Monthly Archives: January 2020

Thus, better to do nothing, as Boz wrote with a rather dramatic flourish, noting with faux-agony that he too was bereft that Facebook helped President Trump achieve victory in 2016. But rather than acknowledge any manipulation of the platform by Russians, Boz argued which is also now the gospel at Facebook that Mr. Trumps success was all due to his campaigns unbelievable work in using digital ad tools like a boss.

Awe and then shock, I guess. As a committed liberal I find myself desperately wanting to pull any lever at my disposal to avoid the same result. So what stays my hand? wrote Boz, as if he were yielding Gandalfs Glamdring sword. I find myself thinking of The Lord of the Rings at this moment specifically, he said, when Frodo offers the ring to Galadriel and she imagines using the power righteously, at first, but knows it will eventually corrupt her. As tempting as it is to use the tools available to us to change the outcome, I am confident we must never do that or we will become what we fear.

Except that what most people fear is a Facebook that continues to take a hands-off approach to a platform that always seems to be running amok somewhere, well beyond whatever microtargeted ads Mr. Trumps brilliant campaign staff runs.

Facebooks lack of significant action to police political ads is in contrast to recent moves by the two other important platforms, which are either outright banning those ads (Twitter) or severely restricting how they are presented (Google). Facebook is the only platform that really counts in this space, so what it has decided is what will be the oxygen of the 2020 race.

There is a fair debate to have on the issue of microtargeting which essentially allows for the slicing and dicing of a message into the tiniest bits, for potentially very narrow groups of users. Some feel microtargeting lets small and more marginalized political voices find their audience in a cost-effective way, since they cannot afford pricier mediums like television ads. Others think that microtargeting allows the powerful to plant millions of lies in the specific ears of the those who are easy to manipulate. Both are true, but by not better policing the practice, Facebook certainly creates an atmosphere of chaos, especially for those interested in more transparent and truthful debate.

Honesty may never be possible, according to Facebook, since the company has opted to keep allowing our elected officials to lie like a rug online. This is an astonishing abrogation of responsibility by the company, although if you have watched it do this same kind buck-passing over the years, it is no surprise.

In a post defending Facebooks policy, Rob Leathern, the director of product management overseeing the advertising integrity division, rehashed the approach to political ads: In the absence of regulation, Facebook and other companies are left to design their own policies. We have based ours on the principle that people should be able to hear from those who wish to lead them, warts and all, and that what they say should be scrutinized and debated in public.

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Facebook Loves to Pass the Buck - The New York Times

Open-source developer advocate Dmitry Vinnik said in a blog post that the social networks internal engineers contributed more than 82,000 commits in 2019, while some 2,500 external contributors committed over 32,000 changes.

He added that almost 93,000 new people starred Facebooks open-source projects last year.

Vinnik shared highlights of Facebooks collaboration efforts in support of open-source projects, including two initiatives in partnership with the Linux Foundation: the GraphQL Foundation and the Presto Foundation.

Facebook expanded on its open-source deep-learning platform, PyTorch, with the debut of PyTorch Mobile, as well as the additions of CrypTen, a framework for privacy-preserving machine learning, and Captum, a model interpretability and understanding library.

The social network also added support for free Jupyter notebook environment Google Colaboratory to its PyTorch tutorials.

On the topic of web and mobile open-source offerings, Vinnik said React and React Nativeremained very active, and he spotlighted the open-source releases of Hermes, a JavaScript engine optimized for mobile applications, and Magma, a platform that enables operators to deploy mobile networks in a timely fashion.

Late in the year, Facebook released Hydra, a framework that simplifies the development of Pythonapps by allowing developers to compose and override configurations.

Finally, Vinnik touched on the social networks work on the blockchain front with the Libra Association via its Calibrasubsidiary.

He wrote, Overall, it has been an excellent year for open source, with many new projects being released and existing communities growing more rapidly than we expected. We want to end this post the same way we started itby thanking all our internal and external contributors, those who use our open-source tools and frameworks and those who give back to the community. We appreciate you and look forward to working with everyone in the years to come.

Continued here:

Facebook Shares Its 2019 Year in Review for Open Source - Adweek

Have you ever covered a friend's expenses like a good pal, but had trouble getting them to pay you back?

