最近我遇到了一位著名的科技公司首席执行官，问他对社交网络的感觉如何(我在派对上玩得非常开心。）首席执行官毫不含糊的回答让我惊讶：“让他们关门吧，”他说。他的理由很简单：网络破坏民主的方式无法用软件更新来修复，他说。在他看来，唯一合乎逻辑的反应就是结束他们。

阿曼达·塔布（Amanda Taub）和马克斯·费舍尔（Max Fisher）在《****》上发表的令人深感不安的最新报告中，社交网络是否可以修复是一个隐约可见的问题。该报告以学术研究为基础，并得到大量实地报道的支持，发现Facebook的使用与袭击德国难民之间存在着强大的联系：

Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz, researchers at the University of Warwick, scrutinized every anti-refugee attack in Germany, 3,335 in all, over a two-year span. In each, they ****yzed the local community by any variable that seemed relevant. Wealth. Demographics. Support for far-right politics. Newspaper sales. Number of refugees. History of hate crime. Number of protests.

One thing stuck out. Towns where Facebook use was higher than average, like Altena, reliably experienced more attacks on refugees. That held true in virtually any sort of community — big city or **all town; affluent or struggling; liberal haven or far-right stronghold — suggesting that the link applies universally.

文章中最引人注目的数据点是：“无论Facebook的人均使用量上升到比全国平均水平高出一个标准差的地方，”作者写道，“对难民的攻击增加了约50%。”

在此基础上，作者探讨了为什么会发生这种情况。他们研究了Facebook如何在平凡的帖子上推广更多的情感帖子，从而扭曲用户的真实感。相对欢迎移民的城镇最终在打开Facebook应用程序时遇到了压倒性的反难民情绪。

这项活动的大部分是由所谓的“超级明星”推动的，他们用负面情绪充斥着服务。这种**的不对称使得难民似乎比他们实际得到的支持要少，这反过来又激发了更多的人联合起来反对他们。

这项研究的一个最显著的特点是，你可以在这里通读它的全部内容，它如何确定Facebook是德国反移民暴力激增的唯一原因。这里是陶布和费舍尔：

German internet infrastructure tends to be localized, making outages isolated but common. Sure enough, whenever internet access went down in an area with high Facebook use, attacks on refugees dropped significantly.

And they dropped by the same rate at which heavy Facebook use is thought to boost violence. The drop did not occur in areas with high internet usage but average Facebook usage, suggesting it is specific to social media.

同样值得注意的是：尽管德国有严格的法律禁止仇恨言论，但这些攻击还是发生了。德国法律要求Facebook在被举报后24小时内删除任何冒犯性帖子。正如作者所指出的，引发暴力的帖子在很大程度上不符合仇恨言论的条件。标准政治演讲的总体效果是让大部分民众相信德国正受到外国威胁的困扰——这一威胁在今年早些时候在德国引发了一场政治危机。

在纽约，Brian Feldman说Facebook有两种选择：

It can do more to limit user speech on posts that are not explicitly hateful but couched in the rhetoric of civil discussion — the types of posts that seem to fuel anti-refugee violence. Or it can tweak its distribution mechani**s to minimize overall user engagement with Facebook, which would also reduce the amount of ad money it collects.

令人惊讶的是，Facebook拒绝就这项研究及其影响发表评论。但即使它仍在互联网上回荡，该公司也准备应对另一系列担忧：四项与俄罗斯和伊朗有关的新影响力活动。从我的故事中：

Facebook removed more pages today as a result of four ongoing influence campaigns on the platform, taking down 652 fake accounts and pages that published political content. The campaigns, whose existence was first uncovered by the cybersecurity firm FireEye, have links to Russia and Iran, Facebook said in a blog post. The existence of the fake accounts was first reported by The New York Times.

“These were networks of accounts that were misleading people about who they were and what they were doing,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a call with reporters. “We ban this kind of behavior because authenticity matters. People need to be able to trust the connecti*** they make on Facebook.

