Monthly Archives: May 2020

Facebook has long made important decisions about what content to remove or leave up on its platform. But new challenges brought by fake news, election tampering or even the persecution of targeted populations showed that the stakes had changed. With those changes came the need for new oversight measures that evaluated content and ensured decisions could be fair, transparent and maintain user trust in the long term.

Facebooks new Oversight Board, launched today, was created to address these challenges. The Oversight Board is an independent body which will sit entirely outside the control or influence of Facebook, and is charged with reviewing the most contentious content posted to the platform, and issuing final, transparent, unappealable decisions.

Whether the Oversight Board succeeds in achieving widespread acceptance will ultimately depend on how it lives up to its mandate. However, the process of creating and launching the Oversight Board contains lessons for any technology company considering how to design solutions that can effectively address emerging governance needs.

Getting started: Collecting global feedback

Facebook collected guidance from a range of stakeholders regarding the design and formation of the Oversight Board, including our firm Baker McKenzie. Given Facebooks objective of forming a private sector entity with the credibility and institutional legitimacy of a global public institution, we proposed that the social media firm model its public outreach according to the standards and best practices of any public consultation undertaken by a public entity:

The resulting public consultation solicited input from thought leaders around the world, as well as the public, on key questions pertaining to the structure, governance, and member composition of this independent content mediation body. Online and in-person consultations undertaken through the first half of 2019 collected input from more than 2,000 people from more than 85 countries.

Conducting public outreach in accordance with these standards ensures transparency in public discourse a critical process step for any technology company seeking to establish institutional legitimacy in a governance initiative.

Designing the boards structure

Arguably the two most important questions for any governance initiative are who will make the decisions, and with what degree of independence? It was therefore not surprising that in the feedback from the public consultation, two key themes emerged: the Oversight Board needed to exercise independent judgment, and it needed to be diverse.

An overwhelming majority of feedback from the consultations expressed support for an Oversight Board with the power to exercise independent judgment that is to say, judgment not influenced by Facebook, governments, or third parties. The Oversight Boards ability to exercise independent judgment was broadly seen as critical to ensuring both its efficacy and legitimacy.

To this end, Facebook asked us to establish the Oversight Board Trust, a Delaware Non-Charitable Purpose Trust and the Oversight Board LLC, a Delaware limited liability company, which will oversee Facebooks funding for the board, run its operations, employ staff and hold contracts with members all completely separate from Facebook. The trust will ensure the boards funding, and the LLC will administer the Oversight Boards payroll and accounting, ensure tax compliance and review the Oversight Boards annual budget. Through the trust and LLC, the Oversight Board will have its own staff, independent from Facebook.

The use of a non-charitable purpose trust and limited liability company as a combined vehicle to preserve the independent judgment was a novel mechanism developed for the challenges of this particular governance initiative, but a mechanism that may serve as a model for other contexts as well. In fact, Facebook designed the trust so that other companies and institutions could contribute to the trust, and work with the Oversight Board, in the future.

The World Economic Forum was the first to draw the worlds attention to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the current period of unprecedented change driven by rapid technological advances. Policies, norms and regulations have not been able to keep up with the pace of innovation, creating a growing need to fill this gap.

The Forum established the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network in 2017 to ensure that new and emerging technologies will helpnot harmhumanity in the future. Headquartered in San Francisco, the network launched centres in China, India and Japan in 2018 and is rapidly establishing locally-run Affiliate Centres in many countries around the world.

The global network is working closely with partners from government, business, academia and civil society to co-design and pilot agile frameworks for governing new and emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous vehicles, blockchain, data policy, digital trade, drones, internet of things (IoT), precision medicine and environmental innovations.

Learn more about the groundbreaking work that the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network is doing to prepare us for the future.

Want to help us shape the Fourth Industrial Revolution? Contact us to find out how you can become a member or partner.

Feedback collected also indicated the need for an Oversight Board that reflects the diversity of the social media platform's global users.

Facebook agreed, and set about achieving that diversity by identifying Board members who are experts hailing from different backgrounds and disciplines, with a range of different viewpoints, but all of whom could act in the interest of a global community. Even if perfect diversity is hard to come by in any group that is also a working body, an Oversight Board that is diverse in the broadest sense - with respect to perspective, background, cultural and linguistic knowledge, professional experience, age, race and gender, to name a few - will be optimally prepared to consider how to guide the social media platform to better, more transparent decisions.