Fortunately, Facebook Messenger has a handy tool that lets you request money from your friend directly, so you don't have to beat around the bush anymore.

Here's how to request money on Facebook.

1. Open the Facebook Messenger app on your iPhone or Android phone and tap on the conversation between you and the person you want to request money from.

2. Once you have the conversation open in Messenger, tap the icon in the bottom-left corner of the screen that resembles four dots arranged in a square shape.

Tap the four dots. Chrissy Montelli/Business Insider

3. A pop-up menu will appear at the bottom of the screen. Tap on "Pay or Request."

Tap "Pay or Request." Chrissy Montelli/Business Insider

4. Type in the amount of money you want to request. You can also include a note. Once you've filled out the pertinent information, tap "Request."

Tap "Request." Chrissy Montelli/Business Insider

Your payment request will now appear in your conversation with the person who you requested money from. However, your payment request will expire after seven days, and you can't control whether or not the person will actually respond to your request.

Your payment request will expire in seven days. Chrissy Montelli/Business Insider

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How to request money on Facebook using the Facebook Messenger app - Business Insider

Facebook director of product management for business integrity Rob Leathern turned to a different social network to share further details on a change introduced last week regarding custom audiencesfrom lists.

Leathern shared a series of tweetsabout the change, which will begin rolling out later this month.

A promised thread for adtech nerds. Since we announced an important product change last week that applies to all ads (not just a subset), for Custom Audiences from a list. I wanted to give some more details. These changes start to roll out later this month (1/17)

He said that when Facebook updated its Why am I seeing this ad? and Ad Preferences tools in July, he told Katie Notopoulos of BuzzFeed Newsin an interview that the tools were still somewhat difficult to navigate and not as comprehensive as (people would) like.

Leathern said this months update will make it easier for Facebook to show its users the relationships between agencies, marketing partners and advertisers, adding, Many small and medium businesses do their own marketing, whereas some big companies have their own marketing affiliates and multiple agencies.

He previewed the new control screen for businesses that people will have access to, saying in his tweets, You can control the use of lists at a business level. You could disallow the use of lists by multiple advertisers at one time, if they are using lists uploaded by the same business account. You can choose whether an advertiser can include or exclude you from their target audience at a business account level. That means any advertiser using any list from that business will also not be able to include, or exclude, you in an audience. Or you could make yourself eligible for seeing the ad, if they are using a list to exclude you. In this example, a gym might exclude you from ads to sign up because youre already a member.

Leathern elaborated on the include/exclude split, saying that advertisers use it for testing purposes, and offering as an example a streaming service that a person is already signed up for not showing them sign-up ads, but showing them ads for specific new shows.

People who are not sure why they were included on a list in the first place will still have to contact the business that created the list, as Leathern said Facebook has no visibility into the makeup of these lists, and all information is hashed before being sent to the social network.

When the update is rolled out, users will be able to access it via Advertisers & Businesses in their Ad Preferences.

Leathern concluded his tweetstorm with, Im excited about the new transparency that people will get about how marketers are trying to reach them and the granular ability to make changes to that picture. Once it rolls out later this month, I would love feedback on how we continue to improve it.

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Facebook Aims to Show Users the Relationships Between Agencies, Marketers, Advertisers - Adweek

A comparison of an original and deepfake video of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (Elyse Samuels/The ... [+] Washington Post via Getty Images)

Let the misinformation campaigns begin.

As you may know, the proliferation of altered content, fake news, videos that are intended to sway voters to one ideology over another, and outright falsehoods and lies seriously impacted the outcome of the last presidential election and the primary culprit was Facebook. (Although Twitter bots were also part of the problem.)

Millions and millions of people read posts about Hillary Clinton being the antichrist or watched videos of Donald Trump looking like a big orange pig.

Because social media is a free-for-all with a steady stream of posts about any topic under the sun, and because millions of people stick to the safe confines of Facebook, it was easy to feed misinformation on both sides of the political spectrum.

In short, it worked.

Recently, Facebook instituted a new policy that bans some deepfake videos. Its a step in the right direction in the battle against fake news.

