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More Social Media and Communication Changes

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More Social Media and Communication Changes

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Choosing the caption for your Instagram can be almost as challenging as deciding on a filter. So, if you're ready to post that Insta, but don't know what to say, here are 44 lyrics for when you need an Instagram caption.
1. "Be young, be dope, be proud." - Lana Del Rey, "American" 2. "I can't really see another squad tryna cross us." - Drake, "No Tellin'" 3. "Darling I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream." - Taylor Swift, "Blank Space" 4. "I'm throwin' shade like it's sunny." - Nicki Minaj, "Want Some More" 5. "I'm gonna live like tomorrow doesn't exist." - Sia, "Chandelier" 6. "Find me where the wild things are." - Alessia Cara, "Wild Things" 7. "If I was you, I'd wanna be me too." - Meghan Trainor, "Me Too" 8. "Sweet like candy to my soul, sweet you rock and sweet you roll." - Dave Matthews Band, "Crash Into Me" 9. "I swear this life is like the sweetest thing I've ever known." - Drake, "Over" 10. "I hope you never lose your sense of wonder." - Lee Ann Womack, "I Hope You Dance" 11. "But if you close your eyes, does it almost feel like nothing's changed at all? - Bastille, "Pompeii" 12. "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one." - John Lennon, "Imagine" 13. "You can't choose what stays and what fades away." - Florence + The Machine, "No Light, No Light" 14. "She acts like summer and walks like rain." - Train, "Drops of Jupiter 15. "She's a good girl, loves her mama. Loves Jesus, and America too." - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, "Free Fallin'" 16. "Lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones." - Coldplay, "Fix You" 17. "Say you'll remember me." - Taylor Swift, "Wildest Dreams" 18. I've got thick skin and an elastic heart." - Sia, "Elastic Heart" 19. "Give me the beat boys and free my soul." - Uncle Kracker, "Drift Away" 20. "One of these days the clocks will stop, and time won't mean a thing." - Foo Fighters, "These Days" 21. "Sunshine mixed with a little hurricane." - Brad Paisley, Perfect Storm 22. "You are the piece of me I wish I didn't need." Zedd feat. The Foxes, "Clarity" 23. "Her mind is Tiffany twisted, she's got the Mercedes bends." - The Eagles, "Hotel California" 24. "Life imitates art." - Lana Del Rey, "Gods And Monsters" 25. "Nobody said it was easy, no one said it would be this hard." - Coldplay, "The Scientist" 26. "You're gonna keep my soul, it was yours to have long ago." - State Radio, "Keepsake" 27. "Celebrate we will 'cause life is short but sweet for certain." - Dave Matthews Band, "Two Step" 28. "It's always darkest before the dawn." - Florence + The Machine, "Shake it Out" 29. "There are many things I'd like to say to you but I don't know how." - Oasis, "Wonderwall" 30. "You say you want a revolution, well you know we all wanna change the world." - The Beatles, "Revolution" 31. "God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy." Billy Currington, "People Are Crazy" 32. "Well my heart is gold, and my hands are cold." - Halsey, "Gasoline" 33. "I don't want to be heard, I want to be listened to." - Twenty One Pilots, "Forest" 34. "Where you invest your love, you invest your life." - Mumford and Sons, "Awake My Soul" 35. "I think I need a sunrise, I'm tired of the sunset." - Augustana, "Boston" 36. "All of these lines across my face tell you the story of who I am." - Brandi Carlile, "The Story" 37. 'Ready or not, here I come. Where you at? The night is young." - Bridgit Mendler, "Ready or Not" 38. "In the land of Gods and Monsters, I was an angel." - Lana Del Rey, "Gods And Monsters" 39. "Turns out not where, but who you're with that really matters." - Dave Matthews Band, "Best Of What's Around" 40. "Know yourself, know your worth." - Drake, "0 to 100" 41. "I'm little but I'm coming for the crown." - Lorde, "Still Sane" 42. "Didn't they tell you I was a savage?" - Rihanna, "Needed Me" 43. "Hands in the air like we don't care." - Miley Cyrus, "We Can't Stop" 44. "I'ma keep running because a winner don't quit on themselves." - Beyonce, "Freedom"

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Social Media Has Changed Communication Today

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Choosing the caption for your Instagram can be almost as challenging as deciding on a filter. So, if you're ready to post that Insta, but don't know what to say, here are 44 lyrics for when you need an Instagram caption. 1. "Be young, be dope, be proud."

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How Social Media has Changed Communication

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How Social Media has Changed Communication

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There are currently 2.8 billion social media users worldwide . This means that over a third of the world's population is using some form of social media to communicate, making social media marketing an imperative tactic for boosting leads for higher education programs. While social media is a commonplace platform for communication today, have you ever considered how significantly social media changed the way we communicate?
Our world as we know it has transformed from the start of text messages to the first years of Facebook, to today's temporary stories. But how has social media changed society and what does this mean for higher education marketing? Let's take a look at what each of the most used social platforms have contributed to our new way of communication and how you can utilize them in your higher education marketing campaigns.

The Top Social Media Platforms Changing Communication

Facebook is seen as the most predominant social media platform and it has the numbers to back it up.

With 2.01 billion monthly users , and 88 percent of 18-29 year olds using this platform,Facebook should always be a top priority for higher education marketers. Facebook is a pioneer in today's social world. Allowing people to connect with anybody, from their best friends to distant relatives, as well as share their personal thoughts, pictures, videos, blogs and links. The addition of Facebook Chatbots has also opened up a whole new world in customer service and digital marketing.

Learn more: Adding Facebook Chatbots to Your Social Media Strategy

Twitter is a fast-paced network that allows users to share information instantaneously -- in 140 characters or less.

With 328 million monthly users , and 36 percent of 18-29 year olds using this platform, it can seem like the next best way to reach potential students. Take into consideration however, that nearly 79% of Twitter accounts are located outside of the United States. If this doesn't affect your digital marketing strategy, then Twitter can still be a lucrative platform. Just remember that the most important aspect of marketing on Twitter is the hashtag. Don't know how to find the best hashtags to get your content seen by your targeted audience? Try TrendsMap or Keyhole for real-time tracking by industry and locale.

Snapchat has led the way in "temporary" social media, allowing users to share content that can only be seen for 24 hours at most.

This social media is only available through a mobile app and boasts roughly 166 million daily users . If you don't believe Snapchat is worth your university's time, consider the fact that 56 percent of 18-29 year olds use Snapchat daily. This app is designed for tech-savvy and content-hungry users. In other words, Snapchat is the perfect application to reach millennials, especially for universities looking to share a different side of their campus and boost interest in their brand. If you're looking to learn more about Snapchat marketing, check out these 7 Snapchat Accounts Every Marketer Should Follow .

This Facebook-owned, social media platform has doubled its user base to 700 million monthly active users in just two years.

How did they do it? By creating a Snapchat clone all their own. Instagram is hugely popular among younger generations, with 59% of 18-29 year olds using the app. In order to grab their attention, Instagram created similar features for their stories, like filters and stickers, but implemented it in their own unique way. Thanks to a social media-savvy audience and visual platform, Instagram Stories has become an integral part of this social media app. Along with announcing its one year anniversary, Instagram Stories now has 250 million daily users (Stories alone is surpassing Snapchat's 166 million daily users). Want to capture more student leads using Instagram Stories? Check out this article.

Now, enough with the statistics. The most important thing to understand is that no matter what platform you look at, social media as a whole has informed and shaped millennial culture through gifs, sound bites, chats, brief moments, and temporary flashes of content. Let's take a look at how all of these social media thrills are affecting the way we communicate.

How Social Media Changed the Way We Communicate

1. Created a Sense of Urgency and a Need to Share ?

Since its launch in 2004, Facebook has created a place to share anything from genius shower thoughts to favorite songs. The catch is: are you sharing too little or too much? Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have manifested the need to constantly broadcast our lives on the internet. Twitter is most famous for this after becoming known for celebrities sharing what they ate that day or if they were tweeting from the bathroom. After this oversharing trend faded, social media became a bit more tolerable for the average user. From then on, nobody could avoid Aunt Vicky's vacation photos or Kim Kardashian's famous behind "
breaking the internet". The need to share and be shared has grown immensely. Fast forward to today's most used social media apps, and you will discover the type of sharing we do today is much different.
In basic communication, humans transmit information and receive instant feedback. The integration of texting, messaging and emailing, however, has enabled senders and receivers to sit and dwell before responding. Instagram Stories and Snapchat have changed the game by making messages and content available to view for only 24 hours. In order to remember what was said, or seen, and reply appropriately, the user must reply as soon as they've opened it. In effect, these temporary messages take away the ability to dwell and create a more real-time form of communication.
Social media has created a way for people to constantly update and share content with their friends with little effort. Whether it is posted forever on a timeline or a couple seconds in a Snap, a picture is worth a thousand words and social media has created the perfect medium to share these visual stories with friends.

2. Provided an Inside Perspective of Faraway Places ?

Social media has enabled people from all over the world to share their story. Besides the internet essentially connecting the world, Snapchat was the first to really give people an inside perspective of foreign places. With the addition of live story streams and Story Explorer, users are able to get a peek of what life in other cities, states, and countries is like. Snapchat in particular, regularly features cities from around the world and features them on the app with a live feed of Snapchats from people in the selected city. For example, tapping on the "Rio" feed instantly transports users to the lively city in Brazil and provides a peek at life through the eyes of everyday citizens.
Besides cities, live feeds are perfect for sharing events. From a higher education perspective, this is the ideal platform to share student events, football games, community outreaches, and more. Snapchat provides universities the unique opportunity of sharing experiences from a wide array of the campus population. By utilizing a live feed, or a Snapchat account altogether, a university is now able to show prospective students what life on campus is like from a student's point of view. The students who Snapchat their experiences are nurturing their connection to the university and sharing student stories on Snapchat can result in higher student interest, and help prospective students to determine if a school is a right fit for them.
More on: Leveraging University Events for Your SEO Strategy

3. Shared the Full Story, Instead of Just Highlights ?

It has already been a year since both Snapchat and Instagram announced the next generation of storytelling: Memories and Stories. These social media channels enable users to not just share the best picture out of their daily experiences; it encourages them to share the full story. Through Instagram, Facebook, AND Snapchat stories many users channel their creativity to share their day from the moment they wake up, to the moment they go to sleep.
Instead of uploading a few photos on Facebook or posting a 140 character tweet on Twitter, universities can utilize Snapchat and Instagram to complete their "social story". Using a mix of video and pictures, a university can share a campus event from beginning to end. A great example would be using Snapchat to share a graduation weekend with their audience. The university can not only share captured moments of graduates but of the ceremony, award banquets, speeches, and more. By sharing moments in this way, a university can create a sense of community and become relatable to current and prospective students.

4. Made Digital Messages More Personal ?

Customizing content doesn't just mean choosing how long a picture is able to be viewed or writing a caption to accompany the picture. Snapchat and Instagram have taken storytelling to the next level by encouraging users to draw, write, sticker, and filter their pictures to add a personal touch and have fun doing it! The newest Snapchat and Instagram features enable users to interact with the content they view and share.
Both Snapchat and Instagram have upgraded the average selfie. Now users can transform into a myriad of animals, characters, and even other people using these smart filters. The most popular example of a filter would be Taco Bell's Cinco de Mayo filter that transformed users into actual tacos. Taco Bell was able to market, create brand awareness, and even set a new record by using Snapchat's features to engage and interact with their customers.

A university could create a Snapchat filter for a football game that would engage students in attendance and encourage them to share their stadium experience. By creating an interactive university brand, prospective students are shown the campus community and current students will feel more engaged and a part of their school's conversation.
Snapchat's Discover features channels for a group of brands to broadcast their own content. These brands are lucky enough to be able to market themselves by engaging their audience and creating a conversation through interactive content. Another ability users have when using Discover is being able to directly share their favorite pieces of content with their Snapchat friends. Instead of having to explain and describe what was so funny, simply holding a finger on the screen allows users to instantly show their friends why they are laughing.

5. Brought News Back into Millennial Life ?

All of this interactive content has lead to journalism becoming attractive to millennials again. A study conducted by Wibbitz found that 40 percent of millennials rely on digital outlets for their news, while 23 percent primarily get their news from social media. Snapchat jumped on this finding and added news outlets to Discover.
An overarching theme in this article is interaction. Millennials love to interact with content, so why not the news? A big step in this new territory occurred when the Wall Street Journal joined Snapchat. CNN and National Geographic are among the 24 other media companies that have also joined the application in hopes of delivering journalistic content to this demographic.
Besides Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter have also played important roles in making the news more accessible and attractive to millennials. Twitter features "trending" hashtags that often highlight important national and global events. The website and app also highlight an array of news updates, events, and hot topics through their "What's Happening" portion of their landing page. Facebook also joined the journalistic movement by creating their own "Trending" section that highlights trending stories ranging from politics to science and technology. Facebook has taken this movement one step further and just debuted a section specifically for Trending News on its mobile app.

6. Provided the Ability to Broadcast Moments -- Live ?

Facebook Live became available to the public in April 2016 and instantly changed social media as we know it. At first it began as a way to innocently share even more with your friends, but then it became increasingly used for serious matters. Facebook Live has ended up revealing a lot about our society, from police shootings to a look at the increasing rate of opioid overdose deaths. On the positive side, it has created a launchpad for these more serious conversations to be had. Thanks to these Facebook Live videos, these controversial moments are not just being talked about, but also building momentum behind creating a positive change.
Besides changing the way we communicate major events through video, Facebook and Instagram Live have also opened up new marketing potential for universities. Similar to how a university can utilize Snapchat and Instagram Stories, higher education marketers can use the Live feature to engage both current and potential customers by sharing university events in real-time! Live allows your audience to jump right into a graduation, special concert, or collegiate event and get a real sense of what life on campus is like from a student's point of view.
Today's social media has undeniably transformed our means of communication, created new opportunities for brands and universities and even brought personality back into a digital world.
Circa Interactive has created innovative social strategies for a number of universities, schools, and individual degree programs. If you would like Circa to create a more targeted strategy focused on interaction and lead generation, please visit our social media marketing services page.

