Monthly Archives: February 2020

Facebook's (NASDAQ:FB) Oculus division announced on Tuesday that it acquired Sanzaru Games, a video game company known for working on titles in the Sly Cooper and Spyro the Dragon franchises. Sanzaru also has experience developing virtual-reality (VR) games, having released titles exclusively for Facebook's Oculus platform including VR Sports Challenge and Ripcoil in 2016 and Asgard's Wrath in 2019.

Sanzaru was the first developer to partner with Oculus in making games, so it's not surprising to see it become part of the broader Facebook family.Facebook hinted that it would buy additional VR development companies when it acquired Beat Games in November, and additional acquisitions could follow soon after the Sanzaru deal.

Image source: Oculus.

Oculus stated in its press release announcingthe Sanzaru acquisition that it has more big announcements in store for this year. The social-media giant will likely have other big acquisitions or major VR-content news to reveal.

Facebook has been one of the most aggressive players in the virtual reality space, acquiring headset-maker Oculus in 2014 at a price of roughly $3 billion and pumping substantial resources into developing software for the new display medium. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made clear that he's a big believer in the potential of virtual reality and once once said that it could succeed mobile as the next majorcomputing platform.

Zuckerberg has also acknowledged that the progression of the VR market has been slower than Facebook anticipated, but it's recently been scoring wins in the space -- with its Oculus Quest headset been putting up encouraging numbers and acquisitions bolstering its content-production capabilities. Signs point to Facebook continuing to bet big on VR.

See the article here:

Facebook Continues Virtual-Reality Gaming Push With New Acquisition - The Motley Fool

Several high-profile Instagram accounts posted sponsored content for Michael Bloombergs presidential campaign on Wednesday afternoon.

World Star Hip Hop, Funny Hood Vidz, Banger Buddy, Nugget, and Wasted, all accounts with millions of followers, posted ads in the form of fake relatable tweets and edited videos.

The posts do not make use of Instagrams official system for disclosing that money has changed hands. The company has said that all creators posting sponsored content on behalf of presidential campaigns must use the official branded content tool. Branded content is a form of advertising.

Many of the accounts the Bloomberg campaign has advertised on are private, which means that followers must request to see the accounts and be approved by the account owners.

Going private is a known growth hack among meme pages. When a follower sends someone a post from that account, the receiver must request to follow the page to see it.

In 2018, many of Instagrams top meme pages locked down their accounts to gain followers in this way. Meme pages often flip between private and public. Some use auto-accept programs to manage their flow of followers.

Large meme pages also set their accounts to private to avoid scrutiny, denying follow requests from journalists or from people they suspect may report the account for violating terms of service. After posting a Bloomberg ad on Wednesday, Funny Hood Vidz flipped its account from public to private, locking out journalists or others who sought to view the ad. (The account is now public again.)

The practice has become so widespread that it has become a pain point with users.

After Josh Constine, a reporter for TechCrunch, spurred a debate about the practice on Twitter on Tuesday, Adam Mosseri, the chief executive of Instagram, replied that the current state is definitely not great, so were looking into a few ideas.

Its not like we just noticed that large meme accounts often go private, Mr. Mosseri wrote in another tweet. Youll probably think this is crazy, it just hasnt bubbled up as the next most important thing to do, weve been more focused on Stories, Direct, creative tools, bullying, elections integrity, etc.

But the scourge of private meme accounts is particularly thorny when it comes to political ads. When sponsored content for political candidates appears on private accounts, it allows those running the ads to escape the direct scrutiny that comes with a public-facing account.

It also keeps non-followers in the dark about ads being run on the page and prevents users from easily searching for specific content.

Liz Bourgeois, a spokeswoman for Facebook, which owns Instagram, wrote in a statement to The New York Times that the company does not have visibility into financial relationships taking place off our platforms, which is why weve asked campaigns and creators to use our disclosure tools. On the broader topic of political branded content, we welcome clearer guidelines from regulators.

The ads posted on Wednesday are just the latest in a campaign that has been orchestrated though Meme 2020, a collective of meme makers who run some of the largest and most influential meme pages on Instagram and have been contracted by the Bloomberg campaign. These meme pages operate as small media companies and make money by posting ads to their feeds.

For weeks, Facebook has been scrambling to respond to the Bloomberg campaigns new social media tactics.

The company, which has spent years preparing for the 2020 presidential elections, has been caught off-guard by the Bloomberg campaigns aggressive and unorthodox use of social media.

Facebooks election team learned about the Bloomberg campaigns plan to hire social media influencers through a report in The Times. On an internal message board used by the team, seen by The Times, the story was posted with a question: Do we know about this?

Immediately, according to a Facebook employee who was at a meeting about it, the group began to scour Facebook and Instagram for examples of influencers who had posted favorable Bloomberg content. With each post, the team checked to see if the photograph or video was clearly labeled sponsored by the Bloomberg campaign.

The posts they found were labeled. The group decided it would create an online database through CrowdTangle, a social media tool also owned by Facebook. The tool allowed them to catalog all posts by influencers that had been paid for by the Bloomberg campaign.

There was just one problem: Facebooks team was relying on the influencers to label themselves.

The memers who created the first round of Bloomberg posts two weeks ago were asked by Facebook to retroactively label their posts through the official tool. However, many ads posted since then have not done so. Facebook is currently investigating how to crack down on these violations. So far, no meme accounts have been penalized.

The only disclosure on the Bloomberg advertisement posted to World Star Hip Hop read: Verified #sPoNsoReD: bY @mIkEbLoOmbErg.

