important to be vigilant about the continuing health of the system. Americans are worried about societal divisions, political polarization, and widespread public mistrust in the U.S. political system.

But the good news is that recent polling from the bipartisan Voter Study Group suggests Americans have not lost faith in democracy. As our Brookings colleague William Galston explains, "Since 2014, the share of Americans who say that it is very important to live in a democracy has increased from 73 percent to 83 percent. ... Only a minority of those who don't think democracy is a good form of government are willing to endorse authoritarian alternatives." ¹⁰

However, the bad news is that support for democracy is weakest among less educated and less politically engaged individuals. That shows how the current populist backlash against major institutions has opened a schism in American society. Those who are not well educated or engaged in politics are the ones most likely to doubt that democracy is a good form of government and are most open to authoritarian systems.

It is important, of course, to keep in mind the limits of internet search data. First, they are highly aggregated and it is not possible to break down the overall numbers by age, gender, race, or other important demographic categories. Second, they measure interest in a topic, but not the direction of sentiment. Third, search data are sensitive to the terms being queried.

Those points notwithstanding, though, internet search data rest on trillions of data points, provide information in real time, and measure trends over time. That helps analysts explore important topics such as views of democracy during the beginning of Trump's presidency, and discern shifts in interest based on subject and time. As such, they represent a valuable technique for the exploration of contemporary politics.
Christian Rome Lansang contributed research to this report.

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Views of American democracy based on internet search data

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Democracy is under attack in the United States and around the world. For example, recent elections in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy featured far-right candidates with explicitly nationalist agendas, and many of their parties gained record numbers of seats in their respective parliaments.

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Influence of internet on election and how having money can affect this

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Worries about the use of online data to target votes aren't limited to the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election. Critics say these tactics are being used around the world. Simon Wilson reports.
Has democracy been hacked?

The jury is still out on the extent to which political-consulting firm Cambridge Analytica's harvesting of Facebook data and psychology-based micro-targeting methods genuinely influenced the 2016 Trump campaign, or the Brexit vote. Perhaps no clear verdict will ever be delivered. In the US, notwithstanding Mark Zuckerberg's grillings on Capitol Hill last week, policymakers remain much more focused on Russian interference than the impact of Cambridge Analytica's tactics.

In the UK there is an overwhelming sense among the political class that Brexit is traumatic enough without digging too deeply into whether Vote Leave manipulated electoral law to circumvent spending limits by channelling an extra £625,000 to another campaign (as a whistleblower claims). Those like Leave.EU's Arron Banks, who once boasted in print of Cambridge Analytica's involvement, now play it down - and in the post-truth age nobody seems to care much.

Isn't that a bit too sanguine?

Maybe so. It's true that as a result of the Channel 4 exposé last month, Cambridge Analytica has come to appear laughably inept rather than wickedly omnipotent. Believing that they were wooing a Sri Lankan client, the firm's chief executive Alexander Nix and a senior colleague made implausible boasts about the scale of their involvement in the Trump campaign, and described dirty-tricks tactics such as honey traps and bribes. (Nix has now been suspended by his board - a meaningless public-relations move, say critics.) In the film, he no longer appeared to be a smooth-talking seer and more a bit of a buffoon. But the reality perhaps lies between the two extremes. Certainly the story of Cambridge Analytica, and its parent/sibling company SCL, remains a disturbing and salutary one.

In what way?

The point is that whether or not Cambridge Analytica swung Trump's victory or Brexit, it has shown how easy it might be to influence votes if you have a rich backer. SCL was founded by Nigel Oakes (under the scientific-sounding name Strategic Communication Laboratories) in 1993, and in its early days was involved in "marketing aromatics" - the use of scents to make shoppers spend more money. In 2005 it positioned itself as the first political consultancy to offer psychological warfare services, or "psyops", to the British military.

It moved on to deploy its brand of micro-targeted propaganda on election campaigns in the developing world, before setting up Cambridge Analytica as a subsidiary in 2013 with the support of Robert Mercer, a billionaire Republican donor, and Steve Bannon, who ran the Mercer-funded right-wing opinion site Breitbart. Mercer invested $10m with the aim of influencing the 2014 congressional elections, claimed one former employee in The Washington Post (he had put a similar amount into Breitbart). Bannon then allegedly signed off on spending nearly $1m to acquire data including Facebook profiles. Cambridge Analytica later won contracts first on Ted Cruz's presidential campaign, then on Trump's, which ultimately paid it $5.9m for its services.

Why is all this disturbing?

Effective democracy depends on public debate and deliberation, on political parties that run public campaigns, on transparency and a basis on which governments can be held to account. Micro-targeting on the basis of data-harvesting leads to a more fractured democracy in which false claims cannot be subjected to public scrutiny and it's easier to exceed spending limits. This undermines the idea that voters are not the unwitting tools of propaganda machines. So these events are worrying as a guide to what could happen to democracy in the future. The age of Facebook - an age where users are not consumers, they're the product - is an ideal breeding ground for misinformation and mass-data gathering. And there are signs that more and more money is being spent in these channels to influence elections across the world.

How widespread is the problem?

Take Latin America, where Andrés Sepúlveda, a now-jailed hacker, has given a compelling account to Bloomberg of his illegal work - hacking opponents, stealing campaign strategies and manipulating social media - across the region. He claims to have spent $600,000 on Enrique Peña Nieto's successful presidential campaign in Mexico in 2012. Or Africa, where Cambridge Analytica was paid $6m for its work for Kenya's Uhuru Kenyatta last year, amid chaotic elections that were characterised by micro-targeting and misinformation.

More openly, in Europe, Hungary's ruling party - which was re-elected this month - spends tens of millions of euros of public money on highly partisan government-information campaigns that amount to electioneering. The result was an election "characterised by a pervasive overlap between state and ruling-party resources, undermining contestants' ability to compete on an equal basis", said election observers.

How serious could the consequences be?

Very bad, say Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas, two academics specialising in democracy, in a recent Spectator article that draws on their new book How to Rig an Election. "In many parts of the world, election rigging is now not the exception but the norm. It's a multi-billion-dollar industry in which government contracts flow to those who deliver the 'right' result." By replacing uninformed votes with misinformed ones, this helps prop up despots, fuel populism and even increase political violence. "Firms such as Cambridge Analytica need to be subject to tighter regulation and scrutiny." If not, "election quality will continue to decline", undermining democracy.

With so much uncertainty, there's never been a more important time to secure your financial future. Try out MoneyWeek today and find out how to make the most of what you have.

Reading your genome is becoming ever easier and cheaper. That makes it possible to figure out which medicines are more likely to work for you. Dr Mike Tubbs looks at the companies best-placed to profit.

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Is the internet a danger to democracy? - MoneyWeek

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Worries about the use of online data to target votes aren't limited to the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election. Critics say these tactics are being used around the world. Simon Wilson reports. The jury is still out on the extent to which political-consulting firm Cambridge Analytica's harvesting of Facebook data and psychology-based micro-targeting methods genuinely influenced the 2016 Trump campaign, or the Brexit vote.

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4 news apps have been removed at the desire of the chinese gov to regulate news media

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China removes news apps to tighten internet control

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The mobile apps for four popular news apps in China, including the most popular aggregator, Jinri Toutiao, were removed from a number of Chinese smartphone app stores following reports of a...

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Chinese communities continue to exist despite china's attempts at censorship 

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Chinese communities continue to exist despite china's attempts at censorship 

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Company gets shut down for censorship but the community remains

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No ideology appears to link the apps' fans, although their online videos suggest that sports cars and community service are common enthusiasms.

In one clip, a column of cars parades down an empty highway, headlights flashing.

In another, a bronze sports car drifts and does doughnuts at an abandoned intersection.

One popular Chinese variety show this year also chronicled some of the good acts done by the fans. In China's sparsely populated west, one group pitched in to help the elderly and entertain children. On Chinese social media, enthusiasts from other parts of the country posted photos after donating blood and sending secondhand goods to remote schools.

China has undergone dizzying social change over the past decades. The internet has become a place for many people to seek out personal connections and community.

"I'm truly sad. My friend and I both cried while talking about it," Liu Wei, 23, an aspiring R&B composer in Shanghai, said of Duanzi's closing. He had been a user of the app for more than five years.

"So many years of love," Mr. Liu said. "It's like I lost a brother."

Bytedance, the company behind both Duanzi and Douyin, has become one of the most highly valued technology start-ups in the world. But it has to manage the material on its platforms carefully in order to stay on the right side of China's censors. Two more of the company's popular platforms have been pulled from app stores in the past week.

Zhang Yiming, Bytedance's founder and chief executive, apologized in a statement for failing to adequately police content, and for the company's failure to respect "core socialist values."

"As a start-up developing rapidly in the wake of the 18th National Congress, we understand deeply that our rapid development was an opportunity afforded to us by this great era," Mr. Zhang wrote, referring to the 2012 Communist Party confab at which President Xi Jinping took office.

"I thank this era," Mr. Zhang wrote. "I thank the historic opportunity of China's economic reform and opening-up. I thank the support the government has given to the technology industry's development."

China's highest media regulator, the State Administration of Radio and Television, did not respond to a faxed request for comment about whether Duanzi's fans were a factor in the app being shut down.

But in recent days, the authorities in China have instructed news outlets to suppress information about fan gatherings, according to censorship orders reviewed by The New York Times. Any mention of "revolt" in connection with Duanzi fans has been ordered scrubbed. Outlets have also been told to censor photos, videos and articles attacking the media regulator or calling for protests.

"It's almost like there's a war on humor and fun," said Joshua Rosenzweig, a Hong Kong-based adviser at Amnesty International. "And the only things that are allowed are the things that fit into the official propaganda messages: the 'China Dream,' the 'Belt and Road.' It has to be connected to what the party wants people to be concerned about."

Internet crackdowns are nothing new in China. But the latest seems more specifically aimed at making sure there is not too much online that might vie with the government's messaging for people's attention, Mr. Rosenzweig said.

"They want to do more, I think, to proactively shape people's thinking through the media," he said, "and they can't have this kind of competition."

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Horns Honk, and Censors in China Get a Headache

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No ideology appears to link the apps' fans, although their online videos suggest that sports cars and community service are common enthusiasms. In one clip, a column of cars parades down an empty highway, headlights flashing. In another, a bronze sports car drifts and does doughnuts at an abandoned intersection.

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China wants to ban content that makes it look bad

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China wants to ban content that makes it look bad

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Chinese government tells big chinese media sites to crackdown on content that puts the government in a bad light

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MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images

Being an internet business in China appears to be getting tougher.

Chinese broadcasters, including social media platform Weibo, streamer Acfun and media company Ifeng were told to shut down all audio and visual content that cast the country or its government in bad light, China's State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television posted on its website on Thursday, saying they violate local regulations.

"[The service providers] broadcast large amounts of programmes that don't comply with national rules and propagate negative discussions about public affairs. [The agency] has notified all relevant authorities and ... will take measures to shut down these programmes and rectify the situation," reads the statement.

China is notorious for its stifling control over the internet and the media. The country ranks 176th out of 180 countries on the 2017 World Press Freedom Index, and its president Xi Jinping is listed as a "press freedom predator" and an "enemy of the Internet" by Reporters without Borders. The statement comes after revised regulations granting the government even more control took effect less than a month ago.

Acfun and Weibo acknowledged the order on their official Weibo accounts and said they will strengthen content management on their respective platforms in compliance with the regulations. In the post, Weibo added that only users that have obtained a license from the government are allowed to broadcast audio and visual content on the platform.
First published June 23, 1:31 a.m. PT. Logging Out: Welcome to the crossroads of online life and the afterlife.
Update, 3:12 a.m. PT: Added Weibo's response.

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Chinese media told to 'shut down' talk that makes country look bad

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Being an internet business in China appears to be getting tougher. Chinese broadcasters, including social media platform Weibo, streamer Acfun and media company Ifeng were told to shut down all audio and visual content that cast the country or its government in bad light, China's State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television posted on its website on Thursday, saying they violate local regulations.

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Chinese media site overturns decision due to backlash

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Chinese media site overturns decision due to backlash

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Gay content undone over site wide backlash from users

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Internet users welcomed the change on Monday. Still, some said the company owed gay people an apology.

"It is totally insincere," Bai Fei, a feminist activist in Shanghai, said of the announcement. "They have already harmed us. I want them to stand up and make a public apology."

Others called on the company to restore content that it had already deleted in the campaign, including a popular Weibo account called the Gay Voice, which published cultural news and podcasts for its more than 230,000 followers.

Weibo's vow to cut gay material prompted an unusually fierce backlash from internet users, who said the campaign would worsen discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in China. Still, some said they saw signs of progress in the company's decision to change course.

Ma Baoli, the founder of Blued, a popular gay dating app, called the uproar a "historic event" in China. He said Weibo's response showed a gradual change in attitudes toward gay people.

"This is a nice outcome and a very valuable chance for the public to discuss homosexuality and to eliminate discrimination," he said.

Weibo's "cleanup" campaign highlighted the intense pressure that media companies in China face to purge sites of content that the authorities deem offensive. Experts said the government's vague definition of improper content often results in companies' going to extremes to show compliance.

"The precise contours of what is 'vulgar' are always very blurry," said Severine Arsene, managing editor of AsiaGlobal Online, a digital journal at the University of Hong Kong. "This campaign is following the same pattern of public space becoming more narrow and subject to conservative norms."

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Chinese Social Media Site Reverses Gay Content Ban After Uproar

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Internet users welcomed the change on Monday. Still, some said the company owed gay people an apology. "It is totally insincere," Bai Fei, a feminist activist in Shanghai, said of the announcement. "They have already harmed us. I want them to stand up and make a public apology."

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Do people actually fight for what they supposedly support online irl

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Love Wins, Women's March, Black Lives Matter, Pray For Paris; These are all hashtags I'm sure most of us, if not all, are familiar with.

Perhaps we "liked" something affiliated with these hashtags on our social media, or marched among our friends, but are we really doing our part and standing up for these causes even after the social media hype?

In the summer of 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of legalizing same sex marriage in all 50 states.

To show support for the LGBTQ community, Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook Headquarters decided that he would give Facebook users an option to have a rainbow overlay over their profile photos to support the cause.

According to an article by Caitlin Dewey at The Washington Post , 26 million people used this option in 2015. This is obviously great, but what else have we done outside of this? Are we speaking out against those who constantly discriminate against others? Do we go out of our way to create social change that creates an impact?

"Profile picture campaigns are effective in showing the friends and family in your social network that you have some affinity for a political candidate or cause," wrote Philip Howard, a sociologist at the University of Washington and the director of the Digital Activism Research Project in the article. "... Policy changes are not usually the outcome."

I don't know how many of these 26 million people actually stand up against discrimination towards members of the LGBTQ community, but I know that I personally make the effort to create a social change outside of my social media.

I never back down from voicing my opinion while trying to make the more conservative side understand, because as much as the LGBTQ community is being more accepted, there are still many who don't accept it and I think they just need to be better informed.

I remember when I went to the Women's March last year, I was speaking to a lot of women and even men about what it meant to them and why they were marching that afternoon.

To my surprise, there were some women marching with the crowd who didn't have a specific answer other than, "I came with my friend, so we can fight for women's rights." Another said, "I'm standing up against the president."

At first glance, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with those answers, but for me, those answers seemed too far from the overall cause for the Women's March.

In 2013, the hashtag Black Lives Matter (BLM) was created after the horrific story went viral about George Zimmerman who was acquitted of all charges after fatally shooting Trayvon Martin.

That was only the beginning. More victims of police brutality became exposed, and this hashtag started to soar with an impressive 41 million tweets, according to NPR .

Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the BLM movement, told the the LA Times in an interview, "I think our target has been law enforcement, and that has been important because black folks not only are killed with impunity, but also black folks are some of the most marginalized and vulnerable communities in this country."

How many times have we "liked" or shared something affiliated with BLM on our social media movement? But, when the meme, article, or photo/video gets "liked" or shared, do we go the extra mile to do our part socially?

According to an article by Olivier Laurent at The Time.com , more than 70 million people from over 200 countries shared the hashtag Pray For Paris on Instagram following the terror attacks in Paris.

Although Paris is so far from our country, I wouldn't expect it to be easy for us to find an easy way to support the cause other than to display the "Peace For Paris" logo. However, we are living in a digital era, which means that we have access to so many resources like never before.

The digital era allows us to participate in hashtag activism, but the next time we like, share, or tweet something, I encourage everyone to do more than display the hashtag.

Find other ways to follow up on the cause, do your research, join meetings to spread awareness within communities, and help inform those who are clueless about the true meaning of the cause.

If we show our support just among our social media group of friends, odds are most of them already agree with your position. So, go find those who don't necessarily agree or are critics of the cause and don't be afraid to educate everyone.

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Hashtag Activism - Are You Really Doing Your Part?

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Love Wins, Women's March, Black Lives Matter, Pray For Paris; These are all hashtags I'm sure most of us, if not all, are familiar with. Perhaps we "liked" something affiliated with these hashtags on our social media, or marched among our friends, but are we really doing our part and standing up for these causes...

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After Kathua and Unnao rape incidents, there began a number of hashtags and profile picture blackening protests on social media. A few, while condemning the attacks just as strongly, felt that there was no point in these hashtag campaigns or profile photo blackening. While some others opined that it is a way to make your voice heard. Same goes with candlelight vigils and marches with placards. We ask activists, artistes and prominent women about their take on these kind of protests, and if it is effective in any way.

The intention should be right: Nimrat Kaur, Actress
Protests, candlelight vigils, marches with placards, and black profile pictures are correct as long as the intention behind these is genuine and not used for any vested interest. Personal interests have led to politicisation of similar issues in the past. But all those are matters of the past. At these times, protests are necessary to bring to the attention of the government such heinous crimes happening in our country, provided it is not linked to politics or used for any personal benefit.

Every drop counts: Madhu Nataraj, choreographer, educator, arts entrepreneur
I was a part of the protest in my own way virtually and it's important that women should stick together as it's getting worse by the day. It is necessary that people protest and I'm very glad that so many vigils happen. I think that nothing is futile. There is backlash over how a candlelight vigil would help. We've been the kind of citizens who firstly, don't go to vote and secondly, sit and complain, so every drop counts if you want to be the change that you want to see. I feel that changing profile pictures is a personal choice and I'm not against it. Everyone wants freedom of expression and safety in our society. They should definitely voice out their opinions and conversations are needed. I'm not sitting in judgement as the issue is too sensitive and it's something that needs to be addressed and acknowledged. If it takes this kind of virtual visibility, so be it.

It gives solace: Sudha Ramalingam, Activist
Expression of dissent or affirmation through candle light vigils or hashtags gives solace a sense of satisfaction for raising his or her voice on the issue at hand. Common persons find a medium to be heard through these hashtags or vigils. Loud and shrill voices in unison give a sense of purpose to its maker. Public opinions are necessarily built to reform the system though not instantaneously. It is also a medium to let the steam out of our system.

The most impractical way to protest: Sajna Vinish, singer-composer
I think it is the easiest and the most impractical way for one to show his/her protest on a certain matter. One can darken the profile picture, put hashtags and posts on social media to express their anger against the system. But what purpose does it actually serve? Rape is heinous and barbaric, but it is not new for us. As per statistics, one female is being raped in India every seven minutes and only one or two incidents get public attention. The cases of Nirbhaya and Jisha saw even more public outrage as people fought for justice through social media. But each time something like this happens, only the name changes. '#Justicefor' remains the same. This directly proves that things are not getting sorted out and are rather, getting worse.

I, therefore, think that putting these hashtags is like not understanding the gravity of the issue and kind of putting it down. And in this case, the entire matter has been elevated as a communal issue, which undoubtedly projects the irresponsibility of the administrative system. So rather than sympathising on the issue and putting hashtags by simply sitting in front of the computer, we need to find out how an effective solution can be found for a problem that pollutes our social environment.