Audrey is a digital marketing and social media specialist at Circa Interactive. She currently manages multiple high profile social media accounts, including Circa Interactive's own social media presence. As a graduate of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and a past president of their Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) chapter, her passion for innovation and connecting like-minded individuals is driving Circa's social media strategy into the future. Connect with Audrey on Twitter:@audgepauge93

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6 Ways Social Media Changed the Way We Communicate

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There are currently 2.8 billion social media users worldwide . This means that over a third of the world's population is using some form of social media to communicate, making social media marketing an imperative tactic for boosting leads for higher education programs. While social media is a commonplace platform for communication today, have you ever considered how significantly social media changed the way we communicate?

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Last week, the Facebook Data Team released its social network analysis research, Anatomy of Facebook (on Facebook of course!). They have annotated their algorithms in two academic papers The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph and Four Degrees of Separation. Facebook claims their data show that connectivity between people around the world has dramatically increased - so much so that we are only four links away from someone in the most remote part of the world, whether that is a tundra or rainforest. A sociological look at the data dispels this notion. Despite its impressive sample, which includes 721 million active Facebook users and their "69 billion friendships", Facebook's findings replicate widely-held sociological knowledge about the way people form social ties. Nonetheless, Facebook's data has great potential to address important social questions, if we can just set aside those pesky social science concerns about research ethics, informed consent and privacy...

Facebook's study has an extraordinary sample of 'active users' representing one tenth of the world's population The term active user is defined by Johan Ugander and colleagues in one of the aforementioned academic papers. This refers to someone with at least one friend who had logged on once in the past 28 days from the study's commencement in May 2011. This is less frequent than the Facebook's company definition of an active user, but the divergent definitions are not explained. For the record, Facebook currently reports it has 800 million active users and 50 percent of them log in at least once a day. Lars Backstrom, computer scientist and one of the Facebook Data Team's lead researchers in this study, reports on the aims and key findings. The Team found that only around 10 percent of active users have less than 10 friends, while half have a median of 100 friends (the average is 190 friends). See below for more detail.

Facebook's researchers are claiming that the small worlds thesis developed by Jeffrey Travers and Stanley Milgram, also popularly linked to Duncan Watt's six degrees of separation research, is wrong. Facebook says that there are only four degrees separating me from you, dear readers.

Facebook is making big claims about this research. The researchers argue that all active Facebook users are potentially connected to someone in Siberia as well as to someone in the Peruvian rainforest. My background is Peruvian - I can tell you right now that even though I'm connected to my cousins in Peru on Facebook, none of us have any connections to people living in a rainforest! Not in real life, let alone on Facebook. This is because, as Facebook concedes, the majority of people on Facebook (84%) are actually only connected to other people in the same country where they live. Moreover, Facebook notes that people's friendships are clustered around the same age groups (see diagram below).

The potential reach of Facebook to bridge social gaps at the global level is actually limited by the same demographical concerns as in real life. In sociology, we know this as homophily: people form friendships, romantic relationships and other social connections with people based on their socio-cultural, geographic and demographic similarities. For example, sociologists Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James Cook find that race and ethnicity are the biggest influences on social networks, followed by age, religion, education, occupation, and gender. The above graph on the age correlations between Facebook friends should therefore come as no surprise.

I'm really pleased that Facebook is releasing this type of data. This is commendable because a lot of companies that push out 'research' about social media usually only pump out infographics but they do not make their methodology or data available to others. (For a very recent example released yesterday, see a study claiming that women gamers have more sex, republished in reputable sites such as Mashable and VentureBeat. The findings seem suspect when we consider the study was commissioned by... a gaming site.)

Despite its progressive approach to social media research, Facebook could greatly benefit with more sociological analysis to make their data more meaningful. I remember reading in The Economist ( from 2009) that Facebook has hired at least one sociologist, Cameron Marlow, to develop their social network research. He has contributed to this Facebook study. Still, as an applied sociologist, I am left wanting. What does it all mean? Mathematical sociologist James Coleman would have had a field day with this wealth of data. Coleman (and other social scientists since) have been interested in social networks as a type of social structure - a microcosm of culture in a particular society, affected by social institutions and informal social norms about trust, obligations and expectations of what type of support we can expect from other people. Facebook's research tells us about the links between a large sub-group of humanity - but it doesn't say anything about what these connections mean.

If most people have 100 to 190 friends on Facebook, as the FB research suggests, are these strong ties that provide bonding social capital, where people trust and help one another effectively increase their socio-economic position? (See Alejandro Portes' research.) Are Facebook friendships mostly weak social ties (such as casual acquaintances, old school friends and former work colleagues) that are good for seeking out new job opportunities, but not so good for emotional support? (Refer to Barry Wellman's classic research.) Are Facebook friends bridging ties that help might help someone find new ideas from outside groups and which facilitate civic cooperation? (See Robert Putnam.) Do people on Facebook have linking ties to important people who can lend their social prestige to important causes? (See Nan Nin.)

Other sociological questions relate to what friendship connections are actually doing on Facebook. Are people merely exchanging hilarious GIFs and links to cute videos or are they exchanging information that improves their quality of life? Why are some groups of people more likely than others to set up successful support groups on Facebook that mobilise social action? What are the cultural differences within different sub-groups in different countries? It seems unlikely that all 721 million active Facebook users are using FB in the same way. Other research identifies qualitative differences in the way people use the internet in different countries, as well as differences between sub-populations within the same country. (For example see Caroline Haythornthwaite and Barry Wellman's research.) Reynol Junco's American study finds that students who regularly use Facebook to collect and share information achieve good high school scores (this includes people who regularly check in with what friends doing and who share links). In comparison, users who simply socialise on Facebook (updating their status and chatting) have poor educational outcomes. Clearly, Facebook friendships and their activities have different real-life benefits, so greater connectivity alone tells us little about the social networks on Facebook.

Hopefully Facebook will release other papers addressing the sociological dimensions of networks. It would be useful if Facebook was somehow able to de-identify at least a representative cut of the data and make it publicly available for other researchers. Then again this brings up a major methodological issue: Facebook did not seek approval from users to use their data. While there are ongoing debates about the ever-changing privacy policies on Facebook, most of this discussion is about how personal data is being used to deliver targeted advertising. The research conducted by Facebook on friendship activity does not feature heavily in such debates. This presents an important ethical dilemma for social scientists, given that informed consent and transparency with research participants is central to social research.

Does anyone have any thoughts about Facebook's 'four degrees of separation' study? Can you think of other questions you'd like Facebook to address? What about the methodological and ethical ramifications of how the data are collected - do you have any concerns or further comments? Please share!
All graphs via Facebook
Follow me @OtherSociology or click below!

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"69 Billion Friendships" on Facebook - How Sociology Can Make This Meaningful

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Last week, the Facebook Data Team released its social network analysis research, Anatomy of Facebook (on Facebook of course!). They have annotated their algorithms in two academic papers The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph and Four Degrees of Separation. Facebook claims their data show that connectivity between people around the world has dramatically increased -...

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Soon, we might not be able to believe our own ears.

New technologies for creating faked audio are evolving quickly in the era of active information campaigns and their use of "fake news."

This has serious repercussions for politics: Influence-mongers could create fake clips of politicians to undermine them - or politicians could deny they said things they were really recorded saying, calling it fake audio.

A Montreal startup called Lyrebird has released a product which allows users to create an audio clip of anyone saying anything. Here's the company using a fake clip of former President Barack Obama to market their technology.

It's not perfect - it sounds like Obama coming in over a bad phone connection. But it does sound like Obama.

"They want to use this technology to change the life of everyone that lost their voice to a disease by helping them recover this part of their identities. Let's help them achieve this goal," the Lyrebird-created version of Obama says.

Lyrebird also created a series of clips of President Trump reading aloud some of his tweets.

Lyrebird isn't the only company which has developed a voice-editing technology.

Adobe is in the early stages of developing its own program, called Adobe VoCo, which would be able to mimic someone's speech based on text. The company pitched it as Photoshop for audio.

"It remains an early-stage research project for Adobe and is not available to the public today. In fact, one of the reasons we provide an early look at technologies like Project VoCo is so that we can engage our community on how best it can be developed, what its potential uses might be, and what safeguards might be put in place to discourage its misuse," the company said.

There are a limited number of distinct sounds in the human voice. These technologies process them and how individuals pronounce them - through a process called machine learning. The implications are huge, observers say.

"I don't think it's an overstatement to say that it is a potential threat to democracy," said Hany Farid, the chair of computer science at Dartmouth College.
Tale of the tape
The ordinary course of a political campaign could provide plenty of grist for the creation of fake audio.

In 2008, for example, rumors circulated about a tape in which Michelle Obama used a derogatory term for white people. There's no evidence that it existed. But using these technologies, a fake could be made.

The growing awareness of influence campaigns and fake recordings also could also give public figures a chance to call real audio a forgery. Farid recalled the Access Hollywood tapes in the 2016 campaign on which Trump was recorded boasting about forcing himself on women.

"Eighteen months ago when that audio recording of President Trump came out ... if that was today, you can guarantee that he would have said it's fake and he would have had some reasonable credibility in saying that as well," Farid said.

Yoshua Bengio, an adviser to Lyrebird, touts such positive uses as restoring voices to those who have lost them to illness.

"I think it's better if companies ... to do it in a way that's going to be beneficial for society," he said. "Try to put as much as possible of the safeguards that I think are necessary and also raise the awareness rather than doing these things in secret."

The Pentagon considers the potential danger from fake audio and video to be urgent enough that it has invested time and resources into coming up with a fix.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has a "media forensics" project aimed at developing the capability to automatically check images, video and audio for authenticity.

David Doermann, who runs the program, imagined a disaster scenario: a collage of fake audio, video and photos that come together in a mass misinformation campaign - and create the impression of a major event that never even occurred.

"That might lead to political unrest, or riots, or at worst some nations acting all based on this bad information," he told NPR.

Ultimately, these technologies mean the public must be far more skeptical in cases of disputed reports, like those that may become more common in the 2018 elections, observers say.

"It wasn't that long ago that you could easily assume that if you have photographic evidence of something that can be used as evidence and no one's going to question it," said Mark Kozak, an engineer who works for PAR Government Systems, a company that creates falsified media that Doermann's team uses to develop their platform.

"I think people have to learn to be questioning everything that you hear and see."

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Can You Believe Your Own Ears? With New 'Fake News' Tech, Not Necessarily

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Soon, we might not be able to believe our own ears. New technologies for creating faked audio are evolving quickly in the era of active information campaigns and their use of "fake news." This has serious repercussions for politics: Influence-mongers could create fake clips of politicians to undermine them - or politicians could deny they said things they were really recorded saying, calling it fake audio.

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And why it's a bad thing

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"It's no good fighting an election campaign on the facts," Cambridge Analytica's managing director told an undercover reporter, "because actually it's all about emotion." To target U.S. voters and appeal to their hopes, neuroses, and fears, the political consulting firm needed to train its algorithm to predict and map personality traits. That required lots of personal data. So, to build these psychographic profiles, Cambridge Analytica enlisted a Cambridge University professor, whose app collected data on about 50 million Facebook users and their friends. Facebook, at that time, allowed app developers to collect this personal data. Facebook argued that Cambridge Analytica and the professor violated its data polices. But this was not the first time its policies were violated. Nor is it likely to be the last.

This scandal came on the heels of Russia's using Facebook, Google, and Twitter "to sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election." It heightened concerns over today's tech giants and the influence they have.

That influence comes in part from data. Facebook, Google, Amazon, and similar companies are "data-opolies." By that I mean companies that control a key platform which, like a coral reef, attracts to its ecosystem users, sellers, advertisers, software developers, apps, and accessory makers. Apple and Google, for example, each control a popular mobile phone operating system platform (and key apps on that platform), Amazon controls the largest online merchant platform, and Facebook controls the largest social network platform. Through their leading platforms, a significant volume and variety of personal data flows. The velocity in acquiring and exploiting this personal data can help these companies obtain significant market power.

Is it OK for a few firms to possess so much data and thereby wield so much power? In the U.S., at least, antitrust officials so far seem ambivalent about these data-opolies. They're free, the thinking goes, so what's the harm? But that reasoning is misguided. Data-opolies pose tremendous risks, for consumers, workers, competition, and the overall health of our democracy. Here's why.

Why U.S. Antitrust Isn't Worried About Data-opolies

The European competition authorities have recently brought actions against four data-opolies: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (or GAFA for short). The European Commission, for example, fined Google a record €2.42 billion for leveraging its monopoly in search to advance its comparative shopping service. The Commission also preliminarily found Google to have abused its dominant position with both its Android mobile operating system and with AdSense. Facebook, Germany's competition agency preliminarily found, abused its dominant position "by making the use of its social network conditional on its being allowed to limitlessly amass every kind of data generated by using third-party websites and merge it with the user's Facebook account."

We will likely see more fines and other remedies in the next few years from the Europeans. But in the U.S., the data-opolies have largely escaped antitrust scrutiny, under both the Obama and Bush administrations. Notably, while the European Commission found Google's search bias to be anticompetitive, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission did not. From 2000 onward, the Department of Justice brought only one monopolization case in total, against anyone. (In contrast, the DOJ, between 1970 and 1972, brought 39 civil and 3 criminal cases against monopolies and oligopolies.)

The current head of the DOJ's Antitrust Division recognized the enforcement gap between the U.S. and Europe. He noted his agency's "particular concerns in digital markets." But absent "demonstrable harm to competition and consumers," the DOJ is "reluctant to impose special duties on digital platforms, out of [its] concern that special duties might stifle the very innovation that has created dynamic competition for the benefit of consumers."