See more here:

Its Facebook vs. the Bloomberg Campaign vs. the Internet - The New York Times

Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is in the midst of a massive pivot toward privacy following years of controversy and data scandals. It's been less than a year since CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out his "privacy-focused vision" in a lengthy manifestothat pins Facebook's future on encryption, ephemeral posts, and interoperability across the company's messaging platforms.

Over the years, Zuck has regularly dismissed the notion of introducing a subscription model that eschews ads altogether in favor of a monthly fee. "All of the research that we have -- it may still end up being the right thing to offer that as a choice down the line -- but all the data that I've seen suggests that the vast, vast, vast majority of people want a free service," Zuckerberg said a year ago.

Mark Zuckerberg. Image source: Facebook.

Speaking of research, a recent study has just attempted to pin monetary values on certain aspects of online privacy.

This month, the Tech Policy Institute (TPI) released the results of a studyacross six different countries -- the U.S., Argentina, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. The study looked at different forms of data sharing and asked respondents how much Facebook would have to pay them to consent to disclosing information to third parties. The results are less about how much users might be willing to pay Facebook to remove ads, but rather seek to estimate a monetary value associated with privacy.

As might be expected, respondents placed the highest average value on financial data such as a bank account balance ($8.44 per month), biometric information like fingerprint data ($7.56 per month), and private texts ($6.05 per month). Sharing location information was worth just $1.82 per month.

German consumers tended to assign higher values for privacy compared to users in the U.S. or Latin America, according to the study. That's partially related to a strong preference for financial privacy. There was a particularly stark contrast in how much consumers valued their personal contact information.

Country

Amount Facebook Would Need to Pay for Permission to Share Contact Information

Germany

$8 per month

U.S.

$3.50 per month

Mexico

$2.30 per month

Colombia

$0.52 per month

Data source: TPI.

On average, women also appeared to value privacy more than men, as did older users. There was no apparent correlation between income and privacy valuation.

"Differences in how much people value privacy of different data types across countries suggests that people in some places may prefer weaker rules while people in other places might prefer stronger rules," TPI's Scott Wallsten, one of the study's authors, toldReuters.

It's also worth noting the stark differences in Facebook's monetizationacross geographies. Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) in North America is over 15 times higher than its "Rest of world" segment.

Region

ARPU (Q4'19)

U.S. and Canada

$41.41

Europe

$13.21

Asia-Pacific

$3.57

Rest of world

$2.48

Data source: Facebook.

If Facebook were to charge a subscription fee to remove ads, these figures represent how much Facebook would require throughout a quarter in order to offset ad revenue. For example, Facebook would need to charge a monthly subscription fee of around $13.80 in the U.S. and Canada to break even from removing ads, on average.

The tech giant could ostensibly pay U.S. users $3.50 per month for permission to share their contact data with third-party advertisers and then sell that information wholesale. Facebook currently does notsell personal information to advertisers directly, but instead targets users on advertisers' behalf. Data leaks and breaches are a different story.

Go here to read the rest:

Here's How Much Your Privacy on Facebook Is Worth - The Motley Fool

It wasn't so long ago thatFacebook's (NASDAQ:FB) stock seemed to be a sure thing.Even recently, the stock seemed to be on the way to a nice recovery following the company's missteps on data privacy and other issues. However, investors seemed frustrated with Facebook's latest quarterly results and the shares dropped almost 10% over the next two days. Challenges from expense growth to changes that could hamper Facebook's advertising business have cast a shadow over the stock.

By contrast, Twitter has received its share of criticism over the years. Yet after its earnings report, the shares jumped 15%. At first, it seems like the choice between the two companies has never been clearer. In reality, Facebook's recent setback represents a buying opportunity for long-term investors.

Image credit: Getty Images

Facebook generated more than 98% of its quarterly revenue from advertising, so any slowdown is a serious concern. InFacebook's conference call, CFO Dave Wehner delivered several updates that likely contributed to the stock's recent decline.

He said that regulatory impacts would curb Facebook's ability to "utilize signals from user activity on third-party websites and services in order to deliver relevant and effective ads to our users." In case that's not clear, this is corporate-speak for we won't be able to track users' activity, and thus our advertising revenue could run into challenges. If you've ever experienced the surreal situation of looking at an item on Amazon.comor eBayand then magically seeing an ad for it in your Facebook timeline, you've experienced Facebook's use of these "signals."

In addition, the company will be releasing a privacy tool to billions of users. It's reasonable to assume that a portion will adjust their settings to prevent Facebook from tracking their usage of third-party sites. Furthermore, Wehner said, "Apple and Google have announced product changes and future plans that will limit our ability to use those signals."

The bottom line is clear: The less effectively Facebook can track users' activity, "that can negatively impact our advertising revenue growth," in Wehner's words.

What some investors may be forgetting is that even if Facebook's advertising business slows down, it will still likely outperform Twitter's performance in the same area. Last quarter, Facebook generated $20.7 billion in advertising revenue, which increased by 25% year over year. Twitter's advertising revenue reached $885 millionand increased by 12%.

Beyond the revenue numbers, Facebook's ad business seems to suggest pricing power. According to Wehner, "total number of ad impressions served across our services increased 31%, and the average price per ad decreased 5%." By point of comparison, Twitter reported that total ad engagements increased 29%, while the cost per engagement decreased by 13%. Said another way, Facebook generated faster transaction growth than Twitter without having to cut prices as far. Even if Facebook's growth slows, it should still handily outperform its peer.

The growth narrative for Facebook has been that the company's user growth will slow, yet it will capitalize on better engagement and grow advertising revenue. However, comments from management suggest Facebook is finally getting serious about its massive payments opportunity. With billions of people using Facebook's different properties, connecting buyers and sellers as a payments intermediary could open up a whole new revenue stream for the social media giant.