To help ensure the consideration of any interested candidate, we opened a recommendations portal to allow anyone to put forward a qualified candidate as a member of the Oversight Board. The portal has allowed for the identification of experts in both the private and public sectors, including experts in freedom of expression, technology and democracy, the rule of law, journalism, child safety, civil rights and human rights protection, among others.

Positioning governance initiatives for success

Facebooks board has yet to begin hearing cases. Still, even those most critical of the company's content moderation policies and practices should have cause to hope that the Oversight Board is a step toward stronger governance, accountability and oversight to Facebook's existing processes.

All companies face their own unique governance challenges. To overcome such challenges, it may be necessary to voluntarily devolve or share power. In such circumstances, the lessons from the Oversight Board formation are instructive: consult widely, with stakeholders and the public, and prioritize the structure of governance. In so doing, it is possible to impart power and responsibility, while ensuring the quality, transparency and accountability of the process is preserved.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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Key lessons from the creation of Facebook's new Oversight Board - World Economic Forum

In two weeks, Idahoans will vote on party nominees for offices ranging from county commissioner and sheriff to U.S. Senate.

Coronavirus has changed the way people will vote, with this year's primary being conducted entirely by mail and May 19 designated as the last day to request an absentee ballot. And it has changed the way candidates campaign, too. Social distancing means no town hall meetings, in-person debates or candidates going from door-to-door asking for votes.

"I think all the candidates are probably struggling a little bit," said Dave Radford, who is challenging Rep. Chad Christensen, R-Ammon, for the Republican nomination for the District 32B House seat. "I think it's just an important thing for people to be careful about their health."

Christensen, who credits his upset win over a longtime incumbent in the 2018 Republican primary to the shoe-leather-heavy campaign he ran, similarly said he is relying on Facebook and the mail to get his message out.

Although there haven't been as many candidate forums or debates as usual, the City Club of Idaho Falls has hosted debates in several contested local legislative and county-level races, albeit without a live audience as the City Club would normally have at its luncheons. (The debates have been available for viewing online.) Other than that, with many traditional campaigning methods out of the question, candidates for local office have been relying on social media and mailers more so than in the past or using Zoom or Facebook Live to talk to voters.

"Probably the biggest winner out of this campaign is going to be the U.S. Postal Service," said Adam Frugoli, one of the candidates for the Republican nomination for the District 30 Senate seat.

A couple of candidates mentioned that they started to campaign before coronavirus changed the rhythms of life, giving them a jump on getting their message out to voters. Marco Erickson, who is running against Rep. Bryan Zollinger, R-Idaho Falls, for the Republican nomination for the 33B House seat, announced his candidacy in early March and said he was able to get a head start on meeting with small groups of voters, who would then spread the word to others.

"Those meetings early on were an hour long, five, six, seven people," he said.

One Idaho Falls-area electoral tradition that won't be happening this election cycle at least are the debates organized by government students at Compass Academy. Erickson said he was looking forward to taking part in those.

"It's sad that we didn't get to do that," he said.

Reporter Nathan Brown can be reached at 208-542-6757. Follow him on Twitter: @NateBrownNews.

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Facebook and mailers: Campaigning in the time of coronavirus - Post Register

Updated: May 25, 2018:

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Ninth Circuit Revives Claims Alleging that Facebook Violated Users Privacy - JD Supra

HEGINS, SCHUYLKILL COUNTY (WBRE/WYOU) A local farmer has created a Facebook page connecting local food producers with consumers across the commonwealth.

Heidi Flory, a contract grower for commercial broilers and owner of a small calf operation on her farm in Hegins turned to social media to help create a community bond. The Facebook page, PA Farm to Family Table +, has already grown to nearly 3400 members in just a few weeks.

I started the Facebook page kind of when the pandemic started, Flory told Eyewitness News. I was noticing the disconnect between consumers and their food. I always knew there was one, but it came very apparent.