Online activism is just not enough: Tejaswini Madabhushi, Activist
Hashtags and other ways of online activism are definitely not enough, we need to do a lot more, but it is harmless. I do not want to dismiss such activism because it does create a dialogue and gives rise to discussion. Even if it is just talk, I believe that nuanced discussion is required. We don't want justice to be only collective anger. We need to counter the rape culture and not just easily say 'hang the rapist'. What these discussions do is tackling the mindsets. We need to understand violence, patriarchy, atrocities against women; and do it right. Change won't happen overnight and these conversations will tackle the long-term goal.

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Does digital activism serve the purpose?

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After Kathua and Unnao rape incidents, there began a number of hashtags and profile picture blackening protests on social media. A few, while condemning the attacks just as strongly, felt that there was no point in these hashtag campaigns or profile photo blackening. While some others opined that it is a way to make your voice heard.

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Digitally documenting the crisis in Syria

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"War arrives suddenly, uninvited, and brings with it a new normal," writes Rania Abouzeid in No Turning Back, her poignant account of the Syrian conflict. Following the lives of a group of people from rebel-held areas over a period of five years, she brings home to us what television coverage rarely can: the human dimension of one of the most violent and complicated conflicts since World War II.

Speaking from her U.K. publisher's office in London, she explains how children learn the vocabulary, and sounds, of war; how the CIA armed rebel groups and used them to spy on jihadists; and why she believes the West should be providing more humanitarian aid to Syrians.
Your book brings to life the experiences over five years of a group of characters caught up in the Syrian conflict. Tell us a bit about your own background, as well as the dangers and other impediments you faced in your reporting.
I've been covering the Middle East and Southeast Asia for over 15 years, including a number of different conflicts. I covered the Tunisia uprising, the Egyptian Revolution, and made my way to Damascus in late February 2011 to get an idea of how the Syrian capital was responding to the momentous events that were happening. I witnessed one of the first protests, outside the Libyan Embassy, which was one of the biggest and earliest attempts by Syrians to push the boundaries in a state that had been governed by an emergency law since the 1960s. From that moment, I focused on Syria.
The United States lists the Nusra Front as a terrorist organization. Yet you eschew any political or ethical judgement in your portrait of one of its fighters, Mohammad. Don't you worry that by being sympathetic you are giving this brutal group a valuable propaganda coup?
I knew that whatever was going to happen there would affect the whole Middle East.

I learned in the summer of 2011 that I was blacklisted by Damascus, but not as a journalist. They considered me a spy working for several foreign states. I was wanted by three of the four main intelligence agencies and banned from entering the country. That forced me to focus on the rebel side, which meant being smuggled across the Turkish border into northern Syria. I did that for years, and even though I was banned by Damascus I managed to make two trips, one in 2013 and one in 2016, to government-held parts of Syria. It wasn't easy. It's a very vicious war, so it was a difficult story to report.

I am not being sympathetic, I am not being judgmental, I am just presenting the information and leaving it up to the readers. My goal is not to characterize, demonize, patronize, or glorify anybody. My interest is to understand. I want to understand a person's motivations, their worldview, and see what makes them tick. I believe very strongly in the intelligence of the readers. You don't need to bang them over the head with how terrible a person might be, because it's evident from their actions.
At one point, one of the people you write about, Ruha, says, "We were fated to learn about things children shouldn't learn about." Introduce us to this brave little girl, and tell us about the new vocabulary she learned.
Mohammad is a man who was radicalized at an early age and spent a number of stints in prison, which only served to further radicalize him. In 2011, he saw an opportunity to take revenge against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. He worked to push what was a peaceful revolution in a very different direction, along with other like-minded men.

In following his story and three al Qaeda characters, you see how the revolution was Islamized and the roles that organizations like al Qaeda played on the battlefield and also politically. Mohammad committed war crimes that he admits to, and is proud of. But it's not about me liking or disliking; it's about presenting information.
Another of your main characters, Suleiman, was from a good, middle-class family, wasn't he? Explain how he gets sucked into the conflict and his, and other rebels', use of social media. The U.S. fully entered the conflict in 2013. Tell us about Timber Sycamore and the espionage work of the Hazm militia.
Ruha was nine years old in 2011. The first time the reader sees her, she is opening the door to a dawn military raid on her family home because they're looking for her father, who was a protestor. She's a very precocious young girl who was absorbing what was happening around her, even though her parents tried to hide things from her. But they couldn't. Children very quickly learned and this was reflected in the games they played and the terminology they came to understand. For example, they learned what a mortar sounds like or the difference between a sniper's bullet and an anti-aircraft gun. The local version of cops and robbers became revolutionaries versus regime thugs. They also started incorporating the language they were hearing into their games and activities.
We can't talk about Syria without talking about ISIS. Tell us about Bandar's experience in Raqqa Your book ends on a redemptive note. Was that important to you? , capital of ISIS's so-called caliphate.
Ruha then became a refugee. She and her family escaped from Syria because her youngest sister, three-year-old Tarla, had an odd hormonal problem, which the few doctors left in town told her parents was brought about by fear. There were no specialists in their area so they escaped to seek medical treatment.
The conflict in Syria has claimed the lives of an estimated 500,000 people and seen more than 5.5 million flee the country. Do you see any hope that the civil war will be resolved any time soon?
Suleiman was a privileged young man who had things most young men want. He had a good job, a lot of money, and came from a family that had connections to the regime. He was also aware of his privilege and when the revolution started, in March 2011, Suleiman took to the streets because he felt that others deserved these same opportunities that he had. So he became a civil activist, documenting the weekly protests in his hometown using his smartphone and uploading them to social media, the same way that many thousands of Syrians did, to try and show the world what was happening in their homeland.
What more can the U.S. and other Western powers do?
The U.S. had been there from the beginning, but not in a leading role. Timber Sycamore was the code name for the CIA effort to arm the rebels, which came into being in late 2013. One of the first rebel groups to be vetted by the CIA was a group called the Hazm Movement and I outline, for the first time, in this book some of the group's clandestine work.

Hazm was one of the many rebel groups operating in Northern Syria. It had formed from the remnants of a much bigger group called the Farouq Brigades. That group splintered and from those splinters emerged the Hazm Movement. They were non-Jihadist and advocated a civil state in Syria. The espionage involved mapping out the foreign fighters and trying to find out who they were and what they were up to, because their idea for a future Syria didn't match Hazm's.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Bandar is a university student in Homs when you first see him in the book. He was a roommate with one of my four main characters, a man called Abu Azzam, who ends up becoming a commander in the Farouq Battalions. Bandar didn't want to participate in the protest. He disliked the regime of President Bashar al-Assad but feared retribution if he participated-not necessarily against himself, but against his family. He tried to stay away from the initial protests, even though his brother had picked up a gun and fought alongside his roommate Abu Azzam. Bandar watched it from a distance initially. He was from Eastern Syria, near Raqqa, so after Homs fell, he moved to Raqqa and watched the black flags come up and how the city, which was one of his adopted hometowns, changed in ways that both terrified and disgusted him.

I put hope in the subtitle because some of the people in the book haven't given up hope. They're still struggling and trying to rebuild their communities, as well as their lives. It was important to show that, even in the grimmest, darkest, bloodiest wars, there are still people who just want to live, and fight for that right, and cling to the things are singular to their culture and identity, like where they're from, their families, their dreams. These are the building blocks of the communities. Every life is consequential because it's part of the mosaic of society. That's true when that mosaic is unravelling; but it also works when that mosaic is being woven back together again.

I want readers to experience the book the way the characters experienced the realities on the ground. I want to place readers there, to give them a sense of what it was like for the people who were living it. They're all real people, there are no composite characters, and they went through things that most of us, if we're lucky, can't even imagine. I want to covey that with as much immediacy as I can.

All civil conflicts eventually end. The question is: When and how many more people have to die until you get to that end point? The Syrian conflict is no longer solely about Syrians. It's a complicated, international battlefield with Russians, Americans, Turks, and Saudis, the Gulf states and Iranians. The outcome has more or less been decided, in the sense that Assad is not going anywhere. He has no reason to negotiate his own demise, especially as he's making gains on the battlefield, thanks to his allies. But the war is by no means over. Syria is a very fragmented state and it'll still take many years to put it back together, in whatever form that eventually takes.

That's not a question for me to answer. I'm not on the opinion pages, and I try to stay off them. But the humanitarian need is massive, and it is woefully underfunded, whether inside Syria or for the refugees. It has been called the gravest humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II. Politics aside, just help on the humanitarian level. Start with that.

A portion of the earnings from No Turning Back will be given to Inara, a nonsectarian charity that provides medical care for children.

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"War arrives suddenly, uninvited, and brings with it a new normal," writes Rania Abouzeid in No Turning Back , her poignant account of the Syrian conflict. Following the lives of a group of people from rebel-held areas over a period of five years, she brings home to us what television coverage rarely can: the human dimension of one of the most violent and complicated conflicts since World War II.

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Battle Royal's taking over the gaming market

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Battle Royal's taking over the gaming market

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Rise in popularity of Battle Royal's

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PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and Fortnite, in which 100 people drop onto an island empty-handed, and have to scavenge for weapons and equipment. Those elements define the Battle Royale genre, along with one other: Last person standing wins.

Battle Royale went from obscure mod to mainstream game phenomenon in less than two years. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' massive popularity made major news of the genre through 2017, having sold more than 30 million copies on PC as of February 2018. The game also launched on Xbox One last year through the Xbox Game Preview program, where it added had another 3 million copies to its totals as of January 2018.

Meanwhile, Epic Games' free-to-play take on the idea, Battle Royale, has garnered an even larger audience. Fortnite earned a record-setting number of concurrent players in February (breaking a record set by PUBG), and broke the concurrent viewership record on Twitch in March.

Even without setting records, other games have been making waves: H1Z1, a Battle Royale title that predates both PUBG and Fortnite, recently announced the end of its long-running stint in PC game portal Steam's in-development "Early Access" section. Developer Daybreak Studios launched a "full release" with new content and a free-to-play business model, and announced partnerships with Facebook and Caesars Entertainment in Las Vegas to further develop the game as an esport.

Simon Darveau, creative director of recently launched Battle Royale game The Darwin Project said the success stories like that of Battlegrounds (or PUBG) are going to draw many, many more imitators. Aside from the insane popularity of PUBG and Fortnite, Darveau said Battle Royale will likely appeal to developer because doesn't really take much to create (or adapt) an existing project into something you might think of as a Battle Royale game. The signature trait of the form is its last-player-standing ruleset, an easy thing to add to any game; other usual elements, like open, explorable maps and random weapon spawns, don't take too much to develop.

"Every single IP (intellectual property) that you know that includes competitive gameplay can have Battle Royale," Darveau said. "And because they can, they will. And because everybody will, it'll become saturated and it'll be perceived like a bubble."

To many of the developers who have already launched Battle Royale games, the last game(s) standing will be the ones that look beyond taking part in the genre's popularity - and push the envelope for the entire video game industry.

A brief history of Battle Royale

The Battle Royale format didn't just appear overnight in PUBG and Fortnite. The genre as we know it now was born largely from multiplayer mods, primarily in multiplayer, open-world survival games, a trending game type among PC players that reached the height of its powers just a few years ago. In games like , , and Rust dropped players into hostile territory, places infested with enemies like zombies (as well as other players), and forced them to rely on their wits to find or make the items they needed to stay alive in those games.

Much of Battle Royale's feel emanates from the games that played host the genre's first iterations. When two players run into each other in these games, it's never clear what might happen. One player might kill the other and steal their stuff; the two people might team up and become friends; or they might seemingly come to an amicable agreement, only for one player to betray the other later.

"In DayZ, I realized for the first time that you could have social experiences with a strong social psychology element in it," Darveau said. "You could be psychologically abused in a game. ...And I feel like those are the most powerful experiences, and it kind of triggered in my brain, 'What the f-, why are games only about physical and mechanical skill, like dexterity, reflexes, timing, precision?'"

We think of Battle Royale primarily as a form of shooter, but the first of these mods was made for Minecraft. " Survival Games," a competitive take on the game modeled after the Hunger Games movies, gained popularity there, and that community spread the idea to others.

The social interactions between players in survival games inspired modders to create new, more competitive scenarios to throw players together: Brendan Greene, creator of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, created similar ideas for games like DayZ and Arma III.

"I loved the interactions that we had," Greene said. "You'd come across another group or a clan in like a town, and there would be an interaction with them, either good or bad. And I loved that idea that you're not dealing with AI (artificial intelligence), you're not dealing with a predictable mechanic, you're dealing with other people. And that's a lot of fun, because there are some crazy and strange people out there."

Greene's mods helped crystalize many aspects of "Battle Royale" as a game type, including the name. He named his survival shooter mods after Battle Royale, the 2000 Japanese cult classic movie, where a group of high school students are forced to fight to the death until only one survives.

Greene also created an official mod for zombie survival game H1Z1, and its popularity led to Daybreak creating its own Battle Royale mode for the game. Before long, H1Z1 was spinning off its zombie survival mode into another game and fully focusing on Battle Royale, becoming the first game in the genre as we know it.

Meanwhile, Greene went off to create his own Battle Royale title: PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, which, in early 2017. Epic Games followed PUBG later in the year with Fortnite: Battle Royale, a free-to-play competitive mode built to complement its co-op zombie survival game. Over time Fortnite has found an immense following, in part because its free-to-play, but also because of its unique spin on form - Using the mechanics created for Fortnite's original mode, now known as Fortnite: Save the World, Fortnite's Battle Royale adds Minecraft-like building capabilities that players use to construct their own fortifications.

Freedom through competition

So what makes Battle Royale so appealing to so many players? To Greene and Darveau, the genre's extension of the freedom of survival games, matched with just enough structure to drive matches forward, created an experience players couldn't find in existing shooters or more niche survival games.

"I think what Battle
Royale does is because
it's session-based, this
idea of permadeath gives you the high stakes feeling without the sort of long-term investment."

"I think, you know, especially with Battlegrounds, there's no right way to play it," Greene said. "However you want to play it is up to you. It's a challenge, you know - it's against other people. It's not something you can predict, it's against another person, and I think those are the best kind of interactions."

H1Z1 General Manager Anthony Castoro said the stakes of Battle Royale also work to set it apart from other competitive game genres. Unlike most shooters, in which players can die and then re-enter the game almost immediately, Battle Royale games incentivize survival.

The longer you stay alive, the more powerful (and invested) you become.

"For the longest time, there's been this fascination especially with core players with permadeath," he said, referring to the idea that players only get one life in games, and once they die, they lose all progress. "And for the most part, as a mainstream game designer, I sort of resisted that idea because the amount of investment you would make into your character and the time that you put in, that dying would be sort of this quitting event. But I think what Battle Royale does is because it's session-based, this idea of permadeath gives you the high stakes feeling without the sort of long-term investment. ... And even often if you lose, it's either 'I'm going to jump back in' or 'I'm going to break my keyboard,' but there's a lot of passion that's built up in that."

The Gladiator Effect

Battle Royale games also take advantage of a major trend in gaming in general, the rise of online streaming and game viewership. Battle Royale games are eminently watchable - The pacing a Battle Royale match is not just a barrage of constant action. Players interact with each other relatively infrequently, raising the tension levels as players go about gathering equipment, only to hear or see someone nearby - or get completely ambushed by another player they didn't know was present.

Darveau also noted that the elimination style of Battle Royale games mirrors another popular form in media: Reality TV shows.

"Every time you press play, there's a new experience waiting," Fortnite Design Lead Eric Williamson told Digital Trends via email. "And even though the only way to win is to be the last one standing, it's not just about winning. It's about all of the fun and hilarious things that can happen along the way, and experiencing that with your friends. But if you're able to make it to the last few minutes, the tension becomes so incredible. Battle Royale just provides such a great mix of highs and lows."

"If you're able to make it to the last few minutes, the tension becomes so incredible. Battle Royale just provides such a great mix of highs and lows.""

The fact that the Battle Royale genre is exciting to play and interesting to watch creates a unique situation that's in line with trends in gaming as a whole. Streaming has become a major part of the video game landscape. In January 2018, the average viewership of streaming site Twitch, which is largely dedicated to game streams, was almost a million people - meaning at any given time, about a million people are watching people play games. That's just one option for watching gaming content; another, YouTube, has seen videos for games such as Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto V garner tens of billions of views.

If Darveau is right, though, and the Battle Royale is due for a surge of "me too" games that will deaden its popularity (something that's happened time and again in video games, in genres from World War II first-person shooters, to MOBAs such as Dota 2 and League of Legends, and on to open-world survival games), where is Battle Royale going in the future?

The answer is different for each game, but it can be summarized in one concept: Innovation. Many of the ideas that are springing up in Battle Royale seem like natural expansions of big ideas in gaming, and they're likely to trickle out into the rest of the space.

Already, Battle Royale games are spinning out interesting ideas from the genre's natural affinity for competition and spectating. Games like The Darwin Project and Outpost Games' SOS, a multiplayer competition in which streaming is baked into the gameplay, put a twist on the Battle Royale idea by making spectating an interactive experience.

emphasizes an entertaining performance, makes streaming a part of the gameplay. Using a proprietary technology platform that works with a Twitch overlay, the game tracks how people watching the game react, through voting with reaction emojis, to the people playing it. The votes of the audience mean part of winning is being entertaining; it's possible to excel at the game purely through social engineering and the way players talk to and interact with each other.

In The Darwin Project, one player can control the Director, a flying, player-controlled TV camera that can influence the match by powering up or undercutting players. The game also can make the Director's powers available to everyone watching The Darwin Project on Twitch, allowing them to vote on who gets targeted for what interaction, changing the game on the fly as people play it.

During a recent invitational tournament that featured a number of big-name streamers, Darveau said, he was surprised to see how the collective consciousness of the audience altered the game - not to make their favorite streamer win every time, like he expected, but to balance the game on the fly.

"The idea that the game world is a living entity that's connected to the collective consciousness - I was under the impression that I was watching a reality show from the future," Darveau said. "It was just great. I had shivers."

There are many more games entering the field, though, even just in 2018. LawBreakers developer Boss Key Studios is the most recent entrant into the field, launching its free-to-play, '80s-inspired Radical Heights just last week. Other games on the horizon include a Battle Royale take on open-world zombie game Dying Light and one in hero shooter , as well as standalone games such as Islands of Nyne, , and , a game whose claim to fame will be its 400-player matches, instead of 100.

Evolve or Die

Even for the games currently at the height of popularity, and especially with new entries on the horizon ready to compete, the need to evolve is ever-present. For Greene, 2018 is a year to continue to polish and improve PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. PUBG's recently released "Event Mode" allows his team to try out new variations on the core Battlegrounds concept and get feedback on them from the player community. Greene also said improvements to things like the game's animations are going to dovetail into amping up existing its spectator experience and eSports scene - two areas the company is also looking to support down the line.

"My dream is to have a stadium full of people watching players battle it out in the center, and watching that first person have to get up and walk off."

"My dream is to have a stadium full of people watching players battle it out in the center, and watching that first person have to get up and walk off," he said. "These kind of events are what I wanted to see, so when I see those I guess I'll be happy that Battle Royale will have reached what I've always dreamed it could be."

Castoro sees the future of Battle Royale as a continued honing of the relatively young concept. A bubble is probably the way to think about it, he said, but there is still a lot of room for improvement on the concept, and in finding ways to capitalize on the ideas.

To that end, Daybreak recently released a new mode for H1Z1 called "Auto-Royale" - a version of the game in which teams of players fight to be the last standing, but play the entire match from the insides of cars.

The more longview approach for H1Z1 is in the game's life as a competitive eSport. Daybreak's recently announced partnerships with Facebook and Caesars Entertainment are all about advancing its "pro league," in which elite players compete in Battle Royale tournaments for cash prizes. Daybreak sees the future of Battle Royale as a spectator sport, as well as a game it wants everyone to play.

"All of our partners are very serious about a new way to do eSports and bring it to the masses," Castoro said. "Facebook is a mass market opportunity, a mass market play. Caesars Entertainment is mass market. Las Vegas, the venue, is mass market. And all of these companies are investing in large ways in this kind of content, and they see H1Z1 and Battle Royale as a way to blaze a new path for eSports."

So while the likelihood of a rush of Battle Royale games seems likely, it's elements like pushes in eSports and streaming that might expand the genre beyond a passing fad. Already the games are going beyond the experience of simply playing fun multiplayer games, to leverage the personalities of the people taking part in them.