The company recently started quoting a stat called family daily active people (DAP) that gives investors a sense of the payments opportunity. Last quarter, Facebook's DAP across its properties reached 2.2 billion.With billions of potential payment users, Facebook isn't starting from scratch moving in on new territory. The Instagram property allows users to buy directly from the app. The company hopes that Facebook Pay will become a standard payment method across multiple properties. Inside of the popular messaging app WhatsApp, the company tested payments. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "when so many people kept using it week after week, we knew it was going to be big when we get to launch."

The worry for Facebook investors is that this big business may not succeed. Several years ago, Twitter's data licensing division seemed to be the future of that company. With hundreds of millions of users tweeting massive amounts of data, it seemed to make sense that this would be a goldmine. Unfortunately, this business has run into challenges. In last year's fourth quarter, the data business grew by 35% annually. Just a year later, this same segment grew by just 5% year over year.

The key difference between Twitter's data business and Facebook's payments ambitions is scale and user composition. Twitter's vast pool of data is heavily tilted toward those who are the most active on the service, many of whom are celebrities. Twitter seems to lack the personal conversations that Facebook properties have in abundance. When a celebrity tweets, the response might be a thousand or two thousand replies, yet there is little real conversation.

Where Facebook is concerned, real interactions between friends and family members give the company significant data about where people are and what they are spending money on. Though Facebook's brand has been tarnished because of past security issues, its other properties don't have the same stigma. WhatsApp has an estimated 2 billion users. If only 10% of users started making payments, this property alone would quickly become a significant threat to payments players like PayPal, Square's Cash App, and more.

Over the last several years, it has been difficult to think of Facebook's stock as cheap. For the first time in a while, the combination of tempered expectations and a realistic growth narrative give investors a chance to buy the stock at a solid value.

If we look at Facebook and Twitter side by side, the better investment nearly jumps off the page.

Measurement

Facebook

Twitter

2020 Projected P/E ratio

18

34

2020 Projected revenue growth

21.2%

15.4%

5-year annual EPS growth

13.2%

13.9%

3 month core operating cash flow growth

8.6%

(35.7%)

Net cash balance and annual growth

$54.9 billion +33.6%

$3.5 billion (22.2%)

(Source: Yahoo Finance for forward P/E ratios; analyst estimates for P/E, revenue growth and five-year EPS projections; three-month operating cash flow growth and net cash results author's calculation from most recent earnings release.)

In short, Facebook offers a forward P/E ratio that is nearly half that of its peer yet is projected to grow earnings at nearly the same rate. While Facebook grew its operating cash flow and net cash, Twitter witnessed a decline by both measures.

If we follow famed investor Warren Buffett's advice to "be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful," the short-term worries about Facebook suggest a long-term opportunity. Facebook's growth may be slowing down, yet the stock has never looked like a better value.

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Facebook's Growth Is Slowing Down, Yet the Stock Has Never Looked Like a Better Value - Motley Fool

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. You'd be hard-pressed to name an American company that's more distrusted and yet more influential today than Facebook. The social media site has been rocked by scandals involving the misuse of its users' personal information and harsh criticism of its role in the 2016 election. And yet it remains huge, with nearly 3 billion users, and profitable, with annual earnings in the billions of dollars. Our guest, Steven Levy, is a veteran technology journalist who's been reporting on Facebook for years and has written a new in-depth history of the company. Facebook's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave Levy leaving nine interviews and permission to talk to many other present and former employees of the company. Levy writes that virtually every problem Facebook has confronted since 2016 is a consequence of its unprecedented mission to connect the world and its reckless haste to do so.

Steven Levy has written for Rolling Stone, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times and The New Yorker. He's now editor at large for Wired and the author of seven previous books. He spoke with FRESH AIR's Dave Davies about his new book, "Facebook: The Inside Story."

DAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: Well, Steven Levy welcome to FRESH AIR. You have covered technology for a long time. When did you decide you had to make this a book-length exploration of Facebook?

STEVEN LEVY: I could pinpoint that pretty precisely. I think it was the end of August of 2015. Mark Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook feed that a billion people had signed on to Facebook that day, and I realized that had never happened before. I'd covered Facebook for a long time before that, but I realized that this is something utterly new, enabled by technology and whatever this company did. And I had to write about it and explain how that happened and what it meant and how they dealt with it.

DAVIES: Right. So what kind of commitment did Zuckerberg and others at Facebook make to cooperating with you?

LEVY: Well, it took me a few months to get them to this point, but eventually, they agreed to give me access to their employees, including Mark and Sheryl Sandberg, his chief operating officer. And this is also very important. They would give a go-ahead to former employees who wouldn't talk to me unless Facebook said it was OK. There were no strings attached. They didn't get the read the manuscript. The only thing that I said was the interviews I did for the book would be embargoed for the book. And I wouldn't be able to take something if someone said something controversial and just write it in an article for Wired the next day.

DAVIES: All right. Everything on the record?

LEVY: Well, they're allowed to go and background. They're off the record if they wanted to go there. And some of the interviews I did, particularly with some people who may be - not be at Facebook, were either on background or not for attribution. So some people were a little worried about direct quotes against Facebook being in the book.

DAVIES: Right. That makes sense. But Zuckerberg himself - was all that on the record?

LEVY: I don't think Mark once said, this is off the record. I think pretty much everything he says - there's - the PR people can't say, Mark, don't say that. At least they don't. And he calls his own shots. Some other people would say, oh, let me say this off the record. And I would try to dissuade them, but a couple of people did that. And one in particular - in the course of our interviews, I kept saying, hey; this has got to be on the record. I really ought to use this.