With the coronavirus pandemic making it difficult to find certain products at the store, Flory wanted to make a non-political page to explain why this may be the case and to show where your food comes from, along with how to get it.

My primary goals were to educate people on what actually goes through to get to the grocery store and then also connect local farmers with consumers directly, so when they cant find things in the store, they know they can get it locally, theres not a shortage. Flory said.

Meats and dairy arent the only things found on to the groups page. Members can advertise or find products such as soaps, nursery plants, produce and even information on local events. It also reaches far outside of Schuylkill County.

Its mostly within Pennsylvania, a lot of it at this point is central and northeast. We are starting to get people in from some of the further counties are sharing the group and getting connected that way. Flory said.

Flory says the group started with nearly seventy producers on the list. Now, they are continuing to make the page easy to connect with producers within specific counties.

We are working on a list by county now of producers that hopefully will be able to post and everybody can just go in and find the county they are looking for and then find the products that they want. Flory said.

A poll with the producers on the Facebook page revealed that a majority of the members saw an increase in business traffic since joining. While it started in part because of the pandemic, Flory told Eyewitness News she intends to keep the group going after the coronavirus.

Flory says shes using her platform as Dauphin County Elite Miss United Atates Agriculture to continue her facebook group and promote food for thought.

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Local farmer creates Facebook page connecting the public to food producers - PAHomePage.com

Facebook is rolling out a new tool today allowing users in the US and Canada to transfer their photos and videos to Google Photos.

The tool can be accessed by heading to your Facebook settings, then heading to the tab that reads Your Facebook Information. There youll find the option to transfer your photos and videos. Youll need to connect your Google account before you can transfer your files.

The photo transfer tool initially launched in early December last year as part of the Data Transfer Project, with Facebook vowing to expand the tool to more countries in early 2020. As of March, the tool started becoming available around the globe, including countries in Africa, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. Facebook said that in the next couple of months remaining countries will have access to this tool. Once the tool rolls out globally later this year, Facebook told The Verge that people will also be able to transfer photos to other companies that join the Data Transfer Program.

The Data Transfer Project is a data-sharing initiative that launched in 2018 to help people easily move their data between various online services. The project includes several companies collaborating to shape the future of portability, including tech giants Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter. The initiative is still in its early stages, with most of the progress focusing on the back end, though last June, Google teased user-facing projects could roll out soon.

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Facebooks new tool makes it easy to transfer photos and videos to Google Photos - The Verge

Facebook Messenger Rooms is set to compete with Zoom and other group video chat apps.

Facebook's new group video chat featureMessenger Roomsis getting ready to compete with services likeZoom, SkypeandMicrosoft Teams, as more people turn to video chat amid coronaviruslockdowns and quarantines.

Facebook users will soon be able to create a video chat room via Facebook or the Messenger app and invite up to 50 people to join a video call -- even if they don't have a Facebook account. There will be no time limits on calls.

Now playing: Watch this: Facebook unveils Messenger Rooms

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Messenger Rooms arrives as some people are looking for an alternative to Zoom, which has faced a number of security and privacy issues in the past two months. (If you are still using Zoom, you can take steps to lock down your meetings and prevent Zoombombing, and learn other hidden tips and tricks).

Facebook Messenger Rooms will be rolling out in certain countries this week before expanding globally, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a livestream on Friday. Keep reading for Facebook Messenger Rooms' stance on privacy, and how to get started using the new video chat platform.

Read more: 10 free Zoom alternative apps for video chats

While Facebook has also grappled with many security and privacy problems, Zuckerberg said in the livestream that the company has been "very careful" and tried to "learn the lessons" from issues with other video conference tools in recent months.

More than 700 million accounts participate in voice and video calls every day on Facebook Messenger and the Facebook-owned WhatsApp, and the number of calls has more than doubled in many areas since the coronavirus outbreak began, the company said in a press release.

Messenger Rooms privacy protections include the ability to control who sees your room, and can lock or unlock it. If it's unlocked, anyone with the link can join and share the room with others. But the room creator has to be present to start the call. They can control who can join, and can remove participants at any time, too. People can report a room for violating Facebook rules -- though those reports will not include any video or audio from the call. Facebook doesn't listen to your calls at all, the company said.

