Alex Jones and Marco Rubio Explain the Internet -- The Atlantic

Tangentially, see How That Magical Jack Dorsey–Alex Jones Photo Happened (Wired)

"The hallway performance perfectly punctuated the hearing’s meek exploration of the calamity that is contemporary life on social media. The technology executives were answering, if weakly, for helping support websites like Infowars and crusaders like Jones. And if not Jones himself, then others who hide their deception more adeptly. The spat was a microcosm of the internet itself: A place where widespread adoption of platforms that give anyone unfettered access to almost everyone else, a place that gives people the sense that they deserve an audience, with anyone, on any topic, all the time.
[...]
Social media’s impact on global democracy has made it seem like the technology, once good, as Rubio observed, can also be used for harm. But maybe the wickedness was there even before the good. The internet’s sin isn’t giving one or another person a mouthpiece with which to reach an audience with lies. It’s giving everyone the impression that they are owed an audience with anyone, with everyone else, at any time, or all the time. A lot of people might be able to agree that Alex Jones shouldn’t be talking to anyone, much at all. But few are ready to cop to a more difficult truth: People just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much in the first place."

Alex Jones and Marco Rubio Explain the Internet -- The Atlantic

Former Facebook security chief says creating election chaos is still easy -- TechCrunch

 From a stark election security reality check

"“If there’s no foreign interference during the midterms, it’s not because we did a great job,” Stamos said in an interview with TechCrunch at Disrupt SF on Thursday. “It’s because our adversaries decided to [show] a little forbearance, which is unfortunate.”

As Stamos sees it, there is an alternative reality in which the U.S. electorate would be better off heading into its next major nationwide voting day, but critical steps haven’t been taken.

“As a society, we have not responded to the 2016 election in the way that would’ve been necessary to have a more trustworthy midterms,” he said. “There have been positive changes, but overall security of campaigns [is] not that much better, and the actual election infrastructure isn’t much better.”"

Former Facebook security chief says creating election chaos is still easy -- TechCrunch

Twitter has permanently banned Alex Jones and Infowars -- The Washington Post

At least one useful thing was accomplished in DC this week

"Twitter said Thursday it had "permanently suspended" conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his website, Infowars, for sharing a series of tweets and videos that violate its policies against abuse, including verbal attacks on a reporter that Jones live-streamed outside of a congressional hearing the day before.

The company said in a statement that it implemented the ban because it was not Jones’s first violation. Twitter previously had suspended Jones for a week after he broke rules against violent threats by telling supporters to get their “battle rifles” ready against news reporters and others. The new move aligns Twitter with some of its tech peers, like Apple and Facebook, which took action against Jones and InfoWars for posting offensive, violent content in August."

Twitter has permanently banned Alex Jones and Infowars -- The Washington Post

What Jack Dorsey and Sheryl Sandberg Taught Congress and Vice Versa -- NYT

Maybe next time...

"Google has spent years building a lobbying operation in Washington, which rests on a foundation of seriousness and good will; while upstarts like Facebook reveled in their break-things disruptive style, Google positioned itself as the grown-up in the room. It also had some positive facts on its side: Google’s services were far less vulnerable to Russian misinformation during the 2016 election than Facebook or Twitter. And because it does not run a social network, Google could credibly argue that it was a less important vector for propaganda and social unrest. Mr. Pichai, who is no dummy, could have persuasively made that case to lawmakers.

But in declining to participate, Google left a sour mood in the Capitol. A parade of Democrats and Republicans in the Senate hearing noted the company’s absence. Many raised questions about Google’s recent actions — for instance, its decision to stop working with the military on artificial intelligence projects and its exploration of a censored search engine for the Chinese market — that the company had no way of defending."

What Jack Dorsey and Sheryl Sandberg Taught Congress and Vice Versa -- NYT

Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head in the last month as it eyes another fundraise-- TechCrunch

Noteworthy changes

"Evernote, the productivity app with 225 million users that lets people take notes and organise other files from their working and non-work life, has been on a mission to reset its image as the go-to service for those seeking tools to help themselves be more efficient, years after losing its place as one of the most popular apps in the app store. But those changes have not come without their own challenges.
TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that in the last month, Evernote  lost several of its most senior executives, including its CTO Anirban Kundu, CFO Vincent Toolan, CPO Erik Wrobel and head of HR Michelle Wagner beyond the usual attrition of engineers and designers.
The departures are coming at a key time: we have also heard that Evernote is fundraising, potentially in a down-round from its most recent (but now several years-old) valuation of $1.2 billion."

Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head in the last month as it eyes another fundraise-- TechCrunch

Instagram is building a standalone app for shopping -- The Verge

Conversational commerce, Instagram edition

"More than 25 million businesses already have Instagram accounts, and 2 million of them are advertisers, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said on the company’s most recent earnings call. Four in five Instagram users follow at least one business. Creating a standalone app would allow the company to provide a dedicated home for an increasingly popular activity on Instagram while also expanding opportunities for revenue.

Over time, Facebook could introduce more tools for merchants who are building their businesses on Instagram, directly challenging e-commerce platforms like Shopify, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking. Most online businesses need an Instagram account already, the thinking goes; many of them would surely use paid business tools if they became available."

Instagram is building a standalone app for shopping -- The Verge

Tech Titans Plot Their Doomsday Escape to New Zealand Luxury Bunkers -- Bloomberg

Prep different

"Think of schoolchildren practicing the duck-and-cover maneuver during the height of the Cold War. Apocalyptic religious cults never seem to end well, from Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple in the 1970s to Heaven’s Gate and the Branch Davidians in the 1990s. Just six years ago, many Americans believed the world was ending because of a Mayan prophesy.

What’s different about Silicon Valley is that those entertaining fears of the eschaton have the means to put elaborate plans into action.

Robert Vicino, founder of the Vivos Project, a builder of massive underground bunkers, said Silicon Valley elites discussed detailed plans to flee to New Zealand last year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He said they foresaw “a revolution or a change where society is going to go after the 1 percenters.” In other words, them.

New Zealand isn’t the best solution, he said, because a tsunami caused by an asteroid strike in the Pacific could submerge the island’s highest point."

Tech Titans Plot Their Doomsday Escape to New Zealand Luxury Bunkers -- Bloomberg

Amazon is the latest $1 trillion tech company -- Engadget

Also see Amazon Hits $1,000,000,000,000 in Value, Following Apple (NYT), which notes "Amazon’s founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, is worth nearly as much as Bill Gates and Warren E. Buffett put together."

"It's not hard to explain why: Amazon has its fingers in many pies, and it's successful in most of them. On top of its centerpiece online store, it has a thriving cloud services business that includes the likes of AWS, Alexa and Prime Video. It's rapidly expanding its hardware offerings, and you can't ignore the value of Whole Foods. This is a company that's not only doing well in its core businesses, but regularly hedges its bets.

Not that everyone will be celebrating. Amazon has faced numerous strikes and other complaints from warehouse workers unhappy with low pay, dangerous working conditions and strict monitoring. Staffers have also complained about questionable technology sales, and there have been ongoing concerns about anti-competitive Kindle book pricing. The company's meteoric rise from a simple online bookstore to a trillion-dollar tech giant was no mean feat, but it might have come at a steep cost."

Amazon is the latest $1 trillion tech company -- Engadget

The Politicians Are Coming for Silicon Valley -- NYT

From Kara Swisher's latest NYT column:

"“It’s how democracies are done, having to justify yourself and your actions in public,” an employee of one of these companies who asked to remain anonymous told me. “And admitting you got things wrong.”

Truth. But it will be the drilling down — and not just the sound bites — that will be key. That includes requiring Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Dorsey to provide deep specifics on how well the platforms have cleaned up fake accounts; how transparent they have made the buying and selling of online political ads (and maybe all ads); and how much progress they have made in demoting and deleting fake news.

Also critical is explaining how and why they let their platforms be so easily manipulated to begin with. This will perhaps require admitting that bad actors used them in exactly the way they were built to be used."

The Politicians Are Coming for Silicon Valley -- NYT

Mark Zuckerberg: Protecting democracy is an arms race. Here’s how Facebook can help. -- The Washington Post

Final paragraphs follow below; also see Jack, Sheryl and the empty chair: A preview of Silicon Valley’s trip to Washington (Recode)

"For the U.S. midterm elections we’re also using a new tool we tested in the Alabama Senate special election last year to identify political interference more quickly. This enabled us to find and remove foreign political spammers who’d previously flown under the radar. And last month, we took down hundreds of pages, groups and accounts for creating networks that were deliberately misleading people about their identities and intentions. Some originated in Iran and others in Russia.