Deepfakes tend to work. Using artificial intelligence and freely available apps, including one that just debuted this week called Doublicat that creates deepfake GIFs using only a selfie, anyone can make it look like a celebrity is advocating for a border wall or trumpeting one of the Democratic candidates.

The catch (and to be honest there is always a catch on social media), this does not include all deepfake videos. In the official announcement, Facebook noted that some fake videos that are meant for satire are still fine, along with any that have a more serious purpose. Videos that were merely edited for quality or clarity will not be banned. What the announcement really addresses are the videos that are part of a misinformation campaign, what Facebook callsmanipulated media. This would include videos that are more coercive in nature, such as those that make it appear as if a high-profile figure or a politician is saying something they did not say.

Deepfake videos have been around for a while, including an infamous one where Barack Obama speaks out about fake news.

Of course, deepfakes can be traced even further back to illicit videos, but they reached a tipping point in 2018 because of how easy they were to create. End users could download a few apps and load Photoshop-altered photos to create deepfakes in a few minutes. The artificial intelligence made it easy. Last year, FaceApp became popular because it could make you look older or younger with a few clicks.

In the upcoming election, social media will again play an even more important role. If its this easy to create deepfakes using an app, they will become even more popular.

Now for the bad news. Its admirable that Facebook is taking a stance against misinformation campaigns and will block these videos, but there are always workarounds. It will be interesting to see if videos that initially look normal and unaltered suddenly insert altered portions and if Facebook will be able to detect these more subtle deepfake videos.

And, deepfakes are only a small part of the problem. Everyone has the right to share their opinion on social media, and Facebook cant police every single post and comment to judge the accuracy of the statements. Its extremely difficult to determine what is an oddball opinion you have the right to post and what is meant as a subversive falsehood that is meant to disrupt the election cycle.

Good luck with that kind of policing, and Im not even sure if AI can help.

Continued here:

Facebook Bans Deepfake Videos That Could Sway Voters, But Is It Enough? - Forbes

More broadly, you can stop some of the web activity being used to target you with ads by visiting the YourAdChoices site run by the Digital Advertising Alliance. You'll notice Facebook advertising targeting is on the list of entriestick the Opt Out box to do just that. Note that you'll need to do this separately for each browser you use; for the biggest impact, you should opt out of all the other platforms as well.

Locking down tracking in your browser is also recommended: Look out for the option to block third-party cookies in your browser settings (the sort that can track activity across multiple sites), and consider using well-respected tracker blocking browser extensions such as Ghostery or Privacy Badger.

On Mobile Devices

Much of what we've already said applies to Facebook's mobile apps as well. If you want to limit what Facebook knows about you, you're best off not installing the mobile apps at all. Doing so gives Facebook permission to log the Wi-Fi networks you connect to, the type of phone you have, the other apps you have installed, and more besides, as well as everything you do on Facebook itself.

You can't stop all of this data collection, but you can curb it. Head to the Facebook permissions pageunder Apps and notifications and Facebook in Android settings and under Facebook in iOS settingsto block Facebook's access to your phone's location, your contacts, your phone's microphone and camera, and more.

The bad news? Even with location tracking turned off, Facebook still makes note of the approximate location that you access the web from via your IP address. It's only a rough guideand Facebook says it's necessary to keep accounts secure and users verifiedbut you can't stop this from happening if you use Facebook.

More bad news: Other apps send data to Facebook as well, often automatically. Almost everyone has a Facebook account, and third-party apps want to make use of that data, whether it's to target users with advertising or to simplify the login process and get more user data as a result. Facebook isn't working in isolation here, and has many profitable partnerships with other apps and data brokers.

It's worth emphasizing that Facebook, like Google, promises to use this treasure trove of data to improve its services and make life safer and more convenient for its users, as well as generating more profitable ads across its network. You are, after all, using everything Facebook offers for free. If you don't trust Facebook's intentionswhich is by now understandablethen you really need to quit using it altogether.