DAVIES: Right. What's he like in person? What was the relationship like?

LEVY: We got to a pretty good place where I think he was probably as candid with me as he's been with any journalist, although I don't think he ever forgot that he was talking to a journalist. He has grown over the years as an interviewee. When I first met him and started asking him questions - this is 2006 - he would just stare at me blankly. And it took him a while before I can get any answer out of him. And by the time I started this book, he had obviously been more comfortable with this. He'd been a CEO for many years and a CEO of a public company, so he understood how to give answers to journalists. And he's a very curious person. People describe him as a learning machine. So sometimes he'll ask questions of me, and I think he did this with other journalists, too.

DAVIES: Yeah. Can you think of an example of him asking you a question?

LEVY: Well, I think one of the most interesting examples - and this sort of casts a light on how Facebook is dealing with its current issues - it was 2018, and it was a run up to their big developer conference they called F8, which has the resonance of fate. And he was explaining to me how he was going to spend half of his keynote speech not apologizing exactly but saying that Facebook knew it made mistakes and we're going to win back your trust. And the other half was going to be about how - well, we have to introduce new things, too, because we can't stand still. So on one hand, it was saying, hey; don't worry; we're fine, and on the other hand saying, here's the new disturbing things we're doing.

And he said, well, we're going to introduce a product called Facebook Dating. And I said, really? Don't you think that's a little off-tone considering people are so concerned about the data they give you? This is just basically a few weeks after Cambridge Analytica, which was the biggest scandal in the company's history, involving the release of data. And he said, well, Facebook has always been sort of a secret dating site of some kind, and we don't think it's that big a deal. And then he went on. And then a few minutes later, he just stopped and he said, hey; do you really think that's going to be a big problem for us?

DAVIES: What'd you say?

LEVY: I said, yeah.

DAVIES: (Laughter) And it didn't happen or did happen? It says in the book, but I can't remember.

LEVY: Well, he - as one would expect, people said, what's going on here? In this moment, they're introducing a dating site. They introduce it in some smaller countries first. And then a year later, they rolled it out to the United States, and you can now date on Facebook.

DAVIES: One of the things you see about Facebook after it got going for a few years was there was a decision to focus on growth - more users, more engagement among the users that we have. What motivated this? I mean...

LEVY: Well...

DAVIES: It's sort of natural for every business, I suppose, but...

LEVY: Sure.

DAVIES: This was sort of a different business.

LEVY: Right, right. Well, it's - every business wants to grow. But what this thing with Facebook was its relentless focus on growth. And Mark always believed in it, but in 2008, an executive named Chamath Palihapitiya said, I want to take this a step farther. I want to start an internal group called the Growth Circle. And we would just do anything we can to make Facebook grow faster and faster and faster and get it to a billion people really, really quickly. And this was unthinkable at the time, but Chamath was very smart, and he gathered the team of the best people at Facebook. He got a few people from outside. And they were almost a group, a wrecking crew from within Facebook. They sat differently in a different place than everyone else, and they did things that really pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in Silicon Valley practices to push growth even farther than it had before.

DAVIES: What were some of the things that they did?

LEVY: Well, one thing was - and this was kind of standard; they did a really great job of it - was to make Facebook higher and higher when you searched in Google for it. And, you know, Facebook profiles were available on Google, so when people search themselves, a Facebook profile would come up with you with your name on it, even though you weren't there. And they would encourage you to take a look and sign up. And another thing was sometimes they would - if you signed up...

DAVIES: Wait one second. You said that it would show a profile of you even if you weren't a user, weren't registered with Facebook?

LEVY: That's right. This is a controversial area of Facebook. It's something - Mark, you know, in 2006, he kept this notebook, and he would speculate on something called dark profiles. And Facebook didn't quite implement it the way he outlined that, which is almost like a Wikipedia page that your friends would start about you even if you weren't on Facebook. That didn't happen.

But there was apparently something - I talked to a couple people in early Facebook who said that if someone tagged you in a photo, Facebook would keep a stub that you would then bring to life if you actually came and signed up for it. And Chamath told me that, yeah, one of the things they would do was have this - he referred to it as a dark profile to me - that would show up. And if you signed up, then they would immediately try to populate your newsfeed so you would have a reason to stay on Facebook.

DAVIES: Right. And so if I weren't even registered with Facebook but Facebook collected information about me - because there's information on the Internet - someone does a Google search and finds my name, then suddenly there's me connected with Facebook. I see that. And I think, how - man, I should sign up? (Laughter).

LEVY: That's what Chamath told me. Oh, yeah. And you know, So...

DAVIES: Wow.

LEVY: ...Facebook has since said that they never use shadow profiles or dark profiles for reasons like that. And I'm not quite sure what they do now, you know, but they do keep tabs on people for security reasons and some other things. But they say they don't serve advertising to anything they keep. So it's sort of a gray area that I found some contradictions when I was doing the book.

DAVIES: They also translated the site into foreign languages and - so that it would grow internationally, too. Right?

LEVY: That's right. And you know, they were very aggressive about translations. They didn't hire translators. They let people - users in that country translate it themselves. And they would sometimes refine it. And especially in the big countries, they would do refinements. But in obscure dialects of certain languages, people would just, you know, translate for themselves. And in some smaller countries, Facebook would be in there in the native language when no one at Facebook spoke the language. There was no way to police what went on in that country from Facebook.

DAVIES: Right. And in some cases, it became a major medium of information and was abused - right? - by people spreading rumors and hate speech.