I’m often asked how confident I feel about the midterms. We’ve made a lot of progress, as our work during the French, German, Mexican and Italian elections has shown. In each case, we identified and removed fake accounts and bad content leading up to the elections, and in Germany we worked directly with the government to share information about potential threats. The investments we continue to make in people and technology will help us improve even further. But companies such as Facebook face sophisticated, well-funded adversaries who are getting smarter over time, too. It’s an arms race, and it will take the combined forces of the U.S. private and public sectors to protect America’s democracy from outside interference."

Mark Zuckerberg: Protecting democracy is an arms race. Here’s how Facebook can help. -- The Washington Post

Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey to face questions from Congress about Russia and censorship this week (The Washingrton Post)

On a related note, see Inside Twitter’s Long, Slow Struggle to Police Bad Actors (WSJ) and Twitter’s insane mind-control power (Axios)

"The political gauntlet begins in the Senate, where the Intelligence Committee will host Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, and Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter. They'll testify -- their first time ever on Capitol Hill -- at a hearing on foreign governments that spread misinformation over social media.

The goal is "to sound the alarm that what happened in 2016, as we've seen, was not a one-off," said Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), the top Democrat on the committee, referring to the presidential election. "While the companies have gotten better and the government's gotten better, the adversaries have gotten better, too.""

Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey to face questions from Congress about Russia and censorship this week (The Washingrton Post)

How a Twitter account convinced 4,000 companies to stop advertising on Breitbart -- Recode

Check the full post for a podcast interview and transcript; tangentially, see New Yorker Festival Pulls Steve Bannon as Headliner Following High-Profile Dropouts (NYT)

"Applying this lesson to something more important than cheap furniture, Rivitz started an account called Sleeping Giants, aimed at alerting advertisers whose ads were appearing on Breitbart. Today, the account has nearly 200,000 followers and has convinced more than 4,000 companies to take their ads off that site; it has also led campaigns aimed at Fox News, Laura Ingraham and Robert Mercer, but Rivitz says it’s not about politics — it’s about bigotry and hate speech.

“A lot of the Breitbarts of the world, they can claim that they’re being silenced because they’re on the right,” he said. “But they’re being thrown off a lot of these platforms because they’re being super racist. To me, if they want to conflate those two things, then let them do that.”"

How a Twitter account convinced 4,000 companies to stop advertising on Breitbart -- Recode

Amazon Sets Its Sights on the $88 Billion Online Ad Market -- NYT

And then there were three (free world digital advertising leaders) -- excerpt:

"Amazon is gaining in advertising when the public perception of Google and Facebook has soured. In addition, some advertisers have yet to return to YouTube, a growing ad channel for Google, after brands like AT&T were found appearing adjacent to videos that promoted racism or terrorism.

“Google and Facebook have been slow to create the standards that advertisers want to see,” said Collin Colburn, an analyst at the research and advisory firm Forrester. “They are concerned about what sort of content their ads are going to be placed next to.”

He added, “Amazon is different because it has a much more controlled environment on its e-commerce site where the products are being sold, and Amazon’s reach into the rest of the World Wide Web is pretty small.”"

Amazon Sets Its Sights on the $88 Billion Online Ad Market -- NYT

Fringe Figures Find Refuge in Facebook’s Private Groups-- NYT

Final paragraphs:

"Foreign organizations have also found private groups useful. Last month, when Facebook took down hundreds of public pages that it said were connected to a coordinated influence operation with hints of Russian and Iranian involvement, it also removed three private groups. The company did not name the groups or say how they were used, but it revealed that 2,300 users joined at least one of them.

“The vast majority of groups on Facebook are probably the run-of-the-mill groups,” said Renée DiResta, a researcher with Data for Democracy who studies online extremism. “The challenge is, how does the groups feature interact with the other features on Facebook that we know are causing radicalization, hate speech and genocide in certain places? Who is taking responsibility for looking at the negative externalities of this push to create communities?”"

Fringe Figures Find Refuge in Facebook’s Private Groups-- NYT

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are useless -- The Economist

From one of several cryptocurrency- and blockchain-related articles in the latest issue of The Economist

"As these limitations become more widely known, the hype is starting to cool. A few organisations, such as SWIFT, a bank-payment network, and Stripe, an online-payments firm, have abandoned blockchain projects, concluding that the costs outweigh the benefits. Most other projects are still experimental, though that does not stop wild claims. Sierra Leone, for instance, was widely reported to have conducted a “blockchain-powered” election earlier this year. It had not.

Just because blockchains have been overhyped does not mean they are useless. Their ability to bind their users into an agreed way of working may prove helpful in arenas where there is no central authority, such as international trade. But they are no panacea against the usual dangers of large technology projects: cost, complexity and overcooked expectations. Cryptocurrencies have fallen far short of their ambitious goals. Blockchain advocates have yet to prove that the underlying technology can live up to the grand claims made for it."