That's where Darveau sees the video game industry at large heading, as it starts to understand its large spectator community. He expects it to become more like the sports world, taking advantage of great, entertaining players and giving others better experiences in watching and interacting with them.

"There are so many more spectators than there are players, and (streamers) are becoming very good, they're becoming very charismatic just like sports (players)," he said. "I think the way that the industry will evolve is actually toward the idea that every single player ... that creates a nice and entertaining experience, should be perceived as someone who has value and could be paid with value generated by people enjoying what he does. And I think that in 10 years, the industry will be like that."

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Massively multiplayer online role-playing game

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How 'Fortnite' and 'PUBG' took the Battle Royale genre to the forefront of gaming

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PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and Fortnite, in which 100 people drop onto an island empty-handed, and have to scavenge for weapons and equipment. Those elements define the Battle Royale genre, along with one other: Last person standing wins. Battle Royale went from obscure mod to mainstream game phenomenon in less than two years.

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Look into the amount of money spent on digital campaign advertisements

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Figures released this week by the Electoral Commission are the simplest way to demonstrate the growing influence of Facebook on British politics. Political parties nationally spent about £1.3m on Facebook during the 2015 general election campaign; two years later the figure soared to £3.2m.

In each election it was the Conservatives that spent the most, with decidedly mixed results. For David Cameron's successful re-election in 2015, the party spent £1.2m; that rose to £2.1m in 2017, but it was far less help to Theresa May.

Sam Jeffers, the co-founder of Who Targets Me, a body that tries to monitor political Facebook advertising, says the difference stems from the fact that the Conservatives had a better overall strategy in 2015. "In 2015 they targeted Lib Dem seats in the south-west; in 2017 they targeted Labour seats in London boroughs, spending money on seats they thought they would win but didn't," he says.

Nevertheless, the Conservative success was so striking in 2015 that every other political party and campaign group felt it had to follow suit.

The idea of marketing on Facebook was brought to the UK by the US political consultant Jim Messina, the campaign manager for Barack Obama in 2012, who Tory officials like to say boasted he had "1,000 pieces of data on every voter in the UK".

It was a big change on the traditional model of supplementing canvass returns with broad demographic data supplied by Experian's Mosaic, which divides people into groups such as "metro high flyers", "classic grandparents" and "disconnected youth" - the kind of data used by all the main parties to help deliver targeted mailshots.

The idea rapidly took hold - and was arguably tailor-made for the EU referendum in 2016. One of the reasons why the Conservatives made heavy use of Facebook marketing was because its canvassing operation is far weaker than Labour's, forcing it to try to identify potential voters using technology.

The temporary campaigns on both sides of the EU referendum debate had no voting history or canvass data they could rely on, making media and marketing messages even more crucial. Vote Leave, the Boris Johnson-fronted campaign, spent 40% of its total budget, or £2.7m, on the services of AggregateIQ, a little-known digital marketing firm based in British Columbia, Canada.

On Friday, in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica affair, Dominic Cummings, the campaign director for Vote Leave, downplayed the role of digital marketing in a lengthy blogpost: "It is hard to change people's minds. We are evolved creatures. If we were all dopey dupes we wouldn't be here, our ancestors would have all been killed."

Cummings blamed Arron Banks from the Leave.EU campaign, whose operation had a brief association with Cambridge Analytica at the end of 2015. Banks has said that Cambridge Analytica did no work for his group, partly because its offer was contingent on Leave.EU winning the designation to be the official leave campaign and so gaining official access to the UK electoral database, which did not happen.

But at the time, Cummings said Banks spread "bullshit about building a 'digital army'" among "a powerful network of MPs, donors, peers and assorted 'campaigners'", who in turn argued Banks should be allowed to control the digital aspects of Vote Leave's campaign.

Labour, too, wanted to revamp its own campaigning. The party was badly bruised by the 2015 loss, and with Jeremy Corbyn it had a 2017 candidate that supporters were eager to back online. The party revamped its Contact Creator software to allow it to target named voters identified by its canvassing via Facebook - and encouraged constituency candidates to do so locally as well.

The party spent £577,000 nationally on Facebook for the 2017 election, according to Electoral Commission figures, while its candidates in seats spent up to £1,000 each. But the party's agents say that although they would definitely spend on Facebook in the future, they could not be sure how effective their Facebook efforts were. "Some young people brought it up on the doorstep," one experienced agent says. "But all the data we could see is how many people clicked on our ads."

The spending continues unabated. The Conservative party in the London borough of Wandsworth has released a short video aimed at residents in the run-up to May's local elections, arguing that Wandsworth council, run by the party, "has the lowest average council tax in the country". A video encouraging people to join the leftwing organisation Momentum begins by singling out the Tory MP Iain Duncan Smith, saying he is "terrified of our unseat campaign" because he only has a majority of 2,500.

Tom Baldwin, a former communications director of the Labour party under Ed Miliband, who is writing a book on media and politics called Ctrl Alt Del, summarises the role of digital marketing in the last two elections as follows: "In 2015, Labour lost for all sorts of reasons: voter perceptions of Ed Miliband, views on economic competence, Scotland. But also the Tories understood it was possible to reach people very effectively at very low cost through Facebook. By 2017, Labour had caught up.

"They spent big on Facebook themselves while having a candidate and a campaign that people were willing to share content from across social media like never before in a UK election. It wasn't the only reason why Theresa May did so badly - she was a bad candidate, running a bad campaign - but it made a difference."
Topics

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Rise of digital politics: why UK parties spend big on Facebook

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Figures released this week by the Electoral Commission are the simplest way to demonstrate the growing influence of Facebook on British politics. Political parties nationally spent about £1.3m on Facebook during the 2015 general election campaign; two years later the figure soared to £3.2m.

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Research and statistics on early internet politics

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by Michael Cornfield, electionmall.com and Lee Rainie, Pew Internet & American Life Project

When computers and the internet first asserted themselves in Americans' cultural imagination in the early 1990s, some foresaw a golden era of politics. As citizens gained more access to information and as their voices could more easily be projected into political discourse via bulletin boards, Web sites and listservs, candidates would have more reason to communicate directly with voters. Campaigns would become cheaper and more honest, while the power of lobbyists, political action committees, consultants and other middlemen would fade. ¹

Recently, as we've gained more experience with our new technological toys, a less optimistic take has emerged: Forget the golden era; through partisan blogs, political web sites and customized news, the internet only hardens our views, polarizes our politics and contributes to the nation's red and blue divides.

So, is the internet the lever for direct democracy? Or is it a wedge for political polarization? Either conclusion may prove too simple. To understand how technology might reshape politics in the years ahead, consider what we've learned from the initial decade of online campaigning, and the degree to which both our fears and hopes have been realized. Let's consider the record on various assertions about its impact:

The internet has transformed political fundraising, advertising and mobilization.

Not so much. However you measure it, online fundraising has indeed increased substantially since 1998, the first year for which we have meaningful data. The growth lines cannot be plotted on a chart with total confidence, because of inconsistencies in Federal Election Communications reporting requirements and industry tabulations and because software packages for campaigns don't require lots of specific detail on these issues.

It's clear that the previous highwater mark for online fundraising - the reported $80 million raised in internet donations by John Kerry in 2004 - is sure to be topped in 2008. This year, the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org has already raised more than $20 million, most of it online, and total online fundraising could reach $100 million. Still, that's less than one 20th of total campaign fundraising this election cycle, which the Center for Responsive Politics puts at $2.6 billion.

Futhermore, the bulk of the political cash raised online is still being spent on tried-and-true outreach efforts such as television advertising, direct mail and telephone calls. In other words, 21st-century fundraising is paying for the same old-fashioned communications mechanisms that have dominated U.S. politics since the 1960s.

Estimates by the research firm PQ Media indicate that online campaign advertising increased to $40 million this year, compared with $29 million in the 2004 election cycle. The firm estimates this represents just 1 percent of all political media spending, and some online ad-buyers think that is high. By contrast, spending on campaign television spots alone might have hit $2 billion this year, according to Evan Tracey of the Campaign Media Analysis Group.

Meanwhile, email is not close to challenging direct mail and phone calls as methods of reaching voters: A survey last month by the Pew Research Center for The People & The Press found that 38 percent of registered voters had received phone calls about the midterm campaign, while only 15 percent had received email.

In 2004, Drs. Quin Monson of Brigham Young University and D. Sunshine Hillygus of Harvard University tracked 1,606 voters during the last three weeks of the campaign for the Brigham Young University Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy. Less than 4 percent of the sample reported receiving a political email message. All told, they received 2,466 unique pieces of direct mail, 9,627 phone calls and 399 personal visits - but only 254 unique campaign email messages.

The internet fosters political "balkanization."

It's not that simple. Yes, partisanship has grown. Analysis of Pew polls has documented how people's views, especially on national security issues and on issues of personal finances, have intensified into distinct partisan realms. But the phenomenon began long before PCs and Internet access became staples of middle-class life.

At the same time, current Internet use may be reinforcing such developments. There is evidence in the surveys of the Pew Internet & American Life Project that people use the internet to help them find and join groups that share their ideological, cultural, and lifestyle preferences. Furthermore, Pew internet work has tracked the rise in the incidence of those who use the internet to customize the news they get - in effect, creating a "Daily Me."

But that is not the whole story. A Pew Internet survey also found that, during the 2004 campaign, internet users were more likely to be aware of differing political views -including those that counter their own beliefs - than non-users. This finding persisted across a wide set of issues, including the merits of George W. Bush versus John Kerry, the war in Iraq, free trade and gay marriage. It seems the internet opens doors to all kinds of information, whether we agree with it or not.

The internet combats political apathy and brings new voters to the polls.

The jury is still out. There is some indication in the research of Dr. Bruce Bimber at the University of California-Santa Barbara in 2000 ² and the Pew Internet Project in 2004 that people who obtain political news and information online are more likely to have voted than those who do not get such information online. But this is not the same as saying that internet causes people to vote. The causal arrow is more like a spinning weather vane here: It could be that politically active citizens are simply more likely to scour the Web for additional insight or political ammunition.

Any number of factors affects the probability that a person will vote, and the internet is just one among them. For instance, in the hotly contested 2004 election, the post-election survey by Pew Internet and People & the Press projects found that partisan identification exerted a big pull toward the voting booth. Those with strong political party connections are very likely to vote, especially in campaigns where the perceived stakes are high. In addition, better educated people are likely voters, and the impact of having a college degree on the chances of voting in 2004 was about twice as powerful as someone's use of the internet for political purposes.

YouTube is the new "killer app" that will transform U.S. politics.

While some of the biggest claims about the impact of the internet are not yet being realized, there is no doubt that new technologies are insinuating themselves into politics. In 2004, 75 million Americans used the internet in some way to engage in politics. Every serious candidate has a Web site that allows for donations, email-alert signups, links to blogs. Some candidates have set up pages on MySpace, Facebook, and lesser known social-networking sites.

And each 24-month election cycle features a motherboard of new campaign devices, techniques, and software applications. This is no surprise to those familiar with Moore's Law, which posits a doubling of computer power every 18 months. (Talk about a great Crystal Ball! Gordon Moore said that in 1965, and it has held true ever since.) The appearance of a popular new web application or tactic (microtargeting) regularly generates a rush to judgment about its transformative impact.

This year's hot new function is YouTube. As recently as the 2004 campaign cycle, an individual with a home-video or a snippet of television programming had a very hard time making it available to the general public for viewing at their pleasure. No longer. Anyone can follow the easy steps to load a video into the YouTube repository, and mark it with key words so it can be easily found and viewed by those in search of campaign footage.

Now, any candidate who nods off at hearings (Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana), runs away from questioners (Rep. Sue Kelly of New York), or comes up with unusual words with which to address opposition videographers (Sen. George Allen of Virginia) must continuously monitor YouTube - along with Googling and Wikipedia'ing themselves - to see what citizen media-creators have wrought.

This could be a major change. Yet, it is very likely that post-election research will confirm the evidence from past campaigns. Online videos will have registered with some voters. Yet, for most, the political news and information on television and in newspapers will have been more routinely part of their lives. It is also likely that the greatest impact of YouTube material will have come through its amplification by the parties and mainstream media.

Our crystal ball

YouTube now takes its place in the procession of internet-driven innovations in politics: candidate web sites in1996, email in 1998 (the Jesse Ventura campaign), online fundraising in 2000 (John McCain), blogs in 2003 (Howard Dean), net-organized house parties in 2004 (Bush-Cheney).

What's next? It could be spin-doctors using google-bombing to frame debates. (Google bombing is a technique where many links are created so that certain search terms become associated with certain individuals and organizations. Learn more.

Or, the next hot innovation could involve mobile applications, especially text messaging, to register and mobilize voters. It could be video emails from candidates that inoculate them against embarrassing YouTube moments. It could be citizen mashups that weave database material, home videos, podcasts, and broadcast snippets into new forms of activism.

As the technology and applications of it evolve there will be new internet effects to test. An emerging contender is the assertion by some that the internet - and the blogosphere in particular - suit the left better than the right. Perhaps, some have mused, the internet is the left's answer to talk radio. (The most recent example: Michael J. Fox's pro-stem call research ads attracted blogger buzz, one million YouTube visits, and challenges from Rush Limbaugh.)

That notion might match some parts of the record, but does not account for such conservative-leaning landmarks as the release of the Starr Report, the online support networks that helped Jesse Ventura win Minnesota's governorship in 1998, John McCain's success online in 2000, or the successful ongoing online efforts of cultural conservatives to galvanize voters in recent elections.

Looking ahead, it's clear that the Internet's role in politics will continue evolving as the technology improves and users continuously adapt it for new purposes. And someday, the iconic internet president may emerge, dominating the medium like FDR did with radio and JFK and Ronald Reagan did with television.

But thus far, the most compelling narrative about the internet's political is not about candidates' skill with new media. Rather, it centers on stories from the grassroots: activists' use of email and Web sites; small donors' contributions online; bloggers' passion to tell stories and debate issues; and amateur videographers' quest to record "gotcha" moments. Perhaps that is the most fitting contribution this technology can endow to democracy.
Michael Cornfield is vice president of public affairs at electionmall.com, a nonpartisan campaign technology company. Lee Rainie is director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
A shorter version of this article appeared in the Outlook section of the Washington Post on Nov. 5, 2006.

Notes

¹A compendium of 1990s predictions about the impact of the internet on politics can be found here.

² Bimber, Bruce, "Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power." University of Cambridge. Cambridge, UK. 2003

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The Internet and Politics: No Revolution, Yet

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by Michael Cornfield, electionmall.com and Lee Rainie, Pew Internet & American Life Project When computers and the internet first asserted themselves in Americans' cultural imagination in the early 1990s, some foresaw a golden era of politics.

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Looks into ideas of communities on platforms that doesn't give full control to the communities themselves

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The psychologists David W. McMillan and David M. Chavis outlined four basic elements of community in a 1986 article titled "Sense of Community: A Definition and Theory." There was membership, or "the feeling of belonging"; influence, or the "sense of mattering, of making a difference to a group"; reinforcement, or "the feeling that members' needs will be met"; and shared emotional connection, or the "belief that members have shared and will share history, common places, time together and similar experiences."

McMillan and Chavis also cited an important distinction between two types of community that have long coexisted. One is geographical - neighborhood, town, city - and the other is "relational," concerned with the interconnections among people. Our sense of community seems to shift steadily among these very different modes of thinking. Over the decades, its meaning has lost the precision of city limits and has expanded to accommodate groups with shared values, planned and intentional organizations and a general sense of interpersonal connectedness. In 2018, it feels as if community is about being recognized as a certain kind of person - when it's not merely about fitting into a broad category. In other words, our sense of community is less and less about being from someplace and more about being like someone.

This is certainly how it works in politics, where "community" magically converts huge groups of people - what we'd maybe once have called a constituency - into neat, undifferentiated units. Community is the spoonful of sugar that makes the othering go down. A politician might gingerly refer to "the black community," which sounds more validating and supportive than simply saying "black people." A "community," it's implied, is vibrant and productive and self-sustaining. It doesn't need others outside it to defend its rights or protect its interests. Adweek once suggested that "the female community is finding and establishing itself among the ranks of the techies in the Big Apple." The "female community," of course, implies that disenfranchisement is just another ladies' choice.

Nobody belongs to just one community, which is part of how communities exert their influence on us: We are different people inside different ones. Our roles and identities shift from one to the next, in large part because the spaces ask different things of us - sometimes under duress. Community can do powerful things to us, as anyone who has ever felt trapped in a small town or dissented from a religious group knows pretty well. A community can liberate or encourage conformity; it can include or keep people out.

In the utopian-village sense of a "community," it's other human beings who accomplish this, exerting all their different social pressures over us to make us behave a certain way. This is a dynamic we can understand, and accept. Raymond Williams's observation - that "community" seems never to be used unfavorably - still rings true. We imagine community as a cocreated project in which everything can be negotiated, in which everyone has a stake, in which democracy can flourish. The only things that can't be negotiated are the laws of nature, the floods and droughts and cataclysms and acts of God no village can avoid.

The digital platforms where we fall into all our different groups make us a similar offer, presenting the communities they host as rich, human-built spaces where we can gather, matter, have a voice and feel supported. But their promise of community masks a whole other layer of control - an organizing, siphoning, coercive force with its own private purposes. This is what seems to have been sinking in, for more of us, over the past months, as attention turns toward these platforms and sentiment turns against them. When you're on Facebook, Facebook is the laws of nature, the force that creates its own ecosystem and determines its workings. It gets to send floods, bring droughts, strike down users and strip-mine their information, decide which community is targeted with what. It can build tools to censor the content a nation like China might wish to censor, and systems that suppress - or fail to suppress - content stoking ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. These powers aren't jointly held; they're entirely private. They eat away at the very thing that makes community worthwhile, until they've created something that's not a community at all, but a simulation of one, a game with one winner and a community of losers.

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What Good Is 'Community' When Someone Else Makes All the Rules?

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The psychologists David W. McMillan and David M. Chavis outlined four basic elements of community in a 1986 article titled "Sense of Community: A Definition and Theory."

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Politics of Silicon valley and whats gone wrong 

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Politics of Silicon valley and whats gone wrong 

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VR pioneer interview over what has happened in tech and what is wrong with it

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Over the last few months, Select All has interviewed more than a dozen prominent technology figures about what has gone wrong with the contemporary internet for a project called "The Internet Apologizes." We're now publishing lengthier transcripts of each individual interview. This interview features Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in the field of virtual reality and the founder of the first company to sell VR goggles. Lanier currently works at Microsoft Research as an interdisciplinary scientist. He is the author of the forthcoming book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.
You can find other interviews from this series here.
Jaron Lanier: Can I just say one thing now, just to be very clear? Professionally, I'm at Microsoft, but when I speak to you, I'm not representing Microsoft at all. There's not even the slightest hint that this represents any official Microsoft thing. I have an agreement within which I'm able to be an independent public intellectual, even if it means criticizing them. I just want to be very clear that this isn't a Microsoft position.

Noah Kulwin: Understood.
Yeah, sorry. I really just wanted to get that down. So now please go ahead, I'm so sorry to interrupt you.

In November, you told Maureen Dowd that it's scary and awful how out of touch Silicon Valley people have become. It's a pretty forward remark. I'm kind of curious what you mean by that.
To me, one of the patterns we see that makes the world go wrong is when somebody acts as if they aren't powerful when they actually are powerful. So if you're still reacting against whatever you used to struggle for, but actually you're in control, then you end up creating great damage in the world. Like, oh, I don't know, I could give you many examples. But let's say like Russia's still acting as if it's being destroyed when it isn't, and it's creating great damage in the world. And Silicon Valley's kind of like that.

We used to be kind of rebels, like, if you go back to the origins of Silicon Valley culture, there were these big traditional companies like IBM that seemed to be impenetrable fortresses. And we had to create our own world. To us, we were the underdogs and we had to struggle. And we've won. I mean, we have just totally won. We run everything. We are the conduit of everything else happening in the world. We've disrupted absolutely everything. Politics, finance, education, media, relationships - family relationships, romantic relationships - we've put ourselves in the middle of everything, we've absolutely won. But we don't act like it.