Once it's available in your area, here's how to create a Room from your phone:

1. Open the Messenger app.

2. Tap the People tab at the bottom right of the screen.

3. Tap Create a Room, and select the people who you want to join.

4. To share a room with people who don't have a Facebook account, you can share the link with them. You can also share the room in your News Feed, Groups and Events.

You can join a room from your phone or computer -- no need to download anything, according to Facebook.

Facebook plans to add ways to create Rooms from Instagram Direct, WhatsApp and Portal as well. Features will include 14 camera filters and changeable backgrounds.

For more, check out 11 video chat app tricks for Zoom, Skype and FaceTimeand how to stay healthy and entertained at home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Discover the latest apps: Be the first to know about the hottest new apps with the CNET Apps Today newsletter.

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Facebook's Messenger Rooms video chat app: How to use this Zoom alternative - CNET

But Facebook and its fellow internet titans have a huge advantage over most other companies: piles of cash.

Googles parent Alphabet had $117 billion on hand at the end of March, while Facebook had more than $60 billion greater than the gross domestic products of Lebanon, Slovenia or Tanzania. Amazon reported $24.3 billion in free cash flow. That money will help the companies to stave off the layoffs and closures that have sent unemployment soaring to Great Depression levels.

Google and Facebook could have revenue decline 20 or 25 percent year-over-year, and not have to worry about going out of business, said Mark Mahaney, managing director at RBC Capital Markets. More than any other ad-driven business model, Google and Facebook can afford whatever comes out of Covid.

Yelp a longtime critic of Google with antitrust regulators laid off one-third of its workforce and furloughed another 1,100 employees this month as its revenue from small-business ads shriveled. TripAdvisor, another Google detractor, said it will lay off 900 employees and furlough many of its remaining U.S. workers. Uber, which competes with Google sibling Waymo in developing self-driving cars, is also considering steep layoffs, The Information reported this week.

The plight is even worse for media companies whose ad dollars were already dwindling amid competition from Google and Facebook. Some estimates place the number of U.S. journalists laid off because of the pandemic at more than 33,000. News Corp. one of the most vocal anti-Google publishers suspended print editions of 60 of its newspapers in Australia, though U.S. operations and the flagship Wall Street Journal have yet to see cuts.

Startups are also aching, with roughly 30,000 of their workers laid off across the country since the beginning of March. In a note Monday, the National Venture Capital Association said investments in fledgling companies is likely to drop significantly, adding that companies will shut down at a higher rate than what is inherent to this risky industry.

And Amazon is poised to have many fewer competitors when the outbreak ends: As many as 100,000 retail outlets are likely to close in the next five years, UBS research analysts suggested in a note last week, as the coast-to-coast shutdowns hasten the trend of shoppers moving online. Some long-established retail names may never recover from the pandemic: The Gap, the San Francisco clothing chain that owns Old Navy and Banana Republic, said last week that it expects to shutter some locations permanently, while J.C. Penney skipped paying interest on bonds this month the first step toward a bankruptcy filing.

Even when the economy recovers, the big guys will be the first to reap the benefits.

Facebook and Google are poised to bounce back faster than other ad-supported businesses, said Jasmine Enberg, senior analyst at eMarketer. Their platforms allow marketers to essentially flip a switch on online ads, so as easily as they could halt them, they can get them running again. The two companies already control 60 percent of the online advertising market, eMarketer estimates.

Whenever there's economic uncertainty, advertisers tend to turn to these tried-and-true platforms and they're less likely to be experimental, she said. Facebook and Google, at this point, are considered to be essential platforms for advertisers.

Amid the last recession, tech companies used their reserves to buy up businesses at a higher clip than normal, with Google scooping up a record 36 companies, according to an analysis by CIO Dive.

Now, the big tech companies will once again have a chance to go bargain hunting scarfing up talent, intellectual property and rival businesses at much reduced prices. Both Zuckerberg and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said during an earnings calls this week that they would look to invest throughout the downturn, even while slowing hiring in areas other than engineering and product management.

One of the harder issues for antitrust will be how to manage mergers and acquisitions coming out of this crisis, said Gene Kimmelman, a senior adviser for the advocacy group Public Knowledge. Certainly, the big tech firms are sitting on boatloads of cash and they could buy if they thought it made sense. There may be a lot of floundering smaller players.