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are useless -- The Economist

Trump’s Ludicrous Attack on Big Tech -- NYT

From Kara Swisher's latest NYT column

"Most of all, the allegation leaves out the pertinent fact that Mr. Trump himself is the most voluble politician ever to use digital media, and his entire existence has been amplified, echoed and re-echoed over and over again by the tools that Silicon Valley has let loose on the world over the past two decades. To say nothing of the widespread belief in the United States intelligence community that Russians manipulated social media in his favor.

Rather than attacking techies, he should send them a gold-embossed thank you note.

Instead, as is his way, Mr. Trump huffs and puffs away on issues that have finally bubbled up to him from the ever-growing cesspool of online anger, especially the truly ludicrous idea that Silicon Valley does not like conservatives."

Trump’s Ludicrous Attack on Big Tech -- NYT

Apple buys startup focused on lenses for AR glasses -- Reuters

In other AR news...

"Apple Inc has acquired a startup focused on making lenses for augmented reality glasses, the company confirmed on Wednesday, a signal Apple has ambitions to make a wearable device that would superimpose digital information on the real world.

Apple confirmed it acquired Longmont, Colorado-based Akonia Holographics. “Apple buys smaller companies from time to time, and we generally don’t discuss our purpose or plans,” the iPhone maker said in a statement.

Akonia could not immediately be reached for comment. The company was founded in 2012 by a group of holography scientists and had originally focused on holographic data storage before shifting its efforts to creating displays for augmented reality glasses, according to its website."

Apple buys startup focused on lenses for AR glasses -- Reuters

Magic Leap’s $2.3 billion augmented-reality gear meets actual reality and stumbles -- The Washington Post

Tough week for Magic Leap PR

"Here’s my real reality experience: Right now, Magic Leap is not even a very good parlor trick. The product lets you walk around a room, tethered only to a disc-shaped computer worn on your hip, and experience a few 3-D apps that map into the space around you. But it is not dramatically better than competing (and not terribly compelling) AR gear already out there, such as Microsoft’s HoloLens.

Palmer Luckey, the former CEO of virtual-reality pioneer Oculus and a rival, has been even more pointed. This week, he wrote, “Magic Leap is a tragic heap.” (The company says he misunderstands its tech.)"

Magic Leap’s $2.3 billion augmented-reality gear meets actual reality and stumbles -- The Washington Post

Why Google Is the Perfect Target for Trump -- Wired

Tangentially, see Dozens at Facebook Unite to Challenge Its ‘Intolerant’ Liberal Culture (NYT)

"Google doesn’t “rig” its algorithm against conservatives, or against Trump, at least not in the way that he means here. Whether the stories and news it surfaces are “bad” depends on what happened in the world—like, say, close associates pleading guilty to or being convicted of federal crimes—right before you search. A very simple case in point: If you type “Trump” or “Trump news” right now into Google News, the top results all center around this very tirade. The fourth result in a recent search in an incognito window, which doesn't factor in search history, came from the reliably conservative Fox News.

Is Google News rigged, though? Almost certainly not, but you’d be hard-pressed to prove it. That’s because Google search, like Facebook’s News Feed and other platforms, derives its power from an algorithm for which no one outside of the company has any specific insight."

  Why Google Is the Perfect Target for Trump -- Wired

Trump claims Google is suppressing positive news about him and ‘will be addressed’ -- The Verge

Just another day on Twitter...

"Trump suggested that not only was there a tendency for tech companies to suppress right-wing voices, but that Google has “rigged” its search results to only show negative reporting about him. The president added that Google and others were “hiding information and news that is good,” and said that this was “very serious situation” that “will be addressed.”
Trump included in his tweets a dubious statistic: that 96 percent of search results for the term “Trump News” came from “National Left-Wing Media.” This claim seems to have originated on the right-wing PJ Media before spreading to other outlets, including Fox News. It’s the analysis of a single reporter who Googled the term “Trump” a number of times “using different computers.” They then tallied up the perceived bias of the outlets appearing in the first 100 results. (The political alignment of the outlets was assigned based on a chart by journalist Sharyl Attkisson, a former CNN reporter who appeared on Fox News last year claiming that the media is feeding the public an “artificial reality.”)"

Trump claims Google is suppressing positive news about him and ‘will be addressed’ -- The Verge