人们确实应该能够信任他们在Facebook上建立的联系。但是，在研究Facebook对德国的影响和多起由国家赞助的攻击事件之间，很难说这种信任来自何方。

扎克伯格告诉记者：“当你以我们的规模运营一项服务时，你会看到很多好的事情，你也会看到人们以各种可能的方式滥用这项服务。”。然而，今天最让我烦恼的不是滥用服务的人。这是德国人在使用Facebook，正如他们打算使用的那样。

民主

Facebook正在对其用户的可信度进行从零到一的评分

Facebook依靠用户报告来确定帖子是虚假的还是误导性的。但用户自己也可以通过虚假报告可信信息来误导Facebook。因此，Facebook开始给用户打分，帮助他们衡量报告的权重。这比故事第一次出现时听起来没有那么戏剧化——这并不等同于优步评级或Reddit karma——但它看起来确实是一件好事。伊丽莎白·德沃斯金报道：

A user’s trustworthiness score isn’t meant to be an absolute indicator of a person’s credibility, Ly*** said, nor is there is a single unified reputation score that users are assigned. Rather, the score is one measurement among thousands of new behavioral clues that Facebook now takes into account as it seeks to understand risk. Facebook is also monitoring which users have a propensity to flag content published by others as problematic and which publishers are c***idered trustworthy by users.

Facebook拒绝报道其用户信任度排名

Facebook似乎不喜欢这篇文章：

“The idea that we have a centralized ‘reputation’ score for people that use Facebook is just plain wrong and the headline in the Washington Post is misleading. What we’re actually doing: We developed a process to protect against people indiscriminately flagging news as fake and attempting to game the system,” a Facebook spokesperson wrote via email, “The reason we do this is to make sure that our fight against misinformation is as effective as possible.”

Facebook正在删除5000多个广告目标选项，以防止歧视

在ProPublica和其他公司发布了一系列关于Facebook广告平台如何实现歧视的报告后，该公司表示将取消数千项目标定位功能，Alex Kantrowitz报道：

Facebook’s removal of the targeting opti*** comes amid an investigation from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, which filed a complaint last week alleging Facebook had enabled discriminatory housing practices with its ad targeting opti***. The complaint began a process that could eventually lead to a federal lawsuit.

在印度WhatsApp假新闻战的前线

Soutik Biswas研究了印度如何努力教育年轻人有关WhatsApp的病毒性错误信息，以期减少平台上恶作剧引发的谋杀数量：

To combat this, district officials have now begun 40-minute-long fake news classes in 150 of its 600 government schools.

Using an imaginative combination of words, images, videos, simple classroom lectures and skits on the dangers of remaining silent and forwarding things mindlessly, this initiative is the first of its kind in India. This is a war on disinformation from the trenches, and children are the foot soldiers.

微软称俄罗斯新黑客攻击目标是共和党团体

根据微软的最新研究，俄罗斯现在的目标是支持对该国实施更严厉制裁的保守派智库。Sanger和Sheera Frenkel报告：

The goal of the Russian hacking attempt was unclear, and Microsoft was able to catch the spoofed websites as they were set up.

But Mr. Smith said that “these attempts are the newest security threats to groups connected with both American political parties” ahead of the 2018 midterm electi***.

杰克·多尔西（Jack Dorsey）就删除推文、禁止特朗普以及是否存在公正的推文发表了评论

你今天的杰克·多西访谈是Buzzfeed的查理·沃泽尔。他提供了更多关于“激励”和“对话”的大局图，很少涉及具体计划。但我很高兴沃泽尔向多尔西暗示，他正被保守派在影子禁令问题上大呼小叫：

Dorsey: I want to acknowledge my bias and I also want to acknowledge there’s a separation between me and our company and how we act. We need to show that in our, we need to be a lot more transparent, we need to show that in our product, we need to show that in our policy and we need to show that in our enforcement and I think in all three we have, but it bears repeating again and again and again. The reason we’re talking with more c***ervatives is just in the past we haven’t really done much. At least I haven’t.