We have no sense of balance or modesty or graciousness having won. We're still acting as if we're in trouble and we have to defend ourselves, which is preposterous. And so in doing that we really kind of turn into assholes, you know?

How do you think that siege mentality has fed into the ongoing crisis with the tech backlash?
One of the problems is that we've isolated ourselves through extreme wealth and success. Before, we might've been isolated because we were nerdy insurgents. But now we've found a new method to isolate ourselves, where we're just so successful and so different from so many other people that our circumstances are different. And we have less in common with all the people whose lives we've disrupted. I'm just really struck by that. I'm struck with just how much better off we are financially, and I don't like the feeling of it.

Personally, I would give up a lot of the wealth and elite status that we have in order to just live in a friendly, more connected world where it would be easier to move about and not feel like everything else is insecure and falling apart. People in the tech world, they're all doing great, they all feel secure. I mean they might worry about a nuclear attack or something, but their personal lives are really secure.

And then when you move out of the tech world, everybody's struggling. It's a very strange thing. The numbers show an economy that's doing well, but the reality is that the way it's doing well doesn't give many people a feeling of security or confidence in their futures. It's like everybody's working for Uber in one way or another. Everything's become the gig economy. And we routed it that way, that's our doing. There's this strange feeling when you just look outside of the tight circle of Silicon Valley, almost like entering another country, where people are less secure. It's not a good feeling. I don't think it's worth it, I think we're wrong to want that feeling.

It's not so much that they're doing badly, but they have only labor and no capital. Or the way I used to put it is, they have to sing for their supper, for every single meal. It's making everyone else take on all the risk. It's like we're the people running the casino and everybody else takes the risks and we don't. That's how it feels to me. It's not so much that everyone else is doing badly as that they've lost economic capital and standing, and momentum and plannability. It's a subtle difference.

There's still this rhetoric of being the underdog in the tech industry. The attitude within the Valley is "Are you kidding? You think we're resting on our laurels? No! We have to fight for every yard."
There's this question of whether what you're fighting for is something that's really new and a benefit for humanity, or if you're only engaged in a sort of contest with other people that's fundamentally not meaningful to anyone else. The theory of markets and capitalism is that when we compete, what we're competing for is to get better at something that's actually a benefit to people, so that everybody wins. So if you're building a better mousetrap, or a better machine-learning algorithm, then that competition should generate improvement for everybody.

But if it's a purely abstract competition set up between insiders to the exclusion of outsiders, it might feel like a competition, it might feel very challenging and stressful and hard to the people doing it, but it doesn't actually do anything for anybody else. It's no longer genuinely productive for anybody, it's a fake. And I'm a little concerned that a lot of what we've been doing in Silicon Valley has started to take on that quality. I think that's been a problem in Wall Street for a while, but the way it's been a problem in Wall Street has been aided by Silicon Valley. Everything becomes a little more abstract and a little more computer-based. You have this very complex style of competition that might not actually have much substance to it.

You look at the big platforms, and it's not like there's this bountiful ecosystem of start-ups. The rate of small-business creation is at its lowest in decades, and instead you have a certain number of start-ups competing to be acquired by a handful of companies. There are not that many varying powers, there's just a few.
That's something I've been complaining about and I've written about for a while, that Silicon Valley used to be this place where people could do a start-up and the start-up might become a big company on its own, or it might be acquired, or it might merge into things. But lately it kind of feels like both at the start and at the end of the life of a start-up, things are a little bit more constrained. It used to be that you didn't have to know the right people, but now you do. You have to get in with the right angel investors or incubator or whatever at the start. And they're just a small number, it's like a social order, you have to get into them. And then the output on the other side is usually being acquired by one of a very small number of top companies.

There are a few exceptions, you can see Dropbox's IPO. But they're rarer and rarer. And I suspect Dropbox in the future might very well be acquired by one of the giants. It's not clear that it'll survive as its own thing in the long term. I mean, we don't know. I have no inside information about that, I'm just saying that the much more typical scenario now, as you described, is that the companies go to one of the biggies.

I'm kind of curious what you think needs to happen to prevent future platforms, like VR, from going the way of social media and reaching this really profitable crisis state.
A lot of the rhetoric of Silicon Valley that has the utopian ring about creating meaningful communities where everybody's creative and people collaborate and all this stuff - I don't wanna make too much of my own contribution, but I was kind of the first author of some of that rhetoric a long time ago. So it kind of stings for me to see it misused. Like, I used to talk about how virtual reality could be a tool for empathy, and then I see Mark Zuckerberg talking about how VR could be a tool for empathy while being profoundly nonempathic, using VR to tour Puerto Rico after the storm, after Maria. One has this feeling of having contributed to something that's gone very wrong.

So I guess the overall way I think of it is, first, we might remember ourselves as having been lucky that some of these problems started to come to a head during the social-media era, before tools like virtual reality become more prominent, because the technology is still not as intense as it probably will be in the future. So as bad as it's been, as bad as the election interference and the fomenting of ethnic warfare, and the empowering of neo-Nazis, and the bullying - as bad as all of that has been, we might remember ourselves as having been fortunate that it happened when the technology was really just little slabs we carried around in our pockets that we could look at and that could talk to us, or little speakers we could talk to. It wasn't yet a whole simulated reality that we could inhabit.

Because that will be so much more intense, and that has so much more potential for behavior modification, and fooling people, and controlling people. So things potentially could get a lot worse, and hopefully they'll get better as a result of our experiences during this era.

As far as what to do differently, I've had a particular take on this for a long time that not everybody agrees with. I think the fundamental mistake we made is that we set up the wrong financial incentives, and that's caused us to turn into jerks and screw around with people too much. Way back in the '80s, we wanted everything to be free because we were hippie socialists. But we also loved entrepreneurs because we loved Steve Jobs. So you wanna be both a socialist and a libertarian at the same time, and it's absurd. But that's the kind of absurdity that Silicon Valley culture has to grapple with.

And there's only one way to merge the two things, which is what we call the advertising model, where everything's free but you pay for it by selling ads. But then because the technology gets better and better, the computers get bigger and cheaper, there's more and more data - what started out as advertising morphed into continuous behavior modification on a mass basis, with everyone under surveillance by their devices and receiving calculated stimulus to modify them. So you end up with this mass behavior-modification empire, which is straight out of Philip K. Dick, or from earlier generations, from 1984.

It's this thing that we were warned about. It's this thing that we knew could happen. Norbert Wiener, who coined the term cybernetics, warned about it as a possibility. And despite all the warnings, and despite all of the cautions, we just walked right into it, and we created mass behavior-modification regimes out of our digital networks. We did it out of this desire to be both cool socialists and cool libertarians at the same time.

This dovetails with something you've said in the past that's with me, which is your phrase Digital Maoism. Do you think that the Digital Maoism that you described years ago - are those the people who run Silicon Valley today?
I was talking about a few different things at the time I wrote "Digital Maoism." One of them was the way that we were centralizing culture, even though the rhetoric was that we were distributing it. Before Wikipedia, I think it would have been viewed as being this horrible thing to say that there could only be one encyclopedia, and that there would be one dominant entry for a given topic. Instead, there were different encyclopedias. There would be variations not so much in what facts were presented, but in the way they were presented. That voice was a real thing.

And then we moved to this idea that we have a single dominant encyclopedia that was supposed to be the truth for the global AI or something like that. But there's something deeply pernicious about that. So we're saying anybody can write for Wikipedia, so it's, like, purely democratic and it's this wonderful open thing, and yet the bizarreness is that that open democratic process is on the surface of something that struck me as being Maoist, which is that there's this one point of view that's then gonna be the official one.

And then I also noticed that that process of people being put into a global system in which they're supposed to work together toward some sort of dominating megabrain that's the one truth didn't seem to bring out the best in people, that people turned aggressive and mean-spirited when they interacted in that context. I had worked on some content for Britannica years and years ago, and I never experienced the kind of just petty meanness that's just commonplace in everything about the internet. Among many other places, on Wikipedia.

On the one hand, you have this very open collective process actually in the service of this very domineering global brain, destroyer of local interpretation, destroyer of individual voice process. And then you also have this thing that seems to bring out this meanness in people, where people get into this kind of mob mentality and they become unkind to each other. And those two things have happened all over the internet; they're both very present in Facebook, everywhere. And it's a bit of a subtle debate, and it takes a while to work through it with somebody who doesn't see what I'm talking about. That was what I was talking about.

But then there's this other thing about the centralization of economic power. What happened with Maoists and with communists in general, and neo-Marxists and all kinds of similar movements, is that on the surface, you say everybody shares, everybody's equal, we're not gonna have this capitalist concentration. But then there's some other entity that might not look like traditional capitalism, but is effectively some kind of robber baron that actually owns everything, some kind of Communist Party actually controls everything, and you have just a very small number of individuals who become hyperempowered and everybody else loses power.

And exactly the same thing has happened with the supposed openness of the internet, where you say, "Isn't it wonderful, with Facebook and Twitter anybody can express themselves. Everybody's an equal, everybody's empowered." But in fact, we're in a period of time of extreme concentration of wealth and power, and it's precisely around those who run the biggest computers. So the truth and the effect is just the opposite of what the rhetoric is and the immediate experience.

A lot of people were furious with me over Digital Maoism and felt that I had betrayed our cause or something, and I lost some friends over it. And some of it was actually hard. But I fail to see how it was anything but accurate. I don't wanna brag, but I think I was just right. I think that that's what was going on and that's what's happening in China. But what's worse is that it's happening elsewhere.

The thing is, I'm not sure that what's going on in the U.S. is that distinct from what's going on in China. I think there are some differences, but they're in degree; they're not stark. The Chinese are saying if you have a low social rating you can't get on the subway, but on the other hand, we're doing algorithmic profiling that's sending people to jail, and we know that the algorithms are racist. Are we really that much better?

I'm not really sure. I think it would be hard to determine it. But I think we're doing many of the same things; it's just that we package them in a slightly different way when we tell stories to ourselves.

This is something I write about, you know I have another book coming out shortly?

Yeah, that was gonna be where I took this next.
One of the things that I've been concerned about is this illusion where you think that you're in this super-democratic open thing, but actually it's exactly the opposite; it's actually creating a super concentration of wealth and power, and disempowering you. This has been particularly cruel politically. Every time there's some movement, like the Black Lives Matter movement, or maybe now the March for Our Lives movement, or #MeToo, or very classically the Arab Spring, you have this initial period where people feel like they're on this magic-carpet ride and that social media is letting them broadcast their opinions for very low cost, and that they're able to reach people and organize faster than ever before. And they're thinking, Wow, Facebook and Twitter are these wonderful tools of democracy.

But then the algorithms have to maximize value from all the data that's coming in. So they test use that data. And it just turns out as a matter of course, that the same data that is a positive, constructive process for the people who generated it - Black Lives Matter, or the Arab Spring - can be used to irritate other groups. And unfortunately there's this asymmetry in human emotions where the negative emotions of fear and hatred and paranoia and resentment come up faster, more cheaply, and they're harder to dispel than the positive emotions. So what happens is, every time there's some positive motion in these networks, the negative reaction is actually more powerful. So when you have a Black Lives Matter, the result of that is the empowerment of the worst racists and neo-Nazis in a way that hasn't been seen in generations. When you have an Arab Spring, the result ultimately is the network empowerment of ISIS and other extremists - bloodthirsty, horrible things, the likes of which haven't been seen in the Arab world or in Islam for years, if ever.

Black Lives Matter has incredible visibility, but the reality is that even though it has had an enormous effect on the discursive level, and at making the country fixated on this conversation, that's distinct from political force necessary to effect that change. What do you think about the sort of gap between what Silicon Valley platforms have promised in that respect and then the material reality?
That observation - that social-media politics is all talk and no action or something, or that it's empty - is compatible with, but a little bit different from, what I was saying. I'm saying that it empowers its opposite more than the original good intention. And those two things can both be true at once, but I just wanna point out that they're two different explanations for why nothing decent seems to come out in the end.

I want to be wrong. I especially wanna be wrong about the March for Our Lives kids. I really wanna be wrong about them. I want them to not fall into this because they're our hope, they're the future of our country, so I very deeply, profoundly wanna be wrong. I don't want their social-media data to empower the opposite movement that ends up being more powerful because negative emotions are more powerful. I just wanna be wrong. I so wanna be telling you bullshit right now.

So far it's been right, but that doesn't mean it will continue to be. So please let me be wrong.

Platforms seem trapped in this fundamental tension, and I'm just not sure how they break out of that.
My feeling is that if the theory is correct that we got into this by trying to be socialist and libertarian at the same time, and getting the worst of both worlds, then we have to choose. You either have to say, "Okay, Facebook is not going to be a business anymore. We said we wanted to create this thing to connect people, but we're actually making the world worse, so we're not gonna allow people to advertise on it; we're not gonna allow anybody to have any influence on your feed but you. This is all about you. We're gonna turn it into a nonprofit; we're gonna give it to each country; it'll be nationalized. We'll do some final stock things so all the people who contributed to it will be rich beyond their dreams. But then after that it's done; it's not a business. We'll buy back everybody's stock and it's done. It's over. That's it."

That's one option. So it just turns into a socialist enterprise; we let it be nationalized and it's gone. The other option is to monetize it. And that's the one that I'm personally more interested in. And what that would look like is, we'd ask those who can afford to - which would be a lot of people in the world, certainly most people in the West - to start paying for it. And then we'd also pay people who provide data into it that's exceptionally valuable to the network, and it would become a source of economic growth. And we would outlaw advertising on it. There would no longer be third parties paying to influence you.

Because as long as you have advertising, you have this perverse incentive to make it manipulative. You can't have a behavior-modification machine with advertisers and have anything ethical; it's not possible. You could get away with it barely with television because television wasn't as effective at modifying people. But this, there's no ethical way to have advertising.

So you'd ban advertising, and you'd start paying people, a subset of people; a minority of people would start earning their living because they just do stuff that other people love to look at over Facebook or the other social networks, or YouTube for that matter. And then most people would pay into it in the same way that we pay into something like Netflix or HBO Now.

And one of the things I wanna point out is that back at the time when Facebook was founded, the belief was that in the future there wouldn't be paid people making movies and television because armies of unpaid volunteers organized through our network schemes would make superior content, just like what happened with Wikipedia. But what actually happened is, when people started paying for Netflix, we got what we call Peak TV - things got much better as a result of it being monetized.

So I think if we had a situation where people were paying for something like Facebook, and being paid for it, and advertising was absolutely outlawed, the only customer would be the user, there would be no other customer. If we got into that situation, I think we have at least a chance of achieving Peak Social Media, just like we achieved Peak TV. We might actually see things improve a great deal.

So that's the solution that I think is better. But we can't do this combination of libertarian and communist ideology. It just doesn't work. You have to choose one.

You've written this book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts. I don't want to make you summarize the whole book, but I want to ask what you thought was the most urgent argument, and to explain why.
Okay. By the way, it's ... For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.

Right now! So the whole thing is already urgent, so which of these urgent pleas do you believe to be the most pressing?
There's one that's a little complicated, which is the last one. Because I have the one about politics, and I have the one about economics. That it's ruining politics, it's empowering the most obnoxious people to be the most powerful inherently, and that's destroying the world. I have the one about economics, how it's centralizing wealth even while it seems to be democratizing it. I have the one about how it makes you feel sad; I have all these different ones.

But at the end, I have one that's a spiritual one. The argument is that social media hates your soul. And it suggests that there's a whole spiritual, religious belief system along with social media like Facebook that I think people don't like. And it's also fucking phony and false. It suggests that life is some kind of optimization, like you're supposed to be struggling to get more followers and friends. Zuckerberg even talked about how the new goal of Facebook would be to give everybody a meaningful life, as if something about Facebook is where the meaning of life is.

It suggests that you're just a cog in a giant global brain or something like that. The rhetoric from the companies is often about AI, that what they're really doing - like YouTube's parent company, Google, says what they really are is building the giant global brain that'll inherit the earth and they'll upload you to that brain and then you won't have to die. It's very, very religious in the rhetoric. And so it's turning into this new religion, and it's a religion that doesn't care about you. It's a religion that's completely lacking in empathy or any kind of personal acknowledgment. And it's a bad religion. It's a nerdy, empty, sterile, ugly, useless religion that's based on false ideas. And I think that of all of the things, that's the worst thing about it.

I mean, it's sort of like a cult of personality. It's like in North Korea or some regime where the religion is your purpose to serve this one guy. And your purpose is to serve this one system, which happens to be controlled by one guy, in the case of Facebook.

It's not as blunt and out there, but that is the underlying message of it and it's ugly and bad. I loathe it, and I think a lot of people have that feeling, but they might not have articulated it or gotten it to the surface because it's just such a weird and new situation.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
On the other hand, there's a rising backlash that may end the platforms before they have the opportunity to take root and produce yet another vicious problem.
I'm in my late 50s now. I have an 11-year-old daughter, and the thing that bothers me so much is that we're giving them a world that isn't as good as the world we received. We're giving them a world in which their hopes for being able to create a decent, happy, reasonably low-stress life, where they can have their own kids, it's just not as good as what we were given. We have not done well by them.

And then to say that observing our own mistakes means that you're old and don't get it is profoundly counterproductive. It's really just a way of evading our own responsibility. The truth is that we totally have screwed over younger generations. And that's a bigger story than just the social-media and tech thing, but the social-media and tech thing is a big part of it. We've created a scammy society where we concentrate wealth in ways that are petty and not helpful, and we've given them a world of far fewer options than we had. There's nothing I want more than for the younger people to create successful lives and create a world that they love. I mean, that's what it's all about. But to say that the path to that is for them to agree with the thing we made for them is just so self-serving and so obnoxiously narcissistic that it makes me wanna throw up.

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Jaron Lanier Q&A: 'We Won, and We Turned Into Assholes'

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Over the last few months, Select All has interviewed more than a dozen prominent technology figures about what has gone wrong with the contemporary internet for a project called " The Internet Apologizes ." We're now publishing lengthier transcripts of each individual interview.

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Calling for the break up of tech companies 

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Calling for the break up of tech companies 

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Vince Cable compares large tech companies to oil monopolies of the early 20th century that need to be regulated

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Vince Cable has compared Google, Amazon and Facebook to the US oil monopolies that exploited their market power more than a century ago - and called for them to be broken up.

In a speech in London, the Liberal Democrat leader said a series of recent scandals, including revelations about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, meant the "tech titans" had "progressed from heroes to villains very quickly".

"Just as Standard Oil once cornered 85% of the refined oil market, today Google drives 89% of internet searches, 95% of young adults on the internet use a Facebook product, Amazon accounts for 75% of ebook sales, while Google and Apple combined provide 99% of mobile operating systems," he said.

Cable, a former business secretary who practised as an economist before entering politics, said the power these giant firms exercise is not like that of traditional monopolies, which exploited their control of scarce resources such as raw materials to overcharge customers.

"Whatever these companies do, they are not price gouging - since their headline price is always zero," he said. "It is the forces underlying this apparently free bounty that politicians must address."

Cable raised four concerns: the use of platforms such as YouTube "as a conduit for content which society regards as unacceptable"; the systematic spread of fake news; the firms' sheer size, making them "a barrier rather than a boon to entrepreneurship" - and the inability of tax authorities to force them to pay their fair share.

"The new internet giants operate in a largely borderless world where their main source of profit is intangible intellectual property rather than measurable 'things'. This is difficult to track and quantify and has turned national tax authorities into largely powerless bystanders," he said.

He called for mergers to be more closely scrutinised; and for authorities to engage in "trust-busting" - breaking up oversized companies that can exploit their dominance to harm consumers - adding that the European Union is better-placed to do this than national governments working alone.

"There is a case for splitting Amazon into three separate businesses - one offering cloud computing, one acting as a general retailer and one offering a third-party marketplace. Other examples would be Facebook being forced to divest itself of Instagram and WhatsApp as a condition for operating in the EU, creating two new social media networks. Divesting Google of YouTube would be another," he said.

Cable also said it was time to consider whether the public should be paid for handing over their data.