LEVY: That's right. We're thinking - yeah. Yeah, the prime example is Myanmar, where Facebook went and became very popular. And then it became even more popular when Facebook wound up giving it away. If you had a mobile plan, you wouldn't pay for the Facebook pages you used. So it became almost, like, synonymous with the Internet in Myanmar and some other places. Meanwhile, Facebook had at first none and then very few people who could read what was going on there and couldn't police it. And it was abuse. People would put up false content that spurred people to violence, literally. And it wasn't until 2015 that Facebook even translated its book of rules into Burmese.

DAVIES: Steven Levy is editor at large for Wired. His new book is "Facebook: The Inside Story." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF ALEXANDRE DESPLAT'S "SPY MEETING")

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Steven Levy. He is editor at large for Wired. He is a veteran technology writer, and he has a deep dive into Facebook. His new book is called "Facebook: The Inside Story."

All right. Let's talk about the 2016 presidential campaign. How much did Facebook know, as that campaign progressed, about Russian efforts to plant fake or provocative stories in the newsfeed and also put bogus information in ads it was buying?

LEVY: Well, the Russian misinformation, which we could talk about, is part of a number of things that happened in the 2016 election that Facebook was involved in. The first thing was, you know, proliferation of fake stories. This called fake news weren't necessarily cooked up by the Russians. Only a small percentage of those turned out to be a part of this big Russian disinformation campaign that took place on Facebook. But a lot of it was done for financial gain - a lot of it from this small town in Macedonia, as it turned out, where people would make up fake stories or take a fake story that some obscure blogger posted and circulate it on Facebook.

And because of decisions made earlier in Facebook's history - around 2008 and 2009, Mark had a Twitter obsession, and he made Facebook more friendly to things that went viral on the system. These fake news stories - things like, you know, the pope endorsed Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton was involved in a sex ring in a pizzeria - they would go viral on Facebook and be more popular than legitimate news stories.

And Facebook had been warned against this sort of phenomenon. And particularly in the later stage of the presidential campaign, people were saying - hey, this has got to stop. But the company made a decision not to stop it because they felt it was part of people's expression to be able to post what they wanted. And Facebook didn't want to be in the position of a referee. Now, that decision, in part, was made by the head of Facebook's Washington office, who was a lifelong Republican and who saw his job, according to people who worked with him, as protecting the Republicans.

So that went on till the end of the election, and fake news proliferated on Facebook.

DAVIES: And I think it's worth making the point that one of the reasons that people in Macedonia found that they could make money by doing this was that, as part of its drive for growth, Facebook had its algorithm tweaked so that the most addictive material would come up at the top of your newsfeed. So there was an incentive for viral stuff, whether it was true or not.

LEVY: Right. Engagement was part of the formula for what would appear on your newsfeed. So if a lot of people shared a post, it would be ranked higher and it would appear in more people's newsfeeds.

DAVIES: Right. So what about the ads that were coming through?

LEVY: So - the fact is that Facebook offered help to political candidates who wanted to use Facebook better. And one side did a much better job of it than the other, and that was Donald Trump's team. And they took advantage of everything you could on Facebook. They spent much, much more on Facebook than the Clinton campaign did. They accepted the help that Facebook offered both sides, and they just built the heck out of their campaign around Facebook. They would do things like create many, many variations of an ad directed to different kinds of people just to see what clicked, and the Clinton campaign did nothing like that.

So the people at Facebook watched this with kind of awe. They're saying, wow, these people are really doing a great job with our campaign there on the Trump campaign. They didn't do anything about it because it wasn't - you know, they wanted to be fair to both sides. And they weren't too bothered by it because they thought - well, Clinton's going to win anyway, so this is just an interesting phenomenon about how someone uses our platform.

DAVIES: And the company was making money from every ad, right?

LEVY: Oh, sure. Yeah, it was making money. It wasn't the giant part of their revenues, but political ads in general were a significant source of revenue.

DAVIES: Right. And of course, it's worth mentioning that that microtargeting of ads based on Facebook's information about its users was its chief selling point, not just on political ads but everything. I mean, you could really a target an ad at a specific kind of customer.

LEVY: Right. And it sort of changed what the feel-good pitch of Facebook advertising was. You know, they would always say when you complained about microtargeting was - hey, this helps us serve more relevant ads to people. If you're interested in a certain musical star, we're going to let you know when that person has an album out or is appearing in your area because the advertisers will know where to find you.

This is something a little different because Facebook knows so much about you that you could target someone who might be vulnerable to a certain kind of pitch that make you change your mind about something or even deter you from voting. So this isn't part of the feel-good vibe of Facebook advertising that it presents to the world.

DAVIES: So Trump wins the election, which was not well-greeted by a lot of the staff at Facebook.

LEVY: No, people were in tears when it's what happened, and they had a big meeting the day after the election.

DAVIES: Tell us about the meeting.

LEVY: Well, people wanted to know for the first time - gee, did we have a hand in this? Were we, in part, responsible for this electoral outcome that we, meaning a lot of the people at Facebook, didn't want to see? And there was some soul-searching among them. And a couple days afterwards, though, Mark Zuckerberg, in speaking at a conference in Half Moon Bay, said he thought it was a crazy idea to think that Facebook influenced the election, which was a statement he had to later walk back.

DAVIES: Right. And eventually, real information came out. How did Zuckerberg's attitude change then?

LEVY: Well, I think he realized that, one, it sounded blithe. I actually was in the room when he said that, and it really didn't sound that blithe. It was part of a longer, more thoughtful answer, and it didn't really bring the room to a standstill. But we learned more in the weeks following about the abuse of Facebook, including the Russian disinformation campaign that took place on Facebook through ads and other posts. And it didn't seem like such a reach when we learned those things.