推特在“必须携带”诉讼中大获全胜——泰勒诉。啁啾

埃里克·戈德曼（Eric Goldman）向我们介绍了一个案件的最新情况，在这个案件中，白人至上主义者起诉Twitter，试图阻止该公司禁止他们。一家上诉**裁定，Twitter不受《通信礼仪法》第230条的起诉。

欧盟新闻网站上的第三方cookie数量在GDPR后下降了22%

如果GDPR…。好吗？Catalin Cimpanu提供了一个数据点：

The number of tracking cookies on EU news sites has gone down by 22% according to a report by the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford, who looked at cookie usage across EU news sites in two phases, in April 2018 and July 2018, pre and post the introduction of the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). […]

“We may be observing a kind of ‘housecleaning’ effect. Modern websites are highly complex and evolve over time in a path-dependent way, sometimes accumulating out-of-date features and code,” researchers said. “The introduction of GDPR may have provided news organizati*** with a chance to evaluate the utility of various features, including third-party services, and to remove code which is no longer of significant use or which compromises user privacy.”

Line是另一款充斥着垃圾邮件、诈骗和不良信息的聊天应用程序。志愿者支持的Cofacts正在公开检查它们

Kirsten Han介绍了Cofacts，这是一个协作**实检查服务，它使用机器人来检查在流行的亚洲短信应用程序线上病毒传播的信息。bot已收到46000多条消息，其中chatbot自动回复35180条：

Any interested volunteers can log into the database of submitted messages and start evaluating the messages, using the Cofacts form. Cofacts offers step-by-step instructi*** for those who can’t figure out how to use the platform, as well as a set of clear editorial guidelines that helps volunteers weed out uncheckable messages or ones that are “personal opinion,” and what types of reliable sources they can use to back up their fact-checking work.

Based on data collected by the Cofacts team on the messages they’ve received so far, the misinformation debunked on the platform can range from fake promoti*** and medical misinformation to false claims about government policies.

错误信息如何在网上传播-东南亚最受欢迎的短信应用之一

说到在线，丹尼尔·芬克（Daniel Funke）着眼于这项服务上的公共账户是如何通过承诺用户免费贴纸，然后在获得大量受众后转向虚假信息而发展壮大的。许多影响力活动似乎都在为价值可疑的医疗保健产品做广告：

Many of the top misinforming accounts on the app publish accurate tips about things like lowering blood pressure alongside spammy ads for things like detoxifying foot pads — and Anutarasoat said channels regularly profit from it.

“The products that some of these networks want to sell, (they’re) not harmful products, but not useful like they advertise — like a fake website that’s selling medicine that can reduce blood pressure, and they’re targeting it for older people who have high blood pressure problem,” he said. “They create a convincing website that has a picture of a doctor and a picture of a witness. In some websites, they actually fake that it is a website from public health ministries.”

在别处

说“你好”：近距离观察Facebook的语音野心

Josh Contne根据研究人员Jane Manchan Wong提供的一些新信息提醒我们，Facebook的家庭扬声器仍在开发中。

学校正在挖掘学生的社交媒体帖子，寻找麻烦的迹象

汤姆·西蒙尼特（Tom Simonite）调查了学校社交媒体监控的现状，发现有几家公司竞相获得地区资金，承诺保护学校免受攻击。但它们的价值尚不清楚，而且它们可能有显著的负面影响：

There’s little doubt that students share information on social media school administrators might find useful. There is some debate over whether — or how—it can be accurately or ethically extracted by software.

Amanda Lenhart, a New America Foundation researcher who has studied how teens use the internet, says it’s understandable schools like the idea of monitoring social media. “Administrators are concerned with order and safety in the school building and things can move freely from social media—which they don’t manage—into that space,” she says. But Lenhart cauti*** that research on kids, teens, and social media has shown that it’s difficult for *****s peering into those online communities from the outside to easily interpret the meaning of content there.