So, the divergence in antitrust enforcement may reflect differences over these data-opolies' perceived harms. Ordinarily the harm from monopolies are higher prices, less output, or reduced quality. It superficially appears that data-opolies pose little, if any risk, of these harms. Unlike some pharmaceuticals, data-opolies do not charge consumers exorbitant prices. Most of Google's and Facebook's consumer products are ostensibly "free." The data-opolies' scale can also mean higher quality products. The more people use a particular search engine, the more the search engine's algorithm can learn users' preferences, the more relevant the search results will likely be, which in turn will likely attract others to the search engine, and the positive feedback continues.

As Robert Bork argued, there "is no coherent case for monopolization because a search engine, like Google, is free to consumers and they can switch to an alternative search engine with a click."

How Data-opolies Harm

But higher prices are not the only way for powerful companies to harm their consumers or the rest of society. Upon closer examination, data-opolies can pose at least eight potential harms.

Lower-quality products with less privacy. Companies, antitrust authorities increasingly recognize, can compete on privacy and protecting data. But without competition, data-opolies face less pressure. They can depress privacy protection belowcompetitive levels and collect personal data above competitive levels. The collection of too much personal data can be the equivalent of charging an excessive price.

Data-opolies can also fail to disclose what data they collect and how they will use the data. They face little competitive pressure to change their opaque privacy policies. Even if a data-opoly improves its privacy statement, so what? The current notice-and-consent regime is meaningless when there are no viable competitive alternatives and the bargaining power is so unequal.

Surveillance and security risks. In a monopolized market, personal data is concentrated in a few firms. Consumers have limited outside options that offer better privacy protection. This raises additional risks, including:

Government capture. The fewer the number of firms controlling the personal data, the greater the potential risk that a government will "capture" the firm. Companies need things from government; governments often want access to data. When there are only a few firms, this can increase the likelihood of companies secretly cooperating with the government to provide access to data. China, for example, relies on its data-opolies to better monitor its population.

Covert surveillance. Even if the government cannot capture a data-opoly, its rich data-trove increases a government's incentive to circumvent the data-opoly's privacy protections to tap into the personal data. Even if the government can't strike a deal to access the data directly, it may be able to do so covertly.

Implications of a data policy violation/security breach. Data-opolies have greater incentives to prevent a breach than do typical firms. But with more personal data concentrated in fewer companies, hackers, marketers, political consultants, among others, have even greater incentives to find ways to circumvent or breach the dominant firm's security measures. The concentration of data means that if one of them is breached, the harm done could be orders of magnitude greater than with a normal company. While consumers may be outraged, a dominant firm has less reason to worry of consumers' switching to rivals.

Wealth transfer to data-opolies. Even when their products and services are ostensibly "free," data-opolies can extract significant wealth in several ways that they otherwise couldn't in a competitive market:

First, data-opolies can extract wealth by getting personal data without having to pay for the data's fair market value. The personal data collected may be worth far more than the cost of providing the "free" service. The fact that the service is "free" does not mean we are fairly compensated for our data. Thus, data-opolies have a strong economic incentive to maintain the status quo, in which users, as the MIT Technology Review put it, "have little idea how much personal data they have provided, how it is used, and what it is worth." If the public knew, and if they had viable alternatives, they might hold out for compensation.

Second, something similar can happen but with the content users create. Data-opolies can extract wealth by getting creative content from users for free. In a competitive market, users could conceivably demand compensation not only for their data but also their contributions to YouTube and Facebook. With no viable alternatives, they cannot.

Third, data-opolies can extract wealth from sellers upstream. One example is when data-opolies scrape valuable content from photographers, authors, musicians, and other websites and post it on their own platform. In this case, the wealth of the data-opolies comes at the expense of other businesses in their value chain.

Fourth, data-opolies can extract our wealth indirectly, when their higher advertising fees are passed along in the prices for the advertised goods and services. If the data-opolies faced more competitors for their advertising services, ads could cost even less - and therefore so might the products being advertised.

Finally, data-opolies can extract wealth from both sellers upstream and consumers downstream by facilitating or engaging in " behavioral discrimination," a form of price discrimination based on past behavior - like, say, your internet browsing. They can use the personal data to get people to buy things they did not necessarily want at the highest price they are willing to pay.

As data-opolies expand their platforms to digital personal assistants, the Internet of Things, and smart technologies, the concern is that their data advantage will increase their competitive advantage and market power. As a result, the data-opolies' monopoly profits will likely increase, at our expense.

Loss of trust. Market economies rely on trust. For online markets to deliver their benefits, people must trust firms and their use of the personal data. But as technology evolves and more personal data is collected, we are increasingly aware that a few powerful firms are using our personal information for their own benefit, not ours. When data-opolies degrade privacy protections below competitive levels, some consumers will choose not "to share their data, to limit their data sharing with companies, or even to lie when providing information," as the UK's Competition and Markets Authority put it. Consumers may forgo the data-opolies' services, which they otherwise would have used if privacy competition were robust. This loss would represent what economists call a deadweight welfare loss. In other words, as distrust increases, society overall becomes worse off.

Significant costs on third parties. Additionally, data-opolies that control a key platform, like a mobile phone operating system, can cheaply exclude rivals by:

steering users and advertisers to their own products and services to the detriment of rival sellers on the platform (and contrary to consumers' wishes)

degrading an independent app's functionality

reducing traffic to an independent app by making it harder to find on its search engine or app store

Data-opolies can also impose costs on companies seeking to protect our privacy interests. My book with Ariel Ezrachi, Virtual Competition, discusses, for example, Google's kicking the privacy app Disconnect out of its Android app store.

Less innovation in markets dominated by data-opolies. Data-opolies can chill innovation with a weapon that earlier monopolies lacked. Allen Grunes and I call it the "now-casting radar." Our book Big Data and Competition Policyexplores how some platforms have a relative advantage in accessing and analyzing data to discern consumer trends well before others. Data-opolies can use their relative advantage to see what products or services are becoming more popular. With their now-casting radar, data-opolies can acquire or squelch these nascent competitive threats.

Social and moral concerns. Historically, antitrust has also been concerned with how monopolies can hinder individual autonomy. Data-opolies can also hurt individual autonomy. To start with, they can direct (and limit) opportunities for startups that subsist on their super-platform. This includes third-party sellers that rely on Amazon's platform to reach consumers, newspapers and journalists that depend on Facebook and Google to reach younger readers, and, as the European Commission's Google Shopping Case explores, companies that depend on traffic from Google's search engine.

But the autonomy concerns go beyond the constellation of app developers, sellers, journalists, musicians, writers, photographers, and artists dependent on the data-opoly to reach users. Every individual's autonomy is at stake. In January, the hedge fund Jana Partners joined the California State Teachers' Retirement pension fund to demand that Apple do more to address the effects of its devices on children. As The Economist noted, "You know you are in trouble if a Wall Street firm is lecturing you about morality." The concern is that the data-opolies' products are purposefully addictive, and thereby eroding individuals' ability to make free choices.

There is an interesting counterargument that's worth noting, based on the interplay between monopoly power and competition. On the one hand, in monopolized markets, consumers have fewer competitive options. So, arguably, there is less need to addict them. On the other hand, data-opolies, like Facebook and Google, even without significant rivals, can increase profits by increasing our engagement with their products. So, data-opolies can have an incentive to exploit behavioral biases and imperfect willpower to addict users - whether watching YouTube videos or posting on Instagram.

Political concerns. Economic power often translates into political power. Unlike earlier monopolies, data-opolies, given how they interact with individuals, possess a more powerful tool: namely, the ability to affect the public debate and our perception of right and wrong.

Many people now receive their news from social media platforms. But the news isn't just passively transmitted. Data-opolies can affect how we feel and think. Facebook, for example, in an "emotional contagion" study, manipulated 689,003 users' emotions by altering their news feed. Other risks of this sort include:

Bias. In filtering the information we receive based on our preferences, data-opolies can reduce the viewpoints we receive, thereby leading to "echo chambers" and "filter bubbles."

Censorship. Data-opolies, through their platform, can control or block content that users receive, and enforce governmental censorship of political or religious information.

Manipulation. Data-opolies can promote stories that further their particular business or political interests, instead of their relevance or quality.

Limiting the Power of Data-opolies

Upon closer examination, data-opolies can actually be more dangerous than traditional monopolies. They can affect not only our wallets but our privacy, autonomy, democracy, and well-being.

Markets dominated by these data-opolies will not necessarily self-correct. Network effects, high switching costs for consumers (given the lack of data portability and user rights over their data), and weak privacy protection help data-opolies maintain their dominance.

Luckily, global antitrust enforcement can help. The Reagan administration, in espousing the then-popular Chicago School of economics beliefs, discounted concerns over monopolies. The Supreme Court, relying on faulty economic reasoning, surmised that charging monopoly prices was "an important element of the free market system." With the rise of a progressive, anti-monopoly New Brandeis School, the pendulum is swinging the other way. Given the emergence of data-opolies, this is a welcomed change.

Nonetheless, global antitrust enforcement, while a necessary tool to deter these harms, is not sufficient. Antitrust enforcers must coordinate with privacy and consumer protection officials to ensure that the conditions for effective privacy competition and an inclusive economy are in place.

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Here Are All the Reasons It's a Bad Idea to Let a Few Tech Companies Monopolize Our Data

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Facebook, Google, Amazon, and companies like them are "data-opolies." They control a key platform, which like a coral reef, attracts to its ecosystem users, sellers, advertisers, software developers, apps, and accessory makers. But is it ok for a few firms to possess so much data and thereby wield so much power?

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Unfortunately, not surprising

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As Women's History Month nears its close in 2018, many people have been reflecting on the struggles women have faced in the past and the strides they are making toward changing the future.

Tech is one area of specific interest here, as it's a place where women have traditionally been under-represented. But is that changing too?

Let's find out. Using data from several large tech surveys, I'll examine the current state of women in tech and see where things stand.
More Women Are Learning To Code Than Ever
While tech has historically been a male-dominated industry, there's a new generation of women who aren't intimidated by that fact. According to HackerRank's Women in Tech report, women now represent the highest number of new CS grads and junior developers (53%) entering the workforce.

What's more, women often learn to code as young teenagers: almost as many women learned before the age of 16 as men who did the same.

Further illustrating the evidence for the shifting demographics of coding as a profession, twice as many women as men have been coding two years or less. Once these women enter the workforce, we will likely see other statistics continue to shift as well.

The tides are turning, but for now, men still vastly outnumber women in tech careers. As an example, look at the demographics of the respondents to Stack Overflow's 2018 developer survey: nearly 93% were male.
(But There Is Still A Gender Pay Gap In Computing)
Many industries still suffer from a gender pay gap, despite rising public awareness of the issue. Tech is one of them.

In fact, according to LiveStories' data for the Computer and Mathematical category, the pay gap was actually worse in 2016 than it had been in 2005. Their numbers are based on income statistics from the United States Census Bureau. Women in computers in 2005 earned 87% as much as their male counterparts, but by 2016, it had fallen to 85%.
Women Prioritize The Skills Employers Want
As the data demonstrates, women in tech are overwhelmingly practical. They tend to pursue proficiency in the languages most in-demand and valued by employers.

Specifically, the top 5 programming languages that most women have proficiency in are,

These are the exact same languages that companies value most in front-end, back-end and full-stack developers.
(But Women Are More Likely To Hold Junior Positions)
Despite the fact that women have skills in demand by employers, Hackerrank found that women of all ages were more likely to hold junior positions than their male counterparts. The difference was especially striking for women over 35, who were 3.5x more likely to be in junior roles.

It's unclear whether women are being passed over for promotions out of implicit bias or because of life events--like having children--that stall the journey into senior positions.

However, there are plenty of inspiring women out there who demonstrate that you can have multiple life paths--like Vidya Srinivasan, who defied workplace stereotypes while pregnant and then successfully integrated back to work after maternity leave.

Furthermore, tech companies who are willing to offer fertility benefits like egg freezing enable women to pursue their professional goals during the crucial growth years, without sacrificing family if that's something they want in the future.
What Women Value In The Workplace
As part of Stack Overflow's annual survey, they ask participating developers what they prioritize while searching for a job. The most popular answers differ when broken down by gender.

When assessing a prospective job, women say their highest priorities are company culture and opportunities for professional development, while men say their highest priorities are compensation and working with specific technologies.

The fact that women actively seek out professional development opportunities shows that there is desire among women to progress to higher roles. They simply need companies who will support their quest to do so.

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Women In Tech: Educated, Ambitious And Underpaid

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As Women's History Month nears its close in 2018, many people have been reflecting on the struggles women have faced in the past and the strides they are making toward changing the future. Tech is one area of specific interest here, as it's a place where women have traditionally been under-represented.

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The number of girls using social networking sites for more than three hours on an average school day has doubled in four years, new figures show.

In 2011/12 8.7% of 10-15-year-old girls surveyed used sites such as Facebook for more than three hours a day, jumping to 17.4% in 2015/16.

[Read more: Social media could cause sleep problems and depression]

The number of boys using social media has increased too, but their usage remains far lower than that of their female counterparts, according to the Office for National Statistics.

In 2011/12 4.9% of boys spent more than three hours on social networking sites, which increased to 8.3% in 2015/16.

(PA Graphics)

The data was collected from Understanding Society, the UK household longitudinal study.

The figures were based on a survey of 4,410 children in 2011/12 and 3,616 in 2015/16.

The Children's Well-being and Social Relationships report also found that for the first time boys were more likely than girls to argue with their mother more than once a week.

In 2015/16 25.2% of girls aged 10-15-years-old reported quarrelling with their mother more than once a week, compared with 26.3% of boys.

This is down from 31.0% of girls and 30.1% of boys in 2009/10.

Both genders argued with their father less than their mother on average, but more children reported talking frequently to their mothers about "things that matter" than their fathers.