DAVIES: Yeah. How big were the numbers? How many people were - how many users got this misinformation?

LEVY: Well, the Russian disinformation was hundreds of thousands - but again, not a big percentage at all, a very tiny percentage of the stuff that people saw on Facebook. Yet it had some really disturbing aspects to it.

The Russians would do things - like, they would be able to find people who were against immigration and tell them - hey, there's this rally happening somewhere in Texas, you know, that's pro-immigration. You ought to go there and protest against it. And then they would inform people who were on the other side about the same rally, which was a nonexistent rally that the Russians were trying to create to bring two sides together that might fight each other. Basically, they were just trying to sow dissent and bad feelings to make people think that the system was really screwed up and, in some cases, deter them from voting.

GROSS: We're listening to the interview FRESH AIR's Dave Davies recorded with Steven Levy, editor at large for Wired and author of the new book "Facebook: The Inside Story."

After a break, they'll talk about the damage to Facebook from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and about Mark Zuckerberg's plans for the future of the company. Later, Ken Tucker will review a newly released Bryan Ferry concert recorded live at the Royal Albert Hall in 1974. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF WAYNE HORVITZ AND THE ROYAL ROOM COLLECTIVE ENSEMBLE'S "A WALK IN THE RAIN")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview Dave Davies recorded with Wired editor at large Steven Levy about the social media giant Facebook. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave Levy nine interviews and permission to talk to many other present and former employees of the company for Levy's new book, "Facebook: The Inside Story." When we left off, they were talking about the damage to Facebook's reputation from its role in the 2016 presidential election.

DAVIES: The criticisms about the fake news and the ad campaigns, some of them from foreign sources, were almost overshadowed by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This really grew out of a decision Facebook had made to make its product not just a social networking site but a platform so that outside software developers could use Facebook data to create apps, software products on Facebook. This was kind of a fateful decision, wasn't it?

LEVY: That's right, and this took place really early in Facebook's history, in 2007. It was a big leap that Facebook all of a sudden said, we want to be kind of the next operating system in the world, and this will be a social operating system. The Internet should be built around people, and we're the place that's going to host that. And you can't say the platform was an unmitigated failure because they really lifted Facebook to the top rung of technology companies. It took place in 2007. And all of a sudden, everyone was talking about Facebook in a way they weren't before. And a couple of months afterwards, I wrote a cover story about Facebook for Newsweek, where I was working then.

But the problem with it was, first, in order to do this, you had to hand over personal data to outsiders, to the software developers who were writing applications for this Facebook platform. And the platform itself had its dreams dashed when mobile phones became popular and people used those as operating systems. So your iPhone apps or your Android apps would be the operating system that you used, and the developers turned their attention to writing applications for phones. The platform still persisted, but it became more of an exchange of information between the developers and Facebook, with Facebook giving a lot of the information to the developers.

In 2010 - and this was where I really say Cambridge Analytica started - Facebook said, we'll give more information than ever to the developers. So when you signed up as a user for one of these apps, the third party would not only get your information that you posted on Facebook but the information that your friends posted on Facebook. You would be giving away your friends' likes, which are very revealing, and their relationship status, sometimes their political status - all falling out of the hands of Facebook into the hands of these developers who could use them for their apps and were told, you can't sell these or give them to anyone else. But Facebook didn't really have strong enforcement to make sure that happened.

DAVIES: And so Cambridge Analytica ends up getting the data of tens of millions of Facebook users.

LEVY: That's right. There was an academic researcher who followed Facebook's rules in getting the information but then broke Facebook's rules in licensing the information to this company called Cambridge Analytica, which was run by this British military consultancy company, which made a partnership with a big funder of the far-right in the United States.

DAVIES: Right, the Mercers.

LEVY: Right.

DAVIES: Right. You said that it's - to this day, it isn't clear whether the company's election efforts used Facebook profiles. Is that right? I thought that was accepted fact.

LEVY: Well, they had the data handed over, but the Trump campaign, which worked with Cambridge Analytica, said that they really didn't use it much as a data source. But they helped with television ads, and they liked some of the people who worked there. It is fuzzy because on the other hand, the head of Cambridge Analytica, the company behind it, was boasting about the information they used. So I think it is a big mystery the degree to which that data was used in the election, but we do know the Trump campaign did use a lot of data and merged it with other databases.

I think the shock to people was that this information got handed over to this company that no one ever heard of that worked for Trump. And that became Facebook's biggest scandal, ironically, even though some of this information had been published in 2015 by The Guardian, the same place that returned with the scoop in 2018. But this is pre-Trump, and it wasn't a big deal then.

DAVIES: So this information about the 2016 campaign and then a subsequent hack of, like, 50 million user accounts sent the company's public image into a real nosedive. And Mark Zuckerberg went before Congress, and they promised serious steps to change things. What are they doing?

LEVY: Well, they've done a number of things. For one thing, they give you more information. When you see something that looks like it's fake on Facebook, they have fact-checkers go over some of these claims. And when they turn out they're not factual, they don't take them off, but they might downrank it in the newsfeed. Fewer people might say it. They give you a chance to mouse over and see a little more information about the publication where this is printed. Maybe it's, like, a phony publication that doesn't exist besides Facebook.

DAVIES: Now, those aren't ads. Those are items posted to the newsfeed, right? So...