"The new oil is data. Data is the raw material which drives these firms and it is control of data which gives them an advantage over competitors," he said.

"By putting data in people's hands and empowering them to choose who to sell it to, personal data would no longer be monopolised by the tech giants, and innovative insurgents could buy the data they needed instead of letting themselves be bought up to access the giants' data pools."

Politicians have been scrambling to address the challenge of regulating the sprawling tech firms, after a series of recent scandals.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donned a suit and tie to face hours of questioning by US politicians. And in Britain, the culture secretary Matt Hancock hauled in Facebook executives and warned them he would not allow them to "shirk their responsibilities to our citizens".
Topics

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Cable calls for 'tech titans' Google, Facebook and Amazon to be broken up

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Vince Cable has compared Google, Amazon and Facebook to the US oil monopolies that exploited their market power more than a century ago - and called for them to be broken up. In a speech in London, the Liberal Democrat leader said a series of recent scandals, including revelations about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, meant the "tech titans" had "progressed from heroes to villains very quickly".

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After the senate hearing on FB, new laws could be on the way

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After the senate hearing on FB, new laws could be on the way

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Due to the outcomes of the senate hearing we may be seeing new legislation created regarding how tech companies work

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"MY GOAL was never really to make Facebook cool. I am not a cool person," said Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of the social-media giant, in 2014. That has never been more true. His company has spent the past year stumbling through controversies over the peddling of fake news and enabling Russian manipulation of American voters, with various degrees of ineptitude. Then, on March 17th, articles in the New York Times and Britain's Observer newspaper suggested that a political consultancy, Cambridge Analytica, had obtained detailed data about some 50m Facebook users and shared this trove of information and analysis with third parties, including Donald Trump's presidential campaign. The result is a corporate crisis-and a political reckoning.

Republicans and Democrats alike have called on Mr Zuckerberg and the heads of other tech firms to testify before the Senate. America's consumer watchdog, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), has also reportedly launched an investigation into Facebook's privacy policies and whether it violated a consent decree of 2011 requiring the social network to notify users about how their data are shared. British MPs have called for Mr Zuckerberg to come before a select committee.
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Even Facebook's allies have unfriended it. On Twitter, Brian Acton, a co-founder of the popular messaging app WhatsApp (which Facebook bought for $22bn in 2014), encouraged people to "#DeleteFacebook". News of his post pinged around the internet, including on Facebook itself. Investors, who have forgiven months of bad headlines in light of Facebook's strong financial performance, are growing jittery. Between March 16th and March 21st the firm's share price fell by 8.5%, erasing $45bn in market value. Facebook is still the world's eighth-most-valuable publicly listed firm, but shareholders worry that politicians in Europe and America may impose onerous restrictions on data, suppressing growth.

Help yourself to our data

The Cambridge Analytica scandal reveals Facebook's morphing, porous privacy policies and the company's cavalier approach to oversight. The data on Facebook users were obtained by Aleksandr Kogan, a researcher at Cambridge University, who enticed some 270,000 people to take part in a survey in exchange for a small fee. When those users installed the survey app, they shared details about themselves and-unwittingly-their friends, around 50m Facebook users in all. Surprisingly, before 2015 Facebook's rules allowed the mining of social connections without each user's consent.

What happened next was never permitted by Facebook. Mr Kogan provided these data to Cambridge Analytica, which then allegedly shared them with customers, including Mr Trump's campaign. Cambridge Analytica is backed by Robert Mercer, a Republican donor; Steve Bannon, formerly a top adviser to Mr Trump, used to serve as an executive. ( The Economist used Cambridge Analytica for a market-research project in the past.)

Although news of Cambridge Analytica's peddling of Facebook data was first reported in December 2015, the social network reportedly did not respond until eight months later, with a letter asking the firm to delete the data. It seems not to have checked that this was done. The lax response is evidence of wider "systemic operational problems", says Brian Wieser of Pivotal Research, who follows the firm.

If reports are to be believed, Cambridge Analytica has a habit of pushing ethical and legal boundaries to gather data. On March 20th Alexander Nix, its chief executive, was suspended after recordings were aired on British television that seem to capture him describing manipulating people for information. Britain's data-protection regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office, is expected to search Cambridge Analytica's offices.

The scandal reverberates through politics as well as the internet. Facebook has built a mammoth advertising business, with sales of around $40bn in 2017, by gathering detailed information about users' identities and behaviour online and then selling access to them. Facebook tracks users not only on its services, including its eponymous social network and Instagram (which it owns), but across the web. Knowing that someone is a dog owner and interested in buying a new lead may not seem controversial. "Microtargeting" someone in order to influence their political views and voting behaviour appears more sinister.

Though political advertising is still a minuscule percentage of Facebook's revenues, perhaps around 3%, it is a growing and lucrative line. Politicians have found that using Facebook can pay dividends. Even without using illegitimately obtained data to boost targeting, the social-media firm offers precise tools to political campaigns, including reaching users on Facebook whose names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses they already have. Facebook also enables campaigns to target voters who show an interest in the same issues or have similar profiles, packaging them into what it calls "lookalike audiences". No other Western company apart from Google has such rich data.

Barack Obama's campaigns were digitally sophisticated and used Facebook to reach prospective voters. Yet Mr Obama got proper permission to obtain data about people's friends and did not microtarget users on an industrial scale, unlike Mr Trump's campaign. Targeting based on Cambridge Analytica's data may have helped Mr Trump win the presidency, although how much cannot be known.

A tepid response

Companies can overcome scandals. Rupert Murdoch, a media mogul, survived a maelstrom in 2011 when it was reported that a newspaper he owned had hacked the phone of a murdered girl, Milly Dowler. Mr Zuckerberg, like Mr Murdoch, has structured ownership of his firm so that he controls super-voting shares, and will probably maintain his power. But there is speculation that some of his lieutenants, including Sheryl Sandberg, could leave in the next year. The head of security, Alex Stamos, is expected to resign.

Mr Zuckerberg's response to the scandal has been modest. He has apologised and promised thorough audits of third-party app developers and steps to make it easier for users to control their privacy settings. Such basic assurances may not be enough to reverse flagging corporate morale and win back the enthusiasm of users. Trust in social media is already low, and Americans have been spending less time on Facebook, in part because so much of what they see online is negative and dubious. Globally, users spent around 50m hours less per day on Facebook in the fourth quarter of 2017, which translates into a 15% drop in time spent year over year, according to Mr Wieser.

As some users turn away, politicians in America and Europe are likely to give Facebook more of their attention. They are scrutinising Facebook's conduct and may propose new laws, especially in the domain of data privacy. In May regulations concerning data protection and user consent will come into effect in Europe. America has historically been weak on data protection, except for specific industries like health care. Overworked regulators have typically responded to reports of misconduct on a case-by-case basis, and the online advertising industry has been trusted to police itself.

Mr Obama was in favour of a consumer-privacy bill of rights, which would give users more control of their online data by requiring user consent. That made little headway because of opposition from the industry. Some politicians may want to revive talk of such a law, especially as Europe strengthens its safeguards. But political reformers seldom have an easy time in America. And, like many others, politicians have come to rely on Facebook.

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The Facebook scandal could change politics as well as the internet

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"MY GOAL was never really to make Facebook cool. I am not a cool person," said Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of the social-media giant, in 2014. That has never been more true. His company has spent the past year stumbling through controversies over the peddling of fake news and enabling Russian manipulation of American voters, with various degrees of ineptitude.

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Internet not completely going in the direction we thought

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Internet not completely going in the direction we thought

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The internet seems to be dividing us more than it is bring us together as predicted years ago

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It used to be that the internet was viewed as a way of connecting people, but it's been evolving into a force that's dividing them, says Mark Penn, the author of "Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving the Big Disruptions Today."

In an updated version of his book "Microtrends," Penn examined the idea that the technological world is separating us as a society.

"It's very hard to understand what's happening in the world," Penn tells CBS News chief White House correspondent Major Garrett. "Think of the world as an impressionist painting with lots of little dots. Microtrends are those dots. They're the smaller trends that have incredible significance."

"Microtrends Squared," revisits some theories that did not come to pass. "I always say that we're never good predictors of the future, because we don't understand the present well enough," said Penn, who was chief strategy officer for Microsoft from 2014 to 2016, and a pollster and strategist for Bill and Hillary Clinton from 1995 to 2008.

Just a decade ago, Penn was sure online dating would break down social barriers, "I theorized that it would mean incredible social mobility." In his new book, though, he observed a different outcome -- that instead, the internet has created more niche subsections.

Penn noticed that while the internet brought more diverse people to a single platforms -- like a dating website -- people can now give six criteria to find a person who matches their interests. People can find someone just like them, he says.

"We thought that this world of choice and personalization would really result in us becoming one big more homogeneous pool where everyone is connected to everybody else. Instead it helped us niche ourselves up," says Penn, "whether it's products, news, politics. And those niches then become kind of cocoons, that really enveloped us and separated us instead of connected us."
For more of Major's conversation with Mark Penn download "The Takeout" podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, or Spotify. New episodes are available every Friday morning. Also, you can watch "The Takeout" on CBSN Friday and Saturday nights at 9pm ET/PT. For a full archive of "The Takeout" episodes, visit www.takeoutpodcast.com. And you can listen to "The Takeout" on select CBS News Radio affiliates (check your local listings). Facebook, Twitter, Instagram: @takeoutpodcast Email: takeoutpodcast@cbsnews.com

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Why we may be wrong about the internet - according to Mark Penn

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It used to be that the internet was viewed as a way of connecting people, but it's been evolving into a force that's dividing them, says Mark Penn, the author of "Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving the Big Disruptions Today."

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How people are using apps to make edits to their face for the perfect selfie

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For the first time ever, the Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before both houses of the US Congress.

On Tuesday, he will testify before a joint sitting of two Senate committees - the commerce, science, and transportation committee, and the judiciary committee. On Wednesday, he will then testify before the House energy and commerce committee. His opening testimony to the House committee has already been released, which you can read in full here.

His appearance comes in the wake of revelations surrounding the abuse of millions of users' personal data by the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. It also comes as the ongoing investigation by US special prosecutor Robert Mueller continues to shed light on the vast scale of Russian government-backed operations to sow discord and fake news on social media platforms, especially Facebook, during the 2016 presidential election.

Zuckerberg has come a long way since the day when, shortly after Donald Trump won the presidential election in November 2016, he said: "the idea that fake news on Facebook ... influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea."

What a difference a year makes. "We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake," Zuckerberg will tell the committee on Wednesday. "It was my mistake, and I'm sorry." That in itself doesn't mean much. Congressional testimony is often an opportunity for political theatre and showboating, rather than an attempt to seek genuine insight.

But even if Zuckerberg's testimony ends up being little more than a circus, here are the five core questions that Facebook really needs to answer, and why:

Can Facebook guarantee that companies like Cambridge Analytica can't get hold of user data like this again?

In his testimony, Zuckerberg will explain that the data gathered by Cambridge Analytica originated from a single personality quiz app, created in 2013 by a researcher at Cambridge University named Aleksandr Kogan. That app, which was downloaded by around 300,000 people, could also access the data of the friends of those who installed it - giving Cambridge Analytica, with whom Kogan later shared his data, the personal information of 87m users.

Zuckerberg says that in 2014 Facebook made changes to "dramatically restrict the amount of data that developers can access", which he said would "prevent any app like Kogan's from being able to access as much Facebook data today".

However, it is still unclear how many applications from Facebook's early days might have had access to similarly vast data sets, let alone how many outside organisations like Cambridge Analytica might have been able to access them. Facebook appears to have spent some years operating what was effectively an honour system: Kogan's app was banned only in 2015, when Facebook says it learned from journalists at The Guardian that data had been shared.

That implies that there was no internal system for tracking and protecting user data, outside of the steps individual users could take with their privacy settings. Worse, it suggests that Facebook then simply asked Kogan to "formally certify" that the data had been deleted, and, according to Zuckerberg's testimony, only learned last month that it had been lied to.

Ultimately, while it is good that Zuckerberg is finally apologising for shutting the stable door far too late, we still don't know how many horses bolted or where they went. It is possible that Facebook doesn't even know that itself.

Why did Facebook take so long to respond after they learned of what Cambridge Analytica did?

Facebook is instigating changes that remove developers' access to data if an app remains unused for three months, reducing the data given to an app, and also instigating a "contract" that developers will now have to sign imposing "strict requirements" if they want their app to request other user data.

But it is only imposing them now, three years after Zuckerberg says the company learned that the data had been shared with Cambridge Analytica. Why did the company not take firmer action at the time to prevent user data being used without its users' consent?

At the moment, it looks as if Facebook was caught on the back foot by the response to the Cambridge Analytica story. It seems clear that it simply didn't think it was a big deal at the time.

Will there be any meaningful changes to how Facebook operates in the long run?

Sorry definitely does not seem to be the hardest word in Silicon Valley. In fact, the unofficial catchphrase of the tech industry is "move fast and break things". Facebook has long embodied this aphorism, and Zuckerberg has demonstrated time and again that he prefers to ask for forgiveness than permission.

He may be contrite now, in the face of massive public opprobrium, but he has been here many times before. "We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it," Zuckerberg wrote after users objected to Beacon, Facebook's first targeted-advertising system, which pulled in data from third-party sites and was instigated without users' permission in 2007.

There was more outrage in 2014, when 700,000 users discovered they had been used as part of a creepy psychological experiment into whether Facebook could use different content to manipulate their emotions. In this case, Zuckerberg didn't even bother to respond himself; instead, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer and Zuckerberg's effective number two, made a breathtaking non-apology apology. "It was poorly communicated... and for that communication we apologise," she said, adding: "We never meant to upset you."

Those are just a few of many times Facebook has had to grovel to its users over the years, but its behaviour never seems to change. Given this history of responding to criticism only when it becomes too noisy to ignore, and then resuming business as usual once attention dies down, it is crucial that Zuckerberg is pressed on maintaining accountability in the long term.

How is it possible Facebook was unaware of the Russian activity on its platform?

This question, in various forms, is of course fairly likely to be asked, especially by the Democrats on the committee.

In October, then-senator Al Franken asked it of Colin Stretch, Facebook's general counsel, during another committee hearing: "How did Facebook, which prides itself on being able to process billions of data points and instantly transform them into personal connections for its users, somehow not make the connection that electoral ads paid for in roubles were coming from Russia? Those are two data points! American political ads and Russian money: roubles. How could you not connect those two dots?"

The answer is likely that Facebook didn't care about where its money was coming from, or the content of the advertisements.

A particularly bleak illustration of that: an investigation by ProPublica in September 2017 found that Facebook's tool presented advertisers with specific options for targeting users with key-phrases including "Jew hater" or "How to burn Jews".

Zuckerberg has pledged to increase the size of the team working on security and content review from 15,000 to 20,000, and also changed the policies around political advertising to mean that anyone running a political ad must be "authorised" to do so, and he will reiterate that pledge in his testimony.

But that itself won't necessarily fix the problem. The actions of organisations like the notorious troll farm called the Internet Research Agency, which was singled out for indictment by Mueller in February, weren't limited to just political advertising; they were able to use Facebook in a much broader way to sow random discord around issues like guns and race in America.

With Facebook, Zuckerberg built a tool for the manipulation of public opinion more powerful than perhaps any other in history. He knows this, because Facebook has built an advertising business worth $40bn a year off the back of it. If you build a tool like that, you don't get to act surprised when people use it for nefarious ends.

Will Facebook take action to address the fact that the users aren't the customers - they're the product?

This is the greatest challenge for Facebook. Its executives, Zuckerberg included, talk a good game about the "responsibility" they face as the administrators of the "community". But that is directly at odds with the company's business model, for which all communities on the site are little more than a useful way of packaging and commodifying users for further targeting by advertisers. Selling the ability to target its users isn't some small side-project, it's the primary business model.

The most breathtaking line in Zuckerberg's testimony is the line "I've directed our teams to invest so much in security - on top of the other investments we're making - that it will significantly impact our profitability going forward." That he would even make such a complaint about the effect on Facebook's profit-margin even is perhaps more illuminating than he intended it to be.

In order to be able to tell whether Zuckerberg is serious or not in this act of performative public contrition, it is crucial to know whether or not he is serious about protecting his users. That means an apology alone isn't good enough; he needs to act to make clear that protecting users is a real priority for Facebook, not merely a nuisance to be occasionally mollified with an apology and then safely ignored.

That would mean not only acting to protect users from not only the publically known dangers to their privacy or safety, but also taking clear steps to protect them from possible unknown and future threats as well. That would also mean working with lawmakers on building a safe regulatory environment for Facebook and platforms like it, no matter what that might mean for the profit-margin. He has floated the idea of an independent "Supreme Court" to settle disputes over independent speech, which would be a good start, but he has given no details as to how such a structure would work.

It seems that the only language Zuckerberg understands is that of shame, so maybe the public ritual he is about to endure before Congress will finally convince him to change his cavalier attitude. But it seems unlikely.

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How millions are turning to "digital plastic surgery" in the quest for the perfect selfie

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For the first time ever, the Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before both houses of the US Congress. On Tuesday, he will testify before a joint sitting of two Senate committees - the commerce, science, and transportation committee, and the judiciary committee. On Wednesday, he will then testify before the House energy and commerce committee.

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Passing of new laws against revenge porn and the first  lawsuit against it

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What appears to be New York City's first suit under a new revenge porn law was filed last week by a CUNY associate professor of public health against an ex-boyfriend and a group of anonymous individuals that allegedly used Tumblr to distribute pornographic images of her, reports Motherboard.

While New York state law currently protects individuals when sexually explicit images are taken and shared without their knowledge, that does not apply when the images were willingly shared. The state senate passed a bill that would criminalize the latter as well in March, but it is still waiting on the state Assembly for consideration. New York City, however, passed its own measure in November, which went into effect in February. It makes the non-consensual sharing of intimate photos or videos a misdemeanor, and offenders can face up to a year in prison and a $1000 fine.

The complaint was brought by Dr. Spring Chenoa Cooper, who says her ex, Ryan Broems, harassed her for weeks after they broke up in November. According to the complaint, the two had argued previously about his "proclivity for masturbating to online revenge pornography" and that after their breakup, he continued to harass her with invasive questions about her sex life and demand explicit photos. When she blocked his text messages and Snapchat account, she received a message from a Tumblr user named Calidaddy26 - whom she told The New York Post she believed to be her ex - that threatened to "post you on my slut-exposing blog" if she did not agree to "be my personal webslut." The user then allegedly uploaded multiple intimate images of her, which she had shared exclusively with Broems, to Tumblr.

Although she was granted a Temporary Order of Protection against Broems from the New York County Family Court, the complaint says the harassment continued on Twitter. "When Dr. Cooper blocked one Twitter account he was using to contact her, he would simply create another; each time, Dr. Cooper would block the account." After a Facebook threat that similarly threatened to post more explicit images, Cooper filed a police report - and eight more images exclusively available to Broems were then uploaded to Tumblr. After Broems was arrested in February, the complaint alleges that he or someone under his direction created more Tumblr pages with explicit images of Cooper, including a screenshot of her faculty page at CUNY.

In addition to Broems and Calidaddy26, it names Tumblr user Inriskwetrust as well as John Does 1-100, alleging that they further shared the images on Tumblr. The complaint is significant beyond just being the first under New York City law: it attempts to create real consequences for users who retweeted and shared the images.

The incident also demonstrates some deep-seated flaws within social media sites such as Facebook, Tumblr, or Twitter, and their ability to stop ongoing harassment and revenge porn. While a spokesperson for Tumblr told Motherboard that the company is committed to enforcing its Terms of Service, and that non-consensual imagery is prohibited, Cooper notes in the complaint that she has been forced to spend several hours a day to locate and request that the images be removed, and that Tumblr can take "days or weeks" to remove the content. In her suit, Cooper says that Broems inflicted severe emotional distress and attempted to harm her reputation and career, causing "economic harm," and seeks punitive damages.

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The first lawsuit has been filed under a new revenge porn law in New York City

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What appears to be New York City's first suit under a new revenge porn law was filed last week by a CUNY associate professor of public health against an ex-boyfriend and a group of anonymous individuals that allegedly used Tumblr to distribute pornographic images of her, reports Motherboard .

