01
Jul 19

Facebook grows up

Any powerful institution has enemies. Facebook has more than most. The platform has multiplied its critics both by its inability to talk clearly about its own power and by its sluggish and uncertain response to alarm about the harms it can cause. But, all the same, the social network with 2.7bn members (and 1.5bn daily users) is doing a little growing up.

Signs of the social network’s greater self-awareness have been accumulating. Its founder Mark Zuckerberg began, gingerly, to talk about power when acknowledging Facebook’s public reponsibilities in front of American legislators last year. I attended the last of Facebook’s workshops on its planned ‘Content Oversight Board’ in Berlin last week and Facebookers there talked quite unselfconsciously about the network’s ‘editorial control’ – not a phrase that they would have been allowed to use in front of strangers a year ago.

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01
Jun 18

Jimmy Wales and Wikitribune: the problem of ‘radically wiki’ news

 

Along with most journalists, I like the speed and compression of Twitter. But in a tweet (above) I over-condensed something I had to say about an online news site called Wikitribune. This post expands and explains.

Wikitribune’s founder Jimmy Wales (also the guy who created Wikipedia) had emailed the site’s followers to say that it was about to go ‘radically wiki’. Users of the site had from the start last year been encouraged to edit and contribute to stories, but filtered and overseen by a small team of journalists. Now, Wales wrote, the Wikitribune ‘community’ would have greater control: Continue reading →

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09
Apr 18

The anatomy of Facebook’s ‘huge mistake’ (or what Zuckerberg could say to the US Congress)

This week, Mark Zuckerberg is due to appear before the US Congress. There’s no shortage of people offering hard questions which should be fired in his direction. Here’s what I think he he ought to say before the interrogation begins:

“I know that members of the committee will want to know about attempts to interfere in American elections, whether social media ruins childhood or whether democracy is damaged by digital communication. We’ll get to those issues, but in opening I’d like to draw the committee’s attention to some of the bigger questions below the surface of the recent controversies.

Apologies first. We at Facebook have made many avoidable mistakes. We were blind to the scale of civic responsibilities inherent in what we do. We were warned and we didn’t want to hear. When I said the other day that in retrospect ‘we clearly should have been doing more all along’, I was drawing attention to our repeated failures to be imaginative in seeing our responsibilities to many different societies, and not just to this one.

I’m going to stop senior people at Facebook saying that were surprised when our network turned out not to be the uncomplicated force for good which we said it was. Quite a number of us have said that one failure or another was ‘unforeseen’ or that we were ‘caught out’. You can occasionally say ‘we didn’t see that coming’. But you can’t say it all the time. Truth is, we’re up to our necks in problems and we should have foreseen at least some of them.

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26
Jun 17

What editors worry about today (notes from Newsgeist)

I went at the weekend to a Google Newsgeist conference in Copenhagen. The discussions are under ‘Chatham House’ rules (views can’t be attributed to individuals) but here are some quick and selective notes on what I learnt as a couple of hundred people from all over Europe (and a few from the US) chewed over journalism, technology and news.

  • Top shock value. When online news platforms try out several headlines on the first version of a story to see which one works best, bots can be used to ‘game’ the results of a survey, distorting the result and delivering – say – a headline more sympathetic to an individual featured in the story. The bots were originally developed to twist these experiments in favour of advertisers, but can just as easily be used to bend headlines in favour of anyone with the clout or expertise to deploy bots. If news sites aren’t savvy and careful.
  • Man with numbers. An expert on news consumption in Facebook made this simple point. The news people are shown in Facebook is more balanced than a lot of people imagine. What is unbalanced is people’s consumption of the stories they are shown. They simply ignore what they think they aren’t going to like.
  • Big underlying fear. No one quite knows what to do about this, but they’re afraid of it. Societies which can’t agree about what might or might not be true are at risk. That isn’t the same as societies disagreeing about stuff: democracies do that ceaselessly. But if a society is fundamentally divided on how to establish (with evidence) truth and how to recognise that, trouble follows. America in the age of Trump was on everyone’s mind. ‘We are losing our sense of collective reality,’ as one participant put it. (My views on this in a review of Cass Sunstein’s book #Republic are here). No consensus on the causes: many people think social networks cause or aggravate the problem, others think it has deeper causes such as social, demographic and geographic segregation.
  • New trend. Journalists, and particularly those with technology backgrounds, are beginning to think harder about how algorithms surface information and the long-term, accumulative implications. Those algorithms which lean particularly heavily on emotion (Facebook) were contrasted with Upday (a news app produced by Samsung and Axel Springer), whose designers claim to be balancing the emotion with some reason and use of public interest criteria. Are we witnessing the first attempts to design an editor-in-chief with machine learning?
  • To be continued. Online makes the disguise of information easier, cheaper and almost frictionless. Huge debunking and factchecking efforts have responded to new fears about ‘fake news’. The Google people present agreed that more technical inquiry was needed into whether there might be better ways to ‘hard code’, label or tag information to make it harder to distort or misuse. I talked about the INJECT project (with which I’m involved) which aims to produce software which, among other things, will help journalists add references and backing to what they write with minimum hassle.
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30
May 17