LEVY: Right. Yeah. And also, they - during elections, they monitor things. They look for the signals of disinformation campaigns and try to shut them down. So they're doing certain things that would have stopped some of the tricks in the 2016 election. And in the couple elections since - the midterm in 2018, elections in France and other places - they've done a better job, but it's an open question of how well they're going to do in 2020 when the people using Facebook and trying to abuse it again are going to come up with a new set of tricks.

DAVIES: Steven Levy's book is "Facebook: The Inside Story." We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF COOTIE WILLIAMS' "RINKY DINK")

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Steven Levy. He is a veteran technology writer and the editor at large for Wired. He has a new book about the history of Facebook. It's called "Facebook: The Inside Story."

So Facebook has this challenge where people can post things on a newsfeed that may be misleading or false, right? And then...

LEVY: Correct.

DAVIES: People can run paid ads. What's the company's policy in dealing with potentially inaccurate or misleading information in the organic posts that people put on the site and the ads that people buy?

LEVY: Well, Facebook will allow people to post misleading content, but if it starts circulating a lot and people complain about it, it will have fact-checkers to verify whether that's true or not. And if it's not true, they may downrank it, show it to fewer people. Then they might provide extra information, saying, you know, this is a publication that you may not want to trust, or, here's some other articles about the same thing that are more factual. Ads are a different thing. Mark has gone out on a limb and said, we are not going to fact-check political ads. So if someone makes a false claim, even consciously, about an opponent in a political ad, Facebook is going to be hands-off.

DAVIES: Right, and that's been controversial.

LEVY: It's really controversial, but Mark has stuck to his guns on this. He went before Congress this past October, where people just pummeled him about this. But he feels that he doesn't want Facebook to be in the position of saying, you know, well, this politician's ad is fake. The thing is a lie, and this isn't.

DAVIES: Does the company have any disclosure requirements for funding sources of the ads?

LEVY: It's the same funding disclosures that people have for ads in print or on TV. You have to say, this is my ad, and I approve this content.

DAVIES: And for Facebook to be looking at not the ads but the posts by users, which might be factually suspect - I mean, given, you know, the scale of the posts every day, that's a huge challenge. How many people are doing this?

LEVY: Well, it is a huge challenge. So the problem they had in 2016 is these Russians were posting it on their fake accounts, so that's not allowed. So if the account is inauthentic, as Facebook calls it, it could be taken down. But if an authentic person somewhere posts something that's fake, Facebook will not take it down. And we've heard that one thing the outside actors - Russians - might do is get people in the United States to post the fake content that they create. And Facebook then, by its own rules, would not be taking it down.

DAVIES: Right. So a fake account can be taken down, right?

LEVY: Yeah. Yeah. So this - and this became clear early in the 2016 election, when there was a page called DCLeaks, which was meant to spread the emails that were hacked from the Democratic National Committee. And at first, Facebook said, we're going to leave this up because it looks like a legitimate account. And then they figured out that it was not an authentic account, and they took it down because of that.

Read this article:

'Inside Story' Sheds Light On Facebook's Effort To Connect The World - NPR

Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson says: "My office takes repeat violations of campaign finance laws seriously." Karen Ducey / Getty Images

Then, six months later, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson agreed to let Facebook settle the matter without an admission of guiltbut required the tech giant to pay a $200,000 penalty and warned that Facebook must follow Washington state's nation-leading election transparency laws going forward, or else "they're going to hear from us again."

Now Ferguson is telling state election regulators in Olympia that he "stands ready" to take Facebook to court over allegations that the company, within less than two months of his 2018 warning, went right back to breaking the same state law again, in the same way, repeatedly.

In a February 20 letter to leaders of the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission, which last year charged Facebook with the new violations of state law, Ferguson told commission Chair David Ammons:

"My office takes repeat violations of campaign finance laws seriously. With regard to Facebook or any respondent that the Commission determines to be repeat violators of state campaign finance laws warranting prompt state action in court, my office stands ready to accept and act on the Commission's referrals."

By sending the letter, Ferguson was drawing attention to the power the PDC has to "refer enforcement matters to the Attorney General's Office for additional investigation and court action" whenever the PDC "believes that additional authority is needed to ensure full compliance with the state's campaign finance laws."

The agency has now spent more than a year investigating the current Facebook case, which, like Ferguson's 2018 lawsuit against Facebook, grows out of requests for local Facebook political ad data made by The Stranger and, separately, a private citizen.

The requests at the center of the current case were made in 2019 but, just like in the 2018 case, Facebook has refused to comply with state law requiring the company to disclose, to "any person" who asks, significant information on the financing and reach of election ads sold to influence this state's local races and ballot measures.

Even so, staff for the PDC recently presented a proposed settlement to commissioners that would allow Facebook to pay a $75,000 fine, again avoid any admission of guilt, and also avoid any promises of future compliance with state disclosure law.

After reviewing the proposed Facebook settlement, a half-dozen experts in campaign finance and digital ad transparency told The Stranger the deal is "dangerous," "troubling," and an insufficient "slap on the wrist" that "certainly isnt going to serve as a deterrent in the future."

Ten days after that story was published, Ferguson sent his letter to PDC Chair Ammons, copying the agency's four other commissioners and a half-dozen lawyers in the attorney general's complex litigation and government compliance and enforcement divisions.

The AG's office did not respond to follow-up questions about Ferguson's letter to the PDC, but Kim Bradford, a spokesperson for the PDC, confirmed Ammons had received the letter and said he'd sent no response ("nor did the attorney general ask for one").

Bradford also noted that Ferguson has the authority to "request" that matters be referred to him. His letter to Ammons, though it could certainly be read as an invitation to referral, stops short of making a formal request.