Slack筹集了4.27亿美元，目前价值超过70亿美元

有时，我想知道，花在运动上的时间是否会影响到著名的嘈杂、耗时的office聊天应用程序Slack。到目前为止，答案是——不，一点也不！

发射

Tinder正在推出一项专为大学学生提供的服务

我的同事阿什利·卡曼（Ashley Carman）报道了Tinder U的发布，Tinder U是一款专为大学生设计的约会应用程序。我想这会很受欢迎，尽管事实可能证明Tinder本身已经足够好了。

Tinder’s marketing frames the service as ideal for finding a study buddy or someone to hang out with on the quad. Also, if Tinder can build in a new dedicated user base of 18-year-olds, it can also start converting them to paid users sooner. Facebook employed a similar strategy when it first launched. The platform required a .edu email address to build out a loyal college following before opening widely a few years later. The opposite is happening with Tinder: everyone can use it, but college kids now might want a safe haven from creepy older people.

谷歌正在开发一款名为Shortwave的实验性播客应用程序

我的同事拉塞尔·布兰登（Russell Brandom）发现了谷歌新播客应用程序的证据：

Nothing in the trademark filing specifies the kind of audio being accessed, but a Google representative said the focus of the app was on spoken word content. There is little public information about the app, although Google has played with **art captioning, translation, and other AI-assisted features in previous podcast products.

拿

广告已经过时了——这就是为什么是时候结束它了

拉姆西·伍德科克（Ramsi Woodcock）对广告提出了全面的指控，称互联网已经使其消费者的核心功能过时，甚至可能违反反垄断法。这是一个很大的收获，但也是经过深思熟虑的收获：

The courts have long held that Section 2 of the Sherman Act prohibits conduct that harms both competition and c***umers, which is just what persuasive advertising does when it cajoles a c***umer into buying the advertised product, rather than the substitute the c***umer would have purchased without advertising.

That substitute is presumably preferred by the c***umer, precisely because the c***umer would have purchased it without corporate persuasion. It follows that competition is harmed, because the company that made the product that the c***umer actually prefers cannot make the sale. And the c***umer is harmed by buying a product that the c***umer does not really prefer.

Facebook和Twitter既不自由也不保守。他们是资本家。

威尔·奥雷莫斯（Will Oremus）听了我昨天写的Radiolab插曲，并结合对平台的偏见指控对其进行了审查：

Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and other Republicans probably won’t buy Dorsey’s claim that he tries to keep his biases out of the company’s decision-making, particularly the next time an Alex Jones gets the boot. Nor will most liberals believe that he isn’t bending over backward to appease the hard right, especially the next time an Alex Jones isn’t ejected from the platform. When a company that shapes the flow of online political speech is making high-stakes decisi*** about who can talk and who can’t, it’s hard to accept that those decisi*** are the product of a jury-rigged rulebook or algorithm rather than political calculati*** or a secret agenda.

But it’s worth remembering, with these controversies, that social media companies do have an agenda, and it isn’t secret. Their agenda is to keep making money, and when it comes to high-stakes decisi*** about who can say what online, the most lucrative option is often to play dumb

最后。。。

小唐纳德·特朗普的Instagram是莎士比亚的悲剧

总统的长子和我们一样——也就是说，他阅读评论。Eve Peyser报道说，特别是在Instagram上：

He’ll respond to anyone—he frequently ignores comments from verified accounts, instead replying to messages from random accounts, which suggests that he reads all the comments. Which has to got to hurt. But when replying to these so-called “whiny libs,” Don Jr. doesn’t hold back, chiding them for their low follower counts, and/or accusing them of being robots.

告诉我唐今天可能会收到比平时更多的评论。

跟我说

向我发送提示、问题、评论、学术研究：[email protected].