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All the Ways Facebook Tracks Youand How to Limit It - WIRED

The companys separate decision not to limit microtargeting is probably welcome news to candidates of both parties, who value the ability to tailor messages based on data such as a voters age, gender, neighborhood, job or sports fandom. President Donald Trumps campaign has pushed Facebook not to limit ad-targeting, a step Google took in November, and accused Twitter of trying to silence conservatives when it banned political ads altogether in October.

Facebook also said it is taking steps to give users more control over and insight into the ads they see, as well as improving its publicly available database of its political advertisements allowing for more precise searches and filtering of ads and offering size estimates for their target audience. And the company announced it will soon allow users to control the volume of political and social issue ads they see.

Theres no change to the policy regarding fact-checking politicians in advertising, Facebook spokesperson Tom Reynolds said in an interview before the announcement. We made a decision, and this is a different set of issues that were tackling here regarding transparency and users controls when it comes to seeing political ads.

Asked whether the companys position on that might change, he added: As of right now, this is what the policy is going to be.

Spending on political ads could reach as much as $6 billion in the 2020 election cycle, including $1.6 billion that will be spent on digital video, according to companies that analyze the advertising market. Facebook and Google are by far the biggest platforms for online political advertising.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. | AP Photo/Susan Walsh

CEO Mark Zuckerberg made two visits to D.C. last fall to defend Facebooks refusal to fact-check candidates claims, including a speech at Georgetown University where he argued that voters should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying.

Facebooks director of product management, Rob Leathern, offered a similar defense in a blog post published Thursday morning, saying the company is following the principle that people should be able to hear from those who wish to lead them, warts and all, and that what they say should be scrutinized and debated in public.

This does not mean that politicians can say whatever they like in advertisements on Facebook, Leathern added, saying candidates must still adhere to community guidelines banning content such as hate speech or messages aimed at intimidating voters. We regularly disallow ads from politicians that break our rules.

Leathern also took a shot at Facebooks rivals, writing that while Twitter has chosen to block political ads and Google has chosen to limit the targeting of political ads, we are choosing to expand transparency and give more controls to people when it comes to political ads.

Civil rights advocates have been some of the harshest critics of Facebooks policies, pointing to a long history of false messages being used to deter minorities from voting.

The backlash to Facebooks ads policy prompted largely by a talk in September by the companys vice president of global affairs and communications, Nick Clegg has reverberated from Congress to the 2020 campaign trail.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) accused Facebook of becoming a disinformation-for-profit machine. And the campaign of Joe Biden, the focus of a baseless Trump campaign ad last fall that implicated the former vice president and his family in corruption in Ukraine, hammered the platform for amplifying and profiting from debunked falsehoods.

Donald Trumps campaign can (and will) still lie in political ads. Facebook can (and will) still profit off it, the campaign's deputy communications director, Bill Russo, said Thursday in response to the policy update. Todays announcement is more window dressing around their decision to allow paid misinformation.

Democratic candidate Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) also blasted Facebook. "It is wrong to take money from political campaigns in exchange for disseminating blatant lies to the American people. It is also wrong that Facebook is immune from any liability for the reckless political ads they sell," she said in a statement.

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Clegg told POLITICO in a November interview that the company was considering limiting candidates microtargeting as part of a broader reassessment of its policies around campaign messaging.

Ultimately, it decided not to.

In contrast, Google announced in late November that it would limit audience targeting on election ads to only three general categories: age, gender and location (down to a postal code level).

Googles move, while cheered by privacy activists, drew sharp criticism from most of the political digital ad industry. Critics of the policy charged that Googles decision at the time could deeply hurt insurgent or less-well-funded candidates, while inadvertently benefiting cash-rich incumbents who had the resources to spend money on digital ads that were ultimately less effective.

Twitter, which was only a minor player in the political ad space, went a step further than Google, banning political ads altogether.

If Facebook did decide to limit political microtargeting, it could have hurt the ability of candidates to raise money and collect the contact information of would-be supporters.

The social network has been a hotbed of political advertising in 2019. Trumps reelection operation spent at least $19.4 million on the platform, making him the top-spending politician for the year. Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer spent at least $16.9 million.

Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with transparency and choice, House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-R.I.), who is leading a probe of Silicon Valley giants, tweeted about the policy on Thursday. This is about money.