But Ammons and the rest of the commissioners are scheduled to discuss the proposed Facebook settlement tomorrow, February 27, at a 1 pm public hearing in Olympia.

If commissioners choose to set aside the "dangerous" settlement that Facebook "urges" them to accept, they could also choose to take Ferguson up on the implied offer in his February 20 letter: refer this case over to AG's office and Ferguson will show Facebook that, as he wrote in his letter, "my office takes repeat violations of campaign finance laws seriously."

Read the original here:

Attorney General Ferguson "Ready" to Take on Facebook Over Charges of Repeated Campaign Finance Violations - TheStranger.com

Haley Celeste Douthat, 25, of Rogersville, was sentenced on Thursday in Hawkins County Criminal Court to a total of 11 years including three years for the robbery to run concurrently with eight years for separate unrelated counts of delivery of meth and possession of drug paraphernalia.

The plea agreement accepted by Judge John Dugger states that Douthat must serve 365 days in jail, after which she can serve the remainder of her 11-year sentence on house arrest. She was also ordered to pay $2,300 in fines and $447 in restitution.

On Oct. 31, 2018, Douthat used communications on Facebook to lure a 42-year-old man to a residence at Cherokee Apartments on Route 66-S south of Rogersville.

After the victim arrived, three male suspects allegedly burst into the apartment wearing ski masks, beat the victim and stole $40 in cash and his phone.

The suspects then allegedly fled in the victims vehicle, which was later found wrecked.

What the four suspects didnt know at the time was the parking lot of the apartment complex was under video surveillance, and Hawkins County Sheriffs Office deputies led by Detective Keith Long were able to identify the suspects from that footage.

All four were named in Dec. 1, 2018, Hawkins County grand jury sealed indictments charging them with robbery, which was enhanced from a Class C felony (3-6 years) to a Class B felony (8-12 years) due to multiple suspects being involved.

As part of her plea agreement, Douthat's robbery charged was reduced to the Class C level.

As for her alleged accomplices, Danny Ray Bledsoe, 35, of Rogersville, is scheduled for trial June 10; Travis Shane Shattuck, 32, of Rogersville, was sentenced last year to three years of house arrest; and Todd Andrew Caswellwas sentenced last year to three years house arrest, although he violated his probation twice since then and has been in and out and back in to jail since his plea.

Other guilty pleas heard Thursday by Judge Dugger include:

Christopher George Cross, 30, Rogersville, was sentenced to one year at 30% and fined $350 for one count of attempted possession of contraband in a penal institution.

Bobby Ray Caudill, 58, Rogersville, was sentenced to three years on house arrest and fined $4,100 for two counts of possession of Schedule II narcotics with intent to deliver and maintaining a dwelling where narcotics are kept or sold.

Travis Scott Gilliam, 33, Rogersville, was sentenced to one year at 30% and fined $450 for two counts of violation of the sex offender registry and violation of community supervision for life.

Gerald Lynn Russell, 38, Rogersville, was sentenced to 120 days in jail, three years of supervised probation and fined $350 for unlawful possession of a weapon by a convicted felon.

Roscoe Paul Johnson, 38, Rogersville, was sentenced to 120 days in jail, two years of supervised probation and fined $1,200 for two counts of violation of the sex offender registry.

Link:

Woman who used Facebook romance to ambush robbery victim gets 11 years - Kingsport Times News

IF you've ever worried that you didn't logout of Facebook on someone else's device then you need the following advice.

Facebook has tech that tracks where your account is logged in and can help you logout or protect your account from people trying to hack into it.

4

Facebook can provide you with data on the location of the devices where your account is being used.

It can also tell you what kind of device it is, the type of browser and the date and time of when the account was last accessed.

If something doesn't look quite right then you can end any of the active Facebook sessions from the one you're logged into.

All you need is the steps below to access the information via your desktop or smartphone.

4

First you'll need to open your web browser of choice and log into your Facebook.

Next, click on the drop down arrow on the top banner of your homepage and select "Settings".

Once on the Settings page you'll need to click "Security and login", which should pop up as an option on the left-hand side of the screen.

Then roll your mouse over to the "Where you're logged in" section.

4

This section will allow you to see all the devices that your Facebook has been logged in on, including any that are currently active.

You'll also be able to see the time and date that the login occurred, what type of device was being used and its location.

If you click on the three vertical dots to the right hand side of each listed session you'll be able to log out or report it as not being you.

You'll also be given the option to "Log out of all sessions".

The process is very similar if you want to check where your Facebook is logged in via the app on your phone or tablet.

On the app you'll need to click on the three horizontal lines in the lower right-hand corner.

Then scroll down until you see "Settings" and click on it.

Once you're in "Settings" scroll down to "Security" and click on "Security and login".

4

You'll then see the section "Where you're logged in" and you can click "See all" to see all the devices.

As with the desktop method, you'll be able to see the time and date that the login occurred, what type of device was being used and its location.

If you click on the three vertical dots to the right hand side of each listed session you'll be able to log out or report it as not being you.

You'll also be given the option to "Log out of all sessions".

How does Facebook's user rating system work?

Facebook told The Sun that this is how the system works...

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In other news, Facebook will now pay users for voice recordings in a bid to improve the firm's AI tech.

Chronology may be coming back to your Instagram feed as an app expert has spotteda "Latest Posts" featurebeing tested.

And, here's the six TikTok settings you need to change right now to protect your kids.

Have you ever had any issues with your Facebook privacy? Let us know in the comments...

We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online Tech & Science team? Email us at tech@the-sun.co.uk

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How to find out if someone is logged into your Facebook and SPYING on you - The Sun