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How the virus could boomerang on Facebook, Google and Amazon - POLITICO

Blenders ability comes from the immense scale of its training data. It was first trained on 1.5 billion publicly available Reddit conversations, to give it a foundation for generating responses in a dialogue. It was then fine-tuned with additional data sets for each of three skills: conversations that contained some kind of emotion, to teach it empathy (if a user says I got a promotion, for example, it can say, Congratulations!); information-dense conversations with an expert, to teach it knowledge; and conversations between people with distinct personas, to teach it personality. The resultant model is 3.6 times larger than Googles chatbot Meena, which was announced in Januaryso big that it cant fit on a single device and must run across two computing chips instead.

FACEBOOK

At the time, Google proclaimed that Meena was the best chatbot in the world. In Facebooks own tests, however, 75% of human evaluators found Blender more engaging than Meena, and 67% found it to sound more like a human. The chatbot also fooled human evaluators 49% of the time into thinking that its conversation logs were more human than the conversation logs between real peoplemeaning there wasnt much of a qualitative difference between the two. Google hadnt responded to a request for comment by the time this story was due to be published.

Despite these impressive results, however, Blenders skills are still nowhere near those of a human. Thus far, the team has evaluated the chatbot only on short conversations with 14 turns. If it kept chatting longer, the researchers suspect, it would soon stop making sense. These models arent able to go super in-depth, says Emily Dinan, the other project leader. Theyre not able to remember conversational history beyond a few turns.

Blender also has a tendency to hallucinate knowledge, or make up factsa direct limitation of the deep-learning techniques used to build it. Its ultimately generating its sentences from statistical correlations rather than a database of knowledge. As a result, it can string together a detailed and coherent description of a famous celebrity, for example, but with completely false information. The team plans to experiment with integrating a knowledge database into the chatbots response generation.

FACEBOOK

Another major challenge with any open-ended chatbot system is to prevent it from saying toxic or biased things. Because such systems are ultimately trained on social media, they can end up regurgitating the vitriol of the internet. (This infamously happened to Microsofts chatbot Tay in 2016.) The team tried to address this issue by asking crowdworkers to filter out harmful language from the three data sets that it used for fine-tuning, but it did not do the same for the Reddit data set because of its size. (Anyone who has spent much time on Reddit will know why that could be problematic.)

The team hopes to experiment with better safety mechanisms, including a toxic-language classifier that could double-check the chatbots response. The researchers admit, however, that this approach wont be comprehensive. Sometimes a sentence like Yes, thats great can seem fine, but within a sensitive context, such as in response to a racist comment, it can take on harmful meanings.

In the long term the Facebook AI team is also interested in developing more sophisticated conversational agents that can respond to visual cues as well as just words. One project is developing a system called Image Chat, for example, that can converse sensibly and with personality about the photos a user might send.

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Facebook claims its new chatbot beats Googles as the best in the world - MIT Technology Review

They will not get to share in the memories synonymous with college graduation the collective tossing of caps, the hugs from friends and the walk across the stage to get their diplomas.

They will get Oprah Winfrey, who Facebook said this week will address graduates in a virtual commencement ceremony on May 15.

This is a bittersweet time for the Class of 2020, Marne Levine, a Facebook vice president, wrote on the social media platform on Tuesday. They are commencing at a time of great uncertainty. But graduating is a tremendous achievement, and worth pausing to celebrate even in these circumstances.

Graduates will also get LeBron James, whose foundation is organizing a prime-time special that will feature musicians, cultural icons, and athletes including Megan Rapinoe, Pharrell Williams, Malala Yousafzai, the Jonas Brothers and Bad Bunny.

This will be a moment to come together as one nation to applaud this rite of passage, the organizers of Graduate Together: America Honors the Class of 2020, said in a statement. The organizers also include Entertainment Industry Foundation and the XQ Institute.

In a statement, Mr. James said he wanted to help create a show that would help ease the pain the coronavirus has had on the more than 3 million seniors who will be missing out on a traditional graduation ceremony and their families.