[Read more: Don't get hacked, be Cyber Aware]

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Twice as many girls using social media for more than three hours a day

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The number of girls using social networking sites for more than three hours on an average school day has doubled in four years, new figures show. In 2011/12 8.7% of 10-15-year-old girls surveyed used sites such as Facebook for more than three hours a day, jumping to 17.4% in 2015/16.

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How close are we? And what does it mean for us?

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Ready Player One / Warner Bros.
"Ready Player One," the latest film from director Steven Spielberg, is the story of Wade Watts, a kid from Columbus, Ohio. He lives in a futuristic world where everyone - the young, old, poor, and rich - spends the vast majority of their time in virtual reality (VR), to avoid the dystopian real world where poverty and despair run rampant as a result of global warming and overpopulation.

Based on the 2011 novel by Ernest Cline, "Ready Player One" paints a rather pessimistic view of society's growing dependence on technology, but also depicts the fantastical possibilities presented by VR and other futuristic technologies.

Given the many realistic-looking and fantastical gadgets and technologies featured in "Ready Player One," we took a closer look at some of the most exciting technologies featured in the film to see how they compare with innovation happening in the real world.
Take a look:

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All the futuristic technologies from 'Ready Player One,' and how close they are to becoming reality

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"Ready Player One," the latest film from director Steven Spielberg, is the story of Wade Watts, a kid from Columbus, Ohio. He lives in a futuristic world where everyone - the young, old, poor, and rich - spends the vast majority of their time in virtual reality (VR), to avoid the dystopian real world where poverty and despair run rampant as a result of global warming and overpopulation.

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It's been a long time coming

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And earlier this month, Google announced a $300 million initiative to address the rise of false information online. "The last thing you want as a search engine is to see the open internet become a race to the bottom," Philipp Schindler, Google's Chief Business Officer, declared.

" Techlash" is having an impact. With growing awareness of threats to privacy, access and innovation, as well as increasing suspicion of super-conglomerates in the areas of search, content, e-commerce and social media, we're finally seeing pervasive pessimism yield some change. But there's still a long way to go.

It's time we all admit a simple fact: Tech is not value-neutral. Technologies embody the goals and values of the people who create them. Until recently much of tech industry has lived with the comfortable certainty that whatever is good for their company is good for society.

Now we are all learning how untrue this can be.

The easiest and best response is competition, innovation and consumer choice. However, the dominance of the big players makes this difficult and unlikely. In the absence of competition, consumers can apply pressure. Consumer pressure validates that the system has problems. When consumers can't abandon a product, even the reaction of usage has an impact. And of course, consumer pressure suggests regulatory legislation might be a realistic fear.

Twenty years ago, when I co-founded Mozilla, a free and open-source technology community, the current crisis in Silicon Valley would have been impossible to fathom. In its early days, the web was almost universally seen as a force for good. It enabled anyone to access knowledge and communicate their views to the world.

Small entrepreneurs could finally compete with bigger firms on a level playing field. Distant possibilities, like universal access to once-reserved knowledge, seemed within reach. Some potential problems surfaced -- such as the ease of one-click copying of images -- but overall a sense of giddiness prevailed.

Today's reality is almost unrecognizable. The biggest tech companies (especially Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft) are now such a dominant part of web life that for many users, they have become more-or-less synonymous with the internet itself. This means when Google tracks users' locations against their wishes, or when deceptive ads on Facebook distort an election, users can feel the entire web has been corrupted.

The big tech players are roundly criticized for not doing enough to stem the tide of bots and disinformation that distorted recent elections. The European Commission imposed its largest antitrust fine ($2.7 billion) on Google for manipulating search-engine results to favor its own platforms against other services. Other regulators throughout Europe -- and in the United States -- appear poised to scrutinize Big Tech more closely than ever. If the biggest tech firms hope to retain public trust, and to play a positive role, then they need to undertake a great deal of reflection and reform.

But it's also important to recognize the internet is far broader, deeper and more inclusive than the Big Five. A handful of firms shouldn't color our perceptions of what's possible on the internet. For the past two decades, the internet has helped billions of people become more educated, informed and empowered. Developers have collaborated to create life-changing open-source software. Social movements have driven tidal waves of political change.

We can build on what the internet has done right. But, for positive reform to take hold, we all need to engage in serious thinking about values. This includes tech's biggest players, in particular.

A decade ago, we at Mozilla wrote a manifesto to articulate the values we hoped to help embed in Internet life. That early document sought to codify what we knew then -- that the internet is an indispensable public resource, that open access to the internet is a basic right, that the internet exists to empower individual human beings and that individual privacy and security are essential.

Today, in response to the current state of affairs, we're expanding our manifesto to include a Pledge for a Healthy Internet -- or four commitments that will guide our work in these areas. We are committed:

1. To an internet that includes all the peoples of the earth -- where a person's demographic characteristics do not determine their online access, opportunities or quality of experience.

2. To an internet that promotes civil discourse, human dignity and individual expression.

3. To an internet that elevates critical thinking, reasoned argument, shared knowledge and verifiable facts.

4. To an internet that catalyzes collaboration among diverse communities working together for the common good.

All this is ambitious, given the current state of the internet. These ideas won't come to life on their own. As in any human institution, real transformation will come from a huge diversity of sources. That's why we're creating an opportunity for anyone to sign the pledge and start consciously implementing the principles.

Policy change is also part of the equation. Recent events demonstrate that market incentives may not be sufficient to realize a healthy web. As Tristan Harris has pointed out, much of the internet is now engineered to "hijack our psychological vulnerabilities." Even many captains of industry -- including Zuckerberg and Sandberg -- have now noted that a government role can be healthy. And there's evidence of bipartisan interest in exploring what's necessary: how the technology giants and a healthy society should coexist.

There's no secret strategy to overcoming the backlash against tech. While Silicon Valley was once defined by utopian dreams, life on the internet was probably always going to look much like life everywhere else -- brilliant, troubling, messy and full of possibility.

It's time to declare a positive set of principles to help renew the original promise of the internet -- as a free, open, empowering system where facts, privacy rights and dignity can rule the day.

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backlash against tech companies is a wake-up call (opinion) - cnn

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Backlash against tech companies is a wake-up call

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And earlier this month, Google announced a $300 million initiative to address the rise of false information online. "The last thing you want as a search engine is to see the open internet become a race to the bottom," Philipp Schindler, Google's Chief Business Officer, declared. " Techlash" is having an impact.

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A trend

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Members of a student law society who allegedly made racist comments have been suspended by the University of Exeter after private WhatsApp conversations were shared on social media.

A student posted screenshots of the "racist and vile" messages - alleged to have been sent between Bracton Law Society members - on Facebook ahead of the society's election.

The group chat messages suggest the Russell Group university's law society should be for white people only, saying: "If they're black, send em back."

Racial slurs, derogatory terms and rape "jokes" all feature in the private WhatsApp messages between students.

The University of Exeter has launched an investigation into the comments - which were made in a group chat called "Dodgy Blokes Soc" - and the accused students have been suspended.

It comes just days after two Nottingham Trent University students were arrested when another student posted video footage of racist chants outside her bedroom door in halls.

Arsalan Motavali, who posted screengrabs of the racist comments on Facebook on Monday, said he had already reported the matter to the university and the students' union, the Exeter Guild.

On Facebook, he said: "I refuse to stand by and let such people who speak in these terms go on to recruit at future law firms or be a part of University culture, whilst cowering behind their phones and talking like this about people that are part of the society they represent.

"If you're going to be a racist, be a racist, just be prepared to face the consequences that come with being such a person."

Mr Motavali added: "I came to this University to learn, better myself and be a part of a community I was led to believe were tolerant and welcoming to all students, regardless of background.

"The University of Exeter has a serious racism problem that they need to deal with urgently and by setting a precedent."

A statement issued by the university on Tuesday said: "The University of Exeter does not tolerate any form of racist, sexist or bigoted behaviour and is committed to eradicating any instances of discrimination and harassment that may arise.

"Following reports of allegations involving a small group of students, the University has launched a major investigation, in conjunction with the Students' Guild, and suspended the students while this takes place. The police have also been informed.

"While it would be inappropriate to comment further while investigations take place, full disciplinary action with be taken as appropriate."

Following reports of allegations involving a small group of students, the University has launched a major investigation, in conjunction with the Students' Guild, and suspended the students while this takes place. The police have also been informed.
- University of Exeter (@UniofExeter) March 20, 2018

The Bracton Law Society said it had banned all the students involved, meaning one candidate would be prevented from standing in the society's upcoming election.

"The Society does not condone or tolerate such behaviour," a statement from the society said.

A Devon and Cornwall police spokesperson said: "Police are aware of this incident and are liaising with staff at the University of Exeter."

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Exeter University students suspended after 'racist' messages shared on Facebook

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Members of a student law society who allegedly made racist comments have been suspended by the University of Exeter after private WhatsApp conversations were shared on social media. A student posted screenshots of the "racist and vile" messages - alleged to have been sent between Bracton Law Society members - on Facebook ahead of the society's election.

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A troubling truth

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This wasn't informed consent. This was the exploitation of user data and user trust.

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that you had explicitly consented to turn over your Facebook data to another company. Do you keep up with the latest academic research on computational inference? Did you know that algorithms now do a pretty good job of inferring a person's personality traits, sexual orientation, political views, mental health status, substance abuse history and more just from his or her Facebook "likes" - and that there are new applications of this data being discovered every day?

Given this confusing and rapidly changing state of affairs about what the data may reveal and how it may be used, consent to ongoing and extensive data collection can be neither fully informed nor truly consensual - especially since it is practically irrevocable.

What did Cambridge Analytica do with all the data? With whom else might it have shared it? In 2015, Facebook sent a stern letter to Cambridge Analytica asking that the data be deleted. Cambridge Analytica employees have said that the company merely checked a box indicating that the data was deleted, at which point Facebook decided not to inform the 50 million users who were affected by the breach, nor to make the issue public, nor to sanction Cambridge Analytica at the time.

The New York Times and The Observer of London are reporting that the data was not deleted. And Cambridge Analytica employees are claiming that the data formed the backbone of the company's operations in the 2016 presidential election.

If Facebook failed to understand that this data could be used in dangerous ways, that it shouldn't have let anyone harvest data in this manner and that a third-party ticking a box on a form wouldn't free the company from responsibility, it had no business collecting anyone's data in the first place. But the vast infrastructure Facebook has built to obtain data, and its consequent half-a-trillion-dollar market capitalization, suggest that the company knows all too well the value of this kind of vast data surveillance.

Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. In many countries, Facebook and its products simply are the internet. Some employers and landlords demand to see Facebook profiles, and there are increasingly vast swaths of public and civic life - from volunteer groups to political campaigns to marches and protests - that are accessible or organized only via Facebook.

The problem here goes beyond Cambridge Analytica and what it may have done. What other apps were allowed to siphon data from millions of Facebook users? What if one day Facebook decides to suspend from its site a presidential campaign or a politician whose platform calls for things like increased data privacy for individuals and limits on data retention and use? What if it decides to share data with one political campaign and not another? What if it gives better ad rates to candidates who align with its own interests?

A business model based on vast data surveillance and charging clients to opaquely target users based on this kind of extensive profiling will inevitably be misused. The real problem is that billions of dollars are being made at the expense of the health of our public sphere and our politics, and crucial decisions are being made unilaterally, and without recourse or accountability.

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Opinion | Facebook's Surveillance Machine

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This wasn't informed consent. This was the exploitation of user data and user trust. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that you had explicitly consented to turn over your Facebook data to another company. Do you keep up with the latest academic research on computational inference?

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Something good!

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Explore National Geographic. A world leader in geography, cartography and exploration.

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How are they linked?

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After a weeklong blackout, the Sri Lankan government lifted its nationwide ban on social media on Thursday. Facebook and several other platforms had been shut down after days of violence targeting Muslims in the Kandy district, a popular destination for tourists and pilgrims. The violence began after a Sinhalese Buddhist truck driver was killed in a road-rage incident. Buddhist chauvinist groups flocked to the area, and their visits were followed by looting, arson, and attacks on mosques and on businesses operated by Muslims.

Anti-Muslim propaganda is pervasive in all types of media in Sinhala, the language of Sri Lanka's majority Buddhist population. But some pieces of disinformation - like false accounts of Buddhist monks being attacked - spread on social media and were perceived as especially dangerous. So the Sri Lankan government imposed the ban on Facebook, WhatsApp and several other services as a temporary security measure.

It remained in effect until Facebook officials traveled to Sri Lanka to make a personal plea to lift it. The Sri Lankan president, Maithripala Sirisena, agreed to end the ban, saying Facebook pledged to work with the government "to prevent hate speech and misuse of the platform." Critics immediately pointed out that the company has not offered any specific measures to "fix Facebook".

The government is claiming a victory, but blanket social media bans are not a solution to the problem of hate speech. They set a bad precedent for freedom of expression and undermine efforts to spread messages of reconciliation.

In Sri Lanka, the time to act was months, if not years, earlier, engaging with all types of media. Facebook and internet penetration in the country is still around 30 percent. It's just as likely that this violence was organized not only through Facebook and WhatsApp but also through phone calls and words exchanged across a neighbor's fence. Facebook and WhatsApp are growing fast in Sri Lanka, but they are only a small part of an extremely polarized media world dominated by television and radio. Anti-minority hate speech, particularly against the Tamil minority, has been part of the Sri Lankan political landscape for decades. Now, it's Muslims, not just Tamils, who have become the target.

We have been conducting surveys and qualitative research on how people use mobile phones and the internet around the region for more than a decade. We recently focused on Myanmar to understand better how hate speech spreads. Social media use has grown at a stunning rate in Myanmar since 2014, at the same time that anti-Muslim violence linked to Buddhist chauvinist groups has escalated.