Unlike Google, Facebook has "chosen not to limit targeting of these ads, the Facebook executive Leathern said. We considered doing so, but through extensive outreach and consultations we heard about the importance of these tools for reaching key audiences from a wide range of NGOs, non-profits, political groups and campaigns, including both Republican and Democrat committees in the U.S.

Leathern said the company didnt believe that decisions about political ads should be made by individual private companies, instead arguing for regulation that would apply across the industry. He highlighted Facebooks support for the Honest Ads Acts much of which was included in H.R. 1 (116), House Democrats sweeping electoral reform bill that passed the lower chamber in March saying that policy makers need to make uniform regulations for the industry. The bill, otherwise known as the For The People Act, stalled out in the Republican-controlled Senate, as has a standalone version of the Honest Ads Act.

Frankly, we believe the sooner Facebook and other companies are subject to democratically accountable rules on this the better, Leathern wrote.

Yet Alex Stamos, Facebook's former chief security security officer, called on the company to take matters into its own hands, tweeting that "targeting limits and a minimal standard on claims about opponents would represent a defensible, non-partisan and helpful position."

Excerpt from:

Facebook sticking with policies on politicians' lies and voter targeting - POLITICO

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg views AR and VR as the next platform after the smartphone, saying it will define the 2030s in his annual goal-settingletter, posted to his profile page last Thursday night.

Business Insider Intelligence

In his letter, Zuckerberg framed Facebook's focus on AR as a bid to create a tech tool for social good, underpinned by Facebook's edict toconnect people: By enabling people to be "present" anywhere, AR glasses woud provide access and social mobility regardless of a user's location.

Developing its own AR glasses also marks the social giant's latest hardware effort: Last year, Facebook advanced further into hardware, expanding its Portal screened smart speaker (Portal, Portal+, and Portal TV) and Oculus VR headset lineups (Rift, Quest, and Go).

Facebook expects that AR will eventually reach mass consumer adoption on par with mobile today and it appears the tech giant wants to lead that race.In the letter, Zuckerberg predicted that "at some point in the 2020s, we will get breakthrough augmented reality glasses that will redefine our relationship with technology."

To that end, Facebook is hoping to make that breakthrough itself: The company is reportedly developing its own AR glasses, which could launch between 2023 and 2025,percomments by Facebook's head of AR and VR Andrew Bosworth last fall. To aid the effort, Facebook has reportedly partnered with Luxottica, the maker of Ray-Ban and Oakley, to develop AR-enabled glasses, a project internally codenamed Orion by Facebook Reality Labs, the team tasked with developing the glasses,perCNBC.

Facebook is also reportedly building its own operating system that it would likely integrate into its hardware, as it looks to wean off of its current reliance on Google's Android as it anticipates greater platform-device rivalries,perThe Information.

Developing its own AR glasses within the next three to five years would predate the expectations of Facebook chief scientist Michael Abrash, who leads Facebook Reality Labs and believes it will take five to 10 years before the AR glasses are ready for the masses though that likely won't prevent Facebook from rolling out its first generation hardware ahead of those expectations,perThe Information.

Facebook's AR hardware push will likely aim to differentiate and scale by integrating the company's communications functionality, including its social apps and services, directly into the glasses.Among the most commonly cited barriers to broader adoption of AR and VR headsets currently include a clunky user experience and lack of content or categories beyond specialized use cases, such as gaming,perPerkins Coie.

Facebook imagines that AR glasses will not only become as ubiquitous as smartphones, but that they will effectively replace them in terms of function. To that end, Facebook is likely to focus entirely on the devices' utility as a communication tool, one that can meet all the same needs as the smartphone currently does, but even more powerfully and efficiently.

By developing its own AR glasses as well as the operating system to run on it, Facebook stands to be able to easily put its services onto the devices, reimagine social sharing and advertising formats for the devices, and collect fees for any apps or services that want to gain a position on the device, in the same way that Apple (App Store), Google (Play Store), and Amazon (Fire TV, Amazon Channels) currently do. For example, the glasses wouldreportedlyallow users to make calls, share information, and live-stream their point of view on social media.

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Zuckerberg outlines Facebook's augmented reality ambitions - Business Insider Nordic