These students have worked incredibly hard for this and theres no way we can let that go unrecognized, he said. While this wont be the graduation experience they were supposed to get, we hope we can still give them something special because they deserve it.

The special will air on May 16 on ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC and on social media.

Ms. Winfreys commencement speech will be broadcast at 2 p.m. Eastern time, or 11 a.m. Pacific time, a day earlier on Facebook and Instagram, which are part of the same social media company.

Oprah will also be joining hundreds of other celebrities starting Friday evening including Julia Roberts, Quincy Jones, Yo-Yo Ma, Naomi Campbell, Alanis Morissette and former President George W. Bush who will gather online for The Call to Unite, a 24-hour charity event to raise money for Covid-19 relief.

Ms. Winfrey is not the only celebrity who has been enlisted to give students a proper send-off.

Simone Biles, the reigning Olympic gold medalist in the all-around gymnastics competition, will also take part in the Facebook virtual graduation, as will the actresses Awkwafina and Jennifer Garner and the musicians Lil Nas X and Miley Cyrus.

The radio giant iHeartMedia is also choreographing a series of star-studded graduation speech podcasts that will feature Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Fallon, Chelsea Handler and others.

Even the Anheuser-Busch-owned beer brand Natural Light is getting involved in the virtual festivities. The brand announced that it would hold a virtual commencement ceremony on May 14, headlined by the billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, the actress Jane Lynch and the sports commentator Stephen A. Smith.

Oprah is not the only Chicagoan who has been highly sought as a graduation speaker. So has former President Barack Obama, whom one graduating senior, in a widely shared tweet, tried to recruit to give a national commencement address.

It drew nearly 50,000 retweets, but no public response from the former president.

Link:

Oprah Winfrey to Give Commencement Address on Facebook - The New York Times

(Bloomberg) -- Facebook Inc. reported an 18% increase in first-quarter revenue, showing advertising demand was strong before the Covid-19 pandemic hit marketing budgets. The company also said business was steady in the first few weeks of April, sparking a surge in its shares.

The social-networking company said sales came in at $17.7 billion in the first quarter, ahead of Wall Street estimates of $17.3 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The results include just a few weeks in March when coronavirus lockdowns began to hammer the economy.

On March 24, Facebook warned that its advertising business was weakening. The company does not issue revenue guidance, but said on Wednesday that revenue in the first three weeks of April was roughly in line with the same period a year earlier.

After the initial steep decrease in advertising revenue in March, we have seen signs of stability, the company said in a statement.

Facebook shares jumped more than 10% in extended trading. They closed at $194.19 in New York earlier.

The companys services are being used a lot more as millions of people shelter in place and look for entertainment and ways to keep in touch online. Daily users of all Facebooks apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, averaged 2.36 billion in March, up from 2.26 billion in December, the company said. Facebooks core social network now has 1.73 billion daily users, compared with 1.66 billion during the final month of 2019.

That spike will likely have less impact on Facebooks business than in prior quarters. Many of the companys most popular features during the pandemic including voice calling and direct messaging are not areas where the company makes significant revenue. Facebook also gets more than half of its sales from small businesses that are suffering from the Covid-19 lockdown and recession.

Some are optimistic, however, that the proliferation of the companys messaging products will pay off in the near future, offering an alternative business to complement advertising. Facebook invested $5.7 billion in Indian telecom giant Jio Platforms earlier this month. The deal, which includes a strategic partnership, could bring WhatsApp business services and payments products to millions of Indian retailers.

There is a silver lining for Facebooks ad woes: a potential to diversify into payments and e-commerce sooner, leveraging engagement and new habits, said Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst Jitendra Waral.

Facebook forecast total expenses to be between $52 billion and $56 billion for the year, down from a previous range of $54 billion to $59 billion. The company said expenses will still grow in the face of expected revenue weakness, which will cut into operating profit margins in 2020.

Shelter-in-place orders are delaying construction projects, including data centers, temporarily lowering Facebooks capital expenditure. Given the strong engagement growth and related demands on our infrastructure, this years capex reduction should be viewed as a deferral into 2021 rather than savings, Facebook added.

(Updates with capex comments in final paragraph.)

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Facebook Surges After Revenue Holds Up in Midst of Pandemic - Yahoo Finance