We noticed that people usually first encountered false stories in "affinity circles" - messages sent through Facebook or WhatsApp groups. Within those circles, the messages appear as a communication from a trusted friend or relative. Because many people belong to multiple affinity circles, the hate-speech messages would jump from one circle to another, in each case appearing as from a trusted person.

In other words, the human factor, not the platform alone, is important. This pattern is consistent with recent research about how falsehoods spread. A study by Sinan Aral at MIT analyzing about 126,000 Twitter "cascades" showed that false stories spread faster and further than true ones, perhaps because of their novelty, and that human beings - people passing along messages to their friends - were more important than bots.

When mob-related violence does occur, the government relies on tactics developed during the colonial era: preventing the formation of mobs, usually through curfews, which stop people from gathering in public spaces. The same principle gives Sri Lanka's telecommunications minister the power to prohibit the transmission or reception of entire categories of messages in emergencies or "in the interest of public safety and tranquillity."

The Facebook ban - a digital curfew - was an extension of that thinking. Sri Lanka does not have legal authority over Facebook, but it does regulate telecom companies, so it ordered them to block access to Facebook and other platforms. Harin Fernando, the telecommunications minister, told The Guardian, " Hate speech is not being controlled by these organizations, and it has become a critical issue globally." In India and Pakistan, too, social media firms have come under scrutiny or faced outright bans for circulating hate speech.

There is no doubt that social media companies need to do more. While Facebook has hired Sinhala-speaking moderators to detect and remove hate speech, its ability to respond to complaints quickly and consistently is limited. Facebook also should not rely on users to report abuse. It should proactively identify and remove hate speech before it spreads widely enough to generate complaints.

But focusing too narrowly on one company or platform is a mistake. A foundation of mutual distrust and fear - not access to social media - is the necessary condition for the mobilization of violent mobs. Governments can't dismantle that foundation alone. Media companies of all kinds must accept responsibility and deploy artificial intelligence and plain old elbow grease to the task. And people of good will must play their part by calling out falsehoods and reporting those responsible.

Banning social media after the mobs have started running is mere political theater.

Rohan Samarajiva is the chairman of LIRNEasia, an information and communications technology and infrastructure think tank, based in Sri Lanka.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

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Opinion | Banning Social Media Won't Stop Hate Speech

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After a weeklong blackout, the Sri Lankan government lifted its nationwide ban on social media on Thursday. Facebook and several other platforms had been shut down after days of violence targeting Muslims in the Kandy district, a popular destination for tourists and pilgrims. The violence began after a Sinhalese Buddhist truck driver was killed in a road-rage incident.

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More News on Facebook Data Misuse in Trump Campaign

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More News on Facebook Data Misuse in Trump Campaign

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Facebook said on Thursday it had suspended a data analytics firm associated with the Trump campaign, but may have indeed greatly downplayed the scale of the data that firm actually had access to, according to a new report in The New York Times.

Cambridge Analytica had worked with University of Cambridge psychology professor named Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, who had developed an app called "thisisyourdigitallife" and obtained user information - which the Times is reporting scooped up information on profiles of as many as 50 million users. Late Friday, Facebook acknowledged that 270,000 people downloaded the app, which used Facebook Login and granted access to users' geographic information. But just one person - with hundreds of friends - allowing access to a personal information through an app, circa 2014, may have had a much larger impact than it does today.

In the earlier stages of a company, it's possible that policies are not rigorous enough and the guardrails on various APIs are not robust enough that this kind of information can just get out in the open without additional scrutiny, allowing firms to take advantage of those shortcomings. Facebook executives, on Twitter no less, were quick to be clear that this wasn't a breach - though the argument is that it is, indeed, might not be considered a breach in the traditional sense of the word. But, here's what Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos said:

Update: Stamos deleted his Tweets. The above is a screenshot of his previous tweet. Here's his explanation.

I have deleted my Tweets on Cambridge Analytica, not because they were factually incorrect but because I should have done a better job weighing in.

- Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) March 17, 2018

I'm going to step away from this one. I really care about privacy and security, as well as platform openness, freedom from censorship and stopping authoritarians who use the internet as a weapon. I just wish I was better about talking about these things in the reality of 2018.

- Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) March 17, 2018

Prior to deleting his tweets, Stamos posted a long thread that explained the nitty gritty of the situation, which is that around the time of the quiz, the Facebook API allowed developers to see a much wider swath of the data that's available now. Those APIs were updated in 2015 to remove the ability to see that kind of friend data, a move Stamos said was "controversial" with app developers at the time. These policies in reality are constantly evolving and trying to hit a moving target, especially at the scale of Facebook with more than 2 billion monthly active users. That being said, Trump's margin of victory in terms of the final vote counts in pivotal states was narrow, so information on the right 50 million people could have made a huge difference.

While Facebook was a publicly-traded company, with a fiduciary duty to its shareholders in 2014 to not have massive screwups and probably a lot more responsibility to keep this kind of information in check, it's hardly alone in that respect. We've seen instances of those missing guardrails to access in many companies and used in many inappropriate ways, like Uber's "god view" and Lyft's own troubles. It's definitely a different situation, but when a company is in growth mode, these kinds of guardrails might simply not be a high priority. That might be especially true when the data sets become increasingly large and simply managing them becomes a huge technical effort. Facebook had 1.39 billion monthly active users by the end of Q4 2014.

To be sure, It does not make the scale of this incident any less severe or important.

Facebook came out with a statement late Friday that it had suspended the account of Strategic Communication Laboratories and its political data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica. However it appears it still may have again downplayed the total scale of the data Kogan had acquired from Facebook users. The Times said it downplayed the scope of the leak and "questioned whether any data still remained out of its controls" throughout a week of inquiries.

This was unequivocally not a data breach. People chose to share their data with third party apps and if those third party apps did not follow the data agreements with us/users it is a violation. no systems were infiltrated, no passwords or information were stolen or hacked.

- Boz (@boztank) March 17, 2018

We reached out to Facebook for some additional information, and will update when we hear back. But for the time being Facebook executives seem to continue to follow a trend of explaining themselves on Twitter, so we'll take that as the current statement for Facebook.

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Trump campaign-linked data firm Cambridge Analytica reportedly collected info on 50M Facebook profiles

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Facebook said on Thursday it had suspended a data analytics firm associated with the Trump campaign, but may have indeed greatly downplayed the scale of the data that firm actually had access to, according to a new report in The New York Times .

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Culture Wars and Cambridge Analytica

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How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions (Published 2018)

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Cambridge Analytica harvested personal information from a huge swath of the electorate to develop techniques that were later used in the Trump campaign.

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Why Facebook Needs to Disclose Ad Pricing

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Why Facebook Needs to Disclose Ad Pricing

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Let's have some transparency, for a start

An interesting report by Antonio García Martínez at Wired on the Facebook ad machinery in play during the 2016 election highlighted an issue that I hadn't considered before: that Facebook's ad marketplace gave a huge pricing advantage to one candidate over the other. It seems like a no-brainer in retrospect that these pricing differences should at the very least be made public in the case of political contests, and arguably should be limited in the way political ads are elsewhere.

The pricing differences are not detailed in the article, exactly, but in chatter on Twitter afterwards, two parties one would ordinarily not expect to agree did just that.

Brad Parscale, who directed Trump's digital media campaign (and was just tapped to do so again), said that compared with the Clinton campaign, he was paying pennies on the dollar for ad space. "I bet we were 100x to 200x her," he wrote in a tweet, referring to the number of impressions they'd receive for a given sum. "We had CPMs that were pennies in some cases." (CPM is cost per 1,000 impressions.)

Unexpectedly, Jennifer Palmieri chimed in; the former communications director for the Clinton campaign merely replied to Parscale: "Agreed."

(Update: Former Facebook VP of ads Andrew Bosworth (AKA Boz) released some limited data showing that the Trump campaign actually paid more on average than the Clinton campaign. Palmieri also clarified to TechCrunch that her comment was meant to indicate agreement with the portion of Parscale's tweet saying Trump had made better use of the platform.

That said, if Parscale's statement is true, ads were being purchased by Trump at very low prices, well below what Facebook's data shows. And regardless of who was paying more or less, the argument stands that the process by which these amounts are arrived at should be publicly disclosed and arguably limited. Furthermore it is in order to avoid this kind of confusion that Facebook should be more transparent to begin with.)

Now, as the Wired article points out, and as anyone in the ad business could tell you, differences in costs are commonplace, always have been. Targeting wealthy folks in cities is generally more expensive than targeting less-wealthy folks in rural areas, for instance, which already does some work to explain the cost difference in this case.

There's also play in the pricing depending on how much Facebook thinks your ad will boost traffic and engage users. If its algorithms think an ad will cause users to spend more time on the site, that ad will be offered at a discounted rate compared with one that doesn't seem to push that button in people. (Kind of flies in the face of the site's supposed pursuit of "time well spent," but that's a discussion for another time.)

As Bosworth explained earlier:

Lots of confusion about ads pricing today. Remember, price for any given impression is determined by an auction so by definition this pricing cannot be discriminatory. 1/4

- Boz (@boztank) February 27, 2018

So it's perfectly reasonable in a way that the Trump campaign's savvy positioning, targeting, and provocative content resulted in Facebook giving them an excellent rate on ads. And that wouldn't be a problem if this was Coke vs Pepsi - it would be a simple case of smart ad spending.

This is certainly a case of smart ad spending - there's no use denying Trump's campaign got far more mileage out of its money than Clinton's - but there's nothing simple about it.

Political spending is, of course, a massively complex issue and I don't intend to dive deeply into it. And in the end there are plenty of loopholes through which any candidate or PAC could slip.

But just that fundamental fact, that one political candidate was being charged a hundred times more than the other for similar access to a platform's users, should give anyone pause. That's fundamentally wrong, because a Presidential election is fundamentally different from choosing between Coke and Pepsi. (I hear you cynics out there saying it isn't, but bear with me here.)

Practically speaking, it's a dangerous precedent to allow to continue. It happens that in this case the one losing out could spare the cash - this was a major election with hundreds of millions being spent. But that price difference could be crippling for a smaller race with less money - the difference between voters seeing one ad even a little versus seeing the privileged one all the time.

This kind of media exposure makes or breaks campaigns, which is why it's regulated with things like the Equal Time rule, and why it's repeatedly proposed that limits be enforced on campaign spending.

There is the counter-argument that if the Clinton rates were the "going" rate, then in fact the other "discounted" rate could in fact encourage challengers and empower those with less money to spend. But this isn't very convincing, since Facebook seems to set the rates entirely arbitrarily depending on how much good it will do for itself, not based on some real, fixed cost (as opposed to, say, a full-page newspaper ad).

If Facebook's intention is to encourage lesser-heard viewpoints by subsidizing their rates, the rates should reflect a judgment of that scarcity and the validity of the message it intends to amplify. Obviously that's not the case, or if it is Facebook has failed to make that clear.

I don't mean to propose any regulations here - I wouldn't even know where to start. But in terms of basic transparency and civic duty, I think we can expect more from Facebook.

After all, it was Facebook's algorithms that created this massive delta in pricing between two rival candidates. And of course it is at least partially because Facebook's algorithms favor things that increase engagement and time on site, which often means the likes of clickbait, misleading and provocative content, divisive content that generates argument, and so on.

So Facebook has two things to fix, if it is really serious about being more than a race to the bottom for perpetuating worthless "engagement" nurtured solely to multiply ad eyeballs.

First, it should work out how to voluntarily disclose and transparently explain the details of its ad sells in cases of genuine public interest. Start with elections. The bare fact that one major Presidential candidate was being charged a hundred times more than another should be considered a major failure of Facebook's so-called commitment to objectivity, promoting multiple viewpoints, and so on.

We have learned to expect nothing better: the company has proven remarkably consistent in failing to predict the abuses and shortcomings of its platform and priorities. (I suppose their livelihood depends on it.)

Second, it should reconsider how its algorithms are applied in these cases. Engagement is not a suitable metric for determining how political ads should be distributed and charged for. The idea that voters were being shown political messages based on how much attention those messages would generate should cause Facebook great embarrassment.

Basically Facebook needs to recognize that the advertising process it has developed is incompatible with ethical and transparent use in situations like elections, and it's an insult to the democratic process (something in which the company's founder purports to be interested) to act otherwise.

It would be much better to do this now, ahead of the regulations some would say are inevitable. Facebook is already thought poorly of by so many, in so many ways. This could be a way to get in front of that sentiment and demonstrate with actions - not more empty pledges and assurances that "we take this very seriously" - that the company has the best interests of its users at heart.

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Facebook should disclose and limit pricing for political campaign ads

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Let's have some transparency, for a start An interesting report by Antonio García Martínez at Wired on the Facebook ad machinery in play during the 2016 election highlighted an issue that I hadn't considered before: that Facebook's ad marketplace gave a huge pricing advantage to one candidate over the other.

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Each autumn, businesses flock to elite universities like Harvard and Stanford to recruit engineers for their first post-university jobs. Curious students pile into classrooms to hear recruiters deliver their best pitches. These are the first moments when prospective employees size up a company's culture and assess whether they can see themselves reflected in its future.

More often than not, this is the moment when these companies screw up, according to new research.

Tech companies have employed a host of tactics to help lift the scant number of women and minorities who work within their ranks, like anti-bias training, affinity groups, and software that scans job postings for gendered language. Yet the numbers remain dire. Of men with science, technology engineering, or math (STEM) degrees, 40 percent work in technical careers; only 26 percent of women with STEM degrees do. That means that qualified women are turning away from the field before they even get started.

Some of the problems start in these preliminary recruiting sessions, which routinely discourage women from applying at all, according to a paper published in February by Alison Wynn, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and Stanford sociology professor Shelley Correll.

In 2012 and 2013, researchers attended 84 introductory sessions held by 66 companies at an elite West Coast university. (They never explicitly name Stanford, but ...) Roughly a quarter of attendees at these one-hour sessions were women, on average. The researchers documented an unwelcoming environment for these women, including sexist jokes and imagery, geeky references, a competitive environment, and an absence of women engineers-all of which intimidated or alienated female recruits. "We hear from companies there's a pipeline problem, that there just aren't enough people applying for jobs. This is one area where they are able to influence that," Wynn says. They just don't.