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Persona and jokes in admission
process

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Six thousand miles away from campus, USC was a dream school for Da Zhong Wang, a high school senior at the Western Academy of Beijing. And when he found USC's Facebook meme group, "USC Memes for Spoiled Pre-Teens," last May, he knew he wanted to apply.

Nationwide, with the popularization of memes, groups like these have come to represent an integral part of campus culture, and prospective students like Wang utilize them to gain insight into schools during the college application process.

This year, USC's acceptance rate dropped three percentage points, elevating its status among other elite institutions, and creating the potential to improve its national ranking. Wang was among those rejected, but instead of grieving over the decision, he decided to post a meme in the form of an email to USC Admissions.

"Thank you for your interest in giving me a rejection letter," Wang's meme said. "I have reviewed your letter and I am impressed with your rejection reasons and other suggestions. However, I have received many rejection letters this year. Under careful consideration I decided not to accept your rejection letter."

Wang was bummed. But he wasn't going to let that rejection get to him.

"I just thought I might write something funny ... it was nothing hostile towards the admission committee," Wang said.

And the Admissions Office noticed the post after it garnered over 2,400 likes. Director of Admission Kirk Brennan left an ambiguous comment on Wang's post: "It might just work."

The group, now filled with over 30,000 members started when Megan Andersen, a sophomore majoring in electrical engineering, and Elise Vondra, a sophomore majoring in aerospace engineering, thought it might be a good idea to have a USC-specific meme group. The page was inspired by UC Berkeley's, "UC Berkeley Memes for Edgy Teens," and has grown far more rapidly than its creators anticipated.

In fact, USC's page was one of the first-ever college meme groups, among several other West Coast schools.

Within the past year, campus meme culture has catapulted into the mainstream. In June, a group of incoming Harvard freshmen were revoked admission to the university for creating a private Harvard memes group chat that featured insensitive memes mocking topics likesexual assault, pedophilia and the Holocaust, according to The Harvard Crimson. But at USC, Andersen regards the page's popularity as a result of students' willingness to partake in self-deprecating humor and satire as a form of stress relief, reassurance and solidarity.

"As we see with all college meme groups that have rose to prominence, it's a great way to get out your frustrations and stress from your classes and just college life in general," Andersen said. "I think that's sort of where the meme page is great because it can bring together people from different areas in USC."

Memes, a term originally coined in reference to cultural units that are imitated among the population, are transformed or duplicated to include different narratives as they are shared. An academic study on memes from the University of Arkansas found that memes represent participation in digital culture, similar to a form of social discourse.

At USC, the group poses an opportunity for students to spread social commentary about the school through sharp-tongued humor, from poking fun at different programs of study to complaining about USC's Wi-Fi networks. While some memes are made for comedic effect, others are satirical criticisms of the University. In fact, some of the most popular memes have focused on tuition increases, gentrification of the local community and the Greek system.

"I think [the meme page] is the most relevant forum on campus ... If anything goes on, I think that's almost the news source that people check," said John Lynch, a sophomore majoring in screenwriting. Lynch is an administrator of the group alongside Andersen and Vondra. "If anything happens, people are automatically making jokes about it or if there's any issues people are going there."

Last year, Lynch posted a meme pointing out Kappa Kappa Gamma Sorority's lack of diversity. The post racked up 2.6K likes - and even some backlash. According to Andersen, stereotypes about USC glorify Trojan Greek life, and Lynch's meme could have disrupted prospective students' beliefs about fraternities and sororities at USC.

Andersen recalls her own college selection process and noted how touring campuses or browsing online forums like College Confidential did not allow her to get a comprehensive look at prospective schools. However, she hopes the meme page can be a helpful and honest resource for interested students.

"It gives USC a lot more, as a school, human qualities," Andersen said. "A campus tour is like -here's what I'm told to present by the admission office so it looks as good as possible, whereas with the meme page we're not affiliated with USC at all. We're from USC, but [the school] doesn't tell us what to post or promote. It's very genuinely from the students and what they're feeling."

Students like Wang, who have grown up immersed in internet culture, appear more attracted to schools that have a prominent online presence like a meme page. Wang said the meme page gave him access to detailed inside information about the school.

"I realized [the meme page] was really helpful because ... the memes they shared are very University specific, so it actually gave me a lot of insight that I wouldn't find anywhere else," he said. "They kind of give off the vibe of each school, each major, how they're like, even down to the specific professors and individuals in the school ... There are universities out there with basically zero humor, and it's nice to see that there's an atmosphere at [USC]."

Cody Bishop, a high school senior at La Costa Canyon High School in Carlsbad, Calif., applied to USC and, like Wang, posted a meme after he was rejected. Bishop said he appreciated the support and positive comments on his meme.

"It felt pretty nice," Bishop said. "[On] the USC meme page, they kind of just connected with you ... [People] said don't give up - you'll probably make it one day if you really try hard enough."

And perhaps students like Bishop and Wang won't stay on the page, but Andersen said she wants students -accepted or not - to enjoy the humor of the Facebook group.

"I feel awful that all these people on the meme page who are so excited about USC didn't get in," Andersen said. "I hope that they realize they're still welcome on the meme page no matter what ... I hope that the meme page can stay a positive and good thing for USC campus like I think it is right now."

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Memes, Teens and Admission Deans: How meme culture is shaping USC's image | Daily Trojan

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Six thousand miles away from campus, USC was a dream school for Da Zhong Wang, a high school senior at the Western Academy of Beijing. And when he found USC's Facebook meme group, "USC Memes for Spoiled Pre-Teens," last May, he knew he wanted to apply.

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Possible misuse of personal  data that could have affected brexit vote outcome brought into question after facebook scandal

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Damian Collins is a few minutes late for our interview in his House of Commons office and immediately apologises. Even in normal times, as chairman of the digital, culture, media and sport committee, he has a lot on his plate. But over the last few weeks, since the Observer broke the story of the Facebook data scandal, the spotlight has fallen on this 44-year-old backbench Tory MP in a way that neither he, nor anyone else, could ever have imagined.

He describes it as a global story and believes "we are only in the foothills" of understanding its enormity, and potential repercussions. "The problem could be far bigger than we realise," he says. An inquiry that his committee was already conducting into fake news is mushrooming into something far wider, attracting extraordinary levels of interest from across the world. It is now about Facebook and its billions of users, the security of people's data in the digital age, and the urgent need for outdated regulatory systems and UK electoral laws to catch up with the scorching pace of technological advance. "We are at a moment," Collins says. "It is like The Wizard of Oz. The curtain has been pulled. Our electoral law was created for a pre-internet world - and that has to change."

When he and his all-party committee interviewed the former Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Chris Wylie on 27 March, the MPs found themselves at the centre of a media event the likes of which Westminster had never seen before. "It was the biggest ever live-streamed audience that parliament has ever had," he says. "We were told if we were doing anything like that again, parliament would have to upgrade its IT systems to cope: 14,000 organisations from across the world were live-streaming footage at one time."

He is deeply immersed in the detail and believes the separate inquiries by his committee, the information commissioner and the Electoral Commission could have very far-reaching implications. Asked if the misuse of data may have affected the result of the 2016 Brexit referendum, he says: "Whether we will ever be in a position to say that the level of interference was such that the result is called into question, I don't know."

But it is a possibility that it did? "There will need to be some public debate about that, because it will be a bigger question to say: 'Do we think it was so compromised there has to be a rerun?' I don't think we are at that point yet."

This coming week - and next - the world's media will be feasting again on the deliberations of his committee as key figures are called in to give evidence. On Tuesday will be Brittany Kaiser, a former business development director at Cambridge Analytica. Kaiser worked to find clients for the election consultancy. " I'm so tired of making excuses for old white men", she said last month, following revelations by the Guardian and Observer of a murky operation by suspected Israeli hackers to obtain the private emails of the current president of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari. Kaiser's story of how the Israelis got their information was even worse.

Collins and his colleagues will want to tease out more of what, precisely, that story is. The day after will, potentially, be even more explosive. Alexander Nix, the former Cambridge Analytica chief executive, will appear for a second time. He has been recalled to account for "inconsistencies" in his earlier evidence.

At his previous appearance Nix denied that his company had acquired data from Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge University academic responsible for building the This is Your Digital Life app which amassed the data of 87 million Facebook users, much of which ultimately ended up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica.

Asked whether he thinks Nix lied last time, Collins is clear. "We asked him directly if they had got data from Kogan and he said that they hadn't - and they had. He said this was a fairly small research project that hadn't really gone anywhere." So what could be the sanctions if Nix is judged to have lied to parliament?

Collins notes that there are ancient statutes which once allowed parliament to send people to prison but he doubts these could be used these days. More likely is that Nix could be forced to apologise to parliament. And if people are found to have broken the law, could the police get involved? "Ultimately if the Electoral Commission believes the law has been broken that power is absolutely there," he says.

Even before this story blew up Collins had already made his mark, and shown how a Commons select committee can effect real changes. Previous work on the use of drugs in sport, particularly professional cycling, as well as inquires into secondary ticketing and the case of Eni Aluko, the black woman footballer who claimed she was the subject of racial prejudice from the former England manager Mark Sampson, were hugely influential in promoting change.

Now, however, he sees the committee's central task as one of strengthening the institutions that are supposed to safeguard the UK's democracy. The system is completely unfit for purpose in the digital age, Collins believes. The Information Commissioner's Office urgently needs to have its powers increased, he insists, and he is pressing ministers to do this through the data protection bill now going through parliament.

"It is ridiculous that it took the information commissioner [Elizabeth Denham] five days to get a warrant to go into the offices of Cambridge Analytica and even then at the end of a relatively long process of investigation," he says. "She needs the legal power to be able to go in and seize documents that are relevant to their inquiry because, if we don't give them that power, then how do we know that organisations are complying with UK data protection law? We just to have to take it on trust that they are and accept that the information they share with us is accurate and true. And I don't think that is good enough any more."

He adds: "I also think there have to be changes around the transparency of platforms [like Facebook]. So that if you are receiving information during an election period, you know where it is coming from, who is paying for it and which organisation is promoting it. It has to be really obvious to you. At the moment it is not clear at all. In an old-fashioned election you would get a leaflet through your door and would know who sent it. You don't know on the internet.

"I think we should look at the election law as well, and the obligations on the tech companies to make the authorities aware if they believe there is activity going on which is a breach of the law. I don't think it is enough for them to say that they will do so only if asked to by the authorities."

He is clear too that the way campaigns are funded during elections and referendums has to become more transparent. "The question is whether a campaign can quite easily hide its spend behind shadow groups that aren't directly affiliated to them but which they control by proxy." This is one of the central allegations made against Vote Leave during the referendum campaign in 2016: that it breached spending limits by allegedly working with a separate organisation, BeLeave. Was it credible that the two organisations were entirely separate when they worked from the same offices? "It is a struggle to believe," Collins replies.

He reveals that the committee has also summoned the former director of Vote Leave, Dominic Cummings to give evidence. A date has yet to be finalised for his appearance, though he says Cummings has agreed in principle to attend. "We want to talk to him about how connected these companies were."

Could he then go a step further and call in the two figureheads of Vote Leave, the cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, and ask what they knew? He doesn't think so at the moment, but does not close off the option. "It depends whether we think they are relevant to our investigation."
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'Was the Brexit poll compromised? We may need a public debate about that'

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Damian Collins is a few minutes late for our interview in his House of Commons office and immediately apologises. Even in normal times, as chairman of the digital, culture, media and sport committee, he has a lot on his plate.

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How digital culture has affected events such as deaths

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It's one of the more blood-curdling things about Facebook - the social media death notice. You know the score: the recently deceased star of Top of the Pops, sitcom or stage is commemorated by way of a YouTube video and a deluge of weepy RIPs and "part of my life" eulogies, a phenomenon derided as "tearleading". The high-water mark for this was who "taught us how to live, then taught us how to die" two years ago.

Of course, entrepreneurs have noticed this spectacle, which writer and psychologist Elaine Kasket brackets as "the data of the dead". It's part of a digital-led revolution in dying and death and it's changing the way we see people pass into the ineffable digital afterlife. "We're developing an entirely new mentality about death and dying," she says.

​Kasket (yes, she knows) is the author of an upcoming book about digital death called All the Ghosts in the Machine, and has observed a huge rise of interest. "I was at a recent SXSW festival and was introduced to someone who put on a super-serious voice and told me: 'I'm in the death-tech space'." As a subject, dying has become fashionable, with investors pouring money into startups, bolstering thought leadership and inspirational TED Talks on "new ways to think about death".

There are so many new death-tech sites that they break up into different types. There's the price disruptors like Harbour Funerals, Beyond.life, and Funeral Zone, which offer price comparisons and sometimes, TripAdvisor-type reviews. Derrick Grant set up Willow when a close friend couldn't afford his funeral expenses and found one-sixth of Britons struggle to pay for a funeral - the average cost of dying is £8,905. He now offers an against-deadline price check to help those who "couldn't afford to die": the ultimate poverty. "I found the industry hadn't changed for 100 years," says Grant. "People thought you had to pay a lot to do right." Now it's becoming more transparent, more open, and partly as a result, says Grant, "funerals have become less funereal".

Then there are the planning sites, which include Cake, a US company that has developed an app for end-of-life planning, and the UK's DeadSocial.org which explains how to prepare your digital estate from the scattered confetti of Instagram, Facebook, Gmail et al. On SafeBeyond, users can create an online cache - including video and audio messages - to be shared posthumously with loved ones which founder and chief executive Moran Zur has called "digital relics" and "emotional life insurance". My Last Soundtrack will develop your end-of-life Spotify playlist. More than half a million people die every year in the UK, and market analyst IBISWorld says the UK funeral sector is worth £1.7bn. No wonder there's been significant funding from angel investors in that "death-tech space".

This stuff enthuses Peter Billingham, a celebrant and "digital death adviser" who founded the website Death Goes Digital. "The world of death and funerals has really been disrupted by digital culture," he says. "What was stable for hundreds of years has changed enormously in the last five years. We're more open about death than ever before and technology is helping to reframe what death means."

Baby boomers, now moving into the death demographic, are leading the way. Milestones include the 2016 livestreaming of funerals, including those of Lemmy Kilmister and Céline Dion's husband René Angélil; and of course Bowie, who as ever in the avant-garde, favoured a direct cremation, where the body is cremated before the funeral. There's a growing inventiveness in eco-death options too: recomposition, where the body becomes compost, and aquamation, a kind of a water cremation - even a "mushroom burial suit". There are death celebrities, notably Caitlin Doughty, a "mortician and activist" who founded "death acceptance" collective The Order of the Good Death, spearheading the "death positive" movement.

But it is the tech spiritualism that is perhaps the most fascinating part of the digital death otherworld. Many readers will recognise the curious and unsettling scenario whereby a dead friend or relative pops up zombie-like on Facebook, perhaps in a prompt to recognise a birthday.

This has led to a huge leap in the way we approach the afterlife. In the past, says Elaine Kasket, attitudes to the dead divided into two main global tendencies: cultures of memory, and cultures of care, roughly zoned into west and east: in China, for example, there's a tradition of believing that one's ancestors remain active, while here we honour their memory with photographs and grave visits.

"Now, with digital culture the dead are becoming more vocal and socially influential and the West is moving towards a care culture," adds Kasket. "They are increasingly in the places of the living." Digital representations of dead persons won't be confined to cemeteries. They will haunt different spaces: perhaps even become a rights lobby: the "transdimensional", perhaps. They will be what Kasket calls the "active dead", and what Billingham calls "present not absent". Many people have online conversations with the dead on Facebook, which introduced a legacy contact option in 2015, and Billingham says that we're already seeing the emergence of a new kind of professional: the "posthumous legacy curator".

There are far reaches of death-tech that encroach upon sci-fi. Eternime, founded by MIT fellow Marius Ursache, is about creating an eternal posthumous avatar: animated by your digital footprint and given life by artificial intelligence, and is building a database of like-minded people who gain the chance for grandchildren to interact with their unmet great-grandparents. Also in the US, Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, a computer scientist and specialist in personality emulation, is engaged in a project to create simulations of the dead people so as to keep our loved ones "alive". These avatars will start on the screen, move into virtual reality and augmented reality, then potentially become life-size simulations. Ahmad, who was inspired to work in the area when his father died, sees it becoming reality between 2030 to 2050. "It's not if, it's when," he says. And to those who say it sounds like Black Mirror: well, go back and have a look at the "Be Right Back" episode.

Ahmad thinks that cultures like Japan, with its animist traditions and a neophilic acceptance of robots, will be the early adopters. But he doesn't see why (bar a few surmountable religious barriers) it shouldn't take hold everywhere as we become used to it. "It means my daughter will have the chance to interact with my father," he says. "It will deepen our relationships with our dead loved ones and offer a living memorial that can bring 'emotional enrichment'." We'll be less likely to visit graves, perhaps, and more likely to summon Gran like a digital Doris Stokes.

Of course Ahmad has critics. "People bring up the idea that we need 'closure'," he says. "But it goes towards solving the 'if only I'd said this or that' problem to an extent." Still, he concedes there are plenty of legal and ethical issues. What if the simulation were sanitised, with difficult opinions edited out? How should their ageing be represented? Does their voice sound right? Ahmad thinks that the development of digital trusts will emerge, and with artificial voice synthesis, the latter will get better. "But these are uncharted territories. It will affect the way we see identity. Adding emotions may be a challenge." Will Death 2.0 bring on unintended consequences? It's a dead cert.

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How the world of death and funerals has become fashionable through digital culture

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It's one of the more blood-curdling things about Facebook - the social media death notice. You know the score: the recently deceased star of Top of the Pops, sitcom or stage is commemorated by way of a YouTube video and a deluge of weepy RIPs and "part of my life" eulogies, a phenomenon derided as "tearleading".

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Issues of people trying to make all tech in their lives the most efficient

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Today's headlines are filled with technological breakthroughs that promise an optimized future, from artificial intelligence to diagnose disease to self-driving cars that revolutionize transportation. One day, everything will be easier, faster, and better, we're told.

It's an appealing vision, but there's a downside to all this efficiency, says scholar and writer Edward Tenner, author of The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can't Do (out next week from Knopf). "Trying to be ultimately efficient at all times will succeed in the short run," he says. "But in the long run, you would be damaging your efficiency." Tenner isn't a Luddite, and his book doesn't suggest renouncing efficiency and Big Data. He just advises us to use common sense and keep in mind that there are always trade-offs.

The Verge spoke with Tenner about how the efficiency paradox happens, its costs, and how to balance intuition and technology.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

What is You define efficiency in the book's preface as being able to produce goods or providing service with a minimum of waste. Then you talk about "continuous-process efficiency" versus "platform efficiency." What's the difference between these two? the efficiency paradox? And how did you become interested in the topic?
I saw that there was something really new and very exciting going on in the web. The rise of mobile computing and the increasing interest in artificial intelligence and big data was actually having as great an impact, in some ways even greater, than the initial web of the 1990s. This story kept growing on me, and gradually, I saw that there was a kind of unintended consequence to this: trying to be ultimately efficient at all times will succeed in the short run. But in the long run, you would be damaging your efficiency.

People in the Elizabethan times and even in the Middle Ages didn't have the concept of efficiency we do today. That really depended on the rise of thermodynamics in the 19th century and the need to get as much power as possible from water turbines and from steam engines. That efficiency of the 19th century is what I call "continuous-process efficiency," and it's when things that were made piece by piece could now be made in a stream. For example, when paper was made in the 18th century, it was always in sheets. In the 19th century, entrepreneurs found a way to have paper coming off a mill continuously, and that is what made possible mass literacy, newspapers, expensive books. It was in its way as important as the Gutenberg revolution of the 15th century had been.
Was there a time in American culture when we didn't care as much about efficiency? To be clear, I'm talking about the general culture not caring, not specific subcultures or movements like the Luddites.
Now, platform efficiency is really a whole other type. It's something that's really in the cloud, and it's about bringing buyers and sellers together with a minimum cost and extremely rapidly. So it's things like getting a ride or buying a ticket or paying rent or banking.