A little (election) manifesto for Facebook

When an issue starts to surface at literary festivals, you can tell that it’s gone middle-class mainstream. Over the weekend, TV celebrity Stephen Fry recommended that Facebook be classified ‘as a publisher’ in order to tackle ‘fake’ news and online abuse.

With an election on in the UK right now, Facebook is the weapon of choice for political parties wanting to spring surprises. The network is being credited with almost magical powers of persuasion and manipulation – largely because few people understand how it works. I live in a marginal constituency in London and printed political nonsense comes through our letterbox every day; I’ve no need to look at Facebook to see people fiddling with the truth.

So how should worry about Facebook be usefully focussed? In a public exchange with Facebook’s Adam Mosseri recently I urged Facebook to think much wider and to worry about helping to rebuild faith in truth in societies where that trust has begun to break down. Unsurprisingly, someone researching platforms asked me what on earth I meant. What follows is based on my reply.

When I talked about a ‘reconstruction effort in civil society’, I was compressing too much into a short phrase. Many journalists were thinking very narrowly about fake news, factchecking and misinformation. That is to say that the concerns about it are perfectly real (as are the solutions which are being tried out and multiplying), but the issue goes wider.

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22
Mar 17

Cut clutter, clarify and care about every word: Robert Silvers, RIP

Much has been written about Robert Silvers, one of two founders of the New York Review of Books, who died the other day. I never met Silvers but almost feel as if I knew him, despite the fact that he almost never wrote in the NYRB as an author. To read the NYRB was to read the minds of many knowledgeable people; one was also reading the mind of Silvers. His mark was on every paragraph.

That was of course because he edited every word. People who create ideas which last simplify and clarify. Listen to Silvers in this interview from four years ago. I can imagine that his voice might, to some, sound ‘elitist’ and arrogant in its certainty. But hear the clarity of purpose – and the watchful care to have that expressed in every word and comma. Lazy writing is lazy thinking, and vice versa.

The only statement of editorial mission the NYRB ever needed appeared in the first issue in 1963:

“This issue … does not pretend to cover all the books of the season or even all the important ones. Neither time nor space, however, have been spent on books which are trivial in their intentions or venal in their effects, except occasionally to reduce a temporarily inflated reputation, or to call attention to a fraud.”

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06
Mar 17

Dear Google, your algorithm went walkabout

In the past couple of years Google has moved more and more openly into creating editorial content, albeit material assembled by computers and not by people. One algorithm experiment in this line reveals a terrible muddle about truth.

The version of machine-created material most often seen in a Google search is the box which flips up on the right hand side of a screen to summarise what Google knows about the main subject of a search. I asked Google for the nearest branch of the restaurant chain Wahaca to my home in London:

For this kind of search, such panels work just fine. I get links to Wahaca locations on the left and a summary of the things I’m most likely to want to know about Wahaca neatly laid out on the right. This is the sort of thing that search does well with what the early pioneers of online called ‘ease of do’. Exact factual information, in a split second.

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20
Feb 17

Mr Zuckerberg’s education has further to go

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