The chilling effect, according to Wynn, starts with the people companies send to staff recruiting sessions. As students entered, women were often setting up refreshments or raffles and doling out the swag in the back; the presenters were often men, and they rarely introduced the recruiters. If the company sent a female engineer, according to the paper, she often had no speaking role; alternatively, her role was to speak about the company's culture, while her male peer tackled the tech challenges. Of the sessions Wynn's research team observed, only 22 percent featured female engineers talking about technical work. When those women did speak, according to the sessions observed, male presenters tended to interrupt them.

Similarly, the follow-up question-and-answer periods were often dominated by male students who commandeered the time, using it to show off their own deep technical know-how in a familiar one-upmanship. Rather than acting as a facilitator for these sessions, male presenters were often drawn into a competitive volley. Wynn and Correll describe one session in which men asked 19 questions and women asked none. Of the five presenters, the two men fielded all the questions while the two female engineers spoke very little; finally, a female recruiter jumped in at the end with application instructions. This clearly didn't entice female attendees. Of the 51 men attending, only one left the room during the Q&A. Four of the 15 women left.

The paper also describes recruiters using gender stereotypes. One online gaming company showed a slide of a woman wearing a red, skin-tight dress and holding a burning poker card to represent its product. Another company, which makes software to help construct computer graphics, only showed pictures of men-astronauts, computer technicians, soldiers. Presentations were often replete with pop-culture images intended to help them relate to students but instead furthered gender stereotypes. One internet startup, for example, showed an image of Gangnam-style music videos that featured a male artist surrounded by scantily clad women.

In an attempt to appear approachable, presenters often made comments that disparaged women or depicted them as sexualized objects rather than talented technical colleagues. For example, in one session, a man mentioned the "better gender ratio" at the company's Los Angeles office compared with its Silicon Valley office. "I had no girlfriends at [University Name], but now I'm married," he said, suggesting that the better odds had helped get him hitched.

This type of informal banter occasionally devolved into overtly sexualized comments. One presenter from a small startup mentioned porn a couple of times. Another, when talking about a project that would allow banking on ships, suggested that sailors needed access to cash for prostitutes.

The few sessions that featured women speaking on technical subjects had fewer such problems. When these women spoke on technical issues-and connected those issues to real-world impact-female students were much more engaged. In these sessions, female students asked questions 65 percent of the time, compared with 36 percent of the sessions without these features.

While the Stanford research looks explicitly at gender, its findings have broader implications. Namely: First impressions are everything. To attract a more diverse workforce, companies need to present themselves as diverse communities of professionals. Wynn says she has presented this research to recruiters and people within tech firms. "They're astonished. They often just don't know what's going on in their recruiting sessions," she says. Knowing where your problems lie is the first step to eradicating them before they block your pipeline.

Opening the Door

A female engineer explains how to encourage talented girls to pursue careers in technology.

Amid a booming tech sector and a tight job market, women in tech have a little more power to speak out about harassment.

The president of Harvey Mudd College discusses how the school has lifted the share of women in computer science to 40 percent, from 10 percent.

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Why Are There Few Women in Tech? Watch a Recruiting Session

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Each autumn, businesses flock to elite universities like Harvard and Stanford to recruit engineers for their first post-university jobs. Curious students pile into classrooms to hear recruiters deliver their best pitches. These are the first moments when prospective employees size up a company's culture and assess whether they can see themselves reflected in its future.

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Facebook puttings its data to use

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is quietly cracking open his company's vast trove of user data for a study on economic inequality in the U.S. - the latest sign of his efforts to reckon with divisions in American society that the social network is accused of making worse.

The study, which hasn't previously been reported, is mining the social connections among Facebook's American users to shed light on the growing income disparity in the U.S., where the top 1 percent of households is said to control 40 percent of the country's wealth. Facebook is an incomparably rich source of information for that kind of research: By one estimate, about three of five American adults use the social network.

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Now the company is making the user data available to a team led by Stanford economist Raj Chetty, a favorite among tech elites for his focus on data-driven solutions to the nation's social and economic problems. Venture capitalist J.D. Vance praised Chetty by name in his 2016 guide to Trump country, "Hillbilly Elegy," saying his work shows how "a poor kid's chances of rising through the ranks of America's meritocracy were lower than most of us wanted."

Facebook and Chetty declined to talk about the full scope of the research, but veterans of Washington's domestic policy debates say the social network's involvement could turbo-charge efforts to map out how geography and social connections play into economic inequality.

"For a policy nerd like me, being able to see that quantifiable evidence about things lots of us have been debating in theory for a long time is absolutely huge," said Cecilia Muñoz, who led the Domestic Policy Council in the Obama White House. "The notion that you can use data about people's social interactions and begin to piece together, 'OK, what is social isolation actually costing us?' is a whole other ballgame."

The new research is the latest sign of Zuckerberg's effort to grapple with the aftershocks of the 2016 election. Facebook has been widely criticized for acting as both a political echo chamber and conduit for Russian propaganda during the campaign, much of it focused on damaging the candidacy of Hillary Clinton - allegations laid out once again in Friday's federal indictment of Russian individuals and organizations.

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Since the election, Zuckerberg has announced a series of changes to the Facebook new feed, trying to move users from passively consuming viral stories to actively engaging with friends and family.

At the same time, the billionaire Facebook CEO has shown growing interest in the concerns of everyday Americans, including the economic anxieties that fueled the rise of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the 2016 race. He's embarked on a well-documented national tour to meet Americans from all 50 states, saying he wants to "get out and talk to more people about how they're living, working and thinking about the future."

Zuckerberg expressed concern about the country's skewed economic playing field during a May commencement speech at Harvard University, lamenting that "we don't do nearly enough to make it easy for everyone to take lots of shots." Zuckerberg, who dropped out of Harvard to found Facebook, said the U.S. should explore the idea of a universal basic income, in which Americans would get a guaranteed sum of money from the government to cover living expenses.

Facebook confirmed the broad contours of its partnership with Chetty but declined to elaborate on the substance of the study. Chetty, in a brief interview following a January speech in Washington, said he and his collaborators - who include researchers from Stanford and New York University - have been working on the inequality study for at least six months.

"We're using social networks, and measuring interactions there, to understand the role of social capital much better than we've been able to," he said.

Researchers say they see Facebook's enormous cache of data as a remarkable resource, offering an unprecedentedly detailed and sweeping look at American society. That store of information contains both details that a user might tell Facebook - their age, hometown, schooling, family relationships - and insights that the company has picked up along the way, such as the interest groups they've joined and geographic distribution of who they call a "friend."

It's all the more significant, researchers say, when you consider that Facebook's user base - about 239 million monthly users in the U.S. and Canada at last count - cuts across just about every demographic group.

And all that information, say researchers, lets them take guesses about users' wealth. Facebook itself recently patented a way of figuring out someone's socioeconomic status using factors ranging from their stated hobbies to how many internet-connected devices they own.

A Facebook spokesman addressed the potential privacy implications of the study's access to user data, saying, "We conduct research at Facebook responsibly, which includes making sure we protect people's information." The spokesman added that Facebook follows an "enhanced" review process for research projects, adopted in 2014 after a controversy over a study that manipulated some people's news feeds to see if it made them happier or sadder.

According to a Stanford University source familiar with Chetty's study, the Facebook account data used in the research has been stripped of any details that could be used to identify users. The source added that academics involved in the study have gone through security screenings that include background checks, and can access the Facebook data only in secure facilities.

Muñoz said it makes her nervous that Facebook can hand out that much data to researchers, but said she's reassured it's in Chetty's hands. She said the professor "had a lot of fans" in the Obama White House, who admired his work using Internal Revenue Service tax records to show how Americans' hometowns strongly predict their future wealth.

Chetty, who won a MacArthur genius grant in 2012, is known for his academic research on "the fading American dream."

Chetty has previously shown an interest in tapping the "big data" held by Facebook. During a 2016 Stanford conference co-hosted by the Obama White House and Zuckerberg's philanthropic foundation, Chetty said he'd like to use Facebook data to figure out "whether you can network yourself out of poverty." On an economics podcast last May, he argued that "social network data gives us the most precise lens to look at how people are connected and how that might influence their long-term outcomes."

Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has increasingly focused on the theme of economic mobility.

In a Facebook post last year after a stop in Wilton, Iowa, part of his national tour, Zuckerberg talked about "a real divergence between opportunity available in small towns and big cities," pointing people interested in the subject to Chetty's research. Economic opportunity has also been a core focus of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropic group founded by the CEO and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

"Raj Chetty is doing unbelievably good work," said Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, whose 2000 book "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" is oft-cited for its examination of the value of social relationships. "Mostly, it's because he's been able to get access to data that nobody else was able to get access to."

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Facebook's next project: American inequality

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is quietly cracking open his company's vast trove of user data for a study on economic inequality in the U.S. - the latest sign of his efforts to reckon with divisions in American society that the social network is accused of making worse.

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"Fair Shot" is a short, easily digestible elaboration of this argument, with a very specific proposal for taking from the rich and giving to the poor. At the top end, Hughes wants to raise the marginal tax rate for those earning more than $250,000 per year to 50 percent, both for earned income and for capital gains. At the bottom end, he wants to give a monthly $500 check to (nearly) all adults living in one of the 42 million households making less than $50,000 per year. The resulting America wouldn't just be healthier and better educated; it would be richer, too, with the economy growing as much as a full percentage point faster than it would without such an intervention. The plan would also, by Hughes's calculations, "lift 20 million people out of poverty overnight."

To make his case, Hughes weaves together two stories. The first is a straightforward and accessible autobiography. Hughes grew up in bucolic, God-fearing North Carolina, with little money but a strong sense of community. He talked administrators at Andover into giving him more financial aid than they'd originally offered, moved on to Harvard, had a brief but lucrative career at Facebook and became director of online organizing for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. Then, fatefully, he decided first to buy and then to sell The New Republic, the storied political magazine.

Hughes presents the decision to sell his magazine in a few sentences: After spending four years and $25 million trying to "turn the numbers in our financial statements from red to black," he finally came to the realization that the loss-making publication he bought in 2012 was, well, a loss-making publication. "Unless I had a political agenda to promote or an ax to grind," he writes, "there was no future in my ownership."

This isn't entirely satisfying. Why give up on subsidizing quality journalism just because you don't have a political agenda? Especially when Hughes's first book, coming out two years after he sold the magazine, is a political agenda, filled with not only detailed fiscal-policy proposals but also shopworn talking points about how "rapid technological advances, globalization, and financialization are pulling the rug out from under the middle class."

In parallel to his autobiography, Hughes tells a wonkier tale of the education of a young philanthropist. Flush with his Facebook millions, he travels to Kenya twice to observe two very different attempts at relieving extreme poverty. The first is a trip with the famed Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs to see for himself the Millennium Villages Project - an ambitious attempt to give some of the poorest people in the world everything from clean water to cellular connectivity. Then, on his second Africa trip, Hughes joins another economist, Michael Faye, the co-founder of GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that has a much simpler strategy of supplying cash grants to people living on less than a dollar a day.

After comparing Faye's approach with Sachs's, Hughes concludes that giving poor people unrestricted cash is generally more effective than trying to second-guess their needs by building them schoolhouses or handing them computers. This insight prompts him to get involved in the nascent campaign for a universal basic income in America. Hughes ends up founding the Economic Security Project, a nonprofit devoted to using cash transfers to end poverty.

The book's trickiest maneuver comes when Hughes attempts to synthesize his two stories by explaining how his turbulent tenure at The New Republic colored his approach to the ideal of a universal income. He still believes in a universal cash-transfer policy, it seems, but no longer has the courage of his convictions: "What went wrong at The New Republic," he says, is "the driving reason why I favor a more modest guaranteed income" instead. But he never convincingly explains why his failure at the magazine plays such an outsize role in his worldview, especially compared with his successes at Facebook and in Obama's presidential campaign.

Hughes's proposal - which he himself describes as a "prosaic and incremental" expansion of the earned-income tax credit - is emphatically not a universal basic income. For one thing, it targets only the bottom 35 percent or so of earners in the country. Worse, it doesn't even reach all of them. The Hughes plan is restricted to working Americans: people who made more than $6,000 last year, who are looking after dependents under the age of 6 or over the age of 70, or who are enrolled in an accredited college. If you earned less than $6,000, you'll receive only your previous year's earnings - and if those earnings were zero, you'll receive zero. Those who live at the very bottom of the income spectrum would have to continue to rely on America's overstretched social safety net, which, in all too many cases, pays them little or nothing.

By creating a hard ceiling at $50,000 a year, Hughes also creates a nasty marriage penalty: He's effectively telling couples where each partner earns less than $50,000 that they shouldn't get married and form a household. That's because, if they do so, thereby bringing their joint earnings above $50,000, they'll lose a combined $12,000 a year in guaranteed income.

Hughes quotes Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the architect of a previous attempt at a national guaranteed income, as saying that it failed because it was "both too much and too little; too radical, too reactionary; too comprehensive, not comprehensive enough." Yet his plan seems to make exactly the same mistake. Opponents of no-strings cash handouts will not be particularly mollified by the fact that this plan targets merely 42 million households rather than all 120 million households in the country. Proponents of a universal basic income, meanwhile, especially those who see it as insurance for a time when robots drive us all out of work, will be exasperated at the way the plan explicitly excludes the jobless and the neediest.

Hughes is attracted to boldness, and played an important part in the achievements of both Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama. But ultimately he's a better follower than a leader. Fired up by his new cause, he could have published a rallying cry, an inspirational manifesto. Instead, he has delivered a book with more footnotes than passion - and, for the very poorest, a proposal that seems deeply unfair.