Platform efficiency is wonderful, and I'm not at all condemning it, but one of the unfortunate consequences is that it has tended to attract investment capital away from much harder things. It's much easier to make a small fortune with a platform-based startup than it is, for example, to develop a more efficient battery. I came to believe that because these physical and chemical enterprises take so much longer, are so much more expensive, are so much messier, and so they're less attractive to investors. That's one negative side of platform efficiency.
Let's talk about some of the examples of the downsides of efficiency. In one of the chapters, you talk about the effects on arts and culture.
One of the interesting things about American culture is that even the subcultures that pretended to disdain efficiency - like Southern planters - ran on the principle of trying to squeeze as much profit as possible from enslaved labor and from the soil. So, there was this industrial regimentation in the South as well as in the factories of the North.

America, I think, has always been a pioneer of efficiency. They were admired by Europeans for their rigorous efficiency in doing everything, and the criticism of Americans was that they were so concerned with making money and with efficiency that they were losing out on the finer things in life. On the other hand, European observers were always coming over here and trying to copy American methods!
I'm also interested in a study you mention about how popularity works and the cost of getting rid of gatekeepers of popular culture.
The huge Soviet-era industrial complexes were based on the Gary, Indiana, steel mills, and Lenin and the other Soviet leaders greatly admired Henry Ford.

By removing so much trial and error and productive mistakes, platform efficiency can lock us into existing patterns. For example, publishers or film producers can analyze data to see what genres have been most popular, what will attract viewers of a certain demographic, and this could indeed make publishing more predictable or producing more profitable.
In your chapter on education, you talk about the "value of the inefficient medium," Medicine is an area with a lot of hope for AI and big data: precision medicine, AI diagnosis. What are some of the drawbacks here? like paper, for example. What are some examples where inefficiency makes us learn better?
But so many of the big hits have been real surprises that have broken so many of the rules. AI is really great at finding hidden rules and applying them and optimizing everything according to hidden rules, but it's really the rule-breaking events that have made life exciting for us.

People have presented gatekeepers as a drag. They're one level between the consumers and the producers. So, if you don't have them, you are reducing transaction costs and making things more efficient. You can just find things yourself. In the mid-'90s, Bill Gates and his co-authors wrote The Road Ahead about the friction-free economy of the future, where there wouldn't be these middlemen.
How should we think about these trade-offs? Who should be helping us determine which trade-offs are important enough for us to make?
But these gatekeepers did have a useful role. They could recognize talent that was not quite ready to go mainstream, but had something interesting and exciting there that was worthwhile to develop. If you eliminate the gatekeepers, it's a little like sports without coaches.
The last chapter of your book talks about strategies for balancing algorithms and common sense. How did you come up with these strategies?
For example, there was a study from Princeton that showed that when you statistically study what people - ordinary consumers, not an elite panel of critics - think of the quality of various works offered on the web, the ones that become very popular have only a small advantage in quality. It's not really random, but it's small. When you look at patterns of popularity on the web, there's a small core interest that snowballs quickly. Without gatekeepers, so much of popularity depends on what happens to become popular first.
What else are we missing?
I've read studies of reading and comprehension that psychologists have done over the years. Electronic reading and paper reading each have their own advantage. The electronic medium is better for recognizing details, but that reading on paper gives you a better, holistic sense of what an author is trying to say. That's a trade-off.

This is similar to what I say in my chapter on geography. The paper map is awkward in a lot of circumstances and inferior to the electronic map, which I use all the time. But on the other hand, the paper map gives you a sense of the broader terrain, and it's very helpful in orienting yourself.

In medicine, there are warning signs, and these warnings, in turn, have to be addressed or ruled out by further tests. As more diagnostics develop, there's a high possibility of false positives that make people go through more tests - and some of the further tests may actually have side effects of their own.

Recently, in The N ew York Times, there was a review of the new book by Barbara Ehrenreich, who is swearing off the medical system altogether. On the other hand, there are people who pay large amounts of money for so-called concierge medicine with doctors that are always monitoring them. There are different styles, and I'm not belittling the project of life extension, but I think quite a few critics of medicine have pointed out the advantage of a holistic approach to people's health and the kind of understanding that the best old-fashioned doctors had.

You don't want to rely completely on that because sometimes those wonderful old-fashioned doctors had old-fashioned ideas that have been contradicted by research data. So you need the big data, but there are many pitfalls in analyzing big data, and there's some tension between academic statisticians and data analysts in the commercial sector about what constitutes good practice in using this data.

"There are many things that even little children can appreciate that the most advanced technologies of machine learning can't."

It's really for every individual to use electronic and analog materials in a way that suits their own lives. This is not a book on policy. It's a book that's telling people, "Don't be afraid of your common sense." I think everybody can recognize what works for them, and people will have very different styles.

I tried to see which of the ideas applied across the chapters. For example, people are familiar with the idea of serendipity, and so that didn't need a lot of introduction. The point about serendipity is just that if you eliminate mistakes then, you're going to be too dependent on immediate and recent experience and not open enough to productive surprises. But the concept of "desirable difficulty," on the other hand - where we can learn better if things are more difficult - is less familiar to people because it occurs in studies, for example, of reading comprehension that show that something less legible might actually encourage people to concentrate more.

There are two factors that are underestimated by people and that are serious issues in the application of efficient technology. One of them is what's called "local knowledge." All of us know that there's some route that might look really great on a map, but we know it's a problem because we've traveled over it. For example, there's an intersection that looks like the shortest way, but I know the traffic is tied up there, and it's quicker to take a longer way, and [traffic app] Waze hasn't done this. Every once in a while, Waze points out a really crazy direction, and if people don't have common sense, sooner or later they will be very disappointed. Since I've come to recognize Waze is not infallible, I use it, and if I see there's something that's not right, I try to pull over and take a look at a printed map and figure out what's going wrong.

The other is tacit knowledge. The idea is that no matter how much information you feed into an intelligent system, there are many, many things that are tacit, meaning that they are not explicitly stated anywhere. You can't find that information in an encyclopedia.

One example is how little children can understand the meaning of a proverb - like "a stitch in time saves nine" or "a rolling stone gathers no moss" - in a way that a computer can't. There are many things that even little children can appreciate that the most advanced technologies of machine learning can't, and I think that to me is one of the most exciting things about the mind and about being human.

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Why trying to be too efficient will make us less efficient in the long run

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Today's headlines are filled with technological breakthroughs that promise an optimized future, from artificial intelligence to diagnose disease to self-driving cars that revolutionize transportation. One day, everything will be easier, faster, and better, we're told.

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how tech is assisting in the HR field

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The Gallup State of the Global Workplace Report 2017 suggests that 85 percent of employees worldwide are not engaged or are actively disengaged in their job. The report further suggests that the low percentages of engaged employees represent a barrier to creating high performing cultures around the world, given that business units in the top quartile of Gallup's global employee engagement database are 17% more productive and 21% more profitable than those in the bottom quartile.

Even, in Deloitte's Human Capital Trends Report 2017, employee engagement is listed as one of the top talent priorities for HR and business leaders.

Although the importance of employee engagement is pervasive, however, it is now moving away from conversations and connects with a reactive approach and organizations are now turning to technology to create predictive steps to identify and correct behaviors proactively.

There was a time when the process of identifying and measuring the engagement levels was perceived as a major challenge. Through various feedback forms, surveys and conversations, HR and managers measured the engagement levels, circled out the critical areas to address and later formed strategies to rectify behaviors. This whole process involved the HR to go through both operational and strategic processes. Now, the tedious task of measuring employee engagement and identifying the pain points has been made simpler and more comprehensive by technology. Various technological solutions, things like data mining and predictive analysis have evolved and have led to better decision making.

While there are challenges which technology has been able to overcome, it has its own set of limitations. To understand the impact of technology on employee engagement we reached out to the experts who are providing these solutions and the experts who are implementing them in their organizations. Here are a few insights of the two perspectives:

How are HR Tech startups solving the engagement challenge?

Arun Krishnan, CEO and Founder, nFactorial says, "Intra-organizational communication is the key to ensuring that employees are engaged and have a great experience. Our platforms help in enabling intra-organizational communication and in fostering the right behaviors."

nFactorial is addressing the engagement challenge with products like n!Gage, which is a continuous employee feedback platform that allows managers to get real-time data and insights about what their employees are feeling. Another Singapore based startup EngageRocket is providing bite-sized action plans to guide managers. These action plans are informed by their team's pattern of data so that managers never need to be lost as to what to do with people problems again.

CheeTung, Co-Founder and CEO, EngageRocket said, "By equipping leaders and managers at all levels in an organization with the data they need about their people, in real-time, companies can be more agile with change, spend more efficiently with their HR initiatives, create more employee engagement, and have higher performing teams." He also feels that one of the challenges can be around user adoption and program implementation and these are aspects any enterprise software needs to address.

Hyphen, another HR tech startup with its mobile-first listening & engagement solution is enabling organizations to create an open platform for all the employees to crowd-source conversations, ideas, feedback and suggestions in a socially engaging and real-time manner.

Arnaud Grunwald, Co-Founder and CEO, Hyphen said, "Hyphen combines top-down communication from the management through employee experience & engagement surveys and pulse polls, with bottom-up employee voice, where the employees can express themselves openly. They can have meaningful conversations with their peers and ask them questions, without the fear of judgment. This provides access to a rich content, which we like to call the goldmine. It captures 'what' people are talking about and 'how' they are talking about in real time, giving timely, actionable and precise insight."

Besides mobile-first platforms and other technological tools, chatbots have also entered engagement space and one such HR tech startup is inFeedo. With its product Amber, a chatbot, it is leveraging the power of A.I. in HR to improve employee experience/engagement that asks questions in tenure based manner with an objective to predict human behavior in enterprises.

Tanmaya Jain, CEO and Founder, inFeedo believes that a product like Amber has enabled HR to introduce "Predictive People Analytics" to reduce top talent attrition and has automated "Continuous Culture Evaluation" to diagnose culture issues."

Technological solutions like these empower employees, create more awareness among management through real-time data and actionable insights and also allows them to take care of future cycles. But technology also has some limitations.

Limitations of HR Tech solutions

While Arun Krishnan believes in the benefits of technology he also highlights that ultimately technology is an enabler.

He said, "Any technological tool or platform will fail if the organizational culture is not conducive to its enablement. Continuous feedback platforms can be game-changers, but they are also a massive change-management exercise within the organization. They will fail if leadership is not completely vested in the platform. It requires a sound change management strategy to enable such platforms to be enmeshed within the organizational processes. Ultimately though, it is all dependent on managing the organizational culture and in ensuring that the company values percolate through the hierarchy and are seen as guiding principles by the employees."

Tanmaya also reiterates the same. He says, "While tools like Amber are great for diagnostics, they're not solutions in themselves. The shift towards adopting talent analytics and using the insights from them is more of a mindset shift and the willingness of the HR leaders to take that leap. While companies like GE, MakeMyTrip, Airtel and 50 other are already using Amber's insights to build a more proactive culture, some HR leaders still have a misbelief that implementation is a costly and a high effort affair. These challenges need to be addressed first where technology takes a backseat, and the human touch is needed."

While technology has been able to streamline the engagement process and has made it more real-time, Arnaud feels that what's missing is even more automation. He believes that the solutions we have now are still static. He said, "Through various tools, we identify critical area from data, share insights and then package it and give it to the manager. But what's next? This piece about so what about this data is still missing, and I believe that it can be solved with new machine learning and AI. In five to seven years the recommendations these solutions provide to the managers would be more robust, and tailor-made."

He also talked about the importance of technological readiness and how it can be one of the major roadblocks, and said, "If organizations are unwilling to embrace new ways of working then technology will fail."

The way forward: HR and Technology

There is no doubt that HR and technology have to move together forward to solve the engagement challenge.

Ajoy Jauhar, Corporate Director - HR Automation and Analytics at Taj Group of Hotels said, " Today, nothing gets closer to an individual than technology. His mobile phone stays with him for his wake times and next to him when he is sleeping. How organizations are able to tap into this opportunity without being obtrusive and invasive will decide the extent to which technology can play a role in HR processes."

Singapore based Singtel is utilizing an online reporting platform - Learn, Segment, Listen -- which guides users to analyze the data through a structured approach by learning the overall results, going one step deeper by segmenting the data and building the engagement story with the qualitative data made available online.

Angeline Oh, VP, Group Talent Management and Development, Singtel says, "The tools have been useful in segmenting the employee population. By using different markers, the tools help us better understand and group employees, making HR solutions more impactful and meaningful."

Kevin Freitas, CHRO, Dream11 who currently utilizes Hyphen's technology thinks that engagement has typically been treated as a discrete function instead of a continuous function. He says, "Technology provides business and HR teams with feedback that is continuous and agile and feeds into action plans that are agile, fast and successful."

However, he adds that while Hyphen's platform can help them with surfacing ideas, questions and feedback, deciding if an organization should pursue or take action on an idea, feedback or question still requires qualitative input.

Even Ajoy Jauhar agrees and adds that while technology is a great enabler, how solutions can be customized to individuals on a mass scale needs to be the next step.

Angeline Oh further strengthens the argument and adds, "At the heart of employee engagement is the belief that everyone's voice matters and the confidence that the management listens to employee feedback and takes appropriate actions to address concerns. So while the results can be produced using technology, the action plan belongs squarely to people, who drive the employee's participation and management's consequent response."

So far the technology has been able to simplify the process of measuring engagement and has enabled the organizations to identify the key areas with more accuracy. But as technology continues to evolve and HR tech startups continue to emerge in this space, HR and business leaders can hope for more actionable and customized solutions. However, technology is just one part of the story. The impact which a person, whether an HR, manager or peer makes based on the insights captured by technology determines the success of any solution. The available solutions are merely ways to crack the employee engagement challenge, it's the execution and appropriate utilization of these solutions that will be the ultimate game changer for any organization.

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Will technology be able to solve the engagement challenge?

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Through data mining and predictive analysis HR technology is enabling the managers to take real-time decisions empowering employees to express themselves and subsequently enhancing the whole employee engagement function But how far has it been able to solve the engagement challenge Lets find out here

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When Mark Zuckerberg was grilled in Congress on Facebook's data privacy scandal, few news outlets picked up on his reference to an internal ethics team at the company.
In an exchange with Senator Gary Peters, a Democrat from Michigan, the tech titan was asked whether his company has a "set of principles" to guide its development of artificial intelligence, a technology it uses to combat misuse of the massively popular social media platform.

"We have a whole (artificial intelligence) ethics team that is working on developing basically the technology...for making sure this goes in the direction that we want," Mr Zuckerberg replied.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes his seat to testify before a joint hearing of the Commerce and Judiciary committees on Capitol Hill in Washington, on 10th April, 2018, about the use of Facebook data to target American voters in the 2016 election. PICTURE: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo
His comment came as lawmakers sought answers over the scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, a company that worked with Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and is said to have illegitimately obtained data from as many as 87 million Facebook users.

Debates are raging these days in the tech industry over issues such as data privacy, online hate speech and foreign interference in American elections, all with important ethical dimensions.

"We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake."

- Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in testimony given to Congress.

But the Facebook CEO's comment offers a glimpse into what experts say is a shift within the American tech sector: a rapid, albeit uneven, embrace of ethics, one that Mr Zuckerberg hinted at during his opening remarks before the Senate, saying of the Cambridge Analytica incident, "We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake."

Tech companies are often loath to detail how they make ethical decisions - Mr Zuckerberg, for instance, did not immediately provide details about his company's principles when asked by Senator Peters, saying he would follow up later.

Brian Green, director of technology ethics at Santa Clara University's Markkula Center for Applied Ethics in California, said this tight-lipped approach is likely strategic.

"I think it's because every company is afraid that they're the one that's going to look like they have an ethical problem," said Mr Green, who has spoken to at least one tech company about ethics but would not give its name. "(But) actually ethics is normal, and we're all doing ethics all the time."
Irina Raicu. PICTURE: Courtesy of Santa Clara University
Despite this reticence, Irina Raicu, who also works at Santa Clara, as director of its Internet Ethics Program, said there has been a "groundswell" of discussion about ethics in Silicon Valley over the past few years. She pointed to a previous Facebook controversy as a major catalyst: a 2014 report that the company - along with researchers from Cornell University - manipulated the newsfeeds of 689,003 users as part of a scientific experiment to test emotional reactions.

Facebook defended itself at the time by arguing, among other things, that "none of the data used was associated with a specific person's Facebook account". Ms Raicu said that episode triggered a national conversation that revolved around a specific question also at the heart of the Cambridge Analytica scandal: Yes, what Facebook did was probably legal - but was it ethical?

"As more and more questions are posed...both the corporate departments in these companies and the people working in these companies - the technologists - have been taking more and more note of (ethics)."

- Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics Program at Santa Clara University's Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.

Ms Raicu pointed to the "issue of content moderation" - be it the spread of "fake news" or online trolling such as the "terrible harassment of journalists on Twitter" - as fueling more recent calls for ethical reform. She also mentioned the recent debate over the spread of misinformation about survivors of the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, including false claims that some students who spoke out in favor of gun control were "crisis actors".

The ethics-based discourse has already produced practical partnerships. In October 2017, for example, the Anti-Defamation League announced it was teaming up with Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft to create a Cyberhate Problem-Solving Lab to counter online hate speech.

"As more and more questions are posed...both the corporate departments in these companies and the people working in these companies - the technologists - have been taking more and more note of (ethics)," she said, noting that Facebook has provided research ethics training since 2014.

Ms Raicu said the influence of ethics in tech - sparked by scandals across the industry - is becoming increasingly visible. She said "tech ethicists" are now invited onto the campuses of major tech companies to speak to employees, company officials are reaching out to Santa Clara and other groups asking for instructional materials on ethics and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers launched a TechEthics initiative in 2016.

The field even has its own rising stars, such as Tristan Harris, a former "Google design ethicist". Mr Harris has accrued a following through TED Talks and his organisation, the Center for Humane Technology, which is critical of any technology Mr Harris says uses "unethical persuasion" to " hijack" our "minds and society," such as social media platforms or smartphones. His campaign, often called the "Time Well Spent" movement, appears to be having an impact: In a January post, Mr Zuckerberg listed "time well spent" as a design goal for Facebook, which many interpreted as a direct reference to Mr Harris.
Pope Francis talks to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, second from left, and Priscilla Chan, Zuckerberg's wife, during a meeting at the Vatican on 29th August, 2016. Vatican spokesman Greg Burke is at far right. PICTURE: Courtesy of Osservatore Romano
Mr Green noted one of the loudest voices on the subject has been none other than Pope Francis, whose 2015 encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si', praised the "immense possibilities" that technology - including information technology - offers, but warned that humanity's "immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience". Mr Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, even met with the pontiff during a visit to the Vatican in August, 2016, to discuss "how to use communications technology to alleviate poverty, encourage a culture of encounter, and to communicate a message of hope, especially to the most disadvantaged."

Pope Francis also railed against the overuse of social media and smartphones in an exhortation published on Monday - as have other religious leaders, such as the Dalai Lama. Even so, Mr Green - who teaches at Santa Clara, a Jesuit university - noted the hyper-diverse tech field includes workers who claim a number of nationalities and faiths (or no faith), meaning religious voices are often lifted up alongside more secular approaches.

"Social transformations are presented as default good."

- Colin Koopman, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon.

To create a more ethical tech sector, experts say, it must re-evaluate a Silicon Valley culture that champions virtually any technology that " disrupts " societal norms.

"Social transformations are presented as default good," said Colin Koopman, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon. He argued the relentless pursuit of transformation "doesn't even raise the question of the specific inequalities, freedoms and other kinds of political and ethical costs that might come from those transformations."

Meanwhile, Mr Green said the tech sector often sees its boundaries as primarily legal, not moral.

"I think the compliance mindset has steered people toward a sort of ethical minimalism, which is something they're now realising might not be the best approach," he said.

Microsoft released a book on artificial intelligence in January that argued it "could make sense" for coders to take a "Hippocratic Oath...like we have for doctors." A month later, a group of data scientists from across the industry - including representatives from Microsoft, Pinterest and Google, according to Wired - gathered in San Francisco to draft a specific ethics code for their profession.