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fair shot: rethinking inequality and how we earn (book)

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Chris Hughes Made Millions at Facebook. Now He Has a Plan to End Poverty.

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"Fair Shot" is a short, easily digestible elaboration of this argument, with a very specific proposal for taking from the rich and giving to the poor. At the top end, Hughes wants to raise the marginal tax rate for those earning more than $250,000 per year to 50 percent, both for earned income and for capital gains.

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Companies Taking Advantage of Customers' Data

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Companies Taking Advantage of Customers' Data

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A surely common trend

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Companies taking advantage of customers' data, says tech expert

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Roger McNamee, Elevation Partners co-founder, discusses his involvement with the Center for Humane Technology that challenges tech giants to tackle the societal effects of tech and social media.

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To hear Andrew Przybylski tell it, the American 2016 presidential election is what really inflamed the public's anxiety over the seductive power of screens. (A suspicion that big companies with opaque inner workings are influencing your thoughts and actions will do that.) "Psychologists and sociologists have obviously been studying and debating about screens and their effects for years," says Przybylski, who is himself a psychologist at the Oxford Internet Institute with more than a decade's experience studying the impact of technology. But society's present conversation-"chatter," he calls it-can be traced back to three events, beginning with the political race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Then there were the books. Well-publicized. Scary-sounding. Several, really, but two in particular. The first, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, by NYU psychologist Adam Alter, was released March 2, 2017. The second, iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy - and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood - and What That Means for the Rest of Us, by San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge, hit stores five months later.

Last came the turncoats. Former employees and executives from companies like Facebook worried openly to the media about the monsters they helped create. Tristan Harris, a former product manager at Google and founder of the nonprofit "Time Well Spent" spoke with this publication's editor in chief about how Apple, Google, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram-you know, everyone-design products to steal our time and attention.

Bring these factors together, and Przybylski says you have all the ingredients necessary for alarmism and moral panic. What you're missing, he says, is the only thing that matters: direct evidence.

Which even Alter, the author of that first bellwether book, concedes. "There's far too little evidence for many of the assertions people make," he says. "I've become a lot more careful with what I say, because I felt the evidence was stronger when I first started speaking about it."

"People are letting themselves get played," says Przybylski. "It's a bandwagon." So I ask him: When WIRED says that technology is hijacking your brain, and the New York Times says it's time for Apple to design a less addictive iPhone, are we part of the problem? Are we all getting duped?

"Yeah, you are," he says. You absolutely are."

Of course, we've been here before. Anxieties over technology's impact on society are as old as society itself; video games, television, radio, the telegraph, even the written word- they were all, at one time, scapegoats or harbingers of humanity's cognitive, creative, emotional, and cultural dissolution. But the apprehension over smartphones, apps, and seductive algorithms is different. So different, in fact, that our treatment of past technologies fails to be instructive.

A better analogy is our modern love-hate relationship with food. When grappling with the promises and pitfalls of our digital devices, it helps to understand the similarities between our technological diets and our literal ones.

Today's technology is always with you; a necessary condition, increasingly, of existence itself. These are some of the considerations that led MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle to suggest avoiding the metaphor of addiction, when discussing technology. "To combat addiction, you have to discard the addicting substance," Turkle wrote in her 2011 book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. "But we are not going to 'get rid' of the Internet. We will not go 'cold turkey' or forbid cell phones to our children. We are not going to stop the music or go back to the television as the family hearth."

Food addicts-who speak of having to take the "tiger of addiction" out of the cage for a walk three times a day-might take issue with Turkle's characterization of dependence. But her observation, and the food addict's plight, speak volumes about our complicated relationships with our devices and the current state of research.

People from all backgrounds use technology-and no two people use it exactly the same way. "What that means in practice is that it's really hard to do purely observational research into the effects of something like screen time, or social media use," says MIT social scientist Dean Eckles, who studies how interactive technologies impact society's thoughts and behaviors. You can't just divide participants into, say, those with phones and those without. Instead, researchers have to compare behaviors between participants while accounting for variables like income, race, and parental education.

Say, for example, you're trying to understand the impact of social media on adolescents, as Jean Twenge, author of the iGen book, has. When Twenge and her colleagues analyzed data from two nationally representative surveys of hundreds of thousands of kids, they calculated that social media exposure could explain 0.36 percent of the covariance for depressive symptoms in girls.

But those results didn't hold for the boys in the dataset. What's more, that 0.36 percent means that 99.64 percent of the group's depressive symptoms had nothing to do with social media use. Przybylski puts it another way: "I have the data set they used open in front of me, and I submit to you that, based on that same data set, eating potatoes has the exact same negative effect on depression. That the negative impact of listening to music is 13 times larger than the effect of social media."

In datasets as large as these, it's easy for weak correlational signals to emerge from the noise. And a correlation tells us nothing about whether new-media screen time actually causes sadness or depression. Which are the same problems scientists confront in nutritional research, much of which is based on similarly large, observational work. If a population develops diabetes but surveys show they're eating sugar, drinking alcohol, sipping out of BPA-laden straws, and consuming calories to excess, which dietary variable is to blame? It could just as easily be none or all of the above.

Decades ago, those kinds of correlational nutrition findings led people to demonize fat, pinning it as the root cause of obesity and chronic illness in the US. Tens of millions of Americans abolished it from their diets. It's taken a generation for the research to boomerang back and rectify the whole baby-bathwater mistake. We risk similar consequences, as this new era of digital nutrition research gets underway.

Fortunately, lessons learned from the rehabilitation of nutrition research can point a way forward. In 2012, science journalist Gary Taubes and physician-researcher Peter Attia launched a multimillion-dollar undertaking to reinvent the field. They wanted to lay a new epistemological foundation for nutrition research, investing the time and money to conduct trials that could rigorously establish the root causes of obesity and its related diseases. They called their project the Nutrition Science Initiative.

Today, research on the link between technology and wellbeing, attention, and addiction finds itself in need of similar initiatives. They need randomized controlled trials, to establish stronger correlations between the architecture of our interfaces and their impacts; and funding for long-term, rigorously performed research. "What causes what? Is it that screen time leads to unhappiness or unhappiness leads to screen time?" says Twenge. "So that's where longitudinal studies come in." Strategies from the nascent Open Science Framework-like the pre-registration of studies, and data sharing-could help, too.

But more than any of that, researchers will need buy-in from the companies that control that data. Ours is a time of intense informational asymmetry; the people best equipped to study what's happening-the people who very likely are studying what's happening-are behind closed doors. Achieving balance will require openness and objectivity from those who hold the data; clear-headed analysis from those who study it; and measured consideration by the rest of us.

"Don't get me wrong, I'm concerned about the effects of technology. That's why I spend so much of my time trying to do the science well," Przybylski says. He says he's working to develop a research proposal strategy by which scientists could apply to conduct specific, carefully designed studies with proprietary data from major platforms. Proposals would be assessed by independent reviewers outside the control of Facebook etc. If the investigation shows the potential to answer an important question in a discipline, or about a platform, the researchers outside the company get paired with the ones inside.

"If it's team based, collaborative, and transparent, it's got half a chance in hell of working," Przybylski says.

And if we can avoid the same mistakes that led us to banish fat from our food, we stand a decent chance of keeping our technological diets balanced and healthy.

Your Technology and You

Wired's editor-in-chief Nick Thompson spoke with Tristan Harris, the prophet behind the "Time Well Spent" movement that argues are minds are being hijacked by the technology we use.

One writer takes us through his extreme digital detox, a retreat that took him offline for a whole month.

Technology is demonized for making us distractible, but the right tech can help us form new, better digital habits-like these ones.

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It's Time For a Serious Talk About the Science of Tech "Addiction"

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To hear Andrew Przybylski tell it, the American 2016 presidential election is what really inflamed the public's anxiety over the seductive power of screens. (A suspicion that big companies with opaque inner workings are influencing your thoughts and actions will do that.)

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How concerning is software like this given data breaches in major tech companies?

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Facial-recognition technology is no longer a gimmick in dystopian science fiction movies or CSI-style cop shows: It's increasingly used in more pedestrian ways. Your face can unlock your iPhone X, for example. Or, if you're flying with Jetblue from Boston to Aruba or the Dominican Republic, you have the option of using your visage as your boarding pass, a system that involves an offsite U.S. Customs and Border Protection algorithm making the matches. And now, the tech-featuring a camera attached to sunglasses- is being used by police officers in crowds in China, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

In addition to the glasses, the Chinese system involves a connected mobile device that the police officers carry that contains offline face data, allowing the system to work quickly. According to the Journal, at one city's railway station, they've nabbed seven people associated with crimes using this method, as well as others traveling under false identities.

Here's how artificial-intelligence-powered technology like this works in general-and what one potential pitfall of it is. (Besides, you know, the whole surveillance-state thing.)

First, look for faces. Then, matches.

Software that powers facial recognition generally uses a two-step process, says David Alexander Forsyth, an artificial intelligence expert and chair of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Step one is to figure out where the faces are in the image in question; the system is looking for a window-like section of the image that also has someone's countenance in it, and not the other stuff of modern life, like stop signs and cars.

Step two: it needs to see if it can match the face to any in its database. "Turns out, that's a harder problem," Forsyth says, in comparison to step one. "People tend to look like each other." (At least to algorithms.)

The system isn't just eyeballing the image the way a human would-it's looking at a representation of it in the form of data, which consists of numbers, Forsyth says. "That representation has to emphasize things that make people look different from each other," he notes-like details involving the shape of features like lips, noses, and eyes. The representation also needs to make sure it is unaffected by variables that might throw it off, like light on someone's face. The software then examines that representation to see if it has a match with a face it has on file.

"The last 10 years or so have seen amazing advances and changes in classifier technologies," he adds. "The procedure of building that representation of the image has become extremely sophisticated and very effective."

Artificial intelligence systems need oceans of data in order to learn how to do their jobs well, and facial recognition technology is no different. "Right now, the best way we know, by a long, long way, is to have an immense number of pictures of faces," to build and train these systems, Forsyth explains. Algorithms need to learn what subtle details to focus on to accurately differentiate people.

The false-match problem

But despite the sophistication of the technology, it remains a difficult field. "The consequence for a mixup can be truly terrible," he adds. In short: it can have false positives, and think that it has flagged someone who is a person of interest but who is, in fact, not.

There's a key difference between using the technology in this way, as China is, and the way you engage with it on an iPhone X, for example. In the case of the smartphone, you are purposely presenting yourself to it so it can unlock the device; it is a low-stakes interaction. That's because if it fails to recognize you, you simply use your passcode, while Apple says the odds of someone else unlocking it with their face are one in a million. After all, your iPhone only needs to learn the details of your own face, which it considers in three-dimensional form.

But using technology like this to scan the multitudes of faces in crowds in settings like airports or train stations presents unique challenges, because of the false-match problem-an outcome that doesn't just affect that individual, but also other travelers who could be delayed by it. "Actually using it can be quite tricky," Forsyth warns.

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Chinese cops are using facial-recognition sunglasses. Here's how that tech works.

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Facial-recognition technology is no longer a gimmick in dystopian science fiction movies or CSI-style cop shows: It's increasingly used in more pedestrian ways. Your face can unlock your iPhone X, for example. Or, if you're flying with Jetblue from Boston to Aruba or the Dominican Republic, you have the option of using your visage as your boarding pass, a system that involves an offsite U.S.

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One take of many

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's how it works in practice:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facebook's Advertising Machine

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

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

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

Photograph by WIRED/Getty Images

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How Trump Conquered Facebook Without Russian Ads

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

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As addictive as tobacco or alcohol? Or more?

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Hint: It likely won't improve it

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That might sound surprising, given that the US is, and has been, in the lead in AI research. But China is catching up-if it hasn't already-and that rivalry, with one nation playing off the other, guarantees that AI is coming.

It will soon be obvious that half our tasks can be done better at almost no cost by AI. This will be the fastest transition humankind has experienced, and we're not ready for it.

China will have at least a 50/50 chance of winning the race, and there are several reasons for that.

First, China has a huge army of young people coming into AI. Over the past decade, the number of AI publications by Chinese authors has doubled. Young AI engineers from Face++, a Chinese face-recognition startup, recently won first place in three computer-vision challenges-ahead of teams from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Second, China has more data than the US-way more. Data is what makes AI go. A very good scientist with a ton of data will beat a super scientist with a modest amount of data. China has the most mobile phones and internet users in the world-triple the number in the United States. But the gap is even bigger than that because of the way people in China use their devices. People there carry no cash. They pay all their utility bills with their phones. They can do all their shopping on their phones. You get off work and open an app to order food. By the time you reach home, the food is right there, hot off the electric motorbike. In China, shared bicycles generate 30 terabytes of sensor data in their 50 million paid rides per day -that's roughly 300 times the data being generated in the US.

Third, Chinese AI companies have passed the copycat phase. Fifteen years ago almost every decent startup in China was simply copying the functionality, look, and feel of products offered in the US. But all that copying taught eager Chinese entrepreneurs how to become good product managers, and now they're on to the next stage: exceeding their overseas counterparts. Even today, Weibo is better than Twitter. WeChat delivers a way better experience than Facebook Messenger.

Kai-Fu Lee

And fourth, government policies are accelerating AI in China. The Chinese government's stated plan is to catch up with the US on AI technology and applications by 2020 and to become a global AI innovation hub by 2030. In a speech in October, President Xi Jinping encouraged further integration of the internet, big data, and artificial intelligence with the real-world economy. And in case you're wondering, these things tend not to be all talk in China-as demonstrated with its past policies promoting high-speed rail and the mass entrepreneurship and innovation movement. In comparison, things get bogged down in the US. Consider the way President Barack Obama's loan guarantee to solar-panel maker Solyndra was hammered as crony capitalism. Truckers are now appealing to President Donald Trump and Congress to stop testing of autonomous trucks.

The rise of China as an AI superpower isn't a big deal just for China. The competition between the US and China has sparked intense advances in AI that will be impossible to stop anywhere. The change will be massive, and not all of it good. Inequality will widen. As my Uber driver in Cambridge has already intuited, AI will displace a large number of jobs, which will cause social discontent. Consider the progress of Google DeepMind's AlphaGo software, which beat the best human players of the board game Go in early 2016. It was subsequently bested by AlphaGo Zero, introduced in 2017, which learned by playing games against itself and within 40 days was superior to all the earlier versions. Now imagine those improvements transferring to areas like customer service, telemarketing, assembly lines, reception desks, truck driving, and other routine blue-collar and white-collar work. It will soon be obvious that half of our job tasks can be done better at almost no cost by AI and robots. This will be the fastest transition humankind has experienced, and we're not ready for it.

Not everyone agrees with my view. Some people argue that it will take longer than we think before jobs disappear, since many jobs will be only partially replaced, and companies will try to redeploy those displaced internally. But even if true, that won't stop the inevitable. Others remind us that every technology revolution has created new jobs as it displaced old ones. But it's dangerous to assume this will be the case again.

Then there are the symbiotic optimists, who think that AI combined with humans should be better than either one alone. This will be true for certain professions-doctors, lawyers-but most jobs won't fall in that category. Instead they are routine, single-domain jobs where AI excels over the human by a large margin.

Others think we'll be saved by a universal basic income. "Take the extra money made by AI and distribute it to the people who lost their jobs," they say. "This additional income will help people find their new path, and replace other types of social welfare." But UBI doesn't address people's loss of dignity or meet their need to feel useful. It's just a convenient way for a beneficiary of the AI revolution to sit back and do nothing.

And finally, there are those who deny that AI has any downside at all-which is the position taken by many of the largest AI companies. It's unfortunate that AI experts aren't trying to solve the problem. What's worse, and unbelievably selfish, is that they actually refuse to acknowledge the problem exists in the first place.

These changes are coming, and we need to tell the truth and the whole truth. We need to find the jobs that AI can't do and train people to do them. We need to reinvent education. These will be the best of times and the worst of times. If we act rationally and quickly, we can bask in what's best rather than wallow in what's worst.

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Tech companies should stop pretending AI won't destroy jobs

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I took an Uber to an artificial-­intelligence conference at MIT one recent morning, and the driver asked me how long it would take for autonomous vehicles to take away his job. I told him it would happen in about 15 to 20 years. He breathed a sigh of relief.

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How to Transition to an Ethical Tech Landscape

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How to Transition to an Ethical Tech Landscape

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The real problems of our reliance on technology

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Tristan Harris holds his iPhone in the air, so the whole crowd of educators, technologists, doctors, and researchers before him can see the virtual wasteland of his iPhone's home screen. Gone are the cluttered, candy-colored icons that a busy brain sees as digital snacks. In their place are but a few utilitarian apps, all set to the same bleak palette of black and white.

Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, wants to show his audience how they, too, can make their phones as visually unappealing as possible, reducing them to functional tools rather than time-sucking toys. He's not doing it to preserve their eyesight, or as some self-help hack to squeeze more time out of the day. Harris is conducting this demonstration because he believes the way tech tools intentionally manipulate the mind has become an existential threat to human beings. Giving the iPhone a makeover is one way to wrest some of that control from their inhuman grip.

"I see this as game over, unless we change course. Really. Genuinely," Harris said on stage Wednesday at a conference hosted by the children's advocacy group Common Sense Media. "We cannot live in this world."

If the rhetoric sounds scary, that's intentional. Earlier this week, Harris announced a newly formed coalition of technologists called the Center for Humane Technology, whose central goal is to spark a mass movement for more ethical technology, in order to put pressure on Silicon Valley giants like Facebook, Google, and Apple-the kind that the Center's leadership says has been entirely missing in Washington. The Center is partnering with Common Sense Media to plan, among other things, an ad campaign in schools across the country to educate parents, students, and even children about the dangers of technology addiction. The Truth About Tech conference Wednesday was the first push in that campaign, sending a signal to both DC and Silicon Valley that if they won't do anything to address tech's unhealthy impact, then maybe the public will.

'I see this as game over, unless we change course.'

Tristan Harris, Center for Humane Technology

At yet, for all of the talk of a "tech backlash" in the United States, companies like Facebook and Google are still viewed favorably in polls. Despite the criticisms from both the left and the right, people are hardly marching by the thousands to protest Big Tech. But Harris and other leaders say maybe they would, if they only understood the way these tools are tailor-made to make addicts of all of us, forever altering the way some 2 billion people on Facebook alone think, feel, and interact with one another.

"This is a version of climate change," Jim Steyer, the CEO of Common Sense Media and brother of the billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, said on stage. "Just like we're watching the extraordinary changes in our physical environment, we're watching extraordinary changes in our social, emotional, and cognitive environment."

If Wednesday's event hoped to provide a spark, it largely came in the form of detailing how a group of young billionaires have enriched themselves by altering the chemistry of kid's brains. That may sound dystopian, but as Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at University of California, San Francisco, made clear on stage, it is very much a reality.

Every time a kid collects coins in Minecraft, or catches a Charizard in Pokemon Go, their brain rewards them with a hit of dopamine. "It tells you, 'This feels good. I want more,'" Lustig explained. "But if you overstimulate dopamine neurons they die."

"We see the outgrowth of these changes in the brain that are manifesting themselves as mental illness in children," Lustig said, pointing to research that has shown spikes in the rate of depression and suicidal thoughts among kids over the last eight years. "It's not a drug, but it might as well be," Lustig said of the way tech is designed to give users constant rewards. "It does the same thing."

Grownups aren't immune, of course. Facebook's News Feed algorithm targets the same pleasure centers as children's games, working behind the scenes to figure out precisely what kind of post you're most likely to like. It's this very feedback loop that enabled Russian trolls to spread divisive propaganda during the 2016 election by setting up Facebook pages that would appeal to people's most vivid emotions, be it love or loathing. The more people engaged with the memes and posts these pages shared, the more memes and posts from those pages they'd see.

Over the course of the conference, a range of speakers including Democratic senator Mark Warner referred to these negative effects as the "unintended consequences" of technological progress. But as Harris first discovered back when he worked at Google, addiction is precisely the intended consequence of ad-based businesses. It's just that in Silicon Valley, they have a different word for it: engagement.

"When you use technology, you have goals," Harris explained. "When you land on YouTube, it doesn't know any of those goals. It has one goal, which is to make you forget those goals that you have."

'We live in an environment, this digital city without even realizing it. That city is completely unregulated.'

Tristan Harris

Harris knows it's not enough to simply turn your phone to gray or to stop using these tools entirely. Always-on technology is now baked into the social fabric. The teen who quits Snapchat risks missing out on the primary way his peers communicate. The employee who declines to answer her boss's after-hours email risks losing career opportunities. Which is why Harris is calling on the companies themselves to redesign their products with ethics, not purely profits, in mind, and calling on Congress to write basic consumer protections into law.

"We live in an environment, this digital city without even realizing it," Harris said. "That city is completely unregulated. It's the Wild West. It's like, build a casino wherever you want with flashing lights and flashing signs. Maximize developer access to do whatever they want to people. Shouldn't there be some zoning laws?"

It's acutely apparent that those laws won't just happen on their own. They require a groundswell of public pressure on both tech companies and politicians. If there was ever a time to apply such pressure, it's this age of unprecedented activism. After all, if tech platforms are influencing the way people think about the world, the way they think about each other, and the way they think about themselves, then they're also influencing the way we talk about women's rights, the climate, and immigration. If we're going to fight over those issues, we might as well fight for a healthier arena.

Ethical Tech

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Ethical Tech Will Require a Grassroots Revolution

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Tristan Harris holds his iPhone in the air, so the whole crowd of educators, technologists, doctors, and researchers before him can see the virtual wasteland of his iPhone's home screen. Gone are the cluttered, candy-colored icons that a busy brain sees as digital snacks.

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Is it time for regulation?

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Reformed techies have united to launch a campaign to put pressure on technology companies to make their products less addictive and manipulative.

"Truth About Tech" is the brainchild of the Center for Humane Technology, a group of former Facebook and Google employees dedicated to "reversing the digital attention crisis and realigning technology with humanity's best interests" and is funded by Common Sense, a not-for-profit that promotes safe technology and media for children.

Tech companies are conducting a massive, real-time experiment on our kids

James Steyer, Common Sense CEO

The campaign will include educational material aimed at families highlighting the potential harm caused by digital platforms and outlining techniques for mitigating the addictive properties of tech, for example turning off notifications and changing the screen to greyscale. There will also be a lobbying push around the issue calling for policymakers to regulate tech companies using manipulative practices and the two organisations will develop standards of ethical design to help the industry discourage digital addiction.

The Center for Humane Technology is led by former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris and former Facebook investor and adviser Roger McNamee.

"Tech companies are conducting a massive, real-time experiment on our kids, and, at present, no one is really holding them accountable," said Common Sense's CEO, James Steyer, warning that tech companies' attention-grabbing business models may hurt "the social, emotional and cognitive development of kids".

"When parents learn how these companies can take advantage of our kids, they will join us in demanding the industry change its ways and improve certain practices."

According to research by Common Sense, teenagers consume an average of nine hours of media per day, while tweens consume six hours. A separate study by psychologist Jean Twenge found that heavy users of digital media are 56% more likely to say they are unhappy and 27% more likely to be depressed.

This is the latest chapter in a rising backlash against big tech. Many former employees of large Silicon Valley firms have offered sharp critiques of the industry.

In November, Facebook's founding president, Sean Parker, said the social network knew from the outset it was creating something that exploited a "vulnerability in human psychology".

"God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains," he said.

In January, the Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, said that Facebook should be regulated like the cigarette industry.
Topics

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Former Facebook and Google workers launch campaign to fight tech addiction

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Reformed techies have united to launch a campaign to put pressure on technology companies to make their products less addictive and manipulative. "Truth About Tech" is the brainchild of the Center for Humane Technology, a group of former Facebook and Google employees dedicated to "reversing the digital attention crisis and realigning technology with humanity's best interests" and is funded by Common Sense, a not-for-profit that promotes safe technology and media for children.

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In a special episode of Too Embarrassed to Ask, we set out to get some insights on tech addiction from people in the media and tech industries: Specifically, the attendees from Code Media 2018.

The Verge's Lauren Goode roamed the halls of the conference last week in Huntington Beach, Calif., interviewing everyone from Nasty Gal founder Sophia Amoruso to Recode reporter Johana Bhuiyan to rapper-turned-entrepreneur Chamillionaire (who now goes by the moniker "Cam"). Goode and Recode Executive Editor Kara Swisher debated whether the responsibility for reducing tech addiction belongs to tech companies or consumers.

Below are some highlights from what Code Media attendees recommend for those looking to get some distance from their gadgets.

You can listen to the new podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Ian Schafer, founder and former CEO, Deep Focus: "I tend to keep my phone away from bed. It's never the last thing I do at night, nor is it the first thing I do in the morning. I cherish that time. I've gotten a little more detached from technology as I stepped away from ad agency life. It seems like when you're in the service business, everything's an emergency."

Rollo Wenlock, CEO, Wipster: "We used to have a country house that was so far in the country there was no internet, which was fantastic. We'd go there and bring friends and everyone's phones would stay in the cars, in the car park. We'd be having fires and jump in the river and everything and you would forget about all that stuff. Then you would realize your habits are like short loops, these habits of check-check-check, that starts to go into a long loop of talking to people and thinking about deeper things. That was really helpful. Then we sold the place and now it's just short loops again."

Hakeem "Chamillionaire" Seriki, founder, Convoz: "I don't consider myself really addicted - that sounds like something an addicted person would say. I challenge myself a lot of times. One time, I challenged myself to not eat any red meat, and I haven't ate red meat in maybe 10 years. I challenged myself to stop drinking caffeine - I used to drink Red Bulls all the time - and I haven't drank caffeine in, I don't remember. So when it comes to setting down my device and not being too attached to it, I can always go on these little fasts, where I'm like, 'I'm not going to do this for a while.'"

Johana Bhuiyan, senior transportation reporter, Recode: "I've been doing this for a few years now ... I do automatic 'Do Not Disturb' at 10 p.m. Not really great when Kara is trying to call you, but whatever. I do try to answer, still, when it's Kara Swisher. So I do automatic Do Not Disturb at 10, it goes off at 7 a.m., and also I put my phone not on my bed, not near me, and I just try not to touch it."

Sophia Amoruso, founder, Nasty Gal: "I've downloaded a bunch of apps that track how much time I'm using my phone. There's one called Moment, I think? Has it changed my behavior? No. I'm kind of always on my phone. I wake up, look at my phone, drop it on my forehead. I carry it to the kitchen with me. It's like my baby blanket."

Have questions about tech addiction or anything else that you want us to address in a future episode? Tweet them to @Recode with the hashtag #TooEmbarrassed, or email them to TooEmbarrassed@recode.net.

Be sure to follow @LaurenGoode, @KaraSwisher and @Recode to be alerted when we're looking for questions about a specific topic.

If you like this show, you should also check out our other podcasts:

Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with the movers and shakers in tech and media every Monday. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Recode Media with Peter Kafka features no-nonsense conversations with the smartest and most interesting people in the media world, with new episodes every Thursday. Use these links to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

And finally, Recode Replay has all the audio from our live events, such as the Code Conference, Code Media and the Code Commerce Series. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

If you like what we're doing, please write a review on Apple Podcasts - and if you don't, just tweet-strafe Kara and Lauren. Tune in next Friday for another episode of Too Embarrassed to Ask!

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How can I be less addicted to tech? Code Media attendees have some solutions.

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In a special episode of Too Embarrassed to Ask, we set out to get some insights on tech addiction from people in the media and tech industries: Specifically, the attendees from Code Media 2018 .

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