They produced a list of principles, such as "be responsible for maximizing social benefit and minimizing harm", respect "human dignity" and take steps to measure and plan for bias.

Ms Raicu's centre came up with a quintessentially Silicon Valley solution: an app for ethical decision-making.

Dr Koopman, who penned a New York Times op-ed in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal calling for ethics in data science, cautioned that ethics codes can sometimes prove static, or quickly rendered obsolete by the rapid advancement of technology.

Instead, he suggested ethics review boards for companies and a "social and ethical audit culture" to help anticipate problems ahead of time.
Colin Koopman. PICTURE: Courtesy of University of Oregon.
"I don't think principles will get us there - I think they're important, it's just that too often the conversation goes there first, and then sort of stays there," Dr Koopman said. "I point to education...We're teaching kids coding in high school, but you don't hear a lot about teaching kids the basics of data privacy."

While the flurry of ethical discourse excites ethicists, many are quick to dispel any notion that Silicon Valley will suddenly become a moral utopia overnight. Ms Raicu said the tech industry is vast and covers a number of different areas, and the field is still growing: "There are ethicists, but not a lot of them work in this particular area."

She also argued in an article in The Atlantic that ethical training will "not inoculate technologists against making unethical decisions - nothing can do that."

But many experts say implementing ethical frameworks, while perhaps inconvenient in the short term, is actually a sound business strategy.

"It makes good business sense that they would want to anticipate the effects of what they're doing now," Dr Koopman said. "Not just, 'How is this going to impact next quarter's profits,' but also, 'How is this going to impact the company in 10 years or 20 years, where we find ourselves in a situation where we've amassed a huge warehouse of data on all of our users?'"

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TECHNOLOGY: AS FACEBOOK REELS, SILICON VALLEY DABBLES IN ETHICS

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When Mark Zuckerberg was grilled in Congress on Facebook's data privacy scandal, few news outlets picked up on his reference to an internal ethics team at the company.

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Even though facebook has the spotlight right now, other companies are doing similar things

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Adobe Announces It's Connecting Companies So They Can Better Track People for Online Ads

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Adobe's new Device Co-op initiative will help companies offer more personalized experiences and make ads less annoying.

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Things that can be done for social media

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But these efforts don't touch the underlying problems, and in fact could make it harder for start-ups to compete with the giants.

If we're really serious about changing how social networks operate, far more radical interventions are required. Here are three possible ways to rescue social media from the market-based pressures that got us here.

Give Power to the People

In their book " New Power," which comes out next week, Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms write about the struggle between centralized, top-down institutions, which represent "old power," and decentralized, bottom-up movements, which represent "new power."

Facebook, they write, is an example of a new power institution that serves old power interests. It harvests the creative output of billions of people and turns it into a giant, centralized enterprise, with most users sharing none of the economic value they create and getting no say in the platform's governance.

Instead, the authors ask, what if a social network was truly run by its users?

"If you're contributing economic value to something of this much social consequence, you should share in the value you're creating," Mr. Heimans told me.

Nathan Schneider, a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado, had a similar idea in 2016, when he proposed that Twitter users band together to buy the platform from its shareholders and convert it into a user-run collective, similar to the way a local credit union is run. People who made valuable contributions to the network, such as employees and power users, would receive bigger stakes and more voting power. And users would have a seat at the table for major decisions about the platform's operations.

It's exceedingly unlikely that Mark Zuckerberg, who has fought hard to keep control of Facebook, will ever convert the company into a user-owned and run collective. But Mr. Schneider believes that giving more control to responsible users could help restore trust in the network, and signal the kind of values Mr. Zuckerberg says he wants Facebook to represent.

"He could show that he takes democracy seriously enough to start with his own baby," Mr. Schneider said.

Create a Social Federation

Another radical approach would be to make social networks work more like email - so that independent apps could seamlessly work together with one another, across a common protocol.

Instead of one big Facebook, a federated social network would look like clusters of independent nodes - Mombook and Athletebook and Gamerbook - all of which could be plugged into the umbrella network when it made sense. Rather than requiring a one-size-fits-all set of policies that apply to billions of users, these nodes could be designed to reflect users' priorities. (A network for privacy hawks and one for open-sharing maximalists could have different data-retention rules, and a network for L.G.B.T. users and one for evangelical pastors could have different hate speech rules.) If a node became too toxic, it could be removed without shutting down the entire network.

"Email is the most resilient social network on the internet," Mr. Schneider said, "and the thing that allows it to adapt is that it's an open protocol, and people build apps on top of it, and we evolve how we use it."

Versions of this kind of network already exist. Mastodon, a decentralized Twitter-like social network, has gotten more than 140,000 registered users since its debut in 2016. And various social networks based on the blockchain - the ledger system that underlies virtual currencies like Bitcoin - have sprung up in recent months.

To be sure, decentralized networks have their own problems. They're messy to administer, and they can still be gamed by bad actors. They can also fall prey to the same kind of privacy issues that Facebook is being criticized for. (In fact, part of the reason users are angry at Facebook right now is that the company's data infrastructure was too open, and made it overly simple for third-party app developers to take user information outside Facebook.)

None of this is a panacea. But experimenting with more decentralized models could give social media users a sense that platforms represented their interests, rather than those of a faceless corporation.

Put Expiration Dates on Social Graphs

A single friend of mine once remarked that the major difference among dating apps like OKCupid, Tinder and Bumble wasn't the way they were designed or the companies behind them - it was how long they had existed.

New apps, she said, were more likely to attract interesting and smart people who were actually looking for dates. Older apps, by contrast, were eventually overrun with creeps and predators, no matter how well built they were.

A similar theory might apply to social networks. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat all had plenty of issues in their early years, but they were by and large cleaner, with fewer types of exploitation and malicious behavior. Today, the enormous size and influence of these platforms have made them irresistible honey pots for bad actors, and many of our "social graphs" - Facebook's term for the webs of digital connections we create - are clogged with years' worth of clutter.

In a blog post last year, the venture capitalist Hunter Walk proposed an interesting idea: a legally mandated "start over" button that, when pressed, would allow users of social networks to delete all their data, clear out their feeds and friend lists, and begin with a fresh account.

I'd go even further, and suggest that social networks give their users an automatic "self-cleaning" option, which would regularly clear their profiles of apps they no longer used, friendships and followers they no longer interacted with, and data they no longer needed to store. If these tools were enabled, users would need to take affirmative action if they didn't want their information to disappear after a certain number of months or years.

Making social graphs temporary, rather than preserving them forever by default, would undoubtedly be bad for most social networks' business models. But it could create new and healthy norms around privacy and data hygiene, and it would keep problems from piling up as networks get older and more crowded. It might even recapture some of the magic of the original social networks, when things were fresh and fascinating, and not quite so scary.

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But these efforts don't touch the underlying problems, and in fact could make it harder for start-ups to compete with the giants. If we're really serious about changing how social networks operate, far more radical interventions are required. Here are three possible ways to rescue social media from the market-based pressures that got us here.

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Small history of big tech and data regulations 

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Small history of big tech and data regulations 

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Over the years, regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have cracked down on Facebook and Google for privacy violations. But as the European Union prepares to introduce comprehensive new data protection regulation in May, European regulators have been stepping up investigations into tech industry data practices.

MARCH 2011

The Federal Trade Commission for the first time requires a company to institute a comprehensive program to protect consumer data privacy

Google reaches a settlement with the F.T.C., which charged the company with using deceptive tactics and violating its own privacy promises to consumers. Google had enrolled Gmail users in its social network, Buzz, without effective ways for them to opt out of the service or limit the sharing of their personal details, the agency said.

NOVEMBER 2011

The F.T.C. goes after Facebook for exposing users' information

Facebook agrees to settle charges by the F.T.C. that it deceived users by telling them that they could keep their profile information private and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public.

AUGUST 2012

The F.T.C. fines Google $22.5 million for Safari privacy violations

Google agrees to pay $22.5 million to settle F.T.C. charges that the company misled people who used Apple's Safari browser by placing advertiser tracking codes, called cookies, on their computers after Google told them that they would be opted out of such tracking. Google also violated a previous settlement that prohibited it from misleading consumers over how they could control collection of their data, the agency said.

SEPTEMBER 2012

Facebook turns off facial recognition in Europe after complaints that the company failed to ensure user consent

After an audit by Ireland's data protection commissioner, regulators report that Facebook turned off its photo-tagging facial recognition feature for new users in the European Union and will delete facial template data it had already collected from users there. The commissioner's office said Facebook had not sufficiently notified users or obtained their explicit consent to use the feature.

May 2017

The European Commission fines Facebook $122 million, saying the social network misled regulators about WhatsApp

The European Commission fines Facebook $122 million for misleading regulators during their investigation of the company's acquisition of the WhatsApp messaging service. The commission, the executive arm of the European Union, says Facebook told regulators that it would be unable to automatically match an individual user's Facebook account with his or her WhatsApp account. But WhatsApp later announced that it would begin sharing user data with Facebook.

In December, the French Data Protection Authority orders WhatsApp to stop sharing data with Facebook or face penalties. And in March, a German court bars Facebook from using data from German users of WhatsApp for Facebook's own purposes, upholding the ruling of a lower court.

DECEMBER 2017

German antitrust regulators censure Facebook's data practices

In a preliminary finding, Germany's Cartel Office reports that Facebook has abused its dominant position in the country by requiring users to allow it to endlessly amass data by tracking them through other online services. In February, the regulator says it planned to investigate whether the ability of large platforms like Facebook and Google to set up closed advertising systems and have access to user data was limiting market competition.

FEBRUARY 2018

A Belgian court tells Facebook to stop tracking users around the web

A court in Belgium rules that Facebook must stop tracking users on third-party sites and delete the data it had already collected. The court says Facebook hadn't sufficiently informed users about the data it gathered on their use of sites outside the social network or how it used that data.

May 2018

A sweeping data privacy law is set to take effect in Europe, reshaping data collection practices

The European Union will put into effect a comprehensive privacy law, called the General Data Protection Regulation, that requires companies to obtain consent from users before processing their data and allows the authorities to fine companies up to 4 percent of their annual revenue if they fail to comply.

Natasha Singer is a business reporter covering health technology, education technology and consumer privacy. @natashanyt

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Feeling Regulators' Glare On Both Sides of the Atlantic. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Timeline: Facebook and Google Under Regulators' Glare

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Over the years, regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have cracked down on Facebook and Google for privacy violations. But as the European Union prepares to introduce comprehensive new data protection regulation in May, European regulators have been stepping up investigations into tech industry data practices.

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Showing everyone your relationships on social media

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"Look at this."

My friend stuck her phone under my nose. On it was a picture on Instagram of a couple we both know, a photo of one of them pursing her lips over a frothy cocktail in a dim bar, flash on. Underneath, the caption said something like, "Weekly Love Post #72: Fancy cocktails with bae #mygirlfriendisbetterthanyours #weekiversary #sorryshestaken."

"Blagahh," I said, doing my best vomiting noise and pushing the phone away. My friend cackled, delighted by how quickly she was able to irritate me. This couple celebrates their "weekiversary" every week, without skipping. Ever. They have been doing it for 72 weeks, which is about 17 months, which is nearly one and a half years. Make it stop.

It is so early in this couple's relationship and I'm already exhausted. So are most of our mutual friends. The responses on their weekiversary posts have dropped from dozens of "You two!!" and "Cutest couple ahhhhh!!" comments in the early days of their relationship to just a single comment from one of their moms. A lone tumbleweed of a comment, rolling through the dusty, echoing canyons of Shut Up You Guys National Park.

The members of this couple are nice in real life, and they are in love, and that is wonderful, but they are terrors on social media. The weekiversary posts are just the tip of the frozen-barf iceberg. There are also close, glistening photos of their home-cooked nightly dinners (kissy face #shesakeeper). There are unrelenting, near identical pictures of one of them napping next to a cat (heart-eyes #allmine). The content is nauseating and compelling; an endless highlight reel of two people who are strangely uninterested in keeping private, small joys in their relationship private.

And it's not just them. I have coupled friends who post daily #whyiloveher pictures with paragraphs dedicated only to their partner (and their 2,000 followers), plus 15 hashtags underneath all that. I know friends in relationships who turn staying in and ordering pizza into a whole thing. It's not just ordering pizza, it's OMG best boyfriend ever!!<3<3 Pizza Date Night! Happy Tuesday babe I love you sooo much I couldn't imagine my life without you! #soinlove.

It creeps me out. Why do people perform their relationships online? Who is it for? I don't understand the point of regularly writing deeply personal declarations of love, even if it's platonic friendship love, for thousands of strangers to see. Do people do it to mark territory? To make their person feel good? To show others that someone is worthy of love, but - hold up - you've already chosen them?

Our real lives and online lives are merging; they're starting to feel indistinguishable. Even regular, noncelebrity people cultivate their own brands. Is a relationship real if it's not flaunted on Instagram? Is the new definition of a commitment-phobe someone who chooses to keep relationships offline?

Then I'm a commitment-phobe. Daily love posts make me want to throw my phone in the street. Public-proposal videos cause me to cover my head and emit feral howling noises. If you have to keep reminding everyone of how happy you are, something's not right. Happy people don't need to announce over and over how happy they are. Happy people just ... are. Your friends? They know when you're in a healthy and loving relationship just by seeing you and knowing you. You don't need to declare it every time you go online. These constant #relationshipgoals posts doth protest too much.

I get especially weirded out by people who seem interested in cultivating "fans" of their relationship. While it's cute and flattering to have people make comments like "y'all are goals" and "adopt me" on a picture of you and your lover, I think it creates social pressure to stay in relationships that might actually be unhealthy. One of my good friends stayed with her evil ex for more than a year after she knew she needed to leave, worrying about "letting people down."

She had relationship fans. Lots of them.

"I just feel so stupid," she told me, in tears. "Everyone thinks we're perfect. I don't want to disappoint people."

Let's take a step back from that. As my mom would say, "Turn the spotlight off, honey." Your relationship and/or breakup is not part of the public domain, unless you invite and encourage that. No couple is perfect, and no one knows the private things that happen between the well-edited photos you've posted with good lighting on vacation days with your partner. All couples are a mess sometimes. How weird is it to encourage people to envy you as you play the role of someone in a happy relationship?

Look, I'm not a monster. I feel happy and excited when my friends are in loving partnerships. I'm in one, too! And it's great! I don't hate all cutesy posts about partners; a few here and there make me coo out loud when I'm lying on the couch scrolling through my social media feeds. "Awww," I'll say to the empty room. "Look at them." And I will tap that "like" button with genuine feeling and search through my emojis for just the right sparkly pink heart and gay rainbow and flame icon.

I love love. Just not, you know, every single time I unlock my phone.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline: Are You Really In Love if It's Not on Instagram?. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Opinion | Are You Really in Love if It's Not on Instagram?

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"Look at this." My friend stuck her phone under my nose. On it was a picture on Instagram of a couple we both know, a photo of one of them pursing her lips over a frothy cocktail in a dim bar, flash on.

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After deleting facebook, how much of you is still there being recorded on the internet

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Here are some answers to questions that many people are posing to The New York Times via social media.
What are the alternatives to using Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp?
There is no real substitute for Facebook if you're looking for a social network that includes virtually everyone you meet in real life. Social networks are all about the people on them, and Facebook has more than 2 billion monthly users. You could consider Snapchat, which has about 187 million daily users, but it's a far different experience - you primarily use it to send photos that self-destruct - with an interface that many people find confusing.

There are plenty of alternatives to WhatsApp. But they have drawbacks and aren't as far-reaching as WhatsApp, which has more than 1.5 billion monthly users.

Signal is a solid app for secure encrypted messaging - but it is still a young service with a relatively small number of users. You might be able to get hundreds of your friends to join Signal. But chances are you have friends or family in other countries, and WhatsApp is the go-to messaging service internationally. For example, practically every smartphone user in India - more than 200 million people - uses WhatsApp.

Another WhatsApp alternative is WeChat, a Chinese messaging app that has about a billion monthly users. But the majority of people on that service are in China. And WeChat faces its own privacy issues because of China's notorious reputation for mass surveillance. Tencent, the company that runs WeChat, denies that it stores the chat histories of its users. But WeChat users have been arrested over conversations they have had in the app, and chat transcripts have been used as evidence in court proceedings.

Instagram, which has more than 800 million monthly users, is also a tough one, giving Facebook a stranglehold on photo sharing. The only real competitor to Instagram is Facebook itself, which has its own photo-sharing features. Remember Flickr? The Yahoo-owned site is the closest thing either has to a competitor, and it's like a graveyard of people's digital memories before they abandoned it for Facebook and Instagram.

Google Photos is a compelling service, but it is a photo album management tool, not so much a social network.
How else do you keep in touch with friends and family? How do you create and discover events? How do you market and manage customer service for your small business? How do you spark and build grass-roots movements?
Facebook is the one-stop shop to accomplish all those tasks. But if you have the patience, you can juggle multiple apps to cobble together the same experience.

Messaging apps are popular for keeping in touch with friends and family - a group chat between family members via text message, for example, is still an efficient way to keep in touch. And sites like MeetUp are designed for hosting and discovering events.

As for customer service, many companies use Twitter to engage with their customers and resolve complaints. Yelp, the reviews site for local businesses, is a common place for customers to talk about their experiences, and business owners often engage with people there.

For grass-roots movements, a Twitter hashtag might be enough. Recent examples include #metoo, the movement for people to discuss sexual assault, #deleteuber, the campaign to protest Uber last year amid political controversy, and now, there is the movement to #deletefacebook in response to the Cambridge Analytica controversy.
What does it mean to delete Facebook? How can you actually delete your account?
You can permanently delete your account by clicking a few buttons on Facebook's website. The company delays deletion for a few days, so do not log back in. Facebook also offers a tool for extracting a copy of your data before deleting your account.

After you delete your account, it won't be recoverable. But there are caveats.

Shadows of your digital self would remain on the site. For example, if people uploaded photos of you, those photos will still be there. The conversations you had with friends through Facebook won't disappear, either.

When you delete your account, you are only deleting the media you posted, like your status updates and photos that you uploaded. That's not going to do much for your privacy, considering that an overwhelming amount of what you do on Facebook involves engaging with other people. All of your friends (and their friends, too) would also have to delete their accounts in order to have any sort of meaningful effect.
What other things are you losing access to if you delete Facebook? Why do so many apps require a Facebook login?
One painful part of breaking up with Facebook would be potentially losing access to the many third-party apps and websites that are tied to your account. Over the past decade, many shopping sites and apps teamed up with Facebook to use the company's login tool, Facebook Login.

Facebook Login became popular because it was a good product for consumers. By clicking a button, you could sign up for an account with an app or website just by sharing your Facebook account data. That allowed you to skip manually entering details like your name and email address - a process that is especially cumbersome on a small smartphone screen. This sped up the process of signing up for an account to buy that pair of shoes you saw go on sale.

If you were to delete Facebook, you would break your access to many sites and apps that you signed up for using Facebook Login. But fortunately, many sites and apps still let you sign up for accounts directly through them, and many also let you log in through your Google account.

It's not impossible to delete Facebook. But it would be a long and tedious process to create new accounts for all the apps and sites you use.
Where does Facebook really equal the internet?
Keep in mind that Facebook reaches well beyond the United States. As my colleague Sheera Frenkel noted on Twitter, deleting Facebook is a privilege. In some parts of the world, like Myanmar, Egypt and Indonesia, people rely on Facebook as a primary means to conduct business and stay in touch with friends and family. In Africa, Facebook has struck deals that offer basic services - centered on those provided by Facebook - to residents for free.

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Here are some answers to questions that many people are posing to The New York Times via social media. What are the alternatives to using Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp? There is no real substitute for Facebook if you're looking for a social network that includes virtually everyone you meet in real life.

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Info regarding the events of the Facebook privacy scandal

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Cambridge Analytica: all the news about Facebook's data privacy scandal

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Facebook's role in the 2016 US election grew more complicated this past weekend, when bombshell reports in The New York Times and The Guardian revealed the extent to which London-based data mining...